IBM Launches Informative Blog
November 20, 2015
IBM has created a free Paper.li blog that features information about the company: IBM’s InfoSphere Master Data Management Roundup. Besides the general categories of Headlines and Videos, readers can explore articles under Science, Technology, Business, and two IBM-specific categories, #Bluemix and #IBM. If you love to watch as Big Blue gets smaller, you will find this free newspaper useful in tracking some of the topics upon which IBM is building its future.
Oddly, though, we did not spot any articles from Alliance at IBM on the site. Some employees are unhappy with the way the company has been treating its workers, and have launched that site to publicize their displeasure. Here’s their Statement of Principles:
“Alliance@IBM/CWA Local 1701 is an IBM employee organization that is dedicated to preserving and improving our rights and benefits at IBM. We also strive towards restoring management’s respect for the individual and the value we bring to the company as employees. Our mission is to make our voice heard with IBM management, shareholders, government and the media. While our ultimate goal is collective bargaining rights with IBM, we will build our union now and challenge IBM on the many issues facing employees from off-shoring and job security to working conditions and company policy.”
It looks like IBM has more to worry about than sliding profits. Could the two issues be related?
Cynthia Murrell, November 20, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
ACA Application Process Still Vulnerable to Fraudulent Documents
November 20, 2015
The post on Slashdot titled Affordable Care Act Exchanges Fail to Detect Counterfeit Documentation relates the ongoing issue of document verification within the Affordable Care Act (ACA) process. The Government Accountability Office) GAO submitted fake applications to test the controls at the state and federal level for application and enrollment in the ACA. The article states,
“Ten fictitious applicants were created to test whether verification steps including validating an applicant’s Social Security number, verifying citizenship, and verifying household income were completed properly. In order to test these controls, GAO’s test applications provided fraudulent documentation: “For each of the 10 undercover applications where we obtained qualified health-plan coverage, the respective marketplace directed that our applicants submit supplementary documentation we provided counterfeit follow-up documentation, such as fictitious Social Security cards with impossible Social Security numbers, for all 10…”
The GAO report itself mentions that eight of the ten fakes were failed at first, but later accepted. It shows that among the various ways that the fake applications were fraudulent included not only “impossible” Social Security Numbers, but also duplicate enrollments, and lack of employer-sponsored coverage. Ultimately, the report concludes that the ACA is still “vulnerable.” Granted, this is why the GOA conducted the audit of the system, to catch issues. The article provides no details on what new controls and fixes are being implemented.
Chelsea Kerwin, November 20, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
All You Can View Patents
November 18, 2015
Patent information is available to peruse via the USPTO Web site and Google has an accurate patent search (that is significantly easier to use than USPTO’s search), but this does not tell the complete story of US patents. GCN announced that the USPTO plans to remedy missing patent information in the article, “USPTO Opens The Door To Four Decades Of Patent Data.”
With the help of the Center of Science and Innovation Policy (CSSIP), the USPTO launched the new tool PatentsView:
“The new tool allows individuals to explore data on patenting activity in the United States dating back to 1976. Users can search patent titles, types, inventors, assignees, patent classes, locations and dates. The data also displays visualizations on trends and patent activity. In addition, searches include graphic illustrations and charts.”
People will be able to conduct the equivalent of an “advanced search” option of Google or an academic database. PatentsView allows people to identify trends, what technology is one the rise or dropping, search a company’s specific patents, and flexible application programming interface to search patent information.
The USPTO wants people to access and use important patent and trademark data. It faces the issue that many organizations are dealing with that they have the data available and even with the bonus of it being digital, but its user interface is not user-friendly and no one knows it is there. Borrowing a page from marketing, the USPTO is using PatentsView to rebrand itself and advertise its offerings. Shiny graphics are one way to reach people.
Whitney Grace, November 18, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
More Bad News for Traditional TV
November 17, 2015
Traditional TV is in a slow decline towards obsoleteness. With streaming options offering more enticing viewing options with less out of pocket expenses and no contracts, why would a person sign on for cable or dish packages that have notoriously bad customer service, commercials, and insane prices? Digital Trends has the most recent information from Nielsen about TV viewing habits, “New Nielsen Study On Streaming Points To More Bad News For Traditional TV.”
Pay-for-TV services have been on the decline for years, but the numbers are huge for the latest Nielsen Total Audience report:
“According to the data, broadband-only homes are up by 52 percent to 3.3 million from 2.2 million year over year. Meanwhile, pay-TV subscriptions are down 1.2 percent to 100.4 million, from 101.6 million at this time last year. And while 1.2 percent may not seem like much, that million plus decline has caused all sorts of havoc on the stock market, with big media companies like Viacom, Nickelodeon, Disney, and many others seeing tumbling stock prices in recent weeks.”
While one might suggest that pay-for-TV services should start the bankruptcy paperwork, there has been a 45% rise in video-on-demand services. Nielsen does not tabulate streaming services, viewership on mobile devices, and if people are watching more TV due to all the options?
While Nielsen is a trusted organization for TV data, information is still collected view paper submission forms. Nielsen is like traditional TV and need to update its offerings to maintain relevancy.
Whitney Grace, November 17, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Icann Is an I Won’t
November 16, 2015
Have you ever heard of Icann? You are probably like many people within the United States and have not heard of the non-profit private company. What does Icann do? Icann is responsible for Internet protocol addresses (IP) and coordinating domain names, so basically the company is responsible for a huge portion of the Internet. According to The Guardian in “The Internet Is Run By An Unaccountable Private Company. This Is A Problem,” the US supposedly runs the Icann but its role is mostly clerical and by September 30, 2015 it was supposed to hand the reins over to someone else.
The “else” is the biggest question. The Icann community spent hours trying to figure out who would manage the company, but they ran into a huge brick wall. The biggest issue is that the volunteers want Icann to have more accountability, which does not seem feasible. Icann’s directors cannot be fired, except by each other. Finances are another problem with possible governance risks and corruption.
A supposed solution is to create a membership organization, a common business model for non-profits and will give power to the community. Icann’s directors are not too happy and have been allowed to add their own opinions. Decisions are not being made at Icann and with the new presidential election the entire power shift could be off. It is not the worst that could happen:
“But there’s much more at stake. Icann’s board – as ultimate authority in this little company running global internet resources, and answerable (in fact, and in law) to no one – does have the power to reject the community’s proposals. But not everything that can be done, should be done. If the board blunders on, it will alienate those volunteers who are the beating heart of multi-stakeholder governance. It will also perfectly illustrate why change is required.”
The board has all the power and the do not have anyone to hold them accountable. Icann directors just have to stall long enough to keep things the same and they will be able to give themselves more raises.
Whitney Grace, November 16, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Expect Disruption from Future Technology
November 13, 2015
A dystopian future where technology has made humanity obsolete is a theme older than the Industrial Revolution. History has proven that while some jobs are phased out thanks to technology more jobs are created by it, after all someone needs to monitor and make the machines. As technology grows and makes computing systems capable of reason, startups are making temporary gigs permanent jobs, and 3D printing makes it possible to make any object, the obsolete humanity idea does not seem so far-fetched. Kurzweilai shares a possible future with “The SAP Future Series: Digital Technology’s Exponential Growth Curve Foretells Avalanche Of Business Disruption.”
While technology has improved lives of countless people, it is disrupting industries. These facts prove to be insightful into how disruptive:
- In 2015 Airbnb will become the largest hotel chain in the world, launched in 2008, with more than 850,000 rooms, and without owning any hotels.
- From 2012 to 2014, Uber consumed 65% of San Francisco’s taxi business.
- Advances in artificial intelligence and robotics put 47% of US employment — over 60 million jobs — at high risk of being replaced in the next decade.
- 10 million new autonomous vehicles per year may be entering US highways by 2030.
- Today’s sensors are 1 billion times better — 1000x lighter, 1000x cheaper, 1000x the resolution — than only 40 years ago. By 2030, 100 trillion sensors could be operational worldwide.
- DNA sequencing cost dropped precipitously — from $1 billion to $5,000 — in 15 years. By 2020 could be $0.01.
- In 2000 it took $5,000,000 to launch an internet start-up. Today the cost is less than $5,000.
Using a series of videos, SAP explains how disruption will change the job market, project management, learning, and even predicting future growth. Rather than continuing the dystopia future projections, SAP positions itself to offer hope and ways to adapt for your success. Humanity will be facing huge changes because of technology in the near future, but our successful ability to adapt always helps us evolve.
3DWhitney Grace, November 13, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Product Hunt Adds Collections to Its Search Results
November 13, 2015
Product Hunt is a website for the cutting-edge consumer, where users share information about the latest and greatest in the tech market. The Next Web tells us, “Product Hunt Now Lets You Follow and Search for Collections.” A “collection” can be established by any user to curate and share groups of products. An example would be a selection of website-building tools, or of the best electronic-device accessories for charging electronic devices. The very brief write-up reveals:
“Product Hunt, the Web’s favorite destination to discover new apps, gadgets and connected services, has updated its Collections feature, allowing users to follow and search for curated lists. You can now follow any collection you find interesting to receive notifications when new products are added to them. Collections will also show up in search results alongside products. In addition, curators can add comments to products in their collections to describe them or note why they’ve included them in their list.”
So now finding the best of the latest is even easier. An important tool for anyone with a need, and the means, to keep in front of the technology curve. Launched in 2013, Product Hunt is based in San Francisco. Their Collections feature was launched last December, and this year the site also added sections specifically for books and for games.
Cynthia Murrell, November 13, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Google Takes Aim at Internet Crime
November 12, 2015
Google has a plan to thwart Internet crime: make it too expensive to be worth it. The company’s Online Security Blog examines the issue in “New Research: The Underground Market Fueling For-Profit Abuse.” The research was presented last June at the Workshop on the Economics of Information Security 2015; I recommend those interested check out the full report here.
The post describes the global online black market that has grown over the last ten years or so, where criminals trade in such items as stolen records, exploit kits, scam hosting, and access to compromised computers. The profit centers which transfer the shady funds rest upon an infrastructure, the pieces of which cost money. Google plans to do what it can to increase those costs. The write-up explains:
“Client and server-side security has dominated industry’s response to digital abuse over the last decade. The spectrum of solutions—automated software updates, personal anti-virus, network packet scanners, firewalls, spam filters, password managers, and two-factor authentication to name a few—all attempt to reduce the attack surface that criminals can penetrate. While these safeguards have significantly improved user security, they create an arms race: criminals adapt or find the subset of systems that remain vulnerable and resume operation.
“To overcome this reactive defense cycle, we are improving our approach to abuse fighting to also strike at the support infrastructure, financial centers, and actors that incentivize abuse. By exploring the value chain required to bulk register accounts, we were able to make Google accounts 30–40% more expensive on the black market. Success stories from our academic partners include disrupting payment processing for illegal pharmacies and counterfeit software outlets advertised by spam, cutting off access to fake accounts that pollute online services, and disabling the command and control infrastructure of botnets.”
Each of the links in the above quote goes to an in-depth paper, so there’s plenty of material to check out there. Society has been trying for centuries to put black markets out of business. Will the effort be more successful in the virtual realm?
Cynthia Murrell, November 12, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Data Analytics Is More Than Simple Emotion
November 6, 2015
Hopes and Fears posted the article, “Are You Happy Now? The Uncertain Future Of Emotion Analytics” discusses the possible implications of technology capable of reading emotions. The article opens with a scenario from David Collingridge explaining that the only way to truly gauge technology’s impact is when it has become so ingrained into society that it would be hard to change. Many computing labs are designing software capable of reading emotions using an array of different sensors.
The biggest problem ahead is not how to integrate emotion reading technology into our lives, but what are the ethical concerns associated with it?
Emotion reading technology is also known as affective computing and the possible ethical concerns are more than likely to come from corporation to consumer relationships over consumer-to-consumer relationships. Companies are already able to track a consumer’s spending habits by reading their Internet data and credit cards, then sending targeted ads.
Consumers should be given the option to have their emotions read:
“Affective computing has the potential to intimately affect the inner workings of society and shape individual lives. Access, an international digital rights organization, emphasizes the need for informed consent, and the right for users to choose not to have their data collected. ‘All users should be fully informed about what information a company seeks to collect,’ says Drew Mitnick, Policy Counsel with Access, ‘The invasive nature of emotion analysis means that users should have as much information as possible before being asked to subject [themselves] to it.’”
While the article’s topic touches on fear, it ends on a high note that we should not be afraid of the future of technology. It is important to discuss ethical issues right now, so groundwork will already be in place to handle affective computing.
Whitney Grace, November 6, 2015
Machine Learning Is Play for Children
November 5, 2015
I heard an interesting idea the other idea. Most parents think that when their toddler can figure out how to use a tablet that he or she is a genius, but did you ever consider that the real genius is the person who actually designed the tablet’s interface? Soon a software developer will be able to think their newest cognitive system is the next Einstein or Edison says Computer World in the article, “Machines Will Learn Just Like A Child, Says IBM CEO.”
IBM’s CEO Virginia Rometty said that technology is to the point where machines are almost close to reasoning. Current cognitive systems are now capable of understanding unstructured data, such as images, videos, songs, and more.
” ‘When I say reason it’s like you and I, if there is an issue or question, they take in all the information that they know, they stack up a set of hypotheses, they run it against all that data to decide, what do I have the most confidence in, ‘ Rometty said. The machine ‘can prove why I do or don’t believe something, and if I have high confidence in an answer, I can show you the ranking of what my answers are and then I learn.’ ”
The cognitive systems learn more as they are fed more data. There is a greater demand for machines that can process more data and are “smarter” and handle routines that make it useful.
The best news about machines gaining the learning capabilities of a human child is that they will not replace an actual human being, but rather augment our knowledge and current technology.
Whitney Grace, November 5, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
