Four short links: 21 October 2016
Democratic Exfiltration, Pornish Tasties, Private Deep Learning, and Security Economics
- Every CRS Report — Until today, CRS reports were generally available only to the well-connected. Now, in partnership with a Republican and Democratic member of Congress, we are making these reports available to everyone for free online. The reports are only released to Congress members, and (although “public”) not released to the public. There have been years of wrangling about whether to release them, so someone set up automatic exfiltration with the help of members of Congress. And they’re scrubbed before release, so the office workers who compiled the reports are not identified (which would have made them targets for online hate). Democracy treats censorship as damage and routes around it.
- Image Synthesis from Yahoo’s open_nsfw Collection — brilliant! Using Deep Dream type amplification, and Yahoo’s open source porn recognizer, you can now “pornicate” everything from landscapes to a blank page. Coming soon to a camera app near you, if you’ll pardon the phrase.
- Semi-supervised Knowledge Transfer for Deep Learning from Private Training Data — aka, how to prevent your sensitive training data from leaking out of your model. [W]e demonstrate a generally applicable approach to providing strong privacy guarantees for training data.
- Open Course in Security Economics (edX TUDelft) — an introduction to the field of cybersecurity through the lens of economic principles. Delivered by four leading research teams, it will provide you with the economic concepts, measurement approaches, and data analytics to make better security and IT decisions, as well as understand the forces that shape the security decisions of other actors in the ecosystem of information goods and services.
