Ghost In The Machine

Ghost In The Machine
Number	2891
Broadcast Date	OCTOBER 31, 2016
Episode Length	33:56
Hosts	Tom Merritt
Guests	Veronica Belmont, Charlie Oliver

AI and machine learning will disrupt the way we do things. Charlie Oliver from ServedFreshMedia talks with Veronica Belmont and Tom Merritt about why we don’t need to fear AI we just need to get informed.

Guest

• Veronica Belmont
  • Growbot
  • Sword and Laser's Patreon
• Charlie Oliver
  • Served Fresh Media

Top Stories

• Microsoft PowerApps and Flow are generally available starting tomorrow

Microsoft will publicly launch its IFTT competitor, Microsoft Flow and its web and mobile app builder PowerApps, on Tuesday November 1st. Now here are some more top stories.

• CenturyLink to buy Level 3, get another 200,000 miles of fiber
• CenturyLink to Buy Level 3 for $34 Billion in Cash, Stock

CenturyLink has agreed to buy Level 3 Communications to create the number 2 global enterprise networking company to AT&T. Netflix and Google use Level 3 to transit Internet traffic and holds 200,000 route miles of fiber in metro areas and undersea routes connecting continents. CenturyLink has 6 million residential customers in the US but makes around 76% of its revenue from enterprise customers. The companies hope to complete the merger by Q3 2017, pending FCC approval.

• Low-Cost Detachables and Slates in the Lead as Tablet Market Slump Persists in the Third Quarter, According to IDC

IDC showed the tablet market declined 14.&% year over year in the fall quarter. Apple raised its top marketshare to 21.5% though total shipments fell 6.2%. More than two thirds of Apple's shipments are the iPad and iPad Mini, not the iPad Pro. Samsung marketshare fell to 15.1% still good for second. Amazon grew 319.9% year over year to take third and 7.3% of the worldwide market. Lenovo and Huawei rounded out the top 5.

• Modders, rejoice: It's legal to tweak your car's software now

Last Friday the US Library of Congress put in force an exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act allowing users to circumvent copyright protection in order to modify and repair their vehicles and tractors. Researchers can also report bugs to automakers without violating the DMCA. The exemption expires in two years.

• Wikipedia is fixing one of the Internet’s biggest flaws

The Washington Post's Jeff Guo posted last week that research from Harvard Business School suggests that Wikipedia has become increasingly balanced in the course of its 15-year history. The site has had its share of flame wars among editors and in the past leaned left but has steadily drifted toward the center. In fact, Shane Greenstein, Feng Zhu and Yuan Gu found that individuals who edit political articles on Wikipedia use fewer ideologically-charged statements over time. The researchers analyzed more than 70,000 articles related to American politics, edited by 2.9 million people.

• Nightmare Machine at CSIRO is slowly but surely learning how to terrify humans

Manuel Cebrian Ramos of Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization and Pinar Yanardag and Iyad Rahwan at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have taught AI algorithms to create frightening images by feeding it one picture of a zombie. The scientists fed 200,000 images of real human faces into the neural network to teach the AI how to create realistic human faces. It used the one zombie face to modify images to make them scary. You can vote on just how scary at http://nightmare.mit.edu/faces and help the AI get better at terrifying people. The scientists say by teaching a machine to know what frightens people, it can avoid doing so.

Discussion

• Do We Need Artificial Intelligence Prophets?
• Techonomy 2016: A Chat with Zuckerberg, and Much More
• WORLDS APART: CLINTON AND TRUMP’S TECHNOLOGY INNOVATION POLICIES
• Tech2025 – The future is yours.

Pick of the Day

• ISEAGE Cyber Defense Competitions

Hello DTNS,

I go to Kirkwood community college in Cedar Rapids, IA and I am the president of our cyber defense club. We will be heading to Iowa State to compete as blue team in their Cyber Defense Competition (CDC). The top 3 teams get to go to the national competition in the spring and compete at the university level.

I thought this type of event would make for a good pick for any students that are listening in the audience. This competition is one of the best learning experiences I have had. It also looks good on a resume. If you have the chance to take part in one of these red vs blue competitions I highly recommend it. If you're not a student and still want to take part do not fear. Often the red team is made up of volunteers and are always in need of talent. If you don't have the skills for red team you aren't left out either. the green team always needs more people to act as the end user.

The scenarios for the competition have been getting more interesting in the last few years. They have been adding phones so blue team can take calls from the "green" team and perform common tasks such as unlocking accounts and password resets. I really appreciate this aspect because as the DTNS audience is well aware, people are a far greater threat than anything else. Last spring in the national competition they added a SCADA network. SCADA is the control system that is in charge of most of our infrastructure and has virtually no security built in.

I just wanted to share this with some people that might actually be interested in talking about this sort of thing. Also. if you mentioned this to Darren Kitchen and the rest of the hak5 gang. I would love to bask in the warmth of their approval.

If you have any questions or want any more information, just let me know.

Thanks for listening,

Submitted by Scott from Iowa

Links

• This episode on dailytechnewsshow.com
• Support DTNS on Patreon
• DTNS subreddit

Preceded by: "Alice In Cryptoland"

Ghost In The Machine

Followed by: "TBD"