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

The weekly newsletter for Fed2
by ibgames

EARTHDATE: December 11, 2016

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WINDING DOWN

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

Only one more weekend before Christmas, which means that next week’s issue will be the last of 2016. This week, though, we have for your reading some material on copyright, a humongous telescope, a surrealist chess board designed by Man Ray, a Brit computing disaster in the making, a brilliant picture of a lightning storm over Colorado, and art from the new underground tunnel in London. For those of you who are not satiated by that collection of stories, we also have URLs pointing to smartphone private info leaks, brain-spine wireless connections, the demise of the Avalanche botnet, British Airways HQ to be demolished, the 24-hour society, nanocrystals and night vision, and Hollywood aliens.

Shorts:

The United States Congress is currently taking a look at reforming the copyright system. I don’t know whether they’ll succeed in passing the legislation before the newly elected one takes office, but the plans revealed so far would, if passed into law, go a long way towards dealing with the dissatisfaction the current system engenders.

There are many problems with the current system, but there is one fundamental structural problem – the copyright office is currently part of the Library of Congress. The problem is that the Library of Congress is a -user- of copyright, not a -creator- of copyright. This can cause serious conflicts of interests. The copyright office needs to become a body independent of the Library of Congress.

From the individual creator’s point of view one of the best proposals being put forward is the idea of a ‘small claims’ court (no lawyers!) to handle low value cases and bad faith take down notices. This would be a major step forward towards restoring the balance of power between the individual copyright holders and the likes of Google.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/12/08/congress_wants_small_claims_track_for_copyright_claims/
https://judiciary.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Copyright-Reform.pdf

Homework:

Ever wondered how it might be possible to make a really big telescope? I mean really, really, big – like one that’s five time the distance from the Earth to the Sun in width. Well it just so happens that some scientists have been thinking about how to do this. Of course, at the moment it’s just a ‘thought experiment’, but if travel in interplanetary space does take off (pun intended), then it is possible.

The idea is that you use lasers to create a highly polished surface on thousands of small asteroids initially (but eventually billions), then you arrange them to form the facets of a huge mirror and use it to look at the stars and their surrounding planets! See – simple when you know how.

The scientists cleverly wrote the report on their thought experiment as though it was a release about the first images viewed by such a telescope, and published it in Physics Today. I’ve also included a URL to a somewhat more layperson oriented explanation on the Centauri Dreams web site.

A very neat idea!
http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=36729
http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/magazine/physicstoday/article/69/12/10.1063/PT.3.3395

I’ve always been a fan of the surrealist photographer Man Ray, but I wasn’t aware that in 1924 he designed a chess set made from abstract geometric forms. It looks gorgeous. A new edition now been made available for purchase. It’s beech wood, and hand crafted. The ultimate, though expensive, Christmas present for a chess aficionado!
http://www.openculture.com/2016/12/man-ray-designs-a-supremely-elegant-geometric-chess-set-in-1920.html
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000M08LA4/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?

Geek Stuff:

The Brit National Health Service (NHS) has, over the years, thrown away literally billions of pounds (that’s even more billions of dollars) on IT. Most of the little they got for all that money still doesn’t work properly – the different bits don’t reliably talk to one another, and in my own experience software being used by more than one person at the same time doesn’t update the data properly.

The problem is that the politicians who dish out the cash, and the NHS administrators who plan the work, are firmly stuck in the 1960s/70s mainframe mind-set. They want to see total control by themselves, and so came up with a centralised plan, which proved impossible to implement, and wasted a vast amount of money. It also shut out smaller IT businesses and made sure that cash went to big software manufacturers, who screwed it up.

What they should have done was to define an applications interface (API) to allow machines to reliably talk to one another over the network, and set up an equipment certification section to certify only two things – that the API was correctly implemented, and that the software was secure. This would have kept prices down through competition, and allowed smaller companies to compete. It would also allow individual units to choose software that properly matched their needs. Not only that, but the NHS IT systems would actually work properly!

What a shambles...

But it turns out things are even worse than we thought. Obviously, the organisation uses PCs for its business. They’re ubiquitous, the general practitioners have then, the admins have them, consultants have them, everyone in the NHS uses one at some time or another. So, they are secure aren’t they? Errrr.... No. Actually, they’re not, it turns out.

It seems that 90% of those PCs are running Windows XP. Microsoft stopped providing security updates for XP early in 2014. At the time the NHS did a one year deal with Microsoft to get special security patches. When the deal ended early in 2015, the NHS decided not to renew. So, for nearly two years 90% of the PCs in the NHS, most of which have access to some sort of confidential information on patients, have not received any security patches! And there’s no sign of any sanity breaking out in the near future.

It’s understandable that an organisation the size of the NHS might not be able to convert all its software to run on Windows 7 or later, but to refuse to provide security patches for nearly two years is unbelievable. Whoever made that decision (probably a high level bean counter) should be prosecuted for criminal negligence...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/12/08/windows_xp_nhs_still/

Pictures:

This week’s picture is of an awesome lightning storm over Colorado. By the way, did you know that lightening heats the column of air it passes through to a temperature triple that of the surface of the sun?
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap161205.html

London:

If you’ve been in London at any time during the last couple of years then, like me, you’ve probably been inconvenienced by all the digging going on for the Crossrail underground train line. Now you can get a view from the other side. The Crossrail project has its own artist, one Julie Leonard, and she has an exhibition of her pictures at The Building Centre until 22 December. I think I’ll be heading down there between now and Christmas.
http://www.buildingcentre.co.uk/exhibitions/above-and-below-the-line
http://www.crossrail.co.uk/route/art-on-crossrail/artist-in-residence

Scanner:

Smartphone WiFi signals can leak your keystrokes, passwords, and PINs
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/smartphone-wifi-signals-can-leak-your-keystrokes-passwords-and-pins/

Wireless brain-to-spine connection gets paralyzed primates walking
http://newatlas.com/wireless-neurosensor-paralyzed-monkeys-move/46361/

Avalanche Botnet comes tumbling down in largest ever sinkholing operation
http://www.darkreading.com/threat-intelligence/avalanche-botnet-comes-tumbling-down-in-largest-ever-sinkholing-operation/d/d-id/1327618

British Airway boss shocked to find that the 3rd Heathrow runway will raze his UK£200 million (US$250 million) company HQ
https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2016/nov/22/ba-boss-shocked-to-find-out-that-third-heathrow-runway-will-raze-his-hq

How the 24-hour society is stealing time from the night
https://aeon.co/ideas/how-the-24-hour-society-is-stealing-time-from-the-night

Nanocrystals may bring night vision to normal glasses
http://newatlas.com/night-vision-nanocrystals/46813/

Visualizing the alien: a Hollywood conundrum
http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=36714

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
11 December 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.

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