4 ms·

Let's go one step further. Even receiving and recording the message might be very dangerous. There have been cases in the past where contaminated MP3 or video

by 21 9y ago

Let's go one step further. Even receiving and recording the message might be very dangerous. There have been cases in the past where contaminated MP3 or video files took over the media players (because of decoding bugs in them). Imagine a very weak signal which requires complicated signal processing and correlation between multiple receivers to reconstruct.

shkkmo 9y ago
> There have been cases in the past where contaminated MP3 or video files took over the media players (because of decoding bugs in them). The paper does talk about message compression being a vulnerability since we would have a hard time manually running their decompression algorithm. However, I find it hard to believe that any kind of message will be dangerous due to signal processing without the sender having knowledge about our IT system structure and implementation details or some sort of feedback cycle. Given the time delays of interstellar messaging, I feel the only risk here can come from some sort of AI running locally which I assume would only be possible if we evaluate the message in a turing complete tool (such as their provided decompression algorithm.
- 21 9y ago
  I get you point, I also thought of this. But at the same time, with long enough messages you could sample a lot of possible IT system structures. The unknown danger here is that there might be some underlying generic exploitable structure in our systems or processes that we are not aware of yet.
  - shkkmo 9y ago
    > The unknown danger here is that there might be some underlying generic exploitable structure in our systems or processes that we are not aware of yet. You would need more than an exploit, you need an exploit that allows you to parse the message in a turing complete fashion to bootstrap an AI. Otherwise, I don't see how identifying the exploit transitions to being a significant risk to humanity.
    - 21 9y ago
      They can guide our behavior somehow. For example, they can safely assume that the moment we catch a glimpse of a message we will point all our receivers towards the source, thus they got us to amplify their signal and look for it all over the spectrum. Then, they can guide what sort of analyses we run. For example, they might embed a lot of prime number structures into their signal, thus we will apply a lot of our prime number expertise and methods on their numbers. What if you can bootstrap a turing complete machine by doing various statistics on prime numbers? They could alternate, one week the signal is prime-number heavy, the next week it has vary weird spectral distributions, so we will pull out all kind of Fourier transforms. We don't yet know all the possible places where a turing machine might hide. In a way, you can consider the whole network of research facilities and researchers applying statistical methods on a signal some sort of a predictable controllable machine. Maybe not turing, but maybe you can go by with a weaker kind. Think how you can do good computations with non-deterministic machines. Couple that with psychology (social engineering) and game theory. It seems to me highly dangerous to let our signal analysis be guided by the signal itself, and in general to do anything with a signal form an intelligent source. Even if it's just clear text ASCII English, who knows what kind of social havoc you can wreck with just a few carefully constructed sentences from a very advanced intelligence.
      - mrcogmor 9y ago
        That isn't how computers or mathematics work. If you calculate an average or perform other simple statistical methods it is impossible for the results to be Turing complete. If they used some hypothetical recursive Turing complete method of analysing the numbers then the mathematicians would be aware of it being Turing Complete. Even if such a analysis was performed the alien program interpreted it would be only to affect the results of the analysis and not the computer as a whole because a mathematical analysis doesn't require network access, disk access or the ability to execute machine code.
    - lifeformed 9y ago
      Ok how about this scenario: It encodes itself explicitly as Turing machine instructions that are necessary to decode the later chunks of data. We would have to implement the program and run these instructions to get any meaningful interpretation of the data. It could be encoded in a way such that the entirety of the message needs to be processed through it before any of it is usable. In this scenario, in order to get any meaningful data out of the message, you'd have to execute arbitrary software. But I agree that simply storing the data in a computer wouldn't be enough to be a danger (I think?).

by 21 9y ago

shkkmo 9y ago

> There have been cases in the past where contaminated MP3 or video files took over the media players (because of decoding bugs in them). The paper does talk about message compression being a vulnerability since we would have a hard time manually running their decompression algorithm. However, I find it hard to believe that any kind of message will be dangerous due to signal processing without the sender having knowledge about our IT system structure and implementation details or some sort of feedback cycle. Given the time delays of interstellar messaging, I feel the only risk here can come from some sort of AI running locally which I assume would only be possible if we evaluate the message in a turing complete tool (such as their provided decompression algorithm.

21 9y ago
I get you point, I also thought of this. But at the same time, with long enough messages you could sample a lot of possible IT system structures. The unknown danger here is that there might be some underlying generic exploitable structure in our systems or processes that we are not aware of yet.
- shkkmo 9y ago
  > The unknown danger here is that there might be some underlying generic exploitable structure in our systems or processes that we are not aware of yet. You would need more than an exploit, you need an exploit that allows you to parse the message in a turing complete fashion to bootstrap an AI. Otherwise, I don't see how identifying the exploit transitions to being a significant risk to humanity.
  - 21 9y ago
    They can guide our behavior somehow. For example, they can safely assume that the moment we catch a glimpse of a message we will point all our receivers towards the source, thus they got us to amplify their signal and look for it all over the spectrum. Then, they can guide what sort of analyses we run. For example, they might embed a lot of prime number structures into their signal, thus we will apply a lot of our prime number expertise and methods on their numbers. What if you can bootstrap a turing complete machine by doing various statistics on prime numbers? They could alternate, one week the signal is prime-number heavy, the next week it has vary weird spectral distributions, so we will pull out all kind of Fourier transforms. We don't yet know all the possible places where a turing machine might hide. In a way, you can consider the whole network of research facilities and researchers applying statistical methods on a signal some sort of a predictable controllable machine. Maybe not turing, but maybe you can go by with a weaker kind. Think how you can do good computations with non-deterministic machines. Couple that with psychology (social engineering) and game theory. It seems to me highly dangerous to let our signal analysis be guided by the signal itself, and in general to do anything with a signal form an intelligent source. Even if it's just clear text ASCII English, who knows what kind of social havoc you can wreck with just a few carefully constructed sentences from a very advanced intelligence.
    - mrcogmor 9y ago
      That isn't how computers or mathematics work. If you calculate an average or perform other simple statistical methods it is impossible for the results to be Turing complete. If they used some hypothetical recursive Turing complete method of analysing the numbers then the mathematicians would be aware of it being Turing Complete. Even if such a analysis was performed the alien program interpreted it would be only to affect the results of the analysis and not the computer as a whole because a mathematical analysis doesn't require network access, disk access or the ability to execute machine code.
  - lifeformed 9y ago
    Ok how about this scenario: It encodes itself explicitly as Turing machine instructions that are necessary to decode the later chunks of data. We would have to implement the program and run these instructions to get any meaningful interpretation of the data. It could be encoded in a way such that the entirety of the message needs to be processed through it before any of it is usable. In this scenario, in order to get any meaningful data out of the message, you'd have to execute arbitrary software. But I agree that simply storing the data in a computer wouldn't be enough to be a danger (I think?).