WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net, technology and science news
by Alan Lenton
This week Winding Down has material on an internet outage, a US$46billion Amazon bill, light bulbs, idiot security, CubeSats, malware in Elmedia Player, pictures of people in museums, and a quote from Seneca. Scanner section URLs point to problems with location services, Apple problems, info grab, a radioactive cloud over Europe, a bad Etherium wallet bug, Napoleon’s version of the Kindle, and an ultra-creepy new service from Facebook.
There will be no Winding Down next week, since I’m told we have a ‘scheduled’ break...
Shorts:
Last week, someone at the Level 3 internet backbone provider made a typing error which knocked out large chunks of the internet , mainly in the USA. For something that was supposed to be designed to survive a nuclear attack, and which is now relied on by a substantial chunk of the world’s population, that’s not very good, to put it mildly.
Let’s face it, the internet is fragile, and prone to disruption for far too many reasons. The real problem is that the internet was designed as an experiment to find out just how well packet switched computer networking worked on a large scale. The whole thing should have been wound up years ago and a new version, incorporating the lessons learned, should have been launched. But instead we bolted on new bits, and papered over the cracks and applied patches.
Ah! Isn’t 20/20 hindsight a wonderful thing. Sigh...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/06/level3_comcast_outage/
Oooops! How would you like to check your Amazon AWS Lightsail bill and discover that you owed US$46 billion! Well it happened this week. Fortunately, no one actually had a heart attack, and Amazon hastened to reassure customer that there were ‘incorrect bill estimations’.
Perhaps it was fortunate that everyone was able to laugh, because it was so ludicrously large. A couple of thousand out would have been a more serious matter...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/07/aws_lightsail_overcharge_error/
Homework:
I want to talk about light bulbs... I’ve just finished replacing all our old lightbulbs with LED light bulbs. There are two important things about LED light bulbs. The first is that they only use about a tenth of the power for the same brightness (and colour) as the old incandescent ones, and secondly, they last a long time. The ones I used are guaranteed for 15 years! The downside is that they are more expensive to buy in the first place.
So, what you have is a product with a large potential user base, which is more expensive to buy, but lasts longer. This is not the first product to be in this position – It happened in the 1970s with radial tyres, and according to Wikipedia:
“In 1974, Charles J. Pilliod, Jr., the new CEO of Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, faced a major investment decision regarding retooling for the radial tire, following the 1973 oil crisis. Despite heavy criticism at the time, Pilliod invested heavily in new factories and tooling to build the radial tire. Today, only Goodyear, Cooper, Titan and Specialty Tires of America remain independent among US tire manufacturers, and the radial has a market share of 100%. Sam Gibara, who headed Goodyear from 1996 to 2003, has noted that without the action of Pilliod, Goodyear wouldn’t be around today.” [References removed – AL]
So, I wonder who is going to be the big guy for light bulbs!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radial_tire
Some companies have a really weird idea of what constitutes security. In particular, I hate the idea that it’s more secure to ask for the (say) the third, fourth and seventh letter of your password, where the letters to ask for are chosen at random. I assume the idea is that you don’t pass the entire password over the net, even though it’s an https encrypted link. The problem is that in order to figure out which letters they want everyone writes down the full password on a piece of paper and counts along to find the required letters.
So, which do you think is more likely to cause a security problem – sending an encrypted password over the net, or having the password written down on a bit of paper so you can count the letters? (Actually, lots of bits of paper given the number of times it’s asked for.)
I rest my case...
[No URL for this one – I’ve never come across any discussion of the problem on the net – AL]
The Space Review has an interesting article on the problems of CubeSats. For those of you who haven’t come across them before, CubeSats are small Earth orbit satellites, with a base size of 10x10x10 cm, weighing 1.33 kg or less. You can have bigger CubeSats, but they have to be a multiple of the base size. They usually hitch a lift on the launch of a regular satellite, and operate in low Earth orbit.
CubeSats are relatively cheap. I guess they are the satellite equivalent of the amateur astronomy network. CubeSats are built by a wide range of organisations, but it’s not as easy as it sounds, and a large number of them are never heard of again after they are launched into orbit – one of the less well known components of ‘space junk’.
The article is about some of the problems identified. One that never occurred to me was the problem of getting enough ground stations to receive the satellite’s telemetry. Everyone has seen pictures of, for instance, the Parkes Radio Telescope in Australia, given its role in Apollo 11, but you can’t just ring them up and ask, “Can you point it at my school CubeSat, please?” Obviously, you will have set up your own ground station, but that will only receive when the satellite is right over head. To get more than that you need to go and talk to radio amateurs all over the world...
The article is about the problems and failures but along the way it has some interesting material about CubeSats, and as the article points out:
“Since the very early days of exploration. people have had to reconcile themselves to the fact that we get a tremendous amount of value from assembling an expedition, and sometimes only from that. Of course we hope that the expedition brings back new discoveries, but putting an expedition together and getting them sent on their way has great value.”
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/3364/1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkes_Observatory#Historical_non-astronomy_research
Geek Stuff:
Bad news for some Mac people. Eltima Software, makers of the popular Elmedia Player and the download manager Folx, has reported that the latest versions of those two apps came with a nasty extra – OSX.Proton malware, after hackers broke into the developer servers.
This is a newer and serious problem. Piriform, the makers of the very popular Windows CCleaner application had a similar problem a month or so ago. Think about it – if you can’t trust software downloaded from the developer’s own site, what can you trust?
And the really bad news for the Mac people afflicted with OSX.Proton is that the only way to get rid of it is a complete wipe and re-install.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/10/20/mac_os_reinstall_eltima_elmedia_malware/
Pictures:
This week’s pictures are perhaps a little different from usual. They are a set of pictures taken of people in museums. They include people touching the artworks, people taking the opportunity to have a snooze in the peaceful atmosphere, and, most wonderful of all, people, who by chance, are wearing clothes that match the picture they are looking at.
https://hyperallergic.com/409246/people-touching-artworks-stefan-drashan/
Coda:
This week’s quote is from the Roman philosopher Seneca: “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.”
Scanner:
Leaky-by-design location services show outsourced security won’t ever work
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/10/10/leakybydesign_location_services_show_
outsourced_security_wont_ever_work/
And here’s some stuff about Apple...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2017/11/07/iphone-x-apples-breakable-ever/
http://www.euronews.com/2017/11/07/apple-caught-in-the-spot-light-of-paradise-papers-revelations
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/07/apple_deny_tax_avoidance/
Huge power imbalance between firms and users whose info they grab
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/10/16/power_imbalance_between_companies_and_
users_poses_risk_to_people_and_society_report/
Nuclear accident sends ‘harmless’ radioactive cloud over Europe
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/nov/10/nuclear-accident-in-russia-or-kazakhstan-sends-radioactive-cloud-over-europe
Parity calamity! Wallet code bug destroys US$280 million in Ethereum
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/07/parity_wallet_destroys_280m_ethereum/
Napoleon’s Kindle: See the miniaturized traveling library he took on military campaigns
http://www.openculture.com/2017/10/napoleons-kindle-see-the-miniaturized-traveling-library-he-took-on-military-campaigns.html
Facebook’s send-us-your-nudes service is coming to UK, America
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/08/facebook_wants_nude_photos/
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
12 November 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.
