A New Data Toy — Unboxing the Raspberry Pi

Last week I received two Raspberry Pis in the mail from AdaFruit and just now have some time to play with them. The Raspberry Pi is a minimal computer system that is about the size of a credit card. In the embedded systems community, the excitement is for obvious reasons, but I strongly believe that such a device can help collect and use data to help us make better decisions because not only is it a computer, but it is small and portable.

For development, Raspberry Pi can connect to a television (or other display) via HDMI or composite video (the “yellow” plug for those still stuck in the 1900s haha). A keyboard, mouse and other devices can be connected via two USB ports. A powered hub can provide support for even more devices. There are also various pins for connecting to a breadboard for analyzing analog signals, for a camera or for an external (or touchscreen) display. An SD Card essentially serves as the hard disk and probably a portion of the RAM. The more recent Model B ships with 256MB RAM. Raspberry Pi began shipping in February 2012 and these little guys have been very difficult to get […]

OpenPaths and a Progressive Approach to Privacy

OpenPaths is a service that allows users with mobile phones to transmit and store their location. It is an initiative by the New York Times that allows users to use their own data, or to contribute their location data for research projects and perhaps startups that wish to get into the geospatial space. OpenPaths brands itself as “a secure data locker for personal location information.” There is one aspect where OpenPaths is very different from other services like Google Latitude: Only the user has access to his/her own data and it is never shared with anybody else unless the user chooses to do so. Additionally, initiatives that wish to use a user’s location data must be asked personally via email (pictured below), and the user has the ability to deny the request.The data shared with each initiative provides only location, and not other data that may be personally identifiable such as name, email, browser, mobile type etc. In this sense, OpenPaths has provided a barebones platform for the collection and storage of location information. Google Latitude is similar, but the data stored on Google’s servers is obviously used by other Google services without explicit user permission.

The service is […]