Car Companies tracking you like Google, Amazon, Facebook and others

Washington Post has an article on how car companies are now tracking drivers.

“Honda wanted to track the location of his vehicle, the contract stated, according to Dunn — a stipulation that struck the 69-year-old Temecula, Calif., retiree as a bit odd. But Dunn was eager to drive away in his new car and, despite initial hesitation, he signed the document, a decision with which he has since made peace.

“I don’t care if they know where I go,” said Dunn, who makes regular trips to the grocery store and a local yoga studio in his vehicle. “They’re probably thinking, ‘What a boring life this guy’s got.’ ”

Dunn may consider his everyday driving habits mundane, but auto and privacy experts suspect that big automakers like Honda see them as anything but. By monitoring his everyday movements, an automaker can vacuum up a massive amount of personal information about someone like Dunn, everything from how fast he drives and how hard he brakes to how much fuel his car uses and the entertainment he prefers. The company can determine where he shops, the weather on his street, how often he wears his seat belt, what he was doing moments before a wreck — even where he likes to eat and how much he weighs.”

There aren't many who think that in order to hide their activity they shouldn't use their car. Turning off your phone is another thing you would do to hide your activity, but how many would do that.

Tracking your activity is still in the early stages and will grow fast as so many companies' business models are built on analyzing your activity and monetizing it.

Google's Focus on Performance improves Data Center PUE 8 - 25%, finding the hidden story in the data

Google announced its use of Machine Learning to improve its data center PUE in May 2014 and I posted on the release.  At 7x24 Exchange Fall 2014 event, 25 years of 7x24 Exchange were celebrated and Google’s Joe Kava, VP of Data Centers presented on “Google - beyond the PUE Plateau.”  The keynote is one of the more interesting and insightful presentations made as Google shared information on its experience deploying Machine Learning to its data center fleet.  One of the questions from the audience was “how was the first data center chosen to use Machine Learning?”  A special guest in the presentation was the data center mechanical engineer who spearheaded the project, Jim Gao.  His answer.  The data center that has most clean data to work with.

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Jim Gao and Joe Kava, 7x24 Exchange Fall Conference.

So what can this 25 year old mechanical engineer do with Machine Learning?  Below is data showing PUE, Wet Bulb, and Cooling Temperature across a range. The Blue areas are good, green not as good, yellow and red are bad.

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Some of you may be saying big deal.  I can figure out how to run the mechanical systems with a low PUE at a given wet bulb temperature to hit a given cooling temperature.  Well the above was a graph to illustrate what can be seen looking at performance data.  What is beyond our ability to see is working out the best way to run your mechanical systems with 19 Input Variables.  The below are the 19 inputs to the Predictive PUE Machine Learning system to figure out the lowest energy consumption.

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FYI, this predictive PUE system does not have autonomous control over mechanical systems.  It does provide information to the data center facility engineering teams on how they can improve PUE performance.  The predictive PUE model is 99.6% accurate.  Jim and Joe discussed how Google looked for a high degree of confidence in order to trust the numbers, and the human operators are an important part of the process like UPS drivers on their route.  UPS is famous for creating better routes for its drivers, but I bet they were not even close to the % savings Google achieved.

So how good are the results?  Google achieved from 8% to 25% reduction in its energy used to cool the data center with an average of 15%.  Who wouldn’t be excited to save an average of 15% on their cooling energy costs by providing new settings to run the mechanical plant?  Below is an example of what was historical PUE (blue) and New PUE (green) for a site.

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One of the risks Google took in this presentation is they let a 25 year old mechanical engineer get on stage.  Was the risk of the kid presenting?  No, Jim was as polished as many who have presented for years.  The risk was everyone at 7x24 Exchange knew who Jim was and they could try and see if he would consider leaving Google.  :-)

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The idea of using Machine Learning in data centers is new and have shown what can be discovered in the data.  It’s like there was a hidden story there waiting to be told.  Does you data center staff look for hidden stories in the data?  Shouldn’t you if you can save between 8-25% of the energy in systems.

#1 google search "microsoft data center executives" greenm3 post

I did the thing you are not supposed to do posting on Friday, Oct 24 2014 at 5:07p on 10 years of Microsoft data center executives.  Friday is a slow media day and posting after 5p on a Friday is something you don’t want to do to spread news, but rules are being broken all over in media.

I was curious to see how well the post distributed.  After a day it popped into the top 10 google search results for “microsoft data center executives"

Curious today I checked and my post made it to #1.

Thanks for reading this blog and forwarding posts to your friends.

Best Feature of Apple Pay, getting notifications within seconds of credit cards registered when swiped

There is all kinds of news on Apple Pay. Apple can do a simple logo that gets your attention.

Almost all the attention is using the iPhone 6 to pay.  I haven’t tried it yet, but the best feature that makes it worthwhile to register your credit cards with Apple Pay is I get a notification of credit card swipes within seconds to my iPhone 6 for my credit cards that Apple Pay works with.

Update: others have not had this feature work.  I think why it works on my iPhone is I have the AMEX app.

Think about how cool this is. Any time your credit card company authorizes a transaction you get a notification of the merchant and amount on your phone.  Not just for those who have NFC for using Apple Pay.

Proof those airport body scanners suck, flaws exposed by University Researchers

One of the benefits of being Pre TSA is you skipped the full body scanners.  Now, all those body scanners have been removed due to privacy concerns.  And, thanks to independent research done by UC San Diego, University of Michigan, and John Hopkins we find out that these device basically suck as there are ways to sneak by explosives and guns.  What?

Here is what the manufacturer and government would like all  of to believe. 

The researchers found they can hide a .380 ACP Pistol.

and C4 explosives.

How can the researchers do this?  They bought a surplus scanner on eBay and spent time figuring out the flaws of the scanner.

The researchers attribute these shortcomings to the process by which the machines were designed and evaluated before their introduction at airports. “The system’s designers seem to have assumed that attackers would not have access to a Secure 1000 to test and refine their attacks,” said Hovav Shacham, a professor of computer science at UC San Diego. However, the researchers were able to purchase a government-surplus machine found on eBay and subject it to laboratory testing.

Many physical security systems that protect critical infrastructure are evaluated in secret, without input from the public or independent experts, the researchers said. In the case of the Secure 1000, that secrecy did not produce a system that can resist attackers who study and adapt to new security measures. “Secret testing should be replaced or augmented by rigorous, public, independent testing of the sort common in computer security,” said Prof. Shacham.