The Guardian Project
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro
Just been watching the latest in the “Rebel Geeks” series on Al
Jazeera. Today the episode was called “A Bigger Brother”
<http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/rebelgeeks/2015/12/bigger-brother-151...>,
centred around the use of an open-source Android app called CameraV.
The aim of this app is to record video along with a whole heap of
corroborating metadata (GPS coordinates, local wi-fi networks etc) to
make the footage credible enough, in particular proof enough against
accusations of tampering, to be used as evidence in court.
This is particularly important where the video is documenting crimes
committed by people in positions of power and trust, such as the police.
They used a nice term for this: “sousveillance” (watching done by
ordinary people from below), as compared to the more usual
“surveillance” (watching by those in privileged positions from above).
One interesting comment made in the program was that the phone needs to
look like it is not capturing video while the app is running, because
in a place like Rio De Janeiro, the cops will grab phones away from
people who they think are filming them.
I did some digging around on GitHub, and found that this app is part of
the Guardian Project, and they have a whole bunch of other
useful-looking tools related to encryption, privacy and so
on <https://github.com/guardianproject>
They also have a website <https://guardianproject.info/>.
4 years, 5 months
HTTP Error Code 451 Approved For Censored Web Pages
by Peter Reutemann
'The Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG) has finally approved
the new 451 status code for HTTP error messages involving web pages
which have been repressed or removed for legal or political reasons.
The initiative was proposed in 2013, and gained interest from various
groups, such as Lumen (formerly Chilling Effects), who see the
potential of the Bradbury-inspired code to help develop comprehensive
indexes of censorship on the internet. Mark Nottingham, chair the IETF
HTTP Working Group, says, "It'll be an RFC after some work by the RFC
Editor and a few more process bits, but effectively you can start
using it now."'
-- source: http://yro.slashdot.org/story/15/12/21/1549258
Cheers, Peter
--
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/
http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
4 years, 5 months
Items From Blender Conference 2015
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro
I saw from Peter’s posting that Blender got one of the “top 10 open
source projects” awards on opensource.com this year. And they had their
Blender Conference 2015 about a month ago.
A couple of notable related articles I found on opensource.com are
“Teaching Teens 3D Animation With Blender”
<https://opensource.com/life/15/12/blender-interview-tom-haines-3dami>
where this nonprofit called 3Dami offers a free, intensive 7-day course
to selected students. Quote on the (much-maligned) Blender interface:
Many do prefer to use Blender outside our events. Once you have got
over the bump of its interface being different to other software,
you soon learn just how insanely fast it is—its interface is
different for a very good reason, and its hard to accept the slow
down of using other software. Some students actually learn that
lesson during our event: More than a few have turned up moaning
that we aren't using a certain piece of software beginning with
"M," but they usually get why we use Blender by the time they leave.
I do know that one of our students is making money using Blender,
and I expect others to join them given time.
Another one, relevant to a University research setting, is “Visualize
Astrophysics Data With Blender”
<https://opensource.com/life/15/11/blender-conference-interview-jill-naima...>.
Besides Blender, this also builds on a Python-based astrophysics
simulation framework called “yt”.
(Aside: the more we become accustomed to being able to use keyword
searches to find everything online, the more annoyed some of us become
with short names that are hard to search for. Is this good or bad?
Discuss.)
I suspect there are bits there that could be adapted to other kinds of
physical simulation.
More presentations to see here:
<https://www.youtube.com/user/BlenderFoundation/videos>
4 years, 5 months
AMD Goes Open Source, Announces GPUOpen Initiative, Linux Compiler, Drivers
by Peter Reutemann
'AMD announced today that the company is releasing a slew of
open-source software and tools to give game developers, heterogeneous
applications, and HPC applications deeper access to the GPU and GPU
resources. AMD and their Radeon Technologies Group (RTG) are looking
for ways to ease game development, so developers can more easily
re-use code and port their games from consoles over to the PC. With
GPUOpen, game developers will have direct access to GPU hardware, as
well as access to a large collection of open source effects, tools,
libraries and SDKs, which are being made available on GitHub under an
MIT open-source license. As part of the effort, the company is also
releasing a new HCC C++ compiler which will be a tool in enabling
developers to more easily leverage the resources of discrete GPU
hardware in heterogeneous systems. The HCC complier also allows
developers to convert CUDA code to portable C++. According to AMD,
internal testing shows that in many cases 90 percent or more of CUDA
code can be automatically converted into C++ with the final 10 percent
converted manually in the widely popular C++ language. An early access
program for the "Boltzmann Initiative" tools is planned for Q1 2016.'
-- source: http://news.slashdot.org/story/15/12/15/1429257
Cheers, Peter
--
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/
http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
4 years, 5 months
Collabora and OwnCloud Announce LibreOffice Online
by Peter Reutemann
'Collabora Productivity, a UK-based consulting company, has
collaborated with ownCloud Inc. to release a developer edition of
online LibreOffice, which they call CODE (Collabora Online Development
Edition). "The office suite implementation runs on ownCloud server.
That's where all the processing and heavy lifting is done. The
rendering happens at the client side. Currently there are three apps:
writer (equivalent to MS Word), spreadsheet (Excel) and presentation
(PowerPoint). At the moment users can create new documents and edit
them. Other functionality, such as collaborative editing, is in the
pipeline."'
-- source: http://tech.slashdot.org/story/15/12/15/1849234
Cheers, Peter
--
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/
http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
4 years, 5 months
Finding Differences Between Binary Files
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro
Hi folks.
As mentioned in passing last night, diff(1) isn’t much help for
tracking down differences between two non-text files: all it will say
is the files differ.
However, there is a way to get detail on the differences, and that is
to use a hex dump command like xxd(1) to produce text output from those
binary files, and diff that text output instead. Thus, instead of
diff binfile1 binfile2
you do
diff <(xxd binfile1) <(xxd binfile2)
This will quickly narrow down runs of changed bytes, and possibly even
small sections of inserted or deleted bytes as well.
4 years, 5 months