![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Have a dispatch from the United States about the government shutdown in the United States. And a consequence - there's a salmonella outbreak in Foster Farms chicken, and the agency whose job it is to track such things has furloughed workers. So we can't always tell how far things have spread. And some of those strains are antibiotic-resistant, too. If only the CDC wasn't considered non-essential.
Having figured out that an extended shutdown will impact their bottom line, business lobbies and groups are now allying with the Obama administration to try and pressure Republicans to come to the table and to rein in the Tea Party candidates in Republican primaries.
Elsewhere, the Russian government intends to surveil all the communication they can that goes on at the Winter Olympics in Sochi, come 2014. Presumably for the safety and security of everyone involved, and, of course, to be sure that nobody does something like stand up for lesbians and gay men in protest of the current law against "homosexual propaganda".
Let's stay in the security theme for a moment - to make a computer as secure as possible, utilize an air gap, encryption, and as much read-only media as possible to prevent connections to the Internet and/or malware. Additionally, some suggestions on how to make computers on the Internet more secure and require more work for the NSA to break. Because as Anonymous reminds us frequently, the Internet does not forget anything. Which means even if you are careful, enough data points existing means you can be linked with something you don't want to be. As things are, national standard security protocols may be deliberately vulnerable to the NSA. And bugs are getting so small and sophisticated, capable of recording all the sounds in a given vicinity that if someone wants to record you physically, it will be very difficult to detect them.
The Onion Router is most people's first choice for trying to increase their security. Naturally, it became subject to an exploit released by the FBI, which they ostensibly because they were trying to break up a kiddie porn ring. The TOR project said to disable Javascript to protect yourself from the exploit at the time. It doesn't stop there, though. The encryption for TOR may not be strong enough to make the NSA work at breaking it.
The end point of the issue is that the NSA deliberately monitors traffic in such a way so as not have to deal with the law, and when it does have to deal with the law, assuming the matter isn't one where the NSA blows off the FISC and gets no oversight or backlash for doing so, or isn't one where the government is willingly giving them the data, in this case, data about financial transactions done in American banks, to go spying with, well, they lie. Or omit. Or require clearance. In all cases, transparency is the furthest thing from their minds.
A browser calling itself Epic intends to be as private a browser as possible, trying to remove or disable any attempts to track browsing. And Google sped up some new encryption rollouts to make it harder for spying to happen to their users. (That said, Google was named on the PRISM list.) And Google wants to share your endorsements and reviews with others who are part of your circles (among other places).
And some very creative attempts to kill the program - such as the NRA and ACLU joining forces to claim the spying program created a forbidden gun registry, because the metadata makes it easy to identify who owns guns.
For others, though, it meant closing the service, as Groklaw, a service that used anonymity as a source to shine light on legal shenanigans, like the SCO cases, did, following in the footsteps of Lavabit.
Facebook has decided that it doesn't want people to not be found by the search function. They claim only a single-digit percentage of their users (which could mean several hundred thousand people) actually use the feature that lets them not be put into search results.
From the "not if, but when" department, Nordstrom found footage of a three-man team installing keyloggers into their cash register systems. Two men distracted the sales person, and the third installed the keylogger, which looks like a PS/2 connector.
That's a lot of security stuff. Thanks to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
thewayne for providing such good stuff.
Despite advertising claims, it is very easy to overdose on acetaminophin (Tylenol) because the safe dosage is very close to the recommended dosage...and because its in so many other combination medicines, so you may already be getting plenty and not need to take pills of it in addition.
The psychology behind superstition suggests it helps us to make actions that dismiss our anxieties, like knocking on wood.
A local Hobby Lobby store made a rather anti-Semitic remark to a Jew looking for materials on their Early Winter Religious Festival. As it turns out, this is not an isolated store being jerks, it could very well be company policy to be against Jews.
There are better ways to get publicity than shooting a nude scene on the front lawn of the Westboro Baptist Church. Not so sure about more effective, but definitely better ways.
Governor Brown of California signed a bill allowing children to have more than two legal parents, addressing issues regarding family situations where children may have been created in one family dynamic, but due to relationship changes, there are now multiple people who need to be able to claim parenthood with the child.
Shouting at kids does not make effective discipline, a study finds. The rest of the article discusses possible solutions to conflict that avoids shouting at the kids.
Observation of wolves in the wild has disproven much of the ":alpha wolf" theory that is still popular in supernatural romances and thrillers of our times. Furthermore, MRI scans of dog brains suggest they have cognitive abilities similar to human children, so, like with many others, "dumb animal" no longer applies.
Coming out is never finished, but it also puts the onus of a lot of things on the person coming out. Things which should be on the other people to not be such jerks about things, or even better, to not make things like sexuality such a BFD that coming out becomes a big deal. It's exhausting to have to keep coming out and explaining and dealing with jerkasses. Really. Yet, being able to define or not define according to your own life is important, and there are a lot of things that people learn and have to work with on the path to becoming one's authentic self.
Right before the end, a lot of intellectual jokes, many of them groaners. To make up for that, storytelling advice from a storyboarder at Pixar.
Last for tonight, a useful meditation on what happens when you have a word that means the "normal" group of something and then a separate word that means "this group, but different". Like "actors and actresses", which, as used in today's society, often translates to "people and women", which would normally look like an odd construction.
Additionally, thoughts on how love memes sometimes have the opposite effect of their intentions, because anxieties and brainweasels. A lot of this has resonance, and the meta there is knitting with other meta about depression and other things and I feel like there's a big ball of post, somewhere, involving memes, salon threads, confidence and competence, and the various ways we communicate and express love and admiration for each other. We'll see what shakes out.
Having figured out that an extended shutdown will impact their bottom line, business lobbies and groups are now allying with the Obama administration to try and pressure Republicans to come to the table and to rein in the Tea Party candidates in Republican primaries.
Elsewhere, the Russian government intends to surveil all the communication they can that goes on at the Winter Olympics in Sochi, come 2014. Presumably for the safety and security of everyone involved, and, of course, to be sure that nobody does something like stand up for lesbians and gay men in protest of the current law against "homosexual propaganda".
Let's stay in the security theme for a moment - to make a computer as secure as possible, utilize an air gap, encryption, and as much read-only media as possible to prevent connections to the Internet and/or malware. Additionally, some suggestions on how to make computers on the Internet more secure and require more work for the NSA to break. Because as Anonymous reminds us frequently, the Internet does not forget anything. Which means even if you are careful, enough data points existing means you can be linked with something you don't want to be. As things are, national standard security protocols may be deliberately vulnerable to the NSA. And bugs are getting so small and sophisticated, capable of recording all the sounds in a given vicinity that if someone wants to record you physically, it will be very difficult to detect them.
The Onion Router is most people's first choice for trying to increase their security. Naturally, it became subject to an exploit released by the FBI, which they ostensibly because they were trying to break up a kiddie porn ring. The TOR project said to disable Javascript to protect yourself from the exploit at the time. It doesn't stop there, though. The encryption for TOR may not be strong enough to make the NSA work at breaking it.
The end point of the issue is that the NSA deliberately monitors traffic in such a way so as not have to deal with the law, and when it does have to deal with the law, assuming the matter isn't one where the NSA blows off the FISC and gets no oversight or backlash for doing so, or isn't one where the government is willingly giving them the data, in this case, data about financial transactions done in American banks, to go spying with, well, they lie. Or omit. Or require clearance. In all cases, transparency is the furthest thing from their minds.
A browser calling itself Epic intends to be as private a browser as possible, trying to remove or disable any attempts to track browsing. And Google sped up some new encryption rollouts to make it harder for spying to happen to their users. (That said, Google was named on the PRISM list.) And Google wants to share your endorsements and reviews with others who are part of your circles (among other places).
And some very creative attempts to kill the program - such as the NRA and ACLU joining forces to claim the spying program created a forbidden gun registry, because the metadata makes it easy to identify who owns guns.
For others, though, it meant closing the service, as Groklaw, a service that used anonymity as a source to shine light on legal shenanigans, like the SCO cases, did, following in the footsteps of Lavabit.
Facebook has decided that it doesn't want people to not be found by the search function. They claim only a single-digit percentage of their users (which could mean several hundred thousand people) actually use the feature that lets them not be put into search results.
From the "not if, but when" department, Nordstrom found footage of a three-man team installing keyloggers into their cash register systems. Two men distracted the sales person, and the third installed the keylogger, which looks like a PS/2 connector.
That's a lot of security stuff. Thanks to
thewayne for providing such good stuff. Despite advertising claims, it is very easy to overdose on acetaminophin (Tylenol) because the safe dosage is very close to the recommended dosage...and because its in so many other combination medicines, so you may already be getting plenty and not need to take pills of it in addition.
The psychology behind superstition suggests it helps us to make actions that dismiss our anxieties, like knocking on wood.
A local Hobby Lobby store made a rather anti-Semitic remark to a Jew looking for materials on their Early Winter Religious Festival. As it turns out, this is not an isolated store being jerks, it could very well be company policy to be against Jews.
There are better ways to get publicity than shooting a nude scene on the front lawn of the Westboro Baptist Church. Not so sure about more effective, but definitely better ways.
Governor Brown of California signed a bill allowing children to have more than two legal parents, addressing issues regarding family situations where children may have been created in one family dynamic, but due to relationship changes, there are now multiple people who need to be able to claim parenthood with the child.
Shouting at kids does not make effective discipline, a study finds. The rest of the article discusses possible solutions to conflict that avoids shouting at the kids.
Observation of wolves in the wild has disproven much of the ":alpha wolf" theory that is still popular in supernatural romances and thrillers of our times. Furthermore, MRI scans of dog brains suggest they have cognitive abilities similar to human children, so, like with many others, "dumb animal" no longer applies.
Coming out is never finished, but it also puts the onus of a lot of things on the person coming out. Things which should be on the other people to not be such jerks about things, or even better, to not make things like sexuality such a BFD that coming out becomes a big deal. It's exhausting to have to keep coming out and explaining and dealing with jerkasses. Really. Yet, being able to define or not define according to your own life is important, and there are a lot of things that people learn and have to work with on the path to becoming one's authentic self.
Right before the end, a lot of intellectual jokes, many of them groaners. To make up for that, storytelling advice from a storyboarder at Pixar.
Last for tonight, a useful meditation on what happens when you have a word that means the "normal" group of something and then a separate word that means "this group, but different". Like "actors and actresses", which, as used in today's society, often translates to "people and women", which would normally look like an odd construction.
Additionally, thoughts on how love memes sometimes have the opposite effect of their intentions, because anxieties and brainweasels. A lot of this has resonance, and the meta there is knitting with other meta about depression and other things and I feel like there's a big ball of post, somewhere, involving memes, salon threads, confidence and competence, and the various ways we communicate and express love and admiration for each other. We'll see what shakes out.
