FBI Photo Recognition: Mixed Views
January 31, 2019
Get used to debates like this in the future: law enforcement agencies develop new technology that helps track criminals more efficiently, but the courts and the public doubt its validity. This is not a new argument, but seems to be entering into a new arena, as we discovered from a recent ProPublica story, “The FBI Says its Photo Analysis is Scientific Evidence—Scientists Disagree.”
The story has several interesting spins:
“FBI examiners have tied defendants to crime pictures in thousands of cases over the past half-century using unproven techniques, at times giving jurors baseless statistics to say the risk of error was vanishingly small. Much of the legal foundation for the unit’s work is rooted in a 22-year-old comparison of bluejeans.”
From bluejeans to facial recognition software, this is the latest frontier for collecting evidence and it is healthy that it is met with skepticism. We are reminded of how fingerprints were disregarded as not being scientific evidence in the 1800s. Over time, thanks to rigorous testing and patience, the world at large began to trust this evidence. We foresee that being the case with photo analysis, once it is able to meet the standards of the scientific community.
Patrick Roland, January 31, 2019
Colorado Retail Fraud Team Brings Agencies Together
January 31, 2019
Law enforcement officers in Douglas County, Colorado, are on the offensive against retail fraud. The Denver Post reports, “Multi-Agency ‘Strike Team’ Puts Heat on Retail Thieves, Fraudsters in Douglas County.” The strike force is called the Financial Investigative Regional Strike Team (FIRST), and brings together investigators from local law enforcement, the U.S. Secret Service, and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, for a total of five agencies involved. At the beginning of this year, the team had already arrested two alleged counterfeiters, stopped a nationwide identity theft involving iPhones, and busted a credit-card cloning and skimming operation, among other accomplishments. Reporter John Aguilar tells us:
“FIRST, which launched in mid-October and operates out of the Douglas County sheriff’s headquarters in Castle Rock, has the singular focus of chasing down the fraudsters and organized retail theft rings that cause misery for victims and cost stores millions of dollars a year. It is a unique example in Colorado of collaboration and information-sharing across jurisdictional boundaries and even state lines. ‘Retail theft and fraud is the No. 1 crime we deal with in Lone Tree, and frankly, in the state,’ said Lone Tree Police Chief Kirk Wilson. ‘This isn’t a new problem — it’s just becoming more prolific every year.’
We also noted:
“In 2018, Colorado was ranked as the second-riskiest state for identity theft, according to a report from ASecureLife. The security firm calculated that 385 victims in the state lost more than $1.7 million to identity theft in 2017.”
Aguilar notes that, nationally, 92% of companies fell victim to organized retail crimes that year, with losses averaging over $777,000 per $1 billion in sales, according to a report from the National Retail Federation. Naturally, the internet makes physical jurisdictions somewhat irrelevant in such schemes, which is why the Secret Service (the only federal agency, we’re reminded, that investigates counterfeiting operations) and the Postal Inspection Service are on board. As Douglas County’s Chief Deputy Steve Johnson observes, such cooperation lets each organization escape their local “silos” see the bigger picture.
Cynthia Murrell, January 31, 2019
Analytic Hubs: Now You Know
January 30, 2019
Gartner Group has crafted a new niche. I learned about analytic hubs in Datanami. The idea is that a DMSA or data management solution fro analytics is now a thing. Odd. I thought that companies have been providing data analytics hubs for a number of years. Oh, well, whatever sells.
The DMSA vendor list in “What Gartner Sees in Analytic Hubs” is interesting. Plus the write up includes one of the objective, math based, deeply considered Boston Consulting Group quadrants which make some ideas so darned fascinating. I mean Google. An analytics hub?
Based on information in the write up, here are the vendors who are the movers and shakers in analytic hubs:
Alibaba Cloud
Amazon Web Services
Arm
Cloudera
GBase
Hortonworks
Huawei
IBM
MapR Technologies
MarkLogic
Micro Focus
Microsoft
Neo4
Oracle
Pivotal
SAP
Snowflake
Teradata
This is an interesting list. It seems the “consultants” at Gartner, had lunch, and generated a list with names big and small, known and unknown.
I noted the presence of Amazon which is reasonable. I was surprised that the reference to Oracle did not include its stake in a vendor which actually delivers the “hubby” functions to which the write up alludes. The inclusion of MarkLogic was interesting because that company is a search system, an XML database, and annoyance to Oracle. IBM is fascinating, but which “analytic hub” technology is Gartner considering unknown to me. One has to admire the inclusion of Snowflake and MapR Technologies.
I suppose the analysis will fuel a conference, briefings, and consulting revenue.
Will the list clarify the notion of an analytics hub?
Yeah, that’s another issue. It’s Snowflake without the snow.
Stephen E Arnold, January 30, 2019
Fact Checkers Are Key to Next Gen Data
January 30, 2019
Misinformation has been a plague on the internet, but also on those working in law enforcement and intelligence. It has never been easy to trust a tip or a hunch, but now with the confusion of data it’s growing more impossible. Facebook’s Cheryl Sandberg recently discussed how her company, arguably the most plague-ridden, is attacking this issue. We found out more from the Tech Crunch article, “Stung by Criticism, Facebook’s Sandberg Outlines New Plans to Tackle Misinformation.”
According to the story:
“She said Facebook was now working with fact checkers around the world and had tweaked its algorithm to show related articles allowing users to see both sides of a news story that is posted on the platform. It was also taking down posts which had the potential to create real-world violence.”
The most interesting part of that quote involves fact checkers. A term that remains a holdover from the days when journalism was king, it reminds us that the role of humans is not outdated. Many are calling for the integration of human fact checkers amidst the ranks of AI and deep learning. This feels like the sensible direction, no matter if you work for Twitter or the CIA, because facts matter. Period.
Patrick Roland, January 30, 2019
Factualities for January 30, 2019
January 30, 2019
Numbers are everywhere. Believe these outputs or not.
- One. The number of autonomous vehicles required to output the same amount of data as 3,000 non autonomous humans. Source: The New York Times
- $21.2 million. The amount spent by Google on its DC centric lobbying in 2018. Source: Thomson Reuters
- 57 percent. The percentage of the population trusting non governmental organizations. Source ZDNet
- 90 percent. The percentage of VPN applications compromising user security and privacy. Source: Trusted Reviews which we trust, right?
- $3.1 million. Funding Google has provided to Wikipedia. Google’s total funding of Wikipedia in the last 10 years has reached $75. million tax deductible dollars. Source: Wired
- 81 percent. The percentage of Amazon’s facial recognition systems’ accuracy. Source The New York Times
- Number five. The rank of Apple among smartphone vendors in China. Source: Macrumors
- 50 percent. The number of fake Facebook users. Source: Zerohedge
- $1.27 billion. amount spent by mobile users for the top 10 video streaming apps in 2018, a 62 percent increase. Source: Sensor Tower
- Four percent. The percentage of Monero mined by bots in 2018. Source: ZDNet
- 57 percent. The percentage of Netflix subscribers who would quit the service if Netflix ran commercials. Source: Net Imperative
- $60 billion. Amount of money Apple spent with American manufacturers in 2018. Source: Apple Insider
Stephen E Arnold, January 30, 2019
Trint Transcription
January 29, 2019
DarkCyber Annex noted “Taming a World Filled with Video and Audio, Using Transcription and AI.” The story explains a service which makes transcriptions of non text information; stated another way, voice to text.
The seminal insight, according to ZDNet, was:
The idea was that we would align the text — the machine-generated transcript and source audio — to the spoken word and do it accurately to the millisecond, so that you could follow it like karaoke, and then we had to figure out a way to correct it. That’s where it got really interesting. What we did was, we came up with the idea of merging a text editor, like Word, to an audio-video player and creating one tool that had two very distinct functions.
Users of the service include “some of the biggest media names, such as The New York Times, ABC News, Thomson Reuters, AP, ESPN, and BBC Worldwide.”
The write up helpfully omits the Trint url which is https://trint.com/.
There was no information provided about the number of languages supported, so here’s that information:
Trint currently offers language models for North American English, British English, Australian English, English – All Accents, European Spanish, European French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Polish, Finnish, Hungarian, Dutch, Danish, Polish and Swedish.
Also, Trint is a for fee service.
One key function of transcription is that it has to time connect real time streams of audio, link text chat messages and disambiguate emojis in accompanying messages, and make sense of text displayed on the screen in a picture in picture implementation.
DarkCyber Annex does not know of a service which can deliver this type of cross linked service.
Stephen E Arnold, January 29, 2019
Playing Games with Money Laundering
January 29, 2019
Mark this one down in your diaries: just when you thought you’ve heard all the strangest ways imaginable to launder money, the dark web strikes again. This time, the incredibly popular online game, Fortnite is being used. Specifically, the pseudo-currency players use to buy weapons and outfits—V-Bucks. We discovered how this strange scam works via a recent Digital Trends article, “Fortnite V-Bucks Used By Criminals for Money Laundering Schemes.”
According to the story:
Criminals are buying V-Bucks from the official Fortnite store using stolen credit card information. The V-Bucks are then sold in online black markets at discounted rates to “clean” the money, according to an investigation by The Independent and research by cybersecurity firm Sixgill.
From bizarre video game-related ways of washing dirty money, to Mexican drug cartels using Chinese crypto-brokers to do the same, one thing is abundantly clear to law enforcement. It pays to look under every rock and follow every lead on the dark web, because criminals are never going to stop looking for strange new avenues to make money.
Yep, games.
Patrick Roland, January 29, 2019
DarkCyber for January 29, 2019, Now Available
January 29, 2019
DarkCyber for January 29, 2019, is now available at www.arnoldit.com/wordpress and on Vimeo at https://www.vimeo.com/313630318. The program is a production of Stephen E Arnold. It is the only weekly video news shows focusing on the Dark Web and lesser known Internet services.
This week’s story line up includes: Microsoft Bing and a child pornography allegation; Endace introduces facial recognition and a tie up with Darktrace; A report about drones and correctional institutions; and CIA report about hazardous compounds.
The first story discusses allegations of child pornography and other inappropriate content in the Microsoft Bing index. DarkCyber’s experts report that problematic content can be found within any free Web search system. The reasons range from bad actors use of code words to innocuous pages which contain links to objectionable content labeled as popular services. Filtering is one approach, but a cat and mouse game requires that Web search providers have to continue to enhance their content review procedures. Chatter about artificial intelligence is often hand waving, politically correct speech, or marketing.
Second, Endace is one of the leaders in lawful intercept hardware and software. However, Endace continues to innovate. The firm has added facial recognition to its service offering. Darktrace, one of the more innovative cyber security vendors, has announced a relationship with Endace. Darktrace’s three D visualization and analytics may spark new products and services for Endace. Verint, another cyber security firm, has also added support for Endace’s lawful intercept systems.
The third story calls attention to a free report about bad actors’ use of drones to deliver contraband into prisons. Correctional institutions in the US are adding anti drone technology. Drones have been used to deliver mobile phones and other contraband to inmates. DarkCyber provides a link so that viewers can request a copy of the Dedrone report.
The final story is a follow up to an earlier report about the chemicals and compounds frequently used for home made explosive devices. A viewer want to know where additional information could be found. DarkCyber provides a link to a CIA document which reviews chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear substances.
A new blog Dark Cyber Annex is now available at www.arnoldit.com/wordpress. Cyber crime, Dark Web, and company profiles are now appearing on a daily basis.
Kenny Toth, January 29, 2019
Amazonia for January 28, 2019
January 28, 2019
Amazon and Open Source
We learned from GeekWire that Amazon Web Services continues open-source push with code behind SageMaker Neo. The write up told us:
Amazon Web Services has decided to release the code behind one of its key machine-learning services as an open-source project, as it continues to push back against critics who find its relationship with open-source software out of balance.
Amazon wants to make friends with the open source world.
The write up pointed out:
The release is also another sign that AWS increasing involvement with the open-source community, after years of criticism over its tendency to use open-source projects as the foundation for revenue-generating services without contributing much back to the community. Neo-AI joins Firecracker, which was also unveiled at re:Invent 2018, as another fundamental technology advance that the cloud leader has decided to release as an open-source project.
Amazon has some interesting use cases for open source. Some of these reminded DarkCyber Annex of Microsoft’s efforts years ago but blended with a little of the IBM lock in methodology.
Amazon Backup: Good Bye Cohesity and Veeam?
Amazon has rolled out its official back up service. “AWS Backup, a fully-managed, centralized backup service that makes it faster and simpler for customers to back up their data across AWS services and on-premises, helping customers more easily meet their business and regulatory backup compliance requirements.” Source: About Amazon
Amazon Helps Lots of Small Businesses. Yep, Lots.
According to Neowin, Amazon has helped 50,000 small businesses. The dollar volume of the help was pegged at $500,000. Plus, an additional “200,000 SMBs managed to generate $100,000” in revenue.
Alexa Team Number 10,0000
What are 10,000 people doing with Alexa. We assume that the Alexa in the auto device is high on the list. Business Insider listed some other important projects in the Bezos jungle:
- Machine learning
- Making Alexa “more knowledgeable”
- Giving Alexa a personality.
Another area of activity is improving the question and answer capability of Alexa.
Amazon Facial Recognition Performance
The New York Times revealed that Amazon’s facial recognition may have some accuracy challenges. For example, Amazon’s Rekognition mistakes women as men 19% of the time, and darker-skinned women as men 31% of the time, more than similar services from IBM and Microsoft.
Amazon and Zigbee. Zigbee?
Amazon is ubiquitous. At least that is what Quartz has concluded. Good catch. Zigbee, which does not occupy too much of my time, is now joined the Board of Directors of the Zigbee Alliance, reports The Verge. The write up states:
Amazon now has a say in the development of a commonly used smart home standard, giving the company more power as it continues to push smart speakers, cameras, doorbells, and all other kinds of gadgets into its customers’ homes.
Another path cut through the jungle by the Bezos bulldozer is being blazed.
Amazon Drivers Unhappy?
We spotted a news item from the CBS affiliate in Dallas, Texas. The write up states:
More than a dozen of Amazon packages were found on the side of the road in Arlington Sunday, addressed to homes not far from where they were left.
A single unhappy driver, perhaps. A signal that pesky humans can foil the well oiled Amazon machine? Amazon delivery robots may be the answer. But humans are still needed for Amazon’s house cleaning service which is becoming more widely available in the US. Humans are still required for this, however.
Stephen E Arnold, January 28, 2019
UK Finds Ways to Fight Dark Web
January 28, 2019
Battling the dark web and its many tentacles of crime is a game of cat and mouse. As soon as law enforcement agents catch on to a scheme, criminals can vanish. However, the tide feels like it is turning, as we discovered from an article found in Breaking News, “Dark Web Criminals Who Sold Fentanyl Around the World Jailed in UK.”
According to the story:
“Prosecutors said that over 2,800 packages were sent by the trio, and at least 635 grams of pure carfentanyl, which is described by some experts as being between 3,000 and 5,000 times stronger than heroin, was found at the premises following their arrests. A raid on the premises by officers following the defendants’ arrests in April 2017 is believed to be the largest single seizure of the two drugs in Europe.”
England’s sophistication with tracking down dark web crime is to be applauded. It is also, oddly, a necessity. Studies have shown that the UK is among the top countries that buy drugs through the dark web. For the tie being, it seems Scotland Yard and the like are keeping up with the bad guys. We can only hope this trend continues.
Patrick Roland, January 28, 2019
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