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

The weekly newsletter for Fed2
by ibgames

EARTHDATE: May 14, 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

Plenty of alarums and excursions his week... A major Intel server chip bug, a world-wide ransomware attack, and a quote from Bruce Schneier. A new Gettysburg map, web assembly, MP3 patents expire, away-day engineering, and a gender gap infographic. URLs point you to material on a cure for baldness, Dr Who, US$5 billion cyber-attack losses, fake peer reviews, powerless IoT device comms, HP recording key-strokes, and US copyright law.

<snuffle> Hopefully, what I’ve written makes sense, since I’m suffering from the worst attack of hay fever I can recall. It’s ‘super pollen’ here in the UK at the moment, and London, being in an atmospheric inversion (the cause of the infamous ‘peasouper’ fogs), has it even worse. <snuffle>
http://www.aol.co.uk/travel/2017/05/13/super-pollen-uk-asthma-allergy/

Shorts:

Well, the week started with the revaletion that a large number of Intel server chips had a vulnerability which could allow attackers to completely take over the system. (Also known as the Intel remote management bug.) Very bad indeed. However, there is a smidgen of good news in the fact that it doesn’t affect desktop computers. Thus, I suspect that the computers of most of my readers won’t be affected. However, I know that some of you do have responsibilities for looking after servers, so if you haven’t already figured out what to do, then I recommend the article pointed to by the URL as a good starting point. (It’s the third article down, headed ‘Intel’s Zero-day problem’.) Feel free to read the other articles if you are interested!
https://lwn.net/Articles/721182/

On Friday, the world was hit by one of the widest spread cyber-attacks yet. It was a ransomware attack, which encrypts the victim’s data files and demands payment in Bitcoin for the key to decrypt the files. The hardest hit seems to have been the UK’s National Health Service hospitals, many of which are still running Windows XP. And guess what, Windows XP is no longer supported by Microsoft, and so there is no patch available to close the vulnerability that was used. There is a security patch for later Windows operating systems – Windows 10 systems will have received it automatically.

If nothing else, this attack does at the very least raise the question of whether the manufacturer should be required to provide security patches for -any- software product they have provided, regardless of how old it is. After all, it was their product that caused the problem. Actually, it raises the wider question of whether software companies should be allowed to continue to claim they only ‘license’ the software, and can therefore evade all the consumer protection laws!

There were over 45,000 individual attacks spread across 74 countries. Maybe people will start taking security seriously, and maybe, just maybe, questions will be asked of intelligence agencies whether they knew about the vulnerability exploited, and failed to warn Microsoft, because they wanted to use it for cyber espionage...
http://www.darkreading.com/attacks-breaches/wannacry-rapidly-moving-ransomware-attack-spreads-to-74-countries/d/d-id/1328874
http://www.snopes.com/2017/05/12/cyber-attack-british-hospitals/

Here’s a quote from security guru Bruce Schneier: “What happens when intelligence agencies go to war with each other and don’t tell the rest of us? I think there’s something going on between the US and Russia that the public is just seeing pieces of. We have no idea why, or where it will go next, and can only speculate.”
https://lwn.net/Articles/721184/

Homework:

I was lucky enough to be taken around the Gettysburg battlefield, at a time when the reconstructionists were out in force, by a Federation player who was also marine officer, and who had, as they all do, studied the battle at staff college. It was fascinating, and left me with an abiding interest in the subject.

I think it would be fair to say that a number of the decisions taken (on both sides) during the three day battle were somewhat less than optimum. Now a new interactive map produced by the Smithsonian goes some way toward explaining those decisions by showing what the key players could actually see from where they were located

Take a look – the map includes both panoramas and field of view overlays. It really will help your understanding of one of the battles generally considered to be a major turning point in the American Civil War. Very impressive.
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/A-Cutting-Edge-Second-Look-at-the-Battle-of-Gettysburg-1-180947921/

Geek Stuff:

I suspect that one of the most important new features for web browsers is going to be ‘Web Assembly’, which will allow the use of languages other than JavaScript to be efficiently used for browser programming – languages like C++, for instance. Since a lot of geeks don’t have much idea what it is, and what’s involved, I thought that, rather than try to explain it here, I’d point you all to a cartoonish explanation of what it is, and why it’s going to be a lot faster than conventional JavaScript programming.
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/02/a-cartoon-intro-to-webassembly/

One piece of good news is that (as far as we are aware) all the patents covering the different bits of MP3 encoding and decoding have now expired, so using it to write coders and decoders is now free! No more worries about legal crud coming down on your head...
http://www.i-programmer.info/news/181/10750.html

Pictures:

This week we have another short video. While the cat’s away, the mice will play, as they say, and in this case the bosses at SGS Engineering went off on an away-day, so the engineers left in the office laid out a track to every desk in the office, so they could race slot cars!
http://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2017/05/05/British-engineers-create-epic-office-racetrack/2141494009532/

No so much a picture as an infographic that shows what the gender gap in the STEM (computer, engineering, and science) occupations is in each US state. Before you look at it try and guess which state has the smallest gender gap... I’ll bet you get it wrong!
http://www.investmentzen.com/news/which-states-have-the-smallest-gender-gap-in-stem-occupations/

Scanner:

Scientists studying cancer stumble on ‘breakthrough’ in search for baldness cure [And this looks like something more than snake oil – AL]
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/05/07/scientists-studying-cancer-stumble-breakthrough-search-baldness/

30 hours of Doctor Who audio dramas now free to stream online
http://www.openculture.com/2017/05/30-hours-of-doctor-who-audio-dramas-now-streaming-on-spotify.html

FBI: Business- and Email account compromise attack losses hit US$5 billion
http://www.darkreading.com/attacks-breaches/fbi-business--and-email-account-compromise-attack-losses-hit-$5-billion/d/d-id/1328812

China publishes more science research with fabricated peer-review than everyone else put together
https://qz.com/978037/china-publishes-more-science-research-with-fabricated-peer-review-than-everyone-else-put-together/?utm_source

Harnessing wider spectrum of ambient radio waves for powerless IoT device communication
http://newatlas.com/disney-backscatter-iot-fm-cellular-signals/49408/

HP laptops secretly recording user keystrokes
http://news.sky.com/story/hp-laptops-secretly-recording-user-keystrokes-10873634

US copyright law shake-up: Days of flinging stuff on the web and waiting for a DMCA may be over
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/05/05/us_copyright_law/

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
14 May 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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