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by ibgames

EARTHDATE: July 21, 2013

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WINDING DOWN

An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week’s net, technology and science news

by Alan Lenton

Welcome to this week’s Winding Down. In this issue we have H-1B visa scams, get out of hell free tweets, NASA satellites, the implications of driverless cars, Google logic, cutting edge military equipment on the eve of World War 1, stillsuits, lawn mowers, and the Sikorsky Prize winner. URLs point you to stories on European ISPs being raided over throttling, a femtocell flaw, Microsoft on government data demands, how to make US$849m profit, and why the world’s deserts are starting to bloom.

You could say that we are living in interesting times...

Editor’s note: there will be no issue of Winding Down next week. It will return on Sunday August 4.


Shorts:

Those of you in the US who got replaced at work by cheap H-1B Visa labor, or are under threat from it, will be very, very, interested in a story in Bob Cringely’s column this week. It’s all about how H-1B fraud works. As you probably know, companies wanting to get H-1B visa staff have to prove that that they have tried to get staff, and that they had no qualified applicants. The normal way to do this is to show that you have advertised in the appropriate magazines, and that you had no takers for the jobs. In other words you show the powers that be your receipts for the adverts, and the HR records for the same period.

The HR records, of course, show that there was no response to the adverts. But what if you didn’t actually put any adverts in, even though you have a receipt from a broker, billing you for those adverts? Perhaps that’s why there were no responders? Well one such broker has now been indicted for defrauding his client companies. His reaction? “So let them litigate, I’ll show everyone how bogus their immigration applications really are.” Not one company complained, in spite of the fact that they paid hundreds of thousands of dollars. So, the question is, were they paying for ads, or for the documentation showing that they had paid for the ads?
http://www.cringely.com/2013/07/18/so-thats-how-h-1b-visa-fraud-is-done/

I see that the Catholic church has come up with a new variation on the ancient practice of selling indulgences. You can now get an indulgence by making the correct sort of tweet. Of course it must be a pious tweet, and you must believe (and presumably, be a practicing Roman Catholic). So, I wonder how long it will be before the internet spawns a new generation of Martin Luthers?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/07/17/twitter_refuseniks_are_going_to_hell_says_catholic_church/

The more space orientated among you may like to take a look at NASA’s Earth Observatory site. It’s got a really nice artist’s impression of all the different satellites that NASA has observing the Earth. You can have some fun trying to guess from their names exactly what they are observing!
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=81559&src=eoa-iotd

I don’t think that many people have really thought about what driverless cars would mean, with the possible exception of Sci-Fi writers (the New York ‘tin cabbies’ in James Blish’s book ‘Earthman, Come Home’ spring to mind). Most people, if they have thought about it, imagine it in terms of reading a book, tweeting, surfing and such like in their own car as it trundles to work.

But this really fails to realize the full implications of the technology. If cars are self-driving, why would you need to keep your own car? Why would you want it to sit in a parking space all day costing you money? Why wouldn’t a driverless car, which by definition has no driver to pay, not go off in search of other work during the day? In which case, why would you need to buy a car of your own? Why not just flag down a passing driverless car and give it your destination, using your credit card to pay? With no driver, it’s going to be a lot cheaper than a taxi! So I’d recommend taking a look at this thoughtful article that follows down some of the implications of driverless cars...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/07/11/driverless_cars_death_knell_of_the_motor_biz/


Homework:

Google. Probably the most frustrating company in the world. More strange management decisions than you can shake a stick at, more nice goodies and freebies than any other company has ever dished out. More sinister strategies and control mechanisms than the much maligned NSA could ever dream of. And yet, as an article in the UK Guardian earlier this month shows, there is a logic behind the weird behaviour. It’s the logic of science, and of the engineering PhD.

Most big companies are run by graduates of the big (usually ivy league) MBA schools, and they are stamped out by the thousand. Any successful startup will sooner or later be under pressure to replace the founders with managers whose badge of competence is their MBA. (incidentally, there is an interesting section on these MBA schools in Susan Cain’s magnificent book ‘Quiet’). My game ‘Federation’ was on AOL when AOL was the top dog, and I’ve always dated AOL’s fall from when the ultra-competent people we originally did business with were systematically replaced by MBA clones.

But I digress. If you want to get a feel for Google’s strengths and weaknesses, which in many way mirror those of the classic engineering nerd, take a good look at this article. It won’t really help predict what they are going to do next, but it will help you figure out why they did it afterwards!
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/jul/09/google-android-reader-why

Here’s an interesting bit of history. Scientific American have taken a look through their 1913 issue and come up with a slide show of the military technology that was on show the year before the World War 1 started - dreadnoughts, battlecruisers, Zeppelins, starshells, and homing pigeons. A fascinating cross section of things that went into the European war machines.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/slideshow.cfm?id=warfare-snapshots-of-military-science-from-1913-slide-show


For Geeks:

Attention all Frank Herbert ‘Dune’ fans - the stillsuit has arrived for real! Well, it needs a little more work, but the basis is there now. A machine that uses a special semi-permeable membrane can take sweat and turn it into potable water. The machine is still too big to be immediately turned into a stillsuit, though from the picture I would guess that you could get it into a rucksack. However, I suspect that miniaturization will come in the not too distant future. It’s not like there aren’t environments here on Earth that are just made for stillsuit wearing!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23360907

On a somewhat wetter topic, how many of you have houses with big lawns that need to be mowed? Well, I’ve got just the thing that you might like to try out. It’s a specially modified version of Honda’s HF260 Lawn Tractor, and it’s billed as the world’s fastest lawn mower - 0-60mph in 4.0 seconds! Of course you will need a long lawn to check the acceleration out, and you can’t really cut the grass at that speed. But just think how your geek friends will envy you!
http://www.gizmag.com/honda-worlds-fastest-mower/28350/

On the other hand perhaps you feel you need some exercise? Then how about spending a little time flying the Kickstarter funded AeroVelo human powered quadricopter. It looks like it could be really hard work, but it has just won the US$250,000 Sikorsky Prize, by making a successful one minute flight.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/07/12/aerovelo_wins_sikorsky_human_powered_helicopter_prize/


Scanner: Other stories

Unmasked: Euro ISPs raided in downloads strangle probe
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/07/15/eurocrats_raid_three_isps_over_throttling_claims/

Femtocell flaw leaves Verizon subscribers’ Wi-Fi and mobile wide open
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/07/15/femtocell_flaw_leaves_verizon_customers_wifi_and_mobile_wide_open/

Responding to government legal demands for customer data
http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_on_the_issues/archive/2013/07/16/responding-to-government-legal-demands-for-customer-data.aspx

British Bebo founder buys back social network for $849m profit
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/07/02/bebo_founder_buys_social_network_for_a_song/

Climate SHOCKER: Rising CO2 is turning the world’s deserts GREEN
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/07/11/co2_greens_the_deserts/


Acknowledgements

Thanks to readers Asti, Barb and Fi for drawing my attention to material for Winding Down.

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 Thunderbird spam filter...

Alan Lenton
alan@ibgames.com
21 July 30013

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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