Looks
like it will take a while for a comprehensive report on this attack.
Information
Concerning the August 2019 Texas Cyber Incident
… Below
is an update as of August 20, 2019, at approximately 3:00 p.m.
central time.
- The number of confirmed impacted entities has been reduced to twenty-two.
- More than twenty-five percent of the impacted entities have transitioned from response and assessment to remediation and recovery, with a number of entities back to operations as usual.
(Related)
Study:
Americans won’t vote for candidates who approve ransomware payments
… New
research
by
The Harris Poll reveals that 64% of registered voters will not vote
for candidates who approve of making ransomware payments.
Pre-crime.
Law
Enforcement To Flag & Spy On Future Criminals
… A
recent Albuquerque Journal article revealed that law enforcement will
flag people that they think might pose a potential risk.
… What
types of things could Americans do that law enforcement would
consider threatening?
Inside
Sources revealed that police would be looking for "certain
indicators."
State
Police Chief Tim Johnson said, “I think it’s obviously important
for all of the citizens of New Mexico to be on the lookout for
certain indicators of these types of folks that would do this. And
part of our job as government officials is to ensure that the
citizens of the community understand what those indicators are so
they can report them."
The
Tampa Bay Times reports that police are looking for “certain
critical threat indicators” on students social media posts and have
even created their own FortifyFL app that allows anyone to secretly
report suspicious behavior.
What
these "indicators" are is anyone's guess.
Not
in the US, yet.
You
Can Finally See All Info Facebook Collected About You From Other
Websites
BuzzFeed
News –
“…Facebook collects information about its users in two ways:
first, through the information you input into its website and apps,
and second, by tracking which websites you visit while you’re not
on Facebook. That’s why, after you visit a clothing retailer’s
website, you’ll likely see an ad for it in your Facebook News Feed
or Instagram feed. Basically, Facebook
monitors where you go, all across the internet, and uses your digital
footprints to target you with ads.
But Facebook users have never been able to view this external data
Facebook collected about them, until now. Facebook tracks
your browsing history via
the “Login with Facebook” button, the “like” button, Facebook
comments, and little bits of invisible code, called the Facebook
pixel, embedded on other sites (including BuzzFeed News). Today the
company will start to roll out a feature called “Off-Facebook
Activity” that allows people to manage that external browsing data
— finally delivering on a promise it made over a year ago when CEO
Mark Zuckerberg announced at a company event that it would develop a
feature then called “Clear History.”
The
new tool will display a summary of those third-party websites that
shared your visit with Facebook, and will allow you to disconnect
that browsing history from your Facebook account. You can also opt
out of future off-Facebook activity tracking, or selectively stop
certain websites from sending your browsing activity to Facebook.
Nearly
a third of all websites include a Facebook tracker,
according to several
studies.
Some people in Ireland,
South Korea, and Spain will gain access to Off-Facebook Activity
first.
Facebook said it will continue rolling out the feature everywhere
else over the coming months. The tool, found in account Settings >
Off-Facebook Activity, includes an option allowing you to “clear”
your browsing history…”
See
also the related Facebook
Newsroom blog posting.
There
is a big difference between, “Hey! We have this shiny new tool!”
and “Hey! We know how to use this shiny new tool!”
Flawed
Algorithms Are Grading Millions of Students’ Essays
Fooled
by gibberish and highly susceptible to human bias, automated
essay-scoring systems are being increasingly adopted, a Motherboard
investigation has found
… Of
those 21 states, three said every essay is also graded by a human.
But in the remaining 18 states, only a small percentage of students’
essays—it varies between 5 to 20 percent—will be randomly
selected for a human grader to double check the machine’s work.
But
research from psychometricians—professionals who study testing—and
AI experts, as well as documents obtained by Motherboard, show that
these tools are susceptible to a flaw that has repeatedly sprung up
in the AI world: bias against certain demographic groups. And as a
Motherboard experiment demonstrated, some of the systems can be
fooled by nonsense essays with sophisticated vocabulary.
Fuel
for an interesting discussion.
RPA
And Machine Learning Brings Us The Autonomous Data Centre
… As
we enter this new revolution in how businesses operate, it’s
essential that every piece of data is handled and used appropriately
to optimise its value. Without cost-effective storage and
increasingly powerful hardware, digital transformation and the new
business models associated with it wouldn’t be possible.
Experts
have been predicting for some time that the automation technologies
that are applied in factories worldwide would be applied to
datacentres in the future. The truth is that we’re rapidly
advancing this possibility with the application of Robotic Process
Automation (RPA) and machine learning in the datacentre environment.
Perspective.
A
Week in the Life of Popular YouTube Channels
“An
analysis of every video posted by high-subscriber channels in the
first week of 2019 finds that children’s content
–
as well as content featuring children – received more views than
other video”
“The
media landscape was upended more than a decade ago when the
video-sharing site YouTube was launched. The volume and variety of
content posted on the site is staggering. The site’s popularity
makes it a launchpad for performers, businesses and commentators on
every conceivable subject. And like many platforms in the modern
digital ecosystem, YouTube has in recent years become a flashpoint in
ongoing debates over issues such as online
harassment, misinformation
and
the impact of technology on children.
Amid this growing focus, and in an effort to continue demystifying
the content of this popular source of information, Pew Research
Center used its own custom mapping
technique to
assemble a list of popular YouTube channels (those with at
least 250,000 subscribers)
that existed as of late 2018, then conducted a large-scale analysis
of the videos those channels produced in the first week of 2019. The
Center identified a
total of 43,770 of these high-subscriber channels
using a process similar to the one used in our study
of the YouTube recommendation algorithm.
This data collection produced a variety of insights into the nature
of content on the platform: The
YouTube ecosystem produces a vast quantity of content. These
popular channels alone posted nearly a quarter-million videos in the
first seven days of 2019, totaling 48,486 hours of content. To put
this figure in context, a single person watching videos for eight
hours a day (with no breaks or days off) would need more than 16
years to watch all the content posted by just the most popular
channels on the platform during a single week. The average video
posted by these channels during this time period was roughly 12
minutes long and received 58,358 views during its first week on the
site…”
Next, speech
to sign?
Google's
AI allows smartphones to translate sign language
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