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EARTHDATE: February 12, 2006

OFFICIAL NEWS
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WINDING DOWN

An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net and technology news
by Alan Lenton

I was just reading a story about a group of 'explorers' following the epic journey of David Livingstone across Africa to the discovery of the Victoria Falls. For those of you who don't know, Livingstone was one of life's great losers, and as such he was one of Victorian England's greatest heroes (along with General Gordon who managed to get himself and his men massacred in Khartoum).

Livingstone was actually searching for (and failing to find) the source of the Nile when he stumbled on the Victoria Falls. Failing to find the source of the Nile was by no means Livingstone's only failure. He was a missionary who spent 30 years wandering around Africa. In that time he managed to convert exactly one person to Christianity!

The report of last year's expedition on the 250th anniversary of the 'discovery' of the Victoria Falls (note that all the Africans who knew about the falls didn't count) had me rolling on the floor with helpless laughter. They were supposed to be 'replicating' Livingstone's journey, and the bit that really got me was about how they were paddling up the Zambezi in dugout canoes of the same sort that Livingstone would have used - while talking into their mobile phones, and being followed by a motor boat carrying their refrigerated supply of beer and coke! I love it!

But down to business.

I had a couple of analysis pieces stacked up for this issue, but the stuff left over from last week and new material coming in took up more space than I expected, so the analysis will have to wait a little longer. in the mean time Winding Down proudly presents a mix of Microsoft, copyright, peer-to-peer networks, the Arctic Monkeys rock band, Apple, Dutch biometric passport hacks, and Google's prime meridian...


Shorts:

Sometimes, just sometimes, Microsoft really gets it right. Most people have been thinking about the new wide screen monitors and LCD laptop panels in terms of viewing DVDs. Microsoft has been thinking ahead what else that extra screen real estate can be used for, and it's come up with a neat idea. A wide sidebar that can hold a slew of mini-applications which it has dubbed 'gadgets'. This is an excellent idea whose roots go back to the TSR mini-apps of the DOS era.

TSR stood for 'Terminate and Stay Resident', and was originally invented by Borland, then in its most innovative phase. TSR programs were things like calculators, that were still there and instantly useable, even though you could actually only use one application at a time under DOS.

Today, of course, under Windows, you can run more than one application (well theoretically, anyway, if there are any computer resources left after Windows XP has taken its cut of the processor and memory). Most applications are designed for a screen ratio of around 4:3, not exactly square, but not long and thin like the wide screen ratio. There are a few applications which could use the extra space at the side with no problems - you could for instance have two pages side to side in a page layout program, but most will just leave the space on one side of the screen blank.

Enter Microsoft's 'Sidebar' application displaying things like RSS links, slide shows, calculators, and tickers. Neat. Of course you could do all that manually, but with sidebar it would all be confined to the sidebar and not get in the way. Let's just hope that you don't need the power of a Cray supercomputer to run the whole thing!

http://ct.techrepublic.com.com/clicks?c=1443311-7863277&brand=techrepublic&ds=5&fs=0

In an interesting move the European Commission (EC) has opened a formal investigation into the companies that collect copyright royalties for music broadcast on the net. Effectively these companies have a monopoly on the collection of royalties for the public performance of music. Having collected the royalties they then distribute the proceeds to their members, after taking their own cut, of course.

In the early 80s I managed a rock band called 'Belt & Braces'. Every time the band played, whether in a pub or in a more formal venue, we had to fill in a form to give a list of songs played and hand it to the venue management who would then make a payment to the Mechanical-Copyright Protection Society to cover the copyright due on the songs. Only one problem from our perspective. The band only played songs they had written, but it never got paid because they weren't members! The same would have applied if we had been broadcast on radio or television.

There was no way to opt out, and there was no alternative collector of moneys. The Society, like its brethren in other western countries, had it firmly sown up. Now, however, they are trying to extend their tentacles to other media, like the Internet, and this has provoked the EC to take an interest in just how they have maintained their monopoly for so long.

With any luck, this will provide a major shake up of the whole rotten system.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/02/09/ec_probes_cisac/

In an interesting move, French courts have ruled that using peer-to-peer (P2P) networks is legal, provided you are using them for personal, not commercial reasons. French law has long had the concept of 'private copying', which is considered to be legitimate, and this ruling confirms that personal P2P qualifies as private copying.

The ruling was from the District Court of Paris, and is being appealed against by the big media flunkies - more when the appeal comes up.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/02/08/france_legalises_p2p/

Still on the topic of music, there was something very interesting happened here in England recently. Have you heard of a band called the Arctic Monkeys? Well it's been top of the UK

album charts , and not just that, it sold more than the rest of the top 20 chart combined. Pretty impressive for a debut album. How did they do it?

Simple. They gave away free MP3 tracks on the Internet, and people who heard them went straight out and bought the CD!

Will the media learn the lesson from this experience? I doubt it. They are so wedded to their old-fangled business models that even money doesn't talk to them any more :(

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/4660394.stm

And finally on the music front, I note that Apple is being sued by some idiot in Louisiana because, he claims, it didn't warn him that he could damage his hearing listening to music that was too loud, on his iPod. What planet has this guy been living on? For years the miserabilist press has been harping on about loud music damaging hearing. Since the 1970 and the debut of the Walkman, much of this has been devoted to dire predications about the effects of listening to personal music devices.

Of course you can damage your health if you do stupid things. Eating vast quantities of carrots will eventually turn you orange and kill you - in large qualities they are poisonous. Should every carrot carry a health warning?

And what about alcohol? That is a potent poison. When I was a student the captain of the university hockey team died of alcohol poisoning after drinking 21 whiskeys on an empty stomach. I know, I was there, I was 18 at the time and I'd never heard that alcohol could poison you. I helped carry him up to his room when he collapsed, we did all the things that you do get told about, like making sure he couldn't choke if he was sick. An hour later he was dead. I don't see warnings on bottles of spirits telling people that drinking the whole bottle in one go will kill you.

We need a new legal concept - common sense. Its application is quite simple. It's common sense that coffee is hot, so you shouldn't be allowed to sue when you spill it on yourself and it hurts, even if the label doesn't tell warn you. It's common sense that if you stick your fingers in an electric socket you will get a (possibly lethal) shock. So you shouldn't be able to sue, even though the socket didn't have a label warning you. And, of course it's common sense that if you subject your hearing to very loud noise for a long period of time, your ability to hear will deteriorate.

Bah! Humbug!

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/02/03/apple_sued_over-ipod/

The Dutch government has been an enthusiastic and early adopter of biometric passports. I guess it's only fitting, therefore, that the Dutch should have the privilege of being the first to have their biometric passports hacked! The attack can be executed from around 10 meters, and reveals the date of birth, facial image and fingerprints. I assume the Dutch government is going to start paying for a lot of face replacements as the criminal elements get into the act. (Thanks for reader Gael for the original info on this case.)

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/01/30/dutch_biometric_passport_crack/

I always knew Google was pretty arrogant, but now they've taken it upon themselves to shift the prime meridian (zero degrees of longitude) about 110 yards to the right of its official position running through the Greenwich observatory... The URL has a picture from Google Maps showing the dastardly re-location.

This takes us back to previous centuries when there were multiple prime meridians, depending on which country your maps came from. The two main contenders, especially for nautical charts were London (The Greenwich Observatory) and Paris. Eventually, in 1875 the wily French offered to trade off agreeing to let the prime meridian run through Greenwich in return for the adoption the metric system by other countries. The English agreed , and the Greenwich meridian was adopted as the prime meridian for all nautical charts. However, the duplicitous English managed to delay keeping their half of the bargain - converting to metric - for the next 100 years!

So, we must ask ourselves, is this a preliminary to a fundamental relocation of the prime meridian to the nether regions of Google Towers in California? And while we are at it, does this relocation have any sinister conspiratorial links to the attempts by Swatch to institute a new 'Swiss Mean Time' on its ultra-trendy throw away watches?

http://wwp.greenwichmeantime.com/info/prime-meridian.htm
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/02/06/greenwich_meridian/


Homework: IT education

The legendary Verity Stob is better known for her classic humorous pieces exposing the follies of programmers, executives and their ilk. However, her latest piece in the Register is well worth a read for more serious reasons. It's a very funny and well aimed piece about the absurdity of what children are being taught about IT in the UK's education system.

Verity looks at a revision program put out by the BBC for those taking school IT assessments. Until I read Verity's article I had no idea just what crud children were being fed under the guise of 'IT literacy'. Well worth a read!

http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2006/02/06/bitesize_gcse/


Scanner - Other Stories:

Spanish hacker jailed for two years
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/02/08/spanish_hacker_jailed/

Google Subpoena Hearing delayed
http://newsletter.infoworld.com/t?ctl=10DE610:1F69382

Four-year 'limited patent' proposed
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/02/06/four_year_patent_term/

Consumers disenchanted with 3G, says UK survey
http://newsletter.eetimes.com/cgi-bin4/DM/y/euLy0FypUC0FrX0EGx40Ay

Mobile TV phones and related wireless services are getting under way.
http://ct.techrepublic.com.com/clicks?c=1313085-7863277&brand=techrepublic&ds=5&fs=0

Alan Lenton
alan@ibgames.com
12 February 2006

Alan Lenton is an on-line games designer, programmer and sociologist. His web site is at http://www.ibgames.net/alan.

Past issues of Winding Down can be found at http://www.ibgames.net/alan/winding/index.html.


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