Andrew

Childhood distorts your memories in strange ways — everything seems bigger, more extensive, more dramatic. Take the seminal comic strip, Calvin and Hobbes, for example. Much of its 1985 - 1995 run lined up with my own childhood; I eagerly waited for the newspaper (yes, comics in the newspaper!) every day from about 1989 on. When I started reading, I was only a year or two older than Calvin himself, thus making the strip eminently relatable in a way that few other pieces of art have ever been for me. (And make no mistake, Calvin and Hobbes is art.)

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This year's Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura — three scientists who helped develop blue light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, in the early 1990s.

LEDs could bring light to the 1.5 billion people who currently lack it

Why did the Nobel committee think LEDs are such a big deal? In part, they explained, because of the technology's potential to make the world a vastly better place: "The LED lamp holds great promise for increasing the quality of life for over 1.5 billion people around the world who lack access to electricity grids: due to low power requirements it can be powered by cheap local solar power."

On top of that, if LEDs continue to get cheaper and more efficient, they could replace existing fluorescents and incandescent lights in places like the United States and Europe — potentially cutting down on energy use and tackle global warming (although this isn't a sure bet).

So how important are LEDs, really? Here's an overview:

A short history of LEDs

(Nobel Prize committee)

LEDs are often viewed as the next generation of lighting technology. First we had fire. Then gaslight in the 19th century. Then Thomas Edison developed his filament bulbs. More recently, we've had the fluorescent and compact fluorescent bulbs most people now have in their offices and homes.

The cost of lighting up a room has dropped 1,000-fold in the last century

Those innovations all helped us get more and more lighting with less and less energy. The cost of illuminating a room has dropped roughly 1,000-fold over the past century.

Now LEDs look more promising still, since they use less energy and don't contain harmful mercury, like fluorescent bulbs do.

Still, it wasn't always obvious that LEDs would be the next step. Back in the 1980s, diodes could still only emit red or green light, which isn't very handy for lighting a room. But in the 1990s, Nakamura helped develop the first high-brightness blue LED — building on the work of Akasaki and Amano in Japan. Now it was conceivable that LEDs could be used for everyday purposes.

Since then, LEDs have advanced further and become used for an array of different sources. They're in streetlights. They're used for displays in computers and smartphones. But the big, idealistic hope is that they could help bring light to the 1.5 billion people who don't have it.

How LEDs could help light up the developing world

Rural Ghanian students study with the help of a kerosene lantern in the evening. Many villages in rural Ghana lack electrical infrastructure, making it difficult for students to study in the evenings. Taylor Weidman/LightRocket/Getty

It's worth remembering that there are about 1.2 billion people in the world who still lack access to electricity. And many people who do have electricity barely have enough power for reliable lighting.

A lack of lighting in the developing world isn't just inefficient — it's deadly

As a result, many households still burn either wood or gas for lighting. Not only is that inefficient, but the resulting indoor air pollutionis killing millions and millions of people. Plus there are all sorts of knock-on effects — it's much harder for kids to study for school if they can't even read their books.

Now enter LEDs. The big thing these lights have going for them is efficiency. Older lightbulbs, after all, are extremely inefficient — it takes a lot of energy to heat up the filament inside, and only a tiny fraction (2 percent or so) of that energy is given off as light.

LEDs do considerably better. Engineers can now get about 300 lumens of light from the most advanced LED bulbs for every Watt of electrical power used — compared to just 70 lumens from a compact fluorescent bulb and just 16 for a filament bulb.

As Charles Kenney explained in Foreign Policy, those low energy demands for LEDs mean that many households that aren't currently connected to the grid could use solar panels and small batteries to power LED lights.

The biggest obstacle is cost: LEDs often have a higher upfront cost than other types of light bulbs. But that price has been steadily falling over time, to the point where we could start to see wider adoption in poorer countries. (The other advantages? LEDs last longer than compact fluorescent bulbs, they don't break as easily, and they don't contain mercury — so they're easier to dispose.)

Could LEDs help tackle global warming?

(Nobel Prize committee)

The other huge potential application for LEDs is in the developed world. It's worth remembering that lighting is a massive source of energy use — it makes up about 17 percent of US electricity consumption.

Lighting makes up 17% of electricity use in the United States

In theory, LEDs could help change that. Most plans to boost energy efficiency and reduce greenhouse-gas emissions in the United States and Europe envision LEDs replacing all existing lighting technologies by 2050 or so. (See, for instance, this recent UN report on "deep decarbonization.")

The one hitch, however, is what's known as the "rebound effect." Historically, as lighting has gotten cheaper, we've used more and more of it — so that overall energy use for lighting has actually gone up, not down. That's one big consideration here. LEDs could well bolster lighting efficiency and make us all better off. But it's not guaranteed that energy use — and greenhouse-gas emissions — will go down as a result.

There are other, smaller benefits too. Los Angeles, for one, recently replaced all its old streetlights with LEDs, in an attempt to save money, cut back in glare, and partially restore the night sky. As light pollution — and the fact that we've blotted out the night sky — becomes a bigger issue, LEDs could play a small role there.

Further reading:

Light pollution is erasing the night sky. Can we bring it back?

The deadliest environmental problem today is indoor air pollution — killing 4 million a year

This week, California became the first state to ban single-use plastic bags. Going forward, customers at grocery stores, pharmacies, and convenience marts will have two options for bagging their purchases: they can pay ten cents for a paper bag, or they can bring a reusable bag from home.

the type of bag you use is less important than what you put in it

Supporters argued that the ban would help cut down on plastic litter — particularly in the oceans, where the bags can pose a threat to sea turtles and other marine life.

But this is also part of a bigger trend. Dozens of cities — including Chicago, Dallas, and DC — either tax plastic bags or ban them outright. And among shoppers, bringing a reusable bag from home has become the most visible symbol of environmental-friendliness. If recycling was the quintessential environmental activity of the the 1970s and 80s, toting a reusable bag may be today's.

There's nothing wrong with any of this. It's a mildly positive step for the planet — especially if the goal is to cut down on plastic waste. But the disproportionate emphasis on plastic bags among people who care about the environment is also a bit misplaced. If you want to use your shopping choices to benefit wildlife and the environment as a whole, the type of bag you use is far less important than what you put inside it.

Plastic bags are a tiny fraction of the trash we make

(Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images)

The main problem with plastic bags — and the one that gets all the attention — is waste.

Most bags end up in landfills, but some don't. Because some people carelessly drop them all over the place, they're a major source of litter. In San Jose, for instance, — which surveyed plastic litter prior to implementing a ban in 2012 — bags previously made up about 8 percent of litter in local creeks. They also made up about 15 percent of the trash in nearby Monterrey Bay. Perhaps most troublingly, they contribute to the patches of garbage that swirl in each of the world's oceans and are a threat to wildlife.

Eliminating the bags will certainly cut down on this litter. But at the same time, it won't substantially cut down on the total amount of trash we make. It's estimated that the US throws out roughly 100 billion plastic bags annually, generating about 3.3 million tons of trash (only about 1 to 2 percent are recycled).

This is a huge amount. But it's actually a pretty small percentage of the total amount of plastic we throw away: 31.8 million tons annually. And this total is still smaller than the amount of food waste we throw away — 36.4 million tons per year.

In other words, we throw away ten times as much food as plastic bags. If we care about reducing garbage, fixating on the huge amount of food waste might make more sense.

Of course, all waste is not the same. While paper and food waste are thought to biodegrade within a few months, plastic bags may take anywhere from 500 to 1000 years to get broken down — we don't really know, because they simply haven't been around that long.

But there are a few reasons why this distinction matters less than you might think. One minor point is that in the actual landfill environment, food waste and paper biodegrade at considerably slower rates than under ideal experimental conditions. Michigan State researchers, for instance, dug into layers of landfill from the early 70s and found readable newspapers, intact grass clippings, and five preserved hot dogs.

running out of space for garbage is not a pressing environmental problem

But the bigger thing to note here is that running out of space for garbage, despite what you might imagine, is not actually a pressing environmental problem. Although worldwide trash production is projected to continue increasing for the foreseeable future, we're nowhere near running out of room for landfills. They can be put virtually anywhere — including otherwise unusable land — and once they're sealed, we can do all sorts of things with the land on top of them, like establish nature preserves or build football stadiums or airports.

Now, burying landfills all over our planet is certainly not an ideal use of it. But doing so just causes localized, limited environmental disruption. In 500 or 1000 years — when those bags are still around — it's exceedingly unlikely that the biggest problem facing our planet's ecosystems will be buried islands of plastic, decomposing at a snail's pace. We know exactly what the problem will be, and we're doing pretty much nothing to stop it.

Trash isn't the real problem. Climate change is

(Mikael Miettinen/Flickr)

In 500 to 1000 years, the primary concern for pretty much every ecosystem on earth will be global warming.

The facts on this are pretty clear. If we don't significantly cut back on greenhouse gas emissions very soon, the world will get hotter, sea levels will rise, and the oceans will turn more acidic, among other problems. If we let truly drastic levels of warming occur — and at this point, there's no sign we're doing anything to stop it — scientists warn that profound disruptions to both modern human society and the natural world are very likely.

when it comes to climate change, eliminating plastic bags is a symbolic move

What does all this have to do with plastic bags? When it comes to greenhouse gases, they're once again dramatically less important than the products we buy and put inside them.

In 2002, when considering a tax on plastic bags, the Australian government conducted one of the most detailed studies of their lifetime environmental costs. They calculated that an average bag has .48 megajoules (MJ) of energy embodied in it — that is, .48 MJ of energy went into producing the plastic polymer, manufacturing the bag, and transporting the various inputs to make it all possible. More energy means more greenhouse gas emissions.

For comparison, making a one-liter plastic bottle — the kind used to hold water, juice, or soda — requires 3.4 MJ. A can of corn requires about 12.82 MJ. A single order of french fries uses up about 3.7 MJ, and a quarter-pound hamburger about 19.88 MJ.

These numbers can vary based on agricultural techniques, shipping methods, and other factors, but when you compare plastic bags with food, it's not even close. Yet for whatever reason, we associate plastic bags — but not food production — with environmental degradation.  If we care about climate change, cutting down on food waste would be many, many times more beneficial than worrying about plastic bags.

Moreover, when food waste is dumped in landfills, it releases substantial amounts of methane — a greenhouse gas — as it as it decomposes. (It doesn't if it's composted, because it undergoes aerobic decomposition, rather than anaerobic.) This is more than a symbolic problem: landfills as a whole account for about 18 percent of all US methane emissions, with food waste responsible for a substantial portion.

On top of all this, if plastic bag bans like California's end up causing people to use more paper bags — instead of bringing their reusable ones to the store — it'll certainly end up being worse for the environment. Research shows that making a paper bag consumes about four times more energy than a plastic bag, and produces about four times more waste if it's not recycled.

When it comes to both climate change and trash production, eliminating plastic bags is a symbolic move, not a substantial one. Encouraging people to cut down on food waste, on the other hand, would actually mean something.

So what should we be focusing on?

(Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

Despite all this, you might say that a small, symbolic step is better than no step at all. A heated-up planet with fewer plastic bags on it, in theory, is still better than one with more of them.

The major benefit of the former scenario is reduction of plastic litter in marine environments, and the benefit to wildlife. But at the same time, it'd be extremely hard to find a marine biologist willing to argue that garbage patches are more of a threat to ocean ecosystems than acidification.

Now we could, theoretically, try to solve both. Is focusing on plastic bags the way to do it?

The answer depends on whether you view the fight against plastic bags as something that will catalyze more people to care about the environment and take action — or an empty gesture that will allow people to pat themselves on the back, imagine they've done something to save the planet, and move on.

i think most people feel they're doing their part for the environment simply by bringing a reusable bag to the store

In some places, it might seem like the former is a possibility. California, in fact, has its own successful cap-and-trade program that limits carbon emissions, and many cities — including Chicago — are taking big steps to cut emissions within their borders.

But at a national level, we still aren't close to enacting a comprehensive plan that could make a significant dent in climate change. And as a cynic, I think most people feel they're doing their part for the environment simply by bringing a reusable bag to the store.

If we want to avoid catastrophic climate change, we need to reinvent our energy systems and make other big, structural changes. An environmentalism that focuses on personal choices and visible, superficial steps is not one that leads to it.

Banning plastic bags is a nice, small, mostly symbolic step towards helping the environment. Now is absolutely not the time for nice, small, symbolic steps.

No matter how well you train your dog, they sometimes slip away from you. You try to get them back, and they just don't want to come. One Quora user has a solution: run the other way.

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You probably remember Friends as one of the best comedies of its era, a megahit that nonetheless possessed warm, funny, relatable characters and a surprisingly soapy storytelling style. It spawned hairstyles, catchphrases, and Ross and Rachel, perhaps the definitive will-they/won't-they relationship of the '90s.

Friends turned 20 in 2014, and that meant the usual round of nostalgic roundups and think pieces about the show (including a couple that suggested it wasn't worth all the hype). Even more of these pieces followed when the show hit Netflix in early 2015.

And now NBC has announced an official Friends "reunion" of sorts, something that many fans of the show have been clamoring for for years. There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical: Not only are the details on said reunion scarce, but it's technically part of a two-hour special honoring director James Burrows, who helmed many of the series' episodes over the course of its 10-season run.

What's more, the only thing we know for certain is that all six members of the main cast — Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc, Matthew Perry, and David Schwimmer — will appear onscreen at some point during the special, which is scheduled to air February 21. There's no guarantee they'll even be in character, let alone share a scene.

"I’m hoping all six of them will be all in the same room at the same time, but I’m not sure if we can logistically pull that off," Bob Greenblatt, NBC’s chair of entertainment, said when he made the announcement at the Television Critics Association winter press tour in Pasadena.

But even if the Friends cast does indeed reconvene for some sort of reunion, scripted or otherwise, missing in much of this is a key piece of information: Friends ruined the TV comedy for a good long while. And it's only just starting to put itself back together.

Pretty people being funny

Okay, okay, if we're being specific, then the executives who kept trying to copy Friends ruined the TV comedy. Really, Friends can't be blamed here. All it did was exist and become extremely popular. At its best, the show was a blast of fresh air, and even when it wasn't very good, it was fun to hang around with the talented ensemble cast week after week.

But perhaps because Friends became one of the last, true TV megahits, executives decided that, hey, they should copy the show. How hard could it be? Since this was television, where copycats usually are blurry Xeroxes, they copied only the most superficial things about the show, which has happened to many a series.

But what was weird about the copying of Friends is that it persists to this day, more than a decade after the show went off the air. Networks can't get it out of their heads that making a new Friends should be incredibly easy, and in the case of How I Met Your Mother, they actually kinda succeeded. (Really, though, HIMYM owes as much to the British Friends-alike Coupling and its inventive narrative trickery as it does the original. But that's another article.)

Take, for instance, the makeup of the Friends cast. All six cast members were ridiculously attractive and funny actors, to boot. Conventional TV wisdom up to that point had been that pretty people struggled to be funny, and if you look at the sitcom casts of previous eras, they rarely had more than a couple of conventionally attractive folks in them. Even in the case of, say, Ted Danson and Shelley Long of Cheers, both actors were good-looking, to be sure, but they were also just a little bit, shall we say, quirky, too.

Nobody's trying to disparage anybody in the cast of Friends here. They all became stars in their own right, and both Jennifer Aniston and Lisa Kudrow won Emmys for their work on the show (and rightly so). It's simply to say that it's hard enough to find funny people. Once you place the restriction of also having those funny people be attractive people, it gets even harder.

Or, as longtime comedy writer Ken Levine (who wrote for both M.A.S.H. and Cheers among his many, many other credits) put it on his blog in a post about how Friends has made executives long for ensemble comedies about young, attractive singles: "I've always believed that for comedies you cast the funniest people. And often times those are not the most attractive. Today that would probably result in a big fight."

Rise of the 20-somethings

Make a list of the biggest hit comedies of the past 20 years. Friends will be on there, of course, but so will Everybody Loves Raymond and Two and a Half Men. So will The Office and Modern Family. And so will current champ, The Big Bang Theory. Yet outside of Modern Family (itself already a "family sitcom," the most generic sitcom format of them all), how many of these shows have inspired legions of copycats to this day? Most of them haven't. But Friends has. Shows attempting to be the new Friends march on and off the schedule every TV season with clockwork regularity.

Now I (and most TV fans) would probably welcome another Friends long before we'd welcome another Two and a Half Men. But it's just weird that TV keeps tossing out parades of single 20- and 30-somethings in an attempt to copy a show that left the air 10 years ago. Granted, the success of HIMYM gave the format new life just when it might have started flagging, but even the shows that last past their first season — the New Girls and Happy Endings of the world — settle into a ratings-deprived state fairly quickly.

But most of these shows are just awful. You won't remember most of them, because they came and went so quickly, but TV keeps trying to make them happen. Even in the most recent TV season, there were NBC's A to Z (which sold itself as a forthright spin on HIMYM, actually, making it a copy of a copy of a copy, if you're following the lineage) and Marry Me (which at least had a few older characters in its ensemble, though it was primarily quirky young folks), to say nothing of Fox's Mulaney (which sold itself as a new spin on Seinfeld but still has tons of Friends in its DNA). That disproportionate focus on one particular type of comedy chokes out lots of other promising types.

And there's something else the three shows above have in common — they all quickly flopped, the fate of so many Friends clones.

Worse, the "singles bouncing in and out of love" genre has a tendency to immediately devolve into a conflictless "hangout sitcom," the sort of show that rarely pushes its characters beyond the most surface-level tension. Comedy thrives on conflict, and the hangout sitcom needs to deflate it, lest we wonder why these people hang out together.

But Friends will remain eternally alluring to network executives. As Jaime Weinman, an associate editor for Canada's Maclean's magazine and one of the world's foremost experts in TV comedy, puts it, the format of the show promises something they love: youth.

"The theme of Friends is what people do when they're not kids anymore, but don't quite feel or act like they're adults yet. You can sell that idea because that's a demographic that networks and advertisers are always trying to reach," Weinman told me. "Writers want to pitch that idea because writers often feel stuck in that limbo between college and adulthood themselves, no matter how old they are."

Ross and Rachel and Monica and Chandler

For all of the ways that TV executives' hunger to find the new Friends hurt broadcast TV comedy for many years, it also had at least one surprisingly beneficial effect — Friends solidified the idea of comedies having long-term story arcs, with the success of its romances between Ross and Rachel and between Monica and Chandler.

Friends' greatest structural innovation was in taking the will-they/won't-they structure Cheers had deployed so successfully and pushing it into the territory of the primetime soap. When done well, it gave viewers something to come back week after week to see — and the network big moments to promote. And that has been influential on nearly every comedy that airs on the screen today.

Go back to that list of big comedy hits. All of them have long-running story arcs that reach resolution very, very, very slowly. And while Cheers paved the way for that, Friends proved that people would sometimes come back just for the romance, or for the characters' career travails, or even for fights between roommates.

That's allowed for TV sitcoms to tackle more ambitious story structures, and it's led to a landscape where everybody pretty much expects there to be continuing story elements in a sitcom, a marked contrast with the history of the medium. At first, executives forced these stories onto sitcom showrunners, but now they're simply a part of the genre's language.

"For better or worse, the basic idea of the sitcom since its inception — that most of the characters are basically in the same place all the time, and so are their relationships — was threatened by Cheers but really demolished by Friends," said Weinman. "Now we expect character relationships to be constantly evolving, to the point that we're surprised if characters don't get together and break up multiple times during a run."

All of this is, of course, an exercise in ridiculousness. Friends' outsize influence has as much to do with the slow collapse of network television (and executives pining for the era when a show could be that big) as it does with anything the show itself did. And the success of How I Met Your Mother proves that with the right cast and right writers, this format can still be amazingly funny and successful.

But we too often think of TV shows as discrete units, things that run for a while, then go off the air and appear in TV Land reruns. Really, however, TV is perhaps the medium most influenced by the other shows that are already on it — whether in reaction to those shows or in embracing what they do so well. Friends might have left the air in 2004, but it also never really did. The seeds of its influence are sprouting all around us.

Last year, the web optimization network CloudFlare promised it would double SSL usage on the web in 2014 — and last night, the company made good on its promise. Overnight, CloudFlare deployed its Universal SSL feature, offering free SSL encryption to any site that opted in. All told, that meant two million new sites with the feature, effectively doubling encryption on the web overnight.

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The Washington Post:

FBI Director James B. Comey sharply criticized Apple and Google on Thursday for developing forms of smartphone encryption so secure that law enforcement officials cannot easily gain access to information stored on the devices — even when they have valid search warrants.

I can’t think of a better endorsement of Apple and iOS.

“Apple will become the phone of choice for the pedophile,” said John J. Escalante, chief of detectives for Chicago’s police department. “The average pedophile at this point is probably thinking, I’ve got to get an Apple phone.”

Well, that didn’t take long. An even stronger endorsement. The pedophile card is pretty much the last resort for these law enforcement types who feel entitled to the content of our digital devices. Fear mongering with bogeymen and an appeal to base emotions.

Jai Agnish/Shutterstock

Sports fans may be rejoicing soon, as the federal government does away with a nearly-40-year-old rule designed to keep fans going to games instead of watching them on television.

Later this week, the Federal Communications Commission is expected to kill what’s known as the sports blackout rule — a restriction that prevents pay-TV providers such as cable and satellite from airing local games if the local stadiums don’t sell out seats.

NFL fans usually complain about this rule because most pro football games are broadcast on over-the-air TV networks instead of cable channels, like other pro sports. While the end of the rule will allow the pay-TV companies to televise games that aren’t sold out, the local broadcast stations will still be barred.

For some people, apparently it's not enough to see Apple's iPhone 6 Plus abused on YouTube. They've got to experience mustering every last bit of their strength to bend Apple's 5.5-inch phablet firsthand. But unlike Unbox Therapy and Consumer Reports, who at least paid for the phones they broke or mutilated during stress tests, these people are going out and destroying Apple's property.

Meet Danny and Kylie, two 15-year-old boys who thought going to a local Apple Store and damaging brand new iPhones would make for a great laugh. It's 2014, so naturally they filmed the entire thing — even showing their own faces and referring to one another by name. The video was posted to YouTube, but it wasn't long before Danny and Kylie had second...

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Last week, FBI director James Comey had sharp words for Apple and its decision to enable encryption by default on iPhones. Comey argued that Apple was allowing its customers to  "place themselves beyond the law," and he worried that unbreakable encryption feature will cost lives when law enforcement isn't able to get the information they need to thwart a kidnapping or terrorist attack.

But there are some good reasons for Apple to offer their customers the most robust privacy protections technology allows — even if that means the job of law enforcement becomes a bit more difficult.

The law is on Apple's side

(Pablo Blazquez Dominguez/Getty Images)

While Comey accused Apple of helping users put themselves beyond the law, it's notable that he didn't say that the products themselves are illegal. That's because they're not: strong encryption products have been legal and widely available for years.

Indeed, the legal status of encryption products was one of the biggest tech policy fights of the 1990s. In the early 1990s, as computers were becoming fast enough to make routine encryption feasible, intelligence and law enforcement agencies were making arguments that sounded a lot like the ones Comey is making now. They wanted backdoors in encryption products to preserve their ability to eavesdrop on people.

But the feds lost that fight, and strong cryptography without backdoors became a foundation of the internet economy. Today, every major web browser comes with strong cryptography built-in. Disk encryption products are available for every major operating system. And email encryption tools are available for free download.

Law enforcement "backdoors" could make iPhones vulnerable to hackers

Former Greek prime minister Konstantinos Karamanlis had his phone calls illegally intercepted due to misuse of a legally-mandated backdoor. (European People's Party)

Comey wants to ensure law enforcement agencies armed with warrants can get access to private samrtphone data. But any system that facilitates access by law enforcement will also make smartphones more vulnerable to hackers too.

As computer scientist Matt Blaze points out, building secure software is a hard enough challenge in its own. Creating a backdoor for the feds adds further complexity, increasing the danger of bugs that will let the bad guys in.

Blaze would know. Two decades ago, the government was pushing the Clipper chip, an encryption device with a built-in backdoor for law enforcement. Then Blaze's research showed that the Clipper chip's backdoor mechanism made the entire encryption scheme insecure. The Clipper chip — and proposals for mandatory backdoors more generally — were scuttled.

Another example of the danger of backdoors came a decade later. The Greek telephone network was built using American hardware that complied with a 1994 law requiring telephone equipment to come with a backdoor mechanism to facilitate spying by law enforcement. In 2004, someone — some have blamed American intelligence agencies — used this system to gain unauthorized access to the Greek telephone network and spy on more than 100 phone lines belonging to senior Greek government officials, including the prime minister.

Some countries are more hostile to privacy rights than the United States

Chinese officials hold an iPhone 6. (ChinaFotoPress/ChinaFotoPress via Getty Images)

Whatever concerns you might have about privacy abuses by the NSA, one thing we can all agree about is that some countries have much worse privacy records. And if Apple retains the ability to unlock peoples' phones in the United States, it's going to face strong pressure to offer the same service to repressive regimes overseas.

That's not just a hypothetical concern. For example, BlackBerry has long touted its strong encryption features when selling its smartphones to corporate clients. But it came under pressure from countries such as the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia to provide access to their customers' secure email.

BlackBerry's negotiating position was strengthened by the fact that, for some corporate and government clients, BlackBerry was unable to break their customers' encryption even if they wanted to. The encryption keys were managed by the customer, not BlackBerry.

If Apple retains the ability to decrypt iPhone data at the behest of US law enforcement, it's going to be hard to say no when Saudi Arabia, Russia, or Egypt comes knocking. And even if you trust the US government not to abuse its decryption authority, you probably don't trust Saudi Arabia's government to respect human rights.

And even if Apple refuses to help repressive governments, the governments might gain access anyway. Last year, the Washington Post reported that Chinese hackers had broken into Google's servers and accessed information about US surveillance targets. If Apple maintains a database of its customers' encryption keys to facilitate law enforcement access, that database would become a juicy target for foreign intelligence services.

The police will still have plenty of ways to solve crimes

Records from cell phone towers can help law enforcement track a suspect's movements hour by hour. (Michael Dorausch)

Comey suggested that law enforcement access to the contents of smartphones would be essential to savings lives in terrorism and kidnapping cases. But his speech was short on specific examples where encryption actually thwarted — or would have thwarted — a major police investigation.

Last week, former FBI official Ronald Hosko wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post offering a concrete example of a case where smartphone encryption would have thwarted a law enforcement investigation and cost lives. "Had this technology been in place," Hosko wrote, "we wouldn’t have been able to quickly identify which phone lines to tap. That delay would have cost us our victim his life."

There's just one problem: Hosko was wrong. In the case he cited, the police had not used information gleaned from a seized smartphone. Instead, they used wiretaps and telephone calling records — methods that would have been unaffected by Apple's new encryption feature. The Washington Post was forced to issue a correction.

Indeed, while law enforcement groups love to complain about ways that encryption and other technologies have made their jobs harder, technology has also provided the police with vast new troves of information to draw upon in their investigations. With the assistance of cell phone providers, law enforcement can obtain detailed records of a suspect's every move. And consumers increasingly use cloud-computing services that store emails, photographs, and other private information on servers where they can be sought by investigators.

So while smartphone encryption could make police investigations a bit more difficult, the broader trend has been in the other direction: there are more and more ways for law enforcement to gain information about suspects. There's no reason to think smartphone encryption will be a serious impediment to solving crimes.

This is a defense of the most prolific and dedicated public servant that has graced the world in my lifetime. One man has added hundreds of billions, if not trillions of dollars of value to the global economy. This man has worked tirelessly for the benefit of everyone around him. It is impossible to name a publicly traded company that has not somehow benefitted from his contributions, and many have benefitted to the tune of billions. In return for the countless billions of wealth that people made from the fruits of his labor, he was rewarded with poverty and ridicule. Now that the world is done taking from him, they are heading to the next step of villifying him as incompetent.

I speak of Richard Stallman, progenitor of the free software movement and creator of GNU (as in GNU/Linux, the most widely deployed operating system in the world, and GNU bash, the tool that has caused so much shellshock lately). He's a hero to me, and anyone that honestly evaluates the landscape of computing's history would conclude that there's few whose contributions may equal his in importance. I place only Ken, Ritchie, and Turing by his side. It is shameful that anyone need to write an essay telling people to stop bashing this man who has worked for free to provide us with some of the greatest software ever written, but I see a number of people who I normally respect defaming the man. Beyond that, irresponsible publications such as the Guardian take the chance to talk shit on Stallman and spew some anti-free software garbage. Over the past few years hating Stallman has become somewhat trendy among the Silicon Valley crowd, and every HN thread involving Stallman spews childish insults about him.

I have, for years, used bash as a central tool in my kit. I have written bash one-liners to spam millions of people with subversive messages and shift the market cap of publicly traded companies by the billions in intraday trading. Like many other GNU tools offered to us at no cost by the Free Software Foundation, I use it frequently to wonderful effect. It is more often than not the first tool I consider when confronted with a problem. It is seriously that useful.

Shellshock is not a critical failure in bash. It is a critical failure in thousands of people who knew a tool so useful that they decided to deploy it far beyond its scope. A tool so resilient that it it did not fall over when everyone deployed against best practices. Everyone knew in the nineties that when you execute a UNIX command with untrusted input, you clear away the environment variables first. Anyone that has untrusted input embedded within a shell script does not know what they are doing. The fact that there is a way to get bash to execute untrusted code is unsurprising. The thing that surprises me is the sheer number of developers who thought it would be otherwise in complete contrast to UNIX parables and common sense.

The real story here, if there is one beyond a piece of software having bugs like all software does, is the Sisyphean responsibility that was placed on one man's shoulders. The world took and took from Richard Stallman thanklessly. All the financiers and tech moguls that made hundreds of billions of dollars off of his work never once wrote him a single check to help him maintain the software their fortunes relied on. After decades of thankless service, a mob of people finally turn upon him like the jackals they are, deriding him as incompetent for a small series of bugs. Richard Stallman accomplished more than any paid developer. They also deride him as a senile fool for his eccentricities. He's always been eccentric. I've talked with him rather recently and guarantee he can code any of his pitiful critics under the fucking table. The world should have given the GNU project some money to hire developers and security auditors. Hell, it should have given Stallman a place to sleep that isn't a couch at a university. There is no fucking justice in this world.

This is a bit of theatre that has played out over and over again. Large and critical pieces of code are heavily relied on, and nobody wants to support them. OpenSSL anyone? Just as print and broadcast technologies were stolen from the people that invented them, the Internet is being hijacked by a bunch of sniveling international bankers that profit off of the effort of those before them. The brave and brilliant men and women who laboured for the Internet's creation will never see a dime for themselves or their offspring. Parasites having the nerve to insult and deride those they leeched from infuriates me.

I, unlike some people, haven't made billions from Stallman's work. That doesn't mean I won't remember what he's done, and what he continues to do for general computation and the Internet. Not a single day goes by that I will not be thankful for his work. You people are pieces of shit. I am disgusted, and you can pry my Emacs from my cold, dead NANDs.

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Reports on the latest Bash bug have gone from bad to worse, as damage from the bug spreads and many early patches are proving ineffective. Unlike Heartbleed, Bash attacks allow for remote code execution, allowing an attacker to exploit the vulnerability for malware distribution. Most attacks from the bug will target web servers and network devices, with experts saying that PHP-based web applications will be particularly vulnerable. Connected devices like smart appliances are also expected to be vulnerable in the long-term, since the devices are often slow to be patched, but early reports indicate an alarming number of systems may be at risk. As Kaspersky Lab's David Jacoby put it, "the real scale of the problem is not yet clear."

"...

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Is it illegal to encrypt the data on your phone? Most would say the answer is a clear no, but Apple's recent announcement that the company won't be able to decrypt user data in iOS 8 apparently has a lot of law enforcement figures spooked. Today at FBI headquarters, director James Comey told reporters he was concerned by the move. "I like and believe very much that we should have to obtain a warrant from an independent judge to be able to take the content of anyone's closet or their smart phone," Comey said. "The notion that someone would market a closet that could never be opened — even if it involves a case involving a child kidnapper and a court order — to me does not make any sense."

It's hard to build a backdoor that can only used...

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HughPickens.com writes: Markus Krajewski reports that today, with many countries phasing out incandescent lighting in favor of more-efficient and pricier LEDs, it's worth revisiting the history of the Phoebus cartel — not simply as a quirky anecdote from the annals of technology, but as a cautionary tale about the strange and unexpected pitfalls that can arise when a new technology vanquishes an old one. Prior to the Phoebus cartel's formation in 1924, household light bulbs typically burned for a total of 1,500 to 2,500 hours; cartel members agreed to shorten that life span to a standard 1,000 hours. Each factory regularly sent lightbulb samples to the cartel's central laboratory in Switzerland for verification. If any factory submitted bulbs lasting longer or shorter than the regulated life span for its type, the factory was obliged to pay a fine. Though long gone, the Phoebus cartel still casts a shadow today because it reduced competition in the light bulb industry for almost twenty years, and has been accused of preventing technological advances that would have produced longer-lasting light bulbs. Will history repeat itself as the lighting industry is now going through its most tumultuous period of technological change since the invention of the incandescent bulb? "Consumers are expected to pay more money for bulbs that are up to 10 times as efficient and that are touted to last a fantastically long time—up to 50,000 hours in the case of LED lights. In normal usage, these lamps will last so long that their owners will probably sell the house they're in before having to change the bulbs," writes Krajewski. "Whether or not these pricier bulbs will actually last that long is still an open question, and not one that the average consumer is likely to investigate." There are already reports of CFLs and LED lamps burning out long before their rated lifetimes are reached. "Such incidents may well have resulted from nothing more sinister than careless manufacturing. But there is no denying that these far more technologically sophisticated products offer tempting opportunities for the inclusion of purposefully engineered life-shortening defects.""

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Right now, security professionals are scrambling to fix a security flaw some are calling Shellshock. It's a major vulnerability related to Bash, a computer program that's installed on millions of computers around the world. There's been a lot of confusion in mainstream media accounts about how the bug works, who's vulnerable, and what users can do about it.

In this explainer, I'll first give a high-level explanation of who is vulnerable and what they can do about it. Then, for those who are interested, I'll give a more technical explanation of exactly how the Bash bug works.

Who is vulnerable?

Bash (which we'll discuss more below) is installed on many computers running operating systems derived from an ancient operating system called Unix. That includes Macs, as well as a lot of web servers running operating systems such as Linux.

Whether these computers are actually vulnerable depends on whether they invoke Bash in an unsafe way. We already know that this is true of many web servers, and it's believed that other types of network services could also be vulnerable. But it'll take a while for security experts to audit various pieces of software to check for vulnerabilities.

(Bwana McCall)

Apple PCs such as MacBooks don't seem to be running services that use Bash in an unsafe way. That means they are probably not vulnerable to hacks from across the internet. But we won't know that for sure until security experts have had time for a careful audit.

Most Microsoft software doesn't use Bash, so users running Windows PCs, people with Windows phones, as well as websites built using Microsoft software, are probably safe from these attacks. Also, it looks like most Android phones are not vulnerable because they use a Bash alternative.

What should I do to protect myself?

Unfortunately, there isn't a ton you can do in the short run. Presumably, Apple will release updated versions of their software soon. So keep an eye out for that on your platform's software update service, and install it as soon as it's available.

There's a good chance hackers will use the vulnerability to create a worm that spreads automatically

There has also been some speculation that a service called DHCP might be vulnerable, though this is looking increasingly doubtful. This is a service that allows laptops, tablets, and smartphones to automatically configure themselves when they log into a wifi network. A malicious wifi router could use the bug to hack into users' laptops and mobile devices. So if you're a Mac user, it might be prudent to avoid logging into untrusted wifi networks — for example, at coffee shops — until Apple has released a security update.

But for the most part, the vulnerability affects servers more than users' own computers. So most of the heavy lifting needs to be done by security professionals, not the rest of us.

What could attackers do with this vulnerability?

The bug can be used to hack into vulnerable servers. Once inside, attackers could deface websites, steal user data, and engage in other forms of mischief.

There's a good chance that hackers will use the vulnerability to create a worm that automatically spreads from vulnerable machine to vulnerable machine. The result would be a botnet, a network of thousands of compromised machines that operate under the control of a single hacker. These botnets — which are often created in the wake of major vulnerabilities — can be used to send spam, participate in denial-of-service attacks on websites or to steal confidential data.

As I write this, security professionals are racing to update their server software before the bad guys have time to attack it.

How hard will it be to fix the problem?

From a technical perspective, the fix shouldn't be too difficult. A partial fix has already been made available, and a full fix should be released soon.

Bash has been around since the 1980s, and it has become an industry standard

The tricky thing will be that, as with the Heartbleed vulnerability earlier this year, Bash is embedded in a huge number of different devices, and it will take a long time to find and fix them all.

For example, many home wifi routers run web servers to enable users to configure them using a web browser. Some of these devices may be vulnerable to a Bash-related attack. And unfortunately, these devices may not have an automatic or straightforward mechanism for upgrading their software. So old IT devices might have lingering vulnerabilities for many years.

OK, let's get technical. What's Bash?

Bash stands for Bourne-Again SHell. It's a computer program that allows users to type commands and executes them. If you're a Mac OS X user, you can check it out out yourself. Go to the Finder, open the Applications folder (from the "Go" menu), then the Utilities folder, and then open "Terminal." It looks like this:

You can see in the menu bar that it says "bash," indicating that the program running inside this terminal window is the Bash shell. The Bash shell understands a wide variety of commands. For example, "cd" stands for "change directory," and tells the Bash shell to navigate to a new folder on your hard drive. Typing "ls" lists the contents of the current directory, while "echo" prints out text to the screen.

Bash has been around since the 1980s, and it has become an industry standard. To this day, it's one of the most popular ways for systems administrators, computer programmers, and other tech-savvy users to execute complex commands on computers.

Because the Bash shell is entirely text-based, it's particularly useful for administering a computer remotely. Running a Bash shell on a server halfway across the world feels exactly the same as running the Bash shell on your local computer. IT professionals use remote shells like Bash extensively to configure, diagnose, repair, and upgrade servers without having to physically travel to their location. As a result, Bash is a standard feature on almost all servers that run an operating system not made by Microsoft.

What's the bug in Bash that people discovered this week?

Bash has a feature where users can set "environment variables" and retrieve them later. It works like this:

That's a trivial example, but environment variables turn out to be an extremely useful feature when executing complex commands.

So what's the bug? Here's a slight variation on the previous example:

The "env" command sets an environment variable (in this case COLOR=red), and then executes a command based on that environment. Here, it's executing a second Bash shell which in turn echoes the string "My favorite color is $COLOR." Because the shell was running in an environment where COLOR=red, it prints out "My favorite color is red."

The exploit works like this:

Notice that the command "echo I hate colors" doesn't use the $COLOR variable at all. So if Bash were working correctly, the command "echo vulnerable" should be ignored — it's just random text in a variable that never gets used. So the word "vulnerable" shouldn't be in the output.

But the malicious string '() { :;}; echo vulnerable" takes advantage of a bug in the way Bash handles environment variables to trick it into treating the string "echo vulnerable" as a command rather than just a string of letters. Even worse, it does this automatically, even if it's evaluating a command (like "echo I hate colors") that doesn't use the $COLOR variable at all!

Of course, in a real attack, the bad guys would do something a lot scarier than printing out the word "vulnerable." They'd use this same mechanism to tell your computer to run spyware, send your private files to a remote server, send out spam, or do other bad stuff.

Wait, doesn't an attacker need to have physical access to my computer to pull this off? That doesn't sound very scary.

If Bash were only a mechanism for accepting commands from human users, this wouldn't be such a big problem. The problem is that Bash has also become a popular way for computer programs to invoke other computer programs.

For example, when you load a website with dynamic content on it, the server handling the request may be using Bash commands to access the information you requested. So while most people never use Bash directly, we're all using it constantly — indirectly — as we're browsing the web.

The problem is that Bash hasbecome a popular way for programs to invoke other programs.

Even worse, when a computer program uses Bash to invoke another computer program, it often uses environment variables to pass along user inputs. For example, when you visit a website, your browser sends the server a variable known as the "User Agent," which tells the server something about which browser you're running. (In my case, I'm running Chrome.)

Web servers often set this user-agent string as an environment variable before using Bash to execute code that generates the web page the user asked for. That allows the server to generate a different website for mobile and desktop browsers, for example.

But malicious parties can manually change their user-agent variable to contain, not a textual description of their browser, but a snippet of malicious code. And if they then visit a server that invokes a vulnerable version of Bash, the server will automatically execute this code, allowing the attacker to hack into the server.

Is anyone actually taking advantage of this bug?

Yes. Malicious software exploiting the vulnerability has already begun to appear online.

Correction: I originally stated that mobile devices running Android and iOS run Bash, but that appears to have been incorrect. Most Android phones ship with a competitor that, so far, does not appear to be vulnerable. I've updated the article accordingly. Also, I stated that a software patch to Bash would fix the problem, but it has since been discovered that the fix is incomplete.

A few hours after the site went live.

Client: I don’t see us on the Google. Shouldn’t the Google be impressed with my website??

Me: No matter what we do, it still takes time to index. The site should start appearing within a month or so. Your brand is very unique.

Client: That’s not fast enough. Should I call the Google?

Me: …You can try.

The largest seller of vinyl albums is now Urban Outfitters, a hipster mecca that sells high-waisted shorts and the occasional offensive sweatshirt. Urban Outfitters sits firmly in the young and hip camp, so this probably means we can definitively declare that vinyl is cool again.

On a call with industry analysts this week, Urban Outfitter's Chief Administrative Officer Calvin Hollinger announced that the company is the biggest seller of vinyl records on planet Earth saying, ""Music is very, very important to the Urban customer. ... In fact, we are the world's number one vinyl seller."

This is an incredible leap for the store. In 2012, independent record stores were still responsible for 64 percent of vinyl sales, according to Forbes. But Urban Outfitters exploited this niche in the market — and at just the right time. While album sales across the country have been in rapid decline, vinyl is experiencing a revival.

Sales of vinyl skyrocketed in 2013 with the release of Jack White's new album, Lazaretto, which quickly became the highest selling vinyl album since Pearl Jam's Vitalogy in 1994. According to Statista, in 2013, vinyl sales jumped 32 percent.

So just who's driving this resurgence? Could it be the work of the teens? When Urban Outfitters saw a drop in revenue in March, Chief Executive Officer Dick Hayne told Buzzfeed that the Urban Outfitters consumer was dipping from the 24-28 age demographic into the 14-18 demographic, and that the company was concerned about this.

So maybe it is the teens who are responsible for vinyl's unexpected revival. Vinyl records may not sound better than digital music, but that doesn't matter to these kids today. They're all about being hip and cool.

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I'd assumed that the banana's protective case would give it some semblance of stability, but I noticed that the one I bought last Friday had a slight bend when I took it out of my pocket this morning. Yes, true, bananas have a natural curve — but you shouldn't be able to bend them further on your own. (Interestingly, I was unable to bend an orange, so not all fruits seem to have this problem.)

Can Chiquita survive a controversy of this magnitude?

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The US Postal Service does a staggering amount of work, when you sit down and really think about it: it delivers 158 billion pieces of mail per year, the vast majority of them on time. And it also has some staggering financial problems: the GAO reported earlier this year that the USPS has $100 billion in debt and unfunded liabilities related to retirees' pensions and health benefits.

All of those troubles have a lot to do with digital communications — it's quicker to send Grandma an email or even a text than a card — but there are plenty of other moving parts. Here are 9 charts that explain what's going on with the US Postal Service.

1) The westward spread of postal service

The US post office underwent some fantastic growth in its early years. In this video from data visualization pro Derek Watkins, you can watch the post office grow from 75 offices in 1789 to nearly 77,000 in 1900. The number of offices would peak in 1901, at 76,945, then start to decline after that with the advent of rural free delivery, which eliminated the need for many offices.

So while the USPS closes post offices today due to shrinking revenues and postal service usage, the decline in post offices has been going on for a century. As of 2013, the total number of post offices stood at 26,670. Since 2012, the postal service has closed 141 facilities as part of a cost-cutting strategy it calls a "network rationalization plan." While the USPS had planned on cutting more than 3,600 offices as of 2011, it eventually decided to instead slash hours at rural offices.

2) The fast death of your friendly neighborhood mailman

Source: USPS

Of course, as the USPS grew, so did its ranks of employees. The number of workers skyrocketed as the population (and therefore number of customers) likewise grew, but in the last decade the postal service has aggressively cut back on workers. Today, there are just under 500,000 workers, down by around 300,000 from the nearly 800,000 there were in 1999.

The postal service has been cutting its workforce through attrition — simply not hiring people to replace its retiring workers, as Government Executive reports — and is also offering buyouts to some postmasters, hoping they'll retire early. But the agency could cut some of those workers through layoffs, if they do not accept buyouts or get other postal jobs. Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe has said he wants ultimately to shrink the workforce down to 400,000 workers by 2017.

3) The check is not in the mail

Starting in 1886, the first year for which continuous data starts to be available (though data doesn't exist for most of 1914-1925), the amount of mail the USPS handled took off, growing exponentially until around 2000. But then email and online bill pay helped drag mail volume down sharply starting in the mid-2000s.

4) Lots of work for far fewer workers

The number of postal workers may be shrinking, but the efficiency of the USPS has grown relatively steadily since 1926. Today, the USPS is handling nearly 325,000 pieces of mail per worker, compared to around 104,000 in 1926. And the trend is still upward, so even as the postal service has shrunk in the last few years, it has grown more efficient by this measure.

5) The ever-rising (but really quite stable) cost of postage

(U.S. News & World Report)

The USPS (through Congress) keeps ramping up the cost of postage, and with each hike, there is some degree of backlash. But when you adjust it for inflation, the cost of postage has been relatively stable since the 1980s and is in fact cheap today compared to the mid-1970s. The above chart from 2013 shows how much today's 49-cent stamp (then the "proposed" rate) would cost in comparison to the past. While it continued the upswing in the cost to send a first-class letter, it really didn't raise prices out of the ordinary.

6) Revenues vs. expenses

Starting in 1971, the USPS stopped receiving taxpayer dollars and became an independent agency of the US government. And in the last decade or so, the USPS's finances have gone from the black to the red. In 2012, the postal service lost a record $16 billion.

The internet certainly helped kill postal revenues, but the question of whether the USPS should have to undertake the costly step of prefunding retirement benefits is very controversial (see chart 8 for more). Congress in 2006 passed a law mandating that the USPS prefund pensions and health benefits for its retirees. The postal service and many of its supporters argue that it's silly to require the USPS to do this — no other government agency is required to do so, nor is any business. But proponents say it's necessary to keep taxpayers from eventually having to bail out the postal service.

What all of this really highlights is the odd no-man's-land that the USPS occupies, somewhere between being a business and a government entity. Congress has made it "independent" but still maintains heavy control over it. For example, Congress has nixed USPS plans to cut costs by cutting Saturday delivery. But then as the USPS cuts costs other ways and shrinks, it reduces service to many Americans, like those in rural areas. That raises the question of what sort of a postal service Americans have a right to.

7) Packages are helping the USPS stay afloat

The postal service isn't hurting on all fronts; in fact, its package business has been one bright spot for the agency. According to data from the USPS's 2013 annual report, package revenue grew by around 8 percent from 2012 to 2013. Partnerships with Amazon, FedEx, and UPS all are helping the USPS keep its parcel business thriving.

But it will take a lot of Amazon and eBay purchases to solve the postal service's fiscal problems. As the Wall Street Journal's Laura Stevens reported earlier this year, the postal service was designed for letters, not packages. First-class mail is simply more profitable than packages; currently, it takes around $3 in package revenue to make up for $1 in lost first-class letter revenue.

8) Prefunding retirements

(Government Accountability Office)

The US Postal Service has long railed against the requirement that it prefund employees' pensions and health benefits. This chart shows exactly how big those liabilities are (i.e., huge). As of 2013, the postal service owed nearly 1.5 times its annual revenues in retiree benefit funding.

9) Postal banking

(USPS Inspector General)

One plan the USPS has to boost its income is postal banking. In a proposal released earlier this year, the USPS inspector general pointed out that around one-quarter of all Americans are unbanked or underbanked — that is, they either have little or no access to financial tools like bank accounts or loans. That's a huge potential customer base, and the plan could benefit both the post office and poor Americans who rely on expensive payday loans. The above chart is an example from the proposal of what loans from a post office would look like — i.e., much less predatory than those from a payday lender.

Did you order an iPhone 6 Plus only to find that the phone was far too big when it finally arrived at your door? I mean seriously, the thing is practically a coffee table. But that's ok, thanks to Japan's Thanko Inc., which has come up with an...

“BlackBerry is still around?”

I’ve heard that question quite often the past few weeks, as I’ve been using the BlackBerry Passport. Contrary to what many people in my social circle believe, BlackBerry is indeed still around and is ready to make itself relevant once again.

For years, BlackBerry tried to fight the iPhone, but that was a battle it brutally lost. Now it's leaving that fight behind and going back to its roots: making tools for getting work done. The ideal BlackBerry user...

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An anonymous reader writes jQuery.com, the official website of the popular cross-platform JavaScript library of the same name, had been compromised and had been redirecting visitors to a website hosting the RIG exploit kit and, ultimately, delivering information-stealing malware. While any website compromise is dangerous for users, this one is particularly disconcerting because of the demographic of its users, says James Pleger, Director of Research at RiskIQ.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Today Microsoft introduced their new Miracast-based wireless streaming device for HDMI monitors and televisions. Its lengthy name is the Microsoft Wireless Display Adapter and it's Microsoft's take on an HDMI streaming dongle. One of the most popular devices in this category is Google's Chromecast, and there are many similarities between the two devices. Like the Chromecast, the Microsoft Wireless Display Adapter is a small adapter that plugs into an HDMI port on your television and uses a USB port for power. From the photos Microsoft has provided, the USB connector seems to be wired directly into the adapter which could pose a problem depending on your television's arrangement of ports as the cord does not look very lengthy. 

The adapter allows streaming and display mirroring from any device with support for Miracast screencasting. Because of this, the adapter is able to work with a variety of devices running on different operating systems, rather than being a device limited to devices that run Windows or Windows Phone 8.

At $59.95 USD, the Microsoft Wireless Display Adapter is around $25 more expensive than Google's Chromecast. It is available for pre-order now on Microsoft's online store, and it will ship in October 2014. 

We've taken Apple's newest iPhones all the way to Iceland to see how well they stack up against last year's model, but what about the original iPhone — and maybe everything in between? That's just what Camera+ app-maker and photographer Lisa Bettany has done with all eight of Apple's iPhone models thus far (except for last year's iPhone 5C) to show the difference a year — or seven — makes in terms of camera hardware.

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Text expanders (a.k.a., on your phone : "keyboard shortcuts" in iOS and "personal dictionary" in Android) are great timesavers : Tap a few keys, and instantly whole words or phrases are entered. Here's a very efficient shortcut if you have multiple email addresses.

Read more...

Car dealers flexed their considerable political muscle during the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul process and got themselves largely exempted from Consumer Financial Protection Bureau oversight. Coincidentally enough, subprime auto loans are now booming even as lending standards remain relatively tight in the rest of the economy. The CFPB announced in mid-September that it's going to push the envelop and try to tighten the screws on this industry, but naturally there is pushback from interests with money at stake.

lending people money so they can buy more durable goods than their wages will support isn't going to solve anything

And Zachary Karabell in Slate makes an important argument that the return of subprime is a good thing. Important not so much because it's persuasive, as because it highlights a more sophisticated argument than simple banker-bashing. The nut of the argument is here: "tight lending standards and even tighter regulations resulted in an unfortunate return to the era before the 1990s, when a low income might mean you were shut out of homeownership, from simple ownership of a car, or from starting a small business."

In other words, lax credit is good for America.

The question Karabell doesn't answer is what, exactly is the social interest in getting more people to own cars? Is it that the extra cars lead to more traffic congestion? That the extra driving leads to more deaths in car crashes? That it leads to more air pollution? It's a bit of a riddle. Obviously cars are useful things to own, which is why they're such a popular consumer product. But is there any good reason at the margin for the government to make higher levels of car ownership per se (rather than, say, higher incomes) a priority? This is especially true when you consider that for a lot of folks the relevant margin won't be car vs no car. It will be cheaper car vs less-cheap car or car-right now-versus car-in-18-months

And the same is true for houses. If more people get to live in big houses because increased supply has made houses more affordable, that's a clear win. Similarly if wages rise and people get to buy nicer houses, that's great. But if houses don't become cheaper and wages don't rise, what is actually achieved by making it easier for people to go into debt to buy them?

The reference to the bad old days before the 1990s leaves out the fact that until 2000 or so, we actually had a pretty good way of getting families into nicer cars and bigger houses. It was called "rising wages and incomes" and it was delightful. But inflation-adjusted median incomes have fallen since 1999, with consumption levels propped up in the mid-aughts by unsustainable debt levels. Then came the crash, the retrenchment, and a number of very tough years for American families. But returning to the idea of lending people money so they can buy more stuff than their wages will support isn't going to solve anything.

This isn't to say that debt is some kind of universal evil. When it finances productive investments — the building of new stores, factories, houses, and hospitals or additional schooling or medical care — it can easily pay off in the long run. Low interest rates mean that a larger set of investments qualify as paying off, which can be very helpful. But looser lending standards for consumer loans (made possible by the implicit guarantee of government bailouts if too many go bad) doesn't have these advantages. It's just a kind of extremely clumsy and opaque shifting around of economic resources.

Editor’s Note: Viewer discretion is advised. Apple lovers and Jony Ive might be disturbed by the content that follows. Also: RIP iPhone 6 Camera

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Hate the iPhone 6′s protruding camera? Feel like it totally takes away from the entire design? Can’t stand that the phone can’t lay flat on its back? The folks at PeripateticPandas agree with you, and they have an… um… industrial fix for you.

Not satisfied with the suggestion that he ‘put a case on it,’ the video’s protagonist decides to take matters into his own hands and grind the thing down till it’s flush with the body. Pros: no more wobble when he sets it down on the table, or snagging on his pocket. Cons: we’re pretty sure that camera is toast. Worth it?

(via Gizmodo)