Google threatened late Tuesday to pull out of its operations in China after it said it had uncovered a massive cyber attack on its computers that originated there.
As a result, the company said, it would no longer agree to censor its search engine in China and may exit the country altogether.
Google said that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human right activists, but that the attack also targeted 20 other large companies in the finance, technology, media and chemical sectors.
In a blog posting by David Drummnod, the corporate development and chief legal officer, Google said that it had found a "highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China."
"These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered - cobined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web - have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China." Mr. Drummond wrote in a blog post.
He wrote that Google was no longer willing to censor results on its Chinese-language search engine and would discuss with Chinese authorities whether it could operate an uncensored search engine in that country.
"We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China," Mr. Drummond wrote, adding that the decision was being driven by executives in the United States, "without the knowledge or involvement of our employees in China."
Google did not publicly link the Chinese government to the cyber attack, but people with knowledge of Google's investigation said they had enough evidence to justify the actions.
A United States expert on cyber warfare said that 34 companies were targeted, most of them high-technology companies in Silicon Valley. The attacks came from Taiwanese Internet addresses, according to James Mulvenon, an expert on Chinese cyberwarfare capabilities.
Mr. Mulvenon said that the stolen documents were sent electronically to a server controlled by Rackspace, based in San Antonio.
"For Google to pull up stakes and basically pull out of China, the attack must have been large in scope and very penetrating," Mr. Mulvenon said. "This attack highlights the fact that cyberwarfare has basically gone to the next level."
Mr. Drummond said that Google decided to speak publicly about the attack not only because of its security and human rights implications, but because "this information goes to the heart of a much bigger global debate about freedom of speech."
Google entered the China market in 2006, agreeing to introduce a censored search engine. At the time, the company said that it believed that the benefits of its presence in China outweighed the downside of its being forced to censor some search results tehre, as it would provide more information and openness to Chinese citizens.
But the company said that it would continue to monitor restrictions in that country and review its decision periodically.
January 12, 2010
World's communication network due an energy diet
by Paul Marks
The internet and other communications networks could use one-ten-thousandth of the energy that they do today if smarter data-coding techniques were used to move information around. That's the conclusion of Bell Labs, the research centre in Murray Hill, New Jersey, where both the laser and transistor were invented.
The lab has launched a consortium of networking and computing firms called Green Touch that is committed to developing new power-saving technologies. The initial goal is to cut power use in the global telecoms network by 99.9 per cent by 2015.
At issue, says Gee Rittenhouse, head of research at Bell Labs, is the 300 million tonnes of carbon dioxide belched into the atmosphere to power today's global telephone, internet and cellphone networks. "That's equivalent to the emissions from 50 million automobiles, or 20 per cent of the cars registered in the US," he says. The explosion in internet traffic taking place as mobiles go online and video viewing grows, plus future changes such as the arrival of 3D TV, will push those emissions even higher.
Back to basics
One way Bell Labs plans to develop low-power networks is by harnessing the theories of its late alumnus Claude Shannon that underlie all electronic communication, wired or wireless.
Shannon worked out that in a low-power channel, where unwanted "noise" is loud compared with the intended signal, a code can always be devised to extract the messages being transmitted. Today's fibre-optic and cellphone networks avoid having to take that approach by using high power levels. "But by using smarter codes we can extract those signals and reconstruct them accurately even in the presence of high noise," Rittenhouse says.
Other members of the Green Touch consortium include US mobile network AT&T, China Mobile – the world's largest cellphone operator – European mobile operator Telefonica, hardware manufacturers Samsung and Freescale Semiconductor, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, California, the University of Melbourne, Australia and the French national computing lab INRIA.
Consolidated data
MIT engineer Muriel Médard says she will be looking for ways to bundle together internet data taking similar routes through the network to reduce the traffic on power-hungry trunk routes. "A lot of energy is dissipated in vain," she says.
At the University of Melbourne, Rod Tucker will focus on the power consumed by broadband modems, phones and cellphones when not in use.
"If you have broadband your modem is probably switched on all the time, consuming a few watts," he explains. "We'll be looking at ways to make modems and phones go into a sleep mode when not in use – but from which they can wake up quickly.
Samsung of South Korea is still firming up its ideas. "But memory and displays in communications systems are areas where we can particularly innovate," says engineer Young Mo Kim.
It's not just hardware that will be getting attention – changing user behaviour can also cut power use. For example by making cellphone battery life indicators more accurate or power-saving settings easier to change, users could be encouraged to use their cellphone batteries more efficiently. "The user aspects of communications energy-saving will be a clear focus," says Bell Labs president Jeong Kim.
October 25, 2009
INPUT/mind/OUTPUT/mind
1/2/1/2/
1/2/1/2/
1/2/1/2/
1/2/1/2/
1/2/1/2/
1/2/1/2/
1/2/1/2/
1/2/1/2/
1/2/1/2/ 1/2/1/2/
&/or/#?
A writing revolution
Nearly everyone reads. Soon, nearly everyone will publish. Before 1455, books were handwritten, and it took a scribe a year to produce a Bible. Today, it takes only a minute to send a tweet or update a blog. Rates of authorship are increasing by historic orders of magnitude. Nearly universal authorship, like universal literacy before it, stands to reshape society by hastening the flow of information and making individuals more influential.
To quantify our changing reading and writing habits, we plotted the number of published authors per year, since 1400, for books and more recent social media (blogs, Facebook, and Twitter). This is the first published graph of the history of authorship. We found that the number of published authors per year increased nearly tenfold every century for six centuries. By 2000, there were 1 million book authors per year. One million authors is a lot, but they are only a tiny fraction, 0.01 percent, of the nearly 7 billion people on Earth. Since 1400, book authorship has grown nearly tenfold in each century. Currently, authorship, including books and new media, is growing nearly tenfold each year. That’s 100 times faster. Authors, once a select minority, will soon be a majority.
(Graph & excerpt from "A Writing Revolution" by Denis G. Pelli & Charles Bigelow in SEED Magazine)
We, the creators of the free information society, mean to wrest from the bourgeoisie, by degrees, the shared patrimony of humankind. We intend the resumption of the cultural inheritance stolen from us under the guise of "intellectual property," as well as the medium of electromagnetic transportation. We are committed to the struggle for free speech, free knowledge, and free technology. The measures by which we advance that struggle will of course be different in different countries, but the following will be pretty generally applicable:
By these and other means, we commit ourselves to the revolution that liberates the human mind. In overthrowing the system of private property in ideas, we bring into existence a truly just society, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.
- Abolition of all forms of private property in ideas.
- Withdrawal of all exclusive licenses, privileges, and rights to use of electromagnetic spectrum. Nullification of all conveyances of permanent title to electromagnetic frequencies.
- Development of electromagnetic spectrum infrastructure that implements every person's equal right to communicate.
- Common social development of computer programs and all other forms of software, including genetic information, as public goods.
- Full respect for freedom of speech, including all forms of technical speech.
- Protection for the integrity of creative works.
- Free and equal access to all publicly-produced information and all educational material used in all branches of the public education system
(from "The dotCommunist Manifesto" by Eben Moglen)
October 24, 2009
Information, memory, & time travel: a tangential thought experiment
The scheme seems ingeniously simple and technically feasible. To overcome oblivion, say the authors, all you need are sensitive miniature sensors and several terabytes of storage, which are already or soon-to-be affordable. You can then record every minute of your life using video, audio, location and physiological signals, culminating in the commitment of this endless stream of information to your personal MyLifeBits account in your pocket and/or in cyberspace. Proper software will permit you to retrieve the information years later, and it will even pass by default to your progeny for eternity, with the hope that they will pay attention to it.
New Scientist: "Memory & Forgetting In The Digital Age" by Yadin Dudai
Dudai brings up some valuable criticisms of the claims being made by the authors, representing a certain faction of technologically minded futurists.
More worrisome than the idea itself is the prevailing assumption that such a recall would in fact be total. Even in its most outlandishly comprehensive form, such technology would merely opportune an augmented reiteration of a numerically unique prior occurrence. Assuming the commonly held empirical view of time, experiencing such a recollection would, no matter its immersiveness, retain distinction, even if only by merit of such numeric identity.
Let's suppose such a device has been built and that it is able to record and induce a recollection so immersive as to be indistinguishable from the original experience. By means of Brain-Computer Interface (BCI, yet another emerging innovation) the device thoroughly records the user's external context as well as affected perceptions and corresponding mental states. In fact the user of this device becomes so immersed in the recollection that he or she would have no idea that it was in fact a recollection, their brain state having been reverted to the time of the initial occurance. They may have forgotten the intervening memories, or else are unable to recollect them. Either way, they essentially live the experience as if for the first time. Of course, when the user is brought back to the present, they become aware of having gone back into their archived past. This shift may be disorienting, or perhaps as banal as turning off a television. Either way, they now have knowledge of having lived the experience, archived it, and subsequently recalled it. All the while, they are recording information. This means they may now recollect recollecting.
What happens when they step back into the moment of stepping back into another moment? Deffering any conclusions bearing resemblence to popular science fiction, this shows that even the most immersive recollection will retain its numerical uniqueness, if only in retrospect.
June 28, 2009
On Pure Capacity
In his discussion of the ideas presented by Democritus in The History of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russell casts the problem of void in a different light, suggesting that the problematic notion be reconsidered in terms of pure capacity rather than spatial terms. Democritus was a philosopher from ancient Greece, a contemporary of Socrates (though still considered to be among the pre-Socratic thinkers), who advocated a theory of physical reality that is a remarkably advanced precursor to today's atomic theory. In brief, he theorized that all matter is made up of imperceptible tiny particles called atoms. The most significant way this theory differs from our present day conception of atoms is that to the Atomists these were necessarily impenetrable, indestructible, and indivisible. There was no further divisions that could be made; atoms were thought to be the absolute smallest building blocks of which every physical thing we encounter is comprised. The Atomists held that the atoms existed in a pure and limitless void, through which they could move freely. At first, this seems natural, basically suggesting that there is a space in which the atoms exist. But if these atoms are the absolute smallest particle which makes up everything that exists, then this space cannot be made of anything that exists and is thus void. Needless to say, this is problematic, or at least it is if we consider void to be the absence of matter.
But if we look at it in terms of pure capacity, then the paradoxical statememnt of positively referring to a negative concept (e.g. "there is nothing here") is, if not eliminated, at least made more comprehensible. In other words, it makes sense to say that we cannot truly conceive of or positively refer to a negative concept such as void. But we can, and I think we do this in our everyday language, positively indicate a level of capacity or degree of something in particular, while we cannot make an utterance that references to, or even conceive of, "nothing."
But what about our concept of nothingness? How is it that we can meaningfully convey anything by this word at all? Certainly we intend to express this all of the time, and wouldn't it follow that we must have somewhere in our heads a concept of it that we understand ourselves if we have an intention to express something? How could someone wish to express something they have no concept of? Certainly if we meant to say "no capacity for x in regards to y" we would say just that, rather than convoluding our ideas with such misleading words as "nothing."
In support of Russell, the Atomists, and common speech, I cannot think of any instance outside of discussions in theology or metaphysics where "nothing" would hold such broad meaning as it does here. In general, if I say "there is nothing in the box," I am really saying that the box does not contain anything mentionable, that is anything besides air or possibly packing material. The person to whom I am communicating the absence of contents in the box would undoubtedly think me peculiar if I informed him that this box contains air. Utterances such as this are also highly dependent on context. A word like nothing, though a noun, is unique in so far as it cannot be conceived to exist independently of its context, as can most other nouns.
There is no question that we do, if in a limited capacity, understand negative concepts on their own. How this can be the case has been the concern of many philosophers throughout history, including Plato's famous argument of recollection in Meno and Immanuel Kant's theory of Transcendental Idealism, which he presents in his Critique of Pure Reason. As I said above, I think that it is the case that we always ascertain a negative idea like nothing by thinking of it in terms of its context, as an absence of the thing or idea to which it refers. But how do we arrive at understanding isolated negative concepts such as nothingness or void? The fact that we refer to them in a positive sense indicates that there is a transference. Rightly or not, it seems to me that we can arrive at a notion of pure nothingness in and of itself by means of induction: there is no ketchup in this bottle, I am short fifteen cents, etc., until we have an idea culminating in a general law-like understanding of absence-in-general, which we, for the most part correctly, apply to describe situations, both observed and hypothetical, that seem to fit its criteria. But to this law-like understanding of absence-in-general, we can only talk about positively, in so far as to do otherwise would be something like removing words from a sentence instead of adding them, or not thinking of an idea to think about it. So, language provides a meaningful and convenient shorthand for such complex inductive thoughts that we barely understand but can successfully convey nonetheless. I suggest that it is by pure analogy that we can successfully entertain and convey these sorts of thoughts, just as it is by pure analogy that the word "negative" refers to its meaning.
It also seems to be so with language in general: that words can somehow be related to the thoughts of their author in such a way that they more or less can reconstruct the author's mental state(s) in a second person is a profound notion. While the Atomists' views regarding the natural world, though insightful and correct to a certain extent, has been exceeded by modern physics, the theory could be applied with more success to our language, and then to the minds of speakers and hearers. Such a theory might culminate a unique take on some problems in philosophy mind, exploring the power of metaphor and symbols of language as mechanisms of pure capacity. Further, such a model might aspire to bridge the waring so-called clashing disciplines of "analytic" and "continental" philosophy.
But if we look at it in terms of pure capacity, then the paradoxical statememnt of positively referring to a negative concept (e.g. "there is nothing here") is, if not eliminated, at least made more comprehensible. In other words, it makes sense to say that we cannot truly conceive of or positively refer to a negative concept such as void. But we can, and I think we do this in our everyday language, positively indicate a level of capacity or degree of something in particular, while we cannot make an utterance that references to, or even conceive of, "nothing."
But what about our concept of nothingness? How is it that we can meaningfully convey anything by this word at all? Certainly we intend to express this all of the time, and wouldn't it follow that we must have somewhere in our heads a concept of it that we understand ourselves if we have an intention to express something? How could someone wish to express something they have no concept of? Certainly if we meant to say "no capacity for x in regards to y" we would say just that, rather than convoluding our ideas with such misleading words as "nothing."
In support of Russell, the Atomists, and common speech, I cannot think of any instance outside of discussions in theology or metaphysics where "nothing" would hold such broad meaning as it does here. In general, if I say "there is nothing in the box," I am really saying that the box does not contain anything mentionable, that is anything besides air or possibly packing material. The person to whom I am communicating the absence of contents in the box would undoubtedly think me peculiar if I informed him that this box contains air. Utterances such as this are also highly dependent on context. A word like nothing, though a noun, is unique in so far as it cannot be conceived to exist independently of its context, as can most other nouns.
There is no question that we do, if in a limited capacity, understand negative concepts on their own. How this can be the case has been the concern of many philosophers throughout history, including Plato's famous argument of recollection in Meno and Immanuel Kant's theory of Transcendental Idealism, which he presents in his Critique of Pure Reason. As I said above, I think that it is the case that we always ascertain a negative idea like nothing by thinking of it in terms of its context, as an absence of the thing or idea to which it refers. But how do we arrive at understanding isolated negative concepts such as nothingness or void? The fact that we refer to them in a positive sense indicates that there is a transference. Rightly or not, it seems to me that we can arrive at a notion of pure nothingness in and of itself by means of induction: there is no ketchup in this bottle, I am short fifteen cents, etc., until we have an idea culminating in a general law-like understanding of absence-in-general, which we, for the most part correctly, apply to describe situations, both observed and hypothetical, that seem to fit its criteria. But to this law-like understanding of absence-in-general, we can only talk about positively, in so far as to do otherwise would be something like removing words from a sentence instead of adding them, or not thinking of an idea to think about it. So, language provides a meaningful and convenient shorthand for such complex inductive thoughts that we barely understand but can successfully convey nonetheless. I suggest that it is by pure analogy that we can successfully entertain and convey these sorts of thoughts, just as it is by pure analogy that the word "negative" refers to its meaning.
It also seems to be so with language in general: that words can somehow be related to the thoughts of their author in such a way that they more or less can reconstruct the author's mental state(s) in a second person is a profound notion. While the Atomists' views regarding the natural world, though insightful and correct to a certain extent, has been exceeded by modern physics, the theory could be applied with more success to our language, and then to the minds of speakers and hearers. Such a theory might culminate a unique take on some problems in philosophy mind, exploring the power of metaphor and symbols of language as mechanisms of pure capacity. Further, such a model might aspire to bridge the waring so-called clashing disciplines of "analytic" and "continental" philosophy.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)