WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net, technology and science news
by Alan Lenton
Another varied selection for this week: a motorcycle riding robot, the Paris attacks aftermath, infected police cams, Harvard Law School library to go online, internet history, MS Windows history, a nice programming quote, London gaslights, and some autumn pictures. URLs point you in the direction of building hot cities, electric plug design, off-shoring half a trillion dollars, a book lovers site, AMD sued - when is a core not a core, and trade pact problems. I hope you like it all (or at least some of it...)
Finally, before we get down to business, there will be no Winding Down next weekend so I can have some time to catch up with all the other things I have on my plate!
Shorts:
At last month's Tokyo Motor Show, Yamaha unveiled something of a surprise - a humanoid motorcycle riding robot. I can't really imagine that there would be much use for such a beast, except as a research project to understand how humans ride bikes, or to build autonomous bikes. That they haven't really got very far yet is shown by a video - I don't recall ever having seem a motorbike with training wheels before!
Let's face it, why would you buy a motorbike, unless it was because you wanted to ride it? I've used motorbikes in the past, and the thrill of being in control of it and having it do what you want is what makes up for all the agro you need to go through, particularly when the weather is inclement. Why would you want to travel in that fashion if you have no compensation?
http://www.gizmag.com/yamaha-shows-motorcycle-riding-motobot/40090/
Well, the aftermath of the Paris attacks was totally predictable: western politicians call for more surveillance, and demand state security forces be able to access encrypted material on the internet. Oh, and they also demand the shutting down of websites and social media that they disagree with. Here is a prediction: here in the UK politicians will soon 'discover' that compulsory ID cards are the way to stop ISIS attacks. US politicians would probably like to propose something similar, but their country has a written constitution, which makes life more difficult for such schemes.
In the meantime, the big US companies, led by Apple, are standing firm in favour of end-to-end encryption. The companies don't have access to the keys for end-to-end, so the security services can't subpoena them - the keys are held on the user's device (phone, laptop, desktop, tablet, etc). Even though the main reason for doing this is strictly commercial - in a post-Snowden world they need to build up trust in their products in order to sell them.
The world of George Orwell's 1984 creeps ever nearer...
http://www.dailydot.com/politics/paris-attack-encryption-snowden/
http://www.ibtimes.com/isis-using-playstation-4-communicate-islamic-state-could-use-ps4-spell-out-attack-2185042
http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/001104.html
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/11/congressman-to-stop-isis-lets-shut-down-websites-and-social-media/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/17/osborne_cybersecurity_announcement_isil_gchq/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/20/tech_companies_against_weaker_encryption/
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nsa-nist-encryption-scandal/
Well I guess it had to happen sooner or later. Police body cams with pre-installed malware. The well-known 'Conficker' worm was found on samples of police body cams sent to security researchers. I guess that could well write off any evidence from body cams in trials, if the cams were found to have been infected at the time.
Actually, thinking about it, this is going to cause problems, because if a cam was used at the scene of a crime, and its footage might be needed for evidence, then the cam itself will have to be treated as evidence and sealed away. How long would it take, given how long it takes things to come to, and proceed, through trial, before the local police force's entire stock of cams was sealed away in sterile plastic evidence bags!
http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/11/police-body-cams-found-pre-installed-with-notorious-conficker-worm/
Homework:
Good news for aspiring lawyers - Harvard's Law School is putting its library online. And, in case you didn't realize it, that law library is considered one of the most comprehensive in the USA. In order to do digitize the material, the library will be slicing off the spines of most of the volumes so the pages can be fed into a high speed scanner. The remainder are some very rare volumes, which, presumably will have to be hand digitised.
At one level it seems like vandalism to chop up the volumes for digitization, but on the other hand with such a large number of books, there isn't really any other way to do it on a reasonable time scale. And the end result, vast amounts of legal information in a searchable format open to the public, has to be a gain. I just hope they retain the originals; even paper is more durable than electronic versions...
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/29/us/harvard-law-library-sacrifices-a-trove-for-the-sake-of-a-free-database.html?_r=0
Most of the histories of the genesis of the internet have been written by techies. Not only that, but they were the techie 'winners'. The ones whose ideas turned out to be right, and at the right time. Reading this history, one would think that there was a seamless flow from the original DARPA decision to fund computer network research through to the commercial internet we now know.
Actually, there were a lot of blind alleys and ideas ahead of their time (and often ahead of the enabling technology). So, I'd like to draw your attention to an interview with historian Professor Andrew Russell, who has just produced a book on this very subject. Take a look, it will open your eyes to aspects of internet history you never knew about...
http://us1.campaign-archive1.com/?u=f105fd56904428bca9da44a82&id=a5f6c1ad44&e=eab3a9dc66
Geek Stuff:
Sheesh! Windows is 30 years old! Personally, I count 'real' Windows as being from Windows 95, which introduced all those useful features Microsoft is now trying to get rid of. That was 20 years ago. OK, I admit that I used it from 3.0/3.1 a few years earlier, but mostly because Windows at that time, though still built on the old, text based DOS system, was the first offering from Microsoft that gave proper access to memory greater than 640k. Yep, in those days we really did write applications that , together with their data, really did run in less that 640k of on-board memory.
So for a trip down memory lane, point your browser at:
http://www.infoworld.com/article/3005611/microsoft-windows/happy-30th-windows-what-weve-loved-through-the-years.html
I'm sure the programmers among you will appreciate this quote from Stephan Kulow on an Open SUSE list:
"There are 2 hard problems in computing:
- Caching problems
- Naming things
- Off-by-One Errors
So, now you know!
http://lwn.net/Articles/647747/
London:
Did you know that Ye Olde London Towne still has some one and a half thousand gaslights scattered around the city? Some of them are 200 years old, dating back to the reign of George IV (1762-1830). Yes, they date back to the reign of a King who was born before the American Revolution! The URL points to a 3 minute video with the chief lamplighter, who tells you a little about the lights and their history - take a look.
http://londonist.com/2015/11/video-meet-london-s-remaining-gas-lamp-lighters
And here are a few nice autumn pictures to make you wish you were here in London...
http://londonist.com/2015/11/friday-photos-autumn-leaves-2015
Scanner:
How to build a city fit for 50 degree heat waves
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/07/h1how_to_build_a_city_fit_for_50_heatwavesh1/
Why can't the world pick just one design for electric plugs?
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/why-cant-the-world-just-pick-one-design-for-plugs
Multinationals hiding more than half a trillion from G20 tax collectors
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/11/multinationals_hiding_money_from_taxmen/
Book lovers are totally obsessed with this website
http://thebookinsider.com/the-one-website-book-lovers-need-to-know-2/?source=tabtbi4_uk
AMD sued: Number of 'Bulldozer' cores in its chips is a lie, allegedly
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/06/amd_sued_cores/
Trade Pact could bar governments from auditing source code in cases like Volkswagen's emissions test case.
http://www.wired.com/2015/11/trade-pact-could-bar-governments-from-auditing-source-code/
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
22 November 2015
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.
