Google Taking Action for Free Speech

In an obvious nod to the recent controversy surrounding the freedom of speech on the web, Google is now taking a clear stand, advocating for a free and unsupervised Internet. It was on Wednesday, January 18th, that Americans stood up in opposition to PIPA and SOPA – bills that would have censored the Web and imposed harmful regulations on primarily U.S. businesses, but also the entire world.

Individuals took action and closed down their personal blogs, companies closed their websites, and thousands of US citizens called their elected representatives in Washington, voicing their mistrust. Their voices were heard. Washington recognized the damage these bills could inflict on the Internet, and as a result, PIPA and SOPA have been indefinitely postponed. However postponed is not good enough; these bills needs to be buried forever. Google recognizes this, and is not petitioning everyone to sign up for a free Internet.

This development follows quite expected from the recent year’s disclosure of Internet espionage. It may seem like ages ago now, but it has not even been a year since former CIA employee Edward Snowden ,in a series of exposés beginning on June 5, 2013, publicized thousands of classified documents to several media outlets. The leaked documents revealed operational details of global surveillance programs run by the NSA, and the other Five Eyes governments of the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, with the cooperation of a number of businesses and European governments.

Within the immediate days that followed Snowden had gotten his passport revoked, fled to and from several different countries, charged with espionage, and quickly seen himself go from patriot to traitor. However some people would say that he has made the exact opposite journey, and gone from traitor to patriot. Seldom has one man been called so many different polar opposites; a hero – a villain, a savior – an enemy, a patriot – a traitor.

The disclosures have fueled debates over mass surveillance, government secrecy, and the balance between national security and information privacy. Two court rulings since the initial leaks have split on the constitutionality of the NSA's bulk collection of telephone metadata, and most would argue that NSA have greatly surpassed their jurisdiction.

Espionage and terrorism have always been the dark side of freedom of speech, and will probably continue to be so until the end of man. The Internet has since the beginning been open and free, and has lately played pivot roles in aiding freedom around the world. Countries like Alger, Tunis, Egypt, Syria, Libya, and Yemen would not have started their paths towards democracy had it not been for the Internet. The Internet has help to uncover racial prosecutions and injustices in Saudi, Oman., Iraq, Djibouti, Sudan and West Sahara, and has also recently shined a strong light on the homophobic nation of Uganda, leading to western countries boycotting the African nation.

I short the Internet was born, and shall remain, free.

Governments alone should not determine the future of the Internet. The billions of people around the globe that use it and the experts that build and maintain it should. A free society depends on free expression. The flow of ideas and open access to information on the web helps communities grow and nations prosper.

https://www.google.com/intl/en/takeaction/

This may be the most important stand we ever make, and Google is leading the way. Please read the petition and get opinionated.

Do you think governments should be able to restrict the Internet? Please comment below.

Google's expanding their AI Mind

Google is expanding its ambitions in Artificial Intelligence with the acquisition of AI company DeepMind for a reported $400 million.

It’s no secret that Google has an interest in AI; after all, technologies derived from AI research help fuel Google’s core search and advertising businesses. AI also plays a key role in Google’s mobile services, its autonomous cars, and its growing stable of robotics technologies.

With the addition of futurist Ray Kurzweil to its ranks in 2012, Google also has the grandfather of “strong AI” on board, a man who forecasts that intelligent machines may exist by midcentury.

If all this sounds troubling, don’t worry: Google’s acquisition of DeepMind isn’t about fusing a mechanical brain with faster-than-human robots and giving birth to the misanthropic Skynet computer network from the Terminator franchise.

DeepMind's Web site describes the London-based company as "cutting edge" and specializing in combining "the best techniques from machine learning and systems neuroscience to build powerful general-purpose learning algorithms." The site says the company's initial commercial applications are simulations, e-commerce, and games.

Google has been particularly focused on advances in artificial intelligence recently. Scientists working on the company's secretive X Labs created a neural network for machine learning by connecting 16,000 computer processors and then unleashed it on the Internet. The network's performance exceeded researchers' expectations, doubling its accuracy rate in identifying objects from a list of 20,000 items.

I wrote about Artificial Intelligence as a part of my article series The Conscious Internet. Do you think the age of Artificial Intelligence is upon us? Comment below...

The Conscious Internet - Part IV: Running Free

A while back a wrote a short article titled "the Conscious Internet" concerning the development of AI and computer technology in regards to the Internet. The article is written with a very philosophical approach to the subject, but handles real life facts. It has long been my intention to publish it here on the blog, but I just haven't gotten around to doing so. Until now ...

Here's part 4 of 8. You can find the previous chapter here. Happy reading, and please comment below.

Running Free

The second of November 1988 a young man named Robert T. Morris Jr. wanted to play a prank. He was a graduate student at Cornell University, and in the spirit of school competitiveness, he released a simple program on the Internet, a so called “worm”. The coding was modest; all the program did was to copy itself until the host computer ran out of memory and crashed. With the opus in hand, Morris hacked into rivalry school MIT’s computer network and unshackled his creation. Using a loophole in the operating system Unix´s network settings, Morris was able to bypass security measure and gain access to the core of the computer. Arriving at its destination the program began multiplying itself, blocking up memory, and thereby rendering the computer useless. When it was done with the first computer, Morris had told the worm to move on to the next neighboring computer, and repeat the process. What Morris had not taken into effect however was that in this case the neighboring computer was to be any computer hooked up to the Internet.

The process took less than a second to perform and within a few hours the chaos was evident. When Morris saw his creation escaping out of his control he immediately contacted a friend at Harvard to help him contain the issue. They quickly sent mail to major US servers, cautioning them of the worm and trying to convince them to shut down. But their warnings were already stacked up in the wake of the worm, and the plead was never even delivered. At that moment the worm had already destroyed more than two thousand servers, as well as over ten thousand computers, some of which belonged to NASA, the BRL, and MIT.

It took teams of programmers numerous weeks to sanitize all the affected computers, and the web was left inoperative for several days. What had started as a practical joke amongst two rivaling top universities, quickly escalated to the largest IT-devastation known to man. The total cost for the fabrications was estimated to be more than $53 000, and Morris himself was convicted to three years on probation, 400 hours of community service, and $10 050 in fines. Morris had negligently tripped over Pandora’s Box, and despite of all his programming skills and knowledge, he was unable to close it.

Suppose now that Morris´s worm was designed with another purpose. Instead of crippling the computers it came across, it would simply copy the contents of that computer and information back to a main hub. Morris would then have created a global network, where he personally controlled all the information that passed through it. A central computer system controlling most governing entities in the US; all-knowing and aware of any minute impact to the network – sound familiar? Today, such cataclysmic event may be regarded as far fetched. Improved anti-virus protections, higher encryptions, and better firewalls should prevent this type of disaster from ever occurring again. This is true to an extent; increased security measure has made it increasingly difficult to hack major system, however, at the same time, the algorithms used in viruses have also improved, placing this virtual arms race neck to neck.

... continues in Part V: Deciphering the Logic