Bitcoin Textbook to Become Available from Princeton
March 16, 2016
Bitcoin is all over the media but this form of currency may not be thoroughly understood by many, including researchers and scholars. An post on this topic, The Princeton Bitcoin textbook is now freely available, was recently published on Freedom to Tinker, a blog hosted by Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy. This article announces the first completed draft of a Princeton Bitcoin textbook. At 300 pages, the manuscript is geared to those who hope to gain a technical understanding of how Bitcoin works and is appropriate for those who have a basic understanding of computer science and programming. According to the write-up,
“Researchers and advanced students will find the book useful as well — starting around Chapter 5, most chapters have novel intellectual contributions. Princeton University Press is publishing the official, peer-reviewed, polished, and professionally done version of this book. It will be out this summer. If you’d like to be notified when it comes out, you should sign up here. Several courses have already used an earlier draft of the book in their classes, including Stanford’s CS 251. If you’re an instructor looking to use the book in your class, we welcome you to contact us, and we’d be happy to share additional teaching materials with you.”
As Bitcoin educational resources catch fire in academia, it is only a matter of time before other Bitcoin experts begin creating resources to help other audiences understand the currency of the Dark Web. Additionally, it will be interesting to see if research emerges regarding connections between Bitcoin, the Dark Web and the mainstream internet.
Megan Feil, March 16, 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
Celebros Launches Natural Language Processing Ecommerce Extension with Seven Conversions
March 9, 2016
An e-commerce site search company, Celebros, shared a news release touting their new product. Celebros, First to Launch Natural Language Site Search Extension for Magento 2.0 announces their Semantic Site Search extension for Magento 2.0. Magento 2.0 boasts the largest marketplace of e-commerce extensions in the world. This product, along with other Magento extensions, are designed to help online merchants expand their marketing and e-commerce capabilities. Celebros CMO and President of Global Sales Jeffrey Tower states,
“Celebros is proud to add the new Magento 2 extension to our existing and very successful Magento 1 extension. Celebros will offer the new extension free of charge to our entire Magento client base to ensure an easy, fast and pain-free upgrade while providing free integrations to new Celebros clients world-wide. The new extension encompasses our Natural Language Site Search in seven languages along with eight additional features that include our advanced auto-complete, guided navigation, dynamic landing pages and merchandising engine, product recommendations and more.”
For online retailers, extension products like Celebros may make or break the platforms like Magento 2.0, as these products are what add value and drive e-commerce technologies forward. It is intriguing that the Celebros natural language processing technology offers conversions available in seven languages. We live in an increasingly globalized world.
Megan Feil, March 9, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
A Hefty Guide to Setting up SharePoint 2013 Enterprise Search Center
March 8, 2016
The how-to guide titled Customizing SharePoint 2013 Search Center on Code Project provides a lengthy, detailed explanation (with pictures) of the new features of SharePoint 2013, an integration of the 2010 version and Microsoft FAST search. The article offers insights into certain concepts of the program such as crawled properties and managed properties before introducing step-by-step navigation for customizing the result page and Display template, as well as other areas of Sharepoint. The article includes such tips as this,
“Query rules allow you to modify the users keyword search based on a condition. Let’s say when the user types Developer, we want to retrieve only the books which have BookCategory as Developer and if they type ‘IT Pro’, we only want to retrieve the Administrator related books.”
Nine steps later, you have a neat little result block with the matching items. The article outlines similar processes for Customizing the Search Center, Modifying the Search Center, Adding the Results Page to the Navigation, and Creating the Result Source. This leads us to ask, Shouldn’t this be easier by now? Customizing a program so that it looks and acts the way we expect seems like pretty basic setup, so why does it take 100+ steps to tailor SharePoint 2013?
Chelsea Kerwin, March 8, 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
A Place to Express Yourself on the Dark Web
March 7, 2016
For evidence that the dark web is not all about drugs and cybercrime, check out this article at Motherboard: “The Dark Web Now Has a Literary Journal.” As it turns out, anonymity is also good for people who wish to freely explore their creativity and private thoughts.
The new journal, the Torist, was just launched by a professor at the University of Utah, Robert W. Ghel, and a person known simply as GMH. Inspired by the free discussions on their dark-web-based social network, Galaxy, they have seized their chance to create something unexpected. The journal’s preface asks:
“If a magazine publishes itself via a Tor hidden service, what does the creative output look like? How might it contrast itself with its clearweb counterparts? Who indeed will gravitate towards a dark web literary magazine?”
So, why is one of the Torist’s creators anonymous while the other is putting himself out there? Writer Joseph Cox tells us:
Gehl, after being pitched the idea of The Torist by GMH, decided to strip away his pseudonym, and work on the project under his own name. “I thought about that for a while,” Gehl said. “I thought that because GMH is anonymous/pseudonymous, and he’s running the servers, I could be a sort of ‘clear’ liason.”
So while Gehl used his name, and added legitimacy to the project in that way, GMH could continue to work with the freedom the anonymity awards. “I guess it’s easier to explore ideas and not worry as much how it turns out,” said GMH, who described himself as someone with a past studying the humanities, and playing with technology in his spare time.
Gehl and GMH say part of their reasoning behind the journal is to show people that anonymity and encryption can be forces for good. Privacy furthers discussion of controversial, personal, and difficult topics and, according to GMH, should be the default setting for all communications, especially online.
Submissions are currently being accepted, so go ahead and submit that poem or essay if you have something to get off your chest, anonymously. If you dare to venture into the dark web, that is.
Cynthia Murrell, March 7, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
If You See Something, Say Something Adopts New Cybersecurity Meaning
March 4, 2016
A post-9/11 campaign for increasing security awareness will inform a similar public service announcement campaign to bring cybersecurity top of mind. See something suspicious online? Homeland Security wants to know about it published by NextGov reports on this 2016 Department of Homeland Security initiative. The decision to launch this campaign comes from an IDC recommendation; the US lacks a culture of cybersecurity concern, unlike Israel, according to the article. While $1 million is allotted for this campaign, the article describes bigger future plans,
“Last week, the Obama administration rolled out a new Cybersecurity National Action Plan, which establishes a new public commission on cybersecurity and proposes billions in new funding to upgrade hard-to-secure legacy IT systems in use at federal agencies, among several other steps.”
This year’s cybersecurity public and private sector awareness campaign was modeled after the “If You See Something, Say Something” campaign rolled out after September 11. However, this is not Homeland Security’s first attempt at educating the public about cybersecurity. The department has sponsored October as National Cybersecurity Awareness Month since 2004. As the article mentions, previous educational efforts have not appeared to influence culture. It would be interesting to know what metrics they are using to make that claim.
Megan Feil, March 4, 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
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
New Tor Communication Software for Journalists and Sources Launches
February 29, 2016
A new one-to-one messaging tool for journalists has launched after two years in development. The article Ricochet uses power of the dark web to help journalists, sources dodge metadata laws from The Age describes this new darknet-based software. The unique feature of this software, Ricochet, in comparison to others used by journalists such as Wickr, is that it does not use a server but rather Tor. Advocates acknowledge the risk of this Dark Web software being used for criminal activity but assert the aim is to provide sources and whistleblowers an anonymous channel to securely release information to journalists without exposure. The article explains,
“Dr Dreyfus said that the benefits of making the software available would outweigh any risks that it could be used for malicious purposes such as cloaking criminal and terrorist operations. “You have to accept that there are tools, which on balance are a much greater good to society even though there’s a tiny possibility they could be used for something less good,” she said. Mr Gray argued that Ricochet was designed for one-to-one communications that would be less appealing to criminal and terrorist organisers that need many-to-many communications to carry out attacks and operations. Regardless, he said, the criminals and terrorists had so many encryption and anonymising technologies available to them that pointing fingers at any one of them was futile.”
Online anonymity is showing increasing demand as evidenced through the recent launch of several new Tor-based softwares like Ricochet, in addition to Wickr and consumer-oriented apps like Snapchat. The Dark Web’s user base appears to be growing and diversifying. Will public perception follow suit?
Megan Feil, February 29, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
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