Take out a couple of big transformers with a rifle and you could cut power over a very large area with a very lengthy repair time.
Friend's dad worked for the power company back in the day. Need some overtime? He and his coworkers would disappear with their 30-30s for a couple of hours. Next thing you knew there were transformers down after the coolant drained from mysterious new holes.
I call bullshit.
Transformer cooling oil isn't just cooling liquid. It's non-conductive, because the inside of a transformer is full of bare copper, all of which is energized when the transformer is in use. If you shoot a transformer, it doesn't just drain out...it's a whole lot worse than that. When a transformer develops an air gap, you get an arc inside the transformer, which ignites the oil in the event that sufficient pressure cannot build to cause a BLEVE, but causes a BLEVE...even if there's a hole in it, sometimes, based on where and how big the whole is...if the pressure is enough. It takes fractions of a second for this to happen, because you can have a massive flash of heat and concordant pressure spike. Things like this have been responsible for loss of life at substations. And it's not something you just fix like a hole in a radiator...you have to replace the whole transformer, and often a good part of the lines leading up to them as well. In the meanwhile, you end up with a sabotage report and law enforcement involvement, and reporting to the local PSC/PUC.
Transformers detonate. They do it because the oil loses its dielectric property, or because an air space forms inside the transformer. The idea that linemen, who eventually would have seen an event like this take place as well as the injury/death that resulted (it's not all that rare, and used to be even more common, "back in the day") would cause such events just to get some overtime, sounds preposterous to me. It'd be like cops getting themselves shot at so that they could do the extra paperwork and get overtime, especially ones who had seen a colleague killed in the line of duty. I work in the power industry, today, and I've never heard of anything like this, nor have I met anyone who I believe would do this.
How can they tell what direction a response comes from, with only one mic?
It came from the person sleeping.
The other problems, though, could be harder.
Which person? How can they tell the difference between the person sleeping and...
The other person sleeping next to them? The pet in the room? Curtains, gently blowing in the breeze? The person shifting in their bed? Sounds from heating/cooling coming online and the air shifting around in the room as a result?
How can it tell the difference between a response...a change in the state of something in the room...and a change in the object composition of the room itself? Without directionality, I don't see how it's possible. And indeed, as someone else pointed out, they did say that it requires phones with two microphones...which I missed when I read the article. So the point seems valid...and most phones won't be able to do this. Come to think of it, I am trying to think of what phones I know for a fact have dual microphones, and I'm coming up short.
Turning smartphones into sonar devices to monitor movements. I'm torn between "this is really cool!" and "these people are so full of shit and just trying to publish something to get tenure!"
I wonder how they solve the problems of directional discrimination without multiple microphones? How can they tell what direction a response comes from, with only one mic? And how do they intend to make this work on multiple phones, for that matter...with their vast differences in both microphone and speaker setups? I'm really skeptical of this.
They also talk about using ultrasonic frequencies...which I also doubt most phones can actually produce.
I've seen a lot of posts to this that seem to believe that all of America is like this. Let's be clear: this kind of crap is almost exclusively found in the Southeastern US. You don't see this in the Northeast (they believe in science there), you don't see it in California, or in the Pacific Northwest. Occasional pockets in the Midwest also get this batshit crazy, but there's a reason we hear about this for schools in Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, etc.
Or, to put it in something that could be a the end of a very (too) honest public service announcement:
"Georgia Public Schools: someone has to build the cars!" (Credit to the show "Squidbillies")
I'm not an Athiest (I'm Jewish), but even I don't want religion taught in schools. When people say "teach religion in schools" (outside of some comparative religion/philosophy class), what they really mean is "teach Christianity in schools." Try teaching Islam in a public school and you'll see all of those "we need to put religion back into public school" advocates go crazy.
I might be religious, but I try not to force my religion on others. I'm willing to discuss it with others if they ask questions, but I don't discuss it in a "my religion is so great, you need to convert now or else" manner. To me, religion is a personal matter and definitely not something for public schools to cover in a science class. You want to believe that the Earth was created 10,000 years ago when God sneezed it into his cosmic hanky? Go right ahead. You can even tell your kids that at home. Just don't try teaching MY kids that in public school because you can't deal with your kids learning about evolution.
If I had any mod points at the moment, I'd mod this up until we had to crane our necks looking upwards to be able to read it from underneath. Bravo, sir, bravo.
Low-resolution copies of the originals does not help preserve the originals.
That's a good point. Perhaps we could drive the point home by bombing Mecca and then providing a low-resolution copy of it to fulfill the same purpose.
Companies where the open office approach succeeded had something in common: the population of the office chose it for themselves, early on. They had an open office environment because that's how they wanted to work, and because the dynamic that existed between the employees was compatible with it. Then later, a lot of other companies had executives look at both the success of those companies and the lower real estate costs that the model uses, and decided they would "choose" it for their own staff. And that's not quite how it works. It's rather like deciding that your goldfish would be better off in a salt water tank because of how big the fish were in some other tank you saw, and then finding yourself confused as to why the fish all died. Not all cultures are the same, and you can't change the culture by imposing something upon it that is toxic.
It's the logical end state of this whole open office thing. Complete transparency and no place to hide.
With tech workers?? Do you actually WANT to see what some of these pale, flabby people look like without clothes on???
Though, then again...if that was walking around me all the time, I'd keep my eyes focused squarely on my monitor and my work. My productivity would soar...hmmmmm....
Question: What role do people who think that AI research is dangerous hold in the field of AI research?
Answer: None...because regardless of their qualifications, they wouldn't further the progress of something they think is a very, very bad idea.
Asking AI experts whether or not they think AI research is a bad idea subjects your responses to a massive selection bias.
Yes. Nobody who worked in the Manhattan Project had any reservations whatsoever about building the atomic bomb, right?
Experts work in fields they're not 100% comfortable with all the time. The actual physicists that worked on the bomb understood exactly what the dangers were. The people looking at it from the outside are the ones coming up with the bogus dangers. You hear things like, "the scientists in the Manhattan project were so irresponsible they thought the first bomb test could ignite the atmosphere, but went ahead with it anyway." No, the scientists working on it thought of that possibility, performed calculations the definitely proved it wasn't anywhere near a possibility and then moved on with it. People outside the field are the ones that go, "The LHC could create a black hole that will destroy us all!" The scientists working on know the Earth is struck with more powerful cosmic rays than the LHC can produce regularly, so there's no danger.
It's just that they don't work in the field of AI, so therefore they must not have any inkling whatsoever as to what they're talking about.
Which is a 100% true statement. They're very smart people, but they don't know what they're talking about in regards to AI research, and are coming up with bogus threats that most AI experts agree aren't actually a possibility.
The topic of the Manhattan Project is a red herring. Those people were choosing between two evils, because the Project was about building a weapon to stop a genocidal maniac from taking over the planet. By the time they were done, D-Day and V-E Day had happened, true, but those victories were far from foregone conclusions when the scientists started.
Nobody's building AI to try and prevent something on the same level as world domination by Hitler, sorry.
based on a presentation from Alvin Cox, a Seagate engineer[...]Alan Cox said, "I wouldn't worry"
Can we get these two gentlemen to agree on a statement of risk? Or maybe just a little, you know, editing from the Slashdot editors?
I'm wondering if the "editing" from the Slashdot editors wasn't the problem in the first place. How many Slashdot summaries wildly overstate/oversimplify/remove from proper context the real meat of a story? How many Slashdot comments essentially say, "RTFA...you'll see that [it only applies to this situation|they mean this instead of that|this was done on purpose under wildly crazy conditions to see if it could ever be true at all|this person has no credibility|this is really advertising for someone's product]"?
In light of the fact that Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates and Elon Musk are not even remotely experts in A.I. your opinion is fairly odd.
Question: What role do people who think that AI research is dangerous hold in the field of AI research?
Answer: None...because regardless of their qualifications, they wouldn't further the progress of something they think is a very, very bad idea.
Asking AI experts whether or not they think AI research is a bad idea subjects your responses to a massive selection bias. And discounting the views of others because they don't specialize in creating the thing they think should not be created does the same. You do realize that at your core, that's your only point...not that Hawking is an idiot, or that Gates doesn't know anything about technology. It's just that they don't work in the field of AI, so therefore they must not have any inkling whatsoever as to what they're talking about.
Kaspersky probably is in bed in some way with the Kremlin, it has nothing to do with the quotes you listed.
Pretty much everyone figured it was a US/Israeli combo for Stux and Flame, not just Kaspersky.
What the OP fails to mention is that Kaspersky also focuses on Equaton, Duqu, and every other campaign that's been attributed with any degree of credibility to the US. And that they don't go near any of the things like Sofacy/APT28 that emanate from Russia.
And do they have a a successful antivirus business?
They must, because they're a fairly prominent sponsor of the Ferrari Formula 1 team.
Now, the only question I have about that is whether they know they're sponsoring Ferrari, or if they just know they're sponsoring "the only car that's completely red."
No worries, millions can move into the "big rig hijacking" business! A semi-trailer full of something easy to sell on the street, or a tanker full of a chemical useful in making meth, or of gasoline (gasoline smuggling was the mafia's most profitable business for years) - all very valuable targets. Today that theft is kept somewhat in check by the real risk of getting shot in the process, or of wrecking the rig if your try a scene out of a Fast and Furious movie. But an AI truck with safety reflexes on a lonely stretch of road? Well, the markets will sort themselves out.
As for the legal trade, driving is a crappy job unless you own your truck, and I rather suspect the owner/operators of today will become the owners of tomorrow. Truckstops may go the way of the buggy whip, but I can't see that happening fast - like all infrastructure changes, the capital outlay is so high this will be a 20-50 year transition.
How are these not targets already? To me, it seems like it'd be a lot simpler to hijack a truck driven by a human who can accept alternate programmed instructions (also known as "threats," in this context) given in natural human language, than a computer-driven truck. You can't just mess with GPS to hijack a truck; telling a truck that he's not where he thinks he is won't work as well as some people might think, and there's the dual-threat of counter-spoofing technologies (easy to build in if you want to..and if GPS spoofing gets used for hijacking they'll want to) and GPS-interference monitoring (which is happening today as we speak). And even then, the "getting shot in the process" risk runs both ways...at least with theft of an automated truck you don't have the safety of the driver to worry about.
If that's what he's saying then it doesn't need to be said, so why is he saying it?
Coming up after the break, how inaccurate rulers mean that shit won't fit.
I asked myself that same question, but I think there's an answer. If you write a version of Angry Birds that sucks, then meh...some people waste a buck each on a crappy game, give it a bad review, and life goes on. If (as actually happened) you radically change the UI on a ubiquitous application *cough*Microsoft Word*cough* then it frustrates a lot of people and wastes a lot of time, but still not necessarily the end of the world. But BI apps drive decision making at a scale that boggles the mind. Things like epidemiology (containing Ebola in West Africa, or trying to reduce HIV infection rates), cancer research (listed up above, and from personal recent experience I can tell you, they're doing some incredible fucking stuff with this), and even decisions that impact negotiations between nation-states all rely upon BI. Because of the cost of the solutions and the effort needed to implement them, no decision they support is really small; nearly all of them have massive impact and thus huge ramifications if the BI solutions drive people in the wrong direction. So while he didn't quite say it this way, I think the point is that BI apps bear a greater moral burden to be effective than most apps because of the impact (good or bad) that they have.
What I wonder about is why he didn't touch upon the other moral issue of BI: usage. One of the first big BI implementations was in Germany, for example. It was used to do number-crunching to manage and provide efficiency of scale for their overall program of concentration camps. (And no, this isn't Godwin's Law in effect...I'm not comparing anyone to Hitler, just raising an interesting historical fact.) IBM designed, built, and supported the solution...this was far, far beyond just making an app that someone else bought and did something bad with, without direct involvement by the app's creator. BI solutions aren't "buy it, install it, use it" products; they need a metric assload of support and consulting services to get them off the ground, and they are purpose-built to the customer's needs. So what are the ethics around what the customer intends to do, and where do you draw the line and say "No, I'm not going to sell you my product or services to help you do that"?
But if it doesn't work, everyone can go down a bunch of rabbit holes and it takes years to figure out that they've been chasing the wrong approaches all along.
Come up with a thousand approaches to a problem
Crowdsource incorrect approaches
Simultaneously discover 999 things that don't work
Success!
Come up with a thousand approaches to a problem. Try all of them at once. Discover that you just broke your statistically-valid group that has the problem into a thousand groups so small that you can no longer detect the difference between success and failure for any one group. Also realize that you just doomed 99.9% of the total test population to failure...and in my example, these are cancer patients, so you also just got yourself barred from practicing medicine. What are you, Dr. Mengele? Fail!
"In a blog post, Rado Kotorov, Chief Innovation Officer at Information Builders asserts that the creators of enterprise apps implicitly assume some of the responsibility for other people's decision making. He says it's not just developers, but anyone who is involved, from defining the concept, to requirements gathering, to final implementation. Thus, the creators of the app have an ethical obligation to ensure that people can reach the right conclusions from the facts and the way they are presented in the app."
I call bullshit. This is simply another step down a slippery slope that removes more personal responsibility.
This is the very definition of the nanny State.
RTFA.
If you look at the article, you'll see just how blatantly Slashdot has mislead us with their summary of the article. The article isn't about "apps" or even just "enterprise apps." It's specifically and only about business intelligence (BI) applications, which are intended to lead their users to make decisions and conclusions. What he's saying, fundamentally, is that "as the makers of business intelligence applications, we have a responsibility to actually not make apps that suck, since the conclusions our users will come to have major ramifications." I agree with him, in that context.
Take it and apply it to a specific situation like cancer research, and the difference between meeting his ethical standard and failing it is the difference between saving lives or losing them. And this is actually a real example; recent cancer research has largely focused upon big-data mining and BI around specific characteristics of various forms of cancer, and matching up with an incredible degree of precision which combinations of treatments work best on certain kinds of cancer. They go so far as to actually examine the genome of tumors...it's fucking cool. This is the kind of use that a BI system can fulfill, if it works. But if it doesn't work, everyone can go down a bunch of rabbit holes and it takes years to figure out that they've been chasing the wrong approaches all along.
I work for a smart grid consulting company...before that, a major (nearly a century old, and widely-recognized) civil engineering firm, again in the power industry. Before that I was the official smart grid security spokesman for a large IT company, and briefed Gartner, Ponemon, Forrester, etc. I've been deep into the guts of generation, T&D, energy marketing, and smart metering infrastructure at dozens of power companies over the past decade.
I've never seen OSGP in the field, not once. The OP talks about "millions of smart meters" using it, but damned if I can figure out which meters those are. Landis+Gyr? Nope. GE? Uh uh. Itron? Hell no; they have their own end-to-end architecture (and it works really, really well, which is why Itron is now the 800-pound gorilla of the smart metering world) Sensus? Nope, they bought FlexNet from Motorola and use that, and it has its own (decent) encryption. Elster? Definitely not...I've seen Elster's architecture up super-close, and this protocol is nowhere to be found.
In fact, if you look up OSGP, you'll see all kinds of announcements from the alliance behind it, but not a lot of actual success. Sounds to me like someone found vulnerabilities in an also-ran protocol, but the security issues aren't the only thing wrong with it...which is why nobody seems to actually USE it.
SAP systems are not protected from cyber threats by traditional security approaches
That implies that there is some sort of protection while leaving out the word "traditional" implies the more correct situation where they are not protected at all. That not necessarily a bad thing so long as the practice is to secure their stuff with third party approaches afterwards (eg. need to get on a secured VPN before you can communicate with the software).
Onapsis' bread and butter is a non-traditional security product meant specifically to secure...wait for it...SAP. So, that gives you an idea what the anonymous OP is up to.
It may seem to you. I asked real students on campus, who had no idea what 4/16 was. Yet a student has lost their educational opportunities here, and likely life ruined.
I'm betting a lot of people don't know the date of the Boston Marathon bombing. But threats are meant for people who DO recognize the significance, and the people who watch for threats do know what these dates are. The key point here is: did what he post actually look like it might be a threat? I say yes, and the fact that the people you asked didn't know the date doesn't have any effect on the situation.
I'm not sure if I think it's incredibly disheartening that Stephen Hawking had been following that whole situation, or that I think it's incredibly cool that he's that in touch with kids. Hm.
It's just a euphemism. I remember working for a company that started embracing offshoring, which they called "right-shoring." Layoffs were called "right-sizing." And the executives were called "cunts." Amazing how just a little "word-smithing" can make things sound better than they really are, huh?
Slashdot Mirror
Take out a couple of big transformers with a rifle and you could cut power over a very large area with a very lengthy repair time.
Friend's dad worked for the power company back in the day. Need some overtime? He and his coworkers would disappear with their 30-30s for a couple of hours. Next thing you knew there were transformers down after the coolant drained from mysterious new holes.
I call bullshit.
Transformer cooling oil isn't just cooling liquid. It's non-conductive, because the inside of a transformer is full of bare copper, all of which is energized when the transformer is in use. If you shoot a transformer, it doesn't just drain out...it's a whole lot worse than that. When a transformer develops an air gap, you get an arc inside the transformer, which ignites the oil in the event that sufficient pressure cannot build to cause a BLEVE, but causes a BLEVE...even if there's a hole in it, sometimes, based on where and how big the whole is...if the pressure is enough. It takes fractions of a second for this to happen, because you can have a massive flash of heat and concordant pressure spike. Things like this have been responsible for loss of life at substations. And it's not something you just fix like a hole in a radiator...you have to replace the whole transformer, and often a good part of the lines leading up to them as well. In the meanwhile, you end up with a sabotage report and law enforcement involvement, and reporting to the local PSC/PUC.
Transformers detonate. They do it because the oil loses its dielectric property, or because an air space forms inside the transformer. The idea that linemen, who eventually would have seen an event like this take place as well as the injury/death that resulted (it's not all that rare, and used to be even more common, "back in the day") would cause such events just to get some overtime, sounds preposterous to me. It'd be like cops getting themselves shot at so that they could do the extra paperwork and get overtime, especially ones who had seen a colleague killed in the line of duty. I work in the power industry, today, and I've never heard of anything like this, nor have I met anyone who I believe would do this.
How can they tell what direction a response comes from, with only one mic?
It came from the person sleeping.
The other problems, though, could be harder.
Which person? How can they tell the difference between the person sleeping and...
The other person sleeping next to them?
The pet in the room?
Curtains, gently blowing in the breeze?
The person shifting in their bed?
Sounds from heating/cooling coming online and the air shifting around in the room as a result?
How can it tell the difference between a response...a change in the state of something in the room...and a change in the object composition of the room itself? Without directionality, I don't see how it's possible. And indeed, as someone else pointed out, they did say that it requires phones with two microphones...which I missed when I read the article. So the point seems valid...and most phones won't be able to do this. Come to think of it, I am trying to think of what phones I know for a fact have dual microphones, and I'm coming up short.
Turning smartphones into sonar devices to monitor movements. I'm torn between "this is really cool!" and "these people are so full of shit and just trying to publish something to get tenure!"
I wonder how they solve the problems of directional discrimination without multiple microphones? How can they tell what direction a response comes from, with only one mic? And how do they intend to make this work on multiple phones, for that matter...with their vast differences in both microphone and speaker setups? I'm really skeptical of this.
They also talk about using ultrasonic frequencies...which I also doubt most phones can actually produce.
I've seen a lot of posts to this that seem to believe that all of America is like this. Let's be clear: this kind of crap is almost exclusively found in the Southeastern US. You don't see this in the Northeast (they believe in science there), you don't see it in California, or in the Pacific Northwest. Occasional pockets in the Midwest also get this batshit crazy, but there's a reason we hear about this for schools in Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, etc.
Or, to put it in something that could be a the end of a very (too) honest public service announcement:
"Georgia Public Schools: someone has to build the cars!" (Credit to the show "Squidbillies")
I'm not an Athiest (I'm Jewish), but even I don't want religion taught in schools. When people say "teach religion in schools" (outside of some comparative religion/philosophy class), what they really mean is "teach Christianity in schools." Try teaching Islam in a public school and you'll see all of those "we need to put religion back into public school" advocates go crazy.
I might be religious, but I try not to force my religion on others. I'm willing to discuss it with others if they ask questions, but I don't discuss it in a "my religion is so great, you need to convert now or else" manner. To me, religion is a personal matter and definitely not something for public schools to cover in a science class. You want to believe that the Earth was created 10,000 years ago when God sneezed it into his cosmic hanky? Go right ahead. You can even tell your kids that at home. Just don't try teaching MY kids that in public school because you can't deal with your kids learning about evolution.
If I had any mod points at the moment, I'd mod this up until we had to crane our necks looking upwards to be able to read it from underneath. Bravo, sir, bravo.
Low-resolution copies of the originals does not help preserve the originals.
That's a good point. Perhaps we could drive the point home by bombing Mecca and then providing a low-resolution copy of it to fulfill the same purpose.
Companies where the open office approach succeeded had something in common: the population of the office chose it for themselves, early on. They had an open office environment because that's how they wanted to work, and because the dynamic that existed between the employees was compatible with it. Then later, a lot of other companies had executives look at both the success of those companies and the lower real estate costs that the model uses, and decided they would "choose" it for their own staff. And that's not quite how it works. It's rather like deciding that your goldfish would be better off in a salt water tank because of how big the fish were in some other tank you saw, and then finding yourself confused as to why the fish all died. Not all cultures are the same, and you can't change the culture by imposing something upon it that is toxic.
...everybody should get naked. There...I said it.
It's the logical end state of this whole open office thing. Complete transparency and no place to hide.
With tech workers?? Do you actually WANT to see what some of these pale, flabby people look like without clothes on???
Though, then again...if that was walking around me all the time, I'd keep my eyes focused squarely on my monitor and my work. My productivity would soar...hmmmmm....
Question: What role do people who think that AI research is dangerous hold in the field of AI research?
Answer: None...because regardless of their qualifications, they wouldn't further the progress of something they think is a very, very bad idea.
Asking AI experts whether or not they think AI research is a bad idea subjects your responses to a massive selection bias.
Yes. Nobody who worked in the Manhattan Project had any reservations whatsoever about building the atomic bomb, right?
Experts work in fields they're not 100% comfortable with all the time. The actual physicists that worked on the bomb understood exactly what the dangers were. The people looking at it from the outside are the ones coming up with the bogus dangers. You hear things like, "the scientists in the Manhattan project were so irresponsible they thought the first bomb test could ignite the atmosphere, but went ahead with it anyway." No, the scientists working on it thought of that possibility, performed calculations the definitely proved it wasn't anywhere near a possibility and then moved on with it. People outside the field are the ones that go, "The LHC could create a black hole that will destroy us all!" The scientists working on know the Earth is struck with more powerful cosmic rays than the LHC can produce regularly, so there's no danger.
It's just that they don't work in the field of AI, so therefore they must not have any inkling whatsoever as to what they're talking about.
Which is a 100% true statement. They're very smart people, but they don't know what they're talking about in regards to AI research, and are coming up with bogus threats that most AI experts agree aren't actually a possibility.
The topic of the Manhattan Project is a red herring. Those people were choosing between two evils, because the Project was about building a weapon to stop a genocidal maniac from taking over the planet. By the time they were done, D-Day and V-E Day had happened, true, but those victories were far from foregone conclusions when the scientists started.
Nobody's building AI to try and prevent something on the same level as world domination by Hitler, sorry.
based on a presentation from Alvin Cox, a Seagate engineer[...]Alan Cox said, "I wouldn't worry"
Can we get these two gentlemen to agree on a statement of risk? Or maybe just a little, you know, editing from the Slashdot editors?
I'm wondering if the "editing" from the Slashdot editors wasn't the problem in the first place. How many Slashdot summaries wildly overstate/oversimplify/remove from proper context the real meat of a story? How many Slashdot comments essentially say, "RTFA...you'll see that [it only applies to this situation|they mean this instead of that|this was done on purpose under wildly crazy conditions to see if it could ever be true at all|this person has no credibility|this is really advertising for someone's product]"?
In light of the fact that Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates and Elon Musk are not even remotely experts in A.I. your opinion is fairly odd.
Question: What role do people who think that AI research is dangerous hold in the field of AI research?
Answer: None...because regardless of their qualifications, they wouldn't further the progress of something they think is a very, very bad idea.
Asking AI experts whether or not they think AI research is a bad idea subjects your responses to a massive selection bias. And discounting the views of others because they don't specialize in creating the thing they think should not be created does the same. You do realize that at your core, that's your only point...not that Hawking is an idiot, or that Gates doesn't know anything about technology. It's just that they don't work in the field of AI, so therefore they must not have any inkling whatsoever as to what they're talking about.
Kaspersky probably is in bed in some way with the Kremlin, it has nothing to do with the quotes you listed.
Pretty much everyone figured it was a US/Israeli combo for Stux and Flame, not just Kaspersky.
What the OP fails to mention is that Kaspersky also focuses on Equaton, Duqu, and every other campaign that's been attributed with any degree of credibility to the US. And that they don't go near any of the things like Sofacy/APT28 that emanate from Russia.
And do they have a a successful antivirus business?
They must, because they're a fairly prominent sponsor of the Ferrari Formula 1 team.
Now, the only question I have about that is whether they know they're sponsoring Ferrari, or if they just know they're sponsoring "the only car that's completely red."
let the markets sort themselves out.
No worries, millions can move into the "big rig hijacking" business! A semi-trailer full of something easy to sell on the street, or a tanker full of a chemical useful in making meth, or of gasoline (gasoline smuggling was the mafia's most profitable business for years) - all very valuable targets. Today that theft is kept somewhat in check by the real risk of getting shot in the process, or of wrecking the rig if your try a scene out of a Fast and Furious movie. But an AI truck with safety reflexes on a lonely stretch of road? Well, the markets will sort themselves out.
As for the legal trade, driving is a crappy job unless you own your truck, and I rather suspect the owner/operators of today will become the owners of tomorrow. Truckstops may go the way of the buggy whip, but I can't see that happening fast - like all infrastructure changes, the capital outlay is so high this will be a 20-50 year transition.
How are these not targets already? To me, it seems like it'd be a lot simpler to hijack a truck driven by a human who can accept alternate programmed instructions (also known as "threats," in this context) given in natural human language, than a computer-driven truck. You can't just mess with GPS to hijack a truck; telling a truck that he's not where he thinks he is won't work as well as some people might think, and there's the dual-threat of counter-spoofing technologies (easy to build in if you want to..and if GPS spoofing gets used for hijacking they'll want to) and GPS-interference monitoring (which is happening today as we speak). And even then, the "getting shot in the process" risk runs both ways...at least with theft of an automated truck you don't have the safety of the driver to worry about.
If that's what he's saying then it doesn't need to be said, so why is he saying it?
Coming up after the break, how inaccurate rulers mean that shit won't fit.
I asked myself that same question, but I think there's an answer. If you write a version of Angry Birds that sucks, then meh...some people waste a buck each on a crappy game, give it a bad review, and life goes on. If (as actually happened) you radically change the UI on a ubiquitous application *cough*Microsoft Word*cough* then it frustrates a lot of people and wastes a lot of time, but still not necessarily the end of the world. But BI apps drive decision making at a scale that boggles the mind. Things like epidemiology (containing Ebola in West Africa, or trying to reduce HIV infection rates), cancer research (listed up above, and from personal recent experience I can tell you, they're doing some incredible fucking stuff with this), and even decisions that impact negotiations between nation-states all rely upon BI. Because of the cost of the solutions and the effort needed to implement them, no decision they support is really small; nearly all of them have massive impact and thus huge ramifications if the BI solutions drive people in the wrong direction. So while he didn't quite say it this way, I think the point is that BI apps bear a greater moral burden to be effective than most apps because of the impact (good or bad) that they have.
What I wonder about is why he didn't touch upon the other moral issue of BI: usage. One of the first big BI implementations was in Germany, for example. It was used to do number-crunching to manage and provide efficiency of scale for their overall program of concentration camps. (And no, this isn't Godwin's Law in effect...I'm not comparing anyone to Hitler, just raising an interesting historical fact.) IBM designed, built, and supported the solution...this was far, far beyond just making an app that someone else bought and did something bad with, without direct involvement by the app's creator. BI solutions aren't "buy it, install it, use it" products; they need a metric assload of support and consulting services to get them off the ground, and they are purpose-built to the customer's needs. So what are the ethics around what the customer intends to do, and where do you draw the line and say "No, I'm not going to sell you my product or services to help you do that"?
But if it doesn't work, everyone can go down a bunch of rabbit holes and it takes years to figure out that they've been chasing the wrong approaches all along.
Come up with a thousand approaches to a problem.
Try all of them at once.
Discover that you just broke your statistically-valid group that has the problem into a thousand groups so small that you can no longer detect the difference between success and failure for any one group.
Also realize that you just doomed 99.9% of the total test population to failure...and in my example, these are cancer patients, so you also just got yourself barred from practicing medicine. What are you, Dr. Mengele?
Fail!
"In a blog post, Rado Kotorov, Chief Innovation Officer at Information Builders asserts that the creators of enterprise apps implicitly assume some of the responsibility for other people's decision making. He says it's not just developers, but anyone who is involved, from defining the concept, to requirements gathering, to final implementation. Thus, the creators of the app have an ethical obligation to ensure that people can reach the right conclusions from the facts and the way they are presented in the app."
I call bullshit. This is simply another step down a slippery slope that removes more personal responsibility.
This is the very definition of the nanny State.
RTFA.
If you look at the article, you'll see just how blatantly Slashdot has mislead us with their summary of the article. The article isn't about "apps" or even just "enterprise apps." It's specifically and only about business intelligence (BI) applications, which are intended to lead their users to make decisions and conclusions. What he's saying, fundamentally, is that "as the makers of business intelligence applications, we have a responsibility to actually not make apps that suck, since the conclusions our users will come to have major ramifications." I agree with him, in that context.
Take it and apply it to a specific situation like cancer research, and the difference between meeting his ethical standard and failing it is the difference between saving lives or losing them. And this is actually a real example; recent cancer research has largely focused upon big-data mining and BI around specific characteristics of various forms of cancer, and matching up with an incredible degree of precision which combinations of treatments work best on certain kinds of cancer. They go so far as to actually examine the genome of tumors...it's fucking cool. This is the kind of use that a BI system can fulfill, if it works. But if it doesn't work, everyone can go down a bunch of rabbit holes and it takes years to figure out that they've been chasing the wrong approaches all along.
I work for a smart grid consulting company...before that, a major (nearly a century old, and widely-recognized) civil engineering firm, again in the power industry. Before that I was the official smart grid security spokesman for a large IT company, and briefed Gartner, Ponemon, Forrester, etc. I've been deep into the guts of generation, T&D, energy marketing, and smart metering infrastructure at dozens of power companies over the past decade.
I've never seen OSGP in the field, not once. The OP talks about "millions of smart meters" using it, but damned if I can figure out which meters those are. Landis+Gyr? Nope. GE? Uh uh. Itron? Hell no; they have their own end-to-end architecture (and it works really, really well, which is why Itron is now the 800-pound gorilla of the smart metering world) Sensus? Nope, they bought FlexNet from Motorola and use that, and it has its own (decent) encryption. Elster? Definitely not...I've seen Elster's architecture up super-close, and this protocol is nowhere to be found.
In fact, if you look up OSGP, you'll see all kinds of announcements from the alliance behind it, but not a lot of actual success. Sounds to me like someone found vulnerabilities in an also-ran protocol, but the security issues aren't the only thing wrong with it...which is why nobody seems to actually USE it.
That implies that there is some sort of protection while leaving out the word "traditional" implies the more correct situation where they are not protected at all.
That not necessarily a bad thing so long as the practice is to secure their stuff with third party approaches afterwards (eg. need to get on a secured VPN before you can communicate with the software).
Onapsis' bread and butter is a non-traditional security product meant specifically to secure...wait for it...SAP. So, that gives you an idea what the anonymous OP is up to.
It may seem to you. I asked real students on campus, who had no idea what 4/16 was. Yet a student has lost their educational opportunities here, and likely life ruined.
I'm betting a lot of people don't know the date of the Boston Marathon bombing. But threats are meant for people who DO recognize the significance, and the people who watch for threats do know what these dates are. The key point here is: did what he post actually look like it might be a threat? I say yes, and the fact that the people you asked didn't know the date doesn't have any effect on the situation.
"Georgia Public Schools...somebody's gotta build the cars!"
I'm not sure if I think it's incredibly disheartening that Stephen Hawking had been following that whole situation, or that I think it's incredibly cool that he's that in touch with kids. Hm.
Can it be both?
But....but....but all my SJW friends said she would rejuvenate the company with her Super Vagina.
Are you sure they didn't say she would "remix" the company instead?
It's just a euphemism. I remember working for a company that started embracing offshoring, which they called "right-shoring." Layoffs were called "right-sizing." And the executives were called "cunts." Amazing how just a little "word-smithing" can make things sound better than they really are, huh?
It's Kim Dotcom.