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But I imagine it's not as direct and effective as going into your brain's code and modifying it.

Then make it a very high building.

People survive skydiving accidents.

But I imagine it's not as direct and effective as going into your brain's code and modifying it.

We'll evolve defenses or perish.

Like our current anti-malware?

Then make it a very high building.

People survive skydiving accidents.

Then try not to survive. Odds are in your favor.

Like our current anti-malware?

Not at all. If we can upload consciousnesses, I imagine we'll have much better anti-malware. Besides, you can like, shoot people in the head and stab people and what not when they aren't uploaded, it's not like you'll only be getting additional risks.

You also don't need to like upload into a cloud or something like that, why not an air-gapped machine? Then you can choose to communicate by sending letters in the mail or something or making phone calls.

Then make it a very high building.

People survive skydiving accidents.

Yeah, at some point you reach terminal velocity and stop speeding up...

Like our current anti-malware?

Not at all. If we can upload consciousnesses, I imagine we'll have much better anti-malware. Besides, you can like, shoot people in the head and stab people and what not when they aren't uploaded, it's not like you'll only be getting additional risks.

You also don't need to like upload into a cloud or something like that, why not an air-gapped machine? Then you can choose to communicate by sending letters in the mail or something or making phone calls.

Yeah, I think any good brain uploading system should have multiple and regularly scheduled backups in different, secure locations, as well as at least some level of separation between individuals and the outside world.

You would think that in some cases with computers today...but it doesn't always happen. And we're just talking run of the mill hackers, what if it's the government wanting to do the reprogramming? I just think that when we get to that point, we're going to have more problems than solutions...unfortunately, as a society our social and moral progress hasn't quite kept up with our technological and scientific progress, I don't believe. There will always be the temptation to abuse our knowledge and technology for wealth, power, or fame...the stakes involved will just keep going up.

How are you going to explain to someone that they're unrecoverable and being deleted because they didn't think to back up their brains before they were infected with ransomware?

Today, how do you explain to someone that they've smoked for 20+ years and now they are dying at 40 of lung cancer? These aren't really new conundrums. It won't be an idyllic paradise, I suspect at first it will be like a wild-wild west type of situation, every consciousness living on the frontier of an unexplored universe. I have faith we'd eventually be able to come up with workable solutions for problems as they come up, as we usually have been able to in the past.

'Workable solutions' are fine and dandy when you're dealing with things that aren't vital, but it takes on a new meaning when it involves your very being. We're not even talking about death here, we're talking about the ability to change what makes each person themselves...we could be talking about creating something like the Borg for all we know. Looking at human nature and the present and the past, it's hard to believe that there wouldn't be powerful people and groups that would want to wield that type of power. I'm sure it would start with good intentions, too...if you can reprogram criminals, you no longer need prisons because they're no longer a threat to society. That would be good, right? If you can reprogram soldiers, you can get better results faster than with any training regime. It's what they signed up for anyways, right? And while we're at it, let's do that with law enforcement too, to make a more efficient, fair, and open force. That'd be great for society, yeah?

But from there, it can go down any number of slippery slopes that can be imagined up. I remember Civilization: Call to Power had a wonder where an AI would directly control everyone, for example.

I think the idea of mind uploading is fascinating, and I've wondered if the future of humanity might involve more exploration of virtual reality than of space like we see in Star Trek...but I also worry that we'll make those discoveries before humanity is ready for them. Technology is neutral...it's up to us to determine if they're applied for good or for bad, and based on the way humanity has handled modern technologies, it's quite a leap of faith to believe that humanity could responsibly handle something like this as it stands now.

I just don't think any amount of preparation could adequately equip us to deal with the first steps, so radical will be the change in perspective. The world has never been an easy place to live when you're on the frontier, we're just now accustomed to it being easy after centuries of civilization. It's not going to go well at first, but if we never take that step, we'll never know.

I think if we ever get to this technological level, one where we are able to read the running of a consciousness so accurately that we can transfer it from place to place, that hacking a running ordinary human brain will be at least as easy as hacking a computer. Probably easier, because the brain was never designed to deal with being hacked. Once the tech is there, changing a mind will be as easy as editing a video. If you're running on a computer, you can at least encrypt yourself, run backups, calculate checksums .. all of the necessary steps to maintain privacy and integrity.

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I'm late to the party on the risks of uploads, but:
You all seem to have missed the simplest solution to the problem of people hacking your uploaded brain.
Use it only for a backup, download from it post-body-death into a new frame, and have the backup stored in a safe spot located entirely within the human body (and thus thoroughly air gapped), or just use ROM for the storage media.
Examples of the former three: literally everyone in Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan (although their backup 'stacks' were located in the spine right beneath the brain stem, which sounds cool but seems like it would be complicated to implant, although points for well-protected-ness; also they're not immune to 'memetic viruses', whose delivery mechanism seems unexplained but are used as a war weapon in like the first chapter, but those seem both uncommon and highly frowned on); example of the latter: the Dixie Flatline in Neuromancer by William Gibson (which I guess is also awful since he seemed to have been begged to be wiped near the end) (oh, also, spoilers for that last bit, but if you didn't read Neuromancer in the 30+ years it's been out it's your fault anyway).
That's your worst case scenario, mostly because the sheer quantity of memory you'd need to store a human brain in sufficient fidelity to be a suitable backup would mean backups would likely be expensive, and ROM isn't exactly reusable. The poor might get 1-3 backups over the course of their entire working life, and might realistically only upload/download once only to go right back to the meaningless poverty grind of endless pointless work. Which just seems depressing if you think about it.

Your best case scenario is a (generally) benevolent post-scarcity government, e.g. The Culture in About 3/4 of the Things I Wrote by Iain M. Banks. Where uploading is fun, and easy, to the point that adrenaline junkies purposely don't upload so they can feel the appropriate element of risk (and, most times they're mentioned, are portrayed as fucking idiots who are wasting all the advantages given to them by being in this magical hedonistic paradise, but maybe that's just me).

As a security professional, I don't think those solutions are completely foolproof even for protecting existing data. What if for example the adversary manages to compromise the hardware performing the backup.. modify it while it's being written, then use other means to attack and destroy the running consciousness. Then they get restored from backup, and you've effectively bypassed the protection no matter how secure the storage medium is.

Also, I don't actually believe every brain uploading method i've read about would work. For example, in one series everyone got an implant in their brain that constantly records and backs up their consciousness, if they get shot or whatever they just take it and grow a new clone and implant the consciousness into the new body. I think that would be the same as dying. Just as it would be dying if your consciousness was infected with malware and had to be deleted and then you were restored from backup. Only very specific means of uploading the consciousness in the first place would work too - you have to somehow redirect the actions of each individual neuron or specific groups of neurons onto electronic media, while the person remains conscious.

The only workable example I've heard of as yet is if you made an electronic analogue of a neuron, and replaced each neuron one at a time with them. I'm sure there are other ways that we've yet to come up with. Restoring from backups also has to occur in very specific ways, you can't just copy the files over. I'm pretty sure that subjective experience would be interrupted, and the person who woke up would act exactly like you, but wouldn't be you. Being me is very important to me.