Monthly Archives: October 2016

Rebuttal | Top 9 ethical issues in artificial intelligence (www.weforum.org)

Please read this before understanding the context of this post.

They are asking silly questions, that need to be nullified.

1. Unemployment. What happens after the end of jobs?

It has been established very strongly that weak minds fear technological advancement. If you are not ready to upgrade yourself, you become stagnant in your current work. So overruled! We should have one objective: advancement in technology should not be subject to professions unless it in unethical. Ask the truck drivers, about the ease of remote car locking( I am sure they are using it). Why did they not protest for locksmiths? Its a statement to create unnecessary tensions.

2. Inequality. How do we distribute the wealth created by machines?

Why? If you stumble across a pot of gold in AI for by providing some solution, you choose how you spend the money you own. Did anyone ask how to distribute money <some-business-tycoon> earned from their business? Such events occur and machines do not own wealth, there’s no inequality.What’s this question for?

3. Humanity. How do machines affect our behaviour and interaction?

We might need to start training everyone on this front. Already we(atleast I) find myself struggling in my behaviors and interactions with fellow humans, another human like AI, with no heart and consciousness, well you are only going to make things complicated. Hence the need for training. Related post here.

4. Artificial stupidity. How can we guard against mistakes?

Remember what Einstein said about Stupidity? Well we should solve/address things that are solvable and not something unpredictable. Can we program stupidity? I think we are still far from it.(stupid != foolish)

5. Racist robots. How do we eliminate AI bias?

Why do we put racist behavior inside AI first? Fix the root, you get a better fruit. See #7 resolution for more on this.

6. Security. How do we keep AI safe from adversaries?

Propaganda. Read a resolution for it in my earlier post here.

7. Evil genies. How do we protect against unintended consequences?

Simply have an insurance policy for AI: Any person/entity who produces an AI product, will be held responsible for any consequences coming from it. And that ownership will be lifetime. Not conditional or not lease based. I do not know why have we forgotten Newton’s 3rd law!

8. Singularity. How do we stay in control of a complex intelligent system?

Two examples come to mind: Alphabet and UN. One is perfectly managed complex system(Alphabet) and the other is a hopeless mess of crap(UN). Learn from Alphabet. I doubt if there is any other convincing organization really working for us humans, genuinely.

9. Robot rights. How do we define the humane treatment of AI?

I am surprised this question is being raised by heartless minds. Rights are for entities that have life(insects,plants,animals,humans qualify). Have we arrived at a state where human rights are protected on whole planet forget about the others? Unless that state is not arrived at, it is unfair to ask for something called robot rights. Did we ask for TV’s rights and camera’s rights and toasters rights? Referencing this post here again.

Hope this takes the thought process in a better direction.

When the internet was crippled to a halt! ~ The dDos attack – A Post Mortem

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The Problem

Couple of days back, 21-October-2016 everyone connected on the web experienced sluggishness in connecting to the normal sites and saw obstruction in their regular works.

The scenario can be visually described as follows:

DDOS Attack Explained
DDOS Attack Explained

Incase you might be wondering why this attack happened now, the internet is way mature, why can’t it protect itself from such attacks?

Well, then do read on…

The Players

From an ideal perspective the players in the attack are listed:

  1. Users of the web (us) (attackers and victims)
  2. ISP’s (medium through which attack was carried out)
  3. Device Manufacturers (Things, which got compromised — zombies)
  4. Regulatory Organizations (They are mostly sleeping or doing other important silly stuff, lets leave them out of this discussion)

The Premise

Let us look at those questions asked earlier and more:

What is dDos?

It stands for distributed Denial of Service. Consider your regular pesky thing that you have to do and can’t live without?(siblings,kids,neighbours.. anyhuman thing). They come nagging to you, you can handle it but maybe 10 requests in a day a max! The 11th request from that pesky thing will get a denial of service response!(simply a No!)

Now,Imagine yourself at a play house. And you are already having a minor headache(it was Friday, everyone was in the mood to relax). Multiply your single pesky thing with say 10, you are bombarded with pesky request from everywhere, what will happen to you? You might handle say 20 requests at that moment, looking at the situation, but a time will come soon where you will get exhausted and simply stop responding to important requests of like : open the door, and you are standing still!

You just got dDos’ed 🙂

Can you explain it in layman’s terms?

Here is the wikipedia entry.

I still did not get it..

See this:

Why this attack happened now?

It was waiting to happen, its like too many cooks, spoil the broth kinda scenario. Lot of unpatched/sloppy devices connected to the internet working for you and they all had a common zombie entry point, that simply got activated!

The internet is way mature, why can’t it protect itself from such attacks?

I am sure there are some orgn that were actually fighting this menace! Imagine a hospital unable to get reports of a patient in critical condition!So I am pretty sure what got reported and what actually got fixed and treated is somewhat different. So the internet is not at all mature, we are still not ready to have our life depend on it, our livelihood might depend on it but not life!So some orgn might be involved (even now) preventing many such attacks to keep the internet working, and some sleeping regulations might have also protected and saved us from a much more severe attack!

The rules are pretty simple, everyone is united on this matter and no one likes a dDos attack to happen! It actually interrupts normal/perceived flow of life on a day-to-day basis.

So basically its the attackers who (misued?) a compromised device and affected the network. Its pretty clear, there is something that needs to be fixed/controlled in the wild. And its not impossible..

Onto the solution then, shall we proceed?

The Solution

Two parts solution can be proposed:

  1. Regulation. In an ideal world, regulation is already in place and device manufacturers are supposed to follow them and hence they are able to sell their products. So something stronger needs to be put in place for regulation. Say if a device is an IoT kinda device, then as per regulation it should be allowed to use 5% of the bandwidth. If its a phone or a computer, then it will not have such a restriction, or maybe it can have!
  2. ISP Level Quota Software. ISP’s would want to pitch in this idea, where a custom configuration software would be installed at per user site and there based on the MAC address the bandwidth quotas can be defined. Say you got a new IoT device for your home, you will get to configure and set a max bandwidth that device is allowed to consume on your home network.

Thoughts?

Java EE 9 Survey ~ Technology has gone Democratic and Political(rant!)

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If you are in the Java ecosystem, please fill out this survey.

After you are done laughing and wondering what you just saw, I will pen down my thoughts and serious objections to the way they are doing the survey.

Here are a few things asked, which I think are absolutely unnecessary, humorous to ask in a tech survey:

  1. How important is Eventing support for the next generation of cloud and microservices applications?

    • Is there any application which does not have eventing? Is there any application that has only Eventing support system??

  2. The current practice of cloud development in Java is largely based on REST and asynchrony

    • So cheeky statement!

  3. Application development style is changing…

    • This is happening for the first time in history of mankind!

  4. How important is HTTP/2 for the next generation of cloud and microservices applications?

    • What if it is important and then What if  a newer protocol/standard comes?

  5. How important are the new features proposed in JSON-P for the next generation of cloud and microservices applications?

    • How many people are aware of these concepts?

  6. The databases may be used as replacements or additions to standard RDBMS storage

    • ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!

  7. Should we standardize a Java EE application configuration API?

    • no let United Nations drive this initiative.

  8. In the Cloud, failure of application instances and services are inevitable

    • Truth statement, not a survey question!!!

  9. Should Java EE introduce a mechanism to communicate the health of the cloud application to the cloud infrastructure?

    • umm.. why just health? why not a cumulative health parameter listing?

  10. Current trends talk about building ‘stateless’ applications and services, but the need to store some state exists nonetheless

    • why NoSQL did not happen yet?

  11. To be successful, many microservices need a scalable, fault tolerant state management solution

    • someone tell me how Oracle defines a micro service?

  12. Should Java EE investigate standards for state management? Should Java EE 9 investigate how to package a set of microservices together?

    • Let some federal body do the investigation? Is modules dead??

  13. The Java EE runtime components could provide an “embedded” API

    • what on earth is an embedded API? some kind of zombie api??

  14. We could enhance key Java EE APIs such as JAX-RS to better handle these technologies.We could integrate JCache with the Java EE platform

    • so kind of you!

  15. We could define a secret management facility suitable for a cloud environment

    • there oracle’s way of management is *secret*… Where on earth are Sun Microsystems engineers?

  16. How important is MVC API for the next generation of cloud and microservices applications?

    • (scared of the spring tools?)

  17. How important is the Management API, as proposed in JSR 373, for the next generation of cloud and microservices applications?

    • So there will be a mgmt api and a secrets management api! I already  like Oracle!

  18. How important is the continued evolution of the JMS API for next generation Java EE applications?

    1. wow! That is so political, stop working on something just because there is little traction… Does not happen in tech guys!

This is my opinion. Could be utterly wrong or out of context.

But Dear World, use democracy judiciously, by indicating you are a a thought leader, do not sit on the general opinion and say you created a standard. A standard creation needs long term vision and astute conformance that a chosen approach would suffice for years to come!(Java is 20+ years already no?)

(Here is an aside…)

It is like you have your food daily on the dining table, its a standard. What you are saying, hey our neighbors are here for couple of days,they have trouble walking, why don’t we have the food daily in the bed itself?So let’s ask everyone if its okay to have food in the bed daily? Let’s ascribe whether we can have chow mien while we are still  in bed?

So please STOP taking opinions and start taking a firm stance and start defending it to your core.You all are at the top of your game so when are you going to put to use of that knowledge? And if something is wrong, humbly accept that for the betterment of the standard. You all sound like a group of politicians gathered to sit and harp on majority public opinion.

Now is the best time for all the smartest minds of the world to forge and take charge and establish standards that are the outcome of their experiences, and not just there to please the majority public opinion. What is correct as per their experiences should be put forth and debated as standards. Not whether X should be a standard or should Y be the standard. What is the use of your expertise then?

Please get back to being engineers and not just tinkerers!