Four short links: 9 February 2018
Small GUI, Dangerous URLs, Face-Recognition Glasses, and The Future is Hard
- Nuklear — a single-header ANSI C GUI library, with a lot of bindings (Python, Golang, C#, etc.). (via Hacker News)
- unfurl — a tool that analyzes large collections of URLs and estimates their entropies to sift out URLs that might be vulnerable to attack. (via this blog)
- Chinese Police Using Face Recognition Glasses — In China, people must use identity documents for train travel. This rule works to prevent people with excessive debt from using high-speed trains, and limit the movement of religious minorities who have had identity documents confiscated and can wait years to get a valid passport. We asked for glasses that would help us remember people’s names, we got Robocop 0.5a/BETA2FINAL. {Obligatory “Black Mirror” reference goes here} (via BoingBoing)
- Why I Barely Read SF These Days (Charlie Stross) — SF should—in my view—be draining the ocean and trying to see at a glance which of the gasping, flopping creatures on the sea bed might be lungfish. But too much SF shrugs at the state of our seas and settles for draining the local aquarium, or even just the bathtub, instead. In pathological cases, it settles for gazing into the depths of a brightly coloured computer-generated fishtank screensaver. Earlier in the essay he talks about how the first to a field defines the tropes and borders that others play in, and it’s remarkably hard to find authors who can and will break out of them. (via Matt Jones)
