This would seem to have some bearing in this: How identity politics drove the world mad.
As Mencken said, “There is no idea so stupid that you can't find a professor who will believe it.” Or, as George Orwell put it, “Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.”
Gov Info Security
September 16, 2019
As cybercriminals adopt new methods to steal and manipulate victims' identities, the U.S. financial services industry needs to rethink how to protect customers' information using emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, security experts testified at a recent U.S. House committee hearing. The U.S. House Financial Services Committee held the hearing Thursday to learn more about how adopting new technologies can help fight ID theft - and how threat actors are already using these same technologies to further expand their crimes. Security experts told the committee that financial services companies, as well as government agencies, need to adopt AI to counter new threats to identity such as "deep fakes," which uses advanced imaging technology and machine learning to convincingly superimpose video images, and "synthetic identities," where cybercriminals use stolen information to attempt to mimic a person to carry out identify-related frauds. "Artificial intelligence is only enhancing cybercriminal's arsenal. AI can be used more quickly to find vulnerabilities in a bank's software and used to impersonate someone's voice or face in a phishing scam," says Rep. Bill Foster, D-Ill., who chaired the hearing
Nextgov
September 20, 2019
When taxpayers use online systems, the IRS really wants to make sure the people accessing information are who they say they are. The agency has implemented a number of authentication tools over the years—with varying degrees of success—and is now looking at behavioral analytics as an option. The IRS announced a sole-source contract to BioCatch for a proof-of-concept that would incorporate behavioral analytics for the agency’s eAuthentication system. BioCatch’s technology tracks how a user interacts with their device and the agency’s apps to continually verify their identity. “BioCatch collects behavioral metrics—i.e., left/right handedness, pressure—while a user is interacting with eAuth without impacting user experience and establishes a profile for the user,” IRS contracting officers wrote in the statement of work. “Once this profile is established, this data is used to detect fraud on subsequent login attempts and to prevent account takeover during the user’s session.”
Rise Of The Anti-Meritocracy
“An attack on meritocracy is invariably an attack on higher education, where meritocrats get sorted and credentialed. So the turn against meritocracy prompts big questions. Has meritocracy in fact failed?” – Chronicle of Higher Education
How Ann Patchett Threw Her Entire Book Away (Parts Of It A Few Times) Before Getting To The Right Voice
Patchett, author of Bel Canto and State of Wonder (and the new The Dutch House): “It was a funny thing to throw a book out. People seemed much more upset about it than I was. Some people said, It must be like a death! It was nothing like a death. It was like burning a cake. You know that feeling? Oh, hell, I burned the cake. Then you cut the cake open and eat the little pieces in the middle that aren’t completely ruined, then you bake another cake.” – LitHub
The New York Times – “The F.B.I. has used secret subpoenas to obtain personal data from far more companies than previously disclosed, newly released documents show. The requests, which the F.B.I. says are critical to its counterterrorism efforts, have raised privacy concerns for years but have been associated mainly with tech companies
The Tools A Well-Educated Person Needs
For Aristotle, the virtues of character are not enough by themselves to work the magic of illumination that comes with exiting Plato’s cave. We also need the intellectual virtues: practical wisdom (phronêsis) and theoretical wisdom (sophia) – the latter being what philosophia is the love of. – Aeon
Morrison’s pep talk to public servants
Shannon Jenkins, writing in The Mandarin, has provided a summary, including extensive quotes, of Morrison’s pep talk to public servants last Monday. Unsurprisingly its style is bland, but that style fits with Morrison’s message that the public service is there to translate ministers’ wishes into outcomes, no matter how wacky, irresponsible, or guided by interest groups those wishes may be. Policy advice gets little mention and there is nothing about the traditional role of the public service in warning of impending policy challenges and evaluating and analysing existing policies and ministers’ proposals.
His approach is a long way from that taken by governments with agendas for reform, who see policy development as a cooperative exercise bringing together the expertise, knowledge and objectivity of public servants and the political knowledge and abilities of ministers. Writing in Pearls and Irritations, former public service head Mike Keating reminds us of the contribution the public service can make to developing and implementing good public policy, while remaining non-partisan. “According to Scott Morrison the role of the public service is limited to implementing government policy, which may help explain the thinness of his Government’s policy agenda”.
Tracking Global Corporate Tax Avoidance Big Picture
Tracking Global Corporate Tax Avoidance Big Picture
… Prosperity Breeds Idiots | Francis X. Maier | First Things
As a gulag survivor, Solzhenitsyn had a barely disguised disgust for Western elites with little experience of political murder and repression. Nor could he abide the legion of fools who seemed fascinated, from a secure and prosperous distance, with socialist thought. In his foreword to The Socialist Phenomenon—an extraordinary book by his friend Igor Shafarevich—Solzhenitsyn noted “the mist of irrationality that surrounds socialism,” and stressed that
The doctrines of socialism seethe with contradictions, its theories are at constant odds with its practice, yet due to a powerful instinct, [these contradictions] do not in the least hinder the unending propaganda of socialism. Indeed no precise, distinct socialism even exists; instead there is only a vague, rosy notion of something noble and good, of equality, of communal ownership, and justice . . .
First Arrest Made In Major Old Masters Forgery Ring Case
“There has at last been an arrest in ahigh-profile string of suspected Old Master forgeries uncovered in 2016. An Italian painter, Lino Frongia, 61, was taken into custody in northern Italy earlier this week, while an arrest warrant has been issued for French art dealer and collector Giulano Ruffini, who sold the works in question.” – Artnet
Spies in Australia – crazier than a Le Carré novel
Veteran journalist and thorn in the side of successive governments Brian Toohey has appeared on Late Night Live, talking about his decades of uncovering the operations of Australia’s security services. It’s a story about government assaults on our liberties in the name in security, about our governments’ misplaced trust in UK and US intelligence, about the disgraceful behaviour of the British when they dropped atomic bombs on Australia, about probable CIA involvement in the Whitlam downfall, and about secrecy as a means to hide government corruption and incompetence. Plus ça change. It’s also a story of bungling, idiocy, concocted threats, personal vendettas and affairs. The interview is 50 minutes; there’s more in Toohey’s book Secret: The Making of Australia’s Security State.
Capitalism cannot live on rationality alone
Writing for the Institute for New Economic Thinking, Lynn Parramore reviews Supritha Rajan’s A Tale of Two Capitalisms, a study of the intellectual history of capitalism. The sacrificial rites of capitalism we don’t talk about. Although the essential creed of capitalism is about rational self-interest, it has always contained a “submerged narrative” of communal values and notions of magic, ritual and sacrifice. Commenting on Rajan’s work, she writes:
The modern capitalist system, she [Rajan] argues, can’t do without the ethics of communality, interdependence, and reciprocity that are officially associated with pre-modern, pre-capitalist societies. Market and non-market values always operate right alongside one another.
The burden of inequality
Frank Stilwell, Professor in Political Economy at the University of Sydney, speaks with Phillip Adams on Late Night Live about the corrosive effects of inequality– specifically the inequality of wealth that accumulates after years of inequality in income. More people are living off the proceeds of financial wealth rather than their own effort. The consequences of widening inequality include “higher crime, higher rates of mental disorders, reduced health and wellbeing, worse educational outcomes, more division, and higher levels of corruption”. Contrary to right-wing rhetoric, research confirms that higher inequality leads to lower productivity: he explains the mechanisms of this dismal economic outcome. (20 minutes)
It's ace that UK.gov 'in 2030 will be joined up, trusted and responsive' – but what about now?
It's ace that UK.gov 'in 2030 will be joined up, trusted and responsive' – but what about now?
