06Jun

What’s the No. 1 ranked college in the National Cyber League?

Hint: It’s not a school you’ve likely heard of unless you live in California or you’ve competed in the NCL competition.

It’s Chico State, officially, California State University – Chico. For three semesters – the last two consecutive — the university in the far northern part of the state has come in at the top of the Cyber Power Rankings.

To achieve that distinction, Chico’s student team had to trump teams from more than 450 other colleges and universities in performing real-world cybersecurity tasks. Annually, some 10,000 students (including some still in high school) enter the National Cyber League competition, testing their skill at identifying hackers from forensic data, pentesting and auditing vulnerable websites, recovering from ransomware attacks and more.

Registration for the Fall 2020 competition is now open. Practice sessions begin Sept. 14 with the individual games starting Oct. 23 and the team competition set to begin Nov. 6th.

Besides the competitive aspect of the games, it’s a learning experience for the participants who are assigned a coach to advise them and help them through the tough practices. Competitors become part of a community lead by Cyber League “Ambassadors” who are experienced players. Some are working professionals; others are students.

Of special value are the scouting reports each player gets. These reports are detailed metrics of a participant’s performance in the competition, listing their national rank and percentile, bracket rank and percentile, performance score, accuracy and completions in each of the 9 categories, as well as the national and bracket averages.

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Job candidates often include these reports and rankings in their resume and applications. Employers can also source candidates from these reports. As one of the Ambassadors explained in a blog post, “Companies pay NCL to produce these scoring reports so that they can scout the best of the best collegiate cyber-athletes.”

The Cyber League was born in 2011 when a group of cybersecurity professionals and academics from several public agencies came together to create “an innovative way for students to apply what they were learning in class.” So they designed the competition to be both an exciting “game-meets-edutainment” and a learning opportunity.

Individuals can participate in the competition even if they don’t have a team. This is how many of the high school students are involved. In the preseason part their fundamental skills are tested so they get placed in the appropriate bracket. In the individual games, participants compete against others of the same skill level. The team game follows.

The power rankings are developed from the individual competition and team competition scores.

Photo by FLY:D on Unsplash

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Anthropic Unveils Claude 3: Redefining AI Chatbots with Enhanced Capabilities

Anthropic, the AI startup backed by Google and with substantial venture capital, has just introduced the latest iteration of its GenAI technology: Claude 3. This announcement marks a significant advancement in AI capabilities, positioning Claude 3 as a formidable competitor even against OpenAI’s GPT-4.

Advanced Capabilities

According TechCrunch, “Claude 3, as Anthropic’s new GenAI is called, is a family of models — Claude 3 Haiku, Claude 3 Sonnet, and Claude 3 Opus, Opus being the most powerful. All show “increased capabilities” in analysis and forecasting, Anthropic claims, as well as enhanced performance on specific benchmarks versus models like ChatGPT and GPT-4 (but not GPT-4 Turbo) and Google’s Gemini 1.0 Ultra (but not Gemini 1.5 Pro).”

Multimodal Functionality

One notable feature of Claude 3 is its multimodal functionality, enabling it to analyze both text and images. This capability, like some iterations of GPT-4 and Gemini, allows Claude 3 to process various visual data such as, “…photos, charts, graphs and technical diagrams, drawing from PDFs, slideshows and other document types.” TechCrunch went further to note, “In a step one better than some GenAI rivals, Claude 3 can analyze multiple images in a single request (up to a maximum of 20). This allows it to compare and contrast images, notes Anthropic.” However, Anthropic has imposed limits on image processing to address ethical concerns, “Anthropic has disabled the models from identifying people…”

Claude 3’s Limitations

While Claude 3 showcases remarkable advancements, it’s not without limitations. TechCrunch reported that, “…the company admits that Claude 3 is prone to making mistakes with “low-quality” images (under 200 pixels) and struggles with tasks involving spatial reasoning (e.g. reading an analog clock face) and object counting (Claude 3 can’t give exact counts of objects in images).” Anthropic promises frequent updates to Claude 3, aiming to enhance its capabilities and address existing limitations. These updates will include improvements in following multi-step instructions, structured output generation, and multilingual support, making Claude 3 more responsive and adaptable to user needs.

As Anthropic continues to innovate and expand their offerings, the company remains dedicated to fostering a transparent and responsible approach to AI development. With substantial backing and a clear roadmap for future enhancements, Anthropic is poised to share the future of AI-driven solutions and pave the way for transformative advancements in various domains.

If you’re looking to take your career to the next level be sure to check out our IT page.

Businesses Are Seeing The Value of Blockchain Sample

Now organizations in sectors well beyond the pioneers in finance are investing in blockchain to protect data, decentralize processes and facilitate asset and data transfer.

“It’s an appealing model for many sectors, promising transparency and trust as it helps make value exchange possible,” says a SmartBrief article. Although focusing mostly on the financial sector, which is where blockchain found its earliest uses, the article mentions the steady creep of the technology into other industries and even slowly becoming commoditized as “blockchain as a service.”

“Amazon and Microsoft both currently offer BaaS, and enterprises as well as startups are taking advantage of it,” says SmartBrief. Citing a Gartner survey of CIOs, the article notes that “60% expected their firms to start or continue adopting blockchain-based technology between now and 2023.”

Earlier this year, Deloitte issued a blockchain trends report. Besides describing the evolving technology and the features each different approach offers, Deloitte found that some of the fastest growth in blockchain investments was coming in such unexpected industries as professional services – a sector that includes the staffing and employment industry – and energy and resources. In each of those 38% and 43% respectively of the firms surveyed were spending at least $5 million each on blockchain initiatives.

Not unexpectedly, the largest percentage of businesses investing in blockchain were in technology, media and telecom.

“More organizations in more sectors — such as technology, media, telecommunications, life sciences, health care, and government — are expanding and diversifying their blockchain initiatives,” Deloitte observes.

Like the financial sector, life sciences and health care deal with highly sensitive medical data they must protect or face legal consequences. Those two sectors are where blockchain “can have a more immediate and meaningful impact,” says Deloitte. They are in an industry, the report explains, “In which data transparency, speed of access, immutability, traceability, and trustworthiness can provide the information necessary for life-altering decisions.”

Interestingly, Gartner assigns a similar importance – not life or death, but still vital – to blockchain’s value to media.

“Organizations and governments are now turning to technology to help counter fake news, for example, by using blockchain technology to authenticate news photographs and video, as the technology creates an immutable and shared record of content that ideally is viewable to consumers,” Gartner said.

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