I remember reading an article on Snopes about this, quite a while ago.
As I understand it, the fly's visual system evolved a beneficial mutation that glitches what they see. Zebras are in reality just black horses (look at their snout), but the fly's retina paints those white stripes on them. This allows the fly to more easily attack the zebra, although not as effectively as if the animal was all white. This effect is well known in our domesticated horses -- horseflies are attracted to light colored animals such as Palominos. Humans are also faked out into thinking there are stripes because we only see zebras on nature documentaries, and a TV cameras have similar scanning artifacts.
That's the way I remember the Snopes article, anyway, and I read it on the Internet so it must be true.
What I don't understand is why you'll have your DNA tested often.
Because (a) it will be a routine part of your examination, and because medical records are not easily shared between providers they can't just look it up in your file and (b) they won't be full genome analysis (just looking at certain different things at different times) and (c) the "raw data" won't be easily available. When the storage and sharing (and privacy) issues with your DNA are technically and legally and procedurally solved someday, then they won't be needing to sample you very often. We're a long way from that in this decade.
Your doctor doesn't tell your insurance agency anything beyond "He had a consult, it costs $X. Pay up." If he tells the insurance agency anything else, he is liable for a whole mess of lawsuits
The insurance company receives every detail of every procedure and every prescription that you have (as well as how often you fill it, whether you do so at the appropriate intervals, etc.) There is a lot more detail than "a consult". The insurance company then uses sophisticated AI programs to guess (when it isn't already spelled out) what's wrong with you, and what might go wrong with you in the future. They know a lot more than you seem to think. They read and process tremendous amounts of this information in near real-time. They use this knowledge for a variety of purposes. At least, that's what happens in the USA.
Guess how I know. Hint: I can't tell you any details due to NDA.
The information that they're wondering if they should give you is often faulty, and results in people making bad choices. For example, undergoing preventive therapy that is costly, has serious side effects, and turns out to have been totally unnecessary. You weren't going to get that disease that you decided you needed to be treated for. Meanwhile, it caused you health problems, and untold mental agony, anda lifetime of worrying. Also for your relatives (children and parents). By giving them this information, you have failed to "First, Do No Harm."
If the genetic analysis were more reliable (like everyone reading this story probably assumes), it would be different. But currently, for most of the information that can be given, it's very dicey.
Facebook is not a place that everyone goes to. It is merely a hosting platform where people create zillions (of partially overlapping) "places" that they go to. Those millions of people are not on your Friends list. Facebook is millions of "places", not one. (However, George Takei's page is indeed the one single place in the world where everyone goes. But just for his stuff; nobody reads the comments.) As for Facebook "bombarding your news feed with useless information 24x7", ummm, that doesn't happen to me. Get a life?
the sellers are con artists and shouldn't be allowed to prey on them
There are con-artist products in every grocery store. Singling out Whole Foods for that is really just an excercise in hippie-punching. If we really want to crack down on false advertising claims, then 1) we should first actually verify them false with research rather than kneejerk skepticism and 2) concentrate on claims most detrimental to public health first, and then after that, those most detrimental to the economy.
...what will it take for general acceptance to finally take hold?
I doubt it will ever be truly widespread. Isn't it still illegal in most places to record people without prior permission, and threatening to record can also be seen as a threat?
No, it is not. In a public place you have no legal expectation of privacy. People can record you all they want. And they do.
What's going on here is that people don't like that fact. They don't like the government and corporate and even the individuals that are recording them everywhere all the time. They don't like being recorded with cell phones, either. But until now, it has been difficult to object to this "invasion of privacy". Along comes Google Glass, which just brings the reality to the forefront where you can't even pretend it isn't happening. Google Glass is both a symbol of "lost" privacy, and the first on-your-face-in-your-face implementation of the coming privacy-invading cyborg culture. While some embrace this future, others loathe and fear it.
In the case of the girl who was assaulted, battered, and robbed at the bar, there is an additional social factor. The people in that neighborhood bar HATE Google and have been assaulting Google employees on the street on their way to work. Hence the comment from the bar patron, "You people are ruining our city!" This incident was as much about hating Google and yuppie-techies in the city, as it was about privacy.
The (actual) privacy-in-public culture we've been living in was a brief and anomalous period in our history. In earlier days, you did not have much privacy in public places like streets and bars. The town was small, and "everyone knew everyone" (to some approximation). The whole town knew who was out and about, on what business, and talking to whom. And of course you could be overheard in bars. If you wanted privacy, you had to be a lot more discreet. When cities got big, it was possible to "get lost in the crowd" and hide in plain sight. Now things are turning around, and your activity outside your house is potentially exposed to everyone. With our new technology will come a return to the old no-privacy culture.
Society will adapt to provide some kinds of "public privacy" by opening bars that have a no-recording-devices policy. And there will be technological aspects to this. One example might be jamming of mobile devices on the premises. (This is currently illegal, and there are several social and legal issues to address there.) Another example: having to walk through the Device Detector (like a metal detector) gate at the bar entrance.
I have, on my head, a device with which I can access all the worlds knowledge, communicate with everyone on the planet, and record and share my life's experiences. I use it for looking at pictures of cats and picking fights with strangers in bars!
does anybody actually know the laws around recording in public? Obv you can record celebrities because they do it on TMZ. and obv you can record with a security camera. but sometimes a tv show is recording at an airport or whatever and I walk by and there are signs "by passing by this sign you consent to being recorded." so obviously the right to record someone else is not absolute.
Can anybody add any actual information to this vacuum?
You are taking those signs at face value and drawing a conclusion from them. But that's not how the world works. There is no need for the airport or a mall to inform you that you might be recorded in public. You do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy when out in public. The reason for the sign is to intimidate the less-intelligent potential criminals who are going to the airport to steal people's luggage and such. The sign might more accurately read, "Attention Dumbshit: Don't Come In Here For Opportunistic Crime; Of Course You Are Being Recorded By Police Who Are Watching You On The Cameras, Hidden And Visible All Over The Place Here." But that wouldn't be as polite. Sometimes the signs do say things like, "Warning: Police Recording", though.
AUTHENTICATION CHALLENGE: During your last session, did you (choose one): (a) Receive email from your sister, Dorothy about her medical condition. (b) Access your bank account 101000187-33400301 (c) Install a root kit onto 0F13C73AAB0D4E000028038C99D3125A
[CONTINUE TO LOGIN]
"The virtual version of Zoe was created by Zoe Graystone herself using hacked rudimentary emulation software capable of duplicating her own V-World avatar. Graystone programmed the copy - a perfect copy - with roughly 100 terabytes of personal information from other databases. This allowed the avatar to access and translate information from medical scans, DNA profiles, psychological evaluations, school records, emails, video and audio recordings, CAT scans, genetic typing, synaptic records, security cameras, test results, shopping records, talent shows, ballgames, traffic tickets, restaurant bills, phone records, music lists, movie tickets, TV shows and "even prescriptions for birth control" - essentially turning raw data into personality and memory." -- http://en.battlestarwiki.org/wiki/Zoe_Graystone
I remember this recycled story from around 2008. The Linden Lab executive (who was also one of their main system creators originally) hasn't been with the company now for many years. This was all eons ago, but it's being brought back up in the wake of Snowden.
The part about Linden Dollars and the Second Life economy is a little ridiculous, since the money is only useful for buying in-game virtual items. For example, terrorists getting some better high heels for their avatars. You can cash out Linden Dollars, but there are lots of limits and monitors on it, and you cash out through either your verified PayPal account or a bank check mailed to you. Neither of those are in any way anonymous, and they are tightly monitored by the feds at multiple levels. (You could get some IP addresses and in-game transaction information from Linden Lab if you were tracing back some accumulated cash-out; that might be useful intelligence, I guess.) Like any glorified chat system.
The idea that terrorists are using Second Life for virtual training is a bad joke. No realistic scenario or actions could be created. You could use the primitive in-game 3D modeling to create a rough representation of the buildings and alleys or whatever. But very little could be communicated beyond that. Avatars can't actually do anything subtle - mainly they can just walk. Arms and hands don't do anything except point-and-click on scripted objects in the world. The scripting can make objects change texture/color and move around. Communication is a very primitive text chat system plus an in-game Voice system that doesn't work very well or reliably. So you could make a really crappy diagramatic 3D model of your bomb scenario, and walk your avatars around it. But you could do infinitely better by just looking at a street map, or Google Earth, and tracing your fingers and talking about it or whatever.
Linden Lab advertises that it keeps Chat logs (etc.) for some period, six months was what they said at one point. However, I asked someone there once and they said, "Well, we've' never actually deleted any logs to date."
Second Life is an interesting experiment along a number of axis, but it's capabilities are really quite primitive. They tried at one point to sell it to businesses as an online meeting system, and it was such a bad joke they gave up that marketing effort. IBM has an open-source version of the system that is integrated with some other IBM meeting software. There are other service providers running "grids" with the open-source version of SL. You can download the server and client onto your laptop if you want to play with it stand-along (or hook together with some other users and make your own network). But it doesn't have any specially great utility for terrorists. Any more than any other MUD/MOO/Mush type system. That was all just hype, years ago, from when Second Life was exciting and hyped and not understood.
NSA monitors AOL chat rooms and whatever, too; it's just exactly the same thing. They didn't understand that a half decade ago when this "news" article first came out.
Is it reasonable to ask if Bruce Schneier can be trusted? WWBSD?
A little history might inform your thinking on this question.
One of the early projects that Schneier lead, precipitated by the Y2K date crisis, was a security evaluation of old COBOL system (code-named "ZEBRA") that was still being used by a certain un-named U.S. Government agency.
This mainframe software had not been maintained for some years, except by patching the binary image; no online version of the source code was available. It would be too hard to audit that way, so they decided to upload the original code (from paper), recompile, diff against the binaries, and eventually reconstruct accurate source code for the Y2K bugs and security issues.
Schneier's group decided to use OCR. The source code had been
"line printed" on "greenbar" paper, where alternate lines have a light green background stripes for contrast. The problem was that OCR scanners of the day were designed only for black-and-white, and would get confused by the green stripes, and sometimes
mis-scan some letters and numbers,
making this source code unreliable. This required them to manually read and type in corrections, to about half the code!
Bruce Schneier is an outspoken critic of agencies like the DHS and the TSA, but he has been a consultant for the Government in the past. And as you can see from the above story, he was originally an early proponent of scanners, and only in more recent years has
spoken out against them.
So it is quite reasonable to ask if Bruce Schneier has ever
changed his stripes.
Slashdot Mirror
If your physical data is in the form of "fish", don't destroy it prematurely!
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
Back in 1983, your games didn't "Phone Home".
The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that you've got it made.
...have been posted by nerval's lobster?
I remember reading an article on Snopes about this, quite a while ago.
As I understand it, the fly's visual system evolved a beneficial mutation that glitches what they see. Zebras are in reality just black horses (look at their snout), but the fly's retina paints those white stripes on them. This allows the fly to more easily attack the zebra, although not as effectively as if the animal was all white. This effect is well known in our domesticated horses -- horseflies are attracted to light colored animals such as Palominos. Humans are also faked out into thinking there are stripes because we only see zebras on nature documentaries, and a TV cameras have similar scanning artifacts.
That's the way I remember the Snopes article, anyway, and I read it on the Internet so it must be true.
What I don't understand is why you'll have your DNA tested often.
Because (a) it will be a routine part of your examination, and because medical records are not easily shared between providers they can't just look it up in your file and (b) they won't be full genome analysis (just looking at certain different things at different times) and (c) the "raw data" won't be easily available. When the storage and sharing (and privacy) issues with your DNA are technically and legally and procedurally solved someday, then they won't be needing to sample you very often. We're a long way from that in this decade.
Your doctor doesn't tell your insurance agency anything beyond "He had a consult, it costs $X. Pay up."
If he tells the insurance agency anything else, he is liable for a whole mess of lawsuits
The insurance company receives every detail of every procedure and every prescription that you have (as well as how often you fill it, whether you do so at the appropriate intervals, etc.) There is a lot more detail than "a consult". The insurance company then uses sophisticated AI programs to guess (when it isn't already spelled out) what's wrong with you, and what might go wrong with you in the future. They know a lot more than you seem to think. They read and process tremendous amounts of this information in near real-time. They use this knowledge for a variety of purposes. At least, that's what happens in the USA.
Guess how I know. Hint: I can't tell you any details due to NDA.
The information that they're wondering if they should give you is often faulty, and results in people making bad choices. For example, undergoing preventive therapy that is costly, has serious side effects, and turns out to have been totally unnecessary. You weren't going to get that disease that you decided you needed to be treated for. Meanwhile, it caused you health problems, and untold mental agony, anda lifetime of worrying. Also for your relatives (children and parents). By giving them this information, you have failed to "First, Do No Harm."
If the genetic analysis were more reliable (like everyone reading this story probably assumes), it would be different. But currently, for most of the information that can be given, it's very dicey.
Facebook is not a place that everyone goes to. It is merely a hosting platform where people create zillions (of partially overlapping) "places" that they go to. Those millions of people are not on your Friends list. Facebook is millions of "places", not one. (However, George Takei's page is indeed the one single place in the world where everyone goes. But just for his stuff; nobody reads the comments.) As for Facebook "bombarding your news feed with useless information 24x7", ummm, that doesn't happen to me. Get a life?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I wonder how much (or in what way) "they" paid this guy to pretend to be Satoshi Nakamoto?
skids:
the sellers are con artists and shouldn't be allowed to prey on them
There are con-artist products in every grocery store. Singling out Whole Foods for that is really just an excercise in hippie-punching. If we really want to crack down on false advertising claims, then 1) we should first actually verify them false with research rather than kneejerk skepticism and 2) concentrate on claims most detrimental to public health first, and then after that, those most detrimental to the economy.
Insightful.
I doubt it will ever be truly widespread. Isn't it still illegal in most places to record people without prior permission, and threatening to record can also be seen as a threat?
No, it is not. In a public place you have no legal expectation of privacy. People can record you all they want. And they do.
What's going on here is that people don't like that fact. They don't like the government and corporate and even the individuals that are recording them everywhere all the time. They don't like being recorded with cell phones, either. But until now, it has been difficult to object to this "invasion of privacy". Along comes Google Glass, which just brings the reality to the forefront where you can't even pretend it isn't happening. Google Glass is both a symbol of "lost" privacy, and the first on-your-face-in-your-face implementation of the coming privacy-invading cyborg culture. While some embrace this future, others loathe and fear it.
In the case of the girl who was assaulted, battered, and robbed at the bar, there is an additional social factor. The people in that neighborhood bar HATE Google and have been assaulting Google employees on the street on their way to work. Hence the comment from the bar patron, "You people are ruining our city!" This incident was as much about hating Google and yuppie-techies in the city, as it was about privacy.
The (actual) privacy-in-public culture we've been living in was a brief and anomalous period in our history. In earlier days, you did not have much privacy in public places like streets and bars. The town was small, and "everyone knew everyone" (to some approximation). The whole town knew who was out and about, on what business, and talking to whom. And of course you could be overheard in bars. If you wanted privacy, you had to be a lot more discreet. When cities got big, it was possible to "get lost in the crowd" and hide in plain sight. Now things are turning around, and your activity outside your house is potentially exposed to everyone. With our new technology will come a return to the old no-privacy culture.
Society will adapt to provide some kinds of "public privacy" by opening bars that have a no-recording-devices policy. And there will be technological aspects to this. One example might be jamming of mobile devices on the premises. (This is currently illegal, and there are several social and legal issues to address there.) Another example: having to walk through the Device Detector (like a metal detector) gate at the bar entrance.
I have, on my head, a device with which I can access all the worlds knowledge, communicate with everyone on the planet, and record and share my life's experiences. I use it for looking at pictures of cats and picking fights with strangers in bars!
does anybody actually know the laws around recording in public? Obv you can record celebrities because they do it on TMZ. and obv you can record with a security camera. but sometimes a tv show is recording at an airport or whatever and I walk by and there are signs "by passing by this sign you consent to being recorded." so obviously the right to record someone else is not absolute.
Can anybody add any actual information to this vacuum?
You are taking those signs at face value and drawing a conclusion from them. But that's not how the world works. There is no need for the airport or a mall to inform you that you might be recorded in public. You do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy when out in public. The reason for the sign is to intimidate the less-intelligent potential criminals who are going to the airport to steal people's luggage and such. The sign might more accurately read, "Attention Dumbshit: Don't Come In Here For Opportunistic Crime; Of Course You Are Being Recorded By Police Who Are Watching You On The Cameras, Hidden And Visible All Over The Place Here." But that wouldn't be as polite. Sometimes the signs do say things like, "Warning: Police Recording", though.
Some say Milk Man's come back to the future!
I have points but couldn't figure out how to mod the actual article -1 Flamebait
AUTHENTICATION CHALLENGE:
During your last session, did you (choose one):
(a) Receive email from your sister, Dorothy about her medical condition.
(b) Access your bank account 101000187-33400301
(c) Install a root kit onto 0F13C73AAB0D4E000028038C99D3125A
[CONTINUE TO LOGIN]
Audi should put a shark on the hood!
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9491253 .... but that's even without a spacewalk.
"The virtual version of Zoe was created by Zoe Graystone herself using hacked rudimentary emulation software capable of duplicating her own V-World avatar. Graystone programmed the copy - a perfect copy - with roughly 100 terabytes of personal information from other databases. This allowed the avatar to access and translate information from medical scans, DNA profiles, psychological evaluations, school records, emails, video and audio recordings, CAT scans, genetic typing, synaptic records, security cameras, test results, shopping records, talent shows, ballgames, traffic tickets, restaurant bills, phone records, music lists, movie tickets, TV shows and "even prescriptions for birth control" - essentially turning raw data into personality and memory." -- http://en.battlestarwiki.org/wiki/Zoe_Graystone
I remember this recycled story from around 2008. The Linden Lab executive (who was also one of their main system creators originally) hasn't been with the company now for many years. This was all eons ago, but it's being brought back up in the wake of Snowden. The part about Linden Dollars and the Second Life economy is a little ridiculous, since the money is only useful for buying in-game virtual items. For example, terrorists getting some better high heels for their avatars. You can cash out Linden Dollars, but there are lots of limits and monitors on it, and you cash out through either your verified PayPal account or a bank check mailed to you. Neither of those are in any way anonymous, and they are tightly monitored by the feds at multiple levels. (You could get some IP addresses and in-game transaction information from Linden Lab if you were tracing back some accumulated cash-out; that might be useful intelligence, I guess.) Like any glorified chat system. The idea that terrorists are using Second Life for virtual training is a bad joke. No realistic scenario or actions could be created. You could use the primitive in-game 3D modeling to create a rough representation of the buildings and alleys or whatever. But very little could be communicated beyond that. Avatars can't actually do anything subtle - mainly they can just walk. Arms and hands don't do anything except point-and-click on scripted objects in the world. The scripting can make objects change texture/color and move around. Communication is a very primitive text chat system plus an in-game Voice system that doesn't work very well or reliably. So you could make a really crappy diagramatic 3D model of your bomb scenario, and walk your avatars around it. But you could do infinitely better by just looking at a street map, or Google Earth, and tracing your fingers and talking about it or whatever. Linden Lab advertises that it keeps Chat logs (etc.) for some period, six months was what they said at one point. However, I asked someone there once and they said, "Well, we've' never actually deleted any logs to date." Second Life is an interesting experiment along a number of axis, but it's capabilities are really quite primitive. They tried at one point to sell it to businesses as an online meeting system, and it was such a bad joke they gave up that marketing effort. IBM has an open-source version of the system that is integrated with some other IBM meeting software. There are other service providers running "grids" with the open-source version of SL. You can download the server and client onto your laptop if you want to play with it stand-along (or hook together with some other users and make your own network). But it doesn't have any specially great utility for terrorists. Any more than any other MUD/MOO/Mush type system. That was all just hype, years ago, from when Second Life was exciting and hyped and not understood. NSA monitors AOL chat rooms and whatever, too; it's just exactly the same thing. They didn't understand that a half decade ago when this "news" article first came out.
Lawyers wield the most dangerous weapon of all, the law.
"Hunting the most dangerous prey of all..."
I'll give you a twelve minute head start..
Ethanol and synthehol: http://science.howstuffworks.com/innovation/edible-innovations/synthehol.htm
Story from 2009: http://io9.com/5434752/real+life-synthehol-will-get-you-buzzed-but-never-drunk
Trekkie: http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Synthehol
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxoqVvBWJLk
One of the early projects that Schneier lead, precipitated by the Y2K date crisis, was a security evaluation of old COBOL system (code-named "ZEBRA") that was still being used by a certain un-named U.S. Government agency.
This mainframe software had not been maintained for some years, except by patching the binary image; no online version of the source code was available. It would be too hard to audit that way, so they decided to upload the original code (from paper), recompile, diff against the binaries, and eventually reconstruct accurate source code for the Y2K bugs and security issues.
Schneier's group decided to use OCR. The source code had been "line printed" on "greenbar" paper, where alternate lines have a light green background stripes for contrast. The problem was that OCR scanners of the day were designed only for black-and-white, and would get confused by the green stripes, and sometimes mis-scan some letters and numbers, making this source code unreliable. This required them to manually read and type in corrections, to about half the code!
Bruce Schneier is an outspoken critic of agencies like the DHS and the TSA, but he has been a consultant for the Government in the past. And as you can see from the above story, he was originally an early proponent of scanners, and only in more recent years has spoken out against them. So it is quite reasonable to ask if Bruce Schneier has ever changed his stripes.