Why, living under the perpetual smog column from the superhighway that bisects my beloved Pasadena!
And Thursday is the morning for four hours of apartment complex leaf blower action.
A new acquaintance recently visited Pasadena for a national convention of art museum librarians. The weather, as usual, was great and she remarked in a message to me that being very fair, she was going to put on sun block before hitting Colorado.
I told her not to worry much about sunburn. In twenty years, I’ve never been sunburned anywhere within a mile of the highway, at best, reddened a little. Can’t happen. In the middle of summer, average days, the mountain disappears. Reflective particulates, an invisibility cloak.
Now, Santa Barbara — on the other hand. Fifteen minutes anytime after 11:00 am, fried.
You don’t really think a few lines of computer code are going to crash the world down around are ears, do you? I’m disappointed, I’m disappointed in you, Sherlock …
I knew you’d fall for it. That’s your weakness. You always want things
to be clever. — Jim Moriarty, The Reichenbach Fall
Took a while to get to it but the New Yorker ran such a thoroughly insipid piece on the matter of cyberwar, it deserves mention for its slapdash collection of pasted-together assertions and idiotic anecdotes.
The distinction between a war with guns and a war with bits is blurring.
(But did the New Yorker writer ask for the opinions on the matter from those bombed or shot?)
Throughout the conflict in Syria, rebels have used YouTube to foment outrage and to tell their stories. A sentence can tell you that blood flows in the streets, but a handheld camera can show it.
The government in Damascus meanwhile has sent out malware and published its own videos …
The so-called Syrian Electronic Army spun the U.S. stock market into a panic by hacking into the Twitter account of the Associated Press …
More recently, hackers broke into the Twitter feed of The Onion [and posted something inane] …
The Internet has helped to open up [Iran] in recent years, as Evan Osnos has written. But the government remains far more lion than wildebeest.
(As Evan Osnos has written. Of course!)
On shutting off the Internet: It’s terrible for business, creates chaos, and enrages the world.
(Did shutting off the Internet in Syria enrage you or appear to enrage many of your friends? Do you think it enraged the President?)
Last year, the security firm Renesys published a study on just how hard it would be to shut off the Internet in countries around the world. Sixty-one were at “severe risk …”
Cyberwar explained, allegedly. Or, rather, cyberwar discussion as a squirt of intellectual air-freshener for the posh.
“Nicholas Thompson is a grandson of Paul Nitze, one of the subjects of his most recent book, which gave him unprecedented access while researching his book. In March 2013, Thompson received a 21st Century Leader award from the National Committee on American Foreign Policy. He is also an acoustic guitarist and has released three albums of original instrumental music.” — Wikipedia
“This biographical article is written like a résumé … Please help improve it,” reads the site.
It’s hard to believe a guy volunteered to tell this story to the New York Times (although the personal business stimulus may be valuable):
SAN FRANCISCO — In the month since two men violently shoved him to the ground and stole his iPhone 5, Dalton Huckaby has almost completely stopped calling his mother. It usually takes him a full day to text his friends back. Nothing personal, but Mr. Huckaby is just too frightened to take his replacement iPhone out in public.
“I never thought this would happen to me,??? said Mr. Huckaby, 39, a personal trainer, who since the robbery, which he called an iCrime, has become the kind of person who patrols his neighborhood streets in San Francisco warning strangers about the dangers of using their smartphones out in the open.
“Happen to see about the horrible violence you incurred …” reads the Facebook page.
The New York Times has advice to keep you and your iPhone out of the grasp of predators:
BE LIKE A DOLPHIN Dolphins sleep with one eye open, to stay semi-alert to lurking predators and unexpected danger. If you need to use your phone in the wilds of the subway or sidewalk, do so discreetly, reserving at least a portion of your cognitive capacity for minding what is happening around you. Avoid leaving your phone on the table at restaurants, bars and coffee shops where it can easily be snatched …
That’s the weekend’s top Culture of Lickspittle entry. And while street heists for consumer electronics are unfortunate, they’re not uncommon. And I doubt that using one example as intellectual air freshener for the haves and its servant class is particularly helpful.
Particularly with the art and phraseology that came with this one.
“It took a well-coordinated and very busy industrious criminal gang — a directed mob,” said George Smith, senior fellow with Washington, D.C.-based think tank GlobalSecurity.org.
“If you have such a similar mob you can put together, you can think about trying to duplicate this type of thing,” Smith said. “But you’ll have to have some startup capital, since it’s not quite something you can just walk out the door and assemble off the cuff.”
“The picture of two of the New York errand boys flaunting their stack of bundled cash in the car won’t strike anyone as being from the high end of innovation and thinking,” Smith pointed out.
Hiring local petty criminals to do the dirty work also increases the risk of exposure, said Sean Sullivan, a security adviser with the F-Secure security firm in Helsinki, Finland.
“The need to have lots of money mules to withdraw all the cash seems to be the big complication in getting away with the crime. That leaves a trail for law enforcement” …
Or, as a commenter on Slashdot wryly observed, “This is not how bank fraud should be done. The right and proper way is to become too big to fail, too big to jail, rig the LIBOR rates, create systematic rigging, award oneself huge salaries and bonuses, threaten worldwide economic collapse, hold governments to ransom and get huge bailout money.”
Global banking, apparently particularly in the Middle East, can’t secure itself. And it is probably quite prone to criminal recruitment of insiders.
The larger issue looming is how does one secure a financial system the average person, or worker, has no faith in?
In the US, bankers and giant banks are now among the most hated. How do you save or batten down a system when attacks on the system are met with public indifference?
Infamous plastic 3D gun-printing schnook Cody Wilson had more good things happen to him this week when a division of the US government ordered him to take down his digital gun plan for violating the ITAR.
It was promptly rehosted on the Pirate Bay. And I am sure his many libertarian supporters banged their keyboards in joy while opening thier Bitcoin wallets for more philanthropic donations to the cause.
Anarchy! Liberty! Death to all fascists! Except us.
Wilson, who continues to call his operation a non-profit company, as if it’s performing a service to mankind had this to say to one of the tech rags:
“This is the conversation I want,??? Wilson said. “Is this a workable regulatory regime? Can there be defense trade control in the era of the Internet and 3D printing????
“The future of distributed technologies in the Internet is that no one has control of the information,” he told Mashable. “This is more than guns now, man, this is about the Internet, this is about information.”
Well, I don’t know, Cody. Can you make highly enriched uranium on your 3D printer? Perhaps a short range ballistic missile?
All right, let’s make it easy. A small plastic cluster bomb. Something that fairly easily explodes into bits of plastic shrapnel when triggered.
The United States has the highest rate of first-day deaths in babies than any other industrialized nation, according to a report released this week by the humanitarian group Save the Children …
Babies born to the poorest mothers are 40 percent more likely to die than babies born to wealthy mothers, said Miles …
The health dangers that poor and minority women face—like a high rate of premature birth and low birth weights—are compounded by the difficulties they have getting high-risk care in the United States, Miles said.
But questions remain about why the United States is in a league of its own for first-day deaths. “We can really only explain about half of the discrepancy,” Miles said, “and more research is needed.”
Today, Google’s worthless ads for scum ideas, people and products, attached to My Plastic Gun Kills Fascists at Globalsecurity.Org.
And here’s a free prediction.
Three years from now Google Fiber ultimate broadband will not have touched off a renaissance in high speed Internet access here. S— don’t work that way in the United States. You’re not some fool who drinks the daily bathwater, right?
Zuckerberg, in the pages of the Washington Post, a few weeks ago:
Today’s economy is very different. It is based primarily on knowledge and ideas — resources that are renewable and available to everyone. Unlike oil fields, someone else knowing something doesn’t prevent you from knowing it, too. In fact, the more people who know something, the better educated and trained we all are, the more productive we become, and the better off everyone in our nation can be.
This can change everything. In a knowledge economy, the most important resources are the talented people we educate and attract to our country. A knowledge economy can scale further, create better jobs and provide a higher quality of living for everyone in our nation.
Many people can grasp why this isn’t really true anymore.
In a global knowledge economy everyone knowing the same thing around the world has and does disempower huge classes of people who helped pay for the invention, development and deployment of the network that distributes it worldwide.
And how this is done is easy to see.
Where the cost of living is high, as it is in the United States relative to China or India or somewhere else, the knowledge the American workers possess — even though it may be the same as those in other countries — is more costly to employ.
Therefore, the value of our knowledge in body has crashed, even though it is the same as elsewhere. It is uncompetitive not because of lack or inferiority, but because of where we live.
And this is really what Mark Zuckerberg and others like him are about. They want cheaper educated labor, always.
However, Mark Zuckerberg is not even particularly accurate in terms of the needs of the United States. He overlooks one of the giant engines of the California economy because it just doesn’t contain the kind of people who are of any consequence to his wealth or business.
Take this bit, written by ex-California Arnold Schwarzenegger, the same week:
The [state of California] produces more than half of the fruits, nuts and vegetables grown in the U.S., with an output of $43.5 billion last year. Californians don’t rely just on the food produced by the state’s farms; they rely on the revenue and the jobs too. Agriculture employs more than 1.5 million people in California.
And who are many of these people employed in the California field, many more than employed in the Silicon Valley?
Well, they’re the brown people without the legal smartypants visas meritocratic KnowledgeStan’s Mark Zuckerbergs want. And these agricultural knowledge workers do not earn top dollar. No one in powerful American giant business stands for them in the Washington Post although it is easy to find those who hate on them. But they cannot be dispensed with, like lots of other American workers with knowledge who are deemed too expensive to employ because you still need people to go into the fields and do s— while being sprayed by crop dusters.
Silicon Valley software, programming genius, social networking, the cloud, Big Data and my new favorite phrase — “the Internet of things” — can’t eliminate the need for their work in this country.
But did you know Mark Zuckerberg and his wife solved the world problem of organ donation, just over a couple glasses of posh wine?
