WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week’s net, technology and science news
by Alan Lenton
This week we look at credit cards - Visa, MasterCard, Genesco, PayPal, Google, credit card skimmers, you name it, we are all affected. We also look at monkeys and fund managers, underwater cable sabotage, iPads in schools and a little something for boy geeks as the summer approaches. The URL point you to improved solar cells, security problems with digital cameras, a Microsoft storm in a twit cup, dark matter and a US bill to stop the state using equipment with Chinese parts - maybe they can find some clubs without Chinese wood or nails in them, who knows!
Well, I'll take the opportunity to remind you that there won't be any Winding Down for the next two weekends, but, assuming my sums are correct, Winding Down will be back on 28 April. I know you'll miss me, but hopefully you'll bear up under the crushing disappointment of having no Winding Down.
Shorts:
The headline in my copy of 'City AM', a freebie newspaper handed out at London Tube (subway) stations, read 'Monkeys trump fund managers'. And no, they weren't talking about an interspecies game of bridge. It seems that academics at the Cass Business School used a computer simulation to emulate the stock picking abilities of monkeys. They then compared these 'random' choices with a traditional market capitalization weighted index, and discovered that the chimps won every time!
I'm sure many of my readers won't be surprised. However, I would point out that there are no details provided about the monkey emulator program, so we have no idea whether it contained any sort of intentional or inadvertent bias in its design and coding. Maybe I should write a program that will let our cat pick stock, and see how that does. Hmmm... Maybe not. I'm sure some people would consider the results to be fishy! Anyway, here is an online URL I found on the experiment.
http://www.fundweb.co.uk/cass-business-school-monkeys-outperform-passive-funds/1068855.article
Credit cards. Now there's a topic dear to everyone's heart. Users hate the exorbitant interest rates charged, while people who accept payment by credit card hate the exorbitant fees charged. Additionally, online traders hate the fact that they are also forced to carry the cost of any fraud even though the credit card companies have authorized the payment.
The credit card companies have a nice thing going and they mean to keep it that way for as long as they can. They have a set of security rules which you must keep to, or you will be fined large sums of money. This system is called the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Standard. The rules set a minimum standard that is required if you store credit card information. Now for the first time a company is contesting, in court, a fine levied for alleged non-compliance with the rules.
The company is Genesco, who suffered a security breach in 2010, and were fined more than US$13 million by Visa for not meeting the PCI standards. The problem is twofold. Firstly, Genesco dispute the allegation that they were in breach of the rules at the time of the break in. Second, there don't seem to be any rules or standards about how the fines are assessed! In this case MasterCard levied a US$2 million fine, while Visa decided on over US$13 million, which is an indication of just how arbitrary the fines are.
Added to that is the fact that the procedure for getting the money from the 'offender' is back to front. Normally, if you want to get money out of someone who is unwilling to pay, you go to court and get a court order. Not so with the credit card companies. They take the money out of your credit card revenue stream, and you have to go to court to get it back. Usually only criminal gangs and governments operate in that fashion, which says a lot about the activities of credit card companies! I suspect the outcome of this case, throwing as it does a light on some of the more murky corners of the credit card business, will not be good for the credit card companies, regardless of which way the decision goes.
http://www.darkreading.com/security/news/240151339/genesco-lawsuit-could-shake-pci-compliance-regime-to-its-core.html
Meanwhile, the credit card companies are looking to expand their information on their customers. MasterCard have decided PayPal, Google Wallet and other online payment systems are to face higher transaction charges because they refuse to share data on what people are spending. The credit card companies want this valuable information as part of their research into customer buying patterns, and these online companies aren't co-operating. That's good, although I doubt that it's altruistic on the part of the likes of Google and PayPal. This information is part of their life blood, and there's no way they would give it away. Industry observers expect Visa will follow suit with increased fees, so this isn't just MasterCard. I'll be interested to see how this all pans out.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/22/mastercard_paypal/
Finally, on a slightly different note, I see that credit card skimmers are starting to broaden their activities - clearly targeting cash machine is now just so last year, dahling... It seems that they are now targeting railway, bus and subway ticket machines, not to mention parking meters and even point of sale terminals. At this rate it will soon be safer to use your card on the internet to buy goods from Russia, than to buy a subway ticket!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/04/03/card_skimmer_atm_fraud_trends/
Reports of data outages caused by rampant backhoe operators are pretty common, ditto for squirrels, and reports of thieves that don't know the difference between copper cables and fibre optics. (Though the latter is a little bit safer than live electric power lines!) Now, however, things have moved up a notch. It seems that the Egyptian military have caught three scuba divers attempting to cut through an underwater data cable belonging to Telecom Egypt. I've just finished reading a book on so-called 'cyber warfare', whose authors refer to physical attacks on data infrastructure, by which they meant data centres. This, though is a whole new ball game. Oh and by the way, last time this cable was damaged, in 2008, Egyptian traffic was cut by 75%, and it had effects throughout the Middle East. I suspect the Egyptian interrogators are currently asking the erstwhile scuba divers some interesting questions!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/27/egypt_cables_cut_arrest/
Homework:
The latest cool idea in trendy education seems to be to give all kids in a school an iPad. The iPad is, supposedly, a sexy little number that will make up for the fact that very few teachers really know anything about IT and programming. Not so fast... These little babies are fragile, and who is going to provide the cash for them, and the inevitable repairs and replacements? What are they going to be used for?
Are the kids going to be escorted home to prevent muggings? Inquiring minds want to know. In the meantime take a look at the URL for a piece by someone who definitely doesn't want to see iPads in schools...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/26/ipads_in_school/
For Geeks:
This item is especially for boy geeks (and yes there are girl geeks, just not very many). It's a nicely spectacular - and geeky looking - pair of flame gloves. The video shows them in action with some pretty impressively long flames when ignited. With a set of these hot dibs, and with summer in the offing, you'll be the hit of the party when you light the barbecue!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=efdDsba-gjk
Scanner: Other stories
Nanowires boost photovoltaics sunlight capture by 15 times
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/25/nanowires_and_photovoltaics/
Digital cameras easily turned into spying devices
http://www.net-security.org/secworld.php?id=14651
Microsoft apologizes for employee’s Xbox Durango ‘always-online’ tweets, claims customer centric approach
http://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2013/04/05/microsoft-apologizes-for-employees-xbox-durango-always-online-tweets-claims-customer-centric-approach/
Dark matter signal possibly registered on the International Space Station
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=dark-matter-ams&WT.mc_id=SA_CAT_SPCPHYS_20130404
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/9969425/Dark-matter-tantalising-hints-detected-in-space.html
US bill prohibits state use of tech linked to Chinese government
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/28/us_government_crackdown_china_it_firms/
Acknowledgements
Thanks to readers Barb and Fi for drawing my attention to material for Winding Down.
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 Thunderbird spam filter...
Alan Lenton
alan@ibgames.com
7 April 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.
