[p2p-research] Drone hacking

[J. Andrew Rogers]

On Wed, Dec 23, 2009 at 12:59 PM, Andy Robinson <ldxar1 at gmail.com> wrote:
> All of which depend on supercomputers more intelligent than humans doing the
> maths.


Humans can do the mathematics, we simply can't compute the values in
many cases.  A computer can trivially sum a billion integers and a
human cannot, but that does not imply that we don't understand the
mathematics of summing or that it requires super-intelligence.

We are talking about something similar here, but the elegant
relationship between all these bits doesn't distill into soundbite
form. It is something like a complex multidimensional relationship,
but some of the "dimensions" are not dimensions in the way that a
layman would think of them and that distinction is essential to the
whole notion. I could attempt to shoehorn that (badly) into bloated
english that someone would complain about, but just about everything
of value would likely be lost in translation.


> Bullshit.  Even the most obscure things have a few web references in obscure
> places.  Pretty much anything that's taught in universities for instance,
> pops up in online lecture notes, help guides, student questions, online
> journals, references to other journals.  Anything that has even a small
> computer-literate discussion basis has its web forums and elists.


Heh, your experience is different than mine. There are a surprising
number of really obscure things that I know exist or that people are
working with which have no real references on the Internet.
Occasionally it is because there is a hapax legomenon that I am
unfamiliar with, but it frequently does not appear to exist at all.
Also, it seems to take about five years for highly technical advances
to bleed onto the 'net so if you are on the bleeding edge none of the
relevant knowledge is indexed on the public web.

A *big* part of this is that the Internet has an event horizon around
the mid-1990s for most things. There may be plenty of dead tree
references, but no one cared enough to put them on the Internet. If
you are looking for some specific literature on an esoteric area of
research in the 1980s that has mostly been forgotten, it may not exist
on the 'net. For example, I will frequently dig through old political
and legislative history. There are a surprising number of important US
state laws enacted in e.g. the 1960s for which there exists not a
single page on the Internet about the history of those laws. Not one
even though they are very visibly in effect. For all intents and
purposes, those laws dropped out of the sky fully formed.

For history generally, only major, modern events have decent coverage
on the Internet. Many events in the 19th century of medium importance
have zero references. The major improvement in recent years has been
Google's indexing of century old dead tree sources, which frequently
are the only existing references on the 'net.


> I do not believe for a moment that the technologies
> you're talking about could be as important as you make out and yet not
> generate a substantial fringe interest at least.


There are a few policy groups following the proliferation of this
technology (e.g. http://www.opensourcesensing.org/), but in truth,
most people don't care.

This is pretty deep in trade secret, NDA, etc territory. There are a
number of fields and industries that have gone almost completely dark
with respect to publishing research, some because they have
traditionally always done so and others because there is no IP
protection as a practical matter. I am only partially unencumbered.


> And not one of the thousands of people who should know about all these
> secret sensors gets 'weirded out' her/himself and breaks it to the media, or
> at least starts a conspiracy blog.  Yeah right.


It is really boring and really technical. Like with most things,
people don't care as long as the right mouth noises are made by
someone in charge. The nominal privacy laws that are put into place
are theater. Many of the privacy guarantees being made are not being
implemented in practice. Even if you are diligent about your privacy,
there are well-known mathematical loopholes that allow your
information to be accurately reconstructed from the people around you
who are less diligent. And the kinds of analytics that can be done
across dispersed, unrelated, and very spotty data sets get more
sophisticated every year.


> Another thing.  If these sensors depend on forms of abuse which are unknown
> and unseen, they are inherently vulnerable the moment they start being used,
> because people figure out how they're being used and react against it.


Sure, this is no different than advertising and marketing. There is
pressure to make advertising more transparent and subtle, though it is
moderately effective even when people are aware of it. Influencing
decisions subconsciously in normal commerce is the subject of much
literature and research, and the methods are increasingly
sophisticated and effective. The recent research on this is really
pretty fascinating and makes you aware of the extent to which it is
employed when you remember to pay attention.

In reality, jingoism, bread, and circuses goes a long way even when it
is obvious. The subtle stuff is useful for the inconvenient remainder.


> You see states and corporations about to obtain the capacity
> for dystopian levels of social control, yet you do not put out a rallying
> cry against them.


A rallying cry for who? People don't care. Even among the minority
that claim to care, all but a few are doing it because it is
fashionable. And of the few that remain, most are willfully ignorant
of the fact that their "solutions" are the building blocks of what
they are trying to avoid. Plenty of "useful idiots" to go around.

If people do not care when it is obvious, why would anyone care when
it is far more subtle? Same outcome, less intrusive.


> The separation between ideology and science is itself ideological.


Science is inductive, to the extent it has axioms it inherits those
from mathematics.

Ideologies have a strong tendency to be axiomatic and hence are
unrelated to science.


-- 
J. Andrew Rogers
realityminer.blogspot.com