Category: Quotations

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Between 2002 and 2009, the [Industrial Control System Cyber Emergency Response Team] conducted more than 100 site assessments across multiple industries–oil and natural gas, chemical, and water–and found more than 38,000 vulnerabilities. These included critical systems that were accessible over the internet, default vendor passwords that operators had never bothered to change or hard-coded passwords that couldn’t be changed, outdated software patches, and a lack of standard protections such as firewalls and intrusion-detection systems.

But despite the best efforts of the test-bed and site-assessment researchers, they were battling decades of industry intertia–vendors took months and years to patch vulnerabilities that government researchers found in their systems, and owners of crucial infrastructure were only willing to make cosmetic changes to their systems and networks, resisting more extensive ones.

– Kim Zetter, Countdown to Zero-Day

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We are now learning that the effect of density is nuanced. For one thing, wealthier people do better in apartment towers than poor people. Not only do they have the money to pay for concierges, maintenance, gardening, decoration, and child care, but, having chosen their residences, they tend to attach greater status to them. Home feels better when it carries a different message about who you are. (A building’s status can be altered without any physical change at all. When they were sold on the open market, once-despised social housing blocks in central London became objects of desire for middle-class buyers who fetishizes their retro modernism.)

  • Charles Montgomery, Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design
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We need the nourishing, helping warmth of other people, but we also need the healing touch of nature. We need to connect, but we also need to retreat. We benefit from the conveniences of proximity, but these conveniences can come with he price of overstimulation and crowding. We will not solve the conundrum of sustainable city living unless we understand these contradictory forces and resolve the tension between them. How much space, privacy, and distance from other people do we need? How much nature do we need? Are there designs that combine the benefits of dispersal with the dividends of proximity?

  • Charles Montgomery, Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design
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… the meeting place, the agora, the village square are not trivial. They are not civic decoration or merely recreational. The life of a community is incomplete without them, just as the life of the individual is weaker and sicker without face-to-face encounters with other people.

  • Charles Montgomery, Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design
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The ability to socialize with friends in private spaces without state interference is vital to citizens’ growth, the maintenance of society, and a free and healthy democracy. It ensures a zone of safety in which we can share personal information with the people that we choose, and still be free from state intrusion. Recognizing a right to be left alone in private spaces to which we have been invited is an extension of the principle that we are not subject to state interference any time we leave our own homes. The right allows citizens to move about freely without constant supervision or intrusion from the state. Fear of constant intrusion or supervision itself diminishes Canadians’ sense of freedom.

  • Factum for Tom Le, in Tom Le v The Queen, Court File No. 37971
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… surely there is no automatic, positive link between knowledge and power, especially if that means power in a social or political sense. At times knowledge brings merely an enlightened impotence or paralysis. One may know exactly what to do but lack the wherewithal to act. Of the many conditions that affect the phenomenon of power, knowledge is but one and by no means the most important.

  • Langdon Winner, The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology
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If those responsible for security believe that the law does not give them enough power to protect security effectively, they must try to persuade the law-makers, Parliament and the provincial legislatures, to change the law. They must not take the law into their own hands. This is a requirement of a liberal society.

  • Canada, Commission of Inquiry Concerning Certain Activities of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Second Report: Freedom and Security Under the Law, vol 1, Part II (Ottawa: Privy Council Office, 1981) at 45.