- Intro Statistics with Randomization and Simulation — free PDF download as well as book for purchase. (via Flowing Data)
- Automated Lip Reading Invented — press release, but interesting topic. The research will be presented at the International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP) in Shanghai.
- A Smartphone-based Laser Distance Sensor for Outdoor Environments (PDF) — We present a low-cost, smartphone-based planar laser distance sensor design for outdoor use with 6 cm accuracy at 5 meters, 30 Hz scan rate, and 0.1 degree resolution over the field of view. The cost of the hardware additions to the off-the-shelf smartphone used in our prototype is under $50.
- Internet Archive Seeks to Defend Against Wrongful Takedowns — In its submission, the Archive goes to some lengths to highlight differences between those engaging in commercial piracy and those who seek to preserve and share cultural heritage. As a result, the context in which a user posts content online should be considered before attempting to determine whether an infringement has taken place. This, the organization says, poses problems for the “staydown” demands gaining momentum with copyright holders.
"Internet Archive" entries
Four short links: 25 March 2016
Intro to Statistics, Automatic Lip Reading, Outdoor Range Finding for $10, and Wrongful Takedowns
Four short links: 6 May 2014
On Google, Non-Profit Cleverness, Textbooks in Markdown, and Amazon with Docker
- Letter to Google from CEO of Axel Springer — very well-written and articulate challenge to the positive Google frame: your company will play a leading role in the various areas of our professional and private lives–in the house, in the car, in healthcare, in robotronics. This is a huge opportunity and a no less serious threat.
- Brewster Kahle Talk — notes from a Brewster Kahle talk. Internet Archive using non-profit status to engineer lower costs in surprising ways: accommodation and banking. (via David Weinberger)
- gitbook — code to turn markdown for textbook-style works (including problems and solutions) into PDF, ebook, HTML, etc.
- AWS Elastic Beanstalk for Docker — use Amazon’s deployment tool with Docker images or Dockerfiles.
Four short links: 19 August 2013
Aural Viz, SPOF ID, Information Asymmetry, and Support IA
- 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.
- 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.
- 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)
- 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: 28 June 2013
Huxley Beat Orwell?, Cloud Keys, Motorola's DARPA, and Internet Archive Credit Union
- Huxley vs Orwell — buy Amusing Ourselves to Death if this rings true. The future is here, it’s just not evenly surveilled. (via rone)
- KeyMe — keys in the cloud. (Digital designs as backups for physical objects)
- Motorola Advanced Technology and Products Group — The philosophy behind Motorola ATAP is to create an organization with the same level of appetite for technology advancement as DARPA, but with a consumer focus. It is a pretty interesting place to be. And they hired the excellent Johnny Chung Lee.
- Internet Credit Union — Internet Archive starts a Credit Union. Can’t wait to see memes on debit cards.
Four short links: 17 April 2013
Software Archive, Self-Tracking, Provisioning, and Python Ciphers
- Computer Software Archive (Jason Scott) — The Internet Archive is the largest collection of historical software online in the world. Find me someone bigger. Through these terabytes (!) of software, the whole of the software landscape of the last 50 years is settling in. (And documentation and magazines and …). Wow.
- 7 in 10 Doctors Have a Self-Tracking Patient — the most common ways of sharing data with a doctor, according to the physicians, were writing it out by hand or giving the doctor a paper printout. (via Richard MacManus)
- opsmezzo — open-sourced provisioning tools from the Nodejitsu team. (via Nuno Job)
- Hacking Secret Ciphers with Python — teaches complete beginners how to program in the Python programming language. The book features the source code to several ciphers and hacking programs for these ciphers. The programs include the Caesar cipher, transposition cipher, simple substitution cipher, multiplicative & affine ciphers, Vigenere cipher, and hacking programs for each of these ciphers. The final chapters cover the modern RSA cipher and public key cryptography.
Four short links: 19 September 2012
Scholar boarding, Javascript macros, Nerd Raptures, Preserved Conversations
- /r/Scholar — Reddit board for tracking down research articles of interest.
- sweet.js (GitHub) — macros for Javascript. (via Brendan Eich)
- The Rapture of the Nerds (Charlie Stoss, Cory Doctorow) — this is the HTML version of the book, which is also available for purchase, and is released under a CC-A-NC-ND license.
- Conversations Network Closes Down — The remaining assets of the Conversations Network (cash and intellectual property) will be acquired by the Internet Archive, another U.S. 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. All existing programs will be moved to the Internet Archive where the world will be able to continue to listen to them for free. (via Jon Udell)
Four short links: 17 May 2011
Sorting Out 9/11, Tagging Text, Unlocking Scientific Publishing, and Internet Archive's Meatspace Branch
- Sorting Out 9/11 (New Yorker) — the thorniest problem for the 9/11 memorial was the ordering of the names. Computer science to the rescue!
- Tagger — Python library for extracting tags (statistically significant words or phrases) from a piece of text.
- Free Science, One Paper at a Time (Wired) — Jonathan Eisen’s attempt to collect and distribute his father’s scientific papers (which were written while a federal employee, so in the public domain), thwarted by old-fashioned scientific publishing. “But now,” says Jonathan Eisen, “there’s this thing called the Internet. It changes not just how things can be done but how they should be done.”
- Internet Archive Launches Physical Archive — I’m keen to see how this develops, because physical storage has problems that digital does not. I’d love to see the donor agreement require the donor to give the archive full rights to digitize and distribute under open licenses. That’d put the Internet Archive a step in front of traditional archives, museums, libraries, and galleries, whose donor agreements typically let donors place arbitrary specifications on use and reuse (“must be inaccessible for 50 years”, “no commercial use”, “no use that compromises the work”, etc.), all of which are barriers to wholesale digitization and reuse.
Four short links: 8 February 2011
Web Memory, Phones Read Cards, Military and Public Data, and NoSQL Merger
- Erase and Rewind — the BBC are planning to close (delete) 172 websites on some kind of cost-cutting measure. i’m very saddened to see the BBC join the ranks of online services that don’t give a damn for posterity. As Simon Willison points out, the British Library will have archived some of the sites (and Internet Archive others, possibly).
- Announcing Farebot for Android — dumps the information stored on transit cards using Android’s NFC (near field communication, aka RFID) support. When demonstrating FareBot, many people are surprised to learn that much of the data on their ORCA card is not encrypted or protected. This fact is published by ORCA, but is not commonly known and may be of concern to some people who would rather not broadcast where they’ve been to anyone who can brush against the outside of their wallet. Transit agencies across the board should do a better job explaining to riders how the cards work and what the privacy implications are.
- Using Public Data to Fight a War (ReadWriteWeb) — uncomfortable use of the data you put in public?
- CouchOne and Membase Merge — consolidation in the commercial NoSQL arena. the merger not only results in the joining of two companies, but also combines CouchDB, memcached and Membase technologies. Together, the new company, Couchbase, will offer an end-to-end database solution that can be stored on a single server or spread across hundreds of servers.
Four short links: 22 October 2010
Image Remapping, Internet Futures, Ebook Reader, and Open Cloud Computing
- Historical Images Remapped — Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum released historical images from their collections, and a historical photo site Sepiatown geolocated and oriented them so they can be viewed side-by-side with current Google Street View images of the same place. And then contributed the refined metadata back to the museum. A great example of your users helping to improve your data.
- Future Internet Scenarios — results of scenario planning by the Internet Society, some possible futures from open and competitive to anticompetitive centralised walled-gardens.
- OpenLibrary Bookreader — the Internet Archive’s book reader is (naturally) open source for you to reuse and improve. (via Kevin Marks on Twitter)
- OpenStack Austin Release — code to compute controller and object storage released. Competition and interoperability require exactly this kind of open cloud environment.
Internet Archive Wins Push-Back Fight with U.S. Government
The Internet Archive has successfully pushed back against a federal national security letter (NSL) request for Archive member records. Brewster Kahle, Internet Archive co-founder, director and digital librarian, discussed the NSL process and outcome with the San Francisco Chronicle: Kahle … was appalled when his volunteer lawyers told him in November that the FBI was demanding records of all communications…