Category Archives: Computers

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Patient monitors altered, drug dispensary popped in colossal hospital hack • The Register

“The findings show an industry in turmoil: lack of executive support; insufficient talent; improper implementations of technology; outdated understanding of adversaries; lack of leadership, and a misguided reliance upon compliance,” the team said.

“[It] illustrates our greatest fear: patient health remains extremely vulnerable. One overarching finding of our research is that the industry focuses almost exclusively on the protection of patient health records, and rarely addresses threats to or the protection of patient health from a cyber threat perspective.”

Hospital information security is “drastically” underfunded, training flawed at all levels, networks are insecure, and policy and audits largely absent and at best flawed when they do exist.

Source: Patient monitors altered, drug dispensary popped in colossal hospital hack • The Register

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Is zero-effort computer security a dream? – Help Net Security

In the ZEBRA system, every user is required to wear a Bluetooth-enabled bracelet, similar to a Fitbit, and the system knows who is wearing which bracelet. When the user logs into a device the first time, the system establishes a secure connection to the bracelet. While the user interacts with the device, the bracelet will send the measurements generated by the interactions over to the device. The device then uses a machine learning classifier to map those actions into a sequence of predicted interactions.

Source: Is zero-effort computer security a dream? – Help Net Security

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Hey developer! DevOps doesn’t mean what you think it does

DevOps simply shouldn’t be a term abused by developers who want to make the direct push to production. It’s well on its way to no longer holding any real meaning, rather than serving as the force for good that we need for the database. In an effort to salvage DevOps’ significance, I’m willing to challenge every developer wanting production access “because it’s DevOps.” This DevOps hollowness epidemic has to stop, lest we provide a severe disservice to our customers and cost ourselves our jobs.

Oh and hey developer, next time you ask about this, I’m making you read the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and telling the CFO.

TL;DR: Dropping your hundreds of SQL scripts in a directory and having the DBA team run them is not DevOps. It’s you being lazy.

Source: Hey developer! DevOps doesn’t mean what you think it does

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Stupid Shit No One Needs & Terrible Ideas Hackathon

I’ve always found the idea behind corporate hackathons to be questionable, but this is a hackathon I can get behind.

Some of my favorites:

“Unfriend the Poors by JB Rubinovitz is a free service that helps you ferret out and then unfriend your poor friends on Facebook.”

3D Cheese Printer. “Hightech 3D cheese prints, by Tyler Erdman, Morgan Steward, David Leach, Brian Wu, Andy Doro and Dano Wall.”

“Mansplain It To Me recreates the experience of asking a question and getting the response from a man who talks to you as though you are a less capable human being. By Cassie Tarakajian and Seth Kranzler.”

“iPad On A Face by Cheryl Wu is a telepresence robot, except it’s a human with an iPad on his or her face.”

Source: Stupid Shit No One Needs & Terrible Ideas Hackathon

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Why sarcasm baffles AIs

A new paper from researchers in India and Australia highlights one of the strangest and ironically most humorous facets of the problems in machine learning – humour.

Automatic Sarcasm Detection: A Survey [PDF] outlines ten years of research efforts from groups interested in detecting sarcasm in online sources. The problem is not an abstract one, nor does it centre around the need for computers to entertain or amuse humans, but rather the need to recognise that sarcasm in online comments, tweets and other internet material should not be interpreted as sincere opinion.

The need applies both in order for AIs to accurately assess archive material or interpret existing datasets, and in the field of sentiment analysis, where a neural network or other model of AI seeks to interpret data based on publicly posted web material.

Source: Why sarcasm baffles AIs

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Errata Security: Hackers aren’t smart — people are stupid

The top three hacking problems for the last 10 years are “phishing”, “password reuse”, and “SQL injection”. These problems are extremely simple, as measured by the fact that teenagers are able to exploit them. Yet they persist because, unless someone is interested in hacking, they are unable to learn them. They ignore important details. They fail at grasping the core concept.

Source: Errata Security: Hackers aren’t smart — people are stupid

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The chips are down for Moore’s law : Nature News & Comment

I think it’s important to remember Ray Kurzweil’s observation that Moore’s Law is simply the most recent in a string of such “laws,” all of which can be summed up as the Law of Accelerating Returns.

The semiconductor industry will soon abandon its pursuit of Moore’s law. Now things could get a lot more interesting.

Source: The chips are down for Moore’s law : Nature News & Comment

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Penn professor’s computer algorithm could fight terrorism while protecting privacy

Professor Michael Kearns, national center chair in the Department of Computer and Information Science, just published a paper on a computer algorithm that can use the structure of social networks to target certain individuals or groups — without compromising the privacy of people who are not involved. The algorithm would come with many applications, but Kearns is currently most interested in potential for counterterrorism.

“It’s an algorithm to use the social network to guide the search for some targeted subpopulation, which in the case of the NSA you can think of as some group of terrorists or other bad actors,” Kearns said.

If created, this algorithm could have major implications for the political scene, particularly after former CIA member Edward Snowden’s revelations of the information that the government has kept secret from the public. The algorithm is possibly the only solution developed so far to find a middle ground between national security and personal security.

Source: The Daily Pennsylvanian – | Penn professor’s computer algorithm could fight terrorism while protecting privacy

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Apple takes its eye off the ball: Why Apple fans are really coming to hate Apple software – LA Times

I hate to add my voice to the chorus, but this has been my experience as well.  I still love Apple hardware, but the software has gotten progressively worse over the last few years.

The last few weeks have seen an explosion of discontent with the quality of the core apps of Apple’s iPhones, iPads and Mac computers — not only its OS X and iOS operating systems, but programs and services such as iTunes, Music, iCloud and Photos. Not only do the programs work poorly for many users, but they don’t link Apple devices together as reliably as they should. These complaints aren’t coming merely from users but several widely followed tech commentators who used to fit reliably in the category of Apple fans.

Source: Apple takes its eye off the ball: Why Apple fans are really coming to hate Apple software – LA Times

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Energy-friendly chip can perform powerful artificial-intelligence tasks | MIT News

A few years back, I remember reading a prediction that, within a decade, we’d have the equivalent of IBM’s Watson A.I. on our smartphones.  This could put us one step closer to that reality.

At the International Solid State Circuits Conference in San Francisco this week, MIT researchers presented a new chip designed specifically to implement neural networks. It is 10 times as efficient as a mobile GPU, so it could enable mobile devices to run powerful artificial-intelligence algorithms locally, rather than uploading data to the Internet for processing.

Source: Energy-friendly chip can perform powerful artificial-intelligence tasks | MIT News