WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at the week's net and technology news and 
comment
by Alan Lenton
December 8, 2002

This is the last 'news' issue till January. I will be out of town for the next 
couple of weeks, so it will be difficult to monitor the news. There will be a 
couple of analysis pieces over the next two weeks, and then I'm taking a two 
week break over Christmas.

This week's top story was AOL's new strategy - the punters weren't impressed 
and AOL stock dropped around fifteen per cent. I'll cover this next week and 
tell you why I think the punters are wrong.

Other stories include blade servers, censorship, and the virus of the year.


Story:

Digital Doomsday

I'm always moaning at people to send me material in a format which is an 
international standard, like HTML or ASCII, preferably ASCII (plain text). I 
don't need you to format your material for me - I'm perfectly capable of doing 
that myself. What I do with it will make it far more readable for me since I 
know what I will be displaying it on. Not only that, but it will be readable long 
after the machines it was created on have vanished into the dustbin (trash 
can, for my American readers) of history.

I permitted myself a little smirk, therefore, while reading about the problems 
retrieving the data from the UK's Digital Doomsday Book. The original 
Doomsday Book was a pen and ink affair which gathered a detailed picture of 
England as it was in 1086. It was intended for tax purposes, but it's also a 
treasure trove of information of then contemporary society for historians, 
geographers and sociologists.

Well, in 1986, (the 900th anniversary of the book) a bright spark at the British 
Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) had the idea of doing a digital Doomsday 
Book, chronicling life in Britain in the 1980s. The project involved children all 
over the UK and the results - a snapshot of the UK in the mid 1980s were 
carefully stored. Unfortunately, they were stored in a format used by the BBC 
microcomputer, on two interactive video disks.

Who now remembers the BBC micro? And where, now, is the documentation 
of the formats it used? The BBC micro was very popular twenty years ago, it 
was adequate for the time - about as powerful as the microchip in one of 
today's washing machines - but all trace of it has long since vanished.

It's even worse than it sounds. It didn't take 20 years for the information to 
become inaccessible, it only took a couple of years.

This story has a happy ending. Researchers from Leeds University and the 
University of Michigan have managed to reconstruct the format and produce 
some emulation software that allows access to the data. Other stories are not 
so happy. NASA, for instance, has vaults of carefully stored digital data from 
early missions, but no one can use it because no one knows how to read it.

At the end of the day, digital data is just noughts and ones. Standards-based 
methods of encoding information last, while information in proprietary formats 
dies with the machines and software that created it.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/2534391.stm


Shorts:

Dell has just shipped the first in its new blade server line. Blade PCs are PC 
servers on a single card. A whole bunch of them plug into a chassis, so that 
you have (say) a dozen servers in a small box, rather than taking up half a 
cabinet in a co-location facility. Blade servers have the additional benefit that 
they are relatively low power devices. Given that co-location facilities charge 
by space used and that they have stringent limits on the amount of power 
customers can use, you would think that customers would be biting off the 
hands of blade server manufacturers. Not so. In fact the take-up has been 
very slow. And why is this? It's because the manufacturers (like Dell, HP, IBM 
and Sun) refuse to learn the lesson that a small chunk of a large market is 
better than a large chunk of a small market. All the manufacturers have their 
own proprietary back-planes that the cards plug into. Result: you can't mix 
and match blades from different manufacturers or change supplier once you 
have bought the back-plane box. Nice try, guys, but we all got caught on that 
one with our operating system software, and we learn, even if you don't.

Did you know that the Chinese government blocks ibgames' web site? It's one 
of 20,000 sites blocked by the current regime. We don't know why - they 
never told us - but I guess we must be doing something right! Harvard Law 
School have just produced a report about China blocking parts of the Internet. 
The report compared Chinese blocking with that in an earlier report about 
Saudi Arabia. The results were fascinating. For instance, the Saudis blocked 
86 per cent of the world's top 800 porn sites, the Chinese only 13 per cent. 
One of the key types of site filtered by the Chinese is news sites, which seem 
to be filtered by what their current content is. Thus you can get to the (say) 
CNN site one day, but not the next, depending on what stories it is carrying. In 
order to carry out this sort of filtering, China has restricted the number of 
places where the Internet comes into the country. Of course that makes it 
much more vulnerable to having the whole system crash, but who cares when 
the power of the ruling regime is at stake...

http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,56699,00.html

The US Government finally stopped shooting itself in the foot over its 
prosecution of ElcomSoft, which is accused of violating the much maligned 
Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The trial had to be delayed because 
the US Immigration and Naturalisation Service refused to issue a visa to 
Russian programmer Dimitry Sklyarov, the prosecution's star witness. Now 
the left hand has had stern words with the right and Dimitry has his visa. Apart 
from the general questions of the legality or otherwise of the DMCA itself, this 
is another case similar to the Kazaa file sharing case I reported last week, 
which seeks to extend US legal jurisdiction outside the US. ElcomSoft is 
accused of violating the DMCA by producing software that allowed purchasers 
to 'unlock' the laughable copy protection on Adobe's e-books - in Russia, 
where it's completely legal. The trial has only just started, but I will be 
following both this and the Kazaa trial in the new year.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/28352.html

US readers often tell me that they have the best politicians money can buy, 
but Microsoft is shopping further afield. It has recruited top European 
Commission (EC) official Detlef Eckert, who will take three year's leave of 
absence to go and work for Microsoft. (The EC is the top level bureaucracy of 
the European Union - it's employees are usual referred to as eurocrats.) 
Given that Microsoft is still being investigated by the EC for competition 
abuses (i.e. anti-trust) recruiting a top eurocrat from the division involved 
raised a few eyebrows. Initially, the EC and Eckert claimed there was no 
conflict of interest and the whole issue was of no import. Then people started 
looking at the work of Eckert's department and it became obvious that the EC 
had been, shall we say, 'economical' with the truth. Have a look at the first 
URL for a list of IT things it's involved in. So now the EC is 'investigating'. So 
that's all right then. By the way, EC investigations typically take three years.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/28298.html
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/28369.html

The results are in for the most prevalent virus/worm of the year competition (It 
won't change during the remaining three weeks of the year). Top by a 
massive margin is (fanfare of trumpets) Klez. Second and third place were 
taken by Bugbear and BADTRANS respectively. That's fairly impressive given 
that Bugbear only appeared on the scene two months ago. The report from 
anti-virus firm Sophos reported over 7,000 new viruses/worms/trojans this 
year, and it has records of just under 80,000 of the critters on its books. 
Sophos also published details of the top ten virus hoaxes this years. Heading 
the list was the nifftily named JDBGMGR hoax which tries to trick people into 
deleting programs needed by Windows operating system. The one I really 
liked, though, was the one that promised to shell out a share of Bill Gates' 
fortune if you forwarded it on to your friends. There's one born every minute.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/56/28439.html


Scanner - Other Stories:

Two States fight on in Microsoft anti-trust trial
http://go.hotwired.com/news/antitrust/0,1551,56676,00.html/wn_ascii

Use once, pay twice - Microsoft reveals Mira
http://cgi.zdnet.com/slink?191338

Fujitsu hard drive disaster - 4.9 million faulty controller chips
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/54/28384.html

Why do users want broad band - surprising answers
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/22/28344.html

US Postal Service & Microsoft in new partnership
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/PrintStory.pl?document_
id=134580416&zsection_id=268448455&slug=comdex21&date=20021121

IBM pushes computing on demand
http://www.infoworld.com/articles/pl/xml/02/11/25/021125plibmfuture.xml

Risk of net collapse (again)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/2514651.stm


Have fun on the web!

Alan Lenton
alan@ibgames.com
8 December 2002

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


