I was just this morning taking a security course required by my employer where they were stressing the importance of securing the supply chain.
Oh and by-the-way, I think there must be some kind of quantum nature to all these exploits. And maybe if we would just stop looking for them, they would not come into existence at all and their eigenvalues would remain undefined. Worth a shot.
Autonomous vehicles. To which you can already marry any of the open-sourced machine learning/AI frameworks. To which you can include any of the open-source face recognition frameworks. To which you can bolt any number of off-the-shelf AR-15s. To which you can add your own 3D-printed ammunition feeder connected to a 3D-printer continuous belt of off-the-shelf 7mm rounds.
So for the cost of a '65 Mustang, some HP servers and a trip to Walmart for the weapons and ammo, just about anyone (least of all a nation with a defense budget) could roll a roving hunter/killer that could murder its way across just about any urban landscape, until it ran out of bullets or gas. I'd put the cost at about $10k each, cheaper at scale.
I'm reasonably certain something just like this is already in testing.
Add to that, AWS is still trying to find a way into the corporate datacenter, which Cisco kinda sorta owns outright. AWS needs Cisco as a partner, at least for a few more years. But in a decade I wouldn't assume any or all of the above is still the case.
The headline is misleading. They just wanted to focus on a 25% that seemed structurally important and therefore "hard", but the next 25% is also "structural" for advanced democracies whose citizens, for example, enjoy their morning latte with a newspaper before catching a cab to work in a highrise office tower, and the remaining 50% is "structural" for global corporations needing to make quarterly growth targets. Maybe in all that you could arm-twist a total 10% that is not important enough to some stakeholder that they wouldn't deliberatively implode the global economy as punishment for touching their important shit, but honestly the other 90% represents a set of sacred cows that nobody is going to molest until there is sea water sloshing around feet deep at the intersection of Wall Street and Broadway in Manhattan. Until then, all searches for a solution will have been an illusion.
The target emitter sources mentioned here are a small part of the problem for developed nations. Unless you can imagine giving up a lot of the lifestyle perks enjoyed in the West, you really cannot find a way to shift something like 75% of current greenhouse gas emissions. That's why the IPPC recommendations and Paris Accords rely on this thing they call "negative emissions" never quite spelled out. Basically, a kind of magic that will remove CO2 not being removed already by the ocean or by land plants. There are a few theoretical ways to accomplish that, but they won't scale without either massive global coordination, or novel sources of non-carbon-based energy inputs to drive them, or both. And even then, you have to "make it work" for nearly longer than the human world has existed, something on the order of 5-10,000 years. The US couldn't even stay signed onto the (almost meaningless) Paris Accords for more than a single election cycle, hard to imagine coordinated global effort spanning thousands of years, isn't it? Actually, it's not hard it's impossible to imagine. LSD works here. Without the copious consumption of LSD I don't see how we imagine a way to reduce even 25% least of all 75%, and let's not even start in with 100% reduction, being the only thing will save us.
At this point, there have been so many "leaks" (whatever the fuck that means) of PI that we have reached a point where there simply is NO remaining PI for anyone older than 18 months old. It's all out there now. Everything about you is in the wild, including things you didn't know about yourself. Everyone now lives in a fishbowl. Get used to it.
I have a modest proposal. To even the playing field (and to make hoarding PI no longer profitable) there ought to be a national database of all our PI that has an open API for anyone wants to access, at any time. Period. One and done. "Securing" PI would then be a form of theft, a felony. Anyone caught collecting and storing PI outside the public domain would be arrested for information crimes (espionage) and if convicted, thrown in prison.
Amazon eventually has something similar planned for Alexa, where casually spoken words (not directed at Alexa) will do exactly the same thing. The trend here is that any device in your vicinity (not even your own home, anywhere at all) can be triggered by any kind of sound (voice or ads, audible or not) to turn on your phone and record other conversation, or maybe to direct your phone web client to an online ad or retailer.
I suggest the mechanism by which we (in the West, at least) enjoy the wealth, comfort and plenty in which we live, as compared to the poverty, hardship and scarcity in which our ancestors lived, is not because of science per se but because of easy access to fossil fuels. I am a field Biologist, and I am the first to admit to this reality. We've come a long way indeed, but primarily because we secured for ourselves a lot more free energy to play with than the ones came before us.
That era may be ending. I don't know how much wealth, comfort etc we can count on going forward. A very few of us can I suppose, I predict the vast majority will be happy to survive at all with the simple tools, classic machines and coarse foods that sustained us for most of the time modern humans have traversed the planet.
Parsimony probably wins this one; positing that "space travel is dangerous" requires 1) life on other worlds, that 2) advance to the point of recognizing "space" and then 3) develop machines of a complexity to fly in any manner at all, and then 4) decide that "space flight" sounds cool, and that they 5) find a way to do that, while not 6) at the same time wrecking themselves with some other marvelous machine they made, such that 7) they reach space and venture anywhere beyond low orbit, enough to 8) be murdered by space with enough frequency and reliability to 9) decide to just not go there at all ever again.
There is a much higher probability and superior simplicity assuming that 1) apart from the Earth there is no planet-sized object in the universe capable of supporting life. Period.
That nobody ever thinks this way is given. That the universe gives no shits at all what anyone thinks is also given.
All this excitement, I know what you're thinking, and you apes need to start taking better care of what is likely the only planet in the entire universe capable of supporting life.
"Crispr-on-demand" is going to become a very crowded play. China will dominate, as they will dominate in AI. Your best bet is to come up with a good product, and sell into a larger company. Take your $700K in tradable stock options (that's what I did) and get out.
I'm writing a novel based on some of the reported advances. I started it 20 years ago, as a grad student in biology with an interest in computers. I gave up biology and now I'm a software engineer, I return to writing my novel once in a while for relaxation. My novel covers some of the same ground as the news, over the years I have steadily watched my "fiction" slowly become "fact", so now I tell people I really have to get the thing published before it becomes less like speculation, and more like an industry blog.
I will reveal this. The technology in my novel ends up watching humans drive themselves to extinction, then simply steps into our position as apex species without skipping a beat. History never records that change. Be careful what you long for.
I wonder if all this is a reaction to the Chinese building so many chips for US domestic consumption, and that process coming under scrutiny as a security threat as well as due to IP theft and corporate espionage. Huawei just today got out of the US networking space because of US gov warnings against buying their kit on national security grounds, but the same should eventually apply to buying chips and chipsets fabbed in China.
Controlling your chip design is a good first step toward making sure there is nothing in there you didn't want. The next step of course is fabbing that chip yourself under highly controlled conditions. You keep your initial design direction under your hat, and you have some confidence that nothing else was introduced somewhere in the burn-to-silicon steps.
That particular shit storm has been brewing for a decade. Part of the faster-better-stronger globalist narrative that supported off-shoring of critical industrial and IP practices may be beginning to fall apart.
I didn't mention pensions because in the US those have been gone (except for government workers) for longer than most workers have been alive. But yes I agree, it just makes it worse. I again blame corporate actors for that, they didn't want the long-term liability of pensions. Making workers another "resource" was all they wanted, and they got that. All the signals then pointed down hill.
This is a global phenomenon already. As birth rates fall in developed countries, older workers are retiring and cannot be easily replaced. Some tasks that used to be attractive (factory work, service jobs) now nobody wants to do. With all the pressure to get a college degree -- and the resulting debt in many cases -- nobody so educated will want to do factory work, and spoon-feed aging seniors. While less developed countries can fill the labor gap in places with labor shortages, there are other pressures to limit immigration. This creates a dire picture of societal implosion; fewer native workers means more money leaving the country to worker homelands, and possible fewer workers paying into socially contracted national systems (in the US, our Social Security fund for one). It might work out for capitalists, for whom all labor is a "human resource" and fungible the same as iron ore, but nation-state actors are likely to find themselves overtaken by declining tax revenues and aging populace.
Robotics might address part of the emerging picture, but notice that robots don't pay ANYTHING into tax roles or social service accounts. Things can only get worse as this trend continues to its logical end.
That said, I have 0% faith in anyone telling me they absolutely will not weaponize AI. Anyone saying that must think we're all idiots. The first and best use for AI is replacing humans in dangerous situations, replacing them with a machine. Yeah you can do that for miners and truck drivers, but the real application will be replacing people as soldiers waging war. Period. Full stop. Okay maybe I should include law enforcement too but these days war and police work are starting to blur together at least in the US.
So, the perfect soldier. Means the perfect war. Means we get lots and lots more wars for increasingly retarded reasons including no reason of any kind. And if you happen to have played the PS4 game "Horizon: Zero Dawn" much then as you hear all these industrialists promising "we will never weaponize AI... much" you might notice a chill running down your spine. Well my friend that is you having a premonition of Fun Things to Come.
There are a lot more ways this could go wrong than go right, and I'm even including increasingly retarded wars as "going right" just because 1) good or bad that is the product working exactly as designed, and 2) retarded wars might not end all life on Earth as we know it, especially not if there is money to be made by the weapons vendors.
But I cannot rule out weapons dealers screwing the pooch in some dead-stupid race to provide the best possible service to war-mongering, seeing as that is mostly what industrialists do when they have room to run: they four-square fuck absolutely everything up.
All the really bad things I can think of coming from weaponized AI end up with organized humans not being around. Probably won't even be an accident when (not if) it happens, probably some genuine god-damned "kill-all-*" wild card feature of the terrifying things.
That Kaspersky is as good as they are might be a good reason for nation states and global corporations to want to give them a hard time. IT has clearly become a modern munition, everyone is playing with fire, and there is a perverse incentive to undermine tools that make that play harder or less fruitful.
Spoken like a true engineer. Including a full stack trace.
If only governance worked like software, or machines. Unfortunately there is this thing called "money" that's gumming up the gears. Money now owns everything including the tools use to clean up the machine. The battle was lost a long time ago and we must await the day when all this falls apart from it's own excessive greed and compulsive malice.
I give it another 15 years. Of course, things will have gotten very ugly by then and it's unlikely we'll be talking about software much for another 15 years past that.
Slashdot Mirror
I was just this morning taking a security course required by my employer where they were stressing the importance of securing the supply chain.
Oh and by-the-way, I think there must be some kind of quantum nature to all these exploits. And maybe if we would just stop looking for them, they would not come into existence at all and their eigenvalues would remain undefined. Worth a shot.
Okay back to your regularly scheduled illusion.
Autonomous vehicles. To which you can already marry any of the open-sourced machine learning/AI frameworks. To which you can include any of the open-source face recognition frameworks. To which you can bolt any number of off-the-shelf AR-15s. To which you can add your own 3D-printed ammunition feeder connected to a 3D-printer continuous belt of off-the-shelf 7mm rounds.
So for the cost of a '65 Mustang, some HP servers and a trip to Walmart for the weapons and ammo, just about anyone (least of all a nation with a defense budget) could roll a roving hunter/killer that could murder its way across just about any urban landscape, until it ran out of bullets or gas. I'd put the cost at about $10k each, cheaper at scale.
I'm reasonably certain something just like this is already in testing.
Add to that, AWS is still trying to find a way into the corporate datacenter, which Cisco kinda sorta owns outright. AWS needs Cisco as a partner, at least for a few more years. But in a decade I wouldn't assume any or all of the above is still the case.
Too late to short. The guys who wrote the original "sky is falling for Cisco" piece were waaaaay ahead of you.
The headline is misleading. They just wanted to focus on a 25% that seemed structurally important and therefore "hard", but the next 25% is also "structural" for advanced democracies whose citizens, for example, enjoy their morning latte with a newspaper before catching a cab to work in a highrise office tower, and the remaining 50% is "structural" for global corporations needing to make quarterly growth targets. Maybe in all that you could arm-twist a total 10% that is not important enough to some stakeholder that they wouldn't deliberatively implode the global economy as punishment for touching their important shit, but honestly the other 90% represents a set of sacred cows that nobody is going to molest until there is sea water sloshing around feet deep at the intersection of Wall Street and Broadway in Manhattan. Until then, all searches for a solution will have been an illusion.
The target emitter sources mentioned here are a small part of the problem for developed nations. Unless you can imagine giving up a lot of the lifestyle perks enjoyed in the West, you really cannot find a way to shift something like 75% of current greenhouse gas emissions. That's why the IPPC recommendations and Paris Accords rely on this thing they call "negative emissions" never quite spelled out. Basically, a kind of magic that will remove CO2 not being removed already by the ocean or by land plants. There are a few theoretical ways to accomplish that, but they won't scale without either massive global coordination, or novel sources of non-carbon-based energy inputs to drive them, or both. And even then, you have to "make it work" for nearly longer than the human world has existed, something on the order of 5-10,000 years. The US couldn't even stay signed onto the (almost meaningless) Paris Accords for more than a single election cycle, hard to imagine coordinated global effort spanning thousands of years, isn't it? Actually, it's not hard it's impossible to imagine. LSD works here. Without the copious consumption of LSD I don't see how we imagine a way to reduce even 25% least of all 75%, and let's not even start in with 100% reduction, being the only thing will save us.
At this point, there have been so many "leaks" (whatever the fuck that means) of PI that we have reached a point where there simply is NO remaining PI for anyone older than 18 months old. It's all out there now. Everything about you is in the wild, including things you didn't know about yourself. Everyone now lives in a fishbowl. Get used to it.
I have a modest proposal. To even the playing field (and to make hoarding PI no longer profitable) there ought to be a national database of all our PI that has an open API for anyone wants to access, at any time. Period. One and done. "Securing" PI would then be a form of theft, a felony. Anyone caught collecting and storing PI outside the public domain would be arrested for information crimes (espionage) and if convicted, thrown in prison.
Amazon eventually has something similar planned for Alexa, where casually spoken words (not directed at Alexa) will do exactly the same thing. The trend here is that any device in your vicinity (not even your own home, anywhere at all) can be triggered by any kind of sound (voice or ads, audible or not) to turn on your phone and record other conversation, or maybe to direct your phone web client to an online ad or retailer.
We're screwed.
Give global warming another decade and .bv will have a deep water port, resort hotel, quaint craftsman's village, and trendy indoor mall.
Well reasoned.
I suggest the mechanism by which we (in the West, at least) enjoy the wealth, comfort and plenty in which we live, as compared to the poverty, hardship and scarcity in which our ancestors lived, is not because of science per se but because of easy access to fossil fuels. I am a field Biologist, and I am the first to admit to this reality. We've come a long way indeed, but primarily because we secured for ourselves a lot more free energy to play with than the ones came before us.
That era may be ending. I don't know how much wealth, comfort etc we can count on going forward. A very few of us can I suppose, I predict the vast majority will be happy to survive at all with the simple tools, classic machines and coarse foods that sustained us for most of the time modern humans have traversed the planet.
Parsimony probably wins this one; positing that "space travel is dangerous" requires 1) life on other worlds, that 2) advance to the point of recognizing "space" and then 3) develop machines of a complexity to fly in any manner at all, and then 4) decide that "space flight" sounds cool, and that they 5) find a way to do that, while not 6) at the same time wrecking themselves with some other marvelous machine they made, such that 7) they reach space and venture anywhere beyond low orbit, enough to 8) be murdered by space with enough frequency and reliability to 9) decide to just not go there at all ever again.
There is a much higher probability and superior simplicity assuming that 1) apart from the Earth there is no planet-sized object in the universe capable of supporting life. Period.
That nobody ever thinks this way is given. That the universe gives no shits at all what anyone thinks is also given.
All this excitement, I know what you're thinking, and you apes need to start taking better care of what is likely the only planet in the entire universe capable of supporting life.
Ref; Fermi's Paradox.
"Crispr-on-demand" is going to become a very crowded play. China will dominate, as they will dominate in AI. Your best bet is to come up with a good product, and sell into a larger company. Take your $700K in tradable stock options (that's what I did) and get out.
I'm writing a novel based on some of the reported advances. I started it 20 years ago, as a grad student in biology with an interest in computers. I gave up biology and now I'm a software engineer, I return to writing my novel once in a while for relaxation. My novel covers some of the same ground as the news, over the years I have steadily watched my "fiction" slowly become "fact", so now I tell people I really have to get the thing published before it becomes less like speculation, and more like an industry blog.
I will reveal this. The technology in my novel ends up watching humans drive themselves to extinction, then simply steps into our position as apex species without skipping a beat. History never records that change. Be careful what you long for.
I wonder if all this is a reaction to the Chinese building so many chips for US domestic consumption, and that process coming under scrutiny as a security threat as well as due to IP theft and corporate espionage. Huawei just today got out of the US networking space because of US gov warnings against buying their kit on national security grounds, but the same should eventually apply to buying chips and chipsets fabbed in China.
Controlling your chip design is a good first step toward making sure there is nothing in there you didn't want. The next step of course is fabbing that chip yourself under highly controlled conditions. You keep your initial design direction under your hat, and you have some confidence that nothing else was introduced somewhere in the burn-to-silicon steps.
That particular shit storm has been brewing for a decade. Part of the faster-better-stronger globalist narrative that supported off-shoring of critical industrial and IP practices may be beginning to fall apart.
I didn't mention pensions because in the US those have been gone (except for government workers) for longer than most workers have been alive. But yes I agree, it just makes it worse. I again blame corporate actors for that, they didn't want the long-term liability of pensions. Making workers another "resource" was all they wanted, and they got that. All the signals then pointed down hill.
This is a global phenomenon already. As birth rates fall in developed countries, older workers are retiring and cannot be easily replaced. Some tasks that used to be attractive (factory work, service jobs) now nobody wants to do. With all the pressure to get a college degree -- and the resulting debt in many cases -- nobody so educated will want to do factory work, and spoon-feed aging seniors. While less developed countries can fill the labor gap in places with labor shortages, there are other pressures to limit immigration. This creates a dire picture of societal implosion; fewer native workers means more money leaving the country to worker homelands, and possible fewer workers paying into socially contracted national systems (in the US, our Social Security fund for one). It might work out for capitalists, for whom all labor is a "human resource" and fungible the same as iron ore, but nation-state actors are likely to find themselves overtaken by declining tax revenues and aging populace.
Robotics might address part of the emerging picture, but notice that robots don't pay ANYTHING into tax roles or social service accounts. Things can only get worse as this trend continues to its logical end.
That said, I have 0% faith in anyone telling me they absolutely will not weaponize AI. Anyone saying that must think we're all idiots. The first and best use for AI is replacing humans in dangerous situations, replacing them with a machine. Yeah you can do that for miners and truck drivers, but the real application will be replacing people as soldiers waging war. Period. Full stop. Okay maybe I should include law enforcement too but these days war and police work are starting to blur together at least in the US.
So, the perfect soldier. Means the perfect war. Means we get lots and lots more wars for increasingly retarded reasons including no reason of any kind. And if you happen to have played the PS4 game "Horizon: Zero Dawn" much then as you hear all these industrialists promising "we will never weaponize AI ... much" you might notice a chill running down your spine. Well my friend that is you having a premonition of Fun Things to Come.
There are a lot more ways this could go wrong than go right, and I'm even including increasingly retarded wars as "going right" just because 1) good or bad that is the product working exactly as designed, and 2) retarded wars might not end all life on Earth as we know it, especially not if there is money to be made by the weapons vendors.
But I cannot rule out weapons dealers screwing the pooch in some dead-stupid race to provide the best possible service to war-mongering, seeing as that is mostly what industrialists do when they have room to run: they four-square fuck absolutely everything up.
All the really bad things I can think of coming from weaponized AI end up with organized humans not being around. Probably won't even be an accident when (not if) it happens, probably some genuine god-damned "kill-all-*" wild card feature of the terrifying things.
Christ but we're dumb.
That Kaspersky is as good as they are might be a good reason for nation states and global corporations to want to give them a hard time. IT has clearly become a modern munition, everyone is playing with fire, and there is a perverse incentive to undermine tools that make that play harder or less fruitful.
That read like it was from The Onion. Around individual rain drops?
Wonder which US government TLAs are working with NewsCorp on this project? And no I don't think TOR is 100% going to solve that particular problem.
Looks like a return to the old "embrace and extend" to me. And we know how that worked out.
But then I always wiped my Lenovo to install Ubuntu anyway.
Who knew?
Spoken like a true engineer. Including a full stack trace.
If only governance worked like software, or machines. Unfortunately there is this thing called "money" that's gumming up the gears. Money now owns everything including the tools use to clean up the machine. The battle was lost a long time ago and we must await the day when all this falls apart from it's own excessive greed and compulsive malice.
I give it another 15 years. Of course, things will have gotten very ugly by then and it's unlikely we'll be talking about software much for another 15 years past that.