The Zen of More Tabs from Yandex
September 5, 2016
Serendipitous information discovery has been attempted through many apps, browsers and more. Attempting a solution, Russia’s giant in online search, Yandex, launched a new feature to their browser. A news release from PR Newswire appeared on 4 Traders entitled Yandex Adds AI-based Personal Recommendations to Browser tells us more. Fueling this feature is Yandex’s personalized content recommendation technology called Zen, which selects articles, videos, images and more for its infinite content stream. This is the first time personally targeted content will appear in new tabs for the user. The press release offers a description of the new feature,
The intelligent content discovery feed in Yandex Browser delivers personal recommendations based on the user’s location, browsing history, their viewing history and preferences in Zen, among hundreds of other factors. Zen uses natural language processing and computer vision to understand the verbal and visual content on the pages the user has viewed, liked or disliked, to offer them the content they are likely to like. To start exploring this new internet experience, all one needs to do is download Yandex Browser and give Zen some browsing history to work with. Alternatively, liking or disliking a few websites on Zen’s start up page will help it understand your preferences on the outset.
The world of online search and information discovery is ever-evolving. For a preview of the new Yandex feature, go to their demo. This service works on all platforms in 24 different countries and in 15 different languages. The design of this feature implies people want to actually read all of their recommended content. Whether that’s the case or not, whether Zen is accurate enough for the design to be effective, time will tell.
Megan Feil, September 5, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
There is a Louisville, Kentucky Hidden Web/DarkWeb meet up on September 27, 2016.
Information is at this link: https://www.meetup.com/Louisville-Hidden-Dark-Web-Meetup/events/233599645/
Social Media Snooping Site Emerges for Landlord and Employers
September 2, 2016
The promise of unlocking the insights in big data is one that many search and analytics companies make. CNet shares the scoop on a new company: Disturbing new site scrapes your private Facebook and informs landlords, employers. Their website is Score Assured and it provides a service as an intermediary between your social media accounts and your landlord. Through scanning every word you have typed on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or even Tinder, this service will then filter all the words through a neuro-linguistic programming tool to provide a report on your reputation. We learned,
There’s no reason to believe that Score Assured’s “analysis” will offer in any way an accurate portrayal of who you are or your financial wherewithal. States across the country are already preparing or enacting legislation to ensure that potential employers have no right to ask for your password to Facebook or other social media. In Washington, for example, it’s illegal for an employer to ask for your password. Score Assured offers landlords and employers (the employer service isn’t live yet) the chance to ask for such passwords slightly more indirectly. Psychologically, the company is preying on a weakness humans have been displaying for some time now: the willingness to give up their privacy to get something they think they really want.
Scraping and finding tools are not new, but could this application be any more 2016? The author of this piece is onto the zeitgeist of “I’ve got nothing to hide.” Consequently, data — even social data — becomes a commodity. Users’ willingness to consent is the sociologically interesting piece here. It remains to be seen whether the data mining technology is anything special.
Megan Feil, September 2, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
The Equivalent of a Brexit
August 31, 2016
Britain’s historical vote to leave the European Union has set a historical precedent. What is the precedent however? Is it the choice to leave an organization? The choice to maintain their independence? Or is it a basic example of the right to choose? The Brexit will be used as a metaphor for any major upheaval for the next century, so how can it be used in technology context? BA Insight gives us the answer with “Would Your Users Vote ‘Yes’ For Sharexit?”
SharePoint is Microsoft Office’s collaborative content management program. It can be used to organize projects, build Web sites, store files, and allow team members to communicate. Office workers also spurn it across the globe over due to its inefficiencies. To avoid a Sharexit in your organization, the article offers several ways to improve a user’s SharePoint experience. One of the easiest ways to keep SharePoint is to build an individual user interface that handles little tasks to make a user’s life easier. Personalizing the individual SharePoint user experience is another method, so the end user does not feel like another cog in the system but rather that SharePoint was designed for them. Two other suggestions are plain, simple advice: take user feedback and actually use it and make SharePoint the go information center for the organization by putting everything on it.
Perhaps the best advice is making information easy to find on SharePoint:
Documents are over here, discussions over there, people are that way, and then I don’t know who the experts really are. You can make your Intranet a whole lot smarter, or dare we say “intelligent”, if you take advantage of this information in an integrated fashion, exposing your users to connected, but different, information. You can connect documents to the person who wrote them, then to that person’s expertise and connected colleagues, enabling search for your hidden experts. The ones that can really be helpful often reduce chances for misinformation, repetition of work, or errors. To do this, expertise location capabilities can combine contributed expertise with stated expertise, allowing for easy searching and expert identification.
Developers love SharePoint because it is easy to manage and to roll out information or software to every user. End users hate it because it creates more problems than resolving anything. If developers take the time to listen to what the end users need from their SharePoint experience than can avoid an Sharexit.
Whitney Grace, August 31, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Can Analytics Be Cloud Friendly?
August 24, 2016
One of the problems with storing data in the cloud is that it is difficult to run analytics. Sure, you can run tests to determine the usage of the cloud, but analyzing the data stored in the cloud is another story. Program developers have been trying to find a solution to this problem and the open source community has developed some software that might be the ticket. Ideata wrote about the newest Apache software in “Apache Spark-Comparing RDD, Dataframe, and Dataset.”
Ideata is a data software company and they built many of the headlining products on the open source software Apache Spark. They have been using Apache Spark since 2013 and enjoy using it because it offers a rich abstraction, allows the developer to build complex workflows, and perform easy data analysis.
Apache Spark works like this:
Spark revolves around the concept of a resilient distributed dataset (RDD), which is a fault-tolerant collection of elements that can be operated on in parallel. An RDD is Spark’s representation of a set of data, spread across multiple machines in the cluster, with API to let you act on it. An RDD could come from any datasource, e.g. text files, a database via JDBC, etc. and can easily handle data with no predefined structure.
It can be used as the basis fort a user-friendly cloud analytics platform, especially if you are familiar with what can go wrong with a dataset.
Whitney Grace, August 24, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
No More Data Mining for Intelligence
August 23, 2016
The U.S. intelligence community will no longer receive information from Dataminr, which serves as a Twitter “fire hose” (Twitter owns five percent of Dataminr). An article, Twitter Turns Off Fire Hose For Intelligence Community from ThreatPost offers the story. A Twitter spokesperson stated they have had a longstanding policy against selling data for surveillance. However, the Journal reported their arrangement was terminated after a CIA test program concluded. The article continues,
Dataminr is the only company allowed to sell data culled from the Twitter fire hose. It mines Tweets and correlates that data with location data and other sources, and fires off alerts to subscribers of breaking news. Reportedly, Dataminr subscribers knew about the recent terror attacks in Brussels and Paris before mainstream media had reported the news. The Journal said its inside the intelligence community said the government isn’t pleased with the decision and hopes to convince Twitter to reconsider.
User data shared on social media has such a myriad of potential applications for business, law enforcement, education, journalism and countless other sectors. This story highlights how applications for journalism may be better received than applications for government intelligence. This is something worth noticing.
Megan Feil, August 23, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
There is a Louisville, Kentucky Hidden /Dark Web meet up on August 23, 2016.
Information is at this link: https://www.meetup.com/Louisville-Hidden-Dark-Web-Meetup/events/233019199/
Read the Latest Release from…Virgil
August 18, 2016
The Vatican Library is one of the world’s greatest treasures, because it archives much of western culture’s history. It probably is on par with the legendary Library of Alexandria, beloved by Cleopatra and burned to the ground. How many people would love the opportunity to delve into the Vatican Library for a private tour? Thankfully the Vatican Library shares its treasures with the world via the Internet and now, according to Archaeology News Network, the “Vatican Library Digitises 1600 Year-Old Manuscript Containing Works Of Virgil.”
The digital version of Virgil’s work is not the only item the library plans to scan online, but it does promise donors who pledge 500 euros or more they will receive a faithful reproduction of a 1600 manuscript by the famous author. NTT DATA is working with the Vatican Library on Digita Vaticana, the digitization project. NTT DATA has worked with the library since April 2014 and plans to create digital copies of over 3,000 manuscripts to be made available to the general public.
“ ‘Our library is an important storehouse of the global culture of humankind,’ said Monsignor Cesare Pasini, Prefect of the Vatican Apostolic Library. ‘We are delighted the process of digital archiving will make these wonderful ancient manuscripts more widely available to the world and thereby strengthen the deep spirit of humankind’s shared universal heritage.’”
Projects like these point to the value of preserving the original work as well as making it available for research to people who might otherwise make it to the Vatican. The Vatican also limits the amount of people who can access the documents.
Whitney Grace, August 18, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
There is a Louisville, Kentucky Hidden /Dark Web meet up on August 23, 2016.
Information is at this link: https://www.meetup.com/Louisville-Hidden-Dark-Web-Meetup/events/233019199/
SEO Is a Dirty Web Trick
August 17, 2016
Search engine optimization is the bane of Web experts. Why? If you know how to use it you can increase your rankings in search engines and drive more traffic to your pages, but if you are a novice at SEO you are screwed. Search Engine Land shares some bad SEO stories in “SEO Is As Dirty As Ever.”
SEO has a bad reputation in many people’s eyes, because it is viewed as a surreptitious way to increase traffic. However, if used correctly SEO is not only a nifty trick, but is a good tool. As with anything, however, it can go wrong. One bad SEO practice is using outdated techniques like keyword stuffing, copying and pasting text, and hidden text. Another common mistake is not having a noindex tag, blocking robots, JavaScript frameworks not being indexed.
Do not forget other shady techniques like the always famous shady sales, removing links, paid links, spam, link networks, removing links, building another Web site on a different domain, abusing review sites, and reusing content. One thing to remember is that:
“It’s not just local or niche companies that are doing bad things; in fact, enterprise and large websites can get away with murder compared to smaller sites. This encourages some of the worst practices I’ve ever seen, and some of these companies do practically everything search engines tell them not to do.”
Ugh! The pot is identifying another pot and complaining about its color and cleanliness.
Whitney Grace, August 17, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
There is a Louisville, Kentucky Hidden /Dark Web meet up on August 23, 2016.
Information is at this link: https://www.meetup.com/Louisville-Hidden-Dark-Web-Meetup/events/233019199/
The Reach of Cyber Threat Intelligence Companies
August 10, 2016
The social media monitoring complex appears to be gaining a follower. LittleSis News shared an article highlighting their investigative findings, You are being followed: The business of social media surveillance. This post not only reveals the technology companies engaged in surveillance and developing tools for surveillance, those at LittleSis News also filed freedom of information requests to twenty police departments about their social media monitoring. The article concludes with,
“Because social media incites within us a compulsion to share our thoughts, even potentially illegal ones, law enforcement sees it as a tool to preempt behavior that appears threatening to the status quo. We caught a glimpse of where this road could take us in Michigan, where the local news recently reported that a man calling for civil unrest on Facebook because of the Flint water crisis was nearly the target of a criminal investigation. At its worst, social media monitoring could create classes of “pre-criminals” apprehended before they commit crimes if police and prosecutors are able to argue that social media postings forecast intent. This is the predictive business model to which Geofeedia CEO Phil Harris aspires.”
In addition to Geofeedia, the other cyber threat intelligence companies listed are: BrightPlanet, ZeroFOX, Intrado, LifeRaft, Magnet Forensics, Media Sonar Technologies, Signal Corporation Limited. These companies specialize in everything from analyzing deep web content to digital forensics software. Ultimately data is their specialty, not people. These technologies and their applications will undoubtedly stir up questions about the relationship between people, the data they produce on social media, and state actors.
Megan Feil, August 10, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
There is a Louisville, Kentucky Hidden/Dark Web meet up on August 23, 2016.
Information is at this link: https://www.meetup.com/Louisville-Hidden-Dark-Web-Meetup/events/233019199/
IBM Cognitive Storage Creates a Hierarchy of Data Value
August 5, 2016
The article titled IBM Introduces Cognitive Storage on EWeek reveals the advances in storage technology. It may sound less sexy than big data, but it is an integral part of our ability to sort and retrieve data based on the metric of data value. For a computer to determine a hierarchy of data value would also enable it to locate and archive unimportant data, freeing up space for data of more relevance. The article explains,
“In essence, the concept helps computers to learn what to remember and what to forget, IBM said… “With rising costs in energy and the explosion in big data, particularly from the Internet of Things, this is a critical challenge as it could lead to huge savings in storage capacity, which means less media costs and less energy consumption… if 1,000 employees are accessing the same files every day, the value of that data set should be very high.”
Frequency of use is a major factor in determining data value, so IBM created trackers to monitor this sort of metadata. Interestingly, the article states that IBM’s cognitive computing was inspired by astronomy. An astronomer would tag incoming data sets from another galaxy as “highly important” or less so. So what happens to the less important data? It isn’t destroyed, but rather relegated to what Charles King of Pund-IT calls a “deep freeze.”
Chelsea Kerwin, August 5, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Is Google a New Science Fiction Sub-Genre?
August 5, 2016
Science fiction is a genre that inspires people to seek the impossible and make it a reality. Many modern inventors, scientists, computer programmers, and even artists contribute their success and careers from inspiration they garnered from the genre. Even search engine Google pulled inspiration from science fiction, but one must speculate how much of Google’s ventures are real or mere fiction? Vanity Fair questions whether or not “Is Google’s BioTech Division The Next Theranos?”
Verily Life Sciences is GoogleX’s biotech division and the company has yet to produce any biotechnology that has revolutionized the medical field. They bragged about a contact lens that would measure blood glucose levels and a wristband that could detect cancer. Verily employees have shared their views about Verily’s projects, alluding that they are more in line to fanning the Google fanfare than producing real products. Other experts are saying that Google is displaying a “Silicon Valley arrogance” along the lines of Theranos.
Theranos misled investors about its “state of the art” technology and is now under criminal investigation. Verily is supposedly different than Theranos:
“Verily, however, is not positioning itself as a company with a salable product like Theranos. Verily ‘is not a products company,’ chief medical officer Jessica Mega argued Monday on Bloomberg TV. ‘But it’s a company really focused on trying to shift the needle when it comes to health and disease.’ That’s a distinction, luckily for Google, that could make all the difference.”
There is also a distinction between fantasy and a reality and counting your chickens before they hatch. Google should be investing in experimentation medical technology that could improve treatment and save lives, but they should not promise anything until they have significant research and even a prototype as proof. Google should discuss their ventures, but not brag about them as if they were a sure thing.
Whitney Grace, August 5, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
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