Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

March 31, 2018

Reverse engineering the Notability file format

Filed under: Files,Reverse Engineering — Patrick Durusau @ 8:38 pm

Reverse engineering the Notability file format by Julia Evans.

From the post:

I spend a fair amount of time drawing comics about programming. (I have a new zine called “profiling & tracing with perf”! Early access is $10, if you want to read it today!)

So on Thursday, I bought an iPad + Apple Pencil, because the Apple Pencil is a very nice tool for drawing. I started using the Notability app for iPad, which seems pretty nice. But I had a problem: I have dozens of drawings already in the Android app I was using: Squid!

Notability does have a way to import PDFs, but they become read-only – you can draw on top of them, but you can’t edit them. That’s annoying!

Here’s the rough dialog that ensued:

I don’t use Apple products so I’m very unlikely to encounter Notability, with or without its limitations.

However, practice at reverse engineering a format? That’s a useful skill!

For non-Apple users, suggestions of a format to reverse engineer?

No promises but curious what looks interesting and useful.

PS: We should all be taking a chance on Evans’ new zine called “profiling & tracing with perf”. I will get paid soon so will report back on the zine.

More Google Censorship – ‘Kodi’ Banned from Auto-Complete

Filed under: Censorship,Free Speech,Intellectual Property (IP) — Patrick Durusau @ 7:42 pm

Google Adds ‘Kodi’ to Autocomplete Piracy Filter

From the post:

Google has banned the term “Kodi” from the autocomplete feature of its search engine. This means that the popular software and related suggestions won’t appear unless users type out the full term. Google has previously taken similar measures against “pirate” related terms and confirms that Kodi is targeted because it’s “closely associated with copyright infringement.”

In recent years entertainment industry groups have repeatedly urged Google to ramp up its anti-piracy efforts.

These remarks haven’t fallen on deaf ears and Google has made several changes to its search algorithms to make copyright-infringing material less visible.

In addition to censoring a legitimate project, Kodi, Google is reported to be acting on behalf of entertainment industry groups, gasp, without being paid.

That’s anti-capitalist! It conditions entertainment industry groups and the anti-piracy crowd to expect free handouts. (Property class privilege for any Marxists in the audience.)

To hell with that!

I urge you to not censor at all, but if you do, make others pay dearly for the privilege.

Forced to pay for censorship, entertainment/anti-piracy groups will collect legitimate data on piracy to determine their cost/benefit ratio for censorship. (Legitimate data being defined as data unchanged by membership calendars and fund raising drives.)

GDPR Linking Guide

Filed under: EU,Privacy — Patrick Durusau @ 2:22 pm

Before you go completely dark for anyone located in the EU, a list of URLs for pointing into Regulation (EU) 2016/679 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 27 April 2016 on the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data, and repealing Directive 95/46/EC (General Data Protection Regulation) appears below.

For all of its cleverness, the EU could not develop an intuitive ID scheme, something like “art-1, art-2,” choosing instead, “d1e1404-1-1 and d1e1455-1-1,” plus 97 more for all the sections. Guessing those section ids for the HTML version is difficult.

To solve that problem, use the following links for English (your language url + the #id for other languages):

I plan on hosting a improved but unofficial version that has predictable links not only for section headings but sub-sections and paragraphs as well. Watch for a note about that version.

If the EU were truly interested in the privacy of natural persons, they would be advocating and supporting the use of Tor servers and browsers.

But, they’re not.

Draw your own conclusions for their failure to do so.

PS: Please copy, modify, share these links for any reason, but especially to promote discussion of this lame approach to privacy by the EU.

March 24, 2018

The Dark Web = Freedom of Speech

Filed under: Censorship,Free Speech,Privacy — Patrick Durusau @ 4:49 pm

Freedom of speech never was all that popular in the United States and recently it has become even less so.

Craigslist personals, some subreddits disappear after FOSTA passage by Cyrus Farivar.

From the post:

In the wake of this week’s passage of the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) bill in both houses of Congress on Wednesday, Craigslist has removed its “Personals” section entirely, and Reddit has removed some related subreddits, likely out of fear of future lawsuits.

FOSTA, which awaits the signature of President Donald Trump before becoming law, removes some portions of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. The landmark 1996 law shields website operators that host third-party content (such as commenters, for example) from civil liability. The new bill is aimed squarely at Backpage, a notorious website that continues to allow prostitution advertisements and has been under federal scrutiny for years.

I am deeply saddened to report that the House vote was 388 ayes and 25 noes and the Senate vote was 97 to 2.

You can follow the EFF lead as they piss and moan about this latest outrage. But all their activity (and fund raising) didn’t prevent its passage. So, what are the odds the EFF will get it repealed? That’s what I thought.

I’m not looking for Craigslist to jump to the Dark Web but certainly subreddits should be able to make the switch. The more subreddits, along with new sites and services that switch to the Dark Web, the more its usage and bandwidth will grow. Looking forward to the day when the default configuration of new computers is for the Dark Web. The “open” web being an optional choice with appropriate warnings.

If you are not (yet) a Dark Web jockey, try: How To Access Notorious Dark Web Anonymously (10 Step Guide). Enough to get you started and to demonstrate the potential of the Dark Web.

March 23, 2018

BaseX 9.0 – The Spring Edition – 229 Days to US Mid-Term Elections

Filed under: BaseX,Politics,XML,XQuery — Patrick Durusau @ 7:32 pm

Christian Grün writes:

We are very happy to announce the release of BaseX 9.0!

The new version of our XML database system and XQuery 3.1 processor includes some great new features and a vast number of minor improvements and optimizations. It’s both the usage of BaseX in productive environments as well as the valuable feedback of our open source users that make BaseX better and better, and that allow and motivate us to keep going. Thanks to all of you!

Along with the new release, we invite you to visit our relaunched homepage: http://basex.org/.

Java 8 is now required to run BaseX. The most prominent features of Version 9.0 are:

Sorry! No spoilers here! Grab a copy of BaseX 9.0 and read Christian’s post for the details.

Take 229 days until the US mid-term elections (November 6, 2018) as fair warning that email leaks are possible (likely?) between now and election day.

The better your skills with BaseX, the better change you have to interfere with, sorry, participate in the 2018 election cycle.

Good luck to us all!

March 11, 2018

Phishing, The 43% Option

Filed under: Cybersecurity,Politics,Security — Patrick Durusau @ 2:54 pm

How’s that for a motivational poster?

You can, and some do, spend hours plumbing in the depths of code or chip design for vulnerabilities.

Or, you can look behind door #2, the phishing door, and find 43% of data breaches start with phishing.

Phishing doesn’t have the glamor or prestige of finding a Meltdown or Spectre bug.

But, on the other hand, do you want to breach a congressional email account for the 2018 mid-term election, or for the 2038 election?

Just so you know, no rumors of breached congressional email accounts have surfaced, at least not yet.

Ping me if you see any such news.

PS: The tweet points to: https://qz.com/998949/can-you-outwit-a-hacker/, an ad for AT&T.

Spreading “Fake News,” Science Says It Wasn’t Russian Bots

Filed under: Fake News,Politics,Twitter — Patrick Durusau @ 2:04 pm

The spread of true and false news online by Soroush Vosoughi, Deb Roy, and Sinan Aral. (Science 09 Mar 2018: Vol. 359, Issue 6380, pp. 1146-1151 DOI: 10.1126/science.aap9559)

Abstract:

We investigated the differential diffusion of all of the verified true and false news stories distributed on Twitter from 2006 to 2017. The data comprise ~126,000 stories tweeted by ~3 million people more than 4.5 million times. We classified news as true or false using information from six independent fact-checking organizations that exhibited 95 to 98% agreement on the classifications. Falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information, and the effects were more pronounced for false political news than for false news about terrorism, natural disasters, science, urban legends, or financial information. We found that false news was more novel than true news, which suggests that people were more likely to share novel information. Whereas false stories inspired fear, disgust, and surprise in replies, true stories inspired anticipation, sadness, joy, and trust. Contrary to conventional wisdom, robots accelerated the spread of true and false news at the same rate, implying that false news spreads more than the truth because humans, not robots, are more likely to spread it.

Real data science. The team had access to all the Twitter data and not a cherry-picked selection, which of course can’t be shared due to Twitter rules, or so say ISIS propaganda scholars.

The paper merits a slow read but highlights for the impatient:

  1. Don’t invest in bots or high-profile Twitter users for the 2018 mid-term elections.
  2. Craft messages with a high novelty factor that disfavor your candidates opponents.
  3. Your messages should inspire fear, disgust and surprise.

Democrats working hard to lose the 2018 mid-terms will cry you a river about issues, true facts, engagement on the issues and a host of other ideas used to explain losses to losers.

There’s still time to elect a progressive Congress in 2018.

Are you game?

March 8, 2018

Contesting the Right to Deliver Disinformation

Filed under: Fake News,Journalism,News — Patrick Durusau @ 8:42 pm

Eric Singerman reports on a recent conference titled: Understanding and Addressing the Disinformation Ecosystem.

He summarizes the conference saying:

The problem of mis- and disinformation is far more complex than the current obsession with Russian troll factories. It’s the product of the platforms that distribute this information, the audiences that consume it, the journalist and fact-checkers that try to correct it – and even the researchers who study it.

In mid-December, First Draft, the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and the Knight Foundation brought academics, journalists, fact-checkers, technologists and funders together in a two-day workshop to discuss the challenges produced by the current disinformation ecosystem. The convening was intended to highlight relevant research, share best-practices, identify key questions of scholarly and practical concern and outline a potential research agenda designed to answer these questions.

In preparation for the workshop, a number of attendees prepared short papers that could act as starting points for discussion. These papers covered a broad range of topics – from the ways that we define false and harmful content, to the dystopian future of computer-generated visual disinformation.

Download the papers here.

Singerman points out the very first essay concedes that “fake news” isn’t anything new. Although I would read Schudson and Zelizer (authors of the first paper) with care. They contend:


Fake news lessened in centrality only in the late 1800s as printed news, particularly in Britain and the United States, came to center on what Jean Chalaby called “fact-centered discursive practices” and people realized that newspapers could compete with one another not simply on the basis of partisan affiliation or on the quality of philosophical and political essays but on the immediacy and accuracy of factual reports (Chalaby 1996).

I’m sorry, that’s just factually incorrect. The 1890’s were the age of “yellow journalism,” a statement confirmed by the Digital Library of America‘s resource collection: Fake News in the 1890s: Yellow Journalism:

Alternative facts, fake news, and post-truth have become common terms in the contemporary news industry. Today, social media platforms allow sensational news to “go viral,” crowdsourced news from ordinary people to compete with professional reporting, and public figures in offices as high as the US presidency to bypass established media outlets when sharing news. However, dramatic reporting in daily news coverage predates the smartphone and tablet by over a century. In the late nineteenth century, the news media war between Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal resulted in the rise of yellow journalism, as each newspaper used sensationalism and manipulated facts to increase sales and attract readers.

Many trace the origin of yellow journalism to coverage of the sinking of the USS Maine in Havana Harbor on February 15, 1898, and America’s entry in the Spanish-American War. Both papers’ reporting on this event featured sensational headlines, jaw-dropping images, bold fonts, and aggrandizement of facts, which influenced public opinion and helped incite America’s involvement in what Hearst termed the “Journal’s War.”

The practice, and nomenclature, of yellow journalism actually predates the war, however. It originated with a popular comic strip character known as The Yellow Kid in Hogan’s Alley. Created by Richard F. Outcault in 1895, Hogan’s Alley was published in color by Pulitzer’s New York World. When circulation increased at the New York World, William Randolph Hearst lured Outcault to his newspaper, the New York Journal. Pulitzer fought back by hiring another artist to continue the comic strip in his newspaper.

The period of peak yellow journalism by the two New York papers ended in the late 1890s, and each shifted priorities, but still included investigative exposés, partisan political coverage, and other articles designed to attract readers. Yellow journalism, past and present, conflicts with the principles of journalistic integrity. Today, media consumers will still encounter sensational journalism in print, on television, and online, as media outlets use eye-catching headlines to compete for audiences. To distinguish truth from “fake news,” readers must seek multiple viewpoints, verify sources, and investigate evidence provided by journalists to support their claims.

You can see the evidence relied upon by the DPLA for its claims about yellow dog journalism here: Fake News in the 1890s: Yellow Journalism.

Why Schudson and Zelizer thought Chalaby, J. “Journalism as an Anglo-American Invention,” European Journal of Communication 11 (3), 1996, 303-326, supported their case isn’t clear.

If you read the Chalaby article, you find it is primarily concerned with contrasting the French press with Anglo-American practices, a comparison in which the French come off a distant second best.

More to the point, the New York World, the New York Journal, nor yellowdog journalism appears anywhere in the Chalaby article. Check for yourself: Journalism as an Anglo-American Invention.

Chalaby does claim the origin of “fact-centered discursive practices” in the 1890’s but the absence of any mention of journalism that lead to the Spanish-American war, casts doubt on how much we should credit Chalaby’s knowledge of US journalism.

I haven’t checked the other footnotes of Schudson and Zelizer, I leave that as an exercise for interested readers.

I do think Schudson and Zelizer capture the main driver of concern over “fake news” when they say:

First, there is a great anxiety today about the border between professional journalists and others who through digital media have easy access to promoting their ideas, perspectives, factual reports, pranks, inanities, conspiracy theories, fakes and lies….

Despite being framed as a contest between factual reporting and disinformation, the dispute over disinformation/fake news is over the right to profit from disinformation/fake news.

If you need a modern example of yellow journalism, consider the ongoing media frenzy over Russian “interference” in US elections.

How often do you hear reports of context that include instances of US-sponsored assassinations, funded and armed government overthrows, active military interference with both elections and governments, by the US?

What? Some Russians bought Facebook ads and used election hashtags on Twitter? That compares to overthrowing other governments? The long history of the U.S. interfering with elections elsewhere. (tip of the iceberg)

The constant hyperbole in the “Russian interference” story is a clue that journalists and social media are re-enacting the roles played by the New York World and the New York Journal, which lead to the Spanish-American war.

Truth be told, we should thank social media for the free distribution of disinformation, previously available only by subscription.

Discerning what is or is not accurate information, as always, falls on the shoulders of readers. It has ever been thus.

Confluence: Mapping @apachekafka connect schema types – to usual suspects

Filed under: Database,Kafka — Patrick Durusau @ 4:27 pm

Confluence has posted a handy mapping from Kafka connect schema types to MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, SQLite, SQL Server and Vertica.

The sort of information that I will waste 10 to 15 minutes every time I need it. Posting it here means I’ll cut the wasted time down to maybe 5 minutes if I remember I posted about it. 😉

Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) Has New Website!

Filed under: #DAPL,Library,Library Associations — Patrick Durusau @ 4:04 pm

Announcing the Launch of our New Website (the chest beating announcement)

From the post:

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) is pleased to unveil its all-new redesigned website, now live at https://dp.la. Created in collaboration with renowned design firm Postlight, DPLA’s new website is more user-centered than ever before, with a focus on the tools, resources, and information that matter most to DPLA researchers and learners of all kinds. In a shift from the former site structure, content that primarily serves DPLA’s network of partners and others interested in deeper involvement with DPLA can now be found on DPLA Pro.

You can boil the post down to two links: DPLA (DPLA Resources) and DPLA Pro (helping DPLA build and spread resources). What more needs to be said?

Oh, yeah, donate to support the DPLA!

March 6, 2018

Numba Versus C++ – On Wolfram CAs

Filed under: C/C++,Cellular Automata,Programming,Python — Patrick Durusau @ 7:49 pm

Numba Versus C++ by David Butts, Gautham Dharuman, Bill Punch and Michael S. Murillo.

Python is a programming language that first appeared in 1991; soon, it will have its 27th birthday. Python was created not as a fast scientific language, but rather as a general-purpose language. You can use Python as a simple scripting language or as an object-oriented language or as a functional language…and beyond; it is very flexible. Today, it is used across an extremely wide range of disciplines and is used by many companies. As such, it has an enormous number of libraries and conferences that attract thousands of people every year.

But, Python is an interpreted language, so it is very slow. Just how slow? It depends, but you can count on about 10-100 times as slow as, say, C/C++. If you want fast code, the general rule is: don’t use Python. However, a few more moments of thought lead to a more nuanced perspective. What if you spend most of the time coding, and little time actually running the code? Perhaps your familiarity with the (slow) language, or its vast set of libraries, actually saves you time overall? And, what if you learned a few tricks that made your Python code itself a bit faster? Maybe that is enough for your needs? In the end, for true high performance computing applications, you will want to explore fast languages like C++; but, not all of our needs fall into that category.

As another example, consider the fact that many applications use two languages, one for the core code and one for the wrapper code; this allows for a smoother interface between the user and the core code. A common use case is C or C++ wrapped by, of course, Python. As a user, you may not even know that the code you are using is in another language! Such a situation is referred to as the “two-language problem”. This situation is great provided you don’t need to work in the core code, or you don’t mind working in two languages – some people don’t mind, but some do. The question then arises: if you are one of those people who would like to work only in the wrapper language, because it was chosen for its user friendliness, what options are available to make that language (Python in this example) fast enough that it can also be used for the core code?

We wanted to explore these ideas a bit further by writing a code in both Python and C++. Our past experience suggested that while Python is very slow, it could be made about as fast as C using the crazily-simple-to-use library Numba. Our basic comparisons here are: basic Python, Numba and C++. Because we are not religious about Python, and you shouldn’t be either, we invited expert C++ programmers to have the chance to speed up the C++ as much as they could (and, boy could they!).

This webpage is highly annoying, in both Mozilla and Chrome. You’ll have to visit to get the full impact.

It is, however, also a great post on using Numba to obtain much faster results while still using Python. The use of Wolfram CAs (cellular automata) as examples is an added bonus.

Enjoy!

March 1, 2018

An Interactive Timeline of the Most Iconic Infographics

Filed under: Graphics,Infographics,Visualization — Patrick Durusau @ 8:26 pm

Map of Firsts: An Interactive Timeline of the Most Iconic Infographics by R. J. Andrews.

Careful with this one!

You might learn some history as well as discovering an infographic for your next project!

Enjoy!

MSDAT: Microsoft SQL Database Attacking Tool

Filed under: Cybersecurity,Database,Security — Patrick Durusau @ 9:30 am

MSDAT: Microsoft SQL Database Attacking Tool

From the webpage:

MSDAT (Microsoft SQL Database Attacking Tool) is an open source penetration testing tool that tests the security of Microsoft SQL Databases remotely.

Usage examples of MSDAT:

  • You have a Microsoft database listening remotely and you want to find valid credentials in order to connect to the database
  • You have a valid Microsoft SQL account on a database and you want to escalate your privileges
  • You have a valid Microsoft SQL account and you want to execute commands on the operating system hosting this DB (xp_cmdshell)

Tested on Microsoft SQL database 2005, 2008 and 2012.

As I mentioned yesterday, you may have to wait a few years until the Office of Personnel Management (OMP) upgrades to a supported version of Microsoft SQL database, but think of the experience you will have gained with MSDAT by that time.

And by the time the OPM upgrades, new critical security flaws will emerge in Microsoft SQL database 2005, 2008 and 2012. Under current management, the OPM is becoming less and less secure over time.

Would it help if I posed a street/aerial view of OPM headquarters in DC? Would that help focus your efforts at dropping infected USB sticks, malware loaded DVDs and insecure sex toys for OPM management to find?

OPM headquarters is not marked on the standard tourist map for DC. The map does suggest a number of other fertile places for your wares.

Powered by WordPress