Fed2 Star - the newsletter for the space trading game Federation 2

The weekly newsletter for Fed2
by ibgames

EARTHDATE: November 24, 2013

Fed2 Star last page Fed2 Star: Official News page 10 Fed2 Star next page

WINDING DOWN

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

by Alan Lenton

This week’s little missive contains material on web browser fingerprinting, Raspberry Pi and Mathematica, anti-virus vendors and government viruses, a warning about CryptoLocker, Google Earth, US health care, SETI debates, the Panther Laptop extraordinaire, and Microsoft’s new Xbox One. For those with insatiable appetites, there are URLs for the deep web, femme fatales, Windows desktop on Amazon cloud, Mavis Batey, Google’s Schmidt on Censorship (Ha! – What world do these people live in?), and AT&T spying for the CIA.

I see that Thanksgiving and the start of Chanukah both fall into the coming week (that hasn’t happened for over a century). I wish both US and Jewish readers all the best for the coming period. My English gentile readers will have to wait until Xmas for their holiday, by which time our cynical UK shops should be pushing out special Easter goods.

In the meantime here’s a little something to keep you occupied...

Shorts:

So... Your browser has its cookies battened down. Your ‘DoNotTrackMe’ plugin tells you that it’s blocked 56,011 trackers since you set it up*. You only ever use incognito windows. Feeling anonymous? Think again. You can still be tracked by anyone who wants to know what you are up to on the net.

The latest technology for this is called browser fingerprinting. The problem is that browsers, whose origins lie in a much more relaxed era, will actually dish out useful information to any web server that asks for it. As InfoWorld explains, “This doesn’t just include the browser’s user agent string, but also the size of the screen, the fonts available in the system (a major source of uniquely identifiable data), and so forth. Because all this data is routinely made available to the browser – and thus any Web page invoked in it – it’s trivially simple to harvest it and create a fingerprint from it.”

That’s pretty nasty, and at the moment there isn’t a lot you can do about it, though I expect that in due course there will be plugins and browser options to prevent this. That, needless to say, will lead to other methods of tracking, leading to yet more plugins, and so on, a veritable arms race. The main reason for this is because the information about you is valuable, and worth at the very least buying in the technology to track you.
http://www.infoworld.com/t/internet-privacy/the-new-web-tracking-you-never-see-it-coming-229440
http://lwn.net/Articles/569966/

There’s a nice bit of news from the Raspberry Pi people. From now on it’s going to ship with a free copy of Mathematica. The deal is retrospective as well – the article tells existing users how to install a copy of Mathematica onto their machines. It’s not absolutely clear from the piece on RaspberryPi.org whether this is the full version of the program, or a cut down version, but it looks like the full version... If it is, then it’s a very nice deal.
http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/5282

I see that the anti-virus people are about to be thrust, somewhat unwillingly, into the limelight. The question this time, thanks to the Snowden revelations, is simple. Did the anti-virus vendors turn a blind eye to government developed/sponsored viruses? The answer, pretty obviously, is no they didn’t.

Why is it obvious?

Because there are too many of them for such a strategy to work. If there was only one such vendor, or at the most two, then maybe, just maybe, a fix could have been put in to avoid reporting such a virus to the user. However, there are just too many such vendors, based in different countries (ie with different governments), for such a scheme to work.

This means that anyone who was nobbled would, at best, get a reputation for missing viruses that all the other vendors caught, or at worse be branded as a government patsy. Neither of these options would exactly help their business model!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/05/av_response_state_snooping_challenge

And while we are on the subject of viruses, I’d like to warn readers that there is a virus called CryptoLocker going around. It’s a nasty piece of work that encrypts your files and then demands money to give you the key to unlock them. If you get caught you won’t be able to decrypt the files without paying. The virus is mainly delivered by fake emails designed to mimic the look of legitimate businesses and through phony FedEx and UPS tracking notices.

Keep your anti-virus programs up to date and back up your important files off line!
https://www.us-cert.gov/ncas/alerts/TA13-309A
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/21/police_pay_cryptolocker_crooks_to_get_their_computers_back/

There’s also a rather neat little slide show (slide show=don’t have to exert myself to write a real article) in InfoWorld on how cops, robbers and bureaucrats use Google Earth to be about their business. Take a look.
http://www.infoworld.com/slideshow/129829/how-cops-and-robbers-are-using-google-earth-231444

Homework:

Looking in from the outside, it seems to me as though health care in the US has problems at the moment. No, I’m not going to crow about it. We in the UK have more than enough problems with our own health service, as I know from first-hand experience. I just got a letter from the clinic that was supposed to be treating me for back pain (back pain is endemic in the programming community – we all slump in our seats). The text of the letter was a cut and paste from another patient’s report – and they’d forgotten to change the name. Whether they also forgot to change the diagnosis as well I don’t know.

However, that’s beside the point. Obama Care is obviously causing a lot of angst, and I have no intention of getting involved. What I wanted to point you to is something a little more fundamental. It is that big changes are taking place in health insurance systems as a result the advances being made in the analysis of large amounts of data.

There’s an interesting, and important analysis of this by Robert Cringley, in his regular blog. Basically, what he is arguing is that originally health care was based on getting as many policies in as possible and analyzing the morbidity and mortality of the policy holders as a whole to set the rate for the insurance that ensured a profit (I guess you could call it a healthy profit...) was made. The key element here is the ‘as many policies as possible’ part, so that you can spread the cost of the policies that you make a loss on when people fall ill.

However, since the 1990s the cost of computing has been falling rapidly, making it possible to push the analysis down to the level of individual policy holder. Add this to the advances in genetics and screening and your health care provider’s business model changes dramatically. No longer is it a model of getting in as many policies as possible. On the contrary, the model becomes one of rejection. You want to be able to refuse policies to people who represent a risk of needing health care. Now you want to only issue policies to those who are not going to need it – ideally, healthy people of working age. In the worst case (from the point of view of the provider) the profit is the same, in the best case, profits soar, because you don’t have medical costs as expenses.

And there you have it. The current model is now rapidly tending to provide health care only to those who are not going to need it...
http://www.cringely.com/2013/10/26/big-data-destroying-u-s-healthcare-system/

We all like the concept of SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence), but the question does arise as to whether this is wise. How do we know that anyone we find is going to be peaceful. It’s not as though the human race has a history of being peaceful, so why do we assume everyone else out there will be peaceful?

This debate is important but unfortunately it seems to have become mired in dogma with opposite sides taking entrenched positions. That’s sad, though based on my past experience of working with people who hold passionate beliefs, not unexpected. Thus I was pleased to find a much cooler piece by SciFi author David Brin looking at the issues and making a plea (which I strongly suspect will be ignored) for some rational debate on this issue. Definitely worth taking a look – what the SETI people are doing at the moment may well come to affect all of us in the long run.
http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=29487

For Geeks:

I have just the kit for you guys. How about a laptop with a 12-core, 24-thread E5-2697 v2 running at 2.7GHz, a four drive raid system, 32GB of RAM, and a Nvidia GBX 670MX graphics card?

It’s called the Panther, and it’s from Eurocom, who refer to it as a mobile server! You will need something more than the usual weedy geek muscles to lug it around – at 5.5kg (12+ pounds) it’s not what you call an ultralight laptop. I don’t think that includes the massive 300W power supply brick, so I’d suggest buying a few extra to leave at all the places you are likely to use the monster...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/21/who_wants_a_12core_xeonpowered_raid_10_laptop/

Given Microsoft’s reputation for only getting things right on the third iteration, I have no idea why they called their third generation console Xbox One. Microsoft seem to have been dishing out the beast to reviewers left, right, and center, so the press has been awash with stories about it. However, to save you ploughing through all these stories, The Register has produced a roundup of the stories, so you can keep up to date.

And The Register’s take on the thing? “A work-in-progress you don’t need to purchase pronto.” So now you know.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/20/microsoft_xbox_one_work_in_progress/

Scanner: Other stories

Why the deep web has Washington worried
http://swampland.time.com/2013/10/31/the-deep-web-has-washington-worried/

Fake femme fatale dupes IT guys at US government agency
http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2013/11/03/fake-femme-fatale-dupes-it-guys-at-us-government-agency/

Amazon WorkSpaces delivers Windows desktops on demand
http://www.infoworld.com/t/virtual-desktop/amazon-workspaces-delivers-windows-desktops-demand-230850

In memoriam – Mavis Batey MBE, codebreaker extraordinaire at Bletchley Park
http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2013/11/15/in-memoriam-mavis-batey-mbe-codebreaker-extraordinaire-at-bletchley-park/

Google’s Schmidt predicts end to global censorship in a DECADE
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/21/google_end_censorship_schmidt/

AT&T turns spying on customers for CIA into cash waterfall – report
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/08/at_and_t_cia_claim/


*At least that’s what mine just told me!

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
24 November 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.

Fed2 Star last page   Fed2 Star next page