This week’s topics: WannaCry, Intel leaks, DocuSign phishing, cockpit codes, Delta facial recognition, China vs. CIA, WordPress bug bounty, Marines and drones, HPE R&D, Watts, graduates only making 40K, China’s DNA project, honeymoons vs. rings, Sherrif Eli, retirees hoarding money, boo restaurant kiosks, investing in employees, discovery, aphorisms, and more… This is Episode No. 79 of Unsupervised Learning—a…
Meaning Anchors
It’s pretty obvious that people need meaning in their lives, but I wonder if the rise of suicide and opiates use can be seen in this light. The way I think about it is that people have to subscribe to something. They need an anchor. Some of the best ones are conservative religions. Conservative Christianity, Islam, etc. I’ll…
An Ubuntu update Command
I have an alias I like to use on Ubuntu that goes something like this: alias update=apt update; apt upgrade -y But there’s an improvement that I made recently I’d like to share. First run this to get the tool. apt install debian-goodies Then run this command checkrestart. checkrestart checkrestart checks to see if you currently need to…
Restaurant Pay Kiosks Are Just Outsourcing Work to the Customer
Restaurants are trying really hard to sell us on the “cool” tech of table kiosks—which, as far as I can tell, are magical boxes that make it so you can never find your waiter. But that’s kind of the point, actually: the more of those boxes there are, the fewer waiters are needed. I thought it was slightly…
How to Download Your LinkedIn Profile as a Resume
For some reason I get a lot of questions about how to create a resume from a LinkedIn profile. I love this functionality because I find it much easier to keep LinkedIn updated and print a resume from there, rather than updating Word docs or whatever. Here’s how you do it. Log into your LinkedIn account. Click the…
Leveraging the Masses as a Competitive Advantage
Imagine a time, say 10-30 years from now, where 80% of people are not needed in society. They can’t produce more value, doing traditional tasks, than computers, AI, and robots can. So they are all either fired or can’t get a job in the first place. It’s a whole separate topic to ask what they’re going to be…
The Best WordPress Plugin for Related Posts
[ May 20, 2017 — I have moved from Similar Posts to YARPP because Similar Posts was destroying my box, both from a network requests and CPU standpoint. I’d avoid it if I were you. ] I’ve been hunting for a solid related posts plugin on WordPress for years. My go-to has always been Contextual Related Posts, which…
Criticism from Both Sides as an Indicator of Neutrality
I just put out issue No. 78 of my newsletter, and I got a couple of critical emails about my mention of the Russians hacking the Macron campaign. Here’s a piece of the first. And here’s a piece of the second. So the first is blasting me for being too right wing, and the second is blasting me…
Unsupervised Learning: No. 78
This week’s topics: The WannaCry ransomware worm, the president’s EO, Macron hacking, HP backdoors, laptop bans, Amazon releases, Chinese online commerce, CRISPR, Germany and renewable energy, beetles, dental health as social indicator, Reading superpowers, Net Neutrality, serverless, deep learning black box, The Three Body Problem, you can now support the site, The Mechanical Universe, TrueCaller, and more… This…
For a Life Upgrade, Swap TV Time for Reading Time
I have a lot of really smart friends, but I have few friends that read. Most of my friends watch TV. And when I say “TV”, I mean all its modern forms—actual broadcast television, DVR’d shows, Netflix, whatever. They watch lots of it. Probably 10-30 hours a week, if I had to guess, which ends up being hundreds…
Some Quick Takeaways from the 2017 Verizon DBIR
For those who lack the time to read the entire report, here are some of the key findings along with some comments. Attackers 75% of breaches done by outsiders. 25% involved internal actors. 18% state actors. 51% involved organized crime actors. I see 25% involving internal actors as quite high, but that depends on the definition of “involved”….
Robert Graham is Wrong About John Oliver Being Wrong About Net Neutrality
For example, he says that without Net Neutrality, Comcast can prefer original shows it produces, and slow down competing original shows by Netflix. This is silly: Comcast already does that, even with NetNeutrality rules.Comcast owns NBC, which produces a lot of original shows. During prime time (8pm to 11pm), Comcast delivers those shows at 6-mbps to its customers,…
My Current Predictions for Thinking Machines
I’ve been thinking a lot about what I called “Getting Better at Getting Better” in my book. It’s the idea of accelerating machine intelligence, where computers aren’t just getting better at solving problems, but the pace at which they get better increases drastically. I think this comes in two forms: Improved machine learning that improves as we provide…
A Look at Application Testing in a Near Future
For some silly reason I was just awoken by the following thoughts about how application tests will be done in the future. I’m thinking this starts phasing in over the next 3-10 years. The application will be decomposed using an automated tool to break it into the binary, the source, the network interfaces, the application-layer interfaces, and any…
How to Get Extracted Fields into Your Splunk Alerts
I’ve been continuing to improve my Splunk> game, and part of that has been improving the information that comes in email alerts. The image above shows the final result I am looking for, where you get custom information that’s contextual to the alert that was generated. The problem The issue is that this doesn’t work by default. You…
Embracing Female Oppression as a Sign of Feminism
The regressive left, or Lupus Liberals as I like to call them, are heroically confused about the Hijab. The source of the confusion seems to be that there are western people, especially men, who don’t like the Hijab for various reasons. Some are good, some are bad. Good reasons include not liking the fact that this is a…
Unsupervised Learning: No. 76
This week’s topics: Verizon’s DBIR report, Chipotle (again), USAF bounty, NSA surveillance hampered, Android hacks, Taser and computer vision, Google fights fake news, Exercise types & mental skills, Perfect pitch recording, Lifecasting, RF X-Ray, discovered links, and more… This is Episode No. 75 of Unsupervised Learning—a weekly show where I curate 3-5 hours of reading in infosec, technology,…
Why You Should Be Using More Emoji
If you’re over 30 you’re probably a bit averse to using emoji to communicate. You probably think it’s unprofessional, that it’s “not real language”, or that it’s a fad that will go away soon. My opinion is that it’s a permanent part of communication (although it’ll evolve into richer forms), and that if you’re not using it you’re…
The Jobs Most Vulnerable to Automation
Any parent or teenager not thinking very hard about this list is putting themselves at a severe disadvantage. And a lot of the jobs will surprise you. Being a waiter at a restaurant is remarkably resilient because the robots required to move around quickly, juggle lots of food, make quick adjustments, read peoples’ temperaments, attitudes, etc., and adjust…
Unsupervised Learning: No. 75
This week’s topics: DoublePulsar in the wild, vigilante IoT worms, Bose listening headphones, PoS hacking sentence, Google ad blocking, best anti-aging exercises, unqualified Indian engineers, , discovered links, and more… This is Episode No. 75 of Unsupervised Learning—a weekly show where I curate 3-5 hours of reading in infosec, technology, and humans into a 15 to 30 minute…
Monitoring SSH Bruteforce Attempts Using Splunk
I do lots of monitoring on my site (I’d rather watch logs than Netflix) which I’ll talk about in separate posts, but today I want to talk about SSH. I’m going to cover how I log, how I get those longs into Splunk, and what kinds of searches and alerts I have set up. Getting Splunk to monitor…
AWS IAM Security Terminology Primer
What is IAM IAM Users IAM Roles Access Keys IAM Policies Security Groups AWS naming can be a bit strange, and there are a lot of components within their security infrastructure, known as IAM. This page will introduce you to the various components are and what they’re used for. Keep in mind this is just a primer; there’s…
My Thoughts on ELYSIUM Basis
I’ve been into supplements since my early 20’s. I’ve just always been intrigued by the possibility of being a better version of myself, via whatever means. A supplement has emerged recently called ELYSIUM Basis that is generating significant chatter in a few circles, and the reason for that is it’s associated with anti-aging. It’s quite controversial, but it’s…
Unsupervised Learning: No. 74
This week’s topics: Shadow Brokers, fingerprinting Netflix traffic, Magneto vuln, Juniper advisories, Amazon speaker tech, Facebook’s 100Gbit optical switches, Google Hire, Minecraft currency, a solar-powered water harvester, OWASP Top 10 draft comments, remote SSH, EC2 and NAT firewalls, deep learning is a black box, discovered links, and more… This is Episode No. 74 of Unsupervised Learning—a weekly show…
Is Trump Pursuing Innovation at Any Cost?
I’ve been having a crazy thought the last couple of months that I couldn’t quite capture. Then my friend Saša hit me with a similar idea this morning. It’s kind of scary, and it goes like this: Trump believes that economic growth will heal all wounds in the country. He believes it’ll fix our position in the world,…
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