"identity" entries

Four short links: 22 April 2016

Four short links: 22 April 2016

Unicorn Hazards Ahead, Brainprinting for Identity, Generating News Headlines, and Anthropic Capitalism

  1. Why The Unicorn Financing Market Just Became Dangerous to Everyone — read with Fortune’s take on the Tech IPO Market. “They profess to take a long-term view, but the data shows post-IPO stocks are very volatile in the case of tech IPOs, and that is not a problem the underwriters try to address.” Damning breakdown of the current state. As Bryce said, Single-horned, majestic, Weapons of Mass Extraction.
  2. Brainprints (Kurzweil) — 50 subjects, 500 images, EEG headset, 100% accuracy identifying person from their brain’s response to the images. We’ll need much larger studies, but this is promising.
  3. Generating News Headlines with Recurrent Neural NetworksWe find that the model is quite effective at concisely paraphrasing news articles.
  4. Anthropic Capitalism And The New Gimmick Economy — market capitalism struggles with “public goods” (those which are inexhaustible and non-excludable, like infinitely copyable bits that any number of people can have copies of at once), yet much of the world is being recast as an activity where software manipulates information, thus becoming a public good. Capitalism and Communism, which briefly resembled victor and vanquished, increasingly look more like Thelma and Louise; a tragic couple sent over the edge by forces beyond their control. What comes next is anyone’s guess and the world hangs in the balance.

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Four short links: 21 April 2016

Four short links: 21 April 2016

BitCoin with Identity, Hardware is Hard, Data Test Suites, and Internet Voting

  1. Bribing Miners to Regulate Bitcoin — interesting! A somewhat conspiracy-theoretical take on an MIT proposal to layer identity onto Bitcoin. Features repurposed DRM tech, no less.
  2. Tesla Model X Quality Issues (Consumer Reports) — hardware is hard.
  3. Data Proofer — open source software that’s test cases for your data, to help ensure you’re not pushing corrupt data into production.
  4. Internet Voting? Really? (YouTube) — TEDx talk by Andrew Appel comparing physical with online voting. Very easy to follow for the non-technical.

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Your money or your life

Microsoft, Google and pushing business models too far.

Photo by Didier, used under a Creative Commons license.I know it’s hard to run a large company. I know that organizations can get too deep into their own visions to imagine conflicting values.

I realized yesterday, though, that:

  • Microsoft ruined their brand for me by holding too tightly to things that they considered theirs. (Software.)
  • Google is ruining their brand for me by holding too tightly to things that I consider mine. (Identity, everything they can possibly learn about me.)

It’s a weird difference, but the Google version makes me much sadder about the world. As I’d tell a mugger, “You can have my wallet, just don’t take me.”

Photo by Didier, used under a Creative Commons license.

Four short links: 25 September 2013

Four short links: 25 September 2013

Scaling Systems, Code Reviews in Github, Humane Javascript, and Privacy in Identity

  1. Salesforce ArchitectureOur search tier runs on commodity Linux hosts, each of which is augmented with a 640 GiB PCI-E flash drive which serves as a caching layer for search requests. These hosts get their data from a shared SAN array via an NFS file system. Search indexes are stored on the flash drive to enable greater performance for search throughput. Architecture porn.
  2. Gerrit Code Review (Github) — tool for doing code reviews on Github codebases. (via Chris Aniszczyk)
  3. Humanize (Github) — Javascript to turn “first” into a list position, format numbers, generate plurals in English, etc. (via Pete Warden)
  4. Users vs Apps (Tim Bray) — the wrong thing being shared with the wrong people, even once, can ruin a trust relationship forever. Personally, I’m pretty hard-line about this one. I’m currently refusing to update the Android app from my bank, CIBC, because it wants access to my contacts. You know what the right amount of “social” content is in my relationship with my bank? Zero, that’s what.
Four short links: 2 September 2013

Four short links: 2 September 2013

Autocomplete, Tor Security, News Glitches, Moz Persona

  1. sifter.js — library for textually searching arrays and hashes of objects by property (or multiple properties). Designed specifically for autocomplete. (via Javascript Weekly)
  2. Tor Users Get Routed (PDF) — research into the security of Tor, with some of its creators as authors. Our results show that Tor users are far more susceptible to compromise than indicated by prior work.
  3. Glitch News — screencaps from glitches in video news.
  4. FC4: Persona (Tim Bray) — Mozilla Persona, reminds us just because you’re using a protocol that allows tracking avoidance, that doesn’t mean you’ll get it.
Four short links: 19 August 2013

Four short links: 19 August 2013

Aural Viz, SPOF ID, Information Asymmetry, and Support IA

  1. choir.io explained (Alex Dong) — Sound is the perfect medium for wearable computers to talk back to us. Sound has a dozen of properties that we can tune to convey different level of emotions and intrusivenesses. Different sound packs would fit into various contexts.
  2. Identity Single Point of Failure (Tim Bray) — continuing his excellent series on federated identity. There’s this guy here at Google, Eric Sachs, who’s been doing Identity stuff in the white-hot center of the Internet universe for a lot of years. One of his mantras is “If you’re typing a password into something, unless they have 100+ full-time engineers working on security and abuse and fraud, you should be nervous.” I think he’s right.
  3. What Does It Really Matter If Companies Are Tracking Us Online? (The Atlantic) — Rather, the failures will come in the form of consumers being systematically charged more than they would have been had less information about that particular consumer. Sometimes, that will mean exploiting people who are not of a particular class, say upcharging men for flowers if a computer recognizes that that he’s looking for flowers the day after his anniversary. A summary of Ryan Calo’s paper. (via Slashdot)
  4. Life Inside Brewster’s Magnificent Contraption (Jason Scott) — I’ve been really busy. Checking my upload statistics, here’s what I’ve added to the Internet Archive: Over 169,000 individual objects, totaling 245 terabytes. You should subscribe and keep them in business. I did.
Four short links: 13 August 2013

Four short links: 13 August 2013

Retro Hackery, Etsy Ops, Distributed Identity, and lolcoders

  1. How Things Work: Summer Games Edition — admire the real craftsmanship in those early games. This has a great description of using raster interrupts to extend the number of sprites, and how and why double-buffering was expensive in terms of memory.
  2. IAMA: Etsy Ops Team (Reddit) — the Etsy ops team does an IAMA on Reddit. Everything from uptime to this sage advice about fluid data: A nice 18 year old Glenfiddich scales extremely well, especially if used in an active active configuration with a glass in each hand. The part of Scotland where Glenfiddich is located also benefits from near-permanent exposure to the Cloud (several clouds in fact). (via Nelson Minar)
  3. Who Learns What When You Log Into Facebook (Tim Bray) — nice breakdown of who learns what and how, part of Tim’s work raising the qualify of conversation about online federated identity.
  4. lolcommits — takes a photo of the programmer on each git commit. (via Nelson Minar)
Four short links: 13 June 2013

Four short links: 13 June 2013

The Contract, Fixing Signin, Pi Gaming, and Glitchy Marketing Constructs

  1. The Unengageables (Dan Meyer) — They signed their “didactic contract” years and years ago. They signed it. Their math teachers signed it. The agreement says that the teacher comes into class, tells them what they’re going to learn, and shows them three examples of it. In return, the students take what their teacher showed them and reproduce it twenty times before leaving class. Then they go home with an assignment to reproduce it twenty more times. Then here you come, Ms. I-Just-Got-Back-From-A-Workshop, and you want to change the agreement? Yeah, you’ll hear from their attorney. Applies to management as much as to teaching.
  2. Fixing SigninThe general principle can be stated simply, in two parts: first, give users a trust-worthy way to identify themselves. Second, do so with as little information as possible, because users don’t want to (and simply can’t) remember things like passwords in a secure way. (via Tim Bray)
  3. Retro Gaming with Raspberry Pi (Adafruit) — finally, a clear incentive for kids to work through the frustration of setting up their own Linux box.
  4. Mieko Haire — Apple’s fictious demo lady. Or is she fictitious? This is a new aesthetic-esque glitch, but while most glitches are glitches because you see something that doesn’t exist, this is glitchy because the fictions are actual people. Ok, maybe I need to lay off the peyote.
Four short links: 12 July 2012

Four short links: 12 July 2012

Mozilla Single Sign-On, Designed Technology, Identifying Crackpots, and Web Page Design

  1. Mozilla Persona — single sign-on for the web.
  2. Interview with Alan Kay (Dr Dobbs Journal) — The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs. (via Daniel Bachhuber)
  3. Crackpots, Geniuses, and How to Tell The Difference (BoingBoing) — think critically, all the time. If you’re told you can’t trust any other sources of information (especially because of Big Conspiracy, or because so-and-so expert is a bad person in other areas of his or her life), be cautious. Replication is a powerful tool. It helps us get past accidental and intentional biases to see something closer to the truth. Suppressing replication is also powerful, because it leaves you with no way to check against bias.
  4. Properties of Intuitive Web Pages (Luke Wroblewski) — Intuitive design is how we give our users super powers. This enables them to do new things.

Big ethics for big data

How businesses can confront the ethical issues tied to massive aggregation and data analysis.

"Ethics of Big Data" authors Kord Davis and Doug Patterson explore ownership, anonymization, privacy, and ways to evaluate and establish ethical data practices within an organization.