Intel bakes super-snooper to stop industrial espionage Intel has created a Hadoop-based rig that analyses just about every network event in the company – four to six billion of them on business days - in close to real time so it can spot threats including industrial espionage. Intel officials declined to name the tool, saying it would not be "productive" to disclose its name, but …
The rate of advance and development of surveillance technologies is not quite logarithmic but not for the want of trying.
As the Reg suggests in the article this latest creation from intel has the potential to manage so much more snooping on so many aspects of our lives.
Applications like this can be used at every level of our lives wherever monitoring or surveillance takes place from kindergarten to old folks home and the rest of our lives in between.
With a little tweaking it has the potential for use as a behavioural monitor at schools, for ensuring workers have their heads down and are not pilfering and for all the multifarious uses that our caring governments can think of to protect us from terrists and ourselves.
What none of these technologies do however is prevent the types of crime that affect ordinary everyday people; like mugging, burglary, violence in the home etc but there is a solution, we must every one of us have a Google glass fitted at birth so that we will be obliged to conform to a government inspired norm or suffer the consequences of re-education.
Scary stuff!
Well, there's some news here. While it's true that packet-inspecting tools with predictive models have been done before, and massive modelling using map/reduce-style distributed processing is now old hat,1 it's notable that a major IT player has put the two together and put the resulting system into production.
It'd be interesting to hear more details, like what algorithms they're using for their model and how they trained it. I may have to do some digging to see if Intel's published any more info on it.
That said, I think calling it "an interesting proof of concept for ubiquitous surveillance being comfortably achievable", as the article does, is overstating the case. There are already firms selling deep-inspection tools for things like information control and liability reduction; typically these use approaches based on higher-order algebras (e.g. lattice algebras) for their models. Such products already claim to be able to scan all documents entering and leaving the organization2. This is at best an incremental step.
I'm also amazed at the naivete of Sharwood's comment that governments might find it difficult to hire expertise on the same level as Intel's. You have to be reasonably bright to develop this kind of stuff, but it's not some sui generis act of supreme genius. And the NSA, for one, doesn't seem to have any problem hiring a great many very talented people.
1With something like Apache UIMA, it's pretty easy these days to prototype this sort of thing, and even go into production if the workloads are feasible. And by "pretty easy" I mean "suitable for a grad student, or even a team of advanced undergrads, as a class project".
2Modulo encryption and the like, of course; the software has to be able to extract something approximating plain text.
Unless it can catch nation state espionage it is useless for tech design & development companies.
The threat to tech companies in developed nations is mostly tech companies in other developed nations -- protecting UK companies from the US government handing US companies our ideas, and protecting US companies from the UK government handing UK companies their ideas.
So long as the NSA has a back door to this Intel product it is useless to us.
It sounds nice on the surface but this sounds a lot like when Norton had crash guard putting all its windows hooks into the OS.
If you run a OS CLOUD deivce would then this type of inspection crash your cloud?
Inspection of VOIP? Expect bad sound quality because of this.
If anything I do hope this works out and nothing is required on the client side or else more CPU usage and people trying to run reports will complain that reports that used to take 10 minutes to report will now take 45 minutes. GOOD LUCK!
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