I do a lot of shopping online. Actually I do most of my shopping online. In Thailand the customs people can be very diligent about charging import duties. In a country like Australia you can order up to a value of $1000 before any taxes are applied. I do a lot of my shopping via eBay but rather than bid I normally find the by now price is good enough. I have bid on and won items on eBay but for the most part I don't bother.
A friend of mine recently pointed out to me a couple of new style bidding sites. The way they work is that you buy a block of bids and depending on the site it will cost you one dollar or $.60 to make a bid. In the last seconds of the bidding cycle each bid will add 10 seconds to the remaining time or something like this. The items being sold, like an iPad, do so for quite low prices. Sounds like a wonderful system doesn't it?
Now step back for a few moments and think about how the people running this kind of site make their money. They sell blocks of bids which are used to bid against others for the same item. At the end of the bidding cycle when the process is more frantic each bid close to the endpoint adds time allowing others to slip in a bid. Considerate and $800 iPad. During the bidding process, earlier on, there might be 10 or 20 bids, which is $10-$20. Near the end of the cycle if there are say 50 people bidding for the same item and they have each decided they're willing to spend $20 in the bidding process that's $1000 before a successful bid and the sellers have made a profit.
For lower cost items or items that are very popular if you scale up the number of bidders suddenly someone is making a lot of money per item because each bid costs money to make. Yes, I wish I'd thought of this one to. It's a subset of the gambling site where you're making a bet to see if you win. Unlike eBay if you're not successful you don't lose any money. In this system everybody who was unsuccessful has spent money ranging from one dollar to the amount they were willing to part with in an effort to win the product.
Like a betting site there is no way of knowing how fair the system being used is. If someone has the algorithm then they will be able to win more easily. The site itself could be putting in some false bids at the end of the process to prolong the bidding. They could also manipulate the occasional winner for a very low bid. As my friend pointed out on the sites he visits they have a checking status at the end of the bid cycle that last a few seconds this is where manipulation logic could be placed. Can you get an item for a low price? The answer is yes but the price is the final bid plus all of the bids you've made to win that bit and all of those used missing out before you were successful.
At a recent Black Hat conference security consultant Tom Parker told participants at the Stuxnet worm writers had made a number of mistakes. He suggested that the malware was detected early and spread further than the writers had intended. He described the command and control mechanisms found in the worm to be in elegant and unsecure because control commands transmitted in clear, i.e. not encrypted. He also called the code obfuscation techniques "lame". According to Parker two teams may have been involved. The first a skilled group of Black Hat programmers who worked on the underlying code and a second team, less skilled, who turned it into a weapon. He also expressed the opinion that a Western state was not involved because they would have done a better job in packaging the payload.
I think Mr. Parker may be one of those individuals who likes to sit back and criticise others but has never written a line of malware in their lives, I could be wrong. Most analysts who looked at the Stuxnet worm consider it to be an exceptional example of using malware to bring about a desired result. It was discovered by accident not by those it was targeted but by an equipment supplier. It managed to work for about 18 months before it was discovered. I consider this a huge success given that most malware is detected inside a week. It did what it set out to do and if we could ask its writers I suspect that it performed far better and for far longer than anticipated.
Industry News
Do you remember the old Duke Nukem game? On 3 May the Duke Nukem Forever product will finally arrive on US shelves. This has been a long time coming and there will be some high expectations as to content, playability and quality.
Leica has a new digital SLR camera. It uses a 37.5 megapixel CCD in a medium format camera. Leica claim that the product is devoid of all optical and chromatic aberrations and requires no software correction. That is a pretty bold claim which at three times the price of say the Nikon D3 ex is one that I won't be able to check.
When it comes to computer memory what we all want is DRAM that behaves like flash memory and flash memory that behaves like DRAM. In other words fast computer memory that remembers what it was doing when the power goes off. Some clever types at the North Carolina State University have come up with double floating gate FET devices that could lead to instant on computers and power saving techniques that shut down idle memory. I'm not sure when we are likely to see them in our computers but thank goodness there are clever people still working to give us better technology in the future.
According to the pundits 2011 will show a reviving IT job market. Here's what I think they're wrong. America's recovery, if it does so this year, will be very slow. Pretty much the whole of Europe is in trouble. China has announced a growth, or what they define as growth, has slowed. China buys raw materials from many nations including Australia. Without sales there is no manufacturing and with the major buyers in trouble themselves the future looks poor for the buying figures this year. So, if China is not buying or manufacturing or selling them those that depend on China for their growth, e.g. Australia were not present a strong economy. In weak economies particularly in Asia when times get lean IT suffers. As an aside Italy is the next country in Europe to watch negative growth.
In movie news, just because the computer-generated graphics are so cool, there is a rumour from no less than Keanu Reeves that two more Matrix movies are in the works. I for one can't wait.
Right after I’ve bought my new Lumix Panasonic has released the DMC-TZ20. The upgrade provides full 1080i video capability and a 14 megapixel sensor. 16 times optical zoom providing the equivalent of a 24-384 mm lens. There are a few software upgrades and some extra features that are well documented on the Panasonic site.
