Technophile

Twitter shut down a service that archived politicians deleted tweets. Infuriatingly, they had this statement to add:

"Imagine how nerve-racking — terrifying, even — tweeting would be if it was immutable and irrevocable?" Twitter reportedly told the OSF. "No one user is more deserving of that ability than another. Indeed, deleting a tweet is an expression of the user’s voice."

I am genuinely stressed about how they don’t see why this is wrong. No, if you tweet as a politician you are responsible for what you say: people should have the right to have access to all that they deemed publicly accessible. Accountability, bitches. It’s nerve-racking to be a politician as is, they are supposed to shoulder the responsibility to serve people’s interests. If they can’t even handle Twitter, they really shouldn’t be politicians.

Australia and the UK are both dialing up to 11 when it comes to surveillance. You know when it’s really bad when the UN special rapporteur on privacy has this to say:

Joseph Cannataci, has called the UK's oversight of surveillance "a rather bad joke at its citizens’ expense," and said that the situation regarding privacy is "worse" than anything George Orwell imagined in his novel 1984

I like this guy. Cannataci seems ready to have some rules about what companies can and can’t do with our data. This is terrific news.

As for Australia... Maybe don’t call on anyone there from 13 October on, ever. Sorry.

The electronically logged data of mobile, landline voice (including missed and failed) calls and text messages, all emails, download volumes and location information will be mandatorily retained by Australian telcos and ISPs.

Intelligence and law enforcement agencies will have immediate, warrantless and accumulating access to all telephone and internet metadata required by law, with a $2 million penalty for telcos and ISPs that don't comply.

The US asked Norway to arrest Edward Snowden would he set foot in the country. They suspect a similar letter was sent to most European countries.

And now, for something completely different

AMAZON

Amazon is laying off employees at its hardware development section bythe dozen. Projects shelved, frantic employees. Amazon is widely known to be a terrible employer (see NYT article). Their 401(k) pension plan is way below Silicon Valley average, and is based entirely on Amazon stock. The new Amazon Underground app, which pays developers 12 cents an hour is also cause to boycott Amazon wonder about Amazon’s business practices. (I will get off my moral high ground soon, but I have been boycotting them since 2011, this series. Buy books from Kobo, people.) The New Yorker wrote a piece about how Amazon is also bad for the readers, too.

Their argument is this: Amazon has used its market power both to influence which books get attention (...) and, in some cases, to drive prices lower. These practices, the authors argue, squeeze publishers, which makes them more risk-averse in deciding which books to publish. As a result, they claim, publishers have been “dropping some midlist authors and not publishing certain riskier books, effectively silencing many voices.” And this is bad not only for the non-famous writers who go unpublished, but for their would-be readers, who are denied the ability to hear those voices

Tor, Ashley Madison and Win10 dominated the news, it was a pretty exciting week.

But first

According to the federal appeals court, the Federal Trade Commission can now sue companies with lousy security. It’s incredible that it took such a long time: we trust companies with our information and so far there was no avenue to reprimand them. Finally.

And it’s not just the US who is now getting the memo that half of our lives are online: in the UK the Advertising Standards Authority reprimanded a children’s website for using peer pressure.

The Technology Review put together the biggest information breaches, á la Ashley Madison. It’s yummy! Part 1, part 2

At&T hotspots inject advertising. Gross business practice.

Ars has a great article on how quantum key distribution - which can make communication really safe - will happen via reflective satellites.

In a weirdly lucky coincidence, The Verge run a piece about a study on advertising malware days before Google announced that from September it will stop playing flash ads in Chrome.

Dubbed "malvertising," the attacks typically sneaking malicious ads onto far-reaching ad networks. The networks deliver those malware-seeded ads to popular websites, which pass them along to a portion of the visitors to the site. The attacks typically infect computers by exploiting vulnerabilities in Adobe Flash, typically triggered as soon as an ad is successfully loaded.

Google urges everyone to convert their Flash ads to HTML5.

Doc Searls has an excellent article on Apple and the adblock. iOS 9 will allow extensions that can stop tracking-based advertising, by blocking cookies. It’s a genius move, especially that Apple’s new app, News is coming to town with their own ad-publisher, iAd. Which means if advertisers will want to reach the highly profitable Apple users, they will need to go to them directly.

TOR

Ars reported a month ago on a vulnerability, using which attackers can have a 88% success rate in identifying server locations. Agora, the new Silk Road temporarily shut down.

BITTORRENT

Some genius figured out how one person can DDOS with the help of a vulnerable Bittorrent app, than it was patched. How amazing is Bittorrent for patching it and not waiting until it becomes a problem?

ASHLEY MADISON

It’s so much fun reading about the AM hack and take a quick, self-righteous shower in the Schadenfreude, until you realize that the site actually ruins lives, not to mention the hack. Yes, Avid Life Media had terrible business practices, the CEO Noel Biderman is slimy, and cheaters have little integrity, but this can never be the reason to jump on a high horse and trample over their lives.

This week, it turned out Avid Life Media hacked into a competitor’s user database, then ALM offered $500,000 for any information on Impact Team, the hacker(s?) claiming responsibility for the attack (Brian Krebs has an idea). Class action lawsuits have already been launched, and ALM is meanwhile trying to (ab)use DCMA requests to take down sites popping up with queriable databases. (Don’t, under any circumstances, download the data, it can have consequences.)

WINDOWS 10

After just a month of availability, Win10 is on 75 M computers, even though it’s privacy settings are simply terrible. I know that this is an abused line, but If you are not paying for it, you really become the product. Microsoft did go around it in a pretty brazen way, too, by getting users to agree to their privacy policy while installing the software. Unless you go to advanced and click it out, Microsoft will gather your location, browser history, and pretty much everything you do online. In a really creepy way, it can also disable pirated games, software or hacked hardware - because you agree to the software to make changes when installing it.

TaskRabbit co-founder is launching a 401k platform, which is ironic, because most who work TaskRabbit can’t really allow a 401(k) plan :)

Microsoft came up with a gadget that can turn the iPhone camera into a 3D scanner. It also stopped using its own machine learning API after their fateful, but hilarious age-telling thingy, and now uses Intel Real Sense 3D cameras for Win 10 biometric authentication.

Google will add Instagram #foodporn pictures to Maps. I think a lot about why now we place so much emphasis on food - it seems like 50% of all conversations millenials have is about this. I think it’s equal parts elitism and Eve Turow’s hypothesis that this is the one thing we feel like we have control over. Google is also making it’s cloud service partly open source, so it can get closer to enterprises. I will now save them hundreds of thousands of dollars: no enterprise will want to use anything they want to offer until they fix their privacy issues and brick up on security. Why would they ask they developers to work with the opensource code to do something, if they can just buy a cloud service for cheaper than the dev’s hours?

I’m glad we had this talk.

Über has the following:

new services (buses, more people in one car... it will not shake the word, even if approx. 4000 sites reported on it)

a new cooperation with the University of Arizona on self-driving cars. They’ll be legal in 3 years, so it was high time to get on it.

$1bn funding in China.

No for a real thing: Intel introduced it’s smallest socketed form factor yet, 5x5 inch, 65W, 128 MB eDRAM. You can actually develop software on it, or do graphics. It’s really good news: unless there is development in this field, virtual reality casquets will never get to households. Last weekend Intel also had it’s Developer Forum, where they gave sign that they’ll be the ones to put chips in humans. Here, if you’re so inclined. In the meantime, Microsoft is turning from GPU to FPGAs, field-programmable gate arrays, basically programmable chips to make deep learning more effective.

Intel also just invested $60M in a Chinese drone company - third drone company they invest in.

There is a new touchpad with 20,000 sensors which can understand up to 16 touches at once, and thus can be used as a pino, or even canvas.

Nevertheless, death is unavoidable.

Concussion blood tests are coming soon.

Rovio just laid off 260 employees.

Facebook is testing a digital assistant called M in Messenger. In a genius move, they previously made Messenger available for even those who don’t have a FB profile. Though digital assistants make me feel the same way as smartwatches do (I understand tech companies suffer from fear of missing out, too, but, seriously.), FastCoDesign points out M’s role will probably be to help users shop. Which is a solid business move.

In Europe, financial startups are gaining ground: Swedish iZettle, a payment service will start its landing program, and raised $67M for it. It really just goes to show recovery in Europe was not successful in the traditional ways.

I really think the best indicator of how scary the Chinese Black Monday was is Tim Cook’s foot-in-the-mouth by writing Jim Cramer a note about how their growth is still strong in China. This was obviously crazy: Cramer is at the helm of a trust fund that owns Apple stock, so the Securities and Exchange Commission would be right to go after him for not keeping himself to the Fair Disclosure regulation. The fact that he would even do this suggests this was a very hasty decision which did not go through legal.

Then again, this TechCrunch chart that shows how the tech giant stocks fell and climbed back on Monday is a bit suggestive of the panic that must have been going down in the headquarters:

Don't get me wrong though: if I were an Apple investor, Cook's reaction - which for me signifies the fear that their operations have not really a place to grow to - would be more scary than the Black Monday itself. Then again, it might be because I just switched to Android? (Life without iTunes is freedom like I have never known before.)

What caused it all?

The Economist called it two weeks ago, when China devalued its currency, and pointed out that even if it's 2%, it's still significant for the world's most important exporter. The exports are also falling, as China is slowly trying to switch to consumption-based economy. There was also a huge up when the Chinese stockmarket blew up, and investors started buying shares with borrowed money (more about debt-fuelled investment here). Also, the government could not nip the crisis in the bud (hence the devaluation), which went on to become a vicious circle of distrust and volatility. They have been criticised for not taking steps to stimulate bank lending. Over the weekend, they did allow for pension funds to buy shares, but it was too little, too late. But, I mean

Everybody picked up the story of how Chinese media kept Black Monday under the rugs and tried to shush it on the internets.In another beautiful coincidence, not long after that Chinese state media published an op-ed about being the biggest democracy in the world, instead of India. Then India turned off mobile internet because they had protests in the Ahmedabad region. This has not much to do with Black Monday (well, the fact that the investment market works with state-provided information probably has a lot to do with it), it’s just a poignant show of how every country is terrible.

The receipts?

Other than the US semi-overreacting (which is basically what all analysts say, at the same time, mmm, did they though? investors will turn to the US or Switzerland for what they consider to be stable currencies, and last time the US had an access of cash so real estate prices could go nice and up it worked out so well, really) - what we should be paying attention to are the developing markets, especially Indonesia and Zambia, and the oil-producing countries.

CHARTS!!!!!

Once, there was a small country called Germany which bankrolled the EU and its biggest trade partner was China. (That’s the EU top trading partners above, from this pdf.) I mean Merkel has to deal with half of the EU ministers clamoring for some new Holy Wars because they have no idea how to deal with approximately 10 000 refugees arriving daily to EU territory, and now this shit.

The Chinese stock market fall also pushed down the price of crude oil, which was already fairly law ever since the Gulf princes sat down and decided that the whole shelling oil industry will just not do. They have enough oil to be able to undercut the shelling industry, which needs a fairly high capital/barrel to work, so they can sit it out.

China is also such a large buyer of industrial commodities that aluminium and copper prices will go down, as the BBC points out.

When it comes to investments, China is counting on $100 billion to Africa by 2020. If its economy slows down, as the recent trade downturn signals, what will that cause? In South Africa, the rand hit an all-time low against the dollar after the Chinese market slump. (In a lovely coincidence, China signed an $4.3 bn deal in Nigeria (which has been hit hard by the falling oil prices) to build cement factories two days later.) (Quartz has a very poignant article about how China gives no damn about whether the country it’s investing in has a strong rule of law, only about political stability. It’s choke-full of numbers - China is present in 49 African countries with over 4000 projects. It also corroborates The Economist’s podcast’s views on how China is shifting to services.)

The US is also not likely to raise interest rates after this, even though it led markets to believe they will do so in September. That, in all probability, will not blow up in our faces.

The GOP in the US also had a field day with Black Monday, most entertaining was Scott Walker’s call to Obama to cancel his meeting with Xi Jinping. Slate explained why Walker is at least populistic with this move, or worse, stupid.

Super exciting security news:

- North-Korea: everybody is talking about the new cyber warfare, but you too, can be a part of it, and shut down the interwebz in North Korea, with just a little help from your friends/$30. - Fingerprint-faking DIY tips were coming from Jan Krissler, who copied the German Defense Minister's fingerprints using a couple of high-res photographs. This is significant on many levels: can we still trust fingerprint as a decisive proof? Can we go on and use security systems that had fingerprint-reading as a frontier? (Krissler also proved that both the iPhone and facial recognition systems can be outsmarted. No news yet on whether Krissler got hired to the German Security Forces.) - Google getting dangerously close at monitoring everything:while it's wonderful that now they can match all house numbers they recorded in France to their geolocation within an hour WITHOUT HUMAN INTERACTION, teaching machines to understand their surroundings is exactly what Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking have nightmares about. The MIT article goes to lengths explaining how they use an 11-level neural sytsem, which is fed 200,000 numbers for 6 days, which are in turn are used as adaptive weights.

Freedom of information

- Marriott is forbidding its customers to use their own wifi hotspots in their hotels, claiming it's a security threat for them. While that is undoubtedly true, it is also a security threat for users to join a public wifi, not to mention that their http requests would probably be seen by the hotel, which can be seen as a breach into the guests' privacy. Their request is also against Federal law. Google filed an opposition to the FCC on the matter.

How stuff works

- Adblock is actually making your computer slower, because it uses up 4MB of RAM just by running in the background. As websites have more iframes (the annoying social media widgets), ABP's block list simply grows too large. ExtremeTech's Sebastian Anthony writes that he stopped using ABP a long time ago, because free websites live off advertising, which is my credo as well. - The more you use smartphones, the more active the part of your brain, which is associated with your thumb, becomes. This is so unsurprising it's slowly crawled its way into being not even news.

Data

- Google now has public data directory, which lets you see so much info in one place, as well as presenting it beautifully. In the name of all data nerds, I kinda got a boner for this.

Business

Whenever I want to feel like a slacker I just go to "Show HN".

Not that I need to, I mean I learned a lot about candy over christmas :(

okay

Perhaps reflecting on a personal achievement makes people feel confident enough to view their group in an unflattering light. Meanwhile, reminding people of the pride they take in their group may make them more defensive and less open.

SECURITY

IT World explored how the weakest link in the security of any organization is human weakness.

„Security experts used fake Facebook and LinkedIn profiles pretending to represent a smart, attractive young woman to penetrate the defenses of a U.S. government agency with a high level of cybersecurity awareness, as part of an exercise that shows how effective social engineering attacks can be, even against technically sophisticated organizations.”

Also, it turns out US intelligence agencies have their own Twitter. There is so much I would give to be able to read it just once.

Vulnerabilities in Microsoft and Office – lock your doors and don’t open attachments, because Indian (and other) groups are targeting the way Microsoft code processes TIFF images. Exciting article with great links.

Once we are on the topic of Microsoft: last week there was some talk about how IE is still the browser with the most users – it seems like in some places, like South Korea, laws are part of the problem. In the country where online shopping is huge, the authentication needed to make purchases above $280 is tied to ActiveX, which is made by Microsoft. On mobile devices, there are special security apps. In a way, this makes me wonder whether the judicial background made it possible for South Korea to become this big in e-commerce.

TWITTER

Last week I was on the point of turning off notifications for any news with the word IPO in it. There were three of them though which were worth the read:

-          AdAge points out some big problems Twitter faces – having a niche audience, not creating content, only meta-content, etc.

-          Facebook was trying really hard to buy Twitter. Facebook, friendly piece of advice: leave the teens alone, make an email service for them, but leave them, and concentrate on your new market: those above 40.

-          „Last month a Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 36 percent of people who joined Twitter say they don’t use it”(Technology Review)

PRIVACY

Tesco gas stations int he UK now personalize ads based on face-recognition software. The Atlantic put together a list of other projects based on facial recognition which will make you consider the beauties of living in the woods, far from civilization.

Scramble is an open-source encrypted mail that has a wonderful description on what is wrong with encryption and a bit of cryptography. Great read, if you’re in the US, do sign up.

Scramble’s description already touched on what was wrong with Lavabit, but Thought Catalogue also has a well-written critique of the service.

THE FUTURE OF BROWSERS

Starting in January, Google's Chrome browser will not allow you to install extensions that aren't hosted in Google's own Chrome Web Store. While Google had..

This Monday, Prezi put together the first Budapest IT Security meetupfor „everyone interested in security”. First, let me just say a huge thank you for both throwing the event (there was beer and pizza!) and making it open for everyone (beer and pizza! I was excited about that). Many of these meetups tend to be exclusive boys’ clubs where everyone knows everyone, it’s great they opened up for a wider audience.

The two presenters were Balazs Bucsay, Ethical Hacking Engineer at Vodafone and Mihaly Zagoff from Prezi’s IT security team. Both presentations were very exciting while showing two totally different sides of the same field.

Balázs’s topic was „It is not the crypto that makes a code secure" (let me TL;Dr it: it's how you implement it). He talked about breaking into a Nagios-like software, which uses active monitoring, servers querying the nodes and traffic encryption, like Nagios does. Balázs basically walked the audience through step-by-step on how they managed to decrypt the software, which was exactly the kind of thing I went to the meetup for (let’s decrypt all the softwares!). They basically sniffed the traffic, saw it was Base 64 (fairly easy, includes the entire alphabet, equal signs appear at the end, etc), and then looked for crypto algorithms within it with the help open source softwares. They then used the application in a basic waty(with the configs grabbed from the server), and after a couple of hours, they found the key hardcoded into the binary. They then used the same algorithm that they found from the Base 64 encrypted traffic in Hex-Rays (C formatting) – by that time, they knew what the key was and with what algorithm was used to encrypt.

Now what?

They had the key, had the encryption algorithm (Blowfish) – but they went ahead and checked to see if there was any more stuff left hardcoded in the binary. They made clear text from the sniffed binary data, which meant that they were at their most powerful: if they modify that script, encrypt it again, and then send it back to the nodes, they can run any type of commands in the server.

What was screwed up?

DO NOT HARDCODE YOUR KEY. That was a big morale of Balázs’s presentation. First, use asymmetric cryptography, to encode your key (have one private that only the server knows, and one public), and then you can use symmetric encoding, such as Blowfish, to encrypt your traffic.

What we learnt

- Don’t implement code, if you don’t know what you’re doing.

- Do test software before you buy it and have amazing warranties.

- Also, did I mention the part about NOT HARDCODING YOUR KEY?

  Mihály’s presentation was slightly less technical but still very instructive. Prezi has a bugbounty program going on, and Mihály basically showed the backstage of the program. His presentation was captivating because he was really excited that the program is taking place, about the number of submissions they received and about Prezi itself.

Mihály introduced the security team at Prezi, and how their goal was creating scalable security – when a company grows as fast as Prezi did, they can’t just keep doing penetration testing.

The bugbounty program’s principle originated from Mozilla, who in 2004 introduced the concept. Since then, a number of other companies started to allow with hat researchers to test your app, the latest-most famous Google with the open source projects.

As I mentioned, Mihály had faith in the program: according to him, everyone wins, as you learn from it, know about any problem ASAP, and you can postmorterm your way about how they could have spotted it before. He claimed it was not more risky than any given day int he jungle: the bad guys were always there. They prepared to be monitoring and follow the attacks real time (which, in the first couple of days, when submission peaked, was impossible), but they did track using Kibana. They also knew from their issue history that there will be unavoidable attack – cross-site request forgeries and JSONP, to mention two they counted on happening. What they learnt is that CSRF can be really bad, and that DOM based XSS will happen, if you don’t sanitize all your input. Mihály mentioned that XSS was the most common attack they experienced, but they also had a phishing attack (which I’m not sure was in the scope of the program?). Prezi also continued with its transparency decision: the finding (with timestamps) were put up on Github. What was unexpected to me was that these gists they put up for educational reasons (and in order not to have the same attacks happen multiple times) were hard to put in a way that shows enough info, but not too much.

In the first 12 days, they found 21 issues, 18 of which has already been solved (which is an amazing percentage). Interestingly, Mihály said the biggest change that the program brought with itself was within the company culture – system devs are now more concerned about security, because they know „someone is always watching”. After the presentations, Mihály told me that hopefully, in the future they might do the same program with their smartphone app as well, which I’m really excited about, because then I can pull a 301 Move Permanently Status Code abuse on them we don’t talk about app security enough.

Foil hat

THERE WILL BE A NEW EMAIL PROTOCOL A NEW EMAIL PROTOCOL A NEW EMAIL PROTOCOL that I’m way too excited about, because, as Jon Callas, CTO of the Silent Circle said: „E-mail was designed 40 years ago when everybody on the Internet knew each other and were friends” It shall be more secure and private. Read it, live it, love it, and fund it on Kickstarter when the campaign starts.

TechCrunch reported on an Uruguay startup, Truly.am, that uses the SkyBiometry Facial Recognition API in such way that once you upload a picture of a given email address’ owner, the owner can prove that it’s their picture by letting their webcam take a number of pictures of them. Who wants to make bets on how much time it’ll take until Google/Facebook/Match.com buys the service and makes it obligatory for its users?

After the news on how your Facebook statuses give away information on your age, race, and sex, it turns out data mining can point to who you are romantically involved with.

„It turns out that if one of your Facebook friends—let’s call him Joe—has mutual friends that touch disparate areas of your life, and those mutual friends are themselves not extensively connected, it’s a strong clue that Joe is either your romantic partner or one of your closest personal friends.”

If you put your data in someone else’s hands (or app), they will make money of it. InfoScout „entic[ed] people to anonymously upload all their receipts via their smartphones”, analyzed the data, and now sells it to marketers. If I had to choose, InfoScout still seems better than most other services, as they actually pay customers for the uploading – ReceiptHog pays coins redeemable via PayPal or Amazon gift cards, while Shoparoo turns the receipts into donations, which just seems amazing for me – InfoScout just covered all the consumer desires, be them materialistic or charitable.

The awkward moment, when news about the Mavericks OS spread that the iSight camera is always on (because if there is movement in front of it, it will not go idle), but then realizing, it’s not the camera, but the light sensor to the left of the camera, that senses movement, and everyone lets out a relieved breath, only to realize later on, that it doesn’t really matter, because the fact is, it could have been the camera.

Tech

So remember how last week everyone was talking about Douglas Hofstadter, „The Man who Would Teach Machines to Think”, and how the expression „artificial intelligence” became corrupted, as people started to use it to signal that they would use problems intelligently (see: Siri), but really, it meant making human thinking into a software, basically? Good news for Mr. Hofstadter, AI company Vicarious just used „an old idea of using an artificial neural network that is modeled on the brain and builds connections between artificial neurons” to break CAPTCHAs with the success rate of 90-99%. While Vicarious is not the first to break CAPTCHAs (list of others), it certainly is the scariest:

„Vicarious hopes to eventually sell systems that can easily extract text and numbers from images (such as in Google’s Street View maps), diagnose diseases by checking out medical images, or let you know how many calories you’re about to eat by looking at your lunch. “Anything people do with their eyes right now is something we aim to be able to automate,” says cofounder D. Scott Phoenix.”

Or I have just been reading „The Circle” by Dave Eggers too much.

Umm, your wireless could double its speed soon.

„Kumu built an extremely fast circuit that can predict, moment by moment, how much interference a radio’s transmitter is about to create, and then generates a compensatory signal to cancel it out. The circuit generates a new signal with each packet of data sent, making it possible to work even in mobile devices, where the process of canceling signals is more complex because the objects they bounce off are constantly changing.”

More cat videos!

Some IE hate

IE is still the web browser with the most users (yet not with the most usage – that’s Chrome). While some cry sad tears over this, we must not forget that Windows XP (that 1 in 4 PCs still run – if you wanna cry about something, this might be the time) will not allow any IE above IE 8 to run. Why is that bad? Because many, many companies are really invested in Microsoft products, and they will have IE as the „natural choice”. Troy Hunt (whose amazing blog continues to be amazing) gives a wonderful explanation of why big corporations should suck it up and change from XP.

It was also a good week, if you like to see marketers freak out (who doesn’t?)

… as Google started to limit the information publishers would see about their keywords. Honestly, I feel like it might lead to better content, as publishers will be less able to play the algorithms. So we will see how the new buzzword, OAO (Online Audience Optimization) will work out.

The Bubble We Live in

Snapchat is valued between 3 and 4 billion dollars. Tencent, a Chinese media holding might buy it, but no one is really sure why. Washington Post guesses it would add Snapchat to its offerings.

SCIENCE

The International Prototype Kilogram (against which 39 other copies are measured) is changing its weight, and no one knows why. As four out of seven SI measurements are underpinned by the kilogram, this is less than ideal. Scientists are trying to pinpoint Planck's constant to make sure that the kilo can be measured by something else than a physical artifact, but it might take up to 2018 to figure that out.

Tl;Dr: can you believe that there is actually a prototype kilogram, and the kilo is not something constant? I had no idea.

USB standards are changing (the world). Next year, by a new USB Power Delivery Standard will come out, changing the amount of watts possibly transferable via USB into 100 (from the 10 that is currently in place). Why is that so important?

it can revive the cause of Direct Current (DC), which, unlike Alternating Current (AC), do not run day and night: "This is where USB cables come in. They carry direct current and also data. That means they can help set priorities between devices that are providing power and those that are consuming it: for example, a laptop that is charging a mobile phone. “The computer can say ‘I need to start the hard disk now, so no charging for the next ten seconds’,” says Mr Bhatt."

DC is much better with solar panels.

It is also safer: if you pool supply, a "smart grid" is more resilient to peak time power outages.

The big roll-out is expected to happen in 2015, but the article notes that big data servers are already using DC, which is super surprising (well, for me).

And not so much as news, but there is a wonderful essay over at the Atlantic on what Artificial Intelligence used to mean (exploring the human mind) and what it means now (solving human problems intelligently with the help of big data). It is also a marvelous piece of writing and look into the brain of Douglas Hofstadter. Highly recommended.

AUTOMATION Another fantastic piece of writing on The Atlantic (which also mentions the Jeopardy-trumping IBM supercomputer) is by Nicholas Carr on how automation is changing our lives (for the worse, of course, not a surprise if you read his book).

A labor-saving device doesn’t just provide a substitute for some isolated component of a job or other activity It alters the character of the entire task, including the roles, attitudes, and skills of the people taking part.

It is worth a read, especially his points on the best practices of software development (switching control back to humans, making people perform challenging tasks. etc), as “it is humanly impossible to carry out the basic function of monitoring for unlikely abnormalities” (Tell that to my boss.)

As a tie-in of the topic to privacy, Evgeny Morozov also had an essay at the Techonology Review on how big data is endangering democracy, and what could be done.

Instead of getting more context for decisions, we would get less; instead of seeing the logic driving our bureaucratic systems and making that logic more accurate and less Kafkaesque, we would get more confusion because decision making was becoming automated and no one knew how exactly the algorithms worked. We would perceive a murkier picture of what makes our social institutions work; despite the promise of greater personalization and empowerment, the interactive systems would provide only an illusion of more participation. As a result, “interactive systems … suggest individual activity where in fact no more than stereotyped reactions occur.”

And how does that work in real life? For example, it might be algorithms that decide how much screening you will receive at airports:

Critics argue that the problem with what the agency calls an “intelligence-driven, risk-based analysis” of passenger data is that secret computer rules, not humans, make these determinations. Civil liberties groups have questioned whether the agency has the legal authority to make these assessments, which the T.S.A. has claimed in Federal Register notices and privacy disclosures about the initiative. Privacy advocates have also disputed whether computer algorithms can accurately predict terrorist intent.

PRIVACY

Kenneth Lipp reported from 120th Annual Meeting of the International Association of Chiefs of Police that 86.1% of law enforcement agencies use social media for investigative purposes, and that soon Facebook will be able to block any "user from the social media platform by account, Internet location, and device" "if it is determined they have posted what is deemed criminal content".