Update: 11-hour AWS failure hits websites and apps
Amazon Web Services, a major cloud hosting service, had a
system failure on Tuesday that affected numerous websites and apps.
The issue was not fixed until just before 5 p.m. ET.
“As of [4:49 p.m. ET] we are fully recovered for
operations for adding new objects in S3, which was our last operation showing a
high error rate. The Amazon S3 service
is operating normally,” the company reported.
The problem had lasted for approximately 11 hours and
caused problems for websites and online services throughout the day.
AWS had reported on its Service
Health Dashboard at 2:35 p.m. ET that its engineers were working on the
problem, which affected websites including Netflix, Reddit and Adobe.
The Associated Press reported that its own photos,
webfeeds and other online services were also affected. And at approximately 3 p.m. ET, Mashable
tweeted that it was also struggling.
"We can't publish our story about AWS being down
because, well, AWS is down," the news outlet tweeted.
Computer Security students: How did you think they would
respond? Give up crime and become monks?
Online Fraud in the U.S. Grew Dramatically Post-EMV
The introduction of EMV (Europay, MasterCard, Visa) cards, also
known as chip-and-PIN cards, into
the U.S. has had the expected effect: with card present fraud more difficult,
fraudsters have moved to on-line card-not-present fraud. Domestic
online fraud became 79% riskier in 2016 than it had been in 2015, according to figures
come from the Forter/MRC Fraud Attack Index (PDF).
Forter, which provides a fraud detection system for
merchants, teamed with the Merchant Risk Council (which currently has almost
450 member companies in more than 20 countries) to develop a Fraud Attack
Index. This is defined as the 'dollars at risk per $100 of sales'. The 'dollars at risk' combines detected and
prevented fraud with actual fraud.
The relative
simplicity of cloning non-EMV cards made domestic (ie, US) off-line
card-present fraud attractive. This is
no longer easy. The introduction of more
secure EMV cards has driven fraudsters from card-present to card-not-present
fraud -- EMV was never going to eliminate fraud, it was merely going to change
its nature. This is shown in the fraud
attack index for 2016, rising from $2.7 in Q4 2015 to $4.98 in Q4 2016.
Privacy issues that AI can’t or shouldn’t deal with? Should Facebook tell friends of the potential
suicide? How about neighbors? Don’t get me wrong, I think this is the start
of a good thing. How do we hurry
development along?
Facebook artificial intelligence spots suicidal users
The social network has developed algorithms that spot
warning signs in users' posts and the comments their friends leave in response.
After confirmation by Facebook's human review team, the
company contacts those thought to be at risk of self-harm to suggest ways they
can seek help.
… The tool is
being tested only in the US at present.
… It has now
developed pattern-recognition algorithms to recognise if someone is struggling,
by training them with examples of the posts that have previously been flagged.
Talk of sadness and pain, for example, would be one
signal.
Responses from friends with phrases such as "Are you
OK?" or "I'm worried about you," would be another.
… Ms
Callison-Burch acknowledged that contact from friends or family was typically
more effective than a message from Facebook, but added that it would not always
be appropriate for it to inform them.
We need to understand how this works so we can keep it
from becoming the only tool politicians use?
Throughout the recent U.S. presidential campaign,
commentators of all political stripes urged Donald Trump to give his Twitter
account a rest. He ignored them,
bypassing mainstream media in favor of a technology that continued to deliver
his provocative messages directly, frequently, at all hours, and without
filters. While no hard proof exists that
his tweets put him over the top in the election, they undeniably riveted the
attention of a broad public, media included — and continue to do so. Here’s what business leaders can learn from
the tweeter-in-chief about trying to win over large segments of consumers
through social media.
(Related).
In series of paper researchers document how Twitter impacted
who won US Presidential election
by on
University of Rochester – “Luo and Wang, a dual
PhD candidate in political and computer science, summarized their findings in
eight papers during the course of the campaign, including these observations:
- The more Donald Trump tweeted, the faster his following grew–even after he performed poorly in debates against other Republican candidates, and even after he sparked controversies, such as proposing a ban on Muslim immigration. (Read the paper.)
- When Trump accused Hillary Clinton of playing the “woman card,” women were more likely to follow Clinton and less likely to “un-follow” her during the week that followed. But it did not affect the gender composition of Trump followers. (Read the paper.)
- Moreover, a “gender affinity effect” seen in other elections–women tending to vote for women–did not appear to be working for Clinton as the primaries drew to a close. The percentage of female Twitter followers in the Clinton camp was no larger than that in the Trump camp. Moreover, though “un-followers” were more likely to be female for both candidates, the phenomenon was “particularly pronounced” for Clinton. (Read the paper.)
- At the same time, several polls, including ABC/Washington Post and CBS/New York Times, suggested that some Bernie Sanders supporters might “jump ship” from the Democratic column, and end up voting for Trump if Sanders dropped out. Luo and Wang found supporting evidence, reporting that the number of Bernie Sanders followers who were also following Trump was increasing–but the number also following Clinton was declining. The dual Sanders/Trump followers were also disproportionately (up to 64 percent) male. (Read the paper.)“
Perhaps the problem goes beyond the Oscars?
From the Oscars to the Oval Office, tweeting and texting at
work is catching flak
… “Distracted
working has become the distracted driving in the workplace,” says Steve
Langerud, workplace consultant and principal of Steve Langerud & Associates
in Grinnell, Iowa. “My clients ask
regularly about how to manage employees who text at work.”
While major gaffes like Sunday’s mix-up of Best Picture
are rare, “the bigger issue is how present employees are at work,” Langerud
says.
Indeed, one in five employers think that employees are
productive fewer than five hours a day, with most citing smartphone use as the
culprit, a 2016 CareerBuilder report of hiring managers found.
Despite repeated warnings, people still get fired for
sending an inappropriate photo or tweet. The problem with sites like Twitter and
Instagram is that immediacy and informality are also social media’s greatest
dangers, experts say. And in many cases,
there’s no turning back once you hit “send” and there are plenty of reasons not
to.
… There’s a
growing body of research supporting “nomophobia”
— the fear of being without your cellphone. Nearly half of Americans (47%) say they
couldn’t go a day without their smartphone, according to a 2014 Bank of America
survey.
Make an App, no matter how narrow your focus and sell the
company for big bucks?
Yelp acquires restaurant waiting list tech startup Nowait in
a $40 million all-cash deal
… Founded out of
Pittsburgh in 2010, Nowait integrates its technology with that of restaurants
to streamline and optimize front-of-house operations, including table
turnover and waiting lists.
… The partnership
was also designed to enable Yelp users to verify restaurants’
waiting times and start queuing remotely — all without leaving the Yelp
app. When a diner’s table is good to go,
they receive a message, and the Yelp user can message back to say if they’re
running late or whether they’re just a few seconds away. It essentially replaces archaic systems
involving handheld buzzers or pieces of paper — now everything happens through a smartphone.
As long as it’s not Soylent Green!
Subway chicken in Canada was part meat, part something else,
according to DNA analysis
… A
researcher delved into the DNA of chicken sold at various fast food
restaurants, at the request of the Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation’s “Marketplace” program. Not all poultry, the CBC reported,
was as it seemed.
Four of the five fast food joints were mostly hawking
the real bird. McDonald’s grilled
country chicken, for instance, contained 90 percent chicken DNA.
But the chicken tucked into the world’s most
ubiquitous submarine sandwiches proved to be an outlier. The chicken sold at Subway — which has the most restaurant locations of any fast food chain on the
planet — was found to be almost equal parts meat to soy, based on DNA.
More tools for my researching students.
No comments:
Post a Comment