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Fiona Craig
Jan 28, 2018, 6:53:14 AM1/28/18
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Fed2 Star
Earthdate January 28, 2018
[This is a subscription mailing list. Details about how to stop
receiving it are at the foot of the email.]
For a fancy formatted version go the Fed2 Star website:
http://www.ibgames.net/fednews/current/index.html
Official News part two
REAL LIFE IMITATES FED: THE ROBOT BARTENDER
by Hazed
The waitdroid, as seen in bars across Fed DataSpace, comes a bit closer
to reality with reports of a robot bartender in Las Vegas.
It doesn’t look anything like the waitroids in Fed. It’s a pair of
robotic arms, that will mix up a cocktail from a vast selection of
drinks and serve it to you.
Watch the robot bartender in action in this video:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/technology-42737844/robot-bartender-the-bar-where-machines-mix-drinks
VIDEO OF THE WEEK: PLAYING CARDS BEHAVE LIKE DOMINOS
by Hazed
You’ve probably seen videos of dominoes laid out in intricate patterns
and then toppled. Well, it turns out you can do it with playing cards as
well, as this video shows.
I have no details about this – all I know is that the video was posted
by the People’s Daily, China. I can’t imagine how long it must have
taken to balance all the cards, but the result is absolutely gorgeous.
Watch the toppling playing cards here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7Mz1ImPHlA
WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week’s net, technology and
science news
by Alan Lenton
We’re having a weekend off next week, but here’s what’s in store for you
this week. Politicians and crypto, drone company DJI and crypto, Montana
state and net neutrality (no crypto, honest), the FCC consultation and a
well-known smut site, two very serious papers on writer’s block, an
explanation of ‘serverless’ the latest super-duper in-word in the
rarefied tech circles in which we move, some nice pictures of
nightclubs, and a quote from James Dewar. I’ve banished the processor
chip bug problems to the Scanner section this week. You can find more
info there than you ever wanted know, and there are also URLs pointing
to material on why human skin doesn’t leak, a Tesla car crash, and some
info about how grow mussels safely. All good stuff!
We’ll be back on Sunday 11 February, see you then...
Shorts:
What is it about politicians that makes them so obtuse when it comes to
encryption? Theresa May, the UK’s prime minister, is yet again coming up
with demands to have ‘backdoors’. The UK government’s own hacking
collective, GCHQ (the equivalent of the USA’s NSA), has repeatedly told
them it’s a very bad idea, but they persist. It’s difficult enough to
design crypto stuff without any way of the bad guys getting in, without
putting deliberate ways of hacking in to it. And it’s not like the bad
guys are stupid enough to use Ms May’s special backdoor encryption so
she can read their messages.
What a dork.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/25/uk_prime_minister_encryption/
And talking of cryptographic things, drone maker DJI rather foolishly
included its drone’s crypto keys in the material it put on GitHub. Of
course that makes it possible for technically-ept users to evade the
firmware that stops them flying in forbidden areas. Apart from anything
else, this makes a mockery of their boast to the powers that be that
people can’t fly their drones into restricted areas!
Being GitHub, and given that they put the material into a public
repository, the stuff was immediately cloned. While DJI can, and
presumably have, closed the their repository to the public, the clone
remains public. They tried using a DMCA takedown notice on GitHub on the
ground that the keys are copyright. GitHub gave them 10 days to justify
the takedown. Given that the stuff has been there for between two and
four years, that would have been difficult to say the least...
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/25/dji_github_public_repo_crypto_key_foolishness/
I see that Montana has come up with its own way of encouraging the
telcos and cable operators to institute net neutrality in the state. The
long and short of it simple. It says, in somewhat more legal language,
“If you don’t maintain net neutrality for customers in this state, we
won’t do any business with you at a state level.”
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/22/montana_net_neutrality_rules/
[This article also has a rather nice picture of Montana -AL]
And talking of net neutrality, remember the FCC ‘consultation’ that came
before the rules were abolished? The one that had a large number of
suspect submissions? Well, various people have been looking a little
more closely at exactly where these submissions came from. And, guess
what... It turns out that a million of them came from a smut site that
employs 55 staff and doesn’t give out addresses to anyone outside the
business! Apparently there are plenty of other anomalies as well, though
none quite so blatant.
Interesting. Perhaps worthy of the appointment of a Special
Investigator, since they seem to be all the rage these days, don’t you
think?
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/22/smut_site_fingered_for_fraud_after_a_million_net_neutrality_comments_get_sent/
Homework:
I rarely refer my readers to journal published academic articles, given
that academia has its own language, specially designed to keep out the
unwashed masses. However, Dennis Upper’s classic paper ‘The Unsuccessful
Self-Treatment of a Case of ‘Writer’s Block’ in the Journal of Applied
Behaviour Analysis is a masterpiece of brevity. Indeed, it is such a
masterpiece, even though it’s over 40 years since it was written, that I
snurfed my coffee when I read it and had to spend some time cleaning the
keyboard before continuing. I’d strongly recommend reading this paper
(including the footnote and the peer reviewer’s comments) but without
snurfing the coffee.
This paper held the record for brevity for 30 years, when it was joined
(but not surpassed) by a follow up paper investigating whether the
results revealed could be replicated (an important issue in science) in
different cultures to that of the original paper. And, indeed they
could! The comments on this paper from the journal’s editor also well
worth a read.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1311997/?page=1 [First article]
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2078566/ [Follow up]
Geek Stuff:
‘Serverless’ is the name of the latest ‘cool’ thing in the computer
business. Probably the most stupid name ever invented, given that all
the ‘serverless’ stuff runs on servers... There’s a good analysis of
exactly what serverless is in the Register this week – the one liner is
that it’s doing things around the idea of making it possible for
ordinary people to write their own programs, in the same way Microsoft’s
Excel did in the 1990s.
Let me explain that last statement a bit. The spreadsheet was one of the
key drivers of business PC adoption in the early days of personal
computing, but by the 1990s there was a split with many of the
spreadsheet companies building better and more complex spreadsheets.
Microsoft took a different position and concentrated their resources on
making it easy for non-techies to write their own scripts (aka programs,
though we don’t use the ‘p’ word, because it frightens ordinary people).
For instance, most people I knew in that period had their address books
on Excel – a most unadressbook like program. The result was predictable.
Excel thrived, and the other programs (think Lotus 123) withered on the
vine.
It’s an interesting concept. Businesses like it because it holds out the
promise of being able to get rid of those pesky awkward (and expensive)
programmers, and non-programmers like it because they can get scripts
done themselves when they need them and evade all the annoying security
controls the IT department insists on.
Does this mean that programmers are going to become obsolete? Probably
not, at least in the near future. I remember back in 1981 a program
called ‘The Last One’. It was a program generator that was supposedly
going to make programming (and programmers) obsolete.
Needless to say we are still here!
But I digress, the article I mentioned at the start is interesting
(though perhaps a little on the wordy side) if you want to know about
this latest trend. Take a look, especially if you think it might affect you.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/23/serverless_exhilarating_terrifying_ridiculous_name/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_One_(software)
Pictures:
Personally, I’m not a clubbing person (neither seals nor night clubs).
However, looking at some of the pictures of SciFi nightclubs and
restaurants in a recent edition of New Atlas, I could be tempted. I
especially like the one based on the movie ‘Tron’. Now, where did I park
my light cycle...
https://newatlas.com/frame-awards-nominees-best-interior-design/53063/#gallery
Coda:
Quote of the week: “Minds are like parachutes. They only function when
they are open.” – James Dewar, physicist and inventor of the vacuum flask.
Scanner:
Yet more stuff about Meltdown and Spectre (wasn’t that a James Bond
villain organisation?)
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/22/meltdown_spectre_week_three_the_good_the_bad_and_the_wtf/
https://www.darkreading.com/vulnerabilities---threats/intel-says-to-stop-applying-problematic-spectre-meltdown-patch-/d/d-id/1330871
https://www.darkreading.com/cloud/fallout-from-rushed-patching-for-meltdown-spectre-/d/d-id/1330887
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/25/intel_q4_fy2017_meltdown_spectre/
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/22/intel_spectre_fix_linux/
Scientists have figured out why human skin doesn’t leak
http://www.sciencealert.com/this-is-why-human-skin-doesn-t-leak-biology
Aut-doh!-pilot: Driver jams 65mph Tesla Model S under fire truck, walks
away from crash
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/23/tesla_autopilot_crash/
Using scientific muscle to grow safer mussels
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=91595&src=eoa-iotd
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
28 January 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.
Earthdate January 28, 2018
[This is a subscription mailing list. Details about how to stop
receiving it are at the foot of the email.]
For a fancy formatted version go the Fed2 Star website:
http://www.ibgames.net/fednews/current/index.html
Official News part two
REAL LIFE IMITATES FED: THE ROBOT BARTENDER
by Hazed
The waitdroid, as seen in bars across Fed DataSpace, comes a bit closer
to reality with reports of a robot bartender in Las Vegas.
It doesn’t look anything like the waitroids in Fed. It’s a pair of
robotic arms, that will mix up a cocktail from a vast selection of
drinks and serve it to you.
Watch the robot bartender in action in this video:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/technology-42737844/robot-bartender-the-bar-where-machines-mix-drinks
VIDEO OF THE WEEK: PLAYING CARDS BEHAVE LIKE DOMINOS
by Hazed
You’ve probably seen videos of dominoes laid out in intricate patterns
and then toppled. Well, it turns out you can do it with playing cards as
well, as this video shows.
I have no details about this – all I know is that the video was posted
by the People’s Daily, China. I can’t imagine how long it must have
taken to balance all the cards, but the result is absolutely gorgeous.
Watch the toppling playing cards here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7Mz1ImPHlA
WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week’s net, technology and
science news
by Alan Lenton
We’re having a weekend off next week, but here’s what’s in store for you
this week. Politicians and crypto, drone company DJI and crypto, Montana
state and net neutrality (no crypto, honest), the FCC consultation and a
well-known smut site, two very serious papers on writer’s block, an
explanation of ‘serverless’ the latest super-duper in-word in the
rarefied tech circles in which we move, some nice pictures of
nightclubs, and a quote from James Dewar. I’ve banished the processor
chip bug problems to the Scanner section this week. You can find more
info there than you ever wanted know, and there are also URLs pointing
to material on why human skin doesn’t leak, a Tesla car crash, and some
info about how grow mussels safely. All good stuff!
We’ll be back on Sunday 11 February, see you then...
Shorts:
What is it about politicians that makes them so obtuse when it comes to
encryption? Theresa May, the UK’s prime minister, is yet again coming up
with demands to have ‘backdoors’. The UK government’s own hacking
collective, GCHQ (the equivalent of the USA’s NSA), has repeatedly told
them it’s a very bad idea, but they persist. It’s difficult enough to
design crypto stuff without any way of the bad guys getting in, without
putting deliberate ways of hacking in to it. And it’s not like the bad
guys are stupid enough to use Ms May’s special backdoor encryption so
she can read their messages.
What a dork.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/25/uk_prime_minister_encryption/
And talking of cryptographic things, drone maker DJI rather foolishly
included its drone’s crypto keys in the material it put on GitHub. Of
course that makes it possible for technically-ept users to evade the
firmware that stops them flying in forbidden areas. Apart from anything
else, this makes a mockery of their boast to the powers that be that
people can’t fly their drones into restricted areas!
Being GitHub, and given that they put the material into a public
repository, the stuff was immediately cloned. While DJI can, and
presumably have, closed the their repository to the public, the clone
remains public. They tried using a DMCA takedown notice on GitHub on the
ground that the keys are copyright. GitHub gave them 10 days to justify
the takedown. Given that the stuff has been there for between two and
four years, that would have been difficult to say the least...
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/25/dji_github_public_repo_crypto_key_foolishness/
I see that Montana has come up with its own way of encouraging the
telcos and cable operators to institute net neutrality in the state. The
long and short of it simple. It says, in somewhat more legal language,
“If you don’t maintain net neutrality for customers in this state, we
won’t do any business with you at a state level.”
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/22/montana_net_neutrality_rules/
[This article also has a rather nice picture of Montana -AL]
And talking of net neutrality, remember the FCC ‘consultation’ that came
before the rules were abolished? The one that had a large number of
suspect submissions? Well, various people have been looking a little
more closely at exactly where these submissions came from. And, guess
what... It turns out that a million of them came from a smut site that
employs 55 staff and doesn’t give out addresses to anyone outside the
business! Apparently there are plenty of other anomalies as well, though
none quite so blatant.
Interesting. Perhaps worthy of the appointment of a Special
Investigator, since they seem to be all the rage these days, don’t you
think?
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/22/smut_site_fingered_for_fraud_after_a_million_net_neutrality_comments_get_sent/
Homework:
I rarely refer my readers to journal published academic articles, given
that academia has its own language, specially designed to keep out the
unwashed masses. However, Dennis Upper’s classic paper ‘The Unsuccessful
Self-Treatment of a Case of ‘Writer’s Block’ in the Journal of Applied
Behaviour Analysis is a masterpiece of brevity. Indeed, it is such a
masterpiece, even though it’s over 40 years since it was written, that I
snurfed my coffee when I read it and had to spend some time cleaning the
keyboard before continuing. I’d strongly recommend reading this paper
(including the footnote and the peer reviewer’s comments) but without
snurfing the coffee.
This paper held the record for brevity for 30 years, when it was joined
(but not surpassed) by a follow up paper investigating whether the
results revealed could be replicated (an important issue in science) in
different cultures to that of the original paper. And, indeed they
could! The comments on this paper from the journal’s editor also well
worth a read.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1311997/?page=1 [First article]
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2078566/ [Follow up]
Geek Stuff:
‘Serverless’ is the name of the latest ‘cool’ thing in the computer
business. Probably the most stupid name ever invented, given that all
the ‘serverless’ stuff runs on servers... There’s a good analysis of
exactly what serverless is in the Register this week – the one liner is
that it’s doing things around the idea of making it possible for
ordinary people to write their own programs, in the same way Microsoft’s
Excel did in the 1990s.
Let me explain that last statement a bit. The spreadsheet was one of the
key drivers of business PC adoption in the early days of personal
computing, but by the 1990s there was a split with many of the
spreadsheet companies building better and more complex spreadsheets.
Microsoft took a different position and concentrated their resources on
making it easy for non-techies to write their own scripts (aka programs,
though we don’t use the ‘p’ word, because it frightens ordinary people).
For instance, most people I knew in that period had their address books
on Excel – a most unadressbook like program. The result was predictable.
Excel thrived, and the other programs (think Lotus 123) withered on the
vine.
It’s an interesting concept. Businesses like it because it holds out the
promise of being able to get rid of those pesky awkward (and expensive)
programmers, and non-programmers like it because they can get scripts
done themselves when they need them and evade all the annoying security
controls the IT department insists on.
Does this mean that programmers are going to become obsolete? Probably
not, at least in the near future. I remember back in 1981 a program
called ‘The Last One’. It was a program generator that was supposedly
going to make programming (and programmers) obsolete.
Needless to say we are still here!
But I digress, the article I mentioned at the start is interesting
(though perhaps a little on the wordy side) if you want to know about
this latest trend. Take a look, especially if you think it might affect you.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/23/serverless_exhilarating_terrifying_ridiculous_name/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_One_(software)
Pictures:
Personally, I’m not a clubbing person (neither seals nor night clubs).
However, looking at some of the pictures of SciFi nightclubs and
restaurants in a recent edition of New Atlas, I could be tempted. I
especially like the one based on the movie ‘Tron’. Now, where did I park
my light cycle...
https://newatlas.com/frame-awards-nominees-best-interior-design/53063/#gallery
Coda:
Quote of the week: “Minds are like parachutes. They only function when
they are open.” – James Dewar, physicist and inventor of the vacuum flask.
Scanner:
Yet more stuff about Meltdown and Spectre (wasn’t that a James Bond
villain organisation?)
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/22/meltdown_spectre_week_three_the_good_the_bad_and_the_wtf/
https://www.darkreading.com/vulnerabilities---threats/intel-says-to-stop-applying-problematic-spectre-meltdown-patch-/d/d-id/1330871
https://www.darkreading.com/cloud/fallout-from-rushed-patching-for-meltdown-spectre-/d/d-id/1330887
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/25/intel_q4_fy2017_meltdown_spectre/
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/22/intel_spectre_fix_linux/
Scientists have figured out why human skin doesn’t leak
http://www.sciencealert.com/this-is-why-human-skin-doesn-t-leak-biology
Aut-doh!-pilot: Driver jams 65mph Tesla Model S under fire truck, walks
away from crash
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/23/tesla_autopilot_crash/
Using scientific muscle to grow safer mussels
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=91595&src=eoa-iotd
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
28 January 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.
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