- cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

life > humans
by Cari Machet 20 Mar '16

20 Mar '16

READINGS <http://t.sidekickopen04.com/e1t/c/5/f18dQhb0S7lC8dDMPbW2n0x6l2B9nMJW7t5XZs1…> — From the August 2015 issue *The Transhuman Condition* By John Markoff <http://t.sidekickopen04.com/e1t/c/5/f18dQhb0S7lC8dDMPbW2n0x6l2B9nMJW7t5XZs1…> Download Pdf Read Online https://harpers.org/archive/2015/08/the-transhuman-condition/ Single Page Print Page *By John Markoff, from* Machines of Loving Grace, *out this month from Ecco Books. Markoff has been a technology and business reporter for the* New York Times *since 1988.* B ill Duvall grew up on the peninsula south of San Francisco. The son of a physicist who was involved in classified research at Stanford Research Institute (SRI), a military-oriented think tank, Duvall attended UC Berkeley in the mid-1960s; he took all the university’s computer-programming courses and dropped out after two years. When he joined the think tank where his father worked, a few miles from the Stanford campus, he was assigned to the team of artificial-intelligence researchers who were building Shakey. Although *Life* magazine would later dub Shakey the first “electronic person,” it was basically a six-foot stack of gear, sensors, and motorized wheels that was tethered — and later wirelessly connected — to a nearby mainframe. Shakey wasn’t the world’s first mobile robot, but it was the first that was intended to be truly autonomous. It was designed to reason about the world around it, to plan its own actions, and to perform tasks. It could find and push objects and move in a planned way in its highly structured world. At both SRI and the nearby Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL), which was founded by John McCarthy in 1962, a tightly knit group of researchers was attempting to build machines that mimicked human capabilities. To this group, Shakey was a striking portent of the future; they believed that the scientific breakthrough that would enable machines to act like humans was coming in just a few short years. Indeed, among the small community of AI researchers who were working on both coasts during the mid-Sixties, there was virtually boundless optimism. But the reality disappointed Duvall. Shakey lived in a large open room with linoleum floors and a couple of racks of electronics. Box-like objects were scattered around for the robot to “play” with. Shakey’s sensors would capture its environment and then it would “think” — standing motionless for minutes on end — before moving. Even in its closed and controlled world, the robot frequently broke down or drained its batteries after just minutes of operation. Down the hall from the Shakey laboratory, another research group, led by computer scientist Doug Engelbart, was building a computer to run a program called NLS — the oN-Line System. Most people who know of Engelbart today know him as the inventor of the mouse. But the mouse, to Engelbart, was simply a gadget to improve our ability to interact with computers. His more encompassing idea was to use computer technologies to make it possible for small groups of scientists, engineers, and educators to “bootstrap” their projects by employing an array of ever more powerful software tools to organize their activities and create a “collective I.Q.” that outstripped the capabilities of any single individual. During World War II, Engelbart had stumbled across an article by Vannevar Bush that proposed a microfilm-based information-retrieval system called Memex to manage all of the world’s knowledge. He realized that such a system could be assembled with computers. The cultural gulf between McCarthy’s artificial intelligence and Engelbart’s contrarian NLS was already apparent to those on either side. When Engelbart visited MIT to demonstrate his project, prominent AI researcher Marvin Minsky complained that he was wasting research dollars on a glorified word processor. But the idea captivated Bill Duvall. Before long he switched his allegiance and moved down the hall to work in Engelbart’s lab. Late on the evening of October 29, 1969, Duvall connected the NLS system in Menlo Park, via a data line leased from the phone company, to a computer controlled by another young hacker in Los Angeles. It was the first time that two computers connected over the network that would become the Internet. Duvall’s leap from the Shakey laboratory to Engelbart’s NLS made him one of the earliest people to stand on both sides of a line that even today distinguishes two rival engineering communities. One of these communities has relentlessly pursued the automation of the human experience — artificial intelligence. The other, human-computer interaction — what Engelbart called intelligence augmentation — has concerned itself with “man-machine symbiosis.” What separates AI and IA is partly their technical approaches, but the distinction also implies differing ethical stances toward the relationship of man to machine. D uring the 1970s and 1980s the field of artificial intelligence drew a generation of brilliant engineers, but it often disappointed them in much the way that it had disappointed Duvall. Like him, many of these engineers turned to the contrasting ideal of intelligence augmentation. But today, AI is beginning to meet some of the promises made for it by SAIL and SRI researchers half a century ago, and artificial intelligence is poised to have an impact on society that may be greater than the effect of personal computing and the Internet. Although their project has now largely been forgotten, the designers of Shakey pioneered computing technologies that are now used by more than a billion people. The mapping software in our cars and our smartphones is based on techniques the team first developed. Their A* algorithm is the best-known way to find the shortest path between two locations. Toward the end of the Shakey project, speech control was added as a research task; Apple’s Siri, whose name is a nod to SRI, is a distant descendent of the machine that began life as a stack of rolling sensors and actuators. While Engelbart’s original research led directly to the PC and the Internet, McCarthy’s lab did not provide a single dramatic breakthrough. Rather, the falling costs of sensors, computer processing, and information storage, along with the gradual shift away from symbolic logic and toward more pragmatic statistical and machine-learning algorithms, have made it possible for engineers and programmers to create computerized systems that see, speak, listen, and move around in the world. As a result, AI has been transformed from an academic curiosity into a force that is altering countless aspects of the modern world. This has created an increasingly clear choice for designers — a choice that has become philosophical and ethical, rather than simply technical: will we design humans into or out of the systems that transport us, that grow our food, manufacture our goods, and provide our entertainment? A s computing and robotics systems have grown from laboratory curiosities into the fabric that weaves together modern life, the AI and IA communities have continued to speak past each other. The field of human-computer interface has largely operated within the philosophical framework originally set down by Engelbart — that computers should be used to assist humans. In contrast, the artificial-intelligence community has for the most part remained unconcerned with preserving a role for individual humans in the systems it creates. Terry Winograd was one of the first to see the two extremes clearly and to consider their consequences. As a graduate student at MIT in the 1960s, Winograd studied human language in order to build a software robot that was capable of interacting with humans in conversation. During the 1980s, he was part of a small group of AI researchers who engaged in seminars at Berkeley with the philosophers Hubert Dreyfus and John Searle. The philosophers persuaded Winograd that there were real limits to the capabilities of intelligent machines. In part because of his changing views, he left the field of artificial intelligence. A decade later, as the faculty adviser for Google cofounder Larry Page, Winograd counseled the young graduate student to focus on Web search rather than more far-fetched technologies. Page’s original PageRank algorithm, the heart of Google’s search engine, can perhaps be seen as the most powerful example of human augmentation in history. The algorithm systematically collected human decisions about the value of information and pooled those decisions to prioritize search results. Although some criticized the process for siphoning intellectual labor from vast numbers of unwitting humans, the algorithm established an unstated social contract: Google mined the wealth of human knowledge and returned it in searchable form to society, while reserving for itself the right to monetize the results. Since it established its search box as the world’s most powerful information monopoly, Google has yo-yoed between IA and AI applications and services. The ill-fated Google Glass was intended as a “reality-augmentation system,” while the company’s driverless-car project represents a pure AI — replacing human agency and intelligence with a machine. Recently, Google has undertaken what it loosely identifies as “brain” projects, which suggests a new wave of AI. In 2012, Google researchers presented a paper on a machine-vision system. After training itself on 10 million digital images taken from YouTube videos, the system dramatically outperformed previous efforts at an automated-vision network, roughly doubling their accuracy in recognizing objects from a list of 20,000 distinct items. Among other things, the system taught itself to recognize cats — perhaps not surprising, given the overabundance of cat videos on YouTube — with a mechanism that the scientists described as a cybernetic cousin to what takes place in the brain’s visual cortex. The experiment was made possible by Google’s immense computing resources, which allowed researchers to turn loose a cluster of 16,000 processors on the problem — though that number still, of course, represented a tiny fraction of the billions of neurons in a human brain, a huge portion of which are devoted to vision. S peculation about whether Google is on the trail of a genuine artificial brain has become increasingly rampant. There is certainly no question that a growing group of Silicon Valley engineers and scientists believe themselves to be closing in on “strong” AI — the creation of a self-aware machine with human or greater intelligence. Whether or not this goal is ever achieved, it is becoming increasingly possible — and “rational” — to design humans out of systems for both performance and cost reasons. In manufacturing, where robots can directly replace human labor, the impact of artificial intelligence will be easily visible. In other cases the direct effects will be more difficult to discern. Winston Churchill said, “We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.” Today our computational systems have become immense edifices that define the way we interact with our society. In Silicon Valley it is fashionable to celebrate this development, a trend that is most clearly visible in organizations like the Singularity Institute and in books like Kevin Kelly’s *What Technology Wants* (2010). In an earlier book, *Out of Control* (1994), Kelly came down firmly on the side of the machines: The problem with our robots today is that we don’t respect them. They are stuck in factories without windows, doing jobs that humans don’t want to do. We take machines as slaves, but they are not that. That’s what Marvin Minsky, the mathematician who pioneered artificial intelligence, tells anyone who will listen. Minsky goes all the way as an advocate for downloading human intelligence into a computer. Doug Engelbart, on the other hand, is the legendary guy who invented word processing, the mouse, and hypermedia, and who is an advocate for computers-for-the-people. When the two gurus met at MIT in the 1950s, they are reputed to have had the following conversation: minsky: We’re going to make machines intelligent. We are going to make them conscious! engelbart: You’re going to do all that for the machines? What are you going to do for the people? This story is usually told by engineers working to make computers more friendly, more humane, more people centered. But I’m squarely on Minsky’s side — on the side of the made. People will survive. We’ll train our machines to serve us. But what are we going to do for the machines? But to say that people will “survive” understates the possible consequences: Minsky is said to have responded to a question about the significance of the arrival of artificial intelligence by saying, “If we’re lucky, they’ll keep us as pets.” Until recently, the artificial-intelligence community has largely chosen to ignore the ethics of systems that they consider merely powerful tools. When I asked one engineer who is building next-generation robots about the impact of automation on people, he told me, “You can’t think about that; you just have to decide that you are going to do the best you can to improve the world for humanity as a whole.” AI and machine-learning algorithms have already led to transformative applications in areas as diverse as science, manufacturing, and entertainment. Machine vision and pattern recognition have been essential to improving quality in semiconductor design. Drug-discovery algorithms have systematized the creation of new pharmaceuticals. The same breakthroughs have also brought us increased government surveillance and social-media companies whose business model depends on invading privacy for profit. Optimists hope that the potential abuses of our computer systems will be minimized if the application of artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and robotics remains focused on humans rather than algorithms. But the tech industry has not had a track record that speaks to moral enlightenment. It would be truly remarkable if a Silicon Valley company rejected a profitable technology for ethical reasons. Today, decisions about implementing technology are made largely on the basis of profitability and efficiency. What is needed is a new moral calculus. -- Cari Machet NYC 646-436-7795 carimachet(a)gmail.com AIM carismachet Syria +963-099 277 3243 Amman +962 077 636 9407 Berlin +49 152 11779219 Reykjavik +354 894 8650 Twitter: @carimachet <https://twitter.com/carimachet> 7035 690E 5E47 41D4 B0E5 B3D1 AF90 49D6 BE09 2187 Ruh-roh, this is now necessary: This email is intended only for the addressee(s) and may contain confidential information. If you are not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any use of this information, dissemination, distribution, or copying of this email without permission is strictly prohibited.

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Drivels on OSS security about CVEs
by Georgi Guninski 19 Mar '16

19 Mar '16

There is some drivel on OSS security about CVEs: http://openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2016/03/04/4 I have trolled on numerous occasions that CVE and mitre suck much, e.g. a post from 2006: http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2006/Jan/259

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Google: 'We'll pay $100K if you can hack a Chromebook remotely'
by Rayzer 18 Mar '16

18 Mar '16

> The move doubles last year's top reward of $50,000, available > exclusively for attacks that achieve a persistent compromise on a > Chromebook in 'guest mode' http://www.zdnet.com/article/google-well-pay-100k-if-you-can-hack-a-chromeb… -- RR "Through counter-intelligence it should be possible to pinpoint potential trouble-makers ... And neutralize them, neutralize them, neutralize them"

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New video on Ethereum at Reason.com
by jim bell 18 Mar '16

18 Mar '16

http://reason.com/reasontv/2016/03/18/ethereum-blockchain-lubin-consensys A very well-done video on the Ethereum blockchain-based network, by Jim Epstein of Reason Magazine. Jim Bell

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Safe country for crypto products
by strife 18 Mar '16

18 Mar '16

Hi! Looks like, rather sooner than later, we will have to move some products to other countries. AnyDVD, which has slightly different enemies, moved from Switzerland to Antigua to Belize. Looking at the slightly outdated cryptolaw.org, I wonder which non-EU/non-US country would actually be suitable to serve as host organization for open source crypto projects. With some thinking, it probably can be arranged to have parallel entities in multiple countries 'responsible' for an open source project. I can't think of any examples where this is the case, most projects do have one primary legal home (trademark, copyright, etc). Suggestions?

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USG-Apple - 3/22/16 Hearing Procedures, Add 3 USGs
by John Young 18 Mar '16

18 Mar '16

USG-Apple - 3/22/16 Hearing Procedures, Add 3 USGs https://cryptome.org/2016/03/usg-apple-181-184.pdf

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ZDNet: "US government pushed tech firms to hand over source code"
by grarpamp 18 Mar '16

18 Mar '16

---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Thu, 17 Mar 2016 14:21:24 -0400 Subject: [Cryptography] ZDNet: "US government pushed tech firms to hand over source code" To: cryptography(a)metzdowd.com NEW YORK -- The US government has made numerous attempts to obtain source code from tech companies in an effort to find security flaws that could be used for surveillance or investigations. The government has demanded source code in civil cases filed under seal but also by seeking clandestine rulings authorized under the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), a person with direct knowledge of these demands told ZDNet. We're not naming the person as they relayed information that is likely classified. With these hearings held in secret and away from the public gaze, the person said that the tech companies hit by these demands are losing "most of the time." http://www.zdnet.com/article/us-government-pushed-tech-firms-to-hand-over-s… _____________________________________________ http://www.metzdowd.com/mailman/listinfo/cryptography

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blockchain startup
by dan＠geer.org 18 Mar '16

18 Mar '16

Good team... Freemit (New York City, NY) http://www.freemit.com Freemit is creating an alternative to current remittance and currency exchange systems. It uses the blockchain and a local currency in/local currency out service, along with a phone app and virtual credit card, to simplify and streamline cross-border money transfers.

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Apple GovtOS/FBiOS & Proof of Work
by grarpamp 18 Mar '16

18 Mar '16

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Henry Baker <hbaker1(a)pipeline.com> Date: Thu, 17 Mar 2016 17:39:22 -0700 Subject: [Cryptography] Apple GovtOS/FBiOS & Proof of Work To: cryptography(a)metzdowd.com If Apple is willing to put some serious Proof of Work into constructing *every* firmware update, then it could achieve some level of privacy: When constructing a firmware update, the SHA512 (or better still, some Apple proprietary) hash of the update has to have some preset number of '0' bits. So Apple will have to brute force fiddle with bits in the firmware load to achieve an appropriate hash. The work involved should grow exponentially in the # of '0' bits required. Most companies operate on a fixed update schedule, so Apple would have to plan every release far enough in advance to give Apple enough time to compute such a firmware load. The reason for an Apple proprietary hash is so any attacker would have to build their own custom chips to be able to beat Apple at this Proof of Work game. Note also, that Apple can *change* the hash function on every firmware update, so said custom chip would be useful for only one firmware release. The firmware loader of course refuses to load any firmware whose hash doesn't have the appropriate number of '0' bits (along with the standard Apple signing key checks, etc.). The hash also incorporates the previous firmware load a la Merkle, so if your firmware is ever compromised, your iPhone is forever bricked. The hardware loading code refuses to load the first block of the new firmware anywhere but right on top of the user's file encryption key. So the *default* for the firmware flasher is to always *forget* this key, unless very special arrangements are made to save this key in other places. This key is further encrypted and broken into many pieces prior to moving it out of the way of the firmware loader (including into the CPU's volatile register memory, so any power disruption will destroy some of this key). Of course, much like a password hashing function, such Apple hash functions would be designed specifically to be *slow*, so GPU's and gate-arrays would be of no particular value. With a proper PoW system, any attacker would have to spend at least as much time as Apple themselves to create a loadable firmware, and that time might be as long as 6-12 months. A scalable way for Apple to dominate any attacker (including most nation-states) is to utilize the *entire installed base* of Apple products (estimated by Tim Cook to be >1 billion devices) in a distributed calculation. Thus, Apple could use its "herd" itself to provide for "herd immunity" to firmware update attacks. iPhone users would notice if Apple were attempting to compute >1 firmware update PoW at any given time! A 6-12 month lead time (during which the PoW for GovtOS is being computed) would give Apple plenty of time to respond to any legal issues and warn other Apple customers of an impending breach-of-trust in the firmware update chain. If Apple is issued an NSL and can't talk about it, 6-12 months would still be a long enough delay to deter all but the most persistent of govts. Even Napoleon refused to look at any messages until they were at least 3 days old; he found out that 99% of these messages resolved themselves without any action on his part -- e.g., "please pardon my son; he is to be executed in the morning". If Apple speeded up or slowed down its pre-announced firmware update schedule, that change itself would provide an excellent "warrant canary". <Apple: please reference this public email in your patent applications. Thx! -- Henry Baker> _______________________________________________ http://www.metzdowd.com/mailman/listinfo/cryptography

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Re: [tor-talk] Latency Spike
by grarpamp 18 Mar '16

18 Mar '16

On 3/17/16, poly <poly(a)darkdepths.net> wrote: > Could anyone please explain the reason behind this spike [0] to me? > > [0] https://metrics.torproject.org/torperf.png?start=2015-12-18&end=201 > 6-03-17&source=all&filesize=50kb That's the NSA giving you the finger...

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