Author: Maverisk

Following up on the earlier post on how GDPR is Y2k’s legal party sibling (as here and here), an evaluation – mid-term, mostly, re your compliance…:

1. You shouted loud enough. Right. That’s the Y2k escape claim in full force and colours. And untrue. The skies haven’t fallen in like they would have with the renewal of the millennium we live in, but a. things did go wrong, back then, and b. this time, non-compliance isn’t that obvious so your claim may fail, as shown in the next option:
2. There’s all sorts of under water non-compliance and you just haven’t been found out …yet. This is the dangerous one, where most of you will be…;
3. You actually are compliant and need not worry at all about possible audits, fines, etc. – that would be miraculous ..! Certainly since this.

So, all of you: Option 2 it is. ‘tMay now seem to just have been yet another law flying by to become and stay compliant with, but … are the professionals who do truly care the only ones that care somewhat, still ..?
Unfortunately, ‘privacy as a competitive differentiator’ hasn’t caught on. New-style-awareness hasn’t caught on.
Continue reading “The GDPR aftermath; your compliance from 00 to 0000”

You may have read that wrong. If so, that was my intention.

Skinny Tipping is about how tipping, e.g. in restaurants, is a balance thing. Certainly not to be overdone, like here. Nor Pittsburg blue but maybe closer to it. Yes, acknowledged, some Yanks err on the wrong side. Most ‘tourists’ err on the other wrong side, leaving only round-off change – next time, do please stay home if you think you can afford the (cattle class / cattle airliner) ticket but not proper behaviour … not defined by what you think that would be, but how it is defined where you find yourself. Fish out of the water? Don’t get out of the water, then. Bye. Don’t want to understand you, when you aren’t a proper guest. Good riddance.

The thing is, Skinny Tipping also goes for your (organisation’s) infosec. That should be done properly, but not a. close-to-zero, certainly not; b. ridiculous-spendwise, on the wrong things. Come to think of it; this also goes for organisation growth also in the private sector which by the way is a stupid name let’s revert to ‘for-profit’ that’s much clearer – why oh why must you grow into infinity where a. either you know can’t continue indefinitely or you’re a stool; b. that is in no way the purpose of your organisation nor of your existence.
Apart from the core basic full last penny’s worth of infosec you’re delivering already, right? The whole shazam, tit-for-tat [uh, no.], no holds barred. Not like this, au contraire my friend fully modern i.e. complete but leanymeany including this sort of sober wizardry but there’s more of course of this stuff to do.

But Skinny Tipping it is; sustainably doing a bit more than was strictly required; not by so slim a margin that no-one notices or feels unhappy/unsatisfied, nor by such an overshoot that anything later, or in parallel, the other ones feel undersold about and you can’t keep that up anyway.
And that is how it’s done, in infosec. True infosec, measured-bit-more than bang for the buck.

I’ll go party now. Because when you read this, it’s <something>:05 or :15, :25, :35, :45, :55 or close enough so the weekend has started.
Plus:

[I wouldn’t attempt skinny ‘tipping’ here…]

– still. Why don’t minds open up, and save a lot of lives ..?
I’m referring to this story, with this one behind it.

Imagine the cost savings if Science weren’t a. so stubborn, b. so completely tied up in commercial interests. The latter, proven over and over again to result in anti-societal behaviour. On a massive scale. If only science would be objective, reproduce claims, and then serve by whom it (?) is paid: Consumers i.e. human beings. No science doesn’t exist for the de-human shareholders nor the some of the latter that are the 0,1%.
Maybe millennials will shift society towards commusocialism. Which is dangerous in itself. Since it may lead to as many deaths as the inaction of science on this one. But the latter is more pernicious, harder to counter.

Well, let’s all stay positive, right?

[Under this starry ceiling, the chance of superbugs being present is … quite high yes; Grand Central]

It seems that LinkedIn posted a piece on how AI has taken over LinkedIn already, and <SkAInet!> they’re massaging our minds before they take over completely. Like, in this:

How you’d think that the first item is not heavily bot-driven, excusing, exonerating themselves [that word assumes agency, doesn’t it ..? 😳] ..? On command by some Power That/To Be, probably, but still.
Yes, I’m scaremongering. You’d need to, too.
Oh, plus of course:

[Don’t worry be happy, Blue Pill style all the way; Amsterdamse Bos]

Who in the world didn’t think this possible ..!? A bug it is. Google says the built-in microphone it never told Nest users about was ‘never supposed to be a secret’.
Of course, Big G claims the mics weren’t On at any point in time, it was just a (free; can you even start to think about the enormity of that claim from them!?) add-on, to be used only later … How trustworthy is that claim …? If you believe that, Santa, Bigfoot, the tooth fairy, etc.etc. are also real. No, no, I mean not only real but they all live in the White House.

Why did nobody take more care ..? Had nobody investigated the technicalities of the equipment ..? Probably Bystander Bugs.
… Not quite. Probably, the more weary already let the sheeple go first. [Disclaimer: I did, explicitly for this very / general security reason.]
You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time. [Abraham Lincoln? Not P.T. Barnum]
You can fool too many of the people too much of the time. [James Thurber]

Maybe laws are needed, to stop the gullible from their own lack of (prefrontal) brain capacity. Anyone who makes it possible to obtain, or conspires to make it possible to obtain either actively or by omission any personal information without consent, shall be fined all income and bonuses and other forms of compensation or renumeration as received over the past five years; in case of non-natural person(s) the fine shall be 10% of global turnover of the organisation and of any organisation that the non-natural person(s) are part of [to thwart jurisdiction shopping by conglomerates] payable in cash including all Board members being fined as natural persons as above.
Something along these lines.

Oh well. Also:

[Your coffers i.e. emptyness – last survivors have good winds; Porto / Foz do Douro]

Just a shortie again, for the weekend when you want to come back to being on top of things, things being the behavioural aspects of compliance.
As too many of us don’t seem to be well-connected enough in the Thinking that goes in in compliance-science circles.

Yes there is such a thing. Yes I know you think you’re all working in compliance the industry, maybe even too much so. But you don’t think you’re effective – as proven by your consistent complaints the ‘users’ don’t seem to ‘get’ it.

Maybe … you should do the read-up this weekend by means of these four articles plus a short vid [unfortunately, may need a professional re-take but still…].

Leaving you with:

[No fun being at the bottom, carrying the top in the clouds; La Défense a couple of years/decade ago]

As a sideline note; the evidence is mounting that the previous hype is fully over, when more and more of these kind of stories emerge [it’s not the first, and will certainly not be the last…], and only those that don’t understand the systemic impact of such ‘incidents’, the hype-laggards, still cling to the same thing as if something might still happen (not) just let those that really know the ins and outs work on it, slavishly, for years to come.

Which the latter won’t. They‘re not the stupids here. The ones you would want, have moved on [or will soon]. Since they do see that the Utopia once presented, will not work that way. The Ideal of it is infeasible; the decadent-hollow pastiche may work but is many thing just not the Ideal.

When (not if) by now you’re still unsure what I’m talking about … it’s just the Blockchain promise of ultimate security that is shown to be most-probably futile. What a way to tell, eh?

Plus:

[We need more research not on b-chains but on butterfly effects of non-compliance in day-to-day infosec without this leading to totalitarian distatorships over ’employees’ but that’s a tricky one, a thin line …; just a dagpauwoog peacock in my back garden through a 300mm]

Ah, not so long ago, I posted Lament:

Those were the days, when knowledge elicitation specialists had their hard time extracting the rules needed as feed for systems programming (sic; where the rules were turned into data, onto which data was let loose or the other way around — quite the Turing tape…), based on known and half-known, half-understood use cases avant la lettre.
Now are the days of Watson-class [aren’t Navy ships not named after the first of the class ..?] total(itarian) big data processing and slurping up the rules into neural net abstract systems somewhere out there in clouds of sorts. Yes these won out in the end; maybe not in the neuron simulation way but more like the expert system production rules and especially axioms of old. And take account of everything, from the mundane all the way to the deeply-buried and extremely-outlying exceptions. Everything.
Which wasn’t what experts were able to produce.

But, let’s check the wiki and reassure ourselves we have all that (functionality) covered in “the ‘new’ type of systems”, then mourn over the depth of research that was done in the Golden Years gone by. How much was achieved! How far back do we have to look to see the origins, in post-WWII earliest developments of ‘computers’, to see how much was already achieved with so unimaginable little! (esp. so little computing power and science-so-far)

Yes we do need to ensure many more science museums tell the story of early Lisp and page swapping. Explain the hardships endured by the pioneers, explorers of the unknown, of the Here Be Dragons of science (hard-core), of Mind. Maybe similar to the Dormouse. But certainly, we must lament the glory of past (human) performance.

And also AI into Evolve:

After the generic-AI hype will have slowed, and actual generic AI of the Normal kind gets integrated into society big time / you ain’t seen nothin’ yet time, what ..?

Apart from a huge spread of more ML algo’s than the mere Bayesian and non-linear regression (e.g., this one that I tested in a thesis already back in 1994 – it worked even when I had the feeble cpu power of the day),
And apart from the return of Expert Systems, since when the above start to become analysed everyone realises that is what ML does, on a big scale but still,
let me propose:

Evolutionary (genetic) algorithms.

Which is mentioned in this overview, I believe to recall – I’m human, and perfection is boring.
But not enough. Strange, when one considers how effective these are, and how e.g., ‘quantum computing’ actually is only a massively-parallel implementation of this.

Which made me consider even more, that we haven’t tackled the core ‘problem’ [That’s engineering-talk. Engineers find something, and solve it period. Not like those ‘alphas’ that keep on talking forever and then are very satisfied they did – notwithstanding the persistence of the problem, that’s not an issue for them; problems are to talk about not solve even when the hurt continues indefinitely hey we babbled away so who cares all are still in pain ..? Etc.].
The core problem being: How to get the I into machines ..!?
Which of course we can only do after we answered some more fundamental questions:

• What is this ‘intelligence’ thing you keep talking about? I don’t think it means what you think it means … [classic] By which I mean, where is it in the knowledge stack ..? And why do you refer to that, as it is so incredibly incomplete, e.g., it misses the idea of context completely. Whereas in this case, context is king, or emperor. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing [proof: the ‘executives’ that ‘lead’ your organisation; or, if you are one, look around you], but a lot of ‘knowledge’ without context and appropriateness of application of that knowledge, is far, far worse [proof: the ‘board room advisors’ that bypass you the real experts, of, if it’s the other way around, look around you. Or maybe you’re the Head Honcho for a reason (not)].
  Only if this ‘intelligence’ is properly defined, can we chase it. And find, that the average human doesn’t. As we consider ourselves to be above-average intelligence [Dunning-Kruger-like!], we consider also more than half of humanity to be of less wit that we ourselves – that’s how averages work [no, I know it’s not about averages but about medians but normalisation-wise it’s close enough together …];
• Context-awareness it is … How is that built into your ‘intelligent’ system? Or is the machine merely raw processing, with polishing required afterwards? Etc.; a lot of variables here. Sensors? Of what kind? Training data – with or without context data?
• Depth of intelligence; depth in field / width of field – how ‘much’ knowledge/intelligence is in your system? Also referring, in an intertwined way, back to the context: What is in, what is out?
• where on the bandwidth of structured-to-chaos? There’s classical algorithms on the one end, and full ANI/AGI/ASI even on the other. In between: Expert systems, Big Data correlations, classifier ML, more-complex ML, basic neural nets, complex neural nets, evolutionary algorithms [or are they a separate, close but parallel track?] … We need to establish a proper scale for this even when allowing for a 2^nd dimension of the above factors, to go along with it.

Which is sort-of the purpose of this post. Surely, I’m not the first one to have considered this; would any of you have pointers ..? I’d be delighted to hear / cross-post / Like (well…)

TIA, and:

[In for Skinny Tipping – “what’s that?”: Keep an eye open for next Friday’s post (22^nd). This, Resson France no you won’t be going there if you knew it]

… Was thinking: How is Quantum Computing not where AI was, around and about 25 years ago ..?

The first wave having past, then, of neuron-simulation you know, like 25 years before that. ‘Expert Systems’ having had some fifteen months/years (?) of fame in between, and then, suddenly, ‘neural networks’ were all the rage. In the news, and for academia. With some PoCs but not much.
Currently, neural nets AI-by-way-of-mere-ML has had yet another wave. Not the Big Kahuna of course, but again the groundswell has risen a serious level and continues to implement all sorts of – what we would now immediately consider mundane – implementations.

On the heels, ‘quantum computing’ is hailed as the Next Big Thing, along with other Next Big Things [probably much Bigger than Big things] like biotech, global cooling [yes that’s what we would need, not the problem we have already but the solution is the Thing], You Name It. QC seeing some qubits implemented here and there, and not much means, knowledge or Understanding what to do with it, how to program it, how to read the results
[when, not if, these don’t crumble under Heisenberg’s – or will entanglement at some future stage be shown to defeat his – and then again, we’ll have gained nothing as we’ll have zero proof that the entangled particle we picked out, actually is the one out of an infinite number that we wanted to ‘read off’; how can we be sure some alpha particle is the one to read off when it might have encountered an anti-alpha particle somewhere along the way? The way being any time frame, even approaching infinity, since linear time is only valid in a singularity spot [by which I mean beyond-infinitesimally small, not 1- but approaching o-dimensionality or worse]. Ah, time; yes, how do we know we measure the ‘immediate’ change to some entangled particle when time is so extremely variant? Does time exist? Note that it needs to, otherwise immediacy that is required in the theories re quantum entanglement so if it doesn’t exist, qe doesn’t either. But it should be clear that there is a strong bond between entanglement and quantum computing. Or at least some bond, theoretically. Kant’s view of inner-time-only may apply.]
.. hey did I digress or what?

Whatever, QC is a hype in a precious handful of labs now. Even when the Marjorana particle is being pulled into it (Delft [other links apply], but of course; almost fittingly), not much has been deployed into, e.g., call centers.
Which places the whole shazam [are you listening?] exactly where AI was 25 years ago.
QED. Well, which was my thesis.

Now, out with other things that rock, but these stood the test of time:

[You recognize D21 immediately, with sweet D22 next to it just outside of view; Drenthe – even if you’re a Rovelli follower: memento mori]

A note, ICYMI, on the insidious effects of free speech … that gives room to Stochastic Terrorism.
Say something vague but suggestive to disassociated loonies to take illegal action, and then deny you suggested the specific action(s)… [i.e. politicianspeak]
Say something vague but claim it is a hard promise, and then disclaim that claim by wiggling your way out in the fat margin of vagueness [i.e. politicianspeak] then be called a big fat liar.

Both as same sides of the coin, denying the other side of accountability for any speech act. If you didn’t intend the consequences, don’t use vague speech. Be clear in both meanings. Or justice will prevail; maybe not immediately but in history – you will be vilified or at best utterly forgotten; useless, wasted life. For the latter, you may be mocked by your own family.

So, what will be your course of action ..?

And:

[Your defences will be outdated before you know it; Château du Haut-Kœnigsbourg (my pic, unedited)]