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Category: cybercrime/malcode – Page 236

I have seen the future of Bitcoin, and it is bleak.

The Promise of Bitcoin

If you were to peek into my bedroom at night (please don’t), there’s a good chance you would see my wife sleeping soundly while I stare at the ceiling, running thought experiments about where Bitcoin is going. Like many other people, I have come to the conclusion that distributed currencies like Bitcoin are going to eventually be recognized as the most important technological innovation of the decade, if not the century. It seems clear to me that the rise of distributed currencies presents the biggest (and riskiest) investment opportunity I am likely to see in my lifetime; perhaps in a thousand lifetimes. It is critically important to understand where Bitcoin is going, and I am determined to do so.

Continue reading “Bitcoin’s Dystopian Future” | >

Greetings to the Lifeboat Foundation community and blog readers! I’m Reno J. Tibke, creator of Anthrobotic.com and new advisory board member. This is my inaugural post, and I’m honored to be here and grateful for the opportunity to contribute a somewhat… different voice to technology coverage and commentary. Thanks for reading.

This Here Battle Droid’s Gone Haywire
There’s a new semi-indy sci-fi web series up: DR0NE. After one episode, it’s looking pretty clear that the series is most likely going to explore shenanigans that invariably crop up when we start using semi-autonomous drones/robots to do some serious destruction & murdering. Episode 1 is pretty and well made, and stars 237, the android pictured above looking a lot like Abe Sapien’s battle exoskeleton. Active duty drones here in realityland are not yet humanoid, but now that militaries, law enforcement, the USDA, private companies, and even citizens are seriously ramping up drone usage by land, air, and sea, the subject is timely and watching this fiction is totally recommended.

(Update: DR0NE, Episode 2 now available)

It would be nice to hope for some originality, and while DR0NE is visually and means-of-productionally and distributionally novel, it’s looking like yet another angle on a psychology & set of issues that fiction has thoroughly drilled — like, for centuries.

Higher-Def Old Hat?
Okay, so the modern versions go like this: one day an android or otherwise humanlike machine is damaged or reprogrammed or traumatized or touched by Jesus or whatever, and it miraculously “wakes up,” or its neural network remembers a previous life, or what have you. Generally the machine becomes severely bi-polar about its place in the universe; while it often struggles with the guilt of all the murderdeathkilling it did at others’ behest, it simultaneously develops some serious self-preservation instinct and has little compunction about laying waste to its pursuers, i.e., former teammates & commanders who’d done the behesting.

Admittedly, DR0NE’s episode 2 has yet to be released, but it’s not too hard to see where this is going; the trailer shows 237 delivering some vegetablizing kung-fu to it’s human pursuers, and dude, come on — if a human is punched in the head hard enough to throw them across a room and into a wall or is uppercut into a spasticating backflip, they’re probably just going to embolize and die where they land. Clearly 237 already has the stereotypical post-revelatory per-the-plot justifiable body count.

Where have we seen this pattern before? Without Googling, from the top of one robot dork’s head, we’ve got: Archetype, Robocop, iRobot (film), Iron Giant, Short Circuit, Blade Runner, Rossum’s Universal Robots, and going way, way, way back, the golem.

Show Me More Me
Seems we really, really dig on this kind of story. Continue reading “The Recurring Parable of the AWOL Android” | >

Whether via spintronics or some quantum breakthrough, artificial intelligence and the bizarre idea of intellects far greater than ours will soon have to be faced.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/08/120819153743.htm

It may be a point of little attention, as the millennium bug came with a lot of hoo-ha and went out with a whimper, but the impact it had on business was small because of all the hoo-ha, not in spite of it. And so it is with some concern that I consider operating system rollover dates as a potential hazard by software malfunction at major industrial operations such as nuclear power stations and warhead controls, which in worst case scenario, could of course have disastrous implications due to out-dated control systems.

The main dates of interest are 19 January 2038 by when all 32-bit Unix operating systems need to have been replaced by at least their 64-bit equivalents, and 17 Sept 2042 when IBM mainframes that use a 64-bit count need to be phased out.

Scare mongering? Perhaps not. While all modern facilities will have the superior time representation, I question if facilities built in the 70s and 80s, in particular those behind the old iron curtain were or ever will be upgraded. This raises a concern that for example the old soviet nuclear arsenal could become a major global threat within a few decades by malfunction if not decommissioned or control systems upgraded. It is one thing for a bank statement to print the date wrong on your latest bill due to millennium bug type issues, but if automated fault tolerance procedures have coding such as ‘if(time1 > time2+N) then initiate counter-measures’ then that is quite a different matter entirely.

I believe this is a topic which warrants higher profile lest it be forgot. Fortunately the global community has a few decades on its hands to handle this particular issue, though all it takes is just one un-cooperative facility to take such a risk rather than perform the upgrades necessary to ensure no such ‘meltdowns’ occur. Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock…

Call for Essays:

The Singularity Hypothesis
A Scientific and Philosophical Assessment

Edited volume, to appear in The Frontiers Collection, Springer

Does an intelligence explosion pose a genuine existential risk, or did Alan Turing, Steven Hawking, and Alvin Toffler delude themselves with visions ‘straight from Cloud Cuckooland’? Should the notions of superintelligent machines, brain emulations and transhumans be ridiculed, or is it that skeptics are the ones who suffer from short sightedness and ‘carbon chauvinism’? These questions have remained open because much of what we hear about the singularity originates from popular depictions, fiction, artistic impressions, and apocalyptic propaganda.

Seeking to promote this debate, this edited, peer-reviewed volume shall be concerned with scientific and philosophical analysis of the conjectures related to a technological singularity. We solicit scholarly essays offering a scientific and philosophical analysis of this hypothesis, assess its empirical content, examine relevant evidence, or explore its implications. Commentary offering a critical assessment of selected essays may also be solicited.

Important dates:

  • Extended abstracts (500–1,000 words): 15 January 2011
  • Full essays: (around 7,000 words): 30 September 2011
  • Notifications: 30 February 2012 (tentative)
  • Proofs: 30 April 2012 (tentative)

We aim to get this volume published by the end of 2012.

Purpose of this volume

Central questions

Extended abstracts are ideally short (3 pages, 500 to 1000 words), focused (!), relating directly to specific central questions and indicating how they will be treated in the full essay.

Full essays are expected to be short (15 pages, around 7000 words) and focused, relating directly to specific central questions. Essays longer than 15 pages long will be proportionally more difficult to fit into the volume. Essays that are three times this size or more are unlikely to fit. Essays should address the scientifically-literate non-specialist and written in a language that is divorced from speculative and irrational line of argumentation. In addition, some authors may be asked to make their submission available for commentary (see below).

(More details)

Thank you for reading this call. Please forward it to individuals who may wish to contribute.

Amnon Eden, School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, University of Essex
Johnny Søraker, Department of Philosophy, University of Twente
Jim Moor, Department of Philosophy, Dartmouth College
Eric Steinhart, Department of Philosophy, William Paterson University

Within the next few years, robots will move from the battlefield and the factory into our streets, offices, and homes. What impact will this transformative technology have on personal privacy? I begin to answer this question in a chapter on robots and privacy in the forthcoming book, Robot Ethics: The Ethical and Social Implications of Robotics (Cambridge: MIT Press).

I argue that robots will implicate privacy in at least three ways. First, they will vastly increase our capacity for surveillance. Robots can go places humans cannot go, see things humans cannot see. Recent developments include everything from remote-controlled insects to robots that can soften their bodies to squeeze through small enclosures.

Second, robots may introduce new points of access to historically private spaces such as the home. At least one study has shown that several of today’s commercially available robots can be remotely hacked, granting the attacker access to video and audio of the home. With sufficient process, governments will also be able to access robots connected to the Internet.

There are clearly ways to mitigate these implications. Strict policies could reign in police use of robots for surveillance, for instance; consumer protection laws could require adequate security. But there is a third way robots implicate privacy, related to their social meaning, that is not as readily addressed.

Study after study has shown that we are hardwired to react to anthropomorphic technology such as robots as though a person were actually present. Reports have emerged of soldiers risking their lives on the battlefield to save a robot under enemy fire. No less than people, therefore, the presence of a robot can interrupt solitude—a key value privacy protects. Moreover, the way we interact with these machines will matter as never before. No one much cares about the uses to which we put our car or washing machine. But the record of our interactions with a social machine might contain information that would make a psychotherapist jealous.

My chapter discusses each of these dimensions—surveillance, access, and social meaning—in detail. Yet it only begins a conversation. Robots hold enormous promise and we should encourage their development and adoption. Privacy must be on our minds as we do.

Originally posted @ Perspective Intelligence

Two events centered on New York City separated by five days demonstrated the end of one phase of terrorism and the pending arrival of the next. The failed car-bombing in Times square and the dizzying stock market crash less than a week later mark the book ends of terrorist eras.

The attempt by Faisal Shahzad to detonate a car bomb in Times Square was notable not just for its failure but also the severely limited systemic impact a car-bomb could have, even when exploding in crowded urban center. Car-bombs or Vehicle-Borne IED’s have a long history (incidentally one of the first was the 1920 ‘cart and horse bomb’ in Wall Street, which killed 38 people). VBIED’s remain deadly as a tactic within an insurgency or warfare setting but with regard to modern urban terrorism the world has moved on. We are now living within a highly virtualized system and the dizzying stock-market crash on the 6th May 2010 shows how vulnerable this system is to digital failure. While the NYSE building probably remains a symbolic target for some terrorists a deadly and capable adversary would ignore this physical manifestation of the financial system and disrupt the data-centers, software and routers that make the global financial system tick. Shahzad’s attempted car-bomb was from another age and posed no overarching risk to western societies. The same cannot be said of the vulnerable and highly unstable financial system.

Computer aided crash (proof of concept for future cyber-attack)

There has yet to be a definitive explanation of how stocks such as Proctor and Gamble plunged 47% and the normally solid Accenture plunged from a value of roughly $40 to one cent, based on no external input of information into the financial system. The SEC has issued directives in recent years boosting competition and lowering commissions, which has had the effect of fragmenting equity trading around the US and making it highly automated. This has created four leading exchanges, NYSE Euronext, Nasdaq OMX Group, Bats Global Market and Direct Edge and secondary exchanges include International Securities Exchange, Chicago Board Options Exchange, the CME Group and the Intercontinental Exchange. There are also broker-run matching systems like those run by Knight and ITG and so called ‘dark-pools’ where trades are matched privately with prices posted publicly only after trades are done. As similar picture has emerged in Europe, where rules allowing competition with established exchanges and known by the acronym “Mifid” have led to a similar explosion of types and venues.

To navigate this confusing picture traders have to rely on ‘smart order routers’ – electronic systems that seek the best price across all of the platforms. Therefore, trades are done in vast data centers – not in exchange buildings. This total automation of trading allows for the use of a variety of ‘trading algorithms’ to manage investment themes. The best known of these is a ‘Volume Algo’, which ensures throughout the day that a trader maintains his holding in a share at a pre-set percentage of that share’s overall volume, automatically adjusting buy and sell instructions to ensure that percentage remains stable whatever the market conditions. Algorithms such as this have been blamed for exacerbating the rapid price moves on May 6th. High-frequency traders are the biggest proponents of algos and they account for up to 60% of US equity trading.

The most likely cause of the collapse on May 6th was the slowing down or near stop on one side of the trading pool. So in very basic terms a large number of sell orders started backing up on one side of the system (at the speed of light) with no counter-parties taking the order on the other side of the trade. The counter-party side of the trade slowed or stopped causing this almost instant pile-up of orders. The algorithms on the other side finding no buyer for their stocks kept offering lower prices (as per their software) until they attracted a buyer. However, as no buyer’s appeared on the still slowed or stopped counter-party side prices tumbled at an alarming rate. Fingers have pointed at the NYSE for causing the slow down on one side of the trading pool as it instituted some kind of circuit breaker into the system, which caused all the other exchanges to pile-up on the other side of the trade. There has also been a focus on one particular trade, which may have been the spark igniting the NYSE ‘circuit breaker’. Whatever the precise cause, once events were set in train the system had in no way caught up with the new realities of automated trading and diversified exchanges.

More nodes same assumptions

On one level this seems to defy conventional thinking about security – more diversity greater strength – not all nodes in a network can be compromised at the same time. By having a greater number of exchanges surely the US and global financial system is more secure? However, in this case, the theory collapses quickly if thinking is switched from examining the physical to the virtual. While all of the exchanges are physically and operationally separate they all seemingly share the same software and crucially trading algorithms that all have some of the same assumptions. In this case they all assumed that because they could find no counter-party to the trade they needed to lower the price (at the speed of light). The system is therefore highly vulnerable because it relies on one set of assumptions that have been programmed into lighting fast algorithms. If a national circuit breaker could be implemented (which remains doubtful) then this could slow rapid descent but it doesn’t take away the power of the algorithms – which are always going to act in certain fundamental ways ie continue to lower the offer price if they obtain no buy order. What needs to be understood are the fundamental ways in which all the trading algorithms move in concert. All will have variances but they will all share key similarities, understanding these should lead to the design of logic circuit breakers.

New Terrorism

However, for now the system looks desperately vulnerable to both generalized and targeted cyber attack and this is the opportunity for the next generation of terrorists. There has been little discussion as to whether the events of last Thursday were prompted by malicious means but it certainly is worth mentioning. At a time when Greece was burning launching a cyber attack against this part of the US financial system would clearly have been stunningly effective. Combining political instability with a cyber attack against the US financial system would create enough doubt about the cause of a market drop for the collapse gain rapid traction. Using targeted cyber attacks to stop one side of the trade within these exchanges (which are all highly automated and networked) would, as has now been proven, cause a dramatic collapse. This could also be adapted and targeted at specific companies or asset classes to cause a collapse in price. A scenario where-by one of the exchanges slows down its trades surrounding the stock of a company the bad-actor is targeting seems both plausible and effective.

A hybrid cyber and kinetic attack could also cause similar damage – as most trades are now conducted within data-centers – it begs the question why are there armed guards outside the NYSE – of course if retains some symbolic value but security resources would be better placed outside of the data-centers where these trades are being conducted. A kinetic attack against financial data centers responsible for these trades would surely have a devastating effect. Finding the location of these data centers is as simple as conducting a Google search.

In order for terrorism to have impact in the future it needs to shift its focus from the weapons of the 20th Century to those of the present day. Using their current tactics the Pakistan Taliban and their assorted fellow-travelers cannot fundamentally damage western society. That battle is over. However, the next era of conflict motivated by a radicalism from as yet unknown grievances, fueled by a globally networked generation Y, their cyber weapons of choice and the precise application of ultra-violence and information spin has dawned. Five days in Manhattan flashed a light on this new era.

Roderick Jones

The link is:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31511398/ns/us_news-military/

“The low-key launch of the new military unit reflects the Pentagon’s fear that the military might be seen as taking control over the nation’s computer networks.”

“Creation of the command, said Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn at a recent meeting of cyber experts, ‘will not represent the militarization of cyberspace.’”

And where is our lifeboat?

I have translated into Russian “Lifeboat Foundation Nanoshield” http://www.scribd.com/doc/12113758/Nano-Shield and I have some thoughts about it:

1) The effective mean of defense against ecofagy would be to turn in advance all the matter on the Earth into nanorobots. Just as every human body is composed of living cells (although this does not preclude the emergence of cancer cells). The visible world would not change. All object will consist of nano-cells, which would have sufficient immune potential to resist almost any foreseeable ecofagy. (Except purely informational like computer viruses). Even in each leaving cell would be small nanobot, which would control it. Maybe the world already consists of nanobots.
2) The authors of the project suggest that ecofagic attack would consist of two phases — reproduction and destruction. However, creators of ecofagy, could make three phases — first phase would be a quiet distribution throughout the Earth’s surface, under surfase, in the water and air. In this phase nanorobots will multiply in slow rate, and most importantly, sought to be removed from each other on the maximum distance. In this case, their concentration everywhere on the Earth as a result would be 1 unit on the cube meter (which makes them unrecognazible). And only after it they would start to proliferate intensely, simultaneously creating nanorobots soldiers who did not replicate, but attack the defensive system. In doing so, they first have to suppress protection systems, like AIDS. Or as a modern computer viruses switches off the antivirus. Creators of the future ecofagy must understand it. As the second phase of rapid growth begins everywhere on the surface of the Earth, then it would be impossible to apply the tools of destruction such as nuclear strikes or aimed rays, as this would mean the death of the planet in any case — and simply would not be in store enough bombs.
3) The authors overestimate the reliability of protection systems. Any system has a control center, which is a blank spot. The authors implicitly assume that any person with a certain probability can suddenly become terrorist willing to destroy the world (and although the probability is very small, a large number of people living on Earth make it meaningful). But because such a system will be managed by people, they may also want to destroy the world. Nanoshield could destroy the entire world after one erroneous command. (Even if the AI manages it, we cannot say a priori that the AI cannot go mad.) The authors believe that multiple overlapping of Nanoshield protection from hackers will make it 100 % safe, but no known computer system is 100 % safe – but all major computer programs were broken by hackers, including Windows and IPod.
4) Nanoshield could develop something like autoimmunity reaction. The author’s idea that it is possible to achieve 100 % reliability by increasing the number of control systems is very superficial, as well as the more complex is the system, the more difficult is to calculate all the variants of its behavior, and the more likely it will fail in the spirit of the chaos theory.
5) Each cubic meter of oceanic water contains 77 million living beings (on the northern Atlantic, as the book «Zoology of Invertebrates» tells). Hostile ecofages can easily camouflage under natural living beings, and vice versa; the ability of natural living beings to reproduce, move and emit heat will significantly hamper detection of ecofages, creating high level of false alarms. Moreover, ecofages may at some stage in their development be fully biological creatures, where all blueprints of nanorobot will be recorded in DNA, and thus be almost no distinguishable from the normal cell.
6) There are significant differences between ecofages and computer viruses. The latter exist in the artificial environment that is relatively easy to control — for example, turn off the power, get random access to memory, boot from other media, antivirus could be instantaneous delivered to any computer. Nevertheless, a significant portion of computers were infected with a virus, but many users are resigned to the presence of a number of malware on their machines, if it does not slow down much their work.
7) Compare: Stanislaw Lem wrote a story “Darkness and mold” with main plot about ecofages.
8 ) The problem of Nanoshield must be analyzed dynamically in time — namely, the technical perfection of Nanoshield should precede technical perfection of nanoreplikators in any given moment. From this perspective, the whole concept seems very vulnerable, because to create an effective global Nanoshield require many years of development of nanotechnology — the development of constructive, and political development — while creating primitive ecofages capable, however, completely destroy the biosphere, is required much less effort. Example: Creating global missile defense system (ABM – still not exist) is much more complex technologically and politically, than the creation of intercontinental nuclear missiles.
9) You should be aware that in the future will not be the principal difference between computer viruses and biological viruses and nanorobots — all them are information, in case of availability of any «fabs» which can transfer information from one carrier to another. Living cells could construct nanorobots, and vice versa; spreading over computer networks, computer viruses can capture bioprinters or nanofabs and force them to perform dangerous bioorganizms or nanorobots (or even malware could be integrated into existing computer programs, nanorobots or DNA of artificial organisms). These nanorobots can then connect to computer networks (including the network which control Nanoshield) and send their code in electronic form. In addition to these three forms of the virus: nanotechnology, biotechnology and computer, are possible other forms, for example, cogno — that is transforming the virus in some set of ideas in the human brain which push the man to re-write computer viruses and nanobots. Idea of “hacking” is now such a meme.
10) It must be noted that in the future artificial intelligence will be much more accessible, and thus the viruses would be much more intelligent than today’s computer viruses, also applies to nanorobots: they will have a certain understanding of reality, and the ability to quickly rebuild itself, even to invent its innovative design and adapt to new environments. Essential question of ecofagy is whether individual nanorobots are independent of each other, as the bacteria cells, or they will act as a unified army with a single command and communication systems. In the latter case, it is possible to intercept the management of hostile army ecofages.
11) All that is suitable to combat ecofagy, is suitable as a defensive (and possibly offensive) weapons in nanowar.
12) Nanoshield is possible only as global organization. If there is part of the Earth which is not covered by it, Nanoshield will be useless (because there nanorobots will multiply in such quantities that it would be impossible to confront them). It is an effective weapon against people and organizations. So, it should occur only after full and final political unification of the globe. The latter may result from either World War for the unification of the planet, either by merging of humanity in the face of terrible catastrophes, such as flash of ecofagy. In any case, the appearance of Nanoshield must be preceded by some accident, which means a great chance of loss of humanity.
13) Discovery of «cold fusion» or other non-conventional energy sources will make possible much more rapid spread of ecofagy, as they will be able to live in the bowels of the earth and would not require solar energy.
14) It is wrong to consider separately self-replicating and non-replitcating nanoweapons. Some kinds of ecofagy can produce nano-soldiers attacking and killing all life. (This ecofagy can become a global tool of blackmail.) It has been said that to destroy all people on the Earth can be enough a few kilograms of nano-soldiers. Some kinds of ecofagy in early phase could dispersed throughout the world, very slowly and quietly multiply and move, and then produce a number of nano-soldiers and attack humans and defensive systems, and then begin to multiply intensively in all areas of the globe. But man, stuffed with nano-medicine, can resist attack of nanosoldier as well as medical nanorobots will be able to neutralize any poisons and tears arteries. In this small nanorobot must attack primarily informational, rather than from a large selection of energy.
15) Did the information transparency mean that everyone can access code of dangerous computer virus, or description of nanorobot-ecofage? A world where viruses and knowledge of mass destruction could be instantly disseminated through the tools of information transparency is hardly possible to be secure. We need to control not only nanorobots, but primarily persons or other entities which may run ecofagy. The smaller is the number of these people (for example, scientists-nanotechnologist), the easier would be to control them. On the contrary, the diffusion of knowledge among billions of people will make inevitable emergence of nano-hackers.
16) The allegation that the number of creators of defense against ecofagy will exceed the number of creators of ecofagy in many orders of magnitude, seems doubtful, if we consider an example of computer viruses. Here we see that, conversely, the number of virus writers in the many orders of magnitude exceeds the number of firms and projects on anti-virus protection, and moreover, the majority of anti-virus systems cannot work together as they stops each other. Terrorists may be masked by people opposing ecofagy and try to deploy their own system for combat ecofagy, which will contain a tab that allows it to suddenly be reprogrammed for the hostile goal.
17) The text implicitly suggests that Nanoshield precedes to the invention of self improving AI of superhuman level. However, from other prognosis we know that this event is very likely, and most likely to occur simultaneously with the flourishing of advanced nanotechnology. Thus, it is not clear in what timeframe the project Nanoshield exist. The developed artificial intelligence will be able to create a better Nanoshield and Infoshield, and means to overcome any human shields.
18) We should be aware of equivalence of nanorobots and nanofabrics — first can create second, and vice versa. This erases the border between the replicating and non-replicating nanomachines, because a device not initially intended to replicate itself can construct somehow nanorobot or to reprogram itself into capable for replication nanorobot.

Referring to the seizure of more than 400 fake routers so far, Melissa E. Hathaway, head of cyber security in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, says: “Counterfeit products have been linked to the crash of mission-critical networks, and may also contain hidden ‘back doors’ enabling network security to be bypassed and sensitive data accessed [by hackers, thieves, and spies].” She declines to elaborate. In a 50-page presentation for industry audiences, the FBI concurs that the routers could allow Chinese operatives to “gain access to otherwise secure systems” (page 38).

Read the entire report in Business Week. See a TV news report about the problem on YouTube.