WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net and technology news
by Alan Lenton
Quote of the week has to be one from Bruce Schneier on security after the so called 'pants bomber' affair, "Only one carry on? No electronics for the first hour of flight? I wish that, just once, some terrorist would try something that you can only foil by upgrading the passengers to first class and giving them free drinks."
Spot on!
Story: What do you want to do tomorrow? We'll let you know.
Well I guess this was Apple's week. Predictably, Apple fans liked the new iPad, while non-Apple fans shrugged, or slated (so to speak) the device for the fact that you could only run things that Apple thought were good for you on it.
My take? It seems like a larger version of the iPhone. If you have a need for a souped up iPhone, then this is probably the device for you. As a book reader, it doesn't really inspire me - I want something that isn't back-lit to read books on. And, of course there is the problem that Apple's tastes in applications and entertainment are unlikely to match my own tastes.
Which brings me to an interesting statistic. A survey here in the UK indicates that less that a quarter of Brits use their phones to access the internet. Even if you just confine it to smartphone owners, in itself a minority of the cell phone market, over 40% don't access the internet via their phones. And of the smart-phone owners, 31% have never even tried. Most of those who do use the internet seem to use an iPhone.
That's interesting to me because I'm one of those 31%, and I've always maintained that using the internet via a cell-phone is over-hyped, only to be told that I'm an old fogey/conservative geek/have different interests to most people/a programmer/awkward critter/etc. Actually, it seems I'm in the majority, at least over here. And for the record, I use my mobile phone to make phone calls. (Yes, I know this is a difficult concept for 'ordinary' people to handle, but I have faith in the intellectual powers of my readers...)
Thinking about it, I think there are two competing ideologies at work here. The first is the idea that you have a tool for each job which does one job and does it well, the other is that you have one tool that does everything, a bit like the legendary Swiss army knife.
In the high tech industry, the latter is known as convergence, and has long been the holy grail of the big consumer firms like Microsoft and Apple. For many years now, Microsoft has been trying to position a PC, or a PC variant such as the Xbox360, as the controlling centre of a hi-tech, microprocessor driven, household. Both of the companies, and via a somewhat different route, Google, would like to establish full control over what you see, what you hear, and how you feel with a single appliance or application, which they have mastery over. (Amazon are slightly less ambitious, so far - they only aspire to control what you read!)
So far, this policy is not working as well as its protagonists hoped. There are reasons for that. It's that individual devices usually work better than hybrid devices and the inbuilt tendency of people (except politicians) to resist centralisation. If you want a non-tech analogy, think of a sofa-bed. Sofa-beds are far less comfortable to sit on than a sofa, and far less comfortable to sleep on than a regular bed. They only sell because, by the very nature of things, the people who buy them do so for guests to use, they never sleep on them themselves.
None of this is likely to stop the likes of Microsoft, Apple and Google from trying, they are not the first, and I'm sure they won't be the last. As one famous baddy would have put it...
One device to rule them all, with GPS to find them,
One device to bring them all, with DRM to bind them
...and we all know what happened to him!
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31021_3-10440943-260.html?tag=nl.e498
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2010/01/23/uk_mobile_internet_data/
Shorts:
OK, back to short pieces. I note that a British company has received at least US$85 million from Iraq for its range of 'hi-tec' hand held bomb detectors, which turned out to be little more than metallic dowsing rods, with virtually no electronic components in them at all. The New York Times first sounded the alarm in an article last November, and now it is now reporting that a director of the company, ATSC Ltd, has been arrested on fraud charges. Incidentally, since November, the company has been working on "developing a new model that has flashing lights." (Their description, not mine!).
Obviously a number of high ranking British and Iraqi officials were dazzled by the high-tec claims for this device, perhaps yet another glaring example of the semi-religious belief of our government in the power of shiny new technology. Oh, and any of my US readers that are sniggering about the naivety of Brit officials, should like to note that US officials have been just as gullible when it comes to assessing claims and dishing out cash for software and devices that would help with the 'War on terrorism'.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/24/world/europe/24scanner.html
In an interesting decision, the US Supreme Court has ruled against New York City's attempt to use federal racketeering laws to sue internet cigarette sellers over lost tax revenue. That's a good decision for common sense - there is no way internet cigarette sellers are racketeers, and everyone knows it. However, the case does raise a couple of important issues.
The first is the increasing tendency for law enforcement to use loosely written laws that were promulgated for 'emergency' type situations, as an easy way to deal with people who they consider are breaking the law, but are unable to pursue via more conventional laws. The UK is even worse than the US for this sort of thing, with the police routinely misusing the anti-terrorist laws against public activity they find inconvenient.
The second is that sooner or later, 'something will have to be done' about consumer taxation not only across state boundaries, but also across international boundaries. OK. None of us like taxes, and we all think politicians fritter our hard earned money away on utopian schemes. However, there are legit state functions that have to be performed, and they have to be paid for. And at the moment, the truth is that internet consumer commerce has outstripped the capacity of existing laws to create tax income.
Remember that before the state can tax something, it must be possible to collect the tax. Currently, consumer taxes on purchases made over the internet do not meet that criteria, making such goods effectively untaxed. Now that wasn't really a problem when internet purchases were only a tiny proportion of the sales within a state or country, but it's now no longer the case. Now the volume of sales is such that they represent a significant chunk of formerly taxed purchases that can no longer be taxed under the current tax regime.
I don't like it, you won't like it, in fact none of us will like it, but the time is fast approaching when 'something' will have to be done about this, and that 'something' will be figuring out a way to tax cross border purchases of consumer goods. It's sad, but necessary...
http://www.physorg.com/news183642196.html
Mad Scientist alert! The Pentagon's DARPA bureau (the ones who invented the internet in the 1970s, before Al Gore) are at it again. They want to establish a 'Cyber Genome' project which will allow them to identify the origin of any digital artifact. The idea is that anything digital can be identified because its author - human or machine - will have a specific way of creating it. This could, if true, then allow an analysis of its 'genome' to identify the true originator.
This isn't completely la-la land. The idea has been around for some time under the rubric of 'fingerprinting' (when it first came out there were no genomes), and at regular intervals claims surface that analysis by this type of software has conclusively proved that Will Shakespeare maybe did/didn't write his plays - which of course were not digital. Will DARPA's project do any better? Who knows, but I can think of several paranoid organisations who would like to get their hands of such software!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/26/cyber_genome_project/
And talking of paranoia, Brit computer scientists have used built in weaknesses in the e-passports used in the US, the UK and some 50 other countries to trace the movements of individuals as they enter and exit buildings. You don't have to know anything about the cryptographic keys involved, and the passports are designed so you can't turn off the radio-frequency identification, so there's little you can do to stop other people tracking you.
This is just the latest in a series of privacy exploits that the bad design of these identity documents have lead to. I don't doubt that more will show up in the future, probably making them the last document you would want to carry around to establish your identity.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/26/epassport_rfid_weakness/
And now for a belated report regarding Santa Claus. Arweena, a spokes-elf for Santa Claus, has admitted that the database posted at Wikileaks yesterday is indeed the comprehensive 2009 list of which kids have been naughty, and which were nice. I'll let you read all about this terrible affair straight from the reindeer's mouth, so to speak.
http://precision-blogging.blogspot.com/2009/12/another-leak-worst-so-far.html
Homework:
If you really, really, want to know about the maze of twisty little laws that make up copyright protection, then take a quick look at the New York Times editorial on the 'Legacy of Baker Street', which is about the disputes among the descendants of Arthur Conan Doyle over who controls the rights Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/24/opinion/24sun4.html?th&emc=th
Scanner:
Climate science panel apologizes for Himalayan glaciers melting by 2035 error - should have been 2350!
http://www.nytimes.com/cwire/2010/01/21/21climatewire-climate-science-panel-
apologizes-for-himalay-25267.html
Crusty fireball space mango wrecks US doctor's office, but causes no casualties
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/22/virginia_doc_office_meteorite/
The Electro Magnetic pulse threat: fact, fiction, and response
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1549/1
Ladbrokes, police probe breach of customer database
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/25/ladbrokes_data_fail/
Acknowledgements
Thanks to readers Barb, Fi, Jason, 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
31 January, 2010
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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