The Oxen of the Cloud
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| The Oxen of the Cloud | |
| Number | 2687 |
| Broadcast Date | FEBRUARY 12, 2016 |
| Episode Length | 42:18 |
| Hosts | Tom Merritt |
| Guests | Darren Kitchen |
Would you still use US products if they were mandated to have an encryption backdoor? Darren Kitchen and Tom Merritt discuss the findings of Bruce Schneier and company.
Guest
Headlines
- Runkeeper CEO and co-founder Jason Jacobs announced the fitness startup has been acquired by Japanese athletic equipment company ASICS. Jason said the companies had complimentary goals and would develop physical products with digital fitness tracking. The Runkeeper app and its development will continue and “from the end-user standpoint, not much will change.” No details on the deal were revealed.
- Submitted by stevei0
- AT&T announced Friday it will begin testing 5G services this year and offer some components of 5G as broadband replacement service in rural areas. AT&T’s Chief Strategy Officer John Donovan told ReCode the company will do lab tests with Intel and Ericsson in the first half of the year followed by field tests in Austin.
- The Guardian reports Facebook India’s managing director Kirthiga Reddy will step down from the post after six years and move back to the US. She called the move a “natural transition” for her school-age children. Facebook says the move has been planned for some time and she will work with teams at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, California.
- Netflix engineers posted Thursday that the company closed its last data center in January 2016 and has completed it cloud migration to AWS. Netflix began the migration of everything but video to the cloud in 2008. Video is still delivered through Netflix Open Connect which it calls its content delivery network.
- Streetmap has lost its case against Google for “anticompetitive conduct” in British court according to the UK Guardian. Online map service Streetmap said Google unfairly promoted Google Maps over rivals contrary to Britain’s Competition Act 1998. The result was a “dramatic loss of traffic” to Streetmap. Google puts its own map in something called 'OneBox' at the top of its results pages. Justice Roth ruled that Google’s 2007 introduction of Maps OneBox was “not reasonably likely appreciably to affect competition in the market for online maps” and Google’s behavior was “objectively justified”. Streetmap director Kate Sutton said they would appeal the judgment.
- The Hollywood Reporter says it has learned that Apple’s first scripted television series will star Dr. Dre who will also executive produce. The six half-hour episode series will be called Vital Signs and likely be distributed through Apple Music. Sam Rockwell and Mo McCrae are cast and music video director Paul Hunter is running it. Empire’s Robert Munic wrote the episodes.
- VentureBeat reports Facebook has confirmed its testing SMS support in Messenger as well as launching multiple account support for Android users. Android Police spotted the new features Thursday. SMS is being tested with a small number of US users but multiple accounts have launched worldwide.
- Researchers from the computer science departments at Caly Poly and North Carolina State University analyzed nearly 1.4 million users of Github on April 1, 2015. The team found 78.6% of pull requests made by women were accepted compared to 74.6% for men. The team also looked at acceptance of code from contributors not well known in the GitHub community. Among those ‘outsiders’ women's acceptance rates were 71.8% when they use gender neutral profiles, but dropped to 62.5% when identified as female.
- Your watch sucks because it doesn’t use ytterbium ions. Physicists in Germany used ytterbium ions to make an optical single-ion clock that traps ions in a lattice of laser beams that allows oscillations to be counted accurately. The clock would not lose or gain a second over several billion years a measurement uncertainty of 3 E-18. That’s 100 times more accurate than old-fashioned Cesium clocks. Time to redefine the Standard International unit of time!
- The UK Investigatory Powers Tribunal declared that GCHQ is not in violation of the law for its persistent surveillance actions. Privacy International alleged GCHQ violated warrant protections based on Snowden revelations that the agency engaged in Computer Network Exploitation. During the case GCHQ admitted to using persistent monitoring software. The court rules that due to the current terrorist threat thematic warrants against broad classes of people with an open time frame were sufficient.
- The UK’s newspaper The Independent confirmed today it will stop printing editions and become digital only. The last print editions will hit newsstands March 26th.
Discussion
- Encryption Is Worldwide: Yet Another Reason Why a US Ban Makes No Sense
- Proposed State Bans on Phone Encryption Make Zero Sense
- A Worldwide Survey of Encryption Products
- Yet another bill seeks to weaken encryption-by-default on smartphones
- Keys Under Doormats: mandating insecurity by requiring government access to all data and communications
- Internet firms to be banned from offering unbreakable encryption under new laws
Pick of the Day
- Credit Unions
- A long time ago (early '70s) after being majorly screwed by a Bank I joined a Federal Credit Union.
On our last re-fi we went through the Kinecta Credit Union, and to our astonishment they did not sell the loan, it's still on our statement and we can easily make payments directly from our household checking account.
If you can find a credit union you qualify for I strongly recommend you open an account there and extend whatever finger you like toward your previous financial institution. - Submitted by Gary the Senior Geek (@SeniorGeek49 almost everywhere)
- A long time ago (early '70s) after being majorly screwed by a Bank I joined a Federal Credit Union.
Messages
- The feedback about sensors in automated systems and the subsequent conversation was excellent. There are so many automated systems around that have the potential to cause serious harm to you, it’s in the programming of those systems to prevent something bad from ever happening. Perfect Exampling being your water supply, I live in a City of 250,000 people, and our city’s water treatment plant is staffed 24/7-365.25 but millions of people live with clean water from facilities that are not staffed all the time. Some only have mechanical safeguards but many newer ones would have control systems and things like sensor failures will shut down those systems as a pre-caution instead of just simply continuing to run.
This programming is what made Stuxnet so scary to people in the world of controls, a virus that can infiltrate a SCADA system, and hijack the system so that all of your remote monitoring is reporting correctly, while the wrong thing is happening. If these cars are communicating, their security will be more crucial to their safe operation than what might happen when a sensor failed. A stuxnet type virus for autonomous cars would be disastrous as it could change the programming of the autonomous logic. - Sent by Scott (@TDEnterprises), Operations Engineer in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan
- The feedback about sensors in automated systems and the subsequent conversation was excellent. There are so many automated systems around that have the potential to cause serious harm to you, it’s in the programming of those systems to prevent something bad from ever happening. Perfect Exampling being your water supply, I live in a City of 250,000 people, and our city’s water treatment plant is staffed 24/7-365.25 but millions of people live with clean water from facilities that are not staffed all the time. Some only have mechanical safeguards but many newer ones would have control systems and things like sensor failures will shut down those systems as a pre-caution instead of just simply continuing to run.
- Hi Tom, Jennie, Roger and guest,
Long time listener of Tom's work since BOL days and proud Patreon supporter.
I wanted to let you know about an exciting project I'm working on next week - I'm filming an attempt to be the first multi-rotor drone to cross the English channel.
The drone, named Enduro, has been developed by a company in the UK called Ocuair. They will set off via boat to France and attempt to make the return journey whilst tailing the drone at 30 knots. The drone will be set to follow way points but will remain in the operators control for the duration of the 30ish mile journey.
The purpose of the attempt is a proof of concept as many in industry look to utilise drones for day to day use. I'm really looking forward to covering it with my team of camera operators and will happily send you the link when it's completed to a recap of what happened. We also aim to complete a documentary about it all, later this year.
I wanted to send this along as I know drones get covered on your show and I thought listeners may like to know about some of ways the technology is being tested for the future.
You can keep up to date with the production side of it via Twitter: @davidtoms and for the details of the attempt itself take a look at the companies Twitter: @Ocuair.
Thanks for your time, - Sent by David Toms
- Hi Tom, Jennie, Roger and guest,
- The problem with using the self-driving train that was taken offline as argument against self-driving vehicles, is that it was comparatively, more like a human being than an self-driving vehicle. Its knowledge and experiences were entirely self-contained and unique to it. It wasn't able to formulate a plan for handling a failing sensor because it had no well of knowledge from which to draw. And its experience was limited to the few data points it had collected about itself (if any).
- Sent by Jey (BigScaryDog on Patreon)
YouTube
Links
| Preceded by: "Kitchen Table Encryption. Also Jobs." |
The Oxen of the Cloud |
Followed by: "Garlic and Lard" |