Being poor changes your thinking about everything
Very interesting research into poverty and scarcity, in the Washington Post:
The scarcity trap captures this notion we see again and again in many domains. When people have very little, they undertake behaviors that maintain or reinforce their future disadvantage. If you have very little, you often behave in such a way so that you’ll have little in the future. In economics, people talk about the poverty trap. We’re generalizing that, saying this happens a lot, and we’ve experienced it.
(tags: poor poverty society economics scarcity washington-post)
Good SSL for your website is absurdly difficult in practice
Yet again, security software fails on packaging and UI. via Tony Finch
Former NSA and CIA director says terrorists love using Gmail
At one point, Hayden expressed a distaste for online anonymity, saying “The problem I have with the Internet is that it’s anonymous.” But he noted, there is a struggle over that issue even inside government. The issue came to a head during the Arab Spring movement when the State Department was funding technology [presumably Tor?] to protect the anonymity of activists so governments could not track down or repress their voices. “We have a very difficult time with this,” Hayden said. He then asked, “is our vision of the World Wide Web the global digital commons — at this point you should see butterflies flying here and soft background meadow-like music — or a global free fire zone?” Given that Hayden also compared the Internet to the wild west and Somalia, Hayden clearly leans toward the “global free fire zone” vision of the Internet.
well, that’s a good analogy for where we’re going — a global free-fire zone.(tags: gmail cia nsa surveillance michael-hayden security snooping law tor arab-spring)