Winding Down
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net, technology, science and other news
by Alan Lenton
19 September 2021
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Stop Press:
As we go to press – or rather the digital equivalent thereof – news is coming in of armed men entering the Google offices in Russia and forcing employees to remove the app of Putin’s opposition from the store... If nothing else, this raises questions of whether Google should continue to operate in the Russia...
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It’s been very quiet this week. Must be what journalists call the ‘Silly Season’. However, I did manage to find one or two pieces of interest. First is some interesting stuff on AI, then a great story on a crime sting, followed by an update on the James Webb Space Telescope, plus some rather alarming stuff of the security of orbital devices and a plan to find underground stuff in the UK.
Pictures covers the Ice Age, photos of microscopic creatures, and some strange Sci-Fi type ones. The quote is from a British comedienne which should make you smile.
Scanner covers a couple of security items and UK government IT.
Hopefully, you’ll find something of interest in that little lot!
Enjoy!
Alan Lenton
Publishing schedule: No issue next week – next Issue 3 October.
Credits: Thanks to readers Fi and Barb for drawing my attention to material for Winding Down.
Artificial Intelligence:
I’ve noticed that the focus in AI is changing. It’s moving away from a concentration on AI algorithms to a more ‘holistic’ approach. By that I mean wider issues such as how to build meaningful, non-discriminatory, datasets, modelling intentions rather than actions and even figuring out how to stop AIs cheating!
This is a long overdue, and very welcome move, but it’s also an indication of the fact that the current level of AI ‘out in the wild’ is not really up to the things it’s tasked to carry out.
As a way of showing the sort of research now starting to be carried out I thought I’d draw your attention to a stats set called LOKI, recently pre-presented on arXiv which contains ‘carefully labelled images of different agents (e.g., pedestrians, bicycles, cars, etc.) on the street, captured from the perspective of a driver’. This is then used to reason about the agents’ long term goals to predict their trajectories.
The sociologist in me is cheering wildly!
https://techxplore.com/news/2021-09-loki-intention-dataset-pedestrian-vehicle.html
Crime:
The Guardian newspaper has a fabulous story about what must be the ultimate sting. It was based around an encrypted mobile phone system called An0m. The handsets cost US$1,700 each – if you knew where to obtain them. Crooks, especially drug gangs, flocked to buy them. Only one problem. The whole thing was being run by the Australian police force, and every message sent was copied to the police (who, of course, also had the decryption keys).
The sting ran from its launch in 2018 through to 7 June 2021 when acting on the information gathered via An0n 800 arrests were made around the world!
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/sep/11/inside-story-most-daring-surveillance-sting-in-history
Space:
Here’s a date for your diary – 18 December 2021. That’s the date set for the launch of the much delayed James Webb Space Telescope. Work on the project started in 1996, and it was supposed to be launched in 2007. Needless to say it wasn’t, and in the meantime its budget is now twenty times its original one.
I must confess to being a little cynical about its chances of being successfully launched and getting working on the new date...
https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/09/james_webb_telescope/
If your paranoia is not already at its maximum level, then it’s time to have a look at another Register piece, this time on hacking orbital hardware. (If it’s already maxed, turn the volume up to 11!)
The truth it that devices in orbit are just as vulnerable as devices on earth – and a lot more dangerous. Those of us down here on the ground are a lot more dependent on orbital technology than we realised.
Take a look – if you aren’t paranoid about it now, you will be afterwards...
https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/02/in_space_no_security/
Utilities:
I’m sure you will all be delighted to know that the UK has a major project under way to map out the UK’s sub-surface assets – utility pipes, cables and the like. The idea is that knowing where this stuff is will save time and money when developing new stuff, both underground or on the surface. Sounds like a nice idea, but I have my doubts about how rapidly it will go out of date.
In the mean time maybe they should start with the legendary 4,000 holes in Blackburn, Lancashire...
https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/08/new_digital_project_to_map/
Pictures:
Our first bunch of pictures this week comes from an impressive visualisation of what the ice age one kilometre thick ice sheet would have looked like if the city of Dundee had been in existence at the time. It takes a few moments to realise what you are actually looking at. Dundee is situated at roughly the place where the massive ice sheet came down to in the last ice age.
Ironically, in the light of subsequent events, when I was growing up in the 1950s and 60s scientists were seriously worried about another ice age starting...
https://www.sciencealert.com/recreation-of-ice-age-glacier-over-scotland-looks-like-something-from-game-of-thrones
Some of the entries in Nikon’s Small World photo competition are on display on the Science Alert web site. I find them rather creepy, but they are impressive...
https://www.sciencealert.com/award-winning-microscopic-images-dazzle-us-with-glimpses-into-hidden-worlds
And lastly some very strange art taken from Simon Stalenhag’s book ‘Passagen/The Electric State’. I have no idea how you would describe the type of pictures they are!
http://simonstalenhag.se/es.html
Quotes:
I couldn’t resist this one. It’s from Beatrice Lillie, an English comedienne, to a waiter who had spilt soup down her neck:
‘Never darken my Dior again!’
Scanner:
Travis CI quietly fixed a bug that exposed secret keys
https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/15/travis_ci_leak/
De-identify, re-identify: Anonymised data’s dirty little secret
https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/16/anonymising_data_feature/
UK celebrates 25 years of wasteful, ‘underperforming’ government IT projects
https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/23/nao_govt_it_projects/
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
19 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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