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by ibgames

EARTHDATE: September 3, 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

Well – here we are after a successful holiday BBQ (ie, nobody went down with food poisoning!), all revved up and raring to go. We start off with the woes of Uber, then we note that the FCC’s net neutrality comments period has ended, followed by pieces on why hurricane Harvey was so bad, the problems of building a Venus rover, a computer that is, how shall I put it – fast, very fast, then prejudicial programming, and finally some excellent airborne pictures of London. As a bonus there’s a Coda section with a quote about the unintended consequence of raising money for a hospital... If you want even more then the URLs in the Scanner section point you in the direction of biological circuits, a patent troll is forced to cough up, the top ten supercomputers, Logitec sued over IoT cam security, carbon nanotubes and desalination, and cracking a DVR – two minutes online and it’s pwned!

Oh, and by the way a belated happy 26th birthday (August 25th) to Linux...

Shorts:

You know, one could almost feel sorry for Uber, if they weren’t such a nasty bunch. They’ve just got a new CEO, who must be wondering how he let himself in for it. When he sat down at his desk on the first day, waiting for him to deal with were sexual harassment scandals, a lawsuit from Waymo (Google’s self-drive people), a lawsuit from Benchmark Capital, a settlement with the US Federal Trade Commission on its privacy practices which forces Uber to undergo probes into what they are doing on the subject every two years, and what to do about Uber drivers who have figured out ways to jack up the fares (and their earnings) by creating artificial scarcities, not to mention that the company lost US$645 million last quarter! And that doesn’t take into account problems outside the USA...

You might have thought that was enough for any new CEO to get stuck into, but now it’s also been revealed that the US Department of Justice is investigating whether Uber managers broke the foreign bribery laws!

I don’t envy the new CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi. However much they are paying him, he will be earning every cent of it.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/08/30/investigation_into_uber_bribery/

The period for making comments about the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) plans to kill off the net neutrality rules has just finished. Not that anything anyone said will make the slightest difference. The chair of the FCC has made it clear that he intends to have the rules killed off regardless.

The rules were made during the last Democratic administration, and everyone seems to think that they will be reinstated by the next Democratic administration. I’m not so sure. The lifetime of even a single administration is a long time in internet time. Who knows what the internet will look like, or what new, more urgent, problems will have arisen in that time. The internet now is different from what it was 5 years ago. and who knows what it will look like in the 2020s?

Former UK Prime Minister Harold Wilson once commented, “A week is a long time in politics.” That’s true, but an hour is a long time on the internet!

In the meantime, The Register has an interesting piece on the 21.8 million comments that were sent in to the FCC.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/08/31/net_neutrality_comments_close/

Homework:

I guess we’ve all been either watching the horrifying flood scenes from Hurricane Harvey, or, sadly, becoming part of them if we live in the area. Harvey is breaking all records, unfortunately, and I know people are wondering why. Well, it just so happens that I found an Scientific American story that explains issues like how it went from category 1 to category 4 so fast, why it stayed in the same place for so long, and how it produced so much rain, even after it had moved off the sea and over land. Recommended!
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/hurricane-harvey-why-is-it-so-extreme/

The Mars rovers have done pretty well and actually survived much longer than their expected lifetime. Their Venus lander brethren have not been so lucky, their lifetime being a few hours, if not a handful of minutes. It’s understandable, given that at ground level on Venus the atmosphere is roughly 100 times hotter and 90 times the pressure of that at sea level on earth.

As you can imagine electronics don’t last very long in these conditions! So, with that in mind the whiz kids at NASA are looking at ways of substituting mechanical alternatives. It’s like going back to the early mechanical computers – for instance the fire control computers used in ships in world War II. One ingenious idea is that instead of a radar transmitter they could have a radar reflector with a rotating shutter to turn the reflection on and off. A Venus orbiter, safely above the atmosphere, would provide the radar beam and pick up the reflected pulses. A neat idea.

There’s an interesting discussion on the subject on the ‘Centauri Dreams’ – take a look to find out more...
https://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=38350
http://mentallandscape.com/V_Lavochkin1.htm

Geek Stuff:

My geek friends, have I got just the computer for you! How does 24,320 GPU cores sound? Interested? It’s ASUS’s new ‘B250 Mining Expert’ motherboard. As the name implies, it’s designed for Bitcoin mining – screaming along at a rate of 407 megahashes a second. But of course, you can use it for other things, like games, or writing that nifty little chess program you’ve had in mind for ages. You know, the one that will thrash IBM’s Deep Blue.

Mind you, you will probably need to your own power station to run it! Still if you can afford the fully decked out system you can probably also afford the power station...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/08/24/asus_19_gpu_motherboard/

Do you program computers? Then maybe you need to read a piece about why you should not write algorithms that are prejudiced – and how laws usually define prejudice. While the laws may vary in details from country to country, they are all remarkably similar in most western democracies. I would guess that dealing with the obvious, like writing a credit scoring program marking down anyone who is black is relatively easy. However, not so obvious would be marking down if the person concerned had sickle cell anaemia, because sickle cell has a close correlation with being black, or having had a black ancestor.

Remember – the path to hell paved with good unintentions...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/08/31/unintentional_discrimination_in_your_ai_model/

Pictures:

This week’s pictures are a bit nearer (my) home. I have lived in London for the last 40 years, and I still haven’t explored even 20% of it in that time. Which is a shame – miss a bit and it probably won’t be there after a few years. It’s constantly mutating, and always interesting. With that in mind, I thought I’d show you some superb aerial pictures of my city. So, click on the URL and take a look.

From top to bottom the pictures show:
Trafalgar Square
The London Eye (that’s the ferris wheel)
The Houses of Parliament (in the foreground)
The Shard (that’s the tall spikey bit)
Regent Street
Tower Bridge
The Shard (again) and London Bridge Rail Station
Buckingham Palace
http://londonist.com/london/art-and-photography/woah-check-out-these-stunning-shots-of-london-from-above?rel=handpicked

Coda:

I was reading a piece about a UK hospital giving Google’s Deep Mind access to 1.6 million patient health records, when I came across this aside that I just had to share with you! (NHS stands for National Health Service)

‘medConfidential’s Smith compares this apparent generosity to a children’s hospital encouraging adults to fundraise for it by skydiving. This might be good for the children’s hospital, but not for the NHS as a whole: a 1998 study covering 174 parachute injuries treated by the NHS, 94 per cent of them being first-time charity parachutists, calculated that for each pound raised for the health service it spent £13.75 on treatment.’

The full piece can be found at:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/08/23/nhs_google_deepmind_lessons/

Scanner:

Living Logic: Biological circuits for the electrically minded
https://hackaday.com/2017/08/21/living-logic-biological-circuits-for-the-electrically-minded/

Ice-cold Kaspersky shows the industry how to handle patent trolls
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/08/31/kaspersky_handles_patent_trolls/

Top 10 supercomputers of 2017
https://www.networkworld.com/article/3218098/data-center/top-10-supercomputers-of-2017.html

Logitech’s security cams allegedly suck so bad, this US bloke is suing it
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/08/24/logitech_sued_bad_cameras_and_support/

Carbon nanotubes worth their salt – desalination
https://www.rdmag.com/news/2017/08/carbon-nanotubes-worth-their-salt

Dangle a DVR online and it’ll be cracked in two minutes
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/08/29/sans_mirai_dvr_research/

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
3 September 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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