Fed II Star newsletter - masthead The weekly newsletter for the Fed II game by ibgames

EARTHDATE: May 14, 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

Aaargh! Everything is against me getting any work done this weekend. First of all the mail server ran out of space - when we set it up in the late 90s it looked like it had masses of space, but with the current spam levels the space available is looking smaller and smaller. :(

I'd just got that sorted out when something went wrong with hardware on which the web server runs. We've got the server running again now, but there are other problems, like we can't update the site for reasons that are still under investigation. Nice phrase that, it covers a multitude of sins. :) In this case, though, it means I haven't a clue, and I'm due to waste vast amounts of time trying to find out.

There was one good bit of news, though. It seems that in December this year Britain will make a final payment of US$83 million to the US. This is, I understand the last instalment of the money Britain borrowed off the US to fight World War II. I'm sure my US readers will be delighted to hear this!

With all the agro it's a relatively short issue this week, and for the time being, it's only available by mail, not on the web site. So here's this week's meagre fayre...


Shorts:

This week AOL announced that it planned to sack 1,300 call centre staff. It seems that the number of help calls it is receiving have dropped by 25 per cent. AOL claim this is because their customers are better equipped to help themselves. There is an alternative possibility, that the standard of customer 'care' is so crap that people aren't bothering to ask for help any more.

Personally I think the latter is a more likely explanation. I don't think I've ever met anyone who asked AOL for help who wasn't told to 're-install Windows'! There is also the fact that AOL's customer base has been steadily shrinking for several years, though I wouldn't have expected that to make any difference, since in my experience it's the more savvy customers that leave AOL and strike out on the net.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4755103.stm

Enterprising thieves have come up with a new scam to get free gas (petrol to my UK readers) by reprogramming electronic controlled pumps. The thieves, it seems, have obtained a key to the pumps' control panels, and use the keyboard to re-program them to dispense free gas.

In an interesting twist, after they fill up they leave the pump reprogrammed so that everyone else using that pump also gets free gas! I guess it's a sort of Robin Hood on high octane... Several gas stations in the St Louis, Missouri area have already managed to dispense something in the region US$10,000 worth of free gas, and the pump suppliers are working to rip out the keyboards from the pumps before the word gets out about how to pull the scam.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/05/10/gas_station_rip-off/

And talking of gas stations, over on this side of the pond Shell has suspended the use of the chip and pin card payments after being burned by a one million UK pound (US$1.7 million) fraud. For those of you who haven't heard of chip and pin it's a method of entering a pin number into a hand held checker instead of signing the slip. It's touted by the banks and credit card companies as cutting fraud.

Actually this is a lie. What it actually does is to make the customer bear the cost of fraud. If someone forges your signature, it's fairly easy to prove you didn't sign, and therefore that the card company had no authority to debit your account. But how do you prove you didn't enter the number or that you didn't give someone else access to the number? The fraud is still there, but the card companies can now shrug and blame it on the customers.

Shell and the card companies are being very tight-lipped about how the fraud happened, but I've no doubt that info will start to trickle out in due course. When it does, I'll let you know!

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/05/08/shell_suspends_chippin/

Shell weren't the only ones to admit failings in the chip and pin system this week. Lloyds TSB banking group customers lost an unspecified amount of money as the crooks started using cloned debit and credit cards in non-UK ATMs.

So far there have been reports of scams involving cash machines in the Netherlands, France, Thailand and Hong Kong. Lloyds TSB told one news paper that it is updating its procedures in a bid to cut down this type of fraud. That's probably because on this one the bank is going to have to swallow the costs itself. I'm sure you've all noticed that bankers are far more concerned when it's their own money at risk. :)

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/05/11/lloyds_tsb_chip_and_pin_fraud/

Oh, and by the way, our old friends EDS are back in the news over here. This time they've screwed up a new human resources (that's payroll to you and me) system for the UK's armed forces. The Air force has been trying to get it to work, without much success, for the last seven weeks. The system, which, it seems is only working at a snail's pace, is due to be rolled out for the army and the navy later on this year. Some hope!

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/05/11/raf_hr_fix/

In an interesting move the Open Document Format (ODF) has now been approved by the International Standards Organisation (ISO). ODF is used by a plethora of both open source and closed source word processing programs.

However, it is not supported by Microsoft's Word program, and indeed Microsoft has refused to support ODF, claiming, among other things, that it isn't possible and that Word has its own 'standard'. The ODF will interest national and local governments, because it is an open international standard (ISO/IEC 26300), which means that any documents saved in it will still be readable 20, 30, 40, 50 or more years down the line.

But that's not all, because almost at the same time the ODF people gave Microsoft a massive tweak of the nose. With superb timing they announced an ODF plugin for all versions of Microsoft Word, from the current one right back to Word 97. The plugin installs on Word's file menu as a natural and transparent part of the 'open', 'save', and 'save as...' sequences, and renders ODF documents as if they were native MS Office documents. So much for Microsoft's claim that it couldn't be done!

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20060504015438308
http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/article.php?story=20060503080915835

Finally, I thought you might be interested to know that Time Warner's Warner Music group has just filed documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission revealing that it has been cited in 14 separate legal actions related to overcharging in its pricing of downloaded music.

I doubt that the likes of New York's Eliot Spitzer are going to be content with just one of the big music companies, so watch out for more filings by the rest in due course.

Perhaps it is time we as the music users had our own definition of piracy. How about:

Piracy: (Modern usage) A term used to describe the activities of modern large media corporations who use their market power to overcharge customers and swindle artists.

Yes, I think that sounds about right. Any takers?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/05/08/warner_sued_downloads/


Personal Losses:

US - Wells Fargo - Compromise of personal information belonging to mortgage customers and potential clients following the theft of a computer. This is the fourth compromise of Wells Fargo computers in the last two and a half years!


Geek Toys:

Not so much a toy as somewhere safe to keep your toys! Wanna buy an Intercontinental Ballistic missile silo? Not exactly all mod cons, but the locals will deliver milk to the silo located near Spokane. It's up for sale on eBay, so you know where to bid for it. It needs a little interior decoration, judging from the pictures, but it can withstand a one megaton nuclear blast within 3,000 ft. Rumour has it that the leading bidder is someone going by the name of Ernst Stavro Blofeld...


Scanner - Other Stories:

The worse Google gets, the more money it makes?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/05/10/google_microsoft_redux/

Time to face the truth about data security
http://ct.news.com.com/clicks?t=2295734-
18a32f6148453f76b7d88f6b914d69a0-bf&s=5&fs=0

FTC halts spyware operation
http://newsletter.infoworld.com/t?ctl=1224230:1F69382

Gowers warned over patent review
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/05/05/patent_warning/

Wells Fargo Lose data
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?
command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9000293


Acknowledgements:

Thanks to readers Barbara and Fi for drawing my attention to material used in this issue.

Alan Lenton
alan@ibgames.com
14 May 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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