Intel CTO: Machines could ultimately match human intelligence

Will machines ever be as smart as humans? The notion of a technological "singularity," a time when machines match and surpass human intellect, has been popularized by thinkers such as inventor and author Raymond Kurzweil, who commonly cites Moore's Law in his arguments about the exponential growth of technology. Intel CTO Justin Rattner thinks that someday, they might.

Rattner's views on the singularity are sought after, given that he is CTO of the world's biggest chipmaker and the head of Intel Labs, the company's primary research arm. So yeah, at some point, assuming all kinds of advances and breakthroughs, it's not inconceivable we'll reach a point that machines do match human intelligence." Already, scientists are working on placing neural sensors and chips into the brain, allowing people to control prosthetic limbs with their own thoughts. In a recent interview with Network World, Rattner said he has "tried to sidestep the question of when [the singularity] might occur," but says machine intelligence is constantly increasing due to laws of accelerating returns, "of which Moore's Law is perhaps the best example." "There will be a surprising amount of machines that do exhibit human-like capabilities," Rattner said. "Not to the extent of what humans can do today, but in an increasing number of areas these machines will show more and more human-like intelligence, particularly in the perceptual tasks. This is likely to become a "relatively routine procedure" in a few years, Rattner said. Rattner's views are also held in high regard in the world of supercomputing, of course, and he will deliver the opening address at the SC supercomputing conference in Portland, Ore. in November.

Rattner said that while many commentators are preoccupied with the far-off singularity, he concerns himself more on how laws of accelerating returns "are real" and could lead to amazing advances in technology, including augmentation of the human body. "Assuming that interface technology progresses in an accelerating way, the possibilities of augmenting human intelligence with machine intelligence become increasingly real and more diverse," Rattner said. Nearly 80% of the world's 500 fastest supercomputers use Intel processors. But Rattner says the supercomputing industry is already looking forward to the era of the exaflop - 1,000 times faster than a petaflop. The world's first petaflop machines, capable of performing one thousand trillion calculations per second, came online just last year. Rattner says the fundamental technologies behind a future exaflop machine could be demonstrated by the middle of next decade, and - depending on government investment - the first exaflop machines could become operational in the second half of the decade.

You'd need a 500-megawatt nuclear power station to run the thing." The industry will have to move that number down to something practical, perhaps tens of megawatts, Rattner said. But this still depends on overcoming limitations in today's computing architectures. "Now that we've achieved petascale computing, there's all this interest in getting the next factor of 1,000," Rattner said. "But we can't get there with today's technology, largely because of power considerations. But the work is just getting started. "We've got a lot of really big engineering challenges," Rattner said. "Today, we just don't know how to get there."

iStockphoto guarantees its collection

Starting today, iStockphoto, the micropayment royalty-free image, video, and audio provider, will legally guarantee its entire collection from copyright, moral right, trademark, intellectual property, and rights of privacy disputes for up to $10,000. The new iStock Legal Guarantee, delivered at no cost to customers, covers the company's entire 5 million-plus collection. Recently however, Vivozoom, another microstock company, took a similar action to guarantee its collection. Additional coverage for an Extended Legal Guarantee totaling $250,000 is available for the purchase of 100 iStock credits. "Our first line of defense has always been-and continues to be-our rigorous inspection process," said Kelly Thompson, chief operating officer of iStockphoto. "The Legal Guarantee is simply an added layer of protection for our customers, many of whom are using microstock more than ever before." Although common for traditional stock houses, such legal guarantees have not been standard in microstock because of the low prices. iStock says that files purchased and used in accordance with its license will not breach any trademark, copyright, or other intellectual property rights or rights of privacy.

And, if a customer does get a claim, iStock will cover the customer's legal costs and direct damages up to a combined total of $10,000. iStock customers can increase their coverage for legal fees and direct damages up to a combined total of $250,000 by purchasing the Extended Legal Guarantee via the iStock credits (which costs between $95 and $138). iStock expects that this program will be popular with a very small percentage of sophisticated media buyers with very specific needs, and considers it to be a value-added service to customers rather than a major source of revenue.

SANS: Security Ignores the Two Biggest Cyber Risks

Two major cyber risks dwarf all others, but organizations are failing to invest in the proper tools to mitigate them, choosing instead to focus security attention on lower risk areas, according to a report released Tuesday by SANS Institute. Attack data for this research was drawn from TippingPoint appliances deployed at customer sites, while vulnerability data was collected via Qualys' scanning services. The research, which draws upon data collected from March to August 2009 from thousands of organizations, claims companies give insufficient attention to today's risks and put their systems in peril by continuing to maintain the status quo with an emphasis on operating system patches and other outdated protection methods. Also see 7 Reasons Websites Are No Longer Safe The most surprising conclusion may be that client-side application software vulnerabilities pose the largest threat to network security as opposed operating system vulnerabilities, which tend to get more attention when it comes to patching.

The report notes that most large organizations take at least twice as long to patch client-side vulnerabilities as they take to patch operating system vulnerabilities, choosing to place a higher priority on the lesser risk. SANS claims many spear-phishing attacks exploit vulnerabilities in commonly-used programs such as Adobe PDF Reader, QuickTime, Adobe Flash and Microsoft Office. "This is currently the primary initial infection vector used to compromise computers that have Internet access," the report states. In addition to unpatched client applications, SANS said the other priority for IT security now should be attention to web application vulnerabilities. The two risks, and their tendency to be low priority for security, create a perfect storm for infection. Web applications constitute more than 60 percent of the total attack attempts observed on the Internet, according to the report. "These vulnerabilities are being exploited widely to convert trusted web sites into malicious web sites serving content that contains client-side exploits," the report states. "Web application vulnerabilities such as SQL injection and Cross-Site Scripting flaws in open-source as well as custom-built applications account for more than 80 percent of the vulnerabilities being discovered." Despite the enormous number of attacks, and despite widespread publicity about these vulnerabilities, most web site owners fail to scan effectively for the common flaws and become unwitting tools used by criminals to infect the visitors that trusted those sites to provide a safe web experience, said SANS researchers. With so many Internet-facing web sites vulnerable, and so many applications that contain bugs, it makes it easy for attackers to take advantage of unsuspecting web browsers.

The victims' infected computers are then used to propagate the infection and compromise other internal computers and sensitive servers incorrectly thought to be protected from unauthorized access by external entities. When users visit a trusted site, they feel safe downloading documents, or simply opening documents, music or video which exploit client-side vulnerabilities. "Some exploits do not even require the user to open documents," the report states. "Simply accessing an infected web site is all that is needed to compromise the client software. In many cases, the ultimate goal of the attacker is to steal data from the target organizations and also to install back doors through which the attackers can return for further exploitation." Also see Drive-By Spyware The report's other conclusions include data that finds operating systems continue to have fewer remotely-exploitable vulnerabilities that lead to massive Internet worms. However, the number of attacks against buffer overflow vulnerabilities in Windows tripled from May-June to July-August and constituted over 90 percent of attacks seen against the Windows operating system. Other than Conficker/Downadup, no new major worms for OSs were seen in the wild during the reporting period, the report said. The research also finds rising numbers of zero-day vulnerabilities. "World-wide there has been a significant increase over the past three years in the number of people discovering zero-day vulnerabilities, as measured by multiple independent teams discovering the same vulnerabilities at different times.

Some vulnerabilities have remained unpatched for as long as two years."

Linux driver chief calls out Microsoft over code submission

After a kick in the pants from the leader of the Linux driver project, Microsoft has resumed work on its historic driver code submission to the Linux kernel and avoided having the code pulled from the open source operating system. The submission was greeted with astonishment in July when Microsoft made the announcement, which included releasing the code under a GPLv2 license Microsoft had criticized in the past. Microsoft's submission includes 20,000 lines of code that once added to the Linux kernel will provide the hooks for any distribution of Linux to run on Windows Server 2008 and its Hyper-V hypervisor technology. Greg Kroah-Hartman, the Linux driver project lead who accepted the code from Microsoft in July, Wednesday called out Microsoft on the linux-kernel and driver-devel mailing lists saying the company was not actively developing its hv drivers.

If they do not show back up to claim this driver soon, it will be removed in the 2.6.33 [kernel] release. HV refers to Microsoft Hyper-V. He also posted the message to his blog. "Unfortunately the Microsoft developers seem to have disappeared, and no one is answering my emails. So sad...," he wrote. They are not the only company." Also new: Microsoft forms, funds open source foundation Kroah-Hartman said calling out specific projects on the mailing list is a technique he uses all the time to jump start those that are falling behind. Thursday, however, in an interview with Network World, Kroah-Hartman said Microsoft got the message. "They have responded since I posted," he said, and Microsoft is now back at work on the code they pledged to maintain. "This is a normal part of the development process. In all, Kroah-Hartman specifically mentioned 25 driver projects that were not being actively developed and faced being dropped from the main kernel release 2.6.33, which is due in March.

On top of chiding Microsoft for not keeping up with code development, Kroah-Hartman took the company to task for the state of its original code submission. "Over 200 patches make up the massive cleanup effort needed to just get this code into a semi-sane kernel coding style (someone owes me a big bottle of rum for that work!)," he wrote. He said the driver project was not a "dumping ground for dead code." However, the nearly 40 projects Kroah-Hartman detailed in his mailing list submission, including the Microsoft drivers, will all be included in the 2.6.32 main kernel release slated for December. Kroah-Hartman says there are coding style guidelines and that Microsoft's code did not match those. "That's normal and not a big deal. But the large number of patches did turn out to be quite a bit of work, he noted. It happens with a lot of companies," he said.

He said Thursday that Microsoft still has not contributed any patches around the drivers. "They say they are going to contribute, but all they have submitted is changes to update the to-do list." Kroah-Hartman says he has seen this all before and seemed to chalk it up to the ebbs and flows of the development process. The submission was greeted with astonishment in July when Microsoft made the announcement, which included releasing the code under a GPLv2 license Microsoft had criticized in the past. Microsoft's submission includes 20,000 lines of code that once added to the Linux kernel will provide the hooks for any distribution of Linux to run on Windows Server 2008 and its Hyper-V hypervisor technology. Follow John on Twitter

Patch Tuesday: What the experts are saying

Windows was hit hard on Microsoft's Patch Tuesday with eight of nine patches addressing issues in all the shipping versions of both the OS client and server.

Related story: Microsoft, Apple, Mozilla patches put heavy load on IT

The lone non-Windows patch fixes holes in Office, Visual Studio, ISA Server and BizTalk Server.

The nine bulletins in total address 19 vulnerabilities, of which 15 are critical. Here's what experts are saying about the flood of patches:

"Many people are going to be looking at the WINS (039) anonymous remote code execution attack as a potential worm vector, but they shouldn't minimize the IIS denial of service attack or Bulletin 038. These vulnerabilities mean that anyone could become infected simply by opening a movie file. Who doesn't use the Internet these days to watch videos? This month had the potential to be the month of ATL bug fixes, but it has turned out to be more of a smorgasbord. These updates are going to require lots of IT resources for testing and deployment." - Andrew Storms, director of security operations, nCircle

"There's no break from patching this summer. Microsoft is playing catch up with these patches as cybercriminals have already used some of the serious vulnerabilities to commandeer vulnerable Windows computers." - Dave Marcus, director of security research and communications, McAfee Avert Labs

"All of the ActiveX issues patched this month could be easily exploited and can impact even the average computer user. For example, any user who has Microsoft Office on their machine could be vulnerable to the Microsoft Office Web Components vulnerabilities. Similarly, every user with Windows XP SP3 or Vista could also be susceptible to one of the Remote Desktop Connection issues." - Ben Greenbaum, senior research manager, Symantec Security Response

"It's been a long time since it has been so operating system focused. In the past year, 75% of more of the bulletins have been focused on Internet Explorer, Office and some of the media players. So this month to have four of them be server-side exploits – IIS 7.0, Workstation, MSMQ and Wins – is unusual. The server-side vulnerabilities are a hacker's best friend. I have been keeping my eye out for them the past year and I have seen so few of them. It is like Microsoft software has gotten so much better, it is harder and harder to find the server-side vulnerabilities. It seems like they were all aggregated and released today. So if I am a hacker, I have quite the playground now to play in." - Eric Schultze, CTO, Shavlik Technologies

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NASA: Robots working perfectly in space mission

After five days of carrying astronauts, lifting massive pieces of equipment and "walking" up and down the spine of the International Space Station, NASA says its robots are performing perfectly in its most technically complicated mission yet.

The seven-person crew of the space shuttle Endeavour are docked and working with the crew of the space station to install the final pieces of the Japanese laboratory on the orbiter. The work, which began on Saturday, simply couldn't be done without robotic arms - one on the Endeavour and two on the space station - doing all the heavy lifting, said Michael Curie, a spokesman for NASA.

"It's very exciting to see all the robotic equipment perform to the expectations that we've all had," Curie told Computerworld. "It's wonderful when you get everyone together in space after a year or two of training, and everything they've practiced using robotics is working just as planned. It's amazing to watch it all working against the beautiful blue background of the Earth."

Holly Ridings, lead space station flight director for the Endeavour mission, said in a previous interview that this is one of the most technical ever undertaken by NASA.

The robotic arm on the space station, dubbed Canadarm II, and the robotic arm on Endeavour have been working steadily since this past Saturday when they worked hand-in-hand to unload and maneuver the final part of the Japanese Kibo lab into place. The arm on the station lifted a 4-ton piece of the Japanese complex out of the shuttle's payload bay. This piece, which has been dubbed a "front porch", will be permanently attached to the outside of the Japanese module. It is designed to hold its own payloads, as well as host experiments that need to be conducted in outer space.

Once the station's robotic arm, called the big arm, extracted the porch from the shuttle, it handed off to the space shuttle's own robotic arm. While the shuttle's arm held the porch, the station's arm moved itself about 50 feet down the length of the space station by basically moving much like a child's Slinky toy.

Either end of the big arm can be used as the base, just as either end can be used as a gripping hand. Once the arm handed off the porch, its gripper end swung over and attached to the space station and the end that was originally attached to the station let go and freed itself to be used as the gripping hand.

At that point, the big arm reached out and took back the porch and moved it into place against the Japanese module where it automatically attached itself.

"It's fabulous," said Curie. "When you consider how large and massive these objects are and how easy the robotic arms make it look, it's astounding. We're doing things today that weren't even imagined in 1981 when the shuttle program first flew."

Since then the two arms have been used to lift a massive cargo carrier out of the space shuttle and moved it to an area where the astronauts could reach it. The carrier holds equipment on its two sides. On one side a spare antennae for the station was attached, along with a spare pump for a cooling system and a motor that runs along the backbone of the station like a train on a rail. The other side of the carrier held six batteries, which are designed to hold power drawn out of the station's solar arrays. The batteries are being installed today.

With the cargo carrier out of the space shuttle, on Monday an astronaut attached himself to the end of the big arm and while he grabbed hold of a spare part, the big arm slowly and gently moved him to where the parts needed to be stowed. Taking each spare one at a time, the astronaut made three separate trips on the robotic arm over the course of five hours in space.

"It moved him slowly and methodically because of the size of the spares and the close proximity of the other pieces of the space station," said Curie. "It would not have been feasible for a spacewalker to have carried these objects from one place to another without the robotic arm. It made what would have taken three space walks possible to do in one."

Curie added that this kind of work - where a human is attached to a robot 220 miles above the Earth's surface - takes a lot of confidence in the machine

"It's not only a trust in the robotic arms but in the crew members who are using them," he noted. "The [astronauts] practice as a team for over a year to make sure they understand what is required. It looks easy because they're very proficient at it and because the hardware is very trustworthy."

On Thursday, the new robotic arm on the Japanese laboratory will be taken out for its first official spin. It's been tested but this week it will be used in a real operation for the first time. This third arm will be used to set up the new lab and get the experiments into place.

"This is the very first time that three robotic arms have been used on one mission. It won't be the last, but it will be the first," said Curie. "I think humans and robotics will be tied together as we move forward in the exploration of space."

FAQ: How to get an iPhone 3G S on Friday

If it's summer, it must be time for a new iPhone.

That's what Apple wants you to think, of course, which is why last week it pulled out the stops - those it could with master marketeer CEO Steve Jobs still on medical leave - when it introduced the newest iPhone, dubbed the "3G S."

The "S," said Apple, stands for "speed," although current iPhone owners who can't buy one at the subsidized price might instead say the "S" stands for "spendy" or "stiffed," or even worse.

Still, the now-annual event will probably draw lines at Apple's retail stores later this week, and unless Apple has filled the pipeline with more inventory than it did last year, shortages of the iPhone 3G S are likely. So how do you get your hands on one? Good opening question. We have more than just that one, though, along with answers, naturally.

Happy hunting.

When does the iPhone 3G S go on sale? In the U.S., Apple's retail stores open their doors on Friday, June 19, at 8 a.m. local time. AT&T's retail stores will open an hour earlier, at 7 a.m. local time, but only for people who pre-ordered via the Web or at a store. (According to The Boy Genius Report, AT&T had sold out its pre-order allotment by Saturday, June 13, and any subsequent pre-orders won't be shipped to a local store for pick-up until seven to 14 days after the order date.)

AT&T will let customers who didn't pre-order into its stores starting at 8 a.m. local time.

Best Buy and Wal-Mart, the other two outlets selling iPhones, will open at their usual business hours on Friday.

What countries get the iPhone 3G S on Friday? Apple said that customers in the U.S., Canada, France, Italy, Spain, Switzerland and the U.K. get first crack at the new iPhone. Other countries will begin to sell their shipments of the upgrade starting July 9.

What's the easiest way to get an iPhone 3G S? Apple is taking pre-orders for both models of the iPhone 3G S on its Web site, and claims that it will deliver the phone to customers by June 19 (that's what it said as of Saturday, June 13, anyway). It's taking only single-line pre-orders, however, so people who want two or more iPhones, or want to add a line to an existing account, are somewhat out of luck: Apple will reserve ordered iPhones, but you'll have to retrieve it by going to a retail store.

During the week of the iPhone 3G S' unveiling, AT&T also took pre-orders on its Web site as well as from walk-ins, telling the former that their iPhones would be shipped via two-day priority, and the latter that they would have to come to a nearby store. By Saturday, June 13, however, a message on AT&T's site read: "Pre-orders for iPhone 3G S will ship 7 to 14 days after your order is placed. Orders will be shipped on a first-come, first-served basis."

Best Buy, which was also taking pre-orders from walk-in customers, said on Saturday that they too had sold out their pre-order inventories. Wal-Mart is not taking pre-orders, according to conversations with salespeople at several of its stores.

Okay, looks like I'm standing in line. Will there be one Friday? Does Steve Jobs wear black? Does Steve Wozniak dance like a "Teletubby going mad?"

People who pre-ordered through AT&T, however, will get preferential treatment. The carrier has said it will start serving them an hour before than other customers. The only concession Apple's making is to open its retail stores an hour earlier than usual.

What about Best Buy and Wal-Mart? "We haven't been told anything about a camp-out or an early opening," said a Best Buy sales representative Saturday. The word from Wal-Mart was essentially the same.

What will I pay for the iPhone 3G S? Good question. Frankly, that depends on your relationship with AT&T, and if you own an older iPhone. If you're currently not an AT&T customer, you're green: You qualify for the subsidized prices of $199 for the 16GB model and $299 for the 32GB version.

If you are a current iPhone owner, or an AT&T customer who uses another type of phone, you may be eligible for the $199/$299 prices, but there's a good chance you're not. Depending on your situation, you may have to pony up an additional $200, putting the prices at $399 and $499.

And that's made a lot of peoplehot under the collar.

Depending on your situation? What does that mean? On which way the wind's blowing or whether your name starts with "Q."

Okay, both of those are a stretch, but eligibility for the subsidized prices seems to be a state secret at AT&T. Generally speaking, you're more likely to qualify for the $199/$299 prices the closer you are to the end of your current service contract, although there seems to be other criteria in play.

Typically, U.S. consumers must fulfill their contract - two years is the general rule - before they're eligible to get a new phone for free or purchase one at a subsidized price. AT&T's not breaking new ground here.

That hasn't stopped more than 12,500 people - as of Sunday - from signing a Twitter petition calling on AT&T to let existing customers purchase the iPhone 3G S at the same price as new customers. Nor did it stop a crisis communications expert from saying that the company had to move quickly to quell the revolt or risk alienating thousands of people who will jump ship if Apple ends AT&T's exclusive deal next summer. His 48-hour deadline, however, has come and gone, with not a peep out of A&T.

Current AT&T customers can determine their eligibility for the iPhone 3G S' discounted prices online by logging in to their wireless account.

How long will it take to get an iPhone? Not even Tim Cook, the chief operating officer running the company while Jobs gets well, knows that. But we're betting the inside-the-store time will be shorter than last year, when the activation servers crashed about an hour-and-a-half into sales on launch day, and Apple and AT&T sent users home with an expensive brick.

That's because Apple and AT&T have discarded in-store activation, a requirement last year, and will let buyers walk out with an iPhone 3G S, then activate it later in the comfort of their own home via iTunes.

Apple re-instituted online sales about a month ago, but gave the same caveat then as it is now: Only new, single-line accounts are eligible. AT&T started selling iPhones online and allowing at-home activation using iTunes in December 2008.

If iTunes activation sounds familiar, it should: That's the process Apple used in 2007 when it launched the first-generation iPhone. But iTunes activation wasn't completely painless either. Plenty of buyers who had queued up in long lines found that when they finally got home, iTunes was dead in the water. AT&T, not surprisingly, blamed Apple, saying that its partner's servers had melted under the strain.

Should you expect a repeat of 2007? Impossible to know. Cynics like us expect the worst, so when things do go smoothly - and sometimes they do, you know - we get the momentary high of having won a round in the battle against technology.

What do I bring with me to the store? To get out of the store with an iPhone 3G S, you'll need a credit card to pay for the phone. Later, during the iTunes activation process, you'll need your Social Security number for the credit check required by AT&T. If you're ordering online, you need all of that to replace an existing iPhone; to open a new account, you'll also need to enter your billing address and date of birth.

To transfer an existing number to the new iPhone 3G S, you'll also need your current cell number and password or PIN to that account.

Think I'll wait a few days to buy. Is there a way to tell whether the iPhone 3G S is in stock before I drive to the store? (I'm trying to reduce my carbon footprint.) Apple will undoubtedly fire up its inventory tool - which it's used the last two years to report stores with models in stock - so you can check online before you leave the house.

The availability tool will be here when the iPhone 3G S launches Friday. It will reflect next-day's status after 9 p.m. local time for the store you're checking. AT&T didn't have anything like that last year, when it told customers to call local stores before driving. Expect the same this time.

How will I transfer settings, e-mail accounts and text messages from an older iPhone to my new iPhone 3G S? Apple's not posted an updated support document to describe the process - which involves syncing the older iPhone, then restoring the backup to the iPhone 3G S using iTunes - but it's probably going to be identical or at least similar to the instructions from last year.

That support document is available here.

They have this recession goin' on, in case you haven't heard. Anything for someone like me who has an iPhone but doesn't want to shell out $200 (or more) for a new one? You get iPhone 3.0, the newest upgrade to the iPhone's software, which Apple previewed last March and talked up more last week. iPhone 3.0 launches on Wednesday, June 17. Among the new features: copy-paste, MMS, Spotlight search and landscape-mode keyboard.

iPhone 3.0 is free to iPhone owners, but costs iPod Touch users $9.95.

Apple and AT&T also reduced the price of the existing iPhone 3G 8GB to $99, so if you have $100 and an aging first-generation iPhone, you can go that route. Have a little more cash? For $149, you can pick up the 16GB iPhone 3G from AT&T and Best Buy.

Those reduced-price iPhones are available now.