Categories
Aside Quotations

Quote of the month

evgenymorozov:

From Warren McCulloch, one of the founding fathers of cybernetics:

“I don’t particularly like people, never have. Man to my mind is about the nastiest, most destructive of all animals. I don’t see any reason, if he can evolve machines that can have more fun than he himself can, why they shouldn’t take over, enslave us, quite happily. They might have a lot more fun, invent better games than we ever did.”

quoted in Mary Catherine Bateson, Our Own Metaphor (New York: Knopf, 1972)

Techno-utopianism (dystopianism?) for the win.

Categories
Links Writing

Casey Johnston!: I have this seminar I’m running for free for college students and I’m…

caseyj:

I have this seminar I’m running for free for college students and I’m going to show them this picture before we start. It’s a picture of someone graduating from college. You can’t tell, but you can guess that they’re probably $150,000 in debt. Written on the top of their mortarboard with masking tape it says, “Hire me.” The thing about the picture that’s pathetic, beyond the notion that you need to spam the audience at graduation with a note saying you’re looking for a job, is that you went $150,000 in debt and spent four years of your life so someone else could pick you. That’s ridiculous. It really makes me sad to see that.

While I understand what Seth Godin is suggesting, I also think that it’s largely reflective of his incredibly privileged position. When people are leaving schools with that amount of debt, with knowledge that they want to start a family and not suffer (total) financial ruin by starting something and failing, then those individuals may quite reasonably want full-time regular employment.

Godin’s most common response is that ‘such employment doesn’t really exist anymore – so adapt!’ While it’s a great response for some people who are willing to take on heightened risks in their lives it isn’t one that ought to be imposed on all individuals. Moreover, the thought that it’s “ridiculous” to want to be picked and work at a meaningful job and launch a career with a business that is compatible with your training and expertise shouldn’t make anyone sad. Instead, what should be “sad” is that such aspirations are less and less likely to be realized as companies abandon long-term commitment to employees and instead harden their ‘flexible’ hiring strategies that facilitate profits at the expense of human life.

Categories
Aside

3D Print of Winterfell

parislemon:

digg:

It only took an hour to print our own model of Winterfell. (Accidentally in Lannister red)

If you have access to a 3D printer, here’s the file.

Finally, a good use for 3D printers.

Hmm…this might be the thing that pushes me to actually look at/use the local makerbot

Categories
Links

Yale Suing Former Students Shows Crisis in Loans to Poor

infoneer-pulse:

infoneer-pulse:

Needy U.S. borrowers are defaulting on almost $1 billion in federal student loans earmarked for the poor, leaving schools such as Yale University and the University of Pennsylvania with little choice except to sue their graduates.

The record defaults on federal Perkins loans may jeopardize the prospects of current students since they are part of a revolving fund that colleges give to students who show extraordinary financial hardship.

Yale, Penn and George Washington University have all sued former students over nonpayment, court records show. While no one tracks the number of lawsuits, students defaulted on $964 million in Perkins loans in the year ended June 2011, 20 percent more than five years earlier, government data show. Unlike most student loans — distributed and collected by the federal government — Perkins loans are administered by colleges, which use repayment money to lend to other poor students.

» via Bloomberg

The default situation is only going to get worse and worse, especially for those that tried to hide from the US recession by staying in school and taking on educational debt.

Yale Suing Former Students Shows Crisis in Loans to Poor

Categories
Links Writing

Banking Trojan Ships With Its Own Certificate

This is all kinds of badness, and speaks to malware vendors becoming increasingly sophisticated in how they are targeting low hanging fruit (i.e. random users). In essence, the attack involved getting a certificate issued and then using it to create valid digital signatures for .pdf invoice documents. Once individuals opened the invoices the malware associated with the .pdf would burrow into the OS and act as a key logger that targeted banking information.

Unfortunately, I’ve not yet seen a media article discuss the mediocre effectiveness of revoking the certificate used to sign the .pdf. The OCSP protocol is incredibly susceptible to being defeated, especially if malware already resides on the target’s computer or a point in between the target and the revocation server is controlled by the attacker (possible by setting a compromised computer to proxy traffic to a host controlled by the attacker). So, while while the cert has been revoked, this actions does not necessarily stop the malware from functioning, but just reduces the prospective attack surface. Moreover, if browser/operating system CA stores are not updated – again, possible if the attacker already controls the host – then the same attacker can convince the browser or OS to continue trusting an expired certificate.

Categories
Quotations

2013.2.5

The totalizers would happily follow Johnson in seeking answers to questions such as “So what does the Internet want?”—as if the Internet were a living thing with its own agenda and its own rights. Cue a recent Al Jazeera column: “The internet is not territory to be conquered, but life to be preserved and allowed to evolve freely. … From understanding the internet as a life form that is in part human, it follows that the internet itself has rights.”13 That is the kind of crazy talk to be avoided. The particularizers would not invoke “the Internet” to embark on a quixotic attempt to re-make democratic politics; but the totalizers, in their quasi-religious belief, would do so gladly.

A good account of the Internet would never need to mention that dreadful word at all. This stringent requirement might uproot most of our Internet thinkers from the plateau of banal and erroneous generalizations where they have resided for the last two decades; after all, it is the very notion of “the Internet” that has allowed them to stay there for so long. Now that Internet-centrism is not just a style of thought but also an excuse for a naïve and damaging political ideology, the costs of letting its corrosive influence go unnoticed have become too high.

Evgeny Morozov, a Review of Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age
Categories
Aside Humour

chartier:

Genius.

OK…this is incredibly amusing. It also speaks volumes about the relative accuracy of biometric analysis technologies that are incorporated into contemporary consumer electronics.

Categories
Quotations

2013.2.5

I treat the Internet like a fucking asp, like a dangerous reptile – my comfort sole squashed down hard on the snakeneck … Your security is only as trustworthy as the worst person on Earth.

Security advice from ‘Tycho’, “A Teachable Moment”
Categories
Links Writing

EU citizen warned not to use US cloud services over spying fears

shonelikethesun:

What the title says, basically. I had missed this.

The warning should be heard by non-EU citizen too, with the Cloud, privacy is fucking dead. And what’s sadder is that 90% of people simply don’t care.
Unless it makes more probable for your significant other to see your transsexual porn browser history…

The EU Report is well worth a full read (available here in .pdf). Things to keep in mind that aren’t all that being well discussed:

  • you know about this report – media is covering it – because of the tireless efforts of Caspar Bowden, one of the authors and a noted global privacy advocate. It was out for months before it hit the media.
  • everyone is focused on US intelligence (good) but missing the significance of the FISAAA amendments: it’s not just that you can be spied on. It’s that the spying does not have to happen for national security reasons. No, it’s sufficient to conduct surveillance for political (read: espionage) reasons.
  • a huge aspect of the report – which isn’t touched on, even in the European media that much – is its call for the European Parliament to given EUROPOL and ENISA a direct mandate.

The second point is particularly important for non-Europeans. While it’s a lesser spoken about part of the intelligence world, spooks are routinely engaged in industrial espionage on the grounds that such acts assist the nation-state’s finances. This can include the theft of foreign corporations’ information, or (in extreme cases) the deletion of the same information. It seems that FISAAA’s amendments would only permit the former, and not the latter. However, as a result of these amendments corporations should be more wary of outsourcing their document storage to US-based cloud services, content creation to US hosts and online services, or communications systems to (you guessed it!) American firms. Placing such data in the hands of the Americans is rife with potential economic harms and, no matter how much you like Dropbox, Google, or other cloud provider, they’re all likely to turn on you if the NSA comes knocking.

Source: EU citizen warned not to use US cloud services over spying fears

Categories
Humour Videos

A truly excellent parody of The Verge’s product reviews