The internet of things

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The internet of things

Postby KEND on Tue Jan 03, 2017 1:13 pm

The next 'big thing' is already amongst us, the following is a transcript of a Senate Committee

The Connected World: Examining the Internet of Things
Adam D. Thierer
George Mason University - Mercatus Center
February 11, 2015
Abstract:
Testimony of Adam Thierer (Mercatus Center at George Mason University) before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation for hearing on “The Connected World: Examining the Internet of Things.”
The three key takeaways of the testimony: (1) First, the Internet of Things offers compelling benefits to consumers, companies, and our country’s national competitiveness that will only be achieved by adopting a flexible policy regime for this fast-moving space. (2) Second, while there are formidable privacy and security challenges associated with the Internet of Things, top-down or one-size-fits-all regulation will limit innovative opportunities. (3) Third, with those first two points in mind, we should seek alternative and less costly approaches to protecting privacy and security that rely on education, empowerment, and targeted enforcement of existing legal mechanisms. Long-term privacy and security protection requires a multifaceted approach incorporating many flexible solutions.

Driverless cars, drones are merely the tip of the iceberg. In the UK there are plans to build surveillance devices into everyday appliances such as refrigerators so police can go to a crime scene and not bother to collect fingerprints all the evidence is stored somewhere. I cant imagine living in such a world. Apart from anything else the possibility that a terrorist could shut down a city at the turn of a switch is a nightmare.

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Re: The internet of things

Postby everything on Tue Jan 03, 2017 1:55 pm

Very interesting topic. I guess some of my questions are:

- can't people already gain control of servers, networks, databases, etc.? so by adding refrigerators, some cars, etc., that is more to take? I'm not particularly worried about my smart lamps or roomba or fridge or fitbit. my self-driving car, yes. the most sophisticated hacking is actually rich-state sponsored. where do we draw the line between illegitimate groups and legitimate groups doing such activity?
- what aspects of surveillance are we/should we be afraid of? if a crime has been committed, isn't it better if new technology helps us solve the crime? OTOH, they are saying smaller acts of terror are much harder to prevent because there isn't elaborate communication/plots happening over electronic media. so the terrorism that we see lately is not because of tech, it's hard to prevent because of lack of tech usage. otherwise, are we afraid mainly of advertising?
- how about being afraid of AIs rather than of other humans? a lot of smart people like stephen hawking, elon musk, bill gates are warning of this danger. since humans will presumably not be smart enough to understand this technology of our own creation, do we even understand what will be at stake? what to be afraid of? how to manage all this?
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Re: The internet of things

Postby windwalker on Wed Jan 04, 2017 6:38 pm

Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance will use IBM’s “Watson Explorer” in the first days of 2017 to replace 34 of its insurance claim workers. According to their press release, the AI will consider injuries and their treatment, the patient’s medical history, as well as the hospital records themselves to determine insurance payouts. In their official press release, they claim that automating this process will expedite service to their customers, increasing productivity by 30%.

http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2017/01/0 ... elligence/

This is not really looked on as a bad thing in some cultures.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3BYCK-3jPc

The clip offers a very different perspective and also touches on AI and other technologies
as well as the Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance use of IBM’s “Watson Explorer”
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Re: The internet of things

Postby Bao on Thu Jan 05, 2017 2:53 am

KEND wrote:In the UK there are plans to build surveillance devices into everyday appliances such as refrigerators so police can go to a crime scene and not bother to collect fingerprints all the evidence is stored somewhere. I cant imagine living in such a world.


There's research that have gone very far as developing camera and recorder that are size of dust, could fly freely in the air or could be maneuvered at distance. Imagine that kind of Big Brother society where thousands of invisible cameras are everywhere. Everything and everywhere is being watched. It must be a very safe place though... :-\
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Re: The internet of things

Postby KEND on Thu Jan 05, 2017 4:09 am

The lessons of history tell us that it will be yet another way in creating a docile non thinking populace totally dependent on , we hope, a paternalistic state. There will still be people who reject it but they will become few and far between. Looking further into the future what if it is decided that humans are occupying too much space and need to be culled.
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Re: The internet of things

Postby everything on Thu Jan 05, 2017 6:47 am

I suppose AI nanotech is the scariest scenario we've discussed so far.

That scene in The Minority Report (SPOILERS BELOW in case you've never seen this movie) ....
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where the spider like bots come to find Tom Cruise ... well why are they so big he can see them and why should water throw them off? kind of stupid I suppose. These bots taking over from humanity could just be essentially invisible to the naked human eye. Boy, it's been fun ruling this 3rd rock from the sun while it lasted I guess.
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Re: The internet of things

Postby windwalker on Thu Jan 05, 2017 6:59 am

everything wrote:I suppose AI nanotech is the scariest scenario we've discussed so far.

That scene in The Minority Report (SPOILERS BELOW in case you've never seen this movie) ....
.
where the spider like bots come to find Tom Cruise ... well why are they so big he can see them and why should water throw them off? kind of stupid I suppose. These bots taking over from humanity could just be essentially invisible to the naked human eye. Boy, it's been fun ruling this 3rd rock from the sun while it lasted I guess.

Image

Technophobia began to gain national and international attention as a movement with the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. With the development of new machines able to do the work of skilled craftsmen using unskilled, underpaid men, women, and children, those who worked a trade began to fear for their livelihoods. In 1675, a group of weavers destroyed machines that replaced their jobs.

By 1727, the destruction had become so prevalent that Parliament made the demolition of machines a capital offense. This action, however, did not stop the tide of violence. The Luddites, a group of anti-technology workers, united under the name “Ludd” in March 1811, removing key components from knitting frames, raiding houses for supplies, and petitioning for trade rights while threatening greater violence. Poor harvests and food riots lent aid to their cause by creating a restless and agitated population for them to draw supporters from.[8]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technophobia

The Luddites were a group of English textile workers and self-employed weavers in the 19th century that used the destruction of machinery as a form of protest. The group was protesting the use of machinery in a "fraudulent and deceitful manner" to get around standard labor practices.[1] They were fearful that the years they had spent learning the craft would go to waste and unskilled machine operators would rob them of their livelihood.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite
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Re: The internet of things

Postby windwalker on Thu Jan 05, 2017 7:09 am

KEND wrote:The lessons of history tell us that it will be yet another way in creating a docile non thinking populace totally dependent on , we hope, a paternalistic state. There will still be people who reject it but they will become few and far between. Looking further into the future what if it is decided that humans are occupying too much space and need to be culled.


Its called "war"

Don't know about "it" doing it.
"we" seem to do it very well.
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Re: The internet of things

Postby everything on Thu Jan 05, 2017 10:07 am

different aspect of this. some companies see a large opportunity in making sense of the data from all of these "things".

I hooked up the Amazon Echo (regardless of whether we are afraid of IoT, it's such a fun/useful device) to control a couple of lamps recently. It's very convenient. I don't think the AIs/terrorists/others are going to hijack my lamps, so it's ok. Meanwhile, Amazon and others can collect a ton of data on this kind of thing. I'm not really convinced it's all that terribly useful or abusable. The smart thermostats claim they can learn your pattern to optimize it. Others say you should leave your thermostat on one temp due to the cost of changing the temp being higher than a steady state (like cruise control vs. acceleration in your car).
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Re: The internet of things

Postby KEND on Fri Jan 06, 2017 3:31 am

The luddites were an extreme example, new technology almost always leads to abuse. Wherever there is something made easy there is a price to be paid, control is given up, we have to judge the extent to which we are willing to do that.
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Re: The internet of things

Postby windwalker on Fri Jan 06, 2017 6:33 am

For now, the increase in robotic employment at Amazon is only outpacing actual people by a narrow margin — 50%, as opposed to 46% more humans, according to The Seattle Times. Human awareness and dexterity still prevent us from becoming a redundant part of these processes… for now, as white collar insurance claims agents are being replaced with AI and the development of self-healing synthetic muscle that could make robots as graceful as any person.

http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2017/01/0 ... rce-by-50/

Image
When Amazon acquired Kiva Systems for $775 million in 2012, they immediately began implementing the squat automatons into their network of massive warehouses. The 16 inch, 320 lb. machines can carry more than twice their own weight and have taken over a sizable chunk of transport and packing tasks.


As the cost of labor reaches parity with automaton more companies will do the same. I expect truck drivers, train engineers, and delivery services to be next.
If they still use people the type and function will be very different then now also they will still not need so many.
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Re: The internet of things

Postby Snork on Fri Jan 06, 2017 10:44 am

The main problem with IoT gadgets is that the security is often implemented poorly. They end up being compromised, added to a botnet and used in DDOS attacks, or simply sending spam. The owners never know it's happening. They're subscribed to all the Windows updates and they think they're ok, but their devices are letting them down.

Second problem is internet connected mics and cams. Speech recognition and synthesis has come on a lot in recent years, a lot of money has been put into it. But it's computationally intensive and works by internet connected mics constantly streaming sound data to huge datacentres where powerful computers are always running speech-to-text and then analyzing it to see if the listening device is being 'talked to'. Samsung smart TVs have this, as do some smartphones and other new gadgets. How long do they keep this data? Does it get sent to 3rd parties e.g. intel agencies, to analyze? Are their unscrupulous employees who might have access, who will sell or use for blackmail? Who knows. There are laws surrounding unnecessary storage of personal data though, so perhaps it's not so bad. Maybe only the paranoid care.

Of course, as far as webcams are concerned, hackers have been breaking into those and selling the details on underground forums for years. If you've got a cam in your laptop or TV and don't have it taped over when not using it, well...

A good form of general self-defence is to ensure outgoing firewall is enabled and authorized only for specific devices like your main computer. Most people know to have incoming firewall enabled (and it's on automatically on most home routers I would have thought), but I think a lot of home routers come out-of-the-box allowing any device on the internal network to initiate any kind of outgoing connection to anywhere. This facilitates all of the above. Also, when hackers hack, usually they've got a script with an exploit set and a long list of IPs. The script is left going overnight with the IP list and it tries to execute the exploit and deliver the payload, which is often a little program which just fires a quick burst of network traffic out to another compromised computer which is keeping a list of which IPs are responding (building a list of computers which have been successfully hacked). If you have your router firewall set up to block outgoing connections then the hacker will never see this beacon and will likely ignore you.
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Re: The internet of things

Postby windwalker on Fri Jan 06, 2017 3:56 pm


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EF-E841WYe4

interesting app. more so in that it seems to be creating a new language of its own.
for those interested wechat is one of the few social net work apps that work in china
and can be used in the west. .
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Re: The internet of things

Postby Snork on Sun Jan 08, 2017 6:43 am

Another attack vector to be wary of, with these voice-activated gadgets:

http://www.cw6sandiego.com/news-anchor-sets-off-alexa-devices-around-san-diego-ordering-unwanted-dollhouses/
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Re: The internet of things

Postby windwalker on Sun Jan 08, 2017 8:55 am

Snork wrote:Another attack vector to be wary of, with these voice-activated gadgets:

http://www.cw6sandiego.com/news-anchor-sets-off-alexa-devices-around-san-diego-ordering-unwanted-dollhouses/


you seem to know about tech.
If so then you should also understand the hardware in the chips
of pc's are also subject to monitoring by the companies that make them.

" Intel chips come with an embedded subsystem called the Management Engine (ME) that functions as a separate CPU and cannot be disabled, and the code is proprietary." http://www.techrepublic.com/article/is- ... -backdoor/

Which is why Russia and China are now using their own home grown chips, and software for their Gov. agencies.
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