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EARTHDATE: June 19, 2016

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WINDING DOWN

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

Something a little different this week. With Net Neutrality hitting the news, I have the first half of a piece explaining what this is all about. Part 2 two will be next week. Its size make for fewer other pieces, but what’s there features Microsoft buying LinkedIn, the Twitter Hack (or not, as the case may be), spaceship sounds, and a very large rechargeable battery. URLs point to changes in Earth’s magnetic field, Cambodian hidden cities, a slap on the wrist for banks, a new FBI database revealed, dodgy contracts from Google Fibre, and a USAF computer oopsie.

Analysis: Net Neutrality

Part 1: The Problem with Utilities

Net neutrality is a thorny topic, which means different things to different people. Bottom line is that it’s about your Internet Service Provider (aka ISP) providing access to anywhere on the internet at the same cost. That means not charging you different prices for accessing different services, or charging those services money for being accessed by you. In effect that makes being an ISP a utility.

Now, the fact is that the current problems being faced in the US, and elsewhere, on this issue are not new. There have been similar problems with other utilities ever since the first water pipe was run into a city! Underlying the problems are two factors. The first is that it is relatively easy for a utility to make a modest profit from providing its basic service, but it is very difficult to make a big profit solely from the basic utility service. This tends to lead to diversification into more profitable adjunct activities, using the basic service as a source of development cash, usually to the neglect of the basic service infrastructure.

The second factor is that utilities tend to rapidly become monopolies, either on a metropolitan, or on a wider basis. The reasons for this are numerous, but the key driver tends to be the fact that most urban areas can only support a single profitable utility for a given service. This leads to all the recognised problems with monopolies, and usually leads to various forms of regulation or municipalisation (think municipal water supplies).

In the case of net neutrality in the US, these basic utility considerations are compounded by the fact that the key players were already major players in other markets – especially services like film, television and telephone – even before they moved into the ISP market. Thus the muddying of the waters over whether they are a utility or not.

There’s another problem in the case of the Internet’s net neutrality. A lot of people still view the Internet as analogous either to a telephone network complete with exchanges that route data. Others, probably a majority, think of it in terms of pipes. Those who think this idea of the Internet as a set of pipes was debunked after Senator Ted Stevens used it publicly are badly mistaken!

Both these views are wrong...

What the Internet actually is, is a giant distributed computer, optimised for copying digital data from one distributed element to another.

If you look at it from this angle there are two obvious differences from common perceptions. The first is that it’s not all like a traditional wire based phone system. When you use a phone service it either sets up a dedicated link for your call, or the call fails completely. All or nothing.

With the phone service if you get busy signals too often, it means that you need to put in more lines. But with the Internet you don’t get this ‘all or nothing’ effect, as long as the site you are contacting is up. What you get is service degradation. In other words, it takes longer and longer for each piece of your data (a ‘packet’) to get to you.

This leads to the second major difference. You don’t necessarily get better service by putting in bigger and bigger ‘pipes’ – for instance fibre instead of copper last mile links. Oh, it can help if the problem is that you are overloading your local link, but the real problems lie further inside the internet.

End of Part 1 – Next issue: Part 2: The Internet Promise

Shorts:

The big news of the week is that Microsoft are buying LinkedIn. For those of you who haven’t come across it, LinkedIn is a site that professionals use to post their CV (‘resume’ for my US readers) and get into contact with recruiters and employers with job vacancies. I’m told it currently it has about 30 million users. A few years back its password database was hacked and it’s still dealing with the fallout from that particular episode.

So why is Microsoft shelling out US$26.2 billion to buy LinkedIn?

Well, as you would expect, the net is awash with theories. Bottom line, what most of them come down to is that Microsoft wants to become the organiser of business professionals’ lives, by mining the very valuable personal information on LinkedIn... Ick!

So here are a couple of URLs to typical pieces about the acquisition, plus a somewhat tongue in cheek, paranoid, but amusing, view from ‘The Register.

And me? I plan to terminate my LinkedIn account with extreme prejudice in the very near future.
http://www.infoworld.com/article/3082634/software-productivity/why-microsoft-bought-linkedin-for-26-billion-in-one-word-cortana.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/14/business/dealbook/microsoft-to-buy-linkedin-for-26-2-billion.html?_r=0
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/06/14/welcome_to_the_microsoftlinkedin_apocalypse/

Well, it looks like there is a possibility that Twitter may have been hacked to the tune of 32 million accounts. I emphasise the word -may-. Twitter deny being hacked and say that samples from the hacker involved are from cases where people were hacked elsewhere and were using the same passwords on different sites around the web.

That may well be the case. Lots of people have a single password that they use for ‘fluff’ sites that they don’t take seriously. Actually, lots of people just have a single password that they use for everything! In a way it’s difficult to blame them. Multiple passwords are a hassle. Programs that will retain multiple passwords and themselves have a single password don’t have a very good security record. Most people with more than a couple of passwords tend to resort to writing them down (usually on a post it note stuck somewhere very close to their monitor).

No, I’m not going to lecture you on passwords! It’s a losing task, and one for which only a burned hand provides an effective lesson. And if anyone insists you use a fingerprint scanner, make sure you ask what facilities they have for replacing hacked fingerprints...
https://techcrunch.com/2016/06/08/twitter-hack/
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2016/06/09/32m-twitter-passwords-may-leaked-put-sale-dark-web/

Geek Stuff:

Listen Boldly! That’s the slogan for this week. Take a listen to the material at the URL. It’s the ultimate in ambient sound to code to – spaceship noises looped from famous movies like the Star Trek. I’m not going on about it – you have to listen to it.

May the Sound Be With You...
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/exploring-the-secrets-of-soothing-spaceship-sound

London:

OK – this isn’t in London, but it’s one of the same sort of incredible UK engineering things like the Thames Barrier. It’s in Wales, and it’s probably one of the biggest energy storage facilities in the world. It is, if you like Britain’s biggest rechargeable battery!

First though, the problem. Everyone wants to use electricity at the same time, for instance when a popular TV show finishes. This means you get sudden surges in demand. That can be a problem, because it takes time to fire up conventional oil, gas or coal fired generators to meet unexpected demand. And firing up and closing down generating equipment is expensive. So, how do you cope with this?

Well what you do is to take a reservoir and stick it on the top of a mountain. You dig a tunnel from the top of the mountain down to the bottom, and then fill the lower end with generating equipment and pumping equipment. Then when there’s a surge in requirement you open the tap (a very large tap, I might add) and within a very short space of time – stand-by to 1.32 gigawatts in 12 seconds – the generators are pumping power into the national electrical grid. By the time all the water has run out of the upper reservoir into one at the bottom, either the surge is over, or conventional generators have come up to power and taken over.

Neat huh? But that’s not all. Recall that you now have a load of water at the bottom, and the top is empty. Now, even in the UK, there’s not enough rain to refill an entire reservoir in a few hours (though our weather does its best). so you wait till a period of low electricity demand, say 3am, and then you take electricity out of the grid to power the pumps (Remember I mentioned pumps at the bottom?) and pump at the water back up to the top. Brilliant!

And in the summer they actually do guided tours of the facility! A must for anyone with geeky tendencies.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/05/16/geeks_guide_electric_mountain/

Scanner:

How Earth’s magnetic field is changing
http://www.gizmag.com/esa-swarm-earth-magnetic-field-changes/43249/

Revealed: Cambodia’s vast medieval cities hidden beneath the jungle
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/11/lost-city-medieval-discovered-hidden-beneath-cambodian-jungle

SWIFT threatens to give insecure banks a slap if they don’t shape up
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/06/03/swift_threatens_insecure_bank_suspensions/

FBI built a massive facial recognition database without proper oversight
https://techcrunch.com/2016/06/15/fbi-built-a-massive-facial-recognition-database-without-proper-oversight/

Google Fiber copies Comcast and AT&T; forces users to give up their legal right to sue
https://consumerist.com/2016/06/16/google-fiber-copies-comcast-att-forces-users-to-give-up-their-legal-right-to-sue/

The US Air Force had a totally accidental computer disaster
http://gizmodo.com/the-air-force-had-a-totally-accidental-computer-disaste-1781973697

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
19 June 2016

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/index.html.

Past issues of Winding Down can be found at http://www.ibgames.net/alan/winding/index.html.

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