Fed2 Star - April 8, 2017 - page 2 (of 2)

[Fiona Craig]

Fed2 Star
Earthdate April 8, 2018


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Official News part two


ROBOT OF THE WEEK: OPENING A DOOR FOR A FRIEND

by Hazed

Robot makers Boston Dynamics released a video a few months ago showing
how one of their robots can open a door to allow its friend through.
It’s quite clever, and cute, since the company has made the Big Dog
style robots look a lot less crude and mechanical.

But we don’t have to worry about the rise of the robots – to defeat the
door-opening robot, just replace the lever-style door handles with round
door knobs!

Watch a video of the robot opening the door here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUyU3lKzoio

As a bonus, here’s a human imitating the robot:
https://twitter.com/twitter/statuses/963450789590196224


VIDEO OF THE WEEK: NIGHT-TIME ORBIT OF EARTH

by Hazed

Astronauts on the International Space Station take many photos as the
ISS orbits the Earth, and these image sequences are then made into
videos. This time-lapse video shows the Earth at night, with auroras,
city lights and lightning storms.

Watch the spectacular night-time orbit video here:
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap180312.html


WINDING DOWN

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


I hope you had a nice Easter break. This week we are back with material
on false cell phone masts, insecure files on the internet, the Space
Race, an ace periodic table, a couple of small robots, a video about
London seen from a different perspective, and a quote about advertising
that I think you’ll like! In the scanner section there are URLs pointing
you to material on the colour (color for my American readers) blue,
making money selling free stuff, defeating data collecting web sites,
2001 movie fifty years on, boiling an egg, cyber attackers shift
targets, and a cyber attack on Atlanta.

Those of you who read Winding Down only on the website may have missed
last Sunday’s April 1 special, which was only available as an email. If
that’s the case you can now catch up by going to
http://www.ibgames.net/alan/winding/180401special.html.


Shorts:

I suppose it was pretty inevitable really. Once word got out about the
US security services ‘Stingray’ – false cell phone towers that slurp up
people’s messages – the bad boys would be sure to follow on! And, it
seems that while they haven’t exactly been sprouting like weeds, there
is definite evidence that there are some around Washington DC. The
powers that be are still trying to zero in on which fakes are ‘official’
fakes, and which are bad boy fakes, but they have no doubts that the
latter exist.

I foresee an escalating fake cell tower war, as the goodies try to
disguise their towers as fake bad boy fake towers, and the bad boys
respond with fake good boy fake bad boy fake towers and then...
Eventually, every city block will have its own collection of fake cell
phone towers, each with it own depth of fakery!
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/04/03/imsi_catcher_stingray_washington_dc/

Over the last few months there have been a number of reports about
important information being open to the internet because of
misconfigured cloud storage – mostly, but not exclusively, Amazon’s S3
buckets. Security researchers recently decided to take a wider look than
just at the Amazon cloud facilities, and discovered that there are
something in the region of one and a half billion sensitive files out
there that can be accessed from the internet. And only 7% of that figure
was due to misconfigured Amazon S3 buckets. 1.5 billion files, that’s
12,000 terabytes of stuff just waiting to be snaffled up. A trifle
worrying, I would think.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/04/05/billions_files_exposed_aws_ftp_wide_open/


Homework:

One of the few tech commentators I really like is Robert Cringely. I
like him for two reasons. The first is that his book ‘Accidental
Empires’ is the best there is about the early history of personal
computing. The second is because he makes bold predictions, backs them
up with factual information, and revisits them later. Also he isn’t
afraid to say ‘I got that wrong’.

His latest prediction is very simple and very bold – that Space X has
now won the space race. According to Cringely it’s on the verge of
moving to such a dominant position and it will be launching so
frequently, and cheaply (‘cheap’ you understand is a relative term when
it comes to space launches...) that it will clean up. He bases this
prediction on the recent decision of the FCC to give Space X permission
to build Starlink, Elon Musk’s version of a satellite-based broadband
internet.

In practical terms it authorised the launching of the first 4,425 of the
satellites. Eventually that number will expand to just under twelve
thousand. The FCC also specified that Space X has to launch the first
2,213 of those satellites within the next six years. Six Years... That
implies that on average, if it starts immediately, it will have to
launch an average of one a day for the next six years. That’s not quite
as bad as it sounds, since they will be able to send aloft more than one
satellite per launch, but it’s pretty stupendous, none the less.

Cringely’s take on this is that, especially given the rapidly developing
re-usability of Space X rocket components, Space X costs for a launch
will go down rapidly, and that will reflect in the launch prices charged
to third party satellite owners. In addition, and perhaps more
important, with such a regular and frequent set of launches, satellite
owners will no longer have to book two (or more) years in advance. When
their satellite is ready, they can ring up and book the next available
flight – just like booking an airline ticket. (Actually, once the
Department of Homeland Security cottons on to this, I’m sure they will
want to put their oar in to make it not quite so simple!)

I’d suggest it’s worth reading Cringely’s analysis, which is much more
detailed than the gloss I’ve just given you. If it comes off, this will
be seen as one of the most important events of the next ten years.
https://www.cringely.com/2018/04/06/the-space-race-is-over-and-spacex-won/

School time. Chemistry lesson... I’d like to introduce you to the
coolest depiction of the periodic table that I’ve come across. Why is it
so cool? Because if you click on any element it pops up a box that tells
you not only about element, but also what it’s used for.

For instance, when I clicked on Promethium (I’d never heard of it
before) it told me that it was radioactive, long lived, mostly human
made and that it was used to make luminous dials. I also discovered that
it was a rare earth metal and that rare earth metals are difficult to
separate from one another. All useful info for budding chemists.
https://www.sciencealert.com/awesome-periodic-table-tells-you-how-to-actually-use-all-those-elements
http://elements.wlonk.com/ElementsTable.htm


Geek Stuff:

‘I Programmer’ has an interesting piece on robot company Festo’s latest
two robots – Flying Fox and Spider. The short videos of the bots are
very impressive, and, in the case of the Spider, more than a little
creepy! Something I suspect that is worth keeping an eye on.
http://www.i-programmer.info/news/169/11679.html


Pictures:

For this week’s pictures I’d like to introduce you to an amazing 3
minute video of London which makes the city look like it’s on a
completely different planet to Earth. I hesitated a bit before drawing
this to your attention, because I know most of my American readers
already think that London is on a different planet! Be that as it may,
this footage was shot last January while the ‘supermoon’ was at it’s
largest, and it makes stunning viewing. Enjoy!
https://aeon.co/videos/the-rare-celestial-events-that-briefly-made-the-british-capital-a-city-of-otherworldly-wonders


Scanner:

There’s evidence humans didn’t actually see blue until modern times
https://www.sciencealert.com/humans-didn-t-even-see-the-colour-blue-until-modern-times-evidence-suggests

Here’s Red Hat’s open secret on how to make $3billion selling free stuff
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/heres-red-hats-open-secret-on-how-to-make-3b-selling-free-stuff/

One solution to wreck privacy-hating websites: Flood them with bogus
info using browser tools
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/04/03/facebook_active_countermeasures/

Fifty years on from the film 2001 – A Space Odyssey
https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2018/04/02/2001-a-space-odyssey-50-years-later/
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/04/03/alternative_2001_space_odyssey/

How to perfectly boil an egg every single time, according to a quantum
physicist
https://www.sciencealert.com/boiling-perfect-egg-every-time-quantum-physicist-calculator

Attackers shift from Adobe flaws to Microsoft products
https://www.darkreading.com/vulnerabilities---threats/attackers-shift-from-adobe-flaws-to-microsoft-products/d/d-id/1331381

A cyberattack hobbles Atlanta, and security experts shudder
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/27/us/cyberattack-atlanta-ransomware.html&ref=headline&nl=top-stories?nlid=54051705-stories


Coda:

Quote of the Week:

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, and the trouble is, I
don’t know which half.”
Lord Leverhulme – English Industrialist and Philanthropist.

Maybe, given the rise of the internet, we should update this from half
to 98% – AL

And also, a question from me for you to ponder on over the next week or
so: “If you have a self-driving car, will you need a driving license to
use it?”


Acknowledgements

Thanks to readers Barb and Fi for drawing my attention to material for
Winding Down.

Please send suggestions for stories to al...@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
al...@ibgames.com
8 April 2018

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.