The weekly newsletter for Fed2 by ibgames

EARTHDATE: October 1, 2006

Official News - page 11

WINDING DOWN

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

Aaargh! A few weeks ago I was scrabbling around for news fit to tell you all. Now it's all arriving at once. I had to prune rather a lot this week - I've put most of the pruned stuff aside, so if next week is light I can cover it then.

So, people, lets get straight into it...


Update 1: HP goes to Washington

It's been a busy week for the top echelons of HP who have been in Washington explaining just why they were engaged in illegal black ops against their own board members and employees, not to mention sundry journalists. Well not all of them were explaining - some were refusing to testify, pleading the Fifth Amendment.

For those of you who aren't US citizens, the Fifth Amendment to the US constitution says that you can't be forced to make a statement incriminating yourself. Pleading the Fifth is something of a two edged sword!

Those that did testify mostly claimed to be ignorant of what was going on. A few, very few, expressed their regret, although it's difficult to tell from the write-ups whether the regret was for doing it, or for being caught doing it.

While this was going on TechRepublic web site was revealing details about a commercial service that tracks emails which was used by HP during the investigation. It provides an interesting look at the arguably legal but sleazy side of the investigation business. Details are in the TechRepublic URL - don't let the shambolic nature of the site put you off - the article is interesting.

Then, at the end of the week, Verizon put its oar in by filing a lawsuit against 20 unnamed data brokers, accusing them of helping with the phone fraud involved in the black op.

Oh, and on a purely business issue, it emerged that HP is to buy VoodooPC, the games PC specialist. VoodooPC make dream machines for playing games on - absolutely top end stuff. I wonder how long it will take HP to wreck that company?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/09/29/verizon_sues_hpspy/
http://ct.techrepublic.com.com/clicks?t=12207181-18a32f6148453f76b7d88f6b914d69a0-bf&s=5&fs=0
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/09/29/hp_buys_voodoopc/


Update 2: Sony batteries - recall redux

More bad news for Sony. Lenovo/IBM are to recall more than half a million laptop batteries after a ThinkPad caught fire at Los Angeles airport. The batteries are the same sort of Sony battery that caused Dell to recall over four million batteries. The ThinkPad batteries were installed in machines sold between February 2005 and this month, so if you have a ThinkPad that was bought in that period, go and check out the web site at http://www.lenovo.com/batteryprogram and see if your battery is affected. So the current total is Dell 4.1 million, Apple 1.8 million, and IBM/Lenovo 500 thousand - total so far 6.4 million recalled batteries!

http://www.physorg.com/news78680281.html
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2006/09/28/lenovo_battery_recall/


Roundup: Microsoft

Not to be outdone by all the stories about HP, Microsoft have been in the news a number of times this week.

The first story to break was one to the effect that a group of security pros called 'ZERT' released an unofficial fix for a serious security flaw in Internet Explorer - one which the bad guys were already exploiting. They did this because of the failure of Microsoft to provide its customers with a fix for the problem. The problem with IE had come to light earlier this month and the fix from ZERT had an interesting effect.

Within 48 hours Microsoft had produced an official fix for the problem! So, I guess we now know how to get timely patches out of Microsoft when it tries to fob people off with its 'we only release one batch of patches each month' refrain...

Barely 24 hours later a new security problem in a Microsoft program emerged - this time it was PowerPoint. Interestingly enough the problem affects both the Windows and the Mac versions of PowerPoint. I wonder whether it will take the issuance of another unofficial patch to make Microsoft take this problem seriously?

While this was going on, over here, on my side of the big pond, reports were emerging of various US politicians attempting to influence the EU anti-trust proceedings against Microsoft. The campaign to influence the current and former competition commissioners goes back to 2004, the time of the original anti-trust ruling against Microsoft. The concerted lobbying seems to have had little effect. As the current commissioner, Neelie Kroes, commented, '...like all companies great and small, Microsoft is not above the law...'.

None of this detracted from Microsoft's ongoing battle with the unknown programmer of the FairUse4WM utility which strips the DRM off Microsoft copy 'protected' files. I reported on this issue a couple of weeks ago, with the programmer repeatedly defeating Microsoft's attempts to patch its DRM software.

Microsoft have now wheeled out the big guns and in a hilarious move filed a legal action alleging that the programmer must have stolen Microsoft's DRM code! It seems that Microsoft simply cannot believe that anyone can reverse engineer its code, therefore, it reasons, the code must have been stolen. Bizarre. There are plenty of people who have the patience to reverse engineer not just Microsoft's code, but anyone else's code as well.

I couldn't do it, but then I loathe assembly code, and I have better things to do with my life, but the world is not short of people who have the ability, time, patience, and motivation to tweak Microsoft's nose in this fashion!

And talking of tweaking Microsoft's nose, Israeli startup Yoggie Security Systems have produced a tiny Linux based remote access device that is designed to protect Windows XP based laptops! The device has two ethernet ports and contains a sophisticated firewall, VPN, and monitoring software, all running on a hardened Linux kernal. Neat, very neat.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/09/28/0-day_powerpoint_threat/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/09/27/ms_emergency_patch/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/09/27/ms_fairuse4wm_lawsuit/
http://ct.enews.deviceforge.com/rd/cts?d=207-152-2-28-255-13141-0-0-0-1
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/09/26/microsoft_eu_political_lobbying/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/09/25/unofficial_ie_patch/


Story: An unhealthy deal

Top story here in the UK is that the big software firm Accenture has pulled out of a crucial 2bn UK pounds (US$3.8bn) contract at the centre of the UK National Health Service (NHS) IT upgrade. I hold no torch for the likes of Accenture, but their reasons for walking away from this contract seem to me to be only too reasonable. Apart from anything else it would have lost US$450 million this year alone.

The original spec for the work was badly defined and the financial terms of the contract were onerous for the suppliers, being written by people with no experience of large IT contracts (the NHS got rid of all programming and systems staff years ago). There was no buy in from the people who are supposed to use the system, and the NHS was unable to provide their share of programmers and analysts to work on the shambles. The latter problem was not surprising since the adverts I saw for computer personnel were offering around one third of the going rate for the qualifications they were requiring.

Accenture have handed over their part of the project to a bunch called Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC). According to Accenture, CSC managed to get 8 systems completed over the last three years, while Accenture managed to complete 800. I'd take that with a pinch of salt, since the last official statistics show Accenture at 4,820 systems installed against CSC with 3,208 installed. You can do anything with figures. Bottom line, I don't think CSC will do any better than Accenture, unless they've got deeper pockets and can sustain bigger losses.

On the other hand it's also likely that the scandal of the effect of all this disruption on the health system will force the government to change tack and do the whole thing differently. Only time will tell - but one thing is for sure, the effect of the publicity has for the first time opened up this can of worms to public view.

http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2006/09/28/accenture_failure_success/
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2006/09/28/accenture_lsp_exit/
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2006/09/28/accenture_npfit/


Personal Losses:

USA - Washington: This week the US Commerce department, which, among other things, oversees the Census Bureau, has admitted to losing no less that 1,137 laptops since 2001. It claims that all the computers containing personal information were protected by passwords or encryption technology. Really? Oh look, there goes a flying pig!

USA - Connecticut: General Electric admitted this week that a laptop containing the names and Social Security numbers of 50,000 current and former employees was stolen in early September.


Scanner: Other stories

GE laptop theft exposes data on thousands of current and former employees
http://ct.techrepublic.com.com/clicks?t=12012171-18a32f6148453f76b7d88f6b914d69a0-bf&s=5&fs=0

Commerce Department loses 1,137 laptop computers
http://www.physorg.com/news78420836.html

Report finds worldwide explosion of FOI laws
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/09/27/foi_laws_widely_adopted/

You can't scare people into getting fit or going green!
http://www.physorg.com/news78577550.html

Europe's central banks caught in US spy scandal
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/09/27/swift_central_banks/

IMF warns of Asian electronics slowdown
http://newsletter.eetimes.com/cgi-bin4/DM/y/ezUq0FypUC0FrK0EmRb0Eh

AOL sued over search engine data release
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/09/26/aol_privacy_breach_lawsuit/

Munich begins Linux replacement of Windows
http://newsletter.infoworld.com/t?r=314&ctl=1423185:215D3E184FC552DC334802736F5C3577EFF29049075316B4


Acknowledgements

Thanks to readers Barbara and Fi for drawing my attention to material used in this issue. Please send suggestions for material to alan@ibgames.com.

Alan Lenton
alan@ibgames.com
1 October 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.


Fed2 Star index Previous issues Fed 2 home page