Author: steve

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Detail and old technology

I keep lots of note books, technical one’s and personal. Unfortunately like most people I’m not blessed with a photographic memory, but I can get rather methodical, and that’s useful.

Technical writing – this blogging thing is valuable. But I also like to write things in long hand and in pencil in note books! I know it sounds crazy, because these days we can google many if not most problems. But writing my own cheat sheets, (spells, as I call them ) can help a lot to jog the memory. Often it can be just as quick if not quicker than trying to find that page in google you forgot to book mark 3 years ago!

Not to mention that there is some evidence that a hand written approach to the problem solving process can have a number of positive side effects.

When I’m working on something technical my journal is close buy but I’ll also have the index open that I maintain in a spread sheet. The reason is that it’s a lot quicker to find things via the spread sheet. But I also have a hand written index that is good for if i’m off line or taking things slowly. We live in very fast times but it’s good on occasion to slow down a little, think and reap the benefits.

 

 

 

 

 

 


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Additional thoughts about AI

Vegetable, Animal or Mineral?

I’ve found an interesting article about AI by research psychologist  Robert Epstein over at Aeon.co . It’s a good read and a breath of fresh air with regards a lot of the noise that is being generated of late, about AI running amok (yes I’m guilty of jumping on that band wagon!).

Mr Epstein’s basic premise is that the brain does not work like a computer – it’s different because it contains 86 billion neurons with  100 trillion interconnections. This big hunk of humanity changes due to each unique experience, and we can’t just reduce human conscious down to a big bag of self learning algorithms. That and the computational model that a lot of people rely on is flawed.

I sort of agree with him on a lot of this, but I am also  still a little concerned about things like people with photographic memories, how studies in childhood development will influence our understanding of the creation of human consciousness, and I’m still worried about self learning. But if you want a fresh perspective on this stuff the article is well worth a read. May be we are not doomed after all!

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Sarah Jamie Lewis and “The Dark Web”!

I have spent the afternoon researching the work of Sarah Jamie Lewis. A very interesting person and among other things she used to work for GCHQ! The irony is that she is now an independent security researcher who is pro anonymity and privacy advocate.

She is also the author of an interesting product called onionscan, which is a tool that can be used for mapping the dark web.

This particular talk I found rather interesting

Sarah Jamie Lewis: OnionScan: Practical Deanonymization of Hidden Services
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8hr0nlfJRc

Among other things it gives rise to the fact that if you want security you should find your self a great Sys admin! Put simply a lot of sites on the “Dark Web” are not well configured and if you use such services you could be at risk.

She covers such topics as why you should be careful if you use apache as a dark web server. Why not to use a google analytics id (don’t use the same id for all your sites) and be aware that if your using it in the real world as well as the dark web this is a rather incriminating vector!

Other things discussed are exif metadata (from photographs for instance) that give away your geolocation, phone type etc!!

Most importantly though she mentions a lot of the good things that the dark web can be used for including, that a lot of the dark web is blog sites, forums that help drug users with regards catching addiction before it happens and harm reduction. Also that the dark web is used to monitor human rights abuses, and censorship data gathering.

She sums up buy proposing that peer to peer may be the future of creating secure communications due to the fact that the client server model is rather difficult to secure and anonymise. Some very interesting, important and thought provoking work. Her twitter feed is also an interesting read and rather humorous but probably NSFW!

Related links
Source for onionscan
https://github.com/s-rah/onionscan