Biz forked out $115k to tout 'Time AI' crypto at Black Hat. Now it sues organizers because hackers heckled it Crown Sterling, a Newport Beach, California-based biz that calls itself "a leading digital cryptographic firm," is suing UBM, the UK-based owner of the Black Hat USA conference, in America for allegedly violating its sponsorship agreement. The complaint [PDF], filed late last week in a New York district court, blames the …
Downvote brigadiers in force today, but you're quite right.
The freedom of speech means that the GOVERNMENT cannot tell you what to/to not say, not that you enjoy legal protections from the consequences of saying things that others find to be bollockry beyond the normal protections of law prohibiting certain actions against others.
The freedom of speech means you cannot be jailed for expressing the view that all members of a given race/ethnicity/religion/sexual orientation/profession are bad/wrong/unclean/deserve to die; nor does it protect you from retaliation from those groups in and of itself. It would not be lawful for such a person to brutally rearrange your face with a tire iron in response; it does not protect you from them organizing many others to have you shunned and heckled and exposed for the thundering fuckstick you are.
No, a website can't censor what you say, because censorship is the sole prerogative of the government. A privately run website can remove your content for any number of reasons; concern of liability, speling mistakes, because they're lickspittle corporate toadys, or because you're a flaming c**t. It's still not censorship.
Yes an employer can remove you from their employ because of your views. You can sue for unfair dismissal, if you're lucky enough to have a job contract and a state that recognises employees rights.
Yes, that phrase is incorrect. A government could censor your views on religion, for example.
"a website can't censor what you say, because censorship is the sole prerogative of the government."
What? Of course a website can censor you. It's done all the time -- any time a website removes a comment (for being spam, abusive, whatever), that is censoring by definition.
The First Amendment to the US Constitution does indeed enjoin the government from most types of restraint on speech and writing (and has been construed to apply to other forms of expression).
However, it is in no way limited to "talking about the government". It applies regardless of subject matter. That includes criticizing the products and claims of private industry.
While the First Amendment's protection of expression is not absolute, and the US does have laws regarding defamation, they're quite restricted. A US corporation suing on grounds like those claimed by Crown Sterling is very unlikely to get anywhere, and as the article points out, they're inviting trouble under anti-SLAPP law.
" ... what kind of inane blathering is that? ... "
This kind ....
" ... Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. ...
The keyword .............. CONGRESS.
You know, the part of the U.S. Government that actually is charged with making laws?
sorry George , i still cant see what this blathering
has got to do with that quote from your Constitution thing.
That appears to say "The govt will not make laws that stop you having the right of free speech"
whats that got to do with
"Freedom of Speech only applies to talking about the government"
which hasnt got anything to do with anything as its a totally bogus statement
You're confusing freedom of speech for responsibility for what you say.
Unfortunately it is a common mistake.
Having said that, setting lawyers on your critics following a public product launch seems to be a very bold strategy - I'm not sure you'd want to focus more public attention on your products, ummmm, challenges.
There really needs to be a federal anti-SLAPP law at this point. You're getting more and more baseless defamation suits fighting to be heard in states without anti-SLAPP legislation like Depp. The fact they're trying this in California is incredibly laughable but you do see it still as a way to silence critics knowing that they can either eat the penalty or that the threat of a lengthy suit is more than most critics are willing to deal with
And, by filling their PR with terms like "multidimensional", just reading their blurb smacks of bull.
Oh, and I'm glad that the encryption takes time into account. That's nice. And they're using a statistical analysis machine, for all the good that will do.
They missed working blockchain in, though. Too bad. That would have clinched their success to be sure.
Richard MacDuff - got there first: sometime prior to 1987 he wrote "an accounting program for the Apple Macintosh. This became Anthem, which on top of its accounting functions could turn the spreadsheet numbers into music pieces.".
That was Reason, which allowed: "users to specify in advance the decision they want it to reach, and only then to input all the facts. The program's task was to construct a plausible series of logical-sounding steps to connect the premises with the conclusion. The only copy was sold to the US Government for an undisclosed fee."
"multidimensional" isn't particularly bad in this context, algorithms like Mersenne twister are multidimensional
But that's the problem. In this context, the term is either trivial or nonsense, depending on how it's used. When a vendor picks a technical term and waves it about as a flag to proclaim the novelty of their product, they'd best be prepared to back that up with a plausible, coherent, specific explanation of how they're using the term, and what the novelty is.
You can make something "multidimensional", a GAN might be "multidimensional" in it's analysis, but the slides and maths would show this...
These were not. They were using specific complex language, as magical spells to cast on prey.
(Quantum is the new "millenium" and AI is the new "led into gold" :( )
Judging just by the video linked in this article, I think it's perfectly open an fair to call bullshit on this "solution".
In fact, if the presentation maintained only about half the fantasy level of the video , I'm surprised they were even able to finish the presentation ...
Both, hackers and engineers, are not known to tolearate fantasy marketing very well.
Both, hackers and engineers, are not known to tolearate fantasy marketing very well.
Yes.
Most companies appear to have now realised that many of us are violently allergic to vague fantasy, vapourware and frankly anything other than a good working product at a realistic, reasonable price. Probably due to darwinism; i've lost count of the number of salesdroids i've told that i've lost interest in their product and then hung up on on the phone, walked away from at events, or terminated meetings with due to having got me a full set of bullshit bingo.
I can't be the only person doing that, and *most* companies appear to have -eventually- gotten the message.
Seriously what did they expect?
Everyone's wearing their black hat at Black Hat. And they never submitted their paper to a peer reviewed journal.
They may have avoided some ridicule if they'd gone through the peer review process first.
They've spent $115k on something they could have got done for free through the right channels.
They spent $115k on getting global publicity in such august journals as el'reg.
If they can manage to spin the response into "the security solution that made the worlds best hackers furious" and "that black hats tried to ban" ... they can probably convince a few CEOs to pay
But on balance they are probably just a wunch of bankers
That would require intelligence in the "scam". No doubt a lot of overselling of features work like that already, do a proper well done presentation of standard but novel/fun tech at Blackhat, use it as marketing to overcharge/boost marketing... but that requires work and some ability. Scamming with "music/quantum/magic" requires only marks.
Eh most business people know of Blackhat at least as a vague understanding. I doubt the idea was ever to sell it to anyone at Blackhat but to just be able to say they presented there to some purchasing managers who don't know better to get them to pay up. I doubt they expected the level of backlash hence the suit to try and reclaim the narrative. It's just a grift to pretend they have a cutting edge product to earn quick cash from companies who want to just buy a product rather than do any real work for security
You just reminded me of a youtube video I saw last night of Tim Michin...
Tom Holt, another fantasist, got there first in Flying Dutch (1991):
“[W]hen I first invented the computer in seventeen—sixteen ninety-four, the nearest approximation to a letter-free system of abstract notation was written music, and I adapted the principle for my own purposes. Minims, crotchets and quavers each have their own quantitative value in base seven, and as it happens it’s an extremely powerful and flexible system: much better than the binary systems that I used in the first commercial models.” — Professor Montalban who, having discovered the elixir of life, needed to invent the computer and many other things in order to counter its effects.
Sounds like it. Sore losers sue critics, real engineers prove their critics wrong. If you talk rot at any science conference, you will get negative reactions. These may vary depending on your seniority, with more senior people drawing a lot more flak than e.g. starting PhD students. Much also depends on the level of arrogance on display. Trot out nonsense while projecting a "listen to me, I am a genius" attitude, and you will be in for a very rough ride.
Probably they hoped for a softer audience at Black Hat than at a scientific conference... but probably they should have presented it at Worldcon....
W. Crusher: "Captain! Those are quantum-entangled keys!"
Data: "Captain, play your pipe to feed a disentanglement algorithm while I modify the warp field to move back in time!"
Q appears: "How little do you mortals understand time. Must you be so constant, Jean-Luc? In Q-universe constants are not constants!".
In other news: MagicLeap buys Crown Sterling technology to deliver encrypted VR.
It is worth reading the article just to get a taste for what this kind of nonsense looks like when about primes. You can get tons of truly terrible and deeply deluded articles form http://vixra.org/ (intentionally no an active link).
Btw. I do not think that everybody can post to arxiv.org, at least it didn't use to be the case. Cannot find anything pertinent at https://arxiv.org/help/submit, though.
The paper is distributed through preprint server ArXiv, which accepts submissions, without peer review, from anyone who chooses to register.
Ah, so it is not a paper, which has to be peer reviewed (oh, and accepted to go into review before that), then accepted and finally published. Otherwise it counts as "other publication", like the sci-fi "novel" you wrote when you were 14 and that was a cheap knock-off of Star Wars (but which has, in fact, not been published, like the stuff on ArXiv).
Technically you are correct. But if you compare good arxiv "preprints" with published versions you'll find that many have only very minor changes. Some are changed into a worse form (two-column layout tends to screw things up). Bad preprints appear nowhere else or (unchanged) in one of those crap-journals.
These observation are from math and compsci articles.
"Technically you are correct. But if you compare good arxiv "preprints" with published versions you'll find that many have only very minor changes."
In general, Wikipedia provides a useful, comprehensive, well-researched, and balanced summary of pretty much every topic. It's a great start for gaining some basic knowledge about something. And if I want to, I can go in and mess it all up. So can a lot of other people, so there's always some chance that the page you see there has been recently vandalized to contain incorrect information. Similarly, Arxiv is a great resource, given it allows members of the public to access papers without having to pay a journal that isn't actually doing the important part, and for that I'm quite grateful. Still, Arxiv can be polluted by useless documents, too. I haven't read the "paper" produced by these people, and I don't intend to, but just because they've posted it on a mostly reputable site doesn't mean that its contents are of any use to anyone.
Maybe I need to clarify: I do not say "on arxiv" ==> "good". The paper is a fine example for "sadly, there are some crap preprints on arxiv".
I consider it my responsibility as a researcher to be able to tell good articles form bad ones.
In the other direction, if you want an example of a reputable journal spiraling into barking madness, lookup "Chaos and Fractals" from Elsevier. I also have seen enough "why the heck was this accepted" articles in top-tier journals to not blindly assume "good journal" ==> "good article".
Correction: "Chaos and Fractals" should have been "Chaos, Solitons & Fractals", here is the Wikipedia paragraph on it.
Wikipedia has been proven to be flawed, skewed and intentionally biased on almost anything political, or that people pushing political agendas feel will support them.
Its quality is sadly falling year by year. Use it only to learn terms and find references, then conduct your own research to find the truth.
Peer review is often utterly fake nowadays. People have gotten pets, relatives etc as reviewers. It was already bad enough when it was presumably legit scientists, but all in the academic same "club" patting each other on the back...
And then there's this, just one example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ras_VYgA77Q
(Defcon testing peer review)
Junk science is all over, and the old attempts to cure it don't work. Fraud abounds. Plenty of people get quite a few papers in before being discovered as total frauds.
At this point, the old "appeal to authority" is revealed as the BS it always was.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=fake+science+journals
> Stopped reading with the first spelling mistake "deviser"
Oh, you are so negative! May I suggest the fine article titled "Three Principles of Akkie Management": http://www.scirp.org/journal/PaperInformation.aspx?PaperID=35542
Authentic scirp.org quality, you'll be not disappointed.
You mean "their lack of any deviser but themselves"? It could be a typo for "divisor", sure; but the authors could also mean that prime numbers created themselves, as some sort of class of numerical auto-ontological demiurges.
That would make as much sense as anything else in the paper.
Hell, just the abstract is painful. Sure, I'll be reading a number-theory paper from a couple of authors who aren't familiar with the term "composite". Very plausible.
But, really, this paper is a gift that keeps on giving. Guys, did you know that "the last digit of any prime number can only be 1, 3, 7 or 9"?!! (Except for 2, I guess, though the authors may not be aware that 2 is a prime number.) And this is (according to the paper) somehow a property of primes, and not of base-10 representation! And many other things which are astonishing, assuming you are a competent student of mathematics at no more than the introduction-to-algebra level, and have never before given these matters much thought!
From https://timeai.io/
"TIME AI™ is a dynamic non-factor based quantum encryption utilizing multidimensional encryption technology including time, music’s infinite variability, artificial intelligence, and most notably mathematical constants to generate entangled key pairs."
To be honest, I thought "Crown Sterling" put it in a very similar category to other young organisations trying to make themselves sound established, grand and reliable - respected investment broker Stratton Oakmont comes to mind...
Enjoy the Matrix visuals- classic.
Then go down and follow 'Meet the Team'
'Page not found'
That'll be 'Team not found'.
Then go down and follow 'Meet the Team'
The link to the Management Team seems to work... unfortunately. I discovered that one Joseph J Hopkins is a thought leader, and as I had just had lunch seeing that nearly cost me a keyboard.
How simply ghastly. If for a moment I had an inkling I might be a "thought leader" then the last thing I would do would be to tell everyone about it.
not around my eyes, into my eyes... 3,2,1, you're under...
I predict that video will attract a cult following among geeks who collect the finer examples of fermented snake oil.
Have you noticed there is a common feel to most of the popular snake oil presentations. They are obviously aimed at anyone EXCEPT the very people they really need to persuade, should what they're peddling have any chance of being anything more than fantasy. They're peppered with scientific jargon but in a naive and pseudo-scientific way; slick and PR glossy, with no sign of ironic awareness of the enormous gaffs or gaps they inevitably expose.
Their ideal target is the kind of consumer who NEEDS something they desire to be true, but cannot find any academic support for their desired truth. There are hundreds of examples in homeopathy and quack medicine generally. More dangerously, this approach also appeals to authoritarians (leaders and followers); for example, the myriad politicians who insist on "secure" back-doors to encryption.
The difficulty for those of us less easily hypnotised is that proving this kind of negative (your argument is bullshit) is MUCH more difficult than the presentation itself and much harder to follow and understand; as illustrated by Mark C's excellent demolition paper (my favourite line from which is: Thus, this method is simply the following: “skip the even numbers")
Like those people who make an entire video explaining the benefits of running your car on water without proving that they have it working. I think we know what the benefits would be, what we want to know is how to do it.
This is how https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ws-Kp2aLcEc, though I'm not that clear on the benefits.
That would have probably done well at a middle manager or PHB conference (Much to the chagrin of their technical underlings that would have to implement it)... but why would you take that *Style* of talk to a bunch of highly technical users that have been trained through years of BOFH and atrocity archives to smell PR bullshit a mile off?
Giving them the benefit of the doubt that their technology actually works and isn't just buzzwords strung together, surely you'd tailor the talk to be nuts and bolts engineering, given the audience?
This sounds like the wrong talk to the wrong audience, and with this lawsuit, I predict they're about to do a Juicero and learn first hand about the Streisand effect...
They actually believe in it!
Here are four more junk-science articles for your, ahem, amusement: https://archive.org/details/@tghannam (no clickable link, because reasons).
For the depth of knowledge, see https://www.amazon.com/Talal-Ghannam/e/B00APUF532%3Fref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share The book titled "Mystery of Numbers" has the tagline "Unraveling the Hidden Design of the Universe Through the Digital Root of Numbers".
See also https://www.robertedwardgrant.com/ for ... something.
They obviously took it to Black Hat because of the credibility ("as announced at Black hat 2019"), but for some reason they were unable to pass that Black Hat oral test. Why? Why were they unable to do the very thing they had paid and come to do?
If they are scammers, they are definitely incredibly stupid to go (and even pay to do so!) to the very place they know nobody will fall for their scam.
So the only possibility is they are deluded, they honestly believe they have made the breakthrough of the century, and they wanted to enlighten the world. Obviously they had expected ecstatic applause, not mockery, which explains their deception and anger...
(What if their idea is real, could one ask. Well, I'm just an amateur in that domain so I can't really judge, but their inability of expressing/explaining their idea to what should be their pairs bodes ill for its credibility. Announcing it to Black Hat is like the orals of your PhD, I'd assume you'd spend a couple hours preparing yourself for that.)
Why would they pay over $100,000 to do it?? Ars Technica has their invoice posted, and I am flabbergasted that the clowns "illustrious mathematicians" gave a talk like that, being billed for an enormous sum like that. I was at Black Hat, no, I didn't see their presentation, but I'm sure security might have asked me to leave if I had seen it.
For the money people are paying just to attend Black Hat, and now that I see the booth prices, that show is way over priced. And it doesn't seem to have a filter for snake oil! Or else the oil peddlers are suckers themselves to pay that much for a presentation...
The real question is why anybody would now pay to go to Blackhat, given its organisers appear to be happy to present utter tosh purely because someone threw money at them.
I'm not naive enough to think all conferences are pure, innocent and trying just to educate you, but this is egregious.
"The real question is why anybody would now pay to go to Blackhat, given its organisers appear to be happy to present utter tosh purely because someone threw money at them."
Well... Every convention needs a comic relief act?
Besides.. I can see a proper BOFH use a thing like this to thin the herd of possible PFY's a bit.. The pill..errm.. partners presenting the thing effectively Carpeting themselves like this lot is an added bonus.
They even apparently paid for that talk, something that wouldn't be thinkable at a CCC conference.
They thought that this being presented at Blackhat gives them some credibility which is important if you don't have any rational indication that your product could possibly "work" as anything else than a scam.
>Here we go again with a Sue-ball because SalesPitch>Critical Thinking.
No just another outing of lawyers doing marketing & brand awareness building.
Aside: Thinking of a career in marketing? suggest getting a law degree if you want those really fat retainers and pay cheques.
Presentations I chaired did NOT have heckling (different sector). If anyone started, I would suggest they formulate a question for the following Q&A session. If several persisted, I would suggest they each write down their observations and bring them quietly to the Chair, so that I could structure the following debate. If people got disruptive, I would call an impromptu 10-minute tea break (no tea outside) and restart with bouncers on call. In Italy, I had red and yellow cards like a football referee and that was totally respected. Incidentally, do read the initial paper, which was somewhat puzzling, and then the refutation, which is quite instructive.
I was once at an IEC meeting where a pair of Americans* asked to be present as observers, and then one of them interrupted the meeting with a completely embarrassing marketing rant having nothing to do with the topic or the agenda. When he eventually wound down the chairman mildly observed "Well, I'm sure nobody paid any attention to that, we will now resume the meeting."
*I mention the nationality merely because the chairman was also an American, and in fact from the same State,
Sounds like Lightsquared all over again.
When technically savvy people point out that your alleged multi squillion dollar business is unworkable shit made of fairy stories, sue.
Emperor's new suit 2.0. Which is the same thing, only the tailors bugger off with the investment capital for the Emperor's magic clothes as soon as someone notices that he's starkers.
All notes in music can be represented by twelve numbers, corresponding to the piano keys in an octave. Which octave you want needs another number. (Ignore microtonal music for this example : that would just need more numbers) A sequence of these numbers can then represent any piece of music, and there are an infinite number of possible sequences using this small number of notes. Therefore they could just have said "the infinite variability of sequences of a small set of numbers". I wonder why they didn't?
I should also like to point out that numerous US businesses that try and appeal to the less sophisticated with royalty-associated names, have been known to sell goods which are not of the quality that would invite sufficient custom in a UK "pound shop".
there are an infinite number of possible sequences using this small number of notes
I found an old Tedx from Crown Sterling where Robert Grant proposed using random YouTube links for the seed.
I've had a look at the arxiv article. Its PDF says it's written in Microsoft Word.
According to "Ten Signs a Claimed Mathematical Breakthrough is Wrong", the first sign is "The authors don't use TeX", with few false positives. However, I know much more about TeX than I know about security, so perhaps I'm wrong.
Any other number/signal theory scams that haven't been used in the past few years? A revolutionary DSL/WiFi/6G/HDD codec that breaks theoretical bandwidth for a given spectrum and SNR? Imaging far beyond aperture limits? Incredible lossless compression? Projecting large holographic images directly into your eyes from a small source?
When I see someone wearing one of those quartz crystal pendants, I usually make some kind of comment about precision cuts and resonance at 3.579545* MHz.
* not only is it the NTSC color burst carrier frequency, it's also an 80m CW frequency!
// the one with the Morse key in the pocket
....what a way to kill your company. I'll never now knowingly buy anything from Crown Sterling and will never recommend them to anyone. What the fuck did you think would happen at black hat. Instead of suing, prove them wrong. Suing has now just killed your business as most people will now avoid you. They'll assume if they use your tech, they'll never be able to point out issues with it for fear of being sued.
* blockchain* quantum computing
* virtual reality ..... trevorde
Essential vital future assets/condiments/confections, trevorde. Without their assistance is future power and energy lost to that and those finding and engaging with new theatres of irreprehensible remote command and ethereal control?
And shared as a question for answering with a simple aye or nay ....... which tells us all how far along and/or how far back El Reg Commentards really are? :-)
Yes, of course it is.
And, of course, IT BetaTests Spooky IntelAIgent Services everywhere, ... which we are blindly led to believe are assiduously listening out for all sorts of unusual and unconventional things. You know. the spaghetti alphabets crowd ...... GCHQ/CIA/FSB/DFS/etc./etc. ........ they're lurking everywhere apparently, skulking in the shade of shadows ....... and they don't like the bright white red hot light of public engagement and that has them seriously disadvantaged and horrendously handicapped ....... although that is a black hole plugged with the employment of an able enabling foreign agent/proxy intelligence source.
filed late last week in a New York district court, blames the conference organizers for allowing Black Hat attendees to disrupt Crown Sterling's talk about supposedly disruptive cryptographic technology – a presentation Crown Sterling paid $115,000 to present to hackers. The heckling then spilled online.
They were mean so i'm going to lob sue balls. Talk about throw your toys out of the pram.
"quasi-prime rib" when the prime rib is right next to it?
"prime rib" is Quality EU Pork Prime Rib
"quasi-prime rib" is American Pork Prime Rib that will get dumped on the UK post BREXIT after Trump and Boris "Pork Pie" Johnson have done a deal.
We all remember the dot-coms with the new "algorithm" that was going to change the world. And we've all watched them implode when it turns out the algorithm was not what it was represented to be (or just downright vaporware in some cases) There are many parallels in "AI". Ironically one of the most overused and misunderstood marketing phrases of the day. The suit by Crown Sterling is more a publicity stunt than an actual suit with merit. The bigger question is why would Black Hat allow presentation of such non-peer reviewed methods that with a cursory mathematics review looks more like Swiss-cheese than some new quantum-leap in cryptographic efficiency. (alas, we all know the answer to that one too -- "for the money", integrity of the conference seems to mean very little when UBM has dollars are waived at it...)
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