CSRankings’ Liao Shumin may want to fluff her or his calligraphy brush for the next go round; otherwise, an opportunity to do some holiday coal mining in Haerwusu may present itself. “Holiday greetings from Inner Mongolia” may next year’s follow up story.
Journalists: Welcome Your New Colleague Artificial Intelligence
January 12, 2020
Life is going to become more interesting for journalists. I use the word in its broadest possible sense. That includes the DarkCyber team, gentle reader. Who needs humans when smart software is available.
“AI-Written Articles Are Copyright-Protected, Rules Chinese Court” explains that software can create content. Then that content is protected by copyright laws.
DarkCyber noted this statement:
According to state media outlet China News Service (CNS), a court in Shenzhen this month ruled in favor of Tencent, which claimed that work created by its Dreamwriter robot had been copied by a local financial news company. The Shenzhen Nanshan District People’s Court ruled that, in copying the Dreamwriter article, Shanghai Yingxun Technology Company had infringed Tencent’s copyright. Dreamwriter is an automated writing system created by Tencent and based on the company’s own algorithms.
Presumably software can ingest factoids, apply algorithms, and output new, fresh, and original information. No hanging out at the Consumer Electronic Show looking for solid information at real technology event. Imagine the value of creating “real” news without having to pay humans. No hotel, airplane, taxi, or meal expenses.
Special content can be produced on an industrialized scale like Double Happiness ping pong balls.
Upsides for journalists include:
- Opportunities to explore new careers in fast food, blogging, and elder care
- Time to study with coal miners learning to code
- Mental space to implement entrepreneurial ideas like elderberry products designed for those who suffer from certain allergic responses.
Downsides, but only a few, of course, are:
- No or reduced income
- Loss of remaining self respect
- Weight loss due to items one and two in this downside list
- No need to have lunch with these content generators.
One question: What’s a nation state able to do with content robots?
Stephen E Arnold, January 12, 2020
Spies, Intelligence, and Publisher Motives
December 31, 2019
We are getting close to a new decade. This morning DarkCyber’s newsfeed contained two stories. These were different from the Year in Review and the What’s Ahead write ups that clog the info pipes as a year twists in the wind.
Even more interesting is the fact that the stories come from sources usually associated with recycled news releases and topics about innovations in look alike mobile phones, the antics of the Silicon Valley wizards, and gadgets rivaling the Popeil Pocket Fisherman in usefulness.
The first story is about Microsoft cracking down on a nation state which appears to have a desire to compromise US interests. “Microsoft Takes Down 50 Domains Operated by North Korean Hackers” states that:
Microsoft takes control of 50 domains operated by Thallium (APT37), a North Korean cyber-espionage group.
The write up added:
The domains were used to send phishing emails and host phishing pages. Thallium hackers would lure victims on these sites, steal their credentials, and then gain access to internal networks, from where they’d escalate their attacks even further.
DarkCyber finds this interesting. Specialist firms in the US and Israel pay attention to certain types of online activity. Now the outfit that brings the wonky Windows 10 updates and the hugely complex Azure cloud construct is taking action, with the blessing of a court. Prudent is Microsoft.
The second write up is “‘Shattered’: Inside the Secret Battle to Save America’s Undercover Spies in the Digital Age.” The write up appears to be the original work of Yahoo, a unit of Verizon. The article explains a breach and notes:
Whether the U.S. intelligence agencies will be able to make these radical changes is unclear, but without a fundamental transformation, officials warn, the nation faces an unprecedented crisis in its ability to collect human intelligence. While some believe that a return to tried and true tradecraft will be sufficient to protect undercover officers, others fear the business of human spying is in mortal peril and that the crisis will ultimately force the U.S. intelligence community to rethink its entire enterprise.
Note that the Yahoo original news story runs about 6,000 words. Buy a hot chocolate, grab a bagel, and chill as you work through the compilation of government efforts to deal with security, bad actors, bureaucratic procedures, and assorted dangers, clear, unclear, present, and missing in action. On the other hand, you can wait for the podcast because the write up seems to have some pot boiler characteristics woven through the “news.”
Read the original stories.
DarkCyber formulated several observations. Here they are:
- Will 2020 be the year of intelligence, cyber crime, and government missteps related to security?
- Why are ZDNet and Yahoo (both outfits with a history of wobbling from news release to news release) getting into what seems to be popularization of topics once ignored. Clicks? Ad dollars? Awards for journalism?
- What will stories like these trigger? One idea is that bad actors may become sufficiently unhappy to respond. Will these responses be a letter to the editor? Maybe. Maybe not. Unintended consequences may await.
This new interest of ZDNet and Yahoo may be a story in itself. Perhaps there is useful information tucked into the Yahoo Groups which Verizon will be removing from public access in a couple of weeks. And what about that Microsoft activity?
Stephen E Arnold, December 31, 2019
Amazon UK Delivery: Maybe Headed for a Tailback on the M5?
December 30, 2019
CNN is signaling how it will approach Amazon in 2020. The online bookstore everyone loves is finding that its half billion dollar Deliveroo play might be caught in a traffic snarl in the UK. “Amazon’s Big Bet on UK Food Delivery Is in Jeopardy” reported:
Britain’s competition regulator is escalating its investigation into whether Amazon’s planned investment in UK food delivery company Deliveroo would reduce competition and harm consumers. The Competition and Markets Authority said in a statement Friday that it had opened a “phase 2” probe after the companies failed to address its concerns about how the deal would affect the market for online deliveries of restaurant meals and groceries.
Maybe dealing the UK regulators has the same priority as training Amazon delivery drivers?
We noted this statement:
The Competition and Markets Authority ordered Amazon to pause its investment in July while it investigated whether the deal amounted to a takeover. Earlier this month, the regulator said that it was also concerned that the deal would discourage Amazon from re-entering the online food delivery market as a competitor to Deliveroo in the future. The companies fought for the same customers before Amazon shuttered its Amazon Restaurants business last year.
Stepping back from the bangers and beans delivery to your flat in Kensington, DarkCyber perceives the harsh approach of the UK and CNN’s enthusiastic reporting of a meeting in a room painted with a weird green and yellow motif as signals that 2020 may not be kind to the Bezos bulldozer.
Stephen E Arnold, December 30, 2019
Cambridge Analytica: Maybe a New Name and Some of the Old Methods?
December 29, 2019
DarkCyber spotted an interesting factoid in “HH Plans to Work with the Re-Branded Cambridge Analytica to Influence 2021 Elections.”
The new company, Auspex International, will keep former Cambridge Analytica director Mark Turnbull at the helm.
Who is HH? He is President Hakainde Hichilema, serving at this time in Zambia.
The business focus of Auspex is, according to the write up:
We’re not a data company, we’re not a political consultancy, we’re not a research company and we’re not necessarily just a communications company. We’re a combination of all four.—Ahmad *Al-Khatib, a Cairo born investor
You can obtain some information about Auspex at this url: https://www.auspex.ai/.
DarkCyber noted the use of the “ai” domain. See the firm’s “What We Believe” information at this link. It is good to have a reason to get out of bed in the morning.
Stephen E Arnold, December 29, 2019
PubMed: Some Tweaks
December 27, 2019
PubMed.gov is an old school online information service. The user types in one or more terms, and the system generates a list of results. Controlled terms work better than “free text” guesses.
According to “Announcing the New PubMed”:
The National Library of Medicine (NLM) is replacing the current version of the PubMed database with a newly re-designed version. The new version is now live and can be found at https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/.
The appearance of the site has been updated. To one of the DarkCyber team members, the logo was influenced by PayPal’s design motif. Clicking for pages of results has been supplanted by the infinite scroll. Personally, I prefer to know how many pages of results have been found for a particular query. But, just tell me, “Hey, boomer, you are stupid.” I get it.
The write up does not comment upon backlog, changes in editorial policy, and cleaning citations to weed out those which are essentially marketing write ups or articles with non reproducible results, wonky statistics, or findings unrelated to the main job of medicine. But you can use the service on a mobile phone.
Stephen E Arnold, December 27, 2019
How to Be Numero Uno in AI Even Though the List Has a Math Error and Is Incomplete
December 24, 2019
DarkCyber spotted an interesting college ranking. Unlike some of the US college guides which rank institutions of higher learning, the league table published by Yicai Global takes a big data approach. (Please, keep in mind that US college rankings are not entirely objective. There are niceties like inclusions, researcher bias, and tradition which exert a tiny bit of magnetic pull on these scoreboards.)
According to “Six Chinese Colleges Place in CSRankings’ Top Ten AI List”, the US and other non-Chinese institutions are simply not competitive. Note that “six” in the headline.
How were these interesting findings determined? The researchers counted the number of journal articles published by faculty at the institutions in the sample. DarkCyber noted this statement about the method:
CSRankings is an authoritative global ranking of computer science higher educational institutions compiled by the AMiner team at Tsinghua. Its grading rests entirely on the number of scholarly articles faculty members publish.
The more papers—whether good, accurate, or science fiction—was the sole factor. There you go. Rock solid research.
But let’s look at the rankings:
- Top AI institution in the world: Tsinghua University.
- Not listed. Maybe Carnegie Mellon University
- Peking University
- University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences
- Not listed. Maybe MIT?
- Nanyang Technological University
- Not listed. Maybe Stanford, the University of Washington, or UCal Berkeley?
- Shanghai Jiao Tong University
- Not listed. Maybe Cambridge University
- Not listed. DarkCyber would plug in École nationale supérieure des Mines de Saint-Étienne whose graduates generally stick together or maybe the University of Michigan located in the knowledge wonderland that is Ann Arbor?
Notice that there are five Chinese institutions in the Top 10 list. Yeah, I know the source document said “six.” But, hey, this is human intelligence, not artificial intelligence at work.
Who’s in the Top 10. Apparently Carnegie Mellon and MIT were in the list, but that’s fuzzy. The write up references another study which ranked “all area” schools. Does MIT teach literature or maybe ethics?
To sum up: Interesting source, wonky method, and incomplete listing. Plus, there that weird six but just five thing.
Stephen E Arnold, December 24, 2019
The Intercept Says Happy Holidays to Thomson Reuters
December 23, 2019
I read “How Ice Uses Social Media to Surveil and Arrest Immigrants.”
DarkCyber’s reaction to this story was, “What did Thomson Reuters do to warrant this Happy New Year greeting?” The good folks at Thomson Reuters are not the largest nor the only source of information for analysts—both commercial and governmental. The write describes a routine method of cross correlating items of information. The write up mentions a number of other outfits selling data to organizations. Hello, this is the commercial database business. The sector includes hundreds of companies, not just those who had a mostly forgotten connection to Lord Thomson of Fleet.
Please, sir, may I have some rich, hearty soup, not thin gruel?
A few observations:
- What other firms provide commercial data services to government agencies? Hint: LexisNexis, Experian, other government agencies, and lots, lots more.
- When did this business begin? What were the first commercial firms operating in this business sector? Hint: History can be interesting if one goes back to the the days of RECON and SDC.
- What are the sources of data available to entities which are not allies of the United States? Hint: Singapore’s information sector is booming for a reason.
But the big red herring in the write up is the failure to address the one important weakness in most of the existing data services. What do we get? Thin porridge like that fed Tiny Tim.
My point is that focusing on Thomson Reuters is a misrepresentation of how data can be cross correlated. What happens if a new service becomes available which provides a meta service? That’s a story.
If you want to obtain a copy of a report which describes one new service taking shape, send an email to darkcyber333 at yandex dot com. A government or company email address is required. Will there be exceptions? Nope.
No Happy New Years to Thomson Reuters from the Intercept and none from me for those wanting a document without the required email type.
I know, “Humbug.”
Stephen E Arnold, December 23, 2019
Microsoft Matches the Amazon AWS Security Certification
December 21, 2019
DarkCyber wants to point out that the JEDI deal has not closed. But one of Microsoft’s weaknesses has been remediated. The news is probably not going to make Amazon’s AWS government professionals smile. In fact, the news could ruin the New Year for the Bezos bulldozer.
Stars and Stripes explained in “With New Pentagon IT Certification, Microsoft Narrows the Cloud Security Gap with Amazon” that:
on December 12 Microsoft became the second company to hold the Pentagon’s highest-level IT security certification, called Impact Level 6, Defense Information Systems Agency spokesman Russ Goemaere told The Washington Post in an email. The temporary certification lasts three months, after which a longer one will be considered, Goemaere said. The news of Microsoft’s certification was reported earlier by the Washington Business Journal. The certification means that, for the first time, Microsoft will be able to store classified data in the cloud. Defense and intelligence agencies typically use air-gapped, local computer networks to store sensitive data rather than the cloud-based systems that most companies now use to harness far-off data centers. Previously, Amazon was the only cloud provider trusted with secret data.
The Grinch may want to contact Amazon customer service and ask for an explanation. DarkCyber is not sure if certification is the same as “real” security, but checklists matter. When billions are at stake, one small item can have significant impact. For more detail, see “How the Grinch Stole Christmas.” The book is just $9.00 on Amazon. The 1957 book is classified as inspirational and religious poetry.
Yep, categories are important too.
Stephen E Arnold, December 22, 2019
About That Google-Rejected Project Maven
December 20, 2019
Anyone familiar with data-systems firm Palantir knows the company makes no apologies for supporting the U.S. military (among others) with their platforms. So it comes as no surprise that it is picking up where Google left off— The Next Web shares their “Report: Palantir Took Over Project Maven, the Military AI Program Too Unethical for Google.” Writer Tristan Greene explains:
“Project Maven, for those unfamiliar, is a Pentagon program to build an AI-powered surveillance platform for unmanned aerial vehicles. Basically, the job is to build a system for the US military to deploy and monitor autonomous drones. This system would, supposedly, give the government real-time battlefield command and control and the ability to track, tag, and spy on targets without human involvement. The limited, unclassified information available makes it appear as though the project stops just short of functioning as an AI weapons system capable of firing on self-designated targets as they become available in the battle space. …
“The Pentagon didn’t have to look very far to find a company willing to pick up where Google‘s ethics left off. Palantir, the company that powers ICE and CBP’s surveillance networks and builds software for police that circumvents the warrant process, is reportedly chugging away on Project Maven.”
We’re reminded Palantir founder Peter Thiel expressed disdain for Google after it dropped Maven following employee protest. Not only has Thiel insisted tech companies are honor bound to help the government with, seemingly, whatever it asks, he also points out Google’s history of working with the Chinese government. Greene notes that, though “we stand on the cusp of AI-powered warfare,” our federal government has yet to develop an official policy on the ethics of military use of AI. The possibilities are endless. Next up: Anduril, another outfit which finds joy where Google finds management challenges.
Cynthia Murrell, December 20, 2019
The Middle Kingdom and Surveillance Technology: Another Revenue and Influencer Opportunity?
December 19, 2019
China empowers 63 ruling entities with surveillance tech.
We are not surprised to learn that China had become a hub of surveillance technologies for repressive governments. The Japan Times’ article, “AI Surveillance Proliferating, with China Exporting Tech to Over 60 Countries, Report Says,” cites a report from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The article specifies:
“Chinese companies have exported artificial intelligence surveillance technology to more than 60 countries including Iran, Myanmar, Venezuela, Zimbabwe and others with dismal human rights records, according to a report by a U.S. think tank. With the technology involving facial recognition systems that the Communist Party uses to crack down on Uighurs and other Muslim minorities in China’s far western Xinjiang region, the report calls Beijing a global driver of ‘authoritarian tech.’ The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace released the report amid concerns that authoritarian regimes would use the technology to boost their power and data could be sent back to China.”
We also learn China often encourages governments to purchase this tech through soft loans, effectively subsidizing high-tech repression throughout the world. To make matters more ominous, over half these countries have opted in to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, an infrastructure project meant to boost China’s global economic influence.
The report does not stop at China, however. It notes that in Japan the NEC Corporation alone exports AI surveillance tech to 14 countries, IBM does so to 11 countries, and France, Germany, and Israel also proliferate it beyond their borders. According to the report, none of these nations adequately monitor and control the technologies, allowing it to be linked to a “range of violations.”
Cynthia Murrell, December 19, 2019
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