Four short links: 27 July 2018
Security Keys, Speech Recognition, Kubernetes Security, and Strategic Competition
- Security Keys Neutralized Employee Phishing — Google has not had any of its 85,000+ employees successfully phished on their work-related accounts since early 2017, when it began requiring all employees to use physical Security Keys in place of passwords and one-time codes.
- The Accent Gap (WaPo) — We tested Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Home to see how people with accents are getting left behind in the smart-speaker revolution. Ok, so first up: everyone has an accent, it’s just that software has been preferentially trained on some of them. But also: I know teachers who use Android’s voice recognition to help students acquire a mainstream accent, a useful skill for them to have. This isn’t all bad.
- Kubernetes Security Best Practices — my goal in this article is to cover some common security mistakes I have observed and offer some general best practices around securing Kubernetes clusters and workloads.
- Strategic Competition in an Age of AI — Software often diffuses much more easily than hardware, both because of the commercial incentives that can drive software creation and because the talent pool necessary to create new software can exist even in countries that are not generally major military producers, such as advanced economies in Asia. The key elements of national power in AI are therefore related to the question of whether it makes sense to think about AI as software or hardware.