Information Operations (IO) – Page 347 – Public Intelligence Blog

MH370: How Fatal is the Chip That Rothschild Reportedly ‘Acquired’?

EXTRACT

How destructible could this chip be?

In a detailed report from Malaysia Chronicle dated April 8, it said that Freescale launched what could be the world's smallest microcontroller in Feb 2013 called the Kinesis KL02.

KL02 measures 1.9 mm by 2mm and contains RAM, ROM and a clock. Even with its minute size, KL02 might be the most potent next-generation war weaponry.

Whether remotely controlled or automatically programmed, KLO2 can be utilised to employ drones smaller than flies. Such small-sized drones were allegedly being used to deliver lab-cloned viruses or toxic drugs instrumental for spreading plague, virus and disease; track spy satellites or large scale and hidden weaponries.

Continue reading “Berto Jongman: Malaysian Airlines “Rothschild Chip” Could Power Nano-Drones for Good or Evil”

2014/04/182014/04/18

Howard Rheingold: Filtering – from Information Deluge to Context with JP Rangaswami

Advanced Cyber/IO

JP Rangaswami's thoughtful series of blog posts on the why and how of filtering online info-flows is a fundamental infotention text. Instead of Scooping all seven, I've Scooped this blog post by Jon Reed that summarizes and links to all seven parts.

Filtering JP Rangaswami – from information deluge to context

Jon Reed

diginomica, 7 February 2014

I liked JP Rangaswami‘s series on filtering so much, I decided to filter it.

The Chief Scientist at Salesforce.com, Rangaswami has a personal blog site, confused of calcutta: a blog about information, where he blogs on far-ranging enterprise topics on behalf of himself, not his employer.

The filtering series has been a very good read, but quickly became a monster series. The initial post laid out seven filtering principles; there are now five follow up posts to chew on.

Full post below the line with links.

Continue reading “Howard Rheingold: Filtering – from Information Deluge to Context with JP Rangaswami”

2014/04/182014/04/18

Berto Jongman: LogAnalysis (Italy) Eats Phone Records, Produces Organization Charts

Advanced Cyber/IO

Mafia Wars: How Italy's Military Police Use Metadata To Track Organized Crime

The Carabinieri, Italy's military police, used a new software platform to analyze the phone records of organized crime groups. Here's what happened.

There's a reason why the NSA likes metadata so much. Metadata–the auxiliary data generated by every digital move you make–can track a person's digital life in detail. Now a team of Italian academics are showing how metadata can reveal the structure of organized crime groups with a software tool called LogAnalysis, which combines information from mobile phone records with police databases. And among LogAnalysis's first users is the Carabinieri, the Italian military police.

Emilio Ferrara, a postdoc at Indiana University, created LogAnalysis with three researchers from the University of Messina in Sicily. Ferrara explains that their platform “infers, with pretty high confidence, the roles of individuals involved in criminal activity from communication data, simply looking at patterns and network features.”

Here's how it works: Police feed phone logs they obtain into LogAnalysis; those then get mashed up with mug shots, criminal records, and other proprietary information from police databases. This information then shapes the Carabinieri's investigations by giving vital clues about intra-group relationships of an organized crime group believed to be behind robberies, extortions, and narcotics trafficking. It's important to note that their paper anonymized all records, and did not identify which organized crime group Italian law enforcement were investigating.

It turns out that metadata can tell quite a lot about the way an organization is set up. Matt Unger, the chief digital officer of New York firm K2 Intelligence, explained over the phone to Fast Company that “with a good analytics platform, cell phone metadata reveals who the influencers are. They are the ones who send and receive the most communications, and you can also see the ripples they make in turn.”

Read full article.

Continue reading “Berto Jongman: LogAnalysis (Italy) Eats Phone Records, Produces Organization Charts”

2014/04/172014/04/17

Stephen E. Arnold: Imagine the Internet Without Search Engines — or Google — or IBM

Advanced Cyber/IO, Commercial Intelligence

PART I Imagine the Internet without Search Engines

Centrifuge Systems proposes an interesting idea in “Big Data Discovery Without Link Analysis Is Like The Web Without Google.” Centrifuge Systems asks readers of the short article to imagine using the Internet without a search engine. How would we locate information? It would be similar to the librarian’s favorite description of the Internet all the contents of a library spilled on the floor. The article continues to explain that big data without link analysis works the same as the Internet without a search engine.

Read full post.

PART II Google and IBM Struggle

At my age, I don’t own stocks. I don’t own anything because life in rural Kentucky is simple. The news about Google’s and IBM’s most recent financial results struck me as an MBA discussion group problem.

IBM issued “IBM Reports 2014 First Quarter Results.” What surprises did the $100 billion giant sprint on me? In a nutshell, declining revenues and profits. The bright spots were IBM’s consulting revenues and the company’s cloud computing. Other parts of the business were less robust. Overall IBM faces major challenges in hardware where no easy fix seems evident. Search as manifested in the Watson initiative will have to deliver.

In “Google Inc. Announces First Quarter 2014 Results” made clear that the Google was able to pump up its revenue. I noted the word “great” as Google’s way of describing the last 12 weeks’ financial performance. I noted that profit was down. Explanations included accountants being accountants and acquisitions. For me, the shift to mobile and the now-familiar dependence on one major revenue stream were important. Google may have to do more to keep up the appearance that it is the same super star that burst upon the scene more than a decade ago. Aging pro athletes and Hollywood starlets know the drill well. More effort goes into staying young at an increasingly higher cost. Is search as Google defines it up to the task of paying for personal trainers and plastic surgeons?

Read full post.

2014/04/162014/04/16

Yoda: Google $50 Smart Phone

Advanced Cyber/IO

$50 Project Ara Modular Smartphone Coming in January

By Stephanie Mlot
PCMag, April 16, 2014

The first Project Ara device will be a gray phone, designed to be intentionally boring so users will customize it.

Google's Project Ara initiative aims to change the future of smartphones, and it just might, when the first modular device launches in January for $50.

During this week's Project Ara Developers Conference, leader Paul Eremenko announced the “Gray Phone”—an intentionally boring handset expected to be personalized.

“It's called the Gray Phone because it's meant to be drab grey to get people to customize it,” Eremenko told the crowd, according to CNET.

Continue reading “Yoda: Google $50 Smart Phone”

2014/04/16

Howard Rheinghold: Science of Paying Attention

Advanced Cyber/IO, Cultural Intelligence

Studies such as Nass et. al.'s “Cognitive Control in Media Multitaskers” have demonstrated on a general level that media multitaskers are actually rapidly task-switching and that the attentional costs of switching focus degrades efficiency in accomplishing individual tasks. But that research is just the beginning. Important to infotention is what is not yet known about how effective attentional training can be.

How the brain pays attention | Infotention | Scoop.it

From scienceblog.com – April 15, 9:15 PM

2014/04/132014/04/13

Berto Jongman: Cyber-Threats Current & Emerging

IO Impotency

Current and Emerging Cyber-Threats

Security expert Steve Durbin discusses nation-state espionage and the dangers lurking in cyberspace, and urges organizations to become cyber resilient.

QUESTIONS ONLY

What should CIOs be most concerned about in Threat Horizon 2016?

How can enterprises mitigate nation-state espionage?

What threat intelligence-sharing forums should enterprise CIOs be following? What are useful security resources they might not be aware of?

Why do you think the Balkanization of the Internet is a large threat? Only a few nations are trying to create geopolitical borders on the Internet.

Regarding the unintended consequences of nation-states policing the Internet, what are the most likely types of incidents we'll see in 2014?

How can enterprises reduce the vulnerabilities posed by third-party service providers? What's a good action plan you've observed?

Your advice about using encryption now that it appears that encryption isn't the fail-safe tool that we'd believed it was.

When companies apply data analytics to information security problems, what are the most common things they do right? And what do they often do wrong?

Read full article with answers to each question.