[extropy-chat] silent night

[Adrian Tymes]

--- Samantha Atkins <sjatkins at mac.com> wrote:
> The neurosecurity stuff is interesting.   If my
> brain is relatively 
> open to would-be neuro-hackers isn't their brain and
> intention, much 
> less action possibly obvious and capable of raising
> alarm?

It would seem far more likely that the interface will
be a hack target than the brain itself.  The interface
will, by necessity, be mass-produced and, whatever
customization it does on the brain end, present a
uniform interface to the outside world.  Thus, there
may be need for security against the interface - but
the senses can be "hacked" (contrary to what the
article says) with illusions and hallucinations, and
there are already defense mechanisms to deal with
these.  The same mechanisms would seem likely to apply
here (i.e., ignore or don't trust your implant if you
think a hacker's feeding it bogus data).

> This gets 
> into issues of privacy inside our very heads which
> is another can of 
> worms.   I sure as hell would not want some
> corporate CIO wonk deciding 
> what patches to put in my brain just because I am
> doing some work for 
> their corporation!

And then there's the repo scenario.

"Your bills are overdue.  You've got a week to pay or
we're taking the hardware back."

"But it's already been installed in our employees!"

(Above lines ripped from the NetRunner card game.)

> I especially would not want
> them or anyone else 
> trying to draw rough analogies to guide actions on
> my head and 
> capabilities from a much simpler and far less
> complex and delicate set 
> of current security scenarios.  The suggested
> "solutions" here aren't 
> even terribly workable at rather coarse
> granularities of software 
> components.

Especially bad was the suggestion to outsource parts
of our minds.  That seems to be analogous to
corporations trying to outsource their core
functionality - i.e., "We're in business because we do
X better...except we're not doing X anymore, we've
found someone else who does X better than us.  So, uh,
why are we in business again?"