We all know modern publications use any or all tools at their disposal in order to drive traffic to their websites. I don’t know what it’s like to write for Quartz, but this gaffe is nothing short of embarrassing for Quartz writer Christopher Mims. Let me elaborate.

The linked article, entitled “Intel’s voice recognition will blow Siri out of the water—because it doesn’t use the cloud”, initially exhibited a fundamental lack of understanding of pattern recognition.¹ Granted, it’s impossible for one person to have an in-depth knowledge of all the technology utilized by our gadgets.

However, in the update he posted to the article, Mims posted a link to an article he wrote that completely invalidates the title of (and largely the premise of) the piece:

Currently, the everyday magic of understanding voice commands is carried out almost entirely in the cloud, because processing human speech is difficult enough that even a sophisticated smartphone doesn’t have the processing power to do it at a high enough level of reliability.

Ideally, either an editor or Mims himself would have noticed this inconsistency before publishing. That the headline remains unchanged after the update is disappointing. Rather than posting an update and leaving the piece otherwise unchanged, Quartz should take a cue from traditional newspapers and at the very least correct misleading body text and explicitly state the difference between the initial and current article. Specifically, the wording “Intel has a solution.” immediately following the first subheadline needs to be stricken. The tone of the rest of the article should be adjusted as well.

Instead, the original (and to a large extent, the current) article states that Intel has somehow magically solved the same problem currently addressed by racks of servers with a chip that can fit in your smartphone.

Time published photos Christopher Morris took early in his career. These photos are a delightful example of a sentiment I highlighted in an earlier post.

Christopher’s photos highlight the value of the ability to remove oneself from the present in order to become a detached observer and document a moment in its unique context.

Though a portrait of “the world as it is” (or “this thing we all see”) is a common photographic project, I believe it’s a project that will always have value partly because it’s my opinion that there aren’t many people who have the skill that Christopher Morris exhibits in this work. There are so many things about our lives that seem unremarkable to us but can be utterly fascinating to those in other cultures or other geographic locations.

Most importantly though, these fascinations can be compounded by time—the inability to physically exist in a specific context facilitates nostalgia.

Useful for those who have “cut the cord”, canistream.it is a service that will tell you if a movie or television show is available for streaming, purchase or rental. Pretty convenient.

The site is easy to use and its utility is obvious. However, this service shouldn’t need to exist in its current form.

The content producers, the people who make the television shows and movies, are notably absent from canistream.it’s streaming, purchase or rental options. Simply, relatively new businesses like Apple, Netflix, Amazon, Google and many others offer modern ways to access content. Television networks and movie studios do not.

This fact wouldn’t be so hard to swallow if content producers cooperated with the businesses facilitating modern distribution. Notoriously, though, they don’t. Instead of embracing new technologies and fitting them into a modern business plan, the traditional content producers ignored new technologies and have defended their obsolete distribution practices with litigation.

The future is here. Embrace it or move out of the way.

Writer’s block is a phony, made up, BS excuse for not doing your work.

Okay.

Kind of.

My intention was to write a concession to a claim I made in an earlier post which stated that the Leica M9 is the smallest interchangeable-lens camera with a 35mm sensor. The Sony A7 and—more interesting to me—the A7R have been released and I had assumed that these bodies were smaller than the M9.

After doing a little research, I found that the M9 will fit into a smaller circumscribed box than the A7. According to Digital Photography Review:

body	length (mm)	height (mm)	width (mm)	box volume (mm3)
Leica M9	139	80	37	408,480
Leica M 240	139	80	42	467,040
Sony A7	127	94	48	573,024

Of course, the viewfinder and grip on the A7 contribute more significantly to the circumscribed box dimensions than the actual displacement of the body. However, circumscribed box dimensions are important when allocating space in a camera bag.

I’ll wait for someone else to do a proper displacement test.

The Great Discontent interviewed Helena Price on the specifics of her photography career. She says:

Don’t worry about creating things that you think will be popular for a certain group of people—just take time to explore and document for yourself. Eventually you’ll find patterns in your work and your viewpoint will emerge on its own.

This is a refreshing, hopeful and liberating approach to getting started with photography. Compared to the never-ending grind of shooting weddings and senior portraits or real estate or whatever else there is out there, thoughtfully and consistently taking photos of what one sees allows the photographer to develop a much greater range.

I’m really into the idea of people’s life stories being recorded and documented, and how documentation has changed over time…I want to leave photos with context; photos that tell stories. I want to be able to leave things that people are going to find later, so that they can know something about our time.

Documenting life using photographs has been an interest of mine in some form for the past several years. The ability to make these photographs (or sets of photographs) tell a compelling story¹ is perhaps a more essential skill than taking a photograph that is inherently unique and interesting through some combination of content and technique. Documenting one’s life provides a framework that helps to develop both of these skills.

Finally, the documentation approach is accessible to anybody with access to any camera.²

Joseph Menn on the NSA paying RSA $10 million to intentionally cripple their own security products (by utilizing the problematic pseudo-random number generator mentioned previously): >RSA adopted the algorithm even before NIST approved it. The NSA then cited the early use of Dual Elliptic Curve inside the government to argue successfully for NIST approval, according to an official familiar with the proceedings.

RSA’s contract made Dual Elliptic Curve the default option for producing random numbers in the RSA toolkit. No alarms were raised, former employees said, because the deal was handled by business leaders rather than pure technologists.

Maddening! This underscores what may be our country’s biggest woes: rampant, corrupt and unchecked capitalism and government, a complete lack of government transparency or cross-communication and a fully inadequate education system.

It should never be possible to purchase the weakening of tools that facilitate privacy. It should be trivial for one government agency to vet the claims of another agency, and to hold other agencies accountable. Businessmen (and congressmen!) should be required to have a technical understanding of the products (or jobs) they oversee.

The more I find out about the NSA and its overreach, the more I feel like I’m in a comic book with no hero.

This one hits close to home.

I can’t imagine how the NIST staff involved in creating SP 800 (and more specifically, the SP 800-90A Dual Elliptic Curve Deterministic Random Bit Generation…bit) must feel.

First of all, given the definition of a deterministic system, the title itself gives me pause. Maybe there’s some next-level random number theory described in the standard, but I’m not sure I’d ever want a random number generator to exhibit deterministic behavior.¹

Second of all, quotes like this make my stomach sink:

“NIST’s decisions used to be opaque and frustrating,” said Matthew Green, a professor at Johns Hopkins University. “Now they’re opaque and potentially malicious. Which is too bad because NIST performs such a useful service.”

NIST is a legitimate, successful research institution. The one-two punch of being required to consult with the NSA and the harsh (if deserved) public reactions do serious damage to the perceived function and utility of government-funded research institutions.

Some months after the piece was released (along with “Return of the Jedi”) they lost the original recording. I recreated the piece for them, but they kept complaining that it didn’t sound the same. Since my random-number generators were keyed on the time and date, I couldn’t reproduce the score of the performance that they liked. I finally found the original version and everybody was happy.

Really cool article by Greg Koenig explaining the Apple video that shows off the manufacturing process for the new Mac Pro.

Mr. Koenig works with Luma Labs, makers of the camera strap I use to carry my camera everywhere so people can ask why I have a camera with me.

CryptoSeal announces that they’ll no longer be providing their consumer-focused virtual private network (VPN) service:

With immediate effect as of this notice, CryptoSeal Privacy, our consumer VPN service, is terminated. All cryptographic keys used in the operation of the service have been zerofilled, and while no logs were produced (by design) during operation of the service, all records created incidental to the operation of the service have been deleted to the best of our ability.

I want to raise a bigger stink about the NSA, the surveillance state, and the secret courts, pen registers and litigation processes they employ but it’s been hard to get people excited or upset about the problem. Rumor has it Edward Snowden has many more documents to release, perhaps one of those reports will be the tipping point. The news that the NSA collected 70 million recordings of private phone calls in France are sure to infuriate the international community, but I’m not sure what recourse they’ll have.

Frankly, I’d rather not get to the point that the world is imposing sanctions on the US due to the actions of the NSA. I sincerely hope we can convince our government to respect our right to privacy (and that of the rest of the world) before then.