It depends heavily on what your threats are and what you are trying to control/prevent. For myself and for most Americans (making a big assumption here I know), the Chinese State is not a serious threat to be concerned about. This due to the fact that they are across an ocean and have close to zero effective physical force projection capability in the US. A greater concern should be domestic criminals (I.E. burglars) or the domestic government because both of those potential threat actors have the capability of using information from a home security system to cause one harm in some way.
They are fundamentally tied into the US economy and are known to effectively share data and behaviour across industries. If you were plausibly competing with a Chinese company and working from home, the question on where the HikVision information goes is a curiousity.
How much does it matter where the hardware was made if it is using local storage? If you are worried about this sort of thing, there is no reason you need to provide routing for the devices outside of your local network (e.g. VLAN). Unlike any hardware relying on cloud services.
Yeah I have to agree with this. If you're savvy enough to setup your own close-looped surveillance system then you're savvy enough to check if the camera is pinging home to a China-based server. And if it is then just block all WAN connections from that IP.
"Hikvision is fighting for its survival after the U.S. banned the company in October, accusing it of helping Beijing crack down on Muslim minorities in the far-western region of Xinjiang. "
Agreed that most electronics have China influence. But there’s a pretty big difference between influence and actual state control.
I have no insider info but from reading the news it appears that what China is doing is several levels sketchier than Amazon/Ring when it comes to infringing on civil liberties.
Protecting your self is one thing; supporting that kind of regime with your money is another.
What are your options for local-network-only cameras built in, say EU or North America? I suppose you can go with commercial surveillance cameras but I'm not sure how practical that is for the average home user...
Unless you monitor the network it is very likely that it is pinging a Chinese server.
Many years ago we bought a treadmill with LCD screen and Android running on it with a browser and other stuff. Connected it to WiFi and were happy.
A couple of years later I got a Ubiquiti edgerouter, configured it and decided to check its deep packet filtering. It started showing me an odd Chinese domain being pinged periodically, like every 5 min. Don't remember the domain but it was some Chinese search engine/portal I had never heard of (not Baidu). It took me a while to figure out that it was the treadmill that was doing this. At which point I had to just disconnect it. I have no idea why it was doing what it was doing and what data it was sending and if I was running a backdoor in my home all this time.
Point I'm trying to make is, don't assume. Mistrust and Verify should be the modern day mantra for Internet connected, especially Chinese, devices.
I have a Hikvision NVR and 4k camera setup. I keep them on a separate subnet and have blocked all access to other subnets and the internet via a Mikrotik router.
In the year or so I have had this setup there hasn't been a single packet from the NVR or cameras in an attempt to access the internet.
I don't have the above mentioned cameras, but I do have cameras that are completely blocked from the internet.
The way I do it is: When I leave my home my home assistant will enable the FTP upload on motion detection feature of the camera. If there's motion then the camera will upload the recording to a ftp server running locally (synology), this then gets synced to google drive.
Home assistant can also do push notifications if there's movement detected.
yes and no.
its a little work but you could whitelist a domain the NVR can connect to or maybe an IP. Block anything else.
for example:
if you want the NVR to upload to Dropbox, you would whitelist the list of domains that are needed for Dropbox to work.
if the NVR tries to connect to 'heartbeat.hikvsn.cn' it would fail.
I was in China recently, and the number of surveillance cameras there is bewildering. I suppose when you buy this brand you benefit from cutting edge technology funded by the investment the state has made...
Fascinatingly, China has a mix of public - private infrastructure. E.g. wireless payments are provided by WeChat and AliPay (although in the West it's not much different, it's Visa/MasterCard), and I guess in the US, Amazon is the private side, and the cops are the public side.
Pretty sure that's the brand I noted in my local McDonalds too. I wondered why there was so much lag to the display, so I checked the brand to look into it later. Dumb of them to write it on the side if they are profiling.
In other news, interest in online chess has never been higher despite Kasparov going down in flames in 1997 in what was billed as “the brain’s last stand.”
Can we please stop flogging this tired “man vs machine” narrative? Not only is it totally unnecessary, it also takes away enjoyment and appreciation for the flourishing in games like chess, go and poker that can occur when man and machine work together.
And not to mention humans designed these computer systems too so its brain(s) vs brains if you go one step down. If you keep proceeding steps down the statement devolves into something weird but the point stands I think.
Big defector, my ass. He doesn’t even have the cojones to call out his old pal Zuck. McNamee is merely profiting from the techlash to get his name out there.
Source: went to see him speak at Stanford. Asked him myself during live Q&A, if Facebook is so evil and must be stopped, why doesn’t he call out Zuck for terrible leadership given that Facebook culture and business practice comes straight from the top? His answer, direct quote: “well, he and I are friends.”
If this is our big defector, we’ve got serious problems.
Hasn’t Mark said in public that he didn’t remember McNamee, that he was barely invested early on in Facebook and left when they switched business model?
(The whole “You know what’s cool, a billion dollars?” and refusing Yahoo!’s offer was actually a big internal shift that ostracised a lot of early employees and investors.)
I don’t know, has he? Citing a source would be constructive as I’m not aware of Zuck saying anything publicly about McNamee ever since his PR stunt kicked off.
What do you mean by 'in private' here? The criticism in your other comment seems to be based on things that he said at a public or at least semi-public event.
In private meaning directly to Zuck, who he claims is his friend. His stated unwillingness to confront Zuck directly means that his entire public narrative is grandstanding at best.
So despite referring to him publicly as an authoritarian, you want him to tell you that he hates him?
What about the parts of the article where McNamee is, according to the Brian Barth, persuading powerful people to rally against every surveillance capitalist.
This is a seriously great idea and looks well executed.
Just to add to the chorus of Firefox requesters. I’m sure you have limited dev resources but the spirit of this concept is very aligned with Firefox and less so Chrome. So it might be worth your time even if chrome has greater market share.
Look forward to seeing where you go with this project.
Thanks for the kinds words! Planning on releasing on Firefox in the next several days and I created a quick form if you'd like an email when it's ready: https://forms.gle/aiEqoSVk6XMb5DaL8
Any explanation of why social media is toxic without mentioning the Like button is incomplete.
All of the status-seeking behaviors the researchers describe existed before Likes, but by gamifying social status Facebook threw gasoline on the narcissism fire.
And yes, Facebook didn’t invent the like button (that was Friendfeed) but they made it a standard.
Also worth noting that a key component of Facebook’s initial positioning was that it did NOT have any gamified counters, unlike MySpace and Bebo which were fueled by profile views and friend counts.
indeed , there were forums well before SNs were a thing, and while they were contentious at times, they weren't constantly at the brink of explosion/tribal wars. Makes one wonder if we even need likes/upvotes to reward opinions. It's possible that they were useful to get the social conversation going, but as the networks grew to huge scale, they ve lost most of their usefulness. I wonder how twitter would be without likes for a day
Likes are 100% never going anywhere. They provide a means for Google/FB/whoever to categorize you. The instant you click 'like' on a post about the latest pro-Dems thing, or on a post organizing a pro-life rally, or on something a band posted, they instantly know a lot about you. (Or more specifically, the algorithms begin acting as if they know a lot about you.) Every time you click 'like,' you are fine-tuning the company's profile of you. Maybe at one point they were about rewarding opinions or something, but in today's big-data-driven social networks, they are entirely about categorization for ads.
Certainly possible. I do know they have done some small work to de-emphasize the numbers -- the idea being that seeing a small number next to your own post makes you sad and less likely to use the service. And I suppose I could see the possibility of a place like instagram deciding, actually, we can deduce enough based purely on who you follow, whose stuff you regularly click on.
Who knows, maybe they do actually see the possibility of culture at large making a hard turn away from SM due to its tendencies to increase depression & anxiety, increase conflict, etc., as a serious risk to their business.
But consider that in Instagram's case, it's most likely just an attempt at discrediting "influencers" - which are a big parallel marketplace of ads occurring on Facebook's property without any return for the main company.
> there were forums well before SNs were a thing, and while they were contentious at times, they weren't constantly at the brink of explosion/tribal wars.
The ones I was on were sure tribal and it was just a gaming forum that could get pretty ridiculous over just Xbox vs PS2 vs Gamecube. Because humans are viscously tribal.
I think the like-button is a distraction from a reality we don't want to admit.
I too remember forums back in the day. Usenet via AOL was my first online social experience. I think Twitter etc would be more like that old school experience - much more of a niche product, still with the usual trolls etc but in general higher quality to noise ratio.
> In this work we present the MuZero algorithm which, by combining a tree-based search with a learned model, achieves superhuman performance in a range of challenging and visually complex domains, without any knowledge of their underlying dynamics.
I mean, it's cool that computers are getting even better at chess and all (and other perfectly constrained game environments), but come on. "Superhuman" chess performance hasn't been particularly interesting since Deep Blue vs Kasparov in 1997.
The fact that the new algorithms have "no knowledge of underlying dynamics" makes it sound like an entirely new approach, and on one level it is. ML vs non-statistical methods. But on a deeper level, it's the same shit.
Unless I'm grossly mistaken, (someone please correct me if this is inaccurate), the superhuman performance is only made possible by massive compute. In other words, brute force.
But it uses less training cycles, you say! AlphaZero et all mastered the game in only 3 days! etc etc. This conveniently ignores the fact that this was 3 days of training on an array of GPUs that is way more powerful than the supercomputers of old.
Don't get me wrong. These ML algorithms have value and can solve real problems. I just really wish DeepMind's marketing department would stop beating us over the head with all of this "superhuman" marketing.
For those just tuning in, this is the same company that got the term "digital prodigy" on the cover of Science [0]. Which is again a form of cheating, because the whole prodigy aspect conveniently ignores the compute power required to achieve AlphaZero. For the record, if you took A0 and ran it on hardware from a few years ago, you would have a computer that achieves superhuman performance after a very long time, which wouldn't be making headlines.
Okay, I will bite. It uses less training cycles. Why is that not significant? Both AlphaZero and MuZero are brute force, but MuZero is less brute force than AlphaZero, so it's heading in the right direction.
Sure, but both of them are more brute force than Deep Blue (unless anybody has a compelling counter argument), so we’re actually heading in the wrong direction.
AlphaZero evaluates comparably less positions per second than Deep Blue. It doesn't even reach 100k nodes per seconds of I remember correctly, while Deep Blue was in the millions[1]. Therefore, even though the training is done by brute force, the evaluation is way less "brute forcing" in AlphaZero than in Deep Blue.
Not just Stockfish on modern hardware can evaluate fewer nodes than Deep Blue and still beat it left and right; in 1995 Fritz on a Pentium was able to beat Deep Thought II at the world chess championship. Deep Blue and its ancestors, with their custom hardware, were perhaps the "most brute force" of all chess engines.
As you yourself point out, the brute force here refers to solving a problem by throwing more hardware at it.
Number of nodes searched is not the key metric for gauging how “smart” the algorithm is. You have less nodes searched but you only got there by having way more upfront processing.
It should be pointed out AlphaZero plays better than Deep Blue. I think comparing computational resource usage is important, but direct comparison only makes sense with equivalent performance level.
> This makes no sense to me. 50% increase in performance can be compared to 50% increase in processing power to evaluate level of brute force-ness.
Computational complexity theory taught us that fundamental difficulty of solving specific types of problems does not always linearly scale with the size of the problems. I guess the same logic applies to the quality of the output?
I mean that ELO is not linear and there is no obvious ratio operation for ELO scores. How much is better than 2,600? Is it 5,200? Is it the rating at which you'd have 2:1 odds of winning a match? (Wikipedia says 200 points represent 74% chance of winning, so somewhere below 2,800) There's just no commonly agreed meaning of "50% better Chess player".
Zuck’s anti China stance has nothing to do with having a spine and everything to do with Facebook’s bottom line. He is merely using China as a very convenient punching bag and foil to deflect attention away from Facebook’s own gross abuses of power.
This is exemplified in his address on free speech several weeks ago - trying to position Facebook as a defender of American values (free speech and human rights) versus big bad China.
Make no mistake, if Zuckerberg actually cared about the values of a free society he would fix his own platform. Don’t applaud him for throwing shade at an even more authoritarian regime.
He doesn't understand how, he's indoctrinated into it as well as his behaviour - he has personal work to do to open up his mind and heart before he'll develop the necessary empathy to see the holistic for what it is.
This commentary gets the psychology of superhero narratives entirely wrong:
> Primarily, mass-market superhero movies seem to be abetting an audience who do not wish to relinquish their grip on (a) their relatively reassuring childhoods
It’s the exact opposite. Superhero movies speak most strongly to those whose childhoods were traumatizing. The misfits, the rejects, the nerds who were bullied and had no protector. These narratives are about downtrodden heroes discovering their inner strength and standing up to evil and abuse. Look at the archetype of the mild mannered geeky protagonist who hides his incredible abilities - Spider-Man, Superman with his Clark Kent glasses and persona.
The reason these movies are resonating so deeply in this cultural moment is we have an entire generation of traumatized kids, now adults, who are searching for stories to help them make sense of their reality. This is directly linked to the rise of so-called mental illness, aka trauma.
I’m not saying that all of these mass produced movies are works of art, but you need to understand where the appetite is coming from. The root is in collective trauma.
The only connection to DW Griffit’s racist film is surface level - literally just the fact that masks and capes are involved. Pointing to that film as a forerunner of superhero movies is frankly absurd.
I can accept that that's part of the reason. Back in the day bullied kids watched Karate Kid to watch the underdog emerge victorious against all odds. But even the most die hard fan will tell you that Karate Kid 3 did not need to be made, it was a cheap cash-in on a successful franchise.
What explains the desire to make a mini-series or spinoff franchise about every single character, if not the desire to cash in? A couple of years ago Netflix had Jessica Jones, Iron Fist and Luke Cage as standalone shows, and The Defenders as its own show. The Defenders had the exact same cast playing the same characters as on the standalone shows. What is the point of that? Certainly not to put traumatized adults at ease I imagine.
I’m not arguing about the motives of the big studios cashing in with superhero franchises. Merely pointing out that the root cause of the demand they’re tapping into is the exact opposite of what the parent comment claims i.e. childhood insecurity not security.
> The problem may not be connectivity itself but rather the way social media turns so much communication into a public performance.
This is a key insight. The performance aspect is what is killing social media and getting us addicted to Like and karma points. And of course these metrics are directly related to engagement and ad-based revenue models. It will be interesting to see how far these companies dare to go undoing the damage by hiding Like counts etc.
Also remember how there were widely reported rumors that Apple had canceled the entire project a little while back, which made no sense given that this is the future of computing and every big tech company has been investing heavily for years.
Given the wild swings of rumors (launching 2020! Canceled! Launching 2023!) it’s almost like Apple is deliberately seeding the market with leaks in order to confuse its real intent. Which would be smart.
My guess with no insider information is they launch smartglasses in 2020 or 2021. First version may not have optical display but still does something cool with a camera.
My reasoning is basically,
1) Snapchat spectacles are getting closer to normal glasses, all you need to do is miniaturize those ridiculous bug eyed lenses
2) ergo Apple needs to get in the market with something fashionable and useful before someone else steals their lunch
Or "all the rumours could be true at once", through a simple misinterpretation of how Apple's internal politics work.
Like, say, Apple could have an AR department with several parallel hardware R&D efforts, where they're constantly cancelling projects when they realize they're dead-end concepts, and putting the staff from them onto new projects.
Yeah, it’s within the realm of possibility that Apple truly is that dysfunctional these days (ie MacBook Pro debacle).
However I don’t think that’s the case here. You have to believe that they have their best resources working on wearables/smartglasses. Look at how Apple Watch and even more so AirPods are just crushing it. Because laptops are the past and wearables are the future. I would wager that this level of dysfunction is kept far from AR.
I'm not seeing how my description was of a dysfunctional business practice. I was attempting to describe a "basic research" arm of a company, one that is trying to advance a field. Some research projects pan out, some don't. And you can't keep your best minds on the ones that don't seem to be going anywhere.
You can research Human-Computer Interaction just like any other research subject, and I wouldn't put it past Apple to have all their best industrial-design staff working on dozens of different AR design prototypes to feed this HCI research, in the hopes of discovering something that creates a whole new AR wearables market segment, rather than just competing in the existing one.
Once they actually "pick an approach" to AR wearables from the firehose of internal HCI R&D projects, then it'd probably be a project of a year-or-so to get it built and shipped (given their existing manufacturing and logistics relationships.) So, when a project is "3-4 years off", I'd expect that to mean—if true—that they're planning on spending the next three years running a tournament of AR approaches; and then build the thing right at the end.
I don't really disagree with the possibility that Apple is working on AR in the way you describe. I guess the point I was trying to make — as a longtime believer in Apple's vision with the Macbook Pro/iPhones/Watch/Airpods to prove it — is that they didn't use to make products from a firehose of internal projects. They had a clear vision for the future and shipped it. Not all of them succeeded (Newton) but during the Jobs era they were right more than not.
This isn't to say that having a tournament of approaches isn't a viable way to figure out a new product. But it speaks to a different, less visionary approach.
I get what you’re saying. I think the difference isn’t so much a lack of a “visionary”, as a lack of decent AR-centered speculative fiction to pull from.
The modern tablet, for example, was essentially designed by the prop designers of Star Trek. The proposed HCI for the device category was entirely laid out by actors fiddling with the prop. No one at Apple needed to have much “vision” to see that if they could pull off something like that without technical constraints forcing any compromises, it’d be a great design.
Most of computing for the last 50 years has been like that in one way or another. We’ve had SF writers, artists, and movie-makers leading the way, and industrial designers cribbing as closely to them as they could. (You can still see this today with driverless-car control-panel designs. You think these designs aren’t just directly copying the “cool car” genre from the 80s?)
(If you’re wondering: “so what made Apple a visionary company, then? That word must mean something...” It’s mostly that they evolved or “massaged” technology in the directions required to get these hypothetical designs built. Rather than building the designs that were possible with commonly-available tech, they invested capital into “operationalizing” previously research-level tech, in order to put it into their devices. A phone you can turn to watch movies in landscape? Better turn “accelerometers” from a weird replacement for mercury switches into a one-cent part!)
But AR is a bit different, in that, while speculative fiction has been somewhat concerned with what AR does (and even more on what VR does), writers in the genre haven’t spent nearly as much time (that I know of, at least) trying to figure out what an AR device that people would be willing to wear would look and work like. So, in this case, the industrial design isn’t just “laying around” waiting for an ID artist to pick it up and say “yes, I’ll make it look like this.” And, on the other side, no audience has been pre-conditioned by this material to think “I want something that looks like the thing I know from book/movie X.”
And, even worse for our intrepid industrial designer—even in the movies based on books that do feature AR wearables, in the movie version, the wearable doesn’t tend to appear at all. AR experiences still exist in such movies, but AR devices, if they’re there at all, are implicit; and most of the time, aren’t even supposed to be there, with AR instead literally an augmentation of reality (using holograms or something) rather than an augmentation of perception. (This is usually a choice by the director: actors act better when they can be in the same room as one-another, reacting to a common “thing” they’re seeing; individual-perceptual AR kind of ruins that, just like cell phones kind of ruin slasher movies.)
Now, mind you, I’m ignoring the elephant-in-the-room of AR in speculative fiction: cyberpunk. But I don’t think Apple could really sell its consumers on perception-changing brain implants, could they? ;) At least, not in 2019...
