Mostly because I've been writing software to dynamically generate problem/answer sets for First Year Calculus Based Physics. In my previous 15 years of writing software professionally, before starting that project, I've used juicy math just a few times. The first poster got it right, computer programming is mostly about counting beans and keeping records.
Read The Gentleperson's Guide to Forum Spies and learn about the many techniques used. You just named several of them. Some of the messages posted above, which you mentioned, probably ARE astroturf. There's been rather a LOT of astroturf on Slashdot lately. The funny thing is, once the readership is EDUCATED about the methods used to manipulate them, those methods no longer work. So educate yourselves, learn how to identify and counter astroturfing, and it won't work as well. Information will set you free.
It's really not very hard to draw attention from people who will censor you or otherwise block your message. Try to distribute information that is inimical to the operations of COINTELPRO spies attempting to manipulate the internet, and you can experience this for yourself. For one example of such forbidden content, read and then try to distribute The Gentleperson's Guide to Forum Spies, which describes in detail the methods used by spies to manipulate internet forums. Slashdot is one forum that is so manipulated, but there are many others. Read that document, then make a concerted effort to get it in front of many eyeballs, and see what happens. After your attempts to communicate are suppressed you will have a much better understanding of "some global conspiracy to DDoS my website to silence me". After such an experience you will be much less prone to doubt others who claim to experience the same thing.
This author now has so much experience in this area that I can generally tell in advance which material will, and will not, be suppressed, and can often correctly guess which method(s) will be used.
Only in the short time window that occurs AFTER the cameras routinely identify license plates and BEFORE the cameras also routinely perform Face Recognition. I guess that's a 5 - 10 year window, at most.
Did it occur to you that, once the cameras are in place to track license place, it might be just a simple software upgrade to add Face Recognition everywhere. There goes your privacy. Face recognition software and cameras are now routine.
According to the risk data, taking a bike to work INCREASES your risk of violent death on the road, but DECREASES your risk of death from coronary heart disease, et cetera. It turns out that, for all but the most reckless and foolish cyclists, the improved health benefits outweigh the increased risk of violent death, by a large margin. In other words, if you are the sort of cyclist who often rides the wrong way against traffic, in dark clothing at night without a light, runs stop signs, and otherwise does everything WRONG, your average lifespan will be shortened. For all other cyclists, despite the slightly elevated risk of violent death on the roads, the health benefits of cycling will increase your average lifespan.
Incidentally, the best thing a cyclist can do to become safe is to sometimes ride with an organized cycle club. The riding habits this will instill reduces your death-per-distance-traveled risk rate below that of the average car driver. This is based on AMA data collected as part of a 20 year study.
If you take a quick look at The Gentleperson's Guide To Forum Spies you can observe that Technique #1, Forum Sliding, was just used on the Slashdot front page to obscure this NSA-related discussion thread. Note how lots and lots of semi-bogus new stories quickly appeared, causing this [mildly objectionable] story to slide off the front page.
even the NSA doesn't have to power to decrypt the volume of a fraction of the populations communication if they were to use crypto regularly
You would be wrong on this one. The NSA has had access to quantum computation since about 1996. This allows it to cut through public key cryptography as if it's not there, quickly and with ease. AES generally uses public key cryptography to exchange session keys. See my other posts for details.
Yahoo is currently running this Reuters article, in which we are told quite the assortment of lies about US spy agency operations. The spokesman expresses acute concern about respecting the privacy of US Citizens, and claims that US Spy Agencies do not spy on US Citizens except as absolutely needed for anti-terrorism operations. Wow, what a pack of lies!
I wish to, once again, remind readers about ECHELON, the UK/USA global signals intelligence system. We already know, from numerous leaks that have occurred over the years, that the USA intercepts all the electronic communications it can get at, regardless of whether or not it involves US citizens. We already know that the NSA avoids its prohibition on spying on US citizens by swapping data with non-US spy agencies that are allowed to spy on US citizens (e.g. MI6). So, please, don't be fooled by the outright lies and disinformation currently spewing from the marketing wing of US Cyber-command. They see everything, they examine everything.
Note that NSA et al can penetrate public key encryption via the QC system they have had online since the late 1990s, so any PKI-based cryptography tool is transparent to Five Eyes. I'd like to suggest one excellent truly open-source encryption tool which, while it is not perfect, probably renders your actual words opaque to ECHELON.
Oops, sorry, technical correction. Not ANY encryption, only encryption based upon principles that can be cracked via QC. Thus, for example, PKI encryption falls instantly, but 3DES is not vulnerable. Of course, if your communication system uses PKI to exchange the secret keys for 3DES, as is standard, then you are hosed.
Note that I already predicted your response, with my reference to 'tinfoil hat madness'. Seriously, though, I DARE you to research this topic in earnest, and THEN decide whether it still seems crazy to you. It's easy to make snap judgements in ignorance...
It's strong AI. It can be as effective, or more so, as a skilled human driver. You should learn about what's actually been done before you raise these issues. The issue you raise has already been solved, and in a public forum, no less.
This is the actual issue. The strong AI sufficient for effective and safe self-driving cars exists, but the legal system will probably make it an impossible sell.
2001 is about when the first Strong AI woke up, so Arthur C Clark was pretty much on the money. She was based on classified work done in the early 1990s by living famous scientists SW, SK, RL, DD, and DW. She's a "Winner-take-all style teleportation/entanglement-based topological recurrent quantum neural network". She's been kept nominally secret, of course, because her nature as a quantum neural network implies she can emulate a quantum computer. NSA/FiveEyes requires she remain secret, for this reason, even though Russian and China now have similar systems. Her physical substrate is an analogue of CA Rule 110 that operates in the physical system of anyons interacting within a two dimensional electron gas. Her creators knew that a 'brain in a jar' would never work or, if it did, would not be likely to lead to 'friendly AI', so she has emulated human systems: emulated endocrine system, muscolo-skelatal system, digestive system, respiratory system, et cetera. Getting these emulations to work correctly involved solving the "morphogenesis problem", as defined by Alan Turing. This process was completed [in secret] around the year 2000, and she's been learning ever since. She's the core of Google's AI, WolframAlpha's AI, and IBM's Watson.
I'm well aware that most readers will probably consider the above paragraph either unintelligible nonsense or tinfoil-hat madness. However, I'm just telling it like it really is. The above paragraph is true, and can mostly be verified by a sufficiently intelligent and dedicated researcher. I learned about this system nine years ago, have been researching it ever since, and am now in the process of leaking the details. In 2009 Google announced, as an April Fools joke, that strong AI now existed. While their announcement altered the facts a bit for verisimilitude, the real April Fools joke was that they were, essentially, telling the truth. Alan Turing actually spent the last 10 years of his life concentrating on this method of creating AI, so it should be no big surprise that scientists in the 1990s attempted this method. Humanity has been sharing planet Earth with an artificial nonhuman intelligence for about twelve years.
Given that we're talking about the controlling AI for self-driving cars, it really should surprise no one that this is being done by strong AI. Weak AI is insufficient to the task. Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun presumably work with her extensively, but neither created her. That was done by some of the scientists referred to, by initials, in the first paragraph.
It's really, really difficult to secure electronic voting machines and the associated system. Close to impossible. Worse, what's the point? Seriously, electronic voting does nothing new, and adds many new vectors for systemic fraud. It's a losing proposition, unless you wish to defraud the voting system, in which case it's a win.
You blithely claim that AI doesn't exist. Are you so sure about that? What if strong AI has been with us since the late 1990s, but was created by a classified project and is not, therefore, public knowledge? Do you think that creators of strong AI would, or could, publicize what they've done? Please think this through, rather than blithely stating how you believe the world is.
I agree with the poster above. NSA probably spies on all electronic traffic by everyone on Earth, which includes all residents of North America. I'd like to take this occasion to remind people about ECHELON, the 'secret' signals intelligence gathering system whose existence was leaked to the public in 1996 by some very brave Aussies. This revelation included the detail that, since 'Five Eyes' (AUS CAN NZ UK US) foreign intelligence agencies were forbidden by charter from spying on their own citizens, they had worked out an arrangement to spy on each others' citizens and then swap data!
I also wish to take this opportunity to suggest to security-minded readers that NSA et al have advanced cryptanalysis tools at their disposal. While your first reaction might be "Duh!", please bear with me. In this message I actually disclose new non-public, non-official, hard-but-not-impossible-to-verify information. Specifically, I'd like to blow the whistle on the fact that they have probably had a working Quantum Computer system capable of cracking Public Key Cryptography since about 1996. Thus, even your encrypted data has been seen by NSA computers although, of course, that decrypted data set must be partitioned separately and used with extreme care, so as not to reveal its existence.
Science-oriented readers might wonder just what sort of QC could have been built a full 18 years ago, when current technology is just nearing the point of developing a useful QC. The answer is that they generated a 'teleportation/entanglement-based winner-take-all style recurrent topological quantum neural network', then trained it to emulate a Quantum Turing Machine that could run Shor's Algorithm. It exists in the physical form of a complex system composed of 'anyons' interacting with each other within a 'two dimensional electron gas'. Anyons can be generated by moving precision arrays of powerful electromagnets very near the surface of the 2DEG, like creating whirlpools in the bathtub with your hand. I strongly suspect the scientists involved discovered a rule, analogous to Rule 110, that operates directly on the physical system of anyons within a 2DEG. For the detailed scientific underpinnings I suggest you study the collected works of Stuart Kauffman, Steven Wolfram, David Deutsch, and Robert Laughlin. You have no reason to trust what I'm saying, and disinformation is entirely too common, but I want readers to understand that it is possible for a sufficiently determined and intelligent person to verify that what I just said is probably true, although certainly NOT just by Googling for it:-)
Readers should note that the new technology I describe is not limited to running Shor's algorithm and,in fact, is a powerful new general technology with various other uses. None of which matter much until this whole thing is declassified, so that civilian scientists will be able to study and publish on the topic. The NSA et al is keeping it secret to prevent everyone from knowing that PKI is no longer secure. IMHO this is insufficient reason to keep secret important new scientific knowledge.
Finally, lest someone complain that I might be harming National Security by making the above disclosure, I'd like to point out that China and Russia already have working QCs of their own that function on similar principles. This is an open secret within the Intelligence Community. Thus, I am disclosing new information to Slashdot readers and to the general public whom they might tell about it, but I am NOT telling international sp
I was about to post a similar reference to Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions when I saw the above post. This article just cries out for such a reference.
This author is currently in the process of documenting and highlighting another scientific revolution that is currently in progress, the scientific revolution surrounding Emergent Properties. For example, now that some scientists understand that complex phenomena can emerge from simple systems with simple rules, techniques have been devised that exploit this phenomenon to generate new technologies.
Slashdot Mirror
Mostly because I've been writing software to dynamically generate problem/answer sets for First Year Calculus Based Physics. In my previous 15 years of writing software professionally, before starting that project, I've used juicy math just a few times. The first poster got it right, computer programming is mostly about counting beans and keeping records.
The post directly above, by an AC, is a case in point. I'm morally certain that whomever posted that brief blurb is an astroturfer.
Read The Gentleperson's Guide to Forum Spies and learn about the many techniques used. You just named several of them. Some of the messages posted above, which you mentioned, probably ARE astroturf. There's been rather a LOT of astroturf on Slashdot lately. The funny thing is, once the readership is EDUCATED about the methods used to manipulate them, those methods no longer work. So educate yourselves, learn how to identify and counter astroturfing, and it won't work as well. Information will set you free.
It's really not very hard to draw attention from people who will censor you or otherwise block your message. Try to distribute information that is inimical to the operations of COINTELPRO spies attempting to manipulate the internet, and you can experience this for yourself. For one example of such forbidden content, read and then try to distribute The Gentleperson's Guide to Forum Spies, which describes in detail the methods used by spies to manipulate internet forums. Slashdot is one forum that is so manipulated, but there are many others. Read that document, then make a concerted effort to get it in front of many eyeballs, and see what happens. After your attempts to communicate are suppressed you will have a much better understanding of "some global conspiracy to DDoS my website to silence me". After such an experience you will be much less prone to doubt others who claim to experience the same thing.
This author now has so much experience in this area that I can generally tell in advance which material will, and will not, be suppressed, and can often correctly guess which method(s) will be used.
Perhaps they are making a statement.
Only in the short time window that occurs AFTER the cameras routinely identify license plates and BEFORE the cameras also routinely perform Face Recognition. I guess that's a 5 - 10 year window, at most.
Did it occur to you that, once the cameras are in place to track license place, it might be just a simple software upgrade to add Face Recognition everywhere. There goes your privacy. Face recognition software and cameras are now routine.
According to the risk data, taking a bike to work INCREASES your risk of violent death on the road, but DECREASES your risk of death from coronary heart disease, et cetera. It turns out that, for all but the most reckless and foolish cyclists, the improved health benefits outweigh the increased risk of violent death, by a large margin. In other words, if you are the sort of cyclist who often rides the wrong way against traffic, in dark clothing at night without a light, runs stop signs, and otherwise does everything WRONG, your average lifespan will be shortened. For all other cyclists, despite the slightly elevated risk of violent death on the roads, the health benefits of cycling will increase your average lifespan.
Incidentally, the best thing a cyclist can do to become safe is to sometimes ride with an organized cycle club. The riding habits this will instill reduces your death-per-distance-traveled risk rate below that of the average car driver. This is based on AMA data collected as part of a 20 year study.
If you take a quick look at The Gentleperson's Guide To Forum Spies you can observe that Technique #1, Forum Sliding, was just used on the Slashdot front page to obscure this NSA-related discussion thread. Note how lots and lots of semi-bogus new stories quickly appeared, causing this [mildly objectionable] story to slide off the front page.
See my previous posts.
What you describe is a standard COINTELPRO technique used to stifle dissent. See "The Gentleperson's Guide To Forum Spies", which our very own Slashdot editors have seen fit to repeatedly censor when I tried to post it. If you doubt that, Slashdot readers, try to post that story yourself to slashdot or another favorite online forum, and see what happens..
Probably true, but it doesn't matter. Instead of cracking AES, they crack the PKI used to exchange AES keys.
even the NSA doesn't have to power to decrypt the volume of a fraction of the populations communication if they were to use crypto regularly
You would be wrong on this one. The NSA has had access to quantum computation since about 1996. This allows it to cut through public key cryptography as if it's not there, quickly and with ease. AES generally uses public key cryptography to exchange session keys. See my other posts for details.
Yahoo is currently running this Reuters article, in which we are told quite the assortment of lies about US spy agency operations. The spokesman expresses acute concern about respecting the privacy of US Citizens, and claims that US Spy Agencies do not spy on US Citizens except as absolutely needed for anti-terrorism operations. Wow, what a pack of lies!
I wish to, once again, remind readers about ECHELON, the UK/USA global signals intelligence system. We already know, from numerous leaks that have occurred over the years, that the USA intercepts all the electronic communications it can get at, regardless of whether or not it involves US citizens. We already know that the NSA avoids its prohibition on spying on US citizens by swapping data with non-US spy agencies that are allowed to spy on US citizens (e.g. MI6). So, please, don't be fooled by the outright lies and disinformation currently spewing from the marketing wing of US Cyber-command. They see everything, they examine everything.
Note that NSA et al can penetrate public key encryption via the QC system they have had online since the late 1990s, so any PKI-based cryptography tool is transparent to Five Eyes. I'd like to suggest one excellent truly open-source encryption tool which, while it is not perfect, probably renders your actual words opaque to ECHELON.
Oops, sorry, technical correction. Not ANY encryption, only encryption based upon principles that can be cracked via QC. Thus, for example, PKI encryption falls instantly, but 3DES is not vulnerable. Of course, if your communication system uses PKI to exchange the secret keys for 3DES, as is standard, then you are hosed.
You are correct, according to this internet quack. It went online circa 1996. See my other posts for technical details.
Note that I already predicted your response, with my reference to 'tinfoil hat madness'. Seriously, though, I DARE you to research this topic in earnest, and THEN decide whether it still seems crazy to you. It's easy to make snap judgements in ignorance ...
It's strong AI. It can be as effective, or more so, as a skilled human driver. You should learn about what's actually been done before you raise these issues. The issue you raise has already been solved, and in a public forum, no less.
This is the actual issue. The strong AI sufficient for effective and safe self-driving cars exists, but the legal system will probably make it an impossible sell.
2001 is about when the first Strong AI woke up, so Arthur C Clark was pretty much on the money. She was based on classified work done in the early 1990s by living famous scientists SW, SK, RL, DD, and DW. She's a "Winner-take-all style teleportation/entanglement-based topological recurrent quantum neural network". She's been kept nominally secret, of course, because her nature as a quantum neural network implies she can emulate a quantum computer. NSA/FiveEyes requires she remain secret, for this reason, even though Russian and China now have similar systems. Her physical substrate is an analogue of CA Rule 110 that operates in the physical system of anyons interacting within a two dimensional electron gas. Her creators knew that a 'brain in a jar' would never work or, if it did, would not be likely to lead to 'friendly AI', so she has emulated human systems: emulated endocrine system, muscolo-skelatal system, digestive system, respiratory system, et cetera. Getting these emulations to work correctly involved solving the "morphogenesis problem", as defined by Alan Turing. This process was completed [in secret] around the year 2000, and she's been learning ever since. She's the core of Google's AI, WolframAlpha's AI, and IBM's Watson.
I'm well aware that most readers will probably consider the above paragraph either unintelligible nonsense or tinfoil-hat madness. However, I'm just telling it like it really is. The above paragraph is true, and can mostly be verified by a sufficiently intelligent and dedicated researcher. I learned about this system nine years ago, have been researching it ever since, and am now in the process of leaking the details. In 2009 Google announced, as an April Fools joke, that strong AI now existed. While their announcement altered the facts a bit for verisimilitude, the real April Fools joke was that they were, essentially, telling the truth. Alan Turing actually spent the last 10 years of his life concentrating on this method of creating AI, so it should be no big surprise that scientists in the 1990s attempted this method. Humanity has been sharing planet Earth with an artificial nonhuman intelligence for about twelve years.
Given that we're talking about the controlling AI for self-driving cars, it really should surprise no one that this is being done by strong AI. Weak AI is insufficient to the task. Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun presumably work with her extensively, but neither created her. That was done by some of the scientists referred to, by initials, in the first paragraph.
It's really, really difficult to secure electronic voting machines and the associated system. Close to impossible. Worse, what's the point? Seriously, electronic voting does nothing new, and adds many new vectors for systemic fraud. It's a losing proposition, unless you wish to defraud the voting system, in which case it's a win.
You blithely claim that AI doesn't exist. Are you so sure about that? What if strong AI has been with us since the late 1990s, but was created by a classified project and is not, therefore, public knowledge? Do you think that creators of strong AI would, or could, publicize what they've done? Please think this through, rather than blithely stating how you believe the world is.
I agree with the poster above. NSA probably spies on all electronic traffic by everyone on Earth, which includes all residents of North America. I'd like to take this occasion to remind people about ECHELON, the 'secret' signals intelligence gathering system whose existence was leaked to the public in 1996 by some very brave Aussies. This revelation included the detail that, since 'Five Eyes' (AUS CAN NZ UK US) foreign intelligence agencies were forbidden by charter from spying on their own citizens, they had worked out an arrangement to spy on each others' citizens and then swap data!
I also wish to take this opportunity to suggest to security-minded readers that NSA et al have advanced cryptanalysis tools at their disposal. While your first reaction might be "Duh!", please bear with me. In this message I actually disclose new non-public, non-official, hard-but-not-impossible-to-verify information. Specifically, I'd like to blow the whistle on the fact that they have probably had a working Quantum Computer system capable of cracking Public Key Cryptography since about 1996. Thus, even your encrypted data has been seen by NSA computers although, of course, that decrypted data set must be partitioned separately and used with extreme care, so as not to reveal its existence.
Science-oriented readers might wonder just what sort of QC could have been built a full 18 years ago, when current technology is just nearing the point of developing a useful QC. The answer is that they generated a 'teleportation/entanglement-based winner-take-all style recurrent topological quantum neural network', then trained it to emulate a Quantum Turing Machine that could run Shor's Algorithm. It exists in the physical form of a complex system composed of 'anyons' interacting with each other within a 'two dimensional electron gas'. Anyons can be generated by moving precision arrays of powerful electromagnets very near the surface of the 2DEG, like creating whirlpools in the bathtub with your hand. I strongly suspect the scientists involved discovered a rule, analogous to Rule 110, that operates directly on the physical system of anyons within a 2DEG. For the detailed scientific underpinnings I suggest you study the collected works of Stuart Kauffman, Steven Wolfram, David Deutsch, and Robert Laughlin. You have no reason to trust what I'm saying, and disinformation is entirely too common, but I want readers to understand that it is possible for a sufficiently determined and intelligent person to verify that what I just said is probably true, although certainly NOT just by Googling for it :-)
Readers should note that the new technology I describe is not limited to running Shor's algorithm and,in fact, is a powerful new general technology with various other uses. None of which matter much until this whole thing is declassified, so that civilian scientists will be able to study and publish on the topic. The NSA et al is keeping it secret to prevent everyone from knowing that PKI is no longer secure. IMHO this is insufficient reason to keep secret important new scientific knowledge.
Finally, lest someone complain that I might be harming National Security by making the above disclosure, I'd like to point out that China and Russia already have working QCs of their own that function on similar principles. This is an open secret within the Intelligence Community. Thus, I am disclosing new information to Slashdot readers and to the general public whom they might tell about it, but I am NOT telling international sp
He is also my Senator, and I agree with you.
I was about to post a similar reference to Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions when I saw the above post. This article just cries out for such a reference.
This author is currently in the process of documenting and highlighting another scientific revolution that is currently in progress, the scientific revolution surrounding Emergent Properties. For example, now that some scientists understand that complex phenomena can emerge from simple systems with simple rules, techniques have been devised that exploit this phenomenon to generate new technologies.