Mansour Chebli and Page De Jager clinched victories in two race categories each while Jad Alawar impressed by winning two podium spots

Qatar National Sprint Round 4 produces thrilling action

The Qatar National Sprint returned with thrilling action after a seven-month break on Saturday as Mansour Chebli and Page De Jager clinched victories in two race categories each while Jad Alawar impressed by winning two podium spots in the fourth round of the popular series at the Lusail Circuit Sports Club Car Park.

Qatar National Sprint: Chebli extends lead; De Jager and others excel

The Learners Relationship Management Department (LRM) of Hamdan Bin Mohammed Smart University (HBMSU) organised the 'Annual Gathering 2023', titl

HBMSU's Annual Gathering 2023 Brings Together Learners And Graduates Under The Theme 'Driving Sustainability In Education'

Dubai: The Learners Relationship Management Department (LRM) of Hamdan Bin Mohammed Smart University (HBMSU) organised the ‘Annual Gathering 2023’, titled ‘Driving Sustainability in Education’, in collaboration with Honeywell and Dar Al Ber Society.

HBMSU’s Annual Gathering 2023 brings together learners and graduates

Hamdan Bin Mohammed Smart University (HBMSU) held the annual gathering in the presence of Dr. Mansoor Alawar, HBMSU Chancellor, and members of the academic and administrative staff on the occasion ...

HBMSU holds its annual gathering exploring AI, its applications in higher education

DUBAI, 20th September, 2023 (WAM) -- Hamdan Bin Mohammed Smart University (HBMSU) held the annual gathering in the presence of Dr. Mansoor Alawar, HBMSU Chancellor, and members of the academic and ...

Hamdan Bin Mohammed Smart University (HBMSU) held the annual gathering in the presence of Dr. Mansoor Alawar, HBMSU Chancellor, and members of the academic and administrative staff on the occasion of the new academic year. The gathering began by welcoming ...

Hamdan Bin Mohammed Smart University (HBMSU) held the annual gathering in the presence of H.E. Dr. Mansoor Alawar, HBMSU Chancellor, and members of the academic and administrative staff on the occasion of the new academic year. The gathering began by ...

HBMSU holds its annual gathering exploring AI and its applications in higher education

To kick things off, it was an awesome experience. Over 320K passionate gamers from 100+ countries, 11 giant halls, a bunch of games we had to play, and people to say “hi” to. We covered a lot ...

Alawar at Gamescom 2023

Lieutenant Colonel Ishaku Takwa, Acting Deputy Director, 3 Division, Army Public Relations, in a statement, said Abubakar stated this when the Commissioner of Police, Plateau State command, CP Okoro Julius Alawar paid him a courtesy call in his office at ...

Plateau: Army, police strengthen ties to curb insecurity

Alawar

alawar

Table of Links Abstract and 1. Introduction Related Work
Model
Experiments
Ablation Study
Conclusion, Limitations, and Risks 6. Conclusion We propose SEAMLESSEXPRESSIVELM to achieve expressive S2ST with chain-of-thought, which unifies semantic and acoustic language modeling, and improves efficiency over cascaded approach. 7. Limitations and Risks Limitations. One limitation of this work is that it focuses on speech-only modeling. Existing works have shown improved speech translation quality with different data types such as aligned speechtext data. The experiments are conducted in a limited setting where the model and training data sizes are not large. Scaling up model and data would help to enhance the translation performance. Ethical considerations. The proposed model is intended to use for expressive speech-to-speech translation with both semantics and vocal style preserved. In case of failure, the system will generate inaccurate semantic meaning or vocal styles, thus negatively impacting the translation quality. One example of unintended use is that bad actors misappropriate the model for nefarious activities such as online scams. References Loïc Barrault, Yu-An Chung, Mariano Cora Meglioli, David Dale, Ning Dong, Mark Duppenthaler, Paul-Ambroise Duquenne, Brian Ellis, Hady Elsahar, Justin Haaheim, John Hoffman, Min-Jae Hwang, Hirofumi Inaguma, Christopher Klaiber, Ilia Kulikov, Pengwei Li, Daniel Licht, Jean Maillard, Ruslan Mavlyutov, Alice Rakotoarison, Kaushik Ram Sadagopan, Abinesh Ramakrishnan, Tuan Tran, Guillaume Wenzek, Yilin Yang, Ethan Ye, Ivan Evtimov, Pierre Fernandez, Cynthia Gao, Prangthip Hansanti, Elahe Kalbassi, Amanda Kallet, Artyom Kozhevnikov, Gabriel Mejia Gonzalez, Robin San Roman, Christophe Touret, Corinne Wong, Carleigh Wood, Bokai Yu, Pierre Andrews, Can Balioglu, Peng-Jen Chen, Marta R. Costa-jussà, Maha Elbayad, Hongyu Gong, Francisco Guzmán, Kevin Heffernan, Somya Jain, Justine Kao, Ann Lee, Xutai Ma, Alexandre Mourachko, Benjamin Peloquin, Juan Pino, Sravya Popuri, Christophe Ropers, Safiyyah Saleem, Holger Schwenk, Anna Sun, Paden Tomasello, Changhan Wang, Jeff Wang, Skyler Wang, and Mary Williamson. 2023. Seamless: Multilingual expressive and streaming speech translation. CoRR, abs/2312.05187. Sanyuan Chen, Chengyi Wang, Zhengyang Chen, Yu Wu, Shujie Liu, Zhuo Chen, Jinyu Li, Naoyuki Kanda, Takuya Yoshioka, Xiong Xiao, Jian Wu, Long Zhou, Shuo Ren, Yanmin Qian, Yao Qian, Jian Wu, Michael Zeng, Xiangzhan Yu, and Furu Wei. 2022. Wavlm: Large-scale self-supervised pre-training for full stack speech processing. IEEE J. Sel. Top. Signal Process., 16(6):1505–1518. Alexandre Défossez, Jade Copet, Gabriel Synnaeve, and Yossi Adi. 2022. High fidelity neural audio compression. CoRR, abs/2210.13438. Qianqian Dong, Zhiying Huang, Qiao Tian, Chen Xu, Tom Ko, Yunlong Zhao, Siyuan Feng, Tang Li, Kexin Wang, Xuxin Cheng, Fengpeng Yue, Ye Bai, Xi Chen, Lu Lu, Zejun Ma, Yuping Wang, Mingxuan Wang, and Yuxuan Wang. 2023. Polyvoice: Language models for speech to speech translation. CoRR, abs/2306.02982. Paul-Ambroise Duquenne, Hongyu Gong, Ning Dong, Jingfei Du, Ann Lee, Vedanuj Goswami, Changhan Wang, Juan Pino, Benoît Sagot, and Holger Schwenk. 2023. Speechmatrix: A large-scale mined corpus of multilingual speech-to-speech translations. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), ACL 2023, Toronto, Canada, July 9-14, 2023, pages 16251–16269. Association for Computational Linguistics. Jarod Duret, Benjamin O’Brien, Yannick Estève, and Titouan Parcollet. 2023. Enhancing expressivity transfer in textless speech-to-speech translation. CoRR, abs/2310.07279. Hongyu Gong, Ning Dong, Sravya Popuri, Vedanuj Goswami, Ann Lee, and Juan Pino. 2023. Multilingual speech-to-speech translation into multiple target languages. CoRR, abs/2307.08655. Wei-Ning Hsu, Benjamin Bolte, Yao-Hung Hubert Tsai, Kushal Lakhotia, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, and Abdelrahman Mohamed. 2021. Hubert: Self-supervised speech representation learning by masked prediction of hidden units. IEEE ACM Trans. Audio Speech Lang. Process., 29:3451–3460. Ye Jia, Michelle Tadmor Ramanovich, Tal Remez, and Roi Pomerantz. 2022. Translatotron 2: High-quality direct speech-to-speech translation with voice preservation. In International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 2022, 17-23 July 2022, Baltimore, Maryland, USA, volume 162, pages 10120–10134. PMLR. Ye Jia, Ron J. Weiss, Fadi Biadsy, Wolfgang Macherey, Melvin Johnson, Zhifeng Chen, and Yonghui Wu. 2019. Direct speech-to-speech translation with a sequence-to-sequence model. In Interspeech 2019, 20th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, Graz, Austria, 15-19 September 2019, pages 1123–1127. ISCA. Ann Lee, Hongyu Gong, Paul-Ambroise Duquenne, Holger Schwenk, Peng-Jen Chen, Changhan Wang, Sravya Popuri, Yossi Adi, Juan Miguel Pino, Jiatao Gu, and Wei-Ning Hsu. 2022. Textless speech-tospeech translation on real data. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, NAACL 2022, Seattle, WA, United States, July 10-15, 2022, pages 860–872. Association for Computational Linguistics. Yifan Peng, Ilia Kulikov, Yilin Yang, Sravya Popuri, Hui Lu, Changhan Wang, and Hongyu Gong. 2024. Mslm-s2st: A multitask speech language model for textless speech-to-speech translation with speaker style preservation. arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.12408. Paul K. Rubenstein, Chulayuth Asawaroengchai, Duc Dung Nguyen, Ankur Bapna, Zalán Borsos, Félix de Chaumont Quitry, Peter Chen, Dalia El Badawy, Wei Han, Eugene Kharitonov, Hannah Muckenhirn, Dirk Padfield, James Qin, Danny Rozenberg, Tara N. Sainath, Johan Schalkwyk, Matthew Sharifi, Michelle Tadmor Ramanovich, Marco Tagliasacchi, Alexandru Tudor, Mihajlo Velimirovic, Damien Vincent, Jiahui Yu, Yongqiang Wang, Vicky Zayats, Neil Zeghidour, Yu Zhang, Zhishuai Zhang, Lukas Zilka, and Christian Havnø Frank. 2023. Audiopalm: A large language model that can speak and listen. CoRR, abs/2306.12925. Chengyi Wang, Sanyuan Chen, Yu Wu, Ziqiang Zhang, Long Zhou, Shujie Liu, Zhuo Chen, Yanqing Liu, Huaming Wang, Jinyu Li, Lei He, Sheng Zhao, and Furu Wei. 2023. Neural codec language models are zero-shot text to speech synthesizers. CoRR, abs/2301.02111. Neil Zeghidour, Alejandro Luebs, Ahmed Omran, Jan Skoglund, and Marco Tagliasacchi. 2022. Soundstream: An end-to-end neural audio codec. IEEE ACM Trans. Audio Speech Lang. Process., 30:495– 507. Ziqiang Zhang, Long Zhou, Chengyi Wang, Sanyuan Chen, Yu Wu, Shujie Liu, Zhuo Chen, Yanqing Liu, Huaming Wang, Jinyu Li, Lei He, Sheng Zhao, and Furu Wei. 2023. Speak foreign languages with your own voice: Cross-lingual neural codec language modeling. CoRR, abs/2303.03926. Authors:
(1) Hongyu Gong, Meta AI (hygong@meta.com);
(2) Bandhav Veluri, Meta AI (bandhav@meta.com). This paper is available on arxiv under CC BY 4.0 DEED license. Table of Links Abstract and 1. Introduction Abstract and 1. Introduction Related Work Model Experiments Ablation Study Conclusion, Limitations, and Risks Related Work Related Work Model Model Experiments Experiments Ablation Study Ablation Study Conclusion, Limitations, and Risks Conclusion, Limitations, and Risks 6. Conclusion We propose SEAMLESSEXPRESSIVELM to achieve expressive S2ST with chain-of-thought, which unifies semantic and acoustic language modeling, and improves efficiency over cascaded approach. 7. Limitations and Risks Limitations . One limitation of this work is that it focuses on speech-only modeling. Existing works have shown improved speech translation quality with different data types such as aligned speechtext data. The experiments are conducted in a limited setting where the model and training data sizes are not large. Scaling up model and data would help to enhance the translation performance. Limitations Ethical considerations. The proposed model is intended to use for expressive speech-to-speech translation with both semantics and vocal style preserved. In case of failure, the system will generate inaccurate semantic meaning or vocal styles, thus negatively impacting the translation quality. One example of unintended use is that bad actors misappropriate the model for nefarious activities such as online scams. Ethical considerations. References Loïc Barrault, Yu-An Chung, Mariano Cora Meglioli, David Dale, Ning Dong, Mark Duppenthaler, Paul-Ambroise Duquenne, Brian Ellis, Hady Elsahar, Justin Haaheim, John Hoffman, Min-Jae Hwang, Hirofumi Inaguma, Christopher Klaiber, Ilia Kulikov, Pengwei Li, Daniel Licht, Jean Maillard, Ruslan Mavlyutov, Alice Rakotoarison, Kaushik Ram Sadagopan, Abinesh Ramakrishnan, Tuan Tran, Guillaume Wenzek, Yilin Yang, Ethan Ye, Ivan Evtimov, Pierre Fernandez, Cynthia Gao, Prangthip Hansanti, Elahe Kalbassi, Amanda Kallet, Artyom Kozhevnikov, Gabriel Mejia Gonzalez, Robin San Roman, Christophe Touret, Corinne Wong, Carleigh Wood, Bokai Yu, Pierre Andrews, Can Balioglu, Peng-Jen Chen, Marta R. Costa-jussà, Maha Elbayad, Hongyu Gong, Francisco Guzmán, Kevin Heffernan, Somya Jain, Justine Kao, Ann Lee, Xutai Ma, Alexandre Mourachko, Benjamin Peloquin, Juan Pino, Sravya Popuri, Christophe Ropers, Safiyyah Saleem, Holger Schwenk, Anna Sun, Paden Tomasello, Changhan Wang, Jeff Wang, Skyler Wang, and Mary Williamson. 2023. Seamless: Multilingual expressive and streaming speech translation. CoRR, abs/2312.05187. Sanyuan Chen, Chengyi Wang, Zhengyang Chen, Yu Wu, Shujie Liu, Zhuo Chen, Jinyu Li, Naoyuki Kanda, Takuya Yoshioka, Xiong Xiao, Jian Wu, Long Zhou, Shuo Ren, Yanmin Qian, Yao Qian, Jian Wu, Michael Zeng, Xiangzhan Yu, and Furu Wei. 2022. Wavlm: Large-scale self-supervised pre-training for full stack speech processing. IEEE J. Sel. Top. Signal Process., 16(6):1505–1518. Alexandre Défossez, Jade Copet, Gabriel Synnaeve, and Yossi Adi. 2022. High fidelity neural audio compression. CoRR, abs/2210.13438. Qianqian Dong, Zhiying Huang, Qiao Tian, Chen Xu, Tom Ko, Yunlong Zhao, Siyuan Feng, Tang Li, Kexin Wang, Xuxin Cheng, Fengpeng Yue, Ye Bai, Xi Chen, Lu Lu, Zejun Ma, Yuping Wang, Mingxuan Wang, and Yuxuan Wang. 2023. Polyvoice: Language models for speech to speech translation. CoRR, abs/2306.02982. Paul-Ambroise Duquenne, Hongyu Gong, Ning Dong, Jingfei Du, Ann Lee, Vedanuj Goswami, Changhan Wang, Juan Pino, Benoît Sagot, and Holger Schwenk. 2023. Speechmatrix: A large-scale mined corpus of multilingual speech-to-speech translations. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), ACL 2023, Toronto, Canada, July 9-14, 2023, pages 16251–16269. Association for Computational Linguistics. Jarod Duret, Benjamin O’Brien, Yannick Estève, and Titouan Parcollet. 2023. Enhancing expressivity transfer in textless speech-to-speech translation. CoRR, abs/2310.07279. Hongyu Gong, Ning Dong, Sravya Popuri, Vedanuj Goswami, Ann Lee, and Juan Pino. 2023. Multilingual speech-to-speech translation into multiple target languages. CoRR, abs/2307.08655. Wei-Ning Hsu, Benjamin Bolte, Yao-Hung Hubert Tsai, Kushal Lakhotia, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, and Abdelrahman Mohamed. 2021. Hubert: Self-supervised speech representation learning by masked prediction of hidden units. IEEE ACM Trans. Audio Speech Lang. Process., 29:3451–3460. Ye Jia, Michelle Tadmor Ramanovich, Tal Remez, and Roi Pomerantz. 2022. Translatotron 2: High-quality direct speech-to-speech translation with voice preservation. In International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 2022, 17-23 July 2022, Baltimore, Maryland, USA, volume 162, pages 10120–10134. PMLR. Ye Jia, Ron J. Weiss, Fadi Biadsy, Wolfgang Macherey, Melvin Johnson, Zhifeng Chen, and Yonghui Wu. 2019. Direct speech-to-speech translation with a sequence-to-sequence model. In Interspeech 2019, 20th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, Graz, Austria, 15-19 September 2019, pages 1123–1127. ISCA. Ann Lee, Hongyu Gong, Paul-Ambroise Duquenne, Holger Schwenk, Peng-Jen Chen, Changhan Wang, Sravya Popuri, Yossi Adi, Juan Miguel Pino, Jiatao Gu, and Wei-Ning Hsu. 2022. Textless speech-tospeech translation on real data. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, NAACL 2022, Seattle, WA, United States, July 10-15, 2022, pages 860–872. Association for Computational Linguistics. Yifan Peng, Ilia Kulikov, Yilin Yang, Sravya Popuri, Hui Lu, Changhan Wang, and Hongyu Gong. 2024. Mslm-s2st: A multitask speech language model for textless speech-to-speech translation with speaker style preservation. arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.12408. Paul K. Rubenstein, Chulayuth Asawaroengchai, Duc Dung Nguyen, Ankur Bapna, Zalán Borsos, Félix de Chaumont Quitry, Peter Chen, Dalia El Badawy, Wei Han, Eugene Kharitonov, Hannah Muckenhirn, Dirk Padfield, James Qin, Danny Rozenberg, Tara N. Sainath, Johan Schalkwyk, Matthew Sharifi, Michelle Tadmor Ramanovich, Marco Tagliasacchi, Alexandru Tudor, Mihajlo Velimirovic, Damien Vincent, Jiahui Yu, Yongqiang Wang, Vicky Zayats, Neil Zeghidour, Yu Zhang, Zhishuai Zhang, Lukas Zilka, and Christian Havnø Frank. 2023. Audiopalm: A large language model that can speak and listen. CoRR, abs/2306.12925. Chengyi Wang, Sanyuan Chen, Yu Wu, Ziqiang Zhang, Long Zhou, Shujie Liu, Zhuo Chen, Yanqing Liu, Huaming Wang, Jinyu Li, Lei He, Sheng Zhao, and Furu Wei. 2023. Neural codec language models are zero-shot text to speech synthesizers. CoRR, abs/2301.02111. Neil Zeghidour, Alejandro Luebs, Ahmed Omran, Jan Skoglund, and Marco Tagliasacchi. 2022. Soundstream: An end-to-end neural audio codec. IEEE ACM Trans. Audio Speech Lang. Process., 30:495– 507. Ziqiang Zhang, Long Zhou, Chengyi Wang, Sanyuan Chen, Yu Wu, Shujie Liu, Zhuo Chen, Yanqing Liu, Huaming Wang, Jinyu Li, Lei He, Sheng Zhao, and Furu Wei. 2023. Speak foreign languages with your own voice: Cross-lingual neural codec language modeling. CoRR, abs/2303.03926. Authors: (1) Hongyu Gong, Meta AI (hygong@meta.com); (2) Bandhav Veluri, Meta AI (bandhav@meta.com). Authors : Authors (1) Hongyu Gong, Meta AI (hygong@meta.com); (2) Bandhav Veluri, Meta AI (bandhav@meta.com). This paper is available on arxiv under CC BY 4.0 DEED license. This paper is available on arxiv under CC BY 4.0 DEED license. available on arxiv available on arxiv

Future of Speech Translation with SEAMLESSEXPRESSIVELM

Multimodal AI for High-Fidelity Video Creation and Editing

Privacy in Cloud Computing through Immersion-based Coding: Conclusion and References

Of the Greek philosophers in Alexandria; and how I had discourse with Philo the Alexandrine

It’s Not (Exactly) 1984, but Big Brother Is Certainly Watching! Over the decades, there was always a fear of government spying, but it couldn’t be confirmed. Fast forward to 2013, and all of that changed when the planet’s most famous whistleblower, , disclosed top-secret documents that revealed extensive global surveillance programs run by American, British, and other foreign security agencies. Edward Snowden But it’s not all about hacking or spying. With the refinement of artificial intelligence technologies like pattern and , citizen data can also be used to control them. The authorities can also use the law, in some circumstances, to view the information stored inside devices (and data centers). facial recognition Because of Snowden’s revelations, perhaps the most famous organization engaging in such shadow activities is the American National Security Agency (NSA). While these projects may have been initiated to fight terrorism, they have  been used for a wide range of nefarious activities. According to , Author, Advisor, Serial Entrepreneur, and President of Nordic IT Association, “surveillance is like a cyber kill chain, and unfortunately, corporate and government security is a mess. The fact that Governments are illegally orchestrating blanket surveillance is one thing, but harvesting that data gives attackers a treasure trove at the end of the tunnel, resulting in increasing and more sophisticated ransomware attacks. US border control was hit with a recent breach and a good example. Yet, despite the cyber pandemic, surveillance activity isn't showing signs of slowing down, in fact it's the opposite now with facial recognition being rolled out. This is all in the name of anti terrorism? We are inadvertently creating new attack surfaces for terrorists, cyber terrorists. Unfortunately, we are not well prepared for what I fear is a cyber storm coming our way, and it is us the people that will suffer for it.” Alexander H Reay (MoD) (CDIS) Even the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have been found to use sophisticated tools to look at sensitive data without a warrant. Recently, FBI agents were found between 2017 and 2018. guilty of conducting tens of thousands of illegal searches on citizens The FBI was awarded NSA tools to search for evidence of a crime, as part of an investigation on foreign targets, or to monitor cyberthreats, and terrorism suspects. However, agents used these tools to engage in warrantless searches of databases for information about coworkers, family, and friends. So How Does the Government Spy on Citizens? Backdoors A is a technique that’s used by hackers and government agencies to bypass the system’s security mechanism, undetected. It helps them spy and access user data without anyone noticing what’s going on. backdoor (or trapdoor) The backdoor methods are also sometimes written by the programmers who build the software. But in 2013, Snowden revealed that the to build backdoors and compromise products. NSA was spending as much as $250 million a year "Obviously, a backdoor is a huge hole in the defense, and as we saw with NSA tools, sadly, this information ends up leaking and [is] exploited by criminal organizations. If not, they eventually get found by security researcher[s], or worse, by criminal organization security specialists, which [who] obviously will never reveal what they found, and while the backdoor creator might think he is alone using it, well, a bunch of people may be too…," stated , Cyber Risk Subject Matter Expert and Director of Security at Adaware. Alexandre Blanc Today, governments in the U.S., Europe, and Australia are demanding backdoor access to and encrypted messaging apps. If tech giants agree to do this, it’ll have significant consequences for all of us. social media platforms (like Facebook) Traffic Monitoring/Data Collection is a tool that was developed and used by the NSA to monitor and analyze global data. It’s highly sophisticated and can monitor global internet traffic in real-time. XKeyScore or XKS XKS allows authorities to access: Browsing history Documents shared online Private emails Search queries Track your device movements This tool also enables security agencies to virtually access devices to monitor everything in real-time. As you can see from the above, such tools provide the government (and potentially bad actors) access to your whole virtual life. Spyware/Malware The NSA's , an elite group of hackers, used spyware or malware to gather data. The TOA was excellent at compromising devices to use them as a surveillance tool or to collect information about different users. Tailored Access Operations (TAO) They also consistently looked for security loopholes to break into software, mobile apps, and other platforms. However, their go-too tool was malware to compromise devices. They achieved this by rerouting traffic from fake versions of popular websites to monitor user activity and logs. Through the years, the TAO has also been known to work with tech companies to develop backdoors in routers, both virtually and physically. Unfortunately, some of the (who aren't working for the government). hacking tools developed by the NSA have fallen into the hands of hackers So we now have hackers targeting high-value servers with NSA hacking tools like (to monitor and exfiltrate data), (a backdoor), and (a plugin for analysis) to infect servers running Windows Server 2003 and 2008 in Egypt, Iran, and Russia. DanderSpritz DarkPulsar Fuzzbunch According to , some of the infected organizations were companies with IT and R&D departments in aerospace and nuclear energy. Other NSA-built hacking tools like have already been used in the infamous WannaCry and NotPetya attacks. Kaspersky Labs EternalBlue Local and International Law The authorities can also leverage the law to access your data. The police, for example, can and even access your car data. The same scenario can happen (especially in the United States). get a warrant to go through all your electronic devices without a warrant at the border In the U.K., it was found that to extract user data from digital devices. However, data were collected for all types of crime, including low-level offenses. 93% of police forces were using mobile phone extraction technology While the forces demand data extraction by default, there are no clear national guidelines as to how citizen data should be extracted, stored, and deleted. As a result, they have also been able to obtain data without a warrant. According to , Cyber Security Specialist, IT Security Awareness, and Senior Full Stack Web Developer at CoreSolutions Software Inc., “we already saw publicized cases of people in powerful positions getting caught putting in mobile unlock passwords on camera. And this is just a simple case. Surveillance can also be used to track for longer periods of time, and with more data points, you can ascertain much more information about a target that can be used to access private information. I use [the word] target on purpose here. When this in place, I feel you stop becoming citizens and now become targets.” Ron Craig Government Surveillance in China The internet (still) remains free in North America and Europe. In China (and to some extent in Russia), the story is quite different. They have their own, highly controlled internet with what’s known as “ ” that keeps citizens in and foreigners out. This makes it easy for Chinese authorities to spy on their citizens, censor information, and exert control. The Great Fire Wall This was evidenced recently when an executive for the . China’s response was quick and resulted in apologies and a ban on speaking about Chinese affairs. National Basketball Association’s Houston Rockets tweeted support for the Hong Kong protesters At the same time, government-backed hackers deployed bots across social media platforms to spread disinformation and attack media companies based in Hong Kong. It was also later revealed that Chinese police were also using these tools to control Muslim Uighurs minorities. . Russia has been accused of doing the same The world of espionage is also quite murky and full of surprises. Security researchers, for example, found that the Chinese were using tools developed by the NSA to hack US agencies. In another incident, Israeli hackers caught Russian spies using Moscow-based antivirus and malware scanner, , to hack American spies. Kaspersky Government Surveillance in Russia Russia has also actively monitored its citizens by installing special equipment at service providers. This enables authorities to track, filter, block, and reroute internet traffic at will. With a , the government can also directly censor content without informing the public. change in the nation’s law is also well documented and evidences the fact that governments are going far beyond controlling what happens within their borders. With and the U.K., it remains to be seen if the Russians will continue to meddle in world politics. Russian interference in the U.S. elections elections coming up again in U.S. The Kremlin has also been accused time and again of to engage in cyber espionage. This sets a dangerous precedent for all other sovereign nations, political parties that form the opposition, and activists (in a country that has a poor human rights record). working together with hackers Government Surveillance in the U.S.A. Because of Snowden and Wikileaks, we are now quite familiar with how the authorities collect citizen data and engage in surveillance activities. Aside from using sophisticated hacking tools, the U.S. government is also on a . relentless campaign to end encryption Part of this crusade includes a demand for tech companies like Facebook and Apple to provide backdoor access to their messaging platform. While most of these initiatives are done under the guise of terrorism, this one focuses on the protection of children. However, the recent takedown of one of the largest dark web child porn marketplaces, , reaffirms the fact there are other ways to tackle the child abuse problem without installing backdoors and ending encryption. Welcome to Video Government Surveillance in Switzerland This subheading is misleading because the Swiss government doesn’t spy on its citizens. In fact, this Central European nation’s y. However, the government can engage in surveillance when there’s a proven case of terrorism (or unlawful activity) that demands the collection of evidence through proper legal channels. Switzerland has been consistently strict on these terms. laws are designed to ensure strict privacy and securit As a result, Switzerland’s reputation in the cloud security market is growing rapidly. According to , Founder and CEO of the cloud security company , “Switzerland has always maintained its status as a neutral nation that respects the privacy of its citizens. What was once a highly attractive destination for banking is also the safest place to host your data.” Mateo Meier Artmotion Meier makes an excellent point as Swiss law protects personal and enterprise data from government subpoenas. So even if, for example, a corrupt government tried to access trade secrets to help a local company gain an advantage, they won’t be able to access it without the explicit permission of the owner (of the data). So How Do You Protect Your Data from Spies? There is no one-size-fits-all type of solution. Protecting data will demand a combination of tools, awareness, and continuous updates to keep up with rapidly evolving hacking technology. Tor and Other Secure Browsers You can engage in secure browsing using Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Safari, but these companies will collect data and track your online behavior. As a result, sensitive information can always be at risk of a data breach or a subpoena. The Tor browser, on the other hand, like , , and . , once properly configured, is also a reasonable option to keep your browsing data private. For secure searching, there’s . keeps you anonymous without the need for extra privacy tools Qubes Tails Whonix Firefox Quantum DuckDuckGo Encrypted Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) To secure your connection to the internet, you can also leverage . As VPN technology sends your data through an encrypted tunnel, you can protect your data from the prying eyes of rogue governments, hackers, and even your internet service provider. VPNs to ensure online privacy Server-Side Encryption While VPN tools can help encrypt the connection (and secure data in motion), server-side encryption can help protect the data where it lives (in the data center). Encryption is based on and comes in different forms like 128-bit, 256-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), and XTS block cipher. The latter is a computer cipher or an algorithm that’s leveraged to achieve robust encryption. advanced mathematical formulae As we enter the age of hyper digitization, you can expect the authorities to try and exert more control over businesses and citizens through spying. As a result, efforts to secure personal and enterprise data will require an on-going, adaptable, and evolving approach to help ensure enhanced privacy and security. Is There Another, More Secure Approach to Ensuring National Security without Compromising Privacy and Cybersecurity? According to Reay “we certainly need independent standards and appropriate procedures and boundaries for offensive cyber operations. More specifically, there is no consensus for military cyber organizations that pretty much can gain access to systems and networks as they please. It's unconstitutional, and certainly a privacy issue, yet people seem to let them get away with it. Is privacy dead? Perhaps, despite the current privacy legislation, there is still a lot of smoke and mirrors. Yes, we have more secure approach, continuous monitoring, secure development approaches by design, defining the external and internal threats leads to a more secure approach to ensure national security. Better awareness, and allowing for people to take their own data and take agency over it. Of course one could put forward the merits of DLT (Distributed Ledger Technology) for that.” Blanc said “well, the aggregated data should be stored in secure data centers, which could only receive information and not let anything out through the same channel. Aggregation of METAdata should be enough to get patterns, leading to [a] warrant, which then could lead to [a] seizure. Sadly, [the] current state of the art on the market is collecting data without any concerns, ripping of privacy. While [the] government is kind of following restrictions, private tech organization[s] just navigate above the laws. First, we need more regulation, and then we need metadata correlation, being [a] mandatory requirement with external proofs or assessment to get a warrant, which should then trigger research. We can't stop private entities [from looking] for vulnerabilities, criminal organizations do so as well, but I think there should be a mandatory disclosure delay, so as any identified weakness should be published in such delay[s], like 90 days or so. This way, while it makes investigation a bit more complex, it would stimulate research, allow [the] most advanced to gather data, and yet enhance overall security…” , IT Security Consultant at Gallant-Daigle IT Security Consultant, Inc. and former IT Security Analyst at IBM Microelectronics Division, suggests another approach. “I believe that it would be possible to use the current technology to establish a Universal Device Authentication Infrastructure (UDAI). This infrastructure could be designed to allow legitimate surveillance, with a warrant, separation of powers. The most important idea behind such public infrastructure is virtual artifact traceability. Authorities and businesses need to have complete visibility of which devices were involved in the creation and modification of computer files, and this would be the main goal of the infrastructure.” Maria Gallant-Daigle However, Craig added that “there very well might not be a way currently to ensure national security from cyber crime without resorting to having a skeleton key, but the reality is this will never work for long. People will find ways to create and control the encryption or the means of transport between themselves. These home grown methods will not abide by the same rules and won’t have the back doors inserted. So that leaves them now with having to control that too. So whatever you can’t decrypt is now criminal or suspect in nature and must be intercepted and blocked from reaching its target or traced to the source and target. That will get lucky a few times at best. Then, they will adapt and send another way. Remember, this is a cat and mouse game, and it’s endless as we keep playing the same game. Maybe it’s time to change the game, but that’s for people much smarter than I to figure out.” What else can you do to ensure privacy and security? For the time being, . However, individuals and companies alike still need to follow cybersecurity best practices and take advantage of the latest innovations to keep their valuable data safe. the best available option is to store your data in Switzerland Let’s take this conversation over to Twitter!

How Does the Government Access Your Data?

Thousands of people unwrapped new and shiny iPads the morning of Christmas Day. Many of them will attempt to use the new device as their only computer, and they will need the right setup in order to succeed. I’ve been using an iPad Pro as my main computer for six months now, and having an organized home screen is the secret sauce for making it possible. I usually treat the iPad’s home screen differently from the phone’s home screen, mainly because my speed requirements are different. On my phone, the most commonly used apps tend to be on the first page of the home screen — the goal is to complete a task as fast as possible after unlocking the device (read ). However, on my iPad I keep apps organized by task category, with the objective of placing related apps as close to each other as possible. What’s on my phone’s home screen? The Dock The Dock is central to anything I do with the iPad, from watching a movie to writing a blog post. I keep it tidy with only four apps that let me do the most important tasks I can do: browse the web, check my calendar or email, and access the device’s settings. is my main browser because it integrates perfectly with iCloud Keychain and it usually works great when requesting the desktop version of most websites. Apple’s app brings together all my calendars. on iPad is able of showing emails organized by labels, my top requirement when it comes to email. Safari Calendar Gmail First home screen page: entertainment As I said before, I organize apps by task category. What this means is that when I’m using my iPad to spend a few hours entertained, I like having all the possible apps I could choose on the same screen. Given the abundant available real estate, this organization makes the iPad screen feel like a delicious menu. I’m not a big iPad gamer, especially since many games are based on rewards and crazy time investments (like or ), but has a special place in my heart and I totally recommend it if you like puzzle games; its ambient music and light treatment is worth the price of admission. SimCity Crazy Taxi Inside The video streaming world is divided by many apps nowadays, so I have a broad selection on my first home screen page. You can find the usual suspects, like , , or , but also some niche apps like (I don’t like playing Sea of Thieves, but watching other people play it is fun!) or the Spanish TV apps and . This is a testament of how ridiculous the situation has become for cord-cutters, I may not pay for cable TV but I’m still a slave of several subscription-based services. Netflix Prime Video YouTube Hulu Twitch RTVE alacarta TV3 Reading is a big part of my life, and I can’t live without (which aggregates newspapers from Spain where Google News doesn’t), (the best substitute for good ol’ Google Reader), and . Microsoft News Feedly Kindle Twitter is the only social network where my friends still post personal content, so it’s also a must on my first page. Instagram Second home screen page: productivity Amazon gives every employee in engineering a laptop, so that they can work remotely; I always work directly from it since the VPN is already set up, but it’s nice to have access to my email, meetings and online design documents here too. Apple’s app is easy to configure with Amazon’s network, so it’s a good complement to and (corporate apps for Amazon employees). Mail Chime WorkDocs Most of my friends have already abandoned and they only use it to consume memes, news or other interesting articles. I use it to share what I write on geekonrecord.com and hackernoon.com. I do the same with and ; I have found that those are great apps for reaching out to other tech professionals. Facebook LinkedIn Medium Writing a post requires a myriad of apps, starting with (which makes it easy to share content with my editor), and (where I sketch ideas), , and (for image composition), and or (for file storage). Google Docs OneNote Paper Photos Over PicsArt Google Drive OneDrive I also consider , and productivity apps, but they are unrelated to work or writing. Stocks Google Maps Amazon The third and fourth home screen pages contain communication apps like or , and other stock Apple apps or like content blockers, so I won’t bore you with the details. Skype Messenger background utilities The bottom line is that having the right home screen organization is all about reducing friction between you and the device; distributing apps by task category in different pages might not work for you, but once you find the right place for all your apps, using your iPad should become intuitive and effortless. What about you? What tips and tricks do you have for organizing your iPad home screen? See also: Why I replaced my laptop with an iPad Pro Did you like this article? Subscribe to get new posts by email. Originally published at geekonrecord.com on January 3, 2019.

What’s on my iPad’s home screen?

The launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 marked a significant milestone for the society. Since its introduction, ChatGPT has rapidly gained traction, attracting a substantial user base of 100 million individuals within just two months. This achievement set a new record for visitor growth in our industry. Professionals across various sectors have started exploring innovative ways to integrate ChatGPT into their operations. Personally, I have taken an interest in its potential applications in business analytics and sought to evaluate the capabilities and limitations of this tool. In preparing this article, I conducted research on the topic, scouring online resources for relevant information. While existing examples largely focused on specific use cases, my goal was to highlight the broad spectrum of possibilities presented by ChatGPT. The outcome of my investigation led me to identify five distinct categories of tasks where ChatGPT can offer valuable assistance. In this article, I provide a concise overview of each of these applications. PlantUML code generation Automated code generation through ChatGPT for PlantUML diagrams is a highly innovative feature. ChatGPT has the capability to generate and correct code, including PlantUML code for various diagram types. PlantUML is a tool commonly used for creating UML and other types of diagrams. One of the key advantages of using PlantUML is the reduction in manual work, as editing the code is a more efficient method compared to manually adjusting diagram elements. In the context of an online shop scenario, let us request ChatGPT to generate the PlantUML sequence diagram depicting the integration process with the Stripe service. My request is as follows: Below is the code generated by ChatGPT: By incorporating this into the online PlantUML editor, we are able to generate a comprehensive high-level sequence diagram that can be further enhanced with additional details. ChatGPT was able to generate this diagram in just one minute, a task that would undoubtedly require a significant amount of time if done manually. Use cases generation ChatGPT can be a valuable resource for generating drafts of use cases for your service. It can assist in efficiently completing this task and offer fresh perspectives by identifying scenarios that may not have been previously considered. The initial request can be formulated as follows: As a result, ChatGPT provides 15 use cases written in the requested format. Here are a few examples: CJM creation This task may align more closely with the responsibilities of the Product Owner role; however, Business Analysts may also contribute to the global product strategy planning. In such instances, ChatGPT can be a valuable tool to assist them in their efforts. I made the request using the following criteria: The response chatbot provided information on three different types of customers: First-Time Visitors, Regular Shoppers, and Dissatisfied Customers. You should agree that you need more than 1-2 minutes for preparing a presentation tailored to a specific customer type. By utilizing ChatGPT, you can generate a high-quality draft that can be further customized and enhanced to meet your needs. Documentation draft creation Utilizing a chatbot is a convenient and rational method for generating documents such as Software Requirement Specifications (SRS). It is important to note that ChatGPT has a tendency to include extraneous details in its output, therefore it is recommended to thoroughly review and edit the text for accuracy and conciseness. I used the chatbot to generate an initial draft of the SRS for the user account page on our online store. As a result I got a document containing functional and non-functional requirements and a glossary: Upon reviewing the requirements, it is evident that some do not align with the SMART criteria and may require editing. This draft can be further enhanced and refined to meet both your and your customer's expectations. Mastering a subject domain Starting to work in the new subject area, Business Analysts often need advice on this new field of knowledge. ChatGPT can assist in this process by providing tailored advice and creating a personalized development plan. Additionally, references, courses, or a summary of high-level knowledge can be requested to enhance comprehension of the subject matter. For example, if we decide to introduce coffee as a product in our online shop, it would be beneficial to acquire knowledge about coffee varieties and characteristics. This includes not only distinguishing between different types such as cappuccino and espresso, but also gaining a basic understanding of the various attributes of coffee. Let`s ask ChatGPT: As a result I got the summary for all requested information: The chatbot successfully generated a list of references as requested: Conclusions Since the inception of ChatGPT, there has been a range of reactions within the community, varying from enthusiasm to concern. Influential figures such as Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, and other experts in the field of artificial intelligence have penned an open letter to call on AI labs to pause in giant AI experiments of all AI systems more powerful than GPT-4 for half a year. All cutting-edge technologies can be intimidating due to the wide range of applications and potential complexities. However, like any tool, when utilized appropriately, they can provide numerous benefits. Our objective is to explore how we can improve efficiency through the use of ChatGPT. It is important to remember that all outputs generated by ChatGPT require thorough validation and editing. ChatGPT has the potential to streamline repetitive tasks, allowing for more time to focus on innovative and challenging issues. If you currently utilize ChatGPT in your role, we would be interested in hearing how it has enhanced your work processes. The launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 marked a significant milestone for the society. Since its introduction, ChatGPT has rapidly gained traction, attracting a substantial user base of 100 million individuals within just two months. This achievement set a new record for visitor growth in our industry. The launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 marked a significant milestone for the society. Since its introduction, ChatGPT has rapidly gained traction, attracting a substantial user base of 100 million individuals within just two months. This achievement set a new record for visitor growth in our industry. record Professionals across various sectors have started exploring innovative ways to integrate ChatGPT into their operations. Personally, I have taken an interest in its potential applications in business analytics and sought to evaluate the capabilities and limitations of this tool. Professionals across various sectors have started exploring innovative ways to integrate ChatGPT into their operations. Personally, I have taken an interest in its potential applications in business analytics and sought to evaluate the capabilities and limitations of this tool. In preparing this article, I conducted research on the topic, scouring online resources for relevant information. While existing examples largely focused on specific use cases, my goal was to highlight the broad spectrum of possibilities presented by ChatGPT. The outcome of my investigation led me to identify five distinct categories of tasks where ChatGPT can offer valuable assistance. In this article, I provide a concise overview of each of these applications. PlantUML code generation PlantUML code generation PlantUML code generation PlantUML code generation Automated code generation through ChatGPT for PlantUML diagrams is a highly innovative feature. ChatGPT has the capability to generate and correct code, including PlantUML code for various diagram types. PlantUML is a tool commonly used for creating UML and other types of diagrams. One of the key advantages of using PlantUML is the reduction in manual work, as editing the code is a more efficient method compared to manually adjusting diagram elements. In the context of an online shop scenario, let us request ChatGPT to generate the PlantUML sequence diagram depicting the integration process with the Stripe service. My request is as follows: Below is the code generated by ChatGPT: By incorporating this into the online PlantUML editor, we are able to generate a comprehensive high-level sequence diagram that can be further enhanced with additional details. ChatGPT was able to generate this diagram in just one minute, a task that would undoubtedly require a significant amount of time if done manually. Use cases generation Use cases generation Use cases generation ChatGPT can be a valuable resource for generating drafts of use cases for your service. It can assist in efficiently completing this task and offer fresh perspectives by identifying scenarios that may not have been previously considered. The initial request can be formulated as follows: As a result, ChatGPT provides 15 use cases written in the requested format. Here are a few examples: CJM creation CJM creation CJM creation This task may align more closely with the responsibilities of the Product Owner role; however, Business Analysts may also contribute to the global product strategy planning. In such instances, ChatGPT can be a valuable tool to assist them in their efforts. I made the request using the following criteria: The response chatbot provided information on three different types of customers: First-Time Visitors, Regular Shoppers, and Dissatisfied Customers. You should agree that you need more than 1-2 minutes for preparing a presentation tailored to a specific customer type. By utilizing ChatGPT, you can generate a high-quality draft that can be further customized and enhanced to meet your needs. Documentation draft creation Documentation draft creation Documentation draft creation Utilizing a chatbot is a convenient and rational method for generating documents such as Software Requirement Specifications (SRS). It is important to note that ChatGPT has a tendency to include extraneous details in its output, therefore it is recommended to thoroughly review and edit the text for accuracy and conciseness. I used the chatbot to generate an initial draft of the SRS for the user account page on our online store. As a result I got a document containing functional and non-functional requirements and a glossary: Upon reviewing the requirements, it is evident that some do not align with the SMART criteria and may require editing. This draft can be further enhanced and refined to meet both your and your customer's expectations. Mastering a subject domain Mastering a subject domain Mastering a subject domain Starting to work in the new subject area, Business Analysts often need advice on this new field of knowledge. ChatGPT can assist in this process by providing tailored advice and creating a personalized development plan. Additionally, references, courses, or a summary of high-level knowledge can be requested to enhance comprehension of the subject matter. For example, if we decide to introduce coffee as a product in our online shop, it would be beneficial to acquire knowledge about coffee varieties and characteristics. This includes not only distinguishing between different types such as cappuccino and espresso, but also gaining a basic understanding of the various attributes of coffee. Let`s ask ChatGPT: As a result I got the summary for all requested information: The chatbot successfully generated a list of references as requested: Conclusions Since the inception of ChatGPT, there has been a range of reactions within the community, varying from enthusiasm to concern. Influential figures such as Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, and other experts in the field of artificial intelligence have penned an open letter to call on AI labs to pause in giant AI experiments of all AI systems more powerful than GPT-4 for half a year. open letter All cutting-edge technologies can be intimidating due to the wide range of applications and potential complexities. However, like any tool, when utilized appropriately, they can provide numerous benefits. Our objective is to explore how we can improve efficiency through the use of ChatGPT. It is important to remember that all outputs generated by ChatGPT require thorough validation and editing. ChatGPT has the potential to streamline repetitive tasks, allowing for more time to focus on innovative and challenging issues. If you currently utilize ChatGPT in your role, we would be interested in hearing how it has enhanced your work processes.

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