Category Archives: The Brain

The Identity of Mr. Mouse

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In most of the conversations about “digital identity” we want to stick
to us humans.  How we make our lives better, easier, more secure,
more private.  There are a couple of flaws that I continue to see
in the process and thinking that, IMHO, are only going to grow and
continue to impart new pressures on our thoughts.

  • Most of the planning is being done by “old people” who have a lot invested in legacy “identity” systems.

As  part of the more “mature” component of the computer industry,
I can say that the conversations that I hear about identity are often
oriented towards solutions for people who have not had their identity
gathered and managed for them from birth.  As I wrote in my
earlier post about Tracking Identity … Cradle to Grave,
there is a whole new generation of children on this planet who will
have their identity accumulated – and available – in whole new
ways.  I believe that the digital identity management solutions
ought to consider a focus on younger generations, rather that how to
deal with legacy Internet 1.0 humans.

My analogy in this is thinking about digital music collections. 
For many people my age or older, the thought of digitizing their music
collection is a monumental task … having to find ways to encode audio
for record albums!  But for the average teen today, there is no
problem … all of their music is already digital as MP3s, or maybe
they have some CDs … which are easily ripped.  With the next
generation of humans, few will know anything but digital music, aquired
via the Internet.

If we focus all of our time looking for ways to solve the “legacy
human” problems, I’m not sure that we’ll do justice for the 2.0 and 3.0
humans coming after us.

So what is the other issue?

  • We keep thinking about humans like us … not the humans, or non-humans, of the future.

I read this article this morning on CNN:  Mice grow human cells after injections
… wow, very cool.  More work that is leading to the potential of
some very interesting life forms.  And this is only the
beginning.  Yes, I fully understand that these experiments are not
creating human-like entities today.  But this is only today. 
Where are we going to be in 10 years?

For those of you who have not read Accelerando I would suggest that
you do.  Much of the content of this book is one possible
extrapolation forward of the current day research that we are
doing.  There is already a considerable amount of thought around mind uploading, and even the personal identity of uploads. 
I started to really think about the issues of “identity of uploads”,
and even “rights of uploads” … since these are going to be the issues
facing our society in the coming years.  (What is considered the ‘murder’ of an upload?)  It’s not about if … but when.

In the CNN article about the mice, they claim that 0.1 percent of the
brain is based on human cells.  When this number increases, what
will emerge?  If not in mice (since the brain cavity might not be
able to contain enough cumulative neurons to cause emergent behaviors)
then in what strange hybrid entity might we see human-like behaviors
emerge?  When they do, will we be able to integrate these new
entities into society?  If not in physical meat-space, but in the
Internet, new forms of consious life emerge … will the various
digital identity systems being designed today take into account how to
verify their identity, and track their attributes?  Are we even thinking about these coming events?

I have another post that I want to write eventually … about the fact
that “Uploads don’t have fingerprints” … not in the same sense as we
do!

How portable are these lie detectors?

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When I read something like this, I start to wonder just how portable a system like this can be made?

Brain imaging ready to detect terrorists, say neuroscientists.
Brain-imaging techniques that reveal when a person is lying are now
reliable enough to identify criminals, with 99% accuracy, claim
University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine researchers.

When someone lies, their brain inhibits them from telli… [KurzweilAI.net Accelerating Intelligence News]

What hacks and trojans are really about

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Few people seem to understand what all of these viruses and malware are really about.  Yes, there is a certain amount of spam that you get that is designed to then barrage you with pop-up ads … as though you would say “Wow, what a great ad!  I’m glad I get these pop-ups … I’ll have to go and spend money with these folks!“

One of the real business models behind all of this – the real people doing business in this space – are the ones that use large numbers of compromised computers at business and homes to launch DDOS (Distributed Denial Of Service) Attacks.  These attacks are used for good ol’ conventional extortion.  It becomes a very simple case of “Pay me, or your Internet presence will be shut down!”  The person who controls the compromised machines can easily “task” them to attack various web sites, at various times, and for various amounts of time.  Reading this article, you can begin to get the idea that large scale “Internet vandelism” can quickly grow into a profitable – yet illegal – business.  I recently read another article where a California 20-year-old had over 400,000 machines under his control as a massively distributed “botnet” that he could divide up and control as a virtual military force.  Yes … 400,000 machines!

A while back I had one of my Linux boxes compromised through a hole in a Open Source PHP application.  The attackers were able to install and execute a small script that pulled down and ran a larger script.  That one actually attached to an IRC server and waited for additional commands.  I found that they then sent a command to download a DDOS script, and would then begin to run it from time to time attacking various sites.  I discovered this whole scenario when I noticed that my DSL line would get swamped from time to time and isolated the traffic to that Linux box.  I actually had some fun before cleaning everything up.  I did patch the hole, but I modified the DDOS script to simply log information about the command and the target, but not actually generate the traffic.  It was fun to review the log and see that my box was being controlled by a compromised machine in South America, and that I was being to used – at one point – to attack an on-line gambling site.

This got me thinking a lot about what we don’t know that we don’t know about the whole world of the Internet, spam, viruses, and malware.  In addition, it reinforces the levels of indirection that can easily be created to hide the identity of the controller.  But not forever!

Hackers Admit to Wave of Attacks. With their ringleader on the run, two cybervandals own up to using an army of compromised PCs to take down sites for commercial gain. By Kevin Poulsen. [Wired News]

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Outsourced Identity Theft

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I know that this type of identity theft is why so many people are working on identity solutions.  I believe that these types of incidents are going to be on the raise for a while.  What is interesting to me is that I am not sure that this can prevented except through the use of harsh penalties.

What we have is a company who specializes in outsourcing various work, and number of companies who have entrusted their customers – and their identity data – to this outsourcing entity.  Within the outsourcing entity, there are employees – or this one employee – who saw the opportunity to compromise the system from the inside!

While I was working at Novell, we often saw the hacker/security breach reports that floated around, and in almost all of the cases that I could remember the biggest breaches were from the inside!  We can do everything that we want to protect the identities of others, however when we have someone within our company – within our community or context – that is committed to exploiting our identity for their own purposes, there is little we can do.  This becomes a fundamental breakdown within that community … and for significant violations in the past there were severe punishments.  This truly gets at the roots of the meaning of being fired!

Indian call center worker arrested. In a new case of alleged data theft, Indian police have arrested a call center employee in the outsourcing hub of Gurgaon. [CNET News.com]

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How many dimensions?

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I really like reading an article like this.  These researchers are pushing the limits of our thoughts, and introduce new ideas that cause our brains to go ‘huh’?  In looking to create new theories that would explain our observations of the universe, these researchers are positing that there could be numerous more dimensions that exist in the universe … and that they are too “small” for our senses to detect them!

I really like this type of thought because it challenges the traditional thinking that we have been trained to think.  It forces to re-evaluate the facts that we are very primitive biological sensory machines, and that in reality it takes very little to fool us.  Additionally, we fall into the traps of “conventional wisdom” which only limits what we believe is possible!  Why only three dimensions?  Why only six?

I believe that over the next decade we are going to begin to “see” that there is much more to the universe that we thought!

Dark matter highlights extra dimensions. University of Oxford scientists say extra spatial dimensions can be inferred from the perplexing behavior of dark matter, which behaves differently in small galaxies and large clusters of galaxies.

Three extra dimensions are altering the effects … [KurzweilAI.net Accelerating Intelligence News]

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Public Distributed Sensor Networks

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I remember talking with Phil Windley
about one of his ideas to leverage OnStar
as a distributed sensor network. He posited that all of these
cars tend to have temperature sensors, some form of GPS, and the
wireless communications … they could be used to create a nationwide
temperature map.

Now here is another article about taking this further to use cell
phones as the source of distributed sensor information. Very cool
idea. Everyone carrying the right kind of cell phone could opt-in
to providing sensor data to one or more servers. A huge variation
on SETI@Home!

Let’s see … what would someone pay me to participate in this? And protect my identity …

Saving the World With Cell Phones.
Scientists work to turn mobile phones into a distributed network
capable of measuring pollution levels — and possibly detecting
biological weapons before they can be launched. By Rachel Metz. [Wired News]

Internet Infrastructure Ignorance

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While at Internet Identity Workshop 2005 this past week, one of the interesting issues that
came up several times related to name spaces.  Specifically, there
were numerous times where people voiced their opinions about how name
spaces “should” map onto the Internet, and they used DNS as an example
of how things “should” be.  The problem is that they demonstrated,
by their words and arguments, that they were ignorant of how DNS
works.  The infrastructure of the Internet has become so
transparent, that it seems to me people have begun to make gross
assumptions about it’s architecture, and this is what is the root of
many of the security and privacy issues that we are seeing today.

I was looking forward to the presentation by Drummond Reed about XRI/XDI.  One of my concerns in any solid digital identity solution is the freedom to choose. 
I am not a big believer in compulsory community membership, but instead
believe that true freedom is represented by our ability to move in and
out of various communities at will, and to create new communities as we
want.  I really like this thought from “The Meaning of Life – Part II“:

There are millions of different social groups in the world, political, economic,
religious, philosophical, and cultural. These groups are all trying to bring
their particular vision into focus and build a life that is related to the
central principles of the group. Each of these groups is an experiment in
progress. As time passes, the ideas that are developed within these groups
either spread to the society as a whole or are abandoned as unworkable. This is
a Darwinian process that develops better ideas in the same way that evolution is
supposed to develop better animals. You can find more information about this
notion of “idea evolution” at the Memes: Introduction site. Even
groups that you personally dislike are working in your behalf, attempting to
build visions of the world that might allow you to interact with the world more
creatively and successfully.

Groups also serve as symbols in the social world. Groups with different
beliefs than your group provide you with viewpoints you wouldn’t have otherwise
considered. They also represent parts of your own mind that you are not focusing
on. However, if you fear those parts of your mind, this representation can
degenerate into projection, which is a bad thing.

What does this have to do with DNS and digital identity?  It is that I want the freedom to NOT
have one name, one identity, or one reference across all
communities.  Yes, there might be some places where I would
benefit from some level of federation.  At Internet Identity Workshop 2005 I actually
saw where OpenID is intended to not only provide Single Sign-On, but
also is specifically designed to cause a level of federation across web
sites.  I DO NOT
want this to be a requirement.  I am ok with it being an option.  It is this flexibility that I
believe will allow a particular solution to become successful and
ubiquitous.

So … I really wanted to hear more about XRI/XDI and i-Names
because I specifically wanted to learn if they were going to try to
“root” the entire name space into one fixed community.  My real
question was:  “Is XRI/XDI yet another Internet ‘tax’ like Domain
Names (DNS), where you have to pay some entity on an annual basis to
use the value of the technology?”  Or, was XRI/XDI simply one
solution that could be “rooted” anywhere, and allow for the emergence
of various communites to use the technology, and have the naming
relative to the community.  To my relief, the latter was
true.  XRI/XDI is based on specified root servers, and so naming
resolution is based on what root servers you choose.  In the end,
what this means is that my i-Name is only relative to the community.  It is not necessarily a globally unique identifier
for me.  It also means that any community can set up their own
root servers, and create name spaces of their own.  In the end
this means that =drummond.reed only refers to Drummond within the context of a particular community!  Bingo!  I like it!

What shocked me was the almost immediate upset expressed by numerous
people at the conference.  They wanted these names to be
absolutely globally unique . .. so that no one would ever be able to
get “my” name, and there would never be any ambiguity about who was
being referred to by an i-Name.  I fully understand the desire,
however what shocked me was the references to DNS as having this
characteristic!  People actually believe that DNS provides an
absolute unique identifier in any context!  The DNS system has
become so transparent, and ubiquitous that people no longer realize
that it is simply one community for naming on the Internet … and
there is nothing locking people into using it.  These people do
not seem to realize that I can set up my own root servers, and resolve
and DNS name to any IP address that I like!  In fact, I’m quite
surprised that the Open Source community has not stepped up to revolt
against the “Intenet tax” imposed by ICANN and re-ignited the efforts
of OpenNIC, AlterNIC, and many of the other early pioneers in creating
a truly free naming system on the Internet.

DNS naming only works because
our servers, workstations and laptops all obey the rules, and the
default configurations imposed on us by our Operating Systems, ISPs,
and DHCP servers.  Anyone who has installed a DNS server could
easily find the default InterNIC root server list in one of the files
on their system …  /var/named/named.ca
on my Fedora Core 4 install.  I could go into my DNS server and
define “www.amazon.com” to be any IP address that I want.  If you
then happened to route through my DNS server (by being on my network)
then you would get *my* name resolution … not InterNICs.  If I
was an ISP, or even an Internet Cafe, there is little that you could
do, and in fact you would most likely just trust
that the DNS server you were using was trustworthy.  Another
common hack used by trojan horses on the net is to modify your local hosts file.  Most all systems have a hosts file that will resolve naming on your local machine without requiring DNS at all!  If I put an entry in your hosts file for “www.amazon.com” then it will never even use DNS to attempt to resolve the name correctly.

There is nothing in DNS that stops me from adding other root servers, and creating my own free
Top Level Domains (TLDs).  It is only because people just fall in
line with the DNS configuration that it works.  It is only because
we allow our machines to automatically join the ICANN community. 
It is only because of our ignorance and lack of education about how all
of this works that we think that DNS names are globally unique in all
situations.  DNS names, and all naming, are the products of
specific communities or contexts.  Although these communities
might grow to be so large that we can’t seem to see anything else,
there still is the something else.  I actually like it that way.

Accelerando … Science Future

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If you have not yet read Accelerando I suggest that you purchase or
download (Yes! He has a free version that you can download!) a
copy.  I am a big fan of Neal Stephenson’s SnowCrash and Diamond
Age, and this is yet another a fun book to read.  Charles Stross
has done an awesome job of extrapolating today’s technology and
research into a great possible future.

Go get it … read it.  Welcome to the future …

George Gilder and Telecosm 2005

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I haven’t been to Telecosm in years … the last year that I
registered was 2001 when 9/11 occurred and caused a lot of 
conferences to change their schedules.  I’m here this year to
catch up on the capitalist view of the world … Forbes conferences are
always impressive to me.

George Gilder did a brief introduction and kicked things off. 
He immediately went into a short story of how he met Ray Kurzweil …
and then invited him to the stage.

Ray told the story of his Telecosm introduction of The Age of Spiritual Machines. 
For anyone who has not read this book, I highly recommend it.  Ray
went on to explain how this led to his indepth research and study of
the trends that he outlined, and how he is now using this as a
foundation to forecast future trends … 3, 5, and even 10 years out.

He spoke about how his research is getting very good at predicting
longer range trends with surprising accuracy … even being very
conservative.  His new book – being released today – is called The Singularity is Near.  I got my copy here at the conference, and even had it signed by Ray after the evening session at the fireside chat.  He indicated that information is becoming the most important aspect of computing.

It’s funny seeing Ray just weeks after Accelerating Change 2005
… he’s giving (of
course) almost the exact same presentation.  It’s always cool to
hear though … the constant reminder of exponential growth.  His
graphs including showing the Mass Use of Inventions – the World Wide Web being adopted far faster than the cell phone.  

He had a great chart that showed the growth in supercomputing –
measured by calculations per second (CPS) – and said that the estimates
of the power of the human brain range from 10^14 to 10^16 CPS. 
His estimates on when we would reach that point were confirmed as being
sooner when a group in Japan just annouced last week that they will
attain 10^16 Calculations per second by 2010!

He next went to The Biotechnology revolution:  the intersection of biology with information technology.  He talked about the research into biology and what is now possible with new technolgies.  RNA interference
is a newer technique to turn-on and turn-off individual genes, and is
now being widely tested and moving towards human trials. United
Theraputics (Nasdaq: UTHR) is one company that Ray is involved with doing research in this area.

As Ray wrapped up, George and Ray went into a brief chat on
stage.  It was interesting to hear the difference in questions
here at Telecosm.  They were more economic based, and global
society based – Where are the profits going to be made?  Will
America keep up?  Will this solve global war issues?  How
will people deal with this radical growth?  How will this be
regulated?  A great opening night!

Playing with Croquet

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Ok … I have a new thing to explore and experiment with.  After
this weekend, I downloaded Croquet and it is pretty amazing.  A
very cool starting point for 3D synthetic worlds.  I also started a new blog to post about my Croquet Experiences … I’ll be posting more as I learn more.

I’m going to go home and get this working on my projector … I think
it would be fun to explore with my kids … see what we can do!