This week’s episode of Unsupervised Learning is now available. Subscribe below and get this episode’s podcast and newsletter. This week’s topics: Atlanta disabled, MyFitnessPal hacked, Cambridge Analytica election tampering, Drupal, Saks, DARPA drones, Cloudflare 1.1.1.1, Slack bosses, Democratic Chinese AIs, Georgia facepalm, tech, humans, ideas, and more… Listen to this week’s Podcast Read this week’s Newsletter
Why I Switched from Patreon to Memberful
Like many people I’ve been soured on ads and sponsors for my podcast and newsletter: Unsupervised Learning. If you hav a decent following it’s actually possible to make a significant living off of both sponsors and ads—and especially sponsors. At one point I was getting a couple thousand a month from just a couple of sponsors, and I…
DevOps as the Art and Science of Deliberate Practice
The best definition I’ve ever heard for DevOps is the ability to practice frequently and well. I prefer DevOps to DevSecOps because I feel security should be part of both development and operations, but I also see the merit in calling it out where this isn’t regular practice. I think there is a powerful analog here to professional…
Analysis of the 2018 F5 Threat Intel Report
F5 just released a threat intel report that covered 433 breach cases spanning 12 years, 37 industries, and 27 countries. When companies release reports like these I go through them and extract nuggets for those who don’t have time to look at the full report. You will find the extraction for this report below. Applications were the initial…
Learn the Difference Between Real and Fake Machine Learning
There are few technologies as misunderstood right now as Machine Learning. Some think it’s 100% hype, sales, and marketing, and others think it’s humanity’s Messiah in the form of math and code. Unfortunately, there’s currently not a lot of space between those two extremes. Here’s how I think about it. Machine Learning is much like Love and Sex.…
Unsupervised Learning: No. 116
This week’s episode of Unsupervised Learning is now available. Subscribe below and get this episode’s podcast and newsletter. This week’s topics: Chinese at CanSecWest, Applebees POS, Palantir, Poisoning, TensorFlow DoD, Amazon laughing, Google 72-qbits, Amazon FinTech, Android P, and more… Listen to this week’s Podcast Become a Member to Get This Week’s Newsletter
The Two Kinds of Privacy Loss
I like to think about our impending loss of privacy as two separate issues. The first type is against the will of the victim and is caused by malice and/or negligence on the part of the entity with your data. This is where you trust your data to a company, and they sell that data to a number…
How to Download the Data Facebook Has on You
People are becoming increasingly worried about the data that Facebook and other social media sites have on them. Luckily, the platforms make it fairly easy to download that data to see for yourself. For Facebook, here’s the process. 1. Go to any Facebook page and hit the down arrow in the corner. 3. Click “Download a Copy of…
The Reason Software Remains Insecure
There are myriad theories as to why software remains insecure after we’ve spend decades trying to solve the problem. Some say it’s the lack of will to secure things, the lack of vendor liability, the insecure languages we use, insufficient developer training, not enough security products—and the list continues… But there’s a far simpler and more powerful explanation,…
Apple’s Biggest Weakness is Siri, and It’s Becoming a Problem
Many think voice assistants are still in the toy category, but I’m convinced that they’ve recently become part of the underlying trust fabric for the Google, Apple, and Amazon brands. Apple is known for its product quality, and up until now Siri has not been considered part of that equation. I think that’s changing, though, and it’s changing…
Success in Life is Determined Most by Parental Culture, Not the Quality of Schools
I think one of the least know truths in liberal circles is that family culture determines educational and financial success far more than school quality. I was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, and we’ve been raised to believe that good schools have lots of resources—like new textbooks, better teachers, etc.—and that students in poor…
Unsupervised Learning: No. 115
This week’s episode of Unsupervised Learning is now available. Subscribe below and get this episode’s podcast and newsletter. This week’s topics: GitHub DDoS, Celebrite Attacks, AI warnings, Palantir in New Orleans, Grub Backspace, 4G attacks, Space Corps, Amazon wins Defense Department deal, tech news, human news, discovery, notes, recommendation, aphorism, and more… Listen to this week’s Podcast Read…
When Companies Stop Caring About Data Loss, Risk Will Be Resilience-based and Focused on Business Disruption and Human Safety
In 2013, I looked briefly at how being hacked affects a company’s stock price. More people are looking at this now, and the evidence seems to show that there is often a major dip, but after 6 to 12 months it’s hard to even notice it happened. I’ve been worried for a long time that we’re getting Breach…
Safe Schools Are the New Luxury Item Because Now Only the Rich Have Stable and Present Families
We just saw another school shooting—this time in Parkland, Florida. The shooter was some kind of foster kid with serious hate in his heart, obviously. The foster parents were devastated, and evidently tried to give him love, but the damage seems to have been too great. He had a history of violence problems, a fascination with guns and…
Unsupervised Learning: No. 113
This week’s episode of Unsupervised Learning is now available. Subscribe below and get this episode’s podcast and newsletter. This week’s topics: Parkland tampering, Avoid Huawei, Bongo S3, Facebook 2FA Spam, Android Cryptojacking, Spyware Hacking, Password Dating, Technology News, Human News, Trends, Ideas & Analysis, Data & Statistics, Discovery, Recommendations, Aphorism, and more… Listen to this week’s Podcast Read…
Expect Deep Learning to be Used By Schools to Predict Violence
Get ready for Palantir-style, AI-based violence prediction on school campuses. There are far too many situations where it happens and basically everyone knew that person would be the perpetrator. This should be used for social work as well, but the more people who get to use it the more people get the data. If the perpetrator is often…
Information Security Professionals Cannot Be Luddites
I'm starting to realize that many infosec people are luddites rather than technologists.Not a good look for us.We need to be the shepherds, not the crazy people belting out scripture at people on the street.— ᴅᴀɴɪᴇʟ ᴍɪᴇssʟᴇʀ (@DanielMiessler) February 18, 2018 I just posted this on Twitter after being frustrated again by how a lot of my fellow…
Unsupervised Learning: No. 112
This post contains the supplemental content for this week’s episode of Unsupervised Learning. Some people prefer fewer stories in each show while others prefer more, so I’ve solved that problem by keeping the main show tightly curated and making all the extra stories and links available to members here. It’s basically an unabridged version of the newsletter for…
I Grow Tired of Technologists Who Don’t Understand the Internet of Things
Gizmodo just did an article about how silly smart homes are, how broken the tech is, and how it’s all annoying and creepy. This type of journalism seriously annoys me. It’s the equivalent of looking at an R&D lab at CalTech in 1973 and saying, “Wow, computers are stupid.” It’s quite sad to see a tech magazine throwing…
Unsupervised Learning: No. 111
This post contains the supplemental content for this week’s episode of Unsupervised Learning. Some people prefer fewer stories in each show while others prefer more, so I’ve solved that problem by keeping the main show tightly curated and making all the extra stories and links available to members here. It’s basically an unabridged version of the newsletter for…
Why Benedict Evans is Wrong About Voice Interfaces
Worse, even if you do create hundreds or thousands of such queries (which Amazon is trying to do with Alexa Skills), you haven’t solved the problem, since there is no way for the user to know what they can ask, nor remember what skills Alexa does and does not have. The ideal number of skills for such a…
The Future of Attack and Defense is AI
I wrote recently about how AI’s biggest advantage in security—at least in the short term—will come from improving coverage rather than analysis quality. I was talking specifically about things like detection of threats within a SOC, or finding asteroids that might hit earth, or listening for dangerous conversations in millions of phone calls. Basically, any situation where there…
Third-party Questionnaires Are Security Theater
If you’ve been in InfoSec for a while you probably have significant experience with third-party security questionnaires. They’re basically the new firewall. Everyone is asking everyone else if they have one. I’ve been troubled for years by the whole charade, but I just recently put my finger on the reason. Third-party security questionnaires are the equivalent of asking…
The Ability to Fake Voice and Video is About to Change Everything
Most people think the way AI is going to significantly impact society is by taking all our jobs or creating robots that try to kill everyone. But while we focus on all the distant or unlikely impacts of artificial intelligence we’re about to get completely blindsided by a very real and practical one. The ability to imitate anyone’s…
Unsupervised Learning: No. 109
This post contains the supplemental content for this week’s episode of Unsupervised Learning. Some people prefer fewer stories in each show while others prefer more, so I’ve solved that problem by keeping the main show tightly curated and making all the extra stories and links available to members here. It’s basically an unabridged version of the newsletter for…