Ransomware isn’t new; the idea dates back to 1986 with the “Brain” computer virus. Now, it’s become the criminal business model of the internet for two reasons. The first is the realization that no one values data more than its original owner, and it makes more sense to ransom it back to them — sometimes with the added extortion of threatening to make it public — than it does to sell it to anyone else. The second is a safe way of collecting ransoms: bitcoin.
This is where the suggestion to ban cryptocurrencies as a way to “solve” ransomware comes from. Lee Reiners, executive director of the Global Financial Markets Center at Duke Law, proposed this in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed. Journalist Jacob Silverman made the same proposal in a New Republic essay. Without this payment channel, they write, the major ransomware epidemic is likely to vanish, since the only payment alternatives are suitcases full of cash or the banking system, both of which have severe limitations for criminal enterprises. Read More
Monthly Archives: July 2021
Burner phones, fake sources and ‘evil twin’ attacks: journalism in the surveillance age
What does the new age of surveillance mean for the work of investigative journalists? Last year, I was preparing to fly from London to a country in the Middle East for a sensitive reporting trip. I wasn’t worried about my own safety – but now I have to take extraordinary measures to protect the security of my data.
Bringing my own laptop or personal phone was out of the question. Instead I bought a completely new phone. I made sure not to sign into any of my accounts from the phone, and I did not save any numbers in the blank address book. Before I left, I created a temporary email address specifically for this trip, where sources could reach me.
Counterintelligence in journalism used to be the domain of reporters digging into matters of national security or liaising with sensitive government whistleblowers; but increasingly those tactics are necessary across the board. Read More
Researchers Hid Malware Inside an AI’s ‘Neurons’ And It Worked Scarily Well
In a proof-of-concept, researchers reported they could embed malware in up to half of an AI model’s nodes and still obtain very high accuracy.
Neural networks could be the next frontier for malware campaigns as they become more widely used, according to a new study.
According to the study, which was posted to the arXiv preprint server on Monday, malware can be embedded directly into the artificial neurons that make up machine learning models in a way that keeps them from being detected. The neural network would even be able to continue performing its set tasks normally. Read More
The Metaverse: A brave, new (virtual) world
If we accept the premise that on the Internet “if you’re not paying, you’re the product”, in the Metaverse you will become a walking — talking billboard.
Intro: Video games now
Amongst the changes that “lockdowns” and “new normality” have brought, there is a revalorization of digital interactions as valuable and meaningful. Ironically, what was once regarded as isolationist or a poor substitute for “real life” (an expression used as an interchangeable semantic proxy for “in-person”) experiences, has become the glue that holds the social fabric together. Read More
The Jessica Simulation: Love and loss in the age of A.I.
The death of the woman he loved was too much to bear. Could a mysterious website allow him to speak with her once more?
Joshua Barbeau, a 33-year-old freelance writer living in Bradford, Canada provided old message exchanges from his wife, plus some necessary background information, a website called Project December, where you can talk to chatbots with state-of-the-art AI systems, to create a new bot, named “Jessica Courtney Pereira.” Read More
Dr. Lex Fridman: Machines, Creativity & Love | Huberman Lab Podcast #29
NeRF-VAE: A Geometry Aware 3D Scene Generative Model
We propose NeRF-VAE, a 3D scene generative model that incorporates geometric structure via Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) and differentiable volume rendering. In contrast to NeRF, our model takes into account shared structure across scenes, and is able to infer the structure of a novel scene— without the need to re-train—using amortized inference. NeRF-VAE’s explicit 3D rendering process further contrasts previous generative models with convolution-based rendering which lacks geometric structure. Our model is a VAE that learns a distribution over radiance fields by conditioning them on a latent scene representation. We show that, once trained, NeRF-VAE is able to infer and render geometrically-consistent scenes from previously unseen 3D environments using very few input images. We further demonstrate that NeRF-VAE generalizes well to out-of-distribution cameras, while convolutional models do not. Finally, we introduce and study an attention-based conditioning mechanism of NeRF-VAE’s decoder, which improves model performance. Read More
#image-recognitionNeuroprosthesis for Decoding Speech in a Paralyzed Person with Anarthria
Technology to restore the ability to communicate in paralyzed persons who cannot speak has the potential to improve autonomy and quality of life. An approach that decodes words and sentences directly from the cerebral cortical activity of such patients may represent an advancement over existing methods for assisted communication.
Researchers implanted an array of 128 electrodes into the region of the brain responsible for movement of the mouth, lips, jaw, tongue, and larynx. They then trained a system to interpret electrical impulses into conversational phrases. Read More
Enterprise-scale machine translation with Spence Green, CEO of Lilt
Enabling the ‘imagination’ of artificial intelligence
A team of researchers at USC is helping AI imagine the unseen, a technique that could also lead to fairer AI, new medicines and increased autonomous vehicle safety.
…as humans, it’s easy to envision an object with different attributes. But, despite advances in deep neural networks that match or surpass human performance in certain tasks, computers still struggle with the very human skill of “imagination.” Read More
Rick's Cafe AI 