The weekly newsletter for Fed2 by ibgames

EARTHDATE: October 26, 2008

Official News page 13


WINDING DOWN

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

Another week, another Winding Down. The summer rains have finally stopped here in the UK, and now the winter rains have started. The good news is that today I got an extra hour's lie in because the clocks went back. In the US they go back next week, causing utter time zone confusion for the coming week. Maybe I should fly to the States to get another lie in next week...


Shorts:

I see that a Dutch court has convicted two youths of theft for stealing items in a computer game. The victim was a 13 year old in the game Runescape, who was intimidated into handing over an amulet and a mask. Unpleasant, but not all that unusual, I would have thought. I wonder would there have been a murder charge if they had killed the avatar first? The 'perps' were sentenced to 200 and 160 hours community service respectably. I hope it was service in the Runescape virtual community. It would have been ever better if they had been sentenced to virtual hard labour - 200 hours of digging out iron ore for other people to forge swords with! Now that would be a punishment to fit the crime!
http://www.physorg.com/news143820388.html

You won't be able to access the web site of 'Quote Unquote Records'. Why not? Because its site has been taken down by its ISP - for infringing the label's own copyright. All the music on the site was free, which I guess must have made it immediately suspect in the eyes of the powers that be. The copyright that was supposedly infringed was actually written by the web site's frontman, Jeff Rosenstock, who is facing demands from the ISP to prove the music is his copyright. However the music is in a Creative Commons copyright - and the license is on the site and as such is unavailable. A classic Catch 22 situation! Perhaps he needs to sue the ISP for the theft of his copyright...
http://torrentfreak.com/record-label-infringes-own-copyright-site-pulled-081019/

Never mind the legality, feel the fines. New York attorney general Andrew Cumono has taken to trolling software from an Australian Company once accused of distributing spyware round the ISPs. AOL is the latest recipient, courtesy of Mr Cumono, of a set of promotional slides from the somewhat dubious Bright Digital Networking, touting their deep packet inspection hardware. Mr Cumono is currently running a crusade against child porn, which he is using as reason to introduce wiretapping of citizen's Internet usage without a warrant.

Obviously none of us would sanction child porn, and it deserves to be stamped out because of the way it exploits children. However it would be much better if Mr Cumono avoided resorting to illegal methods to do so. There are plenty of legal ways to deal with child porn, and I'm sure more can be dreamed up if necessary. You, sir, are supposed to set an example of respect for the law, not encourage people to break it, thereby bringing it into disrepute. You should be ashamed.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/10/20/cuomo_pron_crusade_continues/

As the owner of a really cute little EeeeeeeeePC, I'm happy to tell you all that the latest figures indicate that net notebooks, which are only a year old this month, and have suffered from availability problems, have already taken 10 per cent of the European PC market. ASUS's EeePC had the market to itself for most of the year, but now a plethora of others have entered the market. Add to that the fact that a number of mobile phone carriers and telcos are now starting to offer subsidised versions - and sometimes even free versions - and you can expect the share to grow over the next year. Way to Go!
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2008/10/17/idc_euro_pc_market/

Microsoft has rushed out an emergency security patch. Microsoft normally only put out patches once a month, which underlines the seriousness of the hole being patched. The bad guys have already spotted the problem and the code is out there they will exploit the bug, given a chance. I guess I should recommend you all apply it, especially since Microsoft rate it as 'critical', although I normally wait a while before applying patches - so that other people can find the problems first.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/10/23/emergency_windows_update/

I did wonder, in the light of the current banking crisis, whether a stupid bankers section would be in order, but decided against it. However, here are a couple of stories with a tech slant that readers might find interesting.

This week, German investigators raided the Frankfurt offices of the German KFW bank as part of an investigation into a payment of more than US$400 million made in error to Lehman Bros bank. Apparently the bank's directors did discuss the fact that Lehman was a black hole for money and was bankrupt, but no one thought to check that there were no payments to it in the automated transfer system. The result - US$400 million cash down the drain, three KFW out of work directors and an investigation by Germany's Federal Criminal Office into the possibility that it can be classed as embezzlement. Duh!
http://edition.cnn.com/2008/BUSINESS/10/22/germany.bank.raid/index.html

The other story is a cautionary tale about the use of Microsoft's Excel spreadsheet. It seems that Barclays Capital, who are buying some of the bankrupt assets of Lehman Brothers, have had to go to the court to get the list of what they are buying amended. It seems that in the law firm handling the sale for Barclays used a first year law associate to prepare the list in Excel. Unfortunately, when he (or she) reformatted the sheet no less that 179 contracts were added!

OK, I frequently rail against the quality of Microsoft products, but adding 179 contracts from thin air? It doesn't sound very likely even to my jaundiced eye. In any case, why didn't a senior partner check the work before it went out? The law firm involved was Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP. Make a note of the name; you wouldn't want to be represented by lawyers that don't know how to reformat a spreadsheet, would you?
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&taxonomyId
=9&articleId=9117143&intsrc=hm_topic

I've mentioned before that Transport for London (TfL) use a travel card with the Mifare Classic RFID chip in them. The security on this chip was recently broken by a number of researchers world wide. Now, according to reports, it seems that TfL is planning to change from its current card to a new system as early as 2010, rather than waiting until 2015 as originally intended.

TfL are currently looking at alternatives, including mobile phones and bank cards, and are on the lookout for new technologies. So if you know anyone with bright ideas in this field, now's the time to speak up.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/10/23/tfl_oyster_replacement/

An internal report from the LAPD reports on two cases that have been dropped after it was discovered that the fingerprint evidence was faulty. For a long time fingerprints evidence has been considered to be inviolate, and juries have usually accepted it as a given - your prints are on the scene of the crime and therefore you are guilty. Interestingly enough there has never been any independent verification of the assumption that fingerprints are unique.

Now, a similar thing is happening with DNA profiles. The assumption is that they too are unique, but there are already indications that this may not be the case. Not only that, we are moving towards a society where it is relatively easy for someone knowledgeable to create DNA to specification, and leave it at the crime scene. I wonder what is going to become the 'gold standard' for evidence when DNA flunks out?
http://www.dailynews.com/search/ci_10743941?IADID=Search-www.dailynews.com-
www .dailynews.com

And while we are on the subject of police and high-tec, it's emerged that the Maryland State Police have been adding peaceful protestors who have no record of violent crime to state and federal terrorist watch list databases. When challenged about the practice, the excuse was given that the software used didn't have an option to classify people as peaceful protesters! Perhaps that should have been taken as evidence that details of peaceful protesters are not supposed to be put into these databases...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/07/AR2008100703245.html

Want an excuse to drink more beer? Have I got an excuse for you! How about, 'I've been making sure I don't get cancer, officer'? Yes, coming soon(-ish) to a bar near you, cancer fighting beer. It's long been known that a component of red wine, resveratol, helps protect against heart disease, cancer and generally keeps you healthy as you get older. Now researchers at Rice University in Houston are in the process of creating a genetically modified strain of yeast that not only ferments the beer, but also produces resveratol at the same time. The result? Beer that's good for your health... Bliss!
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&
articleId=9117656


Homework:

Do you regularly follow reports of new discoveries in scientific publications? If you do, you might well find a report on the accuracy of such published articles very interesting indeed. The report - published in the online journal Public Library of Science Medicine - is not concerned with fraud. It looks at how the process of publishing, and the requirements of academic tenure, distort what is published by favouring dramatic and over-hyped material at the expense of material that is more cautious, or reporting negative results.

Interestingly, almost a third of the papers the study looked at had been refuted within a few years. All the papers had been cited at least 1,000 times by other scientists, so in a sense the research was only looking at the cream of the crop. Furthermore, the 'hotter' the field the research was in, the more competition there is, and the more likely it is that research is wrong.
http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12376658

Did you know that Scotch tape emits X-Rays? No? neither did I until recently. It seems that if you peel the tape in a vacuum, it emits rapid pulses of X-Rays, each about a billionth of a second long. I have no idea how the scientists involved came to be peeling tape in a vacuum chamber, but maybe it's a common activity in scientific circles.

Regardless, it's apparently caused by electrons jumping from the roll to the sticky underside of the tape - the X-Rays being emitted when the fast moving electrons are stopped short by the tape. This explains why it only works in a vacuum, in air the electrons would slow down and not emit radiation when they stop - they're not moving fast enough.

The researchers are now trying to figure out how to adapt this effect to produce an X-Ray machine usable in places where there is no electricity - like paramedics at accidents. Fascinating.
http://us.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science/10/22/scotch.tape.xray/index.html

If your tastes extend in the direction of open source software, you might like to take a look at the latest research from The Linux Foundation. It's a paper attempting to estimate the total development cost of a Linux distribution. The total, for the curious, comes out at around US$10.8 billion for the Fedora 9 distribution. That's quite a lot of cash!

The paper explains the methodology used to calculate the figure, and a quick scan of the details suggests to me that the US$10.8 billion is probably in the right ballpark. A similar methodology was used by David A Wheeler in 2002, and at that time the cost came out at about US$1.2 billion, so it's obvious that a lot of value has been added in the last six years.
http://www.linuxfoundation.org/publications/estimatinglinux.php


Scanner: Other Stories

UK.gov says: Regulate the Internet
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/10/20/government_internet_regulation/

'Bonnie' of ID theft pair sentenced to five years in prison for role in multiple scams
http://www.physorg.com/news143614797.html

Merchants and punters cry foul over Verified by Visa
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/10/23/vbyv_analysis/

Social networking sites told to warn users of weak privacy controls
http://www.physorg.com/news143526570.html

Oz watchdogs howl over 'Cyber-Safety' net filter
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/10/17/australia_cyber_safety_no_opt_out/

Computer keyboard hacking
http://www.physorg.com/news143890946.html

Greenspan tells Congress that bad data hurt Wall Street
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&
articleId=9117961


Acknowledgements

Thanks to readers Barb and Fi, and to 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
26 October 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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