The weekly newsletter for Fed2 by ibgames

EARTHDATE: November 14, 2010

Official News page 12


WINDING DOWN

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

Apologies for the non-appearance of Winding Down last week. It was entirely unintended! Our router went down on the Friday night, and we had to wait until Monday night for the ISP to get us a new one. That didn't work when we installed it either. Eventually, we got though to the third level of customer services, after several hours talking, and refusing to perform hardware modifications to our line distribution box. He solved the problem, which was at their end, in a few moments.

[For the benefit of the techies among you, the problem turned out to be that the ISP has upgraded their software to handle IPV6 Internet addresses, and the interface at the exchange wasn't handling static IPV4 addresses properly...]

I suspect that there was nothing wrong with the original router, but since the new one is smaller and lighter, we'll keep it, and send the old one back!

But enough of our problems, let's talk about Google...


Round up: The art of doing no evil

Hmmm, maybe I should have taken the enquiry about was I interested in a Google job seriously - Google is now providing its staff with servants to do the dirty work! Google seems to have piloted a deal with the TaskRabbit service to provide extra staff perks in the form of runners to perform tasks like "assemble robot toy" - an activity I suspect that Googlebots perform quite regularly - and "pick-up dinners from Dream Dinners in San Jose".

At the moment it's only a pilot scheme in a few offices, but who knows, it might just catch on. In the meantime, however, there are real benefits on the way. Google have just announced that all their employees are getting a US$1,000 bonus, and a 10% raise in salary on the coming January 1st. Nice work, though I suspect that it's partly driven by a number of high profile defections from the Google maps people to Facebook!

And talking of Facebook reminds me that Google is starting to get more than a little antsy about Facebook's refusal to let Google services offer its users the option of accessing contact information from Facebook 'friends (sic) list'. Google, on the other hand, has a contacts API which lets any third-party service or application provide tools for importing contacts from GMail, including e-mail addresses. Facebook has not hesitated to take advantage of this, but has systematically refused to reciprocate.

Google has now changed its terms of use to make it clear that the API is only available to companies that make similar APIs available to third parties. Difficult to blame Google for this one, though it's a worrying move in the direction of turning the net into a collection of pre-1990s walled gardens.

And talking of chopping up the net into small, closed-off, non-communicating, pieces, the broadcasting companies have some explaining to do. They are systematically blocking access to their programs by Google TV. This is serious; if allowed to pass unchallenged, it means that any content provider will be allowed to say which device you must use to look at their content. The potential for abuse is enormous.

The broadcasters are trying to blackmail Google into paying licensing fees, but as Google's Rishi Chandra pointed out last week, this would be the equivalent of Microsoft charging people to ensure that video worked on the Explorer Internet browser! Blogger Lauren Weinstein put it succinctly when he wrote, "Imagine the protests that would ensue if Internet services arbitrarily blocked video only to Internet Explorer or Firefox browsers! Or if Hulu and the other networks decided they'd refuse to stream video to HP and Dell computers."

I guess in spite of the creepy nature of its officers, Google really is the good guy this week...
http://www.theage.com.au/technology/technology-news/googlers-get-servants-
to-do-their-dirty-work-20101102-17b6l.html

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-20022318-93.html?tag=nl.e703
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/05/google_cuts_facebook_access_to_
gmail_contacts_api/

http://www.infoworld.com/t/data-security/google-and-facebook-clash-over-
data-sharing-833?source=IFWNLE_nlt_blogs_2010-11-10

http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-20022621-261.html?tag=nl.e703
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-20022463-261.html
http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000777.html


Shorts:

Wow! I've got to admit a tiny bit of admiration (a -very- tiny bit) for the sheer panache of the hackers who managed to hi-jack a million cell phones in China. They used a zombie virus hidden in a bogus anti-virus application to perform the dirty deed, and then used the hi-jacked phones to txt out copies of the virus to everyone in the address book, and to contact the controllers to get further instructions. At the moment it's estimated to be costing users a total of US$300,00 a day in txt message costs. Ouch!
http://www.informationweek.com/news/security/attacks/showArticle.jhtml?
articleID=228200648&cid=nl_TW_security_2010-11-10_text

Given the current state of the economy, lots of people seem to be thinking about making a career change. I get asked quite a lot about whether it's worth it. I guess this must be because I've done it quite a lot in the past. Hmmmm, let me see.

Student, factory worker, civil servant, bookshop manager, political activist, graphic designer, print shop manager, magazine production editor, rock band manager and promoter, DJ, network administration manager, game (box and MMRPG) programmer and designer, CTO, network programmer, programming troubleshooter... I guess a sociology degree really does have its uses!

Anyway, quite a lot of these people seem to want to go into 'IT' (a designation which covers a multitude of sins), and what do I think of the idea. Not a lot, I have to confess. I got into it right at the start of the micro-revolution, which gave me and my peers a unique opportunity to learn as we went along. That time is long since past, and the work is difficult. Even if you have a computing science degree it's difficult. If you don't have some sort of experience of working in a programming team, the chances of you making it are not good.

On the other hand, if you don't try, you'll never know if you can make. However, I really would suggest you take a peek at the piece on switching to IT work in Bob Lewis's Advice line this week. It's very sound advice.
http://www.infoworld.com/d/adventures-in-it/the-pros-and-cons-making-tech-
career-change-531?page=0,0&source=IFWNLE_nlt_blogs_2010-11-09

Talking of IT, InfoWorld (who have now stopped doing the advert that really annoyed me) have just produced a piece on business tech's six biggest money wasters. All the usual suspects are there - unused software licenses, printing of everything in sight, service level agreements that are completely over the top, e-mail (especially the cost of storage), excess bandwidth, and, of course, out of control software projects!

Take a look, and see how many of them apply to the company you work for!
http://www.infoworld.com/t/it-management/its-biggest-money-wasters-242?
page=0,0&source=IFWNLE_nlt_daily_2010-11-08


Homework:

Last year, here in the UK, the police stopped over 100,000 people "to prevent acts of terrorism" under the provisions of the Terrorism Act 2000. How many of them did they actually arrest for terrorist activities? I'll give you one guess (hint - it's a nice round number). Give up? In fact they didn't arrest -anyone- who they stopped and searched using these powers for terrorist activities. What a waste of time!

I didn't raise this issue to have a go at the activities of the police, but because it represents a classic example of the ability of humans to subvert the intention of laws, regulations, and so-called 'targets'. In the case of the police, there were three things worth noting about their activities under this particular law.

The first was that its much easier, and less hard work, to invoke anti-terrorist legislation of this nature, than it is to prove that you had 'reasonable suspicion' before stopping someone. The fact is that all legislation that relaxes the rules governing what police forces are allowed to do will sooner or later be used for purposes the law makers didn't intend.

The second thing of note is that lower level police officers tried to systematically use their powers under the act to prevent members of the public (and professional photographers) from photographing public buildings and the police themselves. Not surprising really, when you consider the number of times policemen have been caught misbehaving on camera (not to mention CCTV). The result was a number of embarrassing high profile cases which the police lost.

Finally, I can definitely tell you that the figures have been massively increased by a scam perpetrated by the police themselves! It's to do with not wanting to appear to be racist. Yep, really. For several years white young people carrying rucksacks on the London Underground (aka the subway) have been approached politely by officers and asked if they would mind the police searching their rucksacks. People were a bit puzzled at first, until it was realized that the anti-terrorist stop and searches were mainly targeting people who 'looked' Asian or Arabic. Hence the stopping of 'white' people, and the politeness, so that complaints wouldn't be triggered. The problem of course, it that this sort of activity is likely to double the figures for stop and search! Hoisted with their own petard, is the expression that comes to mind...

So, just remember this little tale next time you are presented with a ludicrous set of targets to meet. Your quota is set in tons of nails produced? I think one very large nail will meet the target with a minimum of effort. Oh, you want to set it in numbers of nails produced? I think only producing 1/2" panel pins will keep the costs down to a minimum!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/10/28/police_stop_one_hundred_thousand
_arrest_none/

Just a snippet, but those of you who found the piece about Margaret Mead in the last issue interesting, might like to have a look at a piece in Scientific American about her theory of war. I makes it very clear why neo-Darwinists and Malthusians really, really, don't like her...
http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=margaret-meads-war-
theory-kicks-but-2010-11-08&sc=CAT_SP_20101108

NASA's Earth Observatory web site just published an amazing picture of the Nile delta at night. It really shows the age old clustering of civilization along the Nile river and in the fertile delta. Amazing.
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=46820&src=eoa-iotd


Geek Toys:

Controllers for computer games are in the news again with PlayStation Move, the Kinect for Xbox 360, and the Wii Motion Plus being launched, so Gearlog though it might be time to cycle through a few past disasters in the way of game controllers. And what a bunch of turkeys they came up with! Remember, the Nintendo Power Glove? The Rez Trance Vibrator for Play Station? The Atari Mindlink? And bang up to date, the Pinball Magic iPhone accessory? No, well go take a look and see what you were fortunate enough to miss.
http://www.gearlog.com/2010/11/the_worst_video_game_periphera.php


Scanner:

Don't let China hold rare-earths to ransom again
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/08/rare_metals_china/

Backlash grows over TSA's 'naked strip searches'
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20022477-281.html?tag=nl.e703

DespairWear T-shirt: TSA - Your photos are safe with us
http://www.despair.com/tsa.html

Huge gamma-ray bubbles found extending from Milky Way
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-sci-1110-energy-bubbles-
20101110,0,6676497.story


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
14 November, 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.


Fed2 Star index Previous issues Fed 2 home page