Winding Down
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net, technology, science and other news
by Alan Lenton
17 October 2021
Winding Down is back. Apologies to the absence last week, due to circumstances beyond my control. So this week we have stuff on Boeing (of course), social media, sand, AI and Lord of the Rings, footballer data, and DeepMind and the next hour’s weather. The picture is of a fireball over Canada, and the quotes are about Facebook.
Scanner has URLs pointing to material on EU/Apple anti-trust, mRNA vaccines, the time zone database, text message mega-hack, LAN cable transmissions, AI and patents, and finally 5g hype.
Enjoy!
Alan Lenton
Publishing schedule: no issue next week (24 October), next Issue 31 October...
Credits: Thanks to readers Fi and Barb for drawing my attention to material for Winding Down.
Updates:
Oh yes – I nearly missed an update on our old friends Boeing, who are still trying to get their Starliner space capsule working properly. NASA haven’t exactly given up on Boeing, but, significantly, they have transferred two of the astronauts slated to go in the Starliner capsule to Space X’s Crew Dragon capsule.
Transferring astronauts to the opposition’s capsule is a slap in the face for Boeing, no matter how many nice things NASA said in an effort to play down the matter. At the very least it suggests that NASA don’t expect Boeing to make the agreed schedule...
https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/07/nasa_commercial_crew_changes/
Essays:
The first essay I’d like to draw your attention to is an interesting and provocative piece by free market philosopher Gaspard Koenig. He argues that we should treat social media and subject it to age based regulation in the same way as we do alcohol. In other words you would not be allowed access the likes of Facebook and Twitter until you reached the age of majority for your country.
At one level I quite like the idea. However, I can see problems. The obvious one is the problem of how you figure out that someone online is above or below the age limit. Theoretically, the parents and the ‘shopkeeper’, eg Facebook, should be enforcing the limit, but we all know how difficult that is...
But there is another problem. How are you going to define social media? The net is about communication – no matter what you are looking at, the potential for online social interaction is there. To take an example, the game I wrote 30 odd years ago, Federation, is a game, but to get anywhere in it you have to interact with other players. Obviously, players used it for more than just game conversations. The players organised offline meetings, parties, and get togethers, and a surprisingly large number of people met their spouses playing Federation. At one stage we had three generations of some families playing on the game at the same time!
Does this mean that the game should be classed as social media, that teenagers should be banned from playing? And that’s only one example – there are plenty of other examples out there. It just isn’t possible any longer. Even twenty years ago the idea of having access to parts of the net being age based would have been a non-starter. Now it’s even more so.
https://worldcrunch.com/opinion-analysis/social-media-ban/let-s-stop-adultizing-children
Our second essay is, hopefully, a little less contentious. It’s an essay on the subject of sand. And it makes fascinating reading. As the author puts it, of all the different types of matter, ”sand is surely the most untrustworthy, the most shifting and shifty.” Highly recommended!
https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/the-dust-that-measures-all-our-time
Artificial Intelligence:
First it was AI playing the ‘Game of Life’, and winning. Then the AI moved on to chequers, draughts and like. This was followed by chess, and recently Go. But that’s not the end, it seems that researchers using Monte Carlo tree search algorithms have taught AI to play the Lord of the Rings card game!
What has it got in its pocketses? Tell me that, then, AI...
https://techxplore.com/news/2021-10-monte-carlo-tree-algorithms-lord.html
Data Privacy:
Fascinating. it turns out that performance, and other, data on UK professional footballers (soccer) is regularly traded, not just between clubs but also with betting, entertainment and data collection firms. Since, it seems, no one asked the players whose data is being collected and used, for their permission, they are kicking off a GDPR case in the courts.
It seems to me that there is likely to be a lot of sports people watching this case, given the amount of money tied up in professional sport in this country. I suspect it’s going to be a match all the way up through the courts between the players on one hand and the clubs and the betting industry on the other. Oh! And I wouldn’t be surprised if we see a few own goals along the way!
https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/12/footballer_data_trade_case/
Weather:
It seems that the engineers at Google’s DeepMind have improved the accuracy of forecasting for the next hour or so. Impressive, but I’d point out that my father, formerly an officer in the Fleet Air Arm (the Brit navy aircraft carrier people) could step outside, look around at the sky and the current weather condition and then accurately predict the weather for next six hours! He reckoned it wasn’t possible to predict longer than that for British weather systems.
So Google, you’ve got someway to go yet to catch up with humans. Why don’t you just send a man with a video camera over to Japan to watch the butterfly?
https://www.sciencealert.com/ai-is-getting-much-better-at-predicting-the-next-hour-of-weather
Pictures:
APOD – that stands for ‘Astronomy Picture Of the Day’ – is a NASA web site that carries astronomy pictures. As always with this sort of site they are a mixed bunch, but this last week there was a really nice picture of the fireball over Lake Louise in Canada. Take a look and see what you think...
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap211012.html
Quotes:
Social Media Issues
“The issues with Facebook specifically and social media in general are enormously multifaceted and complex. Anyone who tells you that there are simple solutions that can be quickly implemented without doing major collateral damage to users and society broadly, is simply incorrect.”
Lauren Weinstein in PFIR newsletter
Or, if you’d like a different take on the Facebook outage...
“The planet survived six hours without Facebook. Let’s make it longer next time.”
Headline in The Register
Scanner:
EU readies ‘antitrust charges’ against Apple Pay for locking rivals out of iPhone NFC chip
https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/06/eu_apple_nfc/
Study of 6 million Americans finds no significant side effects from mRNA vaccines
https://www.sciencealert.com/study-of-over-6-million-americans-finds-no-significant-side-effects-from-mrna-vaccines
A fork for the time-zone database?
https://lwn.net/Articles/870478/
Company that routes billions of text messages quietly says it was hacked
https://www.vice.com/en/article/z3xpm8/company-that-routes-billions-of-text-messages-quietly-says-it-was-hacked
LAN cables can be sniffed to reveal network traffic with a $30 setup, says researcher
https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/14/lantenna_ethernet_cable_rf_emissions/
AI cannot be the inventor of a patent, appeals court rules
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-58668534
5G hype and exaggeration – be clear and realistic about your claims!
https://disruptivewireless.blogspot.com/2021/10/5g-hype-and-exaggeration-be-clear-and.html
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
17 October 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.
If you have any questions or comments about the articles on my web site, click here to send me email.