Day: February 24, 2018

Political Commentary: Guns, Antisemitism, Chain Migration … What Trumps What?

Posted onAuthorcahwyguy

userpic=divided-nationHere’s one last collection of news chum this morning: all articles centering our our current political debates:

  • The NRA and Antisemitism. Here’s a real interesting article on the underlying Antisemitism of the NRA. It shows how many of the fears and tropes promoted by the organization align with antisemitic fears and tropes. WIthout mentioning Jews by name as a class, the examples that are always cited are Jewish or connected with Judaism. As the piece notes: “This McCarthyite vision of a cancer destroying America, what Richard Hofstadter called “the paranoid style in American politics,” is classic populism. It posits a good, mostly rural, less educated, implicitly white Volk being undermined by a corrupt, mostly urban, over-educated, and foreign set of elites. Sometimes those elites are actual Jews controlling Hollywood, “the media,” banks, or political structures. Other times, they are “structural Jews” – foreigners, Communists, elites, or other outsider-insiders who don’t share the values of “the people.” ” It is yet another example, of implicit racism, often arising from privilege issues (or changes in perceived privilege) that often underlie these shootings. I’ll note I’ve seen this implicit attitude commonly from Conservative folks when they talk about “Globalism”, which is a thinly veiled reference to the notion of a Jewish elite class and the Protocols.
  • Mass Shooting Statistics. Here are a collection of statistics involving mass shootings. I invite you to tease out what is common in these shooting, and hence, what might be controlled. While doing that, note what isn’t there: understanding of the motives of the shooters, why they did it, and any common emotional or medical issues. If we don’t know the underlying cause, masking the symptoms solves nothing.
  • Donald Trump’s Faith. Here’s an interesting explanation of how Faith is behind Trump. Why are the evangelicals supporting him? What is the doctrine of prosperity and why is it, so to speak, Trumping Christian behavior. How do power dynamics play into the equation.
  • Chain Migration Here’s an interesting explanation of why Trump hates chain migration. Again, the real answer boils down to political power, and immigrants often supporting more liberal and progressive causes. The use of “chain migration”, by the way, is pure propaganda. Family reunification is a better term, and it takes much longer to do, results in better citizens, and has much different impacts than are portrayed. By the way, when thinking about “white” vs. “black”, remember that the terms were invented by those supporting slavery and racial superiority beliefs and are relatively modern terms. For most of human civilization, there was no such distinction.
  • Net Neutrality. Net neutrality has been in the news, yet most folks don’t know what it means. Burger King provides a great explaination. Think about it this way: How would you like to have to pay extra to get your burger faster, while your neighbor who didn’t pay as much had to wait. This about what this means in separating privileged classes who can pay from the classes who cannot.

 

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Be Careful Out There

Posted onAuthorcahwyguy

As I continue to clear out the news chum, here are some articles related to security, trust, safety, and cyber. In short: be worried, be suspicious, and everything is not as it seems:

  • Can You Believe Your Eyes? We’ve all been taught that “seeing is believing”. But is it? We live in an era of forgeries: email can be faked (and has been), and videos can be doctored. I’m sure you’ve all heard about “deepfakes”: Where AI is used to put a different face on a body in a porn video, creating celebrity porn without the real celebrity. The LA Times has an interesting article on the rise of fake videos and their implications. Just think about this: What damage could a faked video do when it spreads on the internet? How could a fake be used for propaganda purpose? We’ve been given the blessing of technology, but its misuse could be the downfall of society (as the 2016 election has shown, with the Russian manipulation of the US electorate through technology).
  • Financial Scams. The last few years have seen the growth of person to person online financial exchanges like Venmo and Zelle. But the scams are growing as well.  The services were intended for use between transfers between people that know and trust each other. There are no safeguards for scammers and fraud, unlike services like PayPal. This is starting to bite people in the butt. Remember: Only Venmo/Zelle funds to someone you know and trust in real life. Once the funds are gone, they are gone.
  • The Green Padlock. Starting in July, the Chrome browser will mark all sites using the original web protocol, HTTP, as insecure. This is because the protocol does not provide end-to-end security. I initially believed that was overkill: there are many static sites with no forms, that only serve as information providers. Why do they need encrypted transport? But a discussion of the issue highlighted the reason behind Google’s actions. Even for such sites, moving to HTTPS provides assurance that the data coming from the site is what is being received by the consumer of information. In other words, it prevents man-in-the-middle attacks to insert false data, advertising, or malware. I’ve taken the steps to secure my site for the highway pages, and will be doing it for subsidiary pages in the coming months.
  • Paying for Security. One of the biggest problems that security has is that it is often invisible. If the mechanisms work, nothing bad happens, and you don’t know it is there. It is like high quality building codes, that you don’t discover saved your house until everyone else’s house burned down. As such, consumers haven’t wanted to pay for security; they want new features and whells and bistles, Software and hardware vendors couldn’t justify costly new releases that just added security. Luckily, that’s all changing — a new survey shows that consumers now prefer security over convenience. Will things stay that way? Will the convenience of a simple facial recognition overtake the security of two-factor authentication? Stay tuned.
  • Fixing Vulnerabilities. Vulnerabilities are on the rise, and keeping up can be hard. Here’s an interesting article that highlights the fact that not all vulnerabilities end up in the CVE/NVD database; and thus relying on that database as your sole source of vulnerability information is a bad idea. For those of us who assess for obvious vulnerabilities, this is an important observation. It is also vitally important to understand that a vulnerability is not the same as a risk. Sceptre and Mindfuck (no) Meltdown are good examples. They are vulnerabilities, and their patches are causing incredible slowdowns, but how easy are they to exploit, and what can they leak? A determined adversary will find a way to exploit anything, but the casual “script kiddie” hacker may not find much utility. The same, by the way, is true of gun laws. Gun control will affect law abiding folk, but the determined adversary will find a way. That’s why it is important not only to address the symptom of the problem — the gun control, the identified vulnerability — but to address the source of the problem. We need to engineer-in safety and security in all of our systems — human and technical — from day 0 to identify and prevent problems BEFORE they happen.
  • Safety While Traveling. Here’s an interesting article from the folks at Lastpass on how to use your password manager to make your life safer while traveling.  There are some interesting notions here, including keeping copies of important travel documents in your password vault, so that if you lose them, you have that information. Other ideas include storing the credit card loss and fraud department phone numbers in your vault with your credit card form fills, so if you lose the physical card, you can easily call and report it.
  • Pre-Register to Prevent Fraud. An interesting reminder to register and create your account at SSA.gov, before the bad guys do it for you.
  • Securing the Internet of Things. One increasing risk is the Internet of Things. More and more, everything is being connected to the Internet. Often, what is connected are low-criticality devices (solar panels, refrigerators, light bulbs, dishwashers) with poor security protocols. Miscreants can then use those devices as stepping stones to get a trusted position in a network to jump to a more critical site, or to host a bot net or cryptocurrency mining operation. Luckily, NIST is working on standards for IOT security — and those standards are out for draft and comment.

 

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Up for Discussion

Posted onAuthorcahwyguy

Things have been busy, busy, busy, and the chum has been piling up. I’m spending this morning clearing out the backlog. Here are a few articles that didn’t categorize, but I found extremely interesting and worthy of discussion:

  • Employee Loyalty. At work, one of the big ongoing discussions relates to the company’s proposal to move from our long-standing defined benefit pension plan plus 403(B) to a 401(K). For some employees, it has been reported this could cost them up to $1 Milllion. For others, like me (I’ve been there almost 30 years, I’m on the original retirement pension plan, and have at least 10 years to retire), the impact is significant, but not that high. The proposal has raised questions on the commitment of the company to its employees, and thus this article on “Where Have All The Loyal Employees Gone?” is quite fascinating. It explores why more employees aren’t like me: at one company for 30 years. Employees today don’t find a company and stick with it, unlike our parents or parent’s parents era. The conclusion of the article: There isn’t employee loyalty because employer’s aren’t loyal to the employees — they are just in it for the profit. As the article writes: “Why should anyone be more loyal to you than you are loyal to them?”. It suggests five ways to get employee loyalty: (1) give them long term incentives like you give yourself; (2) give long term employment contracts; (3) pay them market rate or better; (4) give them visibility into the future of the business; and (5) Make your employees’ retirement plans as rich as your own retirement plan. This is great advice — something more companies should heed. Take care of your workers, and they will be there for you.
  • The Eviction Experience. We’ve all heard stories about people being evicted. But what is the process? This is especially true as folks get evicted as part of gentrification. Here is an interesting tale about someone who has been evicted, through a series of bad circumstances. In this particular case, it was bad circumstances created by Internet Conservatives who directed their political anger at a journalist who was just doing their job — and they destroyed his life. As he wrote: “The salacious news—the black guy who suggested Romney was a racist also beat his ex-wife—ricocheted around the internet, and my job prospects evaporated. I suddenly became unhireable, even for bottom-rung media jobs. The modest severance package I got from Politico drained away in a few months, along with my ability to pay my bills and child support.” (This seems especially interesting now that Romney has rentered the political fray as he campaigns for a senate seat). As for the process itself, it is dehumanizing: deputies show up, pack up belongings in black plastic trash bags, and dump them at the curb. Further, this process disproportionately affects minorities. All sorts of questions get raised, worthy of discussion.
  • Bodies Are Awesome. The extent to which people are judgmental about others is incredible — certainly, in the Internet echo chamber. This bullying is serious business. Look at many of the mass shooters, and you’ll find they’ve been the target of bullies at some point in their life. No where is this more visible in how people are bullied for their looks. This is an interesting article that celebrates all bodies, shapes, and sizes — by looking at photos of the wide variety of Olympic athletes — all shapes, sizes, and you name it — all making the best of what they were given. The photos alone are fascinating.  As the article says, “Bodies are awesome. Everyone should get one.”. I find, as I watch people, the bodies I find the most interesting are not the perfectly airbrushed, plastic surgery ideas; the ones with silicone everywhere. What makes people interesting is not their perfection, but their imperfections. That dimple. That unique look. We must celebrate our differences and stories.
  • Crafters and Hoarding. If you live with a fabric artist, you know hoarding and craft rooms. Here is an interesting blog post exploring the broader question of “artist as hoarder”. Just consider the opening paragraph: “As an artist, you’re bound to collect stuff. After all, how can you create art without lots of paint, paper, canvas, clay, stone, metal, fabric, thread, and yarn? But how much stuff? Has your textile stash migrated into every part of the house because one closet won’t hold it all? Is your garage so packed with recycled materials for assemblage that you can’t park your car in there? Do you have any space left for yet another bin of plastic pieces in the barn?” Oh, this sounds so familiar.
  • Comicsgate. If you’ve been on the internet at all, you’re likely well aware of the bullying that goes on — especially towards minorities and women — often coming from the Conservative, sometimes White Supremacist, side. To put it bluntly, the haters. You might recall the Sad Puppies incidents from the Hugos which worked against women and perceived “leftist” authors. You might recall Gamergate, which targeted women in the Video Gaming industry. Both were horrid incidents, reflecting the growth of hate in our society. [As an aside, you want a reason we have so many shooting incidents? The answer is simple: We let hate grow, and we allow weapons to be an outlet to express hate.] There’s a new campaign now: Comicsgate. A campaign by bigots to attack minority and women writers and themes in the comics industry. Recently, as the article notes, “Comicsgate proponents on social media released a public blacklist of names for their followers to boycott. The names are organized under inflammatory titles like the “Pravda Press” and the “SJW Vipers” (“SJW,” for social justice warrior, a derogatory title for progressives). Those attacked are major figures in comics like Larry Hama, Mark Waid, Alex de Campi, Kelly Sue DeConnick, Matt Fraction, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and others. Nearly all of the people singled out are either women, people of color, or left-leaning.” Don’t let the haters win. Support minority and women artists. Fight against the growing intolerance in society: be it intolerance against the immigrant, the intolerance against women and minorities; the intolerance against non-Christians; the intolerance of the non-binary or non-heterosexual. We need to embrace and celebrate difference, what makes us unique, and our unique viewpoints.

As I say when I post my highway headlines: Ready, Set, Discuss.

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