A fake Netflix-like app promises to provide free Netflix content.
The FlixOnline spread malware via WhatsApp conversations.
After hundreds of downloads from Play store, it was finally removed.
About 3 weeks ago, this is what has happened.
As users of internet, we are advised to use apps from reliable sources like Google play store or Apple app store. But sometimes, fake apps like FlixOnline bypasses the online security and protection of Play store and enters it. The FlixOnline combines the popularity of Netflix, the traditional social trigger (‘free’) and the pandemic situation to its favour.
Instead of doing what it says it does, it sends automated reply to WhatsApp conversations luring them with free Netflix. The “wormable” malware spreads further via malicious links. The automated message says “2 Months of Netflix Premium Free at no cost For REASON OF QUARANTINE (CORONA VIRUS) * Get 2 Months of Netflix Premium Free anywhere in the world for 60 days. Get it now HERE ” and it provides a link. The link was designed to gain complete access to the user’s WhatsApp if clicked. “Theoretically, through these auto-generated replies, a hacker can steal data, cause business interruptions on work related chat groups, and even extortion by sending sensitive data to all the users contacts,” the researchers noted.
The FlixOnline malware when installed requests ‘Overlay’, ‘Battery Optimization Ignore’ and ‘Notification’ permissions. These are used to create new windows on top of other apps. The new windows are often designed to look like fake login pages nudging the users to enter authentic credentials. The notification access enables to app to “dismiss” or “reply” to messages while the battery optimization access is used to keep the app running in spite of turning off the app.
The Check Point Research notified the Google about this malicious app that was in its platform. Google was quick to remove it. It was reported that, in the course of 2 months, there were around 500 downloads.
To keep the phone safe, uninstall the app immediately and do not click any malicious links. Recheck your WhatsApp if any messages have been sent. Resetting the system would clear any malicious codes or files in it.
Next time, if something says ‘free’, BEWARE, it might ‘cost’ you a lot.
Sustainable development is a concept that we are made to understand and study, but we are left blind in understanding the ways to achieve it. SD, therefore, stands the risk of becoming a cliché to which everyone pays homage but nobody seems to define with precision and exactitude. We know that Sustainable Development is the road to a better future. But what is the road to sustainable development?
What is Sustainable Development?
Development is defined as ‘an evolutionary process in which the human capacity increases in terms of initiating new structures, coping with problems, adapting to continuous change, and striding purposefully and creatively to attain new goals’ (Peet, 1999 cited in Du Pisani, 2006). According to Reyes (2001) development is understood as a social condition within a nation, in which the needs of its population are satisfied by the rational and sustainable use of natural resources and systems.
Sustainability means ‘a capacity to maintain some entity, outcome or process over time’ (Basiago, 1999). Stoddart (2011) defines sustainability as the efficient and equitable distribution of resources intra-generationally and inter-generationally with the operation of socio-economic activities within the confines of a finite ecosystem. Ben-Eli (2015), on the other hand, sees sustainability as a dynamic equilibrium in the process of interaction between the population and the carrying capacity of its environment such that the population develops to express its full potential without producing irreversible adverse effects on the carrying capacity of the environment upon which it depends.
Sustainable Development, in general, is defined as ‘the development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.
Why Sustainable Development?
Sustainable development is the need of the hour. The economy crashing, forest burning, animals dying, climate-changing are some of the important examples as to why one should know about it. The severe change in climatic conditions rises maximum temperature, rises minimum temperature, rises sea level, causes shrinking glaciers and thawing permafrost. This increases the frequency of storms, floods, heat waves, and drought. There is also a decrease in biodiversity. “Biologists see the loss of biodiversity during the last fifty years as one of the four or five largest incidents of destruction of life on the planet” quotes Graciela Chichilnisky in her journal ‘What is sustainable development.
These problems were first addressed in 1992 at United Nations Earth Summit, Rio de Janeiro. In that Summit, sustainable development emerged as one of the most urgent subjects for international policy.
Pillars of Sustainable Development
To understand sustainable development is to understand its 3 main pillars: Economic sustainability, Social Sustainability, and Environmental Sustainability.
Economic sustainability was first addressed when we realized that natural resources are limited. We understood that not all of them are replenishable or renewable. This fact affected one of our 3 processes in economic sustainability. The function of the production unit started to decline. Newer and newer ways are researched every day to produce things at a correct rate so that everyone have equal consumption. The other two processes in economic sustainability include distribution and consumption. These two processes have to be monitored properly for economic prosperity.
Social sustainability encompasses empowerment, accessibility, notions of equity, participation, institutional stability, human rights, and cultural identity all of which promote peace and social stability for sustainable development. It should aim to alleviate poverty. Because of the complicated dynamics of society, it is said that social sustainability is difficult to achieve. As Everest-Phillips (2014) says, “the definition of success within the social system is that people are not subjected to conditions that undermine their capacity to meet their needs”. Anything that crosses the path of people meeting their needs has to be addressed.
Environmental sustainability, as we all know it, is about nature life and how it supports human life on earth. With increasing disasters every day, life on earth is becoming more and more difficult. This can be reasoned with the fact that we started to seek our existence on other planets, like Mars. It is predicted that, by the year 2080, about 20% of coastal wetlands could be lost due to sea-level rise (UNSD, 2018c). There is also the problem of increasing global warming, decreasing glaciers, rising sea levels, and increasing acidity of oceans.
Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
To solve these issues and everything that concerns it, the UN put forth 17 different goals. These goals are planned to be achieved by 2030.
GOAL 1: No Poverty
GOAL 2: Zero Hunger
GOAL 3: Good Health and Well-being
GOAL 4: Quality Education
GOAL 5: Gender Equality
GOAL 6: Clean Water and Sanitation
GOAL 7: Affordable and Clean Energy
GOAL 8: Decent Work and Economic Growth
GOAL 9: Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure
GOAL 10: Reduced Inequality
GOAL 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities
GOAL 12: Responsible Consumption and Production
GOAL 13: Climate Action
GOAL 14: Life Below Water
GOAL 15: Life on Land
GOAL 16: Peace and Justice Strong Institutions
GOAL 17: Partnerships to Achieve the Goal
Agenda 2030 has five ultimate outcomes, known as the five Ps: people, planet, prosperity, peace, and partnerships, which span across the 17 SDGs.
Implications
Every government in the world should acknowledge the length of issue we are facing and take necessary actions to avoid them. Every government should adhere to SDGs for a successful and flourishing future.
Government should encourage “smart growth” through proper use of land and align their economic development. The government should make policies regarding population growth. As we all know, the more the population, the more the demand for a resource, the more the depletion of the resource. One key principle of SD is to conserve the ecosystem and biodiversity. The government’s policies should be made in a way that wouldn’t disturb biodiversity. Every government should have a social justice system that keeps checking on the integrity of the country.
Conclusion
The three spheres of SD are overlapped with one another that if one progresses, the remaining two follows. If the concepts contained in the sustainable development goals are applied well to real-world situations, everybody wins because natural resources are preserved, the environment is protected, the economy booms and is resilient, social life is good because there is peace and respect for human rights.
AI is well known for its superiority in image and speech recognition, smartphone personal assistants, map navigation, songs, movies or series recommendations, etc. The scope of AI is so much more and expandable that, it can be used in self-driving cars, health care sectors, defense sectors, and financial industries. It is predicted that the AI market will grow to a $190 billion industry by 2025 creating new job opportunities in programming, development, testing, support, and maintenance.
What is AI?
Artificial Intelligence can be described as a set of tools or software that enables a machine to mimic the perception, learning, problem-solving, and decision-making capabilities of the human mind. The ideal characteristic of artificial intelligence is its ability to rationalize and take actions that have the best chance of achieving a specific goal. The two main subsets of AI are machine learning (the ability of the machine to learn through experience) and deep learning (networks capable of learning unsupervised from data that is unstructured or unlabelled). We have to note here that, deep learning is also a subset of machine learning.
History of AI
In 1943,Warren McCullough and Walter Pitts published “A Logical Calculus of Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity.” The paper proposed the first mathematic model for building a neural network. Alan Turing published “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”, proposing what is now known as the Turing Test, a method for determining if a machine is intelligent in 1950. A self-learning program to play checkers was developed by Arthur Samuel in 1952. In 1956, the phrase artificial intelligence was coined at the “Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence.” In 1963, John McCarthy started the AI Lab at Stanford. There was a competition between Japan and the US in developing a super-computer-like performance and a platform for AI development during 1982-83. In 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue beats world chess champion, Gary Kasparov. In 2005, STANLEY, a self-driving car wins DARPA Grand Challenge. In 2008, Google introduces speech recognition. In 2016, Deepmind’s AlphaGo beats world champion Go player Lee Sedol.
How does AI work?
In 1950, Alan Turning asked, “Can machines think?” The ultimate goal of AI is to answer this very question. In a groundbreaking textbook “Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach”, authors Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig approach this question by unifying their work around the theme of intelligent agents in machines. They put forth 4 different approaches: Thinking humanly, Thinking rationally, Acting humanly, Acting rationally.
AI works by combining large amounts of data with fast, iterative processing and intelligent algorithms, allowing the software to learn automatically from patterns or features in the data. AI is a broad field of study that includes many theories, methods, and technologies, as well as the following major subfields:
There are 3 different stages of AI. The first stage is Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI) and as the name suggests, the scope of AI is limited and restricted to only one area. Amazon’s Alexa is one such example. The second stage is Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) which is very advanced. It covers more than one field like the power of reasoning, problem-solving, and abstract thinking. Self-driving cars come under this category. The final stage of AI is Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI) and this AI surpasses human intelligence across all fields.
Conversational bots for marketing and customer service
Robo-advisors for stock trading
Spam filters on email
Social media monitoring tools for dangerous content or false news
Song or TV show recommendations from Spotify and Netflix
Risk factors of AI
There is always a downside to technology. Though scientists assure that machines may not show any feeling of anger or love, there are many risk factors associated with intelligent machines. The AI is designed in such a manner that it is very difficult to turn off and, in such conditions when in the hands of a wrong person, things could go devastating. AI does the job that it needs to do but it could take dangerous paths to do so. For example, in driving an automated car, if we tell the AI to reach the destination soon, it may take rash and risky routes or may exceed the speed limit causing immense pain for us. Therefore, a key role of AI research is to develop good technology without such devastating effects.
Track2Training 
You must be logged in to post a comment.