- These Glasses Thwart Facial Recognition Software (Slate) — good idea, but don’t forget to put a stone in your shoe to thwart gait recognition too.
- opsec for Hackers (Slideshare) — how boring and unexciting most of not getting caught is.
- DHS Warns Password Cracker Targeting Industrial Networks (Nextgov) — Security consultants recently concluded that there are about 7,200 Internet-facing critical infrastructure devices, many of which use default passwords. Wake me when you stop boggling. Welcome to the Internet of Insecure Things (it’s basically the Internet we already have, but Borat can pwn your hydro dam and your fridge is telling Chinese milspec hackers when you midnight snack).
- The Evolution of Steve Mann’s Apparatus (Beta Knowledge) — wearable computing went from “makes you look like a robot who will never get laid” to “looks like sunglasses and promiscuity is an option”.
"computer vision" entries
Thwarting Facial Recognition Software, Operations Security, Password Cracking SCADA Systems, and Wearables Evolved
Deblurring Images, Games Design, Secure Control, and Faster Emulation
- Restoration of Defocused and Blurry Images — impressive demos, and open source (GPLv3) code. All those blurred faces and documents no longer seem so safe.
- Peter Molyneux Profile in Wired — worth reading for: (a) Molyneux’s contribution to the genre; (b) the inspiration he drew from his satirical Twitter mirror (@PeterMolydeux) is lovely, and (c) the game jams to build the fake Molyneux games, where satire becomes reality. (via Andy Baio)
- Trusted Computing for Industrial Control Systems — Kaspersky reveals plans for an open source O/S for industrial control systems, so reactors and power stations and traffic systems aren’t vulnerable to StuxNet-type attacks. (via Jim Stogdill)
- Android Virtual Machines — faster emulation for testing than the traditional simulators.
CV Camouflage, Best Practices, Failure Conference, and Fiber Lessons
- Urban Camouflage Workshop — Most of the day was spent crafting urban camouflage intended to hide the wearer from the Kinect computer vision system. By the end of the workshop we understood how to dress to avoid detection for the three different Kinect formats. (via Beta Knowledge)
- Starting a Django Project The Right Way (Jeff Knupp) — I wish more people did this: it’s not enough to learn syntax these days. Projects live in a web of best practices for source code management, deployment, testing, and migrations.
- FailCon — a one-day conference for technology entrepreneurs, investors, developers and designers to study their own and others’ failures and prepare for success. Figure out how to learn from failures—they’re far more common than successes. (via Krissy Mo)
- Google Fiber in the Real World (Giga Om) — These tests show one of the limitations of Google’s Fiber network: other services. Since Google Fiber is providing virtually unheard of speeds for their subscribers, companies like Apple and I suspect Hulu, Netflix and Amazon will need to keep up. Are you serving DSL speeds to fiber customers? (via Jonathan Brewer)
Jan Erik Solem describes elements and useful tools for computer vision
In this interview, Jan Erik Solem, author of the upcoming book "Programming Computer Vision with Python," describes the uses for some common operations, and choices programmers have.
Internet Cafe Culture, Image Processing, Library Mining, and MediaWiki Parsing
- Chinese Internet Cafes (Bryce Roberts) — a good quick read. My note: people valued the same things in Internet cafes that they value in public libraries, and the uses are very similar. They pose a similar threat to the already-successful, which is why public libraries are threatened in many Western countries.
- SIFT — the Scale Invariant Feature Transform library, built on OpenCV, is a method to detect distinctive, invariant image feature points, which easily can be matched between images to perform tasks such as object detection and recognition, or to compute geometrical transformations between images. The licensing seems dodgy–MIT code but lots of “this isn’t a license to use the patent!” warnings in the LICENSE file. (via Joshua Schachter)
- The Secret Life of Libraries (Guardian) — I like the idea of the most-stolen-books revealing something about a region; it’s an aspect of data revealing truth. For a while, Terry Pratchett was the most-shoplifted author in England but newspapers rarely carried articles about him or mentioned his books (because they were genre fiction not “real” literature). (via Brian Flaherty)
- Sweble — MediaWiki parser library. Until today, Wikitext had been poorly defined. There was no grammar, no defined processing rules, and no defined output like a DOM tree based on a well defined document object model. This is to say, the content of Wikipedia is stored in a format that is not an open standard. The format is defined by 5000 lines of php code (the parse function of MediaWiki). That code may be open source, but it is incomprehensible to most. That’s why there are 30+ failed attempts at writing alternative parsers. (via Dirk Riehle)
Long Tail, Copyright vs Preservation, Diminished Reality, and Augmented Data
- Mechanical Turk Requester Activity: The Insignificance of the Long Tail — For Wikipedia we have the 1% rule, where 1% of the contributors (this is 0.003% of the users) contribute two thirds of the content. In the Causes application on Facebook, there are 25 million users, but only 1% of them contribute a donation. […] The lognormal distribution of activity, also shows that requesters increase their participation exponentially over time: They post a few tasks, they get the results. If the results are good, they increase by a percentage the size of the tasks that they post next time. This multiplicative behavior is the basic process that generates the lognormal distribution of activity.
- Copyright Destroying Historic Audio — so says the Library of Congress. Were copyright law followed to the letter, little audio preservation would be undertaken. Were the law strictly enforced, it would brand virtually all audio preservation as illegal. Copyright laws related to preservation are neither strictly followed nor strictly enforced. Consequently, some audio preservation is conducted.
- Diminished Reality (Ray Kurzweil) — removes objects from video in real time. Great name, “diminished reality”. (via Andy Baio)
- Data Enrichment Service — using linked government data to augment text with annotations and links. (via Jo Walsh on Twitter)
- Interview with Marcin Wichary (Ajaxian) — interview with the creator of Google’s Pacman logo, the original HTML5 slide deck. One of the first popular home video game consoles was 1977’s Atari VCS 2600. It was an incredibly simple piece of hardware. It didn’t even have video memory – you literally had to construct pixels just moments before they were handed to the electron gun. It was designed for very specific, trivial games: two players, some bullets and a very sparse background. All the launch games looked like that. But within five years, companies figured out how to make games like Pitfall, which were much, much cooler and more sophisticated. Here’s the kicker: if you were to take those games, go back in time, and show them even to the *creators* of VCS, I bet they would tell you “Naah, it’s impossible to do that. The hardware we just put together won’t ever be able to handle this.” Likewise, if you were to take Google Maps or iPhone Web apps, take your deLorean to 1991 and show them to Tim Berners-Lee, he’d be all like “get the hell out of here.” (via Russ Weakley)
- Liberating Lives — The historian Tim Hitchcock, behind projects such as the Old Bailey Online and London Lives, has reflected on the impact of digitisation on our access to archives. Archives, he notes, tend to reflect the assumptions and practices of the institutions that created them. But by providing new ways into these records systems, technology can undermine the power relations that persist within their structures. Read the entire post, which has a moving description of the bureaucracy of Australia’s racism and the modern-day projects built on it. (via spanishmanners on Twitter)
- Deblurring Images — interesting research work reconstructing original scenes from blurred images. (via anselm on Twitter)
- 50 Years of Cyborgs: I Have Not the Words (Quinn Norton) — We need language that lets us talk about the terrorism of little changes. Be they good or bad, they are terrible in aggregate. Thought-provoking essay pushing our ideas of change, future, technology, and culture until they break. (via kevinmarks on Twitter)
Python Reasoning, Learning the Right Way, Curated Folksonomy, Arduino Image Correction
- FuXi — Python-based, bi-directional logical reasoning system for the semantic web from the folks at the Open Knowledge Foundation. (via About Inferencing)
- Harness the Power of Being an Idiot — I learn by trying to build something, there’s no other way I can discover the devils-in-the-details. Unfortunately that’s an incredibly inefficient way to gain knowledge. I basically wander around stepping on every rake in the grass, while the A Students memorize someone else’s route and carefully pick their way across the lawn without incident. My only saving graces are that every now and again I discover a better path, and faced with a completely new lawn I have an instinct for where the rakes are.
- Stack Overflow’s Curated Folksonomy — community-driven tag synonym system to reduce the chaos of different names for the same thing. (via Skud)
- Image Deblurring using Inertial Measurement Sensors (Microsoft Research) — using Arduino to correct motion blur. (via Jon Oxer)