In this episode, I talk with Kyle Rankin, vice president of engineering operations at Final, a credit card startup. We discuss old versus new approaches to server hardening in light of the cloud, how institutional inertia thwarts change, and the new security-minded desktop OS Qubes.

Kyle Rankin on Modern Server Hardening for the Cloud

In this episode of the Data Show, I spoke with Siwei Lyu, associate professor of computer science at the University at Albany, State University of New York. Lyu is a leading expert in digital media forensics, a field of research into tools and techniques for analyzing the authenticity of media files. Over the past year, there have been many stories written about the rise of tools for creating fake media (mainly images, video, audio files). Researchers in digital image forensics haven’t exactly been standing still, though. As Lyu notes, advances in machine learning and deep learning have also found a receptive audience among the forensics community.

The Technical, Societal, and Cultural Challenges That Come With the Rise of Fake Media

O'Reilly Media spreads the knowledge of innovators. At O’Reilly, a big part of our business is paying attention to what’s new and interesting in the world of technology. We have a pretty good record at having anticipated some of the big technology developments in recent history. For instance, we launched the first commercial Web site, GNN, in 1993; we organized the meeting at which the term “open source” was first adopted; we were early investors in Blogger, which helped launch the blogging revolution; and more recently, our Web 2.0 conference launched a world-wide meme. We call this predictive sense the “O’Reilly Radar.” And while we’re certainly not always right, we are, at least, good at making interesting guesses.

Our methodology is simple: we draw from the wisdom of the alpha geeks in our midst, paying attention to what’s interesting to them, amplifying these weak signals, and seeing where they fit into the innovation ecology. Add to that the original research conducted by our Research team, and you start to get a good picture of what the technology world is thinking about.

The Technical, Societal, and Cultural Challenges That Come With the Rise of Fake Media

O'Reilly Radar