Winding Down
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net, technology, science and other news
by Alan Lenton
12 September 2021
Another shot of Winding Down hits the presses! This week the update section features a story about -big surprise- Boeing! There’s no essays this week, instead, there are two interviews with people from the dawn of history – the history of the internet, that is – Gene Hoffman and Vint Cerf. Then we have a story from 9/11 (20 years ago this week), a paper on severe solar storms, a closer look at modern day recruitment and its failings, and how not to test new software.
Pictures looks at shooting wildfire pics – and includes an interview with the photographer. Quotes come from Olympic gymnast Simone Biles and from West Virginia Governor Gov. Jim Justice.
Finally, there are a slew of URLs in the scanner section – fusion power, a Starlink legal challenge, conquering polio, UK government IT projects, drone hacking and the military, cryptocurrency and gender, and, finally, US Air Force chief software officer quits...
Hopefully, you’ll find something of interest in that little lot!
Enjoy!
Alan Lenton
Publishing schedule: Next Issue 19 September.
Credits: Thanks to readers Fi and Barb for drawing my attention to material for Winding Down.
Updates:
Ah! Yes! Once again Boeing and the 737 Max aircraft. This week the news on this front is that the directors of Boeing are being sued by the investors over the failure of the directors to take heed of the implications of the first crash and do something to ensure it wasn’t repeated. It seems that in corporate law, the Boeing investors, who lost large amounts of money when the shares dropped dramatically, are also considered victims!
I have to say it sounds really weird to me, but then so does most corporate law...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-58483150
Interviews:
The first interview is with Gene Hoffman, co-creator of the internet’s first ad blocker. Gene is talking about the early days of the nascent commercial internet. The second is with Vint Cerf, one of the co-founders of the internet who discusses the problem of digital material vanishing over time because it’s not stored on anything durable.
Fascinating reading, and perhaps a history lesson for those who didn’t live through that period.
https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/08/interview_gene_hoffman/
https://oldgoats.substack.com/p/ruminating-with-vint-cerf
History:
It’s 20 years since terrorists crashed planes into the twin towers in New York, and there have been lots of remembrances published from people who survived. One of the things that seems to have got overlooked on the way, though, is the story of the volunteers who used their boats to ferry something in the region of half a million people away from ground zero.
The current edition of Smithsonian Magazine has their story.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/911-flotilla-boats-evacuated-500000-new-yorkers-safety-180978614/
Internet & Web:
Science Alert has a report on the likely effects of severe solar storms on our increasing dependency on the Internet. The last two solar storms falling into this category were in 1859 and in 1921 – long before the internet came into being. The good news is that that local and regional services are likely to be safe because new infrastructure is fibre-optic which is not itself affected.
Undersea cables are also fibre-optic, but the repeaters placed at 30 to 90 mile intervals are vulnerable. So, the article suggests, it’s about time grid operators started taking the issue seriously
Interestingly, now I come to think about it, I don’t recall seeing any studies of the likely effects of these sort of storms on devices like smartphones – not to mention all that kit flying around in orbit...
https://www.sciencealert.com/the-next-solar-storm-could-create-an-internet-apocalypse-new-research-warns
Recruitment:
Industry is always complaining about a lack of skilled workers to fill positions. A recent report highlights a number of reasons why this is the case. To start with, one reason there is a shortage is because most of those complaining have no on-the-job training facilities, and because of the cuts in higher education funding.
But there’s another reason – Human Resources – the much maligned ‘HR’. Actually, it’s not so much HR itself as the software that HR commonly uses for recruitment – Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) and Recruiting Management/Marketing Systems (RMS). These systems are badly designed and often reject potential candidates who could easily come up to speed given a small amount of on the job training.
Ironically, many of those applicants who don’t ‘qualify’ under the stringent rules used by ATS and RMS actually have better “attitude and work ethic, productivity, quality of work, engagement, attendance, and innovation”, according to the report.
https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/08/harvard_jobs_report/
Testing:
Now here is a cautionary tale on a subject which most programmers have some knowledge of: Testing new or changed software. And the first commandment is that ‘Thou shalt not use the live data to do the testing!’ Sadly, this was ignored in Maidstone, Kent UK, when a planning officer started testing some new software to handle planning applications.
The officer thought he was in a test environment, but the data he was using was ‘live’ and he managed to reject half a dozen applications. Unfortunately, the decisions were legally binding, in spite of the fact that they were issued in error. The decisions now have to be legally overturned by a court, and that will take at least 3 months, and cost something in the region of £8,000 (approx. US$11,000).
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-kent-58487855
Pictures:
This week’s selection is both pictures and an interview. The interview is with photographer Noah Berger who has photographed more than 100 wildfires, and the interview features some of them. Even if you don’t read the interview, scroll down and look at the pictures – they are pretty amazing, especially the ones right at the end!
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/california-wildfire-photos
Quotes:
Two quotes this week.
Superstar gymnast Simone Biles to her critics: “I can’t hear you over my 7 Olympic medals”
“Republican Governor of West Virginia makes a salient point
Gov. Jim Justice (R-WV) implores people to get the vaccines, noting that
the same people who go nuts believing there are “tracking chips” in
vaccines are carrying around their phones all day. Yep.”
From Larry Weinstein’s PFIR newsletter
Scanner:
Physicists have successfully advanced a key device for producing fusion power
https://www.sciencealert.com/there-s-been-a-significant-advance-in-harnessing-the-power-of-nuclear-fusion
CentOS replacement AlmaLinux free on Azure, Microsoft to provide global network of mirrors
https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/17/almalinux_azure_microsoft/
Change to SpaceX’s Starlink internet constellation faces legal challenge
https://www.space.com/spacex-starlink-megaconstellation-fcc-viasat-dish
Conquering polio
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/conquering-polio-79115957/
UK celebrates 25 years of wasteful, ‘underperforming’ government IT projects
https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/23/nao_govt_it_projects/
Aerial threat: why drone hacking could be bad news for the military
https://theconversation.com/aerial-threat-why-drone-hacking-could-be-bad-news-for-the-military-124588
Cryptocurrency investing has a big gender problem [via ADVFN newsletter]
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/30/cryptocurrency-has-a-big-gender-problem.html
US Air Force chief software officer quits after launching Hellfire missile of a LinkedIn post at his former bosses
https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/03/usaf_chief_software_officer_quits_angry_post/
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
12 September 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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