Jawaan!

China Busts Nation’s Biggest Hacking School …

China Imitates YouTube In this photo taken on Monday, Jan.

There is no doubt that brain-computer interfaces will arrive – because they’re already here, in simple forms, and we’ll have movie-style mind links within a decade at most.  Which makes the movie idea of mind-hacking (as in Ghost In The Shell ) an extremely serious problem.  Never mind how you keep all your most important files up there (little things like “me. exe “) – if it gets damaged, unless you’re a Buddhist there’s no Ctrl -Alt-Delete. The risk comes from the combination of the very best of technologized humanity with the worst: when medical experts and mindologists are building devices to let paralyzed patients communicate with the world, they shouldn’t be worrying about some scumbag hacking the system for a joke.  If you don’t think people would do that, welcome to the internet and don’t give anyone any personal information.  As the technology advances out of medicine and into mass media (as it inevitably will) it’ll only get worse.  If you use the internet you know how much damage someone can do to you with just an image, and that’s just visual meme injection – mental malware a whole new world of sabotage.  Viruses propagate because of exploits in existing system – every copy of a program by definition suffers the same flaws, so a single exploit can spread through the entire network.  Every mind is different, however, with even the most basic functions slightly differently mapped in every head so you don’t have the same rapid-infection risk – but you do have a far more chance of malicious code interacting in unexpected ways and simply breaking part of your soul while it’s in there, with no way to restore it

There is no doubt that brain-computer interfaces will arrive – because they're already here, in simple forms, and we'll have movie-style mind links within a decade at most.  Which makes the movie idea of mind-hacking (as in Ghost In The Shell ) an extremely serious problem.  Never mind how you keep all your most important files up there (little things like “me. exe “) – if it gets damaged, unless you're a Buddhist there's no Ctrl -Alt-Delete

Great Britain’s Royal Society, which is headed up by famed astrophysicist Martin Rees, believes that geo-engineering is imperative, especially if we fail to cut our emissions to half of what they were in 1990. And if talks at the Copenhagen COP15 climate summit in December don’t produce results, there’s a good chance that we will fail.

Why Craigslist Is Such a Mess The Internet's great promise is to make the world's information universally accessible and useful. So how come when you arrive at the most popular dating site in the US you find a stream of anonymous come-ons intermixed with insults, ads for prostitutes, naked pictures, and obvious scams? Energy Sprawl: Will Solar and Wind Farms Become Ghost Malls of Tomorrow

The case of Gary McKinnon has attracted the attention of everyone from Sting to Stephen Fry, he’s been discussed in the House of Lords, NASA, the FBI and if your favorite forum hasn’t at least mentioned him there’s a good chance you’re imagining it.  He combines information age politics, US foreign policy, the hunt for aliens, conspiracy theories and mental illness in the most perfect way possible, at least until Michael Bay makes a movie about a lovable handicapped kid accidentally inventing anti-gravity drives.  (And no, we’re not talking about 1985’s “Explorers”).

NASA hacker Gary McKinnon has lost his latest bid to be tried in the UK, and is now almost certain to face trial in the US. The 43-year old from London has admitted hacking the Pentagon and NASA in 2001 and 2002, claiming that he was looking for evidence of extraterrestrial life. Despite widespread support for his case from London mayor Boris Johnson, the Daily Mail and several MPs, McKinnon was told by the High Court that he must be extradited to the US

Presidential Science Adviser John Holdren recently outlined options for geohacking, forcibly reconfiguring parts of the planet’s ecology.  Since this is a country where you can’t set up a windfarm without someone opposing it, this set off a storm of protest.  But the most vocal cry was “We shouldn’t study it because we don’t know how it would work”, indicating that the those opponents don’t understand what some of their own words mean. It’s important to note that Holdren was advising the study of scientific options, kind of like you’d expect a science adviser to do.  The plan (that of pumping the atmosphere full aerosols) certainly has a couple of potentially-planet-pulverising problems, but that’s exactly his point – it needs study.  He’s a scientist, you see, where admitting you don’t know something is a vital step towards finding a solution.  Unfortunately he’s talking to politicians and the media. One the one hand you’ve got the ultra-Luddite response, that of any scientific change of anything being bad.  The sort of people who’d be running everywhere and tutting loudly when one of those fancy “wheelamajigged” things came along if they’d been born earlier.  Given their opposition not just to doing something, but even learning about how it might work, we can only assume they learned speech by accident or before they came up with their “Don’t learn what I don’t already know” viewpoint

Scientists are using lasers to directly control parts of primate brains – and not just the crude Ming the Merciless “Point a laser gun and tell them what to do” method, where initial apparent successes are overshadowed by the way your entire base blows up. Instead, MIT scientists direct a tightly focused laser pulse onto neurons in primate brains, which is a wonderful way of phrasing it without actually saying “Sawed open monkey skulls.”  You can’t just poke any old neuron with coherent light to make it dance, though, unless you’re prepared to turn up the power and count “burning to death” as a very specific tango. Selected cells are pre-infected with a genetically engineered virus which causes them to glow blue, and makes them susceptible to external light switching certain channels on and off.  External light isn’t normally an issue inside a skull, which is where the laser beam comes in.  So we’ve got genetic engineering, mental lasers, and even brain cells which actually glow blue (which anything with a LED will tell you is the smartest and most modern color) – never mind revolutions in optogenetic neurology, this is what Lex Luthor’s origin story would be if we was written today.