When Will We Ever Learn?
by Miki Saxon
Are you familiar with the song Where have all the flowers gone?
It was written by Pete Seeger, with additional verses added by others, and the full circle of the song is as valid today as it was when Seeger wrote it nearly 60 years ago.
The refrain at the end of each verse is “Oh, when will they ever learn? Oh, when will they ever learn?” and it became one of the best known protest songs of the Viet Nam War. Fast forward to today you find proof across the globe that we still haven’t learned.
That refrain also applies, with some rewording, to the war being waged between technical advances and consumer safety and security.
In September, Facebook hesitantly admitted that its access keys were hacked due to flawed code — a hack that potentially affected more than 50 million users, including Zukerberg and Sandberg.
Facebook explained that the hack was caused by multiple bugs in its code relating to a video-upload tool and Facebook’s pro-privacy “View As” feature. (…)
Most recently, a major flaw was found in the AI code used in personal assistants, such as Alexa, Siri, or Cortana.
Scientists at the Ruhr-Universitaet in Bochum, Germany, have discovered a way to hide inaudible commands in audio files (…) the flaw is in the very way AI is designed. (…) According to Professor Thorsten Holz from the Horst Görtz Institute for IT Security, their method, called “psychoacoustic hiding,” shows how hackers could manipulate any type of audio wave–from songs and speech to even bird chirping–to include words that only the machine can hear, allowing them to give commands without nearby people noticing. The attack will sound just like a bird’s call to our ears, but a voice assistant would “hear” something very different.
The “damn the security / full speed ahead” mentality isn’t anything new.
Nor is the greed that drives it.
There is an old saying, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”
When will they ever learn?”
It’s likely the answer is “never.”
Image credit: koka_sexton
October 31st, 2018 at 1:16 am
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