WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net and technology news
by Alan Lenton
It's miserable here, and dim. This is the coldest winter for over ten years. Global warming? Don't make me laugh. I blame the government, since it's also the reason why everything is dim. The government bullied the light bulb producers into producing only 'energy saving' light bulbs, which give out far less light, thus, they claim, reducing global warming.
Well I've got news for them - they've obviously succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, because it's now freezing cold. Also if you break their new fangled light bulbs, you have to evacuate the room for 20 minutes and stand out in the cold while the poisonous mercury vapour the bulb contain dissipates.
There is hope, however, even in this benighted* (literally) land. Our scientists at Cambridge University have come up with a way of cheaply producing white LEDs, which are three times as efficient as the poisonous bulbs - and they aren't poisonous.
In the mean time: Bah! Humbug!
Story 1: Blowing your own trumpet
A fascinating little story has been breaking for the last week or so on Arlen Parsa's 'Daily Background' blog. What happened was that Parsa was looking through Amazon's 'Mechanical Turk' section looking for some casual work, when he came upon an interesting offer.
For those of you who, like me, have never heard of Mechanical Turk, it's an online market place for small amounts of freelance work. The name is a reference to a famous chess playing hoax from the 18th Century.
But I digress. The ad was posted by somebody called Mike Bayard, and offered 65 cents per review to anyone writing five star positive user reviews of any Belkin product on Amazon. The job specifically -didn't- require you to own or use the Belkin product in question!
So, who is Mike Bayard, and why is he so keen to game the Amazon reviews system for Belkin?
A little bit of sleuthing work by Arlen Parsa pulled up a copy of Mr Bayard's LinkedIn profile showing him as a Business Development Representative at Belkin International. I guess nobody can hide forever on the net.
The next thing to occur, apart from the discovery that Bayard had been writing five star reviews himself under a pseudonym, was a letter from a Belkin whistle blower alleging that this sort of behaviour was endemic within the company. Whether that is the case or not is a moot point - evidence has not been forthcoming yet. In the meantime, Belkin are working overtime to try to minimise the damage, as the story moves out of the blog arena and into the mainstream.
Needless to say, with people alerted to the practice (known in the trade as 'astroturfing') another case, this time involving the Boston, Mass., company Carbonite, was spotted. High level employees from Carbonite all gave their company's product - an online backup service - good reviews. Stupidly, they all posted them on the same day and from the same area - Boston.
The issue raised by all this is, of course, just how much can you trust user reviews of products on sites like Amazon? They are useful for getting a feel for products, and my experience of writing reviews is that something has to be pretty grim before people bother to slag it off. (Here's one of the few bad reviews I've written.)
If you'd like to know more about online reviews, have a look at the pcworld.about.com URL, which is an interesting look at the whole subject.
http://pcworld.about.com/od/consumeradvice1/Online-User-Reviews-Can-They.htm?p=1
http://www.thedailybackground.com/2009/01/16/exclusive-belkins-development-rep-
is-hiring-
people-to-write-fake-positive-amazon-reviews/
http://www.thedailybackground.com/2009/01/19/belkin-whistleblower-alleges-systemic-
wrongdoing-this-only-scratches-the-surface/
http://www.belkin.com/pressroom/letter.html
http://www.thedailybackground.com/2009/01/28/another-tech-company-gets-caught-
astroturfing-reviews/
Story 2: Eat your heart out James Bond
I see that cheating at exams is moving into the realms of James Bond style hi-tech spy gear. As long ago as 2003 UK schools were employing phone scanners to try to stop pupils using mobile phones to cheat. Things have moved on since then, as evinced by two recent cases that came to light.
The first was in China, where it was revealed that more than 1,000 applicants were caught cheating by using micro earpieces and disguised wireless transmitters. About 300 of them were actually caught in the act of using the technology, while another 700 were deemed to have cheated because their papers 'shared much conformity', according to the Xinhua news agency.
Apparently in ancient times, those caught cheating at the imperial exams were executed. These days, though, the punishment is a little less severe - disqualified and barring from retaking the exams for the next five years. I guess the Communist authorities are getting soft in their old age...
The other recent case that came to light also involved Chinese - but in the UK. First a bit of background. If you are an immigrant, in order to get permission to stay and work in the UK indefinitely, or be granted citizenship, you have to pass a multiple choice test.
As an aside, the test is full of inane questions of the 'How many Buddhists are there in Glasgow' ilk and things which are a matter of opinion - you fail unless you agree with the New Labour government's opinion. The test is, not unnaturally, in English.
One day towards the end of last year a couple of women walking home after taking their children to school spotted a parked BMW full of electronic gear and manned by two foreign looking types, one of which was using a laptop. Dead ringers for terrorists, the eagle-eyed ladies thought, and promptly reported the 'terrorists' to the local police force.
The police swooped <Cue James Bond theme music>, and what did they find? Not terrorists, but a sophisticated scam aimed at the test centre in a nearby library. The person wishing to cheat was equipped with a hidden shirt buttonhole camera, a microphone, a transmitter, and a wireless earpiece. The guys in the BMW were looking at the cam image and directing the examinee which boxes to tick.
When the police investigated they discovered that the scam was widespread and very lucrative for the people running it. The guys running the scam were sentenced to eight months imprisonment, while the cheaters each drew 180 hours community work for deception.
I suspect that these cases are only the tip of the iceberg, and that much more exam fraud will become obvious as the examining authorities become more tech savvy.
http://www.physorg.com/news151563376.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1434362/Schools-turn-to-phone-scanners-
to-foil-cheats.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/3459469/James-Bond-
style-spy-gear-used-to-cheat-immigration-test.html
Shorts:
The news was first reported on the nanog mailing list by US based members. Google was branding all search results as dangerous - 'This site may harm your computer', the message said. The problem rapidly spread to affect Canada, and eventually the whole world. Every web site was declared as dangerous! Including my own...
Actually, what happened was that someone in the bowels of the Google machine made a mistake while updating the list of nasty sites and added a plain '/' to the list. All URLs contain these slashes. Ergo all sites are dangerous. The whole thing lasted an hour before the problem was fixed, and normal service was resumed.
The best comment on the whole fiasco came from PFIR's Lauren Weinstein, who commented in his newsletter, '...I might note that the world did not come to an end.'
Which reminds me, those of you who value your privacy might like to take a look at the ixquick search engine which doesn't keep any record of addresses requesting searches. On the subjects I've tried it on, it has come up with results that at least equal Google, and, unlike Google, it doesn't snoop on me while I'm using it.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7862840.stm
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/this-site-may-harm-your-computer-on.html
I'm not sure this counts as a high tech scam - medium-tech, perhaps - but it was too good a story to pass on. How many of you out there have been caught jumping the lights by a speed camera? Well just be thankful you don't drive in Italy, where a new system of cameras linked to the traffic lights has been installed over the last two years.
The system has caught more than a million drivers in that time. Now, however, it has been discovered that the police have been rigging the lights to only allow half the legal time when they change from yellow to red. The fraud was uncovered when a senior police officer noticed that the average number of fines in some areas jumped from 15 a day to more than 1,000.
It seems that the fraud may have netted anything up to US$170 million. A nice little earner for some. As of going to press 100 people are under investigation, including 63 police commanders, and thousands of drivers are expected to file for compensation over the traffic fines they've paid.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7862893.stm
There's an interesting report out on file sharing in the Netherlands. It seems that illegal downloaders represent 45% of consumers who purchase content legally. In real figures that means that some 4.7 million Dutch Internet users of 15 years and older illegally downloaded DVDs, games and music in the last 12 months!
That's a stunning enough example of just how many people share files, but there is even more intriguing information in the report. The study found that the average illegal downloader buys more legal DVDs, music and games that the not downloaders do! I suspect that this definitely isn't a statistic that the likes of the RIAA will want to push.
By the way, while we are on the subject of averages, did you know that most people have more legs than average?
http://www.internetevolution.com/author.asp?section_id=717&doc_id=170903&
More hacking bad news - Monster.com are reporting that the personal details of up to four and a half million of its job seeking users may have been stolen by hackers who broke into their database. Details are not exactly forthcoming, but if you registered with the company, now is the time to start asking them hard questions, and, if you use the same password for multiple sites, now would be a good time to change it.
Incidentally, if you want to keep up with the latest reported data thefts, then the place to go is http://datalossdb.org/. I warn you though, it's not for the faint of heart!
http://www.physorg.com/news152285976.html
In what I suspect may by the first of a number of cases, the New York Times newspaper has reported a 2008 net loss of US$57.8 million, compared with a net profit of US$208 in 2007. I suspect this isn't just a blip caused by the state of the economy (maybe I'll just put the phrase 'the state of the economy' on an F-Key).
I think a wider trend of more and more people getting their news from the Internet is at work here. Yes it will have been exacerbated by the current economic situation (another F-Key, please), but the trend away from print newspapers has been there for some years.
http://www.physorg.com/news152382627.html
How the mighty have fallen. I saw a note that AOL have laid off 700 workers, which is 10% of the total workforce, in a bid to cut costs. I can remember the days when 700 workers wouldn't have even been 1% of its workforce. I guess that's what happens when your business model involves flogging your users off to other people, rather than giving them good content yourself!
http://www.physorg.com/news152381711.html
An Israeli company that makes lie detectors has managed to intimidate the publisher of an article by Swedish scientists about the pseudo-science behind lie detectors into withdrawing the article. The company threatened to take legal action against the publisher if the article was not withdrawn, and is also threatening the authors.
It's a pity, for a whole slew of reason, that the publishers backed down. I for one would have like to have seen a lie detector company in court trying to explain the 'scientific' basis of their devices. As I understand it lie detectors work by intimidating the gullible into believing that they work and so eliciting a confession. Neat trick if you can pull it off.
http://www.su.se/english/about/news_and_events/scientists_threatened_with_legal_action
Finally a case of low-tech shambles here in the UK. The UK Borders Agency is, like most of New Labour's creations, massively inefficient and technically deficient. Our National Audit Office (NAO) - roughly equivalent to the US GAO - recently produced a report on the agency.
And what did it find? It found that most of the data is first hand written and then entered into the database - with all the opportunities for mistakes which that implies. Not only that, but the agency uses fax to send documents internally and externally. Can you believe it in this day and age - FAX! No wonder the agency's backlog of cases has doubled in the last 12 months! Presumably sometime in the 22nd Century the agency will start using electronic data transfers (probably unencrypted...).
http://guardianmail.co.uk/go.asp?/bGUA001/qJU5O09/x9Y5O09
Geek Toys:
It's a while since a decent geek toy was spotted, so it was with some relief that I came across the Wii-styled toaster that fires out the toast on to your plate (42 deg angle, 5.2 Newtons of force) when the bread is suitably brown for your taste. Nothing announced yet in the way of a launch date (so to speak) or a price, but I'll let you know when I find out.
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2009/01/27/wii_toaster_and_hot_plate/
Scanner: Other Stories
LED lighting as cheap as CFLs invented
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16496-cheap-superefficient-led-lights-on-
the-horizon.html
Microsoft 'Vista Capable' settlement cost could be over $8 billion
http://www.crn.com/it-channel/212902345
Universal disk encryption spec finalized
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&taxonomy
Name=storage&articleId=9126869&taxonomyId=19&intsrc=kc_top
AP, NYT, and news groups urge court webcast in RIAA music case
http://www.physorg.com/news152539179.html
*From dictionary.com: 'overtaken by darkness or night'
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
1 February 2009
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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