Tag: Quote of the Week

Privacy Consequences of the SPE Hack

Bruce Schneier in his comments on the recent Sony Hack cites a Gizmondo article that sums it up very well why privacy is important to everyone even for mundane everyday stuff we do on the internet:

These are people who did nothing wrong. They didn’t click on phishing links, or use dumb passwords (or even if they did, they didn’t cause this). They just showed up. They sent the same banal workplace emails you send every day, some personal, some not, some thoughtful, some dumb. Even if they didn’t have the expectation of full privacy, at most they may have assumed that an IT creeper might flip through their inbox, or that it was being crunched in an NSA server somewhere. For better or worse, we’ve become inured to small, anonymous violations. What happened to Sony Pictures employees, though, is public. And it is total.

And in Bruce’s words:

These people didn’t have anything to hide. They aren’t public figures. Their details aren’t going to be news anywhere in the world. But their privacy has been violated, and there are literally thousands of personal tragedies unfolding right now as these people deal with their friends and relatives who have searched and reads this stuff.

Programming is Meaningless

Researchers seemingly have found a way to tell-apart students which will do well in computer science classes and those who won’t. More eloquently put they’ve devised a way  “[to] separate programming sheep from non-programming goats.” 😀

And they come to an interesting conclusion:

Formal logical proofs, and therefore programs – formal logical proofs that particular computations are possible, expressed in a formal system called a programming language – are utterly meaningless. To write a computer program you have to come to terms with this, to accept that whatever you might want the program to mean, the machine will blindly follow its meaningless rules and come to some meaningless conclusion. In the test the consistent group showed a pre-acceptance of this fact: they are capable of seeing mathematical calculation problems in terms of rules, and can follow those rules wheresoever they may lead. The inconsistent group, on the other hand, looks for meaning where it is not. The blank group knows that it is looking at meaninglessness, and refuses to deal with it.
— Saeed Dehnadi and Richard Bornat, 2006, “The camel has two humps (working title)”

I have accepted it. -.-

Die Suppe der Suppe der Suppe

Das ist einer der besten Nasreddin Hoca Witze überhaupt.

Als ein Verwandter vom Land den Hoca besuchte, brachte er eine Ente mit. Hocherfreut ließ dieser das Federvieh zubereiten und teilte das Mahl mit seinem Gast. In der Folgezeit tauchte ein Mann nach dem anderen beim Hoca auf. Jeder behauptete, ein Freund des Freundes des Mannes zu sein, der die Ente mitgebracht hatte. Der Hoca bewirtete sie alle, bis seine Mittel erschöpft waren. Als wieder ein “Freund” erschien, setzte Hoca ihm eine Schale Wasser vor. “Was ist das?” fragte der Gast erstaunt. “Das ist die Suppe der Suppe der Suppe der Ente, die mir mein Verwandter geschenkt hat.”

Laniakea

In the wake of the newly-released Laniakea paper I was inspired. 😀

Humbled and in awe
Just from the images he saw

Of the pearls of light
Making way through the dark and void

A sign, though abstract
Reminding him to not detract

Those mindful can tell
الله أعلى و أجل

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They Used to Say That About Content

Facebook wants you to help them optimize their ads. You’re supposed tell them which ones you like or dislike so they can replace the ones you didn’t like with other you might “like more.” … This seems so bizarre … In essence Facebook is telling you to curate their ad stream for you the way you curate your own content stream. In doing so they blurt out things like

giving people more control about the ads they see

and

show you the ads that are most relevant to you

Is it just me, or is this exactly the way they used to talk about content?!? o.O