I'm not sure about all of these cars, but I remember from the discussion on one of the earliest of these cases that it wasn't actually possible to stop the car in motion. I think that one was supposed to have a solenoid that actually locked the electronic key in place.
Did they also discover a flaw in the brakes such that they could not overcome the engine power? This was the point of the parent post, I think. Modern cars have sufficient braking force to completely stop the engine even at full throttle
Is this definitely always the case? Under all conditions? There's a huge difference, for example, between holding down the brake while stopped and gunning the engine and slamming on the brake while already travelling 70 miles an hour with the engine similarly gunning. Static vs Dynamic friction for one thing. Not to mention brake exhaustion due to overheating. The pads and rotors heat up and the physical properties of both change, the rotors can warp, moisture can flash into steam and create a nearly frictionless layer, the properties of the brake fluid change, making it less efficient as a hydraulic fluid or possibly even vaporize. Coming to a dead stop once is probably not enough to do that, but if the accelerator goes crazy on the highway, people aren't going to suddenly stop. They will use the brakes to slow down, heating them up while they try to figure out what to actually do, where to pull over, etc. The brakes can heat up very quickly doing that.
Why would an honest individual put in a back door in the encryption for "testing"? Just test with data you have the key to.
It doesn't take a dishonest individual. It's just fairly typical in such situations. It depends on who's actually in charge and if they run into problems.
Consider that the US nuclear launch codes were 00000000 for two decades. Consider that something like 30 billion dollars a day is spent in credit/debit card transactions based using a system with effectively _no_ security. Consider the failing grade nearly all large organizations receive pretty much every time they are audited for security. Even when their job is security, most organizations end up using short-term pragmatist modes of thought, and wait until things break before they fix it.
And how can things "break" within an immutable data file?
When it's new and not fully understood and the problems that will crop up when it's massively scaled haven't ben encountered yet and the code is new and buggy.
When's the last time you saw a "broken" bitmap or text file that wasn't due to either a failed creation (probably not worth fixing), or corruption of the transmission or storage medium that can be solved with an error-correcting wrapper around the securely encrypted data?
About 9 hours ago. Technically the file was undamaged, just transformed in way that's normal for the software, but it was still unreadable because the metadata regarding that file in a database disagreed about what transformations it had gone through. Something did go wrong, but it wasn't due to failed creation or corruption during transmission or storage. It was a bug that the file and the database were allowed to be in disagreement, but these things happen when the software isn't infallible.
Honestly, I don't see overlap within a subset of the individual genetic data as being a problem, you just need to make sure there's enough variation in the data that the known contents don't poison the encryption and allow nefarious access to the rest.
Might be, might not be. Depends on other conditions. For example: Someone does a study on an ethnic group that effectively all have certain genetic details in common and, after the study is done, the sequences from that group get added to the broader collection in one big dump. That very well may be exploitable and lead to other opportunities.
Maybe I'm being way too pessimistic. I've just been disappointed far too many times by the intersection of systems that should be secure with politics/greed/stupidity/arrogance/carelessness and other aspects of reality.
A foot higher in elevation (not distance), yes. Over 100 years.
...
You aren't picturing the fact that structures are generally built much higher above a beach than that, if only because of storm surges and the like
Yes, that's what I thought. You're looking at a contour map and saying: "one foot of sea-level rise brings the high tide mark from point A to point B." You're completely ignoring the realities of what even a small increase in water level will do to the dynamics of the ocean and to a coastline. Also, at this point, 1 foot over a century is looking like a best case scenario.
A joke: A physicist, a mathemetician and an engineer are put in a hallway. At the end of the hallway is an extremely attractive member of whatever gender happens to appeal to each of them. They are told that, if they can reach the person at the end of the hallway, they can do whatever they want with them. However, they can only advance down the hallway in increments of the remaining distance. The physicist and the mathematician give up right away, knowing that the task is impossible. The engineer starts immediately, knowing that it's possible to get close enough for all practical purposes.
Some of them might be practicing medicine without a license. Beyond that, it would not be a good thing to make a habit of stifling free speech in that way. Those in direct care of minors such as parents and doctors, however, should face some sort of sanction. Maggiore supposedly got off because she was considered non-negligent because she consulted multiple physicians. The thing is, the reason she consulted multiple physicians was to find one who would echo what she wanted to hear.
Yes, technically PCR is a technique to amplify the signal to allow detection via a test that would otherwise not be sensitive enough. If Mullins believes that it can also amplify noise to create a false signal, that opinion would certainly be well within his professional competence, as well as a statement against his own interest, no?
PCR doesn't create DNA that isn't already there. It takes what's there and makes more of it. It won't make viral DNA magically appear if it's not there in the first place.
"Now, I know it's usually an invalid assumption to criticize a person's science based on their personal life"
If you know that then why did you bother wasting an entire paragraph doing just that? I dont care what these people do in their free time, what I care about is the integrity of science.
I answered that question in the very same (admittedly run-on) sentence you quoted. Your apparent confusion sems disingenuous. Basically I said that one exception to the rule is when their personal life involves doing things that can literally drive you insane. If someone is actually insane, that might be a valid reason to take their wild hypotheses with a grain of salt. If they actually present good experimental data then it doesn't matter if, in their spare time, they're drilling holes in their head to let the gods in. When they have no good experimental data and are basically just making sophist proclamations, then it does matter if they're insane.
As for the integrity of science, you have a strange way of showing your concern for it.
"Dr. Duesburg did some interesting work on cancer. Apparently along with disputing that HIV causes AIDS, he also disputes the results of his own work"
You say that like it's a bad thing, when in reality it is a mark of a real scientist to remain skeptical even of ones own work.
_You_ were the one making an argument from authority using these people. It's not unreasonable for me, in light of that, to discuss their actual scientific track record.
Really, it's almost like you WANT me to believe you are arguing in bad faith.
That's just pathetic. You're the one who, just a few paragraphs back, quoted a sentence fragment out of context in order to attack a straw man. After that little piece of rhetorical garbage, you have some nerve.
"So you believe which of those two contrary hypothoses?" [sic]
Neither, of course.
A scientific mind does not function on 'belief.'
Oh please, spare me the pointless semantic games. 'belief' and 'religious belief' are not the same thing. All minds function on belief, scientific or not. The scientific mind just does its best to have rational beliefs based on emperical evidence where possible. When I talk about believing one theory over another, critical assesment is implicit in my understanding of the term belief. You can pretend that the two theories you mention are somehow valid alternatives to the prevailing theory. Way back in the 80s, you would have had an argument. You could lay out a whole list of experments and observations required before picking one over the other. The simple fact is, since then, those experiments have been done. The evidence says that HIV exists. It's been observed through a number of different imaging methods again and again and again. Its been watched infecting cells, then budding off from those cells in waves of virus particles.The probability of all these observations being wrong is fantastically low. This puts the "Perth Group" you mentioned firmly into "requires extraordinary proof" category.
Duesberg is only marginally better. His theories about the harmlessness of HIV, and retroviruses in general, appear ridiculous in light of all of the animal experiments and observations of human infection over the decades.
Whether or not there is ultimately any truth to the criticisms and countercriticisms is really secondary to me.
Yikes. Why are you even bothering to discuss this then?
What interests me the most is the way that supposedly scientific institutions devolve into exactly the same sort of relationships and behavior that we expect from religious institutions - the way that what should be a scientific theory comes to be viewed more like a religious creed, and scientific skepticism comes to be seen as heresy.
Except that's really, really not what's going on here. The denialists typically either just plain don't have an alternate theory or have a lack of any real evidence for their theory. Scientists don't look at this and say: "These people are heretics and we must shun them!". They look and say: "These people either have little or no experimental evidence or they do have experimental evidence and it completely fails to support their conclusion. Whereas the mainstream theory has lots of expermental evidence that backs it up and makes testable predictions which are successfully saving people's lives." Admittedly many scientists do say "We should shun Duesberg", but that's a natural human reaction to someone who seems to have been instrumental in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, many of them children.
Sounds like a good sales pitch, but how would homomorphic encryption enable such an anonymous data-mining paradise?
Well partly by being effectively backdoored from the start. It seems unrealistic to believe there wouldn't be some sort of backdoor from the start to fix things when they break in the large, complex, inpenetrable data set. After things are pretty stable, the developers will be reluctant to get rid of the back door because of the large number of times they would have had to rebuild entirely from scratch if they didn't have the back door, and it will hang around forever. Mostly, however, there's the simple fact that, for it to be useful, the data has to come out somewhere. Like the front ends of pretty much every otherwise ironclad security system this well not only be completely vulnerable, but people will say: "There's all this useful data in here for research/marketing/random number seeds for bingo, and it's completely secure, so let's mine the data."
Also, on further reflection I think compression would in fact be necessary for secure encryption, probably starting with converting every DNA sequence to a diff from some standardized reference - otherwise you've got a database full of encrypted data where you know what 99.8% of the unencrypted data in each file is. Forget the 500x increase in necessary storage capacity, that's *got* to open a few gaping attack vectors.
A very good point. And a very big problem. The majority of the genome, everyone shares with each other. But there's plenty of stuff in there that exists in say 5% of the population. Unless you actually have an open database of patient data that you can mine to determine the majority of unique sequences out there, then even the heavily compressed version is still going to be full of duplicate sequences that exist in relatively small percentages of the population and overlapping with other sequences that are also duplicated across a small percentage of the population, etc.
Even with a billionfold performance penalty a desktop PC could probably perform at least a handful of tests in a timely fashion.
If that PC is slightly modified to be a trustworthy device with a proper security model, then there's no reason for the homomorphic encryption. The device can just decrypt the data first, then do every test necessary in a very timely fashion...
As for the lab, I suppose I was thinking more about inevitable attempts at corporate lock-in than actual necessity.
There... there you have have a very good point. This article screams of "force patients to store their DNA on your servers, but provide an argument that's reasonably convincing, even to security, experts that it's safe and secure and not subject to the complete sham that doctor/patient confidentiality has become in this day and age."
For security though... how many doctors have you dealt with on a personal level?
Lots. I currently work for a company that makes medical devices. Lots of clinical trial sites. Lots of opinions from doctors about exactly how things should work.
These aren't security professionals - their bains are already jam-packed full of random trivia about the human body, if something can go wrong security-wise it will.
Believe me, I know this very well by now. Many (not all) of these doctors are also pretty bad at mathematical concepts and sometimes some basic understanding of physical principles which I would have thought would be absolutely vital for them to understand in their specialties. Some manage this even while still being fairly brilliant. There are some in there who also clearly just mechanically worked their way through medical school. Regardless of where they fall on that spectrum, nearly all of them don't have the time or energy to do much worrying about security themselves.
Homomorphic encryption would simply cut down drastically on what can go wrong, in most cases at only minimal cost. Yes, the tests might be a billion times slower than they could be, but if they still only take five minutes then it's not much of a price to pay for drastically increased security around such sensitive information, no matter how much it may offend our purist sensibilities.
Pretty much useless in the fields I'm working in. For one thing, you have to understand that some of our devices produce datasets as big as the human genome in a single patient session, and those patients often have to go in for a lot of sessions. Also, as complicated as DNA itself is, most of the actual testing is going to be more or less of the form: read from position X; does it contain sequence Y? That's oversimplifying, I know, but it's broadly accurate. Analysis of just about any other medical dataset is going to be far more complicated. Where I'm working, there's no automated analysis. Doctors review the data and do diagnosis. Automated diagnostic tools are actually something we have on vague future roadmaps but they're not planned features of anything we're currently working on. They're also not really something that would appeal to 90% of the doctors we work with. Same is true in most of the medical industry. Either you need Doctors to review things, in which case you have to decrypt, or you're doing bioinformatics which is so computationally intensive that anything that would slow it down even a little would cause insane extra costs.
All that said, stored data should definitely be encrypted where practical. That's a no brainer. The cases where you can do anything useful with that data without actually decrypting it at some point are just very limited.
I think what they're really trying to sell in this article is saving everyone's data in a central repository where everyone's DNA could be mined for data without compromising their privacy. That's effectively impossible. The only way to do it would be to perform operations that examine the entire database to produce a sigle result. The required computing power/time would be astronomical under this model. Pretty much every other way of doing it allows you to narrow down a particular patients DNA and extract all kinds of identifying information. Enough, for example, for a three letter agency to compare against a sample of DNA they have on hand. Really, you can either make the system too difficult to do anything practical with and secure, or you can make it useful and insecure. Anything else is just a pipe dream or snake oil.
...this has nothing to do with the government. Nobody here is "the government" - it's just three private parties arguing over who's shit got posted to youtube.
Unless we're talking about the government that passed the DMCA into law, or that established copyright in the first place, or that runs the courts where this would go if they file a DMCA counter-claim. You could have made a valid point that copyright is also established in the constitution, however.
I've watched the videos. The problem is that they have lots of reasons to think that they can push a claim through some courts. That's not to say that they have a valid claim, but he modern yardstick is whether they can get some judge to buy it, not whether they're actually in the right. The video content of the first two videos is almost entirely footage from the video they're debunking. A lot of it is the same clips repeated multiple times and there's plenty of extra content in the form of a voice-over critiquing the whole thing, but the majority of the actual video and a decent amount of the audio comes from the other work. This is meant to be protected as the entire work is obviously a valid critical piece, rather than any sort of copy or attempt to plagiarize the original. The problem is, they still might be able to make an argument based on percentages and get a court to buy it. It would be a travesty of justice, but how often do travesties of justice _not_ happen in courts?
"Racist" is not a meaningless term. Yes, it is sometimes misapplied, but calling it meaningless in light of the whole of human history and the present day is a monumental mis-statement (to be kind about it).
There are several different alternative hypotheses, for instance Duesberg argues that HIV is harmless, a very weak virus that is found only in the blood of people experiencing immune collapse (for some other reason) because a healthy immune system wipes it out immediately. Just an opportunistic infection that can be used as a diagnostic.
On the other hand, the Perth group IIRC actually argues that there is no such thing as HIV at all. They challenge the claim that it's ever been properly isolated, and the best I recall they basically argue that what is being detected as HIV is simply cellular trash of a kind typical of an individual with severely compromised immunities.
So you believe which of those two contrary hypothoses? They can't both be right. Do you just add them together and say: "Well, they both think that the mainstream science that actually has a good handle on all of this must be wrong so, if both agree on that, then they must be right, even though their basic theories disagree in other respects"? Seriously? "Denialist" may be a slur word, but if it also accurately describes reasoning like that, it would seem to be justified.
First, PCR isn't a test, it's a technique for generating copies of DNA. It's used to amplify a sample of DNA for various reasons. One of those reasons may be to amplify a sample to make it easier to detect HIV RNA or transcripted DNA. As far as I know, it's not typically used in AIDs clinics. The expertise and equipment required is usually found in more sophisticated labs. Most clinics are going to be using simpler tests and sending out blood or referring patients if they need more sophisticated testing.
Dr Mullis is, indeed, widely credited with PCR, although his technique was just a refinement of a much earlier technique. It should be noted that he's quite public about his avid enjoyment of LSD along with his views that anthrogenic climate change isn't real, HIV doesn't cause AIDS, oh, and that the date of your birth can be used in conjunction with the current apparent position of the stars and planets to divine your personality and fate. Aside from making his own LSD, he's apparently invented plenty of his own psychoactive drugs and used himself as a human guinea pig. Now, I know it's usually an invalid assumption to criticize a person's science based on their personal life, but when their personal life involves heavy use of drugs that are known to have permanent mind altering effects, not to mention drugs with completely unknown effects, it might be wise to take extraordinary claims they make with a grain of salt. Especially when they've done no research in the actual field and are just expressing an opinion.
Dr. Duesburg did some interesting work on cancer. Apparently along with disputing that HIV causes AIDS, he also disputes the results of his own work. His most recent work on cancer is neither proven nor disproven. His views on AIDS is that it's a result of drug abuse and he appears to use no true Scotsman logic for every case where anyone who is clearly not a drug abuser (such as three year old girls) has AIDS. Duesburg played no small part in the policy decision by South Africa to withhold AIDS medications in South Africa. The death toll from that policy is approximately 330,000.
Rasnick performed unauthorized experiments in South Africa where he convinced AIDS patients not to take their antiretrovirals and to take vitamins instead. This was working with a business that, surprise, surprise, sells vitamin supplements. At least five died as a result. He's also been shown to have lied or misrepresented his affiliation with UC Berkley.
As for Dr Farmer... I'm not sure what Dr. Farmer you're talking about? Is it Paul Farmer? As far as I can tell, he has no Denialist views with regards to HIV, but does have views that the current drugs aren't enough and that more needs to be done in areas of the world where AIDS is pandemic socially, medically, politically, etc. You might have meant a different Dr. Farmer, however.
The ones from that list who are actual AIDS denialists seem to be in the minority. There are also plenty of scientists who had done a lot of research that these characters don't even bother to address who have come up with different conclusions. There's also plenty of emperical research that shows that HIV causes AIDS. Not to mention all the laboratory research done with non-human primates that shows that infection with the SIV retrovirus produces AIDS-like symptoms and kills the primates. Dr Duesberg insists that all retroviruses, not just HIV and related viruses, _can't_ kill and are completely harmless. The only way he could believe this without doing his own experiments is by covering his ears, closing his eyes and shouting "La, la, la, I can't hear you!"
There are some tests regarding allowing parents legal guardianship of their offspring. Generally speaking, if you let one die through total, idiotic negligence they take any others from you. Also, if you're too crazy to care for them and one dies due to that insanity, they take any others from you. Christina Maggiore breast-fed her daughter knowing that she (Christina) had been diagnosed as HIV-positive. She also didn't have her children vaccinated or tested for HIV or treated for HIV when seriously ill with the kind of symptoms you would expect from child onset AIDs. Despite being such a dangerous mother, she got to keep her other child who, hopefully, does not have AIDs.
It's not possible to find a single party line, but these are the most common beliefs AFAIK:
AIDS is caused by chemicals, big pharma, the government, the Bilderberg group, the Illuminati, space lizards, etc.
Having just watched the videos in question, one of the people interviewed in the videos they're debunking is Christina Maggiore. She is now dead and, at the time of shooting, her three year old daughter was already dead. Both are dead as a result of AIDs by competent medical accounts. She ran an organization: Alive and Well AIDs Alternatives, which was dedicated to convincing people not to test for AIDs or take antiretrovirals. In the case the death of her daughter (who was born from an AIDs infected mother not taking antiretrovirals and never given them, never tested and also not vaccinated for anything), she took her, for her pneumonia, to one of the board members of her organization, who prescribed her amoxicillin. When Christina herself was dying of pneumonia, she took various alternative medicines and apparently a "holistic cleanse". This is just background.
The weird bit is the causes of her daughter's death according to her and her denialist group and her own death according to the group. Their theory on the daughter's death, despite an autopsy confirming and AIDs related death, was an allergic reaction to Amoxicillin. Their theories on her death included a toxic alternative medication or "holistic cleanse". So... yeah. According to the AIDs-denialist nuts, the causes of death were probably the alternatives they sought out rather than going with proper medicine (not to knock amoxicillin, it might have actually been useful in conjunction with actual AIDS treatment).
The main attack you can make on the practicality of this system is that it evisions encrypting the information on one server and then sending it out to another server to perform operations on it. If a test that takes.2 seconds is a billion times slower than it needs to be, that means that any garden variety computer can perform that test very, very quickly. You can use a fancy encryption method that may already be broken to send out the DNA to some virtual "lab" as if you were sending out a blood sample, or you can just do it more securely locally. Store it with a proven encyption method, then download it to a standalone machine with a custom network port only designed to receive encrypted DNA sequences from the server and some method to receive updated programs (maybe through flash drives), but that can't be compromised because it can never send out information on the network. That would actually be more secure.
What's being advertised in this article is a solution looking for a problem.
Though of course it probably also means that the NIH database will require thousands of times the storage capacity since de-duplication can't be applied to the massive genetic overlap between individuals.
The human genome is what? About 1.5 Gigabytes? That's a lot of data, but far from unmanageable. Store two copies for redundancy and you have 3 Gigabytes. Let's round down a bit and say you can get 600 people's DNA onto 2 TB worth of drives. Let's say you pay $120 per terabyte, then you're paying 20 cents per patient for two copies. Of course, this will be enterprise class storage for medical purposes, so let's say $4 per patient. Not exactly bank-breaking. Anyway, you haven't presented any good reason why you couldn't compress based on the parts of the genome that everyone has in common when you create the sequence in the first place, bringing the costs down to a few cents per patient for storage. Just because the sequences are all stored encrypted doesn't mean you couldn't apply such compression. The homomorphic calculations required might become more difficult because of it, but there's no evidence of that yet.
Of course, this is all moot since this is an article about a commercial company trying to sell a solution to a problem no-one has. The simple fact is, there's no rational reason to send out DNA from a set of servers for testing. Just do it locally. None of the tests you're going to want to do on it are all that computationally expensive (unless you're performing them on homomorphically encrypted data). If you need it encrypted on the local machine for patient privacy, then encrypt it, but have a local medical appliance where you can download it, decrypt it, then display results. Buld the appliance with no network functionality except through a custom one-way (except for control signals for error correction, etc.) port. Seriously, what would ever be the reason to have to send out data to a "lab" for results as if it were a biological sample?
If you were going to build an appliance for something like this, there's also no good reason it couldn't be a cheap device the patient keeps for themselves with 8 GB of storage and a cheap processor and a cheap screen and a some way to download analysis programs and upload results for those so inclined. Something like that could be made for mass production for $50 a piece. Well, I suppose the "good" reason would be that it would be considered a medical device and would have to be more like $5000 per unit. So scratch that idea.
In any case, it's not as if this scheme actually would be secure. Attacks have already been demonstrated on such encryption methods that could reveal details about the data being processed. Also, the results of all relevant medical information from the DNA would likely be pretty personally identifying anyway, and would need to be read out somewhere. Unless you really did have a special appliance for readout of results, the system could be easily compromised by any determined party.
How certain we are of things has to ultimately come down to probability. That's true of everything, even the supposedly direct evidence of our senses. If there's a very high probability that we've found a hidden message, then we've probably found a hidden message. The conclusions we could draw from that are many and varied but, unless someone just forgot to carry the 1, it would be a very profound discovery. Whether it's really a hidden message, or a fundamental flaw in math itself, or some sort of hole in our perceptions that stops us from seeing our mistake (the second two could still just be a way for some intelligence with control over everythign to hide a message, of course), we would have to proceed based on what's most likely. Sure, people get struck by lightning and win the lottery, but rational people still go through life under the assumption that they're not going to win the lottery or be struck by lightning (provided they don't enjoy standing on hilltops in thunderstorms wearing wet copper armor and screaming "all gods are bastards", to paraphrase Terry Pratchett.
Interesting that you think that industrial espionage performed by US spy agencies is not worthy of whistleblowing. It's a crime against the people of those nations. Quite aside from that, even if you take a US exceptionalist stance on this, who exactly do you think benefits in the US? Is it everyone? Or is it just cronies? Does the insider information revealed to select parties financially harm other parties in the US who have a financial interest in the outcome? There's a global finance system out there. If insider information is being given to some parties who use it to gain an advantage to the detriment of an Indonesian company, what about US investors in that Indonesian company? When exactly did such outright criminality become so easily accepted by the public at large?
This is what a spy would do, release and reveal government spying operations against other non allied nations.
Actually, I'm pretty sure what a spy would do would be to secretly reveal such information to handlers. A fairly critical distinction. Also I'm a little unclear on the mindset where spying is simultaneously no big deal and something everyone does but every accused spy gets a torrent of frothing at the mouth hatred. If spying is no big deal, why does the US want to jail and prosecute spies?
Your scenario needs something extra. Perhaps you're using some personal item of theirs in the act? Perhaps they're a neighbor and, in order to get it, you would have had to break into their home, then break into some additional private space. Or, perhaps, they didn't walk in on you. Perhaps they were enjoying some private time with their partner and they looked up to see you lounging in a chair in their bedroom, one hand holding a video camera, the other... well, you know. That's still not quite enough though. In addition, when you demand to know what they're doing and that they stop right away, they demand that you ignore them and keep doing what you're doing or they'll have you arrested. Also, they'll have you arrested if you tell anyone what they were doing. That fits a little better.
You know, that would be a great sketch for a sketch comedy show. I haven't really watched any in years. I imagine most sketch comedy shows these days are effectively barred from criticizing heroic organizations like the NSA by corporate policy.
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I'm not sure about all of these cars, but I remember from the discussion on one of the earliest of these cases that it wasn't actually possible to stop the car in motion. I think that one was supposed to have a solenoid that actually locked the electronic key in place.
Did they also discover a flaw in the brakes such that they could not overcome the engine power? This was the point of the parent post, I think. Modern cars have sufficient braking force to completely stop the engine even at full throttle
Is this definitely always the case? Under all conditions? There's a huge difference, for example, between holding down the brake while stopped and gunning the engine and slamming on the brake while already travelling 70 miles an hour with the engine similarly gunning. Static vs Dynamic friction for one thing. Not to mention brake exhaustion due to overheating. The pads and rotors heat up and the physical properties of both change, the rotors can warp, moisture can flash into steam and create a nearly frictionless layer, the properties of the brake fluid change, making it less efficient as a hydraulic fluid or possibly even vaporize. Coming to a dead stop once is probably not enough to do that, but if the accelerator goes crazy on the highway, people aren't going to suddenly stop. They will use the brakes to slow down, heating them up while they try to figure out what to actually do, where to pull over, etc. The brakes can heat up very quickly doing that.
Why would an honest individual put in a back door in the encryption for "testing"? Just test with data you have the key to.
It doesn't take a dishonest individual. It's just fairly typical in such situations. It depends on who's actually in charge and if they run into problems.
Consider that the US nuclear launch codes were 00000000 for two decades. Consider that something like 30 billion dollars a day is spent in credit/debit card transactions based using a system with effectively _no_ security. Consider the failing grade nearly all large organizations receive pretty much every time they are audited for security. Even when their job is security, most organizations end up using short-term pragmatist modes of thought, and wait until things break before they fix it.
And how can things "break" within an immutable data file?
When it's new and not fully understood and the problems that will crop up when it's massively scaled haven't ben encountered yet and the code is new and buggy.
When's the last time you saw a "broken" bitmap or text file that wasn't due to either a failed creation (probably not worth fixing), or corruption of the transmission or storage medium that can be solved with an error-correcting wrapper around the securely encrypted data?
About 9 hours ago. Technically the file was undamaged, just transformed in way that's normal for the software, but it was still unreadable because the metadata regarding that file in a database disagreed about what transformations it had gone through. Something did go wrong, but it wasn't due to failed creation or corruption during transmission or storage. It was a bug that the file and the database were allowed to be in disagreement, but these things happen when the software isn't infallible.
Honestly, I don't see overlap within a subset of the individual genetic data as being a problem, you just need to make sure there's enough variation in the data that the known contents don't poison the encryption and allow nefarious access to the rest.
Might be, might not be. Depends on other conditions. For example: Someone does a study on an ethnic group that effectively all have certain genetic details in common and, after the study is done, the sequences from that group get added to the broader collection in one big dump. That very well may be exploitable and lead to other opportunities.
Maybe I'm being way too pessimistic. I've just been disappointed far too many times by the intersection of systems that should be secure with politics/greed/stupidity/arrogance/carelessness and other aspects of reality.
A foot higher in elevation (not distance), yes. Over 100 years.
...
You aren't picturing the fact that structures are generally built much higher above a beach than that, if only because of storm surges and the like
Yes, that's what I thought. You're looking at a contour map and saying: "one foot of sea-level rise brings the high tide mark from point A to point B." You're completely ignoring the realities of what even a small increase in water level will do to the dynamics of the ocean and to a coastline. Also, at this point, 1 foot over a century is looking like a best case scenario.
But someone would have to be insane to build something near enough to the ocean where a foot mattered much anyway.
You're just picturing the high tide mark moving a foot higher up the beach, aren't you. How did you get modded +5?
A joke:
A physicist, a mathemetician and an engineer are put in a hallway. At the end of the hallway is an extremely attractive member of whatever gender happens to appeal to each of them. They are told that, if they can reach the person at the end of the hallway, they can do whatever they want with them. However, they can only advance down the hallway in increments of the remaining distance. The physicist and the mathematician give up right away, knowing that the task is impossible. The engineer starts immediately, knowing that it's possible to get close enough for all practical purposes.
Some of them might be practicing medicine without a license. Beyond that, it would not be a good thing to make a habit of stifling free speech in that way. Those in direct care of minors such as parents and doctors, however, should face some sort of sanction. Maggiore supposedly got off because she was considered non-negligent because she consulted multiple physicians. The thing is, the reason she consulted multiple physicians was to find one who would echo what she wanted to hear.
Yes, technically PCR is a technique to amplify the signal to allow detection via a test that would otherwise not be sensitive enough. If Mullins believes that it can also amplify noise to create a false signal, that opinion would certainly be well within his professional competence, as well as a statement against his own interest, no?
PCR doesn't create DNA that isn't already there. It takes what's there and makes more of it. It won't make viral DNA magically appear if it's not there in the first place.
"Now, I know it's usually an invalid assumption to criticize a person's science based on their personal life"
If you know that then why did you bother wasting an entire paragraph doing just that? I dont care what these people do in their free time, what I care about is the integrity of science.
I answered that question in the very same (admittedly run-on) sentence you quoted. Your apparent confusion sems disingenuous. Basically I said that one exception to the rule is when their personal life involves doing things that can literally drive you insane. If someone is actually insane, that might be a valid reason to take their wild hypotheses with a grain of salt. If they actually present good experimental data then it doesn't matter if, in their spare time, they're drilling holes in their head to let the gods in. When they have no good experimental data and are basically just making sophist proclamations, then it does matter if they're insane.
As for the integrity of science, you have a strange way of showing your concern for it.
"Dr. Duesburg did some interesting work on cancer. Apparently along with disputing that HIV causes AIDS, he also disputes the results of his own work"
You say that like it's a bad thing, when in reality it is a mark of a real scientist to remain skeptical even of ones own work.
_You_ were the one making an argument from authority using these people. It's not unreasonable for me, in light of that, to discuss their actual scientific track record.
Really, it's almost like you WANT me to believe you are arguing in bad faith.
That's just pathetic. You're the one who, just a few paragraphs back, quoted a sentence fragment out of context in order to attack a straw man. After that little piece of rhetorical garbage, you have some nerve.
"So you believe which of those two contrary hypothoses?" [sic]
Neither, of course.
A scientific mind does not function on 'belief.'
Oh please, spare me the pointless semantic games. 'belief' and 'religious belief' are not the same thing. All minds function on belief, scientific or not. The scientific mind just does its best to have rational beliefs based on emperical evidence where possible. When I talk about believing one theory over another, critical assesment is implicit in my understanding of the term belief. You can pretend that the two theories you mention are somehow valid alternatives to the prevailing theory. Way back in the 80s, you would have had an argument. You could lay out a whole list of experments and observations required before picking one over the other. The simple fact is, since then, those experiments have been done. The evidence says that HIV exists. It's been observed through a number of different imaging methods again and again and again. Its been watched infecting cells, then budding off from those cells in waves of virus particles.The probability of all these observations being wrong is fantastically low. This puts the "Perth Group" you mentioned firmly into "requires extraordinary proof" category.
Duesberg is only marginally better. His theories about the harmlessness of HIV, and retroviruses in general, appear ridiculous in light of all of the animal experiments and observations of human infection over the decades.
Whether or not there is ultimately any truth to the criticisms and countercriticisms is really secondary to me.
Yikes. Why are you even bothering to discuss this then?
What interests me the most is the way that supposedly scientific institutions devolve into exactly the same sort of relationships and behavior that we expect from religious institutions - the way that what should be a scientific theory comes to be viewed more like a religious creed, and scientific skepticism comes to be seen as heresy.
Except that's really, really not what's going on here. The denialists typically either just plain don't have an alternate theory or have a lack of any real evidence for their theory. Scientists don't look at this and say: "These people are heretics and we must shun them!". They look and say: "These people either have little or no experimental evidence or they do have experimental evidence and it completely fails to support their conclusion. Whereas the mainstream theory has lots of expermental evidence that backs it up and makes testable predictions which are successfully saving people's lives." Admittedly many scientists do say "We should shun Duesberg", but that's a natural human reaction to someone who seems to have been instrumental in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, many of them children.
Sounds like a good sales pitch, but how would homomorphic encryption enable such an anonymous data-mining paradise?
Well partly by being effectively backdoored from the start. It seems unrealistic to believe there wouldn't be some sort of backdoor from the start to fix things when they break in the large, complex, inpenetrable data set. After things are pretty stable, the developers will be reluctant to get rid of the back door because of the large number of times they would have had to rebuild entirely from scratch if they didn't have the back door, and it will hang around forever. Mostly, however, there's the simple fact that, for it to be useful, the data has to come out somewhere. Like the front ends of pretty much every otherwise ironclad security system this well not only be completely vulnerable, but people will say: "There's all this useful data in here for research/marketing/random number seeds for bingo, and it's completely secure, so let's mine the data."
Also, on further reflection I think compression would in fact be necessary for secure encryption, probably starting with converting every DNA sequence to a diff from some standardized reference - otherwise you've got a database full of encrypted data where you know what 99.8% of the unencrypted data in each file is. Forget the 500x increase in necessary storage capacity, that's *got* to open a few gaping attack vectors.
A very good point. And a very big problem. The majority of the genome, everyone shares with each other. But there's plenty of stuff in there that exists in say 5% of the population. Unless you actually have an open database of patient data that you can mine to determine the majority of unique sequences out there, then even the heavily compressed version is still going to be full of duplicate sequences that exist in relatively small percentages of the population and overlapping with other sequences that are also duplicated across a small percentage of the population, etc.
Even with a billionfold performance penalty a desktop PC could probably perform at least a handful of tests in a timely fashion.
If that PC is slightly modified to be a trustworthy device with a proper security model, then there's no reason for the homomorphic encryption. The device can just decrypt the data first, then do every test necessary in a very timely fashion...
As for the lab, I suppose I was thinking more about inevitable attempts at corporate lock-in than actual necessity.
There... there you have have a very good point. This article screams of "force patients to store their DNA on your servers, but provide an argument that's reasonably convincing, even to security, experts that it's safe and secure and not subject to the complete sham that doctor/patient confidentiality has become in this day and age."
For security though... how many doctors have you dealt with on a personal level?
Lots. I currently work for a company that makes medical devices. Lots of clinical trial sites. Lots of opinions from doctors about exactly how things should work.
These aren't security professionals - their bains are already jam-packed full of random trivia about the human body, if something can go wrong security-wise it will.
Believe me, I know this very well by now. Many (not all) of these doctors are also pretty bad at mathematical concepts and sometimes some basic understanding of physical principles which I would have thought would be absolutely vital for them to understand in their specialties. Some manage this even while still being fairly brilliant. There are some in there who also clearly just mechanically worked their way through medical school. Regardless of where they fall on that spectrum, nearly all of them don't have the time or energy to do much worrying about security themselves.
Homomorphic encryption would simply cut down drastically on what can go wrong, in most cases at only minimal cost. Yes, the tests might be a billion times slower than they could be, but if they still only take five minutes then it's not much of a price to pay for drastically increased security around such sensitive information, no matter how much it may offend our purist sensibilities.
Pretty much useless in the fields I'm working in. For one thing, you have to understand that some of our devices produce datasets as big as the human genome in a single patient session, and those patients often have to go in for a lot of sessions. Also, as complicated as DNA itself is, most of the actual testing is going to be more or less of the form: read from position X; does it contain sequence Y? That's oversimplifying, I know, but it's broadly accurate. Analysis of just about any other medical dataset is going to be far more complicated. Where I'm working, there's no automated analysis. Doctors review the data and do diagnosis. Automated diagnostic tools are actually something we have on vague future roadmaps but they're not planned features of anything we're currently working on. They're also not really something that would appeal to 90% of the doctors we work with. Same is true in most of the medical industry. Either you need Doctors to review things, in which case you have to decrypt, or you're doing bioinformatics which is so computationally intensive that anything that would slow it down even a little would cause insane extra costs.
All that said, stored data should definitely be encrypted where practical. That's a no brainer. The cases where you can do anything useful with that data without actually decrypting it at some point are just very limited.
I think what they're really trying to sell in this article is saving everyone's data in a central repository where everyone's DNA could be mined for data without compromising their privacy. That's effectively impossible. The only way to do it would be to perform operations that examine the entire database to produce a sigle result. The required computing power/time would be astronomical under this model. Pretty much every other way of doing it allows you to narrow down a particular patients DNA and extract all kinds of identifying information. Enough, for example, for a three letter agency to compare against a sample of DNA they have on hand. Really, you can either make the system too difficult to do anything practical with and secure, or you can make it useful and insecure. Anything else is just a pipe dream or snake oil.
...this has nothing to do with the government. Nobody here is "the government" - it's just three private parties arguing over who's shit got posted to youtube.
Unless we're talking about the government that passed the DMCA into law, or that established copyright in the first place, or that runs the courts where this would go if they file a DMCA counter-claim. You could have made a valid point that copyright is also established in the constitution, however.
I've watched the videos. The problem is that they have lots of reasons to think that they can push a claim through some courts. That's not to say that they have a valid claim, but he modern yardstick is whether they can get some judge to buy it, not whether they're actually in the right. The video content of the first two videos is almost entirely footage from the video they're debunking. A lot of it is the same clips repeated multiple times and there's plenty of extra content in the form of a voice-over critiquing the whole thing, but the majority of the actual video and a decent amount of the audio comes from the other work. This is meant to be protected as the entire work is obviously a valid critical piece, rather than any sort of copy or attempt to plagiarize the original. The problem is, they still might be able to make an argument based on percentages and get a court to buy it. It would be a travesty of justice, but how often do travesties of justice _not_ happen in courts?
"Racist" is not a meaningless term. Yes, it is sometimes misapplied, but calling it meaningless in light of the whole of human history and the present day is a monumental mis-statement (to be kind about it).
There are several different alternative hypotheses, for instance Duesberg argues that HIV is harmless, a very weak virus that is found only in the blood of people experiencing immune collapse (for some other reason) because a healthy immune system wipes it out immediately. Just an opportunistic infection that can be used as a diagnostic.
On the other hand, the Perth group IIRC actually argues that there is no such thing as HIV at all. They challenge the claim that it's ever been properly isolated, and the best I recall they basically argue that what is being detected as HIV is simply cellular trash of a kind typical of an individual with severely compromised immunities.
So you believe which of those two contrary hypothoses? They can't both be right. Do you just add them together and say: "Well, they both think that the mainstream science that actually has a good handle on all of this must be wrong so, if both agree on that, then they must be right, even though their basic theories disagree in other respects"? Seriously? "Denialist" may be a slur word, but if it also accurately describes reasoning like that, it would seem to be justified.
First, PCR isn't a test, it's a technique for generating copies of DNA. It's used to amplify a sample of DNA for various reasons. One of those reasons may be to amplify a sample to make it easier to detect HIV RNA or transcripted DNA. As far as I know, it's not typically used in AIDs clinics. The expertise and equipment required is usually found in more sophisticated labs. Most clinics are going to be using simpler tests and sending out blood or referring patients if they need more sophisticated testing.
Dr Mullis is, indeed, widely credited with PCR, although his technique was just a refinement of a much earlier technique. It should be noted that he's quite public about his avid enjoyment of LSD along with his views that anthrogenic climate change isn't real, HIV doesn't cause AIDS, oh, and that the date of your birth can be used in conjunction with the current apparent position of the stars and planets to divine your personality and fate. Aside from making his own LSD, he's apparently invented plenty of his own psychoactive drugs and used himself as a human guinea pig. Now, I know it's usually an invalid assumption to criticize a person's science based on their personal life, but when their personal life involves heavy use of drugs that are known to have permanent mind altering effects, not to mention drugs with completely unknown effects, it might be wise to take extraordinary claims they make with a grain of salt. Especially when they've done no research in the actual field and are just expressing an opinion.
Dr. Duesburg did some interesting work on cancer. Apparently along with disputing that HIV causes AIDS, he also disputes the results of his own work. His most recent work on cancer is neither proven nor disproven. His views on AIDS is that it's a result of drug abuse and he appears to use no true Scotsman logic for every case where anyone who is clearly not a drug abuser (such as three year old girls) has AIDS. Duesburg played no small part in the policy decision by South Africa to withhold AIDS medications in South Africa. The death toll from that policy is approximately 330,000.
Rasnick performed unauthorized experiments in South Africa where he convinced AIDS patients not to take their antiretrovirals and to take vitamins instead. This was working with a business that, surprise, surprise, sells vitamin supplements. At least five died as a result. He's also been shown to have lied or misrepresented his affiliation with UC Berkley.
As for Dr Farmer... I'm not sure what Dr. Farmer you're talking about? Is it Paul Farmer? As far as I can tell, he has no Denialist views with regards to HIV, but does have views that the current drugs aren't enough and that more needs to be done in areas of the world where AIDS is pandemic socially, medically, politically, etc. You might have meant a different Dr. Farmer, however.
The ones from that list who are actual AIDS denialists seem to be in the minority. There are also plenty of scientists who had done a lot of research that these characters don't even bother to address who have come up with different conclusions. There's also plenty of emperical research that shows that HIV causes AIDS. Not to mention all the laboratory research done with non-human primates that shows that infection with the SIV retrovirus produces AIDS-like symptoms and kills the primates. Dr Duesberg insists that all retroviruses, not just HIV and related viruses, _can't_ kill and are completely harmless. The only way he could believe this without doing his own experiments is by covering his ears, closing his eyes and shouting "La, la, la, I can't hear you!"
There are some tests regarding allowing parents legal guardianship of their offspring. Generally speaking, if you let one die through total, idiotic negligence they take any others from you. Also, if you're too crazy to care for them and one dies due to that insanity, they take any others from you. Christina Maggiore breast-fed her daughter knowing that she (Christina) had been diagnosed as HIV-positive. She also didn't have her children vaccinated or tested for HIV or treated for HIV when seriously ill with the kind of symptoms you would expect from child onset AIDs. Despite being such a dangerous mother, she got to keep her other child who, hopefully, does not have AIDs.
It's not possible to find a single party line, but these are the most common beliefs AFAIK:
AIDS is caused by chemicals, big pharma, the government, the Bilderberg group, the Illuminati, space lizards, etc.
Having just watched the videos in question, one of the people interviewed in the videos they're debunking is Christina Maggiore. She is now dead and, at the time of shooting, her three year old daughter was already dead. Both are dead as a result of AIDs by competent medical accounts. She ran an organization: Alive and Well AIDs Alternatives, which was dedicated to convincing people not to test for AIDs or take antiretrovirals. In the case the death of her daughter (who was born from an AIDs infected mother not taking antiretrovirals and never given them, never tested and also not vaccinated for anything), she took her, for her pneumonia, to one of the board members of her organization, who prescribed her amoxicillin. When Christina herself was dying of pneumonia, she took various alternative medicines and apparently a "holistic cleanse". This is just background.
The weird bit is the causes of her daughter's death according to her and her denialist group and her own death according to the group. Their theory on the daughter's death, despite an autopsy confirming and AIDs related death, was an allergic reaction to Amoxicillin. Their theories on her death included a toxic alternative medication or "holistic cleanse". So... yeah. According to the AIDs-denialist nuts, the causes of death were probably the alternatives they sought out rather than going with proper medicine (not to knock amoxicillin, it might have actually been useful in conjunction with actual AIDS treatment).
The main attack you can make on the practicality of this system is that it evisions encrypting the information on one server and then sending it out to another server to perform operations on it. If a test that takes .2 seconds is a billion times slower than it needs to be, that means that any garden variety computer can perform that test very, very quickly. You can use a fancy encryption method that may already be broken to send out the DNA to some virtual "lab" as if you were sending out a blood sample, or you can just do it more securely locally. Store it with a proven encyption method, then download it to a standalone machine with a custom network port only designed to receive encrypted DNA sequences from the server and some method to receive updated programs (maybe through flash drives), but that can't be compromised because it can never send out information on the network. That would actually be more secure.
What's being advertised in this article is a solution looking for a problem.
Though of course it probably also means that the NIH database will require thousands of times the storage capacity since de-duplication can't be applied to the massive genetic overlap between individuals.
The human genome is what? About 1.5 Gigabytes? That's a lot of data, but far from unmanageable. Store two copies for redundancy and you have 3 Gigabytes. Let's round down a bit and say you can get 600 people's DNA onto 2 TB worth of drives. Let's say you pay $120 per terabyte, then you're paying 20 cents per patient for two copies. Of course, this will be enterprise class storage for medical purposes, so let's say $4 per patient. Not exactly bank-breaking. Anyway, you haven't presented any good reason why you couldn't compress based on the parts of the genome that everyone has in common when you create the sequence in the first place, bringing the costs down to a few cents per patient for storage. Just because the sequences are all stored encrypted doesn't mean you couldn't apply such compression. The homomorphic calculations required might become more difficult because of it, but there's no evidence of that yet.
Of course, this is all moot since this is an article about a commercial company trying to sell a solution to a problem no-one has. The simple fact is, there's no rational reason to send out DNA from a set of servers for testing. Just do it locally. None of the tests you're going to want to do on it are all that computationally expensive (unless you're performing them on homomorphically encrypted data). If you need it encrypted on the local machine for patient privacy, then encrypt it, but have a local medical appliance where you can download it, decrypt it, then display results. Buld the appliance with no network functionality except through a custom one-way (except for control signals for error correction, etc.) port. Seriously, what would ever be the reason to have to send out data to a "lab" for results as if it were a biological sample?
If you were going to build an appliance for something like this, there's also no good reason it couldn't be a cheap device the patient keeps for themselves with 8 GB of storage and a cheap processor and a cheap screen and a some way to download analysis programs and upload results for those so inclined. Something like that could be made for mass production for $50 a piece. Well, I suppose the "good" reason would be that it would be considered a medical device and would have to be more like $5000 per unit. So scratch that idea.
In any case, it's not as if this scheme actually would be secure. Attacks have already been demonstrated on such encryption methods that could reveal details about the data being processed. Also, the results of all relevant medical information from the DNA would likely be pretty personally identifying anyway, and would need to be read out somewhere. Unless you really did have a special appliance for readout of results, the system could be easily compromised by any determined party.
How certain we are of things has to ultimately come down to probability. That's true of everything, even the supposedly direct evidence of our senses. If there's a very high probability that we've found a hidden message, then we've probably found a hidden message. The conclusions we could draw from that are many and varied but, unless someone just forgot to carry the 1, it would be a very profound discovery. Whether it's really a hidden message, or a fundamental flaw in math itself, or some sort of hole in our perceptions that stops us from seeing our mistake (the second two could still just be a way for some intelligence with control over everythign to hide a message, of course), we would have to proceed based on what's most likely. Sure, people get struck by lightning and win the lottery, but rational people still go through life under the assumption that they're not going to win the lottery or be struck by lightning (provided they don't enjoy standing on hilltops in thunderstorms wearing wet copper armor and screaming "all gods are bastards", to paraphrase Terry Pratchett.
Interesting that you think that industrial espionage performed by US spy agencies is not worthy of whistleblowing. It's a crime against the people of those nations. Quite aside from that, even if you take a US exceptionalist stance on this, who exactly do you think benefits in the US? Is it everyone? Or is it just cronies? Does the insider information revealed to select parties financially harm other parties in the US who have a financial interest in the outcome? There's a global finance system out there. If insider information is being given to some parties who use it to gain an advantage to the detriment of an Indonesian company, what about US investors in that Indonesian company? When exactly did such outright criminality become so easily accepted by the public at large?
This is what a spy would do, release and reveal government spying operations against other non allied nations.
Actually, I'm pretty sure what a spy would do would be to secretly reveal such information to handlers. A fairly critical distinction. Also I'm a little unclear on the mindset where spying is simultaneously no big deal and something everyone does but every accused spy gets a torrent of frothing at the mouth hatred. If spying is no big deal, why does the US want to jail and prosecute spies?
Your scenario needs something extra. Perhaps you're using some personal item of theirs in the act? Perhaps they're a neighbor and, in order to get it, you would have had to break into their home, then break into some additional private space. Or, perhaps, they didn't walk in on you. Perhaps they were enjoying some private time with their partner and they looked up to see you lounging in a chair in their bedroom, one hand holding a video camera, the other... well, you know. That's still not quite enough though. In addition, when you demand to know what they're doing and that they stop right away, they demand that you ignore them and keep doing what you're doing or they'll have you arrested. Also, they'll have you arrested if you tell anyone what they were doing. That fits a little better.
You know, that would be a great sketch for a sketch comedy show. I haven't really watched any in years. I imagine most sketch comedy shows these days are effectively barred from criticizing heroic organizations like the NSA by corporate policy.