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"Internet" entries
AI Lecture, Programming Provocation, Packet Laws, and Infrared Photography
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Analogy as the Core of Cognition (YouTube) — a Douglas Hofstadter lecture at Stanford.
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Why Isn’t Programming Futuristic? (Ian Bicking) — delicious provocations for the future of programming languages.
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Border Check — visualisation of where your packet go, and the laws they pass through to get there.
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Pi Noir — infrared Raspberry Pi camera board. (via DIY Drones)
Flying Robot, State of Cyberspace, H.264, and Principal Component Analysis
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Insect-Inspired Collision-Resistant Robot — clever hack to make it stable despite bouncing off things.
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The Battle for Power on the Internet (Bruce Schneier) — the state of cyberspace. [M]ost of the time, a new technology benefits the nimble first. […] In other words, there will be an increasing time period during which nimble distributed powers can make use of new technologies before slow institutional powers can make better use of those technologies.
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Cisco’s H.264 Good News (Brendan Eich) — Cisco is paying the license fees for a particular implementation of H.264 to be used in open source software, enabling it to be the basis of web streaming video across all browsers (even the open source ones). It’s not as ideal a solution as it might sound.
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Principal Component Analysis for Dummies — This post will give a very broad overview of PCA, describing eigenvectors and eigenvalues (which you need to know about to understand it) and showing how you can reduce the dimensions of data using PCA. As I said it’s a neat tool to use in information theory, and even though the maths is a bit complicated, you only need to get a broad idea of what’s going on to be able to use it effectively.
The Internet of Americas, Pharma Pricey, Who's Watching, and Data Mining Course
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Bradley Manning and the Two Americas (Quinn Norton) — The first America built the Internet, but the second America moved onto it. And they both think they own the place now. The best explanation you’ll find for wtf is going on.
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Staggering Cost of Inventing New Drugs (Forbes) — $5BB to develop a new drug; and subject to an inverse-Moore’s law: A 2012 article in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery says the number of drugs invented per billion dollars of R&D invested has been cut in half every nine years for half a century.
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Who’s Watching You — (Tim Bray) threat modelling. Everyone should know this.
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Data Mining with Weka — learn data mining with the popular open source Weka platform.
Transit and Peering, Quick Web Interfaces, Open Source Licensing, and RC Roach
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Why YouTube Buffers (ArsTechnica) — When asked if ISPs are degrading Netflix and YouTube traffic to steer users toward their own video services, Crawford told Ars that “the very powerful eyeball networks in the US (and particularly Comcast and Time Warner Cable) have ample incentive and ability to protect the IP services in which they have economic interests. Their real goal, however, is simpler and richer. They have enormous incentives to build a moat around their high-speed data networks and charge for entry because data is a very high-margin (north of 95 percent for the cable companies), addictive, utility product over which they have local monopoly control. They have told Wall Street they will do this. Yes, charging for entry serves the same purposes as discrimination in favor of their own VOD [video-on-demand], but it is a richer and blunter proposition for them.”
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Ink — MIT-licensed interface kit for quick development of web interfaces, simple to use and expand on.
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Licensing in a Post-Copyright World — This article is opening up a bit of the history of Open Source software licensing, how it seems to change and what we could do to improve it. Caught my eye: Oracle that relicensed Berkeley DB from BSD to APGLv3 [… effectively changing] the effective license for 106 other packages to AGPLv3 as well.
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RC Cockroaches (Vine) — video from Dale Dougherty of Backyard Brains Bluetooth RoboRoach. (via Dale Dougherty)
Rules of the Internet, Bigness of the Data, Wifi ADCs, and Google Flirts with Client-Side Encryption
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Ten Rules of the Internet (Anil Dash) — they’re all candidates for becoming “Dash’s Law”. I like this one the most: When a company or industry is facing changes to its business due to technology, it will argue against the need for change based on the moral importance of its work, rather than trying to understand the social underpinnings.
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Data Storage by Vertical (Quartz) — The US alone is home to 898 exabytes (1 EB = 1 billion gigabytes)—nearly a third of the global total. By contrast, Western Europe has 19% and China has 13%. Legally, much of that data itself is property of the consumers or companies who generate it, and licensed to companies that are responsible for it. And in the US—a digital universe of 898 exabytes (1 EB = 1 billion gigabytes)—companies have some kind of liability or responsibility for 77% of all that data.
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x-OSC — a wireless I/O board that provides just about any software with access to 32 high-performance analogue/digital channels via OSC messages over WiFi. There is no user programmable firmware and no software or drivers to install making x-OSC immediately compatible with any WiFi-enabled platform. All internal settings can be adjusted using any web browser.
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Google Experimenting with Encrypting Google Drive (CNet) — If that’s the case, a government agency serving a search warrant or subpoena on Google would be unable to obtain the unencrypted plain text of customer files. But the government might be able to convince a judge to grant a wiretap order, forcing Google to intercept and divulge the user’s login information the next time the user types it in. Advertising depends on the service provider being able to read your data. Either your Drive’s contents aren’t valuable to Google advertising, or it won’t be a host-resistant encryption process.
Filmic Photogrammetry, Car APIs, Takedowns, and OpenCV for Processing
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Sifted — 7 minute animation set in a point cloud world, using photogrammetry in film-making. My brilliant cousin Ben wrote the software behind it. See this newspaper article and tv report for more.
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Vehicle Tech Out of Sync with Drivers’ Devices — Ford Motor Co. has its own system. Apple Inc. is working with one set of automakers to design an interface that works better with its iPhone line. Some of the same car companies and others have joined the Car Connectivity Consortium, which is working with the major Android phone brands to develop a different interface. FFS. “… you are changing your phone every other year, and the top-of-mind apps are continuously changing.” That’s why Chevrolet, Mini and some other automakers are starting to offer screens that mirror apps from a smartphone.
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Incentives in Notice and Takedown (PDF) — findings summarised in Blocking and Removing Illegal Child Sexual Content: Analysis from a Technical and Legal Perspective: financial institutions seemed to be relatively successful at removing phishing websites while it took on average 150 times longer to remove child pornography.
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OpenCV for Processing (Github) — OpenCV for Processing is based on the official OpenCV Java bindings. Therefore, in addition to a suite of friendly functions for all the basics, you can also do anything that OpenCV can do. And a book from O’Reilly, and it’ll be CC-licensed. All is win. (via Greg Borenstein)
Mobile Numbers, SSL Best Practices, Free and Open No More, and PRISM Budget
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Mobile Email Numbers (Luke Wroblewski) — 79% use their smartphone for reading email, a higher percentage than those who used it for making calls and in Feb ’12, mobile email overtook webmail client use.
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ProperSSL — a series of best practices for establishing SSL connections between clients and servers.
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How We Are Losing the War for the Free and Open Internet (Sue Gardner) — The internet is evolving into a private-sector space that is primarily accountable to corporate shareholders rather than citizens. It’s constantly trying to sell you stuff. It does whatever it wants with your personal information. And as it begins to be regulated or to regulate itself, it often happens in a clumsy and harmful way, hurting the internet’s ability to function for the benefit of the public.
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The Amazingly Low Cost of PRISM — breaks down costs to store and analyse the data gathered from major Internet companies. Total hardware cost per year for 3.75 EB of data storage: €168M
Hi-Res Long-Distance, Robot Ants, Data Liberation, and Network Neutrality
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Millimetre-Accuracy 3D Imaging From 1km Away (The Register) — With further development, Heriot-Watt University Research Fellow Aongus McCarthy says, the system could end up both portable and with a range of up to 10 Km. See the paper for the full story.
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Robot Ants With Pheromones of Light (PLoS Comp Biol) — see also the video. (via IEEE Spectrum’s AI blog)
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tabula — open source tool for liberating data tables trapped inside PDF files. (via Source)
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There’s No Economic Imperative to Reconsider an Open Internet (SSRN) — The debate on the neutrality of Internet access isn’t new, and if its intensity varies over time, it has for a long while tainted the relationship between Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and Online Service Providers (OSPs). This paper explores the economic relationship between these two types of players, examines in laymen’s terms how the traffic can be routed efficiently and the associated cost of that routing. The paper then assesses various arguments in support of net discrimination to conclude that there is no threat to the internet economy such that reconsidering something as precious as an open internet would be necessary. (via Hamish MacEwan)
Visualizing City Data, Gigabits Unrealized, Use Open Source, and Bad IPs Cluster
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VizCities Dev Diary — step-by-step recount of how they brought London’s data to life, SimCity-style.
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Google Fibre Isn’t That Impressive — For [gigabit broadband] to become truly useful and necessary, we’ll need to see a long-term feedback loop of utility and acceptance. First, super-fast lines must allow us to do things that we can’t do with the pedestrian internet. This will prompt more people to demand gigabit lines, which will in turn invite developers to create more apps that require high speed, and so on. What I discovered in Kansas City is that this cycle has not yet begun. Or, as Ars Technica put it recently, “The rest of the internet is too slow for Google Fibre.”
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gov.uk Recommendations on Open Source — Use open source software in preference to proprietary or closed source alternatives, in particular for operating systems, networking software, Web servers, databases and programming languages.
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Internet Bad Neighbourhoods (PDF) — bilingual PhD thesis. The idea behind the Internet Bad Neighborhood concept is that the probability of a host in behaving badly increases if its neighboring hosts (i.e., hosts within the same subnetwork) also behave badly. This idea, in turn, can be exploited to improve current Internet security solutions, since it provides an indirect approach to predict new sources of attacks (neighboring hosts of malicious ones).
Equity of Access, Smartphone Rare Earths, Nanoquadrocopter, and Macmillan Expands in Open Science
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Myth of the Free Internet (The Atlantic) — equity of access is an important issue, but this good point is marred by hanging it off the problematic (beer? speech? downloads?) “free”. I’m on the council of InternetNZ whose mission is to protect and promote the open and uncaptureable Internet. (A concept so good we had to make up a word for it)
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Periodic Table of the SmartPhone (PDF, big) — from Scientific American article on Rare Earth Minerals in the Smartphone comes a link to this neat infographic showing where rare earth elements are used in the iPhone. (via Om Malik)
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CrazyFlie Nano Preorders — 19g, 9cm x 9cm, 20min charge time for 7m flight time on this nano-quadrocopter. (via Wired)
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Changing Scientific Publishing (The Economist) — Nature buys an alternative journal publisher (30 titles in 14 scientific fields), which comes with an 80k-member social network for scientists. Macmillan are a clever bunch. (O’Reilly runs Science Foo Camp with Macmillan’s Digital Sciences and Google)