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

The weekly newsletter for Fed2
by ibgames

EARTHDATE: April 15, 2018

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WINDING DOWN

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

This week we carry a piece about Facebook and user email, a piece about the open source drugs movement, encryption back doors, a galaxy of pictures, and a whole slew of scanner stuff. It includes air pollution, splitting of the African continent, New York City and algorithms, industrial safety systems and hackers, car cyber security (or rather, lack thereof), switching Earth’s magnetic poles, a simulation of the universe, Open Source is 20 years old, orbital debris removal, DNS leaks, time perception, and science fiction and the future.

Regular readers will realize this is a slightly different balance to what I usually write. That’s because I realized I’d got a lot of interesting stuff going back to the start of the year when I went down with flu, or something similar, which, because it took so long to recover, resulted in missed and/or short Winding Downs. So rather than just junk it all, I kept the main stuff a little shorter than usual, and put some of the more interesting of the missed stuff in scanner.

I don’t expect readers to wade through all of it – just pick the stories that match your interests :)

Shorts:

I see that Faceborg (aka Facebook) has now admitted that some apps had access to its users private messages. It seems that some apps could ask the user for permission to look at their mailbox. I’m not sure why anyone in their right mind would say ‘yes’, but apparently people did. What they weren’t told was that the app wasn’t just looking at their mail (the stuff they sent out) but also the stuff that their friends sent them, thus compromising their friends private mail without their knowledge!

Faceborg eventually shut off the facility to ask for permission to see the mailbox in 2015. Following the revelation this week, Faceborg is trying to downplay the issue, but I suspect that on top of everything else that’s come out over that year or so, it’s not going to help.

What’s that I see? Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No! It’s a class action zooming in...
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/04/11/facebook_admits_users_granted_apps_
permission_to_go_into_their_inboxes/

Homework:

Back in February I came across a fascinating piece about the open source drug movement, but unfortunately, I managed to lose the URL for it at the time. Having finally found it again, I thought I’d tell you all about it.

Frankly, I’d never heard of the idea of open source drugs. Given the nature of the pharmaceutical industry, I would have thought it was the last place that would start to espouse the principles of the same nature as the software open source movement.

The movement started in 2005 around a drug called Pranziquntel which dealt with a nasty parasite, and was given to some 100 million people a year. Unfortunately the key molecule comes in two forms. One does the business, the other tastes exceedingly nasty. So nasty in fact that many people refuse to take the medicine after the first taste!

Getting just the form wanted was expensive so a groups of scientists got together and decided to ask the chemistry world for help. Not something one traditionally does in the chemistry world! Eventually the problem was solved, and it turned out that the key to solving the problem was an open, online, lab notebook, where anyone interested could see how the work was progressing. In other words open access, something which might sound familiar to my software based reapers.

Eventually, the Open Source Malaria (OSM) project was set up around the following principles:

All data is open and all ideas are shared
Anybody can participate at any level of the project
There are no patents
Suggestions are the best form of criticism
Public discussion is more valuable than private email
The project is bigger than, and not owned by, any given lab

Nobody I know trusts the drug industry. They are powerful, secretive and routinely suppress bad testing results. The idea of an open source drug movement is like a breath of fresh air in this environment. One can only wish them the best of luck.
https://lwn.net/Articles/746663/
http://opensourcemalaria.org/

Geek Stuff:

I see back doors to encryption are all the rage again both in the USA and here in the UK. The politicians who have no understanding of the subject want it. Law enforcement – except perhaps the bits that are responsible for ensuring that government messages are kept safe – want it. No one else wants it, especially encryption experts. Meanwhile, the bad guys are rubbing their hands together and beaming wide smiles at the thought of how easy it’s going to be to break the encryption.

The bad guys, of course will get their encryption from elsewhere – encryption that doesn’t have a backdoor in it.

So, given all this, I have a question for the politicians: Will you mandate that -all- government bodies, including the security forces and embassies, must use this same, back doored encryption? And will you also mandate that it also has to be used by all financial transactions (including your own) originating in areas subject to your jurisdiction?

Actually, I’m sure some of them will answer ‘Yes’..
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/04/09/us_encryption_backdoors/
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/31/backdoors_uk_home_affairs_committee/

Pictures:

Am I offering you just one picture this week? Maybe two or perhaps even three? Nope. I’m offering you a galaxy of 71 pictures. In fact 71 pictures of nearby (relatively speaking) galaxies. They’re gorgeous – my favourite is the two pictures of the Sombrero galaxy, which is actually edge on to us at the moment, but I guess that might change if you are prepared to wait a few million years for another look...
https://newatlas.com/gallery-best-photos-galaxies-universe/54155/#gallery

Scanner:

Air pollution might be the new lead
https://www.popsci.com/air-pollution-lead-poisoning-brain-development

There’s mounting evidence the African continent is splitting in two
https://www.sciencealert.com/there-s-mounting-evidence-that-the-african-continent-is-splitting-in-two

New York City’s bold, flawed attempt to make algorithms accountable
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/new-york-citys-bold-flawed-attempt-to-make-algorithms-accountable

Industrial safety systems in the bullseye
https://www.darkreading.com/operations/industrial-safety-systems-in-the-bullseye/d/d-id/1330912

Car cyber-security still sucks
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/26/car_hacking_wireless/

Earth’s magnetic poles are overdue for a switch and we’re not prepared
https://www.sciencealert.com/earth-magnetic-poles-reversal-switch-overdue-turbulent

Astrophysicists have built the most detailed simulation of the universe ever created
https://www.sciencealert.com/most-advanced-illustris-next-generation-computer-model-universe-simulations

Open source turns 20 years old, looks to attract normal people
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/02/03/open_source_turns_20/

Maritime tradition can inform policy and law for commercial active debris removal
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/3434/1

What are DNS leaks, and how to avoid them
https://www.cloudwards.net/what-are-dns-leaks/

This 3-minute animation will change your perception of time
https://www.sciencealert.com/this-3-minute-animation-will-change-your-perception-of-time

Fuelling the future
https://aeon.co/essays/how-science-fiction-feeds-the-fuel-solutions-of-the-future

Coda:

Quote for the Week:

Speaking of the French Bourbon dynasty, which was at that time exiled during Napoleon’s reign, the French statesman Talleyrand said, “They have learnt nothing, and forgotten nothing.”

Incidentally, when Talleyrand died An enormous number of European heads of state came to the funeral of the man who was a senior diplomat of Louis XVI, Napoleon, Louis XVII and Louis-Philippe, and one of the key players in the Congress of Vienna, at the end of the Napoleonic Wars.

The general belief at the time was that they all wanted to make sure that he really was dead!

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
15 April 2018

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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