Traces Of Humanity

(tracesofhumanity.org)

128 points | by alex77456 8 hours ago

7 comments

  • nycerrrrrrrrrr 6 hours ago
    Since some people seem to not be familiar with Joanna, she is a massively influential security researcher. IMO most famous for her "Blue pill" attacks on Vista and Xen: https://blackhat.com/presentations/bh-usa-06/BH-US-06-Rutkow..., https://invisiblethingslab.com/resources/bh08/part3.pdf. Her work demonstrated that hardware virtualization is not in fact the security panacea we wish it was, but that it too is vulnerable to attack just like any other layer of the stack. This revelation resulted in significant changes in the security world.

    She is also famous for the Qubes OS project and coining the term "evil maid attack".

    • Kiboneu 4 hours ago
      > "Blue pill" attacks on Vista and Xen [...] Her work demonstrated that hardware virtualization is not in fact the security panacea we wish it was, but that it too is vulnerable to attack just like any other layer of the stack.

      Blue-pilling is a method for malware to hide from the OS by virtualizing it, not an attack on VMs. That's why it's called "blue pilling". I do agree though that VMs are not airtight and VM escapes have been demonstrated.

      • nycerrrrrrrrrr 3 hours ago
        Yes, but when you blue-pill the hypervisor it becomes an attack on VMs. Her demonstrating the blue pill attack on Xen was really the "oh crap, these aren't as safe as we thought" moment.
  • stared 7 hours ago
    Is there some important context I am missing?
    • gostsamo 7 hours ago
      The author was known with a secure os project some years ago.
  • 47282847 7 hours ago
    In case you read this: Hi Joanna! Nice to hear from you. Looking forward to your thoughts and sharing.
  • piffien 6 hours ago
    > This blog is intended to be a reportage of my struggles between Rationality and Humanism. Pragmatism and Beauty. Formalism and Intuition. Freedom and Love. Individualism, Independence and Privacy on the one side, vs Egalitarianism, Sharing and Community on the other.

    What is he on about? Sounds like his future blog posts could just be rambling about anything.

    • realo 4 hours ago
      She.

      She was a brilliant cybersecurity researcher.

      Nowadays seems to have switched to poetry. Not the first one to do that, recently...

      IMHO she is up there on par with Yudkowsky.

    • emayljames 6 hours ago
      She.
  • brcmthrowaway 7 hours ago
    Why did the author leave computer security industry?
  • askZqt 6 hours ago
    Well known security researcher resurfaces, first blog post mentions Claude:

    https://tracesofhumanity.org/freediving-embodiment-and-human...

    Please, please, please let this not be the incentive!

    • bbor 3 hours ago
      I mean, 'mentions Claude while asking it about AI consciousness at the end of long post about consciousness'**. Seems fair?

      Apologies if I'm misreading 'incentive' and missing some jargon usage, ofc! Or if this just a lament that she's not a purist/gold star doomer? Cause I totally understand that.

  • jgord 3 hours ago
    Joanna, if your reading this, welcome back .. really miss your blog !

    In my ideal future, Joanna would write about things like :

      - how do we secure LLMs leading up to AGI, presumably they can bypass our best attempt at airgap firewalls
      - is consciousness different from thinking from intelligence ?
      - how do we ensure AI is distributed so all humans can benefit, and not used as a multiplier of extreme wealth inequality ?
      - whats missing in current AI LLMs ?
    
    I'll take a crack at the last one : imo, the current generation of LLMs is missing :

      - a bias for truth / fact .. or a mode switch to make it bias truthiness
      - reasoning by chains of formal language [ formal logic ]
      - reasoning by chains of probabilistic inference [ bayesian logic ]
      - reasoning by deep simulation [ stochastic modelling ]
      - spatial reasoning [ 3D model of space, machinery, physics. 3D reconstruction. model of humans and animals with bones, muscles, mass ] 
      - mathematical modelling [ proposing formulae, checking fit ]
      - psychological model of humans, of human populations, their needs / motivations / rewards and psychoses
    
    Essentially AGI would require a proper merging of RL style [ NN learning from a stochastic simulation of future states ] and current ChatGPT style LLMs.

    An implication of the above is that future AGI will need to run on fast branching CPU _and_ massively parallel GPU with a fast data path between them - ie. balanced compute.

    However, the best part will be discovering what the real Joanna writes about !