Digital Antique Coca Cola Signs for Search
March 21, 2018
In a turn that is just about the most human thing we’ve ever heard, just as the world is on the cusp of an AI revolution, many are starting to look backward toward simpler times. We got a sideways glance at our fear of change from a PC Magazine story, “Download Your Entire Google Search History.”
The story is primarily about why on Earth anyone would want to see everything they have ever searched for. But it also touches on our desire for nostalgia in this lightning quick era:
“Users can now download their entire saved search history “to see a list of the terms you’ve searched for,” the company said. “This gives you access to your data when and where you want…For safety’s sake, don’t download past searches on a public computer—at the library, an Internet cafe, or even a friend’s house. Save the curiosity for home.”
This, oddly, isn’t the only place where nostalgia and AI are blending. Remember Nokia, the flip phone people? They are back and reintroducing a line of old school not-smart phones. On top of that, the company is dabbling in new tech like AI, which leads us to wonder where these two can possibly intersect. It’s an interesting move and one that will likely have antique hunters quivering.
Patrick Roland, March 21, 2018
Google: Search Civility
March 21, 2018
Among the many fake news battles organizations like Facebook and Google are fighting, far right racist organizations. More often than not, hate groups are more clever at exposing flaws in algorithms than most companies give them credit for. Big tech is still trying to find solutions to these issues, but the problems keep cropping up, as we learned in a recent Phys.org story, “Google Under Fire for Anti-Semitic Search Results in Sweden.”
According to the story:
“A search on Google for the Holocaust showed an anti-Semitic blog post high up containing information about Swedish Jews. With their names, pictures and occupations listed, dozens of them were described in a humiliating and threatening manner, according to local media.
Searches for the neo-Nazi Nordic Resistance Movement’s propaganda website also appeared as news with “top stories from Nordfront.se.”
This isn’t the only occasion that algorithms have been infiltrated by offensive material. Take for example, the story of Facebook users who typed in “Videos of…” and had their search bar autofill with live sex acts. We are clearly still a long way from social media and big search cleaning up their act and once they do (if they do) we will then be in a controversial world of free speech violations.
What headaches will loom in the future?
Patrick Roland, March 21, 2018
FOIA Suit Seeks Details of Palantirs Work with ICE
March 21, 2018
Well, this should be interesting. The Electronic Privacy Information Center (Epic.org) has announced, “EPIC FOIA- EPIC Sues for Details of Palantir’s Government Systems.” The brief write-up reports the watchdog’s complaint requesting information on the relationship between data-analysis firm Palantir and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE). The announcement specifies:
The federal agency contracted with the Peter Thiel company to establish vast databases of personal information, and to make secret determinations about the opportunities for employment, travel, and also who is subject to criminal investigations. EPIC is seeking the government contracts with Palantir, as well as assessments and other related documents. The ICE Investigative Case Management System and the FALCON system pull together vast troves of personal data from across the federal government. EPIC wrote in the complaint, ‘Palantir’s “big data” systems raise far-reaching privacy and civil liberties risks.’
Palantir’s role in creating “risk assessment” scores for travelers (US citizens and non-citizens alike) was revealed through an earlier FOIA lawsuit from EPIC. It would be interesting to see what information the organization is able to shake loose.
Cynthia Murrell, March 21, 2018
Open Source Panda Simplifies Data Analysis
March 20, 2018
An article at Quartz draws our attention to a potential alternative to Excel—the open source Pandas—in, “Meet the Man Behind the Most Important Tool in Data Science.” Writer Dan Kopf profiles Panda’s developer, Wes McKinny, who launched the Python tool in 2009. In 2012, Pandas’ popularity took off. Now, Kopf tells us:
Millions of people around the world use Pandas. In October 2017 alone, Stack Overflow, a website for programmers, recorded 5 million visits to questions about Pandas from more than 1 million unique visitors. Data scientists at Google, Facebook, JP Morgan, and virtually other major company that analyze data uses Pandas. Most people haven’t heard of it, but for many people who do heavy data analysis—a rapidly growing group these days—life wouldn’t be the same without it. (Pandas is open source, so it’s free to use.) So what does Pandas do that is so valuable? I asked McKinney how he explains it to non-programmer friends. ‘I tell them that it enables people to analyze and work with data who are not expert computer scientists,’ he says. ‘You still have to write code, but it’s making the code intuitive and accessible. It helps people move beyond just using Excel for data analysis.’
McKinney is inspired to improve data science tools because he likes to “empower people to solve problems.” In fact, Pandas sprung from his frustration at the limitations of available tools when he first came to embrace Python. See the article to follow the developer from his time as a high school athlete to his current, full-time work on Pandas and other open source projects, as well as more on Pandas itself.
Cynthia Murrell, March 20, 2018
DarkCyber for March 20, 2018 Now Available
March 20, 2018
DarkCyber, the weekly video news program about the Dark Web, is available at www.arnoldit.com/wordpress and at www.vimeo.com/260619679. Produced by Stephen E Arnold and Beyond Search, DarkCyber covers software, systems, and applications.
DarkCyber reveals the alleged connections between Tor and the US government, why “baby data” are for sale on the Dark Web, the DarkMatter cyber intelligence firm’s capabilities and its Katim secure mobile phone, and how inmates at a Federal penitentiary ran a pornography business via mobile phones from their cells.
The featured story is a profile of DarkMatter is a company based in the United Arab Emirates. The firm is hiring specialists in a number of cyber related disciplines. The company’s capabilities span a wide range of services. The firm’s Web site suggests that the company has technology to intercept, modify, and divert traffic on IP and mobile networks. DarkMatter also sells a secure mobile phone named Katim. DarkMatter’s growth and its intelligence services make clear the technical capabilities available to customers in the Middle East and other parts of the world.
Journalist Yasha Levine made available documents about the relationship between the Tor Project and the US Central Intelligence Agency. Levine is the author of ’Surveillance Valley” published in 2018. The documents span many years and comprise a collection of more than 2,000 emails and other writings. Dark Cyber notes the relationship between among Tor, its Broadcasting Board of Governors, and the US government. The DarkCyber report includes the link to the document collection.
Personal financial information is offered for sale on the Surface Web and the Dark Web. Stephen E Arnold reports that a Baltimore based Dark Web specialist has located ’baby data’ for sale on the Dark Web. The newborns are a blank slate. With a baby’s identity, a bad actor can create obtain an income tax deduction or use the “clean identity” to set up bank accounts.
DarkCyber also reviews the eCommerce business operated by inmates at a US Federal Correctional Institution in New Jersey. Inmates were accessing the Dark Web and selling pornography business from their cells. The data were obtained via mobile phones. The content was distributed on memory cards and via the cloud.
The weekly video about the Dark Web and lesser known Internet services is available at www.arnoldit.com/wordpress.
Kenny Toth, March 20, 2018
Quote to Note: CNBC on Facebook Management
March 19, 2018
Talking head TV does not capture my attention. I did spot an interesting write up this morning. Its title? “Facebook Is Facing Its Biggest Test Ever — and Its Lack of Leadership Could Sink the Company.” Tucked in the analysis is a quote to note. Here’s the passage which I highlighted in high intensity yellow:
There’s no outside attacker bringing Facebook down. It’s a circular firing squad that stems from the company’s fundamental business model of collecting data from users, and using that data to sell targeted ads.
The phrase which is quite nifty is “a circular firing squad.”
The Facebook – Cambridge Analytic dust up is interesting. Our take on the use of academics, industrial strength intelligence analysis methods, and manipulating viewpoints will be featured in the April 3, 2018, DarkCyber video news program.
Until then, enjoy the “circular firing squad” trope. Oh, and a happy honk to the author, editior, producer who okayed this phrase. Nifty.
Stephen E Arnold, March 19, 2018
Big Data and Smart Software: A Volatile Mixture?
March 19, 2018
For several years big data and artificial intelligence have been running on parallel tracks. Once in a while they cross over, but mostly they kept independent of one another. But that is poised to change, as we saw from a recent press release from Lucidworks, “Lucidworks Launches Fusion 4 With Operationalized AI and Portable Applications.”
According to the piece, their AI and big data are coming together because:
“Our customers are global organizations who demand a reactive and flexible platform that lets them adapt to hybrid run-time environments including on premise, private cloud, and public cloud infrastructures. With Fusion 4, we’ve brought that portability to application development so customers can create and run apps that best fit their security and operational constraints.”
This is picking up steam in a major way. Multiple companies are offering mashups of big data and AI and the results run the gamut. Forbes recently ran a list of 30 free sources for such tools. Not only are they becoming more available, there is a lot of evidence that this combo is disrupting the normal patterns of business and life. Expect more from this pairing because our world is waiting for a new explosion of AI and data.
Beyond Search wants to point out that the use of data from services like Facebook by third parties can have unexpected consequences. Those facilitating volatile compounds may find themselves walking a knife edge. Will that “work”?
Patrick Roland, March 19, 2018
Udpipe for R: An NLP Solution for R
March 19, 2018
Natural language processing is a huge component in not only big data, but machine learning when it relates to reading and understanding languages. Natural language processing is not only important to English, but any foreign language in the modern age that needs to take advantage of AI and machine learning. RBloggers takes a look at another new tool in the area of NLP and its updated features, “Natural Language Processing For Non-English Languages With Udpipe.”
We learned from the write up:
“BNOSAC is happy to announce the release of the udpipe R package (https://bnosac.github.io/udpipe/en) which is a Natural Language Processing toolkit that provides language-agnostic ‘tokenization’, ‘parts of speech tagging’, ‘lemmatization’, ‘morphological feature tagging’ and ‘dependency parsing’ of raw text. Next to text parsing, the package also allows you to train annotation models based on data of ‘treebanks’ in ‘CoNLL-U’ format…”
The udpipe R package supports a wide range of languages from Latin-based to Asian, including Slavonic, Russian, Vietnamese, Finnish, Turkish, Serbian, Japanese, Basque, and Greek.
BNOSAC designed the udpipe R package for designer to build NLP applications that can integrate parts of speech tags, tokens, morphological features and dependency on parsing output. BNOSAC really wants non-English speaking designs to take advantage of the upgrade for their applications, because tools like this should not be restricted to English only communities.
Whitney Grace, March 19, 2018
Reddit Turns to Bing for AI Prowess
March 19, 2018
This is an interesting development—MSPoweruser announces, “Reddit Partners with Microsoft and Bing for AI Tools.” We’d though Reddit was thrilled with Solr. Reddit CEO Alexis Ohanian announced the partnership at the Everyday AI event in San Francisco, saying his company required “AI heavy lifting” to analyze the incredible amounts of data it collects. For its part, Bing gets access to valuable data. Writer Surur tells us:
The partnership will benefit both parties with Reddit contributing content to Bing such as AMAs and advertising upcoming AMAs and Reddit Answers and Microsoft making subreddit content more visible in their search results. Now when searching for a subreddit in Bing it will deliver a live snapshot of the top threads in the subreddit. Ohanian noted that Reddit is the largest answer database of nuanced, verified answers, offering an amazing resource to Bing. He noted that the Bing partnership was like a crown jewel for Reddit and just scratches the surface of what is possible with Microsoft’s AI expertise and Reddit data. For companies who use Reddit for professional and commercial reasons, Reddit will be offering the Power BI suite of solution templates for brand management and targeting on Reddit which will enable brands, marketers, and budget owners to quickly analyze their Reddit footprint and determine how, where, and with whom to engage in the Reddit community.
With 330 million active monthly users, Reddit is about the same size as Twitter; that is indeed a lot of data. Surur points us to Reddit’s blog post on the subject for more information.
Cynthia Murrell, March 19, 2018
What Happens When Intelligence Centric Companies Serve the Commercial and Political Sectors?
March 18, 2018
Here’s a partial answer:
And
Plus
Years ago, certain types of companies with specific LE and intel capabilities maintained low profiles and, in general, focused on sales to government entities.
How times have changed!
In the DarkCyber video news program for March 27, 2018, I report on the Madison Avenue type marketing campaigns. These will create more opportunities for a Cambridge Analytica “activity.”
Net net: Sometimes discretion is useful.
Stephen E Arnold, March 18, 2018
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