strains credibility
Not sure why.
Security professionals are constantly complaining about insiders violating security policies for stupid reasons.
Security publications and declassified documents are full of breaches that took way too long to discover.
The Navy may have great security protocols but it’s full of humans that make mistakes. As they say, if you invent a foolproof plan, the universe will invent a better fool.
The original article said the Navy hadn’t provided all the details.
It looks like those 15+ people included at least one person who should have been monitoring for such things and a bunch of people who wanted to follow sports.
They didn’t give the password to most of the crew and they tried to keep the commanding officers in the dark. It sounds like everyone involved faced disciplinary action.
Those chiefs and senior chiefs who used, paid for, helped hide or knew about the system were given administrative nonjudicial punishment at commodore’s mast, according to the investigation.
It looks like that’s an administrative process. https://jagdefense.com/practice-areas/non-judicial-punishmentarticle-15/ Potential penalties are listed near the bottom.
The original article goes into more detail https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2024/09/03/how-navy-chiefs-conspired-to-get-themselves-illegal-warship-wi-fi/
It sounds like there were over 15 people in on the scheme. At some point people noticed that there was some wi-fi network called “STINKY” and rumors started circulating about it. It took a while for those rumors to reach senior command. Then they changed the name to make it look like a printer, which further delayed the investigation.
It doesn’t look like they actually scanned for the access point. I suspect that’s because it would be hard on a ship. All the metal would reflect signals and give you a ton of false readings.
They only eventually found it when a technician was installing an authorized system (Starshield seems to be the version of Starlink approved for military use) and they discovered the unauthorized Starlink equipment.
The Starlink receivers have gotten fairly small. It seems like that was pretty easy to hide among all the other electronics on the ship.
The original article says there were over 15 people involved https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2024/09/03/how-navy-chiefs-conspired-to-get-themselves-illegal-warship-wi-fi/
With that many people, it’s only a matter of time before someone spills the beans.
There are several steps they could have taken to make it much harder to discover. I expect more and more people will take those steps and we’ll never hear about it.
We’re likely to see a variant of Moore’s law when it comes to satellites. Launch costs will keep going down. Right now we have Starlink with a working satellite internet system and China with a nascent one. As the costs come down we’ll likely see more and more countries, companies, organizations and individuals will be able to deploy their own systems.
A government would need to negotiate with every provider to get them to block signals over their country. Jamming is always hard. You could theoretically jam all communications or communications on certain frequency bands but it’s not clear how you would selectively jam satellite internet.
There’s a much bigger story here.
Think about how hard it was to discover this access point. Even after it was reported and there was a known wi-fi network and the access point was known to be on a single ship, it took the Navy months to find it.
Starlink devices are cheap and it will be nearly impossible to detect them at scale. That means that anyone can get around censors. If the user turns off wi-fi, they’ll be nearly impossible to detect. If they leave wi-fi on in an area with a lot of wi-fi networks it will also be nearly impossible to detect. A random farmer could have Starlink in their hut. A dissident (of any nation) could hide the dish behind their toilet.
As competing networks are launched, users will be able to choose from the least restricted network for any given topic.
The effect is mostly from the total number of computer users increasing.
That is, the total number of “tech-savvy” users keeps increasing (https://datausa.io/profile/cip/computer-science-110701) but the number of “non-tech-savvy” computer users has absolutely exploded (https://semiconalpha.substack.com/p/global-semiconductor-sales-increase) (that actually undercounts computers since every dollar in 2020 buys you much more computer power than a dollar in 1987)
You had to pass a nerd gauntlet just to get online in the 80’s or 90’s that meant that everyone you met online had also passed that gauntlet and was tech savvy. Even if you looked in the social usenet groups, a lot of non-technical users were just filtered out. So it looked like everyone was tech savvy but that’s because we were sampling a tiny, tech-savvy portion of the population.
Now anyone can get online. The tech savvy gen-zers are still there but their hidden in a sea of non-technical users. If you go to places like Github or Hackernews (or even more specifically technical fora), you’ll find plenty of enthusiastic young people poking at technology and trying to make it better. They no longer have to mess around with autoexec.bat and config.sys to get their mouse working but they can (and do) get a bunch of Jupyter notebooks and start playing around with Tensorflow.
A great modern example of this is 3-D printing. Modern 3-D printers suck. If you’re a big company you can get super expensive 3-D printers that take up giant rooms and need a team of experts to run. If you’re a home user you can get a cheap FDM printer but you best be prepared to tinker with it. The first thing most people do with their Ender is print mods for their Ender. Bambu Labs is a big improvement but they also attract a lot of users who at least could mod their printer https://forum.bambulab.com/c/bambu-lab-x1-series/user-mods/19
Some day we may have little boxes like in “Diamond Age”. Kids in the future may not even know about crap like bed adhesion and stringing and they’ll concentrate on whatever the new problems are revealed once the current ones are taken care of.
That sounds just fine. I’m pretty suspicious of someone who claims that being able to save 30 seconds typing that post would make you more tech savvy.
I think that true “tech-savvyness” isn’t really a generational thing.
Some people are just really curious about how stuff works. When they see something they aren’t satisfied with, “Just do it.” or “Shit just works.” They want to know how and why it works. When you hand those people a computer, machine or flower they’ll poke at it and try to understand it better.
It’s not clear that typing skills are actually needed for that.
I max out at around 80-100 WPM but I only sustain that when I’m transcribing something. When I need to learn about technology, it’s much more about reading than typing. When I actually need to do some coding, I spend much more time staring at the screen and looking up stuff on Stackoverlow than I do actually typing.
Most of Z is not savvy at all, just like with every generation. And just like with every generation, some of them will push the envelope of technology. I doubt that lack of typing will slow those folks down.
I keep wondering if information like this will change anyone’s mind about Disney.
It seems like all Iger has to do is throw a little shade at Trump or DeSantis and everyone instantly believes that Disney is some sort of bastion of progressive thought that doesn’t have a vile history of exploitation.
The Shoe Bomber and the Underwear Bomber don’t count? :)
They fail gloriously at at that too.
Whenever they get tested the red teams manage to smuggle in everything needed to hijiack a plane plus a kitchen sink.
The few times that terrorists tried to board planes, they made it through security and were caught by other passengers.
FOIA requests generally don’t involve hackers or leaks. The act exists because citizens insisted that government provides visibility into its inner workings.
What is the equivalent for Google, or any other private company?
It’s hard to draw meaningful conclusions form a single 4 year period. There have been several instances of corruption (and significant externalized costs) in private firms that went on for much longer than 4 years.
I agree that there is a lot of corruption in government but there’s a long gap between that and no accountability. We see various forms of government accountability on a regular basis; politicians lose elections, they get recalled, and they sometimes even get incarcerated. We also have multiple systems designed to allow any citizen to influence government.
None of these systems and safeguards are anywhere close to perfect but it must be better than organizations that don’t even have these systems in the first place.
What makes governments any more susceptible to corruption than a private organization?
I’m not actually talking about governments having absolute control. That’s a pretty extreme scenario to jump to from from the question of if it’s better for a private company or a government to control search.
Right now we think Google is misusing that data. We can’t even get information on it without a leak. The government has a flawed FOIA system but Google has nothing of the sort. The only way we’re protected from corruption at Google (and historically speaking several other large private organization) is when the government steps in and stops them.
Governments often handle corruption poorly but I can rattle of many cases where governments managed to reduce corruption on their own (ie without requiring a revolution). In many cases the source of that corruption was large private organizations.
Why is that better? It may not be ideal but governments have at least some accountability.
They could have left out, “for LGBTQ+ people” and it would have been just as accurate.
If they actually did this correctly, it would be great. Whether or not it’s possible, or even desirable to eliminate all hate speech, it should be possible to minimize the harms.
When somebody mutters some hateful comment to themselves, do we care? Not really. We care that the hateful comment gets repeated and amplified. We care that someone might take that hateful comment. We care that someone might take harmful actions based on the comment.
If those algorithms successfully let these comments die in ignominy they’ve done their job. My fear is that they won’t really do this though. Instead they’ll mostly hide these comments and “accidentally” let them slip out when the company thinks they need an “engagement” boost.
Covering the second half:
I hadn’t heard of Elsagate and had to look it up. How does AI factor into that? As near as I can tell Elsagate started with some random guy making disturbing videos and mislabeling them as child-friendly.
I’m a good bit older than you so my nostalgia doesn’t take me lead me to any of the title you mentioned. For the most part it’s stories that aren’t covered by anyone’s IP. My childhood had a lot of folk tales recited from memory. Those stories were fairly common but there would be regional variation and most tellers would put their own twist on the stories (for example, when my Aunt told the story of the Seven Kids she would do a particular squeaky voice when she got to the part where the wolf swallows the chalk (in her version it was always chalk). That’s actually quite close to how LLMs work. She heard various versions of that story throughout her life, then she repeats it with some other bits that she incorporated from the rest of her life. I do the same thing when I retell the story to my children. It’s basically the same story my Aunt told but I translate it into English and add some modern slang.
What would stop an AI from writing Scar into the Lion King? If you told an LLM to, “Write Hamlet but have all the royal family be Lions,” it’s likely you’d get some evil lion version of Claudius.
There were a lot of homosexual coded villains in older media. There were also a lot of films where all the black people were bad guys, all the Asian people were goofy servants and all the women were housewives or prizes. The general consensus today is that those choices were horribly discriminatory. If AI manages to avoid that sort of behavior it would be a good thing.
The flip side is also that artists can just as easily slip hateful material into otherwise reasonable art. Human history is full of unethical choices. Even if the AI itself doesn’t have ethics the people using it can be held to the same ethical standards as the users of any other tool or medium.
Maybe.
Kessler Syndrome doesn’t impact the ability to produce or launch satellites.
It impacts the ability of satellites to function in orbit but it’s not a fixed limit.
Humans have a pretty good track record of developing technologies that break through insurmountable theoretical barriers.