WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net and technology news
by Alan Lenton
Well, like I said last week, this is the last issue for a couple of weeks, but it seemed to be the right time of the year to announce ibgames' new multi-player game - Combat Golf!
Pull on your kevlar woven +4 trousers of golfing, climb into your Janissary armoured golf cart, select your trusty Uzi number nine iron, and you're ready to handle bunkers that can fight back!
Combat Golf by ibgames - it's a Blast!
Season's greetings to all of you :)
Shorts:
I've mentioned the heist of credit card information at TJX - owners of TJ Maxx, Marshalls, Home Goods, AJ Wright, Winners and HomeSense - in past issues. Each time it's been to tell you that even more credit card numbers were stolen than thought previously. Well this time is no exception - the total has now reached 45.6 million numbers, with personal information, including social security numbers for at least 451,000 people.
This makes it the biggest ever reported theft of personal and credit card data. (Previous record holder, CardSystems with 40 million records stolen.) The theft took place after hackers gained access to the company's computers and continued to access it for 18 months. It's unlikely that we will ever know the true breadth of the thefts, because the hackers were, in many cases, able to conceal their traces. Add to that the fact that in the regular course of business TJX administrators deleted many of the files believed to have been copied, and you can start to guess the size of the task facing TJX's investigators.
So, what other companies have this scale of breach of security just waiting to be discovered, I wonder?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/03/29/tjx_credit-card_debacle/
And talking of security, Australian telecoms company, Opus, is having trouble finding the fault on its network that allows customers to eavesdrop on one another's phone calls! The fault, originally thought to be confined to the pre-paid mobile service, has turned out to be much more widespread with landline users also affected.
Users who tried to report the fault said that Opus customer service thought it was quite amusing, and that they had a great deal of difficulty making Opus taking the fault seriously. Eventually, Opus announced they were investigating and that it was a 'vendor-related' fault. Funny the way these things are always someone else's fault, isn't it?
http://www.theage.com.au/news/mobiles--handhelds/optus-glitch-lets-others-listen-in/2007/03/29/1174761637575.html
So far Microsoft seems to be making headway against mass copying of its new Vista Windows operating system. The whole thing is so complex anyway that it's difficult to make a version easy enough for people to install themselves, and Microsoft has spent a considerable amount of programmer time - time which could have been spent putting in features wanted by users - making the beast copy proof.
To be honest, I'm happy to see them succeed. Success will keep the more easily clonable XP in circulation for a lot longer, meaning that people will be writing new programs that run on my XP based machine. Less illegal versions of Vista also means that Linux becomes a more viable alternative, because Windows isn't so easily available.
In the mean time users of Vista have discovered that its trendy new voice interface contains more dangers than they thought. Web sites which use the browser's audio plugins to give verbal instructions to the computer to do various malignant things are springing up all over the place.
It seems incredible that Microsoft didn't think about this when designing the voice interface - it was certainly a regular topic of sarcastic conversation whenever the issue of voice interfaces came up. I guess the programmers were all too busy adding in anti-copy mechanisms and Digital Restrictions Management code..
http://ct.techrepublic.com.com/clicks?t=36177808-18a32f6148453f76b7d88f6b914d69a0-bf&s=5&fs=0
And while we are on the subject of Microsoft, I though you'd like to know that the word on the street is that Microsoft is trying to buy Double-Click, purveyors of many of the more irritating web adverts you are annoyed by during your surfing. It's a sort of 'Redmond Evil Empire meets the Web Ad Evil Empire', and both sides will be using extremely long spoons when they sup with one another! I'll give you more info on this one when it comes available.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/03/28/microsoft_double_click/
Moving to 'harder' news, I see that Intel is to build a new US$2.5 billion chip fabrication plant in China. Supposedly the plant is going to only use 90nm technology (state of the art is half that size - 45nm), which is why it was able to get permission from the US authorities for the complex.
China has been trying to expand and enhance its chip making facilities for some years now, and this makes for a major coup on its part. For Intel the advantages are twofold. On the one hand is cheap labour, which will keep down both the building and operating costs. On the other hand is the fact that making good on its threats to move production out of the US if its home government didn't start to meet its demands, strengthens its hand at home, and proves that it wasn't bluffing.
Only time will tell what the effects of such a double edged strategy are.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/03/26/intel_china_chip_plant/
http://newsletter.eetimes.com/cgi-bin4/DM/y/e5wV0FypUC0FrK0E8xL0E3
While we in the UK can't compete with the likes of TJX, our National Health Service did manage to have three laptops containing personal information on 11,500 children stolen earlier this month. The people responsible for the blunder are holding out the faint hope that the thieves won't be able to access the machines because they were password protected. Some hope. In the mean time, no one is saying anything about why this information was sitting around on laptops waiting to be stolen.
http://update.techweb.com/cgi-bin4/DM/y/e52x0HiOOq0G4W0FAI60EY
Bad news for TV viewers in the rural mid-west of the US. It seems very likely that they will not be able to access TV after the transition from analog to digital broadcasting due to happen in 2009.
At the moment signals in the affected areas are re-broadcast by relay stations (called 'translators', for some reason I can't fathom) into areas too far distant from urban areas to get the signal directly. The problem is that the translators only rebroadcast analog signals, and upgrading them to handle digital signals is beyond the financial resources of the communities and co-operatives who operate them.
To give some idea of the scale of the problem, something like 30% of the population of Arizona lives outside the two main metropolitan areas of Phoenix and Tucson, and so are probably dependant on translators for their broadcast TV. That's an awful lot of TVs that are likely to stop working in a couple of years time. At the moment no one has any idea what to do about it, and it looks like it's going to be a political time bomb.
I guess, if you live in such an area, it's time to start lobbying your congress critter to 'do something'!
http://newsletter.eetimes.com/cgi-bin4/DM/y/e5wV0FypUC0FrK0E8xT0EC
If you live a little further south, though, an alternative form of entertainment may be at hand.
Mexico City cops will soon be offering an Xbox for every handgun turned into them! It's all part of a plan by newly-elected mayor Marcelo Ebrard to cut down on crime in the city. Not got anything as dinky as a hand gun? Not to worry. Heavy caliber weapons, like machine guns can be swapped for a smart new PC!
I wonder what a Russian made T54 tank is worth?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/03/28/xoboxes_for_guns/
Scanner: Other stories
DMCA architect lambasts music moguls
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/03/26/dmca_pants/
Resource race heats up in the melting Arctic
http://www.physorg.com/news93963912.html
Open Source 'General Public License v3' nears final publication
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/03/29/stallman_underfire/
http://ct.techrepublic.com.com/clicks?t=35960060-18a32f6148453f76b7d88f6b914d69a0-bf&s=5&fs=0
ReadyBoost: Better Windows Vista Performance In A Flash
http://update.techweb.com/cgi-bin4/DM/y/e52x0HiOOq0G4W0E8zv0EH
Ideas behind computer games can be copied
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/03/23/computer_games_copyright_law/
University snubs RIAA
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/03/23/university_riaa_snub/
Acknowledgements
Thanks to readers Barbara, Fi and DJ for drawing my attention to material used in this issue. Please send suggestions for material to alan@ibgames.com.
Alan Lenton
alan@ibgames.com
1 April2007
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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