Holy crap. I thought it was a bad idea to self-bug your home with Alexa. But it is worse than I ever thought. Researchers at UC Berkeley and Georgetown have shown that one can embed commands in music. That means just listening to music or a video while Alexa is in the room is a risk. Just don’t do it.
At the HPCC summit, Roger Dev (a truly wonderful name) gave a short course on ML. His couresstarts at 40:30 and ends a 52:00 in the video below.
For years colleagues and I have talked about problems with research funding today. (It wasn’t this way–or not this acute–when I started this job.) I recent paper from the intrepid Martin Center explain this quite well. An excerpt (emphasis mine):
Our institutions are dominated by those doing science in the current paradigm. Which is what we should in fact expect. But that means that most funding sources—whether government or private—are going to be conservative and fund the already-established rather than investigations into something that may not work out. And scientists tend to protect their turf against new ideas that could replace them.
…
To get more money, universities start rewarding researchers for getting grant funding for the institution, meaning scientists are spending more time grant writing and less time in the lab, doing actual science.
Read the whole thing.
I find this cyber attack the cut off power very troubling. Our rapid advance in technology many times seems to be creating less robust versions of the technology.
I’m not a luddite who wants to return to the old.
Sure my grandfather never suffered a “service interruption” at home. But it was because he did have any services.
However, most of us do not realize how fragile our infrastructure is. I hope we wake up to this before we suffer a serious outage.