From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Tue Aug 12 2003 - 09:21:23 MDT
On Tue, 12 Aug 2003, Brett Paatsch (commenting on open source AI) wrote:
> If I was a socially dysfunctional programming wiz with a burning
> desire to make my own avenging bot to settle some scores
> would not this sort of open source open sharing empower me
> in dangerous ways.
You can already see this happening. The increase in SPAM seems
to have annoyed someone high up in the Russian government
(Minister of Communications or something like that) who then
directed some programmers to develop software to take revenge
on the people sending SPAM (I don't know whether it acted
through a Denial of Service attack or an automated calling
of phone number attack, but both are clearly feasible).
[This was discussed on /. a few weeks ago.] One does not
want to SPAM a "Minister of Communications" because one
can be pretty confident that they have access to a bigger
pipe to the internet than you do.
There has also been discussion on /. in one of the articles
related to SPAM about developing standard filters that
effectively extract the response addresses/phone numbers
that SPAM typically require and having them generate
something like one automated response per second. E.g.,
sending email to 25 million people results in 25 million requests
per second to some machine, or telephone effectively shutting it down.
(Interesting to note though that this might produce enough demand
on routers and switches to cause a telecomm industry recovery...).
So we already have examples of individuals getting *really*
annoyed and doing something about it. It is probably not
going to be a good thing if individuals get *really* annoyed
and have an AI at their disposal to do something about it.
Robert
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