I see two things motivating the government: capital flight and undermining redenomination. Regarding capital flight: particularly in developing countries, governments take great steps to restrict the amount of money people take out of the country. The idea is that if you can keep money in country, it'll go to growing the local economy versus investments overseas. Traditionally, these controls have been imposed through government bank regulations. Bitcoin and other "cryptocurrencies" give people an alternative medium to move money and bypass government controls which I'm sure is bothering the Modi government.
The other thing to remember is that India just went through redenomination, where they effectively removed a large number of bills out of circulation (about 80% of all cash value). This was done to shrink the shadow economy, basically the cash-driven underground economy, so that the government can better monitor (and tax) sales, income, etc. It also pushes more money into more traceable electronic transactions, making it harder for corruption payments and criminal funds transfers. Cryptocurrencies however provide another means to move value that the Indian government doesn't have the ability to track (yet), thus the initial reaction to shut it down.
The rise of contract labor versus permanent employment has been an ongoing issue globally, ranging from Canada to France to Japan and even India. There are differences and nuances market by market, but a lot of it comes down to employers demanding workforce flexibility in the face of uncertainty, competition, and plenty of desperate underemployed people. France is a case where labor regulations are so tight, that contract labor is an easy loophole. Maybe the only place that this trend is beginning to reverse is in Japan, but that's simply because their labor force is rapidly shrinking.
Like it or not, the same engine that has helped people on the left is helping people on the right. Is that really such a bad thing, that people are able to find other people who like what they do? I find it hard to call that a crime.
Completely agree. What people seem to conveniently forget was that back in 2008 and 2012, the media and politicos lauded how President Obama's campaign was able to leverage social media in ways never seen. In liberal circles, it was lauded as a great force for change and political mobilization. Therefore, people really shouldn't have been surprised that other parties and factions would study, adapt and evolve those same techniques.
Agreed. I thought this comment from the article summed it up nicely:
Fleur-de-lit - 1/11/18 10:38pm
Sounds like they just wanted to douse flamewars that were using up company resources. That doesn’t seem unreasonable to me.
It's no different than someone creating any other type of provocative political threads on a corporate message board creating a massive distraction for employees and a waste of time for no productive gain.
The article itself makes a good point that the big guys have other existential policy / political issues that they're dealing with, so while they may want to push for net neutrality, they want to save their firepower for those issues especially since it looks like they can't win the fight for now given how the FCC is stacked.
Harold Feld, a senior vice president at Public Knowledge, a nonprofit group that supports net neutrality, said the biggest tech companies were less vocal because they were facing more regulatory battles than in past years. Social media sites have been criticized for allowing foreign actors to interfere in the presidential election of 2016. The biggest tech companies also face complaints from some lawmakers that they have become too large and powerful.
“First, the major tech companies are very aware that Washington has turned hostile,” Mr. Feld said. “In this environment, the big tech companies try to keep a low profile and play defense rather than take positions that draw attention.
“So with the dangers of standing up in D.C. greater, their existential concerns about net neutrality reduced because of their own massive size and a desire not to spook investors, it is unsurprising that Silicon Valley giants have melted into the background and have preferred to work through their trade associations,” he said.
Setting aside organized crime for a moment, every other national intelligence service will thank you for this back door, whether you meant for them to access those devices or not. At very least, you've made it much easier for them to target their collection efforts since all they have to do is compromise a single German agency versus each and every individual device. So pick the boogeyman of choice, the Russians, the Chinese, the Americans, the French, and think of their intelligence agencies crawling through every "secure" network and device inside Germany.
Perhaps then we're returning to the pre-Internet paradigm where you probably get a single newspaper and a small handful of magazines. Except at least in the Internet era, we're no longer locked into the one local paper in our small town.
Not surprised. MBA programs, like Law programs, were setup left and right by universities as cheap ways to raise funds: they command high tuition while requiring minimal in terms of capital expenditures (compared to say, an engineering program that requires substantial capital for labs and whatnot). Now that the market has become saturated with lawyers and MBA's, people are getting more selective, and the programs without strong reputations will wither away. Add on top of that fewer companies are paying to send their talented employees to get MBA's and the general weakening of the i-banking field, and we just simply don't need as many as we used to have.
Sounds like a classic criminal fail: they pull off some great crime or heist, but their pride drives them to somehow brag about it to the world, or at least rub it in the face of their victims. Ultimately, its that desire for recognition that leads to their downfall.
Agreed. I think the very example given in the post and the article provide a concrete example: autonomous weapons that allow someone to inflict greater terror or oppression. In the past, you may have needed a larger network, foot soldiers, etc. With AI, you can potentially do greater damage with fewer individuals. Or with automated weapons, you have fewer soldiers to feed and care for in order to impose your will.
So is Amazon trying to position Drop In as a sort of alternative home security solution to check in on your house / spy on your family and tenants? Otherwise, I don't really see the appeal of having someone just connect into your home without a minimal confirmation by the receiving end. If anything, I just see a whole lot of room for creeping control: parents stalking their children, roommates tracking each other, overbearing significant others demanding monitoring access. Of course, there's also the question of hacking or even an easy way for governments to intrude... Seems a bit too much for me. Amazon Echo Show Drop-In Feature is Really Creepy
This is what is commonly referred to as a flawed assumption. Everything that proceeds after it is therefore suspect.
I think this is a very reasonable assumption. Yes, Google and Facebook aren't strict gatekeepers as in traditional media, but the way it ranks search results, and the way users rarely get past one or two pages worth of results, it effectively makes it into a gatekeeper. That powerful influence allows them to direct focus and attention similarly to news editors of old.
“Typically the main problem with software coding—and I’m a coder myself,” Bantégnie says, “is not the skills of the coders. The people know how to code. The problem is what to code. Because most of the requirements are kind of natural language, ambiguous, and a requirement is never extremely precise, it’s often understood differently by the guy who’s supposed to code.”
My reading of the article is that it's not coding itself that's the problem, we can do that, the problem is that we're struggling to develop requirements for more and more complicated systems. As systems become more flexible and their environments more variable, it's becoming harder to write them.
It's worth pointing out that corporate espionage is not frowned upon in the East the way it is in the West.
Actually, the West is also heavily engaged in economic espionage. Many Western intelligence services, perhaps most notoriously the French, view economic espionage in the name of giving French industry an advantage, is a core national mission. Nearly every other nation engages in this. The United States tends to be shier about this than others given national laws against corporate espionage, but that doesn't mean it doesn't flirt in the gray areas of this as well.
There are no AI companies, because there is no AI. We have artificial, but we don't have intelligence.
This comment is really a part of what the definition of artificial intelligence is, the "AI Effect" that many practitioners and professors I know would always complain about, on how the field of AI would come up with some new technique or system, and then promptly, people would pull that out of the AI field and say, "Well, that's not REAL intelligence." Line one from that article:
The AIS effect occurs when onlookers discount the behavior of an artificial intelligence program by arguing that it is not real intelligence.
Computer Science, at least per Russell and Norvig who wrote the de facto textbook on AI, is "the designing and building of intelligent agents that receive percepts from the environment and take actions that affect that environment." If you use that definition, then many of those claims are true.
I liked these quotes best:
Every time we figure out a piece of it, it stops being magical; we say, 'Oh, that's just a computation.' - Pamela McCorduck
A problem that proponents of AI regularly face is this: When we know how a machine does something 'intelligent,' it ceases to be regarded as intelligent. - Fred Reed
This paradox resulted from the fact that whenever an AI research project made a useful new discovery, that product usually quickly spun off to form a new scientific or commercial specialty with its own distinctive name. These changes in name led outsiders to ask, Why do we see so little progress in the central field of artificial intelligence? - Marvin Minsky
based on the number of records leaked, there's a good 40% chance per top govt exec that their info WAS leaked
I would add, based on that percentage, not only is there a good chance that top government executives had their information leaked, but its most likely that information was also leaked about their spouses, adult children, parents, siblings, friends, etc. So I think many would take this personally. If you want to be cynical about it, this leak is going to create a lot of headaches for powerful entities like multinational banks, telecoms, and others who relied on Equifax to vet loans and identities and are going to have to deal with large spikes in fraud for years because of the breach. This kind of breach also helps to further undermine confidence in the banking system they are a part of. They may want this to go forward so they can take a chunk out of Equifax's hide as well. Oh, and their and their families, friends, etc. personal data has also been leaked, so they will probably have some personal motivations as well.
The flip side is often problematic: people who refuse to hire the help they need and so limit their profits. That's very common.
Understandable. Much harder to measure opportunity and risk going forward - whether or not the market will materialize, or be stable enough, to make the investment of hiring people worthwhile. Classic question of if, when, and how much to expand. Something that has made and broken companies particularly in tech.
The people who told us about sun block were the same people who told us, when I was a kid, that eggs were good. So I ate a lot of eggs. Ten years later they said they were bad. I went, "Well, I just ate the eggs!" So I stopped eating eggs, and ten years later they said they were good again! Well, then I ate twice as many, and then they said they were bad. Well, now I'm really fucked! Then they said they're good, they're bad, they're good, the whites are good, th-the yellows - make up your mind! It's breakfast I've gotta eat!
Perhaps it's just making up for the fact that service is terrible at many restaurants (probably because they pay terribly at least in the United States). Since you can't hire enough competent servers, you rely on technology to make up for it.
Shame we dont have as much enthusiasm for Nobel laureates as we do for sports and the oscars.
Well, people do pay large sums of money for the privilege of attending their classes, regurgitating what they said, and working with them. Yes, there's certification at the end of it, but the value of that degree comes in part from the reputation of said collection of intellectuals.
Slashdot Mirror
No company owns it [email].
That's the "problem" Google is fixing.
I see two things motivating the government: capital flight and undermining redenomination. Regarding capital flight: particularly in developing countries, governments take great steps to restrict the amount of money people take out of the country. The idea is that if you can keep money in country, it'll go to growing the local economy versus investments overseas. Traditionally, these controls have been imposed through government bank regulations. Bitcoin and other "cryptocurrencies" give people an alternative medium to move money and bypass government controls which I'm sure is bothering the Modi government.
The other thing to remember is that India just went through redenomination, where they effectively removed a large number of bills out of circulation (about 80% of all cash value). This was done to shrink the shadow economy, basically the cash-driven underground economy, so that the government can better monitor (and tax) sales, income, etc. It also pushes more money into more traceable electronic transactions, making it harder for corruption payments and criminal funds transfers. Cryptocurrencies however provide another means to move value that the Indian government doesn't have the ability to track (yet), thus the initial reaction to shut it down.
The rise of contract labor versus permanent employment has been an ongoing issue globally, ranging from Canada to France to Japan and even India. There are differences and nuances market by market, but a lot of it comes down to employers demanding workforce flexibility in the face of uncertainty, competition, and plenty of desperate underemployed people. France is a case where labor regulations are so tight, that contract labor is an easy loophole. Maybe the only place that this trend is beginning to reverse is in Japan, but that's simply because their labor force is rapidly shrinking.
He could just write his password in a Post-It and put it on his monitor. You know, like his emergency management guys...
Like it or not, the same engine that has helped people on the left is helping people on the right. Is that really such a bad thing, that people are able to find other people who like what they do? I find it hard to call that a crime.
Completely agree. What people seem to conveniently forget was that back in 2008 and 2012, the media and politicos lauded how President Obama's campaign was able to leverage social media in ways never seen. In liberal circles, it was lauded as a great force for change and political mobilization. Therefore, people really shouldn't have been surprised that other parties and factions would study, adapt and evolve those same techniques.
Fleur-de-lit - 1/11/18 10:38pm
Sounds like they just wanted to douse flamewars that were using up company resources. That doesn’t seem unreasonable to me.
It's no different than someone creating any other type of provocative political threads on a corporate message board creating a massive distraction for employees and a waste of time for no productive gain.
Harold Feld, a senior vice president at Public Knowledge, a nonprofit group that supports net neutrality, said the biggest tech companies were less vocal because they were facing more regulatory battles than in past years. Social media sites have been criticized for allowing foreign actors to interfere in the presidential election of 2016. The biggest tech companies also face complaints from some lawmakers that they have become too large and powerful.
“First, the major tech companies are very aware that Washington has turned hostile,” Mr. Feld said. “In this environment, the big tech companies try to keep a low profile and play defense rather than take positions that draw attention.
“So with the dangers of standing up in D.C. greater, their existential concerns about net neutrality reduced because of their own massive size and a desire not to spook investors, it is unsurprising that Silicon Valley giants have melted into the background and have preferred to work through their trade associations,” he said.
Setting aside organized crime for a moment, every other national intelligence service will thank you for this back door, whether you meant for them to access those devices or not. At very least, you've made it much easier for them to target their collection efforts since all they have to do is compromise a single German agency versus each and every individual device. So pick the boogeyman of choice, the Russians, the Chinese, the Americans, the French, and think of their intelligence agencies crawling through every "secure" network and device inside Germany.
Perhaps then we're returning to the pre-Internet paradigm where you probably get a single newspaper and a small handful of magazines. Except at least in the Internet era, we're no longer locked into the one local paper in our small town.
Not surprised. MBA programs, like Law programs, were setup left and right by universities as cheap ways to raise funds: they command high tuition while requiring minimal in terms of capital expenditures (compared to say, an engineering program that requires substantial capital for labs and whatnot). Now that the market has become saturated with lawyers and MBA's, people are getting more selective, and the programs without strong reputations will wither away. Add on top of that fewer companies are paying to send their talented employees to get MBA's and the general weakening of the i-banking field, and we just simply don't need as many as we used to have.
Sounds like a classic criminal fail: they pull off some great crime or heist, but their pride drives them to somehow brag about it to the world, or at least rub it in the face of their victims. Ultimately, its that desire for recognition that leads to their downfall.
Agreed. I think the very example given in the post and the article provide a concrete example: autonomous weapons that allow someone to inflict greater terror or oppression. In the past, you may have needed a larger network, foot soldiers, etc. With AI, you can potentially do greater damage with fewer individuals. Or with automated weapons, you have fewer soldiers to feed and care for in order to impose your will.
Or, if you read between the lines, maybe it implies that Facebook, Twitter and similar are ALREADY involved in classified government programs.
So is Amazon trying to position Drop In as a sort of alternative home security solution to check in on your house / spy on your family and tenants? Otherwise, I don't really see the appeal of having someone just connect into your home without a minimal confirmation by the receiving end. If anything, I just see a whole lot of room for creeping control: parents stalking their children, roommates tracking each other, overbearing significant others demanding monitoring access. Of course, there's also the question of hacking or even an easy way for governments to intrude... Seems a bit too much for me. Amazon Echo Show Drop-In Feature is Really Creepy
I would add that thanks to VoIP technologies, telemarketers are not only alive and well but thriving.
This is what is commonly referred to as a flawed assumption. Everything that proceeds after it is therefore suspect.
I think this is a very reasonable assumption. Yes, Google and Facebook aren't strict gatekeepers as in traditional media, but the way it ranks search results, and the way users rarely get past one or two pages worth of results, it effectively makes it into a gatekeeper. That powerful influence allows them to direct focus and attention similarly to news editors of old.
“Typically the main problem with software coding—and I’m a coder myself,” Bantégnie says, “is not the skills of the coders. The people know how to code. The problem is what to code. Because most of the requirements are kind of natural language, ambiguous, and a requirement is never extremely precise, it’s often understood differently by the guy who’s supposed to code.”
My reading of the article is that it's not coding itself that's the problem, we can do that, the problem is that we're struggling to develop requirements for more and more complicated systems. As systems become more flexible and their environments more variable, it's becoming harder to write them.
They say that the effect stands out particularly if you flew a different aircraft right before flying a 787 or A350.
It's worth pointing out that corporate espionage is not frowned upon in the East the way it is in the West.
Actually, the West is also heavily engaged in economic espionage. Many Western intelligence services, perhaps most notoriously the French, view economic espionage in the name of giving French industry an advantage, is a core national mission. Nearly every other nation engages in this. The United States tends to be shier about this than others given national laws against corporate espionage, but that doesn't mean it doesn't flirt in the gray areas of this as well.
There are no AI companies, because there is no AI. We have artificial, but we don't have intelligence.
This comment is really a part of what the definition of artificial intelligence is, the "AI Effect" that many practitioners and professors I know would always complain about, on how the field of AI would come up with some new technique or system, and then promptly, people would pull that out of the AI field and say, "Well, that's not REAL intelligence." Line one from that article:
The AIS effect occurs when onlookers discount the behavior of an artificial intelligence program by arguing that it is not real intelligence.
Computer Science, at least per Russell and Norvig who wrote the de facto textbook on AI, is "the designing and building of intelligent agents that receive percepts from the environment and take actions that affect that environment." If you use that definition, then many of those claims are true.
I liked these quotes best:
Every time we figure out a piece of it, it stops being magical; we say, 'Oh, that's just a computation.' - Pamela McCorduck
A problem that proponents of AI regularly face is this: When we know how a machine does something 'intelligent,' it ceases to be regarded as intelligent. - Fred Reed
This paradox resulted from the fact that whenever an AI research project made a useful new discovery, that product usually quickly spun off to form a new scientific or commercial specialty with its own distinctive name. These changes in name led outsiders to ask, Why do we see so little progress in the central field of artificial intelligence? - Marvin Minsky
based on the number of records leaked, there's a good 40% chance per top govt exec that their info WAS leaked
I would add, based on that percentage, not only is there a good chance that top government executives had their information leaked, but its most likely that information was also leaked about their spouses, adult children, parents, siblings, friends, etc. So I think many would take this personally. If you want to be cynical about it, this leak is going to create a lot of headaches for powerful entities like multinational banks, telecoms, and others who relied on Equifax to vet loans and identities and are going to have to deal with large spikes in fraud for years because of the breach. This kind of breach also helps to further undermine confidence in the banking system they are a part of. They may want this to go forward so they can take a chunk out of Equifax's hide as well. Oh, and their and their families, friends, etc. personal data has also been leaked, so they will probably have some personal motivations as well.
The flip side is often problematic: people who refuse to hire the help they need and so limit their profits. That's very common.
Understandable. Much harder to measure opportunity and risk going forward - whether or not the market will materialize, or be stable enough, to make the investment of hiring people worthwhile. Classic question of if, when, and how much to expand. Something that has made and broken companies particularly in tech.
The people who told us about sun block were the same people who told us, when I was a kid, that eggs were good. So I ate a lot of eggs. Ten years later they said they were bad. I went, "Well, I just ate the eggs!" So I stopped eating eggs, and ten years later they said they were good again! Well, then I ate twice as many, and then they said they were bad. Well, now I'm really fucked! Then they said they're good, they're bad, they're good, the whites are good, th-the yellows - make up your mind! It's breakfast I've gotta eat!
- Louis Black
Perhaps it's just making up for the fact that service is terrible at many restaurants (probably because they pay terribly at least in the United States). Since you can't hire enough competent servers, you rely on technology to make up for it.
Shame we dont have as much enthusiasm for Nobel laureates as we do for sports and the oscars.
Well, people do pay large sums of money for the privilege of attending their classes, regurgitating what they said, and working with them. Yes, there's certification at the end of it, but the value of that degree comes in part from the reputation of said collection of intellectuals.