Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:They're already here (Score 1) 131

In the case of Ukraine, the success rate is very high because anybody in range is likely an enemy soldier.

Israel's success rate may be as low as 0.1%. That tells us that robots can't tell civilians from military. A large enough stockpile of human shields would be a serious problem.

And we know drones et al are vulnerable to GPS spoof attacks, making such an attack risky against a technologically advanced enemy with intellectuals and engineers forming a scientific take on special forces.

Comment Re:As A Citizen Of A Threatened Country (Score 1) 131

Why bother with a missile? You're here, so a geek. You know GPS jamming is effective, as is GPS spoofing. All you need is a parabolic dish and a high power transmitter. There's simply no possibility of a wide-angle transmitter on a satellite matching a narrow beam that's broadcast from a hundredth of the distance. Sure, there'll be authentication keys. And social engineers have compromised most of the world's governments, which means the keys will be for sale somewhere.

The only way I can the robot army being effective is if they flatten everything at long range, indiscriminately. And that is going to cause its own problems. Especially if the software gets hacked prior to install. Which will happen, because hiring and training an army of hackers in Mitnick-style social engineering tactics costs a tiny, tiny fraction of the expense of maintaining a wall of tactical nukes that can EMP the robot forces.

Comment Re:Impossible (Score 1) 131

The robots work OK, but the AI doesn't. Israel is using AI extensively to target Hamas at the moment, with the very best AI that exists and the very best military minds the world can produce. The success rate is somewhere between 1% and 0.1%.

Comment Re:Friend or foe? (Score 1) 131

Face scanning tech also depends on the data set being valid. The DOD has been compromised many times by airwall violations, security violations, improper screening, and extremely buggy software from Cisco and Microsoft.

All the enemy needs to do is write a rootkit that flips a couple of bits. The robot army now faces the other way and friends are identified as foe. I wouldn't put it past a group like the Lazarus hackers to be capable of such a stunt. We already know the enemy is capable of GPS jamming and GPS spoofing, because they've done so to hijack US drones, and that's another potential vulnerability.

US military robots are also known to have severe problems identifying that a person dressed as a tree is a person, not a tree. A skillful enemy could walk through US robot army lines without impediment, unless the US robots shoot indiscriminately. But if the US robots are genocidal, mutually assured destruction becomes a viable tactic. You can't be more than dead, after all.

And if the US includes a death switch, given that US defence contractors don't always wipe hard drives and the military don't psychologically screen very well (Manning was known to be seriously mentally unstable prior to deployment, for example), there's absolutely no guarantee the enemy won't simply learn it and spoof it.

I just don't see how the US think this could possibly work.

Comment Re:let's play global thermonuclear war! (Score 1) 131

Its success rate in Israel stands at somewhere between 1% and 0.1%.

One gun can shoot at one target at any one time. If your AI-guided robot army is shooting up chicken farmers and goat herders, it's ergo not shooting at the army that's flanked it which threatens to overrun the opposing side's now largely undefended turf.

A robot army can also be taken out by EMP weapons - basically tax nukes. Since robots can't distinguish between soldiers, civilians, and cake stands (AI is pretty dumb), the defending side already faces complete genocide. You can't get any deader than that, so there's no incentive to not flatten the enemy with nukes and a very slim chance they won't fire back, because it's hard to maintain an expensive nuclear defence and an extremely expensive robot army at the same time.

(Basically, same reason the US is now outgunned on fighters, the new ones are so expensive they can't afford that many. The US relies utterly on them being more destructive faster, but again, what's the point in NOT invoking MAD when your enemy has demonstrated they're genocidal and no respectors of the norms and laws of war?)

Comment Safety and regulatory standards (Score 2) 283

So far the EV autos designed in the PRC have not attempted to meet US/Canada safety and regulatory certification standards. BYD has an engineering and manufacturing center in the US for their EV municipal vehicles so they could certify a car if they thought they had a market for it, but so far that doesn't seem to be the case. Perhaps the US EV makers could concentrate on making their products more price competitive and improving sales and service so they don't have to resort to a trade war to win the market?

Comment Re:Why are they punishing me? (Score 1) 185

I have a houseful of PCs, but only one will officially run Win11 -- a low-powered netbook that ironically is the least competent hardware I own (its horsepower is on par with my laptop from 2003). I'll give it this -- Win11 does a good job of downshifting to match the environment it finds itself in; Win10 would struggle on that netbook.

Comment Re:Or, you know, (Score 1) 185

Which desktops did you try, and what issues blew it for you?

I had a hard time finding a linux I could live with, and I first started looking over 25 years ago. It's only been about six years now since it's become sufficiently stable and complete. And implementations vary wildly. I prefer the KDE desktop as being the most functional (and least annoying), but KDE on Kubuntu is not nearly as slick as KDE on PCLinuxOS.

But at the far end, IMO current Gnome makes Win10 look stellar.... good gods, who thought a cellphone makes a good desktop??

Comment Re:But, but ... (Score 1) 185

Ironically, it's is more of an argument for them. They were not saying there would be no more updates, be them major or minor to windows, but rather than they wouldn't have "numbers" and transition into more of an OS as a service model.

The market doesn't like the sound of that. That's fine, but it's not like if Microsoft stopped numbering their releases they wouldn't be doing the exact same thing: sunsetting older versions of windows and pushing users towards newer supported versions.

I know some people think they should be able to "buy" an OS and stay on it forever, but the internet has rendered that largely impossible. If you want to air-gap your PC and stay on whatever version of Windows you want, go for it, but as soon as you're connected to the internet, they're doing the right thing trying to push people off of codebases that no longer support an economic case for security updates.

Slashdot Top Deals

The hardest part of climbing the ladder of success is getting through the crowd at the bottom.

Working...