- Bank of America Loading up on Bitcoin Patents — The wide-ranging patents cover everything from a “cryptocurrency transaction payment system” which would let users make transactions using cryptocurrency, to risk detection, storing cryptocurrencies offline, and using the blockchain to measure fraudulent activity.
- Vertigo: A Wall-Climbing Robot (Disney Research) — watch the video. YOW! (via David Pescovitz)
- Synthesizing What I Mean — In this paper, we describe SWIM, a tool which suggests code snippets given API-related natural language queries.
- serialusb — this is how you decode USB protocols.
"ip" entries
Four short links: 30 December 2015
Bitcoin Patents, Wall-Climbing Robot, English 2 Code, and Decoding USB
Four short links: 12 October 2015
Unattended Robots, Replicable Economics, Deep Learning Learnings, and TPP Problems
- Acquiring Object Experiences at Scale — software to let a robot examine a pile of objects, unattended overnight.
- Economics Apparently Not Replicable (PDF) — We successfully replicate the key qualitative result of 22 of 67 papers (33%) without contacting the authors. Excluding the six papers that use confidential data and the two papers that use software we do not possess, we replicate 29 of 59 papers (49%) with assistance from the authors. Because we are able to replicate less than half of the papers in our sample even with help from the authors, we assert that economics research is usually not replicable.
- 26 Things I Learned in the Deep Learning Summer School — 20. When Frederick Jelinek and his team at IBM submitted one of the first papers on statistical machine translation to COLING in 1988, they got the following anonymous review: The validity of a statistical (information theoretic) approach to MT has indeed been recognized, as the authors mention, by Weaver as early as 1949. And was universally recognized as mistaken by 1950 (cf. Hutchins, MT – Past, Present, Future, Ellis Horwood, 1986, p. 30ff and references therein). The crude force of computers is not science. The paper is simply beyond the scope of COLING.
- The Final Leaked TPP Text is All That We Feared (EFF) — If you dig deeper, you’ll notice that all of the provisions that recognize the rights of the public are non-binding, whereas almost everything that benefits rightsholders is binding.
Four short links: 22 May 2015
Automobile Ownership, Architectural Robots, UX Psychology, Go Packages
- GM: That Car You Bought, We’re Really the Ones Who Own It — GM’s claim is all about copyright and software code, and it’s the same claim John Deere is making about their tractors. The TL;DR version of the argument goes something like this: cars work because software tells all the parts how to operate; the software that tells all the parts to operate is customized code; that code is subject to copyright; GM owns the copyright on that code and that software; a modern car cannot run without that software; it is integral to all systems; therefore, the purchase or use of that car is a licensing agreement; and since it is subject to a licensing agreement, GM is the owner and can allow/disallow certain uses or access. In the future, manufacturers own the secondary market.
- Architectural Robots (Robohub) — The concept is named ‘Minibuilders.’ This is a group of robots each performing a specific task. The first robot layers a 15 cm (6 in) footprint or foundation, while a second and a third robot print the rest of the building by climbing over the structures they already printed and laying more material over them. This design is only possible at construction scale where printed layers are solid enough to support a robotic print head.
- The Psychology of UX — digging into 10 things about human psychology that should inform UX.
- gigo — Fetching packages in golang can be difficult, especially when juggling multiple packages and private repositories. GIGO (Gigo Installer for Go) tries to solve that problem, effectively being the golang equivalent of Python’s pip.
Managed DNS considered harmful
Outsourcing your DNS is not a magic bullet.
There is frequently a tendency toward letting one’s guard down when it comes to threats to your IT systems. Absent an immediate “hair-on-fire” situation, we may relax and assume all is well. Yet malicious activity such as hacking, phishing, malware, and DDoS attacks never stop accelerating in terms of frequency and intensity.
So it’s important to have a “Plan B” DNS solution in place and ready before a crisis hits. That way, even if you’re taken off guard, you still have a backup plan and can respond appropriately.
DNS is one of those things nobody really thinks about, until it stops working. The first time easyDNS went off the air on April 15, 2003, it induced a type of existential crisis in me. That summer, after meditating intensely on the situation, I came away with the conclusion that the centralized managed DNS model, as we understood it then, was doomed.
My response at the time was a proposal to pivot to a DNS appliance with decentralized deployments, but centralized monitoring and management. That concept was promptly shot down my co-founders and we’ve kept on with the centralized, hosted DNS model to this day.
The core problem is this: there are many reasons to elect to outsource your DNS to a managed DNS provider. Those reasons include:
Four short links: 30 December 2014
DevOps Security, Bit Twiddling, Design Debates, and Chinese IP
- DevOoops (Slideshare) — many ways in which your devops efforts can undermine your security efforts.
- Matters Computational (PDF) — low-level bit-twiddling and algorithms with source code. (via Jarkko Hietaniemi)
- Top 5 Game Design Debates I Ignored in 2014 (Daniel Cook) — Stretch your humanity.
- From Gongkai to Open Source (Bunnie Huang) — The West has a “broadcast” view of IP and ownership: good ideas and innovation are credited to a clearly specified set of authors or inventors, and society pays them a royalty for their initiative and good works. China has a “network” view of IP and ownership: the far-sight necessary to create good ideas and innovations is attained by standing on the shoulders of others, and as such there is a network of people who trade these ideas as favors among each other. In a system with such a loose attitude toward IP, sharing with the network is necessary as tomorrow it could be your friend standing on your shoulders, and you’ll be looking to them for favors. This is unlike the West, where rule of law enables IP to be amassed over a long period of time, creating impenetrable monopoly positions. It’s good for the guys on top, but tough for the upstarts.
Four short links: 22 July 2013
Antivirus Numbers, 3D Printer Explosion, 3D Printing's Particulate Problem, and Simulating Touch
- The Anti-Virus Age is Over — for every analyst that an AV company hires, the bad guys can hire 10 developers.
- 3D Printing’s 2014 Renaissance (Quartz) — patents on sintering about to expire which will open up hi-res production. Happened in the past when patents on fixed deposition modelling expired: Within just a few years of the patents on FDM expiring, the price of the cheapest FDM printers fell from many thousands of dollars to as little as $300.
- Ultrafine Particle Emissions from Desktop 3D Printers (Science Direct) — Because most of these devices are currently sold as standalone devices without any exhaust ventilation or filtration accessories, results herein suggest caution should be used when operating in inadequately ventilated or unfiltered indoor environments. (via Slashdot)
- Aireal — focussed changes in air pressure simulate sensations of touch. The machine itself is essentially a set of five speakers in a box–subwoofers that track your body through IR, then fire low frequencies through a nozzle to form donut-like vortices (I imagine the system as a cigar-smoking Microsoft Kinect). […] In practice, Aireal can do anything from creating a button for you to touch in midair to crafting whole textures by pulsing its bubbles to mimic water, stone, and sand. (via BoingBoing)
An open response to Sen. Blumenthal on Protect IP and SOPA
Almost anything can be claimed as a copyright violation if you don't have to defend the claim.
SOPA and Protect IP are proposing remedies to copyright violation that never come under the scrutiny of the legal system.
Four short links: 27 October 2011
Javascript Coverage, Cheap Tablets, Open Archive, ACTA vs TPP
- ScriptCover — open source Javascript coverage tool.
- Using the $35 Tablet from India (VentureBeat) — nice description of the tablet and what it’s like to use. What makes the Aakash tablet different is that its creators didn’t strive for perfection. Instead, the emphasis was on getting the product into the market quickly so it could be adopted, tinkered with, and improved over time. As Wadhwa said, “to get the cost down, you have to make some compromises.”
- Royal Society Journal Archive Free to Access — the Royal Society, the world’s oldest scientific publisher, has made its journal archive permanently free to access. They also announced an open access journal.
- Intellectual Property in ACTA and the TPP: Lessons Not Learned — ACTA, therefore, as the closest thing we have to a “high protection consensus”, ought to be seen as a kind of ceiling to what is possible or desirable for the present. As I will further show, however, this is far from the approach being adopted by the US in the TPP negotiations. The US’ apparent determination to treat its existing FTAs, and ACTA, as a floor, rather than a ceiling, may well undermine the whole purpose of the TPP negotiations. (via Michael Geist)
Top stories: July 18-22, 2011
Google+ is a social backbone, how to fix the patent mess, and programming well with others.
This week on O'Reilly: We examined the deeper and broader implications of Google+, four solutions to the patent quagmire were offered up, and we learned about the "art of mass organizational manipulation."
"Kind of Screwed"
Andy Baio's copyright run-in is an all-too-familiar story.
Andy Baio believed that the cover art used in a project was a fair use modification. The photographer for the original photo disagreed, and threatened Andy with a lawsuit.