The weekly newsletter for Fed2 by ibgames

EARTHDATE: November 2, 2008

Official News page 14


WINDING DOWN

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

Last month brought me a fine example of just how far away we are from 'intelligent' computers. About once a week I get computer generated e-mail from Amazon suggesting items I might be interested in, based on what I've bought from them recently. Regular readers will know that I recently purchased an EeePC netbook computer - from Amazon, as it happened. Ever since then I've been getting e-mail say something like, "We noticed that you recently bought an EeePC from Amazon, and we thought that you might like to also buy these similar PC netbooks..." Artificial stupidity rules!

I was saddened to note that computing guru Donald Knuth is no longer writing out checks for $2.56 for every bug reported in his software. Apparently of the 275 checks written so far only nine have been cashed! Given Knuth's cult status among programmers, my guess is that the rest have been framed and are hanging on the walls of people's studies.

Since the US election takes place this week, and a lot of you will be casting electronic votes, I thought I'd end this intro with a quote from Joseph Stalin.

"It is enough that the people know there was an election. The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything."

And now we take you over to the Winding Down news room...


Story: Books, Google and the Writers Guild - but no readers

So, Google and the Writers Guild have settled their differences with a US$125 million payment from Google's loose change box. The settlement, trumpeted as a 'win-win' situation by both sides, completely ignores the interests of the book reading public.

So what was in the agreement?

Google will set up a 'Book Rights Registry' which will handle copyright problems and payments for authors. Via the registry authors can either opt out of having their books digitised, or alternatively they can obtain a share of the income from Google's future Book Search profits.

The agreement also gives Google the right to offer full access to scanned books still in copyright, at a price to be determined by the author (or by Google if the author prefers). Books out of copyright (in the US that's anything published before January 1st 1923) are already legally allowed to be scanned, and that will continue.

The real bugbear is the status of books still in copyright, but 'orphaned'. These are books in copyright which are out of print and not being reprinted, or for whom the copyright owner is unknown. Under the new system Google will be able to digitise these books and make them available at on one free terminal in each public library in the US. That's a miserable one terminal per 18,500 citizens! Note that no one is currently making money out of any of these books, so allowing them to be freely read and downloaded, as Google originally wanted to do, would not have been depriving anyone of their royalties.

It seems that even in these days there are benighted souls out there who begrudge people reading even out of print books for free. What a miserable bunch of b*******.

Coda: Those who like the new agreement might like to note something else significant that happened in the print media world this week. The Christian Science Monitor announced that it will become the first national US newspaper to drop its daily print edition and focus on publishing online....
http://settlement.authorsguild.org/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/10/28/google_settles_book_suit/
http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6609308.html
http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=524989
http://www.xconomy.com/national/2008/10/31/in-google-book-search-settlement-
readers-lose/

http://www.physorg.com/news144419035.html


Shorts:

PCWorld has just published its bottom 10 web sites list. Some of the choices are a matter of opinion, but clearly people are curious enough to take a look, since one of them I tried to look at came up with an ISP message saying that the bandwidth allocation had been exceeded! I think my 'favourite', so to speak, has got to be the Bermuda triangle site. Its mixture of graphics overwritten by text reminds me of the 1960s psychedelic London magazine 'It' - a sort of visual analog of hippy drug taking.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/151200/article.html?tk=nl_pvwnws

Incidentally, while we are on a best/worst of theme, take a look at InformationWeek, which has another list - this time of the seven most fantastic Internet hoaxes. Why seven, I wonder? Why not thirteen or twenty nine or even 101? Anyway take a look and see if you got fooled by any of them!
http://update.techweb.com/cgi-bin4/DM/y/eBM5C0HiOOq0G4V0GxsJ0EB

There was an interesting piece in the Wall Street Journal about the effects of a rash of new US state privacy laws currently being promulgated. A typical one is the bill that came into effect in Nevada last month. It requires all businesses to encrypt personally identifiable customer data that is transmitted electronically. That includes names and credit card numbers.

None of the laws yet require businesses to routinely encrypt the information on all hard drives, but hopefully that will come in due course. Massachusetts will, starting next year require the encryption of data on laptop computers and other portable devices, which is a start. Lets hope this trend starts to become more widespread so that the protection - and it does give a measure of protection - becomes even more widespread.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122411532152538495.html

Over on this side of the pond Belgian ISP 'Scarlet' has scored an important legal victory over the local equivalent of the RIAA, known as Sabam. Originally it was told by the court to implement filtering to block the transfer of copyrighted material through their network. Unfortunately for Sabam, the filtering technology Sabam proposed simply didn't work, and now the court has cancelled the order. Sabam has apologised to the court for providing 'incorrect' information. The case continues, and is likely to do so for at least another year.
http://securityandthe.net/2008/10/25/belgian-isp-scores-first-victory-in-p2p-case/

Still over here in Europe, the UK has announced that it is dropping any further plans to trial e-voting. That's not really surprising, since not only is our spendthrift government short of cash after bailing out its friends in the financial sector, but e-voting has also been the target of several none-too-supportive reports recently. Both the Rowntree Reform trust and the election commissioner have said the that e-voting is wide open to fraud, and does not seem to increase the likelihood of more people voting. Hopefully, this will kill e-voting in this country stone dead for quite a while.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/10/27/evote_counted_out/

And another story from Europe - this time from Spain, where a cache of 26 pre-World War II Enigma coding machines has been discovered in a 'gloomy office' in Madrid HQ of the Spanish Army. These are the early civilian version of the machines, and it seems that they were provided to Franco's Nationalists by the Germans at the start of the civil war. Apparently the Germans didn't trust the Nationalists with the military version, but the civil version of enigma seems to have been way above the ability of the Republicans to decrypt.

When the Nationalists won the machines were transferred to the new regular Spanish army, where they remained in use until the early 1950s. Presumably the Brits, who managed to crack the military version of Enigma during the war, were reading all the Spanish Enigma traffic throughout the war and into the 1950s!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/10/24/spanish_enigmas/

Does your clock radio buzz when your iPhone is near it? Does the Bluetooth mouse go haywire when an iPhone wielding colleague walks past your desk? Yes it really is the iPhone which is interfering with other devices which are only a short distance away. To be fair, there are other phones just as noisy as the iPhone, but unlike the iPhone they don't spend so much time talking to base, and their owners don't spend so much time playing with them.

iPhones (or eye-phones as the lady in the UK border controls department wrote down while recording an interview with myself and my wife - clearly tech-savvyness still has only a limited reach here) conform to the radio regulations, but those regulations are fairly lax. That's because, firstly, the regulators wanted to encourage cheap consumer electronic devices, and second, no one envisaged so many people wandering around with transmitters in their pockets. Eventually, devices will start to come onto the market which will be more resistant to these sort of problems. In the meantime, people will just have to put up with it, or ban noisy transmitting devices...
http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2008/10/why-your-clock-radio-is-all-ab.html

Social Workers are not my favourite people, but a number of comments about the computerised casework system foisted onto them struck a chord. The comments were made at a conference earlier this month. Delegates and consultants pointed out that rather than seeing the software as a helpful tool, social workers consider filling each record to be an administrative chore that takes them away from their real work. Then there is the fact that the systems is inflexible - there are boxes to tick whose categories are not fine grained enough, resulting in problems being classified as worse than they are.

Another speaker pointed out that most social workers like to include diagrams in their assessments of children. Needless to say the new software has no facilities for drawing diagrams. Who sold you this then, guv?

The most telling comment of all, though, came from an anonymous delegate, "We do not have a paper and pen department, so why is this being managed by IT? Practitioners and processes should come first." Exactly!
[material drawn from the paper version of the UK Trade magazine, 'Computing']

Windows 7 (that's the follow up to the much reviled Windows Vista) had a preliminary outing earlier this week. In case you are thinking that is fast, it's because Microsoft is in a hurry, because Vista is such a dog. So is Windows 7 any better? Yes! According to some. No! According to others.

Since I have no doubt that the Microsoft publicity leviathan will be trumpeting the good reviews, I'll share with you the other side, exemplified by InfoWorld's Randall Kennedy. He identified three specific things. One, it's just as slow as Vista. Yuck. Two, it's just as consumer focussed as Vista, with little to offer businesses. Three, It's just as confusing as Vista - all the controls are changed yet again. His summary, '...slow, bloated, and frustrating as hell...'

I particularly liked his comment that instead of the solid integration tools he was looking for, '...What I got was a prettier GUI and new ways to share music with my dog. Ugh!'
http://cwflyris.computerworld.com/t/3805712/250590949/147690/0/

And, as if we didn't already have enough security problems, take a look at this new disaster in the making. A firm called 'LogMeIn' has produced software that provides remote control of an Internet-connected Mac or PC through an iPhone or an iPod Touch. It's currently beta, and frankly, I can only hope it stays that way. Some bright ideas are best left as just that - ideas.
http://update.techweb.com/cgi-bin4/DM/y/eBM5C0HiOOq0G4V0GxsH0E8

Moving from big programs to Big Media, there was an interesting little report on EMI produced by Maltby Capital, the company that runs EMI. It seems that the EMI, in spite of the fact that it is dying on its feet (losses last year, 757 million UK pounds - about US$1.5 bn at the then prevailing exchange rate), spent a staggering 700,000 UK pounds (about US$1.25 million) with just one taxi firm! The report says that the costs at EMI are out of control (yes, it does rather look that way), and that 'the business model [is] fundamentally flawed.' You bet it is! By the way, this is the record company that once signed up the Beatles...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/10/27/emi_report/


Homework:

Security guru Bruce Schneier has been laying it on the line at the recent RSA conference in London. He challenged the view that privacy and security are at loggerheads with one another. He feels that the real debate is between liberty and control.

What Schneier suggests is that in five years time things like identity checks and movement tracking, which at the moment are highly visible, will become invisible because they will be done by technologies like RFID. At the same time the falling price of digital storage means that it will become easier to store large amounts of information about who people are and where they have been.

It will become easier to keep social networking conversation records, IMs, e-mail messages than to decide when to throw them away. New search algorithms and faster processing will mean that it is easier to extract material from records. All of which indicates we are going to have to decide just how all this power should be carved up between individuals and the state. As Schneier so aptly puts it, 'Future generations will judge us on how well we grapple with issues such as data pollution and the protection of privacy.'
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/10/29/schneier_rsa_privacy/

Prof Charles Nesson of Harvard Law School has made some interesting point about the RIAA's litigation against file sharers. He suggests that the law on which the RIAA are litigating is essentially a criminal law, in which case the defendants are entitled to due process, including the right to a jury trial. Also, he suggests that the Law violates the constitution by putting the prosecution of a criminal statute in the hands of private parties.

Furthermore, it would mean that Congress has violated the separation of powers by requiring courts to try cases according to inappropriate civil processes. And finally, the law violates the 5th and 8th Amendments by requiring grossly excessive statutory damage awards. Maybe, just maybe, this will finally curtail the pernicious activities of the RIAA. One can but hope.
http://government.zdnet.com/?p=4152


Scanner: Other Stories

Microsoft adopts OpenID, Googles meddles with it.
http://www.nytimes.com/external/readwriteweb/2008/10/27/27readwriteweb-
microsoft_windows_live_openid.html

http://neosmart.net/blog/2008/google-doesnt-use-openid

EU software patents to be decided on
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081030-eu-patent-board-to-decide-
whether-to-allow-software-patents.html

IT credit crunch comes home to roost
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2008/10/28/tech_credit_crunch/

Samsung's New Carbon Nanotube Color E-Paper
http://thefutureofthings.com/news/5646/carbon-nano-tube-color-a4-e-paper.html

Virtual Strip searches
http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/europe/10/23/eu.airport.body.scanners.ap
/index.html


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
2 November 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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