Fishing matches the fly to what the fish are
biting. Phishing matches the lure the same way.
Russian
Spies Lure Targets With NATO Cybersecurity Conference
A
cyber espionage group linked to Russia has been trying to deliver
malware to targeted individuals using documents referencing a NATO
cybersecurity conference, Cisco’s Talos research team reported on
Monday.
… The
campaign was apparently aimed at individuals interested in the CyCon
U.S. conference organized by the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence
Centre of Excellence (CCDCOE) in collaboration with the Army Cyber
Institute at West Point on November 7-8 in Washington, D.C. The
hackers created malicious documents with information that was copied
from the official CyCon U.S. website.
The
topic used as bait in this attack suggests that the threat actor
targeted individuals with an interest in cyber security.
Tales of future greed?
Facebook's
News Feed experiment panics publishers
So, an experiment under way in a few countries,
where the social media giant appears to be making it harder for users
to see news stories, has caused something akin to panic.
The new feature Facebook is trying out is called
Explore. It offers all sorts of stories it thinks might interest
you, a separate news feed encouraging you to look further afield than
just at what your friends are sharing.
Meanwhile, for most people, the standard News Feed
remains the usual mixture of baby photos and posts from companies or
media organisations whose pages you have liked.
Sounds fine, doesn't it? Except that in six
countries - Sri Lanka, Bolivia, Slovakia, Serbia, Guatemala, and
Cambodia - the experiment went further.
For users there, the main News Feed was cleared of
everything but the usual stuff from your friends and sponsored posts
– in other words, if you wanted to have your material seen in the
place most users spend their time you
had to pay for the privilege.
In
a Medium post entitled "Biggest drop in organic reach we've
ever seen", a Slovakian journalist Filip Struharik documented
the impact. Publishers in his country had seen four times fewer
interactions since the change, he said – what had become a vital
and vibrant platform for them was emptying out fast.
How to analyze a Tweet?
The Worst
Tweeter In Politics Isn’t Trump
So we should be learning more about government
data requests?
Microsoft
drops lawsuit after U.S. government revises data request transparency
rules
Microsoft said it will drop a lawsuit against the
U.S. government after the Department of Justice (DoJ) changed data
request rules on alerting internet users about agencies accessing
their information.
The new policy limits the use of secrecy orders
and calls for such orders to be issued for defined periods, Microsoft
Chief Legal Officer Brad Smith said in a blog post on Monday.
… The suit argued that the government’s
actions were in violation of the Fourth Amendment, which establishes
the right for people and businesses to know if the government
searches or seizes their property, and the company’s First
Amendment right to free speech.
Interesting tool.
Primer uses
AI to understand and summarize mountains of text
A startup emerging out of stealth today wants to
help companies understand massive stores of text data using AI. The
company is called Primer, and it uses machine learning techniques to
help parse and collate a large number of documents across several
languages in order to facilitate further investigation.
Here’s how it works: Users feed Primer’s
software a stream of documents, and it automatically summarizes what
it determines to be the most important information out of that
haystack of data. Users are then able to filter by topic, event, and
other categories to drill down into the information Primer collected
so they can go beyond the automatically generated headlines.
The idea is that Primer will augment work done by
the human analysts who would ordinarily be tasked with the job of
wading through many sources and collating them into a report.
… Primer has a contract with In-Q-Tel, an
organization that helps connect the U.S. intelligence community with
new technology through investment and contracting.
Some of these Apps might be fun projects for my
students.
… Working from a small host of research
facilities beyond the sleek downtown headquarters and a lab tucked
away in a suburban strip mall, Kroger’s app developers and data
scientists are mining consumer information to devise the grocery
store of the future. They are testing apps for shoppers’ mobile
devices that will highlight sales based on whether the customer eats
meat or needs help finding recipes for chicken, for example. Want to
make fish tacos tonight? Another app will populate a user’s
digital shopping list with the necessary ingredients available at the
store.
For store managers, meanwhile, a program is in the
works to allow them to literally see how products are selling in a
given aisle, using augmented-reality apps on their phones that show
the prices and sales figures for the products found there.
… Kroger has invested billions over the past
decade and a half to hire engineers out of leading universities and
away from companies recruiting talent with the same kinds of
specialized skills—including data analytics, logistics and
app-development. Recent innovations developed in Kroger’s labs
include infrared sensors that monitor the number of customers in a
store and automatically deploy checkout clerks as the number grows.
This tool alone, Kroger says, has reduced wait times by several
minutes across its stores.
For my students.
… Tech’s biggest companies are placing huge
bets on artificial intelligence, banking on things ranging from
face-scanning
smartphones and conversational
coffee-table gadgets to computerized health care and autonomous
vehicles. As they chase this future, they are doling out salaries
that are startling even in an industry that has never been shy about
lavishing a fortune on its top talent.
Typical A.I. specialists, including both Ph.D.s
fresh out of school and people with less education and just a few
years of experience, can be paid from $300,000 to $500,000 a year or
more in salary and company stock, according to nine people who work
for major tech companies or have entertained job offers from them.
More popular than Steven King? Certainly less
well understood.
University
website crashes as readers rush to read Stephen Hawking's 1966 thesis
When an unknown physics student submitted his
completed PhD thesis in 1966 he had no idea thousands would still be
clamouring to read it more than 50 years later.
But when Stephen Hawking’s Properties of
Expanding Universes was published yesterday (October 23) as part
of Open Access Week 2017 – an annual event which aims to open up
academic resources to the masses.
Cambridge University’s Open Access system
reportedly kept crashing throughout the day as servers struggled to
cope with demand from readers.
And the problems appear to be persisting today.
… Professor Hawking’s 1966 doctoral thesis
‘Properties of expanding universes’ is available in Apollo at
https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.11283
or in high resolution on Cambridge Digital Library at
https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-PHD-05437/1
No comments:
Post a Comment