Gooooooood morning, Humanity!!! Hey, this is not a test, this is a tech roundup. Time to rock it from the Delta to the DMZ.
AI, bots and robots
- Human-robot teams work better when there’s an emotional connection
- Entrepreneurs don’t have a gene for risk–they come from families with money
- Benchmarking TPU, GPU, and CPU Platforms for Deep Learning
- Supervisors Driven by Bottom Line Fail to Get Top Performance: Study
- How I Became a Machine Learning Practitioner
- Math Basics for Computer Science and Machine Learning
- Machine Learning That’s Light Enough for an Arduino
- Advances in Conversational AI
Blockchain and decentralization
- Clinical Trial on a Public Blockchain
- A Comscore Company Distributes a MITM Proxy Spyware Compromising Users Security
Airo Security (AiroAV) has recently discovered that a Comscore product for macOS, called PremierOpinion, uses a harmful Man-In-The-Middle (MITM) practice to facilitate its Spyware functionalities. It is developed, distributed and orchestrated by VoiceFive, Inc. a subsidiary of Comscore, Inc.(NASDAQ: SCOR). This Comscore spyware installs a proxy on ports 8888, 8443 and 8254, where it captures … - MIT Fellow Says Facebook ‘Lifted’ His Ideas for Libra Cryptocurrency
MIT fellow Alex Lipton claims Facebook borrowed the guts of its Libra project from a paper he co-authored last year. - Coinbase Incident Post Mortem: June 25–26, 2019
A close look at two periods of degraded service on Coinbase.com during the week of June 24. - Introduction to Decentralisation
- What Happened with West Virginia’s Blockchain Voting Experiment?
Slateâs Use of Your Data - Gubernator: Cloud-Native Distributed Rate Limiting for Microservices
- LF: Fully Decentralized Fully Replicated Key/Value Store
Fully Decentralized Fully Replicated Key/Value Store – zerotier/lf - Time, Randomness, and a $100k Prize to Forever Change Blockchain
Woman computer scientist of the week
Hava Siegelmann is a professor of computer science, and a world leader in the fields of Lifelong Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Neural Networks, and Computational Neuroscience. Her academic position is in the school of Computer Science and the Program of Neuroscience and Behavior at the University of Massachusetts Amherst; she is the director of the school’s Biologically Inspired Neural and Dynamical Systems Lab. She joined DARPA in July, 2016 and is the Program Manager for the Lifelong Learning Machine (L2M) program.
Cloud and architecture
- Problems with the CSS background-image property
The CSS background-image property allowed us to do some amazing things, but in most cases, it’s time to leave it behind. - How I use the good parts of AWS
- GNES – a cloud-native semantic search system based on deep neural network
- Zoning laws have become absurdly restrictive
- Google reveals fistful of flaws in Apple’s iMessage app
The security researchers involved say that Apple has yet to fix all of the discovered flaws. - Why Pattern Discovery Matters
- Universal Laws of the World
- Cortex – An ML model deployment platform that runs in your AWS account
- Copyright Lawsuits Could Come to Regular Internet Users Under a New Law
- Bubble Experiment Finds Universal Laws
Physicists have found examples of âuniversalityâ in a system of confined bubbles. The work could help researchers understand the strange behavior of singularities. - Lawsuit: Autopilot didn’t prevent Model 3 from driving under semi at 68 MPH
- Lawsuit filed against GitHub in wake of Capital One data breach
Capital One and GitHub have been hit with a class-action lawsuit over the recent data breach that resulted in the data of over 100 million Capital One customers being exposed.
Development and languages
- Exploiting a No-Name FreeBSD Kernel Vulnerability
- GitHub starts blocking developers in countries facing US trade sanctions
- GitHub banned all Iranian users. Our accounts are restricted. Please support us
- Lightning video adapters feature Apple Secure Boot, run Darwin kernel
- New Al Zimmermann’s Programming Contest – Reversing Nearness
- GitHub confirms it has blocked developers in Iran, Syria, and Crimea
The impact of U.S. trade restrictions is trickling down to the developer community. GitHub, the world’s largest host of source code, is preventing users in Iran, Syria, Crimea and potentially other sanctioned nations from accessing portions of the service, chief executive of the Microsoft-own⦠- Pure Python event bus for multi process apps that supports asyncio and trio
Lahja is a generic multi process event bus implementation written in Python 3.6+ to enable lightweight inter-process communication, based on non-blocking asyncio – ethereum/lahja - B-threads: programming in a way that allows for easier changes
- The L.A. Times’ disappointing digital numbers
- First Programmable Memristor Computer
- (How to Write a (Lisp) Interpreter (In Python))
- Building a Programming Language Pt. 3 – Interpreting
Quote of the week
Object-oriented design is the roman numerals of computing.
— Rob Pike
Enterprises
- Facebook and Google Algorithms Are Secret–But Australia Plans to Change That
Tech giants Facebook and Alphabet’s Google could have their secretive algorithms policed by a beefed-up watchdog, under what Australia describes as world-first limits to the power that they wield over news and advertising markets. - How Google Search Works (By Google)
- In Brazil, Amazon Protections Are Slashed and Forests Fall
- Dutch gov publishes report on Microsoft telemetry
On behalf of the Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security, Privacy Company has investigated the privacy risks related to the use of Microsoft Windows 10 Enterprise, Office 365 ProPlus and Office Online, as well as the mobile Office apps. With the Ministryâs permission, we are publishing two blog posts - Uber Lays Off 400
The ride-hailing company’s cuts follow an internal reorganization and questions about whether it can make money. - Stripe plans to open office in Baltimore
- Amazon as experiment
I sometimes think that if you could look in the safe behind Jeff Bezosâs desk, instead of the sports almanac from Back to the Future youâd find an Encyclopedia of Retail, written in maybe 1985. There would be Post-It notes on every page, and every one of those notes has been turned into a team or an - Google Site Search Alternative
- Google unlocks 33% of publisher paywalls on July 30. This is what happens next
- “We plan to hide ‘https’ scheme and subdomain ‘www’ in Chrome omnibox in M76”
- Ring has enormous control over the ways police partners can portray its products
- Alphabet overtakes Apple to become most cash-rich company
Google’s parent company now holds $117 billion in cash - Jeff Bezos sells $1.8bn of Amazon stock
- Combining two great companies: DoorDash to acquire Caviar
- Good for Google, Bad for America
- Amazon will pull the plug on dash buttons
- Rome Is the Fulcrum of AMD’s Datacenter Pivot
- Would you accept cheaper rent in exchange for a monthly Amazon purchasing quota?
- Amazon allegedly scammed out of $370K by 22-year-old’s return shipments of dirt
A 22-year-old is accused of scamming the largest internet retailer in the world out of nearly $370,000 by sending returned packages with dirt. - AMD Ryzen 7 3700X is such a hit it almost outsold Intel’s entire CPU range
Ryzen sales have reached startling heights – and Intel should be worried
Other news
- Teenage hackers are offered a second chance under European experiment
- Has the Time Come for City-Run Public Banks?
A coalition of bank activists in ten California cities is pushing for public banks. A bill to support them is working its way through the state legislature - Bellingcat journalists targeted by failed phishing attempt
Investigative news site Bellingcat has confirmed several of its staff were targeted by an attempted phishing attack on their ProtonMail accounts, which the journalists and the email provider say failed. “Yet again, Bellingcat finds itself targeted by cyber attacks, almost certainly linked to ⦠- Airbnb host ordered to pay £100k of unlawful profits after letting council flat
- Browser extensions are underrated: the promise of hackable software
In a world of closed platforms, browser extensions are the rare exception that let users modify the apps that we use. - Honest to a Fault: Pepys’s journals bear witness to events large and small
- Capital One Systems Breached by Seattle Woman, U.S. Says
- A Critique of Pure Learning: What Neural Networks Can Learn from Animal Brains
- A Programmer’s Regret: Neglecting Math at University
- You’re Paying into a Broken System Whenever You Buy Something on iOS
Appleâs unfair, monopolistic policies on its App Store hurt developers and consumers alike. But thereâs a better way. - Paige Thompson, Capital One Hacking Suspect, Left a Trail Online
- Moving the Linux desktop to another reality
- Amazon, Walmart, Ikea targeted in University of California light bulb lawsuits
- National Australia Bank compromises thousands of customer details
Thousands of National Australia Bank (NAB) customers have had ‘some personal information’ compromised after the bank uploaded the details to the servers of two ‘data service companies’. - Physicists Peer Inside a Fireball of Quantum Matter
- Valve proposes Linux kernel changes to improve gaming performance
- Filling hospitals with art reduces patient stress, anxiety and pain
Chelsea and Westminster Hospital has found that the mental health and experiences of those receiving intrusive examinations, surgery, chemotherapy and emergency care are improved when visual art is installed. - How to Build Payments for an Insurance Startup
- Equifax removed the $125 claim payout option after millions submitted claims
- Programming Algorithms: A Crash Course in Lisp
- Iron Age Celtic Woman Was Buried in a Hollowed-Out Tree Trunk
- Alaska’s scientists despair over plan to shrink state universities
The University of Alaska’s governing board plans to consolidate campuses to cope with a 40% cut in state funding. - China has started a grand experiment in AI education
