[Clifford Stoll — who’s a genuinely smart guy — in 1995. Worth reading before you make any guesses about what the internet *won’t* be capable of in twenty years. -egg]

Consider today’s online world. The Usenet, a worldwide bulletin board, allows anyone to post messages across the nation. Your word gets out, leapfrogging editors and publishers. Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophany more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harrasment, and anonymous threats. When most everyone shouts, few listen. How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc. At best, it’s an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can’t tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.

What the Internet hucksters won’t tell you is tht the Internet is one big ocean of unedited data, without any pretense of completeness. Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data. You don’t know what to ignore and what’s worth reading. Logged onto the World Wide Web, I hunt for the date of the Battle of Trafalgar. Hundreds of files show up, and it takes 15 minutes to unravel them—one’s a biography written by an eighth grader, the second is a computer game that doesn’t work and the third is an image of a London monument. None answers my question, and my search is periodically interrupted by messages like, “Too many connections, try again later.”

via Why the Web Won’t Be Nirvana.

The evidence for plant communication is only a few decades old, but in that short time it has leapfrogged from electrifying discovery to decisive debunking to resurrection. Two studies published in 1983 demonstrated that willow trees, poplars and sugar maples can warn each other about insect attacks: Intact, undamaged trees near ones that are infested with hungry bugs begin pumping out bug-repelling chemicals to ward off attack. They somehow know what their neighbors are experiencing, and react to it. The mind-bending implication was that brainless trees could send, receive and interpret messages.

[…]

Farmer’s study doesn’t mean that plants have neurons, or brains, or anything like the systems that animals use to communicate. We don’t do justice to them when we try to put their fascinating, alien biology into human terms, he said. But we may have dramatically underestimated their capabilities. As researchers begin to learn the language of plants, they are starting to get a whole new view of the leafy green world we live in.

via The Secret Language of Plants | Simons Foundation.

[This is an incredibly subtle attack, and I’m shocked that it works. But, you know, it’s Adi Shamir, so that’s about as hi-crypto-cred as you can get….-egg]

In RSA Key Extraction via Low-Bandwidth Acoustic Cryptanalysis [PDF], a paper by Daniel Genkin and Eran Tromer of Tel Aviv University and Adi Shamir, the authors show that a sensitive microphone (such as the one in a compromised mobile phone) can be used to infer a secret cryptographic key being used by a nearby computer. The computer’s processor emits different quiet sounds (“coil whine…caused by voltage regulation circuits”) as it performs cryptographic operations, and these sounds, properly analyzed, can reveal the key.

It’s a pretty stunning attack, the sort of thing that sounds like science fiction. But the researchers are unimpeachable (Shamir is the “S” in RSA), and their paper is very clear.

via Deriving cryptographic keys by listening to CPUs’ “coil whine” – Boing Boing.

[Some strong arguments here. -egg]

Raghuveer Parthasarathy pointed me to an article in Nature by Mina Bissell, who writes, “The push to replicate findings could shelve promising research and unfairly damage the reputations of careful, meticulous scientists.”

I can see where she’s coming from: if you work hard day after day in the lab, it’s gotta be a bit frustrating to find all your work questioned, for the frauds of the Dr. Anil Pottis and Diederik Stapels to be treated as a reason for everyone else’s work to be considered guilty until proven innocent.

That said, I pretty much disagree with Bissell’s article, and really the best thing I can say about it is that I think it’s a good sign that the push for replication is so strong that now there’s a backlash against it. Traditionally, leading scientists have been able to simply ignore the push for replication. If they are feeling that the replication movement is strong enough that they need to fight it, that to me is good news.

via Replication backlash « Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.

[My feelings exactly. -egg]

Tree Lobsters!: #538 Dammit Gym.

[Damn, there’s some gorgeous stuff here. -egg]

Architects rarely lack creativity, but they frequently lack the freedom to explore it. Clients have preferences and there are often building restrictions in place, which inevitably force architects to compromise on their vision.

But what if those limits were removed? In the daring “Solo Houses” experiment, French developer Christian Bourdais has given ten architects carte blanche to develop vacation homes in southern Catalonia, Spain. Set on the border of the Los Puertos de Beceite nature reserve, these homes don’t resemble typical real estate projects, but rather works of art.

via 10 architects were told to create their fantasy home. This is what happened – CNN.com.

[Two excellent long articles on the recent court decision that went against the NSA. This is an extremely hopeful decision, although it won’t be decisive until and unless it reaches the supremes. -egg]

Ever since Edward Snowden’s revelation that the National Security Agency was collecting and storing data on every phone call every American makes and every text every American sends, the Obama administration has maintained that the program is fully lawful, and that it has been approved repeatedly by all three branches of government. This defense has always been misleading. Since the program was developed, approved, and applied in secret, it had never been subject to public scrutiny or adversarial judicial testing. Now it has, and it has failed dramatically.

On Monday, US District Judge Richard Leon, an appointee of George W. Bush, ruled that the NSA’s program “almost certainly” violates the Fourth Amendment, and issued a preliminary injunction against the program. In the judge’s words:

I cannot imagine a more “indiscriminate” and “arbitrary invasion” than this systematic and high-tech collection and retention of personal data on virtually every single citizen for purposes of querying and analyzing it without prior judicial approval… I have little doubt that the author of our Constitution, James Madison, who cautioned us to beware “the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power,” would be aghast.

via The NSA on Trial by David Cole | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books.

 

But yesterday, for the first time, a federal judge said that Smith v. Maryland, which is now thirty-four years old, is irrelevant to the question of whether the N.S.A.’s mass surveillance program is constitutional. Judge Richard J. Leon, the U.S. district judge who is hearing a challenge to the N.S.A.’s program, essentially declared that the facts and circumstances surrounding the use of a pen register on Michael Lee Smith’s phone in 1979 and the N.S.A.’s collection and search of everyone’s phone records in 2013 are so vastly different that it is ludicrous to use the decades-old opinion to justify the N.S.A. program.

“The question before me is not the same question the Supreme Court confronted in Smith,” he wrote. “Indeed, the question in this case can more properly be styled as follows: When do present-day circumstances—the evolutions in the Government’s surveillance capabilities, citizens’ phone habits, and the relationship between the N.S.A. and telecom companies—become so thoroughly unlike those considered by the Supreme Court thirty-four years ago that a precedent like Smith simply doesn’t apply? The answer, unfortunately for the government, is now.”

via Asking the N.S.A. the Right Question : The New Yorker.

[I’m not convinced that the Catholic Church is capable of overcoming its long history to become a force for good in human affairs — but I sure do like this new pope. -egg]

As Pope, Francis has simplified the Renaissance regalia of the papacy by abandoning fur-trimmed velvet capes, choosing to live in a two-room apartment instead of the Apostolic Palace, and replacing the papal Mercedes with a Ford Focus. Instead of the traditional red slip-ons, Francis wears ordinary black shoes. He declined to order a new set of fine tableware from Leone Limentani, the high-end Roman porcelain company that, since 1870, has supplied every Pope from Pius IX to Benedict XVI with crest-embossed table settings. I visited the shop, where a proprietor told me with a shrug, “Pope Francis has not ordered a new ring—why should he order new dishes?” Yet Francis didn’t criticize the choices of other prelates. “He makes changes without attacking people,” a Jesuit official told me. In his interview with La Civiltà Cattolica, Francis said, “My choices, including those related to the day-to-day aspects of life, like the use of a modest car, are related to a spiritual discernment that responds to a need that arises from looking at things, at people, and from reading the signs of the times.”

St. Francis is said to have declared, “Preach the Gospel, and if necessary use words.” A couple of weeks after his election, the new Pope went to the Casal del Marmo jail, a juvenile detention center on Rome’s outskirts. On Holy Thursday, Jesus’ washing of the feet of the twelve apostles is reënacted in Catholic churches all over the world. Popes typically perform the rite at St. Peter’s or at the magnificent Basilica of St. John Lateran, about four miles from the Vatican. The Pope usually bends for a token swipe at the feet of twelve selected priests. But at Casal del Marmo, Francis knelt on the cold stone floor and put his white skullcap aside. He washed, dried, and kissed the feet of twelve young inmates, some of them bearing tattoos. Two were Muslim. More pointedly, in violation of Church tradition, two of the apostolic stand-ins were women. When one of the inmates asked the Pope why he had come to them, he said, “Things from the heart don’t have an explanation.”

via James Carroll: A Radical Pope’s First Year : The New Yorker.

[Thought-provoking critique. Some interesting discussion in the comments, too. -egg]

Like all currency systems, Bitcoin comes with an implicit political agenda attached. Decisions we take about how to manage money, taxation, and the economy have consequences: by its consequences you may judge a finance system. Our current global system is pretty crap, but I submit that Bitcoin is worst.

via Why I want Bitcoin to die in a fire – Charlie’s Diary.

[excerpted]
‘The tide has turned, and we can finally see a future where we can enjoy security without sacrificing our privacy. Our rights cannot be limited by a secret organization, and American officials should never decide the freedoms of Brazilian citizens. Even the defenders of mass surveillance, those who may not be persuaded that our surveillance technologies have dangerously outpaced democratic controls, now agree that in democracies, surveillance of the public must be debated by the public.

‘My act of conscience began with a statement: “I don’t want to live in a world where everything that I say, everything I do, everyone I talk to, every expression of creativity or love or friendship is recorded. That’s not something I’m willing to support, it’s not something I’m willing to build, and it’s not something I’m willing to live under.”

‘Days later, I was told my government had made me stateless and wanted to imprison me. The price for my speech was my passport, but I would pay it again: I will not be the one to ignore criminality for the sake of political comfort. I would rather be without a state than without a voice.

‘If Brazil hears only one thing from me, let it be this: when all of us band together against injustices and in defence of privacy and basic human rights, we can defend ourselves from even the most powerful systems.

via Edward Snowden’s ‘open letter to the Brazilian people’ – in full | World news | theguardian.com.