WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week’s net, technology and science news
by Alan Lenton
This week: stealth data theft, tablet internet usage, Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShip Two, Windows XP, Oracle security patches, Facebook and hiring, the Pine Island Glacier, micro-windmills, a non-shake spoon, Polaroid’s C3 camera, and Intel’s Edison computer. And there’s more – URLs for a Google maps blunder, Google transparency reports, slime molds, the case of the dancing baby, magnetic nanoparticles, cyber-streetwise Brits (ha!), and the US President’s memo on the NSA. Wow! What more could you want
First off, after the obligatory contents para for the search engines, congrats to long time reader Andrew Byro, who got his PhD in Chemistry on Friday. Way to go!
There was a dizzyingly large collection of stories in the can to use this week – far more than I could ever write. Well that’s not quite true, far more than you would have time to read would be a more accurate assessment... Several stories are a little older than usual, because they fell into the Christmas gap in publication, but I felt they were still worth of covering. I hope you agree.
So, let’s get down to it, people.
Shorts:
Some five years ago, at the DefCon hacker conference, a couple of security researchers demonstrated a serious security hole involving the way traffic is routed through the Internet. Basically it involves diverting the traffic to a router controlled by the bad guys, copying it for later analysis, and then sending the traffic on its way so that it is received as normal, and no one is any the wiser.
At the end of last year we had the first recorded case of someone using this method of attack. Someone mysteriously hijacked internet traffic headed to government agencies, corporate offices and other recipients in the U.S. and elsewhere and redirected it to Belarus and Iceland, before sending it on its way to its legitimate destinations. Whoever it was did this repeatedly over several months.
The attack was spotted by analysts at the network monitoring firm Renesys, but no one knows who was behind the attack, or what they were looking for, or what they did with the data they captured. Scary. Makes the NSA look like a model of public transparency.
You can read more details – including the technical ones – and look at a nice picture of Iceland that nothing to do with internet data theft, in Wired. Just click on the URL. If there’s a delay, it’s probably because your request is being diverted to an unknown destination before being sent on its way...
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/12/bgp-hijacking-belarus-iceland/
One of the more interesting stories that got lost at the end of last year was the latest figures on internet usage from StatCounter. It seems that internet tablet usage is less than 5% of the global usage (and, incidentally, that three quarters of that 5% is iPad usage).
So what does this mean? Well part of it reflects the fact that there are an awful lot more PCs out there than there are tablets! OK, that’s the obvious conclusion. However, I’m not convinced that it’s the end of the matter. Most tablets don’t have a lot of memory, and, unlike PCs, they have been designed from the bottom up to use the internet, both for input and, more importantly, for data storage. This implies that tablet usage of the internet should be way above what it actually is.
I suspect this is because tablets are not in fact replacing PCs, they are becoming a useful adjunct to PCs. People are storing their tablet data on their PCs, and downloading material which they store on the PC, and temporarily move a copy over to the tablet as needed. This happens with e-books, music, video, etc. As I’ve said before, the reason PC sales are dropping has nothing to do with them being replaced by tablets, it’s because the existing PCs are perfectly adequate, and the new ones don’t offer any compelling innovations.
http://gs.statcounter.com/press/new-statcounter-data-finds-that-tablet-internet-usage-is-less-than-5-percent-globally
Congratulations to Virgin Galactic and Scaled Composites. Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShip Two successfully completed its third supersonic test flight to the highest level it’s yet achieved. Travelling at Mach 1.4 (ie 1.4 times the speed of sound) and 71,000 feet (over 13 miles high) it passed all its tests along the way. It’s still a long hard slog to get up to the edge of space, but the prospects look good.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/01/11/spaceshiptwo_third_supersonic_flight/
This week I was standing in the local railway station, and I went to check what was happening to my train (late again). Above the ticket machine is a large screen giving information about trains. Actually, it was a large blue screen – a large blue screen of death – and as I watched it rebooted and up came... a Windows XP logo.
Whatever Microsoft might say, WinXP is ubiquitous in big organizations, which is probably why they’ve now backtracked and said they won’t cut off security updates at the start of April. So those of you who still use the venerable XP have yet another reprieve.
Incidentally, while we are on the subject of security updates, I note that Oracle have just issued nearly 150 patches for their software – pity the poor sysadmins who will be slaving into the night fixing that little lot!
http://www.infoworld.com/d/consumerization-of-it/dont-believe-the-lies-about-windows-xps-imminent-death-233815
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/01/16/microsoft_xp_security_updates_extended/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/01/16/blackberry_oracle_ship_vuln_patches/
Homework:
Over the last couple of years there has been much angst over employers making decisions on whether or not to hire potential employees on the basis of their Facebook records. Well Forbes recently ran a piece on a new study about to be published in the Journal of Management. The study, carried out jointly by a number of universities and Accenture, suggests that Facebook reviews may not be all that they are said to be. Far from it.
In fact, the bottom line was summed up by the lead researcher, Chad H Van Iddekinge of Florida State University when he stated, “Recruiter ratings of Facebook profiles correlate essentially zero with job performance.” In non-statistician speak, that means that what people have on Facebook is completely unrelated to how good they will be at their job.
End of Story. Or maybe not.
I don’t have a Facebook account, but if I did, I wouldn’t want to work for a firm that was stupid enough to believe that anything I put onto a site like Facebook bore any relation to my professional skills. The sort of companies I want to work for are ones that use common sense and would look at technical sites like BitBucket, GitHub, and my own site. And I know a lot of highly skilled professionals who take the same view.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/01/03/facebook-isnt-a-good-way-to-judge-potential-employees-say-researchers/
Global warming seems to be taking a bit of a back seat these days, with the USA getting some of the coldest weather for a long time, the UK getting the wettest weather, and global temperature rises turning out to have unexpectedly been on hold for something like the last 15 years!
In the circumstances, you might have missed a piece about the latest measurements on the melting of the Pine Island Glacier ice shelf in Antarctica. The Pine Island Glacier was the poster child for global warming, since its melt rate seemed to be accelerating rapidly. However, even then there were voices suggesting that the increased rate was not due to global warming, but to other factors. Now the results are in – the rate of melting has slowed right down in the last few years. Follow the URL for details.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/01/03/antarctic_ice_shelf_melt_lowest_ever_recorded_just_not_much_affected_by_global_warming/
Here’s an interesting idea for charging up your phones – micro-windmills. Researchers at University of Texas, Arlington, have come up with a way to use these devices – 1.8mm at their widest point – in their hundreds to generate sufficient power to recharge a phone battery. Basically you just hold them up in a breeze. If there is no breeze, you can create one by waving the phone, with these things mounted on the cover, around. That’s a really neat idea which has implications far wider than just recharging phones.
http://phys.org/news/2014-01-technology-micro-windmills-recharge-cell.html#nwlt
I often carry material about new hi-tech stuff that will (hopefully) move us forward and upward. That sometimes makes it easy to forget that there are a whole host of less glamorous problems that could be solved by applied technology to make some people’s lives less miserable.
One such is the problem of eating without help for people who for one reason or another suffer from tremors in their hands, which means that food tends to fall off their eating utensils. Now a firm called Lift labs, using a grant from the Nation Institutes of Health, has come up with a way to help. They call it Liftware. It’s a small device into which you plug a spoon or a fork unit and which detects the tremors and moves the end of the spoon, etc, to compensate, so that the spoon remains steady. An end to misery for many people.
it’s not cheap at $295, but hopefully the price will drop with mass production. I haven’t seen one in use, but it’s getting a lot of respectable press, and I don’t think it’s a con. However – caveat emptor – do your own research before you shell out money. To me, though, this is as much what hi-tech is about as putting people into space.
http://www.liftlabsdesign.com/
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2013/08/ap_shakeyspoon/
For Geeks:
Don’t overlook Polaroid’s C3 camera. It’s easy to do, since it’s only one and a third inches square. These brightly coloured, neat little items are equipped with magnets top and bottom so they can stick to one another and anything ferro-magnetic based. The resolution isn’t exactly brilliant, but they are, apparently very cute. Stick one on the side of the fridge and see who’s stealing your jolt cola!
http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/cutest-camera-ever-polaroids-c3-micro-sized-colorful-cube-2D11869284
If you thought the Raspberry Pi was a nifty device, then you need to look at Edison, the latest from Intel. They’ve just produced a PC on an SD card sized board. The device includes a low power 32-bit x86 processor, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity, and flash storage, not to mention a small amount of memory.
Very nice. The killer will be just how good a set of development tools Intel provides for it. Over to you Intel.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/01/07/intel_demos_pconsd_tiny_computer_for_internet_of_things_and_wearables/
Scanner: Other stories
Google Maps mistakenly labels Berlin Square after Hitler
http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/10/google-maps-mistakenly-labels-berlin-square-after-hitler/
Google Transparency Reports:
Google: Surge in pressure from governments to delete chunks of the web
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/12/19/google_reports_jump_in_government_takedown_requests/
http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/
http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/government/?hl=en
What can slime molds offer computing?
http://phys.org/news/2014-01-slime-molds.html#nwlt
Why Google, Twitter and Tumblr are backing the ‘Dancing Baby’
http://business.time.com/2013/12/16/why-google-twitter-and-tumblr-are-backing-the-dancing-baby/
Magnetic nanoparticles breakthrough could help shrink digital storage
http://www.gizmag.com/magnetic-nanoparticles-digital-storage-amf-uab/30299/
Government wants Brits to be Cyber Streetwise
http://www.techienews.co.uk/974735/government-wants-brits-cyber-streetwise/
The US Presidential Policy Directive on Signals Intelligence Activities
http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/1006318/2014sigint-mem-ppd-rel.pdf
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
19 January 2014
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.
