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/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=69825370-119401
