WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net, technology and science news
by Alan Lenton
For the last issue of Winding Down in 2016 we have material on the Galileo network, customer bad reviews, Yahoo hacking, living in a simulation, Admiral Grace Murray Hopper, xkcd, a flameless lighter, a very large crack in the ice, and mail tunnels in London. To keep you going over the Christmas break there are also URLs on such weighty subjects as cheapo augmented reality, a botched Microsoft update (and the fix), Patti Smith at the Nobel Prize-giving, rock music and board games, fake news, and polymaths!
No way am I going to write a Winding Down on Christmas Day or on New Years’ Day. It would probably look like it was encrypted! We will be back on January 8 with the next edition of Winding Down.
So until then I bid you a Happy Christmas and a Prosperous New Year. May all your problems be small ones, and all your nice surprises big ones!
Shorts:
Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat,
Please put a penny in the old man’s hat!
Well, somewhat in excess of four billion euros worth of pennies later, there are now two separate GPS type networks available, the original US GPS and the new European Galileo network. Actually, I confess that I thought it would never happen. It’s taken 17 years to get Galileo off the ground (so to speak), and it faced every conceivable difficulty along the way. Interestingly, and hardly surprising, given the way technology has moved on since the original GPS came into existence, Galileo is capable of pinpointing positions down to a few centimetres (2.45 cm make an inch in case you are wondering).
Personally, I can’t imagine why anyone would want to know someone’s location to within a few centimetres, even if they did have a Galileo ready phone, but if they do, and you want to track them to the nearest couple of centimetres, then there are already two phones on the market that can use Galileo – the BQ Aquaris X5 Plus and the Huawei Mate 9.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/12/15/europe_switches_on_galileo_satellite_navigation_network_
at_last/
Good news for once. In the US it’s now illegal to punish customers for giving bad reviews! The new law has the effect of rendering any contract that attempts to include in a clause calling for a fine or penalty for a review to become void and legally unenforceable. It was signed into law by the president this week. I’m not sure how it will play out in practice, but it’s long overdue. Nice work from the law makers!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/12/15/obama_signs_bill_to_protect_bad_reviews/
The bad news is that Yahoo has admitted that one billion of its accounts were hacked – in 2013. We are now about to start 2017 and they’ve only just got round to disclosing it? Of course, they might have only now found out. That’s even worse than trying to hide it for over three years. The level of incompetence it would take to not notice that a billion accounts had been stolen, including names, telephone numbers, dates of birth, encrypted passwords and unencrypted security questions that could be used to reset a password, is breathtaking...
No wonder Verizon is rethinking how much it’s prepared to pay for the remaining embers of Yahoo.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/14/technology/yahoo-hack.html?_r=0
http://uk.businessinsider.com/yahoo-data-breach-billion-accounts-2016-12
Homework:
Are we living in a simulation or computer game? This has been a hot topic in the online gaming community since the first multi-player game – MUD – went live. When the film ‘The Matrix’ came out in 1999, the issue went viral. Things have cooled down a bit now, but the issue still remains and is argued over.
So, if you want something a little more, how shall I put it – rarefied, perhaps – for a discussion over a Christmas day post-prandial brandy, then take a look at the discussion on 33rd Square on the subject. And, if you should come to the conclusion that we live in a simulation, then I recommend taking Max Tegmark’s advice, “Go out and do really interesting things, so the simulators don’t shut you down.”
http://www.33rdsquare.com/2016/12/are-we-living-in-simulation.html
http://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/
This week saw the 110th anniversary of the birth of Admiral Grace Murray Hopper, one of the truly great figures of early computing. To celebrate the anniversary ‘I Programmer’ has produced an infographic of her life and achievements – including her famous nanosecond demonstration.
http://www.i-programmer.info/news/82/10340.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-vcErOPofQ
Geek Stuff:
For this last issue of the year, I thought I’d share my favourite geek Christmas cartoon with you, even though it is from last year.
https://xkcd.com/838/
I gave up smoking some time ago, but I still have my trusty Zippo lighter, and yes it does light up in gale force winds. I’ve always had a soft spot for it, but now for the first time I’m tempted to replace it. Take a look at this little beauty – it’s a flameless lighter! Instead of a flame it electrically generates a beam of plasma which is hotter and cleaner than a conventional flame. Very neat, very cool, very techie!
https://shop.gothamist.com/sales/2-pack-saberlight-rechargeable-flameless-wind-proof-plasma-beam-lighter
Pictures:
The picture this week is just a little scary when you think about it. It’s a picture of a crack in the Antarctic’s Larsen C ice shelf. The dimensions of the crack are stunning – 300 feet wide and a third of a mile deep! Not something you would want to fall into!
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=89257&src=eoa-iotd
London:
Pssst! Wanna take a trip on a mail mini-train in the tunnels of London? There are six and a half miles of miniature track 70 feet below ground level. The tracks were originally built in 1927 to transport mail between the main Royal Mail sorting offices in London. However, over time the sorting offices were moved out to peripheral sites and use declined until the system was mothballed in 2003.
Now sections of it are being de-mothballed and trips will be available to public as part of the new Postal Museum opening in the new year. Keep an eye out for more news when it’s available.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/12/06/geeks_guide_mail_rail/
Scanner:
Move over HoloLens, $30 homebrew cardboard AR is here
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/12/14/move_over_hololens_homebrew_ar_is_here_for_30/
Botched Microsoft update knocks Windows 8, 10 PCs offline
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/12/12/ongoing_windows_8_10_dhcp_problems_affecting_all_isps/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/12/13/microsoft_windows_10_broken_networking/
And the Fix: Windows 10 1607 patch KB 3206632 solves ‘dropped internet connection’ bug
http://www.infoworld.com/article/3150003/microsoft-windows/windows-10-1607-patch-kb-3206632-solves-dropped-internet-connection-bug.html
Patti Smith sings Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rains Gonna Fall” at Nobel Prize Ceremony & gets a case of the nerves [Recommended – AL]
http://www.openculture.com/2016/12/patti-smith-sings-bob-dylans-a-hard-rains-gonna-fall-at-nobel-prize-ceremony-gets-a-case-of-the-nerves.html
Men! If you want to win at board games this Christmas, turn off the rock music
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/12/12/win_at_board_games_festive_rock_music/
What’s real about fake news
http://www.cringely.com/2016/12/08/whats-real-fake-news/
Only the polymaths will thrive
http://www.martingeddes.com/polymaths-will-thrive/
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
18 December 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.
