As a little child I once got a ride to school from a neighbor who had a Subaru 4×4 that could go where school buses were failing (another time our bus was rescued from a ditch by a Korean-war 6×6 but that’s a story for another day).

Her tiny white car slowly crawled in low range over big prairie snow drifts and up the icy dirt hills. She softly patted the dash with her heavily bundled hand and yelled “COME ON BESSIE” above the roar of a little EA82 boxer engine that could.

It has been so many years, I wonder did she put her Bessie down and was it cruel when she did it? That’s the kind of question being asked by MIT in a new article asking if pressing an “off” button is equivalent to a machine murder. Maybe that’s the wrong question entirely, since they can be turned on again? Are you god if you can switch a robot on?

Here’s a particularly funny part where a “roboticist” notices that humans in high-risk/controlled environments like to name things and minimize changes.

Julie Carpenter, a roboticist in San Francisco has written about bomb disposal soldiers who form strong attachments to their robots, naming them and even sleeping curled up next to them in their Humvees. “I know soldiers have written to military robot manufacturers requesting they fix and return the same robot because it’s part of their team,” she says.

Should we accept this as some kind of exception as opposed to a norm? Who doesn’t name things or keep them close, even ones we don’t mind turning off?

Here’s a thought. Sleeping with a machine preserves integrity and reduces cost of trust. Returning the same one helps maintain integrity too, as every machine tends to have particulars.

I’d challenge this roboticist to put such behavior in historic context of soldiers and their machines for the past 100 years. And despite my “Bessie” experience, I’d say we trend more towards machines as extensions of our bodies, and not really companion-like.

Recently I wrote about the Aboriginal soldiers who defeated Ottoman forces in 1917, and how they were ordered to shoot their healthy horses after victory.

In fact the old Japanese theory suggests we are less likely to anthropomorphize robots that appear the most human-like. We might be most comfortable turning them off due to what they called the “uncanny valley“.

Attachment seems to come more from extension of our functional needs, which makes sense especially for bomb disposal risks, and helps explain the reasoning behind shooting victorious horses after battle has ended.

Of all the times I held my named laptop (because of course it has a name) in my arms, even sleeping next to it, nobody ever wrote about this as some kind of attachment. And I’d say they probably didn’t need to.

In fact I’d guess the percentage of security pros who keep their systems close and avoid rotations is near 100% but why call that a study subject?

There’s a part of a new decision that I keep re-rereading, just to make sure I read it right:

As a passcode is necessarily memorized, one cannot reveal a passcode without revealing the contents of one’s mind.

I mean that’s just not true. The old joke about people putting sticky-notes with passcodes on their monitor is because sometimes they are too hard to memorize. The reason NIST backed off complexity requirements and rotations is because passcodes turned out to be too hard to memorize and people were storing them unsafely.

We all recommend password managers and using unique passwords for every site, which is all too hard to memorize. The entire password market doesn’t believe passwords are necessarily memorized.

And then there’s the simple fact that passcode sharing often uses communication channels that rely on storage other than the human mind.

Also beyond being wrong that sentence seems unnecessary to the decision. If this case didn’t have a password written down, despite an accused saying he use one 64 characters long, then it becomes an exception. The fact remains passcodes very often are stored outside the human mind.

The rest of the decision is not terribly surprising

…the compelled production of the computer’s password demands the recall of the contents of Appellant’s mind, and the act of production carries with it the implied factual assertions that will be used to incriminate him. Thus, we hold that compelling Appellant to reveal a password to a computer is testimonial in nature.

The US Department of Defense has issued a challenge for computer vision to correctly classify the state of a building after disasters:

Your model must predict an output PNG image with height and width of 1024 pixels, where each pixel value corresponds to the predicted class at that place in the input image:

0: no building
1: undamaged building
2: building with minor damage
3: building with major damage
4: destroyed building

This makes for very interesting games played at the superficial level with paint or loose objects.

For example could computer vision distinguish easily the sort of building under perpetual construction (as often is the case in developing nations) from one that has been damaged? Or in a similar vein, if buildings are maintained poorly in markets that lack readily available materials, what constitutes minor damage?