The AI Sky Is Falling
May 10, 2018
One Expert Says AI is Threatening Our Lives
Is artificial intelligence a bigger development than electricity or fire? Google CEO Sundar Pichai thinks so. In fact, he warns that if not harnessed correctly, AI could be more deadly than fire. We got the full scoop from a recent Newsweek story, “What’s Bigger Than Fire and Electricity? Artificial Intelligence, Says Google Boss.”
According to the story:
“Pichai went on to warn of the potential dangers associated with developing advanced AI, saying that developers need to learn to harness its benefits in the same way humanity did with fire.
“’My point is AI is really important, but we have to be concerned about it,’ Pichai said.
Scary stuff straight out of a sci-fi novel. Or is it? Investopedia looked deeper into the future and found a mixed bag that has us more than a little concerned. They found that we can relax, because ultimately AI is controlled by electricity and as long as we have control of power we can cut off their source of energy (Warning to power companies: Don’t give your robots the keys!). However, the story continues with a closing thought that mirrors our own—that, yeah, humans are going to push this thing as far as it will go and ultimately suffer some sort of consequence. We’ve been doing it for thousands of years. I doubt we’ll stop now.
Patrick Roland, May 10, 2018
A Particularly Critical Look at the GOOG
May 9, 2018
If you are looking for items of information which suggest that Google has some tricks up its sleeve when it comes to user data, navigate to “Google’s Software Is Malware.” The list is not comprehensive, but it is a useful run down of some Google methods.
The write up addresses:
- Google back doors
- Google censorship
- Google insecurity
- Google sabotage
- Google surveillance
- Google digital rights management
- Google tyrants which seems different from the other observations.
I would note that the write up does not point to some of the technology Google has acquired when it bought certain, very capable companies, nor the capabilities available to the firm because it funded certain start ups.
Here in Harrod’s Creek, we are quite happy with the Google. Your mileage may vary.
Stephen E Arnold, May 9, 2018
France: A Player in Cybersecurity
May 9, 2018
We know the French are good at cheese and wine and romance. Heck, we’d say they are the best in the world in those departments. But when it comes to cyber security, most people think they are about as fresh as rotten brie. That image could be changing. We certainly changed our tune after reading some persuasive recent pieces, starting with Express article, “WhatsApp is About to Get a Rival From One of the Most Unlikely Places.”
That place is, obviously, France. Here’s what the story had to say:
“Since none of the major encrypted messaging apps are based in France, it has raised the risk of data breaches at servers outside the country, the French digital ministry said.
“About 20 officials and top civil servants are testing the new app which a state-employed developer has designed, a ministry spokewoman said, with the aim that its use will become mandatory for the whole government by the summer.”
On the surface, this sounds completely laughable, right? But people are starting to talk about the surprising strength of France’s tech industry. If you ask some people, they are on the cusp of becoming a cyber security power. If things go France’s way, cyber technology might rank up there with champagne, as the country’s finer exports.
Patrick Roland, May 9, 2018
Humans Do Not Cut and Paste 80 Million User Profiles and Draw Link Diagrams by Hand
May 9, 2018
As one who has always been cynical about online confidentiality, I’ve been a bit startled at the recent surprise surrounding Facebook’s privacy practices. Then again, perhaps we who follow information technology, and the ways companies leverage it, have more reason than most to be wary. The Register reports, “As Zuck Apologizes Again… Facebook Admits ‘Most’ of its 2bn+ Users May Have Had Public Profiles Slurped by Bots.” The disclosure appeared in Facebook’s own post announcing its new, post-Cambridge-Analytica-hullabaloo data policies. Writer Shaun Nichols explains:
“Even as the social network’s founder was giving his mea culpa for the Cambridge Analytica fiasco, however, another privacy scandal was emerging. Facebook’s outline of its new data policies included the disclosure that Facebook’s user search and account recovery features had been abused to scrape the profile information of potentially two or more billion accounts.
“‘Until today, people could enter another person’s phone number or email address into Facebook search to help find them,’ Facebook explained. ‘However, malicious actors have also abused these features to scrape public profile information by submitting phone numbers or email addresses they already have through search and account recovery. Given the scale and sophistication of the activity we’ve seen, we believe most people on Facebook could have had their public profile scraped in this way.’ Zuckerberg said the feature has been turned off effective immediately and, once again, apologized. ‘I would assume that if you had that setting turned on, someone at some point has access to your public info in this way,’ he admitted.”
Oh, goody. Nichols seems vexed that Zuckerberg issued a (perhaps legally advisable) caveat in the post—a reminder that, after all, Facebook users did choose to share the scraped information in a publicly accessible profile. Are companies like Facebook responsible for making their fine print more accessible and easy to understand? Or should users pay closer attention and take less for granted? Some of each, perhaps.
Cynthia Murrell, May 9, 2018
Policeware Lights Up Venture World
May 8, 2018
Spy agencies have has recently begun taking on a different look, that of a Silicon Valley startup. That’s because some of the world’s most secretive organizations have started to publicly proclaim that they are investing in digital spying tools. The most recent example popped up in a Jerusalem Times story, “Start-Up Spies? Mossad Enters the World of Venture Capitalism.”
The story focuses on the Israeli spy agency, Mossad, publicly starting a VC fund.
“In June, the fund was made public for the first time and previous announcements have indicated that it would invest NIS 10 million per year in five companies following a similar model to the CIA in this arena.
“The CIA’s parallel outfit is called Q-Tel, which is defined as the ‘strategic investor for the US intelligence and defense communities that identifies and adapts cutting-edge technologies.’”
This combination of entities, spy agencies and tech companies, might seem like a dream combination on the surface, but it is highly flawed. As the New York Times pointed out, being investors is not exactly what an organization like the CIA or Mossad is known for. Perhaps they have bright people handing the money in these organizations, but we wouldn’t count on it.
Patrick Roland, May 8, 2018
DarkCyber for May 8, 2018, Now Available
May 8, 2018
DarkCyber for May 8, 2018, is now available at www.arnoldit.com/wordpress and on Vimeo at https://vimeo.com/268247100
Stephen E Arnold’s DarkCyber is a weekly video news and analysis program about the Dark Web and lesser known Internet services.
Terrogence, a business unit of Verint, has developed a specialized image collection and search system. The focus is on identifying bad actors. Images are harvested from a wide range of sources, and the images are indexed. Verint also offers a robust FaceDetect system, which when combined with Verint’s other technologies and engineering capabilities provides a number of high-value functions for investigators. However, China has made significant advances in facial recognition as well. The key point is that real-time facial recognition technology has diffused around the world. No single country or region dominates this technical field. Although consumer applications of facial recognition technology are reducing flight boarding times, facial recognition is an amplifier for law enforcement. What once took days or weeks can now be accomplished in minutes or hours.
Chemistry majors know that fabricating a synthetic opioid, if not particularly complicated, requires time, expertise, and attention to detail. Bulk 4-ANPP can be acquired via transactions on the hidden Internet, shipped to a country (for example, Mexico), and then smuggled into the US. With this intermediate, street grade fentanyl can be manufactured quickly. Due to the small size of some fentanyl doses, drug orders can be sent via traditional package and letter delivery systems. Fentanyl is, ounce for ounce, significantly more profitable for drug dealers to handle.opioid More aggressive and stringent parcel per-screening may be needed to deal with this type of contraband.
Since the ground breaking FBI PlayPen operation, a number of “seize and operate” stings have neutralized some bad actors. A recent operation in Ohio resulted in the arrest of bad actors who had in their possession more than 250,000 child pornography (CP) images and videos. Operation Pacifier was a success, resulting in the identification of 300 individuals, 55 of whom were hands-on child abusers. Despite the success of CP operations in the US and the UK, child sex abuse remains a serious, world-wide problem.
The final story describes an allegedly fool proof way to allow law enforcement to access encrypted messages. DarkCyber reports that the idea of solving two complicated problems is interesting. However, what a human has crafted can be solved by a human. The academic researchers’ proposed method is likely to be less useful than techniques developed by policeware vendors. DarkCyber believes than one large online vendor will be introducing capabilities which may be more useful to law enforcement. The patented method will be profiled in Stephen E Arnold’s “Deanonymizing Digital Currency Transactions at the Telestrategies ISS conference in Prague in June 2018.
Kenny Toth, May 8, 2018
You Know You Are in Deep Doo Doo When…
May 7, 2018
I flipped through the Overflight news feeds and noted several stories. Remember when you were a wee thing, and you did something wrong. Your friends knew. Your friends’ mom knew. Your mom knew. Then your father or significant parental other (SPO) knew. That may be the feeling of some of the Cambridge Analytica wunderkind.
An example is warranted:
That excellent hire Christopher Wylie has allegedly shared more information about turning clicks into votes. The good hearted wizard told the Guardian about data, target variables, and profiling. There’s even a reference to a patent (absent the patent number, the assignee, and other data which allows one to locate the referenced patent). The kimono is open and the sight does not strike me as one I would describe as attractive.
Will declaring bankruptcy allow the Cambridge Analytica “owner” to avoid further scrutiny? That seems unlikely.
Will an expert step forward and suggest that Cambridge Analytica may have precipitated the Brexit anguish? That seems unlikely.
Nevertheless, I would hypothesize that moms.
PS. Include patent identifiers when you quote patents, dear Guardian editors, please. Perhaps you too are engaging in some data shaping just on a tiny scale?
Stephen E Arnold, May 7,l 2018
Troubling Tech News from Canada
May 7, 2018
When people discuss high tech countries and also countries that censor its citizens through technology, Canada rarely enters either conversation. The country is democratic and values free speech, but has no Silicon Valley. However, a Canadian company was recently outed as a catalyst for censorship in other countries, according to a CBC story, “To Censor The Internet, 10 Countries Use Canadian Filtering Technology.”
According to the story:
“As part of a globe-spanning investigation released Wednesday, researchers at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab say they have found fresh evidence that internet-filtering technology developed by Waterloo, Ont.-based Netsweeper is being used in 10 countries to censor access to news, religious content, LGBTQ+ resources, and political campaigns.
“India and Pakistan, both parliamentary democracies, are two notable entries in a list of regimes that includes the UAE.”
Very disturbing news for any democratic nation, but oddly, not the last of the bad news involving Canadian Tech. Lawmakers in Ottawa have also begun investigating whether or not Canadian tech companies are related to various human rights violations. This is troubling news, but nothing new for countries that practice free speech. That right allows some to profit off of others’ lack of those rights. Hopefully, the Canadian government and people will find a solution to this dangerous news.
Patrick Roland, May 7, 2018
Algolia: Doing What Exalead Failed to Do
May 7, 2018
I read “How Algolia Built Their Real-time Search as a Service Product.” Reading between the lines and doing a bit of thinking, I arrived a hypothesis. The story begins with the Exalead search system. (You can get some information from the original three editions of “The Enterprise Search Report” which I wrote between 2004 and 2008. I also have a for fee profile of Exalead which you can order by writing benkent2020 @ yahoo dot com. The report is $40 payable via PayPal.)
The developers of Algolia focused on the shortcomings of Exalead, which has not changed significantly since its purchase by Dassault Systèmes. A number of Exalead professionals have left the company and had an impact on a number of companies. That may be the case at Algolia, or the founders of Algolia identified the weakness of other French systems and moved forward. Does anyone think about Antidot, Datop, Pertimm, Sinequa, and other French centric search systems?
Crunchbase reports that Algolia says:
Algolia is the most reliable platform for building search. Our hosted search API supplies the building blocks for creating great search to connect your users with what matters most to them. Our hosted search API powers billions of queries for thousands of websites & mobile applications every month, delivering relevant results in an as-you-type search experience in under 50ms anywhere in the world. Algolia’s full-stack solution takes the pain out of building search; we maintain the infrastructure & the engine, and we provide extensive documentations to our dozens of up-to-date API clients and SDKs with all the latest search features, so you can focus on delighting your users.
The write up explains that the complexity of other search systems, the lack of a hosted cloud-based platform, and the failure to swap out proprietary code for open source alternatives have differentiated Algolia from other enterprise search systems.
Some reviews of the system are available on Stackshare. Among the strengths of the system are its speed, its ease of implementation, and its distributed search network. No negatives jumped out at me. Algolia seems to in a good place at this time.
The system is also available for free for “community projects.”
Several observations:
- Large companies purchasing search systems often find that change and improvement is difficult, if not impossible. Too bad for Exalead.’
- The open source orientation of Algolia may put some pressure on Elastic. I would include Lucidworks, but that company continues to borrow or chase venture funds because the home run swing is not yet butter smooth. But Algolia has ingested $74 million, and like Lucidworks, that money has to make money; otherwise, exciting events occur.
- French vendors have had some difficulty penetrating certain markets; for example, the US government. Perhaps Algolia will succeed where other French companies have fallen short.
For more information about Algolia, navigate to www.algolia.com.
I would point out that the European experts and the US SEO crowd have not paid much attention to Algolia. Quite a few dead horses are being whipped while Elastic romps forward. In the US, search means SEO, and that band of merry wizards remains convinced that Google will put their clients’ Web pages at the top of the results list without buying Google ads.
Yeah, and I believe in the tooth fairy.
Stephen E Arnold, May 7, 2018
Metadata Collection Spike: Is There a Reason?
May 6, 2018
I read “NSA Triples Metadata Collection Numbers Sucking Up over 500 Million Call Records in 2017.” Interesting report, but it raised several questions here in Harrod’s Creek. But first, let’s look at the “angle” of the story.
I noted this statement:
The National Security Agency revealed a huge increase in the amount of call metadata collected, from about 151 million call records in 2016 to more than 530 million last year — despite having fewer targets.
The write up pointed out that penetration testing and trace and tap orders declined. That’s interesting as well.
The write up focused on what’s called “call detail records.” These, the write up explained, are:
things like which numbers were called and when, the duration of the call, and so on…
The write up then reminds the reader that “one target can yield hundreds or thousands of sub-targets.”
The article ends without any information about why. My impression of the write up is that the government agency is doing something that’s not quite square.
My initial reaction to the data in the write up was, “That does not seem like such a big number.” A crawl of the Dark Web, which is a pretty tiny digital space, often generates quite a bit of metadata. Stuffing the tiny bit of Dark Web data into a robust system operated by companies from Australia to the United States can produce terabytes of data. In fact, one Israeli company uploads new data in zipped block to its customers multiple times a day. The firm of which I am thinking performs this work for outfits engaged in marketing consumer products. In comparison, the NSA effort strikes me as modest.
My first question, “Why so little data?” Message, call, image, and video data are going up. The corresponding volume of metadata is going up. Toss in link analysis pointers, and that’s a lot of data. In short, the increase reported seems modest.
The second question is, “What factors contributed to the increase?” Based on our research, we think that some of the analytic systems are bogged down due to the wider use of message encryption technology. I will be describing one of these systems in my June 2018 Telestrategies ISS lecture related to encrypted chat. I wonder if the change in the volume reported in the write up is related to encryption.
My third question is, “Is government analysis of message content new or different?” Based on the information I have stumbled upon here in rural Kentucky, my thought is that message traffic analysis has been chugging along for decades. I heard an anecdote when I worked at a blue chip consulting firm. It went something like this:
In the days of telegrams, the telegraph companies put paper records in a bag, took them to the train station in Manhattan, and sent them to Washington, DC.
Is the anecdote true or false? My hunch is that it is mostly true.
My final question triggered by this article is, “Why does the government collect date?” I suppose the reasons are nosiness, but my perception is that the data are analyzed in order to get a sense of who is doing what which might harm the US financial system or the country itself.
My point is that numbers without context are often not helpful. In this case, the 2010 Pew Data reported that the average adult with a mobile makes five calls per day. Text message volume is higher. With 300 million people in the US in 2010 and assuming 30 percent mobile phone penetration, the number of calls eight years ago works out to about 1.5 billion calls. Flash forward to the present. The “number” cited in the article seems low.
Perhaps the author of the article could provide more context, do a bit of digging to figure out why the number is what it is, and explain why these data are needed in the first place.
One can criticize the US government. But I want to know a bit more.
Net net: It seems that the NSA is showing quite a bit of focus or restraint in its collection activities. In the May 16, DarkCyber, I report the names of some of the companies manufacturing cell site simulators. These gizmos are an interesting approach to data collection. Some of the devices seem robust. To me, capturing 500 million calls seems well within the specifications of these devices.
But what do I know? I can see the vapor from a mine drainage ditch from my back window. Ah, Kentucky.
Stephen E Arnold, May 6, 2018
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