How would we ever know for sure when it happens. Every time we make a definition for AI, and then reach that milestone, we end up moving the goalposts because "that's not really AI." Just shows that we can't even define it properly, same as we can't define self-aware with a set of rules that we can use to test if something is truly self aware or not.
Just because you say you're self-aware is not sufficient. I have to trust you, because I have no test that can definitively prove you are one way or another.
I doubt we could ever really know, chances are that if we ever create an AI it wont be anything remotely similar to human, mentally speaking at least.
I mean, first of all the hardware and the limitations imposed by that hardware is COMPLETELY different, that said the "senses" an AI would have would be completely different as well, like, why would we ever give an AI eyes or ears if it does not need to ever process visual or audio data? Its senses would be "data", "different data" and "more different data", its whole concept of reality would be different and wholly alien to us humans.
It's really no different from us ever being able to really understand an alien civilization.
I've never been hit by one of these, but I realize it can cost people a lot of money due to some shitheads. I'm really glad a lot of these keys have been found and made public. I'm sure this won't be the end of ransomware...people will just use new keys, but hopefully this will help some of those who have clicked on a not-a-flash upgrade or bad e-mail attachment.
The droppers for these things are usually based in websites, no clicking on sketchy attachments required. Simply a plausible(ish) looking e-mail from a plausible(ish) sounding organization with a link to a site that will use a browser exploit of some kind and drop the thing onto the computer.
it will go a long way to reducing the amount of organized crime in this and other countries that make their profits off the back of illegal drug sales
These crime gangs will just look for some other large profit activity. If drugs were legalised, do you think they'd all re-train as accountants?
No, but a significant amount of them would. It's easy to paint all drug dealers as these evil super criminals who do nothing but profit on the misery of others. And yes, there are some who are like that, but honestly, a significant amount of drug dealers simply like making money and would go legit if they could do so safely.
No, but I remember the Cue Cat. No less than $185 million was invested in this ridiculous venture. I could never figure out how anyone ever thought this was a good idea, even before the benefit of hindsight. Not only ridiculously impractical, but privacy-invading and prone to security issues? Woot!
Isn't the concept behind that CueCat thing basically the same as what is behind QR codes these days?
Your doctor doesn't want you to know aboyt this 500-year-old remedy for venereal disease.
Hint: it's mercury.
Not every old remedy is good for you. If you get into the history of medicine, you'll find lots of old remedies that are harmful.
I don't know man, I haven't had any disease trepanning or a good blood letting couldn't deal with, well there was this one time where I had to drink a gallon or mercury to get over a...ahem..personal disease.
Then there's marinol. They extracted the THC from pot in some mis-guided effort to get the medicinal effects without admitting they screwed up with the war on drugs. And of course, it was to be far more expensive than even the black market herb it replaced. It failed since they lost at least half of the beneficial effects and potentiated the tendency to cause psychosis. Turns out the CBD is as important as the THC.
Not completely true, yes Marinol was developed because growing weed was illegal, but it was not just pure extracted THC, it was "synthetic THC". As I understood it, the Marinol drug was developed because a lot of people did not want to smoke weed, they wanted a simple and easy to swallow pill.
Killing MRSA is easy. Trivial, even. You can do it with steam, alcohol, or dozens of other disinfecting agents.
Any info about the prophylactic dosage there?
Three or four liters of rubbing alcohol delivered through epidural injection should do the trick, although you might want to hook up a continuous drip through a central line to make absolutely sure.
Yes, and the Apollo program was just fireworks with an unlimited budget.
I realize you, and many others, have a lot of axes to grind with the NSA, but they are an organization of skilled people who actually know what they are doing. If it is so easy to do this, why haven't the Russian internet criminals rolled anything out on this scale? It seems to me that a platform like this would be all kinds of ideal for criminal purposes.
And saying that you cannot put any of your work on a resume is just a boldfaced lie, yes it is true you cannot write on your resume: "I developed the HDD firmware hack that EQUATIONDRUG used" or "I was heavily involved in wiretapping of Burmese embassies in the period from (x) to (y)", but there is nothing stopping you from putting in "I worked extensively with hardware programming and device security" or "I worked extensively with telecommunications infrastructure and security in the South East Asia area". You cannot say that they don't do product development, yes it is true they probably wont ever make any software you can find on the Android or Apple App stores, but that is not the same as saying that they don't do development, it is just that a lot of the software that the NSA (or more likely, NSA subcontractors) develop are developed for a very limited and specialized audience, anything that does come out of NSA development projects is likely to be quite specialized and obscure.
That said - there is a not insignificant chance that a lot of the advancement in speech-to-text and other speech-recognition projects we have seen over the last years, has code in it that was developed by people who started out doing work on those subjects for the NSA (ECHELON supposed relied heavily on the ability to recognize keywords in recordings), likewise it is also quite likely that a lot of people who worked with and for the NSA are now out in the civilian sector designing datacenters and supercomputers. It is easy to see the NSA as this big, evil organization that does only one thing: spy on people. And while that is certainly one of their main objectives, you have to remember they are also a large IT business and as such have a large IT infrastructure, and because of the work they do and the requirements that work puts on their infrastructure they were probably into the whole "big data" mindset several years before mainstream commercial, civilian IT companies got there. Add to this that there is a large section of the NSA that isn't really an intelligence agency at all, they're a Security and Compliance agency that makes sure that DoD, Military and Diplomatic networks meet whatever security standards the NSA specify.
Refusing/saying "I don't talk to police" pisses them off, as well - causing them to get their dogs/such. But still....
Unless you are giving testimony in connection to a crime unrelated to you (ie. you witnessed something and are specifically not charged with anything) you should NEVER talk to a cop. The whole "Everything you say, can and WILL"-thing isn't said just to scare you.
They should be forced to read you your rights when they ask so that you can say no with confidence.
The whole "Reading you your rights"-thing, only really applies in cases where you are being charged and questioned.
And strictly speaking, even if you technically have the right to deny the police the right to search your person or vehicle, all that will happen if you do that is that the police will interpret that as evidence of guilt and arrest you, at which point searching you or your vehicle becomes a security requirement - it represents an unacceptable risk to bring you into custody without searching you because you might be concealing weapons, the same applies to your vehicle.
Remember, the police can arrest you for any reason and hold you for up to 24 hours without charging you with anything.
The reality is, the initial premise is a total lie. The NSA is a failed organisation and they are not looking for the same kind of people. They are looking for 2nd raters, people who specialise in breaking stuff and not in making stuff. The reality is securing stuff in computers is an order of magnitude harder than breaking security. The breakers are always second rate compared to makers, it is inherent in their cerebral makeup and the 2nd rate breakers know it to the core of their being, hence instead of making, their jealousy drives them to breaking.
The NSA were not particularly skilled at hacking, their targets were not focused enough on security and were easy to break into. Now of course the NSA script kiddie perverts are finding life much more difficult as companies become much more focused on security and are hiring the most skilled makers to make better security. The NSA stuck is now failing and that failure is far worse on the securing things side because of their chosen focus on breaking stuff on employing egoistic perverse script kiddies, incapable of securing stuff.
The US government was warned again and again and again, that in order to effectively secure their systems they must completely separate defensive operations from offensive operations but they were locked into arrogance mode and only listen to their own bullshit and now they are stuck.
If you are bright and interested in security, the real skill and challenge is in defensive operations, 24/7/365 operation of skills, abilities and knowledge, real investigatory skills on any exposed breaks or weaknesses and preventing them from happening again and creating a defence in depth system, giving greater opportunity to catch hacks are earlier less damaging levels. The people do not play well with breakers, not at all, the whole psychology is different.
Yes The Equation Group really seemed "2nd rate" and they sure didn't "make" anything.
Only one thing I disagree with - bandwidth costs. The FDR [apparently] records at about 6kB/s (I'm trying to find a source to back that up), so that's 6kB/s per aircraft in satellite data costs. There can be up to 11,000 aircraft flying at any one time, so that totals 66MB/s of bandwidth required globally. I don't believe lack of bandwidth is a factor.
It is if you are transferring that data over a HF link, I mean ostensibly once you are over the pacific or the Atlantic you could switch to communicating over satellite, but in all likelihood, most aviation radio for OTH transmissions are probably HF signals, not sure you have ever tried transferring data over a HF link, but let me put it this way: 9600 bps is considered HIGH speed.
Or maybe change the rules so anyone even suspected of mental health issues isn't instantly and automatically forced out of their career...
I'm all for equal opportunity and right-to-work and all that, but, I really would prefer that the people in control of the thing that lifts me up to 10.000 feet and travels at 500mph is fully certified as "not even a little crazy"
Absence seizures don't really work like that, and they don't really show up as a new diagnosis in someone that age. A prior diagnosis would have disqualified him from getting a commercial (and probably a private) pilot's license. And automatisms won't don't that. My wife is an epileptologist, I know far more than I want to about these things.
They might not work like that when the condition causing them is Epilepsy, which I agree isn't really a thing that just randomly happens. That said, there still could be some kind of neurological condition behind this, I am not a doctor so I am not going to argue the specific diagnosis, I'm sure your wife is right.
The thing that makes me think there was something physically wrong (be it drugs or pathology), is the fact he is reported as "breathing normally" during the whole thing, even if he was a terrorist or suicidal, he would still have the fight or flight reaction, and there is no way rapidly approaching a cliff wall and knowing you are going to die and kill 200 (or however many) people in the process would not trigger the fight or fight response, and one of the main symptoms of a big adrenaline surge is an increase in breathing and heart rate.
could explain why he could be doing these irrational actions.
Possibly. But it would not explain the rational actions of a co-pilot in distress. Such as, I don't know, communicating with ATC that he was feeling light headed and was turning on auto pilot.
You would not always notice that you are becoming light headed, yes, the CO poisoning case he might have had time to radio down.
But, what about a sudden stroke or an absent seizure?
That said, in all likelihood autopilot would have been on already, the co-pilot (as I understand it) just told it to begin a decent.
And you think someone on a suicide death dive with 200 people into a mountain is going to sit there quietly, breathing *normally*? Unless they are a complete and utter psychopath they will surely be in a heightened emotional state, crying, screaming, blaming anyone and everyone, not casually watching the altimeter spin down.
Guy could have had an absent seizure, he would still be breathing but not necessarily conscious of the world around him, what's more it could cause him to exhibit automatism
Adding fuel to this theory is that the co-pilot was detatched and monosyllabic when receiving the briefing about landing in Dusseldorf - he had already made up his mind that he wasn't going to reach Dusseldorf. If the pilot wasn't going to go to the bathroom he probably was planning on killing the pilot anyway.
Danish news (haven't found an English language version) reports that there have been cases before where there were "gas leaks" (Although the described symptoms - headache, fainting and nausea - sounds more like CO poisoning) in planes of this type before, so if there was a carbon monoxide leak in the cockpit, that could explain the abnormal behavior of the co-pilot, not sure you have every tried being hypoxic, but it makes your brain not work very well and it could explain why he could be doing these irrational actions.
That said, reports of the pilot being "detached and monosyllabic" haven't reached any of the sites I've been following this on, so I will take your word for it being that way; if this is the case this would seem to rule out the CO-poisoning theory, it is unlikely the guy would have been huffing CO way before actual take-off. However, it does not rule out either a brain injury (aneurism or stroke) significantly altering his behavior or him being wacked out of his skull on drugs or booze.
I tend to assume incompetence or unfortunate circumstances before I assume malice, that said - I am holding off judgment until the police or security services have taken a good hard look at the co-pilot, but so far I am more inclined to think that either there was one of those CO leaks or the pilot had a stroke or something along those lines.
Various pox related diseases still exists in nature, and various countries have illegal biological weapons programs thought to include small pox. A Soviet defector even indicated that the Soviet Union had been manufacturing small pox for use as a strategic attack weapon.
You are referring to the revelations about Biopreperat made by Ken Alibek and a few others. This is not just some rumor, hear-say based report, US and UN Inspectors visited many of the Biopreperat sites, including the Sverdlovsk site that supposedly caused an accidental release of Anthrax.
Slashdot Mirror
Rudyard Kipling has something to say on the subject of paying Dane-geld. Basically, if you pay the Dane-geld, you'll never be rid of the Dane.
As a Dane, I find this incredibly racist.
We're a very polite people who would never outstay their welcome.
How would we ever know for sure when it happens. Every time we make a definition for AI, and then reach that milestone, we end up moving the goalposts because "that's not really AI." Just shows that we can't even define it properly, same as we can't define self-aware with a set of rules that we can use to test if something is truly self aware or not.
Just because you say you're self-aware is not sufficient. I have to trust you, because I have no test that can definitively prove you are one way or another.
I doubt we could ever really know, chances are that if we ever create an AI it wont be anything remotely similar to human, mentally speaking at least.
I mean, first of all the hardware and the limitations imposed by that hardware is COMPLETELY different, that said the "senses" an AI would have would be completely different as well, like, why would we ever give an AI eyes or ears if it does not need to ever process visual or audio data? Its senses would be "data", "different data" and "more different data", its whole concept of reality would be different and wholly alien to us humans.
It's really no different from us ever being able to really understand an alien civilization.
I've never been hit by one of these, but I realize it can cost people a lot of money due to some shitheads. I'm really glad a lot of these keys have been found and made public. I'm sure this won't be the end of ransomware...people will just use new keys, but hopefully this will help some of those who have clicked on a not-a-flash upgrade or bad e-mail attachment.
The droppers for these things are usually based in websites, no clicking on sketchy attachments required. Simply a plausible(ish) looking e-mail from a plausible(ish) sounding organization with a link to a site that will use a browser exploit of some kind and drop the thing onto the computer.
sudo rm -rf /
sudo rm --no-preserve-root -rf /
rather
it will go a long way to reducing the amount of organized crime in this and other countries that make their profits off the back of illegal drug sales
These crime gangs will just look for some other large profit activity. If drugs were legalised, do you think they'd all re-train as accountants?
No, but a significant amount of them would.
It's easy to paint all drug dealers as these evil super criminals who do nothing but profit on the misery of others. And yes, there are some who are like that, but honestly, a significant amount of drug dealers simply like making money and would go legit if they could do so safely.
No, but I remember the Cue Cat. No less than $185 million was invested in this ridiculous venture. I could never figure out how anyone ever thought this was a good idea, even before the benefit of hindsight. Not only ridiculously impractical, but privacy-invading and prone to security issues? Woot!
Isn't the concept behind that CueCat thing basically the same as what is behind QR codes these days?
Your doctor doesn't want you to know aboyt this 500-year-old remedy for venereal disease.
Hint: it's mercury.
Not every old remedy is good for you. If you get into the history of medicine, you'll find lots of old remedies that are harmful.
I don't know man, I haven't had any disease trepanning or a good blood letting couldn't deal with, well there was this one time where I had to drink a gallon or mercury to get over a...ahem..personal disease.
Then there's marinol. They extracted the THC from pot in some mis-guided effort to get the medicinal effects without admitting they screwed up with the war on drugs. And of course, it was to be far more expensive than even the black market herb it replaced. It failed since they lost at least half of the beneficial effects and potentiated the tendency to cause psychosis. Turns out the CBD is as important as the THC.
Not completely true, yes Marinol was developed because growing weed was illegal, but it was not just pure extracted THC, it was "synthetic THC". As I understood it, the Marinol drug was developed because a lot of people did not want to smoke weed, they wanted a simple and easy to swallow pill.
It's also likely to give you heavy metal poisoning if you use too much of it too frequently.
Copper isn't a heavy metal, it's absolutely poisonous, but not a heavy metal.
Any info about the prophylactic dosage there?
Three or four liters of rubbing alcohol delivered through epidural injection should do the trick, although you might want to hook up a continuous drip through a central line to make absolutely sure.
Citing the biggest underachievers online in arstechnica doesn't help your case here.
I could cite Kasparsky Labs if you'd rather.
Many, many words
Yes, and the Apollo program was just fireworks with an unlimited budget.
I realize you, and many others, have a lot of axes to grind with the NSA, but they are an organization of skilled people who actually know what they are doing.
If it is so easy to do this, why haven't the Russian internet criminals rolled anything out on this scale? It seems to me that a platform like this would be all kinds of ideal for criminal purposes.
And saying that you cannot put any of your work on a resume is just a boldfaced lie, yes it is true you cannot write on your resume: "I developed the HDD firmware hack that EQUATIONDRUG used" or "I was heavily involved in wiretapping of Burmese embassies in the period from (x) to (y)", but there is nothing stopping you from putting in "I worked extensively with hardware programming and device security" or "I worked extensively with telecommunications infrastructure and security in the South East Asia area".
You cannot say that they don't do product development, yes it is true they probably wont ever make any software you can find on the Android or Apple App stores, but that is not the same as saying that they don't do development, it is just that a lot of the software that the NSA (or more likely, NSA subcontractors) develop are developed for a very limited and specialized audience, anything that does come out of NSA development projects is likely to be quite specialized and obscure.
That said - there is a not insignificant chance that a lot of the advancement in speech-to-text and other speech-recognition projects we have seen over the last years, has code in it that was developed by people who started out doing work on those subjects for the NSA (ECHELON supposed relied heavily on the ability to recognize keywords in recordings), likewise it is also quite likely that a lot of people who worked with and for the NSA are now out in the civilian sector designing datacenters and supercomputers.
It is easy to see the NSA as this big, evil organization that does only one thing: spy on people. And while that is certainly one of their main objectives, you have to remember they are also a large IT business and as such have a large IT infrastructure, and because of the work they do and the requirements that work puts on their infrastructure they were probably into the whole "big data" mindset several years before mainstream commercial, civilian IT companies got there.
Add to this that there is a large section of the NSA that isn't really an intelligence agency at all, they're a Security and Compliance agency that makes sure that DoD, Military and Diplomatic networks meet whatever security standards the NSA specify.
Refusing/saying "I don't talk to police" pisses them off, as well - causing them to get their dogs/such. But still....
Unless you are giving testimony in connection to a crime unrelated to you (ie. you witnessed something and are specifically not charged with anything) you should NEVER talk to a cop. The whole "Everything you say, can and WILL"-thing isn't said just to scare you.
They should be forced to read you your rights when they ask so that you can say no with confidence.
The whole "Reading you your rights"-thing, only really applies in cases where you are being charged and questioned.
And strictly speaking, even if you technically have the right to deny the police the right to search your person or vehicle, all that will happen if you do that is that the police will interpret that as evidence of guilt and arrest you, at which point searching you or your vehicle becomes a security requirement - it represents an unacceptable risk to bring you into custody without searching you because you might be concealing weapons, the same applies to your vehicle.
Remember, the police can arrest you for any reason and hold you for up to 24 hours without charging you with anything.
The reality is, the initial premise is a total lie. The NSA is a failed organisation and they are not looking for the same kind of people. They are looking for 2nd raters, people who specialise in breaking stuff and not in making stuff. The reality is securing stuff in computers is an order of magnitude harder than breaking security. The breakers are always second rate compared to makers, it is inherent in their cerebral makeup and the 2nd rate breakers know it to the core of their being, hence instead of making, their jealousy drives them to breaking.
The NSA were not particularly skilled at hacking, their targets were not focused enough on security and were easy to break into. Now of course the NSA script kiddie perverts are finding life much more difficult as companies become much more focused on security and are hiring the most skilled makers to make better security. The NSA stuck is now failing and that failure is far worse on the securing things side because of their chosen focus on breaking stuff on employing egoistic perverse script kiddies, incapable of securing stuff.
The US government was warned again and again and again, that in order to effectively secure their systems they must completely separate defensive operations from offensive operations but they were locked into arrogance mode and only listen to their own bullshit and now they are stuck.
If you are bright and interested in security, the real skill and challenge is in defensive operations, 24/7/365 operation of skills, abilities and knowledge, real investigatory skills on any exposed breaks or weaknesses and preventing them from happening again and creating a defence in depth system, giving greater opportunity to catch hacks are earlier less damaging levels. The people do not play well with breakers, not at all, the whole psychology is different.
Yes The Equation Group really seemed "2nd rate" and they sure didn't "make" anything.
Only one thing I disagree with - bandwidth costs. The FDR [apparently] records at about 6kB/s (I'm trying to find a source to back that up), so that's 6kB/s per aircraft in satellite data costs. There can be up to 11,000 aircraft flying at any one time, so that totals 66MB/s of bandwidth required globally. I don't believe lack of bandwidth is a factor.
It is if you are transferring that data over a HF link, I mean ostensibly once you are over the pacific or the Atlantic you could switch to communicating over satellite, but in all likelihood, most aviation radio for OTH transmissions are probably HF signals, not sure you have ever tried transferring data over a HF link, but let me put it this way: 9600 bps is considered HIGH speed.
Or maybe change the rules so anyone even suspected of mental health issues isn't instantly and automatically forced out of their career...
I'm all for equal opportunity and right-to-work and all that, but, I really would prefer that the people in control of the thing that lifts me up to 10.000 feet and travels at 500mph is fully certified as "not even a little crazy"
I know I wouldn't want to be videotaped 24/7 at work.
So, don't be a work 24 hour hours a day, seven days a week.
This is why pilots hate this. That and what is to stop their employer from listening in on their conversions?
What's to stop their employer from doing this now? I mean, doesn't the cockpit audio recorder already record their conversations?
Absence seizures don't really work like that, and they don't really show up as a new diagnosis in someone that age. A prior diagnosis would have disqualified him from getting a commercial (and probably a private) pilot's license. And automatisms won't don't that. My wife is an epileptologist, I know far more than I want to about these things.
They might not work like that when the condition causing them is Epilepsy, which I agree isn't really a thing that just randomly happens.
That said, there still could be some kind of neurological condition behind this, I am not a doctor so I am not going to argue the specific diagnosis, I'm sure your wife is right.
The thing that makes me think there was something physically wrong (be it drugs or pathology), is the fact he is reported as "breathing normally" during the whole thing, even if he was a terrorist or suicidal, he would still have the fight or flight reaction, and there is no way rapidly approaching a cliff wall and knowing you are going to die and kill 200 (or however many) people in the process would not trigger the fight or fight response, and one of the main symptoms of a big adrenaline surge is an increase in breathing and heart rate.
could explain why he could be doing these irrational actions.
Possibly. But it would not explain the rational actions of a co-pilot in distress. Such as, I don't know, communicating with ATC that he was feeling light headed and was turning on auto pilot.
You would not always notice that you are becoming light headed, yes, the CO poisoning case he might have had time to radio down.
But, what about a sudden stroke or an absent seizure?
That said, in all likelihood autopilot would have been on already, the co-pilot (as I understand it) just told it to begin a decent.
And you think someone on a suicide death dive with 200 people into a mountain is going to sit there quietly, breathing *normally*? Unless they are a complete and utter psychopath they will surely be in a heightened emotional state, crying, screaming, blaming anyone and everyone, not casually watching the altimeter spin down.
Guy could have had an absent seizure, he would still be breathing but not necessarily conscious of the world around him, what's more it could cause him to exhibit automatism
I hate it when they release news piecemeal like this. Yes, they should follow up on this hypothesis.
They are releasing news as they get it, it's not like they can look up on Wikipedia why this dude crashed the plane.
Adding fuel to this theory is that the co-pilot was detatched and monosyllabic when receiving the briefing about landing in Dusseldorf - he had already made up his mind that he wasn't going to reach Dusseldorf. If the pilot wasn't going to go to the bathroom he probably was planning on killing the pilot anyway.
Danish news (haven't found an English language version) reports that there have been cases before where there were "gas leaks" (Although the described symptoms - headache, fainting and nausea - sounds more like CO poisoning) in planes of this type before, so if there was a carbon monoxide leak in the cockpit, that could explain the abnormal behavior of the co-pilot, not sure you have every tried being hypoxic, but it makes your brain not work very well and it could explain why he could be doing these irrational actions.
That said, reports of the pilot being "detached and monosyllabic" haven't reached any of the sites I've been following this on, so I will take your word for it being that way; if this is the case this would seem to rule out the CO-poisoning theory, it is unlikely the guy would have been huffing CO way before actual take-off. However, it does not rule out either a brain injury (aneurism or stroke) significantly altering his behavior or him being wacked out of his skull on drugs or booze.
I tend to assume incompetence or unfortunate circumstances before I assume malice, that said - I am holding off judgment until the police or security services have taken a good hard look at the co-pilot, but so far I am more inclined to think that either there was one of those CO leaks or the pilot had a stroke or something along those lines.
Various pox related diseases still exists in nature, and various countries have illegal biological weapons programs thought to include small pox. A Soviet defector even indicated that the Soviet Union had been manufacturing small pox for use as a strategic attack weapon.
You are referring to the revelations about Biopreperat made by Ken Alibek and a few others.
This is not just some rumor, hear-say based report, US and UN Inspectors visited many of the Biopreperat sites, including the Sverdlovsk site that supposedly caused an accidental release of Anthrax.