WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net, technology and science news
by Alan Lenton
This week’s collection contains material about ad-blockers, a crime wave (or not, as the case may be), dead weasels, Occulus/Facebook in court, answers to the SETI question in last week’s Winding Down, GitLab, and a picture of North American terrain taken from space. URLs in the Scanner section will take you to material on US nuclear weapons and hackers, the consequences of getting mailing lists wrong, NASA’s twins study, personal computer sales figures, bad bots (did you know that a third of all website visitors are attack bots?), Microsoft v. Feds for Irish data, and studying a possible new type of propulsion.
Apart from that, I’m currently surrounded by piles of boxes containing books, CDs, clothes, linens, kitchen stuff and all the other paraphernalia of moving. Fortunately, we only have about 2/3 of the number of books we had last time we moved – thanks to a steady switch to e-books. Most of my Sci-Fi collection is now e-books, much to my relief, since the core of it was 1960s paperbacks, now featuring spine glue crumbling to dust and yellowing pages...
Being realistic, the chances of getting issues of Winding Down out over the next two weeks are not very high (a little English understatement there), so we are going to take two weeks off. I realise you are all going to be heartbroken. You will have to talk to other members of the household over breakfast on the intervening Sundays. I’m sure that is going to be a life changing experience, but I know you can take it.
So, the next issue of Winding Down will, according to my diary, be on Sunday February 26.
Until then...
Comment: Grrr!
For years now I have used an ad-blocker, but a few months ago I decided to try turning it off for a couple of selected web sites. The results were as they say “interesting”. Interesting as in the ancient Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times”.
The worst aspect, I found was that adverts coming down from advertisers’ websites would take ages, and lock up my browser while it was waiting for them. My estimate is that pages from the two web-sites that I don’t use the ad-blocker on take between ten and twenty times as long to load as those I do use the ad-blocker on.
The other thing I discovered was that businesses still don’t monitor the adverts they are allowing on their sites. Only today I had an advert that could only have been designed by a moron attempting to recreate the flickery 1950s TV style. I can only be thankful that I don’t suffer from epilepsy! It was incredible irritating and will ensure that I -never- buy the product being advertised.
I’m not going to mention names this time. But I’m definitely not happy...
And I had to smile. Just after I wrote the above I logged on to a different site and my ad-blocker popped up a message telling me that this site was known to use pop up targeted messages to ad-blocking users – did I want the pop-up messages blocked!
Shorts:
It looks at first sight as though the UK is suffering from a massive wave of crime. Figures published by the Office for National Statistics (there are lies damn lies, and statistics) indicate that crime in this poor country for the year to September 2016 was 6.2 million reported incidents, up 90% from the previous 12 month figure of 3.2 million...
However, all is not what it appears to be. Two types of crime that weren’t previously reported have been added – fraud and hacking! It seems when these statistics were set up, not only was fraud not a significant issue, but the internet hadn’t been invented. Obviously, in the interim, we’ve become a nation of fraudsters and hackers. Fraud alone last year passed the UK£1 billion mark (about US$1.26 billion) thanks to cyber fraud. I guess that’s probably why our court system is now completely jammed up...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/20/cybercrime_stats_uk/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/24/kpmg_fraud_barometer/
Remember last November when the Large Hadron Collider at CERN was knocked out by a weasel jumping into an 18,000 volt sub-station? No? Well it happened, and now the remains of the unfortunate animal with its singed fur and charred feet have gone on display. It seems that the Rotterdam Natural History Museum has a Dead Animal Tales Exhibition, specialising in animal human life collisions. And that’s where the unfortunate weasel ended up. I guess the word ‘Collider’ in the name is descriptive in more ways than one!
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jan/27/cerns-electrocuted-weasel-display-rotterdam-natural-history-museum
I see Occulus Rift, one of the best known virtual reality companies and currently part of the Facebook octopus, has had US$500 million awarded against it when it was found guilty of violating another firm’s copyrights. The case involved a key employee leaving one company, ZeniMax, and becoming the CTO of Occulus Rift.
Occulus Rift has already cost Facebook US$3 billion in purchase and staff retention costs, I guess another half a billion is just part of the cost of doing business in Silicon Valley...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/02/01/oculus_500m_penalty_for_breached_agreement/
Homework:
OK. Let’s mark your homework from last week! If you remember back to last Sunday, in my discussion on SETI and the Alien Civilization Detection Simulator, I asked you about whether you could think of at least two assumptions that might invalidate it. Remember? Good, well if you haven’t been able to think of any objections, here are two to get you started.
First, the equation assumes that electro-magnetic radiation (radio, for instance) is the only form of communication we will be able to detect. For example, in the last year we have been able to detect gravity waves. It’s perfectly possible that more advanced civilisations could use alternatives like gravity waves to communicate. In that case the window in which they are transmitting becomes wider, giving us a longer time period to spot them.
Second, the equation implicitly assumes that aliens will only use electromagnetic radiation while they are confined to their planet of origin. I would suggest that if they at least colonize their local system, then they are likely to use some sort of radio to communicate, extending the length of time we could detect them.
There are other problems, but the Drake equation is nice to play with and gives you some feel for how speculative theories are formed, how you can evaluate them, and how you can find holes in their underlying assumptions. It’s good practice, even if someone more into SETI than me, could probably counter my objections.
Geek Stuff:
Oh dear. GitLab.com is finding the awful truth about backups – they often don’t work. Quite a lot of well-known companies discovered that on 9-11, other have discovered it since.
It seems that a tired sysadmin, working late in the Netherlands on a backup, accidentally deleted a directory on the wrong server. When they tried to get it back off the backup, Uh-huh. Five different backups were tried and none of them worked. Problems ranged from not being able to find where the backups were stored through incompatible versions of the database software to the backup on Amazon’s S3 cloud simply not being there.
A sad tale, but something that happens, though not usually as publicly as this. I bet more than one sysadmin reading the story feels a shiver go down their spine and thinks, “There, but for the grace of god...”
Stop Press – Hold the front page! GitLab are extremely lucky – they found most (but not all) of their deleted data on a staging server. In the end they ‘only’ lost about six hours of data affecting around 700 users. Sounds to me like time for a thorough, grade ‘A’, review of all backup procedures!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/02/01/gitlab_data_loss/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/02/02/gitlabcom_has_found_and_restored_from_an_accidental_backup/
Pictures:
I don’t normally bother with pictures of the Earth taken from space. They’re useful in a utilitarian way, but not what I would call stunning. However, the other week I came across a picture of the terrain along the Colorado River in South Utah and Northern Arizona. It’s taken from just the right angle with the sun in the right place to show the terrain features. Nice!
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=89482&src=eoa-iotd
Scanner:
Will America’s nuclear weapons always be safe from hackers?
https://www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/511904/
UK NHS reply-all meltdown swamped system with half a billion emails
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/31/nhs_reply_all_email_fail_half_billion_messages/
NASA’s twin study throws up an early genetic curveball
http://newatlas.com/nasa-twin-study/47635/
PCs: FIVE straight years of shrinking sales
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/12/pc_sales_stats/
Bad bots up their human impersonation game
http://www.darkreading.com/cloud/bad-bots-up-their-human-impersonation-game/d/d-id/1327964
The US govt can’t stop Microsoft taking its Irish email seizure fight to the Supreme Court
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/24/us_government_microsoft_email_seizure_appeal/
Uncertain propulsion breakthroughs?
http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=36830
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
5 February 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.
