Search results

This paper seeks to report on six Symposia offered at the 2011 Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), held 17‐21 February 2011 in Washington, DC. This 177th Meeting's theme was “Science without Borders.”

The report for each symposium includes internet links and bibliographic citations leading to information that further supports and enriches the information provided in the speakers' presentations.

An enhanced report was presented for each presentation for each symposium.

Several symposia, relating to: global collaboration; the digitization of science; publications without borders; and, teaching, learning, and research in the digital age, are covered in this report. The paper provides a documented insight on the most recent advances in research described by each symposium's presenter.

Highlights the common security pitfalls in cryptographic design. States that even strong encryption algorithms can be circumvented by bypassing the algorithms altogether and exploiting errors in the design, implementation, or installation. Examines attacks against passwords, hardware, trust models, failure recovery systems and users. Discusses the importance of attack detection in addition to attack prevention. Concludes that eventually, every system may be successfully attacked so it is essential to limit the damage that can be done and to capture evidence in the form of an audit trail for later use in a prosecution.

The “4th Industrial Revolution” is characterized by a rapidly developing integration of digital technology and “cyber-physical” capability. Diffusion of open source technology has been cited by security and policing theorists, who note an emerging array of technology-enabled challenges to status quo security regimes. What characteristics define post-industrial crime, and how do post-industrial criminal methods challenge industrial-era security and policing regimes? This chapter opens with an overview of the “4th Industrial Revolution” and its theoretic challenges to conventional security and crime controls. Several pathways of impact are defined in terms of their challenges to industrial-era security, policing, and social controls, and in the complications posed by expanding state countermeasures to combat them. The chapter describes a series of practical, legal, ethical, and technical challenges to be considered for policing and security policy as the 4th Industrial Revolution proceeds.

The purpose of this paper is to explain to readers how intelligent systems can fail and how artificial intelligence (AI) safety is different from cybersecurity. The goal of cybersecurity is to reduce the number of successful attacks on the system; the goal of AI Safety is to make sure zero attacks succeed in bypassing the safety mechanisms. Unfortunately, such a level of performance is unachievable. Every security system will eventually fail; there is no such thing as a 100 per cent secure system.

AI Safety can be improved based on ideas developed by cybersecurity experts. For narrow AI Safety, failures are at the same, moderate level of criticality as in cybersecurity; however, for general AI, failures have a fundamentally different impact. A single failure of a superintelligent system may cause a catastrophic event without a chance for recovery.

In this paper, the authors present and analyze reported failures of artificially intelligent systems and extrapolate our analysis to future AIs. The authors suggest that both the frequency and the seriousness of future AI failures will steadily increase.

This is a first attempt to assemble a public data set of AI failures and is extremely valuable to AI Safety researchers.

This chapter focusses on the ethical issues raised by different types of surveillance and the varied ways in which surveillance can be covert. Three case studies are presented which highlight different types of surveillance and different ethical concerns. The first case concerns the use of undercover police to infiltrate political activist groups over a 40-year period in the UK. The second case study examines a joint operation by US and Australian law enforcement agencies: the FBI’s operation Trojan Shield and the AFP’s Operation Ironside. This involved distributing encrypted phone handsets to serious criminal organisations which included a ‘backdoor’ secretly sending encrypted copies of all messages to law enforcement. The third case study analyses the use of emotional artificial intelligence systems in educational digital learning platforms for children where technology companies collect, store and use intrusive personal data in an opaque manner. The authors discuss similarities and differences in the ethical questions raised by these cases, for example, the involvement of the state versus private corporations, the kinds of information gathered and how it is used.

The proliferation of electronic databases has given rise to many practices and occurrences that pose serious threats to personal privacy. This paper argues that attention to privacy should be an integral part of the database design process, and that database designers are uniquely positioned to ensure that this happens. To motivate students to become privacy‐conscious database design professionals, computer science programs must meet the challenges of implementing an “ethics across the curriculum” methodology to integrate privacy content throughout the design thread of the introductory database course.

The purpose of this paper is to review the influence of the Conficker virus on the internet and show it to be still very much a cause for concern.

The aim is to review developments on the internet, especially those of general cybernetic interest.

Although a deadline of first of April 2009 has passed without apparent disruption, the virus continues to be active and dangerous. An impressive amount of ingenuity and expertise has been invested in it.

Computer users must be vigilant and keep anti‐virus software updated. The Conficker worm appears to be organising a worldwide network whose consequences are difficult to predict but likely to be serious.

It is hoped this paper is a valuable periodic review.