[Very, very helpful in getting a sense of what a reasonable level of paranoia is. -egg]

The latest Snowden document is the US intelligence “black budget.” There’s a lot of information in the few pages the Washington Post decided to publish, including an introduction by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. In it, he drops a tantalizing hint: “Also, we are investing in groundbreaking cryptanalytic capabilities to defeat adversarial cryptography and exploit internet traffic.”

Honestly, I’m skeptical. Whatever the NSA has up its top-secret sleeves, the mathematics of cryptography will still be the most secure part of any encryption system. I worry a lot more about poorly designed cryptographic products, software bugs, bad passwords, companies that collaborate with the NSA to leak all or part of the keys, and insecure computers and networks. Those are where the real vulnerabilities are, and where the NSA spends the bulk of its efforts.

via How Advanced Is the NSA’s Cryptanalysis — And Can We Resist It? | Wired Opinion | Wired.com.

[So here’s what Assad has to say. -egg]

Today there are many Western politicians, but very few statesmen.  Some of these politicians do not read history or even learn from it, whilst others do not even remember recent events.  Have these politicians learned any lessons from the past 50 years at least?  Have they not realised that since the Vietnam War, all the wars their predecessors have waged have failed?  Have they not learned that they have gained nothing from these wars but the destruction of the countries they fought, which has had a destabilising effect on the Middle East and other parts of the world?  Have they not comprehended that all of these wars have not made people in the region appreciate them or believe in their policies?

From another perspective, these politicians should know that terrorism is not a winning card you play when it suits you and keep it in your pocket when it doesn’t.  Terrorism is like a scorpion; it can unexpectedly sting you at any time.  Therefore, you cannot support terrorism in Syria whilst fighting it in Mali; you cannot support terrorism in Chechnya and fight it in Afghanistan.

via Bashar al-Assad: «All contracts signed with Russia are implemented» – Известия.

[Totally kickass short story about technology, memory, and written vs oral tradition. Highly recommended. -egg]

Millions of people, some my age but most younger, have been keeping lifelogs for years, wearing personal cams that capture continuous video of their entire lives. People consult their lifelogs for a variety of reasons—everything from reliving favorite moments to tracking down the cause of allergic reactions—but only intermittently; no one wants to spend all their time formulating queries and sifting through the results. Lifelogs are the most complete photo album imaginable, but like most photo albums, they lie dormant except on special occasions. Now Whetstone aims to change all of that; they claim Remem’s algorithms can search the entire haystack by the time you’ve finished saying “needle.”

via The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling by Ted Chiang — Subterranean Press.

I was away from the network all weekend and caught up on my reading. Rather than make a bunch of separate posts, I’m just going to dump links here. Definitely a bunch of awesome stuff. I’ll post them roughly in order of awesomeness. -egg

Really interesting academic paper arguing that the core of our cultural ideas about constructing the self and about authenticity are shifting from the consumption of cool to the performance of the self on social media. I think the author gets some stuff really wrong, but a lot of stuff really right.

For those who enjoyed Charlie Stross’ article about gen Y, gen Z, and the extremely dangerous loyalty problem faced by the intelligence community, he’s done an extended version for Foreign Policy.

Woohoo, Cory Doctorow’s written a novella in the same series as _Little Brother_ and _Pirate Cinema_! These are the most compelling politically radical books for kids that anyone’s written in a long time, and this one is about Occupy. Available free online, like the others.

Fantastic article (2009) about the world of ’70’s lesbian separatists.

Scathing and well-written: Some Context for Our Upcoming Bombing Campaign

In A Grain Of Golden Rice, A World Of Controversy Over GMO Foods : NPR

How “cell tower dumps” caught the High Country Bandits—and why it matters

The Placebo Effect Is Real. Now Doctors Just Have To Work Out How To Use It

Good long article about what Sonny Rollins is up to these days.

Twitter ‘Joke Bots’ Shame Human Sense of Humor

Nasdaq crash triggers fear of data meltdown

Also, Bruce Sterling has written a very strange novel. Now that he’s not primarily a fiction writer, he can just write whatever the hell he wants, and that shows through here like crazy. I’m really enjoying it so far.

[By far the most lucid thing I’ve read about the current Syria situation (although I’m not terribly knowledgeable about it). -egg]

The UK and France had a lot of experience of running colonial empires, and had devised a recipe for establishing puppet states. You carved up the blank areas on the map, deliberately cutting across tribal/national boundaries, to establish zones with a 70/25/5 percentage split. The 70% majority were to be ruled and policed by representatives drawn from the 25% minority, armed with clubs and possibly rifles, while the 5% of imperial merchants and administrators enforced colonial rule over the 25%ers with machine guns and gunboats.

via On Syria – Charlie’s Diary.

[Absolutely fascinating. -egg]

Researchers say this new breed of bots is being designed not just with greater sophistication but also with grander goals: to sway elections, to influence the stock market, to attack governments, even to flirt with people and one another.

via I Flirt and Tweet. Follow Me at #Socialbot. – NYTimes.com.

[Very interesting. -egg]

Why do children resemble their parents? It’s a question that has intrigued people for millennia, and surprisingly, in spite of our cutting-edge biotechnology, scientists still don’t have an answer. But when they find one, it will have big implications for how we use genetics to personalize medicine and understand human behavior.

via We Still Don’t Know Why We Look Like Our Parents.

[Neat! -egg]

Conventional scientific wisdom has it that plants and other creatures have only lived on land for about 500 million years, and that landscapes of the early Earth were as barren as Mars.

A new study, led by geologist Gregory J. Retallack of the University of Oregon, now has presented evidence for life on land that is four times as old — at 2.2 billion years ago and almost half way back to the inception of the planet.

via Greening of the Earth pushed way back in time | Communications.

[Here’s the part that really blows my mind:

‘“I explained to British authorities that there were other copies in America and Brazil so they wouldn’t be achieving anything,” Rusbridger said. “But once it was obvious that they would be going to law I preferred to destroy our copy rather than hand it back to them or allow the courts to freeze our reporting.”‘ ]

Guardian editors on Tuesday revealed why and how the newspaper destroyed computer hard drives containing copies of some of the secret files leaked by Edward Snowden.

The decision was taken after a threat of legal action by the government that could have stopped reporting on the extent of American and British government surveillance revealed by the documents.

It resulted in one of the stranger episodes in the history of digital-age journalism. On Saturday 20 July, in a deserted basement of the Guardian’s King’s Cross offices, a senior editor and a Guardian computer expert used angle grinders and other tools to pulverise the hard drives and memory chips on which the encrypted files had been stored.

via NSA files: why the Guardian in London destroyed hard drives of leaked files | World news | The Guardian.

[Interesting article from The Guardian. -egg]

We live in the Age of the Algorithm, where computer models save time, money and lives. Gone are the days when labyrinthine formulae were the exclusive domain of finance and the sciences – nonprofit organisations, sports teams and the emergency services are now among their beneficiaries. Even romance is no longer a statistics-free zone.

But the very feature that makes algorithms so valuable – their ability to replicate human decision-making in a fraction of the time – can be a double-edged sword. If the observed human behaviours that dictate how an algorithm transforms input into output are flawed, we risk setting in motion a vicious circle when we hand over responsibility to The Machine.

via The problem with algorithms: magnifying misbehaviour | News | theguardian.com.