WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net and technology news
by Alan Lenton
Well, welcome to the last edition before Xmas. We're off for three weeks holiday. (Would that real life work was the same!) According to my calculations, we should, therefore be back in the new year, on January 16th.
I think everyone's partying at the moment, because not much is really happening, so it's a pretty short issue. A triumph of quality over quantity, I like to think...
Have a nice holiday, and a good new year.
Shorts:
I've mentioned before ACS:Law, the British law firm that's been firing off thousands of letters to supposed file sharers in the hope that they will cough up rather than face the cost of a court case. Well they've now managed to take no less than eight cases to court. Mind you they were still trying it on - they were trying to get default judgments (normally used where the defendant fails to respond, or doesn't file a defense).
The result was just classic. Three of the cases were thrown out because the defendants had filed a defense. Three were thrown out because there was no evidence that the defendants had been served with the claim for money. And the other two? They were thrown out because ACS:Law fail to follow the proper judicial procedure.
But that was only the start. The judge then started to question the right of ACS:Law to make claims against file sharers in the first place, on three counts. These were, whether they had the right to represent the owners of the copyright, whether the owner of an unsecured Wi-Fi connection could be held responsible for copyright infringement over that connection, and finally whether possessing an insecure connection is the same as "allowing" infringement. Incidentally, the actual law uses the term "authorising".
All in all a spectacularly bad day in court for ACS:Law. How sad.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/12/10/acslaw_court_fail/
While we are on the subject of all things legal, I'd draw your attention to an important US appeals court ruling: e-mail is protected by the Fourth Amendment. What does this mean in practice for our US readers? It means that the government must get a search warrant before it can secretly seize and search e-mails stored by service providers. The court found that e-mail users have the same reasonable expectation of privacy in their stored e-mail as they do in their phone calls and postal mail. This is one of the best pieces of privacy news this year. Kudos to the Electric Frontier Foundation (EFF) for their work on this issue.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/12/breaking-news-eff-victory-appeals-court-holds#
Here's a little snippet that might amuse you. Over here in the UK, we have a body called the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA). It's pretty toothless really, but now and again it comes up with a good one. Apparently eight people complained that Microsoft's Advert for Windows 7 was misleading because one of the ads had a claim by 'Alice' that she invented the concept of recording and watching TV on her laptop after her boyfriend smashed the telly with a badly aimed rugby pass. This implied that the idea of watching TV on a PC was new.
After lengthy investigation, the ASA ruled that it is perfectly plausible to claim that Windows 7 was developed by a gaggle of rugby players' girlfriends, "private-browsing" dads, and spud-faced kids in Spanish cafes! Therefore they found in Microsoft's favor.
I can think of a lot of people out there who agree with the ASA on this one...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/12/15/ms_ads/
Bad news, though, for conspiracy theorists. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has so far failed to produce any black holes - even microscopic ones. So, the end of the world has not yet occurred, as you might have noticed. In case you're wondering, the boffins were actually trying to produce micro-black holes as proof that certain theories are correct. (I can't tell you what the theories are, because everyone who knows has disappeared into the 11th dimension.)
The assumption is that if no micro-black holes (or even black micro-holes) appear by the end of the next run, then there aren't any produced in the way, thus discrediting the theory. In the mean time, they are still looking for Higgs particles. Good luck - I suspect that there's probably a Nobel prize at stake somewhere here!
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=no-black-holes-formed-
at-large&WT.mc_id=SA_CAT_SPC_20101216
Homework:
The Miller-McCune website has an interesting piece about the mathematics of terrorist attacks. Physicist Aaron Clauset was searching for patterns in such attacks, and was surprised when he found the attacks match a power law relationship called scale invariance. The effect can't be used to predict a given attack, but it does give a long term - strategic if you like - view of the pattern.
In particular it shows that most terrorist attacks happen in the developing world. Those attacks are mostly small ones. Attacks happen far less in the developed world, but they are often bigger. The size of terrorist groups is also important. The bigger they are, the more frequently they attack. Interestingly, they don't get more lethally efficient, they just attack more often.
There's a lot more to be said, and I'd suggest taking a look at the article, it's very well written, and will make you re-think your assumptions on the subject.
http://www.miller-mccune.com/culture-society/the-physics-of-terror-25955/
Scanner:
Techie kids' toys for every age group
http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-12-gift-techie-kids-toys-age.html
Why are so many geeks also musicians?
http://www.infoworld.com/t/education-and-skills/why-are-so-many-geeks-also-
musicians-574?source=IFWNLE_nlt_blogs_2010-12-13
Microsoft sets record with massive patch
http://www.informationweek.com/news/security/vulnerabilities/showArticle.jhtml?
articleID=228800596&cid=nl_TW_security_2010-12-15_text
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
19 December, 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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