http://www.fastcoexist.com/1681677/a-new-map-of-the-us-created-by-how-our-dollar-bills-move#1
Theoretical physicist Dirk Brockmann used the dollar bill tracking site Where’s George to see how money moves, and create new state boundaries based on our economies. The darker the blue lines, the less likely it is a dollar bill will have crossed it.
Nice article by CloudFlare with a video of Syria turning off the internet for the country.
CDNet on how Egypt did the same thing.
I teach a class on Processing, which is a simplified version of Java designed to enable people to easy create graphics. My class focuses on data visualization. Below is my list of publicly available data sets which I encourage my students to use in their visualizations.
IMDB is a website that maintains a list of movies, actors, actresses, and information about them. They offer a set of downloadable information sets. The sets can be a bit challenging to parse though, so there also exists some Perl parsing scripts.
StackOverflow has a list of publicly available data sets.
Schneier has an interesting article on his blog about end user education.
Sony Hotkeys Utilities (SOAOTH-606A0000-0042.exe) disables User Account Control (UAC) on my Windows 7 machine.
After re-installing Windows 7 on my Sony laptop I wanted to make my hotkeys (like volume) work again so I installed the Hotkeys utility by Sony. A few weeks later I got suspicious when several programs I opened had “Administrator:” in the title when I hadn’t approved any UAC. I checked my logs and the last program to ask for privilege elevation was the Hotkey utility.
I re-enabled UAC dialogs and re-booted the machine. I re-downloaded the utility from Sony, installed it, and was asked to approve a UAC dialog (so UAC was definitely enabled). Sony software asked that I reboot the machine to “finish installation.” Immediately after the Sony dialog appeared a balloon in the bottom right appeared with the following text: “You must restart your computer to turn off User Account Control.” Sony’s software was the only thing running and I hadn’t opened any User Account Control settings since restarting the computer.
I let the software reboot the computer. After the reboot Sony software continued to install itself. I opened the User Account Control settings panel and verified that UAC was disabled.
Sony’s software finished installing itself, theoretically requiring UAC to do so, and asks to reboot a second time. I allowed it to reboot the machine and after the second reboot I pulled up the UAC settings again to verify that they were still disabled. As can be seen below the settings stayed with UAC disabled after two reboots.
Turning off UAC dialogs without user notification is a very dangerous thing to do. My computer spent several weeks in a state where any program that wanted to install could just do so without my approval. My programs were running with “Administrator” in the title because they were running with Administrator privileges (I manually verified this for PowerShell). No well behaved software should ever change security settings on a computer without notifying the user.
A couple of limitations to consider
A map of the world showing the source of attacks and statistics about past attack rates.
http://www.sicherheitstacho.eu/
Article from ARSTechnica detailing a phone scam where the caller uses the errors and warning messages shown in Windows Event Viewer to demonstrate the existance of “viruses” on the computer.
Researchers at Berkeley created a map of Certificate Authorities.
http://notary.icsi.berkeley.edu/trust-tree/
The EFF SSL Observatory also tracks Certificate Authorities and has a downloadable MySQL table of them.
https://www.eff.org/observatory
Also ICIS Certificate Notary system by Berkely
http://notary.icsi.berkeley.edu/
Open source code and open source construction directions for building an eye tracker.
http://code.google.com/p/experteyes/
To import/output csv you need some permissions. As root on mysql run the following code:
> grant all privileges
on YOUR_DATABASE.*
to 'YOUR_USER'@'localhost'
identified by 'your_password';
> GRANT FILE ON *.* TO 'YOUR_USER'@'localhost';
> flush privileges;
For security reasons mysql can only export files to a limited number of directories, this is especially true with Ubuntu which now uses AppArmor. You can change permissions to get around the security restrictions, but it is a major headache. It is much easier to export the file to /tmp and then move it.
To export into the /tmp directory use the following MySQL command. Make sure to replace “database.table_name” with your database and table name.
select * into outfile '/tmp/outfile.csv' FIELDS TERMINATED BY ',' ENCLOSED BY '"' ESCAPED BY '\\' LINES TERMINATED BY '\n' from database.table_name;
Now move the file from /tmp to your favorite directory:
cp /tmp/outfile.csv /home/kami/data/
Unfortunately there is no way to remove /tmp/outfile.csv without using sudo.
For security reasons the ability to load files from the local directory is disabled by default. To temporarily override this restriction use the “–local-infile=1″ parameter when starting MySQL.
mysql --local-infile=1 -u USERNAME -p DATABASE
Lets say my csv file out.csv looked like the following:
a,b,c
1,2,3
2,2,3
2,3,4
The MySQL table I want to load the file into is called my_table and has columns a,b,c,d. I would use the following MySQL command.
LOAD DATA local INFILE '/home/kami/outfile.csv'
INTO TABLE my_table
FIELDS TERMINATED BY ','
ENCLOSED BY '"'
ESCAPED BY '\\'
LINES TERMINATED BY '\n'
IGNORE 1 LINES
(a,b,c);
This command will load the csv file ‘/home/kami/outfile.csv’ into the columns a, b and c in table my_table. It will also ignore the first row.