Month: May 2014

Google Street View vs. captcha

Google Online Security Blog shares the news on the innovation in image recognition technology used in Google Street View:

Translating a street address to an exact location on a map is harder than it seems. To take on this challenge and make Google Maps even more useful, we’ve been working on a new system to help locate addresses even more accurately, using some of the technology from the Street View and reCAPTCHA teams.

This technology finds and reads street numbers in Street View, and correlates those numbers with existing addresses to pinpoint their exact location on Google Maps. We’ve described these findings in a scientific paper at the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR). In this paper, we show that this system is able to accurately detect and read difficult numbers in Street View with 90% accuracy.

Here are some examples of correctly identified street numbers – quite impressive!

street numbers

What’s even more interesting that pushing this technology for good uses also empowers the evil side of things:

Turns out that this new algorithm can also be used to read CAPTCHA puzzles—we found that it can decipher the hardest distorted text puzzles from reCAPTCHA with over 99% accuracy.

Oops!

What roles should the first 10 employees of a tech company be?

Quora runs the question: What roles should the first 10 employees of a tech company be?  Here is my favorite answer:

  1. jack of all trades, master of a few
  2. jack of all trades, master of a few
  3. jack of all trades, master of a few
  4. jack of all trades, master of a few
  5. jack of all trades, master of a few
  6. jack of all trades, master of a few
  7. jack of all trades, master of a few
  8. jack of all trades, master of a few
  9. jack of all trades, master of a few
  10. someone that can sell ice to eskimos

Popcorn Time comes to Android

Lifehacker reports some good news for movie loving owners of Android devices:

Movie streaming service Popcorn Time has had some trouble staying in business (for obvious reasons), but it’s back on Android with a free, open source app that streams movies directly to your device.P

The service works by downloading torrents in the background while you watch. As with any service like this, both legal films as well as illegal, copyrighted movies show up, so it’s up to you to decide how you use it. Unlike the web-based versions of the last couple months, though, it won’t be as easy to pull the plug on an open source app.

Here is the direct link to Popcorn Time on Google Play Store.

Akamai vs Incapsula – Comparison Review

Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs) are the current evolution of old school CDNs platforms tasked with responsibility not only for website’s performance, but also for its security and availability. By singlehandedly covering these mission crucial aspects of content and application delivery these technologies allow you to replace multiple appliances with one full service solution. With that, ADCs help eliminate many integration related issues, while also dramatically cutting down all setup, acquisition and maintenance costs.

In the world of ADCs, Incapsula is perhaps the most promising up-and-comer, a cloud-based service that seems to have the technology and the business sense needed to position itself at the same level as its legacy competitors.

It’s been almost two years since I last blogged about Incapsula. Now with recent announcement of its load balancing and failover features, I decided to update my review by pitching Incapsula against Akamai – a globally recognized CDN industry leader, who is also making a leap into the world of full service application delivery.

For this “head to head” comparison of Akamai vs Incapsula, I’ll be focusing on security, performance, availability and – of course – price of service.

You can find the full comparison here but for those of you who want to skip to the chase, here’s what I think about in a nutshell:

Akamai vs Incapsula: In a Nutshell

Incapsula simply offers more for less. You get all of the essentials you would expect, including a robust CDN, PCI compliant Web Application Firewall, DDoS protection and integrated high availability features (both load balancing and failover), all at very reasonable price point.

Not only that, but when compared with Akamai it looks like most of Incapsula features actually offer more, both in terms of their functionality and in term of their overall synergy. One great example is Incapsula’s Real Time view which complements its custom security rules engine and load balancing features by providing instant feedback on every action taken.

In fact, when looking at value for money, Akamai does not offer any tangible benefits – at least not for those who are looking beyond a CDN-only option.