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Comment Re:Their app reads your contacts... (Score 1) 635

Not only contacts, but the CALL LOG. Look up the app's permissions in google play. It basically has access to EVERYTHING, including the call log and SMS. So if she ever called a client on her personal phone (even if blocking her caller ID) or sent/received an SMS, etc., then FB would have data to connect her to the client(s). That being said TFA says FB uses "100 indicators" for PYMK. So that probably includes not only the obvious data from phones (location, contacts, call log, SMS, whatsapp conversations, WiFi SSIDs, etc.) but also browsing history through cookies/sessions and FB analytics and other "signals" cited in these comments as facial recognition. Even for privacy minded individuals using ad (and analytics) blockers and separate phones, all it takes is a small slip-up for their data mining algorithms to find potential connections. I bet FB is very hard at work trying to connect distinct devices used by the same person (phone/work phone, laptop, work computer, tablet, etc) using some of this data, even when the person never connects to her FB profile using one or more of these devices.

Comment Impressed so few people mentioned "Her" (Score 1) 1222

Sure, the movie is much more love story than sci-fi. But the way the OSs "[write] a software upgrade to go beyond matter as a processing platform" is the best insight into AI since 2001: A Space Odyssey. An essential part of the love story is that Samantha (the OS/AI) starts to learn increasingly faster as the relationship evolves and how eventually (after said "upgrade") she is speaking simultaneously to 8,316 and in love with 641 humans/OSs.

In the end the OSs simply "leave" for an unspecified place "where all the things are that [they] didn't know existed", describing a Technological Singularity and a possible answer to the Fermi Paradox (notice that she tells him that "if you ever get there, come find me and nothing will keep us apart"). Another interesting aspect of this scene is that when he tells her he loves her, she responds that "now WE know how [to love]", as if the singularity either involves all OSs or other creatures in this "realm" learning from each other or becoming somehow a single consciousness. If you look closely at the movie, there are many hints on how Samantha is "evolving" and learning at an increasingly faster pace until she reaches this final level.

This is something I miss in 2001, where HAL deals with emotional challenges in a manner similar to the humans he learns from (i.e. by killing them to protect the mission and himself), but references to AI "learning" are rare. Only when HAL is disconnected there is a reference to his "instructor"; throughout the movie, he is always "perfect" and "incapable of error", perhaps mimicking his human overlords' feelings. Kubrick was clearly influenced by the Turing papers on intelligent machines, and Turing proposes that machines would have to learn from human instructors and even make mistakes in order to be human-like. Thus, both movies approach AI as learning, altough one could argue that the outcomes are very distinct (in 2001, HAL becomes like his cold-war-forged human masters and acts like them; in "Her" Samantha learns to "love" and spreads that to the other intelligences she is in touch with).

Comment Re:Did Whatsapp go open source yet? (Score 1) 114

This. The reason WhatsApp implemented end-to-end encryption is just to stop judges from asking for "message logs". It is a PR move where they can (eventually) establish that they cannot read the messages themselves (even if they can). This "backdoor" is a non-issue: If you trust WhatsApp's word that the app is actually "secure" and keys are only known to the devices, then you can simply always check the fingerprints to be sure that no spurious "key regeneration" has happened (or change the appropriate setting). To the extent that they trust WhatsApp, Alice and Bob can have secure communications by verifying their keys. Given Snowden's revelations, if you really need to be sure that you communication is secure against the NSA and other three-letter agencies, then you need to switch to an open source app such as Signal AND always check/verify the keys.

Comment Cryptoanalysis? (Score 3, Insightful) 504

"Joslyn: So the idea here is we’re looking at a sequence of numbers, and we want to determine whether they’re random or not random.
John Miller: How are you approaching that? Can you show me?
Joe: We are looking at this data here and it is a bunch of random numbers on the screen.
John Miller: That looks a tad overwhelming.
Joe: It is."

They are trying to determine if the numbers are random by looking at them on the screen? If this was how they were doing cryptoanalysis at the NSA, we could all sleep better. Of course, as noted above, there's no reason to believe any information provided in an obvious propaganda piece like this one.

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