No killer robots soon

I'm reading this Slate article about whether you should be worried about robots eventually taking over. The author of that article has a "Harvard Ph.D. in security studies" and "helped write the new president's defense policy agenda". The article was disappointing.

The point he misses is that today's robots are not autonomous. The "Umanned Aerial Vehicles" (UAVs) dropping bombs in Afghanistan still have pilots, it's just that the pilots are located at a military base safely in a bunker rather in the vehicle itself. They don't make decisions to drop bombs, those decisions are likewise made by people, then remote signals sent to the UAV to drop them.

What we have today is not "robotics" so much as "telerobotics". They aren't mechanical soldiers so much as remote tools used by human soldiers -- soldiers who are not in harms way.

I'm an investor in a company that makes remote controlled guns that can, among other things, be controlled through the Internet. They sell them to the military. One of the main features is how and when these devices will actually fire a weapon.

The next level of telerobotics is "programmed response". My companies telerobitic guns have the feature where they can remember scans of the environment, and if something appears in the environment that doesn't belong there, the guns will swivel around, aim at the object, and shoot it. Yet, this still a sort of telerobotics: while the device itself chose to shoot, it did so on precisely programmed responses. It's still humans in control, with the robotics doing precisely what they are told to do.

I've walked past one of these units and had the gun slowly swivel as it followed me across the room. It's a bit unnerving. You do get a Terminator-like, sinister feeling about the device, yet, there is no intelligence lurking back there. It's just following lines of code.

When the robots rise up and enslave us, they won't be the military robots, but our personal robots like washing machines, toasters, and cars. The military is a bunch of control freaks. They don't like the idea of anything, not even their own soldiers, making decisions on their own.

Finally, I'd like to point out that this problem is "AI-complete". The robotic revolution requires artificial intelligence (AI), and if we ever perfect AI, we'll have a lot more to worry about than the errant robot.

Sidejacking poem

"Hackers Can Sidejack Cookies", according to a poem recently published in the New Yorker.

For those who don't know, "sidejacking" is a new variant of cookie hijacking I came up with two years ago at BlackHat. Also, my recent post on the new Star Trek movie comes up on top when you Google "star trek sucked". The moral of the story is that if you produce enough original content, odd bits will eventually start filtering through the mass (un)conscious.

Scan 3rd party websites for safeness

Since I'm a right-wing wacko who enjoys Druge Report, I noticed this this article that claims the U.S. Attorney's Office in Massachusetts told employees not to log onto the Drudge Report because it contained viruses.

Drudge itself isn't hosting malware intentionally, but malware may get through. One possible reason is that they are using a advertising aggregator that isn't too picky about which adds it serves. Another possible reason is it has an exploitable bug, hackers have broken in, and are now attacking visitors.

A good example of this is the related news aggregator BreitBart.com which right this moment has an obvious SQL injection vulnerability. Pick any article with an "id" field in the URL, add a quote, and you get an SQL error message back. If you edit the following URL as shown to add a quote ' character in the id field, you will get the following SQL error message:
URL:http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D986V0E80
Edit:http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D986'V0E80
Message:

Query failed: You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near 'V0E80' ORDER BY issue_date DESC LIMIT 1' at line 3

This means that BreitBart has probably been taken over by hackers, who are either now delivering malware, or are waiting for the next QuickTime/Flash/PDF 0day in order to deliver that.

I feel safe browsing these websites because I browse inside a virtual machine, which has non-root privileges, using NoScript and AdBlock within Firefox. I may be a little extreme, but at MINIMUM, user should browse the Internet without root privileges.

Large organizations might consider scanning websites that are popular among their users to look for obvious vulnerabilities like SQL-injection. Like it or not, popular websites like CNN are part of your infrastructure, and when they get hacked, your users can get hacked.

How to measure download speed

There are lots of "speed tests" websites that will measure your download speed, such as the ones provided DSLreports and SpeakEasy.

Or, you can BitTorrent a Linux distro. The advantage is that instead of incoming data from a single site, you get hundreds of streams of incoming data from all over the Internet. The only limitation will be the download link.

I just got a new cable modem line. It's supposed to be 15megs down, but DSLreports said it was only 8mbps down. That could be a limitation with DSLreports, though, so I downloaded CentOS (popular version of Linux) to be sure, and I'm indeed limited to 8mbps down.

The graph of traffic shows that the traffic quickly ramps up and pegs at the maximum. I accidentally had the maximum set to 900-Kbytes/second, I had to up the limit, at which point the traffic averages at 1000-Kbytes/second, or 8-mbps.

Star Trek Sucked

Everyone else is going to love the new Star Trek movie, but not me. It's got great visuals, great casting, great acting, great editing, and just about everything you'd want in a Hollyword blockbuster movie. It's got all the appropriate "in" jokes that left the Trekkies in the audience giggling throughout the movie. For me, though, it's not what I want from a Star Trek movie.

First of all, I hate time travel. It's a form of "deus ex machina". If you allow time travel in your universe, then the universe has no rules because people can go back and change what happened. Everything becomes a loose end. If the bad guys blow up a planet, just go back in time and kill their grandfather. It means no story truly exists, because someone can come back from the future and change the story. It's the second worst plot device in sci-fi (the worst is where at the end you realize it was all a dream). Time travel is the last refuge of incompetent writers; if they can't figure out how to fit a prequel into the Star Trek universe, they simple go back in time and change the universe.

Second, the movie isn't sci-fi enough. What makes sci-fi different than other genres is that the "setting" is as interesting as "plot" and "character". Blade Runner would have been a good movie, but what made it a great movie was the distopic, cyberpunk vision of the future. In the new Star Trek, the setting is more of an update to the latest fashion rather than the latest technology. It sure is pretty, but it's not interesting.

Lastly, and most importantly, is that the movie is the opposite of Rodenberry's original vision. Rodenberry showed us future not just where technology had improved, but where people had improved as well. Spock's logic wasn't something to look down upon, it was something to look up to. Things like the "Prime Directive" showed the importance of ethics. In this new Star Trek, the opposite is true. Kirk acts like a small minded jerk, demonstrates no moral fiber or great character, and yet is mysteriously promoted above those who do show character. I suppose this is what Hollywood has to do in order to sell movies. Everyone wants more money. However, if you are producing a movie, you don't make one that glorifies hard work, risk taking, education, or saving. Instead, you show movies where rich people steal money and act like greedy bastards, so the audience can feel better about themselves for their lack of industry, risk taking, education, or savings.

It was Rodenberry's belief in mankind that made the original Star Trek series a commercial flop, but cult favorite. I guess you can have one, or the other, but not both.