Monthly Archives: March 2008

The Rite of Spring

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“Having assembled his folk melodies, Stravinsky proceeded to pulverize them into motivic bits, pile them up in layers, and reassemble them in cubistic collages and montages.”

Alex Ross on Stravinsky, in his book The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. Quoted by Steven Poole in his excellent review.

Er, in case you’re wondering (as I was) what ‘motivic’ means, Wikipedia says that it’s “using a distinct musical figure that is subsequently altered, repeated, or sequenced throughout a piece or section of a piece of music”, and that it “has its roots in the keyboard sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti and the sonata form of Haydn and Mozart’s age.”

How the Rumour Mill works

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If you’re puzzled by what happened to HBOS shares last week, then this sobering Telegraph column by Jeff Randall may help.

Put simply: I know that you want to buy 100 shares in Jayar Junk. The shares are trading at £10 each. We strike a deal at that price, and I promise to deliver them in one week’s time. At this point, I still don’t own any Jayar Junk. No matter, my buddies at the Rumour Mill are about to go to work.

Through a series of postings on dodgy websites, anonymous emails and loose talk in dealers’ watering holes, we spread the story that Jayar Junk is running out of readies. Very soon the shares start falling, to £9, £8, £7. In angst-ridden markets, there is no bottom. When they hit £5, we buy 100.

Bingo! You are contracted to take them from me for a total of £1,000. My cost is just £500. I double my money and you are ripped off. It’s no more complicated than that. Like a spiritualist medium, the Rumour Mill relies on its victims believing an illusion: stock market ectoplasm.

It’s not illegal “to short” a stock, ie, sell shares that you do not have. Several reputable hedge funds made millions by “shorting” both Northern Rock and Bear Stearns. The law is broken, however, when the Rumour Mill creates malicious falsehoods with the aim of driving down prices.

For ordinary folk, whose pensions are jeopardised every time the Rumour Mill starts turning, these are troubling times. They tuck away a few quid each month in the belief that they are investing for retirement. They accept that there is risk, but don’t (yet) regard this form of saving as a day at the races.

But in his book, The Truth About Markets, Oxford economist Professor John Kay writes: “Most transactions in securities markets are not about sharing or spreading risks; they are like transactions in a betting shop. The people who engage in them believe they are deploying their superior knowledge, but this can never be true of more than a small minority of players.” The trick for regulators is to make sure that this small minority has gained its advantage openly and honestly, without recourse to chicanery. Experience tells us, however, that this is extremely difficult, if not impossible…

CyberCrime 2.0

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From the Register…

Selling “installs” is a common practice in the cyber-underworld, the most notable example being in 2005 when Jeanson Ancheta was arrested for building a 400,000-strong botnet and installing adware from 180 solutions for a fee of $60,000. Cybercriminals have since moved on to installing spyware onto compromised machines.

Zombie machines infected with Trojan horse malware can be used to relay spam or launch denial of service attacks. Compromised machines can be also be pointed to websites from which additional items of malware can be downloaded. The practice is normally used to update Trojan code, but it also creates a means for cybercrooks to make a “nice little earner”.

The income that can be earned grows with the numbers of installs, and varies based on the geographical location of an installation. For example, installing spyware on 1,000 machines in Australia earns $100 but only $50 in the US, and a measly $3 in Asia. A sample price list obtained by net security services firm sheds fresh light on the phenomenon.

MeesageLabs culled its figures from a malware distribution site in Russia, the existence of which we’ve verified. The site is loaded with malware and for that reason we’ll refer to it by a shortened version of its name, installscash.org.

Google Adsense — or should that be Google Adinsensitive?

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From the Guardian‘s Letters and blogs…

The online Sydney Morning Herald of March 14 took the advert targeting issue, as discussed recently in Technology, to another level altogether. A report of a gruesome assault in a Sydney park was headed “Woman’s nose bitten off”. A link was provided – “Ads by Google” – to “Safe Cosmetic Surgery” from London. “Request a free brochure online now!” it urged, sensing there wasn’t a moment to lose.

Harold Lewis, Cobham

Thanks to Kevin Cryan for spotting it.

The Adsense logic engine produces weird results. When I’ve blogged about the quagmire in Iraq, for example, it often comes up with recruiting ads for the US Army. And whenever I write about the iniquities of the copyright thugs of the RIAA and the MPAA, Google invariably produces ads from legal firms offering their help in “protecting your intellectual property”.

Facebook refines its privacy policy

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From Rory Cellan-Jones…

Facebook has unveiled what it says is a new policy on privacy. The press release says the aim is to give users more control over the information they choose to share. It goes on to explain that the two main features are “a standardized privacy interface across the site and new privacy options.”

Is that perfectly clear? Well, not entirely. What is a “standardized privacy interface” when it’s at home? The 75% of users who never bother to change their default privacy settings probably won’t care. But read on, and it seems the main change is the ability to differentiate between different groups of friends – and give them different levels of access to your information….

Inside the snake-pit

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From today’s Telegraph…

The Bank of England has demanded the Financial Services Authority investigate inaccurate rumours sweeping the market that a British lender is in crisis after being forced to issue a vehement denial that it has been called into emergency meetings.

Sources said the Bank was livid with what it believes are short sellers attempting to turn a profit by spreading false stories about distressed lenders that could undermine the stability of Britain’s financial system in these fragile markets.
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A Bank spokesman said: “No meeting has taken place or been scheduled with any financial institution in the UK.”

It added that it made no loans through its standing facility yesterday.

HBOS appeared to be the main target of this morning’s speculation. Its shares tumbled up to 11pc on rumours that it had applied for emergency central bank funding despite a clear denial.

An HBOS spokesman said: “There is not a shred of substance whatsoever in these unfounded and malicious rumours. This is a classic case of a lie being half way round the world before truth has its boots on. It is deeply concerning these rumours are circulating the markets.

“HBOS is one of the strongest financial institutions in the world with a balance sheet of £660bn the group has also had the largest deposit base in the UK. We are one of the most respected names in the wholesale and capital markets. HBOS is a very strong financial institution.”

50,000 a day!

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Competition Fuels Broadband Use in Europe – New York Times

BRUSSELS — Fierce competition from new providers has pushed the level of broadband subscriptions in eight European countries above the levels in the United States and Japan, according to figures to be released Wednesday.

Growth could accelerate further if the European Commission succeeds in a drive to jolt those countries still dominated by former state monopolies, according to the top telecommunications regulator in Brussels.

The commission says the European Union added 19 million broadband lines in 2007, the equivalent of more than 50,000 households per day…

Spitzer’s downfall

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From Technology Review…

If there is a lesson from former New York governor Eliot Spitzer’s scandal-driven fall (aside from the most obvious one), it is this: banks are paying attention to even the smallest of your transactions.

For this we can thank modern software, and post-9/11 U.S. government pressure to find evidence of money laundering and terrorist financing. Experts say that all major banks, and even most small ones, are running so-called anti-money-laundering software, which combs through as many as 50 million transactions a day looking for anything out of the ordinary.

In Spitzer’s case, according to newspaper reports, it was three wire transfers amounting to just $5,000 apiece that set alarm bells ringing. It helped that he was a prominent political figure. But even the most mundane activities of ordinary citizens are given the same initial scrutiny.

“All the big banks have these software systems,” says Pete Balint, a cofounder of the Dominion Advisory Group, which helps banks develop strategies for combatting money laundering and fraud. “Depending on their volume, they might have thousands of alerts a month.”

Long-Distance Wi-Fi

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Hmmm… This looks promising for those of us interested in ICT for development…

Intel has announced plans to sell a specialized Wi-Fi platform later this year that can send data from a city to outlying rural areas tens of miles away, connecting sparsely populated villages to the Internet. The wireless technology, called the rural connectivity platform (RCP), will be helpful to computer-equipped students in poor countries, says Jeff Galinovsky, a senior platform manager at Intel. And the data rates are high enough–up to about 6.5 megabits per second–that the connection could be used for video conferencing and telemedicine, he says.

The RCP, which essentially consists of a processor, radios, specialized software, and an antenna, is an appealing way to connect remote areas that otherwise would go without the Internet, says Galinovsky. Wireless satellite connections are expensive, he points out. And it’s impractical to wire up some villages in Asian and African countries. “You can’t lay cable,” he says. “It’s difficult, expensive, and someone is going to pull it up out of the ground to sell it.”

Already, Intel has installed and tested the hardware in India, Panama, Vietnam, and South Africa. Later this year, the company will sell the device in India, with a target price below $500. The point-to-point technology will require two nodes, which could provide “full back-end infrastructure” for less than $1,000, Galinovsky says.

One node is usually installed at the edge of an urban area, wired to a local-area network cable, he explains. Using a directional antenna, the device shoots data to a receiving antenna as far as 60 miles away. Any farther away, and the system encounters problems due to the curvature of the earth. Practically, most links will be set up less than 30 miles away from one another. Once a node is installed in a village, the connection can be dispersed using standard cables and wireless routers, Galinovsky says.