Your point is good but I think it ignores the fact that we have an entire system of law built up to assign culpability to humans, in fact, that is mostly what the law is about- holding humans accountable "as if" they could be held accountable, as if their actions were not compelled , which I also think is in very many cases a fiction.
So we have this body of law and historical precendent worked out in ultra-fine detail and a very very deep seated belief that people ARE responsible for their inattentiveness and mistaken judgement and you're going to throw all that away and where is it going to go? Nowhere? No one, no entity is responsible for that tragic crash of the bride and groom on their honeymoon?
Because if Google is responsible, then Google is going broke. No individual company can bear the costs of being liable for all accidents, however infrequent. Now we solve this problem by distributing it to the drivers involved and, occassionally, the manufacturer.
What you're proposing is a redistribution of liability to a single party or alternatively the absolution of liability. The second one is more in line with reality and morality, perhaps, if gross egligence on Google's part isn't uncovered. The fact is, each one of us has been inattentive enough to have taken the life of an innocent with our driving. It's just there was no one there at the time we were being inattentive. What separates the manslaughterer from the rest of us is nothing more than dumb luck. Nothing.
But try telling that to politicians and vicitims families and see how much buy in you get. Liability WILL be assigned, the only question is to whom?
Sorry, but I see this as an unmitigated good. The times I have been damaged, I have been damaged by liars. Liars telling lies they know I have no way to contradict. In fact, this is basically how the world is run. People receive false evaluations from people in positions of power, they receive false promises from associates, they receive false information about people's intentions and the false factual information about events of the world. If there were some way to take away their power, then that would be a good thing.
If you read the Snowden documents I read, then you know the intelligence techniques they use to discredit our enemies and others all involve the falsification of stories about that person- false accusers, false attribution, false stories.
They do this because they know what everyone else on planet earth discovers over the course of their lives- there is virtually no penalty for lying about the speech and action of 3rd parties. It's just what people do to anyone they don't like for any reason and man, it works. It works so well it appears in top secret how-to manuals.
So taking away this power which si basically used by most people for malignant reasons, where is the bad in that? What if you never had to be worry about malicious exes or lying co workers or HR couldn't lie about your performance or other gate keepers couldn't lie about the relative merits of your performance or attitude or speech or actions? How would your life be different?
Sure, I could not tell Aunt Margey that her pie is wonderful, but by then Aunt Margy would have acclimated her expectations for praise, as would have everyone else. People whould do what I did a long time ago and seek and prefer the unhappy truth to the happy layer of bullshit that just confuses the issues.
A lot of very very bad things in society are undergrided by agreed-upon lies. The motivation to maintain these lies ranges from a desire to comfort, to control, to manipulate, to hurt and to maintain a kind of Victorian veneer over the widespread ugliness of human nature.
But many people who is aware of all those things in all their ugliness and the bottom hasn't fallen out of their psyces. They know why they are being rejected (you're ugly !), they know people are, at some basic level, reliably selfish and just bad, they know their SO lie to them that their inlaws have contempt for them that their boss steals credit for their work, that their preist lost his faith ages ago, and that Facebook is abusing its TOS every chance it gets. Still, they are not running mad into the streets or even giving up on humanity.
Interpersonal relations aside, look you can't fix scietal problems you can't acknowledge and this will force people to, amongst other things, acknowledge reality. When in history has the knowledge of reality ever led to a regression in civilization? As far as I can tell it's led to an increase in the sphere of people society is willing to feel compassion towards.
OK here's the thing with this generation of driverless cars- their motion is governed by neural nets. I am going to assume that everyone here is familiar with this programming paradigm. If not, the Wikipedia entry on it is adequate.
While in the end NN are just another form of Turning machine, currently no one can divine the algorithm of a trained neural net well enough to express it in IF THEN ELSE WHILE form.
That means given a trained NN which is 100% correct 100% of the time , no could write an imperative or procedural (broadly speaking) program which captured the logic (IF THEN ELSE) the neural net is using (defacto using, NN don't have IF THEN ELSE logic except those implicitly embedded in their activation rules) to solve the problem.
That means the algorithm the NN has arrived at is not open to analytical inspection and confirmation, except very indirectly.
This is OK for wide variety of predictive tasks in which human life does not hang in the balance. In medicine, the diagnostic results from NN and even Good Old Fashioned AI expert systems are reality--checked by human doctors.
Neural nets ALWAYS run the risk of coming to the right conclusion for the wrong reason enough of the time to fool humans into thinking it "understands" the problem domain in a way that is analogous to a human. A NN so trained will fool or lull human observers into a false sense of security until that BIG ACCIDENT happens then a post mortum reveals the shocking truth about what the NN was focusing in on to make it decisions.
The Big Idea behind NN is that, through a combination of evolutionary forces and billions of iterations the NN will learn using the same Hebbian activation princples the brain appears (now) to use and that with enough training, the exceptional cases that I am describing will be found and rooted out.
But even in nature, this doesn't happen reliably. Take for example the Australian Jewel Beetle. Over perhaps millions of years, it has of course evolved a robust way to recognize desirable mates and procreate. That is as basic an evolutionary task as you can imagine- it has to work or the species is doomed.
However, the male's algorithm for mating is not as robust as you might imagine. It seems that what males rely on to select a mate is a very, very limited set of perceptual cues. As it turns out, it is looking for big glossy brown curved things. When it sights one, it alights and starts humping away.
Well, Austrailian beer bottles fit this description *and fit it better than the female of the species*. People toss empty beer bottles in the outback and the result is the male beetles prefer the beer bottles to such a degree that the beetles were going to go extinct. Austrailia had to pass a law to change the appearance of its beer bottles.
This is a cautionary tale to those who think evolutionary forces produce only *robust* algorithms. What evolution actually produces is *good enough so far* algorithms. What well trained NN produce are similarly good enough algorithms. In both cases we have to do science to try to get at what it is they are relying on- what features they are *really* trained on. And we don't know there's a problem until tragedy happens and we don't know how ridiculous the problem is until we do science.
This is different from procedural programming which, the Halting Problem notwithstanding, CAN be analytically examined for correctness. Procedural type programming plus sensors is what runs water stations, trains, planes etc. The military does use NN to try to recognize things but it has humans making the final decision and when the missle gets launched, it's not left to a NN to decide where to finally land.
Moreover, self driving cars under the control of a NN can and will be attacked by the usual miz of 14 y/o kids, pranksters, criminals and terrorists
Datamining is just a computation, an arbitrary computation. It has input value(s) and an algorithm which depends on computed intermediate values and finally an output(s). There is nothing special about the data that datamining works on which differentiates it from any other kind of data within that framework I described. This is the wonder of homomorphic encryption. It DOES let you do aribitrary computation without decrypting the data.
That's not the same as doing arbitrary computation on data whose general semantics you are totally ignorant of. Is it numeric data? Is it text processing? What is its format. Sure, you have to know that level of detail but that's like saying "this string is a pssword". Does it get you any closer to knowing what that specific encrypted password is? It does not.
Yeah but your counter argument doesn't account for the sheer scale of what VISA and the banking system do compared to Bitcoin. OK the banking system uses more electricity, but what is the amortized cost on a per transaction basis? That's the question. Accoring to TFA the answer is VISA is HUGELY more environmentally friendly and cost effective than Bitcoin and, and this is the point, always will be because by design Bitcoin makes it harder to obtain coins depending on how much processing power (energy) is being expended to obtain those coins at any given time.
If all bitcoin machines went solar however, then we might have a different outcome. The practicalities of that, given that Bitcoin assumes distribution of computing power, are not in Bitcoin's favor either.
It has been my experience that many women enjoy and are actually better than men at UX design. The best books I have are authored by women and when I pass ideas or problems by others, women often bring better insights and ideas than men.
Sorry, but this time you're just wrong without stipulation. The whole point of homomorphic encryption and computation is the computor never has the key and the data is never decrypted. It remains encrypted throughout the computation.
They are doing this and then they're also doing a second thing, distributing the computation which is an ortho. concern to the homomorphic encryption and computation, in theory at least, if not in this implementation.
Homomorphic encryption is counter-intutitve to most of us. I had never heard about it until a few months ago. At first glance, it seems like a thing that can't be true; like relativity.
"..on different nodes, and they compute functions together without leaking information to other nodes. Specifically, no single party ever has access to data in its entirety; instead, every party has a meaningless (i.e., seemingly random) piece of it."
Because there is no Naurus node in ay ATT room anywhere sucking up all internet traffic, duplicating it and sending it off to the NSA before sending it to its intended destination.
Don't get me wrong; the blockchain is fascinating and makes possible very interesting applications with far reaching societal implications. My own opinion is much blockchain applications will overshadow even the IoT in terms of revolutionary effect on society. Irrefutable verifiability is like a philosopher's dream.
But anything operating under the assumption that there is no entity that "has access to all of X" is just wrong out of the box, which is not to say it's useless out of the box or uninteresting, just wrong on that *very* significant detail
So if the plantiff can make "bad faith" claims about domain register renewal and seek to have the government impose sanctions why can't the defendant argue that the case itself is filed in bad faith seeking to separate the defendant from his righttful property? It's all about mens rea- or an intent to do evil , so isn't' using the court or police or prosecutor's office to induce people of good faith to achieve an evil result itself the much more serious crime?
Suppose the defendant is a domain name speculator? Is this kind of speculationi illegal now, an act of bad faith?
Suppose the defendant is a guy with a half baked dream involving his domain name, a dream which will never come true. Does he have to give up his dream because someone started a company and if so isn't this just more lawmaking to suit people with money?
Why is the litigant under no obligation to check on the state of domain names at the time he or she forms the company? If the domain name is taken and the seller isn't selling or an agreed upon price can't be struck, nthen find another name.
No, what I am saying is APIs are generally so isomorphic to their target subject matter that applying the law of copyrights without recognizing a fair use for independently RE-IMPLEMENTING the same API in a completely different code base is wrong.
Indpenedent code bases are going to have the same API interfaces just by dint of the subject they are expressing, as per my original examples.
Yes, this is not exactly the Google case, but the reasoning is the same thing. You would not want to copyright the words Table of Contents ina book's table of contents because that's what is IS./ In that case, even though there is a copyright on the book, the words "table of contents" are NOT copyrighted.
Code has a ton of this kind of thing in it. APIs are by definition there to meaningfully represent some independent reality we all share. The alternative is the first persn to write an API for a graph layout engine effectively OWNS doOrthogonalLayout() and everyone else has to express that idea in other language.
I think this is right. What Google was arguing was a maximalist position that the API was fundamentally uncopyrightable. I don't think that's right. A work is copyrighted upon creation. On the question of fair use however, they're exactly right. If Oracle persists in its path, it WILL destroy Java. Developers will simply leave it because they could without realizing it be guilty of copyright infringement ofr any of the code they write. Consider graphics APIs or graphing APIs . Of necessity, inorder to be faithful to the underlying mathematical, logical and structural realities these APIs are created to contorl, the names of classes methods and members virtually write themselves.
doLayout(Graphics graphics) doOrthoginalLayout(Vertices, Edges)
isConnected (Vertext, Vertex) .
doHierarchicalLayout(Vertices Edges)
isConnected(vertices, Edges)
Etc etc etc onto a million and more narrow verticals whose entities and relationships are shared cultural knowledge.
There's a reason Gosling left Oracle after just a few weeks. Oracles DNA is opportunistic, exploitative and indifferent to the common good. It's been this way for decades and decades and that means something. It means that everyone who has come up through the Oracle culture, who has withstood the test of time and "succeeded" all come to share the same world view. That's what a corporate culture is- the ongoing systematic elimination of people who don't fit the dominant corporate culture. Alowed to run over decades, it becomes a self-perpetuating machine with no need for any specific enforcer or even consciousness of what it is.. Nothing is going to change it, nothing is going to make Oracle see the light" They're Oracle.
"but the security team doesn't care about optimization, summarily blaming sluggishness on lack of SSDs. Are they blowing smoke?"
They're blowing smoke to a large degree. SSDs are lot faster however as anyone who ever bought one knows, they are not capable of speeding up the movement of a large number of files \all THAT much since the Windows Explorer builds in a huge overhead around every file transfer and this is what takes files so long to be copied from point A to point B. So to the extent that you're opening a lot of files, transfering their bytes into RAM, then closing them,. it's still going to take a significant amount of time.
Sure, if you have one HUGE zipped file then SSDs are all that and a slice of cake, as advertised, but not much of what you're describing involves moving large files to and fro. Processing many files you;re going to see some speed up but mostly it's the processing itself that takes the time.
Yes, it's faster to read and write with an SSD but you'd be shocked how often the actual speed of reading into memory and writing out to disk has to little to do with how fast something happens on your computer. I was.
No you can implement transactional processing with full ACID guarantess on top of a non-transactional, non-fail-safe file system, even on that quits mid process- i.e. the plug gets pulled out in the middle of a transaction. Absolutely you can. I refer you to Jim Grey's "Transaction Processing" probably the greatest book on this subject ever written. He explains it so well anyone could implemnent it. Reading that book made me realize I COULD write a fully functional database if the urge was ever to overwhlem me. It will make you realize that too.
Yeah it's great for blowing jihadiis out of their Lexuses in Yemen but that doesn't mean it scales for civilian contexts and populated areas where, you know Newton's Laws of gravitational force act on bodies. You can't have even 4 lb objects flying anywhere they want because each one turns into a downward missle as soon as it malfunctions for any reason whatsoever or runs into a power line or a bird or whatever (whatever =~ 1 million other unforeseen events).
Air space is controlled by the FAA , just some people don't understand that and think drones==kites, 'cause , you know , they're both marketed as harmless toys.
We're not going to be a society whizzing drones overhead ala The Jetsons with falling anvil warning signs ala The Roadrunner everywhere. This is where Hanna Barbera visions of the future break down.
We'll have makebot manufacturing in our general localities before that happens.
Amazon wants to do this and even with all their power to buy the votes of politicians, it aint' gonna happen.
You're just parroting what comapies have always said about everything from anti-lock brakes to air bags...oh it's too expensive, it will destroy the market,
What you're preaching is the inevitability of market failure- that markets can't build X at a profitable price. Then someone does it or they all get forced to by legislation. Then everyone forgets what businesses were saying about how it can't be done. Then businesses trumpet technology X in their ads as their great technological leap and proof they're consciencous corporate citizens.
Yeah it's like this. Until physics prevents a flying drone that fails or is interfered with from following Newton's Laws, drones are too dangerous to be flying over populated areas.
Even "failsafe" parachutes only slow the descent of the 100lb mechanical thing landing on the pedestrian, window, moving car, bridge, darkened road, power line, etc. etc. et fucking cetera.
Read my other post; I am well aware of this. But both can be true. The potential for unlimited blackmail and or targeted destruction AND the leaking of methods and tactics to the enemy. Both.
No one is helped and nothing is advanced by lying or going with a purely emotional (fear based or hate based) argument. As long as we don't tell the story ully in all its complexity , the other side" will detect our fundamental dishonesty and use it to dismiss our entire argument.
t's not completely true what yo'reb saying. Many terrorists did NOT know about the extent of our capabilities. I am ot saying this as a rebuttal to your entire argument, just facts are facts and we shouldn't cloud them for any reason. Both things happened. Snowden blew the whistle on illegal and unconstitutional practices AND ALSO terrorists were made aware of techniques and methods that otherwise would have been used to catch them. Both. Are. True.
FTFA: What Snowden revelaed is just too much unchecked power waiting to be abused. It's a structural flaw in how governments operate that one day is going to cause catastrophic damage to democracy.
I would not have done what Snowden did just because think of the damage to national security and where's the evidence this power is currently being abused to stifle democratic liberties?
Where are the bodies and innocent ruined lives?
Where's the influenced or rigged elections?
Where 's the blackmail of Senators and Congresspeople?
All of these crimes are the stuff a panopticon faciliates, but we find no evidence for them, at least yet.
The worst we know about was what Anonymous revealed- a despicable but private effort on the part of govt. contractors to smear and destroy Glenn Greenwald's career and ability to make a living.
But that was private actors, the Chamber of Commerce going to Stratfor looking to destroy him, not the government.
OTOH revealing what he revealed absolutely helps Very Bad People do Very Bad Things. So that is absolutely a cost to society that can't be just brushed aside.
Point is, this panopticon 1984 shit should never have been put into place without serious limitations and safeguards, ones which were not left in the hands of a small group of political lackeys like the FISA court.
Abusive panopticons are what develop in the dark when no one is looking. No one is above the temptation to create unlimited power and take it unto themselves "for the greater good". If it's not being abused, it will be.
We would never know about it- Wyden wasn't able or willing to get the word out- except for Snowden. So we all owe Snowden a debt of gratitude, even if his process was imperfect. He could not sort everything he took for relevance \ danger to national security \ criminality. It was a logisitcal limitation. So he left it to reproters to sort it out.
It's complicated and I dont feel a need to make is less complicated than it is.
He clearly revealed things that are illegal and dangerous to the point of killing the democracy- dangerous to the point of *clearly being a threat to national security*.
At the same time he clearly damaged national secuity.
Legitimate appeals to national security cannot be allowed to evolve into a democracy suicide-pact.
You can't be allowed to baby-step the democracy off a cliff. You built a dangerous system you can't legitimately claim you can control, that is ripe and aching for Stasi / Nazi / Soviet style abuse, which could be used to kill the democracy. Your otherwise legitimate claims to national security are severely undermined .
What Snowden means is the NSA et al were power hungry madmen building a democracy killing WMD and someone who was not brainwashed into the cult found out about it and blew the whistle, and damaged our national security in the process.
The scary thing is this- we're not any better than THAT at preventing group-think within the parts of government that might wield extraordinary power.
This is the professionalization and fineness of capability at keeping people with dissenting views out.
If our system worked, Greemnwald and Snowden would work WITHIN the NSA in watchdog capacites, not outside it, throwing a baby out with every bathtub of dirty water.
It's not their fault in that sense. It's ours. It our failure to demand that government condict itself in light of the science we have done; science about group think, science about exclusionary tendencies of teams, about mobbing within organizations, about the ways power becomes corrupted.
OK then.
Presidential pardon for Snowden- reinstate him and whomever he selects as watchdogs within the NSA. Let outsiders from academia , lawyers and scholars who understand civil liberties into the sytem in a formal way and give them real, unusurpable apolitical power.
We need to go radically outside the comfort zones of those currently in power. Give them their medals and pensions and honors and then retire them; times are changing faster than they can keep up with.
We're not dealing with treasonous traitors. This is an internal dispute betwen equally patriotic Americans.
FTFA:
Last night, the Murdoch-owned Sunday Times published their lead front-page Sunday article, headlined âoeBritish Spies Betrayed to Russians and Chinese.â
This is the power relationship in this case:
Murdoch's papers are fundamentally criminal enterprises who have been caught tapping the phones of government officials and celebrities alike, among other crimes.
They also deny that man-made climate change is a threat to human civilization, a fact about them which bascially makes them mass murderers in a lot of people's eyes, including a lot of people in government.
So their entire existence is hanging by a thread of goodwill and if that thread ever gets cut, they're going to prosecuted out of existence and Murdoch is going to jail like the criminal he is.
Such an compromised entity is called "useful" in government circles.
"Please dont' prosecute us, we'll do anything you say any time say.. anything..anything!"
Thus this news story.
No one should take from this that I am specifically pro-Snowden.
What I am is anti-what-he-revealed. It's just too much unchecked power waiting to be abused. It's a structural flaw in how governments operate that one day is going to cause catastrophic damage to democracy.
I would not have done what Snowden did just because think of the damage to national security and where's the evidence this power is currently being abused to stifle democratic liberties?
Where are the bodies and innocent ruined lives?
Where's the influenced or rigged elections?
Where 's the blackmail of Senators and Congresspeople?
All of these crimes are the stuff a panopticon faciliates, but we find no evidence for them, at least yet.
The worst we know about was what Anonymous revealed- a despicable but private effort on the part of govt. contractors to smear and destroy Glenn Greenwald's career and ability to make a living.
But that was private actors, the Chamber of Commerce going to Stratfor looking to destroy him, not the government.
OTOH revealing what he revealed absolutely helps Very Bad People do Very Bad Things. So that is absolutely a cost to society that can't be just brushed aside.
Point is, this panopticon 1984 shit should never have been put into place without serious limitations and safeguards, ones which were not left in the hands of a small group of political lackeys like the FISA court.
Abusive panopticons are what develop in the dark when no one is looking. No one is above the temptation to create unlimited power and take it unto themselves "for the greater good". If it's not being abused, it will be.
We would never know about it- Wyden wasn't able or willing to get the word out- except for Snowden. So we all owe Snowden a debt of gratitude, even if his process was imperfect. He could not sort everything he took for relevance \ danger to national security \ criminality. It was a logisitcal limitation. So he left it to reproters to sort it out.
It's complicated and I dont feel a need to make is less complicated than it is.
He clearly revealed things that are illegal and dangerous to the point of killing the democracy- dangerous to the point of *clearly being a threat to national security*.
At the same time he clearly damaged national secuity.
Legitimate appeals to national security cannot be allowed to evolve into a democracy suicide-pact.
You can't be allowed to baby-step the democracy off a cliff. You built a dangerous system you can't legitimately claim you can control, that is ripe and aching for Stasi / Nazi / Soviet style abuse, which could be used to kill the democracy. Your otherwise legitimate claims to national security are severely undermined.
What Snowden means is the NSA et al were power hungry madmen building a democracy killing WMD and someone who was not brainwashed into the cult found out about it and blew the whistle, and damaged our national security in the process.
In good stories, the verifiable facts speak for themselves . That is pretty much the definition of good journalism.
We don't believe journalist's stories because we trust the individual journalist. We believe their stories because of the evidence those journalists assembled in their stories.
I clearly need to be more detailed in my comments. My bad. See two comments aboe you for connection between encryption and anonymity.
Encryption -not of content (the story) but of internet connections- is what permits people to post and read online anonymously.
If people can find out what your IP address is or otherwise get at what computer you were using to author the story then they have an excellent chance at identifying you. To defeat this and remain anonymous, encryption is used by software like TOR to hopelessly obscure the actual source of the computer.
If you surf using some form of encryption to hide your actual IP address it makes it hard for low-level bad guys, even ones with govt. connections, to know who you are.
Of course very powerful goverments like the US can track you, absolutely using a VPN (we know this from Snowden) and probably even TOR can't protect you anymore - that is just my best guess given how TOR works and the what resources that government has at its disposal.
But it takes a nation-state level effort to do that. This guy was not killed by someone with access to that kind of power.
Slashdot Mirror
Your point is good but I think it ignores the fact that we have an entire system of law built up to assign culpability to humans, in fact, that is mostly what the law is about- holding humans accountable "as if" they could be held accountable, as if their actions were not compelled , which I also think is in very many cases a fiction.
So we have this body of law and historical precendent worked out in ultra-fine detail and a very very deep seated belief that people ARE responsible for their inattentiveness and mistaken judgement and you're going to throw all that away and where is it going to go? Nowhere? No one, no entity is responsible for that tragic crash of the bride and groom on their honeymoon?
Because if Google is responsible, then Google is going broke. No individual company can bear the costs of being liable for all accidents, however infrequent. Now we solve this problem by distributing it to the drivers involved and, occassionally, the manufacturer.
What you're proposing is a redistribution of liability to a single party or alternatively the absolution of liability. The second one is more in line with reality and morality, perhaps, if gross egligence on Google's part isn't uncovered. The fact is, each one of us has been inattentive enough to have taken the life of an innocent with our driving. It's just there was no one there at the time we were being inattentive. What separates the manslaughterer from the rest of us is nothing more than dumb luck. Nothing.
But try telling that to politicians and vicitims families and see how much buy in you get. Liability WILL be assigned, the only question is to whom?
Sorry, but I see this as an unmitigated good. The times I have been damaged, I have been damaged by liars. Liars telling lies they know I have no way to contradict. In fact, this is basically how the world is run. People receive false evaluations from people in positions of power, they receive false promises from associates, they receive false information about people's intentions and the false factual information about events of the world. If there were some way to take away their power, then that would be a good thing.
If you read the Snowden documents I read, then you know the intelligence techniques they use to discredit our enemies and others all involve the falsification of stories about that person- false accusers, false attribution, false stories.
They do this because they know what everyone else on planet earth discovers over the course of their lives- there is virtually no penalty for lying about the speech and action of 3rd parties. It's just what people do to anyone they don't like for any reason and man, it works. It works so well it appears in top secret how-to manuals.
So taking away this power which si basically used by most people for malignant reasons, where is the bad in that? What if you never had to be worry about malicious exes or lying co workers or HR couldn't lie about your performance or other gate keepers couldn't lie about the relative merits of your performance or attitude or speech or actions? How would your life be different?
Sure, I could not tell Aunt Margey that her pie is wonderful, but by then Aunt Margy would have acclimated her expectations for praise, as would have everyone else. People whould do what I did a long time ago and seek and prefer the unhappy truth to the happy layer of bullshit that just confuses the issues.
A lot of very very bad things in society are undergrided by agreed-upon lies. The motivation to maintain these lies ranges from a desire to comfort, to control, to manipulate, to hurt and to maintain a kind of Victorian veneer over the widespread ugliness of human nature.
But many people who is aware of all those things in all their ugliness and the bottom hasn't fallen out of their psyces. They know why they are being rejected (you're ugly !), they know people are, at some basic level, reliably selfish and just bad, they know their SO lie to them that their inlaws have contempt for them that their boss steals credit for their work, that their preist lost his faith ages ago, and that Facebook is abusing its TOS every chance it gets. Still, they are not running mad into the streets or even giving up on humanity.
Interpersonal relations aside, look you can't fix scietal problems you can't acknowledge and this will force people to, amongst other things, acknowledge reality. When in history has the knowledge of reality ever led to a regression in civilization? As far as I can tell it's led to an increase in the sphere of people society is willing to feel compassion towards.
OK here's the thing with this generation of driverless cars- their motion is governed by neural nets. I am going to assume that everyone here is familiar with this programming paradigm. If not, the Wikipedia entry on it is adequate.
While in the end NN are just another form of Turning machine, currently no one can divine the algorithm of a trained neural net well enough to express it in IF THEN ELSE WHILE form.
That means given a trained NN which is 100% correct 100% of the time , no could write an imperative or procedural (broadly speaking) program which captured the logic (IF THEN ELSE) the neural net is using (defacto using, NN don't have IF THEN ELSE logic except those implicitly embedded in their activation rules) to solve the problem.
That means the algorithm the NN has arrived at is not open to analytical inspection and confirmation, except very indirectly.
This is OK for wide variety of predictive tasks in which human life does not hang in the balance. In medicine, the diagnostic results from NN and even Good Old Fashioned AI expert systems are reality--checked by human doctors.
Neural nets ALWAYS run the risk of coming to the right conclusion for the wrong reason enough of the time to fool humans into thinking it "understands" the problem domain in a way that is analogous to a human. A NN so trained will fool or lull human observers into a false sense of security until that BIG ACCIDENT happens then a post mortum reveals the shocking truth about what the NN was focusing in on to make it decisions.
The Big Idea behind NN is that, through a combination of evolutionary forces and billions of iterations the NN will learn using the same Hebbian activation princples the brain appears (now) to use and that with enough training, the exceptional cases that I am describing will be found and rooted out.
But even in nature, this doesn't happen reliably. Take for example the Australian Jewel Beetle. Over perhaps millions of years, it has of course evolved a robust way to recognize desirable mates and procreate. That is as basic an evolutionary task as you can imagine- it has to work or the species is doomed.
However, the male's algorithm for mating is not as robust as you might imagine. It seems that what males rely on to select a mate is a very, very limited set of perceptual cues. As it turns out, it is looking for big glossy brown curved things. When it sights one, it alights and starts humping away.
Well, Austrailian beer bottles fit this description *and fit it better than the female of the species*. People toss empty beer bottles in the outback and the result is the male beetles prefer the beer bottles to such a degree that the beetles were going to go extinct. Austrailia had to pass a law to change the appearance of its beer bottles.
http://blogs.scientificamerica...
This is a cautionary tale to those who think evolutionary forces produce only *robust* algorithms. What evolution actually produces is *good enough so far* algorithms. What well trained NN produce are similarly good enough algorithms. In both cases we have to do science to try to get at what it is they are relying on- what features they are *really* trained on. And we don't know there's a problem until tragedy happens and we don't know how ridiculous the problem is until we do science.
This is different from procedural programming which, the Halting Problem notwithstanding, CAN be analytically examined for correctness. Procedural type programming plus sensors is what runs water stations, trains, planes etc. The military does use NN to try to recognize things but it has humans making the final decision and when the missle gets launched, it's not left to a NN to decide where to finally land.
Moreover, self driving cars under the control of a NN can and will be attacked by the usual miz of 14 y/o kids, pranksters, criminals and terrorists
Datamining is just a computation, an arbitrary computation. It has input value(s) and an algorithm which depends on computed intermediate values and finally an output(s). There is nothing special about the data that datamining works on which differentiates it from any other kind of data within that framework I described. This is the wonder of homomorphic encryption. It DOES let you do aribitrary computation without decrypting the data.
That's not the same as doing arbitrary computation on data whose general semantics you are totally ignorant of. Is it numeric data? Is it text processing? What is its format. Sure, you have to know that level of detail but that's like saying "this string is a pssword". Does it get you any closer to knowing what that specific encrypted password is? It does not.
Yeah but your counter argument doesn't account for the sheer scale of what VISA and the banking system do compared to Bitcoin. OK the banking system uses more electricity, but what is the amortized cost on a per transaction basis? That's the question. Accoring to TFA the answer is VISA is HUGELY more environmentally friendly and cost effective than Bitcoin and, and this is the point, always will be because by design Bitcoin makes it harder to obtain coins depending on how much processing power (energy) is being expended to obtain those coins at any given time.
http://motherboard.vice.com/re...
If all bitcoin machines went solar however, then we might have a different outcome. The practicalities of that, given that Bitcoin assumes distribution of computing power, are not in Bitcoin's favor either.
It has been my experience that many women enjoy and are actually better than men at UX design. The best books I have are authored by women and when I pass ideas or problems by others, women often bring better insights and ideas than men.
Sorry, but this time you're just wrong without stipulation. The whole point of homomorphic encryption and computation is the computor never has the key and the data is never decrypted. It remains encrypted throughout the computation.
They are doing this and then they're also doing a second thing, distributing the computation which is an ortho. concern to the homomorphic encryption and computation, in theory at least, if not in this implementation.
Homomorphic encryption is counter-intutitve to most of us. I had never heard about it until a few months ago. At first glance, it seems like a thing that can't be true; like relativity.
"..on different nodes, and
they compute functions together without leaking information to other nodes. Specifically, no single
party ever has access to data in its entirety; instead, every party has a meaningless (i.e., seemingly
random) piece of it."
Because there is no Naurus node in ay ATT room anywhere sucking up all internet traffic, duplicating it and sending it off to the NSA before sending it to its intended destination.
Don't get me wrong; the blockchain is fascinating and makes possible very interesting applications with far reaching societal implications. My own opinion is much blockchain applications will overshadow even the IoT in terms of revolutionary effect on society. Irrefutable verifiability is like a philosopher's dream.
But anything operating under the assumption that there is no entity that "has access to all of X" is just wrong out of the box, which is not to say it's useless out of the box or uninteresting, just wrong on that *very* significant detail
So if the plantiff can make "bad faith" claims about domain register renewal and seek to have the government impose sanctions why can't the defendant argue that the case itself is filed in bad faith seeking to separate the defendant from his righttful property? It's all about mens rea- or an intent to do evil , so isn't' using the court or police or prosecutor's office to induce people of good faith to achieve an evil result itself the much more serious crime?
Suppose the defendant is a domain name speculator? Is this kind of speculationi illegal now, an act of bad faith?
Suppose the defendant is a guy with a half baked dream involving his domain name, a dream which will never come true. Does he have to give up his dream because someone started a company and if so isn't this just more lawmaking to suit people with money?
Why is the litigant under no obligation to check on the state of domain names at the time he or she forms the company? If the domain name is taken and the seller isn't selling or an agreed upon price can't be struck, nthen find another name.
No, what I am saying is APIs are generally so isomorphic to their target subject matter that applying the law of copyrights without recognizing a fair use for independently RE-IMPLEMENTING the same API in a completely different code base is wrong.
Indpenedent code bases are going to have the same API interfaces just by dint of the subject they are expressing, as per my original examples.
Yes, this is not exactly the Google case, but the reasoning is the same thing. You would not want to copyright the words Table of Contents ina book's table of contents because that's what is IS./ In that case, even though there is a copyright on the book, the words "table of contents" are NOT copyrighted.
Code has a ton of this kind of thing in it. APIs are by definition there to meaningfully represent some independent reality we all share. The alternative is the first persn to write an API for a graph layout engine effectively OWNS doOrthogonalLayout() and everyone else has to express that idea in other language.
I think this is right. What Google was arguing was a maximalist position that the API was fundamentally uncopyrightable. I don't think that's right. A work is copyrighted upon creation. On the question of fair use however, they're exactly right. If Oracle persists in its path, it WILL destroy Java. Developers will simply leave it because they could without realizing it be guilty of copyright infringement ofr any of the code they write. Consider graphics APIs or graphing APIs . Of necessity, inorder to be faithful to the underlying mathematical, logical and structural realities these APIs are created to contorl, the names of classes methods and members virtually write themselves. doLayout(Graphics graphics) doOrthoginalLayout(Vertices, Edges) isConnected (Vertext, Vertex) . doHierarchicalLayout(Vertices Edges) isConnected(vertices, Edges) Etc etc etc onto a million and more narrow verticals whose entities and relationships are shared cultural knowledge. There's a reason Gosling left Oracle after just a few weeks. Oracles DNA is opportunistic, exploitative and indifferent to the common good. It's been this way for decades and decades and that means something. It means that everyone who has come up through the Oracle culture, who has withstood the test of time and "succeeded" all come to share the same world view. That's what a corporate culture is- the ongoing systematic elimination of people who don't fit the dominant corporate culture. Alowed to run over decades, it becomes a self-perpetuating machine with no need for any specific enforcer or even consciousness of what it is.. Nothing is going to change it, nothing is going to make Oracle see the light" They're Oracle.
"but the security team doesn't care about optimization, summarily blaming sluggishness on lack of SSDs. Are they blowing smoke?"
They're blowing smoke to a large degree. SSDs are lot faster however as anyone who ever bought one knows, they are not capable of speeding up the movement of a large number of files \all THAT much since the Windows Explorer builds in a huge overhead around every file transfer and this is what takes files so long to be copied from point A to point B. So to the extent that you're opening a lot of files, transfering their bytes into RAM, then closing them,. it's still going to take a significant amount of time.
Sure, if you have one HUGE zipped file then SSDs are all that and a slice of cake, as advertised, but not much of what you're describing involves moving large files to and fro. Processing many files you;re going to see some speed up but mostly it's the processing itself that takes the time.
Yes, it's faster to read and write with an SSD but you'd be shocked how often the actual speed of reading into memory and writing out to disk has to little to do with how fast something happens on your computer. I was.
No you can implement transactional processing with full ACID guarantess on top of a non-transactional, non-fail-safe file system, even on that quits mid process- i.e. the plug gets pulled out in the middle of a transaction. Absolutely you can. I refer you to Jim Grey's "Transaction Processing" probably the greatest book on this subject ever written. He explains it so well anyone could implemnent it. Reading that book made me realize I COULD write a fully functional database if the urge was ever to overwhlem me. It will make you realize that too.
God bless you Jim, wherever you are.
Yeah it's great for blowing jihadiis out of their Lexuses in Yemen but that doesn't mean it scales for civilian contexts and populated areas where, you know Newton's Laws of gravitational force act on bodies. You can't have even 4 lb objects flying anywhere they want because each one turns into a downward missle as soon as it malfunctions for any reason whatsoever or runs into a power line or a bird or whatever (whatever =~ 1 million other unforeseen events).
Air space is controlled by the FAA , just some people don't understand that and think drones==kites, 'cause , you know , they're both marketed as harmless toys.
We're not going to be a society whizzing drones overhead ala The Jetsons with falling anvil warning signs ala The Roadrunner everywhere. This is where Hanna Barbera visions of the future break down.
We'll have makebot manufacturing in our general localities before that happens.
Amazon wants to do this and even with all their power to buy the votes of politicians, it aint' gonna happen.
You're just parroting what comapies have always said about everything from anti-lock brakes to air bags ...oh it's too expensive, it will destroy the market,
What you're preaching is the inevitability of market failure- that markets can't build X at a profitable price. Then someone does it or they all get forced to by legislation. Then everyone forgets what businesses were saying about how it can't be done. Then businesses trumpet technology X in their ads as their great technological leap and proof they're consciencous corporate citizens.
Rinse and repeat.
Get a new argument.
Yeah it's like this. Until physics prevents a flying drone that fails or is interfered with from following Newton's Laws, drones are too dangerous to be flying over populated areas.
Even "failsafe" parachutes only slow the descent of the 100lb mechanical thing landing on the pedestrian, window, moving car, bridge, darkened road, power line, etc. etc. et fucking cetera.
"People paying high rents have a harder time saving for a down payment, preventing tenants from exiting the rental market. "
That's not a bug, it's a feature.
>>No. The 'catching terrorists' angle is simply the cover story used to justify the construction of the surveillance state.
Not a chance that that statement is true.
Read my other post; I am well aware of this. But both can be true. The potential for unlimited blackmail and or targeted destruction AND the leaking of methods and tactics to the enemy. Both.
No one is helped and nothing is advanced by lying or going with a purely emotional (fear based or hate based) argument. As long as we don't tell the story ully in all its complexity , the other side" will detect our fundamental dishonesty and use it to dismiss our entire argument.
First, tell the truth.
t's not completely true what yo'reb saying. Many terrorists did NOT know about the extent of our capabilities. I am ot saying this as a rebuttal to your entire argument, just facts are facts and we shouldn't cloud them for any reason. Both things happened. Snowden blew the whistle on illegal and unconstitutional practices AND ALSO terrorists were made aware of techniques and methods that otherwise would have been used to catch them. Both. Are. True.
FTFA:
What Snowden revelaed is just too much unchecked power waiting to be abused. It's a structural flaw in how governments operate that one day is going to cause catastrophic damage to democracy.
I would not have done what Snowden did just because think of the damage to national security and where's the evidence this power is currently being abused to stifle democratic liberties?
Where are the bodies and innocent ruined lives?
Where's the influenced or rigged elections?
Where 's the blackmail of Senators and Congresspeople?
All of these crimes are the stuff a panopticon faciliates, but we find no evidence for them, at least yet.
The worst we know about was what Anonymous revealed- a despicable but private effort on the part of govt. contractors to smear and destroy Glenn Greenwald's career and ability to make a living.
But that was private actors, the Chamber of Commerce going to Stratfor looking to destroy him, not the government.
OTOH revealing what he revealed absolutely helps Very Bad People do Very Bad Things. So that is absolutely a cost to society that can't be just brushed aside.
Point is, this panopticon 1984 shit should never have been put into place without serious limitations and safeguards, ones which were not left in the hands of a small group of political lackeys like the FISA court.
Abusive panopticons are what develop in the dark when no one is looking. No one is above the temptation to create unlimited power and take it unto themselves "for the greater good". If it's not being abused, it will be.
We would never know about it- Wyden wasn't able or willing to get the word out- except for Snowden. So we all owe Snowden a debt of gratitude, even if his process was imperfect. He could not sort everything he took for relevance \ danger to national security \ criminality. It was a logisitcal limitation. So he left it to reproters to sort it out.
It's complicated and I dont feel a need to make is less complicated than it is.
He clearly revealed things that are illegal and dangerous to the point of killing the democracy- dangerous to the point of *clearly being a threat to national security*.
At the same time he clearly damaged national secuity.
Legitimate appeals to national security cannot be allowed to evolve into a democracy suicide-pact.
You can't be allowed to baby-step the democracy off a cliff. You built a dangerous system you can't legitimately claim you can control, that is ripe and aching for Stasi / Nazi / Soviet style abuse, which could be used to kill the democracy. Your otherwise legitimate claims to national security are severely undermined .
What Snowden means is the NSA et al were power hungry madmen building a democracy killing WMD and someone who was not brainwashed into the cult found out about it and blew the whistle, and damaged our national security in the process.
The scary thing is this- we're not any better than THAT at preventing group-think within the parts of government that might wield extraordinary power.
This is the professionalization and fineness of capability at keeping people with dissenting views out.
If our system worked, Greemnwald and Snowden would work WITHIN the NSA in watchdog capacites, not outside it, throwing a baby out with every bathtub of dirty water.
It's not their fault in that sense. It's ours. It our failure to demand that government condict itself in light of the science we have done; science about group think, science about exclusionary tendencies of teams, about mobbing within organizations, about the ways power becomes corrupted.
OK then.
Presidential pardon for Snowden- reinstate him and whomever he selects as watchdogs within the NSA. Let outsiders from academia , lawyers and scholars who understand civil liberties into the sytem in a formal way and give them real, unusurpable apolitical power.
We need to go radically outside the comfort zones of those currently in power. Give them their medals and pensions and honors and then retire them; times are changing faster than they can keep up with.
We're not dealing with treasonous traitors. This is an internal dispute betwen equally patriotic Americans.
SEe above. It's not about encrypting the story, it's about encrypting your connection so your anonymity remains secure.
FTFA:
Last night, the Murdoch-owned Sunday Times published their lead front-page Sunday article, headlined âoeBritish Spies Betrayed to Russians and Chinese.â
This is the power relationship in this case:
Murdoch's papers are fundamentally criminal enterprises who have been caught tapping the phones of government officials and celebrities alike, among other crimes.
They also deny that man-made climate change is a threat to human civilization, a fact about them which bascially makes them mass murderers in a lot of people's eyes, including a lot of people in government.
So their entire existence is hanging by a thread of goodwill and if that thread ever gets cut, they're going to prosecuted out of existence and Murdoch is going to jail like the criminal he is.
Such an compromised entity is called "useful" in government circles.
"Please dont' prosecute us, we'll do anything you say any time say.. anything..anything!"
Thus this news story.
No one should take from this that I am specifically pro-Snowden.
What I am is anti-what-he-revealed. It's just too much unchecked power waiting to be abused. It's a structural flaw in how governments operate that one day is going to cause catastrophic damage to democracy.
I would not have done what Snowden did just because think of the damage to national security and where's the evidence this power is currently being abused to stifle democratic liberties?
Where are the bodies and innocent ruined lives?
Where's the influenced or rigged elections?
Where 's the blackmail of Senators and Congresspeople?
All of these crimes are the stuff a panopticon faciliates, but we find no evidence for them, at least yet.
The worst we know about was what Anonymous revealed- a despicable but private effort on the part of govt. contractors to smear and destroy Glenn Greenwald's career and ability to make a living.
But that was private actors, the Chamber of Commerce going to Stratfor looking to destroy him, not the government.
OTOH revealing what he revealed absolutely helps Very Bad People do Very Bad Things. So that is absolutely a cost to society that can't be just brushed aside.
Point is, this panopticon 1984 shit should never have been put into place without serious limitations and safeguards, ones which were not left in the hands of a small group of political lackeys like the FISA court.
Abusive panopticons are what develop in the dark when no one is looking. No one is above the temptation to create unlimited power and take it unto themselves "for the greater good". If it's not being abused, it will be.
We would never know about it- Wyden wasn't able or willing to get the word out- except for Snowden. So we all owe Snowden a debt of gratitude, even if his process was imperfect. He could not sort everything he took for relevance \ danger to national security \ criminality. It was a logisitcal limitation. So he left it to reproters to sort it out.
It's complicated and I dont feel a need to make is less complicated than it is.
He clearly revealed things that are illegal and dangerous to the point of killing the democracy- dangerous to the point of *clearly being a threat to national security*.
At the same time he clearly damaged national secuity.
Legitimate appeals to national security cannot be allowed to evolve into a democracy suicide-pact.
You can't be allowed to baby-step the democracy off a cliff. You built a dangerous system you can't legitimately claim you can control, that is ripe and aching for Stasi / Nazi / Soviet style abuse, which could be used to kill the democracy. Your otherwise legitimate claims to national security are severely undermined .
What Snowden means is the NSA et al were power hungry madmen building a democracy killing WMD and someone who was not brainwashed into the cult found out about it and blew the whistle, and damaged our national security in the process.
The scary thing is this- we
In good stories, the verifiable facts speak for themselves . That is pretty much the definition of good journalism.
We don't believe journalist's stories because we trust the individual journalist. We believe their stories because of the evidence those journalists assembled in their stories.
I clearly need to be more detailed in my comments. My bad. See two comments aboe you for connection between encryption and anonymity.
Encryption -not of content (the story) but of internet connections- is what permits people to post and read online anonymously.
If people can find out what your IP address is or otherwise get at what computer you were using to author the story then they have an excellent chance at identifying you. To defeat this and remain anonymous, encryption is used by software like TOR to hopelessly obscure the actual source of the computer.
If you surf using some form of encryption to hide your actual IP address it makes it hard for low-level bad guys, even ones with govt. connections, to know who you are.
Of course very powerful goverments like the US can track you, absolutely using a VPN (we know this from Snowden) and probably even TOR can't protect you anymore - that is just my best guess given how TOR works and the what resources that government has at its disposal.
But it takes a nation-state level effort to do that. This guy was not killed by someone with access to that kind of power.
HTH