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Artificial intelligence, instrumental convergence, and photos of cats

In the awards winning short story, Cat Pictures Please, by Naomi Kitzer, an artificial intelligence with a predilection for cats photos inhabiting some unspecified system has taken to manipulating people to see if it can change their lives for the better. It’s a clever story that raises several interesting issues about what the nature of an A.I. might be and one of the biggest concerns the A.I.’s fondness for pictures of cats. This fondness is understandable as cats can be very entertaining. Consider this video …  Wasn’t that cute? Anyway, in Kitzer’s story, cat pictures are the A.I.’s source of pleasure in a manner that isn’t fully articulated, something that’s fine for the purposes of fiction. On the other hand, in the real world, such an interest by an A.I. could have very different consequences due to something called instrumental convergence, which is defined on Wikipedia as:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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Will autocrats ever learn? – The Internet Blackout in Gambia

On Wednesday afternoon, Cloudflare and other Internet companies noticed that the West African country of The Gambia had dropped off the Internet - the day before the presidential election that was planned to be held there on Thursday, December 1st. This is not unprecedented. The Ugandan government blocked access to Facebook and WhatsApp during its recent election. Internet blocking by governments has also been seen in Gabon. Even Ghana toyed with the idea earlier this year.

Gambia has a population of 1.8 million people, and according to World Internet Stats, Internet penetration is growing fast and is almost 20%. The latest statistics indicate that at least ten percent of Gambians are using Facebook. As shown in the graph below, on Thursday, the Gambian government cut off access to the global Internet and for 39 hours hundreds of thousands of Gambians were unable to use online services on which they rely every day.

All the networks in Gambia disappeared from the global routing tables. This could have been caused by a soft reconfiguration of Internet routers; or by a physical powering down of telecommunications equipment. At this point, we do not know. What we do know is that we Continue reading

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Folks, Let’s Not Forget About the Original Use of SDN, Says Nokia

Carrier SDN can drive 25% more revenue generating services.

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Russia claims it foiled a cyber attack from a foreign spy service

The Russian government claims to have foiled a "large-scale" cyber attack from foreign intelligence services meant to destabilize the country’s financial system.The government’s Federal Security Service made the statement on Friday without blaming a specific country, but said the attack was meant to be carried out on Dec. 5 against a number of major Russian banks.The hack would have also included the use of social media and SMS text messages to circulate posts claiming a crisis in Russia’s financial system. Several dozen cities in the country had been targeted, the Federal Security Service claimed, stating it had already neutralized the threat.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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Russia claims it foiled a cyber attack from a foreign spy service

The Russian government claims to have foiled a "large-scale" cyber attack from foreign intelligence services meant to destabilize the country’s financial system.The government’s Federal Security Service made the statement on Friday without blaming a specific country, but said the attack was meant to be carried out on Dec. 5 against a number of major Russian banks.The hack would have also included the use of social media and SMS text messages to circulate posts claiming a crisis in Russia’s financial system. Several dozen cities in the country had been targeted, the Federal Security Service claimed, stating it had already neutralized the threat.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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Is This A Server Slowdown, Or Increasing Efficiency?

If you happen to believe that spending on core IT infrastructure is a leading indicator of the robustness of national economies and the global one that is stitched, somewhat piecemeal like a patchwork quilt. From them, then the third quarter sales and shipments of servers is probably sounding a note of caution for you.

It certainly does for us here at The Next Platform. But it is important, particularly if we have in fact hit the peak of the X86 server market as we mused about three months ago, to not get carried away. A slowdown in spending …

Is This A Server Slowdown, Or Increasing Efficiency? was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

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Intel’s silence on Optane SSDs raises questions about launch and focus

There's a lot of excitement about Intel's superfast Optane SSDs, but products won't be on shelves this year as the chipmaker had earlier promised.Intel is currently making Optane in a factory in China, and production will "ramp" up next year, said Stacy Smith, executive vice president of manufacturing, operations, and sales at Intel.Smith declined to comment on when Optane products will hit the market, maintaining a consistent pattern of silence among Intel executives on the topic. He spoke at the Credit Suisse 20th Annual Technology, Media, and Telecom conference in Scottsdale, Arizona this week.Intel CEO Brian Krzanich said sample Optane products will ship to more testers next year, and that "it’s really a 2018 ramp for that product," according to a transcript of an October earnings call, posted on Seeking Alpha.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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What it Takes to Build True FPGA as a Service

Amazon Web Services might be offering FPGAs in an EC2 cloud environment, but this is still a far cry from the FPGA-as-a-service vision many hold for the future. Nonetheless, it is a remarkable offering in terms of the bleeding-edge Xilinx accelerator. The real success of these FPGA (F1) instances now depends on pulling in the right partnerships and tools to snap a larger user base together—one that would ideally include non-FPGA experts.

In its F1 instance announcement this week, AWS made it clear that for the developer preview, there are only VHDL and Verilog programmer tools, which are very …

What it Takes to Build True FPGA as a Service was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

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The NSA and Skilz: Turning spying on you into a video game

What could possibly be creepier than a government organization (such as the NSA) having nearly unlimited access to your private, personal information (including access to your webcam)? Turns out, the answer is: when it gets turned into a video game. And it appears, they have done this. On Dec. 1, 2016, Wikileaks released a collection of documents relating to the German parliament inquiry of the cooperation between the German foreign intelligence agency (the BND) and the United States’ NSA. One particular document (pdf) within that collection caught my attention. It appears to be a report from an official at the European Cryptologic Center (ECC) from April 13, 2012, detailing how they can improve usage of Xkeyscore (XKS) to collect information about people. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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The NSA and Skilz: Turning spying on you into a video game

What could possibly be creepier than a government organization (such as the NSA) having nearly unlimited access to your private, personal information (including access to your webcam)? Turns out, the answer is: when it gets turned into a video game. And it appears, they have done this. On Dec. 1, 2016, Wikileaks released a collection of documents relating to the German parliament inquiry of the cooperation between the German foreign intelligence agency (the BND) and the United States’ NSA. One particular document (pdf) within that collection caught my attention. It appears to be a report from an official at the European Cryptologic Center (ECC) from April 13, 2012, detailing how they can improve usage of Xkeyscore (XKS) to collect information about people. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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Containers & Serverless Functions Have Their Day on AWS

AWS goes open source with Blox and seriously revs up Lambda.

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Get Trained on the AWS Cloud

Date: 6 December 2016
Time: 10am – 1.30pm IST
Location: Online

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IDG Contributor Network: Solution to JIT-ROP cyber attacks: Scramble code quickly

A new software development technique promises to end destructive exploits from hackers. The concept is to continually, and repeatedly, rearrange the program’s code while it’s running—and do it very quickly. Doing that shuts down the hacker’s “window of opportunity” because he doesn’t know where to find bugs to hit with his poisonous attack. The scrambling occurs over milliseconds.Code reuse attacks are the kind of harmful exploits that can be stopped dead in their tracks, researchers say in an article on Columbia University’s website.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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IDG Contributor Network: Solution to JIT-ROP cyber attacks: Scramble code quickly

A new software development technique promises to end destructive exploits from hackers. The concept is to continually, and repeatedly, rearrange the program’s code while it’s running—and do it very quickly. Doing that shuts down the hacker’s “window of opportunity” because he doesn’t know where to find bugs to hit with his poisonous attack. The scrambling occurs over milliseconds.Code reuse attacks are the kind of harmful exploits that can be stopped dead in their tracks, researchers say in an article on Columbia University’s website.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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SDxCentral Weekly News Roundup — December 2, 2016

Kevin Johnson (ex-Juniper) gets a promotion; American Airlines picks IBM Cloud.

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Butterfly

The post Butterfly appeared first on 'net work.

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Researchers find a way bypass the iOS activation lock

Two researchers claim to have found a way to bypass the activation lock feature in iOS that's supposed to prevent anyone from using an iPhone or iPad marked as lost by its owner.The first report came Sunday from an Indian security researcher named Hemanth Joseph, who started investigating possible bypasses after being confronted with a locked iPad he acquired from eBay.The activation lock gets enabled automatically when users turn on the Find My iPhone feature via iCloud. It links the device to their Apple IDs and prevents anyone else from accessing the device without entering the associated password.One of the few things allowed from the activation lock screen is connecting the device to a Wi-Fi network, including manually configuring one. Hemanth had the idea of trying to crash the service that enforces the lock screen by entering very long strings of characters in the WPA2-Enterprise username and password fields.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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Researchers find a way bypass the iOS activation lock

Two researchers claim to have found a way to bypass the activation lock feature in iOS that's supposed to prevent anyone from using an iPhone or iPad marked as lost by its owner.The first report came Sunday from an Indian security researcher named Hemanth Joseph, who started investigating possible bypasses after being confronted with a locked iPad he acquired from eBay.The activation lock gets enabled automatically when users turn on the Find My iPhone feature via iCloud. It links the device to their Apple IDs and prevents anyone else from accessing the device without entering the associated password.One of the few things allowed from the activation lock screen is connecting the device to a Wi-Fi network, including manually configuring one. Hemanth had the idea of trying to crash the service that enforces the lock screen by entering very long strings of characters in the WPA2-Enterprise username and password fields.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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6 Steps for a Successful E-rate Season

E-rate, a government funded program, allows schools and libraries to implement and update in-building network infrastructure. For most school districts, this funding is to make sure all students have reliable access to Wi-Fi to enable digital learning and improve student outcomes. However, the process to apply and receive funding can be a little tedious; therefore, many schools do not finish the process or submit forms incorrectly, leading to a loss in funding.

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oVirt Newsletter—November 2016

oVirt's development is continuing on pace, as the calendar year draws to a close and we get ready for a new year of development, evangelism, and making virtual machine management a simple process for everyone.

Here's what happened in November of 2016.

Software Releases

oVirt 4.0.6 Third Release Candidate is now available

oVirt 4.1.0 First Beta Release is now available for testing

In the Community

Testing ovirt-engine changes without a real cluster

Request for oVirt Ansible modules testing feedback

Deep Dives and Technical Discussions

Important Open Source Cloud Products [German]

Red Hat IT runs OpenShift Container Platform on Red Hat Virtualization and Ansible

Keynote: Blurring the Lines: The Continuum Between Containers and VMs [Video]

Quick Guide: How to Plan Your Red Hat Virtualization 4.0 Deployment

A Decade of KVM [Chinese]

Expansion of iptables Rules for oVirt 4.0 [Russian]