WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net, technology and science news
by Alan Lenton
We’re having a weekend off next week, but here’s what’s in store for you this week. Politicians and crypto, drone company DJI and crypto, Montana state and net neutrality (no crypto, honest), the FCC consultation and a well-known smut site, two very serious papers on writer’s block, an explanation of ‘serverless’ the latest super-duper in-word in the rarefied tech circles in which we move, some nice pictures of nightclubs, and a quote from James Dewar. I’ve banished the processor chip bug problems to the Scanner section this week. You can find more info there than you ever wanted know, and there are also URLs pointing to material on why human skin doesn’t leak, a Tesla car crash, and some info about how grow mussels safely. All good stuff!
We’ll be back on Sunday 11 February, see you then...
Shorts:
What is it about politicians that makes them so obtuse when it comes to encryption? Theresa May, the UK’s prime minister, is yet again coming up with demands to have ‘backdoors’. The UK government’s own hacking collective, GCHQ (the equivalent of the USA’s NSA), has repeatedly told them it’s a very bad idea, but they persist. It’s difficult enough to design crypto stuff without any way of the bad guys getting in, without putting deliberate ways of hacking in to it. And it’s not like the bad guys are stupid enough to use Ms May’s special backdoor encryption so she can read their messages.
What a dork.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/25/uk_prime_minister_encryption/
And talking of cryptographic things, drone maker DJI rather foolishly included its drone’s crypto keys in the material it put on GitHub. Of course that makes it possible for technically-ept users to evade the firmware that stops them flying in forbidden areas. Apart from anything else, this makes a mockery of their boast to the powers that be that people can’t fly their drones into restricted areas!
Being GitHub, and given that they put the material into a public repository, the stuff was immediately cloned. While DJI can, and presumably have, closed the their repository to the public, the clone remains public. They tried using a DMCA takedown notice on GitHub on the ground that the keys are copyright. GitHub gave them 10 days to justify the takedown. Given that the stuff has been there for between two and four years, that would have been difficult to say the least...
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/25/dji_github_public_repo_crypto_key_foolishness/
I see that Montana has come up with its own way of encouraging the telcos and cable operators to institute net neutrality in the state. The long and short of it simple. It says, in somewhat more legal language, “If you don’t maintain net neutrality for customers in this state, we won’t do any business with you at a state level.”
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/22/montana_net_neutrality_rules/ [This article also has a rather nice picture of Montana -AL]
And talking of net neutrality, remember the FCC ‘consultation’ that came before the rules were abolished? The one that had a large number of suspect submissions? Well, various people have been looking a little more closely at exactly where these submissions came from. And, guess what... It turns out that a million of them came from a smut site that employs 55 staff and doesn’t give out addresses to anyone outside the business! Apparently there are plenty of other anomalies as well, though none quite so blatant.
Interesting. Perhaps worthy of the appointment of a Special Investigator, since they seem to be all the rage these days, don’t you think?
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/22/smut_site_fingered_for_fraud_after_a_million_
net_neutrality_comments_get_sent/
Homework:
I rarely refer my readers to journal published academic articles, given that academia has its own language, specially designed to keep out the unwashed masses. However, Dennis Upper’s classic paper ‘The Unsuccessful Self-Treatment of a Case of ‘Writer’s Block’ in the Journal of Applied Behaviour Analysis is a masterpiece of brevity. Indeed, it is such a masterpiece, even though it’s over 40 years since it was written, that I snurfed my coffee when I read it and had to spend some time cleaning the keyboard before continuing. I’d strongly recommend reading this paper (including the footnote and the peer reviewer’s comments) but without snurfing the coffee.
This paper held the record for brevity for 30 years, when it was joined (but not surpassed) by a follow up paper investigating whether the results revealed could be replicated (an important issue in science) in different cultures to that of the original paper. And, indeed they could! The comments on this paper from the journal’s editor also well worth a read.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1311997/?page=1 [First article]
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2078566/ [Follow up]
Geek Stuff:
‘Serverless’ is the name of the latest ‘cool’ thing in the computer business. Probably the most stupid name ever invented, given that all the ‘serverless’ stuff runs on servers... There’s a good analysis of exactly what serverless is in the Register this week – the one liner is that it’s doing things around the idea of making it possible for ordinary people to write their own programs, in the same way Microsoft’s Excel did in the 1990s.
Let me explain that last statement a bit. The spreadsheet was one of the key drivers of business PC adoption in the early days of personal computing, but by the 1990s there was a split with many of the spreadsheet companies building better and more complex spreadsheets. Microsoft took a different position and concentrated their resources on making it easy for non-techies to write their own scripts (aka programs, though we don’t use the ‘p’ word, because it frightens ordinary people). For instance, most people I knew in that period had their address books on Excel – a most unadressbook like program. The result was predictable. Excel thrived, and the other programs (think Lotus 123) withered on the vine.
It’s an interesting concept. Businesses like it because it holds out the promise of being able to get rid of those pesky awkward (and expensive) programmers, and non-programmers like it because they can get scripts done themselves when they need them and evade all the annoying security controls the IT department insists on.
Does this mean that programmers are going to become obsolete? Probably not, at least in the near future. I remember back in 1981 a program called ‘The Last One’. It was a program generator that was supposedly going to make programming (and programmers) obsolete.
Needless to say we are still here!
But I digress, the article I mentioned at the start is interesting (though perhaps a little on the wordy side) if you want to know about this latest trend. Take a look, especially if you think it might affect you.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/23/serverless_exhilarating_terrifying_ridiculous_name/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_One_(software)
Pictures:
Personally, I’m not a clubbing person (neither seals nor night clubs). However, looking at some of the pictures of SciFi nightclubs and restaurants in a recent edition of New Atlas, I could be tempted. I especially like the one based on the movie ‘Tron’. Now, where did I park my light cycle...
https://newatlas.com/frame-awards-nominees-best-interior-design/53063/#gallery
Coda:
Quote of the week: “Minds are like parachutes. They only function when they are open.” – James Dewar, physicist and inventor of the vacuum flask.
Scanner:
Yet more stuff about Meltdown and Spectre (wasn’t that a James Bond villain organisation?)
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/22/meltdown_spectre_week_three_the_good_the_bad_and_the_wtf/
https://www.darkreading.com/vulnerabilities---threats/intel-says-to-stop-applying-problematic-spectre-meltdown-patch-/d/d-id/1330871
https://www.darkreading.com/cloud/fallout-from-rushed-patching-for-meltdown-spectre-/d/d-id/1330887
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/25/intel_q4_fy2017_meltdown_spectre/
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/22/intel_spectre_fix_linux/
Scientists have figured out why human skin doesn’t leak
http://www.sciencealert.com/this-is-why-human-skin-doesn-t-leak-biology
Aut-doh!-pilot: Driver jams 65mph Tesla Model S under fire truck, walks away from crash
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/23/tesla_autopilot_crash/
Using scientific muscle to grow safer mussels
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=91595&src=eoa-iotd
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
28 January 2018
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.
