{ As an ex-presidential consultant, a former adviser to the World Bank, a financial researcher for the United Nations and a professor in the US, Artur Baptista da Silva’s outspoken attacks on Portugal’s austerity cuts made the bespectacled 61-year-old one of the country’s leading media pundits last year. The only problem was that Mr Baptista da Silva is none of the above. He turned out to be a convicted forger with fake credentials and, following his spectacular hoodwinking of Portuguese society, he could soon face fraud charges. | The Independent | full story }

{ 5 hurt in accidental shootings at 3 U.S. gun shows }

Google agrees. “Along with many in the industry, we feel passwords and simple bearer tokens such as cookies are no longer sufficient to keep users safe,” Grosse and Upadhyay write in their paper.
Thus, they’re experimenting with new ways to replace the password, including a tiny Yubico cryptographic card that — when slid into a USB (Universal Serial Bus) reader — can automatically log a web surfer into Google. They’ve had to modify Google’s web browser to work with these cards, but there’s no software download and once the browser support is there, they’re easy to use. You log into the website, plug in the USB stick and then register it with a single mouse click.

They see a future where you authenticate one device — your smartphone or something like a Yubico key — and then use that almost like a car key, to fire up your web mail and online accounts.

In the future, they’d like things to get even easier, perhaps connecting to the computer via wireless technology.

{ Wired | Continue reading }

photo { Yasuhiro Ishimoto, Children at Halloween, Chicago, 1952 }

{ Walter Bond, NIO’s “Director of Militant Direct Action,” is serving a federal sentence for torching a restaurant that served foie gras. He’s written that the world would be better off if “non-Vegans were disposed of.” | Gawker | full story }

A massive effort to uncover genes involved in depression has largely failed. By combing through the DNA of 34,549 volunteers, an international team of 86 scientists hoped to uncover genetic influences that affect a person’s vulnerability to depression. But the analysis turned up nothing.

The results are the latest in a string of large studies that have failed to pinpoint genetic culprits of depression. […] Depression seems to run in families, leading scientists to think that certain genes are partially behind the disorder. But so far, studies on people diagnosed with depression have failed to reveal these genes.

{ ScienceNews | Continue reading }

People are often broken into two groups when doing hypnosis research. High hypnotizable people and non-hypnozable people. As most people have heard, hypnosis does not work on everybody. But why is that? Research shows that high hypnotizable people actually have structural differences in their brains.

{ Quora | Continue reading }

{ Cleaning lady stole a train in Sweden, crashed into house }

Researchers have found that placebo treatments—interventions with no active drug ingredients—can stimulate real physiological responses, from changes in heart rate and blood pressure to chemical activity in the brain, in cases involving pain, depression, anxiety, fatigue, and even some symptoms of Parkinson’s.

The challenge now, says Kaptchuk, is to uncover the mechanisms behind these physiological responses—what is happening in our bodies, in our brains, in the method of placebo delivery (pill or needle, for example), even in the room where placebo treatments are administered (are the physical surroundings calming? is the doctor caring or curt?). The placebo effect is actually many effects woven together—some stronger than others—and that’s what Kaptchuk hopes his “pill versus needle” study shows. The experiment, among the first to tease apart the components of placebo response, shows that the methods of placebo administration are as important as the administration itself, he explains. It’s valuable insight for any caregiver: patients’ perceptions matter, and the ways physicians frame perceptions can have significant effects on their patients’ health. […]

What if he simply told people they were taking placebos? The question ultimately inspired a pilot study, published by the peer-reviewed science and medicine journal PLOS ONE in 2010, that yielded his most famous findings to date. His team again compared two groups of IBS sufferers. One group received no treatment. The other patients were told they’d be taking fake, inert drugs (delivered in bottles labeled “placebo pills”) and told also that placebos often have healing effects.

The study’s results shocked the investigators themselves: even patients who knew they were taking placebos described real improvement, reporting twice as much symptom relief as the no-treatment group. That’s a difference so significant, says Kaptchuk, it’s comparable to the improvement seen in trials for the best real IBS drugs.

{ Harvard Magazine | Continue reading }

photo { Erwin Blumenfeld, Nude Light,Shadow, New York, 1952 }

I purchased 75 cheap laptop computers and, with trusted help, installed invisible keystroke logging software on all of them—the kind that calls home (to me) and disgorges the text files. It also, on command, turns on, and off, the microphone and camera—and sends these files on command. I had the computers re-packaged as if new. I began giving these away as presents to select people—government employees, police officers, Cabinet Minister’s assistants, girlfriends of powerful men, boyfriends of powerful women. I hired four trusted people full time to monitor the text files and provide myself with the subsequent passwords for everyone’s e-mail, Facebook, private message boards, and other passworded accounts. The keystroke monitoring continued after password collection, in order to document text input that would later be deleted. So nothing was missed.

I next collected my human resources for the complex social engineering I would have to do. I arranged with 23 women and six men to be my operatives. Eight of the women were so accomplished that they ended up living with me. It was amazingly more efficient and they were easily convinced to check up on each other. One was so accomplished (Marcia) that she became a double agent and nearly got me killed.

{ John McAfee/Ars Technica | Continue reading | Thanks Tim }

Infiniti Poker, like several other new online gambling sites, plans to accept Bitcoin when it launches later this month. […]

Developed in 2009 by a mysterious programmer known as Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoins behave much like any currency. Their value—currently about $13 per Bitcoin—is determined by demand. Transactions are handled through a decentralized peer-to-peer network similar to BitTorrent, the protocol for sharing films and music over the Internet. An assortment of merchants around the globe accept Bitcoin; it’s also the currency used on online black markets such as Silk Road, which processes an estimated $1.2 million a month in sales of illegal drugs, according to Nicolas Christin, the associate director of Carnegie Mellon’s Information Networking Institute.

Individuals can buy and sell Bitcoins using global currencies through such online exchanges as Mt. Gox. There’s even a service facilitated by BitInstant, a payment-processing company, that allows you to purchase the virtual currency for cash at 700,000 U.S. locations, including participating Wal-Mart, Duane Reade, and 7-Eleven stores. Once users have Bitcoins, they store them on their computers or mobile devices in files known as Bitcoin wallets or in cloud-based “e-wallets.”

Hajduk says Infiniti Poker will accept credit cards, wire transfers, and other payment options, but players in the U.S. will be able to play only using Bitcoins. He originally included the currency not to get around U.S. law but to reduce the time it takes to cash players out. Bank transactions can take up to 12 weeks; players who use Bitcoin can get a payout in a matter of hours, he says.

{ Businessweek | Continue reading }

Guns should know where they are and if another gun is nearby. Global positioning systems can meet most of the need, refining a gun’s location to the building level, even within buildings. Control of the gun would remain in the hand of the person carrying it, but the ability to fire multiple shots in crowded areas or when no other guns are present would be limited by software that understands where the gun is being used.

Guns should also be designed to sense where they are being aimed. Artificial vision and optical sensing technology can be adapted from military and medical communities. Sensory data can be used by built-in software to disable firing if the gun is pointed at a child or someone holding a child.

Building software into guns need not affect gun owners’ desire to protect their homes. Trigger control software could be relaxed when the gun is at home or in a car, while other safety features stay on to prevent accidental discharges. Guns used by the police would be exempt from such controls.

{ Jeremy Shane/CNN | Continue reading }

When a law bans exchanges wanted by everyone directly involved a number of things happen:

1) The exchanges continue;

2) Prices of the banned items rise and wars to control turf begin;

3) New criminals are created, including many people who are ordinary good people (like colored margarine seekers);

4) New enforcement agencies and staff are created;

5) New jails are built and new jailers are trained;

6) Laws, lawyers and lawsuits proliferate;

7) A new branch of law and its practitioners prosper and support further extension and complexification of regulations;

8) A portion of the entire apparatus of enforcement and punishment is progressively corrupted;

9) New agencies and staff are created to discover, eliminate or suppress the corruption;

[…]

It is not enough to simply ban exchanges that have consequences we don’t like. The costs of doing it should be compared with the costs of not doing it.

{ Chicago Boyz | Continue reading }

related { Have We Lost the War on Drugs? | Tide detergent: Works on tough stains. Can now also be traded for crack. }

Software developed by the FBI and Ernst & Young has revealed the most common words used in email conversations among employees engaged in corporate fraud.

The software, which was developed using the knowledge gained from real life corporate fraud investigations, pinpoints and tracks common fraud phrases like “cover up”, “write off”, “failed investment”, “off the books”, “nobody will find out” and “grey area”.

Expressions such as “special fees” and “friendly payments” are most common in bribery cases, while fears of getting caught are shown in phrases such as “no inspection” and “do not volunteer information”.

{ Computer World | Continue reading }

Since its introduction in 1846, anesthesia has allowed for medical miracles. Limbs can be removed, tumors examined, organs replaced—and a patient will feel and remember nothing. Or so we choose to believe. In reality, tens of thousands of patients each year in the United States alone wake up at some point during surgery. Since their eyes are taped shut and their bodies are usually paralyzed, they cannot alert anyone to their condition. In efforts to eradicate this phenomenon, medicine has been forced to confront how little we really know about anesthesia’s effects on the brain. The doctor who may be closest to a solution may also answer a question that has confounded centuries’ worth of scientists and philosophers: What does it mean to be conscious?

{ The Atlantic | Continue reading }

The US surveillance regime has more data on the average American than the Stasi ever did on East Germans.

The American government is collecting and storing virtually every phone call, purchases, email,  text message, internet searches, social media communications, health information,  employment history, travel and student records, and virtually all other information of every American.

Some also claim that the government is also using facial recognition software and surveillance cameras to track where everyone is going.  Moreover, cell towers track where your phone is at any moment, and the major cell carriers, including Verizon and AT&T, responded to at least 1.3 million law enforcement requests for cell phone locations and other data in 2011. And – given that your smartphone routinely sends your location information back to Apple or Google – it would be child’s play for the government to track your location that way.

As the top spy chief at the U.S. National Security Agency explained this week, the American government is collecting some 100 billion 1,000-character emails per day, and 20 trillion communications of all types per year.

{ Washington Blogs | Continue reading }

We live in an image society. Since the turn of the 20th century if not earlier, Americans have been awash in a sea of images – in advertisements, in newspapers and magazines, on billboards, throughout the visual landscape. We are highly attuned to looks, first impressions and surface appearances, and perhaps no image is more seductive to us than our own personal image. In 1962, the cultural historian Daniel Boorstin observed that when people talked about themselves, they talked about their images. If the flourishing industries of image management — fashion, cosmetics, self-help — are any indication, we are indeed deeply concerned with our looks, reputations, and the impressions that we make. For over a hundred years, social relations and conceptions of personal identity have revolved around the creation, projection, and manipulation of images. […]

In what follows, I want to contemplate one legal consequence of the advent of the image society: the evolution of an area of law that I describe as the tort law of personal image. By the 1950s, a body of tort law – principally the privacy, defamation, publicity, and emotional distress torts4 — had developed to protect a right to control one’s own image, and to be compensated for emotional and dignitary harms caused by egregious and unwarranted interference with one’s self-presentation and public identity. The law of image gave rise to the phenomenon of the personal image lawsuit, in which individuals sued to vindicate or redress their image rights. By the postwar era, such lawsuits had become an established feature of the sociolegal landscape, occupying not only a prominent place on court dockets but also in the popular imagination. The growth in personal image litigation over the course of the 20th century was driven by Americans’ increasing sense of entitlement to their personal images. A confluence of social forces led individuals to cultivate a sense of possessiveness and protectiveness towards their images, which was legitimated and enhanced by the law.

This article offers a broad overview of the development of the modern “image torts” and the phenomenon of personal image litigation.

{ Samantha Barbas/SSRN | Continue reading }

{ Sexting: Research Criteria of a Globalized Social Phenomenon }

Check Point has revealed how a sophisticated malware attack was used to steal an estimated €36 million from over 30,000 customers of over 30 banks in Italy, Spain, Germany and Holland over summer this year.

The theft used malware to target the PCs and mobile devices of banking customers. The attack also took advantage of SMS messages used by banks as part of customers’ secure login and authentication process.

The attack worked by infecting victims’ PCs and mobiles with a modified version of the Zeus trojan. When victims attempted online bank transactions, the process was intercepted by the trojan.

Under the guise of upgrading the online banking software, victims were duped into giving additional information including their mobile phone number, infecting the mobile device. The mobile Trojan worked on both Blackberry and Android devices, giving attackers a wider reach.

{ Net Security | Continue reading }

Onity, the company whose locks protect 4 million or more hotel rooms around the world, has agreed to reimburse at least some fraction of its hotel customers for the cost of fixing a security flaw exposed in July.

{ Forbes | Continue reading }

Some cyberattacks over the past decade have briefly affected state strategic plans, but none has resulted in death or lasting damage. For example, the 2007 cyberattacks on Estonia by Russia shut down networks and government websites and disrupted commerce for a few days, but things swiftly went back to normal. The majority of cyberattacks worldwide have been minor: easily corrected annoyances such as website defacements or basic data theft — basically the least a state can do when challenged diplomatically.

Our research shows that although warnings about cyberwarfare have become more severe, the actual magnitude and pace of attacks do not match popular perception.

{ Foreign Affairs | Continue reading }

Verizon is arguing before the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit that broadband providers have a right to decide what they transmit online. […] According to Verizon’s argument:

In performing these functions [providing the transmission of speech from Point A to Point B], broadband providers possess ‘editorial discretion.’

Just as a newspaper is entitled to decide which content to publish and where, broadband providers may feature some content over others.
In effect, Verizon claims that by transmitting bits – providing Internet access – it gains the rights of a newspaper like the Washington Post or the New York Times. This assertion has no basis in constitutional law, and in fact repudiates many positions taken by Verizon before Congress, courts and the FCC over the years.

[…]

“Verizon and its predecessors have argued exactly to the contrary time after time — including when they were fighting for open access to cable companies’ wires a decade ago and when they have claimed immunity from liability based on their status as a transmissions provider for the content they carry,” said Tyrone Brown, who served as an FCC Commissioner from 1977-1981.

{ Roosevelt Institute | Continue reading }