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Watch DARPA Artificial Intelligence Search For Crime On the "Dark Web"
An anonymous reader shares this bit of news from DARPA. "Of late, DARPA has shown a growing interest in open sourcing its technology, even if its most terrifying creations, like army robot wildcats designed to reach speeds of 50Mph, are understandably kept private. In a week’s time, the wider world will be able to tinker with components of the military research body’s in-development search tool for the dark web. The Memex technology, named after an mechanical mnemonic dreamt up just as the Second World War was coming to a close, has already been put to use by a number of law enforcement agencies, who are looking to counter crime taking place on networks like Tor, where Hidden Services are protected by the privacy-enhancing, encrypted hosting, often for good, often for bad. In its first year, the focus at Memex has been on tracking human trafficking, but the project's scope stretches considerably wider."
I spent a large part of my time in university studying the Memex and I find it absolutely insulting that this technology is being kept behind the curtain of classified intelligence technology when it's a decades-old invention intended to make everyone's life easier. Meanwhile any researchers that want to be involved have to make the ethical leap of turning their back on their friends, family and hometown so they can do the bidding of a dark shadow government organization.
Mega pico hours? Mega pico hectares?
While I'm glad to hear they're open sourcing some technology... [quote]on networks like Tor, where Hidden Services are protected by the privacy-enhancing, encrypted hosting, often for good, often for bad[/quote] This is what concerns me. Just because the tool is supposedly there to find the bad doesn't mean that it can't be used to go after the good, and not just in the context of the US (though the US has proven itself perfectly willing to go after even journalists doing research into the subject: http://www.forbes.com/sites/sa...). You can't thwart the bad without thwarting the good as well.
"but the project's scope stretches considerably wider" any scope or mission creep that can be found to use it to oppress people someone will.
Hum, I wonder if the real idea here is to locate brief-lived child pornography sites on TOR.
And it'll turn out we're all criminals. Oh well.
I heard you like memex.
How long it takes that MEMEX AI will actually start performing criminal acts on Dark Web to justify it's own existence?
"Advanced web crawling and scraping technologies, with a dose of Artificial Intelligence and machine learning, with the goal of being able to retrieve virtually any content on the Internet in an automated way."
Congratulations: You have invented the search engine. While there is certainly much room for improving search engine technology, the ideas described in the article do not impress me. Perhaps all the really good stuff is classified.
So will this confirm compromised exit nodes allowing the network to heal itself?
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Tor, where Hidden Services are protected by the privacy-enhancing, encrypted hosting, often for good, often for bad
I don't believe that statement one tiny little bit. i believe the bad by huge wide margin use it then the good. I think we shouldn't kid ourselfs by making sugar coated excuses. But im not saying oh we should stop the use of tor no we shouldnt because our govermets have proven they are by a huge margin untrustable scared Corporate tit suckers.
Jack of all trades,master of none
function is_website_illicit(string url){ // this works like 90% of the time
return true;
}
2600 just had a writeup about keeping safe that included from how to properly use hidden services with TOR to booking a 1 way ticket to a country that does not extradite back to your own country.
Memex has been on tracking human trafficking, but the project's scope stretches considerably wider.
So like the track record of the NSA; one trillion dollar expense budget to catch one dude -- a low paid security guard who donated to Al Qaeda.
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