- Unsupervised Learning
- Posts
- Unsupervised Learning No. 242
MEMBER EDITION | EP. 242 | August 17, 2020
Clearview AI ICE, NSA/FBI Fancy Bear Malware, Indian Health Card, Trump TikTok 90 Days, Startups Dying, Uber/Lyft vs. Courts, Android Earthquakes, Technology News, Human News, Ideas Trends & Analysis, Discovery, Recommendations, and the Weekly Aphorism…
SECURITY NEWS
Clearview AI has a new contract with ICE to provide licenses for a division that focuses on cross-border criminal activity. More
The NSA and FBI have jointly released information on new Linux malware called Drovorub, produced by the Russian group called Fancy Bear. Also known as APT28, this is the same group that targeted the 2016 elections, but they haven't seen a connection there yet. The malware is evidently good at hiding, and they're concerned mostly because Linux is used so much within DoD and other sensitive agencies. I love this trend of our agencies cooperating to continuously out and burn foreign malware. More
India is planning a new health initiative that gives every Indian a HealthID Card, that keeps all their health data in one place. Definitely ambitious, but I worry about the protection of that backend database. It's not a question of whether it gets compromised; it's a question of when. More
Vulnerabilities:
15 new security patches for SAP, including a CVSS 9 XSS in NetWeaver. More
Citrix has new critical vulns in its Endpoint Management system. More
Over 30 vulnerabilities have been found in common CMS applications, like SharePoint and Confluence. The research was done by my friend Alvaro Muñoz at Github and Oleksandr Mirosh of Microfocus Fortify. More
If you're one of the people still running vBulletin, you need to patch this patch that was previously patched. It's for an 0-day that bypasses auth and lets you run code. More
Acrobat and Reader have new flaws, 11 of which are critical. More
Tripwire's August Patch Tuesday Analysis More
Companies:
Adaptive Shield is an Israeli startup focused on securing SaaS applications, and they just raised $4 million. They work by constantly monitoring an application's security settings and letting you know if they break policy. More
TECHNOLOGY NEWS
Trump has given ByteDance 90 days to either sell its US business to a US company or shut it down. More
Many startups seem to be bouncing back from the lockdown faster than most expected. A big part of the recovery has come from the pivot to doing business online. More
Yelp has seemingly contradictory data, however, showing that more than 80,000 small businesses permanently closed between March 1st and July 25th. And the American Bankruptcy Institute says they think the 2020 total for bankruptcies could be up 36% from last year. More
California said Uber and Lyft need to classify their drivers as employees, and both companies said that if that happens they'll have to shut down for an unspecified amount of time. More
Amazon is about to incorporate podcasts into Amazon music and Audible. More
Google is turning Android phones into a global earthquake sensor network. This is the kind of stuff that Google is great at. More
The US has opened a major radio band up for use by 5G providers, which will help speed the rollout in America. More
Mozilla is laying off around a third of its staff, and I'm seriously worried for Firefox. I mean I was already worried about because they went from owning the entire space to having 8% of the market. Chrome has won the time being, sitting at 70%. More
Neural Love is a company that provides AI enhancements of video footage, adding fixes, color, resolution, and increased framerate. More
Companies:
HUMAN NEWS
Nearly 41% of 5,412 people who responded to a late-June survey reported having at least one mental or behavioral health condition, which is 3-4 times higher than this time last year. Almost 11% of US adults said they'd seriously contemplated suicide in the last 30 days. 11%. And it's even worse for people 18-24 years old. 25% of that age group—so a quarter of them—said they had considered suicide in that same period. More
Israel signed a historic peace deal with the UAE, which includes embassies, direct flights, and many other indicators of strong relations. I'm rather surprised actually, and ignorantly optimistic. More
The UK's economy shrank 20% compared to the first three months of 2020, and is officially in recession for the first time in 11 years. More
Russia seems so desperate for an international PR win that they're skipping their phase III trial for their Sputnik V COVID-19 vaccine and staring with rollout to their population. Putin says one of his daughters already got the vaccine, and that millions in Russia will get it this month. More
Tech workers are abandoning San Francisco in large numbers. Homes for sale have basically doubled year over year. More
IDEAS, TRENDS, & ANALYSIS
It appears that Instagram and similar tech has killed the fashion industry, or, specifically, the idea of fashion seasons and physical meetups for releases. This has of course been exacerbated and accelerated by the COVID lockdown. More
The Three Bay Areas — A remarkably accurate description of the different social classes in the SF Bay Area. More
If it's a Nice Problem to Have, Don't Solve it Now More
UPDATES
Deep Diving Into Audio: So I just got completely silly with headphone audio. I went with the Focal Utopia headphones paired with the Focal Arche DAC/AMP, which, before discounts, was around $7,000. I figured I'd be at my desk for a very long time in the next many months, or even years, so I might as well dial up my audio experience to 11. I've done similar stuff with my microphone, my monitors, my speakers, etc. Basically anything sight, sound, comfort related. Although I've not yet installed my new bidet toilet seat! So the audio thing has been interesting. I re-learned what an amp actually does at the tube and transistor level, and a ton of audiophile basics via various YouTubers. I think that's as far as I want to go, however, because that is a black hole of wallet and attention. For speakers, I have the Bowers & Wilkins Foundation Series, which are decent for my tiny apartment, and this headphone setup is top of the line unless I go for the most expensive in the world. Those are the H1 by Sennheiser, and they're $50,000. No thanks, Satan. Right now I'm having fun listening to high-quality recordings of stuff I already love, and discovering new music that's famous for unbelievable recording quality. My most interesting find so far has been Yosi Horikawa, who creates these unbelievable soundscapes. And as I write this I'm listening to FLAC EDM out of Europe via Roon. If any of you are audiophiles out there, hit me up. I'm a noob but I'm having fun!
DISCOVERY
The OURA health-tracking ring continues to get great press. I still wear mine after having it for months, which is a strong endorsement by itself. The biggest thing for me right now is I can track my sleep with it, while my watch is charging. And I like the app as well, although I view all data within my mobile OS's built-in apps. More
If Your Email is Hacked, Everything Is More
Thoughts on how to scope webapp pentests. More
This guy takes stock ticker graphs and turns them into paintings. I kind of want one, but I don't really care about any stock enough to memorialize it in that way. A company maybe, but not its stock price. More
Learning Python for Data Science via Jupyter Notebooks More
I want to have an AWS region where everything breaks with high frequency. EC2 networks dropping packets, EBS volumes hanging and failing, entire AZs dropping offline, etc. If it breaks 0.001% of the time in us-east-1, I want it to break 1% of the time in us-fail-1. #awswishlist More
Sudowrite — Use AI to generate realistic characters for your fiction. More
RECOMMENDATIONS
In Praise of Idleness, by Bertrand Russell, was one of the essays that changed me the most when I read it. This is a great article on it and its ideas. More
APHORISMS
“Only in the agony of parting do we look into the depths of love.”
~ George Eliot
Thank you so much for being a supporter of my work. It's a true honor to be worthy of your patronage.
