Rudolf Steiner, Blackboard drawing, 1923
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How Laura Poitras Helped Snowden Spill His Secrets

[ed. A portrait of modern journalism -- it's definitely not your smoke-filled, desk-crammed newsroom of yesteryear.]

This past January, Laura Poitras received a curious e-mail from an anonymous stranger requesting her public encryption key. For almost two years, Poitras had been working on a documentary about surveillance, and she occasionally received queries from strangers. She replied to this one and sent her public key — allowing him or her to send an encrypted e-mail that only Poitras could open, with her private key — but she didn’t think much would come of it.

The stranger responded with instructions for creating an even more secure system to protect their exchanges. Promising sensitive information, the stranger told Poitras to select long pass phrases that could withstand a brute-force attack by networked computers. “Assume that your adversary is capable of a trillion guesses per second,” the stranger wrote.

Before long, Poitras received an encrypted message that outlined a number of secret surveillance programs run by the government. She had heard of one of them but not the others. After describing each program, the stranger wrote some version of the phrase, “This I can prove.”

Seconds after she decrypted and read the e-mail, Poitras disconnected from the Internet and removed the message from her computer. “I thought, O.K., if this is true, my life just changed,” she told me last month. “It was staggering, what he claimed to know and be able to provide. I just knew that I had to change everything.”

Poitras remained wary of whoever it was she was communicating with. She worried especially that a government agent might be trying to trick her into disclosing information about the people she interviewed for her documentary, including Julian Assange, the editor of WikiLeaks. “I called him out,” Poitras recalled. “I said either you have this information and you are taking huge risks or you are trying to entrap me and the people I know, or you’re crazy.”

The answers were reassuring but not definitive. Poitras did not know the stranger’s name, sex, age or employer (C.I.A.? N.S.A.? Pentagon?). In early June, she finally got the answers. Along with her reporting partner, Glenn Greenwald, a former lawyer and a columnist for The Guardian, Poitras flew to Hong Kong and met the N.S.A. contractor Edward J. Snowden, who gave them thousands of classified documents, setting off a major controversy over the extent and legality of government surveillance. Poitras was right that, among other things, her life would never be the same.

Greenwald lives and works in a house surrounded by tropical foliage in a remote area of Rio de Janeiro. He shares the home with his Brazilian partner and their 10 dogs and one cat, and the place has the feel of a low-key fraternity that has been dropped down in the jungle. The kitchen clock is off by hours, but no one notices; dishes tend to pile up in the sink; the living room contains a table and a couch and a large TV, an Xbox console and a box of poker chips and not much else. The refrigerator is not always filled with fresh vegetables. A family of monkeys occasionally raids the banana trees in the backyard and engages in shrieking battles with the dogs.

Greenwald does most of his work on a shaded porch, usually dressed in a T-shirt, surfer shorts and flip-flops. Over the four days I spent there, he was in perpetual motion, speaking on the phone in Portuguese and English, rushing out the door to be interviewed in the city below, answering calls and e-mails from people seeking information about Snowden, tweeting to his 225,000 followers (and conducting intense arguments with a number of them), then sitting down to write more N.S.A. articles for The Guardian, all while pleading with his dogs to stay quiet. During one especially fever-pitched moment, he hollered, “Shut up, everyone,” but they didn’t seem to care.

by Peter Maas, NY Times |  Read more:

Images: Olaf Blecker and Mauricio Lima for The New York Times

Saul Leiter, c. 1953
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Castaway

[Having been blown south in a storm while rounding Cape Horn, Rogers’ ship the Duke sailed to refresh provisions at Juan Fernández Island, where the privateer made the acquaintance of the marooned Selkirk. His description of the encounter served as the inspiration for Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, published in 1719.]

Our pinnace returned from the shore of Juan Fernández Island and brought an abundance of crawfish—and a man clothed in goatskins who looked wilder than the first owners of them. He had been on the island four years and four months, being left there by Captain Stradling of the Cinque-Ports. His name was Alexander Selkirk, a Scotchman. While marooned on the island, Selkirk saw several ships pass by, but only two came in to anchor. As he went to view them, he found them to be Spaniards and retired from them—upon which they shot at him. Had they been French, he would have submitted, but he chose to risk his dying alone on the island rather than fall into the hands of the Spaniards in these parts, because he apprehended they would murder him or make a slave of him in the mines, for he feared they would spare no stranger that might be capable of discovering the South Sea.

He told us that he was born at Largo in the county of Fife in Scotland and was bred a sailor from his youth. The reason of his being left here was a difference betwixt him and his captain, which, together with the ships being leaky, made him willing rather to stay here than go along with him at first; and when he was at last willing, the captain would not receive him. He had been in the island before to wood and water, when two of the ship’s company were left upon it for six months till the ship returned, being chased thence by two French South Sea ships.

He had with him his clothes and bedding, with a firelock, some powder, bullets, and tobacco, a hatchet, a knife, a kettle, a Bible, some practical pieces, and his mathematical instruments and books. He diverted and provided for himself as well as he could, but for the first eight months had much ado to bear up against melancholy and the terror from being left alone in such a desolate place. He built two huts with pimento trees, covered them with long grass, and lined them with the skins of goats, which he killed with his gun as he wanted, so long as his powder lasted, which was but a pound—and that being near spent, he got fire by rubbing two sticks of pimento wood together upon his knee. In the lesser hut, at some distance from the other, he dressed his victuals, and in the larger he slept and employed himself in reading, singing psalms, and praying—so that he said he was a better Christian while in this solitude than ever he was before or than he was afraid he should ever be again.

He might have had fish enough but could not eat them for want of salt, because they occasioned a looseness—except crawfish, which are there as large as our lobsters and very good. These he sometimes boiled, and at other times broiled, as he did his goats’ flesh, of which he made very good broth, for they are not so rank as ours. He kept an account of five hundred that he killed while there and caught as many more, which he marked on the ear and let go. When his powder failed, he took them by speed of foot, for his way of living and continual exercise of walking and running cleared him of all gross humors, so that he ran with wonderful swiftness through the woods and up the rocks and hills, as we perceived when we employed him to catch goats for us. He told us that his agility in pursuing a goat had once like to have cost him his life; he pursued it with so much eagerness that he caught hold of it on the brink of a precipice, of which he was not aware, the bushes having hid it from him, so that he fell with the goat down the said precipice, a great height, and was so stunned and bruised with the fall that he narrowly escaped with his life; and when he came to his senses, he found the goat dead under him. He lay there about twenty-four hours and was scarce able to crawl to his hut, which was about a mile distant, or to stir abroad again in ten days.

by Woodes Rogers (1709), Lapham's Quarterly |  Read more:

Image: Isla Juan Fernandez via; Wikipedia

The Poorest Rich Kids in the World

The black Chevy Tahoe picked up speed as it careened down the curving Wyoming mountain road, the two frightened children inside clutching their seats, certain that they wouldn't make it alive to the school bus at the bottom of the hill. It was only 7:30 in the morning, but their stepmother at the wheel already had liquor on her breath. The kids had seen her this way before; two years earlier they'd been in the car when she was pulled over for a DUI. This morning, she seemed even more wasted.

"Slow down! Please! Please!" 12-year-old Georgia begged from the passenger seat. In the back, her twin brother, Patterson, sat frozen in horror.

"Shut the fuck up!" their stepmother, Daralee Inman, snarled. Her right hand shot out to smack Georgia's face, while her left clutched a glass filled with Trix cereal, leaving no hands on the steering wheel. Pine trees whizzed by to their right, a cliff to their left. "Did I ever get you into a motherfucking wreck?" Daralee demanded, as faster and faster they descended the steep road that served as the family's half-mile-long driveway. "Did I ever get you into a motherfucking wreck?"

The kids reached for their seat belts, too late, as the Tahoe hit a bump, tipped toward the cliff – "God take my soul! Forgive me all my sins!" Georgia cried out – and then veered left and slammed into a tree. The exploding air bags felt like a punch, the windshield like cement. The twins struggled free of the car. Dazed, they began limping back up the mountainside, their stepmother staggering close behind.

As they crested the hill, their house finally came into view: a 10,000-square-foot log-and-stone cabin of preposterous proportions, filled with expensive antiques, valuable artwork and, stashed behind the steel door of a walk-in vault, sacks of gold Krugerrands, bars of silver and gold, jewelry, and millions of dollars' worth of collectible firearms. This wasn't some no-name clan of backwoods hillbillies, Georgia and Patterson Inman were among the wealthiest kids in America: When they turn 21, the family claims, the twins will inherit a trust fund worth $1 billion. They and their father were the last living heirs to the vast Industrial Age fortune of the Duke family, tobacco tycoons who once controlled the American cigarette market, established Duke University and, through the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, continue to give away hundreds of millions of dollars.

The twins' father, Walker Inman, 57, lumbered from the mansion, his tattooed sleeves visible under a black T-shirt, drinking his morning rum, bellowing, "What the fuck did you do to my children?" Morbidly obese after a lifetime of debauchery and heroin addiction, he looked past his keening kids to glare at his fifth wife. "Honey," Walker rumbled, "we're going for a ride." He grabbed Daralee, hopped into his red Dodge truck and took off in a spray of gravel toward the wreckage down the mountain – then promptly lost control of the vehicle, which rolled onto the driver's side and skidded to a stop.

Inside the house, the twins called 911. The dispatcher at the police station couldn't make out what the hysterical children were saying, but local troopers knew exactly where they were needed, and quickly left for the remote Inman property, which Walker had dubbed "Outlaw Acres." Later on, in the presence of the Inmans' high-priced attorney, an officer would confront Daralee with the fact that she'd been driving with a blood-alcohol content of .05 – violating her probation – with her stepkids in the car, and Walker would admit he'd been drinking and driving too. And yet no charges would be levied that November 2009 morning; the Lincoln County Sheriff's department would simply close the case. As ambulances and police cars came screaming up the hill, past the demolition derby of wrecked cars to where Georgia and Patterson sobbed in the grand arched entryway to their palace, it was just another day at the Inmans', home to the poorest rich kids in the world.

Raised by two drug addicts with virtually unlimited wealth, Georgia and Patterson survived a gilded childhood that was also a horror story of Dickensian neglect and abuse. They were globe-trotting trust-fund babies who snorkeled in Fiji, owned a pet lion cub and considered it normal to bring loose diamonds to elementary school for show and tell. And yet they also spent their childhoods inhaling freebase fumes, locked in cellars and deadbolted into their bedrooms at night in the secluded Wyoming mountains and on their ancestral South Carolina plantation.

by Sabrina Rubin Erdely, Rolling Stone |  Read more:

Photo: Danielle Levitt

Joe Jackson

Happy Gut Bacteria

Here's the traditional understanding of metabolic syndrome: You ate too much refined food sopped in grease. Calories flooded your body. Usually, a hormone called insulin would help your cells absorb these calories for use. But the sheer overabundance of energy in this case overwhelms your cells. They stop responding to insulin. To compensate, your pancreas begins cranking out more insulin. When the pancreas finally collapses from exhaustion, you have diabetes. In addition, you develop resistance to another hormone called leptin, which signals satiety, or fullness. So you tend to overeat. Meanwhile, fat cells, which have become bloated and stressed as they try to store the excess calories, begin emitting a danger signal—low-grade inflammation.

But new research suggest another scenario: Inflammation might not be a symptom, it could be a cause. According to this theory, it is the immune activation caused by lousy food that prompts insulin and leptin resistance. Sugar builds up in your blood. Insulin increases. Your liver and pancreas strain to keep up. All because the loudly blaring danger signal—the inflammation—hampers your cells' ability to respond to hormonal signals. Maybe the most dramatic evidence in support of this idea comes from experiments where scientists quash inflammation in animals. If you simply increase the number of white blood cells that alleviate inflammation—called regulatory T-cells—in obese mice with metabolic syndrome, the whole syndrome fades away. Deal with the inflammation, it seems, and you halt the dysfunction.

Now, on the face of it, it seems odd that a little inflammation should have such a great impact on energy regulation. But consider: This is about apportioning a limited resource exactly where it's needed, when it's needed. When not under threat, the body uses energy for housekeeping and maintenance—and, if you're lucky, procreation, an optimistic, future-oriented activity. But when a threat arrives—a measles virus, say—you reprioritize. All that hormone-regulated activity declines to a bare minimum. Your body institutes a version of World War II rationing: troops (white blood cells) and resources (calories) are redirected toward the threat. Nonessential tasks, including the production of testosterone, shut down. Forget tomorrow. The priority is to preserve the self today.

This, some think, is the evolutionary reason for insulin resistance. Cells in the body stop absorbing sugar because the fuel is required—requisitioned, really—by armies of white blood cells. The problems arise when that emergency response, crucial to repelling pillagers in the short term, drags on indefinitely. Imagine it this way. Your dinner is cooking on the stove. You're paying bills. You smell smoke. You jump up, leaving those tasks half-done, and search for the fire before it burns down your house. Normally, once you put the fire out, you'd return to your tasks and then eat dinner.

But now imagine that you never find the fire, and you never stop smelling the smoke. You remain in a perpetual state of alarm. Your bills never get paid. You never eat your dinner. Your house smolders. Your life falls into disarray.

That's metabolic syndrome. Normal function ceases. Aging accelerates. Diabetes develops. Heart attacks strike. The brain degenerates. Life ends early. And it's all driven, in this understanding, by chronic, low-grade inflammation.

Where does the perceived threat come from—all that inflammation? Some ingested fats are directly inflammatory. And dumping a huge amount of calories into the bloodstream from any source, be it fat or sugar, may overwhelm and inflame cells. But another source of inflammation is hidden in plain sight, the 100 trillion microbes inhabiting your gut. Junk food, it turns out, may not kill us entirely directly, but rather by prompting the collapse of an ancient and mutually beneficial symbiosis, and turning a once cooperative relationship adversarial.

by Moises Valasquez-Manoff, Mother Jones |  Read more:

Image: Eye of Science / Science Source

Brownie McGhee

[ed. How you play the blues. And, with long-time partner Sonny Terry....]

Immortal Soldiers from the Darius the Great palace, Susa, Iran
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Me, Myself and I

The bluest period I ever spent was in Manhattan’s East Village, not so long back. I lived on East 2nd Street, in an unreconstructed tenement building, and each morning I walked across Tompkins Square Park to get my coffee. When I arrived the trees were bare, and I dedicated those walks to checking the progress of the blossoms. There are many community gardens in that part of town, and so I could examine irises and tulips, forsythia, cherry trees and a great weeping willow that seemed to drop its streamers overnight, like a ship about to lift anchor and sail away.

I wasn’t supposed to be in New York, or not like this, anyway. I’d met someone in America and then lost them almost instantly, but the future we’d dreamed up together retained its magnetism, and so I moved alone to the city I’d expected to become my home. I had friends there, but none of the ordinary duties and habits that comprise a life. I’d severed all those small, sustaining cords, and, as such, it wasn’t surprising that I experienced a loneliness more paralysing than anything I’d encountered in more than a decade of living alone.

What did it feel like? It felt like being hungry, I suppose, in a place where being hungry is shameful, and where one has no money and everyone else is full. It felt, at least sometimes, difficult and embarrassing and important to conceal. Being foreign didn’t help. I kept botching the ballgame of language: fumbling my catches, bungling my throws. Most days, I went for coffee in the same place, a glass-fronted café full of tiny tables, populated almost exclusively by people gazing into the glowing clamshells of their laptops. Each time, the same thing happened. I ordered the nearest thing to filter on the menu: a medium urn brew, which was written in large chalk letters on the board. Each time, without fail, the barista looked blankly up and asked me to repeat myself. I might have found it funny in England, or irritating, or I might not have noticed it all, but that spring it worked under my skin, depositing little grains of anxiety and shame.

Something funny happens to people who are lonely. The lonelier they get, the less adept they become at navigating social currents. Loneliness grows around them, like mould or fur, a prophylactic that inhibits contact, no matter how badly contact is desired. Loneliness is accretive, extending and perpetuating itself. Once it becomes impacted, it isn’t easy to dislodge. When I think of its advance, an anchoress’s cell comes to mind, as does the exoskeleton of a gastropod.

This sounds like paranoia, but in fact loneliness’s odd mode of increase has been mapped by medical researchers. It seems that the initial sensation triggers what psychologists call hypervigilance for social threat. In this state, which is entered into unknowingly, one tends to experience the world in negative terms, and to both expect and remember negative encounters — instances of rudeness, rejection or abrasion, like my urn brew episodes in the café. This creates, of course, a vicious circle, in which the lonely person grows increasingly more isolated, suspicious and withdrawn.

by Olivia Laing, Aeon |  Read more:

Detail from The Hotel Room (1931) by Edward Hopper. Photo by Francis G. Mayer/Corbis

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You Are Not an Artisan

The future of work looks bleaker than it needs to for one simple reason: we bring consumption sensibilities to production behavior choices. Even our language reflects this: we “shop around” for careers. We look for prestigious brands to work for. We look for “fulfillment” at work. Sometimes we even accept pay cuts to be associated with famous names. This is work as fashion accessory and conversation fodder.

We can think of this as conspicuous production, by analogy to conspicuous consumption. First-world artisan tendencies take this to a logical extreme.

When you subconsciously think of work as something you consume for pleasure, you end up with a possibly irrational (economically speaking) attraction to artisan work. Even those who don’t actually end up as artisans choose work the way they choose cars, jewelry or handbags, over-valuing things like resume-value and exposure-value. (...)

Sexy work, such as being a bard, is work that:

1. humans find easy to enjoy
2. easily catalyzes mindful absorption while learning (flow)
3. is easy to value as a status currency
4. is good raw material for social identity formation

People who seek sexy work are often members of what I called the Jeffersonian middle class in an earlier post — motivated by creative self-expression and a sense of personal dignity rather than economic survival.

The first three attributes are self-explanatory. By social identity, I mean the part of your self-perception that is derived from what you think others think of you. Sexy work is attractive to those who like their social identity to be harmoniously integrated within itself (what your mom thinks of you and what your boss thinks of you are not in conflict) and with your private identity (you don’t feel misunderstood). There is consensual external validation of your internal sense of self-worth. You feel authentic.

Sexy work is easy to enjoy, learn, value and integrate into your identity, primarily because it is downhill psychological work: it is the cognitive equivalent of muscular atrophy. You have to choose to make it hard for yourself. You can cash out some status and attention even if you’re not making any money. It does not test your sense of self-worth significantly.

Schlep work has the opposite characteristics along all four vectors. It is harder to enjoy, learn, value and integrate into your identity, primarily because it is uphill psychological work for a social species. It is hard whether or not you want it to be. It is hard to cash out status and attention even if you’re making good money. It tests your sense of self-worth every day.

Somehow, over the past decade, we’ve gone from a useful heuristic (“focus on your strengths” and “find flow”) down a slippery slope of use-with-caution ideas (“work smart, not hard” and “follow your passion”) to the idea of work as a kind of consumption that should be chosen based on the pleasure one can derive from it. (...)

This is because when you actually poke at what people think of as creative — the broader universe around prototypical categories like fine art, rock music or programming — you realize they don’t really mean creative. They mean sexy. The “creative” attribute (whatever its subtle definition might be) is actually an optional extra. Push comes to shove, that’s an attribute people are pretty willing to give up, so long as the four key attributes are preserved (easy to enjoy, easy to learn, easy to value in a status economy, and easy to integrate into an “authentic” social identity).

In other words, we’re more afraid of machines taking away our social status than our jobs. This might seem like an obvious point. After all, most status-conscious people have strong feelings about what work is “beneath” them, but with machines in the picture, the point gets considerably more subtle.

People substitute creative for sexy in describing their aspirations (to themselves and others) because it sounds less narcissistic. If you seek sexy work, you could be viewed as self-absorbed, entitled and attention/status seeking.

If you pretend it is creative work, you’re suddenly God’s gift to the world, basking in the gratitude, admiration and adoration of all simply for existing.

This is one reason vanity startups, garage bands, indie coffee shops and boutique handbag design businesses proliferate.

by Venkat, Ribbonfarm |  Read more:

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Douglas Portway, Seven Green Apples 1991
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Climbing
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Test Match Special and Technological Agency

When Aleem Dar, one of two umpires at Trent Bridge last Sunday, raised his finger to dismiss Australia’s Brad Haddin and give the first Test to England, he was playing a crucial role not only in the 131 year history of the Ashes contest, but in a far older, and contemporarily relevant debate: that of human versus technological agency. It’s a strange thing when you realise that the most prominent discussion about the future of humanity in a technological age is happening during the lunch break on Radio Four Long Wave – but it is.

For those not familiar with international cricket’s Umpire Decision Review System (DRS), it is the process by which certain matters are decided on the field, not just by the umpires, but by a series of advanced technologies observing the game: watching, analysing, and even listening to it. Haddin was initially given not out when he appeared to be caught behind, presumably because the umpire didn’t believe he had hit the ball. But after England appealed the decision, the decision was referred to the third umpire, and DRS. A slow-motion infra-red camera known as Hot Spot, trained on the batsman from the far side of the field, showed a momentary but incontrovertibly bright dot of friction heat on Haddin’s bat as he just nicked the ball into the England wicket-keeper’s hands. Another system, not officially part of DRS but widely used by broadcasters, confirmed the decision. The Snickometer, a combination of slow-motion camera and high-quality microphone, detected an almost imperceptible but audible “snick” as the ball struck the bat’s edge. The game was England’s.

Hot Spot’s technology was adapted by an Australian broadcasting company for sporting use, but is based on pioneering military work by French scientist Nicholas Bion for tank and jet fighter tracking. The twin SLX-Hawk thermal imaging cameras at Trent Bridge were built by a British engineering company, Selex ES, which also designs laser rangefinders, radars and other sensors for planes, warships and satellites. The Snickometer was invented in the mid-90s by British Computer Scientist Alan Plaskett, who has also worked on Hot Spot. The final piece of DRS, and the best known one due to its use in Tennis and other sports, is Hawk-Eye, another product of British engineering – Roke Manor Research, based in Romsey, which also produces signal intercept systems and altimeters for drone aircraft.

Hawk-Eye uses a network of high-performance cameras to track a ball in motion, combining the footage from each one in order to create a three-dimensional representation of the ball’s trajectory. In tennis, this yields the footprints which decide whether a line call is given in or out in contested calls, and in cricket it is used to predict whether a ball deflecting by the batsman’s pad would have hit the wicket, or not. But of course, this is only a prediction, more accurate than a human eye and capable of greater accuracy than human judges, but not, in any strict sense, infallible. The complexity of the calculations used to determe Hawk-Eye’s accuracy rival those of the more famous, and equally misunderstood, Duckworth-Lewis method. (...)

And this is where sports technology begins to illuminate larger issues around human and technological agency. An unlikely champion of humanity has emerged in the person of Sepp Blatter, President of FIFA. Soccer players and fans have long called for the introduction of goal-line technology, which would be able to tell more accurately than referees if a ball had indeed crossed the line. A number of different approaches, one based on Hawk-Eye, another using chips implanted in footballs, are currently under trial. However, Blatter has long opposed these, based partly on their accuracy, but also going on the record to say that “Other sports regularly change the laws of the game to react to the new technology. … We don’t do it and this makes the fascination and the popularity of football”. What underlies this statement is a fundamental belief that sport is a human undertaking, with all the confusion, fallibility and debate that that involves. One reading is that officials are themselves part of the game, a fact of endless frustration to almost everyone involved; another that sport is inherently chance-based, and while we resist optimising participants through drugs and physical augmentations, the laws and outcomes of sport should remain human too.

by James Bridle, booktwo.org |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Chaotic Storage

How can something be random on purpose? Well, Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer, stores its goods in a chaotic disorder. But only at first glance, because there’s order behind the apparent disarray. It’s called chaotic storage.

How does chaotic storage work?

A warehouse for chaotic storage – sometimes also known as random storage – is basically a shelving system holding the products. So far, it doesn’t differ from a warehouse with fix storage positions. What makes a chaotic storage system so special is the flow of material.

This starts at the goods-in section: the warehouse staff takes incoming goods to the shelving system, where they are placed in unoccupied shelf positions. Each shelf space has a unique barcode and every product as well. The staff uses handheld scanners to record the shelf space and the corresponding product, thus telling the computer, where the goods are located.

When an incoming order requires these goods to be picked, the computer compiles a picking list. It then sends order pickers to exactly those shelf spaces where the requested products can be found, according to the database. In order to keep this database current, each article that is removed from the shelf needs to be scanned again.

By the way, chaotic storage does not imply automatic storage. Although it is possible to operate a chaotic storage system automatically, it is not always the best alternative. Amazon for instance, still needs quite a lot of manpower, because a simulation of the storage processes showed that hiring warehouse staff was more economical than automation.

What are the advantages of chaotic storage?

Chaotic warehouses are much more flexible than conventional ones and can respond to changes in the product range much easier. This reduces the amount of planning, because neither the range of products as a whole nor the sales volume of particular goods need to be known or planned in advance.

In addition, chaotic storage allows to use the available storage space more efficiently, because freed-up space may be refilled immediately. In a storage system with fixed positions on the other hand, some shelf space is always reserved for certain articles, even if their actual stocks are considerably lower.

Chaotic storage is a time saver, not just when stocking up on goods but also during order picking. Incoming goods are simply placed in free spaces on the shelves. The computer will then create picking lists with optimised routes whenever someone orders products. This way, the distance the warehouse staff needs to cover is shortened. Furthermore, picking lists at Amazon are not sorted by order, which means that the picked products have to be combined to shipments in an additional step.

The amount of training required by new employees is also remarkably lower when using chaotic storage. It is not necessary for them to memorise the entire warehouse layout or even single storage locations. This will allow you to replace staff more easily or hire seasonal workers during peak times.

What are the requirements for chaotic storage?

Intuitively, most people would store similar goods together, virtually sorting them according to predefined characteristics. This would place all books in one section of the warehouse and all toys in another section.

But that’s not necessary in a chaotic storage system. The products only need to share the most basic requirements with regard to storage (i.e. temperature, humidity). Further characteristics don’t have to be considered. In a chaotic warehouse, all kinds of different articles may lie directly next to each other, such as books, toys, sport equipment, electronics, DVDs, jewellery and digital cameras.

by Torsten Reichardt, SSI Schaefer Intralogistics |  Read more:
Image: uncredited

FBI Taps Hacker Tactics to Spy on Suspects

[ed. Competing with the NSA to shred your privacy protection every day, so, you know, we can all be safer.]

Law-enforcement officials in the U.S. are expanding the use of tools routinely used by computer hackers to gather information on suspects, bringing the criminal wiretap into the cyber age.

Federal agencies have largely kept quiet about these capabilities, but court documents and interviews with people involved in the programs provide new details about the hacking tools, including spyware delivered to computers and phones through email or Web links—techniques more commonly associated with attacks by criminals.

People familiar with the Federal Bureau of Investigation's programs say that the use of hacking tools under court orders has grown as agents seek to keep up with suspects who use new communications technology, including some types of online chat and encryption tools. The use of such communications, which can't be wiretapped like a phone, is called "going dark" among law enforcement.

A spokeswoman for the FBI declined to comment.

The FBI develops some hacking tools internally and purchases others from the private sector. With such technology, the bureau can remotely activate the microphones in phones running Google Inc.'s Android software to record conversations, one former U.S. official said. It can do the same to microphones in laptops without the user knowing, the person said. Google declined to comment.

by Jennifer Valentino-Devries and Danny Yadron, WSJ |  Read more:

Image: Agence France-Presse/Getty

[ed. See also: Apple Patent Could Remotely Disable Protestors' Phone Cameras; The Reycling Bin is Stalking You; and Are Universities Collecting Too Much Information on Staff and Students.]

Genny Darko, Escape
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Sad day
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