For a long time there has been a fear of a Frankenstein being incarnated with AI. Movies like The Matrix and the recent essay by Bill Joy both express worries that AI (in the form of self replicating robots with some AI agenda) can possibly overcome us if we are not careful. Personally I have always considered the idea rather outlandish, but I'm wondering what an actual expert thinks about the idea.
Do you believe that there is any foundation for worry? If so, what areas should we concentrate on to be sure to avoid any problems? If not, what are the limiting factors that prevent an "evil" AI?
To the best of my knowledge it has never been illegal to write viruses. Nor has it ever been illegal to discuss or share code on how to write a virus.
To use the analogy of somebody else here, it's not illegal to own a car (even if you built it yourself), but it is illegal to use it to kill somebody with it. Similar circumstances follow for a virus. If you intentionally infect a computer or a redistributed file with a virus, then you are violating laws. Simply writing a virus does not make you a criminal.
There are some basic concerns that I have over this system. First that it will be used as part of a ridiculous "zero tolerance" policy that will cause a bunch of innocent kids to get into trouble for no good reason. The current zero tolerance policies are silly enough without having anonymous tips factored in.
I'm also worried that any results of such a system would be applied unfairly. If a chess geek gets beaten up by the football captain and threatens to kill him, who gets in trouble? Currently it seems that the chess geek gets kicked out of school. Frankly, I'd rather see violent behavior tolerated less than threatened violent behavior.
Lastly, and most importantly I'm worried about what sort of attitudes this will foster on children. We're talking about kids here, not convicted felons. If we start getting kids used to totalitarian environments, so that they have to watch every single word they say or risk "counseling or discipline" then how will they ever learn to reject it as adults? Frankly I object to the treatment of kids as hardened criminals. Most parolees don't have to watch their speech as much as many kids today. How much of our children's childhood are we willing to take away to protect them?
My first proposal is that the entire program be dropped. Sensing that that is an unlikely outcome, I also propose the following:
I propose that there be no anonymity allowed in the system. Not necessarily that everybody knows that somebody else accused them of something, but that at least somebody at some area of the program can know who is responsible for the report. Those that report a lot of people should have all their reports reviewed and should themselves be subject to scrutiny.
I also propose that both parents and children be notified IMMEDIATELY if a report is made on the child. It is impossible to defend yourself from false charges if you don't know you've been charged. Further, all records on a child should be accessible by either child or parents at any time when requested.
Any report made by a child that does not involve actual violent behavior or weapons should require an adult report as well before any checks are made. Thus if somebody reports that "Tim said he was going to kill John", that should have no repercussions on how a student is evaluated unless a teacher/parent also reports that "Tim has exhibited violent tendencies".
Reports on violent behavior or weapons possession should require actual proof before any disciplinary action is taken. Any kid can claim he saw somebody with a gun, that doesn't mean it should be assumed that they are telling the truth. A school asking parents if they have a gun, and if that gun is accessible to the child would go a long way towards raising parental awareness of the problem without requiring any action from the school.
Reports of violent behavior based on whether a child plays video games, sees violent movies, has metal or goth musical tastes, dresses goth, is gay orientation etc. should be deleted without ever being entered into the system.
Nah, not stuck at all. Just look at all the distro's and flavors out there. Need somebody to pick on, pick Solaris, FreeBSD, Debian etc. We're set for years.
Now if I can just think up a way to make Linus look like a borg penguin...
The movie industry is insanely profitable. They have never had any justification for imposing copy protection schemes, as pirating causes them to lose approximately 1% of what they would otherwise earn.
And if I buy it, I *should be* allowed to do whatever I want with it within the terms of fair use. Don't make this into a "slashdot users are anarchist" post when all we want is what the law is supposed to give us. The DMCA violates fair use, and that is the beef we have. We are not advocating mass copying SINCE COPYING OF DVDs HAS ALWAYS BEEN POSSIBLE by sampling the output from the DVD player. DeCSS (which I assume is what you're referring to) is a PLAYER, it is not a TOOL OF ANARCHIST PIRATES, since the anarchist pirates have always had the required tools to copy DVDs.
That they are trying to restrict fair use shows us that they want to force us to buy their players that run on a specific operating system. It's worth noting that in order to play DVDs on a linux system you already must have a hardware DVD player (it's not like you're not buying a player). It's just that since they can't be bothered to support linux, we have to write our own tools to view the movie that we bought on the DVD player that we bought. Yet when we do so, all of a sudden we're accused of copyright violation...
A data haven isn't necessarily the solution. A legislation proof anonymous server would probably be more appropriate (still requires a nation/island willing to do it). Data havens are for storing and retrieving documents without the threat of them being compromised by others. For newsgroup postings of a defamatory nature, you need an anon server that you know the feds can't peek at.
Incidentally, there is a version of a data haven in an young incarnation of an "eternity service" at http://www.cypherspace.org/~adam/eternity/ (see associated link to Ross Anderson's white paper as well).
That's break or mutation. Not all tumors are caused by the "lack" of a given gene, rather they can result from a few base pairs being mixed up.
Incidentally in Nancy Kress' "Beggars and Choosers" (dealing with human genemod and nanotech scifi) a group develops a nanobot that basically just compares dna vs other dna (and RNA) and kills any cells that don't match the template. Basically wipes out all illness.
If anything he was asking for LESS protection. While this might be conceivably interpreted as "special", it's fairly obvious that he believes the current system provides too much protection.
Actually a better example would be the ReaperBot. A reaper cranked to max is almost an invincible killing machine. UnrealBots are programmed to be stupid in the way that many people are stupid (and are stupid in their own ways due to programming decisions) for the feeling of realism. If somebody were to go to the trouble of developing a real (military) robot like a reaper then it would not have many of the weaknesses programmed into the current generation of Polge's creations.
It's no fun to play against a maxed out reaperbot, since it always wins.
BTW, I think game AI (and silly things like chatterbots) is more aptly named than "AI as it is practiced at places like MIT". To me, an AI is a program that pretends to be human, not an algorithm that solves a certain class of problem.
That's a human centric view. Human intelligence is not necessarily the goal of AI, to produce a computer cabable of reasoning, extrapolation and generalization is. While it's nice to think that true intelligence in a machine would not be dissimilar to "pretending to be human" it's far more likely that it would be strongly divergent.
The easiest way to distribute software is to buy a judge and get them to put an injuction on it....
Oh wait, they already did that.
Seriously though, if they hadn't gone to the trouble of trying to suppress it I wouldn't have a copy on every machine that I use. Message to clueless suits:
We don't like censors!
We mirror stuff faster than you can issue take down messages!
Any injunction merely speeds the process of propagation as people perceive a need to grab the file before it is taken down!
We are smarter than you are.
We are more resourceful than you are.
You cannot hide things from us, no matter how many judges you pay off.
But what do they really expect to gain from the ISP's log files?
This is a public relations move. By aggressively going after the ISP, they are creating the impression that the release of the list-decrypting software was an illegal action, when it wasn't.
Personally I think they're trying to implement a new type of harassment. Given such a list, perhaps they'll try to subpoena hard drives from a few thousand people for "discovery".
What's this? Somebody accessed a controversial site? Well we'll just have to take their hard drive away and see how they like that. That'll learn 'em to think for themselves.
The word "fuck" is one of a short list of words that aren't allowed into radio or television broadcast. It is also considered grounds for discipline in most, if not all, schooling systems.
As to how this word managed to get such a stigmata in our society I have no earthly idea. Personally I use it a lot (in the proper context of course) and it doesn't seem to bother anybody.
My wife, raised a catholic, believes we should prevent our son from using the word "fuck" and should stop using it around him ourselves. This is one of the few child rearing points we haven't resolved yet, as I personally consider all language to have a proper use. I'd rather my son learn to say FUCK when he drops a hammer on his foot than going around inanely whispering "fuck fuck fuck fuck" and giggling just because it's forbidden.
The entire concept that a word can be "bad" in and of itself has always amused me. Words are just fluff that you throw together to convey ideas. It's the ideas and your ability to convey them that matter, this preoccupation with meaningless taboos is a bad meme.
And before you jump to the conclusion that the majority of us are prudes it's important to realize that the fundamentalists responsible for the majority of censorship in the USA are in fact a minority. They just happen to be a very vocal minority that has regrettably managed to maintain their powerful access to politics for much of this century.
In this case, the documents are in the possession of an organization in a nation other than the USA. Further, I find it difficult to believe that they have been served a US subpoena for them yet. Thus the logical act would be to delete them before our government bullies the Swedish government into enforcing our laws in their country.
There's nothing to say that packets originating in the USA and bound for a destination in the USA cannot be routed through Canada, Malaysia, and Australia on their route to destination. Obviously such a route would be more convoluted than necessary, but I can envision many cases where it would make sense for a router to bump things up to Canada and then back down (and vice versa).
This also doesn't do anything about somebody who decided to get iCrave and capture the content and re-broadcast without the "region filtering".
There would probably be an initial expense at setting up the course. Once you had the course well established, it would probably be possible to recycle a lot of the content every year. You'd have to change the exams of course, but the basic lecture would remain the same. If you were smart you could even store a database per lecture on questions asked and answered so that confusing areas would have excellent documentation.
That's a growing concern as science proceeds to have increasing power. On one hand, we've manage to avoid nuking ourselves down to glowing glass, but on the other hand currently only governments have nuclear bombs (at least, I hope that's still true).
Genetic warfare and nanotechnology are two fronts where it is entirely possible that some looney will come up with a brilliant way to destroy the world without needing an amount of money that would prohibit this to rich nations.
Books like Herbert's "White Plague" are excellent fictional studies into what can happen when the power to make sweeping biological weapons becomes accessible to an "average" man.
Unfortunately it's a bit of a quandry. We can't restrict the progress of technology without becoming a repressive world, and we have severe potential consequences if we let it go unchecked.
You were welcome to conduct your own analysis of Symantec's blocked site list. Peacefire made their software freely available and posted a link to the URL database on Symantec's server... until Symantec rendered their link useless. Kind of makes it hard for anyone to counter Peacefire's numbers, and it was Symantec's decision to do so.
Actually Bennett had several people download the file a week or two ago in case of circumstances like this. The download was done independently using the link while it worked. I do not have high enough bandwidth to mirror the file, but I could probably manage to ftp it (17 megs) to a few people who can. My contact info is listed above. Obviously, if you get the file from me, you cannot (accurately) claim to have downloaded it direct from Symantec, but you can do statistical analysis.
I'm somewhat inclined to agree. Jeff's reply appears carefully engineered to appease the angry hackers. This is not necessarily a bad thing if he actually has to follow up on it, but I suspect that there is less remorse than manipulation.
That said, Tim has most likely dealt with a large range of people and can probably spot a snake, given enough time. I'm going to have to wait this one out to see how Tim feels about it in a couple months.
I definitely agree about the 1-click. It's LESS secure, that's why folks don't use it. (shameless and only moderately relevant dig) Hey, let's patent an encryption scheme that's easy to crack...doh, the DVD consortium beat us to it.
Slashdot Mirror
For a long time there has been a fear of a Frankenstein being incarnated with AI. Movies like The Matrix and the recent essay by Bill Joy both express worries that AI (in the form of self replicating robots with some AI agenda) can possibly overcome us if we are not careful. Personally I have always considered the idea rather outlandish, but I'm wondering what an actual expert thinks about the idea.
Do you believe that there is any foundation for worry? If so, what areas should we concentrate on to be sure to avoid any problems? If not, what are the limiting factors that prevent an "evil" AI?
To the best of my knowledge it has never been illegal to write viruses. Nor has it ever been illegal to discuss or share code on how to write a virus.
To use the analogy of somebody else here, it's not illegal to own a car (even if you built it yourself), but it is illegal to use it to kill somebody with it. Similar circumstances follow for a virus. If you intentionally infect a computer or a redistributed file with a virus, then you are violating laws. Simply writing a virus does not make you a criminal.
There are some basic concerns that I have over this system. First that it will be used as part of a ridiculous "zero tolerance" policy that will cause a bunch of innocent kids to get into trouble for no good reason. The current zero tolerance policies are silly enough without having anonymous tips factored in.
I'm also worried that any results of such a system would be applied unfairly. If a chess geek gets beaten up by the football captain and threatens to kill him, who gets in trouble? Currently it seems that the chess geek gets kicked out of school. Frankly, I'd rather see violent behavior tolerated less than threatened violent behavior.
Lastly, and most importantly I'm worried about what sort of attitudes this will foster on children. We're talking about kids here, not convicted felons. If we start getting kids used to totalitarian environments, so that they have to watch every single word they say or risk "counseling or discipline" then how will they ever learn to reject it as adults? Frankly I object to the treatment of kids as hardened criminals. Most parolees don't have to watch their speech as much as many kids today. How much of our children's childhood are we willing to take away to protect them?
My first proposal is that the entire program be dropped. Sensing that that is an unlikely outcome, I also propose the following:
I propose that there be no anonymity allowed in the system. Not necessarily that everybody knows that somebody else accused them of something, but that at least somebody at some area of the program can know who is responsible for the report. Those that report a lot of people should have all their reports reviewed and should themselves be subject to scrutiny.
I also propose that both parents and children be notified IMMEDIATELY if a report is made on the child. It is impossible to defend yourself from false charges if you don't know you've been charged. Further, all records on a child should be accessible by either child or parents at any time when requested.
Any report made by a child that does not involve actual violent behavior or weapons should require an adult report as well before any checks are made. Thus if somebody reports that "Tim said he was going to kill John", that should have no repercussions on how a student is evaluated unless a teacher/parent also reports that "Tim has exhibited violent tendencies".
Reports on violent behavior or weapons possession should require actual proof before any disciplinary action is taken. Any kid can claim he saw somebody with a gun, that doesn't mean it should be assumed that they are telling the truth. A school asking parents if they have a gun, and if that gun is accessible to the child would go a long way towards raising parental awareness of the problem without requiring any action from the school.
Reports of violent behavior based on whether a child plays video games, sees violent movies, has metal or goth musical tastes, dresses goth, is gay orientation etc. should be deleted without ever being entered into the system.
Nah, not stuck at all. Just look at all the distro's and flavors out there. Need somebody to pick on, pick Solaris, FreeBSD, Debian etc. We're set for years.
Now if I can just think up a way to make Linus look like a borg penguin...
The movie industry is insanely profitable. They have never had any justification for imposing copy protection schemes, as pirating causes them to lose approximately 1% of what they would otherwise earn.
And if I buy it, I *should be* allowed to do whatever I want with it within the terms of fair use. Don't make this into a "slashdot users are anarchist" post when all we want is what the law is supposed to give us. The DMCA violates fair use, and that is the beef we have. We are not advocating mass copying SINCE COPYING OF DVDs HAS ALWAYS BEEN POSSIBLE by sampling the output from the DVD player. DeCSS (which I assume is what you're referring to) is a PLAYER, it is not a TOOL OF ANARCHIST PIRATES, since the anarchist pirates have always had the required tools to copy DVDs.
That they are trying to restrict fair use shows us that they want to force us to buy their players that run on a specific operating system. It's worth noting that in order to play DVDs on a linux system you already must have a hardware DVD player (it's not like you're not buying a player). It's just that since they can't be bothered to support linux, we have to write our own tools to view the movie that we bought on the DVD player that we bought. Yet when we do so, all of a sudden we're accused of copyright violation...
I'm reminded of Neal Stephenson's analogy of the various OS's as car dealerships.
A data haven isn't necessarily the solution. A legislation proof anonymous server would probably be more appropriate (still requires a nation/island willing to do it). Data havens are for storing and retrieving documents without the threat of them being compromised by others. For newsgroup postings of a defamatory nature, you need an anon server that you know the feds can't peek at.
Incidentally, there is a version of a data haven in an young incarnation of an "eternity service" at http://www.cypherspace.org/~adam/eternity/ (see associated link to Ross Anderson's white paper as well).
Go to http://www.waveamerica.com/scripts/report/rptdrill down.asp?pStateID=NCSS
Pick any school, submit a complaint. Use civil language, be concise, try not to misspell any words.
Submit a few thousand complaints each and we'll be set.
That's break or mutation. Not all tumors are caused by the "lack" of a given gene, rather they can result from a few base pairs being mixed up.
Incidentally in Nancy Kress' "Beggars and Choosers" (dealing with human genemod and nanotech scifi) a group develops a nanobot that basically just compares dna vs other dna (and RNA) and kills any cells that don't match the template. Basically wipes out all illness.
I believe the shroud of turin has been debunked using other technologies involving the dating of materials.
If anything he was asking for LESS protection. While this might be conceivably interpreted as "special", it's fairly obvious that he believes the current system provides too much protection.
Actually a better example would be the ReaperBot. A reaper cranked to max is almost an invincible killing machine. UnrealBots are programmed to be stupid in the way that many people are stupid (and are stupid in their own ways due to programming decisions) for the feeling of realism. If somebody were to go to the trouble of developing a real (military) robot like a reaper then it would not have many of the weaknesses programmed into the current generation of Polge's creations.
It's no fun to play against a maxed out reaperbot, since it always wins.
That's a human centric view. Human intelligence is not necessarily the goal of AI, to produce a computer cabable of reasoning, extrapolation and generalization is. While it's nice to think that true intelligence in a machine would not be dissimilar to "pretending to be human" it's far more likely that it would be strongly divergent.
It provides a utility that allows you to see the admin passwords that disable the software's filtering.
Check out the pages of this eternity service, it is similar to what you're talking about.
http://www.cypherspace.org/~adam/eternity/
Oh wait, they already did that.
Seriously though, if they hadn't gone to the trouble of trying to suppress it I wouldn't have a copy on every machine that I use. Message to clueless suits:
We don't like censors!
We mirror stuff faster than you can issue take down messages!
Any injunction merely speeds the process of propagation as people perceive a need to grab the file before it is taken down!
We are smarter than you are.
We are more resourceful than you are.
You cannot hide things from us, no matter how many judges you pay off.
Actually, whenever I use the word stigmata I think of the song by Ministry off of the "Land of Rape and Honey" CD.
This is a public relations move. By aggressively going after the ISP, they are creating the impression that the release of the list-decrypting software was an illegal action, when it wasn't.
Personally I think they're trying to implement a new type of harassment. Given such a list, perhaps they'll try to subpoena hard drives from a few thousand people for "discovery".
What's this? Somebody accessed a controversial site? Well we'll just have to take their hard drive away and see how they like that. That'll learn 'em to think for themselves.
The word "fuck" is one of a short list of words that aren't allowed into radio or television broadcast. It is also considered grounds for discipline in most, if not all, schooling systems.
As to how this word managed to get such a stigmata in our society I have no earthly idea. Personally I use it a lot (in the proper context of course) and it doesn't seem to bother anybody.
My wife, raised a catholic, believes we should prevent our son from using the word "fuck" and should stop using it around him ourselves. This is one of the few child rearing points we haven't resolved yet, as I personally consider all language to have a proper use. I'd rather my son learn to say FUCK when he drops a hammer on his foot than going around inanely whispering "fuck fuck fuck fuck" and giggling just because it's forbidden.
The entire concept that a word can be "bad" in and of itself has always amused me. Words are just fluff that you throw together to convey ideas. It's the ideas and your ability to convey them that matter, this preoccupation with meaningless taboos is a bad meme.
And before you jump to the conclusion that the majority of us are prudes it's important to realize that the fundamentalists responsible for the majority of censorship in the USA are in fact a minority. They just happen to be a very vocal minority that has regrettably managed to maintain their powerful access to politics for much of this century.
In this case, the documents are in the possession of an organization in a nation other than the USA. Further, I find it difficult to believe that they have been served a US subpoena for them yet. Thus the logical act would be to delete them before our government bullies the Swedish government into enforcing our laws in their country.
There's nothing to say that packets originating in the USA and bound for a destination in the USA cannot be routed through Canada, Malaysia, and Australia on their route to destination. Obviously such a route would be more convoluted than necessary, but I can envision many cases where it would make sense for a router to bump things up to Canada and then back down (and vice versa).
This also doesn't do anything about somebody who decided to get iCrave and capture the content and re-broadcast without the "region filtering".
There would probably be an initial expense at setting up the course. Once you had the course well established, it would probably be possible to recycle a lot of the content every year. You'd have to change the exams of course, but the basic lecture would remain the same. If you were smart you could even store a database per lecture on questions asked and answered so that confusing areas would have excellent documentation.
That's a growing concern as science proceeds to have increasing power. On one hand, we've manage to avoid nuking ourselves down to glowing glass, but on the other hand currently only governments have nuclear bombs (at least, I hope that's still true).
Genetic warfare and nanotechnology are two fronts where it is entirely possible that some looney will come up with a brilliant way to destroy the world without needing an amount of money that would prohibit this to rich nations.
Books like Herbert's "White Plague" are excellent fictional studies into what can happen when the power to make sweeping biological weapons becomes accessible to an "average" man.
Unfortunately it's a bit of a quandry. We can't restrict the progress of technology without becoming a repressive world, and we have severe potential consequences if we let it go unchecked.
Actually Bennett had several people download the file a week or two ago in case of circumstances like this. The download was done independently using the link while it worked. I do not have high enough bandwidth to mirror the file, but I could probably manage to ftp it (17 megs) to a few people who can. My contact info is listed above. Obviously, if you get the file from me, you cannot (accurately) claim to have downloaded it direct from Symantec, but you can do statistical analysis.
I'm somewhat inclined to agree. Jeff's reply appears carefully engineered to appease the angry hackers. This is not necessarily a bad thing if he actually has to follow up on it, but I suspect that there is less remorse than manipulation.
That said, Tim has most likely dealt with a large range of people and can probably spot a snake, given enough time. I'm going to have to wait this one out to see how Tim feels about it in a couple months.
I definitely agree about the 1-click. It's LESS secure, that's why folks don't use it. (shameless and only moderately relevant dig) Hey, let's patent an encryption scheme that's easy to crack...doh, the DVD consortium beat us to it.