I suggest everyone to carefully read the replies of the Facebook employees in this thread.
These data are being released in hopes of furthering the developments of these techniques - which ultimately benefits a future use by Facebook.
In turn, people like "presenti" have pointed out several times that the data were collected in Facebook offices or other places where all participants consent. The implication is clear: While the present data are legal, they would not be if shot in the "wild".
In many jurisdictions, there is no legal use case for these methods. It is literally not possible to have a widely-used implementation of these glasses that would not violate the privacy rights of "bystanders".
Of course, Facebook will work hard to make it legal, on all fronts. Whether laws need to be changed or, as pointed out by presenti, some innovation may arise to make you at least an anonymous blob, separate from name and address. And if you do not have an account - see in this thread - what is there to worry about?
Well, even if the association would only be indirect, any data collected from you (with increasing sophistication) would be part of Facebook and its models. Even as a group of anonymous users, you would become less and less anonymous and increasingly more explainable.
If you are so far unconvinced that this matters, please be also aware that the only thing standing between businesses and the extraction of the entire surplus (or consumer welfare) is asymmetry of information.
As soon as your needs and wants are sufficiently modeled, companies will use these data to maximize the profit from all their interactions with you. You will, in a sense, pay monopoly prices without facing monopolies.
Again, read the replies carefully. See how legal constraints are certainly something that is "to be solved in the future". However, whether you should ever be afforded privacy or anonymity in the face of facebook's algorithm is implicitly answered, with (frankly) a worrying amount of arrogance and dismissal: no, you and everything about you should no longer be any unexplained variation for facebook. One way or another, facebook plans to uncover you, and there is no negotiating this point.
You must now realize that Facebook is not interested in your name and birthdate, they are interested in being able to predict everything about you without these personal data. Faeebook wants a model, one that is fundamentally opposed to your welfare. And this objective will be realized.
Take heed of this, better now than later.
We're embracing a subset of 20th century themes. Star Trek: The Next Generation was a very popular XX century series, and yet after it, never again[0] did sci-fi embraced the themes like optimism about the future, exploration, diplomacy, a society as a protagonist just as important as the heroes, etc. I'm saddened about it (and about post-ENT Star Trek reboots). I want my TNG back, and I'm not ashamed of clinging to it.
--
[0] - With the possible exception of Disney's Tommorowland, and of course DS9, VOY and ENT Star Trek series from the same universe as TNG.
I created software that was used by call center agents to bid on “bathroom” break time slots and kept track of who was on break and actively punished those who didn’t follow the rules. It rewarded those that had higher performance and who took less breaks with higher priority. If an agent didn’t come back from their break a security guard would automatically be dispatched to find them. For the same company I also made software that reduced the same call agents to numbers and effectively automated the layoff/termination process. It would contact security with orders to have people escorted out, and had a sinister double verification process that would check to verify the agent was actually fired, or else the responsible security guard would be punished via the same point system. Everything was done via e-mail and would come from “System” and at the time used fancy HTML e-mail templates that looked official. I would frequently hear people talk about how they received a “System e-mail” with a chill in their voice, not knowing I was the one responsible. People who I ate lunch with sometimes didn’t even really know. Embedded in each e-mail was a count-down timer to create a sense of urgency to do whatever was being asked before a “punishment” was applied.
After an agent had been terminated, their punishment points would decay over time until such a time they reached zero (or another configurable threshold depending on how desperate the company was for warm bodies), at which time they would be sent an e-mail to their personal e-mail (which was collected during the application process), inviting them to “re-apply”. Being an early telephony company we also would send them a robo-call with the “good news”. This process was known as a “life-cycle” and it was common in certain labor markets for employees to have many such lifecycles. Another way employees could stave off automated termination was to work for unpaid overtime, which offered to reduce their point values per unit of overtime worked. Everything was tracked to second granularity thanks to deep integration with phone switches and the adoption of the open source Asterisk CTI.
This orwellian automation terrorized the poor employees who worked there for years, long after I left, before it was finally shut down by court order. I had designed it as a plug-in architecture and when it was shut down there were many additional features, orders, and punishment_types.
Strategy of Conflict is one of THE BEST books for ANYONE to read. Schelling is one of the guys whose job it was to do game theory when "I know that you know that I know" had nuclear annihilation at the other end if you get it wrong. He came up with the Red Telephone between the White House and the Kremlin.
As a book that is literally about negotiating your way out of terminal nuclear war, I've also found it an excellent practical guide to raising a toddler.
I wish I could find the exact book, but there was a philosopher writing about anti-semitism after WWII.
I really want to give you direct quotes but I'm about to run to a meeting, I'll search harder afterwards.
The jist, as written in ~1950s IIRC:
1. Anti-semites are immune to argument or criticism, because they are "Just Joking." They will spew hate speech and throw every argument they can at you, logical or otherwise, and outright lie, because they are "just forcing a discussion." If you actually pin them down and try to challenge them, they'll laugh you off. "I'm just starting the discussion here, are you really taking me seriously? Hahahahaha loser, triggered!"
2. It is acceptable to argue the possible benefits of levying import tax on wheat from Alegeria, because there are genuine positive/negatives to the transaction. However, it is not acceptable to argue over whether "All Jews should be killed." A standpoint that suggests the outright destruction of an entire people, or their enslavement or removal of freedoms, is so heinous as to not even be worth discussing the possibility of merit. In other words, anti-semitism is a garbage philosophy that our zeitgeist should not permit. It does not fall under the protection of "free speech," it is simply rejected wholesale.
My point: Restricting hate speech is not a slippery slope for freedom of speech. I personally believe there is no universal morality, but if I had to pick, I'd argue that the best outcome for the human race would be a culture that purges all racist and other arbitrarily prejudiced mindsets that judge entire populations on untenable grounds (race, gender, etc).
It is not a slippery slope if you set clear boundaries.
If want to know more about cool things you can do with shift registers and you've never heard of Solomon W. Golomb, check out Shift Register Sequences (intro at [0]). Most of our fundamental telecommunications is possible because he solved the mathematics involved.
There's SEEED Studio, in Shenzhen. They make PCB boards and assemble them. If you design using only parts in their Open Parts Library [1], they offer quite fast turnaround. They have ARM and ATMega CPU parts. They can also source from DigiKey and Mouser. They have a Design for Manufacturing manual, with lots of information on tolerances.[2] They'll hand-build one-off prototypes for you. Upload your Gerbers and BOM, and they'll give you a quick quote.
Of course, all this assumes you can design a working board. It's not inherently difficult, but there's a considerable learning curve. There are lots of online resources. For board design, there are lots of packages. I use KiCAD, which is open source, but Eagle is probably more suitable for pro work. (KiCAD is a good package, but the component footprint libraries are not that complete and may be somewhat off.)
(I've used them for blank boards. They do a nice job, but it's not super-fast. All their boards have been good, although once, by mistake, I got boards intended for someone in Japan, and they got my boards. Seeed re-made the boards and shipped again.)
So, I've read most of these. Here's a tour of what is definitely useful and what you should probably avoid.
_________________
Do Read:
1. The Web Application Hacker's Handbook - It's beginning to show its age, but this is still absolutely the first book I'd point anyone to for learning practical application security.
2. Practical Reverse Engineering - Yep, this is great. As the title implies, it's a good practical guide and will teach many of the "heavy" skills instead of just a platform-specific book targeted to something like iOS. Maybe supplement with a tool-specific book like The IDA Pro Book.
3. Security Engineering - You can probably read either this orThe Art of Software Security Assessment. Both of these are old books, but the core principles are timeless. You absolutely should read one of these, because they are like The Art of Computer Programming for security. Everyone says they have read them, they definitely should read them, and it's evident that almost no one has actually read them.
4. Shellcoder's Handbook - If exploit development if your thing, this will be useful. Use it as a follow-on from a good reverse engineering book.
5. Cryptography Engineering - The first and only book you'll really need to understand how cryptography works if you're a developer. If you want to make cryptography a career, you'll need more; this is still the first book basically anyone should pick up to understand a wide breadth of modern crypto.
_________________
You Can Skip:
1. Social Engineering: The Art of Human Hacking - It was okay. I am biased against books that don't have a great deal of technical depth. You can learn a lot of this book by reading online resources and by honestly having common sense. A lot of this book is infosec porn, i.e. "Wow I can't believe that happened." It's not a bad book, per se, it's just not particularly helpful for a lot of technical security. If it interests you, read it; if it doesn't, skip it.
2. The Art of Memory Forensics - Instead of reading this, consider reading The Art of Software Security Assessment (a more rigorous coverage) or Practical Malware Analysis.
3. The Art of Deception - See above for Social Engineering.
4. Applied Cryptography - Cryptography Engineering supersedes this and makes it obsolete, full stop.
_________________
What's Not Listed That You Should Consider:
1. Gray Hat Python - In which you are taught to write debuggers, a skill which is a rite of passage for reverse engineering and much of blackbox security analysis.
2. The Art of Software Security Assessment - In which you are taught to find CVEs in rigorous depth. Supplement with resources from the 2010s era.
3. The IDA Pro Book - If you do any significant amount of reverse engineering, you will most likely use IDA Pro (although tools like Hopper are maturing fast). This is the book you'll want to pick up after getting your IDA Pro license.
4. Practical Malware Analysis - Probably the best single book on malware analysis outside of dedicated reverse engineering manuals. This one will take you about as far as any book reasonably can; beyond that you'll need to practice and read walkthroughs from e.g. The Project Zero team and HackerOne Internet Bug Bounty reports.
5. The Tangled Web - Written by Michal Zalewski, Director of Security at Google and author of afl-fuzz. This is the book to read alongside The Web Application Hacker's Handbook. Unlike many of the other books listed here it is a practical defensive book, and it's very actionable. Web developers who want to protect their applications without learning enough to become security consultants should start here.
6. The Mobile Application Hacker's Handbook - The book you'll read after The Web Application Hacker's Handbook to learn about the application security nuances of iOS and Android as opposed to web applications.
I mostly watch youtube to unwind and not think so hard, a few I tend to get really into:
On cooking & food:
jastownsendandson - 18th century history and recipes
foodwishes - nice succinct no fuss recipes, focus on the recipes
TabiEats - casual/fast food reviews and stuff from Japan
gundog4314 - reviews of military rations
Global news and Culture:
PBS NewsHour - public news, nice balanced and thoughtful news without lots of histrionics
ARIRANG TV - korean state cultural TV, mostly because I have Korean family members, but some interesting shows from time to time also "ARIRANG NEWS" for regional news and local Korean politics and ARIRANG CULTURE for more specific Korean arts stuff
Great Big Story - hard to explain, but brilliant short videos from all over that make you feel better about the world after a hard day
Big Think - another hard to explain channel
TheJapanChannel - mostly interesting vignettes from Japan, I find them kind of soothing for some reason
Talk to me in Korean - supposed to be a language learning course, but interesting insights into Korean culture, sometimes some interesting walks around different parts of Korea, skip the language stuff and enjoy the rest
Abroad In Japan - an Englishman in Japan, very dry humor, endlessly entertaining
Korean Englishman - an Englishman in Korea, less dry humor, also endlessly entertaining
OsiyoTV - Cherokee Nation TV, well produced show on Cherokee topics
2hearts1seoul - nice fairly calm looks at stuff in Korea
NHKWorld - Japanese national shows
Simon and Martina - two hyper hipsters in Asia, I like them, but they can be polarizing
TheKoreaSociety - serious talks on Korea and regional issues
Retrocomputing and gaming and stuff:
Kim Justice - some incredible histories of the UK computer gaming scene, fantastically produced all around, an actual hidden gem on youtube
TNT Amusements - business advertisement for a company that refurbs arcade games, fun crew and can be entertaining and informative from time to time
Pixelmusement - old games, my favorite show is "Shovelware Diggers"...strangely relaxing review of crapware dos and early windows games from a 1000 games CD.
Retro Core - English reviews of retro games from Japan. The guy who does it is kind of infectious and opinionated, but has a definite voice.
Computerphile - interesting old to new light computing topics
The Ben Heck Show - various electronics and retro gaming/computing topics, serious hardware hacking
Top Hat Gaming Man - reviews of various games and stuff, puts a bit of effort into production
Grand Illusions - weird toys and nick-nacks, infectious host
Techmoan - odd old things, just watch it
EEVblog - intense teardowns of everything
Game Sack - great, well produced retro gaming
Metaljesusrocks - another great, well produced retro gaming show
Matt Barton - his show "Matt Chat" has interviews with some absolute gaming legends, amazing stuff
Jeremy Parish - one of the "old men" of gaming journalism, has lots of on-line presence, but does tons of interesting reviews
I advise taking a look at the mir titles or the Israel Gelfand books. Looking from it, Russian are really good at producing top notch popular science.
Tough there is no fry, their math book are almost game like, with few carefully built example and very clear explanation using only some diagram when needed (consequently their book are quite small) and the exercise are absolutely not rote based, except the first few exercice, and even then they all serve to illustrate a specific part of a concept, all the others are puzzle like problem.
Putting lots of full color image is not making math "fun", well built and interesting problem is.
This article makes me sad. Interviewing in our industry is so broken. I have been out of school for a while and switch jobs every few years and this is the technique I use to beat the bullshit interview process
. Make a list of companies that I would apply to and sort them from most interesting to no-way-in-hell-i-am-working-here order
. spend a weak reviewing typical algo/data structure questions
. For the companies that I absolutely want to work for, I review every single glassdoor review and write down the interview questions. Remember, most companies have question banks and most interviewers have favorite questions which results in same questions being asked over an over again. You want to exploit that
. Then to get over my interviewing jitters, I interview at a few companies where I would absolutely not work at. This results in no pressure interview practise and you can literally laugh at their asinine interview questions and walk out
. Finally, for the companies i actually want to work at, I try my best to get rid of phone screen. This is usually accomplished by dazzling them with my decent size github profile, contributing some fixes to their OSS project or finding someone who already works there that is in my alumni network
. Then when you finally arrive for the interview, you have real world interview practise, they are already impressed with your github profile/references and biased toward you versus some random joe off the street and you have made sure you have a pretty high probability of getting a question that you have already seen or is similar to a question you already know.
This technique has helped me get Jobs at top 5 employers in the valley along with a few startups. The reason I am posting this here is to demonstrate how broken, unfair and easy to game this whole process is
Dude, seriously...you have to stop peddling this ebay recommendation. No one is going to be competitive with data purchased on an auction website.
In case anyone is wondering where they should actually get data to be competitive, I can personally speak for these two:
* Nanex NxCore
* CBOE Livevol
I haven't purchased data from here, but I have heard it well recommended from people I trust:
* TickData
* QuantQuote
There are likely others, but bear in mind that the higher the data quality, the higher the price. For most strategies you'll likely want vetted intraday data, preferably at minute resolution or lower. Tick data is better, but it's going to be huge (my drives are near 100TB). You can reformat it into custom bar sizes if you have data on the actual trades/quotes.
To mitigate the likeliness of damage during transit, it's recommened to use ECC memory with ZFS. I had FreeNAS running on a system with a faulty memory module. ZFS correctly discovered damage in random files I just transferred over. Luckily, it wasn't too late to replace the bad module and repeat the transfer.
Lessons learned:
- Run MemTest86 on hardware before using it as storage
- Use an FS that does checksums
Unfortunately, the latter doesn't seem to apply to APFS.
> My bet is on micro lenses so small that the camera becomes a flat rectangle taking up most of one side of the phone, along with some crazy insane software processing.
As someone who does research on inverse signal recovery, what can be recovered nowadays is absolutely mindblowing. I work on the group synchronization problem, which aims to extract an underlying ground truth signal from noisy, shifted copies of that signal. In my case, I am extracting atomic environments from noisy rotated and permuted copies of an "archetypal" atomic environment, but I imagine the same technique applied to photography would produce stunning results. You would be surprised with the amount of noise for which you can still recover the true signal.
Not the poster, but I've personally found that old books from the 1950s and 60s about nuclear energy are very approachable. (Plus they have hilariously optimistic assessments of the future. It's cute, in a depressing way.)
"Principles of nuclear reactor engineering" by Samuel Glasstone is a commonly recommended text. If you do a little Googling you can find PDFs of it online, although out of respect for the authors I won't link them directly.
I have a 1955-ish print edition myself, and it's quite wonderful. The first third or so of the book requires no math and is the best overview of nuclear engineering that I've ever read, and then it starts to gradually ramp up the theory. At some point, unless you are coming directly from an undergrad physics program or a related discipline, you may find the math a bit daunting and decide to stop, but you'll still have a better understanding of the subject than probably anyone but a small percentage of humans.
The book does not, however, contain any information on nuclear weapons, such as you might find in a more modern text; at the time of its printing I suppose its inclusion would have gotten the book classified, since I don't think there was much available in the unclassified literature. So if that is an interest it may not be a good source. But this, too, adds a bit to the brave-new-world Atomic Era optimistic charm. I'd love to live in the world that Glassstone thought we'd be living in today from the vantage point of 1955.
I wish it were merely a way to avoid taking personal responsibility. There's much more to it than that.
Read "The Psychology of Influence" along with some of the stuff by, e.g, Kahneman and/or Tversky on behavioral economics and the various cognitive biases humans have that lead them to make poor decisions. I assure you that corporations have read all of this and are taking advantage of it to part you from your money, selling you products that they make you think will increase your happiness. Another resource on this would be Robert Shiller's book "Phishing for Phools, The Economics of Manipulation and Deception".
This isn't about taking personal responsibility. Even when you become fully aware of the insidious way in which our culture works, it's impossible to entirely avoid being taken advantage of by marketing and advertising. We humans are made to think in certain ways, our brains have evolved in a way that gave us cognitive biases we can't escape, even when we're aware of them. Being aware can motivate us to change the culture itself (and its laws), though, so in the future people are less affected by corporate deceit and greed. Yes, this would likely mean lower corporate profits. (Question how we're conditioned to think of lower corporate profits as a bad thing.)
I just graduated from the OMSCS (online master of science in computer science) program, and I found it a wholly worthwhile experience. It was challenging, informative, and for the most part well-run. Software Analysis and Test in particular was a real eye-opener. And while Computability, Complexity, and Algorithms was a hideous death march of terror, the material they covered was some of the most interesting I've ever experienced.
Yes, you can study the same material on your own, but you won't earn a degree from it. Now that I've got the degree, I'm in much better shape to pursue further learning on my own.
Note, however, that I didn't do this to improve my resume, go fishing for a new job, or try to get a raise. With tuition reimbursement from my company I only spent $3500 over 2 1/2 years to earn a full-fledged master's degree.
Based on the above, I can't agree that it's a losing proposition.
The proprietary companies already do this looking for hidden stuff. Mostly patent violations, though, so they can scheme some licensing revenue out of the product they're inspecting. Here's the company that does much of it:
In that one, you'll see the other end of the process where many mobile chips will get extremely specialized. Notice this one has several RF chips instead of an integrated one to attempt to hit some size/price/energy/performance tradeoff. Plus Apple sells premium stuff whether they can put in more, nicer parts. Notice there's 10 different chips involved in just the RF front-end part. :)
Here's a nice PDF with illustrations of the RE processes themselves plus what things look like:
I like Fig 3 especially as a lot of people forget there's circuitry inside their PCB's rather than just on top or bottom. That cell phone has 9 layers of wiring. :)
If you want to buy a cheap printed version search on abebooks.com. They usually have international editions at competitive prices. I used to buy all my college textbooks from there.
These data are being released in hopes of furthering the developments of these techniques - which ultimately benefits a future use by Facebook.
In turn, people like "presenti" have pointed out several times that the data were collected in Facebook offices or other places where all participants consent. The implication is clear: While the present data are legal, they would not be if shot in the "wild".
In many jurisdictions, there is no legal use case for these methods. It is literally not possible to have a widely-used implementation of these glasses that would not violate the privacy rights of "bystanders".
Of course, Facebook will work hard to make it legal, on all fronts. Whether laws need to be changed or, as pointed out by presenti, some innovation may arise to make you at least an anonymous blob, separate from name and address. And if you do not have an account - see in this thread - what is there to worry about? Well, even if the association would only be indirect, any data collected from you (with increasing sophistication) would be part of Facebook and its models. Even as a group of anonymous users, you would become less and less anonymous and increasingly more explainable.
If you are so far unconvinced that this matters, please be also aware that the only thing standing between businesses and the extraction of the entire surplus (or consumer welfare) is asymmetry of information. As soon as your needs and wants are sufficiently modeled, companies will use these data to maximize the profit from all their interactions with you. You will, in a sense, pay monopoly prices without facing monopolies.
Again, read the replies carefully. See how legal constraints are certainly something that is "to be solved in the future". However, whether you should ever be afforded privacy or anonymity in the face of facebook's algorithm is implicitly answered, with (frankly) a worrying amount of arrogance and dismissal: no, you and everything about you should no longer be any unexplained variation for facebook. One way or another, facebook plans to uncover you, and there is no negotiating this point.
You must now realize that Facebook is not interested in your name and birthdate, they are interested in being able to predict everything about you without these personal data. Faeebook wants a model, one that is fundamentally opposed to your welfare. And this objective will be realized. Take heed of this, better now than later.