Common Paradox Tech Blog

If there’s one thing that we seem to take for granted with our smartphones, it’s the fact that the only people that get to listen to our conversations are the fuzz and their wiretaps. But that all has the potential to change, at least if you’re on GSM, as the New York Times has noted that industrious German computer engineer Karsten Nohl has deciphered the encryption algorithm used by the 3.5 billion GSM phones in the world. Nohl essentially force fed random strings of numbers to crack open the 21-year-old 64-bit A5/1 encryption algorithm. And he’s published the code online for torrenting fun.

So what does this mean? Two things. One: Having the code alone is not enough to eavesdrop on a specific conversation. Cracking into the algorithm only exposes the streaming torrents of digital data, one still has to be able to pick out the desired call. Of course, there may very well be software to accomplish that task as well. Two: Carriers need to update their encryption algorithms stat. Simply changing to a different 64-bit algorithm won’t stop a similar cracking attempt, as it would be just as vulnerable as the current code. The GSM Association has had a 128-bit A5/3 algorithm available since 2007, but carriers have been slow to implement the more secure code. We hope that’s going to start changing really quickly.

[via: Engadget]

A mother of two, who also happens to be gay (and not broadcasting it), is anonymously suing Netflix for releasing her movie preferences in that contest they held awhile back. Basically, she’s Borking them.

In the course of releasing boatloads of data to contestants in its “Beat Netflix’s Recommendation Algorithm” contest, they may not have disguised where that data came from as well as they should. The plaintiff, known here as Jane Doe to preserve privacy, alleges that her identity could be divined from the data, and thus threatens her civil right to privacy. Apparently, two researchers compared Netflix reviews to IMDB reviews and figured out some identities that way.

The suit seeks a cash settlement for each of the 2 million Netflix customers involved, and also seeks to stop the upcoming sequel to the original Netflix contest. We’ll keep you updated on the suit—it’s a pretty interesting one, for sure. [Wired]

With more than two billion links a month passed through its link shortening service, bit.ly can see what is some of the most buzzed about and shared content on the Web. Today, it is exposing the most popular videos people share through bit.ly on Bitly.TV, which is the second project under bit.ly Labs (the super-short j.mp URL shortener was the first).

With bit.ly being the main way people share links on Twitter, Bitly.TV might as well be called Twitter TV. The videos featured are based on bit.ly’s bitrank algorithm. “The algorithm looks at velocity, popularity and persistence,” says general manager Andrew Cohen. “We’re examining the social distribution history of each video to determine what is trending, and to predict what will go viral.”

Since launching six months ago, Microsoft’s Bing search engine has made strides to try to differentiate itself from the competition — namely Google. Mobile is vitally important to the next phase of search, and Bing has aggressively targeted smartphone users with its enhanced mobile search page.

Google has had an iPhone app for quite some time and now Bing has followed suit. The new free Bing app is available for download from the App Store right now.

News, Maps, Movies

From the main Bing menu, you can choose to bring up News, Movies, Images, Maps, Businesses or Directions. Movies hooks into your current location, allowing you to see what is playing near you and where. You can get directions to the theater or call it directly, which is a nice touch. I would love to see it integrated with Fandango or MovieTickets.com for easy purchase access.

The new Bing app also features Bing Maps, which offers directions, traffic maps and different aerial views of your area. It uses the iPhone’s built-in GPS for location support. While not as robust as the separate Google-powered Maps application, this is a nice way to get directions when doing a search for a business.

Bing’s news section brings up headlines for national, world and local news stories. Unfortunately you can’t really specify what type of news you want to see.

Voice Search

The Bing App for iPhone isn’t just a wrapper around the mobile Bing website, it adds some new and enhanced features. For instance, like Google, Bing has voice search that works with directions and normal web searches. In my tests, the voice recognition wasn’t as good as Google’s — Mashable was heard as “National” and “Christina Warren” was translated as “Christina Lorenz.” For what it is worth, Google’s iPhone app understood my intended phrases perfectly.

It’s a nice idea, but until Microsoft can improve the voice-to-text algorithm, I’d avoid it for all but the most basic phrases. Even saying “Google” brought up “People” the first time I tried it.

Overall

While this is a valiant effort and an attractive application, Bing for the iPhone won’t displace Google any time soon. In fact, I actually prefer Bing’s optimized mobile website for many of these features because it seems more natural and works faster. Over 3G, the Bing app seemed to hang and even on Wi-Fi my iPhone 3GS seemed to take a long time to process information.

This isn’t a bad first step, but Bing will need to do more if it wants to win over iPhone fans.

Reviews: Bing, Google, Mashable, iPhone, news

Tags: bing, Google, iphone

If you share your own video clips on Twitter, chances are you use or have used TwitVid, a service that easily integrates with mobile Twitter clients and with your Twitter account.

Today the company is launching a whole suite of tools that will make sharing videos via Twitter faster and easier, including real-time video search, video analytics and virtual gifting.

Real-time Search

TwitVid.com now offers real-time search, which highlights popular videos being shared on Twitter. TwitVid aggregates videos being shared via TwitVid and YouTube on Twitter and then uses a special algorithm to separate videos by relevancy, freshness and real-time popularity.

Analytics

Video analytics has the potential to be the most powerful tool for brands or individuals who use Twitter to share videos. The analytics tool tracks how many times videos are tweeted, how many times they are viewed and where people who click on video links live.

Even if you already use tools like HootSuite or YouTube’s built-in analytics, TwitVid can be a very valuable tool — it goes that additional step and analyzes viewer demographics, not just the number of the tweets or Twitter referrals.

How do you share video on Twitter?

Reviews: HootSuite, Twitter, YouTube, video

Tags: twitter, twitvid, video sharing

gyrogeerloose writes “Although there was evidence to suggest that the Japanese navy was up to something in December 1941, that information was scant and came too late. Today’s intelligence agencies have another problem altogether — more information than they can deal with, and computers aren’t helping as much as one might expect for reasons that will be familiar to Slashdot readers: computers can crunch numbers faster and more accurately than humans, but they’re still easily baffled by language as it is commonly used in the real world. Metaphor, slang and simple figures of speech can confuse the best algorithm and, as quoted in the linked article in the San Diego Union-Tribune, ‘A system that takes a week to discover a bombing that will occur in a day isn’t very useful.’”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

gyrogeerloose writes “Although there was evidence to suggest that the Japanese navy was up to something in December 1941, that information was scanty and came too late. Today’s intelligence agencies have another problem altogether — more information than they can deal with, and computers aren’t helping as much as one might expect for reasons that will be familiar to Slashdot readers: computers can crunch numbers faster and more accurately than humans but they’re still easily baffled by language as it is commonly used in the real world. Metaphor, slang and simple figures of speech can confuse the best algorithm and, as quoted in the linked article in the San Diego Union-Tribune, ‘A system that takes a week to discover a bombing will occur in a day isn’t very useful.’”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

blee37 writes “Researchers at Microsoft have invented a system for tagging images by reading brain scans from an electroencephalograph (EEG). Tagging images is an important task because many images on the web are unlabeled and have no semantic information. This new method allows an appropriate tag to be generated by an AI algorithm interpreting the EEG scan of a person’s brain while they view an image. The person need only view the image for as little as 500 ms. Other current methods for generating tags include flat out paying people to do it manually, putting the task on Amazon Mechanical Turk, or using Google Image Labeler.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The guys and gals at Woot have added another portal to their stable of daily deal sites. The deals.woot site is a bit of a departure for Woot. All their preexisting sites feature a product chosen by Woot employees, but deals.woot is a user driven site akin to a Digg for bargain shopping.
 
Woot has made waves in the tech/geek community by offering a daily deal, which is sometimes an insanely good value. More recently, Woot has expanded to various specialized portals like shirt.woot, wine.woot, and sellout.woot. The new site uses an algorithm to bring the users’ favorite deals to the surface for all to see. The top of the landing page, however, isn’t user driven. It is populated by sponsored deals.

Woot explained the sponsored links saying, “OK, yes, companies pay a little something to be Sponsored Deals. But we don’t allow just any old crap in this section… If we find the deal compelling enough that our members will appreciate us bringing it to their attention, we’ll feature it here.” If you’re the type that enjoys a good tech bargain (and who doesn’t?) check it out at deals.woot.com.

Woot, the popular bargain site that offers one good (sometimes great) deal a day, has just launched a new portal at deals.Woot. The new site is a fairly major departure for Woot, which up until now has been driven by product selections from a team of Woot employees (aside from the main Woot.com site, which is often tech/geek focused, there are special subsites for shirts, wine, and a handful of others). Unlike these sites, Deals.Woot is run by its users — it’s essentially a Digg for bargains.

The new site features a list of top deals, as voted on by the community and chosen by the Deals.Woot algorithm. This will be going head to head against other deal sites like SlickDeals and FatWallet, which have well established communities. Woot already has plenty of fans, but it may take some time to build out a base of deal hunters.