Mediaboss Marketing

Knowing whats safe to click on the Internet is a vital skill to folks who want to stay out of trouble. As I am fond of saying, Careful where you click. What you dont click on is just as important as what you do.

The Internet is crawling with websites run by scammers, who want to trick you into clicking on things that lead to misery. Bogus emails clogging inboxes are also trying to trick people into falling for the scammers latest scheme.

Using a high-quality, properly configured browser like Mozillas Firefox is the first step in protecting your Web browsing experience.

Safe surfing can also be enhanced with the addition of a website rating tool that will warn you if you are about to visit a potentially dangerous website. My favorite tool of this type is called Web of Trust.

Web of Trust (WOT) is a free security add-on for your browser, and is designed to warn you before you interact with a risky website, keeping you safe from online scams, identity theft, spyware, spam, viruses and unreliable shopping sites.

WOT is compatible with all popular browsers. Download and install WOT at http://www.mywot.com.

Web of Trust works by allowing WOT users to rate websites that they visit. Ratings are gathered in four areas: trustworthiness, vendor reliability, privacy and child safety.

Users give ratings in each category from dark red (the worst rating) to dark green (the best rating.

The ratings are then analyzed and compiled, and an overall rating is given to the website.

When visiting a website, these ratings show up as a small symbol in the browsers toolbar.

The ratings are also visible in other very useful places, such as Google search results and embedded email links.

One example that I tested demonstrated very clearly just how useful a service Web of Trust can be; that example was the rip-off website FinallyFast.com.

Perhaps you remember the TV commercials for FinallyFast.com, as they aired on most all major networks. They feature regular-looking computer users complaining about poor computer performance.

The first red flag that I noticed, signaling that something wasnt on the up-and-up, was the Apple Macintosh computer that was displaying a Windows blue screen of death error message.

Perhaps thats nitpicking, but the ad does flash a notice on the screen stating that the website is for PC computers only.

The commercial goes on to encourage folks to visit FinallyFast.com and run a bunch of free PC repair tools, so that their computer can run like new.

Joyful computer users (including one lady using a Mac) are shown exclaiming things like, Dude! Its finally fast! FinallyFast.com!

If its true that theres a sucker born every minute, then many a sucker has fallen for FinallyFasts cleverly contrived con job.

After paying for and installing the activated FinallyFast software (a requirement if true repairs are to be made), thousands of PC users have been horrified to learn that the software actually installs multiple viruses and spyware programs.

Stories of mysterious, recurring and hard-to-remove FinallyFast credit card charges abound.

However, if these same people had been using Web of Trust, they would have noticed the WOT circle in the upper right corner turned yellow.

Clicking the circle would reveal a WOT rating of one-half of one star, out of a possible total of five stars. Not so good!

Similar warnings will also appear at other scammy websites like MyFasterPC.com and mycleanpc.com.

Many wasted dollars could have been saved and headaches avoided if their victims had been using Web of Trust.

Is a sucker really born every minute? Maybe so, but they can keep themselves out of trouble by using Web of Trust. I recommend it; trust me.

Dave Moore, CISSP, has been fixing computers in Oklahoma since 1984. Founder of the non-profit Internet Safety Group Ltd, he also teaches Internet safety community training workshops. He can be reached at 919-9901 or internetsafetygroup.com.

More here:
Can you trust the World Wide Web? - Norman Transcript

Get the Insider App

A personalized feed, summary mode, and ad-free experience.

Twitter is adding 600 new roles to its 5,000-person workforce.

The bulk of the social-media platform's open positions are technology jobs in machine learning, design and research, software engineering, data science, and product, said Allison Allen, Twitter's vice president of talent acquisition.

Landing the job, however, will require navigating several technical interviews, including a virtual onsite with four rounds of questioning, Allen said. These interviews test candidates problem-solving ability and creativity, which will prove useful on the job.

"The one thing most people learn at Twitter is this: Change is the only constant," Allen said. "And that goes for the culture too. The culture at Twitter will always be evolving."

The VP shared with Insider how interested tech candidates can ace the interview process.

Twitter employees live by five principles, Allen said: promoting health, earning trust, being straightforward, uniting profit and purpose, and being fast, free, and fun.

These principles relate not just to the product itself, Allen said, but also to employees' work habits.

For example, employees need to be reliable (earn trust) and are encouraged to be themselves in the office (be fast, free, and fun).

"Our product, our behavior, and our work habits should all be transparent and to the point," Allen said.

Twitter embraces its principle of being straightforward in its hiring process. The company doesn't ask for cover letters and instead has multiple rounds of interviews.

"Interviewers are going to be looking for problem-solving, creativity, communication, as well as algorithms and system design if it's a technical interview," she said.

Allen encouraged job seekers to do their research on Twitter's mission, values, and platform and to come prepared with examples of their previous impact at companies. She said Twitter often uses the STAR method, which stands for situation, task, action, and result.

"Have examples ready that are data-driven, show the impact, and provide key learnings," Allen said.

The algorithm interviews, or technical interviews, are an important part of the process at Twitter. During these interviews it's vital to treat your interviewer like a coworker rather than a test administrator, Allen said.

"Bounce ideas back and forth," she said. "Collaborate on the solution."

Additionally, candidates shouldn't jump straight into coding but should take time to ask the administrator questions and understand the problem.

"Remember that we can only evaluate based on what you share, so remember to actively listen to the questions and be prepared to talk about the big picture and details as needed," Allen said. "If you need to be quiet to think, no problem; just let the interviewer know."

Once you think you have figured out your solution, ask your interviewer their thoughts on it.

"Run through the code verbally with your interviewer once complete. Make sure to read what is there and not what you think is there," Allen said. "Proactively suggest ways to optimize to the interviewer and get their feedback to ensure what you are trying to do is not overly complex."

If all that sounds nerve-racking, Allen offers a final piece of advice: "Practice, practice, practice!"

Read more here:
How to Land a Tech Job at Twitter and Nail the Technical Interview - Business Insider

Clearview AI this week revealed that it has offered the Ukraine government free access to the companys facial recognition AI (artificial intelligence) technology, potentially to uncover Russian assailants, identify refugees, combat misinformation, and identify the dead.

The news comes weeks into the Russian invasion of Ukraine and was shared in an exclusive to the Reuters news organization. These potential use cases for the Ukraine defense ministry again put the spotlight on facial recognition technology that has come under fire for the potential for misuse and privacy violations. These are all important considerations for CIOs and IT leaders to weigh as they consider the use of facial recognition, AI software, or really any personal data that requires solid governance and compliance practices.

In many jurisdictions, it is required to gain the permission of the owner of the image before it can be used. Clearview AI built its database of images by scraping social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, never giving individuals the opportunity to opt out of their database.

There are plenty of potentially positive use cases for facial recognition technology, from the face unlock features already available to you on your smart phone to the finding missing children, to future use cases that add convenience such as identifying your face (no need for your passport or drivers license) when you check in at an airport.

Why do you need passports, for example, asks Sagar Shah, an AI ethics specialist and client partner at Fractal.ai. You just enter the airport and the system automatically knows who each person is. All the security protection and X-rays are automated.

But any system that contains the personal information of millions of people also has the potential to be abused.

Facial recognition AI has been fraught in recent years as activists have accused governments and other organizations misusing the technology. Critics of the technology have cited multiple concerns ranging from flawed performance in recognizing people with darker skin tones due to biased training data and algorithms, to the privacy issues that surface when cameras everywhere can recognize your face. These concerns have led to tech giants such as IBM, Amazon, and Microsoft banning sales of their face recognition software to law enforcement.

In November Facebook parent Meta went a step further, shutting down its facial recognition system and deleting more than a billion peoples individual facial recognition templates. But it may have been a case of closing the barn door after the horse had already escaped.

Among the issues in Clearview AIs case is how it built its database of images -- by scraping the ones posted on social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube. These social media companies have taken measures to end the practice by Clearview, but the company still has all the images it has scraped from these sites. The UKs Information Commissioners Office fined Clearview AI 17 million for breaching UK data protection laws, alleging that the company failed to inform citizens that it was collecting their photos.

Clearview AI still sells its facial recognition software to law enforcement and celebrates law enforcement use cases on its website.

Clearview AIs founder told Reuters that his companys database also included more than 2 billion images from Russian social media service VKontakte, which could be useful in applications by the Ukraine government. He told Reuters that he had not offered the technology to Russia.

Omdia Research Director for AI and Intelligent Automation Natalia Modjeska says that the move to provide this software to Ukraine may be Clearview AIs attempt to rehabilitate its reputation by capitalizing on the Ukraine crisis with positive public relations.

Its unclear whether Ukraine will use Clearview, according to the Reuters report, which also noted that the Ukraine Ministry of Digital Transformation had previously said it was considering offers of technology from US-based AI companies like Clearview.

Even if there may be positive use cases, facial recognition software can be used in violation of human rights. Fractal.ais Shah points out the example from Hong Kong a few years ago when China was using facial recognition software to identify protesters.

They used it to figure out, oh, this guys protesting, lets send the police to their home, Shah says.

Tech Giants Back Off Selling Facial Recognition AI to Police

Facebook Shuts Down Facial Recognition

The Problem with AI Facial Recognition

See the rest here:
Clearview AI Offers Face Recognition AI to Ukraine - InformationWeek

Bhopal(Madhya Pradesh): The four arrested alleged members of banned organisation Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen, Bangladesh (JMB), were using the high end technology to dodge the Indian police, said the officials.

On March 13 morning the anti terrorist squad (ATS) had arrested four alleged JMB activists- Fazhar Ali (32), Mohammad Aqueel (24), Jahiruddin Pathan (28) and Faizar Junel from Aishbagh area of the state capital. It is alleged that the activists were preparing remote based sleeper cell in Bhopal. Later three more arrests were made one in Bhopal and two were picked from Howrah city of West Bengal.

During the investigations, it has come to fore that the JMB members were using high tech software and hardware for a long time to remain unnoticed for the security agencies.

They were using special paid software for chatting and thus their chats did not come in the notice of the security agencies, but it failed to escape from the lens of the higher agencies and the module was busted, said one of the officers privy to the investigations.

Similarly the financial transactions was also done in much concealed manner, the agencies took long to crack the trail. The mobile phones, laptop seized by the ATS have revealed the high-tech software and hardware the module was using.

The officials are also looking people who were in contact of these activists. It is claimed that they had met more than 100 people and tried to influence them with their ideology.

Officials privy to the case claimed that it may take weeks to find out the total number of people involved into the case.

(To receive our E-paper on whatsapp daily, please click here. We permit sharing of the paper's PDF on WhatsApp and other social media platforms.)

Continued here:
Bhopal: To avoid detection, JMB used advanced technology - Free Press Journal

Just when you thought it couldnt get any worse, it does. The Biden administration is working on a plan that would make the world a far more dangerous place.

Its a plot with three steps, all terrible and each arguably worse than the previous one.

Step One is the determination to make a new sweetheart nuclear deal with Iran. There is no good reason, only the fetish to undo everything Donald Trump did.

He wisely scuttled the first bad deal, so President Biden is hellbent on making a new one, and is close to the finish line, meaning Iran could escape sanctions and its oil could hit the world market.

Step Two in the budding disaster is that the White House is letting the butcher of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin, broker the talks between America and Iran. As I noted last week, on one hand, Putin is a war criminal raining death and destruction on millions of civilians, and on the other hand, we trust him to make an ironclad deal that blocks the mad mullahs from getting the ultimate weapons of mass destruction.

Oh, and in consideration of Putins efforts for world peace, any construction work Russia does in Iran related to the nuke deal would be exempt from sanctions imposed over Ukraine. As Biden would say, no joke.

If this sounds absolutely insane, get a load of Step Three. The Biden bots are actively considering, as a bonus to the mullahs, removing the terrorist designation of their main military group, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Recall that Trump droned the longtime commander of the Guards elite Quds Force, Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, who was responsible for killing and maiming thousands of American soldiers in Iraq. Soleimani had spread terror in the region for decades, yet Biden said during the 2020 campaign he would not have ordered the hit.

His objection is probably relevant to the fact that Iran added the demand about removing the terror label. They figured they were pushing on an open door with the appeaser in chief.

For Biden, hell likely say yes to the demand for the same reason he wants a whole new deal in the first place: Trump. The former president put the terror designation on the Revolutionary Guards in 2019, a year before he eliminated Soleimani.

Reports say all the group must do is pledge to make nice and stop killing Irans enemies across the Middle East and a separate agreement will lift the sanctions blocking its financing, travel, etc., as if its the Chamber of Commerce.

The whole notion is so far off the charts that the Jewish News Syndicate reports that Israeli leaders, already unhappy about the prospect of any deal with Iran, initially refused to believe the White House would even consider giving a free pass to the Revolutionary Guards.

Convinced the proposal is real, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and Foreign Minister Yair Lapid issued a furious statement denouncing the group as responsible for attacks on American civilians and American forces throughout the Middle East and said it was behind plans to assassinate senior American government officials.

Bennett and Lapid continued: The IRGC were involved in the murder of hundreds of thousands of Syrian civilians; they destroyed Lebanon and they are brutally oppressing Iranian civilians. They kill Jews because they are Jews, Christians because they are Christians, and Muslims because they refuse to surrender to them.

Former American diplomats who have advised both Democrats and Republicans in the region agreed the idea stinks.

Dennis Ross tweeted that the concept makes us look naive and, citing the groups recent rocket attacks in Iraq that nearly struck an American consulate, added: For the IRGC, which admitted this week to firing rockets into Erbil, to promise to de-escalate regionally is about as credible as Putin saying Russia would not invade Ukraine.

Ambassador Martin Indyk tweeted that removing the Guards from the terror list would be seen as a betrayal by many US allies who suffered from their brutal terrorism.

Nonetheless, it looks as if Biden wants to give the terrorists a pass in exchange for a vague promise. The White House has said no decision has been reached, which probably means it has but officials wont defend it publicly until the agreement is signed.

There is one potential roadblock to all the madness, and that is the Senate. Because the entire package is new, Senate approval is required.

Many people believe it should be considered a formal treaty, which would require two-thirds support. Instead, Democrats are likely to try to use an end run similar to the one they used in 2015 to get the first deal through.

After a GOP-led filibuster effort failed, 58 to 42, the pact was deemed approved through what one critic called brilliant political subterfuge. That critic, Eric R. Mandel, director of the Middle East Political Information Network, writes in The Hill: So, lets recap: Forty-two senators were able to bind America to an agreement that should have required the votes of 66 senators for a treaty.

If the Senate lets anything like that happen again, it will prove that Bidens love of extremely bad ideas is contagious.

Crime-wise, New York was a tale of good and bad news last week.

Mayor Adams first anti-gun units hit the streets and one team made a big bust two hours into its first tour. A Bronx 20-year-old said to be a gang member was charged with carrying an illegal 9mm pistol after being searched.

Adams called suspect David Chevarria the poster child of the failing system because he previously was arrested three times for gun possession and attempted murder, yet was released on bail.

Its also good news that Gov. Hochul finally joined the fight against Albanys criminal coddlers, saying she will demand big changes, including in the porous bail laws. One item would give judges more discretion, which is a no-brainer.

The bad news came via NYPD statistics showing serious crime through March 13 was up 45% over last year. Remember, too, 2021 saw a dramatic increase over 2020, which saw a big jump over 2019.

So in the third year of a crime wave, the cavalry is coming. Lets hope its not too little, too late to save the city.

Readers spot various meanings from the Times belatedly calling Hunter Bidens e-mails authentic.

Mark Williams writes, The news here is that the Times is signaling they dont want Biden to run in 2024.

Mary Maillis hopes to use the momentum to end the silencing of conservatives, writing: The only way is to do what liberals do. Hold massive demonstrations outside Twitter and Facebook until they stop discriminating against conservatives.

And Thomas McFadden explains the Gray Ladys switch this way: It seems the science has changed!

Read the rest here:
Joe Bidens Iran plan is a total disaster - New York Post