Jeffrey J. Bloom

Jeffrey J. Bloom

A wearable prototype identifies synthetic speech & alerts user if voice doesn't belong to a flesh-and-blood individual. Developed as a proof of concept in just 5 days, it's powered by Google's Tensorflow neural network machine learning software.
https://www.sciencealert.com/this-wearable-ai-warns-you-when-the-voice-you-re-talking-to-isn-t-human

Jeffrey J. Bloom

Michael Daniel, a top Obama cybersecurity adviser from mid-2012 to the end of the administration, said US intel agencies have to arm themselves for a cyber war & critics who argue for a disarmament are not living in a realistic world.
http://origin-nyi.thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/335344-ex-obama-cyber-czar-defends-government-rules-for-hacking-tools

Jeffrey J. Bloom

Two months ago, the FBI charged Alexsey Belan & two other cyber criminals for Yahoo’s massive data breach & a tirade of other crimes. The hacker is currently the most wanted individual in several cyber security agencies’ lists.
http://theusbport.com/cybercriminals-alexsey-belan-the-hacker-who-breached-yahoo/27703

Jeffrey J. Bloom

Dedicated to AI processing on mobile devices, Apple Neural Engine would catalyse use of AI on mobile devices. Existing AI technologies (like Siri & Google Assistant) rely on servers to process data rather than processing on the mobile device itself.
http://theconversation.com/apple-working-on-ai-chip-for-mobile-devices-bringing-them-a-new-level-of-intelligence-78492

Jeffrey J. Bloom

In Russia, development of critical infrastructure in energy, transport, financial & other sectors has been going hand-in-hand with their digitalization, putting increasing pressure on cyber security. ~70 million cyber attacks are reported annually, including attacks on critical infrastructure.
http://tass.com/sp/948368

Jeffrey J. Bloom

Slashdot picked up on this too.. waiting for some good commentary.. ;)

Processing components specifically designed to tackle onboard AI & ML (Machine Learning) is revolutionary! Last year's updates to improve augmented & VR performance are being extended & elaborated[...] The new designs benefit from an improved branch predictor using neural net algorithms to improve data prefetching & overall performance.
https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/17/05/29/0715255/arms-new-processors-are-designed-to-power-the-machine-learning-machines#comments

Jeffrey J. Bloom

Slashdot picked up on this too.. waiting for some good commentary.. ;)

Processing components specifically designed to tackle onboard AI & ML (Machine Learning) is revolutionary! Last year's updates to improve augmented & VR performance are being extended & elaborated[...] The new designs benefit from an improved branch predictor using neural net algorithms to improve data prefetching & overall performance.
https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/17/05/29/0715255/arms-new-processors-are-designed-to-power-the-machine-learning-machines#comments

Jeffrey J. Bloom

Slashdot picked up on this too.. waiting for some good commentary.. ;)
https://politics.slashdot.org/story/17/05/29/0732203/is-china-outsmarting-america-in-ai#comments

Jeffrey J. Bloom

Generating $44k so far, the earliest detected activity was April 24. Adylkuzz conscripts machines into a botnet mining Monero, the cryptocurrency choice for AlphaBay--a dark web market for illicit goods like drugs & ID theft. Infection symptoms include sluggish performance & loss of access to shared Windows drives. Proofpoint identified 20 servers--worldwide--actively hunting for vulnerable computers..
http://appsforpcdaily.com/2017/05/hackers-use-eternalblue-wannacry-exploit-to-mine/

Jeffrey J. Bloom

The system used in diagnosis and programming the cardiac implants, which uses removable media/hard-drives, is also at risk from hackers who could ...

Jeffrey J. Bloom

By feeding 100,000+ names of actual metal bands, the countries they’re from & an exhaustive listing of sub-genres into the neural network. Highlights from the list:
*Swiil certainly has a nice, Viking metal sound to it, a progressive/thrash act from the States.
*Death From The Trend, which some black metal band from Croatia really should snag for itself right now.
*Deathhouse, a melodic death metal band from Brazil
*Germany’s Stormgarden.
*France, Sun Damage Omen.
*Possibly my favorite name is also the shortest: Sht.
*Snee, Brazilian thrash/death metal act.
*Mashing a metal-sounding word with a decorative object doesn’t always make for a great name, as in Chaosrug.
*I’m not sure irony works well either. I’m looking at you, Jazzy, the new imaginary American group.
https://www.geek.com/tech/this-is-what-happens-when-a-neural-network-names-metal-bands-1701114/

Jeffrey J. Bloom

"Once an adversary identifies packet streams for a particular device, one or more of the streams are likely to encode device state. Simply plotting send/receive rates of the streams revealed potentially private user interactions for each device we tested." "Separating recorded network traffic into packet streams & associating each stream with an IoT device is not that hard."
https://yro.slashdot.org/story/17/05/28/208220/new-privacy-vulnerability-in-iot-devices-traffic-rate-metadata?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed

Jeffrey J. Bloom

It took only one attempt for Russian hackers to compromise a Pentagon official. A link, in a Twitter post, promised a family-friendly vacation package for the summer. It was the kind of thing anyone might click on, according to the official hit by the attack, who was not authorized to speak publicly about it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/28/technology/hackers-hide-cyberattacks-in-social-media-posts.html

Jeffrey J. Bloom

There's a need "to elevate from a low-skill to high-skill labor economy, with AI & other technologies now capable of handling the so-called dirty, dull & dangerous jobs." Seeing "AI adoption in industries not as replacing humans in their jobs, but freeing them from: basic & repetitive tasks, motivating them to upgrade their skills, & move up in the labor value chain."
http://www.sunstar.com.ph/cebu/business/2017/05/29/ais-arrival-means-people-need-better-skills-accenture-544448

Jeffrey J. Bloom

Acquisitions accelerate as tech giants seek to build AI

Jeffrey J. Bloom

It also found automated "bots" were rife on Twitter, publishing a torrent of tweets in support of both Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump.

More than a third of pro-Trump tweets were found to be automated, while almost a fifth of pro-Clinton tweets were from bots.

"The question about the integrity of voting booths in particular has been around for quite a while," ASPI's International Cyber Policy Centre director Fergus Hanson said.

"I think what was the big surprise in the US election in particular was the infiltration and use of fake news, for example, and efforts to manipulate public opinion that we hadn't seen on a scale like that before.

Jeffrey J. Bloom

The balance of technological power is shifting, China's becoming a major player in AI & is trying to reduce excessive top-down control impeding progress.
Beijing's AI push is funded with vast sums of money. Already spending billions on research programmes, China is readying a new multibillion-dollar initiative to fund moonshot projects, start-ups & academic research, all with the aim of growing China’s AI capabilities to predict crimes, lend money, track people on the country’s ubiquitous CCTV, alleviate traffic jams, create self-guided missiles & censor the Internet.
http://www.todayonline.com/chinaindia/china/china-outsmarting-america-artificial-intelligence

Jeffrey J. Bloom

Currently we are looking to recruit up to 5 talented people to be based at our brand new PwC Leeds office. We are looking to recruit a Manager, Senior Associates and Associates as Threat and Vulnerability Management (TVM) Consultants (Ethical Hackers and Penetration Testers) to use a new ‘TVM penetration testing lab’ in Leeds and work with our national TVM team across the UK.

Jeffrey J. Bloom

Russian government hackers seem to have figured out that sometimes the best way to hack into people's Gmail accounts is be to abuse Google's own services.

On Thursday, researchers exposed a massive Russian espionage and disinformation campaign using emails designed to trick users into giving up their passwords, a technique that's known as phishing. The hackers targeted more than 200 victims, including, among others, journalists and activists critical of the Russian government, as well as people affiliated with the Ukrainian military, and high-ranking officials in energy companies around the world, according to a new report.

Jeffrey J. Bloom

FourOctets plugs his vape into a computer's USB & the device immediately lights up as if to charge. A few seconds go by & pops-up appears "DO U EVEN VAPE BRO!!!!!"
http://mashable.com/2017/05/26/vaping-digital-security-virus-usb/

Jeffrey J. Bloom

Matthew Masterson, chairman of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) said they're "focused on helping state & local election officials carry out accurate, accessible & secure elections."
"Our door is always open to DEFCON organizers & anyone with the goal of improving the U.S. election system. The EAC is constantly looking for ways to improve U.S. voting system security & testing guidelines, so communicating with DEFCON could be very informative for us & equally informative for them... We've advised everyone from the DHS to the FBI about the inner workings of our nation's election systems. We would be happy to provide that same kind of soup to nuts expertise to DEFCON organizers."
http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/news/450419672/Voting-machine-hacking-to-be-taken-on-at-DEFCON-2017

Jeffrey J. Bloom

While there is no smoking gun, there are strong similarities between CyberBerkut’s techniques & last year’s phishing attacks targeting the DNC, conducted by Russia-linked hacking group Fancy Bear (aka APT 28).
https://www.justsecurity.org/41404/citizen-lab-tainted-leaks-disinformation/

Jeffrey J. Bloom

Google's AlphaGo has defeated the world's best Go player in the second out of three games, scoring an overall win for the AI algorithm in the fiendishly complex board game. Played in China--where the abstract & intuitive board game was born--the government isn't a big fan of letting its citizens know about the battle & has censored all the livestreams in the country.
https://www.cnet.com/news/google-ai-alphago-wins-again-leaves-humans-in-the-dust/

Jeffrey J. Bloom

So, I think what’s important is that we approach these technologies with responsibility. The next generation of technology is going to be called AI & we’re going to have an I.Q. of 10,000. We’re going to be able to solve every problem & know everything there is to know just by using AI.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/will-artificial-intelligence-help-us-solve-every-problem/

Jeffrey J. Bloom

Apparently, this is all because there are many different subtitle formats & very little security. Downloading fan-made subtitle could compromise you, as media players load said files, giving hackers access to your device.
http://www.avclub.com/article/hackers-could-be-hiding-viruses-subtitles-now-255950

Jeffrey J. Bloom

Snowden stated that what matters most for computer/digital networks is your name which is acknowledged via token, credential or password. And let’s not forget the biggest headline of late, Wannacry, the first time that the media is naming NSA directly.
https://www.acuantcorp.com/what-we-learned-at-the-know-identity-conference-part-one/

Jeffrey J. Bloom

Tech-savvy readers might think it has to do with parallelism, but that would be wrong my friend. It's simpler than that & has to do with memory bandwidth. CPUs are limited to fetching small packages of memory quickly, whereas GPUs have a high latency--making them slower. However, GPUs are ideal when fetching very large amounts of memory--the best GPUs can fetch up to 750GB/s, which is huge compared to the best CPU topping out at 50GB/s.
https://themerkle.com/why-gpus-are-ideal-for-deep-learning/

Jeffrey J. Bloom

"The dream scenario in quantum information processing is making an optical circuit to shuttle photonic qubits & position quantum memory wherever you need it... We’re almost there with this. These emitters are almost perfect."
http://masscentral.com/toward-mass-producible-quantum-computers/

Jeffrey J. Bloom

The annual Cyber Defense Exercise (CDX) is a yearly competition among service academies to see which teams can protect their servers from NSA hackers. This year, Navy beat Army!
https://www.cnet.com/videos/whats-the-military-doing-about-the-future-of-cyberattacks/

Jeffrey J. Bloom

"The most important thing is to build underground," says Cédric Vuilleumier, an engineer for the Federal Office for Civil Protection in Switzerland, where all citizens are legally guaranteed a spot in a bomb shelter. Packed earth insulates against radiation & blast waves, but don’t go deeper than 10 feet; if your exits (make two) become blocked in the blast, you may need to dig yourself out.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/26/magazine/how-to-build-a-fallout-shelter.html