Play Search the Game
March 25, 2016
Within the past few years, gamers have had the privilege to easily play brand new games as well as the old classics. Nearly all of the games ever programmed are available through various channels from Steam, simulator, to system emulator. While it is easy to locate a game if you know the name, main character, or even the gaming system, but with the thousands of games available maybe you want to save time and not have use a search engine. Good news, everyone!
Sofotex, a free software download Web site, has a unique piece of freeware that you will probably want to download if you are a gamer. Igrulka is a search engine app programmed to search only games. Here is the official description:
Igrulka is a unique software that helps you to search, find and play millions of games in the network.
“Once you download the installer, all you have to do is go to the download location on your computer and install the app.
Igrulka allows you to search for the games that you love either according to the categories they are in or by name. For example, you get games in the shooter, arcade, action, puzzle or racing games categories among many others.
If you would like to see more details about the available games, their names as well as their descriptions, all you have to do is hover over them using your mouse as shown below. Choose the game you want to play and click on it.”
According to the description, it looks like Igrulka searches through free games and perhaps the classics from systems. In order to find out what Irgulka can do, download and play search results roulette.
Whitney Grace, March 25, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
VPN Disables Right to Be Forgotten for Users in European Union
March 24, 2016
Individuals in the European Union have been granted legal protection to request unwanted information about themselves be removed from search engines. An article from Wired, In Europe,You’ll Need a VPN to See Real Google Search Results, explains the latest on the European Union’s “right to be forgotten” laws. Formerly, privacy requests would only scrub sites with European country extensions like .fr, but now Google.com will filter results for privacy for those with a European IP address. However, European users can rely on a VPN to enable their location to appear as if it were from elsewhere. The article offers context and insight,
“China has long had its “Great Firewall,” and countries like Russia and Brazil have tried to build their own barriers to the outside ‘net in recent years. These walls have always been quite porous thanks to VPNs. The only way to stop it would be for Google to simply stop allowing people to access its search engine via a VPN. That seems unlikely. But with Netflix leading the way in blocking access via VPNs, the Internet may yet fracture and localize.”
The demand for browsing the web using surreptitious methods, VPN or otherwise, only seems to be increasing. Whether motivations are to uncover personal information about certain individuals, watch Netflix content available in other countries or use forums on the Dark Web, the landscape of search appears to be changing in a major way.
Megan Feil, March 24, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Google Decides to Be Nice to
March 18, 2016
Google is a renowned company for its technological endeavors, beautiful office campuses, smart employees, and how it is a company full of self-absorbed and competitive people. While Google might have a lot of perks, it also has its dark side. According to Quartz, Google wanted to build a more productive team so they launched Project Aristotle to analyze how and they found, “After Years Of Intensive Analysis, Google Discovers The Key To Good Teamwork Is being Nice.”
Project Aristotle studied hundreds of employees in different departments and analyzed their data. They wanted to find a “magic formula,” but it all beats down to one of the things taught in kindergarten: be nice.
“Google’s data-driven approach ended up highlighting what leaders in the business world have known for a while; the best teams respect one another’s emotions and are mindful that all members should contribute to the conversation equally. It has less to do with who is in a team, and more with how a team’s members interact with one another.”
Team members who understand, respect, and allow each other to contribute to conversation equally. It is a basic human tenant and even one of the better ways to manage a relationship, according to marriage therapists around the world. Another result of the project is dubbed “psychological safety,” where team members create an environment with the established belief they can take risks and share ideas without ridicule.
Will psychological safety be a new buzzword since Google has “discovered” that being nice works so well? The term has been around for a while, at least since 1999.
Google’s research yields a business practice that other companies have adopted: Costco, Trader Joes, Pixar, Sassie, and others to name a few. Yet why is it so hard to be nice?
Whitney Grace, March 18, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Google Now Has Dowsing Ability
March 16, 2016
People who claim to be psychic are fakes. There is not a way to predict the future, instantly locate a lost person or item, or read someone’s aura. No scientific theory has proven it exists. One of the abilities psychics purport to have is “dowsing,” the power to sense where water, precious stones or metals, and even people are hiding. Instead of relying on a suspended crystal or an angular stick, Google now claims it can identify any location based solely on images, says The Technology Review in the article, “Google Unveils Neural Network With ‘Superhuman’ Ability To Determine The Location Of Almost Any Image.”
Using computer algorithms, not magic powers, and Tobias Weyand’s programming prowess and a team of tech savvy people, they developed a way for a Google deep-learning machine to identity location pictures. Weyand and his team designed PlaNET, the too, and accomplished this by dividing the world into 26,000 square grid (sans ocean and poles) of varying sizes depending on populous areas.
“Next, the team created a database of geolocated images from the Web and used the location data to determine the grid square in which each image was taken. This data set is huge, consisting of 126 million images along with their accompanying Exif location data.
Weyand and co used 91 million of these images to teach a powerful neural network to work out the grid location using only the image itself. Their idea is to input an image into this neural net and get as the output a particular grid location or a set of likely candidates.”
With the remaining 34 million images in the data set, they tested the PlaNET to check its accuracy. PlaNET can accurately guess 3.6% images at street level, 10.1% on city level, 28.4% country of origin, and 48% of the continent. These results are very good compared to the limited knowledge that a human keeps in their head.
Weyand believes that PlaNET is able to determine the location, because it has learned new parents to recognize subtle patterns about areas that humans cannot distinguish, as it has arguably been more places than any human. What is even more amazing is how much memory PlaNET uses: only 377 MB!
When will PlaNET become available as a GPS app?
Whitney Grace, March 16, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Search Dually Conceals and Retrieves for an Audience
March 8, 2016
There are many ways to trace a digital footprint, but Google is expanding European users’ ability to cover their tracks. An article entitled, In Europe, Google will now remove ‘right to be forgotten’ search results from all its sites, from The Verge tells us the story. Basically, European users who request links to be removed protect those links from being crawled by Google.fr in addition to all their other homepages. The write-up explains,
“So, for instance, if someone in France had previously requested that a link be hidden from search results, Google would just remove it from its European homepages, including google.fr. But a savvy searcher could have just used google.com to dig up all those hidden results. Now, however, the company will scrub its US homepage results, too, but only for European users. The company didn’t provide specifics on how it’ll detect that a user is in Europe, but it’s likely going off IP addresses, so in theory, someone could use a VPN to subvert those results.”
As the article mentions, European privacy regulators are happy about this but would still prefer contested links not appear, even if the searcher is in the U.S. or elsewhere. Between the existence of the Dark Web and the “right to be forgotten” protections, more and more links are hidden making search increasingly difficult.
Megan Feil, March 8, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Artificial Intelligence Competition Reveals Need for More Learning
March 3, 2016
The capabilities of robots are growing but, on the whole, have not surpassed a middle school education quite yet. The article Why AI can still hardly pass an eighth grade science test from Motherboard shares insights into the current state of artificial intelligence as revealed in a recent artificial intelligence competition. Chaim Linhart, a researcher from an Israel startup, TaKaDu, received the first place prize of $50,000. However, the winner only scored a 59.3 percent on this series of tasks tougher than the conventionally used Turing Test. The article describes how the winners utilized machine learning models,
“Tafjord explained that all three top teams relied on search-style machine learning models: they essentially found ways to search massive test corpora for the answers. Popular text sources included dumps of Wikipedia, open-source textbooks, and online flashcards intended for studying purposes. These models have anywhere between 50 to 1,000 different “features” to help solve the problem—a simple feature could look at something like how often a question and answer appear together in the text corpus, or how close words from the question and answer appear.”
The second and third place winners scored just around one percent behind Linhart’s robot. This may suggest a competitive market when the time comes. Or, perhaps, as the article suggests, nothing very groundbreaking has been developed quite yet. Will search-based machine learning models continue to be expanded and built upon or will another paradigm be necessary for AI to get grade A?
Megan Feil, March 3, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Delve Is No Jarvis
March 3, 2016
A podcast at SearchContentManagement, “Is Microsoft Delve Iron Man’s Edwin Jarvis? No Way,” examines the ways Delve has yet to live up to its hype. Microsoft extolled the product when it was released as part of the Office 365 suite last year. As any developer can tell you, though, it is far easier to market than deliver polished software. Editor Lauren Horwitz explains:
“While it was designed to be a business intelligence (BI), enterprise search and collaboration tool wrapped into one, it has yet to make good on that vision. Delve was intended to be able to search users’ documents, email messages, meetings and more, then serve up relevant content and messages to them based on their content and activities. At one level, Delve has failed because it hasn’t been as comprehensive a search tool as it was billed. At another level, users have significant concerns about their privacy, given the scope of documents and activities Delve is designed to scour. As BI and SharePoint expert Scott Robinson notes in this podcast, Delve was intended to be much like Edwin Jarvis, butler and human search tool for Iron Man’s Tony Stark. But Delve ain’t no Jarvis, Robinson said.”
So, Delve was intended to learn enough about a user to offer them just what they need when they need it, but the tool did not tap deeply enough into the user’s files to effectively anticipate their needs. On top of that, it’s process is so opaque that most users don’t appreciate what it is doing, Robinson indicated. For more on Delve’s underwhelming debut, check out the ten-minute podcast.
Cynthia Murrell, March 3, 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
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
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