The weekly newsletter for Fed2 by ibgames

EARTHDATE: December 6, 2009

Official News page 13


WINDING DOWN

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

Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat...

Yes, it's that time of the year again. The news is mostly miserable, but what else can you expect in the middle of a recession? Even the geese look thinner than usual. Which is by way of telling you that I will be skiving off producing Winding Down over some of the next month or so. I can tell you that there definitely won't be an issue next week (the 13th) because I'm out of town for part of the week. I do expect to provide you with Xmas reading on the 20th. And there won't be an issue on the 27th. Whether there will be an issue on the third day of next year remains to be seen. I'll let you know on the 20th.

And now I'll move on to the news leaving you with the thought that in three weeks time it will be after Christmas, and we will be faced with a further three weeks of eating up the leftovers.


Shorts:

Here's a nice little Christmas type thing to start the season with. The world's smallest snowman. It's just 0.01mm wide (about one fifth the width of a human hair). It was created by David Cox, a member of the UK's National Physical Laboratory's Quantum Detection group. Nice work!
http://www.physorg.com/news179153163.html

On a less happy note, I've mentioned before the new Anti-Counterfeit Trade Agreement (ACTA) talks being held in secret between the US, the EU, Japan and a number of other countries. A few leaked details are starting to make their way out, and it's becoming obvious why those who are privy to the discussion didn't want anyone else to know what they want to do.

This week some of the provisions of the discussions leaked out in a document from the EU commenting on the provisions. They're every bit as draconian as people feared. It seems that the US is pushing heavily for a three strikes and you lose your internet connection policy, liability of third parties for copyright infringement, and civil and criminal penalties for people who break Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) computer code. This latter includes preventing countries from establishing interoperability requirements (this means that you won't be able to play media purchased in one country in a different country).

Opposition has been slow to get started, but already the trade body representing 1,700 European Internet Service Providers (ISP) have come out against ACTA, calling it heavy handed and pointing out that its provisions threaten to undermine the protection given to ISPs under EU law. It's also the case that a major thrust of the proposals is to force the ISPs to police their customers free of charge for the big media companies. For big media this has the added advantage of targeting customers' ire at the ISPs rather than the big media itself.

In the US, senators Bernie Sanders and Sherrod Brown have written to US Trade Representative Ron Kirk, requesting that the ACTA documents be made public. Hopefully this is just the beginning of lawmakers starting to take an interest in what is being negotiated in their name.

Like the recent UK Digital Economy Bill, the ACTA talks are not about the future of the digital economy, but about how to protect old industries who are themselves unable to protect their old business plans and unwilling to seek out new ways to make money under a changed situation. Hopefully, opposition to this secretive way of operating, and the results of such discussions, will start to gather force in the coming months.
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/4575/125/
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20091123/1541197061.shtml
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/12/03/isp_treaty_secrecy_objections/
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/digital-disaster-editorial

And while we are talking about DRM, there are interesting things happening in Europe at the moment.

In Denmark the law says that you are allowed to make copies of DVDs for your own use, but you aren't allowed to break the DRM. Since you can't copy the DVDs without removing the DRM, this is something of a conundrum. Now a Danish citizen, Henrik Anderson, has turned himself in to the law enforcement authorities and reported himself to the police for breaking the DRM part of the law, in an effort to get a court ruling on the issue. Actually, he first reported himself to the Danish anti-piracy group Antipiratgruppen, but they don't seem to want to take action against him. I wonder why not?

Meanwhile, in Sweden, the Stockholm District Court has rejected calls that Swedish ISP Portlane should shut down the OpenBitTorrent tracker which was launched earlier this year, and which Portlane hosts. The court ruled that in order for Portlane to be considered as contributing to copyright infringement, it must be guilty of more than just providing Internet access to the site.

And on the non-DRM front here in Europe, artists are not happy with the way they get paid as a result of the legal streaming services playing their material. To take one example, consider the music star Lady Gaga, who has sold more than four million albums and has had in excess of 20 million paid digital downloads. On the advertising supported streaming music service Spotify, her track 'Poker Face' was played over a million times. She got paid the equivalent of US$167.

That's not good. Or is it? Well it depends on whether you see this as sales or free advertising. I see it as free advertising, but maybe others don't see it that way. On the other hand, all the studies that have been done on this issue show that people who listen to free digital music also buy more music and spend more money on live concerts...
http://torrentfreak.com/anti-piracy-group-refuses-bait-drm-breaker-goes-to-the-
police-091201/

http://torrentfreak.com/court-refuses-to-order-shutdown-of-openbittorrent-091202/
http://torrentfreak.com/lady-gaga-earns-slightly-more-from-spotify-than-piracy-091121/


Homework:

The National Institute of Justice has recently awarded a substantial grant to researchers at Virginia Tech to figure out a method of measuring and establishing a standard for sufficiency of information available in fingerprint patterns. This is an important step forward. While prints taken in controlled conditions - for instance at border checkpoints - can be analysed by machine, those at for instance, the scene of a crime, are much less clean and may be distorted or partial.

Such fingerprints cannot be machine analysed, but rely on the judgement of human fingerprint experts. Unfortunately, there is no quantitative standard used by the worldwide fingerprint community to determine the quantity and quality of the information in an image, or even the number of points of comparison required for identification.

For those who are not familiar with the details, I should perhaps explain that fingerprinting in criminal cases does not rely on a complete match of the two prints, only that a certain number of 'points' on the prints match. The number of points 'required' seems to vary with the expert. In the US fingerprinting experts have declared positive fingerprint matches in court after finding even less than eight points matching. In the past this has lead to innocent people being arrested.

For instance in 2004 three FBI fingerprint experts declared that Oregan lawyer Brandon Mayfield's fingerprints match a partial fingerprint found on a bag in Madrid containing detonators. They claimed that there were 15 points of similarity. US officials called the match "absolutely incontrovertible", and Mayfield was immediately taken into custody. In point of fact, the fingerprint belonged to Algerian Ouhnane Daoud, and shortly afterwards the FBI was forced to climb down and eat humble pie over the whole affair.

Clearly, it's important to establish a baseline for just what does constitute a match, and also what the uncertainty is on that match. Equally clearly the less points you match, the more chance there is of false positives. Unfortunately, the more points you match, the fewer matches can be done by machine, and the more you have to use human experts, who are more time consuming, more expensive, and (arguably) more error prone. It is this that makes the forthcoming Virginia Tech study so important. If we can at least start to get everyone using the same measuring stick we are in with a chance. That on its own is not enough (for instance, as far as I am aware, there is actually no scientific proof that fingerprints are unique), but you can't even start to look at anything else without such standards. Fingers crossed that this comes up with some useful metrics!
http://www.physorg.com/news178810066.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64711-2004May28.html
http://www.onin.com/fp/fphistory.html

In a totally ironic piece of serendipity, having written the above, I was looking through the Royal Society's 'Trailblazing' website with a view to reporting on it, when I discovered an entry for 1891 which is Galton's paper on the proof that fingerprints are unique. Galton's fingerprinting categorisation system is still in use today. It was even more ironic that my pdf reader reported that the file was damaged and couldn't be shown!

In spite of this little hiccup (and it may have been a problem with my pdf reader), the site is a superb collection of classic pioneering papers published by the Royal Society in the 350 years of its existence. You can read Dirac's paper predicting the existence of the positron (you need to be good at sums for this one), Watson and Crick on the structure of DNA, Captain James Cook on the prevention of scurvy, and Isaac Newton on light and color. Well worth a look for anyone interested in science and in its history.
http://trailblazing.royalsociety.org/


Geek Toys:

Tesla coils - definitely one of the ultimate geek toys - have now moved into the realms of performance art. Performances from the Chicago based tesla group, Masters of Lightning are starting to become widely known through their impressive ability to play music from tesla generated sparks. Amazing stuff (the second two URLs point to 'The Legend of Zelda' and 'Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy'). Given the voltages involved and the size of the 'sparks', I don't think they'll be allowed to perform at Carnegie Hall in the near future, but it's a pretty impressive display. Hot geek stuff!
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chicago/chi-tesla-coils-zones-02-
dec02,0,3913995.story

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqX0T1Y6lCM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Opf5jIukSBM

And here's something that's not just for geeks. As you probably know, every year the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) uses its tracking stations to follow and report on the progress of Santa as he makes his annual deliveries and chomps his way through endless mince pies and glasses of milk left out as a thank you for him. (No wonder he always looks so overweight!)

This year there is a new twist to the tracking, NORAD have done a deal with OnStar to allow you to get live updates on your OnStar in car GPS system. That's neat, but unfortunately, even if you are an OnStar subscriber, you will have to wait until 24 December to try it out.

In the mean time, should you be sneaking out of bed to check on progress on the night of the 24th/25th of December and, (Ho! Ho! Ho!), spot mommy kissing Santa Claus, don't worry, daddy knows all about it...
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-10406772-36.html?tag=nl.e703


Scanner: Other Stories

Children who use technology are 'better writers'
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8392653.stm

Osram introduces first OLED lighting panel
http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=222000462&cid=NL_eet

Harvard study: Computers don't save hospitals money
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/print/9141428/Harvard_study_Computers_
don_t_save_hospitals_money?taxonomyName=Hardware&taxonomyId=12


Acknowledgements

Thanks to readers Barb, Fi, and to 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
6 December 2709

Alan Lenton is an on-line games designer, programmer and sociologist, the order of which depends on what he is currently working on! 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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