Go back to the office? Some employees would rather quit
It's been difficult to get a good read on what the prevailing attitude is
towards working from home since traditional workplaces shut in the early
months of 2020. While the consensus largely appears to be that employees
relish the flexibility and (subjective) comfort that working from home
provides, this is at odds with the mental health spectre that has loomed over
the COVID-19 crisis, with countless reports and statistics highlighting the
toll that working in insolation has on wellbeing. This is captured in
LiveCareer's survey. Despite 81% of employees saying they enjoyed working
remotely, and 61% expressing a desire to continue working in a remote capacity
after the pandemic is over, only 45% of those polled said that telecommuting
had not taken a toll on their mental wellbeing. Clearly, the ideal situation
is about balance: employees want the option to work remotely, while also
having a shared workspace that they can use when needed. One major factor
employers need to address to make the return to office life more appealing is
safety. With many companies still trying to figure out how they can
reconfigure or otherwise re-think their real estate investments to suit a new
hybrid workforce, ensuring workplaces are safe should top the agenda.
AVIF Image Format: The Next-Gen Compression Codec
AVIF, or AV Image Format, is an open-source and royalty-free image format
based on the AV1 codec, and ,similar to AV1, AVIF provides a very high
compression rate. The fact that it's royalty-free makes it stand out from the
competition. Leveraging the power of AV1 has proven beneficial for AVIF, in
both processing time and its ability to handle hardware issues. Before we
further discuss the advantages of AVIF, be advised that AVIF saves pictures in
AVIF image format, which is relatively new and still not widely adopted. On
top of this, it's using a reasonably new algorithm. So there may be a
possibility that it’s not best for all use cases right now. ... The idea
behind designing AV1 was to transmit video over the internet. With a better
compression rate for video, AVI reduced the number of overall bits. This
allows the AV1 codec to provide multiple coding techniques that gives
developers some freedom when writing their code. If you wonder why we brought
this concept of video compression technique into an image compression post,
its because videos and image codecs share similarities in the nature of their
data. The AV1 codec has proved very advantageous for the internet by saving
bandwidth, which MPEG could not do, although JPEG XR was still in the race but
not as effective as AV1.
Love in the time of algorithms: would you let your artificial intelligence choose your partner?
Another problematic consequence may be rising numbers of socially reclusive
people who substitute technology for real human interaction. In Japan, this
phenomenon (called “hikikomori”) is quite prevalent. At the same time, Japan
has also experienced a severe decline in birth rates for decades. The National
Institute of Population and Social Security Research predicts the population
will fall from 127 million to about 88 million by 2065. Concerned by the
declining birth rate, the Japanese government last month announced it would
pour two billion yen (about A$25,000,000) into an AI-based matchmaking system.
The debate on digital and robotic “love” is highly polarised, much like most
major debates in the history of technology. Usually, consensus is reached
somewhere in the middle. But in this debate, it seems the technology is
advancing faster than we are approaching a consensus. Generally, the most
constructive relationship a person can have with technology is one in which
the person is in control, and the technology helps enhance their experiences.
For technology to be in control is dehumanising.
How Teams Can Overcome the Security Challenges of Agile Web App Development
Managing company secrets in an agile environment means CISOs need to rethink
the scalability of their current security solutions. With rapidly changing
codebases, it’s essential that enterprises use security tools that support
agile development and also extend to other platforms that devops teams might
use. Akeyless is a versatile security tool that fragments encryption keys and
provides a high degree of data security. It supports agile release
environments and can be scaled to different platforms as needed. One of
the reasons I like implementing this solution when consulting for app
companies is how easily I can integrate it with all the major development
platforms through plugins, ensuring that in-house departments and
subcontractors alike can securely manage access to sandbox servers and
databases, without interrupting their workflows. Beyond governance concerns,
in my experience, compliance and audit teams generally stand to gain a great
deal by learning about how automation can help them achieve their goals, along
with how their protocols can improve with automation. On the other hand,
complete automation might not be possible in every area.
Multiple backdoors and vulnerabilities discovered in FiberHome routers
FTTH ONT stands for Fiber-to-the-Home Optical Network Terminal. These are
special devices fitted at the end of optical fiber cables. Their role is to
convert optical signals sent via fiber optics cables into classic Ethernet
or wireless (WiFi) connections. FTTH ONT routers are usually installed in
apartment buildings or inside the homes or businesses that opt for
gigabit-type subscriptions. In a report published last week, security
researcher Pierre Kim said he identified a large collection of security
issues with FiberHome HG6245D and FiberHome RP2602, two FTTH ONT router
models developed by Chinese company FiberHome Networks. The report describes
both positive and negative issues with the two router models and their
firmware. ... Furthermore, the Telnet management feature, which is often
abused by botnets, is also disabled by default. However, Kim says that
FiberHome engineers have apparently failed to activate these same
protections for the routers' IPv6 interface. Kim notes that the device
firewall is only active on the IPv4 interface and not on IPv6, allowing
threat actors direct access to all of the router's internal services, as
long as they know the IPv6 address to access the device.
How do I select a fraud detection solution for my business?
From strictly rules based to fully black box. The former gives you complete
control but can be cumbersome and relies on a knowledgeable in house fraud
team. The other end is perfect for extreme transaction volumes but offers
little explanability. Fortunately, there is a middle ground with whitebox,
supervised machine learning- you get the best of both worlds- granular rule
based with machine learning making connections between disparate and complex
data points. Fraud detection technologies should fit your business, not the
other way around. Fraudsters evolve and find ingenious workarounds to most
point solutions. Modern fraud detection is a “net” approach where the latest
cutting edge tools are used in combination to make it very, very hard for a
fraudster to fool them all. Results are very hard to predict. Try and select
fraud technologies that allow you to test and show proof of value with no
commitment, free trial periods. Modern, effective fraud tech should follow
the best SAAS products where you see actual pricing, monthly contracts and
free trials. Product value and risk should rest solely on the fraud
detection partner.
The AI Incident Database wants to improve the safety of machine learning
“The goal of the AIID is to prevent intelligent systems from causing harm,
or at least reduce their likelihood and severity,” McGregor says. McGregor
points out that the behavior of traditional software is usually well
understood, but modern machine learning systems cannot be completely
described or exhaustively tested. Machine learning derives its behavior from
its training data, and therefore, its behavior has the capacity to change in
unintended ways as the underlying data changes over time. “These factors,
combined with deep learning systems capability to enter into the
unstructured world we inhabit means malfunctions are more likely, more
complicated, and more dangerous,” McGregor says. Today, we have deep
learning systems that can recognize objects and people in images, process
audio data, and extract information from millions of text documents, in ways
that were impossible with traditional, rule-based software, which expect
data to be neatly structured in tabular format. This has enabled applying AI
to the physical world, such as self-driving cars, security cameras,
hospitals, and voice-enabled assistants. And all these new areas create new
vectors for failure.
Chatbot Gone Awry Starts Conversations About AI Ethics in South Korea
Luda came under the national spotlight when it was reported that users were
training Luda to spew hate speech against women, sexual minorities,
foreigners, and people with disabilities. Screengrabs show Luda saying,
“they give me the creeps, and it’s repulsive” or “they look disgusting,”
when asked about “lesbians” and “black people,” respectively. Further, it
was discovered that groups of users in certain online communities were
training Luda to respond to sexual commands, which provoked intense
discussions about sexual harassment in a society that already grapples with
gender issues. Accusations of personal data mishandling by ScatterLab
emerged as Luda continued to draw nationwide attention. Users of Science of
Love have complained that they were not aware that their private
conversations would be used in this manner, and it was also shown that Luda
was responding with random names, addresses, and bank account numbers from
the dataset. ScatterLab had even uploaded a training model of Luda on
GitHub, which included data that exposed personal information. Users of
Science of Love are preparing for a class-action lawsuit against ScatterLab,
and the Personal Information Protection Commission, a government watchdog,
opened an investigation on ScatterLab to determine whether it violated the
Personal Information Protection Act.
Digital transformation: it has never been more relevant for businesses
As it’s not necessarily a tangible metric, it can be hard to measure the
return on investment (ROI) of the transformation journey and its success.
However, numerous considerations can help determine what the ROI is.
Firstly, setting out objectives for transformation – it could be to improve
the customer experience, the company’s infrastructure or staff productivity,
for example. Secondly, outlining the costs of implementing the
transformation strategy is essential – as is knowing what the outcomes of
that financial outlay are. This will provide a reference point and clear
performance indicators when measuring ROI. Of course, setting realistic
goals is important in the first place; stage one of the journey, discovering
and assessing, should provide guidance on setting achievable targets. And
when implementing new systems, there are different metrics that can be
detailed in order to measure their success. For instance, if trying to
improve end user experience, tackling common pain points experienced by
external parties such as slow load times and application response will help
reach the overall goal. If IT systems offer a rapid response, end users
won’t feel frustrated by the operating system.
Do you really want a CEO to be a role model?
It’s likely that the effectiveness of role models is rooted in mirror neurons,
specialized cells that are located in several areas of the human brain. They
were first identified about 30 years ago when neuroscientists who had
implanted electrodes in monkeys to study how their brains generated hand
movements suddenly realized that the same neurons were firing when the monkeys
ate and when the monkeys watched the scientists eat. Since then, some
researchers have come to see mirror neurons as the biological mechanism
through which humans unconsciously copy the behaviors of others. That
conclusion would lend scientific credence to the advice that Sutton got from
his dad: Being a jerk can be contagious. The work of sociologist Robert K.
Merton offers a clue to avoiding an infection of negative behaviors. Merton
made a distinction between role models (a term he coined in the 1950s) and
reference individuals. He said that when a person emulates a reference
individual, he or she copies that person’s good and bad behavioral traits and
values without discrimination. But when a person emulates a role model, the
focus is on a more limited segment of behaviors and values. This suggests that
you can act like Elon Musk, the entrepreneurial innovator, without becoming
Musk, the blurting tweeter.
Quote for the day:
"If one oversteps the bounds of moderation, the greatest pleasures cease to please." -- Epictetus
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