WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net, technology and science news
by Alan Lenton
This is the last of the ‘catch-up’ issues, and it includes material on face recognition software, smart TVs, dealing with a new era in the Japanese calendar, iPhone pictures, a quote on software design, and a coda about the opening of the Black Sarcophagus of Alexandria. A multiplicity of URLs in the Scanner section point the way to material about Google and the EU ruling, Native American iron workers, old Russian crypto, the dark side of olive oil, a social media apology, DNA damage from CRISPR, a Spanish sub running aground, stolen radioactives, moon dust, and the accidental use of a Nazi quote.
There won’t be an issue next week because the production department is suffering from the current heatwave. The production department has two functions. The first is to deal with all the small boring bits that are beneath the notice of those of us who handle the creative stuff. Secondly, and much more importantly, they take the blame if anything goes wrong... [Production department note: Phooey!]
In the meantime, WD will be back on 12 August. Till then, have fun :)
Shorts:
OK. OK, I admit it. It was very difficult to avoid sniggering when I read that Amazon’s facial recognition system picked out 28 Congress critters as suspected criminals. The possible jokes are endless. However, on a more serious note, maybe this little exercise will encourage politicians to look a little more closely at what facial recognition is being used for, how accurate it is, and what the potential dangers are.
Here in London the campaign group Big Brother Watch is asking for a judicial review of the use of facial recognition by the London police force. Actually, most of the action at the moment is focussed on the problems caused by false positives. That’s not surprising, given the damage it could do to a person falsely identified. However, there is the question of false negatives that hardly anyone has raised so far.
So what are false negatives? They are the case where facial recognition software fails to identify someone or something that it was supposed to recognise. The only figures I’ve seen are for the London Police – 98% false positive and no arrests. So even based on what it’s supposed to do, recognise crooks, the police have bought a pig in a poke!
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/26/amazon_face_recogition_sucks/
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/26/big_brother_watch_legal_challenge_facial_recognition/
Homework:
I would guess that a lot of my readers have a smart TV by now. You may, or may not, realize it but a smart TV tracks what you are watching and doing with it, and sends the info back to big brother. At least that’s what they are initialised to do when you install them, and most people tend not to fiddle with the more obscure settings.
However, you can forbid them to track your usage. You didn’t know that? Well none of them make it easy to find – none of them have a menu item labelled ‘TURN OFF OUR SNOOPING ON YOU’, instead they have innocent sounding names like ‘Interactive TV’, ‘Live Plus’, ‘Viewing Data’, and Viewing Information Services’.
But now the New York Times has an excellent piece on how to turn off tracking. It goes through the procedure for a wide range of machines. Very useful!
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/23/smarter-living/how-to-stop-your-smart-tv-from-tracking-what-you-watch.html
Geek Stuff:
Oh dear! And you thought the Year 2000 bug was bad... Then pity the poor programmers having to cope with the Japanese calendar system. It seems that when the emperor changes, a new era starts, with new year numbers starting at the beginning again. And if that’s not enough by itself, the new era will start part way through the Gregorian calendar year, and the name of the new era will not be known until shortly before the changeover. The latter causes problems for the International Standards Organisation, which is responsible for setting the standard character to be used to represent the era name, since it will be announced too late to get into the latest standards document.
Of course, if computers didn’t have to deal with humans they could have declared the release of the first commercially available monolithic CPU – the Intel 4004 – in mid November 1971 as the start of a new era – year zero – with everything afterwards counting from that date :)
Humans are so untidy, dahling...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/25/big-tech-warns-japan-millennium-bug-y2k-emperor-akihito-abdication
Pictures:
Another slew of pictures this week. This time they’re taken from the 2018 iPhone Photography Awards. There are 70 of the pictures, so settle in with your favourite beverage for a long session! My favourite? Picture number 55 – although why they thought it was a panorama is beyond my understanding...
https://newatlas.com/2018-iphone-photography-awards/55543/#gallery
Scanner:
Why Google won’t break a sweat about the EU ruling
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/20/why_google_wont_break_sweat_about_the_eu/
Men of steel: How Brooklyn’s Native American iron workers built New York
https://www.6sqft.com/men-of-steel-how-brooklyns-native-american-ironworkers-built-new-york/ [Some nice pictures as well]
Declassified files reveal how pre-WW2 Brits smashed Russian crypto – Moscow’s agents used one-time pads, er, two times
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/19/russia_one_time_pads_error_british/
Olive Oil’s Dark Side – (the earliest recorded olive oil fraud was in the twenty fourth century BC!)
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/olive-oils-dark-side
Social Media (An Apology)
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-elders-social-media-apology/?include_text=1
Potential DNA damage from CRISPR “Seriously Underestimated,” study finds
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/potential-dna-damage-from-crispr-seriously-underestimated-study-finds/
Too long to fit: launch of new Spanish sub runs aground
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jul/19/too-long-to-fit-launch-of-new-spanish-sub-runs-aground
Crooks swipe plutonium, caesium from US govt nuke wranglers’ car. And yes, it’s still missing
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/16/us_govt_stolen_plutonium/
Will dust prevent us living on the Moon?
https://newatlas.com/dust-moon-living/55333/
University of Exeter sorry for emailing quote from Nazi Erwin Rommel to motivate students
https://news.sky.com/story/university-of-exeter-sorry-for-emailing-quote-from-nazi-erwin-rommel-to-motivate-students-11411926
Quote for the week:
This quote is especially for the hackers and geeks, but I think everyone else will like it, even if they don’t code...
It’s from C.A.R. Hoare giving the 1980 ACM Turing Award Lecture:
“There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.”
Coda:
Two issues ago, I mentioned that a Black Sarcophagus (note the capital letters) had been discovered in Alexandria, Egypt, and that there were plans afoot to open it, not to mention suggestions that it might not be a good idea. Well it’s now been opened... [cue eerie and sinister synthesiser music]. And what did they find? Three skeletons and a mephitic smell. The smell was later discovered to have been local sewage! Sorry, guys, no cursed mummies, flesh eating beetles, demons, Cthulu, Autons, or the like... Maybe next time!
https://www.sciencealert.com/these-photos-from-the-scene-of-the-black-sarcophagus-opening-are-amazing
Acknowledgements
Thanks to readers Asti, 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
29 July 2018
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.
