Robots in the Kitchen

I think it is safe to say that robots won't be replacing kitchen staff in the next twenty years.

I worked in the high tech industry and I was amazed at the advances during my 3 decade career. Generally the advances that were most astonishing were in hardware, architecture, and a bit in software. The "advances" in robots and AI (artificial intelligence) have been amazing for their disappointments and inability to make radical, speedy headway. They are improving, but for an impatient person like myself, way too slow.

If I'm lucky robots will be driving cars (on specially designated and prepared roads) and doing light housework by the day I die, but I doubt they will be doing any truly complex tasks.

Here's the "state of the art" in cooking:



More info is available at Nick Bilton's blog on the NY Times.

All those culinary students can rest easy. Their jobs are safe for at least two decades!

Environmentalism

You don't miss what you didn't like.

After the surge of environmentalism in the late 1960s laws were passed and water, air, and land were cleaned up. (OK, you can't make everybody happy, there is still much to be cleaned up, but it is a heck of a lot better than it was. And ultimately you meet a trade-off between cleaner and cost of cleaning and you accept a little dirt.) But I must admit, I never woke up one day and jumped for joy because the environment was cleaner. I did notice that Los Angeles has less rolling black smog drifting across the highways but even in the smoggy bad old days there were some days with less pollution. So I never really noticed.

Well... I must admit I didn't notice that web pollution has ebbed. Sure, I was annoyed as anybody over the mailbox being full of spam. But I haven't really jumped out of bed lately and shouted "hosannah the spam is gone!". I didn't think about it. But this graphic made me realize I wasn't seeing what wasn't there...

Click to Enlarge

This post on the KrebsonSecurity blog gave me my "aha!" moment:

First, the good news: The past year has witnessed the decimation of spam volume, the arrests of several key hackers, and the high-profile takedowns of some of the Web’s most notorious botnets. The bad news? The crooks behind these huge crime machines are fighting back — devising new approaches designed to resist even the most energetic takedown efforts.

The volume of junk email flooding inboxes each day is way down from a year ago, as much as a 90 percent decrease according to some estimates. Symantec reports that spam volumes hit their high mark in July 2010, when junk email purveyors were blasting in excess of 225 billion spam messages per day. The company says daily spam volumes now hover between 25 and 50 billion missives daily. Anti-spam experts from Cisco Systems are tracking a similarly precipitous decline, from 300 billion per day in June 2010 to just 40 billion in June 2011.

But good news is not permanent and unlike the old westerns where the guy in the white hat cleaned up the city and you could cut to the fadeaway shot knowing that all would rest safe and secure from then on out:

But botmasters are not idly standing by while their industry is dismantled. Analysts from Kaspersky Lab this week published research on a new version of the TDSS malware (a.k.a. TDL), a sophisticated malicious code family that includes a powerful rootkit component that compromises PCs below the operating system level, making it extremely challenging to detect and remove. The latest version of TDSS — dubbed TDL-4 – has already infected 4.5 million PCs; it uses a custom encryption scheme that makes it difficult for security experts to analyze traffic between hijacked PCs and botnet controllers. TDL-4 control networks also send out instructions to infected PCs using a peer-to-peer network that includes multiple failsafe mechanisms.

...

Unfortunately, not many security experts or law enforcement agencies say they are focusing attention on another major weapon in battling e-crime: Targeting the financial instruments used by these criminal organizations.

Arghh!

But Brian Krebs knows something about marketing. He remembers the old cliffhanger technique...

Next week, I will publish the first in a series of blog posts that look at the connections between the financial instruments used by rogue Internet pharmacies and those of the affiliate networks that push rogue anti-virus or “scareware.”

To be continued...

It From Bit

Here is a video of a panel talking about digital physics, the description of the world as discrete instead of continuous. John Wheeler gave this the memorable phrase "it from bit".

From the World Science Festival, the following video has these participants:

• Edward Fredkin, proponent of digital philosophy (DP), one type of digital physics and pancomputationalism


• Seth Lloyd, professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology


• Fotini Markopoulou-Kalamara, faculty member at Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and is an adjunct professor at the University of Waterloo


• Jürgen Schmidhuber, a director of IDSIA (Istituto Dalle Molle di Studi sull'Intelligenza Artificiale), a non-profit oriented research institute for artificial intelligence, affiliated with both the Faculty of Informatics of the University of Lugano and the Department of Innovative Technologies of SUPSI, the University of Applied Sciences of Southern Switzerland

Skip the first 11:40 of introductions to get at the start of the panel discussion...



At 40:30 Fredkin points out that our universe as a simulation means that "the universe", i.e. "the computer", is somewhere else and what we call reality is just a consequence of that machine running its computations.

At 45:00 Seth Lloyd counters Fredkin with the standard physicist view which is that the world itself if the computer.

At 1:24:00 Seth Lloyd explains why this new view of physics as computation is important. This bit of the discussion arises in the context of looking at Conway's game of Life and seeing how a medium that can support computation can give rise to complex entities. They make the point that all of life is like viruses in that they seize the underlying computational machinery (in this case molecules and chemistry) and use the rules to create emergent complexity, i.e. "life", at a higher level. As he points out, this is where physics as computation can explain complexity whereas traditional physics simply has no power to explain the complexity around us.

Brian Christian's "The Most Human Human"

This was an amazingly entertaining book. It was a grand tour of knowledge dressed up as reportage about competing at the Turing Prize as a contestant trying to convince judges you are human while computers do their best to convince the judges that they are in fact "the humans". Like a good Hollywood move, the guys in the white hats win, Cristian comes out... spoiler alert!... triumphant and wins the "most human human" prize.

As a tale of prepping to present himself as a "genuine human" in the Turing test for the Loebner Prize, this book presents an interesting and entertaining tale. The author delves into a richness of subject matter that is unexpected. He explores what it means to be a real person and just how you could use language to try to convince a blind judge that your are really a "human". Getting there involves many detours into arcane specialized knowledge.

What I liked about the book was the amazing depth of knowledge of many fields served up as a charming story in the context of prepping and competing in the Turing test. I actually learned many new things in philosophy and computers, my two fields of expertise, from reading this book. I also learned interesting bits about psychology, linguistics, chess, poetics, and poetry. All this learning while being cleverly entertained!

I learned of entropy, lossless and lossy compression, of aposiopesis, synecdoche, and enthymemes. of computability and complexity theory, of the chatterbots ELIZA and PARRY, and so on. Delightful stuff.

By the way, he points us at the "Shannon Game" and invites us to play it (click here). I can honestly say it is one of the most frustrating things I've ever done. It humiliates you because you think you know language and what letters to expect when, but as confident as I was, I came out a loser, a humbling experience.

Like a delightful musical composition, this book ends with a coda, an epilogue where he looks at another field of computers -- computer graphics -- and in less than a dozen pages riffs a variation on the theme of the book how the effort to present "real stuff" makes you much more critical and appreciative of the reality:

Being a computer graphics person brings with it, as most jobs do, a certain way of looking at and of noticing the world. My own poetry background, for instance, gives me an urge to read things against the grain of the author's intended meaning. I read a newspaper headline the other day that said "UK Minister's Charm Offensive." This to me was hilarious. Of course they mean "offensive" as a noun, as in the tactical deployment of charm for diplomacy purposes, but I kept reading it as an adjective, as though the minister's creepy unctuousness had really crossed the line this time. My friends in the police force and the military can't enter a room without sussing out its entrances and exits; for the one in the fire department, it's alarms and extinguishers.

...

Reflection and refraction are difficult to simulate on a computer. So is water distortion. So-called "caustics," the way that a glass of wine refocuses its light into a red point on your table, are particularly hard to render.

Reflection and refraction are also fairly computationally nasty because they have the habit of multiplying off of each other. You put two mirrors in front of each other, and the images multiply to infinity in no time flat. Light travels roughly 200,000 miles per second: that's a lot of ping-pong,and way beyond the where most rendering algorithms tap out. Usually a programmer will specify the maximum acceptable number of reflections or refractions and cap it there, after which point a kind of software deus ex machina sends the light directly back to the eye: no more bouncing.

...

I love these moments when the theory, the models, the approximations, as good as they are, aren't good enough. You simply must watch. Ah, so this is how nature does it. This is what it looks like. I think it's important to know these things, to know what can't be simulated, can't be made up, can't be imagined -- and to seek it.

Try the book. I think you will be surprised at how enjoyable it is.

The Computers are Taking Over!

How can a book which was originally published in the early 1990s for a price of around $50 become listed by two reputable book vendors in 2011 for a price of over $20 million?

Well... it happens when you let the computers run your world, and sadly we are doing more and more of that. For the gory details, read this post by an evolutionary biologist at UC Berkeley who was trying to buy the textbook for his lab and discovered this insane pricing:

A few weeks ago a postdoc in my lab logged on to Amazon to buy the lab an extra copy of Peter Lawrence’s The Making of a Fly – a classic work in developmental biology that we – and most other Drosophila developmental biologists – consult regularly. The book, published in 1992, is out of print. But Amazon listed 17 copies for sale: 15 used from $35.54, and 2 new from $1,730,045.91 (+$3.99 shipping).

...

The price peaked on April 18th, but on April 19th profnath’s price dropped to $106.23, and bordeebook soon followed suit to the predictable $106.23 * 1.27059 = $134.97. But Peter Lawrence can now comfortably boast that one of the biggest and most respected companies on Earth valued his great book at $23,698,655.93 (plus $3.99 shipping).

Having worked in the computer industry for 30 years, I for one will not be happy the day the computers take over. These machines are not like biological machines which have great redundancy and soft failure modes. Computers simply crash. And like the above case, they simply go nuts from time to time. Humans don't have the abililty to program a truly complex system that is meant to be autonomous. The idea that robots can "do their thing" is scary.

On the other hand, it is inevitable that the computers will take over. We are in a headlong rush of technological development and along the way we keep ceding more and more turf to them. The day will come when they are "in charge". Hopefully I won't live long enough to see that day. Don't get me wrong. I love computers. I'm fascinated by them. But I realize how the industry has grown too fast with too little regard for the robust safety needed for truly autonomous decision-making.

The future will be "interesting". That is both a curse and a promise.

The Truth about Education

Here are some bits from an excellent NY Times op-ed by Paul Krugman:

It is a truth universally acknowledged that education is the key to economic success. Everyone knows that the jobs of the future will require ever higher levels of skill. That’s why, in an appearance Friday with former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, President Obama declared that “If we want more good news on the jobs front then we’ve got to make more investments in education.”

But what everyone knows is wrong.

...

The fact is that since 1990 or so the U.S. job market has been characterized not by a general rise in the demand for skill, but by “hollowing out”: both high-wage and low-wage employment have grown rapidly, but medium-wage jobs — the kinds of jobs we count on to support a strong middle class — have lagged behind. And the hole in the middle has been getting wider: many of the high-wage occupations that grew rapidly in the 1990s have seen much slower growth recently, even as growth in low-wage employment has accelerated.

Why is this happening? The belief that education is becoming ever more important rests on the plausible-sounding notion that advances in technology increase job opportunities for those who work with information — loosely speaking, that computers help those who work with their minds, while hurting those who work with their hands.

Some years ago, however, the economists David Autor, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane argued that this was the wrong way to think about it. Computers, they pointed out, excel at routine tasks, “cognitive and manual tasks that can be accomplished by following explicit rules.” Therefore, any routine task — a category that includes many white-collar, nonmanual jobs — is in the firing line. Conversely, jobs that can’t be carried out by following explicit rules — a category that includes many kinds of manual labor, from truck drivers to janitors — will tend to grow even in the face of technological progress.

And here’s the thing: Most of the manual labor still being done in our economy seems to be of the kind that’s hard to automate. Notably, with production workers in manufacturing down to about 6 percent of U.S. employment, there aren’t many assembly-line jobs left to lose. Meanwhile, quite a lot of white-collar work currently carried out by well-educated, relatively well-paid workers may soon be computerized. Roombas are cute, but robot janitors are a long way off; computerized legal research and computer-aided medical diagnosis are already here.

Read the whole article.

The reality is that most jobs are subject to replacement by computer. In the short term it is the repetitive jobs, as Krugman points out, whether they be blue collar or white collar. There is no place for a diploma-wielding person to hide. The machines are coming to replace you.

Back in the 1960s this was a scary message, but a lot of the fear was couched in "what are people going to do with so much more free time?" The assumption was that the society as a whole would carry everybody and salaries would rise and we would all live happier more stuff-filled lives because the machines were going to take over and produce the goodies.

But since the "Reagan revolution" all those extra goodies being produced have been monopolized by the ultra-rich to help them to go from fabulously wealth to mind-blowingly, insanely wealthy. Instead of 100 foot yachts, they now have to make do with 500 foot yachts. Instead of a main home and one or two vacation homes, they own five, six, or a dozen. Meanwhile unemployment is at record highs, poverty at a record high, and the average was is stuck. This isn't caused by machines. This is caused by a social system where the ultra-rich have a strangle-hold on all increments to productivity. As machines make us more productivity, the ultra-rich skim off the benefits for themselves!

Here's Krugman's bottom line:

But there are things education can’t do. In particular, the notion that putting more kids through college can restore the middle-class society we used to have is wishful thinking. It’s no longer true that having a college degree guarantees that you’ll get a good job, and it’s becoming less true with each passing decade.

So if we want a society of broadly shared prosperity, education isn’t the answer — we’ll have to go about building that society directly. We need to restore the bargaining power that labor has lost over the last 30 years, so that ordinary workers as well as superstars have the power to bargain for good wages. We need to guarantee the essentials, above all health care, to every citizen.

What we can’t do is get where we need to go just by giving workers college degrees, which may be no more than tickets to jobs that don’t exist or don’t pay middle-class wages.

How to Really Know the World

Here is an fine video by Hans Rosling that looks at how statistics can help us understand the world. More strictly, it is about how data visualization techniques can help us understand the world:



I love the bit where he states that "almost every Swede has more legs than the average Swede". That's his way of introducing you into more sophisticated statistics than simple averages that try to summarize phenomena in a single number.

You can think of the above as an hour long infomercial for Rosling's wonderful site that lets you explore data: Gapminder.org.

Something to be Positive About

This sounds like good news to me. Google announces the Google Earth Engine...



Having worked with a company that built ground stations and collected remote sensing data and made claims for years that it wanted to "help the world" by making the data available, I became cynical. The urge to collect fees was like feudal Europe: all the tolls meant nobody went anywhere. But Google is in the business of hiding fees in a way that makes things "free" and lets things flourish. Google makes a ton of money, but it does it in a way that lowers costs for users so the users are happy and willing to jump in and use the data. Finally, after 30+ years, all the Landsat data will be easily accessible (hopefully freely accessible) for analysis.

Here's a bit from a report that tempers my enthusiasm:

In its current form, users of GEE can view imagery that had been processed previously with some basic image classification. Landsat and MODIS imagery are available for viewing from many choices in a limited image catalog. Users can select imagery from the catalog and view the data in the GEE workspace. Many organizations were involved in the image processing effort and they should be commended for this project. It is truly a step in bringing image classification to the masses.

But while this effort is a tremendous step forward, most geospatial remote sensing scientists will have to wait for what we really want...real-time, online image processing. You can't do much with the GEE platform right now. And that will only come with the release of the GEE API that is now only available to a small handful of partners. You can email them if you want access.

Right now, you'll have to be satisfied with simply viewing the results of image processing by others. But I had a hard time discerning what the imagery was trying to portray. The lack of a legend for each classified image hinders interpretation. Sorry, but a map isn't a map without a legend. You can choose an image to view, zoom and pan, but not much more. Viewers will have to go to each project website for more details (a link is supplied with some project imagery). Check out the Map Gallery for examples.

Oh well... here's hoping they move to make the real-time tools available to let you do image classification and analysis. Putting information into the hands of people unleashes incredible advances in knowledge. Some kid in some corner of the world will amaze us with new technologies if we can let him get his hands on this satellite data with the computing power to seriously investigate it.

War By Other Means

Here is an interesting article on the Stuxnet virus which was built by some Western intelligence agency/military and used to trash Iran's nuclear program:

Here's how it worked, according to experts who have examined the worm:
--The nuclear facility in Iran runs an “air gap” security system, meaning it has no connections to the Web, making it secure from outside penetration. Stuxnet was designed and sent into the area around Iran's Natanz nuclear power plant -- just how may never be known -- to infect a number of computers on the assumption that someone working in the plant would take work home on a flash drive, acquire the worm and then bring it back to the plant.

--Once the worm was inside the plant, the next step was to get the computer system there to trust it and allow it into the system. That was accomplished because the worm contained a “digital certificate” stolen from JMicron, a large company in an industrial park in Taiwan. (When the worm was later discovered it quickly replaced the original digital certificate with another certificate, also stolen from another company, Realtek, a few doors down in the same industrial park in Taiwan.)

--Once allowed entry, the worm contained four “Zero Day” elements in its first target, the Windows 7 operating system that controlled the overall operation of the plant. Zero Day elements are rare and extremely valuable vulnerabilities in a computer system that can be exploited only once. Two of the vulnerabilities were known, but the other two had never been discovered. Experts say no hacker would waste Zero Days in that manner.

--After penetrating the Windows 7 operating system, the code then targeted the “frequency converters” that ran the centrifuges. To do that it used specifications from the manufacturers of the converters. One was Vacon, a Finnish Company, and the other Fararo Paya, an Iranian company. What surprises experts at this step is that the Iranian company was so secret that not even the IAEA knew about it.

--The worm also knew that the complex control system that ran the centrifuges was built by Siemens, the German manufacturer, and -- remarkably -- how that system worked as well and how to mask its activities from it.

--Masking itself from the plant's security and other systems, the worm then ordered the centrifuges to rotate extremely fast, and then to slow down precipitously. This damaged the converter, the centrifuges and the bearings, and it corrupted the uranium in the tubes. It also left Iranian nuclear engineers wondering what was wrong, as computer checks showed no malfunctions in the operating system.

Estimates are that this went on for more than a year, leaving the Iranian program in chaos. And as it did, the worm grew and adapted throughout the system. As new worms entered the system, they would meet and adapt and become increasingly sophisticated.

During this time the worms reported back to two servers that had to be run by intelligence agencies, one in Denmark and one in Malaysia. The servers monitored the worms and were shut down once the worm had infiltrated Natanz. Efforts to find those servers since then have yielded no results.
This went on until June of last year, when a Belarusan company working on the Iranian power plant in Beshehr discovered it in one of its machines. It quickly put out a notice on a Web network monitored by computer security experts around the world. Ordinarily these experts would immediately begin tracing the worm and dissecting it, looking for clues about its origin and other details.

But that didn’t happen, because within minutes all the alert sites came under attack and were inoperative for 24 hours.

“I had to use e-mail to send notices but I couldn’t reach everyone. Whoever made the worm had a full day to eliminate all traces of the worm that might lead us them,” Eric Byres, a computer security expert who has examined the Stuxnet. “No hacker could have done that.”

Experts, including inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency, say that, despite Iran's claims to the contrary, the worm was successful in its goal: causing confusion among Iran’s nuclear engineers and disabling their nuclear program.

Because of the secrecy surrounding the Iranian program, no one can be certain of the full extent of the damage. But sources inside Iran and elsewhere say that the Iranian centrifuge program has been operating far below its capacity and that the uranium enrichment program had “stagnated” during the time the worm penetrated the underground facility. Only 4,000 of the 9,000 centrifuges Iran was known to have were put into use. Some suspect that is because of the critical need to replace ones that were damaged.

Go read the whole article.

Kevin Kelly's "What Technology Wants"

This is a "breathless with excitement" book. Kelly tries to present himself as a sober assessor of the role of technology and our relationship with it. But in reality, this is like walking into a big toy story with a 5 year old. Kelly is all atremble and all aglow with his excitement over technology. I share that. But Kelly goes quite a bit further than I would. He see "the technium" as he calls it, a seventh kingdom of life to place up there with the standard six kingdoms. That will surprise a lot of people. But it gives you a clue of how deep his enthusiasm runs.

The book is full of delightful facts. For those who love to sneak a peek at the width and depth of human knowledge, this book is a good one. It is full of interesting facts about technology, humans, history, and speculations. You won't be disappointed with this book. My interest didn't lag. I confess that about three-quarters of the way through I blinked and realized that Kelly was more of an academic than I realized. He is in love with his ideas. But his feet aren't always on the ground. My realization came with chapter ten (of fourteen) entitled "The Unabomber was Right".

As I read that chapter I realized that Kevin Kelly was an academic. He worries with his argument like a dog with a bone. But he fails to show the one concern which is most basic: the Unabomber never showed any concern for people. He developed his "manifesto" dealing with abstractions about technology and "people" but never about any flesh-and-blood person. Kelly does the same with his treatment of this "argument" from the Unabomber. My view is that you don't waste your time "arguing" with a madman. The Unabomber was lashing out at his own shortcomings and using the world as his whipping post. The Unabomber showed no care for humans.

Kelly is right to point out the deep hypocrisy of the Unabomber in "getting away from it all" but depending on the outside world to feed him. The bit about riding his bike to the little town to rent a car and drive to the city to stock up on supplies is perfect. Here's a guy who hates "the system" but rather than really go out in the woods and do it all for himself, he is hiding out in the woods and using civilization to feed, cloth, and entertain himself (I'm thinking of the shelf of books in his cabin).

I get really tired of anti-modernism. Kelly points out the fatal flaw in all of them: they are like Thoreau, they rhapsodize about their little lake in the woods, but in reality they never cut loose of society and the technological goodies. They simply don't face up to the fact that if you give up technology you will die, alone, cold, and starving. You have to go back to pre-pre-humans to find any creature in our lineage who didn't use technology.

Here's a taste of the Kelly in one of his flights of rapture:

The conflict that technium triggers in our hearts is due to our refusal to accpet our nature -- the truth is that we are continuous with the machines we create. We are self-made humans, our own best invention. When we reject technology as a whole, it is a brand of self-hatred.

"We trust in nature, but we hope in technology," says Brian Arthur. That hope lies in embracing our own natures. By aligning ourselves with the imperative of the technium, we can be more prepared to steer it where we can and more aware of where we are going. By following what technology wants, we can be more ready to capture its full gifts.

I don't buy into his anthropomorphizing technology. It is lifeless. It is just the stuff we have created and use. It doesn't have a life of its own as a "seventh kingdom". If we have a nuclear winter tomorrow, that is it for us and for the technology. If we have a sudden religious revival and all go "back to the country" then technologies dies. It has no life outside of us.

The one place where I am willing to give it some life is as we develop autonomous tools. But sixty years ago Alan Turing was arguing that our computers could emulate us. He thought they would in maybe 20 years. They haven't yet. The AI folks keep telling us "20 years" just like the fusion energy folks for 50 years have been tellingus "20 years" and it will happen.

I believe there is a future with intelligent machines. But it much more likely that it is 100 years out and not 20 years out. It might even be 500 years out. There is no serious science of intelligent matter. There's a computer "science" of AI and algorithms. But that is light years from a thinking machine able to hold an intelligent conversation.

Here's Kelly getting mystical again, but this I do agree with:

Unlike the Amish and minimites, the tens of millions of migrants headed into cities each year may invent a tool that will unleash choices for someone else. If they don't then their children will. Our mission as humans is not only to discover our fullest selves in the technium, and to find full contentment, but to expand the possibilities for others. Greater technology will selfishly unleash our talents, but it will also unselfishly unleash others: our children, and all children to come.

Compare that to this over-the-top anthropomorphic version:

So what does technology want? Technology wants what we want - the same long list of merits we crave. When a technology has found its ideal role in the world, it becomes an active agent in increasing the options, choices, and possibilities of others. Our task is to encourage the development of each new invention toward this inherent good, to align it in the same direction that all life is headed. Our choice in the technium -- and it is a real and significant choice -- is to steer our creations toward those versions, those manifestations, that maximize that technology's benefits, and to keep it from thwarting itself.

I enjoyed the book, but I don't take it that seriously. It is more poetry than science. It is a visionary cutting lose with a riff that is his fantasy.

The chapter on the Unabomber is where I turned on Kelly. To waste time on the "manifesto" of a homicidal narcissist was too much. The poetry lost its shimmer in that chapter. And the fact that Kelly didn't realize that he was following the Unabomber into the airy-fairy world of abstract "causes" without any humanity really bothered me. I'm sure Kevin Kelly is a nice enough guy, but to buy into arguments about abstract nouns when killing and maiming of real flesh-and-blood people is invoved. That's just too much for me. I part company from Kelly at that point. The book lost its poetry at that point. After that I became obsessed with seeing the ridiculous generalizations in Kelly's arguments. I couldn't get back to the poetry.

Israel has Attacked Iran?

There is a lot of bad blood between Israel and Iran. Iran's President has publicly stated on many occasions that he sees Israel as a Zionist state with no right to exist. With Iran busy building nuclear bombs and upgrading its existing missiles to deliver the bombs to Israel, it looks like Israel has taken the first discreet step in a war against Iran:



There is a bit more information about the Stuxnet worm on the Wikipedia site.

Update 2010sep26: Here is a bit from a NY Times article:

Given the sophistication of the worm and its aim at specific industrial systems, many experts believe it is most probably the work of a state, rather than independent hackers. The worm is able to attack computers that are disconnected from the Internet, usually to protect them; in those cases an infected USB drive is plugged into a computer. The worm can then spread itself within a computer network, and possibly to other networks.

The semiofficial Mehr news agency in Iran on Saturday quoted Reza Taghipour, a top official of the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, as saying that “the effect and damage of this spy worm in government systems is not serious” and that it had been “more or less” halted.

But another Iranian official, Mahmud Liai of the Ministry of Industry and Mines, was quoted as saying that 30,000 computers had been affected, and that the worm was “part of the electronic warfare against Iran.”

...

But the Iranians have reason to suspect they are high on the target list: in the past, they have found evidence of sabotage of imported equipment, notably power supplies to run the centrifuges that are used to enrich uranium at Natanz. The New York Times reported in 2009 that President George W. Bush had authorized new efforts, including some that were experimental, to undermine electrical systems, computer systems and other networks that serve Iran’s nuclear program, according to current and former American officials.

The program is among the most secret in the United States government, and it has been accelerated since President Obama took office, according to some American officials. Iran’s enrichment program has run into considerable technical difficulties in the past year, but it is not clear whether that is because of the effects of sanctions against the country, poor design for its centrifuges, which it obtained from Pakistan, or sabotage.

“It is easy to look at what we know about Stuxnet and jump to the conclusion that it is of American origin and Iran is the target, but there is no proof of that,” said James Lewis, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington and one of the country’s leading experts on cyberwar intelligence. “We may not know the real answer for some time.”

Based on what he knows of Stuxnet, Mr. Lewis said, the United States is “one of four or five places that could have done it — the Israelis, the British and the Americans are the prime suspects, then the French and Germans, and you can’t rule out the Russians and the Chinese.”

Here is one tech specialist's opinion about this computer worm:

Many aspects of Stuxnet are so completely different from malware as we know it that it's only natural that so many hard-working experts at some point in the analysis ended in frustration. The best way to approach Stuxnet is not to think of it as a piece of malware like Sasser or Zotob, but to think of it as part of an operation -- operation myrtus. Operation myrtus can be broken down into three major stages: Preparation, infiltration, and execution.

Stage 1, preparation:
- Assemble team, consisting of multiple units (intel, covert ops, exploit writers, process engineers, control system engineers, product specialists, military liaison)
- Assemble development & test lab, including process model
- Do intel on target specifics, including identification of key people for initial infiltration
- Steal digital certificates

Stage 2, infiltration:
- Initial infiltration using USB sticks, perhaps using contractor's comprised web presence
- Weapon spreads locally via USB stick sharing, shared folders, printer spoolers
- Contact to command & control servers for updates, and for evidence of compromise
- Update local peers by using embedded peer-to-peer networking
- shut down CC servers

Stage 3, execution:
- Check controller configuration
- Identify individual target controllers
- Load rogue ladder logic
- Hide rogue ladder logic from control system engineers
- Check PROCESS condition
- Activate attack sequence

What this shows is that the 0day exploits were only of temporary use during the infiltration stage. Quite a luxury for such sophisticated exploits! After the weapon was in place, the main attack is executed on the controllers. At that point, where the rogue ladder logic is executed, it's all solid, reliable engineering -- attack engineering.

Update 2010dec25: Here is some interesting info about this attack from Tom Ricks' The Best Defense blog:

By Jay Holcomb
Best Defense infowar columnist

I believe this event should be looked at from a much wider view … the Stuxnet worm (threat vector) certainly should be considered a "game changer" … the folks who are conducting the forensics analysis have been somewhat successful in gaining high level public/government attention to this issue.

While most folks seem to unofficially agree this worm likely targeted Iranian facilities -- if we look wider -- this "attack" … or perhaps a better classification "sabotage" … contains so many complex cyber elements combined into one package that it is absolutely fascinating. I do not believe it is hyperbole to say the Stuxnet worm is "revolutionary" in terms of what we should be expecting to see in future high quality cyber threat vectors.

For example, a few of the well publicized items used by the Stuxnet worm include:

At least four zero-day vulnerabilities were used. Remember, these were classified as "zero-days" once we found out about them back in June/July -- which means the folks that discovered the vulnerabilities could have been using them/testing them for 12-24 months(?) before we even knew they existed. Discovering a single previously unknown vulnerability and using it successfully against a target is impressive!

Used "legitimate certificates stolen from two certificate authorities" to digitally sign Stuxnet code to be installed on target machines -- this was needed to prevent Microsoft Windows from alerting the computer user that a suspicious file is trying to install on the computer. This is huge! Imagine if someone was able to steal a genuine SSL/TLS certificate for YOUR online bank from VeriSign or Entrust and set-up a web site that was an exact clone of YOUR online bank. If you accessed the cloned web site -- your web browser would NOT alert you to any problems with the fake web site because the site uses a valid certificate -- the entire Internet online commerce model is based on this "trust" of Certificate Authorities.
Sound unrealistic … how about this … anyone else remember 10 years ago when VeriSign issued two Microsoft certificates to someone posing as a Microsoft employee? Imagine what they could have done with those certificates … perhaps create their own "special" Microsoft Windows patch … how many folks would download and install? We often trust major companies and our systems will trust the process if the source file is using a "trusted" Certificate Authority (VeriSign for example) security certificate to sign the files! To further highlight this issue … to this day the only two "Untrusted Publishers" certificates installed in our Internet Explorer browsers are for Microsoft from VeriSign!
Numerous propagation methods -- USB drives, network shares, other peer-to-peer methods, etc. Interesting to see the Conficker vulnerability (MS08-067) was one of the Stuxnet propagation options. Depending on what type/version/patch level of Windows the worm is residing determines which propagation method it will use. (Amazing)
Command and Control options -- via Internet or peer-to-peer if Internet access is no longer available.
Very specific configuration of the target environment is needed to activate the Stuxnet payload (manufacturer, specific product type, and unique product configuration are examples) … the intelligence and reconnaissance needed of the target must have been incredible.
The goal does not seem to have been destruction -- rather interruption/delay. The payload modified the speed of very specific high speed motors and at seemingly random intervals. How many people knew weapons-grade uranium enrichment requires long periods of constant high speed motor action?
These examples do not include the many other specific SCADA asset features the worm is targeting to validate prior to payload release/action -- amazing!

With the complexity of this cyber "event" it should change how we view future potential threat vectors -- from both the government (at varying levels and organizations) and civilian perspective. The possibility of this type of complex/specifically targeted cyber threat has now been proven in the wild. It is only a matter of time before we identify a similar event has occurred or is occurring right now.

The potential targets are only limited by our imaginations. I would expect both Nation States and common Cyber Criminals have been analyzing the same materials we are and developing new ingenious complex threat vectors into critical infrastructure, defense assets (government and civilian), financial environments, technology resources, and numerous other industries depending on the target niche market.

The goal would not have to be "global domination" or "nation destruction" -- in fact, I would propose the most dangerous outcome of this event will be the smaller -- highly sophisticated/complex -- threats that are successful but stay under the radar. They launch, are successful, and either destroy themselves or are jettisoned as expendable. (From both Nation States and common Cyber Criminals)

One interesting "pie in the sky" future item -- will Cyber Criminals be able to pull together a team of experts similar to the Stuxnet team (Cyber Mercenaries … a field that we can assume is growing quickly!) to create the civilian Stuxnet equivalent -- perhaps for historic financial gain or nearly any other historic event. Sounds like a Hollywood movie doesn't it … I assume everyone has seen "Live Free of Die Hard"…

Finally, here are some additional background resources and great reading if interested:

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/11/stuxnet-clues/
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/09/stuxnet/
http://www.symantec.com/business/theme.jsp?themeid=stuxnet
http://www.tofinosecurity.com/blog/stuxnet-mitigation-matrix

Jay Holcomb is an assistant professor in the cyber/information assurance depart of the National Defense University.

A Little Bit of Computer History

I've been reading Robert X. Cringely for about two decades. He is always "lively" and entertaining and knowledgeable. Here's a bit from a recent post that harks back to the "good old days" of 1993 in computing history:

There were two high points for me at DefCon 1. First was the appearance of Dan Farmer, then head of data security for Sun Microsystems. Dressed all in black leather with flaming shoulder-length red hair and a groupie on each arm, Dan sat literally making-out in the back row until it was time for his presentation. But that presentation was far more entertaining than the smooching. In a series of rapid-fire slides Farmer showed dozens of ways in which crackers had attacked Sun’s network. He explained techniques that had failed at Sun but would probably have succeeded at most other companies. It was a master class in computer crime and his point, other than to prove that Dan was the smartest guy in the room, was to urge the crackers to at least be more original in their attacks!

But the best part of DefCon 1 was the battle between the kids and hotel security. Contrary to popular belief, breaking into Pentagon computer systems was not very lucrative, so many of the participants in that early DefCon did not have money for hotel rooms. The Dark Tangent handled this by renting the single large meeting room 24 hours per day so it could be used after hours for sleeping. Alas, someone forgot to explain this to the 6AM security shift at the Sands. Just as the hardy group of adventurers returned from a late-night break-in at the local telephone company substation, fresh security goons closed the meeting room and threw the kids out.

It is not a good idea to annoy a computer cracker, but it is a very bad idea to annoy a group of computer crackers bent on impressing each other.

The meeting reconvened at 9 or 10 with the topic suddenly changed to Revenge on the Sands. Gail Thackeray, then a U. S. Attorney from Arizona who at that moment had approximately half the room under indictment, rose to offer her services representing the kids against the hotel management.

Thackeray had been invited to speak by the very people she wanted to put in jail. I told you this was surreal.

Adult assistance might be nice, but a potentially more satisfying alternative was offered by a group that had breached the hotel phone system, gained access to the computer network, obtained root level access to the VAX minicomputer that ran the Sands casino, and were ready at any moment to shut the sucker down. It came to a vote: accept Thackeray’s offer of assistance or shut down the casino.

There was no real contest: they voted to nuke the casino. Not one to be a party pooper, I voted with the majority.

There more, go read the whole post.

Interview with the Author of "Hackers"

Here's an interesting interview with Steven Levy talking about the 25th anniversary edition of his book "Hackers". This gives you a glimpse into the odd group of hackers of the early 1960s.

Techno Future

Here is one guy's view of where the future lies for computers/info devices. The following is by SF writer Charles Stross writing on his blog Charlie's Diary:

Steve Jobs believes he's gambling Apple's future — the future of a corporation with a market cap well over US $200Bn — on an all-or-nothing push into a new market. HP have woken up and smelled the forest fire, two or three years late; Microsoft are mired in a tar pit, unable to grasp that the inferno heading towards them is going to burn down the entire ecosystem in which they exist. There is the smell of panic in the air, and here's why ...

We have known since the mid-1990s that the internet was the future of computing. With increasing bandwidth, data doesn't need to be trapped in the hard drives of our desktop computers: data and interaction can follow us out into the world we live in. Modem uptake drove dot-com 1.0; broadband uptake drove dot-com 2.0. Now everyone is anticipating what you might call dot-com 3.0, driven by a combination of 4G mobile telephony (LTE or WiMax, depending on which horse you back) and wifi everywhere. Wifi and 4G protocols will shortly be delivering 50-150mbps to whatever gizmo is in your pocket, over the air. (3G is already good for 6mbps, which is where broadband was around the turn of the millennium. And there are ISPs in Tokyo who are already selling home broadband delivered via WiMax. It's about as fast as my cable modem connection was in 2005.)

A lot has been said about how expensive it is to boost the speed of fibre networks. The USA has some of the worst domestic broadband in the developed world, because it's delivered over cables that were installed early — premature infrastructure may give your economy a leg up in the early years, but handicaps you down the line — but a shift to high-bandwidth wireless will make up the gap, assuming the frequencies are available (see also: shutting down analog TV and radio to make room). It's easier to lay a single fat fibre to a radio transciever station than it is to lay lots of thin fibres to everybody's front door, after all.

Anyway, here's Steve Jobs' strategic dilemma in a nutshell: the PC industry as we have known it for a third of a century is beginning to die.

PCs are becoming commodity items. The price of PCs and laptops is falling by about 50% per decade in real terms, despite performance simultaneously rising in real terms. The profit margin on a typical netbook or desktop PC is under 10%. Apple has so far survived this collapse in profitability by aiming at the premium end of the market — if they were an auto manufacturer, they'd be Mercedes, BMW, Porsche and Jaguar rolled into one. But nevertheless, the underlying prices are dropping. Moreover, the PC revolution has saturated the market at any accessible price point. That is, anyone who needs and can afford a PC has now got one. Elsewhere, in the developing world, the market is still growing — but it's at the bottom end of the price pyramid, with margins squeezed down to nothing.

At the same time, wireless broadband is coming. As it does so, organizations and users will increasingly move their data out into the cloud (read: onto hordes of servers racked up high in anonymous data warehouses, owned and maintained by some large corporation like Google). Software will be delivered as a service to users wherever they are, via whatever device they're looking at — their phone, laptop, tablet, the TV, a direct brain implant, whatever. (Why is this? Well, it's what everyone believes — everyone in the industry, anyway. Because it offers a way to continue to make money, by selling software as a service, despite the cost of the hardware exponentially dropping towards zero. And, oh, it lets you outsource a lot of annoying shitty admin tasks like disk management, backup, anti-virus, and so on.)

My take on the iPhone OS, and the iPad, isn't just that they're the start of a whole new range of Apple computers that have a user interface as radically different from their predecessors as the original Macintosh was from previous command-line PCs. Rather, they're a hugely ambitious attempt to keep Apple relevant to the future of computing, once Moore's law tapers off and the personal computer industry craters and turns into a profitability wasteland.

The App Store and the iTunes Store have taught Steve Jobs that ownership of the sales channel is vital. Even if he's reduced to giving the machines away, as long as he can charge rent for access to data (or apps) he's got a business model. He can also maintain quality (whatever that is), exclude malware, and beat off rivals. A well-cultivated app store is actually a customer draw. It's also a powerful tool for promoting the operating system the apps run on. Operating system, hardware platform, and apps define an ecosystem.

Apple are trying desperately to force the growth of a new ecosystem — one that rivals the 26-year-old Macintosh environment — to maturity in five years flat. That's the time scale in which they expect the cloud computing revolution to flatten the existing PC industry. Unless they can turn themselves into an entirely different kind of corporation by 2015 Apple is doomed to the same irrelevance as the rest of the PC industry — interchangable suppliers of commodity equipment assembled on a shoestring budget with negligable profit.

That looks like a good estimate of the future. Nobody has a crystal ball, so this extrapolation is subject to the usual qualification "your mileage may vary".

When Real and Virtual Worlds Collide

Here's a bit from a posting by Jennifer Ouellette at Cocktail Party Physics that tells the tale of how virtual and real worlds mingle and create interesting "experiments" that real scientists can find interesting to study:

... Blizzard Entertainment regularly updates the game, introducing new challenges for advanced players. One such update was a new dungeon called Zul'Gurub controlled by a demon (or "end boss" in game parlance) called Hakkar. Only really high-level players could even find Zul'Gurub. I guess the point is to slay Hakkar, who naturally is quite difficult to kill. One of his secret weapons -- wielded when the demon is about the expire -- is a spell called "Corrupted Blood," which inflicts periodic damage on infected players, gradually draining away their vitality points. The only "cure" is to finally kill Hakkar.

It was supposed to just infect nearby players, most of which by default would be at a high level. So as damaging as the spell could be, it was just supposed to be an added annoyance to make the game space a bit more challenging. But then things went horribly wrong. Because of a glitch in the programming, the virtual pets, or animal companions, of players -- while technically "nonplayable" -- could also become infected and spread the disease, although they didn't show any symptoms. Those pets left the Zul'Grub space and spread "Corrupted Blood" to the lower levels, where it literally wreaked havoc. While advanced players would take the damage, lesser players were "killed" outright. At least three servers were affected, and in the end Blizzard had to reboot the whole thing to fix the glitch. ...

Those periodic bloody bursts are the spell inflicting damage. You can see players "dying" in the game space, and those still alive bolting around in a panic, with some taking advantage of healing spells and other strategies. But in general chaos reigns. And that's what Fefferman found so fascinating, because it was actual data that seemed to showcase how human beings behave during an epidemic -- and that behavior is not always rational, or courageous. In fact, there were a few players who teleported out of Zul'Gurub and deliberately spread the disease out of malice. Some players tried to help, administering healing spells, but others panicked and fled after being infected and also carried the disease to uninfected lower levels.

All of this mimics real-world behavior in actual epidemics, according to Fefferman, who pointed out that people choose to play certain roles in this type of crisis, much as they did in the game. There were opportunists, conspiracy theorists, and Fefferman found one video showing a player who decided his role would be to stand on the steps while carnage raged around him, narrating the action and foretelling the end of the world -- yes, he became That Guy, the self-appointed Doomsday Prophet. At least he wasn't one of the malicious infectors. Then there was the sheer idiocy of players who ignored the warnings and went to infected areas out of curiosity, thereby becoming infected themselves. And so she became convinced that we could learn a great deal from studying plague outbreaks in virtual gaming worlds.

Fefferman went on to co-author a paper (with Eric Lofgren) in Lancet Infectious Diseases discussing some of the implications of the "Corrupted Blood" outbreak for improving real-world epidemiological models. Such models, while useful, necessarily must make assumptions about human behavior -- specifically, they use mathematical rules to approximate human behavior. And it would be frankly immoral to deliberate introduce a pathogen into a controlled population to study how things played out firsthand. But what if someone could design a new disease specifically for a virtual online community and study the situation that way, using the collected data to further refine epidemiological models? That would be a dream come true for Fefferman.

Blizzard has always maintained that World of Warcraft is just a game and was never designed to mirror anything "real." Hakkar's spell is the stuff of online fantasy. Also, while players "died" of the plague in the game, a virtual death of an avatar just isn't the same as real, physical death -- plus there are ways to resurrect one's character in the game even after one's demise. Which might be why you had the malicious infectors deliberately spreading the disease, essentially behaving like terrorists. In fact, Charles Blair of the Center of Terrorism and Intelligence Studies thinks World of Warcraft could help scientists study how terrorist cells operate because it "involves real people making real decisions in a world with controllable bounds, which could provide a more realistic model for military intelligence analysts."

...

Fefferman is not not alone in her enthusiasm for the potential of online gaming platforms to improve models for real-world systems, especially those heavily reliant on predicting human behavior. Other scientists have suggested the use of role-playing games as a platform on which to model how infectious diseases spread throughout a population, the most obvious being Second Life. (Second Life has also attracted the attention of folks in behavioral economics who build economic models, particularly the collapse of a virtual bank in what turned out to be eerily similar to the real-world economic collapse of 2008.)The Spousal Unit linked recently to a great online interview with game designer Jane McGonigal, who is particularly gung-ho on the potential for video games to save the world.

The popular children's online multiplyer game, Whyville, has also gotten into the epidemiological act with its own family-friendly version of a plague: Why-Pox, similar to chicken pox, in which players' avatars develop red spots on their faces, among other symptoms. According to Fefferman, even though it isn't "real," kids are very attached to their avatars and find this quite upsetting. Whyville was designed from the start to be educational entertainment, so WhyPox is a designed disease, first introduced in 2002. The game now has its own virtual Center for Disease Control, where children can help "investigate" outbreaks via the Infection Simulator and Epidemic Simulator, learning the fundamentals of epidemiology in a fun, hands-on way. These principles can be difficult to teach, says Fefferman: "It's hard to explain why students should do something." With the simulations, students don't just blindly follow orders, they understand the purpose of the actions they take.

So gaming is now the hot trendy approach to epidemiology -- and education. Fefferman was one of several speakers at this particular AAAS session, which focused on the question of whether one could truly use video games to teach. ...

There is a lot more information in this posting. So go read the whole post to find a discussion of many more experiments and educational activities.

It is fascinating to see how simulations -- where humans are invested in the outcome -- can provide real data for scientists. Fascinating stuff.

The Age of Innovation Dies

Marco Arment has a blog posting that sums up how the computer industry shot itself in the foot and have killed innovation and created a marketplace indifferent or hostile to innovation. The article analyzes why people stuck with XP and never upgraded to Vista. But the lesson is much broader. Here is the key bit:

Our industry has collectively taught average people over the last few decades that computers should be feared and are always a single misstep from breaking. We’ve trained them to expect the working state to be fragile and temporary, and experience from previous upgrades has convinced them that they shouldn’t mess with anything if it works. They’ve learned to ignore our pressures to always get the latest versions of everything because our upgrades frequently break their software and workflow. They expect unreliable functionality, shoddy software workmanship, unnecessary complexity, broken promises from software marketers, and degrading hostility from their office’s IT staff.

When we tell them that the new OS is faster and better, only to have the upgrade break a piece of software that we don’t care about but they really do, we burn our likelihood that they’ll ever willingly upgrade again. Every time we tell them that they can now easily edit video or make DVDs, only to have them abandon their first effort in frustration and never attempt it again because our software sucks, we drive them closer to indifference or resentment toward future technology.

I worked in the industry. This is exactly my complaint. I hated Microsoft because they were the worst of the worst. At least the company I worked for took pride of workmanship (despite pressures from management to cut corners and boost profitability). We built custom, then semi-custom large software applications but despite selling one or at most 20 our defect rate was easily 100 times lower than Microsoft's. We didn't have crashes with the need to reboot. It was nutty. Consumer software needs to be rock solid because you are building mostly for people who just want it to work reliably. But our stuff was way more reliable than the junk that Microsoft pushed out the door.

Oh, and part of my career was researching software development methodologies and I always laughed myself silly at the Microsoft "system" for rapid application development. It was a joke. Completely ad hoc. It showed in their products.

The Wizard of Wall Street are at it Again!

I was horrified to read that no lessons have been learned from the recent stock market crash. (Funny, I just did a post where a right wing ideologue that free markets are better than regulated markets because they "learn their lessons". And now I have a counterexample. Within six months of the crash!)

From an op-ed piece in the NY Times by Paul Wilmott:

ON vacation in Turkey, I am picked up at the airport by a minibus. It’s past midnight, pitch-black, the driver is speeding around corners. Only one headlight is working. And I have my doubts about the brakes. In my head I’m planning the letter of complaint to the tour company. And then the driver’s cellphone rings, he picks it up and answers it, he has only one hand on the steering wheel. Now I’m mentally compiling the list of songs to be played at my funeral.

That’s rather how I feel when people talk about the latest fashion among investment banks and hedge funds: high-frequency algorithmic trading. On top of an already dangerously influential and morally suspect financial minefield is now being added the unthinking power of the machine.

The idea is straightforward: Computers take information — primarily “real-time” share prices — and try to predict the next twitch in the stock market. Using an algorithmic formula, the computers can buy and sell stocks within fractions of seconds, with the bank or fund making a tiny profit on the blip of price change of each share.

There’s nothing new in using all publicly available information to help you trade; what’s novel is the quantity of data available, the lightning speed at which it is analyzed and the short time that positions are held.

You will hear people talking about “latency,” which means the delay between a trading signal being given and the trade being made. Low latency — high speed — is what banks and funds are looking for. Yes, we really are talking about shaving off the milliseconds that it takes light to travel along an optical cable.

So, is trading faster than any human can react truly worrisome? The answers that come back from high-frequency proponents, also rather too quickly, are “No, we are adding liquidity to the market” or “It’s perfectly safe and it speeds up price discovery.” In other words, the traders say, the practice makes it easier for stocks to be bought and sold quickly across exchanges, and it more efficiently sets the value of shares.

...

It has been said that the October 1987 stock market crash was caused in part by something called dynamic portfolio insurance, another approach based on algorithms. Dynamic portfolio insurance is a way of protecting your portfolio of shares so that if the market falls you can limit your losses to an amount you stipulate in advance. As the market falls, you sell some shares. By the time the market falls by a certain amount, you will have closed all your positions so that you can lose no more money.

...

By 1987, however, the problem was the sheer number of people following the strategy and the market share that they collectively controlled. If a fall in the market leads to people selling according to some formula, and if there are enough of these people following the same algorithm, then it will lead to a further fall in the market, and a further wave of selling, and so on — until the Standard & Poor’s 500 index loses over 20 percent of its value in single day: Oct. 19, Black Monday. Dynamic portfolio insurance caused the very thing it was designed to protect against.

This is the sort of feedback that occurs between a popular strategy and the underlying market, with a long-lasting effect on the broader economy. A rise in price begets a rise. (Think bubbles.) And a fall begets a fall. (Think crashes.) Volatility rises and the market is destabilized. All that’s needed is for a large number of people to be following the same type of strategy. And if we’ve learned only one lesson from the recent financial crisis it is that people do like to copy each other when they see a profitable idea.

...

Thus the problem with the sudden popularity of high-frequency trading is that it may increasingly destabilize the market. Hedge funds won’t necessarily care whether the increased volatility causes stocks to rise or fall, as long as they can get in and out quickly with a profit. But the rest of the economy will care.

Buying stocks used to be about long-term value, doing your research and finding the company that you thought had good prospects. Maybe it had a product that you liked the look of, or perhaps a solid management team. Increasingly such real value is becoming irrelevant. The contest is now between the machines — and they’re playing games with real businesses and real people.

I'm 100% behind Wilmott. This claim that machines can safely trade was shown false in the 1987 crash which was proportionally more severe than the 1929 crash.

In short, Wall Street brainiacs keep coming up with "sure thing" approaches where they don't understand the consequences of their own "innovations". They inflict them on the rest of us since crashes on Wall Street quickly devolve into crashes on Main Street. This is precisely why there is a need for financial regulation!

Turing Test

Tyler Cowen and Michelle Dawson have written an interesting paper reviewing Alan Turing's famous 1950 paper in Mind called “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”. Here are some interesting snippets.

Our interpretation fits the broad outlines of Turing’s life. Turing was gay and he was persecuted for this difference in a manner which led to his eventual suicide. In mainstream British society of that time, he proved unable to consistently “pass” for straight. Interestingly, the second paragraph of his paper starts with the question of whether a male or female can pass for a member of the other gender in a typed conversation. The notion of “passing” was of direct personal concern to Turing and surely in more personal settings Turing did not view “passing” as synonymous with actually being a particular way.

It also has been speculated that Turing was autistic or Asperger’s, which suggests his mind was of a very different nature, compared to most of the people he knew. Turing probably was not aware of these neurodevelopmental concepts as such (they had not yet entered standard English-language discourse), but surely he knew, growing up, that he was in some ways very different from others. In public school he was judged to be “ludicrously behind” with “the worst” writing ever encountered, and he was singled out as “bound to be a problem for any school or community.” While we cannot be sure whether Turing was autistic, it is clear from published accounts that other people noticed he thought and acted in highly atypical ways. Again, Turing himself could not pass a test of imitation, namely that of imitating the people he met in mainstream British society, and for most of his life he was acutely aware that he was failing imitation tests in a variety of ways.

...

Turing does not make this point but the reality is that many human beings, intelligent and of mature age, could not pass what we now call a Turing test. This includes many human beings who would do well on IQ tests or other traditional measures of intelligence. Some autistics provide examples, as would other individuals with non-standard neurodevelopmental paths. For instance, an autistic might not comply with the presumed or implied typical social context behind many of the proffered questions. Many answers from autistic individuals might seem “off” to the judging panel, so there is a good chance autistics’ distinctly atypical information processing would fail to pass the imitation or Turing test.

The available evidence is sketchy but we do know that one BBC radio producer doubted Turing’s ability to communicate and complained about the “definite hesitation” in his speech. There is also a transcript of a discussion between Turing and several other scientists; one commentator observed: “Reading the transcript is rather like reading the conversations generated by computers... Few of the discussions can stick to a point or actually address a question!” One of the scientists argues against Turing by implying that Turing’s atypical way of processing information cannot be human.

...

So how does Turing close the paper and what does he see as the best path going forward? In Turing’s penultimate paragraph he presents two paths. The first is to increase the computational abilities of current machines, as we might do by improving their abilities at chess. An alternative is to “provide the machine with the best sense organs that money can buy, and then teach it to understand and speak English. This process could follow the normal teaching of a child.” Is Turing implicitly—and with dry British humor—referring to the “normal teaching” he received as a child, and its unforeseen and atypical outcome? Turing writes that both approaches are required and that much needs to be done, presumably in both computer education and in human education.

In other words, he closes with a call for pragmatism, a recognition and mobilization of many different forms of intelligence, and again he is warning us that imitation isn’t everything. Equating indistinguishable with intelligence may be a serious error. We read Turing as offering an implicit ethical admonition. Turing himself could not “pass” as “normal” in the world of his time and he wasn’t so concerned that machines couldn’t “pass” either. Intelligence will continue to pop up in surprising and indeed hard to recognize forms.

The history of the Turing test itself may illustrate how apparent cognitive deficits may in fact be entangled with underappreciated cognitive advantages. It is possible that Turing conceived of his imitation test precisely because he had so much difficulty “passing” and communicating himself. In social settings these facts were seen as disabilities but in the longer term they helped Turing produce this brilliant essay.

Ultimately, the conferring of status on another entity, machine, human, male, female, ethnic group, or pet is not an intellectual decision. It is an action based on the intentional stance we take toward the other. We confer a status on that entity. There can be rational justifications, but ultimately it is an action springing from deep within, generally hidden from our rational selves. We can be argued into changing our stance. But that doesn't mean our stance is a rational choice. It is a human choice, a choice coming out of us from levels which are inaccessible to our conscious mind. Pets become friends and family members. Some day in the future, intelligent machines will be raised in status to valued companions and, when they surpass us, as beloved guardians and guides.

During my lifetime I've seen great transformations in our relations to others. Those with mental disabilities have been more accepted. The barriers of race have come down. We have even come to accept that some animals have higher cognitive abilities that are dimly like our own. I fully expect this to continue and the barrier between humans and machines to blur.

In the past, viewing Down's Syndrome or Autistics as "mentally retarded" created a self-fulfilling prophecy as these kids were segregated and ghettoized and, sure enough, became so developmentally "challenged" that they were unintegratable into the broader society. That has changed. We now recognize that with strong intervention these kids can be challenged and respond with growth that, while it may not resulting in an "ideal" sociable human, can create somebody able to function in the broader society. We no longer warehouse them. We establish group homes or provide specialized services to allow them to have a degree of independence and a sense of a full life.

Computer Literacy

Here is an excellent lecture by Howard Rheingold.



Rheingold is flamboyant and a bit of a flamboyant nut, but I found this talk to be very good. It gives some sensible advice about how to be "literate" in the new world of on-line information.

• I find his discussion of "the five literacies" --
  attention, participation, critical consumption, and network awareness -- to be excellent. These are good categories by which to think about learning in today's networked digital world.


• The stuff about "crap detection" is excellent.


• The material about multi-tasking and attention is useful because the younger generation is unaware of how they are losing the social skills of attentiveness. His comments on participation are spot on.


• His comments about the divergence of schooling and education are good. His critique of peer-to-peer education is on target.


• I loved the bit about the "Penguin revolution" in Chile where the students used flash mobs to put pressure on the government to fund education.


• Rheingold's bit about "emergent global emergency response" is fascinating. It appeals to me because I'm a radical direct democracy advocate with a jaded view toward bureaucracy.

More Smart Machines

I just did a blog entry showing scepticism about a university announcing it had created a "robot scientist" able to do chemical research. Then I ran across this headline:

Computer Program Self-Discovers Laws of Physics

Wow! First machines conquer chemistry, now physics. Mathematics and medicine can't be far behind!

So I dug a little deeper...

Here's the claim:

In just over a day, a powerful computer program accomplished a feat that took physicists centuries to complete: extrapolating the laws of motion from a pendulum's swings.

That sounds wonderful, but how real is it? The Wired article reporting this "result" does show a little scepticism by reminding readers of previous claims:

Lipson's program, co-designed with Cornell computational biologist Michael Schmidt and described in a paper published Thursday in Science, may represent a breakthrough in the old, unfulfilled quest to use artificial intelligence to discover mathematical theorems and scientific laws:

• Half a century ago, IBM's Herbert Gelernter authored a program that purportedly rediscovered Euclid's geometry theorems, but critics said it relied too much on programmer-supplied rules.


• In the 1970s, Douglas Lenat's Automated Mathematician automatically generated mathematical theorems, but they proved largely useless.


• Stanford University's Dendral project, was started in 1965 and used for two decades to extrapolate possible structures for organic molecules from chemical measurements gathered by NASA spacecraft. But it was ultimately unable to assess the likelihood of the various answers that it generated.


• The $100,000 Leibniz Prize, established in the 1980s, was promised to the first program to discover a theorem that "profoundly affects" math. It was never claimed.

But now artificial intelligence experts say Lipson and Schmidt may have fulfilled the field's elusive promise.

Here is a video put out by the lab to demonstrate the underlying research behind this claim of "discovering laws of physics":



I'm not an expert, but it seems to me the claim is a bit more than the underlying reality. I can see a very clever program that can fit equations to motion. And, although they don't show the evolution of the equations over time, I believe they are able to simplify the equation. This is impressive. But the claim that the software algorithm has "discovered" physical laws is not convincing to me. At 4:20 into the video the researcher highlights key physical laws represented by terms created during the equation fitting. But that isn't the same as "discovering laws of physics". The underlying algorithm has no awareness of any "discovery". It simply has fit an equation to data. The interpretation of "law" is something the human did in looking at the equations produced. I do recognize that terms in the quation represent laws, but I don't know enough to say if the full equation of the double harmonic system is in fact a "law" or just a nice mathematical formulation of the motion. I do know that real behaviour is messy because reality is messy. The best scientific laws are idealizations that remove clutter so that we understand "the essence" of the idea. The machine is clearly not doing that.

Here is a TED Conference talk by Hod Lipson (click to see video), one of the co-authors of the above claim. Here he is giving a presentation of other research in which he claims to have evolved machines that can learn to "walk", machines that can use self-awareness to organize its walking, and machines that without any direction can self-replicate. These claims sound absolutely marvelous. But if you watch the video, and you are like me, you will be underwhelmed. The claim isn't wrong, but it sure leads to an impression that the actual robot behaviour does not match what common sense expects. Sure, the behaviour can be interpreted as demonstrating the principle, but the "accomplishment" is underwhelming. Maybe I'm being too harsh. If I had been at Kitty Hawk in 1903with the Wright brothers and seen the first "flight of an airplane" I would have been underimpressed. But to my mind, there is a long way from this to realizing the claim. This researcher has a long way, just as real airplances were a long way from that first "flight" of 120 feet in 12 seconds, at a speed of only 6.8 mph.

Bottom line: these researchers are overselling his research to get more research funding.