- Science on a Sphere — for when you want to see global data visualised without 2-D projection distortion.
- Lebowsky and Sterling’s 2016 State of the World — These physical barriers will suffer the “Fukushima effect:” the dikes you built to resist the tsunami only hold those catastrophic waters in, once the almighty wave comes over the top. Also, the industrial complex you are trying to protect from natural disaster becomes the source of a secondary, artificial disaster. (via BoingBoing)
- GNU Radio Tools for Radio Wrangling/Spectrum Domination (YouTube) — DEFCON talk.
- End-to-End Arguments in System Design (PDF) — End-to-end arguments are a kind of “Occam’s razor” when it comes to choosing the functions to be provided in a communication subsystem. Because the communication subsystem is frequently specified before applications that use the subsystem are known, the designer may be tempted to “help” the users by taking on more function than necessary. Awareness of end-to-end arguments can help to reduce such temptations.
"network" entries
Four short links: 6 January 2016
Spherical Projection, Sterling's Future, GNU Radio, and End-to-End Design
Four short links: 29 June 2015
Surgery Lag, Clippy Lesson, Telegram Bots, and Censorship Complicity
- Surgery Lag Time (ComputerWorld) — doctors trialling very remote surgery (1200 miles) with a simulator, to see what naglag is acceptable. At 200 milliseconds, surgeons could not detect a lag time. From 300 to 500 milliseconds, some surgeons could detect lag time, but they were able to compensate for it by pausing their movement. But at 600 milliseconds, most surgeons became insecure about their ability to perform a procedure, Smith said.
- Clippy Lessons (The Atlantic) — focus groups showed women hated it, engineers threw out the data, and after it shipped … It turned out to be one of the most unpopular features ever introduced—especially among female users.
- Telegram’s Bot Platform — Bots are simply Telegram accounts operated by software – not people – and they’ll often have AI features. They can do anything – teach, play, search, broadcast, remind, connect, integrate with other services, or even pass commands to the Internet of Things. (via Matt Webb)
- New Wave of US Companies in China (Quartz) — Evernote and LinkedIn let the Chinese government access data and censor results. Smith believes that LinkedIn and Evernote are setting a dangerous precedent for other internet firms eying the Middle Kingdom. “More US companies are going to decide that treating the Chinese like second class information citizens is fine,” he says.
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: 10 July 2014
Journalism Security, Inclusive Technology, Network Magic, and Python Anti-Patterns
- Ex-Google Hacker Taking On The World’s Spy Agencies (Wired) — profile of the security expert working on protecting reporters.
- Meet Google’s Security Princess (Elle) — would have preferred to see her story in Wired. Much is good here, but this is pithy and strong: “If you have ambitions to create technology for the whole world, you need to represent the whole world, and the whole world is not just white men.”
- snabb switch — open source Linux userspace executable for making network appliances. Processes millions of ethernet packets per second per core. Suitable for ISPs. Speaks natively to Ethernet hardware, Hypervisors, and the Linux kernel. You can program it with LuaJIT extensions to do anything you want.
- Anti-Patterns in Python Programming — gold.
The emergence of the connected city
Using technology to prevent rat outbreaks.
If the modern city is a symbol for randomness — even chaos — the city of the near future is shaping up along opposite metaphorical lines. The urban environment is evolving rapidly, and a model is emerging that is more efficient, more functional, more — connected, in a word.
This will affect how we work, commute, and spend our leisure time. It may well influence how we relate to one another, and how we think about the world. Certainly, our lives will be augmented: better public transportation systems, quicker responses from police and fire services, more efficient energy consumption. But there could also be dystopian impacts: dwindling privacy and imperiled personal data. We could even lose some of the ferment that makes large cities such compelling places to live; chaos is stressful, but it can also be stimulating.
It will come as no surprise that converging digital technologies are driving cities toward connectedness. When conjoined, ISM band transmitters, sensors, and smart phone apps form networks that can make cities pretty darn smart — and maybe more hygienic. This latter possibility, at least, is proposed by Samrat Saha, a consultant with the DCI Marketing Group in Milwaukee. Saha suggests “crowdsourcing” municipal trash pick-up via BLE modules, proximity sensors and custom mobile device apps.
Four short links: 2 October 2012
3D Parts, ISP Surveillance, Sensors for Espionage, and Typed Javascript
- Print Your Own 3D Parts (Wired) — Teenage Engineering, makers of a popular synthesizer known as the OP-1, posted the 3-D design files of various components on digital object repository Shapeways, and is instructing 3-D printer-equipped users to print them out instead of buying them.
- Legacy Media Demanding Surveillance In ISPs — music rights groups including the Recording Industry Association of Japan say they have developed a system capable of automatically detecting unauthorized music uploads before they even hit the Internet. But to do that they need to be able to spy on Internet users’ connections and compare data being transferred with digital fingerprints held in an external database. That can only be achieved with the assistance of Internet service providers who would be asked to integrate the system deeply into their networks. It’s Japan for now …
- Sensors for Industrial Espionage (NPR) — Genscape also places electromagnetic monitors beneath the power lines running into the Cushing tank farms to measure their power usage. This gives them an idea of how much oil is being pumped into and out of Cushing.
- TypeScript — Apache2 licensed typed superset of JavaScript that compiles to plain JavaScript.
FCC contest stimulates development of apps to help keep ISPs honest
The winners of the FCC's Open Internet challenge provide consumers with new tools to monitor ISPs.
The FCC Open Internet Challenge stimulated the creation of a new mobile application that enables consumers to analyze the performance of their mobile broadband network. Combined with the other two winners of the challenge, consumers now have better tools to measure their Internet service.
Four short links: 24 February 2011
Network Snooping, Traffic Growth, Data Munging, and Open Interop
- Charles — a debugging proxy that lets a developer view all HTTP and SSL traffic between their machine and the Internet. (via Andy Baio’s excellent “How I Indexed The Daily)
- The Rise and Rise of Mobile Broadband — the Blackberry is now the standard measure of traffic, apparently. The outcome is simple – Cisco estimates that global mobile data traffic grew 159% last year and will grow another 131% this year. They contend traffic will increase 26 times versus 2010 levels, a 92% cumulative annual growth rate. I hope the network engineers are ready.
- Pattern — BSD-licensed Python tools for data retrieval (Google + Twitter + Wikipedia API, web spider, HTML DOM parser), text analysis (rule-based shallow parser, WordNet interface, syntactical + semantical n-gram search algorithm, tf-idf + cosine similarity + LSA metrics) and data visualization (graph networks). (via Hacker News)
- ODF Plugfest — when you have open standards, you need interop events like this to ensure that theoretically compatible programs are actually compatible. (via Jono Bacon on Twitter)
The solutions to our big problems are in the network
"Sustainable Network" author Sarah Sorensen on global connectivity and positive change.
Massive issues around the environment, social change, and worldwide economies feel intractable, but "Sustainable Network" author Sarah Sorensen sees solutions to our biggest problems in something many of use every day: the global communications network.