- LTE Weaknesses (PDF) — ShmooCon talk about how weak LTE is: a lot of unencrypted exchanges between handset and basestation, cheap and easy to fake up a basestation.
- Analyzo — Find and Compare the Best Tools for your Startup it claims. We’re in an age of software surplus: more projects, startups, apps, and tools than we can keep in our heads. There’s a place for curated lists, which is why every week brings a new one.
- How to Keep the NSA Out — NSA’s head of Tailored Access Operations (aka attacking other countries) gives some generic security advice, and some interesting glimpses. “Don’t assume a crack is too small to be noticed, or too small to be exploited,” he said. If you do a penetration test of your network and 97 things pass the test but three esoteric things fail, don’t think they don’t matter. Those are the ones the NSA, and other nation-state attackers will seize on, he explained. “We need that first crack, that first seam. And we’re going to look and look and look for that esoteric kind of edge case to break open and crack in.”
- The End of Big Data — future fiction by James Bridle.
"fiction" entries
Four short links: 29 January 2016
LTE Security, Startup Tools, Security Tips, and Data Fiction
Four short links: 17 December 2015
Structured Image Concepts, Google's SDN, Lightbulb DeDRMing, and EFF SF
- Visual Genome — a data set, a knowledge base, an ongoing effort to connect structured image concepts to language.
- Google’s Software Defined Networking — [What was the biggest risk you faced rolling out the network? …] we were breaking the fate-sharing principle—which is to say we were putting ourselves in a situation where either the controller could fail without the switch failing, or the switch could fail without the controller failing. That generally leads to big problems in distributed computing, as many people learned the hard way once remote procedure calls became a dominant paradigm.
- Philips Backtrack on Lightbulb DRM — In view of the sentiment expressed by our customers, we have decided to reverse the software upgrade so that lights from other brands continue to work as they did before with the Philips Hue system.
- Pwning Tomorrow — EFF Publishes SF Anthology. You can expect liberties and freedoms to feature.
Four short links: 28 May 2015
Messaging and Notifications, Game Postmortem, Recovering Robots, and Ethical AI
- Internet Trends 2015 (PDF) — Mary Meeker’s preso. Messaging + Notifications = Key Layers of Every Meaningful Mobile App, Messaging Leaders Aiming to Create Cross-Platform Operating Systems That Are Context-Persistent Communications Hubs for More & More Services. This year’s deck feels more superficial, less surprising than in years past.
- When the Land Goes Under the Sea — As it turns out: People really despise being told to not replay the game. Almost universally, the reaction to that was a kernel of unhappiness amidst mostly positive reviews. In retrospect, including that note was a mistake for a number of reasons. My favorite part of game postmortems is what the designers learned about how people approach experiences.
- Damage Recovery Algorithm for Robots (IEEE) — This illustrates how it’s possible to endow just about any robot with resiliency via this algorithm, as long as it’s got enough degrees of freedom to enable adaptive movement. Because otherwise the Terminators will just stop when we shoot them.
- The Counselor — short fiction with ethics, AI, and how good things become questionable.
Four short links: 4 May 2015
Silicon Valley Primer, GraphQL Intro, Quantum Steps, and Complex Systems
- Silicon Valley Primer — a short but interesting precis of what made the Valley great, with stories of the nobility. From a historian. All these new people pouring into what had been an agricultural region meant that it was possible to create a business environment around the needs of new companies coming up, rather than adapting an existing business culture to accommodate the new industries. In what would become a self-perpetuating cycle, everything from specialized law firms, recruiting operations and prototyping facilities; to liberal stock option plans; to zoning laws; to community college course offerings developed to support a tech-based business infrastructure.
- Introduction to GraphQL — We believe that GraphQL represents a novel way of structuring the client-server contract. Servers publish a type system specific to their application, and GraphQL provides a unified language to query data within the constraints of that type system. That language allows product developers to express data requirements in a form natural to them: a declarative and hierarchal one. The nightmare of the ad hoc API morass is a familiar one …
- Critical Steps to Building First Quantum Computer — The IBM breakthroughs, described in the April 29 issue of the journal Nature Communications, show for the first time the ability to detect and measure the two types of quantum errors (bit-flip and phase-flip) that will occur in any real quantum computer. Until now, it was only possible to address one type of quantum error or the other, but never both at the same time. This is a necessary step toward quantum error correction, which is a critical requirement for building a practical and reliable large-scale quantum computer.
- Five Short Stories About the Life and Times of Ideas (Nautilus) — In the following five short chapters, David Krakauer, an evolutionary theorist, and president elect of the Santa Fe Institute, haven of complex systems research, examines five facets of chain reactions, each typifying how ideas spread through science and culture. Together they tell a story of how the ideas that define humanity arise, when and why they die or are abandoned, the surprising possibilities for continued evolution, and our responsibility to nurture thought that might enlighten our future.
Four short links: 17 July 2013
Augmented Reality Books, Open Source Success Patterns, Kernel Kourtesy, and Speculative Fiction
- Hideout — augmented reality books. (via Hacker News)
- Patterns and Practices for Open Source Software Success (Stephen Walli) — Successful FOSS projects grow their communities outward to drive contribution to the core project. To build that community, a project needs to develop three onramps for software users, developers, and contributors, and ultimately commercial contributors.
- How to Act on LKML — Linus’s tantrums are called out by one of the kernel developers in a clear and positive way.
- Beyond the Coming Age of Networked Matter (BoingBoing) — Bruce Sterling’s speculative short story, written for the Institute For The Future. “Stephen Wolfram was right about everything. Wolfram is the greatest physicist since Isaac Newton. Since Plato, even. Our meager, blind physics is just a subset of Wolfram’s new-kind-of- science metaphysics. He deserves fifty Nobels.” “How many people have read that Wolfram book?” I asked him. “I hear that his book is, like, huge, cranky, occult, and it drives readers mad.” “I read the forbidden book,” said Crawferd.
Four short links: 19 September 2012
Scholar boarding, Javascript macros, Nerd Raptures, Preserved Conversations
- /r/Scholar — Reddit board for tracking down research articles of interest.
- sweet.js (GitHub) — macros for Javascript. (via Brendan Eich)
- The Rapture of the Nerds (Charlie Stoss, Cory Doctorow) — this is the HTML version of the book, which is also available for purchase, and is released under a CC-A-NC-ND license.
- Conversations Network Closes Down — The remaining assets of the Conversations Network (cash and intellectual property) will be acquired by the Internet Archive, another U.S. 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. All existing programs will be moved to the Internet Archive where the world will be able to continue to listen to them for free. (via Jon Udell)
Four short links: 18 September 2012
Rapture of the Nerds, Amazon Maps API, 3D Printer Queues, and the New Aesthetic
- The Rapture of the Nerds (Charlie Stoss, Cory Doctorow) — available for download and purchase under a CC-A-NC-ND license.
- Amazon Maps API — if there is an API layer of general use to developers, Amazon will build it. They want to be the infrastructure for the web. Tim identified “the Internet Operating System”, and Amazon figured out how to put a pricetag on every syscall.
- Hoektronics — open source 3d printer queue management. (via Daniel Suarez)
- The Machine Gaze (Will Wiles) — Converging, leapfrogging technologies evoke new emotional responses within us, responses that do not yet have names. (via James Bridle)
Short Fiction Renaissance Enabled by Digital
Gary Gibson makes a good observation about the forms of fiction enabled by e-readers. From The Digitalist: There's a potentially very positive aspect to ebooks in relation to short fiction I hadn't previously considered. Publishers rarely produce collections of short fiction in meaningful numbers any more because they long ago ceased to be cost-effective; much of my early reading…
Open Question: Will Genre Fiction Die Off With Traditional Readers?
Is genre fiction on a downhill slide, or, will today's teen eventually gravitate toward long-form storytelling? Please share your thoughts.