Dan Jones

 ★ 

We are going to hear a lot of talk from people in power — even from liberals in power — about how “most police officers” are hardworking, upstanding, pillars of the community who do not choke unarmed black people to death in broad daylight.

Fine. Great! As a large, overweight black man who has lived in New York for most of my life, I’d like to say thank you to all of the police officers who have not yet found me threatening enough to kill. I appreciate you allowing me to live.

However, I’d like to ask the alleged “good cops” of the NYPD, Why aren’t you outraged? Why aren’t you disgusted? Some guys who wear the same uniform that you do take pride in choking a man to death in the street. We all saw it.

Doesn’t that bother you? And if so, why don’t I hear you? Doesn’t being a pillar of your community involve speaking out when somebody harms that community in such a violent and public manner?

It seems to me that if you are a good cop, then you should realize that I am part of your community. Me, right here, the fat black guy who is literally terrified of your power to execute people who look like me: I’m your boy. I’m the guy you signed up to protect. You are supposed to be on my side, not the side of the people who dishonor your uniform.

I get out of my seat and take my hat off when you are honored at Citi Field. I am polite and courteous to you when we cross paths at Grand Central. Why aren’t you willing to stand with me now?

Because of a “Blue Wall of Silence”? That doesn’t sound right. You don’t respect it when there’s an underground movement to “stop snitching.” Surely, you don’t expect me to respect people who only care about crime when it’s committed by somebody they do not know. That’s hypocritical. I don’t think good cops are supposed to be hypocrites.

Relations between the police and the communities they police cannot improve so long as allegedly good people ignore crimes. We talk a lot about what people can do to help stop crime in their communities.

But where are the cops? What can the cops do to help stop crime by other cops? They are, after all, the professional crime stoppers.

There’s an old cop joke about how the NYPD has 25,000 of the finest people in New York City. The trouble is, it’s a 36,000-person force.

Until these allegedly good cops come forth and state, loudly and without equivocation, that they do not support the killing of unarmed black people, I really don’t want to hear about how they exist in silence.

I don’t want to hear about respecting the police and honoring what they do until I can hear just a little about how they respect me and honor my choice to walk around town while black.

Not all Staten Island cops are like the ones who killed Eric Garner? OK. Show me. Show me a loud and proud display by the Finest that opposes these cops.

Same goes for you, Mayor de Blasio. I don’t want hear boo from you about how these cops are not representative of the policing African-American New Yorkers have come to expect until you start showing me some cops who represent a different philosophy. Start showing me some cops who think that omerta is the wrong standard for police officers.

I’ve been black for too long to be surprised that there are cops who would just as soon choke me as look at me. I’ve been black in New York for too long to . . . have a reason to go to Staten Island.

But during all that time, I keep hearing about the good New York City cops. I’d like to see one now. One who hasn’t had his tongue cut out. One who will stand with me against the criminals who hunt me.

Mystal is the managing editor of Above the Law: Redline.

reCAPTCHA protects the websites you love from spam and abuse. So, when you go online—say, for some last-minute holiday shopping—you won't be competing with robots and abusive scripts to access sites. For years, we’ve prompted users to confirm they aren’t robots by asking them to read distorted text and type it into a box, like this:
But, we figured it would be easier to just directly ask our users whether or not they are robots—so, we did! We’ve begun rolling out a new API that radically simplifies the reCAPTCHA experience. We’re calling it the “No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA” and this is how it looks:
On websites using this new API, a significant number of users will be able to securely and easily verify they’re human without actually having to solve a CAPTCHA. Instead, with just a single click, they’ll confirm they are not a robot.
A brief history of CAPTCHAs 

While the new reCAPTCHA API may sound simple, there is a high degree of sophistication behind that modest checkbox. CAPTCHAs have long relied on the inability of robots to solve distorted text. However, our research recently showed that today’s Artificial Intelligence technology can solve even the most difficult variant of distorted text at 99.8% accuracy. Thus distorted text, on its own, is no longer a dependable test.

To counter this, last year we developed an Advanced Risk Analysis backend for reCAPTCHA that actively considers a user’s entire engagement with the CAPTCHA—before, during, and after—to determine whether that user is a human. This enables us to rely less on typing distorted text and, in turn, offer a better experience for users.  We talked about this in our Valentine’s Day post earlier this year.

The new API is the next step in this steady evolution. Now, humans can just check the box and in most cases, they’re through the challenge.

Are you sure you’re not a robot?

However, CAPTCHAs aren't going away just yet. In cases when the risk analysis engine can't confidently predict whether a user is a human or an abusive agent, it will prompt a CAPTCHA to elicit more cues, increasing the number of security checkpoints to confirm the user is valid.
Making reCAPTCHAs mobile-friendly

This new API also lets us experiment with new types of challenges that are easier for us humans to use, particularly on mobile devices. In the example below, you can see a CAPTCHA based on a classic Computer Vision problem of image labeling. In this version of the CAPTCHA challenge, you’re asked to select all of the images that correspond with the clue. It's much easier to tap photos of cats or turkeys than to tediously type a line of distorted text on your phone.

As more websites adopt the new API, more people will see "No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHAs".  Early adopters, like Snapchat, WordPress, Humble Bundle, and several others are already seeing great results with this new API. For example, in the last week, more than 60% of WordPress’ traffic and more than 80% of Humble Bundle’s traffic on reCAPTCHA encountered the No CAPTCHA experience—users got to these sites faster. To adopt the new reCAPTCHA for your website, visit our site to learn more.

Humans, we'll continue our work to keep the Internet safe and easy to use. Abusive bots and scripts, it’ll only get worse—sorry we’re (still) not sorry.

Posted by Vinay Shet, Product Manager, reCAPTCHA

Yesterday, I reported on a spreadsheet apparently taken from Sony Pictures Entertainment, one of the largest and most powerful studios in Hollywood, by a group of hackers calling themselves Guardians of Peace. The document, which listed the names, titles, and salaries of more than 6,000 Sony Pictures employees including senior executives (and may have revealed a gender pay discrepancy), appears to be part of an enormous data breach that hit the studio last week, forcing them to shutter computer systems, move employees to paper and pencils, and call in the FBI and private security researchers to investigate the hack.

I spent most of last night combing through some of the other documents from the hack – there were 26 large archives linked to in the original public Pastebin file, some of which have since been pulled offline. And the breadth and depth of the information I found is just insane.

Assuming the contents of the leak can be verified – so far, they haven’t been, and Sony Pictures hasn’t responded to numerous requests for comment – the Sony Pictures hack appears to be of a completely different magnitude than the normal DDOS attacks, social media hijackings, and other data breaches we’ve grown accustomed to. In fact, it could be one of the largest corporate hacks in history.

Partly, this is because Sony Pictures doesn’t appear to have made things very hard for the hackers. Here are just a few of the revelations I found in the leaked archives – most in normal, unencrypted Excel and Word files, labeled as plain as day:

A spreadsheet listing the names, birth dates, and social security numbers of 3,803 Sony Pictures employees, including all of the company’s top executives. (Happy birthday, Wendy!)

A spreadsheet listing the division-by-division Sony Pictures payroll, as well as breaking down costs for raises and other pay changes. (The company’s total salaries, as of May, were listed at $454,224,070.)

A spreadsheet listing Sony Pictures employees who were fired or laid off in 2014 as part of the company’s reorganization, along with the reasons for their termination. Also on this spreadsheet: estimates of “TOTAL COST TO SEVER,” or the amount Sony Pictures calculated it had to pay to terminate each person’s employment, including severance pay, COBRA health benefits, and outplacement costs. Here’s a sample, with names redacted for privacy:

A cheesy script for an in-house Sony Pictures recruiting video featuring HR executive George Rose and Sony Entertainment CEO Michael Lynton called, appropriately, “The Greatest Recruiting Video Ever.” Someone has edited the script to emphasize the importance of recruiting. (“It would be ideal to have Lynton state that talent acquisition is the single most important project,” one note in red reads.)

Detailed performance reviews for hundreds of Sony Pictures employees. Comments left on individual reviews included sentiments like “[Name redacted] is friendly, open and a fantastic team player,” “Key performer,” and “Flight risk if contributions are not recognised.”

A spreadsheet and chart comparing Sony Pictures’ employee pay to that of its competitors. (The metric used is “market posture,” which measures each level of employee pay compared to the market median for that level.) According to the chart, SPE pays its level 10 employees 113.1% of the median, but only pays its level 1 employees 92.2% of the median.

And on and on it goes. So far, most of the documents I’ve seen concern Sony Pictures’ corporate functions, not individual films or TV projects the studio is working on. But it bears repeating: if these documents are legitimate, their public release represents an unthinkably painful breach of the private data of Sony Pictures employees, and a remarkably lax approach to data security on the company’s part. Even relatively simple encryption or password-protection measures might have kept this data out of hackers’ hands.

Sony Pictures is scrambling to deal with the consequences of the hack. The company has reportedly hired Mandiant, the same security research firm that helped the New York Times deal with an apparent Chinese hack last year. Re/code reported last week that Sony is investigating possible North Korean involvement in the attack. If North Korea is indeed behind the attack, many are speculating it might be an act of retribution for The Interview, a soon-to-be-released Sony comedy starring Seth Rogen that offended North Korean authorities.

If that’s true, then – given the costs of cleaning up one of the largest security messes in Hollywood history – The Interview may turn out to be one of the most expensive movies Sony Pictures has ever made.

Posted: 12/02/2014 12:50 pm Updated: 12/02/2014 1:54 pm

Yesterday, I reported on a spreadsheet apparently taken from Sony Pictures Entertainment, one of the largest and most powerful studios in Hollywood, by a group of hackers calling themselves Guardians of Peace. The document, which listed the names, titles, and salaries of more than 6,000 Sony Pictures employees including senior executives (and may have revealed a gender pay discrepancy), appears to be part of an enormous data breach that hit the studio last week, forcing them to shutter computer systems, move employees to paper and pencils, and call in the FBI and private security researchers to investigate the hack.

I spent most of last night combing through some of the other documents from the hack – there were 26 large archives linked to in the original public Pastebin file, some of which have since been pulled offline. And the breadth and depth of the information I found is just insane.

Assuming the contents of the leak can be verified – so far, they haven’t been, and Sony Pictures hasn’t responded to numerous requests for comment – the Sony Pictures hack appears to be of a completely different magnitude than the normal DDOS attacks, social media hijackings, and other data breaches we’ve grown accustomed to. In fact, it could be one of the largest corporate hacks in history.

Partly, this is because Sony Pictures doesn’t appear to have made things very hard for the hackers. Here are just a few of the revelations I found in the leaked archives – most in normal, unencrypted Excel and Word files, labeled as plain as day:

A spreadsheet listing the names, birth dates, and social security numbers of 3,803 Sony Pictures employees, including all of the company’s top executives. (Happy birthday, Wendy!)

A spreadsheet listing the division-by-division Sony Pictures payroll, as well as breaking down costs for raises and other pay changes. (The company’s total salaries, as of May, were listed at $454,224,070.)

A spreadsheet listing Sony Pictures employees who were fired or laid off in 2014 as part of the company’s reorganization, along with the reasons for their termination. Also on this spreadsheet: estimates of “TOTAL COST TO SEVER,” or the amount Sony Pictures calculated it had to pay to terminate each person’s employment, including severance pay, COBRA health benefits, and outplacement costs. Here’s a sample, with names redacted for privacy:

A cheesy script for an in-house Sony Pictures recruiting video featuring HR executive George Rose and Sony Entertainment CEO Michael Lynton called, appropriately, “The Greatest Recruiting Video Ever.” Someone has edited the script to emphasize the importance of recruiting. (“It would be ideal to have Lynton state that talent acquisition is the single most important project,” one note in red reads.)

Detailed performance reviews for hundreds of Sony Pictures employees. Comments left on individual reviews included sentiments like “[Name redacted] is friendly, open and a fantastic team player,” “Key performer,” and “Flight risk if contributions are not recognised.”

A spreadsheet and chart comparing Sony Pictures’ employee pay to that of its competitors. (The metric used is “market posture,” which measures each level of employee pay compared to the market median for that level.) According to the chart, SPE pays its level 10 employees 113.1% of the median, but only pays its level 1 employees 92.2% of the median.

And on and on it goes. So far, most of the documents I’ve seen concern Sony Pictures’ corporate functions, not individual films or TV projects the studio is working on. But it bears repeating: if these documents are legitimate, their public release represents an unthinkably painful breach of the private data of Sony Pictures employees, and a remarkably lax approach to data security on the company’s part. Even relatively simple encryption or password-protection measures might have kept this data out of hackers’ hands.

Sony Pictures is scrambling to deal with the consequences of the hack. The company has reportedly hired Mandiant, the same security research firm that helped the New York Times deal with an apparent Chinese hack last year. Re/code reported last week that Sony is investigating possible North Korean involvement in the attack. If North Korea is indeed behind the attack, many are speculating it might be an act of retribution for The Interview, a soon-to-be-released Sony comedy starring Seth Rogen that offended North Korean authorities.

If that’s true, then – given the costs of cleaning up one of the largest security messes in Hollywood history – The Interview may turn out to be one of the most expensive movies Sony Pictures has ever made.

Posted: 12/02/2014 12:50 pm Updated: 12/02/2014 1:54 pm