Jesse Hostetler, Dan Garmat, and I recently hacked on DeepMind's implementation of a neural network for the Arcade Learning Environment. The above video shows the agent learning to play a game called Breakout, in which the objective is to break bricks at the top of the screen using a ball …

When you visit a website that looks like your bank's, how do you know that you are actually talking to your bank and not a scammer impersonating your bank? Typically you will look at the address bar of the browser and compare it to the address you remember from the …

I am just wrapping up at the IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing. My paper appears in the proceedings and I presented on Monday. This has been my first Human Computer Interaction (HCI) conference, so I have been exploring the differences and similarities from my AI and FOSS …

For our forthcoming paper at the IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing I built a visualization for testing and debugging optimization simulators and algorithms.

The visualization is built on d3js and runs in the web browser. If you visit mdpvis.github.io you can interact with a wildfire …

A hazard of working in computer security is you see the world through a security-focused lens. Suddenly, mundane tasks transform into interesting intellectual challenges: "That card shuffle did not consume enough entropy!"..."Posting this online will open me up to social engineering!"..."People can learn my bike lock combination through …

Static HTML generators are fun to play with, but they (obviously) suffer from a lack of dynamic content. Today I experimented with using URL shorteners as a distributed hash table as a means of commenting on static sites.

After five hours of dealing with eccentricities of various URL shorteners, I …

I attended a talk at Open Source Bridge titled "Open Source is Not Enough: The Importance of Algorithm Transparency". The TLDR of the presentation is that algorithms shape your view of the world which can lead to socially bad outcomes. Think filter bubbles, search manipulation, etc.

The presenter's prescription was …

The web is rife with recommendations that users change their passwords following a catastrophic bug in the widely used cryptography suite OpenSSL. So the question is, should you change your password?

The short answer is: Maybe?

This particular security hole is scary because we have no way of knowing whether …

My latest blog post appeared on O’Reilly Media’s programming blog.

Recent work by a W3 Working Group plans to expose many powerful cryptographic operations for web applications. Although the planned API adds much needed functionality to JavaScript, it doesn’t address the JavaScript runtime’s terrible security properties …

Advocates for a national DNA identity database won a major victory with the Supreme Court’s recent decision to permit the routine collection and storage of DNA data. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the majority,

When officers make an arrest supported by probable cause to hold for a serious …