The weekly newsletter for Fed2 by ibgames

EARTHDATE: August 31, 2008

Official News page 11


WINDING DOWN

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

Yep. It's all gone quiet.

That's just as well, since this week my really cute little EeePC 901 computer turned up. It is nice and I've been playing around with it all week. There was one little glitchette. The computer runs a cut down version of Xandros Linux, but ASUS, the makers, forgot to include the file browser in the installation. That's no big deal if you are a Linux hacker, you can use the command line. However, this is supposed to be for non-Linux weenies. In the event, the info to retrieve the missing program was on the support forum, and the problem was resolved in less than five minutes.

The 901 has a bigger screen than the original EeePC, and it's a little heavier, but you don't need a special case to carry it, just slip it into your shoulder bag or handbag with all the other junk. It comes with a slip case to provide protection from sharp objects like keys and 'liberated' company paperclips. It also comes with a dinky little cloth that you can use to clean up the keyboard after your friends have drooled all over it! I like it...

Incidentally, Amazon, from whom I bought it, demonstrated the idiot nature of computer 'intelligence' by following up a few days with one of their 'we noticed you bought an xxxx recently, here are some other similar things you might like to also buy' electronic missives. The similar things were no less than eight other laptop computers! Just what I really needed.

And so, on to what little news there is. Have a happy Labor Day tomorrow :)


Shorts:

There's an interesting situation arisen where the execrable McAfee, purveyors of grotty anti-virus software, are being sued by a company call 7Search.com. The reason is that McAfee's SiteAdvisor program tagged 7Search.com's web site with a warning that said, 'Feedback from credible users suggests that downloads on this site may contain what some people would consider adware, spyware, or other potentially unwanted programs.' Note that there is no definition of 'credible'.

Now, according to 'The Register', 7Search.com are known to have ties to a company that pushes what is generally considered to be a dubious tool bar. On the other hand, 7Search.com claims that it hasn't had any software downloads on its site since at least 2003.

It's difficult to say who is in the wrong here. However, while I don't like the sound of 7Search.com, I'm hoping McAfee with lose this one. The big arrogant anti-virus firms are all too happy to declare small companies to be purveyors of malware, while providing little in the way of rapid response when they are mistaken. At the same time they are happy to allow big firms like Sony to install root kits on the computers of customers who have paid the anti-virus vendors to protect them.

Maybe this will be the wake-up the big companies need to force them to be more careful and provide proper, rapid, warning and appeal procedures, before they wreck other companies businesses.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/28/7search_sues_mcafee/

Steve Jobs is dead! Long live Apple. Well, that's according to Bloomberg, at least for a few minutes, until someone spotted the story and it was rapidly removed. All the big new companies have obituaries ready for well known figures, and just occasionally slip-up like this happen. I've always wondered what it's like to read your own obituary!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/28/steve_jobs_obit/

It's definitely the silly season, and I'm pleased to see that ThinkPad laptop maker Lenovo are entering into the spirit of thing. One of their customers, a Czech Linux user, negotiated a refund for a Microsoft Windows Vista Business OEM license. However, before Lenovo would cough up the agreed spondoolies (about US$130), they demanded the customer sign a non-disclosure agreement. Naturally he refused and published the story on AbcLinuxu.cz. AbcLinuxu were delighted with the story and paid him a royalty of - you guessed it - US$130. And Lenovo? Well they just ended up looking like complete idiots.
http://www.abclinuxu.cz/clanky/pr/abclinuxu.cz-vyplatil-nahradu-za-licenci-ms-windows-
misto-lenovo-cr?page=1

I see that online retailers are fighting back against New York state's attempt to get round the law requiring electronic retailers to have a physical presence in the state before they can be forced to collected state taxes on their customers. Some companies, like Amazon, are collecting the taxes at the moment, but have filed court cases to have the regulations struck out. Others like Newegg are taking a more confrontational stance and simply refusing to collect the tax.

I'm ambivalent. Of course I wouldn't want to pay taxes unless I absolutely had to. However, if you are going to have taxes (and I don't want to get into that argument here) then they have to be equitably applied, and charging tax at mom and pop local shops while allowing people to buy stuff tax free from Internet mega-corporations like Amazon doesn't strike me as the way to go. It's probably time some one looked at the whole issue from a fresh perspective. Unfortunately, that's not likely to happen given the vested interests involved.
http://www.internetnews.com/ec-news/article.php/3767486

UK resident and IT manager Andy Chapman paid about US$100 for a computer on eBay. Just how big a bargain it was he didn't find out until it arrived, and he discovered customer details from several of the UK's biggest high street banks including RBS and Natwest. Quite a bonanza. The incident we are told was 'extremely regrettable'. it certainly was, especially if the purchaser had been less honest than Mr Chapman. In the meantime the data archiving company, where the computer originated, are scrambling to find out how it came to be sold - and presumably to keep their customers after this snafu.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7581540.stm

I see that the UK's Daily Express have discovered that taking a laptop on holiday can break up families. The only surprise is that the Daily Express know what a laptop is, given that they aren't exactly the world most techno-competent bunch of journos. The don't say what you are supposed to do instead of using your laptop. Perhaps they were thinking of those other well known British pastimes like getting blind drunk and wrecking the bar, or soaking up some skin cancer on the beach?
http://www.wxpnews.com/J4T3AW/080826-Laptop-on-Holiday


Coda: More on previous stories

Comcast have announced that starting in October they plan to cap their 'unlimited' usage at 250 GB a month. This is a pretty substantial chunk of data - according to Comcast it represents the equivalent of 125 standard quality movies - that's four a day! Comcast will contact people who go over the limit and warn them, telling them how much they've used. This actually sounds like a better deal for the customer than most ISPs, who hide their policies behind a wall of vagueness.

Incidentally I hear rumours that contrary to all the flim-flam about P2P eating up the bandwidth, the people who have really been causing trouble for Comcast are actually business users working from home who were regularly backing up their entire hard drives over the Internet. Given that most business grade machine come with 250 GB drives, you can easily see that at (say) a backup a week we are talking about a terabyte (1,000 GB) of data a month for that alone.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2329170,00.asp

Further to the Jaron Lanier article I drew attention to in last week's Homework section, reader 'Fancy' has pointed out a blog commenting on the difference between the Wikipedia and Google's Knol alterative. Warning: the blog contains strong political opinions!
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com/2008_07_27_archive.html

Ah, yes! Our old friends Diebold, now operating under the moniker 'Premier Elections Solutions' have finally admitted that their voting machines lose votes due to a programming error. (Just one error, I ask myself?)

After trying to blame the problem on humans, and then on anti-virus software, they finally admitted that the problem was caused by a logic error which has been in the software for ten years. Interestingly enough this admission was only extracted from them after Ohio filed a lawsuit against them. What a surprise.

The machines involved are used in 1,750 jurisdictions, which means there is the potential for an awful lot of votes to go missing in the up and coming presidential election. Lets hope that the difference in votes between the candidates isn't small enough to make the outcome decided by a bug in Diebold's voting software!
http://dispatch.com/live/content/local_news/stories/2008/08/21/voting_machines.html
?sid=101

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/26/decade_old_evoting_error/


Geek Toys

How about this, then, boys and girls. A Linux computer that's two inches square? it's called the Space Cube, and according to reviews it's got all the bells and whistles, and then some. The processor runs at 300 MHz, there is 16 meg of flash memory, the operating system runs from a 1GB Compact Flash card, and there is also 64MB of ram. There's plenty of connectors, scattered around the outside, including a rather intriguing sounding Space Wire port, which I hadn't come across before. At a cool US$2,700 it's not cheap, but I could see quite a lot of uses for it in robotics and such like. Definitely something to lust for!
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2008/08/27/a-real-space-oddity-arrives-at-pc-pro/


Scanner: Other Stories

UK opposition party calls for data loss prosecutions
http://www.kablenet.com/kd.nsf/FrontpageRSS/7D0EC68FECF13922802574B1
0037439A!OpenDocument

Best Western rebuts claims of massive data breach
http://www.physorg.com/news138992662.html
http://sundayherald.com/news/heraldnews/display.var.2432225.0.0.php

California's wireless road tolls easily hackable
http://technologyreview.com/Infotech/21301/

Even critics give Apple a pass on iPhone 3G woes
http://www.physorg.com/news139158049.html

British Computer Society to review National Health Service IT for Tories
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/22/bcs_nhs_it_review/


Acknowledgements

Thanks to readers Barb, Fi, Lois, Dj, Fancy and Slashdot's daily newsletter for drawing my attention to material used in this issue.

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 Spamato spam filter...

Alan Lenton
alan@ibgames.com
31 August 2008

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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