North Korea Accused of Stealing Bitcoin to Bolster Finances
… This basic premise that
North Korea is targeting bitcoins is reiterated in a report
from the United Press International news agency. It says, "The CWIC Cyber Warfare Research
Center in South Korea stated a domestic exchange for bitcoin, the worldwide
cryptocurrency and digital payment system, has been the target of an attempted
hacking... CWIC's Simon Choi said it is
'not only one or two exchanges where attack attempts have been made'."
Use any advantage you can find (or create)?
Jamie Williams and Amul Kalia write:
Good news out of a court in San
Francisco: a judge just issued an early ruling against LinkedIn’s abuse of the
notorious Computer
Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) to block a competing service from perfectly
legal uses of publicly available data on its website. LinkedIn’s behavior is just the sort of bad
development we expected after the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth
Circuit delivered two dangerously expansive interpretations of the CFAA last
year—despite our warnings
that the decisions would be easily misused.
Read more on EFF.
[From the
article:
Within weeks after the decisions came out, LinkedIn
started sending out cease and desist letters citing the bad case
law—specifically Power Ventures—to companies it said were violating its
prohibition on scraping. One company
LinkedIn targeted was hiQ Labs, which provides analysis of data on LinkedIn
user’s publicly available profiles. Linkedin had tolerated hiQ’s behavior for
years, but after the Power Ventures decision, it apparently saw an
opportunity to shut down a competing service. LinkedIn sent hiQ letters warning that any
future access of its website, even the public portions, were “without
permission and without authorization” and thus violations of the CFAA.
Interesting, but will customers be willing to walk to the
curb (in rain, snow, dark of night, or from their 12th floor
apartment) to retrieve their pizzas?
Ford driverless cars to deliver Domino's pizzas
… Participants
will receive text messages as the self-driving vehicle approaches with
instructions on how to retrieve their pizza, which can be unlocked from a
“heatwave compartment” inside the vehicle using a unique code.
Perspective.
Because one AI isn’t enough? Note
that they won’t share data.
Alexa meets Cortana: Amazon and Microsoft to integrate their
digital assistants
Amazon and Microsoft announced
something of a curveball this morning as they released plans to integrate Alexa
and Cortana, their respective voice-activated digital assistants.
Later this year, consumers will be able to request Cortana
support through Alexa-powered devices, such as Amazon’s range of Echo smart
speakers, while those using a Cortana-enabled device will be able to beckon
Alexa.
Who could possibly be interested.
FBI shuts down request for files on Hillary Clinton by citing
lack of public interest
The FBI is declining to turn over files related to its
investigation of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails by arguing
a lack of public interest in the matter.
… in a letter sent
this week and obtained by Fox News, the head of the FBI’s Records Management
Division told Clevenger that the bureau has “determined you have not
sufficiently demonstrated that the public’s interest in disclosure outweighs
personal privacy interests of the subject.”
How could I pass up an article with a title like this?
Who Falls for Fake News? The Roles of Analytic Thinking,
Motivated Reasoning, Political Ideology, and Bullshit Receptivity
by on
Pennycook, Gordon and Rand, David G., Who Falls for Fake
News? The Roles of Analytic Thinking,
Motivated Reasoning, Political Ideology, and Bullshit Receptivity (August 21,
2017). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3023545
“Inaccurate beliefs pose a threat to democracy and fake
news represents a particularly egregious and direct avenue by which inaccurate
beliefs have been propagated via social media. Here we investigate the cognitive
psychological profile of individuals who fall prey to fake news. We find a consistent positive correlation
between the propensity to think analytically – as measured by the Cognitive
Reflection Test (CRT) – and the ability to differentiate fake news from real
news (“media truth discernment”). This
was true regardless of whether the article’s source was indicated (which,
surprisingly, also had no main effect on accuracy judgments). Contrary to the motivated reasoning account,
CRT was just as positively correlated with media truth discernment, if not more
so, for headlines that aligned with individuals’ political ideology relative to
those that were politically discordant. The
link between analytic thinking and media truth discernment was driven both by a
negative correlation between CRT and perceptions of fake news accuracy
(particularly among Hillary Clinton
supporters), and a positive correlation between CRT and perceptions of real
news accuracy (particularly among Donald
Trump supporters). This suggests
that factors that undermine the legitimacy of traditional news media may
exacerbate the problem of inaccurate political beliefs among Trump supporters,
who engaged in less analytic thinking and were overall less able to discern
fake from real news (regardless of the news’ political valence). We also found consistent evidence that
pseudo-profound bullshit receptivity negatively correlates with perceptions of
fake news accuracy; a correlation that is mediated by analytic thinking. Finally, analytic thinking was associated with
an unwillingness to share both fake and real news on social media. Our results
indicate that the propensity to think analytically plays an important role in
the recognition of misinformation, regardless of political valence – a finding
that opens up potential avenues for fighting fake news.”
Cute. I haven’t
seen a tool like this in years.
Interactive web visualization of information about capabilities
consequences of missile launches
by on
“MISSILEMAP is an interactive
web visualization meant to aid in the understanding of information about the
capabilities and consequences of missile launches, in particular nuclear-armed
ballistic missiles. It allows for the
graphical representation of ranges, great-circle paths, accuracy (Circular
Error Probable), blast damage, and probabilities of kill (the chance that a
given weapon will put a particular amount of blast damage on a target). It was made to aid in discussions about
missile development, since the technical nature of honest-to-god “rocket
science” can make it rather impenetrable from the perspective of laymen, yet
many of the fundamental questions are key to local understanding of
geopolitical questions (e.g., “could North Korea hit my city with their latest
missile?”). It was created by Alex Wellerstein, a historian of science and
technology at the College of Arts and Letters at the Stevens
Institute of Technology, in Hoboken, New Jersey, USA. The site’s hosting is paid for by the College
of Arts and Letters. It is programmed in
Javascript, making extensive use of JQuery and the D3.js
libraries, as well as the Google Maps Web API. Professor Wellerstein is a historian of
nuclear weapons, the creator of the NUKEMAP, the author of the Restricted
Data Blog, and developed this application using Cold War-era algorithms
that have long since been declassified…”
How to test online students?
Skype’s new ‘Interviews’ feature lets you test candidates
using a real-time code editor
Skype recently introduced a feature designed to cement its place among
business users who aren’t as interested in things like emoji reactions or “Stories.” It now
supports conducting technical interviews via its service through a new Skype Interviews
feature. From a dedicated website, interviewers can test candidates in seven programing
languages over Skype using a real-time code editor.
The feature was introduced a few days ago as a technical
preview, and currently only works in the browser version of Skype, Microsoft
tells us.
Of course, there are already a number of solutions for
conducting interviews with remote technical talent on the market, like HackerRank, Codility, Interview Zen, CoderPad,
Remoteinterview.io, HireVue’s CodeVue (née CodeEval), and others.
But the benefit to using Skype is the platform’s ubiquity,
which makes it a regular tool for doing remote video calls of any kind. Bundling in an interview testing feature
within Skype could speed up the interview process, as subjects won’t have to
switch to a different tool to complete the technical screening.
No comments:
Post a Comment