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

The weekly newsletter for Fed2
by ibgames

EARTHDATE: January 24, 2016

Fed2 Star last page Fed2 Star: Official News page 10 Fed2 Star index

WINDING DOWN

An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net, technology and science news
by Alan Lenton

Time for another chunk of Winding Down. This week we have material on back tax for Apple, commercial pilot skills, the European Court of Human Rights on mass surveillance, happy 30th birthday to the Internet Engineering Task Force, a new planet for the Solar System (in theory), 187,000 public domain downloads released by the New York Public Library, the ultimate drone display from Intel, Masashi Wakui’s wonderful pictures of Tokyo, a Solar System exhibition at London’s Natural History Museum, and what’s left of the ‘Swinging 60s’ in London. Phew – quite a haul, but if you do want more, there are URLs pointing to a deadly Chrome extension, ultrasound and illness, tech stocks that are suffering, smart guns, driving with a negative outlook, and a critique of Bitcoin...

I hope you find it interesting!

Shorts:

Apple, famous, like a number of other Silicon Valley giants for keeping a large chunk of its cash out of the US, could be in for a hit soon. A European Commission ruling on tax laws due out shortly could well result in Apple having to cough up a cool 7.33 billion euros (US$8bn/UK£5.6bn) in back taxes. Even Apple, sitting on a cash pile of something in the region of US$200bn will notice a payment of that magnitude.

Apple will no doubt appeal if the ruling goes against them, even though it represents less than a single quarter’s income.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/01/15/apple_irish_apple/

A worrying new problem if you happen to fly regularly in the USA. An audit by the US Department of Transportation has revealed that the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) isn’t doing enough to ensure that commercial pilots are properly trained to fly manually.

As flying becomes more and more automated, pilots get less and less chance to routinely practice flying the plane without all the automatic trimmings. As a result there is a grave danger that if things go wrong with the automation, the pilots lack the up-to-date skills to take over. Perhaps it might be better if the FAA concentrated on solving this problem instead of harassing hobbyist drone owners to pay to register their drones...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/pilots-manual-flying-audit-report_us_56967325e4b086bc1cd610f7
https://www.faa.gov/news/press_releases/news_story.cfm?newsId=19914

The UK government is still pushing its mass surveillance legislation, but there is now a problem looming on the horizon. The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) recently ruled that mass surveillance is illegal!

In a case based in Hungary the court found in favour of the plaintiffs who claimed that the equivalent Hungarian law infringed their human rights. The court ruled that the Hungarian law – similar to the UK one – did not provide sufficient guarantees against abuse. It also chose to more closely define a key part of article 8 of the Convention – that something be “strictly necessary in a democratic society” – as meaning not just a general protection of democratic institutions but also for “obtaining of vital intelligence in an individual operation.”

The court ruled that the authorities must “verify whether sufficient reasons for intercepting a specific individual’s communications exist in each case.” This means that each individual case must be looked at and a decision made on each individual case. Not something you can do if you are engaging in mass surveillance! What’s more, the decision is binding on all European countries.

Of course the government could just ignore the court ruling. However, it does so at its peril, since it will almost certainly land up in front of the court, which will undoubtedly be somewhat less than sympathetic to the British government.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/01/20/human_rights_court_rules_mass_surveillance_illegal/

Homework:

This last week was the 30th birthday of the IETF – the Internet Engineering Task Force. These are the guys who design all the protocols that keep the internet’s component parts talking to one another. They’ve done pretty well so far. They started out in January 1986 with a group of a mere 21 people, and have been beavering away ever since.

Of course, lots of things have changed in the meantime, not least the massive expansion and commercialisation of the net. And in all that time the internet never failed. Of course, undergoing such massive expansion it sometimes ran slower than we would like, bits of might have suffered temporary disconnects, but overall it just ran, in spite of everything that the people using it tried to do with it. That’s a pretty amazing track record when you stop to think about it. The question now is how will the IETF meet the challenges of the next thirty years?

Only time will tell, but I am sure all of us wish them well and another successful 30 years.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/01/16/happy_30th_birthday_ietf_now_what_
you_going_to_do_with_your_life/

I’m sure that you’ve read the news that we have another, previously undiscovered planet in the Solar System. It’s either the ninth or the tenth depending on which side of the ‘What is a planet’ controversy you are on. But I don’t want to get into that can of worms here. The planet has been predicted by a study of the orbits of other objects in the Kuiper Belt.

The Kuiper Belt is a collection of leftovers from the original formation of the Solar System. It’s a long way away, which made it difficult to study until we actually got a probe there. Recently the astronomers have been looking at the orbits of some of the bits and pieces there, and they discovered that there are oddities about the way they are moving.

Now, some of the scientists involved have worked out one possible way in which this could happen. Note there may well be other ways, as yes unidentified which could solve the problem. Indeed the scientists involved are being a lot more cautious than the newspapers are about reporting it. Indeed for the astronomers one of the problems with the proposed new planet is that its orbit is at right angles to the orbits of everything else. Given the current theories of the way in which the Solar System came into existence that shouldn’t be possible!

So, is it likely? I think it’s got a good chance, but the proof will be in the discovery of any such planet. Remember, until that happens, it’s only a theory awaiting scientific proof. That’s the way science works. And in meantime those of you with a mathematical bent may like to wrap you brains around the n-body problem (nothing to do with CSI) to get some idea of what is involved. Warning – heavy math and physics!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/01/20/ninth_planet_search/
http://supernovacondensate.net/2016/01/21/lurking-giant/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-body_problem

Last week (5th January 2016) the New York Public Library announced the release of more than 187,000 digitizations of public domain works, all available for hi-res download completely free from restrictions.
http://publicdomainreview.org/collections/nypl-release-187k-public-domain-images-in-hi-res/
http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/

Geek Stuff:

Drones are getting a lot of bad publicity these days, so I thought I would draw your attention to an amazing piece of work using drones as an alternative to fireworks. Intel teamed up with Perpetual Computing to make one of the most incredible and elegant video adverts I’ve seen for ages. The two of them used no less than 100 drones fitted with LEDs to produce the modern equivalent of the 1749 Royal Fireworks Display with Handel’s specially written music. In this case an existing piece of music – an extract from Beethoven’s 5th – was used, and lit drones took the place of the fireworks. Magnificent!
http://www.i-programmer.info/news/169/9352.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_for_the_Royal_Fireworks

Are you into night time pictures of urban areas? If, like me, you are, then you need take a look at these gorgeous photographs of night time Tokyo taken by Masashi Wakui.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/megane_wakui/with/23855471613/

London:

London’s Natural History Museum has a new show on. It’s about what it would look like if you were able to visit the different parts of the Solar System. It’s a combined work of science and art. Artist Michael Benson takes the data from NASA and ESA and uses it to produce true colour images of the Solar system. Fog on Mars, solar flare, Storms on Jupiter and on Earth, there’s some really unforgettable images.

There’s a selection of the pictures on the BBC website, and they are well worth a look. The exhibition is now on and runs through to 15 May.
http://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/michael-benson-the-art-of-otherworlds.html
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-35292518

Ever wished you could time travel back to the London of the 1960s? Well, you can, because lots of it still exists – whether in the original brutalist architecture, nostalgic club nights, or retro boutiques. Just be warned: it ain’t all swinging.
http://londonist.com/2015/11/1960slondon

Scanner:

Trojan-filled Chrome extensions for Steam boil off gamers’ assets
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/01/20/steam_chrome_extension_scam/

Ultrasound exposure could be making people ill, study finds
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/jan/20/ultrasound-exposure-could-be-making-people-ill-study-finds

Which tech stocks are suffering and – crucially – why?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/01/20/which_tech_stocks_suffering/

Makers of smart guns waiting to see if Obama will walk the talk
http://www.cnet.com/news/makers-of-smart-guns-waiting-to-see-if-obama-will-walk-the-talk/

Can a negative outlook create a dangerous driver?
http://www.psmag.com/health-and-behavior/that-angry-awful-driver

Bitcoin – A failed experiment.
http://www.i-programmer.info/news/81/9348.html

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
10 January 2016

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.

Fed2 Star last page   Fed2 Star index