Bullets and Blogs: New Media and the Warfighter

5GW operations: Twitterrorism?

From the US Army War College’s Center for Strategic Leadership and The SecDev Group comes “Bullets and Blogs: New Media and the Warfighter” (2.7mb PDF). The report is based on a three-day workshop that took place at Carlisle Barracks in January 2008, one of the best events I have attended. It is required reading for anyone (e.g. more then than the Defense community) involved in the modern information environment.

Source: MountainRunner.

Security and Privacy Risks with Household Robots

WowWee Rovio

Imagine purchasing a new Rovio robot. This wheeled mobile robot sports a webcam and can be accessed easily through the internet. Often these and other robots are bought as toys, used by the owners to check on their home during a vacation, perhaps for teleconferencing, or to check on an elderly loved one.

Now imagine a malevolent hacker from Russia or China, or your next door neighbor, or a even stalker gaining access to this robot. Now they have free access to your home, roving about checking to see if the owner is home, spying on your children, or perhaps taking embarrassing video of you or your family. What if the robot is commanded to break items in your home, hide your keys, or drive under the feet of granny to harm her? Millions of these robots have been sold, meaning they are quite ubiquitous and therefore prime targets of malicious hackers.

Source: IEEE Spectrum blog.

UK leak warns of growing Chinese tech spying

A document recently leaked by the website Wikileaks has revealed the concerns of British intelligence agencies about the focus of Chinese spies increasing in scope from stealing technology and reverse-engineering it to include the understanding of production techniques and methodologies in order to reproduce them cheaply and also warns of the military implications of such an increased focus.

The 2,389 page document, in its estimate of Chinese intelligence aims, says, “Chinese intelligence activity is widespread and has a voracious appetite for all kinds of information; political, military,commercial, scientific and technical. It is on this area that the Chinese place their highest priority and where we assess that the greatest risk lies.”

The document elaborates, “The Chinese have realized that it is not productive to simply steal technology and then try to `reverse engineer it’. Through intelligence activity they now attempt to acquire an in-depth understanding of production techniques and methodologies. There is an obvious economic risk to the UK. Our hard earned processes at very little cost and then reproduce them with cheap labor. ”

Source: StratPost.

The Political Roots of “Overhumanism”

This paper argues that the emergence of “overhumanism”* in Italy is a troubling development, both for Italian and international transhumanism, due to overhumanism’s association with Fascism. The main overhumanist writers seem to view their version of transhumanism as a cultural and spiritual movement with deep historical roots, and see Fascism as its first political manifestation. Italian overhumanism is heavily influenced by the “Nouvelle Droite”, a fringe political movement that emerged from the French neofascist microcosm in the late ’70s/early ’80s, and which attempted to bring far-right ideas into the mainstream by discarding the trappings of historical Fascism in order to convey a similar message in a less unpalatable form. In common with the Nouvelle Droite, it borrows heavily from the extreme left (anti-americanism, anti-clericalism, opposition to globalisation), and has adopted neopaganism as a religious stance. While affirming the importance of science in modern life, this hybrid offspring of neofascism also maintains more traditional far-right positions such as elitism, antiegalitarianism and an interest in ethnic identity that crosses into differentialist racism.

Source: Estropico.

Tests Begin on Drugs That May Slow Aging

It may be the ultimate free lunch — how to reap all the advantages of a calorically restricted diet, including freedom from disease and an extended healthy life span, without eating one fewer calorie. Just take a drug that tricks the body into thinking it’s on such a diet.

It sounds too good to be true, and maybe it is. Yet such drugs are now in clinical trials. Even if they should fail, as most candidate drugs do, their development represents a new optimism among research biologists that aging is not immutable, that the body has resources that can be mobilized into resisting disease and averting the adversities of old age.

This optimism, however, is not fully shared. Evolutionary biologists, the experts on the theory of aging, have strong reasons to suppose that human life span cannot be altered in any quick and easy way. But they have been confounded by experiments with small laboratory animals, like roundworms, fruit flies and mice. In all these species, the change of single genes has brought noticeable increases in life span.

Source: NYTimes.

Robots to get their own operating system

Image: Aldebaran Robotics

THE UBot whizzes around a carpeted conference room on its Segway-like wheels, holding aloft a yellow balloon. It hands the balloon to a three-fingered robotic arm named WAM, which gingerly accepts the gift.

Cameras click. “It blows my mind to see robots collaborating like this,” says William Townsend, CEO of Barrett Technology, which developed WAM.

The robots were just two of the multitude on display last month at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) in Pasadena, California. But this happy meeting of robotic beings hides a serious problem: while the robots might be collaborating, those making them are not. Each robot is individually manufactured to meet a specific need and more than likely built in isolation.

This sorry state of affairs is set to change. Roboticists have begun to think about what robots have in common and what aspects of their construction can be standardised, hopefully resulting in a basic operating system everyone can use. This would let roboticists focus their attention on taking the technology forward.

Source: New Scientist.

Japan’s Cyberdyne shows of new robot suit in Tokyo

Cyberdyne said its 22 pound (10 kilogram) HAL – short for hybrid assistive limb – is equipped with sensors that read brain signals directing limb movement through the skin.

Wearing HAL, the three people took an hour-long train ride Monday from Tsukuba, north of the Japanese capital, to downtown Tokyo.

“HAL is to help people with weak leg muscles and mobility problems … We wanted to show HAL is very useful for our daily life,” said company official Takatoshi Kuno.

Source: AP/Forbes. For background see Huffington Post.

Halted ’03 Iraq Plan Illustrates U.S. Fear of Cyberwar Risk

John Arquilla

It would have been the most far-reaching case of computer sabotage in history. In 2003, the Pentagon and American intelligence agencies made plans for a cyberattack to freeze billions of dollars in the bank accounts of Saddam Hussein and cripple his government’s financial system before the United States invaded Iraq. He would have no money for war supplies. No money to pay troops.

“We knew we could pull it off — we had the tools,” said one senior official who worked at the Pentagon when the highly classified plan was developed.

Source: New York Times.

Scientists fear a revolt by killer robots

Advances in artificial intelligence promise many benefits, but scientists are privately so worried they may be creating machines which end up outsmarting — and perhaps even endangering — humans that they held a secret meeting to discuss limiting their research.

At the conference, held behind closed doors in Monterey Bay, California, leading researchers warned that mankind might lose control over computer-based systems that carry out a growing share of society’s workload, from waging war to chatting on the phone, and have already reached a level of indestructibility comparable with a cockroach.

Source Sunday Times.

Humans, not robots, responsible for robotic threat

Who made who?
T600 from the movie Terminator Salvation

When the legendary science fiction writer Isaac Asimov penned the “Three Laws of Responsible Robotics,” he forever changed the way humans think about artificial intelligence, and inspired generations of engineers to take up robotics.

In the current issue of journal IEEE Intelligent Systems, two engineers propose alternative laws to rewrite our future with robots.

The future they foresee is at once safer, and more realistic.

1. A human may not deploy a robot without the human-robot work system meeting the highest legal and professional standards of safety and ethics.

2. A robot must respond to humans as appropriate for their roles.

3. A robot must be endowed with sufficient situated autonomy to protect its own existence as long as such protection provides smooth transfer of control which does not conflict with the First and Second Laws.

Source: Ohio State University via PhysOrg.