Asanka's blog

Anonymizing data is already quite difficult, as shown in this 2015 paper on the reidentifiability of scrubbed credit card metadata. Beyond ineffective anonymizing, another disturbing aspect is the rate at which AI and ML are improving at image recognition. In particular, face recognition is approaching practicality for general purpose use (See Amazon Rekognition for example). While these technologies aren't quite there yet, they will inevitably reach that point. Once coupled with a data sets that are already publicly available, this means that large public image repositories like Imgur will become petri dishes for face recognition data. These technologies affect existing data retroactively. What is now an unlabeled morass of anonymous pictures could conceivably become treasure troves in the future for data brokers when the cost of picking out pictures of one's likeness from billions of images becomes easily affordable. This can and should be concerning to anyone who's p

It seems there's an unspoken rivalry between snowboarders and skiers.  We found this out when we tried out snowboarding two years ago.  We can barely ski, but we thought we'll try it out.  After all, at worst we'll probably add one more thing to the list of stuff we aren't good at.  Here are some things we learned in the process, offered in instructional format: You will, most probably, be among the oldest people on the beginner slope.  People who hadn't been born when you were graduating high-school will speed past you and do tricks you will probably never be able to do, and that's fine. Get proper gear.  You don't need to buy a snowboard, but make sure you are wearing snow pants and perhaps thermals.  Don't wear cotton pants or khakis.  I've seen people wear those.  After a few falls, the snow sticks to you and melts, making it look like you wet yourself.  It's not pretty and is uncomfortable.  Wear snow pants.  Also, go to a sporting goods

The last time I saw Richard Stallman was when he got into a bus that I was on in Cambridge, MA about 6 or so years back.  His name comes up often whenever the Free Software Foundation , GNU , or open source software in general is discussed.  It should have been no surprise for me to see his name show up in Ohloh , a “ free public directory of open source projects and people ”.  What surprised me was where I found it: There we go.  Five slots above mine. My Kudo Position recently received a fairly large boost (as evidenced by the +2339 above) due to Secure-Endpoints pushing Network Identity Manager and the KCA Provider for Network Identity Manager into GitHub.  Once this got me excited about my Kudo Rank, I discovered that much like democracy, the rank isn’t based upon my opinion of my work or the quantity thereof, but on what others think about it. So how exactly is the Kudo Rank and Kudo Position calcuated? Ohloh’s About Kudos page describes the process.  The Kudo Rank is ba

Back in 2000, when I left the USA and was working in Sri Lanka for a what would turn out to be a nearly two year stint at Slimline, I noticed something interesting.  Before I left, whenever people spoke of searching on the web, the names MSN or Yahoo! would inevitably crop up, since they were the dominant search interfaces* at the time.  There was some talk of Google being an emerging search provider, but it was yet to catch up with the incumbent giants.  The situation in Sri Lanka, however, was markedly different.  Everyone at Slimline was using Google for search. This was intriguing for me, specially since searching the web was synonymous with using Google (although the verb “google” wasn’t in use yet).  How was it that places like this were such early converts to Google search, seemingly so far ahead of the curve compared to USA where a majority were still stuck on MSN and Yahoo!? I don’t have a definite answer, but if I were to make an educated guess, it would be this: usabilit

If you've done any sort of multi-threaded programming on Windows, chances are you've worked with CRITICAL_SECTION s. They are lightweight and effective. However, if your critical sections are causing too much contention, they might be the cause of serious performance problems. While working on Network Identity Manager, I was curious about how all of its hundreds of critical sections are doing. Network Identity Manager is a multi-threaded plug-in based application that is often prone to contention during certain operations. But how bad is it? Critical section contention is a fact of life. It is the normal mode of operation for them. However, each time it happens, the application may pay a fairly hefty performance penalty. We are only interested in keeping contention in check. As such, we would like to know which critical sections are experiencing the highest contention levels so we can evaluate design changes that may help alleviate them. A thorough treatment on the semantic