[p2p-research] Drone hacking

[Andy Robinson]

"Amazon's book recommendations irritate the shit out of me because
they're so damn clumsy."

Me too a lot of the time, and if that's what we're talking about here, it's
really over-hyped.  I can imagine it could increase their sales by 10-30%
because sometimes they will show me something I hadn't heard of or alert me
to something I should have read (based on academic sub-topics and the
like).  But it does NOT tell them anything meaningful about the customer.  I
know someone who once had her father buy a book on the politics of the sex
industry for her degree, and her father was getting quasi-porn ads for
months.  I once discovered the core texts on one of my university's reading
lists all come up as recommendations for one another, presumably because a
lot of students doing that course have bought them.  I've also been
recommended the writings of bin Laden and a few other weird things, which
given the things it was based on (ordering a book on Islamic networks for a
friend, a Che Guevara book for another friend, and admitting I'd read Marx
and Mao) make me seriously hope that they aren't using this kind of software
to pick out the people they profile as "terrorists".  The other sites I know
aren't much better.  Let an overseas friend log in on your Facebook account
a couple of times and the site bots will be convinced you've moved country.
Add a couple of friends who regularly post in a foreign language and they'll
think you speak it.  Not to mention their apparent inability to tell people
using 'add-me lists' for gaming apps from commercial spammers.  Then there's
the occasion when one of the search engines told me I could buy a fascist
dictator on eBay.  Their ineptitude would be hilarious if it wasn't so
serious.

"Pervasive latent and intentional sensor networks which become more
ubiquitous every year.  Obviously not as detailed as what you have in
the developed world, but more useful already than you likely imagine"

Useful enough to predict actions on an individualised level?  REALLY?

Dude, we are not talking about recording average temperatures here.  We're
talking about whether or not they can figure out which of the thousands of
people in a bunch of remote villages have got a bunch of bombs stashed in
the woods.

Sure, your buddies could put CCTVs in every village square, every home, and
at regular intervals in the woods, and hope nobody puts a brick or a bullet
or a laser beam through them - and hope that none of them wear masks or
burqas or looked similar.

Or they could hope for revolutionary breakthroughs in satellite
magnification and gait analysis and try to monitor everyone individually
from space a la Bubblegum Crisis - if domestic public opinion would allow
them, foreign states wouldn't shoot down the satellites, and nobody had
figured out how to get a homemade rocket high enough to hit them.  But
that's even more ifs than the supercomputers.

"I am have a lot of theoretical expertise related to this, so I am
often approached by implementors about specific issues. As a side
benefit I sometimes get insight into current performance metrics."

So you don't have an interest in the companies running the algorithms, but
you DO have a STRONG vested interest in people exaggerating the importance
of your particular research specialism.  People are meant to read your
posts, conclude that your specialism is *the* big breakthrough in marketing
and a whole lot of other fields, and that your knowledge is so massive and
incomprehensible to other people that they can't understand the magnitude of
its implications - so of course they have to hire you to solve their
problems with the miracle-cure offered by your approach.  Before you
discovered algorithms, did you sell revolutionary diet pills and penis
enlargement by any chance?
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