Unsupervised Learning: No. 151

Security News? We’re preparing to release the 2018 version of the OWASP IoT Top 10, and we would love your feedback! Updated to include a feedback form. Form Link? Check your Facebook account to see if it was hacked. LinkThe company that owns Fortnite has purchased a company focused on stopping cheaters. LinkA government report has shown that it’s easy to hack a number of Pentagon weapon systems. I’d be more surprised if they were hard to hack, honestly. Easy to hack is the default for any group as large as the military industrial complex. Still depressing though. LinkA collection of State Attorneys General have petitioned the FCC to let local carriers be more aggressive with blocking “neighborhood” call spam. LinkLaw enforcement is being told not to look at mobile phones because they might have face identification enabled, and they don’t want to reduce their number of guessing attempts or get locked out. LinkA Russian group has filmed a video of a woman pouring bleach on someone manspreading on a train, and they tried to pass it off as real but got discovered. Russian propaganda like this is all over the place, designed to make American’s hate each other. And it’s working. LinkMany are confused by America’s unwavering support for Saudi Arabia, but I don’t see the mystery. Regardless of the bad that they do, and the ways they supply and fund our enemies around the world, they are also—along with Israel—the most powerful counterbalance against Iran in the region. For that reason alone we would be tied to them, but I’m sure there are many other reasons as well. Few things have as much explanatory power as ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’. LinkAdvisories: Google+, FacebookTechnology NewsThese glasses block all screens from view while you’re wearing them. LinkGoogle’s new Call Screen feature looks to massively reduce spam calls by having an AI assistant answer all calls for you and then transcribe what is said in real-time so you can decide to answer or mark the call as spam. LinkGoogle might have benefited greatly from GDPR. With fewer trackers out there, they get more of the pie. Like they needed more pie. LinkAxon’s (formerly Taser) new bodycams can livestream and detect gunshots. LinkThis camera is so fast that it imaged a laser moving through a beamsplitter in slow motion. LinkGoogle is releasing cloud storage that by default lives in two geographic regions to enhance redundancy. LinkFacebook made a video camera that I won’t be buying. I’d rather have a MySpaceCam bankrolled by Satan. LinkAlexa is patenting technology to detect when you’re sick or depressed, so it can send you medication. LinkWe already knew this, but Python is becoming the most popular programming language in the world. LinkHuman NewsThe stock market boom is being driven by consumerism. It’s like cyanide as an antidote to arsenic. LinkA minimum wage worker needs to work 2.5 full-time jobs to afford a one-bedroom apartment in the US. LinkMillions of workers believe they are bound by contracts that either don’t exist or are seldom enforced. LinkTech workers are increasingly asking what they’re building, and why. LinkIdeas, Trends, & AnalysisA discussion into why so many fantasy series’ are focused on academic learning institutions. LinkA ton of workers at Marriott are striking right now, and the pain they’re feeling makes it understandable. I was at AppSec USA and saw them downtown. What’s so remarkable about this is that the general public, and the media, don’t seem to understand how bad this problem actually is. The problem isn’t the companies: the problem is that companies aren’t there to provide jobs. It’s not their purpose. If they could deliver all their services with just one person—the CEO—they would. And it would be ok for them to do so. And if a company has always had 100 employees, but they find a way to do their work with 10 employees instead, that’s not their fault. Because it’s nobody’s fault. Nobody actually owes anyone a job. That’s what people don’t understand. Hell, this didn’t even sink in for me until like 10 years ago. It blew me away, and then it scared the crap out of me. Basically, we’re looking at a world where the only reason people have money to support their families is that companies haven’t yet figured out how to automate their employees’ jobs. And they’re investing millions upon millions of dollars to do exactly that. Where does the anger belong? Who are we supposed to be mad at? The companies? No. The government? No. The name of this pain is technological progress. We need to rapidly prepare for a world where most people working are no longer useful. As Harari calls it, The Useless Class. There is no greater threat right now to the American way of life, or to societal stability, than this. It’s something we can deal with, if we start thinking about it now, and if it happens slowly enough. But I’m worried that people aren’t even seeing the actual problem. They blame the companies for not providing jobs, when that’s not what they’re for. Nobody in the country has a responsibility to provide jobs. It’s insane when you think about it. Human workers were only needed because technology wasn’t advanced enough, and that’s going away soon. It’s seriously time to get ready for how this will impact us. And we’re still in the denial phase.If anything needs a national holiday in a democratic country, it’s Voting Day. LinkDiscoveryA visual explainer for every byte of a TLS connection. LinkData Breach Index seems to be a pretty interesting collection of breach data statistics and trends. LinkThis AI can create high-quality anime characters. LinkSteven Pinker’s list of recommended books. LinkThe Top 10 Web Hacking Techniques of 2017 LinkCERT’s list of publically available tool seen in cyberattacks. LinkJoinCap — Merge pcaps together. LinkNotesCurrently Reading: Algorithms to Live By, The Blade Itself, Soul of a MachineRecently Finished: iGen, Brave New World, Creative Selection, The Plot to Destroy Democracy, The Coddling of the American Mind, Just Purchased: Elements of a LifeI’m starting to enjoy The Blade Itself, finally. Took a long time to get into. I’m like hours and hours into it, and it’s just now starting to come together. I’m having a lot of trouble reading fiction because I feel like all the time I do it could be spent learning something. Currently about 1/4 into the second book in the trilogy.The Plot to Destroy Democracy was excellent. It’s about how Russia—and Putin specifically—are working to build a new white, Christian world leadership structure, lead by Russia. He talks about how Russia penetrated the NRA and how he’s helping white Christian governments all over the world to further the overall plan. Read it like a spy novel that’s true. It has a bit of left bias in there, but it’s easy to look past it since it’s coming from a top-tier intelligence official, and because all the solutions are very right leaning.iGen was an interesting look at today’s youth.Algorithms to Live By is just spectacular. It’s basically taking tons of lessons from computer science and showing how you can apply them to one’s life to improve how they make decisions. This is a must-read.RecommendationsIf everyone loves you and nobody dislikes you, you’re probably being too cautious and passive in life. If everyone dislikes you, you probably need to make changes. Ideally, you’d have a large group of people that love you and respect you, and a small group of haters. As long as most people like you, you should treat haters as a badge.Aphorism“The more you get paid, the less likely turning something off and back on again will resolve the issue”.~ Huxley00 

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