Virtual violence

 

Image from Pixabay

A conference is successful if you have heard at least one thing that you had not previously considered. The longer you have been in the profession, the more difficult this is, but the ONE Conference has once again managed to let me have that experience. Not on a subject in my direct line of interest, but when choosing my parallel sessions I try to make a healthy mix of contributions that are interesting to me now, that seem fun/entertaining, and of which I think: hey, what’s that about? A warning in advance: this will not be a light-hearted blog. The contribution I am referring to was about violence in the virtual world, and that this violence can even penetrate into the real world.

You only need a TV to escape reality, although you are usually not really immersed in a fantasy world. In the cinema it becomes more realistic, especially if you are watching a 3D film (or one with even more dimensions). However, the virtual world that this presentation was about goes a few steps further: you wear a virtual reality headset and you may even wear a suit full of sensors and actuators, so that the computer feels you and can also make you feel things.

It was about that kind of virtual reality (a contradiction in terms?). And more specific: about violence in such an environment. Killing people in films and games is more or less socially accepted: in the westerns of my youth, quite a few cowboys and Indians were shot from their horses. Computer games, in which you have to shoot around to reach your goal, have also been popular for a long time; Back in the 1990s we had Wolfenstein 3D, in which I shot a lot of Nazis, while the blood dripped from the walls. These games have only become 'better' and a link has often been made between violent computer games and players who then started doing very wrong things in real life. I'm not going to rehash that discussion here.

The focus of Anne-Sophie Fritschij and Vien Germawi's presentation was on rape. In an artificial but very immersive world like the one outlined above, rape can have an effect on the victim comparable to physical rape, they explained. In this immersive virtual world, haptic feedback plays an important role – it is not just a matter of hearing and seeing, but also of feeling; you are almost literally immersed in that other reality. Reportedly, the number of sexual abuse cases in the metaverse, as this shadow world is known, is increasing at an alarming rate. There's even a game that revolves around rape (and I don't think it's necessary to mention its name).

The comparison the ladies made between virtual murder and rape revealed a clear difference, both in experience and in consequences. We don't make a fuss about murder in a game, but we deem rape morally reprehensible. An important difference was not discussed: murder in a game does not actually kill anyone, while with the current technology remote rape - or at least the sensation of it - is apparently possible. And that can have lifelong psychological consequences for the victim, according to the speakers.

In an earlier Security (b)log I wrote about the metaverse, with a quote from Winn Schwartau: “We are digitally terraforming the future cognitive infrastructure. We have ONE chance to get it right.” Schwartau painted a less than rosy picture of the metaverse. Fritschij and Germawi's presentation supplements that image with even more dark tones.

Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World in 1932. I read the book half a century later, and last year I watched some episodes of a TV series based on this famous novel. Huxley describes a cinema in which you can watch a feely: a movie with not only 3D image and sound, but also feeling (by grasping two knobs on the arms of the seat). If a sex scene appears in a feely, the viewer's experience goes a long way. Huxley's fantasy from almost a century ago seems to be coming true. Or should I say: is threatens to become reality? Let us take Schwartau's call to heart.

(Possibly) no Security (b)log will appear in the next two weeks.

 

And in the big bad world...

This section contains a selection of news articles I came across in the past week. Because the original version of this blog post is aimed at readers in the Netherlands, it contains some links to articles in Dutch. Where no language is indicated, the article is in English.

• the Red Cross has drawn up rules of war for civilian hackers.
• an attack on a Spanish aviation company began with a fake recruiter on LinkedIn.
• deepfakes of famous people are used to deceive you.
• the US government's top 10 configuration errors are not very surprising.
• it is not a good idea to program a password into an application. [DUTCH]
• the conference has put a major burden on my agenda, so I don't have time to include any more links here.

 

Metaverse

 

Image from Pixabay

We once referred to the internet with the term “the digital highway”. It was the time of 14k4 modems and - if you were lucky - ISDN lines, and compared to today you should have spoken of a digital service road. You regularly found yourself stuck in traffic or having a breakdown along the road. But now there is the metaverse: a virtual 3D world, a parallel universe, whether or not integrated into the real world, in which you can fully immerse yourself and interact with other people and companies.

This sounds very familiar to fans of the science fiction series Star Trek: as early as the late 1990s, Captain Jean-Luc Picard, number one Will Riker and the rest of the crew used the so-called holodeck for recreational and training purposes. There they trained in a safe environment for situations they would later encounter in the real world. However, the metaverse does not work with holograms and force fields, but with 3D glasses and augmented reality (Wikipedia: an interactive experience that combines the real world and computer-generated content).

Winn Schwartau was in the Netherlands a few weeks ago. He is an American security analyst and a thought leader in my field. He came to Utrecht to share his view on the metaverse, and that was certainly not a rosy picture. Just look at the following quote: “We are digitally terraforming the future cognitive infrastructure. We have ONE chance to get it right.” Terraforming is what you do on an alien planet to make that planet habitable - literally forming an Earth. Schwartau applies this mechanism to our future knowledge infrastructure and believes that we should be very careful what we do.

Why these concerns? Schwartau calls the metaverse the most powerful reality distortion machine ever. You choose your own reality, in which you can then be indoctrinated, radicalized and bombarded with advertisements. He emphatically warns of the danger of addiction. I've never been addicted to anything myself, but I can understand that alcohol, drugs, and the metaverse all provide ways to escape the reality where you may not be doing so well. Schwartau substantiates his view with data from neuroscience: our subconscious mind processes data many times faster than our conscious mind – two hundred million times faster. About 84% of that processing capacity is used for seeing, hearing accounts for 10% and then there is still a little left over for smelling, tasting and feeling. If you provide someone with 3D glasses and bombard their subconscious with all kinds of stimuli, while they feel they are doing something fun, you can strongly influence that person. And make them an addict.

And then suddenly the term metawar appeared on the screen. Wait a minute: the metaverse is still in its infancy, but a war is already raging? In the non-English speaking world, ‘war’ is exclusively understood as armed conflict between nations, but (especially in the US?) it also means struggle, of fight, as for example in the war on drugs. Schwartau distinguishes three classes in this struggle: personal, corporate/commercial and nation-state. The stage for the personal battle is the gaming and advertising world, where deceit lurks. In the commercial world we have to fear deep surveillance capitalism, indoctrination of employees and the end of privacy. And nation-state wise, we are threatened by religious extremism, political radicalism and brainwashing.

Disinformation plays a role in all three classes of metawar. To defend ourselves against this, Schwartau advocates three developments: ChatGPT detection (what is real and what has been made by artificial intelligence?), deepfake detection (is that picture, film or sound fragment real?) and teaching critical thinking. I wholeheartedly agree with the latter in particular: use your common sense, and remember that if something seems too good to be true, it usually is.

To end on a somewhat positive note, I don't think the metaverse is any worse than the 'regular' internet. After all, the old incarnation is also widely abused. But with Schwartau's story in mind, I do think that the bad guys in the metaverse have a lot more potential to do evil, because they have much more direct access to your brain - and especially your unconscious. I'd say enjoy it, but watch out crossing the road.

 

And in the big bad world…

This section contains a selection of news articles I came across in the past week. Because the original version of this blog post is aimed at readers in the Netherlands, it contains some links to articles in Dutch. Where no language is indicated, the article is in English.

• Twitter pulls out of an EU agreement against disinformation. [DUTCH]
• AI advises on the impact of AI. [DUTCH]
• iPhones can be infected with malware without user intervention. [DUTCH]
• the US may have used that iPhone vulnerability to spy on Russia.
• professional cybercriminals sign their malware digitally, because then they get through more easily.
• hackers are also sometimes hacked.
• US border guards can no longer search your phone at will.
• Tesla is as leaky as a sieve, and the Dutch Data Protection Authority has to investigate.
• an AI model called DarkBERT is based entirely on knowledge from the dark web.