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Four short links: 18 June 2013

By Nat Torkington
June 17, 2013

Our Backbone Stack (Pamela Fox) — fascinating glimpse into the tech used and why. Automating Card Games Using OpenCV and Python — My vision for an automated version of the game was simple. Players sit across a table on which …

Strata Week: Why we should care about what the NSA may or may not be doing

By Jenn Webb
June 14, 2013

It’s a question of power, not privacy — and what is the NSA really doing? In the wake of the leaked NSA data-collection programs, the Pew Research Center conducted a national survey to measure American’s response. The survey found that …

Strata Week: Wireless body area networks bring humans into the Internet of Things

By Jenn Webb
June 7, 2013

Collaborative sensor networks of humans, and your body may be the next two-factor authenticator There has been much coverage recently of the Internet of Things, connecting everything from washers and dryers to thermostats to cars to the Internet. Wearable sensors …

Four short links: 7 June 2013

By Nat Torkington
June 7, 2013

Accumulo — NSA’s BigTable implementation, released as an Apache project. How the Robots Lost (Business Week) — the decline of high-frequency trading profits (basically, markets worked and imbalances in speed and knowledge have been corrected). Notable for the regulators getting …

Phishing in Facebook’s Pond

By Mike Loukides
June 5, 2013

A recent blog post inquired about the incidence of Facebook-based spear phishing: the author suddenly started receiving email that appeared to be from friends (though it wasn’t posted from their usual email addresses), making the usual kinds of offers and …

Four short links: 30 May 2013

By Nat Torkington
May 30, 2013

Facebook IPO Tech Post-Mortem (PDF) — SEC’s analysis of the failures that led to the NASDAQ kicking Facebook’s IPO in the NADSAQ. (via Quartz) Run That Town — SimCity for real cities, from the Australian Bureau of Statistics and using …

Four short links: 22 May 2013

By Nat Torkington
May 22, 2013

XBox One Kinect Controller (Guardian) — the new Kinect controller can detect gaze, heartbeat, and the buttons on your shirt. Surveillance and the Internet of Things (Bruce Schneier) — Lots has been written about the “Internet of Things” and how …

Four short links: 16 May 2013

By Nat Torkington
May 16, 2013

Australian Filter Scope Creep — The Federal Government has confirmed its financial regulator has started requiring Australian Internet service providers to block websites suspected of providing fraudulent financial opportunities, in a move which appears to also open the door for …

Four short links: 14 May 2013

By Nat Torkington
May 14, 2013

Behind the Banner — visualization of what happens in the 150ms when the cabal of data vultures decide which ad to show you. They pass around your data as enthusiastically as a pipe at a Grateful Dead concert, and you’ve …

Genomics and Privacy at the Crossroads

By James Turner
May 13, 2013

Two weeks ago, I had the privilege to attend the 2013 Genomes, Environments and Traits conference in Boston, as a participant of Harvard Medical School’s Personal Genome Project. Several hundreds of us attended the conference, eager to learn what new breakthroughs might …

Strata Week: President Obama opens up U.S. government data

By Jenn Webb
May 10, 2013

U.S. government data to be machine-readable, Nicole Wong may fill new White House chief privacy officer role The U.S. government took major steps this week to open up government data to the public. U.S. President Obama signed an executive order …

Genomics and Privacy at the Crossroads

By James Turner
May 9, 2013

Two weeks ago, I had the privilege to attend the 2013 Genomes, Environments and Traits conference in Boston, as a participant of Harvard Medical School’s Personal Genome Project. Several hundreds of us attended the conference, eager to learn what new breakthroughs might …

Google Glass and the Future

By Mike Loukides
April 29, 2013

I just read a Forbes article about Glass, talking about the split between those who are “sure that it is the future of technology, and others who think society will push back against the technology.” I don’t see this as …

Strata Week: Movers and shakers on the data journalism front

By Jenn Webb
April 19, 2013

Reuters launches Connected China, Pew instructs on downloading its data, and Twitter gets a data editor Yue Qiu and Wenxiong Zhang took a look this week at a data journalism effort by Reuters, the Connected China visualization application. Qiu and …

Commerce Weekly: Amazon patent indicates its interest in the payments space

By Jenn Webb
April 18, 2013

Editor’s note: This will be the final installment of our Commerce Weekly series. Mobile payments security, privacy concerns rise; Amazon may have a solution The race is on to democratize mobile payments, to create a solution that improves the payment …

Four short links: 18 April 2013

By Nat Torkington
April 18, 2013

The Well Deserved Fortune of Satoshi Nakamoto — I can’t assure with 100% certainty that the all the black dots are owned by Satoshi, but almost all are owned by a single entity, and that entity began mining right from …

Strata Week: Court case sheds light on FBI stingray surveillance

By Jenn Webb
April 12, 2013

FBI and IRS push privacy envelope Details about how the FBI uses stingray or IMSI-catcher technology — and how much more intrusive it is than previously known — have come to light in a tax fraud case against accused identity …

Predictive analytics and data sharing raise civil liberties concerns

By Alex Howard
April 11, 2013

Last winter, around the same time there was a huge row in Congress over the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), U.S. Attorney General Holder quietly signed off on expanded rules on government data sharing. The rules allowed the National …

Privacy vs. speech

By Jim Stogdill
April 9, 2013

A week or so ago this link made its way through my tweet stream: “Privacy and the right to be forgotten.” Honestly I didn’t really even read it. I just retweeted it with a +1 or some other sign of …

Four short links: 8 April 2013

By Nat Torkington
April 8, 2013

mozpay — a JavaScript API inspired by google.payments.inapp.buy() but modified for things like multiple payment providers and carrier billing. When a web app invokes navigator.mozPay() in Firefox OS, the device shows a secure window with a concise UI. After authenticating, …

Four short links: 1 April 2013

By Nat Torkington
April 1, 2013

MLDemos — an open-source visualization tool for machine learning algorithms created to help studying and understanding how several algorithms function and how their parameters affect and modify the results in problems of classification, regression, clustering, dimensionality reduction, dynamical systems and …

Four short links: 21 March 2013

By Nat Torkington
March 21, 2013

The Obfuscation of Culture — Tumblr and LJ users sep ar ate w ords thr ou gh o dd spacin g in o rde r to fo ol sea rc h en g i nes. Chinese users hide political messages …

Four short links: 8 March 2013

By Nat Torkington
March 8, 2013

mlcomp — a free website for objectively comparing machine learning programs across various datasets for multiple problem domains. Printing Code: Programming and the Visual Arts (Vimeo) — Rune Madsen’s talk from Heroku’s Waza. (via Andrew Odewahn) What Data Brokers Know …

Four short links: 4 March 2013

By Nat Torkington
March 4, 2013

Life Inside the Aaron Swartz Investigation — do hard things and risk failure. What else are we on this earth for? crossfilter — open source (Apache 2) JavaScript library for exploring large multivariate datasets in the browser. Crossfilter supports extremely …

Four short links: 18 February 2013

By Nat Torkington
February 18, 2013

crowy — open source social media aggregator. Raytheon makes Social Media Tracking Software (Guardian) — the technology was shared with US government and industry as part of a joint research and development effort, in 2010, to help build a national …

Strata Week: Can big data save human language?

By Jenn Webb
February 15, 2013

Preserving human language with big data Inspired by Deb Roy’s 2011 TEDTalk, “The Birth of a Word,” Nataly Kelly at the Huffington Post’s TEDWeekends took a look at the potential effect big data could have on language — specifically, on …

Privacy in the Online Ecosystem: Obligations and Best Practices Are Evolving

By Alysa Hutnik
February 8, 2013

At the end of 2012, the Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) hosted the public workshop, “The Big Picture – Comprehensive Online Data Collection,” which focused on privacy concerns relating to the comprehensive collection of consumer online data by Internet service providers …

Four short links: 7 February 2013

By Nat Torkington
February 7, 2013

Tridium Niagara (Wired) — A critical vulnerability discovered in an industrial control system used widely by the military, hospitals and others would allow attackers to remotely control electronic door locks, lighting systems, elevators, electricity and boiler systems, video surveillance cameras, …

Four short links: 4 February 2013

By Nat Torkington
February 4, 2013

Hands on Learning (HuffPo) — Unfortunately, engaged and enlightened tinkering is disappearing from contemporary American childhood. (via BoingBoing) FlashProxy (Stanford) — a miniature proxy that runs in a web browser. It checks for clients that need access, then conveys data …

Strata Week: Raising the world’s data privacy IQ

By Jenn Webb
February 1, 2013

Data Privacy Day and the fight against “digital feudalism” Data Privacy Day was celebrated this week. Led by the National Cyber Security Alliance, the day is meant to increase awareness of personal data protection and “to empower people to protect …

Four short links: 29 January 2013

By Nat Torkington
January 29, 2013

FISA Amendment Hits Non-Citizens — FISAAA essentially makes it lawful for the US to conduct purely political surveillance on foreigners’ data accessible in US Cloud providers. [...] [A] US judiciary subcommittee on FISAAA in 2008 stated that the Fourth Amendment …

Commerce Weekly: Analytics for people, the next big thing in retail

By Jenn Webb
January 24, 2013

Here are a few stories that caught my attention in the commerce space this week. New trend in retail customer tracking: Smartphone Wi-Fi Dan Tynan posted a two-part series (here and here) on IT World this week looking at growing …

Commerce Weekly: Analytics for people, the next big thing in retail

By Jenn Webb
January 24, 2013

Here are a few stories that caught my attention in the commerce space this week. New trend in retail customer tracking: Smartphone Wi-Fi Dan Tynan posted a two-part series (here and here) on IT World this week looking at growing …

Towards a better book recommendation service

By Joe Wikert
January 23, 2013

The ideal content discovery service has yet to be invented. Plenty have tried but none have truly succeeded. The latest is venture is BookScout from Random House. It’s a nifty Facebook app that uses your social graph to help you …

Strata Week: The complexities of forecasting the big data market

By Jenn Webb
January 11, 2013

Here are a few stories from the data space that caught my attention this week. Big data needs a bigger forecast The International Data Corporation (IDC) released a forecast this week, projecting “the worldwide big data technology and services market …

Deploying surveillance countermeasures on the web?

By Jim Stogdill
January 4, 2013

Margaret Lord: “Oh, dear. Is there no such thing as privacy any more?” Tracy Lord: “Only in bed, mother, and not always there.” The Philadelphia Story, 1940 Over the summer I wrote a post lamenting IPv4 address scarcity and how …

Big, open and more networked than ever: 10 trends from 2012

By Alex Howard
December 22, 2012

In 2012, technology-accelerated change around the world was driven by the wave of social media, data and mobile devices. In this year in review, we look back at some of the stories that mattered here at Radar and look ahead …

Publishing News: Tech industry history could inform bookstores’ road to recovery

By Jenn Webb
December 7, 2012

Here are a few stories from the publishing space that caught my attention this week. Bookstore lessons and opportunities from the tech industry Brick-and-mortar bookstores arguably have taken the biggest hit thus far as the publishing industry struggles through its …

Strata Week: Big data gets warehouse services

By Jenn Webb
November 30, 2012

Here are a few stories from the data space that caught my attention this week. Amazon, BitYota launch data warehousing services Amazon announced the beta launch of its Amazon Web Services data warehouse service Amazon Redshift this week. Paul Sawers …

Commerce Weekly: Holiday cyber spending breaks records

By Jenn Webb
November 29, 2012

Here are a few stories that caught my attention in the commerce space this week. Holiday weekend sees huge increases in online and mobile spending The big news this week is the cyber spending that happened over the holiday weekend. …

U.S. Senate to consider long overdue reforms on electronic privacy

By Alex Howard
November 27, 2012

In 2010, electronic privacy needed digital due process. In 2012, it’s worth defending your vanishing rights online. This week, there’s an important issue before Washington that affects everyone who sends email, stores files in Dropbox or sends private messages on …

Publishing News: Publishing’s worst-case fate, Amazon as US Steel

By Jenn Webb
November 16, 2012

Here are a few stories from the publishing space that caught my attention this week. Applying an historical perspective to the fate of the publishing industry NPR’s Adam Davidson looked this week at the Penguin-Random House merger from an industrial …

Strata Week: Investors embrace Hadoop BI startups

By Jenn Webb
November 16, 2012

Here are a few stories from the data space that caught my attention this week. Two Hadoop BI startups secure funding There were a couple notable pieces of investment news this week. Platfora, a startup looking to democratize Hadoop as …

Four short links: 6 November 2012

By Nat Torkington
November 6, 2012

Tilt-to-Fly Controller and Copter (Kickstarter) — This looks totally awesome and hackable. The controller has a USB port, the protocol is documented, and you can even connect your own electronics payload, like an Arduino, camera, or homebrewed project to the …

Thin walls and traffic cameras

By Alistair Croll
October 19, 2012

A couple of years ago, I spoke with a European Union diplomat who shall remain nameless about the governing body’s attitude toward privacy. “Do you know why the French hate traffic cameras?” he asked me. “It’s because it makes it …

Four short links: 19 October 2012

By Nat Torkington
October 19, 2012

Home-made 3D-Printed Drones — if only they used computer-vision to sequence DNA, they’d be the perfect storm of O’Reilly memes :-) Hacking Pacemakers For Death — IOActive researcher Barnaby Jack has reverse-engineered a pacemaker transmitter to make it possible to …

Four short links: 18 October 2012

By Nat Torkington
October 18, 2012

Let’s Pool Our Medical Data (TED) — John Wilbanks (of Science Commons fame) gives a strong talk for creating an open, massive, mine-able database of data about health and genomics from many sources. Money quote: Facebook would never make a …

Four short links: 16 October 2012

By Nat Torkington
October 16, 2012

cir.ca — news app for iPhone, which lets you track updates and further news on a given story. (via Andy Baio) DataWrangler (Stanford) — an interactive tool for data cleaning and transformation. Spend less time formatting and more time analyzing …

New ethics for a new world

By Alistair Croll
October 15, 2012

Since the first of our ancestors chipped stone into weapon, technology has divided us. Seldom more than today, however: a connected, always-on society promises health, wisdom, and efficiency even as it threatens an end to privacy and the rise of …

New ethics for a new world

By Alistair Croll
October 15, 2012

Since the first of our ancestors chipped stone into weapon, technology has divided us. Seldom more than today, however: a connected, always-on society promises health, wisdom, and efficiency even as it threatens an end to privacy and the rise of …


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