Four short links: 29 May 2018
Data Beats Algorithms, Copyright Futures, Data Privacy, and Cryptocurrency Attacks
- You Need to Improve Your Training Data (Pete Warden) — without changing the model or test data at all, the top-one accuracy increased by over 4%, from 85.4% to 89.7%. Written up in an Arxiv paper.
- Future Not Made — potential products that won’t exist if the EU passes a database copyright law. In the words of Cory Doctorow: The feature all these devices share is that they rely on databases of user-supplied assets — annotations, recorded sensations, shapefiles — of the sort that the EU is about to make legally impossible. (via BoingBoing)
- California Eyes Data Privacy Measures — Mactaggart says the proposed law would not prevent Facebook, Google or a local newspaper from collecting users’ data and using it to target ads to them. But users will have a right to stop companies from sharing or selling their data. And businesses would be required to disclose the categories of information they have on users — including home addresses, employment information and characteristics such as race and gender.
- Cost of a 51% Attack on Popular Cryptocurrencies — the commentary on Hacker News is also interesting. As one notes: These attacks are only possible for coins where the last column is > 100%. That’s still a distressingly large total market cap in minor coins, even if it doesn’t include the big players.
