Tag: Premium

Stealing someone’s print is easier than you might think:

A reader writes:

The people who are arguing against fingerprint (or other biometric) authentication are forgetting that all the ways of defeating this scheme require physical access to the phone. And Apple’s Phil Schiller has pointed out that more than 50% of iPhone owners did not use the passcode feature. The appropriate comparison here is not an ideal security scheme to this new fingerprint scanner, but to no security at all.

Another reader:

With regard to “The Fifth Amendment Doesn’t Cover Your Fingertips” post, Marcia Hoffman’s worries seem baseless, as least as relates to Apple’s current implementation of the iPhone. She is concerned about a system that would allow a fingerprint alone to unlock a phone. Apple requires not only a fingerprint, but a backup numeric passcode, to unlock the phone. The numeric code is required any time the phone has been rebooted or hasn’t been unlocked for two days. By the time a court would be able to order you to provide your fingerprint, two days would certainly have elapsed, and the fingerprint alone wouldn’t work without the passcode, which is protected by the Fifth Amendment.

Another:

OK, I can’t just stay silent on this: “Passwords provide the strongest possible security guarantee.” No, they don’t. These days, a password you can remember equates to a password that can be cracked.

There are advanced methods that cut down the amount of processing time needed by pulling in vast databases of common patterns (known as rainbow tables), but even without that, your random 16-character password that is impossible to remember, by itself, still isn’t safe.

And that is where this new technology comes in. For today, right this minute, you should already be using two-factor authentication at minimum for all your email and bank accounts (go do it this instant, then come back and finish reading). Two-factor authentication, in short, combines something you know (password) with something you have (iPhone app, security token) so that a remote person has a much harder time getting into the account.

So with this new technology, once Apple opens up the API, your phone can become a more secure version of the security token. Right now if someone steals your token, they can easily get at the random number it generates. (Since they expire every 30 seconds or so, these apps themselves are not password protected, and the hardware tokens are accessed with a simple button press.) With this technology, someone would have to steal three things to access your accounts: something you know (password), something you have (phone) and something you ARE (fingerprint).

Can that be done? Sure. Will that level of protection be enough for the average person? Yes, at least unless/until someone finds out a way to install a virus on the phone remotely that can access the fingerprint validation (not necessarily the data) and your passwords. But once someone has that level of control of your device, they’ve got you dead to rights no matter the technology.

Another rare circumstance:

I would add one more problem to using fingerprints as a means of identification: not everyone has a fingerprint.  A prime example of this is my tech-savvy 84-year-old grandmother, who has owned just about every Mac/Apple device since the mid ’90s, including an iPhone 5. She also hasn’t had fingerprints for at least the last five years. They have simply worn away over the years. I haven’t talked to her about it yet, but I can’t imagine she’s excited about using a fingerprint as a password.

Bucharest:

According to the city government, a staggering 64,000 feral dogs live on Bucharest’s streets, giving the metro area, population 2.3 million, more than twice as many street dogs per capita as Detroit, its closest US rival. Last week, a stray dog debate that had previously been more about public health, animal welfare and Bucharest’s image took a tragic, urgent turn, when a 4-year-old boy died after being mauled by a dog pack. Following an understandable public outcry, Bucharestians will vote on October 6 on whether or not to allow euthanasia for the city’s entire stray dog population.

The origin of the overflow:

The reasons for this glut are connected both to Romania’s former communist government and to the chaos caused by its removal. In the early 1980s, Nicolae Ceaușescu caused havoc in Bucharest when he bulldozed a large chunk of the city center in order to rebuild it along more monumental lines. As well as destroying some of the city’s most beautiful areas, this move forced 40,000 residents to be rehoused elsewhere. Many of these people moved to modern developments on the outskirts that did not allow pets, causing a flood of dogs onto the streets. With Ceaușescu’s grand plan slow to shape, the half-built shells of this wrecked area gave feral dogs a place to thrive.

A reader writes:

Don’t you think Steve Jobs is to blame for some of this animosity? Jobs was deified by lefty middle- and upper-class white people for his aesthetic design and streamlined interface. But his actions as head of Apple were almost exactly antithetical to the professed social/economic concerns of those same people. He cancelled all of Apple’s philanthropic programs, farmed all of their labor out to Chinese hellholes, and accumulated enormous, static piles of cash exactly when enormous, static piles of cash were a serious problem for the economy.

Meanwhile, while Gates was derided for his products, he was actually doing the things that those same lefty middle- and upper-class white people claimed that they cared about. “But, but, but … brushed aluminum!”

It’s good that the public is starting to figure out that we need to hold these guys to the same standards to that we claim to hold other wealthy entrepreneurs/businessmen. But frankly, I think this is Jobs’ fault, and the Cult of Apple was the midwife to the birth of this new obscene vortex of conspicuous consumption about which we are all now so happy to complain.

Another points to Zuckerberg:

My biggest gripe about the tech sector is their unabashed ageist mentality.

Mark Zuckerberg comes right out and says “younger people are just smarter than older people”. Forget about the virtues of wisdom and experience. Forget about modern brain science that says that the brain can expand its capabilities well into adulthood. That’s not it. Zuckerberg wants employees with no lives, who are willing to put in 80-hour weeks in hope of lucrative stock options. Top-notch programmers who have families and will only work normal hours are in unemployment lines. As an employer in a brick-and-mortar business, I have to pay my guys time-and-a-half if they work more than an 8-hour day, and double time under certain circumstances. Zuckerberg and his ilk live in a happy place where the rules that apply to most industries are off the table.

Another zooms out:

I think one of the big problems for the worsening perception of the tech industry is a general lifting of a lot of the mystique of the computers/Internet that initially blinded everyone else from the fact that so much consumer technology was utter crap. There was so much low hanging fruit, so many quick new capabilities, immediate productivity gains, that despite the fact that your computer crashed five times a day and was probably infested with eighteen types of malware that it still felt like an upgrade to your life. It was all so new, most people had grown up never seeing anything like it, and it seemed almost magical.

Today, not so much. Adults have had well over a decade of computers/Internet to get comfortable with it. People graduating from college today can’t really remember a time before they had Internet. It’s not magic anymore; it’s just everyday life.

We’re not as easily impressed anymore. So the tech industry is going to increasingly be judged by the same basic standards as everyone else. Sure, you’ve got a bunch of smart and hardworking people who would love to make people’s lives better, but so does every other profession on the planet. And the market/society/government actually punishes those fields for releasing crap onto the world. If I designed a building that was as unreliable as Twitter has been, the only articles being written about my company would be to mention how we got sued into the ground.

The tech industry isn’t any smarter or harder working than everyone else; they just lucked into being the next big thing, which is why giant piles of money have fallen into their lap, even when what they’re producing isn’t always particularly well made. People outside of the industry might be realizing that more quickly than many people within the industry.

AP VIDEO: George Zimmerman’s wife calls 911 to report her estranged husband had a gun & was threatening her: http://t.co/7l3XHjhH0Y -MM

— The Associated Press (@AP) September 10, 2013

Katie McDonough addresses that question and others:

What does a person have to do in this country to get a gun taken away? Or lose the right to a concealed carry permit? And, more specifically, what does a man [George Zimmerman] with a noted history of both domestic violence complaints and a willingness to use deadly force, who is currently in the news for what may still turn out to be another such incident, have to do? Turns out: quite a terrifying lot. Because, put mildly, the laws in Florida and elsewhere regulating gun ownership among domestic abusers and men suspected of domestic violence are, shall we say, permissive.

According to recent data, more than 60 percent of women killed by a firearm in 2010 were murdered by a current or former intimate partner.

The presence of a firearm during a domestic violence incident increases the likelihood of a homicide by an astounding 500 percent. In general, guns are very, very bad for women’s health. But in spite of all of the evidence identifying a strong and deadly correlation between gun deaths and violence against women, our policies to protect women (victims of intimate partner-related gun violence are, overwhelmingly, female) are full of holes.

For an example of this, look no further than Florida. In Zimmerman’s home state, as a result of federal law, it is illegal for a person subjected to a protective order to own or purchase firearms, and it is a crime for that person to refuse to surrender them to law enforcement. This is a good law that, when effectively enforced, can save women’s lives. … But because the law does not explicitly compel courts to authorize police to take the firearms away, many people who are subjected to domestic violence-related restraining orders are still able to keep and carry their guns, undeterred.

Reviewing Propaganda: Power and Persuasion, a new exhibit on display at the British Library, Christie Davies notices that, even in the midst of war, comedy remained a part of British efforts to change hearts and minds:

A central characteristic of the British propaganda in the exhibition is its extensive and successful use of humor, often achieved by giving official employment to professional cartoonists such as Fougasse. Some of the visitors laughed out loud at the British Ministry of Propaganda film London’s New Version of the Lambeth Walk performed by the Nazi Ballet (1941). The producer, Charles A. Ridley, simply took Lenny Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda film The Triumph of the Will (1934) and edited it so that the marchers, drummers, and goose-steppers of a Nuremberg rally sometimes move too quickly and sometimes move backwards and forwards. They no longer look menacing or impressive, but idiotic. It was all done to the then popular tune “The Lambeth Walk” that accompanied a jaunty walking dance popular in Britain and later in America. The actual music used was from the 1937 musical Me and my Girl. Even Hitler and his comrades salute in time to it.

On seeing the orderly precision of a Nazi rally reduced to a dance that had earlier been condemned by them as “Jewish mischief and animalistic hopping,” Goebbels is said to have been so angry that he ran out of the projection room kicking chairs and shouting obscenities. This short film without words was distributed to newsreel theaters throughout the world. A simple but effective technique for debunking power.

Where people congregate to share experiences about death:

Death Cafés help repair our relationship with farewell rites, largely because they put ritual back into death and mourning. A Death Café is a ritual space, built chair by chair, cup by cup. Its ritual objects are the tea tray, pot, milk jug, tablecloth. These mundane items are essential to how it works. Guests sit around a table and commit to staying for the duration (usually two hours). The host holds the space, administers ritual objects (pen and paper) and performs any rites (pouring tea, cutting cake). …

For a long time, it never occurred to me that what brought me to my first Café — a desire to understand my fear of death — masked a deeper terror.

It took many more mugs of tea around strangers’ tables. It took hearing about a shy 19-year-old’s loss of his father, and how a car crash had subsequently killed his step-dad. It took the pretty funeral director whose kayak had overturned while she was white-water rafting, confessing that as she began drowning she felt nothing but joy. It took the white-haired hypnotherapist, draped in chunky beads, saying how only that morning she’d been bagging up her dead husband’s clothes. It took these and many more Death Café confidences before I realised that death had always been easy to be afraid of, like a bump in the night: the spooky face at the window — out there, but still far away. Life, on the other hand, was here, now, and it was far more treacherous.

I no longer see death as some looming avenger, but rather as a final change in life’s constant flux. I know that chewing it over can help us reflect decisively on our existence, whether we’re devising ‘bucket lists’, or attempting to come to terms with the ‘unfinished-ness’ of living: accepting that the knots of our lives will always remain frayed, or undone.

Jason Webb comes out of the spanking closet:

Let me clarify something: I’m not “into” spanking the way you might be “into” Celine Dion or “The Bourne Identity.” Spanking is a part of my psyche, an essential element of my sexuality. It’s not like slavering over cheerleaders, or fantasizing about sex on the beach at sunset. When I was a kid I used to look up the word “spanking” in the dictionary, and I got a visceral thrill when I saw a spanking scene on “Little House on the Prairie” or “I Love Lucy.”

At times, spanking was an obsession, and one made all the more torturous for the shame I felt harboring it. For more than 20 years I thought there was something wrong with me. I thought that if, by chance, someone else felt the same way, then they’d be a dirty old man with a grubby overcoat and bulging eyes. But I couldn’t help it. I didn’t choose to be kinky in this way, any more than a man or woman chooses to be straight or gay. The way I saw it, homosexuals had their closet and I had mine. Only mine was a lot smaller, and I was the only one in it.

He and his wife went to a special dinner party for hardcore spanking enthusiasts:

Drinks in hand, Emily and I began meeting people. We didn’t talk about spanking, not until much later. But just being around them, being out, was liberating. These were people like me, who in this post-50 Shades era, had nothing in common with the vanilla couples toying with handcuffs and blindfolds, making up safe words and buying heart-shaped paddles. These people were true aficionados, who’d wielded (and felt) those paddles, as well as hairbrushes, floggers and straps, for years. They knew that the technique for caning is different from the one you use to crop. They knew about role play, “domestic discipline” and aftercare. And their spanking implements weren’t heart-shaped, because these people weren’t just playing at it, they were hard-wired like me.

The evening seemed secretive and subversive, in an exciting way, and I asked several people if they thought that spanking might be the next thing out of the closet. “To some degree, it’s already coming out,” said Allison, a teacher. She went on to list a spanking scene in “Weeds,” at least one in “Californication” and a scene on “The Big Bang Theory” when Sheldon spanked Amy. Even a spanking on “American Dad.”

Jacqui Cheng looks into the R&D driving it:

A company out of Houston, Texas named Aneros started out as a medical device company to aid with the comfort problems that come with an enlarged prostate in men. The inventor of Aneros’ first product, a now-78-year-old Japanese man named Mr. Jiro Takashima, was trying to find an alternative solution to surgery before he stumbled upon the adult side of the industry, discovering that his company’s customers were using his prostate device for much longer lengths of time than he intended, and in very different ways.

“That’s what sparked so many different versions of our products today, because users were using them for hours on end, so it’s what motivated us to redesign our products,” Aneros CEO CT Schenk told me. As such, “the things we’ve come out with in the last few years have this concept of a wearable product designed for long-term use.” And some of those designs have had to go against what Mr. Takashima wanted. “For example, he’d always been very adamant that the tab on the Helix Sin always needs to be hard and firm to work correctly,” Schenk said, “but through user testing, we found it’s more comfortable if we make it flexible.”

The company finds readymade focus groups in the products’ online forums:

“People from the forums spend more time using these things than all our employees combined,” Schenk said of Aneros’ forum of around 50,000 members. “The forum has become the foundation of everything we do. We have a few guys who have been around for 10+ years who have volunteered to moderate and keep conversations going about the products. When we do product testing, we ask the questions that these guys will ask, and if they see a problem, they almost deliver a solution themselves.”

Aneros’ almost entirely male community is so dedicated to the company’s main product—Aneros only recently launched its first female product—that they voluntarily become evangelists to try and draft more people into the Aneros cult. “A lot of our users claim our products give a life-changing experience because it changes the way they can have these kinds of sensations,” Schenk said. “In some cases, they’re pretty much the experts.”

Pointing out that critics have called the new Alice McDermott novel “beautifully intimate,” “small, rich, [and] intimate,” and “intimate, elegant, and beautifully crafted,” Alexander Nazaryan begs reviewers to step away from the I-word:

Jhumpa Lahiri’s new novel, The Lowland, is written with attention to “intimate detail,” according to The Guardian. In The New York Review of Books, Joyce Carol Oates says that Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves “provides an intimate, child’s-eye look at a midwestern academic household of the 1980s” – presumably, a vantage point desired by readers. The New York Times Book Review says that Stephen King’s Joyland is narrated with an “intimate quality.” Kevin Powers’s The Yellow Birds, about the war in Iraq, is to be praised for its “intimacy,” according to The Seattle Times. …

“Intimate,” as I understand its usage in contemporary criticism, means “small.” … [McDermott’s] Someone could be a fantastic work of fiction, but the frequent reference to “intimacy” does not do the novel any favors, implying, not only a smallness of setting or overall scope, but a far more fatal smallness of ideas. This, in the end, is the problem with “intimate” fiction – the emphasis, that is, on the novel as a warm blanket to cuddle with instead of a fire that burns clean through you. Intimate reading is reading for comfort, instead of all that good stuff – beauty, truth, wisdom — that we no longer acknowledge seeking without ironic air quotes. Intimacy is too nice for any of that.