Blog

  • Aaron made the world a better place.

  • I backed the digispark kickstarter[1] earlier this year, which makes super cheap little Arduino-speaking…

    I backed the digispark kickstarter earlier this year, which makes super cheap little Arduino-speaking USB sticks.

    My first project was to hook it up to a motion sensor I had lying around, and now my monitor turns on automatically when I sit down in front of my computer.

    I can also imagine having it take a picture with the webcam and email it to me if my phone's GPS isn't at home, and the like.

    More information.

    Motion Sensor

  • Network Visualization

    I presented CalmNetViz to a bunch of students this afternoon at DawgBytes.

  • DriveCode

    Self Relient Text Editing for Drive.

    I spent a couple days making a text editor for Google Drive.

    Quite minimal at the moment, but fun to see how the various Google APIs are meant to fit together.

  • Chrome Proxy



    Proxxy had its best installation day ever yesterday. I have no clue why. Usage is at about 2500 users, up from 1500 this summer.

  • Quals Talk

    Will Scott
    
    Qualifying Evaluation Project Presentation
    
    "Block-Resistant Network Services Using Unblock"
    
    Thursday, November 1, 2012
    
    10:00 a.m.
    
    Allen Center, CSE 203
    
    Advisors:  Tom Anderson and Arvind Krishnamurthy
    
    ABSTRACT--
    
    The desire for uncensored access to the Internet has motivated the
    development of both open proxies like Tor and social graph-based overlays
    like FreeNet. However, neither design is sufficient, since open access
    networks are easily exposed and blocked, and overlays based just on social
    trust suffer from poor availability and performance. This talk presents
    the design for a new overlay service, Unblock, constructed from an
    augmented social graph. In Unblock, multi-hop paths through social links
    protect individual participants from exposure to adversaries. Unblock
    achieves good performance by introducing additional links in the network
    graph in a manner that minimizes vulnerability. We also develop several
    transport level techniques for improved latency and demonstrate the
    practicality of the system for web traffic workloads.
    
  • Cory Doctorow stopped by the UW this afternoon

    Cory Doctorow stopped by the UW to talk about tech policy issues this afternoon. Promoted us to develop new takes on opportunistic encryption to improve privacy, and on the need for privacy as a differentiator for applications.
    He feels, I think rightly, that there is a distinct lack of code being written solving privacy problems. His take is that people have given up trying, but that there are still easy ways to change norms. He pushed on changing browsers to not accept 3rd party cookies by default as a way to change norms. (I have a chrome patch sitting around somewhere that goes further, but never figured out how to surface an appropriate UI.)

  • Tor Censorship

    It was a relatively easy data processing task to look at per-country disruptions in tor users. The numbers are interesting – and heartening. My previous intuition was that there was even more worldwide disruption of the network.


    Data Processing Code