Truth, Trust, and Deepfakes

You never write, you never call, you never send flowers “just because.” But that’s ok, we welcome you back to another scintillating episode of Radio Free HPC anyway. Henry is traveling on yet another business trip, lodged in the Washington, DC area, and not even in his favorite hotel chain. But his reputation as a team player goes back to his days in the bayou, Dan says. And he performs another skillful yet awkward segue from Henry’s swamp origins to the swamp-like nature of the internet, which brings us to our special guest.

What’s true? What’s real? And how can we KNOW it?

We welcome Dave Maher, CTO of internet security company Intertrust, to share with us his deep knowledge of digital communication, identity management, data rights management, cryptography and digital certificates, blockchain, and much else. This whole subject is very much in his wheelhouse.

Dave gave us the run down on Intertrust and his other roles in the cybersecurity arena. Dan opens up the questioning with “Dave, do we really need security on the internet?” Dave, quick on the draw, responded “Well, we really haven’t had it for the last 20 years, so why start now?” which got the conversation off and running. Dave talked about the evolution of the internet and the rising need for security given that the internet has vastly changed since it began so long ago.

The main topic of the conversation is authenticity and truth. With the rise of deepfakes (images or videos that are convincingly falsified), how do we know that what we’re seeing and hearing is created by who we think and is what we think?

This leads to a deep conversation on ways we can verify content so that we know that it’s authentic. There are many ways of approaching it, but some implementation of blockchain seems to be a promising route.

Listen to the pod and get hipped to this very important topic. Shahin keeps saying it's the grand challenge of our time. He might be right.

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Quantum Supremacy? Yes and No!

Quantum Supremacy Is and Is Not

How quantum is that?! The RadioFreeHPC team discusses the Google/NASA paper, titled "Quantum Supremacy Using a Programmable Superconducting Processor", that was published and then unpublished. But it's the internet and everything is a "digital tattoo", so there are copies out there (see below).

The paper, right in its title, and at least in that draft form, claimed Quantum supremacy. "Doing what?" we hope you ask. Well, nothing particularly significant, and decidedly quantum-friendly. You might even call it "embarrassingly quantum" since quantum is all about probability functions and this experiment samples the probability distribution of a repeated experiment. But it's not nothing. 

One scary consequence of quantum supremacy is its ability to readily factorize large numbers which could be used to unscramble encrypted data. But A) this is not what happened, B) it's not expected to happen any time soon (think years), and C) it will depend on the specific encryption algorithm. We must say, however, that the paper looks pretty good. Here's the abstract. Click on the title to read it all:

Quantum supremacy using a programmable superconducting processor

Google AI Quantum and collaborators The tantalizing promise of quantum computers is that certain computational tasks might be executed exponentially faster on a quantum processor than on a classical processor. A fundamental challenge is to build a high-fidelity processor capable of running quantum algorithms in an exponentially large computational space. Here, we report using a processor with programmable superconducting qubits to create quantum states on 53 qubits, occupying a state space 2⁵³∼10¹⁶. Measurements from repeated experiments sample the corresponding probability distribution, which we verify using classical simulations. While our processor takes about 200 seconds to sample one instance of the quantum circuit 1 million times, a state-of-the-art supercomputer would require approximately 10,000 years to perform the equivalent task. This dramatic speedup relative to all known classical algorithms provides an experimental realization of quantum supremacy on a computational task and heralds the advent of a much-anticipated computing paradigm.

LANL gets the First 5,000 Qubit D-Wave

Meanwhile, D-Wave announced that its new 5,000 qubit quantum computer has found its first home at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). Qubits are different from vendor to vendor in terms of the underlying technology and implementation. Shahin lists several.

@RadioFreeHPC Update

So proud of you all! At the time of this writing, @RadioFreeHPC has soared to about 16 followers. We're pretty much there. Thank you!

Henry Newman's Why No One Should be Online, Ever.

Henry tells the fascinating story of Krebs thwarting the nefarious schemes of a professional hacker who aimed to frame him and actually mailed him narcotics. The mastermind behind it was was arrested and imprisoned for unrelated charges. Henry is really turning this into a good news segment. Dan isn't encouraged, however.

Catch of the Week

Shahin talks about using consumer electronics to build supercomputers, mentioning the recent 1,060 node Raspberry Pi cluster built by Oracle, reminiscent of the one LANL did in 2017. AFRL build a 1,760 node cluster of PlayStations, based on the IBM/Sony/Toshiba Cell processor, in 2010 following similar efforts starting in the mid 2000s. He also recalls similar projects he may have had something to do with: SGI's Project Molecule and Project Kelvin (for cooling) in 2008 (also here), and also a cluster of JavaStations at Sun in the late 90s.

Dan discusses a UCLA project to use the thermoelectric effect and build "a device that makes electricity at night using heat radiating from the ground". Intriguing, but looks a tad too pricey for what it can deliver right now.

Speaking of Intriguing, Henry talks about DNA storage. Incredible data density, but don't ask what file system it uses or whether you can have it on a USB stick any time soon. Dan and Shahin seem to have more fun with this topic than Henry!

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Is Our Future Liquid Cooled? Also: Provenance of Surveillance Data!

The Veracity and Provenance of Surveillance Data

Controversy strikes when news breaks that "Amazon's home security company Ring has enlisted local police departments around the country to advertise its surveillance cameras in exchange for free Ring products and a "portal" that allows police to request footage from these cameras, a secret agreement obtained by Motherboard shows."
The nature of such agreements can, well, garner national attention, as we see here (and do our part). That kind of attention led to the PD cited in the news in Lakeland, FL, to clarify its relationship with Ring, saying "their agreement isn't about fostering a particular brand of doorbell, but rather any tool that helps crime-fighting." Several important topics come up which can easily kindle, if not ignite, passions, and they do here also.
All of this is because the evidentiary benefits of actual images is not in doubt. Or is it?! An important issue in this day and age is the veracity and provenance of video feeds, which are liable to be complete fabrications. Welcome to the digital age!

New Supercomputer in Austria

A new system built by Lenovo checks in at #82 on the TOP500 list and is liquid cooled, leading to a debate on the future of cooling and various forms of liquid-cooling: direct contact, immersion, phase chance. Dan puts Henry and Shahin on the spot to look in the crystal ball and see if they can see it as clearly as he does. He thinks they failed.

Catch of the Week

Henry:

Apple looks ahead to 5G with purchase of Intel’s smartphone-modem unit

Apple is paying Intel $1 billion for the chip maker’s smartphone-modem division in a deal driven by the upcoming transition to the next generation of wireless technology.
The agreement announced Thursday comes three months after Apple AAPL, -2.12%   ended a long-running dispute with one of Intel’s rivals, Qualcomm QCOM, -0.07%  . That ensured Apple would have a pipeline of chips it needs for future iPhones to work on ultrafast wireless networks known as 5G.
The Apple-Qualcomm truce prompted Intel INTC, -1.91%   to abandon its attempts to make chips for 5G modems, effectively putting that part of its business up for grabs.

 

Shahin:

Shahin talks about Stephen Wolfram's blog describing his appearance before a US Senate committee.

Testifying at the Senate about A.I.-Selected Content on the Internet

Three and a half weeks ago I got an email asking me if I’d testify at a hearing of the US Senate Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, Innovation and the Internet. Given that the title of the hearing was “Optimizing for Engagement: Understanding the Use of Persuasive Technology on Internet Platforms” I wasn’t sure why I’d be relevant.
But then the email went on: “The hearing is intended to examine, among other things, whether...

Dan:

An entire nation just got hacked

(CNN) - Asen Genov is pretty furious. His personal data was made public this week after records of more than 5 million Bulgarians got stolen by hackers from the country's tax revenue office.
In a country of just 7 million people, the scale of the hack means that just about every working adult has been affected.  

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Is cloud too expensive for HPC?

Is cloud too expensive for HPC?

Enquiring minds want to know, as does the HPC community whose single-minded obsession with maximum price-performance is notorious and legendary. The Radio Free team looks at actual cloud pricing based on available data and Dan's research which fuel a hearty discussion.

They look at configurations, compare prices, talk about the costs that are not included, segment the market, and then segment the applications.

Catch of the Week

Henry:

Henry highlights of the importance of having external 3rd party teams and defined processes (FIPS, Common Criteria, GDPR, etc.) test your equipment. This follows the detection of vulnerabilities in a data center class SSD. Nobody can disagree with that, of course.

Shahin:

Reflections on Trusting Trust, Turing Award Lecture by Ken Thompson

To what extent should one trust a statement that a program is free of Trojan horses? Perhaps it is more important to trust the people who wrote the software.
[...]

In college, before video games, we would amuse our- selves by posing programming exercises. One of the favorites was to write the shortest self-reproducing pro- gram. Since this is an exercise divorced from reality, the usual vehicle was FORTRAN. Actually, FORTRAN was the language of choice for the same reason that three-legged races are popular.

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Multicore Scaling Slow Down, and Fooling AI

The team has an animated discussion about multicore scaling, how easy it seems to be to mislead AI systems, and some good sized catches of the week. A common thread is "data" as is often the case these days.

We continue with making these introductions pretty brief here. This time, we include not only the links but also the first paragraph of the linked page as a block quote so you have a bit more information about what is discussed.

Specialized Chips Won’t Save Us From Impending ‘Accelerator Wall’

As CPU performance improvements have slowed down, we’ve seen the semiconductor industry move towards accelerator cards to provide dramatically better results. Nvidia has been a major beneficiary of this shift, but it’s part of the same trend driving research into neural network accelerators, FPGAs, and products like Google’s TPU. These accelerators have delivered tremendous performance boosts in recent years, raising hopes that they present a path forward, even as Moore’s law scaling runs out. A new paper suggests this may be less true than many would like.

Nice 'AI solution' you've bought yourself there. Not deploying it direct to users, right? Here's why maybe you shouldn't

Top tip: Ask your vendor what it plans to do about adversarial examples.
RSA It’s trivial to trick neural networks into making completely incorrect decisions, just by feeding them dodgy input data, and there are no foolproof ways to avoid this, a Googler warned today.

Catch of the Week

MyEquifax.com Bypasses Credit Freeze PIN

Most people who have frozen their credit files with Equifax have been issued a numeric Personal Identification Number (PIN) which is supposed to be required before a freeze can be lifted or thawed. Unfortunately, if you don’t already have an account at the credit bureau’s new myEquifax portal, it may be simple for identity thieves to lift an existing credit freeze at Equifax and bypass the PIN armed with little more than your, name, Social Security number and birthday.

Announcing the Open Sourcing of Windows Calculator

Today, we’re excited to announce that we are open sourcing Windows Calculator on GitHub under the MIT License. This includes the source code, build system, unit tests, and product roadmap. Our goal is to build an even better user experience in partnership with the community. We are encouraging your fresh perspectives and increased participation to help define the future of Calculator.

Huawei Sues The US, Prodding It to Prove Suspicions

THE WORLD'S LARGEST telecommunications-equipment company, China's Huawei, is suing the US government. But the suit isn't just about US law. It's part of Huawei's larger campaign to defend its role as a global provider of telecom gear amid fears that its technology is or could be used by the Chinese government for spying. In essence, Huawei is challenging the US government to prove its suspicions.

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