ancianita
ancianita's JournalCory Doctorow: Let the Platforms Burn -- The Opposite of Good Fires is Wildfires.
Centuries ago, European settlers dispossessed the state’s First Nations of their ancestral lands and banned “cultural burning,” declaring war on both indigenous people and fire. This was the start of a long period of firelessness, during which time ever-more-heroic measures have been deployed to keep fire at bay.
This is a vicious cycle: massive fire suppression efforts creates the illusion that people can safely live at the wildland–urban interface. Taken in by this illusion, more people move to this combustible zone. The presence of these people in the danger zone militates for more extreme fire-suppression, which makes the illusion all the more tempting. Yielding to temptation, more people move to the fire zone.
But the opposite of controlled burns isn’t no burns, it’s out-of-control burns: wildfires.
Fires that erase whole towns. Fires that burn unchecked. Anything that can’t go on forever will eventually stop. Fire debt mounts. When the interest payments get too high to bear, we go into chaotic default.
California needs to burn. It needs an orderly bankruptcy. It needs to revive the controlled “good fire” that kept the land safe and healthy and allowed humans and forests to peacefully co-exist.
The alternative to letting California burn in an orderly, controlled fashion is for California to burn anyway. It’s wildfire. It’s tragedy and destruction.
Social media needs to burn....
https://doctorow.medium.com/let-the-platforms-burn-6fb3e6c0d980
More climate driven conflicts
Water and food are going to be the bottom line drivers of migration, organized insurgency, coups and land wars. If they aren't already.
Is it true that home routers can dragnet-record & send data to their owner from all our devices?
1.
Since Spectrum forced me to self-install a new modem, router, and all the changing of the devices' identifications that go with it, I've run across that claim. Did Spectrum tell me? Hell no, I should have read the TOS, right? And now I'm supposed to feel like a doofus over this.
I've deleted my FB app from my iPhone, and all other unnecessary apps. Nightly, I put the phone in airplane mode, shut down its wifi, cellular and bluetooth, then do a hard shut down. And no, I refused to use the Spectrum app to install the equipment.
Apps these days are evil. Stay away from voice service like Siri and Alexa; when they talk, don't think they don't also listen.
Corporations for profit and for years, have stealthily
a) drawn our data while offering us free devices and cheap monthly fees, and
b) outrun our government leaders.
Because even when our leaders want to stand up for Internet users' rights, they don't fucking know HOW because they think like consumers of products instead of knowing they and we are the product.
2.
Not for nothing, it won't be just the usual NSA and other operatives who'll be skulking around DEF CON ten days from now.
A couple of skulking rethugs from TX will be there, too, at their corporate owners' behest.
Not to mention other government officials and military people.
Finally, Biden and Harris are paying attention to getting help from the city of 35,000 that has been DEF CON for 30 fucking years.
FINALLY, Mayorkas from DHS is going to speak and do Q & A.
Finally Mark Warner from the Senate's Cybersecurity Caucus & Intelligence Committee will be attending.
There are a few TBA's on the schedule, so who knows, maybe even Biden might make a surprise appearance to praise Austin Carson's AI Red Team of hundreds. Because presidents recognize important infrastructure.
The point is, how much longer are we going to have to exist in what's become a fascist iron dome of surveillance?
I'm no big fish, but it's still the 'right to privacy' principle of the thing.
3.
It's been ten years since ...
a) Laura Poitras went to Hong Kong and helped Snowden tell his situation. She has received numerous awards for her work, including the 2015 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature for Citizenfour, about Edward Snowden, ...
She won the 2013 George Polk Award for national security reporting related to the NSA disclosures. The NSA reporting by Poitras, Glenn Greenwald, Ewen MacAskill, and Barton Gellman contributed to the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service awarded jointly to The Guardian and The Washington Post.
b) Sarah Harrison was a WikiLeaks section editor.
She worked with the WikiLeaks' legal defense and has been described as Julian Assange's closest adviser. Harrison accompanied National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden on a high-profile flight from Hong Kong to Moscow while he was sought by the United States government.
Both these journalists have laid out to millions the 1st, 4th, 5th, 9th & 13th Amendment problems that the coder world has been battling state & corporate abuse of on the nets for 30 ... years. Nothing's changed. Yet.
What Sarah Harrison says here is years old and woke: the neural network must be of, by, and for The People. Not the robots. We need to get woke AF. Good thing Joe and Kamala agree.
Why neither party can figure out Latino voters
I'd like to think that if anyone can increase the Latino vote, Joe Biden can.
A thousand thanks to Hermit-the-Prog for teaching me how to throw up YouTube "shorts" on DU! 
Some footage of the Pacific Garbage Patch cleanup
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ijg1smtVFIQ?feature=sharehttps://www.youtube.com/shorts/f09BU4WXc7Y?feature=share
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/C-zClVmal_w?feature=share
The Dictator Myth That Refuses to Die
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2023/07/authoritarianism-dictatorship-effectiveness-china/674820/Two decades ago, the United States and its Western allies became embroiled in Iraq and later blundered into the financial crisis, leading think tanks to begin praising the “Beijing Consensus,” or the “China Model,” as an alternative to liberal democracy. Critiques of democracy surged in popularity in the era of Trump and Brexit. In the United States, intellectual publications ran articles arguing that the problem was too much democracy. In 2018, The Times of London published a column titled “Our Timid Leaders Can Learn From Strongmen.” China’s state media, capitalizing on the West’s democratic woes, argued that democracy is a “scary” system that produces self-inflicted wounds.
But events and new research in the past several years have taken a wrecking ball to the long-standing myth of benevolent dictatorship. All three pillars of the lie are crumbling. Every fresh data point proves Winston Churchill right: “Democracy is the worst form of Government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”
Let’s start with the myth that dictatorships produce stronger growth. This falsehood arose from a few well-known, cherry-picked examples, in which despots oversaw astonishing transformations of their national economy. Starting in the late 1950s, Lee Kuan Yew helped transform Singapore from a poor, opium-filled backwater into a wealthy economic powerhouse. And in China, per capita GDP rose from nearly $318 in 1990 to more than $12,500 today. Those successes are eye-popping...
However, the myth of strongmen as economic gurus has an even bigger problem. Dictators turn out to have manipulated their economic data for decades. For a long time, they’ve fooled us. But now we have proof: The reason their numbers sometimes seem too good to be true is that they are.
Every government has motivation to fudge its economic data. But democracies have institutions that provide oversight and block politicians from that impulse, ensuring accurate figures. No such checks exist in dictatorships.
That difference led Luis Martinez, an economist at the University of Chicago, to test whether despots were overstating their growth rate. He did so with an ingenious method. Previous studies have verified the presence of a strong, accurate correlation between the amount of nighttime light captured by satellites and overall economic activity. When economies grow, they emit more nighttime light (which is why you can clearly pick out cities on a nighttime satellite image, and why the density of light is so much lower in Africa than, say, in Europe or on the American East Coast). High-resolution images allow researchers to track changes in nighttime illumination over time, and the detailed, granular data these images produce are nearly impossible to manipulate. Martinez discovered an astonishing disparity suggesting that dictators have been overstating their GDP growth by about 35 percent....
DEF CON 31 Gives AI its First Public Examination -- Thank you, Pres Biden and VP Harris!
While we're waiting for Jack, our badass administration stewards our AI future. A BFD! 
1.
Back in March, the WH gave the nod to DEF CON 31 coders, penetration testers, hackers -- their chance to study and ‘bug hunt' current AI models.
But the real attention of the AI community is now fixed in August, at an event that could provide a very public reckoning for the large language models these tech corporations have produced.
Tucked into the White House’s press release Thursday on “new actions that will further promote responsible American innovation in artificial intelligence (AI) and protect people’s rights and safety,” was a nod to DEFCON 31 — a giant hacker convention held across multiple Las Vegas hotels from August 10-13 that now has an unusual endorsement from the Biden administration. Amid all the noise and bluster about regulating AI, it’s the most concrete move yet to provide some public accountability — and public testing — of the fast-moving platforms at the heart of the conversation…
the White House has effectively signed onto a public experiment to find out whether rapidly developing AI models are secure and safe enough for widespread adoption — for the public and for the government itself. This isn’t a formal audit — instead, the plan is to let the world (or at least the part of the world at DEFCON this year) test the models from Anthropic, Google, Hugging Face, NVIDIA, OpenAI, and Stability AI, which are currently some of the most popular LLMs out there.
https://www.politico.com/newsletters/digital-future-daily/2023/05/04/an-ai-reckoning-coming-in-august-00095414
Tech news…
Since last year, large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT have become a popular way to accelerate writing and communications tasks, but officials recognize that they also come with inherent risks. Issues such as confabulations, jailbreaks, and biases pose challenges for security professionals and the public. That's why the White House Office of Science, Technology, and Policy endorses pushing these new generative AI models to their limits.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/05/white-house-challenges-hackers-to-break-top-ai-models-at-def-con-31/?itm_source=parsely-api
2.
The WH does this for good reason. First, we’ve seen ChatGPT4 whip out its own breathtaking AI possibilities — and problems — to the world.
OpenAI’s Sam Altman might appreciate DEF CON’s help, since he’s admitted that he’s had to scrap one AI model that turned out to be dangerous. He realizes that AI’s got more problems than OpenAI’s detected and quickly killed, and he explains some never before considered dangers lying in the learning layers of Artificial General Intelligence. Which AI developers claim isn’t here yet. (tl;dr)
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/09/sam-altman-openai-chatgpt-gpt-4/674764/
Second, because No AI executives have to open their books to government, because most of AI is proprietary coding, algorithms and AI layer development.
But that fact is one major reason that VP Kamala Harris has met at least twice this past year with AI developers; and why this past week, President Joe Biden joined her — to have AI companies prove their commitment to
“...the White House’s facilitating third-party discovery and reporting of vulnerabilities in their AI systems. Some issues may persist even after an AI system is released and a robust reporting mechanism enables them to be found and fixed quickly.https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/07/21/fact-sheet-biden-harris-administration-secures-voluntary-commitments-from-leading-artificial-intelligence-companies-to-manage-the-risks-posed-by-ai/#:~:text=Earlier%20this%20year%2C%20the%20National,Plan%20to%20advance%20responsible%20AI.
Along with that WH announcement came its request for public comment on our national AI strategy.
Pres. Biden and VP Harris got commitments from these AI corporate reps/mgrs/owners over this past year:
Nick Clegg -- Meta/Facebook
Brad Smith, Satya Nadella -- Microsoft
Anna Makanju, Sam Altman -- OpenAI
Sundar Pichai -- Google
Dario Amodei -- Anthropic
Sasha Luccioni, Julien Chaumond, Thomas Wolf (?) -- Hugging Face
AI partnership with Beijin's Baidu — Nvidia
Stability AI — ??
More than once they got the WH message and felt the pressure.
3.
Now DEF CON 31 is officially stoked, and its AI Village will get LIT!
More about DEF CON 31
-- online promo: https://twitter.com/defcon/status/1683995372866375680
-- AI Village statement: https://aivillage.org
-- DEF CON 31 schedule: https://defcon.org/html/defcon-31/dc-31-schedule.html
-- FORUM: "Hack the Future: Why Congress and the White House are supporting AI Red Teaming"
Austin Carson, Founder & President of SeedAI, He/Him
45 Minutes
https://forum.defcon.org/node/246105
Details of the WH's AI Red Team presentation:
In this panel, we'll hear from top officials and executives about how they're balancing the explosion of creativity and entrepreneurship from the advent of GenAI with the known & unknown risks of deployment at scale.
We'll also hear how this exercise is viewed as a model for enhancing trust & safety through democratizing AI education.
Panelists will also discuss why it's meaningful to bring together thousands of people from different communities to conduct the exercise across the available AI models.
Austin Carson is the Founder and President of SeedAI, a nonprofit established to work with a diverse group of policymakers, academics, and private sector experts to help communities across the United States access the resources they need to engage with AI.
Previously, Austin established and led the DC government affairs operation for NVIDIA [translating NVIDIA’s expertise in artificial intelligence and high performance computing for policymakers].
Prior to joining NVIDIA, he held a number of public sector and NGO positions, serving as Legislative Director for Chairman Michael McCaul and Executive Director for the Technology Freedom Institute.
Austin co-founded the Congressional Tech Staff Association, co-led the Congressional Cybersecurity Caucus and the Congressional High Tech Caucus [and is a founding fellow of the Internet Law and Policy Foundry.]
REFERENCES:
We Need Bug Bounties for Bad Algorithms - Amit Elazari - https://www.vice.com/en/article/8xky...bad-algorithms
Introducing Twitter’s first algorithmic bias bounty challenge - Rumman Chowdhury & Jutta Williams - https://blog.twitter.com/engineering...unty-challenge
Sharing learnings from the first algorithmic bias bounty challenge - Kyra Yee & Irene Font Peradejordi - https://blog.twitter.com/engineering...unty-challenge
Bias Buccaneers - Rumman Chowdhury, Jutta Williams, Subho Majumdar, Scott Steinhardt, Ben Colman - https://www.biasbuccaneers.org/
An Algorithmic Framework for Bias Bounties - Ira Globus-Harris, Michael Kearns, Aaron Roth - https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.10408
Machine Learning Security Evasion Competition - Hyrum Anderson, et al. - https://mlsec.io/ https://cujo.com/announcing-the-winn...n-competition/
MITRE ATLAS - Ram Shankar Siva Kumar, et al - https://atlas.mitre.org/
The Spherical Cow of ML Security - Sven Cattell - http://aivillage.org/adversarial%20ml/spherical-cow/
The Case for a Hippocratic Oath for Connected Medical Devices: Viewpoint - Beau Woods, Andrea Coravos, and Joshua David Corman - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6444210/
Announcing OpenAI’s Bug Bounty Program - https://openai.com/blog/bug-bounty-program
Microsoft Malware Classification Challenge - Royi Ronen, Marian Radu, Corina Feuerstein, Elad Yom-Tov, Mansour Ahmadi - https://www.kaggle.com/c/malware-classification https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.10135
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Gender: Do not displayHometown: New England, The South, Midwest
Home country: USA
Current location: Sarasota
Member since: Sat Mar 5, 2011, 12:32 PM
Number of posts: 36,128
