When Robots Meet the Internet

Or how the Internet will make robotics part of our everyday lives

Robots generally get a bad role in the movies, travelling back in time to hunt us down or turning against their creators and endangering the Human race. Outside of fiction, robots are still perceived in the collective imagination as a threat to employment. Such a poor reputation is largely explained by the fear of the unknown and the difficulty to apprehend the whys and wherefores of robotics. Hopefully, things are about to change and the Internet is probably going to be the driving force behind the evolution of mindsets and the demystification of robots. The Internet and more precisely the Internet of Things indeed propose tools and protocols that can tackle efficiently key challenges for the development and democratization of robotics, i.e. object recognition, information processing and control. The Internet is continuously being supplied with eyes and ears, but it still misses arms and legs to take action! […] Robots... Read on

I Know Who You are!

What your Browser Can Reveal About Yourself...

Nowadays, your daily browsing activity is stored, aggregated, analysed and sold for advertising purposes by Internet companies, e.g. Gmail scans your emails to deliver “targeted” ads, Facebook serves ads depending on your relationship status or interests, etc. No big news here! What is less known is how your browser can reveal a sensible amount of information about yourself. This post aims at highlighting and describing the diverse types of data websites can quite easily gather just by “sniffing” your browser, and how these information once all wired together can help recompose a significant part of who you are. I know where you live When your computer, tablet or smartphone connects to a website, it leaves a log of its public IP address. This is because the website needs your IP in order to make the connection between its server and your machine and then send the web pages you requested.... Read on

The Facebook Fail

Or the Bug which was not one...

Facebook faced yesterday (September 24, 2012) one of the biggest critical situations of its history, a trust-based crisis due to old posts featuring potentially some intimate information made easily visible on Facebook profiles, or Timelines. The origin of this situation is not technical but comes mainly from the Facebook’s “usual” lack of prospectiveness concerning the concept of privacy. Now, such an eye-opening experience was necessary both for the company and its users, and some lessons should be clearly learned here. But will they? The Facts The French newspaper Metro reported on Monday 24th September around 4pm (Paris time) a privacy problem regarding some posts published before 2010 displayed on the Facebook timeline of a few users. The latter posts were then thought to be old private messages that Facebook had involuntary made publicly available on the profiles of its users. The news was quickly relayed by other French and international... Read on

Implementation of Social Sharing into Jekyll

How to add social sharing buttons to your Jekyll Powered Blog

Two common features of any blog are (i) a commenting system and (ii) some social sharing buttons. While the Jekyll Bootstrap provides natively a way to add a commenting provider (e.g. Disqus, LiveFyre, Facebook), it does not propose a simple way to add social sharing functionalities yet1. This post aims at presenting a way of filling the latter gap2. Read I did not manage to find any simple way of achieving it ;) All the code presented below can be found in my forked version of the Jekyll Bootstrap on Github. Jekyll configuration Let’s start with the beginning, the Jekyll configuration file. I developed a new sharing section in the configuration file that allows to declare the sharing providers you want your blog to support (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, Google+) and the options (if any) necessary for the creation of the respective buttons. Here is how the new sharing section of... Read on

Lettre Ouverte aux Candidats de l'Élection Présidentielle 2012

Perspectives Numériques, Sur le Besoin d'Abroger Hadopi

Alors que le 6 mai approche à grands pas et que les campagnes respectives des candidats à la présidence de la République Française vont s’intensifier dans les jours et semaines à venir, il semble opportun de proposer sous la forme d’une lettre ouverte un ensemble de mesures traîtant de la place et de l’utilisation du numérique dans une France et une Europe en crise, dans un monde en changement et dans une société humaine toujours plus connectée et digitale. Parce que la loi Hadopi est l’un des premiers projets tangibles (après la loi DADVSI de 2006) du gouvernement français visant uniquement et spécifiquement Internet mais aussi parce que la création d’une “Haute autorité pour la diffusion des œuvres et la protection des droits sur Internet” capture de manière évidente les problèmes engendrés par une volonté trop régulatrice d’un Etat associée à une vision inadaptée et trop peu prospective de ce... Read on

Primaires Socialistes en France

Analyse de la présence Web des différents candidats

A quatre jours des primaires du parti socialiste, j’ai décidé de prendre un peu de temps pour analyser la présence web des six candidats que sont Mme Aubry, Mme Royal, M. Baylet, M. Hollande, M. Montebourg et M. Valls. PS = Open Source ? En parcourant leurs différents sites web, j’ai été tout d’abord agréablement surpris d’observer que tous utilisaient des CMS (Content Management Systems) Open Source. Les sites de Royal, Valls et Baylet sont ainsi sous WordPress alors que ceux de Aubry, Hollande et Montebourg sont sous Drupal, 3 versus 3 => parfaite égalité. Montre-moi ton site et je te dirai qui tu es… Jean-Michel Baylet : A la Traîne ? Jean-Michel Baylet propose un site très décevant avec peu d’identité expliqué par un thème WordPress extrêmement basique, un graphisme ‘amateur’, une intégration sociale pauvre (juste Facebook) et beaucoup trop de plugins de mauvaise qualité. Le site ne comprend... Read on

How Homo-Facebookiens will kill Homo-Sapiens?

Or How Facebook Envisions the Future of Our Digital Lives And Why It's Not a Good Idea

I will start this post with a simple question: How much of your daily time spent on the Web is spent on Google products or Facebook? A very large proportion I presume and this should not be very surprising since the Internet favourites a winner-takes-the-most scheme, i.e. a market in which only an extremely small number of players can survive economic competition, the winning player taking all the market-share. Nowadays, two big ‘survivors’ that are Facebook and Google are engaged in a bloody battle in which the weapons are ways to gather more information/data about their users. More than never, the Summer and early Fall have made obvious this information war and the ‘weapons’ used. Think of Google+1, Google Wallet2, Google Offers3, Facebook Timeline4, Facebook Open Graph5… Because the main casualties of this war will be, at the end, us, their users and the Internet in general, I feel the... Read on

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Oxford Internet Institute. Economist. Hacker.

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