Oxford Researchers Say 45 Percent of America’s Occupations Will be Automated Within the Next 20 Years
September 15th, 2013Via: MIT Technology Review:
Rapid advances in technology have long represented a serious potential threat to many jobs ordinarily performed by people.
A recent report (which is not online, but summarized here) from the Oxford Martin School’s Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology attempts to quantify the extent of that threat. It concludes that 45 percent of American jobs are at high risk of being taken by computers within the next two decades.
The authors believe this takeover will happen in two stages. First, computers will start replacing people in especially vulnerable fields like transportation/logistics, production labor, and administrative support. Jobs in services, sales, and construction may also be lost in this first stage. Then, the rate of replacement will slow down due to bottlenecks in harder-to-automate fields such engineering. This “technological plateau” will be followed by a second wave of computerization, dependent upon the development of good artificial intelligence. This could next put jobs in management, science and engineering, and the arts at risk.
FBI Admits It Controlled Tor Servers Behind Mass Malware Attack
September 14th, 2013Via: Wired:
It wasn’t ever seriously in doubt, but the FBI yesterday acknowledged that it secretly took control of Freedom Hosting last July, days before the servers of the largest provider of ultra-anonymous hosting were found to be serving custom malware designed to identify visitors.
Freedom Hosting’s operator, Eric Eoin Marques, had rented the servers from an unnamed commercial hosting provider in France, and paid for them from a bank account in Las Vegas. It’s not clear how the FBI took over the servers in late July, but the bureau was temporarily thwarted when Marques somehow regained access and changed the passwords, briefly locking out the FBI until it gained back control.
U.S., Russia Reach Agreement on Seizure of Syrian Chemical Weapons Arsenal
September 14th, 2013Via: Washington Post:
The United States and Russia agreed Saturday on an outline for the identification and seizure of Syrian chemical weapons and said Syria must turn over an accounting of its arsenal within a week.
The agreement will be backed by a U.N. Security Council resolution that could allow for sanctions or other consequences if Syria fails to comply, Secretary of State John F. Kerry said.
Kerry said that the first international inspection of Syrian chemical weapons will take place by November, with destruction to begin next year.
Related: Securing Syria’s Weapons May Require U.S. Troops
New Addition to Our Family: Baby Girl
September 14th, 2013Update: Niamh
Her name is Niamh Katherine Flaherty. Niamh is an Irish name and, depending on who you ask, it’s pronounced Neev or Ne-uv. We say Neev.
Niamh was our first choice all along, but we didn’t like the anglicised spellings of it, and we were wondering how difficult it would be for her to have a name like Niamh outside of Ireland.
We will be homeschooling her so she will be spared teachers calling out, “Ny-am” at roll call, etc.
If she winds up thinking Niamh is too weird of a name, I can console her by telling her that I thought Saoirse (sear-sha) and Arwen were pretty cool too. 😉
—
Our daughter was born yesterday afternoon (NZ time) at home. I helped to deliver her because Becky’s labor was very fast! Our midwife was only about a half hour away, but by the time she got here, our baby had been born.
Niamh Katherine Flaherty
Mum and baby are doing great. *phew*
We would like to tell you her name, but we haven’t decided on one yet.
Google Probably Knows Nearly Every Wi-Fi Password in the World
September 13th, 2013Via: Computer World:
If an Android device (phone or tablet) has ever logged on to a particular Wi-Fi network, then Google probably knows the Wi-Fi password. Considering how many Android devices there are, it is likely that Google can access most Wi-Fi passwords worldwide.
Recently IDC reported that 187 million Android phones were shipped in the second quarter of this year. That multiplies out to 748 million phones in 2013, a figure that does not include Android tablets.
Many (probably most) of these Android phones and tablets are phoning home to Google, backing up Wi-Fi passwords along with other assorted settings. And, although they have never said so directly, it is obvious that Google can read the passwords.
Sounds like a James Bond movie.
The First Mechanical Gear Found in a Living Creature
September 13th, 2013Via: Popular Mechanics:
With two diminutive legs locked into a leap-ready position, the tiny jumper bends its body taut like an archer drawing a bow. At the top of its legs, a minuscule pair of gears engage—their strange, shark-fin teeth interlocking cleanly like a zipper. And then, faster than you can blink, think, or see with the naked eye, the entire thing is gone. In 2 milliseconds it has bulleted skyward, accelerating at nearly 400 g’s—a rate more than 20 times what a human body can withstand. At top speed the jumper breaks 8 mph—quite a feat considering its body is less than one-tenth of an inch long.
This miniature marvel is an adolescent issus, a kind of planthopper insect and one of the fastest accelerators in the animal kingdom. As a duo of researchers in the U.K. report today in the journal Science, the issus also the first living creature ever discovered to sport a functioning gear. “Jumping is one of the most rapid and powerful things an animal can do,” says Malcolm Burrows, a zoologist at the University of Cambridge and the lead author of the paper, “and that leads to all sorts of crazy specializations.”
Cambridge University Doomers
September 13th, 2013Via: Independent:
Some of Britain’s finest minds are drawing up a “doomsday list” of catastrophic events that could devastate the world, pose a threat to civilisation and might even lead to the extinction of the human species.
Leading scholars have established a centre for the study of “existential risk” which aims to present politicians and the public with a list of disasters that could threaten the future of the world as we know it.
Lord Rees of Ludlow, the astronomer royal and past president of the Royal Society, is leading the initiative, which includes Stephen Hawking, the Cambridge cosmologist, and Lord May of Oxford, a former government chief scientist.
The group also includes the Cambridge philosopher Huw Price, the economist Partha Dasgupta and the Harvard evolutionary geneticist George Church. Initial funding has come from Jaan Tallinn, the co-founder of Skype.
“Many scientists are concerned that developments in human technology may soon pose new, extinction-level risks to our species as a whole,” says a statement on the group’s website.
Lord Rees said in his closing speech to the British Science Festival in Newcastle this evening that the public and politicians need the best possible advice on low-risk scenarios that may suddenly become reality, with devastating consequences.
“Those of us fortunate enough to live in the developed world fret too much about minor hazards of everyday life: improbable air crashes, carcinogens in food, low radiation doses, and so forth,” Lord Rees told the meeting.
“But we are less secure than we think. It seems to me that our political masters, should worry far more about scenarios that have thankfully not yet happened – events that could arise as unexpectedly as the 2008 financial crisis, but which could cause world-wide disruption,” he said.
Professor David Spiegelhalter, an expert in risk at Cambridge University, said that our increasing reliance on technology and the formation of complex interconnected networks is making society more vulnerable.
“We use interconnected systems for everything from power, to food supply and banking, which means there can be real trouble if things go wrong or they are sabotaged,” Professor Spiegelhalter said.
“In a modern, efficient world, we no longer stockpile food. If the supply is disrupted for any reason, it would take about 48-hours before it runs out and riots begin,” he said.
“Energy security is also an issue, as we import much of our fuel from abroad, so a conflict over resources in the future is possible,” he added.
According to Lord Rees, the threat of nuclear war was the main global risk we faced in the last century, but in the fast-developing 21st Century there are new concerns over risks such as deadly bioterrorist attacks, pandemics accelerated by global air travel, cyberattacks on critical infrastructure and artificially intelligent computers that turn hostile.
“In future decades, events with low probability but catastrophic consequences may loom high on the political agenda,” Lord Rees told the science festival.
“That’s why some of us in Cambridge – both natural and social scientists – plan, with colleagues at Oxford and elsewhere, to inaugurate a research programme to compile a more complete register of these existential risks, and to assess how to enhance resilience against the more credible ones,” he said.
NSA Poses as Legitimate Websites for Man in the Middle Attacks
September 13th, 2013When you’re connected to .mil’s PSYOP ISP, you may get a ‘special’ version of the Internet.
—U.S. Has Secret Tools to Force Internet on Dictators
Via: Cnet:
Here’s one of the latest tidbits on the NSA surveillance scandal (which seems to be generating nearly as many blog items as there are phone numbers in the spy agency’s data banks).
Earlier this week, Techdirt picked up on a passing mention in a Brazilian news story and a Slate article to point out that the US National Security Agency had apparently impersonated Google on at least one occasion to gather data on people. (Mother Jones subsequently pointed out Techdirt’s point-out.)
Brazilian site Fantastico obtained and published a document leaked by Edward Snowden, which diagrams how a “man in the middle attack” involving Google was apparently carried out.
A technique commonly used by hackers, a MITM attack involves using a fake security certificate to pose as a legitimate Web service, bypass browser security settings, and then intercept data that an unsuspecting person is sending to that service. Hackers could, for example, pose as a banking Web site and steal passwords.
Some Dropbox Process Is Opening Documents
September 12th, 2013Via: WNCInfoSec:
So now I’m curious…are the files being accessed for de-duplication purposes or possibly malware scanning? If so, then why are the other file types not being opened? It appears that only .doc files are being opened…
I then uploaded more HoneyDocs files to my Dropbox folder, this time from a different computer and ISP to rule out any of those variables.
All .doc embedded HoneyDocs appear to have been accessed…from different Amazon EC-2 instance IPs.
Beeban Kidron: We Need to Talk About Teenagers and the Internet
September 12th, 2013Grim.
Via: Guardian:
There is a new world order and our children are carrying it around in their pockets.
