When I entered college, the infosec industry was just about to take off. I got out just after the dotcom bust, so finding a job was hard. Many people at local infosec companies had gone there instead of college, and had 4 years work experience.
Several of these people were not especially good at what they do, but just having 4 years experience at those companies launched their careers. Most of them inflated their work experience and technical skills on their resumes, and have moved on to director positions at smaller companies.
I would expect a lot of these folks will not be able to adapt to a changing industry because they have no background in theory, or meaningful technical skills outside of their late-90s apprenticeships. But they certainly had a head start.
In a down economy, it probably makes more sense to go to school while (if?) Things recover.
Why do people seem to think governments are the only threat to our rights in this space?
Large corporations already watch and log everything they can about you. Not just your metadata, but what you do (deep packet inspection), where you are (location-based services), what you buy (sharing all your transactions with "affiliates"), and what you say (facebook messages, etc).
What's worse, this data is all legally their property (at least in the U.S.), so they can basically do whatever they want with it, sell it, store it, give it to the government in exchange for favors, or worse. AFAIK, you cant even demand to see what they are keeping on file for you.
Their capabilities are not just passive, either. They can control what services you can access (now that net neutrality is dead), gouge you financially with little justification (credit ratings are based on proprietary algorithms), open you to barrages of advertisement, trick you into legal commitments you dont understand (do you have $500 to have a lawyer review that EULA?), and guess what? Government provides all the tools to enforce all of this. And you pay for ALL of it.
As long as we are using analogies from EU history, the government is a neutered king who lives far away and you rarely feel his presence. Big Business is the nobility who owns all the land, controls all the food, hoards all the money, and controls your life on a day-to-day basis. Like an indentured servant, you have no choice to participate and hand over most of the fruits of your labor. What are you going to do - stop buying things and stop having a job?
I'll head off one criticism of what I'm saying. This is not conspiracy theory, because there is no conspiracy necessary. This is a system, and most of what I've said above is just legal fact.
Unlike your government, you can not participate in corporate governance, you can't request meeting minutes under FOIA, internal rules and policies are rarely published. You have no voice except your dollars (and many industries are so anticompetitive you really have little choice).
Maybe big business has all this opportunity but doesnt take advantage of it. Do you think so?
We are spending more than our tax revenue because of the bush tax cuts (aka blowjobs to the wealthy). So, it is in fact a revenue problem.
It's the right winger scam: cut taxes, then say we have to all tighten our belts to make the smaller budget work.
It's similar to the other right winger scam: do a shitty job of governing, then say, "see? Government doesn't work."
Just to give a little context for people who do not live around Atlanta:
Gwinnett County has been a traffic ticket mill for decades. This is not Atlanta - it is an exurb of Atlanta where all the racist, faux-Christian whitebread people moved a couple decades back. All it really has going for it is two major highways running through the county (I-85 and GA-316). Several people I know have had bad experiences there, and I literally do not stop in Gwinnett County anymore.
This is also the place where Larry Flynt was brought to court on obscenity charges, and shot by a white supremacist who confessed but never had charges brought against him (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Flynt#Shooting).
Please don't confuse Gwinnett with Atlanta. Gwinnett is a shithole that has only strip malls, a thriving prison industry, a growing international population, and an entrenched set of racist white people who don't like the new international population and want to throw them all in jail.
Worst of all, this place tattooed "GWINNETT IS GREAT" and "SUCCESS LIVES HERE" on their ugly ass water towers. Here's a picture I found via Google, ironically on a blog called "stuff black people don't like": http://stuffblackpeopledontlike.blogspot.com/2012/09/success-used-to-live-here-what-fall-of.html (I haven't read the blog posting, but I'm white and don't like Gwinnett, either).
Make no mistake, this cop was ticketing people for texting solely so he could take all the brown ones to jail. This is the Gwinnett MO: enforce traffic violations heavily, and try to turn every traffic stop into a drug bust or driving-without-a-license bust.
As long as Nvidia keeps crippling double-precision performance on their (non-Tesla) cards, I'll keep buying AMD.
One of the highlights of the GTX Titan was that the card did double-precision floating point at full speed, just like one of Nvidia's Tesla products. That's no longer the case here - the GTX 780 performs double-precision at 1/24 of normal rate, just like a standard desktop GPU.
The only interesting exploit is one that hasn't been patched, right? So anyone who discovers, sells, or buys an exploit knows of a vulnerability and is choosing not to disclose it.
By not disclosing a vulnerability, you are allowing others to be vulnerable. It's hard to argue that this is ethical behavior...
Here's an analogy: what if, for every nuke the U.S. destroyed, a nuke disappeared from every other nuclear arsenal in the world? That's what it's like.. by keeping a vulnerability secret, it can be used against anyone using the software. By disclosing the vuln, everyone can patch, disable, or protect the vulnerable software.
It's not that hard when vendors like AMD have a whole set of docs on how to code OpenCL for AMD GPUs. The docs tell you how to optimize for their particular hardware.
In Atlanta, the speed limits are a fantasy (55mph on many freeways where the flow of traffic is 75mph). If they deploy those systems here, either speed limits will change, or there will be a revolt.
Of course, knowing Georgia, they will deploy said systems to be managed by a private company that keeps half of the ticket fines.
If I had mod points, I'd mod this up. Rich0 is right, we have a legacy system of shareholder voting that does not work so well now that the biggest shareholders are institutional investors. The votes of mutual fund managers dwarf those of individual stockholders.
Sounds kinda like how the wealthy Saudi nationals were able to fly out of the country after 9/11...
âoeSomebody brought to us for approval the decision to let an airplane filled with Saudis, including members of the bin Laden family, leave the country,â Clarke says.
That would be Richard Clarke, who was Terrorism czar at the time. Funny thing is, nobody can remember who requested the authorization for that flight. I guess billionaires, oligarchs, and their other wealthy friends have a common bond they don't share with their fellow countrymen...
In my ML class, we used WEKA. Of course, there is also Matlab. Problem is, neither of these are free, and they are both slow as hell. I would not use either one outside of class/prototyping.
Ideally there would be a free, open source toolkit written in a compiled language. The toolkit should have a variety of ML techniques that can be switched around with little pain. Only toolkit I know of like this is the ML part of OpenCV, and the documentation for OpenCV is... lacking.
Another poster linked to mloss.org. I hadn't seen that site.. Looks like a great resource, but it also looks like 400+ fragmented tools that do not play well together, and are probably mostly dead projects by now.
I dispute that auditory function in the brain is fairly well understood. *Some* of the fundamentals are fairly well understood.
As an example, there is the Olivocochlear system that feeds back from Superior Olives to the cochlea. We think it may contribute to active amplification of sounds in the cochlea. See wikipedia for a list of PROPOSED functions.
What we do know is that cutting the olivocochlear connection impairs sensitivity in the cochlea. We do know what neurons connect to what other neurons, and have some idea of the types of connections.
What we don't know is "how the thing works".
This system is key to human hearing; it's not just a lump of cells with no known function. So, we are a long ways off from any human- (or even cat-) level auditory models.
These fields you mention (computer vision, speech recognition) are good examples of the state of intelligent machines.
We can make these things work pretty well for very specific tasks (e.g. recognize faces in a picture), but we are nowhere near having general, human-level intelligence. It's hard to see how we are even close to having human-level vision capabilities.
Kurzweil is a "futurist" and "technologist" which means he has some technical background and a big mouth with a lot of hot air.
Sure, he accomplished some research VERY early on with sound and OCR. He has not been on the cutting edge for decades.
Kurzweil's career is summed well with this quote (text copied from Wikipedia's article on Kurzweil):
In the cover article of the December 2010 issue of IEEE Spectrum, John Rennie criticizes Kurzweil for several predictions that failed to become manifest by the originally predicted date. "Therein lie the frustrations of Kurzweil's brand of tech punditry. On close examination, his clearest and most successful predictions often lack originality or profundity. And most of his predictions come with so many loopholes that they border on the unfalsifiable."
The way the article is written, it hints that low quality = more implementation flaws.
Let's not forget that software can have design flaws, too, and careful programming might still lead to low quality software.
In the case of Knight, the defects might not have even been a function of the software per se. I'm sure a good bit of probability and machine learning go into HFT; these algorithms may have been the source of the errors, and the flawed algorithms might not even be due to the software engineers.
Here's another advantage: your internal IT organization doesnt skim a 20 - 30% profit off the top.
Seriously, proponents of strategies like outsourcing and privatization always talk about how these companies increase efficiency. But, since they always have a profit motive, these companies must operate (say) 30% more efficiently just to break even.
I think it's funny how Ray Kurzweil predicts a "singularity" within 50 years, but the people who would actually implement the singularity (e.g. Norvig) say that won't happen.
I read an article that gave numbers for the three investment banks (taken from facebook's disclosures).
The numbers totalled $11.6 billion, out of the $16B facebook raised. So, the investment banks bought most of the shares. Some of that is probably for their investors.
I wonder how much the banks will lose from propping up the price.. FB is down 12% today, which means the banks' stock lost over a billion dollars in value. That wipes out everything they made in fees (a few hundred million, IIRC).
Slashdot Mirror
Figures - I write a dozen thoughtful posts that get no love, but when I take a brain shart on a post, that gets the mod points.
Yeah, sometimes I say things so stupid, it amazes me, too
Shill much?
Two anonymous cowards with IDs less than 1000 digits apart write anti-open source posts at the same time?
A lot of this depends on timing in the industry.
When I entered college, the infosec industry was just about to take off. I got out just after the dotcom bust, so finding a job was hard. Many people at local infosec companies had gone there instead of college, and had 4 years work experience.
Several of these people were not especially good at what they do, but just having 4 years experience at those companies launched their careers. Most of them inflated their work experience and technical skills on their resumes, and have moved on to director positions at smaller companies.
I would expect a lot of these folks will not be able to adapt to a changing industry because they have no background in theory, or meaningful technical skills outside of their late-90s apprenticeships. But they certainly had a head start.
In a down economy, it probably makes more sense to go to school while (if?) Things recover.
Why do people seem to think governments are the only threat to our rights in this space?
Large corporations already watch and log everything they can about you. Not just your metadata, but what you do (deep packet inspection), where you are (location-based services), what you buy (sharing all your transactions with "affiliates"), and what you say (facebook messages, etc).
What's worse, this data is all legally their property (at least in the U.S.), so they can basically do whatever they want with it, sell it, store it, give it to the government in exchange for favors, or worse. AFAIK, you cant even demand to see what they are keeping on file for you.
Their capabilities are not just passive, either. They can control what services you can access (now that net neutrality is dead), gouge you financially with little justification (credit ratings are based on proprietary algorithms), open you to barrages of advertisement, trick you into legal commitments you dont understand (do you have $500 to have a lawyer review that EULA?), and guess what? Government provides all the tools to enforce all of this. And you pay for ALL of it.
As long as we are using analogies from EU history, the government is a neutered king who lives far away and you rarely feel his presence. Big Business is the nobility who owns all the land, controls all the food, hoards all the money, and controls your life on a day-to-day basis. Like an indentured servant, you have no choice to participate and hand over most of the fruits of your labor. What are you going to do - stop buying things and stop having a job?
I'll head off one criticism of what I'm saying. This is not conspiracy theory, because there is no conspiracy necessary. This is a system, and most of what I've said above is just legal fact.
Unlike your government, you can not participate in corporate governance, you can't request meeting minutes under FOIA, internal rules and policies are rarely published. You have no voice except your dollars (and many industries are so anticompetitive you really have little choice).
Maybe big business has all this opportunity but doesnt take advantage of it. Do you think so?
We are spending more than our tax revenue because of the bush tax cuts (aka blowjobs to the wealthy). So, it is in fact a revenue problem. It's the right winger scam: cut taxes, then say we have to all tighten our belts to make the smaller budget work. It's similar to the other right winger scam: do a shitty job of governing, then say, "see? Government doesn't work."
Just to give a little context for people who do not live around Atlanta:
Gwinnett County has been a traffic ticket mill for decades. This is not Atlanta - it is an exurb of Atlanta where all the racist, faux-Christian whitebread people moved a couple decades back. All it really has going for it is two major highways running through the county (I-85 and GA-316). Several people I know have had bad experiences there, and I literally do not stop in Gwinnett County anymore.
This is also the place where Larry Flynt was brought to court on obscenity charges, and shot by a white supremacist who confessed but never had charges brought against him (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Flynt#Shooting).
Please don't confuse Gwinnett with Atlanta. Gwinnett is a shithole that has only strip malls, a thriving prison industry, a growing international population, and an entrenched set of racist white people who don't like the new international population and want to throw them all in jail.
Worst of all, this place tattooed "GWINNETT IS GREAT" and "SUCCESS LIVES HERE" on their ugly ass water towers. Here's a picture I found via Google, ironically on a blog called "stuff black people don't like": http://stuffblackpeopledontlike.blogspot.com/2012/09/success-used-to-live-here-what-fall-of.html (I haven't read the blog posting, but I'm white and don't like Gwinnett, either).
Make no mistake, this cop was ticketing people for texting solely so he could take all the brown ones to jail. This is the Gwinnett MO: enforce traffic violations heavily, and try to turn every traffic stop into a drug bust or driving-without-a-license bust.
Here, take a look at what Gwinnett has to offer: http://www.gwinnettmugs.com/
As long as Nvidia keeps crippling double-precision performance on their (non-Tesla) cards, I'll keep buying AMD.
One of the highlights of the GTX Titan was that the card did double-precision floating point at full speed, just like one of Nvidia's Tesla products. That's no longer the case here - the GTX 780 performs double-precision at 1/24 of normal rate, just like a standard desktop GPU.
The only interesting exploit is one that hasn't been patched, right? So anyone who discovers, sells, or buys an exploit knows of a vulnerability and is choosing not to disclose it.
By not disclosing a vulnerability, you are allowing others to be vulnerable. It's hard to argue that this is ethical behavior...
Here's an analogy: what if, for every nuke the U.S. destroyed, a nuke disappeared from every other nuclear arsenal in the world? That's what it's like.. by keeping a vulnerability secret, it can be used against anyone using the software. By disclosing the vuln, everyone can patch, disable, or protect the vulnerable software.
AFAIK, there have been no USB dongles out there with support for 802.11n Master mode in Linux. Sounds like this open firmware is progress!
It's not that hard when vendors like AMD have a whole set of docs on how to code OpenCL for AMD GPUs. The docs tell you how to optimize for their particular hardware.
In Atlanta, the speed limits are a fantasy (55mph on many freeways where the flow of traffic is 75mph). If they deploy those systems here, either speed limits will change, or there will be a revolt. Of course, knowing Georgia, they will deploy said systems to be managed by a private company that keeps half of the ticket fines.
If I had mod points, I'd mod this up. Rich0 is right, we have a legacy system of shareholder voting that does not work so well now that the biggest shareholders are institutional investors. The votes of mutual fund managers dwarf those of individual stockholders.
Sounds kinda like how the wealthy Saudi nationals were able to fly out of the country after 9/11...
âoeSomebody brought to us for approval the decision to let an airplane filled with Saudis, including members of the bin Laden family, leave the country,â Clarke says.
That would be Richard Clarke, who was Terrorism czar at the time. Funny thing is, nobody can remember who requested the authorization for that flight. I guess billionaires, oligarchs, and their other wealthy friends have a common bond they don't share with their fellow countrymen...
In my ML class, we used WEKA. Of course, there is also Matlab. Problem is, neither of these are free, and they are both slow as hell. I would not use either one outside of class/prototyping.
Ideally there would be a free, open source toolkit written in a compiled language. The toolkit should have a variety of ML techniques that can be switched around with little pain. Only toolkit I know of like this is the ML part of OpenCV, and the documentation for OpenCV is... lacking.
Another poster linked to mloss.org. I hadn't seen that site.. Looks like a great resource, but it also looks like 400+ fragmented tools that do not play well together, and are probably mostly dead projects by now.
I dispute that auditory function in the brain is fairly well understood. *Some* of the fundamentals are fairly well understood.
As an example, there is the Olivocochlear system that feeds back from Superior Olives to the cochlea. We think it may contribute to active amplification of sounds in the cochlea. See wikipedia for a list of PROPOSED functions.
What we do know is that cutting the olivocochlear connection impairs sensitivity in the cochlea. We do know what neurons connect to what other neurons, and have some idea of the types of connections.
What we don't know is "how the thing works".
This system is key to human hearing; it's not just a lump of cells with no known function. So, we are a long ways off from any human- (or even cat-) level auditory models.
These fields you mention (computer vision, speech recognition) are good examples of the state of intelligent machines.
We can make these things work pretty well for very specific tasks (e.g. recognize faces in a picture), but we are nowhere near having general, human-level intelligence. It's hard to see how we are even close to having human-level vision capabilities.
Kurzweil is a "futurist" and "technologist" which means he has some technical background and a big mouth with a lot of hot air.
Sure, he accomplished some research VERY early on with sound and OCR. He has not been on the cutting edge for decades.
Kurzweil's career is summed well with this quote (text copied from Wikipedia's article on Kurzweil):
In the cover article of the December 2010 issue of IEEE Spectrum, John Rennie criticizes Kurzweil for several predictions that failed to become manifest by the originally predicted date. "Therein lie the frustrations of Kurzweil's brand of tech punditry. On close examination, his clearest and most successful predictions often lack originality or profundity. And most of his predictions come with so many loopholes that they border on the unfalsifiable."
So, right angle (aka t-bone crashes) are down, but rear- end collisions are up? That doesn't sound so bad.
Right angle crashes can kill people. Rear-end collisions are fender benders.
There's more detail here, including links to papers: http://voipsecurityblog.typepad.com/marks_voip_security_blog/2012/09/dtmf-telephony-denial-of-service-tdos-issues-for-ivrs.html
The way the article is written, it hints that low quality = more implementation flaws.
Let's not forget that software can have design flaws, too, and careful programming might still lead to low quality software.
In the case of Knight, the defects might not have even been a function of the software per se. I'm sure a good bit of probability and machine learning go into HFT; these algorithms may have been the source of the errors, and the flawed algorithms might not even be due to the software engineers.
Here's another advantage: your internal IT organization doesnt skim a 20 - 30% profit off the top.
Seriously, proponents of strategies like outsourcing and privatization always talk about how these companies increase efficiency. But, since they always have a profit motive, these companies must operate (say) 30% more efficiently just to break even.
Because he's a good writer and fun to read. Being a good communicator is the #1 skill required for being a futurist.
When you put it that way, he sounds more like a science fiction writer.
I think it's funny how Ray Kurzweil predicts a "singularity" within 50 years, but the people who would actually implement the singularity (e.g. Norvig) say that won't happen.
Why do people still take Kurzweil seriously?
I read an article that gave numbers for the three investment banks (taken from facebook's disclosures).
The numbers totalled $11.6 billion, out of the $16B facebook raised. So, the investment banks bought most of the shares. Some of that is probably for their investors.
I wonder how much the banks will lose from propping up the price.. FB is down 12% today, which means the banks' stock lost over a billion dollars in value. That wipes out everything they made in fees (a few hundred million, IIRC).