Annual Report 2006: Fill & Download for Free

A lot of people have asked me for a warning on this answer. It's very long, and very detailed explanation to support my belief of what the future is going to hinge on us getting right. That said, if at any time you feel yourself losing interest, please take that time to skip to the bottom section, after the family on the beach, to see why I wrote it. Thanks and please enjoy the essay.If one scrolls through the many answers of this question, "What are the biggest ways in which the world will be be different 20 years from now, the greatest 'X factors' that will change our lives," they'll see many wildly bold, exciting, and optimistic predictions of a future not far from us today. So far, they have ranged from technological leaps in machine automation, biotech, robotic swarms, and 3D printing; to social evolutions such as the conversion to all credit economies, an end to diseases, the post-scarcity, and new levels of international individual equality. Yet more promise better governance via more openness, and even a possible end to war through an even more interconnected world. Of course, others are going the other direction with predictions of diseases we haven't yet discovered, or worse, haven't yet invented. Some warn weapons too terrifying to detail. Others have echoed cautionary tales against the possible destruction of us all through climate change, energy crisis, nuclear devastation, and now to add to the list... radical religious fundamentalism.As I scroll through I, like many of you reading, are wondering to myself what the odds of any one of these outcomes may be. Some seem well thought out, bringing in insights from brilliant minds. Some are simply ridiculous. I am left, however, with one surreal and terrifying truth... at least a few of them will be right. Some of these predictions, wild as they may be, will come true. The sad thing is, we aren't really sure which ones. All we can be sure of, is that there will be change. Change, however it happens, is the one certainty among all this speculation.Change will most certainly come, but it won't come alone. After great change, there is always a period of disruption. Disruption is often used in Silicon Valley to symbolize the moment one company strikes it rich by finding an unknown vacuum to fill, a need to satiate, or dismantling an inefficient system. For many others, it is the fear that automation will leave them and millions of others out of a job and no hope to fill it. To some governments, disruption means a protest of thousands of angry and jobless people turning into a riot, or even a full blown rebellion. Disruption may be in the creation or destruction of entire industries, or as has been the case very recently, entire regimes. Most of the world has already experienced a decade pass where we feel less safe, less secure, and less sure that some catastrophic event won't destroy our lives in the blink of an eye or the click of a mouse. Likewise, many millions have already felt the effects of change destabilize their nations with ramifications that will echo for years to come. Many of the other answers to this question have illustrated why, whether they intended to or not.Consider a case study in change and disruption that was the Arab Spring of 2010. Then, new technology gave way to empowering the youth of several nations with information. A wave of democratic energy swept across the region. Caught in this wave were dictators over nations like Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, and Syria. The world watched in amazement as millions upon millions flooded streets to demand change. To them, change indeed came. In several nations, reforms are taking root, and dictatorial regimes have been replaced, if not ousted entirely. Millions are indeed living freer lives.But...At the same time, today there are three nations currently gripped in struggles of civil war, numerous uprisings already violently crushed, millions already killed, and many tens of millions of people displaced from their homes both nearby and across the world. Worse yet, chaos and anarchy in the region formed in the void of power that once existed under the despots who ruled there. In that void grew medieval death cults bent on absolute devastation and the full scale disruption of the Western world, for no other reason than that the West needed to be disrupted. Today, news of the Middle East centers only on one word - Chaos.This isn't to say that change is necessarily a bad thing, nor even that the disruption that change brings is evil in itself. It is just acknowledging that change happens, and that where change occurs, not far behind it, disruption is sure to follow. Finally, where disruption takes place, as we have seen in Middle East, instability is sure to follow, as well. It is this instability that leads to the crises which we hear about daily, and this instability that creates an ever widening gulf between where are today and the world we envisioned for it twenty years ago. Furthermore, as we experience yet more change, the kinds of technological, social, and political changes highlighted over and over throughout this question, instability will build upon itself, sometimes making way for progress and improvements, but other times, most of the time, preparing the ground for the kinds of horrors that only come from the vacuum where order once existed. It is in these environments desperation happens, and the kind of dangerous actions take place which only further dismantle everything. We see a model of this in Syria, where a desperate leader does unspeakable things to his people, to stop rebels and religious fanatics, all empowered by modern technology, both military and civilian. From the chaos of that nation we have seen yet more chaos spread far beyond when millions fled to Europe, bringing with them terror hidden as one of the refugees.For this reason, the real "X factor" won't be any one technology or suite of technologies. It won't be an idea or a revolutionary act of governance, nor will be the culmination of one single ideological movement. The real "X factor" will be how we deal with all of these changes that are sure to come. How do we deal with change which could come from any source, at any time? How can we continue our operations when others fall into chaos? How do we guarantee safety when we have no guarantees on what tomorrow will look like? The world will change, but it will be the people who can adapt to that change that will survive it the best. Those people are going to be the ones who protect themselves, their communities, and their assets. As others fail and a little bit more chaos is built, these groups and individuals will be those who provide the long term stability needed and become anchors in ever changing worlds. For that reason, the true "X factor" in the future will be the force, in all its forms, that allows the most positive change for the greatest numbers of people, while preventing the kinds of negative change that pulls us all a little bit closer to the abyss.The factor, is security.But wait, security isn't something that is "possible." It is everywhere around us already. While I would agree, this answer will seek to explain just how good our security needs to be in the future, and how it has failed us today. More so than this, I want to show all the needs we have for security already, and how improbable it is that we will live in perfect peace in the next twenty years. Internationally, 2015 saw a surge in terrorism born from conflicts in the Middle East. Attacks in Paris, one at the beginning and again the end of the year, along with another in California, woke many in the West to the present threat that exists when terrorists inspired by jihad overseas are brewed at home. The year also saw tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of individuals hacked in some of the largest information attacks in history. Going beyond this, privately operated drones are now being empowered not only to deliver mail to our doorstep, but to look right in on our lives, as well. What this means for today is a desperate scramble to attempt to find a new normal which we can all feel a sense of peace. What it will mean in the next twenty years is a complete change in the way we see the security industry, and scale which we deal with it in our daily lives.The rest of this answer will be dedicated to listing some of the ways the security industry will need change, and how those changes will affect off all of us. Perhaps more than the question asked, this answer will leave you realizing one truth. Anyone can handle when something goes right, and some new technology makes your life better, but who is going to be left when everything goes to Hell?Information SecurityNot every bad thing can kill you. Oh sure, there are many things that can still ruin your life, but most won't kill you.Something that has remarkably changed in last twenty years is something that didn't exist twenty years before it - online security. The information we publish online about ourselves, the groups we associate with, and even our country, can devastate our lives, or even the lives of people we will never meet. This is so true, that to sign on to read this article, you no doubt had to fill out at least four passwords. Then there is work email, phone keys, banking password, anything associate with a bill, your firewall software (that one's ironic) and anything with the Apple logo that assumes anyone with fat fingers are criminals and forces you redo your freaking password every single time I try to buy a song... legally (that'll teach me the punishment for being good.)In fact, the information that exists in the open is an entire field of spycraft. Open-source intelligence (OSINT) is intelligence collected from publicly available sources. It is the science of gathering executable knowledge to use against someone which they have willingly left available to the world. That's not true, some of that knowledge could be stolen and published already, without the subject's knowledge, and certainly without their permission. In my book, The Next Warrior, which deals with exploring the real way technology will change the face of warfare in the next few decades, this concept is explored with a young female spy named Samantha Avery. In 2026, Avery isn't like the modern day spies, case officers that are employed by the CIA. She sits at a desk and gathers information at her comfortable office outside Washington DC. What makes her special is the ability to find and pool vast databases and other intelligence sources hidden throughout the internet to decipher useful information and patterns her clients are willing to pay desperately for. Why is this special in 2026, when we have Google today? One might only look back to 2006, when there were only 85,507,314 websites in existence. For a better understanding of how much things have changed, as I write, there are 998,253,877[1], just shy of a billion. Sure Google will still be a valuable tool, but as the rest of this section will show you, the information you can access via Google is limited. Beyond the reach of search engines is information hidden in the dark web, databases and forums which house classified, illegal, or personal information that some would pay well to know, or for Avery's case, just pay well to know what to do with it.That said, Cyber Security is already a big deal today. The world isn't waiting for 2026 when Supersleuthes have already mastered the art of unburrying skeletons. Between personal invasions of privacy, to massive breaches of corporate firms and even national governments, the industry surrounding cyber security has exploded to levels we haven't seen ever. In the future, this will be even more true. When we consider the other answers, which show a future possible (almost certain) marriage between our electronics, communications, cars, homes, and entertainment unseen today, and add with them more levels of privately controlled automated drones, our augmented reality suites, driverless everything; all at work, school, home, and at play, security analysts cringe at the myriad of ways in which these technologies will interlock and overlap - each time creating a new vulnerability and entry into our own private motherload of personal information. In truth, swarm technology and the internet of things is a terrifying concept, because with each new device that enters our sphere of influence, we experience a new breach point to our data, one that hackers can use to enter into our lives.Take Nicholas Allegra. He's a hacker who makes a hobby out of defeating Apple's best and brightest security chiefs. [2]“It feels like editing an English paper,” Allegra says simply, his voice croaking as if he just woke up, though we’re speaking at 9:30 pm. “You just go through and look for errors. I don’t know why I seem to be so effective at it.”Going by the hacker name Comex, Allegra created the JailbreakMe code, which allowed millions of users to upload any applications they wanted to Apple's infamously restrictive devices. The way he did it was through exploiting a bug in how Apple’s mobile operating system iOS handles PDFs fonts. That allowed him to both locate and repurpose hidden commands. That critical flaw allowed a series of exploits that not only gains... blah, blah, blah, technical nerd jargon. The point is, this kid was able to publish code allowing millions of people to manipulate their phone against the creator's wishes because of the way the phone read fonts on pdfs.“I spent a lot of time on the polish,” Allegra says with a hint of pride.As I said before, these sorts of security failures aren't limited to phones. In the next era of technological revolutions, new methods will open to new exploits in the same way that a 19 year old can crack the world's safest phone. In a further example of how more tech means more problems, security researcher Nils Rodday is preparing a demonstration for the RSA security conference in San Francisco that will show how he is able to hack and take control of police drones from more than a mile away.[3]"...flaws in the security of a $30,000 to $35,000 drone’s radio connection allow him to take full control over the quadcopter with just a laptop and a cheap radio chip connected via USB. By exploiting a lack of encryption between the drone and its controller module known as a “telemetry box,” any hacker who’s able to reverse engineer the drone’s flight software can impersonate that controller to send navigation commands, meanwhile blocking all commands from the drone’s legitimate operator.I'm just going to take this opportunity to remind people that these things exist, and leave it at that.Personally, I'm just glad people like Nils Rodday and Comex aka Nicholas Allegra are at worst chaotic good, working for the betterment of us all through nefarious means, rather than a full on evil geniuses.There are, however, lots of evil people on the internet and many of these people want to do you great harm, or at least, have no concern for your well being as they attempt to make a better life for themselves. Whether it is because of a lone wolf cyber idealist like Comex; a community of hackers with motivations ranging from patriotism, sexism, anarchism, or just for the lulz; corporate hackers out to steal your money; or national hackers out to bring down the power grid, the internet is growing a more dangerous place, and Wall Street knows it.HACK, the exchange-traded fund bundling 30 cyber security companies, has seen quite a year for just these reasons. Last year, following a spree of high profile hacks across several industries, the fund skyrocketed, increasing in value nearly 30% in only six months to over a $1 billion market cap.[4] Since June, the value in the fund has receded, along with the entire sector. Since the downturn, however, these security companies are coming together, literally, to shake up the security industry again. In the last quarter, niche security companies that weren't able to compete on their own, are merging together and with much larger firms to solve problems some thought we wouldn't have cracked for another decade, along with others, no one predicted.Last year, there were 133 security M&A deals, up from 105 in 2014, according to 451 Research’s February report on the tech outlook for 2016. Its recent survey of investment bankers showed that security is expected to have the most M&A activity this year, surpassing mobile technology for the first time in six years.What this means is that many of today's fears and concerns for tomorrow are getting a lot of attention, and new methods to solve them are gathering steam and energy to attempt the mitigate the flood of invasions expected in the next two decades. One of the biggest leaders in this is a company you know well. Microsoft is shoring up their defense against cyberattacks by purchasing many of these fledgling firms into their corporate umbrella, creating several new layers between its customers (along with itself) and would be hackers. [5]The majority of the new additions came from startups that didn't really have a place in the industry, solving problems too specific to truly go it on their own, but filled with good ideas and brilliant people. Microsoft's recent acquisitions have been intended to add new capabilities, as well as new minds to the brain pool of Seattle. The hope is that, as these new units are integrated, the company will be capable of creating value and new technologies that will keep Microsoft and its users secure for at least the span of this question.So here's the real question. What exactly is it that Microsoft is afraid of? Throughout this answer, I'll attempt to explain some the risks that have the world's largest tech firms, and even the world's largest nations, preparing for a battle that we all need them to win. We will start off small with things that can only ruin your life, and then work up to the stuff that can legitimately break the world.Beginning in August 2014, a the hashtag #GamerGate[6] began to form. It was began by groups of video gamer enthusiasts with the stated purpose of combatting political correctness, censorship, and poor journalistic ethics in video game reporting. Specifically, those who organized their efforts with the hashtag targeted several female members of the gaming community for attacks against the genre norms and values. In retribution, these women and commenters denied the ethical basis and condemned the affair as misogynistic.Which it sorta totally was. That last paragraph really churched up the #GamerGaters, but when you get right down to it, most of what came from the debacle was anything other than advocacy for ethics in video game reporting. The roots of the debate began as a progressive pull to make females in video games less... um... genetically improbable babes.Designers and other feminist gamers argued against the exploitive nature in which females were depicted in many games, showcasing outrageous body types, and surfacing new controversies like "Same Armor/Same Stats" and "Less Armor/More Protection".So yeah, anyone who argues that is pretty much arguing, "I want more boobs! Don't take away the boobs!" Granted, in the defense of the status quo, some interesting arguments did come out, such as asking whether a very popular, very buxom, character from the 1990's should be "reduced" for the upcoming remake. The argument there was that to retool, some said sensor, a character which is already well known on account of her body type is an attack on anyone who legitimately has that body type. In this case, it sends the message that simply having large breasts or long legs is wrong, and something to be ashamed of. [7]I honestly didn't know if I just heard a masterful counterargument supporting both sides of the controversy from the feminist perspective or simply some grade A BS. Regardless, many of the feminists dismissed such views outright, some retaliating through the absolute attack on what it meant it meant to be a "gamer", coinciding the meaning with being synonymous with misogyny. That was wrong, but what happened next disappointed many as conversation wasn't the only thing that came out. Users operating, mostly anonymously via sites like Reddit, 4Chan, and 8Chan, began attacking the feminist taking the stances that games need to redirect. The attacks eventually grew to threats, including the threat of rape and murder. Most of us were surprised it got as bad as it did. I wondered why so many male gamers became so visceral in their attacks against female activists in the industry, or even just their defense of the boobs. I, along with much of the rest of the gaming community with large internet followings, just wondered with a bit of surprise how it got that bad.And that is what is really scary about online security threats like these. People online can get really mean, hateful, and even cruel. I'm not talking about calling you an "asshat" cruel. I mean subjecting people to the constant barrage of hate that results in IRL (in real life) ugliness. There is even a hashtag going out on snapchat called #TBR. For those of us blessed not to work with children on a daily basis, you've probably never heard of #TBR, but it stands for To Be Rude. Literally, it is nothing but children being hateful to one another, insulting one another in "secret", via Snapchat. Snapchat is a novel tool for kids because it allows sharing of content that will "delete" after a predetermined time or number of views, and only to those you choose. I suppose this may be useful to revolutionaries fighting against totalitarian regimes, but mostly kids just use it to post pictures of themselves naked and be monsters to one another. It sort of explains the ghost icon, though; a hint of secrecy.Now where this fits into the GamerGate controversy was that we didn't just see children acting like children. We saw adults acting very maliciously with the intent to cause fear and psychological harm, with the intended purpose of manipulation. By most accounts, that's terrorism. What made normal, boring actually, twenty and thirtysomething year old gamers turn into, well let's call it what it was, terrorists is a question we all need to answer, but it is probably the same reason kids use snapchat to post hateful videos instead of Youtube.Not getting caught.In both cases of Snapchat or #Gamergate, the offenders function behind a wall of protection from authority. For middle schoolers acting badly, it is really no different than any other time when mean girls said mean things when no teachers were around. With #Gamergate, we saw something very different. Grown adults behaving online in a way they never would in the real world. Many attribute this to the anonymous nature in which they gathered, communicated, and executed their "operations."Anonymity on the internet is an important thing if for no other reason than to understand how people act when functioning under the guise of anonymity. Dr. John Suler is a Professor of Psychology and has written on the subject of online behavior. In his paper The Online Disinhibition Effect, Suler argues that those on the internet are able to disconnect from their normal behaviors and can frequently do or say as they wish without fear of any kind of meaningful reprisal. An example being most Internet communities, even one such as Quora which uses real names. The worst kind of punishment an offender can expect for bad behavior is being banned from interaction. In practice, however, this serves little use; the person involved can usually circumvent the ban by simply registering another username and continuing the same behavior as before[8]. Suler calls this toxic disinhibition.CB radio during the 1970s saw similar bad behavior:Most of what you hear on CB radio is either tedious (truck drivers warning one another about speed traps) or banal (schoolgirls exchanging notes on homework), but at its occasional—and illegal—worst it sinks a pipeline to the depths of the American unconscious. Your ears are assaulted by the sound of racism at its most rampant, and by masturbation fantasies that are the aural equivalent of rape. The sleep of reason, to quote Goya's phrase, brings forth monsters, and the anonymity of CB encourages the monsters to emerge.Suler's work was a brilliant synopsis, but we on the internet need a simplified version. "John Gabriel's Greater Internet F***wad Theory" was a posted comic strip by Penny Arcade. The post regards reflects the unsocial tendencies of other internet users as described by the online disinhibition effect. Krahulik and Holkins, Penny Arcade's creators suggest that, given both anonymity and an audience, an otherwise regular person becomes aggressively antisocial.[9]How this relates to security is obvious to those who have experience it. The internet can feel like an unsafe place sometimes. The internet can be an unsafe place sometimes. Looking to the long term effects of bullying that are being better understood every day[10], sometimes I wonder if this place I've called a second home is a place I want my kids to play on. Most of us who are active on this playground understand this as the status quo, but in the future of internet security, the debate will center around the freedom to be private and the freedom to be anonymous. Many fear, given precedence, what may happen under this veil of anonymity. I can't help but agree that his is a rational concern for many. Sometimes the internet comments go far beyond words or threats, which carry lasting psychological damage to some of the victims, but transforming to very legitimate real world threats. What this will mean for the future is that companies is deciding what kind of culture they want to deal with. For the internet to stay the internet we want to be on, we may see more companies adopt guidelines like Quora's, with it's real names policy and Be Nice Be Respectful Policy, a place where people feel welcome and safe to exchange and interact.The Gamergate scandal didn't end at name calling, though. Several key individuals suffered far more than the traditional effects of the average internet rabble. Along with threats of rape and murder, which are disturbing, but easily dismissed given the safety that online anonymity provides, there was another threat, one which pierced that veil of safety and put the power directly in the hands of the mob.Doxxing.Doxxing - from documents - search for and publish private or identifying information about (a particular individual) on the Internet, typically with malicious intent."hackers and online vigilantes routinely dox both public and private figures."[11]During Gamergate the ugly side of the conflict saw the threat, "We will dox you," begin to surface for the first time. Doxxing, as the definition states is when online users attempt to publish personal information about other users, celebrities, or public figures against their will. This personal information ranges from your real name to private email, banking information, and anything that hackers can get hold of. Once one member discovers it and is able to publish it, the fear is that it may lead to future attacks, such as flooding email accounts with harassment emails via a botnet attack, or worse, people literally able to knock on your door.And this is exactly what happened to the internet's Queen, Felicia Day.Day commented that she had thus far remained silent on the issue of Gamergate to fans and the media, including over 2.3 million Twitter followers at the time, not because she wanted to or didn't care, but out of fear of getting doxxed – and seeing her personal information become public knowledge on the seedy parts of the internet.“I realised my silence on the issue was not motivated by some grand strategy, but out of fear that the issue has created about speaking out. ... I have tried to retweet a few of the articles I’ve seen dissecting the issue in support, but personally I am terrified to be doxxed for even typing the words ‘gamer gate’. I have had stalkers and restraining orders issued in the past, I have had people show up on my doorstep when my personal information was hard to get.”This was posted on her personal blog, in a post titled simply The Only Thing I have to Say about Gamergate.[12]She was immediately attacked online and doxxed. Felicia's experiences in the past have included direct encounters with stalkers, empowered by knowledge about her that they shouldn't have access to. Others, such as one of the women central to the beginning of Gamergate, Anita Sarkeesian a game designer who also makes videos explaining misogynist tropes in gaming, were far more disturbing.According to Time, Sarkeesian, had to flee her home because of violent threats. She was even forced to cancel a speaking engagement at Utah State University after an anonymous person sent a letter to the school administration threatening to massacre students if she spoke. “I will write my manifesto in her spilled blood, and you will all bear witness to what feminist lies and poison have done to the men of America,” the letter read.Now, perhaps, we are getting the reason that anonymity is something of a concern for security analysts. With abilities such as doxxing, which is just one among many possible issues that internet users face, those who use the internet, or everyone, is going to need to learn to deal with some new and very profound threats. In the way that we prepared ourselves for active shooters with things like A.L.I.C.E. training, training is going to have to be done to teach people how to protect their personal information from slippage, the military term for unwanted dispersal of sensitive information. If we don't take that initiative,I'm afraid of an internet where anonymity creates a world where there are no activists. Many who have read and follow my work know, if nothing else, one thing about me; I am super American. I like that I have this right and freedom to speak up and speak out, but at the point where living room vigilantes are able to threaten the safety of women for complaining about big tits in video games, along with anyone who happens to listen... I'm seriously afraid of a world twenty years down the road. That anonymity grants protection for criminal acts is something we should very seriously be concerned and something the leaders of the internet need to seriously consider when they list their values. As was mentioned before, to quote Goya, "fantasy abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters." That said, don't be surprised if in your next annual security briefing, you see the "Dox" for the first, but not the last time.Having said that, there is more power to the open internet than you think. Your private information, while important to you for reasons shown in the previous section, is very little compared to what organized groups with an agenda are really after - complete system change. These groups have proven the means to bring down massive sites and even fight terrorism. Of course, they have also cost thousands of innocent people their personal information, destroyed companies, and ruin marriages, along with more than a few lives.To begin, one needs to look into the (perfectly named) Ashley Madison Affair[13]. Ashley Madison was and is the internet's largest website for cheating. Literally, that's all they do is help people who are married cheat on one another. After a savvy campaign including talk shows and clever advertising, one which brought tons of open scorn, but just enough silent attention to keep the profits rolling in, a group calling themselves, "The Impact Group" decided they weren't amused with the salacious shenanigans. The Impact Group researched Ashley Madison and found it to be under the ownership Avid Life Media, which also owns other hookup sites like Cougar Life and Established Men, which they claimed supported prostitution and human trafficking. When Ashley Madison reported that they offered a service to completely delete the accounts of users no longer interested in their services, the Impact Group moved out to show that this service wasn't all it was cracked out to be. 37 million disclosed users later and the site which sold itself on discretion, was in the midst of its worst nightmare.The impact group is only one such online Robin Hood alliance which exists. Others out there have proven themselves time and time again to be able to affect change, either through direct action, or the threat of it via hacking individuals, corporations, and even governments. One such group calls itself, aptly enough, Anonymous.Wikipedia describes Anonymous as a loosely associated international network of activist and hacktivist entities. A website nominally associated with the group describes it as "an Internet gathering" with "a very loose and decentralized command structure that operates on ideas rather than directives".To understand them further, a group of users of various internet forums Reddit and 4Chan, all functioning under anonymous user names began coordinating efforts towards various political and social agendas. Conversation in the all anonymous sites would form, ranging on the spectrum of enlightened social commentary and debate, to outright bigoted hate groups. Within these conversations, like minded leaders would collectively pool resources, and take the conversation into a more private level.To use a metaphor, the internet is a single massive room where everyone is screaming to be heard. The chaos and confusion that follows allows a small group to gather by a wall, completely visible to anyone who were to look, and speak openly to where anyone could listen, but their voices still lost because of the constant noise of internet traffic and news. In these "private open sessions" the leader groups came to a consensus of some action which should be taken. Among them were many who were legitimately talented crackers, the term for internet hackers with malicious intents. Their skills, along with a few who just executed their wishes, were able to achieve some crazy results. From here, the cell would plan an operation, in their parlance, and if successful disintegrate back into the crowed. From there, they may join a new operation, or never be heard from again. For this, they describe their movement as "leaderless."In the beginning operations or "attacks" ranged on the low end with benign acts of internet weirdness, such as the when hundreds of Anons gathered in an online Finnish Hotel with identical black avatars, forming swastikas and closing down the pool due to "fail and AIDS". A bit higher up were a few high profile "operations" including attacks on the Church of Scientology, Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America, various international copywriting offices, Paypal, and eventually Sony's Playstation Network.The group's preferred method of attack were a series of well-publicized publicity stunts and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS). A DDoS attack is one in which an asset is bombarded with fake traffic, slowing down the service or bringing them down all together. Consider a telethon for kids with cancer or adopting puppies. A version of a DDoS attack (by seriously mean people) would be hundreds of people who all collectively call in with prank calls, tying up all the operators, thus making it impossible to actually take real donations. On the internet, this is done through special programs written to cause a single normal device, such as the phone or computer you are reading this article on, to send false traffic to a website with its spare processing power in the background. Your devices are actually quite powerful and the spare processing power can generate a lot of worthless traffic for the receiver. This is often compounded through the use of botnets, programs which control many devices, sometime thousands, with or without their owner's consent, all generating traffic to bring down the target websites or online assets. Technically, this attack is harmless, unlike uploading a malicious computer virus, as all effects end the moment the attack stops. The servers go back to operating as normal, no harm done... except for the millions lost through down time and breaches in their security.Of course, this is all extremely illegal. Many anonymous members found that their movements weren't as secretive as they believed. Various Anons were jailed or suffered massive fines for their infractions. Sadly, many of the people who suffered the most were not leaders in the movements, or operations, but people who didn't understand the risks and were just acting under instructions from other Anons more versed in what could go wrong. One example of this is Dmitriy Guzner[14], a 19 year old American given a one year prison sentence for attacking a protected computer. It was around this time that Anonymous truly began evolving in an attempt to be more than just internet pranksters. Seeing many hauled off to long prison stays saw the movement break into various camps; namely those motivated for ideological reasons and those seeking to provoke for entertainment, ie. trolls for the lulz.Following this period of internal rebranding, and backed by energy gained through the Occupy Wall Street Movement[15], there was some realistic clout to those who participated in the online actions. Brought together by the idealistic sides of Anonymous, operations became more complex, as legitimately talented media experts, artists, videographers, and yes, more hackers, were able to add their capabilities to spread their message and their actions. In the next few years their major operations were more focused and even altruistic. Charitable actions included events like #OpOk and Operation Safe Winter, as well as attempts to intervene in what they viewed as unlawful police brutality, attacking the KKK, and taking down child pornagraphers[16]. Most recently, in an attempt to fight back against the growing threat of Islamic fundamentalism and Middle East born terrorism, operations like #OpSaudi and #OpISIS, sought to disrupt funding for the Islamic State and their vast online propaganda presence. According to some reports, as many as 20,000 accounts on Twitter of ISIS affiliates and recruiters have been brought down[17], as well as the hundreds of websites, and the releasing of ISIS recruiter's personal information including their home address. [18]While many question Anonymous as nothing but a bunch of unaccountable internet pranksters with various and chaotic agendas, others are impressed by their power and the complexity their operations are taking, if for no other reason, than the attention they are able to garnish for their causes and themselves. Others, however, aren't happy with what they are considering a virtual lynch mob. Some are leaving the group for its rather chaotic history of attacking innocent people, which have included people in the random databases Anons have gained access to, as well as anyone who speaks badly about Anonymous.[19]“When I started with Anon I thought I was helping people but over the past few months things inside anon have changed,” the hacker said in a statement posted to the Web. “I am mostly talking about AntiSec and LulzSec. They both go against what I stand for (and what anonymous says they stand for). Antisec has released gig after gig of innocent peoples information. For what? What did they do? Does anon have the right to remove the anonymity of innocent people?At least one commentator went so far as to consider them the living embodiment of George Orwell's thought police from his classic science fiction 1984. [20]There thinking anything against the Party was deemed a criminal act - a “thoughtcrime”, which brought about arrest and rehabilitation (read that as torture) under the Thought Police.1984 is considered a definitive cautionary tale, but what makes Orwell’s masterpiece particularly terrifying is how close 2015 mimics Orwell’s dystopian fiction. You see it in hacktivist groups like Anonymous, commentary shows like The Hannity Show, and online across social networks, the Thought Police has become a reality. If you are outside of their thinking, you become Public Enemy #1 and must be destroyed.What this means for businesses and organizations is yet another threat to security which has to be accounted for. No one knows when something they do, or some policy they have, will catch the attention of Anonymous, or any other major group of like minded internet anarchists to bring about action in numbers that the government can't actually do much about. You never know what kind of vulnerability you have until 10,000 angry hackers start inspecting the cracks in your walls.Ok, so maybe various versions of making people look bad on the internet aren't nearly as terrifying as legitimate terrorism, but what about the presence of true cybercrime, those who use the internet with no agenda for reform, no desire for publicity, and who 99% of the time, you never knew existed? What about when the threats aren't out to make you think about some subjective moral wrongdoing, but steal your money and ruin your life. What's really scary is that no one is safe - quite literally no one. Not even the director of the United States Central Intelligence Agency.A group of young hackers, using rather unsophisticated methods, broke into the CIA Director John Brennan's personal email. So that we are all aware, the director of the CIA is the guy in charge of all US spies and one would thing be well beyond the reach of hackers... especially a group of teenagers. Much to the chagrin of the US government, he really wasn't. This one, however, wasn't really his fault. The method the hackers used was to implement a tactic that predates modern computing by only a few thousand years. They pretended to be people they weren't, tricked a Verizon worker and got Brennan's email password changed the old fashioned way... by lying. The term they used is "social engineering". While they didn't find much, they did find were some documents important to him. Then they bragged about it on Wired. While all of us think this one is hilarious, if a story turns up about a few of these kids turning up missing in a couple of years when no one remembers their antics... don't say this wasn't foreseeable.The same group were responsible for this breach also targeted the FBI... because they are just ballsy I guess... and broke into portals used by police and federal agents to share intel. The site is also used to book suspects, and while it isn't known how much was taken, hundreds of thousands of users may be vulnerable, many already being leaked following the hack.2015 saw attack after attack like these, and some of the most massive breaches to internet security the world has yet seen, all with little other incentive than stealing money, stealing information, and extortion. Like my fictional spy from the future, there are many who profit heavily from the information you keep secret. Over the course of the last year, it is estimated that some 70% of the US population experienced some form of cyber attack and over 2.1 billion internet users worldwide. In a Verizon Study of 90 Security breaches, there were 285 million data exposures. Unsurprisingly, attacks are getting much more advanced, with hackers sometimes using multiple attacks simultaneously to succeed in a breach, such as malware, brute force, and SQL injection. Furthermore, 74% of the attacks were external, meaning that 26% were executed from within the companies we are trusting with our data. [21]In a related vein, but just as disturbing, we are now seeing more breaches being discovered by employees than outsiders. Traditionally, these sorts of attacks were discovered by feds or other companies detecting the irregularities.[22] Now, it is much more likely that when you're breached, you'll be the first to know... which for some of us, isn't that comforting.Depending on how you look at this, it could either be welcome news or utterly terrifying. On the one hand, this means that internal security is at least able to grow to the point that they become aware of their own breaches. On the other hand, it means that the number of breaches, and all the possible avenues of failure have become so numerous, that no government agency can possibly be aware of the threats anymore, let alone protect us from them.The next troubling discovery, this one from the 2014 report, was exactly how big the hacking business is. In spite of the whole last section of activities by groups such as Anonymous, malicious hackers working with financial motives still account for some 60% of cyber crime. Corporate spying, those seeking intellectual property and trade secrets accounted for some 25% (up from previous years). Those hackers who were not set on serious crimes (you know, for the lulz) or hacktivists with some ideological agenda, in spite of all the news, accounted for next to nothing.[23]That means that in spite of internet hacktivists publicised achievements, the vast majority of illicit attacks happen for no other reason than to rob of us of something precious.Some of the biggest of these hits last year:Excellus Blue Cross/Blue Shield - 10 million records lost including names, birth dates, social security numbers, mailing addresses, financial accounts, and claims information[24]Anthem Health Insurance - Access to 80 million current and former customers names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses, and income data[25]Experian - 15 million T-Mobile customers names, addresses, birth dates, drivers’ license ID numbers, and passport numbers. Encrypted Social Security numbers were also stolen, which may provide some measure of safety, but the company warned that encryption may have been compromised[26]Scottrade - 4-6 million customers contact details compromised[27]CVS, Walgreens, Rite Aid, and Costco - millions of customers' credit card, email, postal addresses, phone numbers, and passwords.[28]Donald Trump's hotel chain - many thousands of guests' credit card data[29]Several people probably noticed that last line and thought to themselves, "Ha, that will show the asshat." Well, we need to think about that one again, don't we? Who was hurt by the breach at Trump hotels? Innocent people. Really think about who these people are who are hurt; people who slept at a place. Imagine yourself, really just you, getting a hotel anywhere in the world, never really thinking about the guy whose name is on the side of the exterior wall and if one day he may potentially run for President of the United Freaking States. No, you just slept in a place and now your information is floating around the internet by people who are trading it for money. So to those who are getting their lulz right now from finding out that the "Orange carpeted clown" got pwned ("laughing hard at the misfortunes of Donald Trump" for those not accustomed to the vernacular of the lower internet), you're real a-holes.To illustrate this point, as shown already, some the biggest breaches didn't steal money directly. The big payoff was information. Hackers who can get access to data about real people, not just one, but millions of people at a time, are the biggest scores in the illicit industry of online invasion. Stealing a whole database with customer or employee names, birthdays, SSNs, or any other useful private information can open the door for those people to be targeted later for individual attacks. These attacks may be for money, or they can be for more information, perhaps even national secrets, incriminating information for blackmail, or worse. Often, this information is collected and merged into larger databases, where users are profiled and where that which is stolen can be used against them in some of the most terrifying ways imaginable later... like a hack on the Internal Revenue Service.The IRS is a common target of hacking. As the central collection agency for all taxes of all people of the United States, it is one of the largest gold mines ever created. In 2015 it suffered the largest breach in its history. It acknowledged that hackers had gained access to view more than 300,000 previous tax returns. They did this through a tool made available by the IRS called "Get Transcript". Get Transcript allows users to view old returns. The safety in this system is that it requires numerous layers of identifying information to access Get Transcript and view those old returns. The types of information needed: names, social security numbers, birthdates, addresses - the very same items stolen from the other hacks mentioned above. This means that the hackers were able to make one of the largest internet heists in history, only through access of stolen information, gathered, collected, and organized by other hackers in a cyber black market where your information is the most valuable and most traded commodity there is.Relying on personal information — like Social Security numbers, birth dates and street addresses — the hackers got through a multistep authentication process. They then used information from the returns to file fraudulent ones, generating nearly $50 million in refunds.[30]That means that each of the victims were hacked not once, but twice. The big takeaway from the 2015 IRS Hack is that there is growing evidence of the existence of something we are all afraid of. Databases out there that are growing day by day, where cells of each of our data are collected and merged without our permission or our knowledge, and that these databases are being traded by people across the world, with no good intention for us. This leads many to believe in a future decades from now which has no secrets, where all of our information is direct and open to the public. For those of us with bank accounts, street addresses, or children, that's not the idealistic image of an open society that some would paint. The fact is, we live in a state of danger everyday because of the secrets we entrust to others. In the next few decades, for companies to remain viable, they are going to have to prove they can be trusted with our information. More so than this, if we ever want to feel safe again, perhaps the most valuable enterprise in the future of internet security might not be the next guy who is able to steal our information, but the first guys who figure out how to get it back.Now that we have thoroughly made it clear that there is no place left safe on the internet for the common individual, or even major corporations and government organizations, what about the governments themselves? What role do they play in this story.To begin with, let's talk about Hacking Team. Hacking Team is a company out of Milan that deals in "offensive intrusion and surveillance" capabilities. This includes the ability to monitor communications of internet users, decipher encrypted files and emails, record Skype and VoIP phone calls, as well as remotely activate microphones and cameras on the devices they target. Their primary clients include governments and major corporations, including a few governments with shady human rights records. Basically, they are the most terrifying conspiracy theories on the internet come to life.Hacking Team are leaders in the growing industry to help governments hack in ways that make the rest of this article look like child's play. The Hacking Team gives its clients, through use of their Da Vinci and Galileo platforms the ability to do everything from keystroke logging, GPS tracking on cell phones, and extracting wifi passwords, among many other capabilities.[31] Perhaps most interesting is their ability to steal data on local accounts, contacts and transaction histories by decrypting Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency wallet files.[32]The tools they use, or rather sell, have been used by governments to... well... you've seen the movies. Before you start getting up in arms, you might want to check their previous clients, regimes such as Sudan, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia, and have been accused of being used against activists and protesters in Morocco, Syria, the United Arab Emirates.[33]They even basically serve as the intelligence agency of the Uganda. Some of those relationships landed them in hot water with the UN. To make matters even more frightening, the Italian company maintains two satellite offices within the United States, one in Annapolis and another in Washington DC. That shouldn't lead people think this relationship buys the US anything though, since Hacking Team is suspected of selling tools to clients in Turkey who used it on a woman in the US[34]and is now suspected of selling their technology to Syria, as well.What's put Hacking Team in the news now? Perhaps unsurprisingly at this point, they too were also hacked in 2015. At some point their network was breached and published online - over 400 gigabytes of data. Like I said before, no one is safe.Hacking Team's fate, while ironic, only served to open the eyes of millions to existence of real companies whose only profession is equipping governments with the tools to break down any wall, crack any password, end any online uprising, and own our digital lives. For an example, let's start with something small, like a foreign government hacking into a major American company to determine what media Americans and the rest of the world were allowed to see.You know, I've always wondered if any of the "A movie they don't want you to see," advertisements were ever real. Turns out, there was one that absolutely was. In late 2014, Sony pictures planned to release a movie about a talk show host invited to North Korea. Oh, and he tries to assassinate the dictator. It was an okay movie, but honestly, not something you would watch twice on purpose. Where things went terribly, horribly wrong was when Sony pictures suddenly pulled the movie. In the weeks leading up to the release, the North Korean government expressed their "disapproval" of the film. With its ending scene depicting the violent death of their glorious leader, the North Koreans demanded the movie never show... or else. Whatever, we're Americans, or sort of. Sony Pictures was in America at least. What are they really going to do, bomb us?No, they didn't bomb anyone. Instead, what they did was hack Sony Pictures. In that breach, they stole data that included personal information about Sony Pictures employees and their families, e-mails between employees, information about executive salaries at the company, copies of then-unreleased Sony films, and other information. They threatened to release the information, which any of it could have been deadly to the company, from its employee's information to scripts of movies that haven't been made. What happened next?Sony pulled the film.Not long after, popular demand, and there was a lot of us who now demanded to see this movie, made it available for streaming. Eventually, we were all able to get our fill of the death of the most infamous man alive, but it cost us. The Guardian called the event a massive defeat on American soil and the message was received, international government sponsored hackers can scare Americans into doing whatever they want.It pissed us off as it introduced a new word into our collective lexicon: Cyberwarfare.CyberwarfareAccording to the Rand Corporation,[35] Cyber warfare involves the actions by a nation-state or international organization to attack and attempt to damage another nation's computers or information networks through, for example, computer viruses or denial-of-service attacks. RAND research provides recommendations to military and civilian decisionmakers on methods of defending against the damaging effects of cyber warfare on a nation's digital infrastructure because, when nations involve themselves in the acts of cracking, all bets are off. As previously mentioned, even massive companies like Sony can be leveled by a national attack. Second, we have to ask what counts as warfare? Can it really be an act of war if no one can possibly die from it? Does it matter that this was an American company? Does it change things that it is American citizens? What does retaliation look like? The truth is, we don't have a lot of answers for this right now, but where it might lead to is nerve racking.Joel Brenner, a Senior Counsel at the National Security Agency, in his book America the Vulnerable, focuses on the subject of cyber warfare. He speaks at length about the vulnerabilities to the United States, some already proven and some hypothetical. One threat we may one day face which he poses, comes in the form of an attack on our infrastructure. An attack centered on the Los Angeles powergrid could hold half the West Coast hostage. A similar attack against the DOD or VA could publish every scrap of data on over 22 million veterans for the whole world to see. What's worse, he showed how capabilities already exist that could do this.He continues in his book to describe the threat posed by China. China is a special case in that, besides a cyber warfare branch of the People's Liberation Army[36], China also has the added asset of tens of thousands of nationalistic, "Patriot Hackers". These individuals form a community of cracker groups which focus on exploiting all international information vulnerabilities from corporate, to military, and even personal. This core group of international hackers has been responsible for countless patent thefts and billions in lost research and development to the benefit of Chinese corporations, but is also responsible for compromising classified information worldwide. China's hacker community is distinctly different from that of nations like the United States, which, if a pattern could be set, would be better described as anarchistic and anti-government (remember Anonymous), and even those in Russia, who are much more geared to cyber crime for profit. China's hackers, instead work together alongside, or at least to the benefit of, China's national government. All this while still be officially "unaffiliated" with the government for diplomatic and legal reasons. Effectively, the Chinese have a clandestine cyber national guard, growing in capabilities and there isn't really a thing the world can do about it.In fact, the largest breach of security for information in an American database last year didn't come from someone hacking some corporation to turn a quick profit. It came from China.[37] Last year, the Office of Personnel Management discovered that information over 21 million victims had slipped into hacker's hands. [38]The attack lasted over a year and included some 19 million people who applied for government security clearances and the information pertaining to their background checks, along with 1.8 million spouses, friends, and family members. To throw gasoline onto the fire, another 5.6 million fingerprint files of federal employees may have been lost[39], as well.Moving Westward, Russia is a concern, as well. Having lost much of their technological edge in the last twenty years, they're working to reclaim lost ground. Currently, when one thinks of Russian hackers, they are probably thinking of internet fraud and child pornography. Over the last few years, however, their capabilities have attempted to close the gap. Recently, in their ongoing conflict between Ukraine, Russian hackers were able to shutdown major sections of the Ukrainian power grid. [40]More concerning, however, is Russia's attempts to control the media through the very bottom up. Called The 50 Ruble Army, Russia has copied a Chinese tactic to start employing professional commenters, people who scroll the internet commenting on content that weighs negatively against Russia with links to pro-Russian content, articles, and propaganda.[41] (Oh, yeah. Did I forget that about China, too?[42])If you speak about Russia long enough, you'll see these guys.But Russia and China aren't the only concern in cyberwarfare. What's surprising many, is the capabilities of players that weren't normally seen in traditional spheres of computing capability. In 2011, by all accounts, Iran was able to steal a United States CIA stealth drone, literally out of the sky. [43]According to Iranian sources, they were able to capture the US drone by "spoofing" the onboard GPS system. After technicians were able to hack into the drone, they broke the link with the systems remote controllers. From this point, according to the Iranian source, they simply told the drone to land in on an Iranian base, believing it to be its home in Afghanistan. [44]Quite frankly, if any part of that story is true, that is a real head scratcher for the Americans. More so than that, given the relatively unharmed state of the drone, at least from the pictures, it very well could be true. As far back as 2012, the concept of GPS spoofing was a proven concept by researchers at the University of Texas. [45]Given the resources of an entire nation, it wouldn't surprise me terribly if they figured it out faster than a single American college.Granted, the loss of our drone rattled many, but it wasn't the first attack in the Iran/American Cyber War. Nor would it be the last.Let's take a step back to the 1980's. Russia had poor abilities to produce microchips and the soviets worked to steal technology from the West, decades aheads of them technologically speaking. Because of a defector, the United States was able to know what it was Soviet spies were after. The Americans allowed flawed microprocessors to be stolen and their programs copied. These were made so well that they passed an initial inspection, only break down chemical and manufacturing facilities and overpower turbines in the Trans-Siberian pipeline. When soviet spies stole plans for gas-line pumps, they were unaware that it was intentionally designed to pump with much more pressure than the pipes were ever meant to handle. William Safire of the New York Times in 2004 was the first to break this story 25 years later. In his words, "The result was the most monumental, non-nuclear explosion and fire, ever seen from space."Fast forward a few decades.In January 2010, inspectors with the International Atomic Energy Agency visiting the Natanz uranium enrichment plant in Iran noticed that centrifuges used to enrich uranium gas were failing at an unprecedented rate. The cause was a complete mystery—apparently as much to the Iranian technicians replacing the centrifuges as to the inspectors observing them.Five months later a seemingly unrelated event occurred. A computer security firm in Belarus was called in to troubleshoot a series of computers in Iran that were crashing and rebooting repeatedly. Again, the cause of the problem was a mystery. That is, until the researchers found a handful of malicious files on one of the systems and discovered the world’s first digital weapon.Stuxnet, as it came to be known, was unlike any other virus or worm that came before. Rather than simply hijacking targeted computers or stealing information from them, it escaped the digital realm to wreak physical destruction on equipment the computers controlled.WIRED senior staff writer Kim Zetter[46]A piece of code began showing itself around which became known as the Stuxnet virus, made famous for its approach to disabling Iranian nuclear refinement operations. Brenner describes why Stuxnet was so incredible. It was a worm, a self-replicating virus, which utilized not just one, but four previously unknown vulnerabilities in Microsoft operating systems to spread itself throughout a worldwide infection. Once spread, it sought out particular Siemens centrifuges, like those used by the Iranians to refine Uranium, and bring them down. This virus baffled engineers for months, unaware that random system outages were really the result of advanced sabotage efforts from outside the country. What it showed was the threat to even extremely powerful and well defended military systems were possible via online attack. More perplexing, the Stuxnet virus, Brenner postulates, could have only have been created by one of a very few groups who would have had the technological capability to create it, that being the national governments of either United States, Russia, China, Israel, or one of a few members of the European Community. It goes way beyond the capability of the midnight hacker savant or the college computer science nerd out for kicks. This was deliberate and ingeniously engineered attack conducted by nations.Enter: The US Cyber Command. All the necessary ingredients are in place for the possibility of cyber-threats from other nations, or even cyber-terrorism. For all intents and purposes, the United States built them. For that reason, the United States military created the US Cyber Command. On June 23, 2009, the Secretary of Defense directed the Commander of U.S. Strategic Command to establish a sub-unified command, United States Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM). Full Operational Capability (FOC) was achieved Oct. 31, 2010. The Command has three main focus areas: Defending the Department of Defense's Intelligence assets, providing support to combatant commanders for execution of their missions around the world, and strengthening our nation's ability to withstand and respond to cyber attack. I couldn't find a video. I don't think they want me talking about it.Many speculate that either the US Cyber Command, or some other third party affiliate with the CIA, or even companies like Hacking Team to have created the Stuxnet virus, in conjunction with allies in Israel. As of yet, US Cyber Command has only once, very recently admitted ever taking part in any offensive actions. In the fight to retake Mosul, Iraq US forces are working with allies in the region to stop ISIS on the ground, in the air, and via the web. [47]Meanwhile, U.S. forces are waging a cyber offensive to cut or spy on ISIS communications in Mosul. Carter said cyber attacks are being used “to interrupt [and] disrupt ISIL’s command and control, to cause them to lose confidence in their networks, to overload their network so that they can’t function, and do all of these things that will interrupt their ability to command and control forces there, control the population and the economy.”While this is the first admitted time the US Cyber Command has officially been used in an act of cyber warfare, it will certainly not be the last. Along with this, many fear a future where it is needed. In an answer on a similar vein, I was once asked how vulnerable the US Naval fleet was to attack.Future state-on-state conflict, as well as conflicts involving non-state actors such as al-Qaida, would increasingly be characterised by reliance on asymmetric warfare techniques, chiefly cyber-warfare, Chipman said. Hostile governments could hide behind rapidly advancing technology to launch attacks undetected. And unlike conventional and nuclear arms, there were no agreed international controls on the use of cyber weapons."Cyber-warfare [may be used] to disable a country's infrastructure, meddle with the integrity of another country's internal military data, try to confuse its financial transactions or to accomplish any number of other possibly crippling aims," he said. Yet governments and national defence establishments at present have only limited ability to tell when they were under attack, by whom, and how they might respond.The US Defence Department's Quadrennial Defence Review, published this week, also highlighted the rising threat posed by cyber-warfare on space-based surveillance and communications systems."On any given day, there are as many as 7 million DoD (Department of Defence) computers and telecommunications tools in use in 88 countries using thousands of war-fighting and support applications. The number of potential vulnerabilities, therefore, is staggering." the review said."Moreover, the speed of cyber attacks and the anonymity of cyberspace greatly favour the offence. This advantage is growing as hacker tools become cheaper and easier to employ by adversaries whose skills are growing in sophistication."[48]Some of those vulnerabilities are forehead-smackingly simple, once you know where to look. “You can walk around any ship, most aircraft, and you can find either USB ports or serial ports that were put there for maintenance,” said Leigher. “They were done for good engineering reasons” — to download diagnostic data, for example — “but the engineer wasn’t thinking about computer security.” What if an enemy agent under cover as a contractor or even as a civilian on a good-will tour slipped a virus-loaded thumb drive into one of those ports? What if the bad guy simply tricked a sailor into doing it for him?[49]U.S. computer experts playing the part of foreign hackers managed to shut down all communications among the U.S. Pacific fleet, and could have shut down the entire western half of the U.S. power grid.[50]In that answer, given everything we know about the numerous breaks in our defenses, the capabilities of hackers across the globe, and the outdated systems of much of our Navy, it is plausible a group of hackers which are well enough organized and with enough backing, could compromise our carrier's systems. It is possible that infected equipment could be installed on the ships themselves, since it is economically impossible to produce all the technologies built for these ships in government controlled factories, nor even, all in the United States. Foreign manufacturing produces gateway points for hardware to be slipped in with infected files that could then reproduce throughout the vessel's internal secured networks and systems. If this were to happen, it is possible that these ships could be brought down through their own control systems, locking up, halting their communications, melting down their reactors, crashing them into the rocks or even city docks, or just causing them to float dead in the water defenseless against enemy attack and unable to protect us here at home.Physical SecurityChanging gears from cyber security to the tangible world, 2015 saw one of bloodiest years on record since the end of World War II. Terrorism that originated in Middle Eastern conflicts has spread out and is beginning to become commonplace in Europe and even starting to appear, yet again, in the United States. The Charlie Hebdo and November 2015 Paris Attacks, along with a third attempt foiled by the presence of American military veterans rocked Europe as the world mourned for them. In the US, a similar, though far less attack, took place in San Bernardino, California. Between these three major attacks, around 160 people were killed. This, however, pales in comparison to the world-wide effects of terrorism. In total, there were nearly 400 terrorist attacks around the world that we know of[51]. In that, it is likely that more than ten thousand people lost their lives in acts of pure terror. I say pure terror, not to add drama to the point, but to differentiate these acts from the similar acts of violence. Acts of warfare, kidnapping, and social strong-arming are being ignored, as their practice has exploded in the last decade to unestimatable levels.How this will affect the world in the next twenty years is that people, meaning nations, firms, and individuals, will be taking greater steps towards ensuring their own safety in the event of attack. For many, this will see annual trainings being required at many workplaces and schools. Many are already doing this. In another answer, I described how the last decade of terror and threat of "active shooters" has led to new methods and tactics aimed at empowering the individual victim to better deal with theses threats in a way that mitigates their danger, or when cornered in the worst case scenario, confront and attempt to neutralize the attackers. One such training program is ALICE, controversial in that it actually coaches victims of an active shooter incident to fight back as a very last.[52]Private Security CompaniesBeyond the need for standard training, which will introduce a new vocabulary and the mindset to go with it, is traditional security, which is getting a remarkably untraditional makeover. Companies today are forming which are consolidating the need for security. Less and less often are you seeing security divisions within companies which are not in the business of providing security. Instead, the role of security guard for most companies is often filled by an agent of companies which specialize in the outsourcing of such skillsets. What this means for the future is that we won't see the old mall cops drifting around on their segways, whose only real talents don't actually center on tactics and prevention, but on finding a job where they are being paid to stand there.Instead, these jobs are going to be going more and more to the larger security companies who specialize in the role. Soon, we will likely see a time where all private security for public places, such as malls, workplaces, and schools, all wear an inconspicuous similar uniform labeled with the same logo throughout. Instead of working directly for the companies that employ them, they will be contracted in, all centrally trained and networked with their other satellite offices and local police, all working under a centralized headquarters somewhere in the city, or perhaps across the globe. One such example is Sweden's Securitas, a logo known throughout the West.A recent article followed Securitas and the year it has had[53]. According to the Association for Financial Professionals, Securitas experienced "a sharp rise in profits for 2015 amid an increased threat of terrorism and the European migrant crisis."Net profit for the full-year rose by 18 percent to 2.44 billion kronor (258 million euros, $288 million), or eight percent excluding currency effects.Sales climbed by 15 percent to 80.8 billion kronor.In Europe, sales rose by eight percent to 37.5 billion for 2015 and by 11 percent in the fourth quarter, bolstered by the November 13 attacks in Paris and the arrival of hundreds of thousands of migrants in Europe.The company earnings report cites the increased need for security services owed to terrorism alerts and the refugee situation has impacted organic sales growth in Western Europe, mostly in countries like France, Belgium, Germany and Sweden. They also reported a similar rise in Turkey, a country which has welcomed around two million Syrian refugees and saw numerous terrorist attacks within the last year. Securitas also saw a 24 percent increase in North American sales, as well.Securitas isn't alone, however. Spain's Prosegur has a healthy share of the European public security market along with an American based security firm G4S. G4S started becoming more known for its role as the principal security provider for the 2012 London Summer Olympics, a significant role ever since the Munich massacre where eleven members of the Israeli Olympic team were killed. They have also been called by some the largest company you've never heard of[54], since they maintain the third largest corporate workforce of any company Earth (660,000 employees) and are considered (loosely) by some to be the largest private military that has ever existed.[55]While training for you and me will be mandated behavior to attempt to control and mitigate threats, and very large, very structured private security companies will provide for the broader public to help prevent the dangers, another tier of security will create a phenomenon never before seen - the million dollar bodyguard.High Value Body Guards and Military ContractorsExecutive security is the industry of protection for VIP and High Value Individuals. While this includes those who specialize in shuttling primped up primadonna starlets like Justin Beiber from show to show, unharassed by throngs of fans, there is a much deeper need for experienced, battle ready security teams.Due to the attention grabbing nature of these massive catastrophes, many other acts of overt criminal activities have grown in practice, but go relatively unnoticed by those not engaged in foreign policy news. First among these is the threat of kidnapping. While assassination or general acts of terror surely rank high on the list, kidnapping has a special role to play in the story of international chaos that exists today and which will continue in the future.To understand why this is, one needs to understand how criminal empires and murder crazed caliphates primarily get funding. According to documents discovered following a raid of a prominent ISIS leader[56], the organization is funded massively through the use of kidnapping with the purpose of ransom. CNN and Business Insider investigate further to show the staggering amounts of money generated by these tactics[57] and the rationale for why the act of kidnapping is really such a good idea for such criminal and terrorist organizations.[58]The kidnapping of Kenji Goto and Haruna Yukawa rattled the international press for this reason. This time, however, it wasn't for the sheer barbarity that their fellow news agents were experiencing, (those attempting to report the news in the region are a favorite flavor of victim for the Islamic State, along with female humanitarian aid workers [59]) but the magnitude of the ransom being demanded. The Islamic State demanded of the government of Japan $200 million for their safe return. Like so many others, this negotiation broke down and both were eventually beheaded in brutal fashion.ISIS' rationale seems similar to other terror groups: Kidnappings help raise money and, if ransoms aren't paid, make a point, such as the groups are not to be messed with and even civilians are in danger.$200 million is sizable demand and one which could drastically help fund the operations of the terrorist organization, which is currently already expanding its reach internationally as its borders shrink locally. While these two did not turn a profit, others did. The French have denied that they have paid ransoms[60], but according to a New York Times Report[61]they succeeded in buying back the freedom of kidnapped Frenchman from the Islamic State from ISIS. A second group working for a french nuclear firm were also freed by an al Qaeda affiliate in return for money. In perhaps the greatest coup for the terrorist state, 49 captives of Turkish origin were returned, seemingly for no reason at all to Ankara. Those following the report, myself among them, strongly suspect a major payoff for their safe and uneventful return[62]. There are other reports of three hundred Christians being charged more than $30 million for their release. One victim gave in an interview with New York Magazine that his captors forced him to call his family and a friend while he was being tortured, in hopes that his anguished screams would move them to pay the ransom money.[63][64]“We were blindfolded and chained, and every day they would torture us,” he said. “They would come in, one at a time, and electrocute us or beat us with anything they could find.”“But they didn’t kill me because they wanted to ransom me. One time, they made me speak to my family on the phone as they were electrocuting me. Then, they made me call a friend, who told them he would pay.”However, the practice of criminal kidnapping for profit is not limited to the ISIS threat. Moving to the Gulf of Aden and Somalia in one last example, one only has to recount the story of Captain Phillips. [65]There, Somali pirates attempted to take an American vessel hostage along with its crew. This practice has become common in the narrow straits between Iran and the Horn of Africa. Massive ships with massive shipments worth billions are capable of attracting huge payouts to the pirates and the warlords who control them from the mostly European companies who control them. In the case of Phillips, though, the problem wasn't solved by a financial transaction so much so as the extremely potent delivery of precision fire from the muzzle of US Navy SEAL Snipers.Regardless of the success of the Phillips case, piracy and kidnapping for ransom are not going away. In fact, seeing the financial and propaganda potential for such violations, the value of making such attacks has prompted many, many more. This, perhaps, has only been exacerbated by the American shift in policy that some would say encourages the practice by providing a means for private individuals to pay the ransoms of their friends and families, thus encouraging more like kind kidnappings.Having said all of this, it is no longer safe for most Westerners to travel to the Middle East, and the growing troubles of the region are only spreading more and more throughout the Islamic world, as millions sympathetic to the ideals of the Al Qaeda and the Islamic State begin to copy their tactics and methods. Still, people still have business to do, so Westerners are still going to go there. This leads to the need for private military contractors (PMCs).Mention of the practice of PMCs is one that elicits fear and suspicion in most people unfamiliar with how they are actually used. Often, they can't be mentioned without imaginations of secret mercenary black helicopter events and Orwellian fears of off the books private armies. In all honesty, very few such companies are used for anything other than bodyguards for individuals of extremely high value in the region, rather than elite soldiers willing to kill for the highest dollar. The US State department often contracts with these companies to provide a greater level of security than they can do otherwise with the military for their foreign dignitaries and ambassadors, and the CIA for their foreign case officers. This is outlined well in the opening chapters of the new book 13 Hours - The Inside Account of What Really Happened in Benghazi. The book begins by detailing the lives of the contractors involved, both professional and personal. All of those in the book possessed varied military experience, some US Navy SEALs, Army Rangers, and Marines. They may have in their experience sets Master's Degrees in Criminal Justice, stints as the local police chief, or run warrants as bail bondsmen, and PIs stateside. Other PMCs may come from more diverse backgrounds; internationals with the French Foreign Legion, British SAS, and any number of other places and backgrounds. When I was deployed to Iraq, one team which frequented our Entry Control Point in Al Anbar Province had team members that came from as far off as South Africa, Romania, and Singapore, lead by an English Special Air Service soldier.For the CIA and State Department, the go to is the Global Response Staff, an open secret of an organization created after the attacks on September 11th, 2001. The GRS gathers together teams of the best and most experienced operators from within the United States military with the knowledge and experience to be able to covertly guard its most valuable assets anywhere on the globe. What distinguishes these individuals from the common military they appear to be is the benefits package. Some PMCs today take in over $150,000 annually for their work overseas, on average, around three to five times what they could have expected in any given military career doing much harder work. Why they are useful is their flexibility and potency. Small teams deployed to a city can easily intertwine with the area, and adapt to cover any target that needs their level of protection. They can do this, however, without the massive overhead of the slow moving US military and sticking out like a sore thumb in places where Americans already have a hard enough time blending in. While these men (and women) and their skills don't come cheap, they come without the prohibitive costs of deploying an entire unit of Marines or Army soldiers, which could rank in the millions, assuming an entire base doesn't need to built for the task.As Benghazi itself showed, the need for these individuals does still exist, and the threat of kidnapping, assassination, extortion, and any number of nefarious concerns may confront high value individuals at any time. This is why operators, such as those working with the Global Response Staff or other private military contractors will be in extremely high demand by foreign dignitaries of all nations, local government leaders, spies, journalists, and corporate executives who travel abroad, all doing business in places where business has to be done. These are the types of people who don't want to be recorded in orange jumpsuits, a propaganda tool for murder fiends across the world. What this also means is that over the next twenty years, PMC operators of every brand and color will be in such high demand that they pop up literally everywhere important people can be seen in places where bad things often happen. What's more, many will be more than the sum of high paid former Special Forces operators. They will be homegrown and specialized to their tasks through courses like the various Executive Protection[66][67] courses that exist and under instruction by companies such as the American security services training company Academi[68]or the European Security Academy[69]. Both of these firms provide, alongside their training, mission support in the form of human resources, planning, and operational support. Remember that these people aren't accountants, get creative and realize that that means more or less exactly what you think it does.The big change we will see as a result of this will be rather undemocratic shift in politics across the world. As the means of terrorism continues to grow, the need for higher and higher priced body guards to handle the threat will make some very rich people very safe, while leaving many others with little more than a prayer. In the end, expect to never see another photo again of any person of worth in a critical conflict area of the world without a dedicated staff of very skilled warfighters at their sides and at the ready.Of course, this causes us to ask a very important question, where are all these extremely well paid and well trained operators going to come from?National DefenseAs mentioned before, the vast majority of contractors trace their roots to service with the US military, or the militaries where their company operates. The cream rises to the top, so the best contracts are awarded to those with proven success and training, namely to services like the Navy SEALs, Army Delta Forces, Rangers, or the United States Marine Corps infantry, particularly any of these with experience in combat. Less prestige and pay may be warranted to someone of non-combat military jobs, police officers, and security specialists, and the lowest level bids will likely go to local militia and hired gunman. It must always be remembered, though, that the demand will always come for those elite operators, the Special Forces team members of the US military's Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC).Like any industry built on recruiting the best of a different industry, the first, which expends all the resources to make those operators so valuable, suffers the long term effects of the brain drain. It will be the US military that foots the bill, paying for years, sometimes decades, of training into making civilians into the most lethal warriors on the planet. During their times in, they will amount to the tip of the spear, deploying with units like the SEALs, Marine Raiders, and Army Rangers, to conduct missions in the service of the United States. They will face dangers no one else in the world could handle, able to push through with only the value of the extensive training hours they have logged, the teams they learned to be a part of, and the massive logistical behemoth at their back. As a friend of mine would say, "They are the Dudes of Dudes."At some point though, many just get done with all that. Perhaps they just want to do something else with their life. Underwater basic weaving, maybe. Or crochet. These dudes have enough man cards racked up from 12 years in the SEALs to become professional crochet artists if they want. Many want to retire to their families, while some see the reality that, if they take the PMC jobs, they will experience a better lifestyle with far better pay than the military could ever provide, easier missions, and less chance of death or maiming. It needs to be understood that Benghazi was a freak event. From 2009 to 2012 only 5 members of the Global Response Staff were killed[70]. During the same time 1,808 Americans troops lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan .[71] This includes events like Operation Red Wings, the largest single loss to the US Navy SEALs in its history, when four SEALs on advanced recon were attacked, killing three and a quick reaction force helicopter sent to in to rescue them id was shot down with a rocket propelled grenade, killing all eight Navy SEALs and all eight U.S. Army Special Operations aviators on board.[72]Quite frankly, I wouldn't blame anyone for hanging up the uniform at that point, and it is a wonder why so many of them still don't. But many do, for all the reasons listed before.Now it's important to think about what this means to the military as a whole. The military's job, be it Marines, Army, Navy, or Air Force, are to be the strong arm of American diplomacy and the backbone of defense in NATO. Over the last fifty years, however, we have seen the military reduce in strength, rather drastically, to the point that today we have fewer active duty military than we did prior to the start of World War II.[73]Moreover, the prevailing strategy over the last thirty years has been to obliterate the enemy using advanced weaponry and devastatingly superior technology. The problem we've seen, however, is that the military is proving more and more often to be under equipped to handle the manpower requirements necessary to successfully pacify an occupied territory such as Iraq or Afghanistan, let alone both. Regardless of the number of drones we have in the air, without boots on the ground, we simply don't have enough men to keep the peace. This is particularly true when we consider expending and $80,000 missile on a $200,000 bombing run to kill two insurgents in a tent a sustainable wartime strategy. [74]Instead, the United States has centered its focus on Special Warfare, creating units whose primary focus is in black ops intervention and direct action operations. These forces are truly lethal, the creme of the crop in every sense of the word. They are, as they say, the point of the spear. The problem is, they are only one small point, and not capable of being everywhere at once. For an example, the SEALs are who everyone talks about. For as much as they are mentioned the US Navy SEAL community only has about 2,500 active duty members[75]. There is a reason they are special. Of the three hundred million Americans, almost none of them have what it takes, including the physical desire just to do it, that is required to be a part of these elite teams. This is also why we can't just train to be like them[76]. Of those who try, more than 80% will fail, and according to Marcus Luttrell, the subject of the book Lone Survivor, more candidates die in training than do active duty SEALs in combat.[77]It takes a very special person to even consider joining up with the SEALs, but the problem is, there just simply don't seem to be enough special people to accomplish the missions which are placed on the nation's special warfare community. There is a real need for a larger presence on the ground, which given the direction of the American military back towards an isolationist point, doesn't exist in the numbers needed either.Considering this, if the military is getting smaller and smaller, focusing more of its efforts into the actions of very small, very elite units, and those units are the primary source for private military contractors, it lends one to really consider the threat the PMCs have on the standing military. For the last 7o years, the US military has been the go-to force for international peacekeeping and creating security, protecting international sea lanes, and ensuring that diplomatic efforts stay open. In that time, and despite the constant "If it Bleeds, It Leads" sensationalist news to the contrary, the world has become a pretty awesome place. There are fewer violent deaths, fewer deaths from disease, fewer wars, and increased wealth across the globe. Look at this graph. It's a nice graph. Do yourself a solid and realize that Coca-cola and the Kardashians didn't cause this. Globalization did, and globalization doesn't happen without someone ensuring everyone playing the game is playing by a minimum acceptable set of behaviors.That job of "globo-cop", in the words of Ian Morris in his book War - What is it Good For? Conflict and the Progress of Civilization from Primates to Robots, has traditionally fallen on the Americans. Now considering that the world's current state of relative peace is reliant on a strong force to serve as its backbone[78], what happens when the backbone of world order is weakened, or removed altogether?When that backbone, in this case the US military, is suffering from attrition both in the form of budgetary cutbacks in a belief that it can get by with replacing thinking soldiers with more advanced, but ultimately fewer remote controlled or autonomous systems[79], as it continues to pull back it's overseas holdings[80] and is constantly being cannibalized by the United States' own State Department, CIA, and numerous multinational corporations to provide for their own security needs, where does that put the rest of the world?Focusing on the PMCs, when the highest order performers, in this case the Special Forces operators, no longer provide the kind of support often needed of people with their skillsets, but instead act as a force of protection for VIPs, they are not fulfilling their true potential or carrying the burden the world needs of them. They babysit high value targets rather than killing terrorists and dethroning evil regimes. Instead of getting things done and making peace, they simply serve as a force ensuring peace for those they work for. I want to be clear, I have nothing but respect for these men, and everyone should feel free to enjoy life and pursue happiness, but one has to ask if this path the United States is setting itself on will make for a very, very ugly world twenty years down the line when the best of the best simply aren't where the world needs them anymore.Quite frankly, this story is already starting to play itself out. Military .com posted a review of the United States Army where an industry think tank warned the service was "weak" and incapable of performing the necessary role of sustained conflict in two theaters. [81]Add to this a recent Gallop Poll asking asking if Americans still had faith in their military. The results weren't good.[82]The answer is increasingly 'no,' according to a new Gallup poll. Last year the number of Americans who thought they were protected by the world's strongest military was 59 percent, but this year that number has dropped to 49 percent – the lowest figure in the 23 years Gallup has recorded the trend.While polls are only polls, it does point to a very disturbing trend. People are losing respect for the United States military, and when the world's most important enforcer of global security is no longer respected, one has to wonder what the next twenty years are going to look like. Quite frankly, the United States will be fine. We won't see any existential threats to our way of life any time soon, but the rest of the world may not be so lucky without us. The Middle East, as I have made abundantly clear, is only getting worse as the United States continues to remove itself from the region. Their conflicts are spreading through North Africa and now into Europe and India. Russia is starting to pick up the slack, for better or worse, but their track record for making the world a better place within their shadow is abysmal at best. Perhaps China? Since they have shown little ever to provide security to any foriegn counterparts in spite of their massive military, I don't see security happening outside of the private sites they lease from host countries. Also considering their increasing internal struggles to balance unnatural growth expectations with a workforce growing more demanding every year, and older at the same rate, I doubt they will ever be able to truly challenge American hegemony in the next century. So if no one is capable of ensuring the kind of peace we have grown to expect up to today, what can we expect of tomorrow?I'm not one to usually give into pessimistic fears, but if you want to start getting scared, I wouldn't blame you. The next twenty years are going to get a lot more volatile, and in many places very dangerous. Those who will fare the best will be those who can accept the danger and create a plan to mitigate it.The Black SwanThe last leg of this answer to, "What are the biggest ways in which the world 20 years from now will probably be different from today?" is the Black Swan.Black Swan events, as defined by the guy who proposed their theory are thus:The disproportionate role of high-profile, hard-to-predict, and rare events that are beyond the realm of normal expectations in history, science, finance, and technology.The non-computability of the probability of the consequential rare events using scientific methods (owing to the very nature of small probabilities).The psychological biases that blind people, both individually and collectively, to uncertainty and to a rare event's massive role in historical affairs.This is the stuff no one saw coming that will, more or less, invalidate every prediction we have had so far. They are the agents of chaos, and the disorder in ordered states. They are events which cannot be predicted with ease, never predicted together, and barely explained even in hindsight, but which have monumental effects on the hereafter. They are the surprises God throws at us that both level and unlevel the playing fields as industries rise up out of nowhere, nations fall into memory, and cities crumble as the earth shakes. Consider technology, the surprise we all see coming, but no one guesses quite right. Technology is still growing at an exponential pace. Every day it continues to change the way we live, the way we communicate, and how we conduct business. The rise of social media, perhaps the most unexpected event of the last ten years, and the rise of cellular communications in general over the last twenty certainly fits the ticket. Unfortunately, as technology has become a tool which has empowered literally billions of people into a better, more enlightened and more productive life, so too has it empowered millions of others to pursue their own interests at the detriment of everyone else. Twitter, something that was only founded exactly 10 years to this month helped spur revolution in states like Libya and Syria. Of course, now it also serves as a recruiting tool for Islamic State radicals. Drones, the weapons that were only in their infancy during my first deployment to Iraq, are now toys for children and delivery tools for Amazon. Of course, they too have a dark side which many, many already fear.For that reason, from Swarm of Things to Human Augmentation, Crowd-sourcing to Autonomous vehicles, 3D Printing to Genetic Engineering, the brave new world we are all ready to embrace will empower those of ill-aims so greatly that only an equally aggressive improvement in the means by which we secure our safety, both bodily and the information about us, will ensure the dream of tomorrow the builder's of this technology wish to provide today.Beyond technology, Black Swans are the wills of billions of people; competing, converging, colliding. Nearly all you will never meet, but a few of which, will shape your future.A Black Swan is former fighter of the Soviet Union, setting his sights on his former ally.[83]Black Swans are are planes filled with people crashing into buildings on a clear day in September, and from the visceral reaction, war in two nations erupts.As those wars drug on, the Black Swan was an angry and deeply confused young Army private, with a desire to punish the world. He let slip the largest stockpile of military secrets in history. Some were secrets of the United States, but more importantly was what we had learned of everyone else.In the aftermath, a Black Swan was a wave of democratic energy and revolution. Spurred by the leaks, and the revelations about their dictators, millions went to the streets demanding reform.Amidst the cheering, the sounds of bullets rang out and three civil wars began.In the void that arose, one of these saw the Blackest of Swans, a resurrected medieval empire of hate rising from the desert sands to engulf and overwhelm the Levant.In the terror it brought millions set to flight, many overwhelming Europe.And terror following them in.Those of us alive in 1996 remember that time before the towers fell and not a single one could have predicted any of this. Then we lived in a world of plenty where we were all still cheering the fall of the last evil empire which crumbled when its reach was greater than its capabilities. We were building relationships and the world was going closer together. "They were simpler times," is something old ones always say of when they were young, but looking back to the last two decades, do we not all feel old now? Who, in their most honest self could have predicted any of the events of chaos which bears fruit only to more chaos like it? Who standing back before would have suspected a future like we have seen in his next 20 years?What we can be sure of is that not everything will turn out as we hope. Change will come, but not like we expect. We can't turn away from it. It's coming whether we like it or not. And as soon as think we have it all figured out, a black swan will swoop down to remind us how little foresight we had. This post isn't meant to scare or to paint a dark cloud on the future because of a few of the nightmares that exist today. It is simply a reminder that the unexpected is a factor, and that running from it, or being afraid of it, we need to prepare for it. The best we can do is prepare. Learn the threats that exist today and prepare as best we can so that when change come, we... you, me, us, are able to embrace it. Only those who build their houses on solid rock will weather the coming storms or terror, hacking, disasters, cyberware, and the dark abyss of humanity behind a mask of anonymity and a jihadist's mask. Don't be afraid. I'm sure, exactly because of all the answers which existed to this question, that the world of tomorrow will be as a utopia to the one I live in today, but only if we are collectively prepared for the changes utopia brings along the way. That's why, above all else, those who look to their own security, their adaptability, and their capacity to embrace change and endure disruption... they will be the x factor in the next 20 years.For more answers like this, check out Global Outlook and follow my blog War Elephant for more new content.Thank you for reading, seriously. You've probably wondered why I would bother writing a 16,000 word essay on every terrible thing that could happen in the next twenty years. Well, obviously, it's for the money. Whether this answer is viewed as the most enlightened of the 100+ answers so far, I can only hope. That said, I appreciate the Open Philanthropy Project for giving me the place the reason to record my thoughts for all of you now, regardless of whether it makes it to the top or not.That said, I wanted to write on this subject in particular, is a matter of background. I am a Marine, honorably discharged from the United States Marine Corps in 2008. My primary military occupational specialty was Tactical Data Network Specialist and this was the role I carried on my first tour in Iraq in 2005 along with my second in 2007.My job centered on building and maintaining the information network with which mission critical information and communications were carried out. Our responsibility was to ensure that that data network was secure from outside threats both physical and through our network. I maintained my base's SIPRnet that is discussed over and over in the Manning case. We knew the information was critical, mission-important and not necessary for the general public at their malls. Below, you'll see what were effectively my area of operations during 2005. Yeah, starting to see why I care so much about internet and military security so specifically now?Since leaving active duty, I went to college and became a writer. It is through writing that my greatest achievements have been realized. I've met people I never thought I would and learned lessons I never would have imagined. In that time, I've focused on educating others about the military. From Iraq to what it was like and what it means to be a military veteran, there was so much that needed to be understood. In doing this, I've learned a great deal about the conflicts of our world and the dangers we face. Since growing to understand all of this, it's been a personal mission of mine to explain all of this to as many as will listen. That said, it's also been among the great joys of my life to build and be a part of a community dedicated to understanding the world, its dangers, and bravely pushing through to live in the world we all want so badly. That said, there is another reason why I have been writing so hard this last week.A few months ago, my wife peed on a stick and now my life is going to change forever.This is my son Alex, and in July we look forward to introducing him to all of you. That said, because I am about to be a dad, this could be one of my last posts like this where I get to drive my focus towards a single massive project, eating away my time for the benefit of others. A good dad has to provide a future and sharing knowledge pro bono, while an endless source of self-fulfillment, doesn't give Alex the life I want him to have. I've been very lucky where I work to be able give time to my second profession. Where do I work? I'm a teaching paraprofessional in Oklahoma. I work with the kids at our school who make bad choices. In my room they mentorship and discipline, learning to write essays and pick up trash in the way only an obsessive compulsive Marine writer could make them.That said, being a teacher, let alone a paraprofessional teacher, isn't all that great. The benefits don't provide much, and the pay is terrible. According to the Washington Post, Oklahoma ranks 48th this year in Teacher Pay at about $44,000 a year[84]. Yeah, and as a para... I can expect about a quarter of that. Did I mention that my wife is also a teacher? If you would like to know what it is like for our house take a look at the title of this little gem: Superintendent: Budget Cuts ‘Worst Financial Crisis To OK Schools In Decades’.That said, the last real chance for me to keep writing projects like this is to appeal to people like you. Over the last year and a half, I have been submitting my work through the crowdsourcing website Patreon. If you follow me, you've probably seen my little at the bottom asking you to pledge to my campaign. My supporters have literally changed my life and allowed me to do projects I never would have imagined, all the way up to the point where I was finally able to write my own book The Next Warrior. Still, if want to give my son the life I really want, I need more. That's why I'm going full mercenary, and writing one of my longest answers ever, just to get your attention. If you really like my submissions, I really need your help.This is a link to my Patreon Support Page: Jon Davis is creating A Military Sci-Fi Novel, Articles, and Essays. Here you can pledge any amount you like and every time I submit an article, post, or chapter to one of my books, you'll donate that amount to the Jonathan Alexander Davis College Fund and/or Leaky Roof Trust. There is also a monthly maximum that you can elect to make, so you don't have to worry about me writing fifty articles at a time. The only ones that make Patreon are big articles... kind of like this one.By supporting me, you also support others. 20% of my donations go to other Patreon users as well, namely other veterans like me. So a donation to me helps others veteran artists as they grow, cope, and share their own experiences with the rest of the world. So once again here's that link: (PS - Baby/Veteran/Poor Teacher - needs your help) Jon Davis is creating A Military Sci-Fi Novel, Articles, and Essays.That said, If you're reading this far, I'm sure you've already upvoted, by the way (cough). All kidding aside and with deepest sincerity, I enjoyed every minute of the research and writing that went into it, and hope each and every one of you enjoyed it too. Thank you for reading and sharing.Semper Fidelis,Jon DavisFootnotes[1] Total number of Websites[2] Meet Comex, The 19-Year-Old iPhone Uber-Hacker Who Keeps Outsmarting Apple[3] Hacker Says He Can Hijack a $35K Police Drone a Mile Away[4] Cyber Security Is BIG Business[5] Microsoft Shores Up Its Cyberattack Defenses[6] Gamergate controversy[7] Tifa's Breasts Too Big for the FF7 Remake?[8] Online disinhibition effect[9] Penny Arcade[10] The Long Term Effects of Bullying[11] Page on None[12] The Only Thing I Have To Say About Gamer Gate[13] Page on krebsonsecurity.com[14] Verona teen sentenced to year in prison for online attack of Scientology[15] How Anonymous Turned Occupy Wall Street From A Fledgling Movement Into A Meme[16] Anonymous hackers turn fire on global paedophile menace[17] ‘You’re a virus, we’re the cure’: Anonymous takes down 20,000 ISIS Twitter accounts[18] Anonymous claims to have stopped its first terror attack[19] 'Anonymous' hacker quits, calls group's members hypocrites and its efforts fruitless[20] Tech Tuesday: Considering the (Frightening) Power of the Virtual Lynch Mob[21] Just how many people have been Hacked? -[22] 5 takeaways from Verizon's 2014 Data Breach Investigations Report[23] 5 takeaways from Verizon's 2014 Data Breach Investigations Report[24] This Big U.S. Health Insurer Just Got Hacked[25] Anthem: Hacked Database Included 78.8 Million People[26] Hack Brief: Hackers Steal 15M T-Mobile Customers’ Data From Experian[27] Scottrade suffers hack; 4.6M customers notified of breach | ZDNet[28] CVS Photo website might have been hacked[29] Trump hotels hacked, credit card data at risk[30] Hacking of Tax Returns More Extensive Than First Reported, I.R.S. Says[31] The spies behind your screen[32] Hacking Team broke Bitcoin secrecy by targeting crucial wallet file[33] A Detailed Look at Hacking Team’s Emails About Its Repressive Clients[34] American Gets Targeted by Digital Spy Tool Sold to Foreign Governments[35] Cyber Warfare | RAND[36] PLA Unit 61398[37] As federal agency reels from massive data breach, Chinese hackers blamed | ZDNet[38] The Massive OPM Hack Actually Hit 21 Million People[39] OPM Now Admits 5.6m Feds’ Fingerprints Were Stolen By Hackers[40] http://www.newsweek.com/russian-hackers-shut-ukraine-power-grid-415751[41] Information Warfare: The 50 Ruble Army[42] 50 Cent Party[43] Exclusive: Iran hijacked US drone, says Iranian engineer (Video)[44] Exclusive: Iran hijacked US drone, says Iranian engineer (Video)[45] Todd Humphreys' Research Team Demonstrates First Successful GPS Spoofing of UAV[46] An Unprecedented Look at Stuxnet, the World’s First Digital Weapon[47] The Battle for Mosul Has Begun[48] Cyber-warfare 'is growing threat'[49] Navy Battles Cyber Threats: Thumb Drives, Wireless Hacking, & China[50] Page on ali-cle.org[51] It’s Not Just Paris: From Nigeria to Egypt, 10 of 2015’s Worst Terrorist Attacks[52] Jon Davis's answer to In reference to a 2015 Oregon mass shooting, Ben Carson said he would have rushed the shooter. Would rushing a shooter be a good option at any point?[53] Terrorism fears secure profits for Sweden's Securitas[54] The Largest Company You've Never Heard Of: G4S And The London Olympics[55] What's the largest private army in the world?[56] Jon Davis's answer to What are the most striking insights of the recently published ISIS Files?[57] ISIS Is Making An Absurd Amount Of Money On Ransom Payments And Black-Market Oil Sales[58] Huge ransom demand for Japan hostages raises questions[59] Kayla Mueller Helped Homeless Women, HIV Patients, War Victims[60] France denies paying ransom for al-Qaeda hostages[61] Held 3 Years, French Hostages Return Home[62] Turkey Obtains Release of Hostages Held in Iraq[63] ISIS Tortured Christian Hostage Until Family Paid $80K Ransom[64] ISIS Demands $30 Million Ransom for Christian Hostages in Syria - Breitbart[65] Jon Davis's answer to In Captain Phillips (2013 movie), Greengrass clearly seeks to elicit empathy for Muse and the Somali pirates. How are we supposed to feel about them by the end of the film? Are we supposed to feel bad for them?[66] ESI \ Comprehensive Executive Protection Training[67] Executive Protection and Bodyguard Training[68] DCJS Executive Protection/ Personal Protection Specialist (32E)[69] Home Page - European Security Academy[70] CIA’s Global Response Staff emerging from shadows after incidents in Libya and Pakistan[71] Operation Iraqi Freedom[72] Operation Red Wings[73] Defense Department to cut Army to pre-WW II size[74] How much does one airstrike cost?[75] Jon Davis's answer to Why doesn't the US military just train every soldier like a Navy SEAL?[76] Jon Davis's answer to How do I train myself like a Navy Seal? What are the some of the practices a normal person can include in everyday life which can replicate the mind and body of a Navy Seal (meditation, workout, reading)?[77] Marcus Luttrell, speaker New York, 1 of 2 / Operation Red Wings - Lone Survivor[78] Jon Davis's answer to What would happen if the USA stopped trying to "police the world"? What effects would this have, economically and militarily, on the USA and other countries?[79] Robots May Replace One-Fourth Of U.S. Combat Soldiers By 2030, Says General[80] Will Marines be forced to leave Okinawa?[81] US Army Scores 'Weak' in Think Tank's Review of Military Power[82] Why is America losing faith in its military?[83] Jon Davis's answer to To what extent is Al-Qaeda a creation of the CIA?[84] How much teachers get paid — state by state

Expert Committee Submits its Report on Determining Methodology for Fixing National Minimum Wage, Ministry of Labour and Employment Click hereEconomically Weaker Sections (EWS)ShareEconomically Weaker Sections (EWS) is a term used to refer to those citizens or households with income below a certain threshold level. Though there may be other economic factors in deciding on the economic weakness of the citizen/household, income is the dominant criterion. In public policy domain the term has to be appreciated in the context of the Preamble to India’s Constitution which seeks Justice- social,economic and political. (See Original Text at page 7 of India's Constitution))This categorisation as EWS is distinct from other categories like “disadvantaged sections” which refer to those belonging to the Scheduled Caste/ the Scheduled Tribe /other socially backward communities who may be having a disadvantage owing to social, cultural, geographical, linguistic, gender or such other factors.However, the definition of EWS may include those categorised as “Below Poverty Line (BPL)”.There is no coherent single / unique definition for EWS in India. It is defined differently for different schemes run by the Government. Further, state and central (Union/Federal) governments may set different criteria for deciding on the EWS status. Governments periodically review and re-fix income ceiling levels for Economically Weaker Sections (EWS) to keep it relevant and contemporary.Generally EWS status is confirmed based on the Income certificate issued by a Revenue Officer not below the rank of Tehsildar (Taluk office in-charge), BPL Ration card or Antodya Anna Yojna Ration Card (a ration card issued to the poorest of the poor) or Food Security Card issued by the state government concerned. In some places a legal affidavit is taken for the issue of EWS certificate.The criterion of EWS is evoked while granting benefits under education or housing.Some of the definitions of EWS adopted by Central /State GovernmentsFor instance, Interest Subsidy for Housing the Urban Poor Scheme (ISHUP) was conceived by the central government in 2009 for providing interest subsidy on housing to urban poor to make the housing affordable and within the repaying capacity of EWS and Low Income Groups (LIG). The scheme encourages poor sections to avail of loan facilities through Commercial Banks/ Housing and Urban Development Corporation (HUDCO) for the purposes of construction of houses and to avail 5% subsidy in interest payment for loans upto Rs. 1 lakh. Under this ISHUP Scheme, EWS were classified in 2009 as Households with monthly income of upto Rs 3,300 (or 39600 /annum) while those with monthly income between Rs 3,300 and Rs 7,300 were termed as LIG. Government, later in 2010, revised the income ceiling in respect of Economically Weaker Sections (EWS) from the earlier limit of ‘upto Rs. 3300’ to ‘upto Rs. 5000’ or Rs. 60,000 a year and for LIG to Rs. 10,000 from Rs. 5,001. On 14 November 2012 this was further revised such that urban poor having an annual household income of up to Rs. 1 lakh were classified as EWS and those falling between Rs. 1 lakh and 2 lakhs were categorized as Low Income Group (LIG). The revised criteria, has been approved based on growth in per capita income, minimum wages for non-agriculture workers, monthly per capita expenditure, National Housing Bank’s Residential Price Index, and Consumer price index & consumer food price index.Rajiv Rinn Yojana (RRY) has been formulated by modifying the Interest Subsidy Scheme for Housing the Urban Poor (ISHUP) piloted in the 11th Plan period with enhanced scope and coverage. RRY is a Central Sector Scheme applicable in all the urban areas of the Country. RRY is an instrument to address the housing needs of the EWS/LIG segments in urban areas as well as to channelize institutional credit to the poorer segments of the society thereby, increasing home ownership in the country. Rajiv Rinn Yojana is effective from October 1, 2013. RRY provides for interest subsidy of 5% (500 basis points) on loans granted to EWS and LIG categories to construct their houses or extend the existing ones. The upper limit for loan is Rs 5 lakh for EWS and 8 lakh for LIG (interest subsidy would, however, be limited to the first Rs 5 lakh of the loan amount, in case the loan exceeds this amount). Under RRY, Economically Weaker Section (EWS) is defined as households having an average annual income up to Rs. 1,00,000/- while Low Income Group (LIG) is defined as households having an average annual income between Rs.1,00,001/- and up to Rs.2,00,000/-. More details on RRY may be seen here.Under the new Housing Scheme – Prime Minister’s Awaaz Yojna launched in 2015 with the aim of providing Housing for all by 2022, EWS households are defined as households having an annual income of up to Rs.3,00,000. States/UTs have the flexibility to redefine the annual income criteria as per local conditions in consultation with the Centre. The mission supports construction of houses upto 30 square meter carpet area with basic civic infrastructure, to be registered preferably in the name of the female head. The mission seeks to address the housing requirement of urban poor including slum dwellers through following programme verticals:Slum rehabilitation of slum dwellers with participation of private developers using land as a resource provided at concessional rates by the governmentPromotion of Affordable Housing for weaker section through credit linked subsidyAffordable Housing in Partnership with Public & Private sectors: Providing Central Assistance per EWS house in affordable housing projects where 35% of constructed houses are for EWS categorySubsidy for beneficiary-led individual house constructionUnder Section 2 (e) of Right to Education Act, (The Right Of Children To Free And Compulsory Education Act, 2009) a "child belonging to weaker section" means a child belonging to such parent or guardian whose annual income is lower than the minimum limit specified by the appropriate Government, by notification; For instance, Delhi Government has specified the EWS child as a child resident in Delhi for the last three years with annual parental income of less than Rs. 1 lakh. They are given 25% reservation in seat allotments. On the other hand, Andhra Pradesh has fixed the income ceiling at Rs. 60000. Various definitions of EWS adopted by various states for the purposes of implementing Right to Education may be seen here.The Central Government is implementing the Central Sector Plan Scheme titled “Scheme on Interest Subsidy on Educational Loans from scheduled Banks for professional education of students from economically weaker sections” for providing full interest subsidy during the period of moratorium (i.e. duration of a recognised professional course plus one year) on educational loans availed by students belonging to economically weaker sections whose annual income is not more than Rs.4.5 lakhs.Patients belonging to the economically weaker sections (EWS) are referred to identified private hospitals in Delhi for being provided with free treatment, particularly when such hospitals were set up on land obtained under concessional terms from the government[1]. For the purposes of this, EWS is defined as those with monthly income upto or less than Rs. 8086/-.The Union Budget for 2016-17 presented on 29.02.2016 announced that “Government will launch a new health protection scheme which will provide health cover up to Rs. One lakh per family belonging to poor and economically weak families”. For Senior Citizens of age 60 years and above, an additional top-up package up to Rs. 30,000 per senior citizen per year, got implemented w.e.f 01.04.2016. The Scheme is proposed to be launched w.e.f. 01.04.2017 and the details are awaited.Economically Backward Classes (EBCs)A concept similar to EWS used in India, is Economically Backward Classes (EBC). Citizens having annual income less than Rs.1 lakh and who do not belong to any social category such as Schedule Caste, Schedule Tribe and Other Backward Classes (SC/ST/OBC) have been categorized as Economically Backward Classes (EBCs). For instance, the term EBC is adopted in Dr. Ambedkar Post-Matric Scholarship for the Economically Backward Class Students(Centrally Sponsored Scheme) which is effective from 2014-15. Under this scholarships are given to Indian nationals belonging to General Category whose total income from all sources of the employed candidate or his/her parents/guardians in case of unemployed candidate does not exceed Rs.1 lakh per annum. Another scheme launched alongside this, Dr Ambedkar Central Sector Scheme of Interest Subsidy on Educational Loans for Overseas Studies for Other Backward Classes (OBCs) and Economically Backward Classes (EBCs) also adopts the same definition for EBC.The Central Government had set up a Commission for the Economically Backward Classes in January, 2004. The Commission was reconstituted on 03.03.2005. The revised terms of reference of the Commission were as follows:to elicit the views of State Governments/UTs and other Commissions on the subject;to suggest criteria for identification of economically backward classes;to recommend the welfare measures and quantum of reservation in education and government employment to the extent as appropriate; andto suggest the necessary constitutional, legal and administrative modalities as required for the implementation of their recommendations.The Commission for the Economically Backward Classes submitted its Report to the Government (Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment) on 22.7.2010[2]. The aforementioned scholarship schemes were launched for EBCs subsequent to the submission of this report.International ExperienceMany Governments target benefits to the economically weaker sections of the society. For instance, in the US Small Business Act, a woman is presumed economically disadvantaged “if she has a personal net worth of less than $750,000, her adjusted gross yearly income averaged over the three years preceding the certification does not exceed $350,000, and the fair market value of all her assets (including her primary residence and the value of the business concern) does not exceed $6 million”. Thus, in addition to income, the US Act resorts to networth and asset /wealth status of the person for deciding on their economic weakness.1. Source: PIB release dated 16 December 2014 and 11 February 2014; Health is a State Subject; it is the responsibility of the State Governments to ensure that proper treatment is provided to the poor in their States. For instance, as far as National Capital Territory (NCT) of Delhi is concerned, the Nursing Homes/Private Hospitals in Delhi registered as per the provisions laid down under Delhi Nursing Homes Registration Act, 1953 and Rules (Amendment) made thereunder and which were allotted land at concessional rates by land allotting agencies are providing free treatment to the eligible patients of economically weaker section (EWS) category. There are 45 such functional identified private hospitals which were allotted land at concessional rate by land allotting agencies. They have been providing free treatment to the extent of 10 % IPD and 25% of total OPD, completely free of any charges, to the eligible patients of EWS category whose monthly income is upto or less thanRs.8086/-.2. Source: Annual Report 2013-14 of Department of Social Justice & EmpowermentContributed byRose Mary K Abraham (IES 2006)Email- [email protected] in / create accountPageCommentsSuggest a conceptReadView sourceView historywNavigationHome PageAbout IESConceptsConcept IndexCreate a ConceptSuggest a ConceptUsers GuideProfilesAuthor IndexEditorial BoardSubmission GuidelinesSubscribe to ArthapediaFAQContact UsUpdates HistoryHelpShare ToolsShare119ToolboxRelated changesSpecial pagesPrintable versionPermanent linkTranslateSelect LanguageArabicFrenchGermanHindiPowered by TranslateThis page was first created on 9 February 2016, at 06:44 and last modified on 19 July 2016, at 18:33.This page has been accessed 204,911 times.Privacy policyAbout ArthapediaDisclaimersWebsite developed by csipl.net

What is Alexa Answers and what sociological and anthropological insights can be drawn by the questions?I have been conducting a statistical study of Alexa Answers [1] and what I found is quite astonishing. This results have a robustly impacts understanding of how people use Voice First [2] devices like Alexa from an anthropological, sociological and business perspective.Specimen of Alexa Answers Control Panel.Empirical Research Study On Alexa AnswersI was commissioned to conduct this research by a notable and very astute Sand Hill Road Venture Capital group. My report was a—mouthful with over 600 pages including some relatively unknown and somewhat obscure patent references. I have asked and was granted permission to post some of the insights as an answer to this Quora Question and have deep gratitude to them for allowing me to share a study that they paid very generously for. They agreed with me that there is an undiscovered continent ahead with how people are using Voice First devices at scale to not only surface hundreds of new business plans, based on the questions received by Alexa, but also a window into how people are using Alexa. We also have a window in to the human factors and phycology of interacting with a device that is conducting a limited anthropomorphic conversation in their home.I come to this subject from an interesting and somewhat biased perspective. I have been a top writer at Quora [3] for about 8 years and my work there was published at HuffPost, Slate, Forbes, Apple News, Gizmodo, Newsweek, Inc, Daily Mail, and Business Insider. Thus I not only know the power and utility of Question and Answer sites (Q & A), I also feel rather strongly Quora has continued to not only define the category but also continues to innovate at a rapid pace.This is a concatenation of a report that is ~600 pages. The report had a number of other goals other then to present how Alex Answers works. As with most of my commissioned reports I identify typically multi-billion dollar startup opportunities and true Clayton Christensen disruption, if this is indicated. I have isolated the elements related to Alexa Answers and Q & A Sites in general and how they are vitally important to the next 50 years in computer I call the Voice First revolution [4].History of Q and ATo understand how Alexa Answers in the context of current Q & A systems we will need to digress to surface fundamentally important aspects of successful systems. This is vitally important if the answering community survives and thrives. As we will explore, this is not a certainty.The Straight DopeThe first elements of the modern Q & A system was decidedly not technical but very popular, The Straight Dope newspaper column was first published in 1973 and syndicated around the US. The popularity was partly based on the obscurity of questions asked snd the detailed and creative way they were answered. In many cases the average person cold have looked up the question in a home encyclopedia or local library. Yet there was the element of how columnist Cecil Adams and illustrator Slug Signorino captivated and educated their regular growing reader base. The Straight Dope was still published up to June, 2018 when it started what may be a permanent hiatus.The Usenet OracleIn The Usenet Oracle was a 1989 attempt at the first Internet based Q & A site using a humorous Socratic style, it became a very popular pre-web area to find answers to questions that when completed were called an Oracularity. This established a sort of passive-aggressive answering style that today dominates all parts of the Internet today. Usenet, because it was text based and primarily used by people that worked in the computer and software industry using a 300-1200 baud modem helped progress the terse passive-aggressive Socratic style. For many reasons the Oracle fell out of use. One reason was the rise of the World Wide Web. Another reason was the culture of the community just about chased out any answerer that did not adopt the terse passive-aggressive Socratic style.ProfNetBy 1996 the commercialization of Q & A sites started with the launch of PR Newswire’s site called ProfNet, an online community of communications professionals made to provide reporters access to expert sources. Although I did read The Straight Dope and attended to Usenet nightly, I see my real first Q & A experience with ProfNet, where I answered 100s of questions centered around technology, payments and small businesses primarily. The site was used by reporters, lawyers and a fascinating array of government institutions where to this day, I still do not know what they do and found it important not to ask. The site ended as other professional experts sites surfaced at a lower price point and aimed directly to either reporters or the legal field.Google Question And AnswersIn the intervening years there were many segmented and subject matter focused Q & A sites that spring up and shuttered. Until 2001 with the start of Google Question And Answers was started. This service involved Google staffers answering questions by e-mail for a flat fee $3.00. It was fully functional for about 24 hours, after which it was shut down, possibly due to excessive demand and the tough competition from Yahoo. Determined, Google Answers was launched in April 2002. A month later, a search feature was added so users could read question and answer pairs.By late November 2006 Google reported that it planned to permanently shut down the service. The reason “We considered many factors in reaching this difficult decision, and ultimately decided that the Answers community's limited size and other product considerations made it more effective for us to focus our efforts on other ways to help our users find information.” Keep this reason in mind as it turns out to be rather important. The culture of the community began to decay over time for many reasons.Answer.comAnswer.com and sister site WikiAnswers started as an idealab project (and Answer . Com domain name) in 1996. Initially questions and answers were displayed through a downloadable software product, today known as 1-Click Answers. The product was launched as a free product in 1999. Beginning in 2003 it was sold to users on a perpetual license base and later as an annual subscription. The service suffered from a lack of proficient and quality answers and less then a very low customer base. By 2010 Answer.com launched its alpha version of a Twitter-answering service nicknamed 'Hoopoe.' When tweeting a question to the site's official Twitter account: AnswersDotCom, an automatic reply is given with a snippet of the answer and a link to the full answer page on the Answers website. The service suffered from a lack of use.Yahoo AnswersBy 2005 Yahoo established the first sustainable model to the modern Q & A site to some degree. The concept was simple: Yahoo Answers was a community-driven Q & A site or “a knowledge market” that allows users to both submit questions to be answered and answer questions asked by other users. This gave questioners and answers an equal footing. It turns out there are some people that are great at posing questions, some are rather fascinating and other people are great at either first person knowledge on the subject matter of the question or excel at researching an effective answer. Yahoo Answers had an early limited use version answered by Yahoo employees and contract workers called Ask Yahoo, but this had very little use and exposure.Yahoo established a standard in rights ownership: though the service itself is free, the contents of the answers were owned by the respective users. Yahoo maintained a non-exclusive royalty-free worldwide right to publish the information.Yahoo Answers was a study of the good, bad and ugly of Q & A sites. Yahoo Answers allowed any questions that did not violate Yahoo Answers community guidelines. But the guidelines were an ever changing moving target. It also magnified what we users of the Usenet knew all too well, the terse passive-aggressive Socratic style and the hidden agenda question and hidden agenda answer. Categories like Politics and Religion & Spirituality along with the typical “debunker” clans began to cause internal strife with users and Yahoo. The anonymity of the answerers helps to contribute to this environment, users could choose to reveal their Yahoo Messenger ID on their Answers profile page but even this was not a direct identity as some users had 100s of IDs.Yahoo initially started a points system to “gameify” misuse of Yahoo Answers. This was handled by a user moderation system, where users report posts that are in breach of guidelines or the Terms of Service. Posts were removed if they receive sufficient weight of trusted reports primarily from users with a reliable reporting history. Deletion could be appealed: an unsuccessful appeal receives a 10-point penalty; a successful one reinstates the post and reduces the 'trust rating' of the reporter. If a user receives a large number of violations in a relatively short amount of time or a very serious violation, it can cause the abuser's account to be suspended. In extreme cases for a Terms of Service violation, the abuser's entire Yahoo ID will be suddenly deactivated without warning.The point system also was implanted to encourages users to answer as many questions as possibly, up to their daily limit. Once a user achieves and maintains a certain minimum number of such contributions, they may receive an orange "badge" under the name of their avatar, naming the user a Top Contributor. Users could lose this badge if they do not maintain their level of participation. Once a user becomes a "Top Contributor" in any category, the badge appears in all answers, questions, and comments by the user, regardless of category. A user can be a Top Contributor in a maximum of 3 categories.The points system is weighted to encourage users to answer questions and to limit spam questions. There are also levels with point thresholds, which give more site access. Points and levels have no real world value, cannot be traded, and serve only to indicate how active a user has been on the site. A notable downside to the points/level system is that it encourages people to answer questions even when they do not have a suitable answer to give to gain points. Users also receive ten points for contributing the "Best Answer" which is selected by the question's asker. The voting function, which allowed users to vote for the answer they considered best, was discontinued in April 2014.The Yahoo Answer, Questions were initially open to answers for only our days. However, the asker can choose to pick a best answer for the question after a minimum of one hour. Comments and answers could still be posted after this time. To ask a question, one has to have a Yahoo account with a positive score balance of five points or more.The culture of the community of Yahoo Answers decayed as many of the top answerers moved to Wikipedia and Quora latter on in search of a better community and culture.QuoraThis Q & A site Quora was established in June 21, 2010 and received widespread acclaim very early on, especially praised for its interface and for the quality of the answers written by its users, many of whom were recognized as domain experts with first person knowledge in their respective fields. Quora's user base exploded almost instantly and, by late December 2010, the site was seeing spikes of visitors five to ten times its usual load—so much that the website initially had difficulties handling the increased traffic. When the website first came online and for many years afterward, Quora refused to show ads because, as the company stated in 2016, "...ads can often be negative for user experience. Nobody likes banner ads, ads from shady companies, or ads that are irrelevant to their needsQuora established community moderators as well as moderators employed by the company. Quora requires users to register with the complete form of their real names rather than an Internet pseudonym, although verification of names is not required, false names can be reported by the community. This was done with the intent of adding credibility to answers and to control abuse. Users with a certain amount of activity on the website have the option to write their answers anonymously but not by default.Quora can be thought of as an ongoing science experiment. The site has gone through a great deal of evolution. Each iteration surfaces from the tests of prior iterations. Quora has attributes from many of the Q & A sites that came before. For example Quora has developed its own proprietary algorithm to rank answers, which works similarly to Google's PageRank that gives priority and weighting to an answer along with up/down votes and other engagements like reads and comments.Quora has been by far the most successful Q & A site thus far with millions of questions and answers and over 300 million month visitors. The site’s answers are usually featured at the top of most search results and ranks as the top 128th site in the world.Quora is really the only general interest Q & A site success story and there are many reasons for this. To help guide to the scope of this discussion it is not a chicken/egg situation, the site always needs a deep and wide contingent of writers. The game mechanics and reward systems are vitally important and has contributed greatly to the site’s success.There are many elements that have motivated the most prolific writers on Quora. One of the fundamental ones comes down to distribution, a good answer could potentially be seen by hundreds of thousands of people.Another element is the elastic structure to the answers. Quora is not a Wikipedia rote restatement of “facts” and this is the fundamental strength of the site. If you made it to this point in this posting, you are experiencing it: the wide spectrum of elastic responses to a question.Quora thrives because of what I have come to understand personally, as the inventor of a new type of medium and long form writing. The terse passive-aggressive Socratic style tends not to survive at Quora because of this. Whereas a vast majority of Q & A sites were infected with minimalist answers and easy to notice snide elitism, Quora has flourished with writers that for the greater part know and love the subject matter of the domains they write about first hand.One of the most powerful secrets about Quora is just about any question either has been posed or can be posed (with-in the site guidelines. This allows for domain experts to flourish. This may seem like a minor element, but it is one of the reasons I have been active on the site for over a decade. Quora cares about the sacculated first person knowledge not so much the question, but the knowledge.Storytelling is the fundamental tool humans have to learn. Quora’s success is based on creating an environment where first person knowledge of the domain expert can craft a story about the subjects they have spent their lives on. Although not everyone may be a “great” writer from a technical perspective, somehow the passion that person has becomes shared with the knowledge and information. This inevitably becomes longer form writing.The culture and community at Quora is quite unlike any Q & A site I have participated in. There was a camaraderie from the very early days on to the most current era. There are many elements that have built the core group that carry this ethos forward, one is the comments section where users could interact with the answerer and ask more high resolution details about the question as well as to offer commentary and debate. Although not perfect, the real name elements of Quora has maintained a civil commentary and debate element.The Basis For A Successful Q & A ProgramWe have established a number of criteria for successful and less than successful Q & A sites. This is very important for the longevity of Alexa Answers as if they cann’t sustain consistent good answerers, the system would meet the same fate as other Q & A sites and fall into fiefdoms of despair.Quora and SiriIn April, 2010 a few days after Apple acquired Siri, I began to write about how vitally important site like Quora will become to the Voice First revolution. I wrote “Is Quora Important to Siri” [5} as an example of the opportunity.“Quora As A Best Source For SiriWe are at the precipice of a major shift on how we interact with our devices and the information that is in the cloud. In fact perhaps the entire electronic world controlled by these devices will see this shift.Siri is the first real step in this direction of the 4th user interface, not replacing the Mechanical User Interfaces (the keyboard, mouse and gestures) but enhancing them and perhaps creating an entirely new use case for instant knowledge. The model we had up until this point may in the near future seem somewhat clumsy and dated when used to get at simple end point data. It is perhaps the tasks that all of us have become accustomed to that will be the most stark noticeable difference we will be confronted with. To put it simply, most of us find it is easier to ask a question with our voice, then to go through a Mechanical process. In the old Mechanical User Interfaces model there are the obvious steps and the steps that are less obvious,”—Brian Roemmele Quora, 2010I also answered a recepicol answer Is “Siri important to Quora?” [6]. In 2011 I said:“Siri Will Need To Access The Entire InternetThis type of system is an enhancement to the Mechanical User Interfaces (Keyboard, Mouse, Gestures). But Siri is also far more then this, from a Meta view it is a system that will understand your words, extract intentent, create a plan to access the Domain APIs that will generate the information to either produce an answer or complete a task”—Brian Roemmele Quora, 2011Alexa Answers ResearchIn December 2018 Amazon launched the Q&A platform into beta with the goal of improving Alexa’s ability to answer questions. on September 12, 2019 Alexa Answers was live to all with an Amazon account. On the announcement Amazon said the feature was well-received by the early community of invite-only participants, who have contributed “hundreds of thousands of answers that have been shared with Alexa customers millions of times”.Specimen of the Alexa Answers website 2019To differentiate these answers from other Alexa responses, they’re attributed to “an Amazon customer” post-amble. This attribute brings along many positive and negative aspects we will surface later. However it is safe to say that this post-amble diminishes authority in the answer and Alexa as a system of authority as a whole.During the launch Amazon stated the basis for Alexa Answers was: “there are thousands of answers that had previously stumped Alexa, like ‘Where was Barbara Bush buried?’, ‘Who wrote the score for Lord of the Rings?’, ‘What’s cork made out of?’ and ‘Where do bats go in the winter?’”. It would seem that Alexa should have the ability to answer some of these questions based on Wikipedia searches or the default Bing searches.Some experts feel this is a Knowledge Graph problem and that if the Knowledge Graph was large enough all questions can be answered. This is the same thinking that assumes we will need General Artificial Intelligence or pass some Turing Test for useful Voice First AI, history will show this approach was painful wrong and painful obvious it was in hindsight.As mentioned you must have an Amazon account to participate in Alexa answers. This turns out to have a filtering effect of some bad actors and some abusive passive-aggressive type answers. Many answerers would likely not want to jeopardize their Amazon account with attributes of high negitivity. Even though you can choose not to use your real name in Alexa Answers, Amazon still knows who you are. Yet this element has a huge opportunity for Amazon beyond the the filtering effect, the answerers are also Amazon customers and obviously the shopping habit correlation is interesting, self released data, it also can be used to highly motivate good answers and good answerers in ways that space in this answer does not permit me to explore.Amazon has a history of crowdsourcing book and product reviews since its inception. This experience is both a blessing and curse as they do help the company, on the surface understand some elements of crowdsourcing ecosystems, it also creates the illusion that book/product reviews are somehow similar to answering a question, it will turn out not to be this case.Specimen of the daily bonus questions from Alexa Answers.Once signed in you will be presented with eight general categories of interest/expertise which will then generate a list of questions available. You can choose to filter them based on attributes like “most frequently asked,” or “newest” or by other category areas. You have just 150 characters to answer the proposed questions. It usually takes a few hours to be accepted by Amazon and published. This is easily considered short form questions and in most cases it is all the space we would need. However I discovered cases where this is clearly not the case and thus inaccurate or incomplete answers will result.My research shows that verbosity in response and if the user would find this a good response is based on the Myers-Briggs Indicator (MTBI) of the user. I started building MTBI aware systems in the late 1980s and can extract with high resolution the likely MTBI of the user and thus reflect a correlating MTBI of the persona and answers the Voice First system presents. We can see that although sounding complex just knowing and presenting the MBTI correlation of the user can make an answer more useful and can also help understand the meaning of a question in real-time.Specimen of Alexa Answers community leaderboards.After you submit an answer, you earn points toward monthly and weekly leaderboards and badges based on how many questions you’ve answered, how many times it’s been shared with Alexa users and more. This sort of game mechanics initially serve as a motiving force but for many it loses power over time as more people fill the system with answers. This is similar to the gameifaction used in Amazon Book/Product reviews. Amazon says:“This new feature is just one example of the many ways we’re continuously working to grow Alexa’s knowledge. As always, we’ll continue to evolve the experience based on customer feedback”.Specimen of Alexa Answers levels and points.Although game mechanics have a point in just about everything, they can also serve as a big distraction and cause actions that may not generate quality answers or answerers. We can learn a great deal form the errors of Yahoo and Google form this element.Specimen of Amazon Technical Turks website.I am told Mechanical Turks [7], an Amazon service used the same interface as Alexa Answers. It is interesting that prior to Alexa Answers Amazon paid Technical Turks to answer Long Tail questions. We can speculate if this was successful or not successful as a method. With Alexa Answers there are dashboard and leaderboards showing how much your answer was used by Alexa and how often it was “Star” rated is standard gameifaction. When an Alexa user is presented with the answer there is a random response after the post-amble that states “did you find this question useful”. the issue with this type of feedback is that it is really not a true form of feedback it is entirely situational and subjective. Complicating the gameifaction is the community of answerers can vote a 1 - 5 stars for your answer. It may also be automated by the game mechanics systems Amazon built to motivate better answers. However this is one area where potentially bad actors can form groups, and they do on all of the Q & A sites and vote down certain answers and certain answerers. This has a sort of chilling effect on the results that are generated. Additionally by not using a true Likert Scale [8], this is a type of rating scale used to measure attitudes or opinions, the binary helpful/not helpful is almost useless as it manifests as a thumbs up or thumbs down on the Alexa Answers dashboard next to the answer posted.I have found ways to perform a Voice First AI Likert test that is not obtuse or obvious as a post conversation the system uses to understand and create true feedback. And of course asking an overt 1-5 Likert would be not useful. Of course I do not overtly ask for a Likert score directly but I can arrive at one indirectly through follow up questions and answers.Specimen of the Likert Scale Questions In Textual Form.So we are stuck in a world of crowdsourced answerers judging of answerers and the answers they produce along with the binary “useful” or “not useful” vote by the user. Both signals are ambiguous beyond the obvious and overt incorrect or bad faith answer. Yet there are better ways to determine this beyond crowdsourcing.So on the surface this seems to be a very simple and straight forward Q & A system with Alexa questions serving as the basis for the answerers to respond to. Yet this is not nearly the same feedback loop that exists on successful long for Q & A sites like Quora. Although not immediately obvious to even people that are experts in this field, there exits a vital feedback loop that allows for a better answer. The quagmire starts with the fact this is a post processing result, meaning the original questioner will likely never ask the question again, for a number of reasons. Thus we have a brach in the taxonomy that may or may not bare any fruit. Now there are a number of ways for Amazon to solve this problem, but this is not the approach that will prove to be successful for many more reasons, this is just one.Thus Alexa Answers can be seen as best, as only a way to post process a question via crowdsourcing. In my analysis which we will explore later on, we will surface many examples of questions that will statically fall below the crucial “noise rate” below .01% likelihood. Even more interesting is the face many of the questions are in a format that can easily be answered by a protocol not the path Amazon and others take, I call “rote machine learning”. One way to understand this is how you recognize a bird. When you were first introduced to a bird you formed a protocol on what an ontology of living creatures are like. You further a taxonomy of bird-like over a very short period of hours to days. You did not need to see 10,000 images of a bird in various light settings for an array of reasons, many are related to the tens of thousands of protocols and sub-protocols that run anytime you are greeted with the new. Some think of this as pattern matching and that is a very low resolution way to present what is happening.This is part of systems I have built I call The Intelligence Amplifier [9] and one of the fundamental aspects of the system is to extract intents and meanings and thusly extract answers based on the protools indicated and the information the intelligent agents returned in real-time.BOOM!Meet https://t.co/qdKFgeC498 her first time heard in public. She is particularly adapt at surfacing information not found on the Internet or quite hidden.She is a 100% proactive system that uses a patented notification system.#TheIntelligenceAmplifier is many folks. pic.twitter.com/twolfpNkK1— Brian Roemmele (@BrianRoemmele) August 25, 2019Specimen of Agatha.Best one of The Intelligence Amplifiers performing research.The Perils OF The Voice First Fence LineFrom the user’s experience, when Alexa does not know an answer, a fence line is erected in the mind of the user each time they hear “I don’t know that” or “I cant do that” it is profoundly difficult to change the boundaries, once established after enough of these events. This is why most Voice First platforms will meet with issues that may cause extremely constrained use cases over time. It is also why the companies that build these platforms need to acquire very astute people that have understood this issue for decades, not just since 2008 or something. I call this empirical praxis and the hiring practices of all the companies that build Voice First platforms are usually limited to degreed computer engineers, AI engineers and linguists experts. There are exceptions but theses are the cohorts building these systems. There is absolutely nothing wrong with these professions, indeed they are needed, but there are hundreds of experts that would be shown the door before HR even has a chance to speak with them.How To Answer Any QuestionAlexa Answers was built with the premise that “long tail” questions require human respondents to extract meaning. It is an engineering solution to a human problem that is not fully understood by the engineer. It is classic ex post facto designing where the loop is never closed for the user. Thus we will have an ever widening array of questions that seem unique but have a protocol basis that could allow it to be answered in real time, with no knowledge graph or AGI. In fact this is precisely what I did. Using protocols I developed in The Intelligence Amplifier “I’ answered a few thousand questions across 16 test accounts (don’t ask how I established these active and legal Amazon accounts, but no ill will was involved). All of the questions were processed by the protocols and produced answers that were accepted by Amazon and distributed through the Alexa universe. In effect, The Intelligence Amplifier took questions Alexa could not usually in seconds. I just redirected the answers via a simple script back to Alexa Answers. I had to throttle the system as at some point 30 answers a minute would raise suspicion.I did manually answer a few questions to test the fence line and boundaries of the system. There were interesting artifacts I discovered in just the questions I answered and did not allow The Intelligence Amplifier to answer. In one case, that I can not publish the question or answer for a number of reasons, non are illicit in any way, just proprietary, I found that many “5 star” votes to this obscure answer and a 5 day delay before Amazon published it.I been building databases of questions typically asked since The Usenet Oracle in 1989. Thus with all the Q & A sites of have been a part of or conducted research, I have accumulated over 16 million questions and a percentage of answers. This has allowed me to empirically draw on over 30 direct research databases. I have conducted a longitudinal study of this research over the years and recently created a new study that includes what I have found with Alexa Answers.Ontologies And TaxonomiesThere can be all kinds of taxonomies in an ontology. however ontology attempts to describe and capture an entire subject area, with all of its complexity, whereas a taxonomy tries to simplify a complex collection of seemingly unrelated items into a linear, organization. We can think of the way Alexa’s category system works as an ontology, in as much as the actual question is captured in its complexity but it flows to eight taxonomies. In a real sense the top level of categories could be seen as a true taxonomy, I will use ontology labeling for a number of reasons. One reason is that each question could and should form a true ontology to be correctly answered by a correctly established protocol to categorize the elementals of the question so as to reuse it in future question / answer pairs.By far a significant number of short form resulting questions on the top of ontological tree can be directly based Wikipedia as the primary source. All of the Voice First platforms use Wikipedia resources and Wolfram Alpha as a typical answer source. In the case of Alexa, my research shows that the taxonomies flows from eight primary ontologies:VideoGeographyScienceHistoryMusicFoodLiteratureSportsInternally there may be more top level ontologies, but these are the eight ontologies that have been exposed currently during my research. Even a cursory overview will establish that the whole of possible questions can not be easily held in a top level ontology that Alexa appears to use. Thus the Science category has some odd additions forming a sort of “kitchen sink” catch-all for question categories that do not fit the very limited ontologies.Twenty three percent of the overall questions asked by Alexa users are in the Science and Food categories. It is important to understand there will be distortions in overall questions in as much the Alexa Answer questions show questions that in theory Alexa did not provide a useful answer for. However in my studies of Q & A sites I feel we have a rather robust cross section of Alexa question situations.The distribution of question ontologies do not completely reflect the relationships of the types of questions posed to Alexa, however we can use this data as a rather useful starting point.Specimen of research by Brian Roemmele on the distribution of 5000 questions on Alexa Answers.Why are these ontologies important? They serve two primary functions:In real-time the can establish a guide to the possible answers to ineffectually posed questions.In answer misses, they can serve to notify answers on Alexa Answer the category they selected.Consider the Science ontology, here are two specimen questions presented by Alexa Answers :A) What's the freezing temperature of ice?B) How many squirrels are left in the world?Although it is possible to categorize item B as “science” it is really more of a trivia sort of question that likely has no exact answer. By grouping these types of questions together, there limited ontologies get distorted. Most trivia question can have some statical science involved but they do not truly belong to the science tree. I use over 6000 top level ontologies based on some dozens of studies, real-life testing and the database of Q & A sites I have amassed.Consider this axiom:The fine detail to anything is just 90 steps away.How many times do I need to cut a Cherry Pie before I get to a single atom?It takes ~90 successive cuts.Although the long tail of questions look to be an endlessly complex problem, and to be sure it is if you use the approach every Voice First platform uses, it is reducible to the logical in less then 20 “cherry pie cuts”. And with context of the flow of questions before and other telemetries it can be achieved in many cases with 5 questions to the questioner. Thus if this sort of protocols were instituted, there would really be no need for human answerers in many cases.A Deep Statistical Study Of Questions Pose By Alexa UsersSo lets dive deeper in to the rich insights we can derive from Alexa Answers. There are many anthropological, sociological and business perspectives and insights I have drawn from my research. Although this is on going research the early results are nothing less then fascinating. Alexa Answers as a research tool offers astounding possibilities with the private questions of millions of users presented. Have no doubt they are deemed private questions because there is no overt preambles telling the Alexa user that the question they just posed would be seen by a crowdsourced answerer community. Now can one see anything particularly useful or personally identifiable? In a very limited case the answer is yes. It is not intentional by Amazon but an artifact of how they process and present questions. I will not publish what I discovered publicly, but it is not nearly a big concern, just a general one.To understand intent(s) and meaning(s) of the question we use a process that is engrained into our conscious and sub conscious. But it is designed to be nuanced by interaction and not typically binary Question Answer. To help currant AI systems extract intent and arrive at meaning we typically use a linguistic break down of sentence in to semantics. We use a Reed–Kellogg system or parse tree of the question and typically can be broken down by functional parts:subjectobjectadverbialverb (predicator).nounsThe subject is the owner of an action, the verb represents the action, the object represents the recipient of the action, and the adverbial qualifies the action. The various parts can be phrases rather than individual words and relate to people, places and things. We use a sentence diagram that is a pictorial representation of the grammatical structure of a sentence. The term "sentence diagram" is used more when teaching written language, where sentences are diagrammed. The term "parse tree" is used in linguistics (especially computational linguistics), where sentences are parsed. Both show structure of sentences. The model shows the relations between words and the nature of sentence structure and can be used as a tool to help recognize which potential sentence is actually a sentence.Simple sentences in the Reed–Kellogg system are diagrammed according to these forms:Specimen of the Reed-Kellogg system of parsing.The Intelligence Amplifier uses a meta parse tree indirectly based on the Reed Kellogg systems and establishes a first pass numeric determinism to the question and ultimately to the answer it presents via a feedback loop similar to Likert Scale and also context of preceding questions. The numeric values are:In band +1 - 9Out of band - 1 - 9Obtuse * 1 - 9Gibberish ? 1 - 9I use this scale along with ~92 others to help classify the ontologies and correctly extract intents and meanings. With out correct intent extraction and a road to meaning, the question and the answer is of course meaningless.The Alexa Answers Baseline StudyFor this paper I will use a sample set of ~5000 questions extracted from the Alexa Answers site over the period of 6 months in early 2019. A very curious insight I found early on, is that many questions actually have Alexa answers and they did not need crowdsourcing to arrive at an answer, and in and of itself, this is interesting.Here are some sample questions and the associated ontology Amazon applied:What's the perfect temperature to brew coffee at?Food +1How big is an atlas moth?Science +1Where do honey crisp apples grow?Food +1Did michael jackson go to college?Music +6What was captain kangaroo's real name?Video +1How tall was edward the first?History +1What is the average weight of a motorcycle?Science +7What country has the most females?Geography +9How long is cat's been on broadway?Video +4What is tiny turtles real name?Video +9How long is the continental united states?Geography -1Are sharks warm blooded?Science +1What's the name of robin hood's hideout?Video -6What city has the most snow fall?Geography +5Who is danny treasure?Music +9What is the national dish of greece?Geography +4What is the city with the least population?Geography +1Where is liverpool from?Geography *9Who is the prime minister in nineteen forty two?History ?9What should i do with used cooking oil?Food +9How many calories in a tube of pringles?Food +7How long does cauliflower cheese take to cook?Food +5What is gerry adams in the i. r. a.?History +7What is the average lifespan of a u. k. mail?Science -9 *2Who sings someone's knocking at the door?Music +5How many series of friends are there?Video +9How fast can a staffordshire bull terrier run?Science +9How do you cook a roast dinner?Food -8Who invented the custard cream?Food *5How many disabled people are there in the u. k.?Geography +4In this very small sample we can already surface many interesting if not astounding insights on who is using Alexa and how they are using the system. We can also create an “Expectation map” of what questioners are assuming is possible with Alexa. I could write many books on this general subject, but the Expectation Map, not used by any Voice First platform is very powerful. We can also see the obvious miscategorizations (and you cant change them when answering the question) of ontologies that will do nothing in helping Alexa find a useful answer.What appears to be random questions, I have discovered after analyzing million of questions since the 1990s there are “attractors” and “format types” that repeat endlessly. One format type example is the “How tall/heavy/old/etc is /famous person/?”. The categories are littered with these questions and can be answered using even the crudest AI /ML tools Amazon has. Not only do these questions require their now ontology, they also show a mindset and mentality of the questioner. Although “shaming” words are removed from the questions, they are implied and in some cases are passed through.Consider:How much does jean claude van damme weigh?VideoNot really a video ontology other then the fact he is an actor. This is a format type question in the “How tall/heavy/old/etc is /famous person/?” structure. The parse tree is simple. But lets examine the psychology and perhaps sociological aspects are interesting. Why do we see about 7% of sample questions in this category?Consider another format type question:How tall is john berry?VideoAgain not in the video ontology but we also have a potential common proper name spelling issue. Is it really “John Barry” of was it John Barrie an English actor who appeared in a number of television shows and films who became well known for playing the title character on the police series Sergeant Cork from 1963-68 and playing Detective Inspector Hudson on Z-Cars from 1967-68? Or did the questioner mean J.M. “James Matthew” Barrie, author of “Peter Pan” who like his character in his novels, was of a diminutive height. We don’t know because the questioner is long gone and all that remains is the question. However The Intelligence Amplifier had an In Band +1 assumption It was related to Peter Pan. We may never know as the questioner is long gone, all that remains is this question that to this day, Alex is stumped on.The format type questions all are In Band but many are Out Of Band or even Obtuse. Some reasons are based on subject, object, adverbial, verb and noun errors or miss readings by Alexa.Consider:How does an egg get fertilized?FoodThis of course should be categorized with the limited eight ontologies as Science yet it is Food. Indeed eggs are food, but what was the intent of the questioner. We can use format type here also in the “How does /thing/ /get/do/ /effect/”. Although this seems a more complex format type it really isn’t. We are really dealing with just eggs and the effect of fertilization, we assume food grade eggs but this may very well be a human reproduction question. How do we know? Context. Thus it is likely Alexa answered this as a food question and that was not satisfactory because it may have been in the ontology of food and produced a bizarre response to a human reproduction question.The Intelligence Amplifier, based on millions of questions and format typing found this to be a human reproduction question not a food question of edible eggs. Thus it seems clear why it became an Alexa Answer. Yet this miscategoization will prompt answerers to continue to present “wrong” answers because of the ontology.I have discovered in my research ~3000 format type questions that can cover about 80% of questions in my databases. Now understand I am just some guy in a garage but it is interesting how attractors form around certain subject matter. This of course is usually beyond linguistics and computer science professional domains and shows the blind spot in build Voice First systems using the “usual suspects” and lacking empirical praxis.Beyond format type questions there are other types that could lend itself to visual reinforcements.Consider:Where is denmark on the map?GeographyThis should not have been an Alexa Answers question for many reasons. Even if the questioner had no screen to show the map it can be said thusly: “Denmark, is above Germany and surrounded by the North Sea west of Sweden”. Did you need to see a map? Perhaps if you are not familiar with geography to any deep level. This question also show that a vast majority of questions are not “fact” but “feel” questions. For example we could have giving latitude and longitude data and digressed to highly localized geographical milestones, but this is to a high statical percentage not really what the questioner really wanted. They wanted a “feel” of where it was on the globe and subsequent questions could explore details if desired. But programmers and linguistics experts in group meeting would not agree to a “feel” for a question but will be biased to “facts”. And trying to find “facts” and not a “feel” for a question, even Wikipedia failed to find the fact needed. Is this a small issue? Not by the least the “feeL’ questions represent over 61% of questions I analyzed from Alexa Answers.Consider:What is the most thoroughly research nutritional product in the world?ScienceandHow many calories should you have for breakfast?FoodThese questions don’t have an objective fact they have a subjective insight. The questioners are not looking for anything really exact because it is likely they know there is no universal direct answer. The answers are situational to many elements including the health of the person asking and where they are located in the world. So a “fact” approach by machine, Wikipedia or a human answerer would yield a cascade of less than useful answers over time that will not find a means. But if a “feel” approach is used one universal answer or format can be achieved. One answer vs. thousands.As mentioned before there are many questions in my research data from Alexa Answers that simply do not need to be presented to answerers. Some out easily classified as Out Of Band and Obtuse and others are easily answered from Wikipedia and Bing.Consider:Is the universe still expanding?ScienceAndWhen did bts debut?HistoryAndWhere does mars come from?ScienceAndAre there different galaxies?ScienceAll of these questions waste the time of Alexa Answerers and have simple answers, yes even the BTS questions. So why are they here to be answered? We can only speculate but this along with many other observations I can conclude some serious errors of how Amazon is approaching how they extract intents and meanings.There is a cross section of psychological states presented by the flow of questions found at Alexa Answers.Consider:How do i convert baking soda to baking powder?FoodWhat is the zip code for wenham massachusetts?GeographyDo deers have whiskers?ScienceWhat year was the waco fire?HistoryHow many people live in wild?GeographyHow many ribs does a t. rex have?ScienceIs the tower of babel still standing?GeographyHow much does the heaviest cat weigh?ScienceWhere was the beatles last performance?MusicWhat are the properties of oobleck?ScienceWho is johnny carson's sidekick?VideoWhat year did microwave ovens come out?VideoWhen did naruto first air?VideoWe can conclude that some questions seem to be trivia but on deeper analysis they are not. Some are historical or scientific “facts” but without the context of a conversation one could answer these questions in a manner that would not really reach the essence of the question. Clearly there is no reasons for zip code questions to appear at Alexa Answers. If this was a failure of the Alexa platform it is glaring. I have seen dozens of zip code questions.We can also conclude the location of the Alexa device by virtue of the types of questions rendered. We can also get a feel for when these questions are being asked over the course of the year. It would be helpful for Amazon to show a date and time.Consider:How long will it take to cook a five kilogram turkey?FoodAndWhat temperature do you cook a twenty pound turkey at?FoodAndHow long does it take to cook a twenty eight pound stuffed turkey?FoodAndHow long to cook a sixteen pound stuffed turkey?FoodIt does not take much to conclude these questions are being generated to a high statical percentage around holiday seasons. Likely Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays in the US. You may have noticed a format question here and you are correct. This is a “How long do I cook /Food/ that weighs /weight/?” with variations there are 100s of these questions. There will be hundreds of Alexa Answerers producing specific answers in rote to the endless weight combinations. It is really quite shocking these types of question, weighed to almost the largest percentage has not been automated. It is elementary.The type and range of questions may seem random to even expert observers that do not study this deeply to any level. Yet there is a rather clear psychology behind many questions and attractor patterns are easy to see with even limited data.Consider:What is the most played video game in america?VideoAndWhat are french hens?ScienceAndWhich state has the least amount of natural disasters?GeographyAndWhat color is dove cameron's eyes?VideoAndDo you have a recipe for pumpkin seeds?FoodAndDoes pumpkin pie get refrigerated?FoodAndDoes sweet potato pie need to be refrigerated?FoodAgain, we see holiday cooking. More exactly some post holiday cooking. We also see questions that relate to fears (natural disasters) and human interest (eye color). There is much to be said about post meal food preservation, in particular pies (were they homemade or preserved unrefrigerated store bought pies). What is the “pie psychology?” here there are obvious business cases here but there is also mindset aspects. We also see mindset aspect with the utilization of pumpkin seeds, likely related to making a pumpkin pie or Halloween carving, again dates and times of the question create at least some limited context.The psychology of the questioner can be extracted by the Affect protools of The Intelligence Amplifier and from this some correlating demographic and age cohort data can be extracted. From a sociological and anthropological basis I have also found a rich treasure trove of data. We know the general psychological state of the Alexa user, and how this will play out over time in sociological and anthropological studies. Part off my research creates a statistical word use study that aids in understanding the sentiments of the users. From a fundamental level this data can be used to make Alexa work better. Indeed I have used this data to make The Intelligence Amplifier work better.We can also find opportunities for new businesses and in the case of this report over 27 points of Clayton Christensen disruption either by Amazon if they discover it or by startups or legacy companies if they discover it. I can not over state how many opportunities have been surfaced just by this small study of Alexa Answers. Just by knowing what people curious about and how they ask these questions is an astounding opportunity.ConclusionsIt may be easy to read this presentation as an attack in some way towards Amazon, the Alexa team or the AI community a a whole. Read this clearly: it is not. In fact one reason I requested to release some of this report to the public is to in some way hope to help them. Many ask why I am not working in these companies and could do this privately. Well the short of it is: I really don’t know other then the fact I may be “un hirable” by the current hiring practices at play in technology companies. Even though I could pass the “prove you can code before you can come aboard” hazing tests at play to this day, I am still admittedly a Round Peg to their Square Hole.It can be argued that some of this information is known to the Voice First companies, however I can say with certainty via private conversations most of the information and solution presented here is not widely known for if it were it would not have fallen through to Alexa Answers. It is also very clear this is not just an Amazon problem, Google, Apple and others, I know from other studies have the exact same problem to a greater or lesser degree along with other problems.The Voice First revolution is relatively new. Answering the “long tail” [10] questions and finding the correct short form to long form answer is new for many of the people building these systems. Without empirical praxis and using purely and engineering approach solving these issues. What do you do when you don’t know the answer to a question? You find the answer. The next generations of Voice First systems will find better answers.The Case Against General Artificial Intelligence And The log2(n) - n ParadoxOne of the great debates raging in the tech community is that Voice First systems like Alexa, Siri, Cortana, Google and others are too “dumb”, “they can never answer every question”. The truth is, of course they are. These generation one systems fail outside very constrained domains. Yet using the same criteria to humans, we all look pretty “dumb”. The invention of writing, the printing press, the book, the floppy disk and the Internet allow any properly equipped human to answer any question, or get a fairly good “feeling” of the potential answers.It turns out humans think in a “fuzzy” way. Our answers, as logical as they may seem sometime may have foundations in logic but they are fuzzy in the way they are translated to humans. Most humans chose not to speak in segments of facts connected together and if we do, we suffer a life of loneliness. Humans use analogy and reference to express things. Many researcher and observers assume this is exformation (information to be discarded). However the things we use to present concepts, ideas, even commands have a multiplex quality to how it was said.Thus when we are asked a question it is quite natural for us to simultaneously decode the multiplex layers of context. Many times we will ask additional questions to full understand what was said or the command. However overtime humans learn by doing and tend not to ask rebound questions, we apply prolix, we speak in shortened sentences and we take the sentences as a meta command or meta idea.For computers to solve the what I call the log2(n) - n paradox (or the Evan’s paradox) they need to deal with the Fuzziness of humans and turns out that it is not the “insolvable” problem that even learned experts suggest. The Turing Test was first proposed in 1950 by Alan Turing in the paper “Computing machinery and intelligence”. Turing is commonly acknowledged as the father of artificial intelligence and computer science and later developed the Imitation Game as a substitute for the question “Can machines think?”. The Turing test is interesting but is not the baseline of how future Voice First systems will deal with the log2(n) - n questions and log2(n) - n answers almost seemingly impossible task. Moreover, Turing’s intentions were never to use his test as a way to measure the intelligence of AI programs but rather to provide a coherent example to help arguments regarding the philosophy of artificial intelligence.The idea that any AI system has to anticipate every question and produce a ready-made answer is not only unachievable it is a complete misunderstanding too the way humans work. No system will be omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent. No human, even with the assistance of the internet can address log2(n) - n questions and log2(n) - n answers. Thus to pose a premise that not living or a mechanical system could achieve as an argument against the utility of Voice First systems is an argument under a false premise.Thus Alexa Answers does not seem to have the successful game mechanics that has made Quora successful. This is vitally important for this system to work on a long term basis and not face the Yahoo or Google fate. Additionally we can conclude even if Alexa Answers is successful it will not nearly address the systemic problem at play here either use humans to answer questions or go for a AGI Turing test approach. The reality is it is not a binary choice. Using simple but very powerful protocols that you and I use every day would give the next generation of Voice First devices the ability to answer any question.Sites like Quora and systems to distill long form answers to the needs of the questioner in real-time will be of a tremendous step forward for Amazon. We will always need Q & A systems that extract and utilize first person knowledge that inherently is more fuzzy feel of information and insight than Wikipedia-like fact. This is how all cultures work through history. Indeed this is even how science works. We first arrive at the feel of a subject and then drill down to facts after if this is desired. Humans get mired down with data and not directionals of feel. Some may argue this is a fundamental flaw in humans and may use it as an inditement of our current condition today. This is a mis attribution. What humans need is a feel for the directional to help find the overview and then generate the supporting facts.We do not see the facts of the 2 x 4s and sheet rock of the outside of the house, we see the overall structure of the house and can draw many conclusions about what functions it serves and perhaps the type of rooms it contains, because the direction feel of the subject has been determined, it is a house. Today we have the builders telling us how the house was made and what it is made of. This is natural for people that have to form logical program functions in code. But as this though pattern matriculates up to the product, we actually wind up with a system that has far less utility then it could.Specimen showing Voice First is the fastest adopted technology in history.Voice First is the fastest adopted technology in history. No technology has even come close, not the smartphone or the tablet. Amazon has a majority market share with Alexa. This is deserved and earned. Yet we have not seen anything yet, this is the very early days of the Voice First revolution and even with some of the issues I presented here on Alexa Answers persist.Alexa will continue to do outstanding. Amazon is one of the few companies that get what this technology represents and has dedicated over 20,000 people to make it better. No matter what, we can expect Voice First to get much better. We are at the precipice of a new way to communicate with computers and an new way to arrive at data, information, knowledge, insight, wisdom and understanding. In the past we had to sift and sort through data and information in hopes of some knowledge. The voice First revolution with the correct protocols will bring about insights and hopefully more wisdom and understanding. We are awash in data, we need more wisdom and understanding.[1] Alexa Answers[2] There is A Revolution Ahead and It Has A Voice[3] Brian Roemmele[4] Brian Roemmele's answer to Is Amazon Echo (and/or Siri and other voice assistants) actually useful, or is it just a novelty? Are usage and retention of these products growing?[5] Brian Roemmele's answer to Is Quora important to Siri?[6] Brian Roemmele's answer to Is Siri important to Quora?[7] Amazon Mechanical Turk[8] Likert scale - Wikipedia[9] http://VoiceFirst.ExpertMore details on the Alexa Answers Product.What is Alexa Answers?Alexa Answers is a community where customers can answer questions for Alexa. It contains questions in categories such as Science, History, Literature, and Music which Alexa would like your help in answering.Where do you get questions from?The questions on Alexa Answers are facts Alexa customers want to know. If enough customers ask Alexa a question she cannot currently answer, that question may be published on Alexa Answers.How can I add answers to Alexa Answers?Just browse the categories, select a question you would like to answer, type your answer and click submit.How is my Amazon profile displayed and can I contribute anonymously?You have the option to contribute anonymously or display your Amazon profile information to other users on Alexa Answers. If choose to display your profile information, your profile name and profile image will appear on your answers and throughout the site. It will not be shared when Alexa delivers the answer to an Alexa Customer. If you choose to hide your information, you will appear as “Anonymous” to other users. You can manage your Amazon profile visibility in Settings.What makes a good answer for Alexa Answers?Good Alexa answers respond to the question briefly, directly, and accurately, in a contributor’s own words. They do not contain any content that is obscene, threatening, defamatory, invasive of privacy, or infringing of intellectual property rights (including publicity rights).What answers are not accepted on Alexa Answers?In order to generate helpful responses for Alexa to use when she is asked questions in the future, answers must be kept to under 300 characters. Answers may also be automatically rejected if they contain any of the types of objectionable content listed above. For additional information about what content is and is not accepted on Alexa Answers and other Amazon sites, please see Online Shopping for Electronics, Apparel, Computers, Books, DVDs & more’s Conditions of Use.What happens after I submit an answer?If your answer is accepted, it may be made available on Alexa next time a customer asks the question you answered. If more than one contributor answers a specific question, Alexa may rotate between answers until she gains enough feedback to determine which answer is the most useful. You can tell that your answer is available for Alexa to use if the blue “LIVE” icon appears below your answer.How do I report an offensive or bad answer?You can flag an answer on Alexa Answers to report them. Answers can be flagged if they are inappropriate (subjective, advice, vulgar, insulting, or offensive), incomprehensible (it doesn’t make sense when read out loud), or incorrect (not factually correct or relevant). Once flagged, the answer will be hidden from your feed and reviewed.What does it mean if my answer is flagged?Your answer was reported by members of the Alexa Answer community and/or Alexa Customers. Answers can be flagged if they are inappropriate (subjective, advice, vulgar, insulting, or offensive), incomprehensible (it doesn’t make sense when read out loud), incorrect (not factually correct or relevant) or not helpful (it's received too many downvotes from Alexa customers). Flagged answers are not visible on the Alexa Answers site and not shared with Alexa Customers. You can rewrite and resubmit your answer to address the reason for flagging. If you think your answer was flagged erroneously and would like to dispute it or get more clarity, you can contact us at email and we will review your answer and provide a response, if appropriate.What do the thumbs-up and thumbs-down numbers below my answers mean?When Alexa uses your answer, she may also elicit feedback by asking 'Did that answer your question?' The number of likes reflects the number of times customers said YES to this question. Similarly, the number of dislikes reflects the number of times customers said NO. (As noted above, if enough customers say NO your answer will become blocked and will no longer be used by Alexa).How are the leaderboards calculated?Leaderboards show the top ten weekly and monthly contributors on Alexa Answers. The leaderboard ranks contributors based on points earned on answers submitted within relevant category and time period. Monthly leaderboards reset on the 1st day of each calendar month. Weekly leaderboards reset every Monday.What do the point values mean and how are they calculated?Each answer is given a point score based on the number of times Alexa shares the answer and the quality of the answer. Answer quality is determined by Alexa customer feedback. When an Alexa customer hears an answer they can tell Alexa if the answer was helpful or not. The more positive upvotes an answer receives the more points it earns.I want to correct my answer, how can I edit it?You can click the three dot button to reveal the edit and remove actions. The sooner you do this after you submit the answer, the less likely you will lose any feedback your answer gathered.What if I submit an answer by mistake? How can I delete my answers?You can click the three dot button to reveal the edit and remove actions. Remove means your answer will be no longer be used by Alexa and all the statistics associated with the answer will also be deleted.What does Alexa Answers do if there are multiple answers contributed by the community for the same question?If more than one response to the same question is provided on Alexa Answers, Alexa will rotate between each of the answers until she has enough information to know which answer is the most useful. You can help Alexa choose the most helpful response by providing feedback. Answers with most positive feedback will be used more frequently.What is a HOT question?A HOT question is a popular question on Alexa. It is also more likely to get asked again by other Alexa customers.What are star ratings?You can help Alexa Answers be great answers, by rating answers submitted by other contributors. A 5-star answer is a high quality answer. Alexa can use contributor ratings, along with feedback from Alexa customers, to determine when and how often each answer is used.What should I do if I believe someone has used my intellectual property to respond to a question that appears on the Community Answers page?You can report intellectual property infringement by sending an email with the following information: (1) A physical or electronic signature of the person authorized to act on behalf of the owner of the copyright interest; (2) A description of the copyrighted work that you claim has been infringed upon; (3) A description of where the material that you claim is infringing is located on the site (for example, a screenshot or copy/paste of the question and answer you claim is infringing); (4) Your address, telephone number, and e-mail address; (5) A statement by you that you have a good-faith belief that the disputed use is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law; and (6) A statement by you, made under penalty of perjury, that the above information in your notice is accurate and that you are the copyright owner or authorized to act on the copyright owner's behalf.What happens when I follow a question?When you follow a question, you opt into receiving Alexa device notifications on that question’s answer activity. Click the star icon to follow a question. After following a question, Alexa will notify you through your Alexa device if another contributor submits an answer within 7 days.