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The Perfect Weapon: How Russian Cyberpower Invaded the U.S.

As the year draws to a close, it now seems possible that there will be multiple investigations of the Russian hacking — the intelligence review Mr. Obama has ordered completed by Jan. 20, the day he leaves office, and one or more congressional inquiries. They will wrestle with, among other things, Mr. Putin’s motive.

Did he seek to mar the brand of American democracy, to forestall anti-Russian activism for both Russians and their neighbors? Or to weaken the next American president, since presumably Mr. Putin had no reason to doubt American forecasts that Mrs. Clinton would win easily? Or was it, as the C.I.A. concluded last month, a deliberate attempt to elect Mr. Trump?

In fact, the Russian hack-and-dox scheme accomplished all three goals.

This is an absolutely brilliant piece of journalism by Harris, Singer, and Shane. It unpacks the publicly available information about the intrusions into the Democratic National Committee’s systems and how information was subsequently mobilized and weaponized. These sorts of attacks will continue to be effective because all it takes is a single failure on the part of defenders, often in the face of hundreds or thousands of discrete attacks. As a result the remediation process is, today, arguably the most important of a cyber-security event because a dedicated and resourced attacker will eventually penetrate even the best secured networking infrastructure. And the Democratic National Committee, and Democratic Party more generally, still lacks a remediation policy months after the attacks.

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Privacy and Policing in a Digital World

As the federal government holds public consultations on what changes should be made to Bill C-51, the controversial anti-terrorism legislation passed by the Conservative government, various police agencies such as the RCMP and the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police have petitioned to gain new powers to access telephone and internet data. Meanwhile nearly half of Canadians believe they should have the right to complete digital privacy. The Agenda examines the question of how to balance privacy rights with effective policing in the digital realm.

I was part of a panel that discussed some of the powers that the Government of Canada is opening for discussion as part of its National Security consultation, which ends on December 15, 2016. If you want to provide comments to the government, see: https://www.canada.ca/en/services/defence/nationalsecurity/consultation-national-security.html

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Donald Trump Is Gaslighting America

As a candidate, Trump’s gas lighting was manipulative, as President-elect it is a deliberate attempt to destabilize journalism as a check on the power of government.

To be clear, the “us” here is everyone living under Trump. It’s radical progressives, hardline Republicans, and Jill Stein’s weird cousin. The President of the United States cannot be lying to the American electorate with zero accountability. The threat of deception is not a partisan issue. Trump took advantage of the things that divide this country, pitting us against one another, while lying his way to the Oval Office. Yes, everything is painfully clear in hindsight, but let’s make sure Trump’s win was the Lasik eye surgery we all so desperately needed.

The good news about this boiling frog scenario is that we’re not boiling yet. Trump is not going to stop playing with the burner until America realizes that the temperature is too high. It’s on every single one of us to stop pretending it’s always been so hot in here.

Teen Vogue has one of the more biting analyses of Trump’s activities in the US media. Teen. Vogue.

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The Subtle Ways Your Digital Assistant Might Manipulate You

From Wired:

Amazon’s Echo and Alphabet’s Home cost less than $200 today, and that price will likely drop. So who will pay our butler’s salary, especially as it offers additional services? Advertisers, most likely. Our butler may recommend services and products that further the super-platform’s financial interests, rather than our own interests. By serving its true masters—the platforms—it may distort our view of the market and lead us to services and products that its masters wish to promote.

But the potential harm transcends the search bias issue, which Google is currently defending in Europe. The increase in the super-platform’s economic power can translate into political power. As we increasingly rely on one or two head butlers, the super-platform will learn about our political beliefs and have the power to affect our views and the public debate.

The discussions about algorithmic bias often have an almost science fiction feel to them. But as personal assistant platforms are monetized by platforms by inking deals with advertisers and designing secretive business practices designed to extract value from users, the threat of attitude shaping will become even more important. Why did your assistant recommend a particular route? (Answer: because it took you past businesses the platform owner believes you are predisposed to spend money at.) Why did your assistant present a particular piece of news? (Answer: because the piece in question conformed with your existing views and thus increased time you spent on the site, during which you were exposed to the platform’s associated advertising partners’ content.)

We are shifting to a world where algorithms are functionally what we call magic. A type of magic that can be used to exploit us while we think that algorithmically-designed digital assistants are markedly changing our lives for the better.

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US-CERT: Stop using your remotely exploitable Netgear routers

From Network World:

In case you are wondering, that firmware for the R7000 – Nighthawk AC1900 smart router – is the newest firmware available by Netgear. Here are Netgear’s links to the R8000 – Nighthawk AC3200 tri-band gigabit router and the R6400. Hopefully those – and any other vulnerable models – will soon be updated with less insecure firmware.

Hopefully less insecure firmware will be provided to turn a burning dumpster fire into a merely-smouldering-mess. Hurray for (possible, but don’t bet on it) progress.

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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.