Rules of killing need to be modified to cover drones and robots

May 27, 2014

Should a civilian operator of a killing drone be considered an armed or an unarmed combatant? Can such an operator be targeted in accordance with the Rules of War? Is the US targeting and killing of a US citizen by a drone attack lawful? Can a robot drone ethically be programmed to defend itself, automatically and without any human control, if such defence would require harm to other humans. Asimov’s 3 laws of robotics come to mind.

First Law: A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm, unless this would violate a higher order law.
Second Law: A robot must obey orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with a higher order law.
Third Law: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with a higher order law.

The ethics of killing now need to be revisited.

According to the New America Foundation:

  • The CIA drone campaign began in Yemen in 2002 and in Pakistan in 2004.
  • Drone strikes in Pakistan rose steadily under President Barack Obama in 2009, to their peak of 122 in 2010.
  • Starting in 2011, strikes in Pakistan began to decline, while they spiked in Yemen, particularly as the Obama administration began using drones to support the Yemeni government’s battles against al-Qaeda-linked militants in 2012.
  • The civilian and “unknown” casualty rate from drone strikes has fallen steadily over the life of the program.
  • The casualty rate in Pakistan for civilians and “unknowns” — those who are not identified in news reports definitively as either militants or civilians — was around 40% under President George W. Bush. It has come down to about 7% under President Obama.
  • Only 58 known militant leaders have been killed in drone strikes in Pakistan, representing just 2% of the total deaths.
  • In 2012, 2% of the drones’ victims were characterized as civilians in news reports and 9% were described in a manner that made it ambiguous whether they were militants or civilians.
  • In 2013, civilian casualties are at their lowest ever. That is partly the result of a sharply reduced number of drone strikes in Pakistan — 26 so far in 2013, compared with a record 122 in 2010 — and also more precise targeting.
US Drone killings in Pakistan (New America Foundation)

US Drone killings in Pakistan (New America Foundation)

According to a UN survey, civilians have been killed in 33 separate drone attacks around the world. In Pakistan, an estimated 2,200 to 3,300 people have been killed by drone attacks since 2004, 400 of whom were civilians. According to the latest figures from the Pakistani Ministry of Defense, 67 civilians have been killed in drone attacks in the country since 2008.

Of course the Rules of War are notoriously flexible and tend to follow the actions of the strong. They are not much in evidence in Syria. They were largely ignored in the invasion of Iraq. We have heard today about air attacks by the Ukrainian government on armed “rebels” who wish to secede in Donetsk.

KTH Press Release: In her recent thesis on the ethics of automation in war, Linda Johansson, a researcher in robot ethics at Sweden’s KTH Royal Institute of Technology, suggests that it is necessary to reconsider the international laws of war, and to begin examining whether advanced robots should be held accountable for their actions. ….

She also questions the ethics of assigning drone operators the task of tracking a targeted person from a safe distance for days, perhaps even a week, before striking. “This is different from ordinary combat soldiers who face their opponents directly,” she says. “The post-traumatic stress syndrome that affects an operator may be just as severe as for a regular soldier.”

Currently drones are still operated remotely by a human being, but technological advancement is so rapid that full automation is more than just a grim science fiction fantasy.

Johansson sketches out a scenario to show how reaching that point presents other ethical questions:

“Soon we may be facing a situation where an operator controls two drones instead of one, on account of cost reasons,” Johansson says. “Add to that the human tendency to rely on technology. Now imagine a situation where very quick decisions must be made. It becomes easy to step out of the decision loop and hand over control to the robot or computer.

“Man becomes the weakest link.”

It could also be argued that robots are not entitled to defend themselves, since under the rules of war they are not in danger of losing their lives. “Does it mean that they have lost the right to kill human soldiers?” she asks.

Robots, especially drones, can also facilitate the conduct of “secret war”, with low transparency and minimal involvement of troops.

Linda Johansson’s research has resulted in a compilation of seven articles. In addition to autonomous systems in the war, she studied other aspects of robots. One of the articles is about care-giver robots and the ethics around them. Two of her articles focus on the so-called “agent landscape” – or if and when advanced robots can be held responsible for their actions.

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Universe may be getting more massive rather than expanding

May 25, 2014

Not being Sheldon Cooper I have difficulty with the theory of an Expanding Universe. A finite Universe expanding into an infinite nothingness would be bad enough. But an infinite. ever-expanding Universe becomes incomprehensible. This expansion apparently consists of the scale of space itself expanding, such that galaxies are moving away from each other but where – for some other incomprehensible reasons – this does not apply at less than galactic scale (and certainly not at the scale of the puny earth or our human bodies)!

Skyserver: …. other physicists and mathematicians working on Einstein’s theory of gravity discovered the equations had some solutions that described an expanding universe. In these solutions, the light coming from distant objects would be redshifted as it traveled through the expanding universe. The redshift would increase with increasing distance to the object. ……. 

When he (Hubble) plotted redshift against relative distance, he found that the redshift of distant galaxies increased as a linear function of their distance. The only explanation for this observation is that the universe was expanding.

Once scientists understood that the universe was expanding, they immediately realized that it would have been smaller in the past. At some point in the past, the entire universe would have been a single point. This point, later called the big bang, was the beginning of the universe as we understand it today.

But now a new paper suggests that the red shift may be due to the Universe increasing in mass rather than expanding.  The Big Bang singularity – says the paper – turns out to be a consequence of choosing “a singular set of field coordinates”. But the paper has still to run the gauntlet of peer review.

C. Wetterich, A Universe without expansion, arXiv:1303.6878  arxiv.org/abs/1303.6878/

Abstract
We discuss a cosmological model where the universe shrinks rather than expands during the radiation and matter dominated periods. Instead, the Planck mass and all particle masses grow exponentially, with the size of atoms shrinking correspondingly. Only dimensionless ratios as the distance between galaxies divided by the atom radius are observable. Then the cosmological increase of this ratio can also be attributed to shrinking atoms. We present a simple model where the masses of particles arise from a scalar “cosmon” field, similar to the Higgs scalar. The potential of the cosmon is responsible for inflation and the present dark energy. Our model is compatible with all present observations. While the value of the cosmon field increases, the curvature scalar is almost constant during all cosmological epochs. Cosmology has no big bang singularity. There exist other, equivalent choices of field variables for which the universe shows the usual expansion or is static during the radiation or matter dominated epochs. For those “field coordinates“ the big bang is singular. Thus the big bang singularity turns out to be related to a singular choice of field coordinates.

Just as an expanding Universe -in reverse – leads to a Big Bang where some pre-existing mass “explodes” from a zero size, a Universe getting more massive – in reverse – must lead to a an initial mass-less state. Just about as incomprehensible as the Expanding Universe.

Nature: 

But, as Wetterich points out, the characteristic light emitted by atoms is also governed by the masses of the atoms’ elementary particles, and in particular of their electrons. If an atom were to grow in mass, the photons it emits would become more energetic. Because higher energies correspond to higher frequencies, the emission and absorption frequencies would move towards the blue part of the spectrum. Conversely, if the particles were to become lighter, the frequencies would become redshifted.

Because the speed of light is finite, when we look at distant galaxies we are looking backwards in time — seeing them as they would have been when they emitted the light that we observe. If all masses were once lower, and had been constantly increasing, the colours of old galaxies would look redshifted in comparison to current frequencies, and the amount of redshift would be proportionate to their distances from Earth. Thus, the redshift would make galaxies seem to be receding even if they were not.

Work through the maths in this alternative interpretation of redshift, and all of cosmology looks very different. The Universe still expands rapidly during a short-lived period known as inflation. But prior to inflation, according to Wetterich, the Big Bang no longer contains a ‘singularity’ where the density of the Universe would be infinite. Instead, the Big Bang stretches out in the past over an essentially infinite period of time. And the current cosmos could be static, or even beginning to contract.

Cosmology uses real mathematics and is – of course – much more respected than astrology. However the modern invocation of dark energy and dark matter by physicists and cosmologists is quite as magical as the invocation of the aether or of various elixirs by alchemists. In fact even gravity – though calculable and predictable – is just another “magical” term with no proper explanation.

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Death to homosexuals, adulterers and apostates!

May 25, 2014

I have difficulty to reconcile the bigotry and bloodshed that organised religions have always given rise to  – and still give rise to – with the highs of music and art and science that they have also clearly inspired. Could it be that the characteristics of a religion which inspire creativity and the creation of things of great beauty by some people on the one hand are the same characteristics which drive others to bigotry and barbarism on the other? Or perhaps it is the other way around. Any religion which claims to be “The True Faith” automatically and necessarily requires bigotry against those not of the true faith. Are creativity and inspiration and great beauty the obverse – and the saving grace – of the bigotry necessary to a “true faith”?

I have just been listening to a voluble spokesman of the Islamic Education and Research Academy (iERA) on BBC Radio 4 advocating that – after due process of course – the execution of homosexuals, adulterers and apostates is called for by the Koran and quite justified. He clearly didn’t realise quite how idiotic he sounded. He babbled articulately – but it was still babble. I’m not quite sure why the BBC felt it necessary to give the spokesman so much time. Perhaps it was to let him make a fool of himself. And that he did.

The iERA would like to be seen as “moderate” Islam. But on the basis of this radio broadcast, the iERA could/ should well join Boko Haram, Al Shabab, the Taliban, Al Qaida, and others on the long list of terrorist organisations. The existence of “moderate” Islam is hardly supported by the sheer number of organisations claiming to be Islamic and which dominate the terror list. Or by babbling idiots such as this particular iERA spokesmen.

If moderate Hindus or Buddhists or Catholics don’t keep their extremists in check, the religions themselves will be tainted and will – post facto – be extremist. The BJP as it assumes government in India, for example,  needs to keep the RSS and the VHP in check if it is not itself to be labelled extremist. The Pope needs to keep predatory pedophiles in check if his whole organisation is not be tainted.

Unless “moderate” Islam – assuming it exists – keeps its many bigots and barbarians in check, it will be difficult to avoid the conclusion that “Islam”  – post facto – at best condones barbarism and at worst  is itself barbaric. Right now it does seem as if Islam is being overrun or hijacked by the bigots and the barbarians. And the heady days of great Islamic literature and art and poetry and science have long since gone.

 

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Superhydrophobic and oleophobic

May 25, 2014

Nice video,


But,

From the coating distributor:

Ultra-Ever Dry is a superhydrophobic (water) and oleophobic (hydrocarbons) coating that will completely repel almost any liquid. Ultra-Ever Dry uses proprietary nanotechnology to coat an object and create a barrier of air on its surface. This barrier repels water, oil and other liquids unlike any coating seen before. The other breakthrough associated with Ultra-Ever Dry is the superior coating adherence and abrasion resistance allowing it to be used in all kinds of applications where durability is required.

See Wetting.

Wetting of different fluids. A shows a fluid with very little wetting, while C shows a fluid with more wetting. A has a large contact angle, and C has a small contact angle. – Wikimedia

However, detergents, soaps, Solvents or high pressure water must be kept away from the surfaces or the coating will fail. And it should not be touched with your bare hands  — to protect the coating and/or your hands?

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Huge shale deposits confirmed in the South of England

May 23, 2014
Map of the Weald Basin

Shale deposits in South of England and Wales (BBC)

The British Geological Survey (BGS) has now confirmed the huge deposits of oil bearing shale in the South of England . Ironically this comes just days after the BBC also reported on the idiot report by the self-styled Global Sustainability Institute that the UK would run out of oil, coal and gas in 5 years!!!

BBC (23rd May): The BBC’s John Moylan said that although the BGS study will say that there are several billion barrels of oil in place, is not clear how much would be economically recoverable. ….. By way of comparison, the equivalent of around 45 billion barrels of oil has been extracted from the North Sea over the past 40 years.

Last year, a BGS study of the North of England suggested there could be as much as 1,300 trillion cubic feet of gas contained in shale rocks. ….

Andrew Austin, chief executive of the onshore energy IGAS, said it had long been known that southern England had extensive resources.

He told the BBC: “We’ve known that there’s a big potential for oil and gas explorations across the country but particularly in terms of oil in the Weald Basin which is the area that stretches roughly from Winchester across towards Gatwick, up to the M25 and down to the coast at Chichester.

“There’s been a long history of oil and gas exploration in this area. We as a company produce oil and gas from around 20 sites across that area. Around 40 million barrels have been recovered from that area to date.”

In the US, fracking for oil and gas has created an energy boom and led to speculation that the country could overtake Saudi Arabia as the world’s biggest producer by 2020, or even sooner.

Gas prices in the US have fallen sharply as a result, and other countries are now hoping that shale oil and gas could also lead to lower domestic energy prices.

And just a few days ago the BBC chose to present this nonsense.

BBC (16th May): In just over five years Britain will have run out of oil, coal and gas, researchers have warned. …… There should be a “Europe-wide drive” towards wind, tidal, solar and other sources of renewable power, the institute’s Prof Victor Anderson said. ….

……. Professor Anderson said: “Coal, oil and gas resources in Europe are running down and we need alternatives.

“The UK urgently needs to be part of a Europe-wide drive to expand renewable energy sources such as wave, wind, tidal, and solar power.”

However, Jim Skea, Research Councils fellow in UK Energy Strategy. cast doubt on the findings of the report.

He told BBC News: “This sounds very unlikely. What’s more, it’s irrelevant – the UK has a stable supply of imported energy, even if it is a good idea to increase our own supplies.”

The government recently announced it was cutting subsidies for large-scale solar energy and the Conservatives have said there will be no funding for new onshore wind farms if they win the next election.

Ministers are hoping that enough shale gas – extracted by fracking – will be obtained to make a difference, the BBC’s environment analyst Roger Harrabin says.

Professor Victor Anderson is an alarmist economist who used to work for the World Wildlife Fund. But to develop a catastrophe theory and predict that the UK will run out coal, oil and gas in 5 years is just stupidity.

Prior to taking up his current position Professor Anderson had worked as Senior Policy Officer for One Planet Economy at WWF-UK, a Lecturer at Goldsmith’s College, London University, an Economist at the Sustainable Development Commission, a Senior Parliamentary Researcher at Plaid Cymru Group of MPs, Board Member at London Development Agency and an elected Assembly Member at the Greater London Authority. He is also currently a Member of the Planetary Boundaries Initiative Advisory Group.

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Carbon Cycle: Emissions from forest clearance underestimated, land absorption underestimated

May 23, 2014

Two new papers just published show that the carbon cycle is far from being certain. We still have large uncertainties regarding the sources of carbon dioxide emissions and their magnitude and the sinks where, and mechanisms by which, carbon dioxide is absorbed. One in Global Change Biology. shows that emissions due to forest clearance have been underestimated by some 40% while the second in Nature suggests that there are large land sinks for carbon dioxide in the Southern Hemisphere (paywalled but reported here) which have largely been ignored by climate models.

  1. The amount of carbon lost from tropical forests is being significantly underestimated, a new study reports. In addition to loss of trees, the degradation of tropical forests by selective logging and fires causes large amounts of “hidden” emissions. 
  2. they find that land sinks for CO2 are keeping up with the increase in CO2 emissions, thus modeled projections of exponential increases of CO2 in the future are likely exaggerated. 

The “settled science of climate” is a an edifice tottering on two unproven hypotheses:

  1. That carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere is a key driver of global temperature, and
  2. That man-made emissions of carbon dioxide (primarily fossil fuel combustion) are the key contributor to concentration in the atmosphere.

If either of these two assumptions are incorrect, the entire edifice of climate science and climate policy comes tumbling down.

The first now looks decidedly weak. For almost 20 years now global temperatures have stagnated (and show a slight negative trend) while carbon dioxide emissions from combustion have increased sharply. Carbon dioxide concentration has also continued to increase but at a much lower rate than the rate of man-made emissions. No doubt carbon concentration has some impact but it is clearly far from being a key driver of global temperature.

The second assumes that “natural emissions” and absorption are roughly in balance and therefore it must be fossil fuel combustion which is responsible for the increase of carbon dioxide concentration. But the Carbon balance of the earth is far from certain. Volcanic de-gassng of CO2 has been grossly underestimated. The mass of CO2 absorbing bio-mass in the oceans has also been underestimated and remains still highly uncertain.

The error bands surrounding “natural” emissions are of the same magnitude as man-made emissions. Absorption of Carbon dioxide by the oceans and the biological life (algae) in the oceans are, at best, relatively uncertain estimations.

ktwop: Even though the combustion of fossil fuels only contributes less than 4% of total carbon dioxide production (about 26Gt/year of 800+GT/year), it is usually assumed that the sinks available balance the natural sources and that the carbon dioxide concentration – without the effects of man – would be largely in equilibrium. 

…… Carbon dioxide emission sources (GT CO2/year)

  • Transpiration 440
  • Release from oceans 330
  • Fossil fuel combustion 26
  • Changing land use 6
  • Volcanoes and weathering 1

Carbon dioxide is accumulating in the atmosphere by about 15 GT CO2/ year. The accuracy of the amounts of carbon dioxide emitted by transpiration and by the oceans is no better than about 2 – 3% and that error band (+/- 20GT/year)  is itself almost as large as the total amount of emissions from fossil fuels. ….. 

The demonisation of fossil fuel combustion is based on belief and not on evidence. The carbon dioxide assumptions which are the foundations of the climate orthodoxy are unsound.

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Just not cricket anymore!

May 22, 2014

It is quite possible that there are no longer any matches – especially in the Indian Premier League – which have not been fixed in some way. But the malaise is present even in English County Cricket.

1. ECB charge Lou Vincent and Naved Arif with match-fixing county cricket game

The England & Wales Cricket Board are anticipated to make history later these days by announcing they have charged Lou Vincent and his former Sussex group-mate Naved Arif with fixing the outcome of a county cricket match.

Telegraph Sport can reveal that former New Zealand batsman Vincent, who has currently confessed to fixing, and Arif, a Pakistani living in this nation, are becoming charged with additional than 15 counts of match-fixing.

If the players are found guilty they face lifetime bans from the sport, and the 40-more than match amongst Sussex and Kent played at Hove in August 2011 will be the initial verified case of the result of a county match becoming fixed.

Vincent, who has given proof to the International Cricket Council of fixing in five countries, faces a lot more than 10 charges of fixing some relate to the Sussex/Kent match and other individuals relate to an additional 1-day game he played for Sussex in 2011.

Arif faces at least 5 counts relating to the Sussex game versus Kent alone.

2. Chris Cairns named by NZ Test player’s ex-wife in match-fixing testimony

Former New Zealand Test player Chris Cairns continues to protest his innocence amid more evidence against him, this time from Lou Vincent’s ex-wife, who alleges he was a cricket match-fixing ringleader.

Cairns’ name was publicly linked with sworn evidence to International Cricket Council investigators for the first time on Tuesday, as the former New Zealand all-rounder issued a second statement in a 12-hour period. ‘‘I totally reject the allegations against me, and I will prove this.’’

The latest leaked evidence is a sworn 10-page document from Elly Riley, Vincent’s ex-wife, that she provided to anti-corruption investigators last October. It follows leaks in the past week of former Test opener Vincent’s explosive 42-page testimony, and New Zealand captain Brendon McCullum’s signed three-page statement, both of which are understood to name Cairns as a fixing ringleader.

Riley’s evidence was that the fixing began at the Indian Cricket League in 2008, and that Vincent told her: ‘‘Chris was going to pay him $US$50,000 a game for the fixing.’’

The amount of money sloshing around in Indian Premier League and in the betting surrounding the matches makes spot fixing both tempting and extremely lucrative

3. IPL spot-fixing allegations

The IPL is no stranger to controversy, but on May 16 it met arguably its biggest crisis when Delhi Police arrested three Rajasthan Royals players – Sreesanth, Ajit Chandila and Ankeet Chavan – soon after their match in Mumbai for spot-fixing. Eleven bookies were also arrested at that time, including one – Amit Singh – who was a former Royals player. Royals later suspended their players and the BCCI set up an inquiry, headed by its ACSU chief Ravi Sawani, into the allegations. The board also announced enhanced anti-corruption measures, including two more security personnel with each team. The arrests kicked off a nation-wide search and arrest of bookmakers – betting is illegal in India. One of those picked up in Mumbai was a small-time actor, Virender “Vindoo” Dara Singh, arrested on charges of links with bookmakers. His testimony led the police to arrest, on May 24, Meiyappan Gurunath, a top official of Chennai Super Kings and son-in-law of BCCI president N Srinivasan. Delhi Police eventually chargesheeted the players, among 39 persons, under sections of the Indian Penal Code and the Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act, while the BCCI handed out life bans to Sreesanth and Chavan after Sawani’s probe found them guilty of fixing.

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Weight discrimination against obese politicians

May 21, 2014

Two new papers of little intrinsic interest but much more interesting in juxtaposition.

On the one hand we hear from the National Health Interview Survey that obesity is increasing in the US

Prevalence of Obesity by Occupation Among US Workers

Prevalence of obesity steadily increased from 2004 through 2008 across gender and race/ethnicity but leveled off from 2008 through 2011. Non-Hispanic black female workers in health care support (49.2%) and transportation/material moving (46.6%) had the highest prevalence of obesity. Prevalence of obesity in relatively low-obesity (white-collar) occupations significantly increased between 2004-2007 and 2008-2011, whereas it did not change significantly in high-obesity (blue-collar) occupations.

On the other hand we also hear from a new study that

Weight bias plagues U.S. elections

Overweight political candidates tend to receive fewer votes than their thinner opponents, finds a new study by a weight bias expert. Both obese men and women were less likely to get on the ballot in the first place. When it came to merely being overweight, women were underrepresented on the ballot, though men were not. This is consistent with previous research showing men who are slightly heavy tend not to experience discrimination like that of slightly overweight women.

Perhaps it should be a Fundamental Human Right not to be discriminated against merely for being obese? Maybe we need some affirmative action to ensure that we have the proper representation of fat people in employment, in politics and on Company Boards?

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Chinese back doors and mincing rascals from the US!

May 21, 2014

The United States on Monday charged  five Chinese military officers and accused them of hacking into American nuclear, metal and solar companies to steal trade secrets, ratcheting up tensions between the two world powers over cyber espionage.

Washington is playing the victim of cyber-espionage when in fact it is the world’s top intelligence power, a Chinese state-run newspaper has said in a sharply worded editorial after US authorities levelled criminal hacking charges at China’s army. “Regarding the issue of network security, the US is such a mincing rascal that we must stop developing any illusions about it,” wrote the Global Times, which is close to the ruling Communist party.

Meanwhile we learn from the Snowden affair that the US Government turned Silicon Valley into a surveillance partner. The second part of the United States of Secrets is to be broadcast by PBS tonight.

Increasingly industrial systems have their hardware  and/or their control systems equipped, at the time of manufacture, with “backdoors” to allow remote access at some future time. Inevitably the “backdoors” are associated with embedded software very often with features to make it undetectable. These include power plants and their components, industrial control systems, access control systems, network appliances, surveillance systems, communication devices and even commercial aircraft.

In the US not only the software giants (Microsoft, Google, Apple, Facebook…), but even hardware manufacturers such as Boeing and GE and IBM and even automotive companies have been involved with installing “backdoors” and their associated software (malware) into their products.  Many US companies have regularly utilised their security services for industrial espionage and it is not very surprising that they feel beholden. Intelligence agencies in the US and Australia and the UK are not permitted to use Chinese Lenovo hardware because they are suspected of containing hidden  “backdoors”. Lenovo isn’t unique. Chinese firms accused of espionage in the past include Huawei and ZTE. Chinese government organisations in their turn are not permitted to use Microsoft products and Windows 8 is especially suspected for its many hidden, built-in vulnerabilities.

There is much active research in designing and hiding “backdoors” and in detecting and disabling them.

Hardware backdooring is practical, Jonathan Brossard, Blackhat Briefings and Defcon Conferences, Las Vegas, 2012

(We) will demonstrate that permanent backdooring of hardware is practical. We have built a generi proof of concept malware for the Intel architecture, Rakshasa, capable of infecting more than a hundred dierent motherboards. The net effect of Rakshasa is to disable NX permanently…. resulting in permanent lowering of the security of the backdoored computer, even after complete erasing of hard disks and re-installation of a new operating system. We shall also demonstrate that preexisting work on …. subversions such as bootkiting and preboot authentication software, brute-force or faking can be embedded in Rakshasa with little effort.

Silencing Hardware Backdoors, Adam Waksman and Simha Sethumadhavan, SP ’11 Proceedings of the 2011 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy,Pages 49-63

Hardware components can contain hidden backdoors, which can be enabled with catastrophic effects or for ill-gotten profit. These backdoors can be inserted by a malicious insider on the design team or a third-party IP provider. In this paper, we propose techniques that allow us to build trustworthy hardware systems from components designed by untrusted designers or procured from untrusted third-party IP providers. We present the first solution for disabling digital, design-level hardware backdoors. The principle is that rather than try to discover the malicious logic in the design–an extremely hard problem–we make the backdoor design problem itself intractable to the attacker. The key idea is to scramble inputs that are supplied to the hardware units at runtime, making it infeasible for malicious components to acquire the information they need to perform malicious actions.

The US accusing China is a case of the pot calling the kettle black. But the black methods now surely being used by the Chinese were all invented first in the US and probably under State sponsorship.

There are many Big Brothers out there.

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AstraZeneca prepared to talk to Pfizer if bid is increased another 10%

May 19, 2014

According to the Svenska Dagbaldet

After AstraZeneca today rejected Pfizer’s latest bid of nearly 770 billion kronor, it looks like no deal for this year But in its written response to the bid Astra Zeneca’s board writes that it is prepared to negotiate with Pfizer if the bid is raised by ten percent.

So I suspect that it may be better for shareholders in AstraZeneca to sit tight and wait for the next bid – but it may take a few months. In the worst case, holding on to an independent AstraZeneca is not such a bad deal in the long run.

I have been a little amused with the conservative politicians in Sweden and the UK abandoning their “free market” principles and  invoking the “public interest”  to oppose the deal. But unless they can convert their concern for the “public interest” into something tangible for AstraZeneca shareholders, they are doing them a disservice. In fact I would argue that without acknowledging that the AstraZeneca shareholder interests are also a public interest to be protected, both Cameron’s government and Reinfeldt’s government are engaging in an extra-legal, repressive and discriminatory behaviour.

Needless to say the Left and the Communists are opposed to the deal on religious grounds because rationalisation  – if it leads to the loss of any jobs and even redundant jobs –  is always a great SIN.

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