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"DIY" entries
Scan Win, Watson Platform, Metal Printer, and Microcontroller Python
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Google Wins Book Scanning Case (Giga Om) — will probably be appealed, though many authors will fear it’s good money after bad tilting at the fair use windmill.
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IBM Watson To Be A Platform (IBM) — press release indicates you’ll soon be able to develop your own apps that use Watson’s machine learning and text processing.
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MiniMetalMaker (IndieGogo) — 3D printer that can print detailed objects from specially blended metal clay and fire.
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MicroPython (KickStarter) — Python for Microcontrollers.
ISS Malware, Computational Creativity, Happy Birthday Go, Built Environment for Surveillance
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ISS Enjoys Malware — Kaspersky reveals ISS had XP malware infestation before they shifted to Linux. The Gravity movie would have had more registry editing sessions if the producers had cared about FACTUAL ACCURACY.
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Big Data Approach to Computational Creativity (Arxiv) — although the “results” are a little weak (methodology for assessing creativity not described, and this sadly subjective line “professional chefs at various hotels, restaurants, and culinary schools have indicated that the system helps them explore new vistas in food”), the process and mechanism are fantastic. Bayesian surprise, crowdsourced tagged recipes, dictionaries of volatile compounds, and more. (via MIT Technology Review)
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Go at 4 — recapping four years of Go language growth.
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Las Vegas Street Lights to Record Conversations (Daily Mail) — The wireless, LED lighting, computer-operated lights are not only capable of illuminating streets, they can also play music, interact with pedestrians and are equipped with video screens, which can display police alerts, weather alerts and traffic information. The high tech lights can also stream live video of activity in the surrounding area. Technology vendor is Intellistreets. LV says, Right now our intention is not to have any cameras or recording devices. Love that “right now”. Can’t wait for malware to infest it.
Raspberry Pi MITM, Industrial Robot SDK, Cheap Mill, and Open Source State Replication in Go
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Raspberry Pi Wireless Attack Toolkit — A collection of pre-configured or automatically-configured tools that automate and ease the process of creating robust Man-in-the-middle attacks. The toolkit allows your to easily select between several attack modes and is specifically designed to be easily extendable with custom payloads, tools, and attacks. The cornerstone of this project is the ability to inject Browser Exploitation Framework Hooks into a web browser without any warnings, alarms, or alerts to the user. We accomplish this objective mainly through wireless attacks, but also have a limpet mine mode with ettercap and a few other tricks.
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Industrial Robot with SDK For Researchers (IEEE Spectrum) — $22,000 industrial robot with 7 degrees-of-freedom arms, integrated cameras, sonar, and torque sensors on every joint. […] The Baxter research version is still running a core software system that is proprietary, not open. But on top of that the company built the SDK layer, based on ROS (Robot Operation System), and this layer is open source. In addition, there are also some libraries of low level tasks (such as joint control and positioning) that Rethink made open.
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OtherMill (Kickstarter) — An easy to use, affordable, computer controlled mill. Take all your DIY projects further with custom circuits and precision machining. (via Mike Loukides)
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go-raft (GitHub) — open source implementation of the Raft distributed consensus protocol, in Go. (via Ian Davis)
Email Triage, Pulse Detection, Big Building Data, and Raspberryduino Ardpi
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Triage — iPhone app to quickly triage your email in your downtime. See also the backstory. Awesome UI.
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Webcam Pulse Detector — I was wondering how long it would take someone to do the Eulerian video magnification in real code. Now I’m wondering how long it will take the patent-inspired takedown…
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How Microsoft Quietly Built the City of the Future — The team now collects 500 million data transactions every 24 hours, and the smart buildings software presents engineers with prioritized lists of misbehaving equipment. Algorithms can balance out the cost of a fix in terms of money and energy being wasted with other factors such as how much impact fixing it will have on employees who work in that building. Because of that kind of analysis, a lower-cost problem in a research lab with critical operations may rank higher priority-wise than a higher-cost fix that directly affects few. Almost half of the issues the system identifies can be corrected in under a minute, Smith says.
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UDOO (Kickstarter) — mini PC that could run either Android or Linux, with an Arduino-compatible board embedded. Like faster Raspberry Pi but with Arduino Due-compatible I/O.
Responding to Chinese Hacks, Quantified Self Gadget, Maker's Amazing Life, and Syrian Rebel DIY Hackery
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Administration Strategy on Mitigating the Theft of US Trade Secrets (Whitehouse, PDF) — the Chinese attacks on Facebook, NYT, and other large organisations are provoking policy responses. WSJ covers it nicely. What is this starting? (via Alex Howard)
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BodyMedia FitLink — can use this to gather caloric expenditure and sleep restfulness. (via Jonathan Brewer)
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Bend Not Break — she had an amazing life but this caught my eye in the Make review: In China, she told me, making and craftsmanship are highly revered, and under Mao, factory jobs were prized. Her experience working in Mao’s factories planted a seed in her mind that sprouted when she sought to create her own company. Rather than launch another internet-based business as was the rage at the time, she wanted to connect software to the physical world. (via Makezine)
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DIY Weapons of the Syrian Rebels (The Atlantic) — if WWII France had had X-Box controllers, they’d have been releasing remote controlled homebrew deathmobiles too.
Underground Economy, Continuous Integration, Chinese Cyber-Espionage, Prosthesis From The Future
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Using Silk Road — exploring the transactions, probability of being busted, and more. Had me at the heading Silk Road as Cyphernomicon’s black markets. Estimates of risk of participating in the underground economy.
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Travis CI — a hosted continuous integration service for the open source community. It is integrated with GitHub.
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Chinese Cyber-Espionage Unit (PDF) — exposé of one of China’s Cyber Espionage Units. (via Reddit /r/netsec)
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$250 Arduino-Powered Hand Made by a Teen — the third version of his robotic hand. The hand is primarily made with 3D printing, with the exception of motors, gears, and other hardware. The control system is activated by flexing a pre-chosen muscle, such as curling your toes, then the movement is chosen and controlled by a series of eyeblinks and an EEG headset to measure brainwaves. The most remarkable part is that the hand costs a mere $250.
Enlightened Tinkering, In-Browser Tor Proxy, Dark Patterns, and Subjective Data
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Hands on Learning (HuffPo) — Unfortunately, engaged and enlightened tinkering is disappearing from contemporary American childhood. (via BoingBoing)
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FlashProxy (Stanford) — a miniature proxy that runs in a web browser. It checks for clients that need access, then conveys data between them and a Tor relay. […] If your browser runs JavaScript and has support for WebSockets then while you are viewing this page your browser is a potential proxy available to help censored Internet users.
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Dark Patterns (Slideshare) — User interfaces to trick people. (via Beta Knowledge)
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Bill Gates is Naive: Data Are Not Objective (Math Babe) — examples at the end of biased models/data should be on the wall of everyone analyzing data. (via Karl Fisch)
Vanishing Landlines, Factory Help, Spectral Analyzer, and the State of the World
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Wireless Substitution (BoingBoing, CDC) — very nice graph showing the decline in landlines/growth in wireless.
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Maker’s Row — Our mission is to make the manufacturing process simple to understand and easy to access. From large corporations to first time designers, we are providing unparalleled access to industry-specific factories and suppliers across the United States.
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mySight (GitHub) — myspectral.com Spectruino analyzer for light spectra in UV/VIS/NIR.
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State of the World (Bruce Sterling, John Lebkowsky) — always a delight. Come 2013, I think it’s time for people in and around the “music industry” to stop blaming themselves, and thinking their situation is somehow special. Whatever happens to musicians will eventually happen to everybody. Nobody was or is really much better at “digital transition” than musicians were and are. If you’re superb at digitalization, that’s no great solution either. You just have to auto-disrupt and re-invent yourself over and over and over again.
Kenyan Entrepreneur, Spooky Open Source, Typing Tutor, and Hacker's Bagpipes
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Kenyan Women Create Their Own Geek Culture (NPR) — Oguya started spending some Saturday mornings with Colaco and other women, snipping code and poring through hacker cookbooks. These informal gatherings became the Akirachix. Oguya graduated and turned her mobile phone idea into a company called M-Farm. At 25 years old, she now has a staff of 18. And 7,000 African farmers use her app.
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Ozone Widget Framework (Github) — open source webapp integrator. The Ozone Widget Framework is released to the public as Open Source Software, because it’s the Right Thing To Do. Also, it was required by Section 924 of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act. Spook-made, citizen played.
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gtypist — open source universal typing tutor. You can learn correct typing and improve your skills by practising its exercises on a regular basis.
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Open Source Hardware Bagpipes — to practice your fingerings without actually killing the neighbours. (via Hacked Gadgets)
Industrial Control System Security, Geographic Pricing, Hacker Scouting, pressureNET Visualization
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Improving the Security Posture of Industrial Control Systems (NSA) — common-sense that owners of ICS should already be doing, but which (because it comes from the NSA) hopefully they’ll listen to. See also Wired article on NSA targeting domestic SCADA systems.
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Geographic Pricing Online (Wall Street) — Staples, Discover Financial Services, Rosetta Stone, and Home Depot offer discounts if you’re close to a competitor, higher prices otherwise. [U]sing geography as a pricing tool can also reinforce patterns that e-commerce had promised to erase: prices that are higher in areas with less competition, including rural or poor areas. It diminishes the Internet’s role as an equalizer.
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Hacker Scouting (NPR) — teaching kids to be safe and competent in the world of technology, just as traditional scouting teaches them to be safe and competent in the world of nature.
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pressureNET Data Visualization — open source barometric data-gathering software which runs on Android devices. Source is on GitHub.