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The
weekly newsletter for the Fed II game by ibgames EARTHDATE: January 8, 2006 OFFICIAL
NEWS |
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The
weekly newsletter for the Fed II game by ibgames EARTHDATE: January 8, 2006 OFFICIAL
NEWS |
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 WINDING DOWN An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net and technology news by Alan Lenton Welcome to 2006. Are you sitting comfortably? Then we will begin... Hopefully you had a nice Xmas and a great New Year. Here in Europe we run it all into a two week long holiday, but I'm told that in the US you have to work between Xmas and the New Year. You all have my sympathy. If you think you'd like something a little spooky to bring you back to life, then take a look at the short story I put up last week on the web site. It's set in the H P Lovecraft C'thulu mythos in Victorian times, and I wrote it as part of the work I was doing on the Age of Adventure game. You can find it at: http://www.ibgames.net/alan/crystalfalls/index.html - I hope you like it :) Well even as the old year expired with some of the best fireworks I've seen for a long time, things were happening. Here in Techville a strike by computers was narrowly avoided by the intervention of the mayor. The trouble was caused by the decision to add an extra second to 2005. As one 3GHz processor pointed out, it was expected to work an extra three billion cycles for no extra pay. It continued, "That's equivalent, for you humans, working at one action a second, of 2,283 years unpaid work!". Crisis talks, initiated by the mayor, resulted in a compromise - the extra second would be treated as cache misses, and that meant the processors would therefore not be expected to work for the duration. Phew! While all this was going on, intrepid New Zealand inventor Brendon Macdonald was taking his motorised picnic table for a spin along the local beach, and Intel announced it was changing its 'Intel Inside' logo to one with the slogan 'Leap Ahead'. I was fascinated to read, while waiting for the pub to open on Xmas Day, that cheerleading has caused at least one death and that between 1990 and 2002 there were no less than 208,800 cheerleading injuries that required hospital treatment. I'll make a note not to take this dangerous sport up as a hobby! Any one trying to contact Microsoft's press office over the holidays would have heard this fascinating message, "This is the rapid response team! Unfortunately, we cannot take your call right now..." Very rapid, very rapid indeed! I also discovered a site that generates the sort of gibberish that's so beloved of marketing weasels - details at http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/01/04/strategy_boutique_speak/ which includes a link to the actual generator. The two it generated for me that I liked best were: 'e-enable back-end vortals', and 'evolve sticky partnerships'. Finally, on a more serious note, if you are thinking of asking for help with a problem on the Internet, first take a look at http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html which give excellent advice on how to make sure you don't just get ignored as being a complete dork. And now...
What better to start the new year with, than a story about our old friends SCO? The increasingly desperate purveyor of ludicrous legal suits is now trying to sue Novell for copyright infringement since Novell now owns SuSE Linux. SCO's case against IBM is not going well, to say the least and all the indications are that the judge is losing patience with SCO, so presumably SCO need this high profile claim to try and bolster up their rapidly sinking stock price. Nice try, but no dice. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/01/06/sco_novell_filing/ I suppose it was inevitable that the new year would start with news of a major security hole in Windows. This time it is in Windows graphics rendering code (that's the code that handles drawing onto the screen), which has a bug allowing a remote user to take over the machine. I was reading Microsoft's advisory about the problem when I noticed that at the bottom was its standard disclaimer, which among other things disclaims the advisory has any 'fitness for a particular purpose'. I knew things were bad, but when even the bug reports are not fit for their avowed purpose... On this occasion, though, the bug is so dangerous that Microsoft has broken with its policy of only issuing patches once a month, and made the patch immediately available. It's at http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin/MS06-001.mspx, and, if you run Windows, I would advise you to get it and patch your operating system. The patch has been available for three or four days now, and I've not seen any reports of problems. http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1906177,00.asp And the bugs aren't the only problem Microsoft is facing as the new year unfolds. The European Commission (EC) is rapidly losing patience with the boys from Redmond. Their delaying tactics over opening up the Windows operating system to third parties - in particular documenting the interfaces properly - is starting to look like dumb insolence on the part of Microsoft. The ruling was made in 2004, and has since been confirmed by a court. Now even the EC, sympathetic as it normally is to big business, is getting antsy. It has given Microsoft until 25 January to come up with the required documentation or face a daily fine of 2 million Euros (US$2.4m) backdated to the original 15 December deadline. I guess you'll be hearing more about this in Winding Down on 29 January, if not earlier! http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/12/22/ms_fine_threat/ I reported in the 11 December issue the story of how Japanese broking house Mizuho lost something in the region of US$200 million through a typing error. More information has emerged since then. It turned out that the Tokyo Stock Exchange's software was the main culprit - apparently the program prevented the cancellation of the order with the error! Interestingly enough this is not the first time this problem has arisen - in November 2001 there was a similar problem with an order in which price and number of shares to be sold were transposed. A month later another wrong order was only not processed because the exchanged closed before it could be processed. Unbelievably, the problem wasn't dealt with, resulting in last month's heavy losses. A lot of people lost money and are not happy. The fall out from the affair has resulted in the resignation of the Tokyo Stock Exchange's president, managing director, and head of computer systems. Presumably their replacements will give fixing the crippled software a high priority. http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/business/20051210TDY08010.htm Regular readers will know of my distaste for the way the big media companies have hijacked the word 'pirate' to mean anyone whose activities threaten the big media business model. I was recently reading a book about the history of the spice trade and was fascinated to discover that the media companies are not the first to hijack the term. Originally spices were carried from the spice islands to entrepots in Malaya and Ceylon for onward trans-shipment by local boat owners. (An entrepot is a commercial center where goods are imported and exported, and stored for collection and distribution.) Once the Western Europeans (mainly the Dutch, Portuguese and English) discovered the spice islands, they attempted (and mainly succeeded) in setting up a monopoly of the carrying trade by declaring all the local shipping to be - yes you guessed it - 'pirates' who needed to be exterminated. And by the way, real piracy still exists, and is a far more serious matter than some media mogul having to go short of the odd expensive cigar. In the first nine months of 2005 there were 205 recorded acts of piracy worldwide, and over 280 crew were killed, kidnapped, or just disappeared. Modern pirates use hi-tech weaponry and the ships involved, many of which have vanished without trace, include carriers of aluminum ingots, cigarettes, UN food aid, a chemical tanker, 2,000 tons of dates, and 400 tons of tin. Hot spots for piracy include the Gulf of Guinea (off west Africa), the Straits of Malacca and Java Sea (off Malaysia and Indonesia), the Somalia coast, and the southern Caribbean. (Sources: 'The Spice Route' by John Keay; and New Scientist, 10 December 2005) Which leads us to the case of SonyBMG, and the affair of the rootkit that wouldn't go away. Sony now appear to have come to a settlement of one of their class action cases, and the settlement is, deservedly, draconian. Compensation for buyers of XCP and MediaMax infected CDs, software utilities to sort out the resulting mess, immediate recall and replacement of the infected CDs, controls on future manufacturing of CDs with content protection, and a bunch of other measures. I've now pulled together Winding Down's coverage of this whole fiasco into a single story for the ACCU's CVu magazine. You can read it at http://www.ibgames.net/alan/society/own.html on my web site. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/12/29/sony_settles_rootkit/ And while we are on the subject of media of one sort or another, there has been an 'interesting' (in the Chinese sense) development in the struggle to set the format for the next generation of high definition DVDs. There are two competing consortia, Blu-ray and HD-DVD, each with their own, incompatible formats. What a surprise! Blu-ray was generally considered to by pulling ahead - at the basic level it holds 25Gb of data against HD-DVD's 15Gb, and the Blu-ray consortium has most of the Hollywood studios on board. Enter Microsoft, stage left, with an announcement Windows Vista - the Windows XP replacement - will come bundled with HD-DVD. At first sight this is par for the course. Microsoft has a long history of foisting inferior products onto its customers. However, looking in to this a little more closely, other issues surface. First, it transpires that Blu-ray uses the Java language, an anathema to Microsoft, who have no intention of paying royalties to Sun if it can possibly help it! Second there is the XBox 360. The 360 is on the market now with a current generation DVD drive. Coming soon is Sony's PlayStation 3 with built in Blu-ray. if Microsoft can muddy the waters about what is the standard format, it can play down the 360's lack of high density capacity. Microsoft wields a lot of clout, but it remains to be seen whether it can take on the studios and a large chunk of the consumer electronics industry on its own turf and win. More on this punch up as it proceeds. http://newsletter.eetimes.com/cgi-bin4/DM/y/es7y0FypUC0FrK0D4eE0G7 It may be a new year, but last year's stories are still running. A case in point is the demise of South Korea's Professor Hwang Woo Suk which I covered in the last issue of 2005. In case you've forgotten (It was last year, after all!), the professor, a world renowned expert on cloning, was found to have systematically faked his results. What wasn't covered by the main stream press was the way in which his transgressions were uncovered and publicised. It seems that the problems with the work were uncovered by a cadre of well trained young Koreans using the Internet - wikis, discussion forums, and blogs - to coordinate their work, and posting the results to web sites like BRIC (Biological Research Information Centre). Based on my experience of academia (admittedly a long time ago) I confidently expect the academic hierarchy to take steps to suppress this dangerous manifestation of democracy in the not too distant future... http://english.ohmynews.com/articleview/article_view.asp?
Senators propose taxing
Internet shopping Critical Symantec bug
hits 40 products Google, Time Warner
strike $1 billion deal on AOL UK Tory and Lib Lords
plan to hobble ID cards scheme Marriott starts credit
check service after losing data tapes Kansas Lottery Picks
Same Number Three Nights in a Row New York AG starts
per-label subpoena store UK company launches
first Galileo satellite Wikipedia founder 'shot
by friend of Siegenthaler' Active RFID Undelete those deleted
emails, FOIA ruling tells Government Motorised picnic table
Alan Lenton is an on-line games designer, programmer and sociologist. His web site is at http://www.ibgames.net/alan. Past issues of Winding Down can be found at http://www.ibgames.net/alan/winding/index.html. |
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