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Part 1 - Reconnaissance and Failure June 13 Sometimes if you’re biking or walking around certain cities you’ll see markings on the ground that look like diamonds or boxes. After I first noticed these a few years back, I found out that these are actually induction loops that have been embedded in the pavement to detect the passing of bicycles. Different variants will use different…
Please read part 1 for context. If you don’t want to, here’s a quick summary: Many bike counters are induction loops they work by looking for bike-like signatures in change of inductance over time I want to make non-bikes get counted as bikes Thanks to Neil on Facebook Marketplace who gave me a bike for free (he said on the listing that it was likely just useful for spare parts). It…
Sometimes if you’re biking or walking around certain cities you’ll see markings on the ground that look like diamonds or boxes. After I first noticed these a few years back, I found out that these are actually induction loops that have been embedded in the pavement to detect the passing of bicycles. Different variants will use different shapes and sizes (these diamond ones I’ve…
Last week I was in Niterói to present about health misinformation and religion at AoIR. I had never been to Brazil before, and one of my favourite parts of travelling to new places is seeing how street art / graffiti differs. I can’t read Portuguese so I had to turn to technology to aid my interpretation of what I was seeing. I started to notice the same symbol on a lot of the posts along the…
Back in December 2024 I needed to get to Vancouver from Waterloo. I looked for the cheapest direct flight and found the best option to be from Flair airlines. Trying to get to the website, flyflair.com, resulted in a big scary security warning screen from Firefox. firefox security warning screen indicating the SSL certificate was revoked I found a Reddit thread created on that day by someone with…
As technology improves, it seems like it’s becoming harder to find truthful information. Why? When you lower the barrier to push information out to people en masse, the amount of noise grows. You can make up an infinite amount of falsities about an event but there’s only so many things you can say about that same event that are strictly true. And for the most part, both those creating…
A couple weekends ago V2 hosted ‘Side Quest’, an event for people across science, tech, and art to build something with the potential to improve Vancouver. It was great and people made very cool things! Aside from the main build-a-thon the event was centered around, there were also “Mini Quests”– side activities for participants to have fun while taking a break from…
A while ago, sometime late 2022, I came across a startup called Vana. The website’s landing page explains the general idea behind the company: users put their personal data in their “Vana Vault” at which point they can sell or rent the contents to whoever they choose in the Vana Marketplace. This might be data scientists or the highest-bidder. Vana’s website prior to all…
Many of the top ad and analytics service providers give their users snippets of code to add to their website, and in many cases the snippet includes a unique identification tag that website owners will use across their domains. Because of this, it’s possible to correlate ownership across domains if you can search the sources of a large amount of websites. There are 2 main problems with this…
Most people would agree the first person to write something down and share it with their friends is not responsible for all the horrible things written. In the same way, the inventor of the gun isn’t responsible for the deaths of all those killed with firearms. The latter probably feels more open to debate, particularly around what it means to be ‘responsible’. The difference…