#robotics beware offensive autonomous weapons

8.1: news.cs/robotics/beware offensive autonomous weapons:
8.3: summary:
. we are getting close to robotics that are
so talented they may serve as soldiers;
but scientists warn we should avoid
such a robotics arms race.
. supercomputers will be used to design
robotic soldiers we don't fully understand.
. robots designed for mutually assured destruction
could cause the extinction of the human race
much more effectively than nuclear weapons.

managing capabilities without encryption

12.7: adda/cstr/managing capabilities without encryption:
. in a read of capability-based security
I wondered if there was some way to
have capability enforcement
without having to encrypt all the shared pointers .
. related ideas include:
# Singularity's faster task switching
done by using ref's to shared mem'
instead of passing copies between modules;
# how to use pointers to shared resources
so that even though 2 concurrent sharers
were both active at different processors,
only one active sharer at a time
would have a useful link to the shared resource .
sketch of a possible design:
. a process can never reach out directly,
but is always accessing things via
pointers located in their header,
and only the supervisor can modify this header;
eg, the task scheduler .
. it's not enough to have possession of a pointer,
you've got to have a supervisor
copy it to your header;
so, it's like encryption,
in that it requires an authorization .
layers for when bugs happen:
. encrypted cap'pointers are being
another level of security; [12.25:
. cap'based is supposed to include
the soa idea:
. bugs are going to get into the system,
but in a software system that
connected it's modules
the same way https connects computers,
then it wouldn't matter bugs had invaded;
because each of the components is
being separately guarded by modularity
(not allowing direct access to state)
and is working only with ID'd clients
(not servicing anonymous agents).
. the idea of unencrypted header pointers
is assuming that
the system's runtime can be secured
which is not likely
on today's monolithic OS's .]

China's coming up in a big way

12.11: news.adds/robotics/china's coming up in a big way:

KurzweilAI.net, Dec. 9, 2009

. the Winter 2009 Issue of h+ Magazine,

. just out, includes The Ray Kurzweil Interview,

and The Chinese Singularity

("Chinese culture has little of the West's

subliminal resistance to thinking machines or immortal people

and this cultural difference may manifest itself in the next decades

in subtle ways.")