cloakers.org

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  • The Dangers of Machine Learning

    So have we worked out how to replicate human thinking? Far from it. Instead, the founding vision has taken a radically different form. AI is all around you, and its success is down to big data and statistics: making complex calculations using huge quantities of information. We have built minds, but they are not like ours.

    Their reasoning is unfathomable to humans, and the implications of this development are now attracting concern. As we come to rely more and more on this new form of intelligence, we may need to change our own thinking to accommodate it.

    There are two major areas of artificial intelligence.

    One is rule-based, where effectively a robot/machine/computer is told exactly how to behave in each situation. They are programmed by a human, and will just about always perform as expected.

    The other is machine learning, where the device learns all by itself. Although how it learns is seeded with human programming, beyond that it is on its own.

    Let us say we want an AI to answer questions about a simple topic: what cats like to eat, for instance. The rule-based approach is to build, from scratch, a database about cats and their dietary habits, with logical steps.

    With machine learning, you instead feed in data indiscriminately – internet searches, social media, recipe books and more. After doing things like counting the frequency of certain words and how concepts relate to one another, the system builds a statistical model that gauges the likelihood of cats enjoying certain foods.

    Google Translate is a great example of machine learning. Rather than the massive task of programming translations of dozens of languages by hand, Google just looks at the entirety of the Internet and learns which words go together best.

    This works great when most of what it finds online is true and accurate. Where it falls over is when information online is inaccurate, although generally speaking this is a cultural thing – the phrase “obama is the antichrist” appears more than 1 million times on the web.

    The concern for cloakers is grey areas. Survivalists have been concerned that indicators somebody might be a terrorist are very similar to those for a survivalist. The US Government has told businesses that anyone buying survival equipment and paying with cash should be reported as a potential terrorist.

    We are one step away from a computer determining that you are quite possibly a terrorist. But what makes this very scary is that the computer won’t be able to say why it thinks that. It will just say that, based on what it has learned, this is the conclusion it comes to.

    In the early days of AI, “explainability” was prized. When a machine made a choice, a human could trace why. Yet the reasoning made by a data-driven artificial mind today is a massively complex statistical analysis of an immense number of data points. It means we have traded “why” for simply “what”.

    Even if a skilled technician could follow the maths, it might not be meaningful. It would not reveal why it made a decision, because it wasn’t arrived at by a set of rules that a human can interpret.

    The article I have been quoting from is Higher State of Mind, New Scientist, 10 August 2013, via The Age. It mentions how Google would show ads saying “Have you ever been arrested” if you had a name that was commonly given to a black person.

    The stakes are higher now that intelligent machines are beginning to make inscrutable decisions about mortgage applications, medical diagnoses and even whether you are guilty of a crime.

     

     

  • Dark Wallet Makes BitCoin More Anonymous

    I’m pretty impressed that one of the creators of Dark Wallet was the guy who created the first (working) gun using a 3D printer. From Wired:

     …collective of politically radical coders that calls itself unSystem plans to release the first version of Dark Wallet: a bitcoin application designed to protect its users’ identities far more strongly than the partial privacy protections bitcoin offers in its current form. If the program works as promised, it could neuter impending bitcoin regulations that seek to tie individuals’ identities to bitcoin ownership. By encrypting and mixing together its users’ payments, Dark Wallet seeks to enable practically untraceable flows of money online that add new fuel to the Web’s burgeoning black markets.

    …Its central tool is a technique called CoinJoin: Every time a user spends bitcoins, his or her transaction is combined with that of another user chosen at random who’s making a payment around the same time. If, say, Alice is buying alpaca socks from an online sock seller and Bob is buying LSD on the Silk Road, Dark Wallet will combine their transactions so that the blockchain records only a single movement of funds. The bitcoins simultaneously leave Alice’s and Bob’s addresses and are paid to the sock seller and the Silk Road. The negotiation of that multi-party transaction is encrypted, so no eavesdropper on the network can easily determine whose coins went where. To mix their coins further, users can also run CoinJoin on their bitcoins when they’re not making a real payment, instead sending them to another address they own.

    …Any user can ask Dark Wallet to generate a stealth address along with a secret key and then publish the stealth address online as his or her bitcoin receiving address. When another Dark Wallet user sends payment to that address, Dark Wallet is programmed to instead send the coins to another address that represents a random encryption of the stealth address. The recipient’s Dark Wallet client then scans the blockchain for any address it can decrypt with the user’s secret key, finds the stealth payment, and claims it for the user.

    Slowly and surely a Dark Web is emerging, one that is so encrypted and anonymous that authorities cannot monitor or control it. Eventually it might just be left alone, a modern-day Wild West. Caveat Emptor, anyone who goes there!

    UPDATE: Decent article about the creators of Dark Wallet (and where they are hiding) at Wired.

  • Directional Sound

    Here’s a glimpse of the future. At McDonald’s there is a TV playing. Those who are sitting on designated seats can hear whatever is on. Everyone else in the room hears nothing.

    When combined with technology like Microsoft’s Kinect, inanimate objects can appear to make their own sound, either when you come within range or when you interact with it.

    Your finger touches the door bell. The chime is directed at you and whoever is in the house. But not to dogs. The dogs don’t go crazy because someone is at the door.

    The HyperSound System is currently being used commercially in museums and retailers to provide a spotlight of sound, where passersby can only hear the audio commentary being played when standing in the right space.
    Source: The Guardian

    Yes, it is real and being used already!

    How will this affect Cloakers?

    • Secret communications. You know the classic situation where secret agents meet on a park bench and pretend to not be having a conversation? In the future just sitting on that park bench and making a subtle but unique gesture could trigger directional speakers to relay a message.
    • Misdirection. At an airport you hear that your boarding gate has changed. The think is, only you heard the announcement. That boarding gate is a trap.
    • Proof. Recording equipment won’t be able to prove what was communicated, unless they are situated really close to the aural recipient.
    • Beneficial. Instead of wearing headphones, the music is beamed at you.

    Basically you will no longer be able to trust what you hear, and will no longer know what people nearby are hearing. Just like no two Google search results are the same these days (due to personalisation), all real world aural experiences have the potential to be unique.

  • Dark Web Gets A Search Engine

    As far as search engines go these days, Grams is pretty basic.
    http://www.wired.com/2014/04/grams-search-engine-dark-web/

    Yet it is adding to the growth of the Dark Web, and I am noting how it mimics the early days of the common web known to you and I.

    The focus is narrow – drugs and weapons – but with time, as the dark web expands, Grams could end up being greatly useful.

    Think about it – people who buy drugs and guns are just people, and people love to chat. Before long there will be a great social aspect to the Dark Web, perhaps one day superseding the transactional aspects.

    I predict the Dark Web will be the next big thing by the end of 2014.

  • Surveillance Camoflague

    Surveillance is growing, and the technology keeps improving. Anybody who operates in grey or illegal areas should start considering how to avoid detection.

    Phone Tracking

    On the TV and in movies, typically the culprit/hero realises they are being tracked by their cellphone, and they respond by either removing the battery, smashing it or throwing it away. If you have the right piece of kit there is a much more efficient way:

    Off Pocket

    Basically a sleeve that blocks phone transmissions. Think of it as the ultimate airplane mode.

    Drones / Thermal Imaging

    The idea here is to avoid being visually recognised from above (the bigger the hat or hood, the better) and prevent your heat being detected. That means metallic materials. The required clothing is new and expensive.

    Stealth Burqa $2500 – Silver-plated fabric is hand oxidized with brush stroke camouflage pattern.

    Please note that if you are out in the open you can still easily be spotted due to any movement you make.

    Cameras

    Beating the algorithms of facial recognition technology can be achieved without buying anything. Basically you need a wonky hair cut, and colours on your face that don’t belong there:


    http://ahprojects.com/projects/cv-dazzle/

     

    All the products featured in this post are designed by artist Adam Harvey.

  • Stingray Update

    A reader alerted me to this article, which shows that Harris Corporation has more to offer than just the Stingray:

    …marketing materials come with a warning that anyone distributing them outside law enforcement agencies or telecom firms could be committing a crime punishable by up to five years in jail.

    These little-known cousins of the Stingray cannot only track movements—they can also perform denial-of-service attacks on phones and intercept conversations.

    …documents indicate that the Stingray can also be used with software called “FishHawk,”  which boosts the device’s capabilities by allowing authorities to eavesdrop on conversations. Other similar Harris software includes “Porpoise,” which is sold on a USB drive and is designed to be installed on a laptop and used in conjunction with transceivers—possibly including the Stingray—for surveillance of text messages.

    …Agencies: Federal authorities have spent more than $30 million on Stingrays and related equipment and training since 2004, according to procurement records. Purchasing agencies include the FBI, DEA, Secret Service, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Internal Revenue Service, the Army, and the Navy. Cops in Arizona, Maryland, Florida, North Carolina, Texas, and California have also either purchased or considered purchasing the devices, according to public records. In one case, procurement records show cops in Miami obtained a Stingray to monitor phones at a free trade conference held in Miami in 2003.

    Other devices Harris sell are variations on the Stingray theme, including Triggerfish, Gossamer, Amberjack, Kingfish, Harpoon and Hailstorm. The latter is brand new & even more powerful than Stingray, although little is known about it at this stage.

  • Stingray: Cell Tower Interceptor

    In the USA law enforcement officials have legal means of obtaining cell phone data. But that requires time and paperwork. So much easier to just intercept the information with a piece of technological kit:

    The Stingray is smaller than a suitcase, costs about $400,000, and its function is pretty straight forward. Basically, it tricks all nearby cell phone traffic into sending data to the Stingray as if it were a cell tower. It then downloads all that data to a computer program that translates it for whoever is operating the Stingray. All the traffic is then passed to the nearest cell tower, with no one the wiser. [Source: CrimeLibrary.com]

    Legally or not, as was proven by The Sun newspaper in England, and Wikileaks reports, your cell phone calls can easily be monitored. So either give them no other identifiable or meaningful information; location, content, owner – or just don’t use mobile communications if you operate in illegal or grey areas.

    Learn more at USA Today, who claim “at least 25 police departments own a Stingray“.

     

  • Total Surveillance?

    George Orwell’s 1984 predicted a world of substantial surveillance. Spying on citizens is certainly growing, and if anything it is accelerating. One conclusion is that, with a touch of social massaging, we will end up completely surveilled.

    Excerpts via an article reprinted at Mother Earth:

    Estimates vary, but by 2020 there could be over 30 billion devices connected to the Internet. Once dumb, they will have smartened up thanks to sensors and other technologies embedded in them and, thanks to your machines, your life will quite literally have gone online.

    It is easy to remove yourself from the web – just choose not to participate. The future, however, will include fixed, 24/7 monitoring that is much harder to switch off.

    … The dangers aren’t theoretical. In November, the British tech blogger Doctorbeet discovered that his new LG Smart TV was snooping on him. Every time he changed the channel, his activity was logged and transmitted unencrypted to LG. Doctorbeet checked the TV’s option screen and found that the setting “collection of watching info” was turned on by default. Being a techie, he turned it off, but it didn’t matter. The information continued to flow to the company anyway. [Scary – link]

    • Will eating habits collected by smart fridges be repackaged and sold to healthcare or insurance companies as predictors of obesity or other health problems—and so a reasonable basis for determining premiums?
    • Will smart lights inform drug companies of insomniac owners?

    Outside of your home, products like Apple’s iBeacon will offer improved shopping experiences, but the cost is your privacy – the more Apple knows, the better you are served!

    Sooner or later, with smart devices seamlessly using sensors and Big Data provided by data aggregators, it will be possible to pick you out of a crowd and identify you in complex ways in real time. If intelligent surveillance cameras armed with facial recognition technology have access to social media profiles as well as the information stored by data aggregators, a digital dossier of your life could be called up on-demand whenever your face is recognized. Imagine the power retailers and companies will exert over your life if they not only know who you are and where you are, but what your weaknesses are—whether that’s booze, cigarettes, or the appealing mortgage rate with the sketchy small print. Are we looking at a future where the car salesman really does know what he has to do to put us in that car?

    … “We see outdoor lighting as the perfect infrastructure to build a brand new network,” said Hugh Martin, CEO of Sensity Systems, a Sunnyvale, California-based company interested in making lighting smart. “We felt what you’d want to use this network for is to gather information about people and the planet.”

    The answer, as always in CloakerLand, comes in two flavours:

    1. Disconnect completely, and see your life become more and more difficult compared to regular folk, and appear on the radar of the powers that be – your absence makes you worthy of observance.

    2. Maintain a natural Big Brother profile by generally participating. But cloak any activities that might be misconstrued by those who can lock you up. It’s the equivalent of being in the French Resistance of WW2 – regular citizen by day, dangerous rebel by night.

     

  • Big Brother is Very Much Here

    It doesn’t matter which way the story is spun by internet businesses:

    • We didn’t know they could access our data
    • They forced us to share
    • They told us to deny it

    …governments are intercepting private and personal data. They will achieve it in whichever manner they see fit:

    Applebaum, a cryptography expert, was yesterday named as an author of an explosive article in Der Spiegel listing the names and details of several NSA exploits. The Germany magazine published NSA documents that boasted of the agency’s ability to use zero-day exploits to spy on communications passing through the switches and routers of the world’s largest networking vendors, Cisco, Juniper Networks and Huawei, among others.

    Today, he detailed previously unreported exploits targeting the most popular lines of servers manufactured by Dell and HP, as well as smartphones of Apple and Samsung.
    [Source: IT News]

    Ultimately none of this matters. Rather than trying to second-guess which pieces of your data might be discovered, just presume that they all could.

    Unless your data is transported via irregular and unpopular channels using the strongest cryptography, it is unlikely to be safe.

    Most of the time this won’t be an issue – the NSA won’t be interested in your chit chat – so maintain an everyday social profile online. But for anything that could be flagged or misconstrued (and err on the side of caution), try using off-grid forms of communication.