By Cory Doctorow at 10:29 pm Tuesday, Feb 21
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On Wired, Robert McMillan has an inspiring profile of GitHub, the remarkably successful, self-funded startup that provides a streamlined, easy-to-use version of Git, the version control system beloved by millions. GitHub is a great example of a company that does something simple and well, which scales, doesn't cost much, and improves lots of peoples' lives.
“We don’t keep track of vacation days; we don’t keep track of hours. It doesn’t matter to us,” says CIO Scott Chacon. “I’ve been here at midnight and there are five people here. And I’ve been here in the middle of the day on a Thursday and there’s nobody here.”
And yet it’s the most productive software development team he’s ever worked on, Chacon says.
Preston-Werner’s bet has paid off. GitHub is now profitable. Users can sign up for free and start contributing, but they pay money if they want to privately host code there — starting at $7 per month. GitHub also sells an enterprise product that lets companies run your own version of GitHub behind the corporate firewall. That starts at $5,000 per year, but can cost hundreds of thousands annually for companies with hundreds of coders.
Lord of the Files: How GitHub Tamed Free Software (And More)
By David Pescovitz at 9:46 pm Tuesday, Feb 21
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As I recently posted, my colleagues and I at Institute for the Future hosted a conference late last year where we presented our new map, titled A Multiverse of Exploration: The Future of Science 2021. The map focuses on six big stories of science that we think will play out over the next decade: Decrypting the Brain, Hacking Space, Massively Multiplayer Data, Sea the Future, Strange Matter, and Engineered Evolution. As we were conducting the research that informed the map, I was constantly reminded of Arthur C. Clark's famous quote, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." After all, we were exploring real science around invisibility cloaks, quantum consciousness, designer lifeforms -- I'd say those are pretty magical concepts. That's why we were delighted when Luigi Anzivino, scientific content developer at The Exploratorium and a prestidigitator, offered to speak at our conference about the intersection of magic and neuroscience! Check out his presentation above. More presentations to come from the IFTF Future of Science conference...
By Cory Doctorow at 9:01 pm Tuesday, Feb 21
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From the August 1951 ish of Mechanix Illustrated, a modest HOWTO describing a "Snooperscope" that requires a 4,000 to 6,000-volt power-supply to fire infrared light at and through the materials around you.
Construction of the snooperscope: The image converter tube is mounted in a plastic drinking cup 3-1/2 in. high by 2-1/2 in. in diameter. The optical system required depends upon your intended use. We used a small tripod type magnifier lens of 10 power (1 in. focal length) for the front lens and objects from three inches to one and a half feet can be focused. There is no reason why a greater range cannot be had with this lens by moving it closer or farther away from the tube.
After selecting the lens system mount it in a hole cut into the bottom of the cup. A jeweler’s saw or coping saw is ideal for cutting the hole. Paint the inside of the cup with black paint. Black airplane dope works fine. No light other than that from the lens must be permitted to hit the tube. Place an infrared filter between tube and lens to reduce effects of stray white light.
The image converter tube is inserted with the graphite side toward the front lens and the metal ring toward the mouth of the cup. A thin flexible lead from the metal ring connects to the positive side of the power supply. Some tubes were manufactured without this lead, in which case a piece of spring metal pressed against the metal ring will work just as well. The front end of the tube has a graphite ring around it. This is the end where the infrared image is to be focused. The graphite coating is the cathode or negative lead. Connect this lead to the B minus side of the power supply. A piece of spring brass or even the flat sheet metal carefully removed from a tin can should be formed with the fingers so it fits snugly around the cathode terminal.
make this SNOOPERSCOPE and see in total darkness (Aug, 1951)
By Cory Doctorow at 7:55 pm Tuesday, Feb 21
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Here's the 1958 Ford brochure, in super-widescreen, showing all the models in a mural of tailspin desiderata.
It's also available on Flickr at a whopping 2380 px wide, suitable for framing.
1958 Fords
By Cory Doctorow at 6:59 pm Tuesday, Feb 21
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FCC Commissioner Robert M. McDowell has a WSJ op-ed condemning a treaty proposed at the International Telecommunications Union, the UN agency that oversees global phone systems, which would transfer much of Internet governance to the UN.
Commissioner McDowell correctly asserts that transferring governance to the ITU would be bad for Internet freedom. There are few UN specialized agencies that are more ossified and more prone to being gamed by the world's totalitarian regimes than the ITU. One UN acquaintance of mine memorably referred to the ITU as the place "where superannuated telco bureaucrats go to die." And let's not forget the vital role that ITU designates filled in creating surveillance and censorship regimes established by the failing governments of Tunisia and Egypt (and the similar role they're likely playing in other regional nations in the midst of popular uprisings).
But it's pretty rich for someone from the Obama administration US government to go around talking about how the Internet is in danger from political interference from special interests. This is the administration that gave us SOPA and the TPP, that argues that ACTA can be put into law without an act of Congress, and that has made a habit of extrajudicially seizing .com and .net domains on the sloppy say-so of its political donors from the entertainment industry.
I agree with Commissioner McDowell that the Internet needs to be free of political interference. I agree that this won't happen at the ITU.
But that's where we part ways. McDowell describes a present-day Internet where wise American stewards neutrally steer the net's course. I see a world where political hacks and appointees from the lobbyist/regulator revolving-door are ready to destroy the Internet to maximize profits for one or another industry, and where an amok defense industry is ready to destroy whatever is left after Big Content gets through with its dirty work.
The Internet does need stewards, and the Obama administration has spectacularly demonstrated that it is unfit to carry out that stewardship.
Merely saying "no" to any changes to the current structure of Internet governance is likely to be a losing proposition. A more successful strategy would be for proponents of Internet freedom and prosperity within every nation to encourage a dialogue among all interested parties, including governments and the ITU, to broaden the multi-stakeholder umbrella with the goal of reaching consensus to address reasonable concerns. As part of this conversation, we should underscore the tremendous benefits that the Internet has yielded for the developing world through the multi-stakeholder model.
Upending this model with a new regulatory treaty is likely to partition the Internet as some countries would inevitably choose to opt out. A balkanized Internet would be devastating to global free trade and national sovereignty. It would impair Internet growth most severely in the developing world but also globally as technologists are forced to seek bureaucratic permission to innovate and invest. This would also undermine the proliferation of new cross-border technologies, such as cloud computing.
The U.N. Threat to Internet Freedom
(via Reddit)
By Cory Doctorow at 6:00 pm Tuesday, Feb 21
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Motörhead has officially disavowed the "Complete Early Years Box Set" new $600 product issued by the band's former label, a division of Universal Music Group, which controls the rights to the band's early recordings. Quoted on CNN, the band's frontman Lemmy Kilmister said "Unfortunately greed once again rears its yapping head. I would advise against it even for the most rabid completists!" (I can't locate an underlying source for this quote -- it's not clear whether the band published the statement somewhere, issued a press-release, or were interviewed by CNN). Writing in this Motörhead forum, a fan called Juggernaut describes the set as a "re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-release."
Housed in a Motörhead-style skull with red light-up eyes, the package includes the eight early albums -- from the self-titled debut to "No Remorse" -- plus the band's early singles, along with some posters and a photo book.
"Motörhead have no control over what's done with these early songs, and don't want fans to think that the band is involved in putting out such a costly box set," the band said.
CNN notes that the band has a new DVD/CD set out called "The Wörld Is Yours," which they do endorse.
You may recall that Elvis Costello recently decried his own label's box set reissue of his discography, and exhorted his fans to buy a Louis Armstrong box-set instead, and, if necessary, to acquire his own music by "unconventional means."
Motorhead: Don't buy our new box set
By Mark Frauenfelder at 5:26 pm Tuesday, Feb 21
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My daughter Jane told me she wanted to build something "electronic," and luckily, I had a sample of the Solder: Time kit. It looked like a fun thing to make, and it turned to be so.
It's a large digital wristwatch and the $35 kit (available in Maker Shed) contains everything you need except the tools (a soldering iron and wire cutters).
Jane is 8 years old and I decided to do all the soldering, but she enjoyed loading the printed circuit board with components.
Read the rest
By Cory Doctorow at 4:45 pm Tuesday, Feb 21
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This lovely squid-shaped USB drive makes for a fine way to transfer information around. 4GB for $35.
Squid USB Flash Drive
(Disclosure: the vendor is a Boing Boing advertiser, though I didn't know it at the time that I wrote this post)
Matt Haughey shares his tips on
traveling abroad with an unlocked Verizon smartphone: "Warning: don't use Verizon for international use." [A Whole Lotta Nothing]
— Rob
By Rob Beschizza at 4:02 pm Tuesday, Feb 21
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This cam-drone, illustrating an Atlantic article on the subject by Alexis Madrigal, is the work of Simon Jardine. Jardine's aerial imaging business has an online home at Eye in the Sky; check out his Flickr gallery for more.
By Cory Doctorow at 3:41 pm Tuesday, Feb 21
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Last week, the Electronic Frontier Foundation profiled FinFisher and Amesys, two of the companies that had been caught selling network spying tools to despotic regimes around the world, including Hosni Mubarak's Egypt and Muammar Qaddafi's Libya. This week, EFF continues the series with profiles of Italy's Area SpA (which sells electronic tracking software to Bashar al-Assad's regime in Syria) and Germany's Trovicor (which sells spyware to a dozen countries in the Middle East and North Africa).
In 2011, at the same time that news of Syria’s violent crackdown on democratic protests graced the pages of the world’s newspapers, an Italian company called Area SpA was busy helping the Syrian’s dictator Bashar al-Assad electronically track the dissidents his army was firing upon in the streets. Area SpA had begun installing “monitoring centers” that would give the Syrian government the ability “to intercept, scan and catalog virtually every e-mail that flows through the country” as well as “follow targets on flat-screen workstations that display communications and Web use in near-real time alongside graphics that map citizens’ networks of electronic contacts.”
Worse, as the violence in Syria escalated in mid-2011, “Area employees [were] flown into Damascus in shifts” in the government’s push to finish the project, according to a report from Bloomberg News.
Spy Tech Companies & Their Authoritarian Customers, Part II: Trovicor and Area SpA
By Cory Doctorow at 3:00 pm Tuesday, Feb 21
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One of the most interesting technical presentations I attended in 2012 was the talk on "adversarial stylometry" given by a Drexel College research team at the 28C3 conference in Berlin. "Stylometry" is the practice of trying to ascribe authorship to an anonymous text by analyzing its writing style; "adversarial stylometry" is the practice of resisting stylometric de-anonymization by using software to remove distinctive characteristics and voice from a text.
Stanford's Arvind Narayanan describes a paper he co-authored on stylometry that has been accepted for the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy 2012. In On the Feasibility of Internet-Scale Author Identification (PDF) Narayanan and co-authors show that they can use stylometry to improve the reliability of de-anonymizing blog posts drawn from a large and diverse data-set, using a method that scales well. However, the experimental set was not "adversarial" -- that is, the authors took no countermeasures to disguise their authorship. It would be interesting to see how the approach described in the paper performs against texts that are deliberately anonymized, with and without computer assistance. The summary cites another paper by someone who found that even unaided efforts to disguise one's style makes stylometric analysis much less effective.
We made several innovations that allowed us to achieve the accuracy levels that we did. First, contrary to some previous authors who hypothesized that only relatively straightforward “lazy” classifiers work for this type of problem, we were able to avoid various pitfalls and use more high-powered machinery. Second, we developed new techniques for confidence estimation, including a measure very similar to “eccentricity” used in the Netflix paper. Third, we developed techniques to improve the performance (speed) of our classifiers, detailed in the paper. This is a research contribution by itself, but it also enabled us to rapidly iterate the development of our algorithms and optimize them.
In an earlier article, I noted that we don’t yet have as rigorous an understanding of deanonymization algorithms as we would like. I see this paper as a significant step in that direction. In my series on fingerprinting, I pointed out that in numerous domains, researchers have considered classification/deanonymization problems with tens of classes, with implications for forensics and security-enhancing applications, but that to explore the privacy-infringing/surveillance applications the methods need to be tweaked to be able to deal with a much larger number of classes. Our work shows how to do that, and we believe that insights from our paper will be generally applicable to numerous problems in the privacy space.
Is Writing Style Sufficient to Deanonymize Material Posted Online?
(via Hack the Planet)
By David Pescovitz at 2:27 pm Tuesday, Feb 21
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A start-up called Organovo uses a 3D printer to build a variety of human tissue types, from cardiac muscle to blood vessels. The company hopes to eventually print entire organs for transplant from feedstock of a patient's own cells, thereby reducing the likelihood of rejection. But in the meantime, the 3D printed tissue could be used for drug testing. From Technology Review (photo Frank Rogozienski/Wonderful Machine):
Because Organovo's product is so similar to human tissue, it could help researchers identify drugs that will fail long before they reach clinical trials, potentially saving drug companies billions of dollars…<
Unlike some experimental approaches that have used ink-jet printers to deposit cells, Organovo's technology enables cells to interact with each other much the way they do in the body. They are packed tightly together and incubated, prompting them to adhere to each other and trade chemical signals.
"
Printing Muscle"
By Cory Doctorow at 2:19 pm Tuesday, Feb 21
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Tokyoflash's latest Kisai watch is the Kisai Stencil, based on a concept design submitted by a math teacher named Heather Sable. It uses "negative space" to draw the numbers, a display that is cryptic at first but is easy to read at a glance once you've figured out the knack of it.
I found that I had a knack for creating read-at-a-glance designs with cryptic looking, yet easy to read digits. I designed the digits for this concept by starting with rectangular shapes, and cutting out unnecessary pieces using line segments and dots. By arranging them into four quadrants with some connecting lines, the display appears to be just a bunch of stencilled in lines and dots, while if you read the background, you can see the digits clearly.
When I got an email from Tokyoflash telling me they were interested in this design, I was absolutely elated. I had a huge smile on my face for the entire day. Now that I see how my concept has been brought to reality as Kisai Stencil, I am super-excited. The fact that Tokyoflash decided to emboss the digits I created on the strap fits so perfectly with the fact that I am a Math Teacher - of course there are numbers on my watch strap!
Kisai Stencil LCD Watch
By David Pescovitz at 2:15 pm Tuesday, Feb 21
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Russian scientists grew the plants above from the innards of fruit that had been frozen for 30,000 years. From Discover:
The plant owes its miraculous resurrection to a team of scientists led by David Gilichinsky, and an enterprising ground squirrel. Back in the Upper Pleistocene, the squirrel buried the plant’s fruit in the banks of the Kolyma River. They froze.
Over millennia, the squirrel’s burrow fossilized and was buried under increasing layers of ice. The plants within were kept at a nippy -7 degrees Celsius, surrounded by permanently frozen soil and the petrifying bones of mammoths and woolly rhinos. They never thawed. They weren’t disturbed. By the time they were found and defrosted by scientists, they had been buried to a depth of 38 metros, and frozen for around 31,800 years…
Svetlana Yashina from the Russian Academy of Sciences grew the plants from immature fruits recovered from the burrow. She extracted their placentas – the structure that the seeds attach to – and bathed them in a brew of sugars, vitamins and growth factors. From these tissues, roots and shoots emerged.
"
Flowers regenerated from 30,000-year-old frozen fruits, buried by ancient squirrels"
As I recently 
