WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at the week's net and technology news and 
comment
by Alan Lenton
October 27, 2002

There's a fair amount of news this week, including two follow-ups from 
previous weeks. We seem to have moved out of the silly season (except 
where politicians are concerned, of course) and it's good to see that in spite of 
the economic climate innovations continue. Of course, the various patent 
offices continue to do their best to stifle innovation.


Shorts:

The Internet suffered one of its worst attacks ever this past Monday (21 
October 2002). You may well have not realised it, most people didn't, which is 
a tribute to the skills of those who designed and built the Internet. It seems 
there was a Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack on the Internet's 
thirteen root servers. This means that the attacker tried to flood them with so 
many requests for info that they would not be able to service legitimate 
requests. The root servers are at the top of the Internet hierarchy. When you 
computer wants to contact another one on the net, it asks the root servers 
what the numeric address of the required computer is. If the root computer 
doesn't know, it knows a computer that does!* In the event, some of the root 
servers succumbed to the attack, but four or five withstood the attack, and 
they were able to keep the net running. There isn't currently any indication of 
who was behind the attack.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A828-2002Oct22.html

I've frequently railed against the US (and soon to be European) patent system 
in which ignorant patent examiners dish out patents to all and sundry. Well the 
latest is a real doozy! Way back in 1994 a company called Open Market filed 
a claim with the US Patent Office (USPO) for a network-based sales system. 
The filing is incredibly broad and seems to include a minimum configuration of 
a buyer computer, a merchant computer and a payment computer. That is, it 
covers something like 99% of all consumer payment transactions on the net. 
The patent was granted in 1998, but Open Market got caught in the dot com 
bust and was sold to Chicago-based enterprise services firm Divine last 
October. Now Divine are trying to enforce the patent and demand royalties 
from e-commerce firms. I can foresee some very fat lawyers fees in the offing.

http://news.com.com/2010-1071-962485.html

During last week more detailed analyses have become available about the 26 
per cent jump in earnings by Microsoft I discussed last week. I said at the time 
that the jump seemed to have been caused by Microsoft's new licensing plan. 
Indirectly this is the case, but not in the way I thought. I had assumed that it 
was caused by customers purchasing the the new licensing plan. Not so, it 
turns out. It was caused by people buying the -old- licensing plan at the last 
moment to avoid having to buy the new one! Heads Microsoft win, tails you 
lose, it seems.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/7/27677.html

Earlier this month I ran a story about the demise of the high profile blogger 
listings on Google. Apparently they weren't the only ones who were affected. 
It seems that the tweak to the ratings algorithms also affected a company 
called Search King, which sells advertising on Google high rank pages to 
other companies. So did Search King upgrade their rank prediction? Nah! 
That would take real work. Instead they are suing Google for changing its 
algorithms. Asked for a comment a Search King spokesperson refused. Just 
as well, they probably wouldn't have been heard over the laughter.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/27721.html

Meanwhile, back in the UK, the government's attempt to get the UK ISPs to 
voluntarily implement the controversial data retention scheme is floundering. 
Fuelled by worries about the cost and privacy implications the ISPs are 
balking and even questioning the legality of the measures. The government 
has been negotiating with the ISPs for some time, but the talks seem to have 
broken down. It remains to be seen whether the government will use its 
powers to force the ISPs to implement the measures. If it does, then I 
suspect, given the loose and ambiguous language of the law concerned, this 
one may well be wending its way through the courts for a long time.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/27726.html

Hard words this week, between Apple and IDG, the organisers of the 
MacWorld Expos. IDG announced that they were moving the venue of the 
east coast expo from New York to Boston, and Apple promptly announced 
that they wouldn't be taking part. Traditionally one of the pulls of MacWorld is 
Apple announcing new products, so this is not an insignificant threat on the 
part of Apple. IDG rapidly retaliated by saying that Apple would not be allowed 
to cherry pick and if it carried through its threat, then it would not be allowed 
space at the San Francisco MacWorld. My take? I think it's part of a more 
serious problem for these sort of expos. It's getting very difficult for cash 
strapped hi-tech firms to justify the expense of exhibiting, even as a marketing 
exercise. The problem is particularly acute for Apple which traditionally 
spends about $4m on a show, when most of the attendees are already Apple 
faithful. In the the UK most of these sort of shows died out in the late 80s, and 
there have been several miserable failures in the US over the last year. I 
suspect this may be the start of a downward trend for these types of events.

Information from a 'Tidbits' newsletter - http://www.tidbits.com

Uh huh - trouble at mill... Watch it - the International Telecommunication 
Union (ITU) wants to get its sticky little fingers on the Internet's Domain 
Names System (DNS). DNS is the system that controls who gets the names 
on the Internet and how they convert to the real numerical addresses (see the 
piece above on the DDOS attack on the root servers). The ITU is a Geneva 
based treaty organisation affiliated to the United Nations. Fortunately, given 
the current US government attitude towards the United Nations there are 
likely to be plenty of congress critters who will oppose any such move! The 
best outcome would be for this hijacking attempt to force the current oversight 
body, Internet Corp for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to get their 
act together.

http://sg.biz.yahoo.com/021020/72/33wtu.html

Good news for the environment. Chip manufacturers have for some time been 
top modern users of unpleasant chemicals. Ironic when you think that 
microchips have to be made in ultra-clean rooms. They are also users of vast 
amounts of water, and many of the chip fabrication plants are in areas of 
growing water shortage. Now there is good news on this front with a new 
technology from Los Alamos National Laboratory called Supercritical Carbon 
Dioxide Resist Remover The process cuts out many of the chemicals and 
virtually all the water, and best of all, it's much cheaper than the conventional 
process so there is a real incentive for chip makers to adopt it.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.11/start.html?pg=7

Pity the poor developers of the Open Source WINE Windows emulator for 
Linux. They've discovered that it is possible to be too good. WINE allows you 
to run Windows applications in a window on a Linux system. WINE is 
reckoned by those who use it to be a very good emulator. Too good in fact. 
Yes, you guessed it, Windows viruses, Klez in particular, can run in the WINE 
window! Well it shows that WINE works. And that gives me a perfect excuse 
to hassle you all to make sure your virus scanners are up date - every time 
someone gets a virus our feedback mailbox fills up with choice extracts from 
your hard drives. It makes interesting reading, but, frankly, we have better 
things to do with our lives.

http://articles.linuxguru.net/view/198

Finally, here's some cool stuff for geeks. Want broadband on your mobile 
phone? Have I got the chip for you! Bell Labs have just tested a 19.2Mbps 
mobile phone chip. (current fastest chips are about 2.5Mbps.) So now you will 
be able to get ultra-fast txt messages, and pictures you have no space to 
display... And in another story, IBM have announced that they've succeeded 
in making logic gates from individual carbon monoxide molecules. That's 
about a quarter of a million time smaller that the silicon logic gates used in 
current silicon based computers. Hot stuff, but I can just imagine the 
headlines. 'Hacker dies from carbon monoxide poisoning after breaking into 
computer'!

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/3/27694.html
http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/biztech/10/25/ibm.nanotechnology.reut/index
.html


Scanner: Other stories

Microcircuits on Glass - a computer in the display
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&cid=
569&ncid=738&e=1&u=/nm/20021022/tc_nm/tech_sharp_display_dc

US Disabilities Act doesn't cover Web sites
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-962761.html?tag=fd_ots

Microsoft warns of critical flaw in Outlook Express
http://computerworld.com/securitytopics/security/story/0,10801,75067,00.html

Scottish Power refuses to allow Linux users to open online accounts
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/27698.html

Trend Micro weekly virus report
http://www.trendmicro.com/en/security/report/overview.htm

Have fun on the web!

Alan Lenton
alan@ibgames.com

* OK - it's actually far more complex than that in practice, but this is how it 
works conceptually.

Past issues of Winding Down can be found at
http://www.ibgames.net/alan/winding/index.html.


