Where are we?

It’s been ten days since the internet experienced its first massive protest against SOPA and PIPA. A protest, that all major internet sites took part, either by going black (e.g. Wikipedia), either by informing the masses about what is about to happen (e.g. Google). This succeeded in blocking, at least for now, SOPA and PIPA.

The next day, FBI took down MegaUpload, the biggest file sharing site, arresting the people running the site. A move, whose timing was seen by many as a response to the protest for SOPA and PIPA. See what a Harvard professor has to say about that:

And now it’s time to fight against ACTA.

What is ACTA?

Two days ago, in Tokyo, 22 member states of the EU (UK, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxemburg, Malta, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia, Spain and Sweden), signed in Tokyo the international treaty known as ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement). Five more members of the EU (Cyprus, Germany, Estonia Netherlands and Slovakia) are expected to sign up soon. Don’t think that this is just an EU matter, Australia, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore and the US have already signed ACTA.

The EU ACTA chief has resigned, saying:

“This agreement might have major consequences on citizens’ lives, and still, everything is being done to prevent the European Parliament from having its say in this matter. That is why today, as I release this report for which I was in charge, I want to send a strong signal and alert the public opinion about this unacceptable situation. I will not take part in this masquerade.”

The times they are a changing

Yesteday twitter announced that tweets could be censored based on local laws. Giving a very convincing paradigm:

“for historical or cultural reasons, restrict certain types of content, such as France or Germany, which ban pro-Nazi content.”

Just imagine the importance of this medium in the uprising in Egyptm and other similar cases, and what would have happened if that “censor by country” policy existed by that time.

My greatest fear is that the internet as we know it will stop existing. It’s gone too far as the only trully global free medium and now it’s time to stop. However, it’s the only time that the geeks can (and will) prevent it. The internet can and should stay free. And when all these protests fail, or just similar treaties finally pass in the name of prevention of child pornography or terrorism, we should fix the internet. Copying from a comment I found on reddit:

“The entertainment industry has finally caught up with technology. They understand how it works. It took them 15 years, but they know what DNS is. They are going to exploit a fundamental problem with the way DNS is centralized and there is nothing that can be done to stop it. They have found an error in the very architecture of the Internet. The solution, from a free speech standpoint is not to fight it politically. The solution is the fix the error.”

“We must move to a decentralized system of DNS. It is not impossible. It requires some new thinking and a re-architecture of some web services, but it must be done if we want the Internet, as we know it today, to exist in 5 or 10 years.”

Moving my installation away from a hosting plan to a VPS was the reason to mess around with Wordpress’ files permissions. What really bugged me was the fact that the auto update was not working, it was asking for FTP connection details.

The problem was caused because the web server user has no permissions on your wordpress installation dir. First, find the web server user, assuming you use apache2:

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root@yourdomain:~# ps aux | grep 'apache2'

in my case the web server’s username is www-data, but other usernames exist (e.g. nobody). 

Check the ownership of your wordpress dir directory:

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root@yourdomain:~# ls -l wordpress_dir/

and add the web server user’s owneship to that directory:

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root@yourdomain:~# chown -R www-data wordpress_dir/

Now, your auto update should be working.

“Psychohistory is a fictional science in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation universe which combines history, sociology, and mathematical statistics to make general predictions about the future behavior of very large groups of people”

This is the definition of psychohistory, according to Wikipedia. The two fundamental axioms are:

• the number of people to whom it was being applied should be large enough for a statistical treatment of them to be valid.

• humanity should not know the results of the application of psychohistory before the results were achieved

Nowadays, big data provided from the internet (searches, tweets, facebook updates, financial markets, blog posts) enable us to predict with high probability when and where a political/financial crisis or revolution will emerge.

Uprisings lately are organised almost solely via what we call “social media”. Some examples: Iran, Greece, Arab spring, UK riots. People cheer that they are now free. Internet has given them the tools to free themselves from the “controlled” traditional media. I believe exactly the opposite. You really believe that this enormous amount of data and of all of these paradigms is left alone on the internet to be forgotten? Now, everyone who wants to know, has the ability to know. Not only what happened but most importantly what will happen.

First things first: the fight for privacy over the internet is over. Additionally, no one cares about you as an individual and it’s high time you realised that. It’s time to start concerning on how all this amount of data will be used. Personalised ads, personalised searches and recommendation systems are part of our ordinary life. What will be next?

Personally, I’m pessimistic towards which direction it will be used and with what intensions. One extreme example is the “pre-crime detection” (cc Minority Report by Philip K. Dick) system called FAST (Future Attribute Screening Technology) that is being developed by U.S. Department of Homeland Security which will use data mining algorithms taking into account attributes like ethnicity, gender, breathing, and heart rate to “detect cues indicative of mal-intent”.

Soon enough, the next thing you’ll find yourself fighting for, will be your genomic sequence.

Seven billion, a special year-long series from National Geographic, will cover several issues related with global population that in 2011 will surpass 7 billion. An infographic about where and how we live is already available. Although the accuracy and the data labelling aren’t the best possible I find this map rather interesting.

An article, published some days ago in Businessweek, by Ashlee Vance, is trying to describe in simple words some of the uses of data mining. With some examples that catch the eye, such that of predicting a crime based on a certain behaviour (Minority Report reference) or customer analytics (market- basket analysis) that Wal-Mart and other stores use, the story of the creation of Hadoop in 2006 and how companies took advantage of this technology.

Now a second wave of startups is finding ways to use cheap but powerful servers to analyze new categories of data such as blog posts, videos, photos, tweets, DNA sequences, and medical images. “The old days were about asking, ‘What is the biggest, smallest, and average?’ ” says Michael Olson, CEO of startup Cloudera. “Today it’s, ‘What do you like? Who do you know?’ It’s answering these complex questions.”

Most of what you’d like to say to your friends about data mining but you couldn’t find the correct sequence of words to do so.

[Data Analytics: Crunching the Future]

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The 17th KDD (Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining) conference by ACM, took place in San Diego earlier this week. And what a few decades ago would seem like something that scientists should care about, data mining today plays a crucial role in practically everything, from computing to biology and natural sciences to sales companies.

“Businesses and industry are increasingly interested in leveraging the data they capture through business processes,” says Chid Apte, director of analytics research at IBM and chair of the conference. In particular, he points to health care, social media, and anything that takes place on the Web.

Wherever data can be found in large amounts data mining is essential. But data isn’t always in a nice organised form, for example the web isn’t in that form either (will it ever be?), which makes things more complicated.

Today’s data, however, doesn’t take the familiar form of the database. “The information’s not coming at you in a clean tabular form,” Apte says. “It’s coming at you in a network form.” Often it arrives in a graph, he explains—such as those used by social media. These graphs often record not only the complex connections between nodes but also other types of information in a diversity of formats, such as the videos, images, and comments that people post on social networks.

[Technology review]

At the same time, IBM builds the biggest data drive ever: 120 petabytes. Can you imagine how big this is? And think about it, in 5 years time it won’t look that big at all.

120 petabytes of storage is an insane amount, eight times larger than the 15 PB arrays already out there, and they already had to deal with address space issues. In IBM’s huge array, tracking the location and calling data for its files takes up fully 2 PB of its own space. You’d need a next-generation file index just to index the index!

[Techcrunch]

Especially with the growth of the internet, where the information exchange became so easy, fast and universal, and for the days to come, data mining will be the central point (and I hope not a bottleneck) in any aspect of man’s progress where information will be on top of knowledge.

storage-array/

An interactive visualisation by the Guardian, using areas as keywords on twitter, while riot events were taking place.

(riots-twitter)

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From founding Apple in 1976 and releasing “Apple II” computing, to the iPad and his resignation as CEO from the most valuable company in the world in 2011. Either you like it or not, Steve Jobs shaped computing as we know it today like no one else did. He offered us the PC, the iPod defining the portable mp3s, iPhone which changed mobiles forever after its release, and lately the tablet PC, iPad which is changing the way we use computers.

Here is a video about Steve and his achievements:

I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come.

[Steve’s letter]

(steve’s letter)

Recently, the announcement for a free online course in AI from Stanford received more than (last estimate) 85,000 student sign-ups and high media coverage and I can see three reasons for that. Firstly because of the topic, AI sounds futuristic. Secondly, because of the professors teaching it, Peter Norvig & Sebastian Thurn who are leading men in the field and lastly, because it’s a first experiment if a class experience can be brought to the web. And for this last reason we will argue in this post.

The difference for that particular class is that it is closer to a class in the old-fashioned way, taken online: it consists of two online lectures a week, digital discussions and a weekly piece of homework that must be completed in order for all online students to pass and at the end you receive a ”statement of accomplishment” that will include information on how well a student did in the course. Stanford Engineering already offers 13 courses for free (you can download the teaching material), MIT since 2007 with OpenCourseWare aims at putting all of its educational materials online for free and many more institutions have gone that way.

Today, with top universities in the US requiring extremely high tuition fees and UK tripling its tuition fees (£9000/year for undergraduate studies), the question arising is whether the internet can be the medium for university- level education in the (near) future, for free. As Thurn told the Times “The vision is: Change the world by bringing education to places that can’t be reached today”. And I totally agree with Thurn, it is wonderful to aim for free universal education to everyone, and internet is the only way to achieve it.

However, there are a few assets that I cannot see how they can be taken into the web. The most important, from a student point of  view, is how the environment a university offers can be replaced . There is a study group formed for ai-class on reddit, but is this enough for a university class? Can the interaction between students be limited to an internet forum? Can a conversation with a professor after a lecture be replaced in any way? I can see how an online lecture can help, I’m watching many myself, but only for 101 courses, what about more advanced, graduate topics?

And let’s also think about universities apart from their educational mission, as research institutions, where student’s tuition fees is the main source of their revenue. Will research be their sole purpose in the future, depending only in external funding?

In my opinion, this is a good initiative to bring knowledge to everyone. However, for the reasons stated above and additionally because people - both students and employers - will always seek for a quality stamp, the certificate that an institution offers, makes it difficult to transfer the existing education system to the web. Nevertheless, I can see these problems been tackled in the next few years in one way or another but other problems arising: if you can get a free course from top professors in a field why bother doing anything less than that? Will the education get centralized when the opposite is the goal? The future will tell.

[photo via nytimes]

IBM alongside with four universities (Cornell, Columbia, Merced, Madison) and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency have created, and will unveil today, an experimental chip that is based in human brain’s architecture.

IBM’s so-called cognitive computing chips could one day simulate and emulate the brain’s ability to sense, perceive, interact and recognize — all tasks that humans can currently do much better than computers can.

“This is the seed for a new generation of computers, using a combination of supercomputing, neuroscience, and nanotechnology,” Modha (principal investigator of the DARPA project, called Synapse) said in an interview with VentureBeat. ”The computers we have today are more like calculators. We want to make something like the brain. It is a sharp departure from the past.”

[VentureBeat]

This semiconductor is modeled completely different from the Von Neumann architecture , where memory and processor are linked via bus  - a bottleneck (Von Neumann bottleneck) on the amount of data transfered, in numerous ways. It is based on tracking relationships between events and in a sense have it’s own cognition: learn  and improve through experience, use feedback loops to learn from the outcome, generalize and create hypotheses.

“The goal is not to replace today’s computers. It’s to really take the road less traveled and build new generation of computers with a totally new approach to problems in business and science and government,” Modha says. “If today’s computers are left brained, rational and sequential then cognitive computing is intuitive and right-brained and slow, but the two together can become the future of our civilization’s computing stack.”

more: [GigaOM], [Kurzweil]