apparently these Honda robots do have a large amount of autonomous behaviour
So when no one is looking, they nip down the Tokyo-Narita highway in the new Honda NSX prototypes?!
.... all without any specific, step-by-step instructions....
But surely this is because they are programmed to deal with the situations, i.e. they have a certain amount of inbuilt logic, and do not learn how to do it.
In my mind this doesn't represent "AI" as the article was talking about. Incidently, I wasn't trying to belittle or flame your original post... I was trying to put across another viewpoint;-)
Fine machines though they are, they have nothing to do with AI.
The article specifically mentions that no-one has yet combined an AI brain with a robotic body (I think!).
The robots of today are mere pre-programmed collections of motors. I'll hold out until Honda's baby is combined with an AI-type processing unit, and then I can adopt it as my faithful man-servant:-)
Then there will be some hit hollywood movie where the evil AI Robot Scientist and his/her/its borgified army of bio-engineered clones tries to take over the world via a mutant form of gene therapy
I think the reason cloning, gene therapy, stem-cell research and the like gain so much media attention is because they focus on an issue very important to almost everyone on the planet: the ability to produce/modify babies and are associated with reproductive functions.
White Van Man may not care about evil robots, but he certainly cares about medical advances concerning his "knackers"!
I'm only 30 years old, and as a child I remember the "scary" face of AI being presented to the public as living machines which would out-think humans and render us redundant, engineered by unethical scientists.
Nowadays AI is never mentioned in popular media. It has been replaced by the new emphasis in public-facing science: cloning and gene therapy.
This is the new AI in the mind of the ordinary citizen. It will lead to the destruction of the human race, and poses many ethical and moral questions. In the UK it is being demonised by the popular press without real debate, much like AI probably was 20 years ago.
Incidently, this was an excellent "heads-up" article for a novice like me, and I gained significantly from it.
True, China's connection to the outside world is slow and unreliable at times, but that's not selective by site - it's just poor network infrastructure.
Thank God there is someone else here to lend weight to the impression I formed myself while visiting!
As to the quality of the network infrastructure, in reality China has a fantastic telecoms network in the cities, as most of the phone lines are extremely new. I realise it will be a very different afair out in the sticks, but in comparison to the UK for example, in China it's much easier to get a good, clean dialup connection.
none of the cybercafes I visited allowed me to open an ssh connection
I'd imagine this is a problem in many CyberCafes, because they generally provide heavily-proxied HTTP/HTTPS access to the outside world, a bit like UK budget/free ISP services.
If I ran a CyberCafe I'm not sure I would allow anything other than browsing, purely from a management/maintenance/trojan point of view.
You do raise very valid points here... and I think the problem is that people tend to say "China" forgetting it is a vast place, with wildly different political climates depending on where you are in the country.
For instance, I found Beijing far more oppresive than Shanghai at a personal level, and Hong Kong does not appear to have changed at all.
Further apologies to those in Taiwan who actually live in "China", but have their own freedom-oriented legal framework.
a lot of servers in China got hit by Code Red. This shouldn't have happened if there was a Great Firewall of China.
Well seeing as how the worm travels over Port 80 I don't think either a filter or a firewall would make a blind bit of difference if Port 80 was still open for HTTP traffic duh.
I'm sorry, but I was working in China for 3 weeks last month on a job for a large oil company.
This company gets it's international bandwidth from a global supplier, and this also provides internet and e-mail access.
This means Chinese employees in the firm can surf the Intranet using the corporate intranet connection, and thus completely bypass any state-controls governing usage.
And for the paranoid out there, the bandwidth is provided over a cable laid from Shanghai by MCI WorldCOM. I have used the link extensively, and I found no evidence it is either tapped, filtered, or monitored.
I also used various alleged-illegal crypto products over it, and I never got a knock on my hotel-room door at 3am to tell me to stop.
You CANNOT firewall a country. There are always ways and means, and in practical terms the effort to do so is too high. Just because Chinese cyber-cafe's are monitored does not emply everything else actually is.
Always nice to see professionals understand the benefits of open source that no closed source movement could possibly replicate.
While I am in broad agreement, do not take the announcement of this machine as another blast in the direction of Micro$haft, or another nail in their corporate coffin. If a closed-source system is built correctly, and presents consistent and well-documented interfaces to the outside world, then it can be just as effective.
Business didn't employ Unix because they could get the source code, they bought it because it followed interface standards, and it was thus easier to get your Unix boxes to talk to your S390s and your Unisys 2200s and your VAXs etc etc etc
If Microsoft had offered common external interfaces in the first release of NT, and not those bloated buggy propriety standards years later, they might actually have managed to produce a useable OS that enterprises could then integrate into their existing data centres, rather than boxes that perform tasks in independant installations.
I just queried Netcraft What's That Site Running and it answers:
The site www.hotmail.com is running Microsoft-IIS/5.0 on Windows 2000
I also tried the SSL Port 443 and it's also hosted on IIS5/Win2K.
Hope this clears up any confusion *grin*
One thing to consider here folks: this is a classic case of Security Process falling down. It just so happens it's an Win2K hole in this instance. If Hotmail still ran BSD and there was a root exploit discovered, someone still needs to follow the process and plug the hole.
NB: I'm not excusing MS here... I'm laughing as much as everyone!
As this new story in the Register points out, the Internet managed to survive very well through a whole slew of recent incidents, so there is no reason to believe it will not continue to do so.
Ok, a DDOS might knock out access to a few websites, or at very worst a full ISP, but it would certainly not lead to the entire Internet grinding to a halt.
If I own a CD-CD copy machine (in the same spirit of dual tape players of old), will this prevent me making up my own compilation CDs for my own personal use?
Surely the implication is this protection will break the terms of the licence I have for my media (i.e. the right to make a backup, or a copy for personal use)?
Those of us using phone modems: the ISP knows what number you're dialing in at, what username you're logining in with (for the initial modem connection).
Here in the UK (at least) you can actually block your service provider from forwarding your phone number. I tend to use this when using my modem with Demon Internet to stop the amount of data about me being logged.
However, some ISPs (free access ones: maybe Freeserve) actually refuse the modem connection in this case, and if you want to use their service you must reveal your number.
Huh? 'Scuse my ignorance, but how did the Code-Red worm end up on a few hundred thousand machines, if the ISPs are monitoring traffic?
A fair point: note I said the IDS box needs a database of malicious data to match traffic against, so an IDS system can be rendered useless if someone comes up with a new exploit... it just doesn't recognise it.
With the huge size of existing back-catalogue music collections, all recognisable media (songs/movies) will be in it. It might not catch a new record which just came out (for instance), but I'm pretty sure if they were insane enough to set up a system of this size, they would develop an easy way of distributing new updates to their copyrighted material database.
The only way I could see ISPs finding out who is actually distributing copyrighted data would be to spy on users and look through data manually to find copyright violations. Of course, this would be a violation of several telecommunications laws
Actually I think you will find many (most?) ISPs already monitor most of the traffic passing in/out of their networks: IDS (Intrusion Detection) systems.
These are looking for crack attempts, and must filter every packet of data in order to match it to the pattern of a sample of malicious data.
Now obviously degrees of scale are different here, but these type of systems could easily be checking each data packet for it's similarity to a copyrighted media file.
I don't know anything of your American laws, so I don't know if it's illegal to monitor your traffic to see if you are transmitting malicious data, but you see my point: if transmitting copyrighted material is also illegal, then it's not a large jump to make...
Oh god... hope I'm not giving them ideas!
I've said before that file sharing programs need to move to https as soon as possible
But wouldn't each machine in the peer-to-peer network then need it's own Server Certificate, so the client can do the crypto-handshake?
Or am I just confused?!
The UK government's web sites all run on MS systems, and only work with MS browsers under Windows
Actually I think you will find the situation is being rectified.
One of my colleagues was a key implementor of the Secure Government project in the UK, and the whole lot is based on Linux.
Don't think that the UK civil service blindly follows government ministers, and if anyone of you have ever laughed at the TV show "Yes, Minister" you will understand what I mean.
When I was in England this past June, British telecom had replaced about 5% of their phone booths with free internet stations. It was anice little touchscreen with a very hardcore metal keyboard and trackball.
BT has now installed these all over Victoria in London, and if anyone is passing through Victoria station they should have a look.
It's an excellent design, and it also allows you to send free SMS messages to mobile phones.
I had a quick play, and everything is filtered through WebSense proxy software, but the list of blocked sites was not too restrictive.
I think these are an excellent example of how to encurage non-technical people onto the Internet, and let them play.
That's sounds like a great idea, but what if I decide to connect my iBook up to it, and proceed to hax0r the gibson? Surely, they would have to set up some kind of surveilance so that the park bench doesn't become "uber hax0r HQ".
No, they will do what most ISPs now do. They will have a connection to the Internet bound through a tightly-configured Internet Proxy and/or Firewall product.
This will allow you access to a restricted range of web content, and probably ensure you cannot visit Sex sites and the like.
This is probably a good idea from a decency persepective, as I for one wouldn't like to see one of my Nephews catch a glimpse of some sweaty perv's browsing habits when out in the park for a stroll!
And CCTV is a way of life here, our governments long ago abandoned the ethical viewpoint and even gave grants to councils to install them, to try and curb the rampant violence and crime on UK streets. I am sure I have read we have the most CCTV'd country on the planet now.
This is one of the most dangerous places in the developed world if you do not maintain a streetwise attitude.
Slashdot Mirror
My employer-proxy blocks this on grounds of "tasteless content". Can someone expand for me, until I get the chance to check from home?
apparently these Honda robots do have a large amount of autonomous behaviour
.... all without any specific, step-by-step instructions....
... I was trying to put across another viewpoint ;-)
So when no one is looking, they nip down the Tokyo-Narita highway in the new Honda NSX prototypes?!
But surely this is because they are programmed to deal with the situations, i.e. they have a certain amount of inbuilt logic, and do not learn how to do it.
In my mind this doesn't represent "AI" as the article was talking about. Incidently, I wasn't trying to belittle or flame your original post
Fine machines though they are, they have nothing to do with AI.
:-)
The article specifically mentions that no-one has yet combined an AI brain with a robotic body (I think!).
The robots of today are mere pre-programmed collections of motors. I'll hold out until Honda's baby is combined with an AI-type processing unit, and then I can adopt it as my faithful man-servant
Then there will be some hit hollywood movie where the evil AI Robot Scientist and his/her/its borgified army of bio-engineered clones tries to take over the world via a mutant form of gene therapy
I think the reason cloning, gene therapy, stem-cell research and the like gain so much media attention is because they focus on an issue very important to almost everyone on the planet: the ability to produce/modify babies and are associated with reproductive functions.
White Van Man may not care about evil robots, but he certainly cares about medical advances concerning his "knackers"!
Distributed AI
Is this when Slashdot announces "Birth of the first real AI" and someone posts:
Wow! What about a Beowulf Cluster of these!!
I'm only 30 years old, and as a child I remember the "scary" face of AI being presented to the public as living machines which would out-think humans and render us redundant, engineered by unethical scientists.
Nowadays AI is never mentioned in popular media. It has been replaced by the new emphasis in public-facing science: cloning and gene therapy.
This is the new AI in the mind of the ordinary citizen. It will lead to the destruction of the human race, and poses many ethical and moral questions. In the UK it is being demonised by the popular press without real debate, much like AI probably was 20 years ago.
Incidently, this was an excellent "heads-up" article for a novice like me, and I gained significantly from it.
True, China's connection to the outside world is slow and unreliable at times, but that's not selective by site - it's just poor network infrastructure.
Thank God there is someone else here to lend weight to the impression I formed myself while visiting!
As to the quality of the network infrastructure, in reality China has a fantastic telecoms network in the cities, as most of the phone lines are extremely new. I realise it will be a very different afair out in the sticks, but in comparison to the UK for example, in China it's much easier to get a good, clean dialup connection.
none of the cybercafes I visited allowed me to open an ssh connection
... and I think the problem is that people tend to say "China" forgetting it is a vast place, with wildly different political climates depending on where you are in the country.
I'd imagine this is a problem in many CyberCafes, because they generally provide heavily-proxied HTTP/HTTPS access to the outside world, a bit like UK budget/free ISP services.
If I ran a CyberCafe I'm not sure I would allow anything other than browsing, purely from a management/maintenance/trojan point of view.
You do raise very valid points here
For instance, I found Beijing far more oppresive than Shanghai at a personal level, and Hong Kong does not appear to have changed at all.
Further apologies to those in Taiwan who actually live in "China", but have their own freedom-oriented legal framework.
a lot of servers in China got hit by Code Red. This shouldn't have happened if there was a Great Firewall of China.
Well seeing as how the worm travels over Port 80 I don't think either a filter or a firewall would make a blind bit of difference if Port 80 was still open for HTTP traffic duh.
Surely now that Iridium offers data connections Satellite Internet is now available?
Mind you, guessing there are around 18 Iridium users I suppose this hardly constitues "taking off" *grin*
I'm sorry, but I was working in China for 3 weeks last month on a job for a large oil company.
This company gets it's international bandwidth from a global supplier, and this also provides internet and e-mail access.
This means Chinese employees in the firm can surf the Intranet using the corporate intranet connection, and thus completely bypass any state-controls governing usage.
And for the paranoid out there, the bandwidth is provided over a cable laid from Shanghai by MCI WorldCOM. I have used the link extensively, and I found no evidence it is either tapped, filtered, or monitored.
I also used various alleged-illegal crypto products over it, and I never got a knock on my hotel-room door at 3am to tell me to stop.
You CANNOT firewall a country. There are always ways and means, and in practical terms the effort to do so is too high. Just because Chinese cyber-cafe's are monitored does not emply everything else actually is.
Always nice to see professionals understand the benefits of open source that no closed source movement could possibly replicate.
While I am in broad agreement, do not take the announcement of this machine as another blast in the direction of Micro$haft, or another nail in their corporate coffin. If a closed-source system is built correctly, and presents consistent and well-documented interfaces to the outside world, then it can be just as effective.
Business didn't employ Unix because they could get the source code, they bought it because it followed interface standards, and it was thus easier to get your Unix boxes to talk to your S390s and your Unisys 2200s and your VAXs etc etc etc
If Microsoft had offered common external interfaces in the first release of NT, and not those bloated buggy propriety standards years later, they might actually have managed to produce a useable OS that enterprises could then integrate into their existing data centres, rather than boxes that perform tasks in independant installations.
... yes, but you'll need a Microsoft Passport account to gain access!
I just queried Netcraft What's That Site Running and it answers:
... I'm laughing as much as everyone!
The site www.hotmail.com is running Microsoft-IIS/5.0 on Windows 2000
I also tried the SSL Port 443 and it's also hosted on IIS5/Win2K. Hope this clears up any confusion *grin*
One thing to consider here folks: this is a classic case of Security Process falling down. It just so happens it's an Win2K hole in this instance. If Hotmail still ran BSD and there was a root exploit discovered, someone still needs to follow the process and plug the hole.
NB: I'm not excusing MS here
As this new story in the Register points out, the Internet managed to survive very well through a whole slew of recent incidents, so there is no reason to believe it will not continue to do so.
Ok, a DDOS might knock out access to a few websites, or at very worst a full ISP, but it would certainly not lead to the entire Internet grinding to a halt.
As far as I can recall, it was running on BSD, and it was being recently "migrated" to Win2K. Re: fixing worms ... don't even go there!!
If I own a CD-CD copy machine (in the same spirit of dual tape players of old), will this prevent me making up my own compilation CDs for my own personal use?
Surely the implication is this protection will break the terms of the licence I have for my media (i.e. the right to make a backup, or a copy for personal use)?
... and a card with our Condolences to mark the death of his "child".
Those of us using phone modems: the ISP knows what number you're dialing in at, what username you're logining in with (for the initial modem connection).
Here in the UK (at least) you can actually block your service provider from forwarding your phone number. I tend to use this when using my modem with Demon Internet to stop the amount of data about me being logged.
However, some ISPs (free access ones: maybe Freeserve) actually refuse the modem connection in this case, and if you want to use their service you must reveal your number.
Huh? 'Scuse my ignorance, but how did the Code-Red worm end up on a few hundred thousand machines, if the ISPs are monitoring traffic?
... it just doesn't recognise it.
A fair point: note I said the IDS box needs a database of malicious data to match traffic against, so an IDS system can be rendered useless if someone comes up with a new exploit
With the huge size of existing back-catalogue music collections, all recognisable media (songs/movies) will be in it. It might not catch a new record which just came out (for instance), but I'm pretty sure if they were insane enough to set up a system of this size, they would develop an easy way of distributing new updates to their copyrighted material database.
The only way I could see ISPs finding out who is actually distributing copyrighted data would be to spy on users and look through data manually to find copyright violations. Of course, this would be a violation of several telecommunications laws
...
Oh god ... hope I'm not giving them ideas!
Actually I think you will find many (most?) ISPs already monitor most of the traffic passing in/out of their networks: IDS (Intrusion Detection) systems.
These are looking for crack attempts, and must filter every packet of data in order to match it to the pattern of a sample of malicious data.
Now obviously degrees of scale are different here, but these type of systems could easily be checking each data packet for it's similarity to a copyrighted media file.
I don't know anything of your American laws, so I don't know if it's illegal to monitor your traffic to see if you are transmitting malicious data, but you see my point: if transmitting copyrighted material is also illegal, then it's not a large jump to make
I've said before that file sharing programs need to move to https as soon as possible
But wouldn't each machine in the peer-to-peer network then need it's own Server Certificate, so the client can do the crypto-handshake? Or am I just confused?!
The UK government's web sites all run on MS systems, and only work with MS browsers under Windows
Actually I think you will find the situation is being rectified.
One of my colleagues was a key implementor of the Secure Government project in the UK, and the whole lot is based on Linux.
Don't think that the UK civil service blindly follows government ministers, and if anyone of you have ever laughed at the TV show "Yes, Minister" you will understand what I mean.
For other examples of where the UK government is not a blind MS-led sheep, check below:
The full facts from the best source on the web
What IT people are doing about it
Embracing Open Standards
This area is subject to much FUD. Please don't encourage it.
When I was in England this past June, British telecom had replaced about 5% of their phone booths with free internet stations. It was anice little touchscreen with a very hardcore metal keyboard and trackball.
.
BT has now installed these all over Victoria in London, and if anyone is passing through Victoria station they should have a look.
It's an excellent design, and it also allows you to send free SMS messages to mobile phones.
I had a quick play, and everything is filtered through WebSense proxy software, but the list of blocked sites was not too restrictive.
I think these are an excellent example of how to encurage non-technical people onto the Internet, and let them play
That's sounds like a great idea, but what if I decide to connect my iBook up to it, and proceed to hax0r the gibson? Surely, they would have to set up some kind of surveilance so that the park bench doesn't become "uber hax0r HQ".
No, they will do what most ISPs now do. They will have a connection to the Internet bound through a tightly-configured Internet Proxy and/or Firewall product.
This will allow you access to a restricted range of web content, and probably ensure you cannot visit Sex sites and the like.
This is probably a good idea from a decency persepective, as I for one wouldn't like to see one of my Nephews catch a glimpse of some sweaty perv's browsing habits when out in the park for a stroll!
And CCTV is a way of life here, our governments long ago abandoned the ethical viewpoint and even gave grants to councils to install them, to try and curb the rampant violence and crime on UK streets. I am sure I have read we have the most CCTV'd country on the planet now.
This is one of the most dangerous places in the developed world if you do not maintain a streetwise attitude.