WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net, technology and science news
by Alan Lenton
I hope you had a nice Easter break. This week we are back with material on false cell phone masts, insecure files on the internet, the Space Race, an ace periodic table, a couple of small robots, a video about London seen from a different perspective, and a quote about advertising that I think you’ll like! In the scanner section there are URLs pointing you to material on the colour (color for my American readers) blue, making money selling free stuff, defeating data collecting web sites, 2001 movie fifty years on, boiling an egg, cyber attackers shift targets, and a cyber attack on Atlanta.
Those of you who read Winding Down only on the website may have missed last Sunday’s April 1 special, which was only available as an email. If that’s the case you can now catch up by going to http://www.ibgames.net/alan/winding/180401special.html.
Shorts:
I suppose it was pretty inevitable really. Once word got out about the US security services ‘Stingray’ – false cell phone towers that slurp up people’s messages – the bad boys would be sure to follow on! And, it seems that while they haven’t exactly been sprouting like weeds, there is definite evidence that there are some around Washington DC. The powers that be are still trying to zero in on which fakes are ‘official’ fakes, and which are bad boy fakes, but they have no doubts that the latter exist.
I foresee an escalating fake cell tower war, as the goodies try to disguise their towers as fake bad boy fake towers, and the bad boys respond with fake good boy fake bad boy fake towers and then... Eventually, every city block will have its own collection of fake cell phone towers, each with it own depth of fakery!
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/04/03/imsi_catcher_stingray_washington_dc/
Over the last few months there have been a number of reports about important information being open to the internet because of misconfigured cloud storage – mostly, but not exclusively, Amazon’s S3 buckets. Security researchers recently decided to take a wider look than just at the Amazon cloud facilities, and discovered that there are something in the region of one and a half billion sensitive files out there that can be accessed from the internet. And only 7% of that figure was due to misconfigured Amazon S3 buckets. 1.5 billion files, that’s 12,000 terabytes of stuff just waiting to be snaffled up. A trifle worrying, I would think.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/04/05/billions_files_exposed_aws_ftp_wide_open/
Homework:
One of the few tech commentators I really like is Robert Cringely. I like him for two reasons. The first is that his book ‘Accidental Empires’ is the best there is about the early history of personal computing. The second is because he makes bold predictions, backs them up with factual information, and revisits them later. Also he isn’t afraid to say ‘I got that wrong’.
His latest prediction is very simple and very bold – that Space X has now won the space race. According to Cringely it’s on the verge of moving to such a dominant position and it will be launching so frequently, and cheaply (‘cheap’ you understand is a relative term when it comes to space launches...) that it will clean up. He bases this prediction on the recent decision of the FCC to give Space X permission to build Starlink, Elon Musk’s version of a satellite-based broadband internet.
In practical terms it authorised the launching of the first 4,425 of the satellites. Eventually that number will expand to just under twelve thousand. The FCC also specified that Space X has to launch the first 2,213 of those satellites within the next six years. Six Years... That implies that on average, if it starts immediately, it will have to launch an average of one a day for the next six years. That’s not quite as bad as it sounds, since they will be able to send aloft more than one satellite per launch, but it’s pretty stupendous, none the less.
Cringely’s take on this is that, especially given the rapidly developing re-usability of Space X rocket components, Space X costs for a launch will go down rapidly, and that will reflect in the launch prices charged to third party satellite owners. In addition, and perhaps more important, with such a regular and frequent set of launches, satellite owners will no longer have to book two (or more) years in advance. When their satellite is ready, they can ring up and book the next available flight – just like booking an airline ticket. (Actually, once the Department of Homeland Security cottons on to this, I’m sure they will want to put their oar in to make it not quite so simple!)
I’d suggest it’s worth reading Cringely’s analysis, which is much more detailed than the gloss I’ve just given you. If it comes off, this will be seen as one of the most important events of the next ten years.
https://www.cringely.com/2018/04/06/the-space-race-is-over-and-spacex-won/
School time. Chemistry lesson... I’d like to introduce you to the coolest depiction of the periodic table that I’ve come across. Why is it so cool? Because if you click on any element it pops up a box that tells you not only about element, but also what it’s used for.
For instance, when I clicked on Promethium (I’d never heard of it before) it told me that it was radioactive, long lived, mostly human made and that it was used to make luminous dials. I also discovered that it was a rare earth metal and that rare earth metals are difficult to separate from one another. All useful info for budding chemists.
https://www.sciencealert.com/awesome-periodic-table-tells-you-how-to-actually-use-all-those-elements
http://elements.wlonk.com/ElementsTable.htm
Geek Stuff:
‘I Programmer’ has an interesting piece on robot company Festo’s latest two robots – Flying Fox and Spider. The short videos of the bots are very impressive, and, in the case of the Spider, more than a little creepy! Something I suspect that is worth keeping an eye on.
http://www.i-programmer.info/news/169/11679.html
Pictures:
For this week’s pictures I’d like to introduce you to an amazing 3 minute video of London which makes the city look like it’s on a completely different planet to Earth. I hesitated a bit before drawing this to your attention, because I know most of my American readers already think that London is on a different planet! Be that as it may, this footage was shot last January while the ‘supermoon’ was at it’s largest, and it makes stunning viewing. Enjoy!
https://aeon.co/videos/the-rare-celestial-events-that-briefly-made-the-british-capital-a-city-of-otherworldly-wonders
Scanner:
There’s evidence humans didn’t actually see blue until modern times
https://www.sciencealert.com/humans-didn-t-even-see-the-colour-blue-until-modern-times-evidence-suggests
Here’s Red Hat’s open secret on how to make $3billion selling free stuff
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/heres-red-hats-open-secret-on-how-to-make-3b-selling-free-stuff/
One solution to wreck privacy-hating websites: Flood them with bogus info using browser tools
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/04/03/facebook_active_countermeasures/
Fifty years on from the film 2001 – A Space Odyssey
https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2018/04/02/2001-a-space-odyssey-50-years-later/
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/04/03/alternative_2001_space_odyssey/
How to perfectly boil an egg every single time, according to a quantum physicist
https://www.sciencealert.com/boiling-perfect-egg-every-time-quantum-physicist-calculator
Attackers shift from Adobe flaws to Microsoft products
https://www.darkreading.com/vulnerabilities---threats/attackers-shift-from-adobe-flaws-to-microsoft-products/d/d-id/1331381
A cyberattack hobbles Atlanta, and security experts shudder
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/27/us/cyberattack-atlanta-ransomware.html&ref=headline&nl=top-stories?nlid=54051705-stories
Coda:
Quote of the Week:
“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, and the trouble is, I don’t know which half.”
Lord Leverhulme – English Industrialist and Philanthropist.
Maybe, given the rise of the internet, we should update this from half to 98% – AL
And also, a question from me for you to ponder on over the next week or so: “If you have a self-driving car, will you need a driving license to use it?”
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
25 March 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.
