‘Bash’ bug could let hackers attack through a light bulb – Sep. 24, 2014.
Stories like these should raise alarm bells about IOT security. On the other hand, being a CNN story, it is written to be sensational and is low on technical detail. So difficult to make a reasonable evaluation.
In any case every catastrophe has an opportunity hidden in it. If we assume that the Internet of Things wave is unstoppable (and you may not agree with me on this), then the great opportunity really is in giving people a secure IOT experience – that is, giving them most of the advantages of IOT but with enough safe guards so that blatant violations of privacy and security are not possible. This is a classic engineering challenge, to optimize something with constraint, and I am sure we are more than up to the task. It is certainly not reasonable to have a Luddite reaction and eschew all connected devices.
Cosmic map shows Milky Way at the edge of a supercluster.
Beautiful visualization. And a humbling reminder of our insignificant place in the scheme of things.
On the technical side, an interesting example of teasing out relevant trends from a big data corpus. The scientists measured the velocity of galaxies relative to us (probably by measuring their Doppler shifts), and also had an estimate of their distance (probably using known bench marks of luminosity – standard candles). Then they had to remove the effect of the background expansion of the universe which is quite strong and dominates the entire cosmos. Once that trend was removed what remained was the motion caused by the gravitation interaction of the galaxies. And then they used some standard concepts from dynamical systems theory (attractors, basin of attraction, flows) to defined what a galactic super cluster is. And in the process found that we are on the periphery of a large super-cluster.
Astrophysics and cosmology is in many ways the archetypal big data science – these guys were doing big data while we were still in kindergarten! The cataloging of starts, the discovery of CMBR, the discovery of cosmic expansion – all were the results of painstaking data analysis for teasing out trends from mountains of raw data.
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Anand's musings 