Month: August 2019

Agribusiness Climate Sabotage

But if we want to have a meaningful impact on climate change we will have to confront agribusiness, which spends more on lobbying in the United States than even defense lobbyists. A good first step in the United States would be to break up agribusiness giants that have virtual monopolies in regional seed, chemical, and meat markets. Several Democratic Party presidential candidates have called for such anti-trust action, such as rolling back the recent takeover of Monsanto by Bayer. Internationally, we need governments to sanction the kind of arson going on in the Amazon with punitive measures commensurate with the global threat it poses to humanity.

Privacy Fundamentalism

a takedown of (one of the many) nonsense NYT articles on privacy.

the privacy debate needs to be reset around these 3 assumptions:

  1. Accept that privacy online entails trade-offs; the corollary is that an absolutist approach to privacy is a surefire way to get policy wrong.
  2. Keep in mind that the widespread creation and spread of data is inherent to computers and the Internet, and that these qualities have positive as well as negative implications; be wary of what good ideas and positive outcomes are extinguished in the pursuit to stomp out the negative ones.
  3. Focus policy on the physical and digital divide. Our behavior online is one thing: we both benefit from the spread of data and should in turn be more wary of those implications. Making what is offline online is quite another.

Intel Secure Enclave Attack

Our SGX-ROP attack uses new TSX-based memory-disclosure primitive and a write-anything-anywhere primitive to construct a code-reuse attack from within an enclave which is then inadvertently executed by the host application. With SGX-ROP, we bypass ASLR, stack canaries, and address sanitizer. We demonstrate that instead of protecting users from harm, SGX currently poses a security threat, facilitating so-called super-malware with ready-to-hit exploits.

Air Conditioning heating

The warmer it gets, the more we use air conditioning. The more we use air conditioning, the warmer it gets. Is there any way out of this trap? In the mid-1980s, Geneva, which has a warmer climate than much of the US, the local government banned the installation of air conditioning except by special permission. This approach is relatively common across Switzerland and, as a result, air conditioning accounts for less than 2% of all electricity used. The Swiss don’t appear to miss air conditioning too much – its absence is rarely discussed, and they have largely learned to do without.

Chrome Privacy Sandbox

we are announcing a new initiative to develop a set of open standards to fundamentally enhance privacy on the web. We’re calling this a Privacy Sandbox. we will work with the web community to develop new standards that advance privacy, while continuing to support free access to content. Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve started sharing our preliminary ideas for a Privacy Sandbox – a secure environment for personalization that also protects user privacy. Some ideas include new approaches to ensure that ads continue to be relevant for users, but user data shared with websites and advertisers would be minimized by anonymously aggregating user information, and keeping much more user information on-device only. Our goal is to create a set of standards that is more consistent with users’ expectations of privacy.

Don’t Fear The Simulators

don’t worry if we happen to live in a simulation.

That means it knows these experiments are going to happen. If it cares about the results, it can fake them. Assuming for some reason that it made a mistake in designing the cosmic background radiation (why are we assuming this, again?), it can correct that mistake now, or cause the experimental apparatus to report the wrong data, or do one of a million other things that would prevent us from learning we are in a simulation. The Times’ argument requires that simulators are so powerful that they can create entire universes, so on-top-of-things that they will know the moment we figure out their game – but also so incompetent that they can’t react to a warning published several years in advance in America’s largest newspaper. There’s another argument for the same conclusion: the premises of the simulation argument suggest this isn’t the simulators’ first rodeo. Each simulator civilization must simulate 1000s or millions of universes. Presumably we’re not the first to think of checking the cosmic background radiation. Do you think the simulators just destroy all of them when they reach radio-wave-technology, and never think about fixing the background radiation mismatch or adding in some fail-safe to make sure the experiments return the wrong results?

Skeleton Lake

A new study, dated and analyzed the DNA from the bones of 37 individuals found at Roopkund. The majority of the deceased indeed died 1000 or so years ago, but not simultaneously. And a few died much more recently, likely in the early 1800s. Stranger still, the skeletons’ genetic makeup is more typical of Mediterranean heritage than South Asian.

“It may be even more of a mystery than before. It was unbelievable, because the type of ancestry we find in 33% of the individuals is so unusual for this part of the world.”

Fiaschetteria Pistoia

Bugiani serves a traditional 3-course Tuscan meal in the cozy 11th street location. Among the antipasti, the pappa col pomodoro—a bread and tomato “soup” with the pleasingly spongy consistency of porridge or haggis—is decidedly not photogenic but still worth ordering. Also enticing: sformatino di zucchine (a buttery, slightly nutty zucchini flan). The house-made pasta fresca, though, is the star attraction. Diners can watch the restorative sight of dough unfurling from the pasta machine at the back of the restaurant. There’s a smaller selection of third course secondi options, rounded off a dessert menu of Italian classics (tiramisu, mousse al cioccolato, etc.), and, of course, espresso.

Europa mission

NASA’s Europa Clipper mission will conduct detailed reconnaissance of Jupiter’s moon Europa to see whether the icy moon could harbor conditions suitable for life. The mission will carry a highly capable, radiation-tolerant spacecraft that will perform repeated close flybys of the icy moon from a long, looping orbit around Jupiter. The payload of selected science instruments includes cameras and spectrometers to produce high-resolution images of Europa’s surface and determine its composition. An ice penetrating radar will determine the thickness of the moon’s icy shell and search for subsurface lakes similar to those beneath Antarctica. The mission also will carry a magnetometer to measure strength and direction of the moon’s magnetic field, which will allow scientists to determine the depth and salinity of its ocean.