WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net, technology and science news
by Alan Lenton
This week Winding Down brings you material on Google location tracking vs. EU GDPR, Amazon Prime advertising zapped, Project Orion, VU meters, 3D pictures of classical sculptures, the 2018 Shed of the Year pictures, and a quote on doing more than one thing. The scanner section boasts URLs pointing to material on more security holes in Intel chips, hatred against the big cable companies, a claim that the printer caused spelling errors (!), LIDAR and unmarked graves, build your own NASA space rover, blue wine, plate tectonics, a graphene competitor, and a WordPress hack.
Next weekend is a public holiday (akshirley it’s the Monday that’s the holiday), so there will be no Winding Down next Sunday but we will be back on 2 September.
Shorts:
Remember the EU’s GDPR rules, they’re the ones that laid it on the line to the Internet big boys (and small ones) that that they have to get explicit, informed consent from people before they can obtain and use or sell on personal data. Well, guess who looks like being up in court soon over their tracking of users. It’s Google, of course. They’ve been tracking people and a number of privacy watchers consider that users are misled and that they are not in a position to give informed consent.
San Francisco’s AP News investigation of this issue found that location tracking continues when the user thinks they have disabled it. That’s for various reasons, for instance user settings governing location markers are in different places. You can pause it, but not disable it permanently. Even if tracking is ‘paused’, it continues if you visit Search, Maps and some of the other Google applications.
AP News also points out that the warnings provided to both iOS and Android users are misleading. Given this litany of potential breaches of privacy, not to mention the current climate in which people are starting to worry about the activities of the Internet behemoths, I don’t think it will be very long before this issue starts to wend its way through the courts, or to be investigated by the EU Commission responsible for GDPR.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/08/16/google_risks_megafine_in_eu_over_location_stalking/
https://apnews.com/f60bc112665b458cb6473d7ee9492932
Amazon recently got hauled over the coals on this side of the pond by the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA). The ASA branded its advertising about Prime ‘next-day delivery’ as being ‘misleading’. Given that the ASA isn’t a government body, it’s a self regulatory body set up by advertisers, there wasn’t a fine. However, Amazon were ordered not to let the advert appear again in its current form and that Amazon was to make it clear that some Prime labelled items were not available to be delivered the next day.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/08/14/amazon_prime_ads_misleading_says_asa/
https://www.asa.org.uk/rulings/amazon-europe-core-sarl-a17-408329.html
Homework:
Did you know... that in the late 1950s/early 1960s there was a project to use nuclear bombs to power spaceships? Apparently you would need about 1,000 of them to get a large spaceship into Earth orbit...
It was called Project Orion, and the development was carried out by General Atomic, a division of General Dynamics. They never did get permission to use nuclear explosives, but they did manage to prove it was possible by using scaled down models and chemical explosives. However, by the middle of the 1960s people were becoming much more leery about exploding nuclear weapons in the atmosphere and the experiment was canned by its funders.
Nonetheless, the idea is still around, especially for starships and the like. It also crops up in science fiction, for instance in Niven and Pournelle’s ‘Mote in Gods Eye’, the protagonists discover asteroids that have been moved into new orbits using the technique. Have a look at the URL, which has the full story of the Orion Project.
https://hackaday.com/2018/08/13/project-orion-detonating-nuclear-bombs-for-thrust/
Geek Stuff:
Many years ago, when I was managing a rock band, I was standing next to the mixing desk watching the sound engineer at work and I remember watching the needles on the little VU meters at the top of the controls for each channel flickering dementedly, and wondered exactly what it was they were actually registering. Well, thanks to the Hackaday site, I now know! And it’s a bit complicated, so I’m not going to try and explain it here – just call up the URL, they give a nice clear explanation.
https://hackaday.com/2018/08/09/the-vu-meter-and-how-it-got-that-way/
Pictures:
If you like classical sculptures, or even if you would just like to see some very classy examples of how to do good 3D digitization, I’d recommend that you take a look at the work done on the Medici collection of sculptures. Between the 15th and 18th Centuries the House of Medici acquired a huge number of classical sculptures. A good selection of them are on display are the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy.
Now some of them are online as part of a very well done 3D digitization project. If you think about it, it makes sense. High grade 2D pictures are fine for images of paintings, but for objects like vases and statues you need 3D pictures. An excellent, and good example of the use of modern technology.
https://www.digitalsculpture-uffizi.org/
And now for something completely different, Here in the UK it’s, apparently, 2018’s Shed of the Year competition time, and New Atlas have put together a gallery of the shortlists for the various categories. I particularly liked picture 102 in which the coffee table next to the chaise longue features not only a plate of cookies, a jar of home made marmalade, and a retro style transistor radio, but also a large tin of Cuprinol garden paint!
Since this particular tin of paint appears in a number of improbable places in some of the other pictures as well, it suggests to my keen analytical mind that the competition is being sponsored by the aforementioned paint company. Take a look for yourself!
https://newatlas.com/2018-shed-of-the-year-shortlist/55888/#gallery
Oh, and incidentally, I’d like to take the opportunity to make it clear that we don’t use sponsors, or take in donations for this rag – not even from garden paint people!
Scanner:
Three more data-leaking security holes found in Intel chips as designers swap security for speed
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/08/14/intel_l1_terminal_fault_bugs/
Everybody hates their cable company, unless the company is Google, or the city, or a tiny mom-and-pop
https://boingboing.net/2018/08/09/party-like-its-1982.html
Head of education letter littered with mistakes, blames ‘IT printers’ for bad spelling
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/08/10/devon_county_council_blames_it_for_bad_spelling/
LIDAR shown to be a powerful new tool in the hunt for missing murder victims
https://www.sciencealert.com/lidar-unmarked-graves-murder-victims-forensic-science
Build your own NASA space rover: Here are the DIY JPL blueprints
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/08/02/nasa_open_source_rover/
French wine: Red, white and now blue
http://www.euronews.com/2018/08/01/french-wine-red-white-and-now-blue
Plate tectonics: Necessary for habitability?
https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2018/08/08/plate-tectonics-necessary-for-habitability/
Move over, graphene: Iron ore mineral becomes newest 2D material
https://newatlas.com/hematene-2d-iron-material/55670/
How a hack on 10,000 WordPress sites was used to launch an epic malvertising campaign
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/30/malvertising_wordpress/
Quote for the week:
“The shortest way to do many things is to do only one thing at once.” – Samuel Smiles, writer
From The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations
Coda:
As I mentioned in the intro, next weekend in the UK is what is known as a Bank Holiday. This one, the August Bank Holiday was first defined in the Bank Holidays Act of 1871. At that time it was defined as the first Monday in August. That lasted a mere 100 years, and in 1971 it was moved to the last Monday in August. Bank holidays are proclaimed each year by Royal proclamation – definitely one of the most important royal duties!
There are 8 public holidays a year in the English calendar (Scotland is slightly different). This may sound a lot, but you might like to reflect that until 1834 the Bank of England observed no less that 33 saints days and religious festivals as bank holidays...
Finally, it is a British tradition that it always rains on Bank Holidays!
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
19 August 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.
