The Startup That Could Beat SpaceX to Building a Second Internet in Space

Getty Images

This is a story about the guy who wants to connect billions of unconnected people to the internet. No, not Elon Musk. And not Mark Zuckerberg. It’s the story of Greg Wyler, CEO of OneWeb, a new startup that aims to send thousands of satellites into orbit by 2018, in hopes of delivering fiber-optic-fast internet to the remotest parts of the world.

It’s not an usual mission. Companies like Facebook, Google, and SpaceX are betting on drones, balloons, and satellites to achieve much the same thing. It’s anyone’s guess who will win what many are calling the new space race, but in an in-depth feature published today in Businessweek, journalist Ashlee Vance provides some pretty compelling reasons as to why Wyler might just have a shot. The first reason: he’s got a heck of a head start.

Wyler first became interested in connecting remote parts of the world to the internet back in 2002 after a chance encounter with the Rwandan president’s chief of staff. That meeting compelled Wyler to launch Terracom, a telecommunications company that laid fiber optic cable and set up a 3G network to connect Rwandans to cell phone and internet service. “The mindset in the world at the time was that internet infrastructure was not a high priority,” Wyler told Vance. “I thought that was wrong. When you have good internet access, you have economic growth.”

Terracom became a commercial success, but while Rwandans could send data easily throughout the country, sending and receiving data internationally was still a challenge because it relied on satellites stationed some 22,000 miles away from Earth. If he could bring those satellites closer to Earth and use more of them, Wyler figured, he might be able to offer people on the ground faster speeds.

Wyler tested this model with a company called O3b, which operates 12 satellites 5,000 miles from Earth. Those satellites are already connecting large portions of the world, from the Democratic Republic of the Congo to small island chains to Royal Carribean cruise ships. According to Businessweek, O3b is now the largest internet provider in the Pacific.

But for Wyler, that’s not enough. Now, as founder of OneWeb, he wants to bring even more coverage to the world, by setting up a constellation of hundreds of mini-satellites, which will live 750 miles away from the Earth’s surface, a project that will likely cost $2 billion, according to Wyler. That’s substantially less than Elon Musk’s $10 billion plan to launch his own system of satellites, but it’s still a hefty amount, which is why OneWeb has landed heavyweight investors like Virgin Group and Qualcomm.

The plan, for now, is to sell small antennae that can receive the satellites’ signals to individuals, schools, businesses, and hospitals around the world. According to Businessweek, three of these satellites should cover an areas the size of India.

OneWeb has arguably made more progress in this space than any of its better known contemporaries, and yet, as Vance points out, Wyler is now treading on territory that has crippled other companies in the past. But Wyler argues that the technology itself is now more sophisticated, and therefore, more viable.

Be that as it may, to say that what Wyler is pursuing is a long shot would be an understatement, particularly in the face of so much high-powered, well-funded competition. And yet, Wyler tells Vance that he’s not scared of people like Mark Zuckerberg joining the cause. “He has a much bigger pedestal than I do. I’ve been trying to get people to understand that connectivity is a fundamental layer for societal and economic growth,” he told Businessweek, adding, “The other thing that’s great is that I know our system works.”

Barrett Brown Sentenced to 5 Years in Prison in Connection to Stratfor Hack

Image: Free Barrett Brown Group

Barrett Brown, who became a cause célèbre after he was charged with crimes related to the 2011 Stratfor hack, will not go free as his supporters hoped. He was sentenced today in Texas to five years and three months in prison.

Brown was facing a possible eight-and-a-half years in prison after pleading guilty earlier this year to two charges related to aiding-and-abetting and obstruction of justice and a separate charge involving threats he made to an FBI agent. His attorneys sought a sentence of 30 months with consideration for time served and other mitigating factors, which would have left him with just two months remaining in jail. Brown has been in custody without bail since he was arrested in September 2012 while in the middle of an online chat. The sentence today—of 63 months—means that minus the 28 months already served, he could spend up to an additional three years in prison, though he will reportedly be eligible for supervised release after one year. He was also ordered to pay $890,000 in restitution.

The ruling, in Texas, brings to a close an unusual saga that had the feds initially charging Brown with 12 counts of aggravated identity theft and trafficking in stolen data for simply posting a link in a chat room. That link pointed to a file containing data stolen by members of the hacktivist group Anonymous from the intelligence firm Stratfor, or Strategic Forecasting. The data included company emails as well as credit card numbers belonging to subscribers of Stratfor’s service. The charges against Brown caused a stir when they were first revealed, because Brown hadn’t stolen the data himself, but had simply copied the hyperlink from one public chatroom and posted it to another.

The trial was poised to become an important First Amendment test case until those charges were dropped in 2013, leaving Brown to face just two charges for accessory after the fact and for obstructing the execution of a search warrant. Brown was also facing charges in a separate case related to threats he made against an FBI agent in a YouTube video. In the video titled “Why I’m Going to Destroy FBI Agent Robert Smith Part Three: Revenge of the Lithe,” Brown threatened to “dox” FBI Agent Robert Smith by posting his address and other details online. Brown was charged with making internet threats, conspiracy to make publicly available restricted personal information of a federal employee and retaliation against a federal law enforcement officer. He pleaded guilty to making the internet threat. That case was combined with the Stratfor case for purposes of sentencing.

Under the accessory-after-the-fact charges in the Stratfor case, authorities say Brown tried to help the Stratfor hacker avoid apprehension by creating confusion about his identity “in a manner that diverted attention away from the hacker,” according to court documents. This included communicating with Stratfor employees after the hack in a way that authorities say drew attention away from the hacker. The hacker is not named in court documents filed in Brown’s case, but Anonymous hacktivist Jeremy Hammond was sentenced in 2013 to 10 years in prison over the Stratfor hack.

The obstruction charge relates to an attempt by Brown and his mother to hide a laptop from authorities during a search of her home in March 2012. Brown’s mother was separately charged with obstruction and given six months probation.

Brown had originally been scheduled for sentencing in December but during that hearing Judge Sam A. Lindsay took the unusual step of delaying after prosecutors attempted to re-introduce issues that had long ago been dismissed in the case. It was just one more bizarre turn in an already bizarre case.

According to Brown’s defense attorney Ahmed Ghappour, prosecutors wanted the judge to base sentencing in part on the dismissed charge for trafficking in stolen data—namely, the credit card numbers that were stolen in the Stratfor hack.

“The question is whether there are multiple victims of the accessory-after-the-fact conduct or whether it’s just one vicim, which is Strafor,” Ghappour told WIRED prior to sentencing. “The government argued that there were multiple victims because every one of those credit cards was attributable to a different victim. We argued that those charges have long since been dropped, and he did not contribute to any harm that resulted because all he did was cut and paste a link [to a file containing the credit card numbers].”

The government insists that the credit cards are relevant, even though the actual charge over them was dropped, because they say Brown was part of a conspiracy that included the theft of the cards and should therefore be sentenced as a member of the conspiracy.

“The government tried to posit that there was a vast conspiracy by Anonymous to exfiltrate all this data from various security companies and that Barrett was somehow part of this giant RICO conspiracy,” Ghappour said, calling it a “very wily move on the government’s part.”

The judge, however, pushed back on the government’s attempt to increase Brown’s sentence in this way and decided to postpone sentencing until he could review all of the arguments thoroughly.

“In all the trials I’ve been a part of … and they’re all complex cases … I’ve never seen a judge take a time-out to issue his sentence,” Ghappour said on the eve of today’s sentencing in a phone interview. The move gave him hope that the judge was taking extra care to get the sentencing right and not be unduly swayed by the government’s forceful arguments. That proved not to be the case today, however, when it appeared that the judge had indeed been persuaded by prosecutors. The judge reportedly indicated that he believed linking to the file containing stolen credit card numbers was the same as trafficking in stolen data. The judge reportedly concluded that linking to the data was a form of aiding the Stratfor hackers and therefore part of the conspiracy.

Reaction to the sentencing has been harsh with many on Twitter arguing that all journalists are in danger of similar prosecution if they link to stolen data posted online. “The USG is coming for you next,” independent journalist Alexa O’Brien tweeted.

In his statement to the court today, Brown took responsibility for some of his actions and expressed regret for them but also called out the government for its handling of his case, noting several incidents in which government agents lied to or misled the court.

“Normally this sort of thing is left to one’s lawyers rather than the defendant, because to do otherwise runs the risk of making the defendant seem combative rather than contrite,” he said, according to a prepared statement released to reporters. “But I think Your Honor can walk and chew bubble gum at the same time. I think Your Honor understands that one can regret the unjust things one has done, while also being concerned about the unjust things that have been done to him.”

Ulbricht Confessed to Running Silk Road, His College Friend Testifies

In this courtroom sketch, defendant Ross Ulbricht listens to proceedings from the defense table during opening arguments in his criminal trial in New York, Tuesday, Jan. 13, 2015. Elizabeth Wlliams/AP

As the the trial of alleged Silk Road mastermind Ross Ulbricht unfolds, its transcript has read like a manual of things not to do when running a secret, billion-dollar online drug conspiracy. But on Thursday, the jury heard about the most human of all the human errors Ulbricht may have made: confessing his creation to an in-real-life friend.

In a Manhattan courtroom Thursday, Austin, Texas-based eBay software engineer Richard Bates took the stand to testify against Ulbricht, his college friend and one-time programming partner. From late 2010 until at least 2011, Bates says he gave Ulbricht programming advice on a project Ulbricht described as “top secret.” And when Bates ultimately refused to offer any more assistance unless Ulbricht shared the details of that project, he says that Ulbricht showed him the Silk Road for the first time on a laptop in Bates’ home.

“I told him, tell me about this or leave me out of it,” said Bates, a pale programmer with slicked-back hair and black-rimmed glasses who wore a worried grimace during his entire time on the stand. “He told me about it.”

According to Bates, Ulbricht said that he was working on a “website where people can buy drugs.” Then, using a neighbor’s open Wi-Fi to assuage Bates’ concerns, he showed Bates the site. “I remember seeing the home page, the green camel [of the Silk Road logo] for the first time, and pictures of drugs,” Bates said in response to questions from prosecutor Timothy Howard. “I was shocked and very intrigued. I didn’t know how something like this could be possible.”

Despite all the evidence piled against Ulbricht—which includes screenshots of his seized laptop taken from him while he was logged into the Silk Road’s “mastermind” page and a journal on that PC documenting his thoughts and activities allegedly running the site—Bates’ testimony could be particularly damning.

The defense, after all, has argued that Ulbricht created the Silk Road only as an “economic experiment” before giving it up to the real operators of the site who would expand it into a narcotics empire and then later frame Ulbricht. Bates’ story captures Ulbricht’s intention to sell drugs, specifically, and also indicates Ulbricht ran the site longer than the few months his attorneys have claimed.

Bates told the jury that he had first met Ulbricht during their time together as undergraduate students at the University of Texas at Dallas. Theey once went on a spring break trip together, according to Bates. In 2010, they reconnected when Bates moved to Austin, where Ulbricht lived at the time, and went cliff-jumping a few weeks later. By late 2010, Bates says, they saw one another on a weekly basis.

Around that time, Ulbricht began to ask Bates “very frequent” questions about PHP and server administration, often over Google chat, Bates said. But when Bates asked about the nature of Ulbricht’s project, Ulbricht refused to say more. Eventually Bates wrote to Ulbricht, “I’m officially forbidding you from mentioning your secret project to me again unless you’re going to reveal it.” Soon after that, Ulbricht revealed his secret, Bates said.

Despite his initial shock, Bates said he continued to advise Ulbricht on his Silk Road programming problems, helping him in March of 2011, for instance, to deal with a major site outage. The two would later work together on plans for a bitcoin exchange, Bates confirmed in response to prosecutor Howard’s questions. And Bates also used the Silk Road to buy drugs under the pseudonym “melee”, listing marijuana, ecstasy, psychedelic mushrooms, Vicodin and antibiotics among those he’d purchased. He also told the jury that Ulbricht had personally given him a bag of psychedelic mushrooms he’d grown and stored in a large black trash bag, offering more evidence that Ulbricht had sold his own homemade mushrooms as the first product on the Silk Road.

When Ulbricht was arrested in October 2013, Bates said he was visited by FBI agents, and initially lied to them about his involvement and drug purchases before confessing. He eventually agreed to testify to avoid prosecution.

Over the course of its first 45 minutes interviewing Bates, the prosecution showed him multiple chats between Ulbricht and Bates. One read as follows:

Ulbricht: You gotta keep my secret, buddy

Bates: I haven’t told anyone and I don’t intend to

…

Ulbricht: I know I can trust you

As Bates testified, Ulbricht stared straight ahead, offering no hint of his facial expressions to the press gallery. When the court adjourned, prosecutor Howard hadn’t yet finished questioning his friend. And Bates’ testimony, of course will no doubt be picked apart in cross-examination by the defense.

Stay tuned for an update later today.

How One Ex-Googler Plans to Build the Second Internet — In Space

Getty Images

This is a story about the guy who wants to connect billions of unconnected people to the internet. No, not Elon Musk. And not Mark Zuckerberg. It’s the story of Greg Wyler, CEO of OneWeb, a new startup that aims to send thousands of satellites into orbit by 2018, in hopes of delivering fiber-optic-fast internet to the remotest parts of the world.

It’s not an usual mission. Companies like Facebook, Google, and SpaceX are betting on drones, balloons, and satellites to achieve much the same thing. It’s anyone’s guess who will win what many are calling the new space race, but in an in-depth feature published today in Businessweek, journalist Ashlee Vance provides some pretty compelling reasons as to why Wyler might just have a shot. The first reason: he’s got a heck of a head start.

Wyler first became interested in connecting remote parts of the world to the internet back in 2002 after a chance encounter with the Rwandan president’s chief of staff. That meeting compelled Wyler to launch Terracom, a telecommunications company that laid fiber optic cable and set up a 3G network to connect Rwandans to cell phone and internet service. “The mindset in the world at the time was that internet infrastructure was not a high priority,” Wyler told Vance. “I thought that was wrong. When you have good internet access, you have economic growth.”

Terracom became a commercial success, but while Rwandans could send data easily throughout the country, sending and receiving data internationally was still a challenge because it relied on satellites stationed some 22,000 miles away from Earth. If he could bring those satellites closer to Earth and use more of them, Wyler figured, he might be able to offer people on the ground faster speeds.

Wyler tested this model with a company called O3b, which operates 12 satellites 5,000 miles from Earth. Those satellites are already connecting large portions of the world, from the Democratic Republic of the Congo to small island chains to Royal Carribean cruise ships. According to Businessweek, O3b is now the largest internet provider in the Pacific.

But for Wyler, that’s not enough. Now, as founder of OneWeb, he wants to bring even more coverage to the world, by setting up a constellation of hundreds of mini-satellites, which will live 750 miles away from the Earth’s surface, a project that will likely cost $2 billion, according to Wyler. That’s substantially less than Elon Musk’s $10 billion plan to launch his own system of satellites, but it’s still a hefty amount, which is why OneWeb has landed heavyweight investors like Virgin Group and Qualcomm.

The plan, for now, is to sell small antennae that can receive the satellites’ signals to individuals, schools, businesses, and hospitals around the world. According to Businessweek, three of these satellites should cover an areas the size of India.

OneWeb has arguably made more progress in this space than any of its better known contemporaries, and yet, as Vance points out, Wyler is now treading on territory that has crippled other companies in the past. But Wyler argues that the technology itself is now more sophisticated, and therefore, more viable.

Be that as it may, to say that what Wyler is pursuing is a long shot would be an understatement, particularly in the face of so much high-powered, well-funded competition. And yet, Wyler tells Vance that he’s not scared of people like Mark Zuckerberg joining the cause. “He has a much bigger pedestal than I do. I’ve been trying to get people to understand that connectivity is a fundamental layer for societal and economic growth,” he told Businessweek, adding, “The other thing that’s great is that I know our system works.”

Barrett Brown Sentenced to 5 Years in Prison in Connection to Stratfor Hack

Image: Free Barrett Brown Group

Barrett Brown, who became a cause célèbre after he was charged with crimes related to the 2011 Stratfor hack, will not go free as his supporters hoped. He was sentenced today in Texas to five years and three months in prison.

Brown was facing a possible eight-and-a-half years in prison after pleading guilty earlier this year to two charges related to aiding-and-abetting and obstruction of justice and a separate charge involving threats he made to an FBI agent. His attorneys sought a sentence of 30 months with consideration for time served and other mitigating factors, which would have left him with just two months remaining in jail. Brown has been in custody without bail since he was arrested in September 2012 while in the middle of an online chat. The sentence today—of 63 months—means he could spend up to an additional two-and-a-half years in prison.

The ruling, in Texas, brings to a close an unusual saga that had the feds initially charging Brown with 12 counts of aggravated identity theft and trafficking in stolen data for simply posting a link in a chat room. That link pointed to a file containing data stolen by members of the hacktivist group Anonymous from the intelligence firm Stratfor, or Strategic Forecasting. The data included company emails as well as credit card numbers belonging to subscribers of Stratfor’s service. The charges against Brown caused a stir when they were first revealed, because Brown hadn’t stolen the data himself, but had simply copied the hyperlink from one public chatroom and posted it to another.

The trial was poised to become an important First Amendment test case until those charges were dropped in 2013, leaving Brown to face just two charges for accessory after the fact and for obstructing the execution of a search warrant. Brown was also facing charges in a separate case related to threats he made against an FBI agent in a YouTube video. In the video titled “Why I’m Going to Destroy FBI Agent Robert Smith Part Three: Revenge of the Lithe,” Brown threatened to “dox” FBI Agent Robert Smith by posting his address and other details online. Brown was charged with making internet threats, conspiracy to make publicly available restricted personal information of a federal employee and retaliation against a federal law enforcement officer. He pleaded guilty to making the internet threat. That case was combined with the Stratfor case for purposes of sentencing.

Under the accessory-after-the-fact charges in the Stratfor case, authorities say Brown tried to help the Stratfor hacker avoid apprehension by creating confusion about his identity “in a manner that diverted attention away from the hacker,” according to court documents. This included communicating with Stratfor employees after the hack in a way that authorities say drew attention away from the hacker. The hacker is not named in court documents filed in Brown’s case, but Anonymous hacktivist Jeremy Hammond was sentenced in 2013 to 10 years in prison over the Stratfor hack.

The obstruction charge relates to an attempt by Brown and his mother to hide a laptop from authorities during a search of her home in March 2012. Brown’s mother was separately charged with obstruction and given six months probation.

Brown had originally been scheduled for sentencing in December but during that hearing Judge Sam A. Lindsay took the unusual step of delaying after prosecutors attempted to re-introduce issues that had long ago been dismissed in the case. It was just one more bizarre turn in an already bizarre case.

According to Brown’s defense attorney Ahmed Ghappour, prosecutors wanted the judge to base sentencing in part on the dismissed charge for trafficking in stolen data—namely, the credit card numbers that were stolen in the Stratfor hack.

“The question is whether there are multiple victims of the accessory-after-the-fact conduct or whether it’s just one vicim, which is Strafor,” Ghappour told WIRED. “The government argued that there were multiple victims because every one of those credit cards was attributable to a different victim. We argued that those charges have long since been dropped, and he did not contribute to any harm that resulted because all he did was cut and paste a link [to a file containing the credit card numbers].”

The government insists that the credit cards are relevant, even though the actual charge over them was dropped, because they say Brown was part of a conspiracy that included the theft of the cards and should therefore be sentenced as a member of the conspiracy.

“The government tried to posit that there was a vast conspiracy by Anonymous to exfiltrate all this data from various security companies and that Barrett was somehow part of this giant RICO conspiracy,” Ghappour said, calling it a “very wily move on the government’s part.”

The judge, however, pushed back on the government’s attempt to increase Brown’s sentence in this way and decided to postpone sentencing until he could review all of the arguments thoroughly.

“In all the trials I’ve been a part of … and they’re all complex cases … I’ve never seen a judge take a time-out to issue his sentence,” Ghappour says. The move indicated to him that the judge was taking extra care to get the sentencing right and not be unduly swayed by the government’s forceful arguments.

In his statement to the court today, Brown took responsibility for his actions and expressed regret for them but also called out the government for its handling of his case, noting several incidents in which government agents lied to or misled the court.

“Normally this sort of thing is left to one’s lawyers rather than the defendant, because to do otherwise runs the risk of making the defendant seem combative rather than contrite,” he said, according to a prepared statement released to reporters. “But I think Your Honor can walk and chew bubble gum at the same time. I think Your Honor understands that one can regret the unjust things one has done, while also being concerned about the unjust things that have been done to him.”

Ulbricht Confessed to Running Silk Road, His College Friend Testifies

In this courtroom sketch, defendant Ross Ulbricht listens to proceedings from the defense table during opening arguments in his criminal trial in New York, Tuesday, Jan. 13, 2015. Elizabeth Wlliams/AP

As the the trial of alleged Silk Road mastermind Ross Ulbricht unfolds, its transcript has read like a manual of things not to do when running a secret, billion-dollar online drug conspiracy. But on Thursday, the jury heard about the most human of all the human errors Ulbricht may have made: confessing his creation to an in-real-life friend.

In a Manhattan courtroom Thursday, Austin, Texas-based eBay software engineer Richard Bates took the stand to testify against Ulbricht, his college friend and one-time programming partner. From late 2010 until at least 2011, Bates says he gave Ulbricht programming advice on a project Ulbricht described as “top secret.” And when Bates ultimately refused to offer any more assistance unless Ulbricht shared the details of that project, he says that Ulbricht showed him the Silk Road for the first time on a laptop in Bates’ home.

“I told him, tell me about this or leave me out of it,” said Bates, a pale programmer with slicked-back hair and black-rimmed glasses who wore a worried grimace during his entire time on the stand. “He told me about it.”

According to Bates, Ulbricht said that he was working on a “website where people can buy drugs.” Then, using a neighbor’s open Wi-fi to assuage Bates’ concerns, he showed Bates the site. “I remember seeing the home page, the green camel [of the Silk Road logo] for the first time, and pictures of drugs,” Bates said in response to questions from prosecutor Timothy Howard. “I was shocked and very intrigued. I didn’t know how something like this could be possible.”

Despite all the evidence piled against Ulbricht—which includes screenshots of his seized laptop taken from him while he was logged into the Silk Road’s “mastermind” page and a journal on that PC documenting his thoughts and activities allegedly running the site—Bates’ testimony could be particularly damning.

The defense, after all, has argued that Ulbricht created the Silk Road only as an “economic experiment” before giving it up to the real operators of the site who would expand it into a narcotics empire and then later frame Ulbricht. Bates’ story captures Ulbricht’s intention to sell drugs, specifically, and also indicates Ulbricht ran the site longer than the few months his attorneys have claimed.

Bates told the jury that he had first met Ulbricht during their time together as undergraduate students at the University of Texas at Dallas. Theey once went on a spring break trip together, according to Bates. In 2010, they reconnected when Bates moved to Austin, where Ulbricht lived at the time, and went cliff-jumping a few weeks later. By late 2010, Bates says, they saw one another on a weekly basis.

Around that time, Ulbricht began to ask Bates “very frequent” questions about PHP and server administration, often over Google chat, Bates said. But when Bates asked about the nature of Ulbricht’s project, Ulbricht refused to say more. Eventually Bates wrote to Ulbricht, “I’m officially forbidding you from mentioning your secret project to me again unless you’re going to reveal it.” Soon after that, Ulbricht revealed his secret, Bates said.

Despite his initial shock, Bates said he continued to advise Ulbricht on his Silk Road programming problems, helping him in March of 2011, for instance, to deal with a major site outage. The two would later work together on plans for a bitcoin exchange, Bates confirmed in response to prosecutor Howard’s questions. And Bates also used the Silk Road to buy drugs under the pseudonym “melee”, listing marijuana, ecstasy, psychedelic mushrooms, Vicodin and antibiotics among those he’d purchased. He also told the jury that Ulbricht had personally given him a bag of psychedelic mushrooms he’d grown and stored in a large black trash bag, offering more evidence that Ulbricht had sold his own homemade mushrooms as the first product on the Silk Road.

When Ulbricht was arrested in October 2013, Bates said he was visited by FBI agents, and initially lied to them about his involvement and drug purchases before confessing. He eventually agreed to testify to avoid prosecution.

Over the course of its first 45 minutes interviewing Bates, the prosecution showed him multiple chats between Ulbricht and Bates. One read as follows:

Ulbricht: You gotta keep my secret, buddy

Bates: I haven’t told anyone and I don’t intend to

…

Ulbricht: I know I can trust you

As Bates testified, Ulbricht stared straight ahead, offering no hint of his facial expressions to the press gallery. When the court adjourned, prosecutor Howard hadn’t yet finished questioning his friend. And Bates’ testimony, of course will no doubt be picked apart in cross-examination by the defense.

Stay tuned for an update later today.

Google and Elon Musk to Decide What Is Good for Humanity

esenkartal/Getty

Recently published Future of Life Institute (FLI) letter “Research Priorities for Robust and Beneficial Artificial Intelligence”, signed by hundreds of AI researchers, many representing government regulators, some sitting on committees with names like “Presidential Panel on Long Term AI future”, in addition to the likes of Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking, offers a program professing to protect the mankind from the threat of “super-intelligent AIs.” In a contrarian view, I believe, that should they succeed, rather than upcoming salvation, we will see a 21st century version of 17th century Salem Witch trials instead, where technologies competing with AI will be tried and burned at stake, with much fanfare and applause from mainstream press.

Before I proceed to my concerns, some background on AI. For last 50 years AI researchers promise to deliver intelligent computers, which always seem to be five years in the future. For example, Dharmendra Modha, in charge of IBM’s Synapse “neuromorphic” chips claimed two or three years ago that IBM “will deliver computer equivalent of human brain” by 2018. I have heard echo of this claim in statements of virtually all recently funded AI and Deep Learning companies. Press accepts these claims with the same gullibility it displayed during Apple Siri’s launch and hails arrival of the “brain like” computing as a fait accompli. I believe this is very far from the truth.

The investments on the other hand are real, with old AI technologies dressed up in new clothes of “Deep Learning”. I addition to acquiring Deep Mind, Google hired Geoffrey Hinton’s University of Toronto team as well as Ray Kurzweil whose primary motivation for joining Google Brain seems to be the opportunity to upload his brain into vast Google supercomputer. Baidu invested $300M in Stanford University Andrew Ng’s Deep Learning lab, Facebook and Zuckerberg personally invested $55M in Vicarious and hired Yann LeCun, the “other” deep learning guru. Samsung and Intel invested in Expect labs and Reactor, Qualcomm made a sizable investment in BrainCorp. While some progress in speech processing and image recognition will be made, it will not be sufficient to justify lofty valuations of recent funding events.

While my background is in fact in AI, I worked for last few years closely with preeminent neural scientist, Walter Freeman at Berkeley on a new kind of wearable personal assistant, one based not on AI but on neural science. During this time, I came to the conclusion that symbol based computing technologies, including point-to-point “deep” neural networks (not neural science) can not possibly deliver on claims made by many of these well funded AI labs and startups. Here are just three of the reasons:

1. Every single innovation in evolution of vertebrate brains was due to advances in organism locomotion, and none of the new formations indicate the emergence of symbol processing in cortex.


2. Human intelligence is a product of resonating, coupled electric fields produced by massive population of neurons, synapses and ion channels of cortex resulting in dynamic, AM modulated waves in gamma and beta range, not static point-to-point neural networks.


3. Human memories are formed in hippocampus via “phase precession” theta waves which transform time events into spatial domain without use of symbols like time stamps.

Each of the above three empirical findings invalidates AI’s symbolic, computation approach. I could provide more but it is hard to fight prevalent cultural myths perpetuated by mass media. Movies are a good example. At the beginning of the movie Transcendence, Johnny Depp’s character, an AI researcher (from Berkeley:), makes bold claim that “just one AI will be smarter than the entire population of humans that ever lived on earth”. By my calculation this estimate is incorrect today by almost 20 orders of magnitude, it will take more than a few years to bridge this gap.

Which brings me back to the FLI letter. While individual investors have every right to lose their assets, problem gets much more complicated when government regulators are involved. Here are the the main claims of the letter I have problem with (quotes from the letter in italics):

1. Statements like: “There is a broad consensus that AI research is progressing steadily”, even “progressing dramatically” (Google Brain signatories on FLI web site), are just not true. In the last 50 years there has been very little AI progress (more stasis like than “steady”) and not a single major AI based breakthrough commercial product, unless you count iPhone infamous Siri. In short, despite overwhelming media push, AI simply does not work.


2. “AI systems must do what we want them to do” begs the question of who is “we”? There are 92 references included in this letter, all of them from CS, AI and political scientists, there are many references to approaching, civilization threatening “singularity”, several references to possibilities for “mind uploading”, but not a single reference from a biologist or a neural scientist. To call such an approach to study of intellect “interdisciplinary” is just not credible.


3. “Identify research directions that can maximize societal benefits” is outright chilling. Again, who decides whether a research is “socially desirable”?


4. “AI super-intelligence will not act with human wishes and will threaten the humanity” is just a cover for justification of the attempted power grab of AI group over the competing approaches to study of intellect.

Why should government regulators support technology which failed to deliver on its promises repeatedly for 50 years? Newly emerging branches of neural science which made major breakthroughs in last years are of much greater promise, in many cases exposing glaring weaknesses of AI approach, so it is precisely these groups which will suffer if AI is allowed to “regulate” the direction of future research of intellect, whether human or “artificial”. Neural scientists study actual brains with imaging techniques such as fMRI, EEG, ECOG, etc and then postulate predictions about their structure and function from the empirical data they gathered. The more neural research progresses, the clearer it becomes that brain is vastly more complex than we thought just a few decades ago.

AI researchers on the other hand start with a priori assumption that brain quite simple, really just a carbon version of Von Neumann CPU. As Google Brain AI researcher and FLI letter signatory Illya Sutskever recently told me, “brain absolutely is just a CPU and further study of brain would be a waste of my time”. This is almost word for word repetition of famous statement of Noam Chomsky made decades ago “predicting” the existence of language “generator” in brain.

FLI letter signatories say: Do not to worry, “we” will allow “good” AI and “identify research directions” in order to “maximize societal benefits” and “eradicate diseases and poverty”. I believe that it would be precisely the newly emerging neural science groups which would suffer if AI is allowed to regulate research direction in this field. Why should “evidence” like this allow AI scientists to control what biologists and neural scientists can and can not do?

It is quite possible that signatories motives are pure. But at the moment AI lobby has a near monopoly on forming public opinion and attracting government dollars through the influence of compliant media. Indeed government regulators in this space are all AI researchers, often funding AI startups with taxpayers dollars and later taking up jobs with the very same companies they funded and were supposed to “regulate”. And often, when government regulators lead, private VC funds follow in a “Don’t fight the Fed”, sheep like movement.

There is yet another dimension to this story: In addition to threat of upcoming “singularity” FLI letter reference section has many references to “mind uploading”. After life-time of immersion in Von Neumann architectures, from Ray Kurzweill and Peter Thiel on, many silicon valley prodigies are obsesses with the idea of becoming immortal via mind upload into silicon. Threat of death is a powerful emotion indeed, but it belongs in realm of religious thinking rather than “dispassionate and objective science”.

Let me conclude with another movie quote: At the end of movie Beautiful Mind, mathematician John Nash played by Russell Crowe, recovering from mental illness, lectures a group of students in a cafeteria: “Trust mathematics, trust your teachers”, pauses, then adds with a wink: “just stay away from biologists, do not trust those guys.” Indeed, today’s AI researchers are all children of Rene Descartes, trusting in absolute power of logic and mathematics as they push their religion of Cartesian Dualism on the rest of us. Inadvertently, they tell us all to drink AI Kool-Aid in their “SkyNet is Coming” sermon.

I believe that neural science and biology utilizing wearable sensors is already much more fruitful than AI in delivering personal assistants guiding us through daily life, keeping us healthier and stress free, based on better understanding of brain, rather than logic of CPU programing and algorithms of AI focused on weapons and robotics. I hope US press will arise to a defense of scientists’ rights to continue to perform such free research rather then limiting their research to work on “desirable” results. As a famous US journalist once said: “Those who sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither.”

Roman Ormandy, founder of Embody Corp, is an entrepreneur working in mobile personal assistants space, specifically using wearable sensors. His background is in Computer Science, 3D Graphics, Linguistics and Neural Science.

Antibiotics, bacteria, resistance genes found in dust from feedlots

After testing dust in the air near cattle feedlots in the Southern High Plains, researchers at The Institute of Environmental and Human Health at Texas Tech University found evidence of antibiotics, feedlot-derived bacteria and DNA sequences that encode for antibiotic resistance.

The study was published online in the National Institutes of Environmental Science's peer-reviewed journal, Environmental Health Perspectives. The research was funded through a grant from Texas Tech's College of Arts and Sciences. It is the first study documenting aerial transmission of antibiotic resistance from an open-air farm setting.

Phil Smith, an associate professor of terrestrial ecotoxicology at the institute, said that while scientists couldn't assess if the amounts of these materials were dangerous to human health, it helped explain a previously uncharacterized pathway by which antibiotic-resistant bacteria could travel long distances into places inhabited by humans.

The findings come weeks after a report commissioned by British Prime Minister David Cameron concluded that failure to battle drug-resistant infections and their causes could result in 10 million extra deaths a year by 2050 at a cost of $100 trillion to the global economy.

"You can look in the news, and people are raising red flags about antibiotic resistance all the time," Smith said. "Microbes are pretty promiscuous with their genetic information, and they share it across species fairly easily. We know it's there. We know what causes it, but we don't have a really good handle on how it's transmitted and how it moves in the environment. This is an attempt to provide better clarity on that issue.

"Everyone is fairly certain antibiotic resistance comes from extensive use of antibiotics in animal-based agriculture. About 70 percent of all antibiotics used are for animal agricultural purposes. Overuse contributes to antibiotic resistance. But how does it happen? How does it get from where the drugs are used into the human environment and natural environment?"

Smith said scientists collected air samples upwind and downwind of each feedlot. After analysis, they found greater amounts of bacteria, antibiotics and DNA sequences responsible for antibiotic resistance downwind of the feedlots compared to upwind, which helped scientists determine the source of the materials they found.

Because the antibiotics are present on the particulate matter with bacteria, the selective pressure for bacteria to retain their resistance remains during their flight, said Greg Mayer, an associate professor of molecular toxicology at the institute.

With wind blowing regularly on the Southern High Plains, the antibiotics and bacteria can travel on the dust and particulate matter far from the original starting point at the feedlot. Add the infamous West Texas dust storms into the picture, and these materials have the potential to travel hundreds of miles into cities and towns and possibly around the globe.

"I think implications for the spread of some feedlot-derived, antibiotic-resistant bacteria into urban areas is paramount to the research," Mayer said. "Now, we haven't yet taken samples from an urban area to determine whether bacteria from that particulate matter originated from feedlots or whether it still has antibiotic resistant bacteria on it. However, this study is proof of the principle that antibiotic-resistant bacteria could plausibly travel through the air.

"Further studies are now needed to show where the particulate matter is traveling and what is happening to its passengers when it gets there."

Story Source:

The above story is based on materials provided by Texas Tech University . The original article was written by John Davis. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Tumblr Launches Creative Agency to Connect Artists With Advertisers

Tumblr has already helped millions of artists and creators build cult followings online. Now, the New York City-based blogging platform wants to help those people become commercial successes in the real world, too.

Today, Tumblr announced the launch of the Creatrs Network, a sort of creative agency for Tumblr bloggers that will help connect them with brands and other organizations that want to use Tumblr artist content in their ads and marketing. The new division, which Tumblr has been testing with a hand-selected cohort of artists, has been in development for a year. Already, brands like AT&T, Universal Pictures, and Gap have worked with Tumblr artists to develop original content that can be featured on their Tumblr pages, as well as other platforms. Illustrations by one creator, Trace Loops, were recently featured in the background of an episode of The Voice.

The appeal for artists is obvious. This network gives them access to potentially gargantuan audiences they probably never would have reached otherwise, and Tumblr pays the artists their regular rate for the work. And for brands, Tumblr is promising access to the very artists, who have helped make Tumblr a user-engagement powerhouse.

“We think the creative class is really the next generation that’s going to come up and change the world,” says Tumblr Head of Creative Strategy David Hayes, “and we think we have the largest creative class of any platform.”

In many ways, what Tumblr is doing on behalf of its creators is similar to what YouTube has done for its own community. Earlier this year, YouTube announced it was going to begin running ad campaigns featuring YouTube stars in an effort to turn them into mainstream celebrities. Meanwhile, the company has begun opening its own studios for video creators in cities from Los Angeles to New York to Tokyo. With Creatrs, Tumblr is doing much the same thing. By turning their biggest stars into even bigger stars, these platforms stand to expand their reach exponentially.

For Tumblr, this will also become a revenue stream. Now, rather than simply offering brands tools like sponsored posts and entrusting the brands themselves to come up with the ads, Tumblr can connect brands with the people who will make that content, as well. Brands will join the Tumblr Creatrs Network, outline their goals for a given campaign with the team, and the team will present the company with a hand-picked selection of artists from a pool of 300 Tumblr users who are currently part of the network. And according to Hayes, who previously worked as vice president of digital marketing at Lionsgate Entertainment, the whole process drastically reduces the time it would take for a brand to work with an ad agency on a given piece of promotional content.

“We’re super super proud of the fact that Tumblr powers the world’s best content,” Hayes says. “The idea that Tumblr will power the best advertising campaigns on Tumblr and on Facebook an on Instagram and on YouTube and on display banner campaigns and their websites, it totally makes sense to us. Coming up with a structure that allowed us to do that took a little bit of time.”

Creators who Tumblr selects for the network get more than just publicity, too. Creatrs promises them access to legal assistance as they develop contracts and broker licensing deals. “We will take a much more aggressive stance, as far as protecting artists’ work,” Hayes says. They pay the artists for their content—some $250,000 over the last year of tests—and guarantee they’ll get credit for their work, regardless of where it appears online or in the real world.

Tumblr has also launched an internal program, simply known as Creatrs, through which it will select 10 high-performing artists and match them not just with brands, but with other opportunities like book deals, live events, or the chance to teach classes and seminars at universities. For now, creators have to be selected and can’t sign up on their own, but that may soon change as Tumblr continues to test the model and see increased demand from advertisers.

A Smart Office Desk That Tells You When It’s Time to Stand

Stirworks, Inc.

Stirworks, Inc.

Stirworks, Inc.

Stirworks, Inc.

Stirworks, Inc.

Stirworks, Inc.

Stirworks, Inc.

Stirworks, Inc.

Stirworks, Inc.

Stirworks, Inc.

Stirworks, Inc.

Stirworks, Inc.

Once upon a time, people used analog desks and did Jazzercise and lived in caves. These were dark times.

The new Stir Kinetic Desk M1 is a “smart desk” that learns your daily routine, gently notifies you of the best times to sit and stand, and raises and lowers itself with its quiet motorized legs.

It’s the second desk in Stir’s lineup, and the specs are impressive for a desk: a 1GHz CPU, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity, and a 5-inch touchscreen console that runs Linux. Compared to the first Stir desk (dubbed the F1), this one is sleeker, cheaper, slightly lighter, and has components that are more easily serviceable. Four power outlets are built into the desk, and you’ll need to plug the desk in, too.

You can manually adjust the height, which ranges from 25 to 51 inches, by tapping the touchscreen embedded in the desk’s front-left corner. However, the desk also takes it upon itself to suggest when you should change positions. There’s a subtle motion that’s patterned after an actual human breath—Stir calls it “Whisperbreath”—to let you know it’s time to get up and move around a bit. It won’t force the issue; you still have to give a double-tap to tell the desk you’re ready to switch positions. The touchscreen on this version is bigger, so it’s easier to tap when you’re not looking at it.

I spoke with Stir CEO JP Labrosse, who was a member of Apple’s original iPod team. He says that most of the desk’s users spend about 50 percent of the time standing, and that a strong balance of standing and sitting is ideal. “Physiology experts and ergonomists will tell you that standing for eight to ten hours every day is pretty hard on the body,” he says. “You should be changing positions every hour.”

If you use one of Stir’s desks, the stats about how long you’ve spent sitting and standing are logged and displayed on the touchscreen. The data isn’t just based on the desk’s position—thermal sensors on the underside of the desk detect when you’re seated, standing, or away from the desk altogether.

The desk will also sync with your Fitbit—not just to display more daily activity data, but also to act as a proximity-based login device. If an office is stocked with Stir desks, the system uses the cloud to pull in and apply your personal settings once you’re logged in. So if you’re due for some standing time when you walk up to a Stir, the desk recognizes your Fitbit, greets you, and offers to adjust itself accordingly.

I got the chance to sit (and stand) behind one of these new Stir desks. The new M1 design has curved edges and a little indentation for your belly, and its powder-coated fiberboard surface, which is available in all-black or white-and-gray, feels solid and smooth. It weighs 140 pounds, around 10 pounds lighter than the blockier F1 desk.

At $2,990 per desk, the M1 isn’t cheap. But it does cost significantly less than the earlier F1, which will still be available for $4,190. Stir says the new desk is available for order now via its website and that delivery will take about eight weeks; it’ll also be available in furniture stores and through dealers across the US.