Category Archives: Technology

The Singularity Is Near

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One might say The Singularity Is Near:

AI Pores Over Old Scientific Papers, Makes Discoveries Overlooked By Humans

Researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory trained an AI called Word2Vec on scientific papers to see if there was any “latent knowledge” that humans weren’t able to grock on first pass.

The study, published in Nature on July 3, reveals that the algorithm found predictions for potential thermoelectric materials which can convert heat into energy for various heating and cooling applications.

…

“It can read any paper on material science, so can make connections that no scientists could,” said researcher Anubhav Jain. “Sometimes it does what a researcher would do; other times it makes these cross-discipline associations.“

The algorithm was designed to assess the language in 3.3 million abstracts from material sciences, and was able to build a vocabulary of around half-a-million words. Word2Vec used machine learning to analyze relationships between words.

“The way that this Word2vec algorithm works is that you train a neural network model to remove each word and predict what the words next to it will be,” said Jain, adding that “by training a neural network on a word, you get representations of words that can actually confer knowledge.“

…

As one example, researchers fed publications from before 2009 into the algorithm and were able to predict one of the most effective modern-day thermoelectric materials four years before it was actually discovered in 2012.

The technology isn’t restricted to materials science either – as it can be trained on a wide variety of disciplines by retraining it on literature from whichever subject for which one wants to provide a deeper analysis.

“This algorithm is unsupervised and it builds its own connections,” said the study’s lead author, Vahe Tshitoyan, adding “You could use this for things like medical research or drug discovery. The information is out there. We just haven’t made these connections yet because you can’t read every article.”

One could also say, with a similar amount of justification, Skynet smiles.

Defeating the Fourth Amendment

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This is rather scary stuff:

Liberty Defense is developing Hexwave, a new disruptive technology that was exclusively licensed from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) uses 3D radar imaging and artificial intelligence to detect concealed weapons in urban settings.

…

Hexwave could be the next technology that replaces X-ray machines, such as for scanning bags in airports or other venues, and it also provides 3D scans of a person’s exterior as where X-ray can only provide 2D scans.

“Hexwave provides 3D imaging at a rate that is in real time — it can assess for threats while the person is still walking, which means it is well suited for higher, faster throughput,” Riker told VentureBeat.

The urban security market by 2020 to 2025 in North America is set to increase by 33%. The new 3D detection machine can revolutionize security at indoor high traffic crowded areas, like schools, malls, hotels, and places of worship, and protect outdoor high traffic areas, like airports, sports venues, government buildings, and bus/subway stations.

Will this sneak by the Fourth Amendment? If used in a common access public place, does this constitute an unwarranted search? The courts danced around the Fourth Amendment issues when doing searches at airports by saying, in essence, “You can still drive, ride a bus, and walk without being searched hence you are consenting to these searches.”

Also of great concern is the often used phrase “concealed means concealed” will no longer be true. Statists will use this technology to claim you don’t need to have a gun to protect yourself because they have the ability to prevent bad guys (everyone except agents of the state) from having a gun. While individual and groups of criminals are of obvious concern and a reasonable justification for private ownership and carry of self-defense firearms that isn’t the primary reason we have the Second Amendment. The primary reason is defense against the state. This technology could tip the balance in favor of dependency of the state for personal protection. This leading to inability to justify in the public eye the private carry and eventual ownership of firearms. This, of course, puts people at great risk of wholesale slaughter when our government goes completely rogue:

Computer security truth

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I work in computer security. You have to know a little computer software lingo to fully appreciate this but, including the hover text, xkcd gets it exactly correct:

stack

Quote of the day—Jen Gennai

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Elizabeth Warren is saying we should break up Google. And like, I love her but she’s very misguided, like that will not make it better it will make it worse, because all these smaller companies who don’t have the same resources that we do will be charged with preventing the next Trump situation, it’s like a small company cannot do that.

Jen Gennai
Head of Responsible Innovation, Google
May 2019
Insider Blows Whistle & Exec Reveals Google Plan to Prevent “Trump situation” in 2020 on Hidden Cam
[Via a comment by Chet.

Watch the video. Genai explicitly says they are implementing “fairness” and that their definition of fairness is completely different from the definition of fairness used by the people who voted for Donald Trump. She says everyone got screwed over with the election of Trump and they can’t let that happen again in 2020.

Read her response to the video here.

Click to enlarge the images of the internal documents and read them. They are incredibly damning.

One of my first thoughts was, “It’s a good thing I’m not allowed to own a few tactical nukes at an affordable price. Otherwise Google would own radioactive craters instead office buildings and data centers.” I have since decided there are other, legal and moral, remedies available.—Joe]

Overheard at work

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I work in computer security. I write software to search for “interesting” data in billions of connections between millions of computers. Many times the “interesting” stuff I find turns out to be not quite as “interesting” as I initially thought. I always run it by others to do a “reality check” before investing too much time investigating or raising an alarm of some sort.

I showed my boss some “interesting” data recently:

Chris (my boss): Do you every feel like that guy in a movie sitting in front of radar screen saying, “I don’t think that is a flock of birds!”?

Me: All the time.

Chris: Yeah, well, I don’t think this is a flock of birds.

Cure for cancer?

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This looks promising.

A cure for cancer? Israeli scientists say they think they found one

A small team of Israeli scientists think they might have found the first complete cure for cancer.

“We believe we will offer in a year’s time a complete cure for cancer,” said Dan Aridor, of a new treatment being developed by his company, Accelerated Evolution Biotechnologies Ltd. (AEBi), which was founded in 2000 in the ITEK incubator in the Weizmann Science Park. AEBi developed the SoAP platform, which provides functional leads to very difficult targets.

“Our cancer cure will be effective from day one, will last a duration of a few weeks and will have no or minimal side-effects at a much lower cost than most other treatments on the market,” Aridor said. “Our solution will be both generic and personal.”

From reading the entire article I can’t imagine it will be available to the general public within a year. Maybe five or ten years. But still… very, very, cool if it works out.

Quote of the day—John Robb

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In the past, winning meant having the largest army. That isn’t true anymore. Now, with new forms of warfare, any small group can successfully wage war. With simpler and more appealing goals almost any cause can raise an army. And they will.

John Robb
2007
Brave New War—The next stage of terrorism and the end of globalization, page 63
[What he says is possible hasn’t always become reality (see for example this description of how we might have fallen into civil war after the November 2016 election). But I have spent enough time in the security field and that I listen closely when he has something to say and I don’t think I have ever considered his ideas crazy or implausible.

In this book he tells how a society dependent upon vulnerable infrastructure can be brought to it knees with relatively few people and resources. The leverage exerted can be enormous. How much does the Molotov Cocktail cost versus the government vehicle it destroys? What is the cost to deliver it versus the cost to defend against it? What is the cost of a power outage versus the cost of a cutting torch to bring down a few transmission line towers? What does it cost to topple the towers versus the cost to defend them?

Go through the list of critical items in our world. Food, water, power, sanitation, communication, roads, bridges, etc. The list of leverage points is almost endless in a high tech society.—Joe]

Risks posed by social media and cell phones

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Via email from Chet.

Suicide prediction technology is revolutionary. It badly needs oversight:

Facebook is the largest and most visible company engaged in suicide prediction. After it introduced a live-streaming service in early 2016, dozens of users broadcast suicide attempts in real time on the platform. In response, on Feb. 16, 2017, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook was experimenting with AI-based suicide prediction. Its software analyzes user-generated posts for signs of suicidal intent — the word “Goodbye” paired with responses like “Are you OK?,” for example, or “Please don’t do this” in response to a live stream — and assigns them risk scores. Cases with high scores are forwarded to Facebook’s community operations team, which reviews them and notifies police of severe cases. Facebook also helps pinpoint users’ locations so first responders can find them. In the past 12 months, the company initiated 3,500 of these “wellness checks,” contacting police about 10 times per day, Antigone Davis, Facebook’s head of global safety, said in a recent interview with NPR.

Chet comments:

Are there no limit? They have other avenues to explore to save lives. They could also use it to report crime. Anything that would potentially save lives. And why stop with saving live? Society has plenty of bad actors.

I suspect that if you have the Facebook application running on your cellphone it tracks your location. Furthermore, since you have given your permission for it to do so that data is now theirs to do with what they want. For the police, and others, to obtain that data is probably easier than getting it from your cellphone provider.

Now imagine you live in a relatively free state like, say, Idaho. And your social media posts have been tagged as you are almost certainly an owner of an evil “assault weapon” and you travel on vacation to a tyrannical state like California, New Jersey, or New York. Wouldn’t it be “the right thing to do” for Facebook, et. al. to notify the police? And might not the police and some judges view that as probable cause to search you and your vehicle?

And it need not be just gun ownership and the police involved. Recreational drug users, homosexuals, transsexuals, Jews, Christians, or the targeted group du jour. And they could be reported to employers, family, and spouses. Do you want your visits to a gay bar, strip club, abortion clinic, pot shop, gun store, women’s shelter, divorce lawyer, or Christian/Jewish/Islamic book store be for sale to companies or private investigators who pay for the service?

I’m not sure I want the government writing laws to prohibit such “services”. If you claim the government has the power to prohibit such activity you are also saying the government has the power to mandate that activity.

But I’m not comfortable with my activities being recorded. It violates my Jews In The Attic Test no matter who has the data.

Winter view from the shooting line

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Long timers around here and people that explore the sidebar already know that I have a weather station and webcam at the Boomershoot shooting line. I visit it frequently and sometimes see interesting things. And sometimes the view is just very cool. Just a few minutes ago was one of those times:

P19010611571110

Click on the image for the full effect.

You knew it was coming

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Technology is advancing extremely rapidly. More and more jobs can be done by automation. This should come as no surprise:

Male sex robots with unstoppable bionic penises are coming this year

David Levy, author of Love and Sex With Robots, says, ‘I’m sure women will find robots equally appealing as men. ‘If women are that interested in getting satisfaction from a vibrator, imagine how the same women will feel having a robot they can put their arms round them and having the robot squeeze them.’

The date of that article was a year ago. The male sex robots are now available.

Of course, this same company has been making female sex robots for quite some time now.

I wonder how realistic it will be when one of the male robots is with one of the female robots. Will it be against the law if someone put them in a public park and let them do their thing?

We live in interesting times.

Quote of the day—Joshua Browder

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These processes are so bureaucratic that if you have no resources at all, it really is impossible to get the help you need.

Joshua Browder
September 20, 2018
Meet the Robot Lawyer Fighting Fines, Fees, and Red Tape
DoNotPay is launching a “denial of service attack on the legal system to make it better.”
[I could see this being useful in places like New York City where gun ownership is, technically, legal but is out of the reach of anyone except those who have the money for a lawyer.

Of course I could also see government entities getting their own “robot lawyers” and you end up in a proxy war with the outcome out of human hands.

Interesting times…—Joe]

Quote of the day—Bruce Schneier

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Companies like Facebook are the largest surveillance organizations on the planet, and they need to be recognized as such.

Bruce Schneier
October 24, 2017
An interview with Bruce Schneier on the Internet of Things, global surveillance, and cybersecurity
[I could tell you a lot more. There is stuff that will make your skin crawl. Ask me in person sometime.—Joe]

Wireless devices for home protection

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As an electrical engineer specializing in communications I have a certain bias when I hear the word “wireless”. The “Internet of Things” and the involvement of those sort of things in home security is a big thing these days. Because of the surprise of context switch with this image I received from Rolf a while back I thought it was very funny:

HighSpeedWireless

Friends don’t let friends use Serpa holsters

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If you have a Serpa holster please throw it away. Tell others to throw theirs away. Don’t go shooting with people who use Serpa holsters.

If I know you well enough I’ll tell you the story as to how I came to this very firm conclusion via an email request. Otherwise ask me at match or other shooting event. I won’t be blogging about it.

I was not injured.

Update: Apparently some people aren’t familiar with Serpa holsters:

SerpaHolster

The gun is locked into the holster until you depress the unlocking lever with your index finger. You must keep it depressed until the gun is withdrawn maybe an eighth of an inch. What ends up happening is that the index finger keeps on pressing as the gun is completely removed from the holster. There have been many cases of there being an accidental discharge during the draw because the index finger ends up on the trigger and putting sufficient pressure on it to fire the gun before the gun is pointed away from the shooter.

In the report I have in hand what is believed to have happened was the shooter was moving the gun in and out of the holster practicing the release of the lock. When his finger entered the trigger guard on the partial draw and he then pushed the gun back into the holster catastrophe happened. The shooter survived and probably will make an, essentially, full recovery.

Quote of the day—Quinn Norton

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Facebook and Google seem very powerful, but they live about a week from total ruin all the time. They know the cost of leaving social networks individually is high, but en masse, becomes next to nothing. Windows could be replaced with something better written. The US government would fall to a general revolt in a matter of days. It wouldn’t take a total defection or a general revolt to change everything, because corporations and governments would rather bend to demands than die. These entities do everything they can get away with — but we’ve forgotten that we’re the ones that are letting them get away with things.

Quinn Norton
May 20, 2014
Everything Is Broken
[This appears to be true. I suspect part of it is because most people want to belong to a social group. They want to be “normal” and liked and “supported”. If you take someone out of their social support group they loose their confidence. Making someone an outcast, for many people, is a terrible punishment. “Public opinion” matters because we evolved in an environment where shared values and group support gave us an advantage. Those shared values could contain some great falsities—a rain dance doesn’t change the weather, sacrificing a young girl to a “volcano god” doesn’t appease it, and the Final Solution to the “Jewish problem” didn’t make the world a better place. But a common belief that they could change the unchangeable and improve society by murdering millions probably improved morale, gave them a sense of accomplishment, and increased the productivity of the group.

Belonging to “the tribe” is important at a very deep level. This knowledge gives us power to take down powerful forces. But to be effective you can’t just make large numbers of people outcasts. You have to replace their existing “tribe” with another tribe. Religious cults recruit social outcasts and fulfill this basic need and they will believe the craziest things. Democrats recruit groups of people that believe such crazy things as a people can tax their way to prosperity, the government can control prices with no ill effects, or people and even states cannot afford health insurance but taxing people and filtering the money through the federal government will result in plenty of money. This coalition works and is powerful despite the crazy beliefs for the same reason the rain dancing and sacrificing to the volcano gods work. We can’t just mock them and make them outcasts. They will further insolate themselves from the truth.

I appears to me that all political parties have their share of crazy beliefs and do their share of rain dancing, appeasing non-existent gods, and murdering innocent people. Don’t align yourself with political parties and leaders any more than you have to. Align yourself with the truth and work to make social outcasts of those who promote falsity. Yes, I know truth is very hard to discern but as long as you don’t get emotionally involved with the answers you find along the way you can work your way closer with very little backsliding.—Joe]

Forensic ballistics under fire

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Interesting:

And in 2016, a government-appointed advisory group of leading scientists and engineers released a study that cited serious concerns about the underlying science of ballistic analysis. The study said the practice relies on circular logic and its “conclusions are subjective.”

“It’s basically a guess,” said Jon Loevy, an attorney representing Pursley’s case in civil court. “I’m sure there’s a lot of ballistics examiners that swear by the science, but that doesn’t make it scientific.”

Specifically, Loevy questioned the subjective nature of the analysis.

“Why do we believe science? It’s not just because it’s a guy who says ‘I’m a scientist’ giving it — it’s because you can replicate results with studies,” Loevy said. “Well, there’s no study that corroborates that this shell casing looks like that shell casing — it’s just some guy’s opinion.”

I know a fair amount about biometrics and it appears some of the same issues which trouble the use of fingerprints are also issues with forensic ballistic analysis. Verification is much better than identification. That is, the examiner can say that the odds that a given bullet (partial fingerprint) matches a given gun (person) with 99% certainty. But given a bullet (partial fingerprint) then finding the correct gun (person) out of the entire population of guns (people) the certainty might be only 0.1%.

Think of it this way: Suppose each gun stamped a number from 1 to 100 on each bullet fired. Given a random bullet and a random gun you could reject 99 guns out of 100 as not shooting the bullet. But if there are 100,000 guns, and the numbers are distributed evenly, 1000 of them could have shot the bullet.

The markings left on the bullets (and shell casings) don’t have sufficient persistent “resolution” to uniquely distinguish between all guns when the population of guns is very large.

Denial of service by a spider

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I have a security webcam set up to send me an email of the image when there is movement in its field of view.

A spider decided the camera lens (maybe the IR light was the attraction) was a nice place to do a dance. So… I started getting extremely frequent emails which had large attachments. This filled up the email box on my server and blocked incoming emails from people.

Denial of service by a spider.

It could have been worse. Do you remember my story about denial of service by a dust bunny?

Pro For Sho ear protection

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I recently received an email from Michelle of Pro For Sho asking if I would be interested in reviewing their ear protection.

I expressed my interest because of the mention of rifle shooting and their website was up front about their product being useful for shooting.

I frequently put in plugs rather than try to work around the bulky external muffs required to get good protection. And besides, they are claiming 34db NRR when my go-to muffs for pistol shooting when I am alone (Pro Ears) are at best 30db (title says 30db, but the text of the description says 26db) NRR.

I received them today and tried them on. As I expected, they cannot compare to Pro Ears in the softness of the material around the ears (they are amazing!). But they are better than a lot of muffs I have used and I expect they will be comfortable with the one or two hour sessions I have when using passive muffs.

I put on some loud music with plenty of high frequency content and compare the two sets of muffs. I couldn’t determine which were better.

But, my real test was, “Will they allow me to shoot a rifle?”

Here is a picture of my Pro Ears muffs next to the Pro For Sho muffs:

20180410_185058

This is a huge difference in clearance between your head and the rifle stock. I got out my rifle in Bellevue (I have another rifle in Idaho I should try it with as well) with the least clearance. As expected the Pro Ears were being pushed up by the stock. The Pro For Sho muffs just barely touched. It’s a win!

Additional information from Michelle:

I just want to mention, since we keep getting a lot of similar feedback from our customers, I think it’s necessary to point out that due to the High NRR Ratio, if you find the earmuffs a bit snug when you first start using them, it’s totally normal. It will loosen up over time. Please FIRST double check to make sure you fully adjust the length of the earmuffs by sliding the cup up and down to find a better fit.

Just in case the earmuffs are still tight, we always suggest to stretch them to make it more comfortable. If the earmuffs are still tight after you fully adjust it, take the earmuffs out and clamp it over the box and let it sit overnight. It worked great with most of our customers who tried it.

MORE INFO ABOUT OUT PRODUCT (just want to save your from checking other resources online 😉

We have two types/sizes of Pro For Sho Shooting Hearing Protection Earmuffs:

1. Pro For Sho 34dB Shooting Ear Protection – Special Designed Ear Muffs Lighter Weight & Maximum Hearing Protection

This comes in one size only, which is Standard Size.

This is a more compact sized earmuffs, which is available in 10 different colors.

2.  Pro For Sho All Terrain Safety Ear Protection

This comes in Large Size and has an NRR of 32dB.

This was also designed with larger ear cups.

This one is specifically built for larger head size, available only in black color.

I would like to point out that the Small size actually is the Standard size which is designed for a universal fit, and the Large size should be Extra Large size. Since Amazon only offers a very limited option of the Size Variation, we had to use Small and Large instead of Standard and Extra Large. We already tried coordinating with Amazon to address this issue.

Ballistic gel tests

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I received an email from Brandon B. of Ammunition To Go about a bunch of ballistic gel tests they recently completed. Nearly 100 different handgun loads were tested. See Self Defense Ammunition Ballistic Test for the overview. There are links there to the individual tests but here are the shortcuts to each of the calibers tested:

There were some interesting results in there. I have a probably 400 hundred rounds of some cheap .40 S&W JHP I bought years ago that I thought might use as carry ammo.

And I did use it as carry for a while. But it sort of bothered me that I didn’t have any data to support it being “high quality”. After a year or so I paid about twice as much per round for other ammo that I knew was used by many law enforcement agencies. I have continued that practice ever since. I don’t always buy the same ammo as the previous time, but I always buy something which has been tested and found to work well with the FBI standardized tests. Yes, the FBI tests have some flaws, but if a cartridge performs well in the FBI tests it isn’t likely to be a failure if I ever need “stopping power” in real life.

So, I looked up the cheap ammo in the test results. It did not do well. I might as well use it for practice, reload the brass, and use the shelf space for something else.

The ammo I have more recently purchased did much better.

XKCD for the win

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I love the insight XKCD displays at times. This is a great example and so timely:

Robots

Whenever you visit XKCD be sure to use your mouse to hover over their image. In this case you will see:

Don’t be nervous about the robots, be nervous about the people with the resources to build them.

Of course, we aren’t too far away from the day when there will be robots to do all the mining, transportation, and processing to build themselves.