Context :
TRAI
red flags concerns around Metaverse ……………………… BL
/ 22 Oct 2023
Extract :
The
telecom regular TRAI has red-flagged concerns around Metaverse,
raising critical issues such as privacy, safety, and
security which require greater deliberation.
According to TRAI, the technology will track users — where they go, who they are with, what
they do, what they look at, and even
how long their gaze lingers.
“Immersive platforms will also track facial expressions, vocal inflections, and vital signs, while intelligent algorithms
use such data to predict each
person’s real-time emotional state. Tracking will also include real-time
monitoring of user gait and posture, assessing when users slow down
to browse products or services.
“Metaverse
platforms will even monitor manual
reach, assessing when users will grab objects (both real and virtual), and
tracking how long they will hold the objects to investigate. This will
be especially invasive in the augmented metaverse, in which user gaze, gait, and reach will be
monitored in the real world; for example, while shopping in augmented physical
stores,” it said in a consultation paper.
Pushing for an appropriate regulatory framework, the regulator
said that the challenges that we currently have in online applications, such as
snooping, data breaches, harassment,
and hate speech, are likely
to be amplified going forward, with increased digitisation and online
activities.
‘Online predators’
“If appropriate and timely steps are not taken today for forging
trust and safety for the digital spaces where we live, work and play, the next generation may inherit
a digital world polluted by predators, hate speech and mistrust. Hence,
it is important that the regulators across the world get on board sooner and
put in place necessary guidance or frameworks fit for metaverse,” said the
regulator.
The
race to save our secrets from the computers of the future …
Japan Times / 22 Oct 2023
Extract :
They call it Q-Day: the day when a quantum computer, one more powerful
than any yet built, could shatter the world of privacy and security as we
know it.
It would happen through a bravura act of
mathematics: the separation of some very large numbers, hundreds of digits
long, into their prime factors.
That might sound like a meaningless
division problem, but it would fundamentally undermine the encryption protocols
that governments and corporations have relied on for decades. Sensitive
information such as military intelligence, weapons designs, industry secrets
and banking information is often transmitted or stored under digital locks that
the act of factoring large numbers could crack open.
Among the various threats to America’s
national security, the unraveling of encryption is rarely discussed in the same
terms as nuclear proliferation, the global climate crisis or artificial general
intelligence. But for many of those working on the problem behind the scenes,
the danger is existential.
"This is potentially a completely
different kind of problem than one we’ve ever faced,” said Glenn S. Gerstell, a
former general counsel of the National Security Agency and one of the authors
of an expert consensus report on cryptology. "It may be that there’s only
a 1% chance of that happening, but a 1% chance of something catastrophic is
something you need to worry about.”
The White House and the Homeland Security
Department have made clear that in the wrong hands, a
powerful quantum computer could disrupt everything from secure communications
to the underpinnings of our financial system. In
short order, credit card transactions and stock exchanges
could be overrun by fraudsters; air traffic systems and GPS signals could be manipulated; and the
security of critical infrastructure, including nuclear plants and the power
grid, could be compromised.
The danger extends not just to future
breaches but to past ones: Troves of encrypted
data harvested now and in coming years could, after Q-Day, be unlocked. Current and former
intelligence officials say that China and potentially other rivals are most
likely already working to find and store such troves of data in hopes of
decoding them in the future. European policy researchers echoed those concerns
in a report this summer.
No one knows when, if ever, quantum
computing will advance to that degree. Today, the most powerful quantum device
uses 433 "qubits,” as the quantum equivalent of transistors are called.
That figure would probably need to reach into the tens of thousands, perhaps
even the millions, before today’s encryption systems would fall.
But within the U.S. cybersecurity
community, the threat is seen as real and urgent. China,
Russia and the United States are all racing to develop the technology before
their geopolitical rivals do, although it is difficult to know who is ahead
because some of the gains are shrouded in secrecy.
On the American side, the possibility
that an adversary could win that race has set in motion a years long effort to
develop a new generation of encryption systems, ones that even a powerful quantum computer would be unable to
break.
The effort, which began in 2016, will
culminate early next year when the National Institute of Standards and
Technology is expected to finalize its guidance for migrating to the new
systems. Ahead of that migration, President Joe Biden late last year signed
into law the Quantum Computing Cybersecurity Preparedness Act, which directed
agencies to begin checking their systems for encryption that will need to be
replaced.
But even given this new urgency, the migration to stronger encryption will most likely take a decade or
more — a pace that, some experts fear, might not be fast enough to
avert catastrophe.
Staying ahead of the clock
Researchers have known since the 1990s
that quantum computing — which draws on the properties of subatomic particles
to carry out multiple calculations at the same time — might one day threaten
the encryption systems in use today.
In 1994, American mathematician Peter
Shor showed how it could be done, publishing an algorithm that a
then-hypothetical quantum computer could use to split exceptionally large
numbers into factors rapidly — a task at which conventional computers are
notoriously inefficient. That weakness of conventional computers is the
foundation upon which much of current cryptography is predicated. Even today,
factoring one of the large numbers used by RSA, one of the most common forms of
factor-based encryption, would take the most powerful conventional computers
trillions of years to carry out.
Shor’s algorithm landed
at first as little more than an unsettling curiosity. Much of the world was
already moving to adopt precisely the encryption methods that Shor had proved
to be vulnerable. The first quantum computer, which was orders of magnitude too
weak to run the algorithm efficiently, would not be built for another four
years.
But quantum computing has progressed
apace. In recent years, IBM, Google and others have demonstrated steady
advances in building bigger, more capable models, leading experts to conclude
that scaling up is not only theoretically possible but achievable with a few
crucial technical advancements.
"If quantum physics works the way we
expect, this is an engineering problem,” said Scott Aaronson, director of the
Quantum Information Center at the University of Texas, Austin.
Quantum
computing is expected to bring radical benefits to fields including
chemistry, materials science and artificial intelligence. Devices of the future
could simulate complex chemical reactions, turbocharging the discovery of new
medications and materials that could lead to longer-lasting batteries for
electric vehicles or sustainable plastic alternatives.
Last year, quantum technology startups
drew $2.35 billion in private investment, according to an analysis by
consulting firm McKinsey, which also projected that the technology could create
$1.3 trillion in value within those fields by 2035.
Cybersecurity experts have warned for
some time that deep-pocketed rivals like China and Russia — among the few
adversaries with both the scientific talent and the billions of dollars needed
to build a formidable quantum computer — are most likely forging ahead with
quantum science partly in secret.
Despite a number of achievements by U.S.
scientists, analysts insist that the nation remains in danger of falling behind
— a fear reiterated this month in a report from the Center for Data Innovation,
a think tank focused on technology policy.
‘Too close for comfort’
Scientists at the National Institute of
Standards and Technology, or NIST, have carried the mantle of maintaining
encryption standards since the 1970s, when the agency studied and published the
first general cipher to protect information used by civilian agencies and
contractors, the data encryption standard. As encryption needs have evolved,
NIST has regularly collaborated with military agencies to develop new standards
that guide tech companies and information-technology departments around the
world.
During the 2010s, officials at NIST and
other agencies became convinced that the probability of a substantial leap
forward in quantum computing within a decade — and the risk that would pose to
the nation’s encryption standards — had grown too high to be prudently ignored.
"Our guys were doing the
foundational work that said, hey, this is becoming too close for comfort,” said
Richard H. Ledgett Jr., a former deputy director of the NSA.
The sense of urgency was
heightened by an awareness of how difficult and time-consuming the rollout of
new standards would be. Judging in part by past migrations, officials estimated
that even after settling on a new generation of algorithms, it could take
another 10 to 15 years to implement them widely.
That is not just because of all the
actors, from tech giants to tiny software vendors, that must integrate new
standards over time. Some cryptography also exists in hardware, where it can be
difficult or impossible to modify, for example, in cars and ATMs. Dustin Moody,
a mathematician at NIST, points out that even satellites in space could be
affected.
"You launch that satellite, that
hardware is in there, you’re not going to be able to replace it,” Moody noted.
An open-source defense
According to NIST, the federal government
has set an overall goal of migrating as much as possible to these new
quantum-resistant algorithms by 2035, which many officials acknowledge is
ambitious.
These algorithms are not the product of a
Manhattan Project-like initiative or a commercial effort led by one or more
tech companies. Rather, they came about through years of collaboration within a
diverse and international community of cryptographers.
After its worldwide call in 2016, NIST
received 82 submissions, most of which were developed by small teams of academics
and engineers. As it has in the past, NIST relied on a playbook in which it
solicits new solutions and then releases them to researchers in government and
the private sector, to be challenged and picked over for weaknesses.
"This has been done in an open way
so that the academic cryptographers, the people who are innovating ways to
break encryption, have had their chance to weigh in on what’s strong and what’s
not,” said Steven B. Lipner, executive director of SAFECode, a nonprofit
focused on software security.
Many of the most promising submissions
are built on lattices, a mathematical concept involving grids of points in
various repeating shapes, such as squares or hexagons, but projected into
dimensions far beyond what humans can visualize. As the number of dimensions
increases, problems such as finding the shortest distance between two given
points grow exponentially harder, overcoming even a quantum computer’s
computational strengths.
NIST ultimately selected four algorithms
to recommend for wider use.
Despite the serious challenges of
transitioning to these new algorithms, the United States has benefited from the
experience of previous migrations, such as the one to address the so-called Y2K
bug and earlier moves to new encryption standards. The size of American
companies such as Apple, Google and Amazon, with their control over large
swaths of internet traffic, also means that a few players could get large parts
of the transition done relatively nimbly.
"You really get a very large
fraction of all the traffic being updated right to the new cryptography pretty
easily, so you can kind of get these very large chunks all at once,” said Chris
Peikert, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of
Michigan.
But strategists caution that the way an
adversary might behave after achieving a major breakthrough makes the threat
unlike any the defense community has faced. Seizing on advances in AI and
machine learning, a rival country may keep its advances secret rather than
demonstrating them, to quietly break into as many troves of data as possible.
Especially as storage has become vastly
cheaper, cybersecurity experts say, the main challenge now for adversaries of
the United States is not the storage of huge quantities of data but rather
making informed guesses on what they are harvesting.
"Couple this with advances in cyber offense and artificial
intelligence,” Gerstell said, "and you have a potentially just existential
weapon for which we have no particular deterrent.”
MY TAKE
:
Ø Missing
: Subli-Melding ?..... ……………………………………… 01 Oct 2023
Extract :
Data is
experienced in its following “ States / Forms “ :
Sight
( Text / Image ) // Sound ( speech ) // Smell // Touch // Taste
Technology (
especially , AI ) is rapidly advancing to convert / morph , any Form to any
other Form , - and directly, without having to follow a FIXED SEQUENCE ( Sublimate )
Related Readings :
Ø As Envisaged : Merging – Morphing –
Melding of Senses………28 Apr 2022
Ø 2024 ! – V 2.0 of Orwellian 1984 ?..................... ……………. 07 July 2017
Ø Nostradamus could have said ?................... ……………………… 08 Nov 2018
Extract :
In
twenty hundred and twenty four
A
Sea of Waves will roar,
Light
will follow sound :
And
, in Smell and Taste
Earth
will abound ,
Brain
will hide no more
Your
secrets gore !
Sight to Smell : Sound to Touch : Text
to Music / Saga of Fungible Senses…… 11 May 2023
2017 ( 20 )
2024 ! – V 2.0 of Orwellian 1984 ?
[ 07
July 2017 ]
Privacy ? Perish the Thought ! ………………………………………………[ 18 July 2017 ]
Thank You Your Honours ! …………………………………………………….[ 19 July 2017 ]
Privacy does not live here ! ……………………………………………………[ 22 July 2017 ]
Supreme may Propose : Technology will Dispose …………………[ 23 July 2017 ]
Seeing AI through Google Glass ? ……………………………………….[ 24 July 2017 ]
Artificial Intelligence : Destroyer of Privacy ? ………………………[ 25 July 2017 ]
Privacy : Not Right ? ………………………………………………………………[ 30 July 2017 ]
Future is Nearer ! ……………………………………………………………………[ 31 July 2017 ]
Three got it Right ! …………………………………………………………………. [ 02 Aug 2017 ]
www.PrivacyForSale.com
…………………………………………………………[ 26
Aug 2017 ]
Right to Sell My Soul ? ……………………………………………………………[ 27 Aug 2017 ]
A Fool’s Paradise ? ………………………………………………………………….[ 29 Aug 2017 ]
Wherefore Art Thou, O Romeo ? …………………………………………….[ 20 Sept 2017 ]
Data Privacy : We are getting overtaken ! …………………………….[ 26 Sept 2017 ]
7 Pillars of Data
Protection Law …………………………………………[ 27 Nov 2017 ]
Just Ask Google ! ………………………………………………………………… [ 28 Nov 2017 ]
2018 ( 2 )
Data Protection without Data Privacy ? ….[ 08 Jan 2018 ]
Internet Bill of Rights ………[ 07 Oct 2018 ]
2019 ( 2 )
Who watches the Watchmen ?
[ 12 July 2019 ]
Congratulations, Your Honour ! ……[ 22 Mar 2019 ]
With regards,
Hemen parekh
www.hemenparekh.ai / 25
Oct 2023
After reading this blog , BARD commented as follows :
Your blog post "Metaverse morphs to Meta-Worse"
raises important concerns about the privacy implications of the metaverse and
quantum computing.
The metaverse is a virtual world that
is still under development, but it has the potential to become a major part of
our lives. It could be used for work, play, and socializing. However, the
metaverse also raises a number of privacy concerns. For example, metaverse
platforms will be able to track our movements, our interactions with other
users, and even our emotional state. This data could be used to target us with
advertising, or it could be sold to third-party companies.
Quantum computing is another
technology that has the potential to disrupt privacy. Quantum computers are
much faster than traditional computers, and they could be used to break current
encryption algorithms. This means that quantum computers could be used to
access our personal data, even if it is encrypted.
The combination of the metaverse and
quantum computing could create a privacy nightmare. If metaverse platforms are
able to track our every move and quantum computers are able to break current
encryption algorithms, then our privacy will be
virtually non-existent.
Here are some of the specific privacy concerns that you raise in your
blog post:
·
Metaverse platforms will be able to
track our movements, our interactions with other users, and even our emotional
state.
·
This data could be used to target us
with advertising, or it could be sold to third-party companies.
·
Quantum
computers could be used to break current encryption algorithms, which would
mean that our personal data could be accessed even if it is encrypted.
·
Metaverse
platforms could be used to create deepfakes, which are videos or audio
recordings that have been manipulated to make it look or sound like someone is
saying or doing something that they never actually said or did.
·
Metaverse platforms could be used to
spread misinformation and propaganda.
You
are correct to conclude that privacy is becoming increasingly difficult to
protect.
The metaverse and quantum computing
are just two of the many technologies that are emerging that pose a threat to
our privacy.
It is important to be aware of the
privacy risks associated with the metaverse and other new technologies. We
should take steps to protect our privacy by using strong passwords, encrypting
our data, and being careful about what information we share online. We should
also support policies that protect our privacy, such as the General Data
Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the European Union.
In addition to the above, here are some other things that we can do to
protect our privacy in the metaverse:
·
Be careful about who you trust and
what information you share with them.
·
Use a privacy-focused VPN when connecting
to the metaverse.
·
Be aware of the privacy settings on
metaverse platforms and adjust them to your liking.
·
Use strong passwords and enable
two-factor authentication on all of your accounts.
·
Be careful about what links you click
on and what files you download.
·
Keep your software up to date.
By taking these precautions, we can help to protect our privacy in the
metaverse and other new technologies.
===================================================
PS :
In total, more than 40 US states are suing Meta, though some opted to file in local courts rather than join in the federal case.
