Saturday, May 12, 2018
Friday, May 11, 2018
Star Trek: Discovery fights for more than Trekkies hearts - CNET
"Discovery" arrives at a time when the US is more divided than ever. From the tragic protests last month in Charlottesville, Virginia, to claims by a Google engineer that women aren't suited to work in technology, the nation is wrestling with racism, sexism and questions about its identity.
Enter Star Trek, based on a future universe envisioned by Gene Roddenberry where such issues were resolved long ago. "Discovery" picks up the original show's mantle of diversity and social commentary, which Roddenberry conceived of and aired during the civil rights battles of the 1960s. It focused on different peoples and races (human and alien) working together for the greater good.
The new show boasts a darker, more modern take on Star Trek, complete with complex characters who disagree, change and potentially die throughout an evolving serialized arc. But it preserves Roddenberry's core principle.
To many involved with "Discovery," that's exactly what we need right now.
"I'm excited for what this show represents and for what I truly hope it will do," says Sonequa Martin-Green, who plays First Officer Michael Burnham, the first black woman to headline a Star Trek series. "I just hope that we can incite change."
Legacy of diversity
The casting of Martin-Green as the lead character in "Discovery" sparked a reaction of a different sort after the announcement was made in December.
Critics from across the internet derided "Discovery" as too diverse, even tossing around the concept of "white genocide."
"It surprised me — but it didn't," Martin-Green says in an interview at the Shangri La Hotel in Toronto, Canada, where the show is being filmed at Pinewood Studios. "In those first few encounters, I realized that the hypocrisy is real. You can be a part of something that has been a champion of diversity and still have naysayers."
As she points out, if you're criticizing the show's efforts to present a more diverse future, you've missed one of the central points of Star Trek. The original series, after all, cast a black woman, Nichelle Nichols, as Lt. Nyota Uhura, the Enterprise's communications officer, and a Japanese-American man, George Takei, as Lt. Hikaru Sulu, the ship's helmsman.
We may take such a diverse cast for granted now, but it was a wild concept when the show premiered in 1966.
"To have people of color out in space is quite revolutionary," says Miki Turner, assistant professor of journalism at the University of Southern California. Roddenberry "did it during a time when it was not expected and wasn't accepted in some quarters of the world."
Star Trek also featured its first black commanding officer, Benjamin Sisko, in "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine" in 1993 and its first female captain, Kathryn Janeway, in "Star Trek: Voyager" in 1995.
"Discovery" goes further. The decision to revolve the series around Martin-Green's character, First Officer Burnham, gives it a different point of view than the typical captain-centric focus.
The show also features a gay couple played by Anthony Rapp (Lt. Paul Stamets) and Wilson Cruz (Dr. Hugh Culber).
"Star Trek for 50 years has pushed so many boundaries, but this has been one blind spot," Rapp says. "There's a sizable LGBT contingent, and they've been hungry and clamoring for it."
Then there's Captain Lorca, played by British actor Jason Isaacs, best known for playing Lucius Malfoy in the "Harry Potter" film franchise, who says he chose a southern accent because he didn't want to try to follow Patrick Stewart. He worked with a dialogue coach to create an accent that was an amalgamation from different states, working off the assumption that those boundaries would fade in the future.
When he was training for the film "Black Hawk Down," Isaacs noted that the southern accent was common in the military, even among soldiers who were from the north.
"Something about it conveys something military about him," he says.
Capt. Philippa Georgiou, played by action-film legend Michelle Yeoh, is another pivotal figure. Commander of the USS Shenzhou, Georgiou's ready room features shadow puppets called wayang kulit, a nod to Yeoh's Malaysian heritage.
And we haven't even gotten to the aliens yet.
'Star Trek: Discovery' fights for more than Trekkies' hearts - CNET
Thursday, May 10, 2018
Google now says controversial AI voice calling system will identify itself to humans - The Verge
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/59697929/acastro_180510_1777_google_assistant_0003.0.jpg)
"Following widespread outcry over the ethical dilemmas raised by Google’s new Duplex system, which lets artificial intelligence mimic a human voice to make appointments, Google has clarified in a statement that the experimental system will have “disclosure built-in.” That seems to mean that whatever eventual shape Duplex takes as a consumer product will involve some type of verbal announcement to the person on the other end that he or she is in fact talking to an AI.
“We understand and value the discussion around Google Duplex — as we’ve said from the beginning, transparency in the technology is important,” a Google spokesperson told The Verge in a statement this evening. “We are designing this feature with disclosure built-in, and we’ll make sure the system is appropriately identified. What we showed at I/O was an early technology demo, and we look forward to incorporating feedback as we develop this into a product.”
Duplex is not yet a working product, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai introduced it onstage on Tuesday at the company’s I/O developer conference with only a pre-recorded phone call. That demo showcased how Google Assistant could sound much more lifelike when making use of DeepMind’s new WaveNet audio-generation technique and other advances in natural language processing, all of which helps software more realistically replicate human speech patterns. For instance, Duplex is so convincingly human because Google includes ticks like “uh” and “um” and other more colloquial phrases into the Assistant’s verbal library..."
Google now says controversial AI voice calling system will identify itself to humans - The Verge
Alexa and Siri Can Hear This Hidden Command. You Can’t. - The New York Times
"BERKELEY, Calif. — Many people have grown accustomed to talking to their smart devices, asking them to read a text, play a song or set an alarm. But someone else might be secretly talking to them, too.
Over the past two years, researchers in China and the United States have begun demonstrating that they can send hidden commands that are undetectable to the human ear to Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Assistant. Inside university labs, the researchers have been able to secretly activate the artificial intelligence systems on smartphones and smart speakers, making them dial phone numbers or open websites. In the wrong hands, the technology could be used to unlock doors, wire money or buy stuff online — simply with music playing over the radio.
A group of students from University of California, Berkeley and Georgetown University showed in 2016 that they could hide commands in white noise played over loudspeakers and through YouTube videos to get smart devices to turn on airplane mode or open a website.
This month, some of those Berkeley researchers published a research paper that went further, saying they could embed commands directly into recordings of music or spoken text. So while a human listener hears someone talking or an orchestra playing, Amazon’s Echo speaker might hear an instruction to add something to your shopping list.
“We wanted to see if we could make it even more stealthy,” said Nicholas Carlini, a fifth-year Ph.D. student in computer security at U.C. Berkeley and one of the paper’s authors.
Mr. Carlini added that while there was no evidence that these techniques have left the lab, it may only be a matter of time before someone starts exploiting them. “My assumption is that the malicious people already employ people to do what I do,” he said.
These deceptions illustrate how artificial intelligence — even as it is making great strides — can still be tricked and manipulated. Computers can be fooled into identifying an airplane as a cat just by changing a few pixels of a digital image, while researchers can make a self-driving car swerve or speed up simply by pasting small stickers on road signs and confusing the vehicle’s computer vision system.
With audio attacks, the researchers are exploiting the gap between human and machine speech recognition. Speech recognition systems typically translate each sound to a letter, eventually compiling those into words and phrases. By making slight changes to audio files, researchers were able to cancel out the sound that the speech recognition system was supposed to hear and replace it with a sound that would be transcribed differently by machines while being nearly undetectable to the human ear.
Smartphones and smart speakers that use digital assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri are set to outnumber people by 2021, according to the research firm Ovum.Christie Hemm Klok for The New York TimesThe proliferation of voice-activated gadgets amplifies the implications of such tricks. Smartphones and smart speakers that use digital assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri are set to outnumber people by 2021, according to the research firm Ovum. And more than half of all American households will have at least one smart speaker by then, according to Juniper Research.
Amazon said that it doesn’t disclose specific security measures, but it has taken steps to ensure its Echo smart speaker is secure. Google said security is an ongoing focus and that its Assistant has features to mitigate undetectable audio commands. Both companies’ assistants employ voice recognition technology to prevent devices from acting on certain commands unless they recognize the user’s voice.
Apple said its smart speaker, HomePod, is designed to prevent commands from doing things like unlocking doors, and it noted that iPhones and iPads must be unlocked before Siri will act on commands that access sensitive data or open apps and websites, among other measures.
Yet many people leave their smartphones unlocked, and, at least for now, voice recognition systems are notoriously easy to fool.
There is already a history of smart devices being exploited for commercial gains through spoken commands.
Last year, Burger King caused a stir with an online ad that purposely asked ‘O.K., Google, what is the Whopper burger?” Android devices with voice-enabled search would respond by reading from the Whopper’s Wikipedia page. The ad was canceled after viewers started editing the Wikipedia page to comic effect.
A few months later, the animated series South Park followed up with an entire episode built around voice commands that caused viewers’ voice-recognition assistants to parrot adolescent obscenities.
There is no American law against broadcasting subliminal messages to humans, let alone machines. The Federal Communications Commission discourages the practice as “counter to the public interest,” and the Television Code of the National Association of Broadcasters bans “transmitting messages below the threshold of normal awareness.” Neither say anything about subliminal stimuli for smart devices.
Courts have ruled that subliminal messages may constitute an invasion of privacy, but the law has not extended the concept of privacy to machines.
Now the technology is racing even further ahead of the law. Last year, researchers at Princeton University and China’s Zhejiang University demonstrated that voice-recognition systems could be activated by using frequencies inaudible to the human ear. The attack first muted the phone so the owner wouldn’t hear the system’s responses, either.
The technique, which the Chinese researchers called DolphinAttack, can instruct smart devices to visit malicious websites, initiate phone calls, take a picture or send text messages. While DolphinAttack has its limitations — the transmitter must be close to the receiving device — experts warned that more powerful ultrasonic systems were possible.
That warning was borne out in April, when researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign demonstrated ultrasound attacks from 25 feet away. While the commands couldn’t penetrate walls, they could control smart devices through open windows from outside a building.
This year, another group of Chinese and American researchers from China’s Academy of Sciences and other institutions, demonstrated they could control voice-activated devices with commands embedded in songs that can be broadcast over the radio or played on services like YouTube.
More recently, Mr. Carlini and his colleagues at Berkeley have incorporated commands into audio recognized by Mozilla’s DeepSpeech voice-to-text translation software, an open-source platform. They were able to hide the command, “O.K. Google, browse to evil.com” in a recording of the spoken phrase, “Without the data set, the article is useless.” Humans cannot discern the command.
The Berkeley group also embedded the command in music files, including a four-second clip from Verdi’s “Requiem.”
How device makers respond will differ, especially as they balance security with ease of use.
“Companies have to ensure user-friendliness of their devices, because that’s their major selling point,” said Tavish Vaidya, a researcher at Georgetown. He wrote one of the first papers on audio attacks, which he titled “Cocaine Noodles” because devices interpreted the phrase “cocaine noodles” as “O.K., Google.”
Mr. Carlini said he was confident that in time he and his colleagues could mount successful adversarial attacks against any smart device system on the market.
“We want to demonstrate that it’s possible,” he said, “and then hope that other people will say, ‘O.K. this is possible, now let’s try and fix it.’
Alexa and Siri Can Hear This Hidden Command. You Can’t. - The New York Times: ""
(Via.)
Wednesday, May 09, 2018
Tuesday, May 08, 2018
Chrome OS is getting full-fledged Linux apps - The Verge
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/59669377/acastro_180416_1777_chrome_0001.0.jpg)
"Google Chrome is getting a big upgrade with the ability to run Linux apps, with a preview set to be released on the Google Pixelbook today before rolling out later to other models, according to a report from VentureBeat.
It’s a major addition to Google’s web-based operating system, which up until now has offered web-based Chrome applications and, more recently, the ability to run Android apps. But the option to run full-fledged Linux software marks the first time that real desktop applications have come to Chrome OS.
LINUX APPS WILL WORK JUST LIKE THEY DO ON A REGULAR LINUX MACHINE
According to Chrome OS director of product management Kan Liu, users will be able to run Linux tools, editors, and integrated development environments directly on Chromebooks, installing them from their regular sources just like they would on a regular Linux machine. According to Liu, “We put the Linux app environment within a security sandbox, running inside a virtual machine,” with the apps running seamlessly alongside Android and web applications on Chrome OS.
Chrome OS is getting full-fledged Linux apps - The Verge
Monday, May 07, 2018
How Oman’s Rocks Could Help Save the Planet - The New York Times
"IBRA, Oman — In the arid vastness of this corner of the Arabian Peninsula, out where goats and the occasional camel roam, rocks form the backdrop practically every way you look.
But the stark outcrops and craggy ridges are more than just scenery. Some of these rocks are hard at work, naturally reacting with carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and turning it into stone.
Veins of white carbonate minerals run through slabs of dark rock like fat marbling a steak. Carbonate surrounds pebbles and cobbles, turning ordinary gravel into natural mosaics.
Carbonate veins form when water containing dissolved carbon dioxide flows through these rocks.
Even pooled spring water that has bubbled up through the rocks reacts with CO2 to produce an ice-like crust of carbonate that, if broken, re-forms within days.
When the water comes back into contact with air, a thin layer of carbonate hardens across its surface.
Scientists say that if this natural process, called carbon mineralization, could be harnessed, accelerated and applied inexpensively on a huge scale — admittedly some very big “ifs” — it could help fight climate change. Rocks could remove some of the billions of tons of heat-trapping carbon dioxide that humans have pumped into the air since the beginning of the Industrial Age.
And by turning that CO2 into stone, the rocks in Oman — or in a number of other places around the world that have similar geological formations — would ensure that the gas stayed out of the atmosphere forever.
“Solid carbonate minerals aren’t going anyplace,” said Peter B. Kelemen, a geologist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory who has been studying the rocks here for more than two decades.
How Oman’s Rocks Could Help Save the Planet - The New York Times
Sunday, May 06, 2018
Yes, It’s Bad. Robocalls, and Their Scams, Are Surging. - The New York Times
"It’s not just you.
Those pesky robocalls — at best annoying disturbances and at worst costly financial scams — are getting worse.
In an age when cellphones have become extensions of our bodies, robocallers now follow people wherever they go, disrupting business meetings, church services and bedtime stories with their children.
Though automated calls have long plagued consumers, the volume has skyrocketed in recent years, reaching an estimated 3.4 billion in April, according to YouMail, which collects and analyzes calls through its robocall blocking service. That’s an increase of almost 900 million a month compared with a year ago.
Federal lawmakers have noticed the surge. Both the House and Senate held hearings on the issue within the last two weeks, and each chamber has either passed or introduced legislation aimed at curbing abuses. Federal regulators have also noticed, issuing new rules in November that give phone companies the authority to block certain robocalls."
Yes, It’s Bad. Robocalls, and Their Scams, Are Surging. - The New York Times
Yes, It’s Bad. Robocalls, and Their Scams, Are Surging. - The New York Times
"It’s not just you.
Those pesky robocalls — at best annoying disturbances and at worst costly financial scams — are getting worse.
In an age when cellphones have become extensions of our bodies, robocallers now follow people wherever they go, disrupting business meetings, church services and bedtime stories with their children.
Though automated calls have long plagued consumers, the volume has skyrocketed in recent years, reaching an estimated 3.4 billion in April, according to YouMail, which collects and analyzes calls through its robocall blocking service. That’s an increase of almost 900 million a month compared with a year ago.
Federal lawmakers have noticed the surge. Both the House and Senate held hearings on the issue within the last two weeks, and each chamber has either passed or introduced legislation aimed at curbing abuses. Federal regulators have also noticed, issuing new rules in November that give phone companies the authority to block certain robocalls."
Yes, It’s Bad. Robocalls, and Their Scams, Are Surging. - The New York Times
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)