Schneier on Security

Clive Robinson • September 26, 2020 5:35 AM

@ ALL,

Some what tangental but it is “Food Security” without which we would not have any other kind of security…

Because just hunger let alone starvation is a powerfull driver of human behaviour and if it goes to far death follows in one way or another[1].

Well “food rationing” as I’ve warned is unsurprisingly comming back to the UK and I assume soon to other places for various reasons[2].

Currently in the UK it’s being done by retail outlets, and you might have heard on the news that UK retail outlet Super Market stores Morrison’s and Tesco’s are “rationing” cooking staples that are suitable for longterm storage. one of which is flour which for thousands of years was and still is the most basic and important of staples (remember the unfortunate explosion next to grain silos in the Port of Beirut in August this year that destroyed much of Lebanon’s grain leaving the entire country with less than a months reserves?).

The “official reason” the supermarket chains are given is “people panic buying” which is actually a compleate load of… It’s nowhere near panic buying it’s sensible people waking up to “the new reality” of “yoyo lockdowns” and all that means[3].

That is just ordinary people buying one or two large bags to stock up as they are seeing another “lockdown” in Europe comming within a month or two at the most. And it happens in the UK at this time most years due to the,”Great British Bake Off” very popular television program…

Well wheat shortages are historically not new, harvests fail and it’s why we find five and six thousand year old grain silos in long abandond middle east desserts etc. The importance of bread recognised as the most basic of daily foods, even millennia ago bread has had laws and Royal edicts about it.

So what could a “baker do” to make flour go further in times of shortage? Well substitute part of it with something else, it’s one of the reasons the US still has corn bread, grits and similar. With other countries having kept “harth cakes”, “drop scones” and what some call “biscuits” made with largish amounts of oat flour etc. Others with rye bread etc, to each culture their own harvest disaster memorised in “adulterated” bread.

However in the main people wanted “white loaf bread” not “bothy bread” or the derivatives that had large amounts of wheatgerm and bran in them or other starch substitutes.

Well one substitute that worked so well it never became a distinct cullenary item was using potatoes (and also parsnips in cakes, though the cake recipies are becoming popular again). Well This historic recreation might be of interest to those who want to experiment, and lets face it when locked down in your home taking up “experimental cooking” as a hobby whilst being “frugal” will also help keep you on the saner side of the road as you travel through it,

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_4UR0MUBnOM

Oh what’s not explained is a “peck” is a volumetric not weight measure. So you use it in a ratio 1 volume measure of “potato rice” to two measures, of wheat flour. So 1cup of potato rice to 2cups of flour as you measure it out.

If you want to know what a “peck” actually is, as in the old saying “Everyone has to eat a peck of dirt before they die”[4] it’s actually quite a lot. As you can see from these traditional Scottish measures,

https://www.scan.org.uk/measures/capacity.asp

[1] Remember it was not so long ago in Russia –and other places before– where starvation in remote places drove people to murder and cannibalism… So the old joke about “Sweeny Todd Donor and Pita coming real soon to a place near you!” might get a bit more bite than usual :-S

[2] Yes there is a “shortage of Product” whilst a small part of that currently is production problems in the main it’s supply chain mismanagment yet again and politics politics politics. So just be ready for the fall out in November by which time winter malady season will have kicked in in the Northen Hemisphere[3].

[3] Lockdowns are going to be a major feature of life again along with job losses and financial difficulties and citizens of several Western Nations are going to go into both food and energy poverty quite quickly as food and fuel prises will be put up as part of “Disaster Capatilism”. It won’t be put that way, the politicians who are almost entirely to blaim for this situation will try the usuall “feckless, idle, layabouts, etc etc” nonsense whilst their short term thinking friends will vastly increase their profits and send inflation upwards whilst even those who keep jobs and their homes will be told the economy is bad you can not have pay rises to compensate. So recession will bite in hard and the same politicians will find others to blaim, but it will almost always be those that can not defend themselves.

[4] Yes when times were realy desperate people did eat hot mud to help keep them warm and sate their hunger so they could sleep.

Clive Robinson • September 26, 2020 9:38 AM

@ ALL,

On a slight tangent, but it is about “Food Security” without which all other forms of security are fairly moot[1].

As I expected and have past cautioned about, “basic staple” storable food rationing has started. In the UK the Morrisons and Tescos supermarket chains have put limits on basic long term storable food staples such flour, sugar and similar as well as the now “good old standby” toilet rolls… what would a phoney “panic buy” scare be without those…

Their excuse is “panic buying” which is a compleate load[2] of bovine…

But some people are behaving like “rational actors” they have experienced the previous “lockdown” and all the problems that caused. So they have very real knowledge of what happens. They are seeing COVOD-19 infections very clearly rising in Europe in the media and other sources. For instance the serious demonstrations in Madrid etc[3]. But what ever the cause COVID cases are going up in the Northern Hemisphere and come mid November things will start to get quite nasty if things are not done correctly. Because by then no matter what the politicians do the Seasonal Disease issues will have kicked in and healthcare resources will be at best “stretched”. Thus big lockdowns are very probably on the near horizon, with further job losses etc thus rational people who have the spare money are using it to stock up whilst they can aford to do so[4].

So if you can stock up on staples you can avoid some of the traps and pit falls, and hopefully be both alive and well if and when a safe and effective vaccine reaches you. In six to as long as fifty months. Because those governments that have so far failed to act on science and past disease history knowledge are hardly likely to change their behaviours now. Thus as modeling experts have indicated back in the first part of this year we will probably enter a phase of “yoyo lockdowns” of which the only realistic way out is mass vaccination.

[1] Hunger let alone actual starvation drives humans into often violent and other behaviours fairly quickly. It was actually not that long ago in remote Russian villages etc where cannibalism happened. Also murdering and eating people to survive has a very long and unsavoury history. It is possible the old joke of “Sweeny’s Donor and Kebabs comming real soon to a place near you!” might have some real bite.

[2] The actual problems are much more mundane. Whilst some of it is lack of production and consequent prices, much of it is down to other forms of miss managment to do with the supply chain by the supermarket chains themselves. Oh and to add to the fun the fact a very popular television series “GBBO” has just started,

https://thegreatbritishbakeoff.co.uk/

Which every year causes people to go out and buy baking ingredients to “join in”…

[3] Due according to some media etc to the Spanish Government openening Spain for holiday makers who brought SARS-CoV-2 in “by the coach load” etc and have spread it into the younger population where it has now moved up to the older generations by community spread. Similarly France, but not Italy where the politicians appear to have been somewhat wiser.

[4] Few of us living in the Western world have seen anything even remotely like poverty untill this century. The two Financial / Banking Crises kicked it off with “greedy home owners” being blaimed when infact we now know it was not home buyers but financial organisations… With a few other finance industry shenanigans between then and now. Which this time it’s a disease that again short term thinking profiteers and those they “lobby” have compleatly mismanaged the response and continue to do so well outside of the interests of the majority of citizens. The result loss of jobs, loss of income, loss of homes, inability to buy food to put on a table you nolonger have because it’s been taken with the repossession etc and depression and desperation. The latter easily boiling over into crime. But even if it does not the politicians will blaim the victims for their actions and call them “lazy, feckless, indolent” and much more. When the simple fact is you can only have a job if someone “pays you”… If nobody is paying then no job and the rest follows in short order. Meanwhile those who lobby the politicians will employ all the “Disaster Capitalism” tricks they can[5] and will cause inflation and wage depression to make things better for them and far worse for the rest of us. Oh and a full recession will in all probability come in on it’s heals… If you know that’s comming as a rational actor what do you do? Well stocking up on staple foods that require no energy to store them is a starting point especially if you think as is likely food will go significantly up in price.

[5] One such trick is to control supply in a way that forces others to play your game. Fancy foods are over priced and last next to no time, thus if you stop people buying stable storable basic staples the only choice they have is to buy the fancy foods that carry a very high markup and profit. Another is to deliberately hold items back to create a shortage, put the prices up then talk up a “panic buy” and “kerching” it’s a few verses of “Were in the money” swilled down with fizzy plonk in expensive bottles (real wines will be likewise held back by others for the same reasons).

Clive Robinson • September 26, 2020 12:11 PM

@ Winter,

I saw the run on flour too. I a curious why?

Best guess as it’s only some of the supermarkets I’d go for “mismanaged” their supply chain. Coupled with the start of the very popular “Great British Bake Off” competition television program, that always attracts a certain number of “me too” to take up baking as a hobby etc.

But realistically those who have “sheltered in place” at home on furlow can see a new lockdown comming and they are preparing for it. Not just in terms of basic supplies but as something to do to alleviate the boredom. In which case the preperation involved is in effect a displacment activity so the more intricate and time consuming the better.

Clive Robinson • September 26, 2020 8:02 PM

@ vas pup,

… improve the ability to mind-control brain computer interfaces (BCIs).

Back when I first helped out putting neurons and wires together the big problem was computers were dumber that a pile of bricks.

Therefore it befell on the test subject to produce very clear brain wave signals. Unlike riding a bike where atleast you can judge your progress good or bad, there was effectively no reliable feedback loop so you had to get lucky. But some people did get lucky.

But the big problem was not thinking the signal but not thinking a myriad of other signals. That is it was not finding a signal in “signal plus thermal noise” but “signal plus many other signals plus thermal noise”. As the many other signals were considerably greater than the desired signal the only effective aproach was to get the r^2 advantage by putting the sensor as close to the desired source as posible. As that involved not just making holrs in peoples skulls but the brain as well there was obvious reluctance to do so. Which meant that back then scalp mounted sensors were too far from the signal source to be effective.

These days with specialised signal hunting DSP algorithms and what passes for AI the learning process is easier, but the test subject still has to learn how to clearly think a signal with out actually conciously having to think it out, and also diminish other concious signals etc in comparison.

Thus like learning to drive a car etc you have to learn the “memory muscle” and tone it up.

For various reasons meditation and similar can help with this.

Clive Robinson • September 27, 2020 4:46 AM

@ Wesley Parish,

When coffee makers are demanding a ransom, you know IoT is screwed

In my mind I immediately saw a flash back of an episode of Fututama, where the coffee pot toaster and other kitchen appliances did this 😉

It’s the episode where we also learn the prof used to work for “Mom’s Robots” and had a torrid affair with her (and yes one of her three sons is drawn to look like the Prof 😉

As the way to stop the “revolt” of the machines Mom has started is via a hidden control device in her bra… the Prof is sent in on a “seduction mission” to retrieve the control device. Whilst the first part of the mission works, the prof is unable to retrieve the control device…

Nasty as it sounds it is as usuall very funny.

Clive Robinson • September 27, 2020 6:54 AM

@ Robin,

General rule – finely tuned supply lines are not easy to reprogram at the drop of a hat. Brexiters take note.

Yes it’s below the noise floor for most of the political classes…

Mind you as a design engineer of Fast Moving Consumer Electronics, I got spoiled in the Far East it’s not just China where you can realise you’ve got a production problem in the morning and have it sorted with new parts etc before lunch.

I’m one of those people who do buy 25kg bags of flour –and similar bags of veg etc– if you think about it, if you are baking at home for a family even with only a “breadmaker” machine thats slightly less than you need for a months bread (one loaf a day is only 16 slices of thick slice with morning toast and lunch sarnie it’s gone). Throw in pies, cakes, biscuits and thickening for sauces, stews etc and you might need double that. Even oats goes fairly quickly it’s not just porridge / oatmeal you add it to bread both in the dough and for decoration on top then there’s the “healthier snacks” such as Müesli / Granola bars.

It’s a bit frightening sometimes to realise just how much you get through[1] in grains we actually eat as most now buy it hidden in “finished” items[2]. Though with shop bought you actually eat even more… You make a home made pie or pasty and you make the pastry thiner and up the ingredients inside rather than a “toothpaste tube” type squirt of “mechanically recovered meat and water holding gelling agent in a 4-6mm thick soft effectively undercooked pastry of uncertain shortening that sticks to the roof of your mouth and teeth like mud to a blanket (good pastry should be light and dry, sometimes flaky and not stick like that).

[1] Due to lockdown I’ve kind of changed the way I buy meat, I nolonger get a whole lamb or goat, half pig etc and butcher it into “cuts-crowns-n-sausages” or other charcuterie as the bits you tend not to think of such as the cleaned hog / Ox bung casings are not something I want to buy online (as they have to pass the “snif test”).

[2] When a lot younger I used to sail competitively and for recreation. Back in the 1970/80’s I used to sail to European North Sea and Channel ports from Portugal to Norway. As France particularly Brittany was an easy day sail there was many a saturday afternoon and night spent there. The one thing that made me sad which was the change in bread eating habits in France. From some of the best bread in the world to “white sliced blotting paper” industrial sandwich bread from supermarkets, the dreded UK Chorley Wood “chicken feathers” process for that extra bounce…

Clive Robinson • September 27, 2020 1:55 PM

@ Robin, lurker,

Do you have a method for deterring mites? Even if I keep the flour in what I think are sealed containers, the little blighters eventually make an appearance.

There’s the old way and the new way, but either way you do need air tight containers or vacuum seal bags.

Mites can get in your flour either before you buy it (common) or from your storage area ad they can live in on and off wood, they like dark warm and humind. So don’t use cupboards above stove or kettle hight.

So when you get new flour and don’t plan to use it immediately you can do a couple of thinks to kill any live mites or their eggs.

Basically you can either,

1, heat the flour.
2, freeze the flour.

The way I used to do it was pack the flour in Kilner jars and put in an oven at the lowest temprature then crack the door open a little. Start with the lids very loose so any moisture comes out. Then screw the lids down tight and stick on your pantry shelf out of daylight and where it’s cold and dry.

A friend uses plastic ziplock bags and a microwave oven on a low pulse rate setting. I’ve not tried it myself. However from previous experiments many years ago to kill “Death Watch Beetle” grubs. You might be surprised that the microwave energy travels happily through wood and boils the grubs inards… I’m assuming a similar effect works with mights and weevils.

Again you can put it in plastic bags to make airtight bricks then just put them in the freezer and leave them there for atleast a week or two or untill ready to use them.

People often do not realise that the mites may not lay their eggs in the flour but inside their cupboards etc. It’s why I tell people to avoid beach or similar “flour” boxes. They might look good but you can not stop the mites living in them…

Again I’ve not tried mylar bags deoxyginators and vacuum sealing, because I’m not looking to store for upto 25years or what ever some claim it is these days.

However I do know someone who breaks a big bag down into little ordinary plastic vacuum seal bags, I’ve never asked them about mites so I can not say. But I do know that they freeze all their dry goods for atleast a week.

The point about air tight containers and bags are moisture and oxygen, neither is good for flour and mites need both to live… So remove the moisture by heating to a low temp but warmer than your room will drive the moisture out them any small amount of oxygen in the airtight container/bag will quickly get used up.

Some people swear by bay leaves, I don’t know about those myself, but I do know various Indian leaves work.

The reason I used killner jars is when you’ve finished the flour in them you can “boil them in a pressure cooker” this not only kills mites weevils etc eggs, it kills mold spoors and most bacteria (there is one in rice bacteria,that needs it slightly hotter than an ordinary preasure cooker gets but you can always dry off in the oven at a sufficiently high heat).

I hope that helps.

Clive Robinson • September 27, 2020 10:44 PM

@ vas pup,

Do you think that could be helpful for teaching “memory muscle”?

All feedback systems can be good or bad.

But first a problem to solve when talking about behavioural feedback systems…

There are two terms,

1, Positive feedback
2, Negative feedback

And they mean compleatly different things to “teachers” and “engineers” and will create mayhem with your thinking process if you don’t know this or don’t understand from which perspective a statment is being made.

First simplistically to teachers “positive feedback” is things like “Praise” that is at the basest level when a baby smiles it gets lots of attention from the mother which is the incentivising “reward”. When training animals food rewards are used as well. So a baby learns to smile, and a dog learns to lie down etc, thus the babie or dogs behavioir is modified. But to a teacher “negative feedback” is “scolding” etc where you “punish” not “reward”. This is often done for what is seen as dangerous behaviour such as “reaching out to a flame” or for a dog jumping up at people etc, a sharp tone and raised voice are frrquently used. Some however still believe the use of physical “discomfort” or “pain” should be used, even though it’s been shown that all that realy does is start an adverserial proces unrelated to the training requirment, thus destined to fail.

When engineers talk of feedback as being negative or positive, it is as a direction modification of a signal derived from the system output and “fedback” to the systems input. In effect a difference signal between the desired state of the output signal and the actual output signal is fedback to drive the direction of the signal. Thus negative feedback which causes stability is often seen as good, whilst positive feedback which deliberately causes instability is seen as risky or bad. However the price of negative feedback is slower response times, where as positive feedback you get faster response times.

But back to bio-feedback systems the idea behind them is to change something by repetition and thus gain advantage. With toddlers we throw a ball and if they catch it they get rewarded.

However unlike the generalised feedback systems used by enginners to change a fixed systems output signal, a teacher is trying to change the “system”.

Another important difference is that bio-feedback comes with a number of assumptions,

1, the test subject wants to learn what is being taught.

2, The test subject can learn or change.

3, The test subject can somehow determin a feedback signal as a measure of changes in the system.

4, The test subject can determin the direction of the feedback signal correctly.

If any of those assumptions are incorrect then the lesson will not be learned.

The first assumption is a problem when a system / test subject has the ability to use “free will” and is why the likes of tourture fail to work.

The second assumption is where systems / test subjects fail for both teachers and engineers. If they do not recognise that a system / test subject is incapable of the task it is set, they will fail and often expensively so as they will have needlessly wasted resources.

One of the big problems in neurological bio-feedback systems is the third assumption of a recognisable feedback signal it’s self. Not only does a valid signal have to exist, it has to do so in a way that can be validly measured in an appropriatly short time so it is potentially usable by the system / test subject. So the signal has to be appropriate, sufficiently free of noise and interferance, and timely. Further as the fourth issue indicates the system / test subject must be able to not just recognise the signals existance but also validly measure it to provide the required information. When I had involvement with nascent neurological to electronic interfacing, signal selection was highly problematic, and I suspect it still is (otherwise why get AI involved).

Thus to answer your question on the assumption biology alows the “memory muscle” process to be not just controled but changed, then yes it could be done. But the process is going to be fairly fraught unless good, clear feedback signals are obtained, and to be honest I’m not entirely sure you can get a “real time” signal for such a process as we don’t understand how the “memory” process works[1].

So not impossible, but improbable at our current state of understanding and technology.

[1] It’s the same hurdle AI has, you can build an inferance engine and test it and find it works. The problem though is “correlation is not causation”. Inference engines build rules based on a very small subsets of observation data and two state logic rules. We currently assume such systems spot both correlation and causation and hope that the rules somehow magically reflect “causation” not “correlation”. In reality we usually cheat and select training data where we think “causation” is dominant, thus hope the rules generated reflect that (hence GIGO is the real game in AI). The actual issues are more subtle and to do with cognition, which is intimately based on perception. Computers can not “sense” thus they either need to have sensors added or be told things. However two state logic is not natures way, there is what was (past tense), what is (present tense), and what will be (future tense). So to ask “Is Socrates Mortal?” you first have to ascertain if Socretes had a point of origin in the time line, if he did, you then need to determin if he is dead or not… If he is dead “Then he was mortal” (past tense) if however he is alive (present tense) you can not say if he is mortal it’s not possible to know you thus have three states “True, False, Indeterminate” thus two state “True, False” logic can not answer an apparently simple question, which can then get you into the “Halting problem” and other quite fundemental issues.

Clive Robinson • September 28, 2020 4:52 AM

@ SpaceLifeForm, ALL,

So, Russia, like China, wants to know the name of a website that someone wants to visit.

The ghost of Google strikes again with SORM++ and the illusive SNI.

Yes China and incidently most other countries are after the SNI field in plaintext form. To be honest I’m surprised other countries have not gone down the legislative route.

In fact a number of “service providers” –some US– discorage certain types of protocol as they see the unencrypted SNI field and the info it gives them on users as an income stream…

Most people don’t think about it, but lets look at it another way with the older “Phone Service”. How would people feel in the 1980’s if their phone service provider was making every phone number they called “public information” to who ever handed over a few cents?

For those that have some knowledge of “Trafic Analysis” the prospect would have been –and still is– terrifying.

P.S. Sorry for the late reply still trying to get my head in the right time zone…

Clive Robinson • September 28, 2020 9:13 AM

@ ALL,

A new SARS-CoV-2 paper[1],

Molecular Architecture of Early Dissemination and Massive Second Wave of the SARS-CoV-2 Virus in a Major Metropolitan Area[2]

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.09.22.20199125v2

I’ve not had time to more than skim read it. So the bad news first,

“The genomes were from viruses recovered in the earliest recognized phase of the pandemic in Houston, and an ongoing massive second wave of infections. The virus was originally introduced into Houston many times independently. Virtually all strains in the second wave have a Gly614 amino acid replacement in the spike protein, a polymorphism that has been linked to increased transmission and infectivity. Patients infected with the Gly614 variant strains had significantly higher virus loads in the nasopharynx on initial diagnosis.”

In short there is a mutation in the spike protein which couples to the ACE2 receptors which has made people both more susceptible and more importantly shed considerably more virus. So at the very least it is a mutation that is going to spread through the population faster because it’s,quite a bit more infectious. Thus you should be more cautious about how you interact with society.

Now what should be better news,

“We found little evidence of a significant relationship between virus genotypes and altered virulence”

So apparently it is not anymore virulant/pathogenic within it’s self…

But people should remember that is only part of the infection story…

Because the effect SARS-CoV-2 has on people nieve to the virus, thus without an imunological defence, is dependent on their initial viral load.

So with those infected by this new virus sheading at more significant rates, it may give others a marked increase in viral load. The downside of which is likely to be an increase not just in R0 but also an in the cases going to hospital and like as not increased mortality rates “downstream” in those that are more susceptible[3]

So keep your distance folks and as we are heading into “seasonal infection” time make sure you top up your vitamins and minerals and get your flu shots.

[1] The intro carries a “pre-print” warning so apply caution to the information contained.

[2] The major metropolitan area is Houston Texas USA, which is an ethnically diverse region with seven million residents.

[3] This is unfortunately happening just as we go into the seasonal disease period in the Northern Hemisphere just when healthcare gets most stretched.

Clive Robinson • September 28, 2020 6:15 PM

@ SpaceLifeForm,

At the library, in a section not obviously available, was a physical book, the Criss Cross Directory.

The “not obviously available” is the point.

Back in the 80’s I was teaching students about switches and how they were interfaced to computers. BT had a billing center outside of Cardiff in Wales, and in it’s aircraft hanger sized computer rooms was row after row of IBM computers printing out “billing information”.

Back then it was before “itemized billing” so what was used was the numbers read from “metering pulse counters”. Some were still read from the frame and hand written onto forms that got sent from a local exchange to a regional data entry and verification center.

The thing is there was no record kept of the actual number called back then.

But things were changing and the idea of “Itemized Billing” kind of set the stage for “collect it all”.

The phone switches started to became first digital and then computerised from the early 1960’s. When computerized recording the number dialed, from which consumer pair and at what time and day was fairly simple. Likewise automatically sending the data to the main data center over “leased lines” was almost trivial.

Without these changes to switches “collect it all” would not have been possible. And surveillance would have been bound by resource issues due to having to use “pen registers” to record the numbers.

Whilst engineers and technologists in their geeky bubbles knew all about this, even in the 1980’s not just everyday folk, but judges were not told about how much more power these computer driven switches were. But even when “itemized billing” did come in ordinary people did not realise the implications and judges were still making rulings based on the old model…

Thus data was being gathered in increasing amounts on the “Never To Be Discarded” basis, as the SigInt Agencies came into effect in the closing months of World War Two.

Even now after the Ed Snowden revelations most people and that includes judges as well, still think in the old electro mechanical POTS way.

Clive Robinson • September 29, 2020 4:51 AM

@ Trudi Fenster-Klotz, SpaceLifeForm,

How so ?

I suspect the issue is actually,

“… with refinable predictions as the amount of training data increases, and physical interpretability through discovery of coherent patterns …”

To take the gobbledygook words off of it, it becomes,

“Keep bolting bits on to deal with exceptions caused by correlation not causation”

The first part is how the early Victorian beam engine designers worked. Every time a crack appeared they bolted a plate on thus a crack would appear somewhere else which got treated likewise… So not only becoming increaingly inefficient, with increasing rate of repair it became more fragile still untill the whole edifice colapsed under the weight of the “exceptions”.

Those early Victorian designers were artisans and used artisanal techniques to try to come up with “design patterns”. The trouble with “design patterns” is frequently they “do not scale” thus what works on a small engine does not work on a big engine. It was only as “Natural Philosophy” became “Science” in particular what we now call “Physics” that change became possible and the “design Patterns” were replaced with scalable formulars.

But the use of science to make engineering was realy driven by the common desire expressed via legislation for these artisan pattern designed engines to stop exploding and killing people in horrible ways. There is currently no such imperitive in AI, though as it’s use in surveillance and law enforcment is starting ti rapidly increase, I suspect there will start to be considerable harms likewise rising. Thus the “killing people in horrible ways” will increasingly happen (drone strikes based on Palantir etc output).

Hard AI has been stalled in almost a pre-artisan state for around six decades. Soft AI or rule based systems have been more successful, but they have no intuition of their own only rules to follow, they are in effect just “determanistic systems”. Back in the 1980’s “theory testers” came along and I had peripheral involvment with one called “Helps Uncover Latent Knowledge”(HULK) that was released by Brainstorm Computer Solutions.

HULK alowed you to test your hypothesis against a body of data thus could tell you if your hypothesis had merit on that limited body of knowledge. It was just statistical in nature and was in no way inteligent or intuitive.

Such systems evolved into “inference engines” but this time they used the likes of genetic and aneling algorithms to try to come up with hypothesis, but the reality is as I noted the other day they can not deal with the issue of “causation or correlation”. Thus you have,

“Humans pre-selecting data sets to try and force the outcomes they want.”

However the result is almost always the rules found are based on “correlation” not “causation” the result is as you increase the size of the data set “correlation” breaks down so you end up with,

“Humans having to add exception handeling rules.”

Any time you have to,

1, Pre-select data sets.
2, Add exceptions as data sets grow.

You know almost for certain your rules are based on “correlation” not “causation” thus they are not even valid hypotheses thus candidate laws, they are just “observation correlations” thus mainly usless except on known to comply data sets.

When and only when we can reliably find a way to tell “Causation from Correlation” without throwing more data at the problem will AI move forward. In humans we call the ability to cut through quickly to causation “intuition” and as far as I’m aware nobody is even close to explaining intuition even despite the idea of throwing randomness and even quantum effects into the pot.

Clive Robinson • September 30, 2020 4:43 AM

@ vas pup,

The United Arab Emirates announced a new project on Tuesday to land an unmanned spacecraft on the moon by 2024.

It’s something that people do not think about much, but “Space is becoming weaponised year by year”, it’s also getting filled with,”apparent junk”. If you link the two ideas together it does not take long to realise that it’s becoming like the cold war submarine game of a nuclear boomber with between ten and thirty multiple nuke warhead rockets was the “unseen deterent threat”. Which spawed the new generation of “Hunter-Killer” subs. Thus how much of that junk is realy junk?

Another issue is the tenure on orbits, operators are now required to have de-orbiting capability built in so that satellites can be removed from orbit.

Thus as an operator you have to play poker with your cards face up on the table, whilst others can not only play with their cards face down, they can chose to fold your hand when they chose…

However those rules do not aply to “scientific missions” to other “heavenly bodies”…

Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between “science and surveillance”. Think about not just weather satellites but those that do crop/pollution/etc they are doing their “science by surveillance”.

Thus moon is to all intents and purposes a very large satellite that csn not be shot down or blown up and covers the world. Which was why the NSA did “moon bounce” or Earth-Moon-Earth(EME) communications with it during the the last half of the last century, and for all we know might well be doing so still today.

Thus the Moon represents a very real opportunity as a longterm science / surveillance base of Earth.

What we do not know is if other people have thought about it (highly likely) planed to exploit it (likely) or have already done so (possible).

As they say,

“Just something to think about”

Clive Robinson • September 30, 2020 10:33 AM

@ ALL,

As some of you are aware the extradition hearing against Julian Assange is happening in london as now into 21 days.

Whilst it might be of academic interest as to what happens to Julian, the evidence presented yesterday is most certainly not.

It gives a very rare insight as to whay happens in US Federal maximum security prisons when the US Attorney General puts a prisoner under “Special Administrative Measures” or “SAMs”. As the AG is a “political Appointee” their decisions impartiality is at best extreamly questionable especially as it has been made “unchalengable” by various hurdles.

Which from looking into the US from several thousand miles away, I see should increasingly be of concern to every US Citizen and every person the US Government can get it’s hands on.

It is actually truly frightning about what it does to human beings, as the evidence given on day 20 of the trial shows,

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2020/09/your-man-in-the-public-gallery-assange-hearing-day-20/

Irrespective of what people think about Assange, I think people should read it especially US Citizens. After all,

“First they came for the…”

All US Citizens are on those lists one way or another, as are a great number of others. With such systems it’s just a question of time and probability. After all we know that the Chicago PD has just grabed people off of the streets and “disappeared them” before, very contrary to the law, and the US Administation and Judiciary just looked the other way…

Clive Robinson • September 30, 2020 11:21 AM

@ ALL,

There are growing questions as to if “Herd Immunity” is working with COVID-19.

The current increasing rates of infection where there has already been significant infection suggests that there are issues as yet unknown with “Herd Immunity”

One of the more worrying is in Amazonia in Brazil.

It’s been indicated that between half and two thirds of one population (Manaus) have been infected which is close to the 70% that various epidemiological models suggest would stop the spread of SARS-CoV-2 so it should have significantly slowed down. Unfortunately that is apparently not the case, and infections are rising rapidly again,

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.09.16.20194787v1

The paper has yet to be peer-reviewed, which is a growing problem with COVID/SARS papers in that the supply of papers has significantly over taxed the peer review resources. It may be the case that some papers never get reviewed.

Clive Robinson • October 1, 2020 12:34 AM

@ SpaceLifeForm, ALL,

It’s worth looking at the Microsoft document linked to, even though it’s nearly a 32MByte download[1],

“Microsoft Digital Defence Report 2020 September”

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/confirmation.aspx?id=101738

The real scary bit for everyone is given in the 6 pages before the introduction where it gives,

“8 Trillion signals a day”

That go into it’s ML system. Before telling you those signals all come from Microsoft’s Telemetry system you can not realy opt-out of…

As they say in the Martian “Do the math”… that’s about one telemetry signal every 3-4seconds for the average PC. As a comparison a lot of computer users do not type 1000 key presses an hour…

[1] The size is not due to the “information content” but the flashy graphics on nearly every page… Mind you for what it does say it’s a little “wordy” and “padded”, a kind of a “feel the thickness not the quality” style managment report. Thus an anoyingly slow read for a domain practitioner (ie it could be 1/20th of the size if written concisely).