WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net and technology news
by Alan Lenton
Happy Birthday to the World Wide Web which was 20 years old this week! On 13 March 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, then a software consultant working at CERN, submitted a proposal to its management for a system to track and monitor the flow of research in the organisation.
This was the start of what was eventually to become the World Wide Web. And the rest, as they say, is history.
And this week on the World Wide Web...
Shorts:
As the Obama administration appoints the country's first chief information officer (CIO), InfoWorld has come up with a ten point program. It makes interesting reading. Among the items suggested are mandatory restitution for customer data leaks, restrictions on what end user license agreements can mandate (those are the legal things you click past when installing software on your computer), and cleaning up the spam mess.
Other important issues include a single electronic voting standard, national standards for electronic medical records, and installing modern communications at the White house.
That's quite an agenda, but the real question is whether the new CIO will be in a central enough position with the power and authority to push through needed reforms. Experience in other countries indicates governments are willing to pay lip service to these sort of issues, but never give the legislative time, or the authority to carry through the assignment.
Only time will tell whether the Obama administration will be any different.
http://www.infoworld.com/article/09/03/09/10FE-national-cio-agenda_1.html
I see that Time Warner has appointed former Google executive Tim Armstrong to be the new CEO of AOL. Less than ten years ago AOL was the poster child of the dot com boom, culminating in the fabled US$147 billion deal with Time Warner. Since then there have been almost continuous reshuffles and reorganisations as the Time Warner part of the conglomerate tries to make its poison chalice profitable enough to sell off.
I have to say that this appointment sounds to me more like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic than anything else. As a friend of mine once put it, "What's this week's long term strategy, then?"
http://www.physorg.com/news156105437.html
The UK's BBC has been indulging in immoral - and probably illegal - behaviour this week. As part of a documentary on botnets it used license payers money to purchase a criminal botnet and broke into 22,000 people's computers. It then used the machines to send out junk mail to a couple of its accounts on Gmail and Hotmail and to launch a distributed denial of service attack on an account set up for the purpose.
As a final two fingers to the people whose machines it had broken into it changed their wallpaper.
The BBC seems to think this was a good wheeze, even though it is almost certainly illegal under the UK's Computer Misuse Act. Frankly, I hope all the people involved are prosecuted and sent to jail, to make it clear that breaking into other peoples computers is being taken seriously. Sadly, based on previous experience, that's not likely to happen.
However, it seems pretty unlikely that all the computers attacked by the BBC's botnet would have been in the UK, so with any luck, before too long, we could see other countries applying to extradite those involved...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/03/13/bbc_botnet_analysis/page2.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2009/mar/12/bbc-botnet-legality-questioned
Trouble is brewing on the question of why the general public is not being allowed to see documents relating to a secret international agreement called the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. This is being currently discussed and put together by a number of countries.
While it seems that interested commercial parties are allowed to see, comment on, and propose items for this bill, the negotiators seem to be more than a little unwilling to allow the public to know what is going on.
In Europe, the European Parliament is locked in dispute with the EU Commission over its refusal to comply with the EC Treaty requirement to make all documents relating to ongoing international negotiations public.
At the same time attempts to get documents relating to the agreement in the US under the Freedom of Information Act, have been refused by the Obama administration which has classified them "in the interest of national security". Not a very hopeful precedent for the future, I'm afraid.
Presumably corporate lobbyists in Europe, Japan and the US, amongst whom the documents are being widely circulated, are not threats to the US national security, while the American public are a threat.
This weird topsy turvy logic does not bode well for the release of other documents in the future, and makes one wonder exactly what has been put into this agreement that makes the negotiators so frightened of ordinary people seeing it?
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/03/european-parliament-to-eu-turn-over-acta-docs.ars
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10195547-38.html
http://www.computerworlduk.com/toolbox/open-source/blogs/index.cfm?entryid=1528&blogid=14
Google has admitted that it screwed up the security of its 'Docs' service. The service allows users to use online text handling programs as an internet service. Unfortunately, the bug allowed users private documents to be 'shared' with people they hadn't authorised.
Google's idea of a fix was to run a program which removed all the collaborators, authorised and unauthorised, of the documents which might have been affected, and then emailed the document owners telling them they would have to re-enable sharing themselves. Not exactly user friendly, but fairly typical tech hedgehog behaviour.
To be honest, I've never understood why anyone would want to leave personal documents on someone else's online storage, when personal computers, including laptops, routinely have hundreds of gigabytes of local storage available. Perhaps this so called 'cloud' computing should be renamed 'cloud 9' computing...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/03/09/google_docs_serious_security_breach/
http://www.physorg.com/news155889352.html
One bit of good news over here in the UK is that the government is dropping its proposals to institute a new legal provision to allow itself the privilege of sharing its citizen's data with all and sundry.
The provision was originally sneaked into a bill that otherwise had little to do with data sharing, but the outcry was, for once, sufficient to make it think again about what it was proposing, and the provisions have now been dropped. Hopefully, there won't be time to try to sneak it back in by another route before the next election, but with our current government the price of freedom really is eternal vigilance!
http://www.kablenet.com/kd.nsf/FrontpageRSS/DD7C160A64FA50C480257
574003C9306!OpenDocument
Homework:
If you ignore the twittering about Twitter at the start, there is an interesting interview about things digital with entertainer Stephen Fry. Topics covered include texting, internet red light districts, web snobbery, email, books and the web, and spelling, to mention but a few.
I thought the comments on abbreviations and texting were really interesting. I for one didn't realise that txt style abbreviations were very common in correspondence in the 17th and 18th centuries, because paper and ink were very expensive! Fascinating stuff, and worth a read.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7926509.stm
I've just been looking at a series of videos showing some of the projects involved in developing the next generation of user interfaces for computers. I have to admit that I was pretty cynical to start with, but after watching a few of the videos, I confess to being awed by the creativity, and technical skill, of the people involved.
You'll have to look at the videos, because the concepts involved would require several editions of Winding Down to explain. I'd just say that the Siftables programmable tiles were my favourite - I'm planning to put them onto the bribe list of things people can use to get me to add features to the Federation 2 game. I'd also mention that the parody of Microsoft's Surface technology advert had me in stitches.
Take a look, it's only a few minutes of your time, and it's well worth it.
http://singularityhub.com/2009/03/04/the-next-generation-in-human-computer-
interfaces-awesome-videos/
Geek Toys:
If you drive in the big cities, like New York, London, Paris, and Tokyo, then you will be only too well aware that scratched paint work is an all too frequent hazard. Fear not. Help is at hand with self repairing paint. Using this paint, you just leave your car out in the sun, and within half an hour the scratches are gone as the paint heals itself.
Sounds good. I suppose that if you live in northern climes and it's winter you might have problems obtaining the sunshine, but perhaps holding a UV tanning bed upside down over the scratch would work.
This stuff is still at the research stage at the moment, but it is cheap to manufacture, and it seems to be considered that commercial availability is less than five years away. All we need to go with it is an automatic dent filler :)
http://uk.cars.yahoo.com/13032009/36/new-car-paint-heals-itself-0.html
I know you geeks have been hoping for a new nuke warhead for Xmas, since the one you bought on eBay is really getting past its use by date. Unfortunately (or otherwise), you'll have to wait a while. This is because scientists in the US and the UK seem to have forgotten how to make 'Fogbank'.
What, you may well ask, is 'Fogbank'? I've no idea, but apparently it's a) very toxic, and b) you need it to make Trident missile W76 nuclear warheads.
It seems that the facility that made this Fogbank stuff was demolished in the 1990s, and no one kept the recipe for making it. This wasn't realised until recently, when it was decided that the W76 warheads needed refurbishing. At this stage it was found that no one had kept the formula ("But I thought you had it?", "No we agreed that you would make a copy", etc), and, of course all the people involved left when the old production facility was demolished.
As King Richard III might have put it, "Fogbank! Fogbank! My kingdom for some Fogbank! (With apologies to Will Shakespeare.)
http://www.sundayherald.com/news/heraldnews/display.var.2494129.0.0.php
Scanner: Other Stories
It was 20 years ago today: The Web
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10787_3-10195512-60.html?tag=nl.e432
Bad Symantec update leads to trouble
http://www.infoworld.com/article/09/03/11/Bad_Symantec_update_leads_to_
trouble_1.html?source=NLC-DAILY&cgd=2009-03-11
Funding boost for Bletchley Park code breakers museum
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/beds/bucks/herts/7937155.stm
Watch the mail and opt out of Verizon sharing your personal data
http://i.gizmodo.com/5166365/free-advice-watch-the-mail-and-opt-out-of-verizon-
sharing-your-personal-data
Acknowledgements
Thanks to readers Barb, Fi, Lois, Jezz, 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
15 March 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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