Short-form content, links, miscellaneous item stream.
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 —…
Motherboard recently ran an article discussing how lobbyists for telecom companies were arguing that the vulnerabilities in their networks due to the aging SS7 protocol weren’t that bad. Well, spoiler alert, they are that bad. The (overly) simplified statement is, anyone with access to the SS7 network can redirect any telephone number, practically anywhere in the…
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 unfortunately beleaguered headset maker Facebook Oculus made the news at Bloomberg for a rumoured wireless headset that, according to the outlet, would define a “new class” of VR headsets that is neither a phone nor just a PC display. Unfortunately, while it may indeed serve to advance the VR space, it’s neither first nor…
Thanks to the Nokia 6, I am now in possession of a Google Assistant phone. This gave me the perfect foil against the upcoming Cortana and Siri speakers: if you have an assistant with a screen, how different are the answers to one without, even though it’s the “same” assistant? I expected that the audio…
When running TensorFlow using the official binaries, something that will happen more often now that macOS builds no longer support GPU off the bat, is the recurring and annoying warning that it could be running faster if it were only compiled with some more CPU flags. This seems ominous — keeping track of all the…
IBM’s Watson Speech-to-Text comes with a built-in profanity filter. Unfortunately, Dick Van Dyke, a name that is the bane of profanity filters everywhere, apparently, has ended up on the wrong side of the censoring wall once more.
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.
CoreOS recently commissioned a study to show the usage of containers in the clouds where they discuss how many enterprises are using Kubernetes, and how this is spearheading a move to hybrid clouds. Interesting, I thought, and take a look.
Yesterday’s entry on Google Home has been viewed over 10,000 times at the time of writing. The data collection, however, took much longer than that. I’ve been collecting it over the past week, including several redrafts of the questions themselves. Some of the comments I’ve seen since allude to people receiving different answers. I was…