theatlantic | Since 1998, people all over the world have been living healthier and
living longer. But middle-aged, white non-Hispanics in the United States
have been getting sicker and dying in greater numbers. The trend is
being driven primarily by people with a high-school degree or less.
That's the sobering takeaway from a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published this week.
The study authors sum it up:
Between 1978 to 1998, the mortality rate for U.S. whites aged 45 to
54 fell by 2 percent per year on average, which matched the average rate
of decline in the six countries shown, and the average over all other
industrialized countries. After 1998, other rich countries’ mortality
rates continued to decline by 2 percent a year. In contrast, U.S. white
non-Hispanic mortality rose by half a percent a year. No other rich
country saw a similar turnaround.
That means “half a million people are dead who should
not be dead,” Angus Deaton, the 2015 Nobel laureate in economics and
co-author of the paper, told The Washington Post. “About 40 times the Ebola stats. You’re getting up there with HIV-AIDS.”
The
reasons for the increased death rate are not the usual things that kill
Americans, like diabetes and heart disease. Rather, it’s suicide,
alcohol and drug poisonings, and alcohol-related liver disease.
The
least-educated are worst off: All-cause mortality among middle-aged
Americans with a high-school degree or less increased by 134 deaths per
100,000 people between 1999 and 2013, but there was little change in
mortality for people with some college. The death rate for the
college-educated fell slightly.
chicagotribune | Two months and three days after Fox Lake police Lt. Charles Joseph
Gliniewicz's death, authorities announced Wednesday they believe the
veteran officer took his own life in a carefully staged suicide designed
to cover up extensive criminal acts.
Investigators say they believe two others were involved in criminal activity and that investigation remains ongoing.
Though the announcement answers a key question about his death,
authorities continue to look into related matters. Lake County State’s
Attorney Mike Nerheim said the results of the investigation have been
turned over to his office, as well as to the FBI, for investigation and
potential prosecution of alleged crimes that are not related to his
shooting but were uncovered during the investigation into it. Nerheim
declined to go into further detail.
Gliniewicz was under
increasing levels of stress from scrutiny of his management of the Fox
Lake Police Explorers program, George Filenko, commander of the Lake
County Major Crimes Task Force, said Wednesday.
Gliniewicz had been stealing and laundering money from
the Explorers post, spending the money on travel, mortgage payments,
adult websites and unaccounted cash withdrawals, Filenko said.
The
announcement that Gliniewicz’s death was a suicide marks the completion
of a 180-degree turn for an investigation that began with hundreds of
officers, as well as dogs and helicopters, searching for suspects who
apparently never existed. In the weeks that followed, Lake County,
Illinois authorities downplayed the possibility that Gliniewicz had
committed suicide while they followed leads and reviewed forensic test
results.
NYTimes | When
the nation’s long-running war against drugs was defined by the crack
epidemic and based in poor, predominantly black urban areas, the public
response was defined by zero tolerance and stiff prison sentences. But
today’s heroin crisis is different. While heroin use has climbed among
all demographic groups, it has skyrocketed among whites; nearly 90
percent of those who tried heroin for the first time in the last decade were white.
And
the growing army of families of those lost to heroin — many of them in
the suburbs and small towns — are now using their influence, anger and
grief to cushion the country’s approach to drugs, from altering the
language around addiction to prodding government to treat it not as a
crime, but as a disease.
“Because the demographic of people affected are more white, more middle class, these are parents who are empowered,” said Michael Botticelli,
director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy,
better known as the nation’s drug czar. “They know how to call a
legislator, they know how to get angry with their insurance company,
they know how to advocate. They have been so instrumental in changing
the conversation.”
Mr. Botticelli, a recovering alcoholic who has been sober for 26 years, speaks to some of these parents regularly.
Their
efforts also include lobbying statehouses, holding rallies and starting
nonprofit organizations, making these mothers and fathers part of a
growing backlash against the harsh tactics of traditional drug
enforcement. These days, in rare bipartisan or even nonpartisan
agreement, punishment is out and compassion is in.
The
presidential candidates of both parties are now talking about the drug
epidemic, with Hillary Rodham Clinton hosting forums on the issue as Jeb
Bush and Carly Fiorina tell their own stories of loss while calling for
more care and empathy.
HuffPo |Columbia man Sean Groubert, 32, made headlines in September 2014 when he shot an unarmed black manat
a gas station who was reaching for his driver's license after the state
trooper ordered him to. Groubert fired three times, striking Levar
Edward Jones once in the hip.
"I was just getting my license," Jones says in dash cam footage
after being shot. "Sir, why was I shot? All I did was reach for my
license. I'm coming from work."
Groubert was ultimately fired from the department and charged with assault and battery. In February, Jones received a $285,000 settlement.
Court papers released Monday show that on Oct. 18, Groubert and his wife, Morgan, were arrested for shoplifting from a Columbia Walmart, according to WYFF4. Groubert, who now works as a truck driver, was out on bond.
"Please keep me out of jail,"
the former cop told a judge Monday. Prosecutors contend that the
Grouberts switched price tags on food to change the total price of $135
to just $30, according to Live 5 News.
Groubert faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted for his felony
charges stemming from the shooting. A trial date for those charges has
not yet been set.
kunstler |At a moment in history when the
US is beset by epochal problems of economy, energy, ecology, and foreign
relations, campus life is preoccupied with handwringing over the hurt
feelings of every imaginable ethnic and sexual group and just as
earnestly with the suppression of ideological trespassers who don’t go
along with the program of exorcisms. A comprehensive history of this
unfortunate campaign has yet to be written, but by the time it is,
higher education may lie in ruins. It is already burdened and beset by
the unintended consequences of the financial racketeering so pervasive
across American life these days. But in promoting the official
suppression of ideas, it is really committing intellectual suicide,
disgracing its mission to civilized life.
I had my own brush with this
evil empire last week when I gave a talk at Boston College, a general
briefing on the progress of long emergency. The audience was sparse. It
was pouring rain. The World Series was on TV. People are not so
interested in these issues since the Federal Reserve saved the world
with free money, and what I had to say did not include anything on race,
gender, and white privilege.
However, after the talk, I went
out for dinner with four faculty members and one friend-of-faculty.
Three of them were English profs. One was an urban planner and one was
an ecology prof. All of the English profs were specialists in race,
gender, and privilege. Imagine that. You’d think that the college was a
little overloaded there, but it speaks for the current academic
obsessive-compulsive neurosis with these matters. Anyway, on the way to
restaurant I was chatting in the car with one of the English profs about
a particular angle on race, since this was his focus and he tended to
view things through that lens. The discussion continued at the dinner
table and this is what ensued on the Internet (an email to me the next
morning):
On Oct 29, 2015, at 4:37 PM, Rhonda Frederick wrote:
This is what I posted on my social medias, am sharing with you and your agent.
At the post-talk dinner, he said
“the great problem facing African Americans is that they aren’t taught
proper English, and that … academics are too preoccupied with privilege
and political correctness to admit this obvious fact.” No black people
(I presume he used “African American” when he meant “black”) were
present at the dinner. I was not at the dinner, but two of my
friends/colleagues were; I trust their recollections implicitly. Whether
Kunstler was using stereotypes about black people to be provocative, or
whether he believed the ignorance he spouted, my response is the same: I
cannot allow this kind of ignorance into my space and I am not the one
to cast what he said as a “teachable moment.” I do think there should be
a BC response to this, as the university paid his honorarium and for
his meal. Here’s some contact information for anyone interested in
sharing your thoughts on how BC should spend its money:
Lowell Humanities Series at Boston College (http://www.bc.edu/offices/lowellhs/about.html)
civilbeat | Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, a frequent critic of the Obama administration’s
military policies, was scheduled to appear as the lead guest on HBO’s “Real Time With Bill Maher” live on Friday at 4 p.m. (10 p.m. EST). But her recent comments left little doubt as to how she’d react to the deployment: Only days ago,
she told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer there is “no reason for (U.S. military
personnel) to go and to be deployed into these situations” in Syria.
Military actions being taken against the Islamic State now are being
pursued under the 2001 and 2002 AUMF, which authorized use of military
force against Iraq. Their use in pursuing broader goals in the Middle
East goes back to the George W. Bush administration. Obama submitted a
proposed new AUMF in February, but under House Speaker John Boehner,
Congress failed to take up the authorization.
Up to 50 Special Operations advisers, who will not take part in
direct combat, are expected to comprise the new deployment, which the
White House described as “an intensification of a strategy that the
president announced more than a year ago.”
RT | The one question that has not been answered during Hillary
Clinton’s grilling before a US Congress committee over the deadly 2012
attack in Benghazi, was “What was the policy that was being carried out
that led to the deaths of these four men?”
The attack on the US consulate in Libya resulted in the deaths of four US citizens on September 11, 2012.
The
four who were found dead in the aftermath of the Benghazi chaos of that
night were the US Ambassador to Libya J. Christopher Stevens; Sean
Smith who, significantly, was known as “Vile Rat” in his online gaming
community; and two former US Navy SEALs and Central Intelligence Agency
contractors (CIA), Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods.
These four
public servants answered the call to serve the policy of the US
government. Their deaths in the service of their country are truly
tragic. However, the question that has not been answered in all of the
hoopla over the proceedings of the Select Committee are: “What was the policy that was being carried out that led to the deaths of these four men?”
It is the avoidance of even asking that question in public, let alone
answering it, that is the proverbial elephant in the room.
The top
Democrat on the Select Committee is Representative Elijah Cummings from
Maryland, who in a moment of selective outrage, exclaimed to rousing
applause from the audience, “We’re better than that! We are so much
better! We’re a better country! We’re better than using taxpayer dollars
to try to destroy a campaign! That’s not what America is all about!” But, apparently, using taxpayer dollars to destroy one country and literally wipe another country off the map — that’s OK, I guess. Because, at the time of last week’s hearing, U.S. Embassy in Libya personnel weren’t even in Libya! They’re operating from Malta,
after President Obama’s policy to destroy Libya was so effective. How
much questioning about that took place in the eleven-hour hearing?
usatoday | Since 2013, President Obama has repeatedly vowed that there would be no "boots on the ground" in Syria.
But
White House press secretary Josh Earnest said the president's decision
Friday to send up to 50 special forces troops to Syria doesn't change
the fundamental strategy: "This is an important thing for the American
people to understand. These forces do not have a combat mission."
Earnest
said the promises of "no boots on the ground" first came in the context
of removing Syrian President Bashar Assad because of his use of
chemical weapons. Since then, Syria has become a haven for Islamic State
fighters.
wikipedia | Michael Cannon (Richard Burton) returns to London after the Second World War and places advertisements in the personal column of various newspapers (The Daily Telegraph
distributed miniaturised copies of the newspaper showing the 'ad' at
U.K. cinemas after each performance of the film), in which "Biscuit"
tries to get in touch with "Sea Wife". Eventually Cannon, who is
Biscuit, receives a letter summoning him to the Ely Retreat and Mental
Home. There he meets an ill man nicknamed "Bulldog" (Basil Sydney). Bulldog tries to persuade Biscuit to give up the search. A flashback reveals the backstory.
In 1942, people crowd aboard a ship, the San Felix, to get away before Singapore falls to the Japanese Army. Biscuit is brusquely shouldered aside by a determined older man (later nicknamed Bulldog) (Basil Sydney), who insists the ship's black purser ("Number Four") (Cy Grant)
evict the people from the cabin he has reserved. However, when he sees
that it is occupied by children and nuns, he reluctantly relents. The
nun with her back to him is the beautiful young Sister Therese ("Sea
Wife") (Joan Collins). Later, the San Felix is torpedoed by a submarine. Biscuit, Sea Wife, Bulldog and Number Four manage to get to a small liferaft. Only Number Four knows that Sea Wife is a nun; she asks him to keep her secret.
It soon becomes evident that Bulldog is a racist who does not trust
Number Four. Later, they encounter a Japanese submarine whose captain at
first refuses to give aid, but gives them food and water when Number
Four talks to him in Japanese, though what he said is kept a secret
between him and Sea Wife.
After nearly being swamped by a vessel that passes by so quickly they
do not have a chance to signal for help, they eventually make it to a
deserted island. When Number Four finds a machete,
they build a raft. Number Four insists on keeping the machete to
himself, which heightens Bulldog's distrust. Meanwhile, Biscuit falls in
love with Sea Wife; she is tempted, but rejects his romantic advances
without telling him why.
Finally, they are ready to set sail. Bulldog tricks Number Four into
going in search of his missing machete, then casts off without him. When
Biscuit tries to stop him, Bulldog knocks him unconscious with an oar.
Number Four tries to swim to the raft, but is killed by a shark.
The survivors are eventually picked up by a ship, and Biscuit is
taken to a hospital for a long recovery. By the time he is discharged,
Sea Wife has gone.
Thus, he searches for her via the newspaper advertisements. Bulldog
tells Biscuit that Sea Wife died on the rescue ship. Heartbroken,
Biscuit leaves the grounds and walks past two nuns without noticing that
Sea Wife is one of them. She watches him go in silence.
thisamericanlife | When Jesse first started getting letters from Pamala, he couldn’t
believe his luck. He'd been waiting all his life to fall in love—and
then he started getting these letters from the perfect woman.
Vulnerable. In need of protection. Classic beauty. He was totally
devoted. They corresponded for years. And when something happens that
really should change how he feels about her— he just can’t give it up.
WaPo | To begin, a conclusion: The Internet, whatever its many virtues, is also a weapon of mass destruction.
We have been distracted from focusing on that potential by a succession of high-profile cyberattacks, including China vacuuming up more than 22 million federal employee records, North Korea’s humiliating shot across the bow of Sony Pictures Entertainment
and a barrage of cyberlarceny directed at U.S. banks and businesses,
much of which has originated in Russia and Ukraine. Each of these
targets was protected by firewalls and other defenses. But the Internet
is inherently vulnerable. It was never intended to keep intruders out.
It was designed to facilitate the unimpeded exchange of information,
giving attackers a built-in advantage over defenders. If that
constitutes an ongoing threat to commerce (and it does), it also
represents a potentially catastrophic threat to our national security —
and not just in the area of intelligence-gathering. The United States’
physical infrastructure is vulnerable. Our electric power grids, in
particular, are highly susceptible to cyberattacks, the consequences of
which would be both devastating and long-lasting.
Deregulation of
the electric power industry has resulted in a network of more than
3,000 companies, some of which are well protected, many of which are
not, but all of which are interconnected. Hacking into the most
vulnerable could lead to a domino-like penetration of even the most
secure companies. The automated programs (known as supervisory control
and data acquisition systems) that control the supply and demand of
electricity nationwide are, for the most part, standardized and
therefore highly accessible. Multiple sources in the intelligence
community and the military tell me that Russia and China have already
embedded cyber-capabilities within our electrical systems that would
enable them to take down all or large parts of a grid. Iran’s
capabilities are believed to be close behind. North Korea is working
toward such a goal. George Cotter,
a former chief scientist at the National Security Agency, told me that
he fears groups such as the Islamic State may soon be able to hire
capable experts and assemble the necessary equipment, which is available
on the open market.
HuffPo | In June of this year, the White
House rejected the idea of dropping charges filed against Snowden under
the Espionage Act. The former CIA contractor fled the U.S. in 2013 and
resides in Moscow.
“The fact is that Mr Snowden committed very serious crimes, and the
U.S. government and the Department of Justice believe that he should
face them,” Obama administration spokesman Josh Earnest told the Guardian
at the time. “That’s why we believe that Mr Snowden should return to
the United States, where he will face due process and have the
opportunity to make that case in a court of law.”
Snowden faces the possibility of extradition to the U.S. should he
enter any of the EU’s 28 member countries. At the time of his departure,
Snowden applied for -- and was denied
-- asylum in Austria, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the
Netherlands, Poland and Spain. The FBI pursued him relentlessly, even notifying Scandinavian countries in advance of their intent to extradite him should he leave Moscow via a connecting flight through any of their countries.
The new EU proposition specifically asks countries to "drop any
criminal charges against Edward Snowden, grant him protection and
consequently prevent extradition or rendition by third parties, in
recognition of his status as whistle-blower and international human
rights defender."
Snowden called the vote a "game-changer" on Twitter, adding, "This is not a blow against the US Government, but an open hand extended by friends. It is a chance to move forward."
oilprice | That’s what Congress is considering as it eyes selling oil from the
U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) to pay for certain projects in
its latest spending plan.
The last time the U.S. bought oil for
the SPR in 2000 through 2005, oil prices were rising (Figure 1). Now
Congress wants to sell oil when prices are the lowest in a decade and
continuing to fall.
bloomberg | When Google-parent Alphabet Inc. reportedeye-popping earningslast week its executives couldn’t stop talking up the company’s investments in machine learning and artificial intelligence.
For any other company that would be a wonky distraction from its core business. At Google, the two are intertwined. Artificial intelligence sits at the extreme end of machine learning, which sees people create software that can learn about the world. Google has been one of the biggest corporate sponsors of AI, and has invested heavily in it for videos, speech, translation and, recently, search.
For the past few months, a “very large fraction” of the millions of queries a second that people type into the company’s search engine have been interpreted by an artificial intelligence system, nicknamed RankBrain, said Greg Corrado, a senior research scientist with the company, outlining for the first time the emerging role of AI in search.
RankBrain uses artificial intelligence to embed vast amounts of written language into mathematical entities -- called vectors -- that the computer can understand. If RankBrain sees a word or phrase it isn’t familiar with, the machine can make a guess as to what words or phrases might have a similar meaning and filter the result accordingly, making it more effective at handling never-before-seen search queries.
Unique Questions
The system helps Mountain View, California-based Google deal with the 15 percent of queries a day it gets which its systems have never seen before, he said. For example, it’s adept at dealing with ambiguous queries, like, “What’s the title of the consumer at the highest level of a food chain?” And RankBrain’s usage of AI means it works differently than the other technologies in the search engine.
“The other signals, they’re all based on discoveries and insights that people in information retrieval have had, but there’s no learning,” Corrado said.
Keeping an edge in search is critical to Google, and making its systems smarter and better able to deal with ambiguous queries is one of the ways it can keep a grip on time-starved users, who are now mostly searching using their mobile devices. “If you say Google people think of search,” Corrado said.
So let's start with fully homomorphic encryption.
It's a particular type of encryption scheme,
different from what you have seen so far,
which lets you encrypt data-- so that is the first arrow pointing from
the user
to the cloud.
She encrypts her data and stores it in the cloud.
And then the magic sauce is a procedure that
lets the cloud take this encrypted data and do computations
on the underlying data.
Remember, the cloud doesn't see what's inside,
and yet, magically, it can do computations on it.
And what it gets at the end of it is the encrypted result of this
computation.
Once the cloud gets the encrypted result,
it sends the encrypted result back to the user.
Now the user has the key.
She can open the box, decrypt, and what does she learn?
She learns the result of the computation.
We let the user use the cloud for everything that she wanted to do,
except now she also has privacy.
So the bottom line of fully homomorphic encryption is that it lets you
do
anything that you want to do on plain text data you can see,
it lets you do on encrypted data which you cannot see.
What kind of security do I want from homomorphic encryption?
The standard notion of security, the golden standard
these days in cryptography, is the notion of indistinguishablility
of ciphertexts, or semantic security.
This was a notion developed by Shafi Goldwasser and Silvio Micali
back in the '80s.
And what that says is that, number one, encryption has to be
probabilistic.
In other words, if you encrypt a message twice,
you should get completely different ciphertexts.
Encryption injects randomness into the process,
and the ciphertext looks different every time you encrypt it.
Now, what that means is that if you see a stream of ciphertexts passing
by,
you won't even know if there are any repeats in this ciphertext.
It doesn't let you figure that out.
This is a very, very strong notion of security.
Again, just to be clear, indistinguishability of ciphertexts
says that you, as an adversary, can pick two messages.
You pick.
It's your choice.
They have to have the same length, because from the ciphertext,
you can tell what the length of the message is.
So I'm not trying to hide the length information.
So you pick two messages, same length.
Send it to me.
I, as the challenger for you, will pick a random one of the two
messages
and encrypt them using this probabilistic encryption,
and send it back to you.
Your job is to figure out which message I encrypted.
If you manage to figure this out, you've won.
So I say that an encryption system is secure, semantically secure,
or indistinguishably secure, if there is no way that you can win in
this game.
So that is the notion of security I need from encryption.
That is the notion of security that I need from fully homomorphic
encryption
as well.
Now that we know what homomorphic encryption is,
and what kind of security notion you want it to satisfy,
let's take a step towards trying to see how we can achieve it.
So what is homomorphic encryption?
Again, the new magic sauce is a way to take encryptions of plaintexts--
data--
together with the function that you're interested in computing,
and somehow coming up with an encryption of f of this data, the
function applied
on this data.
So before we even start talking about how to do this, we have to figure
out,
what is this function?
How do I represent this function?
Is it a C program?
Is it a Java program?
Is it-- what is it?
Is it a hardware circuit?
How do we represent these functions?
Well, for me today, and in all the literature
on homomorphic encryption and, in fact, secure multiparty computation,
the standard way to represent functions, computations, is through a
circuit.
So what's a circuit?
You have two types of gates here, addition gates
and multiplication gates.
Now, I can define this over any field.
So if I define it over a field of size 2,
these are basically XOR and AND gates.
But I could do something more general if I wanted.
So how is the circuit defined?
You basically put together XOR gates, addition gates,
and multiplication gates, or AND gates, in this form of a tree or a
graph.
And you feed the circuit inputs that comes from the top,
and every time the circuit computes either the addition
or the multiplication of the bits that are fed into it, and that keeps
going.
So this is a model of computation, and that
is a model I am going to work with.
When I say function, I mean a circuit computing the function.
Now, you might say what happens if I want a computer program or extra
data?
Turns out that I can convert a program into a circuit,
as long as I know its running time.
So if you don't have infinite loops in your program,
you can undraw the program into a circuit,
and that's what I will work with.
Now, there is a separate line of research, very interesting work,
which deals with how to compute on programs directly without undrawing
them and turning them into circuits.
Once you've fixed your model of computation, once you have circuits,
you think about it, and you realize that if you
want to compute a circuit on encrypted inputs-- encrypted bits, here,
let's say-- all you have to do is to add encrypted bits
and multiply encrypted bits.
In other the words, you want an encryption system
where given encryption of x1 and encryption of x2, two bits or two
numbers, x1 and x2, you should be able to turn it
into an encryption of x1 plus x2, as well as an encryption of x1 times
x2.
If you can do this, you can go through the circuit step by step.
Every time you will have an encryption of the wire off the circuit
and you will keep going.
You will get the encrypted result. That's what we're going to do today.
NYTimes | For years, Google, now
known as Alphabet, has supported two operating systems on two very
different tracks: Android and Chrome. But now the company is nodding in
the direction of Android.
Google is working
toward allowing its low-cost Chromebook computing devices to work on the
popular Android operating system. The work will take place over the
next year, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. Google is
not indicating it plans to stop development of Chrome OS, but making
Android work on Chromebooks opens the door to one of the few products
that Chrome OS, the lesser-known operating system, had to itself.
Chrome OS should not be confused with Google’s popular Chrome web browser.
The first Android
operating system for mobile devices was introduced about seven years ago
as a direct competitor to Apple’s iOS mobile operating system. Since
then, it has become the most widely used operating system in the world.
Its development was led by an executive named Andy Rubin, who went on to
lead much of the company’s robotics efforts before leaving Google last
year.
It is instructive to look at Android
as a case study of mobile phone security for two reasons.
First, it's a much more principled design
and approach to security than either the web or desktop application contexts.
Web browsers have evolved incrementally over many years
to incorporate more and more security checks without as clean a
story
for how security should work and how isolation should be done. Looking at Android
allows us to understand how you go about designing a new clean
slate
security architecture from scratch if needed.
To understand what security problems we have to contend with, let's
understand what are the security goals you might have in mind,
or what things you might worry about in the context of applications
running on a user's mobile phone. Simply stated, we are working with a some data that the user has,
as well some resources-- things like the user's camera, GPS
device,
microphone,
and so on, and, a physical human user.
Then, we have the network interacting with the
device.
Some considerations for this interaction include ensuring that when two applications
interact,
they cannot arbitrarily tamper with each other's data, and processes,
and execution. At the same time, we want to allow applications
to interact with one another.
For example, if you get an email attachment in your email program,
you would like to open it up with a text editor, or a PDF viewer, or an
image
viewer.
So we need some sort of protected sharing between applications,
but isolation to make sure that they're still
secure in the presence of other applications.
Next, we might worry about access between applications
and shared
data that the user wants to keep private, perhaps,
or untampered with on their phone.
So we need to make sure that when applications
access the data on the user's device, this
is somehow mediated and done according to whatever policy the user is
OK with.
A similar consideration applies to applications
accessing the phone's resources.
Now this is not necessarily confidential data
that the user has stored on the phone, but it might, nonetheless,
be undesirable behavior from the phone user perspective.
For example, if the phones turn on the GPS device and start tracking
the user,
or running the device out of battery, or these
might cost the user money if the application starts
sending SMS messages, or using a lot of data on the user's mobile phone
plan.
These are some of the considerations that go
into isolating things within the phone.
There are of course other sets of considerations
that you have to worry about when dealing with the outside world--
outside of the phone, but that's Sith bidnis and not for slovenly peasant consideration.
Now in the case of Android, the platform itself
has relatively little to say about protecting the interaction
between the phone and the network.
One of the few exceptions is the application installation update
mechanism.
Here, the mobile phone platform has to make sure
that when your phone downloads a new version of an app,
it comes from the right application developer
and not from some man in the middle that's
injecting a malicious copy of the application into your phone.
Now, in the case of actual interactions between applications and the
network,
such as an application server running somewhere in the Cloud,
the Android platform doesn't provide much
in terms of primitives or mechanisms to help
applications secure that interaction.
The peasants applications are on their own in terms of protecting these
communication.
The final interaction we might want to consider in terms of security
on a mobile phone is the interaction between the human the user
and the phone in their hands.
Here, there are two qualitative kinds of problems you might worry about.
One, is that someone might steal your phone
and try to get at your information at their leisure. The typical defense against this is asking the user,
when they're interacting with the phone, to enter
some kind of a PIN or a password, to unlock a phone
to have the legitimate user be able to identify themselves. There are many techniques you might use here
to make sure that this password or PIN is strongly enforced,
such as disk encryption of all the contents on the phone itself.
We can talk about doing disk encryption as a separate matter.
The final consideration of interactions
between the user and the phone comes from protecting
the phone's proprietary internal states from a potentially curious or malicious
user.
This shows up in the case of DRM, or digital rights management,
concerns,
or paid applications.
So, for example, if a user buys some application in the Android Play
Store
or in Apple's equivalent app store, the phone platform
might want to make sure the user can't take the phone apart and get
the application out and give it to all of their friends for free.
This is really more Sith bidnis and outside the scope of what you peasants need concern yourself with your beloved little digital cather units.
We will focus exclusively on the interactions that take place within the phone--
so isolating applications from each other,
controlling how our applications can get at the data,
and the different resources. other aspects of the Android security problem will be addressed as these come to mind over time. Next time, we camy consider and briefly explore the threat model in which your digital catheter is embedded.
Careful, in-depth consideration of this topic is bound to disclose a very great deal concerning our assumptions about the world. In the world as we know it, your imagination could well run wild with possibilities over which you really shouldn't ever worry your pointy little peasant head...., (^;
aeon | Of all humanity’s eccentricities, religion could very well be the most
baffling. Even though no one has produced a fleck of evidence for the
existence of the gods, people will engage in repetitive, often taxing
behaviours, under the impression that some ethereal being out there
knows and cares. And regardless of whether or not they believe, many
thoughtful people have burned considerable numbers of calories trying to
unravel the mystery that is God’s mind and the implications it has for,
quite literally, everything.
The anthropologist Pascal Boyer of Washington University in St Louis
has observed that people primarily fixate on what gods know and care
about. Those following the Abrahamic traditions – Judaism, Christianity
and Islam – focus on God’s mind. They rationalise their behaviour
whenever they claim that God wants them to do something. They invoke God
to influence others, as in: ‘God sees through your cheap tricks.’ From
Moses on Sinai to ecstatic, modern-day Evangelicals, many claim to have
gone directly to The Man Himself for a chat, even reporting their
conversations in bestselling books.
Ask a random stranger what God knows, and chances are he’ll say: ‘Everything.’ But ask what God cares
about, and he’ll say murder, theft and deceit; generosity, kindness and
love. Amid God’s infinite knowledge, His concerns are quite narrow: He
knows everything but cares only about the moral stuff. Where do these
beliefs come from, and what impacts do they have on our lives?
Across cultures, even children seem to think that gods know more than
normal humans. This is borne out by experiments using what
psychologists call the ‘false-belief task’, which tests whether
individuals can detect that others have false beliefs. In one version of
the test, researchers put a bag of rocks into a box of crackers, showed
children what’s inside, and then asked what various entities would
think was in the box. If the children said: ‘Mom thinks rocks are in
there’, then they haven’t passed the false-belief task. If they said:
‘Mom thinks crackers are in there, but there are really rocks’, they
have a handle on the incorrect mental states of others.
What’s curious is that, with age, children come to know that Mom,
dogs, and even trees will have incorrect thoughts, but they never extend
that vulnerability to God. In fact, the quality of omniscience
attributed to God appears to extend to any disembodied entity. In a 2013
paper in the International Journal for the Psychology of Religion,
Louisville Seminary researchers found that children think imaginary
friends know more than flesh-and-blood humans. There appears to be a
rule, then, deep in our mental programming that tells us: minds without bodies know more than those with bodies.
marketplace |Try to pay for something at
your local store of choice and you might notice a few changes up at the
register. Namely those kiosks where you’re used to paying with a swipe
credit card.
There's a good chance some of those stations are ready to accept the new chip and PIN tech.
But there's also a chance that there's a logo from Apple, Google and
other tech giants letting you know you can pay up with an app on your
phone. And now, add Chase Bank to the mobile payments game.
Molly Wood, senior Marketplace tech correspondent, spoke with Marketplace host Kai Ryssdal about what the biggest bank in the U.S. has planned for the checkout line.
On how Chase is different:
They are not the first ones, but arguably they are the
biggest. Chase is huge. One of every two households, according to Chase,
is a Chase customer. [It is] the No. 1 processor in terms of payments
overall. So what they are going to do differently, I think, is double
down on reach. Chase is partnering up with Wal-Mart and some other big
retailers. Now, that said, even though they have the size and the power,
they’re going all-in on confusing. The digital wallet that they’re
building sounds a little bit funky. There will be a Chase app. You could
use that to pay by showing a code to a cashier that they can scan — but
not in every store. Some stores will require you to use a different app
that is being built by this consortium of retailers. So it’s a little
messy right now.
On why companies are climbing into mobile payments when so few people uses it:
In fact, I think it’s only about 4 percent of consumers.
It’s something like 13 percent have ever actually tried it. It’s very
tiny. But it has the potential to be hugely profitable for whatever
company wins…. There’s a potential for this to become a multibillion
dollar business, even in the next couple years.
A Foundation of Joy
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Two years and I've lost count of how many times my eye has been operated
on, either beating the fuck out of the tumor, or reattaching that slippery
eel ...
April Three
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4/3
43
When 1 = A and 26 = Z
March = 43
What day?
4 to the power of 3 is 64
64th day is March 5
My birthday
March also has 5 letters.
4 x 3 = 12
...
Return of the Magi
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Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
us, s...
New Travels
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Haven’t published on the Blog in quite a while. I at least part have been
immersed in the area of writing books. My focus is on Science Fiction an
Historic...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
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sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...