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link roundup 6

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reading

I don’t remember much about 2009 — I think I was in 9th grade, or maybe 10th — but I know almost every line of dialogue in that year’s finest YouTube video: “Hanwei Practical XL Katana Unveiling HD,” posted by the user “That Sodding Gamer.” If you haven’t seen it, you won’t be disappointed. In it, a man who looks to be in his late 20s unboxes a mid-range replica sword with the help of his mother and younger brother. He recounts his past encounters with low-quality swords as he struggles to remove the plastic packaging. His demeanor is alternately bored and petulant, even as he comes face to face with his long-awaited $210 purchase. His mother, entrusted with the camera, seems to annoy him. Her bemusement at her adult son’s interests is palpable, but she sounds resigned to her fate: Her grandchildren will be swords and sarcastic T-shirts. Such is life in an austerity economy.

The findings, published March 24 in Science, offer a critical insight into how and why the body’s ability to fix DNA dwindles over time and point to a previously unknown role for the signaling molecule NAD as a key regulator of protein-to-protein interactions in DNA repair. NAD, identified a century ago, is already known for its role as a controller of cell-damaging oxidation.

Additionally, experiments conducted in mice show that treatment with the NAD precursor NMN mitigates age-related DNA damage and wards off DNA damage from radiation exposure.

Nick Land’s neoreactionary, right-wing accelerationism is racist in any conventional sense of that term. Yet Land is also a quite interesting thinker of capitalism, and because capitalism, broadly defined, is the reality that structures and will continue to structure human existence throughout the foreseeable future, he is perhaps worth paying attention to. His overriding political and ethical ‘goal,’ from which his racism, his eugenicism, and technological fetishism spring, is optimize for intelligence, which for him is both the Darwinian law of the universe (‘Gnon’), as well as a functional description of what really-exisiting capitalism actually does. Even to call it a ‘goal’ is misleading, as for Land capitalism is an abolition of Hume’s is/ought distinction. What capitalism ‘should’ do (optimize for intelligence) is, as a matter of fact, what it does. Land’s Acclerationism, insofar as it can be understood as a political program, simply counsels that we let this process be, because we don’t really have the capability to control it anyway.

But the progressive detachment of so many adult American men from the reality and routines of regular paid labor poses a threat to our nation’s future prosperity. It can only result in lower living standards, greater economic disparities, and slower economic growth than we might otherwise expect. And the troubles posed by this male flight from work are by no means solely economic. It is also a social crisis – and, I shall argue, a moral crisis. The growing incapability of grown men to function as breadwinners cannot help but undermine the American family. It casts those who nature designed to be strong into the role of dependents – on their wives or girlfriends, on their aging parents, or on government welfare. Among those who should be most capable of shouldering the burdens of civic responsibilities, it instead encourages sloth, idleness, and vices perhaps more insidious. Whether we choose to recognize it or not, this feature of the American condition – the new “men without work” normal – is inimical to the American tradition of self-reliance…

Attackers that have capabilities to deliver high intensity acoustic interference in close proximity to the target MEMS sensor [embedded accelerometers in consumer electronics] can spoof the sensor to output arbitrary, attacker–chosen, signals. Our experiments demonstrate the spelling of the word “WALNUT” over the output signal of a MEMS accelerometer. With proper knowledge of the algorithms that are utilizing the polluted sensor data, adversaries may be able to control the behavior of a system that relies on the sensor data to make automated decisions.

It’s not just about the emerging economies in general, but rather one such economy in particular: China. By purchasing power parity measures China is now the No. 1 economy, and the world’s leading exporter, in addition to its longstanding role as the world’s most populous country. It has had an almost unbroken string of high-growth years since 1979, often at double-digit rates, and it avoided much of the negative fallout from the financial crisis. Its geopolitical influence and its military have been gaining on the U.S. or Europe for decades.

If several generations of Westerners were intrigued by communism, Marxism, Stalinism and even Maoism, is it so implausible to think they might feel some kind of magnetic attraction to the less liberal systems that are flourishing today?

How much of a threat is postmodernism to science? There are certainly some external attacks. In the recent protests against a talk given by Charles Murray at Middlebury, the protesters chanted, as one,

“Science has always been used to legitimize racism, sexism, classism, transphobia, ableism, and homophobia, all veiled as rational and fact, and supported by the government and state. In this world today, there is little that is true ‘fact.'”

When the organizers of the March for Science tweeted:

“colonization, racism, immigration, native rights, sexism, ableism, queer-, trans-, intersex-phobia, & econ justice are scientific issues,” many scientists immediately criticized this politicization of science and derailment of the focus on preservation of science to intersectional ideology. In South Africa, the #ScienceMustFall and #DecolonizeScience progressive student movement announced that science was only one way of knowing that people had been taught to accept. They suggested witchcraft as one alternative.

isis drone dropping bombs on sdf forces

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link roundup 5

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not so many posts this last week or two. i’m getting close to graduating and i’m a little preoccupied between that and my girlfriend. i still have a few ideas for interesting things besides regular features, though.

onward!

reading

In the realm of military action the particularity of this vision of reality via lines of force or faith lines is that the world will be observed through the target tube of a weapon, or, to put it simply, through a weapon. This kind of vision is also most commonly applied in video war games by which the aesthetics of ISIS’s visual material is heavily influenced. A picture of two ISIS fighters inserted into a still from the game Call of Duty symbolizes the video game affinities of ISIS culture and has become famous as it has been widely circulated on the internet. In general, ISIS appropriates aesthetic codes from action movies and video games or it even appropriates entire games. The ISIS video Grand Theft Auto: Salil al-Sawarem is entirely made out of sequences from the video game Grand Theft Auto, reproducing only the most violent scenes and making the nasheed chant the only original contribution.

The popularization of Bitcoin, a decentralized crypto-currency has inspired the production of several alternative, or “alt”, currencies. Ethereum, CryptoNote, and Zerocash all represent unique contributions to the cryptocurrency space. Although most alt currencies harbor their own source of innovation, they have no means of adopting the innovations of other currencies which may succeed them. We aim to remedy the potential for atrophied evolution in the crypto-currency space by presenting Tezos, a generic and self-amending crypto-ledger.

Tezos can instantiate any blockchain based protocol. Its seed protocol specifies a procedure for stakeholders to approve amendments to the protocol, including amendments to the amendment procedure itself. Upgrades to Tezos are staged through a testing environment to allow stakeholders to recall potentially problematic amendments.

Lenin and Wilson both believed that ideology could liberate mankind from imperialism. Articulated within days of each other, their competing messianic visions both aimed to de-Europeanize global geopolitics after three centuries of the Old World’s dominance. One knows a systemic crisis when it spawns challenges from both geographic and political extremes. Aiming to overcome the geopolitical legacy of the “long nineteenth century,” Wilson and Lenin assumed that the proliferation of ideologically similar regimes would ensure peace. Their visions’ competitive symbiosis would define the fate of the world for the rest of the century. But although the age of ideologically driven foreign policy had begun, it did not evolve in a linear fashion.

The FBI first launched its advanced biometric database, Next Generation Identification, in 2010, augmenting the old fingerprint database with further capabilities including facial recognition. The bureau did not inform the public about its newfound capabilities nor did it publish a privacy impact assessment, required by law, for five years.

Unlike with the collection of fingerprints and DNA, which is done following an arrest, photos of innocent civilians are being collected proactively. The FBI made arrangements with 18 different states to gain access to their databases of driver’s license photos.

If Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher had served up an all-you-can-eat shit buffet in the 1980s, promoting the free market at the expense of the majority of their citizens, the Ccru responded by taking laissez-faire economics to a perverse extreme. They saw capital itself as the protagonist of history, with humans as grist for the mill. “What appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy’s resources,” Land wrote in his essay “Machinic Desire.” For Land, the Basilisk was already here.

At the time, Benjamin Noys took note of this philosophical trajectory, initially calling it “Deleuzian Thatcherism.” Eventually, in his 2010 book The Persistence of the Negative: A Critique of Contemporary Critical Theory, he gave it a pithier name, the application of which has been both broadly extended and hotly contested: accelerationism. Noys focused his critique on a particular misreading of Marx as a hybrid technological determinist and catastrophist, which licensed the idea that if the accumulation of capital generates and exacerbates the conditions that lead to its dissolution, then it is the duty of radicals to urge capital to fully realize and hence negate itself. Broadly conceived, the futurist telelogy this term denotes demonstrates the basis for its alignment with the Singularitarian ideology, seeing the exponential growth of technology as the key to the next stage of human species.

What Chiang really wanted to talk about was science fiction. We spoke about free will (“I believe that the universe is deterministic, but that the most meaningful definition of free will is compatible with determinism”), the literary tradition of naturalism (“a fundamentally science-fictional approach of trying to work out the logical consequences of an idea”), time travel (he thinks of “A Christmas Carol” as the first time-travel story), and the metaphorical and political incoherence of Neill Blomkamp’s aliens-under-apartheid movie “District 9” (he believes that “Alien Nation,” in which the aliens are framed as immigrants, is more rigorously thought through). Chiang reframes questions before answering them, making fine philosophical distinctions. He talks more about concepts than he does about people. “I do want there to be a depth of human feeling in my work, but that’s not my primary goal as a writer,” he said, over lunch. “My primary goal has to do with engaging in philosophical questions and thought experiments, trying to work out the consequences of certain ideas.”

To accelerate the process, and to throw oneself into those flows, leaves behind the (already impossible) specter of collective intervention. This grander anti-praxis opens, in turn, the space for examining forms of praxis that break from the baggage of the past. We could count agorism and exit as forms impeccable to furthering the process, and cypherpolitics and related configurations arise on the far end of the development, as the arc bends towards molecularization of economic and social relations. It is in these horizons that conversation and application must unfold.

No more reterritorializing reactions. No more retroprogressivism.

Algo VPN is a set of Ansible scripts that simplifies the setup of a personal IPSEC VPN. It contains the most secure defaults available, works with common cloud providers, and does not require client software on most devices.

quote post 2

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Traditionally, China attributed little importance to Syria, but current circumstances are changing the situation. The report of one of Israel’s three intelligence assessment bodies, along with Military Intelligence and the Mossad, stated, “The arrival of tens of thousands of Chinese citizens fighting and living in the country raises the need for monitoring them. China is interested in as much data that can be collected on them, and it is our understanding that they would prefer to liquidate them on Syrian soil, in order to prevent their return to their region.”

– Israeli report: Thousands of Chinese jihadists are fighting in Syria

vim links

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i’ve been spending the last couple of weeks trying to dive into learning vim, and i’ve made at least a little progress. in the misc links section of link roundup last week, i pointed to my vimrc. i’ve been incrementally adding features to it, and it’s really been shaping up – i have a default layout and color scheme i genuinely enjoy using, and i’ve remapped a few shortcuts most recently.

i’m only just beginning to learn the vim syntax – the way it uses verbs, nouns and modifiers, and i’m genuinely impressed with some examples i’ve seen of what it’s capable of. i’m putting this post together as a collection of resources i’ve saved, to pass along to anyone interested in giving it a shot.

link roundup 4

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a minor announcement: moved this blog to my new domain after some deliberation.

a loose motif for this week – world in flux.

reading

Hikikomori now dances around concepts of counter-culture, hermitage, a sort of sweet awareness of being adrift as much as around the sphere of potential psychological disorders. The word redefines the borders of previous understandings of isolation. So self-inflicted painful isolation becomes a confused extension of spiritual practices and the hyper connectivity that comes with computers nullifies the idea of isolation as degree zero of experience. It is in these juxtapositions of concepts that are apparently not in dialogue, that lies something crucial to unlock such a specific contemporary sensitivity, one that goes well beyond the extreme cases making the headlines. While tackling issues of revolt, the philosopher Julia Kristeva underlines “when revolt exists our spectacle oriented society marginalizes it as one of its tolerated alibis.”

As ever more opt out, the larger culture is damaged. The culture begins to fragment back into pieces. The disconnect can be profound; an American anime geek has more in common with a Japanese anime geek (who is of a different ethnicity, a different culture, a different religion, a different language…) than he does with an American involved in the evangelical Christian subculture. There is essentially no common ground - our 2 countrymen probably can’t even agree on objective matters like governance or evolution!

With enough of these gaps, where is American or French culture? Such cultural identities take centuries to coalesce - France did not speak French until the 1900s (as The Discovery of France recounts), and Han China is still digesting & assimilating its many minorities & outlying regions. America, of course, had it easy in starting with a small founder population which could just exterminate the natives.

The Ural branch of Russian Academy of Science says that thawing permafrost is a suspected reason for the cause of underground gas bubble formation. ‘An early of gas bubbles was discovered during a summer 2016 expedition to Bely island,’ said a spokesman.

Our pictures and video of this remarkable gas release are seen here, although this phenomenon appears different to the exploding pingo events. These bubbles - such as one seen in our video on Bely Island - have been called ‘trembling tundra’.

‘Their appearance at such high latitudes is most likely linked to thawing permafrost which in is in turn linked to overall rise of temperature on the north of Eurasia during last several decades,’ said a spokesman.

How might religious nonattendance lead to intolerance? Although American churches are heavily segregated, it’s possible that the modest level of integration they provide promotes cross-racial bonds. In their book, Religion and Politics in the United States, Kenneth D. Wald and Allison Calhoun-Brown reference a different theory: that the most-committed members of a church are more likely than those who are casually involved to let its message of universal love erode their prejudices.

Whatever the reason, when cultural conservatives disengage from organized religion, they tend to redraw the boundaries of identity, de-emphasizing morality and religion and emphasizing race and nation. Trump is both a beneficiary and a driver of that shift.

Unconditional accelerationism rejects simultaneously the right-accelerationists’ Yudkowskian concern with control and evaluation, with shaping the explosion of modernity, with guaranteeing its heterogeneity, with exploring the possibilities of a supposedly ever-improving transhumanism. The aggregate improvement of humanity’s condition is, to be sure, a fact to which the traditional left seems incapable of responding. But beyond the nostrums of race and nation, the right-accelerationists seem all too anxious over the tearing-apart of humanity that this process has increasingly entailed. Despite their claim to a radical and ‘dark’ identity with acceleration, they model with bureaucratic pedantry forms of government within which they hope the explosion can be moulded and recuperated.

The interesting thing about our time is that however radical the message in your art, if you do your criticism through self-expression, you’re actually feeding the very power structure you’re trying to overthrow. The power structure you’re criticizing also believes in self-expression as the ultimate goal.

Capitalism is about self-expression; art is about self-expression. Art is far from being a radical outside movement. It’s at the heart of the modern conformity. That’s why nothing ever changes, because the radicals have gone to a form of expression at the very center of the power structure they disapprove of. So they’re neutered.

  • Tears – meltingasphalt.com

Tears, in this theory, are a political act, in the same way that tattling, gossiping, and whistleblowing are political. As such, we need to be constantly monitoring and evaluating them, to make sure they aren’t being abused. When people cry in situations that strike us as disingenuous or manipulative, our anger and disapproval are ways of policing the signal. People can’t just “cry wolf” (or “cry bully”) whenever they want and get help from third parties.

So this account is plausible enough. But at least one important question remains: Why did only humans evolve this particular signal? Why doesn’t it make sense for any other creature (e.g. chimps)?

The answer is fairly simple. Humans, unique among all animals, have an instinct to resist aggression even when it’s directed toward other members of the group (even non-kin). We have strong social norms against aggression, coupled with a unique eagerness to support the underdog. Our hearts go out to the oppressed, downtrodden members of the group, and our behavioral instincts follow suit. This whole suite of attitudes and reactions is called a reverse dominance hierarchy, and it goes a long way toward explaining some of the more distinctive features of human social behavior, especially our instincts around social status and cooperation.

related: signaling theory wiki

sinofuturism

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a poem

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this is a poem i wrote about four years ago. it’s only the second poem i ever wrote, i actually still like it a lot, and i wish i had the courage to write more. the ever-present fear of looking like an idiot keeps the irony shields up.

drones are uneasy to me. i’ve always had that teenage boy fetish for sleek weapon systems and military vehicles, i’m not above admitting that. but drones seem like a premonition in a way that i’m not sure has an easy historical parallel. the obvious avenue for comparison is the atom bomb, but that’s both a difference of degree and magnitude. drones are something different – we’re hurtling toward a future of autonomously maintained empire, a historical shift where sovereignty is decoupled from manpower, an immediate after-effect of industrial automation and machine vision. swarm-enforced, mesh-networked, always watching.

i remembered i had written this when i was looking at the header image for this blog. if you don’t know – or you don’t know me – i have that image (general atomics mq-9 reaper) tattooed across my forearm.

anyway, here’s the poem.

reaper

a hawk loiters

at 60,000 feet.

there are cameras.

_

the network is ether;

supernatural framework to facilitate divine will.

_

we know that God is real now

and that He sees everything.

His angels blast

dull klaxons over asia.

link roundup 3

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i’ve got a little pattern down now – i have a page on my vimwiki where i record my candidate links for the week, then burn off a few when i decide to post. i also finally linked this blog to the outside world today. if anyone got here from twitter, let me know in the comments. on to the links:

reading

Whereas in the past tongue mutilation was the last resort to use in order to preserve your secrets, the digital realm has developed a material base where multiple identities can flourish and harden into protective obscurity. Cypherpolitics is advanced by these tools, but only to an extent. Technological migration is a necessity. The minute one tool is compromised, depleted, it is best to find a replacement. Resorting to deletion is not succumbing to an opponent’s or system’s pressures, but something cypherpolitics actively encourages. Deletion immediately refreshes anonymous intergrity and anonymity is the backbone of cypherpolitics- its most powerful feature. If your identities coincide across various platforms, forming patterns, your traces will lead clues. The data sniffer forms beliefs from this picture; denunciation follows. To avoid this, it is necessary to encrypt yourself.

In response to emailed questions, Williamson said that although the list price for Evzio is more than $4,000, that’s “not a true net price to anyone … due to numerous discounts and rebates that are negotiated in the supply chain that make up our healthcare system.”

In other words, even though the price tag for his company’s easy-to-use, lifesaving device is ridiculous and indefensible, there’s no need to worry because backroom deals by assorted players in the healthcare food chain make that price tag meaningless.

This stunning advertisement does a thorough job of showcasing Philadelphia’s many features, including the ability to generate PDF reports and charts of victims “to track your malware campaigns” as well as the ability to plot victims around the world using Google Maps.

“Everything just works,” claim the proprietors of Philadelphia. “Get your lifetime copy. One payment. Free updates. No monthly fees.”

The laughter has now stopped, said Jeffrey Lewis, an expert on North Korean weapons systems. “This idea that these things were just bargaining chips — something that was true years ago — is superseded by the fact that there is now a rocket force . . . with a commander and a headquarters and subordinate bases, all with missiles,” said Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. “This is now a living, breathing thing.”

It operates as a religion in one other critical dimension: If you happen to see the world in a different way, if you’re a liberal or libertarian or even, gasp, a conservative, if you believe that a university is a place where any idea, however loathsome, can be debated and refuted, you are not just wrong, you are immoral. If you think that arguments and ideas can have a life independent of “white supremacy,” you are complicit in evil. And you are not just complicit, your heresy is a direct threat to others, and therefore needs to be extinguished. You can’t reason with heresy. You have to ban it. It will contaminate others’ souls, and wound them irreparably.

The emergence of post-rationality/post-truth/post-systemism/etc is the final triumph of what we might call Irony. The iron-clad position of ultimate immunity to everything, the ferrous dark tower against which pin the world must be turned aside, the point of nuclear stability from which no further action can be extracted. Not merely to unthink your thoughts, not merely to meet a stop-sign and turn back, but to unthink the thoughts about unthinking, and the thoughts about that, quine the whole thing and be done with discourse forever. Ironic detachment beyond merely a new level, but taken to a whole new realm of smug disengagement, an Alcubierre drive running on exotic logic, causally disconnected from the rest of reason and already accelerating away to some absurd infinity.

Actually, one of the best things the book did to me was make me take cliches about “rich people need to defer to the poor on poverty-related policy ideas” more seriously. This has become so overused that I roll my eyes at it: “Could quantitative easing help end wage stagnation? Instead of asking macroeconomists, let’s ask this 19-year old single mother in the Bronx!” But Scott provides a lot of situations where that was exactly the sort of person they should have asked. He also points out that Tanzanian natives using their traditional farming practices were more productive than European colonists using scientific farming. I’ve had to listen to so many people talk about how “we must respect native people’s different ways of knowing” and “native agriculturalists have a profound respect for the earth that goes beyond logocentric Western ideals” and nobody had ever bothered to tell me before that they actually produced more crops per acre, at least some of the time. That would have put all of the other stuff in a pretty different light.

  • tilda terminal – drop-down terminal à la guake, but lighter-weight and plays nice with i3

  • teach yourself computer science – i probably won’t have enough time to plow through much of this on the remainder of my break, but it looks promising

  • syncany – self-hosted spideroak alternative

domains and virtual hosts

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i spent the better part of the last day working on getting a second site running on my vps. it’s live now – you can see it at hyperstition.al (get it?). i got lazy about theming and just used hugo with the theme i tweaked for this blog for the moment. this writeup is mostly for reference in case anything breaks in the future.

first step was registering .al, as cheaply as possible, which i ended up doing for 13/yr with a registrar called istanco (no points for guessing the nationality). it took surprisingly long for the domain to propagate – at least six hours, i went to bed eventually. i thought that kind of latency was relegated to the old days, but i suppose that is to be expected with an albanian domain.

the next step was configuring a second virtual host on apache. this part was especially confusing because the official documentation appeared to tell me to place the edits in /etc/hosts, when they actually went in httpd.conf (apache2.conf on ubuntu). this was followed by it seeing the document root as /var/www/html instead of /var/www/hyperstition.al/public_html, which i couldn’t figure out how to fix, so i sighed and just tried to move on to configuring ssl.

lets-encrypt is some seriously magical software. i went through the motions of following a DO tutorial for configuring virtual hosts on ubuntu, and in the most baffling step in this process, running the setup script somehow managed to crash my vps. as in, i had to log into the vm cp and turn it back on. i don’t have the faintest fucking clue how this happened.

i double checked my config files, remembered to strip out the stuff i had put into my hosts file, and ran it again – voila, not only did it work without a hitch, it began serving the new domain out of the proper document root.

so, now i have a cute albanian domain hack, and it’s got forced ssl.

the next bit took an embarrassingly long time to figure out. to update this blog, i run a relatively straightforward command:

rsync -av public/ reid@artorias.pw:/var/www/artorias.pw/public_html/

however, with the new domain’s folder i kept getting error messages along the lines of

rsync: recv_generator: mkdir "/var/www/hyperstition.al/public_html/categories" failed: Permission denied (13)

i spent a good hour and a half trying to figure out what the fuck was going on, eventually figuring it had something to do with folder permissions, and trying to learn how to parse ls -l output. eventually i guessed that using chown on /var/www/hyperstition.al to change the owner ought to work, and some time after that realized that changing public_html in that folder was the real key. and, finally, all is as it should be – rsync copies everything over without a hitch.

i’m probably going to change the theme to code-editor once i get around to writing something worth posting, but for now, i’m happy that everything is still humming along. and to celebrate: indian food tonight.

quote post 1

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“ideology is a parasite on religious substructures.”

– dr. jordan peterson

link roundup 2

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this week’s link roundup. two of them are from scott alexander’s newest link post, apologies for redundancy 😛

mostly editorials and longform, but a little more varied than last week’s.

The construction cost of the printed house amounted to $10134, which is approximately $275 per square meter, taking in account that partners have provided the highest quality materials, and building itself has an extraordinary shape. This cost includes all the works that were done to make a complete house: work and materials for the construction of foundation, roof, exterior and interior finishing works, installation of heat insulation of walls, windows, floors and ceilings.

The decision to intensify the cyber and electronic strikes, in early 2014, came after Mr. Obama concluded that the $300 billion spent since the Eisenhower era on traditional antimissile systems, often compared to hitting “a bullet with a bullet,” had failed the core purpose of protecting the continental United States. Flight tests of interceptors based in Alaska and California had an overall failure rate of 56 percent, under near-perfect conditions. Privately, many experts warned the system would fare worse in real combat.

So the Obama administration searched for a better way to destroy missiles. It reached for techniques the Pentagon had long been experimenting with under the rubric of “left of launch,” because the attacks begin before the missiles ever reach the launchpad, or just as they lift off. For years, the Pentagon’s most senior officers and officials have publicly advocated these kinds of sophisticated attacks in little-noticed testimony to Congress and at defense conferences.

We should try and appreciate why fields like psychology have integrated biology so much more quickly, and so much more completely, than others like sociology. In large part, sociology maintains certain “sacred values” — beliefs that cannot be challenged and lines that must not be crossed — that make integration very difficult. The history of scientific inquiry is one of violence done to human intuition. Sometimes that has meant trading in our sacred ideas when presented with new information. Sociology seems loath to do this.

While the EU is distracted with the fallout from Brexit and Russian meddling in national elections, militant jihadists will be streaming back into Europe, some of them determined to strike. And while transnational terrorists will undoubtedly flock to Libya and Yemen, the real challenge will be preventing further attacks around the globe, including in major European cities.

According to the former senior U.S. special operations official and a current military consultant, both of whom were briefed on the raid, the SEALs discovered by the time they arrived in the village that their operation had been compromised. It is still unclear how those on the ground were tipped off, but a current consultant to the Joint Special Operations Command, which oversees SEAL Team 6, said the command is investigating whether UAE forces involved in the raid revealed the details of the mission before the SEALs arrived in al Ghayil. (However, local residents, who are used to hearing the buzz of drones in the remote area, said they noticed the unusual presence of helicopters around 9 p.m. the night before the raid, which raised concern.)

Yet, the arrangement where Middle Eastern rulers relied heavily on the religious elite for legitimacy also meant that they were hesitant to take actions that would undermine the religious establishment. This included intruding on the religious establishment’s authority over commercial law. So long as Islam remained a powerful source of legitimacy, the benefits to employing religious legitimacy outweighed its relatively modest costs (i.e., ceding authority over certain aspects of the law) to such a degree that Middle Eastern rulers did not feel the need to bring the economic elite to the bargaining table. Indeed, merchants, money-changers, and others engaged in large scale commerce rarely had political power in the Islamic Middle East.

related: What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response by bernard lewis (ebook)

Now, Saunders also links to a study which suggests that “half to three-quarters” of the difference can be accounted for by socioeconomic status. Maybe so. But crime is crime. If you’re the victim of assault from a Syrian refugee, you don’t really care if it happened because he’s Syrian or because he’s poorer than average.

She herself is wary of any alignment with the right wing. Back in the ’90s, she took umbrage when she was sometimes branded a conservative, and would respond by stressing her rebel credentials: She was out as a lesbian back in the late ’60s, she hated censorship, hated prudery, wanted to liberalize alcohol and drug laws — how could she possibly be a conservative? And yet, by the logic of shared mutual enemies, her attacks on liberalism make her work useful artillery (with the added credibility of coming from someone ostensibly in the enemy camp). She hasn’t paid much attention to the rise of the alt-right, but, she said, “elite discourse about gender has become so nonsensical and removed from reality that rowdy outbreaks of resistance and rebellion are unsurprising.”

Ransomware with the ability to enforce payments would provide a potent funding source for another type of autonomous agent: a Decentralized Autonomous Organization, or (DAO). These systems are “corporations” that consist entirely of code that runs on a consensus network like Ethereum. They’re driven by rules, and are capable of both receiving and transmitting funds without (direct) instruction from human beings.

that last link has given me some ideas for a short story – i’m still mulling over it, but there are a few ideas i’m excited about. watch this space, but no promises.

thoughts on the wikileaks cia malware dump

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this morning, wikileaks posted a summary and partial release of a very large dump of internal cia programs related to their offensive cyber capabilities (nyt writeup, if you prefer). this kind of thing is like christmas to me – i’ve been fascinated by ‘forbidden knowledge’ since i was a kid, downloading anarchist cookbook .rtf’s on kazaa in middle school. to me, whistleblower doc dumps are like finding a new favorite author now, a rare treat where i’m handed a corpus of information to mull over and incorporate into my thinking.

there’s nothing truly shocking in the documents, besides the fact that this appears to be burning the cia’s entire cyber apparatus like a sheet of flash-paper – a few people in langley are having a very bad day right now. besides that though, the nuts and bolts of their ops are basically what one would expect from what we already know about state actor APTs – sophisticated multi-platform malware, including for routers, as well as ios and android exploits that circumvent encrypted chat clients (eg, signal or whatsapp) ‘left of crypto’ – that is, before the encryption is applied. all the curve25519 in the world won’t help you if your iphone is rooted.

a very interesting bit of trivia contained in the summary is that the cia malware and c2 servers are not technically classified, in order to avoid regulation – they’re instead simply obfuscated. servers must be certified to handle classified information in order to face the public internet, but instead the cia has sidestepped this, meaning it probably isn’t technically illegal to hand off those particular files – not that it would ever fly if the leaker is caught. as prior whistleblower cases demonstrated, the IC is willing to (attempt to) retroactively classify documents, or ground diplomatic flights in order to nail ‘traitors’.

the UMBRAGE program described is essentially a trove of techniques and malware attributable to other actors – one would assume russia, china, and probably iran are on the list. this is meant to conceal, mislead, or obfuscate among other evidence anything that could point to an operation being perpetrated by the US. i’ve already seen this used by partisans to throw suspicion on the dnc hack, but i don’t find this very convincing. i should write a separate post about my thoughts on that entire topic, but for now this link covers most of what i would bring up.

what you see in the files is – if you’re like me – some really thrilling scraps of highly sophisticated state actor methods, vectors, and practices. smart tv malware that keeps the tv in a false ‘off’ mode in order to surreptitiously record and upload audio is probably the sexiest, tentative interest in hacking the computers in newer models of cars the most frightening (one is reminded of the questionable circumstances surrounding the death of a particular journalist).

what you won’t see in the dump is information about programs targeting terrorists. this isn’t a result of redaction on wikileaks’ part, as far as i can tell – but this points to a fact that’s little discussed when US IC spy programs are that the bulk of them are focused on diplomatic spying.

Among the list of possible targets of the collection are ‘Asset’, ‘Liason Asset’, ‘System Administrator’, ‘Foreign Information Operations’, ‘Foreign Intelligence Agencies’ and ‘Foreign Government Entities’. Notably absent is any reference to extremists or transnational criminals.

to make my position clear, i believe spying programs should be restricted by outright burdensome regulation if there’s even the possibility of incidental collection from americans. i don’t trust the good faith of the IC, and frankly i think anyone who does is a sucker or a fed. i’m an earnest fan of snowden and a paranoiac with regards to personal infosec practices. but i almost never see it emphasized that diplomatic spying is a necessary function of any government, even as i see calls for the abolition of the entire apparatus.

there are two primary camps you’ll find in online discussions of the IC, apologists and critics. critics are the loudest, and i count myself among them, but their motivations push them to emphasize the dragnet nature of the publicly known programs (almost always nsa sigint, since that’s what we’ve known about up till now). apologists, on the other hand, will almost universally default to the necessity of preventing terrorism. what these documents, and the above excerpt, illustrate is that spying on foreign governments is still bread and butter, at least for cia cyber ops. if i were to offer a word of advice to apologists, it would be to emphasize that this is the way the game works – all governments spy on each other, and one is at an unspeakable disadvantage if one doesn’t play the game. many (yours truly included) are poisonously cynical about the terrorism justification.

it’s going to take a while to go through these, but i’m one of the people who manually pores over every classified document that gets released when these things happen. everyone has hobbies 😛

as an aside, i’ve been running a tumblr blog for the last few years with interesting or ‘cute’ excerpts from snowden documents and other sources related to IC classified programs. if you’re interested in that kind of thing, you might check it out.

winter sunsets 2017

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the iphone 6s plus camera is very impressive: these were all off-the-hip snapchat shots that i decided to save.

interlude

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a minor hiccup this weekend: i messed up the wifi configuration on my laptop, and decided it would be easier to just reinstall the OS than figure out how to fix it. i made backups beforehand, but managed to forget to save my hugo folder. it wasn’t a huge deal: i’d already started committing my blog to github, but it hadn’t been including my theme files which were tweaked enough to make it a pain in the ass to reconfigure. that said, i think i’m back to where i was on friday evening at this point.

lazy weekend, though, the main event was my girlfriend and i watching a few movies with another friend on saturday:

  • my friend rockefeller (2015), a movie about christian gerhartsreiter , a serial conman who impressively managed to fool, variously, rich LA suburbanites into thinking he was minor nobility, a japanese woman he had a relationship for seven years that he met at a job selling eurobonds, and the nyc art scene into thinking he was a rockefeller and art collector – all of this despite being a native german who managed to conceal his accent very convincingly. only busted when the cops got at him for killing a dude twenty five years later. there doesn’t seem to be much of a net presence for this docu, but it’s on netflix.

  • lo and behold (2016), herzog jawn about the internet. very good film but only middling for herzog, i think. much more optimistic about the nature of the internet than i am.

  • spoorloos aka the vanishing (1988) – an old favorite. dutch/french thriller about a man’s search for his missing girlfriend. no spoilers, but this is absolutely my top pick for the genre. No. This time there was another golden egg flying through space. And if we were to collide, it’d all be over.

pretty good selection for one afternoon, imo.

and on my gay computer shit tip: i’ve been playing around with using an i3wm desktop setup. it takes a little getting used to – mainly switching constantly between monitors – but i don’t think it takes long to see why it can be much faster than using the mouse to activate windows. there’s a much deeper hole to dive into as far as customization than i’ve gotten into so far, but i’ve already tweaked it a little – added a few startup programs, reduced borders between windows to 1px, and set up media buttons to work. my dotfile is on github as well, here. example desktop dedicated to terminals included in the screenshot next to this paragraph – the tool i used for sysinfo at the right is neofetch.

and, something i’m excited about: a new clark album next month. first single on soundcloud. clark and opn are the most exciting electronic acts currently active, imo, and this single sounds fantastic.