Weekly Roundup: Friday, 15 September, 2017
Here are some links I thought were worth sharing this week:
AUGMENTED REALITY
Google ARCore gives Android users augmented reality without Tango
"As its name suggests, ARCore is Android’s equivalent to Apple ARKit: a baked-in augmented reality platform for developers. Where Tango’s custom hardware requirements have left it languishing on mediocre smartphones, ARCore is less powerful but more accessible. It’s launching on the year-old Google Pixel and Samsung Galaxy S8 phones, supported by Android 7.0 Nougat as well as its recently released successor Android Oreo. An official launch is loosely planned for this winter, when Google promises ARCore will work with 100 million existing and upcoming devices."
DATA PRIVACY
You Are the Product
Interesting long piece drawing on content from several books: "The Attention Merchants: From the Daily Newspaper to Social Media, How Our Time and Attention Is Harvested and Sold" (Tim Wu), "Chaos Monkeys: Inside the Silicon Valley Money Machine" (Antonio García Martínez) and "Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google and Amazon have Cornered Culture and What It Means for All of Us" (Jonathan Taplin).
CYBER SECURITY
The Internet Of Things’ Massive Security Problem, Visualized
Earlier this year, the usernames and passwords for more than 8,000 internet of things devices were posted online so hackers could easily access them. The security breach was a perfect illustration of the IoT’s security problems: Of the 8,000+ username and password combinations, only 142 were unique. Even more stunning, about half of all usernames and passwords used the same obvious combination: admin/admin. A new data visualization of the breach, created by the IT professional Roland Schwab and posted on Tableau earlier this week, is a shocking window into just how insecure IoT devices are.
DEVELOPMENT
Why Facebook Like buttons account for 16% of an average website’s code
"According to data collected by BuiltWith.com, 6% of the top 10,000 most high-traffic sites load content from Facebook’s servers. For the vast majority of them, that content is likely Facebook’s Javascript SDK, a huge block of code that is needed to display such features as the Like button (as seen on many media sites) and Facebook comments widgets (also used on many big media sites, Buzzfeed among them). This SDK code is so big that it represents about 16% of the total size of all JavaScript on the average web page."
Making the Google Developers documentation style guide public
"For some years now, our technical writers at Google have used an internal-only editorial style guide for most of our developer documentation. In order to better support external contributors to our open source projects, such as Kubernetes, AMP, or Dart, and to allow for more consistency across developer documentation, we're now making that style guide public."