Category: Cyber Security

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Did Sundar Pichai lie to Congress, or just use weasel words?

So I’ve been thinking about this for a while now. Operation Aurora was an attack on Google and a number of other companies and it is believed that it was a Chinese state sponsored attack. This was publicly disclosed by Google on January 12, 2010.

If we look at a basic time line
Sundar Pichai started at Google in 2004.

Listen to Sundar Pichai’s comment when asked by Congress (around or on, July 30 2020).

“Do you believe that the Chinese government steals technology from US companies”?

His response…
“I have no first hand knowledge of information stolen from Google”.

That blog post with the disclosure was written on January 12, 2010. As a tech person I remember hearing about it – it was all over the place, surely he read this as well?

If we look at the original disclosure from Google we find the words
“we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google” (bold text by me).

On a personal level I’m sort of amazed that he got away with this answer (you know CEO of Google and all that) but may be the politicians should have been more specific, better informed, or may be Mr Pichai … {feel free to fill in this blank}?

So there you have it – what do you think
Did Sundar Pichai lie to Congress, or just use weasel words?

Related links
Wikipedia article
Sundar Pichai https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundar_Pichai

Original Google Disclouser
https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china.html

Operation Aurora
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Aurora

Tech giants face grilling by Congress | ABC News
https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china.html

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Algorithms

Algorithms… are in a nutshell sets of rules. Effectively they can be boiled down into lines of code. But they are also the stuff that the corporate machines of social media use to spew information at you.

I’m often stunned by the ugliness of Facebook and YouTube. You click on one BS link and before you know it, your hounded by gun rights, dysfunctional US shock jocks, and adult continence products.

Is this about advertising? Is this about politics? Is this about you? The social media companies don’t want you to know what they are doing, It’s all secrete in confidence data. The Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal was one example of online social manipulation (that we know of).

But those streams of data are the by-product of a relational database and the aforementioned algorithms, that as a rule, the user has very little control or no ability to navigate, let alone curate.

Although I have found one exception, it is the online visual bookmarking tool Pinterest.

I found that I could be surrounded with a visual gentle beauty that is somehow rather comforting. For me, It’s a world of pussycats, French apartments, Computer ephemera, people I find interesting, book shops, cheese, wine, etc.

It’s one of the few online examples of something that the user has some control over. It helps me to explore the net and topics I’m interested in and although I do get some advertising – it’s not gut-wrenchingly intrusive.

It’s a great tool to create Pinboards / Mood boards – or just as a visual research tool.

 

 

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Another Prime A HOle!

Gee 34.142.211.105 thanks for the near 1000 attempts to log on to my wordpress site! Guess you forgot your password! Great…. Nice try with the host name to!

105.211.142.34.bc.googleusercontent.com –

I totly beleive google has nothing better to do than hassel my wordpress install! LOL

Some people are just A holes. Your one of them!

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Cats and AI

So back in 2019 Facebook turned off Facial recognition due to privacy concerns. Today I found that a similar recognition style software is lurking in a number of other products, google photos for example came up with the following when I searched for “cat” (Scroll down for the results).

As you can see the thing picked up all sorts of stuff – including cushion artwork, my bad, very bad pictures of a cat’s bum,  graffiti art of cats not to mention my rather average pen and ink work.

Apple’s photo application also does something similar, (Although I know that they have had facial recognition for a number of years running in the photo’s app) you also have to tell it who you are looking at (so it’s not quite as bad as FB was).

I’m not sure how I feel about this. On one level it’s amazing, on another level it’s yet another thing that creeps me out about AI. All that data is sitting there, how is it being or how has it been used? Stay safe.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-11-02/facebook-to-shut-down-use-of-facial-recognition-technology