Posts Tagged ‘computer science’
Stalkerware -- spyware sold to people as a means of keeping tabs on their romantic partners, kids, employees, etc -- is a dumpster fire of terrible security (compounded by absentee management), ****** business practices, and gross marketing targeted at abusive men who want to spy on women.
To make matters worse, ...
For 17 years, I've been writing about the possibilities of "cognitive radio", in which radios sense which spectrum is available from moment to moment and collaborate to frequency-hop (and perform other tricks) to maximize the efficiency of wireless communications.
It's hard to overstate how revolutionary this would be; today, most radio communication takes place through ...
Making a Turing machine is a kind of nerd rite of passage, like manually editing your X11 settings or building a two-second time-machine. As far back as 2005, we were chronicling the adventures of Lego Turing-machine builders (the state of the art advanced rather a lot by 2012), as well as the ...
In 2014, Quentin Tarantino sued Gawker for publishing a link to a leaked pre-release screener of his movie "The Hateful Eight." The ensuing court-case revealed that the screeners Tarantino's company had released had some forensic "traitor tracing" features to enable them to track down the identities of people who leaked copies.
Working from court records, as ...
Rebecca Tickle is a PhD student in the Faculty of Science at the University of Nottingham, explains what big data is. She uses a handy "Five Vees of Big Data Mnemonic" -- volume, velocity, variety, value, and veracity. She mentions that other people have come up with the "Seven Vees of Big Data Mnemonic" and ...
An adversarial preturbation is a small, human-imperceptible change to a piece of data that flummoxes an otherwise well-behaved machine learning classifier: for example, there's a really accurate ML model that guesses which full-sized image corresponds to a small thumbnail, but if you change just one pixel in the thumbnail, the classifier stops working ...
For decades, programmers have talked about the tendency of software to become less reliable over time as "rot," but Konrad Hinsen makes a compelling case that the right metaphor is "collapse," because the reason software degrades is that the ground underneath it (hardware, operating systems, libraries, programming languages) has shifted, like the earth moving under ...
Researchers from KU Leuven have published a paper showing how they can create a 40cm x 40cm "patch" that fools a convoluted neural network classifier that is otherwise a good tool for identifying humans into thinking that a person is not a person -- something that could be used to defeat AI-based security camera ...
Pete Warden (previously) is one of my favorite commentators on machine learning and computer science; yesterday he gave a keynote at the IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference, on the ways that hardware specialization could improve machine learning: his main point is that though there's a wealth of hardware specialized for creating models, we need ...
In a delightful short video, Klara Sjöberg demonstrates the extreme and alarming freakout that you can trigger in a mechanical calculator by trying to divide a number by zero; in a followup, Lynn Grant tweets "That is why the old Friden calculators had a 'Divide Stop' key."
What happens ...