The tragedy of FireWire: Collaborative tech torpedoed by corporations

Ars Technica tells the story of the betamax of cables: The tragedy of FireWire: Collaborative tech torpedoed by corporations. Today Apple seems happy to keep it's lightening connectors to itself. I'm not sure about Thunderbolt 3. I confuse it with USB-C (which is just the connector and different from USB 3.1 which is the interface and more comparable). My 2012 iMac has 2 Thunderbolt 1 connectors and I've never used them because the USB 3.0 versions of hard drives have always been much cheaper.

A Few Links

Here are some tech related articles I've liked recently

• Bob Messerschmidt wrote in Fast Company, What I Learned Working With Jony Ive's Team On The Apple Watch. This is one of the better "what's it like working at Apple" pieces I've read.

• Tim Cook has been CEO of Apple for five years now and gave an interview to the Washington Post, Tim Cook, the interview: Running Apple ‘is sort of a lonely job’. It's pretty good but there isn't much new here. We did learn that the failure of Maps lead to their public beta programs, which is intersting. Also, some of examples of who he's sought advice from.

• Wired wrote a (too long) piece, Meet Moxie Marlinspike, the Anarchist Bringing Encryption to All of Us. Marlinspike wrote Signal which is now integrated into WhatsApp.

• Wired wrote How One Journalist Uses Social Media to Get Inside the Minds of ISIS

• Joseph Gordon-Levitt is playing Edward Snowden in Oliver Stone's upcoming film. c|net interviewed Joseph Gordon-Levitt: The Privacy Debate is On

Not Politics: Some Random Tech Stuff

Researchers find over 100 spying Tor nodes that attempt to compromise darknet sites

These nodes -- ordinary nodes, not exit nodes -- sorted through all the traffic that passed through them, looking for anything bound for a hidden service, which allowed them to discover hidden services that had not been advertised. These nodes then attacked the hidden services by making connections to them and trying common exploits against the server-software running on them, seeking to compromise and take them over.

The researchers used "honeypot" .onion servers to find the spying computers: these honeypots were .onion sites that the researchers set up in their own lab and then connected to repeatedly over the Tor network, thus seeding many Tor nodes with the information of the honions' existence. They didn't advertise the honions' existence in any other way and there was nothing of interest at these sites, and so when the sites logged new connections, the researchers could infer that they were being contacted by a system that had spied on one of their Tor network circuits.

MIT’s anonymous online communications protocol Riffle could beat Tor at its own game

In addition to wrapping messages in multiple layers of encryption (the eponymous technique of Tor, “The Onion Router”), Riffle adds two extra measures meant to baffle would-be attackers.

First, servers switch up the order in which received messages are passed on to the next node, preventing anyone scrutinizing incoming and outgoing traffic from tracking packets using metadata.

Then comes a two-part measure to prevent a malicious server from simply replacing real messages with dummies and tracking a single target one. Messages are sent from the user to all servers, not just one — and outgoing messages must be signed with an independently verifiable mathematical proof that they are the ones the server received. This way, any server tampering with messages will be spotted at once.

LittleSis is a free database of who-knows-who at the heights of business and government. "A unique resource for investigating cronyism, conflicts of interest, and systemic corruption."

Ars describes Learning to code as a 30-year-old kid with Apple’s Swift Playgrounds

Pretty interesting story of how Feedly tracked down a performance problem: What Goes Down Better Come Up a.k.a. Adventures in Hbase Diagnostics

Here's another where Stack Overflow fixed an outage because of a malformed post an regular expressions: Outage Postmortem - July 20, 2016

Tech Helping Black Lives Matter

The Verge explains, How Facebook Live became our new global distress signal. "This week the world has been and horrified — and captivated — by videos showing the deaths at the hands of police of Alton Sterling in Louisiana and Philando Castile in Minnesota. Last night, at a demonstration protesting those deaths and the broader trend of police violence toward black people, a sniper killed five police officers and wounded seven more. Sterling’s death was captured in videos shot on mobile phones and shared later. But the deaths that came later came to us live, via Facebook’s seven-month-old live-streaming tool. Facebook came late to live streaming, after it was popularized last year by Meerkat and Twitter-owned Periscope. But Facebook’s ubiquity has made it the go-to app for anyone who suddenly becomes a witness to violence or its aftermath. In just a few weeks, it has become a new kind of SOS."

The Washington Post writes The inspiring way hundreds of Asian Americans are teaching their families about Black Lives Matter

In the Internet age, crises have a way of turning completely ordinary, unremarkable tools into tremendously powerful instruments for organizing. Think of the way Hong Kong's democracy protesters used FireChat to message one another in spite of the area's overloaded cellular networks, or how Syrian rebels turned to Skype as a way to plan their opposition.

To that list of technologies we can now add Google Docs, the simple word-processing app that on Thursday became a destination for hundreds of Americans as they tried to assemble an open letter addressing the twin shootings of Alton Sterling in Louisiana and Philando Castile in Minnesota. The authors were largely anonymous to one another. But together, and with remarkable coordination, they took advantage of Google Docs' killer feature: the ability to edit a document, in unison, in real time — something that could not have been achieved a decade ago.

Website Campaign Zero says "We Can End Police Violence In America" and offers some practical ways to help. "Campaign ZERO was developed with contributions from activists, protesters and researchers across the nation. This data-informed platform presents comprehensive solutions to end police violence in America. It integrates community demands and policy recommendations from research organizations and the President's Task Force on 21st Century Policing. Together, we will win."

Some Science Stories

io9 reports New Cancer Therapy Leaves Three Dead "Clinical trials of a promising new therapy, in which white blood cells are reprogrammed to attack cancer cells, has resulted in the deaths of three patients. In response, the US Food and Drug Administration has ordered a temporary halt to the trial."

It’s an incredibly promising new approach to battling cancer—but now there’s been a major setback. Three patients, all under the age of 25, have died in a Juno Therapeutics Phase II clinical trial that’s been using the CAR-T cells to treat ALL. The patients died after excess fluids accumulated in their brains (cerebral edemas). In all cases, the deaths happened after a chemotherapy drug, fludarabine, was added to the treatment regimen.

stat news has more, What's next for CAR-T after Juno's clinical misstep?

The Verge reports This robot stingray is propelled by rat heart cells, and it’s teaching us about underwater robotics. "A team of scientists have developed a robot that mimics the motion of a stingray by using the cardiac muscles from a rat mounted on a stingray-shaped skeleton. The robot, detailed in a study published in the journal Science, is a wonderfully weird hybrid of biological and mechanical engineering that could be the first step towards a new class of underwater robots."

This robot uses a single layer of muscle allowed for downward contraction to mimic movement. While live creatures have another layer of muscle to pull their wings upward, the skeleton of this robot is designed to rebound after such a contraction, simplifying the overall structure. When the muscles were stimulated with light, the combined actions allowed the robot to swim forward.

FIveThirtyEight reports, The Loudest Sound In The World Would Kill You On The Spot. "Consider this piece of history: On the morning of Aug. 27, 1883, ranchers on a sheep camp outside Alice Springs, Australia, heard a sound like two shots from a rifle. At that very moment, the Indonesian volcanic island of Krakatoa was blowing itself to bits 2,233 miles away. Scientists think this is probably the loudest sound humans have ever accurately measured. Not only are there records of people hearing the sound of Krakatoa thousands of miles away, there is also physical evidence that the sound of the volcano’s explosion traveled all the way around the globe multiple times."

Are reports, HTTPS crypto’s days are numbered. Here’s how Google wants to save it. "In the coming months, Google servers will add a new, experimental cryptographic algorithm to the more established elliptic curve algorithm it has been using for the past few years to help encrypt HTTPS communications. The algorithm—which goes by the wonky name "Ring Learning With Errors"—is a method of exchanging cryptographic keys that's currently considered one of the great new hopes in the age of quantum computing. Like other forms of public key encryption, it allows two parties who have never met to encrypt their communications, making it ideal for Internet usage."

Use of robot in Dallas highlights tactical opportunities, ethical questions for police

Obviously the shooting in Dallas were horrible. There are a lot of stories in that event, here's one of them, for the first time, police used a robot to deliver a bomb to blow up a suspect.

The LA Times writes Use of robot in Dallas highlights tactical opportunities, ethical questions for police "Negotiators had been talking for hours with the hunkered-down killer of five police officers in downtown Dallas when the man suddenly resumed firing with an assault rifle. Fearing additional casualties, the officers deployed a small, remote-controlled robot to carry an explosive device near shooter Micah Xavier Johnson, which they then detonated, killing him."

Holland Michel said police departments have been using robots for years. They were deployed at the World Trade Center after the Sept. 11 attacks. Their popularity increased with the aid of the Pentagon’s surplus program, he said, saying the program has provided police with at least 400 robots nationwide.

Although it is an unusual tactic, police have used robots during armed standoffs before. In April 2011, police in Blountville, Tenn., chased a murder suspect to a double-wide trailer. During the ensuing confrontation, police rolled a bomb squad robot into the trailer and had it detonate a tear gas grenade, according to a police incident report released to the Bristol Herald Courier newspaper. The explosion started a fire and the suspect escaped before turning himself in two days later.

In November 2014, a SWAT team in Albuquerque, N.M., requested “robot assistance” to subdue an armed suspect barricaded inside a motel room. “The Bomb Squad robot was able to deploy chemical munitions into the subject’s motel room, which led to the subject’s surrender," according to the Albuquerque Police Department’s description of the incident.

The Intercept couldn't find any previous use by police of a robot in this way, How the Dallas Police Used an Improvised Killer Robot to Take Down the Gunman.

The Verge wrote Everything we know about the bomb robot used by Dallas police.

Bomb disposal robots, though, have emerged as a flexible tool for law enforcement, particularly SWAT teams. In April, members of the California Highway Patrol used a bomb disposal robot to deliver a pizza to a suspect, effectively ending a standoff. And in 2013, a SWAT team in Albuquerque used their bot to remove the blanket from a suicidal individual barricaded in his room, checking whether or not he was armed. (No weapon was found and a SWAT team took him into custody.)

Outside of the ethical questions facing the Dallas police department (what led them to take the decision to simply kill the suspect rather than try other options to capture them?), this incident raises a number of practical considerations. These include the decreased usefulness of such robots as negotiators. If suspects fear them as potential assassins, why bother to talk to the police at the other end?

I first heard of the use of a robot in this case from Matt Blaze's tweet, "How was the control link to the Dallas bomb robot secured? Stakes go way up when something like this is repurposed as a weapon."

Update: Ars has some more, Dallas deployment of robot bomb to kill suspect is “without precedent”

FAA Warns of GPS Outages This Month During Mysterious Tests on the West Coast

FAA Warns of GPS Outages This Month During Mysterious Tests on the West Coast

Starting today, it appears the US military will be testing a device or devices that will potentially jam GPS signals for six hours each day. We say ‘appears’ because officially the tests were announced by the FAA but are centered near the US Navy’s largest installation in the Mojave Desert. And the Navy won’t tell us much about what’s going on.

The FAA issued an advisory warning pilots on Saturday that global positioning systems (GPS) could be unreliable during six different days this month, primarily in the Southwestern United States. On June 7, 9, 21, 23, 28, and 30th the GPS interference testing will be taking place between 9:30am and 3:30pm Pacific time. But if you’re on the ground, you probably won’t notice interference."

IBM's phase-change memory is faster than flash and more reliable than RAM

The Verge reports IBM's phase-change memory is faster than flash and more reliable than RAM

IBM today announced a more efficient way to use phase-change memory, a breakthrough that could help transition electronic devices from standard RAM and flash to a much faster and more reliable type of storage. Phase-change memory, or PCM, is a type of non-volatile optical storage that works by manipulating the behavior of chalcogenide glass, which is how data is stored on rewriteable Blue-ray discs. A electrical current is applied to change PCM cells from an amorphous to crystalline structure, allowing you to store 0s and 1s in either state while the application of low voltage can read the data back.

The issue in the past has been PCM's limited capacity and high cost; you can typically only store one 1 bit per cell. That makes it less useful for main memory applications like laptop or mobile phone storage. Yet IBM researchers discovered how to store 3 bits per cell by tinkering with how the crystals react to high temperatures, which are required to tap into multiple states for PCM cells. The jump is significant 'because at this density, the cost of PCM will be significantly less than DRAM and closer to flash,' Haris Pozidis, IBM's manager of non-volatile memory research, wrote in a statement."

Extracting image metadata at scale

Netflix talks briefly about Extracting image metadata at scale. For each of their showings, they have to present to the user an image with text on top. It turns out they do this algorithmically, finding the most interesting part of the image, avoiding existing text on it and finding a place to position new text. Neat stuff.

Ezra Klein and Rachel Maddow Chat

Ezra Klein has a new podcast, The Ezra Klein Show. The first episode is him talking with Rachel Maddow on skinhead protests, AIDS activism, and why she skips the op-ed page. If you like either of these people you'll love this conversation. It's mostly her bio but there are constant asides into their interests (e.g., comics) and interesting observations (one of Obama's challenges in running in 2008 was building an organization to compete against Hillary's who had most of the traditional democratic experts, but Tom Daschle and some other Congressional leaders had recently lost office and their expert staff was available). It's 1h40m long.

I listen to podcasts using Overcast on my iPhone. One of the great features is a speed boost that doesn't distort the sound. It's a free app, the advanced features are free too (there used to be an in-app purchase to unlock them but the author removed them and went with a patronage model).

My Bathroom Mirror Is Smarter Than Yours

Max Braun claims My Bathroom Mirror Is Smarter Than Yours. He's probably right.

I don't think I'd really like such a thing, but it is kinda neat and certainly a cool DIY project.

A Politics For Technology

Ben Thompson on A Politics For Technology talks about surge pricing and market efficiencies.

The end result is a system that ensures that those who need a ride are guaranteed to get one; those who really could do without self-select out of the system, at least until more drivers are compelled to increase the supply. It is much better than the alternative, where someone who could just as easily walk a couple of blocks might by pure chance grab the taxi needed by, say, a woman in labor. That’s an extreme example, but I use it to make the point: pricing ensures those who truly need a good can get it, and, on a holiday defined by champagne, we should all be grateful.

In the context of the price mechanism, money serves the role of a medium of exchange. The problem, though, is that money serves other functions as well: specifically, money is a unit of account and a store of value. It is the latter that is the rub when it comes to Uber and the idea of allocating rides based on price. To return to the extreme example above, what if the woman in labor is poor, and the person who only needs to travel a few blocks is rich? It very well may be that the latter’s ability-to-pay will trump the former’s willingness-to-pay; this is, to my mind anyways, the most valid reason to oppose surge pricing.

Later on: "Take taxis, to stick with the Uber theme: the justification for most taxi regulations were important ones like safety, dependability, and consumer protection. Given the fact that taxis would be out on the street unsupervised it made sense to tightly control entrance to the market. However, were it possible to address all those same concerns far more effectively, through, say, precise tracking and full histories of both drivers and passengers, as well as knowledge about pick-up and intended drop-off points, would not the regulations look significantly different?"

He peters out in the end, with this, "It would be far better — and a far better match for the reality of today’s labor market — to disentangle once-and-for-all employment from the social safety net." but it was still a good read.

Incredible hack could give Apple Watch ability to detect objects you touch

This seems like magic, Incredible hack could give Apple Watch ability to detect objects you touch “Apple Watch is great at interacting with other smart devices, but a cheap hack allows it to recognize everyday (dumb) objects based on their invisible electromagnetic signals. All it takes is a $10 chip that can be installed on any smartwatch. Check out the demo below:”

The Camera Behind The New Pluto Photos Is Named 'Ralph'

The Camera Behind The New Pluto Photos Is Named 'Ralph' "How to build a camera that travels billions of miles from Earth". They had to adjust for shrinkage and really dim light and make it as small and power stingy as possible.

Kids React To 1st iPod

British man receives world’s first bionic eye implant for macular degeneration

Ars Technica reports British man receives world’s first bionic eye implant for macular degeneration. "A British man has become the first person in the world to receive a bionic eye implant that corrects for age-related macular degeneration (AMD)—the most common cause of vision loss in adults. The implant was a success: previously, the patient had no central vision at all; now, he has low-resolution central vision. The operation was carried out at Manchester Royal Eye Hospital; the recipient of the implant was Ray Flynn, aged 80."

The Plan to 3D Print a Steel Bridge in Mid-Air

Gizmodo reports on a pretty spectacular project, The Plan to 3D Print a Steel Bridge in Mid-Air "In two years, a one-of-a-kind construction project will commence over a canal in Amsterdam. It wont involve any humans at all, but rather, a six-axis robot that can craft molten metal in mid-air. Two months later, a 24 foot-long steel pedestrian bridge will arc its way across the water."

"Creating rail supports as it goes, the metal-printing bot will gradually slide forward, literally building a bridge as it crosses the canal."

Boston | Special Series | Re/code

I finally got around to reading Re/code's Special Series on Boston by James Temple from last December. "The engineers and scientists spilling out of Greater Boston’s world-class universities built the foundations of the modern computing era and amassed the densest cluster of life sciences companies in the world. The region lost some of its most promising startups to Silicon Valley, famously including Facebook. But business is booming — and researchers and entrepreneurs there are aiming far higher than the next social network. This Re/code special series takes a closer look at past, present and future innovation in the region."

It's in nine parts and is pretty entertaining.

How To Keep NSA Computers From Turning Your Phone Conversations Into Searchable Text

Dan Froomkin explains in The Intercept, How To Keep NSA Computers From Turning Your Phone Conversations Into Searchable Text. He recommends using products from Open Whisper Systems. I must be out of it because I hadn't heard of them but they've been endorsed by Edward Snowden, so there's that. Does anyone else use Signal on iOS?

North Korea test-launches “Polaris-1” ballistic missile from submarine

Ars Technica reports North Korea test-launches “Polaris-1” ballistic missile from submarine "On May 9, a Korean People's Army Naval Force submarine test-launched a ballistic missile off the eastern coast of North Korea. The test launch, reported by North Korea's Rodong Sinmun newspaper, only traveled about 150 meters, according to South Korean defense officials. But it demonstrated that North Korea had developed the capability of performing submerged launches of missiles well ahead of previous intelligence estimates. Based on the launch, South Korean officials now believe that North Korea could have a limited submarine-launched missile capability deployed to its fleet of submarines within the next five years."