Astribot S1 – AI Robotics hype meets computer vision snake oil

At the end of April 2024 there was yet another announcement in the autonomous robotics space. This one called the Astribot S1 by a company called Astribot.com. Almost immediately our feeds were filled with posts claiming that the Astribot S1 was nothing short of a revolution, a technical breakthrough which will completely revolutionise our kitchens. In this post I'll do my best to explain why I believe it is at best a prototype with little autonomous or genuine real-world interaction capability, and is also unfit for safe operation around humans.Continue reading

Top 5 Lessons from 20 years of Computer Vision

I’ve learned an untold amount of valuable lessons over the years. Many of these lessons are still as true today as they were 20 years ago. I love to share advice on CV topics with customers and colleagues, and although many of the core lessons and concepts are obvious and well-known there are also some hard-fought personal lessons which I find myself talking about. This article will be exactly about those – the “probably-not-in-your-textbook” Top 5 lessons based on my experiences with shipping CV products!Continue reading

Mr. Robot and EFnet: The day a TV show enacted a scene on our IRC server (2016)

In 2015-2019 a techno-thriller TV show called Mr. Robot was airing, with plot themes which gravitated around Internet underground subcultures. My spouse and I had enjoyed the show partly because of its authentic portrayal of information technology and we were avid viewers. In its second season the show had a short scene where two of the main characters arranged to communicate over IRC, and - you guessed it - the show replicated our real-world server for the shoot!Continue reading

Open Proxy Life Expectancy (2022-2024)

A quick study of open proxy detection data between January 2022 and January 2024 was conducted to evaluate the life expectancy and permanence of openly accessible Internet traffic rerouters (also often referred to as traffic origin anonymisers). The specific objective of the study was to determine basic criteria for identifying IPs which were statistically likely to continue serving as open access traffic anonymisers in the medium term (at least 1 week or longer).Continue reading

A Primer on Live Proxy Detection (2016)

Achieving a high detection rate of remote open proxies requires many considerations. Depending on the desired success rate the allocated resource requirements tend to increase exponentially, and perfect detection certainty for arbitrary external IPs can never be achieved due to numerous complicating factors. This article will first discuss the general dynamics of detecting open proxies along with associated statistical research, and will then discuss specific software considerations. Continue reading

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