Tag Archives: tech

The NSA Can Decrypt More Stuff Than You Think

by Aaron Small Posted on September 5, 2013

Mother Jones

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The Guardian and the New York Times have blockbuster stories today about the NSA’s surprising success in cracking encryption standards that until now everyone has considered safe. More about this later. But here’s a single tidbit from the Times story:

In one case, after the government learned that a foreign intelligence target had ordered new computer hardware, the American manufacturer agreed to insert a back door into the product before it was shipped, someone familiar with the request told The Times.

I guess the lesson here is not to buy network equipment from US companies. I don’t imagine that US purveyors of network equipment are very happy about this revelation.

Awkward question: Was this story timed to coincide with the G20 meeting in Russia?

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The NSA Can Decrypt More Stuff Than You Think

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Do We Really Need iPads For Every Student?

by Julie Plunkett Posted on September 5, 2013

Mother Jones

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From the LA Times today:

In a major shift in how California’s 6.2 million public school students are taught and tested, state officials plan to drop the standardized exams used since 1999 and replace them with a computerized system next spring.

The move would advance new learning goals, called the Common Core, which are less focused on memorizing facts. They are designed instead to develop critical thinking and writing skills that take formerly separate subjects — such as English and history or writing and chemistry — and link them. Forty-five states have adopted these standards.

Click the link to read more about the clusterfuckish nature of this whole thing. But regardless of how you feel about Common Core, why the switch to computerized tests? Can’t you test Common Core knowledge using pencil and paper? Beats me. But it’s apparently going to cost the LA school district some serious money. Here’s a story from yesterday:

Los Angeles school officials are acknowledging a new looming cost in a $1-billion effort to provide iPads to every student: keyboards. Officials so far have not budgeted that expense, but they said the wireless keyboards are recommended for students when they take new state standardized tests.

When I read that, I wondered why they suddenly needed iPads to take standardized tests. I guess now I know. Sort of.

In any case, I’d like to open up this thread to teachers or anyone else who wants to weigh in on the benefit of giving every kid an iPad. I think this is just about the most colossally dumb use of money I’ve come across in a long time. But naturally I want to keep an open mind. So educate me. Someone tell me why I’m wrong.

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Do We Really Need iPads For Every Student?

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Coming Soon: The End of Robocalls (Maybe)

by Jonathan Cawley Posted on September 3, 2013

Mother Jones

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Someday, the robot revolution will create a paradise on earth.1 Before that happens, though, we need to defeat the hordes of evil robots who tirelessly call our phones trying to sell us ripoff home security systems or Medigap plans.2 Obviously the only way to stop a bad robot with a phone is with a good robot with a phone, so last year the FTC offered a $50,000 prize for the best anti-robocall invention. I missed this months ago when it was announced—shame on me!—but in April the FTC announced a pair of winners.

The “Best Solution” award went to Nomorobo, and takes advantage of a widely available (but not commonly used) feature that allows you to route phone calls to all of your phones at the same time. But instead of telling your phone company to ring your landline number and your cell number at the same time, you tell it to ring your landline number and the Nomorobo number at the same time. Inventor Aaron Ross explained it to the LA Times this morning:3

Tell us how it works.

If you have Simultaneous Ring on your phone and someone calls your number, that call is being split and goes first to a Nomorobo number. In real time, it’s analyzing the caller ID and caller frequency across multiple phone lines. It’s a red flag, for example, when the same phone number has made 5,000 calls to different numbers in the past hour. It’s also a red flag when the same phone number is sequentially calling large blocks of phone numbers. Both scenarios indicate robocalling patterns.

If it detects a robocaller, the call is automatically disconnected before the consumer’s phone even rings. Those numbers go onto a blacklist. If an incoming number doesn’t appear on the blacklist, the software asks the caller to type in a number. If it’s a human telemarketer, they’d respond. If it’s a robocaller, they can’t respond and the call is terminated.

Good idea! This will spawn an arms race between robocallers and Nomorobo, of course, just like the arms race between spammers and spam filters, but it seems like it has a lot of potential to cut down on robocalls considerably. There are problems, of course. For starters, you have to enable Simultaneous Calling with the Nomorobo number, and it’s not clear how many people will actually do that. Nor is it clear who exactly is going to run this or how well it will scale if it becomes enormously popular. Nor do we know for sure how well the blacklist/whitelist concept will work in practice. What evidence do I have to provide that I’m a legitimate robocaller to get on the whitelist? And can it be scammed?

Ross says that Nomorobo will roll out this month, so I guess we’ll find out soon. I’m eager to give it a try.

1Maybe.

2If you’re a 20-something who would rather cut off your big toe than actually answer a phone call in the first place, you don’t care about this. You may go about your business.

3No link, sorry. We’re dealing with the LA Times here, the most frustrating news website in the nation. Stories in the print edition are often almost impossible to find online, and sometimes they simply aren’t online at all. That’s what happened to this one.

From – 

Coming Soon: The End of Robocalls (Maybe)

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The Robot Revolution Will Not Be a Rerun of the Industrial Revolution

by lr9porfs Posted on August 30, 2013

Mother Jones

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Eliezer Yudkowsky asks Tyler Cowen today why he thinks the coming robot revolution1 will be a problem for employment. After all, the Industrial Revolution automated a lot of work too, and it worked out fine for employment. The answer to this, I think, is simple: the robot revolution will automate cognitive work, not just manual work. A machine that can literally do anything a human can do will certainly boost economic growth, but it won’t create more human employment in the process. It will just create more robot employment. For a little more detail on this, you can read a short version of the argument here and a longer version here.

But Cowen suggests that you don’t need to buy this to believe that robots are going to create big employment shocks anyway. You just need to look at the history of employment during the Industrial Revolution in a little more detail than we usually do:

I would challenge the notion that it went fine. Think of the machines of the industrial revolution as getting underway sometime in the 1770s or 1780s. The big wage gains for British workers don’t really come until the 1840s. Depending on your exact starting point, that is over fifty years of labor market problems from automation.

….A second point is that now we have a much more extensive network of government benefits and also regulations which increase the fixed cost of hiring labor. Insofar as automation creates short-run adjustment problems, those problems are more likely to show up in the form of decreased labor force participation than they did in previous eras. We are living in a time where the long-run trend is for labor force participation to fall in any case, and that was not in general the case during those earlier episodes.

Extrapolating a bit from Cowen’s point, the problem here is that the robot revolution is likely to be a lot shorter than the Industrial Revolution. Back then, we endured 50 years of employment problems and then things started to get better. But 50 years from today, the robot revolution is likely to be all but over. By the time we might start to expect wage gains, robots will be advanced enough that no more than a tiny percentage of human work is still relevant.

What this means, of course, is that we’d better start thinking about how we’re going to divvy up all the goods and services we produce when virtually none of them are the result of human labor. Call it Economics 3.0. We aren’t there yet, but we might want to start getting ready for it.

1Assuming that it really does come, of course, which we’re assuming for the purposes of this blog post.

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The Robot Revolution Will Not Be a Rerun of the Industrial Revolution

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How Wireless Carriers Make You Trash Your Phone Before It’s Really Broken

by BessMEIF Posted on August 26, 2013

Mother Jones

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Years ago, someone stole my very first cellphone (a flip model with—get this—an antenna) out of my bag on the New York City subway. I despaired. As a grad student, I was chronically broke and couldn’t afford a replacement. Luckily, a generous friend gave me an old phone unearthed from his desk drawer. I got a new SIM card, switched it into my friend’s handset, and added my contacts. Problem solved.

It wouldn’t be so simple these days. In the mid-’90s, wireless companies began to place digital locks on their phones so that consumers couldn’t transfer them to a new carrier. It’s relatively easy to unlock a phone—you can download the necessary code for a few bucks. But as of January 26, under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), you can no longer do this legally. The 1998 law, aimed mostly at curbing digital piracy, also outlawed cellphone unlocking, but the US Copyright Office had always granted an exemption since unlocking phones really has little to do with copyright. The wireless industry didn’t like that—it argued that because carriers often subsidize the cost of phones, it’s not fair to let customers take their device to a competitor.

The Copyright Office has apparently embraced that argument: This year, for the first time, it denied the usual requests by organizations and individuals to extend the exemption. Consumer advocates are now fuming over what Jennifer Granick, director of civil liberties at Stanford University’s Center for Internet and Society, calls “a huge and expensive inconvenience.”

But there’s another reason the unlocking ban is a bad idea: It stifles the secondary phone market—which, of course, is just what phone companies want. “If a person purchases a used handset, they will not be purchasing a subsidized handset from the carrier and signing a two-year contract,” explains James Mosieur, director of a reuse charity called the 911 Cell Phone Bank.

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How Wireless Carriers Make You Trash Your Phone Before It’s Really Broken

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Innoo Tech Purple 5M 50 Led Blossom Solar Fairy Lights for Gardens, Homes, Christmas, Partys, Weddings

by Myrna Posted on August 23, 2013

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Chart of the Day: Steve Ballmer Is the -$18 Billion Man

by BayalaHillesland628 Posted on August 23, 2013

Mother Jones

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Alex Tabarrok points out today that when Steve Ballmer announced early this morning that he would be retiring as Microsoft’s CEO, the value of the company suddenly jumped by $18 billion. Ouch.

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Chart of the Day: Steve Ballmer Is the -$18 Billion Man

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Innoo Tech 55ft/17m 100 LED white Solar Fairy String Lights for outdoor, gardens, homes, Christmas party

by Myrna Posted on August 20, 2013

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Quick Reads: "The Distraction Addiction" by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

by qiuyz4ye Posted on August 16, 2013

Mother Jones

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The Distraction Addiction

By Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

LITTLE, BROWN AND COMPANY

In this rumination on our shrinking digital-era attention spans, Alex Soojung-Kim Pang reminds us that our brains are still capable of feats far beyond the reach of computers. We may be afflicted with “monkey mind,” he concludes, but rather than fight our compulsions with web-blocking software like Freedom, we’re better off embracing technology as an extension of self, wielding it as unthinkingly as we would a bionic arm.

This review originally appeared in our July/August issue of Mother Jones.

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Quick Reads: "The Distraction Addiction" by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

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There Is No Such Thing As NSA-Proof Email

by torrie199 Posted on August 14, 2013

Mother Jones

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Since last June, when Edward Snowden tore the veil off the National Security Agency’s vast data dragnet, Americans have been flocking to ultrasecure email services in the hopes of keeping the government out of their private business. Use of the most popular email encryption software, PGP, tripled between June and July, while revenue for the data-encryption company Silent Circle has shot up 400 percent.

But even these services may not be able to protect your email from government prying. That fact came into stark relief last Thursday, when Lavabit, the secure email service used by Snowden, abruptly shut down. Lavabit’s 32-year-old founder, Ladar Levison, issued a statement saying he pulled the plug because he didn’t want to be “complicit in crimes against the American people.” He has since given up using email entirely, and he urges others to consider doing the same. “I would strongly recommend against entrusting your privacy to a company with physical ties to the United States,” he told Mother Jones. “I honestly don’t think it’s possible to provide a secure service in this country.”

Levison, who is reportedly under federal gag order, declined to elaborate (though he opined, based on his experience, that we’re a “whisper’s breath away” from becoming a society where all electronic communications are recorded and scrutinized by the government). But according to other industry insiders and cybersecurity experts, there’s good reason to be wary of transmitting sensitive information via email—even if your provider claims to have iron-clad safeguards.

Tech giants, such as the Microsoft subsidiary Hotmail, regularly hand over data to the government. In fact, in the last eight months of 2012 (the most recent period for which data is available), Hotmail, Google, Facebook, and Twitter provided law enforcement authorities with information on more than 64,000 users. And that doesn’t include responses to secret national security letters ordered by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court, or FISA.

Secure emails services, such as Lavabit, are supposed to guard against this kind of snooping (as well as hackers and phishers) by encrypting email messages—turning them into gibberish that can only be read by people who have a password, or “key.” Theoretically, in most cases, the email provider can’t even decipher the contents, much less government agencies. But even the most secure email systems don’t completely encrypt “metadata,” the bits of identifying information that accompany messages, such as the sender’s name and IP address; the subject line; and the date and time the message was sent. Matthew Green, an encryption expert at Johns Hopkins University, says the government can tell a lot about a person from these details. “If you can map out who someone has talked to, that’s almost as useful as knowing what they were talking about,” he explained, “especially if you’re trying to map out a criminal conspiracy or find out who leaked information from reporters.”

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There Is No Such Thing As NSA-Proof Email

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