Unsupervised Learning: No. 98

This is episode No. 98 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: The Reaper botnet, Google Advanced Email Protection, Bitcoin Over $6,000, Duo’s $70 million, Dubai going to facial recognition, tech news, human news, ideas, discovery, recommendations, aphorism, and more…

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InfoSec news 





IOTROOP (also called Reaper) is an growing botnet that’s already infected over 1 million organizations, according to Check Point. It’s using similar techniques to Mirai, but it’s far more advanced. Like Mirai it’s using default credentials to attack systems, but it’s also using exploits to attack as well. The researchers think it might be spinning up for a major DDoS attack. Link



Google launched Advanced Protection for Google Apps email last week. It basically does a nuclear lockdown on email security for an organization that’s really worried about getting hacked. They have all sorts of protections in there that can be a bit unforgiving, so it’s not for casual use. Things like requiring a USB key or bluetooth dongle for access to your account, stricter malware scanning on the backend, etc. Link



Bitcoin just topped $6,000, and now websites are commandeering visitors’ browsers to make them mine for them. There’s a package called Coin-Hive that starts mining as soon as you visit a site. Many sites have put it there on purpose, and others have been hacked and had the code placed there by attackers. Link



Windows 10 is adding game cheating prevention to TruePlay in the fall Creator’s Update. It’ll let you prioritize a game as a protected process, which will disable some of the common ways cheats interact with the game. Link



Google Play apps with as many as 2.6 million downloads added installed devices to a botnet. Link



Duo just raised $70 million in a Series D. Link



Dubai is moving to replace ID checks with a facial recognition tunnel. Link





Technology news 





The version of Alpha Go that defeated humanity’s best Go player just lost to a new version of itself that has never been trained by humans. It taught itself how to play. Awesome used to mean a combination of scary and amazing. That’s what this is: awesome. Link



Big banks are embracing blockchain, and are now starting to roll it out as a means of speeding up money transfers from days to hours (and hopefully to minutes or seconds before too long). It’s also going to help them immediately with cross-border transfers. This is a big deal. It’s like the British Army deciding to use guerrilla tactics. Link



Tesla is pushing its new insurance plan, called InsureMyTesla, which gives you cheaper rates because of Autopilot. Link



Magic Leap has raised another half a billion dollars, bringing the total amount to around $2 billion. I hope whatever they end up making is going to be as good as anticipated. Link



Alphabet has invested $1 billion in Lyft. Link





Human news 





Johns Hopkins scientists find that the Dual N-Back brain training regimen is the best system discovered so far for improving mental performance. Link



Due to weight and fitness, misconduct, medical issues, mental health problems, and substance abuse concerns, 71% of 17 to 24-year-old Americans are unfit for military service. Link



Experts are blaming the food industry for saying that exercise is a solution to obesity, likening it to the cover-up regarding the dangers of smoking. Many scientists are now saying that losing weight has very little to do with exercise, and that reducing food intake is the way to go. Link



Nearly half of U.S. medical care comes from emergency rooms. Unbelievable. Link



Stockton, CA is spending $1 million to try a basic income experiment. Link



There’s a growing number of scientists who are seeing sugar more like a toxin than a food, and they’re essentially saying that it invalidates the old concept of calorie in / calorie out that we’ve been sold for decades. Link



Researchers look at why you can focus in a loud coffee shop but not in an open plan office. Basically, if you’re not listening to the noise and it’s at a certain level, it produces creative distraction. And if it goes above or below a certain volume, or you care about what the other people are saying, it does the opposite. Link



Many doctors are now saying exercise, especially Yoga, is better for back pain than pills or surgery. Link



Researchers say Tinder is showing us that men look for beauty in a mate while women look for intelligence, career prospects, and stability. Link



Another story on the depression chatbot I wrote about last week. It’s called Woebot. Link





Ideas 





Personal Sensors Are the Next Breakthrough in Consumer Electronics Link



Beware of Alternate Meaning Loops Link



On the Effects of Shaming Sexual Harassers in Hollywood and Tech Link



How I Would Build My Life If I Could Engineer It From Scratch Link



Why I Call Myself an Atheist Instead of an Agnostic Link



Why I Identify as a Feminist Link



This kind of improvement speed we’re seeing with Alpha Go Zero is all fun and games until it isn’t. We really need some monitoring placed on AI development before we innovate ourselves out of existence. There are lots of things that need to happen before that would be possible, but the point is that the jumps happen quickly, and we might not know what’s happened until it’s too late. 



China is about to pass everyone in terms of new infrastructure, green tech, renewable energy, electric cars, etc. They basically just decided that there was an opportunity to become a world leader on all these things, while everyone else is paralyzed or distracted, and it’s frightening what they’re about to accomplish. We’re going to be left with old bridges, gas cars, ailing roads, and they’re going to be one of the only countries in the 21st century. All because they can simply turn it into a leadership issue internally and unanimously decided to do it. 





Discovery 





How to track an individual’s physical location using less than $1,000 in online ads. Yet another reason to use an ad blocker. Link



Cambridge Analytica is the data analytics company that supposedly helped Trump get elected. They evidently had so much good data on everyone that they knew exactly which buttons would be effective to push. You can request the data that they have on you by mailing them here. Link



It’s easier than ever to create working keys from images. Link



An article on replacing Mailchimp with Amazon SES + Mailwizz. Link



IPFS — The Interplanetary File System Link