Winding Down

An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net, technology and science news
by Alan Lenton
15 March 2020

Well, looking for a bright side amidst the gloom, at least you can’t catch a non-digital virus from an online newsletter... With the news understandably full of stuff about Coronavirus, sifting out tech news was not easy, although I suppose people at the RSA conference coming down with the virus is sort of tech news. Fortunately there was some non-viral news and I was able to draw on a cache of news from earlier that I hadn’t been able to fit in. So, what have we got for you this week?

Well... I thought I was going to have to skip updates this week, but Boeing came through yet again, with details of testing, or rather non-testing of its Calamity Capsule! Other pieces include the fantastic results of an engineering failure in an Italian town, then there is some nice stuff about an algorithm doing some good work (for a change), followed by a piece about the a UK police poster urging parents to shop their offspring for being in possession of online security tools...

We follow that up with a piece on a new use for Lego – making wheelchair ramps, and two pieces pointing to items about very different aspects of time. After that we have an amazing video of a train crashing into a car, two sets of nature pictures and some pictures of Magician Posters.

The quote is from Adlai Stevenson and Scanner has material on a SIM-jacking case against a telco, a graph about the virus, Titanic’s radio room, geological traps in Labrador, chip wars, a Vanderbilt Grand Prix Racer, and dubious activity by a DNA test company.

I hope you find this a little relief from the ceaseless battering of bad news out there at the moment, and stay as safe as you can over the next period.

Alan

Credits: Thanks to readers Barb and Fi for drawing my attention to material for Winding Down.

Updates:

I thought it was going to be another week with nothing to report in the update section, but good old Boeing were there to fill the slot! More info is emerging on the problems with its Calamity Capsule (aka CST-100 Starliner) during its 2019 launch. I covered the problems that were revealed at the time, but since then further information has emerged. It seems that the bits of the capsule were tested separately, but there was no end to end test of the whole mission. Fortunately there weren’t any astronauts in the capsule when the resultant problems showed up. More details at the URL (it’s the last item in the round up).
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/03/03/space_roundup/

Italy:

Amidst all the gloom and doom and lockdown in Italy there was one bit of good news for a few. Owing to a broken valve in the local winery 1,000 litres (1,333 and a third bottles) of red wine flowed out of the taps in the town of Castelvetro di Modena! Glug! Glug! Hic!
https://boingboing.net/2020/03/09/red-wine-literally-flows-from.html

Legal:

It’s nice to see algorithms being used to clear convictions, instead of being used to spy on people. That’s what’s happening in California at the moment, and it’s an interesting example of how algorithms can be used for good as well as bad purposes.

The situation is that in 2016 the possession and smoking of cannabis was, with some caveats, made legal in California. Two years later a further law was passed that allowed people, in many cases, to have previous cannabis convictions removed from the records.

Now, there were a lot of records that needed to be removed – an estimated 220,000, in fact. Trying to do that manually will take years, and the legislation says that prosecutors have only got until July this year to challenge any requests for erasure. So, into the ring steps a San Francisco based non-profit called Code for America, which created and handed over the tools to manage all this work to be used at no cost by the California counties!

The result is that a Los Angeles Superior Court judge is expected to remove 62,000 felony cannabis convictions in the county – some dating as far back as 1961. Nice work – more details at the URL.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/02/14/algorithms_weed_california/

At the other end of the scale, here in UK our police have issued a poster suggesting that parents should check their child’s computer and immediately report them to the police if they find Kali Linux, virtual machines, Tor, Discord or Metasploit on their computer!

Difficult to know where to start on the stupidity of this poster. Perhaps with a note that all of the items mentioned are ‘dual use’ – i.e. they have both legal and illegal uses. Then we could perhaps consider the fact that anyone capable of using all those tools would be more than capable ensuring that one else could find them, were they using them for illegal purposes.

I used Kali Linux and Metasploit to test the security of my Federation II game – perhaps I should report myself to the police!

As for Discord – it’s in common use among gamers who need a secure chat system to plot the downfall of the other side in their games! You can look up uses for most of the other items on the net – they’re dual use, easily obtained, and most of them have Wikipedia entries!
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/02/14/silly_police_infosec_parental_advice_poster/

Lego:

Here’s a new and important use for Lego – building wheelchair ramps. The idea was thought up by a wheelchair user in the German town of Hanau. And in case you are wondering, they use glue to stick the bricks together as they build the ramps.

I’m not sure that it’s a solution available for mass use, but the brightly coloured bricks are a great way of drawing attention to need for ramps. As someone who regularly has to push an occupied wheelchair around, I thoroughly approve!
https://gizmodo.com/one-woman-and-thousands-of-lego-bricks-are-building-a-t-1841813835

Time:

Science fiction author Clifford D. Simak once wrote a book entitled ‘Time is the Simplest Thing’. The book is very good, but he was wrong, there is nothing simple about time! That being the case, I thought I’d direct your attention to a couple of pieces in Aeon online magazine.

The first is a piece entitled ‘A revolution in time’ and discusses the move from local and irregular timekeeping and the transition to universal and linear timekeeping. Originally years were marked not by a number, but by some local significant event that happened in that year.

The critical event in moving to modern timekeeping was when King Seleucus I Nicator arrived in Babylon, which was designated year one of what became known as the Seleucid calendar (this was what we would now call 311 BCE). With each passing year the number was incremented by one. That was a good start, but, just as important, on the death of King Seleucus I his son Antiochus I did not restart the clock, and nor did any of his successors. Time, as we know it, had started!
https://aeon.co/essays/when-time-became-regular-and-universal-it-changed-history

The second piece is an eight minute video interview with physicist Julian Barbour – I’ve always been fascinated by his views ever since I read his book ‘The end of time: the next revolution in physics’. In this short interview Barbour discusses what is time and comes up with some rather interesting points.

Pictures:

First off in this section I thought I’d offer a quite incredible video of a fast moving train smashing into a car that was on the track. Amazingly, the driver suffered only scrapes and bruises!
https://boingboing.net/2020/03/05/watch-a-fast-moving-train-sma.html

After that narrow escape, perhaps something a little more frivolous? How about some poster art from the ‘Golden Age’ of Magicians?
It’s currently on show as an exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario, but there are some nice examples in an article from The Smithsonian.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/art-golden-age-magic-posters-180974304/

If you fancy something a little more conventional how about some of the top pictures in Agora’s nature photo contest? It’s a nice selection of nature pictures, but all very varied.
https://newatlas.com/digital-cameras/agora-best-nature-photography-2020-gallery/

And if you are not ‘pictured out’ yet, here are two other collections to browse through!
https://newatlas.com/digital-cameras/winners-2020-annual-mobile-photography-awards/
https://newatlas.com/digital-cameras/national-winners-2020-sony-world-photography-awards-gallery/

Quotes:

“A free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular”
Adlai Stevenson (1900-1965)

Scanner:

Bloke who was SIM jacked twice by Bitcoin thieves gets green light to sue telco for millions
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/02/26/crypto_theft_att_judge/

This one graph shows why ‘Flattening The Curve’ is so critical for COVID-19 right now
https://www.sciencealert.com/dragging-out-the-coronavirus-epidemic-is-important-in-saving-lives

Raising the Titanic’s radio room
https://hackaday.com/2020/03/04/raising-the-titanics-radio-room/

Step Up Close to the “Labrador Traps”
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/blogs/earthmatters/2020/02/28/step-up-close-to-the-labrador-traps/
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/146342/phenomenal-faults-and-folds

Chips that pass in the night: How risky is RISC-V to Arm, Intel and the others? Very risky.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/03/09/risc_v_intel_amd_arm/

Brass-era Renault Vanderbilt Grand Prix Racer for sale
https://newatlas.com/brass-era-renault-vanderbilt-grand-prix-racer-for-sale/

DNA test company sells rights to drug compound based on customers’ genetic data
https://www.sciencealert.com/23andme-has-sold-its-first-drug-based-on-its-consumer-s-personal-data

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
15 March 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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