Tag: Business For Sale

Here’s how human consciousness works—and how a machine might replicate it

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I recently attended a panel discussion titled Being Human in the Age of Intelligent Machines. At one point during the evening, a philosophy professor from Yale said that if a machine ever became conscious, then we would probably be morally obligated to not turn it off. The implication was that if something is conscious, even a machine, then it has moral rights, so turning it off is equivalent to murder. Wow! Imagine being sent to prison for unplugging a computer. Should we be concerned about this? Most neuroscientists don’t talk much about consciousness. They assume that the brain can be understood like every other physical system, and consciousness, whatever it is, will be explained in the same way. Since there isn’t even an agreement on what the word consciousness means, it is best to not worry about it. Philosophers, on the other hand, love to talk (and write books) about consciousness. Some believe that consciousness is beyond physical description. That is, even if you had a full understanding of how the brain works, it would not explain consciousness. Philosopher David Chalmers famously claimed that consciousness is “the hard problem,” whereas understanding how the brain works is “the easy problem.” This phrase caught on, and now many people just assume that consciousness is an inherently unsolvable problem. Personally, I see no reason to believe that consciousness is beyond explanation. I don’t want to get into debates with philosophers, nor do I want to try to define consciousness. However, the Thousand Brains Theory suggests physical explanations for several aspects of consciousness Read More …

This is how inclusive Netflix’s original programming really is

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Last month, Netflix released its first-ever inclusion report detailing where the company stands with having a diverse and equitable workplace. Now Netflix is keeping that same energy in analyzing its original TV shows and films. Today, Netflix published a study conducted by the University of Southern California Annenberg Inclusion Initiative that breaks down how Netflix’s original content from 2018 and 2019 performed across 22 inclusion indictors. While the streamer excelled in certain areas and showed growth over the year, it’s evident that there’s still a considerable amount of ground to cover toward parity in front of and behind the camera—particularly with more representation from underrepresented racial/ethnic groups. “We’ve released this report in the interests of transparency,” said Ted Sarandos, co-CEO of Netflix. “Because without this kind of information it’s very hard to judge whether we’re improving or not. And the report makes clear that while Netflix has made advances in representation year-over-year, we still have a long way to go.” Here’s a snapshot of some key statistics from the study: 52% of all leads/co-leads (TV and film) were women and girls 31.9% of all leads/co-leads (TV and film) were from underrepresented racial/ethnic groups 23.1% of film directors were women 16.9% of film directors were from underrepresented racial/ethnic groups 29.8% of show creators were women 12.2% of show creators were from underrepresented racial/ethnic groups In addition to the study, which Netflix has committed to releasing every two years through 2026, the streamer also announced the Netflix Fund for Creative Equity, a $100 million endowment that will be distributed globally over five years in an effort to build talent pipelines for underrepresented communities. Read More …

This startup is building a modular, repairable laptop that actually looks good

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A new hardware startup is trying to make a name for itself by selling you fewer new devices. It’s called Framework , and its first product is a laptop that will let users replace or upgrade every component on their own, from the screen to the keyboard to the mainboard inside. That means customers won’t have to pay a premium for repairs when a part breaks, and won’t have to buy an entirely new laptop just to improve one particular component. Nirav Patel, Framework’s founder, says that the startup’s ultimate goal is to build an ecosystem of repairs and upgrades around its products so that users can easily breathe new life into their gadgets Read More …

Why security experts were blindsided by the SolarWinds attack

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The SolarWinds cyberattack on U.S. government agencies and private organizations was and is frightening in its scale and success. It proved no match for the government agencies charged with defending against such things, and brought into sharp focus the fact that the government’s current model for responding to cyberthreats is lacking. The Senate Intelligence Committee hosted some of the main players in the SolarWinds saga Tuesday for some soul-searching on how the government and private tech companies should work together to stop future attacks. Some of the main themes discussed in the hearing are likely to end up in new cybersecurity legislation this year, a Congressional source told me. SolarWinds is the name of the Texas-based company whose IT management software is used by many government agencies and large corporations. Back in March 2020, the attackers—widely thought to be employed by Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service—first planted malware in the SolarWinds system that sends updates to all its clients. When government agencies installed the update, they installed the malware, too. The attack was finally reported in December 2020 by the private security firm FireEye, and then only because the firm discovered its own systems had been infected. The SolarWinds attack was novel, in that it targeted both government and private-sector entities, and for its use of a government supplier (SolarWinds) as a Trojan horse to gain access to government agency systems. The white hats (security good guys) were not ready for this roundabout way of attacking. During the hearing, SolarWinds CEO Sudhakar Ramakrishna said the security community knows how to defend against direct attacks on networks and spear-phishing attacks in which hackers pose as a trusted party and try to trick employees of the target company into giving up their network credentials. Security experts have less experience with attacks that exploit a private-sector supplier of software to the government to gain entry. It’s hard for the eventual target organization—in this case government agencies and corporations—to see that kind of attack coming. The attackers attached malware to an update to SolarWinds’ Orion software. When the company’s clients—18,000 of them—installed the update, they also installed the malware. The attackers are thought to have penetrated the systems of 100 private companies and 11 government agencies, including the Departments of State, Energy, Homeland Security, and Treasury, and the National Nuclear Security Administration Read More …

This new digital rights report flunks the tech giants

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A new report on the human-rights policies of 26 tech and telecom firms around the world delivers a harsh verdict: From Alibaba to Vodafone, they all get an F. The 2020 Ranking Digital Rights Corporate Accountability Index , as previewed in advance of its Wednesday posting, blames this collective failure to get “even close to earning a passing grade” on widespread opacity among these firms in how they analyze, promote, and demote the speech of their customers for marketing, advertising, and content-moderation purposes. That focus on the uses and abuses of algorithms was the major new addition to this corporate scorecard from Ranking Digital Rights (RDR), a project founded by longtime digital-human-rights advocate Rebecca MacKinnon and housed at the nonprofit New America in Washington. Founded with a Knight News Challenge grant and since underwritten by foundation grants and State-Department funding, RDR has graded the policies of tech and telecom companies worldwide since 2015. RDR has yet to hand out a score better than 65 out of 100 (to Google , in 2015 and 2017 ; it’s down to 48 this year). In the new report, Twitter’s score—just 53–was the highest of any company. The report credits Twitter with transparency in such areas as its content-moderation decisions, ad-targeting operations, and government demands that it remove users’ posts. Amazon is way behind its peers in the U.S.” Ellery Biddle, Ranking Digital Rights But the report also knocks the company for not shedding the same light on security practices. In particular, it calls for more disclosure of how Twitter controls employee access to user data, citing Twitter insiders caught spying on Saudi dissidents in 2019 and the July 2020 breach that saw such boldface-name accounts as those of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos hacked to push a Bitcoin scam . Bezos’ own firm Amazon, meanwhile, lands at the bottom of RDR’s digital-platforms list with a score of 20—below even the Chinese e-commerce firm Alibaba, the other company the group added to its 2020 list. The report raps Amazon for disclosing so much less than other U.S. firms about its marketing uses of customer data, its oversight of products in its online store, its rules for use of its of its AWS hosting service , and its responses to government demands for customer information. Amazon’s transparency reports have been skimpier than those of other tech giants for years. The latest runs all of three pages and does not itemize requests for data from Alexa devices Read More …