The BFC Computing Weblog

The ISC is running an interesting note from Craig Goranson today about penetration testing’s potential effects on Bluetooth-enabled medical devices.

In the past, some medical device manufacturers have played it fast and loose with the rules or best-practices. For instance the FCC gave medical devices an exception for radiation, so they didn’t bother to shield anything. And so when wireless network devices started getting near some of these, they went haywire, since they accept interference as well as they restrict it. I know of a respirator that just stopped working when an 802.11b device went near it.

I hope that things have changed recently (I’ve been out of medical for a few years), but I imagine if a rough service scan for bluetooth didn’t take out a device, fuzzing one would. I’d guess that the device manufacturers don’t write their own Bluetooth stacks, and the upstream provider might not have life-critical systems in mind when designing it. I hope I’m wrong on both counts. And I further hope they’re properly watchdogged to reset after a crash. This would make a good study.

It would also be interesting to know what kind of reviews were done on these kinds of devices for some of the high profile people who have them. Do groups like the Secret Service study these things, know how far Bluetooth signals can be transmitted, etc.? There are some crazy implications for security done wrong here.

Ever since Steve Jobs published his Thoughts on Music the music industry and its DRM partners have been in a tizzy, and it’s clear why that is. But there’s a solution, if only we can save them from themselves.

The biggest problem with DRM is lock-in to a particular device or class of devices. Getting one’s music to another type of device is impossible without a DRM break or incurring quality loss. But that’s not what the *AA says is the purpose of DRM - they say it’s to prevent copying. They’re lying.

Right now if you do manage a DRM break of any of the existing systems (and they all fall eventually) you get a media file that’s identical to the file on anybody else’s computer if they do the same thing. From there one can put the file up on a p2p network, the boogeyman of the argument. It’s impossible to trace the origin of the DRM-stripped file, which makes prosecuting copyright law difficult and makes companies like BayTSP a small mint.

Why are these p2p networks so popular? Part of it is the close-to-zero cost, sure, but many others participate in the networks to get content online a format they can manage (typically MP3). AllOfMP3.com (Mothra to p2p’s Godzilla) is popular for similar reasons. No matter how many times I tell these people to ‘just buy the CD’, I can’t stop the march of the world online, nor should I expect to.

So, the obvious solution is to make each media file unique, and trackable. The tool to do this comes from the field of steganography and is called Audio Watermarking. The theory goes like this: an amount of data is hidden in another amount of data, in this case the digital data of an audio (or video) file. It’s a field of active research and the results are good. There are concerns about the quality effect hiding extra data in something like an audio file can have, and you can see this with lossless codecs and an oscilloscope, but for Internet-based audio, where the files are compressed, it has been shown that the data hiding induces less change in the resulting waveform than the compression does, so you effectively can’t hear the watermark. A good watermarking algorithm is resistant to modification, sample rate conversion, etc, and it’s known how to do this.

So, what to include in the watermark? Well, you can include a user ID from the store where it was purchased. You can include my name and home phone number for all I care, my files are only going to be on my devices. The trick here, I believe, is to work out a fair system where the encoding specifies the privacy demands of the end user, such that players can’t become tracking devices without user consent. I suspect the W3C’s P3p can be repurposed for this task. These preferences would need to be embedded in the media file itself. To make all of this work, a standards organization (like the MPEG or ISO) needs to define a common standard container/structure format.

The place where this information is encoded is a classic engineering problem - if it’s done on the server that’s more secure. If it’s done on the client end that’s cheaper for the vendors but somewhat less secure.

So, what do we wind up with? A system for purchasing media on the the Internet that creates files that are playable on all devices, can be easily moved/converted/archived, can be edited and sampled for derivative works and other Fair Use applications, will expire gracefully from Copyright protection at the end of their Copyright term, and allow for prosecution of violations of Copyright Law. This gives something to everbody: the users of the media have it much easier and don’t have to worry about lock-in or obsolescence problems, therefore they buy more music and the vendors (e.g. iTunes) sell more music and devices (e.g. iPods), therefore the *AA get more royalties, and even companies like Macrovision can take their shot at peddling encoders.

So, what’s not to like? I’ll tell you - the *AA thinks DRM will force us to re-purchase our favorite media files over and over each time a new generation of devices comes out. That’s a powerful high they’re on, but users of their content will only purchase Back To The Future so many times before they get as mad as hell. Once these cartels get some rehab about this (and it might take a legislature, unfortunately, to do the rehab) audio watermarking is going to be waiting to make this market explode.

Jessica Hagy has a blog called Indexed where she posts philosophical ideas as images drawn on index cards using set theory, Venn diagrams, and the like. Witty, clever, original, and frequently profound. We’re All Going to Hell is among her most popular. Tell your favorite math teacher!

Steve Cochran sent me a link to a very good demo by Jeff Han of his multitouch lab’s latest research. Check it out for a sense of how people might interact with computers in the not too distant future.

DOAJ lists journals that have an Open Access policy, in this link in the Computer Science field.

I’ve been doing some more computer science research lately, and have been continually frustrated by the prevelance of pay-per-article research on the web. In fact, most research in Computer Science seems to be published under contractual obligations to the Journal doing the publishing with the author signing away rights to his own work.

What’s worse is much of this research is paid for by the Federal Government. So, I’ve paid for the research and now I have to pay again to view it. The fees to view the research range from moderate to expensive, for me, but for someone in a third world country the fees are simply prohibitive.

In researching this topic I’ve found some scholarly articles showing that Open Access research has more of an impact on the scientific community because it’s more available. As a scientist you’d want to have more of an impact rather than less, right? Well, no, apparently you’d rather be published in a more prestigious journal than anything else since that helps with tenure, and it’s those prestigious journals that are most adverse to Open Access since they have the most to lose. That is, their jetset ways, looker assistants, and arbiter-of-all-that-is-good status.

So, if you’re going to publish an article and you’re not on a tenure track (or if you are and have some valor) do it in an Open Access journal.

Now, beyond that, what does the Internet mean for journals? Let’s ask ourselves why journals exist. At one time there needed to be a central clearing house for research. Authors could only send off so many copies to so many people and only so many reviewers could be attached to any one journal.

All those barriers are gone on the Internet. Any author can afford to have n number of people download his PDF (his institution will typically pay for the bandwidth) and anybody can be a reviewer. But what of qualifications? That’s what credibility ratings are for, and they work all over the Internet from Google PageRank to Slashdot Karma. It won’t be long before there’s a website where researchers can get an RSS feed of the best new research, relevance ranked, and rated by reviewers with ranks weighted by the reviewer’s credibility.

Journals are a relic of the pre-Internet era - they raise the bar to publication, introduce inefficiences into the system and keep researchers from getting to papers they want to read. They can chose to evolve or be out-competed.

JPL has a video of the Stardust mission probe’s re-entry. It’s neat to see, but what was most astonishing to me is that we have this kind of resolution for low-orbit satellites. And this is the stuff that’s old enough to be made public. Cool.

This weekend I attended a seminar at Dartmouth College commemorating the fifthieth anniversary of the first Dartmouth Summer Symposium on Artificial Intelligence, where the term was coined. It was a great seminar and it really made me think.

The first speaker was George Cybenko, Professor of Engineering at Thayer. His work is in the current application of Artificial Intelligence, and he had lots of great slides and demos of the state of AI, the autonomous military vehicle project, and the trend towards computing density. According to current rates and Moore’s Law, within 30 years a microchip will have the connection complexity of the human min. Today’s Itanium 2 chip is as complex as a honeybee’s brain.

There has been some theory in the literature about how animal brains may operate on the quantum rather than digital level, with microtubules within cells storing quantum superpositions of information. I asked Professor Cybenko about the current state of this research and it’s still an open question. If it’s true, simply making an Itanium 10 in 2030 won’t approach the complexity of the human brain - we’ll need quantum computing to do that. He gave the great example of an art expert being able to look at a vase and say, instantly, “that’s clearly a fake, but I’m not sure why,” which then takes weeks of experts’ time to prove empirically. To me, that bolsters the argument for our brain storing quantum superpositions.

The most surprising speaker for me was James Moor, Chair of the Philosophy Department. I naively had low expectations for the talk, what with trouble getting PowerPoint up and all, but that was a misleading book cover. His talk covered many aspects of how we should deal with an AI, but the most striking part of his talk was AI Ethics. Right now we’re at the point where we’d like to think about how we should teach ethics to AI’s, if they’re ever to become autonomous. So, the next thirty years may be just that kind of mundane part of how we code ethics into a machine-parseable framework. Where things get interesting is what happens after we achieve it.

I asked the question during the QA session, “Is Ethics Static?” to which Professor Moor gave a good response that ethics by its nature has to evolve. So, I asked the followup question, “so once AI’s learn ethics, and in thirty years they may be as smart as we are, isn’t it natural that they’d decide to continue to evolve the ethics we taught them, perhaps not applying the same values as we would?” This led to a discussion of the three models of the AI future - AI’s as slaves, AI’s conquering humans, and humans merging with AI’s. “What if learning Polish was as simple as plugging in a new ‘chip’? - What would that mean for Dartmouth 300 years from now?” the professor asked.

Discussion continued after the talk and I spoke with Professor Moor for a few minutes about the cyborg outcome. I haven’t given it much credibility in the past, but after this talk I’m changing my mind (rimshot). There exist three certainties, given a flexible enough timeframe:

1. we will invent technologies more complex than our brains
2. we will teach these AI’s ethics
3. these AI’s will evolve themselves to be smarter and more capable than we are

Insofar as we cannot know the mind of God, we don’t know what these AI’s will think of us or how their ethics will evolve. We do know the human race is resource-intensive and damaging to the environment to a degree that an artificial being would not be, so they may view us as pests, or if we’re lucky they may simply view us as pets or respected ancestors.

Either way, Artificial Intelligence isn’t the right term anymore, that’s just one aspect of the project. We’re about to (on most timescales) create a new form of life here on Earth and if we intend to compete for any of the same niches as Engineered Life, well, evolution does not tend to be favorable to the less capable. So, we may be the species that gets to decide if it wants to evolve or not. In this case, the evolution would be to compete with the Engineered Lifeforms, and that makes the Cyborg outcome the most likely for the humans who wish to compete. The degree to which this will be necessary to maintain the species is decidedly unclear and perhaps disquieting for those of us who will be around then and whose children will be smack in the middle of it.

One thing’s for certain - it won’t happen suddenly. I gave the example of treating a patient with Alzheimer’s Disease - what if we had a nano-treatment that could prop up the patient’s failed neurons with engineered replacement neurons to return quality of life to those suffering from the Disease? Hardly anybody would argue that was unethical or question the essence of the person. Now, suppose the person’s brain starts to fail in other ways simply from ‘old age’? Would it be wrong to continue the treatment to prevent the person from dying? It would be hard to argue for letting the person simply die on principle. So, over the next dozen years, perhaps all the natural brain has died and been replaced with engineered structures. But the outward appearance of the person is unchanged, because the process was gradual and the neurons are an exact replacement for the person’s original brain. “Mommy, is Grandma a Computer?”

Some other interesting notes from the Conference:

EXAMPLES OF LINGUISTIC AMBIGUITY (how it’s hard to teach an AI)

flying over Zurich.
Fred saw the mountains flying over Zurich.

The police arrested the demonstrators because they feared violence.
The police arrested the demonstrators because they advocated violence.

These are hard for humans to parse correctly, let alone an AI.

NEURAL NETWORKS
A software program using neural networks such that given a board layout and dice rules, but no game rules, after 1.5 million games simulated in the neural network, the resulting AI was able to beat a champion-level human player in Backgammon. Again, he wasn’t taught the rules. Oh, look, I’ve just gone and anthropomorphized an AI.

New Scientist has an accessible article on Heim Theory - an 8 dimensional theory developed to unify quantum physics and relativity. The theory is not well documented or published but it does manage to derive the masses of elemental particles with astonishing accuracy and provides a mechanism/alterative for dark energy/matter. Should it be true it may be possible to build a space propulsion system using high energy magnetism that exceeds our current hopes, which has attracted interest from military and national labs.

I still maintain that constants are limitations in our knowledge and a proper theory will allow for the derivation of these what we now consider magic numbers.

Larry Lessig has a presentation on his website exploring the threats we face today as a free culture. It’s an ~20 minute Flash of slides and voice-over.

This is a couple years old, but still completely relevant and highly recommended.

If anybody knows how to convert a Flash to DV using OSS tools let me know so I can send some DVD’s to our congresscritters. Quicktime Player falls down dead on synchronization.

I have to admit, I’ve only made it through a hundred pages or so of A New Kind of Science but now Wolfram has applied the concepts to music generation embodied in Wolfram Tones. You can generate a new piece of music from various styles with each click. Finding something inspiried might take lots of iterations, but the Dance piece was sufficiently similar to typical Club music. OK, that’s saying more about Club music than Wolfram Tones, but there it is. You can even download it as a ringtone, if that’s your cup of tea.