WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net, technology and science news
by Alan Lenton
Another Sunday, another Winding Down. This week we try to shed some light on the issues of drone hacking, a very large iceberg, the encryption debate, Telstar and other satellites, lab work a mile underground, a nifty hi-fi amp, pictures of Tokyo, and a way to get art onto your smart phone. Then, to keep the pressure on, the Scanner section contains URLs pointing to commerce and the moon, a new ‘fundamental’ particle from the LHC, the Verizon leak, a biological hard drive, CubeSats, and a dozen technologies that don’t live up to their hype.
All this delivered digitally to a computer near your Sunday breakfast table. What more could you want?
Shorts:
I suppose it was inevitable, really. There’s been an outbreak of drone hackery in the UK. It seems that drone maker DJI was stupid enough to ship its drones with the debugging code still loaded. This, once enabled, allowed the hackers to remove the limits on, for instance, flying height and no-fly zones. You would have thought that the security experiences of the Internet of Things manufacturers would have warned DJI that flying things with computers would be vulnerable if they weren’t careful.
If one of the hacked drones causes damage or death it will be interesting to see who the courts hold responsible.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/07/11/dji_drones_app_sec/
This week’s breakaway of the trillion ton iceberg from the Antarctic’s Larson C ice shelf will undoubtedly result in disagreements over the role of global warming on the event. That being the case, before the debate gets off the ground, I’d like to point you to a report on the issue on Scientific American’s web site. It’s a fairly cool (so to speak) assessment and explanation, which will give you a basis to make your own judgement in the event of a heated debate on the issue!
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/trillion-ton-iceberg-breaks-off-antarctica/
The debate on whether end-to-end encryption should have a ‘backdoor’ to enable the state to read the message contents has been heating up for some time. Recently, Robert Hannigan put his view forward. Hannigan is important because from 2014-2017 he was the director of the UK’s GCHQ (the UK equivalent of the US NSA).
It seems that Hannigan is now of the opinion that end-to-end encryption is a good thing. He comments that “You can’t un-invent end-to-end encryption… you can’t legislate it away.” He is against adding backdoors. “I don’t advocate building in backdoors,” Hannigan said. “It’s not a good idea to weaken security for everybody in order to tackle a minority.” Instead he advocates targeting the smartphones and the laptops that the bad guys use.
He had much else to say on these issues which is well worth your while. Point your browser to the URL for more.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/07/10/former_gchq_wades_into_encryption_debate/
Homework:
Fifty-five years ago this last week, Telstar, the world’s first communications satellite, was launched. I can remember as a teenager watching the first transatlantic live entertainment broadcast which was about five years later. I can’t remember what the US contribution was but the Brits offered no less than The Beatles, in the recording studio with a bunch of their mates, laying down the final take of their new single ‘All you need is love’. I seem to remember that there was a certain amount of ranting from the grownups, because the German contribution was opera, but all the UK had was the “bloody Beatles”. I wasn’t exactly popular when I pointed out that all that was keeping the UK economy afloat during the ’60s was the overseas earnings of British rock and pop groups...
You can get an idea of the speed of development of satellites from the fact that it then took five years to get from the launch of Telstar to the first transatlantic live television broadcast, and now, 50 years later, we have about 1,100 active satellites up there in orbit!
On the downside, there are another 2,600 satellites that no longer work still whizzing round in orbit. You can add to that a further 21,000 pieces of junk bigger than 10 cm (four inches), and a further half a million bigger than one centimetre.
“Houston – we have a litter problem...”
[Satellite figures from Google Search: ‘Number of satellites in orbit’]
Those of you with an interest in physics might like to take a look at a piece in ‘Scientific American’ about a lab, and a series of physics experiments, that are 4,850 feet underground in the former Homestake gold mine, in South Dakota. This is the place where neutrinos, long predicted, were finally discovered, and won their discoverer, Ray Davis, a Nobel Prize in 2002. It took him 25 years from when his neutrino detector first went live, before the evidence of the first neutrino was spotted.
Now the lab is preparing an experiment to actually try and find some trace of the elusive ‘dark matter’, which is generally believed to make up the bulk of the universe, but which is proving difficult to pin down.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/physicists-go-deep-in-search-of-dark-matter/
Geek Stuff:
Here’s a little something for older geeks who still have a Hi-Fi seperates set up, like me. How about a 300 watts per channel amp? Sigh! The McIntosh Labs MA9000, makes my Marantz set up look like a child’s toy. Take a look at the URL for the full spec – not to mention the equally hefty weight, and, of course, the humungous price...
http://newatlas.com/mcintosh-ma9000-integrated-amplifier/50387/
Pictures:
Take a look at these amazing pictures of Tokyo. They are part of a project by photographer, designer, and art director, Cody Ellingham, who wanted to portray the layered nature of the city, with each bit of history leaving its own imprint on the people and architecture of the city.
To get to the pictures, wait till the start screen with DERIVE in big letters appears then run your cursor over the Japanese symbols on the left hand side to get English versions, and click on the one labelled ‘WORKS’. This will start a great slide show!
http://derive.tokyo
Now, here is an interesting way to get pictures to your phone! It’s an idea developed by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. They have 34,678 works of art in their collection, but they only have room to display about 5% of them. So, they hit on the idea of letting people send them a text, and in return they send back a picture which in some way relates to the keyword, colour, or emoji you sent in the text. Neat! Full details at the URL.
http://www.openculture.com/2017/07/send-a-text-to-sfmoma-and-theyll-send-works-of-art-to-your-mobile-phone.html
Scanner:
Moon Express to begin commercially harvesting lunar rocks in 2020
http://newatlas.com/moon-express-2020-launch/50473/
LHC finds a new and very charming particle: the Xicc++ baryon
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/07/10/new_lhc_particle_turns_on_the_charm/
Up to 14 million Verizon subscribers’ details are leaked
https://www.darkreading.com/cloud/verizon-suffers-cloud-data-leak-exposing-data-on-millions-of-customers/d/d-id/1329344
CRISPR used to build a biological hard drive out of live bacteria
http://newatlas.com/crispr-bacteria-hard-drive/50471/
CubeSats swarm Earth orbit
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sweating-the-small-stuff-cubesats-swarm-earth-orbit/
BOFH: That’s right. Turn it off. Turn it on. [the latest episode in The Register’s tech operators from hell saga]
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/07/07/bofh_2017_episode_9/
12 ‘hot’ technologies not living up to the hype
http://www.infoworld.com/article/3205813/application-development/12-overhyped-technologies-for-2017.html
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
16 July 16017
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.
