WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net, technology and science news
by Alan Lenton
Advance warning – Winding Down will be taking a week off in two weeks’ time, Sunday 1 May. It’s a holiday here in the UK. So this week we have stories about UC, Davis triggering off the Streisand effect (seasoned with a dash of pepper), the proposed anti-encryption law, law enforcement ignorance of the internet, debunking pseudo-scientific claims, Ascension Island, CompSci degrees and cybersecurity, photographing a rocket from space, and the 2016 Deutsche Borse Photography Foundation shortlist. In addition, we have URLs pointing to a new type of steel, an important computer memory breakthrough, an explanation of why we have toes (this little piggy went to market), a Microsoft chatbot ooopsie!, scientists publishing, and finally the fine mess the FCC has created over open routers.
And now, the stories...
Shorts:
Some people just don’t get the internet. In November 2011 a group of students were holding a peaceful, non-violent sit-down protest at University of California, Davis, when they were sprayed with pepper by the campus police. Unfortunately for the police, they did this in front of loads of other students, all with camera phones, who promptly published the pictures to the internet.
Obviously this was not what you would call good publicity, and it was seen by a very large number of people – after all it was a big story.
So what did UC, Davis do? They hired some companies, using money from the ‘strategic communications budget’ to try to scrub the story from the internet. Of course, the expenditure – some US$175,000 – eventually came to light, and now it’s yet another rehash of the original story, complete with pictures of the police casually spraying sitting students with pepper!
This is what’s known as the ‘Streisand Effect’, after Barbara Streisand tried to suppress an aerial photograph of her mansion, which was in a publicly available collection. Before she tried to suppress it , the photo was accessed only six times, two of which were by her lawyers. The month after the story of the attempt broke on the net, the photo was accessed 420,000 times!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/04/14/university_spent_175k_to_hide_pepperspraying/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UC_Davis_pepper-spray_incident
The general reaction to the anti-encryption proposed legislation just brought forward is mostly stunned awe that something so brain dead and incompetent that it would even ban lossy compression algorithms could get to this stage! I can see two possible reasons for this. The first is that the authors are so used to legislating that they don’t understand that the laws of physics etc are not amenable to human legislation (pi = 3, yeah man!).
The second is that since no one who has the faintest inkling of the whole issue agrees with them, they were unable to get anyone with a clue to advise them... I’ll leave it for my readers to judge which is the more likely, or whether it’s both.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/04/14/burr_feinstein_bill_prompts_protests/
And while we are on the subject of technical incompetence, those who would protect us don’t seem to be very much better clued in. RIPE, one of the five regional internet registries, recent published its 2015 transparency report. Apparently , it received no less than eight requests from law enforcement agencies for information. The requesters were laughed out of the door. RIPE issues IP numbers (the internet’s addresses) and AS numbers. And guess what? All the details of who it has given the number to, are publicly available on its web site, and always have been!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/04/12/ripe_transparency_report/
Homework:
Here’s a question for you. How do you tell if a technical story is a load of hokey, or the genuine article? Well, even if you are not a techie, there are ways to tell, though of course you have to be prepared to think about it.
Physicist Richard Feynman had one suggestion. Translate the claims into ordinary language, and see if they still make sense. It’s even easier now than it was when Feynman first offered the idea in 1966, because if you don’t understand a term, you can look it up online where someone will almost certainly have posted an explanation for the lay person. If you can’t find the term anywhere on the net, be assured, the trickster just made it up!
Carl Sagan also had a method of debunking pseudo-science, which he called his “Baloney Detection Kit”. It consists of eight principles., starting with ‘Wherever possible there must be independent confirmation of the facts.’ That’s always a good place to start. The second URL has a list of the others, and I urge you to take a look at it. There’s a lot of baloney out there looking for your money...
http://www.openculture.com/2016/04/richard-feynman-creates-a-simple-method-for-telling-science-from-pseudoscience-1966.html
http://www.openculture.com/2016/04/carl-sagan-presents-his-baloney-detection-kit-8-tools-for-skeptical-thinking.html
With all the doom and gloom tales of eco-disaster on its way, I thought you might like to contemplate something a little more cheery for a change.
Ascension Island is the top of a volcano sticking out of the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. (In case you’re wondering, its coordinates are 7 degrees 56 minutes south and 14 degrees, 25 minutes west.) When Charles Darwin visited the place in 1843, the place was a barren volcanic wasteland. However, a couple of decades later, a friend of Darwin – the botanist Joseph Hooker – set out to make the island more hospitable.
He did it by shipping masses of trees and shrubs to the island. His rationale was to establish forests on the island. They, in turn, would capture and retain moisture, improve the quality of the soil and make the island more hospitable to plant life.
And it worked. The URL points to composite picture of the island created using various space borne sensors, showing just how much Hooker’s planting succeeded. And, I might add, most of you reading this make use of the services provided by Ascension Island in your everyday lives. Why? Because it hosts one of five earth stations that assist the operation the GPS navigation system! (OK, and just in case you wanted to know, the other earth stations are at Kwajalein Island, Diego Garcia, Colorado Springs and Hawaii.)
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=87835&src=eoa-iotd
Geek Stuff:
It seems that none of the top ten US University Computer Science and Engineering program degrees require the students to take a course in cybersecurity as part of the requirement for the degree. Absolutely incredible. Cybersecurity is the biggest and most urgent problem facing anyone who uses a computer, a tablet, a smart phone, or any device connected to the internet, and none of the top universities think it’s worthwhile making it a compulsory part of the course. What on earth are they thinking – perhaps they’re not thinking at all, just churning out more of the same.
I notice that job specs are now starting to require CompSci degrees from, and I quote, ‘Top Universities’. Boy, are they going to have some problems once these so called wiz kids start to push code out for them!
http://www.darkreading.com/vulnerabilities---threats/top-us-undergraduate-computer-science-programs-skip-cybersecurity-classes/d/d-id/1325024
Earth Observatory has an interesting picture of a rocket with its engines still firing taken from the International Space Station. It’s not what I would have expected. Indeed, when I first saw it I thought it was a double exposure. But it’s not. So take a look and see what you think.
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=87840&src=eoa-iotd
London:
If you are a photography fan, and you happen to be in London between now and July 3, then what you need to do is to take a trip down to the Photographers’ Gallery to see an exhibition of photographs from the four artists shortlisted for the 2016 Deutsche Borse Photography Foundation Prize. The samples on the gallery’s website make it clear that anyone taking a look will see a wide range, and that’s it’s worth a visit. Even better, it’s free is you go and see it before 12noon!
http://thephotographersgallery.org.uk/deutsche-borse-photography-foundation-prize-2016
Scanner:
Steel breaks record for not breaking
http://www.gizmag.com/steel-alloy-strong-nanotechnology-sintering/42648/
Storage-class memory just got big – 256Mbit big, at least
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/04/14/everspin_ships_256_megabyte_mram/
Why do we even have toes?
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/why-do-we-even-have-toes
Microsoft grounds its AI chat bot after it learns racism
http://www.engadget.com/2016/03/24/microsoft-tay-ai-grounded/
Boffins urged to publish in free journals by science sugardaddy
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/03/26/sick_of_costly_research_journals/
Way to go, FCC. Now manufacturers are locking down routers
http://www.wired.com/2016/03/way-go-fcc-now-manufacturers-locking-routers/
Acknowledgements
Thanks to readers Barb and Fi for drawing my attention to material for Winding Down.
Please send suggestions for stories to alan@ibgames.com and include the words Winding Down in the subject line, unless you want your deathless prose gobbled up by my voracious Thunderbird spam filter...
Alan Lenton
alan@ibgames.com
17 April 2016
Alan Lenton is an on-line games designer, programmer and sociologist, the order of which depends on what he is currently working on! His web site is at http://www.ibgames.net/alan/index.html.
Past issues of Winding Down can be found at http://www.ibgames.net/alan/winding/index.html.
