Winding Down
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net, technology, science and other news
by Alan Lenton
16 August 2020
Another Sunday, another Winding Down. Not a lot to tell you about on the tech front this week, so the issue is a little shorter than usual. You can find out how to update a Boeing 747, how to crash the universe (perhaps), money laundering and digital currencies, printers and the pandemic, and a little bit of rocket science!
There’s no quote this week, but the picture is very creepy (in more ways than one).
Scanner has material on Google, Elon Musk, Earth’s magnetic field, the Meow attacks, Australia v. Google and Facebook, and the venerable Whole Earth Catalog on CD-Rom.
Enjoy!
Alan
Credits: Thanks to readers Fi and Barb, for drawing my attention to material for Winding Down.
Updates:
I mentioned last week that the last Boeing 747 is coming off the assembly line in the next year or so, but what I didn’t know was how you (well not you, but the plane’s operators) update the navigation database, which needs to be done every 28 days. And, no, you can’t just plug it in to the internet and download the update! In fact, the update arrives on a venerable 3.5” floppy disk!
Actually, I didn’t know you could still get 3.5” floppies...
https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/10/boeing_747_floppy_drive_updates_walkthrough/
Astronomy and Cosmology:
Every so often the idea that the universe, including all of us, is just a simulation on the equivalent of a computer being run by advanced beings. It could even be true, but, assuming they don’t get hacked, how would you tell if it was true or not? Well, one recent suggestion is that we, the digital people, should crash the simulation!
Nice idea, but how do you crash a simulation from the inside? Well that’s a problem, but the latest suggestion is that you do something that will cause a memory overflow, which should crash the whole system. And how do you cause a memory overflow? Easy (Ha!) by setting up our own, endlessly recursive simulations that keep on setting up new versions until the memory runs out!
More to the point, perhaps, is the question of how you, as an in game entity, would know that it had crashed (always assuming that it was fired up again)? It’s not as though you could spot a time gap in the enclosing system’s clock. The simulation would have its own clock. What would be different that you would know was different?
As a former games programmer, I can tell you that should a properly programmed game or simulation crash, then the code will ensure that the restart will ensure flawless continuity. In any case it would definitely have code to prevent memory overflows!
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/could-we-force-the-universe-to-crash/
Digital Currencies:
One of the things we hear continuously from lawmakers and their enforcement agencies is that digital currencies are used for ‘money laundering’. Now, given that money laundering means changing ill-gotten gains into legit cash in a way that is untraceable, I always wondered how the powers that be thought that a system which has a publicly available ledger with each entry cryptographically signed and containing every transaction, could be used to successfully launder money...
Well, Cointelegraph has the full works on money laundering (should you ever be rich enough to have the money to launder, this is the place to bone up on how to do it), and how digital currencies are far from ideal tools for use in any of the stages involved. Actually, the biggest offenders when it comes to money laundering seem to be ... BANKS!
Last year the authorities handed out fines totalling US$8.14 million for money laundering – two thirds of which were levied on banks.
Anyway, I really recommend reading this article (it’s fairly lengthy) because it’s really interesting in its own right. All you ever wanted to know about how the money laundering system works!
https://cointelegraph.com/news/comparing-money-laundering-with-cryptocurrencies-and-fiat
Computers:
Could it be – dare I even consider it – the legendary paperless office may finally be about to take off as a result of two things. The first is the rise of cloud storage, and the second is the pandemic home working acceleration.
In 2019 six million pages were printed globally – every minute!
Can’t say that the potential demise of printer makers, with their nasty habits of fleecing owners for consumables and tricks to stop you using third party items, is going to make me cry.
Actually, I’m looking forward to it!
https://www.theregister.com/2020/06/19/idc_printing_plunge_prediction/
Rocket Science:
Ever wondered how you test rockets? And I’m not referring to the Tom Lehrer/Wernher von Braun method (“‘Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That’s not my department,’ says Wernher von Braun.”)
The space review has a really interesting piece on how to test and find out without simply firing them off to see what happens. It’s a classic example of how engineers work, and I’d definitely recommend it !
https://www.thespacereview.com/article/3986/1
Pictures:
Ick! A nasty picture – mini-video, in fact – of a dried up river suddenly filling up with a nasty black sludge. It’s like something out of a horror movie, but it’s real!
https://www.sciencealert.com/bizarre-river-of-black-sludge-in-arizona-looks-like-a-sci-fi-villain
Scanner:
Whoops, our bad, we may have ‘accidentally’ let Google Home devices record your every word, sound – oops
https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/08/ai_in_brief/
How Elon Musk aims to revolutionise battery technology
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-53067009
The mysterious anomaly weakening Earth’s magnetic field seems to be splitting
https://www.sciencealert.com/mysterious-anomaly-weakening-earth-s-magnetic-field-seems-to-be-splitting-into-two
https://www.theregister.com/2020/05/15/magnetic_north_pole/
Ongoing Meow attack has nuked >1,000 databases without telling anyone why
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/07/more-than-1000-databases-have-been-nuked-by-mystery-meow-attack/
Australia to force Google and Facebook to pay for news and reveal algorithm changes before they whack web traffic
https://www.theregister.com/2020/07/31/australian_draft_media_bargaining_code/
The Whole Earth on CD-ROM in HyperCard in your browser
http://blog.archive.org/2020/07/08/the-whole-earth-on-cd-rom-in-hypercard-in-your-browser/
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
16 August 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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