Things I read this week
I feel like this week, I mostly focused on reading my book rather than articles. Will probably need to do a write-up on the book at some point but I'm currently reading Not with a Bug, But with a Sticker: Attacks on Machine Learning Systems and What to Do about Them by Hyrum Anderson and Ram Shankar Siva Kumar. 10/10 recommend book -- incredibly engaging but still technical. It details the current state of Cybersecurity in A.I., how we got here, and what we can do about it. Here's a smattering of the articles that I read through this week:
Driver adventures for a 1999 webcam
Link: https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/quickcam-usb-userspace-driver/
This one was super fun, bringing an old webcam back to life that doesn't have modern day drivers. Maybe a future side project?
The Modern World Is Aging Your Brain
Link: https://www.wired.com/story/aging-brain-volume/
I feel like I've been coming across more and more health articles like this -- I don't know if that's because of the spaces that I am online or if it's just more popular to do this type of study. At any rate -- really interesting study comparing a South American tribe's brain makeup in old age against folks who live in urban areas. Worth a read!
Thales seizes control of ESA demonstration satellite in first cybersecurity exercise of its kind
Now this was fun! Taking over a satellite network and editing the images live, intercepting data being transmitted back to Earth, and more! I actually once wrote a paper for a scholarship about the importance of satellite security in modern techology (got the scholarship). Would love to do this kind of work some day!
TikTok spied on me. Why?
Link: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/05/tiktok-spied-on-me-why/
Interesting article and not just because TikTok has been in the news so much lately. I think this honestly speaks to the dangers of using such huge services like major social media apps -- not just for your mental health but also because you don't control that data anymore. You're not just consuming data from the platform but the platform is logging everything that you do while on the site and, most times, while you're not on it as well.
The Ice Cream Wars
Link: https://jamesbreakwell.substack.com/p/the-wayward-teen
While I definitely read a lot of technical things, I try to break it up a lot too. Exploding Unicorn is the perfect breath of fresh air sometimes -- just a slice of life substack about so many random things. This one is about being a parent, getting older, and ice cream -- really worth your time.
WHO launches global network to detect infectious disease threat
Pretty short article but a big step forward for tracking infectious diseases! I know that WHO (or maybe it was CDC?) already does a lot of surveillance when it comes to this but I'm honestly surprised a network wasn't set up for this already?
And I guess that's it for this week -- like I said, been reading my book more often than reading articles. I've got a couple of forthcoming ones that I just need to get down on paper; my CKA experience, setting up a trino cluster at home and migrating my feeds to a postgres backend, more database based (heh) articles, and a forthcoming project for a trino plugin I'm working on. See you then!