WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net and technology news
by Alan Lenton
It's a holiday weekend here. Therefore it's raining. It always rains in England on holidays. In Scotland it always rains all the time in summer.
It rained two week ago as well, when a bunch of us from the ACCU went to visit Bletchley Park, but the trip was well worth it. During the Second World War, Bletchley Park was the secret headquarters of the Enigma codebreakers. It's now been set up as the National Museum of Computing, and it also has extensive displays of copies of the code breaking machines and the original cypher machines.
The machines include the bombe (which featured in the film Enigma), and Colossus, the world's first semi-programmable computer, plus Enigma and Lorenz cypher machines. There is also a mock up of a wartime German signals group - the 65th Nachrichten Abteilung. And, there is a fabulous statue of computer pioneer Alan Turning made entirely from stacked slates.
Sadly the museum is starved for funds and run on a hand to mouth basis by volunteers. Unlike the Americans who take their history seriously, we have so much history that it's frequently neglected and history projects are left to amateurs to raise funds and run. Usually that means that what you get is much more interesting, but the projects all too often fail through lack of funds. Bletchley Park is one of those 'enthusiastic amateur' projects that we English excel at, but it's currently projected to run out of money within the year.
So if you are visiting this country and are interested in computers, don't just stay in London like most tourists do. Take a trip up to Bletchley Park, the railway station is literally two minutes walk from the entrance, and go and see a real slice of history, as opposed to an 'audio visual' presentation!
http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk
Shorts:
How can anyone spend 100,000 UK pounds (about US$185,000) on their blog? If you want to know the answer ask the UK's Prime Minister, Gordon Brown. And spending ludicrous amounts of money wasn't all. The site's developers managed to use part of a Wordpress theme without the attribution required of its Creative Commons 3.0 licence.
Then there was the problem caused by the fact that not a single page of the site meets the standards laid down by the government for accessibility. And just to round it off, there were also a number of pages left in by mistake referring to former Prime Minister Tony Blair's PR wonk as a 'pratt'.
There isn't really very much else that you could do wrong, barring catching one of the more common viruses floating around. Anyone like to take bets on how long before the site suffers its first security lapse?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/21/downing_street_website_criticisms/
Of course, the UK isn't the only government to suffer embarrassment at its hi-tech bumbling. There were some very red faces at the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) after phone phreakers made US$12,000 worth of calls to the Middle East and Asia on the DHS's phone system. Hopefully it wasn't al Queda phoning home.
Incidentally, in 2003 the DHS issued a warning that unsecured PBX switchboards were wide open to intruders. Perhaps a scan through their own bulletins to see what else they've missed might be in order!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/21/dhs_phonesystem_hacked/
Remember the exploding laptops of yesteryear? Well now we have a new take on the old theme - exploding Apple Nanos. It seems that there was a run of defective batteries that got into Japanese Nanos (does this sound familiar?) between September 2005 and December 2006.
No one's been seriously hurt yet, although there are 14 recorded instances of Japanese Nanos bursting into flame. Apple seem very blase about the whole thing, but then so were the laptop manufacturers until someone published pictures of flaming laptops. I wonder how much personal damage to someone it will take to engender a product recall?
http://www.technewsworld.com/story/Japan-Demands-Probe-Into-Cause-of-Nano-
Flameouts-64224.html
On a less lethal level, hackers have started using Flash banner ads to gain control of client computer clipboards. The attacks works whether you are using a Mac, Windows or Linux, and regardless of whether your browser is Firefox, Safari or Internet Explorer. Once the clipboard is seized it's impossible to use it for anything else until the computer is reset.
The really worrying thing is that the attack is being spread by Flash-based advertising on legit sites such as Newsweek, MSNBC.com and Digg (no snide comments about Digg's legitimacy, please - keep it clean). Sounds to me like a job for Firefox's AdBlock Plus...
http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=1733
More doom and gloom. This time for the Linux community. After a tight lipped bulletin indicating that Linux distributor Fedora's download servers were being rebuilt from scratch, the powers that be came out with the news that an illegal intrusion had been discovered. (Open Source people are just as prone to double speak as government bodies. For 'illegal intrusion' read, 'We got hacked'.)
There were the usual denials that anything dangerous happened, but who really knows what was compromised. In the mean time there is considerable anger among the actual users (including me - I do all of the Federation 2 development on a Fedora Linux machine) that the hack was not reported immediately. I for one will be weighing up whether to change distributions next time I upgrade. Meanwhile, I'm faced with downloading something like 750 packages to replace the ones that I have already installed. I'm not a happy bunny, I can tell you. I expect better from Linux distributors.
http://lwn.net/Articles/295134/
And now for a little light relief. Poland's biggest telecoms operator, Telekomunikacja Polska (TP) has admitted that it paid cool and hip young looking film extras to stand in queues during the national launch of the Apple iPhone in July. Interestingly enough, TP is refusing to reveal figures for the launch. One has to wonder what they are hiding. Incidentally, I'm told that Poles are very good at queuing - they had lots of practice at it during Communist rule!
http://www.physorg.com/news138626303.html
I see that the beast of Redmond is up to its patent tricks again. US patent number #7,415,666, granted to Microsoft, is for a magnificent piece of bleeding edge technology - page-up and page-down keys! You have to wonder where the patent office gets its examiners from with decisions like this. In the meantime, conspiracy orientated mystics will note that the last three numbers of the patent are 666...
http://lwn.net/Articles/295175/
If you use Comcast as your ISP, keep a close watch on them. The FCC may have ordered them to stop discriminating against P2P traffic, but they have every intention of throttling 'heavy' users. As usual, no one is saying what 'heavy' means, or offering subscription refunds to those affected.
It's no accident that the cable operators are in the vanguard of ISPs trying to reduce usage of their networks. That's because their networks are not designed for access to the Internet, they are designed to distribute video efficiently. And that makes all the difference. (If I wasn't so lazy I would dig out my predictions made in Winding Down several years ago that this would happen.)
Cable connections to homes are laid out in a ring, so that a bunch of people are sharing the same cable. As soon as someone starts using a lot of bandwidth, it impacts everyone else on the same ring. If you want to increase the available bandwidth, you have to re-cable the whole ring. Conventional ISP networks run over the phone lines (or fibre-optics) which means that everyone has their own, non-shared line to the exchange. If there is a bottleneck it can be resolved by putting a bigger cable into the exchange. I know which option I prefer.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080821-comcast-to-slow-down-heaviest-net-
users-to-dsl-speeds.html
I see Dell is offering psychedelic tattoo patterns on the lids of its 'Studio' range of laptops. There are five not particularly brilliant swirly patterns to choose from. Potentially it's a good idea to allow this sort of customisation, but why not allow people to provide their own designs to be etched onto the cover? Come on Dell, wake up and do it properly.
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/08/20/dell_designer_laptops_studio/
Well, the results are in - the UK government has managed to lose 29 million personal records over the last year. I think that gives it the gold medal in data loss. Most of the loss comes from the single 25 million loss of child benefit records, but even if you put that to one side, the fact remains that our ham-fisted government has been losing identity records at a rate of 300,000 a month. Frankly, given my personal experience of the glacial speed of operation of government departments, I'm stunned to find that they actually handle that number of records each month...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/20/uk_gov_lost_records/
It's not very often I smirk at a security breach, but the news this week that the chairman of UK high street bank HBOS suffered from ID theft definitely ignited a touch of schadenfreude. The UK banks have a nasty reputation when it comes to security of customers' accounts, so the news that someone had impersonated chairman Andy Hornby and extracted at least 7,000 UK pounds (about US$12,000) from his account was not exactly greeted with sympathy for the victim. Mr Hornby joins Marcus Agius, chairman of Barclays Bank who lost 7,000 UK pounds (US$12,000) when a thief impersonating him obtained a credit card in his name.
Fact: Last year both HBOS and Barclays were among 11 UK banks warned by the Information Commissioners Office to stop the widespread practice of dumping documents related to customer accounts in bins outside their stores!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/20/hbos_chief_id_theft_scam/
I was interested to note that Russia plans to pump something in the region of US$25 billion into technology. The real question is, given Russia's corruption-ridden economic system, how much of that will go into hi-tech research, and how much will be diverted into the pockets of the Russian mafia? At the same time as he announce these plans, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin also announced a US$10 billion five year program for fundamental research. Now, why does the phrase 'Five Year Plan' come to mind?
http://newsletter.eetimes.com/cgi-bin4/DM/y/eBLMP0FypUC0FrK0GafB0Ey
Dell came up with a very interesting piece of news this week. It seems that they are planning to build an EeePC type machine into their new line of enterprise notebooks. What that means is that you will be able to access your mail without needing to boot up the machine, resulting in a battery life of days, rather than hours. The system is based on adding a specially tailored, fast booting, lean and mean Linux system to the laptop. Linux will then handle the networking and the e-mail application. I don't think Microsoft are going to be very happy about this, but I think it's a brilliant idea.
http://ct.enews.deviceforge.com/rd/cts?d=207-347-2-28-255-30214-0-0-0-1
And while we are on the subject, Dell are not the only ones cutting Microsoft out of the loop. Longtime partner Intel is up to the same tricks. This week at its developer conference it announced a new technology called 'Remote Wake'. This is a chipset and software that allows a laptop in sleep mode to be awakened over the Internet. This too was not developed with Microsoft. It was developed with the help of Silicon Valley Voice over IP (VoIP) start-up JaJah.
The chip has other uses and can also be used with Skype, though that use is not built in and will require a separate application to be loaded, but it's going to be a very useful feature. And, do you know what? Microsoft have nothing to match this, in spite of the fact that they've been pushing their Remote Desktop technology for something like ten years. Time for Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to beat up a few more chairs...
http://cwflyris.computerworld.com/t/3479391/121542017/133798/0/
Wow! (Cue sound of fanfare.) The headline read, 'Apple tops the customer satisfaction poll as rival's ratings slide.' This comes as no surprise to non-Applistas, except maybe the reference to customers. Apple doesn't have customers, it has disciples, and except for the occasional Judas type, no one is going to break ranks - even over the iPhone 3G debacle. Anyway, the figures were Apple 85 points (out of 100), Dell 75, and HP 73. Figures courtesy of the American Consumer Satisfaction Index.
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/08/19/apple_acsi_poll_win/
I see that Microsoft has started work on the hype for the next generation of Windows - catchily entitled 'Windows 7'. I can't think of a better way of switching off Vista's life support. Microsoft has announced that it will, '...provide in-depth technical Information...' at its developer conference in late October.
Actually, it did the same in the early days of Vista development. Only one problem. All the technical innovations touted at developer conferences were dropped in the effort to get the beast out of the door. I have this feeling of deja vu creeping over me........ again.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/15/windows_7_blog/
Homework:
I'd like to introduce readers to a piece written a couple of years back by Jaron Lanier called 'Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism'. It's a well argued piece about how unwise we are to put our faith in the 'wisdom' of online collective activities. The Wikipedia, of course, stands out as the premiere representative of the idiom, but there are plenty of other examples.
Lanier also looks at the dangers of the anonymisation and lack of context afforded by the current mania for aggregation and the further aggregation of aggregators. How can you evaluate and make sense of something when its author and original surrounding have been stripped away? The article is about a dozen pages long, and is as relevant now as it was when it was written two years ago. Recommended.
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/lanier06/lanier06_index.html
Scanner: Other Stories
N.Y. Comptroller advises scraping $2 billion network build
http://update.techweb.com/cgi-bin4/DM/y/eBLN60HiOOq0G4V0Gaoq0EY
The robot at the border: UK bets big on face scanning
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/20/electronic_borders_arrive/
UK SATS debacle - company sacked
http://www.kablenet.com/kd.nsf/FrontpageRSS/717690A04159F3DA802574A6003713A0
!OpenDocument
Princeton Review security flaw outed by competitor
http://update.techweb.com/cgi-bin4/DM/y/eBLJx0HiOOq0G4W0GaOD0EK
Identity and Passport Service suspends half-finished ancestry digitisation
http://www.kablenet.com/kd.nsf/FrontpageRSS/C4E4AD8399B1F086802574A9003500A7
!OpenDocument
IFPI: "Three strikes" efforts hit worldwide home run
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080819-ifpi-three-strikes-efforts-hit-worldwide-
home-run.html
ISO rejects Office Open XML appeal (redux)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/16/iso_rejects_ooxml_appeal/
Western Digital Working On a 20,000 RPM Drive
http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2008/06/06/western-digital-working-on-20-000-rpm-raptor/1
Acknowledgements
Thanks to readers Barb, Fi, Lois
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
24 August 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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