Iceland Offers the First Human Search Engine
November 8, 2016
Iceland is a northern country that one does not think about much. It is cold, has a high literacy rate, and did we mention it was cold? Despite its frigid temperatures, Iceland is a beautiful country with a rich culture and friendly people. shares just how friendly the Icelanders are with their new endeavor: “Iceland Launches ‘Ask Guðmundur,’ The World’s First Human Search Engine.”
Here is what the country is doing:
The decidedly Icelandic and truly personable service will see special representatives from each of Iceland’s seven regions offer their insider knowledge to the world via Inspired By Iceland’s social media platforms (Twitter, Facebook and YouTube). Each representative shares the name Guðmundur or Guðmunda, currently one of the most popular forenames in the country with over 4,000 men and women claiming it as their own.
Visitors to the site can literally submit their questions and have them answered by an expert. Each of the seven Guðmundurs is an Icelandic regional expert. Iceland’s goal with the human search engine is to answer’s the world’s questions about the country, but to answer them in the most human way possible: with actual humans.
A human search engine is an awesome marketing campaign for Iceland. One of the best ways to encourage tourism is to introduce foreigners to the locale people and customs, the more welcoming, quirky, and interesting is all the better for Iceland. So go ahead, ask Guðmundur.
Whitney Grace, November 8, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Dark Web Is a Double Edged Sword
November 3, 2016
Apart from hackers and criminals of all kind, the Dark Web is also used by whistleblowers and oppressed citizens for communicating. The Dark Web thus is one of the most secure modes of communicating online; more than secure apps like WhatsApp.
The Newsweek in an article titled How the Dark Web Works and What It Looks Like says:
Dark web technologies are robustly built without central points of weakness, making it hard for authorities to infiltrate. Another issue for law enforcement is that—like most things—the dark web and its technologies can also be used for both good and evil.
Despite backdoors and exploits, law enforcement agencies find it difficult to track Dark Web participants. Few technology companies like Facebook, Microsoft, and Google through its messenger apps promise to provide end-to-end encryption to its users. However, the same companies now are harvesting data from these apps for commercial purposes. If that is the case, these apps can no longer be trusted. As pointed out by the article:
And yet some of these same communications companies have been harvesting user data for their own internal processes. Famously, Facebook enabled encryption on WhatsApp, protecting the communications from prying eyes, but could still look at data in the app itself.
Thus, for now, it seems Dark Web is the only form of secure communication online. It, however, needs to be seen how long the formless and headless entity called Dark Web remains invincible.
Vishal Ingole, November 3, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Big Brother Now in Corporate Avatar
October 31, 2016
Companies in the US are now tracking employee movements and interactions to determine how productive their assets are. Badges created by Humanyze; embedded in employee IDs track these key indicators and suggest appropriate measures to help improve employee productivity.
An article published on Business Insider titled Employees at a dozen Fortune 500 companies wear digital badges that watch and listen to their every move reveals:
Humanyze visualizes the data as webs of social interaction that reveal who’s talking to whom on a by-the-second basis. The goal: Revolutionize how companies think about how they organize themselves.
The badges though only track employees who have explicitly given permission to track their working hours, imagination is the only inhibiting factor that will determine how the meta-data can be used. For instance, as the badges are being embedded into employee IDs (that already have chips), it can also be used by someone with right tools to track the movement of an employee beyond working hours.
Social engineering in the past has been used in the past to breach IT security at large organizations. With Humanyze badges, hackers now will have one more weapon in their arsenal.
One worrisome aspect of these badges becomes apparent here:
But the badges are already around the necks of more than 10,000 employees in the US, Waber says. They’ve led to wild insights. One client moves the coffee machine around each night, so the next morning employees in nearby departments naturally talk more.
The ironic part is, companies are exposing themselves to this threat. Google, Facebook, Amazon are already tracking people online. With services like Humanyze, the Big Brother has also entered the corporate domain. The question is not how the data will be used by hacked; it’s just when?
Vishal Ingole October 31, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Facebook Still Having Trouble with Trending Topics
October 28, 2016
Despite taking action to fix its problems with Trending Topics, Facebook is still receiving criticism on the issue. A post at Slashdot tells us, “The Washington Post Tracked Facebook’s Trending Topics for 3 Weeks, Found 5 Fake Stories and 3 Inaccurate Articles.” The Slashdot post by msmash cites a Washington Post article. (There’s a paywall if, like me, you’ve read your five free WP articles for this month.) The Post monitored Facebook’s Trending Topics for three weeks and found that issue far from resolved. Msmash quotes the report:
The Megyn Kelly incident was supposed to be an anomaly. An unfortunate one-off. A bit of (very public, embarrassing) bad luck. But in the six weeks since Facebook revamped its Trending system — and a hoax about the Fox News Channel star subsequently trended — the site has repeatedly promoted ‘news’ stories that are actually works of fiction. As part of a larger audit of Facebook’s Trending topics, the Intersect logged every news story that trended across four accounts during the workdays from Aug. 31 to Sept. 22. During that time, we uncovered five trending stories that were indisputably fake and three that were profoundly inaccurate. On top of that, we found that news releases, blog posts from sites such as Medium and links to online stores such as iTunes regularly trended. Facebook declined to comment about Trending on the record.
It is worth noting that the team may not have caught every fake story, since it only checked in with Trending Topics once every hour. Quite the quandary. We wonder—would a tool like Google’s new fact-checking feature help? And, if so, will Facebook admit its rival is on to something?
Cynthia Murrell, October 28, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Posting to the Law Enforcement Database
October 28, 2016
The article titled Police Searches of Social Media Face Privacy Pushback on Underground Network discusses the revelations of an NPR article of the same name. While privacy laws are slow to catch up to the fast-paced changes in social media, law enforcement can use public data to track protesters (including retroactive tracking). The ACLU and social media networks are starting to push back against the notion that this is acceptable. The NPR article refers to the Twitter guidelines,
The guidelines bar search companies from allowing law enforcement agencies to use the data to “investigate, track or surveil Twitter’s users (…) in a manner that would require a subpoena, court order, or other valid legal process or that would otherwise have the potential to be inconsistent with our users’ reasonable expectations of privacy.” But that policy is very much open to interpretation, because police don’t usually need legal orders to search public social media…
Some police departments have acknowledged that fuzziness around privacy laws puts the onus on them to police their own officers. The Dunwoody, Georgia police department requires supervisor approval for social media searches. They explain that this is to prevent targeting “particular groups” of people. According to the article, how this issue unfolds is largely up to police departments and social media giants like Twitter and Facebook to decide. But social media has been around for over a decade. Where are the laws defining and protecting our privacy?
Chelsea Kerwin, October 28, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Google Introduces Fact Checking Tool
October 26, 2016
If it works as advertised, a new Google feature will be welcomed by many users—World News Report tells us, “Google Introduced Fact Checking Feature Intended to Help Readers See Whether News Is Actually True—Just in Time for US Elections.” The move is part of a trend for websites, who seem to have recognized that savvy readers don’t just believe everything they read. Writer Peter Woodford reports:
Through an algorithmic process from schema.org known as ClaimReview, live stories will be linked to fact checking articles and websites. This will allow readers to quickly validate or debunk stories they read online. Related fact-checking stories will appear onscreen underneath the main headline. The example Google uses shows a headline over passport checks for pregnant women, with a link to Full Fact’s analysis of the issue. Readers will be able to see if stories are fake or if claims in the headline are false or being exaggerated. Fact check will initially be available in the UK and US through the Google News site as well as the News & Weather apps for both Android and iOS. Publishers who wish to become part of the new service can apply to have their sites included.
Woodford points to Facebook’s recent trouble with the truth within its Trending Topics feature and observes that many people are concerned about the lack of honesty on display this particular election cycle. Google, wisely, did not mention any candidates, but Woodford notes that Politifact rates 71% of Trump’s statements as false (and, I would add, 27% of Secretary Clinton’s statements as false. Everything is relative.) If the trend continues, it will be prudent for all citizens to rely on (unbiased) fact-checking tools on a regular basis.
Cynthia Murrell, October 26, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Artificial Intelligence Is Only a Download Away
October 17, 2016
Artificial intelligence still remains a thing of imagination in most people’s minds, because we do not understand how much it actually impacts our daily lives. If you use a smartphone of any kind, it is programmed with software, apps, and a digital assistant teeming with artificial intelligence. We are just so used to thinking that AI is the product of robots that we are unaware our phones, tablets, and other mobiles devices are little robots of their own.
Artificial intelligence programming and development is also on the daily task list on many software technicians. If you happen to have any technical background, you might be interested to know that there are many open source options to begin experimenting with artificial intelligence. Datamation rounded up the “15 Top Open Source Artificial Intelligence Tools” and these might be the next tool you use to complete your machine learning project. The article shares that:
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one of the hottest areas of technology research. Companies like IBM, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon are investing heavily in their own R&D, as well as buying up startups that have made progress in areas like machine learning, neural networks, natural language and image processing. Given the level of interest, it should come as no surprise that a recent artificial intelligence report from experts at Stanford University concluded that ‘increasingly useful applications of AI, with potentially profound positive impacts on our society and economy are likely to emerge between now and 2030.
The statement reiterates what I already wrote. The list runs down open source tools, including PredictionIO, Oryx 2, OpenNN, MLib, Mahout, H20, Distributed Machine Learning Toolkit, Deeplearning4j, CNTK, Caffe, SystemML, TensorFlow, and Torch. The use of each tool is described and most of them rely on some sort of Apache software. Perhaps your own artificial intelligence project can contribute to further development of these open source tools.
Whitney Grace, October 17, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
The Design of Our Future
September 26, 2016
An article at Co.Exist suggests we all pause to consider what we want our world to look like, in “We Need To Spend More Time Questioning Our Technology-Driven Future.” Along with the boundless potential of today’s fast-evolving technology come consequences, many of them unforeseen. Writer Ben Schiller cites futurist Gerd Leonhard, author of the book, Technology vs. Humanity. Far from a modern Luddite, Leonhard is a consultant for Google and a daily advocate for the wonders of advancing technology. His thorough understanding of the topic allows him to see potential pitfalls, as well.
The shape of technology today calls for society to update the way it approaches doing business, says Leonhard, and move past the “industrial-age paradigm of profit and growth at all costs, or some outmoded technological imperative that may have served us well in the 1980s.” He also points to the environmental problems created by fossil fuel companies as an example—if we aren’t careful, the AI and genetic engineering fields could develop their own “externalities,” or problems others will pay for, one way or another. Can we even imagine all the ways either of those fields could potentially cause harm?
Schiller writes of Leonhard:
The futurist outlines a philosophy he calls ‘exponential humanism’—the human equivalent of exponential technology. As a species we’re not developing the necessary skills and ethical frameworks to deal with technology that’s moving faster than we are, he says. We may be able to merge biology and technology, augment our minds and bodies, become superhuman, end disease, and even prolong life. But we’re yet to ask ourselves whether, for example, extending life is actually a good thing (as a society—there will always be individuals who for some reason want to live to 150). And, more to the point, will these incredible advances be available to everyone, or just a few people? To Leonhard, our current technological determinism—the view that technology itself is the purpose—is as dangerous as Luddism was 200-odd years ago. Without moral debate, we’re trusting in technology for its own sake, not because it actually improves our lives.
The write-up gives a few ideas on how to proactively shape our future. For example, Facebook could take responsibility for the content on its site instead of resting on its algorithm. Leonhard also suggests companies that replace workers with machines pay a tax that would help soften the blow to society, perhaps even with a minimum guaranteed income. Far-fetched? Perhaps. But in a future with fewer jobs and more freely-available products, a market-driven economy might just be doomed. If that is the case, what would we prefer to see emerge in its place?
Cynthia Murrell, September 26, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
There is a Louisville, Kentucky Hidden Web/Dark Web meet up on September 27, 2016.
Information is at this link: https://www.meetup.com/Louisville-Hidden-Dark-Web-Meetup/events/233599645/
Gleaning Insights and Advantages from Semantic Tagging for Digital Content
September 22, 2016
The article titled Semantic Tagging Can Improve Digital Content Publishing on Aptara Corp. blog reveals the importance of indexing. The article waves the flag of semantic tagging at the publishing industry, which has been pushed into digital content kicking and screaming. The difficulties involved in compatibility across networks, operating systems, and a device are quite a headache. Semantic tagging could help, if only anyone understood what it is. The article enlightens us,
Put simply, semantic markups are used in the behind-the-scene operations. However, their importance cannot be understated; proprietary software is required to create the metadata and assign the appropriate tags, which influence the level of quality experienced when delivering, finding and interacting with the content… There have been many articles that have agreed the concept of intelligent content is best summarized by Ann Rockley’s definition, which is “content that’s structurally rich and semantically categorized and therefore automatically discoverable, reusable, reconfigurable and adaptable.
The application to the publishing industry is obvious when put in terms of increasing searchability. Any student who has used JSTOR knows the frustrations of searching digital content. It is a complicated process that indexing, if administered correctly, will make much easier. The article points out that authors are competing not only with each other, but also with the endless stream of content being created on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Publishers need to take advantage of semantic markups and every other resource at their disposal to even the playing field.
Chelsea Kerwin, September 22, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
There is a Louisville, Kentucky Hidden Web/Dark Web meet up on September 27, 2016.
Information is at this link: https://www.meetup.com/Louisville-Hidden-Dark-Web-Meetup/events/233599645/
Elastic Links Search and Social Through Graph Capabilities
September 13, 2016
The article titled Confused About Relationships? Elasticsearch Gets Graphic on The Register communicates the latest offering from Elasticsearch, the open-source search server based on Apache’s Lucene. Graph capabilities are an exciting new twist on search that enables users to map out relationships through the search engine and the Kibana data visualization plug-in. The article explains,
By fusing graph with search, Elastic hopes to combine the power of social with that earlier great online revolution, the revolution that gave us Google: search. Graph in Elasticsearch establishes relevance by establishing the significance of each relationship versus the global average to return important results. That’s different to what Elastic called “traditional” relationship mapping, which is based on a count of the frequency of a given relationship.
Elasticsearch sees potential for their Graph capabilities in behavioral analysis, particularly in areas such as drug discovery, fraud detection, and customized medicine and recommendations. When it comes to identifying business opportunities, Graph databases have already proven their value. Discovering connections and trimming degrees of separation are all of vital importance in social media. Social networks like Twitter have been using them since the beginning of NoSQL. Indeed, Facebook is a customer of Elastic, the business version of Elasticsearch that was founded in 2012. Other users of Elasticsearch include Netflix, StumbleUpon, and Mozilla.
Chelsea Kerwin, September 13, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
There is a Louisville, Kentucky Hidden Web/Dark Web meet up on September 27, 2016.
Information is at this link: https://www.meetup.com/Louisville-Hidden-Dark-Web-Meetup/events/233599645/
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