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• US government removes Russian security software
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Growing Chinese investment

Shortly after North Korea launched the Hwasong-12 in May, the scientists who developed the intermediate-range ballistic missile were honored on the streets of Pyongyang as national heroes.
“The buses carrying them went through the streets of the capital full of flowers of welcome,” KCNA, the state-run news agency, reported at the time. “Citizens warmly congratulated them, waving flags of [North Korea], red flags and bouquets.” Among those offering his congratulations was Kim Jong Un. KCNA reported that the 33-year-old North Korean leader “hugged officials in the field of rocket research, saying that they worked hard to achieve a great thing.”
Scenes like those will probably be repeated over and over again if the last few months are any indication. So far in 2017, the North has carried out a dozen successful missile tests, and is well on its way to surpassing last year’s 14 successful launches. Two of this year’s tests were of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) that are capable of reaching the United States. In this time, North Korea has also been assessed as possessing a miniaturized nuclear warhead that can be fitted onto an ICBM. Last week it stunned the world by testing what it called a hydrogen bomb, far more powerful than anything the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima or Nagasaki. The accomplishments are all the more impressive given that North Korea is one of the most heavily sanctioned countries in the world; until recently was one of its most reclusive; and has a leader who can seem almost cartoonish until he shocks the world with yet another missile or nuclear test.

The place North Korea’s missile and nuclear program holds in the national psyche can be understood in part through the esteem in which scientists are held in the country. There are many high-profile residential construction projects devoted to scientists and their families. State-run media report on the honors they receive after nuclear tests and missile and space launches. They get parades like the one in Pyongyang in May.
“I’d say it’s the most prestigious job in the country right now,” Joshua Pollack, a senior research associate at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, told me. “It used to be that they emphasized the importance of the military in their politics. Now they’ve begun de-emphasizing that and they’ve begun to emphasize the role of scientists in society both for advancing their economy and, even more than that, for advancing their nuclear weapons and missile technology.”
Although scientists are honored and rewarded, they also remain under pressure to produce increasingly better results. There’s a real possibility, said Vipin Narang, an associate professor of political science at MIT, that Kim, like his father Kim Jong Il, “threatened these scientists with their lives if they don’t make progress. That can be a very powerful motivator.”

Whatever the motivation, the results are impressive. Consider this: In 2016, North Korea tested 26 missiles; 16 were successful and 10 failed, according to a database maintained by the Nuclear Threat Initiative. That’s an approximately 62 percent success rate. There have been 18 tests in all so far this year: 12 successes, five failures, and one unknown. That’s a 67 percent success rate. Those figures underscore what Pollack said about North Korea being “determined to break through.” Another thing to consider—the number of tests so far this year.

“The fact that they are willing to test missiles so frequently suggests they are not really worried about supply,” Narang said. “And if you didn’t have the ability to produce so many missiles, then you might be a little more reluctant to test.”
There’s evidence to suggest that North Korea is, in fact, accelerating its push toward the domestic manufacturing of parts needed for its missile and nuclear programs, turning slowly away from the international black market on which it had traditionally relied. Andrea Berger,  a senior research associate at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, said in an interview last week that North Korea has increasingly indigenized manufacturing. “Some of the goods they needed to once procure from overseas, they are now able to make domestically, which creates a local supply chain for, for example, missiles,” she told me.
That’s not to say that North Korea’s missile and nuclear technology is state-of-the-art. Many of the designs date back to the Cold War, when the North received nuclear technology from the Soviet Union. Over the years, it acquired weapons technology from China, Iran, Pakistan, and others, and through what can only be described as perseverance cobbled together successful programs.
“That’s where I think it's really impressive—the innovation by necessity that they’ve had,” Narang said. “It’s a country under sanctions. It’s a country under threat.” The technology, training, and assistance North Korea has received may be old, but “when you have a cadre of scientists and engineers that are familiar with it … it’s not surprising that they’ve gotten better at it.”

Pollack pointed out that while North Korea’s technology isn’t “cutting edge, … it’s commensurate with their capabilities and the level of effort they’ve put into it.” He said the country’s defense industry was robust; its scientific literature and industrial facilities expanding. Photographs of production facilities and production equipment, he said, display equipment that is “increasingly pretty sophisticated.” And, he pointed out, as advanced manufacturing technology becomes more easily available worldwide, “this is only getting easier to do over time.”
The experts I spoke to said they weren’t surprised that North Korea had made the kinds of advances it had, even though they were surprised at the pace at which North Korea had progressed. Roger Kimball,  the executive director of the Arms Control Association, told me, it was a “mystery” how Pyongyang had made gains so rapid that they were now viewed as a threat to the United States. Pollack said North Korea has “been systematically underrated for years.” Narang told me the pace of North Korea’s development surpasses similar programs in India, Pakistan, South Africa, Israel, and even France—and showcases the country’s metallurgical and engineering technology.

“It’s pretty impressive,” he said. “And it suggests they’ve figured out how to do a lot of things, and they are willing to have higher tolerances for failure and for less reliability.” That, ultimately, might be North Korea’s biggest advantage in the current standoff with the U.S. and its allies.
Narang pointed out that the probability that North Korea is able to deliver a nuclear warhead over San Francisco, or Chicago, or a city on the U.S. East Coast, is not 100 percent—because its technology is not yet that accurate. “But to deter the United States or really induce risk, what percentage is necessary before you cause Washington to have some pause: Is 5 percent acceptable? Are you willing to lose 5,000 to 50,000 Americans, on average? Probably not, right?
“And if you’re truly talking about a thermonuclear warhead, you could be talking about … millions of casualties. We need to get beyond this notion that it has to be perfect, and it has to be accurate. The larger the warhead, the less accurate it needs to be.”

A killer robot from the 2014 remake of Robocop. The open letter read: ‘lethal autonomous weapons will permit armed conflict to be fought at a scale greater than ever, and at timescales faster than humans can comprehend.’ Photograph: Allstar/Studio Canal/Sportsphoto Ltd./Allstar

Open letter signed by Tesla chief and Google’s Mustafa Suleyman urges UN to block use of lethal autonomous weapons to prevent third age of war

Some of the world’s leading robotics and artificial intelligence pioneers are calling on the United Nations to ban the development and use of killer robots.
Tesla’s Elon Musk and Google’s Mustafa Suleyman are leading a group of 116 specialists from across 26 countries who are calling for the ban on autonomous weapons.
The UN recently voted to begin formal discussions on such weapons which include drones, tanks and automated machine guns. Ahead of this, the group of founders of AI and robotics companies have sent an open letter to the UN calling for it to prevent the arms race that is currently under way for killer robots.
In their letter, the founders warn the review conference of the convention on conventional weapons that this arms race threatens to usher in the “third revolution in warfare” after gunpowder and nuclear arms.
The founders wrote: “Once developed, lethal autonomous weapons will permit armed conflict to be fought at a scale greater than ever, and at timescales faster than humans can comprehend. These can be weapons of terror, weapons that despots and terrorists use against innocent populations, and weapons hacked to behave in undesirable ways.
“We do not have long to act. Once this Pandora’s box is opened, it will be hard to close.”

Experts have previously warned that AI technology has reached a point where the deployment of autonomous weapons is feasible within years, rather than decades. While AI can be used to make the battlefield a safer place for military personnel, experts fear that offensive weapons that operate on their own would lower the threshold of going to battle and result in greater loss of human life.
The letter, launching at the opening of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) in Melbourne on Monday, has the backing of high-profile figures in the robotics field and strongly stresses the need for urgent action, after the UN was forced to delay a meeting that was due to start Monday to review the issue.

The founders call for “morally wrong” lethal autonomous weapons systems to be added to the list of weapons banned under the UN’s convention on certain conventional weapons (CCW) brought into force in 1983, which includes chemical and intentionally blinding laser weapons.
Toby Walsh, Scientia professor of artificial intelligence at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, said: “Nearly every technology can be used for good and bad, and artificial intelligence is no different. It can help tackle many of the pressing problems facing society today: inequality and poverty, the challenges posed by climate change and the ongoing global financial crisis.
“However, the same technology can also be used in autonomous weapons to industrialise war. We need to make decisions today choosing which of these futures we want.”
Musk, one of the signatories of the open letter, has repeatedly warned for the need for pro-active regulation of AI, calling it humanity’s biggest existential threat, but while AI’s destructive potential is considered by some to be vast it is also thought be distant.
Ryan Gariepy, the founder of Clearpath Robotics said: “Unlike other potential manifestations of AI which still remain in the realm of science fiction, autonomous weapons systems are on the cusp of development right now and have a very real potential to cause significant harm to innocent people along with global instability.”
This is not the first time the IJCAI, one of the world’s leading AI conferences, has been used as a platform to discuss lethal autonomous weapons systems. Two years ago the conference was used to launch an open letter signed by thousands of AI and robotics researchers including Musk and Stephen Hawking similarly calling for a ban, which helped push the UN into formal talks on the technologies.
The UK government opposed such a ban on lethal autonomous weapons in 2015, with the Foreign Office stating that “international humanitarian law already provides sufficient regulation for this area”. It said that the UK was not developing lethal autonomous weapons and that all weapons employed by UK armed forces would be “under human oversight and control”.

Science fiction or science fact?

While the suggestion of killer robots conjures images from science fiction such as the Terminator’s T-800 or Robocop’s ED-209, lethal autonomous weapons are already in use. Samsung’s SGR-A1 sentry gun, which is reportedly technically capable of firing autonomously but is disputed whether it is deployed as such, is in use along the South Korean border of the 2.5m-wide Korean Demilitarized Zone.
The fixed-place sentry gun, developed on behalf of the South Korean government, was the first of its kind with an autonomous system capable of performing surveillance, voice-recognition, tracking and firing with mounted machine gun or grenade launcher. But it is not the only autonomous weapon system in development, with prototypes available for land, air and sea combat.
The UK’s Taranis drone, in development by BAE Systems, is intended to be capable of carrying air-to-air and air-to-ground ordnance intercontinentally and incorporating full autonomy. The unmanned combat aerial vehicle, about the size of a BAE Hawk, the plane used by the Red Arrows, had its first test flight in 2013 and is expected to be operational some time after 2030 as part of the Royal Air Force’s Future Offensive Air System, destined to replace the human-piloted Tornado GR4 warplanes.
Russia, the US and other countries are currently developing robotic tanks that can either be remote controlled or operate autonomously. These projects range from autonomous versions of the Russian Uran-9 unmanned combat ground vehicle, to conventional tanks retrofitted with autonomous systems.
The US’s autonomous warship, the Sea Hunter built by Vigor Industrial, was launched in 2016 and, while still in development, is intended to have offensive capabilities including anti-submarine ordnance. Under the surface, Boeing’s autonomous submarine systems built on the Echo Voyager platform are also being considered for long-range deep-sea military use.

ABUJA—THE Federal Executive Council, FEC, yesterday, approved a new policy that bars foreign professionals from practising in Nigeria unless they were registered and certified by all the necessary regulatory bodies.

• Turkish authorities block Wikipedia without giving reason

'High-quality' authors

 Turkey now joins the Chinese government as two of the only nations to completely block access to Wikipedia.

News of the blockage was first reported by the website Turkey Blocks, at around 1AM Eastern this morning.



The website, which was set up to monitor what online properties are blocked by the Turkish government, reported that the blockage was approved by the Ankara first criminal court.

Since a failed coup attempt last July, Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan has steadily tightened controls over Turkish media both traditional and online.

The government has also cracked down on dissidents in the country. Picking up a story from the Associated Press, Canada’s Globe and Mail is reporting that at least 4,000 civil servants have been expelled from their posts as a result of a recent decree from the Erdogan government. So far, 47,000 people have been arrested and 100,000 purged for alleged connections to terror organizations.

Tensions in Turkey have been running even higher since a recent referendum on the fate of the Turkish political system. That election saw a small majority of the country grant sweeping new powers to Erdogan, who has been ruling largely by Presidential decree since the July coup, according to reports.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales took to Twitter a few hours ago to post his response to the crackdown on Wikipedia.

According to the Voice of America, the US sponsored news outlet: