Winding Down
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net, technology and science news
by Alan Lenton
26 January 2020
This week in Winding Down we look at the latest in the Boeing saga, cheating in an AI contest, the reality of a Mars colony, the dangers of technical expertise, the time the UK and the USA nearly went to war over a dead pig, (un)encrypted device back up, an amusing picture on the subject of backup, and a quote from Zsa Zsa Gabor.
Scanner has URLs pointing to issues involving Y2K, sticky notes, a cooling material, locusts, gravity, advertisers and web privacy, fingerprint dating, and Middle Eastern groups raising funds via Bitcoin...
Enjoy your reading.
Credits: Thanks to readers Barb and Fi for drawing my attention to material for Winding Down.
Updates:
Just when I thought there might not be anything for ‘Updates’ this week, Boeing comes through with another 737 Max software bug! This time Boeing has not released details, but ‘The Register’ suggests that the two flight computers might have stopped talking to one another. I’ll give you more details if they ever become available...
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/01/17/boeing_737_flaw/
Programming:
Cheating in an AI programming contest raises its head. It seems there was a contest to develop some machine learning code. And this code had US$25,000 in prizes... The winner, it now turns out cheated. What a surprise. The fact is that people cheat whether or not there are cash rewards.
You have to take account of this when you design the competition. What they should have done, was to employ an online game designer to design the competition. Good online game designers are the evolved result of years of pitting their wits against hordes of players who will use any tricks to gain an advantage...
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/01/21/ai_kaggle_contest_cheat/
Space:
The idea of human colonies on Mars is a theme that has cropped up a number of time over the last ten years, and seems to be likely to keep coming up in the near future. Part of the reason for this, I suspect, is that people realise that the moon, with its lack of an atmosphere and it’s long days and nights is an intensely hostile environment.
By comparison, Mars seem much ‘nicer’. But is it?
Well actually, not really when you come to look at the details. For instance, the Martian atmosphere is so thin that it’s equivalent to the Earth’s atmosphere at over 18 miles up. That’s pretty thin – and it has no oxygen in it! It doesn’t provide much in the way of protection from either solar radiation, or cosmic rays. And to compound the issue, there’s no strong magnetic field to deflect the radiation, either.
Then there is the matter of the gravity. It’s only a third that of the Earth, which will, over time, play havoc with human Earth-based physiology, even for adults, let alone the physical development of children...
And even if all those things are solved – perhaps by living underground – there’s the issue of human politics, both internal to the colony and external, over claims by different Earth-based countries. That topic alone has provided the basis of innumerable science fiction stories of the last 80 or so years!
The horrible truth is that anywhere we go to live in the solar system, except Earth, we will probably have to live underground and never, or hardly ever, see the stars. It’s depressing, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. We just need to be aware of what’s involved first.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/life-unbounded/death-on-mars1/
Technical Expertise:
I usually scan LWN.net for their weekly round up of Linux community news. Usually it’s stuff that’s not really of interest to readers of this rag, but in the current issue I found a really interesting report of a talk about problems caused by expertise. The speaker was Dr Sean Brady. Brady is a forensic engineer who specializes in analysing engineering failures to try to discover the root causes behind them.
The talk he gave was covered extensively in LWN and I think it’s well worth a read. It’s the first article , and it’s called ‘The dark side of expertise’. Highly recommended – I think you will find it fascinating.
https://lwn.net/Articles/809097/
History:
Did you know that in 1846 Britain and the USA very nearly went to war over the death of a pig! No? Neither did I until I found an article about it on the Historic UK website...
Seems that it escalated out of control, not helped by the time it took to get messages back to the powers that be in those days. Towards the end of the confrontation there were three warships, 84 cannon and over 2,600 infantry facing off! Wow!
https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/The-Pig-War/
Security:
Do you encrypt your backups? Or are you assuming it’s done for you? Well think again because it’s now been revealed that Apple, possibly under pressure from the FBI, don’t encrypt iCloud backups. Well, that’s a surprise, I don’t think. And I also don’t think that Apple is unique in this.
It’s time we all realised that if we want security and privacy, there are only two options – cut yourself off from all thing digital and become a hermit, or handle your own security yourself.
The first option is clearly not on, because you wouldn’t be able to get your weekly dose of Winding Down...
That leaves the second option. Handle your own security. The problem if you want to do that is the complexity of modern security systems. Very few people have the time to learn all they would need to secure their kit against state-based hacking, and it takes only one small mistake to make everything vulnerable.
Don’t despair, though, sophisticated protection is getting easier – and the programmers are gradually coming to grips with the fact that potential users rarely have a PhD in digital security...
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/01/21/apple_encrypt_icloud_backups/
Pictures:
And following on from security, I had to laugh at the picture at the top of Hackaday’s new year article. Take a look for yourself!
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/20/new-year-habits-what-do-you-do-for-data-storage/
Quotes:
This week’s quote is from the legendary Zsa Zsa Gabor:
“I never hated a man enough to give him his diamonds back.”
Scanner:
Y2K quick-fix crick? 1920s come roaring back after mystery blip at UK’s vehicle licensing agency
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/01/13/y2k_dvla/
Hong Kong’s sticky-note revolution
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/hong-kongs-sticky-note-revolution-180974042/
Cool coating allows hot electronics to let off some steam
https://newatlas.com/materials/mof-water-cooling/
Kenya suffers worst locust infestation in 70 years as millions of insects swarm farmland
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/26/kenya-suffers-worst-locust-infestation-in-70-years-as-millions-of-insects-swarm-farmland
Physicists probe validity of Einstein’s gravity on cosmic scales
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/physicists-probe-validity-of-einsteins-gravity-on-cosmic-scales/
Advertisers want exemption from web privacy rules that, you know, enforce privacy
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/12/09/ad_groups_privacy_rules/
Fingerprint-dating tech could thwart lying criminals
https://newatlas.com/science/fingerprint-dating/
Report: Hamas, Iran-Tied militants intensify Bitcoin fundraising
https://cointelegraph.com/news/report-hamas-iran-tied-militants-intensify-bitcoin-fundraising-action
Footnote
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
26 January 2020
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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