WHY IT MATTERS: Digital Transformation

WHY IT MATTERS: a very good update on wearables digital monitoring technologies. Not surprised to see the explosion of sensors, solutions and metrics monitored.

WHY IT MATTERS: another hype cycle, but with 2 important trends: composite architectures and digital me. In that context I wrote qui a bit about this years ago. See here for example: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/pyramid-digital-needs-farid-mheir/

WHY IT MATTERS : the chart says it all: to protect your systems you must ensure your employees are properly trained on phishing schemes. Software solutions can help but HUMANS are the weak link in cybersecurity.

WHY IT MATTERS: cameras are everywhere - phones, streets, home, office - and AI enables new capabilities that can present massive surveillance possibilities as well as personal protection and real-time data. This very well done video - as is the case with most VOX videos - should give you a good rundown of the plus and minuses...

WHY IT MATTERS: an article full of eye opening data on hacking and security (like only 750$ to hack someone's password) and links to protect your Google accounts (like adding recovery phone number).

WHY IT MATTERS: with voice enable devices making their way into the professional settings like doctors offices or lawyers office, the impact of devices that record everything that is being said in very private settings should concern us all.

WHY IT MATTERS: with digital transformation comes new tools and techniques that we need to learn to keep our privacy. These are 5 of them.

WHY IT MATTERS: for geeks that want to understand which trackers exists and how they appear on mobile apps and websites. Can also be used to add them to your apps of sites, unfortunately...

WHY IT MATTERS: I wrote about this many years back and it is worth an update given this very interesting article from WP. The growth of mobile tracking, yes even on iPhone, should be cause for concern. They also link to a solution, disconnect.me which I also covered in the past when it was launched as the collusion chrome plugin (in 2013!!!!). Moreover the very good github list of trackers is quite mindblowing. Yes it has been 6 years and the state of privacy has worsened in serious ways. Follow the links in the article for details but here are the 2 I consider most useful:

https://disconnect.me/

https://github.com/disconnectme/disconnect-tracking-protection

WHY IT MATTERS: this new service will help you determine if your account has been hacked and watch for it. This is a new twist on a service I discussed before http://fmcs.digital/?s=pwned but that remains more valuable than ever today.

WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT

The video is short and provides very good explanation of how the AI can pass the University entrance exam without understanding a thing. Nevertheless, I find this amazing because once AI learns something, or acquires a skill, *every* other AI can benefit from it. As opposed to humans who *individually* have to learn new things for themselves. Thus, we can expect AI to learn at an exponential rate and become truly "intelligent" very rapidly. This example should be a wake up call for all of us.

WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT

Tata Consulting CTO Franck Diana consistently raises interesting trends and forecasts. here, I find useful his mapping of well-being to innovation (mostly technological innovations that fall in the digital transformation/disruption world). I plan to reuse this grid in my work and analysis.

WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT

Digital transformation often starts with innovative new technologies. This technologies has been in development for many years and thus we should keep them on our radars for when they spring out of the lab as commercial products. Not just yet though but keep that in mind when strategic plans are being drawn...

WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT

Fake news is difficult to debunk because we are trained to believe what we read has been vetted and checked for validity. Images and videos are even worse because, until now, it was difficult to alter them in any meaningful way. Technologies like this may change that forever. Watch out for elections 202 in the USA.

WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT

A relatively technical explanation of the methods used to track people on the web.

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Discusses different solutions to remain anonymous online, from TOR to bitcoins.

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Humans may not be so smart after all if it takes a few simple neural nets to start to create new languages and communicate. The article is just a teaser, if you want to know more you have to go the the Facebook research group blog to read the full thing.

https://research.fb.com/category/facebook-ai-research-fair/

https://code.facebook.com/posts/1686672014972296/deal-or-no-deal-training-ai-bots-to-negotiate/

https://code.facebook.com/posts/266433647155520/parlai-a-new-software-platform-for-dialog-research/

WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT

This is the basics you need to know: incognito mode, VPNs and TOR network. If you don't read this.

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Big brother is watching and when it does you can gain tremendous insights into the behaviour of humans. I zoomed in on Montreal and the diagram is very clear about which run trails are most popular on the Mount Royal. On the dark side, of course, this means Strava performs some high level surveillance on us as we share our bike and run rides with their software.

WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT
Wearablesbubble has burst in recent months, when the hype of Apple watch has died down. But this technology remains important but still looking for the killer app, better battery life and lower price point. Expect this to reappear within a few year with, possible a low cost device with lots of sensors and a battery life of many days.

WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT

Social logins are very useful but they carry security and privacy concerns that every company must examine as they move to digitalize everything. In "Kill the password" (fmcs.digital/blog/kill-the-password-a-string-of-characters-wont-protect-you/), the author shows the impact of having multiple websites and applications connected with one another. This is a security concern that must be addressed, mitigated or at the very least highlighted so that everyone involved is aware of the risks and the benefits.

Other articles:

• somewhat technical: http://www.businessinsider.com/the-danger-of-social-media-logins-2014-5
• recent stats on social login use: https://betanews.com/2016/10/19/social-logins-convenience-risks/ 

Mozilla has always been promoting Internet security and privacy and this new report paves the way for a very interesting ongoing look at key elements of the public Internet.

Read this important post to understand just how many traces we leave behind as we lead our daily lives.

WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT

On this Data Privacy Day 2017, I thought I would review what Google, Apple, Facebook and others know about me. Unfortunately, it looks like this information is difficult to find and pretty much the only data we can find is from Google. So, let's assume Apple, Facebook, twitter, and others know as much if not more.

Google tools that will show you what they know about you:

• https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity 
• https://www.google.com/settings/u/0/ads/authenticated 
• https://myaccount.google.com/dashboard 
• http://visual.ly/how-much-does-google-really-know-about-you

Other articles about those tools:

• http://www.businessinsider.com/everything-google-knows-about-you-2016-5/#to-delete-all-of-your-web-and-app-activity-in-one-shot-go-back-to-the-main-web-and-app-activity-page-and-click-on-the-three-dots-at-the-top-corner-of-the-page-then-click-on-delete-options-then-on-advanced-and-then-on-all-time-4
• http://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-see-everything-google-knows-about-you-2016-6
• http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-much-google-know-about-you/