The weekly newsletter for Fed2 by ibgames

EARTHDATE: February 22, 2009

Official News page 12


WINDING DOWN

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

Another Sunday, and another Winding Down for your edification. This week we feature stories about Pirate Bay, facial recognition, Windows 7, and Internet Explorer 8, to name but a few.

Given the extensive coverage in the mainstream press and by the twittering classes, the Facebook kerfuffle has been relegated to Scanner section of this prestigious publication.

And, without further ado...


Shorts:

The story of the week was the sensational dropping, on the second day of the trial, of half of the charges against the Pirate Bay P2P search engine.

The prosecutor removed all mention of 'complicity in the production of copyrighted material' from the charge sheet filed in the Stockholm district court. That's half, and the most serious half at that, of the charges originally filed which have now been dropped.

It became clear during the first day that the prosecutor had been taking the music business at their word, and hadn't really understood what it is that Pirate Bay actually does. Consequently, he had to reconsider exactly what he could charge them with, without making a complete fool of himself.

It will be interesting to see what else is going to come out of this case (in more ways than one) as it proceeds.
http://torrentfreak.com/50-of-charges-against-pirate-bay-dropped-090217/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/17/pirate_bay_half_charges_dropped_report/

Have you got one of those fancy Lenovo, ASUS or Toshiba laptops that uses facial recognition for security? It turns out that it's not that difficult to fool. Security researchers have cracked it by holding up a photograph of the authorized user in front to the laptop's cam. Worse, they were able to knock up a completely phony image that the computer accepted.

I guess you need something else to secure your computer. I wouldn't recommend using a fingerprint reader either. Fingerprints can change as you do things that affect the tips of your fingers, and as you get older. If you use the reader every day, that's not such a problem, as the software can update the small changes over time.

However, a few month ago I was asked to help getting some material off a ThinkPad with a fingerprint reader that hadn't been used for a few months. The reader no longer recognised its owner's fingerprints. Eventually, I was forced to use some Linux security tools (fortunately, the machine was running Windows) to make it possible to log in without a password or fingerprint.

So, looks like an old fashioned password is better than any of these new fangled tricks for logging on!
http://www.darkreading.com/security/vulnerabilities/showArticle.jhtml;
jsessionid=1TT4XOGIHD2DCQSNDLRS KHSCJUNN2JVN?articleID=213901113

Microsoft's 'open beta' of Windows 7 has been running for a while now. The consensus seems to be that it is a better Vista (for some definition of 'better). In other words, Vista users will joyfully upgrade, to get what they should have had in the first place, while XP users won't be impressed.

The beta has been running long enough for some of the more sordid aspects of Windows 7 to become clear. In particular it has some extremely draconian Digital Restrictions Management (DRM). Draconian enough to lock you out of your own files, and sloppy enough to allow programs like Photoshop to change the settings on your firewall so they can phone home and download material without your permission.

The details are on Slashdot. Looking at them, it's clear that Microsoft has raised the stakes in the battle for who owns your desktop to a new, and very disturbing level. I wonder just how much more of this sort of thing is going to emerge over the next few months?
http://tech.slashdot.org/firehose.pl?id=3443509&op=view

Fancy breaking the bank in a casino? Well there's an iTunes App Store application that will help you do it - it's a blackjack card counter. Card counting is a method of tracking what cards have already been played in Blackjack. It's not illegal if you do it in your head, but if you use a 'device' to count then you can end up in the nick.

In Nevada, for instance, you could be banged up for six years and be fined US$10,000 for using such a device. So if you habitually frequent casinos, and find a notice at the door requiring patrons to check in their iThingies, you know why!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/17/iphone_card_counter/

I was fascinated to learn that president Abraham Lincoln was something of a geek. Not only was he the first leader of a nation to make extensive use of the telegraph to direct his generals, but he was also given to testing new rifles on the White House lawn.

He also tested the 'coffee-mill gun', which was an early hand cranked machine gun. (I doubt that many people walked their dog near the White house in those days!) Lincoln even filed a patent for a device to lift riverboats over shoals.

All this, and a still unmatched command of the English language. No wonder he became a successful commander in chief at the most critical juncture in US history.
http://www.usnews.com/articles/news/history/2009/02/11/abraham-lincoln-a-technology-
leader-of-his-time.html?PageNr=1

You may, or may not, know that Microsoft has a new version of Internet Explorer (IE) in the works. It's nearly ready for release, and already there is a list of 2,400 major sites that it won't work with in its default, out of the box, mode.

The list actually includes the Microsoft and MSN sites, not to mention the BBC, CNN, Google, Apple, PayPal, Amazon, and major UK sites like Barclays Bank, Tesco, the Royal Mail and ITV.

Actually, this isn't really Microsoft's fault, but it is in a way. OK, OK, let me explain. This is the first version of IE that is standards compliant, out of the box. Unfortunately, previous versions weren't, so those who built web sites added workarounds to deal with IE's idiosyncrasies.

These bodges mean that those sites now don't work properly with the new version of IE. Well, the new version (IE8) does have an incompatibility mode to handle this stuff that's incompatible with the standards. But it's a pain to keep switching back and forth.

I think I'll stick with using Firefox as a browser.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/18/internet_explorer_8_list_challenge/

Finally, I have to tell you about the latest achievements of the Nigerian 419 scammers. This time they managed to take in a government - to whit the State of Utah. The amount? A cool US$2.5 million. It would have been more, had not the bank being used called the state to enquire why such large sums of money were going to an account in Texas.

The scammers were able to obtain the vendor number for the University of Utah's design and construction department, forge the signature of the director and submit the paperwork through a state web site, using their own bank account information.

Unbelievably, the money was paid out with no further security checks! I suspect Utah taxpayers are going to be asking some interesting questions about where their hard earned tax dollars have gone.
http://www.sltrib.com/ci_11691598?IADID=Search-www.sltrib.com-www.sltrib.com


Homework:

Interested in the English language? Then there is a paper in the latest issue of First Monday that you might find interesting. It is an answer to those who argue that the English language is becoming devoid of content because of the rise of 'managerial' style writing, and the dreadful style and spelling of blogs on the Internet.

Similar laments about the 'death' of 'good' English have, of course, been heard down through the ages, but some how or other the language has survived its naysayers.

The author, Carolyne Lee, argues that there is plenty of good writing on the net - some of it even in blogs. She also argues, persuasively, that it is the very openness of the net that is helping to preserve good English, since the political and management elite no longer have sole control of the language.

Well argued and cogent.
http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2320/2094

There's some fascinating news from Australia where a team of scientists and engineers have developed a way of printing plastic solar cells in a cost effective way.

The process allows the manufacture of the flexible cells using a technology similar to that used to print bank notes. This is considerably cheaper than other methods, and would allow sheets of the material to be applied to, for instance roof tops. Given that one of the limiting factors in the widespread use of solar cells to generate electricity at the moment is cost, this promises to be a major innovation.

This innovation also produced what must be a classic remark from a politician. Peter Batchelor, the State of Victoria Minister for Energy and Resources announced, "The production of these film-like solar cells will be literally as easy as printing money." Politicians printing money? Surely not!
http://www.physorg.com/news154264153.html

Ars Technica has a report on a new study that's just come out about profiling as a method of deciding who is more likely to be a terrorist. This is a thorny question that generates a lot of heat.

The study doesn't look at the generation of profiles and the resulting risk calculations themselves. It looks at the way in which they are used to decide who is going to receive more intensive security checking.

One of the consequences of the way screening is currently done, at airports, for instance, is that the same small subset of the population gets screened ever time, even when they've already been cleared on previous occasions! Talk about a waste of time, effort and resources.

Ars Techica's explanation of the paper is easy to understand and will give you an interesting take on airport security (which is where most of us encounter profiling).
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/02/study-racial-profiling-no-more-
effective-than-random-screen.ars


Geek Toys:

Fancy a really classy looking, small form factor, games machine? Then take a look at Shuttle's SDXi Carbon machine. The liquid cooling enables much higher processor speeds, while maintaining a small size. Indeed one option available is a 3.00 GHz version of Intel's Core 2 Extreme QX9650. Mind you, that's not a cheap option - add a cool (so to speak) one thousand US dollars to the price.

It almost looks fast enough to run Windows Vista...
http://us.shuttle.com/ConfigurePackage.aspx?package=SYH7-G4500-SDXI

Not exactly a toy, but still worth a mention is Data Center Knowledge's video galley of exploding servers. Yes - it's a set of videos of people blowing up servers. I'm sure that at some time you've wanted to take out a server and shoot it. I know I have.

The videos, all taken from YouTube, are of varying quality. Personally, I liked the exploding web server best, although the HP one was a good explosion, even if it took a while to get there.
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/the-gallery-of-exploding-servers/


Scanner: Other Stories

Spammers break Live Hotmail's CAPTCHA yet again
http://www.infoworld.com/article/09/02/17/Spammers_break_Live_Hotmails_
CAPTCHA_yet_again_1.html?source=NLC-NETWORK&cgd=2009-02-17

Obama anti-trust choice sees Google as the next Microsoft
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aG9B5.J3Bl1w

700 comments tell the FTC "No DRM!"
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/02/700-comments-tell-the-ftc-no-drm.ars

Facebook does U-turn on eternal data grab
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/18/facebook_terms_uturn/
http://www.informationweek.com/news/internet/social_network/showArticle.jhtml?
articleID=214303433&cid=nl_tw_security_T


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
22 February 2009

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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