Mark Gibbs
Author Archives: Mark Gibbs
- Home → Author's archive:
Mark Gibbs
0
Bigfoot data: Disney patent to track visitors by their shoes
We are truly in the era of all-encompassing analytics. Today, everything you click on, everything you post, where you go, what you purchase, and who you’re connected to are all data points to be captured, categorized, cross-indexed, tabulated, and analyzed. “O! M! G!” you may be muttering “Will surveillance never end?” Sure it will end. When hell freezes over. Nope, the surveillance cat is out of the bag, the monitoring pigeon has flown the coup, and the privacy bridge has been burnt. Welcome to the future. As if to underline that reality, the latest foray into quantifying you, has just been patented by Disney. In a recent filing titled System and method using foot recognition to create a customized guest experience, the company that bought you “a people trap run by a rat” (I kid you with love, Disney) has raised (lowered?) the bar on knowing who you are by proposing that they will track you by looking at ... wait for it ... your footwear.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
0
Bigfoot data: Disney patent to track visitors by their shoes
We are truly in the era of all-encompassing analytics. Today, everything you click on, everything you post, where you go, what you purchase, and who you’re connected to are all data points to be captured, categorized, cross-indexed, tabulated, and analyzed. “O! M! G!” you may be muttering “Will surveillance never end?” Sure it will end. When hell freezes over. Nope, the surveillance cat is out of the bag, the monitoring pigeon has flown the coup, and the privacy bridge has been burnt. Welcome to the future. As if to underline that reality, the latest foray into quantifying you, has just been patented by Disney. In a recent filing titled System and method using foot recognition to create a customized guest experience, the company that bought you “a people trap run by a rat” (I kid you with love, Disney) has raised (lowered?) the bar on knowing who you are by proposing that they will track you by looking at ... wait for it ... your footwear.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
0
Initial State, powerful data capture and analytics for your IoT infrastructure
A few posts ago I reviewed Cayenne, an IoT Platform as a Service (PaaS) solution that really impressed me. Today, I have a sort of competing service that has also impresses me: Initial State. But where Cayenne focusses on device management with support for shutting down, rebooting, configuration, and remote access, Initial State, is focussed on event data capture and analytics and ignores the device control aspect. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
0
StayblCam, a cheap way to improve your crappy video technique
The explosion of videos created by consumers using smartphones and action cams has been astounding but one thing is obvious: Most of the footage is terrible. It seems that to many people the concept of framing their subject is a an alien concept and the value of a smooth tracking shot pretty much unknown (it seems that way too many videos we see were shot by people suffering from uncontrollable seizures). Perhaps one day smartphone and action cam video systems will have built-in AI that will frame shots expertly as they automatically compensate for the shaking but until then, anyone who wants to produce decent video footage needs to get the right tools and techniques.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
0
Big data paper shows stock market trades behave like light bulbs
In the stock market, electronic trading (AKA “etrading”) originally started so people could buy and sell stocks and other financial instruments more easily. No more hanging out on the floor of a stock exchange or calling your orders into your broker; you could do it all from your desktop. This was good because it made markets more accessible and reduced costs.Then, in the 1980’s, because the electronic trading platforms had application programming interfaces to allow new client-side interfaces to be developed, the inevitable happened, the next generation of electronic trading appeared. Algorithmic trading (AKA “algo trading” or “black box trading”) removed humans from the equation and exploded as the latest, greatest stock market money-making strategy. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
0
Big data paper shows stock market trades behave like light bulbs
In the stock market, electronic trading (AKA “etrading”) originally started so people could buy and sell stocks and other financial instruments more easily. No more hanging out on the floor of a stock exchange or calling your orders into your broker; you could do it all from your desktop. This was good because it made markets more accessible and reduced costs.Then, in the 1980’s, because the electronic trading platforms had application programming interfaces to allow new client-side interfaces to be developed, the inevitable happened, the next generation of electronic trading appeared. Algorithmic trading (AKA “algo trading” or “black box trading”) removed humans from the equation and exploded as the latest, greatest stock market money-making strategy. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
0
Enterprise encryption adoption up, but the devil’s in the details
I was talking about security with a good friend of mine who runs a software development company. He’s a really smart, technology-savvy guy but his take on encryption wasn’t positive. While he completely understands the need, he hates encryption (and security in general) because he says it always gets in the way when he’s trying to get work done. In this respect, I don’t think he’s that different from most people in the high tech world or, indeed, in the business world in general. This general dislike of encryption is because encryption doesn’t seem valuable when it’s a virtual speed bump in the road to getting stuff done and its benefits, despite the huge increase in breaches and hacking, are hard to quantify. So, with the exception of the paranoid and security geeks, encryption has traditionally been seen as a belt added to the braces of other simpler and therefore more tolerable security measures.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
0
Enterprise encryption adoption up, but the devil’s in the details
I was talking about security with a good friend of mine who runs a software development company. He’s a really smart, technology-savvy guy but his take on encryption wasn’t positive. While he completely understands the need, he hates encryption (and security in general) because he says it always gets in the way when he’s trying to get work done. In this respect, I don’t think he’s that different from most people in the high tech world or, indeed, in the business world in general. This general dislike of encryption is because encryption doesn’t seem valuable when it’s a virtual speed bump in the road to getting stuff done and its benefits, despite the huge increase in breaches and hacking, are hard to quantify. So, with the exception of the paranoid and security geeks, encryption has traditionally been seen as a belt added to the braces of other simpler and therefore more tolerable security measures.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
0
ChefSteps’ Joule: Food meets tech. Result? Delicious!
When I’m not writing about technology or playing wi-, er, testing software or hardware, I cook. Food and cooking are two of my passions and one of the worst things about being in the tech world is that cooking usually has to take second place. Today, however, I have the pleasure of combining tech with my culinary pursuits as I recently got my hands on a really cool cooking device that’s Bluetooth and Wi-Fi enabled and controlled by a smartphone app. The device is an immersion circulator called Joule that was developed by one of my favorite foodie resources, ChefSteps. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
0
OS X code names for US election candidates
Code names for operating systems have become “de rigeur” in the industry but, as far as I can figure out, it wasn’t until 2001 after Apple’s marketing people started using code names as part of their branding (OS X "Cheetah”) that other OS vendors adopted the practice. Note that it wasn’t that other companies didn’t have code names for their products, it was just that they just didn’t use them as part of product marketing until Apple did (for example, how many people know that Windows XP was code named “Whistler”?).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
0
Houston, we have code!
Did you know that the computer that coordinated the Apollo 11 mission that landed on the moon, the Apollo Guidance Computer, had about 0.08 percent of the processing power of an iPhone 5s? That it had just 2K of RAM and ran at 1.024MHz and its external signaling ran at 512Khz ? That it had only four 16-bit registers and 32KB of storage? Despite having so little power, the AGC guided the Apollo 11 mission across more than 221,000 miles of space to land on the moon then brought them back again. Amazing. And check out the AGC's user interface:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
0
Cayenne, how to manage a frustration of IoT devices
Collective nouns are fascinating. You start with the basics — a flock of seagulls, a herd of buffalo, a school of fish, an army of ants — then you move on to the more interesting ones — a lodge of beaver, a mob of kangaroos, a warren of rabbits, a covey of grouse. Now we come to the truly great collective nouns: An unkindness of ravens, a murder of crows, a parliament of owls, an implausibility of gnus, an ambush of tigers, and a descent of woodpeckers. We also have collective nouns for things: A box of crayons, a pad of paper, and so on. There are also the invented collective nouns; a purchase of senators, a deficit of economists, a shortage of dwarves, and for all you GoT fans, a weyr of dragons (okay, so that was made up by Anne McCaffrey but it works even better for GoT). To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
0
Nexar, turning your smartphone into a dash cam with crowdsourced smarts
I’ve tested a few dash cams in the last year (for example the Swann DriveEye and the Papago GOSAFE 520) and I’ve been impressed. Even if you’re not planning to capture the next meteor screaming over your town and shattering windows for miles around, it’s a great hedge against fraudulent insurance claims against you and terrific documentation for any road travel incidents you might have. But as with all technology, while there’s a lot of value in point application, when the point data is aggregated and treated as Big Data, amazing opportunities and insights emerge … which is exactly what comes from turning your iPhone into an ultra-sophisticated dash cam with the Nexar app.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
0
Automotive cybersecurity; what we don’t hack will probably be used to kill us
Car hacking is not only a “thing” but it's also a thing that’s in its early days and because there’s the potential for exploits with serious and quite possibly life-threatening consequences, automotive cybersecurity is something we should all be very concerned about. Just imagine your own car traveling at speed and having your ability to steer, alter speed, and brake, taken away and then being ransomed to regain control. Charles01 / Wikipedia Chrysler Jeep CherokeeTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
0
Automotive cybersecurity; what we don’t hack will probably be used to kill us
Car hacking is not only a “thing” but it's also a thing that’s in its early days and because there’s the potential for exploits with serious and quite possibly life-threatening consequences, automotive cybersecurity is something we should all be very concerned about. Just imagine your own car traveling at speed and having your ability to steer, alter speed, and brake, taken away and then being ransomed to regain control. Charles01 / Wikipedia Chrysler Jeep CherokeeTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
0
9 Raspberry Pi programming tools bundled with Raspbian
Raspbian 8.0Image by Mark GibbsIn my Ultimate Guide to Raspberry Pi Operating Systems (Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3; 58 choices in total!) I listed pretty much every noteworthy OS available for the Raspberry Pi family of single board computers. Of these OSes the 800-pound gorilla has to be Raspbian. Based on Debian, Raspbian 8.0 ("Jessie") on a Raspberry Pi boasts an amazing and rich set of tools, including some of the most widely used programming languages. Let's take a look at what you get out of the box with Raspbian 8.0 …To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
0
Crafting responsive email with CoffeeCup’s RED
If you’ve ever sent bulk email such as newsletters, updates, sales pitches, etc., then you’ll be aware that this isn’t as simple as it used to be. Many moons ago, you could slap some text into a page along with a few links and that was good enough. Then came HTML mail and the ante was upped but you still didn’t have to break a sweat to ensure that the user could read your content. But now …To be competitive these days you have to deliver slick, styled, typographically sophisticated content with color, responsiveness, animation … you name it. And you’ve got to take into account not only how email renders on desktop clients (just consider the horrors of Microsoft Outlook’s eccentric rendering of otherwise valid HTML and CSS content) but also what happens to content in various Webmail services and, most importantly these days, on mobile devices. And just to make it all that little bit harder, many mobile platforms have specific version-dependent quirks that break the best-laid plans o' mice and designers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
0
Amazing analysis of the Brexit with machine learning
So the UK has just given itself a national headache. Whether you think the Brexit was the right decision or a dangerous and unmitigated screw-up (as I do), the consequences of the referendum will be non-trivial and take years to complete. But the mechanics of the UK exiting the European Union aside, the question of how people now feel about the Brexit is interesting. Are they awash in jubilation or has buyer’s remorse set in? An intriguing post by MonkeyLearn attempts to answer this question by analyzing tweets and, as a bonus, provides tools that you might well find useful for similar exercises.First, let me explain what MonkeyLearn is: The service defines itself as a “[highly] scalable Machine Learning API to automate text classification.” To use MonkeyLearn you assemble your text data, train and test a machine learning model with that data, then, using a custom API for your model, have your application code interact with the API to perform analysis and classification of new data. You can also provide your data to MonkeyLearn by pasting it into their Web interface or uploading CSV files or Excel spreadsheets.To read this article in full or to leave a Continue reading
0
Intel Management Engine’s security through obscurity should scare the **** out of you
For a long time there was a commonly held belief that open source products were inherently more secure because there was nothing hidden. The thought was that with the code for popular applications out in the open, there’d be scores of good guys looking at every line and bugs and flaws would be few and far between. Alas, this turned out to be a pipe dream because even the most examined code can still contain flaws so obscure and arcane, even highly skilled and incredibly talented coders can’t find them. Why? It’s usually because the good guys don’t have the time to play hacker as intensely as the real hackers do. For the bad guys, the rewards for finding exploitable flaws are tangible while for the good guys, the cost of not finding flaws far exceeds, by orders of magnitude, the value of the few flaws they do find because those flaws are the most easily found.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
0
Intel Management Engine’s security through obscurity should scare the **** out of you
For a long time there was a commonly held belief that open source products were inherently more secure because there was nothing hidden. The thought was that with the code for popular applications out in the open, there’d be scores of good guys looking at every line and bugs and flaws would be few and far between. Alas, this turned out to be a pipe dream because even the most examined code can still contain flaws so obscure and arcane, even highly skilled and incredibly talented coders can’t find them. Why? It’s usually because the good guys don’t have the time to play hacker as intensely as the real hackers do. For the bad guys, the rewards for finding exploitable flaws are tangible while for the good guys, the cost of not finding flaws far exceeds, by orders of magnitude, the value of the few flaws they do find because those flaws are the most easily found.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here