- Australia Floating the Idea of Cloud Passports — Under a cloud passport, a traveller’s identity and biometrics data would be stored in a cloud, so passengers would no longer need to carry their passports and risk having them lost or stolen. That sound you hear is Taylor Swift on Security, quoting “Wildest Dreams” into her vodka and Tang: “I can see the end as it begins.” This article is also notable for The idea of cloud passports is the result of a hipster-style-hackathon.
- Jupyter — Python Notebooks that allows you to create and share documents that contain live code, equations, visualizations, and explanatory text. Uses include: data cleaning and transformation, numerical simulation, statistical modeling, machine learning, and much more.
- Telcos $24B Business In Your Data — Under the radar, Verizon, Sprint, Telefonica, and other carriers have partnered with firms including SAP, IBM, HP, and AirSage to manage, package, and sell various levels of data to marketers and other clients. It’s all part of a push by the world’s largest phone operators to counteract diminishing subscriber growth through new business ventures that tap into the data that showers from consumers’ mobile Web surfing, text messaging, and phone calls. Even if you do pay for it, you’re still the product.
- Introducing Agate — a Python data analysis library designed to be useable by non-data-scientists, so leads to readable and predictable code. Target market: data journalists.
"privacy" entries
Four short links: 29 October 2015
Cloud Passports, Better Python Notebooks, Slippery Telcos, and Python Data Journalism
Four short links: 7 October 2015
Time for Change, Face Recognition, Correct Monitoring, and Surveillance Infrastructure
- The Uncertain Future of Emotion Analytics — A year before the launch of the first mass-produced personal computer, British academic David Collingridge wrote in his book “The Social Control of Technology” that “when change is easy, the need for it cannot be foreseen; when the need for change is apparent, change has become expensive, difficult, and time consuming.”
- Automatic Face Recognition (Bruce Schneier) — Without meaningful regulation, we’re moving into a world where governments and corporations will be able to identify people both in real time and backwards in time, remotely and in secret, without consent or recourse.
- Really Monitoring Your Systems — If you are not measuring and showing the maximum value, then you are hiding something. The number one indicator you should never get rid of is the maximum value. That’s not noise — it’s the signal; the rest is noise.
- Haunted by Data (Maciej Ceglowski) — You can’t just set up an elaborate surveillance infrastructure and then decide to ignore it. These data pipelines take on an institutional life of their own, and it doesn’t help that people speak of the “data-driven organization” with the same religious fervor as a “Christ-centered life.”
No, the IoT does not need strong privacy and security to flourish
The Internet of Things will happily march along with lousy privacy and security, and we will be the poorer for it.
“Without addressing privacy and trust, the Internet of Things will not reach its full potential.”
This refrain can be heard at IoT conferences, in opinion pieces in the press and in normative academic literature. If we don’t “get it right,” then consumers won’t embrace the IoT and all of the wonderful commercial and societal benefits it portends.
This is false.
It’s a nice idea, imagining that concern for privacy and security will curtail or slow technological growth. But don’t believe it: the Internet of Things will develop whether or not privacy and security are addressed. Economic imperative and technology evolution will impel the IoT and its tremendous potential for increased monitoring forward, but citizen concern plays a minor role in operationalizing privacy. Certainly, popular discourse on the subject is important, but developers, designers, policy-makers and manufacturers are the key actors in embedding privacy architectures within new connected devices. Read more…
Four short links: 25 September 2015
Predicting Policing, Assaulting Advertising, Compliance Ratings, and $9 Computer
- Police Program Aims to Pinpoint Those Most Likely to Commit Crimes (NYT) — John S. Hollywood, a senior operations researcher at the RAND Corporation, said that in the limited number of studies undertaken to measure the efficacy of predictive policing, the improvement in forecasting crimes had been only 5% or 10% better than regular policing methods.
- Apple’s Assault on Advertising and Google (Calacanis) — Google wants to be proud of their legacy, and tricking people into clicking ads and selling our profiles to advertisers is an awesome business – but a horrible legacy for Larry and Sergey. Read beside the Bloomberg piece on click fraud and the future isn’t too rosy for advertising. If the ad bubble bursts, how much of the Web will it take with it?
- China Is Building The Mother Of All Reputation Systems To Monitor Citizen Behavior — The document talks about the “construction of credibility” — the ability to give and take away credits — across more than 30 areas of life, from energy saving to advertising.
- $9 Computer Hardware (Makezine) — open hardware project, with open source software. The board’s spec is a 1GHz R8 ARM processor with 512MB of RAM, 4GB of NAND storage, and Wi-Fi and Bluetooth built in.
Four short links: 17 September 2015
Google's Code, China's Pledge, MD5's Cracks, and Toyota's Robotics Hire
- Google’s 2 Billion Lines of Code (Wired) — 85TB, 45,000 changes/day in Google’s DVCS “Piper.” They’re looking at Mercurial.
- China Extracting Pledge of Compliance from US Firms (NY Times) — The letter also asks the American companies to ensure their products are “secure and controllable,” a catchphrase that industry groups said could be used to force companies to build so-called back doors — which allow third-party access to systems — provide encryption keys or even hand over source code.
- MD5 To Be Considered Harmful Some Day (Adrian Colyer) — walkthrough of Dan Kaminsky’s paper on the growing number of cracks in MD5.
- Toyota’s Robot Car Plans (IEEE Spectrum) — Toyota hired the former head of DARPA’s Robotics Challenge. Pratt explained that a U.S. $50 million R&D collaboration with MIT and Stanford is just the beginning of a large and ambitious program whose goal is developing intelligent vehicles that can make roads safer and robot helpers that can improve people’s lives at home.
Four short links: 11 September 2015
Wishful CS, Music Big Data, Better Queues, and Data as Liability
- Computer Science Courses that Don’t Exist, But Should (James Hague) — CSCI 3300: Classical Software Studies. Discuss and dissect historically significant products, including VisiCalc, AppleWorks, Robot Odyssey, Zork, and MacPaint. Emphases are on user interface and creativity fostered by hardware limitations.
- Music Science: How Data and Digital Content Are Changing Music — O’Reilly research report on big data and the music industry. Researchers estimate that it takes five seconds to decide if we don’t like a song, but 25 to conclude that we like it.
- The Curse of the First-In First-Out Queue Discipline (PDF) — the research paper behind the “more efficient to serve the last person who joined the queue” newspaper stories going around.
- Data is Not an Asset, It Is a Liability — regardless of the boilerplate in your privacy policy, none of your users have given informed consent to being tracked. Every tracker and beacon script on your website increases the privacy cost they pay for transacting with you, chipping away at the trust in the relationship.
Four short links: 9 September 2015
Bricklaying Robots, Photographic Insecurity, Quantum-Resistant Crypto, and Garbage Subtraction
- Bricklaying Robot Lays 3x Speed of Humans (MIT TR) — The robot can correct for the differences between theoretical building specifications and what’s actually on site, says Scott Peters, co-founder of Construction Robotics, a company based in Victor, New York, that designed SAM as its debut product. (via Audrey Watters)
- When a Photo Ends Your Security (Bruce Schneier) — the TSA’s master key was shown in a Washington Post photo spread, so now it can be recreated from the photo.
- Online Security Braces for Quantum Revolution (Nature) — PQCRYPTO, a European consortium of quantum-cryptography researchers in academia and industry, released a preliminary report on 7 September recommending cryptographic techniques that are resistant to quantum computers […] It favoured the McEliece system, which has resisted attacks since 1978, for public-key cryptography.
- The New Wave is Garbage Subtracted (Adam Trachtenberg) — Adam found some amazingly prescient writing from Esther Dyson. The new wave is not value-added; it’s garbage-subtracted. The job of the future is PR guy, not journalist. I’m too busy reading, so why should I pay for more things to read? Anything anyone didn’t pay to send to me…I’m not going to read.
Four short links: 8 September 2015
Serverless Microservers, Data Privacy, NAS Security, and Mobile Advertising
- Microservices Without the Servers (Amazon) — By “serverless,” we mean no explicit infrastructure required, as in: no servers, no deployments onto servers, no installed software of any kind. We’ll use only managed cloud services and a laptop. The diagram below illustrates the high-level components and their connections: a Lambda function as the compute (“backend”) and a mobile app that connects directly to it, plus Amazon API Gateway to provide an HTTP endpoint for a static Amazon S3-hosted website.
- Privacy vs Data Science — claims Apple is having trouble recruiting top-class machine learning talent because of the strict privacy-driven limits on data retention (Siri data: 6 months, Maps: 15 minutes). As a consequence, Apple’s smartphones attempt to crunch a great deal of user data locally rather than in the cloud.
- NAS Backdoors — firmware in some Seagate NAS drives is very vulnerable. It’s unclear whether these are Seagate-added, or came with third-party bundled software. Coming soon to lightbulbs, doors, thermostats, and all your favorite inanimate objects. (via BetaNews)
- Most Consumers Wouldn’t Pay Publishers What It Would Take to Replace Mobile Ad Income — they didn’t talk to this consumer.
Four short links: 28 August 2015
Ad Blockers, Self-Evaluation, Blockchain Podcast, and Mobile Fingerprints
- 10 Ad Blocking Extensions Tested for Best Performance — This test is about the performance of an ad blocker in terms of how quickly it loads a range of ad blocked pages, the maximum amount of memory it uses, and how much stress it puts on the CPU. µBlock Origin wins for Chrome. (via Nelson Minar)
- Staff Evaluation of Me (Karl Fisch) — I also tried the Google Form approach. 0 responses, from which I concluded that nobody had any problems with me and DEFINITELY no conclusions could be drawn about my coworkers creating mail filters to mark my messages as spam.
- Blockchain (BBC) — episode on the blockchain that does a good job of staying accurate while being comprehensible. (via Sam Kinsley)
- Fingerprints On Mobile Devices: Abusing and Leaking (PDF) — We will analyze the mobile fingerprint authentication and authorization frameworks, and discuss several security pitfalls of the current designs, including: Confused Authorization Attack; Unsecure fingerprint data storage; Trusted fingerprint sensors exposed to the untrusted world; Backdoor of pre-embedding fingerprints.
Four short links: 19 August 2015
Privacy-Respecting Algorithms, Dealers Growing, Book Recommendations, and End of Internet Dreams
- Efficient Algorithms for Public-Private Social Networks — Google Research paper on privacy-respecting algorithms for social networks. From the overview: the models of privacy we’re landing on (nodes or edges in the graph are marked as “private” by a user) mean that enforcing these privacy guarantees translates to solving a different algorithmic problem for each user in the network, and for this reason, developing algorithms that process these social graphs and respect these privacy guarantees can become computationally expensive. The paper shows how to efficiently approximate some of the graph operations required to run a social network.
- Rise of Networked Platforms for Physical World Services (Tim O’Reilly) — the central player begins by feeding its network of suppliers, but eventually begins to compete with it. […] Over time, as networks reach monopoly or near-monopoly status, they must wrestle with the issue of how to create more value than they capture — how much value to take out of the ecosystem, versus how much they must leave for other players in order for the marketplace to continue to thrive.
- Book Recommendations from BLDBLOG — Winslow memorably pointed out how farmers in the Sinaloa region of Mexico had been swept up into the cartel’s infinitely flexible method of production, and that, despite any ensuing role growing and harvesting marijuana or even poppies, the cartel offered them new jobs in logistics, not agriculture. “They didn’t want to be farmers,” Winslow said at Bookcourt, “they wanted to be FedEx.”
- The End of the Internet Dream (Jennifer Granick) — this is all gold. Something resonating with my current meditations: People are sick and tired of crappy software. And they aren’t going to take it any more. The proliferation of networked devices — the Internet of Things — is going to mean all kinds of manufacturers traditionally subject to products liability are also software purveyors. If an autonomous car crashes, or a networked toaster catches on fire, you can bet there is going to be product liability. […] I think software liability is inevitable. I think it’s necessary. I think it will make coding more expensive, and more conservative. I think we’ll do a crappy job of it for a really long time.