WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week’s net, technology and science news
by Alan Lenton
This week we have for your edification pieces on the following: Google and the EU (again), Shellshock, an FBI insider warning, India’s Mars Mission, Apple bendy phones – the truth, the Blackberry Passport and a Temple of Mithras. There are URLs pointing to material on Amazon Lab 126, the Apple watch, Einstein’s time dilation prediction and Kali (the hacking tools, not the many armed one) on a Nexus tablet.
So, let’s get started...
Shorts:
I see that Google is in the process of ignoring the advice given to it by a European Union working party that consists of all the EU’s national data protection supervisors. This particular missive was about the way Google have made their terms and condition virtually unreadable by their users, by combining the T&Cs for a number of its key apps – such as Google Drive, Google Docs and Google Maps. Incidentally, Google Maps is rapidly becoming unusable, as well as unreliable, since they changed it a short while ago.
I have to admit that, given Google’s casual attitude to privacy, the recent US court decision that US government bodies can subpoena data held in centres in non-US locations, and the NSA’s long history of handing over sensitive commercial information it comes across in the course of its business to US companies in the same field, I have to wonder why any non-US companies, including the one I work for, persist in in using the likes of Google Docs and Drive. The same goes for any of the cloud alternatives run by the other big US IT companies.
I guess it’s a combination of inertia, convenience and the cost of the alternatives. Pretty short sighted, though.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/09/25/google_eu_working_party_privacy/
A number of people have asked me about the latest ‘Shellshock’ bug discovered in the Linux Bash Shell. Yes it is dangerous, and you should apply updates as soon as possible. The main problem is dynamic web sites. That is those that actually generate material on the fly, which unfortunately is a large number of them. This is because they use the shell program to call the code which handles creating the web pages.
On the other hand static web sites, like the ibgames.com one, are not vulnerable, because they don’t use the shell for anything. So, unless you actually run stuff on Linux yourself, you don’t need to worry about doing anything. On the other hand you can start worrying about whether the site you are visiting has been patched by its administrator! For those of you who -like- worrying, here are a few articles for you to worry over...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/09/25/shellshock_bash_worm_type_fears/
http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/09/bug-in-bash-shell-creates-big-security-hole-on-anything-with-nix-in-it/
http://www.darkreading.com/shellshock-bash-bug-impacts-basically-everything-exploits-appear-in-wild/d/d-id/1316064
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/09/24/bash_shell_vuln/
Incidentally, this week there was an interesting warning from the FBI to the effect that businesses are more at risk from disgruntled employees and ex-employees, than they are from outside hacking. It’s all caused by the IT systems. They do exactly what they are supposed to do (well mostly they do), and bring everything together so it can be accessed easily.
But this means it’s also easier to delete the lot, or encrypt it, or steal it and sell it to competitors! Everything is just a key press away. It’s called ‘insider threats’ and it’s a growing problem. A recent survey by Forrester Research found that 25% of the respondents believed that they had security breaches caused by malicious insiders. To be honest, I’m not surprised. Even the most secure environment can be subverted by someone who has the keys. You just have to keep your eyes peeled!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/09/25/insider_threat_growing_warn_feds/
Homework:
Congratulations are in order for the Indian Space Research Organization over the success of its Mars Mission getting into orbit without a hitch this week. It’s an impressive achievement, though I suspect the thing that will interest a lot of people is the cost of the mission – US$74million – a fraction of the cost of space missions by other people!
Maybe now, British politicians will take the hints coming from Indian politicians over the last four or five years, that they neither need nor want the overseas aid that Britain provides. The Indians could just refuse it, but doing so would seriously embarrass leading British politicians, who staked a lot of reputation explaining how badly the money in aid budget is needed by the recipients, even though budgets are being cut at home! So the Indians are playing along with requests not to refuse the aid.
Come to think of it, if we kept that money here in the UK, then based on the Indian costs, we could sent a whole fleet of UK spacecraft to Mars with it!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/09/24/indian_spacecraft_enters_mars_orbit/
For Geeks:
No doubt you’ve heard about the inadvertent bendiness of the new Apple iPhone. I bet you thought it was caused by the owner sitting down with it in their hip pocket. Well, you are wrong! Now we have the true cause of the iPhone’s bendiness, from the ultimate expert on bending things.
Ladies and gentlemen I give you – Uri Geller!
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/uri-geller-identifies-the-real-reason-the-iphone-6-bends-2014-09-24
By the way, have you had a look at the new Blackberry Passport? It’s not in fact a real passport, but a cell phone, so don’t try waving it at the airport immigration man. It actually looks quite nice in a funny sort of squarish way. However, I’m not a Blackberry person, so if you mourn the passing of your old Blackberry, take a look at this URL.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/09/24/blackberry_passport_first_look/
London:
I live in London (London UK that is, ignore all feeble imitations). So, I’ve decided to tell you a little snippet about London each week, so that when you are drawn to visit the place, you will know where all the interesting bits we don’t normally tell tourists about are.
London is old. Very old in the sense that there was a town – Londonium – on the site in Roman times. Being Roman, there were lots of temples, but most of them are now buried beneath churches. That’s not just a London thing incidentally, lots of Christian churches are built on pagan sacred sites, and a lot of the rituals were appropriated too. (If you don’t believe me, ask a priest to tell you how they calculate the date of Easter each year!)
Anyway, 60 years ago, a mere drop in the ocean of London’s history, archaeologists discovered a Temple of Mithras in the square mile, that’s the original city, now the financial district of a much larger city. It became quite famous, and thousands of people queued up to see the work. The dig is still there – I walked past it every day when I worked in the area – so you can still see the remains. There is also a project to interview people who went to see the dig, and you can listen to recordings of their memories of what it was like, at the Museum of London, if you are in London this year.
http://londonist.com/2014/09/temple-of-mithras-were-you-there.php?showpage=1#gallery-1
Scanner:
Amazon shovels cash into hush-hush Lab126 despite Fire Phone fizzle
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/09/24/amazon_shovels_cash_into_hushhush_lab126_despite_fire_phone_fizzle/
Avoid the Apple Watch. Buy a drone or robot instead, techies told
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2014/09/24/canalys_on_apple_watch_robots_and_drones/
Einstein’s time dilation prediction verified
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/einsteins-time-dilation-prediction-verified/
Kali turns Nexus fondleslabs into hacking weapons
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/09/24/kali_turns_nexus_fondleslabs_into_hacking_weapons/
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
28 September 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.
