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

The weekly newsletter for Fed2
by ibgames

EARTHDATE: March 30, 2014

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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 Winding Down brings you Wal-Mart vs. Visa, the US government washes its hands of the internet and ICANN (sort of), 25,000 linux servers compromised, spider webs, FisicalLab, 2048 (a game), some very heavy metal, diamond armour, and Nvidia’s ‘Titan Z’ card. Scanner gives you access to a look at a 3D printed skull, body clock resets, and the HTC1-M80 smart phone. In Scanner there’s also a virtual reality round up that gives you pieces on Oculus, Sony’s ‘Project Morpheus’, and an interesting use of Google Glass. That should keep you going for a while.

No Winding Down next week, I’m afraid, because I’m out of town on family business, but this marvellous little rag will be back the following week (13th April) to delight and entertain you. Incidentally, I notice that the following weekend is Easter, so there probably won’t be an issue then, either, but I’ll let you know in the next issue.

And now...

Shorts:

As we go to press (quaint echoes of another, non-digital, era there) news is coming in that Wal-Mart have filed a US$5 billion against Visa over its unreasonably high charges when customers pay by credit card.

Effectively there are only two major credit card organizations – Visa and MasterCard – and the two of them totally dominate the business. In effect the retailer is saying that the high fees charged are breaking the anti-trust laws. Over the last nine years these fees have generated a cool $350 billion for card issuers, and at the end of the day it’s the customers that have been carrying those costs in the form of increased prices.

For good measure Wal-Mart threw in the failure to move to secure card payments by instituting chip-and-pin facilities on credit cards, resulting in major breaches of security.

I guess IBM had no idea what they started in 1960 when they invented a type of magnetic tape that could be stuck onto a piece of plastic!
http://www.foxbusiness.com/industries/2014/03/27/wal-mart-files-suit-against-visa-for-m/

I haven’t commented on the decision by the US government to pull out (sort of) from controlling the internet’s Domain Name System (DNS). Personally, I’ve felt for a long time the DNS was a major mistake, and represents one of the few single points of failure in the system.

The record of ICANN, the body set up to look after it, only confirms my opinion. If there were an award for the worst run quasi-government body, then ICANN would have scooped it every year since its inception. ICANN is in the unusual position that it no longer even provokes contempt – only derision.

The truth is that the internet is still working in spite of being ‘looked after’ by ICANN, and ‘overseen’ by the US government. I don’t think it’s going to make much difference. Internet usage is going places no one foresaw when it was being set up (which is why we have so many security problems). I think it will continue to strike out in even more different directions in the future.

It seem to me that for most users the problem is not DNS; it’s easy to find things on the net, especially if you know what you want to find. It is the poor quality of access suffered by a lot of its ordinary users – especially in the USA.

Time will tell, but here are three more or less different views on the hoo-ha for you to look further into it, if you wish...
http://www.infoworld.com/t/internet/relax-the-us-hasnt-lost-the-internet-238804?source=IFWNLE_nlt_blogs_2014-03-21
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/03/15/us_to_hand_dns_stewardship_over_to_icann/
http://www.politico.com/story/2014/03/internet-transition-triggers-gop-backlash-104698.html

I normally rail against Windows security, but this time it’s Linux in the news, with something like 25,000 compromised servers out there. It’s not Linux itself or even its applications that are at fault. It’s poor security settings by the people running the servers. The compromising software has to be manually installed by the hacker, it doesn’t take advantage of a software flaw, it just needs the security settings to be wrong.

Perhaps it’s not surprising. Three in five servers on the internet use Linux as the operating system, and an awful lot of those are people’s personal servers. The people running them are not sysops, they are probably not even web server specialists. They just set up a server so they could feature pictures of cats (who also aren’t sysops, although they have other vital skills, like purring and allowing their humans to take goofy pictures).

This is going to take a while to clean up. I suspect the Linux distributions need to sort out their default security settings for a start. Also the hosting companies should think about how they need to do regular security audits on customer small web servers, and perhaps adjust their firewalls to check on what’s going out, as well as what’s coming in!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/03/18/windigo_unix_botnet/
http://www.securityweek.com/researchers-uncover-attack-campaign-leveraging-25000-unix-servers

Homework:

There is an interesting little piece on Science Blogs. It’s about the use of spider webs to investigate the toxicity of chemicals. It seems that when spiders are exposed to toxic chemicals the webs they spin become non-symmetrical. This has been known for some time, but the problem was assessing the degree to which the webs differ. Now however, tools developed to investigate symmetry in crystalline structures have been applied to the spider webs. So it is now possible to use the results to infer the degree of toxicity that caused the lopsided web.

It’s an interesting application, and while the article is digitized from a paper piece, so it’s a bit smudgy, it’s worth a look.
http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/files/2013/07/NASA_Tech_brief.jpg

If you are interested in education then you might like to take a look at the GNU’s FisicalLab project. Apart from the fact that it’s trying to raise $7K for the project, it’s an interesting looking software package to help with the understanding of basic physics concepts involving statics and dynamics. I would think it could prove very useful for physics teachers.
http://www.gnu.org/software/fisicalab/

For Geeks:

Fancy yourself as a logic meister? Then try this deceptively simple little game! There nearly didn’t get to be a Winding Down this week, because I lost track of time playing it...
http://sujeetgholap.github.io/2048/

Size isn’t everything, so I’ve been told, but when it comes to giant weapons, maybe the jury’s out. How would you like to be able to park a 69 ton tank in your driveway (just a leetle bit of reinforcing needed there), or perhaps use a 36-inch mortar to take out those annoying teenagers?

My fave? Gustav and Dora – massive railway guns capable of firing a seven ton shell 29 miles. I’m not sure what I would do with it, but I am sure I could find something. Definitely toys for boys!
http://io9.com/these-weapons-are-the-largest-ever-made-in-history-1548647155

It may be that after browsing through the heavy weapons options above you need a little protection? OK. How about Diamond Armor? It’s a diamond-studded, bullet-proof, air-conditioned, bespoke-tailored suit costing a cool US$3.2 million. A tad on the expensive side, but if you happened to have some shares in Oculus, then you might be able to afford it!
http://www.gizmag.com/diamond-armor-bullet-proof-suit/31293/

Oh yes. The latest from Nvidia is graced with the moniker ‘Titan Z’. (Cue sound of dark thundering doom like music.) If nothing else you’ll need the music as a background while you fork out a massive US$2,999.

On the other hand it has got 5,760 CUDA cores in it – not to mention what looks like a very powerful fan. Not for people with small wimpy power supplies in their computers – especially when you consider that it’s also got 12GB of memory, and a memory bus width to two 384-bit channels.

If you can’t afford it, don’t worry, in a couple of years the price will probably drop to around US$50, and it’ll be fitted as standard on entry level computers... And what would you use it for? Well, I imagine it could generate ‘Nine Billion Names of God’*, before you could say Jack Robinson! No doubt other people could think of more, less dangerous things, to do with it!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/03/26/nvidia_unveils_titan_z_retail_supercomputer_eight_teraflops_graphics_card/

Scanner:

Medical First: 3-D printed skull successfully implanted in woman
http://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/medical-first-3-d-printed-skull-successfully-implanted-woman-n65576

Body clock reset discovery could mean an end to jet lag
http://www.33rdsquare.com/2014/03/body-clock-reset-discovery-could-mean.html

HTC’s stunning sequel steals the show
http://www.cnet.com/uk/products/htc-one-m8/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/03/26/htc_m8_2014_launch_london/

Virtual reality news:

Sony reveals “Project Morpheus” VR headset for the PS4
http://www.gizmag.com/sony-virtual-reality-headset-project-morpheus/31285/

Facebook swallows Oculus VR goggle-geeks. Did that really happen?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/03/25/facebook_buys_oculus_virtual_reality/

Facebook to buy Oculus for $2 billion
http://www.cnet.com/uk/news/facebook-to-buy-oculus-for-2-billion/

One of America’s largest hospitals brings Google Glass into the Emergency Room
http://www.fastcompany.com/3027978/one-of-americas-largest-hospitals-brings-google-glass-into-the-er

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
30 March 2014

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/index.html.

Past issues of Winding Down can be found at http://www.ibgames.net/alan/winding/index.html.

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