If you are interested in testing and trying object recognition with TensorFlow, I recommend this Medium post:
Building a Real-Time Object Recognition App with Tensorflow and OpenCV.
I tried it and it works quite well and the available source code allows you to learn how this all works.
You should also read Dat Tran follow up post, that shows how to train the NN with your own images, to identify new objects.
How to train your own Object Detector with TensorFlow’s Object Detector API
A new book by Kevin Mitnick is out, The Art of Invisibility. A good read on how to protect our information and privacy online.
I am going to list the tools and software mentioned on that the book:
ABOUT PASSWORDS
Elcomsoft Phone Password Breaker: is intended to enable law enforcement and government agencies to access iCloud accounts.
iBrute: a password-hacking mechanism specifically designed for acquiring iCloud credentials from just about anyone.
oclHashcat: a password cracking tool that leverages GPU for high speed cracking
John the Ripper: password cracker
www.haveibeenpwned.com: to see if your account has been compromised in the past
Password Safe: passwords manager
KeepPass: passwords manager
EMAILS/ BROWSING
Tor torproject.org
Orbot free Tor app from Google Play, iOS install the Onion browser
EFF HTTPS Everywhere
DuckDuckGo private search engine
startpage.com private search engine
Geo Location check: http://benwerd.com/lab/geo.php
https://panopticl check your browser signature
NoScript Firefox defense against third party tracking
ScriptBlock for Chrome
CanvasBlocker for Firefox
CanvasFingerPrintBlock for Chrome
Facebook Disconnect for Chrome
Facebook Privacy List for Adblock Plus for Firefox and Chrome
http://www.piriform.com CCleaner android/iOs/PC/Mac
Experian and Axiom: companies gathering info about us
CALLS/CHATS
Ransomware/WiFi
aircrack-ng: can reveal the authorized MAC address of currently connected users to a WiFi router.
Reaver: can crack a WPS-enabled router within several hours
Cryptowall: it encrypts your entire hard drive, locking you out of every file until you pay the attacker
Transmit app on Mac or Tunnelier on Windows
VPN
make sure the service includes PFS (perfect forward secrecy), that does not block Tor and does not log the connections
Proxy
OS/Disk/Networks
Tails and Tor
BitLocker Disk encryption in Windows
PGP Whole Disk Encryption Disk encryption
WinMagic disk encryption for Windows
FileVault 2 Apple disk encryption
VeryCrypt Disk encryption
SpiderOak encrypted cloud storage
Network monitoring: Pwn Pulse identifies femtocells and even IMSI catchers such as StingRay (TriggerFish, Wolfpack, Gossamer)
Various
Keyboard Privacy Chrome browser plugin
KeySweeper Keylogger
Shodan IoT devices
syncstop.com a USB condom which allows you to safely plug into any USB charger or computer
Tumblers services that take Bitcoin from a variety of sources and mix or tumble them together so that the resulting Bitcoin retains its value but carries traces of many owners.
Vanilla Visa and Vanilla MasterCard gift cards, viabuy.com in Europe
Paxful.com bitcoin wallet site. Using Tor, you can setup an initial Bitcoin wallet.
protonmail.com tutanota.com to create an email accout without any request to my verify the identity, using Tor
Other links/apps not on the book but important to know
In Android I would recommend: Keeppass2Android (password manager), OpenKeyChain: Easy PGP (manage PGP keys), K-9 email (PGP encryption through OpenKeyChain), Orbot and Orfox (Tor tools).
VPN: Freedome by F-secure
Chrome Plugins: CryptUp (encrypt Gmail with PGP), Privacy Badger (to avoid tracking cookies)
Processing power has increased, data storage is increasingly cheap and algorithms to analyze that makes sense of all the data exist and are continuously refined.
Smartphones, camera and other devices are connected to the Internet (defined ioT Internet of Things) and continuously capture data. Websites track our interactions and preferences, what we like and do not like; who we interact with and who are our friends. Google, Facebook and other services know where we live, where we work, the road we take and many other things.
In most cases, aware or not, we give this information for free in return for the services. These service monetizes our personal information by showing us ads or selling our info to other third party that will aggregate it and make sure they can make money out of it.
Our info is analyzed not only for commercial reasons, but also by governments that intercept and analyze Internet traffic and more.
A couple of examples:
Get your loved ones off Facebook.
Are you heading toward a big brother scenario? Is there a way to defend ourselves?
Some tools:
Some research groups
Element AI, Montreal, co-founder prof. Benjo
Deep Mind, London, acquired by Google
OpenAI, Ilya Sutskever research director
Machine learning is the ability to learn and make predictions using data. Data are the input and the output. A diverse set of skills set are required for manipulating large amount of data, defining the problem and the outcome, an understanding of the algorithms and an understanding of a lot of maths and statistics. Overall, machine learning is a complex task that requires advanced knowledge of different and complex subjects.
Fortunately a set of services are available that abstract the level of competencies required and they support data scientists and analysts in their tasks. At the end, what we really want is to make sense of our data and be able to make predictions about them.
The level of abstraction is important and allows the creation of more advanced services on top of machine learning cloud platforms.
Below a list of some of the most well known services in this space:
Amazon: Amazon Machine Learning – Predictive Analytics with AWS
Google Cloud Machine Learning
Microsoft: Azure Machine Learning
Watson Analytics: Guided and automated analytics from the cloud.
BigML: BigML: Machine Learning made easy
Ersatz: Hosted deep learning with GPUs
ForecastThis: automated predictive modeling solution
Big data and predictive models are currently used and are going to be pervasive affecting our lives. There are many positive news coming from these new algorithms and techniques. At the same time, it is important to be aware of their impact, biases and how to deal with the imperfections and abuses that inevitable will come with them.
Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O’Neil is an extremely good and important book on this subject and I highly recommend it to all the people that want to understand how society is and will be affected by all these new algorithms and predictive models.
The Dentist Office Software Story is an excellent blog post by Fred Wilson at avc.com.
There were a couple of sentences what caught my attention and I want to emphasize here. Below the excerpt where I have highlighted the sentences in bold.
This story is designed to illustrate the fact that software alone is a commodity. There is nothing stopping anyone from copying the feature set, making it better, cheaper, and faster. And they will do that. This is the reality that Brad and I stared at in 2003 as we were developing our initial investment thesis for USV. We saw the cloud coming but did not want to invest in commodity software delivered in the cloud. So we asked ourselves, “what will provide defensibility” and the answer we came to was networks of users, transactions, or data inside the software. We felt that if an entrepreneur could include something other than features and functions in their software, something that was not a commodity, then their software would be more defensible. That led us to social media, to Delicious, Tumblr, and Twitter. And marketplaces like Etsy, Lending Club, and Kickstarter. And enterprise oriented networks like Workmarket, C2FO, and SiftScience. We have not perfectly executed our investment strategy by any means. We’ve missed a lot of amazing networks. And we’ve invested in things that weren’t even close to networks. But all of that said, our thesis has delivered for us and we stick to it as much as we can.
Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari is out. A must read book. His previous book is awesome Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
In the concluding chapter he writes:
Yet if we take the really grand view of life, all other problems and developments are overshadowed by three interlinked processes:
1. Science is converging on an all-encompassing dogma, which says that organisms are algorithms, and life is data processing.
2. Intelligence is decoupling from consciousness.
3. Non-conscious but highly intelligent algorithms may soon know us better than we know ourselves.
These three processes raise three key questions, which I hope will stick in your mind long after you have finished this book:1. Are organisms really just algorithms, and is life really just data processing?
2. What’s more valuable – intelligence or consciousness?
3. What will happen to society, politics and daily life when non-conscious but highly intelligent algorithms know us better than we know ourselves?
I have been reading The Inevitable by Kevin Kelly. A great book that I highly recommend.
Here I report a few excerpts from the “Flowing” chapter to describe how flows of data are inevitable and what we can do about it.
———
The Internet is the world’s largest copy machine. At its most fundamental level this machine copies every action, every character, every thought we make while we ride upon it.
If something can be copied – a song,a movie, a book – and it touches the internet, it will copied.
The information age is driven by digital copies – exact and free.
In this new supersaturated digital universe of infinite free digital duplication, copies are so ubiquitous, so cheap – free, in fact – that the only things truly valuable are those that cannot be copied.
When copies are superabundant, they become worthless. Instead, stuff that can’t be copied become scarce and valuable.
Here are eight generatives that are “better than free”:
Immediacy: Getting something the moment it is released, or even better, produced by its creators.
Personalization: providing something personalized according to your taste, your reading taste, your living room, etc.
Interpretation: interpretation of genomic info, healthcare, travels, consulting Linux, etc.
Authenticity: make sure you have the real thing, the real software app
Accessibility: example are cloud services to access info wherever and whenever you want with full backup, security.
Embodiment: live concerts, live lessons, printed book, Ted talks
Patronage: fans want to pay creators
Discoverability: providing guides or ways to help discover new things, reading lists, videos, movies