morsel ingests h264 & aac and produces fragmented mp4 files & playlists.
plainview reads the playlists and uses MSE in the browser to play them via the web
pupil is a WIP server that reads h264 & aac over TCP and passes that data to morsel, then uploads to any s3 compatible storage (AWS, Minio, etc)
It's bizarre how focused programmers are on syntax.
It seems like half the comments about Swift have been comparing it to languages which it superficially resembles at the syntax level. And the other half of the comments are along the lines of, "I can't stand Objective-C's brackets, this looks much better."
It's like that scene from The Matrix: "I don't even see the code. All I see is blonde, brunette, red-head." I'd have expected experienced programmers to have reached that point long ago.
Wadler's Law: "In any language design, the total time spent discussing a feature in this list is proportional to two raised to the power of its position:
Speaking of which, I was quite pleased to see the inclusion of nested comments. Makes getting rid of currently incorrect code during development much easier.
No different from learning a human language I think.
The first thing you're exposed to is its sounds and symbols.
They look & sound strange and your brain instinctively tries to make sense of them by comparing it to something you are already familiar with.
Then when you dig into it you begin learning vocabulary and grammar. You focus on that for a long time until the sounds sound less like gibberish and resemble something like what you've been practicing putting on paper.
Once you get comfortable with the constructs and stop focusing on them you can start conversing - putting more effort into what you're trying to say then how you would go about saying it.
After that then you can start picking up all the idioms, colloquialisms, cliches, double entendres, etc
Most of the commenting on a new language, particularly here (as opposed to on e.g. Lambda The Ultimate) is from people who aren't going to write a single line in it in anger; it's not surprising that idle commentary would focus on syntax. It's of a piece with all internet commentary, which rarely gets below the outermost layer of thinking about anything.
I've been seeing much the same from programmers invested in the Apple ecosystem who will likely be spending all day writing nothing but Swift within a year.
Definitely. I suppose it's understandable if this is your first exposure to type inference. Superficially it looks exactly like the "assign anything to anything" languages like Python or JavaScript.
Aditya, if you're reading this: the next time a TSA agent threatens to call the cops, let them. If you hadn't made any outbursts, you haven't broken any laws.
Plus they'd be calling REAL cops. Ones that have to enforce and abide by real laws or actually face consequences.
It's easy to opine about things like educating the public or engineering 'crypto' for the common man.
In my opinion that would be an exercise in futility.
I think a proper response to this issue is to simply promote social depravity on a grand scale.
Everybody should just constantly read/watch/listen to media involving things like methamphetamine manufacturing, nuclear & home made weapons/chemicals, illegal currencies, human trafficking, hardcore pornography, armed rebellions, the middle east, famous terrorists, serial killers, bon jovi, etc
All of those are a lot more interesting to the common man than lessons on how to use PGP....which is theoretically breakable thanks to the advent of quantum computing.
If everything is being sniffed and stored, there have to be a number of very specific topics that are being sought after in that data.....in my opinion it'd be far worse if the government wasn't searching for things like human trafficking and nuclear weapons (things, hopefully, we can all agree are not good).
Television series like "Breaking Bad" are already pulling weekly audience number of around 3 million plus. One could argue that you wouldn't even have to do much promotion, as these topics already seem to be mainstays in much present day pop culture
As much as I hate to disappoint everyone, chaffing with lots of keywords, made up searches, and arbitrary blocks of suggestive text will not trigger any kind of flag except "people trying (poorly) to chaff NSA".
The algorithms used for text mining are much more contextual and semantic than what would be fooled by the simple gags I commonly see on the Internet. Those gags might send a message of sorts but they don't make anyone's job more difficult. For a start, they know you are not a terrorist or whatever; nothing about your life as modeled across myriad data sources suggests that. Instead, you will be some random person pretending to stick it to The Man, which they don't care about and never lands in front of a person.
To chaff the state-of-the-art data mining would require some sophisticated computer science and sophisticated operations. You would (1) have to understand the state-of-the-art algorithms used and (2) devise a way to break those algorithms transparently. It is not a trivial task by any means even for someone that understands what is involved.
Superficial attempts to chaff surveillance systems might feel good but they won't accomplish much against a sophisticated adversary. The tech these days is much too good. Even leaving a minimal footprint for analysis is becoming nigh impossible.
What if I create a new hotmail account which I use exclusively for emailing a random address in Pakistan, and after a few months delete all of my Facebook/gmail accounts and go completely off the grid save for this one email account which I start accessing from internet cafes dotted around the country, where I also look up information on Arabic websites about fertiliser... would that get their attention?
That's what I was getting at with my "Breaking Bad" comment.
A sort of "total depravity" is already a big part of pop culture, so it'd be easy to ignore false positives of people crying wolf.
What I was getting at is that what they're looking for is kind of a big unknown. If media about illegal things is so popular and they ignore it, it leads one to think that data being mined is possibly being used in a fashion similar to a personal agenda.
That's what's truly dangerous about monitoring at this scale. It's not so much that it's happening it's that they're creating something that could grant someone almost god like powers.
If I were to make an analogy, I'd say it's like a man buying a pistol to protect his family and then his child finds it loaded in a night stand.
It's funny you should mention godlike powers. We're pretty fast reaching a point where an individual can have "god like" powers for not very much $$$. You could argue that the genie isn't out of the bottle yet, but I think the point is arguable. As reprehensible as this sounds, maybe it'll turn out that whoever did the 2000 Anthrax attacks did the human race a favor.
Emacs' M-x spook command will paste some suitable words into the current buffer:
Croatian nuclear FBI colonel plutonium Ortega Waco, Texas Panama CIA DES jihad
fissionable quiche terrorist World Trade Center assassination DES NORAD Delta
Force Waco, Texas SDI explosion Serbian Panama Uzi Ft. Meade SEAL Team 6
Honduras PLO NSA terrorist Ft. Meade strategic supercomputer $400 million in
gold bullion quiche Honduras BATF colonel Treasury domestic disruption SEAL
Team 6 class struggle smuggle [Hello to all my fans in domestic surveillance]
Business idea: A "chaff box" that can be sold to the public.
Given a list of dodgy search keywords, youtube links, etc etc etc, regularly updated from a central location (think like a websense blocklist but in reverse), uses a configurable amount of bandwidth. Hits these sites with a human-like usage pattern when HTTP traffic from your LAN IP is detected (so it only works when you're actually browsing the web).
Plug it in and gain plausible deniability from most forms of government shenaniganery. Given critical mass, makes most forms of government behavioral analysis (and possibly advertiser behavioral analysis) useless.
Build it on the raspberry pi or similar platform. Materials cost is $35 plus shipping materials. Main time investment is limited to maintaining the blocklist and the central servers.
Hmm. Wonder how this could sell to the soccer mom crowd...
Would also raise some interesting and thorny questions for the server side. If enough people are using the box for the effect to be meaningful, then a lot of sites are going to have a lot of useless web traffic; yet allowing sites to "opt out" or having an identifier of some kind of the box's traffic completely defeats the purpose of the system.
There's a story by Cory Doctorow, in which terrorists blow up Bay Bridge and the US establish a surveillance state in the wake of those events. In response, the protagonist creates a distributed system using Xboxes that pretty much works like the way you're suggesting.
I'll admit I don't know all that much about machine learning and statistics, but it seems like it would be pretty hard to simulate human activity in a way that was really indistinguishable (highly sporadic, with trends of connected ideas, for a start). More immediately, most people are never going to get on board with making it look like they're into "bad stuff". It's icky, and they don't think they have that much to lose.
This is an interesting idea. However, for a noise box to be effective requires that a significant number of people are also using a noise box, which assures plausible deniability the same way TOR and shared-IP VPNs do.
If you're the only one using a noise box, or are part of a very small minority of users that do, the random noise you generate is just increasing your attack surface through which the government can more easily target and identify you.
Forget the box, you just need a web browser plugin. It could sit in the background. It could have two lists (updated occasionally like spamblockers do it), one of search engines and one of spook-luring phrases. Every, say rand(1..10) minutes, it could make a few connected queries from list B to some engine in list A. Visit a link or two from the gotten page. Stop after say rand(1..10) queries total on that theme. Throw everything away and go back to sleep.
If a million people installed this plugin, that would avg 5 queries every 5 minutes, that would be avg 1.4e9 queries per day, a tiny fraction of the intertubes.
edit: but, apology to parent, you'd never sell a browser plugin...
If it's from a central location and all clients are working off the same database, it seems like it would be fairly simple for their data mining teams to sift out the identical chaff.
In theory, couldn't an interested party filter out the blocklist from the all other traffic? It would be more interesting to have a dynamic list that gets updated based on actual user behavior. That way, the interested party wouldn't be able to filter out the blocklist without potentially filtering out actual traffic. This of course would create all kinds of legal issues.
In theory yes, but everything hinges on the "given critical mass" thing - once a large amount of the sites the government would look askance at you for visiting are on the chaffbox's list and thefore being browsed by a large amount of people, it serves to protect someone who wants to view one of these sites legitimately.
A dynamic list would be better,granted, but a much harder nut to crack.
> PGP....which is theoretically breakable thanks to the advent of quantum computing.
This is a minor quibble with your overall point, but what I've quoted is wrong. The underlying encryption algorithms for modern PGP implementations are breakable with Shor's algorithm on a quantum computer, but not all encryption algorithms are vulnerable and a PGP implementation in the future could use such an algorithm as default instead. (For instance, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McEliece_cryptosystem)
I suspect that an organization with the computational resources and mathematical clout of the NSA are going to have little trouble distinguishing between people clicking around on "J0llY R0g3rs Gu1d3 to NUKELERA WEPONS" and people creating specific, repeated trails to suspicious resources.
The idea, if nothing else, is that such an analysis is possible it is also expensive enough to make it hard to do for everyone at once. If everyone superficially appears to be searching for verboten stuff, then their job becomes harder than just "carefully investigate whoever is hitting naughty keywords".
