This Week I Learned - Week #15 2023

This Week I Learned - 

* CentOS is a Linux distribution that provides a free and open-source community-supported computing platform, functionally compatible with its upstream source, Red Hat Enterprise Linux. 

* IBM has a market valuation of just under $120 billion. IBM is in the middle of a yearslong makeover, focusing on transforming itself into a hybrid-cloud and artificial-intelligence business. In recent years, it has spun off or divested businesses including Kyndryl Holdings Inc., a big player in IT infrastructure and data-center management.  - WSJ

* A security playbook is a collection of procedures that can help Security Operations Center (SOC) engineers and analysts of all tiers to automate and simplify tasks and orchestrate a response.

* Playbooks are what you would use when doing troubleshooting, investigations, and root-cause analysis, while runbooks are what you would use post-incident to recover and resume normal operations.

* Jupyter Notebook is an open-source web application that allows you to create and share documents that contain live code, equations, visualizations, and narrative text. 

* Bing Chat uses OpenAI’s DALL-E & ChatGPT 4. Google's Bard chat application is based on LaMDA language model. Unlike ChatGPT and GPT-4, Bing Chat & Bard have access to information on the Web.

* Both DALL-E (2021) DALL-E 2 (2023) can generate astounding images from natural-language text descriptions; they’re capable of producing images that look like photos, illustrations, paintings, animations, and basically any other art style you can put into words. DALL-E 2 upped the ante with better resolution, faster processing, and an editor function that lets the user make changes within a generated image using only text commands, such as “replace that vase with a plant” or “make the dog’s nose bigger.” Because of DALL-E 2’s clear potential for misuse, OpenAI initially granted access to only a few hundred people, mostly AI researchers and artists. Prompts that seem likely to produce forbidden content are blocked and, in an attempt to prevent deepfakes, it can't exactly reproduce faces it has seen during its training. Prompts that seem likely to produce forbidden content are blocked and, in an attempt to prevent deepfakes, it can't exactly reproduce faces it has seen during its training.

* LLMs will change the scam pipeline...There will also be a change in the sophistication of these attacks. This is due not only to AI advances, but to the business model of the internet—surveillance capitalism—which produces troves of data about all of us, available for purchase from data brokers. Targeted attacks against individuals, whether for phishing or data collection or scams, were once only within the reach of nation-states. Combine the digital dossiers that data brokers have on all of us with LLMs, and you have a tool tailor-made for personalized scams...the technology is advancing too fast for anyone to fully understand how they work, even the designers...It reminds us that many of the bad uses of AI are a reflection of humanity more than they are a reflection of AI technology itself.  - Wired

* Writeout is a free audio transcription and translation service, powered by the Whisper language model. Whisper was developed by OpenAI, and is closely related to the GPT-series large language models.

* Pixel’s voice recorder app has been able to do offline transcriptions for years, and a version of that feature is starting to roll out to some other Android devices.

*Apple has offline dictation built into iOS (though currently there’s not a good way to actually transcribe audio files with it). - Verge

* Felt is a collaborative mapping tool. Felt supports common vector formats such as File Geodatabase, Shapefile, Geopackage, KML, GeoJSON, OSM PBF, CSV,  KMZ, GPX. Starting in 2024, Teams and related features will be available only to paying customers. 

* Xcode is Apple's integrated development environment for macOS, used to develop software for macOS, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, and tvOS.

* Telangana State Development Planning Society offers Weather Data for commercial & non-commercial purposes. The monthly datasets are provided in CSV format.

* Cross site cookies are set by third-party domains present on a website, and the same third-party might also present in other websites as well. Third party domains track you across your browsing sessions and able to identify you uniquely across different websites. That’s how you are shown ads based on your browsing history. Because the third party is usually an advertising company (cough! Google) and they are present in almost all websites. Companies have found another way to uniquely identify you across different sessions and websites without using cookies or other persistent storage. It’s called web fingerprinting. Fingerprinting is a more sophisticated approach to identify a user among millions of others. It works by studying your web browser and hardware configuration. Many websites use a fingerprinting library to generate a unique ID. This library collects data from multiple JavaScript APIs offered by your web browser. For example, websites can see web browser version, number of CPUs on your device, screen size, number of touchpoints, video/audio codecs, operating system and many other details that you would not want a typical news website to see. Given there are companies selling fingerprinting as a service, if you want to really protect yourself from fingerprinting, you should use Tor Browser or Firefox with resistFingerprinting=true. If you need to use Chromium, then Brave browser is a good choice.