Fraud in Digital Advertising

Posted on 2017-10-22 by jcs

I’ve written many times (1, 2, 3, 4) about adtech and the associated fraud. The sooner the advertising industry stops tracking us the better it will be for them, the advertisers, and us. A recent BuzzFeed article indicates that the problem is much more widespread and serious than most of us believed. It turns out the fraud is rampant in digital advertising and even “legitimate” players are aware of and profiting from it. The article is long but it’s worth a read.

Tracking is infuriating and needs to end but this article calls digital advertising itself into question. In addition to the fraud, many advertisers are finding that digital advertising is largely ineffective. Proctor and Gamble, for example, recently decided to forego an large advertising buy and found it made little difference to its business.

All this got me thinking about what happens if advertisers give up on digital advertising altogether. Will the content that we enjoy and have come to depend on disappear too? Probably not because the Internet is eating all the other content delivery systems so advertisers don’t have anywhere else to go. What has to change is that the advertising agencies have to clean up their act and provide ads that consumers are willing to watch or read and to provide real value to their clients, the advertisers. It’s pretty clear that that means—just for starters—no more tracking and no more fraud.

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Practical GPG

Posted on 2017-10-21 by jcs

Over at Hackaday, Pedro Umbelino has a nice article on the practical mechanics of using GPG and, more generally, public key cryptography. Rather than looking at its integration into a particular email client, Umbelino demonstrates everything on the command line. That’s handy because sometimes you want to sign, verify, or encrypt documents that aren’t email. For me, this most often this comes up when I want to verify a signed software download, such as the latest Emacs distribution from GNU.

The hardest part of public key cryptography is the verification of public keys. It’s almost certainly the reason that encrypted emails have never gained traction. Umbelino’s article covers this in more depth than most similar posts but at the end of the day, you’re pretty much stuck with the web of trust and pubic key servers. If you have a few people with whom you need to exchange encrypted documents, you can sign each others keys and the system works well.

If you’ve wanted to try public key cryptography, Umbelino’s article provides a good go-by. You’ll probably want to explore how it’s handled by your email client because unless you’re using it only to verify signed downloads, you’ll likely use it mostly with email. The article is definitely worth a read.

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Lists in Word

Posted on 2017-10-20 by jcs

So true. So very, very true:

Note: Unfortunately, the embedded tweet has the formatting messed up a bit. Click on it to see the original.

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Which-key and Calc

Posted on 2017-10-19 by jcs

I ran across this excellent video on Emacs calc and was preparing to write about it. During my research, I discovered that I’d already written about it. That was a couple of years ago so you can consider this a reminder to watch it if you haven’t already. Calc is much much more than a simple calculator and can do some pretty astounding things. Karthik C covers only a few of them but the video does serve to show you powerful it is. For example, if it’s been a few years since you last sat in a Calculus class and you need to know the indefinite integral \(\int x^{2}e^{x}\,dx\), just power up calc, type in x^2 exp(x), press a i and discover the integral is \(x^{2}e^x+2e^{x}-2xe^{x}\). As I say, watch the video. If you want to start using calc, you should also download a copy of Sue D. Nymme’s cheat sheet. It’s, by far, the best one I know of.

Once I discovered that I’d already written about the video, I abandoned the post but started playing around with calc just for fun. It was then that I discovered something new. If you’re familiar with calc or watch the video, you know that you can get help by hitting a prefix key and ?. For example, if you can’t remember how to integrate, you can type a ? to get a list of options. However, with which-key installed, that all happens automatically. If you type a and pause before hitting another key, which-key will pop up one of its normal help buffers with all the options. That very nice and reason enough to install which-key if you’re a calc user. Actually, unless you have a photographic memory you should install which-key.

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Emacs Line Modes

Posted on 2017-10-18 by jcs

LigerLearn has another nice video up. This time it’s about line wrapping, line truncation, and visual line mode. If you’ve ever been confused about visual line mode and what it’s for, this video will help clear things up for you.

The video begins with a demonstration of how many Emacs commands don’t act in the expected way when operating on long lines that are wrapped on the screen. It then goes on to show how visual line mode solves these problems and gives you a better user experience both visually and operationally.

The video is short—5 minutes, 40 seconds—so it’s easy to find time for it. If your understanding of visual line mode is that it just automatically adjusts line wrapping as you edit, you should take a few minutes to watch this video.

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Remote Sudo

Posted on 2017-10-17 by jcs

If your workflow involves administering remote systems or something similar, you probably have the following burned into your muscle memory. If, on the other hand, you’re like me and don’t have occasion to need root access on a remote machine very often, you can probably use a reminder. If you’re in the second category, here, courtesy of abo-abo, you go:

If you click on the tweet, you’ll see the next tweet, which explains that “cloud” is the name of a remote system defined in abo-abo’s ~/.ssh/config. Defining often used remote systems like this is something I do too and it saves me a bunch of time and mental cycles trying to remember domains or, worse yet, IP addresses.

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Mathematical Typesetting

Posted on 2017-10-16 by jcs

I’ve always been fascinated by the typesetting process and have a particular fondness for the old mechanical typesetters such as the Linotype. I wrote about that in this post from a couple of years ago. That post has a link to a wonderful film that describes in detail how the Linotype worked. It really was a mechanical marvel.

Over at Practically Efficient Eddie Smith has a long post that describes the special problems that mathematical typesetting presents. If you think of a reasonably complicated mathematical expression, the Cauchy Integral Formula, say, \[f(a)=\frac {1}{2\pi{}i}\oint_\Gamma \frac{f(z)}{z-a}\,dz\] you can see right away why it was such a problem. There are Greek letters, fractions, and special symbols that can take up either multiple lines or have to be set in part of one of those lines. It was difficult and expensive to typeset.

Smith discusses some of the solutions to these problems but until fairly recently, you had a choice of expensive, essentially hand-set type or something that looked ugly on the page. It was that “ugly on the page” part that provoked Don Knuth to take a decade off from writing The Art of Computer Programming and develop \(\TeX\). I have the original version of Volume 2 of AOCP that was produced with the traditional hot lead Monotype typesetter. I remember seeing the revised edition that was produced by an early phototypesetter in a book store. It looked terrible. That book was the impetus for \(\TeX\).

Now, of course, typesetting mathematics isn’t much harder than typesetting anything else. \(\TeX\) and especially \(\LaTeX\) have made it so easy that many, or maybe even most, authors typeset their work themselves. The publisher may tweak the \(\LaTeX\) a bit but essentially all the hard work is already done.

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Start an Engineering Notebook

Posted on 2017-10-15 by jcs

Camilla over at Winterflower argues that software engineers should keep an engineering notebook. That’s advice that everybody knows they should follow but that too many of us don’t. We’re busy and we think, “I’ll remember what I just did, I don’t need to write it down.” Of course, a little later we don’t remember and have to go through the pain of figuring things out all over again.

I keep a journal in which I record everything I do and discover but I’ve only been doing this for about 3 years. I really wish I’d started earlier. A good way of making it easier to get started and keep with it is to have a good system for recording things.

Of course, as an Emacs and Org mode user that means I have a built-in infrastructure for such things. One of the things that Emacs and Org mode provide is an easy way of retrieving information from your notebook. Org mode tags provide an excellent way of finding things. For example months ago I revised the way I compile Emacs (which can be a bit finicky on macOS), put it in my journal, and added the tags emacs and compiling. When I want to compile Emacs, I merely type Ctrl+c a m emacs:compiling to find all my journal entries with those tags. Even better, I have the commands in a code block so I can run them automatically by just typing Ctrl+c Ctrl+c in the block. That’s a real win over trying to figure out everything each time I compile a new Emacs.

There’s lots of examples like this, of course, and the more you put into your notebook, the more you can get out and the easier it will make things for you. Of you aren’t already keeping an engineering notebook, you should start. Or at least make a New Years resolution to start. I promise you, you’ll be glad you did.

Update [2017-12-13 Wed 14:48]: comiling → compiling

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Everybody Wants to Get Into the Act

Posted on 2017-10-14 by jcs

BuzzFeed—I know, I know—is reporting that the Treasury Department is now spying on Americans and their financial data. As the late, great Jimmy Durante used to say, “Everybody wants to get into the act.” This spying is so egregious that even Treasury employees are complaining.

The Treasury’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis (OIA) is gathering and storing financial data on Americans without warrants and apparently without any legal justification. The OIA says that everything they do is legal and that the BuzzFeed article is inaccurate but a senior Treasury official says flatly that it’s domestic spying.

The issues are a bit arcane but the BuzzFeed article does a good job of explaining what’s going on. Basically it’s another case of the Iron Law of Data Collection. In this case, data collected from the banks on money transfers over $10,000 that is supposed to be used to prevent money laundering is being mined and stored by the OIA over the objections of the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, the agency tasked with collecting the data and preventing money laundering.

It seems that you just can’t be a real government agency without spying on your citizens. Pretty soon, Animal Control will start spying on us. Oh wait, they already are.

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Elisp for Configuration

Posted on 2017-10-13 by jcs

Chris Done has a nice introduction to Elisp for configuration. This introduction is aimed at programmers who are relatively new to Emacs and want to start doing some simple customization.

He doesn’t intend to provide an thorough guide to the Elisp language but rather to give you just enough to be able to use more comprehensive documentation such as the Elisp manual. He assumes the reader has enough programming experience that an “Introduction of Programming” section isn’t necessary.

If you fall into the intended readership, you should give Done’s article a read. It might help you get started making Emacs your own editor.

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