Wireless devices are everywhere, at home, at the office, and on the street. Devices are bombarding us with transmissions across a wide range of RF frequencies. Many of these invisible transmissions reflect off our bodies, carrying off information about ou location, movement, and other physiological properties. While a boon to professionals with carefully calibrated instruments, they may also be revealing private data about us to potential attackers nearby.
In this paper, we examine the problem of adversarial WiFi sensing, and consider whether ambient WiFi signals around us pose real risks to our personal privacy. We identify a passive adversarial sensing attack, where bad actors using a single smartphone can silently localize and track individuals in their home or office from outside walls, by just listening to ambient WiFi signals. We experimentally validate this attack in 11 real-world locations, and show user tracking with high accuracy. Finally, we propose and evaluate defenses including geo-fencing, rate limiting, and signal obfuscation by WiFi access points.

Artificial Intelligence gives us a uniquely fascinating and clear perspective at the nature of our minds and our relationship to reality. We will discuss perception, mental representation, agency, consciousness, selfhood, and how they can arise in a computational system, like our brain.

This is a clean-room implementation of rsync with a BSD (ISC) license. It's compatible with a modern rsync (3.1.3 is used for testing), but accepts only a subset of rsync's command-line arguments.

Rapid serial visual presentation is an experimental model frequently used to examine the temporal characteristics of attention. The RSVP paradigm requires participants to look at a continuous presentation of visual items which is around 10 items per second.

Transport Layer Security Secure Remote Password (TLS-SRP) ciphersuites are a set of cryptographic protocols that provide secure communication based on passwords, using an SRP password-authenticated key exchange.

Pirlo was designed to eliminate and automate many of these manual processes. In this post we will describe Pirlo, a flexible system designed to validate and configure network switches and to ensure the reliability of servers before they enter production. We will explain the design of Pirlo and its components, and show how some of the design choices we have made enable Dropbox to manage our physical infrastructure operations efficiently and safely.

For decades, discussion of software reuse was far more common than actual software reuse. Today, the situation is reversed: developers reuse software written by others every day, in the form of software dependencies, and the situation goes mostly unexamined.

Since 2013, we at the SmartData@Polito lab, Politecnico di Torino, have been conducting a large-scale measurement study from the perspective of a Tier-1 ISP based in Europe. We do this to better characterize Internet usage trends, as well as the technologies and infrastructure changes, that are being implemented by the industry for the benefit of forecasting potential changes and expenses.

This post describes WePay's highly available MySQL architecture, and how we achieve short outage times during failures.

Interactive Learning and Training Platform for Software Engineers. Helping Developers Learn and Companies Increase Adoption.

This web site presents one glyph for each of the world’s writing systems. It is the first step of the Missing Scripts Project, a long-term initiative that aims to identify writing systems which are not yet encoded in the Unicode standard. As of today, there are still 146 scripts not yet encoded in Unicode.

Critical but oft-neglected service metrics that every SRE and product owner should care about.

The Goldilocks principle is named by analogy to the children's story The Three Bears, in which a little girl named Goldilocks tastes three different bowls of porridge and finds that she prefers porridge that is neither too hot nor too cold, but has just the right temperature.

A tiny web auditor with strong opinions.

Monitoring one's current standing with respect to goals can promote effective self‐regulation. However, the present review suggests that there is an ostrich problem such that, in many instances, people have a tendency to “bury their head in the sand” and intentionally avoid or reject information that would help them to monitor their goal progress.