Are we on the cusp of real-time translation?

The article I'm about to link to covers so much that I talk about in class, including neural networks, deep learning, artificial intelligence, real-time speech parsing for things like Siri, corpus analysis (evaluating large collections of text) and so on that it boggles the mind.

There are already a myriad of tools to help you convert one language into another in almost real time, including apps for iPhone, Android, and Windows. Something like that is very useful if you are, say, traveling and don't speak the local language.

Now, however, Microsoft is planning on releasing functionality in Skype that doesn't simply translate text, but will translate spoken conversation from one language to another in real time.

This may not seem like a big deal, but it could be very useful for obvious reasons, for example company meetings comprising employees from different countries, or medical consultations with specialists from around the world, or having a classroom comprised of students from all over. Or, for more mundane reasons, if you simply had friends whose native language was different from your own.

80+ schools around the world participating in Skype in the Classroom

Whatever the use, something like this would be a big step in further shrinking the world and removing a significant communication barrier that has always existed. The implications for this type of functionality are enormous.

The Internet in Real Time

We once discussed in class that we create as much information every two days as we did from the beginning of time until 2006. It's a hard statistic to process, the numbers and amounts of information are so vast that trying to imagine it is all but impossible.

If you would like to see a small part of that information being created however, then you should head over to The Internet in Real Time. The header image for this post is a screenshot of the page, and each of those tiles is updating in real time as you watch along with a statistic of how many gigabytes of data has transferred over the Internet as you watched. The number may not look so big considering it's the whole Internet, but remember that only 1000 gigabytes makes a terabyte, 1000 terabytes makes a petabyte, and 1000 of those makes an exobyte! When you think about it that way, that number is pretty big.

So click over, and be amazed!

It's happening.

See those up there? Those are Bitcoins, a form of digital currency. That also means they're not *real* Bitcoins since real Bitcoins are actually digital...you get the idea.

Anyway, now take a look at the picture below.

Notice anything...odd? I saw this yesterday on the door of a small cafe on Decatur and I had to take a picture. You'll notice that under the list of credit cards they take, it shows they also take Bitcoin.

I predict we will see this much more often. Bitcoin is a digital currency earned through running algorithms on a PC known as mining. Solve the algorithm, earn some Bitcoin. It's a gross over-simplification, but that's essentially how it works. The hardware required to do this, in other words the computational cost, has been increasing as the algorithms have been becoming more complex, however the value of Bitcoins has been rising as well - last year a single Bitcoin was worth an all-time high of $1200. At the time of this posting, one Bitcoin is worth $533.

So disruptive has Bitcoin been, and so much has it become an economic force, that countries including Canada, the United States, and even Iran have suggested they will consider regulation, while others such as Jordan and Israel have warned against it, Germany will tax it as private money, England won't, and Japan has no plans to address it at all. Whether or not that is because of the spectacular collapse of Japanese Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox is unknown, but there is likely some influence there.

Thousands of places take bitcoin as payment, but not Amazon, which may be needed to truly make them mainstream.

There was also the very sad story about the poor guy who disposed of a hard drive containing around $9 million worth of Bitcoin in a landfill. That's because he mined the coins when it was a new hobbyist thing done by computer geeks, and not the global juggernaut it is now, and didn't realize their value.

As you can see, there is a lot going on with Bitcoin and while it is still the techie's domain, I suspect that will change in somewhat, but not very, short order.

PC-camera spying software leads to arrests.

Ever wonder if people can watch you through your PC's webcam? Well, if it makes you feel any better, they can! it has been going on for a while, in fact - for example, there was this story from 2010 about teachers and administrators watching students at home through their webcams for disciplinary purposes. Completely invalid, unacceptable disciplinary purposes that ended in a huge scandal, but they were still doing it.

More recently, last week in fact, the creators of Blackshades RAT, and many of its users, were arrested. Blackshades RAT (Remote Access Tool or Remote Administration Trojan, depending on who you talk to) is a trojan that infects a PC when the owner opens an attachment in an email which then installs the tool. Once that happens, it allows a remote user to see through the PC's camera and record what it sees without the owner's knowledge. It's believed that around 500,000 machines were infected worldwide.

The raid on the creators and users was an international effort that took place in many countries and saw almost 100 people taken in to custody. It was brought to light when a hacker attempted to blackmail Miss Teen USA with images recorded using the trojan, but it backfired when she contacted law enforcement and went public.

It's an interesting case, since the creators of software aren't usually held responsible for what the users of that software do. In this case, though, since the software was sold for $40 through their site, was designed explicitly to carry out illegal acts, and even offered technical support through their website, there was more leeway in the prosecution. The outcome of the raid is unknown for now, but it will be interesting to see how it all works out.

A couple of additional points: The only anti-virus program I could find that confirmed the ability to remove this malware is Symantec's Norton Antivirus, a product I am not a big fan of, as you all know. I believe most antivirus programs have the capability to remove this malware, but you'll want to check to be sure. Also, sometimes people advise that you put black electrical tape over your webcam if not using it. I advise against that because it will gum up the front of the camera and prevent the laptop from closing, and if you don't clean off the gum it can even damage the machine. You can hang something over it, cloth perhaps, use a binder clip, but electrical tape is a bad idea. But it is a good idea to cover it!

China charged with hacking U.S. companies

If you haven't heard, the United States, for the first time ever, has filed charges against another government. Specifically, China. This was because the U.S. discovered that members of the Chinese military, who were part of an elite unit known as 61398, used what's known as spearphishing, in which phishing emails are sent to a specific company to get information about that specific company, then once inside stole corporate secrets that allowed them to create new, cheaper products that then flooded the American market, from steel tubes to nuclear power plants. This is known as Industrial Espionage.

The result is lost jobs and closed companies, and the U.S. isn't willing to let this go. Of course China denies it, even going so far as to issue a warning, but the evidence is clear. Even so, filing charges against another COUNTRY, as opposed to a foreign company or person, is untested ground.

Michael Jackson performs once more.

I'm not sure exactly why, but people are often surprised to find out I'm a fan of Michael Jackson. He was a great performer, great entertainer, great songwriter, and the entertainment world is worse of because of his loss.

However, during this year's Billboard Music Awards (held right here in Las Vegas, by the way), we were able to see him perform one more time, through realistic light projection similar to the process that brought Tupac Shakur back to life at Coachella a couple of years ago.

This time, it was Michael Jackson that received the treatment. It combines live dancers with pre-recorded and holographic technology to bring the performer back to life. The technology involved is mainly projection technology, but its development and history, even its ownership, is murky and involves a bankrupt company that originally brought Tupac back to life, and the current owners of the technology actually sued to have MJ's performance blocked!

The video of his posthumous performance is below. Pretty amazing stuff, and I'm very curious to see who gets the treatment next. I'm guessing Elvis.

Love Star Trek? Have $35,000,000? This house is for you!

Star Trek, originally run for three seasons from 1966-1969, predicted many of the technologies we have today. Communicators, space travel tech, medical technology, automatic doors, voice commands, big screens, portable computers, in fact it predicted so much that there was a TV show called How William Shatner Changed the World, which focused on the predictions the show made.

If that isn't enough for you, if you need to live *in* the Star Trek universe and happen to be rich, really rich, supa-dupa rich, and don't mind living in Florida, then do I have the house for you. A spectacular house that has been built up to represent everything Star Trek. Never mind the 16 bathrooms, full arcade, and bridge-movie-theater, it's Star Trek!

Read the article and definitely take a look at the pictures over on Cnet. The full listing for the house is here.

It's still looking bad

Although it's not finalized, the FCC, chaired by former cable-company lobbyist Tom Wheeler, has allowed discussion to move forward on the idea of allowing 'paid priority' for companies on the Internet. In other words, ISPs such as Cox or Comcast can charge a company like Netflix for a guaranteed level of service.

This really annoys me, not just because it will completely rearrange the economy of the Internet and cause content-delivery companies (like Netflix) to pass the costs on to you making the whole experience more expensive while other companies friendly to the ISP won't have to, but also because Tom Wheeler is blatantly lying to us. He is saying there will always be an open Internet and nothing will interfere with the end-users' experience online, but it's a bald-faced lie. He has toed that line for a long time, then this happens. It's bizarre in how overt his deceit is. Usually when politicians lie, they couch it in terms that make it seem like they're sort-of telling the truth, but Wheeler hasn't even done that.

Want to see something really scary? This chart from the Huffington Post shows how much extra you might have to pay for various web services if this plan moves forward. Truly terrifying, and a dark day if this ever comes to fruition.

Again, nothing is finalized but it looks more and more likely that it will ultimately go through, even though many heavy-hitters including almost all large tech companies, many politicians, citizens, the only ones who *do* want this to happen are Tom Wheeler and the communication companies.

With this change looming, as well as control of the Internet infrastructure soon to be handed over to the U.N. (at the request of China and Russia, no less), the Internet will never be the same, in a bad way.

My newest find.

This is a Sony Video Walkman. We all remember the regular Sony Walkman, right? No? Sheesh, alright, Sony had the big electronics device of the '80's, the cassette-playing Walkman. The Walkman made it easy to take your music with you, something that was obviously not as easy to do as it is today. There was no such thing as a portable turntable (well, maybe there was, but it clearly had very limited use).

Anyway, I found this Video Walkman, which was intended to make portable video as easy as the Walkman made portable music, at a Goodwill and it is quite a find - a sort of portable VCR. It uses a standard 8mm tape, and in the days of analog TV broadcasts could pick those up as well. As you will see in the images, it has quite the array of controls in a small package; it can switch between TV and Tape, it has all controls for both, it can display the data of the tape or not, it can output video to a TV or take video input *from* a TV, it's just an amazing device.

Sadly, you can tell from the white screen that the capacitors have gone bad, so it will need to have them replaced. That's no small task. Even so, for $6 I'm really happy with it.

Have some more images!

Google Glass is finally for sale to everyone, sort of.

If you have $1,500 burning a hole in your pocket and don't feel you stand out enough in a socially awkward way, then you're in luck!

Starting yesterday, anyone who wants can buy Google Glass. Originally it was only available to beta testers, but now anyone can buy a pair, although the device itself is still in beta. Not only that, they're only for sale to the general public as long as Google has them in stock. On the other hand, as the linked article states it might be better to wait until official release when they'll be attached to frames from such companies as RayBan and Oakley.

Google refers to people who are testing their glasses as 'Explorers,' but others have less dignified names. So if you don't mind people snarkily referring to you as a 'Glasshole' - something even Google itself doesn't want you to be - and want to give a new technology a try (and are rich), then jump in! You can buy them here. Be aware: the backlash can be severe; we're already seeing signs stating Google Glass is banned in some places.

Facebook now provides self-esteem.

About a month ago I deactivated my Facebook account. I needed a break from the 'OMG please like and share!!' posts, the blatantly self-promotional posts, the Foursquare check-ins that just tell me you're not home in case I want to burglarize the place, and the passive-aggressive posts that provide no context yet scream out for a response. You know the ones - they say something along the lines of 'well this sucks' and nothing else, begging you to pry in a false display of concern.

I even saw conversations happen on Facebook among people who lived in the same house!

So I needed a hiatus. Facebook was just causing me too much stress, with the ratio of inane, nonsense posts to valuable, informative posts being very high. It appears, however, that in doing so I am in the vast minority. According to this article on Cnet, immediate feedback on Facebook posts is required for many people to feel a sense of belonging, to feel involved, loved, and worthy. In other words, without immediate feedback to posts people suffer measurable drops in self-esteem and self-value, they feel ostracized and no longer part of a social circle or group of friends. Even depression can result. The Atlantic has a brutally in-depth article about technology, Facebook included, actually making us lonelier as our social interaction moves all on-line to the increasing exclusion of actual human contact.

Answer: Yes. Also, don't think what this image depicts doesn't happen.

This is troublesome, a continuing example of the move to virtual interaction over actual interaction. I was astounded, and more than a little distressed, when a couple of friends (not many, mind you, I vanished from Facebook almost unnoticed, apparently) informed me, one via email and one via text, that they didn't know how to get in touch with me any other way than Facebook. Apparently they didn't realize they had just contacted me in a way other than Facebook.

I don't have anything inherently against Facebook, I used it to keep in touch with people all over the world, it was good for sharing photos and interesting tidbits and even for group meetings for projects on which I was involved, and it does provide a valuable source of social interaction. It's good for those things and I don't think people should abandon it. But when it starts to become the barometer of your self-worth and your value as a person, something is very, very wrong. Personal interaction is monumentally important, but actual personal interaction, not just virtual.

Let's get outside, people! Call someone on the phone!

(In the interests of full disclosure, my understanding is if I log back on to Facebook it will all come back, so perhaps in the future I will do that; never say never!)

The future of this blog.

Just a quick note to anyone who may be interested - although commenting will obviously no longer be required (Sunday was the last day comments counted towards your grade), I will continue to make posts and you are welcome to follow along or even comment if you are so inclined; everyone is welcome! The 419 scam / Apple-password entry below is the first post-class post to start off the summer.

If you need to get in touch with me, if you have a tech-related question you'd like to ask or need more info on something, you can contact me through my NSC email address, but not Canvas as I won't be checking that after Wednesday.

Either way, it was a wonderful semester, a great class, and a pleasure to have you all be part of it!

Look what I got.

Remember we talked in class about the 419 scams? The scams in which someone sends you an email saying you are a beneficiary to a foreign dignitary with no heirs and they would like to offer you a million dollars or so to help them transfer funds to an American bank account?

My NSC account finally got its first one. Here, in all its glory, is what they sent.

---
Attn: Beneficiary.

Note that in regards to your over due funds release to you, your due required fees has been settled by the central bank through the federal high court in Lagos in a 14 page affidavit sworn on your behalf and we hereby notify you that your funds have been cleared to be delivered to you through the UN zonal office here in London.

Be officially informed that Patrick Howard, a diplomat attached with the UN zonal office will inform you of his arrival with your funds by tomorrow, please you are urgently required to forward your address and your direct telephone number immediately.

Thanks for your urgent co-operation.

Regards,

Mr Mauri Butlear
UN Zonal Office,
3 Whitehall Court London SW1A 2EL
United Kingdom
---

As you can see, it is completely legitimate. By which I mean not legitimate at all. There is no UN 'Zonal Office,' there is no 'Mr. Mauri Butlear,' and there is no money waiting. Remember, if you get anything like this, DO. NOT. RESPOND. If you do, they will never, ever let go.

On another note, I meant to show this in class but didn't get the chance: this is the message I received from Apple when I needed to change my password. This is what makes passwords weak, not strong. It's what causes people to write them down which negates their effectiveness. This is terrible password policy.

I don't remember what password I used, of course. I guess I'll be seeing this window again.

The worst passwords of 2013

This week's discussion question was about passwords and password strength, and from the responses I've seen so far it was enlightening for some of you to see the relative strength and weakness of your passwords.

I'm just going to leave this image here, it's the 25 worst passwords of 2013. If you read the story at the Tech Times website, they're also the most common. It's not actually a direct match, but it's pretty close. Don't use these passwords! If you are still doing so after class, then you deserve to have all your monkeys stolen.

It's World Password Day!

That's right, in an explosion of serendipity based on our discussion and all the talk of passwords, it turns out today is World Password Day, a day created by Intel and MacAfee to encourage people to change their passwords.

As the linked article states, the common password used last year was '123456,' but that's the most common password EVERY year! Don't use that password!

And as much as I want people to have good, strong passwords, I will be the one dissenting voice and ask that you not actually change it until Friday, after we have talked about what makes a good password. If you read the linked article, however, there is a very, very strong bit of foreshadowing regarding the discussion we'll have.

And really - if you're going to change it, change it to something good!

Write your first program

Way back in the the late '70s and early '80s, as PCs were becoming more popular as consumer devices, the programming language of the time was BASIC, which was an acronym for 'Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code.' It's a cumbersome name, but it was the layman's first exposure to programming and to what it could do, and it was easier to understand than the Assembly code that was used by serious programmers, and it's even more understandable than the languages we have today such as C# (pronounced "C sharp") and Java.

It used line numbers in front of every line, usually incremented by 10, so  program might look like:

10 print "Hello World!";
20 GOTO 10

This program would print the phrase 'Hello World' over and over until you stopped it. If you needed to add a line between the two that comprise this program, you could preface it with any number between 11 and 19, but if you needed more than that you were in trouble.

BASIC programs could be very complex, as you can see here. In fact, one of the earliest graphics-capable adventure games ever created for the computer, back in 1979 and on an Apple IIe - while not looking like much - was created entirely in BASIC; it's still considered a programming triumph. Back then we'd never seen anything like it, and it shows the power of the language in capable hands. You can see it in all its glory below.


However, if you are interested, you can experiment with BASIC programming yourself at the Quite Basic website. I'll even give you a program to start with.

When you first visit the site, you'll see a program already typed in, and if you's like to see what it does you can hit the 'play' button right above the code window and it will draw some circles. Or, you can delete all the green code in the text window and type this instead:

10 input "What is your name?"; n
20 print "Well hello there, "; n; "!"

If you type this in the window, then hit the play button right above the window, you will be prompted for your name, and when you type it in it will respond with "Well hello there [you]!".

You can experiment with it, the site is rich with information and examples, you can even create and save projects if you're so inclined. The complex program I linked to earlier didn't work quite right due to some compatibility issues, but I'm working through it to see if I can get it up and running.

Stephen Hawking agrees with me.

We have talked a whole lot over the course of this semester about artificial intelligence; what it means, what it doesn't mean, where it is, where it's going, and it's that last one that has caused us the most uncertainty. Remember, we don't want a toaster that decided for us whether it will make our toast or not.

Now, writing in British publication The Independent, Hawking uses the current Johnny Depp film Transcendence as a jumping off point for his view that AI could be the biggest mistake humanity has ever made.

He worries that as we rush to create technology that can adapt to its environment, analyze gargantuan amounts of data in fractions of a second, and become self-aware, they will begin to form their own identities, their own societies, and their own needs for survival, of which humans may not play a part.

We have seen this theory played out countless times in many movies and works of fiction including I, Robot, I have No Mouth and I Must Scream, System Shock, The Terminator, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and many, many others.

Hawking doesn't deny that there is some good in all of the developments we're seeing, but he worries that things like Microsoft's  Cortana and Apple's Siri are just the beginning of an AI arms race that we will all lose.

There is an interesting sidebar in this article at DailyMail about the Hawking post, in which one of the founders of DeepMind, the company formed by a neuroscientist to develop machines that can think and was recently acquired by Google, stated that he feels "human extinction will happen and technology will likely play a part." Google actually had to set up an ethics committee to monitor what Deep Mind is doing, although I suspect they will not be limited in any way.

I for one welcome our new toaster overlords. I hope they heard me. I love toast!

Fun computer-thingy time!

That interesting piece of art you see above is actually the result of a tiny program, IOGraph, that tracks mouse movements and converts them into a graphic visualization. Just double-click the program icon and let it run in the background,  no install necessary. The above graphic is from about two hours of computer use on my laptop, with the lines being mouse movements and the circles indicating when the mouse was at rest and for how long. I don't think the colors are relevant but I'm honestly not sure.

The program window itself is very small and uses very few resources.

If you would like to look around the page then I certainly encourage you to do that, and you can download the program from there, however the big download link is for Linux, while the download links for Mac and Windows are at the bottom of the page and represented by tiny icons. If you just want to download the thing and get to tracking, for Windows you can click here for the .exe file and for Mac you can click here for the .dmg file (right-click and select 'save file as' to control where it downloads).

I...wait, what is this I hear?

No more of this, hopefully.

Can it be? According to this article over on Ars Technica, it appears Cox Communications is going to be rolling out Gigabit service capabilities to all it's residential customers! Fiber speeds, people.

HOWEVER, there are some serious caveats. First of all, it's likely to be very expensive, at least in the beginning; some commenters suggesting around $300 a month, although I have no idea one way or the other.

This is from a Google fiber speed test, and it fills me with envy-based hate, but hopefully we'll be closer.

The other thing is, and this is less of an issue, we're not talking multi-gigabit speeds, only gigabit speeds. Still, that's fiber-level, and it's all we can have anyway since the DOCSIS specifications - protocols (remember those?) for sending data over pre-existing coaxial (remember that?) cable infrastructure - don't allow for multi-gigabit data transmission with current consumer-level cable hardware such as cable modems. That type of hardware is only compatible with DOCSIS 3.0 which allows for gigabit speed, but it would need to support DOCSIS 3.1 to support multi-gigabit speed. But we don't need that now anyway. Let's not get greedy!

This is what I expect now, only without the tie.

Still, the fact they anticipate it will be available to all their customers in all their markets by the end of the year is an incredible start; I wasn't aware of this plan and it seemed to come out of nowhere. I fully support it and hope that the full rollout will eventually drive the cost down and the availability of compatible hardware up.