Exposing Your Personal Information – There’s An App for That

Mobile devices and applications are no longer an accessory – they’re central to our daily lives. Gartner predicts the number of mobile apps downloaded will double to 45 billion this year – and they’re only getting smarter. Today’s apps are increasingly essential to accessing critical business applications, connecting with friends on the go and even adopting digital wallets.

While these apps make our lives easier, they also give a wider group of application developers and advertising networks the ability to collect information about our activities and leverage the functionality of our devices. At the same time, the companies, consumers and government employees who install these apps often do not understand with who and how they are sharing personal information. Even though a list of permissions is presented when installing an app, most people don’t understand what they are agreeing to or have the proper information needed to make educated decisions about which apps to trust.

More concerning is that many apps collect information or require permissions unnecessary for the described functionality of the apps. This is not the first time this issue has surfaced – reports of popular apps collecting irrelevant information or transmitting data when devices are turned off has led to significant backlash. However, less is known about the state of privacy across the entire application ecosystem.

To get a sense of the state of application privacy today, Juniper Networks’ Mobile Threat Center (MTC) analyzed over 1.7 million apps on the Google Play market from March 2011 to September 2012.

Topline Findings

We found a significant number of applications contain permissions and capabilities that could expose sensitive data or access device functionality that they might not need. We also determined these apps had permission to access the Internet, which could provide a means for exposed data to be transmitted from the device. Of particular interest, free applications were much more likely to access personal information than paid applications. Specifically, free apps are 401 percent more likely to track location and 314 percent more likely to access user address books than their paid counterparts.

• 24.14 percent of free apps have permission to track user location, while only 6.01 percent of paid apps have this ability;
• 6.72 percent of free apps have permission to access user address books, while 2.14 percent of paid apps do;
• 2.64 percent of free apps have permission to silently send text messages, whereas 1.45 percent of paid apps can;
• 6.39 percent of free apps have permission to clandestinely initiate calls in the background, while only 1.88 percent of paid apps do; and
• 5.53 percent of free apps have permission to access the device camera, whereas only 2.11 percent of paid apps have this access.

by Daniel Hoffman, Juniper Networks |  Read more:

Joe Leavenworth
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On Point, in Their Jeans and Sneakers

[ed. Repost of an extraordinary performance. Lil Buck (with Yo-Yo Ma).]

On Point in Their Jeans and Sneakers.
Alastair Macaulay, NY Times

Japanese Colour Woodcut ca.1790, Unknown Artist
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It Doesn't Mean We're Wasting Our Time

It Doesn't Mean We're Wasting Our Time
~ Frank Cassese: Reflections on a Postcard from David Foster Wallace

Massive Attack

How the Internet Economy Works: Bandwidth

The internet is made of thousands of networks, and a complex web of economic considerations has developed to support the free flow of information. How bandwidth is “manufactured” and then allocated is far more complex than how a packet gets from here to there.

Most people know certain things about the Internet. They know that cables run under the sea, that wires come into your homes, and that modems carry the digital signals to your devices.

But they’ve probably never heard of Internet Exchange Points, and that’s where the magic of the Internet really happens.

Internet Exchange Points (aka IXPs) are the manufacturing floor of the Internet — that is where bandwidth is created and deployed. And bandwidth is just like water and oil and other economic goods: If your country has a lot of it, prices fall; if it doesn’t have a surplus, prices go up. And that has a big impact on the web companies that buy bandwidth.

The Netherlands, for example, is a large net-exporter of Internet bandwidth, using only half of what it produces domestically. That means that large companies like Disney, Google and Netflix can buy ports there at rates that are significantly lower than in some other places and that have dropped by 50 percent in the last year. But where there isn’t an Internet Exchange Point and competition can’t flourish, prices remain high. That’s what you see in places like Mexico. More on that below.

Though Internet Exchange Points are a key building block of the Internet economy, you’d never guess it from where they’re located. They don’t remotely resemble other temples of commerce. You don’t see people standing in them yelling at each other, like you would at a stock exchange. Instead, they can be located inside a beat-up building near a railroad track. Sometimes there’s not a single human being in the vicinity.

A report I covered earlier from the OECD lays out in awesomely clear detail why Internet exchange points are so essential for every geography that values the Internet. They not only facilitate the creation of bandwidth, they lower the cost of transit/bandwidth for businesses and consumers and help create redundant networks and limit or diminish the power of monopoly telecommunications providers.

by Stacey Higginbotham, GigaOM | Read more:

Photo: Om Malik

Light Beer: You Don't Have to Like It, but Respect It

On a hot summer night in Manhattan, the young beer connoisseurs were talking shop inside Good Beer NYC, a craft-beer store on East Ninth Street, when the conversation turned to light beer. The consensus: Three of the top-sellers in America -- Bud Light, Coors Light, and Miller Lite -- were barely worth the glass they're bottled in.

"I used to hate beer because I thought it all tasted like Natural Light," said Jennifer Dickey, the store manager, who was leaning against a shelf of Stone Brewing's Imperial Russian Stout.

Al Alvarez, an accountant who spent his formative beer-drinking years in Germany, thanked God that even the diviest American bars carry Sierra Nevada Pale Ale.

Melissa Brandt, another Good Beer employee, chimed in. She'd recently bought her father a case of craft beer but couldn't convert him. Once he'd polished off the gift, he retreated to his basement kegerator full of Bud Light.

"It was a sad moment," she said.

It's common to disparage light beers. As craft beers have elbowed their way into American refrigerators and taps, light beers have become punch lines. What few drinkers know, however, is that quality light beers are incredibly difficult to brew. The thin flavor means there's little to mask defects in the more than 800 chemical compounds within. As Kyler Serfass, manager of the home-brew supply shop Brooklyn Homebrew, told me, "Light beer is a brewer's beer. It may be bland, but it's really tough to do." Belgian monks and master brewers around the world marvel at how macro-breweries like Anheuser-Busch InBev and MillerCoors have perfected the process in hundreds of factories, ensuring that every pour from every brewery tastes exactly the same. Staring at a bottle, it's staggering to consider the effort that goes into producing each ounce of the straw-colored liquid.

by Mental Floss, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Photos by Tim Soter

Ikeda Koson Flower Arrangement and Incense Burner 19th century.

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linda vachon / tête de caboche
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Furry Lewis

What It Will Take for Barack Obama to Become the Next FDR

Ever since Barack Obama's election in 2008, people have debated whether he might be for the Democratic Party what Ronald Reagan was for the Republicans -- a transformational president in the mold of Franklin Delano Roosevelt who changes the basic assumptions of national politics for a generation or more. In this essay, I draw on Yale political scientist Stephen Skowronek's work on presidential leadership to answer this question and explain the challenges facing Obama if he wins a second term. (In a previous essay, I evaluatedthe prospects for a Mitt Romney presidency, which, I concluded would range from difficult to bleak). If Obama wins a second term, he still has a chance to be a transformative leader. But the odds are that he will be more like Bill Clinton--a Democratic president swimming against the tide of conservative politics ushered in by Reagan.

Obama has long had the ambition to be a great liberal president in the tradition of FDR. During the 2008 campaign, he acknowledged that the last Democratic president, Bill Clinton, had not changed the course of politics the way that Ronald Reagan had. That is no slight to Clinton, who was (and is) perhaps the most gifted politician of his generation. It is simply the case that Clinton faced a very different set of political constraints than Reagan did when he took office.

And this brings us to Skowronek's central insight. The course of a president's career is structured by where he sits in what Skowronek calls "political time." Is the president allied with the dominant regime in American politics or opposed to it? And is the regime itself robust or vulnerable? (See my essay on Romney for more details.)

Both Clinton and Reagan were oppositional leaders. Reagan opposed the New Deal politics of the Democratic Party that dominated the period from FDR's election in 1932 until 1980. Clinton opposed the conservative Republican regime that Reagan began and under which we still live today.

Reagan had the good fortune to take office when the New Deal regime and its electoral coalition were falling apart. Therefore, he had the opportunity to become what Skowronek calls a "reconstructive" president, one who sweeps away the old regime and its assumptions in order to create a new one. Bill Clinton, by contrast, entered the White House as the first Democrat elected since the Reagan Revolution, when the current conservative political regime was at its strongest. Unlike Reagan, whose political opponents were in disarray, Clinton faced a hostile political climate and continually had to trim his sails. Skowronek calls this situation a "preemptive" presidency, because the leader tries to forestall opposition by triangulating or finding a "third way." Examples of preemptive presidents include Grover Cleveland, Woodrow Wilson, Richard Nixon, and, of course, Clinton.

Preemptive presidents are the most interesting type in Skowronek's theory. In a political age dominated by the other party, they must continually navigate upstream against fierce political currents. Their political legitimacy is always in question. The regime's dominant party continually casts doubt on their right to rule, and their own party often seems too weak to defend them.

This predicament drives preemptive presidents to be pragmatic, compromising, non-ideological, and unorthodox. They triangulate in order to survive. As a result, preemptive presidents often deeply disappoint their own party faithful, who crave greater ideological purity and stronger principled stands. To members of their own party, it sometimes seems as if preemptive presidents never stand up for their principles; instead, they are always temporizing, compromising, and letting their political opponents push them around.

Preemptive leaders quickly learn that ideological purity will get them nowhere. They have no scruples about borrowing the best ideas of their political opponents, modifying them slightly, and then claiming them as their own. They specialize in offering more moderate (and hence more popular) versions of the dominant party's policies.

This practice may annoy members of their own party, but it drives members of the other party positively insane. The latter are quite certain that the preemptive president's pragmatism and moderation are merely a ruse, hiding a criminal conspiracy or a radical agenda. Indeed, preemptive presidents make members of the dominant party so angry that the latter often seem hellbent on destroying them. Think only of the conservative rage against Clinton and the liberal rage against Nixon.

by Jack M. Balkin, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Photo: Larry Downing/Reuters

A Gated Community

I‘m driving a rented white Nissan Sentra, winding past a church and 250 homes near Louisiana’s Lake Killarney on my way to play golf. The houses are small but tidy, with neatly clipped yards and recycling bins out front. Everyone waves at me as I drive by.

The scene is similar to that at thousands of gated-community golf courses across the country. Here, though, I’m required to answer an unusual question before I hit the links. “You don’t have any guns, do you?” the security guard asks at the front gate. “All right, you’re good to go. Pro shop’s to the right.”

I pay my greens fees and head to the first hole. The tee markers are white handcuffs, welded shut. Just past the lake, peering at me from the distance, are the eyes of six guard towers.

If ever there were a question about the ballooning scale of America’s prison system, the Louisiana State Penitentiary provides an answer. It has its own golf course.

There is a correctional center in America for every man here at Angola prison: 5,300 and counting. Fifteen hundred are state or federal prisons, 3,000 are local jails, and the rest are a combination of juvenile centers and private detention centers. There are enough prisoners in the United States to fill every NFL football stadium at the same time, with 80,000 inmates left over.

The vast majority of these facilities will never be tourist attractions—America’s prisons are warehouses for the production of premature death. Even the buildings are designed “to make punishment efficient as possible,” geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore has said. With the exception of a basketball game or a slow jog around the yard, their existence seems mutually exclusive with recreation or leisure pursuits of any kind.

Yet at Angola, the largest maximum-security prison in the country, more than 70,000 people a year pay to enter the gates for fun. Most go to see the Angola Prison Rodeo, where inmates have built a 10,000-seat stadium to house “The Wildest Show in the South” every Sunday in October and one weekend in April. Some go for the arts and crafts festival, where prisoners sell handmade items like birdhouses and matchstick replicas of space shuttles for as much as $500. I went to play golf. They sell a t-shirt in the nearby gift shop: “ANGOLA: A GATED COMMUNITY.”

My journey to Angola began earlier this year, when I stumbled on a peculiar image while compiling satellite photos of every American prison, jail, and detention center for prisonmap.com. Next to the entrance to Louisiana State Penitentiary—one of the most notorious prisons in the country, the subject of songs and investigative reports and novels—was a Google Maps marker for “Prison View Golf Course.”

Indeed, Prison View is a public golf course located inside prison walls—perhaps needless to say, the only course of its kind in America. The warden, Burl Cain, had the course built in 2001 to keep the guards around on weekends—“in case of an emergency,” he told the Associated Press at the time. Operated by the Louisiana State Penitentiary Employee Recreation Committee, the course according to its website offers “a spectacular view of Louisiana’s only maximum security prison.” Ten bucks buys a round of golf for anyone who passes a background check.

by Josh Begley, Tomorrow | Read more:

Victo Ngai
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Big Sugar's Sweet Little Lies

On a brisk spring Tuesday in 1976, a pair of executives from the Sugar Association stepped up to the podium of a Chicago ballroom to accept the Oscar of the public relations world, the Silver Anvil award for excellence in "the forging of public opinion." The trade group had recently pulled off one of the greatest turnarounds in PR history. For nearly a decade, the sugar industry had been buffeted by crisis after crisis as the media and the public soured on sugar and scientists began to view it as a likely cause of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. Industry ads claiming that eating sugar helped you lose weight had been called out by the Federal Trade Commission, and the Food and Drug Administration had launched a review of whether sugar was even safe to eat. Consumption had declined 12 percent in just two years, and producers could see where that trend might lead. As John "JW" Tatem Jr. and Jack O'Connell Jr., the Sugar Association's president and director of public relations, posed that day with their trophies, their smiles only hinted at the coup they'd just pulled off.

Their winning campaign, crafted with the help of the prestigious public relations firm Carl Byoir & Associates, had been prompted by a poll showing that consumers had come to see sugar as fattening, and that most doctors suspected it might exacerbate, if not cause, heart disease and diabetes. With an initial annual budget of nearly $800,000 ($3.4 million today) collected from the makers of Dixie Crystals, Domino, C&H, Great Western, and other sugar brands, the association recruited a stable of medical and nutritional professionals to allay the public's fears, brought snack and beverage companies into the fold, and bankrolled scientific papers that contributed to a "highly supportive" FDA ruling, which, the Silver Anvil application boasted, made it "unlikely that sugar will be subject to legislative restriction in coming years."

The story of sugar, as Tatem told it, was one of a harmless product under attack by "opportunists dedicated to exploiting the consuming public." Over the subsequent decades, it would be transformed from what the New York Times in 1977 had deemed "a villain in disguise" into a nutrient so seemingly innocuous that even the American Heart Association and the American Diabetes Association approved it as part of a healthy diet. Research on the suspected links between sugar and chronic disease largely ground to a halt by the late 1980s, and scientists came to view such pursuits as a career dead end. So effective were the Sugar Association's efforts that, to this day, no consensus exists about sugar's potential dangers. The industry's PR campaign corresponded roughly with a significant rise in Americans' consumption of "caloric sweeteners," including table sugar (sucrose) and high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS). This increase was accompanied, in turn, by a surge in the chronic diseases increasingly linked to sugar. Since 1970, obesity rates in the United States have more than doubled, while the incidence of diabetes has more than tripled. (...)

Precisely how did the sugar industry engineer its turnaround? The answer is found in more than 1,500 pages of internal memos, letters, and company board reports we discovered buried in the archives of now-defunct sugar companies as well as in the recently released papers of deceased researchers and consultants who played key roles in the industry's strategy. They show how Big Sugar used Big Tobacco-style tactics to ensure that government agencies would dismiss troubling health claims against their products. Compared to the tobacco companies, which knew for a fact that their wares were deadly and spent billions of dollars trying to cover up that reality, the sugar industry had a relatively easy task. With the jury still out on sugar's health effects, producers simply needed to make sure that the uncertainty lingered. But the goal was the same: to safeguard sales by creating a body of evidence companies could deploy to counter any unfavorable research.

This decades-long effort to stack the scientific deck is why, today, the USDA's dietary guidelines only speak of sugar in vague generalities. ("Reduce the intake of calories from solid fats and added sugars.") It's why the FDA insists that sugar is "generally recognized as safe" despite considerable evidence suggesting otherwise. It's why some scientists' urgent calls for regulation of sugary products have been dead on arrival, and it's why—absent any federal leadership—New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg felt compelled to propose a ban on oversized sugary drinks that passed in September.

by Gary Taubes and Cristin Kearns Couzens, Mother Jones |  Read more:
Illustration: Chris Buzelli

Night and Sleep, Evelyn De Morgan. 1878
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Passers by Lyudmila Rashtanova
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Shitty First Drafts

Excerpted from “Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life” by Anne Lamott

Now, practically even better news than that of short assignments is the idea of shitty first drafts. All good writers write them. This is how they end up with good second drafts and terrific third drafts. People tend to look at successful writers, writers who are getting their books published and maybe even doing well financially, and think that they sit down at their desks every morning feeling like a million dollars, feeling great about who they are and how much talent they have and what a great story they have to tell; that they take in a few deep breaths, push back their sleeves, roll their necks a few times to get all the cricks out, and dive in, typing fully formed passages as fast as a court reporter. But this is just the fantasy of the uninitiated. I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much. We do not think that she has a rich inner life or that God likes her or can even stand her. (Although when I mentioned this to my priest friend Tom, he said you can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.)

Very few writers really know what they arc doing until they’ve done it. Nor do they go about their business feeling dewy and thrilled. They do not type a few stiff warm-up sentences and then find themselves bounding along like huskies across the snow. One writer I know tells me that he sits down every morning and says to himself nicely, “It’s not like you don’t have a choice, because you do—you can either type or kill yourself.” We all often feel like we are pulling teeth, even those writers whose prose ends up being the most natural and fluid. The right words and sentences just do not come pouring out like ticker tape most of the time. Now, Muriel Spark is said to have felt that she was taking dictation from God every morning—sitting there, one supposes, plugged into a Dictaphone, typing away, humming. But this is a very hostile and aggressive position. One might hope for bad things to rain down on a person like this.

For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts.

The first draft is the child’s draft, where you let it all pour out and then let it romp all over the place, knowing that no one is going to see it and that you can shape it later. You just let this childlike part of you channel whatever voices and visions come through and onto the page. If one of the characters wants to say, “Well, so what, Mr. Poopy Pants?,” you let her. No one is going to see it. If the kid wants to get into really sentimental, weepy, emotional territory, you let him. Just get it all down on paper, because there may be some thing great in those six crazy pages that you would never have gotten to by more rational, grown-up means. There may be something in the very last line of the very last paragraph on page six that you just love, that is so beautiful or wild that you now know what you’re supposed to be writing about, more or less, or in what direction you might go—but there was no way to get to this without first getting through the first five and a half pages.

I used to write food reviews for California magazine before it folded. (My writing food reviews had nothing to do with the magazine folding, although every single review did cause a couple of canceled subscriptions. Some readers took umbrage at my comparing mounds of vegetable puree with various ex-presidents’ brains.) These reviews always took two days to write. First I’d go to a restaurant several times with a few opinionated, articulate friends in tow. I’d sit there writing down everything anyone said that was at all interesting or funny. Then on the following Monday I’d sit down at my desk with my notes, and try to write the review. Even after I’d been doing this for years, panic would set in. I’d try to write a lead, but instead I’d write a couple of dreadful sentences, xx them out, try again, xx everything out, and then feel despair and worry settle on my chest like an x-ray apron. It’s over, I’d think, calmly. I’m not going to be able to get the magic to work this time. I’m ruined. I’m through. I’m toast. Maybe, I’d think, I can get my old job back as a clerk-typist. But probably not. I’d get up and study my teeth in the mirror for a while. Then I’d stop, remember to breathe, make a few phone calls, hit the kitchen and chow down. Eventually I’d go back and sit down at my desk, and sigh for the next ten minutes. Finally I would pick up my one-inch picture frame, stare into it as if for the answer, and every time the answer would come: all I had to do was to write a really shitty first draft of, say, the opening paragraph. And no one was going to see it.

by Anne Lamott, YMFY | Read more:
Image: First Draft of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

Charles Emery Ross
15 x 11”, mm/paper
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