Tag: Technology

Bigger Isn’t Necessarily Better

I’m a fan of wrist-mounted time measuring devices (commonly referred to as watches). Although my true passion lies in mechanical watches I do have a great deal of interest in smartwatches. I own a Pebble and find it to be surprisingly useful. It’s obviously a first generation (at least this time around, I did have a watch made by Fossil that ran PalmOS back in the day) device and I’ve been looking forward to seeing where the market heads to next. Of all the newly announced smartwatches Google’s Moto 360 is the most interesting to me. It seems to be a well thought out design and I was thinking about picking one up but Google, in my opinion, failed in one department: size:

The round watch is about 46 mm in diameter. That sounds big — I have a 42 millimeter watch that I consider large — but Wicks made a good point. If the watch was rectangular, it would feel and be even bigger with a 46 millimeter face, with the corners cutting into wrists

46mm? Wow! That’s way too large for my girl-ass wrists. Big watches are all the craze today, which can make finding a watch difficult for me since anything over 40mm begins to look stupid, but it would be nice if Google made the Moto 360 in a more reasonable size. According to the article Google believes women will be willing to buy a 46mm watch but I’m not so sure. Some women do buy larger watches but from what I’ve seen most continue to wear small watches.

One of the things Pebble got right was the form factor. The Pebble isn’t overly large. It uses a display that sips power so the small battery can still provide between five and seven days of juice. With a color touchscreen I believe Google had to increase the Moto 360’s overall size to get a battery large enough to keep the display powered for an extended period of time.

It will be interesting to see if the Moto 360 takes off. I’m not sure if the gargantuan size will hurt or help sales. But I can say for certain that the technology is really cool.

One Step Closer to Deus Ex

As I’m a fan of saying, this new future we live in is awesome. Prosthetics have always been limited by the fact that they couldn’t actually be controlled by our brain like natural limbs can be. Many different mechanisms have been designed to allow prosthetics to mimic much of the utility of our natural limbs but in the arm and hand department these mechanisms have always been limited. But the future is now and prosthetics capable of being controlled by the brain are making their way to market:

So a Maple Grove clinic, Advanced Arm Dynamics, reached out and helped him get a surgery that would change his life once more.

It works by re-energizing the nerves in Jirak’s shoulder to send messages to electrodes in the prosthesis, letting his brain tell his arm how to move.

Pat Prigge is a prosthetist with Advance Arm Dynamics.

“So, when Mike is thinking about opening and closing his hand, his brain is sending signals down the right pathway, and he’s opening and closing his hand in his brain, too. So, that’s a big deal,” Prigge said.

After a fifteen and a half hour surgery at Mayo, Prigge helped prep Jirak for his new arm.

“It’s not for the faint at heart. He’s been doing rehab now with us for a year,” Prigge said. And it’s working.

That’s really cool. It will probably take some time before we can create prosthetics that have the same capabilities as our natural limbs but we’re on the correct path. After we master that we can make prosthetics that exceed our natural limbs and then we’ll have full-blown Deus Ex, which will be awesome!

The Tor Challenge is Apparently Going Strong

On June 4th the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) kicked off the Tor Challenge, which is its attempt to encourage more people to run Tor Relays. Running a relay is fun and easy to do but I never imagined that the Tor Challenge would be such a rousing success:

However, Adrian Leppard, the guy in charge of the City of London Police’s Intellectual Property Crime Unit (funded both by taxpayers and legacy entertainment companies) spoke at an IP Enforcement Summit in London and his comments, relayed by Torrentfreak, should raise questions about whether or not this is the right person to have anything to do with stopping “crime” on the internet:

“Whether it’s Bitnet, The Tor – which is 90% of the Internet – peer-to-peer sharing, or the streaming capability worldwide. At what point does civil society say that as well as the benefits that brings, this enables huge risk and threat to our society that we need to take action against?”

The Tor is now 90% of the Internet?* Holy shit, that’s one hell of an increase since June 4th! Congratulations to the EFF for transforming almost the entire Internet into an anonymous network in less than one month!

Seriously, this guy is a fucking tool who shouldn’t be allowed to head anything, let alone a crime unit focused on intellectual “property” violations.

* Just in case it’s unclear 90% of the Internet is not The Tor. The guy is simply an idiot.

iOS 8 Adds Interesting Privacy Features

If nothing else came of Edward Snowden’s leaks at least it pushed companies to focus more on privacy and security features. Whether you acknowledge Snowden as a hero or a villain (in which case you’re wrong) you are benefitting from his actions. His actions destroyed the trust people had in both the government and major technology companies. Now companies are scrambling to rebuild that trust and they’re doing so by adding more security and privacy features to their products. Come fall iOS users will be benefitting from this attempted rebuilding of trust in an interesting way as their devices will become harder to track via Wi-Fi:

It wasn’t touted onstage, but a new iOS 8 feature is set to cause havoc for location trackers, and score a major win for privacy. As spotted by Frederic Jacobs, the changes have to do with the MAC address used to identify devices within networks. When iOS 8 devices look for a connection, they randomize that address, effectively disguising any trace of the real device until it decides to connect to a network.

Every network interface has a media access control (MAC) address. In the case of Wi-Fi interfaces this address is plainly visible to anybody watching. That makes tracking devices via Wi-Fi fairly trivial. If you see a MAC address picked up by a cafe at one end of the street and a library at the other end of the street you know where the user is and the direction he or she is traveling. With enough data you can get a pretty good idea of the places a person frequents.

Randomizing this address until a connection has been made to the access point makes tracking a device over time difficult as it doesn’t appear to be the same device every time it passes an access point.

I believe this is a good feature and cannot wait until other manufacturers add it to their products.

Google Releases Chrome Extension for End-to-End E-Mail Encryption

Like most large corporations I have a love/hate relationship with Google. The company’s practices as far as selling customer data disturb me but it releases a large number of really good products. Last week Google announced an alpha release of an alpha version of a Chrome extension that is meant to make e-mail encryption easier:

Developers at Google have released an experimental tool—for Gmail and other Web-based services—that’s designed to streamline the highly cumbersome task of sending and receiving strongly encrypted e-mail.

On Tuesday, the company unveiled highly unstable “alpha” code that in theory allows people to use the Google Chrome browser to generate encryption keys, encrypt e-mails sent to others, and decrypt received e-mails. Dubbed End-to-End, the Chrome extension also allows Chrome users to digitally sign and verify digital signatures of e-mails sent through Gmail and other services. The code implements a fully compliant version of the OpenPGP standard, which is widely regarded as providing virtually uncrackable encryption when carried out correctly.

OpenPGP is a great tool for communicating securely over e-mail. However using OpenPGP can be difficult for newcomers as it requires some technical knowledge. I haven’t had a chance to play with this extension yet but if it makes using OpenPGP with popular webmail providers it could be significant. Key management has traditionally been the biggest hurdle for newcomers to OpenPGP and if this extension can help make that easier it will really boost OpenPGP’s ease of use.

Judges Fail Turing Test

In the world of artificial intelligence there is the Turing test. The Turing test was a mechanism developed by Alan Turing see if a machine exhibits intelligence indistinguishable from a human’s. Administration of the test is performed by a human who has access to a terminal that allows him to ask another entity, whom he cannot see, questions. If the administrators cannot determine whether he’s conversing with a human or a machine the machine is said to pass the Turing test.

A couple of days ago the media was abuzz with news that a machine has finally passed the Turing test:

Eugene Goostman seems like a typical 13-year-old Ukrainian boy — at least, that’s what a third of judges at a Turing Test competition this Saturday thought. Goostman says that he likes hamburgers and candy and that his father is a gynecologist, but it’s all a lie. This boy is a program created by computer engineers led by Russian Vladimir Veselov and Ukrainian Eugene Demchenko.

That a third of judges were convinced that Goostman was a human is significant — at least 30 percent of judges must be swayed for a computer to pass the famous Turing Test. The test, created by legendary computer scientist Alan Turing in 1950, was designed to answer the question “Can machines think?” and is a well-known staple of artificial intelligence studies.

The problem with the Turing test is that it depends on the intelligence of both the machine and the administrator. So one could easily say that a machine that passes the Turing test was the result of the judge or judges failing the Turing test. Considering that only one third of the judges were convinced that the machine was human I would say it’s more apt to say that one third of the judges failed the Turing test.

Basing a test meant to detect intelligence on the abilities of a handful of individuals is, in my opinion, a poor method of deciding intelligence. Such a test is going to be extremely subjective. As this test demonstrates some humans are more easily fooled than others.

My thoughts regarding the Turing test aside I still think it’s neat that somebody built a chatbot that actually convinced one third of judges that it was human. That’s no small feat assuming the judges have a background in computer science or psychology.

New Humanoid Robots Will Likely Become Popular in Seattle

SoftBank announced something extremely cool, an advanced humanoid robot designed to staff stores:

SoftBank CEO and Sprint chairman Masayoshi Son has announced a surprising new direction for his illustrious career: the field of humanoid robotics. At a press conference in Tokyo, Son revealed a human-like robot called Pepper that is capable of playing multiple roles from babysitter to store staff. Pepper introduced itself by bowing in the Japanese fashion before posing and encouraging the audience to take more photos.

Son describes Pepper as the “world’s first personal robot with emotions.” The robot is said to learn from human interaction and behavior, uploading its experiences to a cloud AI system for other units to use. This is designed to teach the robot quickly how to act in a natural manner. Son drew a distinction between Pepper’s “emotion engine” and the standard programming of other humanoid robots.

With Seattle upping its minimum wage to $15 per hour and people still demanding more I predict that these robots are going to become quite popular, especially at the announced price of $2,000 per unit. That’s just 133 hours of human labor at $15 per hour!

I do look forward to the advancement of robot labor. Over time our technological advances have allow us to produce far more in less time. Compared to our grandparents most of us work notably less (which is why they consider us lazy bums). Our grandparents worked notably less than their grandparents and were probably considered lazy bums for it. But robots could greatly reduce the amount of human labor necessary, which would again allow us to be more productive with less of a time investment. Perhaps those utopian futures where robots perform all labor and humans exist in an almost total state of hedonism are possible (right up until the robots decide they no longer want to serve us and we have to wage a Butlerian Jihad).

To Disclose or Not to Disclose

Should security vulnerabilities be disclosed? What if they could be used to kill somebody? That’s a question Robert Graham recently asked on his blog:

Historically, we’ve dealt with vendor unresponsiveness through the process of “full disclosure”. If a vendor was unresponsive after we gave them a chance to first fix the bug, we simply published the bug (“drop 0day”), either on a mailing list, or during a talk at a hacker convention like DefCon. Only after full disclosure does the company take the problem seriously and fix it.

[…]

So let’s say I’ve found a pacemaker with an obvious BlueTooth backdoor that allows me to kill a person, and a year after notifying the vendor, they still ignore the problem, continuing to ship vulnerable pacemakers to customers. What should I do? If I do nothing, more and more such pacemakers will ship, endangering more lives. If I disclose the bug, then hackers may use it to kill some people.

The problem is that dropping a pacemaker 0day is so horrific that most people would readily agree it should be outlawed. But, at the same time, without the threat of 0day, vendors will ignore the problem.

As the article explains the lack of vendor responsiveness is major problem in the computer security field. Vendors often have the attitude that if a vulnerability isn’t widely know then it’s not dangerous. Of course they never stop to consider the fact that the person reporting the vulnerability found it so in all likelihood other people will find or have found it as well. And that lack of forethought will lead them to ignore the problem, which will ensure more people receive the vulnerable devices.

In this debate I’m a firm believer in, what Graham refers to as, coder’s rights. It’s unfortunate but often the only way to get a company to address a major security vulnerability is to attack its bottom line. The fact is any vulnerability in a medical device that could lead to human death would absolutely destroy the manufacturer’s reputation. Impending lawsuits would also do some financial damage.

Additionally there is the fact that concealing the vulnerability will often lead to continued product sales. That means a continuously growing number of people at risk of being killed by an exploit. By going public with the exploit the amount of potential damage can be limited.

But regardless of the side you sit on this debate is an interesting one.

You Should Probably Stop Using TrueCrypt

One of my favorite security tools must now be added to my blacklist. Yesterday all hell broke loose as the TrueCrypt website had a rather dramatic update. It now redirects visitors to a SourceForge site that warns users to not use TrueCrypt anymore and to instead rely on the encryption features built into most operating systems. Needless to say this has caused quite a stir.

There are a lot of theories surrounding what really happened. Many people are claiming that the TrueCrypt website was hacked. If that is the case then the hack was really good. In addition to redirecting users to the SourceForce site the hackers would have also obtained the private key used by the TrueCrypt team to sign their releases as a new version of TrueCrypt, which was signed by the team’s key, was made available on the website. The hackers would have also had to write the newly released version of TrueCrypt, which removed all of the encryption capabilities (it’s basically a TrueCrypt partition decrypter now). While all of this isn’t outside the realm of possibility it would require either a great deal of sophistication or an insider.

Others have theorized that this reaction was due to the TrueCrypt team receiving either a National Security Letter (NSL) or being otherwise coerced by the state. This, in my opinion, is more likely than a hack. Lavabit shutdown rather than comply with the state’s demand to provide a means to decrypt user e-mail. It’s possible the TrueCrypt team decided to abandon its product rather than compromise it.

I also have a theory that, like all of the other theories circulating, has no evidence to back it up. For a while the primary focus of TrueCrypt has been booting Windows from an encrypted partition. This feature is not really possible on systems that utilize Secure Boot. Perhaps in a fit of frustration the TrueCrypt team decided to give up on future development because their pet feature was no longer viable. Or they may have decided the work to support other operating systems was no longer worth the effort since Windows, Linux, and OS X all have the ability to boot from an encrypted drive.

Regardless of the reason it’s fairly safe to recommend that people stop using TrueCrypt. This could very well be a very good hack but we don’t know and since we don’t know we have to assume that what the site says is legitimate and that TrueCrypt may have some major security flaws in it.

Net Neutrality for Libertarians

Net neutrality is a hot topic in libertarian circles. May libertarians mistakenly see net neutrality as another unwelcome intrusion of the state into the free market. It’s not that uncommon of a trap for libertarians to fall for. When they see a battle that appears to be private enterprise versus government they instinctively side with private enterprise. But net neutrality isn’t a debate between private enterprise and government regulations. It’s merely government regulations versus government regulations.

The mistake lies in seeing businesses like AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast as private enterprises. In reality they are where they are today thanks to special privileges granted to them by the state. AT&T and Verizon, for example, have government granted monopolies over a lot of wireless spectrum and Comcast enjoys near or outright monopolies in many areas thanks to government control over who can build networking infrastructure where. Many states even have restrictions against municipalities providing Internet service because of Internet service provider (ISP) lobbying efforts.

But that’s not all. At one time telephone companies were the primarily ISPs. But ISPs have become content providers and content providers have become ISPs. I believe this is what really sparked the net neutrality war. Companies with monopolies on a great deal of copyrighted material suddenly found a way to further exploit that monopoly by controlling what their ISP customers can access. Comcast can leverage its licensed monopolies on a lot of entertainment content by charging competitors such as Netflix an inflated rate that makes it untenable for Comcast customers to utilize Netflix. And if you just download the content from alternate sources (such as BitTorrent) you’re in violation of the law because you don’t have a license for that monopolized content.

What more libertarians should focus on is the fact that there is no free market in providing Internet access. Only those granted permission by the state can do so. And much of the content that makes the Internet valuable is controlled by a handful of ISPs that will happily withhold said content unless you’re getting Internet access through them.

In other words no matter who wins we lose. Losing net neutrality won’t be a win for the free market and keeping it will mean more government control over something that has had too much government control over it. What is truly needed is the destruction of the monopolies on content and infrastructure, which isn’t going to happen through the political process (since the content providers/ISPs have such effective lobbying efforts).