WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net, technology and science news
by Alan Lenton
This week we feature stories on VW’s cheating, Ashley Madison fem-bots, cryptography back door keys, the Solar System drawn to a proper scale, IPv4 Internet addresses finally run out in America, a weird gadget, and pictures of London. URLs cover new material on Stonehenge, listening to the stars, plutonium power, a really interesting piece on Neanderthals, a camera that maybe won’t take a picture, and the GM ignition defect settlement.
I hope you like it...
Shorts:
Well I guess the story of the moment is the one about Volkswagen installing software to reduce nitrous oxides emissions only during testing. When I first read the reports two things were immediately obvious to me. The first was that this sort of thing must have been more or less widely known within the industry, and second, given the cut-throat nature of the car industry, it’s likely that the same, or similar, tricks are being used by the other industry players.
Think it through. VW is the biggest auto maker in the world, and it spends more on R&D than anyone else. If they can’t figure out how to legitimately meet the standards with ordinary, on the road cars, how likely is it that anyone else can? The fact that they thought they could get away with it suggests that this sort of behaviour is commonplace in the industry. Remember VW installed this software in 11 million cars – 400,000 of them in the US – and expected that no one would notice!
There’s been a lot of press coverage about it, but the best analysis I’ve seen is in The Economist, which while a little longer than average, covers the scandal in some detail. Despite the length it’s well worth a look.
http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21667918-systematic-fraud-worlds-biggest-carmaker-threatens-engulf-entire-industry-and
http://hackaday.com/2015/09/23/ethics-in-engineering-volkswagens-diesel-fiasco/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/22/volkswagen_admits_11_million_cars_dieselgated/
I guess you’ve all heard of the Ashley Madison hack by now. Enough salacious details have been in the regular press and online. What doesn’t seem to have made it into the headlines, was the fact that a large chunk of the ‘women’ that chatted to the men were bots! It turns out that they didn’t just have one or two bots – they had thousands of them, all designed to con non-paying members into believing that there was a woman wanting an affair with them. All the mark had to do was to buy credits from Ashley Madison. I don’t know about you, but to me that sounds like fraud. I wonder if anyone is going to take up that issue?
http://gizmodo.com/how-ashley-madison-hid-its-fembot-con-from-users-and-in-1728410265
I see that the US bodies responsible for security are still pursuing their demands for a ‘back door’ into consumer cryptography. I sometimes wonder at how alien these people’s thought processes are. In spite of their own people saying that such things would make life much easier for hackers, they are still ploughing ahead with their demands.
On my browser is a report of major insecurities at the Department of Homeland Security. Another tab is about the OPM heist, which netted, among other things, 5.6 million fingerprints belonging to government workers. (Sorry about that, guv, I’m afraid you’ll have to change your fingerprints!) And my files are stuffed full of articles about the NSA allowing one of its contractors (not even an employee) to walk out with a USB stick full of sensitive and secret documents...
If the powers that be (and not just those in the US) have back door keys to commonly used cryptography, how long do you think it will be before someone steals it off them?
Add to that mix the rise of international cloud computing, and recent court rulings that US security and criminal investigation forces should have access to data hosted by US companies, no matter where the computers are physically located, and you have a recipe for total disaster.
You know, following this story is a bit like watching a slow motion version of a train wreck.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/16/dhs_cyber_audit_2015_deficiencies/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/09/23/opm-now-says-more-than-five-million-fingerprints-compromised-in-breaches/
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2015/09/fbi_cia_nsa_want_
backdoor_access_to_data_yet_they_can_t_keep_their_own_data.html
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/07/31/microsoft_overseas_data_ruling/
Homework:
You know those nice pictures of the solar system you get in educational books? Well they’re very misleading, because they don’t make it clear that they aren’t drawn to a linear scale, and, as such, they give a very misleading impression of how much space there really is between the planets in the solar system. Wylie Overstreet and Alex Gorosh set out to rectify this, and to show just how big the solar system really is.
To do that they needed a big canvas. And when I say big, I mean big – like a 7-mile chunk of Nevada’s Black Rock Desert. Take a look at the video, and marvel.
http://www.openculture.com/2015/09/the-solar-system-drawn-amazingly-to-scale-across-7-miles-of-nevadas-black-rock-desert.html
I see ARIN has finally run out of IPv4 addresses. For those who don’t know ARIN is the organization that provides internet addresses for America. IPv4 (Internet Protocol version 4) addresses are the ones in the format 178.250.53.192. They’ve been around since the internet began, and at that time 4.3 billion addresses seemed more than enough. Now they’ve run out. Strictly speaking there are still addresses unused, because originally there seemed to be so many available that they were handed out in much larger blocks than they needed to be. When I first got an address in the late 80s I was given a block of 32 addresses, even though I only had one computer! Not everybody has given back the unused addresses, and the exact status of the addresses handed out in the early days is ambiguous. Are they owned by the person who was given them, or by the likes of ARIN? No one knows.
In practical terms this means anyone wanting new addresses will have to go to version 6 of the protocol (IPv6). Fortunately a number of areas – mainly in the Pacific – are already using IPv6, so there’s plenty of experience of using them around. I guess that eventually IPv4 will be phased out and everyone will use IPv6, which has 34 followed by 37 zeros* addresses available. For comparison the world population in March 2012 was 7 followed by 9 zeros!
Of course, that assumes nothing unexpected happens... But as the physicist Niels Bohr once said, “Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future.”
http://www.networkcomputing.com/networking/arin-ipv4-address-supply-runs-out/d/d-id/1322333
Geek Stuff:
And from our department of mad gadgets, we are proud to present – ta-da – the Smartphone and Tablet Duel Holder! Yep. It bolts on to your desk or bed and uses two Cthulu-style arms to hold a smart phone and a tablet at whatever position you choose. The pictures don’t actually show the two devices duelling but I guess you’d need a video to show that. Bizarre.
http://www.redferret.net/?p=50460
London:
This week’s London bit is a magnificent set of aerial views of London. They’re mostly of the City of London area, but there are a couple taken south of the river. And where else can you get a photo looking down on a police helicopter!
http://londonist.com/2015/03/aerial
Scanner:
Stonehenge: Temple near site shows evidence of a religious revolution – when Britons switched from worshipping landscape features to a solar cult
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/stonehenge-temple-near-site-shows-evidence-of-a-religious-revolution-when-britons-switched-from-10488928.html
Go to Green Bank to listen to the stars
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/go-green-bank-listen-stars
NASA struggles over deep-space plutonium power
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/within-nasa-a-plutonium-power-struggle/
How our understanding of Neanderthals has dramatically – and rapidly – shifted
http://www.psmag.com/nature-and-technology/neanderthals-are-us
Camera that takes the snap out of snaps
http://news.sky.com/story/1556338/camera-that-takes-the-snap-out-of-snaps
Prosecutors, GM reach $900M agreement to settle criminal charges over ignition defect
http://consumerist.com/2015/09/17/report-prosecutors-gm-reach-900m-agreement-to-settle-criminal-charges-over-ignition-defect/
* 340,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 addresses!
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
27 September 2015
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/index.html.
Past issues of Winding Down can be found at http://www.ibgames.net/alan/winding/index.html.
