WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net and technology news
by Alan Lenton
The most important story of the week was missed by the mainstream press. Someone in the New York area is mailing out 31-pound blocks of marijuana to what appear to be random addresses... The immediate response of everyone I know who read the story is, "How do I get my address on the list!" The URL is in the Scanner section for those of you who wish to study the matter further. Purely as an academic exercise, of course!
In the meantime, the rest of you will just have to get your highs from reading the stories in Winding Down!
Shorts:
Had difficulty in getting cash out of the ATM (known here in the UK as the 'hole in the wall') recently? That might be because Westpac's data center got just a leeetle overheated after the air conditioning developed a fault on Wednesday. Westpac, it seems, unlike most of the Wall Street financials, don't have a separate back up center. The result was that all Westpac's ATM, EFTPOS and online banking systems died on Wednesday.
Yet another example of experience proving my theory that no one takes all the different forms of backup seriously, until after they've been hit by an experience in which they needed the backup and it wasn't there.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/05/05/westpac_down/
I see that Google has finally dumped all the data it collected on Wi-Fi during its Street View forays in Australia. Google claims that the collection of the data was a 'mistake' - presumably similar to the 'mistake' that caused Apple to collect location data on its iPhone users, and numerous other 'mistakes' by hi-tech firms violating their customer's privacy. I guess they've all been taking lessons from Facebook.
That seems to have sorted out the problems in Australia, but what about the data on the rest of the world? Do we have to take Google to court on a country by country basis before they destroy all of the data they eavesdropped on?
Which brings me to another point... Do you have any idea just how difficult it is to destroy modern commercial data that's been properly looked after? To put it bluntly it is well nigh impossible. Yes - impossible, that was what I said. This is one of IT's dirty little secrets. It's not difficult to eliminate the current version, but one of the purposes of backup is to recreate data that's been deleted. And the longer the data has been around, the more backup systems it will be on in one form or another.
Let me give you some very simplified example figures. Take just one server, and one information set, held for a year. This is customer information, so it's important and it's backed up weekly to tape. We are a year into this affair, so the info is, at a minimum, on 52 tapes for starters (the company learned the hard way not to re-use tapes for backup, and we won't even get into the complications of incremental backup here). Seems fairly simple though, just find the set on each tape and delete it. Technically it's not that easy, but we will assume that it's possible, and that there isn't a daily network backup.
But what about the copy of the set that the business analyst pulled into his spreadsheet? It's a reasonable assumption that he backs stuff up as well. I wonder if he can remember where all the backups for the last year are. Oh! And what about the copy of the spreadsheet he gave the CEO for that presentation, eight months ago. Even the CEO has been known to make backups on a sort of desultory basis.
There is also at least one copy on a USB stick that was used to take a copy to an overseas office. And then it turns out that someone thought the data set was really interesting - so they helpfully put a copy of it in the company's Dropbox folder. This was spotted immediately as a possible security problem and deleted. Now does anyone fancy explaining to Dropbox that the files need removing from -their- backup system?
That's just the files we know about. In the mean time, a load of other people probably looked through the data set, or at least a subset of the data. They've probably deleted it from their drives, and have forgotten that they ever had it, much less that it was backed up at some stage! And all this is about one set of data stored for just one year on one server...
As for data that people have stored on the cloud, you don't even want to go there! For instance, files on Amazon's cloud, are stored across five different disk clusters and can be reconstructed from any three of those clusters! They may also be stored to tape, I'm not sure about that, but I wouldn't be surprised.
And you want it all completely deleted so no one can ever get it back?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/05/05/google_wifi_datadump/
Did you know that the first device that could be considered to be a mouse was made with a bowling ball by the Royal Canadian Navy in 1952? No? Neither did I! I picked this useful dinner party snippet (shows what sort of dinner parties I go to!) from the DVICE web site which has a display of pictures of the most important computer mice (mouses?) in history. Take a look and see if you recognize any.
http://www.dvice.com/archives/2011/04/a-visual-histor.php
I was fascinated to note that at the first meeting of Catholic bloggers in the Vatican, a number of delegates indicated in their speeches that they considered it just fine to lift content from so-called "old media". The Catholic church hasn't actually pronounced on this issue yet, but the bloggers obviously consider that they have God on their side!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/05/03/vatican_blogs/
In what must surely be an exemplary piece of irony, the password storing service, LastPass, managed to get itself hacked. At least that's what they think has happened. They reported it last week. This is pretty unfortunate for a company that stores passwords for other people. Frankly, I've no idea why anyone would store their passwords online, although I can see a case for storing them on your computer if you have too many to remember, which is fairly common. Lotsa people out there scrambling to change passwords that they can't remember...
http://edition.cnn.com/2011/TECH/web/05/05/last.pass.gahran/
Well the final report is out on the Amazon Cloud debacle. The problem that took large numbers of sites of the web was caused by - ta da - a botched network upgrade. I'm not surprised, network upgrades are a prime cause of these sort of problems. What this did do, though, was to show that the 'availability zones', which Amazon touts as being completely separate from one another, are not quite as separate as they thought. The outage caused problems in several supposedly unrelated availability zones.
The shambles was compounded by the failure of Amazon to tell anyone what was going on. Conspiracy theory says that this was an attempt by Amazon to hush up the scale of the problems. I have a different theory - hubris and incompetence. I think Amazon didn't think anything could go wrong (hubris), so they didn't have any mechanism in place to respond to customers when something did go wrong (incompetence). As someone famous, who's name I forget, once said, "Never ascribe to malice that which can be accounted for by stupidity and incompetence."
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/04/29/amazon_ec2_outage_post_mortem/
Homework:
If you wondered how Bin Laden's computers will be cracked by the US security services, then you need to take a look at an interesting article by Declan McCullagh on Cnet's news site. The work, it seems will be done by the shadowy National Media Exploitation Center (NMEC), which seems to be the current holder of the NSA trophy for being not very much talked about.
One of the more interesting points is that many of the products used are commercial or semi-commercial, such as Vound's Intella software, designed to build up a picture of who, when, where, and what from a collection of e-mails. The worrying thing, though, is that jobs at one contractor working for NMEC are advertised as needing proficiency in "creating databases in MS Access and SQL". Microsoft, as we all know, is world renowned for the ultra-high security of its software!
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20060321-281.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20&tag=nl.e703
One of the world's first printed history books, which was also one of the world's first illustrated books, goes under the auctioneer's hammer in London on June 7th. Only 1,500 copies of the Liber Chronicarum (Nuremberg Chronicle) were published in Latin in July 1493. Four hundred of them have survived the intervening 500 or so years. With its 1,809 woodcut illustrations, this book was the height of high technology when it came out. One has to wonder how much of what is now on the Internet will be available in 2511 AD? Apart from Winding Down, of course!
http://www.gizmag.com/liber-chronicarum-illustrated-printed-book-auction/18567/?utm_source=Gizmag+Subscribers&utm_campaign=9ae8eaae99-UA-2235360-4&utm_medium=email
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Chronicle
Science, the website of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), has a brilliant tongue in cheek piece about scientific hoaxes, and their role in keeping scientists on their toes. It even includes some tips for how to make up a convincing hoax yourself.
The suggestion I particularly liked was, "Ensure that your hoax defies some well-established scientific principle. Ideally, it should involve one or more of the following: virgin birth, spontaneous generation, perpetual motion, cold fusion, or adequate funding." But then I guess I'm just warped.
http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previous_issues/articles/2011_04_22/caredit.a1100035
Geek Toys:
I have the ultimate (well nearly ultimate) toy for those of you who are helicopter pilots (Hi Allison!), or who wish to become one. The Ukraine, being a little on the cash strapped side is flogging off some of its Russian built Mi-8 and Mi-171 attack 'copters, armed to the teeth with guided anti-tank missiles, rockets and chainguns. You can get a fully loaded model for around US$12 million. Any takers?
http://web.orange.co.uk/article/quirkies/Helicopter_gunships_up_for_grabs_online
Scanner:
Mysterious packages of pot being delivered all over
http://gothamist.com/2011/05/01/mysterious_packages_of_pot_being_de.php
Apple squashes location tracking 'bugs' with iOS update
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/05/04/apple_updates_ios_to_addresss_location_tracking_database_cache/
Want an untracked Android? Here’s how
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/05/05/marlinspike_kills_android_tracking/
The mobile phone made out of paper
http://www.lbc.co.uk/the-mobile-phone-made-out-of-paper-39555
Hacker pwns police cruiser and lives to tell tale
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/05/03/cop_car_hacking/
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
8 May, 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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