The weekly newsletter for Fed2 by ibgames

EARTHDATE: May 23, 2010

Official News page 12


WINDING DOWN

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

As you draw some cash out of the ATM this week spare a moment of silence for the inventor of the cash machine who died this week. Like Archimedes, John Shepherd-Barron had the idea in the bath, after finding his bank closed. Being a Scotsman, not an Athenian, he didn't run down the street naked shouting "Eureka!"

Instead, he sensibly discussed the idea for a vending machine that dispensed money using a six figure PIN with his wife. She informed him that she could only remember four numbers. Thus, the genesis of modern four number PIN cash machines!

While we are on the subject of RIPs, next time you don your headphones to listen to your fave music, take a 10 second silence to remember Dr. Fritz Sennheiser, who invented the lightweight headphones, radio mikes, and the shotgun microphone, for which he was awarded the 'Scientific and Engineering Award' by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1987.

So, on to WD proper, beginning with a birthday, rather than a death...


Shorts:

"Next Friday, May 28th, Science will be 2,595 years old. On May 28, 585 B.C. the swath of a total solar eclipse passed over the Greek island of Miletus. The early Greek philosopher, Thales of Miletus, alone understood what was happening. The world's first recorded freethinker, Thales rejected all supernatural explanations, and used the occasion to state the first law of science: every observable effect has a physical cause. The 585 B.C. eclipse is now taken to mark the birth of science, and Thales is honored as the father." This is taken from Bob Park's 'What's New' newsletter. If you want a hard nosed version of what's going on in science these days and just how the politicos are screwing around with science, by a real scientist, this is the place to look.
http://www.bobpark.org/

The ghost of Orwell's 1984 strikes again. Last time round it was Amazon deleting the books people had purchased from their Kindles with out permission. This time it's Google's turn! It turns out that their obnoxious Street View cars have been up to a little more than just taking pictures. That's creepy enough, and with not much more than a dodgy justification. However, the aforementioned vehicles have also been listening in to wireless traffic as they take the pictures. This allows them to build up a picture of what people who happened to be using their browsers at the time were doing.

Nasty. very nasty indeed.

Google claim that it was a mistake. Maybe it was, but even if we give them the benefit of the doubt (which I'm inclined to), how did they come to make a mistake of these proportions? To me it is yet another example of the hubris Google are developing, and their casual attitude to other people's privacy. Peering into my crystal ball, I foresee a slew of class action cases, and some extremely hard questions being asked, especially in Europe where there is already a great deal of opposition to Street View. The Germans have already ordered Google to hand over one of the drives used to collect the info by the 26 May, or face panzers rolling into the GooglePlex... oh sorry, I was day dreaming, I mean legal action.

When you have as much cash in the bank as Google has, you really have to be careful about this sort of thing. Everyone wants to sue Google for a piece of its cash.
http://www.infoworld.com/d/networking/google-admits-wi-fi-spying-023?
source=IFWNLE_nlt_networking_2010-05-18

http://www.infoworld.com/d/the-industry-standard/google-and-facebook-
are-violating-your-privacy-again-435?page=0,1&source=IFWNLE_nlt_
daily_2010-05-20

Ironically, in the same week the old Google we all know and love performed one of the classic fun and technical tour-de-forces it does so well. The occasion was the 30th anniversary of the PacMan game. To celebrate, Google changed its opening banner to a fully functioning PacMan game. It's a brilliant way to pay homage to one of the seminal computer games, and the game includes all 255 of the original levels, plus the famous 256th level that crashed it!

The technical side is equally impressive. No Flash, no Silverlight, just pure, unadulterated HTML5. <twenty minutes later...> Yep, the banner is still up. If you have an HTML5 aware browser (Chrome and Firefox, I don't know about the others), just click on the 'Insert Coin' button, and away you go!
http://www.joystiq.com/2010/05/21/google-celebrates-pac-mans-30th-with-
playable-logo/

http://www.google.com

The Dutch transit authorities have joined the long line of those responsible for allowing personal information out into the net. They have closed down one of their sites after a hacker demonstrated that he could access addresses, birth dates, and other info on some 168,000 passengers. And what caused the problem? One of the oldest bugs in the Web site creation trade, SQL-Injection. Some people never learn from others' experiences.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/05/18/transit_site_privacy_breach/

I see that our old friends at DARPA, originators of the internet (presumably thanks to Al Gore), are now trying to stuff the genie back into the bottle. They are looking to start a new project known as SMITE. SMITE stands for Suspected Malicious Insider Threat Elimination. I think they must have recruited a tabloid headline writer to come up with their acronyms.

They state, "We define insider threat as malevolent (or possibly inadvertent) actions by an already trusted person with access to sensitive information and information systems and sources." Indeed! And topics of interest for this automated witchfinder general include, "...suggestions about what evidence might mean and [ways to] forecast context-dependent behaviors both malicious and non-malicious..." Un-gobble-de-gooked that means they want ways of predicting what you are going to do next!

And are they likely to get what they are looking for? Possibly, it's difficult to say. But there are research results on the horizon that indicate it might be partially possible. No one thought the internet was a goer when the contract was first issued, but look at it now!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/05/19/darpa_smite/

I see that a Californian judge has permanently closed a web hosting site accused of hosting sites for child pornographers, spammers and malware purveyors. The hosting company, 3FN.net/Pricewert was also ordered to liquidate all assets and surrender more than US$1million in illegal profits.

The closing of the site represents something of a first for Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which, as far as I'm aware, hasn't done anything like this before. The really interesting point to be made here is that the whole thing was done properly with legal oversight, and evidence to back up the request for the closure, and an earlier, temporary, sealed warrant, so that the sites being hosted couldn't remove the content. Makes a change from big media's dodgy take down notices!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/05/19/3fn_permanently_shuttered/

Finally, I note that some of the biggest names in memory chips got their come-uppance from the EU this week. A number of large, well known, companies were caught operating a cartel to fix memory chip prices in the period 1998-2002, and fined a total of US$403 million.

The biggest fine, 145 million Euros went to Samsung, while Infineon copped 56.7 million Euros, and Hynix a mere 5.5 million Euros. Others involved to a lesser extent included Hitachi, Mitsubishi, and NEC. Samsung already got fined US$300 million in the US, the biggest criminal anti-trust fine in US history!

You know, if this sort of thing continues, we might not have to pay non-local taxes at all. The Feds and the EU could run on the proceeds of the fines it levies on IT companies - Google take note!
http://www.physorg.com/news193473092.html


Homework:

There has been much boasting about the security of quantum computers since the possibility of such beasts first raised their heads above the parapet a few years back. Uncrackable, trumpeted the companies moving into this potentially lucrative market.

Uncrackable? Really? Well actually, no - not really. Yes, it's theoretically uncrackable. However, in practice...

Now the wannabe Eves* at Canada's University of Toronto have managed to break a commercial quantum encrypted system to listen in to a conversation between the legendary Alice* and Bob*. How did they do it? Well if you want the full techie details look at the URL, but in a nutshell it's this. Quantum cryptography relies on the fact that if anyone listens in, they create errors, which can be detected by the recipients, who then know someone is listening in.

Unfortunately, in the real world there are always errors, even when no one is listening in, so the system sets a threshold (around 20% currently) below which errors are admissible without triggering alarms. Think of it in terms of the motion detectors in the office. They are programmed to ignore motion by small bodies, otherwise every time a butterfly flaps its wings the alarm would go off. But I digress. In the case of the quantum system, the crackers were able to hold the rate of the errors they were causing, by reading part of the transmission, to 19.7%, so everything looked hunky dory to Alice and Bob.

I wonder what other problems with quantum cryptography are going to show up in the future?
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/25189/

On a slightly older topic, did you know that the laser is 50 years old? No, I hadn't realized that it was that old either. Generally considered by the public to be a solution without a problem, it was, in fact being used and developed extensively as a tool by scientists, especially after the laser diode was invented by General Electric in 1962. Scientific American has an interesting interview with a couple of the pioneers in field, which I'd recommend to anyone interested in the history involved.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=key-moments-in-laser-history&page=2


Geek Toys:

I see that Seagate have a new 3 TeraByte hard drive on the starting blocks. Unfortunately, it might be a longer wait than you think before you can put your massive Grateful Dead live bootleg collection (cool... 42 different versions of 'St Stephen', man) onto a single disk. The show stopper is that the software on most people's computers only reads drives up to 2.1TB. When the current standard for addressing was written in 1980, no one thought that anyone would need more than 2.1TB of disk. What on earth would you do with that amount of data? Don't laugh, at that time few could imagine needing more than 640KB of memory either!

Some 64-bit Linux systems can handle the new drives, and so can the 64-bit version of Windows 7. Oh, and so can the 64-bit version of Vista, but I doubt anyone is using that nowadays. Don't expect much of a resolution soon, especially if you want to use existing kit, since these problems are built into the BIOSs, or the modern equivalent, of older computers (older computer = the one you buy tomorrow).

You know, wanting to use a 3TB drive is about the only good reason I've heard for wanting to upgrade to Windows 7...
http://www.thinq.co.uk/news/2010/5/17/exclusive-seagate-confirms-3tb-drive/page-2/


Scanner:

Is Firefox headed towards a massive decline? Its co-founder thinks so
http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/18/future-of-firefox/

Hacked off: How PC game modders are evolving
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-05/17/hacked-off-how-pc-game-
modders-are-evolving

Prof. Dr. Fritz Sennheiser - RIP
http://www.sennheiser.com/sennheiser/home_en.nsf/root/press_releases_
180510_biographie

Inventor of first cash machine dies at 84
http://www.physorg.com/news193547143.html

Switch on memory
http://hplusmagazine.com/articles/neuro/switch-memory


* In cryptography the participants are traditionally called Alice and Bob (much better than A and B), and Eve, the eavesdropper...


Acknowledgements

Thanks to readers Barb, Fi, Jason, 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
23 May, 2010

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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