WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week’s net, technology and science news
by Alan Lenton
It’s been a quiet week for news this week. Nonetheless I was able to dredge up a few odds and ends. In particular we have items on a new drug that mimics exercise, fitness apps, Nokia’s patents, Asimov on 50 years into the future, theKube, and Panasonic’s Toughpad. URLs include an MP3 honeypot, more NSA leaks, this time on acquiring bank details, NSA v tech companies, three strikes, and suggestions that Gmail is used by terrorists.
Here in the Winding Down news complex, things are settling down. We still have two boxes of stuff left over from putting everything away in our newly refurbished kitchen. Experiments in re-arranging are continuing. Unfortunately, my suggestion that we use some of the extra dimensions predicted by string theory didn’t go down very well...
Anyway, here are the stories I thought might interest you this week.
Shorts:
I don’t normally do biological material in this newsletter because a) I never really had a lot interest in the subject, going right back to my school days, and b) I’m much too squeamish. However, just for once, given the lack of exercise normally experienced by techies, I thought I’d draw your attention to some research reported in the Scripps Institute News. It seems that researchers might be nearing a breakthrough in producing a drug that mimics the beneficial effects of exercise.
So far the new drug has only been tested on mice, but the results were startling. Treatment with the drug, which currently has the very untrendy name of SR9009, has produced athlete style muscles in the mice who developed up to 50% greater running capacity. Of course, this may turn out to be a dead end. A lot of drugs look promising at this stage, but fail to make it to the market for one reason or another, such as toxic side effects in humans.
If it’s at all possible though, this drug will make it to market, because it will be enormously profitable in rich western countries.
http://www.scripps.edu/newsandviews/e_20130729/burris.html
On the other hand you may not need such artificial aids as drugs. You may already practice a fitness regime, aided by your trusty mobile phone with an app that records the details of your jogging, visits to the gym and the like.
There are a number of such apps available, many of them free. But did you ever stop to consider just where all that useful information the app is collecting is going? There’s some pretty intimate info on you and your body in that pile of data, and now suggestions are starting to emerge that the information is in some cases being made available to third parties.
Whether this is true or not I honestly don’t know, but if I were such a user I would treat it as a wakeup call to find out, especially if I was using a free app.
If an app is free, the producers must be getting income from somewhere other than from you. I can only think of three likely sources. Advertising along the bottom of the app, which isn’t a problem. Venture capital, in which case the VC is going to want to see a return on his investment in the near future, and where is that going to come from if the app is free? Which leaves selling on the data gathered as the most likely avenue...
Just remember, there’s no such thing as a free lunch!
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/10279814/Health-and-fitness-apps-harvesting-data.html
There has been plenty of material around about Microsoft buying Nokia’s phone division, and yet most of the pieces missed one of the most important points. Nokia sold the phones, but kept all the patents. Yes that’s right. They didn’t sell Microsoft the patents that go with the devices, they merely licensed them to Microsoft.
This puts Nokia in the unique position of holding mobile phone patents but not producing phones. Why is this important? Because normally if you needed to use some patented phone technology, you would go to the patent owner and do a ‘you let me use your patents for free and I’ll let you use mine for free’ deal. No money changes hands, everyone’s happy.
But if the holder of the patent you need isn’t in the business covered by the patent, they’re not going to be interested in using your patents – they are going to want hard cash for the use of their patents. And in an industry like mobile phones where most of the suppliers are working on wafer thin margins (Apple excepted, though for how much longer, I’m not sure), this could be truly a killer.
http://www.infoworld.com/t/intellectual-property/microsoft-plus-nokia-pending-patent-troll-226057
Homework:
There are plenty of future gazers out there who are happy to tell you what the future has in store for us. I can tell you now, they’re mostly wrong. Why? Because although they might be able to extrapolate from current trends, usually in technology, the chances of them figuring out what the societal effects are going to be are close to zero.
Which is by way of an introduction to a 1964 article by the legendary scientist and science fiction author Isaac Asimov, written on the eve of the World’s Fair, predicting what the world would be like in 50 years’ time. Take a look. It’s fascinating.
http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/23/lifetimes/asi-v-fair.html
For Geeks:
Here’s a nifty little gadget. It’s an extremely small, and colourful, MP3 player called ‘theKube’. Available in white, green, yellow, black or pink and weighing in at 18 grams it’s 22mm a side – just big enough to take a microSD card. How this will fare in an era where most people keep a selection of their music on their phones, I don’t know, but it is a neat gadget.
http://thekubeplayer.co.uk/product.html
I don’t really need a tablet computer, but if I did then Panasonic has the one for me. A cool 20-inch screen with a Core i7 processor, 16GB of ram and an Nvidia Quadro GPU. Of course, I’ll need to get a bigger bag to put it in...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/09/06/ifa_2013_panasonic_makes_20in_4k_tablet_for_business_to_swallow/
Scanner: Other stories
Copyright troll ran Pirate Bay honeypot, Comcast confirms
http://torrentfreak.com/copyright-troll-ran-pirate-bay-honeypot-comcast-confirms-130815/
Leaked docs: NSA ‘Follow the money’ team slurped bank records, and credit card data
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/09/18/nsa_banking_cybersnooping/
Tech companies and government may soon go to war over surveillance
http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/08/stop-clumping-tech-companies-in-with-government-in-the-surveillance-scandals-they-may-be-at-war/
Copyright and the three strikes rule: it doesn’t work
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2322516
Former NSA and CIA director says terrorists love using Gmail
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/09/15/former-nsa-and-cia-director-says-terrorists-love-using-gmail/
Acknowledgements
Thanks to readers Barb and Fi for drawing my attention to material for Winding Down.
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 Thunderbird spam filter...
Alan Lenton
alan@ibgames.com
22 September 2013
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.
