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Justin's Linklog Posts

Links for 2012-04-16

Published April 16, 2012

  • The Cybercrime Wave That Wasn’t – NYTimes.com : MSFT researchers discover fundamental scientific failures in almost all data on cybercrime/spam/malware damages. ‘In numeric surveys, errors are almost always upward: since the amounts of estimated losses must be positive, there’s no limit on the upside, but zero is a hard limit on the downside. As a consequence, respondent errors — or outright lies — cannot be canceled out. Even worse, errors get amplified when researchers scale between the survey group and the overall population. […] The cybercrime surveys we have examined exhibit exactly this pattern of enormous, unverified outliers dominating the data. In some, 90 percent of the estimate appears to come from the answers of one or two individuals. In a 2006 survey of identity theft by the FTC, two respondents gave answers that would have added $37 billion to the estimate, dwarfing that of all other respondents combined.’ my opinion: this is what happens when PR drives the surveys — numbers tend to inflate to make headlines
    (tags: fail science pr press cybercrime ms via:mark-russinovitch data surveys spam malware viruses phishing)

  • Censoring The Pirate Bay is Useless, Research Shows : ‘The assumption of BREIN and the court was that a blockade of The Pirate Bay would lower the number of infringers at [Dutch ISPs Ziggo and XS4ALL], but new research from the University of Amsterdam shows that this is not the case. […] The claim that The Pirate Bay blockade by Ziggo and XS4ALL leads to a decrease of copyright infringement by their subscribers via BitTorrent transfers must be rejected. There is no significant effect of this measure. […] ‘Ziggo and XS4ALL subscribers who use BitTorrent apparently found different routes other than ‘The Pirate Bay’ to share files, and remain active as seeders to upload files to others.’ Unfortunately the paper is in Dutch, however
    (tags: holland brein ziggo xs4all bittorrent piratebay piracy research data)

  • French ‘Three Strikes’ Law Slashes Piracy, But Fails to Boost Sales : Hadopi report says piracy dropped in France by between 17% and 66% during 2011, while Hadopi was in force; however the SEVN report on 2011 notes that legitimate sales of video dropped by 2.7%, ironically blaming ‘the continually high level of piracy despite counter measures adopted under the HADOPI law’ (http://www.dvd-intelligence.com/display-article.php?article=1676), and the SNEP report on 2011 sales of audio indicates that the market dropped by 3.9% (http://www.telecompaper.com/news/french-online-music-worth-eur-110-mln-in-2011-study). Hard not to come to a conclusion that actions against piracy do not improve sales
    (tags: france hadopi legal music piracy sales revenues sevn snep video)

  • Why the New Aesthetic isn’t about 8bit retro, the Robot Readable World, computer vision and pirates | : ‘The New Aesthetics, or at least the aspect I’m looking at, is inspired by computer vision. And computer vision is at the point now that computer graphics was at 30 years ago. The New Aesthetics isn’t concerned with retro 8bit graphics of the past, but the 8bit graphics designed for machines of the now.’ — ie, The Robot Readable World, etc. Great essay, and exciting stuff
    (tags: art design new-aesthetic retro robotics graphics computer-vision)

  • HotelClub : a decent hotel search/booking site, recommended by On The Record’s Jim Carroll ?(@jimcarrollOTR on Twitter): ‘@sineadgleeson use HotelClub – good range of hotels & prices. Or use Hotel Tonight app for real last minute stuff’
    (tags: hotels travel recommended booking)

  • Metricfire – Powerful Application Metrics Made Easy : Irish “metrics as a service” company, Python-native; they’ve just gone GA and announced their pricing plans
    (tags: python metrics service-metrics)

Links for 2012-04-13

Published April 13, 2012

  • Ask For Forgiveness Programming – Or How We’ll Program 1000 Cores : Nifty concept from IBM Research’s David Ungar — “race-and-repair”. Simply put, allow lock-free lossy/inconsistent calculation, and backfill later, using concepts like “freshener” threads, to reconcile inconsistencies. This is a familiar concept in distributed computing nowadays thanks to CAP, but I hadn’t heard it being applied to single-host multicore parallel programming before — I can already think of an application in our codebase…
    (tags: race-and-repair concurrency coding ibm parallelism parallel david-ungar cap multicore)

  • Operations, machine learning and premature babies – O’Reilly Radar : good post about applying ML techniques to ops data. ‘At a recent meetup about finance, Abhi Mehta encouraged people to capture and save “everything.” He was talking about financial data, but the same applies here. We’d need to build Hadoop clusters to monitor our server farms; we’d need Hadoop clusters to monitor our Hadoop clusters. It’s a big investment of time and resources. If we could make that investment, what would we find out? I bet that we’d be surprised.’ Let’s just say that if you like the sound of that, our SDE team in Amazon’s Dublin office is hiring ;)
    (tags: ops big-data machine-learning hadoop ibm)

Links for 2012-04-12

Published April 12, 2012

  • Graft punk: Breaking the law to help urban trees bear fruit : This is brilliant. I find it pretty offensive that “ornamental” fruit trees are chosen by urban councils, so that fruit doesn’t fall on the path and become slippery or whatever — come on, that’s just what trees do! ‘They’re covertly grafting — a practice of connecting two branches in a way that will allow their vascular tissues to join together — fruit tree limbs onto the trunks of ornamental cherry, plum, and pear trees.’
    (tags: public roads trees nature city urban fruit guerrilla grafting)

  • The Cake Cafe map of Ireland : ‘Now that Dublin is in our bag, on our Tea Towel and across our Aprons, The Cake Café is going to create a new map of Ireland. We want to fill this map with all of your favorite places in land. Please send us locations that turn you on, fire your imaginations, or just fulfill your dreams; what ever you think should be included. Please pass the request on to friends in far flung parts of the land so they too can send their suggestions; natural or unnatural, animal or man made, a view, a corner of a field, an island or even a journey or hidden places to enjoy a picnic. — thecakecafe /at/ gmail.com’. Their map of Dublin is a work of genius — I love that they include a decent chunk of the Northside, which was a notable failure of the Alljoy Design version. I can’t wait to see what they come up with for Ireland.
    (tags: cake-cafe ireland maps mapping crowdsourcing dublin design tea-towels)

Links for 2012-04-06

Published April 6, 2012

Links for 2012-04-04

Published April 4, 2012

  • A one-line software patent – and a fix : Just another sad story of how software patenting made a standard useless. “I had once hoped that JBIG-KIT would help with the exchange of scanned documents on the Internet, facilitate online inter-library loans, and make paper archives more accessible to users all over the world. However, the impact was minimal: no web browser dared to directly support a standardized file format covered by 23 patents, the last of which expired today. About 25 years ago, large IT research organizations discovered standards as a gold mine, a vehicle to force users to buy patent licenses, not because the technology is any good, but because it is required for compatibility. This is achieved by writing the standards very carefully such that there is no way to come up with a compatible implementation that does not require a patent license, an art that has been greatly perfected since.”
    (tags: via:fanf patents jbig1 swpats scanning standards rand frand licensing)

Links for 2012-03-31

Published March 31, 2012

  • Girls and coding: female peer pressure scares them off | Education | The Observer : ‘Coding and digital prowess is still niche at a young age, self-taught by the studious. It is often considered a bit nerdy in senior school, where it is not currently taught as a part of the curriculum, although this is changing in senior schools from September 2012. Therefore, generally speaking, those who code have taught themselves. Teaching yourself something that should really be covered as a part of lessons is a bit like doing extra homework – why, ask many teens, would anyone do that? There is no way the majority of hormonally challenged, desperate-to-find-their-place-in-the-world teenage girls would risk ridicule or isolation by doing such a thing – let alone be open and proud about it. (Boys of the same age have different social challenges and do not measure their societal worth so much by peer review.)’
    (tags: girls coding education peer-pressure software teaching kids)

Links for 2012-03-30

Published March 30, 2012

Links for 2012-03-27

Published March 27, 2012

Links for 2012-03-22

Published March 22, 2012

Links for 2012-03-20

Published March 20, 2012

Links for 2012-03-18

Published March 18, 2012

  • Colm McCarthy: This burden of bank debt is simply not sustainable : Powerful burn-the-bondholders editorial from Colm McCarthy in the Indo. ‘No other eurozone member has incurred bank-related debt under ECB duress. There are no provisions in the Maastricht Treaty, in the Stability and Growth Pact or in any other pact or international treaty which grant this power to the ECB, nor was any eurozone member state ever asked to accede to such an arrangement. Commissioner Rehn’s Latin phrase (“pacta sunt servanda”) has no pact to refer to, insofar as these imposed debts are concerned. Ireland never signed a pact or treaty which empowered the ECB to behave in this fashion. One can only speculate as to the ECB’s motives, since it does not deign to explain. European banks have come to rely heavily on unsecured bond financing and the ECB may have felt that no bank bondholder should suffer losses, in order to encourage the survival of this market in bank debt. If this was the motive, the policy is being paid for, not by the ECB, but by Irish taxpayers and sovereign bondholders and financed by European taxpayers and the IMF. There is no pact which confers powers of taxation on the ECB.’
    (tags: bondholders ireland finance colm-mccarthy bailout)

Links for 2012-03-14

Published March 14, 2012

Links for 2012-03-13

Published March 13, 2012

Links for 2012-03-11

Published March 11, 2012

  • I left my shutter open for 30 seconds in the wilderness at 10.30pm, under a full moon : Amazing shot. With a sufficiently long exposure, it looks like midday — no colour correction applied. (via fp)
    (tags: via:fp pictures photos night colour landscapes long-exposure photography)

  • Occursions : ‘Our goal is to create the world’s fastest extendable, non-transactional time series database for big data (you know, for kids)! Log file indexing is our initial focus. For example append only ASCII files produced by libraries like Log4J, or containing FIX messages or JSON objects. Occursions was built by a small team sick of creating hacks to remotely copy and/or grep through tons of large log files. We use it to index around a terabyte of new log data per day. Occursions asynchronously tails log files and indexes the individual lines in each log file as each line is written to disk so you don’t even have to wait for a second after an event happens to search for it. Occursions uses custom disk backed data structures to create and search its indexes so it is very efficient at using CPU, memory and disk.’
    (tags: logs search tsd big-data log4j via:proggit)

Links for 2012-03-10

Published March 10, 2012

Links for 2012-03-09

Published March 9, 2012

  • Welcome, Apple! : ‘The desktop version of iPhoto, and indeed all of Apple’s iOS apps until now, use Google Maps. The new iPhoto for iOS, however, uses Apple’s own map tiles – made from OpenStreetMap data (outside the US).’
    (tags: apple ios maps openstreetmap osm free iphoto)

  • Apple Map Tiles : I actually really quite like these, particularly how they render parks. Good for leisure use, maybe not so hot for navigation. cute
    (tags: apple gis mapping maps)

Links for 2012-03-07

Published March 7, 2012

Links for 2012-03-06

Published March 6, 2012

  • FOI docs regarding lobbying of Sean Sherlock on the copyright SI : Truly amazing outcome from Mark Tighe’s FOI request regarding lobbying on the copyright SI. It turns out that (a) IRMA want all Irish ISPs to enact “3 strikes”, and view the SI as a way to force this; but (b) Eircom are of the opinion that “3 strikes” is now illegal and unenforceable under EU and Irish law. Despite knowing this, Sherlock then went ahead and signed the SI into law *anyway*, just to avoid the hassle of IRMA’s members bringing the government to court. Which they did anyway, regardless. What an utter shambles
    (tags: sopaireland sean-sherlock irma emi copyright ireland law eircom lobbying foi)

Links for 2012-03-04

Published March 4, 2012

Links for 2012-03-03

Published March 3, 2012

Links for 2012-03-02

Published March 2, 2012

Links for 2012-02-29

Published February 29, 2012

Links for 2012-02-27

Published February 27, 2012

  • On The Record » The hue and cry over buying and selling tickets : ‘If you really think that all 14,500 tickets for a hot show at Dublin’s O2 like, let’s say, One Direction will go on sale to the general public, you probably also still believe in the tooth fairy. While 10 per cent of the tickets are usually held back for O2’s priority customers, there will always still be far less than the remaining 13,000 tickets available on Ticketmaster’s system when the show purportedly goes on sale. How else do you think tickets for those One Direction Dublin shows in March 2013 can on sale minutes after they are sold out on the supposed primary ticket-selling site, on a secondary site like Viagogo at a hugely inflated premium? Do you really think people queued overnight for those tickets to go “nah, not bothered, have to wash my hair that night” five minutes after getting them in their hands about a show 13 months away? Perhaps we need a Dispatches-type expose over here to lift a few rocks and show the type of fat, avaricious worms wiggling around underneath feasting like parasites on the wallets and credit cards of Irish music fans.’
    (tags: secondary-sales touts tickets gigs ireland music dispatches)

Links for 2012-02-26

Published February 26, 2012

  • Zombie Gnomes Bye Bye Birdie by ChrisandJanesPlace on Etsy : ‘This is a sorry sight indeed. A poor helpless Lawn Flamingo has been taken down by zombie gnomes: Nose-less Ned, Greedy Gary, and Bartolomeu.It seems like an unlikely kill until Bartolomeu broke the elegant beasts leg and brought it crashing to the ground. Where they pounced upon their helpless victim and began their feast. So we say “Bye Bye Birdie, I’m going to miss you so, Bye Bye Birdie, Why’d you have to go?”‘ — bloody hell
    (tags: etsy regretsy funny odd flamingo zombies gnomes)

  • twitter/jvmgcprof – GitHub : ‘gcprof is a simple utility for profile allocation and garbage collection activity in the JVM […] Profile allocation and garbage collection activity in the JVM. The gcprof command runs a java command under profiling. Allocation and collection statistics are printed periodically. If -n or -no are provided, statistics are also reported in terms of the given application metric. Total allocation, allocation rate, and a survival histogram is given. The intended use for this tool is twofold: (1) monitor and test garbage allocation and GC behavior, and (2) inform GC tuning.’
    (tags: gc java performance twitter jvm tools)

  • YouTube Identifies Birdsong As Copyrighted Music – Slashdot : ‘So I asked some questions, and it appears that the birds singing in the background of my video are Rumblefish’s exclusive intellectual property.”‘ Major problems with how YouTube is now policing IP infringement, it seems
    (tags: birdsong absurd google fail youtube rumblefish copyfight)

Links for 2012-02-24

Published February 24, 2012

  • BBC News – Sentinel project research reveals UK GPS jammer use : GPS jamming was this commonplace? I had no idea. ‘”We believe there’s between 50 and 450 occurrences in the UK every day,” said Charles Curry of Chronos Technology, the company leading the project, though he stressed that they were still analysing the data.’ […] “Most of them are used by people who don’t want their vehicles to be tracked.” (via Tim Bunce)
    (tags: via:timbunce jamming gps uk location chronos)

  • Library Closure of Type .nu : Alan Toner on library.nu’s shutdown. ‘The case of library.nu is significant because the demand for the works offered there demonstrates that filesharing is not just about pop music, porn and cams of action movies, but also those forms and sources of knowledge whose acquisition are ritually celebrated within ‘enlightenment’ culture. Many of those whose works were offered derive income not from royalties, but from related activities such as teaching and research. Such people were themselves an important component library.nu’ user base. Some have other means to access the same materials, others, especially those in countries with weaker education infrastructures and more emaciated library budgets, do not. Outside of formal education, the millions of online autodidacts may be denied access to material, seriously impinging on their lives and possibilities. When one considers the cost of text books and more especially scholarly articles, that is no hyperbole, and applies not only to the global south but the post-industrial north as well, awash in its dreams of knowledge economies and human capital.’
    (tags: alan-toner library.nu ebooks education filesharing copyright piracy)

Links for 2012-02-23

Published February 23, 2012

  • Canadian Universities Agree To Ridiculous Copyright Agreement That Says Emailing Hyperlinks Is Equal To Photocopying | Techdirt : ‘The agreement reached last month with the licensing agency includes provisions defining e-mailing hyperlinks as equivalent to photocopying a document, an annual $27.50 fee for every full-time equivalent student and surveillance of academic staff email.’ wow, incredibly bad terms
    (tags: copyright canada hyperlinks copyfight techdirt licensing academia)

  • EFF Wins Protection for Time Zone Database : ‘The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is pleased to announce that a copyright lawsuit threatening an important database of time zone information has been dismissed. The astrology software company that filed the lawsuit, Astrolabe, has also apologized and agreed to a ‘covenant not to sue’ going forward, which will help protect the database from future baseless legal actions and disruptions. Software engineers around the world depend on the time zone database to make sure that time-stamps for email and other files work correctly no matter where you are. However, last September, Astrolabe filed a lawsuit against Arthur David Olson and Paul Eggert – the researchers who coordinated the database’s development for decades – because the database includes information from an atlas in which Astrolabe claimed to own copyright. But facts – like what time the sun rises – are not copyrightable. EFF, along with co-counsel Adam Kessel and Olivia Nguyen at the Boston office of Fish & Richardson P.C, promptly signed on to defend Olson and Eggert and protect this essential tool. In January, EFF advised Astrolabe that Olson and Eggert would move for sanctions if Astrolabe did not withdraw its complaint. Today’s dismissal followed.’
    (tags: copyright eff timezones via:fanf time unix olson)

Links for 2012-02-22

Published February 22, 2012

Links for 2012-02-16

Published February 16, 2012