Winding Down
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net, technology, science and other news
by Alan Lenton
20 February 2022
Hot off the press, here is your latest edition of Winding Down featuring the latest in the HP/Autonomy saga, the shades of the QuadrigaQX fiasco raise their head, the dangers of the very latest technology, peering through the space telescopes, and drinking red wine supposedly makes you less likely to catch COVID (nice excuse there!).
There’s also URLs pointing to a wide variety of other topics.
Cheers!
Alan Lenton
Publishing schedule: No issue next week. The next issue is due on 6 March.
Credits: Thanks to readers Fi and Barb for drawing my attention to material for Winding Down.
Updates:
The long running Hewlett-Packard/Autonomy alleged fraud case in which HP bought Autonomy for US$11 billion, only to have to write down the value to US$2 billion and some loose change, is drawing to an end, with the judge siding with HP. I’m no financial expert, but what struck me about the whole business was that there must have been a massive due diligence failure or the part of HP!
In the meantime, the US Department of Justice is trying to get former slippery Autonomy head Mike Lynch extradited to stand trial. The UK Home Secretary has recently approved the extradition, but that is now being appealed against by Lynch.
This one will run and run...
https://www.theregister.com/2022/01/28/hpe_multibillion_fraud_trial_mike_lynch_autonomy/
https://www.theregister.com/2022/01/28/lynch_extradition/
Some years ago I covered the fiasco of the Canadian crypto exchange QuadrigaCX – a thrilling story of the mysterious death of its founders in India, with a missing body, not to mention missing master keys, and investors owed a cool US$190 million in crypto. Well it turns out that the other co-founder of QuadrigaCX, one Michael Patryn, is, under a different name, one of the co-founders of a multi-billion dollar cryptocurrency protocol...
Investors in the crypto protocol company are taking a very close look at their investment!
https://www.vice.com/en/article/epxakz/crypto-co-founder-revealed-to-be-infamous-fraudster-investors-shaken
Essays:
IEEE Spectrum, has a case study essay which should act as a serious warning of the dangers inherent in trusting your health to the very latest technology, and, in this case, it is technology that actually worked.
In this case it was for retinal implants that helped people who had gone blind because of a genetic problem. There was no scam involved. The problem is that that the company involved, Second Sight Medical Implants, was unable to make a profit and had to discontinue the product.
Now its former patients are left without support if anything goes wrong, and retinal implants that may cause problems in the future. All in all a very sad story,
(Curious note: I couldn’t remember what IEEE stood for, and it doesn’t seem to say anywhere on it’s website! Eventually I tracked it down on Wikipedia – where else – and for the record it stands for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.)
https://spectrum.ieee.org/bionic-eye-obsolete
Astronomy & Cosmology:
Well, the James Webb Space Telescope seems to be up and running, and seems destined for the same sort of ground-breaking stuff that has made the Hubble such a household name.
We’ve all seen the Hubble pictures, and expect to see equally good material coming out of Webb in due course, but have you ever wondered who get slots of time to -use- it (and the Hubble for that matter)? It’s not as though the picture and info telescopes produce just somehow happen. NASA don’t just point it at random and hope for the best!
Well, it turns out that you can actually make proposals for an allocation of time to use the telescope by submitting the details of the project; the rules for doing this are very strict to avoid favouritism, and the projects are evaluated in a way that ensures the people evaluating the project have no information about who the proposers are.
Needless to say, the time slots for using it are massively over-subscribed! More details at:
https://www.space.com/james-webb-space-telescope-observing-time-anonymous
Surveys, Data and Statistics:
I was fascinated to find a piece in ‘Science Alert’ about a study suggesting that drinking red wine can help protect against COVID! As a drinker of wine and beer I immediately read the article avidly. The piece was an excellent explanation of how the study was flawed. As it so aptly put it, “This paper is a great example of why many studies addressing diet and health are unreliable and need to be interpreted carefully.”
Mind you, I did like the idea that drinking five or more glasses of red wine a week reduced the risk of getting COVID by 17 percent.
Joking apart this is well worth a read because it discusses common problems with these sort of surveys. Interestingly enough my immediate take on the story was different from the article, but on reflection I realised that my take was a product of my age cohort and my social background, and the fact that I’m a Brit!
My reaction was, “Of course that’s the case, you drink beer at the pub with your mates, and wine at home with your meals!”
https://www.sciencealert.com/does-drinking-red-wine-really-protect-against-covid-19-let-s-look-at-the-evidence
Pictures:
Pictures this week are from NASA’s APOD (Astronomy Picture Of the Day) site. Both are of Auroras:
The first is from Sweden...
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap220212.html
...and the second is an aurora and an erupting geyser in Yellowstone National Park!
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap220220.html
Quotes:
The Reserve Bank of India has warned about the risks of investing in cryptocurrency, saying such assets have no underlying value whatsoever, “not even a tulip”. (*)
Scanner:
University loses valuable supercomputer research after backup error wipes 77 terabytes of data
https://gizmodo.com/university-loses-valuable-supercomputer-research-after-1848286983
Alarm raised after Microsoft wins data-encoding patent
https://www.theregister.com/2022/02/17/microsoft_ans_patent/
Which government censors the tech giants the most?
https://www.comparitech.com/blog/vpn-privacy/tech-giant-censorship/
US-China chip cold war? It’s only helping the Middle Kingdom, silicon makers warn
https://www.theregister.com/2022/01/15/us_china_chip_war/
Coffee may become more scarce and expensive thanks to climate change – new research
https://theconversation.com/coffee-may-become-more-scarce-and-expensive-thanks-to-climate-change-new-research-175766
Amazon, Visa strike global truce on credit card charges
https://www.theregister.com/2022/02/17/amazon_and_visa_deal/
How scholars cracked a medieval alchemist’s secret code
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/medieval-alchemist-secret-code
Facebook is one bad Chrome extension away from another Cambridge Analytica scandal
https://www.theregister.com/2022/02/17/chrome_meta_token/
(*) https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-51311368
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
20 February 2022
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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