What Google did next (and how it knew what you were going to do before you did)

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Wow! Google Prediction API. Announced this week:

The Prediction API enables access to Google's machine learning algorithms to analyze your historic data and predict likely future outcomes. Upload your data to Google Storage for Developers, then use the Prediction API to make real-time decisions in your applications. The Prediction API implements supervised learning algorithms as a RESTful web service to let you leverage patterns in your data, providing more relevant information to your users. Run your predictions on Google's infrastructure and scale effortlessly as your data grows in size and complexity.

Thanks to my colleague Tony Hirst for his skilled distillation of what Google announced.

End of the road for H.264?

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This clipping from GMSV’s coverage of the Google Developers’ conference is interesting.

The announcement with the biggest implications down the road was the unveiling of WebM, an open-source, royalty-free video codec based on VP8. It’s being positioned as the standard for video in HTML5 rather than the proprietary H.264 or the royalty-free but problematic Theora. Yep, you with the glazing eyes: Adoption of H.264 could mean fees imposed on content distributors and providers, though so far the license holders have waived collection. Those license holders include Microsoft and Apple — and Apple is the notable abstainer in the chorus of support for VP8. Could get interesting.

Yep. And the most interesting thing about it is that it’s open source.

My old Carolina Home

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Cue Randy Newman. For those of us d’un certain age, this is a poignant moment.

This week marks the end of an era for one of the earliest pieces of Internet history, which got its start at Duke more than 30 years ago.

On May 20, Duke will shut down its Usenet server, which provides access to a worldwide electronic discussion network of newsgroups started in 1979 by two Duke graduate students, Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis.

Working with a graduate student at UNC-Chapel Hill, they came up with a simple program to exchange messages and files between computers at Duke and UNC using telephone modems.

The “Users Network,” Usenet for short, grew into an international electronic discussion forum with more than 120,000 newsgroups dedicated to various topics, from local dining to computer programming languages. Each group had a distinctive name such as soc.history or sci.math.

Usenet also played an integral role in the growth of the popularity of the Internet, said Dietolf Ramm, professor emeritus of computer science. At the time, a connection to the Internet was not only expensive but required a research contract with the federal Advanced Research Projects Agency.

“ARPA had funded a few schools to begin the early stages of Internet, but most schools didn’t have that,” said Ramm, who worked with the students who developed Usenet. “Usenet was a pioneering effort because it allowed anybody to connect and participate in communications.”

When I was writing A Brief History…, Usenet archives provided a wonderful treasure-trove. They also provided a picture of the Net as it was before the arrival of AOL’s redneck hordes. When the groups alt.sex and alt.drugs were started (after a hoohah) on April 3, 1988, for example, it was immediately felt necessary to start alt.rock-n-roll. One has to be consistent in these matters. Those were the days.

Thanks to Rex Hughes for spotting the announcement.

And man made life

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From this week’s Economist.

Craig Venter and Hamilton Smith, the two American biologists who unravelled the first DNA sequence of a living organism (a bacterium) in 1995, have made a bacterium that has an artificial genome—creating a living creature with no ancestor. Pedants may quibble that only the DNA of the new beast was actually manufactured in a laboratory; the researchers had to use the shell of an existing bug to get that DNA to do its stuff. Nevertheless, a Rubicon has been crossed. It is now possible to conceive of a world in which new bacteria (and eventually, new animals and plants) are designed on a computer and then grown to order.

That ability would prove mankind’s mastery over nature in a way more profound than even the detonation of the first atomic bomb. The bomb, however justified in the context of the second world war, was purely destructive. Biology is about nurturing and growth. Synthetic biology, as the technology that this and myriad less eye-catching advances are ushering in has been dubbed, promises much. In the short term it promises better drugs, less thirsty crops, greener fuels and even a rejuvenated chemical industry. In the longer term who knows what marvels could be designed and grown?

The abstract of the article in Science reads:

We report the design, synthesis, and assembly of the 1.08-Mbp Mycoplasma mycoides JCVI-syn1.0 genome starting from digitized genome sequence information and its transplantation into a Mycoplasma capricolum recipient cell to create new Mycoplasma mycoides cells that are controlled only by the synthetic chromosome. The only DNA in the cells is the designed synthetic DNA sequence, including “watermark” sequences and other designed gene deletions and polymorphisms, and mutations acquired during the building process. The new cells have expected phenotypic properties and are capable of continuous self-replication.

The Economist has a rather good article on it (which is probably behind a paywall). It includes this elegant paragraph:

If it is a stunt, it is a well conceived one. It demonstrates more forcefully than anything else to date that life’s essence is information. Heretofore that information has been passed from one living thing to another. Now it does not have to be. Non-living matter can be brought to life with no need for lightning, a vital essence or a god. And this new power will allow the large-scale manipulation of living organisms. Hitherto, genetic modification has been the work of apprentices and journeymen. This new step is, in the true and original sense of the word, a masterpiece. It is the demonstration that the practitioner has mastered his art.

Sigh. Just when I was hoping for a quiet life. Still, it’s better than cloning Jeffrey Archer.

Euphemism, NYT-style

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Why can’t the New York Times call a spade a spade? This is how it reports Connecticut Attorney-General Richard Blumenthal’s claim — in a speech to military veterans — that he had served in Vietnam:

“We have learned something important since the days that I served in Vietnam,” Mr. Blumenthal said to the group gathered in Norwalk in March 2008. “And you exemplify it. Whatever we think about the war, whatever we call it — Afghanistan or Iraq — we owe our military men and women unconditional support.”

There was one problem: Mr. Blumenthal, a Democrat now running for the United States Senate, never served in Vietnam. He obtained at least five military deferments from 1965 to 1970 and took repeated steps that enabled him to avoid going to war, according to records.

The deferments allowed Mr. Blumenthal to complete his studies at Harvard; pursue a graduate fellowship in England; serve as a special assistant to The Washington Post’s publisher, Katharine Graham; and ultimately take a job in the Nixon White House.

In 1970, with his last deferment in jeopardy, he landed a coveted spot in the Marine Reserve, which virtually guaranteed that he would not be sent to Vietnam. He joined a unit in Washington that conducted drills and other exercises and focused on local projects, like fixing a campground and organizing a Toys for Tots drive.

And the headline over this story?

This seems a bit of an understatement, to put it mildly. A British tabloid would doubtless scream “Attorney-General Lied About Serving in Vietnam”. The Guardian might have “Memory Loss Afflicts Top Lawyer”.

On balance, maybe I’ll take the bike

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Wow! Impressed by your vehicle’s sophisticated electronics? Well, have a look at this.

We conducted our computer security analyses on two modern cars. These cars were introduced into the U.S. market in 2009 and are of the same make and model. We determined that someone with access to the internal network in the car could use his or her own computer equipment to take over a broad array of safety-critical computer systems.

For example, in live road tests, were able to forcibly and completely disengage the brakes while driving, making it difficult for the driver to stop. Conversely, we were able to forcibly activate the brakes, lurching the driver forward and causing the car to stop suddenly. We were also able to control the lighting within the cabin, the external lighting, the vehicle’s dash, and so on. A full description of the road tests is described beginning on page 11 of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy paper (PDF).

We stress that all our experiments focused on what an unauthorized party could do if they had the ability to access the car’s internal network (e.g., via physical access to the car). For example, that unauthorized party might plug in a computer to the standard OBD-II diagnostic port under the dash. Clearly the risk in this scenario is low — it implies that someone already has physical access to the car — which is one reason we think consumers should not be alarmed by our results.

But our concern is that the increasing use of externally facing wireless interfaces may increase the risks for future vehicles and provide a way for someone to remotely access the car’s wired network. Hence, even though it may be challenging — and unlikely — for an unauthorized individual to perform the actions we describe in this paper, it is still important to understand them so that we can develop solutions that will continue to be robust even as our cars become increasingly connected.