Freedom Versus Fear
September 4, 2015
The Ashley Madison data breach has understandably been getting a lot of press, but what does it portend for the future of the Internet? Computerworld’s Tech Decoder predicts far-reaching consequences in, “Here’s Why the Dark Web Just Got a Lot Darker.” Security experts predict a boom in phishing scams connected to this data breach, as well as copycat hackers poised to attack other (more legit) companies.
Reporter John Brandon suspects such activity will lead to the government stepping in to create two separate Internet channels: one “wild and unprotected” side and a “commercial” side, perhaps sponsored by big-name communications companies, that comes with an expectation of privacy. Great, one might think, we won’t have to worry if we’re not up to anything shady! But there’s more to it. Brandon explains:
“The problem is that I’m a big proponent of entrepreneurship. I won’t comment on whether I think Ashley Madison is a legitimate business. … However, I do want to defend the rights of some random dude in Omaha who wants to sell smartphone cables. He won’t have a chance to compete on the ‘commercial’ side of the Internet, so he’ll probably have to create a site on the unprotected second-tier channel, the one that is ‘free and open’ for everyone. Good luck with that.
“Is it fair? Is it even (shudder) moral? The commercial side will likely be well funded, fast, reliable, government-sanctioned, and possibly heavily taxed. The free side will be like drinking water at the local cesspool. In the end, the free and open Internet is that way for a reason. It’s not so you can cheat on your wife. Frankly, people will do that with or without the Internet. The ‘free and open’ bit is intended to foster ideas. It’s meant to level the playing field. It’s meant to help that one guy in Omaha.”
Yes, security is important, but so is opportunity. Can our society strike a balance, or will fear reign? Stay tuned.
Cynthia Murrell, September 4, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
The Cricket Cognitive Analysis
September 4, 2015
While Americans scratch their heads at the sport cricket, it has a huge fanbase and not only that, there are mounds of data that can now be fully analyzed says First Post in the article, “The Intersection Of Analytics, Social Media, And Cricket In The Cognitive Era Of Computing.”
According to the article, cricket fans absorb every little bit of information about their favorite players and teams. Technology advances have allowed the cricket players to improve their game with better equipment and ways to analyze their playing, in turn the fans have a deeper personal connection with the game as this information is released. For the upcoming Cricket World Cup, Wisden India will provide all the data points for the game and feed them into IBM’s Analytics Engine to improve the game for spectators and the players.
Social media is a huge part of the cricket experience and the article details examples about how it platforms like Twitter are processed through sentimental analysis and IBM Text Analytics.
“What is most interesting to businesses however is that observing these campaigns help in understanding the consumer sentiment to drive sales initiatives. With right business insights in the nick of time, in line with social trends, several brands have come up with lucrative offers one can’t refuse. In earlier days, this kind of marketing required pumping in of a lot of money and waiting for several weeks before one could analyze and approve the commercial success of a business idea. With tools like IBM Analytics at hand, one can not only grab the data needed, assess it so it makes a business sense, but also anticipate the market response.”
While Cricket might be what the article concentrates on, imagine how data analytics are being applied to other popular sports such as American football, soccer, baseball, golf, and the variety of racing popular around the world.
Whitney Grace, September 4, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Shades of CrossZ: Compress Data to Speed Search
September 3, 2015
I have mentioned in my lectures a start up called CrossZ. Before whipping out your smartphone and running a predictive query on the Alphabet GOOG thing, sit tight.
CrossZ hit my radar in 1997. The concept behind the company was to compress extracted chunks of data. The method, as I recall, made use of fractal compression, which was the rage at that time. The queries were converted to fractal tokens. The system then quickly pulled out the needed data and displayed them in human readable form. The approach was called as I recall “QueryObject.” By 2002, the outfit dropped off my radar. The downside of the CrossZ approach was that the compression was asymmetric; that is, slow preparing the fractal chunk but really fast when running a query and extracting the needed data.
Flash forward to Terbium Labs, which has a patent on a method of converting data to tokens or what the firm calls “digital fingerprints.” The system matches patterns and displays high probability matches. Terbium is a high potential outfit. The firm’s methods may be a short cut for some of the Big Data matching tasks some folks in the biology lab have.
For me, the concept of reducing the size of a content chunk and then querying it to achieve faster response time is a good idea.
What do you think I thought when I read “Searching Big Data Faster”? Three notions flitter through my aged mind:
First, the idea is neither new nor revolutionary. Perhaps the MIT implementation is novel? Maybe not?
Second, the main point that “evolution is stingy with good designs” strikes me as a wild and crazy generalization. What about the genome of the octopus, gentle reader?
Third, MIT is darned eager to polish the MIT apple. This is okay as long as the whiz kids take a look at companies which used this method a couple of decades ago.
That is probably not important to anyone but me and to those who came up with the original idea, maybe before CrossZ popped out of Eastern Europe and closed a deal with a large financial services firm years ago.
Stephen E Arnold, September 3, 2015
Facebook One Billion. Google Plus Not So Much
September 3, 2015
Alphabet Google can spell dominance. The problem is that in the social media department, spelling is not the same as doing. Navigate to the Zuck’s post here. Here’s the social media reality:
We just passed an important milestone. For the first time ever, one billion people used Facebook in a single day.
The Alphabet Google thing is likely to point out that it has more users every day. So there.
Stephen E Arnold, September 3, 2015
Dark Web Drug Trade Unfazed by Law Enforcement Crackdowns
September 3, 2015
When Silk Road was taken down in 2013, the Dark Web took a big hit, but it was only a few months before black marketers found alternate means to sell their wares, including illegal drugs. The Dark Web provides an anonymous and often secure means to purchase everything from heroin to prescription narcotics with, apparently, few worries about the threat of prosecution. Wired explains that “Crackdowns Haven’t Stopped The Dark Web’s $100M Yearly Drug Sale,” proving that if there is a demand, the Internet will provide a means for illegal sales.
In an effort to determine if the Dark Web have grown to declined, Carnegie Mellon researchers Nicolas Cristin and Kyle Soska studied thirty-five Dark Web markets from 2013 to January 2015. They discovered that the Dark Web markets are no longer explosively growing, but the market has remained stable fluctuating from $100 million to $180 million a year.
The researchers concluded that the Dark Web market is able to survive any “economic” shifts, including law enforcement crackdowns:
“More surprising, perhaps, is that the Dark Web economy roughly maintains that sales volume even after major disasters like thefts, scams, takedowns, and arrests. According to the Carnegie Mellon data, the market quickly recovered after the Silk Road 2 market lost millions of dollars of users’ bitcoins in an apparent hack or theft. Even law enforcement operations that remove entire marketplaces, as in last year’s purge of half a dozen sites in the Europol/FBI investigation known as Operation Onymous, haven’t dropped the market under $100 million in sales per year.”
Cristin and Soska’s study is the most comprehensive to measure the size and trajectory of the Dark Web’s drug market. Their study ended prematurely, because two Web sites grew so big that the researchers’ software wasn’t able to track the content. Their study showed that most Dark Web vendors are using more encryption tools, they make profits less $1000, and they are mostly selling MDMA and marijuana.
Soska and Cristin also argue that the Dark Web drug trade decreases violence in the retail drug trade, i.e. it keeps the transactions digital than having there be more violence on the streets. They urge law enforcement officials to rethink shutting down the Dark Web markets, because it does not seem to have any effect.
Whitney Grace, September 3, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Does This Autonomous Nerf Gun Herald the Age of Killer Robots?
September 3, 2015
Well here’s something interesting that has arisen from HP’s “disastrous” $11 billion acquisition of Autonomy: check out this three-minute YouTube video: “See What You Can Create with HP IDOL OnDemand.” The fascinating footage reveals the product of developer Martin Zerbib’s “little project,” made possible with IDOL OnDemand and a Nerf gun. Watch as the system targets a specific individual, a greedy pizza grabber, a napping worker, and a thief. It seems like harmless fun, until you realize how gruesome this footage would be if this were a real gun.
It is my opinion that it is the wielders of weapons who should be held directly responsible for their misuse, not the inventors. Still, commenter “Dazed Confused” has a point when he rhetorically asks “What could possibly go wrong?” and links to an article in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, “Stopping Killer Robots and Other Future Threats.” That piece describes an agreement being hammered out that proposes to ban the development of fully autonomous weapons. Writer Seth Baum explains there is precedent for such an agreement: The Saint Petersburg Declaration of 1868 banned exploding bullets, and 105 countries have now ratified the 1995 Protocol on Blinding Laser Weapons. (Such laser weapons could inflict permanent blindness on soldiers, it is reasoned.) After conceding that auto-weaponry would have certain advantages, the article points out:
“But the potential downsides are significant. Militaries might kill more if no individual has to bear the emotional burden of strike decisions. Governments might wage more wars if the cost to their soldiers were lower. Oppressive tyrants could turn fully autonomous weapons on their own people when human soldiers refused to obey. And the machines could malfunction—as all machines sometimes do—killing friend and foe alike.
“Robots, moreover, could struggle to recognize unacceptable targets such as civilians and wounded combatants. The sort of advanced pattern recognition required to distinguish one person from another is relatively easy for humans, but difficult to program in a machine. Computers have outperformed humans in things like multiplication for a very long time, but despite great effort, their capacity for face and voice recognition remains crude. Technology would have to overcome this problem in order for robots to avoid killing the wrong people.”
Baum goes on to note that organizers base their call for a ban on existing international humanitarian law, which prohibits weapons that would strike civilians. Such reasoning has already been employed to achieve bans against landmines and cluster munitions, and is being leveraged in an attempt to ban nuclear weapons.
Will killer robots be banned before they’re a reality? It seems the agreement would have to move much faster than bureaucracy usually does; given the public example of Zerbib’s “little project,” I suspect it is already way too late for that.
Cynthia Murrell, September 3, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Watson Speaks Naturally
September 3, 2015
While there are many companies that offer accurate natural language comprehension software, completely understanding the complexities of human language still eludes computers. IBM reports that it is close to overcoming the natural language barriers with IBM Watson Content Analytics as described in “Discover And Use Real-World Terminology With IBM Watson Content Analytics.”
The tutorial points out that any analytics program that only relies on structured data loses about four fifths of information, which is a big disadvantage in the big data era, especially when insights are supposed to be hidden in the unstructured. The Watson Content Analytics is a search and analytics platform and it uses rich-text analysis to find extract actionable insights from new sources, such as email, social media, Web content, and databases.
The Watson Content Analytics can be used in two ways:
- “Immediately use WCA analytics views to derive quick insights from sizeable collections of contents. These views often operate on facets. Facets are significant aspects of the documents that are derived from either metadata that is already structured (for example, date, author, tags) or from concepts that are extracted from textual content.
- Extracting entities or concepts, for use by WCA analytics view or other downstream solutions. Typical examples include mining physician or lab analysis reports to populate patient records, extracting named entities and relationships to feed investigation software, or defining a typology of sentiments that are expressed on social networks to improve statistical analysis of consumer behavior.”
The tutorial runs through a domain specific terminology application for the Watson Content Analytics. The application gets very intensive, but it teaches how Watson Content Analytics is possibly beyond the regular big data application.
Whitney Grace, September 3, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Old News but a Keeper Quote: Google to the Eurocrats
September 2, 2015
The news is old. Google has done nothing untoward. I understand. I love the Alphabet Google. Tucked into a BBC write up called “Google Rejects EU’s Search Abuse Complaint” was this statement:
“Data from users and advertisers confirms they like these formats. That’s not ‘favouring’ – that’s giving our customers and advertisers what they find most useful.”–Google’s lawyer Kent Walker
I like relevance, but what do I know? How does Alphabet spell, “precision” and “recall”?
Stephen E Arnold, September 2, 2014
HP: Clever, Clever Downsizing
September 2, 2015
I have no idea if Hewlett Packard is giving employees 48 hours to decide on their future. I know that the time limit seems very MBAish. You can decide for yourself when you read “HP Layoffs Are Going on Now and Involve a New Job Offer … but No Severance.”
But the article contained a management gem, crafted by some of the folks who bought Autonomy and then wrote off billions because Autonomy was not what HP concluded Autonomy was. Yeah, I know that sounds wacky.
Here’s the passage:
A person close to the company told us last month that remaining remote workers in the HP ES division — people who lived too far to commute — were being pressured to move so they could drive in, or driving three hours each way. This even though some regional HP offices didn’t have enough desk space to accommodate them all.yee
I like the no room for employee thing. Good planning, better execution. Now what about splitting the company in half and reversing the five consecutive quarters of revenue decline?
Stephen E Arnold, September 2, 2015
Suggestions for Developers to Improve Functionality for Search
September 2, 2015
The article on SiteCrafting titled Maxxcat Pro Tips lays out some guidelines for improved functionality when it comes deep search. Limiting your Crawls is the first suggestion. Since all links are not created equally, it is wise to avoid runaway crawls on links where there will always be a “Next” button. The article suggests hand-selecting the links you want to use. The second tip is Specify Your Snippets. The article explains,
“When MaxxCAT returns search results, each result comes with four pieces of information: url, title, meta, and snippet (a preview of some of the text found at the link). By default, MaxxCAT formulates a snippet by parsing the document, extracting content, and assembling a snippet out of that content. This works well for binary documents… but for webpages you wanted to trim out the content that is repeated on every page (e.g. navigation…) so search results are as accurate as possible.”
The third suggestion is to Implement Meta-Tag Filtering. Each suggestion is followed up with step-by-step instructions. These handy tips come from a partnering between Sitecrafting is a web design company founded in 1995 by Brian Forth. Maxxcat is a company acknowledged for its achievements in high performance search since 2007.
Chelsea Kerwin, September 2, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
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