- Remotely Bricking Cars (BoingBoing) — story from 2010 where an intruder illegally accessed Texas Auto Center’s Web-based remote vehicle immobilization system and one by one began turning off their customers’ cars throughout the city.
- Beginning to Map the Human Epigenome (MIT) — Kellis and his colleagues report 111 reference human epigenomes and study their regulatory circuitry, in a bid to understand their role in human traits and diseases. (The paper itself.)
- Machine Learning Classification over Encrypted Data (PDF) — It is worth mentioning that our work on privacy-preserving classification is complementary to work on differential privacy in the machine learning community. Our work aims to hide each user’s input data to the classification phase, whereas differential privacy seeks to construct classifiers/models from sensitive user training data that leak a bounded amount of information about each individual in the training data set. See also The Morning Paper’s unpacking of it.
- Privacy of Phone Audio (Reddit) — unconfirmed report from Redditor I started a new job today with Walk N’Talk Technologies. I get to listen to sound bites and rate how the text matches up with what is said in an audio clip and give feed back on what should be improved. At first, I though these sound bites were completely random. Then I began to notice a pattern. Soon, I realized that I was hearing peoples commands given to their mobile devices. Guys, I’m telling you, if you’ve said it to your phone, it’s been recorded…and there’s a damn good chance a 3rd party is going to hear it.
"mobile" entries
Four short links: 25 February 2015
Bricking Cars, Mapping Epigenome, Machine Learning from Encrypted Data, and Phone Privacy
Swift-like Swift code
A brief introduction to Swift optionals.
Swift is becoming the language of choice for more and more developers on iOS and OS X. It’s fast, simple, clean, and has a number of features that simply aren’t available to Objective-C programmers.
While it isn’t a hard requirement to do so, several projects are being ported from Objective-C to Swift — especially those in their early stages — in order to take advantage of the speed, power, and safety of Swift. One of those projects isn’t actually a software project — it’s the upcoming Swift edition of iOS Games Programming Cookbook. When we began updating the book for Swift, the first thing that we had to do was to rewrite all of the book’s code in the new language. However, a straight re-write from one language into another isn’t enough. Swift behaves differently than Objective-C in very important ways, and that means that your ported Swift code needs to be aware of how Swift does things.
Four short links: 5 February 2015
Mobile Supply Chain, Regulating the Interwebs, Meh MOOCs, and Security School
- The Home and the Mobile Supply Chain (Benedict Evans) — the small hardware start-up, and the cool new gizmos from drones to wearables, are possible because of the low price of components built at the scale required for Apple and other mobile device makers. (via Matt Webb)
- FCC Chairman Wheeler Proposes New Rules for Protecting the Open Internet (PDF) — America may yet have freedom. No blocking, no throttling, no paid prioritisation.
- The Future of College (Bill Gates) — The MOOC, by itself, doesn’t really change things, except for the very most motivated student. HALLELUJAH!
- Breaker 101 — 12-week online security course. $1,750 (cue eyes water). Putting the hacker back in hacker schools …
Four short links: 21 January 2015
Mousey PC, Sad G+, Medium Data, and Upgraded DARPA Contest Robot
- PC in a Mouse — 80s = PC in a keyboard. 90s = PC in a box. 2000s = PC in the screen. 2015 we get PC in a mouse. By 2020 will circuitry be inline in the cable or connector?
- Estimating G+ Usage (BoingBoing) — of 2.2B profiles, 6.6M have made new public posts in 2015. Yeesh.
- Medium Data — too big for one machine, but barely worth the overhead of high-volume data processing.
- New Hardware for the DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals (IEEE) — in the future, we’ll all have a 3.7 kwh battery and a wireless router in our heads.
Four short links: 18 December 2014
Manufacturer Rootkits, Dangerous Dongle, Physical Visualisation, and Cryptoed Comms
- Popular Chinese Android Smartphone Backdoored By Manufacturer — Coolpad is the third largest smartphone builder in China, and ranks sixth worldwide with 3.7 percent global market share. It trails only Lenovo and Xiaomi in China and is the leader of China’s 4G market with 16 percent market share. Coolpad outsells Samsung and Apple in China, and has said it plans to expand globally with a goal of 60 million phones worldwide. For now, its high-end Halo Dazen phones are the only ones containing the backdoor, Palo Alto said. Backdoor enabled installation of other apps, dial numbers, send messages, and report back to the mothership. The manufacturer even ran the command-and-control nodes for the malware.
- USB Driveby — dongle that plugs into USB, and tries to root the box. Specifically, when you normally plug in a mouse or keyboard into a machine, no authorization is required to begin using them. The devices can simply begin typing and clicking. We exploit this fact by sending arbitrary keystrokes meant to launch specific applications (via Spotlight/Alfred/Quicksilver), permanently evade a local firewall (Little Snitch), install a reverse shell in crontab, and even modify DNS settings without any additional permissions.
- Physical Data Visualisations — a chronological list of physical visualizations and related artifacts. (via Flowing Data)
- Dissent — an anonymous communication substrate intended primarily for applications built on a broadcast communication model: for example, bulletin boards, wikis, auctions, or voting. Users of an online group obtain cryptographic guarantees of sender and receiver anonymity, message integrity, disruption resistance, proportionality, and location hiding. And a pony.
Four short links: 8 December 2014
Systemic Improvement, Chinese Trends, Deep Learning, and Technical Debt
- Reith Lectures — this year’s lectures are by Atul Gawande, talking about preventable failure and systemic improvement — topics of particular relevance to devops cultural devotees. (via BoingBoing)
- Chinese Mobile App UI Trends — interesting differences between US and China. Phone number authentication interested me: You key in your number and receive a confirmation code via SMS. Here, all apps offer this type of phone number registration/login (if not prefer it). This also applies to websites, even those without apps. (via Matt Webb)
- Large Scale Deep Learning (PDF) — Jeff Dean from Google. Starts easy! Starts.
- Machine Learning: The High-Interest Credit Card of Technical Debt (PDF) — Google research paper on the ways in which machine learning can create problems rather than solve them.
Four short links: 10 November 2014
Metascience, Bio Fab, Real-time Emoji, and Phone Library
- Metascience Could Rescue the Replication Crisis (Nature) — Metascience, the science of science, uses rigorous methods to examine how scientific practices influence the validity of scientific conclusions. (via Ed Yong)
- OpenTrons (Kickstarter) — 3d-printer style frame for micropipetting, magnetic micro-bead washes, and photography. Open source and kickstarterated. (via Evil Mad Scientist)
- Emoji Tracker — real-time emoji use across Twitter. (via Chris Aniszczyk)
- libphonenumber — open source Google’s common Java, C++ and Javascript library for parsing, formatting, storing and validating international phone numbers. The Java version is optimized for running on smartphones, and is used by the Android framework since 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich).
Four short links: 5 November 2014
Robotic Microscallops, Fluid Touch, Brackets 1.0, and Robot Bodies
- Swimming Robotic Microscallops (Nature) — blood, and indeed most of the internal fluids, is non-Newtonian, which works nicely with the simple reciprocating motion that basic robot actuators generate. Best headline and readable coverage in IEEE, and the best headline: Robotic Microscallops Can Swim Through Your Eyeballs.
- Eliminating Taps with Fluid Touch Gestures (Luke Wroblewski) — every tap powers Hitler’s war machine! Swipe and hold for Victory today!
- Adobe Brackets Reaches 1.0 — Brackets is Adobe’s open source code editor for the web, written in JavaScript, HTML, and CSS.
- Poppy — open source 3D-printed robot, built to encourage experimentation with robot morphologies (“bodies”). (via Robohub)
Four short links: 30 October 2014
Security and Privacy, ISP Measurement, Github for Education, and Mobile Numbers
- A Critique of the Balancing Metaphor in Privacy and Security — The arguments presented by this paper are built on two underlying assertions. The first is that the assessment of surveillance measures often entails a judgement of whether any loss in privacy is legitimised by a justifiable increase in security. However, one fundamental difference between privacy and security is that privacy has two attainable end-states (absolute privacy through to the absolute absence of privacy), whereas security has only one attainable end-state (while the absolute absence of security is attainable, absolute security is a desired yet unobtainable goal). The second assertion, which builds upon the first, holds that because absolute security is desirable, new security interventions will continuously be developed, each potentially trading a small measure of privacy for a small rise in security. When assessed individually each intervention may constitute a justifiable trade-off. However, when combined together, these interventions will ultimately reduce privacy to zero. (via Alistair Croll)
- ISP Interconnection and its Impact on Consumer Internet Performance (Measurement Lab) — In researching our report, we found clear evidence that interconnection between major U.S. access ISPs (AT&T, Comcast, CenturyLink, Time Warner Cable, and Verizon) and transit ISPs Cogent, Level 3, and potentially XO was correlated directly with degraded consumer performance throughout 2013 and into 2014 (in some cases, ongoing as of publication). Degraded performance was most pronounced during peak use hours, which points to insufficient capacity and congestion as a causal factor. Further, by noting patterns of performance degradation for access/transit ISP pairs that were synchronized across locations, we were able to conclude that in many cases degradation was not the result of major infrastructure failures at any specific point in a network, but rather connected with the business relationships between ISPs.
- The Emergence of Github as Collaborative Platform for Education (PDF) — We argue that GitHub can support much of what traditional learning systems do, as well as go beyond them by supporting collaborative activities.
- Mobile is Eating the World (A16Z) — mobile becoming truly ubiquitous, bringing opportunities to use the construct “X is eating Y.”
Four short links: 28 October 2014
Continuous Delivery, UX Resources, Large-Screen Cellphone Design, and Scalable Sockets
- Build Quality In — an e-book collection of Continuous Delivery and DevOps experience reports from the wild. Work in progress, and a collection of accumulated experience in the new software engineering practices can’t be a bad thing.
- UX Directory — collection of awesome UX resources.
- Designing for Large-Screen Cellphones (Luke Wroblewski) — In his analysis of 1,333 observations of smartphones in use, Steven Hoober found about 75% of people rely on their thumb and 49% rely on a one-handed grip to get things done on their phones. On large screens (over four inches) those kinds of behaviors can stretch people’s thumbs well past their comfort zone as they try to reach controls positioned at the top of their device. Design advice to create interactions that don’t strain tendons or gray matter.
- fastsocket (Github) — a highly scalable socket and its underlying networking implementation of Linux kernel. With the straight linear scalability, Fastsocket can provide extremely good performance in multicore machines.