Winding Down
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net, technology and science news
by Alan Lenton
22 March 2020
A slightly different format this week. There are only three main stories, but they’re a bit longer than usual. To compensate for that there are more ‘Scanner’ URLs than usual. I’ve avoided stories about the pandemic, since I suspect readers are getting enough of that from the regular press. I must confess though, that I was amused to find out that while the rest of the Western world is hoarding toilet paper (which I’m sure says something about our civilisation, though I don’t know what) the inhabitants of California are panic buying and hoarding a certain variety of smokable weed...
The three main stories are about the history of shipping containers, the fate of the universe, and a CIA hacking trial. There’s a couple of landscape at sunset pictures and some videos of the Earth and Moon from outer space, and an amusing quote from Quentin Crisp.
The Scanner section contains pointers to stories about a US$2million scam, the next DARPA X-Plane, art and money laundering, face masks and facial recognition cameras, Apple and back pay, geopolitics and the end of oil dependency, the IT hype cycle, a health service DDOS attack, and NASA deep space missions. Something for everybody there, I think.
Stay safe – I don’t have so many readers that I can afford to lose some of you!
Alan
Credits: Thanks to readers Barb and Fi for drawing my attention to material for Winding Down.
Transport:
The BBC web site has a good story about how shipping containers came into use. Since these containers are critical to the blossoming of world trade to what it is today, it’s an interesting and fascinating story. I would point out, though, that there is one piece missing from the story – the owners of the goods being shipped and their attitude to containers. They were massively in favour of containers, and to find out why, I’ll tell you a little story from my (misspent) youth, about the time when there were no shipping containers...
It was 1970-71-ish and I had recently moved to Liverpool. One evening I was sitting in a pub on the dock road having an after work beer with a couple of docker friends before I went home.
Suddenly, the door opened and a big burly docker came in pushing a rack of highly fashionable and expensive looking ladies dresses. He took it round the room selling dresses to various other patrons, until he got to our table, “Evenin’, any one of these your missus will like for a fiver (five UK pounds) – over £100 to buy in the shops!” he told me. I declined on the grounds that my wife liked blue and there were no blue dresses on his rack.
He looked the rack over and said, “Hmmm, you’re right. I’ll have to see what I can do.”
After he’d gone, one of my friends winked and said “Fell off a lorry in the docks.” I was amazed at the casualness, but soon forgot as we talked about the Irish ‘troubles’. Next day I was in the same pub with my mates when the same docker reappeared, pushing a new rack, this time full of BLUE dresses! They’d ‘fallen off a lorry’ to my specifications!
And that was a classic example of why the owners of goods that had to be shipped were heavily in favour of containers, which they filled on their own premises, and had customs and excise seal and then sent off to the docks. You can drop a wooden crate so it breaks open and remove some of the contents, but it’s a lot more difficult to ‘accidentally’ break open a corrugated steel box, 8ft (2.4m) wide, 8ft 6in (2.6m) high, and 40ft (12m) long weighing anything up to 29.5 tons (26,750kg) fully laden! Before containers became near universal, theft was endemic in docks around the world...
And do I hear people asking what I did? I bought two dresses for my wife, of course! I never forgot that experience, as you can tell, and fifteen years later when I was writing my online game, that burly docker became the model for the space port thieving stevedores in my Federation II multi-player space trading game!
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-38305512
Astronomy & Cosmology:
The fate of the universe has always been a matter of some fascination for humans ever since the earliest civilizations arose on our planet. Lots of dates have been proposed, most of the earlier ones have now passed without the prophesied cataclysms. Of course, the chances of humanity still being around at the ‘end’ of the universe are, to say the least, pretty minimal!
By the middle of the 20th Century there were two main theories extant – either that the universe would expand with increasing speed, or that it would oscillate between expansion and contraction. The answer to this lay in the mathematical constant known as the Hubble constant, and in August 1951 the 200-inch telescope at Mt. Palomar in California came up with an answer that showed that the universe was expanding, not oscillating.
But that, as is the case with all science was not the end of the story. There are two completely different empirical ways of working out the Hubble constant, the original way, and a way using a particular type of star, whose spectrum is sufficiently regular to be able to work out the value of the constant – and they give different results. (For the record the results are 67 and 73 and the units are kilometres per second per megaparsec.)
Now a piece of work by a group of scientists has shown a value of 73.3 just adding to the dispute without resolving it. Overall it seems that there is a flaw in our model of the universe. How this will be finally resolved (if it ever is) I don’t know, but I suspect that final resolution will be a long way in the future.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/it-seems-the-universe-might-be-expanding/
https://aeon.co/essays/how-they-pinned-a-single-momentous-number-on-the-universe
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/01/10/h0licow_hubble_constant/
Legal:
I can only shake my head in disbelief at the recent trial of the alleged ‘Vault 7’ (CIA secret hacking tools) hacker. The defendant was a classic geek, employed by the CIA, unpleasant, argumentative, secretive, and obnoxious, to mention only a few of his less annoying traits. He was also, as you would expect from someone employed by the CIA as a hacker, very good at his chosen profession.
I’ve known quite a lot of people like him in the 40 odd years I’ve been programming. It is possible to manage them, especially if you are yourself a geek. But that, I imagine, is not the management style used in the CIA, and if there is one thing guaranteed to raise the hackles of an uber-geek, it’s conventional management style!
So, when the collection of the CIA’s top secret hacking tools appeared on WikiLeaks, our geek, one Joshua Schulte, seemed to be the obvious candidate. Only one problem. There was no convincing evidence of his having broken into the CIA! Well, as the prosecution hastened to point out, there wouldn’t be, because his day job was to hack into computers without leaving any evidence of his activities!
Actually it turned out during the course of the trail that a 12 year old (perhaps one of the ones I mentioned last week with Kali Linux on their computer) could have broken into the CIA’s top secret hacking tools machine. The password for the tools area? ‘123ABCdef’. The root login password? ‘mysweetsummer’. Those passwords were even posted to the intranet used by the elite programming unit, the CIA Operational Support Branch (OSB).
The CIA must be regretting that this prosecution ever started, especially now the trial has ended with a hung jury presumably partially composed of people who have ‘interacted’ with cranky geeks before! The jury did, however, find him guilty on two counts – contempt of court, and making false statements to the FBI.
Let’s face it, the only losers in this shambles were the CIA. Various other spy organisations around the world will be smirking over a drink of their favourite beverage. The CIA must be thankful that the pandemic is probably diverting the attention of US citizens from its black eye.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/03/05/cia_leak_trial/?page=1
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/03/09/cia_hacking_trial_verdict/
Pictures:
For starters this week we have two rather nice pictures from the Smithsonian Magazine photo contest. The first is Sunset over Lake Wanaka in New Zealand, and the second a picture of a Guanaco in the Chilean Andes at sunset.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/photocontest/photo-of-the-day/2020-03-17/that-wanaka-sunset/
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/photocontest/photo-of-the-day/2020-03-19/guanaco-at-sunset-with-torres-del-paine-in-the-background/
W also have a set of videos taken from space. I particularly recommend the footage of Earth taken at night from the space station. There is also a video of the Earth rising over the horizon of the moon taken by the Selene satellite, and a rather nice sequence from NASA’s Deep Space Climate Observatory showing the Moon transiting the Earth.
https://www.sciencealert.com/find-your-serenity-in-these-awe-inspiring-views-of-earth-from-space
Quotes:
“An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last instalment missing.”
Quentin Crisp – English writer (1908-99)
Oxford Dictionary of Quotations.
Scanner:
Fella accused of ripping off Cisco, Amazon, iRobot, and others to the tune of US$2m by fraudulently demanding replacements for tech gear
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/03/04/amazon_cisco_product_return_scam_charges/
The next DARPA X-Plane won’t maneuver like any plane before it
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-next-darpa-x-plane-wont-maneuver-like-any-plane-before-it/
Deploying innovative technology could help combat the dark art of money laundering
https://www.euronews.com/2020/02/11/deploying-innovative-technology-could-help-combat-the-dark-art-of-money-laundering-view
Frustration grows in China as face masks compromise facial recognition [smirk – AL]
https://qz.com/1796833/coronavirus-face-masks-foil-facial-recognition-cameras/
Not a Genius move after all: Apple must cough up $$$ in back pay for store staff forced to wait for bag searches
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/02/13/apple_bagsearching_employees/
What will the end of oil dependence mean for geopolitics?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-50974609
If you’re looking for a textbook example of an IT hype cycle, let spin be your guide
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/03/16/dissecting_it_hype_spintronics/
US Health and Human Services targeted by DDoS scum at just the time it’s needed to be up and running
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/03/16/hhs_reports_cyberattack/
How NASA approaches deep space missions
https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2020/02/24/how-nasa-approaches-deep-space-missions/
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
22 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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