WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net and technology news
by Alan Lenton
The ACCU conference was great, apart from the food, which was even worse than the stuff they used to serve at my old boarding school. I suppose it must be considered an advantage that I lost four pounds, due to there being nothing worth eating until I could get away in the evening.
The talks and keynotes were very impressive - note to all programmers, functional programming is finally making its way out of academia and into the real world. if you want to keep your skills honed, learn Haskell or Erlang. Even if you can't use them at work, the ideas behind them will make you a better programmer.
And in the meantime, I now have a new job as 'Technical Team Lead' at Digital Governance, also, scientists have discovered how coffee (my beverage of choice, preferably freshly roasted Sumatra) protects the brain against dementia and Alzheimer's, and the Labour government's despicable attempt to prevent the fraud squad investigating allegations that BAE used bribes to gain Saudi Arabian business was zapped by the UK High Court, which called it 'abject surrender'. Life is looking up!
So, lets get right down to this week's edition...
Shorts:
And where better to start, other than with the revelation that patent madness has even penetrated the depths of space! I kid you not. It seems that Boeing owns a patent on a process that uses lunar gravity to put satellites back in the correct geostationary orbit.
This came to light last month when a newly launched comsat satellite was found to have ended up in a marginally too low orbit. Plans to use lunar gravity to correct the orbit were scrapped in the light of the Boeing patent, and the satellite, AMC-14 is to be returned to Earth. What a waste.
http://www.space-travel.com/reports/Boeing_Patent_Shuts_Down_AMC_14_Lunar_
Flyby_Salvage_Attempt_999.html
Mind you, the situation isn't that much better here on the ground. I see that IBM are attempting to patent the process of clean up and rescue in the aftermath of disasters... To quote the application, IBM is seeking the rights to a "... system and method for optimising the selection, verification, and deployment of expert resources in a time of chaos."
I'm in two minds about this. The whole idea is obviously ludicrous. However, since the most effective work in disasters is often achieved by local people helping one another, and the arrival of so-called experts frequently hampers the clean up, I can see that something which gums up the works and hampers official 'help' could be very useful!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/04/10/ibm_chaos_patent/
Moving on to the vexing issue of spam, I was amused to note that the CBL spam blacklist made an embarrassing screw up last week. It managed not only to wrongly block a number of ISPs, but also Internet security monitoring outfit Message Labs! Nice one, guys. Apparently, Microsoft's Hotmail was also affected, but that's probably valid, given the amount of spam emanating from Hotmail addresses :)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/04/11/cbl_blacklists_messagelabs_isps/
Interestingly enough, Google mail is starting to run into the same sort of spammer problems that plague Hotmail. Google relies on the 'CAPTCHA' method of making sure there is a real human applying for the address. CAPTCHA is that stupid kiddie game where you have to try to figure out distorted letters. I never get then right, so I just junk anything that relies on them.
The CAPTCHA letters are supposed to be difficult for computers to recognise, but, in fact, there is already software in the wild that can recognise about 30% of the letters (better than my average). In any case spammers now have software that passes the picture back to far eastern sweat shops where minimally paid humans match the letters and feed them back to the automated software. Time for a new cycle in the ongoing arms race, I suspect.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/04/10/web_mail_throttled/
Hmm... What else have we got this week. Oh yes, politicians! Here in the UK the Conservative Party leader, David Cameron, pledged that, if his party took power in the next election, there would be 'No more NHS computers'. The NHS is the UK's National Health Service, one of the biggest employers in Europe. In the same blog post he referred to 'Labour's hubristic NHS supercomputer'.
Hubristic? I've heard of heuristic based computers, but computers with hubris? Now, I'm all in favour of politicians learning about the tools of modern society, but this one has obviously been briefed by a snake oil vendor. Mind you, given the current government's shamble over the NHS computer project, it is possible that an NHS without any computers would have distinct advantages...
http://www.kablenet.com/kd.nsf/FrontpageRSS/71FC69340E504C748025742100398997
?OpenDocument
Everyone I know curses at the software crud that the computer manufacturers dump onto new computers, but now HP have gone one better. They will sell you a flash memory based 'floppy drive' for your Proliant computer that comes pre-infected with malware.
It's simple - just plug it in to any USB port on your computer, and Presto! all the drives on the computer, and any other computer's drives mapped to your computer are infected. This follows a similar affair earlier this year when Best Buy Co sold a bunch of malware-infected digital photo frames.
The moral of the story is simple - any new hardware you buy should be checked by your anti-virus software - no ifs, no buts.
http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php/id;314715708
And now for a soupcon of good news. Safer, higher capacity laptop batteries may be on their way in the not too distant future. Regular readers will recall several pieces in this rag over the last few years about spontaneously combusting laptop batteries (and the unfortunate laptops).
Scientists at the Argone National Laboratory have discovered a way to make the batteries both less prone to combustion, but also hold up to 50% more charge. They've done it by changing the physical make up of the battery's negative electrode and the process looks very promising. You won't see the new style batteries in the shops immediately, but given the demand for more powerful laptop batteries, I expect that there won't be much delay in the discovery being commercialised.
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/04/10/boffins_build_better_battery/
There's quite a little spat going on between the BBC and the ISPs over here in the UK. The ISPs are, to say the least, not happy about the BBC's TV on demand over the Internet - aka iPlayer. It seems it's become very popular - you can watch TV programs you missed for several days after they are broadcast - and it is eating up limited ISP bandwidth. The ISPs are demanding that the BBC pay them to upgrade their links to cope with the extra traffic, while the BBC is pointing out that the ISPs were the ones that were advertising their services as 'unlimited'.
I hate TV, but in this case my sympathies lie entirely with the BBC. Furthermore, the BBC has threatened to publish details of any ISP it finds interfering with the iPlayer traffic, so that customers know what is going on. This has left the ISPs frothing at the mouth, but, after all, they were the ones that backed themselves into this corner with a price war and dishonest claims that their services featured 'unlimited bandwidth'. Good luck to the BBC over this one.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7336940.stm
Who in their right mind would be an Apple developer? Those who downloaded the beta release of the iPhone developers' kit found their iPhone bricked the morning after. It seems that the new package timed out and killed the iPhone beastie before a new version was available! Most developers eventually managed to sort something out (manual starting handle, anyone?), and get their phones working again.
Meanwhile, the masochists among my readers might be interested to know that the iPhone SDK Beta 3 is now available for download...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/04/09/iphone_cut_off/
With the US 2008 voting season in sight, a Maryland voting integrity group called 'SaveOurVotes' decided to look at exactly what the cost of the state trying to switch to the unreliable electronic voting machines really was. The figures they came up with are staggering. It seems that by the end of this year's presidential election, Maryland will have spent more than US$97.5 million on machines it's now abandoning. Nearly half of that sum - US$44 million went to Diebold just for operation and maintenance!
While these figure come from an advocacy type group, I have to say that they look convincing, and are in the sort of ballpark I would have expected. Also, the figures have been available for over a week now, and I haven't seen any refutation. So, now you know where your tax dollars are going!
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/04/the-cost-of-e-v.html
I see that the latest twist in the Microsoft/Yahoo takeover bid is that Time-Warner's AOL division has now jumped into the fray. Let's see, now, that means we have Microsoft, News Corp, AOL, and even Google tangled up in this one. I suspect Yahoo are really only interested in forcing up the bidding price, while Microsoft are trying to build a big enough online unit to challenge Google in the US$41 billion online advertising market.
I'm not sure Microsoft's strategy will work. Google currently have 59.2% of the search engine market, Yahoo have 21.6% and Microsoft have 9.6% (AOL have 4.9%). Even if no customers were lost in a Microsoft/Yahoo fusion (an unlikely event) the combined unit will only have 31.2% of the market - only just over half of Google's market share.
I think Microsoft will win the battle, but I strongly suspect they will lose the war on this one.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=aQ_rZbWGTBx0&refer=news
And talking of Google and Yahoo, I note that the arch-rivals have joined hands to try to zap a proposed new law in New York. The bill is a 'consumer bill of rights' that requires web sites that use third-party advertising networks, like the execrable DoubleClick, to post a notice warning that they are doing so.
It also requires a link to details of the third party network's data collection policies. Much more to the point it mandates that there should be a way for consumers to opt-out. The bill also controls what data the networks collect and how they the use it. For instance the bill says, "Third party advertising networks shall not use information about sensitive medical or financial data, sexual behaviour or sexual orientation for the purposes of online preference marketing without the affirmative consent of the consumer."
Needless to say, the likes of Google and Yahoo aren't happy bunnies and they have become part of an industry coalition to oppose the bill.
With enemies like these, who needs friends!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/04/10/yahoo_google_new_york_online_ad_bill/
You've probably heard about the chaos at London Heathrow's new Terminal Five. (You should have done - I reported it in the last issue of Winding down!) Over 20,000 pieces of luggage lost - eat your heart out, Denver. Well... it seems one of those pieces of luggage belongs to chart DJ Calvin Harris who stuck his laptop with the only copy of his new CD into his check baggage. No backup, no earlier versions elsewhere.
The bag is, of course, in the T5 baggage mountain, somewhere. Still, looking on the bright side, the authorities at T5 have offered him the princely sum of 750 UK pounds (US$1,400) in compensation. Big deal.
Maybe we should launch an appeal to buy Mr Harris some backup software :)
Coda: El Reg has a brilliant 'Shock. Horror' picture of how BA handles customer lost luggage complaints - take a look.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/04/04/t5_complaints_handling/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/south_of_scotland/7328513.stm
Recent Reading:
White Heat - A history of Britain in the Swinging Sixties by Dominic Sandbrook, Abacus.
There is something almost voyeuristic about reading the history of a period that you lived through! This is a fine book that is readable, comprehensive and covers not only the outward manifestations but also the underlying causes of events. That's something that is remarkably difficult to do when you are covering such a recent period, but the author manages it with an appearance of ease.
There are places where I disagree with the analysis - for instance the interplay of personalities, events and environment in the Northern Ireland. I don't agree that Ian Paisley happened to be in the right place at the right moment to inflame the protestant population against the mild reforms being undertaken. Paisley was a product of the history and environment of Northern Ireland - if he hadn't been there, someone else would have fulfilled the role.
Quibbles aside this is contemporary history at its best, and well worth a read.
Unreservedly recommended.
Scanner: Other Stories
Wanted: Gordon Brown's fingerprints, £1,000 reward
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/04/07/brown_smith_fingerprints_wanted/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/03/30/german_interior_minister_fingerprint_appropriated/
MIT researcher 'paints' cyber-threats
http://www.physorg.com/news127025838.html
EC probes OOXML standards-setting process
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/04/04/ooxml_ec_investigation_iso/
Microsoft discloses 14,000 pages of coding secrets
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/04/08/microsoft_posts_protocol_documents/
Courts disagree on the legality of uploading
http://www.physorg.com/news126595904.html
Movement sensors a less invasive alternative To CCTV
http://technology.newscientist.com/article/dn13632-big-brother-buildings-offer-less-
invasive-security.html
Move over Storm - there's a bigger, stealthier botnet in town
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/04/07/kraken_botnet_menace/
eBay forces Aussies to use PayPal
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/04/10/ebay_australia_paypal/
Bank loses thousands of customer details in the post
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/04/07/hsbc_disc_loss/
Acknowledgements
Thanks to readers Barb, Fi, and Slashdot's daily newsletter for drawing my attention to material used in this issue.
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 Spamato spam filter...
Alan Lenton
alan@ibgames.com
13 April 2008
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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