Programmer creates 800,000 books algorithmically, starts selling them on Amazon

When we think about writing books, especially the technical kind, we think about a person or small group of people hunched over their keyboards typing away. There’s a good reason for that mental image: that’s how the majority of books are written. That’s not the way it has to be, though. Philip M. Parker, a marketing professor at INSEAD, has a patented system for algorithmically compiling data into book form. Thanks to Parker’s system, Amazon now has over 800,000 books for sale from his company. Other organizations pay for this service to compile data for their reports, so the system clearly has flexibility.

In a fascinating piece covering the news the sheer power of this system was revealed. Countless topics can be listed on sites like Amazon — everything you’d ever want to know. The funny part is that the books don’t even have to be written yet. Thanks to digital distribution and print-on-demand solutions, a whole new book can be generated on an incredibly obscure topic as soon as someone buys it. The system will be able to compile an entire book on the subject in the range of ten minutes to a few hours. It’s that simple.

This video below features Parker himself explaining how the process works, and why it’s useful. Because of his specialty in marketing, it’s easy to assume that these books are designed for spam-like purposes, but it does also have benefits to traditional writing outside of the amazing speed. Specifically, he points out that in the case of very rare diseases, it’s unlikely that any books would be written in the first place. Especially when you’re looking at statistics and data, having a computer compile and find potentially significant data is very useful. While the books won’t be particularly creative, they absolutely do have a place.

The technology isn’t just for books. Videos and games can be generated as well. When you’re focusing on areas like developing and distributing content all over the world in dozens of languages, traditional manpower isn’t exactly efficient. Humans just don’t have the ability to translate content to that many languages in a time and cost effective manner. Computers can knock that out during a long lunch. Using this system, it is possible to spread information to places that used to be impossible to reach. Computers won’t be replacing humans for writing the great American novel or entertaining the masses on TV, but it is obvious that computers will be an increasing fixture in the analysis and translation of content. This is a perfect complement to human creativity — not something for creatives, researchers, or consumers to fear.

[Image credit: Willi Heidelbach]

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How to dual-boot Windows 8 and Windows 7

One of the big barriers to upgrading to Windows 8 is that Windows 7 is so good. For keyboard-and-mouse users, Windows 8 isn’t a hugely compelling upgrade — and without judicious use of third-party apps tobring back the Start menu and other core Windows 7 features, Windows 8 can actually make the desktop experience worse.

But what if you want to try out Windows 8? What if you want to take the Metro Start screen for a spin? (Who knows, maybe you’ll like it.) What if you want to give Windows 8 a chance?

One method you could use is virtualization, where you quite literally have Windows 8 open in a window on your Windows 7 PC. Virtualization isn’t really viable if you’re looking to truly experience Windows 8 and everything that it entails, though. For that, you need to dual-boot.

How to dual-boot/multi-boot Windows 8 with Windows 7

This guide assumes that you already have Windows 7 (or XP or Vista) installed. If you’ve already got Windows 8 installed, and you want to install Windows 7 as an additional OS, this guide might still work — but no guarantees.

First things first, you should backup any important documents. You shouldn’t lose any files during this process, but it’s better to be safe than sorry. See our Backup Masterclass for tips on how to backup your data efficiently and securely.

With that out of the way, hit Start, typediskmgmt.msc, and press Enter. This will open the Disk Management console. You should see a big (or small) list of all the drives currently attached to your computer.

Find the drive that Windows 7 is installed on (it should be marked as “Boot” or “System”), right click it, and click Shrink Volume. In the window that pops up, you ideally need a figure that’s around 50,000MB (50GB). If your hard drive is very full, this might not be possible. In theory the minimum install size for Windows 8 is around 20GB, but I really wouldn’t proceed without at least 30-50GB. If Disk Management refuses to shrink your volumes, you may need to try a third-party tool such as Paragon’s Hard Disk Manager.

Once the volume has been shrunk, a black, “Unallocated” region will appear at the end of the drive. Right click this and select New Simple Volume. Click through the dialog windows and give the new volume a memorable name such as Windows 8. Don’t change any other settings. This process will format the new partition, which may take a little while.

Installing Windows 8

At this point, all you really need to do is install Windows 8. You might opt to install a full version of Windows 8, or you can grab a 90-day evaluation copy. Either way, you want to slot the DVD (or USB stick) into your computer, reboot, and begin the installation process. (You may need to change the boot priority of your DVD drive/USB stick, which can be done in the BIOS).

When given the option, select a Custom install (not Upgrade). On the next screen you’ll be shown a bunch of partitions/volumes. Select the one that’s labeled Windows 8 (or whatever you called it). Be absolutely certain that you’ve selected the right volume, then click Next.

The slick Windows 8 installer will now do its thing. It will reboot once or twice, but eventually you’ll be greeted with a multi-boot menu that allows you to select which OS you want to load (Windows 8, Windows 7, or any other OSes that’re installed). Windows 8 will load by default after a few seconds, but you can change it back to Windows 7 by clicking “Change defaults or choose other options” at the bottom of the screen. Voilà: You now have a PC that dual-boots Windows 8 and Windows 7.

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Fusion power at home, or, how small science will defeat big science

Fusion research is known for its huge projects — and its huge lack of tangible success. Big machines like the Princeton tokamak and theLivermore laser have indeed managed to fuse a few nuclei, but have required too much energy to get too little in return. A Brooklyn web developer named Mark Suppes recently created fusion in in his own home, using a much simpler device called a Farnsworth fusor. Accessing declassified experiments, and using open-source software, open-source hardware and crowdsourced funding, he has turned the traditional approach to scientific research on its head — and he makes it look easy.

In his early teenage years, Philo Farnsworth presented a concept for the all-electronic “image dissector,” and soon developed it into the first functioning television set. He successfully defended his rights to the design against larger corporations like RCA, which tried to claim it in a patent, and in the process became a legend and inspiration for private inventors and DIYers everywhere. Farnsworth’s skill at controlling electrons with electric fields later led him to develop a small nuclear fusion device. The device used inertial electrostatic confinement, as opposed to magnetic confinement which is used to fuse charged particles in the larger and more complex machines.

Suppes first heard about the Farnesworth fusor from Robert Brussard’s Google Tech Talk.With DARPA’s permission, Brussard described his work on Polywell reactors. The Polywell is a refinement of the Farnesworth fusor, but has the potential for significant net energy production. Suppes knew little of physics, but decided that with a little help from the open source community, he could make a fusor for himself. His blog
and Github repository show step-by-step exactly how he did it. In the video below, you can see a talk that Suppes gave at Wired 2012.

Can you really create fusion at home?

The biggest challenge to homebrew fusion is creating a spot where the conditions are just right. Typically a vacuum chamber that can tolerate some heat is needed. In university and industrial research labs a vacuum system is built using standard erector set pieces called“conflat flange” mounts. Prior to Ebay, the best way to get value out of an old vacuum system was to recycle it for the nickel and chrome in the steel. Today however, passing these systems on to someone who can use them is just a matter of a few clicks.

Another thing Suppes had going for him was the capability to design and 3D print heat resistant parts in the complex geometry needed for the Polywell device. The Polywell is basically a set of electromagnetic coils positioned in a precise geometry that enables charged particles to be confined. Ceramic is needed because other heat resistant materials, like metals, would perturb the field and let particles escape.

The most important a tool for Suppes was the willingness of skilled individuals to help him at every turn. As the 38th person to build a working fusor, there was a lot of technical know-how floating around. Suppes was able to collect that information into one place and package it in a way anyone can understand. His approach of publish first, then review, has been catching on as the new way to do science. Not every person cares about the research that their tax dollars fund, but those who do care have demanded access to it — and are getting it.

A cautionary note is perhaps in order. David Hahn, also known as the radioactive boy scout, was a child prodigy who built a subcritical fission reactor in his backyard using tiny amounts of radioactive material from many smoke detectors. He eventually became obsessed with his hobby and landed himself in the hospital for treatment of radiation injuries, and then in jail for larceny. The risks from radiation are not the same with fission as with fusion. High energy X-rays and neutrons are created in a fusor and need need to be respected accordingly.

The fire that Farnsworth lit years ago continues to burn bright. The untimely death of Brussard, just a year after his Google Talk and initial results with the Polywell device offered the torch, and Suppes and others have run with it. Big science concentrates all the money and knowledge on large projects that can’t fail, but it is slowly yielding to small science, where nimble, crowd-funded and -sourced projects can gracefully die if they don’t yield productive results. Not every scientist is compelled to fuse atoms, nor every layperson, but with enough people working on the problem and communicating their results and techniques openly, humankind will one day harness the power of the Sun (perhaps through a Sun-encompassing Dyson sphere, hm?)

Now read: Inside California’s star power fusion facility

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Apple, Intel, Samsung petition congress for more spectrum in search of faster wireless

As more wireless devices like smartphones and tablets are sold and used, the current infrastructure becomes substantially more taxed. Compression and caching technologies help a good bit, but as we use more data wirelessly, the only way forward is by allotting more wireless spectrum to telcos and device manufacturers. Yesterday, a letter from Alcatel-Lucent, Apple, Cisco, Ericsson, Intel, Nokia, Qualcomm, Research In Motion and Samsung was sent to US Congress in hopes of fast-tracking more spectrum to be freed up for purchase.

In the letter, of which excerpts have been published, the alliance says that “we joined this debate because policymakers need to know that we cannot simply engineer our way out of this problem.” Despite increasing moves to auction off more television spectrum, that’s not enough for these companies. They want access to the much coveted parts of the radio spectrum held by the federal government. In a less than subtle manner, the letter essentially accuses federal agencies of being inefficient and lazy with their prime cut of radio frequencies. They want federal agencies to increase efficiency, share bands with each other instead of using separate bands, and to lease the underutilized parts of their assigned spectrum.

Amusingly, the companies also attempt to link this spectrum crisis to the fiscal crisis that the government is facing with the so-called “fiscal cliff.” While requiring federal agencies to optimize their use of frequencies would obviously cause some serious friction and short-term costs, it would truly benefit the US government to lease more of its spectrum to the highest bidder. Everyone wins in this scenario. The government gets some cold hard cash, the telcos and device manufacturers get more wiggle room, and users get faster wireless connections and better coverage.

Emergency frequencies, like those used by police and fire companies, obviously shouldn’t be compromised by cell phone companies. However, the majority of that spectrum is used and partly controlled at the state and county level, so that would be difficult to manipulate or sell on a national level no matter what. It’s not at all impossible to sell that spectrum, but there is a lot of lower hanging fruit to be picked. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s Office of Spectrum Management (OSM) has a huge PDF summary all about federal spectrum use. Without a doubt, congress and the OSM will be able to find nice big chunks to lease out to the telcos. It will take a bit of finagling to get everything right and to calm the nerves of those losing the spectrum, but it will benefit us all in the long run.

[Image credit: Karl Baron]

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Microsoft’s share of the consumer market has dropped from 95% to 20% in 8 years

This chart says it all: From 2004 to 2012, Microsoft’s share of the consumer computing market has plummeted from 95% to 20%. For 20 years, thanks to the desktop PC, Microsoft enjoyed an almost complete monopoly of consumer computing — and yet today it is a minority stake holder, languishing behind Google’s 42% and Apple’s 24%.

Never has Microsoft’s precarious position been so starkly illustrated. Of course, we’ve known that the PC market has been basically static for a few years, and Microsoft’s smartphone and tablet offerings aren’t exactly exploding onto the market — but 20%? I don’t think anyone would’ve guessed that things were that bad for the 800-pound gorilla of consumer tech.

Taking a closer look at the graph, it’s easy to see that 2005 was the turning point: In one year Microsoft drops precipitously from 95% to 49% of the consumer compute market. Unfortunately, Goldman Sachs, which produced the chart, doesn’t elaborate on these figures. It isn’t entirely clear what happened in 2005: The iPhone didn’t come out until 2007, and the chart doesn’t show Apple’s market share moving at all in 2007. To be honest, I have no idea what caused Apple (or “Other”) to shoot up in 2005. Sachs says it is due to “mainstream adoption of non-PC consumer computing devices,” but I am hard stretched to think of a device or breed of devices that could cause such a monumental shift in market share. Perhaps Sachs got its dates wrong, and 2005 is actually meant to be 2007.

For a few years, the Microsoft/Apple/Other status quo is preserved, and then from 2008 to 2012 Google grows from 1% to 42% of the market. As of today, Apple has a 24% share of the consumer market (iOS and OS X), Microsoft has 20% (Windows, Windows Phone), Other accounts for 14% (smart TVs, e-book readers, etc.), and Google absolutely dominates with 42% (Android, Chrome OS). Looking forward, Goldman Sachs paints a slightly rosier picture for Microsoft — gaining from 20% to 26% by 2016 — but it’s fairly safe to say that Microsoft will never again have a 95% share of the consumer market.

There is no doubt that Microsoft’s dizzying decline is due to its seriously late entrance into the smartphone and tablet markets. Windows Phone 7 crawled out of gestation in October 2010, a full three years after the iPhone and two years after the first Android devices. The touch- and tablet-oriented Windows 8 and Surface RT tablet came out in October 2012, two and a half years after the iPad. Unless you’ve been asleep under a rock for the last decade, you will have seen how the entire tech landscape can change in a year. It was bad enough that Microsoft was caught with its pants down with the iPhone, but it’s almost unforgivable that it also missed the tablet train. This is probably why Windows chief Steven Sinofsky was let go, incidentally.

Short of praying and plowing billions of dollars into marketing — and I’m sure Microsoft is doing both — there isn’t really anything else that Microsoft can do. Generally, if you’re late to a tech party, you might as well not turn up at all. Microsoft has to innovate dramatically and lead from the front — and if the behemoth can’t let go of its Desktop and Office baggage, this simply isn’t going to happen. Realistically, I think it will be very tough for Microsoft to change its ways — it’s too big, too old, and too expensive to suddenly change its entire consumer strategy. The tech industry is all about the fast-moving innovator or fresh-faced debutante, and Microsoft is neither of those things.

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Linux drops support for Intel’s 386 processors, but does it really matter?

If you’re the type of person that not only heavily uses the Linux platform, but also has a bunch of very old processors lying around for everyday use, you’ll be disappointed to know that Linux has just dropped support for Intel’s 386 processors. Say goodbye to that hobby Linux operating system you’ve been building on your twenty-year-old rig.

Linux and the i386 have something of an intertwined history. Intel first released the i386 processor back in 1985, and Linux’s source code was first released back in 1991, after Linus Torvalds developed the operating system on a 386. Eventually, back in 2006, Intelannounced that it would finally cease production of the i386 the following year. Linux continued to support the processor years after it died, and has now finally abandoned said support.

Aside from being free and highly customizable, one of the best features of Linux is that it always maintained support for older or lower-end systems, helping to breathe new life into that old Thinkpad sitting at the bottom of your closet. Case in point: The Raspberry Pi, extremely tiny and underpowered by today’s desktop standards, comes stock with a Linux distribution. As for why Torvalds decided to drop i386 support from the Linux kernel, Red Hat employee and Linux hacker Ingo Molnar explained it was a simple matter of the extra work involved in continuing support not outweighing the resulting benefits. He noted that the complexity of supporting the 386 architecture “has plagued us with extra work whenever we wanted to change SMP primitives, for years.”

A little snarky in his explanation, Molnar goes on to say: “Unfortunately there’s a nostalgic cost: your old original 386 DX33 system from early 1991 won’t be able to boot modern Linux kernels anymore. Sniff.” Torvalds followed Molnar’s remark with cold acceptance, stating “I’m not sentimental. Good riddance.”

Torvalds announced the dropped support just two days after Linux 3.7 was released, though no mention of the dropped support appears in the release notes. Along with removing i386 support, Linux 3.7 brings some other major changes and additions. It includes completely new architecture for ARM 64-bit CPUs, as well as the ability to build a single ARM kernel that is portable across different hardware setups.

In the scheme of things, Linux dropping i386 support won’t really affect much other than the staunchest of hobbyists. The act holds more historical weight than it does any kind of practical significance, signaling the end of a relatively long era.

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Internet Explorer flaw lets websites track your every mouse movement, and MS refuses to fix it

Security flaws are inevitable in operating systems and applications. Modern software is incredibly complex, and even the best developers in the world aren’t perfect. How the public responds to security flaws largely depends on how the developer reacts to the exploit. If it responds quickly with a promise to patch the flaw, and then delivers the fix in a timely manner, all is forgiven most of the time. Sadly, an exploit found in Internet Explorer that tracks mouse movement and certain key presses — even when IE is minimized, or the tab is in the background — isn’t getting patched by Microsoft.

A web analytics company alerted Microsoft to this quirk back in October. The security vulnerability affects all versions of Internet Explorer from version 6 through 10. While Microsoft has acknowledged the issue, it isn’t going to be patched in the near future. This is a problem, not only for the obvious privacy concerns, but also for security. Some people use software keyboards on their screen specifically to reduce the chance of their passwords being tracked by a keylogger. With this flaw, unscrupulous people could record the mouse movements used for entering a password just by having a web page loaded in the background. Microsoft even advocates the security benefits of using mice-based password systems with its picture password feature in Windows 8. Yikes.

In this demo, the possibilities for mapping cursor movement are shown quite clearly. The video below even shows how some simple analysis of mouse movements can be used to gather private information like passwords or phone numbers. Even scarier is the revelation that at least two ad analytics companies are already using this exploit to track users. If you weren’t freaked out about advertisers tracking you before, now is the time to think again. The site that revealed the flaw even has a challenge posted for people to try to decipher tracked mouse movements. The leader board shows that it takes less than half an hour for someone to figure out what was being typed on a software keyboard. It’s very scary stuff.

The methodology of exploiting this flaw to track cursor movements and modifier key presses is out in the wild, and any generic ad on any trustworthy website can use it to track what you’re doing. If you don’t want to be tracked, you do have options available. Firstly, you can switch to a different browser. Chrome or Firefox are fantastic options, and they aren’t affected by this flaw. Secondly, you could turn off JavaScript in IE. While this does hinder the usefulness of most modern websites, it will prevent IE from passing on your mouse movements. These aren’t optimal solutions, but Microsoft has given us little choice in the matter. Unless it steps up and patches this flaw, it just isn’t safe to use IE withJavaScript turned on.

[Image Credit: Edith Soto]

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Father-daughter duo have the world’s first brain-to-brain ‘telepathic’ conversation

It should be fairly obvious why, all technological considerations aside, there has been much more research into letting machines extract our thoughts, rather than insert them. Mind reading is a scary-enough concept all on its own — but mindwriting? It calls to mind the hacker deities of cyber punk novels; skinny, trench-swathed Neos projecting e-thoughts into the skulls of passing civilians. With such basic issues of privacy on the line, it took the trusting relationship between UK scientist Christopher James and his adventurous young daughter to give us our first stab at developing real telepathic, brain-to-brain communication technology.

James’ process of telepathic communication is rough, its results shaky, but the principle of brain-to-brain (B2B) communication is unquestionably met. It begins with the by-now standard collection of mental information, achieved in this case with electrodes placed against the skull. “I only used scalp electrodes on my daughter, since my wife wouldn’t let me drill holes in my daughter’s head,” James told the Times of India.

In the experiment, the sender imagined a series of binary digits, broadcasting their choices by imagining movement in their right arm or their left. The resulting patterns of brain activity were recorded and expressed by an LED — one frequency to represent a one, another to represent a zero. The patterns are simply too arcane to be useful to the conscious mind, too quick and complex, but they’re not meant to be read like Morse code, in any case.

Dr. James conducting a preceding experiment in 2009.

When the LED signal travels to the recipient, it flashes into a very specific part of the eye (which part doesn’t matter much) and so the resulting optical signal is sent to a predictable section of the visual cortex. Surface electrodes just like those that originally recorded the signal are much better than people at making sense of the quick-flash LED language, seeing in the recipient’s brain more data than does the recipient themselves.

Once the pattern has been reverse-engineered from LED back to arm-waving, the telepathic process is said to have concluded. “The key idea to grasp,” said Dr. James, “is that a person’s eyes cannot distinguish between the different frequencies of flashing lights but a part of his brain, [the] visual cortex, can.” For more serious results, the electrodes would have to be implanted on the surface of the brain, a procedure for which he had neither governmental nor spousal approval.

All in all, this advance will take some time to spawn any dystopian mind flayers or Inception-style dreamscapes. This advance has to do with the translation of thought to binary data, and the ability to technically induce that data in the brain of another person. The glaringly absent piece of the puzzle is any ability to induce much more sophisticated visual images; multi-pixel messages that appear in the mind’s eye, as opposed to the physical one.

That sort of sophistication could come through a better understanding of just how stimulation of the visual cortex influences images in the mind, or in teaching brains the language of light bulbs. With LED technology now finding its way into contact lenses, this technology seems well-suited to the (possibly) upcoming brain-machine revolution. It’s unclear was uses this tech might find in such a future, especially when it steps beyond the constraints of fatherly affection.

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Vector vengeance: British researchers claim they can kill the pixel within five years

The humble pixel — the 2D picture element that has formed the foundation of just about every kind of digital media for the last 50 years — may soon meet its maker. Believe it or not, if a team of British researchers have their way, the pixel, within five short years, will be replaced with… vectors.

If you know about computer graphics, or if you’ve ever edited or drawn an image on your computer, you know that there are two primary ways of storing image data: As a bitmap, or as vectors. A bitmap is quite simply a giant grid of pixels, with the arrangement and color of the pixels dictating what the image looks like. Vectors are an entirely different beast: In vector graphics, the image is described as a series of mathematical equations. To draw a bitmap shape you just color in a block of pixels; with vector graphics, you would describe the shape in terms of height, width, radius, and so on.

These two methods are very different, and they fulfill very different needs. Vector graphics, because they’re made out of geometric primitives, are infinitely scalable, making them the ideal image format for illustrations, clipart, maps, typography, Flash animations, and so on. For everything else, we use pixel bitmaps. Streaming videos, digital cameras, movie editing, video game textures — all bitmaps. There might be different file formats involved (PNG, MOV, JPG), but they’re all ultimately converted into pixel bitmaps when it comes to displaying them on your monitor, TV, or cinema screen.

Pixel bitmaps have their problems, though. As display (and camera and cinema) resolution increases, so does the number of pixels. The obvious problem with this is that larger bitmaps are computationally more expensive to process, resulting in a slower (or more expensive) workflow. Pixel bitmaps also don’t scale very gracefully; reduction is okay, but enlargement is a no-no. There is always the issue of a master format, too: With pixel bitmaps, conversions from one format to another, or changing frame rates, is messy, lossy business.

Which finally leads us back to the innovation at hand: Philip Willis and John Patterson of the University of Bath in England have devised a video codec that replaces pixel bitmaps with vectors. In a conventional digital camera, images (or videos) are captured as pixel bitmaps and compressed using a codec such as JPEG or H.264. Willis and Patterson have devised a codec called Vectorized Streaming Video (VSV) that converts the bitmap image into vectors. This builds on their previous work with VPI — vectorized photographic images [PDF] — which deals with converting bitmap images into perfect, vectorized copies.

At the moment there’s very little information about VSV, only that the Bath researchers are working with Root6 Technology (a company that specializes in transcoding) and Smoke & Mirrors (a post-processing studio) to bring the codec to market. According to Smoke & Mirrors, there should be working demonstrations of VSV within the next three to six months — and then, within five years, according to the University of Bath, the pixel will simply… die.

An example of the VPI bitmap-to-vector conversion. Bitmap (left) vs. vectorized (right)

Looking at the sample images in the VPI paper (above), Bath’s vectorizing algorithm is certainly quite impressive. Performance is awful — but the algorithm is apparently very parallelizable, so this is unlikely to be an insurmountable issue. A brief look through the paper suggests that the algorithm is fairly similar to the auto-vectorization tools, such as Adobe Live Trace. The biggest issue with photorealistic vector graphics is the coloring of spaces between the geometric shapes — but apparently Willis and Patterson have solved this.

Ultimately, though, I think it will take a lot more than a new codec to kill the pixel. There has been no shortage of new codecs over the last few years, but it has so far proved to be very, very difficult to unseat entrenched favorites such as JPEG, GIF, and PNG. Even WebP, which promised to be better than JPEG in every way, failed to gain traction — and that was with the might of Google behind it.

Who knows: A bona fide, high-performance vector video codec would be very, very exciting. If anything could shake up the tools and industry that has built up around the bitmap, it would be a vector video codec, with vector masters that can be scaled and resized infinitely in any direction. “This is a significant breakthrough which will revolutionise the way visual media is produced,” says co-inventor Willis. We shall see.

[Image credit]

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Nowhere to hide: Advertisers can now stalk you across multiple devices

Advertisers want to compile as much information about you as possible. Tracking where you go, what you click, and how you search is literally their business. They use that data to target ads directly to you, and feed relevant data to their partners. With the increasing use of tablets and smartphones in daily life, advertisers have been frustrated by a limited ability to correlate traffic from multiple devices to a single person. Well, there is some good news for advertisers, but bad news for privacy advocates. A company by the name of Drawbridge has developed a system that will analyze known data from devices surfing from the same location, and supposedly pick out which devices belong to which user.

The Drawbridge system allows the advertisers to target a single person with a specific advertising campaign, regardless of what device you happen to be using at the time. Using a hugely parallel Hadoop infrastructure, it takes the data it has about your online profiles and your known locations, and analyzes the probability that two devices are being used by the same user. If you looked up video games recently on your MacBook Pro in Chrome, you’ll get to see ads for Call of Duty on your iPhone.

Drawbridge specifically says that it doesn’t use personally identifiable information, but it ismatching first-party cookie data from all of your devices. There is quite a bit of semantic hairsplitting going on here around what “personally identifiable” means.

Research has been done about how much data popular websites send to third-party companies, and the results are staggering. “… the Journal examined what happens when people logged in to roughly 70 popular websites that request a login and found that more than a quarter of the time, the sites passed along a user’s real name, email address or other personal details, such as username, to third-party companies.” Filling out forms truthfully, even on relatively popular and “safe” sites, can be very bad for your privacy.

How to prevent third parties from tracking you

If you don’t want advertisers stalking your movements around the web and compiling a massive amount of data about you, you do have options. First off, there is the Do Not Track (DNT) header. Now available in most browsers, this feature puts a specific statement in its communication with web servers that asks advertisers to opt the user out. While there has been proposed legislation about DNT, there currently isn’t any enforcement of websites to obey the DNT header. Even if there was some sort of enforcement, the shadiest off-shore tracking and ad companies would still skirt around it.

A large amount of tracking is done via JavaScript and cookies. Extensions like NoScript for Firefox, NotScripts for Chrome, and JavaScript Blocker for Safari give you control over which websites are allowed to run JavaScript in your desktop browser. The selection of JavaScript blocking utilities are more limited on mobile devices, but even Apple’s locked-down Safari browser has the ability to toggle off JavaScript completely when needed. As for cookies, most browsers have the built-in ability to turn off third-party cookies, so you should always use that feature unless you have a specific reason not to.

If you’re really worried about being tracked, you can use a Tor proxy to mask your identity by obscuring your browsing activity. The use of VPNs from other parts of the world will help reduce the ability of the advertisers to use geolocation to target you effectively.

If you’re sick and tired of advertisers watching your every move, you can take these steps, and you’ll be in a much better situation. However, the most important way to keep your information out of the hands of these third parties is to refrain from giving it out in the first place. Whenever possible, use fake names and burner email addresses to keep accounts from being correlated with a single person. There’s no guarantee that the brilliant minds behind these analytics and advertising companies won’t be able to thwart your efforts, but these steps will make their jobs a lot harder.

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