Unsupervised Learning: No. 104

This is episode No. 104 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: NiceHash hacked, Apple bugs, Stealing Cars via Relay, Crypto Collusion, technologgy news, human news, discovery, notes, recommendations, and the aphorism of the week…

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Security newsSomeone just stole $70 million from NiceHash, a crypto mining company. Know this: if you have cryptocurrency, you need to take its protection very seriously. And the more visible you are about having it, the higher your risk.Apple fixed two major bugs recently—one that allowed you to log in as root to Macs without a password, and an undisclosed bug in HomeKit devices.Relay systems are being used to steal high-end cars. You basically get the key to activate, and then you rebroadcast that signal to the car so it thinks the key is present.When small numbers of people control significant amounts of a cryptocurrency, there's significant risk of manipulation. Technology newsAmazon announced tons of stuff at their re:Invent conference, including EKS which is basically an Amazon implementation of Kubernetes. Cloud9 is a new web-based IDE. Rekognition is an AI service that identifies distinct people in images and video. Translate is a language translation service that uses machine and deep learning at scale and for low cost. GuardDuty is a managed threat detection service that continuously monitors for unauthorized activity in your environment. Comprehend is a service that pulls insights from text. Fargate, which allows you to launch containers without managing the servers that host them. They also released 6 new products around IoT security, including many focused on edge devices. There were many more announcements, but these are the ones that glimmered for me.Steam has dropped Bitcoin as a payment option because it's too volatile. Silicon Valley is paying models to show up to tech parties and talk to the men. Sigh.Human news Farmers are committing suicide at over twice the rate of veterans.After 37 years, Voyager fired up its trajectory thrusters at the command of the Voyager team on Earth. It took the commands almost 20 hours to reach Voyager because it's around 21 billion kilometers away (actually in interstellar space). I am blown away that this works but I can't get my phone to play songs correctly in my car over bluetooth. A Chinese paleontologist found a small dinosaur tail trapped in amber in Myanmar. The tail was extremely well preserved and shows intact feathers, adding to the evidence that many dinosaurs had feathers like modern birds.Google has released an AI tool that looks at your genome and recommends customized therapies.CVS bought Aetna, which I hope will bring an improvement in the availability of decent healthcare. I'm quite happy to see Amazon, Walmart, Walgreens, and CVS compete to have the best and most available healthcare in the country by having it available both online and multiple places around town. Cheap drugs too. Once again, Amazon is forcing good things to happen.IdeasTechnical Professions Progress From Magical to Boring. And InfoSec is in the middle of the transition right now.Responsible Disclosure? How About Responsible Behavior? My essay on how to simplify the disclosure debate by stepping out of the security industry.Facebook is the opposite of mindfulness. I should write an essay about it, but the sentence by itself pretty much covers it.I'm going to write another essay about this at some point, but I've sensed a lot of unhealthy groupthink on the net neutrality issue. Ben Thompson's argument was quite good for why he's supporting the FCC's decision. Basically, the existing law and net neutrality are not the same thing. So it's possible to be for net neutrality and for the repeal. That's one confusion. The other one is around the harm that can be caused by imprecise and overreaching regulations. Not many people know that the financial crisis in 2008 was largely caused by regulation. Not just removing controls on shady practices, but actually forcing banks to make bad deals to help poor people. That legislation, from Clinton and Bush, started the entire mess. It's another example of where you can have good ideas turn into bad legislation, but where the negative externality might not manifest for quite some time, and might not be easy to link to the regulation. Short version: the net neutrality issue is not as simple as most think it is.Measuring HappinessDiscoveryI made a graphic that shows the differences and relationship between Artificial Intelligence and the different types of Machine Learning.NIST has released a new draft of their Cybersecurity Framework.What I Learned From Doing 1,000 Code ReviewsAttributes of the best interviewers, from interviewing.io.In Safari, you can type Shift-⌘-\ to search your open tabs.How to send email like a CEO.The 2017 Information Is Beautiful Data Visualization WinnersA campaign cybersecurity playbook (any party).The Thrive QuestionnairePacketTotal — Free, high-quality .pcap analysis. Note: You're sending your network traffic to the internet.DNSLeakTest tests your DNS for leaks (good name)Ten Year Futures, by Benedict Evans.A History of Big Data in Security, by Rafael Marty.Wired's Guide to Digital Security. This one is cool because it has you pick your threat profile.NotesIf you can, do me a favor and give me a great rating rate the show on iTunes. It's technically for the podcast, but it's the same content since this newsletter is the show notes. Thank you!RecommendationsUpdate your Macs, and make sure everyone around you does as well.If you have Bitcoin, or any other type of cryptocurrency, make sure you have it secured. There are groups of thieves going around breaking into peoples' digital lives just to steal the stuff, and they're quite good at it.Aphorism“If you have a bowl of apples and you eat the best ones, you only have the best ones left.” ~ Shelly Horton

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