Book titles are meant to be provacative. During the dot-com boom when no company that had the word “internet” in its business plan could go wrong, two authors published Dow 36000: The new strategy for profiting from the coming rise in the stock market. This widely optimistic prediction became a Business Week best-seller. But the authors’ optimism was topped by another book called Dow 40000. That was still doom-and-gloom compared to Dow 100000 which trounced all competitors in the Business Week review aptly titled Talk about throwing the bull. Eight years after the bubble burst, the authors continue to provide amusement. Today the Dow Jones index hovers around 12750, about one third of the conservative 36K estimate while the book itself managed a whopping one-and-half start from a total of three reviewers on Barnes and Noble website.

Yet one equally outrageous prediction may be coming reality faster than expected. In February 2006 Steven Leeb and Glen Strathy published The coming economic collapse: how you can profit when oil costs $200 a barrel. Leeb is no stranger to playing the virtual Casandra when it comes to apocalyptic renditions of the peak oil theory. One year earlier he had co-authored Oil factor: protect yourself and profit from the coming energy, so the newer publication could be considered variation on a theme. But prominently committing to a specific price point in the title is a bold move– and as the authors of the Dow 36000 theory discovered, one that can make you look foolish quickly.

At the time light crude oil traded around $70, roughly where it had settled after the supply crunch following Hurricane Katrina. That was already considered exorbitant, prompting consumer indignation and posturing from aspiring politicians eager to call oil companies on the carpet for alleged price-gouging. Of all place in the US where cheap oil and even cheaper gasoline are considered foundational pillars, the prediction that this price would triple not as a temporary spike but a stable long-term inevitability would have been heresy.

Crude oil has recently cleared $125/barrel. This is not simply seasonal variation and the much maligned summer driving season. Between May 2007 and May 2008 alone it has more than doubled. The long standing weakness of the US dollar has played a part. But Goldman Sachs predicted the situation is not about to improve: one report recently set a target of $150-$200 barrel. For the authors of the oil-collapse book, it may be time for a revised second edition because their predictions will be given a reality check much sooner than expected.

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Security often makes for a convenient excuse for hidden agendas. An article from Gaming Today looks at the possibility of officially sanctioned modifications to the gaming console XBox 360 and concludes on a pessimistic note. Quoting a group manager from the XNA initiative:

“I’m a little disturbed when I think about other systems and people using what we call native code – code that goes right down to the metal – and then allowing people to run script mods on top of that without the right security measures. It could be really dangerous.”

This is no doubt a thinly-veiled reference to the Sony Playstation 3, which makes it very easy to install a different operating system: it’s there on the UI. Is that a dangerous security vulnerability? To answer that question, a different question must be posed: security of what? Dangerous to which persons?

It is well-known that one of the reasons for trying to lock down the hardware is that the consoles are sold at a loss. The revenue from games and additional services is expected to recoup that loss and move into the black on the balance sheet. If users could install Linux on the console, then they would have simply acquired a very capable general purpose computer on the cheap and opted out of the gaming ecosystem. This is a security problem all right, but it is the security of the revenue stream. It is not about user data.

Once that is acknowledged, the discussion quickly turns to the other bogey-man: cheating at online games. This is about to become the fifth horseman of the digital apocalypse, riding the coat-tails of rampant P2P content piracy horse. Stopping piracy was one of the arguments for closing down the open PC architecture and replacing it with the Trusted Computing Group vision where remote attestation capabilities would force users to run the “approved” software. Preventing cheating at online games falls into the same category and has also been used as an example for the benefits of attestation. If all the users in a multi-player game can prove they are running the official game software– instead of one tweaked and perhaps modified with cheating aids– the playing field is leveled. The same argument could be made in favor of locking down gaming consoles. Unofficial software can give the player an unfair edge; by design, each player’s computer receives a lot of information that the game keeps hidden, such as the location of other players. A modified client would not respect the rules of the game and could “see through walls” so to speak. Gary McGraw has done a lot of work on exploiting online games such as on Second Life. This is an example of what happens when game modifications are easy (because the software runs on PC) and the designers failed to appreciate the fact that user’s machine is outside the trust boundary.

This becomes the last refuge for arguing that modifications to a console pose a security threat. But even this is qualified: a user modifying their console at home is not a threat to the gamer ego of anyone else until they connect to a multi-player game. In that case the problem could have been framed as detecting modded consoles as opposed to preventing modifications in the first place, which also happens to be an easier problem.

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