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Links for 2018-03-01

Published March 1, 2018

  • Yes, bacon really is killing us - The Guardian Long Read

    Nooooo!

    Since we eat with our eyes, the main way we judge the quality of cured meats is pinkness. Yet it is this very colour that we should be suspicious of, as the French journalist Guillaume Coudray explains in a book published in France last year called Cochonneries, a word that means both “piggeries” and “rubbish” or “junk food”. The subtitle is “How Charcuterie Became a Poison”. Cochonneries reads like a crime novel, in which the processed meat industry is the perpetrator and ordinary consumers are the victims. The pinkness of bacon – or cooked ham, or salami – is a sign that it has been treated with chemicals, more specifically with nitrates and nitrites. It is the use of these chemicals that is widely believed to be the reason why “processed meat” is much more carcinogenic than unprocessed meat. Coudray argues that we should speak not of “processed meat” but “nitro-meat”. [...] When nitrates interact with certain components in red meat (haem iron, amines and amides), they form N-nitroso compounds, which cause cancer. The best known of these compounds is nitrosamine. This, as Guillaume Coudray explained to me in an email, is known to be “carcinogenic even at a very low dose”. Any time someone eats bacon, ham or other processed meat, their gut receives a dose of nitrosamines, which damage the cells in the lining of the bowel, and can lead to cancer. You would not know it from the way bacon is sold, but scientists have known nitrosamines are carcinogenic for a very long time. More than 60 years ago, in 1956, two British researchers called Peter Magee and John Barnes found that when rats were fed dimethyl nitrosamine, they developed malignant liver tumours. By the 1970s, animal studies showed that small, repeated doses of nitrosamines and nitrosamides – exactly the kind of regular dose a person might have when eating a daily breakfast of bacon – were found to cause tumours in many organs including the liver, stomach, oesophagus, intestines, bladder, brain, lungs and kidneys.
    But there IS some good news for Parma ham and sausages:
    In 1993, Parma ham producers in Italy made a collective decision to remove nitrates from their products and revert to using only salt, as in the old days. For the past 25 years, no nitrates or nitrites have been used in any Prosciutto di Parma. Even without nitrate or nitrite, the Parma ham stays a deep rosy-pink colour. We now know that the colour in Parma ham is totally harmless, a result of the enzyme reactions during the ham’s 18-month ageing process. [...] the average British sausage – as opposed to a hard sausage like a French saucisson – is not cured, being made of nothing but fresh meat, breadcrumbs, herbs, salt and E223, a preservative that is non-carcinogenic. After much questioning, two expert spokespeople for the US National Cancer Institute confirmed to me that “one might consider” fresh sausages to be “red meat” and not processed meat, and thus only a “probable” carcinogen.

    (tags: bacon sausages meat parma-ham ham food cancer carcinogens big-meat nitrates nitrites)

Links for 2018-02-28

Published February 28, 2018

  • 30 kWh Leaf Nissan Connect Issues

    seems there's some kind of firmware/importation issue with the Nissan Leaf app integration.... bit of a mess

    (tags: nissan-leaf nissan leaf apps mobile cars driving)

  • Palantir has secretly been using New Orleans to test its predictive policing technology - The Verge

    Predictive policing technology has proven highly controversial wherever it is implemented, but in New Orleans, the program escaped public notice, partly because Palantir established it as a philanthropic relationship with the city through Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s signature NOLA For Life program. Thanks to its philanthropic status, as well as New Orleans’ “strong mayor” model of government, the agreement never passed through a public procurement process. In fact, key city council members and attorneys contacted by The Verge had no idea that the city had any sort of relationship with Palantir, nor were they aware that Palantir used its program in New Orleans to market its services to another law enforcement agency for a multimillion-dollar contract. Even James Carville, the political operative instrumental in bringing about Palantir’s collaboration with NOPD, said that the program was not public knowledge. “No one in New Orleans even knows about this, to my knowledge,” Carville said.

    (tags: palantir creepy surveillance crime forecasting precrime new-orleans us-politics privacy)

  • Huy Fong sriracha hot sauce label - Fonts In Use

    The fonts of the iconic sriracha bottle, analysed. Interestingly, the Chinese serif text is typeset in a universally-reviled font, PMingLiu:

    For East Asian designers, PMingLiu was probably as despicable as Papyrus. Many have publicly voiced their disdain for PMingLiu, and some even see the elimination of PMingLiu from public sight as a career goal. Julius Hui, then consultant for Commercial Type, exclaims: PMingLiu inhibits the type business, maims the public’s aesthetic judgment, and puts a bad face on the Minch? genre. As long as the public have not harbored a deep hatred against PMingLiu, it is futile to completely eliminate it from the world.

    (tags: typography packaging sriracha pmingliu mincho fonts type food labels)

Links for 2018-02-22

Published February 22, 2018

  • The Codex - I Do Not Like Go

    Some gripes about Go from this blog, specifically around developer ergonomics (syntax highlighting and language-inherent error detection), politics, packaging and distribution, GOPATH, and the tuple-oriented error handling idiom. As R. I. Pienaar noted, the Go community seems full of "at-Google-wes", which is an excellent way of putting it.

    (tags: golang go criticism blogs syntax-highlighting coding languages google at-google-we)

  • Can I Extend and Renovate my “Fixer Upper” for €100,000? A First Time Buyer’s Renovation Budget Explained

    In 2013, €100,000 was like a king’s ransom to most businesses in the Irish construction industry. Now clients approach us with budgets at this level and are shocked when we tell them how little can be achieved with such a large sum of money. We have decided to tackle this issue with a clear worked example. In 2018, rates for some types of construction have increased 50% since the recession, client expectations have increased, there is a shortage of competent construction workers, and subcontractors are now more accountable for quality. These pressures have inflated the many expenses which make up a typical renovation budget. Even the most seasoned commercial clients are struggling to achieve tenable construction prices, and first time buyers must understand the financial risk of buying a home in need of complete renovation.
    whoa.

    (tags: renovation homes architecture houses building)

Links for 2018-02-19

Published February 19, 2018

Links for 2018-02-15

Published February 15, 2018

Links for 2018-02-14

Published February 14, 2018

  • Single Trapped Atom Captures Science Photography Competition's top prize - EPSRC website

    An image of a single positively-charged strontium atom, held near motionless by electric fields, has won the overall prize in a national science photography competition, organised by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). ‘Single Atom in an Ion Trap’, by David Nadlinger, from the University of Oxford, shows the atom held by the fields emanating from the metal electrodes surrounding it. The distance between the small needle tips is about two millimetres. When illuminated by a laser of the right blue-violet colour the atom absorbs and re-emits light particles sufficiently quickly for an ordinary camera to capture it in a long exposure photograph. The winning picture was taken through a window of the ultra-high vacuum chamber that houses the ion trap.

    (tags: atom photography science strontium ion-traps light)

Links for 2018-02-12

Published February 12, 2018

  • Thousands of websites hijacked by hidden crypto-mining code after Browsealoud hacked

    The affected sites all use a fairly popular plugin called Browsealoud, made by Brit biz Texthelp, which reads out webpages for blind or partially sighted people. This technology was compromised in some way – either by hackers or rogue insiders altering Browsealoud's source code – to silently inject Coinhive's Monero miner into every webpage offering Browsealoud. For several hours today, anyone who visited a site that embedded Browsealoud inadvertently ran this hidden mining code on their computer, generating money for the miscreants behind the caper. A list of 4,200-plus affected websites can be found here: they include The City University of New York (cuny.edu), Uncle Sam's court information portal (uscourts.gov), Lund University (lu.se), the UK's Student Loans Company (slc.co.uk), privacy watchdog The Information Commissioner's Office (ico.org.uk) and the Financial Ombudsman Service (financial-ombudsman.org.uk), plus a shedload of other .gov.uk and .gov.au sites, UK NHS services, and other organizations across the globe. Manchester.gov.uk, NHSinform.scot, agriculture.gov.ie, Croydon.gov.uk, ouh.nhs.uk, legislation.qld.gov.au, the list goes on.

    (tags: browsealoud accessibility http sri coinhive monero hacks ico nhs)

Links for 2018-02-09

Published February 9, 2018

  • How the Game Genie worked

    "Sometimes it was really easy to find cheats, because the code was very straightforward, and sometimes it was a massive pain in the arse," recalls Jon. "In simple terms, if a game started you with three lives I'd set up the logic analyser to stop when it found the value three being written to RAM. Then I'd use the Game Genie to change that 3 to say a 5, reboot the game and see if I started with 5 lives. If not, then I'd let it find the next time it wrote 3 into RAM and try that. "Infinite lives codes were always the best. Once I'd found where in RAM the lives value was stored I'd then monitor when it got decremented. What I was looking for was where the game's original coder used -most likely - the DEC A (&H3D) instruction after reading the lives value from RAM, and then storing it back into RAM. If I found this then all I had to do was swap out the DEC A (&H3D) decrement operation with a NOP (&H00), which performed no operation. So the lives value would be left as-is and voila the player had infinite lives."

    (tags: games gameboy game-genie via:its logic-analysers reverse-engineering history hacking)

  • Last orders: Ireland's vanishing 'quirky' shopfronts – in pictures | Cities | The Guardian

    Graphic designer Trevor Finnegan spent seven years documenting traditional shopfronts throughout Ireland.
    Lovely examples of a vanishing vernacular style.

    (tags: architecture ireland rural shopfronts signs history)

  • Russia Did It, Y’all. And Nobody Fucking Cares.

    That’s right, that’s CRAZY LIBERAL CONSPIRACY THEORIST George W. Bush [...] saying it’s still an open question whether Russia actually successfully rigged the 2016 election. What a Code Pink Occupy Democracy Now liberal George W. Bush is being, to even ask that question!

    (tags: wonkette elections donald-trump 2016 us-politics george-w-bush hacking)

  • Car Hacker's Handbook

    Modern cars are more computerized than ever. Infotainment and navigation systems, Wi-Fi, automatic software updates, and other innovations aim to make driving more ­convenient. But vehicle technologies haven't kept pace with today's more hostile security environment, leaving ­millions vulnerable to attack. The Car Hacker's Handbook 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. Then, once you have an understanding of a vehicle's communication network, you'll learn how to intercept data and perform specific hacks to track vehicles, unlock doors, glitch engines, flood communication, and more.
    Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license.

    (tags: cars books hacking exploits can-bus)

Links for 2018-02-07

Published February 7, 2018

Links for 2018-02-02

Published February 2, 2018

  • Amazon Aurora Parallel Query is Available for Preview

    Looks very nifty (at least once it's GA)

    Parallel Query improves the performance of large analytic queries by pushing processing down to the Aurora storage layer, spreading processing across hundreds of nodes. With Parallel Query, you can run sophisticated analytic queries on Aurora tables with an order of magnitude performance improvement over serial query processing, in many cases. Parallel Query currently pushes down predicates used to filter tables and hash joins. 

    (tags: parallel aurora amazon mysql sql performance joins architecture data-model)

Links for 2018-01-30

Published January 30, 2018

Links for 2018-01-29

Published January 29, 2018

  • Key metrics for RabbitMQ monitoring

    Good suggestions from Datadog

    (tags: rabbitmq mq monitoring metrics graphite ops)

  • Amazing thread from @gavinsblog on the Strava leak

    'This often led to the same results you see with Strava. In low population countries, or countries with low smartphone penetration, it was often easy to detect Westerners (usually soldiers) in remote areas. this usually led to being able to identify bases and other types of things based solely on social data. Iraq, Afghanistan = always easy to find US troops (Instagram being a common sharing tool). Same true of IDF troops in staging areas before invasion of Gaza in 2014. and the same true in 2014 with Russian troops in Ukraine. All too easy. Of course the other thing you might be nosey about [is] known military facilities. Social geotagging can give you staff/visitor lists if you persist long enough. the difference between this technique and Strava was you could usually quickly deduce first name/last name if you wanted, and infer other social profiles eg LinkedIn -> FB -> FB friends -> work colleagues. Not only that but it was possible to automate.'

    (tags: strava privacy military security geotagging geodata gavin-sheridan)

  • My £300 32Amp Charging Station Install

    good writeup of a DIY EV car charger install

    (tags: ev cars diy car-chargers home)

Links for 2018-01-28

Published January 28, 2018

  • Strava app gives away location of secret US army bases

    This is a privacy nightmare. Even with anonymized userids the data was far too user-specific.

    The details were released by Strava in a data visualisation map that shows all the activity tracked by users of its app, which allows people to record their exercise and share it with others. The map, released in November 2017, shows every single activity ever uploaded to Strava – more than 3 trillion individual GPS data points, according to the company. The app can be used on various devices including smartphones and fitness trackers like Fitbit to see popular running routes in major cities, or spot individuals in more remote areas who have unusual exercise patterns.

    (tags: strava privacy fail army us-army data)

Links for 2018-01-27

Published January 27, 2018

  • 'A Look into 30 Years of Malware Development from a Software Metrics Perspective'

    'During the last decades, the problem of malicious and unwanted software (malware) has surged in numbers and sophistication. Malware plays a key role in most of today’s cyber attacks and has consolidated as a commodity in the underground economy. In this work, we analyze the evolution of malware since the early 1980s to date from a software engineering perspective. We analyze the source code of 151 malware samples and obtain measures of their size, code quality, and estimates of the development costs (effort, time, and number of people). Our results suggest an exponential increment of nearly one order of magnitude per decade in aspects such as size and estimated effort, with code quality metrics similar to those of regular software. Overall, this supports otherwise confirmed claims about the increasing complexity of malware and its production progressively becoming an industry.'

    (tags: malware coding metrics software history complexity arms-race)

Links for 2018-01-25

Published January 25, 2018

  • Rocket Lab secretly launched a disco ball satellite on its latest test flight - The Verge

    I'm quite conflicted about this -- I think I like it:

    Shaped a bit like a disco ball, the Humanity Star is a 3-foot-wide carbon fiber sphere, made up of 65 panels that reflect the Sun’s light. The satellite is supposed to spin in space, too, so it’s constantly bouncing sunlight. In fact, the probe is so bright that people can see it with the naked eye. The Humanity Star’s orbit also takes it all over Earth, so the satellite will be visible from every location on the planet at different times. Rocket Lab has set up a website that gives real-time updates about the Humanity Star’s location. People can find out when the satellite will be closest to them, and then go outside to look for it. The goal of the project is to create “a shared experience for all of humanity,” according to Rocket Lab.

    (tags: rocket-lab disco-balls satellites humanity-star orbit space)

  • 3D Scans of 7,500 Famous Sculptures, Statues & Artworks: Download & 3D Print Rodin's Thinker, Michelangelo's David & More | Open Culture

    oh my.

    (tags: 3d-printing art history british-museum models cool)

  • 'DolphinAttack: Inaudible Voice Commands' [pdf]

    'Speech recognition (SR) systems such as Siri or Google Now have become an increasingly popular human-computer interaction method, and have turned various systems into voice controllable systems(VCS). Prior work on attacking VCS shows that the hidden voice commands that are incomprehensible to people can control the systems. Hidden voice commands, though hidden, are nonetheless audible. In this work, we design a completely inaudible attack, DolphinAttack, that modulates voice commands on ultrasonic carriers (e.g., f > 20 kHz) to achieve inaudibility. By leveraging the nonlinearity of the microphone circuits, the modulated low frequency audio commands can be successfully demodulated, recovered, and more importantly interpreted by the speech recognition systems. We validate DolphinAttack on popular speech recognition systems, including Siri, Google Now, Samsung S Voice, Huawei HiVoice, Cortana and Alexa. By injecting a sequence of inaudible voice commands, we show a few proof-of-concept attacks, which include activating Siri to initiate a FaceTime call on iPhone, activating Google Now to switch the phone to the airplane mode, and even manipulating the navigation system in an Audi automobile. We propose hardware and software defense solutions. We validate that it is feasible to detect DolphinAttack by classifying the audios using supported vector machine (SVM), and suggest to re-design voice controllable systems to be resilient to inaudible voice command attacks.' via Zeynep (https://twitter.com/zeynep/status/956520320504123392)

    (tags: alexa siri attacks security exploits google-now speech-recognition speech audio acm papers cortana)

Links for 2018-01-24

Published January 24, 2018

  • Targeted Audio Adversarial Examples

    This is phenomenal:

    We have constructed targeted audio adversarial examples on speech-to-text transcription neural networks: given an arbitrary waveform, we can make a small perturbation that when added to the original waveform causes it to transcribe as any phrase we choose. In prior work, we constructed hidden voice commands, audio that sounded like noise but transcribed to any phrases chosen by an adversary. With our new attack, we are able to improve this and make an arbitrary waveform transcribe as any target phrase.
    The audio examples on this page are impressive -- a little bit of background noise, such as you might hear on a telephone call with high compression, hard to perceive if you aren't listening out for it. Paper here: https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.01944 (Via Parker Higgins, https://twitter.com/xor )

    (tags: papers audio adversarial-classification neural-networks speech-to-text speech recognition voice attacks exploits via:xor)

Links for 2018-01-22

Published January 22, 2018

Links for 2018-01-18

Published January 18, 2018

Links for 2018-01-17

Published January 17, 2018

  • Boost your immunity: Cold and flu treatments suppress innate immune system

    The next time you feel a cold coming on, maybe what you really want is just a little teensy bit of innate immune suppression, not an immunity boost. Over-the-counter medications like ibuprofen and antihistamines should help you feel better. Meanwhile, sit back while your acquired B and T cells do the rest. And if you aren't yet sick, stay up-to-date on your vaccines, including the yearly influenza vaccine. Most importantly, practice vigorous hand washing — after all, the skin is also a component of your natural defenses and one that actually can be enhanced by good hygiene. Take care of yourself by keeping a balanced diet, maintaining good sleep habits, and minimizing stress. These are interventions that have been shown to help keep your immune system at its best. These alone can "boost" your odds of staving off an infection this cold season.

    (tags: immunity health immune-system colds b-cells t-cells flu)

  • Sarah Jeong's hilarious Twitter thread on Bitcoin

    "People are sick of the Federal Reserve, sick of bailouts, sick of inflation. You know what we need? Internet money with the usability of PGP and the reliability of BART" and much, much more

    (tags: bitcoin funny sarah-jeong comedy lols pgp twitter threads)

  • How To Measure the Working Set Size on Linux

    A nifty metric:

    The Working Set Size (WSS) is how much memory an application needs to keep working. Your app may have populated 100 Gbytes of main memory, but only uses 50 Mbytes each second to do its job. That's the working set size. It is used for capacity planning and scalability analysis. You may never have seen WSS measured by any tool (I haven't either). OSes usually show you virtual memory and resident memory, shown as the "VIRT" and "RES" columns in top. Resident memory is real memory: main memory that has been allocated and page mapped. But we don't know how much of that is in heavy use, which is what WSS tells us. In this post I'll introduce some new things I've developed for WSS estimation: two Linux tools, and WSS profile charts. The tools use either the referenced or the idle page flags to measure a page-based WSS, and were developed out of necessity for another performance problem.
    (via Amy Tobey)

    (tags: via:amytobey memory linux rss wss proc ps processes metrics working-set-size ram)

Links for 2018-01-15

Published January 15, 2018

  • The likely user interface which led to Hawaii's false-alarm incoming-ballistic-missile alert on Saturday 2018-01-13

    @supersat on Twitter: "In case you're curious what Hawaii's EAS/WEA interface looks like, I believe it's similar to this. Hypothesis: they test their EAS authorization codes at the beginning of each shift and selected the wrong option." This is absolutely classic enterprisey, government-standard web UX -- a dropdown template selection and an easily-misclicked pair of tickboxes to choose test or live mode.

    (tags: testing ux user-interfaces fail eas hawaii false-alarms alerts nuclear early-warning human-error)

  • The Death of Microservice Madness in 2018

    Quite a good set of potential gotchas, which I've run into myself, including: 'Real world systems often have poorly defined boundaries' 'The complexities of state are often ignored' 'The complexitities of communication are often ignored' 'Versioning can be hard' 'Microservices can be monoliths in disguise'

    (tags: architecture devops microservices services soa coding monoliths state systems)

  • Do algorithms reveal sexual orientation or just expose our stereotypes?

    'A study claiming that artificial intelligence can infer sexual orientation from facial images caused a media uproar in the Fall of 2017. [...] Michal Kosinski, who co-authored the study with fellow researcher Yilun Wang, initially expressed surprise, calling the critiques “knee-jerk” reactions. However, he then proceeded to make even bolder claims: that such AI algorithms will soon be able to measure the intelligence, political orientation, and criminal inclinations of people from their facial images alone.' 'In [this paper], we have shown how the obvious differences between lesbian or gay and straight faces in selfies relate to grooming, presentation, and lifestyle? — ?that is, differences in culture, not in facial structure. [...] We’ve demonstrated that just a handful of yes/no questions about these variables can do nearly as good a job at guessing orientation as supposedly sophisticated facial recognition AI. Therefore?—?at least at this point?—?it’s hard to credit the notion that this AI is in some way superhuman at “outing” us based on subtle but unalterable details of our facial structure.'

    (tags: culture facial-recognition ai papers facial-structure sexual-orientation lgbt computer-vision)

  • Shanzhai ?? China & its Contents

    As he drinks Sino-coffee for around RMB 10, Comrade X might well be wearing the latest ‘ZARE’ couture while watching the TV news streaming on his HiPhone.[2] Back in Guangdong, his girlfriend — a sales consultant at a small stall in one of Shenzhen’s many wholesale electronics markets — sports a ‘high-end replica’ ?? Louis Vuitton bag and makes a living selling ‘domestically produced’ ?? and ‘smuggled’ ?? smartphones. The imitation products that festoon the couple’s lives are part of ‘shanzhai ?? China’. Shanzhai, the word means roughly ‘mass-produced imitation goods’, has created a Chinese landscape that is littered with products derided by the media, Chinese and international, as ‘copycat’, ‘guerrilla counterfeits’ and ‘knockoffs’, all the work of thieves.[3] Those who feel that their intellectual property and copyright has been infringed by shanzhai producers describe the products as ‘rubbish’, ‘piracy in disguise’ and ‘hooligan’.[4] Regardless of such righteous outrage, shanzhai — the producers, the products and the mentality — continues to flourish as an essential, quasi-legitimate shadow dimension of the Chinese economy. And, in practical terms, shanzhai products give disenfranchised ‘non-consumers’ of the orthodox economy — that is, people who would like to own but can’t afford the ‘original’ products — cut-price access to high-end technologies, as well as offering aspirational shoppers consumer satisfaction.

    (tags: shanzai china fakes consumerism hiphone smartphones copycat knockoffs imitation consumption)

  • Don Norman on "Human Error", RISKS Digest Volume 23 Issue 07 2003

    It is far too easy to blame people when systems fail. The result is that over 75% of all accidents are blamed on human error. Wake up people! When the percentage is that high, it is a signal that something else is at fault -- namely, the systems are poorly designed from a human point of view. As I have said many times before (even within these RISKS mailings), if a valve failed 75% of the time, would you get angry with the valve and simply continual to replace it? No, you might reconsider the design specs. You would try to figure out why the valve failed and solve the root cause of the problem. Maybe it is underspecified, maybe there shouldn't be a valve there, maybe some change needs to be made in the systems that feed into the valve. Whatever the cause, you would find it and fix it. The same philosophy must apply to people.

    (tags: don-norman ux ui human-interface human-error errors risks comp.risks failures)

Links for 2018-01-14

Published January 14, 2018

Links for 2018-01-12

Published January 12, 2018

  • google/highwayhash: Fast strong hash functions: SipHash/HighwayHash

    HighwayHash: 'We have devised a new way of mixing inputs with AVX2 multiply and permute instructions. The multiplications are 32x32 -> 64 bits and therefore infeasible to reverse. Permuting equalizes the distribution of the resulting bytes. The internal state occupies four 256-bit AVX2 registers. Due to limitations of the instruction set, the registers are partitioned into two 512-bit halves that remain independent until the reduce phase. The algorithm outputs 64 bit digests or up to 256 bits at no extra cost. In addition to high throughput, the algorithm is designed for low finalization cost. The result is more than twice as fast as SipTreeHash. We also provide an SSE4.1 version (80% as fast for large inputs and 95% as fast for short inputs), an implementation for VSX on POWER and a portable version (10% as fast). A third-party ARM implementation is referenced below. Statistical analyses and preliminary cryptanalysis are given in https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.06257.' (via Tony Finch)

    (tags: siphash highwayhash via:fanf hashing hashes algorithms mac google hash)

  • Brain Cells Share Information With Virus-Like Capsules - The Atlantic

    ...a gene called Arc which is active in neurons, and plays a vital role in the brain. A mouse that’s born without Arc can’t learn or form new long-term memories. If it finds some cheese in a maze, it will have completely forgotten the right route the next day. “They can’t seem to respond or adapt to changes in their environment,” says Shepherd, who works at the University of Utah, and has been studying Arc for years. “Arc is really key to transducing the information from those experiences into changes in the brain.” Despite its importance, Arc has been a very difficult gene to study. Scientists often work out what unusual genes do by comparing them to familiar ones with similar features—but Arc is one-of-a-kind. Other mammals have their own versions of Arc, as do birds, reptiles, and amphibians. But in each animal, Arc seems utterly unique—there’s no other gene quite like it. And Shepherd learned why when his team isolated the proteins that are made by Arc, and looked at them under a powerful microscope. He saw that these Arc proteins assemble into hollow, spherical shells that look uncannily like viruses. “When we looked at them, we thought: What are these things?” says Shepherd. They reminded him of textbook pictures of HIV, and when he showed the images to HIV experts, they confirmed his suspicions. That, to put it bluntly, was a huge surprise. “Here was a brain gene that makes something that looks like a virus,” Shepherd says. That’s not a coincidence. The team showed that Arc descends from an ancient group of genes called gypsy retrotransposons, which exist in the genomes of various animals, but can behave like their own independent entities.* They can make new copies of themselves, and paste those duplicates elsewhere in their host genomes. At some point, some of these genes gained the ability to enclose themselves in a shell of proteins and leave their host cells entirely. That was the origin of retroviruses—the virus family that includes HIV.

    (tags: brain evolution retroviruses viruses genes arc gag proteins memory biology)

Links for 2018-01-11

Published January 11, 2018

  • [1801.02780] Rogue Signs: Deceiving Traffic Sign Recognition with Malicious Ads and Logos

    Well, so much for that idea.

    We propose a new real-world attack against the computer vision based systems of autonomous vehicles (AVs). Our novel Sign Embedding attack exploits the concept of adversarial examples to modify innocuous signs and advertisements in the environment such that they are classified as the adversary's desired traffic sign with high confidence. Our attack greatly expands the scope of the threat posed to AVs since adversaries are no longer restricted to just modifying existing traffic signs as in previous work. Our attack pipeline generates adversarial samples which are robust to the environmental conditions and noisy image transformations present in the physical world. We ensure this by including a variety of possible image transformations in the optimization problem used to generate adversarial samples. We verify the robustness of the adversarial samples by printing them out and carrying out drive-by tests simulating the conditions under which image capture would occur in a real-world scenario. We experimented with physical attack samples for different distances, lighting conditions, and camera angles. In addition, extensive evaluations were carried out in the virtual setting for a variety of image transformations. The adversarial samples generated using our method have adversarial success rates in excess of 95% in the physical as well as virtual settings.

    (tags: signs road-safety roads traffic self-driving-cars cars avs security machine-learning computer-vision ai)

  • The Stress of Remote Working – Martin De Wulf – Medium

    There is a lot of good to say about remote working, and I see a lot of rabid defence of the practice. That said, I have been working remotely for a little more than 5 years now, and I now must acknowledge that it does not come without stress. This might come as a surprise for some, but in the end, I think that remote working has taken some toll on me over the last two years, especially when I went almost fully remote for a year.
    I have to say, I agree with this 100% -- I spent a few years remote working full time, and by the end of it I was absolutely delighted to return to a mainly office-based job.

    (tags: business work life coding teleworking remote-work stress anxiety mental-health)

  • Best way designing a GDPR compliant datalake using AWS services : aws

    interesting thread at Reddit

    (tags: gdpr reddit aws tips design services ops)

Links for 2018-01-10

Published January 10, 2018

Links for 2018-01-09

Published January 9, 2018

Links for 2018-01-04

Published January 4, 2018

Links for 2018-01-03

Published January 3, 2018

Links for 2018-01-01

Published January 1, 2018

  • Steven Bellovin on Bitcoin

    When you engineer a system for deployment you build it to meet certain real-world goals. You may find that there are tradeoffs, and that you can't achieve all of your goals, but that's normal; as I've remarked, "engineering is the art of picking the right trade-off in an overconstrained environment". For any computer-based financial system, one crucial parameter is the transaction rate. For a system like Bitcoin, another goal had to be avoiding concentrations of power. And of course, there's transaction privacy. There are less obvious factors, too. These days, "mining" for Bitcoins requires a lot of computations, which translates directly into electrical power consumption. One estimate is that the Bitcoin network uses up more electricity than many countries. There's also the question of governance: who makes decisions about how the network should operate? It's not a question that naturally occurs to most scientists and engineers, but production systems need some path for change. In all of these, Bitcoin has failed. The failures weren't inevitable; there are solutions to these problems in the acdemic literature. But Bitcoin was deployed by enthusiasts who in essence let experimental code escape from a lab to the world, without thinking about the engineering issues—and now they're stuck with it. Perhaps another, better cryptocurrency can displace it, but it's always much harder to displace something that exists than to fill a vacuum.

    (tags: steven-bellovin bitcoin tech software systems engineering deployment cryptocurrency cypherpunks)

Links for 2017-12-19

Published December 19, 2017

Links for 2017-12-18

Published December 18, 2017

Links for 2017-12-15

Published December 15, 2017

Links for 2017-12-14

Published December 14, 2017

Links for 2017-12-13

Published December 13, 2017

Links for 2017-12-12

Published December 12, 2017

  • The Case for Learned Index Structures

    'Indexes are models: a B-Tree-Index can be seen as a model to map a key to the position of a record within a sorted array, a Hash-Index as a model to map a key to a position of a record within an unsorted array, and a BitMap-Index as a model to indicate if a data record exists or not. In this exploratory research paper, we start from this premise and posit that all existing index structures can be replaced with other types of models, including deep-learning models, which we term learned indexes. The key idea is that a model can learn the sort order or structure of lookup keys and use this signal to effectively predict the position or existence of records. We theoretically analyze under which conditions learned indexes outperform traditional index structures and describe the main challenges in designing learned index structures. Our initial results show, that by using neural nets we are able to outperform cache-optimized B-Trees by up to 70% in speed while saving an order-of-magnitude in memory over several real-world data sets. More importantly though, we believe that the idea of replacing core components of a data management system through learned models has far reaching implications for future systems designs and that this work just provides a glimpse of what might be possible.' Excellent follow-up thread from Henry Robinson: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/940344992723120128 'The fact that the learned representation is more compact is very neat. But also it's not really a surprise that, given the entire dataset, we can construct a more compact function than a B-tree which is *designed* to support efficient updates.' [...] 'given that the model performs best when trained on the whole data set - I strongly doubt B-trees are the best we can do with the current state-of-the art.'

    (tags: data-structures ml google b-trees storage indexes deep-learning henry-robinson)

  • Internet protocols are changing

    per @mnot. HTTP/2; TLS 1.3; QUIC and UDP; and DOH (DNS over HTTP!)

    (tags: crypto encryption http https protocols http2 tls quic udp tcp dns tunnelling)

Links for 2017-12-06

Published December 6, 2017

  • In first, 3-D printed objects connect to WiFi without electronics

    This. is. magic.

    Physical motion—pushing a button, laundry soap flowing out of a bottle, turning a knob, removing a hammer from a weighted tool bench—triggers gears and springs elsewhere in the 3-D printed object that cause a conductive switch to intermittently connect or disconnect with the antenna and change its reflective state. Information—in the form of 1s and 0s—is encoded by the presence or absence of the tooth on a gear. Energy from a coiled spring drives the gear system, and the width and pattern of gear teeth control how long the backscatter switch makes contact with the antenna, creating patterns of reflected signals that can be decoded by a WiFi receiver.

    (tags: magic wifi whoa 3d-printing objects plastic gears springs)

Links for 2017-12-05

Published December 5, 2017

  • AMERICAN AIRLINES 737MAX8: “LIKE A FLYING PRISON”

    Quite unusual to see an honest review of travelling coach-class on an internal US flight. This is a massive stinker: “I admit American isn’t my favourite airline, but this has made me seriously re-evaluate ever travelling on them again. And it won’t be economy. If this is Americans idea of their future standards, they can keep it. Aviation enthusiasts might find it really interesting- I felt like I was in a flying prison”.

    (tags: coach travel aa airlines 737 boeing reviews comfort)

  • Using AWS Batch to Generate Mapzen Terrain Tiles · Mapzen

    Using this setup on AWS Batch, we are able to generate more than 3.75 million tiles per minute and render the entire world in less than a week! These pre-rendered tiles get stored in S3 and are ready to use by anyone through the AWS Public Dataset or through Mapzen’s Terrain Tiles API.

    (tags: mapzen mapping tiles batch aws s3 lambda docker)

  • Theresa May's Blue Monday -- Fintan O’Toole

    Having backed down, May was then peremptorily informed that she was not even allowed to back down. She left her lunch with the president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, to take a phone call from the DUP’s Arlene Foster, who told her that the deal she had just made was unacceptable. May then had to go back in and tell Juncker that she could not agree to what she had just agreed to. It is a scarcely credible position for a once great state to find itself in: its leader does not even have the power to conduct a dignified retreat.

    (tags: eu ireland brexit uk theresa-may dup politics ec fintan-otoole)

  • Handling GDPR: How to make Kafka Forget

    How do you delete (or redact) data from Kafka? The simplest way to remove messages from Kafka is to simply let them expire. By default Kafka will keep data for two weeks and you can tune this as required. There is also an Admin API that lets you delete messages explicitly if they are older than some specified time or offset. But what if we are keeping data in the log for a longer period of time, say for Event Sourcing use cases or as a source of truth? For this you can make use of  Compacted Topics, which allow messages to be explicitly deleted or replaced by key.
    Similar applies to Kinesis I would think.

    (tags: kafka kinesis gdpr expiry deleting data privacy)

Links for 2017-12-04

Published December 4, 2017

  • Bella Caledonia: A Wake-Up Call

    Swathes of the British elite appeared ignorant of much of Irish history and the country’s present reality. They seemed to have missed that Ireland’s economic dependence on exports to its neighbour came speedily to an end after both joined the European Economic Community in 1973. They seemed unacquainted with Ireland’s modern reality as a confident, wealthy, and internationally-oriented nation with overwhelming popular support for EU membership. Repeated descriptions of the border as a “surprise” obstacle to talks betrayed that Britain had apparently not listened, or had dismissed, the Irish government’s insistence in tandem with the rest of the EU since April that no Brexit deal could be agreed that would harden the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland. The British government failed to listen to Ireland throughout history, and it was failing to listen still.

    (tags: europe ireland brexit uk ukip eu northern-ireland border history)

  • AWS re:invent 2017: Advanced Design Patterns for Amazon DynamoDB (DAT403) - YouTube

    Video of one of the more interesting sessions from this year's Re:invent

    (tags: reinvent aws dynamodb videos tutorials coding)

  • AWS re:invent 2017: Container Networking Deep Dive with Amazon ECS (CON401) // Practical Applications

    Another re:Invent highlight to watch -- ECS' new native container networking model explained

    (tags: reinvent aws containers docker ecs networking sdn ops)

  • VLC in European Parliament's bug bounty program

    This was not something I expected:

    The European Parliament has approved budget to improve the EU’s IT infrastructure by extending the free software security audit programme (FOSSA) and by including a bug bounty approach in the programme. The Commission intends to conduct a small-scale "bug bounty" activity on open-source software with companies already operating in the market. The scope of this action is to: Run a small-scale "bug bounty" activity for open source software project or library for a period of up to two months maximum; The purpose of the procedure is to provide the European institutions with open source software projects or libraries that have been properly screened for potential vulnerabilities; The process must be fully open to all potential bug hunters, while staying in-line with the existing Terms of Service of the bug bounty platform.

    (tags: vlc bug-bounties security europe europarl eu ep bugs oss video open-source)

Links for 2017-12-01

Published December 1, 2017

  • Sonarr

    newsgroup/torrent TV PVR automation. looks neat

    (tags: pvr tv automation usenet bittorrent)

  • South Pole Ice Tunnels – Antarctica - Atlas Obscura

    'One of the strangest of these monuments consists of the body of an atrophied White Sturgeon and a handwritten account of its journey. The fish had arrived in 1992 at McMurdo Station (a US base located at the edge of Antarctica and the Ross Sea) and had been destined for a remote Russian station called Vostok. However, the Russians gifted the sturgeon to American scientists who later discarded it after it had languished uneaten in a freezer for several months. It was from the trash dump that a garbage processing crew reclaimed the sturgeon, and it then made its way from location to location across Antarctica. It finally became enshrined in the tunnels beneath the South Pole where it greets visitors from a ledge chiseled in the ice.'

    (tags: south-pole pole big-dead-place shrines funny sturgeons antarctica amundsen-scott-station mcmurdo vostok)

Links for 2017-11-30

Published November 30, 2017

  • Introducing the Amazon Time Sync Service

    Well overdue; includes Google-style leap smearing

    (tags: time-sync time aws services ntp ops)

  • The Impenetrable Program Transforming How Courts Treat DNA Evidence | WIRED

    'So the lab turned to TrueAllele, a program sold by Cybergenetics, a small company dedicated to helping law enforcement analyze DNA where regular lab tests fail. They do it with something called probabilistic genotyping, which uses complex mathematical formulas to examine the statistical likelihood that a certain genotype comes from one individual over another. It’s a type of DNA testing that’s becoming increasingly popular in courtrooms. ' [...] 'But now legal experts, along with Johnson’s advocates, are joining forces to argue to a California court that TrueAllele—the seemingly magic software that helped law enforcement analyze the evidence that tied Johnson to the crimes—should be forced to reveal the code that sent Johnson to prison. This code, they say, is necessary in order to properly evaluate the technology. In fact, they say, justice from an unknown algorithm is no justice at all.'

    (tags: law justice trueallele software dna evidence statistics probability code-review auditing)

  • Meet the man who deactivated Trump’s Twitter account

    Legend!

    His last day at Twitter was mostly uneventful, he says. There were many goodbyes, and he worked up until the last hour before his computer access was to be shut off. Near the end of his shift, the fateful alert came in. This is where Trump’s behavior intersects with Duysak’s work life. Someone reported Trump’s account on Duysak’s last day; as a final, throwaway gesture, he put the wheels in motion to deactivate it. Then he closed his computer and left the building.

    (tags: twitter trump bahtiyar-duysak abuse reporting funny)

Links for 2017-11-29

Published November 29, 2017

Links for 2017-11-27

Published November 27, 2017

Links for 2017-11-24

Published November 24, 2017

  • Witney Seibold watches all the Academy Award Best Picture winners

    Myself and the missus are in the process of doing this right now!

    (tags: nerdist witney-seibold academy-awards best-picture awards movies)

  • Spam is back | The Outline

    it’s 2017, and spam has clawed itself back from the grave. It shows up on social media and dating sites as bots hoping to lure you into downloading malware or clicking an affiliate link. It creeps onto your phone as text messages and robocalls that ring you five times a day about luxury cruises and fictitious tax bills. Networks associated with the buzzy new cryptocurrency system Ethereum have been plagued with spam. Facebook recently fought a six-month battle against a spam operation that was administering fake accounts in Bangladesh, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and other countries. Last year, a Chicago resident sued the Trump campaign for allegedly sending unsolicited text message spam; this past November, ZDNet reported that voters were being inundated with political text messages they never signed up for. Apps can be horrid spam vectors, too — TechCrunch writer Jordan Crook wrote in April about how she idly downloaded an app called Gather that promptly spammed everyone in her contact list. Repeated mass data breaches that include contact information, such as the Yahoo breach in which 3 billion user accounts were exposed, surely haven’t helped. Meanwhile, you, me, and everyone we know is being plagued by robocalls. “There is no recourse for me,” lamented Troy Doliner, a student in Boston who gets robocalls every day. “I am harassed by a faceless entity that I cannot track down.” “I think we had a really unique set of circumstances that created this temporary window where spam was in remission,” said Finn Brunton, an assistant professor at NYU who wrote Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet, “and now we’re on the other side of that, with no end in sight.”
    (via Boing Boing)

    (tags: spam privacy email social-media web robocalls phone ethereum texts abuse)

Links for 2017-11-20

Published November 20, 2017

Links for 2017-11-16

Published November 16, 2017

  • Why is this company tracking where you are on Thanksgiving?

    Creepy:

    To do this, they tapped a company called SafeGraph that provided them with 17 trillion location markers for 10 million smartphones. The data wasn’t just staggering in sheer quantity. It also appears to be extremely granular. Researchers “used this data to identify individuals' home locations, which they defined as the places people were most often located between the hours of 1 and 4 a.m.,” wrote The Washington Post. [....] This means SafeGraph is looking at an individual device and tracking where its owner is going throughout their day. A common defense from companies that creepily collect massive amounts of data is that the data is only analyzed in aggregate; for example, Google’s database BigQuery, which allows organizations to upload big data sets and then query them quickly, promises that all its public data sets are “fully anonymized” and “contain no personally-identifying information.” In multiple press releases from SafeGraph’s partners, the company’s location data is referred to as “anonymized,” but in this case they seem to be interpreting the concept of anonymity quite liberally given the specificity of the data. Most people probably don’t realize that their Thanksgiving habits could end up being scrutinized by strangers. It’s unclear if users realize that their data is being used this way, but all signs point to no. (SafeGraph and the researchers did not immediately respond to questions.) SafeGraph gets location data from “from numerous smartphone apps,” according to the researchers.

    (tags: safegraph apps mobile location tracking surveillance android iphone ios smartphones big-data)

  • Quad9

    Quad9 is a free, recursive, anycast DNS platform that provides end users robust security protections, high-performance, and privacy.  Security: Quad9 blocks against known malicious domains, preventing your computers and IoT devices from connecting malware or phishing sites. Whenever a Quad9 user clicks on a website link or types in an address into a web browser, Quad9 will check the site against the IBM X-Force threat intelligence database of over 40 billion analyzed web pages and images. Quad9 also taps feeds from 18 additional threat intelligence partners to block a large portion of the threats that present risk to end users and businesses alike.  Performance: Quad9 systems are distributed worldwide in more than 70 locations at launch, with more than 160 locations in total on schedule for 2018. These servers are located primarily at Internet Exchange points, meaning that the distance and time required to get answers is lower than almost any other solution. These systems are distributed worldwide, not just in high-population areas, meaning users in less well-served areas can see significant improvements in speed on DNS lookups. The systems are “anycast” meaning that queries will automatically be routed to the closest operational system.  Privacy: No personally-identifiable information is collected by the system. IP addresses of end users are not stored to disk or distributed outside of the equipment answering the query in the local data center. Quad9 is a nonprofit organization dedicated only to the operation of DNS services. There are no other secondary revenue streams for personally-identifiable data, and the core charter of the organization is to provide secure, fast, private DNS
    Awesome!

    (tags: quad9 resolvers dns anycast ip networking privacy security)

Links for 2017-11-13

Published November 13, 2017

Links for 2017-11-10

Published November 10, 2017

  • Driverless shuttle in Las Vegas gets in fender bender within an hour

    Like any functioning autonomous vehicle, the shuttle can avoid obstacles and stop in a hurry if needed. What it apparently can’t do is move a couple feet out of the way when it looks like a 20-ton truck is going to back into it. A passenger interviewed by KSNV shared her frustration: The shuttle just stayed still and we were like, ‘oh my gosh, it’s gonna hit us, it’s gonna hit us!’ and then.. it hit us! And the shuttle didn’t have the ability to move back, either. Like, the shuttle just stayed still.

    (tags: ai driverless-cars driving cars las-vegas aaa navya keolis)

  • The naked truth about Facebook’s revenge porn tool

    This is absolutely spot on.

    If Facebook wanted to implement a truly trusted system for revenge porn victims, they could put the photo hashing on the user side of things -- so only the hash is transferred to Facebook. To verify the claim that the image is truly a revenge porn issue, the victim could have the images verified through a trusted revenge porn advocacy organization. Theoretically, the victim then would have a verified, privacy-safe version of the photo, and a hash that could be also sent to Google and other sites.

    (tags: facebook privacy hashing pictures images revenge-porn abuse via:jwz)

Links for 2017-11-09

Published November 9, 2017

Links for 2017-11-08

Published November 8, 2017

  • Facebook asks users for nude photos in project to combat revenge porn

    The photos are hashed, server-side, using the PhotoDNA hashing algorithm. This would have been way way better if it ran locally, on user's phones, instead though. Interesting to note that PhotoDNA claims to have a "1 in 10 billion" false positive rate according to https://www.itu.int/en/cop/case-studies/Documents/ICMEC_PhotoDNA.PDF

    (tags: photodna hashing images facebook revenge-porn messenger nudes photos)

  • The $280M Ethereum bug

    The newly deployed contract, 0x863df6bfa4469f3ead0be8f9f2aae51c91a907b4, contains a vulnerability where its owner was uninitialized. Although, the contract is a library it was possible for devops199 to turn it into a regular multi-sig wallet since for Ethereum there is no real distinction between accounts, libraries, and contracts. The event occurred in two transactions, a first one to take over the library and a second one to kill the library?—?which was used by all multi-sig wallets created after the 20th of July. Since by design smart-contracts themselves can’t be patched easily, this make dependancies on third party libraries very lethal if a mistake happens. The fact that libraries are global is also arguable, this would be shocking if it was how our daily use Operating Systems would work.

    (tags: security bitcoin ethereum lol fail smart-contracts)

  • How Facebook Figures Out Everyone You've Ever Met

    Oh god this is so creepy.

    Facebook’s machinery operates on a scale far beyond normal human interactions. And the results of its People You May Know algorithm are anything but obvious. In the months I’ve been writing about PYMK, as Facebook calls it, I’ve heard more than a hundred bewildering anecdotes: A man who years ago donated sperm to a couple, secretly, so they could have a child—only to have Facebook recommend the child as a person he should know. He still knows the couple but is not friends with them on Facebook. A social worker whose client called her by her nickname on their second visit, because she’d shown up in his People You May Know, despite their not having exchanged contact information. A woman whose father left her family when she was six years old—and saw his then-mistress suggested to her as a Facebook friend 40 years later. An attorney who wrote: “I deleted Facebook after it recommended as PYMK a man who was defense counsel on one of my cases. We had only communicated through my work email, which is not connected to my Facebook, which convinced me Facebook was scanning my work email.”

    (tags: facebook privacy surveillance security creepy phones contacts pymk)

  • A Clash of Cultures

    In short, I am in support of Naomi Wu. Rather than let the Internet speculate on why, I am sharing my perspectives on the situation preemptively. As with most Internet controversies, it’s messy and emotional. I will try my best to outline the biases and issues I have observed. Of course, everyone has their perspective; you don’t have to agree with mine. And I suspect many of my core audience will dislike and disagree with this post. However, the beginning of healing starts with sharing and listening. I will share, and I respectfully request that readers read the entire content of this post before attacking any individual point out of context. The key forces I see at play are: Prototype Bias – how assumptions based on stereotypes influence the way we think and feel Idol Effect – the tendency to assign exaggerated capabilities and inflated expectations upon celebrities Power Asymmetry – those with more power have more influence, and should be held to a higher standard of accountability Guanxi Bias – the tendency to give foreign faces more credibility than local faces in China All these forces came together in a perfect storm this past week.

    (tags: culture engineering maker naomi-wu women stereotypes bias idols power china bunnie)

Links for 2017-11-07

Published November 7, 2017

Links for 2017-11-06

Published November 6, 2017

  • How to effectively complain to an Irish broadcaster about a public affairs show

    Simon McGarr: "If you think that a public affairs show has failed to address a matter with proper balance, you can (Tweet) say it to the breeze or complain. There is a process to follow to make an effective complaint 1) complain to broadcaster 2) complain to BAI if unhappy with response." Thread with more details, and yet more at https://twitter.com/IrishTV_films/status/927172642544783360

    (tags: complaining complaints rte bai ireland current-affairs)

  • The 10 Top Recommendations for the AI Field in 2017 from the AI Now Institute

    I am 100% behind this. There's so much potential for hidden bias and unethical discrimination in careless AI/ML deployment.

    While AI holds significant promise, we’re seeing significant challenges in the rapid push to integrate these systems into high stakes domains. In criminal justice, a team at Propublica, and multiple academics since, have investigated how an algorithm used by courts and law enforcement to predict recidivism in criminal defendants may be introducing significant bias against African Americans. In a healthcare setting, a study at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center observed that an AI system used to triage pneumonia patients was missing a major risk factor for severe complications. In the education field, teachers in Texas successfully sued their school district for evaluating them based on a ‘black box’ algorithm, which was exposed to be deeply flawed. This handful of examples is just the start?—?there’s much more we do not yet know. Part of the challenge is that the industry currently lacks standardized methods for testing and auditing AI systems to ensure they are safe and not amplifying bias. Yet early-stage AI systems are being introduced simultaneously across multiple areas, including healthcare, finance, law, education, and the workplace. These systems are increasingly being used to predict everything from our taste in music, to our likelihood of experiencing mental illness, to our fitness for a job or a loan.

    (tags: ai algorithms machine-learning ai-now ethics bias racism discrimination)

  • Something is wrong on the internet – James Bridle – Medium

    'an essay on YouTube, children's videos, automation, abuse, and violence, which crystallises a lot of my current feelings about the internet through a particularly unpleasant example from it. [...] What we’re talking about is very young children [..] being deliberately targeted with content which will traumatise and disturb them, via networks which are extremely vulnerable to exactly this form of abuse. It’s not about trolls, but about a kind of violence inherent in the combination of digital systems and capitalist incentives. It’s down to that level of the metal.'

    (tags: internet youtube children web automation violence horror 4chan james-bridle)

Links for 2017-11-03

Published November 3, 2017

  • Inside The Great Poop Emoji Feud

    PILE_OF_POO in the news!

    The debate appears to be between some of Unicode’s most prolific contributors and typographers (Unicode was initially established to develop standards for translating alphabets into code that can be read across all computers and operating systems), and those in the consortium who focus primarily on the evolution of emojis. The two chief critics — Michael Everson and Andrew West, both typographers — say that the emoji proposal process has become too commercial and frivolous, thereby cheapening the Unicode Consortium’s long body of work. Their argument centers around “Frowning Pile Of Poo,” one of the emojis under consideration for the June 2018 class. In an Oct. 22 memo to the Unicode Technical Committee, Everson tore into the committee over the submission calling it “damaging ... to the Unicode standard.”

    (tags: pile-of-poo emoji funny michael-everson unicode frowning-poo poo shit)

  • newrelic/sidecar: Gossip-based service discovery. Docker native, but supports static discovery, too.

    An AP gossip-based service-discovery sidecar process.

    Services communicate to each other through an HAproxy instance on each host that is itself managed and configured by Sidecar. It is inspired by Airbnb's SmartStack. But, we believe it has a few advantages over SmartStack: Native support for Docker (works without Docker, too!); No dependence on Zookeeper or other centralized services; Peer-to-peer, so it works on your laptop or on a large cluster; Static binary means it's easy to deploy, and there is no interpreter needed; Tiny memory usage (under 20MB) and few execution threads means its very light weight

    (tags: clustering docker go service-discovery ap sidecar haproxy discovery architecture)

Links for 2017-11-02

Published November 2, 2017

  • aws-vault

    'A vault for securely storing and accessing AWS credentials in development environments'. Scott Piper says: 'You should not use the AWS CLI with MFA without aws-vault, and probably should not use the CLI at all without aws-vault, because of it's benefit of storing your keys outside of ~/.aws/credentials (since every once in a while a developer will decide to upload all their dot-files in their home directory to github so they can use the same .vimrc and .bashrc aliases everywhere, and will end up uploading their AWS creds).'

    (tags: aws vault security cli development coding dotfiles credentials mfa)

  • AWS Service Terms

    57.10 Acceptable Use; Safety-Critical Systems. Your use of the Lumberyard Materials must comply with the AWS Acceptable Use Policy. The Lumberyard Materials are not intended for use with life-critical or safety-critical systems, such as use in operation of medical equipment, automated transportation systems, autonomous vehicles, aircraft or air traffic control, nuclear facilities, manned spacecraft, or military use in connection with live combat. However, this restriction will not apply in the event of the occurrence (certified by the United States Centers for Disease Control or successor body) of a widespread viral infection transmitted via bites or contact with bodily fluids that causes human corpses to reanimate and seek to consume living human flesh, blood, brain or nerve tissue and is likely to result in the fall of organized civilization.
    Seems fair enough.

    (tags: aws zombies funny t-and-cs legal civilization just-in-case)

  • How the Guardian found 800,000 paying readers

    The strategy to rescue the Guardian from financial oblivion has attained a landmark position by increasing its revenue from readers to a point where it now outweighs the paper’s income from advertising. This significant shift in the Guardian’s business model, making it less dependent on a highly challenging advertising market for media companies, results largely from a quadrupling in the number of readers making monthly payments under the title’s membership scheme, which has grown from 75,000 to 300,000 members in the past year.
    Wow. Good job Guardian!

    (tags: guardian journalism subscriptions newspapers future membership donations)

  • How to make the function keys the default Touch Bar display

    Gonna need this for the new work laptop

    (tags: touchbar apple ui function-keys keyboard usability it-just-works)

  • 20 Touch Bar Tips & Tricks for the New MacBook Pro - YouTube

    another set of touchbar tips

    (tags: touchbar it-just-works apple ui usability youtube)

Links for 2017-11-01

Published November 1, 2017

  • Fooling Neural Networks in the Physical World with 3D Adversarial Objects · labsix

    This is amazingly weird stuff. Fooling NNs with adversarial objects:

    Here is a 3D-printed turtle that is classified at every viewpoint as a “rifle” by Google’s InceptionV3 image classifier, whereas the unperturbed turtle is consistently classified as “turtle”. We do this using a new algorithm for reliably producing adversarial examples that cause targeted misclassification under transformations like blur, rotation, zoom, or translation, and we use it to generate both 2D printouts and 3D models that fool a standard neural network at any angle. Our process works for arbitrary 3D models - not just turtles! We also made a baseball that classifies as an espresso at every angle! The examples still fool the neural network when we put them in front of semantically relevant backgrounds; for example, you’d never see a rifle underwater, or an espresso in a baseball mitt.

    (tags: ai deep-learning 3d-printing objects security hacking rifles models turtles adversarial-classification classification google inceptionv3 images image-classification)

  • Rich "Lowtax" Kyanka on Twitter's abuse/troll problem

    how did you solve this problem at Something Awful? You said you wrote a bunch of rules but internet pedants will always find ways to get around them. The last rule says we can ban you for any reason. It's like the catch-all. We can ban you if it's too hot in the room, we can ban you if we had a bad day, we can ban you if our finger slips and hits the ban button. And that way people know that if they're doing something and it's not technically breaking any rules but they're obviously trying to push shit as far as they can, we can still ban them. But, unlike Twitter, we actually have what's called the Leper's Colony, which says what they did and has their track record. Twitter just says, “You're gone.”

    (tags: twitter communication discussion history somethingawful lowtax)

Links for 2017-10-25

Published October 25, 2017

Links for 2017-10-24

Published October 24, 2017

Links for 2017-10-19

Published October 19, 2017

  • Open-sourcing RacerD: Fast static race detection at scale | Engineering Blog | Facebook Code

    At Facebook we have been working on automated reasoning about concurrency in our work with the Infer static analyzer. RacerD, our new open source race detector, searches for data races — unsynchronized memory accesses, where one is a write — in Java programs, and it does this without running the program it is analyzing. RacerD employs symbolic reasoning to cover many paths through an app, quickly.
    This sounds extremely interesting...

    (tags: racerd race-conditions data-races thread-safety static-code-analysis coding testing facebook open-source infer)

  • Solera - Wikipedia

    Fascinating stuff -- from Felix Cohen's excellent twitter thread.

    Solera is a process for aging liquids such as wine, beer, vinegar, and brandy, by fractional blending in such a way that the finished product is a mixture of ages, with the average age gradually increasing as the process continues over many years. The purpose of this labor-intensive process is the maintenance of a reliable style and quality of the beverage over time. Solera means literally "on the ground" in Spanish, and it refers to the lower level of the set of barrels or other containers used in the process; the liquid (traditionally transferred from barrel to barrel, top to bottom, the oldest mixtures being in the barrel right "on the ground"), although the containers in today's process are not necessarily stacked physically in the way that this implies, but merely carefully labeled. Products which are often solera aged include Sherry, Madeira, Lillet, Port wine, Marsala, Mavrodafni, Muscat, and Muscadelle wines; Balsamic, Commandaria, some Vins doux naturels, and Sherry vinegars; Brandy de Jerez; beer; rums; and whiskies. Since the origin of this process is undoubtedly out of the Iberian peninsula, most of the traditional terminology was in Spanish, Portuguese, or Catalan.

    (tags: wine aging solera sherry muscat vinegar brandy beer rum whiskey whisky brewing spain)

Links for 2017-10-18

Published October 18, 2017

Links for 2017-10-17

Published October 17, 2017

Links for 2017-10-16

Published October 16, 2017

Links for 2017-10-12

Published October 12, 2017

Links for 2017-10-11

Published October 11, 2017

  • Study: wearing hi-viz clothing does not reduce risk of collision for cyclists

    Journal of Transport & Health, 22 March 2017:

    This study found no evidence that cyclists using conspicuity aids were at reduced risk of a collision crash compared to non-users after adjustment for confounding, but there was some evidence of an increase in risk. Bias and residual confounding from differing route selection and cycling behaviours in users of conspicuity aids are possible explanations for these findings. Conspicuity aids may not be effective in reducing collision crash risk for cyclists in highly-motorised environments when used in the absence of other bicycle crash prevention measures such as increased segregation or lower motor vehicle speeds.

    (tags: health safety hi-viz clothing cycling commute visibility collision crashes papers)

Links for 2017-10-10

Published October 10, 2017

Links for 2017-10-09

Published October 9, 2017

Links for 2017-10-06

Published October 6, 2017

  • The world's first cyber-attack, on the Chappe telegraph system, in Bordeaux in 1834

    The Blanc brothers traded government bonds at the exchange in the city of Bordeaux, where information about market movements took several days to arrive from Paris by mail coach. Accordingly, traders who could get the information more quickly could make money by anticipating these movements. Some tried using messengers and carrier pigeons, but the Blanc brothers found a way to use the telegraph line instead. They bribed the telegraph operator in the city of Tours to introduce deliberate errors into routine government messages being sent over the network. The telegraph’s encoding system included a “backspace” symbol that instructed the transcriber to ignore the previous character. The addition of a spurious character indicating the direction of the previous day’s market movement, followed by a backspace, meant the text of the message being sent was unaffected when it was written out for delivery at the end of the line. But this extra character could be seen by another accomplice: a former telegraph operator who observed the telegraph tower outside Bordeaux with a telescope, and then passed on the news to the Blancs. The scam was only uncovered in 1836, when the crooked operator in Tours fell ill and revealed all to a friend, who he hoped would take his place. The Blanc brothers were put on trial, though they could not be convicted because there was no law against misuse of data networks. But the Blancs’ pioneering misuse of the French network qualifies as the world’s first cyber-attack.

    (tags: bordeaux hacking history security technology cyber-attacks telegraph telegraphes-chappe)

  • Slack 103: Communication and culture

    Interesting note on some emergent Slack communications systems using emoji: "redirect raccoon", voting, and "I'm taking a look at this"

    (tags: slack communications emojis emoji online talk chat)

  • This Future Looks Familiar: Watching Blade Runner in 2017

    I told a lot of people that I was going to watch Blade Runner for the first time, because I know that people have opinions about Blade Runner. All of them gave me a few watery opinions to keep in mind going in—nothing that would spoil me, but things that would help me understand what they assured me would be a Very Strange Film. None of them told me the right things, though.

    (tags: culture movies film blade-runner politics slavery replicants)

  • poor man's profiler

    'Sampling tools like oprofile or dtrace's profile provider don't really provide methods to see what [multithreaded] programs are blocking on - only where they spend CPU time. Though there exist advanced techniques (such as systemtap and dtrace call level probes), it is overkill to build upon that. Poor man doesn't have time. Poor man needs food.' Basically periodically grabbing stack traces from running processes using gdb.

    (tags: gdb profiling linux unix mark-callaghan stack-traces performance)

Links for 2017-10-03

Published October 3, 2017

  • Intel pcj library for persistent memory-oriented data structures

    This is a "pilot" project to develop a library for Java objects stored in persistent memory. Persistent collections are being emphasized because many applications for persistent memory seem to map well to the use of collections. One of this project's goals is to make programming with persistent objects feel natural to a Java developer, for example, by using familiar Java constructs when incorporating persistence elements such as data consistency and object lifetime. The breadth of persistent types is currently limited and the code is not performance-optimized. We are making the code available because we believe it can be useful in experiments to retrofit existing Java code to use persistent memory and to explore persistent Java programming in general.
    (via Mario Fusco)

    (tags: persistent-memory data-structures storage persistence java coding future)

  • Google and Facebook Have Failed Us - The Atlantic

    There’s no hiding behind algorithms anymore. The problems cannot be minimized. The machines have shown they are not up to the task of dealing with rare, breaking news events, and it is unlikely that they will be in the near future. More humans must be added to the decision-making process, and the sooner the better.

    (tags: algorithms facebook google las-vegas news filtering hoaxes 4chan abuse breaking-news responsibility silicon-valley)

Links for 2017-10-02

Published October 2, 2017

Links for 2017-09-29

Published September 29, 2017

  • The Israeli Digital Rights Movement's campaign for privacy | Internet Policy Review

    This study explores the persuasion techniques used by the Israeli Digital Rights Movement in its campaign against Israel’s biometric database. The research was based on analysing the movement's official publications and announcements and the journalistic discourse that surrounded their campaign within the political, judicial, and public arenas in 2009-2017. The results demonstrate how the organisation navigated three persuasion frames to achieve its goals: the unnecessity of a biometric database in democracy; the database’s ineffectiveness; and governmental incompetence in securing it. I conclude by discussing how analysing civil society privacy campaigns can shed light over different regimes of privacy governance. [....] 1. Why the database should be abolished: because it's not necessary - As the organisation highlighted repeatedly throughout the campaign with the backing of cyber experts, there is a significant difference between issuing smart documents and creating a database. Issuing smart documents effectively solves the problem of stealing and forging official documents, but does it necessarily entail the creation of a database? The activists’ answer is no: they declared that while they do support the transition to smart documents (passports and ID cards) for Israeli citizens, they object to the creation of a database due to its violation of citizens' privacy. 2. Why the database should be abolished: because it's ineffective; [...] 3. Why the database should be abolished: because it will be breached - The final argument was that the database should be abolished because the government would not be able to guarantee protection against security breaches, and hence possible identity theft.

    (tags: digital-rights privacy databases id-cards israel psc drm identity-theft security)

Links for 2017-09-28

Published September 28, 2017

Links for 2017-09-27

Published September 27, 2017

Links for 2017-09-25

Published September 25, 2017

  • Legendary aquarium "piscamel" thread from the GotMead forums

    I thought I had detected a studied disinterest for my March 28 questions about raising fish and making mead in the same aquarium --- now I realize that you mazers probably thought I was drunk. My hypothesis was that fish manures would provide valuable fertilizer to the yeast, the aquarium bubbler would keep O2 levels high, and the fish would get a nice honey drink. The result, instead, was 3 "piscamels" flavored by rotting fish.
    This sounds utterly revolting. Mead made with biohazard waste. Those poor fish! (via John Looney)

    (tags: via:johnlooney biohazard mead fish aquarium gotmead forums brewing disgusting)

  • Relicensing React, Jest, Flow, and Immutable.js | Engineering Blog | Facebook Code

    This decision comes after several weeks of disappointment and uncertainty for our community. Although we still believe our BSD + Patents license provides some benefits to users of our projects, we acknowledge that we failed to decisively convince this community.

    (tags: facebook opensource react patents swpats bsd licensing)

  • 'Monitoring Cloudflare's planet-scale edge network with Prometheus' (preso)

    from SRECon EMEA 2017; how Cloudflare are replacing Nagios with Prometheus and grafana

    (tags: metrics monitoring alerting prometheus grafana nagios)

  • European Commission study finds no link between piracy and lower sales of digital content

    According to the report, an average of 51% of adults and 72% of minors in the EU have pirated digital content, with Poland and Spain averaging the highest rates of all countries surveyed. Nevertheless, displacement rates (the impact of piracy on legitimate sales) were found to be negligible or non-existent for music, books and games, while rates for films and TV were in line with previous digital piracy studies. Most interesting is the fact that the study found that illegal game downloads actually lead to an increase in legal purchases. The report concludes that tactics like video game microtransactions are proving effective in converting illegal users to paying users. The full report goes in-depth regarding potential factors influencing piracy and the challenges of accurately tracking its impact on legitimate sales, but the researchers ultimately conclude that there is no robust statistical evidence that illegal downloads reduce legal sales. That's big news, which makes it all the more troubling that the EU effectively buried it for two years.

    (tags: piracy eu studies downloads ec games movies books content)

  • Understanding Uber: It's Not About The App

    the next time you see a link to a petition or someone raging about this decision being ‘anti-innovation’, remember Greyball. Remember the Metropolitan Police letter [regarding several sexual assaults which Uber didn't report to police]. Remember that this is about holding ULL, as a company, to the same set of standards to which every other mini-cab operator in London already complies. Most of all though remember: it is not about the app.

    (tags: uber ull safety crime london assault greyball taxis cabs apps)

Links for 2017-09-21

Published September 21, 2017

Links for 2017-09-20

Published September 20, 2017

  • Locking, Little's Law, and the USL

    Excellent explanatory mailing list post by Martin Thompson to the mechanical-sympathy group, discussing Little's Law vs the USL:

    Little's law can be used to describe a system in steady state from a queuing perspective, i.e. arrival and leaving rates are balanced. In this case it is a crude way of modelling a system with a contention percentage of 100% under Amdahl's law, in that throughput is one over latency. However this is an inaccurate way to model a system with locks. Amdahl's law does not account for coherence costs. For example, if you wrote a microbenchmark with a single thread to measure the lock cost then it is much lower than in a multi-threaded environment where cache coherence, other OS costs such as scheduling, and lock implementations need to be considered. Universal Scalability Law (USL) accounts for both the contention and the coherence costs. http://www.perfdynamics.com/Manifesto/USLscalability.html When modelling locks it is necessary to consider how contention and coherence costs vary given how they can be implemented. Consider in Java how we have biased locking, thin locks, fat locks, inflation, and revoking biases which can cause safe points that bring all threads in the JVM to a stop with a significant coherence component.

    (tags: usl scaling scalability performance locking locks java jvm amdahls-law littles-law system-dynamics modelling systems caching threads schedulers contention)

  • "HTML email, was that your fault?"

    jwz may indeed have invented this feature way back in Netscape Mail. FWIW I think he's right -- Netscape Mail was the first usage of HTML email I recall

    (tags: netscape history html email smtp mime mozilla jwz)

Links for 2017-09-19

Published September 19, 2017

  • Undercover operation 'Close Pass' reduced cyclist injuries by 20% in a year

    An initiative to protect cyclists from dangerous overtaking has been praised, after reducing the amount of cyclists killed or seriously injured on the roads by 20% over the last year. Operation 'Close Pass' was devised by West Midlands Police as a low cost way of preventing accidents caused by motorists who are driving too close for comfort.
    (Via Tony Finch)

    (tags: cycling via:fanf safety overtaking roads bikes)

  • Normietivity: A Review of Angela Nagle's Kill all Normies

    Due to a persistent vagueness in targets and refusal to respond to the best arguments presented by those she loosely groups together, Nagle does not provide the thoroughgoing and immanent treatment of the left which would be required to achieve the profound intervention she clearly intended. Nor does she grapple with the difficult implications figures like Greer (with her transphobic campaign against a vulnerable colleague) and Milo (with his direct advocacy for the nativist and carceral state) present for free speech absolutists. And indeed, the blurring their specifically shared transphobia causes for distinguishing between left and right wing social analysis. In genre terms, Nagle’s writing is best described as travel writing for internet culture. Kill All Normies provides a string of curios and oddities (from neo-nazi cults, to inscrutably gendered teenagers) to an audience expected to find them unfamiliar, and titillating. Nagle attempts to cast herself as an aloof and wry explorer, but at various points her commitments become all too clear. Nagle implicitly casts her reader as the eponymous normies, overlooking those of us who live through lives with transgenders, in the wake of colonialism, despite invisible disabilities (including depression), and all the rest. This is both a shame and a missed opportunity, because the deadly violence the Alt-Right has proven itself capable of is in urgent need of evaluation, but so too are the very real dysfunctions which afflict the left (both online and IRL). After this book patient, discerning, explanatory, and immanent readings of internet culture remain sorely needed. The best that can be said for Kill All Normies is, as the old meme goes, “An attempt was made.”

    (tags: angela-nagle normies books reading transphobia germaine-greer milo alt-right politics internet 4chan)

Links for 2017-09-18

Published September 18, 2017

  • Native Memory Tracking

    Java 8 HotSpot feature to monitor and diagnose native memory leaks

    (tags: java jvm memory native-memory malloc debugging coding nmt java-8 jcmd)

  • This Heroic Captain Defied His Orders and Stopped America From Starting World War III

    Captain William Bassett, a USAF officer stationed at Okinawa on October 28, 1962, can now be added alongside Stanislav Petrov to the list of people who have saved the world from WWIII:

    By [John] Bordne’s account, at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Air Force crews on Okinawa were ordered to launch 32 missiles, each carrying a large nuclear warhead. [...] The Captain told Missile Operations Center over the phone that he either needed to hear that the threat level had been raised to DEFCON 1 and that he should fire the nukes, or that he should stand down. We don’t know exactly what the Missile Operations Center told Captain Bassett, but they finally received confirmation that they should not launch their nukes. After the crisis had passed Bassett reportedly told his men: “None of us will discuss anything that happened here tonight, and I mean anything. No discussions at the barracks, in a bar, or even here at the launch site. You do not even write home about this. Am I making myself perfectly clear on this subject?”

    (tags: wwiii history nukes cuban-missile-crisis 1960s usaf okinawa missiles william-bassett)

  • malware piggybacking on CCleaner

    On September 13, 2017 while conducting customer beta testing of our new exploit detection technology, Cisco Talos identified a specific executable which was triggering our advanced malware protection systems. Upon closer inspection, the executable in question was the installer for CCleaner v5.33, which was being delivered to endpoints by the legitimate CCleaner download servers. Talos began initial analysis to determine what was causing this technology to flag CCleaner. We identified that even though the downloaded installation executable was signed using a valid digital signature issued to Piriform, CCleaner was not the only application that came with the download. During the installation of CCleaner 5.33, the 32-bit CCleaner binary that was included also contained a malicious payload that featured a Domain Generation Algorithm (DGA) as well as hardcoded Command and Control (C2) functionality. We confirmed that this malicious version of CCleaner was being hosted directly on CCleaner's download server as recently as September 11, 2017.

    (tags: ccleaner malware avast piriform windows security)

Links for 2017-09-15

Published September 15, 2017

  • Malicious typosquatting packages in PyPI

    skcsirt-sa-20170909-pypi vulnerability announcement from SK-CSIRT:

    SK-CSIRT identified malicious software libraries in the official Python package repository, PyPI, posing as well known libraries. A prominent example is a fake package urllib-1.21.1.tar.gz, based upon a well known package urllib3-1.21.1.tar.gz. Such packages may have been downloaded by unwitting developer or administrator by various means, including the popular “pip” utility (pip install urllib). There is evidence that the fake packages have indeed been downloaded and incorporated into software multiple times between June 2017 and September 2017.

    (tags: pypi python typos urllib security malware)

Links for 2017-09-14

Published September 14, 2017

  • London police’s use of AFR facial recognition falls flat on its face

    A “top-of-the-line” automated facial recognition (AFR) system trialled for the second year in a row at London’s Notting Hill Carnival couldn’t even tell the difference between a young woman and a balding man, according to a rights group worker invited to view it in action. Because yes, of course they did it again: London’s Met police used controversial, inaccurate, largely unregulated automated facial recognition (AFR) technology to spot troublemakers. And once again, it did more harm than good. Last year, it proved useless. This year, it proved worse than useless: it blew up in their faces, with 35 false matches and one wrongful arrest of somebody erroneously tagged as being wanted on a warrant for a rioting offense. [...] During a recent, scathing US House oversight committee hearing on the FBI’s use of the technology, it emerged that 80% of the people in the FBI database don’t have any sort of arrest record. Yet the system’s recognition algorithm inaccurately identifies them during criminal searches 15% of the time, with black women most often being misidentified.

    (tags: face-recognition afr london notting-hill-carnival police liberty met-police privacy data-privacy algorithms)

Links for 2017-09-13

Published September 13, 2017

Links for 2017-09-12

Published September 12, 2017

  • "You Can't Stay Here: The Efficacy of Reddit’s 2015 Ban Examined Through Hate Speech"

    In 2015, Reddit closed several subreddits—foremost among them r/fatpeoplehate and r/CoonTown—due to violations of Reddit’s anti-harassment policy. However, the effectiveness of banning as a moderation approach remains unclear: banning might diminish hateful behavior, or it may relocate such behavior to different parts of the site. We study the ban of r/fatpeoplehate and r/CoonTown in terms of its effect on both participating users and affected subreddits. Working from over 100M Reddit posts and comments, we generate hate speech lexicons to examine variations in hate speech usage via causal inference methods. We find that the ban worked for Reddit. More accounts than expected discontinued using the site; those that stayed drastically decreased their hate speech usage—by at least 80%. Though many subreddits saw an influx of r/fatpeoplehate and r/CoonTown “migrants,” those subreddits saw no significant changes in hate speech usage. In other words, other subreddits did not inherit the problem. We conclude by reflecting on the apparent success of the ban, discussing implications for online moderation, Reddit and internet communities more broadly.
    (Via Anil Dash)

    (tags: abuse reddit research hate-speech community moderation racism internet)

  • The Immortal Myths About Online Abuse – Humane Tech – Medium

    After building online communities for two decades, we’ve learned how to fight abuse. It’s a solvable problem. We just have to stop repeating the same myths as excuses not to fix things.
    Here are the 8 myths Anil Dash picks out: 1. False: You can’t fix abusive behavior online. 2. False: Fighting abuse hurts free speech! 3. False: Software can detect abuse using simple rules. 4. False: Most people say “abuse” when they just mean criticism. 5. False: We just need everybody to use their “real” name. 6. False: Just charge a dollar to comment and that’ll fix things. 7. False: You can call the cops! If it’s not illegal, it’s not harmful. 8. False: Abuse can be fixed without dedicated resources.

    (tags: abuse comments community harassment racism reddit anil-dash free-speech)

  • 'Let’s all survive the GDPR'

    Simon McGarr and John Looney's slides from their SRECon '17 presentation

    (tags: simon-mcgarr data-privacy privacy data-protection gdpr slides presentations)

Links for 2017-09-11

Published September 11, 2017

  • The React license for founders and CTOs – James Ide – Medium

    Decent explanation of _why_ Facebook came up with the BSD+Patents license: "Facebook’s patent grant is about sharing its code while preserving its ability to defend itself against patent lawsuits."

    The difficulty of open sourcing code at Facebook, including React in 2013, was one of the reasons the company’s open-source contributions used to be a fraction of what they are today. It didn’t use to have a strong reputation as an open-source contributor to front-end technologies. Facebook wanted to open source code, though; when it grew communities for projects like React, core contributors emerged to help out and interview candidates often cited React and other Facebook open source as one of the reasons they were interested in applying. People at Facebook wanted to make it easier to open source code and not worry as much about patents. Facebook’s solution was the Facebook BSD+Patents license.

    (tags: facebook bsd licenses licensing asf patents swpats react license software-patents open-source rocksdb)

  • HN thread on the new Network Load Balancer AWS product

    looks like @colmmacc works on it. Lots and lots of good details here

    (tags: nlb aws load-balancing ops architecture lbs tcp ip)

  • Java Flame Graphs Introduction: Fire For Everyone!

    lots of good detail on flame graph usage in Java, and the Honest Profiler (honest because it's safepoint-free)

    (tags: profiling java safepoints jvm flame-graphs perf measurement benchmarking testing)

  • Teaching Students to Code - What Works

    Lynn Langit describing her work as part of Microsoft Digigirlz and TKP to teach thousands of kids worldwide to code. Describes a curriculum from "K" (4-6-year olds) learning computational thinking with a block-based programming environment like Scratch, up to University level, solving problems with public clouds like AWS' free tier.

    (tags: education learning coding teaching tkp lynn-langit scratch kids)

  • So much for that Voynich manuscript “solution”

    boo.

    The idea that the book is a medical treatise on women's health, however, might turn out to be correct. But that wasn't Gibbs' discovery. Many scholars and amateur sleuths had already reached that conclusion, using the same evidence that Gibbs did. Essentially, Gibbs rolled together a bunch of already-existing scholarship and did a highly speculative translation, without even consulting the librarians at the institute where the book resides. Gibbs said in the TLS article that he did his research for an unnamed "television network." Given that Gibbs' main claim to fame before this article was a series of books about how to write and sell television screenplays, it seems that his goal in this research was probably to sell a television screenplay of his own. In 2015, Gibbs did an interview where he said that in five years, "I would like to think I could have a returnable series up and running." Considering the dubious accuracy of many History Channel "documentaries," he might just get his wish.

    (tags: crypto history voynich-manuscript historians tls)

  • How to Optimize Garbage Collection in Go

    In this post, we’ll share a few powerful optimizations that mitigate many of the performance problems common to Go’s garbage collection (we will cover “fun with deadlocks” in a follow-up). In particular, we’ll share how embedding structs, using sync.Pool, and reusing backing arrays can minimize memory allocations and reduce garbage collection overhead.

    (tags: garbage performance gc golang go coding)