Richard, To the uninformed like me, can you explain why it would be so easy for an intelligent person to cause great harm on the net. What are the major weaknesses of the architectures of virtually all operating systems that allow this. It is just lots of little bugs.
Ed Porter -----Original Message----- From: Richard Loosemore [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, November 28, 2007 4:51 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Hacker intelligence level [WAS Re: [agi] Funding AGI research] Ed Porter wrote: > Richard, > > Since hacking is a fairly big, organized crime supported, business in > eastern Europe and Russia, since the potential rewards for it relative to > most jobs in those countries can be huge, and since Russia has a tradition > of excellence in math and science, I would be very surprised if there are > not some extremely bright hackers, some of whom are probably as bright as > any person on this list. > > Add to that the fact that in countries like China the government itself has > identified expertise at hacking as a vital national security asset, and that > China is turning out many more programmers per year than we are, again it > would be surprising if there are not hackers, some of whom are as bright as > any person on this list. > > Yes, the vast majority of hackers my just be teenage script-kiddies, but it > is almost certain there are some real geniuses plying the hacking trade. > > That is why it is almost certain AGI, once it starts arriving, will be used > for evil purposes, and that we must fight such evil use by having more, and > more powerful AGI's that are being used to combat them. Hey, no disagreement here about the potential for mischief, and the availability of bright people in the hacker community. My only point was that among those who write damaging viruses (so, not those who penetrate into systems for profit or ideology, but those whose kick is to cause serious damage to large numbers of random machines), there was a bizarrely low percentage of people who could pull it off. What I am saying is that as an empirical fact, it baffled us every day. Writing a devastating virus was a relatively simple matter. But when we looked inside people's attempts to do it, we would gradually understand what their code was supposed to do ... and then, when we understood the design, we would almost always (in my experience) see some huge, glaring stupidity in the code, which made it fail. It just seemed as though *real* maliciousness was always combined with rank amateurism. Good job too, but nevertheless a fascinating piece of empirical data. No big issue, I offer this only as an interesting tidbit. Richard Loosemore ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?&; ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=69837066-203ab0
