WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net and technology news
by Alan Lenton
Next week Winding down will having a week off. I realize this will come as a mind-numbing shock to all my avid readers, but I have every faith in your collective ability to survive. Which is more than can be said for Sun.com, recently snapped up by the ghastly Oracle (my spelling checker suggests that I meant to type 'orc'). Oracle have announced that the sun.com web site is about to be decommissioned. End of an era for the organization whose servers dominated the early Internet.
The sun.com domain is estimated to be worth anything between USD$1 million and USD$2 million. It was the fourteenth dot com domain to be registered, and will undoubtedly be of interest to the Internet equivalent of antiques collectors and businesses with the word sun in their product name or company title. Sad, but life goes on, as does Winding Down.
Shorts:
Those of you who, like me, value privacy, have probably been watching the online debate about the right to be forgotten with some interest. I know a number of people who take this idea very seriously, but like everything else on the Internet, this idea is a double-edged blade. Lauren Weinstein recently took a careful look at this question and has pointed out that it has some very 1984/big brother like aspects, since an uncritical blanket application would allow governments, businesses, and even individuals to effectively rewrite history.
"But of course we didn't mean that", I can hear its protagonists say. Well in that case, where are the proposals to stop the rewriting of history? Be careful what you ask for - you might just get it...
http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000826.html
http://web.archive.org/web/
http://www.ibgames.net
Do you gamble online? I don't but then I used to work in the industry, so perhaps that's why. Or perhaps it's because I remember what my grandfather told me when I was a teenager - "Only the bookies make money out of gambling."
It was a while ago that I worked in the online poker industry, and at that stage poker bots - programs that people ran on their computers to play poker - were only a minor nuisance. More of a problem was players communicating with one another by, say, telephone and playing together to beat the rest of the table. However, even in the year and a half that I worked in the industry, it was obvious to me that poker bots were improving, and now it seems that the best of them are ready for the big time.
The New York Times has an interesting piece about the rise of poker bots, worth a look if you do play online poker. Most of the bots are pretty useless, they can't cope with bluffing or with different styles of play, but that is steadily changing, and it will change even faster if the big crime syndicates come to believe that there is real money to be made and start funding poker bot development.
My advice as a non-gambler who has no moral objection to gambling? If you want to gamble anything more than very small stakes - too small for the big boys to be interested in - then think twice before you take up online poker, because it's just too easy for the people you are playing against to cheat.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/14/science/14poker.html?_r=2&partner=rss&emc=rss
(Note: read this before 28 March - that's when the New York Times starts charging!)
The committee organizing the 2012 Olympics in London has long been considered by Londoners to be a bunch of incompetent idiots to whom the government has given a carte blanche to spend our tax money and disrupt our lives and livelihood. Their choice of an Olympic symbol looks like something that can't be mentioned in a family friendly newsletter like this magnificent missive, but we all creased up at the sight of their latest cock up.
A few days ago they proudly unveiled a massive digital clock in central London that counts down the time until the opening ceremony. Unfortunately... Within 24 hours the clock got stuck on 500 days, 7 hours, 6 minutes and 56 seconds.
On the other hand their ticket sales web site didn't crash when it opened up at the same time. Mind you, that could be because, rumor has it, the number of tickets being sold is considerably less than they expected. No one (except the committee) is surprised, the prices are a complete rip off.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/15/olympic_clock/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-12749912
It seems that Microsoft may have lost as much as US$1.2million when hackers managed to figure out the algorithm used to generate promotional codes tied to XBox Live. I guess that's an expensive lesson on the need to use strong cryptographic security to generate promotional codes. Microsoft is in the process of canceling promo points generated by the scam, so at least some of the people who bought scam generated keys will lose their money.
Which raises a more general point. If you are offered a game key for the latest MMO, Steam PC game, or console block-buster and the price is too good to be true, then the price probably -is- too good to be true. These keys are always revoked as soon as the scam is discovered, leaving you partway through the game, and completely out of pocket...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/11/xbox_promo_code_sploit/
And while we are on the subject of security, I see that RSA, the security division of EMC, the world's biggest data storage vendor, was hacked recently. The hackers appear to have been able to access confidential data related to the RSA branded 'keychain' dongles used to access high security networks.
These dongles work by generating a unique additional password each time you log into the system. The password changes at frequent intervals so you never use the same one twice. At the other end the authorization system knows how the passwords are generated, so that it can check your password. If information on how the passwords are generated is part of the stolen data, then there will be serious problems, since RSA keys of this sort are used by governments and multi-national companies - prime espionage targets - to secure their networks.
I doubt if we will ever get any more information, unless one of the users is among our readers...
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hWWskVLGBCtA85JrR5Rw2qwVVhzg?
docId=b1ba3837beb84619b6242c8da0d393cf
The level of spam I'm getting has dropped by around half (it's now about 500 day), which is probably because the control servers on the Rustock botnet have been taken down. The Rustock botnet is estimated to have over 800,000 compromised PCs, controlled by a network of 26 servers, and is probably the largest single global source of spam. The source of the coordinated action to take out the controlling servers seems to have been Microsoft, whose digital crimes unit worked in concert with US marshals to bring about the bot's demise. Good work!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/17/rustock_botnet_takedown/
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-20044480-75.html?tag=nl.e703
Homework:
All the rumpus over the Japanese nuclear power plants hit by the tsunami is diverting attention away from a couple of other important issues. The first, and most important in the short run, is that people in northern Japan are starving and without shelter because of the diversion of resources and concentration of the world's media on the power plants. Fortunately, the newspapers are finally beginning to cover this problem, and, hopefully, aid will start to get through before it's too late.
To explain the second problem, I need to give a bit of geological background. Most people will be aware that the surface of the earth is made up of a series of plates which move very very slowly around on the molten rocks underneath - these are called tectonic plates. Earthquakes and volcanoes occur along the boundaries of the plates, where they 'rub' against one another (note for pedants: I'm simplifying things, so don't complain).
Japan lies at the boundary of a number of plates, which is why it has so many earthquakes, but the plate we are interested in is the one called the Pacific Plate. The other point to remember, is that we know from historical data that earthquakes come in 'clusters'. We don't know why this is, although some have theorized that the earth 'rings' like a bell from the effects of a large earthquake, and this triggers other quakes. Certainly the Japanese quake was violent enough to change the earth's orbit and daily rotation by a very tiny, but measurable amount.
Now, the point is that in the last year or so there have been three major earthquakes. The first was last year in Chile, which lies on the south east corner of the Pacific Plate, The second was a month ago in New Zealand, the south west corner of the Pacific Plate. The latest, Japan, straddles the north west corner of the same tectonic plate.
There's one missing. Its the remaining north east corner, which actually has its own name. It's called the San Andreas Fault. The last major movement of that fault was a hundred years ago - the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906. And that, is the second problem to which I referred at the start of this piece.
http://www.newsweek.com/2011/03/13/the-scariest-earthquake-is-yet-to-come.html
We haven't had a recommendation for TED video for a while, not that there weren't any, just none that piqued my interest. This week, though I found one that was very unusual. Physicist Janna Levin giving a 17 minute talk about sounds that the universe makes. It's a fascinating little talk about gravity waves and other astronomical phenomena. Recommended
http://www.ted.com/talks/janna_levin_the_sound_the_universe_makes.html
Geek Toys:
Here's a little something for the aspiring geek - a do-it-yourself quantum spooky action kit. It's a bit pricey at 20,000 euros (US$28,000), but you can buy it with the loose change left over from your dot com boom profits. It's made by a Munich based start-up called qutools, and allows you to do your own entangling and then see how the action of one half of the entanglement affects the other instantaneously. Einstein must be turning in his grave. Hmm... Maybe I could get someone to sponsor me to go over to Munich and review the kit. Anyone know date of this year's Beer Festival?
Of course, (product plug ahead) in my space trading Federation 2 game the players already ship entangled quarks (TQuarks) around the universe to facilitate instantaneous communications :)
http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=do-it-yourself-quantum-spooky-actio-
2011-03-17&WT.mc_id=SA_CAT_physics_20110318
http://www.ibgames.net/
And while your poker bot is amassing the cash to pay for the entanglement kit, you might like to while away some time playing a neat little game called URL Hunter, which is played entirely in the URL bar of your browser!
http://probablyinteractive.com/url-hunter#
Fancy a 480-core server to go into the hall closet? Then Calxeda may have just the thing for you - a new ARM based quad core low power processor, 120 of which are capable of fitting into a standard 2U box. That's a lot of cores, I wonder where you put the memory to go with them, and what memory model they all use?
http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/379549/calxeda_arm_chips_designed_480-core_servers/
Scanner:
Sun.com name could fetch Oracle $1 million
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/031811-suncom-name-could-fetch-oracle.html
http://www.whoisd.com/oldestcom.php
Cutting prices is the only way to stop piracy
http://www.thinq.co.uk/2011/3/15/cutting-prices-only-way-stop-piracy/
Japan quake: Tracking the status of chip fabrication plants in wake of disaster
http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4214018/Japan-quake--Tracking-the-status-of-fabs-in-wake-
of-disaster?cid=NL_EETimesDaily
Intel and server buddies forge micro boxes
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/11/intel_ssi_micro_server/
Coming to a head: Mathematicians invent a new way to pour stout
http://www.economist.com/node/18329424
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
20 March, 2011
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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