- Restoration of Defocused and Blurry Images — impressive demos, and open source (GPLv3) code. All those blurred faces and documents no longer seem so safe.
- Peter Molyneux Profile in Wired — worth reading for: (a) Molyneux’s contribution to the genre; (b) the inspiration he drew from his satirical Twitter mirror (@PeterMolydeux) is lovely, and (c) the game jams to build the fake Molyneux games, where satire becomes reality. (via Andy Baio)
- Trusted Computing for Industrial Control Systems — Kaspersky reveals plans for an open source O/S for industrial control systems, so reactors and power stations and traffic systems aren’t vulnerable to StuxNet-type attacks. (via Jim Stogdill)
- Android Virtual Machines — faster emulation for testing than the traditional simulators.
Nat Torkington
Nat has chaired the O'Reilly Open Source Convention and other O'Reilly conferences for over a decade. He ran the first web server in New Zealand, co-wrote the best-selling Perl Cookbook, and was one of the founding Radar bloggers. He lives in New Zealand and consults in the Asia-Pacific region.
Four short links: 24 October 2012
Deblurring Images, Games Design, Secure Control, and Faster Emulation
Four short links: 23 October 2012
Software-Defined Radio, Google Mapping, Windows Exploits, and Firesheep Moments
- Getting Started with Software-Defined Radio (ThePowerBase) — Now, anyone with about $20 USD to spare can tune into everything from police and fire transmissions to the International Space Station. We were talking about this on the Radar mailing list, and Mike Loukides offered these pithy words of wisdom: antennas only get complicated if you’re transmitting. If you’re transmitting, you run a real possibility of letting the magic smoke out if something’s wrong with the antenna. But with receivers, there’s very little that more wire won’t fix. And at TV frequencies, you don’t even need that much wire. (via Jim Stogdill)
- How Google Builds Its Maps (The Atlantic) — fascinating look into Google’s project Ground Truth. [T]he maps team, largely driven by Street View, is publishing more imagery data every two weeks than Google possessed total in 2006. The analysis of human-powered software is great: Google’s map offerings build in the human intelligence on the front end, and that’s what allows its computers to tell you the best route from San Francisco to Boston.
- USB Stick of Death — very detailed internals walkthrough of how to simply insert a USB stick, have it automatically mounted by the operating system and immediately compromise it by triggering a vulnerability in ntfs.sys.
- Basecamp — A Firesheep Moment for PLCs. I love the idea of Firesheep moments: when the obscurity is removed by making the flaw so easy to exploit that nobody can deny the problem exists. (via Jim Stogdill)
Four short links: 22 October 2012
JSON Tool, Technology Arts, Pentesting Kit, and Open Access Week
- jq — command-line tool for JSON data.
- GAFFTA — Gray Area Foundation For The Arts. Non-profit running workshops and building projects around technology-driven arts. (via Roger Dennis)
- Power Pwn — looks like a power strip, is actually chock-full of pen-testing tools, WiFi, bluetooth, and GSM. Beautifully evil. (via Jim Stogdill)
- Open Access Week — this week is Open Access week, raising awareness of the value of ubiquitous access to scientific publishing. (via Fabiana Kubke)
Four short links: 19 October 2012
3D Printed Drones, When Pacemakers Attack, N-Gram Updated, and Deanonymizing Datasets
- Home-made 3D-Printed Drones — if only they used computer-vision to sequence DNA, they’d be the perfect storm of O’Reilly memes :-)
- Hacking Pacemakers For Death — IOActive researcher Barnaby Jack has reverse-engineered a pacemaker transmitter to make it possible to deliver deadly electric shocks to pacemakers within 30 feet and rewrite their firmware.
- Google N-Gram Viewer Updated — now with more books, better OCR, parts of speech, and complex queries. e.g., the declining ratio of sex to drugs. Awesome work by Friend of O’Reilly, Jon Orwant.
- Deanonymizing Mobility Traces: Using Social Networks as a Side-Channel — a set of location traces can be deanonymized given an easily obtained social network graph. […] Our experiments [on standard datasets] show that 80% of users are identified precisely, while only 8% are identified incorrectly, with the remainder mapped to a small set of users. (via Network World)
Four short links: 18 October 2012
Medical Data Commons, Verizon Sell You, Doctor Watson, and Weedkilling Drones
- Let’s Pool Our Medical Data (TED) — John Wilbanks (of Science Commons fame) gives a strong talk for creating an open, massive, mine-able database of data about health and genomics from many sources. Money quote: Facebook would never make a change to something as important as an advertising with a sample size as small as a Phase 3 clinical trial.
- Verizon Sells App Use, Browsing Habits, Location (CNet) — Verizon Wireless has begun selling information about its customers’ geographical locations, app usage, and Web browsing activities, a move that raises privacy questions and could brush up against federal wiretapping law. To Verizon, even when you do pay for it, you’re still the product. Carriers: they’re like graverobbing organ harvesters but without the strict ethical standards.
- IBM Watson About to Launch in Medicine (Fast Company) — This fall, after six months of teaching their treatment guidelines to Watson, the doctors at Sloan-Kettering will begin testing the IBM machine on real patients. […] On the screen, a colorful globe spins. In a few seconds, Watson offers three possible courses of chemotherapy, charted as bars with varying levels of confidence–one choice above 90% and two above 80%. “Watson doesn’t give you the answer,” Kris says. “It gives you a range of answers.” Then it’s up to [the doctor] to make the call. (via Reddit)
- Robot Kills Weeds With 98% Accuracy — During tests, this automated system gathered over a million images as it moved through the fields. Its Computer Vision System was able to detect and segment individual plants – even those that were touching each other – with 98% accuracy.
Four short links: 17 October 2012
Invisible Data Economy, Hacked Value, Open Algorithms Textbook, and Mobile Testing
- Beyond Goods and Services: The Unmeasured Rise of the Data-Driven Economy — excellent points about data as neither good nor service, and how data use goes unmeasured by economists and thus doesn’t influence policy. According to statistics from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, real consumption of ‘internet access’ has been falling since the second quarter of 2011. In other words, according to official U.S. government figures, consumer access to the Internet—including mobile—has been a drag on economic growth for the past year and a half. (via Mike Loukides)
- How Crooks Turn Even Crappy Hacked PCs Into Money (Brian Krebs) — show to your corporate IT overlords, or your parents, to explain why you want them to get rid of the Windows XP machines. (via BoingBoing)
- Open Data Structures — an open content textbook (Java and C++ editions; CC-BY licensed) on data structures. (via Hacker News)
- Mobiforge — test what gets sent back to mobile browsers. This site sends the HTTP headers that a mobile browser would. cf yesterday’s Responsivator. (via Ronan Cremin)
Four short links: 16 October 2012
News App, Data Wrangler, Responsive Previews, and Accountable Algorithms
- cir.ca — news app for iPhone, which lets you track updates and further news on a given story. (via Andy Baio)
- DataWrangler (Stanford) — an interactive tool for data cleaning and transformation. Spend less time formatting and more time analyzing your data. From the Stanford Visualization Group.
- Responsivator — see how websites look at different screen sizes.
- Accountable Algorithms (Ed Felten) — When we talk about making an algorithmic public process open, we mean two separate things. First, we want transparency: the public knows what the algorithm is. Second, we want the execution of the algorithm to be accountable: the public can check to make sure that the algorithm was executed correctly in a particular case. Transparency is addressed by traditional open government principles; but accountability is different.
Four short links: 15 October 2012
DIY Thermal Camera, Watching Trolls Wither, Discovering Dark Social, and Student Mobile Phone Use
- Cheap Thermocam — cheap thermal imaging camera, takes about a minute to capture an image. (via IEEE Spectrum)
- Observations on What’s Getting Downvoted (Ars Technica) — fascinating piece of social work, showing how the community polices (or reacts to) trolls. (via Hacker News)
- Dark Social (The Atlantic) — Just look at that graph. On the one hand, you have all the social networks that you know. They’re about 43.5 percent of our social traffic. On the other, you have this previously unmeasured darknet that’s delivering 56.5 percent of people to individual stories. This is not a niche phenomenon! It’s more than 2.5x Facebook’s impact on the site.
- A Tethered World — All students, across all 56 represented countries, are doing generally the same few things. Facebook and Twitter, above all else, are the predominant tools for all information use among the participants. The predominance of these few tools are creating a homogenizing influence around the world.
Four short links: 12 October 2012
Designers and Coders, Randomised Parachute Trials, Testing HTML5 Features, and Backbone Book
- Code Talks and Designers Don’t Speak the Language (Crystal Beasley) — Many of the bugs, however, require a deep understanding of why the product exists in the marketplace and a thorough understanding of the research that underpins the project. These strategic questions are analogous to what a software architect would do. I was on the Persona project full time for three months before I felt confident making significant choices about UX.
- Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma related to gravitational challenge: systematic review of randomised controlled trials (British Medical Journal) — you don’t need to subscribe to appreciate this.
- html5test — see how the browsers stack up in features and compliance.
- Backbone Fundamentals — A creative-commons book on Backbone.js for beginners and advanced users alike.
Four short links: 11 October 2012
A/B with Google Analytics, Lego Rubiks Solver, TV Torrents, and Performance Tools
- ABalytics — dead simple A/B testing with Google Analytics. (via Dan Mazzini)
- Fastest Rubik Cube Solver is Made of Lego — it takes less than six seconds to solve the cube. Watch the video, it’s … wow. Also cool is watching it fail. (via Hacker News)
- Fairfax Watches BitTorrent (TorrentFreak) — At a government broadband conference in Sydney, Fairfax’s head of video Ricky Sutton admitted that in a country with one of the highest percentage of BitTorrent users worldwide, his company determines what shows to buy based on the popularity of pirated videos online.
- Web Performance Tools (Steve Souders) — compilation of popular web performance tools. Reminds me of nmap’s list of top security tools.