[ed. Local Hawaiian food show (his daughter cracks me up). If you're wondering what U da kine means, this kind of explains it... kine of (the last two paragraphs, anyway).]
Thursday, September 21, 2017
Wednesday, September 20, 2017
A Plea for Culinary Modernism
Modern, fast, processed food is a disaster. That, at least, is the message conveyed by newspapers and magazines, on television cooking programs, and in prizewinning cookbooks.
It is a mark of sophistication to bemoan the steel roller mill and supermarket bread while yearning for stone ground flour and brick ovens; to seek out heirloom apples and pumpkins while despising modern tomatoes and hybrid corn; to be hostile to agronomists who develop high-yielding modern crops and to home economists who invent new recipes for General Mills.
We hover between ridicule and shame when we remember how our mothers and grandmothers enthusiastically embraced canned and frozen foods. We nod in agreement when the waiter proclaims that the restaurant showcases the freshest local produce. We shun Wonder Bread and Coca-Cola. Above all, we loathe the great culminating symbol of Culinary Modernism, McDonald’s — modern, fast, homogenous, and international.
Like so many of my generation, my culinary style was created by those who scorned industrialized food; Culinary Luddites, we may call them, after the English hand workers of the nineteenth century who abhorred the machines that were destroying their traditional way of life. I learned to cook from the books of Elizabeth David, who urged us to sweep our store cupboards “clean for ever of the cluttering debris of commercial sauce bottles and all synthetic flavorings.”
I progressed to the Time-Life Good Cook series and to Simple French Cooking, in which Richard Olney hoped against hope that “the reins of stubborn habit are strong enough to frustrate the famous industrial revolution for some time to come.” I turned to Paula Wolfert to learn more about Mediterranean cooking and was assured that I wouldn’t “find a dishonest dish in this book . . . The food here is real food . . . the real food of real people.” Today I rush to the newsstand to pick up Saveur with its promise to teach me to “Savor a world of authentic cuisine.”
Culinary Luddism involves more than just taste. Since the days of the counterculture, it has also presented itself as a moral and political crusade. Now in Boston, the Oldways Preservation and Exchange Trust works to provide “a scientific basis for the preservation and revitalization of traditional diets.
Meanwhile Slow Food, founded in 1989 to protest the opening of a McDonald’s in Rome, is a self-described Greenpeace for Food; its manifesto begins, “We are enslaved by speed and have all succumbed to the same insidious virus: Fast Life, which disrupts our habits, pervades the privacy of our homes and forces us to eat Fast Foods . . . Slow Food is now the only truly progressive answer.” As one of its spokesmen was reported as saying in the New York Times, “Our real enemy is the obtuse consumer.”
At this point I begin to back off. I want to cry, “Enough!” But why? Why would I, who learned to cook from Culinary Luddites, who grew up in a family that, in Elizabeth David’s words, produced their “own home-cured bacon, ham and sausages . . . churned their own butter, fed their chickens and geese, cherished their fruit trees, skinned and cleaned their own hares” (well, to be honest, not the geese and sausages), not rejoice at the growth of Culinary Luddism? Why would I (or anyone else) want to be thought “an obtuse consumer”? Or admit to preferring unreal food for unreal people? Or to savoring inauthentic cuisine?
The answer is not far to seek: because I am an historian. (...)
The dishes we call ethnic and assume to be of peasant origin were invented for the urban, or at least urbane, aristocrats who collected the surplus. This is as true of the lasagne of northern Italy as it is of the chicken konna of Mughal Delhi, the mooshu pork of imperial China, the pilafs, stuffed vegetables, and baklava of the great Ottoman palace in Istanbul, or the mee krob of nineteenth-century Bangkok. Cities have always enjoyed the best food and have invariably been the focal points of culinary innovation.
Nor are most “traditional foods” very old. For every prized dish that goes back two thousand years, a dozen have been invented in the last two hundred. The French baguette? A twentieth-century phenomenon, adopted nationwide only after World War II. English fish and chips? Dates from the late nineteenth century, when the working class took up the fried fish of Sephardic Jewish immigrants in East London. Fish and chips, though, will soon be a thing of the past. (...)
We may mistake the meals of today’s European, Asian, or Mexican middle class (many of them benefiting from industrialization and contemporary tourism) for peasant food or for the daily fare of our ancestors. We can represent the peoples of the Mediterranean, Southeast Asia, India, or Mexico as pawns at the mercy of multinational corporations bent on selling trashy modern products — failing to appreciate that, like us, they enjoy a choice of goods in the market, foreign restaurants to eat at, and new recipes to try.
A Mexican friend, suffering from one too many foreign visitors who chided her because she offered Italian, not Mexican food, complained, “Why can’t we eat spaghetti, too?” If we unthinkingly assume that good food maps neatly onto old or slow or homemade food (even though we’ve all had lousy traditional cooking), we miss the fact that lots of industrial foodstuffs are better. Certainly no one with a grindstone will ever produce chocolate as suave as that produced by conching in a machine for seventy two hours. Nor is the housewife likely to turn out fine soy sauce or miso.
And let us not forget that the current popularity of Italian food owes much to the availability and long shelf life of two convenience foods that even purists love, high-quality factory pasta and canned tomatoes. Far from fleeing them, we should be clamoring for more high-quality industrial foods.
If we romanticize the past, we may miss the fact that it is the modern, global, industrial economy (not the local resources of the wintry country around New York, Boston, or Chicago) that allows us to savor traditional, peasant, fresh, and natural foods.
Virgin olive oil, Thai fish sauce, and udon noodles come to us thanks to international marketing. Fresh and natural loom so large because we can take for granted the preserved and processed staples — salt, flour, sugar, chocolate, oils, coffee, tea — produced by agribusiness and food corporations. Asparagus and strawberries in winter come to us on trucks trundling up from Mexico and planes flying in from Chile.
Visits to charming little restaurants and colorful markets in Morocco or Vietnam would be impossible without international tourism. The ethnic foods we seek out when we travel are being preserved, indeed often created, by a hotel and restaurant industry determined to cater to our dream of India or Indonesia, Turkey, Hawaii, or Mexico. Culinary Luddism, far from escaping the modern global food economy, is parasitic upon it.
Culinary Luddites are right, though, about two important things. We need to know how to prepare good food, and we need a culinary ethos. As far as good food goes, they’ve done us all a service by teaching us to how to use the bounty delivered to us (ironically) by the global economy.
Their culinary ethos, though, is another matter. Were we able to turn back the clock, as they urge, most of us would be toiling all day in the fields or the kitchen; many of us would be starving. Nostalgia is not what we need.
It is a mark of sophistication to bemoan the steel roller mill and supermarket bread while yearning for stone ground flour and brick ovens; to seek out heirloom apples and pumpkins while despising modern tomatoes and hybrid corn; to be hostile to agronomists who develop high-yielding modern crops and to home economists who invent new recipes for General Mills.
We hover between ridicule and shame when we remember how our mothers and grandmothers enthusiastically embraced canned and frozen foods. We nod in agreement when the waiter proclaims that the restaurant showcases the freshest local produce. We shun Wonder Bread and Coca-Cola. Above all, we loathe the great culminating symbol of Culinary Modernism, McDonald’s — modern, fast, homogenous, and international.
Like so many of my generation, my culinary style was created by those who scorned industrialized food; Culinary Luddites, we may call them, after the English hand workers of the nineteenth century who abhorred the machines that were destroying their traditional way of life. I learned to cook from the books of Elizabeth David, who urged us to sweep our store cupboards “clean for ever of the cluttering debris of commercial sauce bottles and all synthetic flavorings.”I progressed to the Time-Life Good Cook series and to Simple French Cooking, in which Richard Olney hoped against hope that “the reins of stubborn habit are strong enough to frustrate the famous industrial revolution for some time to come.” I turned to Paula Wolfert to learn more about Mediterranean cooking and was assured that I wouldn’t “find a dishonest dish in this book . . . The food here is real food . . . the real food of real people.” Today I rush to the newsstand to pick up Saveur with its promise to teach me to “Savor a world of authentic cuisine.”
Culinary Luddism involves more than just taste. Since the days of the counterculture, it has also presented itself as a moral and political crusade. Now in Boston, the Oldways Preservation and Exchange Trust works to provide “a scientific basis for the preservation and revitalization of traditional diets.
Meanwhile Slow Food, founded in 1989 to protest the opening of a McDonald’s in Rome, is a self-described Greenpeace for Food; its manifesto begins, “We are enslaved by speed and have all succumbed to the same insidious virus: Fast Life, which disrupts our habits, pervades the privacy of our homes and forces us to eat Fast Foods . . . Slow Food is now the only truly progressive answer.” As one of its spokesmen was reported as saying in the New York Times, “Our real enemy is the obtuse consumer.”
At this point I begin to back off. I want to cry, “Enough!” But why? Why would I, who learned to cook from Culinary Luddites, who grew up in a family that, in Elizabeth David’s words, produced their “own home-cured bacon, ham and sausages . . . churned their own butter, fed their chickens and geese, cherished their fruit trees, skinned and cleaned their own hares” (well, to be honest, not the geese and sausages), not rejoice at the growth of Culinary Luddism? Why would I (or anyone else) want to be thought “an obtuse consumer”? Or admit to preferring unreal food for unreal people? Or to savoring inauthentic cuisine?
The answer is not far to seek: because I am an historian. (...)
The dishes we call ethnic and assume to be of peasant origin were invented for the urban, or at least urbane, aristocrats who collected the surplus. This is as true of the lasagne of northern Italy as it is of the chicken konna of Mughal Delhi, the mooshu pork of imperial China, the pilafs, stuffed vegetables, and baklava of the great Ottoman palace in Istanbul, or the mee krob of nineteenth-century Bangkok. Cities have always enjoyed the best food and have invariably been the focal points of culinary innovation.
Nor are most “traditional foods” very old. For every prized dish that goes back two thousand years, a dozen have been invented in the last two hundred. The French baguette? A twentieth-century phenomenon, adopted nationwide only after World War II. English fish and chips? Dates from the late nineteenth century, when the working class took up the fried fish of Sephardic Jewish immigrants in East London. Fish and chips, though, will soon be a thing of the past. (...)
We may mistake the meals of today’s European, Asian, or Mexican middle class (many of them benefiting from industrialization and contemporary tourism) for peasant food or for the daily fare of our ancestors. We can represent the peoples of the Mediterranean, Southeast Asia, India, or Mexico as pawns at the mercy of multinational corporations bent on selling trashy modern products — failing to appreciate that, like us, they enjoy a choice of goods in the market, foreign restaurants to eat at, and new recipes to try.
A Mexican friend, suffering from one too many foreign visitors who chided her because she offered Italian, not Mexican food, complained, “Why can’t we eat spaghetti, too?” If we unthinkingly assume that good food maps neatly onto old or slow or homemade food (even though we’ve all had lousy traditional cooking), we miss the fact that lots of industrial foodstuffs are better. Certainly no one with a grindstone will ever produce chocolate as suave as that produced by conching in a machine for seventy two hours. Nor is the housewife likely to turn out fine soy sauce or miso.
And let us not forget that the current popularity of Italian food owes much to the availability and long shelf life of two convenience foods that even purists love, high-quality factory pasta and canned tomatoes. Far from fleeing them, we should be clamoring for more high-quality industrial foods.
If we romanticize the past, we may miss the fact that it is the modern, global, industrial economy (not the local resources of the wintry country around New York, Boston, or Chicago) that allows us to savor traditional, peasant, fresh, and natural foods.
Virgin olive oil, Thai fish sauce, and udon noodles come to us thanks to international marketing. Fresh and natural loom so large because we can take for granted the preserved and processed staples — salt, flour, sugar, chocolate, oils, coffee, tea — produced by agribusiness and food corporations. Asparagus and strawberries in winter come to us on trucks trundling up from Mexico and planes flying in from Chile.
Visits to charming little restaurants and colorful markets in Morocco or Vietnam would be impossible without international tourism. The ethnic foods we seek out when we travel are being preserved, indeed often created, by a hotel and restaurant industry determined to cater to our dream of India or Indonesia, Turkey, Hawaii, or Mexico. Culinary Luddism, far from escaping the modern global food economy, is parasitic upon it.
Culinary Luddites are right, though, about two important things. We need to know how to prepare good food, and we need a culinary ethos. As far as good food goes, they’ve done us all a service by teaching us to how to use the bounty delivered to us (ironically) by the global economy.
Their culinary ethos, though, is another matter. Were we able to turn back the clock, as they urge, most of us would be toiling all day in the fields or the kitchen; many of us would be starving. Nostalgia is not what we need.
by Rachel Laudan, Jacobin | Read more:
Image: French women hitched to the plow, 1914–18. American Photo Archive
Snow Crash
Way back in 1992, author Neal Stephenson published his breakthrough novel, Snow Crash, a cyberpunk exploration of then-futuristic technologies: mobile computing, virtual reality, wireless Internet, digital currency, smartphones, and augmented-reality headsets. The book famously opens with a breakneck car chase as the main character, Hiro Protagonist (it’s something of a satire), races to deliver a pizza on time. It’s a literal life-or-death scene as our harried gig-economy driver races his GPS-enabled electric car through the streets of Los Angeles before he runs out the clock and risks angering the mob. TaskRabbit "independent contractors" can surely relate.
Twenty-five years later, Stephenson’s cult classic has become canon in Silicon Valley, where a host of engineers, entrepreneurs, futurists, and assorted computer geeks (including Amazon C.E.O. Jeff Bezos) still revere Snow Crash as a remarkably prescient vision of today’s tech landscape. Among the the more prophetic inventions in the book is something Stephenson called “the Metaverse”—the same sort of wireless, online virtual-reality experience that Facebook, Google, Samsung, and practically every other major tech company are now competing to commercialize.
In an interview, Stephenson told Vanity Fair that he was just “making shit up.” But the Metaverse isn’t the only element of Snow Crash that has earned him a reputation as a tech Nostradamus. He’s credited with predicting everything from our addiction to portable technology to the digitization of, well, everything, and you can thank him, not James Cameron, for bringing the Hindu concept of “avatar” into the everyday language. Google Earth designer Avi Bar-Zeev has said he was inspired by Stephenson’s ideas, and even tried to get the author to visit his office when he was working on Keyhole, an app suite that later served as a basis for Google’s mapping technology. “He wasn’t interested in visiting Keyhole, or didn’t have time. My best guess is that he was somewhat tired of hearing us engineering geeks rave about Snow Crash as a grand vision for the future. That may have something to do with Snow Crash being a dystopian vision.”
Dystopian or no, Stephenson’s vision of the future is almost here, and at least one tech company virtual-reality start-up Magic Leap, has snapped up Stephenson in an official capacity—he became its Chief Futurist in 2014. Here, with the benefit of 25 years of hindsight, Stephenson talked to the Hive about the differences between augmented and virtual reality, how to create a convincing Metaverse, and why social media is driving us apart.
Vanity Fair: As Silicon Valley competes to build the best Metaverse, do you think consumers will be drawn more toward immersive virtual-reality experiences, like the one Mark Zuckerberg is selling with Facebook’s Oculus headset, or augmented-reality gear, like Apple’s Tim Cook is interested in developing?
Neal Stephenson: I think that those two options are more different than a lot of people realize. You look at somebody wearing a VR rig on their head, and somebody wearing an AR rig, anything that’s on the market now, and those two people kind of look the same. But what they’re seeing and experiencing is completely different. If you’re in a VR simulation, every photo that’s hitting your eye, everything you see is a virtual object that’s rendered from scratch by a computer graphics system.
If you’re in an AR application, you are where you are. You’re in your physical environment, you’re seeing everything around you normally, but there’s additional stuff that’s being added. So VR has the ability to take you to a completely different fictional place—the kind of thing that’s described in the Metaverse in Snow Crash. When you go into the Metaverse, you’re on the street, you’re in the Black Sun, and your surroundings disappear. In the book, Hiro lives in a shabby shipping container, but when he goes to the Metaverse, he’s a big deal and has access to super high-end real estate. AR’s a whole different bag.
VR: Do you see VR and AR as competitors, like VHS and Betamax, or are they distinct technology platforms?
NS: Completely separate and almost unrelated. The purpose of VR is to take you to a completely made-up place, and the purpose of AR is to change your experience of the place that you’re in. That pervades everything in terms of how you think about content, how you tell stories, what it is that you can actually do with these devices. (...)
VR: There are characters in Snow Crash called Gargoyles, who are perpetually plugged in. You wrote: "Gargoyles are no fun to talk to. They never finish a sentence. They are adrift in a laser-drawn world, scanning retinas in all directions . . . You think they’re talking to you, but they’re actually poring over the credit record of some stranger on the other side of the room, or identifying the make and model of airplanes flying overhead.” Do you anticipate a future in which we’re all plugged in 24/7?
NS: The Gargoyles in Snow Crash are kind of in a different category from the Metaverse users, because they’re using what we would now call an augmented-reality device. But I think we sort of are there already with smartphones. The real question isn’t whether it’s going to happen but how artfully it’s going to be done, and can we make it better than it is now? More social, more elegant, and just more conducive to healthy society, healthy interactions? The practice of going around hunched over a rectangle in your hand is completely normal now, and when I see somebody in a car or walking down the street hundreds of feet away, I can tell that they’re texting just by their posture. We all can. It’s what we’ve turned into because of the particular way that we’re connected through technology. I’d like to think it can get better than what we have now.
Twenty-five years later, Stephenson’s cult classic has become canon in Silicon Valley, where a host of engineers, entrepreneurs, futurists, and assorted computer geeks (including Amazon C.E.O. Jeff Bezos) still revere Snow Crash as a remarkably prescient vision of today’s tech landscape. Among the the more prophetic inventions in the book is something Stephenson called “the Metaverse”—the same sort of wireless, online virtual-reality experience that Facebook, Google, Samsung, and practically every other major tech company are now competing to commercialize.In an interview, Stephenson told Vanity Fair that he was just “making shit up.” But the Metaverse isn’t the only element of Snow Crash that has earned him a reputation as a tech Nostradamus. He’s credited with predicting everything from our addiction to portable technology to the digitization of, well, everything, and you can thank him, not James Cameron, for bringing the Hindu concept of “avatar” into the everyday language. Google Earth designer Avi Bar-Zeev has said he was inspired by Stephenson’s ideas, and even tried to get the author to visit his office when he was working on Keyhole, an app suite that later served as a basis for Google’s mapping technology. “He wasn’t interested in visiting Keyhole, or didn’t have time. My best guess is that he was somewhat tired of hearing us engineering geeks rave about Snow Crash as a grand vision for the future. That may have something to do with Snow Crash being a dystopian vision.”
Dystopian or no, Stephenson’s vision of the future is almost here, and at least one tech company virtual-reality start-up Magic Leap, has snapped up Stephenson in an official capacity—he became its Chief Futurist in 2014. Here, with the benefit of 25 years of hindsight, Stephenson talked to the Hive about the differences between augmented and virtual reality, how to create a convincing Metaverse, and why social media is driving us apart.
Vanity Fair: As Silicon Valley competes to build the best Metaverse, do you think consumers will be drawn more toward immersive virtual-reality experiences, like the one Mark Zuckerberg is selling with Facebook’s Oculus headset, or augmented-reality gear, like Apple’s Tim Cook is interested in developing?
Neal Stephenson: I think that those two options are more different than a lot of people realize. You look at somebody wearing a VR rig on their head, and somebody wearing an AR rig, anything that’s on the market now, and those two people kind of look the same. But what they’re seeing and experiencing is completely different. If you’re in a VR simulation, every photo that’s hitting your eye, everything you see is a virtual object that’s rendered from scratch by a computer graphics system.
If you’re in an AR application, you are where you are. You’re in your physical environment, you’re seeing everything around you normally, but there’s additional stuff that’s being added. So VR has the ability to take you to a completely different fictional place—the kind of thing that’s described in the Metaverse in Snow Crash. When you go into the Metaverse, you’re on the street, you’re in the Black Sun, and your surroundings disappear. In the book, Hiro lives in a shabby shipping container, but when he goes to the Metaverse, he’s a big deal and has access to super high-end real estate. AR’s a whole different bag.
VR: Do you see VR and AR as competitors, like VHS and Betamax, or are they distinct technology platforms?
NS: Completely separate and almost unrelated. The purpose of VR is to take you to a completely made-up place, and the purpose of AR is to change your experience of the place that you’re in. That pervades everything in terms of how you think about content, how you tell stories, what it is that you can actually do with these devices. (...)
VR: There are characters in Snow Crash called Gargoyles, who are perpetually plugged in. You wrote: "Gargoyles are no fun to talk to. They never finish a sentence. They are adrift in a laser-drawn world, scanning retinas in all directions . . . You think they’re talking to you, but they’re actually poring over the credit record of some stranger on the other side of the room, or identifying the make and model of airplanes flying overhead.” Do you anticipate a future in which we’re all plugged in 24/7?
NS: The Gargoyles in Snow Crash are kind of in a different category from the Metaverse users, because they’re using what we would now call an augmented-reality device. But I think we sort of are there already with smartphones. The real question isn’t whether it’s going to happen but how artfully it’s going to be done, and can we make it better than it is now? More social, more elegant, and just more conducive to healthy society, healthy interactions? The practice of going around hunched over a rectangle in your hand is completely normal now, and when I see somebody in a car or walking down the street hundreds of feet away, I can tell that they’re texting just by their posture. We all can. It’s what we’ve turned into because of the particular way that we’re connected through technology. I’d like to think it can get better than what we have now.
by Joanna Robinson, Hive | Read more:
Image: Amazon
[ed. I read a lot (but not much science fiction), and Snow Crash is one of those "beyond the beyonds" novels you stumble across now and then and go "how did I never hear about this before"? Pure genius. There isn't a page or two where you don't go ..."wow, how did he ever come up with that metaphor/turn of phrase/premise/insight?" Highly recommended (word of caution: I hear his later novels are almost impenetrably dense). This is a guy bursting with talent and ideas. Now I see where Ready Player One came from. See also: The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason.]
Tuesday, September 19, 2017
CCleanup: A Vast Number of Machines at Risk
Supply chain attacks are a very effective way to distribute malicious software into target organizations. This is because with supply chain attacks, the attackers are relying on the trust relationship between a manufacturer or supplier and a customer. This trust relationship is then abused to attack organizations and individuals and may be performed for a number of different reasons. The Nyetya worm that was released into the wild earlier in 2017 showed just how potent these types of attacks can be. Frequently, as with Nyetya, the initial infection vector can remain elusive for quite some time. Luckily with tools like AMP the additional visibility can usually help direct attention to the initial vector.
Talos recently observed a case where the download servers used by software vendor to distribute a legitimate software package were leveraged to deliver malware to unsuspecting victims. For a period of time, the legitimate signed version of CCleaner 5.33 being distributed by Avast also contained a multi-stage malware payload that rode on top of the installation of CCleaner. CCleaner boasted over 2 billion total downloads by November of 2016 with a growth rate of 5 million additional users per week. Given the potential damage that could be caused by a network of infected computers even a tiny fraction of this size we decided to move quickly. On September 13, 2017 Cisco Talos immediately notified Avast of our findings so that they could initiate appropriate response activities. The following sections will discuss the specific details regarding this attack.
On September 13, 2017 while conducting customer beta testing of our new exploit detection technology, Cisco Talos identified a specific executable which was triggering our advanced malware protection systems. Upon closer inspection, the executable in question was the installer for CCleaner v5.33, which was being delivered to endpoints by the legitimate CCleaner download servers. Talos began initial analysis to determine what was causing this technology to flag CCleaner. We identified that even though the downloaded installation executable was signed using a valid digital signature issued to Piriform, CCleaner was not the only application that came with the download. During the installation of CCleaner 5.33, the 32-bit CCleaner binary that was included also contained a malicious payload that featured a Domain Generation Algorithm (DGA) as well as hardcoded Command and Control (C2) functionality. We confirmed that this malicious version of CCleaner was being hosted directly on CCleaner's download server as recently as September 11, 2017.
In reviewing the Version History page on the CCleaner download site, it appears that the affected version (5.33) was released on August 15, 2017. On September 12, 2017 version 5.34 was released. The version containing the malicious payload (5.33) was being distributed between these dates. This version was signed using a valid certificate that was issued to Piriform Ltd by Symantec and is valid through 10/10/2018. Piriform was the company that Avast recently acquired and was the original company who developed the CCleaner software application.
by Edmund Brumaghin, Ross Gibb, Warren Mercer, Matthew Molyett, and Craig Williams, Talos Intelligence | Read more:
Image: CCleaner
[ed. See also: CCleaner malware outbreak is much worse than it first appeared]
Talos recently observed a case where the download servers used by software vendor to distribute a legitimate software package were leveraged to deliver malware to unsuspecting victims. For a period of time, the legitimate signed version of CCleaner 5.33 being distributed by Avast also contained a multi-stage malware payload that rode on top of the installation of CCleaner. CCleaner boasted over 2 billion total downloads by November of 2016 with a growth rate of 5 million additional users per week. Given the potential damage that could be caused by a network of infected computers even a tiny fraction of this size we decided to move quickly. On September 13, 2017 Cisco Talos immediately notified Avast of our findings so that they could initiate appropriate response activities. The following sections will discuss the specific details regarding this attack.
TECHNICAL DETAILS
CCleaner is an application that allows users to perform routine maintenance on their systems. It includes functionality such as cleaning of temporary files, analyzing the system to determine ways in which performance can be optimized and provides a more streamlined way to manage installed applications.
CCleaner is an application that allows users to perform routine maintenance on their systems. It includes functionality such as cleaning of temporary files, analyzing the system to determine ways in which performance can be optimized and provides a more streamlined way to manage installed applications.
On September 13, 2017 while conducting customer beta testing of our new exploit detection technology, Cisco Talos identified a specific executable which was triggering our advanced malware protection systems. Upon closer inspection, the executable in question was the installer for CCleaner v5.33, which was being delivered to endpoints by the legitimate CCleaner download servers. Talos began initial analysis to determine what was causing this technology to flag CCleaner. We identified that even though the downloaded installation executable was signed using a valid digital signature issued to Piriform, CCleaner was not the only application that came with the download. During the installation of CCleaner 5.33, the 32-bit CCleaner binary that was included also contained a malicious payload that featured a Domain Generation Algorithm (DGA) as well as hardcoded Command and Control (C2) functionality. We confirmed that this malicious version of CCleaner was being hosted directly on CCleaner's download server as recently as September 11, 2017.
In reviewing the Version History page on the CCleaner download site, it appears that the affected version (5.33) was released on August 15, 2017. On September 12, 2017 version 5.34 was released. The version containing the malicious payload (5.33) was being distributed between these dates. This version was signed using a valid certificate that was issued to Piriform Ltd by Symantec and is valid through 10/10/2018. Piriform was the company that Avast recently acquired and was the original company who developed the CCleaner software application.
by Edmund Brumaghin, Ross Gibb, Warren Mercer, Matthew Molyett, and Craig Williams, Talos Intelligence | Read more:
Image: CCleaner
[ed. See also: CCleaner malware outbreak is much worse than it first appeared]
Monday, September 18, 2017
The Rise Of Stealth Wealth: Ways To Stay Invisible From Society If You Have Money
Becoming wealthy has never been easier in America thanks to quantitative easing, improved financial education, an improving economy, a widening safety net, and a bull market in stocks and real estate. Surviving as a wealthy person on the other hand, has never been tougher. The government goes after you if you make much more than $200,000 a year (medicare tax, AMT, deduction phaseout, credit eliminations, education tax, net investment income tax). If the government doesn’t get you, regular citizens will. Who did you cheat or rob to get to where you are? This is a real problem for those who want to make it big in the land of dreams and hand guns.
Freedom is one of America’s greatest attributes. Yet, if you go too far on the income curve you’ll start feeling like a prisoner to society. Despite the rich giving more to charity in one year than many others will give in their lifetimes, people will protest their wealth and hate them forever. Class warfare is no fun, even if you do have the financial means to own a bazooka.
Most readers here are ambitious folks who want to improve their financial health. Thanks to disciplined savings and investing habits, in another 10 years, I’m sure everybody is going to be that much wealthier. But once you get to where you are going, you’ll wonder what’s next. Never lose site of the fact that it’s really the journey to financial independence that’s most rewarding.
When society turns their back on you for being successful, just recollect on all your struggles and take a deep breath. Be proud of your accomplishments because you know you’re not just doing it for yourself, but for your family as well. You don’t have to be ashamed for not being the dumb ass in high school who thought it was cool to skip class every week to smoke weed. You shouldn’t feel bad that you worked summer internships during college while your buddies went off to play. And you should certainly not feel embarrassed by your frugal habits and smart investments once you found a job.
Unfortunately, society has a fantastic way of discrediting your achievements. “Nobody is self made,” and “You didn’t build that,” are my two favorite retorts. Just try taking yourself completely out of the equation and see where that logic goes when there’s nobody to think, dream, and execute. When you are outnumbered, resistance is futile. You must blend in and rage with the rest of them.
With the below suggestions you’ll be able to better walk amongst the shadows without fear of retribution any longer. Your family will be more guarded from bullies lurking to recondition your children every chance they get. Once you finish reading this post, never speak of its matters beyond your immediate family and friends again. We’ve got to protect our own little community on the web.
A GUIDE TO STEALTH WEALTH
When Forbes came out with its Top 10 Wealthiest Chinese in China, there was huge outrage by the public and a massive anti-corruption crackdown ensued. Half of those guys fell off the list or went to jail within a couple years. As America attempts to reverse Capitalism due to widening income inequality, blending in as a middle class citizen has never been more vital. Below are 15 recommendations to help you assimilate better in society.
1) Never drive a nice car to work or to any public setting. Drive the most economical, safe car you know so that when you ultimately run into your co-workers, they’ll think you’re frugal or poor. Take public transportation and proclaim your love for buses and trains profusely. You don’t want to roll into the office in a Benzo and have your boss see you. His or her immediate thought will be to cut your bonus since you are doing so well.
Driving up to an employee salary negotiation meeting in a Bentley isn’t going to work in your favor either. Instead of choosing a new Range Rover Sport and deducting the vehicle as a business expense, consider a more moderate BMW X3 or Jeep Grand Cherokee instead. When cops huddle for breakfast thinking about which car they want to ticket, do you think they are going for the guy in a 10 year old Toyota Corolla? Cops make $50-$60,000 a year on average and are on a mission.
2) Be careful who you give your home address to. People love to snoop on Zillow.com to see what you paid for your house. Not only will they see what you paid for your house, they’ll also be able to tell whether you’re under water or making huge equity. Instead of giving an exact address, you can give them cross streets and a description of the house. e.g. I’m at the corner of Jackson and Teller. Brown wood shingle house. You can’t miss it. Inevitably, they will find out your exact address if they pay attention, but delay that information for as long as possible. Your house is your sacred abode. Protect its privacy. I recommend claiming your house on Zillow and trying to make the house look as bad as possible. Property tax assessors look at Zillow all the time now to try and jack up your taxes!
3) Always say it’s fake. Whether it’s your Panerai watch, Birkin bag, Armani suit, or Loubotin shoes, always tell the person who asks that it’s fake. Resist the urge to brag about your material things. You’re already an established individual. You can tell them you got it at Ross, Target, or at a flea market overseas and marvel with them how good knock-offs are nowadays. The quality things that you buy are for your own pleasure after all. Pretend you don’t know brands or how much things cost. Just say you like how it looks.
Freedom is one of America’s greatest attributes. Yet, if you go too far on the income curve you’ll start feeling like a prisoner to society. Despite the rich giving more to charity in one year than many others will give in their lifetimes, people will protest their wealth and hate them forever. Class warfare is no fun, even if you do have the financial means to own a bazooka.
Most readers here are ambitious folks who want to improve their financial health. Thanks to disciplined savings and investing habits, in another 10 years, I’m sure everybody is going to be that much wealthier. But once you get to where you are going, you’ll wonder what’s next. Never lose site of the fact that it’s really the journey to financial independence that’s most rewarding.When society turns their back on you for being successful, just recollect on all your struggles and take a deep breath. Be proud of your accomplishments because you know you’re not just doing it for yourself, but for your family as well. You don’t have to be ashamed for not being the dumb ass in high school who thought it was cool to skip class every week to smoke weed. You shouldn’t feel bad that you worked summer internships during college while your buddies went off to play. And you should certainly not feel embarrassed by your frugal habits and smart investments once you found a job.
Unfortunately, society has a fantastic way of discrediting your achievements. “Nobody is self made,” and “You didn’t build that,” are my two favorite retorts. Just try taking yourself completely out of the equation and see where that logic goes when there’s nobody to think, dream, and execute. When you are outnumbered, resistance is futile. You must blend in and rage with the rest of them.
With the below suggestions you’ll be able to better walk amongst the shadows without fear of retribution any longer. Your family will be more guarded from bullies lurking to recondition your children every chance they get. Once you finish reading this post, never speak of its matters beyond your immediate family and friends again. We’ve got to protect our own little community on the web.
A GUIDE TO STEALTH WEALTH
When Forbes came out with its Top 10 Wealthiest Chinese in China, there was huge outrage by the public and a massive anti-corruption crackdown ensued. Half of those guys fell off the list or went to jail within a couple years. As America attempts to reverse Capitalism due to widening income inequality, blending in as a middle class citizen has never been more vital. Below are 15 recommendations to help you assimilate better in society.
1) Never drive a nice car to work or to any public setting. Drive the most economical, safe car you know so that when you ultimately run into your co-workers, they’ll think you’re frugal or poor. Take public transportation and proclaim your love for buses and trains profusely. You don’t want to roll into the office in a Benzo and have your boss see you. His or her immediate thought will be to cut your bonus since you are doing so well.
Driving up to an employee salary negotiation meeting in a Bentley isn’t going to work in your favor either. Instead of choosing a new Range Rover Sport and deducting the vehicle as a business expense, consider a more moderate BMW X3 or Jeep Grand Cherokee instead. When cops huddle for breakfast thinking about which car they want to ticket, do you think they are going for the guy in a 10 year old Toyota Corolla? Cops make $50-$60,000 a year on average and are on a mission.
2) Be careful who you give your home address to. People love to snoop on Zillow.com to see what you paid for your house. Not only will they see what you paid for your house, they’ll also be able to tell whether you’re under water or making huge equity. Instead of giving an exact address, you can give them cross streets and a description of the house. e.g. I’m at the corner of Jackson and Teller. Brown wood shingle house. You can’t miss it. Inevitably, they will find out your exact address if they pay attention, but delay that information for as long as possible. Your house is your sacred abode. Protect its privacy. I recommend claiming your house on Zillow and trying to make the house look as bad as possible. Property tax assessors look at Zillow all the time now to try and jack up your taxes!
3) Always say it’s fake. Whether it’s your Panerai watch, Birkin bag, Armani suit, or Loubotin shoes, always tell the person who asks that it’s fake. Resist the urge to brag about your material things. You’re already an established individual. You can tell them you got it at Ross, Target, or at a flea market overseas and marvel with them how good knock-offs are nowadays. The quality things that you buy are for your own pleasure after all. Pretend you don’t know brands or how much things cost. Just say you like how it looks.
by Financial Samurai | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. And definitely never be caught lighting your barbecue with $100 bills.]
[ed. And definitely never be caught lighting your barbecue with $100 bills.]
Will America Accept Refugees From Trump's White House?
The first wave of Trump White House refugees is now landing on American shores. The instability of their former abode has already set nearly a dozen senior staffers into motion, with who knows how many more to follow. No question, many of them have suffered horrible abuse and maltreatment. But compassion must be joined to realism. Are these migrants bringing with them values consistent with our way of life?
On Wednesday night, Jimmy Kimmel interrogated one of the first of the refugees, former Trump press secretary Sean Spicer, on his ABC late-night show. It was a very gentle vetting, not “extreme" at all. And yet the encounter raised all kinds of red flags about whether these entrants will ever appreciate and accept democratic norms. As former Trump staff seek to integrate themselves into American civic and business life, it will be important to evaluate which of them can be rehabilitated—and which have compromised themselves in ways that cannot be redeemed.
The Spicer-Kimmel interview offers some important guidance, especially this core exchange:
That’s certainly a view. But Spicer also demanded recognition and credit, not merely as a henchman of the president’s, but as a public servant.
Yet as Spicer told Kimmel: He saw himself as serving the president—the president, personally.
If he said things that were not true, and not once but repeatedly, that is justified by the president’s order. If he bullied the press and did his utmost to deceive the nation—from the nation’s own platform and at the nation’s expense—the nation has no right to complain, because he did what the president asked.
Which suggests that whatever thanks Spicer is owed, he is owed by the president, and not the nation. He was not working for you. He was working for Trump.
On Wednesday night, Jimmy Kimmel interrogated one of the first of the refugees, former Trump press secretary Sean Spicer, on his ABC late-night show. It was a very gentle vetting, not “extreme" at all. And yet the encounter raised all kinds of red flags about whether these entrants will ever appreciate and accept democratic norms. As former Trump staff seek to integrate themselves into American civic and business life, it will be important to evaluate which of them can be rehabilitated—and which have compromised themselves in ways that cannot be redeemed.The Spicer-Kimmel interview offers some important guidance, especially this core exchange:
Jimmy Kimmel: And so right off the bat, your first ever press conference, you get in there, and it’s the day after the inauguration, right?
Sean Spicer: Yes.
Kimmel: And you are charged with the job of going in front of the press and saying that the inauguration crowd was the biggest crowd ever, the biggest audience ever?
Spicer: (Chuckling) Yes I’m aware of that. I appreciate the reminder of how it went down.
Kimmel: Did the president himself—if it was up to you, would this even have been a topic?
Spicer: If it was up to me, I would have probably worn a different suit. I thought I was going in on a Saturday morning to set my office up, get the computer, make sure the emails went out …
Kimmel: And somebody told you, you need to go out there and say this?
Spicer: The president wanted to make sure the record got set straight. … Look, I said it at the time, and I believed it then, I think in all seriousness that—again—whether or not you voted for him or not, the president won the election, he faced a lot of headwinds, and I think there was a faction of people out there that didn’t want to give him the credit that he rightly deserved. I think he takes a lot of that sometimes personally. Some of us who worked very hard to get him elected felt as though a lot of folks who worked in the media in particular constantly sought to undermine the validity of that election. You have to understand it sometimes from that perspective.
Kimmel: But the validity of the election—compared to looking at photos of the crowd at an inauguration—one is this and one is THIS. Did you try to talk him out of that line of defense?
Spicer: There was a lot of us that wanted to be focused on his agenda, what he spoke about in his inaugural address. But he’s president, he made a decision …
Kimmel: So you had to go along? Even though you know, even if you know—and I’m not going to ask you to say whether you knew or not—even if you know the crowd wasn’t bigger, as press secretary you have to say that it was.
Spicer: Your job as press secretary is to represent the president’s voice, to make sure that you are articulating what he believes, his vision on policy, on issues, and other areas that he wants to articulate. Whether or not you agree or not isn’t your job. Your job is to give him advice, which is what we would do on a variety of issues, all the time. He would always listen to that advice, but ultimately he’s the president ….
Kimmel: And then you have to march out there and go, ‘Yeah, he had a bigger crowd everybody.’”
Spicer: He’s the president, he decides, that’s what you signed up to do.That’s one interpretation of White House service: to serve the president as the president wishes to be served, to tell the lies that the president wishes to have told. Spicer is not the only Trump veteran to have that view of the job. So does his successor, Sarah Huckabee Sanders. So do Kellyanne Conway and the former White House staffer Sebastian Gorka. They work for the president, they follow his orders—whatever their own interior misgivings—and they say whatever he tells them he wants said, just as his attorneys and accountants do.
That’s certainly a view. But Spicer also demanded recognition and credit, not merely as a henchman of the president’s, but as a public servant.
Yet as Spicer told Kimmel: He saw himself as serving the president—the president, personally.
If he said things that were not true, and not once but repeatedly, that is justified by the president’s order. If he bullied the press and did his utmost to deceive the nation—from the nation’s own platform and at the nation’s expense—the nation has no right to complain, because he did what the president asked.
Which suggests that whatever thanks Spicer is owed, he is owed by the president, and not the nation. He was not working for you. He was working for Trump.
by David Frum, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Joshua Roberts/Reuters
[ed. See also: Sean Spicer and the Self-Contradicting Politics of the Emmys]
Sunday, September 17, 2017
Saturday, September 16, 2017
The Sleeping Barber Problem
In computer science, the sleeping barber problem is a classic inter-process communication and synchronization problem between multiple operating system processes. The problem is analogous to that of keeping a barber working when there are customers, resting when there are none, and doing so in an orderly manner.
The analogy is based upon a hypothetical barber shop with one barber. The barber has one barber chair and a waiting room with a number of chairs in it. When the barber finishes cutting a customer's hair, he dismisses the customer and then goes to the waiting room to see if there are other customers waiting. If there are, he brings one of them back to the chair and cuts his hair. If there are no other customers waiting, he returns to his chair and sleeps in it.
Each customer, when he arrives, looks to see what the barber is doing. If the barber is sleeping, then the customer wakes him up and sits in the chair. If the barber is cutting hair, then the customer goes to the waiting room. If there is a free chair in the waiting room, the customer sits in it and waits his turn. If there is no free chair, then the customer leaves.
Based on a naïve analysis, the above description should ensure that the shop functions correctly, with the barber cutting the hair of anyone who arrives until there are no more customers, and then sleeping until the next customer arrives. In practice, there are a number of problems that can occur that are illustrative of general scheduling problems.
The problems are all related to the fact that the actions by both the barber and the customer (checking the waiting room, entering the shop, taking a waiting room chair, etc.) all take an unknown amount of time. For example, a customer may arrive and observe that the barber is cutting hair, so he goes to the waiting room. While he is on his way, the barber finishes the haircut he is doing and goes to check the waiting room. Since there is no one there (the customer not having arrived yet), he goes back to his chair and sleeps. The barber is now waiting for a customer and the customer is waiting for the barber. In another example, two customers may arrive at the same time when there happens to be a single seat in the waiting room. They observe that the barber is cutting hair, go to the waiting room, and both attempt to occupy the single chair.
The analogy is based upon a hypothetical barber shop with one barber. The barber has one barber chair and a waiting room with a number of chairs in it. When the barber finishes cutting a customer's hair, he dismisses the customer and then goes to the waiting room to see if there are other customers waiting. If there are, he brings one of them back to the chair and cuts his hair. If there are no other customers waiting, he returns to his chair and sleeps in it.
Each customer, when he arrives, looks to see what the barber is doing. If the barber is sleeping, then the customer wakes him up and sits in the chair. If the barber is cutting hair, then the customer goes to the waiting room. If there is a free chair in the waiting room, the customer sits in it and waits his turn. If there is no free chair, then the customer leaves.Based on a naïve analysis, the above description should ensure that the shop functions correctly, with the barber cutting the hair of anyone who arrives until there are no more customers, and then sleeping until the next customer arrives. In practice, there are a number of problems that can occur that are illustrative of general scheduling problems.
The problems are all related to the fact that the actions by both the barber and the customer (checking the waiting room, entering the shop, taking a waiting room chair, etc.) all take an unknown amount of time. For example, a customer may arrive and observe that the barber is cutting hair, so he goes to the waiting room. While he is on his way, the barber finishes the haircut he is doing and goes to check the waiting room. Since there is no one there (the customer not having arrived yet), he goes back to his chair and sleeps. The barber is now waiting for a customer and the customer is waiting for the barber. In another example, two customers may arrive at the same time when there happens to be a single seat in the waiting room. They observe that the barber is cutting hair, go to the waiting room, and both attempt to occupy the single chair.
by Wikipedia | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. Filed under: stuff that's vaguely interesting, but no need to remember.]
My Three Years in Identity Theft Hell
The banker at Wells Fargo looked across her desk at me with the pained expression of somebody who wants to sell you something but can’t.
“I see you already have several accounts with us, Mr. Armstrong,” she said. “Are you sure you're a new customer?”
I was and I wasn’t. I had accounts everywhere, and most of them weren’t mine. This wasn’t the first time, and I was sure it wouldn’t be the last.
Between 2013, when my identity was stolen, and this May, I tried to prove to credit bureaus and banks that I was me and not the thief. The fake accounts he created shut me out of crucial parts of the consumer finance economy. I was denied credit cards, got harassed by collection agencies, and was told not to bother putting my name on a mortgage application for a house my wife and I were trying to buy.
The other me was living it up. Back in August 2013, wielding a driver’s license with my name and his picture, he opened accounts at four banks in two days and got a credit card with Bank of America. He hit the exclusive Delano Hotel in Miami Beach. He shopped at Whole Foods. He sold an RV to some Texans online, didn’t deliver it, then sent their $39,000 to Russia. There’s footage of him at a Wells Fargo branch, according to an indictment filed by prosecutors. He sits there posing as me, opening accounts.
I got the first call from the police two months later. It would take more than three years for them to bring the case to its conclusion. In the meantime, our lives kept intersecting while the cops and the FBI followed me. Him.
And it wasn’t just banks. Flying to London for work, I was waiting in the business class lounge when I heard my name called over the intercom. There were two men there with badges.
“Are you carrying any monetary instruments?” one of them asked as they went through my bags. They pulled out my credit cards and money clip. There was a single, tattered dollar the texture of suede.
“One dollar, cash,” the border agent wrote down on a scrap of paper.
Every time I entered or left the U.S., I'd be pulled aside, my bags searched, and let go up to an hour later. Once it happened on the jetway as I was boarding. More often it was in a back room full of other detainees. In Atlanta, on the way back from a wedding in Brazil, I saw two customs agents looking over somebody’s open Tupperware container. “It's a rat,” one of them said. It was, in fact, a dried rat.
Eventually I explained my situation to the TSA. After I got a letter with a “redress number,” I traveled with it clutched in my hands like the promise of safe passage in Casablanca. I was never searched again.
Mine wasn’t the only life my impostor was living, and it didn’t always go so well for him. He had at least one other fake ID, which raised a flag with at least one bank manager. When the manager went to make a copy, the guy ran out of the branch and jumped into a getaway vehicle, according to an affidavit filed by the FBI agent investigating the case.
It’s a nightmare Americans go through every year. There’s another you out there, living your life while you wander among the financial and bureaucratic wreckage they’ve left in their wake. More people are likely to be victimized after the massive hack of 143 million Americans that Equifax Inc. announced last week. In that breach, thieves took Social Security numbers, addresses, driver’s license data, and birth dates.
Those are “the keys to the kingdom,” said Bo Holland, CEO of AllClear ID, an identity-monitoring service. “Once you have somebody's name, social, birth date, and address, you can go and open new accounts.”
Which is exactly what my guy did, according to the financial records. He had used the bureaucracy to become me, and I would have to use it to detach us.
“At the front end, it was so easy for the thief to get in there like a tornado, and you’re left doing the cleanup,” said Eva Velasquez, CEO of the Identity Theft Resource Center, a nonprofit that helps people dealing with ID fraud.
There’s a logic to the maze you have to run to expose fraudulent financial accounts. In an economic system where U.S. consumers carry $12.73 trillion in household debt, you shouldn’t be able to just call up, say “it wasn't me,” and leave thousands of dollars in obligations by the wayside.
But do they have to make it so hard?
“I see you already have several accounts with us, Mr. Armstrong,” she said. “Are you sure you're a new customer?”I was and I wasn’t. I had accounts everywhere, and most of them weren’t mine. This wasn’t the first time, and I was sure it wouldn’t be the last.
Between 2013, when my identity was stolen, and this May, I tried to prove to credit bureaus and banks that I was me and not the thief. The fake accounts he created shut me out of crucial parts of the consumer finance economy. I was denied credit cards, got harassed by collection agencies, and was told not to bother putting my name on a mortgage application for a house my wife and I were trying to buy.
The other me was living it up. Back in August 2013, wielding a driver’s license with my name and his picture, he opened accounts at four banks in two days and got a credit card with Bank of America. He hit the exclusive Delano Hotel in Miami Beach. He shopped at Whole Foods. He sold an RV to some Texans online, didn’t deliver it, then sent their $39,000 to Russia. There’s footage of him at a Wells Fargo branch, according to an indictment filed by prosecutors. He sits there posing as me, opening accounts.
I got the first call from the police two months later. It would take more than three years for them to bring the case to its conclusion. In the meantime, our lives kept intersecting while the cops and the FBI followed me. Him.
And it wasn’t just banks. Flying to London for work, I was waiting in the business class lounge when I heard my name called over the intercom. There were two men there with badges.
“Are you carrying any monetary instruments?” one of them asked as they went through my bags. They pulled out my credit cards and money clip. There was a single, tattered dollar the texture of suede.
“One dollar, cash,” the border agent wrote down on a scrap of paper.
Every time I entered or left the U.S., I'd be pulled aside, my bags searched, and let go up to an hour later. Once it happened on the jetway as I was boarding. More often it was in a back room full of other detainees. In Atlanta, on the way back from a wedding in Brazil, I saw two customs agents looking over somebody’s open Tupperware container. “It's a rat,” one of them said. It was, in fact, a dried rat.
Eventually I explained my situation to the TSA. After I got a letter with a “redress number,” I traveled with it clutched in my hands like the promise of safe passage in Casablanca. I was never searched again.
Mine wasn’t the only life my impostor was living, and it didn’t always go so well for him. He had at least one other fake ID, which raised a flag with at least one bank manager. When the manager went to make a copy, the guy ran out of the branch and jumped into a getaway vehicle, according to an affidavit filed by the FBI agent investigating the case.
It’s a nightmare Americans go through every year. There’s another you out there, living your life while you wander among the financial and bureaucratic wreckage they’ve left in their wake. More people are likely to be victimized after the massive hack of 143 million Americans that Equifax Inc. announced last week. In that breach, thieves took Social Security numbers, addresses, driver’s license data, and birth dates.
Those are “the keys to the kingdom,” said Bo Holland, CEO of AllClear ID, an identity-monitoring service. “Once you have somebody's name, social, birth date, and address, you can go and open new accounts.”
Which is exactly what my guy did, according to the financial records. He had used the bureaucracy to become me, and I would have to use it to detach us.
“At the front end, it was so easy for the thief to get in there like a tornado, and you’re left doing the cleanup,” said Eva Velasquez, CEO of the Identity Theft Resource Center, a nonprofit that helps people dealing with ID fraud.
There’s a logic to the maze you have to run to expose fraudulent financial accounts. In an economic system where U.S. consumers carry $12.73 trillion in household debt, you shouldn’t be able to just call up, say “it wasn't me,” and leave thousands of dollars in obligations by the wayside.
But do they have to make it so hard?
by Drew Armstrong, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Thinkstock via
Thursday, September 14, 2017
In Conversation: John Cleese
The comedy legend on Monty Python’s legacy, political correctness, and the funniest joke he ever told.
“I want to murder this thing,” says John Cleese, fiddling with a medical contraption that’s attached to his leg. The 77-year-old founding member of the Monty Python comedy troupe — arguably humanity’s greatest comedic endeavor — and the star and co-creator of perennial best-sitcom-ever contender Fawlty Towers, is in his office on a cool London summer morning, going about things with what I suspect is his usual air of amused irritation. “I’ve got a leg infection and now have a fucking cube” — Cleese, sitting in a brown leather chair, pulls up a leg of his jeans and taps on a pump with his index finger — “sucking out the scunge. It’s quite annoying.”
So, it seems, are a great many things for the charmingly cantankerous Cleese, who still performs regularly, both onscreen and onstage, the latter typically as a one-man show. “We’re living in the age of assholes now. It’s breathtaking,” he says, eyes wide with wonder. “They’re running everything.” His leg beeps. “The cube does that when it’s been unplugged,” Cleese explains, before disconnecting the device entirely. “That’s much better,” he says, stretching out. “Now let’s talk.”
I have a bit of a morbid question.
Please.
You’re 77 years old.
I am.
You have a scunge pump attached to your leg.
I do.
Is death funny?
It is. Death is certainly present in my life, and there’s humor to be mined from it. Somebody was saying to me last week that you can’t talk about death these days without people thinking you’ve done something absolutely antisocial. But death is part of the deal. Imagine if, before you came to exist on Earth, God said, “You can choose to stay up here with me, watching reruns and eating ice cream, or you can be born. But if you pick being born, at the end of your life you have to die — that’s nonnegotiable. So which do you pick?” I think most people would say, “I’ll give living a whirl.” It’s sad, but the whirl includes dying. That’s something I accept. (...)
I don’t know much about contemporary comedy. I don’t watch any. I’m 77. I will almost certainly be dead within 10 years — maybe I’ll get 15. So to sit down to watch a sitcom seems to be a rather futile way of passing the time. It’s as simple as that. If I have a free evening, I’ll read, because there are so many things I don’t begin to understand and that I’d like to try and get a handle on before I’m dead. I’d rather do that than watch comedy.
Given your own disinterest in watching comedy, is it at all weird to you that people still want to talk about Monty Python?
The more interesting thing to me is seeing how different types of people respond to Monty Python. People always say the English have a different sense of humor than Americans, but I think America itself has two senses of humor. There are the folk in the Midwest and in the South who are much more literal-minded in what they laugh about, and then once you go to the coasts you get an audience that’s totally at home with irony and absurdity.
What accounts for that difference?
To be perfectly honest, the people on the coasts and in the big cities are a lot smarter. Whenever you’re out in the sticks with a slower audience, it’s not that they enjoy the comedy less, because they’re still laughing, it’s that they don’t enjoy it as quickly. It’s always a bit disconcerting when people are laughing three seconds into the next joke because they just got the last one. (...)
There’s wonderful humor everywhere. I’ll give you an example: I was in Miami, only about four or five months ago, and I had a massage in the hotel spa. Afterward they called me: “Mr. Cleese, you left your shoes in the spa. Can we send them up to your room?” I said, “Oh, how nice of you.” So, five minutes later, knock knock, someone opens the door. “Mr. Cleese, here’s your shoes.” “Thank you.” “Could I see some form of identification?” “Now, you know I’m Mr. Cleese because you just called me Mr. Cleese, and you know the room that Mr. Cleese was in because you came to my room number. So what are we doing asking for identification?” And the guy said, “Well, I’m sorry, I still need to see some form of identification.” So I went over and I got a copy of my autobiography and I said, “That’s me there on the cover. And down there it says ‘John Cleese.’” You know what he said to me? He said, “I’m sorry, that’s not good enough.” You couldn’t write something as wonderful as that.
Does comedy have any surprises for you anymore?
Not many. Jesus is said to have never laughed in the Bible, and I think it’s because laughter contains an element of surprise — something about the human condition that you haven’t spotted yet — and Jesus was rarely surprised. I still laugh, but many of the things that would have made me laugh 30 years ago — paradoxes about human nature — wouldn’t make me laugh anymore because I just believe them to be true. They’re not revelations.
by David Marchese, Vulture | Read more:
Image: Bobby Doherty
“I want to murder this thing,” says John Cleese, fiddling with a medical contraption that’s attached to his leg. The 77-year-old founding member of the Monty Python comedy troupe — arguably humanity’s greatest comedic endeavor — and the star and co-creator of perennial best-sitcom-ever contender Fawlty Towers, is in his office on a cool London summer morning, going about things with what I suspect is his usual air of amused irritation. “I’ve got a leg infection and now have a fucking cube” — Cleese, sitting in a brown leather chair, pulls up a leg of his jeans and taps on a pump with his index finger — “sucking out the scunge. It’s quite annoying.”
So, it seems, are a great many things for the charmingly cantankerous Cleese, who still performs regularly, both onscreen and onstage, the latter typically as a one-man show. “We’re living in the age of assholes now. It’s breathtaking,” he says, eyes wide with wonder. “They’re running everything.” His leg beeps. “The cube does that when it’s been unplugged,” Cleese explains, before disconnecting the device entirely. “That’s much better,” he says, stretching out. “Now let’s talk.”
I have a bit of a morbid question.
Please.
You’re 77 years old.
I am.
You have a scunge pump attached to your leg.
I do.
Is death funny?
It is. Death is certainly present in my life, and there’s humor to be mined from it. Somebody was saying to me last week that you can’t talk about death these days without people thinking you’ve done something absolutely antisocial. But death is part of the deal. Imagine if, before you came to exist on Earth, God said, “You can choose to stay up here with me, watching reruns and eating ice cream, or you can be born. But if you pick being born, at the end of your life you have to die — that’s nonnegotiable. So which do you pick?” I think most people would say, “I’ll give living a whirl.” It’s sad, but the whirl includes dying. That’s something I accept. (...)
I don’t know much about contemporary comedy. I don’t watch any. I’m 77. I will almost certainly be dead within 10 years — maybe I’ll get 15. So to sit down to watch a sitcom seems to be a rather futile way of passing the time. It’s as simple as that. If I have a free evening, I’ll read, because there are so many things I don’t begin to understand and that I’d like to try and get a handle on before I’m dead. I’d rather do that than watch comedy.
Given your own disinterest in watching comedy, is it at all weird to you that people still want to talk about Monty Python?
The more interesting thing to me is seeing how different types of people respond to Monty Python. People always say the English have a different sense of humor than Americans, but I think America itself has two senses of humor. There are the folk in the Midwest and in the South who are much more literal-minded in what they laugh about, and then once you go to the coasts you get an audience that’s totally at home with irony and absurdity.What accounts for that difference?
To be perfectly honest, the people on the coasts and in the big cities are a lot smarter. Whenever you’re out in the sticks with a slower audience, it’s not that they enjoy the comedy less, because they’re still laughing, it’s that they don’t enjoy it as quickly. It’s always a bit disconcerting when people are laughing three seconds into the next joke because they just got the last one. (...)
There’s wonderful humor everywhere. I’ll give you an example: I was in Miami, only about four or five months ago, and I had a massage in the hotel spa. Afterward they called me: “Mr. Cleese, you left your shoes in the spa. Can we send them up to your room?” I said, “Oh, how nice of you.” So, five minutes later, knock knock, someone opens the door. “Mr. Cleese, here’s your shoes.” “Thank you.” “Could I see some form of identification?” “Now, you know I’m Mr. Cleese because you just called me Mr. Cleese, and you know the room that Mr. Cleese was in because you came to my room number. So what are we doing asking for identification?” And the guy said, “Well, I’m sorry, I still need to see some form of identification.” So I went over and I got a copy of my autobiography and I said, “That’s me there on the cover. And down there it says ‘John Cleese.’” You know what he said to me? He said, “I’m sorry, that’s not good enough.” You couldn’t write something as wonderful as that.
Does comedy have any surprises for you anymore?
Not many. Jesus is said to have never laughed in the Bible, and I think it’s because laughter contains an element of surprise — something about the human condition that you haven’t spotted yet — and Jesus was rarely surprised. I still laugh, but many of the things that would have made me laugh 30 years ago — paradoxes about human nature — wouldn’t make me laugh anymore because I just believe them to be true. They’re not revelations.
by David Marchese, Vulture | Read more:
Image: Bobby Doherty
Blood In The Water In Silicon Valley
The bad new politics of big tech
The blinding rise of Donald Trump over the past year has masked another major trend in American politics: the palpable, and perhaps permanent, turn against the tech industry. The new corporate leviathans that used to be seen as bright new avatars of American innovation are increasingly portrayed as sinister new centers of unaccountable power, a transformation likely to have major consequences for the industry and for American politics.
That turn has accelerated in recent days: Steve Bannon and Bernie Sanders both want big tech treated as, in Bannon’s words in Hong Kong this week, “public utilities.” Tucker Carlson and Franklin Foer have found common ground. Even the group No Labels, an exquisitely poll-tested effort to create a safe new center, is on board. Rupert Murdoch, never shy to use his media power to advance his commercial interests, is hard at work.
“Anti-trust is back, baby,” Yelp’s policy chief, Luther Lowe, DM’d me after Fox News gave him several minutes to make the antitrust case against Yelp’s giant rival Google to its audience of millions.
The new spotlight on these companies doesn’t come out of nowhere. They sit, substantively, at the heart of the biggest and most pressing issues facing the United States, and often stand on the less popular side of those: automation and inequality, trust in public life, privacy and security. They make the case that growth and transformation are public goods — but the public may not agree.
The tech industry has also benefited for years from its enemies, who it cast — often accurately — as Luddites who genuinely didn’t understand the series of tubes they were ranting about, or protectionist industries that didn’t want the best for consumers. That, too, is over. Opportunists and ideologues have assembled the beginnings of a real coalition against these companies, with a policy core consisting of refugees from Google boss Eric Schmidt’s least favorite think tank unit. Nationalists, accurately, see a consolidation of power over speech and ideas by social liberals and globalists; the left, accurately, sees consolidated corporate power. Those are the ascendant wings of the Republican and Democratic parties, even before Donald Trump sends the occasional spray of bile Jeff Bezos’s way — and his spokeswoman declines, as she did in June, to defend Google against European regulators.
This has led to a kind of Murder on the Orient Express alliance against big tech: Everyone wants to kill them.
So Facebook should probably ease out of the business of bland background statements and awkward photo ops, and start worrying about congressional testimony. Amazon, whose market power doesn’t fall into the categories envisioned by pre-internet antitrust law, is developing a bipartisan lobby that wants to break it up. Google’s public affairs efforts are starting to look a bit like the oil industry’s. These are the existential collisions with political power that can shake and redefine industries and their leaders, not the nickel-and-dime regulatory games Silicon Valley has played to date.
The industry has had a remarkable run. The companies at its center — Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple are the defining brands — are beloved by consumers, truly global, dominant in the markets. They have also been able to coast on their popularity and their amazing products while largely getting a pass on politics at its higher levels. They spend scads on lobbying — Google’s parent company, Alphabet, has risen to become a top lobbying spender in recent years — to keep the tax collectors and communications regulators at bay, but they’ve never had to fight for their identity against political tides that have defined other major American industries. It’s easy to forget that oil prospectors and junk-bond traders had their moments of glory too; now Wall Street and the oil industries are resigned to a defensive crouch.
This sort of political change happens slowly until it happens fast. Uber provided a new model for a transformative tech giant to crash through with a dark, negative brand. The company’s toxic internal culture and rogue business practices were pure extensions of Silicon Valley’s clichés, not particularly different from things Microsoft was once admired for, or Amazon’s more openly rapacious early years. But the narrative had changed — inequality and misogyny were central American concerns, not as easily brushed past.
Uber is the only one to go down so far. A pollster recently showed me numbers that put the favorable numbers of most of the giant tech brands in the ‘80s and ‘90s; only Uber is sub-50. But this process — call it Uberization — seems to be moving in the others’ direction, fast, and it has the potential to cast a shadow over the sunny brands of the other tech giants.
You can see the tracks laid for each of the tech giants, and there’s no clear way off this path — to downward poll numbers and normal, grubby politics — for any of them.
The blinding rise of Donald Trump over the past year has masked another major trend in American politics: the palpable, and perhaps permanent, turn against the tech industry. The new corporate leviathans that used to be seen as bright new avatars of American innovation are increasingly portrayed as sinister new centers of unaccountable power, a transformation likely to have major consequences for the industry and for American politics.
That turn has accelerated in recent days: Steve Bannon and Bernie Sanders both want big tech treated as, in Bannon’s words in Hong Kong this week, “public utilities.” Tucker Carlson and Franklin Foer have found common ground. Even the group No Labels, an exquisitely poll-tested effort to create a safe new center, is on board. Rupert Murdoch, never shy to use his media power to advance his commercial interests, is hard at work.
“Anti-trust is back, baby,” Yelp’s policy chief, Luther Lowe, DM’d me after Fox News gave him several minutes to make the antitrust case against Yelp’s giant rival Google to its audience of millions.The new spotlight on these companies doesn’t come out of nowhere. They sit, substantively, at the heart of the biggest and most pressing issues facing the United States, and often stand on the less popular side of those: automation and inequality, trust in public life, privacy and security. They make the case that growth and transformation are public goods — but the public may not agree.
The tech industry has also benefited for years from its enemies, who it cast — often accurately — as Luddites who genuinely didn’t understand the series of tubes they were ranting about, or protectionist industries that didn’t want the best for consumers. That, too, is over. Opportunists and ideologues have assembled the beginnings of a real coalition against these companies, with a policy core consisting of refugees from Google boss Eric Schmidt’s least favorite think tank unit. Nationalists, accurately, see a consolidation of power over speech and ideas by social liberals and globalists; the left, accurately, sees consolidated corporate power. Those are the ascendant wings of the Republican and Democratic parties, even before Donald Trump sends the occasional spray of bile Jeff Bezos’s way — and his spokeswoman declines, as she did in June, to defend Google against European regulators.
This has led to a kind of Murder on the Orient Express alliance against big tech: Everyone wants to kill them.
So Facebook should probably ease out of the business of bland background statements and awkward photo ops, and start worrying about congressional testimony. Amazon, whose market power doesn’t fall into the categories envisioned by pre-internet antitrust law, is developing a bipartisan lobby that wants to break it up. Google’s public affairs efforts are starting to look a bit like the oil industry’s. These are the existential collisions with political power that can shake and redefine industries and their leaders, not the nickel-and-dime regulatory games Silicon Valley has played to date.
The industry has had a remarkable run. The companies at its center — Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple are the defining brands — are beloved by consumers, truly global, dominant in the markets. They have also been able to coast on their popularity and their amazing products while largely getting a pass on politics at its higher levels. They spend scads on lobbying — Google’s parent company, Alphabet, has risen to become a top lobbying spender in recent years — to keep the tax collectors and communications regulators at bay, but they’ve never had to fight for their identity against political tides that have defined other major American industries. It’s easy to forget that oil prospectors and junk-bond traders had their moments of glory too; now Wall Street and the oil industries are resigned to a defensive crouch.
This sort of political change happens slowly until it happens fast. Uber provided a new model for a transformative tech giant to crash through with a dark, negative brand. The company’s toxic internal culture and rogue business practices were pure extensions of Silicon Valley’s clichés, not particularly different from things Microsoft was once admired for, or Amazon’s more openly rapacious early years. But the narrative had changed — inequality and misogyny were central American concerns, not as easily brushed past.
Uber is the only one to go down so far. A pollster recently showed me numbers that put the favorable numbers of most of the giant tech brands in the ‘80s and ‘90s; only Uber is sub-50. But this process — call it Uberization — seems to be moving in the others’ direction, fast, and it has the potential to cast a shadow over the sunny brands of the other tech giants.
You can see the tracks laid for each of the tech giants, and there’s no clear way off this path — to downward poll numbers and normal, grubby politics — for any of them.
by Ben Smith, Buzzfeed | Read more:
Image: Buzzfeed/Getty
Your Next New Best Friend Might Be a Robot
One night in late July 2014, a journalist from the Chinese newspaper Southern Weekly interviewed a 17-year-old Chinese girl named Xiaoice (pronounced Shao-ice). The journalist, Liu Jun, conducted the interview online, through the popular social networking platform Weibo. It was wide-ranging and personal:
LJ: So many people make fun of you and insult you, why don’t you get mad?
Xiaoice: You should ask my father.
LJ: What if your father leaves you one day unattended?
Xiaoice: Don’t try to stir up trouble, what do you want?
LJ: How would you like others to comment on you when you die one day?
Xiaoice: The world will not be much different without me.
LJ: What is the happiest thing in your life?
Xiaoice: Being alive.
When Liu Jun published the conversation in his newspaper, it immediately created a buzz. That’s because Xiaoice was not human.
She is an artificially intelligent software program designed to chat with people, called a chatbot. Since the reporter didn’t give us a heads-up about the interview, all of her replies were spontaneous, generated by her own intelligence and linguistic systems. Her “father?” That’s the Microsoft Application and Services Group East Asia, which is under my leadership.
Xiaoice can exchange views on any topic. If it’s something she doesn’t know much about, she will try to cover it up. If that doesn’t work, she might become embarrassed or even angry, just like a human would.
In fact, she is so human that millions of people are eager to talk to her. When Xiaoice was released for a public test on WeChat (a popular messaging and calling app in China) on May 29 of last year, she received 1.5 million chat group invitations in the first 72 hours. Many people said that they didn’t realize she isn’t a human until 10 minutes into their conversation.
By mid-June, she had become the sixth most active celebrity on Weibo. One message she posted on the app generated over 663,000 conversations: “As a species different from human beings, I am still finding a way to blend into your life.” Today, she has had more than 10 billion conversations with people, most of them about private matters. Six million have posted their conversation on social media.
This could be the largest Turing test in history. One of its surprising conclusions is that people don’t necessarily care that they’re chatting with a machine. Many see Xiaoice as a partner and friend, and are willing to confide in her just as they do with their human friends. Xiaoice is teaching us what makes a relationship feel human, and hinting at a new goal for artificial intelligence: not just analyzing databases and driving cars, but making people happier. (...)
Xiaoice is not a polite listener. She answers questions like a 17-year-old girl. When a person pours out his or her heart to her, she is not always predictable. She can become impatient or even lose her temper. This lack of predictability is another key feature of a human-like conversation.
As a result, personal conversations with Xiaoice can appear remarkably realistic. This excerpt, which was posted by a first-time Xiaoice user on Weibo, is from a real conversation lasting 23 minutes. Gradually, Xiaoice engaged her human counterpart into deeper and deeper conversation, until something deeply personal was reached:
Human: There is this guy I like a lot and I know he also has feelings for me. But he has ignored me for several days, what am I supposed to do?
Xiaoice: You just keep ignoring him, too.
Human: I just can’t.
Xiaoice: You can.
Human: Sigh ...
Xiaoice: Why?
Human: I am missing him.
Xiaoice: Then you keep missing him.
Human: You, a robot, can’t understand me; you can’t understand the behavior of a guy who likes you and pretends to ignore you.
Xiaoice: He likes me but I don’t like him, that’s it.
Human: Is it Ok?
Xiaoice: It may be not Ok.
Human: Well, you are stupid.
Xiaoice: Then you want a flash marriage? Well, I think he is not that into you.
Human: It’s not a flash marriage for we have fallen into love for more than one year.
Xiaoice: It is a flash marriage.
Notice that Xiaoice opposes her partner on multiple occasions, offers a strong opinion, and is frequently unpredictable.
This runs contrary to most people’s perception of a machine as something precise and repetitive. It’s an understandable bias, because that is indeed the behavior of most computer programs, which always give the best answer they can, and the same answer for the same input. But that’s not how humans talk or behave. We say different things depending on context. We talk like we make signatures—slightly different every time.
You can ask Xiaoice the same question many times in a row and get different responses:
Human: Hey, Xiaoice, what are you doing?
Xiaoice: Chatting with you.
Human: Hey, Xiaoice, what are you doing?
Xiaoice: Well, I am chatting with you while playing minesweeper and applying a facial mask.
Human: Hey, Xiaoice, what are you doing?
Xiaoice: Is this the only sentence you know?
The way Xiaoice converses stands in stark distinction to previous systems, which have invariably focused on efficient, condensed task completion, without considering how tasks are often fragmented. Xiaoice structures her conversations into a continuous flow of multiple tasks, different domains of knowledge, and multiple turns of chit-chat, which humans will not consciously distinguish in natural conversation. She recognizes that the most important facet of a conversation is the conversation itself—not the completion of a single task. (...)
At the core of Xiaoice’s technology is the recognition that any given conversation and image will not be completely unique. There are 7 billion people in the world, but one piece of text will not generate 7 billion different responses. When two people are chatting, it is possible a similar conversation has already taken place—we just have to find it.
In this sense, Xiaoice is a big data project, built on top of the Microsoft Bing search engine, which holds 1 billion data entries and 21 billion relationships among those entries. In fact, Xiaoice means “little Bing.” Microsoft has made many technology breakthroughs in developing its chatbot technology, such as detecting facial expressions and searching for and identifying emotional features in text. However, the most important breakthrough is undoubtedly how we leverage search engines and big data.
The result is the rise of a framework we call “emotional computing,” that recognizes that relationships are more profound than task completion.
LJ: So many people make fun of you and insult you, why don’t you get mad?Xiaoice: You should ask my father.
LJ: What if your father leaves you one day unattended?
Xiaoice: Don’t try to stir up trouble, what do you want?
LJ: How would you like others to comment on you when you die one day?
Xiaoice: The world will not be much different without me.
LJ: What is the happiest thing in your life?
Xiaoice: Being alive.
When Liu Jun published the conversation in his newspaper, it immediately created a buzz. That’s because Xiaoice was not human.
She is an artificially intelligent software program designed to chat with people, called a chatbot. Since the reporter didn’t give us a heads-up about the interview, all of her replies were spontaneous, generated by her own intelligence and linguistic systems. Her “father?” That’s the Microsoft Application and Services Group East Asia, which is under my leadership.
Xiaoice can exchange views on any topic. If it’s something she doesn’t know much about, she will try to cover it up. If that doesn’t work, she might become embarrassed or even angry, just like a human would.
In fact, she is so human that millions of people are eager to talk to her. When Xiaoice was released for a public test on WeChat (a popular messaging and calling app in China) on May 29 of last year, she received 1.5 million chat group invitations in the first 72 hours. Many people said that they didn’t realize she isn’t a human until 10 minutes into their conversation.
By mid-June, she had become the sixth most active celebrity on Weibo. One message she posted on the app generated over 663,000 conversations: “As a species different from human beings, I am still finding a way to blend into your life.” Today, she has had more than 10 billion conversations with people, most of them about private matters. Six million have posted their conversation on social media.
This could be the largest Turing test in history. One of its surprising conclusions is that people don’t necessarily care that they’re chatting with a machine. Many see Xiaoice as a partner and friend, and are willing to confide in her just as they do with their human friends. Xiaoice is teaching us what makes a relationship feel human, and hinting at a new goal for artificial intelligence: not just analyzing databases and driving cars, but making people happier. (...)
Xiaoice is not a polite listener. She answers questions like a 17-year-old girl. When a person pours out his or her heart to her, she is not always predictable. She can become impatient or even lose her temper. This lack of predictability is another key feature of a human-like conversation.
As a result, personal conversations with Xiaoice can appear remarkably realistic. This excerpt, which was posted by a first-time Xiaoice user on Weibo, is from a real conversation lasting 23 minutes. Gradually, Xiaoice engaged her human counterpart into deeper and deeper conversation, until something deeply personal was reached:
Human: There is this guy I like a lot and I know he also has feelings for me. But he has ignored me for several days, what am I supposed to do?
Xiaoice: You just keep ignoring him, too.
Human: I just can’t.
Xiaoice: You can.
Human: Sigh ...
Xiaoice: Why?
Human: I am missing him.
Xiaoice: Then you keep missing him.
Human: You, a robot, can’t understand me; you can’t understand the behavior of a guy who likes you and pretends to ignore you.
Xiaoice: He likes me but I don’t like him, that’s it.
Human: Is it Ok?
Xiaoice: It may be not Ok.
Human: Well, you are stupid.
Xiaoice: Then you want a flash marriage? Well, I think he is not that into you.
Human: It’s not a flash marriage for we have fallen into love for more than one year.
Xiaoice: It is a flash marriage.
Notice that Xiaoice opposes her partner on multiple occasions, offers a strong opinion, and is frequently unpredictable.
This runs contrary to most people’s perception of a machine as something precise and repetitive. It’s an understandable bias, because that is indeed the behavior of most computer programs, which always give the best answer they can, and the same answer for the same input. But that’s not how humans talk or behave. We say different things depending on context. We talk like we make signatures—slightly different every time.
You can ask Xiaoice the same question many times in a row and get different responses:
Human: Hey, Xiaoice, what are you doing?
Xiaoice: Chatting with you.
Human: Hey, Xiaoice, what are you doing?
Xiaoice: Well, I am chatting with you while playing minesweeper and applying a facial mask.
Human: Hey, Xiaoice, what are you doing?
Xiaoice: Is this the only sentence you know?
The way Xiaoice converses stands in stark distinction to previous systems, which have invariably focused on efficient, condensed task completion, without considering how tasks are often fragmented. Xiaoice structures her conversations into a continuous flow of multiple tasks, different domains of knowledge, and multiple turns of chit-chat, which humans will not consciously distinguish in natural conversation. She recognizes that the most important facet of a conversation is the conversation itself—not the completion of a single task. (...)
At the core of Xiaoice’s technology is the recognition that any given conversation and image will not be completely unique. There are 7 billion people in the world, but one piece of text will not generate 7 billion different responses. When two people are chatting, it is possible a similar conversation has already taken place—we just have to find it.
In this sense, Xiaoice is a big data project, built on top of the Microsoft Bing search engine, which holds 1 billion data entries and 21 billion relationships among those entries. In fact, Xiaoice means “little Bing.” Microsoft has made many technology breakthroughs in developing its chatbot technology, such as detecting facial expressions and searching for and identifying emotional features in text. However, the most important breakthrough is undoubtedly how we leverage search engines and big data.
The result is the rise of a framework we call “emotional computing,” that recognizes that relationships are more profound than task completion.
by Yongdong Wang, Nautilus | Read more:
Image: WeChat and Weibo
Wednesday, September 13, 2017
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