Firefox users worried about Internet eavesdropping are being offered a new way to encrypt their interaction with a range of popular websites, including Facebook and Twitter. Called HTTPS Everywhere, the free add-on is the result of a collaboration between the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the Tor Project. Sites with which the software works include [...]
Archive for the ‘I.T News’ Category
What Every Developer Needs to Know About “Public” Data and Privacy
It is natural for developers building web applications to operate under a public/private dichotomy, the assumption being that if a user made a piece of data public, then they’ve given up any privacy expectation. But as we saw in a previous article, users often expect more subtle distinctions, and many unfortunate privacy blunders have resulted. [...]
Computer automatically deciphers ancient language
A new system that took a couple hours to decipher much of the ancient language Ugaritic could help improve online translation software. In his 2002 book Lost Languages, Andrew Robinson, then the literary editor of the London Times’ higher-education supplement, declared that “successful archaeological decipherment has turned out to require a synthesis of logic and [...]
CIOs cry out for business sense
Chief Information Officers (CIO) are crying out for IT analysts and architects with business sense in the face of a looming skills shortage, according to a report from recruitment firm Hudson ICT. The report, which examined the case studies of CIOs around Australia and New Zealand, found that “while technical and vendor-specific skills seem plentiful, [...]
cells. A massively multi-agent Python programming game.
This article describes a project of mine that has been laying around my harddrive in a rough draft for a couple of months. I want to continue developing it at some point, but can’t right now for lack of time. Many of the details described here will very likely be subject to change, but the [...]
Never Trust a Programmer
Programming is a bit of mystery to people. It breeds a lot of distrust in an organization. In general, when you don’t understand what it takes to make something, anything seems plausible. You might think a house can be built in couple of weeks if you’ve never gone through the process. In truth they probably [...]
How To Read Code
Scientifically Tested Code Reading Skills I’ve run across a paper [
You don’t understand “ordinary people”
Unhappy at being treated “increasingly badly” at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1985 and as a result eager to begin an institute of his own within which to continue his research, 26-year-old computer scientist Stephen Wolfram looked to ex-colleague and physics Nobelist Richard Feynman for advice. Feynman’s honest, humorous, and less than encouraging response can [...]
The 10:10 Code
Four years ago I wrote about a way to encode the latitude and longitude of any point on the Earth’s surface to 10m of accuracy with a 10 character code. Apart from a modification to the way the check digit is calculated, the code remains unchanged. The idea is this: instead of giving people addresses, [...]
Fun with Python, OpenCV and face detection
I had some fun with Gary Bishop’s OpenCV Python wrapper this morning. I wanted to try out OpenCV for detecting faces using a web cam. This could be used for instance to see if someone is sitting behind his desk or not. I used Gary’s Python wrapper since I didn’t want to code in C++. [...]