To me, the hard problem of consciousness is the link between observable physical activity of matter in the brain, and conscious experience. Science has found correlations between brain activity and experiences. But nothing is known about a mechanism of cause and effect which connects them.
Dualism is probably mistaken. The only evidence we have for anything about physical reality comes from experiences. It does not seem logical to believe that there is a physical reality which is separate from conscious experience. Quantum theory hints at this, with how the observer becomes significant. But this does not make understanding how it all works much easier.
I view World War 2 as Nazis harnessing discontent in Germany to motivate Germans to fight a war. So, the main risk I see is discontent building up again. What about people who can't have a good future because of the industrial decline of Germany?
As long as we don't understand how consciousness works, I don't think it's possible to make claims about what is or isn't conscious. It's all just speculation.
But if others are speculating, I might as well. What if AI consciousness depends not on computation, but on what seems like randomness? When something is running a fully deterministic process, consciousness seems irrelevant. I don't think the meaning that humans see in the process makes it conscious. Even a simple industrial control system using relays senses and responds to meaningful things.
How is this possible? Are phones willing to connect to any cell and blindly trust that text messages from there are genuine and really coming from the numbers they claim to be coming from? Isn't there some cryptographic verification?
Agree. I do a lot of travel and in 3rd-world countries it is quite common to get 2g spam, it's really unacceptable that Apple doesn't offer a way to turn off 2g short of lockdown mode.
Are you sure it's not sourced from the visited network? In that case, 3G or beyond wouldn't help you, as mutual authentication does not imply end-to-end authentication of all traffic between you and your home provider.
It's always amusing to me how apple tries to hide basic security features behind there super duper totally secure mode which nobody will enable because it destroys usability.
Meanwhile GrapheneOS in the default mode is as much or much more secure (and private duh) than there marketing mode with little to no usability decrease.
I was curious about this so I looked around a bit. My interpretation is that GrapheneOS still has not cracked this nut. Neither has iPhone, unless you enable "Lockdown Mode"
It doesn't matter what the network is doing; the phone needs to disable 2g. There's various ways to get the phone to downgrade to 2g otherwise, eg https://montsecure.com/files/2021_downgrade.pdf
And if you have a modern enough SIM+phone combo, it won’t even display the 2g network as an available network, nor 3G on my device.
I wonder if this mostly hit international SIMs, since they wouldn’t be running the same level of SIM code to prefer various network locks like a local SIM.
Helps you stay under the radar and gov services over SMS is a lot more advanced outside of Canada if you want to do some fraud.
>And if you have a modern enough SIM+phone combo, it won’t even display the 2g network as an available network, nor 3G on my device.
Source? It might just be that your carrier retired its 2g/3g network, not that the phone/sim refuses 2g/3g connections. If some cell tower popped up claiming to 2g/3g, your phone still might happily connect.
Unfortunately, I think there's no way for a SIM card to indicate to the phone that it would like it to please never connect to any 2G (or any non-mutually-authenticated) network.
Absent that, maybe this happens via a carrier profile (or equivalent mechanism)?
I don't think that matters, since the phone has no way of knowing from the SIM card alone whether it should still connect to 2G networks or not.
It sounds like a good idea to at least restrict 2G connections to non-roaming scenarios, but then you have the next practical problem: How does your baseband know that you're abroad?
Sure, all solvable at the application layer (the phone could use location heuristics to figure out where it is etc.), but not trivial and full of edge cases that could easily result in your phone mysteriously not connecting while abroad or, worse, not being able to make an emergency call or similar.
I also kinda figure there’s some magic running to “stick” to your home network where available/visible because of international border areas and people historically getting regularly upset about being roaming charges despite never leaving their home country.
SIMs can define both their home network (both implicitly since the IMSI starts with MCC/MNC of the issuer/home network, and explicitly in the form of a list of "equivalent networks", which is useful for MVNOs with their own MNC that don't want the "roaming" icon to show up) and a ranked list of preferred roaming networks. The phone should usually define those.
Of course, in some situations you might only get signal from across the border, and then none of these mechanisms can help.
I’d add in some high buildings in Toronto, if I did a network scan with a foreign SIM, I could see some US networks from over the lake, but with a Rogers SIM, they would not be visible in the scan.
That's incredible, here in Australia they not only shut down all 2G networks almost a decade ago, but they've already shut down 3G as well!
Although now looking at Wikipedia there are a lot more 2G networks sticking around than I realised, still hard for me to believe given what's happened here!
Funny enough its the tower that tells the cellphone modem which network is "better" and it does this in an unencrypted cell reselection message. So it is easy to force a phone to select 2G.
Probably some IoT/M2M contracts. Telus/Bell has really cut down on the spectrum allotted to their 3G that’s still up, and I doubt much is still assigned on Rogers’ 2G side.
Well, based on what I'm gleaning from https://www.smsbroadcaster.com/ (yes, they sell these brazenly in the open), I suspect they're doing some SDR shenanigans to bring up fake cell networks and leverage Cell Broadcast instead of just SMS.
They are also interfering with connections and attempting downgrade attacks to do 2G SMS messages as well (and is likely where Canadian carriers were picking up the 'millions' of attacks against its network and failed authentication attempts).
Amusingly this was all also caught because of Telus reviewing those SMS messages that were reported as spam from people on iOS/Android and realizing that the messages weren't being terminated inside the cell network at all when they tried tracing them out and suspected that this was the case.
The original standards weren't expecting anyone but carriers to send messages and ramping up security has been a slow process, so downgrade attacks probably work nicely.
Guessing the spammer doesn't want to overload towers or be foxed within the same 3 so they're driving. Maybe the hats(?) shut off on rotation... or eSIM?
SMS is old infrastructure and the sender identity in an SMS is not like a signed email domain or an end-to-end verified chat identity. A lot of trust sits in the carrier network and interconnects
The biggest problem is that Canada shares a long land border with the US but is isolated by oceans from other countries. Having alternatives is good, but conflict with the US is dangerous. The US could do a huge amount of damage just by blocking trade with Canada. They're also capable of blocking trade between Canada and other countries, and occupying Canada. It is probably unwise to escalate conflict when the other side can escalate a lot more.
Nuclear weaponry is offensive in nature, and Canada does not need them. The population broadly does not want them. Most people may acknowledge (after slight thought) that if we were to obtain/produce them, certainly other countries won't be happy and if we were to 'use' them, well I'm sure the fallout will end up on our own soil after it's swatted out of the sky. So, let's build AA defence/defense networks of our own, instead.
> there is no other way to resist US military power
I'm struggling with how to articulate the idea that seems to be in so many Canadian heads, regardless of their military experience.
Assume the worst case, that the US invades Canada and that no allies come to assist, for whatever reason.
The best the US can hope for is a pyrrhic victory: while it may well be true that the Canadian military and population cannot hope to resist the US military, anyone thinking there would be anything other than a pyrrhic victory does not understand how, uh, what words to choose, hmm, bloody mindedly petty and vindictive Canadians can be.
There is that old trope about mistaking "polite" for "nice". Canadians are mostly are the former, and are mostly the latter most of the time, and can even be the former while not at all being the latter. But remember too the trope as to why so many of the specific rules of the Geneva Convention, etm., exist.
Canadians don't pick fights, generally, but see fights to the end, always, and almost always no matter what. And it's not a red mist thing: That comes and clears. What is left is cold. Sober. Focused. Are you still here? Are you not retreating fast enough? Do I still have functional limbs/weapons/comms? Carrying on....
We don't stop until it is safe to stop, and by safe I mean we can stand down and not have to stand to again, or until there is no we left.
Now, more tropes:
Longest sniper kill: Canada has the top spot and at least two more of the top five. Those are all recent.
Only force to meet its D-Day objectives: Canada, with fighting as fierce on Juno as elsewhere.
Only western soldier to fire on a Soviet: A Canadian with the group sent to protect Denmark from Soviets who were rolling fast and hard over northern Germany. The RoE were sort of vague on that point, but they were explicit about not withdrawing, about not giving up an inch. Words didn't work, triggers were pulled, a standoff occurred until sufficient forces arrived to convince the Soviets to withdraw to their agreed lines.
Before becoming PM, Lester B. Pearson won the Noble Peace Prize for the idea of UN Peacekeepers, of putting Canadians in harm's way to separate combatants in hot zones. The idea was taken seriously because memories of Canadian performance in WWII and Korea were fresh in mind. "Oh, those guys? Yeah, OK, ceasefire and separation sounds good."
Again, I am not in anyway suggesting that the US would not win in an invasion of Canada, if Canada stood alone. What I am suggesting is that what would be left (of the US, let alone Canada) would make the victory hollow and bitter.
(You do know that the Canadian boycotts that are so impacting tourism and distillers, among others, are not economically motivated, right? So many US talking heads cite tit-for-tat tariff nonsense, and very few miss the point entirely: Canadians mostly didn't give a damn about tariffs, but when "51st state" was mooted, even if as a joke, Canadians stopped buying US stuff. The tariffs could disappear today and many would still push for closer ties with the EU, possibly even membership, for distancing Canada from the US even more, all because we are fiercely independent, and willing to sacrifice a great deal to retain that independence. Canadians are mostly quiet about it, but never mistake silence for acquiescence or consent.)
I mean, for the first 100 yearsish of our existence we actively traded mostly with the "mother country" via shipping through the St Lawrence. Fur trade and then agriculture and forestry goods, etc. Our entire initial infrastructure from rail to canals was built for west -> east movement of goods.
The (over) emphasis on north south came a bit later. And certainly since the signing of the FTA it's been the most important thing.
Shipping to China from ports in Vancouver and to Europe from ports in the gulf of St Lawrence is actually quite strategically advantageous.
Maybe motivation needs to be considered separately from intelligence. Pure intelligence is more like a tool. Something needs to motivate use of that tool toward a specific purpose. In humans, motivation seems related to emotions. I'm not sure what would motivate an artificial intelligence.
Right now the biggest risk isn't what artificial intelligence might do on its own, but how humans may use it as a tool.
