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

The weekly newsletter for Fed2
by ibgames

EARTHDATE: January 29, 2017

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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’s Winding Down features material on easily available CIA documents, a warning about the inaccuracy of Bluetooth Breathalyzers, doing your homework on the cloud, a SETI simulator, Microsoft running into an IPV6 brick wall, a nice picture of the ‘Winter Hexagon’ in the northern sky, and some snowbound scenes from the old Japanese capital of Kyoto. If your brain isn’t frazzled by that little lot, URLs in the scanner section will take you to material on fingerprinting your computer, the Solar economy, a 350,000 Twitter bot sleeper cell, the FBI apparently paying for evidence, the putative demise of the hard drive, and mysterious cosmic bursts. I think most readers will find something of interest in that little lot!

So, let’s get right down to it...

Shorts:

Now, here’s a little something to gladden the hearts of conspiracy theorists – 12 million declassified CIA documents are now free online. All the material is at least 25 years old, but it’s a treasure trove including UFOs, secret tunnels, psychic experiments, Cold War stuff, and material collected on prominent people, to name only the most obvious stuff. It’s all in the CIA’s CREST search program. So, ramp up the level of paranoia to overdrive, and get your fingers typing in those search words...

You never know, if you type in enough dubious queries, you might feature in the next 25 years’ worth of searchable CIA documents!
http://www.openculture.com/2017/01/12-million-declassified-cia-documents-now-free-online.html
https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/collection/crest-25-year-program-archive

Do you by any chance use a Bluetooth Breathalyzer to check that you’re not over the limit for driving. Well, there are two things you should think about in that case. The first is that if you feel you need to check, the wisest course would be not to drive at that time! The second, however, is that even if the Breathalyzer says you are OK, you may well not be under the legal limit.

The Register surveyed what’s on the market three years ago, and found that most of the samples it tested gave readings of blood alcohol levels lower than what they actually are. Now The Register’s findings have been vindicated by the FTC bringing charges against one of the companies The Register checked, because the claims made for its Breathalyzers weren’t backed up by scientific evidence and could mislead users about how sober they were.

Drink driving is in many ways a cultural thing. When I first passed my driving test here in the UK (no, I’m not going to tell you how long ago that was...) there was, in fact, no law against driving while you were drunk! After the drink driving law came in there was an attitude that it was just bad luck to get caught – your mates didn’t see anything intrinsically wrong with it.

By the end of the century, hard core drinking and driving was mainly confined to middle-aged sales men who had spent an extended lunch hour in the bar on expenses, treating their customers. But by now things have changed, and you won’t get any sympathy from your mates if you get caught driving while over the limit. A lot of bars provide coffee and a reasonable selection of soft drinks for the ‘designated driver’ to consume (some, a very few, provide free soft drinks for the designated driver!).

Now, the road safety people are working on speeding...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/24/breathometer_is_bollocks/

Homework:

Yes! The ultimate excuse has finally arrived... “The Cloud ate my homework!” And, what’s more, it’s true for any user of ‘Code Studio’, because as its blog says, “Code Studio had some technical difficulties and any student progress from 9:19 – 10:33 am PST on Friday, January 20th was not saved.” You non-techies can keep your dogs – we geeks have the cloud.
http://blog.code.org/post/156133016748/this-mornings-technical-difficulties-on-code

I’ve just been playing with a piece of thought provoking software called the Alien Civilisation Detection Simulator (ACD). SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) has been around for 50 years or so. In effect, it’s trying to answer a question posed by physicist Enrico Fermi who, incidentally, built the first nuclear reactor. The question is simple: “Where is everybody?”

Fermi’s point was that in a universe the size of ours, and that’s been around for as long as ours has, by now we should have seen some evidence of other intelligent species. But we haven’t. This in turn lead to the formulation of what is known as the Drake Equation, first formulated by Dr Frank Drake. This equation suggests that the number of alien civilisations that exist and which we can detect is governed by the following: the rate at which suitable stars form, the fraction of those stars with planets, the number of planets per system capable of supporting life, the fraction of those planets on which life appears, the fraction of life bearing planets on which intelligent life emerges, the fraction of those civilisations that release detectable electromagnetic waves (for example radio) into space, and finally the length of time such civilizations release the detectable signals into space.

Phew! There’s one important assumption in the equation that isn’t mentioned – it assumes that we are going to continue looking for the evidence for ever! ‘For ever’ is a long time (and very expensive). Currently we’ve been searching for radio wave evidence for about 50 years and already voices are being heard suggesting that’s long enough. ‘For ever’ may be an unwarranted assumption. If it’s not true, then the chances of discovering an alien civilization are even slimmer.

ACD is a simulation that allows you to fiddle with the values in the different parts of the Drake Equation (using dials – no typing of numbers!) and then run it to see how many civilizations you detect in a given time. You get a picture of the ‘local’ chunk of the galaxy with civilizations coming into existence as the equation specifies, then transmitting for a time. You see the radio waves spreading out and getting fainter as they go further, until they become indistinguishable from the general background noise of the universe. On the simulation they fade completely. You ‘discover’ an alien civilization if a radio signal reaches the Earth before it fades out.

To give you some idea of what’s involved, the first run I did was for 10,000 years and I left all the settings as they were when I got it, which represents our current best guess. The results were an eye opener. It took nearly 3,000 years to find the first alien civilization, and in the whole 10,000 years it simulated, I only found five lots of aliens! That’s not very many... If, like me, you are curious, I recommend that you have a play with ACD. You can get it via the author’s Dropbox, but you don’t need a Dropbox account.

Now for your homework. I mentioned about that there is an assumption in the Drake Equation. Actually, I can think of at least two others, both of which make the equation more pessimistic than it actually should be. Can you figure them out? Answers in next week’s issue.
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/dlkx24shyfjsoax/AADeFd2wZyZxvLYHU2f4jJ0ha?dl=0

Geek Stuff:

Oh great... Microsoft is hoisted by its own petard. Well, arguably it was shafted by the insane decision of the Internet Engineering Task Force not to make the next generation IPV6 networking protocol compatible with the current generation IPV4 protocol used by everyone and their dog.

Microsoft are trying to move their own networking from IPV4 to IPV6, but there is an IPV6 bug in Windows 10, which, of course, is what all its own computers are running. The estimates are that it’s going to take six months or more to get all its own computers using IPV4. No wonder it’s taken years for IPV6 to gain any traction in the community. If a company with the sort of resources Microsoft has can’t get it working, then what chance does any other companies stand – not to mention mere individuals?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/19/windows_10_bug_undercuts_ipv6_rollout/

Pictures:

I have two gorgeous pictures for you this week. The first is a great picture the ‘Winter Hexagon’ stars over the Manla Reservoir in Tibet. A truly stunning picture with an overlay showing the positions of well-known stars and constellations.

The second picture is much more down to earth. A cold front brought heavy snow to Japan recently and Spoon & Tamago have published a number of pictures of Kyoto in the snow. The pictures are beautiful, especially the last one of the snow covered Arashiyama Bamboo Grove – take a look for yourself...
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap170123.html
http://www.spoon-tamago.com/2017/01/17/heavy-snowfall-transforms-kyoto-into-wintry-wonderland/

Scanner:

It’s not just your browser: Your machine can be fingerprinted easily
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/13/its_not_just_your_browser_your_machine_
can_be_fingerprinted_easily/

A vision to bootstrap the Solar System economy
http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=36963

350,000 Twitter bot sleeper cell betrayed by love of Star Wars and Windows Phone
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/20/researchers_uncover_350k_dormant_twitter_bots/

FBI allegedly paid Geek Squad for evidence
https://www.engadget.com/2017/01/11/fbi-allegedly-paid-geek-squad-for-evidence/

Trouble at t’spinning rust mill: Disk drive production is about to head south
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/04/26/disk_drives_facing_declining_demand/

Newfound source of mysterious cosmic bursts poses deeper enigmas
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/newfound-source-of-mysterious-cosmic-bursts-poses-deeper-enigmas/

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
29 January 2017

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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