WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net and technology news
by Alan Lenton
Yes, we definitely are moving into a quiet period for stories. Fortunately, there were a few this week, though nothing like as many as usual. Or maybe I'm getting cynical and immune to stories that would once have alarmed and outraged me.
So, this week, for one week only, we will aim for quality over quantity!
Ladies and gentlemen, please take your seats, the show is about to begin...
Shorts:
El Reg has recently been running a mini-vendetta against Hewlett-Packard's wasteful packaging methods. Judging from my own experience with HP in the past, they've picked a very easy target, and HP deserve all the abuse that The Register can muster. Take a look at the URLs - one is the use of 17 boxes, including foam protection, to ship 32 sheets of paper, the other is a full scale wooden pallet to ship a single PS2 mouse!
No wonder there's never any room left in the recycling bins when you want to use them!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/18/hp_packaging/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/23/enormouse/
The Recording Industry Ass. of America (RIAA) seems to be about to meet its nemesis - American mothers. Over the last few months it has suffered a number of defeats at the hands of various mothers, one of the consequences of its business tactic of suing potential (and actual) customers.
Previously, when it made false accusations and the defendants fought back, the RIAA would drop the case just before it got to court. Usually the defendants were sufficiently relieved to just let everything go.
Now, however, some are fighting back. Tanya Andersen, for instance, is suing Atlantic Records under the federal anti-racketeering statutes. Debora Foster and her daughter were awarded US$66,000 in court fees, and even in the RIAA's most successful case - that against Jammie Thomas - the judge has indicated that he feels he may have given the jury incorrect advice.
I await the next move from the RIAA with some interest...
http://cwflyris.computerworld.com/t/3368106/121542019/127120/0/
Actually there were several 'piracy' related stories in the e-postbag this week. For instance the Economist published a piece about how music companies are using file sharing statistics to target their marketing to geographical areas where a new artist is getting a lot of peer2peer downloads. Pretty cheeky if you ask me!
http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11750492
Game publisher Ubisoft has also been using 'illegal' software in innovative ways. When it added some 'security' to its last update of 'Rainbow Six: Vegas 2', one of the things the fix did was to check for a legit disk in the drive. No disk, no game. The fix didn't stop pirated versions appearing immediately, of course, but it did screw over people who had bought the game as a download from Ubisoft's online store, Direct2Drive. They, surprise, surprise, had no physical disk...
Ubisoft's solution? Pirate the pirated version! A fix, since removed, was uploaded, which was a cracked version of the game produced by the hacker group 'Reloaded'.
I wonder if they've made provision in their accounts for royalty payments to 'Reloaded'?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/18/ubisoft_pirates_fix_from_pirates/
While this was going on those brave and foolish souls who actually bought and downloaded songs from Yahoo! Music Stores have received an e-mail from Yahoo! saying that the store is closing for good. The key servers, which you need to transfer your music to a new machine will hang around for another couple of years and then go too. Sounds to me like an expensive lesson in why you shouldn't buy music 'protected' by DRM (Digital Rights Restriction).
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080724-drm-still-sucks-yahoo-music-
going-dark-taking-keys-with-it.html
And from 'piracy' we move on to security, or lack thereof.
Last week I gave some background to the management incompetence that lead to San Francisco network administrator Terry Childs being held in jail on a US$5 million bail bond. One of the main charges leveled against Child was that he refused to give out the network passwords to those he considered incompetent.
As if to prove Child's case, the District Attorney has made public 150 user names and password that can access the network! The names and password have been filed as 'Exhibit A' in a court public document arguing that the US$5 million bail should not be reduced. I'm not sure what the DA's been smoking, but there are a lot of people asking where they can get some of whatever it is!
http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/07/25/San_Francisco_DA_discloses_citys_
network_passwords_1.html
Meanwhile, on this side of the big pond, our Ministry of Defence has admitted that it managed to lose 87 classified USB sticks in 2006. This is probably not as bad as it sounds, given the penchant of the department for slapping security warnings on everything in sight. Still, maybe the red faces that ensued will teach them to be more careful in the future. Probably not, though.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/18/mod_secret_usb_sticks/
And talking of the government classifying documents, our Home Office (that's the equivalent of the US Department of Justice) put up a public document that came out of their review on openness on their website. There was no worry, though, that these documents might leak secrets to the untrustworthy public. They were password protected, and only the mandarins at the Home Office knew the password. There must have been something very secret in them!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/22/password_protected_openess/
There was some hilarity over here when an incident from Prime Minister Gordon Brown's trip to China earlier this year leaked out. It seems that one of his aids went off to a disco where he met a lovely lady who accompanied him back to his room. When he woke the next morning, the lady was gone - and so was his Blackberry smart phone. We are all assured that there was no security breach. That's probably true - this government has sold off everything worth stealing!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/21/government_dataloss_china/
And to round off our security stories, I'll draw your attention to a piece featuring the ten weirdest anti-terrorist patents. They include a biohazard suit with a built in toilet, a trapdoor to drop terrorists trying to hijack an aircraft into a pit, tranquillized bracelets for air passengers, and a truck with a pop-up machine gun turret. I love the drawing of how the devices work - especially the umbrella for containing suicide bomb explosions! Take a look.
http://www.neatorama.com/2008/06/27/top-10-strangest-anti-terrorism-patents/
Homework:
There is a report of an interesting piece of research from Purdue University, where they have managed to overcome one of the biggest problems involved in making economic solid state lighting. You can use solid state (white LEDs) for room lighting now, but the bulbs cost around US$200 a piece, because they're based on a sapphire substrate. The people at Purdue have found a method of using much cheaper, silicon based, substrates.
I'm hopeful that this discovery will be exploited as rapidly as possible to make cheap LED lighting. Our clueless government has bullied the UK light bulb manufacturers into only producing mercury filled 'power saving' lamps in this country. Mercury is a dangerous and insidious chemical. Indeed the advice is to evacuate the room for 15 minutes if you break one of the bulbs. How they figure they are going to dispose of these things at the end of their five year lives, I really don't know. Perhaps they don't expect to be in power when it happens!
http://news.uns.purdue.edu/x/2008b/080717SandsLighting.html
Geek Toys:
Suffering from Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI) in your hands? Then I've got just the thing for you - a foot controlled mouse. Yes, the eagle eyed bosses at Fentek Industries of Cottonwood, Arizona have spotted the fact that humans have four limbs and that two of them are unused when you are sitting at a computer. The mouse features two foot pedals - one to control movement, and one to handle (footle?) the clicks...
Now, does anyone know of a cure for carpal foot syndrome?
http://www.fentek-ind.com/nh-mouse.htm
Recent Reading:
Snipers, Shills & Sharks by Ken Steiglitz. Princeton University Press
This is a book not about eBay per se, but about auctions - their history and how they work - from a technical, sociological and psychological angle. The reader will learn all about how auctions work and how eBay actually works, which is something many of its users don't understand.
The explanations are clear and well written, the mathematics banished to a number of appendices. I was impressed by this book and I learned a lot about auctions and human behaviour from it. I'd recommend it to anyone who uses eBay, or any other on-line auction sites, regularly - you may be surprised at what your optimal strategies are!
Recommended.
Scanner: Other Stories
Dutch university can publish controversial RFID chip security flaw research
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/18/university_can_publish_oyster_research/
Security flaw in online banking sites found to be widespread
http://www.physorg.com/news135959959.html
The death of nearly all software patents?
http://www.insidecounsel.com/section/litigation/1413?pagenum=1
Microsoft to sponsor the Apache Software Foundation
http://lwn.net/Articles/291628/
Big Cable: FCC Internet policy should apply to colleges too
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080724-big-cable-fcc-internet-policy-should-
apply-to-colleges-too.html
Nintendo loses controller patent lawsuit
http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3168949
Seattle Dark Mailer faces 47-month sentence
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/23/soloway_sentenced/
Acknowledgements
Thanks to readers Barb, Fi and Slashdot's daily newsletter for drawing my attention to material used in this issue.
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 Spamato spam filter...
Alan Lenton
alan@ibgames.com
27 July 2008
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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