The weekly newsletter for Fed2 by ibgames

EARTHDATE: August 3, 2008

Official News page 11


WINDING DOWN

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

I just read a really interesting piece on the BBC web site. It's got nothing to do with tech, but I thought I would share it with you anyway. It's all about how cigarette smuggling funded a large chunk of the Balkan wars. It's a tale of secret meetings, Italian mafia gangs, super fast speedboats, Serbian entrepreneurs, assassinations, and the equivalent of US$8 billion on lost taxes for the EU countries. Fascinating.

I'm sad to have to report the unexpected death of Ed Foster, the editor of InfoWorld's Gripe Line column. I never met Ed, but I've followed his column for years, and sometimes used it to point readers issues he's raise. I could always get a reasoned view from reading Ed's material. Ordinary people will be poorer for the demise of his incisive analysis.


Shorts:

The US band, BuckCherry, (no I've never heard of them either) were caught out last week after they issued a press release last week saying how much they hated the fact that their latest single had been leaked on BitTorrent. Only one problem. It had been leaked by their manager!

A neat bit of work by a Torrenter established that the person who seeded BitTorrent with the material has the same IP address as band's manager. Nice work. Somehow I don't think I'm likely to even try out a track from a band that takes part in this sort of dishonest scam.

http://torrentfreak.com/band-leaks-track-to-bittorrent-blames-pirates-080731/

I gather that Microsoft (Remember them? They're Bill Gates' old company.) have decided to give the Open Source Apache project their loose change (US$100,000) each year. Could this be a turn around for the evil empire from Redmond? I guess it depends on what you mean by turn around. (The last sentence come to you by courtesy of WeaselsRUs.)

No, in all honesty I don't think that the leopard has changed its spots. I think that it's a pure business decision, and that it relates to the penetration of open source flagship software (Linux, Apache, MySQL, etc.) into big business. Microsoft have always been a very pragmatic organisation, and they are starting to realise that they are going to have to work with open source, at least for the foreseeable future, so they are buying into it.

Is this wrong, evil and dastardly? No. It's a sensible business decision, and probably one they should have made before now. But I still wouldn't trust them further than I could throw them. I'll wait and see what happens. In the meantime, if you want a hard line open source view of the matter, point your browser at the URL and have a look at a piece by Bruce Perens.

http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/osrc/article.php/3762786/Bruce+Perens:
+Microsoft+and+Apache+-+Whats+the+Angle?.htm

Blizzard have stepped up their fight to 'protect' their 'World of Warcraft' (WoW) game from 'unauthorised' client software. Not content with downloading software that rummages through the private memory and non-WoW processes running on their customer's machines, they are now seeking a court injunction forbidding the authors of the MMO Glider software from making their software open source!

What no-one seems to have asked about is -why- these other programs, basically bots that run on the client and perform repetitive actions without any human intervention, are so popular. The answer is, because WoW contains large chunk of really boring stuff that you have to wade through in order to get to the interesting stuff. And the boring stuff is designed to take lots of time, so that you play WoW for a long time - longer than it would take if you could just do the interesting stuff. Needless to say six months of subscriptions cost three times as much as two months of subscriptions!

The real solution that Blizzard need is to stop stuffing the game with boring and repetitive crud and replace it with something more varied and interesting - or cut it down considerably! But for that you need imagination, and Blizzard isn't showing much of that when it comes to considering the consequences of trying to order something not to be open source!

http://virtuallyblind.com/2008/07/29/blizzard-seeks-permanent-injunction/

Microsoft and HP are currently engaged in an amusing little spat over just exactly how well Vista is selling. A month ago Microsoft 'ended' sales of XP on new machines, and now it has proudly announced that sales of Vista are looking healthy.

Not so, says HP, the world's biggest seller of PCs. Most of those machines sold with Vista licenses are pre-loaded with XP! It seems that big business is ordering the machines with a Vista license, since they have no choice in the matter, but specifying that they want to 'downgrade' and receive them with XP Professional installed. I seem to recall that Dell are making healthy sales by pulling the same trick.

So, who are we to believe: Microsoft or HP? Difficult call, but I suspect, based on my own experience, that HP are by far the more accurate ones in this case.

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/215502/hp-windows-xp-accounts-for-majority-of-vista-sales.html

Here's something to watch out for. There is a new treaty being drawn up by various governments. It's called the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). The negotiations are taking place at the moment, and while governments are not exactly keeping it secret, they are taking care not to publicise it, and are only seeking input from big business copyright holders. I don't think I need to tell you what the views of the copyright holders are! Conspicuous by their absence are representatives of the consumers (that's you and me).

Why not ask your elected representatives about what's going on?

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080731-canada-seeks-industry-not-
consumer-input-on-secret-treaty.html

In a breath-taking piece of hypocrisy, the UK police are allowing the contents of the national DNA database, which includes the DNA of many completely innocent people, to be used for research purposes. No attempt is being made to allow the people whose DNA is being used to opt out of the research.

With one exception.

The police. Many members of the police forces have, in the past, voluntarily added their DNA to the database, and they were consulted, and have rejected the request for their samples to be used! So, the question is, what do the police know that no one else knows about this 'research'?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/30/commercial_access_dna_database/

There was an interesting court ruling in California (where else?) this last week. The judge nixed the fees that cell phone carriers like Nextel charge for breaking their contracts. The contracts, he intimated probably violate state law. Last month Verizon Wireless agreed to pay US$21 million to settle an identical lawsuit, just before the trial was about to begin.

Since the FCC is taking a look at this as well, expect some climb down on this issue in the not too distant future.

http://www.physorg.com/news136567697.html

Here's an interesting little snippet for those you who fancy yourselves as analysts. Voltaix Inc, who manufacture materials for solar cells, recently received a cool US$12.5 million from Intel's investment arm. The investment was specifically to expand Voltaix's manufacturing capacity.

Put this together with Intel's recent investment in high efficiency solar modules company Sulfurcell GmbH, and you begin to get some idea of where Intel thinks it might be going next.

http://newsletter.eetimes.com/cgi-bin4/DM/y/eBKnw0FypUC0FrK0GWj80Et

And now for another lesson in technological incompetence from the UK government. It recently had 3,000 blank 'biometric' passports ripped off. What did our hopeless Identity & Passport Services (IPS) have to say about this disaster? It seems they are under the illusion that because the passports contain an RFID chip, they can't be used to produce fake passports!

The IPS seems to have idea that no one else in the whole wide world, except, of course, the IPS, knows anything about these chips. Surely there must be someone, somewhere, in the government who understands the basics of computer technology. They can't all be techno-dweebs. Or can they...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/29/biometric_passport_heist/

Did you know that Comcast reads people's blogs? (Cue outbreak of doom-laden music) No, actually, there's nothing sinister about it, they're not scanning for legal material, they're trying to clean up their image by finding out what customer problems are getting past them. Blog owners are starting to get emails dealing with the problems they are complaining about. I don't really hold much truck with Comcast, based on what I've read about them in the past, but this initiative deserves ten house points and a gold star. Well done!

http://www.pcauthority.com.au/News/117924,comcast-communicated-by-blog.aspx

And finally, in this section, here's a pretty amazing statistic for you. Google recently passed the one trillion mark for the number of unique web pages they are indexing. That's not all. According to a blog posted by a couple of Google software engineers, the number of individual web pages 'out there' is growing by several billion pages a day. Wow!

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-9999814-93.html?tag=nefd.top


Recent reading:

The Definitive Guide to SQLite by Michael Owens. Apress

I recently decided that it was long overdue time for me to start moving the databases in my programs away from Sleepycat's Berkeley DB (recently purchased by Oracle, whom I don't trust) to SQL databases. Since I wanted built-in databases, SQLite seemed to be the only serious contender. I didn't really have much experience with SQL databases, so I needed a comprehensive book that would teach me about SQL as well as this specific database.

Michael Owens' book didn't disappoint me. It gave me a solid grounding in SQL and taught me how to use SQLite efficiently. The SQL material covers both relational theory and the actual language, while the SQLite specific material covers the use of the 'C' API, and the internals of how SQLite works. I doubt that most people would be likely to do programming at the latter level, but a knowledge of what goes on 'under the hood' makes it easier to program at a higher level. Comprehensive appendices cover an SQL alphabetical reference, and all the 'C' API functions.

I liked this book and thought it was well worth the money I paid for it.

Highly recommended.


Scanner: Other Stories

Software patent sanity on the way?
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080728-patent-office-becoming-a-voice-for-
software-patent-sanity.html

Dual boot not trusted, installation rejected by Vista SP1
http://apcmag.com/vista_sp1_wont_install_on_dualboot_systems_microsoft.htm

Mosley orgy judge blocks web forum libel writ onslaught
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/29/advfn_libel_eady_mosley/

Laptops with certain NVidia chips failing
http://www.eetimes.com/news/semi/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=208802249

Familiar websites riddled with crimeware
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/30/websense_high_profile_website_malware_survey/

Ten technologies cybercrooks love to exploit
http://newsletters.zdnetuk.cneteu.net/t/374731/921984/461319/0/

Swedish spy agency sics lawyers on wiretap critic
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/29/sweden_charges_blogger/


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
3 August 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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