Tag Archive for: Flock

Moroccan Geeks Flock To ‘Paradise For Hackers’


With its rows of sleek computers and ultra-modern study methods, Morocco’s 1337 campus is a dream come true for budding geeks, in a country where IT skills are in high demand.

Conceived as a paradise for coders, the centre offers project-based training on programming, innovation and building IT systems.

Tuition is free and students largely create their own curricula.

It all happens on a 24-hour campus reminiscent of Silicon Valley, complete with a canteen, graffiti art on the walls and games rooms offering swings and table football.

“It’s too beautiful to be true,” said Ismail El Mheki, who initially struggled to drag himself away from his screen to answer questions.

On discovering the institute, which ran its first courses in 2018, he thought it was a trick — so his reaction was to hack the system.

Conceived as a paradise for coders, 1337 offers project-based training on programming, innovation and building IT systems Conceived as a paradise for coders, 1337 offers project-based training on programming, innovation and building IT systems Photo: AFP / FADEL SENNA

But today, the slightly stooping 22-year-old is gushing.

“Everything here is incredible, starting with the teaching,” he said.

A self-declared “ethical hacker” (“white hat” in geek speak), Mheki taught himself with resources found in dark corners of the internet.

He dropped out of school before his final exams, much to his parents’ dismay.

“Everything bored me at school,” he said.

But after two years in Norway working for a cybersecurity firm, he took the entry test for 1337 and passed with flying colours.

Before he had even finished his course, he was offered a job as part of the school’s IT security team.

Morocco's 1337 campus is a dream come true for budding geeks, in a country where IT skills are in high demand Morocco’s 1337 campus is a dream come true for budding geeks, in a country where IT skills are in high demand Photo: AFP / FADEL SENNA

“He’s very strong, much stronger than an old man like me,” said Youssef Dahbi, the school’s technical chief — who is in his 30s.

“Cybersecurity is constantly evolving, so skills quickly become obsolete.”

Morocco’s phosphate giant OCP decided to set up the 1337 campus, converting a disused factory in the central mining town of Khouribga in a bid to address the country’s severe need for tech expertise.

The name of the centre comes from a system of modified spellings known as Leet Speak or “1337 5P34K”, used…

Source…

Shitbirds Of A Feather Flock Together: ICE Signs $274,000 Contract With Clearview

ICE continues to not care what anyone thinks of it. Its tactics over the past few years have turned it into one of the federal government’s most infamous monsters, thanks to its separation of families, caging of children, unfettered surveillance of undocumented immigrants, its fake university sting created to punish students trying to remain in the country legally, its sudden rescinding of COVID-related distance learning guidelines solely for the purpose of punishing students trying to remain in the country legally… well, you get the picture.

Perhaps it’s fitting ICE is buying tech from a company that appears unconcerned that most of the public hates it. Clearview — the facial recognition software that matches uploaded facial images with billions of images scraped from the open web — is one of the latest additions to ICE’s surveillance tech arsenal.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) signed a contract with facial recognition company Clearview AI this week for “mission support,” government contracting records show (as first spotted by the tech accountability nonprofit Tech Inquiry). The purchase order for $ 224,000 describes “clearview licenses” and lists “ICE mission support dallas” as the contracting office.

That its new partner is being sued in multiple states (including a suit filed by the Vermont Attorney General) doesn’t appear to concern ICE, which is itself often on the receiving end of lawsuits. Clearview may be making good on its promise to pull out of the private market and sell only to government agencies, but that just means it will be only governments using unproven AI and scraped images to pursue investigations and arrest people.

Clearview’s statement to The Verge about its contract with ICE makes it appear this is all about the children:

“Clearview AI’s agreement is with Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), which uses our technology for their Child Exploitation Unit and ongoing criminal investigations,” Clearview AI CEO Hoan Ton-That said in an emailed statement to The Verge. “Clearview AI has enabled HSI to rescue children across the country from sexual abuse and exploitation.”

Clearview leans on the children here, but the statement says a couple of other interesting things I’m sure Ton-That would rather slide by unnoticed. First: “and ongoing criminal investigations.” ICE considers every undocumented immigrant to be a criminal, which means the agency is going to use this software to track down people in the US for committing the civil violation of staying in the country without the proper paperwork. ICE has not been able to find enough dangerous immigrants to make the administration’s public statements about rampaging hordes of bad hombres come true, so it has decided to go after everyone, including students here on visas.

Second, Clearview claims it has “enabled” HSI to “rescue children across the country.” I’d say we’d just have to take its word on this but we certainly don’t have to take its word on this because it’s said things like this in the past only for the named law enforcement agency to contradict Clearview’s claims when asked for comment. That may be what Clearview hopes its partnership with ICE/HSI will do, but it’s difficult to believe the recently signed contract has already produced results or that ICE/HSI are really using this mostly to fight child sexual exploitation rather than just uploading photos of brown people and hoping for hits.

Either way, we can safely conclude both partners here suck. ICE is bad and keeps getting worse, and Clearview isn’t ever going to improve and is presumably still scraping sites for “content” it can sell to its customers.

Techdirt.