- The Secrets of Surveillance Capitalism — The assault on behavioral data is so sweeping that it can no longer be circumscribed by the concept of privacy and its contests. […] First, the push for more users and more channels, services, devices, places, and spaces is imperative for access to an ever-expanding range of behavioral surplus. Users are the human nature-al resource that provides this free raw material. Second, the application of machine learning, artificial intelligence, and data science for continuous algorithmic improvement constitutes an immensely expensive, sophisticated, and exclusive 21st century “means of production.” Third, the new manufacturing process converts behavioral surplus into prediction products designed to predict behavior now and soon. Fourth, these prediction products are sold into a new kind of meta-market that trades exclusively in future behavior. The better (more predictive) the product, the lower the risks for buyers, and the greater the volume of sales. Surveillance capitalism’s profits derive primarily, if not entirely, from such markets for future behavior. (via Simon St Laurent)
- Thunder — Spark-driven analysis from Jupyter notebooks (open source).
- Hacking Mobile Phones Using 2D-Printed Fingerprints (PDF) — equipment costs less than $450, and all you need is a photo of the fingerprint. (like those of government employees stolen en masse last year)
- SSHKeyDistribut0r (Github) — A tool to automate key distribution with user authorization […] for sysop teams.
"biometrics" entries
Four short links: 9 March 2016
Surveillance Capitalism, Spark in Jupyter, Spoofing Fingerprints, and Distributing SSH Keys
Four short links: 15 April 2015
Facebook as Biometrics, Time Series Sequences, Programming Languages, and Oceanic Robots
- Facebook Biometrics Cache (Business Insider) — Facebook has been accused of violating the privacy of its users by collecting their facial data, according to a class-action lawsuit filed last week. This data-collection program led to its well-known automatic face-tagging service. But it also helped Facebook create “the largest privately held stash of biometric face-recognition data in the world,” the Courthouse News Service reports.
- The Clustering of Time Series Sequences is Meaningless (PDF) — Clustering of time series subsequences is meaningless. More concretely, clusters extracted from these time series are forced to obey a certain constraint that is pathologically unlikely to be satisfied by any data set, and because of this, the clusters extracted by any clustering algorithm are essentially random. While this constraint can be intuitively demonstrated with a simple illustration and is simple to prove, it has never appeared in the literature. We can justify calling our claim surprising since it invalidates the contribution of dozens of previously published papers. We will justify our claim with a theorem, illustrative examples, and a comprehensive set of experiments on reimplementations of previous work. From 2003, warning against sliding window techniques.
- Toolkits for the Mind (MIT TR) — Programming–language designer Guido van Rossum, who spent seven years at Google and now works at Dropbox, says that once a software company gets to be a certain size, the only way to stave off chaos is to use a language that requires more from the programmer up front. “It feels like it’s slowing you down because you have to say everything three times,” van Rossum says. Amen!
- Robots Roam Earth’s Imperiled Oceans (Wired) — It’s six feet long and shaped like an airliner, with two wings and a tail fin, and bears the message, “OCEANOGRAPHIC INSTRUMENT PLEASE DO NOT DISTURB.” All caps considered, though, it’s a more innocuous epigram than the one on a drone I saw back at the dock: “Not a weapon — Science Instrument.”
What Do the New iPhones Mean For Developers?
Sometimes earth changing moments come in fingertip-sized packages
Well, the media feeding frenzy that is an Apple product release press conference is over, and the whelmingness is definitely on the under, rather than over side. Part of the lack of drama is that, these days, it’s almost impossible for Apple to keep anything under wraps. There are just too many hands in the supply chain, too many carriers to coordinate a launch with, and too many opportunities for a stealthy cameraphone snapshot of a box or component. Add in patent and FCC filings, and your barber can tell you what’s going to be unveiled, at least a week or less from the event.
The convergence of biometrics, location and surveillance
Mary Haskett and Alex Kilpatrick examine biometrics in a surveillance society.
Future applications of biometrics promise increased security and convenience, but they could also dilute our expectations of privacy. In this interview, Where 2.0 speakers Mary Haskett and Alex Kilpatrick discuss what lies ahead in the biometrics world.