https://pinboard.in/u:jm/public/ recent bookmarks from jm 2022-03-15T09:29:43+00:00 https://www.nature.com/articles/s42256-022-00465-9?fbclid=IwAR11_V1cd9SUxEvUfwrWMA7TUcroyYIY1nBDUL3KaS-8B4rG5MIqZCmjm0M jm In less than 6 hours after starting on our in-house server, our [machine learning] model generated 40,000 molecules that scored within our desired threshold. In the process, the AI designed not only VX, but also many other known chemical warfare agents that we identified through visual confirmation with structures in public chemistry databases. Many new molecules were also designed that looked equally plausible. These new molecules were predicted to be more toxic, based on the predicted LD50 values, than publicly known chemical warfare agents (Fig. 1). This was unexpected because the datasets we used for training the AI did not include these nerve agents. The virtual molecules even occupied a region of molecular property space that was entirely separate from the many thousands of molecules in the organism-specific LD50 model, which comprises mainly pesticides, environmental toxins and drugs (Fig. 1). By inverting the use of our machine learning models, we had transformed our innocuous generative model from a helpful tool of medicine to a generator of likely deadly molecules. (via Theophite) ]]> dual-use grim-meathook-future ai machine-learning drugs vx scary papers https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:7d0c5d1d1515/ 2021-04-12T09:51:35+00:00 https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/pranavdixit/indian-government-using-tech-destroy-democracy jmI love tech. But watching it intersect with a Hindu nationalist government trying to crush dissent, choke a free press, and destroy a nation’s secular ethos doesn’t feel like something I bought a ticket to. Writing about technology from India now feels like having a front-row seat to the country’s rapid slide into authoritarianism. “It’s like watching a train wreck while you’re inside the train,” I Slacked my boss in November. ]]> india technology whatsapp facebook twitter scary authoritarianism dystopia tech https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:4fbaf295eccc/ 2020-07-17T20:05:12+00:00 https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/34204/turkey-now-has-a-swarming-quadcopter-suicide-drone-that-it-could-export jmIt seems very possible that, in addition to providing these improved Kargu [drones] to the Turkish armed forces, STM could also seek to export them, proliferating this capability further around the world. STM has already said that it has received serious inquires about the Kargu series from at least three unnamed potential foreign customers. Turkey, as a whole, has become a powerhouse of drone development and production, employing larger types to great effect in Syria and Libya just this year. This is precisely the type of weapon we have been warning about for years now. The fact that it is already here and potentially exportable should be yet another wake-up call to the level of threat low-end drones pose to U.S. and allied forces, as well as domestic infrastructure and VIPs.  "I argue all the time with my Air Force friends that the future of flight is vertical and it's unmanned," U.S. Marine General Kenneth McKenzie, head of U.S. Central Command, said at an event hosted by the Middle East Institute last week. "I'm not talking about large unmanned platforms, which are the size of a conventional fighter jet that we can see and deal with, as we would any other platform." "I'm talking about the one you can go out and buy at Costco right now in the United States for a thousand dollars, four quad, rotorcraft or something like that that can be launched and flown," he continued. "And with very simple modifications, it can make made into something that can drop a weapon like a hand grenade or something else." ]]> drones war terrorism ai autonomous scary kargu kerkes turkey stm https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:2e3c0b19c047/ 2020-02-22T22:02:25+00:00 https://thebulletin.org/2020/02/a-biotech-firm-made-a-smallpox-like-virus-on-purpose-nobody-seems-to-care/ jmThe loosely regulated market for synthetic DNA, the normalization of synthetic orthopoxvirus research, and a large number of capable facilities and researchers creates an environment in which a rogue state, unscrupulous company, reckless scientist, or terrorist group could potentially reintroduce one of the worst microbial scourges in human history. Unless world bodies, national governments, and scientific organizations put in place stronger safeguards on synthetic virus research, the next press release touting a new breakthrough in synthetic biology might announce that an unknown scientist in an obscure lab has successfully resurrected the smallpox virus. ]]> smallpox weapons scary diseases biological-weapons dna viruses https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:82ca1901a817/ 2019-01-11T11:19:17+00:00 https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/BA6132ED-1F6B-4A0B-AC22-81278F5AB81E%40tripadvisor.com jmStreaming replicas—and by extension, base backups—can become dangerously broken when the source and target machines run slightly different versions of glibc. Particularly, differences in strcoll and strcoll_l leave "corrupt" indexes on the slave. These indexes are sorted out of order with respect to the strcoll running on the slave. Because postgres is unaware of the discrepancy is uses these "corrupt" indexes to perform merge joins; merges rely heavily on the assumption that the indexes are sorted and this causes all the results of the join past the first poison pill entry to not be returned. Additionally, if the slave becomes master, the "corrupt" indexes will in cases be unable to enforce uniqueness, but quietly allow duplicate values. Moral of the story -- keep your libc versions in sync across storage replication sets!]]> postgresql scary ops glibc collation utf-8 characters indexing sorting replicas postgres https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:7a5ed209308e/ 2018-10-12T10:14:53+00:00 https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/apr/26/were-doomed-mayer-hillman-on-the-climate-reality-no-one-else-will-dare-mention jmCan civilisation prolong its life until the end of this century? “It depends on what we are prepared to do.” He fears it will be a long time before we take proportionate action to stop climatic calamity. “Standing in the way is capitalism. Can you imagine the global airline industry being dismantled when hundreds of new runways are being built right now all over the world? It’s almost as if we’re deliberately attempting to defy nature. We’re doing the reverse of what we should be doing, with everybody’s silent acquiescence, and nobody’s batting an eyelid.” ]]> climate capitalism environment future scary mayer-hillman https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:94e4c37134f4/ 2018-08-09T10:46:49+00:00 https://medium.com/@vesirin/how-i-gained-commit-access-to-homebrew-in-30-minutes-2ae314df03ab jmIf I were a malicious actor, I could have made a small, likely unnoticed change to the openssl formulae, placing a backdoor on any machine that installed it. If I can gain access to commit in 30 minutes, what could a nation state with dedicated resources achieve against a team of 17 volunteers? How many private company networks could be accessed? How many of these could be used to escalate to large scale data breaches? What other package management systems have similar weaknesses? This is my growing concern, and it’s been proven time and time again that package managers, and credential leaks, are a weak point in the security of the internet, and that supply chain attacks are a real and persistent threat. This is not a weakness in Homebrew, but rather a systemic problem in the industry, and one where we need more security research. ]]> homebrew github security jenkins credentials scary https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:ac2818d8335a/ 2018-06-19T12:45:14+00:00 https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/07/when-the-next-plague-hits/561734/ jmThe egg-based [vaccine manufacture] system depends on chickens, which are themselves vulnerable to flu. And since viruses can mutate within the eggs, the resulting vaccines don’t always match the strains that are circulating. But vaccine makers have few incentives to use anything else. Switching to a different process would cost billions, and why bother? Flu vaccines are low-margin products, which only about 45 percent of Americans get in a normal year. So when demand soars during a pandemic, the supply is not set to cope. American hospitals, which often operate unnervingly close to full capacity, likewise struggled with the surge of patients. Pediatric units were hit especially hard by H1N1, and staff became exhausted from continuously caring for sick children. Hospitals almost ran out of the life-support units that sustain people whose lungs and hearts start to fail. The health-care system didn’t break, but it came too close for comfort—especially for what turned out to be a training-wheels pandemic. The 2009 H1N1 strain killed merely 0.03 percent of those it infected; by contrast, the 1918 strain had killed 1 to 3 percent, and the H7N9 strain currently circulating in China has a fatality rate of 40 percent. That the U.S. could be so ill-prepared for flu, of all things, should be deeply concerning. The country has a dedicated surveillance web, antiviral drugs, and an infrastructure for making and deploying flu vaccines. None of that exists for the majority of other emerging infectious diseases. ]]> vaccines health diseases h1n1 flu pandemics future scary https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:8fcb871836c7/ 2017-07-11T15:55:49+00:00 https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/07/a-road-trip-to-the-end-of-the-world/532914/ jm“what I like to talk about is ‘the Great Weirding’ and not just the Great Dying because the Great Dying seems to have been a relatively quick event at the very end. But if you just talk about the Great Dying you’re missing all of this other crazy stuff that led up to it,” he said. “The Earth was getting really weird in the Permian. So we’re getting these huge lakes with these negative pHs, which is really weird, we don’t know why that happened. Another thing is that the whole world turned red. Everything got red. You walk around today and you’re like, ‘Hey, there’s a red bed, I bet it’s Permian or Triassic.’ The planet started looking like Mars. So that’s really weird. We don’t know why it turned red. Then you have a supercontinent, which is weird in the first place. Plate tectonics has to be acting strangely when you have all the continents together. Eventually it rifts apart and we go back into normal plate tectonics mode, but during the Permian-Triassic everything’s jammed together. So there has to be something strange going on. And then at the end, the Earth opens up and there’s all these volcanoes. But we’re not talking about normal volcanoes, we’re talking about weird volcanoes.” ]]> extinction history geology permian-era earth climate-change carbon-dioxide scary pangaea https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:f88607f61f61/ 2017-05-08T11:13:29+00:00 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/07/the-great-british-brexit-robbery-hijacked-democracy?CMP=share_btn_tw jm A map shown to the Observer showing the many places in the world where SCL and Cambridge Analytica have worked includes Russia, Lithuania, Latvia, Ukraine, Iran and Moldova. Multiple Cambridge Analytica sources have revealed other links to Russia, including trips to the country, meetings with executives from Russian state-owned companies, and references by SCL employees to working for Russian entities. Article 50 has been triggered. AggregateIQ is outside British jurisdiction. The Electoral Commission is powerless. And another election, with these same rules, is just a month away. It is not that the authorities don’t know there is cause for concern. The Observer has learned that the Crown Prosecution Service did appoint a special prosecutor to assess whether there was a case for a criminal investigation into whether campaign finance laws were broken. The CPS referred it back to the electoral commission. Someone close to the intelligence select committee tells me that “work is being done” on potential Russian interference in the referendum. Gavin Millar, a QC and expert in electoral law, described the situation as “highly disturbing”. He believes the only way to find the truth would be to hold a public inquiry. But a government would need to call it. A government that has just triggered an election specifically to shore up its power base. An election designed to set us into permanent alignment with Trump’s America. [....] This isn’t about Remain or Leave. It goes far beyond party politics. It’s about the first step into a brave, new, increasingly undemocratic world.]]> elections brexit trump cambridge-analytica aggregateiq scary analytics data targeting scl ukip democracy grim-meathook-future https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:b8b70fae2685/ 2017-04-24T20:23:53+00:00 https://lyrebird.ai/ethics jm lyrebird audio technology scary ethics https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:231b2db40556/ 2017-04-20T20:27:24+00:00 https://www.ted.com/talks/zeynep_tufekci_machine_intelligence_makes_human_morals_more_important jmMachine intelligence is here, and we're already using it to make subjective decisions. But the complex way AI grows and improves makes it hard to understand and even harder to control. In this cautionary talk, techno-sociologist Zeynep Tufekci explains how intelligent machines can fail in ways that don't fit human error patterns — and in ways we won't expect or be prepared for. "We cannot outsource our responsibilities to machines," she says. "We must hold on ever tighter to human values and human ethics." More relevant now that nVidia are trialing ML-based self-driving cars in the US...]]> nvidia ai ml machine-learning scary zeynep-tufekci via:maciej technology ted-talks https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:86510676134c/ 2017-04-10T14:05:19+00:00 https://labs.spotify.com/2017/03/31/spotifys-lovehate-relationship-with-dns/ jm spotify networking architecture dht insane scary dns unbound ops https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:6a8721da7a88/ 2016-05-13T15:09:19+00:00 http://gizmodo.com/5909961/kodak-had-a-secret-weapons-grade-nuclear-reactor-hidden-in-a-basement jmKodak's purpose for the reactor wasn't sinister: they used it to check materials for impurities as well as neutron radiography testing. The reactor, a Californium Neutron Flux multiplier (CFX) was acquired in 1974 and loaded with three and a half pounds of enriched uranium plates placed around a californium-252 core. The reactor was installed in a closely guarded, two-foot-thick concrete walled underground bunker in the company's headquarters, where it was fed tests using a pneumatic system. According to the company, no employees were ever in contact with the reactor. Apparently, it was operated by atomic fairies and unicorns. ]]> kodak nuclear safety non-proliferation scary rochester reactors https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:d18363139d64/ 2015-03-30T13:04:23+00:00 http://mic.com/articles/113740/a-team-of-biohackers-has-figured-out-how-to-inject-your-eyeballs-with-night-vision jmDid it work? Yes. It started with shapes, hung about 10 meters away. "I'm talking like the size of my hand," Licina says. Before long, they were able to do longer distances, recognizing symbols and identifying moving subjects against different backgrounds. "The other test, we had people go stand in the woods," he says. "At 50 meters, we could figure out where they were, even if they were standing up against a tree." Each time, Licina had a 100% success rate. The control group, without being dosed with Ce6, only got them right a third of the time. Well, that's some risky biohacking. wow]]> biohacking scary night-vision eyes chlorin-e6 infravision sfm https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:f41dc17864e2/ 2014-02-10T22:45:21+00:00 http://boingboing.net/2014/02/09/a-reason-to-hang-him-mass.html jmBrandon Mayfield was a US Army veteran and an attorney in Portland, OR. After the 2004 Madrid train bombing, his fingerprint was partially matched to one belonging to one of the suspected bombers, but the match was a poor one. But by this point, the FBI was already convinced they had their man, so they rationalized away the non-matching elements of the print, and set in motion a train of events that led to Mayfield being jailed without charge; his home and office burgled by the FBI; his client-attorney privilege violated; his life upended. ]]> confirmation-bias bias law brandon-mayfield terrorism fingerprints false-positives fbi scary https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:d392847cd900/ 2013-07-30T15:55:24+00:00 http://krebsonsecurity.com/2013/07/mail-from-the-velvet-cybercrime-underground/ jm silk-road drugs bitcoin ecommerce brian-krebs crime framed cybercrime russia scary law-enforcement https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:4f74c5fd169a/ 2012-07-29T20:48:04+00:00 http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/133514-the-worlds-first-3d-printed-gun jm A .22-caliber pistol, formed from a 3D-printed AR-15 (M16) lower receiver, and a normal, commercial upper. In other words, the main body of the gun is plastic, while the chamber — where the bullets are actually struck — is solid metal. [...] While this pistol obviously wasn’t created from scratch using a 3D printer, the interesting thing is that the lower receiver — in a legal sense at least — is what actually constitutes a firearm. Without a lower receiver, the gun would not work; thus, the receiver is the actual legally-controlled part. In short, this means that people without gun licenses — or people who have had their licenses revoked — could print their own lower receiver and build a complete, off-the-books gun. What a chilling thought. ]]> via:peakscale guns scary future grim-meathook-future 3d-printing thingiverse weapons https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:707bf456728f/ 2011-11-26T09:19:29+00:00 https://plus.google.com/u/0/110897184785831382163/posts/5qsNxFEaiML jm scary aviation flight security boeing 747 via:risks https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:84940f0c3c84/