1:25 - Newly discovered vulnerability raises fears of another WannaCry 2:38 - Manchester attack could lead Theresa May's government to launch huge internet crackdown 5:32 - Vermont DMV Caught Using Illegal Facial Recognition Program 6:49 - Malicious Subtitles Threaten Kodi, VLC and Popcorn Time Users, Researchers Warn 7:45 - Wikimedia is clear to sue the NSA 9:16 - Google Following Your Offline Credit Card Spending To Tell Advertisers If Their Ads Work 12:01 - Hackers hit Russian bank customers, planned international cyber raids 13:40 - Hackers Unlock Samsung Galaxy S8 With Fake Iris 15:10 - DJI threatens to 'brick' its £1.5k copters unless owners agree to share their details online 17:53 - FCC won't publish evidence of alleged DDoS attack, amid net neutrality battle 18:32 - Comcast tries to censor pro-net neutrality website calling for investigation of fake FCC comments potentially funded by cable lobby 20:43 - Dead People Are Posting Anti-Net Neutrality Comments to the FCC Website 21:46 - Republicans want to leave you more voicemail - without ever ringing your cellphone 23:57 - Robot police officer goes on duty in Dubai 25:11 - Google AI AlphaGo wins again, leaves humans in the dust 25:53 - China censored Google's AlphaGo match against world's best Go player 26:40 - Bitcoin plunges more than $300 after earlier hitting all-time high 28:10 - Microsoft says its best not to fiddle with its Windows 10 group policies (that don't work) 31:11 - Announcing Windows 10 China Government Edition and the new Surface Pro 32:14 - Goldman Sachs analysis of autonomous vehicle job loss 33:50 - Facebook flooded with 'sextortion' and revenge porn, files reveal 34:55 - Ukraine blocks popular social networks as part of sanctions on Russia 36:21 - Gaming: Community Update #4: Let's Talk DRAM! 38:04 - Amazon's Free Banana Stands Disrupting Local Fruit Economy 39:03 - World Of Tanks Developer Gets Negative Review Video Taken Down Under Threat Of Copyright Claim, Backlash Ensues 40:54 - Xbox game subscription service launches June 1 42:15 - New Battery Technology Draws Energy Directly From Human Body 44:16 - Boeing will make the military's new hypersonic spaceplane 46:42 - Geneticists edited tomato mutations with CRISPR tech
Great show as always. Can't wait for Computex stuff. Should have gone with a thumbnail from attack of the killer tomatoes on this video though. xD
On the DJI drone account story: I don't think they are doing this for anything else than covering their asses. I mean yes, drones are kind of like remote toy cars but they add a whole new dimension to it. (not a pun but a simple fact)
It isn't about people that want to weaponize drones. It is about people that should not be allowed to pilot anything. You don't need to be a terrorist to cause massive destruction with them. You just need to be stupid enough to fly one close to an airport. Think about what could happen if one of these would get sucked into a turbine of a jet that is about to land or taking off.
Could this be another database to mine? Yes, of course. But I can totally see why they want you to think twice about your actions by making you accountable for your drone. This is one of very few examples where I think a database of users might not be the worst idea.
On the Alpha Go story: Go is not close to chess in complexity, it is the other way around. Chess is not even close to Go in complexity.
Despite its relatively simple rules, Go is very complex, even more so than chess, and possesses more possibilities than the total number of atoms in the visible universe. Compared to chess, Go has both a larger board with more scope for play and longer games, and, on average, many more alternatives to consider per move. - Wikipedia
I don't know the game myself but I heard of this story a while back on the Tested.com podcast. I know that wasn't the point for you but I think it is interesting.
Also fun fact: Alpha Go does not learn from playing against humans anymore. It now basically learns only by playing the game against itself. Humans have become to dumb for this machine to be considered a worthy opponent.
The security agencies in multiple countries have the same agenda. In times of economic concerns, like now where this "New World" is about to give way to the "Third World", "Old World" knowledge is needed to understand it. For this I would suggest reading "The Prince" by Machiavelli.
In times like these, where nation states are at risk for collapse, the motive is to manipulate the populous into favoring the government. That is often done with scare tactics like the current terrorist scare. There is also climate change being used as a scare tactic; by presenting a disproportionate amount of danger. This one is working on the more liberal minded citizens. For more reading, I would suggest Noam Choimsky's "Manufacturing Consent".
What it boils down to is manipulating the average amygdala to favor the comfort of being under the government's thumb. The most disgusting and ironic aspect of this agenda is the total disregard for security in the name of security. For instance, in the Soviet Union, when the economy collapsed, there was no 2nd Amendment rights for citizens (as the USSR was a Socialist state). This resulted in almost free reign of organized crime; that prevented the horizontal growth, that tends to occur in the growth stage of the cycle, to a substantial degree. This is because small businesses could not effectively defend themselves against the Russian Mafia's "protection" schemes. Nothing was done about the reign of the Russian Mafia until they tried to extort someone who was much more rich and powerful. This however is far from the worst case scenario.
These tactics are having an extremely negative impact on the general security of the "super powers". For instance, a terrorist attack occurred in the US as a result of direct "entrapment" by the FBI. This was creating a scenario that would evoke will of the public to be protected from such scenarios. The behavioral sciences have a term for this type of behavior.
The long and short of it is: they are creating scenarios to save us from. This is of course to manufacture our consent. There is no sense in these behaviors. There is only agenda.
"These are the times that try men's souls"
Regarding the media blackout of Alpha Go:
Benjamin Goertzel, one of the leading AI researchers in the world is stationed in China; and he's not quiet about advancements in AI. The entire enterprise of higher education is probably informed on the subject. There are also college and private media sources that are spreading the information to the degree that the media blackout will have little to no effect. The suppression of this information could only be temporarily delayed. Education is bigger in China than in the US. They have to fill those sparsely populated cities with middle class citizens.
Regarding the impact of UBI:
It seems that UBI is more of a buffer between economic models. Monetary economics is dying in the fire that it started with Capitalism; and the increases in frequency of crises. Crises are coming more frequently with technological advancement. This is because of the resulting added resources for upward mobility and the ease of access to resources that can be used nefariously.
The Issue with UBI is the fact that it is centralized and egalitarian. This isn't likely to bode well for it; as it's in human evolutionary predisposition to work toward improving ones circumstances through economized energy expenditure. This means that it is likely that homes will be automated to stretch the funding. This is where the new economic "paradigm" is likely to self organize. It is of course likely to be a decentralized model. There is ample reason to believe that aggregation of wealth would offset funding for UBI. This is probably the most accurate extrapolation of how the next economic revolution will take place. It would of course be difficult to make a prediction about what the specifics of the final model would be; however trade systems are 10,000 year old dogma; and not so much human nature or necessity.
Regarding C.R.I.S.P.R:
The notion of genetic determinism is dying hard. Even now, due to C.R.I.S.P.R, there is the term "gene drives". The problem with this notion is... genes don't drive. Interaction is a feedback loop between sub-systems and overarching systems. It would be reasonable to expect that a similar result to the human genome project would result with C.R.I.S.P.R. This is because in order to achieve the desired result with gene modification, the epi-genetic components in the environment must be present and --> not mitigated by other components <-- in order to activate targeted genes. It's not just a case of "add the desired gene to get the desired effect". The environment is the most influential factor; as in all natural systems.
It would be presumptuous to suggest that genetic modification would not produce more variety and quality; however the difficulty of doing so is extremely understated. The same was true of the Human Genome Project; and it resulted in the Big Pharma that we know today. The investments just weren't justified; and as a result were not compensated.
The horrors of what could come with another over investment should be on the minds of everyone.
Unsolicited phone calls should be permanently prohibited, landline or mobile. They would be using your technology, your property to break your thread of thought, your conversation, your leisure time, driving in an bad traffic situation, or a very important thing you are working on, you at any time that fits them. Other than specific authorities, unsolicited calls must not happen. At the very least, because it is humiliating to have no actual protection against the callers. Synchronous communication should be reserved to contacts which are both individually and mutually agreed on per-case to be of value. Anything else must be asynchronous (email, SMS, messaging, a letter, etc), and even then it needs to be respectful of the recipient, because all the spam/trash is left to the recipient to take care of.
I honestly can't believe the level of attack on one's integrity allowed here. There is no excuse for not being allowed to have the time to and decide on the exact time to compose yourself for calls like this.
Without having any integrity whatsoever on your communication channels, anyone gets to wield you when they feel like it. It makes your time and thread of thought valueless. FFS, when someone calls you, they are with you, in your home, speaking. That is, to me, far worse than knocking at your door. And when the advertisers can't reach you, it seems not to have even occurred to them that, well, maybe they shouldn't?
This is just shows the degree of our consent - we are defaulting to the case against our best interest as individuals, because we lack the energy, the time, and the willpower to push back.
Regarding Ukraine blocking Russian social network, antivirus and probably more.
You realize these countries are at war? That why ISP blocked most popular social network in country when asked. Think how much information you can gather from it.
Serbia, or for that matter the entire former Yugoslavia Balkans region is a very interesting and worthwhile case study when it comes to rule of law and democracy. Lot to be learned there.
The difference here, I think, is who is raising the dead. With the net neutrality thing, it would seem the scenario is there is a large company who hired some hacks to do the job. The voting zombie outbreak in Serbia seems less of a corporate doing, but just as clumsy. The problem of trust in public servants does seem to be a common theme. Also, the public official's failure to even acknowledge such events and just keeping on going as if nothing happened is truly appalling.
That is also why the EU countries have a different failsafe than the USA, and would/will fail differently should/if/when the time comes to change the economy to another model. Instead of the 2nd Amendment which is generally unthinkable in EU, we have a limited degree of socialism (probably as generally unthinkable in USA), including living wages (for the most part) and generally higher taxes to support the system (the criticism of either way is far beyond my intention here). Yet, this is important, because international corporations seem to have been able to learn and to play these differences to their own advantage. These differences are (in their effect on our perception of reality) just sufficiently huge to make it very difficult to debate also seemingly unrelated subjects. It ends up with us silencing each other.
We may sometimes superficially fully agree on many things, but find it often to be based on different assumptions about reality. It is the same between the EU members, or any countries, really, sometimes even in the same country. It is these local idiosyncrasies that are worth study, because they define the needs and the character of each country as a political entity, and the voice and vocabulary of each citizen.
Any solution to any problem can only be accepted by citizens and pursued by citizens if and only if that solution is defined within the vocabulary those citizens know. It is only then that one has something to voice that isn't just an aspect of madness. If the solution happens to be outside their vocabulary, then it won't happen - it won't even become considered as a possibility.
I've said this before and I am saying it again, this is a global problem.
Think of how much information they already have gathered from it. I'd rather ask, why now, and not before? What is different today, that hasn't been for the past, what, 3 years?
The Pacific Ocean is big but not empty nor a deorbit target. Apart from all the boat people that missed their target in it, its relativly quiet and clean, especially the southern bit (which I beleive you were meaning) compared to the rest of the world draining grounds. We'd like to keep it that way, have to admit the ones that get fried on re-entry look super cool though
I seem to remember a space shuttle astronaut saying that the 'personal' laptops that they carry into orbit are 486 models. The reason was that the larger process node (90nm?) was less susceptible to random cosmic radiation altering a data bit. I know it is probably easy to shield a PC built into a console. But a laptop is a different animal.
Is this a thing? Will a larger node protect against data corruption? Was it ever a thing?
Good question. Maybe incompetence. Maybe they came to realization how powerful tool it is in disinformation. Or first step into censorship.
I just think that when you report that country blocked businesses/services from another country you should say that they are actively in war. It's not like they disallowed encryption to catch illegal downloads.
In response to the Goldman Sachs analysis of autonomous vehicle job loss, I don't see the problem with this. Having robots/AI do low level tasks frees up the human capital to do more advance work. This generally causes a increase in GDP because our GDP at full employment would increase. It may cause some temporary structural unemployment, but that's only temporary.
The same goes for Asia's manufacturing boom. This is specialization that eventually results in an increase of GDP for both Asia and western countries.
I can't help but agree. It's also a long lived problem. A "one size fits all" solution doesn't seem likely in any case. Natural systems self organize; and the best solutions seem to come from decentralization. This is where the populous picks up solutions and implements them themselves.
Where it really gets interesting is where the third world countries come into play. They are not in the same position as the developed world. Their markets are just now beginning to form. Saturation is far off. I've heard suggestions that Africa might pick up manufacturing in the coming decades; but I think it's too late. I think that currency systems have had their day and are quickly becoming a dysfunctional liability.
There is also talk of a third industrial revolution. If this is the case it seems to be a decentralized one. 3D printers are no indication of what could be accomplished with Drexlarian nano-tech. Microscopic components have been around for almost a decade now. This race to the bottom is also a race to the micro. Everything is getting smaller; and it's gaining a lot of funding. Something similar to the Star Trek replicator is on the horizon.
The most interesting axioms are Kurzweil's "Law of Accelerating Returns"; which is based on the accelerating advancement of technology. It appears to be following an exponential curve. There is also the accelerating frequency of financial crises. The time from collapse to collapse is in the realm of one humans lifetime; and it accelerates faster than the technology that aids it.
Trade systems seem to be lacking as well. When the primary resources are elemental forms, where is the "competition" to come from. Who's carbon 6 is the best?
Not sure if it has been covered before on the news but rocket labs have just completed their first successful test launch and are gearing up to be able to send low cost satellites into space (lower orbit) before the end of the year. I think the Boeing concept is cool but not as low cost as they claim it will be if cost of development is factored into it.
this is the most complete article I have found so far
Curiously... let us assume for a moment that this acceleration has become possible through the idea of free market becoming a guarantee of peace. For one, free flow of money, i.e. large piles of money have become possible to gather in the same place allowing grander corporate strategies than within most national economies. Also, the lowered military expenditure and general robustness of products delivered made it possible to optimize for throughput and acceleration of returns. Almost everyone, one could easily point out (at least for the sake of argument, since it is also easy to go off on a tangent debating this claim), has more today then they've had 40 years ago, while there is also about twice as many people on Earth now. Yet, it is my personal understanding (but almost certainly not only mine) that this economy has reached and perhaps to a certain degree passed its peak usefulness, and is about to transform, but is due to fear, uncertainty, doubt, acting like a stressed out demented cat with epilepsy (if you've had one you will know just how horrible and grotesque that is).
Yet, it can be argued that this new level, this new headroom at which corporations have become allowed to operate at least since the 80's, has also allowed us to approach a proverbial technological singularity, which almost certainly wasn't the goal at the time. It appears increasingly more likely that we will experience technological singularity within our lifetimes even at the current rate of development, i.e. even without any further headroom for the current economy, i.e. in spite of it having peaked and possibly thrashing around like a sick cat (and it is debatable whether the current model is dead or not, I just happen to be convinced it is myself). This singularity event will be potentially far more disruptive to the perception of world and the shape of the economy than the free market globalization was to national economies. Fine.
Now to this new thought that's been nagging me here. I have certainly not considered this at any great depth myself and I wonder whether you have?
If the following is true:
Simply put, there are recent events and interests no one has missed in world politics, and which shall remain individually unspecified by myself, but which indicate that there are attempts by several governments to step back from the free market globalization and return to the national economies.
Then:
If those attempts are also successful, do you think they are perchance (and then by what chance) sufficient to prevent the technological singularity from occurring?
Having posed that question (by no means a rhetorical one, I'd like to hear thoughts on it), we have either a new economy with a singularity, or a potential zombification of the old economy without a singularity (as in: the re-animated dead usually don't come back the same as when they were alive). I for one don't know how to immediately relate to either.
Addam Smith warned against such things. Just the same, many countries under financial crisis have closed themselves off to immigration, imposed tariffs and limited trade with their countries. This keeps on happening; however a technological singularity of sorts is likely to happen outside of the countries suffering crises. This may be the reason that the US is aggressive with third world countries that are growing and democratizing. The US govt. is notorious for shutting down rising democracies in South America. This is of course not going to be so easy if the military isn't getting it's hundreds of billions a year. This is likely to be the case after a collapse. Notice the mass of Russian arms in the Middle East post collapse of the USSR. The Russian military was selling arms to anyone and everyone for funding for basic homeland security. I'm thinking that those who we call enemy now will be brandishing M4s in the coming decades.
With this particular question, we've been here before. It's a default behavior in global economics and politics. Financial collapse is a frightening prospect for anyone who is in office. Noone wants to be remembered for tanking the country. It's put off as long as possible; with as little change as possible until the instability creates a chain reaction between businesses that rely on each other. The stock market crashes; and panic causes people to hoard money that could be circulating. Then it's one loss after another until The economy bottoms out.
It is however a little different now. Resources for upward mobility have never been more accessible. Even if full collapse were to occur, it wouldn't likely be near as bad as 1929. Small, local operations would have a multiplicative of the resources as almost 100 years ago. This may mean that fundamental economic reform is even more likely where the most severe crises exist. Nothing would get people to utilize the new resources like necessity.
"Never let a crisis go to waste" ~ Rahm Emanuel
The relationship between the crisis cycle and technological advancement is a little nuanced. The advancements allow exponential acceleration of the growth curve. The growth imperative of global economics, that has countries competing with each other, sends economies rocketing toward growth maximum at a faster and faster pace. It's however the crises and collapses themselves that are likely to promote economic reform.
The countries that are headed toward singularity are likely to be in the growth stage of the cycle. Instability is likely to hinder advancement as it is now. Decline often results in hoarding; which causes economies to slow significantly. Recovery is where the economic change is likely to occur. I'm not really a fan of the term "Singularity" (Vernor Vinge) or even "The Surge" (Max Moore). This stage of our advancement seems likely to occur in asynchronous waves across numerous countries. I doubt that one singular push toward a Singularity type event could happen under a currency system or even a trade system.
This doesn't mean that I think it won't happen though. The birth of civilization was a lot of change in short order. It may not seem as such to us 10,000 years later; but that is probably just perspective. The rise of Capitalism is more easily seen as a large degree of change in a short amount of time: and was only a couple hundred years ago. The chronological distance between the birth of civilization and the implementation of Capitalism is much longer than the distance between the rise of Capitalism and now. This is probably because of technological advancements.
Populations have enjoyed more and more liberties over the past few hundred years. The fact that automation has had a direct impact on this trend is often overshadowed. For instance, abolition began gaining traction with the advent of the barn engine. The end of the civil war in the US was accompanied with experimentation with working tractors.
There is a direct connection between technological advancement and decentralization throughout history. This even goes back to the allowance of the general public to own land. The family farms fed the growing populations from the 17th to the 20th century; and slavery was a small part of it; that only existed on the larger plantations.
Large leaps have happened throughout history. The rise of the US and the recurrence of a democratic model was one as well. There could very well be a bold leap forward in the coming years or decades. The increased frequency of crises is a prime candidate for environmental influence.
. Will be thinking on it for a while.