An Occasionally updated series of rantings and musings live from "Content Central". These are solely my personal views, happily presented here on the interwebs for your viewing pleasure. Comments are welcome.
This post originally appeared on my Facebook page. Since not everyone sees that page, I wanted to share it here for all to see.
Friends, I want to take a minute to be very serious here. Actual serious, not sarcasm or snark. Not even Cubs ranting.
I try to share the best of my world, things I find interesting, and a laugh or two on Facebook. And in the past, I've tried to wish those I know or are somehow connected with a happy birthday in as special way as I can. I hope it makes you happy, I know I enjoyed looking for a way to celebrate you on YOUR day.
I've failed to do that last part for the last year or so. I've had a horribly difficult year, with a startup company I poured my heart and soul into betraying its employees, going out of business, and leaving really good people in emotional and financial shambles. It's been a distraction to say the least, and I haven't done a good job in helping those whose connection and friendship I appreciate celebrate their special day, let alone maintain normal contact.
As the High Holy Days leave their lessons behind and my own birthday approaches, I look back on the last year and apologize to those I've overlooked or just plain ignored. That was wrong and selfish, no matter what was going on in my life.
Borrowing from C. S. Lewis, “There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind.” I ask you to accept my most sincere apologies and join me in trying to experience a positive end to this year as well as a great year ahead. The fog is lifting and I'm hoping to put the past and the damage it caused behind and return to a better place in my new natal year. Hopefully, you'll still want to join me on that journey.
On September 22, Yahoo! announced that some 500 million email accounts had been compromised. If you have email that ends in att.net, you very well might have had your email password and other personal information stolen. Here's what you need to know if you're an att.net customer through the company's DSL service, U-Verse, or other products.
First, some background. It turns out the even though Yahoo! finally got around to letting their users and Verizon, the company getting ready to buy them, know about the breach today, the crime happened in 2014, at least according to Yahoo's official statement:
“We have confirmed that a copy of certain user account information was stolen from the company’s network in late 2014 by what it believes is a state-sponsored actor. The account information may have included names, email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth, hashed passwords (the vast majority with bcrypt) and, in some cases, encrypted or unencrypted security questions and answers. The ongoing investigation suggests that stolen information did not include unprotected passwords, payment card data, or bank account information; payment card data and bank account information are not stored in the system that the investigation has found to be affected. Based on the ongoing investigation, Yahoo believes that information associated with at least 500 million user accounts was stolen and the investigation has found no evidence that the state-sponsored actor is currently in Yahoo’s network. Yahoo is working closely with law enforcement on this matter.”
It's all the rage now to blame rogue governments for any kind of data breach, so it's no wonder that Yahoo is using that tactic. Regardless of who stole the att.net information, it's freely available on the Dark Web, and that means your email information, as well as anything you've associated with the account could end up in the hands of Bad Guys.
If you call AT&T to get some help with this problem, a few things will happen. First you'll be told that they don't know for sure if you're information has been compromised. That's true, but if there's even a slight chance that it has been stolen, changing your password is the smart thing to do. You'll also be told that if you change your email password, it will not affect any password information on other AT&T services such as television or wireless that may be associated with your AT&T account. That is a flat-out lie. In most cases, if you change your email password, everything you have connected to AT&T will have its password changed as well. And there's no way around that happening.
cbc.ca
Having all those passwords changed might not be the worst thing in the world. Sometimes refreshing passwords is just good security. However, AT&T won't tell you that once you change your email password, you'll have to change passwords for everything else connected to your AT&T accounts. That means your billing information, any apps that work with your accounts, and other services. It might take an hour or two to fix all the passwords that got changed, so be prepared.
All of that will get you through the first part of the process of trying to protect your email, But what do you do in the long run? Far and away the smartest thing to do is get away from any service running on Yahoo's servers. At some point AT&T may wise up and change to another email provider, But for now if you want to keep your AT&T address you are stuck with Yahoo. There are dozens of other good free email services out there and unless you rely on your current att.net email address for critical items, you might want to retire it temporarily and use another service.
Another thing you can do is just dump AT&T email for good. It's pretty easy to export all of your data to other services, forward email from AT&T to your new address, and most likely be safer than you are today when it comes to the security of your personal information. That's what I'm doing, and what I'm advising my family to do as well.
marketingland.com
A lot of things are different in 2016 than they were before. One of them is that nothing online is as secure as you think it is. Yahoo! taking almost 2 years to tell the world about a breach that affected half a billion customers is proof of that. Do business and use services that you trust, is very strong passwords, and change them a couple times a year. You will probably thank yourself the next time you read the story about a huge data breach.
This Post Originally Appeared On Medium August 23, 2016
Twenty years ago today, my son Ross was born. I know it’s not quite a milestone like his 18th birthday when he got to be “legal” or his 21st birthday, but this is an incredibly special day. Not for me, but for one of the most incredible, unstoppable people I’ve ever known. This guy has been a fighter all his life. My wife and I tried for years to have him, her pregnancy was, to say the least, difficult, and Ross entered the world in truly dramatic fashion as I described to the Chicago Tribune in this column that ran on my first Father’s Day.
“All of a sudden the door flies open and it seems like a hundred people flew into the room and the attending doctor is saying, `OK, we gotta go right now, we gotta take her,’ “
Ross was delivered by vacuum extraction, and I won’t embarrass him by posting a photo of his pointy newborn head for the world (and his future bride and children) to see. But suffice it to say we almost lost him, but he came out fighting and has never stopped. Ross didn’t grow as large or as fast as most babies, and eventually he was diagnosed with “short stature” and spent over a decade having to be injected with growth hormones every day. At first, my wife or I gave him his shots, but he eventually learned and wanted to do the injections himself, and became as skilled at it as Dr. Doug Ross, and I promise you it’s only a coincidence the he shares that name. He also has, and will always have, Asperger Syndrome, which is now considered being an Autism Spectrum Disorder. Some call it “high functioning autism”, and the main symptoms Ross presents have to do with social interaction. But he’s worked incredibly hard to overcome his affliction, and has indeed been “high functioning”, taking Honors classes, playing in the high school and college marching bands, getting great grades, and doing an amazing job working part time at a fast food chain, both through his Senior year of High School and now at another location in College. He’s not gregarious, but he gets better at interacting with people every day, and when he’s with his friends, you’d never know how being social can be challenging for him. Ross started his Sophomore year of college yesterday, and is fascinated by history, so much so that he wants to get a doctorate in the field. He speaks fluent Latin, knows facts about every era of the past, and is a voracious reader and learner. College can be challenging for him, but he handles every part of University life with confidence and grace. Undergraduate study is hard enough, especially at the state’s “Honors University”, but his grades are fantastic and he’s committed himself to do whatever it takes to get his PhD. It’s not going to be easy, but he’s faced adversity more times than I can explain and has come out ahead in every instance. His courage, strength, and refusal to let obstacles deter him are truly remarkable. I don’t want you to think I’m bragging on my parenting skills or some secrets I’ve learned to create an amazing son. I’m not, and I’ve seen for twenty years how Ross has overcome multiple obstacles all by himself and is becoming an exceptional adult. He’s come a long way from being that pointy head baby, and I have complete confidence that he’ll go on to do whatever he wants to, no matter how big the sacrifice or how hard the battle. He certainly hasn’t stopped, or even slowed down, yet. Happy birthday Ross. You amaze me every day. I love you and wish I could be with you to celebrate.
I've not made a secret about the fact that I'm visually handicapped. It's been part of my life since birth, I'm not ashamed of it, and I think I've done a pretty good job in a world that was never designed for the disabled. The ONLY thing I can't do is drive a car, which can be challenging at times, but has never stopped me from living a great life, albeit with the challenges of being very nearsighted.
I've always been fascinated with technology, from building crystal radio sets as a kid to seeing the potential of this thing called the Internet back in the early 90's to being at the head of the line with this wacky concept called Social Media a decade ago. One of the things futurists and geeks have always said about technology is that while it could do all kinds of "cool" things, it had the power to change how people live.
I've been fortunate enough to work with a smartphone app that literally can let the blind and partially sighted see. The app is called Aipoly, and there's an article about the app now on Newsweek.com and it will be in their April 8th print edition. The article talks about the app and the kind of work that goes into developing such a revolutionary piece of software. It also shows that the people who predicted all the good things technology could do were indeed right. The same device that you use for Snapchat and Tinder can also have Aipoly, and that's a blessing for thousands, someday maybe millions. Here's the article, hopefully shared with the permission of Newsweek.
The first time Mark Edwards used Aipoly Vision, he cried. Edwards, 56 and legally blind since birth, had signed up as an early tester for the smartphone app that claims to help the visually impaired people “see” the world around them. “When it immediately told me what was surrounding me, I was completely overcome with tears of joy,” says Edwards. “That doesn’t happen very often to a middle-aged man.”
Other early users of the app have called it “game changing” and on par with self-driving cars for its potential to transform the lives of blind people. Born out of the Singularity University in California—an institution set up in 2008 at NASA Research Park to produce “exponential technologies to address humanity’s grand challenges”—Aipoly Vision combines recent advances in artificial intelligence with the standard technology found in an iPhone. The neural networks and deep learning algorithms that power it may be complex, but how it works is simple: Users point their phone at any day-to-day object and the app speaks out what it is seeing.
“When we were first coming up with the idea we spoke to 88 blind people and asked what they wanted,” says Marita Cheng, one of the app’s creators. “We found that their biggest frustration was having to ask what things are.” Before Aipoly Vision, a visually impaired person travelling solo had only one option besides asking for help: to rely on apps that use volunteers to help identify things via video calls. But that can be time-consuming. “The thing that’s special about our app is that it’s all done in real time,” Cheng says. “Current methods require an Internet connection and can take anywhere up to two minutes. Our system can recognize three objects per second.” Bringing in a third party—like those volunteer apps do—also isn’t ideal for those who want privacy. But with Aipoly, says Cheng “no one knows what you’re looking at.”
The version of the app that Edwards is testing is able to identify around 1,000 objects and any color. An update expected to be released by the end of the month will be able to recognize around 5,000 objects. In its current form it can also distinguish between different brands and explain to the user what’s in an image printed or on a screen. What’s more, users can “teach” the app about objects it doesn’t recognize—benefiting both themselves (later on) and other users.
Text recognition is another struggle for blind people, though this has already been largely solved through an app called KNFB Reader. Developed through a partnership between the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) and Ray Kurzweil (one of the founders of the Singularity University), the KNFB Reader app allows users to listen to an audio readback of printed text. While some have criticized its relatively high cost ($99), the KNFB Reader has proved invaluable in helping blind and visually impaired people carry out tasks like reading menus in restaurants or understanding printed instructions. Aipoly Vision aims to take this one step further. And for free.
Chris Danielsen, a spokesperson for the NFB who has been blind since birth, tells Newsweek that object recognition usually isn’t a problem for blind people if they can touch it. “Where this technology comes in handy is when you don’t know what color something is or when there are items inside a container,” he says. “It can also be useful when you’re in an unfamiliar area, as it could be used to recognize local landmarks, or in an education setting to describe diagrams in textbooks or images without captions.”
While Aipoly’s AI is not yet sophisticated enough to describe the details displayed in a diagram, it is able to understand certain images and communicate them to the user. For example, when shown a cartoon of Superman it is able to understand that the figure is indeed the superhero from the planet Krypton, but the app couldn’t tell you what exactly Superman is doing. And this isn’t its only limitation. The app touts its ability to differentiate between logos of different brands, which is very handy when a user is faced with cans and packets of food or drink that feel identical to each other. Unfortunately, when shown a can of Coca Cola in tests, the app misidentified it as Coors beer, a mistake that could prove dangerous if made in a real world setting.
Despite the limitations—and no money spent on advertising or marketing—the app has already had 35,000 downloads on Apple’s App Store. The limited funding received through grants from competitions has been spent instead on improving the technology and developing new functionality, such as facial recognition, which it hopes to add in future versions of the app.
Something that has come as a surprise to the app’s creators is its popularity in Japan, where there have been over 8,000 downloads since the start of 2016. It turns out that people in Japan—people without visual impairments—are using it to learn English. “It speaks with a proper British accent so people know how to pronounce in English,” says Simon Edwardsson, co-founder of Aipoly. “That’s something we’re going to explore more in the future.”
The app’s creators are also working on ways to give it a more holistic view of the world, so that it can explain not just what an object is, but can also offer context on how the object relates to its surroundings. For Edwards, even in its current form Aipoly Vision has become an essential part of his daily life. It is allowing him to explore the world in a way they never could before. “Walking in town I use it to tell me what’s ahead, be it a traffic light, a sign or a mailbox,” he says. “That’s life changing. I know that sounds grandiose but it really is.”
