TensorBoard: Embedding Visualization for Tensorflow

Embeddings are ubiquitous in machine learning, appearing in recommender systems, NLP, and many other applications. Indeed, in the context of TensorFlow, it’s natural to view tensors (or slices of tensors) as points in space, so almost any TensorFlow system will naturally give rise to various embeddings.

To learn more about embeddings and how to train them, see the Vector Representations of Words tutorial. If you are interested in embeddings of images, check out this article for interesting visualizations of MNIST images. On the other hand, if you are interested in word embeddings, this article gives a good introduction.

TensorBoard has a built-in visualizer, called the Embedding Projector, for interactive visualization and analysis of high-dimensional data like embeddings. It is meant to be useful for developers and researchers alike. It reads from the checkpoint files where you save your tensorflow variables. Although it’s most useful for embeddings, it will load any 2D tensor, potentially including your training weights.

Source: TensorBoard: Embedding Visualization

There’s a projector as well, which you can use seperately from tensorflow here

You can use this to see what your AI is thinking…

Open-sourcing DeepMind Lab

DeepMind Lab is a fully 3D game-like platform tailored for agent-based AI research. It is observed from a first-person viewpoint, through the eyes of the simulated agent. Scenes are rendered with rich science fiction-style visuals. The available actions allow agents to look around and move in 3D. The agent’s “body” is a floating orb. It levitates and moves by activating thrusters opposite its desired direction of movement, and it has a camera that moves around the main sphere as a ball-in-socket joint tracking the rotational look actions. Example tasks include collecting fruit, navigating in mazes, traversing dangerous passages while avoiding falling off cliffs, bouncing through space using launch pads to move between platforms, playing laser tag, and quickly learning and remembering random procedurally generated environments.

Source: Open-sourcing DeepMind Lab | DeepMind

github repo here

OpenAI Universe allows your AI to train on games, browsers by looking at screen pixels. Uses Gym (also OSS) for algo devs

We’re releasing Universe, a software platform for measuring and training an AI’s general intelligence across the world’s supply of games, websites and other applications.

Universe allows an AI agent to use a computer like a human does: by looking at screen pixels and operating a virtual keyboard and mouse. We must train AI systems on the full range of tasks we expect them to solve, and Universe lets us train a single agent on any task a human can complete with a computer.

In April, we launched Gym, a toolkit for developing and comparing reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. With Universe, any program can be turned into a Gym environment. Universe works by automatically launching the program behind a VNC remote desktop — it doesn’t need special access to program internals, source code, or bot APIs.

Source: Universe

The homepage
The Git repo

It uses OpenAI Gym for Reinforcement Learning

Reinforcement learning (RL) is the subfield of machine learning concerned with decision making and motor control. It studies how an agent can learn how to achieve goals in a complex, uncertain environment. It’s exciting for two reasons:

RL is very general, encompassing all problems that involve making a sequence of decisions: for example, controlling a robot’s motors so that it’s able to run and jump, making business decisions like pricing and inventory management, or playing video games and board games. RL can even be applied to supervised learning problems with sequential or structured outputs.
RL algorithms have started to achieve good results in many difficult environments. RL has a long history, but until recent advances in deep learning, it required lots of problem-specific engineering. DeepMind’s Atari results, BRETT from Pieter Abbeel’s group, and AlphaGo all used deep RL algorithms which did not make too many assumptions about their environment, and thus can be applied in other settings.

However, RL research is also slowed down by two factors:

The need for better benchmarks. In supervised learning, progress has been driven by large labeled datasets like ImageNet. In RL, the closest equivalent would be a large and diverse collection of environments. However, the existing open-source collections of RL environments don’t have enough variety, and they are often difficult to even set up and use.
Lack of standardization of environments used in publications. Subtle differences in the problem definition, such as the reward function or the set of actions, can drastically alter a task’s difficulty. This issue makes it difficult to reproduce published research and compare results from different papers.

OpenAI Gym is an attempt to fix both problems.

source
The Gym homepage
The Gym github page

Guessing valid credit card numbers in six seconds? Priceless

Fraudsters can guess credit card numbers in as little as six seconds per attempt thanks to security gaps in Visa’s network, academics say.

The brute force attacks allow criminals to bombard Visa with card payment requests across multiple sites with each attempt narrowing the possible combinations until a valid card number and expiry date are determined.

Visa, unlike rival Mastercard, does not detect the flood of requests as unusual, the researchers say.

The attacks, handy for criminals with only partial breach records oof personal information, work against the Alexa Top 400 online merchant sites accroding to findings in the paper Does The Online Card Payment Landscape Unwittingly Facilitate Fraud? [PDF] written by Newcastle University’s Mohammed Aamir Ali, Dr Leonardus Arief, Dr Martin Emms, and professor Aad van Moorsel.

Source: Guessing valid credit card numbers in six seconds? Priceless

Vulnerability Note VU#582384 – Multiple Netgear routers are vulnerable to arbitrary command injection

Netgear R7000, firmware version 1.0.7.2_1.1.93 and possibly earlier, and R6400, firmware version 1.0.1.12_1.0.11 and possibly earlier, contain an arbitrary command injection vulnerability. By convincing a user to visit a specially crafted web site, a remote unauthenticated attacker may execute arbitrary commands with root privileges on affected routers. A LAN-based attacker may do the same by issuing a direct request, e.g. by visiting:

http:///cgi-bin/;COMMAND

An exploit leveraging this vulnerability has been publicly disclosed.

This vulnerability has been confirmed in the R7000 and R6400 models. Community reports also indicate the R8000, firmware version 1.0.3.4_1.1.2, is vulnerable. Other models may also be affected.

Source: Vulnerability Note VU#582384 – Multiple Netgear routers are vulnerable to arbitrary command injection

Ouch!

How IBM Watson saved the life of a woman dying from cancer, exec says – Business Insider

“There’s a 60-year-old woman in Tokyo. She was at the University of Tokyo. She had been diagnosed with leukemia six years ago. She was living, but not healthy. So the University of Tokyo ran her genomic sequence through Watson and it was able to ascertain that they were off by one thing. Actually, she had two strains of leukemia. The did treat her and she is healthy.”

He added, “That’s one example. Statistically, we’re seeing that about one third of the time, Watson is proposing an additional diagnosis.”

Source: How IBM Watson saved the life of a woman dying from cancer, exec says – Business Insider

Unfortunately he then goes on to say how great Watson is at pushing ads at you.

Full Disclosure: [ESNC-2041217] Critical Security Vulnerability in PwC ACE Software for SAP Security

An attacker can misuse PwC ACE security vulnerability in order to: – make changes to the production systems and their settings including manipulating or corrupting ABAP programs shipped by SAP and making the system and data inoperable; – plant an SAP backdoor for accessing the system and sensitive data later; and – shut down the SAP systems and cause downtime.

Source: Full Disclosure: [ESNC-2041217] Critical Security Vulnerability in PwC ACE Software for SAP Security

Apparently PwC tried to shut these researchers up by sending lawyers at them, instead of working together to close the holes. Before this blew into a court case, the researchers have gone full disclosure. The people at PwC need to learn that security is something that can’t be hidden – if these guys found the holes, someone else will too. Working together with people trying to help you out is a much better strategy than threatening them.

AMD Introduces Radeon Instinct Machine Intelligence And Deep Learning Accelerators

AMD is announcing a new series of Radeon-branded products today, targeted at machine intelligence (AI) and deep learning enterprise applications, called Radeon Instinct. As its name suggests, the new Radeon Instinct line of products are comprised of GPU-based solutions for deep learning, inference, and training. The new GPUs are also complemented by a free, open-source library and framework for GPU accelerators, dubbed MIOpen. MIOpen is architected for high-performance machine intelligence applications, and is optimized for the deep learning frameworks in AMD’s ROCm software suite
[…]
The first products in the lineup consist of the Radeon Instinct MI6, the MI8, and the MI25. The 150W Radeon Instinct MI6 accelerator is powered by a Polaris-based GPU, packs 16GB of memory (224GB/s peak bandwidth), and will offer up to 5.7 TFLOPS of peak FP16 performance. Next up in the stack is the Fiji-based Radeon Instinct MI8. Like the Radeon R9 Nano, the Radeon Instinct MI8 features 4GB of High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM), with peak bandwidth of 512GB/s — it’s got a nice small form factor too. The MI8 will offer up to 8.2 TFLOPS of peak FP16 compute performance, with a board power that typical falls below 175W. The Radeon Instinct MI25 accelerator will leverage AMD’s next-generation Vega GPU architecture and has a board power of approximately 300W.

Source: AMD Introduces Radeon Instinct Machine Intelligence And Deep Learning Accelerators

Hardcoded root accounts found in 80 Sony IP security camera models

Researchers from SEC Consult have found two backdoor accounts that exist in 80 models of professional Sony security cameras, mainly used by companies and government agencies given their high price.

One set of hard-coded credentials is in the Web interface and allows a remote attacker to send requests that would enable the Telnet service on the camera, the SEC Consult researchers said in an advisory Tuesday.

The second hard-coded password is for the root account that could be used to take full control of the camera over Telnet. The researchers established that the password is static based on its cryptographic hash and, while they haven’t actually cracked it, they believe it’s only a matter of time until someone does.

Source: Backdoor accounts found in 80 Sony IP security camera models | PCWorld

Chicago Face Database

The Chicago Face Database was developed at the University of Chicago by Debbie S. Ma, Joshua Correll, and Bernd Wittenbrink. The CFD is intended for use in scientific research. It provides high-resolution, standardized photographs of male and female faces of varying ethnicity between the ages of 17-65. Extensive norming data are available for each individual model. These data include both physical attributes (e.g., face size) as well as subjective ratings by independent judges (e.g., attractiveness).

Source: Chicago Face Database

PowerShell security threats greater than ever, researchers warn

In March 2016, security experts warned that PowerShell had been fully weaponised. In the following month, a report confirmed that PowerShell was used to launch 38% of cyber attacks seen by security firm Carbon Black and its partners in 2015.

Now more than 95% of PowerShell scripts analysed by Symantec researchers have been found to be malicious, with 111 threat families using PowerShell.

Malicious PowerShell scripts are on the rise, as attackers are using the framework’s flexibility to download their payloads, traverse through a compromised network and carry out reconnaissance, according to Candid Wueest, threat researcher at Symantec.

“This shows that externally sourced PowerShell scripts are a major threat to enterprises,” he wrote in a blog post.

The researchers also found that many targeted attack groups use PowerShell in their attack chain because it provides easy access to all major functions of the Microsoft Windows operating system.

PowerShell is also attractive to attackers because it is installed by default on computers running Windows and leaves few traces for analysis. This is because the framework can execute payloads directly from memory.

Source: PowerShell security threats greater than ever, researchers warn

Holding Shift + F10 During Windows 10 Updates Opens Root CLI, Bypasses BitLocker – Slashdot

This CLI debugging interface grants the attacker full access to the computer’s hard drive, despite the presence of BitLocker. The reason is that during the Windows 10 update procedure, the OS disables BitLocker while the Windows PE (Preinstallation Environment) installs a new image of the main Windows 10 operating system.

Source: Holding Shift + F10 During Windows 10 Updates Opens Root CLI, Bypasses BitLocker – Slashdot

Uber begins collection of rider location data – whether using the app or not

The app update (it’s 3.222.4, for those keeping track) changes the way Uber collects location data from its users. Previously, Uber only collected location information while a user had the app open – now, Uber asks users to always share their location with the ride-hailing company.

Uber says that, even though it can harvest your location constantly while its app is running in the background on your phone, it won’t use that capability. Instead, Uber claims it just needs a little bit more location data to improve its service, and it has to ask for constant access because of the way device-level permissions are structured.

Specifically, Uber wants access to a rider’s location from the moment she requests a ride until five minutes after the driver drops her off, even if the app is not in the foreground of her phone. Previously, Uber would not collect a rider’s background location during the trip, or her location after drop-off.

Source: Uber begins background collection of rider location data | TechCrunch

They have many excuses as to why, but who knows what the truth is? You have become the product of Uber and having them follow you around is just creepy.

The FBI Just Got Disturbing New Hacking Powers

Under the old version of “Rule 41,” agencies like the FBI needed to apply for a warrant in the right jurisdiction to hack a computer, presenting difficulties when investigating crimes involving suspects who had anonymized their locations or machines in multiple places. Under the new version, a federal judge can approve a single search warrant covering multiple computers even if their owners are innocent or their locations are unknown.

Source: The FBI Just Got Disturbing New Hacking Powers

So, who cares about innocent until proven guilty? Or probable cause? Or mass surveillance and breach of privacy? Or security for your own devices?