Showing 1 - 10 of 11
The new normal of AI fakes
Life, James Hein, Published on 11/10/2023
» Following on from my last article, consider the following scenario. You've grabbed enough clear speech of someone to make a good AI model of them. You write up some text, pass it through the model and verify that the result sounds exactly the same as that individual. This is a little different from the previous example because it's a text to speech model, but essentially the same as using one voice to change to another. You now take a speech or interview from that person, change one word that will essentially change the context, and process this.
Protect yourself when online
Life, James Hein, Published on 03/08/2022
» A friend of mine, let's call him Dave, wrote to me recently about identity theft. He told me that all of his identifying information like phone numbers, email addresses, old passwords and his usual security questions, were all available on the dark web. He also had a number of notifications of personal information breaches that resulted in fraudulent charges, the need to replace credit cards and attempts to set up fake bank accounts in his name. The latter is used if a hacker is planning to get into your other accounts so they can transfer funds to themselves under your name.
Chinese tech companies are at it again
Life, James Hein, Published on 12/05/2021
» A reminder on the importance of both scalable systems and load testing. The recent Philippines' attempt to expand its national ID programme had a number of issues when they introduced a two-factor authentication system. PhilSys, as it is known, started out just fine when registrations began in 2020, when paper forms were still used. This in itself was a little strange as the purpose of the new system was to do away with the need to present physical documents when interacting with government agencies. PhilSys the digital ID system was marketed as such and promised transformation and other buzzwords including easier opening of bank accounts. All of this would also help everyone involved during Covid times. After 28 million paper applications, the digital system was turned on and in the first hour 40,000 people tried to register. The system promptly fell over due to the load and inability to scale quickly. Most IT people will admit to a similar experience in their past, but by 2021 there are surely enough historical examples of what will happen if you don't do sufficient load testing before a major release like this.
Biggest IT fix you never heard of
Life, James Hein, Published on 15/01/2020
» The clock ticked over to 2020 and the UK giant Lloyds Bank fell over -- well it had some problems populating bank accounts with payments at least. The problem? Apparently a Y2K bug that affected mobile apps and web logins. A similar problem occurred again on Jan 2. Well before the year 2000 was reached I was one of those involved in Y2K mitigation. Large teams spent months making sure that software didn't fail when 2000 and 2001 kicked over along with a few other key dates, one of which was indeed Jan 1, 2020. Now I'm not sure if these issues are Y2K related but the Yorkshire and Clydesdale banks in the UK had similar issues that Lloyd's did, not processing payments into customer accounts. Latter reports did indicate the issue was with processing date problems.
Surprisingly, your personal data isn't safe with Facebook
Life, James Hein, Published on 10/10/2018
» Facebook has been in the news recently having large numbers of public profiles harvested by marketing conglomerates. Estimates from this incident alone range from 50 to 90 million users and there may be a lot more. The "more" part comes from the user search and account recovery features that may have been abused to scrape up to 2 billion or more accounts. In other words, if you are on Facebook and have any kind of public profile someone has more info on you than you might like. The feature has since been turned off but not before a lot of information went to the marketers.
Protecting your privacy
Life, James Hein, Published on 05/04/2017
» Internet privacy is dead, at least in the US. This will trigger a rush to VPN's, the use of Tor browsers and advanced encryption, for some. In the US, new legislation allows your ISP to collect and store all of your browsing history. This will include length of time spent on sites and pages visited. The information will be at the mercy of the ISP to keep or use it to apply social engineering in terms of recommended sites and marketing. While the point seems to be to allow ISPs to make more money, the scary part for some will be that hackers seem to be able to regularly hack into ISPs and grab stored data.
Password ain't a password
Life, James Hein, Published on 01/02/2017
» How many people do you know, including yourself, who are avid Facebook users? Be honest. You will know that your account contains a large amount of information, much of it quite personal, that data thieves would be happy to mine and use. A solution is to protect this information.
Even Facebook can't crack AI
Life, James Hein, Published on 30/11/2016
» So where are we as far as artificial intelligence is concerned? For some time now Facebook, with all of its resources, has tried to build a machine intelligence that can reason based on text input. Different groups have been trying for decades to build some form of machine intelligence but it is still a long way from what TV shows like Westworld and Humans portray. Even so, there are groups such as the University of Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute and the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence in Cambridge that are also looking into the long-term risks of developing AI, just in case.
When help is really a hindrance
Life, James Hein, Published on 16/12/2015
» Computer help has progressed to the point where it has become annoying. Microsoft is the master of trying to help and at least in my case, not getting it right. Users of Yahoo Mail will also know what I mean. You will be in the middle of doing something and Yahoo will refresh the inbox bumping you out of a move, a delete or some other half-completed action. Note to Yahoo, this is not helping. I can understand that Yahoo wants to get the latest emails to you as quickly as possible but I wonder how those who get lots of emails every day cope with continually being interrupted by the never-ending refresh. I can understand a drive to continually improve things but there is a point where too much help can be less than helpful, and what some consider help is a hindrance to another.
Google going great, greater, the greatest?
Life, James Hein, Published on 31/07/2013
» In 2010 the figure was a mere 6%, but according to the monitoring firm DeepField, data to and from Google now accounts for a quarter of all traffic in the US across the internet. We all knew that Google was big, but until now no one was sure just how big they were, at least in the US. When it comes to sheer bandwidth demand at certain times of the day, the winner is Netflix, but in terms of overall traffic Google beats Netflix, Twitter and Facebook combined. Remember that Google includes YouTube and a wide range of other services.