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Ed Webb

Would You Protect Your Computer's Feelings? Clifford Nass Says Yes. - ProfHacker - The ... - 0 views

  • The Man Who Lied to His Laptop condenses for a popular audience an argument that Nass has been making for at least 15 years: humans do not differentiate between computers and people in their social interactions.
  • At first blush, this sounds absurd. Everyone knows that it's "just a computer," and of course computers don't have feelings. And yet. Nass has a slew of amusing stories—and, crucially, studies based on those stories—indicating that, no matter what "everyone knows," people act as if the computer secretly cares. For example: In one study, users reviewed a software package, either on the same computer they'd used it on, or on a different computer. Consistently, participants gave the software better ratings when they reviewed in on the same computer—as if they didn't want the computer to feel bad. What's more, Nass notes, "every one of the participants insisted that she or he would never bother being polite to a computer" (7).
  • Nass found that users given completely random praise by a computer program liked it more than the same program without praise, even though they knew in advance the praise was meaningless. In fact, they liked it as much as the same program, if they were told the praise was accurate. (In other words, flattery was as well received as praise, and both were preferred to no positive comments.) Again, when questioned about the results, users angrily denied any difference at all in their reactions.
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    How do you interact with the computing devices in your life?
Ed Webb

Does the Digital Classroom Enfeeble the Mind? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • My father would have been unable to “teach to the test.” He once complained about errors in a sixth-grade math textbook, so he had the class learn math by designing a spaceship. My father would have been spat out by today’s test-driven educational regime.
  • A career in computer science makes you see the world in its terms. You start to see money as a form of information display instead of as a store of value. Money flows are the computational output of a lot of people planning, promising, evaluating, hedging and scheming, and those behaviors start to look like a set of algorithms. You start to see the weather as a computer processing bits tweaked by the sun, and gravity as a cosmic calculation that keeps events in time and space consistent. This way of seeing is becoming ever more common as people have experiences with computers. While it has its glorious moments, the computational perspective can at times be uniquely unromantic. Nothing kills music for me as much as having some algorithm calculate what music I will want to hear. That seems to miss the whole point. Inventing your musical taste is the point, isn’t it? Bringing computers into the middle of that is like paying someone to program a robot to have sex on your behalf so you don’t have to. And yet it seems we benefit from shining an objectifying digital light to disinfect our funky, lying selves once in a while. It’s heartless to have music chosen by digital algorithms. But at least there are fewer people held hostage to the tastes of bad radio D.J.’s than there once were. The trick is being ambidextrous, holding one hand to the heart while counting on the digits of the other.
  • The future of education in the digital age will be determined by our judgment of which aspects of the information we pass between generations can be represented in computers at all. If we try to represent something digitally when we actually can’t, we kill the romance and make some aspect of the human condition newly bland and absurd. If we romanticize information that shouldn’t be shielded from harsh calculations, we’ll suffer bad teachers and D.J.’s and their wares.
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  • Some of the top digital designs of the moment, both in school and in the rest of life, embed the underlying message that we understand the brain and its workings. That is false. We don’t know how information is represented in the brain. We don’t know how reason is accomplished by neurons. There are some vaguely cool ideas floating around, and we might know a lot more about these things any moment now, but at this moment, we don’t. You could spend all day reading literature about educational technology without being reminded that this frontier of ignorance lies before us. We are tempted by the demons of commercial and professional ambition to pretend we know more than we do.
  • Outside school, something similar happens. Students spend a lot of time acting as trivialized relays in giant schemes designed for the purposes of advertising and other revenue-minded manipulations. They are prompted to create databases about themselves and then trust algorithms to assemble streams of songs and movies and stories for their consumption. We see the embedded philosophy bloom when students assemble papers as mash-ups from online snippets instead of thinking and composing on a blank piece of screen. What is wrong with this is not that students are any lazier now or learning less. (It is probably even true, I admit reluctantly, that in the presence of the ambient Internet, maybe it is not so important anymore to hold an archive of certain kinds of academic trivia in your head.) The problem is that students could come to conceive of themselves as relays in a transpersonal digital structure. Their job is then to copy and transfer data around, to be a source of statistics, whether to be processed by tests at school or by advertising schemes elsewhere.
  • If students don’t learn to think, then no amount of access to information will do them any good.
  • To the degree that education is about the transfer of the known between generations, it can be digitized, analyzed, optimized and bottled or posted on Twitter. To the degree that education is about the self-invention of the human race, the gargantuan process of steering billions of brains into unforeseeable states and configurations in the future, it can continue only if each brain learns to invent itself. And that is beyond computation because it is beyond our comprehension.
  • Roughly speaking, there are two ways to use computers in the classroom. You can have them measure and represent the students and the teachers, or you can have the class build a virtual spaceship. Right now the first way is ubiquitous, but the virtual spaceships are being built only by tenacious oddballs in unusual circumstances. More spaceships, please.
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    How do we get this right - use the tech for what it can do well, develop our brains for what the tech can't do? Who's up for building a spaceship?
Ed Webb

OpenAI's bot wrote my obituary. It was filled with bizarre lies. - 0 views

  • What I find so creepy about OpenAI’s bots is not that they seem to exhibit creativity; computers have been doing creative tasks such as generating original proofs in Euclidean geometry since the 1950s. It’s that I grew up with the idea of a computer as an automaton bound by its nature to follow its instructions precisely; barring a malfunction, it does exactly what its operator – and its program—tell it to do. On some level, this is still true; the bot is following its program and the instructions of its operator. But the way the program interprets the operator’s instructions are not the way the operator thinks. Computer programs are optimized not to solve problems, but instead to convince its operator that it has solved those problems. It was written on the package of the Turing test—it’s a game of imitation, of deception. For the first time, we’re forced to confront the consequences of that deception.
  • a computer program that would be sociopathic if it were alive
  • Even when it’s not supposed to, even when it has a way out, even when the truth is known to the computer and it’s easier to spit it out rather than fabricate something—the computer still lies
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  • something that’s been so optimized for deception that it can’t do anything but deceive its operator
Ed Webb

BBC News - Cult of less: Living out of a hard drive - 0 views

  • The DJ has now replaced his bed with friends' couches, paper bills with online banking, and a record collection containing nearly 2,000 albums with an external hard drive with DJ software and nearly 13,000 MP3s
    • Ed Webb
       
      MP3s are convenient, of course, but they don't sound even half as good as vinyl. Seriously.
  • Mr Klein says the lifestyle can become loathsome because "you never know where you will sleep". And Mr Yurista says he frequently worries he may lose his new digital life to a hard drive crash or downed server. "You have to really make sure you have back-ups of your digital goods everywhere," he said.
  • like a house fire that rips through a family's prized possessions, when someone loses their digital goods to a computer crash, they can be devastated. Kelly Chessen, a 36-year-old former suicide hotline counsellor with a soothing voice and reassuring personality, is Drive Savers official "data crisis counsellor". Part-psychiatrist and part-tech enthusiast, Ms Chessen's role is to try to calm people down when they lose their digital possessions to failed drives. Ms Chessen says some people have gone as far as to threaten suicide over their lost digital possessions and data. "It's usually indirect threats like, 'I'm not sure what I'm going to do if I can't get the data back,' but sometimes it will be a direct threat such as, 'I may just have to end it if I can't get to the information',"
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  • Dr Sandberg believes we could be living on hard drives along with our digital possessions in the not too distant future, which would allow us to shed the trouble of owning a body. The concept is called "mind uploading", and it suggests that when our bodies age and begin to fail like a worn or snapped record, we may be able to continue living consciously inside a computer as our own virtual substitutes. "It's the idea that we can copy or transfer the information inside the brain into a form that can be run on the computer," said Dr Sandberg. He added: "That would mean that your consciousness or a combination of that would continue in the computer." Dr Sandberg says although it's just a theory now, researchers and engineers are working on super computers that could one day handle a map of all the networks of neurons and synapses in our brains - and that map could produce human consciousness outside of the body.
  • Mr Sutton is the founder of CultofLess.com, a website which has helped him sell or give away his possessions - apart from his laptop, an iPad, an Amazon Kindle, two external hard drives, a "few" articles of clothing and bed sheets for a mattress that was left in his newly rented apartment. This 21st-Century minimalist says he got rid of much of his clutter because he felt the ever-increasing number of available digital goods have provided adequate replacements for his former physical possessions
  • The tech-savvy Los Angeles "transplant" credits his external hard drives and online services like iTunes, Hulu, Flickr, Facebook, Skype and Google Maps for allowing him to lead a minimalist life.
  • - the internet has replaced my need for an address
Ed Webb

Could self-aware cities be the first forms of artificial intelligence? - 1 views

  • People have speculated before about the idea that the Internet might become self-aware and turn into the first "real" A.I., but could it be more likely to happen to cities, in which humans actually live and work and navigate, generating an even more chaotic system?
  • "By connecting and providing visibility into disparate systems, cities and buildings can operate like living organisms, sensing and responding quickly to potential problems before they occur to protect citizens, save resources and reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions," reads the invitation to IBM's PULSE 2010 event.
  • And Cisco is already building the first of these smart cities: Songdo, a Korean "instant city," which will be completely controlled by computer networks — including ubiquitious Telepresence applications, video screens which could be used for surveillance. Cisco's chief globalization officer, Wim Elfrink, told the San Jose Mercury News: Everything will be connected - buildings, cars, energy - everything. This is the tipping point. When we start building cities with technology in the infrastructure, it's beyond my imagination what that will enable.
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  • Urbanscale founder Adam Greenfield has written a lot about ubiquitous computing in urban environments, most notably in 2006's Everyware, which posits that computers will "effectively disappear" as objects around us become "smart" in ways that are nearly invisible to lay-people.
  • tailored advertising just about anywhere
  • Some futurists are still predicting that cities will become closer to arcologies — huge slabs of integrated urban life, like a whole city in a single block — as they grapple with the need to house so many people in an efficient fashion. The implications for heating and cooling an arcology, let alone dealing with waste disposal, are mind-boggling. Could a future arcology become our first machine mind?
  • Science fiction gives us the occasional virtual worlds that look rural — like Doctor Who's visions of life inside the Matrix, which mostly looks (not surprisingly) like a gravel quarry — but for the most part, virtual worlds are always urban
  • So here's why cities might have an edge over, say, the Internet as a whole, when it comes to developing self awareness. Because every city is different, and every city has its own identity and sense of self — and this informs everything from urban planning to the ways in which parking and electricity use are mapped out. The more sophisticated the integrated systems associated with a city become, the more they'll reflect the city's unique personality, and the more programmers will try to imbue their computers with a sense of this unique urban identity. And a sense of the city's history, and the ways in which the city has evolved and grown, will be important for a more sophisticated urban planning system to grasp the future — so it's very possible to imagine this leading to a sense of personal history, on the part of a computer that identifies with the city it helps to manage.
  • next time you're wandering around your city, looking up at the outcroppings of huge buildings, the wild tides of traffic and the frenzy of construction and demolition, don't just think of it as a place haunted by history. Try, instead, to imagine it coming to life in a new way, opening its millions of electronic eyes, and greeting you with the first gleaming of independent thought
  • I can't wait for the day when city AI's decide to go to war with other city AI's over allocation of federal funds.
  • John Shirley has San Fransisco as a sentient being in City Come A Walkin
  • I doubt cities will ever be networked so smoothly... they are all about fractions, sections, niches, subcultures, ethicities, neighborhoods, markets, underground markets. It's literally like herding cats... I don't see it as feasible. It would be a schizophrenic intelligence at best. Which, Wintermute was I suppose...
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    This is beginning to sound just like the cities we have read about. To me it sort of reminds me of the Burning chrome stories, as an element in all those stories was machines and technology at every turn. With the recent advances is technology it is alarming to see that an element in many science fiction tales is finally coming true. A city that acts as a machine in its self. Who is to say that this city won't become a city with a highly active hacker underbelly.
Ed Webb

An Algorithm Summarizes Lengthy Text Surprisingly Well - MIT Technology Review - 0 views

  • As information overload grows ever worse, computers may become our only hope for handling a growing deluge of documents. And it may become routine to rely on a machine to analyze and paraphrase articles, research papers, and other text for you.
  • Parsing language remains one of the grand challenges of artificial intelligence (see “AI’s Language Problem”). But it’s a challenge with enormous commercial potential. Even limited linguistic intelligence—the ability to parse spoken or written queries, and to respond in more sophisticated and coherent ways—could transform personal computing. In many specialist fields—like medicine, scientific research, and law—condensing information and extracting insights could have huge commercial benefits.
  • The system experiments in order to generate summaries of its own using a process called reinforcement learning. Inspired by the way animals seem to learn, this involves providing positive feedback for actions that lead toward a particular objective. Reinforcement learning has been used to train computers to do impressive new things, like playing complex games or controlling robots (see “10 Breakthrough Technologies 2017: Reinforcement Learning”). Those working on conversational interfaces are increasingly now looking at reinforcement learning as a way to improve their systems.
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  • “At some point, we have to admit that we need a little bit of semantics and a little bit of syntactic knowledge in these systems in order for them to be fluid and fluent,”
Ed Webb

AI Causes Real Harm. Let's Focus on That over the End-of-Humanity Hype - Scientific Ame... - 0 views

  • Wrongful arrests, an expanding surveillance dragnet, defamation and deep-fake pornography are all actually existing dangers of so-called “artificial intelligence” tools currently on the market. That, and not the imagined potential to wipe out humanity, is the real threat from artificial intelligence.
  • Beneath the hype from many AI firms, their technology already enables routine discrimination in housing, criminal justice and health care, as well as the spread of hate speech and misinformation in non-English languages. Already, algorithmic management programs subject workers to run-of-the-mill wage theft, and these programs are becoming more prevalent.
  • Corporate AI labs justify this posturing with pseudoscientific research reports that misdirect regulatory attention to such imaginary scenarios using fear-mongering terminology, such as “existential risk.”
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  • Because the term “AI” is ambiguous, it makes having clear discussions more difficult. In one sense, it is the name of a subfield of computer science. In another, it can refer to the computing techniques developed in that subfield, most of which are now focused on pattern matching based on large data sets and the generation of new media based on those patterns. Finally, in marketing copy and start-up pitch decks, the term “AI” serves as magic fairy dust that will supercharge your business.
  • output can seem so plausible that without a clear indication of its synthetic origins, it becomes a noxious and insidious pollutant of our information ecosystem
  • Not only do we risk mistaking synthetic text for reliable information, but also that noninformation reflects and amplifies the biases encoded in its training data—in this case, every kind of bigotry exhibited on the Internet. Moreover the synthetic text sounds authoritative despite its lack of citations back to real sources. The longer this synthetic text spill continues, the worse off we are, because it gets harder to find trustworthy sources and harder to trust them when we do.
  • the people selling this technology propose that text synthesis machines could fix various holes in our social fabric: the lack of teachers in K–12 education, the inaccessibility of health care for low-income people and the dearth of legal aid for people who cannot afford lawyers, just to name a few
  • the systems rely on enormous amounts of training data that are stolen without compensation from the artists and authors who created it in the first place
  • the task of labeling data to create “guardrails” that are intended to prevent an AI system’s most toxic output from seeping out is repetitive and often traumatic labor carried out by gig workers and contractors, people locked in a global race to the bottom for pay and working conditions.
  • employers are looking to cut costs by leveraging automation, laying off people from previously stable jobs and then hiring them back as lower-paid workers to correct the output of the automated systems. This can be seen most clearly in the current actors’ and writers’ strikes in Hollywood, where grotesquely overpaid moguls scheme to buy eternal rights to use AI replacements of actors for the price of a day’s work and, on a gig basis, hire writers piecemeal to revise the incoherent scripts churned out by AI.
  • too many AI publications come from corporate labs or from academic groups that receive disproportionate industry funding. Much is junk science—it is nonreproducible, hides behind trade secrecy, is full of hype and uses evaluation methods that lack construct validity
  • We urge policymakers to instead draw on solid scholarship that investigates the harms and risks of AI—and the harms caused by delegating authority to automated systems, which include the unregulated accumulation of data and computing power, climate costs of model training and inference, damage to the welfare state and the disempowerment of the poor, as well as the intensification of policing against Black and Indigenous families. Solid research in this domain—including social science and theory building—and solid policy based on that research will keep the focus on the people hurt by this technology.
Ed Webb

Tracking The Companies That Track You Online : NPR - 1 views

  • A visit to Dictionary.com resulted in 234 trackers being installed on our test computer, and only 11 of those were installed by Dictionary.com.
  • Every time I have a thought, I take an action online and Google it. So [online tracking] does build up these incredibly rich dossiers. One question is: Is knowing your name the right definition of anonymity? Right now, that is considered anonymous. If they don't know your name, they're not covered by laws that regulate personally identifiable information. And that's what the Federal Trade Commission is considering — that the definition of personal information should be expanded beyond name and Social Security number. Another thing that [online tracking] raises is sensitive information. So if you're looking at gay websites, then you're labeled as gay in some database somewhere and then you're followed around and sold on some exchange as gay, and you just may not want that to happen. So I feel like there are some categories that we as a society may not want collected: our political affiliation, our diseases, our income levels and many other things."
  • you can go to the websites of all of these tracking companies and ask them not to track you — which is absurd, because you'd have to know who they are. There is a list of all of them on the ad industry's webpage, and you can opt out of all of them at the same time. But one thing to know about tracking is they actually put a tracker on your computer saying don't track me. So you're opting in to being tracked for not being tracked
Ed Webb

To avoid ID, more are mutilating fingerprints - The Boston Globe - 2 views

  • a sevenfold spike in people arrested with mutilated fingertips, a disturbing trend they said reflects dire efforts to evade the harsher punishments that come with multiple arrests, to avoid deportation, or to fool the increasingly sophisticated computers that do most fingerprint checks
  • While authorities have had some recent successes in identifying those with mutilated fingerprints, most have not been identified. Indeed, of the recorded arrests this decade in Massachusetts, only 17 percent were positively identified by matching their scuffed fingerprints with previously recorded prints.
  • detectives suspect they are missing many others who may have been recorded as new fingerprints by the state’s computer system, which receives on average about 700 fingerprint cards a day from some 360 law enforcement agencies around the state
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  • Officials at the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement said they do not keep national records of the number of suspects found to have deliberately disfigured their fingerprints.
  • Jose Elias Zaiter-Pou, a doctor who flew from the Dominican Republic and allegedly planned to surgically remove the fingerprints of illegal immigrants for a $4,500 fee
  • Surface cuts do not do the job, he said; the marring must go deep under the skin, which grows back with the original patterns if not sufficiently disfigured.
  • “I can’t imagine the pain it must take. You have to get deep down, in the nerve endings. I see these people, to go to this extreme, as a real danger to society.’’
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    Sign in stranger
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    Ahhh that's disgusting. And disturbing. And it's awful that people feel they need to go to this extreme.
Ed Webb

Was Stuxnet Built to Attack Iran's Nuclear Program? - PCWorld Business Center - 0 views

  • A highly sophisticated computer worm that has spread through Iran, Indonesia and India was built to destroy operations at one target: possibly Iran's Bushehr nuclear reactor.
  • Langner thinks that it's possible that Bushehr may have been infected through the Russian contractor that is now building the facility, JSC AtomStroyExport. Recently AtomStroyExport had its Web site hacked, and some of its Web pages are still blocked by security vendors because they are known to host malware. This is not an auspicious sign for a company contracted with handling nuclear secrets.
  • y messing with Operational Block 35, Stuxnet could easily cause a refinery's centrifuge to malfunction, but it could be used to hit other targets too, Byres said. "The only thing I can say is that it is something designed to go bang," he said.
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  • Many security researchers think that it would take the resources of a nation state to accomplish.
  • Bushehr is a plausible target, but there could easily be other facilities -- refineries, chemical plants or factories that could also make valuable targets, said Scott Borg, CEO of the U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit, a security advisory group. "It's not obvious that it has to be the nuclear program," he said. "Iran has other control systems that could be targeted."
  • Iran has been hit hard by the worm. When it was first discovered, 60 percent of the infected Stuxnet computers were located in Iran, according to Symantec.
Ed Webb

Charlie Brooker | Google Instant is trying to kill me | Comment is free | The Guardian - 0 views

  • I'm starting to feel like an unwitting test subject in a global experiment conducted by Google, in which it attempts to discover how much raw information it can inject directly into my hippocampus before I crumple to the floor and start fitting uncontrollably.
  • It's the internet on fast-forward, and it's aggressive – like trying to order from a waiter who keeps finishing your sentences while ramming spoonfuls of what he thinks you want directly into your mouth, so you can't even enjoy your blancmange without chewing a gobful of black pudding first.
  • Google may have released him from the physical misery of pressing enter, but it's destroyed his sense of perspective in the process.
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  • My attention span was never great, but modern technology has halved it, and halved it again, and again and again, down to an atomic level, and now there's nothing discernible left. Back in that room, bombarded by alerts and emails, repeatedly tapping search terms into Google Instant for no good reason, playing mindless pinball with words and images, tumbling down countless little attention-vortexes, plunging into one split-second coma after another, I began to feel I was neither in control nor 100% physically present. I wasn't using the computer. The computer was using me – to keep its keys warm.
  • I'm rationing my internet usage and training my mind muscles for the future. Because I can see where it's heading: a service called Google Assault that doesn't even bother to guess what you want, and simply hurls random words and sounds and images at you until you dribble all the fluid out of your body. And I know it'll kill me, unless I train my brain to withstand and ignore it. For me, the war against the machines has started in earnest.
Ed Webb

Google admits cars collected email, passwords - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corpo... - 0 views

  • Google said collecting the additional data was a mistake resulting from a piece of computer code from an experimental project that was accidentally included.
    • Ed Webb
       
      One has to wonder what that project was...
  • Google has acknowledged a fleet of cars, equipped with wireless equipment, inadvertently collected emails and passwords of computer users in various countries, and said it was changing its privacy practices. The company said it wants to delete the data as soon as possible. Google announced the data collection in May, but said at the time the information it collected was typically limited to "fragments" of data because the cars were always moving. Since then, regulators in several of the more than 30 countries where the cars operated have inspected the data. "It's clear from those inspections that while most of the data is fragmentary, in some instances entire emails and URLs were captured, as well as passwords," said Google's vice-president of engineering and research, Alan Eustace, in a post on Google's blog.
Ed Webb

DHS built huge database from cellphones, computers seized at border - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • U.S. government officials are adding data from as many as 10,000 electronic devices each year to a massive database they’ve compiled from cellphones, iPads and computers seized from travelers at the country’s airports, seaports and border crossings, leaders of Customs and Border Protection told congressional staff in a briefing this summer.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe rapid expansion of the database and the ability of 2,700 CBP officers to access it without a warrant — two details not previously known about the database — have raised alarms in Congress
  • captured from people not suspected of any crime
  • many Americans may not understand or consent to
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  • the revelation that thousands of agents have access to a searchable database without public oversight is a new development in what privacy advocates and some lawmakers warn could be an infringement of Americans’ Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches and seizures.
  • CBP officials declined, however, to answer questions about how many Americans’ phone records are in the database, how many searches have been run or how long the practice has gone on, saying it has made no additional statistics available “due to law enforcement sensitivities and national security implications.”
  • Law enforcement agencies must show probable cause and persuade a judge to approve a search warrant before searching Americans’ phones. But courts have long granted an exception to border authorities, allowing them to search people’s devices without a warrant or suspicion of a crime.
  • The CBP directive gives officers the authority to look and scroll through any traveler’s device using what’s known as a “basic search,” and any traveler who refuses to unlock their phone for this process can have it confiscated for up to five days.
  • CBP officials give travelers a printed document saying that the searches are “mandatory,” but the document does not mention that data can be retained for 15 years and that thousands of officials will have access to it.
  • Officers are also not required to give the document to travelers before the search, meaning that some travelers may not fully understand their rights to refuse the search until after they’ve handed over their phones
Ed Webb

DK Matai: The Rise of The Bio-Info-Nano Singularity - 0 views

  • The human capability for information processing is limited, yet there is an accelerating change in the development and deployment of new technology. This relentless wave upon wave of new information and technology causes an overload on the human mind by eventually flooding it. The resulting acopia -- inability to cope -- has to be solved by the use of ever more sophisticated information intelligence. Extrapolating these capabilities suggests the near-term emergence and visibility of self-improving neural networks, "artificial" intelligence, quantum algorithms, quantum computing and super-intelligence. This metamorphosis is so much beyond present human capabilities that it becomes impossible to understand it with the pre-conceptions and conditioning of the present mindset, societal make-up and existing technology
  • The Bio-Info-Nano Singularity is a transcendence to a wholly new regime of mind, society and technology, in which we have to learn to think in a new way in order to survive as a species.
  • What is globalized human society going to do with the mass of unemployed human beings that are rendered obsolete by the approaching super-intelligence of the Bio-Info-Nano Singularity?
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  • Nothing futurists predict ever comes true, but, by the time the time comes, everybody has forgotten they said it--and then they are free to say something else that never will come true but that everybody will have forgotten they said by the time the time come
  • Most of us will become poisoned troglodytes in a techno dystopia
  • Any engineer can make 'stuff' go faster, kill deader, sort quicker, fly higher, record sharper, destroy more completely, etc.. We have a surfeit of that kind of creativity. What we need is some kind of genius to create a society that treats each other with equality, justice, caring and cooperativeness. The concept of 'singularity' doesn't excite me nearly as much as the idea that sometime we might be able to move beyond the civilization level of a troop of chimpanzees. I'm hoping that genius comes before we manage to destroy what little civilization we have with all our neat "stuff"
  • There's a lot of abstraction in this article, which is a trend of what I have read of a number of various movements taking up the Singularity cause. This nebulous but optimistic prediction of an incomprehensibly advanced future, wherein through technology and science we achieve quasi-immortality, or absolute control of thought, omniscience, or transcendence from the human entirely
  • Welcome to the Frankenstein plot. This is a very common Hollywood plot, the idea of a manmade creation running amok. The concept that the author describes can also be described as an asymtotic curve on a graph where scientific achievement parallels time at first then gradually begins to go vertical until infinite scientific knowledge and invention occurs in an incredibly short time.
Ed Webb

BlackBerry's Security Approach Leads to Theories of Secret Deals - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • R.I.M. officials flatly denied last week that the company had cut deals with certain countries to grant authorities special access to the BlackBerry system. They also said R.I.M. would not compromise the security of its system. At the same time, R.I.M. says it complies with regulatory requirements around the world.
  • law-enforcement agencies in the United States had an advantage over their counterparts overseas because many of the most popular e-mail services — Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo — are based here, and so are subject to court orders. That means the government can often see messages in unencrypted forms, even if sent from a BlackBerry
  • “R.I.M. could be technically correct that they are not giving up anything,” said Lee Tien, a senior staff lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco group that promotes civil liberties online. “But their systems are not necessarily more secure because there are other places for authorities to go to.” When China first allowed BlackBerry service in the last few years, sales were restricted to hand-held devices linked to enterprise servers within the country. Many security experts say Chinese security agencies have direct access to all data stored on those servers, which are often owned by government-controlled corporations.
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  • a recently changed Indian law that gives the government the power to intercept any “computer communication” without court order to carry out criminal investigations
Ed Webb

On the Web's Cutting Edge, Anonymity in Name Only - WSJ.com - 0 views

  • A Wall Street Journal investigation into online privacy has found that the analytical skill of data handlers like [x+1] is transforming the Internet into a place where people are becoming anonymous in name only. The findings offer an early glimpse of a new, personalized Internet where sites have the ability to adjust many things—look, content, prices—based on the kind of person they think you are.
  • The technology raises the prospect that different visitors to a website could see different prices as well. Price discrimination is generally legal, so long as it's not based on race, gender or geography, which can be deemed "redlining."
  • marketplaces for online data sprang up
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  • In a fifth of a second, [x+1] says it can access and analyze thousands of pieces of information about a single user
  • When he saw the 3,748 lines of code that passed in an instant between his computer and Capital One's website, Mr. Burney said: "There's a shocking amount of information there."
  • [x+1]'s assessment of Mr. Burney's location and Nielsen demographic segment are specific enough that it comes extremely close to identifying him as an individual—that is, "de- anonymizing" him—according to Peter Eckersley, staff scientist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy-advocacy group.
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