Author: Christopher Parsons

Policy wonk. Torontonian. Photographer. Not necessarily in that order.

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Twenty-four pedestrians were hit on Toronto’s roads on Tuesday — including an 87-year-old who died

“Do we recognize that weather plays a part in it? Yes, that’s a contributing factor. But what do you do when you can’t see where you’re going? You slow down, you look around. Unfortunately, drivers, let’s be quite frank, are somewhat lazy. They don’t adjust for the driving conditions they face. They’re still trying to push the envelope.”

It’s always a bit shocking to have the Toronto police holding drivers to account for, you know, killing people with their vehicles. It’s a nice change from just blaming pedestrians.

But, at the same time, I don’t think that drivers being “somewhat lazy” is a legitimate comment when talking about people being killed. People get lazy and don’t wash the dishes. Or don’t take the dog out. When they get lazy and kill someone we tend to use another word when we’re not referring to drivers killing pedestrians.

That word? Manslaughter.

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Millions exposed to malvertising that hid attack code in banner pixels

From Ars Technica:

Despite targeting only people using IE and unpatched versions of Flash, Stegano is noteworthy for its concealment of exploit code in the pixels of the banner ads. There’s no reason future campaigns—or possibly ongoing ones that have yet to be discovered—couldn’t exploit zero-day vulnerabilities that infected a much larger base of people. Until ad networks get much better at detecting malvertising campaigns, the scourge is likely to continue.

The lesson, again, is that the advertising that is scattered throughout the web should be generally regarded as hostile and that ad blockers aren’t just a privacy tool but a security tool as well.

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I’m giving up on PGP

This is one of the clearest (and bluntest) critiques of PGP/GPG I’ve read in a long time. It very, very clearly establishes PGP’s inability to successfully protect people facing diverse threat models, the failure of the Web of Trust to secure identities and communities of trust, and challenges of key security and rotation. I’d consider it assigned reading in a university class if the students were ever forced to learn about PGP itself.

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THE REAL RISK BEHIND TRUMP’S TAIWAN CALL

From The Australian:

For a piece I published in September, about what Trump’s first term could look like, I spoke to a former Republican White House official whom Trump has consulted, who told me, “Honestly, the problem with Donald is he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know.” It turns out that is half of the problem; the other half is that he has surrounded himself with people who know how much he doesn’t know. Since Election Day, Trump has largely avoided receiving intelligence briefings, either because he doesn’t think it’s important that he receive them or because he just doesn’t care about them. George W. Bush, in the first months of 2001, ignored warnings about Osama bin Laden. Only in our darkest imaginings can we wonder what warnings Trump is ignoring now.

While the point that Trump’s team is dangerously able to manipulate him is fair, linking that capability with Trump not receiving intelligence briefings (and the 9/11 attacks) is unfair and misleading. Other past President-elects have also been slow to receive intelligence briefings and the current tempo of such briefings remains a relatively new phenomenon in the history of the United States presidency.

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George Yancy: I Am a Dangerous Academic

It is deeply concerning that faculty in American universities are being ‘put on notice’ even before the President-Elect takes office. The solution is to stand with them and speak, and argue, and fight against efforts to silence such academics regardless of whether we individually agree with the targeted academics’ respective philosophical or political leanings. The goal of the academy is to further thinking and thoughtful analyses rather than collectively advocate for any particular political leaning.

In Yancy’s defense of himself, the academy, and philosophy itself he succinctly explains the value and importance of a philosophically-influenced education:

To be “philosophically adjusted” is to belie what I see as one major aim of philosophy — to speak to the multiple ways in which we suffer, to be a voice through which suffering might speak and be heard, and to offer a gift to my students that will leave them maladjusted and profoundly unhappy with the world as it is. Bringing them to that state is what I call doing “high stakes philosophy.” It is a form of practicing philosophy that refuses to ignore the horrible realities of people who suffer and that rejects ideal theory, which functions to obfuscate such realities. It is a form of philosophizing that refuses to be seduced by what Friedrich Nietzsche called “conceptual mummies.” Nietzsche notes that for many philosophers, “nothing actual has escaped from their hands alive.”

In my courses, which the watchlist would like to flag as “un-American” and as “leftist propaganda,” I refuse to entertain my students with mummified ideas and abstract forms of philosophical self-stimulation. What leaves their hands is always philosophically alive, vibrant and filled with urgency. I want them to engage in the process of freeing ideas, freeing their philosophical imaginations. I want them to lose sleep over the pain and suffering of so many lives that many of us deem disposable. I want them to become conceptually unhinged, to leave my classes discontented and maladjusted.

Philosophy, like the Arts and Social Sciences more generally, ought to leave students upset. Confused. And disturbed. Not for the purpose of causing harm but to generate an unrootedness; as students re-plant their roots following a period of unrootedness they may return to the same political and philosophical positions as before but with stronger rationales that are girded in a deeper ethical and normative appreciation of reality. But maybe they subtly, or significantly, shift in their understandings of the world and their ethical commitments within it. In either situation the student has changed by broadening and deepening their ability to consider the different aspects involved in holding their respective positions. And that’s absolutely fine to my mind.

The goal of philosophically-influenced education isn’t to force a reversal in view, belief, or understanding but to compel students to better consider why they hold the positions they do and better appreciate those positions’ implications. The very act of reflecting upon oneself invokes the opportunity for change, but to prompt such change the academy (and its students) need to support and protect those who prompt such uneasiness in students. Silencing such academics-of-change thus constitutes a directed threat to an essential aspect of what the University is meant to provide to society.

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1 million Google accounts compromised by Android malware called Gooligan

From Ars Technica:

Researchers say they’ve uncovered a family of Android-based malware that has compromised more than 1 million Google accounts, hundreds of them associated with enterprise users.

Gooligan, as researchers from security firm Check Point Software Technologies have dubbed the malware, has been found in at least 86 apps available in third-party marketplaces. Once installed, it uses a process known as rooting to gain highly privileged system access to devices running version 4 (Ice Cream Sandwich, Jelly Bean, and KitKat) and version 5 (Lollipop) of Google’s Android operating system. Together, the vulnerable versions account for about 74 percent of users.

…

Update: In a separate blog post also published Wednesday morning, Android security engineer Adrian Ludwig said he and other Google officials have worked closely with Check Point over the past few weeks to investigate Gooligan and to protect users against the threat it poses. He said there’s no evidence data was accessed from compromised accounts or that individual users were targeted. He also said Google has been using a service called Verify Apps to scan individual handsets for signs of Gooligan and other Ghost Push apps. When detected, device owners receive a warning and installations are halted.

“We’ve taken many actions to protect our users and improve the security of the Android ecosystem overall,” Ludwig wrote. “These include: revoking affected users’ Google Account tokens, providing them with clear instructions to sign back in securely, removing apps related to this issue from affected devices, deploying enduring Verify Apps improvements to protect users from these apps in the future and collaborating with ISPs to eliminate this malware altogether.”

While Google is taking this threat seriously – which is a good thing! – there is the problem where handsets shipping without the Google Play Store will remain vulnerable to this and other kinds of malware, unless those other app stores also try to warn users. Even Google’s warning system is, really, some chewing gum to cover up a broader security issue: a huge majority of Android phones have an outdated version of Android installed and will likely never see operating system or security updates. These vulnerabilities will continue, unabated, until Google actually can force updates to its partners. And history says that’s not likely to happen anytime soon.

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Intelligence experts urge Obama to end Edward Snowden’s ‘untenable exile’

Intelligence experts urge Obama to end Edward Snowden’s ‘untenable exile’:

Fifteen former staff members of the Church committee, the 1970s congressional investigation into illegal activity by the CIA and other intelligence agencies, have written jointly to Obama calling on him to end Snowden’s “untenable exile in Russia, which benefits nobody”. Over eight pages of tightly worded argument, they remind the president of the positive debate that Snowden’s disclosures sparked – prompting one of the few examples of truly bipartisan legislative change in recent years.

They also remind Obama of the long record of leniency that has been shown by his own and previous administrations towards those who have broken secrecy laws. They even recall how their own Church committee revealed that six US presidents, from Franklin Roosevelt to Richard Nixon, were guilty of abusing secret powers.

“There is no question that Snowden broke the law. But previous cases in which others violated the same law suggest leniency. And most importantly, Snowden’s actions were not for personal benefit, but were intended to spur reform. And they did so,” the signatories write.

While anything is possible, I have pretty strong doubts that a pardon is coming from Obama. His Whitehouse has aggressively expanded the prosecution of whistleblowers and I’ve never, once, gotten the feeling that Obama was genuinely receptive to Snowden’s actions.

In many ways, several years of US foreign policy has been disrupted — and continues, to this date, to be disrupted — by Snowden’s actions. Given that this has an impact on Obama’s daily briefings and the capabilities of US foreign diplomats I can’t imagine that Obama is likely to pardon Snowden. In fact, I suspect that Obama would argue that if had Snowden just revealed domestic surveillance activities then a pardon might be forthcoming: it’s the revelation of foreign activities that presumably prompt an executive body to assert that harm had in fact occurred based on ability to directly influence world affairs.

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How a Grad Student Found Spyware That Could Control Anybody’s iPhone from Anywhere in the World

This is probably the best journalistic account of how current and past members of the Citizen Lab, in tandem with Lookout (a security company), identified the most significant vulnerability to ever target Apple devices.

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How a Facial Recognition Mismatch Can Ruin Your Life

Via The Intercept:

“As an analytical scientist, whenever someone gives me absolute certainty, my red flag goes up,” said Jason Latham, who worked as a biochemist prior to becoming a forensic scientist and certified video examiner. “When I came from analytical sciences to forensic sciences, I was like some of these guys are not scientists. They are voodoo witchcraft.”

Forensic reports generally provide few details about the methods they use to arrive at points of similarity. But in Talley’s case, the FBI examiner’s report displayed a high degree of certainty. George Reis, a facial examiner who has testified more than 50 times for state, federal, and military courts throughout the country on forensic visual comparisons, pointed out that the report on Talley’s case was vague. “It is generally considered best practice to be specific in reports and to point out features of similarity, as well as differences, in any comparison illustration or chart,” Reis noted. “In the Talley case no such markings exist. The video frames that were used in the FBI illustration were of poor quality and limited value.”

Facial recognition: sorta fun if you’re using it for commercial stuff like tagging your friends, but really dangerous if its part of what is used to convict persons for crimes they’re alleged to have committed.

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Looking For My Mother At The Bottom Of A Pot

Looking For My Mother At The Bottom Of A Pot is a beautiful personal essay on being away from family during major events. It’s worth every second it will take to read.