Unsupervised Learning: No. 90

This is episode No. 90 of Unsupervised Learning—a weekly show where I curate 3-5 hours of reading in infosec, technology, and humans into a 30 minute summary. The goal is to catch you up on current events, tell you about the best content from the week, and hopefully give you something to think about as well…

This week’s topics: Swedish gov leak, OPM hacking arrest, cybersecurity spending $1T, Oreo, Whole Amazon Foods, intelligence genes, false dichotomy of conflicting ideas, OPSEC obscurity, discovery, aphorism, and more…

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Infosec news 





The largest governmental data leak ever has just been uncovered in Sweden. The data was transferred to The Cloud (TM) some time ago, managed by IBM, and included police records, names/addresses/photos of Air Force pilots, elite special forces units, witness relocation people, and basically anyone else who was supposed to be secret. Plus tons of data on military vehicles and tons of other critical infrastructure. It’s essentially the most sensitive information in the entire country, all in the cloud, all exposed through what seems to be incompetence. This will likely add momentum to the trend of people pulling their data back to their own datacenters. Link



The FBI has arrested Yu Pingan on charges related to the hacking of OPM. Link



China’s government is now requiring that you use your real identity to make comments online, effectively eliminating anonymity on the Chinese internet. Link



Barclays’ mobile banking app now lets you pay with Siri. Expect voice interfaces to become more of an attack surface in coming years. Link



The U.S. has a massive surveillance spy hub in the middle of Australia. Link



1/4 of the president’s cybersecurity panel has resigned in moral protest. Link



Gartner says information security spending will hit $93 billion in 2018, and exceed $1 trillion over the next five years. Link



Crashplan is getting out of consumer backup services. They’re focusing now on enterprise and education customers. Link



It’s a bad idea to allow access to your boarding passes. Link





Technology news 





Google has announced the next release of Android, called Oreo. Link



The problem for mobile app developers, and the app industry as a whole, is that 66% of consumers download 0 apps per month. Zero. So if you want to be a successful app developer at this point you either need to be so awesome that you’re creating a new space, or so awesome that you’re knocking out the app that everyone already has in an existing space. Both are hard. Link



Medium is experimenting with paying writers based on how much people like their work. Link



iOS 11 is going to strip AMP content from links automatically. Link



Amazon is significantly lowering the prices at Whole Foods, starting Monday. Link



Shonin is launching a personal bodycam on Kickstarter. I think we’re getting close to the reality I described in my Lifecasting post from 2008. Link



YCombinator is making a significant pivot into the B2B space with its current round of investments. Link





Human news 





We now have a significant photo of the red giant star Antares. I always loved looking at this star. If placed in our solar system it’s outer edge would end between Mars and Jupiter. Link



Scientists have identified 22 genes associated with intelligence. Link



Maine’s statewide laptop program appears to have been a complete failure in terms of raising test scores. Link



1 in 3 Americans have nothing saved for retirement, and 56% have less than $10K. Link



Gut microbes may talk to the brain through Cortisol. Link



It seems listening to certain sounds through the night while sleeping can help your memory. Link



This is our broken economy in one simple chart. Link



A study has shown that teenagers with fewer good friends rather than lots of looser friends are more likely to be happy later in life. Link



Get ready for Season 4 of Black Mirror. Link





Ideas 





The False Dichotomy of Conflicting Ideas Link



If obscurity weren’t a valid security layer, nobody would be doing OPSEC. Link



There is some confusion about the difference between artificial intelligence and machine learning. Here’s a quick summary: artificial intelligence is an attempt to create a human-like agent that can detect its environment and try to achieve its goals. Machine learning is a sub-domain of AI that deals with teaching computers to learn from data rather than needing to be re-programmed. Link



Continuing on the AI topic, Weak AI is AI that can only do one particular thing, and Strong AI (or General AI) is the kind we don’t have yet, where it can do everything a human can, but as good or better.



We should send our key politicians to space so they can experience “The Overview Effect”. Link



It seems that if a show is popular enough, like Game of Thrones, then piracy of content isn’t a major threat. A number of leaks have hit GoT this season, but they seem to have had very little effect on viewership. Link



An interesting female perspective on the STEM gender gap being overblown. Link



It’s evidently possible to improve how much you like a song by adding FOMO (fear of missing out) to the track. People have been adding muffling to songs so that they sound like they’re coming from next door, and it’s making them like them even more. I find this fascinating because it’s clearly a ‘grass is greener’ issue. The effect should be strongest for party songs, where it most clearly communicates that someone is having fun but it ain’t you. Link



An argument that most people are using git quite incorrectly, and how it should be used instead. Link





Discovery 





Corporations are trying hard to do for your job what they’ve already done for tomato sorting. Link



D&D now has an official digital platform for managing tabletop games. Link



A Redditor put 1.8 petabytes of porn on Amazon just to see if “unlimited” really was unlimited. It wasn’t, and his account was shut down. Perhaps relatedly, so was Amazon’s unlimited data storage service. Link



How to practice a programming language. Link



This company will take an idea and build a prototype of it for $20K. Link



A humorous list of 10 things that will make you appear smart in a meeting. Link



A massive list of free computer science courses. Link



Reverse engineering the art of storytelling. Link



NetworkMiner 2.2 — NetworkMiner has been updated with new features and now runs on .NET 4.0. This has always been one of my favorite Windows utilities.



Vulscan — a vulnerability scanning module for Nmap that uses the NSE engine. It uses the -sV information and matches it to a number of vulnerability databases. Link



Using Shodan and some Golang to do mass scans of bug bounty targets to find vulnerabilities. Link





Notes 





I am currently reading The Fourth Turning, a book about constantly repeating cycles in the United States that affect the population, politics, and innovation. The most interesting piece is that the book was written back in 1998, and it made predictions that have (evidently) largely come true. I think this book is likely to change how I see the flow of events in the world. I can’t wait to do the summary for this one. Link



I’m also starting a book by Gavin de Becker called The Gift of Fear. It was recommended by Sam Harris on one of his podcast episodes, and I’m looking forward to it. It’s about how to survive in various real-world situations. Link





Recommendations

 



David Brooks talks about there being two different types of attributes: resume attributes, and eulogy attributes. Resume attributes are what give you a good career. Eulogy attributes are what make people say nice things about you after you’re gone. Don’t let your focus on resume attributes distract from working on your eulogy attributes.





Aphorism





“There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.” ~ Francis Bacon

 

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I do a weekly show called Unsupervised Learning, where I curate the most interesting stories in infosec, technology, and humans, and talk about why they matter. You can subscribe here.

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