Mixed Signals
Any sufficiently advanced information is indistinguishable from noise
Sunday 11 May 2008, 1:15 PM
The Dongle - a case study in evolution
It is a privilege and a joy to be called upon to serve one's friends and family, as anyone with technical knowledge will confirm. Mostly, this takes place within normal protocols of friendship and familial interaction - a category of human behaviour that covers everything from foot massage to nuclear warfare - but there's always someone.
Thus, this conversation with a female pal who in every other matter is perfectly personable, but when it comes to asking me about tech turns into a Gestapo interrogator out of Hyacinth Bucket.
Phone rings.
Rupert: "Hello?"
Friend: "Dongles!"
Rupert: "er... yes?"
Friend: "Tell me. Dongles. Good or bad?"
Rupert (clouds clearing):"Aah... that's you, isn't it?"
Friend: "Of course. Should. I. Get. A. Dongle?"
(and so on)
She was asking about 3G USB modems - as are all civilians, of course, now the networks have worked out that most of their grown-up punters don't want Madonna, videoconferencing on the move (now largely forbidden, ironically), replaceable covers, entertainment news via a hot portal or any of that nonsense. Give us the Internet and leave us alone.
It's still like the early days of mobile phones: you can't advise someone what to get until you've squinted at coverage maps, asked them about what they're going to do with it, warned then ten times about roaming, and then picked your way through the tariff minefield.
I sorted her out. But my initial confusion wasn't so much about being abruptly interrogated, but by the word "dongle" (*) itself. It's been through so many shades of meaning since (at least) the 1970s, and all of them have left accretions on my internal vocab. USB modems are merely the latest: I hadn't realised until that phone call that the dongle had now escaped from Tech Island and was breeding in the wild under this particular plumage.
The most common early usage for dongle was as a software protection plug-in, usually on an RS-232 serial port. It's mentioned as such in the 1990 edition of the Jargon File-
DONGLE (don-gl) n. 1. A security device for commercial microcomputer programs consisting of a serialized EPROM and some drivers in an RS-232 connector shell. Programs that use a dongle query the port at startup and programmed intervals thereafter, and terminate if it does not respond with the dongle's programmed validation code.
Thus, users could make as many copies of the program as they want but must pay for each dongle. The idea was clever but a practical failure, as users disliked tyng up a serial port this way.
2. By extension, any physical electronic key or transferable ID required for a program to function.
and the earliest dated reference I can find online is from 4 May 1984 in the net.micro.cbm newsgroup:
The device referred to is known as a "dongle" (I've no idea why). It is used by various software companies (the Paperclip word processor uses it) to prevent piracy while still allowing backups."
But at exactly the same time, the benighted QL was being sold with a dongle - in this case, a memory board containing the bits of the operating system that wouldn't fit in the onboard chips. Clearly, anything that dangles out of the back of a computer is fit to be called a dongle.
Anything? Not quite. In my experience, it has to be active - something like an RS232 gender-bender or other adaptor cable, no matter how bulky they are, never gets called a dongle. You wouldn't call a USB keyboard light a dongle - but you would a USB-RS232 converter. I've heard USB thumb drives called dongles (although rarely; key drives, flash drives, data drives are more common), likewise USB-Bluetooth converters. In general, the more mysterious the dongle's role is, the more likely it is so to be called.
There's clearly a complex semantic map to explore here.
(*) Not to be confused with Dongola, capital of the North area of Sudan, or Dongola Road West, a street in Newham named after Kitchener's victory there against the Mahdi in 1896. "There" being the Sudan rather than Newham, of course, although if you adopt a post-modernist approach to imperial history and perform a time-variant matrix transformation on conceptual resonances there are arguments that they can be framed as part of one and the same construct. Wouldn't bother, if I were you.
Friday 9 May 2008, 1:25 PM
BBC in international spam shock scandal
Last week saw the plausible 30th anniversary of the creation of email spam, an event marked by the arrival in journos' inboxes of large numbers of unrequested press releases from security companies.
These even reached the BBC, which decided to run a story over the bank holiday weekend -- traditionally a good time for soft news --on BBC World. They rang around the usual suspects: I was up in Edinburgh devoting my attention to single malts, the sisterhood and medieval plainchant (sounds better than wine, women and song), and so Aunty picked on my brother in North London media tarthood, Adrian Mars.
Adrian represents the finest in media punterhood; not only does he know what he's talking about and is more comfortable in front of a camera than Richard and Judy's sofa, he has a sense of humour that would make Sid James blush and a sense of shame so small that it's discussed at nanotechnology conferences.
Parked on set and transmitting live to the world, the man was asked why spammers keep going for the same old stiffening pills and willy embiggenment scams. He could not resist: "It's a formula that works, and since most men are insecure about the size of their parts... Of course some of us don't need to worry."
At this, he erected one eyebrow and the presenter giggled like a schoolgirl.
So far, so good: BBC happy at a nice soft story, Adrian cock-a-hoop at slipping it in, and world not quite sure it just saw what it thought it saw.
And it turns out that this was one enlargement spam that worked - albeit for the man's ego rather than his privy member. A couple of days later, he got this email from an old flame, now working as a journalist in one of the world's high profile trouble-spots. (The location and identity of his correspondent have been disguised to protect him or her from the authorities - yes, really. And I wish I could be more specific about gender, just to finally put to rest those persistent rumours about Adrian's sexuality, but you understand. Lives are at stake.)
"So, there I was in XXXX (being an intrepid fighter for freedom and democracy, albeit one with access to BBC world) when who should pop up but you, talking about the size of your parts. Bizarre.
Hope you are well.
XX
PS I don't think you have anything to worry about..."
The man is now unbearable, and it is only with the greatest self-restraint that I eschew giving you further information on this subject. Me, I think he just misheard the BBC's motto: "Nation Shall Speak Peace Unto Nation". Eric Gill would have approved.
Friday 9 May 2008, 11:00 AM
3G iPhone confirmed, for Italy at least
Over at David Manners' blog, there's confirmation -- if it were really needed -- that the 3G iPhone is launching next month, in Italy at least.
Manners is one of the world's most venerable tech journalists (he interviewed Marconi after the famous radio-assisted Titanic rescue, asking when the ship's radio cat's whisker detectors were going to move from the three-inch to the one-and-a-half inch manufacturing process). In typical style, he trapped a senior executive from Telecom Italia Mobile on a bus. In the Dubai desert.
Really, there was nothing to do but confess. From Manners' blog:
""We will be selling an iPhone with 3G capability next month", Luigi Licciardi, executive vice president for technology and operations at TIM told me yesterday evening on a bus taking us out into the desert for dinner following the first day of the International Electronics Forum 2008 in Dubai."
Not the first time that a big American company has found its holy writ fails to run quite as expected outside the linear borders of the 48 states. All we have to do now is see whether the other rumours - non-exclusivity, discount deals - are true,and if so whether this means Apple will make that 14 million sales figure being tossed about at the moment.
Thursday 8 May 2008, 6:33 PM
Memristor - everything changes
At least two or three times a week, we get a press release about some fundamental breakthrough in nanotechnology, silicon engineering, wireless or similar.
Normally, the story is rather less exciting than the PR would have us think: after a good twenty years of exciting fundamental breakthroughs in nanotech, and we've got accelerometers in our iPhones, mirrorchips in our projectors, and... well, not much else. In some cases, this is because it always takes a long time for new ideas to turn into products -- there's been steady progress, but how long have we been waiting for OLEDs? -- and in others, the idea just doesn't make it because it's impossible to produce economically, for technical reasons or because the market's moved on.
So I thought I'd leave HP's Memristor announcement of last week to... mature a bit. Some of the headlines - HP DIscovers Electronics God Particle - made me think it'd better to let that side of things burn itself out, and revisit it after cooler minds had taken a look.
I'm glad that I did, because now some of the smoke has cleared it looks a very compelling discovery - one, moreover, that has good potential for a relatively swift adoption by the industry..
Ignore all the stuff about 'a new fourth class of electronic component': there are loads of interesting weird electronic devices which aren't resistors, capacitors or inductors. What matters is what the memristor does, how it does it and whether it's going to be actually useful.
What it does is simply put: it has a resistance to electrical current, but as you put current through it that resistance changes. Take the current away, and it sticks. Come back some time later, and you can read the old state: it's an analogue memory circuit.
How it works is beguilingly simple. Titanium dioxide is a poor conductor of electricity, with one interesting twist: it changes its conductivity when it encounters oxygen - in fact, it's used in oxygen detectors. The more oxygen, the worse the conductivity.
Take a chunk of titanium dioxide - which has a crystal structure based around two oxygen atoms for every titanium. Arrange for some of the chunk to have holes in its crystal lattice where the oxygen should be. More holes - less oxygen - lower resistance.
The interesting thing is, when you pass a current through the substrate, the holes move across - reducing the overall resistance. Reverse the current flow, and they move back, bringing the resistance back up again. Not too dissimilar with the way that charges move around a semiconductor, but because the flow is ionic, the condition of the device stays constant when the motive force goes.
For a memory circuit, you pass current one way for a zero, the other for a one. That leaves the memristor in a high or low conductivity state. Come back later and measure the resistance, and you can read it back. (Yes, you at the back, measuring resistance does involve passing a current through the memristor and thus changing its state. Use alternating current, and you can easily leave it as you found it).
Sounds simple. So how come it took so long to find? Turns out that it only becomes a significant effect at nanotech scales: you need to get down to the nanometres to be able to spot it happening.
The really exciting thing -- assuming that I haven't missed anything: haven't seen the Nature paper yet -- is that this is pretty much a plug-in-and-go component for existing techniques. HP already has the nanowire crossbar technology that's necessary to turn the memristor into a memory array, and the business of putting down carefully tuned layers of chemicals; well, that's what the semiconductor industry's all about.
So not only does the memristor seem like a simple, effective and useful innovation that works in a reasonably clear way, it's within sight of the finishing line already.
Lots more on this to come.
Wednesday 7 May 2008, 12:15 PM
WiMAX USA: $3.2 billon and counting...
After much secret dealing and many, many rumours, potential alliances and posturing, WiMAX is finally getting going in the USA. The Wall Street Journal is saying that Sprint Nextel and Clearwire's joint venture is finally shaping up, with a billion from Intel, a billion and change from cable company Comcast, half a billion from Google and a bit over half a billion from Time Warner Cable - oh, and a hundred million from Bright House Networks. The service will have broadband and voice, and be sold by cable companies under their own names.
You'll notice that Sprint's Xohm idea is absent - this was the great idea that gadgets would sprout WiMAX and use it to talk to each other and the Internet. I never got any good answers about how that would actually work - it looks good on PowerPoint until you start asking about how the accounting, billing, usability and security would hang together when you have to start doing things like adding your new digital SLR to the network.
Also absent, I fear, is any hope of the darn thing making money. The backers are an unholy alliance of people doing it because they're annoyed at not having a slice of mobile and are scared of where that lack will lead. These are sensible emotions, but the response is not: the chances of that lot agreeing on anything beyond the colour of the boardroom wallpaper are slim, especially when (as will happen) cash gets tight before the network starts to make money. The amount of investment needed to create an entire industry capable of taking on the GSM/3G monster is orders of magnitude greater than the figures mentioned above, and there won't be time to grow it organically before LTE turns up in its finery.
GSM has an installed base of half the world. There is a linear, credible and largely proved roadmap from $10 handsets to multi-megabit broadband and beyond. Yesterday, I travelled 400 miles on a train using GSM-based wireless broadband that was so cheap that the railway company could afford to give it away - and it worked, as it's worked for years now.
I know the US is a bit behind on this sort of thing, but imagining that this confers some sort of magic shield from the global dynamics of wireless broadband is as daft as splurging billions on an international satellite telephone network because the US cellular companies couldn't make roaming work.
Clearwire should take its investors money and blow it on hiring the state of Montana for a month-long, all-comers, free rock festival with an on-site brewery. Fly The Who in on jetpacks. Everyone will have a lot more fun and then we can all get on with the rest of our lives. And I bet the ROI will be better.
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