Bufferbloat is the undesirable latency that comes from a router or other network equipment buffering too much data.

The Bufferbloat projects provide a webspace for addressing chaotic and laggy network performance. We have a number of projects in flight:

The Request to FCC for Saner Software Policies is a response to Docket ET 15-170 which appears to require vendors to lock down the software in Wi-Fi routers, prohibiting experimentation and field testing of new techniques. Read the Press Release and our Letter to the FCC

The Bufferbloat project has largely addressed latency associated with too much buffering in routers. The CoDel and fq_codel algorithms are the first fundamental advance in the state of the art of network Active Queue Management in many, many years. These algorithms have been deployed in millions of computers, and reduce the induced delay from competing traffic on a bottleneck link to the order of 20 msec.

The Make-Wi-Fi-Fast project, with many of the same team members as the Bufferbloat project, intends to improve Wi-Fi’s speed and use of the spectrum by inserting CoDel/fq_codel into the Wi-Fi queues, and actively measuring the power required for successful transmission, in order to minimize contention and interference on the RF channel.

Source: Bufferbloat.net – Bufferbloat.net

These guys have had a poke around some publically available firmwares and describe how it works

Source: IOActive Labs Research: In Flight Hacking System

“Everything” is search engine that locates files and folders by filename instantly for Windows.Unlike Windows search “Everything” initially displays every file and folder on your computer (hence the name “Everything”).You type in a search filter to limit what files and folders are displayed.

Source: Everything

For almost five months—possibly longer—the Spotify music streaming app has been assaulting users’ storage devices with enough data to potentially take years off their expected lifespans. Reports of tens or in some cases hundreds of gigabytes being written in an hour aren’t uncommon, and occasionally the recorded amounts are measured in terabytes. The overload happens even when Spotify is idle and isn’t storing any songs locally.

The behavior poses an unnecessary burden on users’ storage devices, particularly solid state drives, which come with a finite amount of write capacity. Continuously writing hundreds of gigabytes of needless data to a drive every day for months or years on end has the potential to cause an SSD to die years earlier than it otherwise would. And yet, Spotify apps for Windows, Mac, and Linux have engaged in this data assault since at least the middle of June, when multiple users reported the problem in the company’s official support forum.

“This is a *major* bug that currently affects thousands of users,” Spotify user Paul Miller told Ars. “If for example, Castrol Oil lowered your engine’s life expectancy by five to 10 years, I imagine most users would want to know, and that fact *should* be reported on.”

Three Ars reporters who ran Spotify on Macs and PCs had no trouble reproducing the problem reported, not only in the above-mentioned Spotify forum but also on Reddit, Hacker News, and elsewhere. Typically, the app wrote from 5 to 10 GB of data in less than an hour on Ars reporters’ machines, even when the app was idle. Leaving Spotify running for periods longer than a day resulted in amounts as high as 700 GB.

Source: Spotify is writing massive amounts of junk data to storage drives

That’s incredibly poor design!

Traditional approaches separated the problem into two stages: designing or learning visual features, and prediction. More recent deep lipreading approaches are end-to-end trainable (Wand et al., 2016; Chung & Zisserman, 2016a). All existing works, however, perform only word classification, not sentence-level sequence prediction. Studies have shown that human lipreading performance increases for longer words (Easton & Basala, 1982), indicating the importance of features capturing temporal context in an ambiguous communication channel. Motivated by this observation, we present LipNet, a model that maps a variable-length sequence of video frames to text, making use of spatiotemporal convolutions, an LSTM recurrent network, and the connectionist temporal classification loss, trained entirely end-to-end.
[…]
LipNet achieves 93.4% accuracy, outperforming experienced human lipreaders and the previous 79.6% state-of-the-art accuracy

Source: [1611.01599] LipNet: Sentence-level Lipreading

fuzzing involves sending random data at a piece of software to crash it and capturing the conditions at the time of the crash.
[…]
libFuzzer attacked individual components of Chrome, sending the random data directly to the API. It’s a coverage-guided fuzzer, meaning it measures “code coverage for every input, and accumulate test cases that increase overall coverage”.

Guided coverage is also what Mountain View wants to offer for the world of open source software.

Described as in an “early stage”, the authors say their current focus is on libFuzzer, with documentation teaching users how to:

Add fuzzing to an open source project:
How to build and run fuzzers into a target source code repo; and
Build and run external fuzzers.

Source: Google offers baseball bat and some chains with which to hit open source software

You used to be able to use synergy, but that has become non-free.

Now you have the following two free alternatives:

Input Director enables the control of multiple Windows systems using the keyboard/mouse attached to one computer
Switch control between systems either by hotkey or by moving the cursor off the screen edge on one computer for it to appear on the next one
Input Director supports a shared clipboard – copy on one computer, switch control, and paste

Input Director is compatible with Windows 10, Windows 8/8.1, Windows 7, Windows 2008, Windows Vista, Windows 2003 and Windows XP(SP2). The systems must be networked.

Input Director

it allows you to reach across your PC’s as if they were part of one single desktop… I can move files between the 2 computers simply by dragging them from one desktop to another. In fact you can control up to four computers from a single mouse and keyboard with no extra hardware needed

Mouse without Borders

The myvirtucalcloud.net VDI Calculator has been used by thousands of users over the years to size VDI deployments using tradicional and hyper-converged infrastructures

Source: GitHub – aleibovici/vdicalc

In a test lasting until December this year, KLM will be using an AI to answer questions from a pool of 60000 responses in the database. It will learn from user responses to these questions. Currently KLM is answering 100000 user queries per week on social media, so this must make a huge saving!

Source: KLM zet kunstmatige intelligentie in op social media – Emerce

Free vector graphics editor. A simple yet powerful web and desktop cross-platform tool for everyone.

Source: Vectr – Free Online Vector Graphics Editor

You don’t have to use the online version, you can also download the offline client.

Across the nation, and also on Twitter, Lexus owners say the navigation systems in their luxury cars suddenly stopped working today for some as-of-yet unknown reason.

Source: Lexus Owners Experiencing A Nationwide Blackout Of Nav Systems

It seems a software update was the cause – QA testing fail!

WebGazer.js is an eye tracking library that uses common webcams to infer the eye-gaze locations of web visitors on a page in real time. The eye tracking model it contains self-calibrates by watching web visitors interact with the web page and trains a mapping between the features of the eye and positions on the screen. WebGazer.js is written entirely in JavaScript and with only a few lines of code can be integrated in any website that wishes to better understand their visitors and transform their user experience. WebGazer.js runs entirely in the client browser, so no video data needs to be sent to a server. WebGazer.js runs only if the user consents in giving access to their webcam.

Source: WebGazer.js: Democratizing Webcam Eye Tracking on the Browser

Redmond assumes closing nagware dialog means ‘yes’, says that’s by design […] Redmond recently created a new Windows 10 nagware reminder that presented a dialog asking you to install the OS. But if users clicked the red “X” to close the dialog – standard behaviour for dispelling a dialog without agreeing to do anything – Microsoft took that as permission for the upgrade.

Source: Microsoft won’t back down from Windows 10 nagware ‘trick’

Fuckers, we don’t want your Windows 10 spyware!

Get it on Github have fun resolving dependencies 🙂

Courses in C++, Java, Javascript, Python3, PHP, C#, Swift, HTML, CSS and SQLCourses | SoloLearn: Learn to code for FREE!

Franz is a free messaging app / former Emperor of Austria and combines chat & messaging services into one application. He currently supports Slack, WhatsApp, WeChat, HipChat, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, Google Hangouts, GroupMe, Skype and many more. You can download Franz for Mac, Windows & Linux.

Source: Franz – a free messaging app for Slack, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Telegram and more

It’s a simple bot that helps with court appeals — but could it replace the need for human lawyers?

Source: A 19-year-old made a free robot lawyer that has appealed $3 million in parking tickets

As of March 15, 2016, we will no longer be supporting the Picasa desktop application. For those who have already downloaded this—or choose to do so before this date—it will continue to work as it does today, but we will not be developing it further, and there will be no future updates. If you choose to switch to Google Photos, you can continue to upload photos and videos using the desktop uploader at photos.google.com/apps.

Source: Picasa Blog

So download and keep the installer somewhere safe!

How about this for bizarre bug of the week: the latest version of Adobe Creative Cloud deletes the first hidden directory in root directories on Macs.

That’s bad news for users of BackBlaze: the backup software stores a .bzvol folder in the top level of every drive it backs up, and uses these folders to store information about the drives. Adobe’s Creative Cloud app wipes away these directories, leaving BackBlaze’s users faced with “your drive is no longer backed up” errors.

Source: ‘Adobe Creative Cloud update ate my backup!’

This has been done in the past, but the computing power required has made it impractical. A new algorithm makes it possible to do this with much less computational grunt.

Source: Computationally Efficient Carrier Integer Ambiguity Resolution in Multiepoch GPS/INS: A Common-Position-Shift Approach

It looks nice 🙂 Better than a todo list, better than a scrum board, software kept simple.
Download it here