Netizen: National Security Agency

Showing posts with label National Security Agency. Show all posts

Monday, May 18, 2015

The Brain

Singularity is NOT near! Stop complaining about overpopulation. Why try to mimic brains when there are so many brains out there, undernourished, underutilized?

Your brain has roughly 100 billion neurons and 100 trillion neural connections, or synapses. An iPhone 6’s A8 chip has 2 billion transistors. (Though, let’s be clear, a transistor is not anywhere near the complexity of a single synapse in the brain.) .... The highest bandwidth neural interface ever placed into a human brain, on the other hand, had just 256 electrodes. Most don’t even have that. ..... The second barrier to brain interfaces is that getting even 256 channels in generally requires invasive brain surgery, with its costs, healing time, and the very real risk that something will go wrong. .............. the former editor of the journal Neuron has pointed out that carbon nanotubes are so slender that a bundle of a million of them could be inserted into the blood stream and steered into the brain, giving us a nearly 10,000-fold increase in neural bandwidth, without any brain surgery at all.

Tuesday, September 09, 2014

Ultraprivate Smartphones

I guess we live in the Snowden era.

Ultraprivate Smartphones

Mobile phones for the consumer market that transmit minimal personal information. ... On January 21 a text message flashed on phones held by the protesters thronging Kiev’s Independence Square. Ukraine’s president, Viktor Yanukovych, was then still clinging to power and brutalizing opponents. The message—from the number 111—read: “Dear subscriber, you are registered as a participant in a mass disturbance.” ...... the NSA gathers huge amounts of information from cloud computing platforms and wireless carriers, including the numbers ordinary people called and the times they called them. Not only could the government be watching you: so could websites, advertisers, and even retailers trying to track your movements within stores. Modern smartphones and the apps running on them are engineered to collect and disseminate enormous amounts of user data—such as location, Web browsing histories, search terms, and contact lists. ....... Traditional crypto required the parties in an encrypted conversation to possess the same unique decoding tool (or “key”). The new approach was fundamentally different: it involved two mathematically linked keys, one private, the other public. Suddenly, applications such as digital signatures became possible. You could use a private key to “sign” a document; later, anyone else could use the public key to verify that you were indeed the author.

Tuesday, November 13, 2012

The Surveillance State

FBI's abuse of the surveillance state is the real scandal needing investigation

The US operates a sprawling, unaccountable Surveillance State that - in violent breach of the core guarantees of the Fourth Amendment - monitors and records virtually everything even the most law-abiding citizens do. Just to get a flavor for how pervasive it is, recall that the Washington Post, in its 2010 three-part "Top Secret America" series, reported: "Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications." ...... And the Obama administration has spent the last four years aggressively seeking to expand that Surveillance State, including by agitating for Congressional action to amend the Patriot Act to include Internet and browsing data among the records obtainable by the FBI without court approval and demanding legislation requiring that all Internet communications contain a government "backdoor" of surveillance. ....... what is most disturbing about the whole Petraeus scandal is not the sexual activities that it revealed, but the wildly out-of-control government surveillance powers which enabled these revelations. What requires investigation here is not Petraeus and Allen and their various sexual partners but the FBI and the whole sprawling, unaccountable surveillance system that has been built.