Stolen Online Account Info Now More Valuable than Stolen Credit Card Details
March 2, 2016
You should be aware that criminals are now less interested in your credit cards and other “personally identifiable information” and more keen on exploiting your online accounts. As security firm Tripwire informs us in their State of Security blog, “Stolen Uber, PayPal Accounts More Coveted than Credit Cards on the Dark Web.” Writer Maritza Santillan explains:
“The price of these stolen identifiers on the underground marketplace, or ‘the Dark Web,’ shows the value of credit cards has declined in the last year, according to security firm Trend Micro. Last week, stolen Uber account information could be found on underground marketplaces for an average of $3.78 per account, while personally identifiable information, such as Social Security Numbers or dates of birth, ranged from $1 to $3.30 on average – down from $4 per record in 2014, reported CNBC. Furthermore, PayPal accounts – with a guaranteed balance of $500 –were found to have an average selling price of $6.43. Facebook logins sold for an average of $3.02, while Netflix credentials sold for about 76 cents. By contrast, U.S.-issued credit card information, which is sold in bundles, was listed for no more than 22 cents each, said CNBC.”
The article goes on to describe a few ways criminals can leverage these accounts, like booking Uber “ghost rides,” or assembling personal details for a very thorough identity theft. Pros say the trend means service providers to pay closer attention to usage patterns, and to beef up their authentication processes. Specifically, says Forrester’s Andras Cser, it is time to move beyond passwords; instead, he proposes, companies should look for changes in biometric data, like phone position and finger pressure, which would be communicated back to them by our mobile devices. So we’re about to be even more closely monitored by the companies we give our money to. All for our own good, of course.
Cynthia Murrell, March 2, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
No Search Just Browse Images on FindA.Photo
March 2, 2016
The search engine FindA.Photo proves itself to be a useful resource for browsing images based on any number of markers. The site offers a general search by terms, or the option of browsing images by color, collection (for example, “wild animals,” or “reflections”) or source. The developer of the site, David Barker, described his goals for the services on Product Hunt,
“I wanted to make a search for all of the CC0 image sites that are available. I know there are already a few search sites out there, but I specifically wanted to create one that was: simple and fast (and I’m working on making it faster), powerful (you can add options to your search for things like predominant colors and image size with just text), and something that could have contributions from anyone (via GitHub pull requests).”
My first click on a swatch of royal blue delivered 651 images of oceans, skies, panoramas of oceans and skies, jellyfish ballooning underwater, seagulls soaring etc. That may be my own fault for choosing such a clichéd color, but you get the idea. I had better (more various) results through the collections search, which includes “action,” “long-exposure,” “technology,” “light rays,” and “landmarks,” the last of which I immediately clicked for a collage of photos of the Eiffel Tower, Louvre, Big Ben, and the Great Wall of China.
Chelsea Kerwin, March 2, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Online Translation: Google or Microsoft?
March 1, 2016
HI have solved the translation problem. I live in Harrod’s Creek, Kentucky. Folks here speak Kentucky. No other language needed. However, gentle reader, you may want to venture into lands where one’s native language is not spoken or written. You will need online translation.
Should I forget Systran and other industrial strength solutions of yesteryear. Today the choice is Google or Microsoft if I understand “2 Main Reasons Why Google Translate Is Ahead of Microsoft and Skype.” (The link worked on February 22, 2016. If it does not work when you read this blog post, you may have to root around. That’s life in the zip zip world today.)
Reason one is that Google supports more languages than Microsoft. The total is 100 plus. The write up is sufficiently amazed to describe the language support of the Alphabet Google thing as “mind blowing.” Okay.
Reason two is that Google’s translation function works on smartphone. The write up points out:
You can hand-write, speak, type, or even take a picture of a given language and Google Translate will translate it for you. Not only this but on Android, some of the translation features are available offline. So, some features are accessible even if you do not have access to the internet.
The write up does not dig too deeply into Microsoft’s translation capability. If you are interested in Microsoft’s quite capable and useful services, navigate to the Microsoft Language Portal. Google is okay, but one service may not do the job a person who does not speak Kentucky requires.
Stephen E Arnold, February 27, 2016
A Yahoo Google Analysis Which Misses One Obviously Irrelevant Fact
March 1, 2016
I love it when with it universities analyze businesses. Universities are loan factories, have some exciting management methods in their athletic departments, and dabble in foundations plays to generate some financial loyalty.
Why would a university not be a source of expertise in the analysis of digital businesses?
I read “A Tale of Two Brands: yahoo’s Mistakes vs Google’s Mastery.” The write up is clear and marches through the analysis like General Sherman on his way to Atlanta. Like General Sherman, the march was not exactly what it seemed.
I learned that Google is just a lot better than Yahoo. No disagreement from me. Yahoo’s former chief technology officer complained that I did not have enough appreciation for the work flowing from Yahoo’s research and development units. He was right. I didn’t. I don’t hear from that Yahooligan since he got a job at Google. There is apparently no need to be defensive when one is a Googler.
The write up points out these flaws in Yahoo’s management which look really awful when compared to the wonderfulness of Google’s management:
- Google operates with clarity; Yahoo has an identity crisis
- Google anticipates; Yahoo reacts
- Google has substance; Yahoo is a fashion week poster child.
The problem is that the write up misses one probably irrelevant fact about the Google and its performance.
When Google did not have a revenue business model, the Googlers looked around for a way to make money from search. The answer it found was online advertising. Prior to the IPO, the Googlers settled Yahoo’s patent suit. Yahoo took the money and found itself struggling to serve ads from its ageing infrastructure. The Google had a brand new, nifty infrastructure courtesy of some of the hires from AltaVista’s outfit.
Google’s system served ads more effectively. With more traffic, the Google ad system became a money trickle and then a money gusher.
Poor Yahoo watched as its methods were put to good use on a more efficient ad serving system. End of Yahoo. The company almost immediately began its death march to irrelevancy.
Google’s virtues are easy to see if one overlooks the one tiny fact of Google’s me-too approach to revenue. Clever seemed to be more effective than “management”, but that’s just my opinion.
The university analysis is okay, just not in line with the key event which made Google the one trick pony it is today. More significantly, that trick was someone else’s innovation via the Overture.com (GoTo.com) method.
Refresh your memory is this okay write up from 2004: “Google Settles Yahoo Patent Suit in Anticipation of IPO.”
In this context, the academic write up strikes me as baloney.
Stephen E Arnold, March 1, 2016
Real Time: Maybe, Maybe Not
March 1, 2016
Years ago an outfit in Europe wanted me to look at claims made by search and content processing vendors about real time functions.
The goslings and I rounded up the systems, pumped our test corpus through, and tried to figure out what was real time.
The general buzzy Teddy Bear notion of real time is that when new data are available to the system, the system processes the data and makes them available to other software processes and users.
The Teddy Bear view is:
- Zero latency
- Works reliably
- No big deal for modern infrastructure
- No engineering required
- Any user connected to the system has immediate access to reports including the new or changed data.
Well, guess what, Pilgrim?
We learned quickly that real time, like love and truth, is a darned slippery concept. Here’s one view of what we learned:
Types of Real Time Operations. © Stephen E Arnold, 2009
The main point of the chart is that there are six types of real time search and content processing. When someone says, “Real time,” there are a number of questions to ask. The major finding of the study was that for near real time processing for a financial trading outfit, the cost soars into seven figures and may keep on rising as the volume of data to be processed goes up. The other big finding was that every real time system introduces latency. Seconds, minutes, hours, days, and weeks may pass before the update actually becomes available to other subsystems or to users. If you think you are looking at real time info, you may want to shoot us an email. We can help you figure out which type of “real time” your real time system is delivering. Write benkent2020 @ yahoo dot com and put Real Time in the subject line, gentle reader.
I thought about this research project when I read “Why the Search Console Reporting Is not real time: Explains Google!” As you work through the write up, you will see that the latency in the system is essentially part of the woodwork. The data one accesses is stale. Figuring out how stale is a fairly big job. The Alphabet Google thing is dealing with budgets, infrastructure costs, and a new chief financial officer.
Real time. Not now and not unless something magic happens to eliminate latencies, marketing baloney, and user misunderstanding of real time.
Excitement in non real time.
Stephen E Arnold, March 1, 2016
Natural Language Processing App Gains Increased Vector Precision
March 1, 2016
For us, concepts have meaning in relationship to other concepts, but it’s easy for computers to define concepts in terms of usage statistics. The post Sense2vec with spaCy and Gensim from SpaCy’s blog offers a well-written outline explaining how natural language processing works highlighting their new Sense2vec app. This application is an upgraded version of word2vec which works with more context-sensitive word vectors. The article describes how this Sense2vec works more precisely,
“The idea behind sense2vec is super simple. If the problem is that duck as in waterfowl andduck as in crouch are different concepts, the straight-forward solution is to just have two entries, duckN and duckV. We’ve wanted to try this for some time. So when Trask et al (2015) published a nice set of experiments showing that the idea worked well, we were easy to convince.
We follow Trask et al in adding part-of-speech tags and named entity labels to the tokens. Additionally, we merge named entities and base noun phrases into single tokens, so that they receive a single vector.”
Curious about the meta definition of natural language processing from SpaCy, we queried natural language processing using Sense2vec. Its neural network is based on every word on Reddit posted in 2015. While it is a feat for NLP to learn from a dataset on one platform, such as Reddit, what about processing that scours multiple data sources?
Megan Feil, March 1, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
IBM Continued to Brag About Watson, with Decreasing Transparency
February 29, 2016
A totally objective article sponsored by IBM on Your Story is titled How Cognitive Systems Like IBM Watson Are Changing the Way We Solve Problems. The article basically functions to promote all of the cognitive computing capabilities that most of us are already keenly aware that Watson possesses, and to raise awareness for the Hackathon event taking place in Bengaluru, India. The “article” endorses the event,
“Participants will have an unprecedented opportunity to collaborate, co-create and exchange ideas with one another and the world’s most forward-thinking cognitive experts. This half-day event will focus on sharing real-world applications of cognitive technologies, and allow attendees access to the next wave of innovations and applications through an interactive experience. The program will also include panel discussions and fireside chats between senior IBM executives and businesses that are already working with Watson.”
Since 2015, the “Watson for Oncology” program has involved Manipal Hospitals in Bengaluru, India. The program is the result of a partnership between IBM and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. Watson has now consumed almost 15 million pages of medical content from textbooks and journals in the hopes of providing rapid-fire support to hospital staffers when it comes to patient records and diagnosis. Perhaps if IBM put all of their efforts into Watson’s projects instead of creating inane web content to promote him as some sort of missionary, he could have already cured cancer. Or not.
Chelsea Kerwin, February 29, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Intel Identifies the Future of High Performance Computing. Surprise. It Is Itself
February 29, 2016
I make a feeble attempt to pay attention to innovations in high performance computing. The reason is that some mathematical procedures require lots of computing resources; for example, figuring out the interactions in a fusion plasma test. Think in terms of weeks of calculation. Bummer. Most folks believe that the cloud and other semi magical marketing buzzwords have made super computers as fast as those in a sci fi movie. Wrong, gentle reader. There are computational issues. Big O?
I read with interest “The Future of High Performance Computing Has Arrived.” The write up does not do too much with the GPU methods, the brute force methods, or the “quantum” hopes and dreams.
Nope.
The write up points out with a nifty diagram with many Intel labels:
Intel is tightly integrating the technologies at both the component and system levels, to create a highly efficient and capable infrastructure. One of the outcomes of this level of integration is how it scales across both the node and the system. The result is that it essentially raises the center of gravity of the memory pyramid and makes it fatter, which will enable faster and more efficient data movement.
I like the mathy center of gravity lingo. It reminds me of the “no gravity” buzzword from 15 years ago.
Allegedly Moore’s Law is dead. Maybe? Maybe not? But as long as we are geared up with Von Neumann’s saddles and bits, Intel is going to ride that pony.
Gentle reader, we need much more computing horse power. Is it time to look for a different horse to ride? Intel does not agree.
Stephen E Arnold, February 27, 2016
Watson Weekly: Managing Smart Buildings
February 29, 2016
I read “Now IBM Watson Wants to Look after Your Office Too.” Interesting. IBM as a company seems to be struggling with watching over its stakeholders’ interests, but let’s not go there.
No, let’s go there. I find the idea that a company which has demonstrated its inability to reverse a revenue decline after four years of trying and talking lacks a bit of credibility in the “management” area of expertise.
The write up informs me:
Siemens and IBM have announced they are working together to integrate software from IBM’s Watson IoT Business Unit, including analytics and asset management, into Siemens cloud-based Navigator energy and sustainability management platform to make it easier to manage smart buildings.
Now how many smart buildings are not managed at this time? I suppose I would like to know what a “smart building” is. Once that information is available, one can ask, “Who is providing management functions for these light, HVAC, and other accoutrements of life in increasingly marginalized traditional office structures?”
No answers in the write up, which is not surprising.
IBM’s public relations and marketing efforts for Watson are roaming far and wide. This is okay from a marketer’s point of view, but when the horse carrying the valiant marketers into battle is Lucene, I wonder about the steed’s trailworthiness.
Is anyone thinking about the glue factory? Do these facilities need Watson?
Stephen E Arnold, February 29, 2016
LinkedIn: Looking for Its Next Gig?
February 29, 2016
I signed up for the free LinkedIn years ago. I don’t do too much LinkedIn surfing. I do delete the email I get from the company. I had one of the goslings post a list of my articles to see what would happen. (Results of the test: Nothing happened.) I find it amusing that marketers and PR “professionals” want to be my LinkedIn contact. I used to write these folks and ask, “Why do you want to be my LinkedIn friend?” (Results of the test: No one writes back.) Now you know why I don’t do much LinkedIn surfing. No, I don’t read the musings of the firm’s “thought leaders.”
I did read “LinkedIn Problems Run Deeper Than Valuation.” The write up informed me of this interesting “assertion”:
The problem stems from each of the company’s revenue streams, which ultimately diminish the business value of using the service. Whether it’s being paid to promote content, focusing on sales and recruitment over other professions, or interruptive advertising, these streams incentivize poor behavior by individual users on the site.
I like that “poor behavior” and the incentive angle. The concrete foundation of LinkedIn, it seems to me, is spam.
The company, according to the write up, has a reason to face each day with a big smile:
The company still has assets that are the envy of any tech company — a vast user base and a wealth of content to exploit.
As Yahoo’s publishing experiment demonstrates, content may not be enough.
I think the larger issue is the fact that social networks often lose their stickiness after a period of time. Google’s social efforts seem to mirror the challenges of MySpace. LinkedIn may find itself trapped by its own job hunting system choked with marketers’ leading thoughts.
Why not drive for Uber, Lyft, or Amazon? Less spam and probably a shorter path to some real cash. By the way, did you ever try to locate something using the company’s search engine? Quite a piece of work is that.
Stephen E Arnold, February 29, 2016
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