- Ocrad.js — open source OCR in Javascript, a port of GNU Ocrad software.
- HP’s IoT Security Research (PDF) — 70% of devices use unencrypted network services, 90% of devices collected at least one piece of personal information, 60% of those that have UIs are vulnerable to things like XSS, 60% didn’t use encryption when downloading software updates, …
- USB Security Flawed From Foundation (Wired) — The element of Nohl and Lell’s research that elevates it above the average theoretical threat is the notion that the infection can travel both from computer to USB and vice versa. Any time a USB stick is plugged into a computer, its firmware could be reprogrammed by malware on that PC, with no easy way for the USB device’s owner to detect it. And likewise, any USB device could silently infect a user’s computer. “It goes both ways,” Nohl says. “Nobody can trust anybody.” [...] “In this new way of thinking, you can’t trust a USB just because its storage doesn’t contain a virus. Trust must come from the fact that no one malicious has ever touched it,” says Nohl. “You have to consider a USB infected and throw it away as soon as it touches a non-trusted computer. And that’s incompatible with how we use USB devices right now.”
- AdBlock vs AdBlock Plus — short answer: the genuinely open source AdBlock Plus, because AdBlock resiled from being open source, phones home, has misleading changelog entries, …. No longer trustworthy.
ENTRIES TAGGED "open source"
Four short links: 31 July 2014
OCR in Javascript, Insecure IoT, USB Considered Insecure, and Use AdBlock Plus
Four short links: 29 July 2014
Community Detection, Proven Kernel, Graph Processing on GPUs, and Browser Vision
- Online Community Detection for Large Complex Networks (PLosONE) — readable recount of earlier algorithms and inventions in the area, as well as a new algorithm with linear time complexity for large complex networks.
- sel4 — open source OS kernel (GPLv2, most userland is BSD) with end-to-end proof of implementation correctness and security enforcement. (For a discussion of what’s verified, see this blog post)
- mapgraph.io — Massively Parallel Graph processing on GPUs. (via Leo Meyerovich)
- tracking.js — browser framework and algorithms for computer vision algorithms and frameworks.
Four short links: 28 July 2014
Secure Server, Angular Style, Recursion History (see Recursion History), Aerospike Open Source
- streisand — sets up a new server running L2TP/IPsec, OpenSSH, OpenVPN, Shadowsocks, Stunnel, and a Tor bridge. It also generates custom configuration instructions for all of these services. At the end of the run you are given an HTML file with instructions that can be shared with friends, family members, and fellow activists.
- Angular.js Style Guide — my opinionated styleguide for syntax, building and structuring Angular applications.
- How Recursion Got into Programming — Committee member F.L. Bauer registered his protest by characterizing the addition of recursion to the language as an “Amsterdam plot”.
- aerospike — open source database server and client, with bold claims of performance.
Four short links: 25 July 2014
Public Private Pain, Signature Parsing, OSCON Highlights, and Robocar Culture
- What is Public? (Anil Dash) — the most cogent and articulate (and least hyperventilated dramaware) rundown of just what the problem is, that you’re ever likely to find.
- talon — mailgun’s open sourced library for parsing email signatures.
- Signals from OSCON — some highlights. Watching Andrew Sorensen livecode synth playing (YouTube clip) is pretty wild.
- Two Cultures of Robocars (Brad Templeton) — The conservative view sees this technology as a set of wheels that has a computer. The aggressive school sees this as a computer that has a set of wheels.
Signals from OSCON 2014
From tiny satellites to young programmers to reasoned paranoia, here are key talks from OSCON 2014.
Experts and advocates from across the open source world assembled in Portland, Ore. this week for OSCON 2014. Below you’ll find a handful of keynotes and interviews from the event that we found particularly notable.
How tiny satellites and fresh imagery can help humanity
Will Marshall of Planet Labs outlines a vision for using small satellites to provide daily images of the Earth.
OpenStack creates a structure for managing change without a benevolent dictator
Can education and peer review keep a huge open source project on track?
When does a software project grow to the point where one must explicitly think about governance? The term “governance” is stiff and gawky, but doing it well can carry a project through many a storm. Over the past couple years, the crucial OpenStack project has struggled with governance at least as much as with the technical and organizational issues of coordinating inputs from thousands of individuals and many companies.
A major milestone was the creation of the OpenStack Foundation, which I reported on in 2011. This event successfully started the participants’ engagement with the governance question, but it by no means resolved it. This past Monday, I attended some of the Open Cloud Day at O’Reilly’s Open Source convention, and talked to a lot of people working for or alongside the OpenStack Foundation about getting contributors to work together successfully in an open community. Read more…
Four short links: 23 July 2014
Selfless Machines, Docker Security, Voice Hacks, and Choiceless Programming
- Talking to Big Machines (Jon Bruner) — “Selfless machines” coordinate across networks and modify their own operation to improve the output of the entire system.
- Docker Security — Containers do not contain and Stop assuming that Docker and the Linux kernel protect you from malware.
- Your Voice Assistant is Mine (PDF) — Through Android Intent mechanism, VoicEmployer triggers Google Voice Search to the foreground, and then plays prepared audio files (like “call number 1234 5678”) in the background. Google Voice Search can recognize this voice command and execute corresponding operations. With ingenious designs, our GVS-Attack can forge SMS/Email, access privacy information, transmit sensitive data and achieve remote control without any permission.
- escher (GitHub) — choiceless programming and non-Turing coding. Mind: blown.
Online communities could benefit from the power of offline meetings
Face-to-face engagement can cement relationships and build depth in online communities.
As software vendors, open source projects, and companies in all fields rush to gather communities around themselves, I’m bothered that we haven’t spent much time studying the lessons face-to-face communities have forged over decades of intensive work by a dynamic community organizing movement. I have spoken twice at the Community Leadership Summit (CLS) about the tradition of community organizing as practiced by the classic social action group, Saul Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation. Because we all understand that a community is people — not software, not meeting places, not rules or norms — it’s worth looking at how face-to-face communities flourish.
Storytelling and urban organizing session at CLS
Last week’s CLS event had several talks and sessions about face-to-face organizing, which the attendees liked to call offline meetings because we assume so much interaction between groups takes place nowadays on the Internet. As one can find at CLS, a passionate confluence and sharing among dedicated “people people,” there’s a great deal of power in offline meetings. An evening at a bar — or an alternative location for those who are uncomfortable in bars — can cement relationships and provide depth to the formal parts of the day. Read more…
Four short links: 22 July 2014
English lint, Scalable Replicated Datastore, There's People in my Software, and Sci-Fi for Ethics
- write-good — a naive `lint’ for English prose.
- cockroachdb — a scalable, geo-replicated, transactional datastore from a team that includes the person who built Spanner for Google. Spanner requires atomic clocks, cockroach does not (which has corresponding performance consequences). (via Wired)
- The Deep Convergence of Networks, Software, and People — as we wire up our digital products increasingly with interconnected networks, their nature is increasingly a product of the responses that come back from those networks. The experience cannot be wholly represented in mock prototypes that are coded to respond in predictable ways, or even using a set of preset random responses. The power of the application is seeing the emergent behaviour of the system, and recognizing that you are a participant in that emergent behaviour. (via Tim O’Reilly)
- An Ethics Class for Inventors, via Sci-Fi — “Reading science fiction is kind of like ethics class for inventors,” says Brueckner. Traditionally, technology schools ask ‘how do we build it?’ This class asks a different question: ‘should we?’
Transparency and transformation at PayPal
PayPal has gone through a cultural transformation with radical transparency as a cornerstone of the plan.
Three years ago, PayPal was growing exponentially, staying profitable and was considered the most successful online payments company in the world. This should have been the recipe of a company that was attracting top talent across the globe, and keeping their core engineers happy, thriving, and innovative. But, at the time, the PayPal engineering team wasn’t where they needed to be to stay ahead of the curve — they didn’t have the process, the tools, or the resources to extend their talent and stay engaged in creating amazing products and services.
Leadership had encouraged the formation of engineering silos to “concentrate expertise,” but this made it incredibly challenging to get things done. At the same time, popular services such as Google and Amazon were raising the bar for everybody. All businesses — not just software-focused businesses — needed to have websites (and mobile apps) that were snazzy and responsive in addition to being reliable. PayPal engineering needed to push the proverbial envelope to stay competitive in a fierce and unrelenting industry landscape.
For PayPal, the transformation started at the edge of the stack. The Kraken project, which was started by an internal team to support a new checkout system, proved that an open source platform could reduce time to market and still perform at scale. This was achieved largely in spite of the silo culture that ran rampant and tended to restrict innovation and creativity. Support from senior management and perception of less risk at the edge of the stack helped the project and ultimately unleashed a gold rush of interest in repeating the win with releases of internally developed improvements to other open source projects. When I came into PayPal, I received an avalanche of mail from teams who wanted to “open source something.”