Winding Down
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net, technology, science and other news
by Alan Lenton
8 November 2020
Not a lot to talk about this week. The US election has been the main topic of news. The only comment I have to make is that virtually every non-US person I heard or read, failed to understand how these things work and what they were seeing.
In the meantime, I’ve managed to pull together a few bits and pieces that are not about the election! First there’s a couple of updates – one on Huawei and China’s digital yuan, and one about flying American Airlines on the Boeing 737-Max. There’s some stuff on the blockchain, one piece on using it with gin and another about a mega survey of its use.
There’s an essay on people’s satisfaction with their housing, especially during lockdown, and an amusing snippet on a hacker quiz. There’s a load of pictures, some soothing, some otherwise, including a video clip of a car driven by AI. The quote is from the politician Benjamin Disraeli.
The Scanner section has URLs pointing to material on Vikings under a grocery store, right to repair ballots, new names for computer bugs, an old computer manual discovered, and an auction of KGB ‘tools’.
Hopefully, next week the cupboard will be a little less bare!
Stay safe!
Alan Lenton
Publishing schedule: No issue – 29 November
Credits: Thanks to readers Fi and Barb, for drawing my attention to material for Winding Down.
Updates:
I mentioned China’s plans for its own digital currency last week. Well, this week there was an announcement that Huawei is planning to add a digital yuan wallet app to its flagship Mate 40 mobile phone.
https://www.theregister.com/2020/11/02/huawei_mate_40_digital_yuan/
And, of course, no Winding Down Update section would be complete without an item on Boeing and their much cursed 737-Max aircraft. The Aviation News website reports that when the aircraft is finally allowed back into the air with passengers, American Airlines plans to have the captain ring the passengers a few days before the flight with soothing messages about how safe it is after the changes have been made!
Frankly, if they did that to me, it would make me even less likely to want to board a Boeing 737-MAX to fly anywhere!
https://www.avweb.com/aviation-news/american-pilots-to-reassure-passengers-before-max-flights/
Blockchain & Digital currency:
Cointelegraph has an interesting piece on how Austrian gin makers plan to use blockchain technology to guarantee the bottle’s rarity. I suspect that this sort of thing – especially validating the provenance of items in a supply chain – is going to be one of the major uses of the blockchain in the future.
Linking this technology to things like NFC chips is going to speed up and secure supply chain tracking over the next few years. Eventually, I suspect someone will find a way around it, and there will then be fixes, and so on. But in the meantime this sort of thing can only confirm the flexibility and security of blockchains.
Personally, though I prefer Bombay Sapphire in my G&T...
https://cointelegraph.com/news/austrian-gin-makers-to-use-blockchain-to-guarantee-bottles-rarity [via ADVFN]
And no sooner had I finished the previous piece than I spotted an article in TechRepublic about a survey to find out about blockchain standards just launched by the World Economic Forum and the Global Blockchain Business Council (who I’ve never heard of before). It will be interesting to see what they come up with, since they do seem to be talking to a lot of different bodies.
They don’t seem to be going to talk any hackers though. This might prove to be a serious flaw!
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/world-economic-forum-and-gbbc-launch-comprehensive-effort-to-survey-global-blockchain-standards/
Essays:
Just one essay this week, and it’s a timely one as the UK goes into a second lockdown. It’s looking at a study that found that people in newer homes found lockdown more difficult to deal with. The figures relate to the UK, where standards have been slipping for a number of years. Significantly, people in neighbourhoods built in the last ten years recorded the lowest levels of satisfaction.
Personally, I’ve noticed that newer buildings have seriously low levels of general storage space. In fact, in the late 1990s, when I moved into a newly built apartment, it was noticeable that everyone in ground floor apartments, which had gardens, had built a garden shed to provide the missing storage space!
It’s an interesting read and as usual with ‘The Conversation’ website’s excellent writing.
https://theconversation.com/people-living-in-newer-homes-found-lockdown-more-difficult-new-research-147724
Security:
I confess, when I read this story I was smirking! It seems that Deloitte, the big international accounting and consulting company, decided to put a “Test Your Hacker IQ” up on one of their sites.
Unfortunately...
There was a security flaw which exposed the user name and password in clear text! How embarrassing...
https://www.theregister.com/2020/11/05/deloitte_hacker_test/
Pictures:
New Atlas has a selection of rather nice pictures from the International Photography Awards. My favourites? Number 2, 7, 8, and 28,
https://newatlas.com/photography/lucie-2020-international-photography-awards-winners-gallery/
There’s also a classy picture of an Icelandic beach in the Smithsonian Magazine...
https://photocontest.smithsonianmag.com/photocontest/detail/painted-3/
Oh and I thought you might like this video clip of a car being controlled and driven by an Artificial Intelligence...
https://clips.twitch.tv/ColdbloodedCredulousTriangleArsonNoSexy
Quotes:
“No government can be long secure without a formidable Opposition.”
Benjamin Disraeli – British politician 1804-1881
Scanner:
Shoppers at Dublin grocery store glimpse Viking history beneath their feet
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/dublin-grocery-store-shoppers-glimpse-viking-history-beneath-their-feet-180976150/
Voters in US state approve a landmark right-to-repair ballot measure
https://www.theregister.com/2020/11/04/right_to_repair/
CERT/CC: ‘Sensational’ bug names spark fear, hype – so we’ll give flaws our own labels... like Suggestive Bunny
https://www.theregister.com/2020/11/03/cert_bug_names/
Discovery: User manual of the oldest surviving computer in the world
https://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/247521-discovery-user-manual-of-the-oldest-surviving-computer-in-the-world/fulltext
You could own a lipstick gun, a poison-tipped umbrella and other KGB spy tools
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/spy-museum-selling-most-its-stealthy-tools-180976223/
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
8 November 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.
If you have any questions or comments about the articles on my web site, click here to send me email.