How do I know? Well, (a) Google's leadership says so and AFAICT there is no law that allows the government to compel them to lie, publicly or internally and in fact there are laws that make it a crime for executives of publicly-traded companies to lie about issues which could affect the stock price (which this definitely does!); (b) as a Google employee who manages sensitive user data I have some visibility into how requests for that data are handled; and (c) as someone who is familiar with Google culture I find it inconceivable that such a thing could be happening on any kind of significant scale without being outed -- like most of silicon valley, and like geeks in general, Googlers tend to be pretty iconoclastic and anti-authoritarian.

If the speculation has been floating around that long, without a shred of evidence to support it in spite of the large-scale conspiracy that would be required to keep all such evidence suppressed, I think that's pretty compelling evidence that it's not true. You can never completely prove a negative, of course, but you can asymptotically approach certainty.

I think you're overstating what he's saying. He's saying that the government can't get access to the stuff we don't want people to know without getting an appropriate court order. That's not inconsistent with suggesting that if there's stuff you don't want people (the government) to know, then you shouldn't be doing it... because the government still can get it. They just need to be able to convince the appropriate magistrate that they have a good reason. Oh, and they have to be targeting you specifically.

Sure, they could resort to rubber-hose cryptanalysis, targeting key Google employees. If it were to come out, though, it would make the Snowden leaks look very, very mild. As one of said key Google employees (I work on security infrastructure), I've been given to understand that if I am ever approached in any way by the government, I am to immediately consult with Google legal counsel, and that any request that I not talk to counsel would be illegal (I think it would violate the constitutional guarantee of due process).

Certainly, as long as the order or warrant is issued by the appropriate court, is not excessively broad, etc., and then Google will add it to the statistics for the transparency report.

In an information-theoretic sense that is undoubtedly true. In that sense, though, I'd argue that nothing that touches a networked computer is safe.

YMMV, of course, but I actually am pretty comfortable with it. Of course, I have visibility into how Google manages user data, which helps. There is the possibility that a future version of Google may behave differently, but I think that possibility is at least a decade or two away, because I think it would take that long for the company's culture to change enough to make it possible.

Perhaps. I think the general belief about what data Google has overstates the reality by a wide margin, and further even where it's accurate it overstates Google's (current) ability to actually make use of the data.

In any case, if you're concerned with it, Google provides you with the tools to opt out. I encourage you to use them. Personally, I turned on web history, location history, route all of my email through gmail, use Hangouts for SMS, etc., etc. I find the value I get from the services to outweigh the risk I perceive. If you see that balance differently, you should act accordingly.

I do, but as a Google engineer involved in security and privacy infrastructure I'm in a position with much greater than normal visibility into exactly what is done and how.

Governments can ask, and Google will say "No, please come back with an order."

Governments can order, and Google will comply, as long as the order was issued by proper authority, isn't excessively broad, etc. And then Google will add the order, and the number of accounts it affects, to the next transparency report.

That's not perfect, but it's much, much better than the government being able to snarf all the data with no accountability at all.

Elon Musk = D.D. Harriman, only with bigger dreams.

And not a fictional character.

I got four letters for you:J-U-R-Y

I got some letters for you, too: Voir dire. This is the process wherein lawyers weed out all your peers in favor of compliant idiots. That's not what it's supposed to do, of course, but that's how it's used. It's then almost always followed by admonishment by the judge to the effect that the jury has to apply the law as written, with nothing at all about the jury's actual duty to evaluate the law -- in fact, if that's brought up, likely you'll have a mistrial.

If you go to court in the US, you can pretty much look forward to success in ratio with the money you spend on your lawyer, and how well your lawyer manages to pass that largesse along to the judge. And too bad if the judge thinks public opinion means more than your money.

Letsee here. The Kurzweil model is suggesting that we can get to smart machines by way of brute force. Not necessarily the only way, but one that's hard to argue against as it's just extending today's neural net simulators to faster hardware. Using the open source NEST model, a supercomputer in Japan, the K computer, simulated a second's worth of "brain" activity in 40 minutes. That was a network 1% the size of human brain. So you'd need at least 240,000 times the CPU power to do this at 100% in realtime. Except maybe a few more zeros, since growing a neural network isn't linear, even if you're able to split off subsection for different work, as the brain seems to do. Sometimes.

So 2029 is 15 years away. If we take the erroneous but popular idea that Moore's Law is both a real law and directly about CPU performance (neither of which is true), that's a doubling of performance every 18 months. So by 2029, we only have computers 1024x faster than today's. But by 2045, computers will be a million times faster, at least based on these bad assumptions. So maybe we have a supercomputer than can run a human brain sized neural net in realtime. That get us Skynet by brute force, but not Commander Data. That's another 20 years off.

Of course, I started low... anyone ran run NEST. But it's by far not the most aggressive model. IBM built a more efficient model, modeling a whole artificial brain the complexity of the human brain on a Blue Gene/Sequoia Q supercomputer. It ran 1053x slower than realtime.... which suggests a realtime version might be possible around 2029. IBM actually say it might be as early as 2023, as they're building chips that implement their "neurosynaptic cores" in hardware. The model has over 2 billion neurosynaptic cores, and it's very intentionally designed to be a brain, though not a strict emulation of a human brain. There are dozens of projects around the world doing similar things. One team in Europe has a realtime honeybee scale brain running, and hopes to have a rat scale brain done this year. Another team has a non-realtime model similar to a cat's brain... can hatz cheezeburger?

So it sure looks possible to have Skynet by 2029. Self-contained thinking mobile machines, probably not for a decade or two beyond. And that's assuming no technological roadblocks in scaling our hardware. But also no huge leap away from the brute force approach. And no hardware design help from IBM's realtime brain of 2023. But of course, it won't even graduate college before 2030, assuming a few upgrades along the way. And a few years after that, we may not even understand the improved brain it's getting us to build for it...

So getting a program to work right with SELinux takes a RHCE? And elevated access so you can drop the context rule in the right secure place?

As one of the other posters noted here, the problem isn't configuring SELinux right on one system. The problem is that configuring it right is done differently on each user's different system - so you either have to write the configuration 3+ times (RPM, DEB, and pick some other common format, then listen to Linux users gripe about how you didn't support THEIR package format), or you have to write some sort of complicated setuid-root shell script that does the right thing. And to install this silly game (which doesn't require root), you have to be root! Remember how Windows got into a lot of trouble about how you had to be Administrator to install anything? But when it's SELinux with the same requirement, we are supposed to call this a good thing?

SELinux is a wonderful system - IF you can enumerate all permissions needed by all software that will ever be installed on the system. Which is true only for toy OSes or base OS installs or for people who have solved the halting problem. And that's why any non-trivial software immediately suggests turning off SELinux - the defaults are too restrictive for real-world software (JIT is only allowed for Java / Browsers / other things the SELinux rule authors have seen before), and you need to really know the system well to properly alter the configuration while still maintaining security. The point is, installing new pieces of "normal" software is a major piece of functionality for the OS, which means the OS needs to handle this itself and configuring security is not something that should be foisted upon the software being installed. Really fancy software - e.g. database servers and such - may need to carry a security configuration with it. But come on - a game needs security configuration ?!?!

(And before the Linux people skewer me for saying Windows is better - Linux is perfectly fine. It's SELinux that is ... difficult.)

Yes and no. I studied this in college, five courses covering AI and related things, both from the CS and the Psychological perspective.

Computer Engineering has typically made AIs in a practical way: we're trying to build a machine that exhibits intelligent behavior. We don't begin to mean that it thinks, but rather, that it's capable of analyzing data and making decisions that we, as the real thinkers, judge to be the intelligent decision. That can be an expert system that passes a Turing Test or beats the Jeopardy champion, it could be a chess player that beats grandmasters, or a "smart" combine that can robo-harvest your fields using less fuel that a human would. No one's claiming any thinking here, but we all agree that the behavior is emulating intelligent human behavior.

In the Cognitive Psychology department, they're far more interested in modeling what the brain is actually doing. Using the open source NEST model, supercomputers have already run a brain of about 1% the capacity of the human brain. That's a brute force model, but still, way more powerful than an insect, no "magic spark" needed. And none ever will be. Life isn't magic.

They still need a off switch. In most every scifi doomsday story, we seem to decide that off switches or plugs are unnecessary, maybe just a couple of years before the machines go sentient and run around killing everyone. It's probably even easier with the robots. The first several generations of thinking machines won't fit in a robot. So they'll be robotic drones, much like today's robotic drones, just driven by thinking machines. Over radio. Radio that we already know how to jam, even if we have at some point lost the ability to access said drones through the RF link.

Kurzweil's smart machine predictions are, last I checked anyway, based on a rather brute force approach to machine intelligence. We completely understand the basic structure of the brain, as a very slow, massively parallel analog computer. We understand less about the mind, which is this great program that runs on the brain's hardware, and manages to simulate a reasonably fast linear computing engine. There is work being done on this that's fairly interesting but not yet applied to machine mind building.

So, one way to just get there anyway is basically what Kurzweil's suggesting. Since we understand the basic structure of the brain itself, at some point we'll have our man made computers, extremely fast, somewhat parallel digital computers, able to run a full speed simulation of the actual engine of the brain. The mind, the brain's own software, would be able to run on that engine. Maybe we don't figure that part out for awhile, or maybe it's an emergent property of the right brain simulation.

Naturally, the first machines that get big enough to do this won't fit on a robot... that's why something like Skynet makes sense in the doomsday scenario. Google already built Skynet, now they're building that robot army, kind of interesting. The actual thinking part is ultimately "just a simple matter of software". Maybe we never figure out that mind part, maybe we do. The cool thing is that, once the machine brain gets to human level, it'll be a matter of a really short time before it gets much, much better. After all, while the human brain simulation is the tricky part, all the regular computer bits still work. So that neural net simulation will be able to interface to the perfect memory of the underlying computing platform, and all that this kind of computation does well. It will be able to replace some of the brute force brain computing functions with much faster heuristics that do the same job. It'll be able to improve its own means of thinking pretty quickly, to the point that the revised artificial mind will run on lesser hardware. And it well be that there are years or decades between matching the neural compute capacity of the human mind and successfully building the code for such a mind. So that first sentient program could conceivably improve itself to run everywhere.

Possibly frightening, which I think is one reason people like to say it'll never happen, even knowing that just about every other prediction about computing growth didn't just happen, but was usually so conservative it missed reality by lightyears. And hopefully, unlike all the doomsday scenarios that make fun summer blockbusters, we'll at least not forget the one critical thing: these machines still need an off switch/plug to manually pull. It always seems in the fiction, we decide just before the machines go sentient and decide we're a virus or whatever, that the off switch didn't needed anymore.

Someone here doesn't keep up with philosophy.

A good deal of philosophy is mythology, trendy mythology, which is why I tend to ignore the signals coming from that direction. It's not even a soft science: it's not science at all. So yes, you're quite right, and thank you for noticing I'm not taking part in that mostly-bewildered sideshow.

There is nothing -- repeat, absolutely nothing -- to indicate, in any way, that there is anything going on in brains that isn't mundane physics. Further, not anywhere in the body, not anywhere in the world, not anywhere in the entire universe. The tendency of certain personality types to attribute the unknown to various imaginary basics without bothering with objective fact, measurable cause and effect, and the inconvenience of presenting a falsifiable proposal is what got us gods, elves, banshees, ghosts, chupacabras, and so forth.

Me, I'll wait to assert that force X is making something happen until someone demonstrates that there is a force X. In the interim, we already know the living brain is replete with electrical, chemical and physical activity (by which I mean the actual physical configuration is known to change over time... I'm not just talking about niceties like oxygen transport.) We don't know what it all does in any kind of holistic sense; that makes it far too early to be presuming the existence of further activity of another order. If, however, we look into all the known activities and find that they cannot account for the end result, that's the time to look further -- that, or if someone builds an X detector and demonstrates that X is, in fact, going on -- as it were. I must point out to you that no such thing has occurred.

In the interim, the way to bet is clearly that it's all mundane, in the sense that we already understand the underlying physics principles. Everything from Occam's Razor to basic statistics tells us the probable solution lies in the set of solutions we've determined describe everything else; for one, we know of nothing else, for another, there's no evidence whatsoever that points to something else. There's simply no path from here to Dualism. Chalmer's assertions are baseless at this point in time, as they were when made. There's simply no evidence for consciousness as "it's own thing"; it exists in the mundane world, odds are that it is of the mundane world -- just like everything else we've ever looked into.

Take two genomic pills and call me in the morning. Sounds affordable.

c'mon. Every indication says your brain is you. Chemical reactions, electrical impulses, stored states, massive, active and dynamic connectivity. That's what "you" arise from. When your brain stops, you stop. Your head contains a most effective EM shield consisting of wet, conductive layers that are sufficient to prevent huge RF and EM fields from getting into your brain tissue. The tiny, minuscule events going on inside your head can't get out under any circumstance for the same reason, unless you (a) punch a hole in your skull or (b) scan it with instruments so sensitive you can hardly comprehend the idea, or (c), you effectuate your mind's activity in some manner by moving your body via the nerves that connect your muscles and other parts to the brain through the base of your skull. Your brain is not an interface. Your brain is the computer. Everything we know about physics points this way; nothing points the way you suggest. It's simply not the way to bet. What you're talking about has basis only in mythology at this point in time.