- Beyond the Stack (Mike Loukides) — tools and processes to support software developers who are as massively distributed as the code they build.
- Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends 2014 (PDF) — the changes on slide 34 are interesting: usage moving away from G+/Facebook-style omniblather creepware and towards phonebook-based chat apps.
- Introduction to Software Engineering Ethics (PDF) — amazing set of provocative questions and scenarios for software engineers about the decisions they made and consequences of their actions. From a course in ethics from SCU.
- Open Government Data Online: Impenetrable (Guardian) — Too much knowledge gets trapped in multi-page pdf files that are slow to download (especially in low-bandwidth areas), costly to print, and unavailable for computer analysis until someone manually or automatically extracts the raw data.
"Internet" entries
Four short links: 29 May 2014
Modern Software Development, Internet Trends, Software Ethics, and Open Government Data
Four short links: 28 May 2014
Targeted Breakage, Driverless Cars, BitCoin Bigness, and IoT Approaching
- Maciej Ceglowski on Our Internet — If you haven’t already read this because someone pushed it into your hands, read it now. If these vast databases are valuable enough, it doesn’t matter who they belong to. The government will always find a way to query them. Who pays for the servers is just an implementation detail.
- Design Changes Possible With Robot Cars (Brad Templeton) — While a nice windshield may be good for visibility for forward-facing passengers, there is no need to have a large unobstructed view for safety. The windshield can be reinforced with bars, for example, allowing it to be much stronger in the case of impacts, notably impacts with animals. Other than for passenger comfort, the windshield barely has to be there at all. On behalf of everyone who has ever driven in Australia at dusk … I for one welcome our new robot chauffeurs. (via The Atlantic)
- Bitcoin Set to Overtake Paypal Transaction Volumes — “In the next one or two years, Bitcoin can surpass the dollar transaction volumes of other established payment companies including Discover, and even American Express, MasterCard, and Visa,” said SmartMetric CEO Chaya Hendrick. (via Hamish McEwan)
- 1 in 5 Americans Has Their Physical Environment on the Internet (Quartz) — One in five adult American internet users already has a device at home that connects the physical environment to the internet, according to a Forrester Research report (paywall) out last week.
Four short links: 7 May 2014
Internet Broadband, Open Radio, Excel Formulae in JS, and Block Chains
- Observations of an Internet Middleman — Five of those congested peers are in the United States and one is in Europe. There are none in any other part of the world. All six are large Broadband consumer networks with a dominant or exclusive market share in their local market. In countries or markets where consumers have multiple Broadband choices (like the UK) there are no congested peers. Relevant as competition works for gigabit fibre to consumers.
- Open TX — open source firmware for RC radio transmitters. The firmware is highly configurable and brings much more features than found in traditional radios.
- formula.js — Excel formulae in Javascript. Waiting for someone to write a Apple 1 emulator in them.
- Minimum Viable Block Chain — The block chain is agnostic to any “currency”. In fact, it can (and will) be adapted to power many other use cases. As a result, it pays to understand the how and the why behind the “minimum viable block chain”.
Four short links: 2 May 2014
Collaborative Neighbourhood Storytelling, Chrome Evil, Responsive Web Instruction, and Open Source Packet Processing
- NewsPad: Designing for Collaborative Storytelling in Neighborhoods (PDF) — Microsoft Research report about tests of a tool to address needs in community reporting.
- Burying the URL — makes you suspect that “users interact with the web directly instead of via Google” is the #1 bug in Chrome’s issue tracker.
- Web Fundamentals — Google steering developers to making responsive sites, showing workflow for styling such that you can get sites that look good on all screens.
- snabbswitch — open source packet processing for ISPs.
Four short links: 7 April 2014
Auto Ethics, Baio on Medium, Internet of Insecure Things, New Unlicensed Spectrum
- Can We Design Systems to Automate Ethics — code in self-driving cars will implement a solution to the trolley problem. But which solution?
- My First Post on Medium (Andy Baio) — one or two glitches but otherwise fine demonstration of what’s possible with Medium.
- SCADA Vulnerability: 7600 Plants at Risk (BBC) — the vulnerabilities are in unpatched Centum CS 3000 software. The real business for IoT is secure remote updates and monitoring. (via Slashdot)
- New Unlicensed Spectrum — The unanimous vote frees up 100 MHz of airwaves in the lower part of 5 GHz spectrum band. Previously, the FCC reserved those airwaves for exclusive use by a satellite phone company. The FCC vote opens those unlicensed airwaves so they can be used by consumer electronics equipment, including Wi-Fi routers. With the new airwaves, Wi-Fi equipment can handle more traffic at higher speeds.
Four short links: 4 April 2014
MSFT Opening, Declarative Web, Internet Utility, and Design Fiction Reading List
- C# Compiler Open Sourced — bit by the bit, the ship of Microsoft turns.
- The Web’s Declarative Composable Future — this. For the first time since 1993, I feel like the web platform is taking a step towards being a real platform (vs simply bolting features on the side).
- Why the Government Should Provide Internet Access — video interview with Susan Crawford about why the Internet should be treated like a utility. She’s the only policy person I see talking sense. There’s a multilarity coming, when a critical mass of everyday objects are connected to each other via the Internet and offline devices become as useful as an ox-drawn cart on railway tracks. At that point it’s too late to argue you need affordable predator-proof Internet, because you’re already over the (sensing, e-ink covered, Arduino-powered) barrel. (via BoingBoing)
- Design Fiction: A Bibliography — Some resources about design fiction I’m use to share with students.
Four short links: 11 February 2014
Shadow Banking, Visualization Thoughts, Streaming Video Data, and Javascript Puzzlers
- China’s $122BB Boom in Shadow Banking is Happening on Phones (Quartz) — Tencent’s recently launched online money market fund (MMF), Licai Tong, drew in 10 billion yuan ($1.7 billion) in just six days in the last week of January.
- The Weight of Rain — lovely talk about the thought processes behind coming up with a truly insightful visualisation.
- Data on Video Streaming Starting to Emerge (Giga Om) — M-Lab, which gathers broadband performance data and distributes that data to the FCC, has uncovered significant slowdowns in throughput on Comcast, Time Warner Cable and AT&T. Such slowdowns could be indicative of deliberate actions taken at interconnection points by ISPs.
- Javascript Puzzlers — how well do you know Javascript?
Email: The Internet’s First and Last Killer App
I’m dating myself here, but I remember a time when AOL was obviously going to replace email (or at least that’s what the pundits and day traders told us). Standard Internet email was clearly too anarchic, uncontrolled, and uncommercial to be suitable for real business. Now that email was escaping the ivory towers of academia, it had to be owned and managed by a corporation. That…didn’t happen.
A few years later, MySpace was obviously going to replace email. Email was only used by old fogies like myself. Anyone under 18 didn’t send or read email; and as teenagers grew up, graduated from college, and joined the work force, email was going to fade away much like Usenet news before it. That also…didn’t happen.
Four short links: 26 November 2013
Internet Cities, Defying Google Glass, Deep Learning Book, and Open Paleoanthropology
- The Death and Life of Great Internet Cities — “The sense that you were given some space on the Internet, and allowed to do anything you wanted to in that space, it’s completely gone from these new social sites,” said Scott. “Like prisoners, or livestock, or anybody locked in institution, I am sure the residents of these new places don’t even notice the walls anymore.”
- What You’re Not Supposed To Do With Google Glass (Esquire) — Maybe I can put these interruptions to good use. I once read that in ancient Rome, when a general came home victorious, they’d throw him a triumphal parade. But there was always a slave who walked behind the general, whispering in his ear to keep him humble. “You are mortal,” the slave would say. I’ve always wanted a modern nonslave version of this — a way to remind myself to keep perspective. And Glass seemed the first gadget that would allow me to do that. In the morning, I schedule a series of messages to e-mail myself throughout the day. “You are mortal.” “You are going to die someday.” “Stop being a selfish bastard and think about others.” (via BoingBoing)
- Neural Networks and Deep Learning — Chapter 1 up and free, and there’s an IndieGogo campaign to fund the rest.
- What We Know and Don’t Know — That highly controlled approach creates the misconception that fossils come out of the ground with labels attached. Or worse, that discovery comes from cloaked geniuses instead of open discussion. We’re hoping to combat these misconceptions by pursuing an open approach. This is today’s evolutionary science, not the science of fifty years ago We’re here sharing science. […] Science isn’t the answers, science is the process. Open science in paleoanthropology.
How Secure Is Your Old and Inactive User Data?
The need to root out old data goes well beyond creating disk space
A couple weeks ago Brian Krebs announced that Adobe had a serious breach, of customer data as well as source code for a number of its software products. Nicole Perlroth of The New York Times updated that to say that the breach appears to be much bigger than thought and, indeed, Krebs agrees. Adobe themselves announced it first, earlier than Krebs’s first report in CSO Brad Arkin’s terse blog post, Illegal Access to Adobe Source Code.
By now, breaches are hardly news at all. All of us pros flat out say that it isn’t a matter of *if* you get hacked, but *when*. Adobe’s is of note solely because of the way that the news has dribbled out. First, the “illegal access” to source code, then the news of lost customer data to the tune of 2.9 million, then upping that to 38 million, but really actually (maybe?) 150 million. The larger number is expired accounts—or something.