The weekly newsletter for Fed2 by ibgames

EARTHDATE: November 4, 2007

Official News page 12


WINDING DOWN

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

Winding Down proudly present another bumper issue stuffed with goodies for your edification and browsing pleasure.

Both Microsoft and Apple were making a nuisance of themselves on a number of fronts this week, so in both cases I've rounded up the info for easy assimilation. And just when you thought it was safe to fire up your Linux desktop, the Santa Cruz Organisation is making a bid to rise from the grave.

For those of you who have a really warped sense of humour, I've included in the Scanner section a URL to an article describing the attempt of the UK government to explain to the House of Lords why items such as two jars of marmite constitute a security risk to aircraft. My favourite quote though is, "The fact that there has not been a serious incident involving liquid explosives, indicates, I would have thought, that the measures we have put in place so far have been very effective."

The mind boggles!

And now, readers for the first item in the Shorts section, I want you to put on your false beard and moustache, dark glasses and slip your (t)rusty pistol into your shoulder holster.

Ready? Then lets go...


Shorts:

In the words of the legendary 'Q', "Now listen carefully, James." MI6, the UK's secret intelligence service is recruiting a new Chief Information Officer. [Cue spy type music.] Of course, since this is a spy organisation, it's no good sending your resume into somewhere like mi6.org - that's just a seller of things associated with Internet spy toys (or maybe that's just a front for MI6, or could it be that that's what they want you to think, or, maybe they want you to think that they think that you think...).

Nope, your first task, Meestair Bond, should you decide to accept it, will be to find out why MI6 are using a Hotmail address! This item will self-destruct in 30 seconds...

[Info taken from Computing Essentials 1 Nov]

And now for a report from our department of unforeseen consequences. There are red faces in the European Commission's Employment, Social Affairs and Equal Opportunities section. They just had to put their shiny new legislation on exposure to electromagnetic fields onto the back burner for two years while it's re-written. It seem that in its current form it would almost completely stop the use of MRI scans anywhere in the EU. I don't know how much they spent on this fiasco, but it won't be just loose change. Next time someone tells you democracy is 'inefficient', or open government is 'costly', remember this little affair.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/10/30/em_mri_rethink_ec/

I see our old friends at the Santa Cruz Organisation (SCO) are displaying their completely unmatched chutzpah. You will remember that last time we left them they were going into Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Having poured all their money down the legal drain, their case for owning the Unix intellectual property was blown out of the water by the trial judge, who pointed out that they also owed the real legal owner, Novel, royalties.

SCO's latest wheeze is try to get the bankruptcy court to agree to let it sell off its Unix assets. Why? So it can use the money to pursue legal action! I just can't wait to hear the outcome of this one.

http://www.news.com/8301-13580_3-9804865-39.html?tag=nefd.blgs

Good news on the hard drive front. For years now hard drive manufacturers have been ripping people off with claims about the size of their drives by counting the size in decimal instead of binary. At the level of a single kilobyte it doesn't make much difference - 1,000 bytes as opposed to 1,024 bytes, but take it up to a GB and you are talking about a discrepancy of 73.74 Megabytes. That's nearly seven and a half times the size of my first hard drive! And when you take into account the fact that '200GB' drives are quite common these day, the discrepancy is starting to approach 15GB.

This week, though, disk drive maker Seagate have settled a lawsuit alleging that the storage capacity of their drives was 7% less than advertised. Under the settlement Seagate will pay out real cash (unusual in itself) to people who purchased its drives before Jan 1st 2006. Maybe now the manufacturers will start to label their drive sizes properly, lest they too end up in a class action suite.

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&taxonomy
Name=storage&articleId=9045141&taxonomyId=19&intsrc=kc_top

And finally, in this section, a story about scientists at Newcastle University in the UK, who, in all seriousness, are proposing that instead of remembering a password to log on, users should make a drawing and then reproduce the drawing every time they want to log on! The really horrible thing is that I think they're serious, although they do admit that artists manage to reproduce the picture better. I'm sure it would be very secure - not even the user would be able to log on, let alone anyone else!

I wonder what Salvador Dali would have had to say about this scheme?

http://www.ncl.ac.uk/press.office/press.release/content.phtml?ref=1193215475


Roundup: Apple - The Leopard Strikes

Leopard, the latest version of the Mac OS X operating system has been causing some problems for its users, and, for once, the users are being vocal about it. Normally, problems with Macs don't make the news, because Macs are only bought by Applista acolytes who are prepared to defend the superiority of their kit come what may.

However, recently, Apple kit has been bought by people who are simply fed up with Windows and looking for something better. This means that they simply view it as a tool, not an icon to worship, and are not happy when it doesn't work.

The first problem to emerge was that some installs were causing the machine to die on reboot, showing a --gasp-shock-horror-- blue screen of death. Like everyone else I thought that was a Microsoft invention (and probably patented), but it seems it must be a physical constant of computing. Apple are 'looking into it'. I'm sure that's a great comfort to people whose machines don't work.

Next, the people who develop non-Apple applications discovered that Leopard doesn't run the latest version of the Java Virtual Machine, so their latest snazzy programs no longer run. (For those of you not technically orientated, Java is a system that lets you write your program many times and run it once, or something like that.)

That wasn't all, either; a bit later in the week researchers at a security firm revealed that Leopard's firewall had a not insignificant flaw which allowed unwanted outsiders into the system. That was a little unfortunate, to say the least, given that Apple are pushing Leopard for its improved security. Oooops!

But Leopard wasn't the only thing for which Apple was found wanting this week. Data Recovery company, Retrodata, announced that they are getting 20-30 times more failed Mac Seagate 2.5in SATA drives than any other drives. It put the problem down to a lack of quality control in the Chinese supplier (Now where have I heard that before?), and called on Apple to come clean about the problem.

You know, just for a minute, my attention wandered while I was writing this roundup, and I thought I was writing about Microsoft. Perish the thought!

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/10/27/leopard_install_problems/
http://ct.cnet-ssa.cnet.com/clicks?t=40764883-77a80411825e5dd129351740e378161b-bf&s=5&fs=0
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2007/10/30/apple_seagate_drive_warning/
http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2007/10/29/no_java_for_leopard/


Roundup: Microsoft (again)

Well once again Microsoft is in the news for a bunch of disparate things. The first was an admission by Microsoft that sales of Vista are down from 10 million copies a month to 9.3 million copies a month. The news was part of a release of quarterly figures showing increased turnover and profits for the company. Looking closely, though, it seems that the entertainment division (Xbox 360 and Zune) was the star performer, turning a loss in summer 2006 into US$165 million profit this summer.

However, looking even more closely it turns out that a large chunk of this could be attributed to the US$330 million in sales from Halo 3. Can they carry on like this? The consensus from my Halo playing friends was that Budgie, the developer, seem to be running out of ideas. I suspect Microsoft urgently need a replacement for their premiere Xbox 360 game series.

On a somewhat less violent level, last week a Microsoft engineer revealed that Microsoft has 200 developers working on trying to slim down its mega-bloated Windows kernel. This is generally thought to be an attempt to make Windows more virtualization friendly, but I think its got more to do with trying to regain control of the Windows code. When a version of Windows using this kernel will appear, I don't know, but by its compatibility problems with other versions of Windows shall ye know it!

This week Microsoft filed suites against 20 software dealers who they claim have been counterfeiting Windows, Office, SQL Server, and other products. Microsoft estimates that this sort of activity costs 'the US economy' US$7.3 bn a year. Somehow I doubt it. Apart from the fact that the FBI's estimate was, I seem to remember, a lot lower, it fails to take into account the productivity gains of the US citizens using the software. Unless, of course, Microsoft means that people in the US using its software experience a productivity drop?

By the way, I'm sure that the suggestion that you can tell the fake software by the fact that it works is just a malicious rumour :)

Over here in the UK, the computer agency responsible for schools has taken the unusual step of warning schools not to take out Microsoft academic licenses. It also warned them to be wary of using Office 2007 and Vista, and complained to our office of fair trading.

The problem with Office 2007 and Vista stems from the fact that they won't run on current equipment, and the hardware upgrade costs are huge. The license problem relates to the fact that you have to pay a fee for -every- computer in the school, whether it's running Windows or not! A profitable deal for Microsoft, but terrible news for our cash strapped schools. The phrase 'con trick' is the one that comes to mind.

Finally, more info is emerging about Microsoft's shenanigans with its 'Automatic Update' (AU) programs. Users have for some time been complaining that updates have been installed without their authority when the system was told to ask first. Well it seems that Microsoft's 'One Care' program automatically sets AU to fully automatic without asking the computer owner. Of course, it's not surprising, Microsoft never have believed that it's your computer. They firmly believe it's their computer, you just have the right to pay them (another US$49.95 in the case of One Care).

Microsoft's motto has got to be 'Caveat Emptor.'!

http://update.techweb.com/cgi-bin4/DM/y/eBEeL0HiOOq0G4W0FcK80Ef
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do
?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9043359

http://www.electronista.com/articles/07/10/26/vis
ta.sales.rate.slowing/

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7063716.stm
http://newsletter.infoworld.com/t?ctl=
1A0E0F4:215D3E184FC552DCC40528747E7D0F2A3D14AFC16EA995E9


Homework: Mutant Ninja Trojans

Infoworld has an interesting short piece on the rise of a new generation of mutating computer viruses and trojans. It's called server-side polymorphism (a sobriquet that's not as meaningless as you might think). It involves a program on a compromised server creating different variants of viruses on the fly and sending them off to compromise other machines. Since each virus is unique it's not possible to spot them by the tried and trusted method of looking for known sequences of code ('signatures') in incoming material.

The article gives some idea of the ongoing battle between malware and anti-malware producers. Well worth a look.

http://newsletter.infoworld.com/t?ctl=
1A0E0FA:215D3E184FC552DCC40528747E7D0F2A3D14AFC16EA995E9


Geek Toys:

How would you like the world's smallest radio receiver? The only problem is you would need a rather more bulky electron microscope to see it. It's a carbon nano-tube 50 millionths of an inch long, and one millionth of an inch thick. Basically it behaves like an old fashioned electronic valve - but much smaller, of course. It was developed at the National Science Foundation, and now all they have to do is to commercialise it.

Honey, I shrunk the Radio!

http://nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=110566

And in the Toys for the Boys department we can offer the latest in robot pirate hunting boats. The 30 foot long Predator remote controlled boat comes fitted with a machine gun as standard, and is attracting a lot of interested in the US Navy and Coast Guard.

On the other hand, if you are looking for speed as opposed to fire power, how about the 21 foot Interceptor. It can travel at a cool 55mph and you can drive it from inside, or remotely. If you use a Hotmail address to ask for the details and prices, then the powers that be will probably assume that you are part of the security forces. :)

http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/robotics/4229443.html


Scanner: Other stories

UK House of Lords debates airline liquids ban
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/10/30/lords_liquid_ban/

EMI caught offering illegal downloads
http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2007/10/30/fripp-lays-music-industry-rip

Is the US stuck in the Internet slow lane?
http://www.physorg.com/news112987306.html

World's most gullible supermarket chain falls victim to online scam
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/10/29/supermarket_online_scam/

Senators want probe on content blocking
http://www.physorg.com/news112637155.html

UK mobile phones not worth stealing
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/10/26/stolen_phones_blocked/

Electronic Arts post 2Q net loss
http://www.physorg.com/news113158825.html

Italian court rules against HP on pre-installed Windows
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2007/10/29/hp_windows_xp_preinstalled_software/
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2007/09/26/acer_laptop_microsoft_windows_french_ruling/

University of Oregon says no to RIAA
http://www.oregonlive.com/news/oregonian/index.ssf
?/base/news/1193975731224800.xml&coll=7&thispage=1

UK minister pledges policing for Second Life
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/10/26/virtual_worlds/


Acknowledgements

Thanks to readers Barb, Fi and Lois for drawing my attention to material used in this issue. Please send suggestions for material to alan@ibgames.com.

Alan Lenton
alan@ibgames.com
4 November 2007

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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