Winding Down
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net, technology, science and other news
by Alan Lenton
6 June 2023
Welcome to the first issue of Winding Down this year written on a sunny morning! For your Sunday reading we have pointers to material on hypersonic missiles, the late, and not very great ‘Metaverse’, Marie Curie, and Tesla cars. Pictures include those of the Sun close up, the best of UK press photography, and artist designed hotel rooms. The quote is about motor car driving – and pedestrians.
Scanner contains material on three day weekends, bank job adverts, the EU’s Cyber Resilience Act, The Toyota data heist, a US/China space race, and Amazon Ring security breach.
Enjoy!
Alan Lenton
Publishing schedule: Next issue will be published on 11 June.
Credits: Thanks to Fi for editing, correcting errors, etc.
Essays:
‘Hypersonic missiles’ have been in the news on on and off for a while now, but there seems to be a lot of misconceptions about what they are and what they mean, and whether they are actually being deployed in the Ukraine. So I thought I would point you at a piece with the intriguing title of ‘Hypersonic Missiles are Just Misunderstood’. It’s a fairly long piece and it makes clear that intercontinental missiles are far more developed than most people (including me) realise.
https://medium.com/@ToryBrunoULA/hypersonic-missiles-are-just-misunderstood-1a35c8ae3dd0
The Insider web site has an interesting account and analysis of the rise and fall of Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse. I have to admit I never tried it out. I could never see what the point of it was – virtual worlds are great in movies and sci-fi books, but in the ‘real’ world.... And, from all accounts it was both clunky, and had no reason to exist. Not that that stopped the hype – especially by the financial elements – Citi group produced a report that valued the whole thing at becoming worth a stunning US$13 trillion by 2030.
I wonder how much they paid the consultants for those predictions!
https://www.businessinsider.com/metaverse-dead-obituary-facebook-mark-zuckerberg-tech-fad-ai-chatgpt-2023-5
https://interestingengineering.com/culture/metaverse-is-a-13-trillion-opportunity-says-citi-group-report
People:
Atlas Obscura has a fascinating piece about Marie Curie, best known as the discoverer of radium. It turns out that she was really quite a nerd – a nerd who became the first woman to win the Nobel Prize, and she did it twice – once for physics, and once for science. She kept a large chunk of radium as a night light, and some of her notebooks are so radioactive that have to be kept in a lead box!
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/fun-facts-about-marie-curie-paris
Transport:
A leak at electric car maker Tesla underlines the problems that Tesla is facing, and not being, to say the least, very open about. According to the leak, covering the period between 2015 and March 2022, its customers reported over 2,400 self acceleration issues, 1,500 braking problems and 383 reports of false collision warning resulting in 383 ‘phantom’ stops.
The Spring of 2023 has not been a good time for Elon Musk’s companies....
https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/25/23737972/tesla-whistleblower-leak-fsd-complaints-self-driving
Pictures:
I’ve got a whole slew of pictures for you this week.
We start with some pictures of the Sun.
The first is that of an approximately 100,000 kilometre ‘Waterfall’ spotted on the surface of the Sun. Apparently you could fit about eight Earths inside it!
https://www.sciencealert.com/behold-the-62000-mile-high-plasma-waterfall-that-erupted-from-the-sun
The second is a mosaic of pictures of the Sun’s surface released by the NSF’s Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope. Maybe it’s just my warped imagination, but one of the pics looks disturbingly like it is a face!
https://nso.edu/press-release/new-images-released-by-nsfs-inouye-solar-telescope/
Next in this section another set of pictures – this time taken by British press photographers over the period from July 2021 through to the spring of 2023. My favourite in this bunch? Difficult, because they are all good, but I’ll plump for the last one in the series, the storm and breaking waves crashing into the harbour wall at Porthcawl in South Wales.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/in-pictures-65645239
Finally, take a look at these pictures of artist-designed rooms at the at the Park Hotel Tokyo. I’m not convinced I could easily fall asleep in some of them, though I love most of the graphics!
https://www.spoon-tamago.com/stay-in-artist-designed-hotel-rooms-at-the-park-hotel-tokyo/
Quotes:
This issue’s quote comes from the UK’s Lord Dewar:
“[There are] only two classes of pedestrians in these days of reckless motor traffic – the quick, and the dead.”
Lord Dewar 1864-1930
Scanner:
Why three-day weekends are great for wellbeing – and the economy
https://theconversation.com/why-three-day-weekends-are-great-for-wellbeing-and-the-economy-205063
Bank rewrote ads for infosec jobs to stop scaring away women
https://www.theregister.com/2023/04/04/westpac_rewrote_inosec_job_ads_for_women/
EU’s Cyber Resilience Act contains a poison pill for open source developers
https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/12/eu_cyber_resilience_act/
Toyota: Car location data of 2 million customers exposed for ten years
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/toyota-car-location-data-of-2-million-customers-exposed-for-ten-years/
Is the US in a space race against China?
https://www.space.com/is-the-us-in-a-space-race-against-china
Amazon Ring, Alexa accused of every nightmare IoT security fail you can imagine
https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/01/ftc_alexa_ring_amazon_settlement/
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
6 June 2023
Alan Lenton is a retired on-line games designer, programmer and sociologist (among other things), 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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