Internet digest
- Ben Evans - https://goo.gl/Cymhkf
- New post about chain effects in retail / TV / technology - https://goo.gl/gwuynK
- 39M smart speakers in the US https://goo.gl/nkvUc4
- US$1bn ticketing IPO in China - https://goo.gl/Zt1CmZ

Social Media
- FB updates its news feed algorithm to promote content you are more likely to interact with
https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/01/news-feed-fyi-bringing-people-closer-together/

Trivia
- Magnetic disks work after 30 years - https://goo.gl/oWoaWi
- Self-driving cars being DEPLOYED for SECOND time for one district with retired people - https://goo.gl/AKowqX

#internet
#digest

Internet Digest
- Ben Evans - https://goo.gl/TPyLoD
- Youtube tightening moderation screws for small channels - https://goo.gl/SHpC2h
- Camera strapped to plane - https://vimeo.com/240106846
- Guardian online getting profitable - https://goo.gl/CDpNFb
- Amazon testing a shop wo cashiers - you just take goods and walk out - https://goo.gl/hvh63Z
- Drone saving a drowning person - https://goo.gl/RdGYDx

ГЫ
- А это отлично зайдет русским ко-ко-ко разрабам и культуре "обсирания всего", которая царит в нашем IT - https://goo.gl/S5poqv


#internet
#digest

When looking at WorldBank, WEF and some consulting company reports and white-papers I always wondered if anybody reads them.

Here is a possible answer - No
https://img.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/files/2014/05/pdfs.jpg

They do not understand that making content more reachable and SEO-friendly helps long-term. But SEO-friendly websites are usually full of bullshit.

#internet

This is just EPIC
- https://habrahabr.ru/post/347760/

#internet

Internet digest
- Ben Evans - https://goo.gl/XYKbvr
- RNNs + band names - https://goo.gl/LBBEiP
- Soldiers + fitness trackers = military bases - https://goo.gl/B4yzxX
- Google's new unit - security and ML - https://goo.gl/q1Xnjd
- Apple produces TV content - https://goo.gl/P2X9Gb
- Some bs rumours about Telegram ICO size - https://goo.gl/D4XgPD
- Twitter is plagued by bot-farms - https://goo.gl/ZLHVz1
-- Easy to detect via similar registration dates - https://goo.gl/ZLHVz1
- Podcast about financial innovations in the US - https://goo.gl/kxHUQY

#digest
#internet

Internet digest
- Ben Evans - https://goo.gl/VKLgma
- Ben Evans about smart home hype - https://goo.gl/jPrCEd
- Google closing Google Fiber - https://goo.gl/urftJc
- Amazon tracks warehouse slackers with wristbands - https://goo.gl/avtMyn
- Apple music overtaking Spotify - https://goo.gl/ghQ43p
- Why people like infinite scroll https://goo.gl/tp1XNV
- Netflix personalizes artwork - https://goo.gl/dF5hLL
- Self-driving trucks => morel local trucking jobs https://goo.gl/tfaZSS

#internet
#digest

Internet digest
- Ben Evans - https://goo.gl/7e1M4H
- FB tried to buy Snapchat 2 times - for US$60m and US$3b - https://goo.gl/xUVAM1
- Allegedly some ML can achieve 85% diabetes prediction accuracy on apple watch sensor data - https://goo.gl/Jyz5fG
- Cars may embrace 48 volts instead of 12 volts - https://goo.gl/Xmq9W5
- Google reabsorbs Nest (read between the lines - it was successful) - https://goo.gl/TzbTtY
- Snap +70% revenue growth - https://goo.gl/CQM6Xn
- 7 of 8 USA top grocers participate in Instacart - https://goo.gl/CAmoqA
- Siri APIs are fragmented lol - https://goo.gl/D6vvMK
- Uber agreed to provide Waymo, the self-driving car unit under Google’s parent company, Alphabet, with 0.34 percent of its stock - https://goo.gl/uatWBx

#internet
#digest

Internet Digest
- Ben Evans - https://goo.gl/XsBqHN
- Flipboard (orly) launches ads - https://goo.gl/2muoiT
- Google sold 3.9 million Pixel phones in 2017 - https://goo.gl/6eUiXw
- Looks like smartbuses may be cool. App => bus route information => route gap => launch cosy bus with music and social features - https://goo.gl/TjKndB (I doubt this is a business though)
- About the importance of decentralization - next Internet will be a set of cryptonetwork protocols - https://goo.gl/c2aB4n

- How London is responding to technological innovationhttps://goo.gl/Dh6NgD
(1) Connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) or driverless (2) cars won't be on the road until the 2030s at least and could add to congestion
(3) Dockless cycle schemes need to be able to operate across London to be effective
(4) There is no control system in place for drones and droids
(5) TfL is monitoring technological developments but this needs to be embedded across the whole organisation

- Nice info graphics about city dwellers daily routes on pages 7-10 - https://goo.gl/vV71DR

#internet
#digest

Internet digest
(1) Ben Evans - https://goo.gl/8f4RkE

Market
(1) Waymo launching pilot for the self-driving trucks - https://goo.gl/Bw2R9Q
(2) Netflix to spend US$8bn on ~700 shows in 2018 - https://goo.gl/6myKj6 (sic!)
(3) Intel vs Qualcomm and Broadcomm - https://goo.gl/pa3iYB + Inter considering to buy Broadcomm - https://goo.gl/XP8fqd
(4) Amazon buys ring - https://goo.gl/cnMw6o
(5) Latest darkmarket bust - Hansa - https://goo.gl/YcUxYD - it was not busted at once, but put under surveillance
- As with Silk Road - all started with the officials finding a server and making a copy of hard drive
- This time - it was a dev server
- It contained ... owners' IRC accounts and some personal info

Internet + ML
(1) Netflix uses ML to generate thumbnails for its shows automatically - https://goo.gl/6poibk
- Features collected: manual annotation, meta-data, object detection, brightness, colour, face detection, blur, motion detection, actors, mature content

#internet
#digest

Also also
(1) Dropbox - https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1467623/000119312518055809/d451946ds1.htm
(2) And Spotify https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1639920/000119312518063434/d494294df1.htm

filed for IPOs

#internet

New stack overflow survey 2018
- https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018/

Key fact - global and USA Data Scientist salary
- Global https://goo.gl/AyYoVv
- USA https://goo.gl/CKdthV

Interesting facts
- Countries - https://goo.gl/2neadX
- How people learn - https://goo.gl/HxKuRH
- Git dominates version control - https://goo.gl/HDXVMj
- PyTorch is in the top of most loved frameworks https://goo.gl/66xJXs
- Connected stacks of technologies - https://goo.gl/pcXiNj
- Most popular languages and tools - https://goo.gl/GK32vn
- Most popular frameworks - https://goo.gl/Khjw87 (PyTorch =) )
- Most popular databases - https://goo.gl/TjTp65
- Attitude to rivalry - https://goo.gl/7mwWd2

#internet

Internet digest
- Chrome OS on tablets - https://goo.gl/K5iCJw
- Facial recognition in China - https://goo.gl/aJjPH5 - 1984
- Ikea + AR manual - https://goo.gl/WW6Eqg
- WildBerries.ru stats - https://goo.gl/qPspe1
- Digital content forgery and ML - https://goo.gl/e5tqWa
- On Facebook tracking your SMS and calls
-- https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/03/fact-check-your-call-and-sms-history/

#digest
#internet

Internet digest
- Ben Evans - https://mailchi.mp/ben-evans/benedicts-newsletter-no-450525?e=b7fff6bc1c
- About autonomous cars - https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2018/3/26/steps-to-autonomy - autonomy will vary based on the route / conditions / situation / use case
- FB delays its speaker - https://www.bloomberg.com/technology
- Foxconn buys Belking https://goo.gl/Xf6g9A
- Amazon music > 10m subs - https://goo.gl/C8Qhdm
- The Economist about ML in business - https://goo.gl/fTCHE9
- Apple to make its own chips - https://goo.gl/ZkkEVc

#internet
#digest

So, usually I try to stay away from such controversial topics, but I have to address and elephant in the room. You all know, that originally I am from Russia and I have quite liberal world views.

Seeing that many people start to ride the hype and advertising some expensive "solutions", this is why today I decided to do a post about creating your own SOCK5 proxy server via a droplet on Digital Ocean:
- Post - https://spark-in.me/post/vds-socks5-proxy-server - note that unlike my other posts - this one is a step-by-step explanation;
- It explains how to create your own SOCK5 proxy-server using Ubuntu and Digital Ocean with dante;
- The cheapest digital ocean droplet is US$5 per month (you can find such droplets for as low as US$2-3 with inferior service);
- If you use my referral link - you will get US$10 for free - https://m.do.co/c/6f8e77dddc23
- Also you can create credentials for your friends and family;

Also note, that foreseeing this s**t - I created aliases for our telegram channel
- In twitter https://twitter.com/AlexanderVeysov
- In the web http://snakers41.spark-in.me
- RSS http://snakers41.spark-in.me/rss/

UX is not so great, but it works more or less. Please tell me what you think. I know that the majority of readers are Russians and we have quite a negative mentality, but this is one of the cases when you have to share this message and my post as much as possible. We will be doing an adapted post on habrhabr.ru as well.

And I know that there are free proxy lists. But if you create a simple service today - tomorrow you can add layers to it (see some hints in the article) and not rely on other people.

If you like what I shared - please support our channel (see a pinned message)
- https://buymeacoff.ee/8oneCIN

#internet
#digital_freedom

So, I just found out that Firefox rendering engine was rewritten, now it boasts the fastest speeds and support for ... socks5 proxies, both on mobile and desktop.
- https://github.com/FelisCatus/SwitchyOmega/
- https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/08/inside-a-super-fast-css-engine-quantum-css-aka-stylo/

Also projects like orbot+orfox help in more extreme cases.

#internet

Out post is live on Russian reddit - geektimes
- https://geektimes.ru/post/299971/

Please support if you have a valid account!

#internet

A note on CDNs and protecting your website against censorship

TLDR
- https://goo.gl/47UqyZ
- Using a free / cheap CDN service can enable you to protect your domain hosted resource from censorship
- Unless CDN servers will be blocked (but I guess the CDN has more servers, than you, right?)

So, I host spark-in.me on Digital Ocean. And I do not want to move or start a CDN by myself. I read news, that Google abandoned some of its proxying tools because of such censorship events...interesting.

I knew that services like Cloudflare (**CDN**) forward your traffic somehow, but I was not sure what IP is actually seen by the user and whether all of the traffic is forwarded. Then I read their FAQ
- https://goo.gl/uHPLjW

It says

After a visitor's browser has done the initial DNS lookup, it begins making requests to retrieve the actual content of a website. These requests are directed to the IP address that was returned from the DNS lookup. Before Cloudflare, that address would have been 198.51.100.1. With Cloudflare as the authoritative nameserver, the new address is 203.0.113.1. Cloudflare’s data center at 203.0.113.1 will serve as much of your website as it can from its local storage, and ask your web server at 198.51.100.1 for any part of your website it doesn’t already have stored locally. The Cloudflare data center at 203.0.113.1 will then provide your complete website to the visitor, so the visitor never talks directly to your web server at 198.51.100.1.

So I tried their free-tier service (paid service starts from US$20-200, which is too steep) and it just works, though SSL certificates were issued ~90 mins after I changed my nameservers. It is as easy as:
- Backup your DNS settings somewhere
- Import to CloudFlare
- Change name servers in your domain registrar cabinet
- 90 mins and ... profit

Now I cannot see my direct DO server IP when I resolve my DNS:

$ dig +short spark-in.me
104.27.142.65
104.27.143.65

#internet
#security

Internet digest

(0) Ben Evans - https://goo.gl/72b4pm

ML / industry
(1) FB to design its own FPGAs / ML chips - https://goo.gl/nh2Wph ?
(2) Google willing to replicate iMessage, again https://goo.gl/MtwCet
-- No mention of Telegram - but all Google's attempts are aeons behind Telegram
-- Google willing to go the hardest route - a standard enforced on the carrier + replace the messenging app
-- All of the previous attempts kind of did not work
(3) Facebook media backlash - https://goo.gl/rKd9E5
(4) Who makes LIDARs - https://goo.gl/uD5qc5
(5) Tesla over automation - https://goo.gl/1WBMj3

Telecom
(1) British Telecom to switch to VOIP - https://goo.gl/MCbZgq
(2) Flickr purchased - https://goo.gl/AMcE6f

#internet