Ocean Confetti
May 15th, 2014Via: MinuteEarth:
‘Now The Military Is Going To Build Robots That Have Morals’
May 14th, 2014Via: DefenseOne:
The Office of Naval Research will award $7.5 million in grant money over five years to university researchers from Tufts, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Brown, Yale and Georgetown to explore how to build a sense of right and wrong and moral consequence into autonomous robotic systems.
Pervasive Monitoring Is an Attack
May 14th, 2014Via: Tim Bray:
That’s the title of RFC 7258, also known as BCP 188 (where BCP stands for “Best Common Practice”); it represents Internet Engineering Task Force consensus on the fact that many powerful well-funded entities feel it is appropriate to monitor people’s use of the Net, without telling those people. The consensus is: This monitoring is an attack and designers of Internet protocols must work to mitigate it.
Hunter Biden to Ukraine Gas Board
May 13th, 2014Via: Politico:
Hunter Biden, the younger son of Vice President Joe Biden, will be joining Ukraine’s largest private gas producer, the company announced in a statement
“The company’s strategy is aimed at the strongest concentration of professional staff and the introduction of best corporate practices, and we’re delighted that Mr. Biden is joining us to help us achieve these goals,” Alan Apter, Burisma Holdings’ chairman of the board of directors, said in a statement, which was reported by The Moscow Times on Tuesday.
Human Consciousness Probably Can’t Be Modeled On A Computer
May 13th, 2014Via: Medium:
The central part of their new work is to describe the mathematical properties of a system that can store integrated information in this way but without it leaking away. And this leads them to their central proof. “The implications of this proof are that we have to abandon either the idea that people enjoy genuinely [integrated] consciousness or that brain processes can be modelled computationally,” say Maguire and co.
Since Tononi’s main assumption is that consciousness is the experience of integrated information, it is the second idea that must be abandoned: brain processes cannot be modelled computationally.
Robotic Arm Catches Objects On The Fly
May 13th, 2014Via: EPFL:
A robot developed by EPFL researchers is capable of reacting on the spot and grasping objects with complex shapes and trajectories in less than five hundredths of a second.
Is Your Job at Risk from Robot Labor? Check This Handy Interactive Chart
May 13th, 2014Via: Quartz:
In the second machine age, robots will perform tasks once thought to require uniquely human abilities, like driving our taxis and filleting our fish. But not all jobs will be equally affected by automation. The interactive plot above attempts to sort out the differences.
We compared three variables related to the American workforce: the median wage for various jobs; the number of people employed in those positions in the United States; and the likelihood that these jobs will become automated. The data for this last metric come from a recent study, “The Future of Employment” (pdf). Use the interactive to explore which jobs are most susceptible to computerization, how many people will be affected, and how much money these workers make.
The densest cluster sits at the bottom-right, representing the massive numbers of workers in jobs that are both low-paying and highly likely to become automated. That corner is home to many occupations that are already being automated: cashier, retail salesperson, telemarketer.
But a low median wage doesn’t necessarily mean robots are set to make humans in a given job obsolete. In the bottom-left are low-income jobs that require high levels of “social intelligence” or creativity, such as coaching and photography. Computers are still hopeless at these kinds of tasks.
Document Establishes NSA’s Involvement in COINTELPRO
May 13th, 2014Via: The Guardian:
One document from the Snowden files, dated 3 October 2012, chillingly underscores the point. It revealed that the agency has been monitoring the online activities of individuals it believes express “radical” ideas and who have a “radicalising” influence on others. The memo discusses six individuals in particular, all Muslims, though it stresses that they are merely “exemplars”.
The NSA explicitly states that none of the targeted individuals is a member of a terrorist organisation or involved in any terror plots. Instead, their crime is the views they express, which are deemed “radical”, a term that warrants pervasive surveillance and destructive campaigns to “exploit vulnerabilities”.
Among the information collected about the individuals, at least one of whom is a “US person”, are details of their online sex activities and “online promiscuity” – the porn sites they visit and surreptitious sex chats with women who are not their wives. The agency discusses ways to exploit this information to destroy their reputations and credibility.
NSA Routinely Installs Backdoors in Computers and Networking Equipment Exported from the U.S.
May 13th, 2014Via: The Guardian:
But while American companies were being warned away from supposedly untrustworthy Chinese routers, foreign organisations would have been well advised to beware of American-made ones. A June 2010 report from the head of the NSA’s Access and Target Development department is shockingly explicit. The NSA routinely receives – or intercepts – routers, servers and other computer network devices being exported from the US before they are delivered to the international customers.
The agency then implants backdoor surveillance tools, repackages the devices with a factory seal and sends them on. The NSA thus gains access to entire networks and all their users. The document gleefully observes that some “SIGINT tradecraft … is very hands-on (literally!)”.
Eventually, the implanted device connects back to the NSA. The report continues: “In one recent case, after several months a beacon implanted through supply-chain interdiction called back to the NSA covert infrastructure. This call back provided us access to further exploit the device and survey the network.”
It is quite possible that Chinese firms are implanting surveillance mechanisms in their network devices. But the US is certainly doing the same.
New Zealand: Big Brother Has to Sign Off on ISP Infrastructure Changes and Personnel
May 13th, 2014So it goes…
Via: ITnews:
Local and international telcos and network providers in New Zealand are now required to comply with strict and complex new communications interception and security legislation.
…
Known as the Telecommunications (Interception Capability and Security) Act (TICSA), the new law requires network operators to register with the NZ Police. Similary, suppliers of a wholesale or retail telecommunications service must provide their information to the police registry.
Registrants must tell the police their total number of connections, customers and size of their geographic coverage, and ensure that law enforcement agencies have access to customer data and connections when needed.
As part of the new law – which requires the country’s main signals intelligence agency, the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) to play a prime role in network and systems security – providers are now dutybound to notify the state about any design and procurement decisions before implementation, according to government guidance [PDF].
Prior to TICSA, network operators were free to design their infrastructure according to their wishes and to meet commercial demands, and to buy equipment and software from any supplier.
From this month, the GCSB has to be notified of and approve proposed changes to a provider’s network operations centre, core network including gateways and interconnects as well customer databases and authentication systems.
Providers will also be required to have their staff vetted for security clearance. However, the GCSB will not run the security clearance process itself, and warns that this “may take a significant length of time.”
