Edge + IoT

• Intel hopes to burn newly open-sourced AI software debug tool into chips

  Chipzilla's dreams for ControlFlag
  Agam Shah Mon 25 Oct 2021 // 14:45 UTC

  Intel Labs has big plans for a software tool called ControlFlag that uses artificial intelligence to scan through code and pick out errors.

  One of those goals, perhaps way out in the future, is to bake it into chip packages as a last line of defense against faulty code. This could make the information flow on communications channels safer and efficient.

  But that's a big "if," and contingent to many things falling in place. Last week Intel open-sourced the tool – dubbed ControlFlag – to software developers. The software pores over lines of code and points out errors that developers can then fix.

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• SolarWinds attacker on the move: Russia's Nobelium crew has trebled attacks targeting MSPs, cloud resellers, says Microsoft

  Phishing and password spraying on the up
  Gareth Corfield Mon 25 Oct 2021 // 13:16 UTC 1

  Russia's Nobelium group – fingered as being a Russian state actor by both the United States and Britain – has massively ramped up phishing and password spraying attempts against managed service providers (MSPs) and cloud resellers, Microsoft's security arm has warned.

  The Windows maker said the group's targeted attacks against "resellers and other technology service providers that customize, deploy and manage cloud services and other technologies on behalf of their customers" had trebled over the past three months.

  Nobelium has been linked by Microsoft and others as the organisation behind the infamous SolarWinds supply chain compromise, and linked to Russia's foreign intelligence (SVR). In infosec circles the SVR-backed group is also known as APT29.

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• Tesla slams into reverse, pulls latest beta of Full Self-Driving software from participating car owners

  FSD rolled back to 10.2 after 'issues' found
  Richard Speed Mon 25 Oct 2021 // 12:31 UTC 9

  Tesla has yanked the latest beta, 10.3, of its Full Self-Driving (FSD) software from participating car owners after boss Elon Musk noted the company was "seeing some issues" with the code.

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• HIV Scotland fined £10,000 for BCC email blunder identifying names of virus-carriers' patient-advocates

  'Serious deficiencies in tech and organisational measures'
  Paul Kunert Mon 25 Oct 2021 // 11:48 UTC 5

  The United Kingdom's data watchdog is calling on organisations to review their "bulk email practices" after a BCC blunder by HIV Scotland incurred a £10,000 fine for breaking data protection regulations.

  The case pertains to an email that was sent to 105 individuals on the Community Advisory Network (CAN) list, which is made up of patient-advocates "from across Scotland to represent the full diversity of people living with HIV". In the offending chain, all of the email addresses were visible to all recipients and some 65 were people identified by name.

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• Twitter's machine learning algorithms amplify tweets from right-wing politicians over those on the left

  Enginners and researchers don't know why
  Katyanna Quach Mon 25 Oct 2021 // 11:02 UTC 23

  Twitter's algorithms are more likely to boost right-wing content than left-wing posts from politicians and news publications, according to a recent study.

  A team of engineers working on Twitter's own ML Ethics, Transparency and Accountability (META) unit scraped millions of tweets of thousands of elected officials from seven different countries: US, Japan, UK, Canada, Germany, Spain, and France. They tracked how likely these posts made between 1 April 2020 and 15 August 2020 were to be placed in a higher rank in users' personal Twitter feeds using Twitter's algorithms.

  Tweets posted by politicians from right-wing parties were amplified more than those from left-wing parties in all countries except Germany. The effect was strongest for Canadian and British politics. For example, content from UK Labour MPs was amplified 112 per cent as opposed to the 176 per cent amplification of Conservative MPs' content; and Canada's Liberal party politicos were amplified 43 per cent versus 167 per cent for the Canadian Conservative party.

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• Poor data sharing is holding back the UK court system's pandemic recovery, says National Audit Office

  Lack of data for planning also a problem, spending watchdog finds
  Lindsay Clark Mon 25 Oct 2021 // 10:14 UTC 3

  The UK court system's failure to implement its own recommendations for improving data sharing is holding back its recovery from the pandemic, according to a report from the National Audit Office (NAO).

  The government spending watchdog has reported on progress in reducing the backlog in criminal courts, which stood at 60,692 in the Crown Court in June, a 48 per cent increase on March 2020, when the first UK's pandemic lockdown was introduced.

  "The COVID-19 pandemic significantly affected the work of the criminal justice system and necessitated extensive changes in criminal courts to keep judges, court staff, and users safe," the report said.

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• Online harms don’t need dangerous legislation, they need a spot of naval action

  It worked on Jolly Roger, it can work on ProudWhiteGuy66373
  Rupert Goodwins Mon 25 Oct 2021 // 09:29 UTC 40

  Opinion Three things on the morning news reliably ruin breakfast for socially aware technogeeks.

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• IT outsourcing: SLAs, patches – and how uptime funk's going to get to you

  Cheaper, better than running it yourself? Maybe
  Dave Cartwright Mon 25 Oct 2021 // 08:45 UTC 3

  Feature Outsourcing generally has a bad reputation, scarred by countless failed projects in the public and private sectors and with cost cutting, rather than improved sevice delivery, seeming to drive business decisions.

  It's big business: the global IT outsourcing market was worth $318.5bn (£232.5bn) in 2019, according to one report. So not every CIO can be wrong when they decide that bringing in an external technology provider is preferable to doing it themselves. Can they?

  The failures can be high profile in nature, be it the Home Office's digital border sevices contract with Raytheon; IBM and WPP; Capita and the Primary Care contract; Capita and the Army recruitment services; Capita and the school bug; Capita and... we'll stop there.

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• Facebook sues scraper who sold 178 million phone numbers and user IDs

  Apparently The Social Network^TM is the only one allowed to do nasty things with users' data
  Laura Dobberstein Mon 25 Oct 2021 // 08:01 UTC 26

  Facebook has sued a Ukrainian national for allegedly harvesting and selling personal data describing 178 million of the Social Network^TM's users – actions it says violates the service's terms of service.

  The suit alleges that Alexander Alexandrovich Solonchenko created millions of virtual Android devices, each with a different phone number, and used them to deliver automated requests to Facebook systems using the Messenger app.

  Over 21 months between January 2018 and September 2019, Solonchenko purportedly took advantage of Facebook Messenger's now-defunct Contact Importer feature. The feature allowed users to synchronize their phone address books and see which contacts had an account with The Social Network^TM, presumably so they could contact them on Messenger rather than through other means.

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• Orders wrong, resellers receiving wrong items? Must be a programming error and certainly not a rushing techie

  Some of those punch cards may still be lying at the bottom of a lift shaft
  Richard Speed Mon 25 Oct 2021 // 07:33 UTC 47

  Who, Me? Punch cards are the order of the day in a reader confession that takes us back to an unfortunate incident with a trolley. Welcome to Who, Me?

  To be fair, punch cards were on the wane at the time of our story in the early 1980s, but our reader (Regomised as "Ivor") was gainfully employed at an international manufacturer still keen on the things.

  After all, if a system wasn't broken, it didn't need fixing, right?

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• Asia's 'superapps' bundle ride-share, food delivery, even financial services – and they're beating big tech

  China backed the concept of tools users perceive as an extension of the OS, not just an app
  Laura Dobberstein Mon 25 Oct 2021 // 07:03 UTC 21

  Catch a ride, pay your utility bills, order your dinner, top up your insurance, chat with friends – how many apps did you need to get that lot done? In much of the world North America and Europe your answer could involve a fistful of apps, but in Asia you could do it all in one, thanks to rise of the "superapp".

  Superapps are, for now, largely an Asian phenomenon, although the concept is more than a decade old. Blackberry founder Mike Lazaridis coined the term in 2010 to mean "a closed ecosystem of many apps that people would use every day because they offer such a seamless, integrated, contextualized and efficient experience".

  Academic and researcher of digital business models and ecosystems at Singapore's ESSEC Business School Dr Jan Ondrus thinks a better definition for a superapp is essentially "an operating system".

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