The weekly newsletter for Fed2 by ibgames

EARTHDATE: December 14, 2008

Official News page 12


WINDING DOWN

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

As a C++ programmer I'm naturally interested in how new programmers - especially C++ ones - are taught their trade. I was, therefore, pleased to find an interview with the creator of C++, Bjarne Stroustrup, on just this subject. What he had to say was interesting, I recommend it to anyone in the field.

However, there was one comment he made that seemed to me to be applicable to far more than just programming, and to more than just the USA. Talking about schools he said, "High schools could teach students to work hard at something (just about anything), to search out information as needed, and learn to express their ideas in writing and orally." I just wish our educators would listen to this voice of sanity.

Reality catches up with my prognostications at internet time speeds. I reported on femtocells last week, this week I find that AT&T is planning to rollout the units in trial markets next year. Today Winding Down, tomorrow the world!

We all had a snigger here in the UK when the UK Government's 'resilience' web site broken down as soon as someone tried to send in some feedback. The government's resilience website is supposed to act as a resource for those involved in emergence situations. You know the sort of things - bird flu, flooding, foot and mouth disease, influenza. Incidentally, we had extensive flash flooding in the UK's west country this week...

(All the URLs for the above are in the Scanner section.)

OK, enough of the schadenfreude, here's the news.


Shorts:

Flexible displays using Organic LEDs (OLEDs) have, at least theoretically, been around for a while. Unfortunately, you don't see many of them because of the cost. Now, it looks like that might change with a new process developed by European researchers. Currently the main use of OLEDs is in high grade TV sets, where the OLEDs are backed with glass to keep them accurately positioned. The new process uses printing machines to print the OLEDS onto a flexible protective film. The whole assembly is about as thick as three or four sheets of paper, and it's flexible.

The real killer, though, is that you can use standard printing machines to print the OLEDs onto the film, which is far cheaper than having to build special machinery. And the way traditional new media is going, I suspect there will be plenty of second hand suitable equipment on the market over the new ten years or so! Expect to see the first trials of this stuff within the next two to three years.
http://www.physorg.com/news147969623.html

Move over, Germany, make way for China. It's official, China is now the second biggest top level internet domain after .com. The information was in domain registrar VeriSign's latest report. That's up 76% for the .cn domain. Mind you the .uk domain showed 14% growth and .de (Germany) 8%, which shows that not all the growth is in countries catching up. Overall the total number of domain names registered rose nearly 20% to 174 million. Impressive, but what does it mean, I hear you ask...

I wish you hadn't asked that, because I'm not sure. If the growth had been all Russia and China, I would have suspected spammers buying large blocks of names, but the .uk and .de indicates that other processes are also under way. I seem to remember that at the moment the USA, Germany and the UK all have relatively static numbers of internet subscribers, so perhaps it means that existing subscribers are becoming more savvy and changing from being just internet consumers to also producing material. It could also be that companies are buying up names in multiple top level domains to redirect to their existing .com domains. I guess we are just going to have to wait and see what emerges from this - and what the effect of the ongoing financial crisis has on people and companies.
http://www.internetnews.com/stats/article.php/3789456/Of+China+Growth+and+TLDs.htm

The UK government is up to its tricks again. As I've indicated before New Labour is trying to put into place all the elements to create a society redolent of George Orwell's 1984. Their latest wheeze is to slip into an obscure bill going through parliament measures to allow more sharing of personal data between government departments, thus creating a massive distributed government database.

The government have to be careful, because after losing personal and financial data on over half the population not very long ago, there is intense suspicion of government databases. The bill will probably get through its first reading in the House of Commons, but I suspect it may well have these proposals zapped in the House of Lords.

It's pretty ironic when you think about it, we have to rely on an unelected, appointed second chamber to protect us from the machinations of our democratically elected representatives!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/05/gov_grows_data_share/

Still, at least we've won one round in the UK. For years now the government has allowed police forces to keep the DNA of innocent people in a national database. Anyone who is arrested, even if they are not charged, or are found to be innocent, has their DNA kept on the database. Now the European Court of Human Rights has ruled that the practice violates the respect for private life, which is part of the Human Rights Convention.

This means that the records of all those not convicted of criminal offences should be deleted. Needless to say our government is attempting to wriggle out of that obligation. Whether it will succeed or not remains to be seen.
http://kable.msgfocus.com/c/11tuUUpcLheUCd

Good news for rural US internet subscribers who have to rely on satellites for their broadband access. Arianespace have reported that they have inked a deal to put a new high capacity satellite - ViaSat-1 - into space next year. ViaSat-1 has a throughput of something in the region of 100Gb/sec, which is more than all the current North American satellites combined.

This is good for subscribers. It won't reduce the lag (the time it takes each packet to get to its destination) because that depends on the distance travelled, but it will increase the throughput, so that, for instance, files will download in less time. The press release suggests that the increased capacity will probable benefit something in the region of two million subscribers.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/06/viasat_1_launch_contract_arianespace/

Our old friends the Recording Industry Ass of America (RIAA) are at it again. Not content with merely suing the dead, grandparents, and small children, they've now moved on to suing transplant candidates. This time it's 19 year old woman disabled by pancreatitis who has to be hospitalised every week while she waits for a transplant.

Not being in much of a state to read and understand the 60 pages of legal crap the RIAA sent her, she didn't understand that if she didn't respond within a short space of time, she would lose the court case by default. Now a local attorney is offering to represent her for free and is trying to get the case re-opened. Hopefully he will succeed in doing so.
http://www.thepittsburghchannel.com/news/18160365/detail.html

Pssst! Wanna buy details of 21 million German bank accounts? Yours for a mere 12 million Euros (US$15 million). It's a bargain! And, to prove that we have them, we can let you have a CD with the 1.2 million accounts. This was exactly what happened to two investigative journalists posing as interested buyers working for a gambling organisation. They met the sellers in a Hamburg hotel and took the CD away as the first delivery.

Their magazine, WirtschaftsWoche, believes the information was collected by call center employees, and could affect as many as three out of four German households. If that's the case, and it would make sense since call center employees are badly paid and have access to this sort of information as part of their job, then calls for the regulation of call centers are likely in near future. Alternatively, the banks might have something to say about the use of call centers...

This is Germany's second major personal info heist in just a few months. Last October T-Mobile admitted it had lost records on 17 million customers, including names, address, dates of birth, phone numbers, and e-mail addresses. If I lived in Germany, I would be starting to get more than a little worried about just who has my personal information now.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/09/stolen_german_bank_accounts_for_sale/

Thinking of giving your friends a celestial present this Xmas? Maybe a plot on the moon - 40 acres and a robot sounds about right. On the other hand, perhaps you'd prefer one of Uranus's rings. (You at the back, stop that smutty laughter!)

It seems that sales of Lunar real estate are soaring at the moment, but no one seems to know what the legal situation is - it's not as though anyone actually owns the moon. It may be that you have to go there and defend it against all comers! Space.com has been looking at some of the issues surrounding the legality of selling off chunks of the solar system. It makes for interesting reading.

As it happens, I have this really hot property for sale. It's on the sun...
http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/081210-who-owns-moon.html
http://www.buyuranus.com/

The news on the security front isn't good. I already mentioned the German ID info heist, but that is only one problem revealed this week. Security researchers also reported a new piece of malware that is capable of subverting all the devices on a local network if one infected box is attached to the network.

Microsoft issued a large number of patches on Tuesday, but within hours new zero day exploits were announced. Among them were a security hole in fully patched internet Explorer 7 browsers, an SQL server attack, and problems with WordPad on Windows XP SP2, Windows 2000, and Server 2003. Hackers look likely to have a merry Xmas, even if the rest of us don't.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/11/sql_server_vuln/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/11/wordpad_zero_day/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/09/zero_day_ie_flaw_exploited/


Geek Toys:

Now here is something for programming geeks to play around with over the Xmas hols - genetic programming - Mona Lisa in 50 triangles and a million generations. Roger Alsing wrote a short program to see if he could simulate the evolution of a random set of polygons into something similar to a given picture. Once he had written it, he tested it with 50 semi-transparent triangles as a starter and let it run for several hours using a picture of the Mona Lisa as the desired end.

The details, code, and results, including sample intermediate pictures are on his Weblog, and are amazing - the end result is a clearly recognisable Mona Lisa. It's a classic little experiment showing the power of genetic and evolutionary programming - well worth a peek and code to play with. What more could you want for Xmas?
http://rogeralsing.com/2008/12/07/genetic-programming-evolution-of-mona-lisa/


Scanner: Other Stories

Brits not turned on by mobile internet
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/12/05/moneysupermarket_web_use_report/

AT&T testing femtocells
http://links.techwebnewsletters.com/ctt?kn=53&m=30670230&r=MTQxNTE3OTc3M
wS2&b=2&j=NDM4NTM1NzES1&mt=1&rt=0

UK.gov resilience website feedback falls over
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/09/uk_resilience_website_easy_pushover/

Bjarne Stroustrup on educating software developers
http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/features/article.php/3789981/Bjarne+Stroustrup+
on+Educating+Software+Developers.htm

Scorpions' tale leaves Internet Watch Foundation exposed
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/09/iwf/

Sony sued for collecting kids data
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/11/sony_child_data_collection_suit/


Acknowledgements

Thanks to readers Barb, Fi, lois, 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
14 December 30008

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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