Fed2 Star - the newsletter for the space trading game Federation 2

The weekly newsletter for Fed2
by ibgames

EARTHDATE: October 27, 2013

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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 LinkedIn’s latest abomination, problems with contactless banking, the filter bubble, London in the 17th century, sleep, DARPA’s WildCat robot, Elon Musk’s new car, and a note on the D-Link routers security hole covered last week. Even more is available in the Scanner section including NSA revelations, Lego landmarks, a 121 MW Solar Power Station, the Obamacare Website, and some patent news.

Let battle commence...

Shorts:

Do you use LinkedIn? I gave up years ago, after they managed to store vast numbers of passwords in an insecure fashion, and lost them to a bunch of crooks.

Now they have produced an app for iOS and Android that will allow them tamper with email sent to and from the user. This is probably the most egregious app I’ve ever seen short of deliberate criminal hacking attempts. My advice? DON’T TOUCH IT WITH A BARGEPOLE. Details are in at the URL if you want to know more.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/24/linkedins-new-mobile-app-called-a-dream-for-attackers/?_r=0

I see that banks in the UK are already acknowledging that their ‘contactless’ technology doesn’t work. Contactless technology is based on the idea that you can just wave your card over a receiver and the amount required will be deducted automatically. The banks have been rolling this out for a while now, by fitting debit/ATM cards with the appropriate chip as they are renewed. Now the First Direct bank has told its customers that they have to take the card out of their wallet in order to wave it. If you have to take it out of your wallet, there’s no advantage.

Actually, I already crossed swords with this technology a few months ago, when I got a new ATM card. It lasted until the following Saturday, because it interfered with the working of my subway pass. Obviously this was widespread, because when I stomped into the bank ready for a row, I was referred to a gentleman sitting at a desk with a PC on the desk (normally there is just a screen).

The man was very polite and I explained the problem, he took my card and fed it into a slot in the PC for a few seconds, and then returned it to me telling me that the contactless part had been disabled (presumably the PC burned out a link on the chip), and that I would receive a new card sans contactless facilities, shortly.

The new card duly arrived a week later. This whole set up told me that my experience with contactlessness was far few unusual. You don’t have a whole system set up for handling a problem like that if there is only the occasional case. Somehow, I don’t think this one is going to fly.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/consumertips/banking/10398813/Bank-acknowledges-contactless-card-problems-by-changing-rules.html

Homework:

There is an interesting piece by Paige Brown on SciLogs. It’s about what is referred to as the ‘filter bubble’. The filter bubble is the name given to the growing level of personalization of material – news, reviews, suggestions, blogs, and op-eds that we get from the net. The personalization is based on things we have already done or bought – just more of the same.

The key problem with this approach, which is ubiquitous, apart from the strong possibility of terminal boredom, is that it reinforces existing beliefs and gives no chance for learning. Learning, as Brown points out, is finding out about things you don’t know or haven’t encountered before. There’s no chance of serendipity raising its head in the world of modern web browsing.

This is something which I first encountered on Amazon, but it is ubiquitous. Amazon have a system of recommendations. To generate those recommendations they look at what you’ve already bought through them (a small fraction of the books I’ve ever read), and what’s stashed on your wish list, to produce a list of similar books. But I don’t want similar books – I want new books on interesting topics that haven’t engaged my interest before.

Let me give you an example. About seven or eight years ago, when there were still physical bookshops, I was looking in one for something to read on the tube (subway) while commuting to work. I was looking to see if there was a new SciFi author I might like. But I couldn’t find one. I was feeling jaded about SciFi. Casting around I looked through the table in the center of the room, which was piled up with the latest books from various genres. I picked up one called ‘The Magicians Death’ by Paul Doherty. It turned out to be the latest in a series of medieval whodunits, and a flip through the pages told me that it looked interesting.

So I bought it. It was a brilliant read, and awoke an interest in the genre. More, it triggered my curiosity about that whole period of English history, resulting in my reading non-fiction material on the subject as well, and learning about it. To be blunt, there is no way Amazon’s predictive filters could have spotted that.

I looked through about 20 pages of Amazon ‘recommendations’ the other day – a sad and dreary selection from the sort of material I already had.

Fortunately, I get a wide variety of email newsletters. Most of them just get scanned and deleted without reading anything in depth, but sometimes it pays off and I find something new that I wouldn’t have found out about otherwise. That makes the time spent worthwhile from my point of view. But in the mainstream, and for most people? Only stuff that you already know about.

Take a look at Paige Brown’s article – you never know, you might find something you didn’t already understand!
http://www.scilogs.com/from_the_lab_bench/personalization-algorithms-and-why-they-dont-understand-us-creative-types/

While we are on the subject of medieval times, there is a very nice video of a reconstruction of what London looked like in the 17th Century. It’s done as a 3D fly through, based on maps made at the time. Take a look, fortunately the technology doesn’t yet exist to package in authentic 17th Century smells...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/europe/uk/london/10404898/3D-animation-see-London-as-it-looked-before-the-Great-Fire.html

I was interested to read about the new material that’s coming out on the subject of sleep. A new body system has been discovered that flushes the accumulated toxins out of the brain. Crucially, it does this vital work while you are asleep. The new system has been dubbed the glymphatic system, and it’s ten times more active while you are sleeping than it is while you’re awake.

That’s not the only thing sleeping does, of course, though it’s very important, since letting toxins accumulate is storing up trouble for the future. Sleeping also gives your brain a chance to sort out all the things you’ve been doing during the day, fixing long term memories, discarding the irrelevant, and such like.

“To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub” – Shakespeare’s Hamlet, 1602
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-10-perchance-reveals-brain-trash.html#nwlt
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=mental-downtime

For Geeks:

This item files itself under the heading ‘worried fascination’. It’s called ‘WildCat’, and it’s the latest product of the US DARPA project. It’s a very creepy looking autonomous robot capable of travelling at a steady 16 miles an hour. And it can jump gates...
http://www.dailytech.com/WildCat+Robot+Ready+to+Run+Free+Hunt+Humans+at+up+to+16+MPH/article33496.htm

On a happier note, I see that uber-inventor Elon Musk has bought the Lotus Esprit road/underwater car used by James Bond in the film ‘The Spy Who Loved Me’. The underwater shots in the film were faked, but Musk intends to make it work for real.

That’s great.

However, given Musk’s other interests, I was thinking of a comment by the maverick British astronomer Fred Hoyle. He said, “Space isn’t remote at all. It’s only an hour’s drive away if your car could go straight upwards..”

Over to you Mr Musk...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/10/18/musk_buys_bond_submarine_car/

I have a note from reader Chandra relating to my article on the back door in D-Link routers in the last issue. “In regards to the D-Link firmware issue you reported. There is a potential fix for this. http://www.dd-wrt.com/ is a site devoted to making open-source firmware for a myriad of routers, and, while it isn’t for the computer illiterates, should remove any back doors in the firmware.” I took a look at the site myself. It looks interesting in its own right – I may end up poking around it in a little more depth over Xmas.

Scanner: Other stories

The NSA’s new risk analysis
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/10/the_nsas_new_ri.html

NSA harvests personal contact lists, too
http://www.informationweek.com/security/privacy/nsa-harvests-personal-contact-lists-too/240162656

Brick City: new Lego exhibition shows London and world landmarks
http://londonist.com/2013/10/brick-city-new-lego-exhibition-shows-london-and-world-landmarks.php?showpage=8#gallery-1

Israel announces plans for 121 MW solar power station in the Negev Desert
http://inhabitat.com/israel-to-build-121-mw-solar-power-station-in-the-negev-desert/

Obamacare website violates licensing agreement for copyrighted software
http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/obamacare-website-violates-licensing-agreement-copyrighted-software_763666.html

Sueball-happy patent biz slaps lawsuits on FOURTEEN tech firms
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/10/23/optical_patents_lawsuits/

Acknowledgements

Thanks to readers Barb, Chandra 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
27 October 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.

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