WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week’s net, technology and science news
by Alan Lenton
Already in February - time flies. There’s a pretty packed issue this week. The PlayStation Network, Google transparency, WTO ruling on the Antigua dispute, the Alfred Russel Wallace letter collection online, YouTube, the Gini Coefficient, asteroid mining, humans in space, cats, and Peter Diamandis of the X Prize Foundation. There are also URLs for drones, the Dutch, Raspberry Pi, IE7 and a student hacker.
You may be wondering why I bung all this information in the first paragraph every week. In fact, you may be intimidated by it. Fear not - you can skip it if you like. It’s not there because I think that my readers all have such a short attention span that all they can cope with is the first paragraph. It’s solely there because it seems that if I don’t put it in, the search engines, being a snooty bunch, will refuse to index the gems I write for you.
I used to put all that sort of info in keywords, where it didn’t annoy my illustrious readers. Unfortunately, it turns out that so many people cheated that the search engines now not only disregard the keywords, but treat them as evidence that that there is something dodgy on the page involved. Humph! In the meantime, I’m still waiting for someone to give me a convincing explanation of why search engines believe that people who used to put lies in the keywords, won’t write a first paragraph with lying search words in?
And now for something completely different - but not really, the keywords are the same...
Shorts:
The mills of the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), may grind slowly, but they do eventually get there. In this case they have levied a 250,000 UK pounds (about US$400,000) on Sony for allowing the April 2011 hack of the PlayStation Network, which compromised the personal details of millions of Brits. The various reports thought this was a suitably massive fine. They probably paid it out of their petty cash, and put it down to the cost of doing business - the transnational company equivalent of plumbers paying parking fines!
It seems to me if you are going to have fines then there has to be a way of making them hurt enough to make it cheaper to comply rather than risk a fine. Perhaps we should be basing fines not just on a set scale, but with a multiplier based on the annual turnover of offender as well?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/01/24/sony_psn_breach_fine/
I see that Google is extending the data it collects on the number of warrants and such like it receives for email and cloud data. All very laudable, and I definitely approve. Now, tell me what sort of ‘warrant’ Google has to obtain to make use of the data it stores on its servers?
http://googleblog.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/googles-approach-to-government-requests.html
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/01/google-says-get-a-warrant/
http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/transparency-report-what-it-takes-for.html
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/01/24/google_transparency_report/
Yea! It’s not very often I have really good news, but Newegg’s success in crushing patent troll Soverain’s ‘shopping cart’ patent deserves much wider publication than it got. But even better is the vindication that it proves for Newegg’s decision in 2007 not to settle with patent trolls - ever. Newegg, absolutely correctly in my view, realized that while it might be cheaper to pay off one troll, that would just encourage others, making it much, much more expensive in the long run.
One can but hope that this decision will embolden other companies to take the same route. If enough companies put their foot down in this way we may start to see an end to this epidemic of patent troll demands for protection money. (As an aside, I’ve always wondered why organized crime never got its fingers into this particular pie!)
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/01/how-newegg-crushed-the-shopping-cart-patent-and-saved-online-retail/
What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander... The World Trade Organization (WTO) seems to have hoist the US by its own petard (incidentally I’ve never seen a convincing explanation of the origin of that phrase). It has ruled that the refusal of the US government to stop blocking on-line gambling sites in Antigua and Barbuda means that the islands can legally strip US intellectual property of its protection and resell it. I’m pretty sure that there won’t be much sympathy for the US over this case, given that in the past that it has used WTO rulings to ensure that US goods and services can be sold in other countries without interference.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/copyright-haven-caribbean-islands-get-approval-to-engage-in-what-us-calls-authorized-piracy/2013/01/28/647759d6-6956-11e2-9a0b-db931670f35d_story.html
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/01/30/antigua_usa_wto_dispute/
Interested in evolution and biology? Then you need to take a look at a new online collection from the UK’s Natural History Museum. They’ve managed to collect and publish online around 95% of the known surviving letters of Alfred Russel Wallace, co-discoverer, with Darwin, of evolution by natural selection. The 4,000 or so letters are in a fully searchable database, and make fascinating reading, since Wallace corresponded extensively with all the top scientists of his day. Recommended.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=letters-of-alfred-russel-wallace-go-online&WT.mc_id=SA_CAT_SP_20130128
http://www.nhm.ac.uk/research-curation/scientific-resources/collections/library-collections/wallace-letters-online/index.html
Do you put your own home made movies on YouTube? If so then you may like to take a look at the URL below. One of the problems facing ‘Tube droids is that of having your masterpiece blown out by inadvertently having some music in the background which is subject to copyright (think videos of weddings, for instance). All is not lost, though. Google have come up with a tool that will let you remove the music which some soulless apparatchik has objected to. Nice work Google, but now you need to come up with a way of dealing with companies that have a record of making false copyright claims.
http://support.google.com/youtube/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2902117&rd=1
Homework:
Those of you who read this rag regularly or look through my book reviews will have noticed my occasional rants against the use of a single social or economic indicator to explain social phenomena (See for example my review of Hernando De Soto’s book ‘The Mystery of Capital’ on Amazon UK.
I was, therefore, interested to read a piece about the misleading nature of what is known as the Gini Coefficient, widely used as a measure of inequality. The index was invented by uber-control freak Corrado Gini just over 100 years ago. Pundits and politicians love single numbers - they ‘simplify’ things for what the pontificators consider to be the great unwashed masses. In this case it’s even better, because it’s a number between zero and 100, with zero as perfect equality - in other words everyone has the same income.
Sounds really useful - most people understand numbers scaled from zero to 100 (actually what most people understand is numbers scaled from one to 100, but that’s another story). So what’s the problem? Well, the real problem is that the index can’t really handle non-cash based rural economies, and therein lies the rub.
The example in the article makes this very clear. Namibia has a Gini index of 70.7, as opposed to the US index of 45. Roughly speaking, in Namibia 10% of the population take 60% of the country’s income. In the US, 1% take 20% of the income. However, even the smallest town and most inaccessible rural areas in the US operate a cash economy, even where there is a tradition of bartering.
In Namibia, though, around a third of the country’s population are rural farmers on less than US$1 a day. Do these people really subsist on US$1 a day? Of course not. They are either self- sufficient or part of a barter economy, and in general they are not starving. But, of course their economy doesn’t show up on the Gini index.
So, while the Gini index might, in some cases, be a marker for levels of social discontent, on its own it is a pretty lousy measure for comparison on a worldwide basis. Nonetheless, I think readers might find the article gives you an interesting insight into what basis politicians and talking heads are using when they talk about social inequality.
http://www.psmag.com/magazines/january-february-2013/gini-coefficient-index-poverty-wealth-income-equality-51413/
On a completely different topic, the recent announcements about asteroid mining are, I think, an exciting step forward. It’s interesting to look at just how much creativity and progress has been unleashed since NASA stopped monopolizing US space flight. I know a lot of my readers are interested in the subject, so I thought I’d draw your attention to a couple of interesting articles on the subject.
I’ve also included a third URL to an article called ‘Cargo cult exploration’ which is one of the best discussions I’ve seen about why, and whether, humans should be in space. Personally, I have no doubt that the answer should be ‘yes’, but this article made me think hard about exactly why. Try it and see what you think.
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/2227/1 (Asteroid mining boom or bubble?)
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/2226/1 (The asteroid mining bank)
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/2223/1 (Cargo cult exploration)
Geek Stuff:
Are you a cat-loving-fantasy-game-playing geek? Then take a look at the URL. There really is nothing else to say on this topic!
http://io9.com/5979303/animal+shaped-armor-for-the-eternal-battle-of-cats-vs-mice
I think most geeks know about the X Prize Foundation, so I thought you might like to take a look at this interview with its creator, Peter Diamandis. In it he highlights eight technologies that are making the world a better place. Most of them are ‘obvious’, but it’s interesting to see the views of someone who has very definitely put his money where his mouth is!
http://www.33rdsquare.com/2013/01/peter-diamandis-on-eight-technologies.html
Scanner: Other stories
NOVA’s ‘Rise Of The Drones’ opens the shutters on lethal airborne robotics technology
http://www.33rdsquare.com/2013/01/novas-rise-of-drones-opens-shutters-on.html
Tech firms face massive tax bill if Dutch vote to end loopholes
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/01/23/dutch_parliament_tax_vote/
Weird and wonderful Raspberry Pi hacks
http://www.infoworld.com/slideshow/82717/weird-and-wonderful-raspberry-pi-hacks-211145?source=IFWNLE_nlt_daily_2013-01-19#slide1
World’s first ‘tax’ on Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18440979
School that expelled student hacker may have ignored 16-month-old security flaw
http://www.infoworld.com/t/security/school-expelled-student-hacker-may-have-ignored-16-month-old-security-flaw-211314
Acknowledgements
Thanks to readers Barb and Fi 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
3 February 2013
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.
