Four short links: 14 November 2019
Adversarial Interoperability, Open Virtual Assistants, Code Verification, Distributed Graph Computation
- alt.interoperability.adversarial (EFF) — If adversarial interoperability still enjoyed its alt.-era legal respectability, then Facebook alternatives like Diaspora could use their users’ logins and passwords to fetch the Facebook messages the service had queued up for them and allow those users to reply to them from Diaspora, without being spied on by Facebook. Mastodon users could read and post to Twitter without touching Twitter’s servers. Hundreds or thousands of services could spring up that allowed users different options to block harassment and bubble up interesting contributions from other users—both those on the incumbent social media services and the users of these new upstarts.
- Stanford Open Virtual Assistant Workshop — video available for interesting talks about open VA platforms and the problems that VAs face.
- Scaling Symbolic Evaluation for Automated Verification of Systems Code with Serval (Google) — Through this paper, we address the key concerns facing developers looking to apply automated verification: the effort required to write verifiers, the difficulty of diagnosing and fixing performance bottlenecks in these verifiers, and the applicability of this approach to existing systems. Serval enables us, with a reasonable effort, to develop multiple verifiers, apply the verifiers to a range of systems, and find previously unknown bugs. (via Morning Paper)
- Plato — Tencent’s framework for distributed graph computation and machine learning at WeChat scale.
