Archive for the ‘algorithm’ Category
Spreading Passwords over Multiple Locations #security
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Spreading Passwords over Multiple Locations #security ??RSA’s new approach is a version of a technique known as threshold cryptography, which has long been explored by researchers. They split the password in chunks and store the chunks over multiple servers.
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/429498/to-keep-passwords-safe-from-hackers-just-break/ To Keep Passwords Safe from Hackers, Just Break Them into Bits – Technology Review
Millions of passwords have been stolen from companies such as LinkedIn and Yahoo. A new approach aims to prevent future heists.
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Just Finished Reading: Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother #books
I started begging my mother for piano lessons from a very young age, had my mother been a Tiger Mother I would have been a child prodigy. I’d seen Amy Chua in an interview program and had wanted to read Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother
The book is an autobiographical view of the way Amy Chua raised her daughters Sophia and Louisa (Lulu) to become straight A students, and focusses mainly on her teaching her children to play the musical instruments of her choice. In the end it devolves into a war of attrition between Amy and Lulu, resulting in a revelation for the Tiger Mother.
Proof of Concept: Google Docs Mail Merge Form with Text and HTML #wordpress
I needed a way to be able to shamelessly plug the posts I recently bundled into the booklet “Write Something” again.In a similar way to the last time I did it in Proof of Concept: Google Docs Mail Merge Form
As I explained before I have set up a system to automatically mail somebody when the enter their address in the form, my issue was that I wanted to add a unique blogpost which they would only be able to get by signing up. Naturally I wanted to style it in the same way the posts are styled in this blog. Again I turned to the documentation, specifically the Class MailApp which I was using to send the mail. Using this documentation I had a starting point. I wanted three changes to the current script:
- keep the plain text
- add HTML message
- add inline images
Just Finished Reading: How Doctors Think #books
My daughter’s Godmother is studying to be an MD, and has started her internship. Starting her internship coincided with her birthday, which meant that many of the presents she received were related to medicine. One of the gifts, which she gracefully allowed me to borrow before she read it was How Doctors Think
Groopman’s book covers one subject which I love: heuristics and bias. Heuristics are the stuff the practice of medicine is made of, which makes it a little strange that this isn’t always taught. The influence of the intuitive, fast, effortless System 1 thinking versus the slower, conscious, System 2 thinking is reasonably well known. System 1 allows us to unconsciously come to conclusions based on the information at hand, as Groopman says: “When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.” The practice of medicine is such that most of the diseases encountered fit into a nice pattern, however it is also a burden which make cognitive bias possible. When a doctor sees nine patients who are suffering from flue symptoms, System 1 will quickly come to the conclusion that the diagnoses of the tenth patient with these symptoms is also flue, and will even ignore facts to the contrary. Read the rest of this entry »
Proof of Concept: Google Docs Mail Merge Form #wordpress #updated
I needed a way to be able to shamelessly plug the posts I recently bundled into the booklet “Write Something“. I want to build a list, and offering something which adds value for the subscriber is a good way to do this. There is a host of good material which you can use to help, so I won’t elaborate on that in this post.
I have a hosted WordPress.com blog, which means that I can’t run a local script to collect the mail addresses and mail them, so I turned to Google Docs’ Form functionality for the entry form, naturally I give them the option to download the booklet there, and I wanted to send the subscriber a message to thank them. In the Google tutorial: Simple Mail Merge they explain how to do a mail merge using the Script Editor. I wanted to go a little further and have it send a mail with thank you note and a link to each subscriber as soon as they filled in the form.
Coriolanus Effect and Wakoopa Stats #productivity #timemanagement
I first started writing about Wakoopa in 2009, when I wrote the article Time Spend, is Time Earned on using it for time management, it has mostly been running in the background to give me some statistics on the way I use my time behind my computer, and whether it is used effectively. Recently I started a new projects with new computers and again installed the Wakoopa Tracker to measure the effective use of my time. Naturally the Parato principle still holds, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.
Coriolanus effect: n. the act of going around in ever decreasing circles until one vanishes up one’s own backside.
–Glaswegian expression
For Sunday it is possible to see the amount of time I spend creating a Christmas card, and I see that – split over Mac and Windows – I seem to be spending the productive 62% of my office time on development, documentation and mail. Again I can also immediately see correlations between any dips in time – such as Monday – and real events, in this case meetings. Furthermore the relatively short time spend on development on Monday can be seen to have a ripple effect that continues on Tuesday and Wednesday. I’m sure that had the statistics been available for Thursday this line would continue.
Using my calendar I could get a similar graph, and although the details of how long I was “researching” a recent XKCD joke are still lots be lost, Wakoopa enables me to see the usage of my time slightly better and the collection is entirely passive.
Image source: Wakoopa
Kings of Code Conference #kingsofcode
This week I went to the Kings of Code Conference, to “explore and discuss the latest trends, developments and best practices in web and mobile development technologies.” It included a hackbattle, lots of presentations and free beer.
HackBattle
Just Finished Reading: The Quants #books #risk #economy
I had heard of The Quants
The first thing that I noticed were the multiple references to Ed Thorpe’s “Beat the Dealer”, a book on card counting Black Jack using a Hi-Lo method, and “Liar’s Poker
The book reminded me of playing the computer game “Capitalism” when I was 16 in which I would game the system by creating a company which produced a little profit and initially plowing that profit into buying companies by hostile takeovers on the mini stock market and then avoid the system creating more AI companies – it had a fixed number of AI companies and mergers would cause new AI companies to be created – by buying a controlling interest in the AI companies and forcing them to turn out high dividends until all the AI companies in the stock market were under my control. And leave the computer AIs to tend to the companies and all their business while the dividends pushed my company’s profit into 12 digits.
The Quants is less of a narrative than Liar’s Poker, much of it is carefully crafted from multiple interviews with most of the players, books, magazines and newspaper articles. The tale of hedge fund managers and traders taking ever increasing risk just to earn the same amount that they did the previous year is and as it notes “Hedge fund managers who’ve seen big losses can be especially dangerous. Investors [...] may become demanding and impatient. … [T]here can be a significant incentive to push the limits of the fund’s capacity to generate large gains [...] If a big loss is no worse than a small loss or meager gains [...] the temptation to jack up the leverage and roll the dice can be powerful.”
Even the glaring warning of Meriwether’s LTCM failure in 1998, like Daedalus’ warning to Icarus, it was ignored by most of the hedge funds. “By 1998, nearly every bond arbitrage desk and fixed-income hedge fund on Wall Street had copied LTCM’s trades.” They were leveraged up to their eyeballs, and while making huge debts of their own they traded with the debts of others, bonds, collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps. Some hedge fund had leverages of 30 to 1, which means they borrowed $30 for each dollar they had as an asset. “Coming into 2008, hedge funds were in control of $2 trillion.” And the banks they were borrowing from had leverages of at least 9 to 1, because of fractional-reserve banking, these same banks “… Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, and Deutsche Bank, [...] were rapidly transforming from staid white-shoe bank companies into hot-rod hedge fund vehicles fixated on the fast buck…” These banks had “… trillions more in leverage that juiced their returns like anabolic steroids.”
And it wasn’t just the banks, insurance companies go into the action too. These insurance companies insured the credit default swaps, “[i]f the value of the underlying asset insured by the swaps declined for whatever reason, the protection provider [...] would have to put up more collateral, since the risk of default was higher.”
The light at the end of the tunnel is an oncoming train.
–Wall Street proverb
“… [T]here were legitimate concerns that as computer-driven trading reached unfathomable speeds, danger lurked. Many of these computer-driven funds were gravitating to a new breed of stock exchange called ‘dark pools’—secretive, computerized trading networks that match buy and sell orders for blocks of stocks in the frictionless ether of cyberspace. … In these invisible electronic pools, vast sums change hands beyond the eyes of regulators. While efforts were afoot to push the murky world of derivatives trading into the light of day, stock trading was sliding rapidly into the shadows.”
Conclusion
“The findings of behavioral finance .. had shown time and again that people don’t always make optimal choices when it comes to money [...] [N]euroeconomics, was delving into the hardwiring of the brain to investigate why people often make decisions that aren’t rational [...] Evidence was emerging that certain parts of the brain are subject to a ‘money illusion’ that blinds people to the impact of future events, such as the effect of inflation on the present value of cash—or the possibility of a speculative bubble bursting.”
To me it also looks like they were and still are blinded to money. Two great reads for the weekend.
Image source: Amazon
Just Finished Reading: Moonwalking with Einstein #books
I’ve had an interested in memory for as long as I can remember, so when I saw Joshua Foer on The Colbert Report I went straight to the store to get myself a copy of his book Moonwalking with Einstein
Through out the book Foer briefly dips into techniques that he used to improve his recollection, although he calls it memory in the book. He starts with Simonides’ memory palace as his basis and continues by learning the Major System, below, and the PAO system – where every two-digit number from 00 to 99 is represented by a single image of a person performing an action on an object – which he uses for committing cards to memory three at a time.
Although the book is mostly about how Foer trained to become the US champion in one year – and it only touches on the underlying techniques used – it shows the power of not just the mind, it shows that perseverance can make the unlikely possible.
Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live a long life, while experiencing a short one. If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound to blend unmemorably into the next—and disappear. That’s why it’s important to change routines regularly, and take vacations to exotic locales, and have as many new experiences as possible that can serve to anchor our memories. Creating new memories stretches out psychological time, and lengthens our perception of our lives.
A great read.
Clipperz, Online Password Share
I was trying to think about what to say about SlideShare, so I was browsing the site to give me inspiration, it didn’t work.
What I did find was Clipperz, Clipperz makes it possible to login with one click. The username and password for the site is stored encrypted at Clipperz and is decrypted and posted to the site. I’ll use the example of /., the bookmarklet provided extracts the form and uses that to populate the login form.
{
"page": {"title": "Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters"},
"form": {
"attributes": {"action": "http://slashdot.org/login.pl", "method": "post"},
"inputs":[
{"type": "text", "name": "unickname", "value": "username"},
{"type": "hidden", "name": "returnto", "value": "//slashdot.org/"},
{"type": "hidden", "name": "op", "value": "userlogin"},
{"type": "password", "name": "upasswd", "value": "password"},
{"type": "checkbox", "name": "login_temp", "value": "yes"},
{"type": "submit", "name": "userlogin", "value": "Log in"}]
},
"version": "0.2.3"
}
To be entirely portable you can access the websites from a sidebar in your browser. Naturally this is a nice proof of concept for the real product they are selling: zero-knowledge web applications.
Zero-knowledge web applications is about making web applications more secure. Do you trust Google Documents with your confidential documents? You shouldn’t unless the data is stored without the knowledge of the SaaS provider. Clipperz password manager is the first zero-knowledge web application. This means that Clipperz knows nothing about its users and their data. They do this using a JavaScript library, based on Ajax and browser-based cryptography, which can be used to build applications that users can can use to manage their private data.
technorati tags: saas, business, javascript, security, authentication, identity
