Tuesday, October 24, 2017

Fishing matches the fly to what the fish are biting. Phishing matches the lure the same way.
Russian Spies Lure Targets With NATO Cybersecurity Conference
A cyber espionage group linked to Russia has been trying to deliver malware to targeted individuals using documents referencing a NATO cybersecurity conference, Cisco’s Talos research team reported on Monday.
The campaign was apparently aimed at individuals interested in the CyCon U.S. conference organized by the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence (CCDCOE) in collaboration with the Army Cyber Institute at West Point on November 7-8 in Washington, D.C. The hackers created malicious documents with information that was copied from the official CyCon U.S. website.
The topic used as bait in this attack suggests that the threat actor targeted individuals with an interest in cyber security.




Tales of future greed?
Facebook's News Feed experiment panics publishers
So, an experiment under way in a few countries, where the social media giant appears to be making it harder for users to see news stories, has caused something akin to panic.
The new feature Facebook is trying out is called Explore. It offers all sorts of stories it thinks might interest you, a separate news feed encouraging you to look further afield than just at what your friends are sharing.
Meanwhile, for most people, the standard News Feed remains the usual mixture of baby photos and posts from companies or media organisations whose pages you have liked.
Sounds fine, doesn't it? Except that in six countries - Sri Lanka, Bolivia, Slovakia, Serbia, Guatemala, and Cambodia - the experiment went further.
For users there, the main News Feed was cleared of everything but the usual stuff from your friends and sponsored posts – in other words, if you wanted to have your material seen in the place most users spend their time you had to pay for the privilege.
In a Medium post entitled "Biggest drop in organic reach we've ever seen", a Slovakian journalist Filip Struharik documented the impact. Publishers in his country had seen four times fewer interactions since the change, he said – what had become a vital and vibrant platform for them was emptying out fast.




How to analyze a Tweet?
The Worst Tweeter In Politics Isn’t Trump




So we should be learning more about government data requests?
Microsoft drops lawsuit after U.S. government revises data request transparency rules
Microsoft said it will drop a lawsuit against the U.S. government after the Department of Justice (DoJ) changed data request rules on alerting internet users about agencies accessing their information.
The new policy limits the use of secrecy orders and calls for such orders to be issued for defined periods, Microsoft Chief Legal Officer Brad Smith said in a blog post on Monday.
… The suit argued that the government’s actions were in violation of the Fourth Amendment, which establishes the right for people and businesses to know if the government searches or seizes their property, and the company’s First Amendment right to free speech.




Interesting tool.
Primer uses AI to understand and summarize mountains of text
A startup emerging out of stealth today wants to help companies understand massive stores of text data using AI. The company is called Primer, and it uses machine learning techniques to help parse and collate a large number of documents across several languages in order to facilitate further investigation.
Here’s how it works: Users feed Primer’s software a stream of documents, and it automatically summarizes what it determines to be the most important information out of that haystack of data. Users are then able to filter by topic, event, and other categories to drill down into the information Primer collected so they can go beyond the automatically generated headlines.
The idea is that Primer will augment work done by the human analysts who would ordinarily be tasked with the job of wading through many sources and collating them into a report.
… Primer has a contract with In-Q-Tel, an organization that helps connect the U.S. intelligence community with new technology through investment and contracting.




Some of these Apps might be fun projects for my students.
The future of grocery shopping is all about data
… Working from a small host of research facilities beyond the sleek downtown headquarters and a lab tucked away in a suburban strip mall, Kroger’s app developers and data scientists are mining consumer information to devise the grocery store of the future. They are testing apps for shoppers’ mobile devices that will highlight sales based on whether the customer eats meat or needs help finding recipes for chicken, for example. Want to make fish tacos tonight? Another app will populate a user’s digital shopping list with the necessary ingredients available at the store.
For store managers, meanwhile, a program is in the works to allow them to literally see how products are selling in a given aisle, using augmented-reality apps on their phones that show the prices and sales figures for the products found there.
… Kroger has invested billions over the past decade and a half to hire engineers out of leading universities and away from companies recruiting talent with the same kinds of specialized skills—including data analytics, logistics and app-development. Recent innovations developed in Kroger’s labs include infrared sensors that monitor the number of customers in a store and automatically deploy checkout clerks as the number grows. This tool alone, Kroger says, has reduced wait times by several minutes across its stores.




For my students.
Tech Giants Are Paying Huge Salaries for Scarce A.I. Talent
… Tech’s biggest companies are placing huge bets on artificial intelligence, banking on things ranging from face-scanning smartphones and conversational coffee-table gadgets to computerized health care and autonomous vehicles. As they chase this future, they are doling out salaries that are startling even in an industry that has never been shy about lavishing a fortune on its top talent.
Typical A.I. specialists, including both Ph.D.s fresh out of school and people with less education and just a few years of experience, can be paid from $300,000 to $500,000 a year or more in salary and company stock, according to nine people who work for major tech companies or have entertained job offers from them.




More popular than Steven King? Certainly less well understood.
University website crashes as readers rush to read Stephen Hawking's 1966 thesis
When an unknown physics student submitted his completed PhD thesis in 1966 he had no idea thousands would still be clamouring to read it more than 50 years later.
But when Stephen Hawking’s Properties of Expanding Universes was published yesterday (October 23) as part of Open Access Week 2017 – an annual event which aims to open up academic resources to the masses.
Cambridge University’s Open Access system reportedly kept crashing throughout the day as servers struggled to cope with demand from readers.
And the problems appear to be persisting today.
… Professor Hawking’s 1966 doctoral thesis ‘Properties of expanding universes’ is available in Apollo at https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.11283 or in high resolution on Cambridge Digital Library at https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-PHD-05437/1


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