"regulation" entries

Four short links: 15 March 2016

Four short links: 15 March 2016

Car Hackers Handbook, Exoskeleton Regulation, Pythonic Spreadsheet, and AI Myths

  1. The 2016 Car Hacker’s Handbook (Amazon) — will give you a deeper understanding of the computer systems and embedded software in modern vehicles. It begins by examining vulnerabilities and providing detailed explanations of communications over the CAN bus and between devices and systems. (via BoingBoing)
  2. More Exoskeletons Seeking FDA ApprovalThe international group of exoskeleton providers with various FDA or CE certifications is growing and currently includes: Ekso in the US; Cyberdyne in the EU and Japan; ExoAtlet from Russia; and Israel’s ReWalk. Other providers are in the process of getting approvals or developing commercial versions of their products. My eye was caught by how global the list of exoskeleton companies is.
  3. Dirigible Spreadsheet — open source spreadsheet that’s not just written in Python, it exposes and IS python. See also Harry Percival talking about it.
  4. Everything You Know About AI Is Wrong (Gizmodo) — an interesting run-through of myths and claims about AI. I’m not ready to consider all of these “busted,” but they are some nice starters-for-ten in your next pub argument about whether the Matrix is coming.
Four short links: 21 September 2015

Four short links: 21 September 2015

2-D Single-Stroke Recognizer, Autonomous Vehicle Permits, s3concurrent, and Surviving the Music Industry

  1. $1 Unistroke Recognizera 2-D single-stroke recognizer designed for rapid prototyping of gesture-based user interfaces. In machine learning terms, $1 is an instance-based nearest-neighbor classifier with a Euclidean scoring function — i.e., a geometric template matcher.
  2. Apple Talking to California Officials about Self-Driving Car (Guardian) — California DMV’s main responsibility for autonomous vehicles at present is administering an autonomous vehicle tester program for experimental self-driving cars on California’s roads. So far, 10 companies have been issued permits for about 80 autonomous vehicles and more than 300 test drivers. The most recent, Honda and BMW, received their permits last week.
  3. s3concurrent — sync local file structure with s3, in parallel. (via Winston Chen)
  4. Amanda Palmer on Music Industry Survival Techniques (O’Reilly Radar) — I’ve always approached every Internet platform and every Internet tool with the suspicion that it may not last, and that actually what’s very important is […] the art and the relationships I’m building.
Four short links: 24 February 2015

Four short links: 24 February 2015

Open Data, Packet Dumping, GPU Deep Learning, and Genetic Approval

  1. Wiki New Zealand — open data site, and check out the chart builder behind the scenes for importing the data. It’s magic.
  2. stenographer (Google) — open source packet dumper for capturing data during intrusions.
  3. Which GPU for Deep Learning?a lot of numbers. Overall, I think memory size is overrated. You can nicely gain some speedups if you have very large memory, but these speedups are rather small. I would say that GPU clusters are nice to have, but that they cause more overhead than the accelerate progress; a single 12GB GPU will last you for 3-6 years; a 6GB GPU is plenty for now; a 4GB GPU is good but might be limiting on some problems; and a 3GB GPU will be fine for most research that looks into new architectures.
  4. 23andMe Wins FDA Approval for First Genetic Test — as they re-enter the market after FDA power play around approval (yes, I know: one company’s power play is another company’s flouting of safeguards designed to protect a vulnerable public).

More than a currency, bitcoin is an enabling technology

The O'Reilly Radar Podcast: Balaji Srinivasan on the bigger picture of bitcoin, liquid markets, and the future of regulation.

The promise of bitcoin and blockchain extends well beyond its potential disruption as a currency. In this Radar Podcast episode, Balaji Srinivasan, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, explains how bitcoin is an enabling technology and why it’s like the Internet, in that “bitcoin will do for value transfer what the Internet did for communication — make it programmable.” I met up with Srinivasan at our recent O’Reilly Radar Summit: Bitcoin & the Blockchain, where he was speaking — you can see his talk, and all the others from the event, in the complete video compilation now available.

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The bigger picture of bitcoin

More than just a digital currency, bitcoin can serve as an instigator for new markets. Srinivasan explained the potential for everything to become a liquid market:

“Bitcoin is a platform for programmable money, programmable interchange, or anything of value. That’s very general. People have probably heard at this point about how you can use a blockchain to trade — in theory — stocks, or houses, or other kinds of things, but programmable value transfer is even bigger than just trading things which we know already exist.

“One analogy I would give is in 1988, it was not possible to find information on anything instantly. Today, most of the time it is. From your iPhone or your Android phone, you can google pretty much anything. In the same way, I think what bitcoin is going to mean, is markets in everything. That is, everything will have a price on it — everything will be a liquid market. You’ll be able to buy and sell almost anything. Where today the fixed costs of setting up such a market is too high for anything other than things that are fairly valuable, tomorrow it’ll be possible for even images or things you would not even think of normally buying and selling.”

Read more…

Four short links: 5 February 2015

Four short links: 5 February 2015

Mobile Supply Chain, Regulating the Interwebs, Meh MOOCs, and Security School

  1. The Home and the Mobile Supply Chain (Benedict Evans) — the small hardware start-up, and the cool new gizmos from drones to wearables, are possible because of the low price of components built at the scale required for Apple and other mobile device makers. (via Matt Webb)
  2. FCC Chairman Wheeler Proposes New Rules for Protecting the Open Internet (PDF) — America may yet have freedom. No blocking, no throttling, no paid prioritisation.
  3. The Future of College (Bill Gates) — The MOOC, by itself, doesn’t really change things, except for the very most motivated student. HALLELUJAH!
  4. Breaker 101 — 12-week online security course. $1,750 (cue eyes water). Putting the hacker back in hacker schools …
Four short links: 30 January 2015

Four short links: 30 January 2015

FAA Rules, Sports UAVs, Woodcut Data, and Concurrent Programming

  1. FAA to Regulate UAVs? (Forbes) — and the Executive Order will segment the privacy issues related to drones into two categories — public and private. For public drones (that is, drones purchased with federal dollars), the President’s order will establish a series of privacy and transparency guidelines. See also How ESPN is Shooting the X Games with Drones (Popular Mechanics)—it’s all fun and games until someone puts out their eye with a quadrocopter. The tough part will be keeping within the tight restrictions the FAA gave them. Because drones can’t be flown above a crowd, Calcinari says, “We basically had to build a 500-foot radius around them, where the public can’t go.” The drones will fly over sections of the course that are away from the crowds, where only ESPN production employees will be. That rule is part of why we haven’t seen drones at college football games.
  2. Milestones for SaaS Companies“Getting from $0-1m is impossible. Getting from $1-10m is unlikely. And getting from $10-100m is inevitable.” —Jason Lemkin, ex-CEO of Echosign. The article proposes some significant milestones, and they ring true. Making money is generally hard. The nature of the hard changes with the amount of money you have and the amount you’re trying to make, but if it were easy, then we’d structure our society on something else.
  3. Woodcut Data VisualisationRecently, I learned how to operate a laser cutter. It’s been a whole lot of fun, and I wanted to share my experiences creating woodcut data visualizations using just D3. I love it when data visualisations break out of the glass rectangle.
  4. Why is Concurrent Programming Hard?on the one hand there is not a single concurrency abstraction that fits all problems, and on the other hand the various different abstractions are rarely designed to be used in combination with each other. We are due for a revolution in programming, something to help us make sense of the modern systems made of more moving parts than our feeble grey matter can model and intuit about.

New opportunities in the maturing marketplace of big data components

The evolving marketplace is making new data applications and interactions possible.

Editor’s note: this is an excerpt from our new report Data: Emerging Trends and Technologies, by Alistair Croll. Download the free report here.

Here’s a look at some options in the evolving, maturing marketplace of big data components that are making the new applications and interactions we’ve been looking at possible.

Graph theory

First used in social network analysis, graph theory is finding more and more homes in research and business. Machine learning systems can scale up fast with tools like Parameter Server, and the TitanDB project means developers have a robust set of tools to use.

Are graphs poised to take their place alongside relational database management systems (RDBMS), object storage, and other fundamental data building blocks? What are the new applications for such tools?

Inside the black box of algorithms: whither regulation?

It’s possible for a machine to create an algorithm no human can understand. Evolutionary approaches to algorithmic optimization can result in inscrutable, yet demonstrably better, computational solutions.

If you’re a regulated bank, you need to share your algorithms with regulators. But if you’re a private trader, you’re under no such constraints. And having to explain your algorithms limits how you can generate them.

As more and more of our lives are governed by code that decides what’s best for us, replacing laws, actuarial tables, personal trainers, and personal shoppers, oversight means opening up the black box of algorithms so they can be regulated.

Years ago, Orbitz was shown to be charging web visitors who owned Apple devices more money than those visiting via other platforms, such as the PC. Only that’s not the whole story: Orbitz’s machine learning algorithms, which optimized revenue per customer, learned that the visitor’s browser was a predictor of their willingness to pay more. Read more…

Regulation and decentralization: Defending the blockchain

Andreas Antonopoulos urges the Canadian Senate to resist the temptation to centralize bitcoin.

Editor’s note: our O’Reilly Radar Summit: Bitcoin & the Blockchain will take place on January 27, 2015, at Fort Mason in San Francisco. Andreas Antonopoulos, Vitalik Buterin, Naval Ravikant, and Bill Janeway are but a few of the confirmed speakers for the event. Learn more about the event and reserve your ticket here.

We recently announced a Radar summit on present and future applications of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies. In a webcast presentation one of our program chairs, Kieren James-Lubin, observed that we’re very much in the early days of these technologies. He also noted that the technologies are complex enough that most users will rely on service providers (like wallets) to securely store, transfer, and receive cryptocurrencies.

As some of these service providers reach a certain scale, they will start coming under the scrutiny of regulators. Certain tenets are likely to remain: currencies require continuous liquidity and large financial institutions need access to the lender of last resort.

There are also cultural norms that take time to change. Take the example of notaries, whose services seem amenable to being replaced by blockchain technologies. Such a wholesale change would entail adjusting rules and norms across localities, which means going up against the lobbying efforts of established incumbents.

One way to sway regulators and skeptics is to point out that the decentralized nature of the (bitcoin) blockchain can unlock innovation in financial services and other industries. Mastering Bitcoin author Andreas Antonopoulos did a masterful job highlighting this in his recent testimony before the Canadian Senate:

“Traditional models for financial payment networks and banking rely on centralized control in order to provide security. The architecture of a traditional financial network is built around a central authority, such as a clearinghouse. As a result, security and authority have to be vested in that central actor. The resulting security model looks like a series of concentric circles with very limited access to the center and increasing access as we move farther away from the center. However, even the most outermost circle cannot afford open access.

Read more…

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: 7 November 2014

Four short links: 7 November 2014

Twitter Emoji, Immersive Cinema, Bitcoin Regulation, and Internet Sovereignty

  1. Twitter Open Sources Their Emoji Library — Emoji are the sparklines of sentiment.
  2. Interactive 360-degree Films. From Google (Medium) — you move the camera through a movie shot in 360 degrees, and can choose what you’re looking at through the scene. I can’t wait to try this, it sounds brilliant.
  3. Bitcoin Crackdown — everyone who started exchanges and mutual funds thinking Bitcoin wouldn’t be regulated like a currency is getting an SEC headache.
  4. Connected Choices: How the Internet is Challenging Sovereign Decisions (PDF) — Ultimately, the Internet remains both a global commons and part of each nation’s sovereign infrastructure, and thus activities in cyberspace must continue to navigate two sets of demands: national interests and global interests. […] Political leaders are responsible for articulating a vision and establishing general principles and policies to achieve their goals and, accordingly, are constantly trying to advance their agendas using policy, law, market mechanisms, regulation, standards, and other initiatives. The evidence is clear; you just have to look for it.