Tuesday, October 19, 2021

You can be anything anyone you want to be… A common risk for such databases.

https://www.databreaches.net/hacker-steals-government-id-database-for-argentinas-entire-population/

Hacker steals government ID database for Argentina’s entire population

Catalin Cimpanu reports:

A hacker has breached the Argentinian government’s IT network and stolen ID card details for the country’s entire population, data that is now being sold in private circles.
The hack, which took place last month, targeted RENAPER. which stands for Registro Nacional de las Personas, translated as National Registry of Persons.

Read more on The Record.



I just love a good rant.

https://thenextweb.com/news/facial-recognition-could-solve-any-social-problem?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheNextWeb+%28The+Next+Web+All+Stories%29

Facial recognition to eat lunch? Why stop there, you cowards!?

The tech could solve any social problem



Does seem a little snoopy. The IRS will love it.

https://www.pogowasright.org/a-privacy-breach-waiting-to-happen-oklahoma-banks-speak-out-against-new-banking-reporting-proposal/

a privacy breach waiting to happen” — Oklahoma banks speak out against new banking reporting proposal

Thomas Fleming reports:

Oklahoma Attorney General John O’ Conner is one of 20 Republican attorneys general who are calling on the Biden administration to drop a recent proposal that would increase reporting requirements for banks.
They sent a letter Friday to both President Biden and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. They say the proposal stands in direct opposition to privacy that Americans are entitled to.
If the proposal were signed into law, banks would have to annually report on total inflows and outflows on accounts, both business and personal, with a balance over $600.

Read more on KFOR.



Well, probably not dull old me, but you get the idea.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/10/china-america-surveillance-hikvision/620404/

China Is Watching You

With generous state support at home and low-cost sales abroad, Hikvision has become a world heavyweight.

Even if you have never set foot in China, Hikvision’s cameras have likely seen you. By 2017, Hikvision had captured 12 percent of the North American market. Its cameras watched over apartment buildings in New York City, public recreation centers in Philadelphia, and hotels in Los Angeles. Police departments used them to monitor streets in Memphis, Tennessee, and in Lawrence, Massachusetts. London and more than half of Britain’s 20 next-largest cities have deployed them.

Hikvision’s reach requires a map to fully appreciate it. A recent search for the company’s cameras, using Shodan, a tool that locates internet-connected devices, yielded nearly 5 million results, including more than 750,000 devices in the United States.

Offering huge discounts to American redistributors, Hikvision has supplied cameras to Peterson Air Force Base, in Colorado, as well as the U.S. embassies in Kyiv, Ukraine, and Kabul, Afghanistan. More than 90 companies relabeled the cameras with their own brands, according to IPVM, a surveillance-industry-research group. Citing national-security concerns, Congress ordered federal agencies to remove Hikvision cameras by August 2019. The U.S. government struggled to find them all.



Machine learning for fun and profit. This will work on any keypad, not just ATMs.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/10/using-machine-learning-to-guess-pins-from-video.html

Using Machine Learning to Guess PINs from Video

Researchers trained a machine-learning system on videos of people typing their PINs into ATMs:

By using three tries, which is typically the maximum allowed number of attempts before the card is withheld, the researchers reconstructed the correct sequence for 5-digit PINs 30% of the time, and reached 41% for 4-digit PINs.

This works even if the person is covering the pad with their hands.

The article doesn’t contain a link to the original research. If someone knows it, please put it in the comments.



I’m more likely to have lots if “small data,” but will I recognize its potential?

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/small-data-is-also-crucial-for-machine-learning/

Small Data’ Is Also Crucial for Machine Learning

When people hear “artificial intelligence,” many envision “big data.” There’s a reason for that: some of the most prominent AI breakthroughs in the past decade have relied on enormous data sets. Image classification made enormous strides in the 2010s thanks to the development of ImageNet, a data set containing millions of images hand sorted into thousands of categories. More recently GPT-3, a language model that uses deep learning to produce humanlike text, benefited from training on hundreds of billions of words of online text. So it is not surprising to see AI being tightly connected with “big data” in the popular imagination. But AI is not only about large data sets, and research in “small data” approaches has grown extensively over the past decade—with so-called transfer learning as an especially promising example.

Also known as “fine-tuning,” transfer learning is helpful in settings where you have little data on the task of interest but abundant data on a related problem.



Go where the money goes? (Try to get there first.)

https://www.zdnet.com/article/gartner-survey-of-cios-highlights-investments-in-ai-cloud-and-cybersecurity/

Gartner survey of CIOs highlights investments in AI, cloud and cybersecurity

A new survey from Gartner found that a majority of CIOs are focusing their investments this year and next year on AI and distributed cloud technology.

The survey focused on "business composability", -- which involves the mindset, technologies and set of operating capabilities that enable organizations to innovate and adapt quickly to changing business needs.

"63% of CIOs at organizations with high composability* reported superior business performance compared with peers or competitors in the past year. They are better able to pursue new value streams through technology, too,"


(Related) Worth a detailed read.

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/gartner-analyst-12-technologies-to-accelerate-growth-engineer-trust-and-sculpt-change-in-2022/

Gartner analyst: 12 technologies to accelerate growth, engineer trust and sculpt change in 2022

CEOs and boards are striving to grow and are willing to spend for digital investments to make direct connections with customers, Groombridge said. He cited 12 technologies that can enhance organizational efforts to accelerate growth, engineer trust and sculpt change.


No comments: