Quotulatiousness

May 11, 2011

How resilient is the internet?

Filed under: Economics, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:57

Richard Clayton summarizes a recent study by European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) on the internet’s ability to cope with disruptions. Among the ways the internet is vulnerable are:

First, the Internet is vulnerable to various kinds of common mode technical failures where systems are disrupted in many places simultaneously; service could be substantially disrupted by failures of other utilities, particularly the electricity supply; a flu pandemic could cause the people on whose work it depends to stay at home, just as demand for home working by others was peaking; and finally, because of its open nature, the Internet is at risk of intentionally disruptive attacks.

Second, there are concerns about sustainability of the current business models. Internet service is cheap, and becoming rapidly cheaper, because the costs of service provision are mostly fixed costs; the marginal costs are low, so competition forces prices ever downwards. Some of the largest operators — the ‘Tier 1′ transit providers — are losing substantial amounts of money, and it is not clear how future capital investment will be financed. There is a risk that consolidation might reduce the current twenty-odd providers to a handful, at which point regulation may be needed to prevent monopoly pricing.

Third, dependability and economics interact in potentially pernicious ways. Most of the things that service providers can do to make the Internet more resilient, from having excess capacity to route filtering, benefit other providers much more than the firm that pays for them, leading to a potential ‘tragedy of the commons’. Similarly, security mechanisms that would help reduce the likelihood and the impact of malice, error and mischance are not implemented because no-one has found a way to roll them out that gives sufficiently incremental and sufficiently local benefit.

Fourth, there is remarkably little reliable information about the size and shape of the Internet infrastructure or its daily operation. This hinders any attempt to assess its resilience in general and the analysis of the true impact of incidents in particular. The opacity also hinders research and development of improved protocols, systems and practices by making it hard to know what the issues really are and harder yet to test proposed solutions.

H/T to Bruce Schneier for the link.

May 10, 2011

Is Facebook “managing” your friends for you?

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 14:54

An interesting (and potentially disturbing) article from Mike Elgan may help explain why you don’t see as much activity from some of your Facebook friends as you might expect:

Every action you take on Facebook — clicking “Like,” commenting, sharing, etc. — is called an “Edge” internally at Facebook. Each Edge is weighted differently according to secret criteria.

What you need to know is that relationships and content that don’t get enough “Edges” will get “edged” out of existence. Facebook will cut your ties to people — actually end the relationships you think you have — and block content that doesn’t earn enough Edge points.

For example, many Facebook friendships exist solely through reading each other’s Status Updates. An old friend or co-worker talks about a new job, shares a personal triumph like reaching a weight-loss goal, and tells a story on Mother’s Day about how great his mom is. He posts and you read. You feel connected to his life.

Without telling you, Facebook will probably cut that connection. Using unpublished criteria, Facebook may decide you don’t care about the person and silently stop delivering your friend’s posts. Your friend will assume you’re still reading his updates. You’ll assume he’s stopped posting.

Any friends who fail to click or comment on your posts will stop getting your status updates, too. If you have 500 friends, your posts may be actually delivered to only 100 of them. There’s no way for you to know who sees them and who doesn’t.

I don’t use Facebook too often: certainly not every day. My Twitter updates are echoed to Facebook (but not retweets), so I don’t find it surprising that I haven’t seen everyone’s status updates lately: I just assume they’ve scrolled too far down the page by the time I get around to opening Facebook. This article implies that I never had the chance to see many of these status updates because they have “Edged” out of my feed.

IPv6 day is coming

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:45

There’s been a short cycle of “we’re running out of internet addresses” articles over the last few months, as the available free blocks of IPv4 addresses are allocated. By now, we were all theoretically supposed to have moved on to the successor addressing scheme, IPv6:

On the 8 June, it’ll be World IPv6 Day — a coordinated effort by major services on the internet, including Google and Facebook, to provide their services using the new version of the Internet Protocol. It’s part of the plans to cope with internet addresses ‘running out’. But just what is IPv6 — and what does it mean for most users?

At its most simple, IPv6 is the successor to IPv4 which has become the de facto standard for both local and global connectivity. It includes many extra features, including processing speed-ups, and enhancements to security and to quality of service, but the one that’s really driving the need to change is that there are many more internet addresses available with IPv6.

Most Reg Hardware readers will be familiar with the look of an IPv4 address: it’s 32 bits long, and typically written as a series of four eight-bit decimal numbers, separated by full stops, like 10.0.0.1.

An IPv6 address is 128 bits long, and usually represented by groups of four hexadecimal digits, separated by colons. Each of those four digits represents 16 bits, so there are up to eight groups, giving IPv6 addresses that look like 2001:0470:1f09:1890:021f:f3ff:fe51:43f8.

It won’t be a simple case of turning on IPv6 and turning off IPv4, however, as there’s still huge numbers of devices that depend on IPv4. Over time, more and more devices (not just computers, or not only what we tend to think of as “computers”) will work natively with IPv6 addresses.

You won’t just get a single IPv4 address from your ISP anymore: you’ll get a huge block of addresses (“you’ll receive more addresses for your home network [than the] whole of the IPv4 internet”).

Typically, a broadband customer will be given a set of IPv6 addresses for their network, and the router will also provide an IPv4 address and NAT (Network Address Translation) for devices that can’t use the new protocol. The big change for many people is that all their IPv6 devices will be publicly available to the net. That will make setting up many devices much simpler, but also reinforces the need for a proper firewall in the router.

May 9, 2011

Gadgets from science fiction

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:55

Caleb Cox rounds up ten geeky gadgets from science fiction shows and movies that he thinks we’d all like to have:

Tomorrow is always round the corner in the world of tech, and gadgets that started life in the imaginations of mad folk are starting to become a possibility.

Tools that give us superpowers may seem impossible, but ultramobile computing is a reality these days, with commonplace kit that seems more capable than devices Gene Roddenberry dreamt up.

As we’ve already looked at fantasy blades you wished you owned, it’s about time we talked-up the fantasy tech, after all, we are Reg Hardware. So here’s ten of our favourite gadgets from popular culture that may or may not be the tech of the future.

Let us know if there’s anything you think we’ve missed and give us your views on its commercial prospects in the comments section at the end.

His choices are:

  • Cloaking device — Predator
  • Holodeck — Star Trek: The Next Generation
  • Hologram communication — Star Wars
  • Orgasmatron — The Sleeper
  • Peril Sensitive Sunglasses — The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
  • Personality glasses — Joe 90
  • Sonic Screwdriver — Doctor Who
  • Timebooth — Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure
  • Telepathic Lens — The Lensman series
  • Teleportation belt — The Tomorrow People

May 8, 2011

Can you tell the difference between Apple fans and cult members?

Filed under: Humour, Religion, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:02

An amusing comparison from PC World:

Some tech fanboys and fangirls become so lost in the technology of their choice that it becomes a big part of their identity. Cult members do something similar, only with a spiritual belief system or philisophical concept.

Covering tech for as long as we have (and reading our message boards), we can’t help but notice that tech fanboys and girls sometimes talk like those people who wear purple capes and Nike tennis shoes, or who drink the grape Kool-Aid and then go to sleep.

To make the point, we’ve assembled here a group of quotes, some of which are from tech fan boys and fan girls while others are from real cult members. Can you tell the difference? We’ll give you the answers at the bottom of the page. Good luck (you’ll need it)!

May 7, 2011

Comparing mouldy old tech with bright, shiny new tech

Filed under: Books, Economics, Media, Technology — Tags: — Nicholas @ 00:19

Dark Water Muse looks at competing technology from different eras:

The tech world is all a-buzz with reviews of eReaders and tablets capable of rendering eBooks, each of these device types purported to be candidates as the preferred host for future textual content to dethrone the lowly book as the natural media form readers turn to for reading textual content. Technical reviews focus solely on the merits of individual tablets and eReaders or line them up in comparative reviews. In DWM’s opinion these reviews completely miss the whole context of what is to be critiqued.

This tablet versus eReader battleground isn’t the real competitive landscape. Tablets and eReaders aren’t merely duking it out between themselves to win the hearts of readers. DWM views tablets as equivalent to eReaders when used to access published textual content such as books and magazines. Throughout the remainder of this piece DWM will refer to tablets, and other computer hardware which support eBook formats, and eReaders as simply eReaders.

As noted earlier, eReaders aren’t merely fighting amongst themselves for market share. The eReader, collectively, is fighting to displace the printed book. Read on as DWM explores exactly how that fight is going.

At the moment, I don’t really have any strong urge to purchase an ebook reader. I have a few dozen books on my iPhone, and it’s able to display the text acceptably well for casual reading (those few times I have to wait and for some reason don’t have a real book with me). My big concern with ebooks is less the reader and more the content: unlike a real book, you don’t own your copy of the content, and it can (and has) been remotely removed by the licensor in more than one case already. I have very great reservations about paying money to “buy” when it turns out that I’ve just paid a license fee that can be revoked at the licensor’s discretion without warning or compensation.

May 6, 2011

CRTC: broadband decision now in government’s hands

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:16

Michael Geist sums up the CRTC’s universal service decision:

The CRTC issued its universal service decision this week, which included analysis of funding mechanisms for broadband access, broadband speed targets, and whether there should be a requirement to provide broadband access as part of any basic service objective. Consumers groups and many observers were left disappointed. The CRTC declined to establish new funding mechanisms (relying on market forces) or changes to basic service and hit on a target of 5 Mbps download speed (actual not advertised) to be universally available by the end of 2015. Critics argued this left consumers on their own and suggested that the targets were underwhelming, particularly when contrasted with other countries.

While I sympathize with the frustration over the CRTC’s decision to essentially make broadband a “watching brief,” I wonder why Canadians should expect the CRTC to lead on broadband targets and funding. Universal access to globally competitive broadband (in terms of speed, pricing, and consumer choice) is a perhaps the most important digital policy issue Canada faces and it should not be viewed through a narrow telecom regulatory lens.

The “orphan works” gap in US copyright law

Filed under: Law, Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:30

Nicole Ciandella writes about so-called “orphan works” under current US copyright law:

Jazz enthusiasts rejoiced when the National Jazz Museum in Harlem purchased the famous Savory Collection last year, but unless Congress fixes a gaping hole in U.S. copyright laws, few people will actually hear the prized recordings.

William Savory was an audio engineer who developed his own method of recording live audio performances in the late 1930s. Up until World War II, most live performances were recorded on 78 rpm records that could capture only about three minutes of music. But Savory used 12- and 16-inch aluminum discs, which enabled him to create and store high quality recordings of longer performances. His collection includes a six-minute version of Coleman Hawkins performing “Body and Soul” in the spring of 1940 and a recording of Billie Holliday singing a rubato-tempo version of “Strange Fruit” in a nightclub only a month after her original version was released.

While he was alive, Savory kept his recordings mostly to himself. He died in 2004. His son, who inherited the recordings, finally agreed last year to sell the whole Savory Collection to the National Jazz Museum.

Museum spokespeople say the museum is eager to share the songs with the public online, but because of the recordings’ murky copyright status, that’s unlikely to happen anytime soon. The performances Savory recorded are now considered “orphan works” — in other words, their copyright owners are unknown and cannot be tracked down. The museum can’t obtain permission to disseminate the recordings; and if the museum were to go ahead without permission, it would risk being hit with a copyright infringement lawsuit, meaning potentially hefty civil penalties.

May 3, 2011

The lawfare threat to bloggers (and anyone else who posts on the web)

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 18:15

Box Turtle Bulletin lays out the details of a very disturbing development:

By providing blockquotes, we let the source material speak for itself without any inadvertent inaccuracies or biases which may creep in if we were to paraphrase it. And by providing links, we allow you, the reader, to click through for more information. Of course, we cannot copy the source material in its entirety, nor can we copy major portions of it. That would violate copyright laws, which is a very serious issue. But copyright laws do allow us to copy small portions of source material for commentary and discussion purposes.

As I said, copyright laws — or more specifically, copyright lawsuits — are serious business. And now, three newspaper chains have discovered that filing copyright lawsuits can become yet another profit center. The problem is, their definition of copyright infringement not only contradicts copyright law, but also poses a serious threat to bloggers and other online outlets everywhere.

Righthaven LLC is a copyright holding company which acquires “rights” to newspaper content after finding the content published on other web sites without permission, and files lawsuits against those web site. Righthaven was created as a partnership with Stephens Media, publisher of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, and their business model rests entirely on suing web site owners and operators for extravagant “damages” as a shakedown exercise. (“Rights” are in quotes, because, contrary to what is required under copyright law, Righthaven doesn’t actually acquire any legitimate copyright “rights,” which is yet another problem with their business model.) Two other newspaper chains, WEHCO Media and Media News Group have entered into agreements with Righthaven to split the profits from lawsuits stemming from their respective newspapers’ contents.

The three newspaper chains partnering with Righthaven represent some very important voices in the newspaper industry, including the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Denver Post, Salt Lake Tribune, San Jose Mercury News, Oakland Tribune, St. Paul Pioneer Press, Detroit News, El Paso Times, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, and Charleston Daily Mail.

I had already heard that the Las Vegas Review-Journal had some unusual views on quoting from their website, so I’ve avoided using that site for years. I didn’t know that the St. Paul Pioneer Press had also adopted that highly restrictive view of copyright, and they were one of the newspapers I read regularly for Minnesota Vikings information. I’m going to have to avoid quoting from them, however. Here is how Box Turtle Bulletin will be handling the situation in future:

And so to protect ourselves and this web site, we will no longer cite any content from Denver Post, Las Vegas Review-Journal, Salt Lake Tribune, or any of the other news sources listed no linkhere. There will be no links, no blockquotes, nothing. For the most part, it will be as if these sources simply don’t exist.

But if it happens that, for example, the Denver Post has an exclusive story that no one else has, we will do what the Associated Press does whenever the New York Times breaks a story. We will write about the story by paraphrasing the Post’s article, but we will not quote from it or provide a link to it — just like the Associated Press does. There will be however one tweak from standard AP practice: we will provide a link, but it will be to an explanation as to why there is no link. It will look something like this:

     “The Denver Post (no link) reports blah, blah, blah…”

H/T to Walter Olson for the link.

Michael Geist on what the Conservative majority means for digital policies

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:29

In short, he sees it as a mixed bag:

For example, a majority may pave the way for opening up the Canadian telecom market, which would be a welcome change. The Conservatives have focused consistently on improving Canadian competition and opening the market is the right place to start to address both Internet access (including UBB) and wireless services. The Conservatives have a chance to jump on some other issues such as following through on the digital economy strategy and ending the Election Act rules that resulted in the Twitter ban last night. They are also solidly against a number of really bad proposals — an iPod tax, new regulation of Internet video providers such as Netflix — and their majority government should put an end to those issues for the foreseeable future.

On copyright and privacy, it is more of a mixed bag.

The copyright bill is — as I described at its introduction last June — flawed but fixable. I realize that it may be reintroduced unchanged (the Wikileaks cables are not encouraging), but with the strength of a majority, there is also the strength to modify some of the provisions including the digital lock rules. Clement spoke regularly about the willingness to consider amendments and the Conservative MPs on the Bill C-32 committee were very strong. If the U.S. has exceptions for unlocking DVDs and a full fair use provision, surely Canada can too.

The Conservatives are a good news, bad news story on privacy. A fairly good privacy bill died on the order paper that will hopefully be reintroduced as it included mandatory security breach notification requirements. There will be a PIPEDA review this year and the prospect of tougher penalties for privacy violations is certainly possible. Much more troubling is the lawful access package which raises major civil liberties concerns and could be placed on the fast track.

May 2, 2011

I think I’ll hold off on buying a PlayStation for a little while longer

Filed under: Gaming, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:17

I actually was considering buying a PS3 in the near future, as our existing Blu-Ray player doesn’t play nicely with Netflix, while my domestic gaming advisor tells me that PS3’s do. Sony’s security problems are enough to give me pause:

“It’s really scary,” said Marsh Ray, a researcher and software developer at two-factor authentication service PhoneFactor, who fleshed out the doomsday scenario more thoroughly on Monday. “It’s justification for Sony freaking out. They could lose control of their whole PS3 network.”

Ray’s speculation is fueled in part by chat transcripts that appear to show unknown hackers discussing serious weaknesses in the PSN authentication system. In it, purported hackers going by the handles trixter and SKFU discuss how to connect to PSN servers using consoles with older firmware that contain bugs susceptible to jailbreaking exploits, even though Sony takes great pains to prevent that from happening.

“I just finished decrypting 100% of all PSN functions,” SKFU claimed.

There’s no evidence the participants had anything to do with the massive security breach that plundered names, addresses, email addresses, passwords and other sensitive information from some 77 million PSN users. But the log did raise questions about the security of the network, since it claimed it was possible to fool the PSN’s authentication system into permitting rogue consoles.

On this reading, arrogance on the part of Sony executives, and complacency on the part of developers and testers are key elements of the security failure:

“If you can’t jailbreak it, then I can see a developer assuming that they don’t need a particular authorization check on what’s coming across the wire because a user can’t do that,” said WhiteHat Security CTO Jeremiah Grossman, an expert in web application security. “So if somebody managed to jailbreak their device and pop a flaw, I can see something major happening there.”

Hotz, the PS3 jailbreaker who recently settled the copyright lawsuit Sony brought against him, said in a recent blog post that the theory is plausible and that responsibility for the hack lay squarely on the shoulders of Sony executives who placed too much trust in the invulnerability of the PS3.

“Since everyone knows the PS3 is unhackable, why waste money adding pointless security between the client and the server?” Hotz, aka GeoHot, wrote. “This arrogance undermines a basic security principle, never trust the client. Sony needs to accept that they no longer own and control the PS3 when they sell it to you.”

Household robots, a progress report

Filed under: Randomness, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:10

Over at The Register, Bill Ray talks about the robotic domestic servants in operation around his house:

We like to consider ourselves the new breed of enlightened robot owners — not hobbyists, or enthusiasts, just enormously lazy people who’d prefer to see something else doing the work. That includes mopping the floor, cutting the grass or letting the cats in, not to mention motivating the children into keeping both room and garden tidy for fear of having their toys eaten by the machines.

[. . .]

We know Mowbot can destroy toys because sometimes he does, if the children are foolish enough to leave them on the lawn: he’ll bounce off walls and larger obstacles, but he’ll give them a shove first. It was moments after I predicted he would have no difficulty bouncing off the inflatable paddling pool that it vanished in a swirling maelstrom of plastic and water droplets that was enough to ensure the children kept the garden tidy for a year or two.

[. . .]

iRobot developed the first Roomba to raise money and credibility so it could get into the far-more-lucrative military robot business, but what makes Roomba, Scooba and Mowbot useful is not how clever they are but how much they achieve with such limited intelligence.

While Dyson repeatedly demonstrates prototypes that scan the room with sonar, and Electrolux charges a thousand pounds for their Trilobite bristling with sensors, iRobot’s Roomba bounces off walls at random while Mowbot repeatedly cuts the same grass and calls it “mulching” to avoid having to pick up the bits. None of our robots is efficient, a human could do the job in half the time – but speaking as that human I’m glad I don’t have to.

We’ve been considering buying a Roomba for one particular room in our house: our bedroom. We have three cats, one of whom is utterly terror-stricken at the sight or sound of a vacuum cleaner. At the first hint of a vacuum cleaner attack, he retreats at maximum speed in a random direction, leaving a trail of urine in his wake. This means that our bedroom gets far too infrequently vacuumed. We’re hoping that a Roomba won’t trigger his flee-and-pee instincts . . .

April 28, 2011

Just for you efficiency fans

Filed under: History, Humour, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:42

The world’s least efficient machine:

More information about this modern day wonder here.

Bill for Royal Navy’s new carriers continues to rise

Filed under: Britain, Military, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:26

In news that will surprise nobody who has any familiarity with military equipment purchases, the Royal Navy’s new aircraft carriers are now expected to cost at least another £1bn:

The cost of building two new aircraft carriers for the navy has soared again and could eventually total £7bn.

The latest increases follow a series of costly delays and are largely the result of a decision in last year’s defence review to equip HMS Prince of Wales with aircraft catapults and traps. It is the second of the carriers due to enter into service by 2020.

The first carrier, HMS Queen Elizabeth, will be mothballed when it is completed, leaving Britain without a carrier able to take aircraft for 10 years.

The carriers were officially estimated to cost less than £4bn when they were announced in 2007. The estimate rose to £5bn last year after the Ministry of Defence decided to delay the construction programme to put off costs. Short-term savings led to cost increases in the longer term.

It’d be absolutely normal for the British government to decide to delay the ships’ completion even longer, raising total costs but stretching the purchase out over more budget years. It’s a common false economy, and it’s one of the reasons that military equipment manufacturers have to build possible delay costs into their plans.

Learning from mistakes, Martian style

Filed under: Space, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:56

I have to admit it’s doubly amusing finding articles like Mars ate my spacecraft!, once for the content and once for the amusing title:

The investigation board made the not-terribly-earth-shaking observation that tired people make mistakes. The contractor used excessive overtime to meet an ambitious schedule. Mars is tough on schedules. Slip by just one day past the end of the launch window and the mission must idle for two years. In some businesses we can dicker with the boss over the due date, but you just can’t negotiate with planetary geometries.

[. . .]

NASA’s mantra is to test like you fly, fly what you tested. Yet no impact test of a running, powered, DS2 system ever occurred. Though planned, these were deleted midway through the project due to schedule considerations. Two possible reasons were found for Deep Space 2’s twin flops: electronics failure in the high-g impact, and ionization around the antenna after the impacts. Strangely, the antenna was never tested in a simulation of Mar’s 6 torr atmosphere.

While the DS2 probes were slamming into the Red Planet things weren’t going much better on MPL. The investigation board believes the landing legs deployed when the spacecraft was 1,500 meters high, as designed. Three sensors, one per leg, signal a successful touchdown, causing the code to turn the descent engine off. Engineers knew that when the legs deployed these sensors could experience a transient, giving a false “down” reading… but somehow forgot to inform the firmware people. The glitch was latched; at 40 meters altitude the code started looking at the data, saw the false readings, and faithfully switched off the engine.

A pre-launch system test failed to detect the problem because the sensors were miswired. After correcting the wiring error the test was never repeated.

H/T to Paula Lieberman for the link.

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