Monday, September 30, 2019

FinTech and HPC-AI

@RadioFreeHPC Has Entered The Building

First things first, you can call us @RadioFreeHPC now, thanks to our new Twitter account. We decided maybe this social media thing is not a fad after all. We are also pleased to inform you that our Twitter account is almost as heavily followed as the podcast itself. Thank you! We should be up to about 6 or 7 followers by the time you read this. Good thing we allocated 64 full bits to track the number.

FinTech and HPC-AI

Shahin gives an update on the HPC-AI on Wall Street conference. We discuss the well-received Cryptocurrency panel that he moderated, the challenges of using of AI in financial services, the emerging computational storage, and advanced HPC-class modeling that helps venture capital investors decide whether to invest in a startup. Check out his blog on the panel and top-10 crypto topics of the day here:

Top-10 Crypto/Blockchain Topics

Why? What’s the big deal? Blockchain or Crypto? ICOs Political Support Libra Apps Security Other Coins Digital Assets Smart Contracts

Henry Newman's Why No One Should be Online, Ever.

Once again, Henry actually has good news, and once again, it's the kind of good news that highlights the bad news.

Man Who Hired Deadly Swatting Gets 15 Months

An Ohio teen who recruited a convicted serial “swatter” to fake a distress call that ended in the police shooting an innocent Kansas man in 2017 has been sentenced to 15 months in prison. “Swatting” is a dangerous hoax that involves making false claims to emergency responders about phony hostage situations or bomb threats, with the intention of prompting a heavily-armed police response to the location of the claimed incident.

Catch of the Week

Shahin talks about France and Germany planning to block the Libra cryptocurrency. Henry and Dan think this is a good time to say "we told you so"! Nobody's surprised, though Shahin thinks this is the beginning of this, not the end.

Germany's Scholz: We cannot accept parallel currencies such as Facebook's Libra

German Finance Minister Olaf Scholz said on Tuesday policymakers could not accept the emergence of parallel currencies such as Facebook’s planned Libra, adding that Berlin would reject any such plans. Facebook’s planned Libra is the most well-known of the stablecoins, a certain form of cryptocurrency backed by assets such as traditional money deposits, short-term government securities or gold.
Henry doesnt know whether to laugh or cry as he describes some of the "ignoble" prize winners and wonders how they ever got funded.

Magnetic cockroaches, dirty money, wombat poo and posties' balls: It's the Ig Nobels 2019

This year's theme was 'habits' and they were baaaaad The Annals of Improbable Research held its annual award-giving ceremony – the Ig Nobel Prize – on Thursday night at Harvard's Sanders Theatre, and the entries were as worthy as ever.
Dan talks about the call-center scammer whose plea deal backfires:

Call-center scammer loses $9m appeal in stunning moment of poetic justice

But I only expected to pay $250,000, wails scumbag to wall of blank faces. A call-center scammer has lost his appeal to overturn a $9m fine – after a court pointed out the crook had specifically waived the right to appeal when he pleaded guilty.

Listen in to hear the full conversation.

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Saturday, September 21, 2019

RFP Pro Tips

The Dos and Donts of RFP Benchmarks

In today’s show we only have Dan and Henry on deck, Shahin is away at the “HPC and AI on Wall Street” event where he’ll be hosting various panel discussions. But Dan and Henry soldier on with a discussion based on a recent, and fascinating, presentation by Tricia Balle of Cray at the HPC-AI Advisory Council event in Perth, Australia.

The topic: Benchmarks in HPC Procurement Tenders. As Shahin said in the IO500 episode (originally about SPEC) "benchmarks specify the specious specter of our species", but in market whose middle name is "performance", they can be pretty much everything, and a real and critical part of the RFP/buying process. We discuss how benchmarks should and shouldn’t be used in RFPs, and the relevant best practices; important stuff whether you are on the customer side or the vendor side.

You can see the entire presentation with slides here:


Henry Newman's Why No One Should be Online, Ever.

Dan comes up with a new label for the ever uplifting Feel Good Security Corner.  Henry talks about the Google security exploit, discovered in 2017 and finally getting fixed, that allows miscreants to take over your system through a combination of Google email and calendar applications. However, this isn’t so bad – it only potentially impacts 1.5 million users…oh, wait, that’s not correct, it impacts as many as 1.5 BILLION users…which makes it quite bad. Here’s a link to the story:

Google To Fix Malicious Invites Issue For 1 Billion Calendar Users

Way back in 2017, two researchers at Black Hills Information Security disclosed how a vulnerability in the Google Calendar app was leaving more than a billion users open to a credential-stealing exploit. Google apparently didn't fix this at the time as it would have caused "major functionality drawbacks" for Calendar users, despite those researchers demonstrating how they had weaponized the vulnerability at the Wild West Hackin' Fest.

Catch of the Week

Henry discusses the Wired story below about how wifi almost didn’t happen. Most people probably don’t know that September 15th will mark the 20th anniversary of Wi-Fi. It was introduced to a room of 60 people at the Atlanta Convention Center, an understated announcement for a technology that would go on to change the world. The story is a very cool look at the history of Wi-Fi and how a little-known IEEE specification went on to become the standard vs. something called HomeRF, which was supported by IBM, HP, Intel, and Compaq.

How Wi-Fi Almost Didn’t Happen

We all love Wi-Fi, except when we can’t connect. We take for granted being able to have wireless access at home and the office, on airplanes, in cafés around the globe, and if we'd be so lucky, floating on the International Space Station. But what if Wi-Fi hadn’t happened? It almost didn’t, at least not in the way we recognize it today.

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Sunday, September 15, 2019

Extreme Power and Cooling Efficiency

Yes, You Can Be More Efficient!

Dan is back from way Down Under bearing intellectual gifts from the recent HPC-AI Advisory Council meeting in Perth. The RadioFree HPC team drills down on one interesting presentation focused on extracting more from power and cooling systems. Take a look at the video below and the rest of the talks at the conference.



Henry Newman's Feel-Good Security Corner

The go-to place for why being online is just too dangerous. Henry has good news actually.  Targeted by a usually deadly ransomware attack, a city in Massachusetts managed to restore operations without paying a dime. Nice job!  But Dan thinks this is a back-handed way of saying you should stay offline!

Ransomware attacker demanded $5.3 million from city of New Bedford, mayor says

In the video below (also linked in the heading), the mayor of New Bedford explains what happened and how the averted disaster! 





Catch of the Week

Henry talks about new technology that is using carbon nanotubes to build microprocessors. Shahin says this was on the TSMC roadmap slide after you get past 7 and 5nm. It's reassuring that the academic research is pushing to make this an industrial reality.

MIT engineers build advanced microprocessor out of carbon nanotubes

After years of tackling numerous design and manufacturing challenges, MIT researchers have built a modern microprocessor from carbon nanotube transistors, which are widely seen as a faster, greener alternative to their traditional silicon counterparts. The microprocessor, described today in the journal Nature, can be built using traditional silicon-chip fabrication processes, representing a major step toward making carbon nanotube microprocessors more practical.
Deepfakes are coming and they're coming fast. Shahin talks about the Chinese phone app, Zao,  that went viral before getting banned for reportedly data privacy issues. It takes a headshot and works it into a video clip. It does a very convincing job according to the samples that people have put on social media. Now, imagine what the real bad guys or so-inclined organizations can do with more resources.  He also references an NPR article that discussed the impending impact of Deep Fakes on elections with pretty much no solution in sight. Serious problem.

A face-swapping app takes off in China, making AI-powered deepfakes for everyone

It’s as easy as using a photo filter on Instagram or Snapchat, but it also demonstrates the remarkable power of advances in artificial intelligence to make fake videos.

What You Need To Know About Fake Video, Audio And The 2020 Election

Security experts have warned about the prospect of a new era of high quality faked video or audio, which some commentators worry could have deeply corrosive effects on U.S. democracy. Here's what you need to know.
Dan talks about the new experience he had during a 12 hour layover at the Perth airport in Australia. He decided to use the shower facilities. Generally a good experience but he has some pointers for you.

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Saturday, September 7, 2019

IO500 Team Visit

IO500 Benchmark Gets Traction

Storage is complicated and benchmarking it has too many complexities for the traditional kernel-like or application-specific approaches. Thanks to a few experienced and tenacious researchers, and the community that supports them, the IO500 has managed to put a credible stake in the ground, and is getting traction, with 101 entries on the current list and expecting many more by SC19.

ReadioFreeHPC hosts the IO500 Steering Committee to do a deep dive. "The steering committee is the decision body ensuring the development and curation of the benchmark and its results but also responsible to resolve ethical issues." Henry and Shahin ask the hard questions, or so they think!

John Bent (Seagate), Julian Kunkel (University of Reading), and George Markomanolis (Oak Ridge National Laboratory) join RadioFreeHPC's virtual studio. We missed the fourth member of the team, Jay Lofstead (Sandia National Laboratories) due to scheduling conflicts. We also missed Dan once more as he was navigating airports and planes coming back from Australia.
"The IO-500 has been developed together with the community and its development is still ongoing. The benchmark is essentially a benchmark suite bundled with execution rules. It harnesses existing and trusted open source benchmarks. The goal for the benchmark is to capture user-experienced performance.
IO500 Lists

Henry Newman's Feel-Good Security Corner

The segment that is rapidly establishing itself as the go-to place for why being online is just too dangerous. Our spirits are lifted again as Henry describes a ransomware attack on a back-up site for dental offices in Wisconsin. There go insurance data, contact information, etc.

Ransomware Bites Dental Data Backup Firm

PerCSoft, a Wisconsin-based company that manages a remote data backup service relied upon by hundreds of dental offices across the country, is struggling to restore access to client systems after falling victim to a ransomware attack.

Catch of the Week

Mining cryptocurrencies is compute intensive. The high levels of required electricity has made the topic visible and controversial. So where would you go if you want a lot of electricity? Why, the nearest nuclear power reactor, of course. Shahin talks about crafty folks who have done just that!

Employees connect nuclear plant to the internet so they can mine cryptocurrency

Ukrainian authorities are investigating a potential security breach at a local nuclear power plant after employees connected parts of its internal network to the internet so they could mine cryptocurrency.
Henry describes a few ISPs who ended up stealing communication spectrum from, guess where, the airport, obviously. And here's the thing about at least some of these incidents: the whole thing is so complex now that it can be hard to tell incompetence from malice.

American ISPs fined $75,000 for fuzzing airport's weather radar by stealing spectrum

Three ISPs will be fined $25,000 apiece by America's broadband watchdog, the FCC, for interfering with weather signals in Puerto Rico. Boom Solutions, Integra Wireless, and WinPR were all found to be using devices for their point-to-point broadband that were “misconfigured,” according to the regulator this week. This caused interference with a doppler weather radar station at San Juan international airport.

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Sunday, September 1, 2019

The Hottest of Hot Chips Conference

The 31st Hot Chips Conference

Shahin reports from the Hot Chips conference with Henry and new guest Glenn Heinle, a veteran of AI, HPC, and Storage worlds and currently at Keeper Tech.

The team discusses and debates the highlights of the conference and the hottest of the Hot Chips. Here are a few notes and images to prepare you for the podcast.

AMD CEO Dr. Su's talk was all about High Performance Computing, used more in its English meaning than a market segment. The evidence that HPC is going mainstream is mounting.






TSMC took a perhaps overly literal definition of Moore's law and talked about transistor density and the killer apps that have driven the fabrication industry.





The giant wafer-scale chip from Cerebras is definitely a head turner, and solving a lot of cool problems along the way, but "is it a monument or a market?" as Shahin put it.





Upmem showed what it sees as a practical approach to processor-in-memory, producing standard-interface DIMMs with embedded processors and a novel programming model.





Jintide showed a cool behavioral analytics approach to actual full CPUs, aiming to monitor its traffic in real time and flagging misbehavior.  Shahin calls this general approach "Wide Packet Inspection" as a contrast to the traditional "Deep Packet Inspection."




So, car companies and other manufacturers may just have enough volume and interest to roll their own. Tesla talked about their Full Self Driving inference chip, the what-is-the-word?, bespoke AI chip that meets only their requirements and nothing else and comes in at 40 Watts.



Henry Newman's Feel-Good Security Corner

"Turn off your Bluetooth", says Henry as he talks about the now-famous KNOB vulnerability, which is obviously serious enough to have its own web site! Shahin points out how the equivalent of VPN for Bluetooth and other protocols are out there and references the company he works with, Afero, who has developed this and is thus not affected.

KNOB Attack Weakens Bluetooth Encryption

It turns out Bluetooth might have more in common with doors than we thought. Researchers disclosed a new attack they called Key Negotiation of Bluetooth (KNOB) that affects every device released before 2018 (and potentially some released after) because of an issue with the Bluetooth protocol itself. This attack can be used to make it easier to brute-force the encryption keys used by the devices.

Catch of the Week

Glenn talks about a 1-inch (cubed) full Linux computer:

This Linux computer plus router is the size of a ring box

If there's one thing that stayed consistent through the last decade or so of tech industry turmoil, it's the love affair between techies and Linux. There's just a ton you can do with the OS, and its open-source format means you can customize your rig from the ground up.
Bluetooth is not enough! Henry asks us to cancel our credit card too if we have shopped at Hy-Vee:

Breach at Hy-Vee Supermarket Chain Tied to Sale of 5M+ Stolen Credit, Debit Cards

On Tuesday of this week, one of the more popular underground stores peddling credit and debit card data stolen from hacked merchants announced a blockbuster new sale: More than 5.3 million new accounts belonging to cardholders from 35 U.S. states. Multiple sources now tell KrebsOnSecurity that the card data came from compromised gas pumps, coffee shops and restaurants operated by Hy-Vee, an Iowa-based company that operates a chain of more than 245 supermarkets throughout the Midwestern United States.

Shahin puts in a plug for a meetup group he has formed called Enterprise IoT.

Sharing insights about the challenges and successes in Enterprise IoT

We will discuss all aspects of building and scaling commercial IoT products. Topics include building a business case, assessing end-user benefits, selecting connectivity hardware, software development for embedded-mobile-cloud including multi-product mobile apps, security, privacy, cloud back-end, analytics and AI, remote control, commerce, governance, the relevance of cryptocurrencies, etc.
Anyone with a serious interest in IoT or engaged in planning or launching IoT projects should consider attending.
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