"mozilla" entries

Four short links: 15 February 2016

Four short links: 15 February 2016

Deep Learning Analogies, IoT Privacy, Robot Numbers, and App Economy

  1. Deep Visual Analogy-Making (PDF) — In this paper, we develop a novel deep network trained end-to-end to perform visual analogy making, which is the task of transforming a query image according to an example pair of related images. Open source code from the paper also available.
  2. Samsung’s TV and Privacy Gets More AwkwardSamsung has now issued a new statement clarifying how the voice activation feature works. “If a consumer consents and uses the voice recognition feature, voice data is provided to a third party during a requested voice command search,” Samsung said in a statement. “At that time, the voice data is sent to a server, which searches for the requested content then returns the desired content to the TV.” It only seems creepy until you give in and nothing bad happens, then you normalise the creepy.
  3. 2015 Robot Numbers (RoboHub) — The Robotic Industries Association (RIA), representing North American robotics, reported […] 2015 set new records and showed a 14% increase in units and 11% in dollars over 2014. The automotive industry was the primary growth sector, with robot orders increasing 19% year over year. Non-automotive robot orders grew at 5%.
  4. Mozilla, Caribou Digital Release Report Exploring the Global App Economy (Mark Surman) — The emerging markets are the 1% — meaning, they earn 1% of total app economy revenue. 95% of the estimated value in the app economy is captured by just 10 countries, and 69% of the value is captured by just the top three countries. Excluding China, the 19 countries considered low- or lower-income accounted for only 1% of total worldwide value. Developers in low-income countries struggle to export to the global stage. About one-third of developers in the sample appeared only in their domestic market.

Four short links: 26 November 2015

Four short links: 26 November 2015

Mozilla Search, Web Dependencies, Systems and Power, and Alphabet Structure

  1. Firefox Leaves Google’s Money Behind (CNET) — regional deals with other search engine companies, notably Yahoo in the United States, Baidu in China and Yandex in Russia.
  2. Managing Performance of Third-Party Scripts — in the words of Tammy Everts, A typical web page contains 75+ 3rd-party calls, which means 75+ potential webperf SPOFs.
  3. How Change Happens — draft of a book with a “systems and power” approach. Consultation period ends December 10, so get in fast if you’re interested. (via Duncan Green)
  4. More on Alphabet (NY Times blog) — G charging its Alphabet siblings for services like HR, mapping tech, compute, etc. Paging Ronald Coase! Ronald Coase to Finance!

JavaScript shares its ubiquity

WebAssembly changes the rules of the JavaScript game.

engineroom

I’ve never seen a technology lay down its primary advantage and prepare to hand over its ubiquity. I’m proud of JavaScript for doing this, and I’m sure that in the long run this will be good for the Web, but in the meantime I’m wondering where WebAssembly will take us.

Brendan Eich’s announcement of the effort makes clear that this builds on the earlier asm.js (and Google’s similar PNaCl), a highly efficient JavaScript subset that compilers of other languages could target. Eich enjoyed using Unreal Engine for demos of the speed asm.js could provide, but compiling to JavaScript, even weird JavaScript, still needed to go through a JavaScript parser. (Other approaches compiled to more comprehensible but less optimized JavaScript.)

WebAssembly – wasm – skips that final step, producing a binary format, technically a compressed AST encoding. Unless you’re going to be building compilers, you can compare wasm to a bytecode system. There is a text format for debugging, but the binary emphasis yields substantial extra speed as it skips parsing and minimizes decompression.
Read more…

Four short links: 14 November 2014

Four short links: 14 November 2014

Completing Maps, ChatOps, Career Design, and Data Privacy

  1. Missing Maps Fill In the Blanks (New Scientist) — OpenStreetMap project to crowdmap slums around the world.
  2. Chatops — devops deployment chatter with Hubot.
  3. Alternatives to Tech Career Ladders — Spotify trying to figure out how to keep engineers challenged as they become more senior.
  4. Mozilla’s Data Privacy Principles — well-articulated and useful: without pre-defined principles, it’s so easy to accidentally collect or poorly protect data.
Four short links: 11 November 2014

Four short links: 11 November 2014

High-Volume Logs, Regulated Broadband, Oculus Web, and Personal Data Vacuums

  1. Infrastructure for Data Streams — describing the high-volume log data use case for Apache Kafka, and how it plays out in storage and infrastructure.
  2. Obama: Treat Broadband and Mobile as Utility (Ars Technica) — In short, Obama is siding with consumer advocates who have lobbied for months in favor of reclassification while the telecommunications industry lobbied against it.
  3. MozVR — a website, and the tools that made it, designed to be seen through the Oculus Rift.
  4. All Cameras are Police Cameras (James Bridle) — how the slippery slope is ridden: When the Wall was initially constructed, the public were informed that this [automatic license plate recognition] data would only be held, and regularly purged, by Transport for London, who oversee traffic matters in the city. However, within less than five years, the Home Secretary gave the Metropolitan Police full access to this system, which allowed them to take a complete copy of the data produced by the system. This permission to access the data was granted to the Police on the sole condition that they only used it when National Security was under threat. But since the data was now in their possession, the Police reclassified it as “Crime” data and now use it for general policing matters, despite the wording of the original permission. As this data is not considered to be “personal data” within the definition of the law, the Police are under no obligation to destroy it, and may retain their ongoing record of all vehicle movements within the city for as long as they desire.
Four short links: 16 May 2014

Four short links: 16 May 2014

Winter of Security, Javascript Unit Tests, Better/Beta Banks, and Quantified Parent

  1. Mozilla’s Winter of SecurityStudents who have to perform a semester project as part of their university curriculum can apply to one of the MWOS project. Projects are guided by a Mozilla Adviser, and a University Professor. Students are graded by their University, based on success criteria identified at the beginning of the project. Mozilla Advisers allocate up to 2 hours each week to their students, typically on video-conference, to discuss progress and roadblocks.
  2. Jestpainless Javascript unit testing.
  3. New Ways to Pay Your Bills (The Economist) — roundup of new payment systems that are challenging the definition and value of “bank”.
  4. The Difference a Data Point Makes — the change in the new parent’s life, as seen in personal data. Awesome.
Four short links: 15 May 2014

Four short links: 15 May 2014

Pervasive Monitoring, Mozilla DRM, Game Finances, and Distributed Systems

  1. Pervasive Monitoring is an Attack (Tim Bray) — if your ap­pli­ca­tion doesn’t sup­port pri­va­cy, that’s prob­a­bly a bug in your ap­pli­ca­tion.
  2. Reconciling Mozilla’s Mission and the W3C EME — essentially, “we don’t want to put a closed source bolus of evil into our open source unicorn, but you won’t be able to watch House of Cards with Firefox if we don’t.”
  3. The Financial Future of Game Developers (Raph Koster) — Today, a console is really just a hardware front end to a digital publisher/distribution network/storefront. […] Any structure that depends solely on blockbusters is not long for this world, because there is a significant component of luck in what drives popularity, so every release is literally a gamble. […] The median game uploaded to the App Store makes zero dollars. It starts great and just gets better. Koster is on fire! He scores again! GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAL!
  4. Notes on Distributed Systems for Young Bloods“It’s slow” is the hardest problem you’ll ever debug.
Four short links: 3 March 2014

Four short links: 3 March 2014

Vanishing Money, Car Hackery, Data Literacy Course, and Cheaper CI

  1. The Programming Error That Cost Mt Gox 2609 Bitcoins — in the unforgiving world of crypto-currency, it’s easy to miscode and vanish your money.
  2. Ford Invites Open-Source Community to Tinker AwayOne example: Nelson has re-tasked the motor from a Microsoft Xbox 360 game controller to create an OpenXC shift knob that vibrates to signal gear shifts in a standard-transmission Mustang. The 3D-printed prototype shift knob uses Ford’s OpenXC research platform to link devices to the car via Bluetooth, and shares vehicle data from the on-board diagnostics port. Nelson has tested his prototype in a Ford Mustang Shelby GT500 that vibrates at the optimal time to shift.
  3. Making Sense of Data — Google online course on data literacy.
  4. Cost-Efficient Continuous Integration at Mozilla — CI on a big project can imply hundreds if not thousands of VMs on Amazon spinning up to handle compiles and tests. This blog post talks about Mozilla’s efforts to reduce its CI-induced spend without reducing the effectiveness of its CI practices.
Four short links: 31 October 2013

Four short links: 31 October 2013

Flying Robot, State of Cyberspace, H.264, and Principal Component Analysis

  1. Insect-Inspired Collision-Resistant Robot — clever hack to make it stable despite bouncing off things.
  2. The Battle for Power on the Internet (Bruce Schneier) — the state of cyberspace. [M]ost of the time, a new technology benefits the nimble first. […] In other words, there will be an increasing time period during which nimble distributed powers can make use of new technologies before slow institutional powers can make better use of those technologies.
  3. Cisco’s H.264 Good News (Brendan Eich) — Cisco is paying the license fees for a particular implementation of H.264 to be used in open source software, enabling it to be the basis of web streaming video across all browsers (even the open source ones). It’s not as ideal a solution as it might sound.
  4. Principal Component Analysis for DummiesThis post will give a very broad overview of PCA, describing eigenvectors and eigenvalues (which you need to know about to understand it) and showing how you can reduce the dimensions of data using PCA. As I said it’s a neat tool to use in information theory, and even though the maths is a bit complicated, you only need to get a broad idea of what’s going on to be able to use it effectively.
Four short links: 29 October 2013

Four short links: 29 October 2013

Digital Citizenship, Berg Cloud, Data Warehouse, and The Spying Iron

  1. Mozilla Web Literacy Standard — things you should be able to do if you’re to be trusted to be on the web unsupervised. (via BoingBoing)
  2. Berg Cloud Platform — hardware (shield), local network, and cloud glue. Caution: magic ahead!
  3. Sharka large-scale data warehouse system for Spark designed to be compatible with Apache Hive. It can execute Hive QL queries up to 100 times faster than Hive without any modification to the existing data or queries. Shark supports Hive’s query language, metastore, serialization formats, and user-defined functions, providing seamless integration with existing Hive deployments and a familiar, more powerful option for new ones. (via Strata)
  4. The Malware of Thingsa technician opening up an iron included in a batch of Chinese imports to find a “spy chip” with what he called “a little microphone”. Its correspondent said the hidden devices were mostly being used to spread viruses, by connecting to any computer within a 200m (656ft) radius which were using unprotected Wi-Fi networks.