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Reading List, October 2017

  1. Jenny List, Accidental satellite hijacks can rebroadcast cell towers, in Hack A Day, 3 October 2017. [Online]: http://hackaday.com/2017/10/02/accidental-satellite-hijacks-can-rebroadcast-cell-towers/

    Satellites are simple transponders placed in the sky, often with old but robust technology. It is no surprise then, that they could sometimes pick up and rebroadcast some unintended traffic, in this case, GSM traffic from Nigeria broadcast to large parts of Europe and Africa.

  2. Steven Englehardt, Jeffrey Han, and Arvind Narayanan I never signed up for this! Privacy implications of email tracking, in Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETS) 2018. [Online]: https://senglehardt.com/papers/pets18_email_tracking.pdf

    It is no secret that information is the new oil. Today, everyone and everything is tracking you, including your email. This paper discusses the techniques for email tracking, and how tracking pixels and links in mass emails leak way more information than you could ever imagine, including setting cookies that track you across the web.

    My solution, I use Thunderbird and view only plain-text emails. After reading this article, I set my privacy policy to reject cookies (amazing how many cookies were set in Thunderbird in the first place, even with my cautious approach), and installed Adblock Plus.

  3. Jon Burt, Why does punching Sonic 3D trigger a secret level select?, in GameHut’s YouTube channel, 29 September 2017. [Online]: https://youtu.be/i9bkKw32dGw

    Programmers back in the day took all sorts of shortcuts around management and red tape. If you’re a programmer, you’ll really enjoy this explanation of why Sonic 3D told you that you reached a secret level if you jiggled the ROM cartridge. I won’t spoil it for you, check out this video.

  4. Harry McCracken, How IBM’s ThinkPad became a design icon, in FastCodeDesign, 5 October 2017. [Online]: https://www.fastcodesign.com/90145427/how-ibms-thinkpad-became-a-design-icon

    I use a Lenovo ThinkPad and I love it. It is the most practical of all the laptops I’ve ever owned, and also the best built. Incidentally, the first IBM ThinkPad was released on the 5 October 1992, so the ThinkPad brand is exactly twenty-five years old now. This article talks about how the ThinkPad brand became an icon, and how it survived twenty-five years in the tech industry.

    Richard Sapper designed the ThinkPad, and he was responsible for putting in the iconic touches such as the industrial black colour that meant business, and the bright red TrackPoint. Everything about the first ThinkPad seemed to be designed with the business traveller in mind, with a hard drive that could be swapped out from the front without disturbing your neighbour on a flight, to the TrackPoint which is absolutely the best pointing method when using a laptop on your lap or within the confines of an airline seat.

    Other interesting titbits include the fact that Tim Cook, now Apple’s CEO, was responsible for the ThinkPad 701c, or the Butterfly, thus named because it had a butterfly keyboard that folded when the laptop was closed, but expanded to a comfortable size for use when the screen was opened.

    Lenovo released a ThinkPad 25 version to commemorate this anniversary, and I must say that it is the most beautiful computer ever. I won’t be buying it, of course, because I already have a trusty ThinkPad.

  5. Natalie Shure, Down with copay, in Jacobin Magazine, 6 October 2017. [Online]: https://jacobinmag.com/2017/10/sanders-single-payer-copays-medicare-for-all

    A look at Universal Health Care, and why copays and deductibles have no place in the system. This is a damning indictment of one of the worst health-care systems in the world, that of the USA, where almost everyone gets priced out of health-care, a country that makes employees beholden to their employers for a chance to live a life where they can afford medical treatment.

  6. Daniel Lemire, The Harvey-Weinstein scientific model, in Daniel Lemire’s blog, 14 October 2017. [Online]: https://lemire.me/blog/2017/10/14/the-harvey-weinstein-scientific-model/

    It seems to me that talk of science has been broken by popular media. It also seems that this has occurred because some people treat science as “just another random theory, about as sound as my theory that 9/11 was an inside job”. Lemire, in this article, talks about how science should always be a healthy dose of scepticism, something that is now lacking when we talk about “scientific consensus”. In this article, he talks about how science should get away from the Harvey Weinstein model, where people shut up because of a fear of rejection rather than speak the truth.

  7. Daniel Lemire, Bee-level intelligence, in Daniel Lemire’s blog, 13 October 2017. [Online]: https://lemire.me/blog/2017/10/13/bee-level-intelligence/

    Everyone is talking about computers reaching human-level intelligence. In this article, Lemire argues that this is not the case. While we have indeed trained neural networks to perform as good or even better than humans at specific tasks, AI is nowhere close to reaching the intelligence of even a simple bee when it comes to working in the real world. Bees sense the environment and react to it, they can communicate with others, and work in swarms, all with a fairly low number of synapses in their nervous system. This is the difference between narrow AI – one that is good at only a specific task or a specific set of tasks – and general AI – which would be able to interact intelligently with situations it has never encountered.

    I would pair this article with Steven Pinker’s book ‘How the mind works’, as Pinker has some interesting things to say about the same debate, albeit over twenty years ago (when the book was first published). Pinker argues that humans and computers perform different tasks efficiently, so who is to say which task is easy and which is difficult? Humans find it easy to read and produce a gist of ‘Alice in wonderland’ but hard to remember a twenty digit number. Computers find it easy to remember the twenty digit number, but hard to read and produce a gist of ‘Alice in wonderland’

  8. Rodney Brooks, The seven deadly sins of predicting the future of AI, in Rodney Brooks – Essays, 7 September 2017. [Online]: https://rodneybrooks.com/the-seven-deadly-sins-of-predicting-the-future-of-ai/

    Yet another piece on AI and the hype around it. Rodney Brooks was the director of MIT’s Computer systems and artificial intelligence lab (CSAIL), so hopefully, he knows what he’s talking about. :) I won’t bother summarising the article here, go read the whole thing.

  9. Daniel Golden, How the CIA staged sham academic conferences to thwart Iran’s nuclear program, in ProPublica, 10 October 2017. [Online]: https://www.propublica.org/article/spy-schools-how-the-cia-staged-sham-academic-conferences-to-thwart-iran-nuclear-program

    A fascinating tale into the cloak and dagger world of espionage, how spooks attend conferences and recruit scientists to defect. The best part – apparently, one of the defectors got a PhD from MIT even though this person was spirited out of Iran without diplomas or transcripts. Allegedly, the CIA pressured MIT to grant this person admissions to its PhD program. While MIT denies this, two professors have apparently corroborated this story.

  10. Al Williams, Retrotechtacular: Tom Carter revolutionized your phone, in Hack A Day, 16 August 2016. [Online]: https://hackaday.com/2016/08/16/retrotechtacular-tom-carter-revolutionized-your-phone/

    A fascinating David v. Golaith tale of how a Texan named Tom Carter took the massive monopoly known as the phone company to court and allowed us to connect any device to our phone lines, opening the way to answering machines, cordless phones, and yes, modems, that connected us all to the internet.

    I did not know that the first 9600 baud modems were released in
    1. I can’t even imagine the level of innovation that would have been required to develop these devices before the age of transistors and LSI chips.
  11. Sarah Jeong, The judge’s code, in The Verge, 19 October 2017. [Online]: https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/19/16503076/oracle-vs-google-judge-william-alsup-interview-waymo-uber

    A fascinating sketch of the judge who presided over Oracle v. Google. It is refreshing to read about a judge who actually understands the technical details of the case he is presented, and can make intelligent decisions. It also reminds me of the nostalgia of the old school of programming (the one I used back when I was in high school and just learning C++) which involves reading up books and documentation and does not involve googling for the answer or looking it up on StackOverflow. (As an aside, check out StackOverflow Importer)

  12. Alex Campolo, Madelyn Sanfilippo, Meredith Whittaker, and Kate Crawford, AI Now 2017 report, ed. Andrew Selbst and Solon Barocas. [Online]: https://assets.contentful.com/8wprhhvnpfc0/1A9c3ZTCZa2KEYM64Wsc2a/8636557c5fb14f2b74b2be64c3ce0c78/_AI_Now_Institute_2017_Report_.pdf

    A look beyond the scaremongering by people like Elon Musk, this is a practical look at AI systems in use today and how they need to be regulated in a way that affects society in a positive manner. Important recommendations include not using “black-box” AI systems in core public agencies, ensuring that AI systems are trained on data and produce outputs that do not reflect or amplify systemic biases, intellectual and societal diversity in AI researchers, and ethical codes in the AI community.

  13. Ernie Smith, The incredibly technical history of digital rights management, in Vice Motherboard, 19 October 2017. [Online]: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/evbgkn/the-incredibly-technical-history-of-digital-rights-management

    Anyone who knows me knows that I hate DRMs. This is a technical history of DRMs, traced back to the 1960s when IBM decided against encrypting its software and relying on the inherent honesty of its customers, to the modern era, when music labels had almost dropped DRMs, until Spotify revived the idea. Also interesting, Steve Jobs’ essay, “Thoughts on music” which is linked in the article, in which Jobs argues that DRMs are essentially useless, but necessary to get the licensing permissions from the music labels.

  14. Alex Parker, Writing a bootloader, in Alex Parker’s Website, 13 October 2017. [Online]: http://3zanders.co.uk/2017/10/13/writing-a-bootloader/

    Computers are increasingly complex. They are so complex that I can no longer write even a simple “Hello World” program any more without using a gazillion libraries, an operating system, a compiler that I don’t understand, and much more. In this series of posts, Parker walks us through writing a simple bootloader for an x86 processor, yes, the same one running my laptop right now, that can print Hello World using only BIOS calls. Pretty neat, and reminds me that computers are not all that complicated.

  15. Rob Goodman and Jimmy Soni, How a genius thinks, works, and lives, in The Mission, 20 July 2017. [Online]: https://medium.com/the-mission/10-000-hours-with-claude-shannon-12-lessons-on-life-and-learning-from-a-genius-e8b9297bee8f

    An inspiring article on a legend. This article talks about ten lessons (yes, I know, clickbait cliché) the authors of Shannon’s biography learnt when researching the man.

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