The weekly newsletter for Fed2 by ibgames

EARTHDATE: September 24, 2006

Official News - page 12

WINDING DOWN

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

I was peacefully drinking my first coffee of the day and idly scanning through the overnight mail one day earlier this week, when I spotted a piece by Joel Spolsky entitled 'Amazing X-Ray Glasses from Sprint!'. Joel's stuff is always worth reading, although I don't always agree with his views, so I settled down to read it.

It was the funniest piece I've read for ages. At one particularly amusing point I actually snurfed my coffee all over my keyboard! I'm not going to spoil it by telling you what it's about - just go and read it, the URL is in the Scanner section.

I've started a new occasional section called 'Tech2Watch' this week. Usually I stick new and interesting technologies into Geek Toys, but this is a more appropriate place to note new breakthroughs that I think will become important.

Lots of material for you this week, including an analysis of the burgeoning HP espionage case, AOL's AIM, and yet again patents. So, lets get down to it!


Story: Hewlett-Packard - the Unasked Questions

The HP affair gets more bizarre by the day. At first it seemed like a joke with allegations of board members' and journalists' phone records being stolen. However, it pretty rapidly became clear that these weren't just allegations, it really happened, and a new word - pretexting - entered the popular vocabulary.

That wasn't all - it turned out that the decision to set the dogs onto the leak came from the highest levels, the HP chairwoman, Patricia Dunn, who has now resigned from the board. It was also known about by the CEO Mark Hurd, who gave a press conference on Friday amid further revelations.

It seems that not only were phone records accessed illegally, reporters were also tailed and photographed, and there was an attempt to plant trojan software on the computer of one reporter. At one stage there was even discussion about the possibility of infiltrating the San Francisco offices of the Wall Street Journal and online news bureau C|Net with operatives posing as cleaners.

Unbelievably enough, investigation of the latter possibility was overseen by HP's director of ethics, Kevin Hunsaker!

Much of the coverage in the press has been about the unbelievably clumsy 'crisis management' practiced by HP since the story broke, and the ongoing ever more weird revelations. There are, however, two crucial aspects to the story which appear to have either been completely missed, or which are being completely avoided (I suspect the former, rather than the latter - never ascribe malice where mere incompetence will suffice).

Issue one: How were HP able to be so quick off the mark in starting up surveillance of board members and reporters? This wasn't a story of a large company bumbling around employing amateurs to spy on people. This is about a well oiled mechanism swinging in to action on the word of the highest authorities in the company.

In other words, the mechanisms to mount an illegal surveillance operation were already in place before C|Net broke the triggering story about board strategy discussions.

The implication is that HP had permanent espionage facilities available, and from the speed and smoothness of the original operation, this wasn't the first time they had been used. So, the question is how long has HP had an espionage department, and what other 'black ops' has it carried out in the past?

Issue two: How many other large companies have similar facilities, and have used them? The best way I can explain this is by analogy with the Enron scandal. When the Enron story broke it looked like an isolated, albeit very big, incident. But as more details emerged it became clear that Enron were not alone in what they were doing, they had merely taken what 'everyone' was doing to the limit, and as such were the first to fall.

The question is to what extent is the HP affair a similar tip of the iceberg?

Let me suggest a pointer. When the story first broke, HP's first line of defence was that they weren't doing anything illegal. This was so patently absurd to the press that there was a great deal of mocking about the clumsiness of HP's damage limitation process. At the time some surprise was expressed about the incompetence. After all the HP public relations machine has a great deal of experience of handling potentially damaging problems.

There is, though, a scenario within which HP's initial response makes sense. Perhaps they genuinely thought there was no problem, because they, and other big companies routinely carry out such actions...

The problem is that it's easy to come up with conspiracy theories, both about the government and big business. So how likely are the two scenarios I've laid out above?

I truly don't know, though I suspect the first issue is probably correct, if only because of the slickness of the operational side of the affair - note that it didn't come apart until the principals actually used the information they had obtained.

As far as the second scenario goes, it's difficult to say. Hopefully I'm wrong, but we won't find out unless the questions are asked, or the law enforcement authorities in California probe a little deeper than just the obvious illegalities.

In the mean time here is a selection of other people's takes on the issue:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/09/19/hp_spy_reporters/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/09/20/hp_investigation_roundup/
http://ct.news.com.com/clicks?t=11121368-18a32f6148453f76b7d88f6b914d69a0-bf&s=5&fs=0
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/09/20/hp_pretexting_part_94/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/09/21/hp_hurd_named/


Shorts:

Happy birthday, hard drives. This week saw the 50th anniversary of the very first hard drive, the IBM RAMAC 305 (such a trendy name!), introduced in 1956. The storage part of the drive was about 5' square and its capacity was around 4.4MB. Apparently the drive could have been given a larger storage capacity, but the IBM sales department didn't think they could sell the thing with more storage! The entire RAMAC unit weighed over a ton and had to be moved around with forklifts and delivered via large cargo airplanes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAMAC
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/09/15/hard_drive_is_50/

If you want a lesson on the absurdity of the patent system you just need to look at the brief filed this week by lawyers for the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), arguing that Rambus should be barred from collecting royalties on its pre-1996 JEDEC-compliant patents.

JEDEC is the Joint Electronic Device Engineering Council, which, among other things, developed a standard for Dynamic Random Access Chips (DRAM) - the most widely used type of memory chips used in computers. Rambus participated in the drawing up of the standards while surreptitiously filing patents on those standards.

As a result Rambus has been able to collect royalties on technology that was intended to ensure interoperability and to be used free by DRAM makers. The FTC considers this to be unlawful behaviour, although, I confess, that I find it difficult to see exactly where Rambus broke the law. If you have laws that were originally designed to give monarchs a source of income through the sale of patents, then you must expect them to not work very well in a democratic society.

The fault is in the law, not in Rambus's sleazy manipulation of it!

http://newsletter.eetimes.com/cgi-bin4/DM/y/ezYY0FypUC0FrK0Emmz0EE

AOL's AIM instant messenger service is under attack from hackers - nothing new there, but it seems this attack is slightly different. Users are receiving a trojan package which purports to be a picture attached to an instant message from someone on their buddy list. If the picture is opened then a program is installed on the computer which allows the hackers access to the machine. The aim (little pun there, folks...) of the hacker is to create a bot-net of machines which can be used to attack other parts of the Internet.

If you use AOL's AIM system be careful, very careful, about what files you open. Better still, don't use AIM to accept files, and run anti-virus software to warn you of possible problems. You have been warned!

http://www.physorg.com/news77939770.html

I mentioned a week or so ago the skirmishing over the new security measures in Windows Vista. Things are narrowing down a bit and focussing on a particular component of Vista - the Windows Security Centre. Rivals, such as Symantic and McAfee want to be able to replace it with their own desktop security consoles, but Microsoft is resisting in what looks a re-run of the 'IE on the desktop' punch up.

Sigh. OK, I confess. I'd like to see both sides to lose. I suspect the Security Centre really should be replaceable (though I can see serious security problems if that was the case), but I also think the main anti-virus companies are a bunch of arrogant tossers who don't deserve to win a prize in a penny arcade, let alone in this case.

Ugh!

http://ct.techrepublic.com.com/clicks?t=10611967-18a32f6148453f76b7d88f6b914d69a0-bf&s=5&fs=0


Tech2Watch:

Engineers at LG have come up with an interesting piece of technology - a mobile phone that doubles as an e-book reader. LG are currently pitching it as device for the visually impaired, but I can see much wider applications for the idea. Whether it will work as part of a mobile phone, I'm not sure. The version in the article's picture looks pretty clunky to me. However, the idea of an audio e-book reader is brilliant, and I'm sure will be incorporated in other devices in the not too distant future.

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/09/20/lg_handset_for_visually_impaired/

Moxia have come up with a really brilliant idea - rechargeable batteries you can recharge through the USB port on your computer! It's a simple and brilliant idea. Charging batteries is a pain, and this way you can charge them anywhere you have your computer plugged into the mains.

At the moment only AA batteries are available, but the square PP9 batteries are due out next, and further sizes, including popular cell phone sizes, will follow after that.

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/09/20/usb_rechargeable_standard_batteries/


Scanner: Other stories

Amazing X-Ray Glasses from Sprint!
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/09/19b.html

IBM's 'secret island'
http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2006/09/21/ibm_secret/

Why Google Earth means business
http://newsletters.zdnetuk.cneteu.net/t/146179/921984/209083/0/

US government agency to extend oversight of ICANN
http://www.physorg.com/news77991152.html

Free anonymous browsing
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/09/20/free_web_browsing/

Technology with no past
http://newsletter.infoworld.com/t?r=314&ctl=1408E0F:215D3E184FC552DC2457681BBB9BC75CEFF29049075316B4

Open Source Silicon
http://newsletter.infoworld.com/t?r=314&ctl=1404882:215D3E184FC552DCEE432E71F1669BB5EFF29049075316B4

Microsoft patches critical flaw in Office.
http://newsletter.infoworld.com/t?r=314&ctl=1400C87:215D3E184FC552DC53436CB593BF1AA5EFF29049075316B4

Man makes Xbox 360 laptop
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/09/15/man_makes_xbox360_laptop/


Acknowledgements

Thanks to readers Barbara and Fi (and to someone else but I can't remember who - my apologies to whoever it was) for drawing my attention to material used in this issue. Please send suggestions for material to alan@ibgames.com.

Alan Lenton
alan@ibgames.com
24 September 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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