Fed II Star newsletter - masthead The weekly newsletter for the Fed II game by ibgames

EARTHDATE: February 5, 2006

OFFICIAL NEWS
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WINDING DOWN

An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net and technology news
by Alan Lenton

Just a short Winding Down this week, I'm afraid. Other work intervened to cut down the amount of time available for the newsletter, but hopefully things will improve for next week. So this week I have for your edification material on search engines and privacy, ICANN, the Wikipedia, Windows Vista, and phone tapping...


Shorts:

The recent fishing expedition by the US department of Justice trawling for information on what people are using search engines for has highlighted the privacy dangers of using search engines. C'net recently asked four of the major search engines providers - AOL, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo - to give information about what data they keep on searches by customers.

The really interesting news was that AOL is by far and away the best search engine to use from a privacy point of view. Not only do they collect considerably less information about the searches their users are making, but they allow customers to delete most of the data they do collect, either on a case by case basis, or in all cases. Yahoo and Microsoft said they were considering allowing such customer driven deletion, but Google were very firm about the fact that they have no intention of allowing users to delete their own data!

One has to wonder how much longer Google are going to remain the darling of the net lefties.

http://news.com.com/2100-1025_3-6034626.html

ICANN, the official gatekeepers of the Internet's address system, are under attack again (actually, they never stopped being under attack, but that's another story). This time it's over their proposals to hand over the control of the .com domain, the most lucrative of all the domains, to Verisign forever. Yes, that's right, forever. This is the second attempt. The first attempt gave it to Verisign forever and also allowed them to more or less charge what they liked for the domains. This version puts some limits on Verisign's ability for charge the earth, but still hands control of the domain over to Verisign forever.

As the first poster on ICANN's public response board put it 'Lipstick on a pig doesn't make me want to kiss it.' Clearly people are not impressed.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/01/30/icann_verisign_new_contract/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/02/01/dotcom_contract_comments/

We all know politicians are not the world's most morally spotless people, having an 'economical' view of the concept of truth, and this was shown recently when the editors of the Wikipedia compiled a list of over 1,000 edits made by Internet addresses allocated to the US Senate and House of Representatives. The edits included such items as changing the entry on Iraq to push dubious and unproven links between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, abusing various opposition senators, and other juvenile pranks.

I guess they were just trying to assist the Wikipedia maintain its reputation as the world premier source of urban legends!

http://news.com.com/2061-10796_3-6033082.html

Microsoft's Windows head honcho, Jim Allchin, has come up with a new reason why you would want to buy the eventually to be released 'Windows Vista' - for security! It seems that people are not being impressed enough with the huge range of extra knick-knacks and gewgaws that Microsoft is stuffing into its new version of Windows. At least they don't seem impressed enough to massively upgrade their perfectly good computers to run Microsoft's new behemoth operating system.

(As an aside, I recently got a new laptop - twice as fast a processor as the old one, twice the memory, a much faster hard drive and a faster, more sophisticated graphics chip set. It runs Windows XP slower than my old machine ran Windows 2000. All the increase in power, and some more, was gobbled up by XP.)

I suppose the recently introduced new technique of issuing security patches for an operating system before it's been released might just help it to be more secure, but permit me to remain a cynic until I see some real practical evidence of a change in the programming techniques by Microsoft.

http://techrepublic.com.com/2100-10877_11-6032344.html?tag=search

Finally, thinking of using a mobile phone in Greece? Think again. It's just emerging that the mobile phones of some very important people in Greece have been tapped for up to a year after the Olympic games in 2004. The list of 100 people whose phones were known to have been tapped - until the tap was discovered in March 2005 - included the Greek Prime minister, his wife, and the ministers of defence, foreign affairs, justice and public order. Most of Greece's top military officials and police officers were also targeted - and the US embassy. The tap was eventually discovered after a routine check by the supplier, Vodafone, at which stage it was stopped. No one knows who it was who did the tapping...

http://guardian.co.uk/mobile/article/0,,1701298,00.html


Scanner - Other Stories:

AT&T boss warns on bandwidth
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/01/31/att_charge_for_broadband/

EU C.A.P. policy change sees costs rocket
http://www.computing.co.uk/computing/news/2149145/cap-policy-change-sees-costs

UK Police lose gun system link
http://www.computing.co.uk/computing/news/2149164/police-lose-gun-system-link

Alan Lenton
alan@ibgames.com
5 February 2006

Alan Lenton is an on-line games designer, programmer and sociologist. 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.


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