The Command Line

Appearance on Valid Syntax

Thomas Gideon — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 13:40:01 +0000

A few weeks back, my friend and fellow podcaster, Kreg Steppe, asked me to come onto his open software focused show, Valid Syntax, to discuss free software and open source licenses. I was more than happy to oblige and I very much enjoyed the ensuing conversation.

Kreg just posted the episode, if you would like to take a listen. If you have been wanting to learn more about free and open licenses, I think this makes a good place to start. Kreg has also said that this will be the first of a renewed run of episodes so consider subscribing, too, for more discussions of open source projects.

On the Way to Dragon*Con 2010, Day 1

Thomas Gideon — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 00:57:30 +0000

Just a quick note from on the road as we make our way South from DC to Atlanta for this year’s Dragon*Con. We made excellent progress, stopping just past the halfway point in Greensboro, North Carolina. There was a little bit of traffic between DC and Richmond, Virginia, but once we got into I-85, the highway we’ll take the rest of the way, it was smooth sailing. If we make an early enough start tomorrow, we’ll hit Atlanta early in the afternoon.

I already talked about how this time last year marked the start of my daily blogging habit. It seems like a good time of year for me to start new practices. I’ve undertaken three in the last few weeks that seem to be sticking well. They are small things, not directly related to my hacking or other pursuits but helping to maintain and improve my overall health and mental well being. The coming week may present a bit of challenge as any con, let alone Dragon*Con, is chaotic and can be highly disruptive to daily routines.

Tomorrow, I will get to re-connect with friends I see about once a year and am getting excited about the prospect. In fact, since programming doesn’t start in earnest until Friday, tomorrow will be all about the opportunity to hang out with friends. Since Balticon is my local con, I don’t typically arrive early for it and miss out on this window driven mostly by out of town travelers. It is my turn to be the out of town con-goer and I am looking forward to it.

feeds | grep links > Breakthrough in Miniaturizing Silicon Switches and PS3 Jail Break Duplicated, Propagated

Thomas Gideon — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 00:37:10 +0000

5nm switches could lead to higher storage density in silicon, PopSci
HT @WryneckStudio
Code in contested PS3 jailbreak device reverse engineered, released, Ars Technica

feeds | grep links > Open Source Cell Network, Chrome 7 Sports Hardware Accelerated Effects, Gmail Gets a Priority Inbox, and More

Thomas Gideon — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 20:49:54 +0000

Today, the blogging has definitely slowed as I anticipated yesterday. I haven’t started packing for my trip in earnest but later on tonight I will.

Open source, renewably powered cell network at Burning Man, Slashdot
Chrome 7 shows off hardware accelerated effects, Ars Technica
iFixit adds repair guides for video game consoles, Ars Technica
Google launches priority inbox for Gmail, ReadWriteWeb
Historical cell phone location data is ruled to be an intrusion by NY judge, Boing Boing

feeds | grep links > Digital Census in Brazil, Ads that Stalk Surfers, Cyanogen Supports FroYo, and More

Thomas Gideon — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 21:49:44 +0000

Brazil undertaking all digital census, using smartphones, Slashdot
Contribute to SETI@home from your browser
Via Hacker News.
Re-targeting ads stalk surfers for weeks after they shop
Slashdot links to a story at NYT that I find fascinating for its potential to drive home the point about widespread behavioral advertising. If more users notice these sorts of creepy practices, the more fuel we’ll have for debate around better practices around transparency and affording the ability to opt out.
Cyanogen, after market mod for Android smart phones, now supports FroYo, ReadWriteWeb
GPU assisted sorting algorithm breaks giga-sort barrier, Slashdot
iPhone app in approval limbo goes open source, Slashdot
New model developed to help organize, keep private massive amounts of online data, Science Daily
HT @joabj
Some California schools decide to track students with RFIDs, EFF

“The Pirate Bay: Away from Keyboard” Documentary Reaches Funding Goal

Thomas Gideon — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 21:35:00 +0000

When visiting The Pirate Bay this weekend, as I am occasionally want to do, I clicked on the big splash ad for “The Pirate Bay: Away From Keyboard“. I was greeted by a video by Simon Klose, the director responsible for this project. He already has accumulated a large volume of footage, over two hundred hours, short over the course of two years. He has started a Kickstarter project to hire on a professional editor to help produce the finished work from all that material. His intro video is a nice tease for the stories he’ll be working into the finished product.

When I committed my own modest pledge, he was only a few thousands dollars towards his goal. When I saw Cory at Boing Boing pick up the story, I had an update in my inbox from Simon. As of this writing, he has met his project goal and still has most of a month left for further fund raising. The surplus above the original $25K milestone will got to “more time in the editing studio, sound production and animations”. In other words, polishing the film even further.

I am fascinated by The Pirate Bay, as long time listeners and readers no doubt realize. There is a lot more going on to their motivations than any petty sense of entitlement their critics would like to believe. I am heartened that Klose has the funds he needs to proceed and cannot wait to view the finished result.

CodeSounding, Sonification of Source Code Structure

Thomas Gideon — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 21:07:36 +0000

So much for only posting some links tonight.

I saw this project via Hacker News, which reminded me of two other recent stories. One I shared a while back was video of sonification of various sorting algorithms. The first sample at the CodeSounding project page sounds similar which is surprising to me. A sort algorithm only has a few dimensions of interest, mostly time and relative magnitude of elements being sorted.

The reason I am surprised by the similarity between some of the samples and the very simple sonic space produced from sorting is due to the other recent story, Jonathan Berger’s lecture (mp3 link) on TVO’s Big Ideas about the social ethics of music. In that lecture, he specifically presents sonification of data sets that have a deep social dimension, for instance the spread of the oil plume in the gulf. Berger is a composer so perhaps his work, which uses similar techniques, shows more of his hand as a maker. His finished work definitely is meant to be as evocative in the result as the original input.

However one of the things he said that stuck with me is how music, and sound more generally, is better than visualization for representing multidimensional data. I would expect code to open up much more fully using sonification than the CodeSounding samples represent. Maybe it just wants for a hacker/musician to do a better job mapping the interesting dimensional elements of source code into the sound scape.

Word of warning, I could not find any license information so I suspect it is all rights reserved. That and the fact it takes in Java class and jar files, being written itself in Java, may be a turn off. Or an inspiration for an open source project to do one better.

CodeSounding: computer generated music sounds from a source code structure

Slowing Down for a Spell

Thomas Gideon — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 17:54:22 +0000

I am already on a hiatus from the podcast for reasons of preparing for and attending Dragon*Con. I though I would take more time off than in years past as a much needed mental break. So far, it has been relaxing though I will admit to feeling a little at loose ends at various points during this past weekend.

I have been deliberating what to do with the blog during my extended podcast hiatus. The news stories I curate flow out of the editorial process for putting together each week’s news show. It is pretty easy to keep that going even without the dedicated work on the weekends to do the more in depth write ups for the podcast. Blogging at the same volume, though, feels like I am not taking as full advantage of my hiatus as I should.

Despite that I’ve already caught myself glossing over more stories, falling back more on the form of the link dump in the last few days. Once on my way to Dragon*Con, I will be thoroughly unable to keep up with any news curation or comment. There just isn’t enough time left at either end of the day to keep up with my feeds, let alone pull even the barest post together.

Because of a year’s worth of accumulated habit, I am loathe to spin the blog down entirely while I am traveling. I am reminded of last year’s con at which I successfully started blogging daily (on weekdays anyway). I have fond memories of pushing myself to stay up just a bit later each day to blog solely by the glow of my laptop screen before finally crashing. That started as a promise to my wife to share an update every day since she didn’t join me last year. It grew into a very effective, more encompassing habit of which I am rather proud.

I definitely think I will embrace slowing posts down to more like a one a day. Between now and Wednesday, those will more than likely take the form of lists of links. After that and until I return next week, the daily posts will share more of my thoughts and impressions of the convention and the travel on either side. I will try to resist the urge even to keep up with my feeds, devoting my attention to activities at the con and relaxing.

I may, however, spend a bit more time micro-blogging. My iPod Touch usually works pretty well in the convention hotels. I like to share updates to make it easier to find and hang out with folks on site. I rarely use it anywhere enough for my activity to be considered a deluge, but fair warning. Also, if you see a story you don’t want me to miss and would accept 140 characters or less of comment, feel free to @-message it to me. Posting a social message fits into the breaks between panels and events pretty well as it happens.

Following Up for the Week Ending 8/29/2010

Thomas Gideon — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 17:37:26 +0000

Security Alerts for the Week Ending 8/29/2010

Thomas Gideon — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 17:35:52 +0000

I should have posted these yesterday, going by my usual schedule. Being on hiatus from the podcast is disrupting my usual force of habit though.

Anticipating Dragon*Con 2010

Thomas Gideon — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 17:28:19 +0000

The day after tomorrow, the wife and I will pack most of a week’s worth of stuff into our wagon and head South on a two day drive to Atlanta. I’ll be attending my fifth Dragon*Con, the east coast’s biggest pop culture gathering featuring a ridiculous amount of programming and attracting attendees in the tens of thousands. For the fourth year in a row, I will be volunteering as a member of the podcasting track’s staff and participating as a panelist on the same.

Not surprisingly, Dragon*Con feels deeply steeped in personal traditions. I’ll be working with the same group of excellent volunteers. I’ll be reprising my discussion of copyright, Creative Commons and legal issues for podcasters with the same core of well informed panelists. Randy Chertkow, of Beatnik Turtle, and I will once more try to find a quiet spot at some point during the weekend to catch up on a year’s worth of music, innovation, and a little bit of tech. I’ll be seeking out the same amazing falafel place in the nearby mall. We’ll be circulating through some of the same room parties and enjoying the live broadcast of the Masquerade Sunday night.

My schedule this year is light, outside of my staff commitment. You can see where I know for sure that I’ll be below or on my Google calendar. Best way to find me during the con is to check in at the podcasting track room, 204 in the Hilton, or via Twitter.

Podcasting Track Kick-off
Friday 1PM, Hilton 204

Volunteering
Friday 2-5PM, Hilton 204

Technorama Live!
Friday 10PM
(I’ll be in the audience, supporting my good friends Chuck and Kreg)

Volunteering
Saturday 10AM-1PM, Hilton 204

Creative Commons and Legal Issues
Saturday 1PM, Hilton 204

Parsec Awards
Saturday 4-7PM, Hyatt Regency V

TWiT/Sword and Laser Meetup
Saturday 6-8PM, Westin Sundial Bar
(I’ll make it out for as much of this one as I can, given the conflict and the distance between the Hyatt and the Westin)

Volunteering
Sunday 10AM-1PM, Hilton 204

Beyond these, my schedule is fluid. I’ll go where I see something interesting or I know my friends are going. The wife and I hope to find some interesting dining options in Atlanta, doing more exploring than in years past. If you have any suggestions, please let me know.

I am trying to keep my expectations light. This year’s WorldCon has drawn away many friends and acquaintances and several others are not making it out to either convention for a variety of reasons. It would be easy to give in to the notion that Dragon*Con will be a ghost town but that is not fair to those people who are still going. It would also discourage remaining open to serendipity, getting to know mere acquaintances better, making new friends, finding the kind of surprises that are much of the joy of any kind of travel, let alone con-going.

If you are going to be at the con, find me and say, “Hi!”

feeds | grep links > More Open Cloud Computing, More API’s for Mozilla JetPack, Diaspora to Release Next Month, and More

Thomas Gideon — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 21:11:27 +0000

RedHat opens its cloud APIs, ReadWriteWeb
Three new APIs included in latest version of JetPack from Mozilla, The H
Diaspora sticks to its committed release date, Wired
Czech copyright bill threatens public licenses like CC, Slashdot
Pirate Bay documentary to be crowd, or peer, funded, TorrentFreak
Court halts PS3 jail break sales, Ars Technica
Sweden may get second Pirate MEP, TorrentFreak

Microsoft Co-Founder Fires a Patent Broadside

Thomas Gideon — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 21:04:03 +0000

Paul Allen’s company, Interval, holds four patents against which they are filing complaints against eleven high profile technology companies. The list, not surprisingly, doesn’t include Microsoft.

The patents revolve around three main concepts: browser use for navigating through information, managing a user’s peripheral attention while using a device, and alerting users to items of current interest. They collectively address the general concept of presenting searched-for information to a user along with related news articles, media (such as music or videos), status updates from friends, or data (such as stock or weather info).

As Jacquie Cheung points out, this move is very consistent with the practice of patent trolling. Interval, like other ventures by Allen, doesn’t really produce anything yet still holds several patents. The suit is based solely on holding these patents, not on any actual inventions produced and sold.

Hopefully the suit will be thrown out. Most of the claims seem pretty obvious, obviousness being a foil to patents. Much will depend, of course, on the timing of the patents. What seems obvious now may not have been when the applications were made.

Microsoft cofounder drops patent bomb on Apple, Google, Facebook, Ars Technica

New Alpha Release of Mozilla’s Fennec

Thomas Gideon — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 20:47:47 +0000

Fennec is Mozilla’s mobile browser, currently targeting the Nokia internet tablets and the Android operating system. This latest release still bears the the alpha tag signifying users should try it with the utmost caution as all bets are on in terms of reliability. The prior alpha truly looked unusable but as Frederic Lardinois at RWW explains, addressing performance was the top priority informing this fresh update.

The video is well worth a watch, giving a sense of where the browser’s speed is at but also highlighting Fennec’s interface. I cannot wait to get a mobile friendly version of Firefox’s awesome bar. The search engine integration in Fennec’s awesome page is a nice touch.

One of the reasons I am particular interested in getting an Android MID as my next mobile gadget is the possibility of running Fennec. I am an immense fan of Firefox, the full browser, both for the software itself but also for the principles of an open web on which it is built. Fennec would bring that same openness to the mobile web, not to mention the recent data sharing via Sync that has shaped up to be a killer feature across most of Mozilla’s offerings.

Mozilla Fennec, First Browser for Android with Support for Add-Ons, ReadWriteWeb

Dell Streak Stumbles Over GPL Compliance

Thomas Gideon — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 20:37:03 +0000

The Register has the details, driven by the hackers among Android’s larger community, of Dell’s failure to fully honor their GPL obligations with their new gadget. The Streak is an early entrant into a promising field of Android powered mobile devices, tablets. Well, it isn’t quite a tablet as the consensus seems to consider tablets in the range of seven inch screens and up. And it isn’t quite a true MID, usually coming in at four inch or so. (MID stands for mobile internet device and is a bland and worthless descriptor that seems most commonly applied to handy non-tablet devices like the iPod Touch.) The most frequent attempt at describing the Streak I’ve seen is to characterize it as an oversized phone, with all the appropriate hardware and available with a service place but clumsy to hold up to the ear.

This is one of the devices I am following with interest to potentially purchase as a successor to my aging and increasingly decrepit first generation iPod Touch. Hopefully Dell will come into compliance sooner, rather than later. Especially as the sources in question could mean the difference between having or not having the option of an after market, manually upgrade to FroYo, the latest version of Android.

Dell Streak snub enrages Android fans, The Register

Library at the Heart of Linux is Finally Free and Open

Thomas Gideon — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 20:31:14 +0000

A nice bit of software archeology by Simon Phipps. Not just digging up the history of this old Sun code that was up until this month still under a restrictive license, but the challenges and Phipps’ own part in correcting that situation after a few attempts.

This may come as a shock, but all GNU/Linux distributions to date have been built with essential software under a licence that clearly meets neither the Open Source Definition nor the Free Software Foundations’ requirements for a Free software licence. The tenacity of a Red Hat hacker has finally solved this problem for everyone, however, and I’m proud to have played a part too.

The code in question is the original SUN RPC code, buried in the guts of Linux’s, and other OSes’, networking code. The most fascinating aspect is how the original, informal licensing terms purely as a function of time evolved from seeming liberal to quite conservative. As Phipps notes, this code well predates the GPL so didn’t benefit from the kind of legal theorizing and scrutiny that came to software licensing later on.

GNU/Linux – finally it’s free software, Computer World UK

feeds | grep links > Why Privacy Isn’t Dead, H.264 Royalty Waiver Extended Again, and More

Thomas Gideon — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 21:50:01 +0000

Why privacy is not dead
Many of the people I follow online re-posted the link to this brief article by danah boyd on Technology Review about how our implementation of privacy in networked systems needs to evolve. Much of what she says resonates with what I was trying to say in my podcast rant about complex privacy and privacy controls. Hopefully more people will pay attention to a researcher whose focus is in this area than did to my muddled rantings. If you struggled to understand what I was trying to communicate in my own rant, please read this post by boyd.
A new coalition forms to offer self-service private cloud
MPEG-LA extends royalty fee period for H.264
The H was one of several sites to have this news. Its still a little unclear exactly when the new waiver period ends, what exactly “end of the license period” means in practical terms. Regardless, this is only for players, not for encoders. By comparison, Google’s patent grants for WebM make both ends of video, production and consumption, free as in beer and liberty. There is also nothing stopping the MPEG-LA from changing terms on new licenses, even if existing licenses are still in some royalty-free grace period. Chris Foresman at Ars Technica clarifies that the waiver of royalties only covers free internet streaming, excluding for-pay video and other uses.
Police extend detention of e-voting critic

Touchless, Gestural Interface

Thomas Gideon — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 21:33:37 +0000

Slashdot embedded this video demo that is pretty compelling.

What is shown isn’t going to replace the fine selection and manipulation possible with touch interfaces but would make an excellent complement. The very first thing I thought of was for in car control where you could easily gesture at your console without taking your eyes of the road, easily turning the system on and off and performing simple navigation. Of course, that’s the very example mentioned in the link post so clearly is intentional in the video.

Although there isn’t any more detail in the press release, it didn’t dissuade me from my other impression, about the coarseness of control. I very much doubt you’ll be able to pull off any sophisticated gestures, like drawing shapes. All the same, even a chunky version will be intensely useful.

Touchless Gesture User Interfaces, Slashdot

TCLP 2010-08-25 Inner Chapter: Superstitions

Thomas Gideon — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 00:34:24 +0000

This is a feature cast, an episode of The Command Line Podcast.

In the intro, the last reminder of my impending travel to Dragon*Con. Also a quick review of Neil Netanel’s “Copyright’s Paradox“.

Listener feedback is a thoughtful and thought provoking email from Grant who wrote in response to my discussion of ebooks in the developing world.

The hacker word of the week this week is finger-pointing syndrome.

The feature this week is an Inner Chapter on the subject of superstitions.

View the detailed show notes online. You can grab the flac encoded audio from the Internet Archive.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

feeds | grep links > Another Zombie Cookie Lawsuit, Airport Scanners Outside the Terminal,

Thomas Gideon — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 22:22:01 +0000

3rd zombie cookie suit filed
Ryan Singel at Wired shares the details of this case as well as the two previous. Hopefully this draws the right kind of scrutiny to curb the practice of using Flash to resuscitate standard browser cookies after users delete them. I hope this stays in the courts rather than being addressed in any future privacy legislation as I don’t think the technology is the problem but the factors in advertisers calculus that would lead them to using a trick that so defies the users’ express wishes.
Digitizing your own books becoming popular in Japan
New optical technique may accelerate development of practical spintronics
Paper on defeating common attempts at obscuring network protocols
Google responds to Android DRM crack explaining developers are using it wrong
Low energy super computing
Airport scanner technology leaves the terminal – There are a couple of key points in Mike Masnick’s post at Techdirt to emphasize. The news is that the technology has been sold outside of where it was first deployed, airports, and may be spreading beyond military use through these sales. He does mention the critical legal theory that would ordinarily curb using these scanners without the blessing of a warrant. We have no idea where and how the scanners are being used, whether we are likely to see a test case arise about them. He’s just hopeful, as am I, that we have solid precedent to help minimize abuse.
Federal circuit rules GPS tracking without a warrant is legal

Google Brings Telephony to Gmail

Thomas Gideon — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 22:05:35 +0000

Flooding through most of my usual news sources, this rolling update to the search giant’s hyper-popular webmail application is pretty hard to ignore. That didn’t stop me from trying. We have a good variety of systems that allow peer to peer voice and video, even Gmail could do that between its own users. There are also many good, cheap options for IP telephony though Google’s free domestic calls may be a first.

What I am not seeing in the coverage are answers to my own, more specific questions. I want to know how this relates to the technology Google got when it acquired Gizmo, an open source competitor to Skype that has far better compatibility with existing, open standards like SIP. I suppose I understand why this is only available in Gmail, as an incentive to use it more and ideally increase ad impressions.

It doesn’t address my desire to have a standalone desktop client, though, that integrates as seamlessly with my Google Voice account as this new Gmail feature does. The fact that making calls requires a browser plugin to be installed tells me that re-packaging those same guts would possible.

Google Brings Google Voice to Gmail, ReadWriteWeb

Study Reveals Counter Intuitive Privacy Behavior

Thomas Gideon — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 21:57:34 +0000

John Timmer at Ars discusses the findings in study to be published in the Journal of Consumer Research. It didn’t get to the bottom of why users give up personal data when they clearly should know better. Rather it just revealed how ineffective environmental cues about privacy risks are and that they might even have the opposite of the desired effect.

I can’t help but think of my friend and privacy lawyer, Carey Lening, who routinely rolls her eyes when I share bits like these revealing how easily ordinary folks violate their own privacy. She always uses the example of how quickly people will give up their info for even the most modest reward, like a tchotchke or t-shirt. To be fair, this study is a little more confounding than that.

I am increasingly convinced by her arguments that we need user education before we wade too deeply into crafting new regulations. These findings however suggest that education may not be enough. Or that there may be greater challenges inherent in crafting an effective curriculum than it seems at first blush.

Users are still idiots, cough up personal data despite warnings, Ars Technica

feeds | grep links > RIAA Says DMCA Not Working (Hard Enough for Them), Jury Invalidates EFF’s Top Patent, Proposed Apple Spyware Goes Too Far, and More

Thomas Gideon — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 21:35:25 +0000

Apple seeking to patent spyware and traitorware
I have to agree with the incredulous tone in EFF’s analysis of Apple’s patent application. This goes well beyond anti-theft measures, none of the included techniques are worth it for a phone no matter how expensive or the risk of a breach of personal info. Simple encryption would be a more suitable solution for the latter and insuring the device if it is that important the former. I am really far more concerned about the potential privacy implications than Apple using this as some sort of spite based DRM to increase the pain of jail breaking a device despite it now being authorized under the DMCA section 2101 rulemaking.
Jury invalidates one of EFF’s “Most Wanted” patents
Google Marketplace DRM cracked
As the Register explains, the break was relatively simple predicated on the ease of de-compiling Java bytecode. To be more specific, as they clarify if you read the article, the DRM itself actually has not be broken but the application code that uses the simple affirmative or negative response from the platform can be re-engineered to essentially ignore the secure check. Each app would then have to be broken in turn but the break would hold for all copies of the cracked version.
The RIAA may have hurt its own arguments against innocent infringement
RIAA pushing to eliminate DMCA safe harbors
Mike Masnick at Techdirt does an excellent job digging out what might otherwise be a confusing claim made in the course of this story, that the RIAA doesn’t think the DMCA is working. Clearly, what they think is a failure is the small and flawed free speech safety valve of safe harbors from liability for ISPs. Their reasoning tends to the absurd, that because the trade association cannot monitor enough traffic to reach whatever its current goals are in curbing infringement through DMCA takedown requests, they think the law should be re-written to directly deputize ISPs to do their enforcement work for them.

feeds | grep links > Flipside of the Oracle Suit, Indian Voting Systems Research Arrested, Inadvertent Location Sharing, and More

Thomas Gideon — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 21:16:41 +0000

Why Oracle was right to sue Google
This counter position to the vast majority of reactions to the Oracle suit is well worth reading. I won’t say I agree with it, though the individual points make sense on their own. I just don’t think the dots connect into any sort of picture that makes sense of Oracle’s ham handed lawsuit. Any number of less severe steps would have made far more sense of trying to restore effective leadership to Java and address the recent fragmentation.
Electronic voting researcher arrested over anonymous source
J. Alex Halderman worked with Hari Prasad, along with Rop Gonggrijp in testing the security of voting systems deployed by the Indian government. On the Freedom to Tinker blog Halderman provides a clear retelling of this baffling arrest without charges of Prasad for his part in the research. He also fills in the back story and speculates about motivation and effects of the arrest.
New California bill could threaten parody that uses online impersonation
Virtual router smashes speed record
Site exposes geo-data from photos on Twitter
Sarah Perez at RWW has full details of the site, I Can Stalk U, including it’s stated purpose. I am not sure that efforts like these usually are all that helpful. The only reason I think this one is worth comment is that the location data it highlights isn’t so obvious, like your browser or mobile informing Twitter of where you are. I suspect most people have a good sense for that but may not realize that the cameras on their phones encode their own location info that bypasses any controls built into social and sharing sites.

TCLP 2010-08-22 News

Thomas Gideon — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 22:34:52 +0000

This is news cast 223, an episode of The Command Line Podcast.

In the intro, an obligatory reminder there will be no new shows on the 29th, the 1st and the 5th because of Dragon*Con. Also, if you are in the north west of the UK, check out U^3 an UnWorkShop being held the 28th of August.

This week’s security alerts are a Firefox bug bypasses URL protection for embedded frames and an old Linux Kernel flaw allows exploits to acquire root privileges.

In this week’s news the end of privacy, a new probabilistic processor design, a thirty year old crypto system is resistant to quantum cryptanalysis, and privacy concerns (among others) over Facebook’s new Places feature. The EFF already has a guide to protecting your privacy against it.

Following up this week EFF appealing the Jewel v. NSA warrantless wiretapping case and negotiators concede ACTA isn’t about counterfeiting after all.

View the detailed show notes online. You can also grab the flac encoded audio from the Internet Archive.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Following Up for the Week Ending 8/22/2010

Thomas Gideon — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 19:28:27 +0000

Quick Security Alerts for the Week Ending 8/22/2010

Thomas Gideon — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 18:54:09 +0000

feeds | grep links > Chrome Store Opens to Developers, Flash in Java, P2P Users as Innocent Infringers, and More

Thomas Gideon — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 22:45:34 +0000

Google opens Chrome app store to developers
The Register has more details on a move from Google that has been puzzling me. From their description, what “installing” a web app in Chrome will do is allow a traditional web application to customize Chrome’s, er, chrome with its own icon and such as well as getting some higher privileges to access the browser’s resources. I suppose the security implications aren’t very different from other kinds of add ons, many of which already integrate with web services. I do wonder if the lower barrier to entry than a proper extension might make auditing for securing harder just because of increased volume.
Java based Flash player
Legal analysis of Oracle v. Google
SCOTUS told P2P users can be “innocent infringers”

Kurzweil Responds to Critics of His Prediction

Thomas Gideon — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 22:26:49 +0000

More specifically, he wrote a response to PZ Myers whose article I linked in my own criticism. I saw this via Hacker News and thought it would be fair to write it up as well, especially given the repeated comments on my own thoughts by a clear defender of Kurzweil’s work.

The part I will concede is that neither PZ nor I had the whole of Kurzweil’s argument to inform our reactions. I have already decided to borrow “The Singularity is Near” from the library on the suggestion of my own commenter, specifically to read through the more fleshed out hypothesis Kurzweil wrote in that book’s fourth chapter.

Despite clear need to inform it further, on reading his own defense my opinion remains that the man is profoundly naive. He suggests that forty years contemplating the problem of reverse engineering the human brain pushes his ideas above the sort of reproach expressed by Myers and myself. I would offer that the whole of the artificial intelligence field has been studying variations of the very same problem for that duration and has very little to show for it. Kind of suggests that the problem truly is that hard. The vast majority of thought leaders in the field are much more humble in what they predict about its future as well as the time scales involved. Simple time spent on the problem is once again a poor metric to gauge any single researcher’s grasp on the overall complexity.

I also find his flogging of Moore’s law suspect. I’ve been tracking the state of current and future computing architectures, physical and logical. Though I am not a computer scientist or researcher my own reading leaves me skeptical that progress will remain on a doubling curve. That isn’t a certainty just my view as an enthusiast.

Moore’s second, lesser known observation about the stable or decreasing power consumption and thermal load on chips over time hasn’t panned out. I suspect will inevitable exert a braking force on his more famous, first observation. We all get that exponential trends are hard to predict, more is different. I doubt anyone would gainsay that assertion. I am just not so certain that the doubling of computing power every eighteen months will abide for the next two decades.

The two most likely alternative ways forward, partially or completely bypassing limits on transistor density, present considerable hurdles that make prediction of Moore’s Law, or something like it, holding true over the next two decades unlikely in my view. Increasingly parallel direct successors to today’s chips are taxing computer science and programming practice to continue to saturate all of the horsepower these chips have to offer. Maybe we’ll have effect some kind of Kuhnian paradigm shift like the past leaps to structured, procedural and object oriented programming. That is far from guaranteed let alone probable. At this point, no one knows.

The future of quantum computing is even less certain. We haven’t been able to scale experimental computers of this type to a point where we can build informed guesses about their capabilities, let alone gauge how they might or might not make short work of simulating a system as complex as the human brain.

Even if I agreed with Kurzweil’s estimation of the complexity of virtualizing a human brain, it just isn’t a certainty that at the end of the next two decades we’ll have the horse power to drive it. I’ll extend the benefit for now on his estimation until I’ve had a chance to read his explanation more thoroughly but I rather doubt it will change my opinion. I will endeavor to keep an open mind.

Just so we are clear, I want to see machine intelligence in my lifetime. That achievement will herald unpredictable changes not only in our society but in what it means to be human. I just think that the progress towards that goal is better served by humility and nose-to-grindstone pragmatism than Kurzweil’s unquestioning faith in an unqualified outcome that seems far from certain. Embracing the questions more fully seems like a better way forward than blind devotion to a presupposed answer.

Quantum Zeno Effect May Allow Routing Qbits

Thomas Gideon — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 22:05:19 +0000

One of the barriers to using quantum states for information processing is the unexpected effects of observation. Trying to figure out how to put these counter intuitive processes to work often seems insurmountable, as is the case when contemplating how to preserve the usual superposed states of qbits when the goal is to send them over a network. That superposition, the simultaneous holding of multiple states, is the biggest difference from how information is represented in classical computing. Observation ends superposition, or more properly causes it to decohere.

Technology Review explains some new research Yu-Ping Huang and colleagues at Northwestern that may make switching and routing of quantum information possible.

First a little more about the effect itself. Imagine a photon in state 0 which has a certain probability of decaying into state 1. Now carry out a series of periodic measurements on the photon. Between the measurements, the photon evolves into a superposition 0 and 1 states and a measurement will cause it collapse into one or other of these.

However, if the time between the measurements is small, the chances of it collapsing to form a 1 are smaller than the chances of it becoming a 0. And if the periodic measurements are made rapidly enough, the probability of a measurement producing a 1 tends to zero.

In effect, the process of repeated measurement prevents the photon decaying from a 0 to a 1. That’s the quantum zeno effect, sometimes also called the watched-pot-never-boils effect.

Now Huang and co have come up with a scheme that exploits this effect to create a switch. The basic idea is to take a signal wave in state 0 which will decay or evolve into a 1 when it passes it through a nonlinear waveguide.

Not only is the quantum state, the superposition, of the information carrying bit preserved with this scheme but it could offer power savings to boot. The research is still very much in the theoretical stage but is part of a larger project at DARPA. By the time quantum computers are ready to be networked together, we may just be able to do so practically.

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