Backdoors and Hardware Attacks
Guantanamo – Media Missing the Point?
Hackers in Demand — and Rehabilitated
Snowden Method – How He Breached NSA
Stuxnet in Space (from 2008 onwards)
Event: 18-20 JUL 14 NYC Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE X)
#Events, Advanced Cyber/IO, Cultural Intelligence
HOPE X
July 18-20, 2014
Hotel Pennsylvania
New York City
NOTE: The movie “Hackers” was based on HOPE co-founder and spiritual leader Emmanuel Goldstein (not his real name) and his various Pheaker (phone hacks) and Hacker (computer hacks) colleagues. There is no other event on the planet quite like this, at least in the English language. Robert Steele moves heaven and earth to be there (it takes place every two years). In passing, you can leave HOPE a certified lock picker, fully equipped. Hackers are like astronauts, full of the right stuff, pushing the edge of the envelope in whatever domain they choose (not just software).
See Also:
PBS Interview: Robert Steele on Hackers
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Berto Jongman: Bits, Bytes, & Stuff
Commercial Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, IO ImpotencyAnalog Laws Lag Digital Reality
Phi Beta Iota: The above requires an honest informed legislature and an honest informed executive, both committed to the public interest. Mike Nelson described the problem in 1994: “1970's technology and 1950's mind-sets struggling with 1990's opportunities.” It has gotten worse, not better. Cyber Commands are retarded — they destroy productivity, do not protect anything at all, and generally cost vastly more than they are worth across multiple forms of accounting.
Biometrics Trend: Voice Recognition [Joins Typing “Fist” Recognition]
Do Not Trust Your Computer — National Spying on Remote Devices
German Internet Shutting Out NSA Et Al
Media Landscape – the Revolution (Video)
Stephen E. Arnold: Bing versus Google
IO Impotency
Over at Search Engine Watch, Mark Jackson reminds us that Google was not always top dog in the search field. His article, “Could Bing Ever Overtake Google in Search?” emphasizes that competition is a good thing. While this is true, could the SEO CEO have any other reasons to hope for the search giant’s wane? Vicious pandas and penguins, perhaps? After all, Jackson opens with an admission that he is angry at Google for ceasing to push keyword data into the public realm (where search engine gamers, er, optimizers can get to it) while continuing to supply that data to paid advertisers. The nerve!
Jackson does make some interesting points. He cites a recent Pubcon keynote address given by Google’s own Matt Cutts, which discusses some major developments for the leading search engine. Knowledge Graph, of course, will continue to play a role, as will voice search and “conversational” search. Jackson picks up on Cutt’s last item, “deep learning.”
He writes:
“Google is focused on deep learning and understanding what users want so searchers don’t have to use simple keyword phrases to search Google. Bing, on the other hand, has partnerships with every major social site and receives data directly from those sources. So, rather than trying to understand what users mean and predicting it, Bing actually knows what user want based on actual data from social sites.”
Owl: Madsen on Low-Tech No-Cost Avoidance of NSA Surveillance in Africa
IO Impotency
Madsen: Low-Tech and Cheap Solutions to Getting Around NSA Surveiling in Africa
Madsen omits mention of it in this otherwise well-informed article, which provides a comprehensive summary/history of US signals intel activities in Africa, but at least in the past, Africans also communicated over long distances using coded drum beats. He is quite correct in saying NSA personnel live and work in Africa, as I have known a retired NSA officer who shared with me years ago stories of his adventures there over lunch a number of times. Nothing “secret” was shared, of course, he was very careful about that, but the fact he and other NSA agents spent so much time there was remarkable in itself.
“In fact, NSA personnel are found in so many exotic locations in Africa and elsewhere in the world, one NSA briefing slide released by Snowden, titled “Know your cover legend,” instructs NSA personnel on covert assignment abroad to “sanitize personal effects” and bars them from sending home any postcards or buying local souvenirs. In reality, the fastest means of communications in Africa remains the «jungle telegraph,» the word of mouth alerts that travel from town to town and village to village warning the local residents that there are Americans in their midst. It is the one means of communications NSA cannot automatically tap unless NSA’s agents overhear conversations and understand obscure African dialects. Somali insurgents have stymied NSA eavesdroppers by using coded smoke signals from networks of burning 55-gallon drums to warn of approaching U.S., Kenyan, Ethiopian, and other foreign troops.
Stephen E. Arnold: SAIL LABS Media Mining Indexer Updated
IO Technologies, IO ToolsNew Version of Media Mining Indexer (6.2) from SAIL LABS Technology
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.
Chelsea Kerwin, November 09, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Stephen E. Arnold: Data Science Explained With an Infograpic [Science without Art Tends to be Stupid]
IO Impotency
Data Science is a hot career. Even though data scientists have been around for decades, but it is only the proliferation of new devices and data streams that have brought the career to the Internet spotlight. Data Science is more than monitoring reports about data or even the big data revolution. Data Science is an intricate and interesting science and to understand it better check out the Visual.ly infographic labeled: “Data Science: More Than Mining.”
The graphic explains that data science has exploded:
“Proliferation of sensors, mobile and social trends provide explosive growth of new types of data. Data scientists are creating the tools that can be used to interpret and help translate the streams of information into innovative new products. Social media platforms such as Facebook depend on data science to create innovative, interactive features that encourage users to get interested and stay that way.”
The basic of data science are data mining, statistics, interpretation, and leveraging. The data scientist interacts with the data by asking questions about how to apply the information in new ways and better the process. Data scientists are hardly people off the street, they require the skills of hacker, mathematician, and an artist. Mixing all those together goes makes a data scientist a very diverse person and able to see how to apply the data in new, unknown ways. It is amazing how data science has shaped society from behind the current since 1790.
Whitney Grace, November 08, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
