Wednesday, August 21, 2019


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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