Mind-Boggling Developments
OMG
[Mind-Boggling Developments]
"Quote” To Be Decided
This page is experimental: it brings together material discussed elsewhere on the website, with some new material thrown in. The intention is to provide some thought-provoking content that will challenge readers to think about the possible implications of some recent advances in technology, and also how cybercriminal and malicious state actors are already exploiting this. With luck it will also make people think about their own behaviour online and perhaps think twice before they share that scurrilous or titillating news item with friends and colleagues.
And to challenge conspiracy theorists — who seem to question everything except their cherished theory — to reflect on the consequences of their views for society and how
it is they have come to reject logic and science but are happy to benefit so much from what it has given them — not least their mobile phones and the internet (which they are using to spread their views).
1 Bad Bots & Online Criminal Behaviour
Some 40% of Internet Traffic Isn’t Human
Bad bots that scrape our data[1] and are involved in hacking attacks and other criminal activity are becoming more sophisticated. And they are becoming more common.
Indeed, today, some 40% of internet traffic isn’t human and includes bad bots designed to steal punters’ data, manipulate opinion and corrupt social intercourse...
A bot is a device or piece of software that can execute commands, reply to messages, or perform routine tasks, either automatically or with some human intervention. [DDos = Distributed Denial of Service — which is used to overwhelm a target website/email system]
Cyber-criminals Are Offering Disinformation Services
Cyber-criminals are now offering disinformation services to the private sector. For a few hundred dollars, criminal forums
on the Dark Web will craft a highly customised disinformation campaign that generates false positive propaganda about your company — or lies or malicious material to tarnish rivals. They make use of social media to help generate influence.
The Dark Web is where stolen data and illicit material is traded and used for financial, political or personal gain or sexual gratification. It accounts for perhaps 4% of the internet, roughly the same fraction as the World Wide Web that we routinely access and browse.[2]
2 Privacy & Security
"Arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.”
Edward Snowden [3]
Facial Recognition & Adversarial Image Technology
Using Facial Recognition Technology without informed consent raises profound questions about our rights — maybe OK at passport control or when scanning prison visitors or criminal suspects, but what about monitoring the mood of customers in a store, checking whether staff are smiling, or observing people’s behaviour in the street? Facial recognition cameras can now analyse video in real time and identify individuals in a crowd...
The Spy in Your Home
More and more products are coming equipped with cameras, microphones, accelerometers, thermal sensors, biometric analysis and GPS. Smart devices are designed to collect and share potentially private data as part of their normal operation, and the consequences for our privacy and security are potentially enormous.
Google
and Amazon
have secured a range of patents relating to potential future functions of their home assistant products — one is a method for extracting keywords from ambient speech which would then trigger targeted advertising. Amazon
has a patent
allowing Alexa to decipher a user’s physical characteristics including accent, ethnic origin, emotional state, gender, age, even background noise.
The Spy in Your Pocket
TO DEVELOP: Your mobile phone is amazing, but do you understand what information may be being collected about you?
TO ADD: A report
published in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs
has found that smartphones can detect when you've had too much to drink by monitoring your walk [so-called 'gait analysis']. American researchers used sensors in smartphones to detect when somebody was over the legal drink-drive limit. Phones were able to do this with about 90% accuracy when users walked just 10 steps in the study by the University of Pittsburgh. Scientists hope the discovery can be used to develop device alerts, such as asking people not to drive while drunk.
3 Image Manipulation
Deepfake
In Sept 2019 the BBC
broadcast a useful overview of the development of deepfake which went “deep into the world of deepfakes" to "meet some of the people who are trying to develop methods to detect them." And it looked into just how easy it is to make a convincing deepfake from scratch.
Do make time to listen; you'll find it here
[24 mins].
Fooling the Camera
We’re also seeing the development of ‘adversarial images’ that dupe machine learning systems using pixel gradients. In this example an imperceptible amount of a carefully-prepared image is used to fool the recognition technology that it's not looking at something different, in this case, a gibbon rather than a panda.
Manipulation of Satellite Imagery & GPS Spoofing
The manipulation of satellite imagery [including Google Maps] and GPS Spoofing today pose serious threats...Imagine an adversary fooling you that there’s a bridge across an important river. Then, during mission you plan to use this ‘bridge’, but when you arrive at the point the bridge is not there...
The Russian military are increasingly using GPS spoofing[4] as a way to protect sensitive locations (like The Kremlin) but also cause disruption outside the country's borders or in military zones. GPS spoofing is now a viable strategic threat.
4 Colateral Damage
"Digital technologies privilege our impulses
over our intentions. They are increasingly designed to exploit our psychological vulnerabilities in order to direct us toward goals that may or may not align with our own. In the short term, this can distract us from doing the things we want to do. In the longer term, however, it can distract us from living the lives we want to live, or, even worse, undermine our capacities for reflection and self-regulation, making it harder, in the words of philosopher Harry Frankfurt, to ‘want what we want to want.’ A primary effect of digital technologies is thus to undermine the operation and even development of the human will. This militates against the possibility of all forms of self-determination at both individual and collective levels, including all
forms of politics worth having."
James Williams (former Google
advertising strategist) [5]
Social Media & Mental Health
There is no doubt that the internet and social media has had a profound impact on the young, especially since the introduction of touch-screen smartphones (in 2000) and the IPhone (2007). But the jury is out as to what this portends: some argue that smartphones / tablets can encourage children to read and develop their imagination / communication skills; others, that their introduction is leading to a range of conditions from mobile-phone addiction, sleep deprivation, depression and reduced attention span,[6] to illiteracy, superficiality in relationships, and problems with their sexual development. And should we be concerned that Facebook is now actively working on technology to read your brainwaves so that you don’t have to look down at your phone to type emails, you can just think them?
The Human Cost of Content Moderation
Facebook
has ‘Deletion Centres’ in a number of countries and a 35,000-strong army of Content Moderators. [It is working to increase its use of artificial intelligence to remove harmful content, but it and the other social media platforms still have a long way to go.
But the human cost of viewing disturbing content under pressure is high, as Chris Gray discovered. He developed PTSD after moderating content for 6 months in Facebook's Dublin office. Chris' story is told in The Irish Times.
Notes
1
Data scraping
is a technique in which a computer program extracts data from human-readable output coming from another program.
2 The main part of the internet (90%+) is taken up by the Deep Web. This is the hidden territory where standard search-engines do not go; where you find web mail, online banking, private or otherwise restricted access social-media pages and web forums, and a plethora of commercial databanks and services that users must pay for, such as video on demand and some online magazines and newsfeeds. It is accessed using multi-layered encryption via the Tor Browser (which was developed initially with the help of US government funding to provide access to the open web to users from repressive regimes.)
3 American whistleblower who copied and leaked highly classified information from the National Security Agency
in 2013 when he was a Central Intelligence Agency
employee and subcontractor.
4 More correctly, GNSS, Global Navigation Satellite System.
5 Quote from James Williams' winning 2017 entry for the Nine Dots Prize, 'Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Persuasion in the Attention Economy' (which is now in book form).
6 It is reported that the authorities in Augsburg, Germany, have actually embedded pedestrian traffic lights in the pavement for people not paying attention as they walk along, the so-called ‘smombies’ (smartphone + zombies). What next?
