Via Interrete – “Our world is a bizarre and awesome place – but some things are just hard to believe! Here are 10 world geographical facts that you might find surprising or interesting“
Many scholars seek a solemn, serious life, like monks determined to eradicate frivolity. Benedict Anderson favored jokes, digressions, and sarcasm... Hard Core Irony
“I was nonplussed by this awful reaction. I had borrowed certain traits, gestures, tricks of speech and various mannerisms from members of the family, but had fixed them on to characters with very different careers and past lives.” LitHub
Sorry, ladies and lads, but your good looks aren't protected by the legal system: The Secret Lives Of Right Wing Professors
THE SCIENCE IS SETTLED: ‘Dilbert’ Creator Scott Adams to Bill Maher: Donald Trump Will Win Election In A Landslide
Peter Thiel (Co-founder, PayPal), Commencement Address at Hamilton College (May 22, 2016)
Thank you so much for the kind introduction. It’s a tremendous honor to be here.
Like
most graduation speakers my main qualification would seem to be that I
am one of the few people who are even more clueless about what is going
on in your lives than your parents and your professors.
Most
of you are about 21 or 22 years old, you’re about to begin working. I
haven’t worked for anybody for 21 years. But if I try to give a reason
for why it makes sense for me to speak here today I would say it’s
because thinking about the future is what I do for a living. And this is
a commencement. It’s a new beginning. As a technology investor, I
invest in new beginnings. I believe in what hasn’t yet been seen or been
done.
This
is not what I set out to do when I began my career. When I was sitting
where you are, back in 1989, I would’ve told you that I wanted to be a
lawyer. I didn’t really know what lawyers do all day, but I knew they
first had to go to law school, and school was familiar to me.
Peter Thiel may not have liked being a lawyer, but he’s willing to pay for them — as long as they’re suing Gawker. [Law and More]
There has been much coverage of the revelation that Peter Thiel has funded Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker behind the scenes, especially following the Silicon Valley figure’sacknowledgment that he views taking down the notoriously scurrilous publisher as a public service (“one of my greater philanthropic things that I’ve done”) and has sought out and funded other litigants besides Hogan in order to make that happen. As I said in my explainer the other day, the decay of age-old rules against outsider funding of litigation (“champerty and maintenance”) is a broader trend that has left many sectors of society more exposed to the dangers of litigation, with the press just the latest.
I’m quoted by Alison Frankel in her Reuters column on this (“Our ancestors were not complete fools,” I say) and byTimothy Lee at Vox (“‘Some people following the Thiel story appear to be surprised that these weapons can be used by rich and powerful people in order to get their way,’ Olson tells me.”;also see Ezra Klein’s piece). And Lee recounts a recent episode that passed with little notice at the time ... Gawking Fairness
Researcher Hacks Symantec's AV Via Email Gov Info Security
Anti-virus
vendors must dread hearing from Tavis Ormandy. The Google Project Zero
researcher has been hunting bug vulnerabilities in anti-virus products for at
least a year, unearthing holes in the very software that is supposed to protect
companies. Ormandy's target this time was Symantec. He found several remote
code execution vulnerabilities, including one in the core scanning engine used
in all Symantec and Norton-branded products. The problem is so severe that even
a single email engineered to exploit the flaw could compromise a computer,
depending on the platform. "Just receiving an email is enough, no need to
open or read it (even webmail, so long as the tab is open)," Ormandy wrote
on Twitter. Symantec said Monday in an advisory that it had issued a fix for the
flaw - designated CVE-2016-2208 - through its LiveUpdate service. The
up-to-date version of its anti-virus engine is "20151.1.1.4."
"Who Knew Ruth Bader Ginsburg's Son Is Revolutionizing World Music?" Ronald Litke of The Forward has this report.
"Who Knew Ruth Bader Ginsburg's Son Is Revolutionizing World Music?" Ronald Litke of The Forward has this report.
How
Islamic State militants attempt to outwit spies The
Christian Science Monitor
Islamic
State supporters have published a series of manuals to help the militants and
their followers use smartphone encryption and other technologies to hide from
government spy agencies. Though the militant group has previously released guides
for using encrypted mobile apps, the new documents suggest that the terrorist
organization is becoming increasingly sophisticated when it comes to the use of
digital security. The Horizon Electronic Foundation, a group claiming Islamic
State links, began distributing five Arabic-language manuals via encrypted
channels on the messaging service Telegram last month. Security analysts say
the releases come with the group increasingly worried about the threat of
surveillance from Western intelligence agencies.
Washington Post, Republicans Detail Case Against IRS Chief in Hearing Democrats Call a Sham:
ISPs around
the world are being attacked by self-replicating malware that can take complete
control of widely used wireless networking equipment, according to reports from
customers and a security researcher who is following the ongoing campaign. San
Jose, California-based Ubiquiti Networks confirmed on Friday that attackers are
actively targeting a flaw in AirOS, the Linux-based firmware that runs the wireless
routers, access points, and other gear sold by the company. The vulnerability,
which allows attackers to gain access to the devices over HTTP and HTTPS
connections without authenticating themselves, was patched last July, but the
fix wasn't widely installed. Many customers claimed they never received
notification of the threat.
CIA Interventions, Tariff Changes, and Trade During the Cold War: Bruno Ćorić tests the robustness of results of an American Economic Review article, using a different data set, and finds that increases in imports from the United States can be explained by changes in tariffs that are unrelated to CIA interventions.
Yesterday, Justice Don R. Willett delivered the commencement address at the Texas Tech University School of Law: You can view the video on YouTube at this link.
Here in the
middle of the Negev Desert, a cyber-city is rising to cement Israel’s place as
a major digital power. The new development, an outcropping of glass and steel,
will concentrate some of the country’s top talent from the military, academia
and business in an area of just a few square miles. No other country is so
purposefully integrating its private, scholarly, government and military cyber-expertise.
Israel is a nation of 8 million people with little in the way of natural
resources. But in global private investment into cybersecurity firms, it is
second only to the United States, with half a billion dollars flowing to the
sector annually. Israel has not only vowed to repel the thousands of daily hack
attacks against targets as diverse as the electric grid and ATMs, but it has
also promised to build its commercial cybersector into an economic powerhouse.
CIA Interventions, Tariff Changes, and Trade During the Cold War: Bruno Ćorić tests the robustness of results of an American Economic Review article, using a different data set, and finds that increases in imports from the United States can be explained by changes in tariffs that are unrelated to CIA interventions.
Yesterday, Justice Don R. Willett delivered the commencement address at the Texas Tech University School of Law: You can view the video on YouTube at this link.
House
Republicans on Tuesday reprised their probe into four-year-old missteps
by the Internal Revenue Service, making a detailed case why
Commissioner John Koskinen should be impeached in a colorful hearing
that underscored conservatives’ suspicion of the agency.