"copyright" entries

Four short links: 19 April 2016

Four short links: 19 April 2016

Security Controls, Dataflow Checkups, Fair Use Wins, and Internet Moderators

  1. Security Controls for Computer Systems — Declassified 1970s DoD security document is still relevant today. (via Ars Technica)
  2. Checking Up on Dataflow Analyses — notable for a very easy-to-follow introduction to what dataflow analysis is. Long after the chatbot startups have flamed out, formal methods research in CS will be a key part of the next wave of software where code writes code.
  3. Fair Use Triumphs in Supreme Court (Ars Technica) — a headline I never thought I’d see in my lifetime. The Supreme Court let stand the lower court opinion that rejected the writers’ claims. That decision today means Google Books won’t have to close up shop or ask book publishers for permission to scan. In the long run, the ruling could inspire other large-scale digitization projects.
  4. The Secret History of Internet Moderators (The Verge) — the horrors and trauma of the early folks who developed content moderation systems (filtering violence, porn, child abuse, etc.) for Facebook, YouTube, and other user-contributed-content sites. It’s still a quiet and under-supported area of most startups. Some of them now meet roughly monthly for dinner, and I’m kinda glad I’m not around the table for that conversation!

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Four short links: 25 March 2016

Four short links: 25 March 2016

Intro to Statistics, Automatic Lip Reading, Outdoor Range Finding for $10, and Wrongful Takedowns

  1. Intro Statistics with Randomization and Simulation — free PDF download as well as book for purchase. (via Flowing Data)
  2. Automated Lip Reading Invented — press release, but interesting topic. The research will be presented at the International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP) in Shanghai.
  3. A Smartphone-based Laser Distance Sensor for Outdoor Environments (PDF) — We present a low-cost, smartphone-based planar laser distance sensor design for outdoor use with 6 cm accuracy at 5 meters, 30 Hz scan rate, and 0.1 degree resolution over the field of view. The cost of the hardware additions to the off-the-shelf smartphone used in our prototype is under $50.
  4. Internet Archive Seeks to Defend Against Wrongful TakedownsIn its submission, the Archive goes to some lengths to highlight differences between those engaging in commercial piracy and those who seek to preserve and share cultural heritage. As a result, the context in which a user posts content online should be considered before attempting to determine whether an infringement has taken place. This, the organization says, poses problems for the “staydown” demands gaining momentum with copyright holders.
Four short links: 14 March 2016

Four short links: 14 March 2016

Measure What Matters, Broken Laws, Password Recovery Questions, and 3D Object Tracking

  1. What Thomas Hardy Taught MeIn educational research, perhaps the greatest danger lies in thinking “that which I cannot measure is not real.” The disruption fetishists have amplified this danger, now evincing the attitude “teaching that cannot be said to lead to the immediate acquisition of rote, mechanical skills has no value.” But absolutely every aspect of my educational journey — as a student, as a teacher, and as a researcher — demonstrates the folly of this approach to learning. (via Dan Meyer)
  2. Why Anti-Money Laundering Laws and Poorly Designed Copyright Laws Are Similar and Should be Revised (Joi Ito) — Just like with the Internet, weaknesses in networks like the blockchain propagate to countries and regions where privacy risks to users could cause significant risks to human rights workers, journalists, or anyone who questions authority. The conversation on creating new AML and KYC laws for new financial systems like bitcoin and blockchain needs to be a global one.
  3. Secrets, Lies, and Account Recovery: Lessons from the Use of Personal Knowledge Questions at Google — Adrian Colyer summarizes a paper from Google. Using a crowdsourcing service, the authors asked 1,000 users to answer the ‘Favourite Food’ and ‘Father’s middle name’ questions. This took less than a day and cost $100. […] Using a single guess, it turns out, you have a 19.7% chance of guessing an English-speaking users’ answer to the favourite food.
  4. Clever MEMS 3D Object Tracking — early Oculus engineer has invented a nifty way to track a tagged object in 3D space. Worth reading for the description of how it works.
Four short links: 16 December 2015

Four short links: 16 December 2015

Face Matching, Engineering Rewrites, Public Domain Illustrations, and Robotic Wrapup

  1. Face Director — Disney software to match faces between takes. We demonstrate that our method can synthesize visually believable performances with applications in emotion transition, performance correction, and timing control.
  2. Move Fast and Fix Things — blow by blow of an engineering rewrite of some key functionality at GitHub, interesting from a “oh so that’s how they do it” point of view (if blow-by-blow engineering rewrites qualify as “interesting” to you).
  3. Old Book Illustrations — public domain book illustrations, tagged and searchable. Yes, like Font Awesome of engraving.
  4. The State of Robotics for 2015 (TechCrunch) — nice summary/wrapup of what’s out there now.
Four short links: 11 December 2015

Four short links: 11 December 2015

Probabilistic Algorithms, Copyright-Free, AI Hardware, and Autonomous Vehicle Policy

  1. Real-world Probabilistic Algorithms (Tyler McMullen) — This article addresses two types of probabilistic algorithms: those that explicitly introduce randomness through a rand() call, and those that convert input data into a uniform distribution to achieve a similar effect.
  2. Class of 2016those whose works will, on 1st January 2016, be entering the public domain in many countries around the world. Le Corbusier, T.S. Eliot, Malcolm X, Bela Bartok, Winston Churchill, and W. Somerset Maugham among others. (Which person in which country depends on copyright term. Not for you, America. Nor us after TPP)
  3. Facebook to Open Source AI Hardware DesignBig Sur is our newest Open Rack-compatible hardware designed for AI computing at a large scale. Eight GPUs, and designs to be released through Open Compute Project.
  4. Driving Changes (PDF) — policy impacts, benefits, and considerations for autonomous vehicles. Written for Toronto but applicable to many more cities. (via David Ticoll)
Four short links: 17 November 2015

Four short links: 17 November 2015

Remix Contest, Uber Asymmetry, Language Learning, and Continuous Delivery

  1. GIF It Up — very clever remix campaign to use heritage content—Friday is your last day to enter this year’s contest, so get creating! My favourite.
  2. Uber’s Drivers: Information Asymmetries and Control in Dynamic WorkOur conclusions are two-fold: first, that the information asymmetries produced by Uber’s system are fundamental to its ability to structure indirect control over its workers; and second, that Uber relies heavily on the evolving rhetoric of the algorithm to justify these information asymmetries to drivers, riders, as well as regulators and outlets of public opinion.
  3. ANNABELL — unsupervised language learning using artificial neural networks, install your own four year old. The paper explains how.
  4. Spinnakeran open source, multi-cloud continuous delivery platform for releasing software changes with high velocity and confidence.
Four short links: 28 October 2015

Four short links: 28 October 2015

DRM-Breaking Broken, IT Failures, Social Graph Search, and Dataviz Interview

  1. Librarian of Congress Grants Limited DRM-Breaking Rights (Cory Doctorow) — The Copyright Office said you will be able to defeat locks on your car’s electronics, provided: You wait a year first (the power to impose waiting times on exemptions at these hearings is not anywhere in the statute, is without precedent, and has no basis in law); You only look at systems that do not interact with your car’s entertainment system (meaning that car makers can simply merge the CAN bus and the entertainment system and get around the rule altogether); Your mechanic does not break into your car — only you are allowed to do so. The whole analysis is worth reading—this is not a happy middle-ground; it’s a mess. And remember: there are plenty of countries without even these exemptions.
  2. Lessons from a Decade of IT Failures (IEEE Spectrum) — full of cautionary tales like, Note: No one has an authoritative set of financials on ECSS. That was made clear in the U.S. Senate investigation report, which expressed frustration and outrage that the Air Force couldn’t tell it what was spent on what, when it was spent, nor even what ECSS had planned to spend over time. Scary stories to tell children at night.
  3. Unicorn: A System for Searching the Social Graph (Facebook) — we describe the data model and query language supported by Unicorn, which is an online, in-memory social graph-aware indexing system designed to search trillions of edges between tens of billions of users and entities on thousands of commodity servers. Unicorn is based on standard concepts in information retrieval, but it includes features to promote results with good social proximity. It also supports queries that require multiple round-trips to leaves in order to retrieve objects that are more than one edge away from source nodes.
  4. Alberto Cairo InterviewSo, what really matters to me is not the intention of the visualization – whether you created it to deceive or with the best of intentions; what matters is the result: if the public is informed or the public is misled. In terms of ethics, I am a consequentialist – meaning that what matters to me ethically is the consequences of our actions, not so much the intentions of our actions.
Four short links: 12 October 2015

Four short links: 12 October 2015

Unattended Robots, Replicable Economics, Deep Learning Learnings, and TPP Problems

  1. Acquiring Object Experiences at Scale — software to let a robot examine a pile of objects, unattended overnight.
  2. Economics Apparently Not Replicable (PDF) — We successfully replicate the key qualitative result of 22 of 67 papers (33%) without contacting the authors. Excluding the six papers that use confidential data and the two papers that use software we do not possess, we replicate 29 of 59 papers (49%) with assistance from the authors. Because we are able to replicate less than half of the papers in our sample even with help from the authors, we assert that economics research is usually not replicable.
  3. 26 Things I Learned in the Deep Learning Summer School20. When Frederick Jelinek and his team at IBM submitted one of the first papers on statistical machine translation to COLING in 1988, they got the following anonymous review: The validity of a statistical (information theoretic) approach to MT has indeed been recognized, as the authors mention, by Weaver as early as 1949. And was universally recognized as mistaken by 1950 (cf. Hutchins, MT – Past, Present, Future, Ellis Horwood, 1986, p. 30ff and references therein). The crude force of computers is not science. The paper is simply beyond the scope of COLING.
  4. The Final Leaked TPP Text is All That We Feared (EFF) — If you dig deeper, you’ll notice that all of the provisions that recognize the rights of the public are non-binding, whereas almost everything that benefits rightsholders is binding.
Four short links: 10 September 2015

Four short links: 10 September 2015

Decentralised Software, Slow Chemistry, Spectrum Maps, and RF Interference

  1. Popcorn Time — interview with the creator. All the elements we used already existed and had done so for a long time. But nobody had put them together in an interface that talked to the user in a nice way, said Abad. Very Anonymous approach to software: Who are you going to sue? The first? The second? The third? I did the design. Was it illegal? I didn’t link the various parts together. There is no comprehensive overview of who did what. For we don’t have any business. We don’t have any headquarters or a general manager.
  2. Slow Chemistry (Nature) — “lazy man’s chemistry”: let a mix of solid reactants sit around undisturbed while they spontaneously transform themselves. More properly called slow chemistry, or even just ageing, the approach requires few, if any, hazardous solvents and uses minimal energy. If planned properly, it also consumes all the reagents in the mix, so that there is no waste and no need for chemical-intensive purification.
  3. Mapping the Spectrum in the Mission — SDR scanner to make a map of spectrum activity.
  4. Electronic Noise is Drowning Out the Internet of Things (IEEE Spectrum) — (paraphrasing) increases deployment costs, decreases battery life, creates interference, ruins policies of spectrum allocation, is expensive to trace, and almost impossible stop.
Four short links: 5 August 2015

Four short links: 5 August 2015

Facebook Video, Lost Links, Regulatory Push, and LLVM Teases

  1. Theft, Lies, and Facebook Video (Medium) — inexcusable that Facebook, a company with a market cap of $260 BILLION, launched their video platform with no system to protect independent rights holders. It wouldn’t be surprising if Facebook was working on a solution now, which they can roll out conveniently after having made their initial claims at being the biggest, most important thing in video. In the words of Gillian Welch, “I wanna do right, but not right now.
  2. The Web We Have to SaveNearly every social network now treats a link just the same as it treats any other object — the same as a photo, or a piece of text — instead of seeing it as a way to make that text richer. You’re encouraged to post one single hyperlink and expose it to a quasi-democratic process of liking and plussing and hearting: Adding several links to a piece of text is usually not allowed. Hyperlinks are objectivized, isolated, stripped of their powers.
  3. California Regulator Pushing for All Cars to be Electric (Bloomberg) — Nichols really does intend to force au­tomakers to eventually sell nothing but electrics. In an interview in June at her agency’s heavy-duty-truck laboratory in downtown Los Angeles, it becomes clear that Nichols, at age 70, is pushing regulations today that could by midcentury all but banish the internal combustion engine from California’s famous highways. “If we’re going to get our transportation system off petroleum,” she says, “we’ve got to get people used to a zero-emissions world, not just a little-bit-better version of the world they have now.” How long until the same article is written, but about driverless cars?
  4. LLVM for Grad Students — fast intro to why LLVM is interesting. LLVM is a great compiler, but who cares if you don’t do compilers research? A compiler infrastructure is useful whenever you need to do stuff with programs.