Oops! I misremembered. So8res’ second post was for that tournament, but his first was two weeks earlier. Shouldn’t have put words in his mouth, sorry!
solipsist
Karma: 3,073
I am not close to an expert in security, but my reading of one is that yes, the NSA et. al. can get into any system they want to, even if it is air gapped.
Dilettanting:
It is really really hard to produce code without bugs. (I don’t know a good analogy for writing code without bugs—writing laws without any loopholes, where all conceivable case law had to be thought of in advance?)
The market doesn’t support secure software. The expensive part isn’t writing the software—it’s inspecting for defects meticulously until you become confident enough that defects which remain are sufficiently rare. If a firm were to go though the expense of producing highly secure software, how could they credibly demonstrate to customers the absence of bugs? It’s a market for lemons.
Computers systems comprise hundreds of software components and are only as secure as the weakest one. The marginal returns from securing any individual software component falls sharply—there isn’t much reason to make any component of the system too much more secure than the average component. The security of most consumer components is very weak. So unless there’s an entire secret ecosystem of secured software out there, “secure” systems are using a stack with insecure, consumer, components.
Security in the real world is helped enormously by the fact that criminals must move physically near their target with their unique human bodies. Criminals thus put themselves at great risk when committing crimes, both of leaking personally identifying information (their face, their fingerprints) and of being physically apprehended. On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog, and if your victim recognizes your thievery in progress, you just disconnect. It is thus easier for a hacker to make multiple incursion attempts and hone his craft.
Edward Snowden was, like, just some guy. He wasn’t trained by the KGB. He didn’t have spying advisors to guide him. Yet he stole who-knows-how-many thousands of top-secret documents in what is claimed to be (but I doubt was) the biggest security breach in US history. But Snowden was trying to get it in the news. He stole thousands of secret document, and then yelled though a megaphone “hey everyone I just stole thousand of secret documents”. Most thieves do not work that way.
Intelligence organizations have budgets larger than, for example, the gross box office receipts of the entire movie industry. You can buy a lot for that kind of money.
In addition to current posters, these tournaments generate external interest. I, and more importantly So8res, signed up for an account at LessWrong for one of these contests.
In fairness to Hal Abelson, the pontification I remember isn’t in the lecture in question, and my annoyance is more directed at pretentious classmates and some other things edit and aimed at marketing style, rather than substance.
If I were to attempt to summarize the lecture in question, it would be “The Greeks named Geometry after measuring the earth, but hundreds of years later think of them as wrestling with more fundamental ideas about space. Hundreds of years from now, people won’t think of computer science as writing C programs for silicon, so much as wrestling with more fundamental ideas about ”.
If you think that I’m missing the important crux, please let me know
It’s a profoundish idea, and an interesting one to think about.
But (my point) I don’t think it is an important misconception for the general public that computer science is about computers when it is in fact about . For 98% percent of humanity, and a good portion of computer scientists, Computer Science is a good name.
If DNA computers were big, or nanoparticle cellular automata building large structures were a thing, I would be more for separating out computers and to the general public. I hear the meme more in circumstances I interpret as trying to sounding counterintuitive and deep, which I think is the cause of my knee-jerk negative reaction.
EDIT The people I am quoting do not live in my world. They are at places like the Center for Bits and Atoms, where they really are studying the without the computers. But for the masses, today, in 2015, I do not think the distinction matters.
If you tell a pre-industrial farmer about machines, they are likely to form confused ideas. “You want theses “combine harvesters” to be born fully grown? That may sound like a time saver, but I assure you from years of experience that these combine harvesters will never be obedient unless you train them from infancy”.
I think the misconceptions people have with AI stems from a lack of familiarity with any intelligent agent besides humans, not from bad terminology. You’re going to have trouble talking to foragers about industrial equipment no matter what you call it.
SICP’s whole “Computer science is neither about computers nor a science” pontification annoys the heck out of me, but arguments over definitions in general annoy the heck out of me. I mean, who the hell cares what CS is called? We don’t title any Physics class Differencial Equations Which Exist in Their Own Platonic Sense And Only Incidentally Can Be Used To Model Our World, even though alien mathematicians whose world runs on cellular atomata might still study the heat equation. “Computer Science” tags a class as something you should study if you want to invent new things related to computers, and another name wouldn’t do that much better.
Nice article. Minor note: the use of “launch a coup against the vice president” as the example of nice behavior added a surprising amount of cognitive burden for me. Stroop effect and all that.
With a 1,000 square kilometer industrial complex for the manufacture of slinkys and a million trained botanists.
So it has a current utility of (1-ε)10, and can increase this by reducing ε - hence by building even more paperclips.
I take ε to be the probability that something weird is happening like you’re hallucinating your paperclips. Why would building more paperclips reduce ε? If you are dreaming, you’re just making more dream paperclips.
I’m sure you’d spend your time with trying to find increasingly elaborate ways to probe for bugs in Descartes’ demon’s simulation. It is not clear to me why your increasingly paranoid bug probes would involve making paperclips.
For one, I cannot answer certain questions in the frame which my therapist imposes because I intellectually reject the assumptions that underlie them.
Examples? Just curious.
For another, I do not fully agree with the psychological establishment on what constitutes “healthy”, adaptive, rational behaviour and would not like myself to adhere to even the closest variation on mental normality. There are areas of myself which I do not wish to display as “up for fixing”, and do not allow interference other than my own in those areas. I consider myself rational enough to debug myself, if and only if I decide an intervention is warranted. Otherwise, I like and accept myself as I am, I consider most of my traits, broadly speaking, as part of my ideal self, and would like to preserve most aspects about myself.
Total armchair-psychologist kibitzing. This reads to me like someone who feels judged, or been repeatedly told that there’s something wrong with them that they should fix, or for some other reason is in an emotionally defensive position. My guess is if you felt less judged or more respected, following the shrink’s suggestions would feel more like giving some new habits a test drive than like ritually sacrificing parts of your identity.
If I can recover on my own and with the aid of antidepressants, without having to waste time on therapy for it, I’d gladly do it, but I have the lingering doubt that the shrink may be right after all and I might need to get my head checked.
I don’t know enough about psychotherapy efficacy statistics to say, but heuristically I tend to assume that experts are better at judging these things than non-experts.
A possibility to consider: there may be behavior changes that would have a highly positive impact to your future life (avoiding arguing habits which exacerbate relational strife, to make up an example), but that aren’t terribly relevant to getting out of this depressive slump. Have you tried the usual anti-depressive suspects (exercise and socializing)? When you feel better / at the beginning your next relationship, it might be worth revisiting some of the things which went wrong in the past to try to avoid them.
This comment should be read as informal musings for the purpose of collecting outside views.
Eh. I think Snape already understood that Dumbledore was manipulating him. From the interlude with the confessor:
“It’s strange,” Snape said quietly. “I have had two mentors, over the course of my days. Both were extraordinarily perceptive, and neither one ever told me the things I wasn’t seeing. It’s clear enough why the first said nothing, but the second...” Snape’s face tightened. “I suppose I would have to be naive, to ask why he stayed silent.”
> He knows. The thought came to Harry, and he couldn’t have said in words just what the Potions Master now knew; except that it was clear that Severus knew it.
The Dark Lord spoke the words “Hyakuju montauk” without pausing in his stride, accompanied by a jab of his wand; and Severus staggered before he lifelessly drew himself up beside the door once more.
“What—” Harry said, as he followed. “What did you—”
“Just fulfilling my obligation to my faithful servant. It shall not kill him, as I promised you.” The Dark Lord laughed again.
I don’t understand either of these. Though this in the mix and I still don’t understand.
> I went to the Dark Lord intending to sell him the prophecy in exchange for Lily’s love becoming mine, by whatever darkness was required to achieve it.
Severus shook his head. “Too many students would remember me as the evil Potions Master. No, Minerva. I will go someplace new, and take a new name, and find someone new to love.”
I get the character arc “Snape’s obsession was used by Dumbledore and Voldemort, but he has finally gotten over Lily and can move on”—it’s just these specifics I don’t understand.
It was the only way to make peace between the little and big endians.
Right, but she didn’t have a reason to look at the note before she died, doesn’t have the note on her person in the hospital, and even if she did she doesn’t have a reason to look at the note now.
How does Harry think Hermione will figure out how to cast the true patronus? She needs to figure out that dementors are magical manifestations of death, which Voldemort / Dumbledore / loads of smart wizards seem not to have done. Did he tell her, is is he planning on telling her, or something else?
HELL FREAKING YES, even on LessWrong. That said, it hasn’t been as bad as I was expecting.
Yes, but he could do all of that with a single twist.
Well, if Harry, say, rescues Narcissa from the mirror, Draco might call it even.
Questions I still have:
What will Snape do now that he’s no longer in love with Lilly?
How did Dumbledore hide in the mirror?
Why did all the different groups of people on the third floor corridor at the same time?
What’s up with Cedric?
How was magical Italy ruined 323 years ago, or does it matter?
How will the Hallows come together?
How will the “rip apart the very stars from the heaven” prophecy play out?
Did Harry time-turn the day Hermione died, and, if so, what did he do?
Why did Harry say that he wouldn’t let anyone obilivate everything he knew about calculus?
Quirrell teaching students the Killing curse...will it matter?
What happened to Narcissa Malfoy?
Why did the rememberal go off?
The climax and the reader reaction to it have been slightly better than I was expecting. I would certainly not complain about improvements, but there are probably better marginal returns elsewhere.
My understanding is that a Snowden-leaked 2008 NSA internal catalog contains airgap-hopping exploits by the dozen, and that the existence of successful attacks on air gapped networks (like Stuxnet) are documented and not controversial.
This understanding comes in large measure from a casual reading of Bruce Schneier’s blog. I am not an security expert and my “you don’t understand what you’re talking about” reflexes are firing.
But moving to areas where I know more, I think e.g. if I tried writing a program to take as input the sounds of someone typing and output the letters they typed, I’d have a decent chance of success.