How to Build a Schizophrenic Computer

From article:

"Schizophrenia is one of the most infamous and mysterious mental disorders. Attempting to get to the root of the problem, scientists recently came up with an extraordinary solution: They built a schizophrenic computer. In a study published in the online version of Biological Psychiatry in March, researchers altered an artificial neural network capable of learning language and stories, to the point where it started "acting" schizophrenic.

People who suffer from schizophrenia often have difficulty thinking logically or discerning what is real or not real in their lives. "It is characterized by delusions or disassociation of language, often with hallucinations of spoken speech," says psychiatrist Ralph Hoffmann of Yale University, coauthor of the study along with computer scientist Risto Miikkulainen of the University of Texas, Austin. Because of that language disassociation, struggling to recount stories correctly is one of the early signs of schizophrenia. So to gain new insight into how schizophrenia might affect the human brain, Hoffmann and Miikkulainen tried to give a storytelling computer system the same problem."

Read more: DISCERN Artificial Neural Network - How to Build a Schizophrenic Computer - Popular Mechanics

Writer Cutting Out Traditional Publishers With Amazon Kindle

From the Article:
"Welcome to disruption. 26-year old Amanda Hocking is the best-selling "indie" writer on the Kindle store, meaning she doesn't have a publishing deal, Novelr says.



And she shouldn't. She gets to keep 70% of her book sales -- and she sells around 100,000 copies per month. By comparison, it's usually thought that it takes a few tens of thousands of copies sold in the first week to be a New York Times bestselling writer.



The comparison isn't entirely fair, because Hocking sells her books for $3, and some $.99. But that's the point: by lowering the prices, she can make more on volume, especially impulse buys. Meanwhile e-books cost nothing to print, you don't have to worry about print volumes, shelf space, inventory, etc. And did we mention the writer keeps 70%?"

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/amanda-hocking-2011-2#ixzz1Ff3qQpI9

I love it when people use technology for to their benefit.

More about Anonyomous and HBGary

No, we have not seen the end of this.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/02/anonymous-vs-hbgary-the-aftermath.ars

Anonymous vs. HBGary

Anonymous is "The loose hacker collective had been responsible for everything from anti-Scientology protests to pro-Wikileaks attacks on MasterCard and Visa, and the FBI was now after them. But matching their online identities to real-world names and locations proved daunting. Barr found a way to crack the code....But did he?"

Read the article below for more info.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/02/how-one-security-firm-tracked-anonymousand-paid-a-heavy-price.ars

Iron Man and Information Security

This is an interesting article about Information Security and the movie Iron Man 2 from CIO.  It does include spoilers so read at you own risk.

Since Stark is the only person who knows what makes Iron Man tick, the world's security rests entirely in his hands. Not surprisingly, the U.S. government wants to reproduce the Iron Man suit for its own militaristic purposes; the debate over private vs. public security forms one of the movie's core conflicts.

Meet the villains: Hacker, security vendor

See the link for the entire article.

Wired Article On Geek Power

This is a good article from Wired;
But behind the inventiveness was something even more marvelous — all real hackers shared a set of values that has turned out to be a credo for the information age. I attempted to codify this unspoken ethos into a series of principles called the hacker ethic. Some of the notions now seem forehead-smackingly obvious but at the time were far from accepted (”You can create art and beauty on a computer”). Others spoke to the meritocratic possibilities of a digital age (”Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position”). Another axiom identified computers as instruments of insurrection, granting power to any individual with a keyboard and sufficient brainpower (”Mistrust authority — promote decentralization”). But the precept I perceived as most central to hacker culture turned out to be the most controversial: “All information should be free.”

Stewart Brand, hacker godfather and Whole Earth Catalog founder, hacked even that statement. It happened at the first Hackers’ Conference, the week my book was published, during a session I moderated on the future of the hacker ethic. “On the one hand, information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable,” he said. “On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.” His words neatly encapsulate the tension that has since defined the hacker movement — a sometimes pitched battle between geeky idealism and icy-hearted commerce.
It is worth a read.

This Bee A Problem

Honey bees continue to die off;

The 2010 prognosis for honey bees doesn't look good, according to Jeff Pettis, Research Leader at the USDA Bee Lab.


Although hard data won't be available until April, preliminary surveys of our nation's beekeepers suggest that at least as many bee colonies have died off over the winter as they have the last few years -- and possibly even more than in years past -- thanks to Colony Collapse Disorder, or CCD.

I last spoke with Pettis in 2007, when I visited his lab as they researched the cause of CCD. Back then, they were pretty optimistic about finding the cause, but three years later answers are still elusive. I spoke to him this week about the state of the investigation.

Jeff Pettis: “We obviously think it’s more complicated than we first believed as in we don’t believe that we’re looking for a single virulent pathogen, although that can’t totally be ruled out. At first we were thinking that we’d find a single causative agent, a virulent pathogen sweeping through the bee population, and that doesn’t appear to be the case.”

I do know that lemony pays alot for honey, and if this keeps up so will the price of honey.

The Feds Want To Be Your Facebook Friend

From the article;

In a quaint presentation, cybercrime prosecutors last year gave fellow Department of Justice officials an introduction to social networking sites and their possible investigative uses. In detailing the possible value of sites like Twitter and Facebook, lawyers John Lynch and Jenny Ellickson--both with the department's Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section--noted that information gathered could "establish crime or criminal enterprise" and "prove and disprove alibis."

So who are your friends and Twitter followers?

Cyber Crooks Leave Traditional Bank Robbers in the Dust

Interesting articel; "Organized cyber criminals stole more than $25 million from small to mid-sized businesses in brazen e-banking heists in the 3rd quarter of 2009 alone, federal regulators said last week. In contrast, traditional stick-up artists hauled less than $9.5 million out of U.S. banks over that same time period last year."

Where Not To Put A USB Drive

From the article;
MARCH 2--In a bold and bizarre attempt to destroy evidence seized during a federal raid, a New York City man grabbed a flash drive and swallowed the data storage device while in the custody of Secret Service agents, records show. Florin Necula ingested the Kingston flash drive shortly after his January 21 arrest outside a bank in Queens, according to U.S. District Court filings. Necula and several codefendants had been transported to a Secret Service office in Brooklyn, where they were to be questioned and processed. While there, and in the view of investigators, Necula "grabbed Subject Flash Drive 2, which had been on his person at the time of his arrest, and swallowed,"

Pailin To Testify Against Her Email Hacker

I have mentioned Sarah Palin before. Now it looks like she will be testifying in the Yahoo email hacking case.
From the article; "Former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin will testify in person against the college student accused of breaching her Yahoo mail account and leaking some of its contents online, according to published reports."
My point is still that Palin broke the law. It looks like the state of Alaska may agree: "Palin also said the interception of personal and official phone numbers "created paralysis" by severing easy communication with her "Alaska staff". The admission supports claims she may have skirted state laws requiring official business to be carried out using email accounts maintained by the government."
Well see what happens.

TED Top Ten

I posted about TED in the past. A CNN article mentioned TED recently and I checked out a few more of the new talks. From the CNN article;
Here are 10 big ideas from TED2010...
$60K a year can make you happy
Psychologist and Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman says millions of dollars won't buy you happiness, but a job that pays $60,000 a year might help.
Save the world through games
Jane McGonigal, a game designer, says playing online video games gives people "superpowers" that help them improve the real world...
Anonymity promotes honesty
Christopher "Moot" Poole runs one of the seedier corners of the Internet. His site, called 4chan, is known as a den of porn, hacking and anonymous rants...
We can end slavery
Kevin Bales, founder of a group called Free the Slaves, said he was surprised to learn slavery still existed when he read a pamphlet saying just that...
Moral ideas are right or wrong, not both
Writer Sam Harris -- who is perhaps best known as a stern critic of organized religion -- says we use science to prove or disprove hypotheses, and we should similarly use evidence to say some activities are moral and others are not...
'What we eat is really our chemotherapy three times a day'
William Li, president and medical director of The Angiogenesis Foundation, which focuses on the connection between blood vessel growth and aggressive cancers. There are 11 FDA-approved drugs that inhibit growth of blood vessels that sustain cancers, but Li pointed out that there are a number of foods and beverages that could offer substances that accomplish the same thing -- and could help prevent cancer...
The ukulele can stop war
Ukulele virtuoso Jake Shimabukuro says his traditional, Hawaiian instrument, which he learned to play at age 4, can make the world a less violent place...
$28 billion mostly wasted on placebos
Holding up bottles of herbal supplements, writer Michael Specter spoke out against what he sees as a growing rejection of science. He says it's resulted in parents refusing to vaccinate their children due to an unfounded connection to autism and people shunning genetically modified foods that have the potential of helping the world fight increasing hunger.
The herbs, he said accomplish one thing: "They darken your urine. You want to pay $28 billion for dark urine? That's OK."
'Stop politicians doing stupid things that spread HIV'
Elizabeth Pisani, epidemiologist who has studied drug abusers and sex workers who are involved in the spread of HIV-AIDS, said nations that have followed former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's example by creating programs to provide sterile needles to drug abusers are much more successful in curbing the spread of the disease...
Every eight days, the toll of a Haiti quake
Esther Duflo, a professor in MIT's economics department, said, that every day, 25,000 children die of preventable causes, adding up every eight days to the approximate death toll of the Haiti earthquake...

BigDog v. Roxxxy: robots that you fight and ....

BigDog is a cool robot that looks like a giant headless dog. It was design to carry supplies over almost any terrain. The video below is from 2008, and is impressive. I especially like it crossing ice, and jumping.

So now the next step; "DARPA just awarded a $32 million contract to build it.
The contract's been won by maker Boston Dynamics, which has just 30 months to turn the research prototype machines into a genuine load-toting, four-legged, semi-intelligent war robot--"first walk-out" of the newly-designated LS3 is scheduled in 2012."

"LS3 stands for Legged Squad Support System, and that pretty much sums up what the device is all about: It's a semi-autonomous assistant designed to follow soldiers and Marines across the battlefield, carrying up to 400 pounds of gear and enough fuel to keep it going for 24 hours over a march of 20 miles."

Meanwhile the inventor of Roxxxy the adult robot has named his price. "Meet Roxxxy, who may be the world's most sophisticated talking female sex robot. For $7,000, she's all yours.
"She doesn't vacuum or cook, but she does almost everything else," said her inventor, Douglas Hines, who unveiled Roxxxy last month at the Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas, Nevada."

Again I wonder which robot will cause the most problems over the world in the next 20 years.

So are you supposed to marry the robot or.....

So everyone knew this day would come, when robots started to move into the bed room. This week a new robot was announced, meet Roxxxy.
From the article; "A former Bell Labs scientist, Douglas Hines, has unveiled what he describes as the world's first sex robot: "She's a companion. She listens to you. She speaks. She feels your touch. She goes to sleep." Christened "Roxxxy," the robot has life-like silicone skin, a mechanical heart, and five personality options ranging from "Wild Wendy" to "Mature Martha." Read more if you want to, beware some content may not be work or kid friendly.

So while new and unusual, this is not surprising. Science fiction stories have been telling us this would happen. Human nature tells us this would happen. But what is more unusual, sex with a robot, or falling in love with a robot.

From the article; "Inventor Le Trung spent Christmas Day with the most important woman in his life - his robot Aiko.The science genius enjoyed a festive dinner with his mum, dad and his £30,000 fembot which he designed and built by hand.Le, 34, from Brampton, Ontario, Canada, even bought gifts for his dream girl, who is so lifelike she speaks fluent English and Japanese, helped cook the turkey and hang up decorations.'Aiko is like any woman, she enjoys getting new clothes,' he said.'I loved buying them for her too.'

What can you say about young robot love? I wonder if in the future we will talk or interact with people at all.

The Killer App of 1900

"A hundred years ago, lighting was the killer app for electricity, the thing that made it worthwhile to have installed. No one particularly understood what else electricity might bring to the mass market, because other uses were generally specialized, the province of experts, the wealthy, or industry. Compressors to allow refrigeration and freezing, electric heat, and other innovations came later to homes."
This is an interesting articel that compares electricity 100 years ago to broadband access today. Here is a section that if you replace the word electricity with broadband it could be used today.
"In researching a KUOW segment airing soon about the digital divide and Seattle’s particular problems with broadband, I found this marvelous statement from Oct. 24, 1905, in the Richmond, Virginia, Times-Dispatch newspaper. A lawyer named Henry Anderson was arguing on behalf of two clients of the city who didn’t want to be taxed to pay for a municipal utility. Among other arguments against municipal ownership, he said, eloquently:
“Unless we adopt the principles of socialism, It can hardly be contended that It is the province of government, either state or municipal, to undertake the manufacture or supply of the ordinary subjects of trade and commerce, or to impose burdens upon the whole community for the supposed benefit of a few….
“The ownership and operation of municipal light plants stands upon a different basis from that of the ownership of water works, with which it is so often compared. Water is a necessity to the health and life of every individual member of a community…It must be supplied in order to preserve the public health, whether it can be done profitably or not, and must be furnished, not to a few individuals, but to every individual.
“Electric lights are different. Electricity is not in any sense a necessity, and under no conditions is it universally used by the people of a community. It is but a luxury enjoyed by a small proportion of the members of any municipality, and yet if the plant be owned and operated by the city, the burden of such ownership and operation must be borne by all the people through taxation.
“Now, electric light is not a necessity for every member of the community. It Is not the business of any one to see that I use electricity, or gas, or oil in my house, or even that I use any form of artificial light at all.”
When will we listen to the past?

All I need is this news, and this Rant, and that Dog....

As the fighting for the control of rights of who owns what information continues we continue to all lose. Microsoft, Yahoo and possibly Amazon.com have joined a group of opponents in a class action lawsuit against Google. In brief summary Google is digitizing book for access over the Internet, but critics say that if the service becomes a necessity they would, Google would have a monopoly.

It comes down to rights, everyone wants the rights and the ability to control the access to everything. To be able to charge for it, decide who can use it, sue over who had what idea, sang what song, and shot what movie. Welcome to the information age. I have mentioned these things before. (1) (2)

But I want to move on. I was born what can arguably be called the computer age, or the Information age. To me these two “ages” or eras are separate. IMHO, the computer age started at the end of the industrial age after WWII, and the computer age ended around the time of the Internet, in the early 1990’s. I know some people will disagree but that is how I see it. The industrial age created the power and technical knowledge to launch the Computer age. The computer made possible the collection and processing of information quick and easily. That changed when a way to universal way to connect all of these computer systems came to be. This allowed the sharing and, later the search, of data. To me these are clear differences. Wikipedia disagrees, but doing more research on the subject no one agrees on the dates or the terminology. This brings me to my next point having too much information and what is next.

In the last few weeks announcements have been made how humans are 10 years from creating a virtual brain. Is this the next age of Humans? What about energy? The main problem with having machines like electric cars and robots is the power-to-weight ratio. The catch-22 is that when you need more power, you add more batteries, that adds weight, so you need more power. No current battery can supply the amount of power we need to drive the technology we have to make it independent of external energy. Is the battery the next age of Humans? What if nanotechnology solves both these problems? The Nanotech age certainly has a good ring to it.

So what do you think? Go ahead and post you thought on Facebook or Tweet it, sometimes giving your rights away on ownership of your comment. We will read it and laugh for your 15 minutes of fan. Next we will move on to the latest and greatest of freely generated comments, videos, and pictures on the Internet, by the only people who still create original content…you.

Who Watches the Tweets

It seems to be a love hate relationship between the Armed Forces and social networks. The Marine Corps' recently blocked network users from accessing social networks, like Facebook and Twitter, saying that it provides information to adversaries and provides an easy path for information leakage.
The Air Force on the other hand has been embracing cyberspace. The Air Force has a long established Cyber Command, and have started to understand that in the information age people give you the information you want faster than ever before.
"The Air Force tracked the instant messaging service Twitter, video carrier YouTube and various blogs to assess the huge public backlash to the Air Force One flyover of the Statue of Liberty this spring, according to the documents.
And while the attempts at damage control failed - "No positive spin is possible," one PowerPoint chart reads - the episode opens a window into the tactics for operating in a boundless digital news cycle."
So don't worry everyone, they will figure out the positive spin.

Passport RFID

This is an old topic, but a good one. On June 1, 2009 it became mandatory for Americans entering the US to present identity documents that are embedded with radio frequency identification tags, or RFID chips. This means Passports. So why is this a problem?

"Climbing into his Volvo, outfitted with a Matrics antenna and a Motorola reader he'd bought on eBay for $190, Chris Paget cruised the streets of San Francisco with this objective: To read the identity cards of strangers, wirelessly, without ever leaving his car.
It took him 20 minutes to strike hacker's gold.
Zipping past Fisherman's Wharf, his scanner detected, then downloaded to his laptop, the unique serial numbers of two pedestrians' electronic U.S. passport cards embedded with radio frequency identification, or RFID, tags. Within an hour, he'd "skimmed" the identifiers of four more of the new, microchipped PASS cards from a distance of 20 feet."

The AP written article on Fox News is not talking about anything new. Security researchers were talking about this problem when it was first announced that the US government was going to start embedding RFID chips in passports. In fact RFID security has become enough of a hot topic that one FLL (First Lego League) Referee I talked to last year was planning on specializing in the subject after school.

So I don't have a passport, no problem, right? Wrong. Wal-Mart loves RFID chips to the point that they where talking about fining suppliers not using them on pallets in Sams club distribution centers. But this is at the supplier level, still no worries right? Wrong again. Several companies are looking at ways to use RFID tags on the consumer level.

Think about this scenario. You walk into a grocery or department store. You walk around picking up the things that you need and want, depositing them into your cart. When you are done, you simply head to the door and walk through a small doorway on your way out. Much like the sensors you see now to detect shoplifters. As you push your cart through, all the RFID tags are scanned and totaled, so as you pass through the doorway sensors a printer hands you a receipt to give to the cashier or even automatically charges a predetermined credit card that is linked to a pin you punched in, or better yet tied to the RFID chip you carry on your person or on your cell phone. That way the store no longer has to pay a cashier, and check out is quick and easy. The funny part is that these types of scenarios have been tested. Beside finding a way to disable the RFID tags once you have left the store so people can't scan your house to find out what you have the other major push back from consumers was that they had to bag there own stuff.

So what is the best way to protect your self from RFID chips besides a tinfoil wallet? Wired has a suggestion, but use at your own risk and watch your fingers.

To end this rant I give you a cheesy, but informative video off YouTube. Enjoy.

Web Sites Targeted in Cyber Attack

US, S. Korean Government Web Sites Targeted in Cyber Attack By Kurt Achin is an interesting article about a recent and ongoing cyber attack from North Korea.
"South Korean authorities began to notice the Internet disruption Tuesday evening. By Wednesday, Korea Communication Commission official Lee Myung-su said the attack program had spread far and wide.
He says 18,000 personal computers have been infected by a malicious code.
At least 11 South Korean government sites have been either greatly slowed or made unavailable, including the sites for the presidential Blue House, the Defense Ministry, and the lawmaking National Assembly. Several major South Korean banks and the leading Internet portal, Naver, were also affected.
U.S. sites have also been affected, including the Treasury Department, Secret Service, and Federal Trade Commission. The Web site of Voice of America news has been unavailable in South Korea for two days."
And if you are asking why attack South Korea;
"South Korea is one of the most wired nations in the world. Major governmental agencies like the Ministry of Defense find themselves under attack by hackers thousands of times on any given day. Parliamentary hearings on this particular round of attacks are scheduled for Thursday."

WW1, WW2, WWW

I wonder how many people think about cyber warfare. I know even children think about conventional warfare, but how many people contemplate the effects of information, and cyber warfare. China seems to be thinking about it;

"Nations develop defense capabilities and weapon systems based on threat perception. While it is extremely difficult to predict future war, it is something each country must take seriously. You don’t spend all of your military budget on coastal defense if estimates show it is more likely you will engage in land warfare. If military decision-makers predict that future combat will center around non-contact war, using drones, cyber attacks and space-based weaponry, you focus your energy and resources on those areas.
China has openly announced that they are moving toward an “informationized” force and it is one of their top priorities. While we do not have to agree with their rational, it is imperative that we understand it."

The Dark Visitor goes on to talk about the original post on tech.qq.com (in Chinese). It is a good article if you like this kind of thing.

SO who is thinking about this stuff? The FAA is, Congress is, and a lot of businesses are too. Google it and you will see more. So what is the government doing about it? They are creating USCYBERCOM. "...Secretary Gates ordered the creation of U.S. Cyber Command, a subordinate unified command under U.S. Strategic Command."

So this shows Government is thinking about it, what about Commercial? Some companies think about this stuff. I know TJ MAXX does, now. I also know lots that are still catching up.

So what about you? How do you protect your data? Do you have your passwords saved in a document anyone can open on your computer? Do you have an updated anti-virus? Do you patch your system on a regular basis? Do you backup your files to a separate drive?

Physical attacks will remain the primary way to fight a war for a long time and will be the only way to win the battle. But the Cyber attack may win the next war.