"news" entries

Four short links: 24 August 2015

Four short links: 24 August 2015

Real World Security, Car Hacking, News Designs, and Graphs in Shared Memory

  1. This World of Ours (PDF) — funny and accurate skewering of the modern security researcher. In the real world, threat models are much simpler (see Figure 1). Basically, you’re either dealing with Mossad or not-Mossad. If your adversary is not-Mossad, then you’ll probably be fine if you pick a good password and don’t respond to emails from ChEaPestPAiNPi11s@virus-basket.biz.ru. If your adversary is the Mossad, YOU’RE GONNA DIE AND THERE’S NOTHING THAT YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT. The Mossad is not intimidated by the fact that you employ https://.
  2. Highway to Hack: Why We’re Just at the Beginning of the Auto Hacking Era (Ars Technica) — detailed article covering the state of in-car networks and the security risks therein. (via BoingBoing)
  3. 64 Ways to Think about a News Homepage — design and content ideas.
  4. Ligraa lightweight graph processing framework for shared memory. It is particularly suited for implementing parallel graph traversal algorithms where only a subset of the vertices are processed in an iteration.

Podcast: news that reaches beyond the screen

Finding ways to make media interact with the physical world

Reporters, editors and designers are looking for new ways to interact with readers and with the physical world–drawing data in through sensors and expressing it through new immersive formats.

In this episode of the Radar podcast, recorded at News Foo Camp in Phoenix on November 10, Jenn and I talk with three people who are working on new modes of interaction:

Along the way:

For more on the intersection of software and the physical world, be sure to check out Solid, O’Reilly’s new conference program about the collision of real and virtual.

Subscribe to the O’Reilly Radar Podcast through iTunesSoundCloud, or directly through our podcast’s RSS feed.

Four short links: 22 November 2012

Four short links: 22 November 2012

Urine Checkins, News Summaries, Zombie Ideas, and Scanner Plans

  1. Mark Your Territory — Urine integration for Foursquare. (via Beta Knowledge)
  2. TL;DR — news summaries. Finally.
  3. Zombie Ideas and Online InstructionThe repeated return of mistaken ideas captures well my experiences with technologies in schools and what I have researched over decades. The zombie idea that is rapidly being converted into policies that in the past have been “refuted with evidence but refuse to die” is: new technologies can cure K-12 and higher education problems of teaching and learning. The most recent incarnation of this revolving-door idea is widespread access to online instruction in K-12 education cyber-charter schools, blended schools where online instruction occurs for a few hours a day, and mandated courses that children and youth have to take.
  4. Google Open Sources Their Book Scanner — hardware designs for their clever system for high-throughput non-destructive book-scanning. (via Hackaday)
Four short links: 19 June 2012

Four short links: 19 June 2012

Map Usage, Transit Data, Mozilla Web Maker, and Print-to-Web Design

  1. Mobile Maps (Luke Wroblewski) — In the US, Google gets about 31 million users a month on its Maps app on iOS. On average those users spend more than 75 minutes apiece in the app each month.
  2. The Importance of Public Traffic Data (Anil Dash) — Bill Gates and Paul Allen’s first collaboration was a startup called Traf-O-Data, which recorded and analyzed traffic at intersections in their hometown using custom-built devices along with some smart software. Jack Dorsey’s first successful application was a platform for dispatch routing, designed to optimize the flow of cars by optimizing the flow of information. It’s easy to see these debates as being about esoteric “open data” battles with governments and big corporations. But it matters because the work we do to build our cities directly drives the work we do to build our communities online.
  3. Mozilla ThimbleWrite and edit HTML and CSS right in your browser. Instantly preview your work. Then host and share your finished pages with a single click.
  4. Design of the Guardian iPad App (Mark Porter) — thoughtful analysis of the options and ideas behind the new Guardian iPad app. Unlike the iPhone and Android apps, which are built on feeds from the website, this one actually recycles the already-formatted newspaper pages. A script analyses the InDesign files from the printed paper and uses various parameters (page number, physical area and position that a story occupies, headline size, image size etc) to assign a value to the story. The content is then automatically rebuilt according to those values in a new InDesign template for the app. (via Josh Porter)
Four short links: 21 March 2012

Four short links: 21 March 2012

Data Journalism, Fast Web Servers, Android App Inventor, and Daily Deal Dirt

  1. S0rce — gorgeous infographics. They purport to let you Think for Yourself which is bald-faced bullshit: the choice of which data to present, and the invisible collection and curation practices behind the data, is the choice of what story to tell and what it will say. That said, it’s wonderful to see the numbers (and they are attributed) behind the Republican Primary and Copyright and Piracy Legislation.
  2. Modern HTTP Servers are Fast — I remember when the best web engineering in the world would still fall over if a box got more than 10 hits/second. Yes, yes, I’m writing this on my grandpa box. Check out the hardware specs of the box these numbers are from.
  3. MIT App Inventor — web-based app designer. Does not appear to be open source. There is no long-term sustainability for this kind of development environment: when MIT decide “nah screw it, not going to run this any more” or “hmm, maybe we’ll charge for it”, you’re boned–you can download the “source” to your app in a zip file but AppInventor is the only dev environment which can consume it. I hope it’ll become the awesome and easy dev environment that Android needs, but I hope they prevent it from being a dead end.
  4. Daily Deals: Prediction, Social Diffusion, and Reputational Ramificationswe consider the effects of daily deals on the longer-term reputation of merchants, based on their Yelp reviews before and after they run a daily deal. Our analysis shows that while the number of reviews increases significantly due to daily deals, average rating scores from reviewers who mention daily deals are 10% lower than scores of their peers on average. (via Greg Linden)
Four short links: 20 December 2011

Four short links: 20 December 2011

Maximum MySQL, Digital News, Unbiased Mining, and Congressional Clue

  1. How Twitter Stores 250M Tweets a Day Using MySQL (High Scalability) — notes from a talk at the MySQL conference on how Twitter built a high-volume MySQL store.
  2. How The Atlantic Got Profitable With Digital First (Mashable) — Lauf says his team has focused on putting together premium advertising experiences that span print, digital, events and (increasingly) mobile.
  3. Data Mining Without Prejudice — an attempt to measure fit without pre-favouring one type of curve over another.
  4. It Is No Longer OK Not To Know How Congress Works (Clay Johnson) — looking for a specific innovation to try and change the way Washington works by the time Congress votes on SOPA is about as foolish as Steve Jobs trying to diet his way out of having pancreatic cancer.
Four short links: 9 September 2011

Four short links: 9 September 2011

Pay for News?, Outages Compendium, CSS Sudoku Solver, and Open Source in the Military

  1. A Simple Test For Whether People Will Pay For News — an excellent thought experiment, one which sends shivers down the spines of editors.
  2. Outages.orgThis is as complete a list as possible of links to carrier and other provider network status pages as well as links to network diagnostic tools; user contributions are strongly encouraged. (via Jesse Vincent)
  3. Sudoku Solver Just in CSS — boggle. (via Paul Irish)
  4. MIL-OSS Conference WriteupAlex S. Voultepsis explained how the intelligence community has built up an internal infrastructure with the tools that people want to use; in a vast number of cases, they use OSS to do this. For example, Intellipedia is implemented using MediaWiki, the same software that runs Wikipedia. (via John Scott)

If it's important, the news will find me

Which works better: gulping from the info firehose or letting news come to you?

Facing info overload, Peter Meyers ponders more efficient ways to find what’s newsworthy. What works for you?

Four short links: 23 June 2011

Four short links: 23 June 2011

Communities, Statistics, News, and Doubting Data

  1. The Wisdom of Communities — Luke Wroblewski’s notes from Derek Powazek‘s talk at Event Apart. Wisdom of Crowds theory shows that, in aggregate, crowds are smarter than any single individual in the crowd. See this online in most emailed features, bit torrent, etc. Wise crowds are built on a few key characteristics: diversity (of opinion), independence (of other ideas), decentralization, and aggregation.
  2. How to Fit an Elephant (John D. Cook) — for the stats geeks out there. Someone took von Neumann’s famous line “with four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk”, and found the four complex parameters that do, indeed, fit an elephant.
  3. How to Run a News Site and Newspaper Using WordPress and Google Docs — clever workflow that’s digital first but integrated with print. (via Sacha Judd)
  4. All Watched Over: On Foo, Cybernetics, and Big Data — I’m glad someone preserved Matt Jones’s marvelous line, “the map-reduce is not the territory”. (via Tom Armitage)

Publishing News: Rebooting online news presentation

Ben Huh has a fling with news, checking in on the Twitter archive, and readers can now fund authors directly.

In the latest Publishing News: Ben Huh dishes on news organizations moving in the right direction; one year later, the Library of Congress' Twitter Archive is still being built; and the Unbound.co.uk publishing platform launched with some big-name authors.