WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net and technology news
by Alan Lenton
Sid Meier's Civilization Five came out at the start of the week. Most of the reviews rate it as one of the best versions for a while. So far I've managed to keep my hands off it, so I can get some work done, but I confess I'm weakening. So if in a week or so, you get a very skimpy Winding Down, you'll know that I have finally cracked!
Since I did manage to resist the siren call of Civ V, you do actually get a review of some of the week's more interesting items of news this week, and for your edification, here they are...
Shorts:
Google's Data center in Oregon is having problems. Nothing to do with the programs its running, or the data its storing. Quite to the contrary - it's game hunters. It seems that after they've spent a while decimating the local fauna, they get bored and start trying to hit the insulators on the electricity distribution poles.
So far they don't seemed to have managed to actually off an insulator (which perhaps says something about their aiming ability) but they do manage to hit the fibre optic cable, which is also carried by the electricity poles, pretty regularly, thus cutting off digital access to the data center. This happens every hunting season, apparently, and it's now getting to the stage where Google is starting to consider burying the cable.
I guess that will help, at least until the backhoe season starts!
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/232831,us-hunters-shoot-down-google-fibre.aspx
In the mean time, Google has just released an interesting new service as part of its transparency program. It's a set of tools that allow you to look at maps of Internet censorship levels around the world. To give a couple of examples in the first six months of this year the US government made 4,287 requests for user data, and made 128 requests for the removal of 678 items. Google also provide a breakdown of what happened to the requests after they were received.
The equivalent figures for the UK, my own government, are 1343, 48, and 232. There was a major change of government here in the UK during those six months. The new government is pledged to roll back the boundaries of the state, so I look forward to comparing the figures for the second half of this year with those of the same period last year.
http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/governmentrequests/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11380677
The decision of the Senate Judiciary Committee to try to fast track the 'Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act' (COICA), raised warning flags for tech companies, large and small. Not content with having the taxpayer act as policeman for their out of date business models, the legacy media industries want to impress the tech companies to do their dirty work as well.
This isn't the first time legacy technology industries have mobilized to fight new technologies, and TechDirt has an interesting list of industries that when they were in their early stages were also accused of being 'infringing'. Take for instance Hollywood. Yes, it was set up on the West Coast solely to evade Thomas Edison's attempt to control the movie making business with various patents he held!
Other big infringers include the then nascent recording industry, radio, the infant cable TV, which made its money charging users to watch 'pirated' TV shows, photocopying machines, the VCR, cassette tapes, and more recently MP3 players and DVRs. Quite a little collection. And for a final bit of Luddism, the senate once even tried to ban dial telephones!
In the meantime the Obama administration is doing its best to indulge in a little censorship even though COICA hasn't been passed yet, and may never be. It has been meeting with ISPs, registrars, payment processors and the like to persuade them to censor sites regardless of whether the law passes or not. The meeting was ostensibly about sites that sell grey market pharmaceuticals, but most people, correctly in my opinion, see this as the thin end of the wedge. All this without any trial or any type of due process.
Add to that the administration's plans to force companies that provide encrypted services - think Skype, Blackberry, even Google - to make their encryption breakable so that government can read the contents of people's communications, and you get a very dangerous mix indeed.
Time, I suspect for US citizens to discuss the issue with their congress critters.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-20018091-261.html?tag=nl.e703
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100919/02284211072/back-when-the-
senate-tried-to-ban-dial-telephones.shtml
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100925/12401911168/a-look-at-the-
technologies-
industries-senators-leahy-hatch-would-have-banned-in-the-past.shtml
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100929/20293711230/even-without-
coica-
white-house-asking-registrars-to-voluntarily-censor-infringing-sites.shtml
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/27/us/27wiretap.html?_r=2&emc=na
Homework:
The BBC has an article about plant life in the Chernobyl area in the aftermath of the reactor melt down. It was generally expected that the immediate area around the defunct reactor would be a lifeless wasteland, but it seems that this is not the case, and the plant life, at least, is thriving and has developed mechanisms to handle the high levels of radiation. Come to think of it, I've also seen stories of birds and animals re-colonizing the area. Clearly if this is the case some serious study needs to be done to find out just what is happening, and what the mechanisms are that allow plants, in particular, to not just survive but thrive in the area.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11345935
MIT's Technology Review has an interesting piece suggesting that the death of the printed book has been greatly exaggerated. Given that Amazon recently announced that its sales of e-books have now overtaken those of hard back books, this might sound surprising.
Am I suggesting that Amazon might be lying? No, it's the figures themselves that show e-books have a long way to go. To make sense of Amazon's figures you need two other bits of information.
The first is that Amazon, in spite of its apparently ubiquitous position, has only something like 19% of the world new book market. The second point is that it has about 90% of the e-book market. With these figures in hand we can figure out that e-books, popular as they are, only have about 6% of the total new book market. That's a slightly different proposition to that of futurist pundits like the Media Lab's Negroponte, who suggests that the printed book will be dead within 5 years.
The article, which also looks at other aspects of e-books v. printed books, is definitely worth a read - even if you are reading it on-screen!
http://technologyreview.com/blog/mimssbits/25783/
Geek Toys:
OK all you Lego freaks, take a look at this article and its three videos. I had no idea that the European Space Agency (ESA) used Lego to visualize problems when designing its space craft. It has now turned the visualization from the Rosetta comet chasing mission into a Lego educational kit, which, I guess, will be released soon. The release from the ESA also includes couple of videos. The last of them shows more Lego bricks that you've ever seen before!
http://www.physorg.com/news204391929.html
Feeling bored? Then here's a nifty little piece of javascript that will stave off the ennui. It puts an asteroids type spaceship on the screen allowing you to fire missiles at the boring bits of the page zapping them. Hmmm - I want one that works with boring, tedious and interminable presentations!
http://erkie.github.com/
Scanner:
Sid Meier’s Civilization V review from PC Gamer magazine
http://www.pcgamer.com/2010/09/20/civilisation-v-review/
Large Hadron Collider spies hints of an infant universe
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19485-large-hadron-collider-spies-
hints-of-infant-universe.html
Newspaper publishers want control over iPad subscriptions
http://www.physorg.com/news204397993.html
ACS:Law Roundup:
ACS:Law Anti-Piracy law firm torn apart by leaked emails
http://torrentfreak.com/acslaw-anti-piracy-law-firm-torn-apart-by-leaked-
emails-100925/
ISP Sky Broadband cuts off ACS:Law
http://www.slyck.com/story2064_ISP_Sky_Broadband_Cuts_off_ACSLaw
ACS:Law The 4chan porn leak: First of many?
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-20017945-261.html?tag=nl.e703
Acknowledgements
Thanks to readers Barb, Fi, 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
3 October, 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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