WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week’s net, technology and science news
by Alan Lenton
Google Talk, iPads in schools, net neutrality, anti-viral drugs, Oracle and strippers, and Secret Operation 610 for you this week. For those who crave more there are also URLs for Windows 8 – an NSA Trojan, iOS7 bugs, a smart rifle, and Martha Stewart v. patent trolls.
If it looks thin on the ground this week, you’re correct. It is – I lost a load of URLs accumulated during the week while wrestling with the removal of a Google App icon they’d stuffed onto it during an update. I like Google, but when it comes to this sort of thing, they resemble a bunch of ill-mannered louts.
Finally, I nearly forgot to tell you, no Winding Down next week, I’m out of town on family business.
Shorts:
I always wondered why on earth people think that the ills of schools can be cured by giving each of the pupils an iPad. A truly loony and expensive idea. What schools need is more teachers, not expensive gimmicks.
The latest iPad experiment to come to grief is a school in LA, in which it took the kids just one week to hack the security software that was supposed to only allow the iPads to be used for school work. Several other schools quickly followed suit (it’s the Internet, you know, once a security hack is discovered everyone knows how to do it).
Still I suppose it’ll look good on a CV when the kids are old enough to apply for a job with the NSA!
http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-lausd-ipads-20130925,0,906924.story
One morning last week I got a weird message on the little Google Talk panel that I keep open while I’m at work. I seemed to be part of a conversation from someone I worked with two years ago, to someone else I didn’t know. Left me more than a little puzzled. It wasn’t until the afternoon that all became clear – it was a Google screw up, which resulted in Talk conversations going to the wrong people. This is a pain for all talk users, including me, because now you have to watch what you are saying on Talk, because Google might send it to the wrong person – and I don’t mean the NSA.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/09/26/google_gchat_messages_tangled/
I see that the regular showdown between the US president and Congress over the budget is rearing its head again. Normally I would not consider it anything to do with me, but I see that one of the demands that the Republicans are making as part of the price for passing the budget is the scrapping of ‘Net Neutrality’.
Net neutrality is the principle that the ISPs are just carriers whose job it is to pass through their system whatever their customer asks for. In other words they are not allowed to discriminate against some services and favour others. You can see what you want to see on the internet (at least in theory), you aren’t restricted to what your service provider wants you to see. Consequently, it means that the ISPs can’t demand payment from the web sites for allowing their customers to access those sites.
Net neutrality is important in the US, where most users do not have much choice about which service to use, because there are only one or two services, and legislation prevents the local governments from providing a service, a state of affairs that has resulted in most citizens having one of the lowest average bandwidths in the western world.
So, if you want net neutrality to continue, I would suggest that a conversation with your congress critter is called for...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/09/26/us_house_republicans_end_net_neutrality_or_no_debt_ceiling_deal_report/
Homework:
Most drugs that we have don’t target viruses, they only target bacteria. The search for effective anti-viral drugs has produced one or two successes, but little that could be termed a major breakthrough. However, recently, researchers at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory have developed a clever new approach to the problem, which may, at last, herald a breakthrough.
Most drugs work by disrupting the cellular machinery of their targets. The new approach differs by finding infected cells and triggering the cell’s own suicide mechanism, so that the virus can’t use the cell’s machinery to replicate itself. The drug does this by looking for a particular type of RNA which is present in most viruses, but not in humans. When the drug finds a cell with double-strand RNA (dsRNA) it knows the cell must have been infected with a virus, and immediately triggers the cell’s suicide mechanism.
It’s early days yet, but the drug has already been tested on cultured cells and in mice, and worked. Not only that, it seems to work against a wide range of viruses, including the one that causes the common cold (I could have done with that this last week), and dangerous viruses such as the one that causes dengue fever. Don’t expect to see it available in the near future, though. It’s nowhere near being ready to test on humans, and lots of promising drugs fail in later stages when it becomes obvious that they are too toxic for humans to take.
http://www.33rdsquare.com/2013/09/anti-viral-drugs-may-soon-be-available.html
For Geeks:
You may think that Oracle is boring. Well, all that database stuff is not exactly sexy compared with, say NoSQL and other similar new style means of storing and retrieving your data. However, it seems that there is more to Oracle than meets the eye, with reports of an Oracle corporate card being used to run up a US$33,000 bill in a strip club! And how do we know this? Because Oracle are refusing to pay the bill, and the strip club are suing to get their money. Perhaps Oracle aren’t boring after all.
Gives new meaning to the cloud computing acronym SaaS – ‘Strippers as a Service’!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/09/25/oracle_sued_after_refusing_to_fund_stripping_as_a_service/
Secret Operation 610, a cool and geeky piece of art has lumbered out of its bunker. It looks like a stealth hermit crab crossed with an airport waiting lounge. Black, sinister and ultra-cool. Take a look and you’ll see what I mean.
http://www.gizmag.com/secret-operation-610/29180/
Scanner: Other stories
Is Windows 8 a Trojan horse for the NSA? The German Government thinks so
http://news.techworld.com/security/3465259/is-windows-8-a-trojan-horse-for-the-nsa-the-german-government-thinks-so/
Bad news: iOS 7’s HTML5 is full of bugs
http://www.infoworld.com/t/html5/bad-news-ios-7s-html5-full-of-bugs-227685?source=IFWNLE_nlt_daily_pm_2013-09-27
Now you’re a sharpshooter: The smart rifle arrives
http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-57604113-76/now-youre-a-sharpshooter-the-smart-rifle-arrives/
Don’t mess with Martha (Stewart): Patent troll’s suit met with countersuit
http://www.infoworld.com/t/intellectual-property/dont-mess-martha-stewart-patent-trolls-suit-met-countersuit-227646
Acknowledgements
Thanks to readers Barb, Djand 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
29 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.
