Category: Advanced Cyber/IO

Search Atlas Demonstrates Google Search Bias by Location

An article at Wired reminds us that Google Search is not the objective source of information it appears to many users. We learn that “A New Tool Shows How Google Results Vary Around the World.” Researchers and PhD students Rodrigo Ochigame of MIT and Katherine Ye of Carnegie Mellon University created Search Atlas, an experimental Google Search interface. The tool displays three different sets of results to the same query based on location and language, illustrating both cultural differences and government preferences. “Information borders,” they call it.

The first example involves image searches for “Tiananmen Square.” Users in the UK and Singapore are shown pictures of the government’s crackdown on student protests in 1989. Those in China, or elsewhere using the Chinese language setting, see pretty photos of a popular tourist destination. Google says the difference has nothing to do with censorship—they officially stopped cooperating with the Chinese government on that in 2010, after all. It is just a matter of localized results for those deemed likely to be planning a trip. Sure. Writer Tom Simonite describes more of the tool’s results:

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Microsoft Percept: Perception in the Azure Cloud
Does your printer work? The printer is fine and our Apple Minis and laptops have zero problem generating hard copy. What about people joining a Teams meeting when those individuals are not 365 paying customers? Have you plugged in a second or third monitor and wondered where the icons went when using Windows 10? How is Windows Defender working for you since you received the Revil ransomware popup?

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Surveillance: Looking Forward
I read “The Future of Communication Surveillance: Moving Beyond Lexicons.” The article explains that word lists and indexing are not enough. (There’s no mention of non text objects and icons with specific meanings upon which bad actors agree before including them in a text message.)

I noted this passage:

Advanced technology such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and pre-trained models can better detect misconduct and pinpoint the types of risk that a business cares about. AI and ML should work alongside metadata filtering and lexicon alerting to remove irrelevant data and classify communications.

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Cyber Security: What Are You Doing?
I read “A Federal Government Left Completely Blind on Cyber attacks Looks to Force Reporting.” The write up uses a phrase for which there are a limited number of synonyms in English; namely, completely blind. There are numerous types of blindness. There’s the metaphorical blindness of William James, who coined the phrase “a certain blindness.” The wordy kin of the equally wordy Henry James means, I think, that some people just can’t “see” something. A friend says, “You will love working at Apple.” You say, “I don’t think so.” Hey, working at Apple is super, like the chaos monkeys on steroids.

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How Are Those Cyber Security Vendors Performing?

This sounds like old news. This is really new news. The trust outfit Thomson Reuters published “U.S. Government Probes VPN Hack within Federal Agencies, Races to Find Clues.” The main idea is that despite the amped up cyber security efforts, another somewhat minor issue has been discovered. The trust outfit reports:

The new government breaches involve a popular virtual private network (VPN) known as Pulse Connect Secure, which hackers were able to break into as customers used it. More than a dozen federal agencies run Pulse Secure on their networks, according to public contract records.

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