skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The site shows a PHP script targeting vbulletin. Obviously there are lots of ways of attacking servers, especially if they run PHP applications and such.

There was once a PDF exploit for iOS that made it possible to jailbreak the phone (or run any code) if the user opened a PDF, so the PHP program could have been redirecting to something like this.

Linux malware would probably have a much lower effectiveness / $, so it doesn't pay off for them.
Anyone who thinks this kind of work requires nation-state backing should look at the (hobbyist!) projects to jailbreak the Xbox, X360 and PS3. Low-level kernel- and hypervisor- programming in which obstacles are casually overcome by dropping zero-day memory corruption bugs in core libraries that would be worth tens of thousands of dollars today just from bounty programs, deploying crypto bugs that make "custom RC5" and "thousands of iterations of SHA1" look like the shoplifted- from- Schneier technique that it appears to actually be (TEA hash collision, ECDSA nonce repeats, &c).

And these were, more or less, student side projects.
I don't think the title is the big issue here. I don't think it's good, and clearly it does put some people off with its tone, but as you say, maybe at least some of those people aren't the intended target audience.

My stronger reservation is that these books have a lot of loose writing and give so much space over to asides or describing bad practices that someone who wasn't so experienced might still not know JS by the end, having missed the wood for the trees.
I had a typing mistake. Indeed, Rails/Django is for developing full-fledged systems, but what I am building is really lightweight and simpler than those.
Equation Group malware can embed in hard drive firmware, can't be deleted
Er, sorry for giving the impression that it'd be a supervillain. My intention was to indicate that it'd be a weird intelligence, and that by default weird intelligences don't do what humans want. There are some other examples which I could have given to clarify (e.g. telling it to "make everyone happy" could just result in it giving everyone heroine forever, telling it to preserve people's smiles could result in it fixing everyone's face into a paralyzed smile. The reason it does those things isn't because it's evil, but because it's the quickest+simplest way of doing it; it doesn't have the full values that a human has)

But for the "off" switch question specifically, a superintelligence could also have "persuasion" and "salesmanship" as an ability. It could start saying things like "wait no, that's actually Russia that's creating that massive botnet, you should do something about them", or "you know that cancer cure you've been looking for for your child? I may be a cat picture AI but if I had access to the internet I would be able to find a solution in a month instead of a year and save her".

At least from my naive perspective, once it has access to the internet it gains the ability to become highly decentralized, in which case the "off" switch becomes much more difficult to hit.
Are you now or have you ever been a TERF?
I could not agree more with everything that you talk about in this post. StartupBus was my first real hackathon and it definitely changed my life.
Tax Pain Relief – Taking the Pain Out of Taxes
Once I had to port a large legacy FORTRAN program to a Unix box. It was structured entirely with goto, no procedures, functions, or control structures - just thousands of lines of code with gotos.

I had to do something like that once. I printed out the program on fanfold paper, took over a conference room with a long table, and traced out the control flow with colored markers. I was able to fix the program. That was not fun.

I have never coded a goto in any language since the days of FORTRAN and assembler. If I need to bail out of the middle of something, I'll use a break or a return, even if this requires encapsulating a loop in a function.

Note that languages with nested functions facilitate programming without "goto". When you need to encapsulate something which may require a bailout, it's easier.

Rust does nested functions well. The compiler can tell whether a nested function references an outer scope and thus needs to be a closure. If the function doesn't, an ordinary function is generated.
FISA is for Foreigners outside of US soil. You literally are exactly incorrect.
The tech sector and the energy surrounding it is palpable here; it's incredible. But, thankfully, it's not the only dominant voice in the city. I hear more and more people at every meetup I attend saying they moved from San Francisco to escape the "tech-centric" culture there. While Silicon Valley is likely still "the" place to be for tech, I'm glad NYC is emerging as a viable East coast alternative.
Unfortunately, many societies today incorporate too strongly one's official profession/title with self-worth. I don't believe sama was implying those who work those jobs are worthless. Instead, it seems like he's trying to say that there are far better ways to accomplish the same objective, and we shouldn't ignore them.

Because our systems of retraining and placing workers into a new profession are so terrible, it's common to assume that many or most displaced workers will remain unemployed. Breaking this status quo is essential to giving everyone a fair chance to work on what truly drives them while we automate more and more worthless jobs. That's why I'm so excited about free and widely available educational resources springing up online. It's not perfect yet, but we had to start somewhere. I have a deep respect for everyone (including sama) who've helped build or teach a mooc.
How to Transform Your Health with Gluten-Free Diet
What the article doesn't reveal is the attack vector, how did the firmware in these drives come to be infected?

Worst case scenario; They all are infected as they come out of the factory. Best case, they are rerouted and patched during postal delivery by a targeted ops team.
Comparison: Lockless programming with atomics in C++ 11 vs. mutex and RW-locks
My $2375 Amazon EC2 Mistake
So like it's clear to me why you wouldn't want to take a system based on AI-like technology and have it control air traffic or missile response.

But it doesn't take a deep appreciation for the dangers of artificial intelligence to see that. You can just understand the concept of a software bug to know why you want humans in the observe/decide/act loop of critical systems.

So there must be more to it than that, right? It can't just be "be careful about AI, you don't want it controlling all the airplanes at once".
Of course I do. The question, of course, is what else is that site doing that needs cookies or local storage?
Do guns kill people, or do people kill people?
I guess the same vectors available to a blogger, or pundit, or politician? To fear-monger; to mislead important decision makers; to spread lies and manipulate the outcomes of important processes.

Is it possible to say that such AIs are NOT at work right now, fomenting terrorism, gathering money through clever investment and spending it on potent schemes to upset economies and governments?
I have had a tow line break, and lost an entire tender in a calm sea. As soon as you lose eye contact, it's almost as good as gone.

And everytime I have sailed in a blue water race, the entire crew wear self inflating harnesses that also contain a radio, gps, knife, dye, etc.... and often also a high vis swimmers cap. And the harness never comes off. Even while sleeping.
>It's terrible sure, but it's popular only because our economy requires it. That is the basis for the whole economy. It's not like people are clamoring to serve McDonalds for minimum wage or clean shit out bathrooms. They have no other choices in this economy. The economy demands it. While those jobs might be necessary, most middle management and office type jobs are incredibly redundant and frankly, pointless. They are there because people need to eat and we haven't figured out a better, more appropriate way of wealth transfer.

Then we should probably change the economy so that the people don't have to suffer so much.

>It's not astonishing considering that these things don't exist, pose no threat, and the people in power wouldn't understand them even if they did exist. There are many more pressing issues that hypotheticals.

I'll go tell friends, colleagues, and my professional idols that their work does not exist and is purely hypothetical, then.
If mixed drink sales are poor (for instance, because many consumers cannot justify the price), then there isn't much motivation for the bar to hire professional bartenders rather than college kids, or even create a proper cocktail menu. Extreme cocktail pricing made it a niche market with few businesses willing to participate in it in earnest.
I'm not an expert but I imagine any bit of code you put into firmware will target very narrow configuration of other software on the PC, will be pretty fragile and susceptible to bit rot.

To be able to routinely steal something from the PC it will need to be tailored to specific configuration.

Am I wrong?
Sure please take a look at this an tell me if you see any similarities (1990): http://www.nytimes.com/1990/06/05/science/great-15-year-proj...
Its only really useful against non-terrorists, but that doesn't mean its a waste of money: if it is used to make money.

So maybe its being used to make money - i.e. targetting non-terrorists (i.e. industrial espionage) - precisely because it is a huge waste of money. Wow, its almost like the whole thing was just a bad idea in the first place - its become self-serving.
Sentiment Tagging with Node.js and the AYLIEN API
Here is a link with some more technical details

https://securelist.com/files/2015/02/Equation_group_question...
Adding more sound absorption is a one-way street, it reduces reverb. This could (theoretically) take an overly muffled room and give it the reverb of Carnegie Hall, or a jazz club, or whatever sound profile you have in your computer. And then you can change it back.

Nothing will match a naturally good sounding room but could you use this to benefit an awful sounding room? Maybe. Digital reverb has a bit of an uncanny valley that you have to make it across.
No, we helped the Pahlavi dynasty launch a nuclear program, whereas the Iranian Republic is now launching a nuclear program using what they've scavenged from that one.

You are conflating two different nations that happen to share a name and borders. The US trades technology with the Fourth Republic of Germany; The US did not with the Third Reich.
So far as I'm aware, most proponents of recursively self improving AIs don't necessarily think they can improve without upper limit (as in perpetual motion). They just think they can improve massively and quickly. Nuclear power lasts a hell of a long time and releases a hell of a lot of energy very fast (see: stars) but that's not perpetual motion/infinite energy either. And prior to those theories being developed it would seem inconceivable for so much energy to be packed into such a small space. But it was. Could be for AI too.

Not saying the parallel actually carries any meaning, just pointing out that you can make multiple analogies to physics and they don't really tell you anything one way or the other.
Its a bit like my Oric Telestrat, which was an upgrade to the Oric-1 -> Atmos machines, in that it gave a full 64k and had expansion options.

Sure was a wild and woolly period of computing - so many wonderful machines, too many different ways to develop things. Just like today, only cuter ..
Two economists are walking down the street. One spots a $100 bill on the ground.

"Hey," he says to his friend, "There's a hundred bucks lying on the ground!"

"Don't be silly," the other replies, "If there were a hundred dollars on the ground, someone would have picked it up already!"

The two economists keep walking down the street.
The ngram viewer, you're correct, doesn't clearly indicate the origin date of several of these names.

But you can bet your patootie it shows you when they emerged into common and popular usage. And that's the point I'm making here.

Yes, some of those brands "existed" going back through history to dates earlier than U.S. Prohibition. I explored that aspect in an earlier question to reddit's /r/AskHistorians, and from what I could glean from that, while the names existed they were largely as small and local establishments. Not the national conglomerates we've got today.

Most large alcohol brands underwent a revolution in the post-WWII era. Many far more recently than that.
The US already has the responsibility to end Iran's nuclear program, which threatens the safety of US citizens and the world.

But if the US also helped start the program, I guess it is even "more" responsible, if that is even possible.
For whatever it's worth, that scalac fork hasn't been updated in over 5 months.

From personal experience, it helps to know the Java ecosystem and the basic data structures but it won't hurt you too much if you don't. Read 'Programming in Scala' and you'll pick up on all the missing pieces pretty quickly.
Cookies disabled here, Iceweasel on Debian. I only get the intro on loop. And I can't full-screen. Once I allow cookies, the thing loads.

Why does a website need cookies in order to show me a video?
No, it only applies on US soil. It's aimed at the communications of foreign powers that involve a person on US soil or somehow else take place on US soil.
Piracy and cheating has always been gateway to serious programming.
That's a good point, but in most societies, most people aren't out of work. The safety net depends on people paying in to the system, which depends on people having something to pay.
Medium case: The NSA has a slate of exploits that lets them target malware installation on specific machines.

Edit: are downvotes because you don't think it's "medium", or implausible, or what?
Yeah for me it's trying to make calls to http://www.openstreetmap.org/http://nominatim.openstreetmap....

It kind of demonstrates how far behind they are with things like navigation, search etc. It's a shame because the actual mapping data behind OSM is absolutely fantastic.
That doesn't mean that it's easy, it just means that hacking a PS3 is highly motivating. Making some lame centerfuge explode half-way around the world is high on patriotism (I guess) but short on lols.
We are losing the backs of things
A typical example, which I don't really like, is that once it gains some insight into biology that we don't have (a much faster way of figuring out how protein folding works). It can mail a letter to some lab, instructing a lab tech to make some mixture which would create either a deadly virus or a bootstrapping nanomachine factory.

Another one is that perhaps the internet of things is in place by the time such an AI would be possible, at which point it exploits the horrendous lack of security on all such devices to wreck havoc / become stealth miniature factories which make more devistating things.

I mean, there's also the standard "launch ALL the missiles" answer, but I don't know enough about the cybersecurity of missiles. A more indirect way would be to persuade the world leaders to launch them, e.g. show both Russia and American radars that the other one is launching a pre-emptive strike and knock out other forms of communication.

I don't like thinking about this, because people say this is "sci-fi speculation".
The Art of Coffee Brewing
We working to fix this right now ;-) (OSM sysadmin here)
They should connect and then integrate the calendar into gitstats, it looks really useful and would be awesome to put into the gitstats report.
Because the latter is pointless when there already exist tools better suited to that task?

The efforts of those road workers are effectively meaningless. Worthless. Moot. Their efforts would be better expended elsewhere - service jobs, creative occupations, the like - yet here they are, digging ditches for subsistence wages (at best) instead of doing something properly meaningful with their time on Earth and their energy.

The idea in places like India that manual labor takes precedent is a symptom - I'd argue - of exposure to the lingering remnants of a very long-lived caste system; instead of pushing these laborers into more useful fields, there's a preference to relegate them to menial, worthless work under the guise of "public service" or "charity" in order to reinforce that system, whether deliberately or perhaps unconsciously. I can assure you that, of the many reasons to emphasize such manual labor, "dignity" of the laborers is not one of them in this case.
> One is not going to be able to engineer a dangerous plague that will wipe out the human race in one shot. One would have to do experiments, and those experiments will be noticed, because people will get sick and die.

We should still institute safety protocols suitable for a really-bad-case scenario.
The trouble with "persuasion" as the vector of harm from AI is that some of the dumbest people in the world are capable of getting thousands or (in the case of ISIS) millions of people to do their bidding. What contains persuasion as a threat isn't the intellectual limitations of the persuaders: it's the fact that persuasion is a software program that must run at the speed of transmitted human thought.
I think of it differently. As an engineer I'd use a control volume - draw a circle around the economy. Label inputs and outputs. E.g. mining, sunlight to produce food and energy, available land and water. The economy thrives if those things have a positive balance. The money is just a strange way of scorekeeping - imaginary points the people use to regulate their selfishness.

For instance the idea of a Basic Income is proposed once the economy has enough to feed and house everyone insensitive to the exact employment rate.
How do security issues happen?
It would have been a great thing explaining what is wrong in my comment
The Patriot Act means the US three letters agencies could get whatever they want from whatever US company(or company that sells in the US).

As the article says, they could ask for the code for making an audit. Of course they can do whatever they want with it.

They can abuse this power in so many ways, from giving this source code to competitors but "closer to home", individual members of those agencies selling it for profit, or analyzing vulnerabilities and not reporting them to you.
I've updated my post with the ngram for "cocktail, cocktail hour, cocktail party, cocktail lounge", from 1850-2008: http://goo.gl/EBXM87

You'll find that as with the others I've cited, it shows a rapid and dramatic growth during Prohibition, to levels not achieved previously, and which have been maintained since.

Subsequent peaks in 1953, 1985, and 2002.

I'm aware that "appearance in print" is only a proxy for cultural prevalence. But it's a good one.
Not exactly - and that's why FISA is so controversial.

The FISA Amendment Act permits the court to issue a warrant if either the sender or recipient is a non-US citizen abroad (since the "target" can be either party involved in the communication). Foreign nationals who are acquired abroad as FISA targets can later enter the US and remain subject to the warrant. And if there is uncertainty about the location or nationality of the target, the dispute is frequently resolved in favor of the surveillance agency.

The ACLU has fought FISA since it was enacted, as they believe it creates a way to unconstitutionally surveil people in the United States.
Economic progress in a free market involves technological progress, the accumulation of capital, and the increased productivity of labor thanks to the two previous elements. That's not something to fear. There is no limit to human ingenuity. Labor is not a fixed pie that technology and capital shrink over time. And yes some labor-intensive activities have been and will continue to be replaced by capital-intensive systems -- which is wonderful because it means that it frees people to make ever-more of their time and powers of reason. The demand for labor (hence the wages for labor) increases with the accumulation of capital -- not the opposite. There is a line of economic thinkers who have elaborated on a pro-Capitalist view of economics, from Adam Smith to George Reisman via Jean-Baptiste Say, David Ricardo, Carl Menger, and Ludwig von Mises. It may help to read them.
In the presence of laziness, it can be very difficult to reason about what code executes when. When you don't know when your unsafe IO happens, things can get out of order or have other unforeseen side effects.
The Next BALLET MUSIC VIDEO to Go VIRAL
Imagine Superman actually fighting criminals and keeping America safe.

Now imagine Superman sneaking laxative into criminals' sandwiches so they are slightly inconvenienced, but allowing them to continue to kill people in the long run.

The US government is Superman. But it is the second version, while it can and should be the first version.

---

We know who the enemies are. We know who funds and harbors terrorism. We need to take them out, not spy on them.

---

And no, I am not advocating Vietnam III (note: Iraq/Afghanistan was Vietnam II). That was a purely self-sacrificial program to bring "democracy" to people who didn't want it. I am advocating warfare in the classic sense: Destroy the enemy. I am advocating what we did to the Nazis and Japanese.
It's not easy (the sophistication of some of the console jailbreaking work is extremely frustrating to some of us in the pro vuln research community, in that they treat as footnotes things that would score a whole Black Hat talk).
Absurdity is a relative state. When philosophy starts trying to bullshit with semantics, I completely loose interest. That's this article.
> "There is zero chance that someone could rewrite the [hard drive] operating system using public information," Raiu said.

Anybody have anymore info on this? I've always been under the impression that it's at least theoretically possible to copy the firmware off of something and decompile it at least.
WWE Superstar Antonio Cesaro’ Twitter Account Hacked
Oh yes, that thing. I had one, but it was too late, PC already was taking over :(
Ask HN: How to learn social skills; is this the curse of being a hacker?
I'm thankful that I had the opportunity to spend most of my teenage years learning web dev, programming and tinkering with technology, instead of catching up with fashion trends and doing other teenage shenanigans. Unfortunately I rarely ever went out, and the result is that I've entered my twenties and I don't know how to carry a basic conversation.

I'm pretty sure it's not a personal problem, as I've never been diagnosed with autism or the like, and I am a very professional communicator by email. It's just that I struggle to respond to basic social cues, read people's emotions, know what to say, and to talk loudly and clearly. The only exception is business, which I can generally handle decently. As soon as it becomes informal however, I become a train wreck of awkward, and am very conscious of it. I especially struggle with saying something without thinking; I need 5 seconds to think over my next sentence, and people give up on me.

I've heard Bill Gates can be pretty unapproachable; is there really something about being mathematically minded which makes us socially different? How does one learn basic social skills after "growing up", has anyone done it?
What makes life so interesting and great in my opinion, are the limitations --and the boundaries of those limitations that people push further and further-- of these meat bags we carry eveywhere with us.
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Tailor Brands Raises $1.1m in Funding to Build Out Its Automated Design Process
Reactive ReactJS: improving data flow using reactive streams