Not to hijack a thread, but: this is is why Apple's iOS is such a compelling case. They make it so easy to control access to the location/microphone/etc. in one tab: Settings -> Privacy -> Location Services
I don't know what Google is thinking, but given the current snooping climate you think they'd err on the side of the customer... but they don't.
They released an App Ops-like feature in an Android beta (I think it was KitKat, but don't quote me) and pulled it because it broke compatibility with so many apps.
(It caused an exception to be thrown whenever an app tried to access something that had been locked down by the user. Legacy apps obviously couldn't catch the exception, so typically the app would just crash.)
It seems easy to fix: can't they test the app in the app store and see if it can handle the exception or not, and if it can't, return a dummy (0,0) coordinate?
Actually testing every app sounds like a challenge Google isn't interested in taking on.
There's also the question of whether apps will still behave gracefully when receiving dummy data. Some apps may misbehave in ways such that it's not immediately apparent that the root cause is a permissions issue.
I have a relative who make more than that as an accountant. He does forensic accounting, essentially auditing financial records in corporate lawsuits. Reconstructing where money did or did not go. Testifies at trials as an expert witness and so on.
One of the biggest problems with politics is that politicians need to raise a lot of money to get (re)elected. That money comes with strings attached, which makes it difficult for our politicians to make good decisions.
I had never considered that the same problem exists in academia, but apparently it does. Hamm has donated tens of millions to the University of Oklahoma, and it's pretty obvious he's trying to use his money to influence the direction of the University. I'm surprised it isn't working.
Remember this next time someone suggests getting rid of tenure or cutting federal research funding. Especially for areas of research that are politically or economically hot (climate/environment, privacy, etc.)
This is actually the main reason for tenure. It is to protect intellectual freedom. Granted, nowadays due to excessive abuses by lazy faculty, the whole system is likely to die a slow death.
> due to excessive abuses by lazy faculty, the whole system is likely to die a slow death.
That's true of a lot of systems; Tenure, unionization, welfare. It becomes easy to stir people in to a frenzy to eliminate the freeloader problem while the question of whether the institution is too important to care about freeloaders remains ignored. In all the cases, perhaps freeloaders are just part of the price for a valuable system, and we should accept it.
What surprises me isn't that Universities need money, it's how cheap they're willing to sell themselves. $20 million allows one guy to push around a university with an endowment and budget both more than 50x that. [1]
Generally naming rights involve doubling the endowment of a school. And of course you get some added influence, but $20 million in Oklahoma seems like it wouldn't even pay for 5 years of the football coach's [2] (coach's, not coaches!) salary.
> What surprises me isn't that Universities need money, it's how cheap they're willing to sell themselves. $20 million allows one guy to push around a university with an endowment and budget both more than 50x that.
Certain very direct actions may not work, but the ability for this funding to slowly corrupt the science produced is still very much a risk and the ability for the rich to influence the very discoveries that science makes is still something to be feared.
I read a book on this that describes the money/politics problem as two categories:
A Guardian Syndrome, and a Commerce Syndrome. Both syndromes are efficient and well when independent, but it's when the categories begin to merge that you begin to get problems and conflict of interest.
I recommend people to check out the book. It's a great analysis of the nature of corruption from a very cultural, anthropological and economic perspective. It's a refreshing angle from the typical character assassinations you see in the news. It's called Systems of Survival by Jane Jacobs.
This problem isn't unique to this story. As examples, look up Confucius Institutes or the Koch brothers (yes, them again) funding of colleges and programs.
It's not unique to private funds; federal funding is controlled, ultimately, but Congress, which brings politics into the mix. Public universities are ultimately controlled by state governments. Finally, politics affects schools directly; probably not many administrators want to sacrifice their futures to protect an unpopular professor. I'd be interested in seeing how our colleges and acedemics fared during the McCarthy witch hunts.
I don't know the US system specifically, but industry usually has a say in how public spending on research (particularly applied research) is distributed. Usually the process is that they're consulted on what they think future prioritized research topics should be.
Interesting post! The author mentions that the first step was to "receive this input and to generate HLS output to a known folder". I have a couple questions about this step:
1: Did they re-encode the input? Or just repackage it?
2: I'm unfamiliar with EvoStream, but if it is ingesting RTMP and outputting HLS, why did Globo need to bother generating an HLS manifest? Couldn't they just use the one EvoStream created?
I am glad you liked. I am not the author of the blog post, but I was a member of the team.
1: We just repackage it.
2: The problem is that EvoStream stores the manifests and chunks locally and we needed high availability. That's why we use an external data storage. We have had up to 30 simultaneous streams, with 7 bitrates each and 2 hours of DVR.
Just adding one extra information, building the playlist on our side enabled us to define the DVR window (how many time one can seek back on the video). Since we built both the server and client side, it was also possible to add tags to the stream and we did it. tl;dr; It was possible to control the adaptive streaming on the server side.
When our CDN was very crowded, one tag on the HLS playlist was able to direct users to a lower quality, preventing all the users to fight for the same bandwidth and avoiding rebuffering events.
Taxation is a huge part of it. Employees don't have to pay taxes on the benefit.
I think with the ACA, some small business can claim a tax credit for providing health insurance to their employees, but I'm not 100% sure about that part.
Do you believe anyone can become a 10X programmer? Or do you need a certain level of talent in order for the hard work to pay off?
My high school had an introductory programming class. Most students hadn't done any programming before, yet there were a couple of students who quickly understood the concepts and could solve weeks worth of assignments in a single day, whereas the rest of the class struggled. Those students, for whatever reason, were able to learn programming much more quickly than the average student, and I believe those students they'd see a greater return on their investment of hard work.
Here's another anecdote: do you know any experienced engineers who work 12 hours a day and still struggle to do relatively easy jobs? I do. Talent is an important piece of the puzzle. Hard work is also an important part of the puzzle. Both are important.
This seems reasonable to me. Pretty much every academic code of conduct requires students not to publish solutions to homework problems. This doesn't prevent the use of git, just git public repositories.
Rather than just issue DMCA takedown notices, it might be useful for the University of Illinois to provide students with access to private git repositories. Of course, I suspect many students have drank the "github is your resume" kool-aid and would be less likely to use private repositories.
Random tangent: I recently had two copies of a key made, and noticed that the guy at the duplicating machine was able to remove the original after "scanning" it to make the first copy. Seems obvious in retrospect, but I hadn't realized that nowadays those machines had memory like photocopiers, instead of just being purely mechanical.
With that in mind, seems like it should be possible for someone to scan a key, save the pattern, and be able to use it later on to cut new keys on-demand. Does a service like this exist?
The mechanical copiers have never been the best way to copy a key.
Each key manufacturer has a fixed set of depths to cut each position on the key at, which you can represent as a single digit. Combined for the whole key and you can talk about the data encoded into the piece of metal as a string of digits.
Telling you my apartment key is a kwikset KW1 with bitting 64265 is enough to cut a new key.
This is possible with the RFID transponders used in ignition keys by most carmakers. However, BMW had the foresight to prevent this.
Maybe the downmarket carmakers have gotten smarter, but for a long time BMW stood out as the one that did not permit simple duplication of the data in the RFID transponders (each transponder has its data changed every time it is used.)
As far as mechanical key bittings go, any locksmith should be able to clone a key with a photograph of it.
I was puzzled by this too, and surprised at how simple it was. Remember during the 90's we had ISO7816 cards that were a lot more difficult to attack (for instance, payphone cards permuted a challenge from the phone with a shared secret and a secret algorithm, and additionally had some good anti-reading protection, and an irreversible counter)
As far as I know all the technology able to fit in a 7816 card has been put into contactless cards too.
I think that carmakers are lazy, they go to a vendor who designs a system with off the shelf parts and implements it poorly, and we end up with our $30,000 car secured by a PCF7930 or something weaker and if it has security features they are not fully utilized.
I think they also have to design these things within the constraints of being able to service them in the field and not upsetting the customer. Vendor doesn't want to be responsible for a bunch of cars not working if reliability is low, and carmakers wouldn't want the bad press. On the other hand, when criminal activity is involved, it's real easy to blame the criminal.
Depends on where you live. Here in Sweden it is common with doors with locks which are both impossible to bump and hard to pick. Our insurance companies require them.
>Even if I had a printer I'd need some fancy scanning equipment to figure out how to make the key.
Keys have been reproduced from a single photo before. It seems to always involve someone who has experience making keys using the photo to reproduce the key, but in theory software could be able to automate this for the easier cases.
If I have a key or picture of a key, yes. If I have access to just the lock, I can't figure out how to do this without some odd equipment. And if the 3d printer + just the lock can't do something new, then how do 3d printers make traditional locks obsolete?
In the US, the details vary by state but in general you don't need any kind of license to possess or use lockpicks (except in Tennessee): http://toool.us/laws.html
3) Do not lie to police officers; it's a crime. A defense lawyer in this video advised not to talk to police at all if you are being investigated; you could misspeak (esp. under stress), be misunderstood, be taken out of context, the officer could misremember, etc. I have no idea if he's a crank or if it's good advice:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc
What makes you even consider answering that question? I can't imagine a reason to answer, whether I was completely broke or carrying a few grand.
Of course, as others have said, it's probably best to seek advice from a group that focuses on this topic - perhaps Flex Your Rights.
But when in doubt, definitely don't answer. "Officer, I prefer not to discuss money right now" is a completely reasonable answer that most cops will respond to with an understanding nod. If they don't, just calmly tell them you aren't sure what questions to answer until you have a lawyer present. Again, totally reasonable answer.
In John Markoff 's 2005 book What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (even the book's title is from a hoary old Jefferson Airplane track) he reveals that the world's first online transaction was a drug deal:
In 1971 or 1972, Stanford students using Arpanet accounts at Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory engaged in a commercial transaction with their counterparts at Massachussetts Institute of Technology. Before Amazon, before eBay, the seminal act of e-commerce was a drug deal. The students used the network to quietly arrange the sale of an undetermined amount of marijuana.
