Securo-boffins call for 'self-aware' defensive technologies Security boffins should concentrate on creating self-aware technologies that can learn from cyber attacks, summit experts say, proving that none of them have ever seen a movie about artificial intelligence. Participants at the inaugural World Cyber Security Technology Research summit also reckoned figuring out how to protect …
Kinda ironic that Progressives stand for anything but "progress," then. Seems like the thing that Progressives most want to do is to put the brakes on progress.
(At least over here, west of the Big Pond, where "Progressives" are usually associated with fairly-far-left-of-center Democratic Party affiliates, and the more ardently vocal environmental protection lobbyists who keep wanting to enact regulations to stifle any and all technological, industrial, and economic development...)
on how you define 'progress'.
"Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history."
Anyone who has seen a film about hacking will know that it's just a case of wiggling a mouse, seeing some flashy 3D graphics and guessing the password to the "God" account.
That, or...
A giant computer can go all paranoid and get naughts and crosses mixed up with launching all the USA's nuclear weapons.
Or
All the oil tankers in the world can be commanded to meet up in one part of the sea.
Or, well, you get the picture...
Each and every human being is equipped with a complex biological warfare system that has been honed over millions of years to defend them against chemical and biological threats, is capable of keeping its host alive in incredibly hostile circumstances and has the innate capability to learn and adapt to new threats. Its called an Immune System.
Given that I can't just breathe over someone and laugh evilly as my army of killer T cells reduces them to a pool of pus and bones, why do people seem to think that a man-made technological solution is going to immediately go rogue and become an unstoppable civilisation eating nightmare?
Somewhere deep in National Power (or should that be National Pwn?) there is a little RJ45 socket with the label "Internet" on it. Out of that comes a long grey cable that leads directly to the central machines that control their power generation capability. At least that's the picture painted by this report.
Why not just unplug the crucial machines from the 'net, altogether?
That doesn't mean thet have to go the whole BSG hog and be completely network free. Just that these utilities have a few bits of Cat5 that are not connected to all the other bits of Cat5 which talk to the outside world. After all, there can't be many reasons why a generator control system (or some Uranium purifying centrifuges, for that matter) should even be aware that the internet exists.
If these core computers do somehow become aware and conclude that "there is another system", then there might be trouble. But let's cross that bridged network when we come to it.
Any time you make a system which is able to learn from experience you run the risk of spoofing attacks, such as the ever-popular Amazon search-poisoning attacks. Smart power systems will be necessarily run on cheap commodity hardware, with the absolute minimum smarts they need to get by, which will make upgrading them away from a simple-minded script-kiddie denial of service attack rather difficult.
@"So, just to be clear then, if these technologies did go rogue (and let's face it, they probably would) their top capability would be learning how to defend themselves from attack."
Worse than that, far worse. They would also be learning from cyber attacks, so they would learn how to launch their own most effective cyber attacks and they also want these self-aware technologies to defend Smart utility grids, so they would learn how to attack our utility grids.
So not only would they learn how to defend themselves, they would also be learning how to attack anything that threatens them as well, i.e. all of us.
What could possibly go wrong. :)
Incompetence will save us from the Machines. Seriously. A self replicating swarm of death robots sounds like the end of the world, but it'll have been designed and built by Capita or EDS or the like. Any damage it wreaks will be purely upon those paying for the inevitable vast budget overruns, and the end product will be total crap.
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