Official News page 11

WINDING DOWN

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

One of my readers, Jaap, has pointed out that, my assertion last week that governments can't both tax and make something illegal may not be exactly 100% accurate. He cites the Dutch government's soft-drugs policy as an example of doing both. I'll forgo mumbling about exceptions that prove the rule!

By the way, did you know that every day Microsoft gets 50GB of data from users whose Windows programs have crashed? Neither did I, but it's in 'New Scientist', so it must be true :)

There was news this week, but nothing really inspiring. Fairly typical was the news that after all the hype the 'mega' launch of the iPhone in the UK was a flop - sales droids far outnumbered punters in the shops, which had stayed open late for the anticipated 'rush'.

There were, however, two items that restored my faith in the innate abilities of the English. The first was that the reconstructed wartime Colossus code cracking computer lost a code cracking contest - to a German with a PC. Lost to the Germans, again... <Sigh>... Still, we won the two contests that really matter - World Wars one and two.

The other story was a classic. Shaun Greenhalgh, was rejected as a 'failed' artist by the art establishment in the UK (they prefer unmade beds as art objects). Since then he has been working for a decade in a hut at the bottom of his parents' council house garden (my US readers would call a council estate a project) to produce art fakes worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. The story is fabulous - it would have made a brilliant Ealing comedy. In the end he was only caught because he made a spelling error on an Assyrian cuneiform tablet. Read the story - the URL is in the Scanner section.

Oh, and by the way these are the same Assyrians that Lord Byron referred to when he wrote, 'The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold...' Lord Byron was the father of Ada Lovelace, the world's first programmer, which is how I can claim the story is tech related!

OK, OK, back to business...

Shorts:

It was 'Stomp a Bug' week this week - 54 security bugs in the case of Apple, and three mega patches for Vista in the case of Microsoft. The Microsoft ones were to address core issues concerned with performance, reliability, and stability. One can only wonder how it was that they didn't notice these problems before they shipped it, nearly a year ago!

Apple was cleaning up its act with the final fixes for its old operating system, 'Tiger', some fixes for Time Machine and Finder, and, of course, a slew of fixes to plaster over some of the more spectacular of the gaps in its most recent offering 'Leopard'.

Nothing like having your paying customers do your testing for you. Much more profitable than running a Q&A department!

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/15/behemoth_apple_patch_batch/
http://ct.news.com/clicks?t=41056629-18a32f6148453f76b7d88f6b914d69a0-bf&s=5&fs=0

Here's an interesting little experiment. An Internet collective, MyFootballClub (ick, Microsoft have a lot to answer for on the MyXxxXxx front) , have bought an English non-league soccer club. Yep, Ebbsfleet United (formerly Gravesend & Northfleet) are now owned by an Internet collective. I wonder if the new owners know where Ebbsfleet is? I certainly didn't. Google maps to the rescue! It's on the Kent coast between Ramsgate and Sandwich - look for the Straights of Dover on your atlas, and then move up the map a little. Why an Internet collective would want to buy a soccer team is beyond me, but it takes all sorts...

http://www.physorg.com/news114192916.html

A survey just out has some interesting figures for European Internet use. About 6 out of 10 Europeans regularly (for some definition of regularly) access the Internet, and 16-24 year olds now opt to go online instead of watching TV. It seems 82% use the Internet between 5 and 7 days a week, while 77% watch TV regularly. The other really interesting figure to come out of the survey was that 80% of West Europeans now connect to the Internet via broadband. What this means in social terms remains to be seen, but in the near future you can expect to see an outbreak of punditry forecasting all sorts of dire consequences!

http://www.physorg.com/news114171106.html

The Taiwan government's Investigation Bureau revealed this week that it had discovered trojan malware on high capacity disks manufactured in China. It claimed that the trojan, on Seagate drives of the sort frequently used by government bodies (Maxtor Basics 500GB discs), automatically uploads the disc contents to Chinese web sites.

Most things the Taiwanese government has to say about the Peoples Republic of China can be taken with a pinch of salt. However, this does jibe with other odd reports of similar incidents. Perhaps it's not so surprising that some producers, and not just those making computers, are starting to advertise their wares as being free of Chinese components.

Caveat emptor!

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2007/11/11/2003387202/print

A big punch-up is looming in New York State which will have implications for the future of democracy in the United States. The US Department of Justice (DoJ) is going to the courts to try to force New York State's Board of Elections to buy the DoJ's preferred voting machines for the 2008 elections. The Board of Elections has declined to buy these machines, on the ground that they don't meet its standards.

Since they were introduced, virtually all uses of electronic voting machines have been mired in controversy. There are a number of problems, but the key ones revolve around the fact that there is no audit trail which would enable a manual recount in the event of a dispute. Add to this numerous claims and studies that they are vulnerable to tampering, and you have a recipe for the election of politicians and officials that have no relation to how the electorate voted.

Here in the UK, the Scottish elections last year resulted in 140,000 ballot papers being rejected by the electronic counting machines with no reference to a human. Our unelected prime minister, Gordon Brown, has resisted calls for a complete re-run of the election. He seems to see no problem with 140,000 people being disenfranchised. Still, what can you expect from someone who is too cowardly to accept an invitation to appear on the Simpsons.

Bottom line, you have to have a reliable voting system that the electorate can trust in order to have a democracy. The current generation of electronic voting machines fail on all counts. I'm not a US elector, and this is an issue for the electorate, but I know which side I'm rooting for in the DoJ v Board of Elections court case...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/12/doj_nys_legal_fight/

There was an interesting piece on the ITWorld.com site this week. It suggested that with Windows 7 due in late 2009 or 2010, many businesses might just skip Vista entirely. While I think that this reveals a touching faith in the ability of Microsoft to deliver something resembling 'on time', ITWorld may have a point.

Businesses are flocking away from Vista in droves. Microsoft has already had to extend the life of XP, and will probably have to do so again in the near future. Microsoft's Service Pack 2 for XP was more of an upgrade than a set of bug fixes, and they've confirmed that they are working on a Service Pack 3 (SP3). SP3 would extend the life of XP for several more years - perhaps until Windows 7 makes it out of the door.

Most of the people I know are in the software business, and those who need new machines are buying them through their companies so they can get them with XP loaded instead of Vista. I may be biased, but it looks to me like Vista is headed in the same direction as the much maligned Windows ME. ('You've got Windows ME? Most unfortunate. I suggest you can it and put a different version on your hard disk...')

Of course there's always the Mac, or Linux :)

http://www.itworld.com/Comp/2218/071115vistaskip/

The Recording Industry Ass of America's (RIAA) campaign against students is in danger of crunching to a halt as the courts decide that Colleges have better things to do with their money than act as unpaid agents for the RIAA.

The RIAA normally calls for a subpoena to get the name and address of the students or staff who might have used a certain IP address. Unfortunately, a number of courts have recently dug their heels in. A Virginia judge refused, saying the RIAA was not entitled to such discovery. A New Mexico judge denied the application on the grounds that there was no grounds for such secrecy. He required the RIAA to serve a full set of papers for each 'John Doe' and give the students 40 days to review the papers with counsel and make a motion to quash if they so chose.

Then the Attorney General for the State of Oregon has made a motion to quash the RIAA's subpoena against the University of Oregon, on the grounds of lack of scientific validity in the RIAA's 'identification'. This case remains to be resolved.

Finally, after reading a motion to quash from a George Washington University student, the judge issued an order to show cause. She also instructed them to provide information showing why her ruling should not also be applicable to all the RIAA requests before her. As one commentator put it, 'Much combat remains, but the RIAA's campaign is no longer a hot knife cutting through butter on the nation's campuses.' Quite!

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/14/1654230
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/17/0229238

The headline said it all - 'Amazon Planning E-book Debacle'! Yes, Amazon are planning to launch an E-book they're calling Kindle tomorrow. I hope they didn't pay anybody to come up with that stupid name, they are going to lose enough money as it is. The thing even looks pug ugly, to put it mildly. Haven't they learned anything from Apple's design successes over the last few years?

I ask you, why would anyone want to cough up 400 greenbacks for an ugly piece of crud like that? How many real books could you buy for that money? What's more, real books don't need batteries, they can be dropped and get wet and still work as long as there is some light. They can be used on an aircraft, on a crowded subway, and, with a torch, under the bedclothes, where there is no air circulation, when your parents send you to bed early for being naughty.

I could go on...

http://www.halflifesource.com/news/2007/11/16/article10127.htm
http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2007/11/amazon_planning.html;jsessionid=
RHN15JPIJSM1CQSNDLPSKH0CJUNN2JVN?print=true

Homework:

Japanese scientists have come up with a way of shifting data down fibre optics at hundreds of terabits speeds. This is quite a breakthrough, though, if it proves commercial, I suspect it will take a while to percolate through the Internet infrastructure. It uses a technique called quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM), which is already in use at radio frequencies. The scientists have come up with a way of overcoming the stability problems at optical wavelengths. The Wikipedia URL gives an explanation of QAM, but you will need to remember high school maths - calculus and cosines, etc - to understand it :)

Once it becomes widespread, this breakthrough could have a profound effect on how we use the Internet.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadrature_amplitude_modulation
http://www.tech.co.uk/computing/internet-and-broadband/news/terabit-class-data-pipes-movies-in-
an-instant?articleid=1920847255

Most traffic control systems in the industrialised world were introduced in the 60s and 70s. Traffic was a lot lighter then, and the main jobs of the traffic lights was to manage peak time traffic flows. Also, fuel was cheap and 'plentiful', and no one was concerned about making the traffic flow in a fuel-efficient manner.

Now a study at ETH Zurich has come up with a way of overcoming these problems using a combination of two different local strategies, rather than the current hierarchical strategies. Interestingly enough, not only is the traffic flow more efficient, it also makes the journey times more predictable. The problem is that it will probably require the re-education of drivers to handle the different cycle of lights involved. None the less, I think that this is an interesting example of the sort of lateral thinking we need if we want to deal with the human generated component of greenhouse gasses.

http://www.physorg.com/news114355988.html

Geek Toys:

A little something (possibly) for Xmas for the eco-geek this week. ASUS is in the process of bringing to market an eco friendly laptop - the ASUS Ecobook. It promises to be 50% recyclable, and has a bamboo case. Not much other info is being leaked at the moment, but we do know it will have a Core Duo 2 processor. I'll let you know when this little number makes it onto the shelves.

http://blog.scifi.com/tech/archives/2007/11/12/asus_ecobook_re.html

Scanner: Other stories

Council house art fakers
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/11/17/nfake117.xml

Tumbleweeds outnumber punters, as iPhone's First Night flops
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/11/iphone_uk_flop/

Reconstructed WWII code cracker Colossus defeated
http://www.physorg.com/news114422189.html

Virtual theft has real consequences:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/technology/7094764.stm

Europe recycles TV, PC screens into building materials
http://newsletter.eetimes.com/cgi-bin4/DM/y/eBFEs0FypUC0FrX0FeWY0Af

Illegal immigrant finds work as spook for the FBI and CIA
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/14/cia_officer_pleads_guilty/

Acknowledgements

Alan Lenton
alan@ibgames.com
18 November 2007

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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