Diminished reality

The future is now:

What the fuck is my information security "strategy"?

A useful resource for sysadmins.

Asian wedding proposal

A Digital Media Primer For Geeks

I really dug this video primer ... I now feel like digital audio and video make a lot more sense to me.

ESR reviews:

This is, hands down and no exceptions, the best instructional video I’ve ever seen. It takes a complex, dry, detail-filled topic and presents it with lucid clarity and a sense of fun.

They’re not kidding about the “for geeks” part; the exposition is fast and dense and assumes the reader is able to handle having concepts as complex as Nyquist’s theorem thrown at them in one go. But the exposition is also very clear and direct, and delivered with a keen sense of which details need most emphasis. The effect is only secondarily to impart facts; what they’re attempting, successfully, is to give the viewer a feel for the subject matter, an overall grasp of how the pieces fit together which can be filled in by later deep-diving into the pieces.

Full marks to Monty for his delivery, which is excellent on all levels. I’m no slouch myself at presenting technical ideas in accessible language, but I will cheerfully admit that this is as good as me at the top of my form, or possibly better. I know how much skill and effort is concealed in making a performance like this look casual; if you don’t, just trust me that what Monty has pulled off here is quite impressive just as an act of presentation-fu.

And yes, this is a video – not just an e-book narrated by a well-spoken talking head. The uses of props, whiteboard, and special effects are tasteful and understatedly clever. I particularly enjoyed the playful use of special effects to illustrate things like sample-rate compression, signal-clipping artifacts and how YUV chroma representation actually works. That was a very effective way to tie those abstractions to experiential reality so the viewer won’t forget them.

The material was ideal for my level of knowledge at start. That is, if you have (a) programmer chops, (b) a bit of basic knowledge of the physics of sound, and (c) you’ve heard of Nyquist’s theorem before and broadly grasp the relationship between sampling rate and cutoff frequency, you’re going to eat the rest of the video up like candy. Probably (c) isn’t necessary; what it meant for me is that I started getting new material at the point where Monty explained about sample rates above 44.1 being a way to get away with cheaper bandpass filters.

Programming as art

A redditor calls this mindblowing..I wouldn't go that far, but it's pretty cool if your address works. Some say it runs fine in Firefox and Safari in addition to Google Chrome.

Ubercab

The taxi business could finally get some disruption.

Afganistan has minerals

Ooh shinies!

Ambers says the news is not new.

Foreign Policy is also skeptical.

Please do not change your password

(meme) Finally some economic sanity on the computer security front.

The signularity is near

Forget the iPad, I too want one of these:



(via MR)

One gaming machine per child

The punchline writes itself.

Text 2.0

Interesting. If you're thinking of getting an iPad, wait till they come with a built-in camera.

Brilliant

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. (Clarke's 3rd law)

Skip to 2:50 if you're pressed for time, because the second half is even more amazing.

This is how people who don't understand Photoshop thought the program worked... and now it actually will. (reddit)

Drones as war porn

An airman checks a Hellfire missile mounted on a MQ-1B Predator drone.


A ground control station for a MQ-9 Reaper drone. From here, the aircraft is flown by a pilot and a sensor operator.

SPIEGEL - Until recently, people looked at this as something abnormal. But drones and robotic warfare in general are actually the new normal now. We've gone from using a handful of these systems to now having around 7,000 in the air. And the US is not the only country flying them. There are drones from 43 other countries, including Great Britain, Germany and Pakistan.

[..] There are parallels to other historical moments when there was no turning back. The automobile in 1909. Computers before 1980. The nuclear bomb in 1940s. This is much beyond an evolution, it's a revolution. This happens very rarely in history. These developments force us to ask questions of right and wrong we never had to think about before.

[..] For example the question of the public's relationship to war. The drone war is documented, downloaded, accessible for everyone. You can see the videos on YouTube. It's turning war for some into a form of entertainment. The soldiers call that "war porn." We can see more but experience less.

—P.W. Singer, Brookings Institution

A sample video from Iraq:



And here's video of controllers doing a training exercise.

Sentence to ponder

"Society will reject capitalism once automation nears 100%."

—reddit thread on research milestones

It's easy to appreciate that in post-material society in which robots self-replicate and do all the work, there will be little use for capital markets in common material goods.

But won't there always be a market in rare goods?

As well as in research and the arts? ... at least until AI can staff the research labs and produce the entertainment for us--but at that point won't humans be obsolescent anyway?

The Postal Service - Such Great Heights

How far we've come

"The Exceptionally Tough Politics of Cyber Security"

Ambers explores:

Fact: if the NSA were to detect the presence of a malicious worm or destructive virus on a U.S. Internet server targeted at a bank, perhaps stealing money from that bank, it could do nothing but warn the bank. The bank, most likely, does not have the capacity to deal with the worm itself; the NSA does not have the legal authority to employ methods to screen out the bad code, even though it has the technological capability. You can employ any type of thought of experiment you want here. Entities like utility companies and banks often rely on overtaxed communications networks to assess their performance; those communications networks are extraordinarily vulnerable because they rely on vulnerable machines -- machines that are old and were built with technology that, in many instances, originated elsewhere. The backbone of the Internet itself is very fragile; the VeriSign corporation, which essentially runs the Net, deals with thousands of attacks per day, some of them harmless, some of them dangerous, some of them from state actors (like China), others from well-funded and savvy techno-terrorists.

This is a tech problem and a law problem. Congress is trying to come up with ways to designate certain types of corporations that are responsible for large segments of some major activity -- power generation, money transferring, information sharing -- as, essentially, too big to fail -- or be shut down -- by cyber intruders. The idea, in essence, would be to require these entities to submit to a cyber audit. In the event of a major attack, the government (actually, the Department of Homeland Security, using NSA technology) would have the authority to quarantine the problem until it was removed. As you might imagine, this approach raises hackles with a lot of people. The corporations resist the idea of government intrusion. Their CFOs don't see the risk, so they're not interested in spending money to preemptively solve the problem. Civil libertarians properly ask about oversight; who's going to watch the watchers? Technologists wonder whether there aren't other ways to protect the nation's information grid from systemic threats.
(cont.)

Internet-enabled atheism

Via Andrew, Unreasonable Faith floats a theory:

Atheists have always been a minority. Religious minorities are frequently in an awkward position, particularly when the majority considers their very existence to be a challenge. So atheists have tended to keep quiet, sometime not even realizing that the person they are speaking to is another atheist.

The internet has alleviated some of this problem. First it provides a semi-anonymity, which allows people to speak freely. Second, it’s created a way for people who are geographically spread around the world to meet together and discuss. So the internet provides something of a support group, which makes the atheists stronger and more confident. This also produces a group polarization effect, which makes the stronger atheists more confrontational.

So when folks like Dawkins came along, there was a ready made audience for their work. The success of The God Delusion helped get other atheist works published, creating the wave of “New Atheists” we see today.

I remained a theist in 1999. Without internet access to open my mind over the past decade, I might still be one. Or at least the transition would've been slower.

"Offensive Cyber War Turned The Insurgency In 2007"

Ambers summarizes:

Now it can be fully revealed: In May of 2007, the National Security Agency launched a massive cyber offensive against insurgent cell and computer networks in Iraq, which officials believe was responsible for breaking the back of the insurgency.  Shane Harris at National Journal takes you inside the Oval Office as the decision was made:

Former officials with knowledge of the computer network attack, all of whom requested anonymity when discussing intelligence techniques, said that the operation helped turn the tide of the war. Even more than the thousands of additional ground troops that Bush ordered to Iraq as part of the 2007 "surge," they credit the cyberattacks with allowing military planners to track and kill some of the most influential insurgents. The cyber-intelligence augmented information coming in from unmanned aerial drones as well as an expanding network of human spies.

When Bob Woodward wrote about unspecified techniques used to turn the tide of the war, this is what he meant.