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EARTHDATE: May 28, 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

I read an interesting fact the other day. Here in the UK 80 per cent of government IT spending goes to just 11 firms. This makes an easy solution for avoiding the mega-disasters that we've seen in the past. Just strike the 11 companies off the list of those who can tender! I wonder if there is a similar situation in the US? It would be interesting to find out - I suspect there is.

Anyway, given that this issue is larger than usual, let's get straight down to business...


Shorts:

Uh oh! Dell have just done a deal with Google to pre-install Google's web and desktop search software on machines sold by Dell. Dell already has a reputation for loading unwanted, and unasked for, crud onto its machines. It looks like there is going to be even more junk arriving in the near future. The situation is already so bad that there are programs out on the net that will remove all this stuff for you. I guess the guys who write the Dell decrudulating programs are going to be busy in the near future!

http://ct.techrepublic.com.com/clicks?t=2422026-
18a32f6148453f76b7d88f6b914d69a0-bf&s=5&fs=0

Now here's a nice story. It seems that those who use spam to spread the word about their products are getting their come-uppance - from the fraudsters who deal in stolen credit cards!

Apparently, the fraudsters are signing up as affiliates to spam campaigns, but instead of sending out junk mail they are using the stolen cards to purchase the goods, getting a 40-50 percent kickback from the sale of the goods.

The losers are, of course, the sponsors of the spam campaigns (my heart bleeds for them), who suffer the charge-back on the stolen cards long after the fraudsters have disappeared.

I'd like both sides to lose in this battle, please!

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/05/24/carders_scam_spammers/

And just to close up on a story from last year, I note that the US Federal courts have approved the settlement between Sony-BMG and all the people whose computers it infected with a rootkit last year. Sony's affected customers will get new, uninfected CDs, a patch to remove the offending XCP and MediaMax code, and free downloads. To my mind it's not enough considering the sheer level of agro caused by Sony's attempt to establish its Digital Restrictions Management, but it's a start.

In any other industry I would have hoped that the whole experience would be a warning to the rest of the industry. Not so in the media industry. In that industry the big media companies are pirates that will assume they can get away with anything they like. Take my word for it, this will only be the first such case.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/05/23/sony_rootkit_settlement/


Microsoft Roundup:

I was planning to give Microsoft news a break this week, but they've been in the news so much that I need to say something, so here's a quick round up.

A new trojan virus has been detected that uses a Microsoft Word vulnerability to spread itself. So, be careful with Word files that you receive through the mail or even from your co-workers. The situation is serious enough that Microsoft is rumoured to be thinking of issuing a patch before the next batch is due in the middle of next month.

Microsoft's advice is to run the application in 'safe mode', whatever that may be! Maybe you should change your Word processor to something a little less dangerous, not to mention a little less expensive, perhaps?

Microsoft issued a new bunch of beta test versions this week and one of them was - you guessed it - a beta of the new version of Office, including Word. There was also a new beta version of Vista, the Windows replacement, and a version of Longhorn server, the next version of its server operating system.

Another Microsoft bright idea that emerged during the week was one for pay-as-you-go PCs for emerging countries. The idea is that you pay a few pennies for each application each time you use it, until eventually you have paid for the whole PC and you can own it.

I can see lots of problems, starting with the fact that a PC costs more than a year's wages for most of the people being targetted. Other problems include the fact that owning a PC is not going to be high on the shopping list of people who don't even have clean safe drinking water, and the fact that by the time most people finished paying for the computer, it would be completely obsolete - fit only to run Linux, in fact!

Attendees at a Microsoft conference in Seattle we were greeted by protesters wearing bright yellow hazmat suits, underlining the message that Microsoft produces defective software that's dangerous to users. The protestors were especially focussing on Microsoft's Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) software and its collaboration with the big media company pirates, but I'm sure the idea has wider applications. :)

And finally, Korea's Fair Trade Commission (KFTC) has rejected Microsoft's appeal against a multi-million dollar fine levied earlier this year. The KFTC also ordered Microsoft to produce versions of Windows without Media Player and Messenger, and with links to Web sites offering rival software. Microsoft is more worried about the new versions of Windows than the fine, which is just the cost of doing business, and is desperately trying to get a stay on the judgement. If it doesn't succeed it will have to release new versions of Windows in August, and, frankly, I'm not even sure they are capable of doing that!

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/05/24/ms_word_security_workaround/
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/05/19/ms_windows_vista_hardware_tool/
http://ct.techrepublic.com.com/clicks?t=2410287-
18a32f6148453f76b7d88f6b914d69a0-bf&s=5&fs=0
http://www.physorg.com/news67536128.html
http://newsletter.infoworld.com/t?ctl=12541CD:1F69382
http://newsletter.infoworld.com/t?ctl=12541C7:1F69382
http://ct.techrepublic.com.com/clicks?t=2405789-
18a32f6148453f76b7d88f6b914d69a0-bf&s=5&fs=0


Personal Losses:

USA - A worker at the Missouri-Illinois region of the American Red Cross used social security numbers to steal personal information of at least 8,000 blood donors and may have compromised up to a million donors. Why on earth is the Red Cross keeping records of its donors social security numbers? This is a classic case of an organisation maintaining personal information from which it has no legitimate use.

USA - Trust the US government to do things in true style. Everyone else compromises a mere few hundred thousand people's personal information, maybe a million at the outside. The US department of Veteran Affairs, though, managed to compromise the records of no less than 26 million citizens when a laptop computer was stolen. And just to compound the matter, it waited nearly three weeks to inform those affected. Sheesh! So much for providing timely warnings.


Homework:

The latest edition of the ACM's online magazine, Ubiquity, has an interesting commentary by Dr M E Kabay on the 'net-neutrality' debate, which has been simmering for quite a while, but has recently gained a high profile because of a number of bills being considered in Congress. The analysis makes an interesting read, arguing that regulation is not needed because the market will ensure that ISPs maintain their neutrality.

If the ISPs start favouring organisations that pay extra, the argument runs, then the customers will move to ISPs that don't discriminate. Unfortunately there is a fundamental flaw in the argument. It assumes that customers have a choice of suppliers. A lot don't, they have access to only one ISP, so they have no choice if they want to remain connected to the net.

This is always a problem with industries that are utilities, and the problem is not going to go away any time soon as consolidations and take-overs continue in the industry.

http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/views/v7i20_neutrality.html

Still in ACM's output, take a look at the ACM Queue interview with Amazon CTO Werner Vogels. Currently Google is getting all the limelight as it takes on the Microsoft behemoth, but I've personally felt for a while that the spotlight is misdirected. I think the Amazon platform is more likely to be the challenge that Microsoft fears. OK, so it's not a general computing platform, but I think that it is already moving towards domination in the ultra-important e-commerce market, and that that market will prove to be decisive in the long run. Well worth a read by those interested in exactly what Amazon is up to at the moment.

http://www.acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=388

And while we are on the subject of hard problems to deal with, what would you do with a country of a billion people, 1,652 languages, and in which three quarters of the workforce are in agriculture? That is the problem facing India today. Only about 10 per cent of the population speak English, which effectively limits the number of PCs to about 60 million.

The problems with using the major languages - Hindi, Urdu, and Gujarati, to name but three - on a computer are manifold. It looks, though, as if HP India have a possible solution in the form of a tablet and stylus system that might just work. The idea is intriguing and you can read all about it in an interesting piece by ZDNet UK's Rupert Goodwin.

http://newsletters.zdnetuk.cneteu.net/t/118634/921984/188435/0/


Geek Toys:

Watch this one very carefully - it is the shape of things to come. Samsung are about to launch a laptop PC with a 32-Gigabyte NAND flash based solid state disk drive. This is a first for laptops, and points out the way forward. It's not just that the drive is solid state rather than the conventional electro-mechanical, it's also that it's up to 300 per cent faster than a conventional drive, and it's silent. The last point makes it suitable for using in lectures, presentations and libraries. It also uses less battery power than a conventional drive.

The demise of conventional drives at the hands of solid state drives has been predicted for many years, but this is the first time I can recall that solid state drives have really been in the running. I want one!

http://www.physorg.com/news67620189.html


Scanner - Other Stories:

Red Cross warns blood donors of possible ID thefts in Midwest
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command
=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9000754&source=NLT_AM&nlid=1

The future starts here...or does it?
http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2006/05/18/microsoft_future_starts_here/

Source: Theft of vets' data kept secret for 19 days
http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/05/23/vets.data/index.html

PGP creator offers VoIP crypto to Windows users
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/05/23/zfone/

Apple's cold and fuzzy dead pixel policy
http://newsletter.infoworld.com/t?ctl=12542C5:1F2BBBE

Fortress Blair - The UK Prime Minister bets on biometric ring of steel to 'fix' immigration
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/05/22/blair_biometric_migration_fix/


Acknowledgements:

Thanks to readers Barbara and Kevin for drawing my attention to material used in this issue.

Alan Lenton
alan@ibgames.com
28 May 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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