It's been proposed before, but MIT takes it a step further and is
fleshing out a system where users can take control of their own data. This would be a radical shift in how things work now.
In the latest issue of PLOS One, MIT researchers offer one possible answer. Their prototype system, openPDS - short for personal data store - stores data from your digital devices in a single location that you specify: It could be an encrypted server in the cloud, but it could also be a computer in a locked box under your desk. Any cellphone app, online service, or big-data research team that wants to use your data has to query your data store, which returns only as much information as is required.
Interestingly, the system involves sharing code, not data. They outline a music recommendation service that would make a recommendation to you not by requesting access to your music store, but by sending you an algorithm your datastore would run and return. There's more work to do here, but it seems like a step up from the "everyone owns your data except you" model in which we're currently living.
This week's Friday distro is Alpine Linux, a surprisingly interesting distro specialized for Routers, VPNs, VOIP service, and firewalls that takes an aggressive, proactive approach to security. It's therefore minimalist, so you can install it on a router, and includes the absolute minimum (no Perl, for example). It began life as a branch of the
LEAF project, which wanted a router/vpn system that could be booted from a floppy disk and run from memory: the Alpine hackers decided that config was a bit
too minimal and chose instead a slightly larger package set that also provided squid, samba, dansguardian, and some other heavier applications. I thought for sure I'd learn it was developed by a bunch of Swiss or Austrian hackers, but no: it simply stands for "A Linux Powered Integrated Network Engine."
Distrowatch reports it comes originally from Norway.
Most interesting of all, Alpine incorporates two security enhancements I haven't yet found on any other distro:
PaX and
Buffer Overflow Protection (Stack Smashing Protection). PaX is a Linux kernel patch that implements least privilege protection for memory pages. It flags data memory as non-executable, program memory as non-writable and randomly arranges the program memory. Inclusion of these two systems kept Alpine Linux protected from the vmsplice 0-day Linux kernel vulnerability: even though the attack would crash the OS, there would be no system compromise.
If you're interested in trying it, it's easy: you can run it from a USB stick, back up your config to a single file, and its simple package management and init systems make it possible to be up and running in under 10 minutes.
KDE 5 has been released. Er, that's the
KDE 5 Plasma Desktop since the folks at KDE are now very particular about making sure you call it Plasma. But nomenclature isn't important; what's important is what this latest evolution of the desktop brings to the user, and in my opinion it's quite a lot. Plus, two big things: First, unlike the transition from KDE3 -> KDE4, which broke everything, the transition from KDE4 -> KDE5 should be automatic. Secondly, this article points out everything has gotten
faster, which makes clear a lot of energy has gone into optimizing underneath the hood. Sounds good!
- Converged Shell: means the same components can be used to design a desktop or tablet interface or phone interface. It lays the groundwork for a device that adapts its interface to whatever you're holding, like the Asus Padphone [ed. note: which is pretty damned cool!]
- Modernized launchers: 3 of them, including one called Kicker (for you KDE3 nostalgics like me)
- Improved notification area: leads to fewer distractions, apparently
- Better support for high DPI displays
In the words of Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
1:
When KDE made a radical change to its popular Linux desktop in 2008 in KDE 4, I hated it. Over a year and many changes later, I finally found KDE 4.3 usable. This time, with the just-released KDE Plasma 5, I didn't have to wait for it to be usable. The new KDE is already good to go.
1Get a nickname, dude! SJVN is too much to type!
The
Sword of Damoclese may be well about to drop over at Microsoft today.
Last week, Satya Nadella promised a big shake-up in the way Microsoft does business, corporate-speak for a reorganization many would say is long-overdue.
Today is the day.
Employees at the company's campus in Redmond, Wash., are already bracing for the news. Human resources managers have begun reserving conference rooms for most of Thursday, most likely a sign that they will be used to meet with laid-off employees, a person with knowledge of the plans said. Employees will have an opportunity to question Microsoft's chief executive, Satya Nadella, about the cuts on Friday at a regular town hall meeting that was scheduled before the exact timing of the layoffs was known.
Frank Shaw, a company spokesman, declined to comment.
We knew this, but now it's increasingly such a part of the written record that even the
United Nations Office on Human Rights has made a statement.Stepping into a fierce debate over digital privacy rights, the U.N. office says it has strong evidence of a growing complicity among private companies in government spying. It says governments around the world are using both the law and covert methods to access private content and metadata.
U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay said the lack of transparency and tactics extend to governments' "de facto coercion of companies to gain broad access to information and data on citizens without them knowing."
[Ed. note: So who are these private companies, and are they hiring? Because it seems like a bit of a growth industry at the moment: job security, woo hoo!]
A group of scientists and enthusiasts are undertaking one of the most ambitious and interdisciplinary crowdfunded projects ever attempted:
They want to resurrect a long-dead satellite and send it on a close-range flyby of the Moon. The public has taken an inordinate interest in this resurrection plan, funding its RocketHub project to the tune of $160,000 - but the dream is quickly evaporating. The International Sun/Earth Explorer-3 (ISEE-3), which finished its original mission more than 30 years ago, has just days left in which to troubleshoot the satellite's many remaining problems. At this point the question is not whether the team can do everything they'd hoped, but how much of the original dream they can salvage.
This is interesting at every level. The satellite itself is interesting, this project is too, but the level of interest and effort that has gone into the
RocketHub project is really amazing. Good luck, team!
Who cares that it's 20 years old:
FreeDOS is still around, fulfilling an interesting and valuable role in the world of tech, and what's more, is ardently supported and appreciated by a loyal core of users and developers. Sean Gallagher over at Ars Technica interviews the FreeDOS lead developer, Jim Hall, to find out why FreeDOS still fills a niche:
Because FreeDOS is, as some have called it, "barely an operating system," it allows developers to get very, very close to the hardware. Most modern operating systems have been built specifically to avoid this for security and stability reasons. But FreeDOS has become much more friendly to virtualization and hardware emulation-it's even the heart of the DOSEMU emulator
The direction the project has taken hasn't exactly followed the road map Hall envisioned after version 1.0. He once had ambitious plans for a next-generation of DOS, originally envisioning a modern FreeDOS along the lines of an alternative history of computing. "For a while, I was thinking, 'If MS DOS survived, where would DOS have gone in the last 10 to 15 years?'" Hall said. "I was advocating some sort of multitasking-we could have task switching like what was supported in the 286, where you can put one process to sleep while you do another process. I wanted to have TCP/IP added to kernel."
FreeDOS might hail from the era before networking but it's inherently real-time, provides a great teaching tool that allows you to get close to the bare metal, and remains deliciously uncomplicated.
That's also the opinion of Gallagher, who spent a whole day {gasp!} running DOS just to remember what it's like. Now get offa my lawn.
At its core, it's a question of quantity versus quality, or the right to access information. But it's also a question about the role humans should play in an ostensibly human-edited encyclopedia. Here not to provoke those questions but simply to add information to
Wikipedia is a Swede by the name of Sverker Johansson. He is single-handedly responsible for 2.7 million articles on wikipedia (8.5% of the entire site).
But 'single-handedly' isn't quite right: he wrote and deploys a bot.
Mr. Johansson's program scrubs databases and other digital sources for information, and then packages it into an article. On a good day, he says his "Lsjbot" creates up to 10,000 new entries. On Wikipedia, any registered user can create an entry. Mr. Johansson has to find a reliable database, create a template for a given subject and then launch his bot from his computer. The software program searches for information, then publishes it to Wikipedia.
Bots have long been used to author and edit entries on Wikipedia, and, more recently, an increasingly large amount of the site's new content is written by bots. Their use is regulated by Wikipedia users called the "Bot Approvals Group." While Mr. Johansson works to achieve consensus approval for his project, he and his bot-loving peers expect to continue facing resistance. "There is a vocal minority who don't like it," he said during a recent speech on his work. Still, he soldiers on.
Complex questions are at play here: is it better Wikipedia lack articles that humans can't or won't write? Can robot-written articles be trusted? Should they be labeled and approved? What kind of criteria would be applied and who would fund/oversee this kind of oversight body? And lastly: is all this work even worth it in the first place? Do these bot-written articles even add any value to everyone's favorite information site?
More coverage at
Business Spectator (Australia) and
Popular Science.
Laura Hall over at Atlantic Magazine asks: what happens when digital communities are abandoned? Although she covers the closing of Geocities, she's really more interested in the virtual worlds we build in our
MUDs and
immersive games.
Though they swarm with players for long periods of time, as user interest wanes and gamers go elsewhere, then what do they look like?When Second Life launched in 2003, the world was captivated by visions of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash come to life. The virtual world isn't a game--it's a venue, a platform, a plot of undeveloped land, a blank canvas, an open world. Users make of it what they will. ...
But that was nearly 10 years ago. I wondered: what happened to all of those buildings? Were people still making use of them? So I logged in. The world of Second Life, it turns out, is not abandoned. Estimates put the current active user-base around 600,000 members; in its heyday, it boasted between 60 and 80 thousand simultaneous logins. There are often a handful of people in most of the spaces you'll visit, but it's easy to find privacy. Here and there are signs that point to its lack of people: "space for rent", "band wanted." But the sheer variety of environments, and the obvious care that people put into them, remains stunning.
