Glueware: A Sticky and Expensive Mess
April 5, 2016
I have been gathering open source information about DCGS, a US government information access and analysis system. I learned that the DCGS project is running a bit behind its original schedule formulated about 13 years ago. I also learned that the project is little over budget.
I noted “NASA Launch System Software Upgrade Now 77% overt Budget.” What interested me was the reference to “glueware.” The idea appears to be that it is better, faster, and maybe cheaper to use many different products. The “glueware” idea allows these technologies to be stuck or glued together. This is an interesting idea.
According to the write up:
To develop its new launch software, NASA has essentially kluged together a bunch of different software packages, Martin noted in his report. “The root of these issues largely results from NASA’s implementation of its June 2006 decision to integrate multiple products or, in some cases, parts of products rather than developing software in-house or buying an off-the-shelf product,” the report states. “Writing computer code to ‘glue’ together disparate products has turned out to be more complex and expensive than anticipated. As of January 2016, Agency personnel had developed 2.5 million lines of ‘glue-ware,’ with almost two more years of development activity planned.”
The arguments for the approach boil down to the US government’s belief that many flowers blooming in one greenhouse is better than buying flowers from a farm in Encinitas.
The parallels with DCGS and its well known government contractors and Palantir with its home brew Gotham system are interesting to me. What happens if NASA embraces a commercial provider? Good news for that commercial provider and maybe some push back from the firms chopped out of the pork loin. What happens if Palantir gets rebuffed? Unicorn burgers, anyone?
Stephen E Arnold, April 5, 2016
Google: Data Center Tour
April 5, 2016
If you marvel at all things Google, you will enjoy “Behind the Scenes and 360 at Google’s Dalles Data Center.” Dalles is not a suburb of the Cowboys’ football stadium, however. The video is a virtual tour of a “secret” Google facility. Even better, the article tells me the data center “is a highly secure area most Google employees aren’t even able to access.” There you go.
The article points out this surprising fact:
While the video is – naturally – highly curated, it nonetheless provides an interesting insight into Google’s vast data center, which can hold more than 750,00 machines and what’s behind running it all – from the sizeable hard drive shredder to very colorful water pipes – in Google colors of course.
Of course and naturally. Here’s the link.
Enjoy as long as you have Google Chrome, the YouTube app on m mobile gizmos, or the wonderful Google Cardboard thing. For information about the security in use at some Google facilities, check out this article too.
Stephen E Arnold, April 5, 2016
Forget World Population, Domain Population Is Overcrowded
April 5, 2016
Back in the 1990s, if you had a Web site without a bunch of gobbidly-gook after the .com, you were considered tech savvy and very cool. There were plenty of domain names available in those days and as the Internet became more of a tool than a novelty, demand for names rose. It is not as easy anymore to get the desired Web address, says Phys.org in the article, “Overcrowded Internet Domain Space Is Stifling Demand, Suggesting A Future ‘Not-Com’ Boom.”
Domain names are being snapped up fast, so quickly, in fact, that Web development is being stunted. As much as 25% of domains are being withheld, equaling 73 million as of summer 2015 with the inability to register domain names that would drive Internet traffic.
“However, as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has begun to roll out the option to issue brand new top-level domains for almost any word, whether it’s dot-hotel, dot-books or dot-sex – dubbed the ‘not-coms’ – the research suggests there is substantial untapped demand that could fuel additional growth in the domain registrations.”
One of the factors that determine prime Internet real estate is a simple, catchy Web address. With new domains opening up beyond the traditional .org, .com, .net, .gov endings, an entire new market is also open for entrepreneurs to profit from. People are already buying not-com’s for cheap with the intention to resale them for a pretty penny. It bears to mention, however, that once all of the hot not-com’s are gone, we will be in the same predicament as we are now. How long will that take?
Whitney Grace, April 5, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Google DeepMind Acquires Healthcare App
April 5, 2016
What will Google do next? Google’s London AI powerhouse has set up a new healthcare division and acquired a medical app called Hark, an article from Business Insider, tells us the latest. DeepMind, Google’s artificial intelligence research group, launched a new division recently called DeepMind Health and acquired a healthcare app. The article describes DeepMind Health’s new app called Hark,
“Hark — acquired by DeepMind for an undisclosed sum — is a clinical task management smartphone app that was created by Imperial College London academics Professor Ara Darzi and Dr Dominic King. Lord Darzi, director of the Institute of Global Health Innovation at Imperial College London, said in a statement: “It is incredibly exciting to have DeepMind – the world’s most exciting technology company and a true UK success story – working directly with NHS staff. The types of clinician-led technology collaborations that Mustafa Suleyman and DeepMind Health are supporting show enormous promise for patient care.”
The healthcare industry is ripe for disruptive technology, especially technologies which solve information and communications challenges. As the article alludes to, many issues in healthcare stem from too little conveyed and too late. Collaborations between researchers, medical professionals and tech gurus appears to be a promising answer. Will Google’s Hark lead the way?
Megan Feil, April 5, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Venture Dollars Point to Growing Demand for Cyber Security
April 4, 2016
A UK cyber security startup has caught our attention — along with that of venture capitalists. The article Digital Shadows Gets $14M To Keep Growing Its Digital Risk Scanning Service from Tech Crunch reports Digital Shadows received $14 million in Series B funding. This Software as a service (SaaS) is geared toward enterprises with more than 1,000 employees with a concern for monitoring risk and vulnerabilities by monitoring online activity related to the enterprise. The article describes Digital Shadows’ SearchLight which was initially launched in May 2014,
“Digital Shadows’ flagship product, SearchLight, is a continuous real-time scan of more than 100 million data sources online and on the deep and dark web — cross-referencing customer specific data with the monitored sources to flag up instances where data might have inadvertently been posted online, for instance, or where a data breach or other unwanted disclosure might be occurring. The service also monitors any threat-related chatter about the company, such as potential hackers discussing specific attack vectors. It calls the service it offers “cyber situational awareness”.”
Think oversight in regards to employees breaching sensitive data on the Dark Web, for example, a bank employee selling client data through Tor. How will this startup fare? Time will tell, but we will be watching them, along with other vendors offering similar services.
Megan Feil, April 4, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
RAVN ACE Can Help Financial Institutions with Regulatory Compliance
March 31, 2016
Increased regulations in the financial field call for tools that can gather certain information faster and more thoroughly. Bobsguide points to a solution in, “RAVN Systems Releases RAVN ACE for Automated Data Extraction of ISDA Documents Using Artificial Intelligence.” For those who are unaware, ISDA stands for International Swaps and Derivatives Association, and a CSA is a Credit Support Annex. The press release informs us:
“RAVN’s ground-breaking technology, RAVN ACE, joins elements of Artificial Intelligence and information processing to deliver a platform that can read, interpret, extract and summarise content held within ISDA CSAs and other legal documents. It converts unstructured data into structured output, in a fraction of the time it takes a human – and with a higher degree of accuracy. RAVN ACE can extract the structure of the agreement, the clauses and sub-clauses, which can be very useful for subsequent re-negotiation purposes. It then further extracts the key definitions from the contract, including collateral data from tabular formats within the credit support annexes. All this data is made available for input to contract or collateral management and margining systems or can simply be provided as an Excel or XML output for analysis. AVN ACE also provides an in-context review and preview of the extracted terms to allow reviewing teams to further validate the data in the context of the original agreement.”
The write-up tells us the platform can identify high-credit-risk relationships and detail the work required to repaper those accounts (that is, to re-draft, re-sign, and re-process paperwork). It also notes that even organizations that have a handle on their contracts can benefit, because the platform can compare terms in actual documents with those in that have been manually abstracted.
Based in London, enterprise search firm RAVN tailors its solutions to the needs of each industry it serves. The company was founded in 2011.
Cynthia Murrell, March 31, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Predictive Analytics on a Budget
March 30, 2016
Here is a helpful list from Street Fight that could help small and mid-sized businesses find a data analysis platform that is right for them—“5 Self-Service Predictive Analytics Platforms.” Writer Stephanie Miles notes that, with nearly a quarter of small and mid-sized organizations reporting plans to adopt predictive analytics, vendors are rolling out platforms for companies with smaller pockets than those of multinational corporations. She writes:
“A 2015 survey by Dresner Advisory Services found that predictive analytics is still in the early stages of deployment, with just 27% of organizations currently using these techniques. In a separate survey by IDG Enterprise, 24% of small and mid-size organizations said they planned to invest in predictive analytics to gain more value from their data in the next 12 months. In an effort to encourage this growth and expand their base of users, vendors with business intelligence software are introducing more self-service platforms. Many of these platforms include predictive analytics capabilities that business owners can utilize to make smarter marketing and operations decisions. Here are five of the options available right now.”
Here are the five platforms listed in the write-up: Versium’s Datafinder; IBM’s Watson Analytics; Predixion, which can run within Excel; Canopy Labs; and Spotfire from TIBCO. See the article for Miles’ description of each of these options.
Cynthia Murrell, March 30, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Surfing Safely on the Dark Web
March 29, 2016
The folks at Alphr want us to be safe if we venture onto the Dark Web, so they offer guidance in their article, “Is the Dark Web Safe?” The short answer, of course, is “parts of it.” Writer Thomas McMullan notes that, while the very act of accessing hidden sites through Tor is completely legal, it is easy to wander into illegal territory. He writes:
“‘Safe’ is a bit of a vague term. There is much of worth to be found on the dark web, but by its nature it is not as safe as the surface-level internet. You can only access pages by having a direct link (normally with a .onion suffix) and while that makes it harder to accidentally stumble across illegal content, you’re only a click away from some pretty horrible stuff. What’s more, the government is cracking down on illegal material on the dark web. In November 2015, it was announced that GCHQ and the National Crime Agency (NCA) would be joining forces to tackle serious crimes and child pornography on the dark web. Director of GCHQ Robert Hannigan said that the new Joint Operations Cell (JOC) will be ‘committed to ensuring no part of the internet, including the dark web, can be used with impunity by criminals to conduct their illegal acts’.”
The article goes on to note that plugins which can present a false IP address, like Ghostery, exist. However, McMullan advises that it is best to stay away from anything that seems questionable. You have been warned.
Cynthia Murrell, March 29, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Reputable News Site Now on the Dark Web
March 28, 2016
Does the presence of a major news site lend an air of legitimacy to the Dark Web? Wired announces, “ProPublica Launches the Dark Web’s First Major News Site.” Reporter Andy Greenberg tells us that ProPublica recently introduced a version of their site running on the Tor network. To understand why anyone would need such a high level of privacy just to read the news, imagine living under a censorship-happy government; ProPublica was inspired to launch the site while working on a report about Chinese online censorship.
Why not just navigate to ProPublica’s site through Tor? Greenberg explains the danger of malicious exit nodes:
“Of course, any privacy-conscious user can achieve a very similar level of anonymity by simply visiting ProPublica’s regular site through their Tor Browser. But as Tigas points out, that approach does leave the reader open to the risk of a malicious ‘exit node,’ the computer in Tor’s network of volunteer proxies that makes the final connection to the destination site. If the anonymous user connects to a part of ProPublica that isn’t SSL-encrypted—most of the site runs SSL, but not yet every page—then the malicious relay could read what the user is viewing. Or even on SSL-encrypted pages, the exit node could simply see that the user was visiting ProPublica. When a Tor user visits ProPublica’s Tor hidden service, by contrast—and the hidden service can only be accessed when the visitor runs Tor—the traffic stays under the cloak of Tor’s anonymity all the way to ProPublica’s server.”
The article does acknowledge that Deep Dot Web has been serving up news on the Dark Web for some time now. However, some believe this move from a reputable publisher is a game changer. ProPublica developer Mike Tigas stated:
“Personally I hope other people see that there are uses for hidden services that aren’t just hosting illegal sites. Having good examples of sites like ProPublica and Securedrop using hidden services shows that these things aren’t just for criminals.”
Will law-abiding, but privacy-loving, citizens soon flood the shadowy landscape of the Dark Web.
Cynthia Murrell, March 28, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Bigger Picture Regarding Illegal Content Needed
March 25, 2016
Every once in awhile an article on the Dark Web comes along that takes a step back from the latest action on Tor and offers a deep-dive on the topic at large. Delving into the World of the Dark Web was recently published on Raconteur, for example. In this article, we learned the definition of darknets: networks only accessible through particular software, such as Tor, and trusted peer authorization. The article continues,
“The best known, and by far the most popular, darknet is the Onion Router (Tor), which was created by the US Naval Research Labs in the 90s as an enabler of secure communication and funded by the US Department of Defense. To navigate it you use the Tor browser, similar to Google Chrome or Internet Explorer apart from keeping the identity of the person doing the browsing a secret. Importantly, this secrecy also applies to what the user is looking at. It is because servers hosting websites on the Tor network, denoted by their .onion (dot onion) designation, are able to mask their location.”
Today, the Dark Web is publicly available to be used anonymously by anyone with darknet software and home to a fair amount of criminal activity. Researchers at King’s College London scraped the .onion sites and results suggested about 57 percent of Tor sites host illegal content. We wonder about the larger context; for example, what percent of sites viewed on mainstream internet browsers host illegal content?
Megan Feil, March 25, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
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