Monday, September 09, 2019


About time.
DoD Releases Public Draft of Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification and Seeks Industry Input
On September 4, the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Acquisition released Version 0.4 of its draft Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) for public comment. The CMMC was created in response to growing concerns by Congress and within DoD over the increased presence of cyber threats and intrusions aimed at the Defense Industrial Base (DIB) and its supply chains. In its overview briefing for the new model, DoD describes the draft CMMC framework as a “unified cybersecurity standard” for DoD acquisitions that is intended to build upon existing regulations, policy, and memoranda by adding a verification component to cybersecurity protections for safeguarding Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) within the DIB. As discussed in a prior post, the model describes the requirements that contractors must meet to qualify for certain maturity certifications, ranging from Level 1 (“Basic Cyber Hygiene” practices and “Performed” processes) through Level 5 (“Advanced / Progressive” practices and “Optimized” processes), with such certification determinations to generally be made by third party auditors.




Just a demonstration of capabilities. Think: same technique, different target.
Wikipedia goes partly offline after massive DDoS attack
The attack was launched on September 6, 2019 (Friday) and targeted several countries including the U.K., France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, and parts of the Middle East.




“Surveillance is as surveillance does.” F. Gump
How does Apple (privately) find your offline devices?
Matthew Green – Cryptography Engineering Blog: [June 5, 2019] Apple announced a cool new feature called “Find My”. Unlike Apple’s “Find my iPhone“, which uses cellular communication and the lost device’s own GPS to identify the location of a missing phone, “Find My” also lets you find devices that don’t have cellular support or internal GPS — things like laptops, or (and Apple has hinted at this only broadly) even “dumb” location tags that you can attach to your non-electronic physical belongings.
The idea of the new system is to turn Apple’s existing network of iPhones into a massive crowdsourced location tracking system. Every active iPhone will continuously monitor for BLE beacon messages that might be coming from a lost device. When it picks up one of these signals, the participating phone tags the data with its own current GPS location; then it sends the whole package up to Apple’s servers…. (It’s worth mentioning that Apple didn’t invent this idea. In fact, companies like Tile have been doing this for quite a while. And yes, they should probably be worried.) If you haven’t already been inspired by the description above, let me phrase the question you ought to be asking: how is this system going to avoid being a massive privacy nightmare? Let me count the concerns…”




Technology similar to that used in traffic Apps and in battlefield information for infantry.
Real-time maps warn Hong Kong protesters of water cannons and riot police
Quartz – The “Be Water” nature of Hong Kong’s protests means that crowds move quickly and spread across the city. They might stage a protest in the central business district one weekend, then industrial neighborhoods and far-flung suburban towns the next. And a lot is happening at any one time at each protest. One of the key difficulties for protesters is to figure out what’s happening in the crowded, fast-changing, and often chaotic circumstances. Citizen-led efforts to map protests in real-time are an attempt to address those challenges and answer some pressing questions for protesters and bystanders alike: Where should they go? Where have tear gas and water cannons been deployed? Where are police advancing, and are there armed thugs attacking civilians?
One of the most widely used real-time maps of the protests is HKMap.live, a volunteer-run and crowdsourced effort that officially launched in early August. It’s a dynamic map of Hong Kong that users can zoom in and out of, much like Google Maps. But in addition to detailed street and building names, this one features various emoji to communicate information at a glance: a dog for police, a worker in a yellow hardhat for protesters, a dinosaur for the police’s black-clad special tactical squad, a white speech-bubble for tear gas, two exclamation marks for danger.”




Similar globally? I doubt it.
Almost one-fifth of Britons 'do not use internet'
… "Non-users are older, proportionately less well-educated and have lower incomes," said Dr Grant Blank, survey research fellow at the OII, who oversaw the project.
… "Virtually everyone is online before age 50," Dr Blank told the BBC.
After that milestone, he said, there was a "sharp decline" in use of about 2% a year.
"There are a lot of things about the internet that get less useful as you get older," he said.
As people's circle of friends and interests shrink they see less and less reason to spend time online.
Other survey findings:
  • 10% do not use the net because of privacy worries
  • 40% of those earning less than £12,500 do not go online
  • 70% of all respondents "uncomfortable" with targeted advertising and data tracking




Interesting “Big Think” article. Not sure I agree with it.
The International Governance of AI – We Unite or We Fight
While most of the articles in this series have related to the near-term struggles for power between organizations and governments with regards to regulation, data, and international policy, this article will focus on the long-term trajectory that AI and technology are headed towards and what that means for the most powerful nations and organizations.
In the long term (15-40 years ahead), the power struggles around AI will not end with economic and military competition. Ultimately, AI power will involve determining the trajectory of intelligence itself.




Are we moving to AI too quickly?
State Of AI And Machine Learning In 2019
  • Marketing and Sales prioritize AI and machine learning higher than any other department in enterprises today.
  • In-memory analytics and in-database analytics are the most important to Finance, Marketing, and Sales when it comes to scaling their AI and machine learning modeling and development efforts.
  • R&D’s adoption of AI and machine learning is the fastest of all enterprise departments in 2019.
These and many other fascinating insights are from Dresner Advisory Services’ 6th annual 2019 Data Science and Machine Learning Market Study (client access reqd) published last month. The study found that advanced initiatives related to data science and machine learning, including data mining, advanced algorithms, and predictive analytics are ranked the 8th priority among the 37 technologies and initiatives surveyed in the study.




For my geeks.
IBM releases quantum computing textbook and video tutorials
Quantum computers are quite different, at an architectural level, than traditional computers. Programming quantum computers, it stands to reason, is equally dissimilar—quantum computers use qubits, not bits. The properties of qubits are fundamentally what powers the potential of quantum computers, though learning how to harness qubits effectively requires a different way of thinking.
It's not entirely dissimilar, however, as IBM's Q System can be programmed using Python, providing a familiar language for developers to get started. Likewise, IBM announced the release of a new video tutorial series and open-source quantum computing textbook available through their Qiskit learning platform.




Free is good!



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