Fed2 Star - the newsletter for the space trading game Federation 2

The weekly newsletter for Fed2
by ibgames

EARTHDATE: November 26, 2017

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WINDING DOWN

An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net, technology and science news
by Alan Lenton

OK, it’s Sunday, and time for Winding Down. This week we have stories on Google information collection from Android phones, a cautionary tale for internet of things users, yet more Uber problems, driverless cars legislation, a RAND study on driverless cars, Firefox browsers, a selection of pictures from NASA covering Antarctic ice, the latest asteroid, and the sky at night. URLs in the Scanner section point you to problems for older tech workers, Napoleon’s kindle, looney job specs, Equifax, election hacking, cashierless stores, a NSA employees home computer, and a USA military wide open archive on AWS.

That should keep you going for the rest of the week!

Shorts:

One of the more worrying items of news this last couple of weeks was the revelation that Google collects tracking information all the time Android smartphones are switched on – even if tracking is switched off. If this was done by a human it would be called stalking. They’ve promised to stop it, having been caught in the act, but I suspect many people will consider this to be a totally inadequate response. Effectively, they will have got away with it.

I think it’s probably time for companies and their chief officers and boards to start to be held responsible for crimes committed by algorithms they develop or deploy...
https://qz.com/1131515/google-collects-android-users-locations-even-when-location-services-are-disabled/

Are you wondering whether to connect your home to the ‘Internet Of Things’ (IoT)? Well before you do so, you might like to ponder the problem that people who invested in Logitech’s Harmony Link home products controller are suffering. Logitech have just announced that they are shutting down the website it talks to next March. The result? The hub won’t work anymore, once the site is down.

This raises a lot of questions, but two of them stand out. First, why would anyone buy Logitech products in the future, since they can be rendered inoperable on a whim, with no recourse available to purchasers? Second, why is something which is just responsible for managing a bunch of internet enabled home gadgets like smart lights, talking to a website run by the manufacturer. What information are they collecting, what are they doing with it?

Even leaving those aside. Why are they making no effort to make the hub run without the website? if the hub currently talks to the website it should be possible to remotely upgrade the firmware in the beast to run without need to access the site. I guess this is just yet another example of big tech company arrogance...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/08/logitech_harmony_link_universal_
controller_to_stop_working_next_year/

Even more Uber disasters – more than a year ago hackers stole personal data relating to 57 million customers and drivers from Uber. They’ve now only just admitted it. Apparently they paid the hackers US$100,000 to delete the data. And was it deleted? Uber would like to think so, but who knows whether all copies were deleted. Just add it to the list of pending prosecutions...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-21/uber-concealed-cyberattack-that-exposed-57-million-people-s-data
http://money.cnn.com/2017/11/21/technology/uber-hacked-2016/index.html

Homework:

The UK government is currently looking at the question of who pays if driverless cars are hacked and used illegally. The owner? The company that made it? The insurance company? The company that wrote the algorithms? Who pays is only part of the issue. For instance, if you have a driverless car, does the owner have to have a driving license? If so, should the maker be responsible for teaching the ‘driver’ how to operate the car? All is not quite as simple as it seems (and no, I have idea what the solution is – but I do know that we need one before these cars hit the streets).
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/07/automated_electric_vehicle_bill_experts/

While we are on the subject of autonomous cars, the URLs below are links to a RAND Corporation study suggesting that autonomous cars need only be 10% better than humans to be worth deploying, because that would cut 10% off the death total (currently running at 35,000 a year in the USA alone). This is an interesting discussion, and you might like to have a look at the URLs and think about what problems there are with the report.

The first URL is a summary of the report by ‘The Register’. The second is the article about it on RAND’s web site. Note that the web site also includes an opportunity to explore the model they used.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/08/autonomous_cars_and_value_of_human_life/
https://www.rand.org/blog/articles/2017/11/why-waiting-for-perfect-autonomous-vehicles-may-cost-lives.html

And after all that hard work, you might like to relax and read Jim Beall’s fascinating account of the battle to electrify the USA. Highly recommended!
http://www.baen.com/gridwars

Geek Stuff:

I used to be a Firefox user, but many years ago it got so clunky that I switched to the then sleek and clean Google Chrome. I’ve been using Chrome ever since, but for a while now Google has been getting increasingly creepy, and I’m considering switching back to Mozilla, who have just released a radical new rewrite of Firefox. I’ll probably wait until the next release, by which time they will have ironed out any bugs with the rewrite. I’ll let you know how I get on in a couple of months.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/15/mozilla_interview/

Pictures:

I’ve got some interesting pictures from NASA this week.

The first one is a picture of some very unusual features in the Weddell Sea. It’s called ‘finger rafting’ and it breaks the ice into long rectangular shapes. It’s so regular that when I first saw the picture I thought it was an industrial park full of warehouses!
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=91306&src=eoa-iotd

The second picture is an artist’s illustration of the Oumuamua asteroid that visited the Solar System recently. I’m not sure just how accurate the picture is, but it looks impressive. If you’ve never read Aurthur C Clarke’s ‘Rendezvous with Rama’, now is the time to do so...
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap171122.html

The remaining two pictures are of the sky at night. Both feature the Plough constellation (Big Dipper to my American friends) and a darkened earthscape. By pure luck, one of them also figures a very dramatic meteor!
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap171117.html
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap171121.html

Coda:

This week’s quote: “I cook with wine, sometimes I even add it to the food.” – W. C. Fields

Scanner:

Survey: Tech workers are terrified they will be sacked for being too old
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/10/19/tech_workers_terrified_theyll_age_out/

Napoleon’s Kindle: See the miniaturized traveling library he took on military campaigns
http://www.openculture.com/2017/10/napoleons-kindle-see-the-miniaturized-traveling-library-he-took-on-military-campaigns.html

You can’t find tech staff – wah, wah, wah. Start with your ridiculous job spec
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/10/19/it_staff_supply_problems/

Security guru Bruce Schneier on the Equifax security breach [One of the best pieces on the subject – AL]
https://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram/archives/2017/1115.html#1

Think the US is alone? 18 countries had their elections hacked last year
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/14/think_the_us_is_alone_18_countries_
had_their_elections_hacked_last_year/

Amazon’s cashierless store is almost ready for prime time
https://medium.com/bloomberg/amazons-cashierless-store-is-almost-ready-for-prime-time-560a5c30cc78

121 pieces of malware flagged on NSA employee’s home computer
https://www.darkreading.com/analytics/121-pieces-of-malware-flagged-on-nsa-
employees-home-computer/d/d-id/1330450

Massive US military social media spying archive left wide open in AWS S3 buckets
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/17/us_military_spying_archive_exposed/

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
26 November 2017

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.

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