by Alex Balk, The Awl
Image: via
Sunday, November 2, 2014
Shift The Darkness Around, It Won't Help Any
by Alex Balk, The Awl
Saturday, November 1, 2014
Smuggling Snowden's Secrets
Late on the evening of January 11, 2013, someone sent me an interesting email. It was encrypted, and sent from the sort of anonymous email service that smart people use when they want to hide their identity. Sitting at the kitchen table in the small cottage where I lived in Berkeley with my wife and two cats, I decrypted it.
The anonymous emailer wanted to know if I could help him communicate securely with Laura Poitras, the documentary filmmaker who had repeatedly cast a critical eye on American foreign policy.
From: anon108@■■■■■■■■■I didn’t know it at the time, but I had just been contacted by Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency contractor who was then preparing a momentous leak of government data.
To: Micah Lee
Date: Fri, 11 Jan 2013
Micah,
I’m a friend. I need to get information securely to Laura Poitras and her alone, but I can’t find an email/gpg key for her.
Can you help?
A month earlier, Snowden had anonymously emailed Glenn Greenwald, a Guardian journalist and chronicler of war-on-terror excesses, but Greenwald didn’t use encryption and didn’t have the time to get up to speed, so Snowden moved on. As is now well known, Snowden decided to contact Poitras because she used encryption. But he didn’t have her encryption key, as is necessary to send someone encrypted email, and the key wasn’t posted on the web. Snowden, extraordinarily knowledgeable about how internet traffic is monitored, didn’t want to send her an unencrypted email, even if just to ask for her key. So he needed to find someone he thought he could trust who both had her key and used encrypted email.
That was me.
And as it turned out, several months later I was drawn more deeply into the whole thing, when Snowden got back in touch and asked me to work with him to launch an online anti-surveillance petition.
Until now, I haven’t written about my modest role in the Snowden leak, but with the release of Poitras’ documentary on him, “Citizenfour,” I feel comfortable connecting the dots. I think it’s helpful to show how privacy technologists can work with sources and journalists to make it possible for leaks to happen in a secure way. Securing those types of interactions is part of my job now that I work with Greenwald and Poitras at The Intercept, but there are common techniques and general principles from my interactions with Snowden that could serve as lessons to people outside this organization.
When I got that first email, I was working as a staff technologist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and as the chief technology officer of the Freedom of the Press Foundation. My encryption key was posted at both sites, so Snowden was able to find it easily, and the key was digitally signed by people who were well-known in the privacy world (pioneering blogger Cory Doctorow and free software champion Richard Stallman, for instance); this meant those people had digitally vouched, in a way that was incredibly difficult to forge, that the key really belonged to me and not to, say, some NSA trickster. In other words, Snowden didn’t need to worry about the key being a fake. Poitras was a founding board member of the FPF, so he assumed I would have her key, and he was right.
It wasn’t uncommon for me to receive the type of email Snowden sent — strangers send me encrypted emails all the time, requesting help. Some of those emails are from people who appear to have personal issues to work out, but the inquiry from Snowden, emailing under a pseudonym, struck me as serious. I quickly forwarded it in an encrypted email to Poitras. The encryption technology we used — the standard among email users concerned with privacy — is known by two acronyms: GPG, for GNU Privacy Guard, or PGP, for Pretty Good Privacy.
From: Micah LeeLike me, Poitras was accustomed to receiving anonymous inquiries, and she recognized that this one was credible. A few hours later, she sent me a reply.
To: Laura Poitras
Date: Sat, 12 Jan 2013
Hey Laura,
This person just send me this GPG encrypted email. Do you want to respond? If you want to, and you need any help with using crypto, I’m happy to help.
From: Laura PoitrasThe frustrating and ironic thing about GPG is that even experts make mistakes with it. Even, as it turns out, Edward Snowden.
To: Micah Lee
Date: Sat, 12 Jan 2013
Hey Micah,
Thanks for asking. Sure, you can tell this person I can be reached with GPG at: laurapoitras@gmail.com
I’ll reply with my public key.
I’m also on jabber/OTR at:
l.p.@jabber.org
I hope all is good with you!
Laura
I now had Poitras’ permission to send Snowden her encryption key, but in his first email to me, Snowden had forgotten to attach his key, which meant I could not encrypt my response. I had to send him an unencrypted email asking for his key first. His oversight was of no security consequence—it didn’t compromise his identity in any way—but it goes to show how an encryption system that requires users to take specific and frequent actions almost guarantees mistakes will be made, even by the best users.
After receiving Snowden’s key, I sent him an encrypted email with Poitras’ key. This enabled him to send his first encrypted email to Poitras, in which he called himself Citizenfour. But I wasn’t out of the identity-confirmation picture yet.
Snowden and Poitras quickly set up a more secure channel for communication. Poitras created an anonymous email account, doing so with the Tor Browser that masks your identity on the web, and she created a new GPG key, just for communicating with Citizenfour. This was advisable because, if she were under surveillance by the NSA or any other intelligence agency, they might have compromised her known accounts, and she would prefer for there to be no trace of her true name in the correspondence with this secrecy-seeking stranger.
But the internet is a hall of mirrors.
Should Journalism Worry About Content Marketing?
[ed. See also: Newsrooms struggle with free-content strategy]
At a glance, the Daily Growl could be any morning news meeting held in the “win the internet through pet videos” bureau of a lavishly funded media startup. Rows of eager young people stand behind their monitors—“TMZ-style,” managing editor Lisa Keller told me—as Keller solicits memes and news pegs to supplement the content already scheduled on the team’s editorial calendar. Monitors are tuned to Twitter feeds and Photoshop works in progress. Any of the team’s 10 “community managers” and eight designers might produce as many as 10 postings a day. Those numbers don’t include the constant interaction with fans and followers and strangers that is also a big part of the job. The office is light-filled and, despite the heavy productivity expectations, seemingly free of stress. I’m struck by this, having been in so many newsrooms in which there’s a palpable sense that the media industry, to say nothing of the country and the human race, is at the abyss.
The Daily Growl is the morning ritual of Nestlé Purina PetCare’s content marketing team. Neither the Daily Growl nor its counterpart, the Weekly Meow, are really news meetings. But the Purina operation is, in some ways, closer to a newsroom than journalists would care to admit. As its name, The Feed, suggests, the team produces timely information and entertainment and pushes it out to an audience on social platforms. It’s focused on speed, accountable for accuracy, and perpetually aware of the needs of its readers. The most obvious difference between The Feed’s work and that of an actual newsroom is that the team is explicitly aligned with the interests of the world’s second-largest pet food company. Then again, boundaries between editorial and advertising in journalism newsrooms aren’t what they used to be. Editors at Time Inc. now report to managers on the business side, and a series of recently leaked emails suggests that executives at Vice expect to know in advance about stories that mention advertisers or other corporate brands. That The Feed’s work is overtly coming from a brand is arguably a win for transparency.
The Feed devotes itself to customer service, with the ultimate goal of making money. Signs posted throughout the team’s office remind members of this: “Engage,” “Impact Business Now,” “Convert,” “Results.” How different are these reminders of the realities of capitalism from the various measures of popularity (total traffic, new readers, etc.) prominently displayed in newsrooms? Are the lists a reminder that reporters should be giving readers what they want, or just rankings of the writers whose stories have been most successfully monetized that day, not unlike the sales-leader board in a firm hawking timeshares?
Another thing The Feed’s work on behalf of Purina has in common with the work of journalists on behalf of their own (often corporate) owners: People are reading it.
The employees of The Feed are practitioners of a shape-shifting genre that has taken over billions of dollars of corporate marketing budgets globally in the last decade. Content marketing is so broad that it eludes definition even by its most ardent practitioners, but the term includes essentially any form of content (a Facebook post, a celebrity Q&A, a feature-length documentary) created by or on behalf of a brand with the hope that it will attract an audience on its own merits—as opposed to traditional advertising, which has the far smaller ambition of gaining notice from a captive audience before the ad break ends, or the page gets flipped, and the real content begins.
Most content marketing bypasses traditional media entirely, and as such it threatens to further erode journalism’s dwindling advertising revenue. (...)
As journalism newsrooms have diminished in strength and ambition over the last decade, “brand newsrooms,” a term that’s now used casually within the marketing and PR industry, are booming—and have been for some time. As Sam Slaughter, the vice president of content at Contently, a software platform with a network of freelance writers available to both marketers and journalism publishers, notes, Red Bull was covering the action-sports industry when “BuzzFeed was just a twinkle in Jonah Peretti’s eye.” American Express has a publication devoted to small-business owners, and General Electric covers its own scientists and hopes to never send another press release to an inattentive newspaper reporter. Chevron runs a community news site for Richmond, CA, where it is the town’s largest employer. Coca-Cola now reportedly spends more money creating its own content than it does on television advertising.
Nestlé, Purina’s parent and the world’s largest food company, creates more than 1,500 pieces of content each day company-wide, and its brands have accumulated more than 250 million Facebook fans.
Advertisers and journalists have always been partners, and that partnership has always contained an inherent tension. Content marketing has the potential to turn that tension into an existential threat. Journalists like to think of themselves as protectors of the public interest, intermediaries who police both fact and rhetoric. The very premise of the profession is that it’s dangerous to have words pass straight from the mouths of CEOs or politicians to the public’s ear. This intermediary function is at the core of journalism’s identity and, though it wasn’t always thought of this way, the core of its business model. But each successful piece of content marketing is, in effect, a statement that a journalist wasn’t wanted or needed. Each time a consumer clicks on a piece of content marketing, or shares it with a friend, it’s confirmation that they’re very comfortable being out there in the information landscape on their own.
At a glance, the Daily Growl could be any morning news meeting held in the “win the internet through pet videos” bureau of a lavishly funded media startup. Rows of eager young people stand behind their monitors—“TMZ-style,” managing editor Lisa Keller told me—as Keller solicits memes and news pegs to supplement the content already scheduled on the team’s editorial calendar. Monitors are tuned to Twitter feeds and Photoshop works in progress. Any of the team’s 10 “community managers” and eight designers might produce as many as 10 postings a day. Those numbers don’t include the constant interaction with fans and followers and strangers that is also a big part of the job. The office is light-filled and, despite the heavy productivity expectations, seemingly free of stress. I’m struck by this, having been in so many newsrooms in which there’s a palpable sense that the media industry, to say nothing of the country and the human race, is at the abyss.The Daily Growl is the morning ritual of Nestlé Purina PetCare’s content marketing team. Neither the Daily Growl nor its counterpart, the Weekly Meow, are really news meetings. But the Purina operation is, in some ways, closer to a newsroom than journalists would care to admit. As its name, The Feed, suggests, the team produces timely information and entertainment and pushes it out to an audience on social platforms. It’s focused on speed, accountable for accuracy, and perpetually aware of the needs of its readers. The most obvious difference between The Feed’s work and that of an actual newsroom is that the team is explicitly aligned with the interests of the world’s second-largest pet food company. Then again, boundaries between editorial and advertising in journalism newsrooms aren’t what they used to be. Editors at Time Inc. now report to managers on the business side, and a series of recently leaked emails suggests that executives at Vice expect to know in advance about stories that mention advertisers or other corporate brands. That The Feed’s work is overtly coming from a brand is arguably a win for transparency.
The Feed devotes itself to customer service, with the ultimate goal of making money. Signs posted throughout the team’s office remind members of this: “Engage,” “Impact Business Now,” “Convert,” “Results.” How different are these reminders of the realities of capitalism from the various measures of popularity (total traffic, new readers, etc.) prominently displayed in newsrooms? Are the lists a reminder that reporters should be giving readers what they want, or just rankings of the writers whose stories have been most successfully monetized that day, not unlike the sales-leader board in a firm hawking timeshares?
Another thing The Feed’s work on behalf of Purina has in common with the work of journalists on behalf of their own (often corporate) owners: People are reading it.
The employees of The Feed are practitioners of a shape-shifting genre that has taken over billions of dollars of corporate marketing budgets globally in the last decade. Content marketing is so broad that it eludes definition even by its most ardent practitioners, but the term includes essentially any form of content (a Facebook post, a celebrity Q&A, a feature-length documentary) created by or on behalf of a brand with the hope that it will attract an audience on its own merits—as opposed to traditional advertising, which has the far smaller ambition of gaining notice from a captive audience before the ad break ends, or the page gets flipped, and the real content begins.
Most content marketing bypasses traditional media entirely, and as such it threatens to further erode journalism’s dwindling advertising revenue. (...)
As journalism newsrooms have diminished in strength and ambition over the last decade, “brand newsrooms,” a term that’s now used casually within the marketing and PR industry, are booming—and have been for some time. As Sam Slaughter, the vice president of content at Contently, a software platform with a network of freelance writers available to both marketers and journalism publishers, notes, Red Bull was covering the action-sports industry when “BuzzFeed was just a twinkle in Jonah Peretti’s eye.” American Express has a publication devoted to small-business owners, and General Electric covers its own scientists and hopes to never send another press release to an inattentive newspaper reporter. Chevron runs a community news site for Richmond, CA, where it is the town’s largest employer. Coca-Cola now reportedly spends more money creating its own content than it does on television advertising.
Nestlé, Purina’s parent and the world’s largest food company, creates more than 1,500 pieces of content each day company-wide, and its brands have accumulated more than 250 million Facebook fans.
Advertisers and journalists have always been partners, and that partnership has always contained an inherent tension. Content marketing has the potential to turn that tension into an existential threat. Journalists like to think of themselves as protectors of the public interest, intermediaries who police both fact and rhetoric. The very premise of the profession is that it’s dangerous to have words pass straight from the mouths of CEOs or politicians to the public’s ear. This intermediary function is at the core of journalism’s identity and, though it wasn’t always thought of this way, the core of its business model. But each successful piece of content marketing is, in effect, a statement that a journalist wasn’t wanted or needed. Each time a consumer clicks on a piece of content marketing, or shares it with a friend, it’s confirmation that they’re very comfortable being out there in the information landscape on their own.
by Michael Meyer, CJR | Read more:
Image: Noma Bar
Friday, October 31, 2014
On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning
[ed. Repost. Given the recent controversy over street harassment that has the whole internet aflame, perhaps it's time for a more poignant perspective.]
One beautiful April morning, on a narrow side street in Tokyo’s fashionable Harujuku neighborhood, I walked past the 100% perfect girl.
Tell you the truth, she’s not that good-looking. She doesn’t stand out in any way. Her clothes are nothing special. The back of her hair is still bent out of shape from sleep. She isn’t young, either - must be near thirty, not even close to a “girl,” properly speaking. But still, I know from fifty yards away: She’s the 100% perfect girl for me. The moment I see her, there’s a rumbling in my chest, and my mouth is as dry as a desert.
Maybe you have your own particular favorite type of girl - one with slim ankles, say, or big eyes, or graceful fingers, or you’re drawn for no good reason to girls who take their time with every meal. I have my own preferences, of course. Sometimes in a restaurant I’ll catch myself staring at the girl at the next table to mine because I like the shape of her nose.
But no one can insist that his 100% perfect girl correspond to some preconceived type. Much as I like noses, I can’t recall the shape of hers - or even if she had one. All I can remember for sure is that she was no great beauty. It’s weird.
“Yesterday on the street I passed the 100% girl,” I tell someone.
“Yeah?” he says. “Good-looking?”
“Not really.”
“Your favorite type, then?”
“I don’t know. I can’t seem to remember anything about her - the shape of her eyes or the size of her breasts.”
“Strange.”
“Yeah. Strange.”
“So anyhow,” he says, already bored, “what did you do? Talk to her? Follow her?”
“Nah. Just passed her on the street.”
She’s walking east to west, and I west to east. It’s a really nice April morning.
Wish I could talk to her. Half an hour would be plenty: just ask her about herself, tell her about myself, and - what I’d really like to do - explain to her the complexities of fate that have led to our passing each other on a side street in Harajuku on a beautiful April morning in 1981. This was something sure to be crammed full of warm secrets, like an antique clock built when peace filled the world.
After talking, we’d have lunch somewhere, maybe see a Woody Allen movie, stop by a hotel bar for cocktails. With any kind of luck, we might end up in bed.
Potentiality knocks on the door of my heart.
Now the distance between us has narrowed to fifteen yards.
How can I approach her? What should I say?
“Good morning, miss. Do you think you could spare half an hour for a little conversation?”
Ridiculous. I’d sound like an insurance salesman.
“Pardon me, but would you happen to know if there is an all-night cleaners in the neighborhood?”
No, this is just as ridiculous. I’m not carrying any laundry, for one thing. Who’s going to buy a line like that?
Maybe the simple truth would do. “Good morning. You are the 100% perfect girl for me.”
No, she wouldn’t believe it. Or even if she did, she might not want to talk to me. Sorry, she could say, I might be the 100% perfect girl for you, but you’re not the 100% boy for me. It could happen. And if I found myself in that situation, I’d probably go to pieces. I’d never recover from the shock. I’m thirty-two, and that’s what growing older is all about.
We pass in front of a flower shop. A small, warm air mass touches my skin. The asphalt is damp, and I catch the scent of roses. I can’t bring myself to speak to her. She wears a white sweater, and in her right hand she holds a crisp white envelope lacking only a stamp. So: She’s written somebody a letter, maybe spent the whole night writing, to judge from the sleepy look in her eyes. The envelope could contain every secret she’s ever had.
I take a few more strides and turn: She’s lost in the crowd.
Now, of course, I know exactly what I should have said to her. It would have been a long speech, though, far too long for me to have delivered it properly. The ideas I come up with are never very practical.
Oh, well. It would have started “Once upon a time” and ended “A sad story, don’t you think?”
by Haruki Murakami, YMFY | Read more:
Image via:: City Block, Geoffrey Johnson. Represented at the Hubert Gallery here
My Week With a Flip Phone
“Oh, is that an iPhone 6?” someone asks. Two-thirds of the dinner party turns to look at the girl who’s just taken her phone out to check a message. “Can I hold it?” someone else asks. “Does it really bend when you sit?” “Man, that’s huge.” “How’s the camera? I hear it’s the best camera.”
The girl passes it around with a shrug and offers a few low-key Luddite excuses for her embrace of new and exciting technology. “I didn’t even want one, really,” she says. “My other screen was just so cracked. So I thought, If I have to get a new phone, why not?”
Another woman turns to me. “I’m just, like, so not into technology,” she says, just loudly enough. “I still have an iPhone 4! And I don’t even load music on it.” I ask her what she does on long walks or the subway.
“I just look at the world. I mean, God, can’t people just do that anymore?”
I’m at a gathering of people I don’t really know, many of whom have septum rings and stick-and-poke tats, so I wasn’t exactly expecting to be the coolest person at the jamboree. Normally, I would just shut up at this point and fume at the insufferable nature of people who claim they don’t need music on the subway. But tonight, I have an ace in my pocket.
So, as if I’m just casually checking an incoming message, as one does, I pull out my brand-new phone — a Samsung flip phone. A flip phone.
Lately the flip has been discussed as a sort of “status phone” among cool people, like pretentious technophobes and Anna Wintour, so I’m wondering if my newly acquired flip phone will provide me entry to this club. With a satisfying fwaaap! and a flick of the wrist — like I’m opening a switchblade — I pop that faux Luddite’s over-inflated bubble. There’s a moment of silence as I pretend to text away — slowly, precisely, laboriously. For I am on a flip phone, and I revel in my slow text messaging, much as a slow-food early adopter would revel in raising her own chickens.
“Whoa,” says Zoe, a particularly cool redhead who was seconds ago blowing cigarette smoke in my face as if I were invisible, “is that a flip phone? Rad.”
Does the hipness of the flip represent a rebellion against mindless iPhone addicts? A fear of the hackable Cloud? A desire to return to simpler, more social times? As a smartphone addict who literally sleeps with my iPhone clutched in my hand (it’s an alarm clock!), the idea of something that allows me to communicate but can free me from the attention-prison of a smartphone is enticing. And I’m not alone. A Pew study revealed that 9 percent of American adults don’t use smartphones, including 15 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds and 13 percent of 25- to 34-year-olds. So a few weeks ago, after reading this Medium essay heralding the flip phone as the phone of cool girls, I decided to give smartphoneless life a shot.
The girl passes it around with a shrug and offers a few low-key Luddite excuses for her embrace of new and exciting technology. “I didn’t even want one, really,” she says. “My other screen was just so cracked. So I thought, If I have to get a new phone, why not?”
Another woman turns to me. “I’m just, like, so not into technology,” she says, just loudly enough. “I still have an iPhone 4! And I don’t even load music on it.” I ask her what she does on long walks or the subway.“I just look at the world. I mean, God, can’t people just do that anymore?”
I’m at a gathering of people I don’t really know, many of whom have septum rings and stick-and-poke tats, so I wasn’t exactly expecting to be the coolest person at the jamboree. Normally, I would just shut up at this point and fume at the insufferable nature of people who claim they don’t need music on the subway. But tonight, I have an ace in my pocket.
So, as if I’m just casually checking an incoming message, as one does, I pull out my brand-new phone — a Samsung flip phone. A flip phone.
Lately the flip has been discussed as a sort of “status phone” among cool people, like pretentious technophobes and Anna Wintour, so I’m wondering if my newly acquired flip phone will provide me entry to this club. With a satisfying fwaaap! and a flick of the wrist — like I’m opening a switchblade — I pop that faux Luddite’s over-inflated bubble. There’s a moment of silence as I pretend to text away — slowly, precisely, laboriously. For I am on a flip phone, and I revel in my slow text messaging, much as a slow-food early adopter would revel in raising her own chickens.
“Whoa,” says Zoe, a particularly cool redhead who was seconds ago blowing cigarette smoke in my face as if I were invisible, “is that a flip phone? Rad.”
Does the hipness of the flip represent a rebellion against mindless iPhone addicts? A fear of the hackable Cloud? A desire to return to simpler, more social times? As a smartphone addict who literally sleeps with my iPhone clutched in my hand (it’s an alarm clock!), the idea of something that allows me to communicate but can free me from the attention-prison of a smartphone is enticing. And I’m not alone. A Pew study revealed that 9 percent of American adults don’t use smartphones, including 15 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds and 13 percent of 25- to 34-year-olds. So a few weeks ago, after reading this Medium essay heralding the flip phone as the phone of cool girls, I decided to give smartphoneless life a shot.
by Allison P. Davis, NY Magazine | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Thursday, October 30, 2014
Myths And Misconceptions Of Our Wearable Future
Wearables as a second brain. The Internet of Self and Things. One trillion sensors….
There’s no doubt that a sensor-laden world is the buzz of the town. The next Big Thing. In fact, there is so much buzz that many consumers probably dismiss it as hype. Yet, in spite of all this hype, as a 30-year veteran of Silicon Valley’s semiconductor and sensor industry, this is about as exciting a space I’ve ever been in.
The reality is of course more nuanced. Yes it’s true that the market is growing extremely fast and there will be many winners — but there will be even more losers in the space. Sensors are getting amazingly accurate, but wearable products continue to be clunky and provide a poor user experience. In fact, studies have found that 40 percent of consumers who buy and try a wearable fitness tracker leave it sitting on their bedside after a month or two.There’s clearly a lot of work to be done.
Unfortunately, PR hype and science-fiction-fueled ideas, have pushed consumer expectations to an all-time high, and have raised the bar for just about any company (look at Apple, for example). Meanwhile, vaporware that takes advantage of this enthusiasm, mixed with crowdfunding campaigns, are a real danger and risk affecting the industry’s credibility if companies do not deliver. At this point, it is critical to separate over-promised functionality from a reality that is still, by any measure, incredibly exciting.
In this article, we’ll review myths and misconceptions that are prevalent around hardware and that may mislead consumers.
by Hamid Farzaneh, TechCrunch | Read more:
Image:Bryce Durbin
Major Cyber Attack Expected by 2025
A major cyber attack will happen between now and 2025 and it will be large enough to cause “significant loss of life or property losses/damage/theft at the levels of tens of billions of dollars,” according to more than 60 percent of technology experts interviewed by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. (...)
A key concern for many of the experts Pew interviewed is infrastructure, where very real cyber vulnerabilities do exist and are growing. Stewart Baker, former general counsel for the National Security Agency and a partner at Washington, D.C.-based law firm Steptoe & Johnson told Pew, “Cyberwar just plain makes sense. Attacking the power grid or other industrial control systems is asymmetrical and deniable and devilishly effective. Plus, it gets easier every year. We used to worry about Russia and China taking down our infrastructure. Now we have to worry about Iran and Syria and North Korea. Next up: Hezbollah and Anonymous.”
Jeremy Epstein, a senior computer scientist working with the National Science Foundation as program director for Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace, said, “Damages in the billions will occur to manufacturing and/or utilities but because it ramps up slowly, it will be accepted as just another cost (probably passed on to taxpayers through government rebuilding subsidies and/or environmental damage), and there will be little motivation for the private sector to defend itself.”Today, cities around the world use supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems to manage water, sewage, electricity, and even traffic lights. Last October, researchers Chris Sistrunk and Adam Crain found that these systems suffer from 25 different security vulnerabilities. And it’s not unusual for them to have the same security passwords that came direct from the manufacturer. As writers Indu B. Singh and Joseph N. Pelton pointed out in The Futurist magazine, the failure to take even the most basic security precautions leaves these systems open to remote hacking.
Its one reason why many security watchers were hopeful that the Obama administration’s Cybersecurity Framework, released earlier this year, would force companies that preside over infrastructure components to take these precautions, but many in the technology community were disappointed that the guidelines did not include hard mandates for major operators to fix potential security flaws. (...)
But SCADA vulnerabilities look quaint compared to the exploitable security gaps that will persist across the Internet of Things as more infrastructure components are linked together. “Current threats include economic transactions, power grid, and air traffic control. This will expand to include others such as self-driving cars, unmanned aerial vehicles, and building infrastructure,” said Mark Nall, a program manager for NASA
Other experts told Pew that military contractors, facing declining business for missiles and tanks, have purposefully overblown the threats posed by cyber attacks to scare up an enemy for the nation to arm against.
“…This concern seems exaggerated by the political and commercial interests that benefit from us directing massive resources to those who offer themselves as our protectors. It is also exaggerated by the media because it is a dramatic story,” said Joseph Guardin, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research. “It is clear our leaders are powerless to rein in the military-industrial-intelligence complex, whose interests are served by having us fearful of cyber attacks. Obviously there will be some theft and perhaps someone can exaggerate it to claim tens of billions in losses, but I don’t expect anything dramatic and certainly don’t want to live in fear of it.” (...)Still others, such as lead researcher for GigaOM Research Stowe Boyd, said that the growing cyber capabilities of states like China almost promise bigger cyber attacks of growing international importance.
“A bellicose China might ‘cyber invade’ the military capabilities of Japan and South Korea as part of the conflict around the China sea, leading to the need to reconfigure their electronics, at huge cost. Israel and the United States have already created the Stuxnet computer worm to damage Iran’s nuclear refinement centrifuges, for example. Imagine a world dependent on robotic farm vehicles, delivery drones, and AI-managed transport, and how one country might opt to disrupt the spring harvest as a means to damage a neighboring opponent,” Boyd said.
by Patrick Tucker, Defense One | Read more:
Image: via:
Wednesday, October 29, 2014
You Don't Wanna Talk?
[ed. THE viral video of the moment (maybe the year). The comments section on YouTube is just as disturbing. See also: here and here.]
by Bethonie Butler, Washington Post | Read more:
Video: Rob Bliss Creative
And The Biggest Beneficiary Of QE3 Is...
[ed. QE3 also known as QE-Infinity - the Federal Reserve's decision to implement an open-ended bond buying program in 2012 (at the rate of $40-$85 billion a month).]
Aside from the S&P 500 of course, which made billionaires out of millionaires (even if it failed to make billionaires into trillionaires this time around - we will have to wait for QE4 or QE5 for that), some may wonder: who was the biggest beneficiary of QE3? It certainly wasn't the US middle class, which has seen its real wages decline in 6 of the past 7 months, and its disposable income is back at levels not seen since the mid-1990s. No, the biggest winner of QE3 is the same entity that we noted benefited the most from QE over the past 6 years, and which even the WSJ realized was the primary beneficiary of the trillions in cash created out of thin air by the Fed, when in late September Hilsenrath wrote "Fed Rate Policies Aid Foreign Banks"... something we first said back in 2011 with "Exclusive: The Fed's $600 Billion Stealth Bailout Of Foreign Banks Continues At The Expense Of The Domestic Economy, Or Explaining Where All The QE2 Money Went."
So when it comes to the Fed's QE3 generosity to foreign banks, what was the real number?
Here is the answer.
The first chart below shows that since starting in December 2012, when QE3 was formally launched, and continuing through today, the Fed injected some $1.3 trillion reserves with banks, which has manifested as extra cash held by various banks operating in the US, both domestic, but most importantly, foreign.
So when it comes to the Fed's QE3 generosity to foreign banks, what was the real number?
Here is the answer.
The first chart below shows that since starting in December 2012, when QE3 was formally launched, and continuing through today, the Fed injected some $1.3 trillion reserves with banks, which has manifested as extra cash held by various banks operating in the US, both domestic, but most importantly, foreign.
by Tyler Durden, Zero Hedge | Read more:
Image: Zero Hedge
Stop Thanking Me For My Service
[ed. See also: No thanks, I won't "support the troops".]
Last week, in a quiet indie bookstore on the north side of Chicago, I saw the latest issue of Rolling Stone resting on a chrome-colored plastic table a few feet from a barista brewing a vanilla latte. A cold October rain fell outside. A friend of mine grabbed the issue and began flipping through it. Knowing that I was a veteran, he said, "Hey, did you see this?" pointing to a news story that seemed more like an ad. It read in part:
The sucking sound from the espresso maker was drowning out a 10-year-old Shins song. As I read, my heart sank, my shoulders slumped.
Special guests at the Concert for Valor were to include: Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks, and Steven Spielberg. The mission of the concert, according to a press release, was to “raise awareness” of veterans issues and “provide a national stage for ensuring that veterans and their families know that their fellow Americans’ gratitude is genuine.”
Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Michael Mullen were to serve in an advisory capacity, and Starbucks, HBO, and JPMorgan Chase were to pay for it all. "We are honored to play a small role to help raise awareness and support for our service men and women,” said HBO chairman Richard Plepler.
Though I couldn’t quite say why, that Concert for Valor ad felt tired and sad, despite the images of Rihanna singing full-throated into a gold microphone and James Hetfield and Kirk Hammett of Metallica wailing away on their guitars. I had gotten my own share of “thanks” from civilians when I was still a U.S. Army Ranger. Who hadn’t? It had been the endless theme of the post-9/11 era, how thankful other Americans were that we would do... well, what exactly, for them? And here it was again. I couldn’t help wondering: Would veterans somewhere actually feel the gratitude that Starbucks and HBO hoped to convey? (...)
These two ceremonies seemed to catch a particular mood (reflected in so many similar, if more up-to-date versions of the same). They might have benefited from a little “awareness raising” when it came to what the American military has actually been doing these last years, not to say decades, beyond our borders. They certainly summed up much of the frustration I was feeling with the Concert for Valor. Plenty of thank yous, for sure, but no history when it came to what the thanks were being offered for in, say, Iraq or Afghanistan, no statistics on taxpayer dollars spent or where they went, or on innocent lives lost and why.
Will the “Concert for Valor” mention the trillions of dollars rung up terrorizing Muslim countries for oil, the ratcheting up of the police and surveillance state in this country since 9/11, the hundreds of thousands of lives lost thanks to the wars of George W. Bush and Barack Obama? Is anyone going to dedicate a song to Chelsea Manning, or John Kiriakou, or Edward Snowden -- two of them languishing in prison and one in exile -- for their service to the American people? Will the Concert for Valor raise anyone’s awareness when it comes to the fact that, to this day, veterans lack proper medical attention, particularly for mental health issues, or that there is a veteran suicide every 80 minutes in this country? Let’s hope they find time in between drum solos, but myself, I’m not counting on it.
Last week, in a quiet indie bookstore on the north side of Chicago, I saw the latest issue of Rolling Stone resting on a chrome-colored plastic table a few feet from a barista brewing a vanilla latte. A cold October rain fell outside. A friend of mine grabbed the issue and began flipping through it. Knowing that I was a veteran, he said, "Hey, did you see this?" pointing to a news story that seemed more like an ad. It read in part:"This Veterans Day, Bruce Springsteen, Eminem, Rihanna, Dave Grohl, and Metallica will be among numerous artists who will head to the National Mall in Washington D.C. on November 11th for 'The Concert For Valor,' an all-star event that will pay tribute to armed services.""Concert For Valor? That sounds like something the North Korean government would organize," I said as I typed Concertforvalor.com into my MacBook Pro looking for more information.
The sucking sound from the espresso maker was drowning out a 10-year-old Shins song. As I read, my heart sank, my shoulders slumped.
Special guests at the Concert for Valor were to include: Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks, and Steven Spielberg. The mission of the concert, according to a press release, was to “raise awareness” of veterans issues and “provide a national stage for ensuring that veterans and their families know that their fellow Americans’ gratitude is genuine.”
Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Michael Mullen were to serve in an advisory capacity, and Starbucks, HBO, and JPMorgan Chase were to pay for it all. "We are honored to play a small role to help raise awareness and support for our service men and women,” said HBO chairman Richard Plepler.
Though I couldn’t quite say why, that Concert for Valor ad felt tired and sad, despite the images of Rihanna singing full-throated into a gold microphone and James Hetfield and Kirk Hammett of Metallica wailing away on their guitars. I had gotten my own share of “thanks” from civilians when I was still a U.S. Army Ranger. Who hadn’t? It had been the endless theme of the post-9/11 era, how thankful other Americans were that we would do... well, what exactly, for them? And here it was again. I couldn’t help wondering: Would veterans somewhere actually feel the gratitude that Starbucks and HBO hoped to convey? (...)
These two ceremonies seemed to catch a particular mood (reflected in so many similar, if more up-to-date versions of the same). They might have benefited from a little “awareness raising” when it came to what the American military has actually been doing these last years, not to say decades, beyond our borders. They certainly summed up much of the frustration I was feeling with the Concert for Valor. Plenty of thank yous, for sure, but no history when it came to what the thanks were being offered for in, say, Iraq or Afghanistan, no statistics on taxpayer dollars spent or where they went, or on innocent lives lost and why.
Will the “Concert for Valor” mention the trillions of dollars rung up terrorizing Muslim countries for oil, the ratcheting up of the police and surveillance state in this country since 9/11, the hundreds of thousands of lives lost thanks to the wars of George W. Bush and Barack Obama? Is anyone going to dedicate a song to Chelsea Manning, or John Kiriakou, or Edward Snowden -- two of them languishing in prison and one in exile -- for their service to the American people? Will the Concert for Valor raise anyone’s awareness when it comes to the fact that, to this day, veterans lack proper medical attention, particularly for mental health issues, or that there is a veteran suicide every 80 minutes in this country? Let’s hope they find time in between drum solos, but myself, I’m not counting on it.
by Rory Fanning, Salon | Read more:
Image: via:
Dear Mountain Room Parents
Hi, everyone!
The Mountain Room is gearing up for its Day of the Dead celebration on Friday. Please send in photos of loved ones for our altar. All parents are welcome to come by on Wednesday afternoon to help us make candles and decorate skulls.
Thanks!
Emily
Hi again.
Because I’ve gotten some questions about my last e-mail, there is nothing “wrong” with Halloween. The Day of the Dead is the Mexican version, a time of remembrance. Many of you chose Little Learners because of our emphasis on global awareness. Our celebration on Friday is an example of that. The skulls we’re decorating are sugar skulls. I should have made that more clear.
Emily
Parents:
Some of you have expressed concern about your children celebrating a holiday with the word “dead” in it. I asked Eleanor’s mom, who’s a pediatrician, and here’s what she said: “Preschoolers tend to see death as temporary and reversible. Therefore, I see nothing traumatic about the Day of the Dead.” I hope this helps.
Emily
Dear Parents:
In response to the e-mail we all received from Maddie’s parents, in which they shared their decision to raise their daughter dogma-free, yes, there will be an altar, but please be assured that the Day of the Dead is a pagan celebration of life and has nothing to do with God. Keep those photos coming!
Emily
Hello.
Perhaps “pagan” was a poor word choice. I feel like we’re veering a bit off track, so here’s what I’ll do. I’ll start setting up our altar now, so that today at pickup you can see for yourselves how colorful and harmless the Day of the Dead truly is.
Emily
Parents:
The photos should be of loved ones who have passed. Max’s grandma was understandably shaken when she came in and saw a photo of herself on our altar. But the candles and skulls were cute, right?
Emily
Mountain Room Parents:
It’s late and I can’t possibly respond to each and every e-mail. (Not that it comes up a lot in conversation, but I have children, too.) As the skulls have clearly become a distraction, I decided to throw them away. They’re in the compost. I’m looking at them now. You can, too, tomorrow at drop-off. I just placed a “NO BASURA” card on the bin to make sure it doesn’t get emptied. Finally, to those parents who are offended by our Day of the Dead celebration, I’d like to point out that there are parents who are offended that you are offended.
Emily
The Mountain Room is gearing up for its Day of the Dead celebration on Friday. Please send in photos of loved ones for our altar. All parents are welcome to come by on Wednesday afternoon to help us make candles and decorate skulls.Thanks!
Emily
Hi again.
Because I’ve gotten some questions about my last e-mail, there is nothing “wrong” with Halloween. The Day of the Dead is the Mexican version, a time of remembrance. Many of you chose Little Learners because of our emphasis on global awareness. Our celebration on Friday is an example of that. The skulls we’re decorating are sugar skulls. I should have made that more clear.
Emily
Parents:
Some of you have expressed concern about your children celebrating a holiday with the word “dead” in it. I asked Eleanor’s mom, who’s a pediatrician, and here’s what she said: “Preschoolers tend to see death as temporary and reversible. Therefore, I see nothing traumatic about the Day of the Dead.” I hope this helps.
Emily
Dear Parents:
In response to the e-mail we all received from Maddie’s parents, in which they shared their decision to raise their daughter dogma-free, yes, there will be an altar, but please be assured that the Day of the Dead is a pagan celebration of life and has nothing to do with God. Keep those photos coming!
Emily
Hello.
Perhaps “pagan” was a poor word choice. I feel like we’re veering a bit off track, so here’s what I’ll do. I’ll start setting up our altar now, so that today at pickup you can see for yourselves how colorful and harmless the Day of the Dead truly is.
Emily
Parents:
The photos should be of loved ones who have passed. Max’s grandma was understandably shaken when she came in and saw a photo of herself on our altar. But the candles and skulls were cute, right?
Emily
Mountain Room Parents:
It’s late and I can’t possibly respond to each and every e-mail. (Not that it comes up a lot in conversation, but I have children, too.) As the skulls have clearly become a distraction, I decided to throw them away. They’re in the compost. I’m looking at them now. You can, too, tomorrow at drop-off. I just placed a “NO BASURA” card on the bin to make sure it doesn’t get emptied. Finally, to those parents who are offended by our Day of the Dead celebration, I’d like to point out that there are parents who are offended that you are offended.
Emily
by Maria Semple, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Jordan Awan
Tuesday, October 28, 2014
No Windows But Everyone Gets a Window Seat
The goal of the proposal is to reduce how much commercial aircraft bodies, or fuselages, weigh thereby also reducing fuel consumption, costs, and carbon emissions. Windows add weight to aircraft cabins because of both the materials used to make them, and the additional components that must be added to the hull to strengthen and secure it.
Jon Helliwell of CPI told the Guardian, “We had been speaking to people in aerospace and we understood that there was this need to take weight out of aircraft. ... Follow the logical thought through. Let’s take all the windows out—that’s what they do in cargo aircraft.”
To keep people in “window” seats happy, and minimize general feelings of claustrophobia, CPI wants to use cameras mounted on the exteriors of planes and flexible OLED screens on the interior walls to project real-time footage of what's going on outside all over the cabin.
by Lily Hay Newman, Slate | Read more:
Image: CPI
Being Bill Murray
Many of us have random impulses, but Bill Murray is the man who acts on them, for all of us. Consider, for example, the time a couple of years ago when he caught a cab late at night in Oakland. Facing a long drive across the bay to Sausalito, he started talking with his cabbie and discovered that his driver was a frustrated saxophone player: He never had enough time to practice, because he was driving a taxi 14 hours a day. Murray told the cabbie to pull over and get his horn out of the trunk; the cabbie could play it in the back seat while Murray drove.
As he tells this story, Murray is sitting on a couch in a Toronto hotel. Wearing a rumpled shirt with purple stripes, he looks like he'd rather be playing golf than doing an interview. But his eyes light up as he remembers the sound of the cab's trunk opening: "This is gonna be a good one," he thought. "We're both going to dig the shit out of this." Then he decided to "go all the way" and asked the back-seat saxophonist if he was hungry. The cabbie knew a great late-night BBQ place, but worried that it was in a sketchy neighborhood. "I was like, 'Relax, you got the horn,'" says Murray. So around 2:15 a.m., Bill Murray ate Oakland barbecue while his cab driver blew on the saxophone for an astonished crowd. "It was awesome," Murray says. "I think we'd all do that."
In fact, most of us wouldn't (although we probably should). Most of us don't crash strangers' karaoke parties, or get behind a bar in Austin to fulfill all drink orders from whatever random bottle was handy, or give a kid $5 to ride his bike into a swimming pool. Murray has done all those things, and more. The world has an apparently bottomless hunger for true stories of Bill Murray making strangers' lives stranger, and he obliges, whether he's stealing a golf cart and driving it to a nightclub in Stockholm or reading poetry to construction workers. He makes our world a little bit weirder, the mundane routines of everyday life a little more exciting, or as Naomi Watts puts it, "Wherever he goes, he's leaving a trail of hysteria behind him."
The website urban dictionary defines "Bill Murray Story" as "an outlandish (yet plausible) story that involves you witnessing Bill Murray doing something totally unusual, often followed by him walking up to you and whispering, 'No one will ever believe you.' " Ask Murray about his reputation as the master of surreal celebrity encounters and he grimaces, not eager to explain his motivations. But he will concede that he's aware of how his presence is received. "No one has an easy life," he says. "It's this face we put on, that we're not all getting rained on. But you can't start thinking about numbers – if I can change just one person, or I had three nice encounters. You can't think that way, because you're certainly going to have one where you say, ‘What did I just do?' You're a disappointment to yourself, and others, imminently. Any second."
When Lost in Translation was released in 2003 (Murray got an Oscar nomination for playing an aging movie star stranded in the same luxury Tokyo hotel as Scarlett Johansson), I asked director Sofia Coppola what her wish for the following year was. She looked startled. "My wish came true," she said. "Bill Murray did my movie."
Murray, 64, has not made it easy to get him to be in your movie. Unlike any other actor of his stature, he has no agent, no manager, no publicist. If you want to cast him, you get a friend of his to persuade him. Or you call his secret 1-800 number and leave your pitch after the tone. If he checks his voicemail, maybe he'll call you back. After he agrees to be in your movie, you may not hear from him again until the first day of shooting, when he'll show up in the makeup trailer, cracking jokes and giving back rubs. Sometimes his inaccessibility means that he misses out on films he would have excelled in – Little Miss Sunshine, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Monsters, Inc. – but Murray isn't particularly concerned. It's a worthwhile trade-off for him, considering that what he gets in return is freedom.
As he tells this story, Murray is sitting on a couch in a Toronto hotel. Wearing a rumpled shirt with purple stripes, he looks like he'd rather be playing golf than doing an interview. But his eyes light up as he remembers the sound of the cab's trunk opening: "This is gonna be a good one," he thought. "We're both going to dig the shit out of this." Then he decided to "go all the way" and asked the back-seat saxophonist if he was hungry. The cabbie knew a great late-night BBQ place, but worried that it was in a sketchy neighborhood. "I was like, 'Relax, you got the horn,'" says Murray. So around 2:15 a.m., Bill Murray ate Oakland barbecue while his cab driver blew on the saxophone for an astonished crowd. "It was awesome," Murray says. "I think we'd all do that."In fact, most of us wouldn't (although we probably should). Most of us don't crash strangers' karaoke parties, or get behind a bar in Austin to fulfill all drink orders from whatever random bottle was handy, or give a kid $5 to ride his bike into a swimming pool. Murray has done all those things, and more. The world has an apparently bottomless hunger for true stories of Bill Murray making strangers' lives stranger, and he obliges, whether he's stealing a golf cart and driving it to a nightclub in Stockholm or reading poetry to construction workers. He makes our world a little bit weirder, the mundane routines of everyday life a little more exciting, or as Naomi Watts puts it, "Wherever he goes, he's leaving a trail of hysteria behind him."
The website urban dictionary defines "Bill Murray Story" as "an outlandish (yet plausible) story that involves you witnessing Bill Murray doing something totally unusual, often followed by him walking up to you and whispering, 'No one will ever believe you.' " Ask Murray about his reputation as the master of surreal celebrity encounters and he grimaces, not eager to explain his motivations. But he will concede that he's aware of how his presence is received. "No one has an easy life," he says. "It's this face we put on, that we're not all getting rained on. But you can't start thinking about numbers – if I can change just one person, or I had three nice encounters. You can't think that way, because you're certainly going to have one where you say, ‘What did I just do?' You're a disappointment to yourself, and others, imminently. Any second."
When Lost in Translation was released in 2003 (Murray got an Oscar nomination for playing an aging movie star stranded in the same luxury Tokyo hotel as Scarlett Johansson), I asked director Sofia Coppola what her wish for the following year was. She looked startled. "My wish came true," she said. "Bill Murray did my movie."
Murray, 64, has not made it easy to get him to be in your movie. Unlike any other actor of his stature, he has no agent, no manager, no publicist. If you want to cast him, you get a friend of his to persuade him. Or you call his secret 1-800 number and leave your pitch after the tone. If he checks his voicemail, maybe he'll call you back. After he agrees to be in your movie, you may not hear from him again until the first day of shooting, when he'll show up in the makeup trailer, cracking jokes and giving back rubs. Sometimes his inaccessibility means that he misses out on films he would have excelled in – Little Miss Sunshine, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Monsters, Inc. – but Murray isn't particularly concerned. It's a worthwhile trade-off for him, considering that what he gets in return is freedom.
by Gavin Edwards, Rolling Stone | Read more:
Image: Caddyshack
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