Software Detection of Currency
Steven J. Murdoch presents some interesting results indicating that the EURion constellation may have been obsoleted:
Recent printers, scanners and image manipulation software identify images of currency, will not process the image and display an error message linking to www.rulesforuse.org. The detection algorithm is not disclosed, however it is possible to test sample images as to whether they are identified as currency. This webpage shows an initial analysis of the algorithm’s properties, based on results from the automated generation and testing of images. […] Initially it was thought that the “Eurion constellation” was used to identify banknotes in the newly deployed software based system, since this has been confirmed to be the technique used by colour photocopiers, and was both necessary and sufficient to prevent an item being duplicated using the photocopier tested. However further investigation showed that the detection performed by software is different from the system used in colour photocopiers, and the Eurion constellation is neither necessary nor sufficent, and in fact it probably is not even a factor.
(tags: eurion algorithms photoshop security currency money euro copying obscurity reversing)
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a simple-to-use, extensible, text-based data workflow tool that organizes command execution around data and its dependencies. Data processing steps are defined along with their inputs and outputs and Drake automatically resolves their dependencies. […] Drake is similar to GNU Make, but designed especially for data workflow management. It has HDFS [and S3] support, allows multiple inputs and outputs, and includes a host of features designed to help you bring sanity to your otherwise chaotic data processing workflows.
Via Nelson. Looks interesting, although I’d like to see more features around retries, single-executor locking, parallelism, alerting/metrics, and unattended cron-like operation — those are always the hard part when I wind up coding up a data pump.(tags: make data data-pump drake via:nelson pipelines workflow)
AK at re:Invent 2013: Getting Maximum Performance from Redshift
good Redshift tips
(tags: redshift aws amazon performance scaling s3 rdbms sql ops analytics)
Tintin And The Copyright Sharks – Falkvinge on Infopolicy
A rather sordid tale of IP acquisition and exploitation, from the sounds of it
(tags: tintin moulinsart belgium history herge ip copyright royalties rick-falkvinge)