"future" entries

Four short links: 15 March 2016

Four short links: 15 March 2016

Car Hackers Handbook, Exoskeleton Regulation, Pythonic Spreadsheet, and AI Myths

  1. The 2016 Car Hacker’s Handbook (Amazon) — will give you a deeper understanding of the computer systems and embedded software in modern vehicles. It begins by examining vulnerabilities and providing detailed explanations of communications over the CAN bus and between devices and systems. (via BoingBoing)
  2. More Exoskeletons Seeking FDA ApprovalThe international group of exoskeleton providers with various FDA or CE certifications is growing and currently includes: Ekso in the US; Cyberdyne in the EU and Japan; ExoAtlet from Russia; and Israel’s ReWalk. Other providers are in the process of getting approvals or developing commercial versions of their products. My eye was caught by how global the list of exoskeleton companies is.
  3. Dirigible Spreadsheet — open source spreadsheet that’s not just written in Python, it exposes and IS python. See also Harry Percival talking about it.
  4. Everything You Know About AI Is Wrong (Gizmodo) — an interesting run-through of myths and claims about AI. I’m not ready to consider all of these “busted,” but they are some nice starters-for-ten in your next pub argument about whether the Matrix is coming.
Four short links: 11 March 2016

Four short links: 11 March 2016

Deep-Learning Catan, Scala Tutorials, Legal Services, and Shiny Echo

  1. Strategic Dialogue Management via Deep Reinforcement Learning (Adrian Colyer) — a neural network learns to play Settlers of Catan. Is nothing sacred?
  2. scala school — Twitter’s instructional material for coming up to speed on scala.
  3. Robin Hood Fellowship — fellowship to use technology to increase access to legal services for New Yorkers. Stuff that matters.
  4. The Echo From Amazon Brims With Groundbreaking Promise (NY Times) — A bit more than a year after its release, the Echo has morphed from a gimmicky experiment into a device that brims with profound possibility. The longer I use it, the more regularly it inspires the same sense of promise I felt when I used the first iPhone — a sense this machine is opening up a vast new realm in personal computing, and gently expanding the role that computers will play in our future.
Four short links: 29 January 2016

Four short links: 29 January 2016

LTE Security, Startup Tools, Security Tips, and Data Fiction

  1. LTE Weaknesses (PDF) — ShmooCon talk about how weak LTE is: a lot of unencrypted exchanges between handset and basestation, cheap and easy to fake up a basestation.
  2. AnalyzoFind and Compare the Best Tools for your Startup it claims. We’re in an age of software surplus: more projects, startups, apps, and tools than we can keep in our heads. There’s a place for curated lists, which is why every week brings a new one.
  3. How to Keep the NSA Out — NSA’s head of Tailored Access Operations (aka attacking other countries) gives some generic security advice, and some interesting glimpses. “Don’t assume a crack is too small to be noticed, or too small to be exploited,” he said. If you do a penetration test of your network and 97 things pass the test but three esoteric things fail, don’t think they don’t matter. Those are the ones the NSA, and other nation-state attackers will seize on, he explained. “We need that first crack, that first seam. And we’re going to look and look and look for that esoteric kind of edge case to break open and crack in.”
  4. The End of Big Data — future fiction by James Bridle.
Four short links: 14 January 2016

Four short links: 14 January 2016

DRM at W3C, Tractor DRM, Self-Driving Timeline, and Emoji Analytics

  1. You Can’t Destroy a Village to Save It (EFF) — EFF have a clever compromise for W3C’s proposal for DRM on the Web. [T]he W3C could have its cake and eat it, too. It could adopt a rule that requires members who help make DRM standards to promise not to sue people who report bugs in tools that conform to those standards, nor could they sue people just for making a standards-based tool that connected to theirs. They could make DRM, but only if they made sure that they took steps to stop that DRM from being used to attack the open Web. I hope the W3C take it.
  2. Copyright Law Shouldn’t Keep Me From Fixing a Tractor (Slate) — When a farmer friend of mine wanted to know if there was a way to tweak the copyrighted software of his broken tractor, I knew it was going to be rough. The only way to get around the DMCA’s restriction on software tinkering is to ask the Copyright Office for an exemption at the Section 1201 Rulemaking, an arduous proceeding that takes place just once every three years.
  3. License to DriveI have difficulty viewing No Drive Day as imminent. We’re maybe 95% there, but that last 5% will be a lengthy slog.
  4. Text, Sentiment & Social Analytics in the Year Ahead: 10 Trends — emoji analytics and machine-written content are the two that caught my eye.
Four short links: 13 January 2016

Four short links: 13 January 2016

Object Lessons, Data Programming, Generational Adoption, and Product Observations

  1. Object Lessons — Bogost and Schaberg edit a series about the hidden lives of ordinary things, from advocates to attendants, heresies to shares. For anyone who cares about products.
  2. A Data Programming CS1 Course (PDF) — We have found that students can be motivated to learn programming and computer science concepts in order to analyze DNA, predict the outcome of elections, detect fraudulent data, suggest friends in a social network, determine the authorship of documents, and more. The approach is more than just a collection of “nifty assignments”; rather, it affects the choice of topics and pedagogy.
  3. Cars and the Future (Ben Thompson) — This generational pattern of adoption will, in the history books, look sudden, even as it seems to unfold ever so slowly for those of us in the here and now — especially those of us working in technology. The pace of change in the technology industry — which is young, hugely driven by Moore’s Law, and which has largely catered to change-embracing geeks — is likely the true aberration. After all, the biggest mistake consistently made by technologists is forgetting that for most people technology is a means to an end, and for all the benefits we can list when it comes to over-the-top video or a network of on-demand self-driving vehicles, change and the abandonment of long-held ideals like the open road and a bit of TV after supper is an end most would prefer to avoid.
  4. CES 2016 Observations for Product PeopleThe big challenge is no surprise. Software development is unable to keep up with the hardware. What is going to separate one device from another or one company from another will be the software execution, not just the choice of chipset or specs for a peripheral/sensor. It would be hard to overstate the clear opportunity to build winning products using stronger software relative to competitors. Said another way, spending too many cycles on hardware pits you against the supply chain for most products. The whole piece is solid.
Four short links: 6 January 2016

Four short links: 6 January 2016

Spherical Projection, Sterling's Future, GNU Radio, and End-to-End Design

  1. Science on a Sphere — for when you want to see global data visualised without 2-D projection distortion.
  2. Lebowsky and Sterling’s 2016 State of the WorldThese physical barriers will suffer the “Fukushima effect:” the dikes you built to resist the tsunami only hold those catastrophic waters in, once the almighty wave comes over the top. Also, the industrial complex you are trying to protect from natural disaster becomes the source of a secondary, artificial disaster. (via BoingBoing)
  3. GNU Radio Tools for Radio Wrangling/Spectrum Domination (YouTube) — DEFCON talk.
  4. End-to-End Arguments in System Design (PDF) — End-to-end arguments are a kind of “Occam’s razor” when it comes to choosing the functions to be provided in a communication subsystem. Because the communication subsystem is frequently specified before applications that use the subsystem are known, the designer may be tempted to “help” the users by taking on more function than necessary. Awareness of end-to-end arguments can help to reduce such temptations.
Four short links: 17 December 2015

Four short links: 17 December 2015

Structured Image Concepts, Google's SDN, Lightbulb DeDRMing, and EFF SF

  1. Visual Genomea data set, a knowledge base, an ongoing effort to connect structured image concepts to language.
  2. Google’s Software Defined Networking[What was the biggest risk you faced rolling out the network? …] we were breaking the fate-sharing principle—which is to say we were putting ourselves in a situation where either the controller could fail without the switch failing, or the switch could fail without the controller failing. That generally leads to big problems in distributed computing, as many people learned the hard way once remote procedure calls became a dominant paradigm.
  3. Philips Backtrack on Lightbulb DRMIn view of the sentiment expressed by our customers, we have decided to reverse the software upgrade so that lights from other brands continue to work as they did before with the Philips Hue system.
  4. Pwning Tomorrow — EFF Publishes SF Anthology. You can expect liberties and freedoms to feature.
Four short links: 10 December 2015

Four short links: 10 December 2015

Reactive Programming Theory, Attacking HTTP/2, Distributed Systems Explainer, and Auto Futures

  1. Distributed Reactive Programming (A Paper a Day) — this week’s focus on reactive programming has been eye-opening for me. I find the implementation details less interesting than the simple notion that we can define different consistency models for reactive programs and reason about them.
  2. Attacking HTTP/2 ImplementationsOur talk focused on threats, attack vectors, and vulnerabilities found during the course of our research. Two Firefox, two Apache Traffic Server (ATS), and four Node-http2 vulnerabilities will be discussed alongside the release of the first public HTTP/2 fuzzer. We showed how these bugs were found, their root cause, why they occur, and how to trigger them.
  3. What We Talk About When We Talk About Distributed Systems — a great intro/explainer to the different concepts in distributed systems.
  4. The Autonomous Winter is ComingThe future of any given manufacturer will be determined by how successfully they manage their brands in a market split between Mobility customers and Driving customers.
Four short links: 21 October 2015

Four short links: 21 October 2015

Technology Ideals, Saying No, Future Things, and a Sweet Article Format

  1. How Will We Live?we tend to imbue technology with the ideals of the people who have created it, and the messages of those who market it. However, creators and marketeers only ever set the affordances and suggest a use case. A technology’s true impact will always be defined by those who use it. Whether that’s knitting groups or fascist regimes, technology becomes an amplifier and accelerator of the social, cultural, and political values of the groups who use it, not those who made it. And it will continue to be used in ways you can never imagine.
  2. Fortunate People Say No (Ian Bogost) — you have to say ‘yes’ for a long while before you can earn the right to say ‘no.’ Even then, you usually can’t say ‘no’ at whim. By the time you can say ‘no’ indiscriminately, then you’re already so super-privileged that being able to say ‘no’ is not a prerequisite of success, but a result of it. (via Austin Kleon) (via Cory Doctorow)
  3. The Thing From The Future (Stuart Candy) — a game for creating thought-provoking artifacts from the future. Design fiction idea generator, in other words.
  4. Sweet Article Format — big lede with shortcuts to relevant sections. As Courtney says, “while I don’t know what I’d use this for, I like it.” (via Courtney Johnston)
Four short links: 13 October 2015

Four short links: 13 October 2015

Apple Chips, Death of the Data Center, IBM R&D, and Stateful Services

  1. Apple’s Incredible Platform Advantage (Steve Cheney) — the best people in chip design no longer want to work at Intel or Qualcomm. They want to work at Apple. I have plenty of friends in the Valley who affirm this. Sure Apple products are cooler. But Apple has also surpassed Intel in performance. This is insane. A device company – which makes CPUs for internal use – surpassing Intel, the world’s largest chip maker that practically invented the CPU and has thousands of customers.
  2. Data Center’s Days are Numbered — Adrian Cockroft says, the investments going into bolstering security on AWS and other clouds are set to pay off to the point where within five years, “it will be impossible to get security certification if you’re not running in the cloud because the tools designed for data centers are sloppily put together and can’t offer the auditing for PCI and other regulators.”
  3. A Peek Inside IBM’s R&D LabIBM still has a physics department, but at this point, almost every physicist is somehow linked to a product plan or customer plan.
  4. Building Scalable Stateful Services (High Scalability) — elucidation of a talk by Caitie McCaffrey (YouTube), tech lead for observability at Twitter.