I went through the process of removing the plug-in. While I was incensed that it was installed without so much as a by-your-leave, the removal method I used didn't require registry hacks or anything so high falutin.
That said, I should not have had to have gone to any such effort in the first place.
This sounds a lot like Snow Crash to me - making brains respond automatically to perceived binary input. I wonder if it would be possible to use a sequence of flashing lights to stimulate the brain in the correct manner to produce useful perceptual data within the target brain?
Yes, I agree - these are potentially plausible situations, but we're not there yet. As I said in my initial post, we're at the point where we'd say "Hey, it might be a good idea to think about robot security".
The idea of making a robot do nothing when it should do something is interesting - especially when considering the complexity of aircraft autopilots these days. I wonder to what extend those systems are hardened (although I suspect that critical avionic systems run on a completely closed network).
I'm going to pull out the Yes-I-make-robots-for-a-living-card here and tell you that both your points are quite untrue. Firstly, hacking robot code is not just a case of saying "Do Y, then do X" - I'm sorry, but it doesn't work that way, especially if you have something like cascading vision systems and sensor fusion.
Software, and robot software in particular, is extremely brittle - you muck up one little bit and it doesn't go haywire, it just falls in a heap and does very little at all. The level of cognition required to, say, determine that it's unsafe vs safe is no different from that required to determine if it's safe vs unsafe. Maybe if you know the code well enough to slip a single '!' into the test, sure you could do something like what you suggest, but you've still got to be smart enough to know where in the code that is,/and/ be able to remotely modify that code in the first place. Actually, the best place to make malicious code changes would be in a UAV, where doing nothing at all is as good as sending the "Halt; scatter internals over a wide area" command.
The market is most definitely open to anyone. I've been to robotics expo's geared to military customers in particular (in fact, I was at one in Boston recently) where everybody from Raytheon to a backyard operator building recon bots from modified RC trucks were present. If you've got a better mousetrap you can definitely sell it - if not to the government, then at least to a huge corporation (who might then give you a job!).
It always amuses me when people worry about robots going wrong or turning on us, or being used by The Bad Guys of the Week to do us harm. I know a lot of very smart people who are involved in robotics research, and they will tell you that making robots do anything is hard. Making robots do something with surreptitiously poisoned programming would be even harder. Seriously,
if you're smart enough to remotely modify a robot's code to do something usefully nefarious, you're smart enough to sell a usefully nefarious to the government for megadollars.
There's a lot more money to be made will legitimate killbots. It might be nice to protect robots from script kiddies who just want to throw a spanner in the works but until robots are ubiquitous enough that domestic cybernetic terrorism becomes attractive (ie, doing it for the lulz) I don't think we need to be overly worried now.
That said, now -is- the time to be thinking about these things so that we're ready before we get to that point. Thinking, but not worried.
Ugh. I feel the need to clarify, before the shouts from the peanut gallery. Yes, some robots have computer vision and are not 'blind', yes some robots can be well programmed and very smart, but that's still not the same thing as a true reasoning intelligence. Robots are only as good as their software and, if their programming has been corrupted, there is nothing you can do to get around that.
I agree software is most often the problem - certainly with the sorts of systems that end up at ACME PCFixitWorld to get picked over by staff (although, in my homebrew systems, most of my problems have been PSU-related). I think the software trouble is two fold: crappy software design, and the differences across systems.
Embedded devices 'Just Work' because they're one platform, one piece of finely-tuned software and off they go. With PCs, there's this "we'll just patch it later" mentality where bugs are ok if they don't break too much, and there's plenty of memory to leak into so don't worry if you don't clean up after execution completes.
They're still around, but hiding. I've had a great relationship with some of the local resellers in my neighborhood. I often walk out of there with a bunch of stuff I didn't plan on buying - not because they told me I needed it, but because they showed me some amazing new cool thing I didn't know about and I -had- to have.
Since when was IT prestigious? It once used to be the hot new industry where people made lots of money, but it was never 'sexy'. Lucrative, not glorious. And now it's not even that, so much.
Sorry, I'm accepting what now? I don't buy from the big chains that employ clueless fraudulent people - I buy my parts from resellers I know and trust. I vote with my dollars.
Don't make stupid uninformed assumptions about my accepting anything.
Re:The only person dumber than a computer salesper
on
Bad PC Sales Staff Exposed
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The problem here is that computer use and maintenance really is a technical subject. It's no less sophisticated than car repair - sure, some little jobs an owner-operator can get away with, but stripping the engine down or safety checking the brakes might be a bit too much.
Thing is, we don't expect people to be able to walk in off the street and adjust a carburetor. We demand training, and credentials and certificates before we let people monkey around with car electricals. But somehow, somehow it's ok to hire clueless people to maintain and service the PCs that people's livelihoods may depend on. Sure, they may not -die- if you do a bad job, but you can end up wasting thousands of their dollars and still not fix the problem.
We don't need to educate people about computers - we need to educate people about the value of professional IT training and certification.
No, you don't have to be a mechanic to sell a car; but that's only because cars come as a prefabricated system where your only choices are what colour and what model of CD player to put in. If you were selling cars assembled from any number of subsystems you -would- need to be a mechanic to offer useful advice.
PC sales staff are clueless droids - film at 11. It's been this way since PCs hit retail sales floors. Anybody with the smarts to sell a PC with competence has the smarts to not be in retail.
I'm all in favour of making DIY HERF devices to safeguard against tyranny. But we only need such things because the government is no longer afraid of the people who vote it into power. When ordinary people can no longer acquire the tools to depose despots, then it is a sure sign that those tools are now needed.
Must explain itself to whom in order to not be broken?
To the user, presumably. Just as a piece of writing must be geared towards its likely audience, so too must software be composed to address its likely user. When I write aeroelastic simulation code, I know I'm writing for people who have a clue what a Reynold's Number is so I don't take the time to explain it. When I write a test module for students, I know they need to have their hands held through every step.
Also, it's ridiculous to infer that I say usability is the #1 concern in developing software and that software shouldn't be used until it's easier to understand - that's a scurrilous misrepresentation. However, there is no point in even having nuclear detonation simulators if no one can figure out how to use the bloody thing. Mind you, given that that software will be used by highly technical professionals who are experts in their field and so it's likely to require less simplification than, say, a web browser UI.
Target your UI for your audience; unusable software is not better than no software at all.
This is a good point - if software doesn't explain itself, then it is broken. I believe this holds all the way from the top level to the basics. If the architecture of the system isn't well signposted and comprehensible, it fails. If an icon meaning is murky and there are no tooltips, it fails. Now you always have to assume some basic level competence on the part of the user (eg. knowing to type man to get program info, or knowing how to click with a mouse) but once you're part that, there is no reason why programs can't be self-explanatory, or at the very least self-documenting. I don't know how many times I've torn my hair out because the 'Help' menu's only item was "About".
Where I live there is a disturbing number of scooters for the grossly obese - those people who are so corpulent that even walking is beyond them. Whenever I see one, I get to thinking that the only reason why Segways haven't brought on the chubpocalypse is because they were priced too high for lower income people (who have the highest rate of obesity) to afford.
Dr. Fauci said that scientists would seldom consider licensing a vaccine less than 70 or 80 percent effective, but he added,"If you have a product that's even a little bit protective, you want to look at the blood samples and figure out what particular response was effective and direct research from there."
They don't expect to be selling this as is - they know it's not good enough. Instead, they're going to use the results to further research until they can produce a better, practical vaccine.
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I went through the process of removing the plug-in. While I was incensed that it was installed without so much as a by-your-leave, the removal method I used didn't require registry hacks or anything so high falutin.
That said, I should not have had to have gone to any such effort in the first place.
This sounds a lot like Snow Crash to me - making brains respond automatically to perceived binary input. I wonder if it would be possible to use a sequence of flashing lights to stimulate the brain in the correct manner to produce useful perceptual data within the target brain?
Yes, I agree - these are potentially plausible situations, but we're not there yet. As I said in my initial post, we're at the point where we'd say "Hey, it might be a good idea to think about robot security".
The idea of making a robot do nothing when it should do something is interesting - especially when considering the complexity of aircraft autopilots these days. I wonder to what extend those systems are hardened (although I suspect that critical avionic systems run on a completely closed network).
I'm going to pull out the Yes-I-make-robots-for-a-living-card here and tell you that both your points are quite untrue. Firstly, hacking robot code is not just a case of saying "Do Y, then do X" - I'm sorry, but it doesn't work that way, especially if you have something like cascading vision systems and sensor fusion.
/and/ be able to remotely modify that code in the first place. Actually, the best place to make malicious code changes would be in a UAV, where doing nothing at all is as good as sending the "Halt; scatter internals over a wide area" command.
Software, and robot software in particular, is extremely brittle - you muck up one little bit and it doesn't go haywire, it just falls in a heap and does very little at all. The level of cognition required to, say, determine that it's unsafe vs safe is no different from that required to determine if it's safe vs unsafe. Maybe if you know the code well enough to slip a single '!' into the test, sure you could do something like what you suggest, but you've still got to be smart enough to know where in the code that is,
The market is most definitely open to anyone. I've been to robotics expo's geared to military customers in particular (in fact, I was at one in Boston recently) where everybody from Raytheon to a backyard operator building recon bots from modified RC trucks were present. If you've got a better mousetrap you can definitely sell it - if not to the government, then at least to a huge corporation (who might then give you a job!).
It always amuses me when people worry about robots going wrong or turning on us, or being used by The Bad Guys of the Week to do us harm. I know a lot of very smart people who are involved in robotics research, and they will tell you that making robots do anything is hard. Making robots do something with surreptitiously poisoned programming would be even harder. Seriously,
if you're smart enough to remotely modify a robot's code to do something usefully nefarious, you're smart enough to sell a usefully nefarious to the government for megadollars.
There's a lot more money to be made will legitimate killbots. It might be nice to protect robots from script kiddies who just want to throw a spanner in the works but until robots are ubiquitous enough that domestic cybernetic terrorism becomes attractive (ie, doing it for the lulz) I don't think we need to be overly worried now.
That said, now -is- the time to be thinking about these things so that we're ready before we get to that point. Thinking, but not worried.
Ugh. I feel the need to clarify, before the shouts from the peanut gallery. Yes, some robots have computer vision and are not 'blind', yes some robots can be well programmed and very smart, but that's still not the same thing as a true reasoning intelligence. Robots are only as good as their software and, if their programming has been corrupted, there is nothing you can do to get around that.
...useless when your robot doesn't have any intelligence and just executes commands blindly.
Which would be all of them, currently.
I do all my engineering on the back of a napkin, you insensitive clod!
I think that was the point of the article - that the circular one was useless, but the group theory-based one might actually have predictive power.
I always wanted to make a T-shirt that said "I make Apple uncool", then wear it to Jobs' keynote.
So if I buy a ticket and perform the tasks of a flight engineer, do I get a discount?
Embedded devices 'Just Work' because they're one platform, one piece of finely-tuned software and off they go. With PCs, there's this "we'll just patch it later" mentality where bugs are ok if they don't break too much, and there's plenty of memory to leak into so don't worry if you don't clean up after execution completes.
They're still around, but hiding. I've had a great relationship with some of the local resellers in my neighborhood. I often walk out of there with a bunch of stuff I didn't plan on buying - not because they told me I needed it, but because they showed me some amazing new cool thing I didn't know about and I -had- to have.
Since when was IT prestigious? It once used to be the hot new industry where people made lots of money, but it was never 'sexy'. Lucrative, not glorious. And now it's not even that, so much.
Don't make stupid uninformed assumptions about my accepting anything.
Thing is, we don't expect people to be able to walk in off the street and adjust a carburetor. We demand training, and credentials and certificates before we let people monkey around with car electricals. But somehow, somehow it's ok to hire clueless people to maintain and service the PCs that people's livelihoods may depend on. Sure, they may not -die- if you do a bad job, but you can end up wasting thousands of their dollars and still not fix the problem.
We don't need to educate people about computers - we need to educate people about the value of professional IT training and certification.
No, you don't have to be a mechanic to sell a car; but that's only because cars come as a prefabricated system where your only choices are what colour and what model of CD player to put in. If you were selling cars assembled from any number of subsystems you -would- need to be a mechanic to offer useful advice.
PC sales staff are clueless droids - film at 11. It's been this way since PCs hit retail sales floors. Anybody with the smarts to sell a PC with competence has the smarts to not be in retail.
I'm all in favour of making DIY HERF devices to safeguard against tyranny. But we only need such things because the government is no longer afraid of the people who vote it into power. When ordinary people can no longer acquire the tools to depose despots, then it is a sure sign that those tools are now needed.
Maybe the guy lured him to the library by offering "to ride him" and the jock misinterpreted it, and though he was going to get some action instead?
Just be glad they aren't outsourcing them to Digg.
Must explain itself to whom in order to not be broken?
To the user, presumably. Just as a piece of writing must be geared towards its likely audience, so too must software be composed to address its likely user. When I write aeroelastic simulation code, I know I'm writing for people who have a clue what a Reynold's Number is so I don't take the time to explain it. When I write a test module for students, I know they need to have their hands held through every step.
Also, it's ridiculous to infer that I say usability is the #1 concern in developing software and that software shouldn't be used until it's easier to understand - that's a scurrilous misrepresentation. However, there is no point in even having nuclear detonation simulators if no one can figure out how to use the bloody thing. Mind you, given that that software will be used by highly technical professionals who are experts in their field and so it's likely to require less simplification than, say, a web browser UI.
Target your UI for your audience; unusable software is not better than no software at all.
This is a good point - if software doesn't explain itself, then it is broken. I believe this holds all the way from the top level to the basics. If the architecture of the system isn't well signposted and comprehensible, it fails. If an icon meaning is murky and there are no tooltips, it fails. Now you always have to assume some basic level competence on the part of the user (eg. knowing to type man to get program info, or knowing how to click with a mouse) but once you're part that, there is no reason why programs can't be self-explanatory, or at the very least self-documenting. I don't know how many times I've torn my hair out because the 'Help' menu's only item was "About".
Remember folks: every time you say, read or think a dirty word, god kills a kitten.
Where I live there is a disturbing number of scooters for the grossly obese - those people who are so corpulent that even walking is beyond them. Whenever I see one, I get to thinking that the only reason why Segways haven't brought on the chubpocalypse is because they were priced too high for lower income people (who have the highest rate of obesity) to afford.
Dr. Fauci said that scientists would seldom consider licensing a vaccine less than 70 or 80 percent effective, but he added,"If you have a product that's even a little bit protective, you want to look at the blood samples and figure out what particular response was effective and direct research from there."
They don't expect to be selling this as is - they know it's not good enough. Instead, they're going to use the results to further research until they can produce a better, practical vaccine.