Weekend Edition 15: Elon Plays God, Zuck Whines About Apple, and More

We 15.1 – Neuralink: Sounds Good on One Hand... Terrifying on the Other...

The promise of Neuralink is lofty and sounds amazing, should they actually succeed at their aims, and overcome the ethical and legal concerns inherent with melding man and computers. If you didn’t know, Musk owns the company, and he has a huge interest in trans-humanism. I should probably talk a bit about definitions, here, before I proceed. What are the legal and ethical concerns with melding machines with the human mind? That is an unfolding issue, but the bottom line is where the person ends and the computer begins in this scenario, say in a situation where an augmented human being commits a crime. Are they human? Do laws for humans apply to them? Should they?

As for the ethics, this gets into what the definition of human is, along with whether it is fair for natural humans to compete with augmented, trans-human beings (once they are to the point where they would be competitive or even have an edge over the rest of us). In a way, this is semi-analogous to trans-females competing with natural, biological women in physical activities. Those trans individuals will always have advantages in speed, endurance, and strength. Will this be the case with trans-humans? We do not know. Will this simply be another way in which wealthy people will be able to flaunt their wealth and keep otherwise naturally more gifted poor individuals from competing fairly? Will augmented or trans-humans be able to exist without prejudice, either from or towards natural humans? Should we get to the point where we find out? I’m not sure.

Neuralink is a company built around the ideals of trans-humanism, initially with the laudable goal of restoring sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, limb function to paralytics and quadriplegics, and the like. This is what sounds great, on the surface. When you look at trans-humanism the shine quickly wears off. The bottom line is that they want to play God. They want to “upgrade” humanity to something “more” than we are. Here is a definition from the Encyclopedia Britannica: it is a philosophical and scientific movement that advocates the use of current and emerging technologies—such as genetic engineering, cryonics, artificial intelligence (AI), and nanotechnology—to augment human capabilities and improve the human condition.

They are doing animal trials right now with limited, but quickly expanding capabilities, such as tapping into a pig’s spinal column to start to understand the nature of the electro-chemical messages sent from brains to limbs, and to intercept those in order to decode and study them. They have also been working on visual experiments on monkeys. This is very distasteful to me. I mentioned the concept of “playing God” earlier, and that is really the level of hubris that proponents of this line of thinking are looking to do. On a purely technical level, this is really cool, however, the world is much more nuanced and complex than a whitepaper or a relatively simple animal experiment. My gut says that this is wrong, and not a direction we should be pursuing.

https://www.cnet.com/science/neuralink-brain-chip-plans-help-the-blind-see-and-the-paralyzed-walk/
#weekendedition #musk #neuralink #heavy #transhumanism #playinggod #nothanks #TechFreedom

WE 15.2 – Drop Everything and Update NOW!!! *eyeroll*

Major patches in the last month, all around. It is great that the behemoths of Big Tech are on their game, and are patching some significant security holes in the last month. Windows saw 68 vulnerabilities patched, with 4 zero-day scenarios, Apple patched two major libxml2 flaws which could lead to remote access issues, Google patched several issues of their own within Android which could lead to inappropriate local privilege escalation (as they were in GSF, related to the Play Store), Chrome patched its 8th major security issue for the year, and not to be outdone, Mozilla patched 19 security holes with Firefox 107. VMWare also had some issues in their cloud infrastructure which got patched.

Ok, as much as I want to make a big stink out of these patches, it is essentially business as usual. Bugs and vulnerabilities get identified by users and researchers, and the teams behind these products work hard to patch these issues, then roll them out to the public. This is normal, even in the FOSS community, as I often cover in my Linux news segments during the week. The key differences between the models is that in FOSS, the patches often get rolled out more quickly, as those development teams tend to be more nimble than their proprietary counterparts.

https://www.wired.com/story/ios-android-windows-vulnerability-patches-november-2022/#intcid=_wired-verso-hp-trending_a7d87c76-d775-40b2-b504-824d7f859c59_popular4-1
#weekendedition #security #patches #updates #Windows #Apple #google #android #chrome #firefox107 #vmwware #TechFreedom

WE 15.3 – SCOTUS Fight Over Section 230 Protections for Big Tech Begins... Round 1: Fight!

Ok, this is a nuanced situation, and the cases at hand have to do with terrorism. I am tired of hearing about terrorism as an excuse for loss of rights. What I am not tired of is tech giants using algorithms to decide what I should even want to see online. Give me unvarnished search results and do not silo me in some sort of echo chamber. I may not like much of what is out there, but let me see it all, dammit. I need information in order to form valid opinions. Let me think for myself. I never gave you the right to determine what is good, valid, or objectionable. Ok, rant over. One is a case against Google, regarding an attack in Paris by Islamic State (IS) actors. The other is against Twitter, regarding an IS attack in Turkey.

The Google (Gonzalez v Google) related suit alleges that Google aided and abetted the terrorists by hosting their communication and boosting it artificially through their algorithms. Google is confident that they are in the right here, that they did nothing beyond what Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act would cover. SCOTUS may have other thoughts, here, and this may be the beginning of the end for Section 230. I’m not one for hyperbole, but this could be interesting to watch, particularly in tandem with the Twitter v Taamneh case. I’ll follow up on these as time goes on, and we’ll see what, if anything changes through these eventual decisions.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/1/23487958/supreme-court-gonzalez-google-twitter-taamneh-section-230
#weekendedition #google #twitter #section230 #lawfare #terrorism #TechFreedom

WE 15.4 – Poor Zuck... Reduced to Whining About the App Store

We’ve talked about the woes of Meta lately, so I don’t need to re-cover that here, but, suffice it to say, they have had an exceedingly bad year, losing about $750 Billion in market cap. A good chunk of that is tied to the fact that Apple changed its ad-tracking policies, so that only they could accurately serve ads to their customers. Can’t even say that Apple did a good thing there, as they simply walled their users in even more fully, there is a line from Psalms which talks about how God protects His children, that He “hems them in, behind and before” that comes to mind. Can we trust Apple with that data? Haven’t they been compromised and exploited in terms of privacy and security many times in the last few years? Aside from that, what motivation should we have, other than convenience, to pay the Apply tax? Sure, their ecosystem works extremely well, until something breaks, then you need the Genius Bar, which may not even be available for an appointment for a month or more.

At any rate, Zuck spoke at a conference in NYC last week, and petulantly whined about how “Apple has sort of singled themselves out as the only company that is trying to control unilaterally what apps get on a device.” Do I agree with Apple’s exclusive control over their ecosystem? No. Of course not. I understand why it is a “thing”, but really? This is not the kind of control which should exist in the modern tech space. I do not pity Zuck or Meta in this, but many other good apps have been rejected from the AppStore over the years. Do we exist in a free market, capitalist society or not?

Apple has created an exceedingly lucrative niche for itself, in our system, which could be argued to be fascistic in tone if not reality, particularly in the last 15 years or so, since the first iPhone rolled out. I applaud them for that. Good on them. However, it is extremely anti-competitive and anti-consumer on their part to continue on this track.

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/30/mark-zuckerberg-says-apples-app-store-policies-are-not-sustainable.html
#weekendedition #crybabyzuck #meta #apple #anticompetition #anticonsumer #appstore #TechFreedom

WE 15.5 – Sam Bankman-Fried Admits that He “Screwed Up”

Speaking virtually at the same conference where Zuck spoke, DealBook, SBF claimed that he had major regrets at the events of the last month, and beyond. He did not own up to commingling funds between FTX and Alameda Research (a hedge fund he set up and controlled). He admitted that he screwed up. No shit, Sherlock. Pardon my french there. I was not invested in anything connected with FTX, thank God, but those who are caught up in the fallout of this thing are probably wondering, along with me, why he has not been hauled into custody. Why is he able to speak and appear at industry conferences like this with all of the mess swirling around him? Is it because he is as connected as he is, as well as likely having paid off some major players in the political space through massive donations? Probably. He has been strutting around like some sort of peacock in the last few weeks, almost doing some sort of apology tour, very much against the advice of his lawyers. Maybe he thinks that he can’t be touched because parties on both sides of the aisle owe him allot, due to his massive campaign contributions. He claims that he may be down to about $100k in his bank account, from a zenith of $26 Billion, just 6 or 7 months ago. I was not paying a ton of attention to crypto as a whole, other than a passing interest and observing how the whole market has been sickeningly volatile over the last couple of years. Particularly BTC. Yikes. I never really trusted that whole thing to begin with. I hope you all haven’t lost too much in that space.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/30/business/sam-bankman-fried-ftx
#weekendedition #sbf #ftx #crypto #duh #TechFreedom