In a matter of a few years, tons of drones could be whizzing around residential zones, taking away tiny pieces of privacy people once had. DroneShield is a fresh new concept that alerts of nearby low-flying UAV devices in the area. John Franklin, one of the developers, told the Voice of Russia that 18 countries, including Russia, have already put in orders for the gadget and has been creating buzz ever since.
I don’t pay much attention to mobile anything. I am nosing near 70, and I find life works just fine without checking a mobile device every few minutes.
“Open” is a good example. Open invokes images of free and open source software. As my columns in Online Searcher document, open is usually closed. For software, open is a way to open the door to consulting services.
Open in the Google context is similar. The monetization angle is different. Google has a huge appetite for revenue. The system Google has constructed over the last 13 or so years is an expensive puppy to operate, upgrade, and maintain.
Phi Beta Iota: Google is the Standard Oil or Monsanto equivalent to the world of knowledge. As admirable as their computational mathematics are, they are evil polluters and manipulators of information. Google — like NSA — is not a public service operating in the public interest. It is a monopoly, a predatory monopoly with zero ethics that will eventaully have to be shut out and routed around by alternatives such as the Autonomous Internet.
What tech companies does the financial sector think are on top right now? TechCrunch discussed invitees ahead of the recent Goldman Sachs Private Internet Company Conference in Las Vegas in, “Here Are the Hottest Companies in Tech Right Now, According to Goldman Sachs.” Reporter Colleen Taylor reproduces for us the conference schedule, which apparently should have been kept on the down-low, but TechCrunch got a hold of somehow. She writes:
“The Goldman Sachs conference for private web firms is one of the most high-end and hush-hush events in the tech world. It’s essentially like the Hackers Conference or dinners at Sheryl Sandberg’s house or Fight Club, except for tech executives who are likely to soon go through an IPO or big M&A deal. If you’re on the invite list, you’re in pretty good company — and the first rule is that you don’t talk about it to others.
“[…] It bears mention that companies attending this conference have not necessarily engaged in an exclusive relationship with Goldman to manage their potential upcoming IPOs or M&A deals. In fact, most of them are free agents, fielding offers from any number of firms.”
Taylor points out a few notable absences, like Square, Dropbox, and Box. We, however, noticed something different: not a single search company is represented. Well, humph.
The next generation hackers may be taking to sound waves, and the Navy is understandably spooked.
Speaking at last week's Defense One conference, retired Capt. Mark Hagerott cited recent reports about sonic computer viruses as one way that hackers could “jump the air gap” and target systems that are not connected to the Internet.
“If you take a cybernetic view of what's happening [in the Navy], right now our approach is unplug it or don't use a thumb drive,” Hagerott said. But if hackers “are able to jump the air gap, we are talking about fleets coming to a stop.”
For a long time the thought was that an air gap (systems that are not connected to the Internet) rendered networks pretty much impenetrable.
Then the Stuxnet virus happened — an Iranian nuclear scientist with an infected thumb drive walked a virus through the air gap and unknowingly uploaded a destructive virus onto a network controlling nuclear centrifuges. This attack not only damaged Iran's nuclear facilities, but it also signaled the dawn of kinetic cyber attacks (the kind that cause physical damage) and the revealed the vulnerability of air gaps.
It's not just thumb drives though. Hagerott cited reporting by Arstechnica's Dan Goodin on a virus that supposedly transmitted via high-frequency sound waves.
Goodin called the malware “the advanced persistent threat equivalent of a Bigfoot sighting.”
The release titled SAIL LABS Announces New Release Of Media Mining Indexer 6.2 from SAIL LABS Technology on August 5, 2013 provides some insight into the latest version of the Media Mining Indexer. SAIL LABS Technology considers itself as an innovator in creating solutions for vertical markets, and enhancing technologies surrounding advanced language understanding abilities. The newest release offers such features as,
“Improved named entity detection of names via unified lists across languages… improved topic models for all languages… improved text preprocessing for Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Frasi, US and international English…support of further languages: Catalan, Swedish, Portuguese, Bahasa (Indonesia), Italian, Farsi and Romanian…improved communication with Media Mining Server to relate recognized speakers to their respective profiles.”
Gerhard Backfried, Head of Research at SAIL LABS, called the latest release a “quantum leap forward” considering the system’s tractability, constancy and ability to respond to clients needs. The flagship product is based on SAIL LABS speech recognition technology, which as won awards, and offers a suite of ideal components for multimedia processing, and the transformation of audio and video data into searchable information. The features boast the ability to convert speech to text accurately with Automatic Speech Recognition and the ability to detect different speakers with Speaker Change Detection.
I wrote a feature for Beyond Search which summarized the relevance problems for the query “ocr programs.” You can find that article at http://goo.gl/aBDjyI. The main point is that an average user would find links to crapware, flawed software, or irrelevant information. But Google was not the only offender. Bing and Yandex returned results almost as frustrating to me as Google’s output.
You may know that indexing the Web is expensive, technically challenging, and filled with pitfalls. Over the years, Web indexing systems which depend on advertising to pay the bills have walked a knife edge. On one side, are spoofers who want to exploit free visibility in a search results list. On the other side are purists like me who expect a search and retrieval system to return results which are objective and conform to standard tests such as those for precision and recall.
The Web indexes try to balance the two sides while calculating furiously how to keep traffic up, revenues growing, and massaging the two sides to remain faithful to Google. For those looking for free visibility, Google wants to offer an advertising option in the event that a site drops or disappears from a results list. For the inner librarians, Google has to insist that results are indeed relevant to the users.
I am okay with distorted results. I am okay with the search engine optimization folks who charge large sums to spoof Google. I am okay with librarians who grouse about the lack of date filtering and advanced search operations. I am pretty much okay with the state of search.
