Category: Uncategorised

(credit: Troll Hunter)

Few grounds in the battle over the meaning of truth are as hotly contested as the edit wars which people wage on Wikipedia's biographies of living people. As you'd expect, the edit histories of polarising figures like Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are an eternal clustershag of counterclaims and counter-counterclaims, but almost every sufficiently famous public figure has their detractors, no matter how benign they seem.

Even those rare ones who somehow manage to avoid upsetting anyone still attract vandals trying to insert whimsical libel into their articles for the lulz (who could remember the laughs we had way back in 2006 when someone asserted David Beckham was Chinese?), while there are dozens of examples of lies plucked unknowingly from the site being reported as fact in the newspapers, which is a battle without end in itself for libel lawyers.

However, at the other end of the endless struggle waged by keyboard warriors to prove that popular celebrities are all ultimately problematic, there's the fight fought by the marginally famous for recognition and notability. Who decides who is famous enough for their own entry on the encyclopedia of everything? It's inevitably a matter of degrees, of lines drawn in the sand. But where do we draw them?

LAS VEGAS—On a raised floor in a ballroom at the Paris Hotel, seven competitors stood silently. These combatants had fought since 9:00am, and nearly $4 million in prize money loomed over all the proceedings. Now some 10 hours later, their final rounds were being accompanied by all the play-by-play and color commentary you'd expect from an episode of American Ninja Warrior. Yet, no one in the competition showed signs of nerves.

To observers, this all likely came across as odd—especially because the competitors weren't hackers, they were identical racks of high-performance computing and network gear. The finale of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's Cyber Grand Challenge, a DEFCON game of "Capture the Flag," is all about the "Cyber Reasoning Systems"(CRSs). And these collections of artificial intelligence software armed with code and network analysis tools were ready to do battle.

Inside the temporary data center arena, referees unleashed a succession of "challenge" software packages. The CRSs would vie to find vulnerabilities in the code, use those vulnerabilities to score points against competitors, and deploy patches to fix the vulnerabilities. Throughout the whole thing, each system had to also keep the services defined by the challenge packages up and running as much as possible. And aside from the team of judges running the game from a command center nestled amongst all the compute hardware, the whole competition was untouched by human hands.