Monday, February 18, 2019

Perhaps China looking for politicians to support or compromise.
Australia accuses foreign government of cyber attack on lawmakers
A cyber attack on Australian lawmakers that breached the networks of major political parties was probably carried out by a foreign government, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said on Monday, but did not name any suspects.
As Australia heads for an election due by May, lawmakers were told this month told to urgently change their passwords after the cyber intelligence agency detected an attack on the national parliament’s computer network.
… Morrison did not reveal what information was accessed, but he said there was no evidence of election interference. [The best kind of hack! Bob]
Investors are still securing local networks, said Alastair MacGibbon, head of the Australian Cyber Security Centre, the government department responsible for online security.
… “When you consider motivation, you would have to say that China is the leading suspect, while you wouldn’t rule out Russia either,” said Fergus Hanson, head of the International Cyber Policy Centre at think-tank the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.
“It is the honey pot of juicy political gossip that has been hoovered up. Emails showing everything from the dirty laundry of internal fights through to who supported a policy could be on display.”
Ties with China have deteriorated since 2017, after Canberra accused Beijing of meddling in its domestic affairs.


(Related)
Australia political parties hacked by 'sophisticated state actor'
… The announcement on Monday came 10 days after the launch of a probe into the cybersecurity breach of the parliament's computer network.
Morrison told parliament that, while investigating the parliament hack, "we also became aware that the networks of some political parties, Liberal, Labor and Nationals have also been affected"
… He added that the hackers were sophisticated enough to get into the network, but "not sophisticated enough to remain undetected".
He said it was unclear whether the attackers gained access to sensitive data or emails.
"We don't know. These are very early days," he said. "We genuinely do not know."




My Enterprise Architecture students will find the frameworks interesting.
The latest AI trends you need to know
KERAS
It is an open source python based neural networks library that can run over Microsoft CNTK (Cognitive Toolkit), Tensorflow and many other frameworks.
KERAS is best to be used by beginners in AI development.
PYTORCH
Pytorch is an open source machine learning code library based on python for natural language processing.
SONNET
Sonnet is a python based AI development code library built on top of TensorFlow to build complex neural networks for deep learning. SONNET is best for Artificial Intelligence research and development it is not easy for beginners to develop in SONNET.
MXNET
Apache MXNET is an open source deep learning software framework for training and deploying neural networks. It has a scalable training model which supports multiple programming languages Go, R, Scala, Perl, C++, Python, Julia, Matlab, JavaScript for AI development.




I’m beginning to think that someone who knew how Facebook operated reversed that thinking and created the GDPR.
Germany Sets New Data Collection Precedent with Facebook Anti-Trust Ruling - CPO Magazine
Germany’s Federal Cartel Office (FCO), the country’s competition law authority, set a new precedent recently with an antitrust ruling against Facebook. The ruling may force Facebook to make major changes to their data collection practices – at least in Germany.
The ruling sharply limited Facebook’s ability to collect data on user activities outside of the site. According to the company’s official line, Facebook collected anonymous data on anyone visiting a site that has one of their services or apps integrated. Testimony to the United States Congress by Mark Zuckerberg in 2018 revealed that the scope of this data collection was beyond what Facebook had previously been willing to be transparent about, however. The public learned that Facebook was creating “shadow profiles” using every scrap of information they could harvest, including profiles on people who do not have a Facebook account. This collection was not disclosed to end users, and would require logging in to Facebook to opt out of it.
… Within the boundaries of Germany, this ruling is devastating to Facebook’s advertising revenue streams. However, at this point, this is not something that applies to the company across the whole of the European Union. Facebook can continue with their current data collection in the country for the time being as they work through the appeal process. Should the appeal be denied, Facebook will immediately be required to provide notice of and obtain consent for all of the applicable data types and uses.




It’s all about employee retention. The marginal cost to Purdue of one more online student is pretty low, so I suspect Papa John’s isn’t likely to go broke on this.
Papa John’s offering employees free college tuition
… The pizza company is offering employees free college tuition.
The chain has teamed up with Purdue University Global.
Employees are eligible for free tuition at the online-only institution if they have worked more than 20 hours per week for at least 90 days.


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