Yes, this is the inevitable blog about Cambridge Analytica, Strategic Communications Laboratories and Facebook, because this is a cyber security blog and this counts as compromised security. First things first, the old admonition: if you are getting something for free, you are the product. Maybe it’s not that old, but it definitely applies. Facebook offers a lot, and offers it, ostensibly, for free. Now you could say that advertising revenue pays for it, and to some degree you would be correct, but one thing the former Harvard female ranking website has plenty of is information: data. And data, particularly the specific kinds you feed the Zuckerbergian Machine every 30 seconds, is worth more than its weight in gold. Machine Learning and AI companies need as much as possible to teach their silicon brains, and advertising departments and companies love knowing how to manipulate you into buying things help you choose their products. Here’s where Cambridge Analytica, and their parent ...
Why Bastard Academic, you ask? You put the word Gentleman before both terms: the Gentleman Academic and the Gentleman Bastard (at least according to Scott Lynch). The intention here will be to collect some of my Cyber Security blogs for CoderSource.io, as well as supplementary information and resources on and around the field. I will also throw in the odd instructional post on things I'm learning or working on, as well as the occasional political theorising/ranting and philosophical musing.