WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net and technology news
by Alan Lenton
Welcome back to Winding Down, purveyors of fine snippets to the digital masses. Contrary to my statement in the last issue, we will be here next week, since things changed while we were 'resting' between issues! On the other hand we will definitely be off over Xmas, my best guess would be December 21 and 28 for no issue, but I haven't received my orders yet, so take that as provisional.
I was interested to see that Atlantic Records have reached a milestone - more than half its music sales in the US come from digital products like iTunes and ring tones. Perhaps this will encourage the music business to stop treating all its customers as criminals. And then again, perhaps not.
And first in this week's Winding Down, a peep behind the scenes on the internet...
Story: A tale of two botnets - the story so far
Tuesday November 11 - Action by upstream internet providers takes the McColo ISP off the internet after details of its spamming and crimeware activities are published in the Washington Post. One of the results of this was that the command and control servers for two of the world's biggest botnets were taken out of commission. Botnets are networks of compromised computers (known as 'bots') used by their controllers to send out spam and to launch distributed denial of service attacks. The two botnets, Srizbi and Rustock, are estimated to control, respectively, 315,000 and 150,000 - that's nearly half a million compromised computers. The results were rapidly noticeable in the form of a sizeable drop in the amount of spam sloshing around the net.
Saturday November 15 - Using a backup arrangement it had with a Swedish internet provider, McColo comes back to life for 12 hours, enabling the Rustock servers to instruct a large portion of their bots to connect to a server in Russia. In the meantime, the Srizbi bots were trying a number of specially generated internet addresses to try to reconnect with their controlling servers. Security researchers who had figured out how to generate the new addresses from the code started buying these addresses so the owners of Srizbi couldn't obtain them.
Tuesday November 25 - The security researchers, running out of resources, drop out of the unequal competition, having registered several hundred domain names. The Srizbi bots reconnect with a controlling server based in Estonia.
Wednesday November 26 - Estonian ISP Starline Web Services, having discovered that the Srizbi control servers are hosted by them, pull the plug on the servers. Srizbi bots start looking for new command and control servers. To be continued...
While the efforts of the security firms and the ISPs are to be lauded - the amount of spam I received dropped from around 1,000 a day to a mere 300 or so - the real question is what happened to law enforcement? There are two elements to this question, and both of them need serious thought. The first is why the US law enforcement agencies didn't deal with McColo themselves, or at the very least why weren't they involved in the takedown, so that the escape of the Rustock botnet could have been prevented?
Even more worrying is the question that flows from this: is the use of self-appointed vigilantes the only way that this sort of cyber crime can be policed? No due process, no right of appeal, no oversight? Do we have to convince the powers that be that the cyber criminals that control these botnets are funding 'terrorists' to get the problems faced by ordinary users of the net dealt with by law enforcement?
One of the key gains of the enlightenment, enshrined in the US constitution, was to replace the rule of man (kings and the like) with the rule of law. Let's hope that the events of the last couple of weeks convince at least some of the legal authorities that the time has come to start acting on these issues, so that we don't have to take matters into our own hands to get things done.
Coda: A recent report from Symantec, who admittedly, as a security firm, are biased, estimates that the value of the internet underground economy in fraud and stolen goods was more than US$276 million for the period July 2007 to June 2008...
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&
articleId=9121678
http://tech.yahoo.com/news/pcworld/20081127/tc_pcworld/estonianispcutsoffcontrol
serversforsrizbibotnet
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&
articleId=9120727
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/11/18/short_mccolo_resurrection/
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&
articleId=9120542
http://www.physorg.com/news146830296.html
Shorts:
And now for an absolute smorgasbord of patents. IBM are trying to patent a system for splitting the bill when a party of people go to a restaurant. Now I know that this can be difficult, but a patent? I confess that my first though was that it was it must be April 1st, but no it's true - you can look it up in the patent office database, it's number 7,457,767. The Onion has a marvellous spoof on the topic, take a look.
Meanwhile, not to be outdone, McDonalds have slapped in a 55 page claim trying to patent the humble sandwich. Yep, the sandwich. I think John Montagu, Fourth Earl of Sandwich, and the inventor of the food named after him might have had something to say about the issue. And, come to that, how are they going the get round the fact that people have been making sandwiches for hundreds of years?
Now if you will excuse me while I just file this patent on a method of drinking beverages. It consists of an upright cylindrical shape closed at one end and open at the other...
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/52324
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?patentnumber=7,457,767
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2006/nov/20/foodanddrink.uk
There was an interesting snippet from HP Labs in Paolo Alto. They managed to make a hybrid chip with the recently discovered memristor. Memristors are circuit components that vary their resistance, and remember that resistance when switched off. Their existence was predicted as long ago of 1971, but it's only recently that anyone has been able to make them. Judging from the HP report, once memristors are in production, it's going to be possible to produce chips that use less transistors, so you can get more on the chip and, even more important, it uses less power. It's not possible to tell how soon this technology will take to get into production, but when it does it's going to have a lot of impact on the computing scene.
http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/21710/?a=f
And talking of HP, I think they are trying to get into the Guinness Book of Records for using the most packaging. The register has a photograph of a massive box used to ship a single memory chip...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/11/21/more_hp_packaging/
Here in the UK our government is again showing its ignorance of the realities of IT life. It decided to reduce the rate at which VAT is charged from 17.5% to 15%. (The nearest US equivalent is sales tax.) It gave exactly one week's notice of this - one week to change every computer in the country that does retail calculations, including all those web sites and their shopping baskets. Nice going, but I suppose it's only to be expected from a government that thinks computers are a type of mass surveillance device.
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2008/11/26/vat_struggle/
Homework:
I missed this when it originally came out, but it's pretty timeless so I'll tell you about it belatedly! It's an article in The Atlantic Online by Nicholas Car entitled, 'Is Google Making Us Stupid?'. Actually, he isn't really suggesting it makes us stupid, but that it is rewiring our brains from being able to handle extended study to handling skimming multiple summaries and small snippets.
This is not as far fetched as it sounds. Our brains handle memory and behaviour by physically rewiring the circuits to handle what we are doing. The more we do something, the more durable those circuits become. If we stop doing something regularly, then the circuit components are rearranged to handle more recent types of activity. That's why you often have to re-learn things you haven't done for some time - the brain has to re-wire the circuits.
It's an interesting read, now 'scuse me while I rewire my brain to write Winding Down - it's several weeks since I wrote the last one!
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google
There's was an interesting piece in The Register about a talk given by David Patterson, a well respected figure in the semiconductor industry. He explained that the manufacturers had run up against increasing heat problems as they made faster chips. Their solution was to reduce the speed and put more cores on the chip. But as many people have found out this isn't much of a solution.
Take for example the situation a few years down the line. You are thinking of upgrading your 32-core laptop to one of the new 64-core machines. Just what applications are you running that would use 64-cores? Patterson isn't the first computing luminary to raise these sort of concerns. For instance, programmers' doyen Donald Knuth has for some time been an outspoken critic of the move to multi-core.
Patterson, who is currently head of the Parallel Computing laboratory at Berkeley, looks at some of these problems, and comes up with a few suggestions as to solutions. Worth looking at - it will affect you in the coming years, you know.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/11/26/patterson_keynote_sc08/
http://thunk.org/tytso/blog/2008/04/26/donald-knuth-i-trust-my-family-jewels-only-to-linux/
Geek Toys:
DIY hardware geeks should be having a ball this year. The number of open source hardware projects is climbing steadily with over 60 different electronic project kits available and over 60,000 units of the Arduino kit shipped. Makezine has just published its annual review of projects. My favourite was the LilyPad pro kit - a microcontroller designed to handle wearables and e-textiles. Take a look if you are into hardware projects, you might find a board you can use.
http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2008/11/_draft_open_source_hardwa.html
Do you like old computers? Mainframes? DEC PDP minis? Early micros like the Commodore 64? Then have I got pictures for you! Take a look at Australia's largest private computer collection. The URL leads to a stunning set of pictures that will blow the socks off computer buffs. (Warning: cio.com.au don't seem to have heard of AJAX, so the whole page reloads each time. Very irritating, but the pics are worth the aggro.)
http://www.cio.com.au/article/268510/slideshow_--_tech_yesteryear_where_
old_computers_find_their_final_resting_place
Scanner: Other Stories
At Atlantic Records, digital sales surpass CDs
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/26/business/media/26music.html?partner=rss
Google Maps used to mark pirate attacks
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2008/11/20/google-maps-used-to-mark-pirate-attacks
Anderson downgrades Long Tail to Chocolate Teapot status
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/11/21/anderson_long_tail_fail/
Julie Amero is free at last
http://ifwnewsletters.newsletters.infoworld.com/t/3924752/121542019/153274/0/
Judge excludes 3 "John Does" from RIAA subpoena
http://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com/
Collective solution to accessing the Internet via satellite
http://www.physorg.com/news146925966.html
Acknowledgements
Thanks to readers Barb, Fi, Lois and to 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
30 November 30008
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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