- These Glasses Thwart Facial Recognition Software (Slate) — good idea, but don’t forget to put a stone in your shoe to thwart gait recognition too.
- opsec for Hackers (Slideshare) — how boring and unexciting most of not getting caught is.
- DHS Warns Password Cracker Targeting Industrial Networks (Nextgov) — Security consultants recently concluded that there are about 7,200 Internet-facing critical infrastructure devices, many of which use default passwords. Wake me when you stop boggling. Welcome to the Internet of Insecure Things (it’s basically the Internet we already have, but Borat can pwn your hydro dam and your fridge is telling Chinese milspec hackers when you midnight snack).
- The Evolution of Steve Mann’s Apparatus (Beta Knowledge) — wearable computing went from “makes you look like a robot who will never get laid” to “looks like sunglasses and promiscuity is an option”.
ENTRIES TAGGED "hardware"
Four short links: 23 January 2013
Thwarting Facial Recognition Software, Operations Security, Password Cracking SCADA Systems, and Wearables Evolved
Four short links: 17 January 2013
Free Books, Analytics Goofs, Book Boilerplate, and Learn CS with the Raspberry Pi
- Free Book Sifter — lists all the free books on Amazon, has RSS feeds and newsletters. (via BoingBoing)
- Whom the Gods Would Destroy, They First Give Realtime Analytics — a few key reasons why truly real-time analytics can open the door to a new type of (realtime!) bad decision making. [U]ser demographics could be different day over day. Or very likely, you could see a major difference in user behavior immediately upon releasing a change, only to watch it evaporate as users learn to use new functionality. Given all of these concerns, the conservative and reasonable stance is to only consider tests that last a few days or more.
- Web Book Boilerplate (Github) — uses plain old markdown and generates a well structured HTML version of your written words. Since it’s sitting on top of Pandoc and Grunt, you can easily make your books available for every platform. MIT-style license.
- Raspberry Pi Education Manual (PDF) — from Scratch to Python and HCI all via the Raspberry Pi. Intended to be informative and a series of lessons for teachers and students learning coding with the Raspberry Pi as their first device.
Four short links: 15 January 2013
Gadgets Over Time, Telco Evil, Open Source Savings, and Plus-Sized Husky Tablet
- Electronic Gadgets in the NZ Consumer Price Index — your CPI is just as bizarre, trust me. (via Julie Starr)
- Captive Audience: Telecom Industry and Monopoly in the New Gilded Age (Amazon) — Foo camper and former Washington insider, now truth-teller about broken telco industry in the US. From Time’s review of the book and interview with her: Meanwhile, Comcast has sharply reduced its capital expenditures, which have now fallen to 14% of revenues from over 35% a decade ago, even as it enjoys a whopping 95% profit margin on its broadband service. “They’re not expanding and they’re not enhancing their service,” Crawford says. “They’ve done their investment, now they’re just harvesting.” Not surprisingly, Comcast’s stock price increased over 50% in the last year, and nearly 200% over the last four years. “Shareholders are doing well,” Crawford says. “The rest of the country, not so great.”
- Barclays Cut Software Expenditure 90% With Open Source (The Inquirer) — “We’ve been making significant savings in our technology platform by doing a lot of the work in-house to develop and launch our own applications rapidly,” he said. “It means we can write new applications once and then develop them using an open source model, rather than rewriting them again for legacy systems.” (via The Linux Foundation)
- Lenovo Has a 27″ Tablet Due This Summer — USD1700 and I want one. The label “tablet” is a tough pill to swallow (ho ho) but it’d make an awesome table. That you could never put anything on. Hmm.
Four short links: 14 January 2013
Open Source Metrics, BitTorrent to TV, Tumblr Value, and Variable Fiction
- Open Source Metrics — Talking about the health of the project based on a single metric is meaningless. It is definitely a waste of time to talk about the health of a project based on metrics like number of software downloads and mailing list activities. Amen!
- BitTorrent To Your TV — The first ever certified BitTorrent Android box goes on sale today, allowing users to stream files downloaded with uTorrent wirelessly to their television. The new set-top box supports playback of all popular video formats and can also download torrents by itself, fully anonymously if needed. (via Andy Baio)
- Tumblr URL Culture — the FOO.tumblr.com namespace is scarce and there’s non-financial speculation. People hoard and trade URLs, whose value is that they say “I’m cool and quirky”. I’m interested because it’s a weird largely-invisible Internet barter economy. Here’s a rant against it. (via Beta Knowledge)
- Design-Fiction Slider Bar of Disbelief (Bruce Sterling) — I love the list as much as the diagram. He lays out a sliding scale from “objective reality” to “holy relics” and positions black propaganda, 419 frauds, design pitches, user feedback, and software code on that scale (among many other things). Bruce is an avuncular Loki, pulling you aside and messing with your head for your own good.
Four short links: 10 January 2013
Engineering Virality, App Store Numbers, App Store Data, and FPGA OS
- How To Make That One Thing Go Viral (Slideshare) — excellent points about headline writing (takes 25 to find the one that works), shareability (your audience has to click and share, then it’s whether THEIR audience clicks on it), and A/B testing (they talk about what they learned doing it ruthlessly).
- A More Complete Picture of the iTunes Economy — $12B/yr gross revenue through it, costs about $3.5B/yr to operate, revenue has grown at a ~35% compounded rate over last four years, non-app media 2/3 sales but growing slower than app sales. Lots of graphs!
- Visualizing the iOS App Store — interactive exploration of app store sales data.
- BORPH — an Operating System designed for FPGA-based reconfigurable computers. It is an extended version of the Linux kernel that handles FPGAs as if they were CPUs. BORPH introduces the concept of a ‘hardware process’, which is a hardware design that runs on an FPGA but behaves just like a normal user program. The BORPH kernel provides standard system services, such as file system access to hardware processes, allowing them to communicate with the rest of the system easily and systematically. The name is an acronym for “Berkeley Operating system for ReProgrammable Hardware”.
Four short links: 3 January 2013
Historic Social Media, Latency Numbers, Quantified Auto, and I Feel Old
- Community Memory (Wired) — In the early 1970s, Efrem Lipkin, Mark Szpakowski and Lee Felsenstein set up a series of these terminals around San Francisco and Berkeley, providing access to an electronic bulletin board housed by a XDS-940 mainframe computer. This started out as a social experiment to see if people would be willing to share via computer — a kind of “information flea market,” a “communication system which allows people to make contact with each other on the basis of mutually expressed interest,” according to a brochure from the time. What evolved was a proto-Facebook-Twitter-Yelp-Craigslist-esque database filled with searchable roommate-wanted and for-sale items ads, restaurant recommendations, and, well, status updates, complete with graphics and social commentary. But did it have retargeted ads, promoted tweets, and opt-in messages from partners? I THOUGHT NOT. (via BoingBoing)
- Latency Numbers Every Programmer Should Know (EECS Berkeley) — exactly that. I was always impressed by Artur Bergman’s familiarity with the speed of packets across switches, RAM cache misses, and HDD mean seek times. Now you can be that impressive person.
- Feds Requiring Black Boxes in All Vehicles (Wired) — [Q]uestions remain about the black boxes and data. Among them, how long should a black box retain event data, who owns the data, can a motorist turn off the black box and can the authorities get the data without a warrant. This is starting as regulatory compliance, but should be seized as an opportunity to have a quantified self.
- Average Age of StackExchange Users by Tag (Brian Bondy) — no tag is associated with people who have a mean age over 30. Did I miss the plague that wiped out all the programmers over the age of 30? Or does age bring with it supreme knowledge so that old people like me never have to use StackExchange? Yes, that must be it. *cough*
Four short links: 28 December 2012
Kenyan Entrepreneur, Spooky Open Source, Typing Tutor, and Hacker's Bagpipes
- 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.
- 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.
- gtypist — open source universal typing tutor. You can learn correct typing and improve your skills by practising its exercises on a regular basis.
- Open Source Hardware Bagpipes — to practice your fingerings without actually killing the neighbours. (via Hacked Gadgets)
Four short links: 26 December 2012
Remote-Controlled Arduino, JS Notifications, Device Numbers, and Network Hostility
- Arduino IR Remote Control — control your Arduino project via your TV’s remote control. (via Arduino)
- holler — WTFPL-licensed Javascript library for real-time in-app notifications via the commandline (uses node). (via Javascript Weekly)
- First Tweets — numbers of “first tweet from my new {X}” giving indications of the popularity of each. Not good for Surface, alas.
- It’s Clear Verizon is Blocking Google Wallet Anti-Competitively — Verizon blocked Google’s mobile payments app until Verizon’s own was available. One irony of course is that in conjunction with Verizon, Google worked to gut meaningful network neutrality rules that would have prevented this very thing from happening on wireless networks.
Four short links: 25 December 2012
Regressive Future, Data Viz, Sterile Pump, and Javascript App Kit
- RebelMouse — aggregates FB, Twitter, Instagram, G+ content w/Pinboard-like aesthetics. It’s like aggregators we’ve had since 2004, but in this Brave New World we have to authenticate to a blogging service to get our own public posts out in a machine-readable form. 2012: it’s like 2000 but now we have FOUR AOLs! We’ve traded paywalls for graywalls, but the walls are still there. (via Poynter)
- Data Visualization Course Wiki — wiki for Stanford course cs448b, covering visualization with examples and critiques.
- Peristaltic Pump — for your Arduino medical projects, a pump that doesn’t touch the liquid it moves so the liquid can stay sterile.
- Breeze — MIT-licensed Javascript framework for building rich web apps.
Interoperating the industrial Internet
If we're going to build useful applications on top of the industrial Internet, we must ensure the components interoperate.
One of the most interesting points made in GE’s “Unleashing the Industrial Internet” event was GE CEO Jeff Immelt’s statement that only 10% of the value of Internet-enabled products is in the connectivity layer; the remaining 90% is in the applications that are built on top of that layer. These applications enable decision support, the optimization of large…
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