WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week’s net, technology and science news
by Alan Lenton
This week’s offerings include Aereo v ABC/CBS/NBC/Fox, D-Link routers lack of security, iMessages not as secure as Apple claim, MPAA v isoHunt, New York streets, climate change (yet again), Oban in Scotland, and Java security patches. Those of you wanting more should take a look at the Scanner URLs which include Microsoft Surface trade-ins at Best Buy, cannabis and cancer, Healthcare.gov, and a bit about media barons committing hari-kari with their current policies.
In the meantime the world continues to rotate on a 24 hour basis...
Shorts:
I don’t know whether you’ve heard of a US based service called Aereo. It’s rather a neat idea. It’s a TV streaming subscription service with a difference. Subscribers get tiny, dime sized antenna, which they use to pull in free broadcast TV and store it in cloud based digital recorders for later streaming on demand. Neat – a smart idea. Why pay a cable operator for something that is, by law, free?
Big media is, inevitably, furious, since the scheme bypasses the retransmission fees they get from the cable carriers. Needless to say they’ve been trying to do down Aereo in the courts ever since its inception. Unsuccessfully, I might add. The latest defeat for big media is in the Massachusetts district court, when the court refused to grant an injunction closing down Aereo’s Boston service while the court case was being heard.
“Hearst fails to make a sufficient showing that it is likely to prevail on any of [its] claims and therefore this factor weighs against a preliminary injunction in its favor,” said the presiding judge, referring to Hearst Stations, who requested the injunction. So, rather than waste time on these unruly lower courts, the big four TV broadcast outfits – ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox – have decided to go right to the top and have asked the Supreme Court to take the case.
I’ve no idea whether the Supreme Court will even take up the case. One doesn’t demand the US Supreme Court take up one’s case. One asks it very nicely if it would mind doing so. I suspect that it’s not going to look that favorably on this sort of attempt to jump the queue by bypassing the lower courts, but who can tell – the Supreme Court is a law unto itself, so to speak.
However, I will keep you up to date on this story, since, to my mind, it’s a classic case of old established businesses trying to use the law to crush a young upstart in order to defend their existing business model.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/10/10/broadcast_tv_bete_noire_aereo_adds_android_app/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/10/12/streaming_tv_aereos_enemies_lob_sueball_into_supreme_court/
Got a D-Link Router in your home network? If you have then the chances are that it’s got a back door to its admin interface built right into it. That means that the bad guys can get to it and reprogram it to use in their nefarious activities. Will these manufacturers never learn? Really they are the best advert for open source technology that exists! You can check if your D-Link model is affected at the URL – not that you can do anything about it, other than junking the offending box, if it is affected.
http://www.infoworld.com/d/security/backdoor-found-in-d-link-router-firmware-code-228725
I see that Apple’s claim that iMessage encryption is unbreakable is rather economical with the truth. And why is that? It’s because Apple keeps the keys to itself, so you have no way of knowing if someone at Apple, or somebody from, let say, the NSA bearing warrants, has substituted their own key. You never get to see the key, so you can’t even tell if it’s suddenly changed. Not a very secure way of running things, but very much an Apple way of running things...
http://www.infoworld.com/d/security/apples-claim-of-unbreakable-imessage-encryption-basically-lies-228948
In a new filing submitted to a California federal court, the MPAA says that actual piracy damages “are not capable of meaningful measurement”. Frankly, I’m not exactly amazed to find that the MPAA has difficulty with maths. One has to wonder exactly how the MDAA is going to calculate the damages it is going to win, if the damage is, by definition, ‘incalculable’!
One thing the MPAA and the defendants, isoHunt – a BitTorrent Search Engine – are in disagreement over is whether isoHunt should be able to question the notion that piracy is actually hurting the movie industry. The site has listed researcher and economics professor Koleman Strumpf as one of its witnesses. Strumpf’s research has previously shown that piracy is not hurting sales at all, and isoHunt is expected to use this in its favor during the trial.
The MPAA argue that the issue is too complex and that it could mislead the jury. This is a favorite argument of corporate shysters. In this country the question of special courts to try corporate fraudsters comes up at regular intervals, as the suggestion is made that the issues are ‘too complex for ordinary people to understand’.
Take it from me that what they mean is that ordinary people are more likely to cut to the nub of the case and disregard specious ‘technical’ bullshit. (See also the story ‘Media barons slit own throats in anti-freetard crackdowns’ in the Scanner section)
http://torrentfreak.com/mpaa-says-piracy-damages-cant-be-measured-131016/
Homework:
I don’t watch video very often, but I found this TED talk by New York transport commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan really interesting. She is talking about some of the things that they have tried out in New York over the past few years. The results, she claimed have improved the lot of car drivers, pedestrians and cyclists.
Personally, as pedestrian I can’t get particularly enthusiastic over the latter. Cars can be pretty dangerous, but at least car drivers understand that the laws apply to them. Unfortunately this is not the case for most cyclists, making them far more likely to run me down than a car...
The talk is definitely worth watching though.
http://www.ted.com/talks/janette_sadik_khan_new_york_s_streets_not_so_mean_any_more.html
Climate Change. It seems to have taken something of a back seat recently, as the human warming pundits struggle to figure out why their predictions are so badly off – there having been no statistically significant increase in the past 17 years. Now some help, of a type they probably don’t want, has come from a couple of reputable scientists who have discovered a standing wave pattern in the weather that implies that the current pause could last through to 2030.
The details are in the URLs, but the malevolent effects of badly flawed models in the UN’s predictions are still working their way through here in England with my gas and electricity bills rising by around another 10% this year. Most of that rise is due to various governments forcing the energy industries to subsidize so-called green technologies and rebuild chunks of their distribution networks to cope with these technologies. It’s a way of taxing people without it being obvious and making it look like it’s greedy energy companies. (The matter isn’t helped by the fact that energy companies -are- greedy, but in this case they’re just the fall guys.)
It would be interesting to see an unbiased study on just whether, and how much these climate change green policies have contributed to sustaining the current economic climate.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/10/11/mexican_wave_climate_variability/
http://judithcurry.com/2013/10/10/the-stadium-wave/
Should you be visiting Scotland on, say, a whisky tasting tour, and happen to wash up in Oban, then be aware that you are in an historic tech site. Oban is where the first transatlantic phone cable – carrying no less than 35 simultaneous calls – came into the UK. The cable was also the transatlantic chunk of the fabled Moscow-Washington hotline. There’s not much to see these days, but Oban is a nice place – when it’s not raining.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/10/14/reg_man_talks_transatlantic_with_tat1/
For Geeks:
I see Oracle has just issued 127 security patches, of which 51 are for Java – mostly for Java on the desktop. I don’t think I really need to say much else, this is one case where the numbers truly do speak for themselves.
http://www.informationweek.com/security/application-security/oracle-issues-massive-security-patch-for/240162695
http://www.infoworld.com/t/security/javas-insecurity-has-doomed-it-the-desktop-228922
http://www.infoworld.com/d/application-development/really-java-developers-love-writing-non-java-228905
Scanner: Other stories
Best Buy introduces trade-in deals for unloved Windows 8 tablet
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/10/11/surface_bestbuy_trade_in/
Windows 8.1: New features, but same problems
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-57607877-75/windows-8.1-new-features-but-same-problems/
Tiny ‘LEGO brick’-style studs make solar panels a quarter more efficient
http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/newsandeventspggrp/imperialcollege/newssummary/news_18-10-2013-12-9-7
Cannabis can cure cancer – cheaply and without getting you high
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/10/15/cannabis_without_the_hallucinogens_can_cure_cancer/
How federal cronies built – and botched – Healthcare.gov
http://www.infoworld.com/t/e-government/how-federal-cronies-built-and-botched-healthcaregov-228724
Media barons slit own throats in anti-freetard crackdowns
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/10/15/study_suggests_big_media_cutting_own_throat_with_duff_piracy_tactics/
Acknowledgements
Thanks to readers 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
20 October 2013
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.
