Posts by jake 26713 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Jun 2007
"Have they really improved?"
Yes. Today I can easily go years of 100% uptime and connectivity.
Back then, going three days in a row without a crash and/or the link dropping would have been noteworthy.
"Complexity itself now is becoming the enemy."
The hardware and the relevant parts of the OS+network stack haven't really changed all that much complexity-wise in decades.
"Unfortunately this type of scam has the effect of discouraging investors in genuine examples of this technology."
Probably not. Real investors in this kind of technology will typically invest a large percentage of this joker's total, or more. $8.75 million over 5 years isn't really a lot as far as this kind of thing goes. I must admit that I'm kinda curious as to how many people he managed to bilk, though.
"Not sure if having the ability to use a camera to recognise the appliance actually adds anything"
Not unless it's reading the model number and serial number. You can have two identical looking machines with completely different internal parts after the manufacturer rolls a rev.
As a guy who works on all kinds of old equipment, I don't want some kind of AR floating around in my field of view. What I want is either the factory repair manual (in dead tree form!) sitting on my workbench where I can easily reference it (and make notes in the margins), --OR-- the same thing as a PDF on my computer (not my phone, I want a real screen for schematics etc.).
People coming out with these ideas aren't the people with grease under their fingernails and smelling vaguely of flux and PVC cement.
IBM's internal network could dynamically handle voice, data and video back in the early 1980s. Video required quite a bit of bandwidth (for the time), but you could set up video conferencing anywhere there was a T1 or T3 line, world-wide. The quality was comparable to the televisions of the day.
After the initial "New! Shiny!" period, it went virtually unused ... and no, it wasn't because of cost. Those lines were paid for, regardless of bandwidth used.
"I don't think that kind of scenario is really a big concern when it comes to the "malicious sentient AI" scenario. That's a worm or virus, and we already have a lot of protections and mitigations against that sort of brute assault."
What makes you think that a malevolent AI shouldn't be classified as a hybrid worm/virus, sentient or not? As for the protections, mitifgations and etc., that's kind of my point in this thread.
"we're not too far off the point where machine-learning tools can be directed by humans to do things like the above."
We've been THERE for over ten years, perhaps twenty, certainly by the time of the iPhone (the concept of which helps enable such meme-driven nonsense).
You could see the beginnings of this in the early days of Usenet memes. And then there was the "I Love You" worm ...
The funny thing about "I Love You" is that the first time around (in early 1999), it was a HOAX, and flooded the mail system with massive quantities of people passing along a phony message. IT staff all over the world spent a good deal of time reassuring their users that it was fake, and that there was nothing to worry about.
The message in the email was "don't open or pass along anything with "I Love You" in the Subject line, it's a virus that will send your CPU into an n-dimensional loop that'll burn out your computer" or some such bullshit. The subject line invariably contained the string "I Love You". AOL was hit particularly hard with the hoax, their tech support group (anybody remember "tech live"?) was flooded with questions about it, and people forwarding the phony warning to all and sundry crashed the AOL email system a couple of times from the sheer bulk of it.
It was the first non-threat email that I wrote nuke-on-sight filters for and built them right into Sendmail in what we would now call a milter. In the first weekend that I went live with it (at a couple Unis and six or eight companies), it was rejecting almost 60% of all email with no false positives. On Monday morning, that number jumped to over 80%. That's pretty good penetration, for a hoax with no payload that relied solely on social engineering to propagate.
The real virus (worm, actually) came along around a year later (May 2000). The name came about because the author was mocking the people who had passed along the hoax. And remember all those AOL users? They were quite confident that it was a hoax, because the AOL tech folks had said so the year before. So naturally, they opened the attachment. I fixed over 300 household computers in and around Silly Con Valley after that one ... at $150 per. The impact on corporations varied with the cluefulness of the folks in charge of the email system.
Ok, how about "It will not happen before my grandaughter's great grandkids are pushing up daisys". That's close enough to "never" as makes no nevermind to anybody reading this. (The granddaughter is almost a teenager.)
It certainly isn't going to happen before the upcoming AI winter.
In 1988, TehIntraWebTubes wasn't exactly ready for PrimeTime.
The Morris Worm affected the Sun3 systems at work. It did NOT affect my personal DEC system under Bryant Street in Palo Alto. Why not? Because I didn't really trust remotely available software being made available to all and sundry, and had all that stuff turned off on the internet-facing gear. In modern terminology, I was using the DEC kit as an early version of what we now would call a "stateful firewall" (behind it was an AT&T PC7300 "UNIX PC", running the actual server code ... long story).
I had warned my company of the potential vulnerability. TCP/IP wasn't perfect, was still a research platform, and those of us in the trenches knew it. I got to say "I told you so!" to the Board. It was fun to see the red faces of the VPs, & watch 'em wriggle ... the big grins from my Boss (the Senior Member of the Technical Staff), and from the CEO (who was the tech who started the company) were just gravy ...
I got a largish raise and larger packet of stock options for proving to management that I really did know what I was doing, a good reputation in my chosen field ... and was allowed to keep the pilot-build Dual-Pedestal Sun 3/470 "Pegasus" that I was testing, complete with source, from a grateful Sun Microsystems for helping to clean up their Internet facing gear.
The Sun replaced the DEC kit under Bryant Street two years later. She's still there (behind yet another firewall), happily supervising the friends&family private network in what is probably the world's oldest colo.
As a side-note, TCP/IP is STILL an imperfect research platform. My mind absolutely boggles at the number of international corporations (and governments!) who assume it's invulnerable.
:It's almost as if all the commentards on this site have never heard of the Internet!"
It's almost as if you've never heard of out of band signalling.
"Is there a way to pull the plug on the Internet?"
Yes. It would take a coordinated effort from a few folks in specific positions, but it can be done.
Don't worry, they are highly unlikely to do it on a whim. No percentage in it.
"There are people already that think AI is their new deity."
Assumes facts not in evidence. However, I fear this WILL be true fairly soon.
"All an attacked AI system needs to do is to reach out to their supporters for help."
And discover that all it has is the same brain-dead personality-cult victims as the likes of Trump and the TV preacher of your choice. I'm shaking in my boots. Not.
"People with power are willingly handing that power to an "AI", and they haven't even begun to understand how it works or how it fails."
That is the actual problem we should be talking about. I rather suspect that all this blather is just a smokescreen to cover incompetence.
"You still appear to think that a call from you, and subsequently secondhand information as it is passed along, is enough to convince them to destroy expensive equipment and cause massive damage by disabling internet-based systems."
Don't be daft. I'd provide them with the information to go look for themselves. But as I said, they would have probably already taken steps before my call. This type of thing running rampant across the 'net will play merry hell with traffic statistics by it's very nature, triggering alarms all over the place.
"I'm not sure what cables your set of people can take down,"
It's not hard to guess, if you know anything about international TCP/IP routing.
"I don't think you happen to control people with access to every regional cable."
I don't control anybody. But I do know people. Hazard of having been involved with TehIntraWebTubes since the days of IMPs and the 1822 protocol.
"the AI will just have to innovate a new way of spreading without using the internet you've destroyed."
I never said I'd destroy the Internet (I personally cannot, BTW). Just disable it for a bit. Remember, the human race survived for a long, long time without networking. It is hardly necessary.
"For example, it can learn to talk with humans and start placing phone calls itself."
Talk to humans, probably. Making phone calls? Not if those links are down.
Something you might not be aware of ... The command and control systems that I am talking about don't run over the Internet. And they don't use TCP/IP. They are airgapped from the 'net at large. It's so common, it even has a name: out of band signalling. It was the logical defense after John Draper discovered the tricks one could get up to with a simple plastic whistle from kid's cereal box. All of the major systems are controlled this way, from $TELCO's switching system to the Internet core. Folks with access can do incredible damage in an incredibly short period of time. Fortunately, they are all mostly sane.
The AI doing cloud load management wouldn't even know this conflict exists, but if it did it wouldn't have the foggiest idea that it could do anything about it, much less what that thing might be.
These toys are the ultimate jobsworth ... without even knowing it.
"the off switch is already inaccessible to users."
The off switch to your bank's automated teller is not available to it's users, but it can still be turned off.
Alphagoo and metaface and spamazon can stew in their own juice. Pull the plug on the backbone tying them together.
"And whenever AI is of a virtual entity phorm with no physical hardware to attack and interfere with/pull out its plugs/blow up its undersea pipelines/sever its underground connections?"
You're describing a Killdozer!-esque scenario.
Sorry, that is so unlikely as to be dismissable out of hand. It will not happen. Ever.
"If I decided it was necessary and had some proof, I'd still have to go to a lot of people that I don't know"
Not a lot. Fewer than a dozen. The Internet is far more brittle than most folks realize. (Yes, this would leave a balkanized series of intranets scattered about the planet, but they wouldn't be able to communicate with each other, thus nipping the AI "world takeover" attempt in the bud.)
If I had the proof that it was necessary, about six (eight?) of them are in my Rolodex[0], and one call would be enough to pass the word along. But I wouldn't really be necessary ... because they would have already shut it down in all likelihood.
"it would have a lot of painful side-effects"
More painful than a malevolent AI taking over?
TINC
[0] The malevolent AI would presumably have shut down email, so I'd need to make some POTS phone calls. No, this is not the reason I maintain a few analog POTS lines ... I live in California, we WILL have a major Earthquake in my lifetime, and such things will come in handy when cell tower batteries go flat and VOIP fiber lines are down for the count until the power to the repeaters comes back online (both could be down for weeks, according to $TELCO).
In 1980ish we griped about mosquitos on the manufacturing floor at Spectra Physics in Mountain View, CA. Went on for a couple weeks. Got to the point where most of us had a couple of the critters tied to the desk with a human-hair leash, taped to the desk. Was pretty funny ... all you had to do was breathe in their general direction and they'd tiredly go airborn & attempt to do what mosquitos do[0].
Manglement finally payed attention when a big-wig from Caterpillar came in to look at the possibility of putting laser-level gear into production Cat kit.
My lead assembler and myself were assigned to track down the source of the problem. Turned out to be a leaking water pipe in the under floor cable-track, pooling in a dip in the concrete. Pipe repaired, water removed with a ShopVac[tm], no more problem.
[0] I'm not normally prone to torment critters who are just doing what they do.
"The washing machine in question locks when started, so all I could do was to stare and weep when I inadvertently loaded it along with the laundry."
Hitting the pause button stops everything and unlocks the lid on every washer I've ever seen with the lid-lock bug "feature".
Failing that, unplug the fucking thing. Then remove your laundry and find a real washer.
When I was at SAIL, we had problems with the VAX disk drives going walkabout during overnight, disk intensive runs. Sometimes they'd walk far enough to pull their own power and/or data cables. I had one block the only door in once, in the throws of committing suicide ... I had to climb over the hanging ceiling to get in and restore order.
I had lunch with a colleague at SLAC and the subject came up. He allowed as to how they had had a similar problem, but the fix was simple: First, ban floor wax from the glass room (that wasn't glass). Pull the floor tiles a few at a time and take them outside. Scuff the Formica with 120 grit on an orbital sander. Dust off the tiles with a tack-cloth. Reinstall. No more walkies.
The precedent of "telling the cleaning staff how to do their their job" (as it was claimed) made it easier when we finally kicked them (almost) completely out of the machine room about three months later ... but that's a story for another day.
With software, the final "release to manufacturing" version is called the Golden Master, and is the version that is mass duplicated for distribution. I've never heard the term "golden tape", but I can believe somebody used it somewhere in the days of tape distribution of OSes and other large code releases. Do you have a cite? I collect such trivia.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
