WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net, technology and science news
by Alan Lenton
First off, best wishes to all my readers in the hurricane hit areas. I hope you stay safe and don’t suffer too much damage.
The hurricanes have driven most other news into the ‘also ran’ category this week, so I don’t have a lot of material. However, I do have some, starting with Estonian ID card problems, the Equifax hack, Facebook telling porkies*, nation states, Babylonian trig tables, rocket fuel, cutaway maps, and Snopes top 50 urban legends. What! You want? More? OK! The scanner section figures URLs pointing to material on Juicero, law and asteroid mining, VW engineer jailed, space travel and biolation, Microsoft/NYPD phones, the oldest ice core, and a small laser engraver.
What more could you want?
Shorts:
Ooops! Ultra-digital country Estonia has identified a security risk in three quarters of a million of its ID cards – over half the population. That’s a lot of cards to replace, and it’s not the first time. Last year some of the cards had to be re-issued to cope with the way Google Chrome did security checks. The lot of a digital pioneer is a somewhat rocky one.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/09/05/estonia_identifies_security_risk_in_750000_id_cards/
As if hurricanes weren’t enough, now half the population of the US is struggling to come to grips with the fact that its personal data been hacked. The data breach at Equifax affected 143 million customers. It also affected Equifax customers in Canada and the UK, but we don’t have the figures for these countries yet.
This is not looking good. The data available to the hackers includes names, dates of birth, addresses, social security numbers and driver’s license numbers. That’s exactly the information that you are asked for to establish your identity. It’s exactly what thieves need for successful identity theft. And, as if that weren’t enough, another 209,000 customers had their credit card numbers stolen, and a further 182,000 had ‘personally identifying’ information lifted.
And for the cream on the jam (jelly in the US) on the butter on the cake, it turns out that there is a clause in some Equifax contracts that bars the customer from joining a class-action suit against them! The situation on this front is murky, but Snopes has a piece that goes some way towards sorting out the issues. Actually, I think it’s long overdue for governments to make contracts that bar people from access to legal processes invalid.
https://consumerist.com/2017/09/07/equifax-announces-data-breach-affecting-143-million-customers/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/09/07/143m_american_equifax_customers_exposed/
http://www.snopes.com/equifax-credit-monitoring-class-action/
https://www.darkreading.com/attacks-breaches/equifax-data-breach-prompts-calls-for-tougher-security-requirements-on-data-aggregators/d/d-id/1329833
I see that Farcebook (Ooops – slip of the finger there, I mean Facebook, of course) has been promising advertisers access to more US customers than actually exist. According to investment analyst Brian Wieser of Pivotal Research group, it assures potential advertisers that it can reach 41 million people in the US in a target group of 18-24 year olds.
There’s one problem – according to the latest census, there are only 31 million people in the US in that group! As the Romans used to say ‘caveat emptor’.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/09/06/facebook_claims_more_users_than_exist/
Homework:
We all (well nearly all) live in nation states. In fact they are so pervasive that most of us assume this has always been the case and always will be. Actually nation states are a fairly recent human invention (passports are only 150 years old), and recent inventions such as the internet and modern travel are stressing the limits of the nation state.
Median has an interesting piece on the topic arguing that there is already evidence that we are ripe for a decline in nation states and a rise in city states analogous to the city states of the Italian Renaissance. I remain unconvinced, but the article is well worth a read.
https://aeon.co/essays/the-end-of-a-world-of-nation-states-may-be-upon-us
Geek Stuff:
You thought Pythagoras invented trigonometry? Wrong! The Babylonians had trig tables 1,000 years before the Greeks. A tablet with the tables has been known for around a century, but until recently no one was able to figure out what it was. That’s because the Babylonians counted using numbers to the base 60, rather than the base ten which we commonly use. (Base 60 is much more sensible than base 10, but that’s another story.)
Finally, it’s been deciphered, and the trig tables revealed are more accurate than the one I used when I was at school. Neat work.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/aug/24/mathematical-secrets-of-ancient-tablet-unlocked-after-nearly-a-century-of-study
http://newatlas.com/ancient-babylonian-tablet-trigonometry-table/51055/
If you are into rockets, then the book ‘Ignition’ is for you. It’s a history of rocket fuel research. Sounds a bit pedestrian, doesn’t it. But as Isaac Asimov puts it in his intro,
“[A]nyone working with rocket fuels is outstandingly mad. I don’t mean garden-variety crazy or a merely raving lunatic. I mean a record-shattering exponent of far-out insanity.
“There are, after all, some chemicals that explode shatteringly, some that flame ravenously, some that corrode hellishly, some that poison sneakily, and some that stink stenchily. As far as I know, though, only liquid rocket fuels have all these delightful properties combined into one delectable whole.”
The book is available as a free PDF, and it makes a wonderful read with plenty of anecdotes along the way.
https://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pdf
Pictures:
Only half of London is in fact above ground!
Actually, I just made that up, but I’ve always wanted to be ‘investigated’ by Snopes for spreading falsies... It’s not true of course, but it is true that a lot of London is beneath the city streets. Some of it you can get to relatively easily (and legally), and some of it can only be accessed by ‘urban explorers’.
One thing that can give you any idea of what’s there is ‘cutaway’ drawings, and London Transport (aka TfL) has been known to produce posters featuring these cutaways of its underground (transit) systems. The Londonist has a selection of these posters on its website, going all the way back to the 1920s. See what you think!
http://londonist.com/london/transport/london-cutaways
Coda:
Those of you who are into fake stories and urban legends might like to scan Snopes top 50 urban legends for some good ones. My favourite? The one about typing your pin number backwards on an ATM to call the police!
http://www.snopes.com/50-hottest-urban-legends/
Scanner:
Crushed Juicero now officially a fruitless endeavor [I couldn’t resist sharing this headline! – AL]
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/09/01/juicero_now_a_fruitless_endeavor/
Floating treasure: Space law needs to catch up with asteroid mining
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/floating-treasure-space-law-needs-to-catch-up-with-asteroid-mining/
VW engineer sent to the clink for three years for emissions-busting code
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/08/25/vw_engineer_gets_3yrs_for_emissionbusting_sw/
Extended human space travel through biolation
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/3318/1
Memo to Microsoft: Keeping your promises is probably a good idea
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/09/01/microsoft_to_blame_for_nypd_phone_shock/
Oldest ice-core ever drilled dates back 2.7 million years
http://newatlas.com/oldest-ice-core-ever-antarctica/50973/
Cubiio downsizes the laser engraver
http://newatlas.com/cubliio-compact-laser-engraver/50976/
* Cockney rhyming slang: Lies = Pork Pies = porkies, which has now passed into colloquial English over here. UK English is a -very- flexible language.
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
10 September 2017
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.
