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saberal

Opinion | Joe Biden Is Electrifying America Like F.D.R. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...biden-fdr-americans.html

US history

shared by saberal on 04 May 21 - No Cached
  • The best argument for President Biden’s three-part proposal to invest heavily in America and its people is an echo of Franklin Roosevelt’s explanation for the New Deal.
  • We should be cleareyed about both the enormous strengths of the United States — its technologies, its universities, its entrepreneurial spirit — and its central weakness: For half a century, compared with other countries, we have underinvested in our people.
  • in my hometown, Yamhill, the New Deal was an engine of opportunity. A few farmers had rigged generators on streams, but Roosevelt’s rural electrification brought almost everyone onto the grid and output soared. Jobs programs preserved the social fabric and built trails that I hike on every year. The G.I. Bill of Rights gave local families a shot at education and homeownership.
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  • Yet beginning in the 1970s, America took a wrong turn. We slowed new investments in health and education and embraced a harsh narrative that people just need to lift themselves up by their bootstraps
  • What does that mean in human terms? I’ve written about how one-quarter of the people on my old No. 6 school bus died of drugs, alcohol or suicide — “deaths of despair.” That number needs to be updated: The toll has risen to about one-third.
  • The most important thread of Biden’s program is his plan to use child allowances to cut America’s child poverty in half. Biden’s main misstep is that he would end the program in 2025 instead of making it permanent; Congress should fix that.
  • Roosevelt started a day care program during World War II to make it easier for parents to participate in the war economy. It was a huge success
  • Then there are Biden’s proposed investments in broadband; that’s today’s version of rural electrification. Likewise, free community college would enable young people to gain technical skills and earn more money, strengthening working-class families.Some Americans worry about the cost of Biden’s program.
  • As many Americans have criminal records as college degrees. A baby born in Washington, D.C., has a shorter life expectancy (78 years) than a baby born in Beijing (82 years). Newborns in 10 counties in Mississippi have a shorter life expectancy than newborns in Bangladesh. Rather than continue with Herbert Hoover-style complacency, let’s acknowledge our “grave internal disorder” and summon a doctor.
ethanshilling

San Francisco and Other Cities Try to Give Artists Steady Income - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-francisco-artists-income.html

san francisco art income

shared by ethanshilling on 06 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • In San Francisco, public officials have announced a pilot program that will provide a monthly stipend to artists. The mayor’s office recently unveiled the initiative, city payments that were approved by the arts commission, which will provide a guaranteed monthly income of $1,000 over six months to 130 eligible artists.
  • A similar experiment started in St. Paul, Minn., this week. There, a nonprofit organization is working with the city to disburse monthly $500 checks to 25 local artists for the next 18 months.
  • And more programs, not limited to arts workers, are springing up in cities like Oakland, Calif., and Atlanta, whose leaders are part of a 41-member coalition, Mayors for a Guaranteed Income.
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  • “We knew this health crisis would impact artists, and artists of color in particular,” San Francisco’s mayor, London Breed, said in a statement. “If we help the arts recover, the arts will help San Francisco recover.”
  • Since opening the application portal for artists on March 25, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, which is administering the guaranteed income program on behalf of San Francisco, said it has received more than 1,800 responses.
  • In St. Paul, the McKnight and Bush Foundations have helped get the guaranteed-income program off the ground. Laura Zabel, Springboard’s director overseeing the project, said that the monthly payments would help artists afford food and rent.
Javier E

Want a Green New Deal? Here's a better one. - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...9-af5b-b51b7ff322e9_story.html

GND climate change activism reform policy

shared by Javier E on 24 May 19 - No Cached
  • the goal is so fundamental that policymakers should focus above all else on quickly and efficiently decarbonizing. They should not muddle this aspiration with other social policy, such as creating a federal jobs guarantee,
  • the goal is so monumental that the country cannot afford to waste dollars in its pursuit. If the market can redirect spending most efficiently, money should not be misallocated on vast new government spending or mandates.
  • we propose our own Green New Deal. It relies both on smart government intervention — and on transforming the relentless power of the market from an obstacle to a centerpiece of the solution.
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  • U.S. natural gas is far less damaging to the environment than coal. It has become so cheap that it is displacing coal in electricity generation, driving down emissions. To others, Cove Point is an environmental catastrophe. Natural gas is still a fossil fuel, and burning it releases lots of greenhouse-gas emissions, which cause climate change. Both arguments are right.
  • society must eliminate its carbon dependency. It cannot burn vast amounts of any fossil fuel for “decades and decades,” as Mr. Farrell hopes, unless there is a revolution in emissions capture technology. Even in the short term, U.S. emissions are rising, despite the restraint that stepped-up natural-gas burning has provided. The government must demand more change, more quickly.
  • One objection is that carbon pricing is not powerful enough. The European Union’s carbon pricing program has not worked well. But that is a failure of design and political will. A carbon price equal to the challenge would start high and rise higher, sending a much stronger price signal.
  • carbon pricing is still the best first-line policy
  • A high-enough carbon price would shape millions of choices, small and large, about what to buy, how to invest and how to live that would result in substantial emissions cuts. People would prioritize the easiest changes, minimizing the costs of the energy transition. With a price that steadily rose, market forces would steadily wring carbon dioxide out of the economy — without the government trying to dictate exactly how, wasting money on special-interest boondoggles.
  • The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found last year that an average carbon price between 2030 and the end of the century of $100, $200 or even $300 per ton of carbon dioxide would result in huge greenhouse-gas emissions cuts, could restrain warming to the lowest safety threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius and would almost certainly prevent the world from breaching the traditional warming limit of 2 degrees Celsius
  • Republicans never embraced the market-based idea, even though conservative economists admit its appeal, because they never accepted the need to act at all. Some environmentalists, meanwhile, are increasingly wary of carbon pricing. The Democrats’ Green New Deal, which is noncommittal on the policy, reflects the accelerating drift from the obvious.
  • A third objection is that carbon pricing is politically impossible, because it reveals the cost of fighting global warming in the prices people pay
  • Another criticism is that carbon pricing hurts the poor, who would suffer most when prices rose. But the revenue from carbon pricing could be recycled back to Americans in a progressive way, and most people would end up whole or better off.
  • This is a leadership challenge, not a policy challenge. More than 40 governments globally, including several states, have found the political will to embrace carbon pricing programs, which is the only option that would plausibly be bipartisan.
  • One objection does have merit: Though carbon pricing would spur huge change in infrastructure and power generation, that alone would not be enough. It would not stimulate all the innovation the nation needs in the climate fight, nor would it change behaviors in circumstances where the desired price signal is muted or nonexistent
  • Foreign aid to prevent deforestation could be among the most cost-effective climate-preserving measures. Helping other countries to replace archaic cooking stoves that produce noxious fumes would help cut emissions and improve quality of life across the developing world.
  • , economists know that companies that invest in research and development do not get rewarded for the full social value of their work. Others benefit from their innovations without paying. Consequently, firms do not invest in research as much as society should want
  • It would take only a small fraction of the revenue a carbon pricing system would produce to fund a much more ambitious clean-energy research agenda. Basic scientific research and applied research programs such as ARPA-E should be scaled up dramatically
  • The government must also account for the fact that not all greenhouse-gas emissions come from burning the fuels that a carbon pricing program would reach — coal, oil and gas. How would the government charge farmers for the methane their cows emit or for the greenhouse gases released when they till their soil? How about emissions from cement, ammonia and steel production? The federal government would have to tailor programs to the agricultural and industrial sectors, which might include judicious use of incentives and mandates.
  • only government can ensure adequate mass transit options. Local governments could help with zoning laws to encourage people to live in denser, more walkable communities. The federal government should also press automakers to steadily improve fuel efficiency.
  • That starts with making sure that emissions-cutting efforts at home do not have unintended consequences. If the United States puts a price on greenhouse-gas emissions, other countries would lure U.S. manufacturers with the promise of lax environmental rules. Relocated manufacturers could then export their goods to the United States. The net effect would be no benefit for the planet but fewer U.S. manufacturing jobs.
  • One response is a kind of tariff on goods entering the country from places with weaker carbon-dioxide policies. That would both eliminate the incentive to offshore manufacturing and encourage countries to strengthen their own rules.
  • Participating in the agreement would give the United States a forum — and a basis — to press other nations to reduce emissions.
  • Start with carbon pricing. Then fill in the gaps.
  • There are a lot of bad ideas out there.
  • The Green New Deal that some Democrats have embraced is case in point. In its most aggressive form, the plan suggests the country could reach net-zero greenhouse-gas emissions by 2030, an impossible goal
  • that would be more spent every three years than the total amount the country spent on World War II.
  • At the same time, the Democratic plan would guarantee every American “high-quality health care” and “a job with a family-sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations, and retirement security.” These expensive aspirations, no matter how laudable, would do nothing to arrest greenhouse-gas emissions.
  • Massive social reform will not protect the climate. Marshaling every dollar to its highest benefit is the strongest plan.
hannahcarter11

US officials quiet on Iranian assassination amid fears of dangerous escalation - CNNPol... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

Iranian assassination fears trump

shared by hannahcarter11 on 01 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • US officials told CNN they are closely monitoring fallout from the alleged assassination Friday of one of Iran's top nuclear scientists, which Iran blamed on Israel, but they are hesitant about speaking publicly about the issue to avoid further inflaming an already tense situation.
  • Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, viewed as one of the masterminds of Iran's controversial nuclear program, was assassinated by gunfire and explosives while riding in a vehicle east of Tehran.
  • Iran alleged that Israel is behind the assassination and called it an act of terrorism
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  • The attack comes weeks after the International Atomic Energy Agency, the top nuclear watchdog, said that Iran now has 12 times the amount of enriched uranium that is permitted under the 2015 nuclear accord.
  • President-elect Joe Biden has said he will renew efforts to negotiate with Tehran over its nuclear program when he takes office and any escalation following Fakhrizadeh's death would only complicate an already tough task.
  • Experts tell CNN that the episode underscores shifting dynamics in the Middle East as Trump leaves office and countries fearful of Iranian aggression ally together in solidarity against Iran.
  • Pompeo spoke of the danger emanating from Iran and elsewhere during an interview broadcast on Fox News Thursday referencing the aftermath of the January strike by the United States that killed Soleimani.
  • Ben Rhodes, who served as deputy national security adviser under President Barack Obama, tweeted that the attack was "an outrageous action aimed at undermining diplomacy between an incoming US administration and Iran. It's time for this ceaseless escalation to stop."
  • In a 2018 speech, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo accused the Iranian government of going out of its way to protect, hide and preserve him because he was so critical to their nuclear program.
  • The US military view right now is that unless there is a direct provocation against the United States by Iran, there is no justification for a US strike.
  • The US has currently just more than 50,000 troops in the region, which is not enough to carry out a sustained military campaign against Iran.
  • "I think it goes without question that Israel did it," said Simon Henderson, Baker fellow at The Washington Institute and a specialist on Iran's nuclear program. "If you are Israel, you want to set the program back months if not years."
  • CNN reported earlier this month that President Trump floated the idea of a military strike on Iran during the remaining days of his term but was dissuaded by senior officials. It's not clear if the administration would considering sabotage, cyber action or other clandestine alternatives were Trump to order up some sort of action.
lmunch

The Pandemic Has Hindered Many of the Best Ideas for Reducing Violence - The New York T... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...crime-pandemic-cities.html

politics us culture pandemic crime

shared by lmunch on 06 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • Reported crime of nearly every kind has declined this year amid the pandemic. The exception to that has been stark and puzzling: Shootings and homicides are up in cities around the country, perplexing experts who normally expect these patterns to trend together.
  • The president and others have blamed protests and unrest, the changing tactics of police, and even the partisan politics of mayors.
  • And programs devised to reduce gun violence — and that have proved effective in studies — have been upended by the pandemic. Summer jobs programs were cut this year. Violence intervention workers were barred from hospitals. Group behavioral therapy programs meant to be intimate and in-person have moved, often haltingly, online.
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  • Some version of that fear — students with no school to attend, long summer days with no summer jobs, young people with nowhere to go — may be part of what is happening this year on a wider scale.
  • The behavior of the police has certainly changed. Early in the spring, officers pulled back on their interactions amid social distancing. Later in the spring and summer they faced mass protests — and may have reacted to those protests with slowdowns. But Mr. Abrams said the effect of any policing changes wouldn’t be limited to homicides and shootings.
  • “When confidence in the police wanes and drops sufficiently, then one gets a rise in so-called street justice, in people taking matters into their own hands to settle disputes,” Mr. Rosenfeld said. “That contributes to a rise in violence.”
  • Separately, there’s evidence that the presence of nonprofits in a community has helped lower violent crime. There’s evidence that hospitals can play a role in reducing violence, when gunshot victims are identified in trauma centers for follow-up interventions. There are randomized control trials showing that summer youth employment programs reduce violent crime among participants, even well after the programs have ended.
  • “The first thing to go last March when the stay-at-home order was issued here in Chicago for these young people was the stability of school,”
Javier E

Whistleblower: Twitter misled investors, FTC and underplayed spam issues - Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...twitter-whistleblower-sec-spam

twitter whistleblower security social media technology crisis policy spam

shared by Javier E on 27 Aug 22 - No Cached
  • Twitter executives deceived federal regulators and the company’s own board of directors about “extreme, egregious deficiencies” in its defenses against hackers, as well as its meager efforts to fight spam, according to an explosive whistleblower complaint from its former security chief.
  • The complaint from former head of security Peiter Zatko, a widely admired hacker known as “Mudge,” depicts Twitter as a chaotic and rudderless company beset by infighting, unable to properly protect its 238 million daily users including government agencies, heads of state and other influential public figures.
  • Among the most serious accusations in the complaint, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post, is that Twitter violated the terms of an 11-year-old settlement with the Federal Trade Commission by falsely claiming that it had a solid security plan. Zatko’s complaint alleges he had warned colleagues that half the company’s servers were running out-of-date and vulnerable software and that executives withheld dire facts about the number of breaches and lack of protection for user data, instead presenting directors with rosy charts measuring unimportant changes.
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  • “Security and privacy have long been top companywide priorities at Twitter,” said Twitter spokeswoman Rebecca Hahn. She said that Zatko’s allegations appeared to be “riddled with inaccuracies” and that Zatko “now appears to be opportunistically seeking to inflict harm on Twitter, its customers, and its shareholders.” Hahn said that Twitter fired Zatko after 15 months “for poor performance and leadership.” Attorneys for Zatko confirmed he was fired but denied it was for performance or leadership.
  • the whistleblower document alleges the company prioritized user growth over reducing spam, though unwanted content made the user experience worse. Executives stood to win individual bonuses of as much as $10 million tied to increases in daily users, the complaint asserts, and nothing explicitly for cutting spam.
  • Chief executive Parag Agrawal was “lying” when he tweeted in May that the company was “strongly incentivized to detect and remove as much spam as we possibly can,” the complaint alleges.
  • Zatko described his decision to go public as an extension of his previous work exposing flaws in specific pieces of software and broader systemic failings in cybersecurity. He was hired at Twitter by former CEO Jack Dorsey in late 2020 after a major hack of the company’s systems.
  • “I felt ethically bound. This is not a light step to take,” said Zatko, who was fired by Agrawal in January. He declined to discuss what happened at Twitter, except to stand by the formal complaint. Under SEC whistleblower rules, he is entitled to legal protection against retaliation, as well as potential monetary rewards.
  • A person familiar with Zatko’s tenure said the company investigated Zatko’s security claims during his time there and concluded they were sensationalistic and without merit. Four people familiar with Twitter’s efforts to fight spam said the company deploys extensive manual and automated tools to both measure the extent of spam across the service and reduce it.
  • In 1998, Zatko had testified to Congress that the internet was so fragile that he and others could take it down with a half-hour of concentrated effort. He later served as the head of cyber grants at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon innovation unit that had backed the internet’s invention.
  • Overall, Zatko wrote in a February analysis for the company attached as an exhibit to the SEC complaint, “Twitter is grossly negligent in several areas of information security. If these problems are not corrected, regulators, media and users of the platform will be shocked when they inevitably learn about Twitter’s severe lack of security basics.”
  • Zatko’s complaint says strong security should have been much more important to Twitter, which holds vast amounts of sensitive personal data about users. Twitter has the email addresses and phone numbers of many public figures, as well as dissidents who communicate over the service at great personal risk.
  • This month, an ex-Twitter employee was convicted of using his position at the company to spy on Saudi dissidents and government critics, passing their information to a close aide of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in exchange for cash and gifts.
  • Zatko’s complaint says he believed the Indian government had forced Twitter to put one of its agents on the payroll, with access to user data at a time of intense protests in the country. The complaint said supporting information for that claim has gone to the National Security Division of the Justice Department and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Another person familiar with the matter agreed that the employee was probably an agent.
  • “Take a tech platform that collects massive amounts of user data, combine it with what appears to be an incredibly weak security infrastructure and infuse it with foreign state actors with an agenda, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster,” Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee,
  • Many government leaders and other trusted voices use Twitter to spread important messages quickly, so a hijacked account could drive panic or violence. In 2013, a captured Associated Press handle falsely tweeted about explosions at the White House, sending the Dow Jones industrial average briefly plunging more than 140 points.
  • After a teenager managed to hijack the verified accounts of Obama, then-candidate Joe Biden, Musk and others in 2020, Twitter’s chief executive at the time, Jack Dorsey, asked Zatko to join him, saying that he could help the world by fixing Twitter’s security and improving the public conversation, Zatko asserts in the complaint.
  • The complaint — filed last month with the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Justice, as well as the FTC — says thousands of employees still had wide-ranging and poorly tracked internal access to core company software, a situation that for years had led to embarrassing hacks, including the commandeering of accounts held by such high-profile users as Elon Musk and former presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump.
  • But at Twitter Zatko encountered problems more widespread than he realized and leadership that didn’t act on his concerns, according to the complaint.
  • Twitter’s difficulties with weak security stretches back more than a decade before Zatko’s arrival at the company in November 2020. In a pair of 2009 incidents, hackers gained administrative control of the social network, allowing them to reset passwords and access user data. In the first, beginning around January of that year, hackers sent tweets from the accounts of high-profile users, including Fox News and Obama.
  • Several months later, a hacker was able to guess an employee’s administrative password after gaining access to similar passwords in their personal email account. That hacker was able to reset at least one user’s password and obtain private information about any Twitter user.
  • Twitter continued to suffer high-profile hacks and security violations, including in 2017, when a contract worker briefly took over Trump’s account, and in the 2020 hack, in which a Florida teen tricked Twitter employees and won access to verified accounts. Twitter then said it put additional safeguards in place.
  • This year, the Justice Department accused Twitter of asking users for their phone numbers in the name of increased security, then using the numbers for marketing. Twitter agreed to pay a $150 million fine for allegedly breaking the 2011 order, which barred the company from making misrepresentations about the security of personal data.
  • After Zatko joined the company, he found it had made little progress since the 2011 settlement, the complaint says. The complaint alleges that he was able to reduce the backlog of safety cases, including harassment and threats, from 1 million to 200,000, add staff and push to measure results.
  • But Zatko saw major gaps in what the company was doing to satisfy its obligations to the FTC, according to the complaint. In Zatko’s interpretation, according to the complaint, the 2011 order required Twitter to implement a Software Development Life Cycle program, a standard process for making sure new code is free of dangerous bugs. The complaint alleges that other employees had been telling the board and the FTC that they were making progress in rolling out that program to Twitter’s systems. But Zatko alleges that he discovered that it had been sent to only a tenth of the company’s projects, and even then treated as optional.
  • “If all of that is true, I don’t think there’s any doubt that there are order violations,” Vladeck, who is now a Georgetown Law professor, said in an interview. “It is possible that the kinds of problems that Twitter faced eleven years ago are still running through the company.”
  • “Agrawal’s Tweets and Twitter’s previous blog posts misleadingly imply that Twitter employs proactive, sophisticated systems to measure and block spam bots,” the complaint says. “The reality: mostly outdated, unmonitored, simple scripts plus overworked, inefficient, understaffed, and reactive human teams.”
  • One current and one former employee recalled that incident, when failures at two Twitter data centers drove concerns that the service could have collapsed for an extended period. “I wondered if the company would exist in a few days,” one of them said.
  • The current and former employees also agreed with the complaint’s assertion that past reports to various privacy regulators were “misleading at best.”
  • For example, they said the company implied that it had destroyed all data on users who asked, but the material had spread so widely inside Twitter’s networks, it was impossible to know for sure
  • As the head of security, Zatko says he also was in charge of a division that investigated users’ complaints about accounts, which meant that he oversaw the removal of some bots, according to the complaint. Spam bots — computer programs that tweet automatically — have long vexed Twitter. Unlike its social media counterparts, Twitter allows users to program bots to be used on its service: For example, the Twitter account @big_ben_clock is programmed to tweet “Bong Bong Bong” every hour in time with Big Ben in London. Twitter also allows people to create accounts without using their real identities, making it harder for the company to distinguish between authentic, duplicate and automated accounts.
  • In the complaint, Zatko alleges he could not get a straight answer when he sought what he viewed as an important data point: the prevalence of spam and bots across all of Twitter, not just among monetizable users.
  • Zatko cites a “sensitive source” who said Twitter was afraid to determine that number because it “would harm the image and valuation of the company.” He says the company’s tools for detecting spam are far less robust than implied in various statements.
  • The complaint also alleges that Zatko warned the board early in his tenure that overlapping outages in the company’s data centers could leave it unable to correctly restart its servers. That could have left the service down for months, or even have caused all of its data to be lost. That came close to happening in 2021, when an “impending catastrophic” crisis threatened the platform’s survival before engineers were able to save the day, the complaint says, without providing further details.
  • The four people familiar with Twitter’s spam and bot efforts said the engineering and integrity teams run software that samples thousands of tweets per day, and 100 accounts are sampled manually.
  • Some employees charged with executing the fight agreed that they had been short of staff. One said top executives showed “apathy” toward the issue.
  • Zatko’s complaint likewise depicts leadership dysfunction, starting with the CEO. Dorsey was largely absent during the pandemic, which made it hard for Zatko to get rulings on who should be in charge of what in areas of overlap and easier for rival executives to avoid collaborating, three current and former employees said.
  • For example, Zatko would encounter disinformation as part of his mandate to handle complaints, according to the complaint. To that end, he commissioned an outside report that found one of the disinformation teams had unfilled positions, yawning language deficiencies, and a lack of technical tools or the engineers to craft them. The authors said Twitter had no effective means of dealing with consistent spreaders of falsehoods.
  • Dorsey made little effort to integrate Zatko at the company, according to the three employees as well as two others familiar with the process who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive dynamics. In 12 months, Zatko could manage only six one-on-one calls, all less than 30 minutes, with his direct boss Dorsey, who also served as CEO of payments company Square, now known as Block, according to the complaint. Zatko allegedly did almost all of the talking, and Dorsey said perhaps 50 words in the entire year to him. “A couple dozen text messages” rounded out their electronic communication, the complaint alleges.
  • Faced with such inertia, Zatko asserts that he was unable to solve some of the most serious issues, according to the complaint.
  • Some 30 percent of company laptops blocked automatic software updates carrying security fixes, and thousands of laptops had complete copies of Twitter’s source code, making them a rich target for hackers, it alleges.
  • A successful hacker takeover of one of those machines would have been able to sabotage the product with relative ease, because the engineers pushed out changes without being forced to test them first in a simulated environment, current and former employees said.
  • “It’s near-incredible that for something of that scale there would not be a development test environment separate from production and there would not be a more controlled source-code management process,” said Tony Sager, former chief operating officer at the cyberdefense wing of the National Security Agency, the Information Assurance divisio
  • Sager is currently senior vice president at the nonprofit Center for Internet Security, where he leads a consensus effort to establish best security practices.
  • The complaint says that about half of Twitter’s roughly 7,000 full-time employees had wide access to the company’s internal software and that access was not closely monitored, giving them the ability to tap into sensitive data and alter how the service worked. Three current and former employees agreed that these were issues.
  • “A best practice is that you should only be authorized to see and access what you need to do your job, and nothing else,” said former U.S. chief information security officer Gregory Touhill. “If half the company has access to and can make configuration changes to the production environment, that exposes the company and its customers to significant risk.”
  • The complaint says Dorsey never encouraged anyone to mislead the board about the shortcomings, but that others deliberately left out bad news.
  • When Dorsey left in November 2021, a difficult situation worsened under Agrawal, who had been responsible for security decisions as chief technology officer before Zatko’s hiring, the complaint says.
  • An unnamed executive had prepared a presentation for the new CEO’s first full board meeting, according to the complaint. Zatko’s complaint calls the presentation deeply misleading.
  • The presentation showed that 92 percent of employee computers had security software installed — without mentioning that those installations determined that a third of the machines were insecure, according to the complaint.
  • Another graphic implied a downward trend in the number of people with overly broad access, based on the small subset of people who had access to the highest administrative powers, known internally as “God mode.” That number was in the hundreds. But the number of people with broad access to core systems, which Zatko had called out as a big problem after joining, had actually grown slightly and remained in the thousands.
  • The presentation included only a subset of serious intrusions or other security incidents, from a total Zatko estimated as one per week, and it said that the uncontrolled internal access to core systems was responsible for just 7 percent of incidents, when Zatko calculated the real proportion as 60 percent.
  • Zatko stopped the material from being presented at the Dec. 9, 2021 meeting, the complaint said. But over his continued objections, Agrawal let it go to the board’s smaller Risk Committee a week later.
  • Agrawal didn’t respond to requests for comment. In an email to employees after publication of this article, obtained by The Post, he said that privacy and security continues to be a top priority for the company, and he added that the narrative is “riddled with inconsistences” and “presented without important context.”
  • On Jan. 4, Zatko reported internally that the Risk Committee meeting might have been fraudulent, which triggered an Audit Committee investigation.
  • Agarwal fired him two weeks later. But Zatko complied with the company’s request to spell out his concerns in writing, even without access to his work email and documents, according to the complaint.
  • Since Zatko’s departure, Twitter has plunged further into chaos with Musk’s takeover, which the two parties agreed to in May. The stock price has fallen, many employees have quit, and Agrawal has dismissed executives and frozen big projects.
  • Zatko said he hoped that by bringing new scrutiny and accountability, he could improve the company from the outside.
  • “I still believe that this is a tremendous platform, and there is huge value and huge risk, and I hope that looking back at this, the world will be a better place, in part because of this.”
Javier E

Excuse me, but the industries AI is disrupting are not lucrative - 0 views

www.theintrinsicperspective.com/...se-me-but-the-industries-ai-is

AI effects benefits investment

shared by Javier E on 23 Dec 23 - No Cached
  • Google’s Gemini. The demo video earlier this week was nothing short of amazing, as Gemini appeared to fluidly interact with a questioner going through various tasks and drawings, always giving succinct and correct answers.
  • another huge new AI model revealed.
  • that’s. . . not what’s going on. Rather, they pre-recorded it and sent individual frames of the video to Gemini to respond to, as well as more informative prompts than shown, in addition to editing the replies from Gemini to be shorter and thus, presumably, more relevant. Factor all that in, Gemini doesn’t look that different from GPT-4,
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  • Continued hype is necessary for the industry, because so much money flowing in essentially allows the big players, like OpenAI, to operate free of economic worry and considerations
  • The money involved is staggering—Anthropic announced they would compete with OpenAI and raised 2 billion dollars to train their next-gen model, a European counterpart just raised 500 million, etc. Venture capitalists are eager to throw as much money as humanely possible into AI, as it looks so revolutionary, so manifesto-worthy, so lucrative.
  • While I have no idea what the downloads are going to be for the GPT Store next year, my suspicion is it does not live up to the hyped Apple-esque expectation.
  • given their test scores, I’m willing to say GPT-4 or Gemini is smarter along many dimensions than a lot of actual humans, at least in the breadth of their abstract knowledge—all while noting even leading models still have around a 3% hallucination rate, which stacks up in a complex task.
  • A more interesting “bear case” for AI is that, if you look at the list of industries that leading AIs like GPT-4 are capable of disrupting—and therefore making money off of—the list is lackluster from a return-on-investment perspective, because the industries themselves are not very lucrative.
  • What are AIs of the GPT-4 generation best at? It’s things like:writing essays or short fictionsdigital artchattingprogramming assistance
  • While I personally wouldn’t go so far as to describe current LLMs as “a solution in search of a problem” like cryptocurrency has famously been described as, I do think the description rings true in an overall economic/business sense so fa
  • The issue is that taking the job of a human illustrator just. . . doesn’t make you much money. Because human illustrators don’t make much money
  • While you can easily use Dall-E to make art for a blog, or a comic book, or a fantasy portrait to play an RPG, the market for those things is vanishingly small, almost nonexistent
  • As of this writing, the compute cost to create an image using a large image model is roughly $.001 and it takes around 1 second. Doing a similar task with a designer or a photographer would cost hundreds of dollars (minimum) and many hours or days (accounting for work time, as well as schedules). Even if, for simplicity’s sake, we underestimate the cost to be $100 and the time to be 1 hour, generative AI is 100,000 times cheaper and 3,600 times faster than the human alternative.
  • Like, wow, an AI that can write a Reddit comment! Well, there are millions of Reddit comments, which is precisely why we now have AIs good at writing them. Wow, an AI that can generate music! Well, there are millions of songs, which is precisely why we now have AIs good at creating them.
  • Search is the most obvious large market for AI companies, but Bing has had effectively GPT-4-level AI on offer now for almost a year, and there’s been no huge steal from Google’s market share.
  • What about programming? It’s actually a great expression of the issue, because AI isn’t replacing programming—it’s replacing Stack Overflow, a programming advice website (after all, you can’t just hire GPT-4 to code something for you, you have to hire a programmer who uses GPT-4
  • Even if OpenAI drove Stack Overflow out of business entirely and cornered the market on “helping with programming” they would gain, what? Stack Overflow is worth about 1.8 billion, according to its last sale in 2022. OpenAI already dwarfs it in valuation by an order of magnitude.
  • The more one thinks about this, one notices a tension in the very pitch itself: don’t worry, AI isn’t going to take all our jobs, just make us better at them, but at the same time, the upside of AI as an industry is the total combined worth of the industries its replacing, er, disrupting, and this justifies the massive investments and endless economic optimism.
  • It makes me worried about the worst of all possible worlds: generative AI manages to pollute the internet with cheap synthetic data, manages to make being a human artist / creator harder, manages to provide the basis of agential AIs that still pose some sort of existential risk if they get intelligent enough—all without ushering in some massive GDP boost that takes us into utopia
  • If the AI industry ever goes through an economic bust sometime in the next decade I think it’ll be because there are fewer ways than first thought to squeeze substantial profits out of tasks that are relatively commonplace already
  • We can just look around for equivalencies. The payment for humans working as “mechanical turks” on Amazon are shockingly low. If a human pretending to be an AI (which is essentially what a mechanical turk worker is doing) only makes a buck an hour, how much will an AI make doing the same thing?
  • , is it just a quirk of the current state of technology, or something more general?
  • What’s written on the internet is a huge “high quality” training set (at least in that it is all legible and collectable and easy to parse) so AIs are very good at writing the kind of things you read on the internet
  • But data with a high supply usually means its production is easy or commonplace, which, ceteris paribus, means it’s cheap to sell in turn. The result is a highly-intelligent AI merely adding to an already-massive supply of the stuff it’s trained on.
  • Was there really a great crying need for new ways to cheat on academic essays? Probably not. Will chatting with the History Buff AI app (it was is in the background of Sam Altman’s presentation) be significantly different than chatting with posters on /r/history on Reddit? Probably not
  • Call it the supply paradox of AI: the easier it is to train an AI to do something, the less economically valuable that thing is. After all, the huge supply of the thing is how the AI got so good in the first place.
  • AI might end up incredibly smart, but mostly at things that aren’t economically valuable.
mcginnisca

Europe's Aid Plan For Syrian Refugees: A Million Debit Cards : Parallels : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...refugees-a-million-debit-cards

europe refugees crisis Syria Turkey aid plan

shared by mcginnisca on 27 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • The European Union is desperate to keep Syrian refugees from bolting from Turkey for Europe. But the prospects for Syrians in Turkey have been slim. Now the EU is launching its biggest aid program yet – more than $375 million aimed at a million of the neediest Syrians in Turkey.
  • a debit card that can be used to buy whatever food, medicine or clothing a family needs, or to get cash.
  • There have been cash-based aid programs before, but not on this scale. Jonny Hogg, spokesmen for the World Food Program, says this is the biggest humanitarian relief contract ever signed by the EU.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Syrians in Turkey are supposed to stay where they're registered. They can rent property if they can afford it, work if they can find a job, and can be eligible for health care and education. But as a practical matter, the demand usually outstrips the supply. Turkey's Ambassador to the U.K. recently wrote that there are around 853,000 school-aged children, 310,000 of which are eligible to receive education.
lindsayweber1

Ben Carson's Impossible Vision for American Housing - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...513011

housing urban development ben carson white house usa

shared by lindsayweber1 on 15 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • How would an agency with a $47 billion budget fare under someone who thought government spending should be cut, and that efforts to end segregation—a core HUD mission—are akin to “failed socialist experiments”?
  • His Senate confirmation hearing did little to answer these questions, as Carson both pledged to cut spending, and to keep—or even expand—programs that are the hallmark of what HUD does.
  • he point being, if we can find a number on which we can agree and begin to cut back, we can start thinking about fiscal responsibility,” Carson said. “Bear in mind, we are approaching a $20 trillion national debt.”
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Yet when various senators asked Carson to weigh in on specific programs that helped their constituents, he consistently pledged to keep them going. That included a rental-assistance demonstration that provides assistance to 4.5 million households, a community-development block grant that will provide $1.6 billion to Americans, including thousands affected by floods in Louisiana, and a program to rid housing of lead hazards. In fact, he said, a program to end veteran homelessness “needs more enhancements.” He also promised to embark on a nationwide “listening tour” to hear more about what needs to be improved at the department.And, despite his own repeated statements to cut down on expenses, he pledged, to the Democrat senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii, that he would advocate for a budget for HUD
Javier E

Farhad and Mike Discuss the Apple Case and a Go-Playing Computer Program - The New York... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-playing-computer-program.html

AI computer intuition

shared by Javier E on 13 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • The program is a blend of deep learning and Monte Carlo algorithms, meaning it is both good at recognizing patterns and has the ability to exhaustively search vast libraries of possible moves.
  • the timetable for computing dominance of Go has been moved up roughly a decade from when it had been expected. That’s largely because the new ability to blend pattern recognition algorithms and vast data sets has been yielding spectacular results in the last half-decade. It’s like computer scientists have found a powerful new hammer, and they’re using it to pound lots of different nails
  • The Google program combines two types of algorithms. One is a machine learning algorithm, which does an extremely good job of recognizing patterns based on being trained on a vast set of examples. So it is likely to have seen almost any move that a human could make, and also know which responses are better ones.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • A second type of algorithm can also see the consequences of particular moves far, far in advance of the game by playing millions and millions or perhaps even billions of combinations of moves. In contrast, human Go experts have their experience to rely on, but it is fuzzy by comparison. Think of this as an intellectual version of John Henry and the jackhammer.
Javier E

In Yahoo, Another Example of the Buyback Mirage - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ple-of-the-buyback-mirage.html

stock market repurchase shareholder company EPS valuation

shared by Javier E on 26 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • It is one of the great investment conundrums of our time: Why do so many stockholders cheer when a company announces that it’s buying back shares?
  • Stated simply, repurchase programs can be hazardous to a company’s long-term financial health and often signal a management that has run out of better ways to invest in the business.
  • given the enormous popularity of buybacks nowadays, those that are harmful probably outnumber the beneficial.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • Consider Yahoo. The company bought back shares worth $6.6 billion from 2008 to 2014, according to Robert L. Colby, a retired investment professional and developer of Corequity, an equity valuation service used by institutional investors. These purchases helped increase Yahoo’s earnings per share about 16 percent annually, on average.
  • a company’s overall profit growth is unaffected by share buybacks. And comparing increases in earnings per share with real profit growth reveals the impact that buybacks have on that particular measure. Call it the buyback mirage.
  • Those who run companies like buybacks because they make their earnings look better on a per-share basis. When fewer shares are outstanding, each one technically earns more.
  • But a good bit of that performance was the buyback mirage. Growth in Yahoo’s overall net profits came in at about 11 percent annually
  • Given these figures, Mr. Colby reckoned that Yahoo, if it had invested that same amount of money in its operations, would have had to generate only a 3.2 percent after-tax return to produce overall net profit growth of 16 percent annually over those years.
  • But Mr. Colby pointed out that buybacks provide only a one-time benefit, while smart investments in a company’s operations can generate years of gains.
  • Mr. Colby said his research “confirms my suspicion that while buybacks are not universally bad, they are being practiced far more broadly and without as much analysis as there should be.”
  • Perhaps the crucial flaw in buybacks is that they reward sellers of a company’s stock over its long-term holders. That’s because a company announcing a repurchase program usually sees its stock price pop in the short term. But passive investors, such as index funds, and other long-term holders gain little from the programs.
  • Another hazard: companies that spend billions to repurchase stock without substantially shrinking the number of shares outstanding. That’s because in these circumstances, prized corporate cash is used to buy back shares that offset stock grants bestowed on company executives in rich compensation plans.
  • And there are plenty of companies whose buybacks have simply left them with less money to invest in more promising opportunities. Advertisement Continue reading the main story “By throwing away money on buybacks, companies are giving up on the ability to grow in the future,”
  • proposals ask the companies to adopt a policy of excluding the effect of stock buybacks from any performance metrics they use to determine executive pay packages.
  • At 3M, for example, research and development expenditures plus strategic acquisitions have totaled $22 billion over the last five years, Mr. Kanzer said. In the meantime, the company’s buyback program has cost $21 billion.
  • “You really have to ask why a company’s board decides to return a big chunk of capital instead of replacing managers with ones who can figure out how to develop the operations,”
  • “If the board doesn’t think it’s worth investing in the company’s future,” Mr. Lutin added, “how can a shareholder justify continuing to hold the stock, or voting for directors who’ve given up?”
Javier E

Nonfiction Curriculum Enhanced Reading Skills in New York City Schools - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...-in-new-york-city-schools.html

reading curriculum education K-12 core

shared by Javier E on 12 Mar 12 - Cached
  • For three years, a pilot program tracked the reading ability of approximately 1,000 students at 20 New York City schools, following them from kindergarten through second grade. Half of the schools adopted a curriculum designed by the education theorist E. D. Hirsch Jr.’s Core Knowledge Foundation. The other 10 used a variety of methods, but most fell under the definition of “balanced literacy,”
  • The study found that second graders who were taught to read using the Core Knowledge program scored significantly higher on reading comprehension tests than did those in the comparison schools. It also tested children on their social studies and science knowledge, and again found that the Core Knowledge pupils came out ahead.
  • The study found that for each of the three years, students in the Core Knowledge program had greater one-year gains on a brief reading test than their peers in the comparison schools.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Under the balanced literacy approach, which was used by seven of the comparison schools and remains the most popular method of teaching reading in the city’s schools, children are encouraged to develop a love of reading by choosing books that are of interest to them.
  • Reading nonfiction writing is the key component of the Core Knowledge curriculum, which is based on the theory that children raised reading storybooks will lack the necessary background and vocabulary to understand history and science texts. While the curriculum allows children to read fiction, it also calls on them to knowledgeably discuss weather patterns, the solar system, and how ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia compare.
  • The curriculum may have a particular appeal for city schools beginning to adopt the Common Core standards, which emphasize nonfiction reading and will go into effect in 2014.
  • anonymous on 23 Mar 12
     
    Though the Core Knowledge approach seems to have its merits when it comes to standardized test scores, there are certainly disadvantages. Students in the Core program are receiving higher scores on the test because they have been "trained" in that specific field. Now, as a junior, I have recently taken my first SAT. The SAT tests three areas of study (critical reading, writing, and mathematics). If my entire school experience had been based solely upon these three areas, I would be lacking much vital information. Sure, in this alternate universe, I might be a 2400 scoring genius debating between Yale, Brown, and Princeton, but does that mean I am at all prepared for such colleges? By these standards, we might as well just toss out History class (Not on standardized testing? Get rid of it!). I am not suggesting that preparation for standardized testing should be completely overlooked in school curriculum; I just think that it should not be the main objective. In the long run, reading "Ramona Quimby, Age 8" in 1st grade may not have made my scores as high as those reading Malcolm Gladwell's latest work, but it did something just as important. It, along with numerous other books of my choosing, cultivated my love for reading. This love for reading will stay with me long after standardized test scores even matter, and I might just get to that Gladwell book after all.
Javier E

Obama Ordered Wave of Cyberattacks Against Iran - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...cyberattacks-against-iran.html

cybersecurity US foreign policy computer infrastructure

shared by Javier E on 01 Jun 12 - Cached
  • It appears to be the first time the United States has repeatedly used cyberweapons to cripple another country’s infrastructure, achieving, with computer code, what until then could be accomplished only by bombing a country or sending in agents to plant explosives.
  • If Olympic Games failed, he told aides, there would be no time for sanctions and diplomacy with Iran to work. Israel could carry out a conventional military attack, prompting a conflict that could spread throughout the region.
  • Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, took reporters on a tour of the plant and described grand ambitions to install upward of 50,000 centrifuges. For a country with only one nuclear power reactor — whose fuel comes from Russia — to say that it needed fuel for its civilian nuclear program seemed dubious to Bush administration officials.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • Hawks in the Bush administration like Vice President Dick Cheney urged Mr. Bush to consider a military strike against the Iranian nuclear facilities before they could produce fuel suitable for a weapon. Several times, the administration reviewed military options and concluded that they would only further inflame a region already at war, and would have uncertain results.
  • The first stage in the effort was to develop a bit of computer code called a beacon that could be inserted into the computers, which were made by the German company Siemens and an Iranian manufacturer, to map their operations. The idea was to draw the equivalent of an electrical blueprint of the Natanz plant, to understand how the computers control the giant silvery centrifuges that spin at tremendous speeds. The connections were complex, and unless every circuit was understood, efforts to seize control of the centrifuges could fail.
  • The first attacks were small, and when the centrifuges began spinning out of control in 2008, the Iranians were mystified about the cause, according to intercepts that the United States later picked up.
  • The unusually tight collaboration with Israel was driven by two imperatives. Israel’s Unit 8200, a part of its military, had technical expertise that rivaled the N.S.A.’s, and the Israelis had deep intelligence about operations at Natanz that would be vital to making the cyberattack a success.
  • Soon the two countries had developed a complex worm that the Americans called “the bug.” But the bug needed to be tested. So, under enormous secrecy, the United States began building replicas of Iran’s P-1 centrifuges, an aging, unreliable design that Iran purchased from Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani nuclear chief who had begun selling fuel-making technology on the black market.
  • “This is the first attack of a major nature in which a cyberattack was used to effect physical destruction,” rather than just slow another computer, or hack into it to steal data.
  • It took months for the beacons to do their work and report home, complete with maps of the electronic directories of the controllers and what amounted to blueprints of how they were connected to the centrifuges deep underground. Then the N.S.A. and a secret Israeli unit respected by American intelligence officials for its cyberskills set to work developing the enormously complex computer worm that would become the attacker from within.
  • the code would lurk inside the plant for weeks, recording normal operations; when it attacked, it sent signals to the Natanz control room indicating that everything downstairs was operating normally. “This may have been the most brilliant part of the code,” one American official said.
  • the Iranians had grown so distrustful of their own instruments that they had assigned people to sit in the plant and radio back what they saw.
  • Mr. Bush urged him to preserve two classified programs, Olympic Games and the drone program in Pakistan. Mr. Obama took Mr. Bush’s advice.
  • Mr. Obama authorized the attacks to continue, and every few weeks — certainly after a major attack — he would get updates and authorize the next step. Sometimes it was a strike riskier and bolder than what had been tried previously. “From his first days in office, he was deep into every step in slowing the Iranian program — the diplomacy, the sanctions, every major decision,” a senior administration official said. “And it’s safe to say that whatever other activity might have been under way was no exception to that rule.”
  • In the summer of 2010, shortly after a new variant of the worm had been sent into Natanz, it became clear that the worm, which was never supposed to leave the Natanz machines, had broken free, like a zoo animal that found the keys to the cage.
  • An error in the code, they said, had led it to spread to an engineer’s computer when it was hooked up to the centrifuges. When the engineer left Natanz and connected the computer to the Internet, the American- and Israeli-made bug failed to recognize that its environment had changed. It began replicating itself all around the world.
  • “We think there was a modification done by the Israelis,” one of the briefers told the president, “and we don’t know if we were part of that activity.”
  • Mr. Obama, according to officials in the room, asked a series of questions, fearful that the code could do damage outside the plant. The answers came back in hedged terms. Mr. Biden fumed. “It’s got to be the Israelis,” he said. “They went too far.”
  • American cyberattacks are not limited to Iran, but the focus of attention, as one administration official put it, “has been overwhelmingly on one country.” There is no reason to believe that will remain the case for long. Some officials question why the same techniques have not been used more aggressively against North Korea. Others see chances to disrupt Chinese military plans, forces in Syria on the way to suppress the uprising there, and Qaeda operations around the world. “We’ve considered a lot more attacks than we have gone ahead with,” one former intelligence official said.
  • In fact, no country’s infrastructure is more dependent on computer systems, and thus more vulnerable to attack, than that of the United States. It is only a matter of time, most experts believe, before it becomes the target of the same kind of weapon that the Americans have used, secretly, against Iran.
Javier E

The Biggest Economy Killer - Our Government - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...omy-killer-our-government.html

economics US government policy tea party

shared by Javier E on 25 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • According to estimates by the Congressional Budget Office, the pullback in spending by Washington — it declined in 2013 for an extraordinary second year in a row — together with higher taxes will cause the economy to grow by 1.5 percentage points less this year than it would have if the deficit had remained constant
  • that’s the equivalent of 1.5 million fewer jobs.
  • the lack of a thoughtful budgeting process in Congress has shifted priorities in unfortunate ways.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • cuts to domestic programs resulted in a decline in spending on critically needed infrastructure from 0.22 percent of gross domestic product in 2010 to 0.14 percent in 2012, and it’s still falling.
  • Harder to quantify — but unquestionably occurring — is the effect of the uncertainty and government by crisis on both consumers and business. During the 2011 debt ceiling drama and again this fall, consumer confidence, as measured by surveys, plunged and is currently at a nine-month low.
  • One-half of the chief executives in the latest Business Roundtable CEO Economic Outlook survey “indicated that the ongoing disagreement in Washington over the 2014 budget and debt ceiling is having a negative impact on their plans for hiring additional employees over the next six months.”
  • Macroeconomic Advisers recently estimated that since the end of 2009, the uncertainty created by the series of crises has shaved 0.3 percentage points per year off economic growth and raised the unemployment rate in 2013 by 0.6 percentage points, the equivalent of 900,000 lost jobs.
  • the practice of making key fiscal decisions a few months at a time, under the repeated threat of draconian consequences, should come to an end. Both business and consumers are reasonably entitled to be able to plan.
  • Second, we need to bring some sanity to fiscal policy. No one can doubt the need for significant, long-term reform. The growth in spending for Medicare, Social Security and other “entitlement” programs brings the distasteful prospect of continuing cuts in all other programs, higher taxes, growing deficits or some combination of them all.
  • But more immediately, because of the influence of conservative groups like the Tea Party, spending by the federal government on these other critical domestic programs has fallen by 10 percent (before adjusting for inflation!) in just two years
  • Without Congressional action, the forced sequester cuts will have an even greater effect as they are fully implemented in this fiscal year. It’s time that policy makers recognize the damage they are doing to the economy with their short-term thinking and imprudent fiscal decisions.
qkirkpatrick

UMass Bans Iranian Nationals From Science Classes, Stirs Backlash - NBC News.com - 0 views

www.nbcnews.com/...classes-stirs-backlash-n307806

iran nuclear politics policy obama

shared by qkirkpatrick on 18 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • University of Massachusetts decision this month to stop admitting Iranian nationals to certain engineering and science programs at its Amherst campus has stirred charges of discrimination and a backlash among students
  • dispute stems from the United States' efforts to prevent the Iranian government from developing a nuclear weapon, which prompted a 2012 law that excludes Iranian nationals from studying in America if they planned to work in nuclear or energy fields.
  • But last week, the University of Massachusetts said that compliance with the government sanctions was getting increasingly difficult, and that it would simply bar all Iranian nationals from enrolling in certain graduate programs in its College of Engineering and College of Natural Sciences.
  • qkirkpatrick on 18 Feb 15
     
    Iranian Students barred from UMA science and engineering programs due to threat of Iranian development of nuclear weapons
Javier E

China Is Said to Use Powerful New Weapon to Censor Internet - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...weapon-to-censor-internet.html

china internet cybersecurity surveillance weapon

shared by Javier E on 11 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • The Great Cannon, the researchers said in a report published on Friday, allows China to intercept foreign web traffic as it flows to Chinese websites, inject malicious code and repurpose the traffic as Beijing sees fit.
  • With a few tweaks, the Great Cannon could be used to spy on anyone who happens to fetch content hosted on a Chinese computer, even by visiting a non-Chinese website that contains Chinese advertising content.
  • “The operational deployment of the Great Cannon represents a significant escalation in state-level information control,” the researchers said in their report. It is, they said, “the normalization of widespread and public use of an attack tool to enforce censorship.”
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • The device has the ability not only to snoop on Internet traffic but also to alter the traffic and direct it — on a giant scale — to any website, in what is called a “man in the middle attack.”
  • The American system, according to the documents, which were published by The Intercept, can deploy a system of programs that can intercept web traffic on a mass scale and redirect it to a site of their choosing. The N.S.A. and its partners appear to use the programs for targeted surveillance, whereas China appears to use the Great Cannon for an aggressive form of censorship.
  • The similarities of the programs may put American officials on awkward footing, the researchers argue in their report. “This precedent will make it difficult for Western governments to credibly complain about others utilizing similar techniques,” they write.
  • the Chinese program illustrates how far officials in Beijing are willing to go to censor Internet content they deem hostile. “This is just one part of President Xi Jinping’s push to gain tighter control over the Internet and remove any challenges to the party,
  • Beijing continues to increase its censorship efforts under its State Internet Information Office, an office created under Mr. Xi to gain tighter control over the Internet within the country and to clamp down on online activism. In a series of recent statements, Lu Wei, China’s Internet czar, has called on the international community to respect China’s Internet policies.
  • “The position of the Chinese government is that efforts to serve what it views as hostile content inside China’s borders is a hostile and provocative act that is a threat to its regime stability and ultimately its national security.”
  • by sweeping up Baidu’s would-be visitors in its attacks, researchers and foreign policy experts say, Beijing could harm the company’s reputation and market share overseas.
  • “Because both the Great Cannon and Great Firewall are operating on the same physical link, we believe they are both being run under the same authority,
  • researchers’ fear is that the state could use its new weapon to attack Internet users, particularly dissidents, without their knowledge. If they make a single request to a server inside China or even visit a non-Chinese website that contains an ad from a Chinese server, the Great Cannon could infect their web communications and those of everyone they communicate with and spy on them.
  • Ultimately, researchers say, the only way for Internet users and companies to protect themselves will be to encrypt their Internet traffic so that it cannot be intercepted and diverted as it travels to its intended target.“Put bluntly,” the researchers said, “unprotected traffic is not just an opportunity for espionage but a potential attack vector.”
Javier E

It Takes a Party - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...it-takes-a-party.html

election 2016 parties position policies partisan polarization GOP Democratic party

shared by Javier E on 14 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • there has never been a time in American history when the alleged personal traits of candidates mattered less. As we head into 2016, each party is quite unified on major policy issues — and these unified positions are very far from each other. The huge, substantive gulf between the parties will be reflected in the policy positions of whomever they nominate, and will almost surely be reflected in the actual policies adopted by whoever wins.
  • any Democrat would, if elected, seek to maintain the basic U.S. social insurance programs — Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid — in essentially their current form, while also preserving and extending the Affordable Care Act. Any Republican would seek to destroy Obamacare, make deep cuts in Medicaid, and probably try to convert Medicare into a voucher system.
  • Any Democrat would retain the tax hikes on high-income Americans that went into effect in 2013, and possibly seek more. Any Republican would try to cut taxes on the wealthy — House Republicans plan to vote next week to repeal the estate tax — while slashing programs that aid low-income families.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Any Democrat would try to preserve the 2010 financial reform, which has recently been looking much more effective than critics suggested. Any Republican would seek to roll it back, eliminating both consumer protection and the extra regulation applied to large, “systemically important” financial institutions.
  • And any Democrat would try to move forward on climate policy, through executive action if necessary, while any Republican — whether or not he is an outright climate-science denialist — would block efforts to limit greenhouse gas emissions.
  • How did the parties get this far apart? Political scientists suggest that it has a lot to do with income inequality. As the wealthy grow richer compared with everyone else, their policy preferences have moved to the right — and they have pulled the Republican Party ever further in their direction. Meanwhile, the influence of big money on Democrats has at least eroded a bit, now that Wall Street, furious over regulations and modest tax hikes, has deserted the party en masse. The result is a level of political polarization not seen since the Civil War.
jongardner04

China must stop enabling North Korea's nuclear program - LA Times - 0 views

www.latimes.com/...orth-korea-20160305-story.html

china north korea

shared by jongardner04 on 07 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Unlike Iran, North Korea has been impervious to international efforts to force it to forswear the use of nuclear weapons. But new sanctions approved by the United Nations Security Council last week offer at least the possibility of altering North Korea's behavior. Much will depend on whether China, North Korea's patron, enabler and largest trading partner, follows the letter and spirit of the resolution it supported.
  • The measure was prompted by North Korea's test in January of what it characterized as a hydrogen bomb, as well as repeated missile test launches. But North Korean defiance of the international community stretches back years. Neither previous sanctions nor diplomacy have induced the reclusive regime in Pyongyang to end its nuclear program.
  • But even as it strengthens sanctions, the resolution leaves their enforcement to U.N. members. As a practical matter, that means North Korea will feel the pressure only if China takes its responsibilities seriously, rather than circumventing the sanctions on the pretext of avoiding “adverse humanitarian consequences.”
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Beijing must recognize that anxiety about North Korea's intentions threatens a nuclear arms race not just on the Korean peninsula but in the entire region. It also should realize that if it doesn't put meaningful pressure on North Korea, the U.S. may go forward with a high-altitude missile defense system in South Korea that China sees as a threat to its own arsenal. However justified it might be, a strengthening of South Korea's defenses would make it even less likely that there would be another round of negotiations involving the two Koreas, the U.S. China, Russia and Japan. The last version of such talks collapsed in 2009.
johnsonma23

U.S. Prods China on North Korea, Saying Soft Approach Has Failed - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...to-north-korea-has-failed.html

new york times US china

shared by johnsonma23 on 08 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • U.S. Prods China on North Korea, Saying Soft Approach Has Failed
  • The Obama administration warned China on Thursday that its approach to reining in North Korea had “not worked” and said the time had come to end “business as usual” with the country Beijing has supported for the past six decades.
  • China’s approach to influencing North Korea — issuing warnings while also trying to warm long-strained relations — had proved a failure.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • “China had a particular approach that it wanted to make, and we agreed and respected to give them space to be able to implement that,
  • But today in my conversation with the Chinese I made it very clear: That has not worked and we cannot continue business as usual.”
  • Beijing has only agreed to impose bans on weapons shipments to the North and sanctions on specific companies and individuals linked to the nuclear program,
  • Kerry did not specify the sanctions that he wanted China to agree to, but two officials familiar with the discussions between the United States and its Security Council partners say the United States is drafting a resolution that envisions far more severe sanctions
  • The first would be a ban on North Korean ships in ports around the world
  • But the scope of that ban is unclear;
  • exceptions for food and humanitarian goods
  • A second set of sanctions under consideration is a cut-off of North Korean banking relationships, akin to the restrictions placed on Iran in the successful effort to drive it to the negotiation table on its nuclear program.
  • During the George W. Bush administration, the United States shut down transactions at one particular institution,
  • The most effective step against North Korea, most experts believe, would be the one that the Chinese most oppose: a restriction or cut-off of oil exports to the North.
  • South Korean and American officials said there was also renewed discussion of deploying an advanced missile defense system
  • Taken together, those steps amount to what one American official called “a big wish list.” And they all reflect the reality of economic interdependence, which makes it hard for the South Koreans, or the United States, to be too confrontational with China.
  • North Korea then threatened to attack the loudspeakers, which it said sullied the “dignity of our supreme leadership,” and put its military on what it called a “semi-war” footing,
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Trump administration implements new restrictions on refugee program as ban comes to an ... - 0 views

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Terrorism US refugee

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  • The Trump administration resumed the U.S. refugee program Tuesday after a 120-day ban, but there will be severe new restrictions on admissions going forward. After the four-month review, the administration enhanced vetting for all refugee applicants and determined that an additional 90-day review was needed for 11 countries.
  • During the ban, the Departments of State and Homeland Security, in consultation with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), were tasked with determining whether additional security procedures identified during the review process were sufficient to ensure the security and welfare of the United States and whether the program should be reinstated. Those 11 nationalities were deemed to have a higher risk to the U.S. by the interagency review. Those countries are not being identified because of "law enforcement sensitivities," according to a senior DHS official.
  • At the end of January, one week into President Donald Trump's term, he signed an executive order banning all citizens from seven Muslim-majority countries for 90 days, indefinitely banning all Syrian refugees and stopping all refugee admissions for 120 days.
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