Facebook to Tackle Terrorism with Increased Monitoring
July 5, 2017
Due to recent PR nightmares involving terrorism organizations, Facebook is revamping their policies and policing of terrorism content within the social media network. A recent article in Digital Trends, Facebook Fights Against Terrorist Content on Its Site Using A.I., Human Expertise, explains how Zuckerberg and his team of anti-terrorism experts are changing the game in monitoring Facebook for terrorism activity.
As explained in the article,
To prevent AI from flagging a photo related to terrorism in a post like a news story, human judgment is still required. In order to ensure constant monitoring, the community operations team works 24 hours a day and its members are also skilled in dozens of languages.” Recently Facebook was in the news for putting their human monitors at risk by accidentally revealing personal information to the terrorists they were investigating on the site. As Facebook increase the number of monitors, it seems the risk to those monitors also increases.
The efforts put forth by Facebook are admirable, yet we can’t help wonder how – even with their impressive AI/human team – the platform can monitor the sheer number of live-streaming videos as those numbers continue to increase. The threats, terrorist or otherwise, present in social media continue to grow with the technology and will require a much bigger fix than more manpower.
Catherine Lamsfuss, July 5, 2017
Booz Allen Hamilton Under Scrutiny
July 5, 2017
Consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton is facing an inquiry by the U.S Department of Justice for irregularities in billing inappropriately its clientele mostly comprising of government agencies.
As reported by Washington Times in a news piece titled Booz Allen Hamilton Under Federal Investigation over Billing Irregularities, Contractor Says, the reporter says:
Booz Allen was notified of the probe earlier this month and is working to resolve the matter with federal investigators, the company said in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing Thursday afternoon.
This is not the first time that the consulting firm dubbed as world’s most profitable spy organization has come under fire. In October 2016, an employee of the company was apprehended by federal authorities in possession of classified information. This was the second time an employee of the largest intelligence and defense contractor was arrested on charges of spying and selling classified information.
The investigation pertaining to irregularities in billing in ongoing.
Vishal Ingole, July 5, 2017
HonkinNews for 4 July 2017 Now Available
July 4, 2017
Bang, boom, sizzle. The Fourth of July HonkinNews reports that Palantir may be igniting an investor frenzy. We report that one real publishing outfit believes Google has be be more organized. But HonkinNews thinks that innovation is a bigger challenge to the online advertising giant. Is Google’s Area 120 going to share its sleep pods with Googlers from Area 51. We report that Facebook has what we think are censorship rules. Who is favored by these precepts? Hint: It is not native Americans. IBM Watson and IBM artificial intelligence are reevaluated by MIT’s Technology Review. Surprise! The Technology Review folks are now wondering if Watson is a marketing confection. HonkinNews reveals the “truth,” if there is such a thing in out fact-filled world. HonkinNews explains that the former Yahooligan Marissa Mayer may try to give Uber a “lyft.” Surprised at the idea. So was the Beyond Search goose. You can view the program at this link.
Kenny Toth, July 4, 2017
Deleting Yourself from the Internet Too Good to Be True
July 4, 2017
Most people find themselves saddled with online accounts going back decades and would gladly delete them if they could. Some people even wish they could delete all their accounts and cease to exist online. A new service, Deseat, promises just that. According to The Next Web,
Every account it finds gets paired with an easy delete link pointing to the unsubscribe page for that service. Within in a few clicks you’re freed from it, and depending on how long you need to work through the entire list, you can be unwanted-account-free within the hour.
Theoretically, one could completely erase all trace of themselves from the all-knowing cyber web in the sky. But can it really be this easy?
Yes, eliminating outdated and unused accounts is a much-needed step in cleaning up one’s cyber identity, but we must question the validity of total elimination of one’s cyber identify in just a few clicks. Despite the website’s claim to “wipe your entire existence off the internet in a few clicks” ridding the internet of one’s cyber footprints is probably not that easy.
Catherine Lamsfuss, July 4, 2017
Amazon Alexa Enables Shopping Without Computer, Phone, or TV
July 4, 2017
Mail order catalogs, home shopping networks, and online shopping allowed consumers to buy products from the comfort of their own home. Each of them had their heyday, but now they need to share the glory or roll into a grave, because Amazon Alexa is making one stop shopping a vocal action. Tom’s Guide explains how this is possible in, “What Is Alexa Voice Shopping, And How Do You Use It?”
Ordering with Amazon Alexa is really simple. All you do is summon Alexa, ask the digital assistant to order an item, and then you wait for the delivery. The only stipulation is that you need to be an Amazon customer, preferably Amazon Prime. Here is an example scenario:
Let’s just say you’ve been parched all day, and you’re drinking bottle after bottle of Fiji water. Suddenly, you realize you’re all out and you need some more. Rather than drive to the store in the scorching summer heat, you decide to order a case through Amazon and have it delivered to your house. So, you say, “Alexa, order Fiji Natural Artesian Water.” Alexa will hear that and will respond by telling you that it’s found an option on Amazon for a certain price. Then, Alexa will ask you if it’s OK to order. If you’re happy with the product Alexa found, you can say “yes,” and your order will be placed. Now, sit back, relax and wait for your water to arrive.
There are some drawbacks, such as you cannot order different multiple items in the same order, but you can order multiples of the same item. Also if you are concerned about children buying all the toys from their favorite franchise, do not worry because you can set up a confirmation code option so the order will only be processed once the code is provided.
It is more than likely that Amazon will misinterpret orders, so relying on language services like Bitext might help sharpen Alexa’s selling skills.
Whitney Grace, July 4, 2017
Palantir Technologies: The Buzzfeed Beat
July 3, 2017
I read “There’s a Fight Brewing between the NYPD and Silicon Valley’s Palantir.” Two points about this story. Palantir Technologies, a vendor profiled in my CyberOSINT and Dark Web Notebook reports is probably going to keep its eye on the real journalistic outfit Buzzfeed. I don’t know much about “real” journalism, but my hunch is that if Palantir’s stakeholders find the Buzzfeed write up coverage interesting, some of those folks might spill their Philz coffee.
The other point is that the New York Police Department may find questions about its contractual dealings a bit of distraction from the quotidian tasks the force faces each day. I would not characterize “real” journalists asking questions “annoying,” but I would hazard the phrase “time consuming” or the word “distracting.”
“You want me to believe that?” asks Max, a skeptical show dog who knows that some owners will do anything to win.
The point of the “Fight Brewing” write up strikes me as a story designed to suggest that Palantir Technologies may be showing some signs of stress. When I read the story, I thought of the news which swirled around some of the defunct enterprise search companies when one of their client engagements went south. Vendors hit with these situations can do little but ride out the storm.
Hey, enterprise search was routinely oversold. When a system was up and running, the results were usually similar to the results generated by the previous “solution to all your information problems.” The search engineers who coded the systems knew that overpromising and under delivering were highly probable once the on switch was flipped. But the sales professional were going to say what was necessary to close the deal. In fact, most of the fancy promises about an enterprise search system set the company up for failure.
Is that what’s going on in the NYPD-Palantir “showdown”? To wit:
Palantir explained the system’s functions and outputs. The NYPD signed on. Then when the system was installed, additional work was needed to make the Palantir system meet the expectations set by the Palantir sales engineers.
The “Fight Brewing” story says:
The NYPD quietly began work last summer on its replacement data system, and in February it announced internally that it would cancel its Palantir contract and switch to the new system by the beginning of July, according to three people familiar with the matter. The new system, named Cobalt, is a group of IBM products tied together with NYPD-created software. The police department believes Cobalt is cheaper and more intuitive than Palantir, and prizes the greater degree of control it has over this system.
Keep in mind that I, before I retired in 2013, had been an adviser to the original i2 Group Ltd., the company which created in my opinion the analytic and visualization method which defines modern cyber eDiscovery in the 1990s.
The notion that IBM, which now owns i2’s Analyst’s Notebook, is working hard to close deals in key Palantir accounts from what I have heard in the general store in Harrod’s Creek.
I don’t have to go much farther than my own experience to get a sense that the “fight” may be a manifestation of how the world works when it comes to making sales for systems like Palantir’s Gotham or IBM’s i2. In my work career I have seen some interesting jabs and punches thrown to close a deal.
The NYPD, like any organization, wants systems which work and represent good value. Incumbent vendors have to find a way to retain a customer. Competitors have to find a way to get a licensee of one product to switch to a different product.
I noted this statement in the “Fight Brewing” story:
Palantir has struggled to expand its work with the police force, the emails show. As of March and April 2015, Palantir had had “little exposure to the top brass,” and although it wanted to add more business, “the door there clearly still remains closed given the larger political environment,” staffers wrote in emails. A staffer at one point invoked a phrase popularized by Thiel, author of Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future, saying that Palantir still needed to get “from 0->1 at NYPD.”
Now how many police forces in the US can afford a comprehensive cyber eDiscovery system like Palantir Gotham or IBM Analyst’s Notebook? This is an important point because the number of potential customers is quite small. For example, after NY, LA, Chicago, Miami, and maybe three or four other cities, the sales professional runs out of viable prospects. How many counties can foot the bill for the software, the consultants, and the people required to tag and analyze the data? The number is modest. How many US states can afford the investment in high end cyber eDiscovery software? Again, the number is small, and you can count out Illinois because getting bills paid is an interesting challenge. The same market size problem exists for US government entities.
Facebook: Search Images by the Objects They Contain
July 3, 2017
Has Facebook attained the holy grail of image search? Tech Crunch reports, “Facebook’s AI Unlocks the Ability to Search Photos by What’s in Them.” I imagine this will be helpful to law enforcement.
A platform Facebook originally implemented to help the visually impaired, Lumos (built on top of FBLearner Flow), is now being applied to search functionality across the social network. With this tool, one can search using keywords that describe things in the desired image, rather than relying on tags and captions. Writer John Mannes describes how this works:
Facebook trained an ever-fashionable deep neural network on tens of millions of photos. Facebook’s fortunate in this respect because its platform is already host to billions of captioned images. The model essentially matches search descriptors to features pulled from photos with some degree of probability. After matching terms to images, the model ranks its output using information from both the images and the original search. Facebook also added in weights to prioritize diversity in photo results so you don’t end up with 50 pics of the same thing with small changes in zoom and angle. In practice, all of this should produce more satisfying and relevant results.
Facebook expects to extrapolate this technology to the wealth of videos it continues to amass. This could be helpful to a user searching for personal videos, of course, but just consider the marketing potential. The article continues:
Pulling content from photos and videos provides an original vector to improve targeting. Eventually it would be nice to see a fully integrated system where one could pull information, say searching a dress you really liked in a video, and relate it back to something on Marketplace or even connect you directly with an ad-partner to improve customer experiences while keeping revenue growth afloat.
Mannes reminds us Facebook is operating amidst fierce competition in this area. Pinterest, for example, enables users to search images by the objects they contain. Google may be the furthest along, though; that inventive company has developed its own image captioning model that boasts an accuracy rate of over 90% when either identifying objects or classifying actions within images.
Cynthia Murrell, July 3, 2017
DoD and Textron Move Analytics to Cloud
July 3, 2017
Continuing in its efforts to become more cloud-based, the DOD has partnered with Textron to create a web-based intel program. This latest edition of intelligence gathering program has shifted the DOD away from software into cloud presence, one of the government’s goals for the future.
Defense Systems recently reported on this new collaboration:
Decreasing a hardware footprint by consolidating data-centers and servers is entirely consistent with the Pentagon’s push to move more services, applications, storage systems and functions to a cloud-based architecture; this is particularly relevant in light of DOD’s initiative to integrate more commercial IT systems and move more Joint Regional Security Stacks (JRSS) functions to the cloud.
The program itself streamlines data analysis and places it in the cloud for easier storage and access. This latest move showcases how technology across the board is shifting from traditional software and hardware driven data analytics and moving toward cloud-based.
Catherine Lamsfuss, July 3, 2017
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