Lives in a Shoe

Robot Dog Opens Door for its Friend

A couple of my flesh and blood dogs can do this.  Still, kind of creepy.

 

We’re Building a World-Size Robot, and We Don’t Even Realize it.

Startling essay by Bruce Schneier writing in NY Mag.  Read it.

We no longer have things with computers embedded in them. We have computers with things attached to them.

Your modern refrigerator is a computer that keeps things cold. Your oven, similarly, is a computer that makes things hot. An ATM is a computer with money inside. Your car is no longer a mechanical device with some computers inside; it’s a computer with four wheels and an engine. Actually, it’s a distributed system of over 100 computers with four wheels and an engine. And, of course, your phones became full-power general-purpose computers in 2007, when the iPhone was introduced.

Equal and Opposite Reaction, Maybe?

Amazon will be opening has opened a store in Seattle with software that recognizes your face and keeps track of your purchases so they are charged to your account and you do not need to tarry at the checkout counter.  Okay. Maybe.

Then I learned about Adam Harvey who is developing has developed a camouflage fabric intended to confuse the software so it cannot distinguish you from Millard Fillmore.   It involves printing patterns of pixels on to clothing or textiles that look, to computers, like they could be faces, with eyes, noses, mouths and ears. Okay.

Then somehow I have learned that young Adam, as HyperFace, is involved with something called NeuroSpeculative AfroFeminism ("a transmedia exploration of black women and the roles they play in technology, society and culture") which we are told "will explore an Afrocentric countersurveillance aesthetic."

The page is noted to be fleeting so I have copied all of it, what little there is, below the jump.  But here's the deal, maybe: HyperFace reduces the confidence score of the true face (figure) by redirecting more attention to the nearby false face regions (ground). O-kay.

Disclaimer at bottom of page:  "Will not make you invisible."

Why do we care?  

As far as sophistication goes, Facebook’s systems are apparently approaching the point where they don’t even have to see your face to recognize your face, and Microsoft has been showing off technology that can decipher emotions from the facial expressions of people who attend political rallies, recognize their genders and guesstimate their ages.

Researchers have also demonstrated that algorithms can be trained to identify people by matching previously observed patterns around their heads and bodies, even when their faces are blurred or obscured.

It’s that area around the face that Harvey’s HyperFace is designed to obfuscate, by throwing high-confidence-level faces all around your true face so machines will gravitate toward the fake faces.

Reply to Spam

Best few minutes you'll spend today. Really.  James Veitch.

 

Fight the Power

Apple engineers quietly discuss refusing to create the FBI's back door.

Related: US Government Has Apparently Demanded, And Obtained, Tech Companies' Source Code In The Past

 

Anybody Believe the FBI Isn't Out to Defeat Encryption?

Read the whole thing, then give it some thought.

FBI Director James Comey starts his defense of their effort to force Apple to help them break into the iPhone of San Bernardino terrorist and killer Syed Farook with a sentence that is that is extremely hard to take seriously: "The San Bernardino litigation isn't about trying to set a precedent or send any kind of message."

I've Been Telling You...

...and now the Atlantic is onboard.

Article is humorous, yes.  Maybe.  But it's like reading about lice. You don't realize you are starting to itch but you do.

If you're not paranoid, you're crazy

Or you're just not paying attention.

Are you aware of the NSA site in Utah?  If you're not, you should be.  Wired has referred to it as, "in effect, the NSA's cloud".

As far as I know Rand Paul is the only candidate mentioning this.

 

 

Good to Know

How to Use Your Cat to Hack Your Neighbor’s Wi-Fi

Coco, modeling the WarKitteh collar. Gene Bransfield

Late last month, a Siamese cat named Coco went wandering in his suburban Washington, DC neighborhood. He spent three hours exploring nearby backyards. He killed a mouse, whose carcass he thoughtfully brought home to his octogenarian owner, Nancy. And while he was out, Coco mapped dozens of his neighbors’ Wi-Fi networks, identifying four routers that used an old, easily-broken form of encryption and another four that were left entirely unprotected.