WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net and technology news
by Alan Lenton
Seems like a long time since the last Winding Down, but here I am again with news, views, thrills, and spills ( the last being coffee in the keyboard). The news over the past few weeks has been mostly flat, with just a few highlights. I think we are getting into the summer dead period, and I'm going to have to make something up.
How about 'EU orders an edible RFID quality control chip in every strawberry'. Or maybe 'British Government to require pedophile database check for all parents having contact with children.' Maybe not. The problem is that anything you invent that governments might be doing with computers, however mad, is completely believable!
Anyway, here are a few real stories to keep you going for this week.
Story: Porcupines v. Weasels, Round One
The story seemed like an everyday story of a system administrator gone rogue, and sabotaging the network he was supposed to be looking after. On the other hand, the network in question was the city of San Francisco's shiny new fiber wide area network. Now yer average sysadmin doesn't get to be in charge of something that big, and sysadmins are not usually banged up in jail on US$5 million bonds (going bond for murder = US$1 million) for misusing the network.
So what's going on? Well details are slowly emerging. It seems that Terry Childs, the sysadmin, hasn't actually sabotaged anything. What he actually did was to refuse to give the network configuration passwords to people he considered technically incompetent. Childs is a highly skilled professional. He holds a Cisco CCIE certification - that's Cisco's highest certification level - and there aren't that many people anywhere in the world who have achieved that level of certification. He also has the social skills of a porcupine.
And therein lies the problem. And it's not a new one, from all accounts. It seems that over the years management allowed him to create a situation where he became technically 'indispensable'. It happens all the time. And in this case Childs can easily sustain claims that he was merely protecting the network from those who could cause damage through their ignorance.
Frankly I blame the management. Not that I am totally out of sympathy with their problem. Been there and done that myself. On the other hand, I didn't have the offending sysadmin jailed on a US$5 million bond. That was not only unwarranted and vindictive, but also crassly stupid. Nobody - managers or techies - gets things done in big organisations without breaking the rules.
Now there's going to be a court case which will drag everything out into the open. the winners in this affair will be the lawyers, the losers will be the taxpayers of San Francisco.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/07/14/BAOS11P1M5.DTL
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/16/sf_sysadmin/
http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/07/18/30FE-sf-network-lockout_1.html
http://cwflyris.computerworld.com/t/3356966/121542017/126025/0/
Shorts:
You've got to hand it to the UK government - after presiding over some of the most spectacular IT fiascoes the world has seen, what they doing?
Publishing books telling everyone how to run IT projects!
Unbelievable.
Well, unfortunately, it's all too believable given the arrogance of our current government. Anyway, should you want a laugh (and have money to burn) the 'ITIL' books are authored by the Office of Government Commerce (aka the OGC) and published by Stationary Office Books. They cost an eye watering US$403.65 for the three books.
Actually, when I fed the OGC into Amazon UK, I noticed that the list of their publications included a tome with the title 'Buying Software - A Best Practice Approach'. Frankly the mind boggles. The government's record on purchasing software would make the generals running a banana republic look competent.
[Source: Linux Magazine, August 2008, paper edition, reviews section]
'Do no evil', they said. But some of the practices coming to light over Google's AdWords seem to belie the motto. It seems that they have been putting adds on error pages and parked domains, and charging for them. Naughty boys.
In a case just filed in California, Google is being sued for 'unjust enrichment' (brilliant term that!), by promising high quality ad placements, which then ended up as mentioned above.
Google have now changed their policy, you can now opt out, though the ability to do so is carefully hidden four clicks down in the Google interface. The lawyers are currently trying to have the case made into a class action for anyone who had a Google ad stuck onto an error page/parked domain over the last four year. That could make for a very big category of Google AdPeople!
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080716-google-accused-of-ad-fraud-over-
adwords-
on-parked-domains.html
Soon to be US Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama seems to be causing problems for Windows Vista. Indeed, things are so bad that Microsoft have issued a patch clocking in at a staggering 11MB to add his name and four other words (Friendster, Klum, Nazr and Racicot) to Vista's dictionaries.
Presumably the word 'Barack' is already in the dictionaries. But presumably this goes to show that Mr Obama is worth his weight in bits and bytes...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/11/vista_update/
And talking of Vista, I note that the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) have decided to ban the contractors who administer its tests for Air Traffic Controllers from using the much reviled Windows Vista. The tests must be run on computers using Windows XP, which could make for an interesting situation, given that Microsoft officially retired XP last month.
http://www.informationweek.com/news/windows/operatingsystems/showArticle.jhtml?
articleID=208808318
I would suggest to my readers in Texas that they try and refrain from having their computer require repairing. In a law redolent of the shenanigans indulged in by the medieval trade guilds, computer repairers are being required to complete a three year 'apprenticeship' under a licensed Private Investigator in order to get a PI license to do computer repairs. I suggest a bit of public investigation into the finances of those who proposed and supported this measure would be in order.
http://www.ij.org/first_amendment/tx_computer_repair/6_26_08pr.html
One piece of good news was the jailing of an AOL spammer for 30 months, after he spammed 1.2 million AOL users. The spammer, Adam Vitale, was also ordered to pay AOL US$180,000.
Hmm.... Let me see... That makes the going rate for convicted spammers 65 seconds in jail for each junk mail. That's not bad, but I'm sure we would all like to see it pushed up to the five minute mark...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/16/aol_spam_sentencing/
Open Sourcers are celebrating the court decision that SCO unjustly enriched itself by licensing Novell's source code to Sun in 2003, so that SCO have to pay Novell US$2.54 million.
I think they are celebrating a little too soon. That's pocket money for most large firms, even SCO. Also the same judgement allowed that the US$16 million deal with Microsoft, also in 2003, was OK, and SCO didn't have to pay any of it to Novell.
I think we will be hearing more of SCO. It's a vampire feeding on the Open Source movement, and until someone manages to stick a stake through its heart it will keep reappearing.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080716-ruling-sco-owes-novell-2-54-million-from-
sco-sun-svrx-deal.html
http://update.techweb.com/cgi-bin4/DM/y/eBKXn0HiOOq0G4T0GEZA0Ey
http://lwn.net/Articles/290755/
The EU is trying to retroactively change the copyright terms for music recordings by extending the term for 50 years. It seems that they feel that unlike the rest of the population, copyright owners should not have to plan for their retirement, so they will continue to get royalties after they retire.
I like the sound of this, though, of course, there is no reason why musicians should be the only people who continue to get paid after they retire - this should clearly be a universal right. Once this amendment has been added to the proposal, maybe a clause to set the retirement age 45 would also be a good idea!
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080716-eu-caves-to-aging-rockers-wants-45-
year-copyright-extension.html
And finally in this section, I must draw your attention to a new series of videos on the periodic table of elements from the UK's University of Nottingham. They're shot by a cameraman who has obviously only just discovered the zoom feature on his camera, and is determined to play with it as much as possible. It features a professor who resembles the original mad boffin - just look at the hair - and two assistants who are like boys who've been given a chemistry set for Xmas. And along the way you get to find out a bit about the elements... Take a look at the video for sodium - it's a classic!
http://www.periodicvideos.com/index.htm (select the 'Na' box, third down on the left for the sodium video.)
Recent Reading:
Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Penguin
The art of the sustained polemic is not dead! In an age where bland agreement with the current fad is 'in', Nicholas Taleb has written a book that not only takes apart the pretensions of the market traders and other would-be oracles, but also reintroduces robustness into debate.
Some people won't like the style, of course. That's sad, because they will also be missing a very informative book. It really does tell you a lot about randomness in life, what it means, and possible strategies for dealing with it.
As a computer programmer I was particularly struck by the discussion of how easy it is to mistake noise for signal by looking at phenomena at the wrong scale. That's a small part of the discussion though, others will find nuggets relating to their own experience as they read through the book.
I liked this book. I liked the irreverence - arrogance even - with which Taleb dispatches his enemies, and turns 'common sense' upside down.
Highly recommended
Scanner: Other Stories
Review site furious over McAfee SiteAdvisor 'false alert'
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/17/siteadvisor_false_alert/
Diebold patch may be evidence of '02 election yampering
http://rawstory.com//news/2008/Cybersecurity_expert_raises_allegations_of_2004_0717.html
Researchers look to air-condition computer chips
http://www.physorg.com/news135422626.html
Bic to offer 'disposable' pre-charged phone
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/07/11/bic_mobile/
HP demonstrates mega-memory concept
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/11/hp_memristor/
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
20 July 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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