But how do we know that tables and individual cells don't have consciousness either[1]? And why should there be consciousness as a necessary result and "emergent effect"? Couldn't you have the same results without actual consciousness?
Consciousness as a phenomena is one of the reasons why I don't dismiss the possibility of the existence of God. There may be no hard proof of God's existence and Occam's Razor could say it's superfluous. But you could say the same thing of consciousness. As you said why couldn't we behave like conscious beings without consciousness existing? And yet I KNOW it exists. Weak Anthropic Principle could explain it, but at some point we might find Occam's Razor double bladed...
It's funny that most scientists may never ever successfully and fully explain the very first observation they all make- consciousness.
My theory is it's useful for most creatures to try to simulate the world, predict the future and hopefully pick the "better choice" more often than by chance. Exploiting quantum computing and parallelism would likely be an efficient and compact method. It already seems that photosynthesis exploits quantum effects for greater efficiencies. So perhaps many creatures are using quantum effects for such computing and consciousness is what happens if a quantum computer recursively simulates and predicts itself.
Still doesn't explain WHY though;).
[1] I've seen single celled creatures moving about and why should we assume that they are not as conscious as fish or insects? There are even testate amoeba that build shells: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejft31w708E I'm pretty convinced that fish are as conscious as I am. They may be stupider, but my guess is consciousness does not require much intelligence. Memory, senses and other capabilities may be more limited, but you could be just as conscious.
What you could do is have a logic test and somewhat easy to read captcha test then: a) if your account passes both tests you end up in Group 1 b) if your account passes the logic test but fails the captcha test you end up in Group 2 c) if your account passes fails the logic test but passes the captcha test you end up in Group 3 d) if your account fails both tests you end up in Group 4.
What you can see or access then depends on what group you are in and which part of the site. If you are in Group 1, you can access all forums and sections including Group 1 only forums. There should also be shared forums, but you can choose not to see posts by other groups. You could do something similar with Libertarian, Democrat and Republican. That way your site can serve multiple groups and they get to see what they want.;)
I've long wondered about setting up something like a review site with a vaguely similar concept - you can choose to see things from any of the various automatically and manually computed Point of Views (most people tend fall into fewer groups for food, movies etc). Sometimes you're not buying stuff for yourself. So if you want to buy a present for your niece/aunt, you might enter her preferences and other details that you know of, then select a possible matching Point of View and go shopping based on that point of view.
Facebook or Amazon could probably do something like this from their "Likes" data.
Don't cry, wait a bit and there won't be very many Amazon warehouse workers to worry about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWNuaPE4DTc I'm sure they can eventually have a robot that can replaces those pickers. Right now it might be just a bit expensive.
8 core general processing CPUs on a phone are dumb for now given the power consumption and battery limits.
If you have 8 processes running 100% max, it's likely something is wrong somewhere - you either want to kill the processes (and save battery life) or you should be running the workload on a PC/laptop.
Maybe in the future we would have wearable computers that continuously do video capture, video compression and image+audio recognition (includes 3D location and separation of audio items[1] and 3D visual mapping), navigation (GPS and via visual mapping), augmented reality stuff, run "iSavant" apps (be Rain Man without hopefully the autistic bits) and also allow you to do virtual telepathy (brain computer interfaces) and telekinesis (by interacting with location servers - that help people control stuff at a location).
But till then, what 8 core apps make sense on phones?
. Since registers are limited and you can call many functions recursively, the data has to go somewhere and that somewhere is the stack. There is no way around that in the general case.
No way? Why not two stacks? One for addresses and one for data. That way even if there is an error you don't end up returning to an "attacker" supplied address (via data). The program might still crash, but it is less likely to "execute arbitrary machine code of the attackers choice" which seems to happen too often.
And also arguably if you keep the data and address stacks separate so that the address stack only ever contains addresses it might be easier to do optimization tricks.
round trips occur every time you call a function/method and the stack has to be saved..
Is this always true? Can't the compiler unroll that, or the CPU store the stack info somewhere fast?
I personally find it weird that many systems still push parameters onto the stack and then call the function. That's mixing code and data. Very unhygienic. Security problems and potentially poorer performance.
You seem to be assuming a naive method of obfuscation. In theory you can obfuscate a program so there is no single "exposed real program" with just a few possible paths. There would be an exposed obfuscated program with say 2^256 possible different paths depending on your inputs.
Capturing one run will give you a different sequence of instructions from capturing another run, and each run the instructions you capture will only work for a particular set of inputs and state.
If you are copying the entire obfuscated program to support those 2^256 different paths you're not reverse engineering it.
To give an example to help make it clearer imagine converting a function to one that has zillions of "if then else" statements. The path and sequence of instructions will be different depending on what the parameters and state are. Figuring out the "real" source function from those statements would be tricky if it is a nontrivial function.
A real obfuscated program probably won't have zillions of statements - it's just an example to try to help you understand.
As for saying it only works of encrypt/decrypt, such obfuscation in conjunction with copyright law is good enough for preventing unauthorized 3rd party clients/software from interoperating with your products. If the only way they can create or verify signed messages to/from your services/other software is by copying your obfuscated signing module then they breach copyright law.
Maybe some countries have laws making it illegal to do such obfuscation to prevent interoperability, but not all of them.
that will be able to capture the run of the program and recypher it to the original, non-obfuscated code during run-time.
Assuming "full" obfuscation if you do that you'd only capture the "program" for generating that one hash alone - one input and its corresponding output. The path would be different for different data/inputs. For a 256 bit hash you'd have to run it 2^256 times.
Of course there might not be full obfuscation. But I see no evidence so far that full obfuscation would be impossible or that difficult. Maybe someone could prove it impractical.
You actually don't believe that Google has access to more keywords and passwords than those in password dictionaries?
Google's list would be a superset since Google crawls all of that. They even had wifi data gathered from around the world. They are likely to have most of the words/passwords that have appeared on the Internet (they even have had a fair bit of USENET).
While that would be a huge number that is still a lot less to go through than say brute forcing AES.
100% AV/malware detection is arguably harder than solving the halting problem - since it's not certain you're given the full program and its inputs;). In practice malware is not so obfuscated and while it seems to be a losing battle, I don't have to outrun the "bear", I just have to outrun the average user...
That said it would be safer if OS makers solved it by better sandboxing and better sandboxing infra/UI. Sandboxing is like "solving" the halting problem by setting a time limit.
In fact you're still in a better position even if you allow the program itself to request/suggest the limits upfront for its sandbox. Because if the program asks for too much you know it's up to no good.
Halting problem analogy: if a program asks for a time limit of infinity you know it might not halt (it could still halt) whereas if it asks for a time limit of 60 seconds whether it halts or not is immaterial since the OS is going to limit it to a max of 60 seconds;).
3rd parties could audit the sandbox request templates and sign them, so you could lock down a machine as much as you want or not at all. You could set up a machine so that Aunt May could install any harmless software (no access to private data, network, etc), or any software signed by a trusted party.
OK as an example what if you have worked out a way to transform an arbitrary program in to a huge bunch of "if else", goto statements with "magic numbers" or worse (e.g. setaddress(mod(magic1+sha256memoizer(magic2+parm1+parm2+...),dataend))=parm3; linenumber=mod(magic3+sha256memoizer(magic4+parm5+parm6+...),maxlines); goto linenumber; ) and some stores and loads so that it's still equivalent and does the same thing but just a bit slower. So when you disassemble it - it's still a big mess that makes it hard to figure out or "improve" - which is the whole purpose of at least some code obfuscation.
So perhaps this bunch have figured out how to do something like this (and maybe better).
Or maybe they're just converting the program to encrypted perl and then compiling it to run on a custom vm;). Just because you can see the final instructions doesn't mean you'd be much closer to figuring out the code.
For example if someone made a new cryptographic hash function and obfuscates it in one of the ways I mentioned. Would it really be so easy to reverse engineer it, just by seeing the instructions given to the processor? I don't think it would be so simple. More so if you need to reverse engineer it to the extent that you can write a detailed enough description and specification so that someone else could create a clean room implementation.
If I were the NSA I would ask Google etc to provide keyword lists (from search keywords etc) and user plaintext passwords. I'm sure most people's passwords/passphrases would have "words" that are on those lists. Then if they ever really need to crack your Truecrypt container they'll have a good chance at it.
Write a Mac emulator in javascript/java, add a bit of "glue" and it'll be cross platform? The decades ago the Mac only had 128KB RAM. That's smaller than jquery;) And 800KB floppies (we can ignore the 400KB ones).
BTW, I'm kidding. Just trying to make people think how much we've actually advanced and gained in the past 5 decades (since the Mother of All Demos).
We seem to be mainly producing "reruns" with newer technology. Whether it's Hollywood, NASA, or in IT.
Car analogy, the engineers are making new "cars" with newer technology. But we're not driving them anywhere new and interesting. Then again, most people don't care - we're mostly happy with the new cars - we usually go to the same places every day anyway.
You'd need to start a Manhattan Project equivalent with a real visionary at the top if you want to change things fast. There are plenty of smart but overly specialized people around that need guidance in order to do great stuff otherwise they'll just do "normal stuff" e.g. http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/07/30/2018214/why-the-internet-needs-cognitive-protocols They're smart in their field, but they are clueless with the big picture. The big picture is it should be obvious that one "brain" cannot trust another "brain" completely hence wiring them up is stupid.
It would be terrifying if you were actually an "Immortal" who can't die and yet does not have enough power to create universes or do other things to actually enjoy Eternity.
Being stuck on a planet for billions of years till its sun blows up is not going to be pleasant especially if you can't die and you can't escape. After that you'd probably be stuck in space for a long time - which might be even worse.
Might be fine if you have really good Immortal friends to be stuck in the same "boat" with... Not sure how many times you can laugh at the same jokes though;).
Slashdot Mirror
What would really make me laugh is them resorting to downloading the movie from thepiratebay ;).
But how do we know that tables and individual cells don't have consciousness either[1]? And why should there be consciousness as a necessary result and "emergent effect"? Couldn't you have the same results without actual consciousness?
Consciousness as a phenomena is one of the reasons why I don't dismiss the possibility of the existence of God. There may be no hard proof of God's existence and Occam's Razor could say it's superfluous. But you could say the same thing of consciousness. As you said why couldn't we behave like conscious beings without consciousness existing? And yet I KNOW it exists. Weak Anthropic Principle could explain it, but at some point we might find Occam's Razor double bladed...
It's funny that most scientists may never ever successfully and fully explain the very first observation they all make- consciousness.
My theory is it's useful for most creatures to try to simulate the world, predict the future and hopefully pick the "better choice" more often than by chance. Exploiting quantum computing and parallelism would likely be an efficient and compact method. It already seems that photosynthesis exploits quantum effects for greater efficiencies. So perhaps many creatures are using quantum effects for such computing and consciousness is what happens if a quantum computer recursively simulates and predicts itself.
Still doesn't explain WHY though ;).
[1] I've seen single celled creatures moving about and why should we assume that they are not as conscious as fish or insects? There are even testate amoeba that build shells: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejft31w708E
I'm pretty convinced that fish are as conscious as I am. They may be stupider, but my guess is consciousness does not require much intelligence. Memory, senses and other capabilities may be more limited, but you could be just as conscious.
Maybe they're trying get some money from the NSA too ;)
No idea. Probably similar to goat...
Check this out though- camel biryani: http://shw.abakim.fotopages.com/14265650.html
Way over the RDA for camel, rice and pepsi? ;)
Looks like it's possible: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2737577/?tool=pmcentrez
Yeah it'll be a big problem if you continue to control stuff with your mind after you fall asleep.
Fall asleep while wearing your iThink and watching a movie, and dream of sending That Email to your boss/customer? Wake up and find out it's sent...
Normally most people get somewhat immobilized when they sleep. But even then some sleepwalk.
What about fans?
I thank you all!
*bows*.
You'd want a stillsuit. That would be a useful wearable habitat.
What you could do is have a logic test and somewhat easy to read captcha test then:
;)
a) if your account passes both tests you end up in Group 1
b) if your account passes the logic test but fails the captcha test you end up in Group 2
c) if your account passes fails the logic test but passes the captcha test you end up in Group 3
d) if your account fails both tests you end up in Group 4.
What you can see or access then depends on what group you are in and which part of the site. If you are in Group 1, you can access all forums and sections including Group 1 only forums. There should also be shared forums, but you can choose not to see posts by other groups. You could do something similar with Libertarian, Democrat and Republican. That way your site can serve multiple groups and they get to see what they want.
I've long wondered about setting up something like a review site with a vaguely similar concept - you can choose to see things from any of the various automatically and manually computed Point of Views (most people tend fall into fewer groups for food, movies etc). Sometimes you're not buying stuff for yourself. So if you want to buy a present for your niece/aunt, you might enter her preferences and other details that you know of, then select a possible matching Point of View and go shopping based on that point of view.
Facebook or Amazon could probably do something like this from their "Likes" data.
Links to that quality content please!
Even on Slashdot many people post before reading or researching anything ;).
And it's not like the editors make submissions more accurate - sometimes it seems as if they add errors to get more useless posts.
Don't cry, wait a bit and there won't be very many Amazon warehouse workers to worry about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWNuaPE4DTc
I'm sure they can eventually have a robot that can replaces those pickers. Right now it might be just a bit expensive.
Amazon owns Kiva:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-03-19/amazon-acquires-kiva-systems-in-second-biggest-takeover.html
8 core general processing CPUs on a phone are dumb for now given the power consumption and battery limits.
If you have 8 processes running 100% max, it's likely something is wrong somewhere - you either want to kill the processes (and save battery life) or you should be running the workload on a PC/laptop.
Maybe in the future we would have wearable computers that continuously do video capture, video compression and image+audio recognition (includes 3D location and separation of audio items[1] and 3D visual mapping), navigation (GPS and via visual mapping), augmented reality stuff, run "iSavant" apps (be Rain Man without hopefully the autistic bits) and also allow you to do virtual telepathy (brain computer interfaces) and telekinesis (by interacting with location servers - that help people control stuff at a location).
But till then, what 8 core apps make sense on phones?
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bi4ACLfaWy0
. Since registers are limited and you can call many functions recursively, the data has to go somewhere and that somewhere is the stack. There is no way around that in the general case.
No way? Why not two stacks? One for addresses and one for data. That way even if there is an error you don't end up returning to an "attacker" supplied address (via data). The program might still crash, but it is less likely to "execute arbitrary machine code of the attackers choice" which seems to happen too often.
And also arguably if you keep the data and address stacks separate so that the address stack only ever contains addresses it might be easier to do optimization tricks.
round trips occur every time you call a function/method and the stack has to be saved..
Is this always true? Can't the compiler unroll that, or the CPU store the stack info somewhere fast?
I personally find it weird that many systems still push parameters onto the stack and then call the function. That's mixing code and data. Very unhygienic. Security problems and potentially poorer performance.
You seem to be assuming a naive method of obfuscation. In theory you can obfuscate a program so there is no single "exposed real program" with just a few possible paths. There would be an exposed obfuscated program with say 2^256 possible different paths depending on your inputs.
Capturing one run will give you a different sequence of instructions from capturing another run, and each run the instructions you capture will only work for a particular set of inputs and state.
If you are copying the entire obfuscated program to support those 2^256 different paths you're not reverse engineering it.
To give an example to help make it clearer imagine converting a function to one that has zillions of "if then else" statements. The path and sequence of instructions will be different depending on what the parameters and state are. Figuring out the "real" source function from those statements would be tricky if it is a nontrivial function.
A real obfuscated program probably won't have zillions of statements - it's just an example to try to help you understand.
As for saying it only works of encrypt/decrypt, such obfuscation in conjunction with copyright law is good enough for preventing unauthorized 3rd party clients/software from interoperating with your products. If the only way they can create or verify signed messages to/from your services/other software is by copying your obfuscated signing module then they breach copyright law.
Maybe some countries have laws making it illegal to do such obfuscation to prevent interoperability, but not all of them.
that will be able to capture the run of the program and recypher it to the original, non-obfuscated code during run-time.
Assuming "full" obfuscation if you do that you'd only capture the "program" for generating that one hash alone - one input and its corresponding output. The path would be different for different data/inputs. For a 256 bit hash you'd have to run it 2^256 times.
Of course there might not be full obfuscation. But I see no evidence so far that full obfuscation would be impossible or that difficult. Maybe someone could prove it impractical.
You actually don't believe that Google has access to more keywords and passwords than those in password dictionaries?
Google's list would be a superset since Google crawls all of that. They even had wifi data gathered from around the world. They are likely to have most of the words/passwords that have appeared on the Internet (they even have had a fair bit of USENET).
While that would be a huge number that is still a lot less to go through than say brute forcing AES.
It could be a custom/modified cryptographic hash used to verify and create signatures. In which case it won't make that many syscalls.
Reverse engineering something like that will be hard if its obfuscated.
If you can't reverse engineer it you can't make a compatible version without breaking copyright by copying the hash module as is.
100% AV/malware detection is arguably harder than solving the halting problem - since it's not certain you're given the full program and its inputs ;). In practice malware is not so obfuscated and while it seems to be a losing battle, I don't have to outrun the "bear", I just have to outrun the average user...
;).
That said it would be safer if OS makers solved it by better sandboxing and better sandboxing infra/UI. Sandboxing is like "solving" the halting problem by setting a time limit.
In fact you're still in a better position even if you allow the program itself to request/suggest the limits upfront for its sandbox. Because if the program asks for too much you know it's up to no good.
Halting problem analogy: if a program asks for a time limit of infinity you know it might not halt (it could still halt) whereas if it asks for a time limit of 60 seconds whether it halts or not is immaterial since the OS is going to limit it to a max of 60 seconds
3rd parties could audit the sandbox request templates and sign them, so you could lock down a machine as much as you want or not at all. You could set up a machine so that Aunt May could install any harmless software (no access to private data, network, etc), or any software signed by a trusted party.
OK as an example what if you have worked out a way to transform an arbitrary program in to a huge bunch of "if else", goto statements with "magic numbers" or worse (e.g.
setaddress(mod(magic1+sha256memoizer(magic2+parm1+parm2+...),dataend))=parm3;
linenumber=mod(magic3+sha256memoizer(magic4+parm5+parm6+...),maxlines);
goto linenumber;
) and some stores and loads so that it's still equivalent and does the same thing but just a bit slower. So when you disassemble it - it's still a big mess that makes it hard to figure out or "improve" - which is the whole purpose of at least some code obfuscation.
So perhaps this bunch have figured out how to do something like this (and maybe better).
Or maybe they're just converting the program to encrypted perl and then compiling it to run on a custom vm ;). Just because you can see the final instructions doesn't mean you'd be much closer to figuring out the code.
For example if someone made a new cryptographic hash function and obfuscates it in one of the ways I mentioned. Would it really be so easy to reverse engineer it, just by seeing the instructions given to the processor? I don't think it would be so simple. More so if you need to reverse engineer it to the extent that you can write a detailed enough description and specification so that someone else could create a clean room implementation.
If I were the NSA I would ask Google etc to provide keyword lists (from search keywords etc) and user plaintext passwords. I'm sure most people's passwords/passphrases would have "words" that are on those lists. Then if they ever really need to crack your Truecrypt container they'll have a good chance at it.
Write a Mac emulator in javascript/java, add a bit of "glue" and it'll be cross platform? The decades ago the Mac only had 128KB RAM. That's smaller than jquery ;)
And 800KB floppies (we can ignore the 400KB ones).
BTW, I'm kidding. Just trying to make people think how much we've actually advanced and gained in the past 5 decades (since the Mother of All Demos).
We seem to be mainly producing "reruns" with newer technology. Whether it's Hollywood, NASA, or in IT.
Car analogy, the engineers are making new "cars" with newer technology. But we're not driving them anywhere new and interesting. Then again, most people don't care - we're mostly happy with the new cars - we usually go to the same places every day anyway.
You'd need to start a Manhattan Project equivalent with a real visionary at the top if you want to change things fast. There are plenty of smart but overly specialized people around that need guidance in order to do great stuff otherwise they'll just do "normal stuff" e.g. http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/07/30/2018214/why-the-internet-needs-cognitive-protocols
They're smart in their field, but they are clueless with the big picture. The big picture is it should be obvious that one "brain" cannot trust another "brain" completely hence wiring them up is stupid.
It would be terrifying if you were actually an "Immortal" who can't die and yet does not have enough power to create universes or do other things to actually enjoy Eternity.
Being stuck on a planet for billions of years till its sun blows up is not going to be pleasant especially if you can't die and you can't escape. After that you'd probably be stuck in space for a long time - which might be even worse.
Might be fine if you have really good Immortal friends to be stuck in the same "boat" with... Not sure how many times you can laugh at the same jokes though ;).
I've done it a few times, the results were hilarious, if almost hitting pedestrians on the sidewalk is your version of hilarious.
you need to work on your aim. Play Carmageddon, GTA and similar a bit more.