The weekly newsletter for Fed2 by ibgames

EARTHDATE: January 24, 2010

Official News page 12


WINDING DOWN

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

I was saddened to hear that the mystery man who has visited Edgar Allen Poe's grave on the anniversary of Poe's birthday every year since 1949 failed to turn up this year. Each year, the man, dressed in black, face hidden by a broad rimmed hat, has turned up early in the morning , toasted Poe with a cognac, laid the rest of the bottle and three red roses on the grave and then departed. The identity of the figure has never been established, and I guess now never will be...

Nevermore...


Shorts:

By the end of last week the code used to hack Google et al in China was live on the net. The bad boys were busy over the weekend, and by early this week it was being used on infected sites all over the net. The code, which exposes a hole in Microsoft's Internet Explorer code, affects all versions of the program going back as far as IE6.

The sweeping nature of the problem prompted first the German, and then the French, governments to issue a recommendation that its citizens and businesses switch to using a non-IE browser. Needless to say, the British government didn't notice what was going on, and slept through the whole affair. Microsoft's response to this was to suggest people switch to using IE8, the latest version. Unfortunately, even IE8 is vulnerable to the problem, making the response little more than a marketing ploy.

Normally Microsoft issues all its patches once a month, but this time it hastily cobbled together a patch, which was finally distributed on Thursday. At the same time it admitted that it's known about the problem for more than three months! All this isn't going to play well with the advertising for Windows 7 and IE8 that Microsoft is pumping out.

In the mean time, if you are the remaining user of IE, I'd suggest you go and get the patch from here as soon as possible, unless you want to surrender all you hold dear to those who would like to know what you are hiding!
http://www.infoworld.com/d/security-central/attack-code-used-hack-google-now-public-
224?source=IFWNLE_nlt_sec_2010-01-18

http://www.informationweek.com/news/services/disaster_recovery/showArticle.jhtml?
articleID=222301351&cid=nl_tw_software_2010-01-19_t

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/21/ie_emergency_patch_released/

Meanwhile in Russia a story about CCTV was breaking. For the last year the Moscow police have been keeping a close watch on crime in the city using their shiny new CCTV cameras, installed last year as part of a US$17 million program. At least, that's what they thought they were doing.

But all was not what it seemed.

As the police spokeswoman, Olga Dumalkina, put it, "From May to September 2009 CCTV cameras in several districts of Moscow streamed pre-recorded pictures instead of real-time video." Oops!

The company involved apparently received around a million dollars for what the police thought were live pictures, and, according to investigators, the company also released a computer virus designed to disable the cameras of its rival in the western part of the city.

What I want to know is how come no one noticed that the pictures were recordings for over four months?
http://rt.com/Top_News/2010-01-13/cctv-cameras-fraud-moscow.html

And while we are on the subject of Moscow, it seems that cameras are not its only hi-tech problem. Earlier this week traffic came to a halt when someone hacked into the electronic billboard system and substituted some extremely graphic pornography for the regular adverts. It took 20 minutes before the billboards were finally disabled, by which time traffic on the busy Garden Ring Road had come to a complete halt!
http://www.switched.com/2010/01/16/russian-commuters-treated-to-free-
roadside-pornography/

Rumour has it that The New York Times is moving glacially forward with its plans to charge people for accessing the on-line edition. I've seen estimates of 2011 before the paper starts costing readers, but the consensus is that something will be said shortly (for a given definition of 'shortly') after the launch of Apple's tablet computer later this week. Always assuming Apple is going to launch a tablet computer, of course.

I'll be honest, I don't know what the future of newspapers is. Charging clearly doesn't work. Advertising just drives readers into a foaming at the mouth frenzy, and classifieds have migrated, successfully, to places like Craig's List. The truth is that it is entirely possible that after a very successful century, newspapers have reached the end of their natural life.

Newspapers were founded, and were successful, on the basis of a fundamental premise - that news was a scarce commodity - which meant that you could, if you had enough money to gain access to the expensive means of production and dissemination, harvest it and charge for access to the results. With the internet in its current incarnation, it's clearly no longer the case that we have scarcity, and the financial results are showing it, with the crisis affecting not just the publishers, but the whole infrastructure.

Newspapers aren't going to vanish overnight, there is too much tied up in them, and an older generation that will continue to get its newspapers to read on the daily commute in big cities, but it's difficult to know how they can survive in the long run.
http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2010/01/new_york_times_set_to_mimic_ws.html

I'm sure everyone by now has heard about the distraction caused by using a cell-phone while driving, and the argument (with good science to back it up) that even hands off phones are a distraction. Well that's not all there is to it - last year over 1,000 pedestrians checked in to emergency rooms across the USA, after having accidents as a result of using their mobile phones while walking.

Take for example the 16 year old who suffered from concussion after walking into a telegraph pole while texting, or the 28 year old who tripped up and broke a finger of the hand holding his cell-phone. Actually this sort of thing isn't new. I've suffered similar (though not as serious, I hasten to add) accidents for many years as a result of reading books while walking. The problem even has a medical name - inattention blindness.

So, I wonder, how long is it before it is made illegal to use a cell-phone while walking in a public place?
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/17/technology/17distracted.html?partner=rss

I just had to laugh. A UK government report on future jobs has come up with the suggestion that we should be training young people for jobs like 'vertical farmers', body parts makers and space pilots. Our esteemed, and unelected, Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, betrayed just how totally out of touch he was by saying that he hoped the report would inspire young people to gain skills and training for these new careers.

Good grief! And this from a country that doesn't have a space program, and where it's illegal for citizens to fire off rockets. My advice to aspiring UK space pilots? Emigrate to the USA. As someone famous once nearly said,

"...Give me your tired, your space pilots,
Your huddled body parts makers, yearning to breathe free,
The wretched vertical farmers of your teeming towers..."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/jan/14/futurists-predict-radical-job-changes


Homework:

There was a fascinating piece about slime molds in e!Science News this week. OK, I know slime molds aren't normally considered to be the white hot heat of technology, but bear with me. It seems they have a very efficient set of internal algorithms when it comes to setting up networks to forage for food. Researchers at Japan's Hokkaido University, placed oat flakes on a wet surface in a configuration that matched the cities surrounding Tokyo.

They then put a slime mold in the middle and watched it self-organize, spread out, and form a network connecting the flakes that was comparable in efficiency, reliability, and cost to the real-world infrastructure of Tokyo's train network!

Exactly how this can be capitalised on for network technology, is not yet clear, but there are plenty of examples around where nature has provided ways to organise things more efficiently. We may yet see network engineers getting out their pet slime molds when they want to start designing a new networking system...
http://esciencenews.com/articles/2010/01/21/slime.design.mimics.tokyos.rail.system

Meanwhile, I note that Jurassic Park is closer than you think. Plans are afoot to bring back the giant European cattle known as aurochs, which have been extinct for 400 years. The plan is to do this by selective breeding of modern day wild cattle and using knowledge of what the auroch's genome looked like.

The researchers hope to be able to cross breed large wild cattle varieties like Highland and White Maremma breeds, while selecting for known genome artifacts, to get back to the auroch. For the record, aurochs stood around six and a half feet at the shoulder and weighed over 2,000 pounds.

Not exactly pterodactyls from magpies, but still pretty impressive!

In the meantime, do not, repeat not, annoy these critters while on a nature walk.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/wildlife/7011035/Giant-cattle-to-be-bred-back-from-extinction.html


Geek Toys:

Not exactly a toy, but you might like to take a look at the Develop site's list of the noughties' most disastrous games. These are ones that were not just bad, but so bad that they actually killed off the companies involved, although to be fair, in most cases these were the final straw that broke the camel's back.

One or two of them I can definitely remember, like 'Malice', which finally offed Jez Sans' Argonaut Software in 2003. San was a recipient of the Order of the British Empire (OBE), for services to industry in 2002, and it was probably doomed from that moment. I say this without any political partisanship. All the governments I've ever known have displayed an unerring capacity to pick losers when it comes to ministerial visits, awards, and honours!

Other entrants include 'Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness', which resulted in a hostile takeover of its studio, Eidos, and Richard Garriot's (Lord British of Ultima fame) 'Tabula Rasa', which sank at a cost of US$69 million. And, of course no list would be complete without that legendary piece of vapourware, 'Duke Nukem Forever', which was in development for around 12 years before finally killing off its studio, 3D-games, early last year.
http://www.develop-online.net/features/751/Whoops-The-noughties-most-
damaging-games

Garmin has an interesting new toy for geeks - an in-car navigation device that also picks up free digital TV and radio content. Sounds interesting, though at the moment it's only scheduled for release in Europe, and at the equivalent of over US$400.

Yes, I know, TV, in a car? Well it does have a safety feature that stops TV broadcasts being shown while the car is moving. I give this feature less than a week before someone figures out how to disable it! Be the first one on your block to wrap your car round a bollard while watching TV!
http://www.electronista.com/articles/10/01/21/garmins.nuvi.1490tv.will.pick.up.50.
tv.stations/


Scanner:

Open letter from OK Go, regarding non-embeddable YouTube videos
http://okgo.forumsunlimited.com/index.php?showtopic=4169

New service hamstrings Google data hoarding
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/19/google_anonymizer_unveiled/
http://www.googlesharing.net/

Mystery object behaves both like a comet and an asteroid
http://news.discovery.com/space/mystery-object-behaves-both-like-a-comet-
and-asteroid.html

More problems for Apple's high end top desktop
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/21/imacs_delayed/

Asus DR-570 E-Reader to use color OLED display
http://hothardware.com/News/Asus-DR570-EReader-To-Bring-OLED-Display-
Potentially-Change-The-Market/

Ex-mistress puts Oracle executive on the spot
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE60L58Z20100122?loomia_ow=t0:s0:
a49:g43:r2:c0.138694:b29948594:z0


Acknowledgements

Thanks to readers Barb, Fi, Jason, 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
24 January, 2010

Alan Lenton is an on-line games designer, programmer and sociologist, the order of which depends on what he is currently working on! 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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