The Internet of Things (IoT)

Posted on January 15, 2013 by Stuart Hall

The Internet of Things (IoT) entails connecting physical objects to cyberspace, says Professor Jon Crowcroft: “In this talk, I will discuss the business of trying to bootstrap the IoT. To this end, we need to create an innovative ecosystem that addresses two things: Firsty, we need to create a platform for peer-networks of users to create new ways to connect new objects, e.g. household appliances, to the Internet.

“A secondary appstore would hold systems for controlling home sets of appliances, and combining sets of such networks, securely, and safely. This would also extend access to the “home” (or work, or in the car) network of things to multiple remote sites (e.g. work to home, or public transport to home, or home to car).”

Speaker:

Professor Jon Crowcroft

Marconi Professor of Communications Systems, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge.Associate Fellow of the Centre for Science and Policy.

Jon Crowcroft is the Marconi Professor of Networked Systems in the Computer Laboratory, of the University of Cambridge. Prior to that he was professor of networked systems at UCL in the Computer Science Department. He has supervised over 45 PhD students and over 150 Masters students.

He is a Fellow of the ACM, a Fellow of the British Computer Society and a Fellow of the IEE and a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, as well as a Fellow of the IEEE. He was a member of the IAB 96-02, and went to the first 50 IETF meetings; was general chair for the ACM SIGCOMM 95-99; is recipient of Sigcomm Award in 2009. He is the Principle Investigator in the Computer Lab for the EU Social Networks project, the EPSRC funded Horizon Digital Economy project, hubbed at Nottingham, the EPSRC funded project on federated sensor nets project FRESNEL, in collaboration with Oxford; and a new 5-year project towards a Carbon Neutral Internet with Leeds.

Professor Crowcroft’s research interests include Communications, Multimedia and Social Systems, especially Internet related.

Professor Jon Crowcroft

Meeting details:

When:19th Feb 2013, 18:30 – 19th Feb 2013, 21:00
Where:BCS, 1st Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London, WC2E 7HA
Town/City:London
Organiser:BCS Internet Specialist Group
Price:There will be a £10 admission fee (inc vat) for BCS Members, £15 (inc vat) non-members, £5 Student (inc vat)
Booking Link:https://events.bcs.org/book/481/
Further Information:Further Information

Closing date for bookings is 12:00 noon on 17 February 2013. No more bookings will be taken after this date

Witty comment on customer expectations

Posted on June 18, 2012 by Stuart Hall

Saw this witty comment on people’s expectations around products on an Engadget piece regarding the new Google TV launch:

Man people go off-topic fast… can’t we just comment on the actual product instead of making useless comparisons?

“Get an Xbox instead because of X & Y”
“Instead of an Xbox get a PS3, because it offers Z & X”
“Yea but why a PS3 when you can just get XBMC, you can do Y & Z”
“Forget XBMC, just get Plex because it does W & T”
“Or just get an iPad w/ HDMI so you can do Z & W”
“Ew don’t get an iPad, get a Transformer Prime because W & Z”
“Or get a computer, since it does X, Y, Z, O, M, G, S, T, F, U”
“A computer can’t move, get a car because it seats at least 4 people”

2011 was a fun year in computer security..

Posted on January 9, 2012 by Stuart Hall

Now this sounds like an interesting BCS event covering cyber-security with Gareth Lapworth from De Montfort University, clearly surveying the collateral damage with an expert eye. Should be epic!

“2011 was a fun year in computer security. The term “epic” doesn’t quite do it enough justice, but it’s the best term we’ve got. The lulz were had by the bad guys, the overtime was pocketed by the good guys and it was gripping for those sitting on the sidelines.

“One of the most public and explosive attacks of the year was aimed directly at the Sony corporation, not just once, but at least four different times. In order to solve their problems they simply laid off a significant number of their security team. Epic.

“2011 also saw a rise in malware related attacks. Whilst most computer users were worried about receiving viruses and attempting to solve that problem, computer security dudes in the power and water industries were trying to secure centrifuges and utility supplies. They failed. Miserably. Epic.

“It was a win for those that did manage to secure their computer systems, but not those that chose Symantec anti virus. We found out recently that the bad guys had access to the source code of some versions of this software. Of course, the same bad guys helped the world by uncovering that the Indian government requested that Apple, RIM and Nokia placed back doors in their hardware/software solutions. It’s always pleasing to know that a government has access to all of your private data. Epic.

“Don’t have nightmares, though. William Hague wants you to know that we’ll strike first in any cyber war. Super Epic.

“This lecture discusses some cyber security related activities and gives a taste of things yet to come in the next 12 months. It is hoped that you will walk away from this lecture with a feeling of helplessness and fear that will instil in you the correct level of paranoia when conducting yourself online.”

It appears Gareth has left out the FBI arrest of 16 suspected ‘Anonymous’ hackers in July, not long after the PayPal Twitter account was hacked. Which in turn came not long after news that PayPal had dropped online banking for WikiLeaks.

Also see ‘Six security forecasts for 2012′ written by the BCS’s David Lacey, starting with Space weather creates concern: “…increased solar activity will probably cause a few minor annoyances to GPS users. The larger concern, however, is that it might take out mobile communications, power supplies or perhaps anything with a GPS chip. Not quite Y2K in impact, but longer, less predictable and much less researched and publicised”.

Inception movie explained programmatically

Posted on July 30, 2010 by Stuart Hall

Inception movie explained programmatically — scrapped off the site by me; constructed by A R Karthick.

This URL has Read-Only access

Trigger Eames to fake Fischers father in level 3 before triggering Fischer to
meet his father. Update Saito’s state on all levels followed by limbo state
update without holding any dream level lock. Updated README to just add the
steps to compile and run the code

name	age	history message
Makefile	3 days ago	Linking with -lrt only for Linux builds using c… [karthick18]
README	1 day ago	Trigger Eames to fake Fischers father in level … [karthick18]
inception.c	1 day ago	Trigger Eames to fake Fischers father in level … [karthick18]
inception.h	2 days ago	Support for MacOSX and it now correctly dumps F… [karthick18]
inception_arch.h	3 days ago	Support to build for unixes other than linux li… [karthick18]
list.h	July 24, 2010	Adding the code that explains the movie Incepti… [karthick18]

README

Programmatic representation of the Brilliant movie: INCEPTION by the Genius Director THY name is Christopher Nolan!

My tribute to Nolan in “C” Language and a bit of assembly (x86) as the inception is done using x86 code morphing so that Fischer wakes up thinking that the thought was originated from his mind. Running the program would unravel the entire sequence in the movie. Reading the code would explain the movie Programmatically.

In order to compile the code, just type: “make” And run the code by typing: “./inception” , to see the sequencing in the movie and have the code exit with Fischers Inception thought planted by the Inception team!

-Karthick (a.r.karthick@gmail.com)

A new OS for your Android mobile?

Posted on July 6, 2010 by Stuart Hall

Just been sent a link to this interesting open source news – that I have an option to replace my current Android OS on my T-Mobile G1 with a firmware alternative called CyanogenMod. That doesn’t happen every morning! Note that the controversy about including Google apps, which appears to have been resolved..

CyanogenMod is an aftermarket firmware for four families of cell phones—HTC Dream (marketed as T-Mobile G1 in Europe and the US, and Era G1 in Poland) and HTC Magic (T-Mobile myTouch 3G in the US, DoCoMo HT-03A in Japan and Vodafone Magic in the UK, Germany among some other states.), the Motorola Droid^[2], and the Google Nexus One.^[3]

CyanogenMod is a community-based distribution of the open-source Android operating system. It offers features not found in the official Android-based firmwares of vendors of these cell phones, including support for FLAC Lossless Audio, multi-touch, the ability to store and run downloaded applications from the microSD card, compressed cache (compcache), a large APN list, a reboot menu, support for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and USB tethering, as well as other enhancements. CyanogenMod was also the first mobile OS to incorporate BFS as the task scheduler, a change that has been merged into experimental branches in the official Android source tree.^[4] CyanogenMod claims to increase performance and reliability over official firmware releases.

Connecting Facebook status updates and fighter pilot tactics

Posted on February 22, 2010 by Stuart Hall

Really liked the link made in the fourth programme of the BBC’s The Virual Revolution between Norbert Wiener’s feedback loop for anti-aircraft gunners in WWII (ie breaking down the division between people and systems, to allow gunner’s to hit their airborne targets) and the radical impact of the status updates within Facebook (and the likes of Twitter…) on driving the internet revolution.

So here’s my question. What would happen if you applied fighter pilot military strategist John Boyd‘s concept of “the decision cycle or OODA Loop, the process by which an entity (either an individual or an organization) reacts to an event. According to this idea, the key to victory is to be able to create situations wherein one can make appropriate decisions more quickly than one’s opponent” (see wikipedia page) to understanding of how *we* interact online?

I wonder if anyone’s applied this to produce an effective counter-cyber warfare strategy, as I can see the ‘fit’ from a theoretical point of view? [pause while *we*make a quick check..] oh yeah, see here for example as part of the University of Washington’s resource page on cyberwarfare.

More practically perhaps I wonder what would the OODA loop mean in explaining differing peoples’ actions online in the context of the BBC programme’s ‘Web Behaviour Test’ experiment?

Of course on a more practical social media level I have already blogged recently, thanks to HP Labs paper, on the value of creating good feedback loops with your top contributors:

This paper demonstrates that submitters who stop receiving attention tend to stop contributing, while prolific contributors attract an ever increasing number of followers and their attention in a feedback loop.

We demonstrate that this mechanism leads to the observed power law in the number of contributions per user and support our assertions by an analysis of hundreds of millions of contributions to top content sharing websites Digg.com and Youtube.com.

Download: Feedback loops of attention in peer production (PDF; 0.5 mb).

Comparing US patent search engines

Posted on February 5, 2010 by Stuart Hall

I quickly put together this short animoto-video showing the beta Google Patents, US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and new Xyggy patent search engines, entry page followed by advanced search page. How do they compare in your view, focusing on US granted patents from 1976 onwards?

You should notice a difference with the Xyggy engine. Why? It runs an item search which it claims provides substantial advantages and additional information over text search. Also, the makers say that with multiple items in the query, Xyggy discovers what they have in common to return better results.

@stuartgh (#thinslicing)

Making people happy. Serving thinslices of insight to achieve this!

Category Archives: IT