"advertising" entries

Four short links: 23 November 2015

Four short links: 23 November 2015

Elasticsearch SQL, App Privacy, Ad Bubble, and LLVM Fortran

  1. Elasticsearch SQLQuery elasticsearch using familiar SQL syntax. You can also use ES functions in SQL. Apache2-licensed.
  2. In Communist China, Tinder Screws YouChinese Tinder clone Tantan is endangering young women and men by failing to use encryption and exposing private data like that made public in the Ashley Madison hack.
  3. The Advertising Bubble (Maciej Ceglowski) — This is an article-length ad (1) targeted at companies selling software (2) to advertising startups (3) sellling their own ads (4) God knows where, possibly to some publishing startup burning through your grandmother’s pension fund (5,6,7,8). There’s an ad bubble. It’s gonna blow.
  4. Fortran for LLVMThe U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and its three national labs today announced they have reached an agreement with NVIDIA’s PGI® software to create an open source Fortran compiler designed for integration with the widely used LLVM compiler infrastructure. Rumor has it the nuclear labs will defer implementation of READ DRUM to later generations.

Blocked!

Will content-blocking change the Web?

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“No one ever turns off JavaScript any more.” I remember when I first believed that, probably around 2007. The growth of Ajax had meant that more people were actually losing content if they turned off JavaScript. From what I could tell, most of the few folks still blocking JavaScript surrendered pretty quickly.

I don’t believe that any more, though, thanks to advertising and the doors that blocking advertising has opened.

While a key part of the last decade’s Web conversation has been performance, the walled gardens are taking advantage of our failure to deliver performance to make their own promises. Facebook’s Instant Articles offer a way for publishers to use the (relative) certainty of Facebook delivery, while Apple took a more direct route for demanding performance: blocking advertisements, and more.
Read more…

Four short links: 28 September 2015

Four short links: 28 September 2015

Coordinated Disclosure Kit, Coding Contests, Growth Strategies, and Ad Buck Passing

  1. Coordinated Disclosure Toolkita generic copy of the resources used by Portcullis Computer Security to manage our Advisory Process.
  2. Competitive Coding (Bloomberg) — ignore the lazy author’s patronising tone; the bit that caught my eye was: He first began freaking people out in second grade, at age 8, when he took second place in a major Belarusian coding competition. To put this achievement in perspective, the score was high enough for Korotkevich to be granted automatic enrollment in a top technical university without needing to pass any other entrance exams. That is how you value STEM education: let people test out of it if they don’t need it!
  3. Here’s What a Growth Strategy Looks Like (First Round) — User acquisition doesn’t really make sense unless you already have healthy retention [of diversity-in-tech pipeline conversations].
  4. How We Pass The Buck (Anil Dash) — The thing is, technology is not neutral, algorithms are built with values, and the default choices in our software determine huge swaths of our culture. We delegate ethical decisions as consumers and citizens to people who make software, but almost no computer science program teaches ethics, and almost no major technology company has a chief ethicist.
Four short links: 25 September 2015

Four short links: 25 September 2015

Predicting Policing, Assaulting Advertising, Compliance Ratings, and $9 Computer

  1. 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.
  2. 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?
  3. China Is Building The Mother Of All Reputation Systems To Monitor Citizen BehaviorThe 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.
  4. $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: 24 September 2015

Four short links: 24 September 2015

Machine Music Learning, Cyber War, Backing Out Ads, and COBOL OF THE 2020s

  1. The Hit Charade (MIT TR) — Spotify’s deep-learning system still has to be trained using millions of example songs, and it would be perplexed by a bold new style of music. What’s more, such algorithms cannot arrange songs in a creative way. Nor can they distinguish between a truly original piece and yet another me-too imitation of a popular sound. Johnson acknowledges this limitation, and he says human expertise will remain a key part of Spotify’s algorithms for the foreseeable future.
  2. The Future of War is the Distant Past (John Birmingham) — the Naval Academy is hedging against the future by creating cybersecurity midshipmen, and by requiring every midshipman to learn how to do celestial navigation.
  3. What Happens Next Will Amaze You (Maciej Ceglowski) — the next in Maciej’s amazing series of keynotes, where he’s building a convincing case for fixing the Web.
  4. Go Will Dominate the Next Decade (Ian Eyberg) — COBOL OF THE 2020s. There, I saved you the trouble.
Four short links: 8 September 2015

Four short links: 8 September 2015

Serverless Microservers, Data Privacy, NAS Security, and Mobile Advertising

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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)
  4. 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: 7 August 2015

Four short links: 7 August 2015

Dating Culture, Resilient Go Services, Engineering Managers, and Ads Up

  1. Tinder and Hook-Up Culture (Vanity Fair) — “There have been two major transitions” in heterosexual mating “in the last four million years,” he says. “The first was around 10,000 to 15,000 years ago, in the agricultural revolution, when we became less migratory and more settled,” leading to the establishment of marriage as a cultural contract. “And the second major transition is with the rise of the Internet.”
  2. Building Resilient Services with Go — case study of building a Go app to survive the real world.
  3. 90-Day Plan for New Engineering Managers — so much truth, from empathy to giving up coding.
  4. Networks Increasing Ad StuffingTV audiences (as determined by Nielsen C3 measurements: TV watched both live and three days after the show was first aired on catch-up services) are down 9% year on year, yet ad loads on some networks are up as much as 10% on last year. The dinosaurs are hungry.
Four short links: 23 June 2015

Four short links: 23 June 2015

Irregular Periodicity, Facebook Beacons, Industry 4.0, and Universal Container

  1. Fast Lomb-Scargle Periodograms in Pythona classic method for finding periodicity in irregularly-sampled data.
  2. Facebook Bluetooth Beacons — free for you to use and help people see more information about your business whenever they use Facebook during their visit.
  3. Industry 4.0 — stop gagging at the term. Interesting examples of connectivity and data improving manufacturing. Human-machine interfaces: Logistics company Knapp AG developed a picking technology using augmented reality. Pickers wear a headset that presents vital information on a see-through display, helping them locate items more quickly and precisely. And with both hands free, they can build stronger and more efficient pallets, with fragile items safeguarded. An integrated camera captures serial and lot ID numbers for real-time stock tracking. Error rates are down by 40%, among many other benefits. Digital-to-physical transfer: Local Motors builds cars almost entirely through 3-D printing, with a design crowdsourced from an online community. It can build a new model from scratch in a year, far less than the industry average of six. Vauxhall and GM, among others, still bend a lot of metal, but also use 3-D printing and rapid prototyping to minimize their time to market. (via Quartz)
  4. runCa lightweight universal runtime container, by the Open Container Project. (OCP = multi-vendor initiative in hands of Linux Foundation)
Four short links: 19 June 2015

Four short links: 19 June 2015

Computational Journalism, Bio Startups & Patents, Ad Blocker Wars, and The Night Watch

  1. Computational Journalism — Google awards to projects around computational journalism. Sample: The goal of the project is to automatically build topic “event threads” that will help journalists and citizens decode claims made by public figures, in order to distinguish between personal opinion, communication tools, and voluntary distortions of the reality.
  2. Editing the Software of Life — research yielding the ability to edit DNA has spawned a new set of biotech startups, and a patent morass. Zhang already holds the first of several vital and broad patents covering cas9 genome editing. Yet, Doudna and Charpentier had filed patent applications covering similar ground earlier than Zhang.
  3. Ad Blocker-Stopping Software — the evolutionary battle between ads and blockers is about to get gunpowder. As Ethan Zuckerman said, advertising is the original sin of the Internet.
  4. The Night Watch (PDF) — There is nothing funny to print when you have a misaligned memory access, because your machine is dead and there are no printers in the spirit world.
Four short links: 9 June 2015

Four short links: 9 June 2015

Parallelising Without Coordination, AR/VR IxD, Medical Insecurity, and Online Privacy Lies

  1. The Declarative Imperative (Morning Paper) — on Dataflow. …a large class of recursive programs – all of basic Datalog – can be parallelized without any need for coordination. As a side note, this insight appears to have eluded the MapReduce community, where join is necessarily a blocking operator.
  2. Consensual Reality (Alistair Croll) — Among other things we discussed what Inbar calls his three rules for augmented reality design: 1. The content you see has to emerge from the real world and relate to it. 2. Should not distract you from the real world; must add to it. 3. Don’t use it when you don’t need it. If a film is better on the TV watch the TV.
  3. X-Rays Behaving BadlyAccording to the report, medical devices – in particular so-called picture archive and communications systems (PACS) radiologic imaging systems – are all but invisible to security monitoring systems and provide a ready platform for malware infections to lurk on hospital networks, and for malicious actors to launch attacks on other, high value IT assets. Among the revelations contained in the report: A malware infection at a TrapX customer site spread from a unmonitored PACS system to a key nurse’s workstation. The result: confidential hospital data was secreted off the network to a server hosted in Guiyang, China. Communications went out encrypted using port 443 (SSL) and were not detected by existing cyber defense software, so TrapX said it is unsure how many records may have been stolen.
  4. The Online Privacy Lie is Unraveling (TechCrunch) — The report authors’ argue it’s this sense of resignation that is resulting in data tradeoffs taking place — rather than consumers performing careful cost-benefit analysis to weigh up the pros and cons of giving up their data (as marketers try to claim). They also found that where consumers were most informed about marketing practices they were also more likely to be resigned to not being able to do anything to prevent their data being harvested. Something that didn’t make me regret clicking on a TechCrunch link.