In scientific visualization a tensor glyph is an object that can visualize all or most of the nine degrees of freedom, such as acceleration, twist, or shear – of a 3 × 3 {\displaystyle 3\times 3} matrix. It is used for tensor field visualization, where a data-matrix is available at every point in the grid. "Glyphs, or icons, depict multiple data values by mapping them onto the shape, size, orientation, and surface appearance of a base geometric primitive." Tensor glyphs are a particular case of multivariate data glyphs. There are certain types of glyphs that are commonly used: Ellipsoid Cuboid Cylindrical Superquadrics According to Thomas Schultz and Gordon Kindlmann, specific types of tensor fields "play a central role in scientific and biomedical studies as well as in image analysis and feature-extraction methods."
ActivTrak
ActivTrak is an American company that produces workforce analytics and productivity software. The company was founded in 2009 by Birch Grove Software and is headquartered in Austin, Texas. The company has raised US$77.5 million in funding and is backed by Sapphire Ventures and Elsewhere Partners. == History == ActivTrak was founded in 2009 by Herb Axilrod and Anton Seidler in Dallas, Texas. ActivTrak's first on-demand software product launched in 2012, and the workforce analytics platform launched in 2015. It uses data sourced from more than 9,500 customers and 900,000 users. In 2019, ActivTrak raised $20 million in a Series A round of funding with Elsewhere Partners, a growth-stage venture capital firm that principally invests in B2B startups. Rita Selvaggi assumed the role of CEO. In 2020, ActivTrak raised $50M in a Series B round of funding with Sapphire Ventures and Elsewhere Partners. The company also introduced the ActivTrak Productivity Lab, an online resource about workforce productivity research, industry benchmark data, and best practices. == Product == ActivTrak is a workforce analytics and productivity platform that uses reports, dashboards, and data analysis. The platform uses machine learning (AI) to collect and analyze user activity data and produce reports about workforce productivity. The software runs on Microsoft Windows, Mac, Chrome, Terminal Services, and VDI. It includes the ActivTrak Agent, which runs in the background and collects data. It responds to user activity, sensing mouse and keyboard movement in the active window(s) of the user's device. This data is collected and stored in a database that aggregates the data based on the user's request. ActivTrak does not utilize keystroke logging, content scraping, camera access, video recording or mobile device monitoring. The database leverages data analytics to generate account and team benchmarks, and identify productivity patterns and outliers. == Awards == Built In, 100 Best Midsize Places to Work in Austin, 2025 G2, Winter: Best Estimated ROI, High Performer, Best Relationship, Best Support, Users Most Likely to Recommend, Easiest Setup, Easiest Admin, Best Meets Requirements, Users Love Us, 2025 TrustRadius, Buyer’s Choice, 2025 Deloitte Technology Fast 500, No. 468 Fastest-Growing Company, 2024 Product Marketing Alliance, AI Marketing Innovation, 2024 Fortune Best Workplaces in Technology™, 2024 Inc. 5000, No. 2335 of America’s Fastest-Growing Private Companies, 2024 Fortune Best Workplaces in Texas™, 2024 Reworked IMPACT Gold Award: Most Innovative Workplace Productivity Solution, 2024 TrustRadius, Most Loved, 2024 Great Place To Work-Certified™, 2024 Inc. 5000 Regionals: Southwest, 2024 Brandon Hall Group, Best Advance in HR Predictive Analytics Technology, 2024
Videotex
Videotex (or interactive videotex) was one of the earliest implementations of an end-user information system. From the late 1970s to early 2010s, it was used to deliver information (usually pages of text) to a user in computer-like format, typically to be displayed on a television or a dumb terminal. In a strict definition, videotex is any system that provides interactive content and displays it on a video monitor such as a television, typically using modems to send data in both directions. A close relative is teletext, which sends data in one direction only, typically encoded in a television signal. All such systems are occasionally referred to as viewdata. Unlike the modern Internet, traditional videotex services were highly centralized. Videotex in its broader definition can be used to refer to any such service, including teletext, the Internet, bulletin board systems, online service providers, and even the arrival/departure displays at an airport. This usage is no longer common. With the exception of Minitel in France, videotex elsewhere never managed to attract any more than a very small percentage of the universal mass market once envisaged. By the end of the 1980s its use was essentially limited to a few niche applications. == Initial development and technologies == === United Kingdom === The first attempts at a general-purpose videotex service were created in the United Kingdom in the late 1960s. In about 1970 the BBC had a brainstorming session in which it was decided to start researching ways to send closed captioning information to the audience. As the Teledata research continued the BBC became interested in using the system for delivering any sort of information, not just closed captioning. In 1972, the concept was first made public under the new name Ceefax. Meanwhile, the General Post Office (soon to become British Telecom) had been researching a similar concept since the late 1960s, known as Viewdata. Unlike Ceefax which was a one-way service carried in the existing TV signal, Viewdata was a two-way system using telephones. Since the Post Office owned the telephones, this was considered to be an excellent way to drive more customers to use the phones. Not to be outdone by the BBC, they also announced their service, under the name Prestel. ITV soon joined the fray with a Ceefax-clone known as ORACLE. In 1974, all the services agreed on a standard for displaying the information. The display would be a simple 40×24 grid of text, with some "graphics characters" for constructing simple graphics, revised and finalized in 1976. The standard did not define the delivery system, so both Viewdata-like and Teledata-like services could at least share the TV-side hardware, which was expensive at the time. The standard also introduced a new term that covered all such services, teletext. Ceefax first started operation in 1974 with a limited 30 pages, followed quickly by ORACLE and then Prestel in 1979. By 1981, Prestel International was available in nine countries, and a number of countries, including Sweden, The Netherlands, Finland and West Germany were developing their own national systems closely based on Prestel. General Telephone and Electronics (GTE) acquired an exclusive agency for the system for North America. In the early 1980s, videotex became the base technology for the London Stock Exchange's pricing service called TOPIC. Later versions of TOPIC, notably TOPIC2 and TOPIC3, were developed by Thanos Vassilakis and introduced trading and historic price feeds. === France === Development of a French teletext-like system began in 1973. A very simple 2-way videotex system called Tictac was also demonstrated in the mid-1970s. As in the UK, this led on to work to develop a common display standard for videotex and teletext, called Antiope, which was finalised in 1977. Antiope had similar capabilities to the UK system for displaying alphanumeric text and chunky "mosaic" character-based block graphics. A difference however was that while in the UK standard control codes automatically also occupied one character position on screen, Antiope allowed for "non spacing" control codes. This gave Antiope slightly more flexibility in the use of colours in mosaic block graphics, and in presenting the accents and diacritics of the French language. Meanwhile, spurred on by the 1978 Nora/Minc report, the French government was determined to catch up on a perceived falling behind in its computer and communications facilities. In 1980 it began field trials issuing Antiope-based terminals for free to over 250,000 telephone subscribers in Ille-et-Vilaine region, where the French CCETT research centre was based, for use as telephone directories. The trial was a success, and in 1982 Minitel was rolled out nationwide. === Canada === Since 1970, researchers at the Communications Research Centre (CRC) in Ottawa had been working on a set of "picture description instructions", which encoded graphics commands as a text stream. Graphics were encoded as a series of instructions (graphics primitives) each represented by a single ASCII character. Graphic coordinates were encoded in multiple 6 bit strings of XY coordinate data, flagged to place them in the printable ASCII range so that they could be transmitted with conventional text transmission techniques. ASCII SI/SO characters were used to differentiate the text from graphic portions of a transmitted "page". In 1975, the CRC gave a contract to Norpak to develop an interactive graphics terminal that could decode the instructions and display them on a colour display, which was successfully up and running by 1977. Against the background of the developments in Europe, CRC was able to persuade the Canadian government to develop the system into a fully-fledged service. In August 1978, the Canadian Department of Communications publicly launched it as Telidon, a "second generation" videotex/teletext service, and committed to a four-year development plan to encourage rollout. Compared to the European systems, Telidon offered real graphics, as opposed to block-mosaic character graphics. The downside was that it required much more advanced decoders, typically featuring Zilog Z80 or Motorola 6809 processors. === Japan === Research in Japan was shaped by the demands of the large number of Kanji characters used in Japanese script. With 1970s technology, the ability to generate so many characters on demand in the end-user's terminal was seen as prohibitive. Instead, development focussed on methods to send pages to user terminals pre-rendered, using coding strategies similar to facsimile machines. This led to a videotex system called Captain ("Character and Pattern Telephone Access Information Network"), created by NTT in 1978, which went into full trials from 1979 to 1981. The system also lent itself naturally to photographic images, albeit at only moderate resolution. However, the pages typically took two or three times longer to load, compared to the European systems. NHK developed an experimental teletext system along similar lines, called CIBS ("Character Information Broadcasting Station"). Based on a 388×200 pixel resolution, it was first announced in 1976, and began trials in late 1978. (NHK's ultimate production teletext system launched in 1983). == Standards == Work to establish an international standard for videotex began in 1978 in CCITT. But the national delegations showed little interest in compromise, each hoping that their system would come to define what was perceived to be going to be an enormous new mass-market. In 1980 CCITT therefore issued recommendation S.100 (later T.100), noting the points of similarity but the essential incompatibility of the systems, and declaring all four to be recognised options. Trying to kick-start the market, AT&T Corporation entered the fray, and in May 1981 announced its own Presentation Layer Protocol (PLP). This was closely based on the Canadian Telidon system, but added to it some further graphics primitives and a syntax for defining macros, algorithms to define cleaner pixel spacing for the (arbitrarily sizeable) text, and also dynamically redefinable characters and a mosaic block graphic character set, so that it could reproduce content from the French Antiope. After some further revisions this was adopted in 1983 as ANSI standard X3.110, more commonly called NAPLPS, the North American Presentation Layer Protocol Syntax. It was also adopted in 1988 as the presentation-layer syntax for NABTS, the North American Broadcast Teletext Specification. Meanwhile, the European national Postal Telephone and Telegraph (PTT) agencies were also increasingly interested in videotex, and had convened discussions in European Conference of Postal and Telecommunications Administrations (CEPT) to co-ordinate developments, which had been diverging along national lines. As well as the British and French standards, the Swedes had proposed extending the British Prestel standard with a new se
Collaboration-oriented architecture
Collaboration Oriented Architecture (COA) is a computer system that is designed to collaborate, or use services, from systems that are outside of the operators control. Collaboration Oriented Architecture will often use Service Oriented Architecture to deliver the technical framework. Collaboration Oriented Architecture is the ability to collaborate between systems that are based on the Jericho Forum principles or "Commandments". Bill Gates and Craig Mundie (Microsoft) clearly articulated the need for people to work outside of their organizations in a secure and collaborative manner in their opening keynote to the RSA Security Conference in February 2007. Successful implementation of a Collaboration Oriented Architecture implies the ability to successfully inter-work securely over the Internet and will typically mean the resolution of the problems that come with de-perimeterisation. == Etymology == The term Collaboration Oriented Architectures was defined and developed in a meeting of the Jericho Forum at a meeting held at HSBC on 6 July 2007. == Definition == The key elements that qualify a security architecture as a Collaboration Oriented Architecture are as follows; Protocol: Systems use appropriately secure protocols to communicate. Authentication: The protocol is authenticated with user and/or system credentials. Federation: User and/or systems credentials are accepted and validated by systems that are not under your (locus of) control. Network Agnostic: The design does not rely on a secure network, thus it will operate securely from an Intranet to raw-Internet Trust: The collaborating system have the capacity to be able to confirm to a specified degree of confidence that the components in a transaction chain have. Risk: The collaborating systems can make a risk assessment on any transaction based on the communicated levels of required trust, based on the required degree of identity, confidentiality, integrity, availability. == Authentication == Working in a collaborative multi-sourced environment implies the need for authentication, authorization and accountability which must interoperate / exchange outside of your locus / area of control. People/systems must be able to manage permissions of resources and rights of users they don't control There must be capability of trusting an organization, which can authenticate individuals or groups, thus eliminating the need to create separate identities In principle, only one instance of person / system / identity may exist, but privacy necessitates the support for multiple instances, or one instance with multiple facets, often referred to as personas Systems must be able to pass on security credentials /assertions Multiple loci (areas) of control must be supported
Tensor glyph
In scientific visualization a tensor glyph is an object that can visualize all or most of the nine degrees of freedom, such as acceleration, twist, or shear – of a 3 × 3 {\displaystyle 3\times 3} matrix. It is used for tensor field visualization, where a data-matrix is available at every point in the grid. "Glyphs, or icons, depict multiple data values by mapping them onto the shape, size, orientation, and surface appearance of a base geometric primitive." Tensor glyphs are a particular case of multivariate data glyphs. There are certain types of glyphs that are commonly used: Ellipsoid Cuboid Cylindrical Superquadrics According to Thomas Schultz and Gordon Kindlmann, specific types of tensor fields "play a central role in scientific and biomedical studies as well as in image analysis and feature-extraction methods."
Security switch
A security switch is a hardware device designed to protect computers, laptops, smartphones and similar devices from unauthorized access or operation, distinct from a virtual security switch which offers software protection. Security switches should be operated by an authorized user only; for this reason, it should be isolated from other devices, in order to prevent unauthorized access, and it should not be possible to bypass it, in order to prevent malicious manipulation. The primary purpose of a security switch is to provide protection against surveillance, eavesdropping, malware, spyware, and theft of digital devices. Unlike other protections or techniques, a security switch can provide protection even if security has already been breached, since it does not have any access from other components and is not accessible by software. It can additionally disconnect or block peripheral devices, and perform "man in the middle" operations. A security switch can be used for human presence detection since it can only be initiated by a human operator. It can also be used as a firewall. == Types == === Hardware kill switch === A hardware kill switch (HKS) is a physical switch that cuts the signal or power line to the device or disable the chip running them. == Examples == A cellphone is compromised by malicious software, and the device initiates video and audio recording. When the user activates the “prevent capture of audio/video” mode of the security switch, that either physically disconnects or cut the power to the microphone and the camera, which stops the recording. A laptop that has an embedded security switch is stolen. The security switch detects a lack of communication from a specific external source for 12 hours, and responds by disconnecting the screen, keyboard and other key components, rendering the laptop useless, with no possibility of recovery, even with a full format. A user wishes to prevent tracking of their location. The user then activates geolocation protection and the security switch disables all GPS communication, eliminating the possibility of tracking the device's location. A user desires to eliminate the possibility of their PIN being copied from their smartphone. They can activate the secure input function, causing the security switch to disconnect the touch screen from the operating system, so input signals are not available to any devices except the switch. A security switch performs scheduled monitoring and finds that a program is attempting to download malicious content from the internet. It then activates internet security function and disables internet access, interrupting the download. If laptop software is compromised by air-gap malware, the user may activate the security switch and disconnect the speaker and microphone, so it can not establish communication with the device. == History == Google started to work on a hardware kill switch for AI in 2016. In 2019, Apple, and Google, along with a handful of smaller players, are designing “kill switches” that cut the power to the microphones or cameras in their devices. Googles first product that implemented this is Nest Hub Max. Hardware kill switches are already available and widely tested on the PinePhone, Librem, Shiftphone, to cut power to the input peripherals (microphone, camera) but also the network connectivity modules (wifi, cellular network).
Nobody (username)
In many Unix variants, "nobody" is the conventional name of a user identifier which owns no files, is in no privileged groups, and has no abilities except those which every other user has. It is normally not enabled as a user account, i.e. has no home directory or login credentials assigned. Some systems also define an equivalent group "nogroup". == Uses == The pseudo-user "nobody" and group "nogroup" are used, for example, in the NFSv4 implementation of Linux by idmapd, if a user or group name in an incoming packet does not match any known username on the system. It was once common to run daemons as nobody, especially on servers, in order to limit the damage that could be done by a malicious user who gained control of them. However, the usefulness of this technique is reduced if more than one daemon is run like this, because then gaining control of one daemon would provide control of them all. The reason is that processes owned by the same user have the ability to send signals to each other and use debugging facilities to read or even modify each other's memory. Modern practice, as recommended by the Linux Standard Base, is to create a separate user account for each daemon.