Winding Down

Homework

2006-07-07T06:39:00.000-04:00

Alexander Cameron of Digital TX has written an neat analysis of why he thinks the big media companies are heading for a fall. Interestingly enough this is one of the few pieces I have read about this topic that doesn't start from a copyright and DRM = bad, peer2peer = good point of view, or the other way round. It is a cool look at the forces acting to negate the old saying 'content is king'. I'd recommend this to anyone interested in this issue, although I wouldn't unreservedly endorse his conclusions.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/06/24/iptv_vod_content/

One of the main bodies that will affect the future of the Internet in the USA is the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). CNet's News.Com has just published an interview with Democrat FCC commissioner Michael Copps. The interview makes for interesting reading about the way in which he thinks about Internet regulatory issues. With the debate on 'Net neutrality' hotting up in Washington, the interview is well worth looking over, if you can take the vomit yellow design of the CNet site.

http://ct.news.com.com/clicks?t=2762772-18a32f6148453f76b7d88f6b914d69a0-bf&s=5&fs=0

And a couple of pieces for the programmers out there from the 'acmqueue' online magazine.

The first is a fascinating mini-history of the Object Management Group's CORBA technology (for the non-techies, it's a method of getting programs on different machines to talk to one another). I haven't personally ever had to use CORBA but I knew programmers didn't like CORBA. However, I had no idea what the genesis of the problems was. As a discussion on how not to create standards this is a must read. Recommended.

http://www.acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=396

The second piece is called 'The Fallacy of Premature Optimization' by Randall Hyde. Basically it is a re-look at the whole issue of optimization in the light of how people have taken Sir Tony Hoare's famous quote, 'premature optimization is the root of all evil' as an excuse to eschew all optimization. As with all polemics, it goes a little overboard in the opposite direction, but it is nevertheless a timely reminder that optimization does have a role and it is worth thinking about at the design stage.

http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/views/v7i24_fallacy.html

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
July 2, 2006

Google Launches Payment System

2006-07-02T09:11:00.000-04:00

And so to the news of the week - Google launches its long awaited online payment processing system. Just for once they are launching with the production version, not an early beta version :) This is definitely a first! Actually, there's not a lot to say about it, other than that it will probably give PayPal a run for its money.

Personally I wouldn't trust either PayPal or Google to collect money for me, not unless they came under the same regulation as banks do - and even then I would still be a little leery about it.

I want my money handled by boring men in grey suits whose mission in life is to look after money and make sure none of it goes astray, not dot com throwbacks for whom the company's chef is, like, where it's at, man. I'm the creative one - I don't want other people being creative with my money!

http://ct.techrepublic.com.com/clicks?t=2749085-18a32f6148453f76b7d88f6b914d69a0-bf&s=5&fs=0

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
July 2, 2006

SCO v IBM

2006-07-02T09:10:00.000-04:00

Ah yes! SCO v IBM and the rest of the world. The end is (nearly) nigh. The judge has dismissed nearly two thirds of the items in SCO's case on the grounds that it had failed to provide sufficient evidence to allow them be part of the case. Groklaw's transcript of the judges ruling makes for fascinating reading (see the URL at the end of this item) - you can see her frustration with the tactics of SCO in the case.

I thought the best bit was where she demolished the argument of SCO's technical expert using his (the expert's) own published textbook on Unix programming! It's my nomination for the best read of the week :)

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20060628203537917

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
July 2, 2006

Vista Hardware Requirements

2006-06-18T11:58:00.000-04:00

Hands up those of you that sloped off to the Windows Vista web site to try running the evaluation tool on your current computer? Lots of you? Yes! I though so. And most of you came away having been told that your kit would run Vista, no doubt. Forget it sunshine. The tool merely checks that your kit meets what Microsoft defines at the 'minimum' requirements.

To give you some perspective, the Microsoft minimum for XP Pro is a 233Mhz Pentium, 64MB of RAM and 4GB of hard drive. XP Pro runs like a dog on my laptop with a 2.1GHz processor, 1GB of RAM and a 7GB hard drive. If you really want to know what it takes to run Vista, then you need to get hold of the documents Microsoft produces for hardware manufacturers. It's called the 'Windows Logo Program Requirements' and you can find it at http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/winlogo/hwrequirements.mspx.

Unsurprisingly enough the requirements shown in the Excel spreadsheet and the three Word documents are considerably more than those of all but the most cutting edge machines available at the moment. The truth is that Windows Vista - which comes in seven different flavours - is realistically only going to be available on new, high performance, and expensive, machines. And that's a lot of money to pay for extra eye candy - especially when you take into account the loss of facilities in current machines as the built in DRM facilities to allow the big media companies to spy on you!

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/06/15/windows_vista_hardware/

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
June 18, 2006

Homework: VoIP and Games

2006-06-16T13:32:00.000-04:00

Those of my readers who play multi-player games (and possibly others who don't) will be interested by an article from my old friend Richard Bartle on gamegirladvance.com. Richard, for those of you who don't know, wrote the original MUD way way back in the 1980s. It was the first MUD ever, and it was the first online game I ever played. You could only play it late at night, because it ran on university computers, and it had a limited number of access lines, so you had to be there as soon as it was open to get in!

Richard's article is about the game design implications of including voice chat in multi-player games. To cut to the chase, he is opposed to it, given the current level of technology. Why? Because it will break the spell. It's difficult to remain immersed in a virtual world when you can hear the real voice of the person you're talking to!

I don't totally agree with Richard, but I think most of his argument is valid. In any case it's well worth a read.

http://www.gamegirladvance.com/archives/2003/07/28/not_yet_you_fools.html

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
June 11, 2006

Ad Subbing Upsets Media Companies

2006-06-12T06:57:00.000-04:00

Now here's a major punch-up in the offing - one that's going to be well worth keeping an eye on. US company Flying J Inc is using technology to strip out commercials from major broadcast and cable companies, and replace those commercials with its own local commercials, and all in real time. The technique is called 'ad subbing', and is being applied to the big screens you see at truck stops round the US.

The media companies are, not unnaturally, furious, and are crying 'foul', and threatening legal action. But what legal action can they take? As Flying J points out, its technology is more like a remote control that allows users to switch away from programming. Its technology doesn't copy, modify, or redistribute the incoming signal, and thus does not constitute copyright infringement.

That's true, very true. So, watcha gonna do about it, Mr Big Media?

http://www.physorg.com/news68999198.html

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
June 11, 2006

Geek Toys: Solid State Disk Drive

2006-06-02T05:34:00.000-04:00

Watch this one very carefully - it is the shape of things to come. Samsung are about to launch a laptop PC with a 32-Gigabyte NAND flash based solid state disk drive. This is a first for laptops, and points out the way forward. It's not just that the drive is solid state rather than the conventional electro-mechanical, it's also that it's up to 300 per cent faster than a conventional drive, and it's silent. The last point makes it suitable for using in lectures, presentations and libraries. It also uses less battery power than a conventional drive.

The demise of conventional drives at the hands of solid state drives has been predicted for many years, but this is the first time I can recall that solid state drives have really been in the running. I want one!

http://www.physorg.com/news67620189.html

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
May 28, 2006

Homework: Computers and Foreign Languages

2006-06-02T05:32:00.001-04:00

Here's a hard problem to deal with: what would you do with a country of a billion people, 1,652 languages, and in which three quarters of the workforce are in agriculture? That is the problem facing India today. Only about 10 per cent of the population speak English, which effectively limits the number of PCs to about 60 million.

The problems with using the major languages - Hindi, Urdu, and Gujarati, to name but three - on a computer are manifold. It looks, though, as if HP India have a possible solution in the form of a tablet and stylus system that might just work. The idea is intriguing and you can read all about it in an interesting piece by ZDNet UK's Rupert Goodwin.

http://newsletters.zdnetuk.cneteu.net/t/118634/921984/188435/0/

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
May 28, 2006

Homework: Amazon Interview

2006-06-02T05:32:00.000-04:00

Still in ACM's output, take a look at the ACM Queue interview with Amazon CTO Werner Vogels. Currently Google is getting all the limelight as it takes on the Microsoft behemoth, but I've personally felt for a while that the spotlight is misdirected. I think the Amazon platform is more likely to be the challenge that Microsoft fears. OK, so it's not a general computing platform, but I think that it is already moving towards domination in the ultra-important e-commerce market, and that that market will prove to be decisive in the long run. Well worth a read by those interested in exactly what Amazon is up to at the moment.

http://www.acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=388

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
May 28, 2006

Homework: Net Neutrality

2006-05-29T07:11:00.000-04:00

The latest edition of the ACM's online magazine, Ubiquity, has an interesting commentary by Dr M E Kabay on the 'net-neutrality' debate, which has been simmering for quite a while, but has recently gained a high profile because of a number of bills being considered in Congress. The analysis makes an interesting read, arguing that regulation is not needed because the market will ensure that ISPs maintain their neutrality.

If the ISPs start favouring organisations that pay extra, the argument runs, then the customers will move to ISPs that don't discriminate. Unfortunately there is a fundamental flaw in the argument. It assumes that customers have a choice of suppliers. A lot don't, they have access to only one ISP, so they have no choice if they want to remain connected to the net.

This is always a problem with industries that are utilities, and the problem is not going to go away any time soon as consolidations and take-overs continue in the industry.

http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/views/v7i20_neutrality.html

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
May 28, 2006

Continuing lawsuits

2006-05-28T09:22:00.000-04:00

Oh dear, it was sue and sue again this week. Apple may have won the first
round of its legal tussle with the Beatles UK record company, but that didn't
mean it was out of the lawsuit frying pan. Early in the week Creative made
good on their sabre rattling over the last year and filed a suit alleging that
the iPod violates Creative's intellectual property. Creative, it seems, has a
patent that covers selecting songs using a side scrolling menu system.

By the end of the week Apple had hit back and counter-sued. So far they
haven't revealed any details, but no doubt we will find out soon.

While all this was going on Symantec was taking the bold step of suing
Microsoft over the alleged infringement of Symantec's Volume manager
technology. What's special about this is that Symantec is also trying to
obtain an injunction against Microsoft that would probably halt the much
delayed launch of Vista. (I'll overlook the suggestions that Microsoft might
have somehow tried to get this to happen so that it has a cast iron excuse,
unrelated to its development processes, to postpone Vista yet again!)

Frankly, surveying the scene, I'm irresistibly reminded of children's
squabbles in the school playground...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/05/19/symantec_vs_microsoft/
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/05/19/apple_sues_creative/
http://newsletter.eetimes.com/cgi-bin4/DM/y/ewe70FypUC0FrK0EXBk0EU
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/05/16/creative_sues_apple/

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
May 21, 2006

Story: Wither Windows?

2006-05-22T10:08:00.000-04:00

I knew that Microsoft's new version of Windows was late - I've mentioned it often enough here - but I hadn't realised just how late until the other day when I came across a timeline published on TechRepublic. Vista, then known as Longhorn, was first touted in 2001, and was being slated for a late 2002 release as a cut down version of a more ambitious project called Blackcomb.

By July 2002 Bill Gates was touting Longhorn as a major breakthrough in Windows technology, but there was still no sign of the product itself. The next significant thing to happen was the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference in 2003, which was called Longhorn Professional Developers Conference. However, it still didn't actually feature a working version of Longhorn!

In 2004 Gates announced the target date for shipping Longhorn was 2006, promising important advances in 'performance, security, and reliability'. Nothing much else happened until mid-2005 when Microsoft announced that the new name would be Windows Vista. It was also supposed to be launched in late 2006.

Now, of course, we know that it is not going to be launched until 2007 - early 2007 according to Microsoft, late 2007 according to all the analysts. I know who I would back over when it's going to appear!

The question is, of course, why is it so late?

If you want my opinion, I think that Microsoft has lost control of its operating system. The thing is so massive, and the different bits so intertwined, that it no longer knows what's going on. This also explains the problems the company's having with the EC and the US DoJ over documenting the interfaces for third party developers.

Forget the stupidity of the corporate leadership of Microsoft over the licences and fees. The bottom line is that they are finding it almost impossible to document their unbelievably convoluted interfaces. If they are having this amount of trouble documenting the interfaces, what do you think the chances are of anyone understanding the code behind the interfaces?

The truth is that Windows is out of control and Microsoft is riding a tiger. It daren't let go of the existing code and develop anew because of the number of applications that depend on the bugs and idiosyncrasies of the current system. But if it continues with the current code, then time between new releases it going to carry on growing geometrically. At this rate we can expect to see Windows Vista's successor sometime around 2020...

http://ct.techrepublic.com.com/clicks?t=2355221-
18a32f6148453f76b7d88f6b914d69a0-bf&s=5&fs=0

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
May 21, 2006

Story: The RFID readers story...

2006-05-11T11:38:00.000-04:00

I've mentioned Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags before, mostly in terms of their potential to violate people's expectations of privacy. Those concerns are about the ability of large companies, like, for instance, Wall-Mart, to track details of their customers' purchasing habits. There are, however, a whole slew of other problems with the tags - especially in the realm of the tag's security vulnerabilities.

For those of you who haven't come across them before, RFID tags are tiny sensor chips that emit a burst of radio carrying information when triggered by a reader. Over the last few years the prices have dropped dramatically, making the possibility of tagging individual items a reality. The justification is that it helps shops track their inventory, especially in a situation where the shops are using just in time inventory control.

What is not generally realised is that RFID tags are also being used for a variety of other things, and are starting to exhibit serious security vulnerabilities. Wired magazine recently published a piece about the RFID hacking underground, and it's well worth a look.

The article looks at four or five different cases of RFID insecurity.

The first is a system that uses an RFID based smart card to unlock doors as the owner approaches the door. In this case a 'hacker' was able to read out a copy of the tag's emissions and duplicate them, allowing the hacker (who was employed to test the security of the system) to enter the supposedly secure building. The process of obtaining and cloning the card took only a few minutes.

Then there was the case of a library using a very common RFID chip based system to control the loans of its library books. In this case the chips had been deliberately left 'unlocked', so that extra data could be added later. The result? A system that could be completely wiped by anyone with a few hundred dollars worth of home made equipment that fits into a jacket pocket.

A similar system in a hi-tech German shop called Future Store allowed anyone with similarly equipment to rewrite the prices encoded in the tags - and I doubt that anyone doing so would have made the price higher! Admittedly the shop is an experimental one to show off the possible technologies available for the future. Presumably the demonstration of futuristic shop lifting technologies wasn't intentional!

Still on the data addition and changing, there is the issue of placing data - similar to browser cookies - onto RFID chips, to track the activities of users. Imagine putting a cookie onto the toll pass of someone you wanted to track, and then coming back a few days later and downloading all the information about where they had been. Scary, isn't it!

Or, how about the guys who cracked the RFID encryption in Exxon Mobile's Speed Pass a few years back. Apparently it took only 30 minutes to crack with a brute force attack - something which is supposed to take several hundred years. The crack would have allowed those involved to get free gas at any Exxon gas station had they been so inclined (and who knows who else didn't reveal that they'd cracked the system and took the free gas?).

Finally, of course, there are the much publicised RFID chips that some people have implanted. Yet another security silver bullet for those with more money than common sense. The intrepid Wired reporter had one implanted in his arm. It took only a few seconds for a hacker to read out the ID information and clone it.

So, why bother to clone the human, when you can clone their ID?

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.05/rfid_pr.html

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
May 7, 2006

Technologies to Watch: Light-emitting Devices

2006-05-02T12:11:00.000-04:00

Researchers working in the field of organic light-emitting devices (OLEDs) are within striking distance of attacking the market for ordinary light bulbs. A team at the University of Southern California have been able to create OLEDs that produce brilliant white light at high efficiencies. OLED panels last for five to ten years. The only problem remaining to be overcome for commercial exploitation is for the plastic coating to be improved so that water doesn't degrade the OLED. Somehow I don't think that is going to take a very long time to overcome!

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/04/13/oled__white_light_invention/

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
April 30, 2006

Hard Drive Encryption

2006-04-30T11:48:00.000-04:00

Security guru Bruce Schneier raised an important issue at a security conference in London this week. Microsoft's new version of Windows, Vista, due out next year has a new hardware based encryption feature. Known as 'BitLocker Drive Encryption' it encrypts the contents of the hard drive, so that if the computer is stolen, no one can get at the data. Interestingly enough, and perhaps deliberately, this encryption will also make life difficult for people who use dual boot systems (so that they can boot into other operating systems as well as Windows).

For instance, my laptop allows me to choose, at boot time, whether to run Linux or Windows. If I choose Linux it will mount my Windows partition for me as an additional drive, giving me access to all my Windows data while I am programming the Federation 2 server code under Linux. However, BitLocker will make that impossible, since all the data on the Windows drive will be encrypted whether I like it or not.

Actually I think this is a classic case of optimising the wrong thing. OK, in a few high profile cases there are problems with data on the drives of stolen laptops. It should have been encrypted, because of its sensitivity, but wasn't, even though there are already programs around that will encrypt hard drives. But that isn't a problem for most people. The problem they have is retrieving material from their hard drives when something goes wrong. Not only will BitLocker do nothing to help in that case, it will make it even more difficult to retrieve the material you forgot to back up...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/04/27/schneier_infosec

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
April 30, 2006

Update: How to SCOtch vague claims

2006-04-10T12:34:00.000-04:00

Fascinating new info on the SCO vs IBM and the rest of the world case. For the uninitiated, SCO claims to own the licence to Unix (something which is disputed, but that's another story). A couple of years ago it decided that Linux included source code from SCO's version of Unix. It therefore decided to file a case against IBM of all people. Why it picked the one organisation with both the will and the money to mount a determined defence, I have no idea. Inflated egos, maybe.

To cut a long (very long) story short, IBM said (in legal jargon) OK, tell us which code, file names and line numbers and we will look into this. SCO failed to come up with the goodies, citing all sorts of spurious reasons. Eventually, IBM got the court to order SCO to produce file names and line number and details of the alleged infringement for IBM to investigate. Zilch. SCO continued to run around making vague claims and asserting that it was up to IBM to figure out where it had 'infringed' SCO's source code.

And there the matter rested until recently.

Now, however, IBM has moved onto the offensive with request for the judge to dismiss 198 items (the bulk of the items) listed in SCO's filing, since they haven't complied with the court judgement to provide details.

IBM's filing gives some idea of what is involved, and the scale is staggering. Remember that IBM hasn't been told what these 198 items are, but it is supposed to search for them in:

11 versions of System V code - 112,622 files - 23,802,817 lines of code
9 versions of AIX code - 1,079,986 files - 1,216,698,259 lines of code
37 versions of Dynix code - 472,176 files - 156,757,842 lines of code
597 versions of Linux code - 3,485,859 files - 1,394,381,543 lines of code

That's over 5 million files and just under 2.8 billion lines of code. ( I had to work out the latter number by hand because my freebie Microsoft calculator plugging Visual C++ .NET couldn't handle it!) Interestingly enough, IBM experts reckoned that it wasn't the size of the job that was defeating them, but the fact that they had no idea what they were supposed to be looking for.

So, the question is, will the court punish SCO for its failure to comply with court instructions? I'll let you know the answer when it becomes available. In the mean time, the Groklaw article the URL points to gives interesting background on this issue.

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20060405002552215

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
April 9, 2006

Roundup: More Microsoft tribulations

2006-04-05T08:36:00.000-04:00

I reported in the last issue at some length on Microsoft's decision to delay the launch of the new Windows operating system, Vista, until next year. Since then it has added Virtual Server to Vista and Office 2007. Like Vista, Virtual Server was supposed to ship at the end of this year. It is a product intended to compete with VMware and the open source Xen, allowing a single computer to be partitioned into multiple virtual machines. This delay means that Microsoft will have no competing product for at least another year. Not good.

Piling on the woes, a new critical Internet Explorer (IE) bug has come to light. Microsoft admits it could put PCs and data at risk (see my comments last week about why a bug in this application can bring down the whole operating system). However, they have yet to issue a fix, and are instead advising customers to avoid untrusted web sites. Gee! Thanks Microsoft! Just as well I use Firefox as my browser.

Still on the subject of IE, Microsoft has created a bug database for IE7, which it is encouraging people to add public feedback to. This is something of a departure for Microsoft, and a welcome one at that. However, one should not exactly jump for joy. You have to use the notorious Microsoft Passport to access the site, and you can't post about security or about earlier versions of IE. Oh, and btw, IE7 is only available in beta - as far as I'm aware it doesn't get properly released until next year with the much delayed Vista. Perhaps we should give Microsoft one star for trying...

Microsoft and the EU are still talking about Microsoft's failure to meet the terms of the EU anti-trust ruling, and now the US mission to the EU has sent a letter to the EU Competition Commissioner, saying it would have 'substantial concerns' if Microsoft was being treated unfairly. Interesting. I wonder who defines 'unfairly'? We shall see.

Well that's not all, but it's enough about Microsoft for one issue. If you want to know more, browse through the URLs.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/29/ms_virtual_delays/
http://www.physorg.com/news63040772.html
http://newsletter.eetimes.com/cgi-bin4/DM/y/evQw0FypUC0FrX0EO1M0AQ
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/29/vista_eu_antitrust/
http://ct.techrepublic.com.com/clicks?c=1877123-7863277&brand=techrepublic&ds=5&fs=0
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/27/another_ie_security_flaw/
http://newsletter.infoworld.com/t?ctl=118838C:1F69382

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
April 2, 2006

Geek Toys: Enigma Machine

2006-04-05T08:35:00.000-04:00

Fancy yourself as a cypherpunk? I have just the toy for you, if you hurry. A nearly mint condition German WWII Enigma coding machine is up for auction on eBay. The closing date for the auction is tomorrow, Monday 3 April, so you need to get in fast to secure it.

It is the three wheel version, rather than the four wheel naval version, and comes with two spare code wheels. And it's in full working order. All you need is a mate with another one and you can exchanged coded messages with one another. Whether they will be secure is, of course, a different matter!

When Hugh Sebag-Montefiore's book about Enigma came out in paperback I did a review. The review is at http://www.ibgames.net/alan/reviews/enigma.html if you are interested in the subject.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/29/enigma_for_sale/

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
April 2, 2006

Unwanted Carp

2006-03-31T07:17:00.000-05:00

Do you like fish? How would you like a million of them? Yes, really! Utah Lake, it seems, is overflowing with carp. A few of them were introduced about 125 years ago and they rather liked their new environment. In fact, they liked it so much that there are now 7.5 million of them in the lake, and they are driving out all the native fauna.

Officials at the lake plan to tackle the problem by scooping out one million of the blighters each year until things are under control. However, what do you do with a million fish? It puts eating the left over turkey at Xmas and Thanksgiving into perspective!

If you think you could market a million carp annually, send ten copies of your statement of qualifications and ten copies of the proposal to the Utah Department of Natural Resources before April 10th. I assume from the ten copies bit that they don't have photocopiers in Utah.

OK. I know it's not a techie subject, but I couldn't resist telling you about it :)

http://www.physorg.com/news12080.html

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
March 26, 2006

RFID Viruses

2006-03-28T11:38:00.000-05:00

And from the 'Just when You Thought It was Safe...' department comes news of a new virus threat. Viruses in RFID tags. Those are the little wireless chips that are starting to get everywhere courtesy of big supermarket chains like Wal-Mart and Tesco who use them to track merchandise. The chips have also started to appear in the latest generation of US passports, something which will no doubt spread, like a plague, to other countries' passports in the not too distant future. In some countries pets also have the chips implanted, usually in their ears, to help identify them.

Anyway, some researchers in Amsterdam have just published a paper showing how RFID tags can be used to inject an SQL based virus into the database that is being used by whatever is scanning the chips.

Manufacturers are, of course, denying that it's possible because there are no accepted standards for the RFID software. That's true, but that isn't likely to be more than a minor hindrance to intrepid hackers. And, in any case, the trend these days is towards standardisation and connecting up databases. You only need one infected database to pass on the infection to another if they are all connected.

So, you never know, one day your cat might become the 21st Century equivalent of Typhoid Mary!

http://ct.cnet-ssa.cnet.com/clicks?c=1816869-7863277&brand=cnet-ssa&ds=5&fs=0Cash-strapped

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
March 26, 2006

Three years late, and counting...

2006-03-27T09:32:00.000-05:00

So, Microsoft is delaying the launch of Vista, its new version of Windows, until next year. Vista is already three years overdue. The question is, will the beast make it out of the door in the first quarter of next year, or will it slip even further?

The delay is really going to hit the PC industry hard, because it was expected that Vista would be available for the Xmas season and fuel high levels of sales. The failure is expected to hit hard, with shocks rippling up through PC sellers, the makers themselves, peripheral vendors and chip fabricators, to name only the most obvious.

Microsoft tried to put a good gloss on the news by claiming that the delay was to enable them to improve the security of the system, but I don't think many people believed that. I only found one analyst prepared to accept that excuse, and he was pretty half hearted, giving the impression of a man clutching at straws.

So what's the problem? Why are successive releases of Windows becoming further and further behind schedule?

The answer is twofold. The underlying problem is one of complexity. The whole system is so complex that altering anything is likely to bring down the whole house. Partly this is bad design, but only partly. Microsoft employs some of the brightest software engineers I know, but their hands are tied by instructions from above not to separate out the different component of the system.

The Internet Explorer (IE) browser was a case in point where the programmers had to integrate its functionality into the core of the operating system during the period running up to the anti-trust actions. The result is that every time a security flaw is found in IE it compromises the security of the entire system, and patches to fix IE have been known to bring down Windows itself.

The second part of the problem lies in Microsoft's propensity for big bang launches, which means that, unlike other vendors, who tend to upgrade things incrementally, Microsoft likes to launch everything new in one package. As a result each new version includes massive quantities of new code, plus all the old code, because people's current applications use the existing code, making testing a nightmare.

Vista has already had a number of major features ripped out in order to meet the three years late deadline. One has to wonder what else is going to be removed to make it ship in the new time slot.

And that's not all. The new release of Microsoft Office - Office 2007 - has also been delayed as a consequence of the Vista delay. It's interesting to speculate what other delays might be be in the works as the ripples spread.

And Microsoft's response? It's reorganised its company structure once again.

Anyone else interested in re-arranging the deck chairs?

http://ct.news.com.com/clicks?c=1847854-7863277&brand=news&ds=5&fs=0
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/business/4831374.stm
http://news.com.com/Clouds+over+Redmond/2100-1016_3-6052928.html
http://newsletter.eetimes.com/cgi-bin4/DM/y/evF50FypUC0FrK0ENoU0E8
http://news.com.com/Microsoft+Office+2007+to+be+late%2C+too/2100-1012_3-6053504.html

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
March 26, 2006

Big Business and Global Warming

2006-03-17T07:09:00.000-05:00

Here is an alert for the more ecologically inclined amongst my readers. What do you think is going to happen to the Arctic once the already observed effects of global warming start to take increased effect? The Greenland glaciers are already shedding ice at nearly four times the rate 30 years ago, and the arctic ice pack is retreating further and further each year.

Well you may not know, but big business already has its own ideas - especially the big energy companies who are desperate to start exploiting the natural resources the melting ice is starting to reveal.

Then there is the possible opening of the fabled North West Passage round the northern end of Canada. There are already hard words being spoken between the USA and Canada about whether such an open water strip between the Atlantic and the Pacific would count as Canada territorial waters or whether it should be considered international waters. I'm sure you can guess who is on which side.

The North West Passage would cut down the trip from Europe to the Pacific coast of both North America and Asia by a substantial amount. (Remember, the distance is a lot smaller than it looks on a map, because most map projections stretch out horizontal distances more the further away you are from the equator. In far northern latitudes, which is what we are talking about here, distances can be as little as half what they appear to be! You have to look at it on a globe to get an idea of the true distances involved.)

So, I'd suggest you might like to take a look at the report of the speeches made by key industry figures at the World Economics Forum in Davos in January. Clearly big business see global warming as an opportunity, not a problem. Quite who they think they are going to sell their goods to, when 90% of the most heavily populated areas vanish under water, I'm not sure...

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
March 12, 2006

AOL's Mail Charges

2006-03-17T07:08:00.000-05:00

AOL's nifty wheeze to make extra cash by fast tracking the mail of spammers, oops, sorry, 'legitimate companies', who are prepared to pay AOL for the privilege, is attracting increasing opposition from all sections of the community. Already 500 organisations have signed a letter to AOL demanding it give up the idea. AOL is trying to create a two tier system in which anyone with the money to pay will get preferential treatment when they send e-mail to AOL customers.

I'm sure you won't be surprised to hear that AOL's customers have no say in whose mail -they- want fast tracking into their mailbox. AOL is obviously worried by the opposition, it's already making offers to allow 'qualified' charity organisations to join the fast track with out paying. Who qualifies the qualifiers has not been revealed. This crude attempt to split the opposition has led to a further growth in opposition, and presumably AOL customers will want to have their own say when the news percolates down to those who pay subscriptions. More about this as the story unfolds.

http://www.eff.org/news/archives/2006_03.php#004461
http://www.dearaol.com/

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
March 12, 2006

Internet Refuseniks

2006-03-10T09:16:00.000-05:00

There's an interesting survey just out from Parks Associates. It seems that a
third of US households are not connected to the Internet, and that these
refuseniks have no intention of getting connected to the net. I've mentioned
before that there is a large chunk of the populations of western countries
who are not connected to the net, and who won't connect.

Governments worry about this and think that it's because the people
involved can't afford it, or are there are technical issues, and they run
campaigns to get people connected. The government officials just don't get it
- the Internet doesn't provide anything that these people consider to be
necessary. You can make it as cheap as you like, you can create brilliant
technical solutions, but if the Internet doesn't provide anything they want,
they won't use it. Full stop.

And you know, that has really, really, bad implications for the cost of
providing government services. Governments are rushing helter-skelter to
implement eGovernment in the fond belief that everyone will use the services
on line, thus massively cutting costs. Wrong. They will end up having to
provide the electronic services that they made into a mantra, and also the
manual services that exist at the moment. Just what we really needed - one
for the price of two!

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/02/27/us_net_usage_flatlines/

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
March 5, 2006

Analysis: Databases get interesting (well almost)

2006-03-07T06:10:00.000-05:00

I reported a couple of issues ago that database mega-corp Oracle had bought open source embedded database manufacturer Sleepycat. In fact this was the second recent acquisition of an open source company, because last October it bought an open source
company called Innobase.

The acquisition of Innobase, which I managed to miss at the time, is even
more significant than the Sleepycat purchase, because Innobase created the
most robust and popular transaction engine for MySQL.

The term 'transaction engine' is probably geek gobbledy-gook to most of you,
so I guess I'd better explain.

Most of the big databases in the world are what is known as 'relational'
databases. Like all databases they store data in a format where, if the
programmer has done his work properly, any arbitrary piece of data can be
retrieved rapidly. (By the way, people who program databases tend to refer to
themselves as 'database architects'. I think this is because it sounds more
glamorous than being a mere programmer.)

Lots of databases can perform this piece of wizardry, but relational
databases have proved to be able, in general, to do it more efficiently, so they
are what is used most often, and the relational database language SQL is the
one most often used to extract information.

However, while retrieving information fast is a necessary condition for any
self-respecting database, it isn't really sufficient if the database is going to
be used for any significant commercial application.

Let me give you an example.

Suppose you instructed your bank to make a US$500 donation to ibgames
(because its online game, Federation II, which I wrote, is fabulous, dazzling,
brilliant and real cool, and you want to help support it). Anyway, your bank
needs to do at least three things to complete the transaction. It has to debit
your bank account the US$500, it has to credit ibgames account with
US$500, and it has to write the details of the transaction into the audit log
in case there is any question about the payment ('transaction') at a later
date.

Easy I hear you say - three lines of Visual Basic, it's a snip - what's the big
deal?

Ah! But there are three separate things to be done here - what happens if
there is a crash immediately after the money is deducted from your bank
account? You lose the US$500, ibgames goes bust for want of the US$500,
and the bank is smiling all the way to its bank (until the class action law
suite arrives, that is).

Preventing this from happening is the job of a piece of software known as the
transaction engine. A transaction engine is one of the most difficult pieces of
software to write, and Innobase (Remember them? This is a piece about
Innobase.) wrote the transaction engine used by the top open source
database, MySQL.

Ooops!

Obviously it's not good for your biggest rival to gain control of the company
that wrote your transaction engine, although, being open source, Oracle
can't just kill the product. Understandably, MySQL are starting to look
elsewhere for a transaction engine, having already rebuffed Oracle's
overtures.

Enter Netfrastructure. MySQL's first move has been to acquire this company
which makes tools and server software for web-based application. The
consensus is, though, that the reason for this acquisition is not the
company's product, but to get Netfrastructure's founder, relational database
guru Jim Starkley, to work on developing MySQL's own transactional engine.
If the rumour mill is correct, that's a wise move!

Meanwhile, Oracle, who are not short of a dollar or two, are not standing
still. Persistent rumours abound that they are looking to buy Zend
Technologies. Zend's PHP-based Zend Engine is one of the most popular
open source web site back ends, and is capable of using a wide range of back
end databases. Only this week, Zend announced that they had upgraded the
ability of their engine to work with Oracle databases, provoking a new crop
of rumours.

Databases are generally considered to be a pretty boring topic, but what is
happening in the database market at the moment will have tremendous
implications for the future way in which open source and proprietary
software interact. For the ultra-hard-line open sourcers, these acquisitions
mean that the end is nigh, but I don't think that's the case. It was always
unlikely that open source, which I wholeheartedly support and use all the
time, would remain in some sense 'pure' once it became mainstream. It was
bound to start interacting with commercial software and the line would start
to get blurred. We have yet to see where this will all end, but I suspect that
it will result is a balancing act between the two types of software.

In the meantime, I have to confess that I'm impressed with Oracle's strategy
for dealing with open source challenges to its position, which is much more
subtle (not something I normally associate with Oracle) than Microsoft's
attempts at sowing fear, uncertainty and doubt. I wonder how many more
commercial software makers will seek to emulate Oracle's example over the
next few years?

http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2006/02/28/zend_oracle_database_php/
http://newsletter.infoworld.com/t?ctl=112BB59:1F69382
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/02/15/oracle_buys_sleepycat/
http://ct.techrepublic.com.com/clicks?c=1507010-7863277&brand=techrepublic&ds=5&fs=0
http://www.oracle.com/innodb/index.html

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
March 5, 2006

Quantum computer strangeness

2006-02-28T07:20:00.000-05:00

Here we are at the end of another month. The weather's cold, miserable, and wet - but not wet enough, it seems, to break the drought affecting the south-east of England.

On the other hand some very clever scientists have persuaded their quantum computer to solve a problem without actually running the computer (http://www.physorg.com/news11087.html).

Fortunately, as far as I can tell you still have to program the computer first, so my profession isn't about to become yet another victim of quantum uncertainty. This new computer should be ideal for EDS. I can't think of a company better suited to writing programs for computers that aren't going to run!

Oh, and I did learn one thing this month. If I ever get stranded in Sweden, I know how to say the Monty Python phrase 'My hovercraft is full of eels' in the local lingo. ('Min svavere ar ful med al', for those of you who have a need for the phrase, or are just plain curious.)

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
February 26, 2006

Analysis: Value for money?

2006-02-26T06:02:00.000-05:00

I was looking at a story about the UK's Project Semaphore the other day and thinking about value for money. Let me explain. The project is a pilot scheme for the British Government's much vaunted eBorders scheme, which, it is claimed, will enable us to spot baddies trying to get into the country. The pilot project has just finished, and the politicians were boasting about how successful it was - six million passengers screened and 140 arrests.

The report was fairly straightforward, talking about how the main eBorders program would now go forward and tenders were out for the contract. The main thrust of the article was about whether in the light of all the other major IT projects going on, there would be enough skilled developers.

But that wasn't what caught my attention. It was the 140 baddies caught that I wondered about. Unfortunately, I couldn't find out any information about what they were arrested for, but I guess it would be reasonable to assume that had any of them been known terrorists the politicians would have been trumpeting the success of the scheme across the national newspapers. So my betting was that quite a number of the arrests were for relatively minor infringements of the immigration rules.

I was intrigued enough to search for material from when the scheme was started to discover that it was budgeted at 15 million UK pounds (about US$25.5 million). I couldn't find anything about cost overruns - suspicious in itself, but we will give them the benefit of the doubt and assume it did only cost 15 m UKP.

So, 15 m UKP for 140 arrests. I make that just under 110,000 UKP per arrest (about US$180,000). That's an awful lot of money to pay to track and arrest someone. In fact it's the sort of Return on Investment (RoI) that would result in mass sackings in most big corporations. And remember that's only apprehending the person, not prosecuting or anything like that. Significantly, figures don't exist for conviction rates, or what sort of sentences were given, or whether those involved were just refused entry, because their papers weren't in order.

And lest my US readers are feeling smug about the UK wasting money, let me mention that a few days after reading about Project Semaphore, I came across a piece about the US government's US-VISIT program in security wiz Bruce Schneier's newsletter.

According to Schneier, since January 2004, US-VISIT has processed more than 44 million visitors. It has spotted and apprehended nearly 1,000 people with criminal or immigration violations. The budget for that phase of US-VISIT was US$15 billion - we'll assume, as with Semaphore, that it didn't overrun on costs - a very dubious assumption, but we will be generous. That makes the cost of catching each baddie a cool US$15 million. Wow! Maybe we Brits are, in fact, doing really well.

Interesting to know what the government is doing with your tax dollars, isn't it? By the way have you noticed that politicians never apply value for money criteria to their pet projects, only to ones they want to close down?

(Based on reports in 'Computing' print magazine 23 Feb 2006 and Bruce Schneier's newsletter 'Cryptogram' http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-0602.html)

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
February 26, 2006

'Important stop Telegrams abolished stop'.

2006-02-20T12:17:00.000-05:00

Sad news earlier this month from Western Union - the yellow flimsy telegram is now a thing of the past - after 154 years. The telegram almost defined the era for over a hundred years, but this month Western Union stopped offering the service. No more yellow envelopes hand delivered by a courier.

Western Union's component companies were formed in 1851, and Western Union came into being ten years later. Telegrams reached a peak in the 1920s and 30s when it was cheaper to send a telegram than to make a long distance phone call. Since punctuation was extra, and the four letter word 'stop' was free, people started using the word stop instead of a period to end sentences, giving the telegram its unique syntactical flavour. Ironically, the end of the telegram was reported by bloggers - one of the agents of its demise!

RIP Telegrams stop.

(Thanks to reader Lois for drawing attention to the story).
http://cbs13.com/topstories/topstories_story_033183306.html/

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
February 19, 2006

Microsoft Office Live

2006-02-19T09:51:00.000-05:00

Microsoft has opened up the test version of its new Office Live service. This is an interesting experiment aimed at small businesses with less than 10 employees. Such businesses rarely have their own web sites, or the wherewithal to set up and maintain one. Office Live offers a three tier system. The Basic, free service offers an Internet domain, 2GB storage for five e-mail accounts, 30MB Web site storage and 10GB a month data transfer. The next level increases the e-mail accounts to 50 and the web storage to 50MB and bandwidth to 25GB a month.

Frankly I don't know how many genuine takers they'll get. It seems to me that the cost, as such, isn't usually a problem even for very small businesses. The cost today of what Microsoft is offering at the basic level is rarely more than US$30/month, petty cash for even mom and pop stores. The real problem, as I mentioned earlier, is a lack of expertise and resources to set up and maintain a site. I don't think Microsoft addresses this problem at all. Oh, I think they'll get plenty of takers for the basic service, after all it's free. But real businesses that would be able to/want to expand to the second tier? Not very likely.

The other service Microsoft is offering is web based programs for managing contacts, tracking projects and such things as completing expense reports. Microsoft is making it clear that they are targeting these, paid, services at people who don't use such software today. Interesting, but first Microsoft will have to persuade those people that they actually need to use software for such things. And as an aside, I don't think I can think of any small business, like corner shops, that have anything they would consider to be a 'project'. As such they wouldn't see any need for project tracking software. If your 'projects' are really simple, tracking them using software would double or triple the time spent on the project, hardly what you'd call a productivity increase...

http://ct.techrepublic.com.com/clicks?c=1485470-7863277&brand=techrepublic&ds=5&fs=0

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
February 19, 2006

Google shifts prime meridian

2006-02-18T11:08:00.001-05:00

I always knew Google was pretty arrogant, but now they've taken it upon themselves to shift the prime meridian (zero degrees of longitude) about 110 yards to the right of its official position running through the Greenwich observatory... The URL has a picture from Google Maps showing the dastardly re-location.

This takes us back to previous centuries when there were multiple prime meridians, depending on which country your maps came from. The two main contenders, especially for nautical charts were London (The Greenwich Observatory) and Paris. Eventually, in 1875 the wily French offered to trade off agreeing to let the prime meridian run through Greenwich in return for the adoption the metric system by other countries. The English agreed , and the Greenwich meridian was adopted as the prime meridian for all nautical charts. However, the duplicitous English managed to delay keeping their half of the bargain - converting to metric - for the next 100 years!

So, we must ask ourselves, is this a preliminary to a fundamental relocation of the prime meridian to the nether regions of Google Towers in California? And while we are at it, does this relocation have any sinister conspiratorial links to the attempts by Swatch to institute a new 'Swiss Mean Time' on its ultra-trendy throw away watches?

http://wwp.greenwichmeantime.com/info/prime-meridian.htm
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/02/06/greenwich_meridian/

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
February 12, 2006

Copyright royalties for net music

2006-02-18T11:08:00.000-05:00

In an interesting move the European Commission (EC) has opened a formal investigation into the companies that collect copyright royalties for music broadcast on the net. Effectively these companies have a monopoly on the collection of royalties for the public performance of music. Having collected the royalties they then distribute the proceeds to their members, after taking their own cut, of course.

In the early 80s I managed a rock band called 'Belt & Braces'. Every time the band played, whether in a pub or in a more formal venue, we had to fill in a form to give a list of songs played and hand it to the venue management who would then make a payment to the Mechanical-Copyright Protection Society to cover the copyright due on the songs. Only one problem from our perspective. The band only played songs they had written, but it never got paid because they weren't members! The same would have applied if we had been broadcast on radio or television.

There was no way to opt out, and there was no alternative collector of moneys. The Society, like its brethren in other western countries, had it firmly sown up. Now, however, they are trying to extend their tentacles to other media, like the Internet, and this has provoked the EC to take an interest in just how they have maintained their monopoly for so long.

With any luck, this will provide a major shake up of the whole rotten system.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/02/09/ec_probes_cisac/

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
February 12, 2006

Microsoft does something right

2006-02-12T09:52:00.000-05:00

Sometimes, just sometimes, Microsoft really gets it right. Most people have been thinking about the new wide screen monitors and LCD laptop panels in terms of viewing DVDs. Microsoft has been thinking ahead what else that extra screen real estate can be used for, and it's come up with a neat idea. A wide sidebar that can hold a slew of mini-applications which it has dubbed 'gadgets'. This is an excellent idea whose roots go back to the TSR mini-apps of the DOS era.

TSR stood for 'Terminate and Stay Resident', and was originally invented by Borland, then in its most innovative phase. TSR programs were things like calculators, that were still there and instantly useable, even though you could actually only use one application at a time under DOS.

Today, of course, under Windows, you can run more than one application (well theoretically, anyway, if there are any computer resources left after Windows XP has taken its cut of the processor and memory). Most applications are designed for a screen ratio of around 4:3, not exactly square, but not long and thin like the wide screen ratio. There are a few applications which could use the extra space at the side with no problems - you could for instance have two pages side to side in a page layout program, but most will just leave the space on one side of the screen blank.

Enter Microsoft's 'Sidebar' application displaying things like RSS links, slide shows, calculators, and tickers. Neat. Of course you could do all that manually, but with sidebar it would all be confined to the sidebar and not get in the way. Let's just hope that you don't need the power of a Cray supercomputer to run the whole thing!

http://ct.techrepublic.com.com/clicks?c=1443311-7863277&brand=techrepublic&ds=5&fs=0

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
February 12, 2006

Greek mobile phones tabbed

2006-02-12T06:42:00.000-05:00

Thinking of using a mobile phone in Greece? Think again. It's just emerging that the mobile phones of some very important people in Greece have been tapped for up to a year after the Olympic games in 2004. The list of 100 people whose phones were known to have been tapped - until the tap was discovered in March 2005 - included the Greek Prime minister, his wife, and the ministers of defence, foreign affairs, justice and public order. Most of Greece's top military officials and police officers were also targeted - and the US embassy. The tap was eventually discovered after a routine check by the supplier, Vodafone, at which stage it was stopped. No one knows who it was who did the tapping...

http://guardian.co.uk/mobile/article/0,,1701298,00.html

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
February 5, 2006

Search Engines and Privacy

2006-02-12T06:41:00.000-05:00

The recent fishing expedition by the US department of Justice trawling for information on what people are using search engines for has highlighted the privacy dangers of using search engines. C'net recently asked four of the major search engines providers - AOL, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo - to give information about what data they keep on searches by customers.

The really interesting news was that AOL is by far and away the best search engine to use from a privacy point of view. Not only do they collect considerably less information about the searches their users are making, but they allow customers to delete most of the data they do collect, either on a case by case basis, or in all cases. Yahoo and Microsoft said they were considering allowing such customer driven deletion, but Google were very firm about the fact that they have no intention of allowing users to delete their own data!

One has to wonder how much longer Google are going to remain the darling of the net lefties.

http://news.com.com/2100-1025_3-6034626.html

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
February 5, 2006

Data Loss

2006-02-03T07:01:00.000-05:00

So many reports of lost data tapes are coming in these days that soon losing a data tape with tens of thousands of your customers' social security numbers won't be news anymore. The latest story to break is of Bridgeport-based People's Bank losing a tape containing information on 90,000 of its customers. The information included names, addresses, social security and checking account numbers.

Meanwhile, many miles away, Kansas City-based H&R Block was busy sending out unsolicited mail to its customers. H&R Block wasn't actually losing computer tapes, instead it was embedding the recipient's social security number in the package tracking number. H&R Block seem to feel that no one is going to notice because the entire tracking code is 47 digits long. I guess it gives a new meaning to the term 'security by obscurity'!

While all this was going on, ChoicePoint, erstwhile involuntary purveyors of identity information to the criminal fraternity, were settling up with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to the tune of US$10 million in fines. It was also bound to pay a further US$5 million in restitution to those who suffered from identity theft as a result of it compromising the information of 163,000 people.

Have you noticed how there has been a sudden outbreak of data loss since it became a legal requirement to notify the affected customers? This suggests to me one of three things. Either companies have been getting very careless since the notification laws were passed, or... data thieves have decided the new laws are an opportunity to go high profile. Alternatively, perhaps, it's been like this all the time and millions of people had their personal information compromised, but no one was told about it. Now which do you think is the correct answer?

http://www.boston.com/news/local/connecticut/articles/2006/01/11/bank_loses_tape_with_personal_information_on_90000_customers/
http://netscape.com.com/H38R+Block+blunder+exposes+consumer+data/2100-1029_3-6016720.html
http://www.physorg.com/news10281.html

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
January 29, 2006

Microsoft - The cost of doing business

2006-01-30T09:07:00.000-05:00

Microsoft is still locking horns with EU over the company's failure to provide adequate documentation for third party developers. Developers need this to produce sophisticated products that work with Microsoft's operating systems. But even as the EU granted an extension until February 15 to produce the documentation, the US Department of Justice (DoJ) was articulating very similar criticism.

If Microsoft doesn't come through with the documentation the EU will be fining it US$2.45 million a day, backdated to when the documentation was originally due, last December. The documentation it has so far produced was judged to be 'totally unfit for its intended purpose' by the neutral arbiter approved by both Microsoft and the EU.

Microsoft has cited an inability to find qualified employees able to construct adequate documentation from the documentation they have available. This is totally believable and says a lot about the quality of Microsoft's internal documentation, and the quality of its code. The question is however, how much of the lack of quality is deliberate? And what are they going to do about it?

Microsoft have offered an alternative. Third party developers can sign a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) and pay to look at the source code. Pay for something that was supposed to be provided free as part of the anti-trust settlement!

But even without the NDA and the payment, the code base is a poison chalice. Anyone who looked at the code would automatically be prevented from working on competing products. Why? Because they would be liable to accusations that they had used copyrighted code they had seen in Microsoft's source. Fortunately, the EU are not taking the offer at face value and have already declared that it's not good enough. Lets hope they stick to that position.

A lot of people have asked me how it is that Microsoft can mess around when they have a fine of US$2.45 million per day hanging over their heads? Well there are two possible answers to that question. The first is that the cultural gulf between the US and the EU is such that Microsoft simply do not believe that the EU will actually impose the fine. They could be right, but I don't think that's really what is behind it.

To find out what is behind Microsoft's arrogance you have to look at the numbers and do some sums. This week Microsoft published its accounts for the last quarter of 2005. On a record revenue of US$11.84 billion (up 9 percent and the best quarter ever) it made a net income of US$3.65 billion (that's over 30 percent, by the way). Ok - now US$3.65 billion is US$3,650 million, and that is for three months - or 90 days. Now, 90 days worth of fines at US$2.45 million per day is US$220 million. Divide the net income by the total fine and we find that Microsoft is earning 16.5 times more that it is being fined. And Microsoft is predicting that the current quarter's income is going to rise to US$4.5 billion. (Note: the figures have been rounded out for the arithmetic.)

Even on last quarter's figures the fine represents only six per cent of Microsoft's income. The fact is that these fines are like the parking tickets that plumbers get - part of the cost of doing business! So now you know why Microsoft would rather risk the fine than provide the documentation...

http://www.physorg.com/news10326.html
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20060125103545406
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/01/26/microsoft_licensing_ec/
http://www.physorg.com/news10293.html
http://newsletter.eetimes.com/cgi-bin4/DM/y/etlo0FypUC0FrK0EBoG0EH

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
January 29, 2006

Sony rootkit affair

2006-01-26T08:45:00.000-05:00

And talking of DRM, here is an interesting coda to the Sony Rootkit affair. Recent research suggests that 350,000 networks have computers infected with Sony's Rootkit. While this is down from the 570,000 networks tracked a month earlier, it is still an enormous number, and, apparently, includes a significant number of government and military networks. The figures are for networks, not computers, which is a consequence of the very clever way researcher, Dan Kaminsky, built up the information. It seems highly likely that the affected networks have more than one infected computer on them, meaning that there are still potentially millions of infected computers out there. Not a pleasant thought.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/01/16/sony_bmg_rootkit_still_widespread/

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
January 22, 2006

Consumer protection against DRM

2006-01-26T08:44:00.000-05:00

In an interesting move, the UK's National Consumer Council (NCC) has called for new laws to protect consumers against the Digital Rights Management (DRM) used by the software industry. In addition to restrictions imposed by the media companies, the NCC pointed out that buyers are subject to unfair contracts, lack of information, and security risks to their own equipment. It also noted that consumers are also losing privacy rights because of the information required to enforce contracts. It's interesting that the situation has reached such a pitch that even non-technical bodies like the NCC are starting to intervene and argue for legislation to protect consumers, something that has been lacking in the past. Hopefully it's just the start of a movement to restore consumer rights in the hi-tech arena.

http://newsletter.eetimes.com/cgi-bin4/DM/y/ethI0FypUC0FrX0EAsd0AG

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
January 22, 2006

Broken Windows

2006-01-23T08:27:00.000-05:00

Still on Windows and security, I think this must be a first. Remember Windows Vista? You know the new version that's not coming out until the end of this year? Yes, that one. Microsoft have issued a security patch for it! This has to be a first - a security patch issued nearly a year before it goes on sale. I guess they must be getting in practice ready for when Vista is launched! Nice one, Bill.

http://ct.techrepublic.com.com/clicks?c=1222908-7863277&brand=techrepublic&ds=5&fs=0

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
January 22, 2006

EU Patents

2006-01-23T08:23:00.000-05:00

On the European side of the pond, the whole patent issue has been re-opened by the EU's Internal Markets Commissioner, Charlie McCreevy, who has launched a public consultation on patent policy. McCreevy is notorious for his toadying to big business and their demands for a US style patent policy. A former Eire finance minister, he was instrumental in the policy of cutting taxes for overseas companies that lies at the heart of Eire's economic growth over the last few decades. Last time round the patent proposals were soundly defeated by the EU Parliament.

Looks like another struggle is about to start.

http://newsletter.eetimes.com/cgi-bin4/DM/y/ethI0FypUC0FrX0EAsz0Ac
http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2006/01/17/ec_patents_directive_revived/

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
January 22, 2006

Financial compliance and management

2006-01-20T11:10:00.000-05:00

Here's some interesting figures that came through from analysts Gartner at the end of last year. In 2004 financial compliance and management spending took up less than 5 per cent of corporate IT budgets. This year it is estimated that it will take anything up to 15 percent of the IT budget. Corporate IT departments are being flooded with demands for new compliance programs, and there are more regulations on the way to increase the load.

I searched Google for the two main pieces of legislation currently affecting corporations. 'Sarbanes-Oxley', the US legislation, threw up 15.2 million entries, while 'Basel 2', the European version of the legislation, threw up a further 13.2 million entries. Some people are making plenty of money out of the insatiable appetite for regulation, but all is not rosy, because the money has to come from somewhere.

It's coming from two sources. Increased prices for the consumer (that's you and me) and it's siphoning off cash from other IT projects. Remember how all new IT development was put on ice as the year 2000 approached and all resources went into fixing those problems? Well it's starting to happen again, but this time rampant legislation is the cause. So now, not only is half the result of programmer productivity going to the lawyers, but the other half is going on meeting even more government regulation. Yuk!

http://newsletter.infoworld.com/t?ctl=106D400:1F69382
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/12/16/gartner_sarbox_it_spending_estimate/

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
January 15, 2006

...And the walls came tumbling down

2006-01-15T13:33:00.000-05:00

There was a piece of very bad news for the e-commerce community at the end of last year. The brilliant Chinese cryptographer Xiaoyun Wang announced that she had found a way to break SHA-1. SHA-1 was considered the most secure algorithm in general use, and was endorsed by the US National Security Agency. The previous year Wang broke MD-5, another widely used security algorithm.

The e-commerce world isn't going to come to an end because of this - it still requires formidable resources to break the code, but SHA-1 and MD-5 are absolutely central to e-commerce. No one has actually broken SHA-1 yet, but the first demonstrations of MD-5 being broken are already out there in the crypto community. Since MD-5 and SHA-1 are used to digitally sign documents and to secure passwords, the problem is being taken very seriously.

Replacing the old algorithms won't be pretty. Once a new algorithm is available - and that could take several years - all the existing security infrastructure will have to be replaced. Think about it - all the secure (https) web servers will have to be upgraded, so will the browsers, just to mention the most obvious cases. Then there is digital signing for formats like Adobe's Acrobat (.pdf). Just as bad, what about documents that were signed with MD-5 and SHA-1? They will probably have to be re-signed and distributed to the people they were originally sent to.

None the less it will have to be done, and sooner rather than later. As crypto guru Bruce Schneier put it in an interview with New Scientist, "Attacks always get better, they never get worse."

(Source, New Scientist, 17 December 2005)

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
January 15, 2006

DVD Formats

2006-01-12T07:25:00.000-05:00

And while we are on the subject of media of one sort or another, there has been an 'interesting' (in the Chinese sense) development in the struggle to set the format for the next generation of high definition DVDs. There are two competing consortia, Blu-ray and HD-DVD, each with their own, incompatible formats. What a surprise! Blu-ray was generally considered to by pulling ahead - at the basic level it holds 25Gb of data against HD-DVD's 15Gb, and the Blu-ray consortium has most of the Hollywood studios on board.

Enter Microsoft, stage left, with an announcement Windows Vista - the Windows XP replacement - will come bundled with HD-DVD. At first sight this is par for the course. Microsoft has a long history of foisting inferior products onto its customers. However, looking in to this a little more closely, other issues surface.

First, it transpires that Blu-ray uses the Java language, an anathema to Microsoft, who have no intention of paying royalties to Sun if it can possibly help it! Second there is the XBox 360. The 360 is on the market now with a current generation DVD drive. Coming soon is Sony's PlayStation 3 with built in Blu-ray. if Microsoft can muddy the waters about what is the standard format, it can play down the 360's lack of high density capacity. Microsoft wields a lot of clout, but it remains to be seen whether it can take on the studios and a large chunk of the consumer electronics industry on its own turf and win. More on this punch up as it proceeds.

http://newsletter.eetimes.com/cgi-bin4/DM/y/es7y0FypUC0FrK0D4eE0G7

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
January 8, 2006

Real Piracy

2006-01-11T13:36:00.000-05:00

Regular readers will know of my distaste for the way the big media companies have hijacked the word 'pirate' to mean anyone whose activities threaten the big media business model. I was recently reading a book about the history of the spice trade and was fascinated to discover that the media companies are not the first to hijack the term. Originally spices were carried from the spice islands to entrepots in Malaya and Ceylon for onward trans-shipment by local boat owners. (An entrepot is a commercial center where goods are imported and exported, and stored for collection and distribution.) Once the Western Europeans (mainly the Dutch, Portuguese and English) discovered the spice islands, they attempted (and mainly succeeded) in setting up a monopoly of the carrying trade by declaring all the local shipping to be - yes you guessed it - 'pirates' who needed to be exterminated.

And by the way, real piracy still exists, and is a far more serious matter than some media mogul having to go short of the odd expensive cigar. In the first nine months of 2005 there were 205 recorded acts of piracy worldwide, and over 280 crew were killed, kidnapped, or just disappeared. Modern pirates use hi-tech weaponry and the ships involved, many of which have vanished without trace, include carriers of aluminum ingots, cigarettes, UN food aid, a chemical tanker, 2,000 tons of dates, and 400 tons of tin. Hot spots for piracy include the Gulf of Guinea (off west Africa), the Straits of Malacca and Java Sea (off Malaysia and Indonesia), the Somalia coast, and the southern Caribbean.

(Sources: 'The Spice Route' by John Keay; and New Scientist, 10 December 2005)

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
January 8, 2006

New Year Problems

2006-01-08T11:03:00.000-05:00

Well even as the old year expired with some of the best fireworks I've seen for a long time, things were happening. Here in Techville a strike by computers was narrowly avoided by the intervention of the mayor. The trouble was caused by the decision to add an extra second to 2005. As one 3GHz processor pointed out, it was expected to work an extra three billion cycles for no extra pay. It continued, "That's equivalent, for you humans, working at one action a second, of 2,283 years unpaid work!". Crisis talks, initiated by the mayor, resulted in a compromise - the extra second would be treated as cache misses, and that meant the processors would therefore not be expected to work for the duration. Phew!

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
January 8, 2006

Government's ID card DVD

2005-12-15T07:46:00.000-05:00

Some of you will no doubt remember that I've discussed our government's enthusiasm for identity cards, even though it looks increasingly likely that they will cost 300 UK pounds (US$560) each. Unsurprisingly, the government are meeting increasing resistance to this sweeping example of the big brother state. The government solution - produce a DVD extolling what it perceives as the virtues of its ID card.

Being the government, though, it proceeded to blow 70,482.38 UK pounds (US$119,820) on the initial run of 50 DVDs of its magnum opus 'Passport to Perdition'. The second run - a further 200 copies - by comparison cost a mere 1,400 UK pounds (US$2,380). By my calculations that means it cost 287.57 UK pounds (US$488) to produce each DVD. That's nearly as much as the ID cards are likely to cost. Baby, I really want to see what's on this DVD - I wonder how long before we see it advertised on E-Bay?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/12/02/id_card_video_costs/

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
December 11, 2005

Self-monitoring cars

2005-12-13T12:11:00.000-05:00

I was reading a report of new moves towards self-monitoring cars that can diagnose their own faults. Pretty good idea, you might think. I'm not so sure. Like most pieces of technology, it depends how it's used. I suspect that it will be used by manufacturers to increase their profits by allowing them to decide when the car needs repairing, rather than the owner deciding. Given that the decision will depend on the party that makes the money out of the transaction rather than the party that does the paying, I suspect that the repairs will be demanded earlier rather than later.

http://www.physorg.com/news8716.html

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
December 11, 2005

The joys of on-line shopping

2005-12-11T10:39:00.000-05:00

Bad news for those who evangelise about the ubiquity of the online experience and the joys of on-line shopping. With the biggest credit card burner of the year rapidly approaching, a new survey shows that a mere 18 percent of on-line buyers account for 46 per cent of all on-line sales in the US.

Something like 55 per cent of buyers account for only 21 percent of online purchases. This is not good news for on-line shops. In general the smaller your customer base, the more vulnerable you are to the whims of individual customers and other unforeseen problems. Ideally you want a large number of high paying customers. Failing that a large number of low paying customers is preferable to a small number of high paying customers generating the same income. It will be interesting to see the figures for this Xmas.

http://www.physorg.com/news8702.html

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
December 11, 2005

Geek Toys

2005-12-05T12:25:00.000-05:00

I've got to have one. You know those toy guns that fire foam darts? Over here in the UK there is a USB version available! Just plug it into your Mac or PC USB port and you have full control of the three missile battery. What's more it's only 19.95 UK pounds (about US$32). Faaaan-tastic!

Marks and Spencer web site

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
December 4, 2005

Geek toy

2005-12-03T15:11:00.000-05:00

And for those of you with a more musical bent, run your pinkies over the keys of Korg's latest synth. In the Linux powered OASYS (a snip at US$8,000) they have produced a real masterpiece. Think 172-voice polyphony, all the latest of everything in digital synth tricks, and software upgradable to boot. Ah! I can't play music to save my life, but even I want one of these to play with...

http://digitalmedia.oreilly.com/2005/11/09/inside-the-korg-oasys.html

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
November 27, 2005

Homework: To innovate, or not to innovate?

2005-12-03T15:10:00.001-05:00

'Spiked!' recently published an interesting piece by Norman Lewis on innovation in the contemporary world. It seems that while references to 'innovation' have multiplied massively (from being mentioned in 55 articles between 1970 and 1980 to 4,583 articles between 2000 and today), actual innovation has declined. In particular he points out that innovations coming in today are based on R&D projects from 20 years ago. However, today companies are shifting resources from R&D to software patents, which are much cheaper than R&D. The paper's conclusions about this trend are not exactly happy, but well worth reading by anyone interested in contemporary trends in the hi-tech industries. The article is short and easy to read - well worth a look.

http://www.spiked-online.com/articles/0000000CAE72.htm

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
November 27, 2005

EDS fined by UK government

2005-12-03T15:10:00.000-05:00

The really good news from the UK is that our old friend EDS has been forced to cough up over the tax credit fiasco. The Inland Revenue switched to an EDS designed system a few years ago. The result of this inspired decision was over US$3 billion in overpayments in the first year alone. EDS have agreed to pay the government US$113 million in compensation for screwing up. US$113 million is loose change to both the government and EDS, but it establishes the principle that if you screw up on a government contract you are going to have to pay. I sure that when the news was announced a frisson went through the board rooms of certain large software consultancy companies. And well it might.

http://www.computing.co.uk/computing/news/2146441/eds-pay-hmrc-tax-credits-fiasco

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
November 27, 2005

UK government terrorist wish list

2005-12-03T15:09:00.000-05:00

Here in the UK the Blair government has issued a resounding call to start using science to tackle the problem of terror. Its wish list includes RFID tracking, new scanning technologies, portable roadside drug testing equipment and more sophisticated biometric identifiers. In the circumstances it was perhaps unfortunate that it came out the same week as a report linking the precipitous decline in students taking physics with the acute shortage of physics teachers. And the shortage is likely to get worse, since something like 30 per cent of existing physics teachers are due to retire in the next ten years.

Of course, it's not surprising that few students want to do subjects like physics. They're are hard and require serious and sustained intellectual work. The government's attempt to get half the school leaver population into university, without providing commensurate funding, has lead to a proliferation of new 'soft' courses. How can you expect physics to compete with, for instance, a full time three year BA course in beach and surf management? (I kid you not - the course is run by Swansea Institute of Higher Education.) Maybe what the government is really looking for is portable drug testing equipment to use on surfers wearing psychedelic wet-suits?

http://www.physorg.com/news8362.html
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/11/23/science_vs_terrorism/

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
November 27, 2005

Fraud free ballots

2005-11-27T10:02:00.000-05:00

Now here's something interesting - the Basque regional government (the Basque provinces cover the northern part of Spain) have unveiled an electronic ballot box designed to make fraud a thing of the past. I don't know about anyone else, but this sounds to me remarkably like tempting fate! The box uses a bunch of high (and low) tech tricks ranging from invisible ink, readable only under UV, to mobile communications. I foresee problems. Apart from the challenge implicit in announcing something as fraud free, the procedure for using the systems looks to me to be suspiciously slow and cumbersome, which means it won't scale well. The other factor working against the beast is its cost - at over US$1,000 per ballot box the system is not a cheap option for cash strapped local authorities. I really don't think this one is going to take off.

http://www.physorg.com/news8331.html

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
November 27, 2005

EU Accounts problem

2005-11-27T10:00:00.000-05:00

Here's an interesting question for everyone. Suppose you were part of a 70 billion dollar organisation whose auditors had just refused to sign off on the annual accounts for the eleventh year running. What would your reaction be? Horror? Anger? Disgust? At any rate, you wouldn't be happy, would you? Well that's exactly what happened a week or so ago - The European Union's auditors refused to sign off on its accounts. And there wasn't a murmur from any of the constituent national governments about the scandal. And I thought the tech business was dodgy!

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
November 27, 2005

You can use a Cray Supercomputer

2005-11-27T09:55:00.000-05:00

Have you ever wanted to get your hands on a Cray? Now's your chance to at least use one, even if you can't keep it in your bedroom. Cray-Cyber.org is an organisation dedicated to preserving the memory of Seymour Cray and his supercomputers. They have obtained a number of Cray supercomputers and make them available on the net for people to use. Not all of the machines are on all the time, but the web site gives times at which the different machines are available. So you too can run your pet project on a Cray. Hot stuff!

http://www.cray-cyber.org/general/start.php

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
November 20, 2005

Amazon files sweeping patents

2005-11-23T12:15:00.000-05:00

Another story about patents, this time in the US of A - Amazon is at it again, filing patents on common online techniques. It has just persuaded the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to grant it three sweeping patents on 'Methods and system of obtaining consumer reviews', 'Search query processing to provide category-ranked presentation of search results', and 'Computer services for assisting users in locating and evaluating items in an electronic catalog based on actions performed by members of specific user communities.'

Pretty all-embracing stuff, and most of it in common use today on e-commerce and social networking sites. This is much wider than the notorious 'one-click' patent that came out of Amazon's last foray into the patent arena. I think the other e-commerce companies might, just might, decide to challenge this one.

Incidentally, did you, like me, wonder where exactly Amazon gets these wizard ideas from? Well, thanks to the eagle eye of reader Lois Goldthwaite I can reveal their secret sources. In the reviews patent (number 6,963,848) there is a section 'References Cited', which has a sub-heading 'Other References. And what is the first 'other reference' to be cited? 'Hiam, Alexander, "Marketing for Dummies", IDG Books Worldwide, 1997, pp.98-108'. So now you know!

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/11/12/amazon_triple_patent/
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?u=/netahtml/srchnum.htm&Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&r=1&l=50&f=G&d=PALL&s1=6963848.WKU.&OS=PN/6963848&RS=PN/6963848

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
November 20, 2005

Digital Rights for Consumers

2005-11-20T10:08:00.000-05:00

It's a little ironic that the Sony affair blew up in the same week that the pan-European consumer organisation BEUC launched a campaign to have consumers' digital rights enshrined in law. BEUC's 'Declaration of Consumers' Digital Rights' calls for companies working on DRM solutions to be compelled to respect fair use rights, and argues that service providers should not be able to unilaterally change the terms and conditions controlling music a person has already purchased.

BEUC, which already has some support in the European Parliament, is demanding six rights be established for consumers:

* The right to choice, knowledge and cultural diversity
* The right to the principle of 'Technical neutrality' - defend and maintain consumer rights in a digital environment
* The right to benefit from technological innovations without abusive restrictions
* The right to interoperability of content and devices
* The right to the protection of privacy
* The right not to be criminalised

How far this will fly I don't know, but the European Parliament is starting to assert its authority - witness the demise of the proposed new patent laws earlier this year - and the Sony affair will certainly strengthen the hand of those seeking to establish consumer digital rights. More on this issue if anything develops.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/11/10/digital_rights_online/

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
November 20, 2005

Mail bomber gets off

2005-11-06T07:35:00.000-05:00

UK tech crime laws revealed their age this week after a teenager who allegedly mail-bombed his former employer with five million emails escaped trial. The judge ruled that the Computer Misuse Act (CMU), under which he was charged did not apply since the purpose of the e-mail server was to receive mail, which is what the teenager was sending. Thus there was no 'unauthorised access' or 'unauthorised modification' of computer systems. The fact that the server crashed under the load was considered to be irrelevant.

I don't like the idea of the guy getting away with a mail bomb attack (assuming he did it - because he didn't come to trial, the matter is not proved one way or the other), but I have to approve of the ruling. All too much legislation - both here and in the US - is sloppily written. It's hastily drafted, usually in response to some passing media fad, and rushed through without proper debate. It's main purpose seems to be so that politicians can go to the polls saying 'Look! I did something about XYZ!', rather than to solve real problems. We need less, but better thought out, legislation, not quick and dirty fixes that later will blow up in our faces.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/11/03/email_bomb_case_dismissed/

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
November 6, 2005

Security Questions about E-voting

2005-11-03T09:14:00.000-05:00

A rather alarming report came out this week. It was produced by the US Government Accountability Office (GAO), and said that questions about the security and accuracy of electronic voting machines are likely to continue into the 2006 national elections. The main reason for this, the report states, is because there are still no government guidelines on electronic voting, allowing election officials to go their own way. Recent elections have thrown up a number of high profile problems including miscounted and missing votes. Apologists for the voting machine manufacturers have pointed out that these only represent a tiny minority of the votes cast. They're right, and in a way one wouldn't be worried about these cases, because the errors were spotted.

The real question, though, is how many cases weren't spotted. The obvious thing to do would be to take a statistically representative sample and check the results. Unfortunately, that's not possible, because there are no alternative means of verifying the totals produced by many of the machines! Very convenient, is it not? Add to this the fact that most of the code in these machines is not publicly available for those with programming knowledge to check, and you have a recipe for the discrediting of one of the fundamental tenets of democracy - voting. I don't have a vote in the US, but if I did I'd be starting to get more than a little worried about where exactly my vote was going, whichever way I planned to cast it!

http://newsletter.infoworld.com/t?ctl=F82307:1F69382

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
October 30, 2005

Irrigation not broadband

2005-10-22T07:49:00.000-04:00

Most people who are not executives of large tech companies, highly paid consultants, or directors of 'Media' labs, understand that what people in the third world need is basic facilities, like clean drinking water, shelter, and food. A major punch up is in the offing over this very issue in the Peruvian Andes, where local farmers are making their feeling clear on the issue. As part of a deal to open a huge new copper mine, the mining company have created a fund with something in the region of US$45million in it to help relieve poverty.

The authorities promptly laid out plans to blow the cash on such essentials as soccer pitches, rehabilitating city squares, and, of course, Internet connected computers. The local farmers were not impressed. As one representative put it, 'We're peasants, many of us cannot read or write... we don't believe the Internet will help us as much as an irrigation channel will.' Difficult to argue with them - schools, hospitals, water and electricity sound like a much better bet. Which goes a long way towards explaining why a blockade of the mining site is being planned - and I doubt if this will be organised via txt messages...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/10/13/peru_mine_protest/

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
October 16, 2005

'Ker-Ching!' That'll do nicely...

2005-10-19T08:33:00.000-04:00

Big news of the week was Microsoft's settlement with RealNetworks. This is the latest in a string of settlements undertaken by Microsoft in the last year or so:

Sun Microsystems - US$1.95 billion
IBM - US$850 million
RealNetworks - US$761 million
AOL Time Warner - US$750 million
Novell - US$536 million
InterTrust Technologies - US$440 million
Gateway - US$150 million
Be - $23 million

Quite a pile of cash! You may well ask what's going on. Well there is a connecting thread - in virtually all cases part of the settlement has been a requirement that the recipients withdraw from their participation from the European Union's antitrust proceedings. This case is currently wending its way through the various European courts after Microsoft was fined near $600 million for unfairly using its market position against rivals.

Those who think that the withdrawal part of the deals was merely coincidence should take a quick look at the settlement with the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA) earlier this month. The CCIA got a payment of just under US$20 million from Microsoft, in return for dropping the CCIA's antitrust case.

Weirdly enough the CCIA then used half of this money to give their Chief Executive, Ed Black, a US$10 million bonus. No, I don't understand the logic of doing that either - but I do know that I'm in the wrong business!

I doubt that this will be the end of the payouts, since there are other, ongoing, legal disputes occupying Microsoft's corporate lawyers. The EU case will be with Microsoft for some time yet, and there is the possibility of further cases coming from the EU. Microsoft suffered a further blow last month when the US Patent Office once again displayed their ignorance of anything to do with software by confirming the Eolas web browser patent. In July Go sued Microsoft on antitrust grounds. And the list goes on...

It would be easy to smirk about Microsoft's problems, and, indeed, many of them are of Microsoft's own making. However, before schadenfreude completely takes over, just remember that if a company the size of Microsoft can suffer these sort of legal problems, the precedents set could well put your company and your job next in line.

The lawyers have got the bit firmly between their teeth, and it may not be long before we all have to start paying their fees through the increased cost of our computer software and hardware.

http://ct.news.com.com/clicks?c=569647-7863277&brand=news&ds=5&fs=0

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
October 16, 2005

Publicity

2005-10-17T10:14:00.000-04:00

There are a couple of publicity things to tell people about:

First I was interviewed by Ubiquity, the on-line magazine of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and the interview has now been published at http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/interviews/v6i37_lenton.html.

And second, advance notice that I'm going to be talking about Open Source Software to a meeting of the Oxford branch of the British Computer Society on Thursday 10th November - details at http://www.oxon.bcs.org/program2005-6.htm.

Symantec's sneaky price rise

2005-10-17T10:13:00.000-04:00

There was some sneaky business from Symantec, this week, as they raised their subscription prices by up to 33 per cent last Monday. Symantec conspicuously failed to mention the price hike last month when they announced the 2006 editions of their products. Anti-virus products are one of the relatively few products that you -have- to have frequent updates for, making them effectively a subscription product - something that has become the holy grail of the big software corporations. The consensus out there seems to be that Symantec are banking on people not noticing the increase when they renew their subscription - after all who can remember how much it was a year ago?

For the record the anti-virus software subscription cost is being jacked up from $24.95 to $29.99, i.e. by 20 per cent. Symantec has about 40 million subscribers for all its subscription products, so this move is likely to add as much as a quarter of a billion dollars to its annual revenue. If you don't want to pour your hard earned cash into Symantec's ever expanding coffers, then take a look at the free version of AVG anti-virus. Even AVG's professional version only costs $38.95 for two years, and the company actually has real customer support, unlike Symantec. The AVG web site is at http://www.grisoft.com and contains more info and downloads.

http://ct.techrepublic.com.com/clicks?c=559566-7863277&brand=techrepublic&ds=5&fs=0

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
October 16, 2005

Office Upgrade

2005-09-29T11:27:00.000-04:00

Microsoft is planning to upgrade its Office suite next year. Office 12 will be the most radical overhaul yet. Office is a poster child for what is known in the programming world as 'feature creep'. Early versions of Office had 100 commands organised in menus. The current version has something like 1,500 commands located in zillions of menus, toolbars and dialog boxes. Anyone who's tried to locate a command the name of which they are not sure will be only to well aware of the problems. Add to this the realisation by Microsoft that 9 out of 10 features that customers wanted to see added to Office were already in the program, and you have some idea of the scale of the problem. So, Microsoft are planning to simplify things. Gulp!

I shall watch the exercise with some cynicism; will it really be easier to use? Or will the desertions to alternatives like Open Office speed up? After all if you have to retrain to learn a completely new interface, it suddenly starts to make sense to look at cheaper alternatives, since you are going to have to pay for the retraining anyway. Personally I only use Word when my arm is twisted, and even then I write the text in a straightforward editor and cut and paste it into Word when I've finished. Either way I won't cry to see the old version of Word slide into oblivion.

http://newsletters.zdnetuk.cneteu.net/t/82813/921984/71788/0/

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
September 25, 2005

DeleteNow

2005-09-26T07:55:00.000-04:00

This week was the expensive DemoFall '05 conference. There were many new products vying for attention, but among the reports from those who could afford to go (or whose journals could afford the entrance fees) was one that looked really interesting. It's called DeleteNow, and it's from a start-up called UniPrivacy. It's a service that searches the net for references to you in on-line databases and deletes them for you. It's a subscription service, and as long as you subscribe, it makes sure that your personal info doesn't go back into the database. Very neat.

You could do this manually I guess, since most online databases have facilities to allow you to remove information, but they make you jump through hoops to do so. DeleteNow automates all that, so that deleting personal information from the Internet won't occupy all your time until the universe dies a heat death! If UniPrivacy can get this one off the ground, I for one will probably subscribe to it. Definitely a product to watch out for.

http://reviews.cnet.com/4532-10921_7-0.html?author=5092826&tag=nl.e501
http://www.uniprivacy.com/faq.htm

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
September 25, 2005

Homework: Interview with John Markoff

2005-09-23T10:08:00.000-04:00

There is a brilliant interview with author John Markoff in the August 9 issue of Ubiquity. Markoff is talking about his new book "What the Dormouse Said". The book is about the relationship between the sixties counter culture and rise of the personal computer. The book is a long overdue assessment of this topic. The conventional view has been something like 'And while the students were having sit-ins and protesting about the Vietnam war others preferred to create the Internet and start the personal computing revolution'. This is in spite of the fact that that the ideology surrounding personal computers and the Internet is clearly drawn from the concerns of the rebellious young people of the sixties. The interview looks at some of these links and where they came from. I'm really looking forward to getting hold of a copy of the book, and when I do I'll put a review of it on my web site.

Highly recommended.

http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/interviews/v6i29_markoff.html

PS: And what did the dormouse say?

"When Logic and proportion
Have fallen sloppy dead
And the White Knight is talking backward
And the Red Queen's 'Off with her head!'
Remember what the dormouse said:
Feed your head!
Feed your head!
Feed your head!"

From the song 'White Rabbit' by Jefferson Airplane.

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
September 18, 2005

FreeConference.com

2005-09-19T12:20:00.000-04:00

One thing I spotted this week that looked interesting was a company called FreeConference.com, who do just that - provide free teleconferencing facilities. I was fascinated enough to check out their web site and discovered it was true. They also provide extra services which they charge for. However given the massive cost of normal tele-conferencing facilities, the prices looked extremely modest to me. If you, or your company need access to this sort of facility, I would suggest that you take a look.

http://www.freeconference.com/

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
September 11, 2005

Microsoft delays patch

2005-09-18T10:07:00.000-04:00

The week before last Microsoft announced it would be issuing a security patch this week. The patch contained a critical security fix for Windows. This week they pulled the patch because of 'quality control' issues - i.e. there was a bug in the patch. Since Microsoft only issues patches once a month, this means that a serious security hole in Windows will go unfixed for another month. This has the security experts in a tizz. Microsoft used to issue security patches as they became available , but that meant that their Windows security (or lack of it) was being kept in the news all the time. To fix this they moved to only issuing patches once a month, which meant they only got bad publicity once a month.

This is grim enough, but it usually takes Microsoft six months to get a patch out in the first place. Most companies manage to produce fixes within a few week, often only a week. Open source developers frequently get fixes out with hours. Microsoft's problem is simple - years back it took a decision to tie its application software into its operating system. Now it has masses of cross linked code and fixing one thing often breaks something else. Microsoft is between a rock and a hard place as a result of this simple marketing decision. It gets hammered whatever it does - fix the problem and break something else so no one applies the patch, or go through and fix the cascading set of failures brought on by the fix and you have weeks if not months of delay. The people I feel sorry for are the programmers that had this mess imposed on them by an out of control marketing department.

Frankly, I can't see how they are going to get out of this jam except by re-writing the whole lot, this time sticking to well known programming principle of separating out all these different items. That way we might stand a chance of getting a secure operating system that doesn't allow the applications to access it's internals.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/09/14/secfocus_patches/

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
September 18, 2005

ZigBee

2005-09-12T10:51:00.000-04:00

Have you ever heard of ZigBee? No? I thought not. I suspect however you will have soon. ZigBee is a specification for building large networks of low power radio networks. I've been following reports of its development for the last year or so, and it is finally getting to the stage of working products. ZigBee scores over other systems, like Bluetooth, because it is so low powered that the batteries in its components (think sensors) can last for several years. At the moment most of the touted products seem to be home and business security (and the mandatory Internet fridge, of course). I suppose that's inevitable given the current climate. However, I predict that if the technology develops as I suspect it will, then there will be many new unexpected uses for this technology. Definitely one to watch in my opinion.

http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,68700,00.html?tw=newsletter_topstories_ascii

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
September 11, 2005

Register Your Support for Linux

2005-09-10T09:43:00.000-04:00

Do you use Linux on your computer? If you do I'd urge you to consider registering the computer at http://counter.li.org/ - the home of the Linux Counter project. The project is a long running attempt to gain some idea of the extent to which Linux is in use. I registered ibgames' machines in 1994, not long after we first started using Linux in a production environment (we were using Linux for development before that). Some idea of how early our registration was can be gained from the fact that our registration number is 6,822. The current number of registered users is hovering around the 150,000 mark. Obviously not everyone registers, but it's a worthwhile project, and I would urge you to participate. It only takes one logon a year to keep the entry current, and the project sends you the current statistics once a month, with the figures broken down by country. Well worth supporting, and it has a nice drawing of a Linux abacus on the home page :)

http://counter.li.org/

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
September 4, 2005

Floods

2005-09-05T12:50:00.000-04:00

Floods - while they're not strictly tech, they are, to say the least, topical. My US readers may think that their government is the only one from an industrialised country that sticks it's head in the sand over sea level rises and flooding. I can assure you it's not. Over here in the UK our government is doggedly pursuing it's plans to spend vast amounts of tax money building not far short of a quarter of a million houses on the main river Thames flood plain in east London.

Actually it's even worse than that. The south east of England, which includes London, is, in fact, sinking. In the last Ice Age the north west of Scotland was covered in a thick sheet of ice. The weight of the ice pushed that corner of the country down into the Earth's mantle, the lever effect of this action pulled the opposite corner, the south east, up. The ice, of course is long gone. So, slowly, over tens of thousands of years, the country has been leveling back up, which means the north west has been getting higher and the south east is sinking back to its original level - which is at or below sea level. And all this is without any global warming or increase in the height of the sea level.

Still our government has not been known to let facts get in the way of policies before, so I guess there's no reason why we should expect it to do so now!

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
September 4, 2005

Silly Season

2005-08-14T08:03:00.000-04:00

It's the silly season. There's no doubt about it. Here in the UK the August lack of real news combines with hot sun and booze-addled journalists' brains to produce a heady mix of fantasy and the blindingly obvious.

Usually, the target of the journalistic fantasies is some imagined EU directive. 'Traditional British Sausages Threatened!!!!' scream the headlines. Actually if you've even tried what laughingly passes for 'traditional' British sausages these day, you will be aware that wiping it out might be a good idea. It's one of the few 'meat' products I can think of that could be eaten by vegetarians, safe in the knowledge that it contains no dead animals.

But I digress. This year the wine sodden purveyors of third rate English language have a ready-made topic - nothing less than terrorism. Terrorists have become the bogeymen, lurking in every corner, and tacked on the end of every piece of high and low tech news. I even found an otherwise excellent piece of research on shoplifting suggesting that shoplifted items might be sold to provide funds for terrorist activities! Read it for yourself at http://www.physorg.com/news5762.html if you don't believe me.

Oh, and incidentally, now that we have terrorism over here in the UK, the police seem to have taken it as a carte blanche to race up and down the streets of Olde London Towne with their sirens going full blast. Presumably it's their way of telling us that they're out there busy protecting us.

Anyway the net result of all this is that I need a break from reading press releases telling me that the Hoochie-Coochie 2005 special telepathy edition contains a built in anti-terrorist module that connects you direct to the FBI/NSA/MI5/CIA/KGB/RIAA on finding evidence of terrorist thoughts nearby. I am in dire need of a rest before I become totally overwhelmed by cynicism.

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
August 14, 2005

Tea making, the hacker's way

2005-08-07T07:29:00.000-04:00

Well the quiet season has started with a whimper. That being the case I spent some time learning how to make tea the Russian way, thanks to a tip from Federation II player Neecerie. If you would like to know all about how Russian hackers make tea, you can read about it on Dániel Nagy's site.

It includes such fascinating info as 'The traditional way [to light the samovar heater] is to use pieces of bark from a birch-tree. In the soviet era, we used Pravda, the newspaper of the Communist Party. Proprietary software licenses work just as well.' And did you know that Fidel Castro's web site runs on a Linux box? I didn't - actually, I doubt if Fidel Castro does either...

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
August 7, 2005

Analysis: Research and Development

2005-08-04T07:11:00.000-04:00

At regular intervals I read stories of Europe's Research and Development (R&D) being less than that of the US. EU governments exhort their country's companies to spend more, and they promulgate complex regulations to give R&D tax breaks. Anything, in fact, except spending real cash themselves! A piece about HP Labs being decimated in the recent layoffs left me thinking about this issue.

Two things occurred to me.

The first is that the US might not now be quite as far ahead as the statistics seem to prove. In an economic downturn it is often the R&D that gets hit most, since it is not seen as producing an immediate revenue stream - apart from HP Labs, I know that the famous Bell Labs has suffered cutbacks in the last few years. This sort of thing wouldn't show up in the statistics yet, since they are usually several years behind the times.

Also, unlike the US governments, European governments are not heavy consumers of home grown hi tech. To give just one example, the Pentagon is the largest consumer of software in the world. Most of it is produced by US companies. This sort of thing gives the US companies a powerful incentive to invest in R&D. If their R&D comes up with something good, there is a ready market for it in the government, especially if you can add an anti-terrorist slant. "Have I got a product for you! Anti-terrorist pot noodles with built in anthrax detection!"

Here in the UK, for instance, the government buys non-functioning software from US companies like EDS, without our home grown industry even get a look in. Mad really when you think about it. Our own stuff couldn't do any worse, and you never know, it might actually work, unlike the snake oil they are buying at the moment.

One day, maybe, things will change. But don't hold your breath...

HP Lab Cuts

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
July 31, 2005

Homework: Joel on Software

2005-08-02T08:54:00.000-04:00

Joel Spolsky has just published two excellent pieces on his web site. They will be of interest to programmers and those who work in software companies.

The first is a review of a new piece of software for usability studies called 'Morae'. As a programmer myself, I've long come to the conclusion that programmers (including me) simply don't think the way non-programmers do.

Now, programmers can take one of two attitudes to this problem. The majority view is that the rest of the world should change. The result of this is that the majority of software sucks! It doesn't do what the users expect and leads to user mega-frustration and expensive customer support requirements.

The alternative, which I feel is more useful (though I have to confess to being guilty of backsliding on occasion), is to find out how the non-programmers think and adapt the user interface to their customers' expectations.

And that is where usability studies come in.

The problem is, traditional usability studies involve the use of extremely expensive (think six figure sums to hire) labs. For those of you who haven't come across it, usability testing involves giving users the software to use with no extras other than what they would get from opening the shrink wrap on the box, and videoing the results. People I know who've tried this tell me the results are very, very, sobering! The product Joel is reviewing, Morae, allows you to do this without having a huge expensive lab. It's still not cheap at over a grand, but it's immeasurably cheaper than the alternatives. Also, and I think this will be the killer app for this software, it looks to me from the description that it will be easier to set this up in the field - on the user's own computer, in their own environment. That will help eliminate problems due to an unfamiliar computer/environment. I'll be interested to see just how well Morae does in the market.

The second piece is about programmers. I make no apology for talking about programmers, I am, after all, a programmer as well as a games designer. It has long been my contention that good programmers are orders of magnitude more productive than ordinary programmers. I make this assertion based on over 20 years of programming. Unfortunately, how do you define 'good', 'ordinary' and 'productive'? I've never been able to find any metrics to back up.

Enter Joel Spolsky, a programmer himself, who has finally come up with at least some metrics which might indicate that my assertion is on the correct lines. Joel also takes up the question of whether you can substitute (say) five ordinary programmers for one good programmer, and gives an excellent, clear, explanation of why you can't.

As 'C' and 'C++' programmers would put it '(ord_prog *5) != good_prog'. (For a truly geeky expression, remove all vowels.)

Highly recommended reading!

Usability testing
Programmers

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
July 31, 2005

Analysis: Video iPod == iEdsel?

2005-07-31T09:32:00.000-04:00

There are persistent rumours doing the rounds that Apple plans to launch a video iPod later this year. Given the success of the regular iPod, the consensus seems to be that it will be a smash hit. I'm not so sure. I'll stick my neck out and suggest that it might well not have anything like the impact of the iPod.

Of course it won't completely bomb, some people will buy it because it's Apple and they liked the iPod. Not, I wish to point out, that everything Apple produces is wildly successful. Who remembers the Apple III? The Apple Lisa? Or how close Jobs came to killing the Apple Mac before it ever saw the light of day?

I think amongst the tech savvy community there is a failure to understand the difference between video and audio. It's fundamental - you can do other things while you listen to audio. Video requires your concentration. How many people drive watching television? Or walk down the street watching a video? How many even walk along the street reading a book? Now tell me about how many people drive with the radio or car stereo playing? How many people use Walkman or MP3 players while they do other things? Interesting isn't it?

So where does a video iPod fit in? Where would you use one? The iPod is an incremental development of existing, widely used technology - the Sony Walkman and its imitators. I see nothing similar in the works for a video iPod. True there are teeny televisions with three inch screens, but they are exotic sports, not mainstream. Hell, the technology for video phones has been around for years, but no one buys them, despite the predications of everyone from science fiction writers to respected tech commentators.

We shall see - after all we don't even know that Apple have definitely decided to launch such a beast yet. I may well have to eat humble pie over this one! But I doubt it.

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
July 31, 2005

Homework: Graphical User Interfaces

2005-07-27T08:48:00.000-04:00

'Ubiquity' on-line magazine has produced an interesting piece by Warren M Myers arguing for round windows on our computer screens (port holes, perhaps?). For anyone interested in the development of GUIs this is an interesting read. I don't really agree with the conclusions, but I guess I'm just an old fashioned square :)

http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/views/v6i26_myers.html

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
July 24, 2005

Update: Dual Core Processors

2005-07-25T12:57:00.000-04:00

Last week I discussed dual core processors. It seems it was a more timely piece than I realised. This week Intel announced that there will only be one more single core upgrade of its Itanium 2 processor family. After that it will be multi-core versions only.

I mentioned in the analysis piece that software vendors are having difficulty sorting out licensing prices. This week two software companies announced how they will deal with multi-core processors. VMware are being sensible and are charging as though the chips were single core - i.e. they are charging per processor chip. Oracle, being Oracle, have announced a complex formula. I won't bore you with the maths, but to give you some idea if you had a chip with 11 cores, you would pay the same price as if you had 9 single core processors! Oracle claim this will reduce costs for their customers, but I don't think they have factored in the cost of hiring a maths Ph.D. to do the sums!

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
July 24, 2005

Analysis: Two's Company

2005-07-17T09:19:00.000-04:00

Deep down in the murky depths of Intel, something is stirring. And that something is dual core processor chips. Intel is way behind most of its rivals in producing dual core chips, but presumably expects to be able to catch up by using it's marketing muscle. I expect that means that we will be hearing a lot about dual core processors and computers just as soon as Intel has ramped up the production to commercial levels.

So what is a dual core chip, how will it affect the ordinary computer user, and how much of the razz is just marketing hype?

Dual core chips are, in effect, two processors on the same chip. As any one who has looked at the 'Processes' tab of the Windows Task Manager will know modern desktop computers run dozen of tasks simultaneously (I count 60+ running on my laptop as I write this piece). Server machines, of course run far more tasks than that.

Single cores, single processor, machines handle this by splitting their time up into extremely small chunks (known as time slices) and running each program for a couple of slices before moving onto the next one. Given the speed at which processors work these days, and the relative sluggishness of the human nervous system, it looks to an outside observer as though all the programs are running simultaneously.

Until, that is, there are too many programs to run...

If there are too many programs then two things happen. First, the programs get time slices too infrequently and starts to run slowly. Second, since switching between programs in itself takes time, the cost of switching programs starts to take an ever larger proportion of the processor's time, making thing run even slower. Traditionally, the way to handle this has been to buy a faster processor, but there are limits to how far you can go down that path.

Enter dual- and multi-processor machines. In theory it's very simple. If you have (say) two processors, then the operating system can allocate half the work to each processor. Very neat - but unfortunately you don't actually get twice the power. There are many reasons for this, the key one being that the processors are sharing the same memory sub-system. Even though they are probably not using the same area of memory, both processors are using the same address and data busses to access the memory. Unfortunately, you can only have one processor at a time access the busses, so the processors have to queue up when they want to fetch more data or programming instructions from the main memory.

The net result is that you get less and less additional processing power for each processor added. For instance you might get something like this: one processor = 100%, two processors - 190%, three processors 275%, four processors 350%, and so on. As you can see, you will eventually get to a stage where adding another processor gets you no more power.

So far dual- and multi-processor machines have been the province of server class machines and high-end workstations. This is mainly because they are expensive - the processor chip and the Windows operating system are the two most expensive components in the average desktop machine. Add another processor and you significantly increase the cost of the machine.

There is another process at work here too. Over the last 20 years the number of transistors that manufacturers can cram onto a chip has doubled about every 18 months - this is known as 'Moore's Law' - and that is expected to continue, at least for the next ten years. This has resulted in bigger and faster chips with the chip companies, like Intel and AMD, falling over one another to announce more and better processors.

The problem is, processor speed isn't turning into faster performance. I've just got a new laptop. The processor on the last one was 1.2 GHz, the new one is 2.1 GHz. My new laptop certain doesn't run at nearly twice the speed of the old one. (Not that I'm complaining, though, it's a gorgeous machine!) Think about it. When was the last time you upgraded a computer and got a really massive increase in speed? I bet it was a long time ago.

Partly the problem is that the other parts of computer haven't experienced a similar increase in speed, so the processor spends a lot of time waiting around. Partly it's because the programmers are writing larger and more complex programs that absorb more of the available processing power. (Programmers haven't really had to consider performance for most desktop computer software since Windows 3.1 came in - if customers complained about speed they were advised to upgrade their computer.)

So what does a competitive chip manufacturer do when faced with twice the chip real estate that there was 18 months ago, but nothing like a corresponding increase in performance? Twice as much space - why not put two processors on the same chip! This is what's known as a dual-core processor. It won't necessarily allow you to run any given program faster, but you will be able to play Doom at full speed on one of the cores while the other one crunches numbers on your Excel spread sheet. :)

It -could- also speed up individual programs if they are multi-threaded. Threading is a technique already in use by some programs; it allows different bits of the same program to run simultaneously. If you use a modern version of Microsoft Word then you will have used its threading capabilities whenever you do background printing. One thread is formatting the text and sending it to the printer queue while another is accepting typed input from you.

The problem with threading is that you have to make sure the different threads are not simultaneously manipulating the same bit of memory. If two threads try to write to the same bit of memory at the same time, the results can be extremely unpleasant. There are ways to prevent that happening, of course, but they increase both the size and the complexity of the program, and make it much more difficult to debug.

The advantage of multi-threading is that if you have more than one processor (either multiple processors or a multi-core processor) the operating system can run different threads on different processors or cores, effectively speeding the program up.

Unfortunately, writing multi-threaded programs properly is an order of magnitude more difficult than writing single-threaded programs, and if you make a mistake it's much more difficult to find it, because it often only shows up with unusual combinations of things happening. Most of the multi-threaded programs around at the moment have only ever run on one, single-core, processor. People whose programming ability I have a great deal of respect for tell me that there is a real possibility that problems will start to show up when the threads are actually running on different processors.

And, there's another problem clouding the horizon. This time it's the commercial software vendors. The shrink-wrapped software you pay for is licensed on the assumption that it's going to run on a single processor system. What happens when you run it on a dual-core system?

Quite a lot of server software is licensed on a per-processor basis. I have no doubt that the commercial software companies would like to extend that to desktop machines, charging extra for running on multi-core chips. That debate is already underway, and the big companies are divided on which route to go down - charging by the processor chip, or charging by the number of processor cores.

So - you might get something out of dual core processors. Problem is, that something might just be more buggy programs. And you could well have to pay more for the privilege! Interesting times, as the Chinese say, interesting times.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/07/11/intel_dualcore_server/

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
July 17, 2005

...And our new peer-to-peer software comes complete with its own lawyer...

2005-07-03T07:50:00.000-04:00

The news of the week was, of course, the decision of the US Supreme Court that peer-to-peer (P2P) companies such as Grokster could be held liable for the copyright piracy on their networks. This was hailed as a triumph for the big media companies.

Well... Sort of.

The media companies certainly did come off well out of it, but that wasn't really what the ruling was about. The ruling was actually something quite different, which certainly didn't give the media companies everything they wanted.

The ruling was, in fact, the biggest job creation scheme for lawyers for several generations.

What the ruling actually said was that the original standard laid down in the 1984 Sony Betamax ruling - that any technology with 'substantial noninfringing use' was legal to sell - still held. However, they then went on to say that the 1984 ruling wasn't enough to protect a company that actively induced or encouraged the use of its products for copyright infringement.

The likes of Grokster only have themselves to blame for this ruling. They completely failed to understand the lessons of the Microsoft Anti-Trust trial which, regardless of the outcome of that trial, made it absolutely clear that even hi-tech companies can't go out of their way to thumb their noses at the legal system with impunity.

The nearer to the edge of the line between legal and illegal you walk the more self-effacing, discreet and careful you have to be. How many more of these sort of trials are needed before the people involved finally get it, I wonder?

And the ruling? Well it's taken a fairly clear concept - substantial non-infringing use is legal - and added to it a couple of 'but' clauses which hinge around the intent of the parties involved. This is a classic recipe for the involvement of legions of lawyers!

Like I said, the ruling is a job create scheme for lawyers - just watch what happens over the next year or two.

[Everybody and their uncle had something to say about this issue - though most missed the point. Here are a couple of URLs with typical stories, and the PFIR statement on the issue.]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/06/27/p2p_goes_down/
http://ct.news.com.com/clicks?c=256508-7863277&brand=news&ds=5
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/06/27/supremes_punt_on_grokster/
http://www.pfir.org/statements/file-sharing-scotus

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
July 3, 2005

Data Theft: Them Rules are Made for Breakin'

2005-06-26T09:47:00.000-04:00

In my piece on Data Theft last week I mentioned the security breach at credit card transaction processing company CardSystems Solutions, which put something like 40 million card details at risk. Well, over the last week more information has emerged about this case, with the company admitting the data was kept improperly.

Let me explain a bit more of the background.

When you use your credit card online, it's unlikely that the company you are using has a direct line to the credit card company to check that the card is OK and take the payment.

What usually happens is that your browser is redirected to a third party processing company, which does have a link to the credit card company. The processing company collects your details, checks them with the credit card company and processes the payment (assuming your other half hasn't already maxed out the card!). The processing company then notifies the company you are purchasing from that the transaction has completed. Each month the processing company tallies up the payments it collected on behalf of other companies and makes a single payment, less a fee for the transactions, to each of the companies.

CardSystems Solutions is one of these processing companies. Now the credit card companies, like Mastercard and Visa have fairly stringent rules about what processing companies are allowed to do. For instance there are rules about what transaction information they should keep, what they are not allowed to keep, and where they should keep it. And, of course, they are not supposed to keep the information in a place accessible from the web site. Can't say that I would disagree with any of those stipulations!

Our friends, CardSystems Solutions, though, obviously thought they knew better. Not only did they keep information they weren't supposed to for 'research purposes', it was also unencrypted, and the information included the three or four digit card security code for each transaction. As the chief executive of CardSystems Solutions, John M Perry put it, 'We should not have been doing that.'

When you consider that CardSystems Solutions processes something in the region of US$15 bn (yes -billion-) each year and the problem potentially compromised 40 million cards, it becomes obvious that they should definitely not have been doing that!

One of the more interesting aspects of this case is that it wasn't CardSystems Solutions that realised its security was wide open. It was Mastercard who spotted a statistically high level of fraud on cards processed by CardSystems Solutions, and jointly with Visa sent in the heavies to audit CardSystems Solutions security systems. This team found the rogue program inserted by the thieves. Presumable they also uncovered the breaches of the rules while they were looking.

I don't know exactly what the credit card company rules are, and I confess that I haven't been involved in anything like that for nearly 20 years. But even then - when 1200 baud dial up modems were cutting edge technology, and we sent in our subscription direct debits on 5 1/4 inch floppies - the rules were pretty stringent and the banks we were dealing with took security very seriously. I doubt that the rules have got sloppy since then. Quite to the contrary, I'm sure they have been tightened up, so it's not the rules that were at fault.

This is a classic example of security only being as strong as the weakest link. It didn't matter whether all the other processing companies obeyed the rules to the letter, it only needed one company to falter and the whole system was blown wide open. My guess is that the credit card companies are now in the process of seriously beefing up their compliance departments to minimise the risk of this happening again. And CardSystems Solutions? No one is saying what it's going to cost them in fines from the credit card companies, not to mention the possibility of law suits from the various aggrieved parties. The whole thing could prove to be an extremely expensive bit of 'research' for them...

Coda: You've got to hand it to the phishers. The very next day after Mastercard announced that 14 million of its credit cards were at risk the following started to appear in people's e-mail in boxes:

From: Master Bank [master@masterbank.com]
To:
Subject: **Your Mastercard online Confirmation**

Dear User, During our regular update and verification of the accounts, we couldn't verify your current information. Either your information has changed or it is incomplete. If the account information is not updated to current information within 5 days then, your access will be restricted.
go to this link below or copy and paste it on your addresse tool bar.
[URL deleted for safety reasons - AL]
***Please Do Not Reply To This E-Mail As You Will Not Receive A Response***
Thank you Accounts Managent

Needless to say you shouldn't go to the URL given in the e-mail, should you get a copy!

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
June 26, 2005

Apple and Intel chips

2005-06-21T10:04:00.000-04:00

A number of people have asked me for my take on the announcement, reported last issue, that Apple is going to start using Intel chips. In particular Mac users were worried that it would affect their ability to get programs that would run on their 'old' Macs. Now I'm not a Mac expert, but I asked around and was eventually pointed to an article by Jason Snell in Macworld, which, in my opinion, best covers the issues that are worrying Mac users. Even if you aren't a Mac user, I'd still recommend you take a look at it, since it's a fine example of how to deal with technical issues in plain English!

http://www.macworld.com/2005/06/features/intelfaq/
see also
http://ct.news.com.com/clicks?c=226822-7863277&brand=news&ds=5

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
June 19, 2005

Data Theft: Once more unto the breach...

2005-06-19T09:26:00.000-04:00

June has been a good month for credit card and identity thieves. At the start of the month CitiGroup's consumer financial division, CitiFinancial, started notifying 3.9 million US customers that computer tapes containing information about their accounts have been lost. The tapes, containing information including Social Security numbers and payment histories, were lost by UPS while in transit to a credit bureau.

A week later Motorola revealed that a pair of computers containing personal information on employees were stolen from the office of a third party contractor in Chicago. Names and Social Security number were among the material on the computers.

Finally, at the end of this week, it was reported that security at the credit card transaction processing company CardSystems Solutions had resulted in the exposure of 40 million credit cards including 22 million Visa cards and 14 million MasterCards. In this case the hacker had installed a script that searched out certain types of card transaction data.

This is interesting, to put it mildly.

Have you noticed that ever since California passed a law requiring disclosure there has been a rash of these reports of personal information theft? Now, personally, I can see two possible reasons for this sudden outbreak. The first is that there was always this level of data compromise, but that the companies involved hushed it up so as not to damage their reputations.

'Surely not!' I hear you cry - these are respectable companies who would never stoop so low.

OK, OK. Let me give you the alternative. When California passed its law mandating reporting of these sort of security breaches, all the data thieves got together and said 'Lets start a campaign against respectable companies by stealing their data. We've avoided doing this before because there was no publicity in it for us. Now we will enhance our reputations and make them look foolish'. (Cue evil laughter and fade out a picture of a bunch of middle aged men wearing masks and striped t-shirts).

And pigs might fly.

http://money.cnn.com/2005/06/17/news/master_card/index.htm?cnn=yes
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/06/13/motorola_worker_data_security_breach/
http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,67766,00.html?tw=newsletter_topstories_ascii

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
June 19, 2005

Analysis: In Through The Outdoor

2005-05-15T09:54:00.000-04:00

It's not just the economy that goes in cycles. The first part of this year has seen several high profile announcements about companies bringing their previously outsourced IT back in house. It's big names too - Prudential Insurance, Cable & Wireless, JP Morgan Chase, and London Oxford Street retailer Selfridges. Some of these deals, which have either been cancelled or not renewed when the contracts ran out, are for substantial sums of money running into billions of dollars.

To my knowledge this is at least the second time around this loop of outsourcing and then bringing everything back into the company - aka insourcing.

So what's going on?

There are a number of different interacting trends that drive the cycle, including the notoriously short memories of those at the top. Much of the most recent round of outsourcing was driven by two factors. The first was the desire by the bean counters to 'cut costs', especially in the tough trading conditions prevailing when the dot com boom ended. The second was a dire shortage of trained IT staff. There were plenty of ex-dot com wannabes around, but they lacked both the discipline and skills needed for mainstream IT.

In these circumstances, IT directors looked longingly at the outsourcing suppliers who did have good quality trained staff, and became susceptible to the outsourcers' blandishments. Add to this the alluring spreadsheets showing how much could, hypothetically, be saved, and you have the makings of a rush to outsourcing for corporate IT operations.

And indeed that's exactly what happened. Firms almost stampeded to hive off their IT departments. Top management, most of whom thought the term 'software' meant silk knickers, were only too happy to hand over the expensive and mysterious IT department to other hands.

Of course, it turned out not to be quite so easy as it was expected to be.

For a start, few people realised that if you outsource your IT, you need to employ some extremely competent - and therefore highly paid - staff to make sure the outsourcing company are doing what you want. You also need lawyers with technical expertise in the IT business to make sure that the contracts are watertight with respect to what you get for your money. Most of the firms putting out their IT didn't realise that, and as a consequence the contracts were riddled with loopholes, especially on the issue of quality of service. This, of course, was more than capable of wiping out the projected savings.

Even worse, as soon as a significant number of firms outsourced their IT, the outsourcing companies started to suffer from the very shortage of trained staff that had impelled their customers to outsource in the first place! You don't resolve trained staff shortages by giving the work to someone else - that just pushes the shortage over to a different venue.

So, while it appeared to work just fine at first, the potent mix of badly drawn up contracts (frequently lasting for ten or more years), inadequate supervision by customers, and serious staff shortages soon led to problems. These problems were compounded by the fact that usually all the work was outsourced to one supplier, so you couldn't compensate by switching work around between suppliers.

At this stage we also had the fall out from the corruption in the dot com boom, and the aftershocks of 9/11. So the government added its little soupcon to the mix in the form of extra reporting requirements, for instance the Sabine-Oxley act in the US and the Basle II regulations in Europe. This meant major rewrites of the IT systems for most, if not all of the major corporations.

It was at this stage that it finally became obvious to those at the top that outsourcing was not only not solving problems, it was causing even more, and had resulted in management losing control over important parts of the corporation and its policy.

Welcome to the world of insourcing. Well at least until the shambles fades from corporate memories yet again!

Yes, as you guessed, corporations are now starting to bring their IT operations back in house. This will solve the problems caused by outsourcing - at a high price - but it won't solve the problems that caused the work to be outsourced in the first place. And, of course, solving the skills problem is even more difficult post-9/11, because the governments are restricting the movement of skilled labour into the countries suffering a shortage.

But that, as they say, is another story.

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
May 15, 2005

Analysis: The FCC

2005-05-09T10:48:00.000-04:00

Analysis: The FCC - Hubris and Legal Limits, An All Too Common Tale

Well, the big story of the week is a US Court of Appeal striking down the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) attempt to impose a 'broadcast flag' on hardware makers. Last November the FCC produced new rules prohibiting the manufacture of computer and video hardware without a specific type of copy protection known as the 'broadcast flag'.

What this meant was that that hardware devices should be made incapable of copying material that had this flag set, thus protecting the business models of the big media monopolies.

Ostensibly, the purpose of the flag was to stop the re-distribution of TV broadcasts. Of course, you can copy TV broadcasts at the moment, but they are analog broadcasts, and each time you make an analog copy the quality degrades until, eventually, it's not worth watching. The coming of digital TV, however, completely changes the equation. If you copy digital media, the copy is an exact replica of the original, no degradation - as many copies as you like.

The court was pretty definite in its views of the FCC's transgression. It said, "The broadcast flag regulations exceed the agency's delegated authority under the statute... The FCC has no authority to regulate consumer electronic devices that can be used for receipt of wire or radio communication when these devices are not engaged in the process of radio or wire transmission." Not much wriggle room there!

How did this happen? How did the FCC come to exceed it's authority in this way? And how was it able to get so close to making its ruling stick?

Well, actually, it wasn't an accident.

Let me explain. The FCC is what we in the UK call a 'quango'. That stands for 'Quasi-Government Organisation'. There are loads of these around, doing different jobs. Often, they have some sort of regulatory powers and in some cases taxpayer money to dish out. What is common to all of them, though, is that the people who run them are unelected appointees of current ruling politicians. Usually the quango is only answerable to the government in the most general terms.

Now, if we look at the regulatory quangos, we can see, across all of them the sort of mission creep that the FCC just got hammered for. There is a reason for this. It's because regulatory quangos have the power of life and death over companies operating in the sector in which the quango operates. You see, the problem for companies is that they have to go back to the quango at regular intervals to be re-licenced.

The fact that the company has to go back to the quango opens the door for the imposition of new rules, often outside the scope of the quango's legal authority, on the companies. Of course, most quangos aren't so stupid as the FCC was, the new rules are purely voluntary recommendations, not regulations, and so are very difficult to challenge. Often they masquerade as something called 'best practice'. It's not compulsory to run your business that way, of course, but if you don't then there may well be questions as to your 'fitness' to hold a license when you apply for renewal.

The FCC's mistake was twofold. First it made some real legally binding regulations that fell outside its remit. Secondly, and more importantly, the regulations affected a group of companies - the consumer electronics industry - over which it had no current financial hold. The result was a group of companies with nothing to lose from making a legal challenge to the authority of the FCC.

There are other things that often happen with quangos, which are just as corrosive as the 'mission creep' problem. Two in particular are especially noteworthy.

The first is that after a while you get a system of musical chairs played by the staff of quangos. Staff move from senior jobs in the quango to senior jobs in the organisations being regulated, and back again. It doesn't take very long to build up a professional cabal in senior positions in both the regulator and the regulated, who share a joint ideology and who are opposed to anything that might change the cosy relationship.

The second thing flows out of the first. The staff in the regulator would have a lot easier time if the regulated industry was 'tidy'. The more companies there are in the regulated industry, the more difficult and hard work it is to regulate. Very soon, therefore, they start to promote industry consolidation, first as a general ideology, but then backing it up with the same informal regulation that I discussed earlier.

The classic way of doing this is to start suggesting that the smaller players are too small to have long term financial viability, and therefore their re-licensing is in jeopardy. Needless to say the phrase 'long term financial viability' has no figures attached to it, so that the victims can't prove that they do not fall into that category. Ironically, of course, once an organisation is pushed into this category by the regulator, then its 'long term financial viability' is indeed in jeopardy - because of the actions of the regulator!

Eventually, what you end up with is the regulator and a small, tightly knit group of large companies that fight to keep outsiders from breaking into the their field and rocking the boat.

To paraphrase an old saying, 'Who will regulate the regulators?'

http://newsletter.eetimes.com/cgi-bin4/DM/y/enlG0FypUC0FrK0DOC40Ee
http://news.com.com/Court+yanks+down+FCCs+broadcast+flag/2100-030_3-5697719.html?tag=nefd.ledeexit
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,67447,00.html?tw=newsletter_topstories_ascii

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
May 8, 2005

Homework: Plato as Software Designer

2005-05-08T06:53:00.000-04:00

Plato as Software Designer
by Francis Hsu, 9pp

If you are a programmer, or if you have any interest at all in the development of language you will love this short piece by Francis Hsu. Taking as a start Plato's 'Ideal Types' he looks at how humans store concepts in their minds. Do we store a single copy of something or do we store a copy for each time we encounter it? Having convincingly argued for the former he then goes on to consider how we must, of necessity, store a 'fuzzy' copy of the concept so that we can fit it to a vast collection of variations in the realisation of the concept.

Compare that to the way in which digital computers work. We humans recognise that, for instance, 'alan', 'Alan', 'alaN', and 'aLAn' all refer to my name, and we know that it still refers to my name if it's printed in a combination of purple and yellow inks (although aesthetic consideration might force me to deny it in the latter case...). To a digital computer, though these are all different names. Why? Because it keeps a copy of each word in its memory and only understands exact matches. As you can see, the implications of the different methods of storage are massive. Highly recommended reading for the intellectually curious.

http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/views/v6i13_hsu.html

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
May 1, 2005

Homework: Manpower Retention in IT

2005-05-06T11:33:00.000-04:00

Manpower Retention in IT: An Oxymoron?
by Sunil Tadwalkar and Manjira Sen, 9pp

This paper is a useful look at what IT companies need to do to keep their workforce happy, productive, and not zooming off after other jobs. The paper raises interesting issues and makes some fairly radical proposals. I particularly like the idea that managers' bonuses should, among other things, depend on them retaining the staff under them. I suspect that the implementation of such a proposal would radically alter the attitudes of certain managers for whom arrogance is a way of life! Definitely worth a read and contains useful information and figures to demolish ignorant HR departments and pointy haired bosses!

http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/views/v6i14_tadwalkar.html

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
May 1, 2005

ACCU Conference

2005-05-01T09:44:00.000-04:00

Well the ACCU's Spring conference went very well. Freya's presentation on project management generated, I understand from people who attended it, a highly structured discussion on the issues raised (well it would be highly structured, wouldn't it, given the number of project managers at it). I can't give you a personal account of the presentation since she banned me from it. I'm now even more suspicious about whether ibgames figured as a worst case scenario...

My presentation went reasonably well until I got to the bit where I was showing some not very good code. At this stage Windows 2000 decided to crash while I was scrolling through the source code. Everyone thought it was very funny, and there were comments about Windows being able to spot bad code when it saw it. My theory is that it suddenly realised it was displaying Linux source code! Fortunately I didn't need the display any more at that stage, and was able to continue without it.

Anyway, a good time was had by all, and I'm pretty certain that everyone who attended learned a lot and came away a better programmer - I certainly did.

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
May 1, 2005

Are certificates worth the paper they are written on?

2005-04-24T09:29:00.000-04:00

Analysis: Are certificates worth the paper they are written on?

I often get asked about certification for programmers, and whether it makes any difference in the job market. The answer, predictably, is both yes and no! It really depends on what sort of job you are looking for, and how the recruitment procedure of the firms you are interested in applying to works.

Let me start by asking a slightly different question. Does a programming certification prove you can program?

Not necessarily. It certainly proves that you can pass programming tests. Programming itself, is, however, a different matter. The problem is that programming is something you need to constantly practice. Let me give you a couple of analogies.

My first analogy is that learning to program is a bit like learning to drive a car. You spend some time with an instructor, and he or she teaches you the formal elements you need. But I don't think I've ever known anyone who passed their driving test with what an instructor taught them. To really learn to drive you then have to get a friend to sit with you while you practice until the driving becomes second nature. When you reach that level you go back to the instructor who teaches you how to pass the test.

In a way computing is very similar. Your teacher can teach you the basics, but to go beyond the basics you have to practice. The problem from the point of view of a potential employer is that people usually get the certification at the end of the teaching period - they know enough to pass the test, but are not fluent.

There is also one way in which programming is very different from driving a car. Even if you stop driving, you never really forget how to do it, and you can get back up to speed pretty rapidly (the same goes for riding a bicycle or roller skating). This is not the case with programming. Programming skills are use it or lose it skills par excellence.

That's why the second analogy I would make for programming is with music making. It's not enough merely to learn to play a musical instrument, you have to constantly practice to keep your skills .

Programming is much the same, if you don't keep programming you will lose your programming skill and fluency. Even worse, you will fall behind in what is a rapidly changing skill set. It's not just that you get up to speed, it's that you are learning new techniques as you go along, and the longer your experience, the better you are as a programmer.

Why does experience make so much difference? It has to do with the nature of the problem solving needed for programming. Virtually any problem that requires professional programming has thousands, if not millions, of potential solutions. Not only that, but all the solutions that will work have different trade-offs in development time, ease of use, resources required, maintenance and a hundred other things. The difference between an experienced programmer and a novice is that the experienced programmer can almost immediately partition that solution space into a small number of feasible solutions and a large number of impractical solutions. Even a well trained novice cannot do that, until they have experience to inform their judgements. To a novice all the solutions are more or less equal.

This is why certification doesn't really tell you, as an employer, much about how good a potential employee is going to be. If you get interviewed by a professional, your certification won't cut much ice - they will be looking for answers to their question that indicate a depth of knowledge which is entirely different from the skill that the certificates test. (Incidentally, I suspect that most of the really good programmers I know would probably fail the tests!) Your interviewer is also going to be looking for something else - an ability to fit in with a team. You can be the most brilliant programmer in the world, but if you can't work with other people, you're sunk. Social skills matter just as much.

But I did originally say that part of the answer to the question I started with - are certificates worth the paper that they are written on - was yes.

The reason for this has little or nothing to do with your programming ability. It has everything to do with the structure of modern business. The days when the people responsible for the work hired and fired the people who did the work are long since gone in companies that employ more than a handful of people. The last half century has seen the rise of the Human Resources (HR) department, and that has changed the rules.

HR departments evolved from the original personnel departments which had a fairly minor role. As the volume of legislation relating to the workplace and employees grew they assumed more and more functions and eventually took control of hiring and firing to ensure that such activities complied with the relevant legislation. This meant that you were no longer hired by the person you would work for - the person who had the technical knowledge of your work. Instead you were hired by people whose profession was understanding employment law.

This had an immediate consequence - the HR department needed some sort of validation to prove that you were technically qualified, since they had no means of judging for themselves. This set the stage for demands first of all for academic qualifications (Computer Science degrees in this case), and then certificates to say that you were qualified to do the job.

Of course, it's relatively unusual to see a 'pure' model of this process; usually the department has some input into the job advert - although I did once see an advert for a programmer with five years experience of C++, just three years after the first C++ compiler became available! The department also usually handles the interviews. The important point, though, is that the interviewees are selected by HR, and HR will automatically exclude all those who are not qualified. And to an HR department if you don't have a certification, you aren't qualified, even if you've been programming for years.

Finally, an additional push to the whole business of certification is that training, publishing and testing for these certificates has become a very lucrative business, which taken with the need felt by HR departments for the certificates has generated a whole new industry.

So there you have it.

The answer is that you probably do need certification, although it tells your prospective employer nothing about your skills - but what it does tell him or her is that you understand the rules of the game!

from Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
April 24, 2005

WIPO Overview of WIPO Panel

2005-04-21T07:55:00.000-04:00

Homework: WIPO Overview of WIPO Panel Views on Selected UDRP Questions 11pp

This document has been produced by WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organisation) and is organised in a similar fashion to an FAQ, offering possible answers to common questions such as 'Can a fan site constitute a right or legitimate interest in the disputed domain name?'. It explains the consensus view developed by WIPO arbitration panels and cites some of the cases that establish that view. This could be useful if you get into a dispute with a big company over your domain name, but it also makes an interesting read in its own right, for anyone interested in how the system works.

http://go.theregister.com/news/2005/03/25/wipo_case_book_of_domain_name_decisions/
http://arbiter.wipo.int/domains/search/overview/index.html

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
April 10, 2005

Perspectives on the Shared Source Initiative

2005-04-21T07:54:00.000-04:00

Homework: Perspectives on the Shared Source Initiative 4pp

This is an interesting piece by ex-Microsoft employee, Stephen R. Wall, and it explains, from a Microsoft point of view, Microsoft's response to the idea of open source - its Shared Source Initiative. The article, at ONLamp.com deserves to be read by open source advocates, not because I think they'll necessarily agree with it, but because they need to be aware of what it is. All too often people discuss these issues with only the vaguest idea of what arguments they are trying to counter. The refrain is that Microsoft is evil, and therefore any contact with their material will necessarily infect the otherwise pristine open source supporter. Wrong. The other side's arguments need to be properly countered, and you can't do that by reading second hand versions of the arguments.

http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2005/03/24/shared_source.html

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
April 10, 2005

Selling the Dot Net Registry

2005-04-21T07:51:00.000-04:00

Story: Selling the Dot Net Registry

The ownership of the lucrative .net Internet registry has come under close scrutiny over the last ten days. The registry is currently run by Verisign, but the contract is now up for grabs and there were five bidders. ICANN, the body that runs all these top level domains, contracted out assessing the bidders and making a recommendation to a firm called Telcordia. The firm recommended awarding the contact to... Verisign!

Obviously the other bidders weren't going to be happy about this, but there appears to be a lot more to this unhappiness than just bad losers. It turns out that Telcordia was, until very recently, owned by Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), which also used to own Verisign until 2000, and it still held shares in Verisign until the year before last. Then there is the fact that both Telcordia and ICANN are refusing to say who was actually on the evaluation team, which many regard as being suspicious because of possible cross links between SAIC, Telcordia and Verisign.

The first objection to be made public was from bidder Denic who pointed out that the report incorrectly stated they had an in house proprietary data base, and marked them down for it. It also pointed out glaring differences in how bidders were ranked on the different criteria.

But it wasn't just the losers who were unhappy. The very next day there was a blast from Philip Sheppard, the chair of the body that originally drew up the criteria and the methodology to be used. He commented that the 'methodology of the evaluator's report directly contradicts the essence of the GNSO report'. Pretty damming stuff.

This emboldened other losing bidders to also raise their objections. Sentan pointed out four criteria where it considered Verisign has been wrongly award top ranking. The clearest one was that different evaluations were applied to Verisign as opposed to the other bidders when it came to the issue of how far away the backup servers were from the primary servers. Denic and Sentan have their sites separated by 275 miles and 400 miles respectively, Verisign by 10 miles. Verisign got a higher ranking that either Denic or Sentan!

Next off the block was CORE++, which analysed the report very thoroughly and pointed out factually incorrect items, counting of underlying criteria multiple times, to Verisign's advantage, and use of Verisign benchmarks designed to disadvantage competitors using different methodologies.

ICANN, however is reverting to its old tricks, and is insisting that the objections are submitted to Telcordia, in spite of the fact that Telcordia has been found so badly wanting. It is also insisting that everything take place behind closed doors. What a surprise. And what a slap in the face for those who thought that the leopard might have changed its spots...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/03/31/net_report_denic/
http://go.theregister.com/news/2005/04/01/net_report_spat/
http://go.theregister.com/news/2005/04/05/sentan_slams_dot_net_report/
http://go.theregister.com/news/2005/04/07/ican_on_dotnet/

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
April 10, 2005

AeA paper on Science and Technology

2005-04-19T09:46:00.000-04:00

Homework: The American Electronic Association (AeA) paper on Science and Technology

I've just finished reading this paper (it's about 30 pages). If I was a US citizen I'd be quite worried. The paper deals with United States' steady loss of lead in the scientific and engineering fields. While it is a plea from more Federal Dollars for the industry's research and development programs, it also makes out a serious case that the technology lead the US has enjoyed for the last 50-60 years is about to come to an end.

There are a number of reasons for this, some relate to happenings in the US, others are external factors like the fact that the communications inventions of the last fifteen years mean that the developing countries can now skip all the intermediate steps and go straight to modern technologies. Internal factors include the fact that the US educational system simply isn't turning out enough scientists and technologists, and that in the post 9/11 climate the gifted students from overseas who in the eighties and nineties studied in the States and made a crucial contribution to the US technological lead simply cannot get into the US to study now.

The AeA report is not what you would call a comprehensive report - in particular it doesn't cover the problem of the increasing anti-intellectualism that is manifest in the US politics these days - but what it does do is put together a number of worrying trends, each of which by itself would be a problem, but not critical. However, taken together they are seen to be symptoms of a wider decline.

As a Brit with an interest in history I can tell you something else that's not in the paper, as well. If you look over the sweep of human history, it is common for empires to be at the peak of their military power just at the time when they are losing their economic and social control. The problem is that the military dominance obscures and ameliorates the internal problems until it is too late to do anything about them, after which economic and military decline follows rapidly.

The question is, will the US be the first to break out of this pattern of rise and fall?

http://www.aeanet.org/Publications/idjj_CompetitivenessMain0205.asp
http://newsletter.eetimes.com/cgi-bin4/DM/y/emm80FypUC0FrK0DGqA0EG

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
March 20, 2005

Microsoft v The EU

2005-03-27T10:03:00.000-05:00

Story: Microsoft v The EU - One step forward, two steps backwards

There's trouble at mill on the European side of the Pond. The EU Commission and Microsoft are at loggerheads again. This time the argument is over whether Microsoft is complying with the anti-trust ruling made last year.

Among other things Microsoft was ordered to provide a version that didn't have the media player bundled in. Microsoft grudgingly complied, but tried to name it 'Windows Reduced Media Edition'. presumably this is Microsoft's idea of sticking two fingers in the air to the EU Commission, which promptly told it to think again.

The EU Commission has also rejected Microsoft's proposals for its interoperability licence. This was part of the original EU Commission ruling and was intended to give competitors the information they need to allow them to interface their products with Microsoft products. Microsoft has produced a licence, after a fashion, but not only is it expensive, it is also written to exclude free software developers. That's not really surprising, because Microsoft considers free and open source software to be the biggest threat to it's dominance. I'm not sure how they thought they could get away with this, given the strength of open source software in Europe.

A further issue is the appointment and powers of a non-partisan trustee to monitor Microsoft's compliance with the EU Commissions sanctions. Microsoft has just produced a proposal to severely limit the powers of the trustee - and the EU Commission has rejected the proposal out of hand. This row does not bode well for the compliance monitoring system when it eventually gets sorted out.

And finally, the EU Commission has indicated that it has concerns with the quality of the stripped down version of Windows.

It's clear that although it has paid the record breaking 497 million Euro (US$660 million) fine, Microsoft has no intention of complying with the spirit of the EU Commission sanctions, and it will do its utmost to subvert even the letter of the sanctions. This is the same sort of childish behaviour that it was trying on in the US a few years back. I had assumed that they would have learned that the best way is to co-operate, and then there is the possibility of a decent working compromise.

In the mean time the image of Microsoft that comes over is that of a small boy stamping his foot in rage while announcing that if the other children don't play to his rules, then he is going to take his ball and go home. Not really a very pleasant sight.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4360577.stm
http://go.theregister.com/news/2005/03/24/microsoft_ec_disagree/

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
March 27, 2005

Girls and Computer Games

2005-03-20T12:55:00.000-05:00

Analysis: Girls and computer games

Earlier this week a friend sent me the URL for an article on a talk about women in computer games given at this year's Game Developer's Conference. For some years now video games manufacturers have been trying to identify exactly what it is that will drag the legendary 'women's market' into playing their games. This search has gone down many twisty little alleys, and, in the main, has got nowhere. Of course there are more women computer games players now, but really not much more than you'd expect from the increased penetration of suitable machines.

Why is this?

The publishers and designers have come up with all sorts of ideas to increase female take up of computer games. They are still arguing about whether the pictures of female avatars, having been designed for men, are a turn off for women, or whether the violence puts women off, or maybe there should be special games for women that are more 'home' orientated. None of these strategies, or other similar ones, have, when tried, significantly increased the number of women who play games. Indeed, virtually all of the attempts to produce 'women's games' have been grade 'A' disasters.

The logical question to ask here is not what would be a better tweak, but whether there is something more fundamental at work here. There are, of course, reasons why the more fundamental question is not being asked. Sales and marketing departments have a macho culture that says any old rubbish can be marketed and sold if it's done properly. Even aside from that, the fact is that many people just don't believe that an industry the size of the games industry could have a product which intrinsically only appeals to half of the human race. Well, you can see their point!

Nonetheless, they are in my opinion wrong.

I realise I'm pitting my views on this against the perceived wisdom of the computer games industry, but I think they are wrong, and that there is a more underlying reason why women are seriously under-represented amongst games players. I think that the fundamental reason that women don't play computer games is because doing it is interacting with a computer rather than with other people. If I'm right, then no amount of tweaking of female avatar pictures, home making games, or toning down of violence will make any serious difference.

Now, I don't want to get into heated argument about why women are more interested in interpersonal relationships than men are, or even arguments about whether it is the case. Arguments about nature versus nurture are interesting, but not relevant here. And in any case personal observation has long since convinced me that, in general, women are more interested in other people than men are.

When I first wrote the multi-player game Federation nearly 20 years ago, I was surprised, and very gratified, at the high number of women who played. Being young and arrogant then, I put it down to something that I'd done. Certainly my game was far less violent than the average game, maybe it was that. Since that time, though, I've been able to observe other multi-player games and the hard truth is that all the multi-player games have a far higher level of female players than ordinary computer games.

Does this mean that multi-player games designers are somehow more 'female oriented'? No, I don't think so, I think the answer lies in the nature of multi-player games. It's very simple. In multi-player games you are playing with and/or against other humans. And -that- more than anything else provides the necessary stimulus to involve a higher proportion of women.

So, that's my theory. Of course I'm biased, after all I'm a multi-player game designer, and I'm certainly not paid to go round advising companies on how to make their games more attractive to the female market. But, maybe, just maybe, because I haven't got a vested financial interested in the industry I'm in a position where I can see the wood, and it's not obscured by the trees!

http://news.com.com/Video+games--a+girl+thing/2008-1043_3-5618256.html

From Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
March 20, 2005

The chilling wind of patent laws

2005-03-15T23:54:00.000-05:00

Story: The chilling wind of patent law

I've ranted about the patent shambles before, but it's now the turn of the big boys to suffer from the problem. I covered the Microsoft/Eolas dispute in the last issue, but now rival Apple is suffering from patent disputes too. Apple, it appears is involved in two separate patent disputes. The first is over a patent held by Pat-rights over Apple's DRM, which the Hong-Kong based company claims violates its US patent number 6,665,797. Pat-rights wants a cool twelve and a half percent of Apples iTunes profits... The second claim is from Chicago based Advanced Audio Devices, who were granted US patent number 6,587,403 on a music jukebox system. Advanced have now filed a suite in a Federal court.

I think these suites are only the start of a trend which is going to cause a lot of disruption.

Let me explain.

It used to be that patents were a game played only by the big boys, they were expensive to get, maintain and defend. The big companies built up portfolios of patents, which they used as a defence against other big company patent claims. Usually patents were traded - we'll grant you a license to use our patents if you grant us a license to use yours. Only in very rare cases did money actually change hands.

Normally start up companies don't have the money to indulge in patents. However, in recent yeas, especially during the dot com boom, the fledgling online companies had cash to spare to apply for patents, which the US Patents Office handed out like confetti. The dot com boomers never used the patents, because they were too busy burning up the vulture capitalist's money.

However, all good things come to an end, and we had the dot com bust.

This caused the closure of the bulk of the dot com companies. Many of them just closed their doors and vanished. They didn't even go in to liquidation in the usual way. They just ceased to exist leaving collocation data centres full of orphaned servers which actually belonged to leasing companies. But not all the companies just vanished, some of them were sold or wound up properly by their creditors. And many of those had a fistful of patents, which, being the only assets the now defunct company possessed, were sold for a song to a new breed of company - the intellectual property company.

Now, intellectual property companies are very different from traditional patent holders in two ways. First of all they are well funded for litigation, indeed that is their main raison d'etre, and secondly they do not have any other activity that requires them to cross license patents.

In other words, they are only interested in hard cash.

It's going to be interesting to see what the outcome of this is going to be, because these patent holders, unlike previous ones, are going to hit even the big companies right on their bottom line. Soon, I suspect, it will be more than just Open Source advocates demanding reform of the whole system.

More on the different disputes as they come to court.

http://go.theregister.com/news/2005/03/10/apple_ipod_patent_lawsuits/

from Winding Down
by Alan Lenton
March 13, 2005