Warrant Canaries are Here

A term that was new to me .... I remember well the notion of the 'canary in the coal mine', the canary tells us by dying, that something has happened.  Now the idea is broadened technically to indicate a simple signal that something has changed in a company, system. status ... '  The signal can be read by people or machines.       Warrant Canaries.

Recently discussed in an excellent Twit TV podcast .....
Also quoting from the podcast notes:

'.... A proposed standard for making warrant canaries machine readable.

This tidbit popped-up a few weeks ago and I didn't want to skip it:
https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2019/12/19/proposed-standard-would-make-warrant-canarie
s-machine-readable/

The term “Canary” comes from the idea of taking a canary down into a coal mine as a low-tech oxygen and noxious gas monitor. Wiktionary defines a “Canary in a coal mine” as “Something whose sensitivity to adverse conditions makes it a useful early indicator of such conditions; something which warns of the coming of greater danger or trouble by a deterioration in its health or welfare.”

Which brings us to “Warrant Canaries”...
The trouble was that government warrants compelling the release of information were typically accompanied by gag orders enjoining the served party from making any disclosures about being in receipt of such a warrant. In other words: "You must provide us with the following information and you cannot tell anyone that we asked and you provided."

When it was passed in 2001, the US Patriot Act enabled authorities to access personal information stored by a service provider about US citizens. It also let them issue gag orders that would prevent the organisation from telling anyone about it. It meant that the government could access an individual’s private information without that person knowing.

Privacy respecting companies like ISPs and cloud service providers want their users to know whether the government is asking for this information. The idea of the Warrant Canary was first conceived by a guy named Steve Schear in 2002 after the Patriot Act came into effect. The idea was to provide a passive way of warning people that an organisation holding their data has received a subpoena.

The idea is sheer brilliance: Instead of an organization telling people that it has been served with a subpoena (which is illegal under the Patriot Act), the organisation stops telling them that it hasn’t been service with a subpoena.

To do this, the organization displays a public statement online that it only changes if the authorities serve it with a warrant. As long as the statement stays unchanged, individuals know that their information is safe. But if the "nothing to see here, move along" statement changes or disappears, they can infer that all is not well without the organisation explicitly saying so.

The idea is clever, but, until now it hasn't scaled well. That may be about to change. The problem is that these statements have been ad hoc and designed to be read, interpreted and understood by people. This makes them difficult to track and monitor at scale... Which is what a warrant canary standard would solve.  ... "

The Efficient Mathematics of Cells

Neural nets are great simplifications of how real neurons work,  but have now been used to solve very tough computational goals.  can other examples given by nature help us as well?  I see it every day in my gardens, plants know how to seek light and water.   Converting sensing into seeking.   But are there other deeper levels of value we can adapt for our use?  A kind of learn and mimic among forms among life forms? A form of synthetic biology?  But with our own goals inserted.  Here an possible example:

The Math That Tells Cells What They Are    in Quanta Magazine

During development, cells seem to decode their fate through optimal information processing, which could hint at a more general principle of life.

'..Cells in embryos need to make their way across a “developmental landscape” to their eventual fate. New findings bear on how they may do this so efficiently....'

Adrian du Buisson for Quanta Magazine
By Jordana Cepelewicz Staff Writer

In 1891, when the German biologist Hans Driesch split two-cell sea urchin embryos in half, he found that each of the separated cells then gave rise to its own complete, albeit smaller, larva. Somehow, the halves “knew” to change their entire developmental program: At that stage, the blueprint for what they would become had apparently not yet been drawn out, at least not in ink.

Since then, scientists have been trying to understand what goes into making this blueprint, and how instructive it is. (Driesch himself, frustrated at his inability to come up with a solution, threw up his hands and left the field entirely.) It’s now known that some form of positional information makes genes variously switch on and off throughout the embryo, giving cells distinct identities based on their location. But the signals carrying that information seem to fluctuate wildly and chaotically — the opposite of what you might expect for an important guiding influence....."

Omohundro on Costly Signalling

Interesting thoughts, can this be implemented in a behaviorally predictive system?

What Scientific Term or Concept Ought to be more Widely Known?
By Steve Omohundro   Scientist, Self-Aware Systems; Co-founder, Center for Complex Systems Research

Costly Signalling

If something doesn't make sense, your go-to hypothesis should be "costly signalling." The core idea is more than a century old, but new wrinkles deserve wider exposure. Veblen's "conspicuous consumption" explained why people lit their cigars with $100 bills as a costly signal of their wealth. Later economists showed that a signal of a hidden trait becomes reliable if the cost of faking it is more than the expected gain. For example, Spence showed that college degrees (even in irrelevant subjects) can reliably signal good future employees because they are too costly for bad employees to obtain.

Darwin said, "The sight of a feather in a peacock's tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick!" because he couldn't see its adaptive benefit. It makes perfect sense as a costly signal, however, because the peacock has to be quite fit to survive with a tail like that! Why do strong gazelles waste time and energy "stotting" (jumping vertically) when they see a cheetah? That is a costly signal of their strength and the cheetahs chase after other gazelles. Biologists came to accept the idea only in 1990 and now apply it to signalling between parents and offspring, predator and prey, males and females, siblings, and many other relationships.

Technology is just getting on the bandwagon. The integrity of the cryptocurrency "bitcoin" is maintained by bitcoin "miners" who get paid in bitcoin. The primary deception risk is "sybil attacks," where a single participant pretends to be many miners in an attempt to subvert the network's integrity. Bitcoin counters this by requiring miners to solve costly cryptographic puzzles in order to add blocks to the blockchain. Bitcoin mining currently burns up a gigawatt of electricity, which is about a billion dollars a year at US rates. Venezuela is in economic turmoil and some starving citizens are resorting to breaking into zoos to eat the animals. At the same time, enterprising Venezuelan bitcoin miners are using the cheap electricity there to earn $1200 per day. Notice the strangeness of this: By proving they have uselessly burned up precious resources, they cause another country to send them food!

As a grad student in Berkeley, I used to wonder why a preacher would often preach on the main plaza. Every time he would be harassed by a large crowd and I never saw him gain any converts. Costly signalling explains that preaching to that audience was a much better signal of his faith and commitment than would preaching to a more receptive audience. In fact, the very antagonism of his audience increased the cost and therefore the reliability of his signal.

A similar idea is playing out today in social media. Scott Alexander points out that the animal rights group PETA is much better known than the related group Vegan Outreach. PETA makes outrageous statements and performs outrageous acts which generate a lot of antagonism and are therefore costly signals. They have thrown red paint on women wearing furs and offered to pay Detroit water bills for families who agree to stop eating meat. They currently have a campaign to investigate the Australian who punched a kangaroo to rescue his dog. Members who promote ambiguous or controversial positions signal their commitment to their cause in a way that more generally accepted positions would not. For example, if they had a campaign to prevent the torture of kittens, everyone would agree and members wouldn't have a strong signal of their commitment to animal rights. ... 

This connects to meme propagation in an interesting way. Memes that everyone agree with typically don't spread very far because they don't signal anything about the sender. Nobody is tweeting that "2+2=4." But controversial memes make a statement. They cause people with an opposing view to respond with opposing memes. As CGP Grey beautifully explained, opposing memes synergistically help each other to spread. They also create a cost for the senders in the form of antagonistic pushback from believers in the opposing meme. But from the view of costly signalling, this is good! If you have enemies attacking you for your beliefs, you better demonstrate your belief and commitment by spreading them even more! Both sides get this boost of reliable signalling and are motivated to intensify meme wars. ... "