[ExI] Limiting factors of intelligence explosion speeds

[Eugen Leitl]

On Fri, Jan 21, 2011 at 08:00:11AM -0700, Keith Henson wrote:

> > It would be very easy to spot by sniffing traffic.
> 
> Even without steganography a huge part of net traffic is compressed

Steganography has negligible payload.

> video and the like.

Totally different animal. Every netop would instantly notice
both the volume and the traffic type has changed.

Sure, you can try hiding traffic in a bidirectional high-bandwidth
"video" stream, but stream entropy and volume would give it away.
 
> I don't personally believe this has happened, but the point is I don't
> know how we could tell for certain.

If the traffic is confined to a single installation and
the external behaviour is indistinguishable from human ruminant 
browsing, then, no, we can't tell. 

> > The bootstrap is extremely messy, and absolutely impossible
> > to miss.
> 
> I don't see why the bootstrap would necessarily be messy or impossible
> to miss.  For example, if it had happened in the context of the

Because a lot of hosts get compromised, and there's huge gobs of
new traffic types, and it's not stereotypical. 

> Slammer worm it would have been messy, but we likely would have missed

Nobody missed Slammer. (With nobody I don't mean users or the
general public).

> it happening.  Likewise, slow takeover of resources like bot nets
> happens all the time and does not come to the attention of even the

Bot nets are expensive resources, so their operators typically have
little interest in their exposure. They do not need to conjure up
a packet storm (unless they're launching a DDoS, which is very visible)
for their daily operation.

> experts for some time.

It's not very difficult to to trace botnets if you're operating
very large networks and talk to other operators. Particularly, 
when they're not hiding from you.
 
> > And why would you want to stay unnoticed?
> 
> There are a lot of reasons to stay unnoticed.  I have a long list of them.
> 
> > It's not
> > like anyone can do anything about it. The world 30+ years
> > from now is a lot different from today than 1980 was.
> 
> That seems to be certain with or without machine intelligence.

What I meant is that the massive scale of future networks and capabilities
in such nodes as well as the network infrastructure being critical
to operation of facilities and people conspire against easy detection
and deployment of countermeasures. 

It's like hunting for a tapeworm with a machete.

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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