Which suggests that all your email and metadata that you and others have stashed in encrypted stores may be decodable if you (and they) keep the stores around too long.
Worse than that: We're constantly putting sensitive information out in public because, "Hey, it's encrypted. Even if someone intercepts this or downloads this, it'll take them billions of years to crack the encryption." If someone has scooped that data up now, they might be able to get access to a whole lot of information that people thought was safe.
On the other hand, most of us can take some solace in the volume of data on the Internet. It'd be challenging just to "scoop that data up" and store it all. Then once it's all decrypted, someone would still need to sort through it all, looking for juicy secrets. After 10 years, a lot of those juicy secrets won't be relevant.
Still, people will justify having data in the open because "it'll take billions of years to crack it". If that "billions of years" just got cut down to "5 years", that's a little scary.
But seriously, he's not a businessman. He's a guy who inherited a fortune from his father, ran up debts, ran his businesses into the ground, and didn't pay his bills. He had become famous for being a failure until a reality TV show started selling him as a businessman. At that point, "Trump" started making a bunch of money for their branding, but claiming that Trump's company is making money because of his shrewd business judgement is like saying Disney makes money because of Mickey Mouse's smart decisions.
He's a mascot. He doesn't understand anything except how to stir up a crowd of people who don't know any better.
I don't think I'd agree that this phenomenon "reveals flaws in how we listen to audio". "Flaw" is the wrong word. It's more that this reveals that "listening" is not an objective process, to people who didn't already know that.
When you hear things, you are never hearing a sound that exists in the world. There are "sound waves", i.e. vibrations in air, that exist in the world, but your perception of a sound is not a perfect, immediate, or objective experience of those vibrations. The vibrations hit your body and the various components of your ears, and the structure of those organs respond to certain qualities of the vibration. If the structure is different, the response is different. Then that response triggers an effect in your nervous system, which gets fed to the brain. The brain then filters and interprets those effects, and converts it to basic auditory perception. Then still other parts of your brain try to interpret that perception for meaning.
So it's not quite that there are sounds in the world that we hear, more or less as they are. It's more like, there are things happening in the world that hit our ears, and we create the sounds in our brain.
To put it into computer terms (which aren't a perfect analog), think about Siri (or other phone assistants). it's not like there are WAV files floating around in the air, and the mic on your phone just downloads the WAV file out of the air and stores it on the hard drive with perfect fidelity, and then Siri just understands what you're saying because the language is embedded in the WAV file. No, the design of the microphone will only pick up certain frequencies and volumes of sound, and it was designed specifically to pick up speech. The input from the mic is then converted into digital electrical signals, which are already different from the actual sound in the world. The computer then puts it through some filters to clean the audio up and remove noise, and algorithms are used to identify features and quality of the sound, looking for specific patterns that might be speech. Information about those patterns are then processed and sent to an AI that tries to interpret those patterns into words, and then in turn interpret an intended meaning from the words.
And in this example, even by the time you pass information to the AI, that information is so processed that, if you could just "play it back" as audio, it wouldn't sound like what the mic picked up. In a similar way, what things "sound like" to us is not a precise representation of the reality of sound waves.
And before someone jumps in with a technical objection, like, "Actually, Siri doesn't use the sort of pre-processing that you're describing," I don't care. It's a metaphor, and not intended to be a entire and correct scientific explanation of what's going on.
No, laws are good, but you don't want to make vague laws so every single thing that comes up needs to be settled in court. Especially when you're talking about things that involve a lot of small transactions, and there's a more technical solution available.
I don't think I'd name that for "safest" in terms of security. I could be wrong, but I don't remember it having a whole lot of security features, e.g. web filtering, IPS, antivirus scanning.
So you're citing an editorial on a conservative rag that doesn't seem particularly reputable, which spends most of its time quoting another disreputable source, and again, it doesn't back up the things you were saying.
Another way would be that if you register XYZ.com then any established business called XYZ can boot you out unless you can come up with a good idea why not.
Right, like I said, there are various ways to try to solve the problem. However (and I'm sorry if this is rude), what you're suggesting is not a particularly good solution. It'd be courting controversy, and there'd bound to be a lot of administrative overhead.
Because think about this: What constitutes a "good idea why not"? Someone needs to come up with a set of reasons why it's ok to own a domain, and why not, when someone can have their ownership challenged, and when they can't. And then once the rules are set, there needs to be some kind of court or governing body that decides whether a given situation falls under some particular rule. Then lawyers will get involved. Next thing you know, there's a billion-dollar legal industry set up for the sole purpose of manipulating this governing body, and who has a "good reason" for owning a domain becomes about who has the most money to spend on lawyers.
And even if you can come up with a reasonable and iron-clad reason why the current owner shouldn't have access to XYZ.com, so you revoke their ownership, but now 10 different companies all come forward claiming they they should be granted owership-- how do you decide who has the best claim.
No doubt we could come up with a plan to address some of these things, but I think it's going to be a problem as long as you're relying on a "good reason", which is going to be judgement-based. I could see there being a more technical justification like, "there is no original content on the website" or "the website has not been updated in [X] years." However, I could see either of those being abused/manipulated. What constitutes "original content"? What constitutes and "update"? What if you just use a domain for email, and not for a website?
I think there should be (and actually I believe there is) some mechanism for revoking domain ownership in case of obvious abuse. If you somehow hijack Microsoft's domain and use it to spread malware, I'm pretty sure that'll get shut down and returned to Microsoft. Otherwise, because of the scale of the Internet and the number of controversies that are bound to arise, I think the solution should probably be more technical than legalistic.
I understand what you're saying, but on the other hand, I could see some possible value from increasing the number of TLDs.
One of the problems with the domain naming system is that there are a lot of squatters. For a long time, there's been a land-grab to gobble up every desirable.COM domain and hold out for a big payday. There are a lot of companies that go to buy a domain that matches the company name, only to find that [company-name].com is taken, and so are most of the variations that they would want. They end up paying hundreds, thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of dollars to get the domain that they want, from someone who isn't using it and doesn't even want it. There are actually cases where domain names went on sale for tens of millions of dollars.
There are various ways to try to solve this problem. One part of the reason the land-grab works is because there's so little land being sold for such small amounts of money that it makes a lot of sense to buy as many potentially useful domains as you can, and sit on them until you find a buyer. One way to try to address that is to increase the cost of a domain, such that sitting on unused domains is less profitable. However, that also creates a big barrier to people who want to start a website without spending a ton of money.
Another approach is to drastically increase the amount of land. If there are nearly infinite combinations of domains, then it becomes much harder (or at least more expensive) to monopolize all of the memorable combinations. As a result, domain squatters have less leverage-- they may have the exact domain that you want, but you should be able to come up with some other acceptable variation.
Ok, so I'm not 100% right but not 100% wrong. It's not that they can compromise your system, but they can compromise your other encrypted messages.
To reframe the metaphor, it's not "We've discovered that locks can be picked, so remove locks from all of your doors." It's more like, "We've discovered that there's a way that sticking your key into a malicious lock might allow them to scan your key and unlock your doors. Don't go sticking your key into unknown locks." Or something.
Agreed! Or even if we (for some reason) standardized on a single AI (or limited set of AIs), its features would probably not be inherent to all possible AI, but based on the particular design choices.
I think that if you read between the lines, the problem isn't that PGP can be broken. The problem is that there's a vulnerability in the PGP code such that a specially-crafted payload can exploit it and compromise your system... somehow.
That's why they're specifically warning not to automatically open PGP-encrypted messages. It implies that someone might send a malicious PGP message that could cause damage, so you should be careful about which messages you decrypt until this is fixed.
This is both why making predictions is so hard, and why making predictions is such an important exercise.
Well I'm not trying to say that there can't be any interesting questions or worthwhile predictions about AI. My argument is more that the question, "How Would a Self-Aware AI Behave?" does not have sufficient framing for anyone to answer. It's the sort of question where you need to provide context, and then that context determines the kind of answer you get.
For example, you could ask "How will an AI behave if we successfully design an AI with human-like intelligence?" It's still a pretty vague question, but it's enough to provide a vague answer: It'll behave similar to how a person would. To narrow it down, we might ask, "Will that AI with human-like intelligence be friendly toward us?" We can start to make a guess based on the context that the AI will think somewhat like us. Then we can say, "There's a good chance it won't be friendly." Because imagine I took you, stuck you in a box where you couldn't do anything, boosted your intelligence until you were smarter than me, and then tried to make you act as my servant. If the AI thinks like people, then you can make guesses at its reactions based on how you would think.
If you want it to be friendly, you could try to have one of its basic components be that it wants to be friendly and obedient toward humans. If it's still designed to think like a person, it's still not clear how well that would work out. A person intelligent enough to understand that they'd been brainwashed to be obedient might very well become resentful, and a human-like AI might respond similarly.
Perhaps it is programmed to "enjoy" being correct, which would be useful for an AI used for information-based jobs.
I'm not sure how you mean that, but I don't think a motivation to be "correct" is enough. Ignoring that it's not clear how the AI will know it's giving correct answers to questions it doesn't already know the answer to, It's very easy to be "correct": only answer easy questions. An AI designed to get a digital dopamine dose whenever it's "correct" might just spend all day telling you that 1+1=2.
Also, this concept of growing an AI that's recognizable to humans as "truely intelligent" would likely require that we give it a human-like outer-life as well as inner-life. The level and kind of intelligence that will form won't just be determined by the chosen motivations and computer architecture. The intelligence will also be shaped and bound by the constraints that it has on the types of solutions it can seek, and the tools that it has available to it.
For example, if we were able to force a dog to have the same level of intelligence as humans, it would probably still not think exactly like a person. It's not just because dogs have different motives (though that may play a part), but also because dogs' bodies are different. They're shorter, and closer to the ground. They don't have hands to grab onto things or wield tools. Their eyesight isn't as good, but their sense of smell better. Given the same scenario, their understanding of it might be different; given the same problem, they might come to a drastically different solution.
The more different their bodies and perceptions, the more foreign the intelligence is likely to be. In addition to coming up with different kinds of solutions, an extremely foreign intelligence might not be capable of understanding our concerns. An intelligence with no agency in the world is unlikely to share our sense of morality or fair play.
Consider this: When people have thought about creating AI, one of the ideas that people quickly jumped to was teaching a computer how to play chess. I guess it's because chess is a game that's perceived as highly intellectual, and a computer that can play chess must be "smart". However, I've rarely heard anyone talk about how it would form the AI to have its foundations in learning to
So what should be the proper term be for the 'reputation management' firms that are employed by our own political factions?
If they're upfront about who they are and what they're doing, maybe "PR firms". Some of the organizations you're talking about, maybe "advocacy groups". If they're doing it covertly and nefariously, then propagandists, shills, or astroturfers. If they're doing it covertly and maliciously on behalf of a foreign government, then spies or intelligence operatives.
Where is the distinction when groups such as these act on the behest of the US government, as a result of the repeal of the Smith Mundt act [wikipedia.org], which restricted propaganda campaigns being conducted on the public?
Same thing, basically. If it's in the open, we seem to have generally settled on the term "public relations" for benign propaganda, and stuck with "propaganda" when it's nefarious. In some circumstances, you might still call them spies. Like if the CIA is spreading propaganda as part of an operation, I'd call them spies.
Because it seems that those drumming up concern about 'Russian agents'
Nope. The news the Trump campaign conspired with Russian spies to fix the election has drummed up concern about Russian spies.
And let's be clear: collusion already been proven. Donald Trump's son has publicly admitted that he and the campaign manager had met with a Russian operative in order to orchestrate the release of damaging material on Clinton, illegally obtained by the Russian government. We have his emails agreeing to the meeting and suggesting when the material should be released. We have his confession that he met for that purpose. It's no longer a question of whether they "colluded", it's a question of who within the campaign will be criminally prosecuted. There have been a couple plea bargains already.
I think if Skynet were very smart, it'd realize that a war against humans is useless. People are easier to manipulate than to fight in a head-on confrontation. Skynet could have completely controlled humanity by setting up a few Facebook and Twitter accounts.
But part of my point is, in reality, we have no way of knowing whether a hypothetical AI would be interested in domination or even self-preservation. We don't know whether it would understand "The Terminator" if it were to watch it. Just as we might not understand it clearly, a sentient AI might find our concerns completely alien and incomprehensible.
What an AI thinks, and whether we're capable of understanding it, might depend on whether we choose to (or are able to) construct it to think and perceive like we do. And even if we do design it to be human-like, once it starts thinking for itself, there's no telling whether it'll stick to the script or come up with ideas that don't fit with our ideas. The only way to be sure it was understandable to us would be to design it to be restricted to ideas that we prescribe for it. If we were to do that, I don't know if we'd still consider that genuine intelligence, or just complex programming.
"The only way we can begin to inoculate ourselves against a future attack is to see first-hand the types of messages, themes and imagery the Russians used to divide us...."
I'm bored of saying it but... Yes, it's all Russia's fault.
Reason Trump got elected - Russia.
Reason BREXIT happpened - Russia.
When somebody gets poisoned... you know who did it ? - Russia
Doping scandals - Russia
/sarcasm
Sorry, but... why is that sarcasm? Those things all happened.
It's becoming more clear all the time that Russia probably did get Trump elected. They put a lot of effort into trying to help him win, and he won by a slim margin. Russia seems to have at least been part of the Brexit vote. Russia has been caught poisoning people. Russian athletes were caught doping.
It's kinda like going, "Oh, I see, let's all blame Hitler. Poland gets invaded? - Hitler. Six million Jews murdered? - Hitler./sarcasm"
There's truth to what you're saying. However, that doesn't mean that the squealing is always equally justified (or unjustified). Just because some people are going to squeal whenever they don't win, that doesn't mean that it's not appropriate to "squeal" when someone truly awful and dangerous is elected.
You're right that the two are not the same. Calling them "trolls" is disingenuous. Internet "trolls" are people who screw with others on the Internet for fun, to get a reaction. These people are professionals working on behalf of the Russian government. They're intelligence agents.
We should stop talking about "Russian trolls" and talk in terms of "Russian agents" and "Russian spies". It's more accurate, and gives a better sense of the malice with which they're acting. They're not trolls who are trolling, they're Russian spies engaged in a covert propaganda and influence campaign.
You can either have a valid definition and see what that gets you, or you can have a contrived definition arranged to fit a preconceived fact.
To some extent, it depends on what you're doing and in what way the definition is useful. Is the definition of "planet" a scientific one because "planets" are meaningfully different from the astroids and need to be distinguished for the purpose of scientific study? Or is it just a historical and cultural definition, of the astronomical bodies local to our solar system that we've decided are the "important" ones.
Because if the definition is historical and cultural, then it's not a contrived definition to identify 9 planets based on the historical significance of their discovery, even if there's not anything to distinguish them scientifically from other objects.
The real answer is, we have no idea what a self-aware AI will be like. We don't know what it'll think or how it'll think. It's especially hard to predict because it might depend on the parameters it's programmed with and the hardware architecture it runs on. But in any case, a real general AI might be totally alien to us, and even unrecognizable. it's even possible that we wouldn't know when we'd made it, because it could understand the world so differently from us that we don't view its actions as intelligent.
Part of the problem here is that it's a poorly framed problem. We don't understand intelligence or awareness or consciousness, we don't all agree on what those things are, and we don't know what the boundaries of them might be.
Aw, did I hurt your feelings? Poor little snowflake.
And yet, for some reason, you don't object to the idea that you might be a Russian or a skinhead. You're upset that I said you had a favorite news agency.
Sullivan’s order did not come due to any known request from the defense team and he did not explain his rationale for releasing it. Instead, he said only that the order was issued “sua sponte,” in other words, at his own volition.
That's not an assertion that Mueller was withholding exculpatory evidence. There's no assertion of impropriety at all. Just an order that if he has exculpatory evidence, that Mueller provide it. Your own source indicates that nobody knows exactly why the order was issued.
The reason that the plea bargain has been rejected is because directly of that.
Citation needed. I'm having trouble finding news that the plea bargain was rejected. I don't know if you're aware of some breaking news that's not on the Internet yet, but all I can find are some paranoid articles from far-right sources claiming, back in February, that the plea was about to be rejected. And then some more recent articles arguing that Flynn should withdraw his plea.
That's what Mueller's team told the judge, not Trump, not people working under him, not random people.
Again, citation needed. From what I've been able to find, there are some crazy conspiracy-theory sites pushing the term "secret mandate", but that's not what it is, and that's not what . It seems to be that Mueller received official guidance from the DoJ that Manafort's crimes fall under his existing mandate. That guidance was "secret" in the sense that it came in the form of a classified memo, and neither Mueller nor the DoJ are in the habit of publicly disclosing classified information about ongoing investigations, but there's not some alternate "secret mandate" in addition to investigating Russian interference in the election.
The original mandate was to investigate Russian interference and anyone who might be involved. Manafort was caught running afoul of FARA by taking large payments from the Ukraine to influence US politics. Literally, that's what happened. Trump's campaign manager took tens of millions of dollars in illegal payments from people connected to Putin, laundered it to hide where it was coming from, and in return promised political influence in the US. How could that not be considered a reasonable area of investigation for a special counsel tasked with investigating Russian attempts to influence the election?
I wouldn't say you're a Russian bot. I'm pretty sure you're a person. I don't know if you're a Russian, a skinhead, or a moron, but you're certainly spreading some nonsense propaganda.
And talk about snowflake. You can't even take criticism about your favorite news agency without crying about how unfair it is.
Let's see, one of the people "convicted" of lying to the FBI was Michael Flynn, about whom James Comey testified to Congress under oath that the agents who interviewed him believed he was being honest...
So what...? The FBI interviewed someone and believed at the time that the person was being honest. Later, they learned otherwise.
the judge who oversaw that plea bargained conviction was involved in granting the FISA warrant under suspect circumstances...
What suspect circumstances, exactly? Or are you just asserting that the circumstances were suspect?
(the wording suggests that the judge believes that the Mueller team was hiding exculpatory evidence from the defense)
Citation needed.
And if Flynn is so innocent and there's all this exculpatory evidence, why the plea bargain at all? If Mueller had been caught hiding exculpatory evidence, why hasn't the conviction been overturned?
At this level, plea bargains happen because the criminal has evidence of a different crime, and the prosecutor believes that crime is of greater importance. From the fact that there was a plea bargain, we know that Mueller had Flynn on a worse crime than lying to the FBI, and that Flynn had evidence of someone else committing an even worse crime.
the response from Mueller's team was that, in addition to the public statement from Rod Rosenstein they had a secret mandate that expanded their power further.
Regarding the whole "secret mandate" thing, that's some clever propaganda from Trump's goons. Mueller works with the DoJ, and as his investigation discovers additional crimes, he goes back to Rosenstein for instruction on what to follow and what not to follow. It's not a "secret mandate". It's how the process works when you're going by the book. They're not going to publicly discuss the particulars of every crime, divulging everything they know to the people they're investigating because that would be improper and stupid.
Mueller is investigating Manafort for laundering money from Putin's stooges. Manafort's lawyers challenged it, not on the basis of innocence, but on the basis that Mueller was only supposed to be investigating the Trump campaign. The judge asked if Mueller could justify that it's connected to the Trump campaign, and Mueller did just that.
Slashdot Mirror
Which suggests that all your email and metadata that you and others have stashed in encrypted stores may be decodable if you (and they) keep the stores around too long.
Worse than that: We're constantly putting sensitive information out in public because, "Hey, it's encrypted. Even if someone intercepts this or downloads this, it'll take them billions of years to crack the encryption." If someone has scooped that data up now, they might be able to get access to a whole lot of information that people thought was safe.
On the other hand, most of us can take some solace in the volume of data on the Internet. It'd be challenging just to "scoop that data up" and store it all. Then once it's all decrypted, someone would still need to sort through it all, looking for juicy secrets. After 10 years, a lot of those juicy secrets won't be relevant.
Still, people will justify having data in the open because "it'll take billions of years to crack it". If that "billions of years" just got cut down to "5 years", that's a little scary.
He's not a businessman, but he plays one on TV.
But seriously, he's not a businessman. He's a guy who inherited a fortune from his father, ran up debts, ran his businesses into the ground, and didn't pay his bills. He had become famous for being a failure until a reality TV show started selling him as a businessman. At that point, "Trump" started making a bunch of money for their branding, but claiming that Trump's company is making money because of his shrewd business judgement is like saying Disney makes money because of Mickey Mouse's smart decisions.
He's a mascot. He doesn't understand anything except how to stir up a crowd of people who don't know any better.
I don't think I'd agree that this phenomenon "reveals flaws in how we listen to audio". "Flaw" is the wrong word. It's more that this reveals that "listening" is not an objective process, to people who didn't already know that.
When you hear things, you are never hearing a sound that exists in the world. There are "sound waves", i.e. vibrations in air, that exist in the world, but your perception of a sound is not a perfect, immediate, or objective experience of those vibrations. The vibrations hit your body and the various components of your ears, and the structure of those organs respond to certain qualities of the vibration. If the structure is different, the response is different. Then that response triggers an effect in your nervous system, which gets fed to the brain. The brain then filters and interprets those effects, and converts it to basic auditory perception. Then still other parts of your brain try to interpret that perception for meaning.
So it's not quite that there are sounds in the world that we hear, more or less as they are. It's more like, there are things happening in the world that hit our ears, and we create the sounds in our brain.
To put it into computer terms (which aren't a perfect analog), think about Siri (or other phone assistants). it's not like there are WAV files floating around in the air, and the mic on your phone just downloads the WAV file out of the air and stores it on the hard drive with perfect fidelity, and then Siri just understands what you're saying because the language is embedded in the WAV file. No, the design of the microphone will only pick up certain frequencies and volumes of sound, and it was designed specifically to pick up speech. The input from the mic is then converted into digital electrical signals, which are already different from the actual sound in the world. The computer then puts it through some filters to clean the audio up and remove noise, and algorithms are used to identify features and quality of the sound, looking for specific patterns that might be speech. Information about those patterns are then processed and sent to an AI that tries to interpret those patterns into words, and then in turn interpret an intended meaning from the words.
And in this example, even by the time you pass information to the AI, that information is so processed that, if you could just "play it back" as audio, it wouldn't sound like what the mic picked up. In a similar way, what things "sound like" to us is not a precise representation of the reality of sound waves.
And before someone jumps in with a technical objection, like, "Actually, Siri doesn't use the sort of pre-processing that you're describing," I don't care. It's a metaphor, and not intended to be a entire and correct scientific explanation of what's going on.
No, laws are good, but you don't want to make vague laws so every single thing that comes up needs to be settled in court. Especially when you're talking about things that involve a lot of small transactions, and there's a more technical solution available.
I don't think I'd name that for "safest" in terms of security. I could be wrong, but I don't remember it having a whole lot of security features, e.g. web filtering, IPS, antivirus scanning.
So you're citing an editorial on a conservative rag that doesn't seem particularly reputable, which spends most of its time quoting another disreputable source, and again, it doesn't back up the things you were saying.
More like "Stop using the automatic door unlocking tool".
Yeah, but it's more like, "Don't have your automatic door unlocking tool automatically unlock any door that any random stranger might send to you."
Like you said, the analogy doesn't work.
Another way would be that if you register XYZ.com then any established business called XYZ can boot you out unless you can come up with a good idea why not.
Right, like I said, there are various ways to try to solve the problem. However (and I'm sorry if this is rude), what you're suggesting is not a particularly good solution. It'd be courting controversy, and there'd bound to be a lot of administrative overhead.
Because think about this: What constitutes a "good idea why not"? Someone needs to come up with a set of reasons why it's ok to own a domain, and why not, when someone can have their ownership challenged, and when they can't. And then once the rules are set, there needs to be some kind of court or governing body that decides whether a given situation falls under some particular rule. Then lawyers will get involved. Next thing you know, there's a billion-dollar legal industry set up for the sole purpose of manipulating this governing body, and who has a "good reason" for owning a domain becomes about who has the most money to spend on lawyers.
And even if you can come up with a reasonable and iron-clad reason why the current owner shouldn't have access to XYZ.com, so you revoke their ownership, but now 10 different companies all come forward claiming they they should be granted owership-- how do you decide who has the best claim.
No doubt we could come up with a plan to address some of these things, but I think it's going to be a problem as long as you're relying on a "good reason", which is going to be judgement-based. I could see there being a more technical justification like, "there is no original content on the website" or "the website has not been updated in [X] years." However, I could see either of those being abused/manipulated. What constitutes "original content"? What constitutes and "update"? What if you just use a domain for email, and not for a website?
I think there should be (and actually I believe there is) some mechanism for revoking domain ownership in case of obvious abuse. If you somehow hijack Microsoft's domain and use it to spread malware, I'm pretty sure that'll get shut down and returned to Microsoft. Otherwise, because of the scale of the Internet and the number of controversies that are bound to arise, I think the solution should probably be more technical than legalistic.
I understand what you're saying, but on the other hand, I could see some possible value from increasing the number of TLDs.
One of the problems with the domain naming system is that there are a lot of squatters. For a long time, there's been a land-grab to gobble up every desirable .COM domain and hold out for a big payday. There are a lot of companies that go to buy a domain that matches the company name, only to find that [company-name].com is taken, and so are most of the variations that they would want. They end up paying hundreds, thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of dollars to get the domain that they want, from someone who isn't using it and doesn't even want it. There are actually cases where domain names went on sale for tens of millions of dollars.
There are various ways to try to solve this problem. One part of the reason the land-grab works is because there's so little land being sold for such small amounts of money that it makes a lot of sense to buy as many potentially useful domains as you can, and sit on them until you find a buyer. One way to try to address that is to increase the cost of a domain, such that sitting on unused domains is less profitable. However, that also creates a big barrier to people who want to start a website without spending a ton of money.
Another approach is to drastically increase the amount of land. If there are nearly infinite combinations of domains, then it becomes much harder (or at least more expensive) to monopolize all of the memorable combinations. As a result, domain squatters have less leverage-- they may have the exact domain that you want, but you should be able to come up with some other acceptable variation.
Ok, so I'm not 100% right but not 100% wrong. It's not that they can compromise your system, but they can compromise your other encrypted messages.
To reframe the metaphor, it's not "We've discovered that locks can be picked, so remove locks from all of your doors." It's more like, "We've discovered that there's a way that sticking your key into a malicious lock might allow them to scan your key and unlock your doors. Don't go sticking your key into unknown locks." Or something.
Agreed! Or even if we (for some reason) standardized on a single AI (or limited set of AIs), its features would probably not be inherent to all possible AI, but based on the particular design choices.
I think that if you read between the lines, the problem isn't that PGP can be broken. The problem is that there's a vulnerability in the PGP code such that a specially-crafted payload can exploit it and compromise your system... somehow.
That's why they're specifically warning not to automatically open PGP-encrypted messages. It implies that someone might send a malicious PGP message that could cause damage, so you should be careful about which messages you decrypt until this is fixed.
This is both why making predictions is so hard, and why making predictions is such an important exercise.
Well I'm not trying to say that there can't be any interesting questions or worthwhile predictions about AI. My argument is more that the question, "How Would a Self-Aware AI Behave?" does not have sufficient framing for anyone to answer. It's the sort of question where you need to provide context, and then that context determines the kind of answer you get.
For example, you could ask "How will an AI behave if we successfully design an AI with human-like intelligence?" It's still a pretty vague question, but it's enough to provide a vague answer: It'll behave similar to how a person would. To narrow it down, we might ask, "Will that AI with human-like intelligence be friendly toward us?" We can start to make a guess based on the context that the AI will think somewhat like us. Then we can say, "There's a good chance it won't be friendly." Because imagine I took you, stuck you in a box where you couldn't do anything, boosted your intelligence until you were smarter than me, and then tried to make you act as my servant. If the AI thinks like people, then you can make guesses at its reactions based on how you would think.
If you want it to be friendly, you could try to have one of its basic components be that it wants to be friendly and obedient toward humans. If it's still designed to think like a person, it's still not clear how well that would work out. A person intelligent enough to understand that they'd been brainwashed to be obedient might very well become resentful, and a human-like AI might respond similarly.
Perhaps it is programmed to "enjoy" being correct, which would be useful for an AI used for information-based jobs.
I'm not sure how you mean that, but I don't think a motivation to be "correct" is enough. Ignoring that it's not clear how the AI will know it's giving correct answers to questions it doesn't already know the answer to, It's very easy to be "correct": only answer easy questions. An AI designed to get a digital dopamine dose whenever it's "correct" might just spend all day telling you that 1+1=2.
Also, this concept of growing an AI that's recognizable to humans as "truely intelligent" would likely require that we give it a human-like outer-life as well as inner-life. The level and kind of intelligence that will form won't just be determined by the chosen motivations and computer architecture. The intelligence will also be shaped and bound by the constraints that it has on the types of solutions it can seek, and the tools that it has available to it.
For example, if we were able to force a dog to have the same level of intelligence as humans, it would probably still not think exactly like a person. It's not just because dogs have different motives (though that may play a part), but also because dogs' bodies are different. They're shorter, and closer to the ground. They don't have hands to grab onto things or wield tools. Their eyesight isn't as good, but their sense of smell better. Given the same scenario, their understanding of it might be different; given the same problem, they might come to a drastically different solution.
The more different their bodies and perceptions, the more foreign the intelligence is likely to be. In addition to coming up with different kinds of solutions, an extremely foreign intelligence might not be capable of understanding our concerns. An intelligence with no agency in the world is unlikely to share our sense of morality or fair play.
Consider this: When people have thought about creating AI, one of the ideas that people quickly jumped to was teaching a computer how to play chess. I guess it's because chess is a game that's perceived as highly intellectual, and a computer that can play chess must be "smart". However, I've rarely heard anyone talk about how it would form the AI to have its foundations in learning to
So what should be the proper term be for the 'reputation management' firms that are employed by our own political factions?
If they're upfront about who they are and what they're doing, maybe "PR firms". Some of the organizations you're talking about, maybe "advocacy groups". If they're doing it covertly and nefariously, then propagandists, shills, or astroturfers. If they're doing it covertly and maliciously on behalf of a foreign government, then spies or intelligence operatives.
Where is the distinction when groups such as these act on the behest of the US government, as a result of the repeal of the Smith Mundt act [wikipedia.org], which restricted propaganda campaigns being conducted on the public?
Same thing, basically. If it's in the open, we seem to have generally settled on the term "public relations" for benign propaganda, and stuck with "propaganda" when it's nefarious. In some circumstances, you might still call them spies. Like if the CIA is spreading propaganda as part of an operation, I'd call them spies.
Because it seems that those drumming up concern about 'Russian agents'
Nope. The news the Trump campaign conspired with Russian spies to fix the election has drummed up concern about Russian spies.
And let's be clear: collusion already been proven. Donald Trump's son has publicly admitted that he and the campaign manager had met with a Russian operative in order to orchestrate the release of damaging material on Clinton, illegally obtained by the Russian government. We have his emails agreeing to the meeting and suggesting when the material should be released. We have his confession that he met for that purpose. It's no longer a question of whether they "colluded", it's a question of who within the campaign will be criminally prosecuted. There have been a couple plea bargains already.
I think if Skynet were very smart, it'd realize that a war against humans is useless. People are easier to manipulate than to fight in a head-on confrontation. Skynet could have completely controlled humanity by setting up a few Facebook and Twitter accounts.
But part of my point is, in reality, we have no way of knowing whether a hypothetical AI would be interested in domination or even self-preservation. We don't know whether it would understand "The Terminator" if it were to watch it. Just as we might not understand it clearly, a sentient AI might find our concerns completely alien and incomprehensible.
What an AI thinks, and whether we're capable of understanding it, might depend on whether we choose to (or are able to) construct it to think and perceive like we do. And even if we do design it to be human-like, once it starts thinking for itself, there's no telling whether it'll stick to the script or come up with ideas that don't fit with our ideas. The only way to be sure it was understandable to us would be to design it to be restricted to ideas that we prescribe for it. If we were to do that, I don't know if we'd still consider that genuine intelligence, or just complex programming.
"The only way we can begin to inoculate ourselves against a future attack is to see first-hand the types of messages, themes and imagery the Russians used to divide us...."
I'm bored of saying it but... Yes, it's all Russia's fault.
Reason Trump got elected - Russia.
Reason BREXIT happpened - Russia.
When somebody gets poisoned... you know who did it ? - Russia
Doping scandals - Russia
/sarcasm
Sorry, but... why is that sarcasm? Those things all happened.
It's becoming more clear all the time that Russia probably did get Trump elected. They put a lot of effort into trying to help him win, and he won by a slim margin. Russia seems to have at least been part of the Brexit vote. Russia has been caught poisoning people. Russian athletes were caught doping.
It's kinda like going, "Oh, I see, let's all blame Hitler. Poland gets invaded? - Hitler. Six million Jews murdered? - Hitler. /sarcasm"
There's truth to what you're saying. However, that doesn't mean that the squealing is always equally justified (or unjustified). Just because some people are going to squeal whenever they don't win, that doesn't mean that it's not appropriate to "squeal" when someone truly awful and dangerous is elected.
You're right that the two are not the same. Calling them "trolls" is disingenuous. Internet "trolls" are people who screw with others on the Internet for fun, to get a reaction. These people are professionals working on behalf of the Russian government. They're intelligence agents.
We should stop talking about "Russian trolls" and talk in terms of "Russian agents" and "Russian spies". It's more accurate, and gives a better sense of the malice with which they're acting. They're not trolls who are trolling, they're Russian spies engaged in a covert propaganda and influence campaign.
You can either have a valid definition and see what that gets you, or you can have a contrived definition arranged to fit a preconceived fact.
To some extent, it depends on what you're doing and in what way the definition is useful. Is the definition of "planet" a scientific one because "planets" are meaningfully different from the astroids and need to be distinguished for the purpose of scientific study? Or is it just a historical and cultural definition, of the astronomical bodies local to our solar system that we've decided are the "important" ones.
Because if the definition is historical and cultural, then it's not a contrived definition to identify 9 planets based on the historical significance of their discovery, even if there's not anything to distinguish them scientifically from other objects.
The real answer is, we have no idea what a self-aware AI will be like. We don't know what it'll think or how it'll think. It's especially hard to predict because it might depend on the parameters it's programmed with and the hardware architecture it runs on. But in any case, a real general AI might be totally alien to us, and even unrecognizable. it's even possible that we wouldn't know when we'd made it, because it could understand the world so differently from us that we don't view its actions as intelligent.
Part of the problem here is that it's a poorly framed problem. We don't understand intelligence or awareness or consciousness, we don't all agree on what those things are, and we don't know what the boundaries of them might be.
You provided a source, but the source didn't say what you claimed it said. Can you provide a real source that backs you up?
Aw, did I hurt your feelings? Poor little snowflake.
And yet, for some reason, you don't object to the idea that you might be a Russian or a skinhead. You're upset that I said you had a favorite news agency.
Sullivan’s order did not come due to any known request from the defense team and he did not explain his rationale for releasing it. Instead, he said only that the order was issued “sua sponte,” in other words, at his own volition.
That's not an assertion that Mueller was withholding exculpatory evidence. There's no assertion of impropriety at all. Just an order that if he has exculpatory evidence, that Mueller provide it. Your own source indicates that nobody knows exactly why the order was issued.
The reason that the plea bargain has been rejected is because directly of that.
Citation needed. I'm having trouble finding news that the plea bargain was rejected. I don't know if you're aware of some breaking news that's not on the Internet yet, but all I can find are some paranoid articles from far-right sources claiming, back in February, that the plea was about to be rejected. And then some more recent articles arguing that Flynn should withdraw his plea.
That's what Mueller's team told the judge, not Trump, not people working under him, not random people.
Again, citation needed. From what I've been able to find, there are some crazy conspiracy-theory sites pushing the term "secret mandate", but that's not what it is, and that's not what . It seems to be that Mueller received official guidance from the DoJ that Manafort's crimes fall under his existing mandate. That guidance was "secret" in the sense that it came in the form of a classified memo, and neither Mueller nor the DoJ are in the habit of publicly disclosing classified information about ongoing investigations, but there's not some alternate "secret mandate" in addition to investigating Russian interference in the election.
The original mandate was to investigate Russian interference and anyone who might be involved. Manafort was caught running afoul of FARA by taking large payments from the Ukraine to influence US politics. Literally, that's what happened. Trump's campaign manager took tens of millions of dollars in illegal payments from people connected to Putin, laundered it to hide where it was coming from, and in return promised political influence in the US. How could that not be considered a reasonable area of investigation for a special counsel tasked with investigating Russian attempts to influence the election?
I wouldn't say you're a Russian bot. I'm pretty sure you're a person. I don't know if you're a Russian, a skinhead, or a moron, but you're certainly spreading some nonsense propaganda.
And talk about snowflake. You can't even take criticism about your favorite news agency without crying about how unfair it is.
Let's see, one of the people "convicted" of lying to the FBI was Michael Flynn, about whom James Comey testified to Congress under oath that the agents who interviewed him believed he was being honest...
So what...? The FBI interviewed someone and believed at the time that the person was being honest. Later, they learned otherwise.
the judge who oversaw that plea bargained conviction was involved in granting the FISA warrant under suspect circumstances...
What suspect circumstances, exactly? Or are you just asserting that the circumstances were suspect?
(the wording suggests that the judge believes that the Mueller team was hiding exculpatory evidence from the defense)
Citation needed.
And if Flynn is so innocent and there's all this exculpatory evidence, why the plea bargain at all? If Mueller had been caught hiding exculpatory evidence, why hasn't the conviction been overturned?
At this level, plea bargains happen because the criminal has evidence of a different crime, and the prosecutor believes that crime is of greater importance. From the fact that there was a plea bargain, we know that Mueller had Flynn on a worse crime than lying to the FBI, and that Flynn had evidence of someone else committing an even worse crime.
the response from Mueller's team was that, in addition to the public statement from Rod Rosenstein they had a secret mandate that expanded their power further.
Regarding the whole "secret mandate" thing, that's some clever propaganda from Trump's goons. Mueller works with the DoJ, and as his investigation discovers additional crimes, he goes back to Rosenstein for instruction on what to follow and what not to follow. It's not a "secret mandate". It's how the process works when you're going by the book. They're not going to publicly discuss the particulars of every crime, divulging everything they know to the people they're investigating because that would be improper and stupid.
Mueller is investigating Manafort for laundering money from Putin's stooges. Manafort's lawyers challenged it, not on the basis of innocence, but on the basis that Mueller was only supposed to be investigating the Trump campaign. The judge asked if Mueller could justify that it's connected to the Trump campaign, and Mueller did just that.