Official News page 12

WINDING DOWN

An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net and technology news
by Alan Lenton

No intro this week - straight into the hard stuff...

Shorts:

The report is now out on what caused the brief stock market crash last May. And the answer is... trading! Yep, it was caused by trading on the market, in this case automated trading by a Kansas mutual fund, who ran a computer trading program that disposed of a staggering US$4.1 billion in 20 minutes. I wish I had US$4.1 billion to dispose of... In the event the trading caused the Dow Jones industrial average to drop a massive 600 points in just a few minutes, and then, shortly after, recover in the blink of an eye (or perhaps the space of a screen refresh).

Part of the problem was other automated response programs responding to the disposal. The contracts apparently changed hands 27,000 times in 14 seconds, but in the end only 200 of them actually ended up bought or sold. The effect of all this trading moved from the futures markets to the underlying stock markets, where it resulted in some very weird price fluctuations in the stock of well known companies like Proctor & Gamble and Accenture whose shares at one stage were trading for as little as a penny, or as much as US$100,000. It was only when the automatic brakes cut in and stopped all the trading to 5 seconds that things settled down again.

At least they've figured out what happened, but there seems to be no guarantee that it won't happen again in the future...
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/02/business/02flash.html?_r=2

PCMag has a nearly nice little slide show on forgotten online games dating from the days before the Internet. I say nearly because not only does it not mention my online game - Federation 2 - which predates many of the games chosen, but it also fails to mention the original MUD which ran on the UK's University of Essex DEC10 computers, and even more strikingly, the fabulous Air Warrior that ran on GEnie in the late 80s and early 90s.

However the slide show of screen shots does have a superb ASCII art picture of Cthulu!
http://www.pcmag.com/slideshow_viewer/0,1205,l%253D255130%2526a%
253D255131%2526po%253D1,00.asp?p=n

I see that security bigwigs are working themselves up into a lather over a new smartphone app that tracks the exact location of passenger aircraft as they fly over. How can it track planes? Because, in the USA, at least, the aircraft are required to broadcast this information over a system called ADS-B.

At the time the ADS-B program was started, it was pointed out that the security implications had not been thought through, and that the information should be encrypted, however this very sage advice was ignored by the powers that be.

Now that the phone application is out there - 2,000 copies have already been downloaded - it's not even likely they can put it back in the box, though I have no doubt that someone will try to do just that. I guess they'll just have to encrypt the information, or stop transmitting it.
http://www.ndtv.com/article/technology/a-phone-application-that-threatens-security-56673

Honor among thieves? Forget it! As a policeman once told me, a large percentage of crooks prey on other crooks (and no, he wasn't talking about London's Metropolitan Police force in the 1960s and '70s). More proof of his conjecture came out this week with the revelations that the makers of the Zeus botnet software have had their programs 'pirated' by other wannabe botnet meisters!

Obviously the original owners were aware of the possible problem, because the Zeus software is protected by a reasonably sophisticated Digital Restrictions Manager system, but the bad, bad guys cracked it and are using ripped off copies. I wonder it the creators of Zeus are going to sue under the DMCA, or its equivalent in other countries? In the UK they could do no better than to use the much reviled ACS:Law firm, purveyors of fine legal missives to the movie watching masses, whose database recently got hacked and published on the net.
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/10/01/software-theft-problem-zeus-botnet/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11467347

Did you know that two thirds of all Windows users still use Windows XP? No? I didn't either until I saw a report of a survey by Net Applications, but I'm not really surprised. Computers that shipped with XP as the operating system were the first generation that did everything most people wanted to do on computers. As such they didn't need upgrading, and no one in their right mind, if they are not a techie, would try and install Windows on their machine themselves! So, people just keep on using their computers, running XP, for all the things they need to do. Yes they'll upgrade eventually - when their computer dies. I wonder what version of Windows Microsoft will be at when that happens?
http://www.conceivablytech.com/3227/business/66-of-all-windows-users-still-use-windows-xp/

And while we are on the subject of Microsoft numbers, according to the market watcher StatCounter, Microsoft's share of the browser market has now dropped to below 50%. It's now 49.7%, down from 67% two years ago, and over 90% in 2002. And all this decline in spite of governments and mega-corporations -mandating- Internet Explorer. How the mighty have fallen!
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/100510-microsoft-ie-browser-firefox-chrome.html

And, incidentally, Microsoft is actually aware of what's going on, if a recently published internal document is anything to go by. Apparently the powers that be in Microsoft are warning that "...Business processes that have remained untouched for years urgently need to be examined..."

Furthermore, according to the CEO Steve Ballmer, in a talk at the London School of Economics, he wants the entire company to learn to bring a hybrid structure of cloud computing, desktop, and smartphones into organizations. It's a nice idea but we should note that Microsoft only 'owns' one of those components - the desktop. It's also debatable whether an organization like Microsoft can make those sort of changes to itself...
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2010/10/05/steve_ballmer_lse_cloud_computing/

Scientific American has an interesting little op-ed piece on why the US has fallen so far behind in the Broadband stakes, arguing that the problem is far more a political one than a technical one. They pinpoint the source of the problems as being the 2002 FCC decision to classify broadband as an information service, rather than a telecommunications service.

My US readers will probably know more about exactly what this means for their connection choices than I do, but Scientific American argues that its effect is to cause a duopoly of one cable provider and one phone provider for broadband. No effective competition. That doesn't sound too good to me.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=competition-and-the-internet

Rare earth elements are in the news again this week as Japan promotes a recycling program. Let me tell you a little bit about rare earths, which are needed in electronics, especially devices like mobile phones.

First, they're not rare.

Second, they are not 'earth'.

So, you may ask, how come only China has them? Well that's not true either. Until a while back there were several facilities producing rare earths, but there were problems with the disposal of the spoil, which tended to be toxic/radioactive/generally nasty. That can be overcome, though, and more to the point, was the fact that the Chinese were selling the rare earths they mined at below the cost. The combination, taken together with lack of demand at that time, resulted in the closure of alternative sources of production.

So, next time you see a talking head pontificating about Chinese monopoly of important strategic resources, take it with a pinch of salt (sodium chloride, neither of which are rare earths).
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/05/business/global/05recycle.html?_r=2

Homework:

There's an interesting little breakthrough at Institut Langevin in Paris. Scientists there have been able to reconstruct images from light passing through opaque substances. Just like X-Rays, but without the attendant risk of damaging cells. It also has implications for fibre optic telecoms, since the research could be used to clean up noise in the signals. The research is only at an early stage at the moment, and it's by no means perfect, but when it has been investigated and improved, expect it to have a lot of unexpected implications!
http://news.discovery.com/tech/see-through-visible-light.html

And how about a little history - in particular, the history of electricity. The Atlantic has an interesting piece on this subject, linking it in to the heyday of Rube Golberg's amazing cartoons. We all take electricity for granted now (except when the grid goes down, of course), but when it first became available it seemed to the population at large like magic. Take a look, it's an interesting little piece.
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/09/rube-goldberg-and-the-
irreducible-strangeness-of-electricity/63537/

Here's an interesting question: without consulting the Internet, how much shelf space do you need for eight million books? Give up? OK, I'll tell you - 153 miles. And how do I know this? Simple, -I- looked it up on the Internet :)

Well, not exactly. In fact I came across a story about Oxford University's Bodleian Library, which has just built 153 miles of shelving as a new home for its books, many of which are currently stored in a disused salt mine in Cheshire. As an aside, disused salt mines are ideal for this sort of storage because they are inherently dry. If you want to store things safe from the WWII era Lufwaffe, then disused Welsh slate mines are a better bet. But I digress.

The Bodleian is a very old library - it even has four original manuscript copies of the Magna Carta - and under UK copyright law it is entitled to receive one copy of every book published in the UK. This means they will be out of space in about 20 years time, but by then I suspect they will be looking to build a large data center, not a new physical book repository!

And for those of you who like numbers, here are the figure for the book depository: The 153 miles of storage space includes 11 metre-high racks on 31 narrow aisles, each of which are 71 metres long. There are a total of 3,224 bays with 95,000 shelf levels in the warehouse, as well as 600 map cabinets. You know, I think my book collection might just fit into it!
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/what-do-you-do-
with-8-million-books-build-a-shelf-153-miles-long-2099910.html

Geek Toys:

Good news on the computer hardware front for geeks. Western Digital are rolling out new versions of their external drives with a capacity of 3TB. Not only that, but they are also available with the new USB3 standard to connect to your computer. Of course there aren't very many computers that support USB3 connections at the moment, but I'm sure there will be plenty by Xmas!
http://www.reghardware.com/2010/10/05/wd_updgrades_drives_to_superspeed_usb/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/10/05/wd_3tb/

And a little snippet to store up for the future. You will probably know that Babbage's Difference Engine was constructed from the original plans by a team at the UK's national Science Museum in London. (I think there is a second version finished recently which has been shipped out to the US west coast.)

What I want to tell you about, though, is that there are the stirrings in the nether regions of the net to try and get funds to build the ultimate steampunk machine - Babbage's steam driven Analytical Engine, which really does have a claim to be the first computer, nearly a hundred years before Bletchley Park built Colossus. This I really am going to keep an eye on. I'll let you all know what happens!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/10/05/analytical_engine_build_call/

Scanner:

Some Android apps caught covertly sending GPS data to advertisers
http://arstechnica.com/security/news/2010/09/some-android-apps-found-to-
covertly-send-gps-data-to-advertisers.ars

NASA's Webb telescope MIRI instrument takes one step closer to space
http://www.physorg.com/news205236178.html

How to sue telemarketers and win
http://www.infoworld.com/d/adventures-in-it/how-sue-telemarketers-and-
win-843?page=0,0&source=IFWNLE_nlt_gripe_2010-10-05

Ten great free desktop productivity tools that aren't OpenOffice.org
http://www.infoworld.com/d/applications/10-great-free-desktop-productivity-
tools-arent-openofficeorg-641?page=0,0&source=IFWNLE_nlt_daily_2010-10-04

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
10 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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