Stanford's Online AI-Class; First Impressions

Monday, October 10th marked the start of ai-class.com.  A novel experiment by Stanford, this free online course attempts to teach over 150,000 people about artificial intelligence through a series of videos and quizzes.  At first I was skeptical, as I watch tons of great videos for the purpose of learning everyday, but to convey an entire college course through YouTube videos is a different story.  Although admittedly, I was presently suppressed with the first lesson.  It consisted of 13 videos ranging from 30seconds to 9minutes, each ending with a one question quiz, and the next video typically starting with the answer.  I thought the lessons were absolutely fabulous, moving slow with illustrations and step by step explanations.  If one needed extra help understanding a topic, all you have to do is use Google or Wikipedia and you are almost instantly caught up again.  My only complaint with the class thus far has been with the ability of their servers to handle the students.  Too often when I go to visit the page is it unavailable due to the sheer about of connections and work put upon their servers.  They have also been patching and updating their hardware, but this is almost an effort too late, as the classes have already started.  One has to try several times to make a successful connection to the website, and even then it is not parented you will complete your lesson.  Overall, it's a great course, although it defiantly was under prepared with handling the influx of students it received, something I thought Stanford would have anticipated and solved (they knew how many students registered before hand, they should have stress tested their servers prior to launch).  Hopefully it improves, I will be updating you in the future, but in the mean time feel free to discus the course in the comments.

Here is the beginning of Unit 2. If you aren't registered you can follow along on YouTube!

Free Learning Online!

Recently, I have found a number of amazing resources for learning online.  Academic Earth, is a fantastic website that gives awesome speech from renowned professors all over the world.  AE offers courses on all subjects in easy to digest videos, making it easy to watch, learn, and understand.  Stanford's Engineering Everywhere is also offering top notch courses in computer science and mathematics. I have personally enrolled in the AI courses, and am excited to begin watching the videos and then attempting some assignments.  You can also find a very eclectic collection of subjects and schools over at LifeHacker's Technophilia, which has everything from history to foreign languages. If video's aren't your thing, you can always check out Wikiversity, which is Wikipedia's take on open source education.  Although, Wikiversity may not have the depth of Standford's courses it certainly has the breadth, offering courses from gastronomy all the way to oncology.  But going back to the computer subjects, if you want to learn how to program there is no better place than Google Code University.  At GCU, you can learn C++, Java, Javascript, and Python!  All great languages which can help teach the concepts of computer science, such as object oriented, abstraction, and design styles.  They offer also courses on computer security, but if you really want to learn information security, I suggest the best: SecurityTube.  SecurityTube offers the best videos and lectures from professionals in the hacker field and at security conferences.  SecurityTube also offers certifications as well, so you can actually get something to show from all this e-learning.  Until next time Internet, educate yourself! We have a long, hard road ahead of us, and I want everyone on the top of their game!  We must all be well educated and critical of our world if we hope to survive and continue bettering our situation.

Watch it on Academic Earth

Threats to Grass Roots Reporting: Astroturfing and Plagiarism

One of the greatest threats to any grass roots system is the falsification of perspective.  This means falsifying the authenticity, integrity, or credibility of a news-article, blog-post, or even status-update.  Many examples of this exist on The Internet, which shatter the fundamental ethics of journalism, such as truthfulness, objectivity, and accuracy.  I am speaking of plagiarism and astroturfing, which both drastically threaten independent news and blogging.  Plagiarism involves an individual copying a greater[or any] work, with the intent of deceiving readers into believing it is an original work of their own;  whereas astroturfing is a larger entity posing as individual perspectives, with the intent of deceiving readers into believing these are stand alone entities. Both jeopardize legitimate blogging, press, and personal value.  As defenders of grass roots, decentralized technologies, and individual rights we must call out these impostors and fakes whenever possible!

Astroturfing largely damages the value of true public opinion as it bolsters biased perspectives through falsifying grass root claims.  A great example of this is The News Hawks Review, a fake news web site that is paid to wright positive reviews of topics.  The LA times even called out a public water service for paying the Hawks Review for SEO (search engine optimization).  This is a disgusting act, as it attributes fake accolades to the public service as well as profit from reporting biased news.  As news reporters and defenders of the net, we must all call out such atrocities in public forum, such as Internet defender Michelle Marie did.

Plagiarism also destroys the value of independent news and blogs. Take for example this man, Mukesh Saini, a self asserted security professional, who had been plagiarizing and disseminating "his" writings around private security groups. The blog, security-of-cyberspace, mysteriously started up on September 7th and had since then published 54 professional articles in less than 10 day.  Many of the posts on this blog heavily plagiarized entire articles without giving credit to the original sources. He has since gone back and linked each article and given credit to each individual writer, after I had called him out in a closed professional forum.  This is exactly what we must do as a society in this age of over-information, call out the fakes! We must deroot these phony actors, and have them give real credit where it is due.

A Decentralized Solution to Certificate Authorities: Moxie Marlinspike's Convegence.io

By now, I hope most people understand that certificate authorities are not invulnerable to hacks, and putting full trust in any single source is just poor faith.  This point is only amplified when we invest full trust in multiple stand-alone authorities, such as the situation we have today. If any single one of our trusted authorities fails,then we the end users are left vulnerable. Moxie Marlinspike sums the whole situation up rather nicely in this video:

At the end of the video, Moxie announces Convergence.  Converge is a new FireFox add-on, that runs in the background, and verifies the CA's result through multiple physical channels.  This provides a decentralized perspective to aid in authentication confirmation.   Convergence was built on a white-paper entitled, Perspectives.  His solution at convergence.io also takes care of several information leaks that existed in the original Perspectives implementation.  I highly suggest user's instal this FireFox add-on!  It has several verification options which provides a huge amount trust agility, allowing user's to set their level of paranoia.  It still has some problems, but Moxie is also accepting code reviews and donations.  The point is: We need more technologies like Convergence, which harness the decentralized strength of the Internet, and protect all individual users!

Americans Elect 2012

www.AmericansElect.org could change the way we vote in America. This novel concept asks the Internet, what are the issues you care about? It allows nominations of any applicable person to the ballet of President of the United States. The person with the most votes will be featured on ballots across America, as an actual candidate for presidency. This gives the people the power to disrupt to the two party system, and potentially set a new precedent in voting. I urge you to check out the website, and give change a chance.

Amazing Open Source Tools

Ever need free solutions to the many problems of computing? Or how about free software that can compete with those expensive corporate versions? Welcome to The Internet, where like minded individuals noticed such a need, and developed tools for the good of humanity and advancement in general. These are known as open source projects, and are completely free to use, distribute, and modify. For starters, there is the wiki of open source, which provides amazing projects for math, finance, speech, data Storage, networking, and even file servers. But the real gold mine of open source is OSINT, or Open Source Intelligence, which can help you locate valuable resources all over the web. But if you only ever try one open source program, it has to be TrueCrypt, the industry standard on freely available encryption. TrueCrypt can encrypt virtual files, hard disk partitions, entire devices, and even allows for real-time encryption of communications. And who said nothing is free nowadays?

Keep The Internet Decentrelized

The State of The Internet

The State of The Internet has tons of amazing infographs that really applied the data to physical locations for me. For example,"While 71% of the people in developed countries are online, only 21% of those in developing countries have access so far. In spite of such regional disparities, the Internet continues to become faster and more affordable overall. As the number of users increases, so does the sheer amount of money, information and opinions exchanged online. When it comes to the Internet's future, most specialists are optimistic: 64% of them believe the flow of information online will remain mostly free rather than falling under the control of powerful institutions and 81% believe the Internet will enhance human intelligence."
The State of The Internet has also provided me with other interesting facts, such as the locations of 3 major Internet backbones: DE-CIX The Deutscher Commercial Internet Exchange in Frankfurt, TAT-14 an underwater cable connecting New Jersey and much of Europe, and the VSNL Tata Communications Limited in Mumbai. These Internet backbones are critical to infrastructure, for example, ex-president Mubarak leveraged a backbone in Egypt to cut off Internet to the entire country. Speaking of which, The State of The Internet also has a nice infograph showing which countries censor their citizens Internet access (China is excluded for some reason). For example, both Saudi Arabia and Burma heavily censor their sites, only allowing traffic for government approvied sites, which greatly hurts the global economy. Other places like Syria, totally shut down access to the web in a blatant violation to human rights. This is where I'm concerned. As a whole, as one Internet, we need make the world aware of these censorship actions. The State of The Internet is doing it's part, what are you doing to spread awareness and fight censorship?

Internet Access Is a Human Right

Friday June 3rd, 2011, The United Nations declared that preventing people from connecting to the Internet is a violation of human rights and against international law. The act was initially in response to France and The United Kingdom who were shutting down Internet access over copyright disputes. Although this act does much more for civil rights, and easily extends to dictators who try to put information blockades on their own people.

"While blocking and filtering measures deny users access to specific content on the Internet, states have also taken measures to cut off access to the Internet entirely. The Special Rapporteur considers cutting off users from internet access, regardless of the justification provided, including on the grounds of violating intellectual property rights law, to be disproportionate and thus a violation of article 19, paragraph 3, of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights."

Stop Internet Censorship: Stop "Protect IP Bill"

Despite it's name, The Protect IP Bill, is a dangerous legislation that would give government the power to censor and block web sites it deemed 'controversial'. The bill has mad massive reworkings since it's inception as COICA, but still remains as maleficent and blatant censorship. It has had numerous opponents: Google stood up against the bill, Senator Ron Wyden saw through it, Anonymous attacked it, and recently, over 90 professors of law at major universities signed AGAINST this bill. So why is this bill so evil? The Protect IP Bill would force Internet providers, search engines, and credit card companies actively cut service to any party the government decided to black list. Freedom of information is important, and people are actively trying to encroach on our freedoms all the time. We all have to take a stand, before our freedoms are taken from us. The best way to fight censorship is simple: spread awareness!

Originally posted on Lockboxx.

Bitcoin

Bitcoin is a revolutionary form of digital currency, invented by Satoshi Nakamoto. Bitcoin, or BTC, is genius in it's design, due to it's grass-roots distribution style, as well as it's advanced application of cryptography techniques. This mathematical backing and lack of central control makes the Bitcoin market a very fair playing field, and thus very attractive.

The official website: http://bitcoin.org/

"Governments are good at cutting off the heads of a centrally
controlled networks like Napster, but pure P2P networks
like Gnutella and Tor seem to be holding their own.."
--Satoshi Nakamoto

Bitcoin is the future.

Independent Cyber News

With all the news media recently about hacking, and so many different perspectives floating around, I thought it was extremely important to get a professional, independent perspective. Freedom of information is a valuable concept, and can only truly come about when grass-roots individuals, who are unswayed by political or corporate agenda, give honest opinions and research. Blogging is a fantastic channel for this, as anyone can create an account and publish their works instantly. Unfortunately, this creates the problem of telling the quality works apart from "run-of-the-mill reporting", which is where search engine optimization comes in. These 'stand alone' blogs don't get the same indexing as blogs with corporate backings, or hack news sights that irresponsibly chase the latest release. No, these quality works must be sought after if you want to attain the real story. Thats where I come in. I believe the independent thinkers of our day should have an equal voice, not drowned out by the major news organizations. Here I attempt to bring a digest of well researched information, that links to other independent research across the web. Freedom of information needs a pure future, without the corruption and political sway of major governments. Help support the cause by spreading the word, following the blog, and learning every day.

Originally, posted on Lockboxx.

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A place for philosophical minds to express the impact of current technology on human relationships. A place to connect curious minds with new ideas, groups, and ways of life.