[p2p-research] Drone hacking

[J. Andrew Rogers]

On Wed, Dec 23, 2009 at 7:58 AM, Andy Robinson <ldxar1 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I thought none of us could learn the mathS (mathematics is a plural word not
> singular) because it was too complicated for our inferior meaty brains.


Empirically, this list uses American English norms.  I tend to only
use "maths" when referring to multiple fields and "math" for a
singular field. Most Americans use "math" for everything.

You are the only person that asserted this mathematics is beyond
ordinary mortals; it is esoteric but accessible.  Your insistence to
the contrary reads like an inferiority complex.


> The onus is on you to MAKE me
> interested by showing how what you think I should study is central to what
> I'm trying to find out.


Why? I don't care about behavioral prediction. I only mention it
because it will have a very significant social impact in the
not-too-distant future, a relevant factor that is being ignored.


> If that was dumbed down then I don't fancy your chances ever teaching
> anything.  Every one of your posts contained undefined technical
> terminology, such as 'autonomous and algorithmic in a pure sense', 'ambient
> entropy', 'finite state machines', 'cryptographic lack of predictability',
> etc etc.


You are correct, I have no skill at teaching the basics. When I teach
these subjects (which I do, incidentally) I can assume a
graduate-level understanding of theoretical computer science in
relevant fields. The terms that you found confusing above are
undergraduate level; if I had to elaborate on what a "finite state
machine" is, we'd never get to the point.


> On the occasions where I was concerned enough that you might mean something
> interesting to actually go looking - as in the case of your deus ex machina
> "pervasive latent and intentional sensor networks" - the concept either
> didn't turn up on Google or only turned up in contexts (such as weather
> readings) which are not relevant.


The Internet has a certain myopia in that it primarily reflects the
public meme space.  If it isn't in the public consciousness, it
doesn't exist. This is a nascent area, but the infrastructure is ahead
of the applications and analytic technology. There are more latent
sensor networks than most people would ever imagine, the existence of
many of them being buried in technical documentation that spans
industries as parts of uninteresting products. It isn't just the one
or two innocuous sensors you might be aware of, it is the integration
of dozens that are completely off the radar for most people and
increasingly powerful analytics that can detect very subtle and
dispersed patterns. Many sensors implicitly measure things they were
not designed to measure.

Work to effectively exploit these resources has been underway for a
number of years now, but for obvious reasons it is not a PR-friendly
subject -- out of sight, out of mind. Even for boring stuff like ad
targeting it weirds people out.


> In that case I eventually figured, after
> a considerable time on Google, that you probably meant such mundane things
> as mobile phone tracking, RFID chips in products, CCTV footage, and spy
> satellites (if this is indeed what you meant - the fact that nobody else
> uses the concept of 'pervasive latent and intentional sensor networks' makes
> it rather hard to confirm).


Those are the obvious sensor sources, the ones I would expect you to
know about. There are dozens of other ubiquitous network-connected
sources that are a lot less obvious because they were purpose-built
for a specific industrial function and being leveraged for other
purposes. It is a bit like how you can use underground fiber networks
as seismographs.

More importantly, the number of sensors is growing exponentially and
their distribution is rapidly becoming pervasive.  Even if you don't
believe there is much penetration now, it is plainly obvious that
there will be in a few years.


> The only emotional stake I have in this is that I
> don't want control-freaks in governments and businesses, or rogue
> supercomputers, imposing totalitarian social control by predicting and
> manipulating people, or making massively false assumptions based on
> quantitative models which have real effects in terms of intrusiveness,
> violence, persecution, etc.


If you really care about this then it would behoove you to understand
the nature of the technical capability and its current state of
implementability. Pretending it is impossible is not a constructive
defense.


> You on the other hand don't seem to worry about this at all, but simply to
> be blithely accepting that the loss of existential freedom and the
> imposition of total control are prices to be paid for progress and for the
> final loss of what you take to be fallacious humanist ideologies.


No, I simply don't lose all perspective and shout denials when faced
with a difficult reality. If I am going to solve a real problem, I
prefer to work from cold, hard facts even if they are unpleasant. One
can't just magic a pleasant outcome with wishful thinking.


> But what I do care about is
> people thinking they can capture a limited cross-section of data however
> massive, tally this up into a parody of the real individual (ignoring
> whatever has not been captured), and then act as if the imperfect
> predictions they can make (85% or whatever) amount to reliable prediction
> and total capture of the entire person.


Who said anything about capturing an entire person? This is about
behavior, not what a person is thinking.


(...odd PKD fantasy elided...)


What it comes down to is that you really don't understand the
technology, and you object to the implications of the technology on
ideological grounds.

You are inventing non-existent limitations on the technology and
ignoring the real limitations.


-- 
J. Andrew Rogers
realityminer.blogspot.com