WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net and technology news
by Alan Lenton
We are definitely moving into the quiet season at the moment, and it's made worse by the downturn, which has everyone depressed. I've been forced to include at least two stories which have only the most tenuous links to the digital world, in order to make sure Winding Down has enough material to satisfy my voracious readers!
And so...
Shorts:
With the US Senate holding hearings about mobile telephone companies having exclusive contracts for various models of phone (in truth AT&T and the iPhone), the New York Times columnist David Pogue has produced an interesting rant about what Congress really needs to look into in the cell-phone industry.
David's take? It isn't as unreasonable as it sounds having exclusive agreements, given what's involved in terms of re-engineering the network to support iPhone features, and the way in which phones are subsidised up-front, and then effectively paid off over the period of the contract.
That said, he then goes on to list things that do need looking at in the US market. For instance, the mysterious doubling of the cost for text messages in the last two years - something which the big four managed to do at more or less at the same time. Then there is the fact that people are double billed for text messages - once for the person who sends it, once for the person who receives it. A nice little earner if those involved have no alternative.
And what about the exorbitant cost of international calls? Calls which you could make for free via Skype, or for a couple of cents a minute via Google Voice. I recently started using Skype for work - it's pretty impressive quality these days, unlike when I last used it a few years back. Then there is the way in which time is used up having to listen to the carriers instructions for accessing your voicemail.
Altogether a sad litany of methods that can be use to bilk customers. What is it about telecoms operators that makes them such obvious corporate successors to the great railroad robber barons of the 19th Century?
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/23/technology/personaltech/23pogue.html
?_r=1&hpw=&pagewanted=all
Since we are taking about cell phones, and looking at the New York Times, how about the recently revealed decision by the US National Traffic Safety Administration (NTSA) not to publish or make available hundreds of pages of research and warnings about the use of phones by drivers.
The suppressed information makes frightening reading. Even in 2002, when cell phones were nothing like as prevalent as they are now, there were estimated to be nearly a quarter of a million accidents involving drivers using cell phones, not to mention just under a thousand deaths.
A number of states have tried to rectify this problem by legislating so that only 'hands free' phones can be legally used in a car. Unfortunately, according to the research that doesn't help. It's the call that distracts the driver from watching the road, not the holding of the phone.
What is clear is that the decision not to publish the research was driven by political considerations, and the only reason we are seeing the material now is because of the Freedom of Information Act. That's really frightening, considering the job of the NTSA is to promote safety. Lets hope that this acts as a wake up call for any other groups indulging in the same sort of acts of suppression.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/21/technology/21distracted.html?_r=1
Everyone knows that the FBI has its list of most wanted fugitives, but did you know that the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has its own most wanted list of environmental criminals? No? Neither did I until it cropped up in an article I was reading, so I went over to the EPA's web site to find out who they are looking for, and what the crimes were that put them on the list.
It was really interesting. The crimes ranged from smuggling illegal freon into the USA, discharging hazardous substances into the navigable waters of the USA, illegal disposal of mercury contaminated material, installing a secret pipe to discharge pollutants into a tributary of the Mississippi River, and illegally importing automobiles that did not meet the United States emissions standards.
You can actually print out a wanted poster of each of these guys and stick it in your window. Fascinating stuff!
http://www.epa.gov/fugitives/index.html
I never particularly liked Adobe as a company (and I still don't), and I always really disliked its main creation, the .pdf file. I wasn't, therefore, surprised to find it in hot water over its habit of offering downloads of its software that contain dozens of known security vulnerabilities, many of which are already being exploited to install harmful malware on users' machines.
The main culprit is Adobe Reader, which is available on the web site. The real 'latest' version is two iterations further on, and these versions have fixed a whole bunch of serious security problems.
Adobe defend this practice by saying that once the downloaded version is run it will offer to update itself. I bet most people just say no - they've already gone through the trouble of downloading and installing the damn thing, presumably, so they can use it as a tool to do something that really matters to them. What a bunch of dorks Adobe are. They are completely out of touch with reality.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/07/22/outdated_adobe_reader_downloads/
Ever heard of a company called Spinvox? They claim to make a technology that reliably converts voice messages into text, using what they have claimed is advanced speech recognition technology. This is a pretty impressive claim, since people have been, unsuccessfully, trying to do this for years. This type of software does exist, but it needs training to understand the diction of the person who is going to use it. General purpose software that can understand anyone and produce text from speech seems a long way in the future.
Thus it was that Spinvox got quite a lot of publicity and has been used by a number of firms. But now the cat is out of the bag. Spinvox's 'advanced' speech recognition technology is a call center in South Africa, where the staff transcribe the calls. Spinvox deny this, of course, and claim that only a few difficult parts of anonymised speech are manually transcribed. However, according the BBC, a source at the company told them that the vast majority of messages are converted into text by staff at call centres.
Which just goes to show that if it sounds too good to be true, then it probably is too good to be true.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8163511.stm
It seems as though Microsoft are going to at least appear to cooperate with the EU, instead of racking up huge lawyers bills fighting them, given the straightened times in which we live. The latest announcement from the EU Competition Commission indicates that Windows 7 will ship in the EU with the choice of which browsers to install left to the computer manufacturers. When the machine first fires up, the user will be presented with a list of the manufacturer chosen browsers to select their preferred one.
Given Microsoft's history of pressuring manufacturers into doing things in a way that benefits Microsoft, I'm not personally convinced that this represents a step forward. The real question, to my mind, is whether Windows will work without a Microsoft browser installed? I suspect the answer to that is a resounding NO. In which case we aren't very much further forward than we were before - especially when you consider that my last two Dell machines came with Firefox already installed as an alternative browser.
However, given that everyone else seems to like the EU solution, I suppose it is likely to go forward, at least until people figure out how Microsoft is planning to subvert the intent of this agreement with the EU.
http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/07/microsoft-caves-to-eu-pressure-will-
offer-browser-ballot.ars
That wasn't the only bit of news about the beast of Redmond this week. At the start of the week there was a lot of excitement in technical circles about Microsoft releasing some formerly closed driver code under the open source General Public License (GPL). Was this a new step forward to rapprochement with the open source community. Was it part of an deep and devious 'embrace and destroy' policy, as laid down in the Halloween Papers?
Actually, on close examination it turned out that Microsoft had used some open source modules in the code, and was therefore legally bound under the terms of the GPL to publish its code under the GPL. Before they did this, they were in breach of the GPL. Naughty boys. So my take is that nothing, absolutely zilch, should be read into the event. Only time will tell whether the use of open source modules was an accident, a one off, or the first in a series of such releases.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/07/23/microsoft_hyperv_gpl_violation/
http://catb.org/~esr/halloween/
This story has little to do with digital issues, but I couldn't resist it. It seems that the Royal Canadian Mint has 'misplaced' a cool $15.3 million worth of gold that was supposed to be in its vaults. That's quite a lot of gold, and gold has something of a reputation for being, how shall I put it, heavy. How can you pinch all that gold, and have no one notice until it came to light in an audit? One bar at a time? The mind boggles.
It reminds me of the Johnny Cash cash song 'One piece at a time'.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=US&v=sIuo0KIqD_E
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/ottawa/story/2009/06/29/ottawa-mint-gold-missing.html
You can tell it's the quiet season, cause here is another non-techie piece you'll like. It seems the French army managed to set fire to chunks of the outskirts of Marseilles, after a practice artillery shelling session. Apparently the shelling set off wild fires in the tinder dry area east of the city, and in short order the fires reach the eastern Trois-Ponts suburb burning down several dozen houses, and forcing an evacuation of the area.
Fortunately no one seems to have been killed, but the locals are not happy with the army. The regional prefect, M. Michel Sappin, described the army's action as 'imbecilic'. Difficult to disagree with that assessment!
http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/world/suburbs-in-flames-after-military-
exercise/story-e6frev00-1225753863171
Homework:
A couple of computer scientists have come up with a rather interesting way of making electronic communication, such as e-mail, Facebook postings and chat messages disappear over time. It's a neat little concept. The idea is that you encrypt it, and break the key into pieces which you scatter through a peer2peer file sharing system. When you want to read the message, the software, dubbed 'Vanish', collects in the bits of the keys and decrypts your message for you.
You specify the time (in a multiple of eight hours) that you want the message to last and after that period the parts of the keys start to delete themselves and the message becomes impossible to decrypt.
As I said earlier, it's a neat idea. However, it only defeats attempts to store it in transit and in the backing stores of things like your e-mail service. I can't see that there is any way your could reliably stops the recipient copying it unencrypted to store or forward onwards. Nice try, though.
http://www.physorg.com/news167395285.html
Geek Toys:
Forget the astronauts, what about the game? Do you remember the Lunar Lander computer game? It's one of the very oldest computer games, originally written in text for the DEC PDP-8 mini-computer, and then converted for a vector graphics terminal, and finally arriving at modern bit-mapped computer screens with the rise of personal computers.
Variants are still around today, allowing those who can't do fuel/thrust/speed of descent calculations in their head (or the equivalent) to turn themselves into digital jam on the surface of the moon. The Technologizer site has a story, with pictures and screen shots of the evolution of the game over the years. A nice bit of nostalgia for the aging geek!
http://technologizer.com/2009/07/19/lunar-lander/
Scanner: Other Stories
Four million British identities are up for sale on the internet
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article6718560.ece
Barnes & Noble plans an extensive E-Bookstore
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/21/technology/internet/21book.html?_r=2
Unsung heroes save net from chaos (Spot the errors in this story! AL)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8163190.stm
Network Solutions: 573,928 possibly compromised in attack
http://www.thetechherald.com/article.php/200930/4128/Network-Solutions-
573-928-possibly-compromised-in-attack
Passwords for Brazilian jobless site insult users
http://www.physorg.com/news167320948.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
26 July 2009
Alan Lenton is an on-line games designer, programmer and sociologist, the order of which depends on what he is currently working on! 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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