Month: October 2017

Obscurity is a Valid Security Layer

Source: Obscurity is a Valid Security Layer

risk = probability X impact

This means you lower risk (and increase security) by doing one of two things:

  1. Reducing the probability of being attacked, or…
  2. Reducing the impact if you are attacked.

…
The key point is that both methods improve security. The question is really which should you focus on at any given point. Is adding obscurity the best use of my resources given the controls I have in place, or would I be better off adding a different (non-obscurity-based) control?

A Viral Game About Paperclips Teaches You to Be a World-Killing AI | WIRED

Source: A Viral Game About Paperclips Teaches You to Be a World-Killing AI | WIRED, by Adam Rogers

RE: Universal Paperclips, by Frank Lantz (director of the New York University Games Center), Everybody House Games

RE: Paperclip maximizer, described by Nick Bostrom

Paperclips is a simple clicker game that manages to turn you into an artificial intelligence run amok.

“The idea isn’t that a paperclip factory is likely to have the most advanced research AI in the world. The idea is to express the orthogonality thesis, which is that you can have arbitrarily great intelligence hooked up to any goal,” Yudkowsky says.

in a more literary sense, you play the AI because you must. Gaming, Lantz had realized, embodies the orthogonality thesis. When you enter a gameworld, you are a superintelligence aimed at a goal that is, by definition, kind of prosaic.

“When you play a game—really any game, but especially a game that is addictive and that you find yourself pulled into—it really does give you direct, first-hand experience of what it means to be fully compelled by an arbitrary goal,” Lantz says. Games don’t have a why, really. Why do you catch the ball? Why do want to surround the king, or box in your opponent’s counters? What’s so great about Candyland that you have to get there first? Nothing. It’s just the rules.

In Favor Of Futurism Being About The Future | Slate Star Codex

Source: In Favor Of Futurism Being About The Future | Slate Star Codex

The Singularity is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed across various scales of x-axis

This is what everyone in whatever school or quadrant of futurism you care to name is thinking about.

I don’t know whether the future will be better or worse than the past, but I feel pretty sure it will be grander. Either we will perish in nuclear apocalypse or manage to avert nuclear apocalypse; either one will be history’s greatest story. Either we will discover intelligent alien life or find ourselves alone in the universe; either way would be terrifying. Either we will suppress AI research with a ferocity that puts the Inquisition to shame, or we will turn into gods creating life in our own image; either way the future will be not quite human.

The GPS/GNSS system behind finance, telecommunications and transportation networks is vulnerable to terrorist jamming and criminal spoofing — Quartz

Source: A Time and Place: The entire global financial system depends on GPS — Quartz

There is an enormous, invisible clock that keeps ultra-precise time, can be checked from anywhere on earth, and is free for everyone to use. This technological gift to mankind was built by the US government. It is called the Global Positioning System (GPS), it lives in space, and you use it every time you check the map on your phone. … And it is far more vulnerable to attack and disruption than most people know or are willing to admit.

While the US GPS constellation is the preeminent source of this data, other nations have launched similar constellations: Russia’s GLONASS, China’s BeiDou and Europe’s Galileo, along with smaller regional services, offer a similar signal under the rubric of “GNSS”—Global Navigation Satellite System.

Intentional or unintentional jamming could cause millions, even billions of dollars in damage; it could also lead to the loss of life.
…
To prepare for such threats, experts urge laws that would require toughening up critical infrastructure so it would be able to maintain its own high-quality timing for at least thirty days if GNSS vanishes.

But the more important idea is simply to create a terrestrial back-up: Let’s build another invisible clock, down here on earth. … budget cuts prompted the Obama administration to cancel the eLoran upgrade in 2008.

Putting it in place now could cost as much as $500 million. It’s a lot of money, but it’s a little less than the $547 million total cost of one of the latest generation of GPS satellites. (The current constellation includes many that are well past their theoretical expiry dates.)
…
The other obstacle is that the companies that depend most on this technology are reluctant to advertise their Achilles’ heel by lobbying for a more resilient system.

After the end of the startup era | TechCrunch

Source: After the end of the startup era | TechCrunch, by Jon Evans

because we’ve all lived through back-to-back massive worldwide hardware revolutions — the growth of the Internet, and the adoption of smartphones — we erroneously think another one is around the corner, and once again, a few kids in a garage can write a little software to take advantage of it.

But there is no such revolution en route. The web has been occupied and colonized by big business; everyone already has a smartphone, and big companies dominate the App Store; and, most of all, today’s new technologies are complicated, expensive, and favor organizations that have huge amounts of scale and capital already.

From here on in, the existing tech titans will accrue ever more power, and startups will be increasingly hard-pressed to compete. This is not a good thing. Big businesses already have too much power. … startups bring fresh approaches and thinking, while hidebound behemoths stagnate in their old ways of doing things. But for the next five to ten years, thanks to the nature of the new technologies coming down the pipe, those behemoths will just keep accruing ever more power — until, we can hope, the pendulum swings back again.