- Digital Music Consumption on the Internet: Evidence from Clickstream Data (Scribd) — The goal of this paper is to analyze the behavior of digital music consumers on the Internet. Using clickstream data on a panel of more than 16,000 European consumers, we estimate the effects of illegal downloading and legal streaming on the legal purchases of digital music. Our results suggest that Internet users do not view illegal downloading as a substitute to legal digital music. Although positive and significant, our estimated elasticities are essentially zero: a 10% increase in clicks on illegal downloading websites leads to a 0.2% increase in clicks on legal purchases websites. Online music streaming services are found to have a somewhat larger (but still small) effect on the purchases of digital sound recordings, suggesting complementarities between these two modes of music consumption. According to our results, a 10% increase in clicks on legal streaming websites lead to up to a 0.7% increase in clicks on legal digital purchases websites. We find important cross country difference in these effects. A paper from the EU commission’s in-house science service. (via Don Christie)
- Six Degrees of Francis Bacon — data-driven research into “the early-modern social network”. (via Jonathan Gray)
- jsshaper — an extensible framework for JavaScript syntax tree shaping. Super-powerful source code reformatter & more for Javascript.
- Internet Census 2012 — scanning the net via botnet. Appalling how many unsecured devices are directly connected to the net. Also appalling how underused the address space is.
ENTRIES TAGGED "security"
Four short links: 20 March 2013
"Piracy" Good for Sales, Digital Humanities, Javascript Source Formatting, and Research by BotNet
Four short links: 19 March 2013
Visualizing City Data, Gigabits Unrealized, Use Open Source, and Bad IPs Cluster
- VizCities Dev Diary — step-by-step recount of how they brought London’s data to life, SimCity-style.
- Google Fibre Isn’t That Impressive — For [gigabit broadband] to become truly useful and necessary, we’ll need to see a long-term feedback loop of utility and acceptance. First, super-fast lines must allow us to do things that we can’t do with the pedestrian internet. This will prompt more people to demand gigabit lines, which will in turn invite developers to create more apps that require high speed, and so on. What I discovered in Kansas City is that this cycle has not yet begun. Or, as Ars Technica put it recently, “The rest of the internet is too slow for Google Fibre.”
- gov.uk Recommendations on Open Source — Use open source software in preference to proprietary or closed source alternatives, in particular for operating systems, networking software, Web servers, databases and programming languages.
- Internet Bad Neighbourhoods (PDF) — bilingual PhD thesis. The idea behind the Internet Bad Neighborhood concept is that the probability of a host in behaving badly increases if its neighboring hosts (i.e., hosts within the same subnetwork) also behave badly. This idea, in turn, can be exploited to improve current Internet security solutions, since it provides an indirect approach to predict new sources of attacks (neighboring hosts of malicious ones).
Four short links: 15 March 2013
Search Ads Meh, Hacked Website Help, Web Design Sins, and Lazy Correlations
- Consumer Heterogeneity and Paid Search Effectiveness: A Large Scale Field Experiment (PDF) — We find that new and infrequent users are positively influenced by ads but that existing loyal users whose purchasing behavior is not influenced by paid search account for most of the advertising expenses, resulting in average returns that are negative. We discuss substitution to other channels and implications for advertising decisions in large firms. eBay-commissioned research, so salt to taste. (via Guardian)
- Google’s Help for Hacked Webmasters — what it says.
- 14 Lousy Web Design Trends Making a Comeback Thanks to HTML 5 — “mystery meat icons” a pet bugbear of mine.
- The Human Microbiome 101 (SlideShare) — SciFoo alum Jonathan Eisen’s talk. Informative, but super-notable for “complexity is astonishing, massive risk for false positive associations”. Remember this the next time your Big Data Scientist (aka kid with R) tells you one surprising variable predicts 66% of anything. I wish I had the audio from this talk!
Four short links: 14 March 2013
On Anonymous, Information Rights, RSS Readers, and CDN Sec
- Our Weirdness is Free (Gabriella Coleman) — Often lacking an overarching strategy, Anonymous operates tactically, along the lines proposed by the French Jesuit thinker Michel de Certeau. “Because it does not have a place, a tactic depends on time—it is always on the watch for opportunities that must be seized ‘on the wing,’” he writes in The Practice of Everyday Life (1980). “Whatever it wins, it does not keep. It must constantly manipulate events in order to turn them into ‘opportunities.’ The weak must continually turn to their own ends forces alien to them.” (via Jonas Kubilius)
- Information Rights and Copy Rights (YouTube) — Justice David Harvey’s keynote at Australian Digital Alliance forum, proposing balance of rights. (via Alastair Thompson)
- NewsBlur (GitHub) — one of the many trending repos in the wake of the announcement of Google Reader’s case of terminal lack of relevance to Google+. See also Tiny Tiny RSS, FastLadder, and a million repos empty but for “TODO” files listing the almighty RSS reading features yet to be added to the empty file. Also found: this obsessive guide to Reader’s history.
- The Pentester’s Guide to Akamai (PDF) — This paper summarizes the findings from NCC’s research into Akamai while providing advice to
companies wish to gain the maximum security when leveraging their solutions.
Security on the industrial Internet
Roel Schouwenberg on Kaspersky Lab's forthcoming industrial OS and building a system with security in mind.
Security must evolve along with the industrial Internet. The Stuxnet attack on Iran’s centrifuges in 2010 highlighted both the risks of web-borne attacks and the futility of avoiding them by disconnecting from the Internet (the worm spread, in part, using USB keys). Potential attackers range from small-time corporate spies to sophisticated government units that might use infrastructure…
Four short links: 5 March 2013
Video Magnification Code, Copyright MOOC, Open Access Cost-Effectiveness, and SCADA Security (Sucks)
- Eulerian Video Magnification — papers and the MatLab source code for that amazing effect of exaggerating small changes in file. (*This work is patent pending)
- CopyrightX — MOOC on current law of copyright and the ongoing debates concerning how that law should be reformed. Through a combination of pre-recorded lectures, live webcasts, and weekly online seminars, participants in the course will examine and assess the ways in which law seeks to stimulate and regulate creative expression. (via BoingBoing)
- Cost Effectiveness for Open Access Journals — This plot reveals the prestige (Article Influence score) and publication charges for open access journals.
- Results of SANS SCADA Survey 2013 (PDF) — Unfortunately, at this time they seem unable to monitor the PLCs, terminal units and connections to field equipment due to lack of native security in the control systems themselves. (via InfoSecIsland)
Four short links: 1 March 2013
Drone Journalism, DNS Sniffing, E-Book Lending, and Structured Data Server
- Drone Journalism — two universities in the US have already incorporated drone use in their journalism programs. The Drone Journalism Lab at the University of Nebraska and the Missouri Drone Journalism Program at the University of Missouri both teach journalism students how to make the most of what drones have to offer when reporting a story. They also teach students how to fly drones, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regulations and ethics.
- passivedns — A network sniffer that logs all DNS server replies for use in a passive DNS setup.
- IFLA E-Lending Background Paper (PDF) — The global dominance of English language eBook title availability reinforced by eReader availability is starkly evident in the statistics on titles available by country: in the USA: 1,000,000; UK: 400,000; Germany/France: 80,000 each; Japan: 50,000; Australia: 35,000; Italy: 20,000; Spain: 15,000; Brazil: 6,000. Many more stats in this paper prepared as context for the International Federation of Library Associations.
- The god Architecture — a scalable, performant, persistent, in-memory data structure server. It allows massively distributed applications to update and fetch common data in a structured and sorted format. Its main inspirations are Redis and Chord/DHash. Like Redis it focuses on performance, ease of use and a small, simple yet powerful feature set, while from the Chord/DHash projects it inherits scalability, redundancy, and transparent failover behaviour.
Four short links: 22 February 2013
Indiepocalypse Continued, Unblockable p2p Twitter, Disposable Satellites, and iOS to HTML5
- 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.”
- 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)
- 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.”
- 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)
Four short links: February 21 2013
Responding to Chinese Hacks, Quantified Self Gadget, Maker's Amazing Life, and Syrian Rebel DIY Hackery
- Administration Strategy on Mitigating the Theft of US Trade Secrets (Whitehouse, PDF) — the Chinese attacks on Facebook, NYT, and other large organisations are provoking policy responses. WSJ covers it nicely. What is this starting? (via Alex Howard)
- BodyMedia FitLink — can use this to gather caloric expenditure and sleep restfulness. (via Jonathan Brewer)
- Bend Not Break — she had an amazing life but this caught my eye in the Make review: In China, she told me, making and craftsmanship are highly revered, and under Mao, factory jobs were prized. Her experience working in Mao’s factories planted a seed in her mind that sprouted when she sought to create her own company. Rather than launch another internet-based business as was the rage at the time, she wanted to connect software to the physical world. (via Makezine)
- DIY Weapons of the Syrian Rebels (The Atlantic) — if WWII France had had X-Box controllers, they’d have been releasing remote controlled homebrew deathmobiles too.
Four short links: 19 February 2013
Underground Economy, Continuous Integration, Chinese Cyber-Espionage, Prosthesis From The Future
- Using Silk Road — exploring the transactions, probability of being busted, and more. Had me at the heading Silk Road as Cyphernomicon’s black markets. Estimates of risk of participating in the underground economy.
- Travis CI — a hosted continuous integration service for the open source community. It is integrated with GitHub.
- Chinese Cyber-Espionage Unit (PDF) — exposé of one of China’s Cyber Espionage Units. (via Reddit /r/netsec)
- $250 Arduino-Powered Hand Made by a Teen — the third version of his robotic hand. The hand is primarily made with 3D printing, with the exception of motors, gears, and other hardware. The control system is activated by flexing a pre-chosen muscle, such as curling your toes, then the movement is chosen and controlled by a series of eyeblinks and an EEG headset to measure brainwaves. The most remarkable part is that the hand costs a mere $250.
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