Behind the ‘business’ of hacking

Posted by & filed under Cyber Security, Cyberattack.

Group of people on computers around a table at work

Real life is rarely as exciting or fraught with complications as the movies, except when it comes to businesses under attack. Cybercriminals around the world take hacking to the next level — stealing passwords, scraping credit card numbers and attacking the Internet of Things. That’s where “ethical hackers” like Sherri Davidoff come in, finding weaknesses and helping businesses protect themselves and their communities.

Davidoff is a cybersecurity and digital forensics expert and CEO of LMG Security and BrightWise Inc. She has worked with businesses and organizations for several years, evaluating security systems and data breach responses. A

Source: National Retail Federation

Date: May 16th, 2019

Link:
https://nrf.com/blog/behind-business-hacking

Discussion

  1. The hackers “kept to normal U.S. business schedules. ” Why is this an important part of criminal hacking?
  2. Then they sent me a fake invoice that said, “Hey, can you send our payment to this other place?”  How could you train users to not be conned by this?

Facebook ‘auto-generated’ extremist video

Posted by & filed under Facebook.

Facebook logo

Facebook has been accused of “auto-generating” extremist content, including a celebratory jihadist video and a business page for al-Qaeda.

The material was uncovered by an anonymous whistleblower who filed an official complaint to US regulators.

Similar content for self-identified Nazis and white supremacist groups was also found online.

Facebook said it had got better at deleting extreme content but its systems were not perfect.

Source: BBC Technology News

Date: May 11th, 2019

Link:
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-48217827

Discussion

  1. Facebook says that its “systems are not perfect”, but how can it be making such mistakes?
  2. What steps could you make to improve the Facebook systems?

Would you buy shares in Uber?

Posted by & filed under Uber.

Uber sign on car


For sale: shares in a company that has already burned through $27bn (£20.7bn; €24bn) in cash, will burn through tens of billions more of its new shareholders’ money, has never made a profit and won’t for many years – if ever.

Sounds too bad to be true, but that is precisely what is on offer when Uber shares start trading today.

It seems impossible to imagine why anyone would want to buy them, and yet market watchers expect there to be no shortage of people queuing up to buy a slice of a company whose name has become a recognised noun in dozens of languages around the world.

Source: BBC Technology News

Date: May 11th, 2019

Link:
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-48228812

Discussion

  1. What are some points to be made for BUYING shares in Uber?
  2. What are some points to be made for NOT BUYING shares in Uber?

CATCH THE BUZZ – A NEW APP LISTENS TO THE PROBLEMS OF BEES. MATCHING HONEY BEE NOISES TO THEIR AILMENTS.

Posted by & filed under AI/Artificial Intelligence, App Economy.

YOU might expect to hear an angry buzzing when honeybees have been disturbed. But some apiarists reckon they can also deduce the condition of their bees from the sounds they make. A steady hum could be the sign of a contented hive; a change in tone might indicate that the bees are about to swarm. That intuition is about to be put to the test. Soon, beekeepers will be able to try to find out what is troubling a colony by listening to the buzz using a smartphone app.   

The app, which is in the final stages of testing, has been developed by Jerry Bromenshenk and a group of fellow bee experts at the University of Montana. It uses a form of artificial intelligence to analyse the sound that bees are making in order to deduce whether they are suffering from a number of maladies.

Source: Bee Culture Magazine

Date: May 3rd, 2019

Link:
https://www.beeculture.com/catch-the-buzz-a-new-app-listens-to-the-problems-of-bees-matching-honey-bee-noises-to-their-ailments/

Discusssion

(Note: David Firth, the author of this blog, is the business manager and co-developer of the Bee Health Guru app

  1. What are some of the issues of pushing a smartphone technology app on to beekeepers?
  2. What are some other possible applications of this app?

Apple’s iPhone sales fall 17% from prior year

Posted by & filed under Apple.

At one time, the staggering success of the iPhone helped catapult Apple to become the world’s most valuable company. Now, its lackluster smartphone sales are dragging down Apple’s business.Apple (AAPL) said Tuesday that its revenue for the first three months of 2019 declined 5% from the year prior to $58 billion as it grappled with sluggish smartphone demand. iPhone sales for the period fell 17% from the year prior.For years, Apple’s iPhone business appeared to defy gravity as the company managed to sell more devices and gradually charge more for them. But that narrative was shattered at the beginning of this year when the company warned investors that iPhone sales had taken a hit from a slowdown in China amid an ongoing trade war.

Source: CNN Technology News

Date: May 3rd, 2019

Link:
https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/30/tech/apple-q2-earnings/index.html

Discussion

  1. Does it matter that iPhone sales are slowing down?
  2. What was last genuinely innovative thing Apple came up with?

Uber aims for $90bn stock market debut

Posted by & filed under Payment Technology, Uber.

Uber office sign

Uber has revealed that it is seeking a valuation of $90bn (£70bn) in its much anticipated stock market flotation.

The taxi-app firm has said that its shares will be priced at between $44 and $50 each, with the share issue set to raise about $10bn.

As part of the offer it will sell $500m worth of shares to payment giant, PayPal.

Uber warned earlier this month that it may never make a profit.

The IPO price values the company below the $100bn some had expected it to aim for.

As well as the original “ride-hailing” business, Uber is developing driverless cars, and has a food delivery business, Uber Eats.

Source: BBC Technology News

Date: April 26th, 2019

Link:
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-48063637

Discussion

  1. Why is Paypal buying half-a-billion dollars of Uber stock? What’s in it for PayPal?
  2. Why would anyone buy IPO stock in a company that is losing $1bn a quarter?

Could a computer ever create better art than a human?

Posted by & filed under AI/Artificial Intelligence.

AI art


Last year a portrait of Edmond Belamy sold for $432,000 (£337,000).

A bit steep, you might think, for a picture of someone you’ve never heard of. And you won’t have heard of the artist either, as the picture was created by an algorithm drawing on a data set of 15,000 portraits painted between the 14th and 20th Centuries.

And to be honest, it’s a bit rubbish.

The sale, which astonished auction house Christie’s, raised many important questions. Can a computer, devoid of human emotion, ever be truly creative? Is this portrait really art? Does any of that matter if people are prepared to pay for it?

And as artificial intelligence evolves and eventually perhaps reaches or surpasses human level intelligence, what will this mean for human artists and the creative industries in general?

Source: BBC Technology News

Date: April 26th, 2019

Link:
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-47700701

Discussion

  1. “In 2017, one of DeepMind’s AI programmes beat the world’s number one player of Go, an ancient and highly complex Chinese board game, after apparently mastering creative new moves and innovative strategies within days.
    Google would say that was creativity – new ways of finding solutions that it was not taught.” What do you think counts as creativity?

2. Does creativity have to solely come from humans to actually be creativity?

Will AI kill developing world growth?

Posted by & filed under AI/Artificial Intelligence, Career.

A call centre

I am becoming increasingly concerned that AI will, in fact, block the traditional growth path by replacing low-wage jobs with robots.

As Kai-Fu Lee, a Beijing-based venture capitalist who invests in artificial intelligence, tells us, AI is potentially the most revolutionary technology to emerge this century. It is also, along with the associated technologies of machine learning and robotics, advancing at breakneck speed.

Already AI has the capacity to replace many work tasks that are rules-based and repetitive, and which do not require great dexterity or empathy.

In developed economies, for instance, robots have replaced well over half of the jobs in the car and related industries in recent decades.

Source: BBC News

Date: April 19th, 2019

Link:
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-47852589

Discussion:
1) AI has the capacity to replace many work tasks that are rules-based and repetitive, and which do not require great dexterity or empathy. ” What topics have you covered so far in your business school courses that almost exactly match this statement?
2) What are you doing to better understand how AI works?

” AI has the capacity to replace many work tasks that are rules-based and repetitive, and which do not require great dexterity or empathy. ” What topics have you covered so far in your business school courses that almost exactly match this statement?

Facebook copied email contacts of 1.5 million users

Posted by & filed under Facebook.

Man looking at Facebook

Facebook “unintentionally” uploaded the email contacts of more than 1.5 million users without asking permission to do so, the social network has admitted.

The data harvesting happened via a system used to verify the identity of new members,

Facebook asked new users to supply the password for their email account, and took a copy of their contacts.

Facebook said it had now changed the way it handled new users to stop contacts being uploaded.

Source: BBC News
Date: April 19th, 2019
Link: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-47974574

Discussion

  1. How likely is it that no one immediately noticed that the entire contact lists of 1.5 million people suddenly appeared in a database at Facebook? (If each person only had 100 contacts that would be 150 million entries in a database)
  2. What does it say about Facebook’s software testing procedures that this “error” existed?

Amazon reportedly employs thousands of people to listen to your Alexa conversations

Posted by & filed under Amazon, Civil Liberties, Privacy.

Image result for amazon alexa

Not only is Alexa listening when you speak to an Echo smart speaker, an Amazon employee is potentially listening, too.Amazon (AMZN) employs a global team that transcribes the voice commands captured after the wake word is detected and feeds them back into the software to help improve Alexa’s grasp of human speech so it can respond more efficiently in the future.

Amazon reportedly employs thousands of full-time workers and contractors in several countries, including the United States, Costa Rica and Romania, to listen to as many as 1,000 audio clips in shifts that last up to nine hours. The audio clips they listen to were described as “mundane” and even sometimes “possibly criminal,” including listening to a potential sexual assault.

Source: CNN Technology News

Date: April 12th, 2019

Link (includes video):
https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/11/tech/amazon-alexa-listening/index.html

Discussion

  1. If the audio clips don’t come with a name and address, is this even a privacy issue?
  2. Why does Amazon need to have humans listen to what Alexa is hearing?