Traffic Jam vs Eclipse

The total eclipse passed through the continental US today, with an estimated 7 million people travelling to view it. Now that it has passed, we can look at a historical indicator of where it was viewed from, by means of traffic. Spontaneous traffic jams seem to mysteriously correlate to the path of the moon.

DNN-assisted colorization of images

There has been previous work on automatic colorization of images, a fairly impressive process that takes a black and white image and converts into a colour one. This uses DNN’s and their ability to guess at probable outcomes based on massive amounts of trained data. It’s pretty cool, but it can sometimes go wrong —…

Nokia 8 pictures, details leak… looks cheaper than the 6?

VentureBeat has a piece on the upcoming Nokia 8, HMD’s flagship entry. It lists the customary high-end specs expected; Snapdragon 835, 4gb RAM, 64GB flash, dual camera, and higher end version available for more moolah. The piece also cites an unnamed “Scandinavian Retailer”, the source of which appears to be an entry a few days…

The World May Be Headed for a Fragmented ‘Splinternet’

Davey Alba at Wired muses that we are headed towards a “splinternet”: an internet that is different depending on the country of origin. There are two unfortunate realities to this. First, this is already true, in his own acknowledgement. Second, it is inevitable. What’s worrying isn’t that there are different internets; it’s that there’s a max-censored one.

Spiderweb

Grey Failures and the Quest for More Monitoring

A recent paper from Microsoft Research, Azure and John Hopkins University discusses the issues of troubles of grey failures. This is a type of cloud failure under some discussion, that I treat as follows: A grey failure is a problem that is affecting one or more applications deployed on a platform, that is detectable by those…