"peer to peer" entries

Four short links: 3 September 2015

Four short links: 3 September 2015

Lock Patterns, Peer-to-Peer Markets, Community Products, and Speech Recognition

  1. The Surprising Predictability of Android Lock Patterns (Ars Technica) — people use the same type of strategy for remembering a pattern as a password
  2. Peer to Peer Markets (PDF) — We discuss elements of market design that make this possible, including search and matching algorithms, pricing, and reputation systems. We then develop a simple model of how these markets enable entry by small or flexible suppliers, and the resulting impact on existing firms. Finally, we consider the regulation of peer-to-peer markets, and the economic arguments for different approaches to licensing and certification, data, and employment regulation.
  3. 16 Product Things I learned at ImgurYou can A/B test individuals, but it’s nearly impossible to A/B test communities because they work based on a mutually reinforcing self-conception. Use a combination of intuition (which comes from experience), talking to other community managers and 1:1 contact with a sample of your community. But you’ll still be wrong a lot.
  4. kaldia toolkit for speech recognition written in C++ and licensed under the Apache License v2.0
Four short links: 16 July 2015

Four short links: 16 July 2015

Consumer Exoskeleton, Bitcoin Trends, p2p Sockets, and Plain Government Comms

  1. ReWalk Robotics Exoskeleton — first exoskeleton for the paralyzed to receive regulatory approval; 66 bought so far, 11 with reimbursement from insurance. The software upgrades for the ReWalk 6.0 provide a smoother walking gait (with less of a soldier-like marching step), an easier stopping mechanism, and a much-improved mode for ascending and descending stairs. The user wears a wristwatch-like controller to switch the suit between sit, stand, walk, and stair modes. How long until a cheaper version hits the market, but you don’t always get to control where it takes you if there’s a sale on featuring brands you love? (via IEEE)
  2. Bitcoin Trends in First Half of 201594% increase in monthly transactions over the past year. 47% of Coinbase wallet holders are now from countries outside the U.S.
  3. Socket.io p2pan easy and reliable way to set up a WebRTC connection between peers and communicate using the socket.io-protocol.
  4. 18F Content Guide — communications guide for government content writers that bears in mind the frustrations citizens have with gov-speak websites.
Four short links: 8 October 2013

Four short links: 8 October 2013

Video Editing, Game Engine, Python Debugger, and P2P VPN

  1. Lightworks — open source non-linear video editing software, with quite a history.
  2. Puzzlescript — open source puzzle game engine for HTML5.
  3. pudb — full-screen (text-mode) Python debugger.
  4. Freelanfree, open-source, multi-platform, highly-configurable and peer-to-peer VPN software.
Four short links: 22 April 2013

Four short links: 22 April 2013

3D Code, Malbuffering, p2p Hardware, and Crypto Challenges

  1. Meshlabopen source, portable, and extensible system for the processing and editing of unstructured 3D triangular meshes.
  2. HTML5 Video on iOS (Steve Souders) — While it’s true that Mobile Safari on iOS doesn’t buffer any video data as a result of the PRELOAD attribute, it does make other video requests that aren’t counted as “buffered” video. The number and size of the requests and responses depends on the video. For larger videos the total amount of data for these behind-the-scenes requests can be significant.
  3. Space Monkey (Kickstarter) — distributed encrypted peer-to-peer cloud service using custom hardware. Not open source, which would make me nervous that I was buying a botnet client with storage capability. (via BERG London)
  4. Matasano Crypto ChallengesCounting is not a hard problem. But cryptography is. There are just a few things you can screw up to get the size of a buffer wrong. There are tens, probably hundreds, of obscure little things you can do to take a cryptosystem that should be secure even against an adversary with more CPU cores than there are atoms in the solar system, and make it solveable with a Perl script and 15 seconds. Don’t take our word for it: do the challenges and you’ll see. People “know” this already, but they don’t really know it in their gut, and we think the reason for that is that very few people actually know how to implement the best-known attacks. So, mail us, and we’ll give you a tour of them.
Four short links: 22 February 2013

Four short links: 22 February 2013

Indiepocalypse Continued, Unblockable p2p Twitter, Disposable Satellites, and iOS to HTML5

  1. Indiepocalypse: Harlem Shake Edition (Andy Baio) — “After four weeks topping the Billboard Hot 100, Macklemore and Ryan Lewis’s “Thrift Shop” was replaced this week by Baauer’s “Harlem Shake,” the song that inspired the Internet meme.”
  2. SplinterNet — an Android app designed to create an unblockable Twitter like network that uses no cellular or Internet communications. All messages are transmitted over Bluetooth between users, creating a true peer-to-peer messaging system. All messages are anonymous to prevent retaliation by government authorities. (via Ushahidi)
  3. Disposable Satellites (Forbes) — “tiny, near-disposable satellites for use in getting battlefield surveillance quickly […] launched from a jet into orbit, and within a few minutes […] provide soldiers on the ground with a zoomed-in, birds-eye view of the battlefield. Those image would be transmitted to current communications devices, and the company is working to develop a way to transmit them to smartphones, as well.”
  4. Native iOS to HTML5 Porting Tool (Intel) — essentially a source-to-source translator that can handle a number of conversions from Objective-C into JavaScript/HTML5 including the translation of APIs calls. A number of open source projects are used as foundation for the conversion including a modified version of Clang front-end, LayerD framework and jQuery Mobile for widgets rendering in the translated source code. A porting aid, not a complete translator but a lot of the dog work is done. Requires one convert to Microsoft tools, however. (via Kevin Marks)

The MOOC movement is not an indicator of educational evolution

MOOCs get the attention, but DIY and peer-to-peer exchange are more fertile grounds for development

Somehow, recently, a lot of people have taken an interest in the broadcast of canned educational materials, and this practice — under a term that proponents and detractors have settled on, massive open online course (MOOC) — is getting a publicity surge. I know that the series of online classes offered by Stanford proved to be extraordinarily popular, leading to the foundation of Udacity and a number of other companies. But I wish people would stop getting so excited over this transitional technology. The attention drowns out two truly significant trends in progressive education: do-it-yourself labs and peer-to-peer exchanges.

In the current opinion torrent, Clay Shirky treats MOOCs in a recent article, and Joseph E. Aoun, president of Northeastern University, writes (in a Boston Globe subscription-only article) that traditional colleges will have to deal with the MOOC challenge. Jon Bruner points out on Radar that non-elite American institutions could use a good scare (although I know a lot of people whose lives were dramatically improved by attending such colleges). The December issue of Communications of the ACM offers Professor Richard A. DeMillo from the Georgia Institute of Technology assessing the possible role of MOOCs in changing education, along with an editorial by editor-in-chief Moshe Y. Vardi culminating with, “If I had my wish, I would wave a wand and make MOOCs disappear.”

There’s a popular metaphor for this early stage of innovation: we look back to the time when film-makers made the first moving pictures with professional performers by setting up cameras before stages in theaters. This era didn’t last long before visionaries such as Georges Méliès, D. W. Griffith, Sergei Eisenstein, and Luis Buñuel uncovered what the new medium could do for itself. How soon will colleges get tired of putting lectures online and offer courses that take advantage of new media? Read more…

DC Circuit court rules in Comcast case, leaves the FCC a job to do

The DC Circuit didn't tell the FCC to turn back. It has a job to
do–promoting the spread of high-speed networking, and ensuring that
it is affordable by growing numbers of people–and it just has to find
the right tool for the job.

Innovation Battles Investment as FCC Road Show Returns to Cambridge

Opponents can shed their rhetoric and reveal new depths to their thought when you bring them together for rapid-fire exchanges, sometimes with their faces literally inches away from each other. That made it worth my while to truck down to the MIT Media Lab for yesterday’s Workshop on Innovation, Investment and the Open Internet, sponsored by the Federal Communications Commission. The event showed that innovation and investment are not always companions on the Internet. An in-depth look at the current state of the debate over competition and network neutrality.

Vendor Relationship Management workshop

Nobody knows you as well as you do. Or do they? Let's run a test. Do you
know what percentage of your food bill went to processed products? Or
what type of coupons (store coupons, newspaper coupons, etc.) is most
likely to get you to switch brands? I bet someone out there knows.This kind of data mining is the modern companion to Customer Relations Management, which is the science of understanding customers and trying to get repeat business. CRM can offer many valuable benefits, but ultimately the control lies
with the vendor. A Vendor Relationship Management workshop at
Harvard looked at what it would take to leave control with the
customers.

RSS never blocks you or goes down: why social networks need to be decentralized

Recurring outages on major networking sites such as Twitter and LinkedIn, along with incidents where Twitter members were
mysteriously dropped for days at a time, have led many people to challenge the centralized control exerted by
companies running social networks. We may have been willing to build our virtual houses on shaky foundations when they were temporary beach huts; but now we need to examine the ground on which many are proposing to build our virtual shopping malls and even our virtual federal offices. Instead of the constant churning among the commercial sites du jour (Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter), the next generation of social networking increasingly appears to require a decentralized, peer-to-peer infrastructure. This article looks at efforts in that space and suggests principles to guide development.