HUPOMNEMATA

We still have not seen the Matrix. But even The Register’s Security Focus journalist, Kevin Poulsen, seems to give credit to Trinity’s talent…

“A scene about two thirds of the way through the film finds Carrie-Anne Moss’s leather-clad superhacker setting her sights on a power grid computer, for plot reasons better left unrevealed.

But at exactly the point where audiences would normally be treated to a brightly-colored graphical cartoon of a computer intrusion, ala the 2001 Travolta vehicle Swordfish, or cheer as the protagonist skillfully summons a Web browser and fights valiantly through “404 Errors,” like the malnourished cyberpunk in this year’s “The Core,” something completely different happens: Trinity runs “Nmap.”

Probably the most widely-used freeware hacking tool, the real-life Nmap is a sophisticated port scanner that sends packets to a machine — or a network of machines — in an attempt to determine what services are running. An Nmap port scan is a common prelude to an intrusion attempt — a way of casing the joint, to find out if any vulnerable service are running.

That’s exactly how the fictional Trinity uses it. In a sequence that flashes on screen for a few scant seconds, the green phosphor text of Trinity’s computer clearly shows Nmap being run against the IP address 10.2.2.2, and finding an open port number 22, correctly identified as the SSH service used to log into computers remotely. ”

more on Trinity

Just finished “the collapsium” by Wil Mc Carthy, in which people can fax themselves to the other end of the galaxy, or even just send copies if need be. Some nice plot twist about the legal status of these copies : who are they? Do they belong to their “original”? What happen if someone make an illegal copy of you? Is what happen in the head of your copy your intellectual property?
And, when you’re faxed, what happens to you?

« Bruno marveled again that faxing now seemed to provoke no sensation at all, though their bodies were sundered, atomized, quantum-entangled and finally recreated. Exactly as before? Indistinguishable, anyway. The soul, it was imagined, followed the entangled quantum states to the new location. Inconvenient to think it might be destroyed and duplicated along with the body, or worse, that copies of it might be piling up in an afterlife somewhere. But weighed against crowds and traffic and bad weather and all the other inconveniences of physical travel, people were surprisingly willing to take the risk. »

If you can’t wait to read something about Matrix reloaded actually written by someone who has seen it, I guess you could choose worse than this.

This from the wikipedia, placing artificial intelligence as a key element building to singularity but not being it (and mentionning Matrix along the way 😉

“Vinge’s technological singularity is commonly misunderstood to mean technological progress rising to “infinity.” Actually, he refers to the pace of technological change increasing to such a degree that a person who doesn’t keep pace with it will rapidly find civilization to have become completely incomprehensible. This was one of the philosophical ideas that inspired the successful movie The Matrix.

It has been speculated that the key to such a rapid increase in technological sophistication will be the development of superhuman intelligence, either by directly enhancing existing human minds (perhaps with cybernetics), or by building artificial intelligences. These superhuman intelligences would presumably be capable of inventing ways to enhance themselves even more, leading to a feedback effect that would quickly surpass preexisting intelligences.”

From the same source as the “Cyberspace as place” paper, this one referring to the classic “measure of man” Star Trek Next Generation episode :

“This article brings together the law’s story of corporate personhood with its science fictional counterpart: the story of the android, Lieutenant Commander Data, from “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” Both the modern corporation and Data are cases of artifactual agency–actors created by artificial means. As such, their claims to personhood–that is, to being moral agents with the same rights and duties as their human counterparts–are problematic. But the story science fiction tells of Data’s claim to personhood is markedly different from the story the law tells about the corporation. Data’s story reveals the “silences” in the narrative of corporate law, replacing them with dialogue. In revealing such “silences,” Data’s story brings into view an alternative moral framework for the law’s struggles with corporate personhood, a new “ending, which we can supply.”

It’s written by Jeffrey Nesteruk. I’m not completely sure the comparison is really relevant as I would rather take the tea with Data than with a corporation (actually the paper itself is not downloadable, which is a shame)

A long paper byDan Hunter about the metaphor of cyberspace as place and its consequences in terms of property and law. Here’s how the abstract begin :

“Cyberspace was once thought to be the modern equivalent of the Western Frontier, a place, where land was free for the taking, where explorers could roam, and communities could form with their own rules. It was an endless expanse of space: open, free, replete with possibility. This is true no longer. This Article argues that we are enclosing cyberspace, and imposing private property conceptions upon it. As a result, we are creating a digital anti-commons where sub-optimal uses of Internet resources is going to be the norm.”

Seems pretty interesting. Downloadable as pdf there

As we had this little discussion with Nicolas and Laurence some days ago about what is singularity, there is this short text on the Guardian’s website :

“A singularity, in physics and astronomy, is a place where the laws of physics as we know them break down – like a black hole in space. But when applied to society by Vernor Vinge, singularity means a moment beyond which huge but unpredictable changes occur.

Vinge, 58, a retired professor of computer science (from San Diego State University) and perhaps the world’s most visionary science-fiction writer, believes – and has done since 1993 – that a singularity will occur when computers become intelligent enough to upgrade themselves, because their learning curve will be straight up, in the most giddy exponential fashion. In the blink of an eye, or rather in as little as 60 hours of becoming ‘superhuman’ – something he expects no later than the year 2030 or he’ll be ‘surprised’ – computers could have re-modelled society and subverted laws in ways utterly bewildering to us. ‘In the early post-human era, everything will be new again.'”

read more

On kuro5hin, Polyglot wrote that review of contemporary (last 20 years) sf. The comments below are actually more interesting.

a nettime post from Bruce Sterling

Special Dispatch Series – No. 497
May 1, 2003 No.497
Nuclear Scientists in Iraq: Citizens Stole Uranium and Other Dangerous
Materials

The Qatari television station Al-Jazeera recently interviewed two Iraqi
scientists employed by Iraq’s Nuclear Energy Authority – Dr. Hamid
Al-Bahali, an expert in nuclear engineering and a graduate of the Moscow
Institute of Nuclear Engineering, and Dr. Muhammad Zeidan, a biology expert
and a graduate of Damascus and Baghdad Universities. The scientists
discussed the looting of the Nuclear Authority after the war. The following
are excerpts from the interview:

Dr. Al-Bahli: “I have been working at the Nuclear Authority since 1968, when
the doors opened to the use of atomic [energy] for peaceful purposes in
Iraq. We activated the first atomic reactor in Iraq in 1968, and within four
days we transferred radioactive isotopes to hospitals to treat various
illnesses. Since then, and up to 1990, we continued this type of work which
was absolutely for peaceful and humanitarian purposes…”

“As for nuclear weapons, Al-Tawitha, the main area that we will be talking
about, is free of weapons of mass destruction and as far as I know, nothing
was done there in this respect…”

“What happened in Iraq did not happen before anywhere else in the whole
world, and I hope will never happen again; there was anarchy. After hearing
that radioactive components were stolen, the employees of the Nuclear
Authority started informing people that the materials that were stolen were
indeed radioactive and should be returned. A person who has dirty
radioactive components is in danger. How is he going to behave? He may
behave in a way that would harm Iraq’s ecology and even [cause harm] outside
Iraq…”

“Tons of uranium known as yellow cakes were stored in barrels. This was a
phase in the production of uranium from crude components. There were also
other by-products from processing these materials. There were tens of tons
of radioactive waste. They were stored in barrels and their radioactivity
was not high as long as they were under supervision.”

“When order was disrupted, simple citizens – sorry to say – did not have
containers to store drinking water, so they stole those barrels, each one
containing 400 kilos of radioactive uranium. Some of them dumped the powder
on the ground in very large quantities, and others took the contaminated
barrels to their homes, and the barrels appeared in various areas. They
stored water in them, and had every intention of drinking from them or
[using] the barrels to sell milk.”
Continue Reading »

Privatisation and ownership are key issues in the book, too?

Yes. I also postulate what is already happening: public space has been more or less given up for lost. Security is now a matter of gated communities. Instead of having people living in one place and commuting, which has now become too unsafe, in the book they’ve got the mall within the walls, like castles. Corporations want to prevent knowledge theft and raiding, because everything is now completely commercialised. That means the profit motive is the only motive. There is no more pure science, but if you’ve looked at a university recently you know that the people who get the grants are the people that large corporations think might be doing something useful for them. What you have mostly is people thieving from graduate students, as it were. The students do the work, the guy puts his name on it and collects the rewards, but not in my book. Things are better in some respects: if the students invent something, they get to collect on it, which makes them very inventive.

read the interview