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How Not To Get Hacked When Renting An Airbnb Apartment

How Not To Get Hacked When Renting An Airbnb Apartment:

The problem is that, thanks to the rise of home-sharing services such as Airbnb and HomeAway, thousands of people are letting strangers into their houses and apartments, and, potentially, into their networks and routers.

That’s why, Galloway argues, we need to be careful when connecting to Wi-Fi networks in Airbnbs, and just treat them like we treat airport or Starbucks connections.
“When you’re traveling and you’re on an unfamiliar network, you should behave like it and not behave like when you’re at home,” Galloway says. “You don’t use the Airbnb toothbrush, and you should probably think twice before just jumping on their network and putting your bank credentials in there.”

If you’re a renter, Galloway says the first thing to do to stay safe is using a virtual private network, or VPN, that will encrypt and protect all your connections. (There’s a lot of easy to use options out there, such as Freedome or TunnelBear.) Another, slightly more complex precaution, is to hardcode DNS settings into their devices, switching to Google Public DNS, for example.

I don’t disagree with this advice but admit it’s only something I consider when travelling for work (in part because I do so few ‘risky’ things when vacationing and decision to mostly rely on apps which I hope – though often cannot know – are transmitting credentials over SSL). But more broadly I think that what is being argued for is out of touch with how people are generally taught to understand computing and out of touch with how most Airbnb hosts operate: guests rarely meet their host and it’s unclear how often hosts themselves ever really look in on their properties. So maybe before we insist that people be wary of landlords and Airbnb hosts we should be considering what baseline requirements for offering such services themselves should be.

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The Security of Our Election Systems

The Security of Our Election Systems:

Government interference with foreign elections isn’t new, and in fact, that’s something the United States itself has repeatedly donein recent history. Using cyberattacks to influence elections is newer but has been done before, too ­ most notably in Latin America. Hacking of voting machines isn’t new, either. But what is new is a foreign government interfering with a U.S. national election on a large scale. Our democracy cannot tolerate it, and we as citizens cannot accept it.

Last April, the Obama administration issued an executive orderoutlining how we as a nation respond to cyberattacks against our critical infrastructure. While our election technology was not explicitly mentioned, our political process is certainly critical. And while they’re a hodgepodge of separate state-run systems, together their security affects every one of us. After everyone has voted, it is essential that both sides believe the election was fair and the results accurate. Otherwise, the election has no legitimacy.

Election security is now a national security issue; federal officials need to take the lead, and they need to do it quickly.

The effects of a decade of focusing on attack capabilities at the expense of defence is now becoming apparent. And I’d bet that we’ll see democratic governments call for heightened national ‘defence’ capabilities that entail fully inspecting packets. Which will require laws that water down communicative privacy rights. Which will themselves damage the democratic characters of our political systems.

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Dollar Shave Club and The Disruption of Everything

Dollar Shave Club and The Disruption of Everything:

The implications of this go far beyond P&G: fewer Gillette razors also mean less TV advertising and no margin to be made for retailers, who themselves are big advertisers; this is why I argued last month that the entire TV edifice is not only threatened by services like Netflix, but also the disruption of its advertisers, of which P&G is chief.

The importance of looking at secondary consequences of product disruption – in this case with regards to men’s razors – is key to mapping out the still-developing Internet-inflected economy. If it’s razors today, what might it be tomorrow?

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Can we design sociotechnical systems that don’t suck?

Can we design sociotechnical systems that don’t suck?:

Many hard problems require you to step back and consider whether you’re solving the right problem. If your solution only mitigates the symptoms of a deeper problem, you may be calcifying that problem and making it harder to change.

Ethan’s essay is a long response to Shane Snow’s proposals for prison reform. In short, Snow is aiming to adjust conditions inside of prisons without considering whether there is a broader series of social issues that are responsible for actually leading to incarcaration. And, worse, he’s making his proposals without lived experiences of what prison itself is like.

The crux of Ethan’s argument, really, doesn’t concern the kinds of prison reform which are(n’t) appropriate so much as this: is it appropriate for a given person, or group, to solve the problem(s) in the first place? Are they capable of even identifying what are the problem(s)?

I think that this kind of attitude – of humbleness and appreciation for one’s limited perspective on the world – is something that should be taken up by more technologists, policy makers, and law makers. Too often we assume we know how to help without even knowing whether, and if so why and under what conditions, help is needed in the first place.

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Chelsea Manning Could Face Additional Punishment for Her Suicide Attempt

Chelsea Manning Could Face Additional Punishment for Her Suicide Attempt:

U.S. Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning tried to kill herself on July 5 in her cell at Fort Leavenworth military prison. Now, military officials are considering filing charges in connection to the suicide attempt that could make the terms of her imprisonment much more punitive — including indefinite solitary confinement — while possibly denying her any chance of receiving parole.

According to a charge sheet posted by the American Civil Liberties Union, Manning was informed by military officials on Thursday that she is under investigation for “resisting the force cell move team,” “prohibited property,” and “conduct which threatens.”

After engaging in the equivalent of torture, the US government considers doubling down and to make Manning’s live even more unbearable after driving her to suicide. A ‘just’ state indeed.

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The Best Coffee Roasters in Toronto

Only helpful for those local to Toronto, but it’s great for those of us that are. I particularly enjoy Pilot and Propeller, though admit that my favorite place to get coffee these days is from Ideal Coffee (the Red Sea beans are absolutely terrific). Still, I look forward to trying the whole list and determining if there is a company that can unseat Ideal Coffee or Pilot and Propeller!

The Best Coffee Roasters in Toronto

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Roger Ailes Got Us To Mistrust Everyone—Including Himself

Roger Ailes Got Us To Mistrust Everyone—Including Himself:

The best evidence that Ailes no longer wields the power he once did? If reports are to be believed, Ailes himself is about to step down from the network he defined. On its surface, the reasons have nothing to do with Fox News’ diminishing political influence. Gretchen Carlson, a former anchor, has accused Ailes of harassment, and apparently a number of other women—including Kelly—have come forward with their own accusations. James and Lachlan Murdoch, Rupert’s sons, have long looked to boot Ailes, and now they seem to have found the opportunity to do so. Still, it’s hard to imagine that Ailes would be so vulnerable if his role as GOP kingmaker were still secure.

He wouldn’t be ‘vulnerable’ to being fired for sexual misconduct if he still was influential in, or with, the Republican Party. This is the definition of casual sexism in journalism.

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Scientists Release Air that Has Been Trapped for 800 Million Years

Scientists Release Air that Has Been Trapped for 800 Million Years:

“There was a lot of debate as to what the oxygen content was 800 million or more years ago,” said Blamey in a statement. “We’ve come up with a direct method of analyzing the content of those trapped fossil gasses in the atmosphere and found that the oxygen level was approximately half of what it is today.”

To get a nice healthy wiff of that nearly billion-year-old atmosphere, the team placed halite crystals from southwest Australia in a vacuum chamber and crushed them, releasing the actual air that circulated during this bygone era in our planet’s history.

“It’s a direct measurement of the atmosphere of that time, not an interpretation,” emphasized study co-author Uwe Brand.

Modern science is amazing.

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On weaponized transparency

On weaponized transparency:

Over the longer term, it’s likely that personal or sensitive data will continue to be hacked and released, and often for political purposes. This in turn raises a set of questions that we should all consider, related to all the traditional questions of openness and accountability. Weaponized transparency of private data of people in democratic institutions by unaccountable entities is destructive to our political norms, and to an open, discursive politics.

Weaponized transparency, especially when it affects the lives of ordinary persons who take an interest in the political process, is dangerous for a range of reasons. And responsible journalists – to say nothing of publishers such as Wikileaks – ought to be condemned when they fail to adequately protect the private interests of such ordinary persons.

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The Top-Secret Cold War Plan to Keep Soviet Hands Off Middle Eastern Oil

This article discusses how, following the Second World War and advent of the Cold War, the United States and British governments worked with oil companies to plan ‘denial’ operations should the USSR invade the Middle East. Core to the plan was for combined CIA and military, along with corporate employees, efforts to strategically blow up parts of the refineries such that the Soviets would be unable to take advantage of the oil reserves and thus empower the West to invade and ideally retake the strategic resource.

The efforts were developed and iterated on for almost a decade, though towards the end the focus shifted from the USSR and towards nationalist governments in the region. Moreover, what started as a denial approach transformed into one where oil production would be maintained: the thirst for oil on the part of the United States and Britain meant that turning off the taps could be a serious blow to their economic and military efforts.

These were contingency operations but they were taken seriously. Explosives were moved and put in place and the British even established plans for nuclear assaults to prevent the fields from falling into non-Western hands. It raises the question of whether similar kinds of activities are planned, today, or whether cooler heads now are responsible for establishing contingency plans when it comes to core resources that contemporary Western economies rely upon. And would nuclear or other explosives be used, now, or is this where we would see a first and genuinely far-reaching aspect of hard ‘cyber’ power?