Winding Down
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net, technology, science and other news
by Alan Lenton
25 April 2021
Thanks to everyone for their patience with the erratic nature of this newsletter at the moment. And I guess I should tell you now that there won’t be an issue next week because it’s a UK holiday – May Day, I believe. Dancing round the may pole, morris dancers and all that. But we will be back the following week on 9 May.
We have a fun-packed issue this time covering SpaceX/Starlink, TACS updates, the three-body problem, predicting physical events, the EM Drive, and Open Source security.
Pictures looks at interior design, and the quote will make any techie smile.
Finally URLs in the Scanner section point your browser in the direction of the UK Cyber Security Council, IoT (in)security, Google’s FLoC, online spending, the UK taxman, SpaceX’s Starship program, and the question of ‘Who owns Linux’.
Stay Safe,
Alan Lenton
Publishing schedule: No issue next week. Next issue 9 May
Credits: Thanks to readers Fi and Barb for drawing my attention to material for Winding Down.
Essays:
The first essay I’d like to draw your attention to is an interesting piece on SpaceX, and how Starlink is about to become the first, and possibly only, global ISP, and at little or no cost to SpaceX itself. There are a whole set of interconnected reasons for this and Cringley, the author, makes a pretty convincing case. This is one of those pieces of analysis that even if you end up not agreeing, it’s well worth a read , because of the completely different light it casts on its subject!
https://www.cringely.com/2021/04/20/starlink-is-a-global-isp-built-at-zero-cost-to-spacex-enabling-nasas-artemis-launch/
Science Alert has an interesting piece about how a teacher asked his university students to bring back samples of food from their home towns when they came back from the spring break. This was part of a way of showing that there was still fallout from the atmospheric atomic weapons testing in the 1950s and ‘60s. The results were not exactly what he expected! Read more to find out the details.
https://www.sciencealert.com/american-honey-still-contains-radioactive-fallout-from-nuclear-tests-decades-ago
Aerotech:
The US Federal Aviation regulators have issued instructions for private jet operators to update their collision avoidance software. It seems that there is a flaw in the Garmin TCAS which causes it to tell the pilot that they are too close to another aircraft when, in fact, they are an acceptable distance apart. The Federal Aviation Administration is worried that in avoiding a false alarm they will move into the flight path of another aircraft.
While that is a possibility, I don’t think that’s the real problem in this case. The real problem is psychology. If you give enough false alarms, then sooner or later the pilot is going to start to ignore the alarms, and eventually one of the alarms will be real and lead to a mid-air collision!
https://www.theregister.com/2021/04/22/garmin_tcas_software_collision_risks_faa/
Physics:
Some 300 years ago Isaac Newton succeeded is explaining the motion of the planets around the sun. This is what became known as the two-body problem. He also had a crack at what has become known as the three-body problem. Earth and the Sun is a two body problem, Earth, Sun and the Moon is a three-body problem. He failed to find a general formula for the three-body problem, and that failure has annoyed generations of mathematicians and physicists ever since.
Now there is some movement on the issue from researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Racah Institute of Physics. They haven’t exactly solved it – more a step along the way allowing a prediction of the probability for each of the three bodies to escape from the system...
https://phys.org/news/2021-04-theory-centuries-old-physics-problem.html
Science:
Phys.org has an interesting piece about shallow but dangerous landslides in California. Among other things it is very indicative of the limits of predictions – even with computer models. Often it’s easy enough to say that something -could- happen, but virtually impossible to say when, if at all, it will happen...
https://phys.org/news/2021-02-shallow-dangerous-landslides-size.html
And so to the legendary ‘EM Drive’. For those of you who’ve not come across it, the EM Drive was a rocket engine which was supposed to provide thrust without producing any exhaust! The problem was that the thrust was extremely weak, and it was difficult to show that any force produced was actually thrust rather than, say, expansion of metal parts, or some such problem.
Does it really work or not? No one has been able to convincingly explain the physics if it is working. The question has rumbled on for years, as more and more sensitive test rigs have become available.
Now, read on at URL for details of the latest set of tests which should resolve the issue once and for all...
https://www.sciencealert.com/in-a-comprehensive-test-the-impossible-em-drive-has-again-failed-to-produce-thrust
Security:
I’m a fan of open source software – after all I open sourced the source code for my game, Federation, when people continued playing it after 30 years! However, I would be one of the first to admit that there are problems – especially in the realm of security. And there are a lot more security holes that most will admit. The obvious solution to the problem is simple: all those companies out there (especially the big ones) who use open source code in their business software, need to allocate a programmer or two to maintaining the open source software they use, and putting the fixes back to the code base.
Tech republic has a piece on open source security flaws – very worrying – with some suggestions for how users of the code can protect themselves.
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-open-source-security-flaws-pose-a-threat-to-organizations/
Pictures:
Just one set of pictures this week. It features interior design and shows just what you can do with bent plywood and left over 19th Century machinery!
https://newatlas.com/architecture/aia-interior-awards-2021/
Quote:
“Rage Against the Machine never specified what type of machine they were furious with but I reckon it was probably a printer.”
Spotted on Twitter! Posted by @JohnMoynes
Scanner:
Their ‘next job could be in cyber’: UK Cyber Security Council launches itself by pointing world+dog to domain it doesn’t own
https://www.theregister.com/2021/04/06/uk_cybersecurity_council_domain_fail_launch/
100 million more IoT devices are exposed—and they won’t be the last
https://www.wired.com/story/namewreck-iot-vulnerabilities-tcpip-millions-devices/
Google’s FLoC flies into headwinds as internet ad industry braces for instability
https://www.theregister.com/2021/04/17/google_floc_adoption/
How the COVID-19 Pandemic has accelerated the shift to online spending
https://blog.ons.gov.uk/2020/09/18/how-the-covid-19-pandemic-has-accelerated-the-shift-to-online-spending/
UK taxman plonks £23bn (sorry HMRC meant £23m) on the table, asks vendors: OK, so what can you do for us in terms of ‘mobility services’? Shuffling the pork barrel again.
https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/15/hmrc_mobility_services_pre_market_engagement/
Putting SpaceX’s Starship program in the proper context
https://www.thespacereview.com/article/4160/1
Yep, the ‘Who owns Linux?’ case is back from the dead
https://www.theregister.com/2021/04/06/xinuous/
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
25 April 2021
Alan Lenton is a retired 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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