Ok but imagine how the aliens would react to the idea of the “mom friend”. Like the crew is losing their mind over the fact their human is reckless, doing so many dangerous things that would have killed any other race but of course it’s fine because it’s a human and those things are so hard to kill anyway.
The only planet that is a danger to a human is the one it came from.
So when the human-Kat comes into the control room with that adorable hopeful face a lot of the crew members are instantly on guard. The last time Human-Kat had that expression they almost lost Xe'rex to the waves of that one planet that Human-Kat just had to “Surf”.
“Can my friend Lola come meet us for the 34-OJ mission? She’s right in our pathway to that new planet? Please?” Huamn-Kat says and though they want nothing more then to say no, the crew of 626- Launch can’t say anything else other then yes. They know how humans react when left alone for too long. Humans claim that their greatest criminals are placed in “solitary confinement” as punishment which goes very far to show how much bonds affect their life spans.
Human-Kat needs human interaction to stay alive and sane (or as sane as humans can be)
So the crew agrees to have Friend-Lola on the voyage, slightly terrified of having two humans. But when the new human arrives it is not what they expected.
“Kat, have you finished your paperwork? Come on man, you know it’s due in like a day. Get on it.”
“Whoa dude, I love you ok. But no. You are not going to go surfing down there. It’s for your own good.”
“Girl you got the promotion?! Yes! Ok Ok! We need to celebrate with girls night in!”
“Hey I have some tissues in my bag somewhere hold on. There ya go.”
“Look at this game I picked up on RE-vr’. It’s just like Cards against Humanity but space!”
“Go. To. Sleep. Kat.”
“Remember that pact we made in high school? The one where I would stop you from doing something that will get you arrested or killed? Yeah well I’m calling it into action and saying that you do not lick anything on a unknown planet!“
This Human…holds common sense? That is possible for that race?!
After Friend-Lola leaves they ask Human-Kat about this and she merely laughs while swiping through photographs she had taken with the other human.
“Well Lola is the mom friend.”
And the crew of 626-Luanch are so confused because they have already seen photos of Human-Kat’s birth givers and they look nothing alike not to mention Human-Kat already has a Mom. Do humans have more then one “Mom”?
“Oh you know a mom friend is the one friend in a group that keeps everyone else from dying.” Human-Kat jokes.
But the crew is amazed. They have learn the reason humanity haven’t killed itself off. They send a message to every out post in the area.
If xe have a human on-board make sure that they are accompanied by a Mom Friend. These are the humans in charge of keeping other humans alive and well-behaved.
The human classification system is in constant evolution, but the addition of Mom Friend has helped with establishing parameters for the care and well-being of human crew members. There have been cases of incompatibility, especially with sub-class Asshole of the designation Cranky, but the provision of a designated “Ship Mom” has generally created greater stability for vessels with multiple humans on board.
An important note for Mom Friend humans is that they must be provided with designated human crew to care for. Even with said provision, some will expand their interest to monitoring and nurturing all sapients on board. Such monitoring may include anything from restructuring the mess to provide optimal nutrition with occasional “treats” to engineering a way to ease molting with the application of a warm, nubby cloth and soft cooing. Some Mom Friends can be stopped from this; there is a ritual surrounding the phrase “I was just trying to help” that is still being investigated for potential use after it is properly translated and understood.
Care should be taken to ensure that Mom Friend sub-class “Mama Bear” is kept away from weapons storage if there is any interest in survivors after a ship is boarded.
Any Mom Friend designated human using “that’s it” in a declarative manner should be treated with level III diplomatic protocols. If the phrase is accompanied by some variation of “had enough,” evacuation of the immediate area is advised.
in the virginia legislature, a trans woman named Danica Roem just defeated the man who wrote that gross bathroom bill. that’s how history works and that’s why elections matter. SO proud of every single one of you who voted today.
Testimony and Statement for the Record of Bruce Schneier
Fellow and Lecturer, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School
Fellow, Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School
Hearing on "Securing Consumers' Credit Data in the Age of Digital Commerce"
Before the
Subcommittee on Digital Commerce and Consumer Protection
Committee on Energy and Commerce
United States House of Representatives
1 November 2017
2125 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515
Mister Chairman and Members of the Committee, thank you for the opportunity to testify today concerning the security of credit data. My name is Bruce Schneier, and I am a security technologist. For over 30 years I have studied the technologies of security and privacy. I have authored 13 books on these subjects, including Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World (Norton, 2015). My popular newsletter Crypto-Gram and my blog Schneier on Security are read by over 250,000 people.
Additionally, I am a Fellow and Lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government --where I teach Internet security policy -- and a Fellow at the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. I am a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, AccessNow, and the Tor Project; and an advisory board member of Electronic Privacy Information Center and VerifiedVoting.org. I am also a special advisor to IBM Security and the Chief Technology Officer of IBM Resilient.
I am here representing none of those organizations, and speak only for myself based on my own expertise and experience.
I have eleven main points:
1. The Equifax breach was a serious security breach that puts millions of Americans at risk.
Equifax reported that 145.5 million US customers, about 44% of the population, were impacted by the breach. (That's the original 143 million plus the additional 2.5 million disclosed a month later.) The attackers got access to full names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses, and driver's license numbers.
This is exactly the sort of information criminals can use to impersonate victims to banks, credit card companies, insurance companies, cell phone companies and other businesses vulnerable to fraud. As a result, all 143 million US victims are at greater risk of identity theft, and will remain at risk for years to come. And those who suffer identify theft will have problems for months, if not years, as they work to clean up their name and credit rating.
2. Equifax was solely at fault.
This was not a sophisticated attack. The security breach was a result of a vulnerability in the software for their websites: a program called Apache Struts. The particular vulnerability was fixed by Apache in a security patch that was made available on March 6, 2017. This was not a minor vulnerability; the computer press at the time called it "critical." Within days, it was being used by attackers to break into web servers. Equifax was notified by Apache, US CERT, and the Department of Homeland Security about the vulnerability, and was provided instructions to make the fix.
Two months later, Equifax had still failed to patch its systems. It eventually got around to it on July 29. The attackers used the vulnerability to access the company's databases and steal consumer information on May 13, over twomonths after Equifax should have patched the vulnerability.
The company's incident response after the breach was similarly damaging. It waited nearly six weeks before informing victims that their personal information had been stolen and they were at increased risk of identity theft. Equifax opened a website to help aid customers, but the poor security around that -- the site was at a domain separate from the Equifax domain -- invited fraudulent imitators and even more damage to victims. At one point, the official Equifax communications even directed people to that fraudulent site.
This is not the first time Equifax failed to take computer security seriously. It confessed to another data leak in January 2017. In May 2016, one of its websites was hacked, resulting in 430,000 people having their personal information stolen. Also in 2016, a security researcher found and reported a basic security vulnerability in its main website. And in 2014, the company reported yet another security breach of consumer information. There are more.
3. There are thousands of data brokers with similarly intimate information, similarly at risk.
Equifax is more than a credit reporting agency. It's a data broker. It collects information about all of us, analyzes it all, and then sells those insights. It might be one of the biggest, but there are 2,500 to 4,000 other data brokers that are collecting, storing, and selling information about us -- almost all of them companies you've never heard of and have no business relationship with.
The breadth and depth of information that data brokers have is astonishing. Data brokers collect and store billions of data elements covering nearly every US consumer. Just one of the data brokers studied holds information on more than 1.4 billion consumer transactions and 700 billion data elements, and another adds more than 3 billion new data points to its database each month.
These brokers collect demographic information: names, addresses, telephone numbers, e-mail addresses, gender, age, marital status, presence and ages of children in household, education level, profession, income level, political affiliation, cars driven, and information about homes and other property. They collect lists of things we've purchased, when we've purchased them, and how we paid for them. They keep track of deaths, divorces, and diseases in our families. They collect everything about what we do on the Internet.
4. These data brokers deliberately hide their actions, and make it difficult for consumers to learn about or control their data.
If there were a dozen people who stood behind us and took notes of everything we purchased, read, searched for, or said, we would be alarmed at the privacy invasion. But because these companies operate in secret, inside our browsers and financial transactions, we don't see them and we don't know they're there.
Regarding Equifax, few consumers have any idea what the company knows about them, who they sell personal data to or why. If anyone knows about them at all, it's about their business as a credit bureau, not their business as a data broker. Their website lists 57 different offerings for business: products for industries like automotive, education, health care, insurance, and restaurants.
In general, options to "opt-out" don't work with data brokers. It's a confusing process, and doesn't result in your data being deleted. Data brokers will still collect data about consumers who opt out. It will still be in those companies' databases, and will still be vulnerable. It just don't be included individually when they sell data to their customers.
5. The existing regulatory structure is inadequate.
Right now, there is no way for consumers to protect themselves. Their data has been harvested and analyzed by these companies without their knowledge or consent. They cannot improve the security of their personal data, and have no control over how vulnerable it is. They only learn about data breaches when the companies announce them -- which can be months after the breaches occur -- and at that point the onus is on them to obtain credit monitoring services or credit freezes. And even those only protect consumers from some of the harms, and only those suffered after Equifax admitted to the breach.
Right now, the press is reporting "dozens" of lawsuits against Equifax from shareholders, consumers, and banks. Massachusetts has sued Equifax for violating state consumer protection and privacy laws. Other states may follow suit.
If any of these plaintiffs win in the court, it will be a rare victory for victims of privacy breaches against the companies that have our personal information. Current law is too narrowly focused on people who have suffered financial losses directly traceable to a specific breach. Proving this is difficult. If you are the victim of identity theft in the next month, is it because of Equifax or does the blame belong to another of the thousands of companies who have your personal data? As long as one can't prove it one way or the other, data brokers remain blameless and liability free.
Additionally, much of this market in our personal data falls outside the protections of the Fair Credit Reporting Act. And in order for the Federal Trade Commission to levy a fine against Equifax, it needs to have a consent order and then a subsequent violation. Any fines will be limited to credit information, which is a small portion of the enormous amount of information these companies know about us. In reality, this is not an effective enforcement regime.
Although the FTC is investigating Equifax, it is unclear if it has a viable case.
6. The market cannot fix this because we are not the customers of data brokers.
The customers of these companies are people and organizations who want to buy information: banks looking to lend you money, landlords deciding whether to rent you an apartment, employers deciding whether to hire you, companies trying to figure out whether you'd be a profitable customer -- everyone who wants to sell you something, even governments.
Markets work because buyers choose from a choice of sellers, and sellers compete for buyers. None of us are Equifax's customers. None of us are the customers of any of these data brokers. We can't refuse to do business with the companies. We can't remove our data from their databases. With few limited exceptions, we can't even see what data these companies have about us or correct any mistakes.
We are the product that these companies sell to their customers: those who want to use our personal information to understand us, categorize us, make decisions about us, and persuade us.
Worse, the financial markets reward bad security. Given the choice between increasing their cybersecurity budget by 5%, or saving that money and taking the chance, a rational CEO chooses to save the money. Wall Street rewards those whose balance sheets look good, not those who are secure. And if senior management gets unlucky and the a public breach happens, they end up okay. Equifax's CEO didn't get his $5.2 million severance pay, but he did keep his $18.4 million pension. Any company that spends more on security than absolutely necessary is immediately penalized by shareholders when its profits decrease.
Even the negative PR that Equifax is currently suffering will fade. Unless we expect data brokers to put public interest ahead of profits, the security of this industry will never improve without government regulation.
7. We need effective regulation of data brokers.
In 2014, the Federal Trade Commission recommended that Congress require data brokers be more transparent and give consumers more control over their personal information. That report contains good suggestions on how to regulate this industry.
First, Congress should help plaintiffs in data breach cases by authorizing and funding empirical research on the harm individuals receive from these breaches.
Specifically, Congress should move forward legislative proposals that establish a nationwide "credit freeze" -- which is better described as changing the default for disclosure from opt-out to opt-in -- and free lifetime credit monitoring services. By this I do not mean giving customers free credit-freeze options, a proposal by Senators Warren and Schatz, but that the default should be a credit freeze.
The credit card industry routinely notifies consumers when there are suspicious charges. It is obvious that credit reporting agencies should have a similar obligation to notify consumers when there is suspicious activity concerning their credit report.
On the technology side, more could be done to limit the amount of personal data companies are allowed to collect. Increasingly, privacy safeguards impose "data minimization" requirements to ensure that only the data that is actually needed is collected. On the other hand, Congress should not create a new national identifier to replace the Social Security Numbers. That would make the system of identification even more brittle. Better is to reduce dependence on systems of identification and to create contextual identification where necessary.
Finally, Congress needs to give the Federal Trade Commission the authority to set minimum security standards for data brokers and to give consumers more control over their personal information. This is essential as long as consumers are these companies' products and not their customers.
8. Resist complaints from the industry that this is "too hard."
The credit bureaus and data brokers, and their lobbyists and trade-association representatives, will claim that many of these measures are too hard. They're not telling you the truth.
Take one example: credit freezes. This is an effective security measure that protects consumers, but the process of getting one and of temporarily unfreezing credit is made deliberately onerous by the credit bureaus. Why isn't there a smartphone app that alerts me when someone wants to access my credit rating, and lets me freeze and unfreeze my credit at the touch of the screen? Too hard? Today, you can have an app on your phone that does something similar if you try to log into a computer network, or if someone tries to use your credit card at a physical location different from where you are.
Moreover, any credit bureau or data broker operating in Europe is already obligated to follow the more rigorous EU privacy laws. The EU General Data Protection Regulation will come into force, requiring even more security and privacy controls for companies collecting storing the personal data of EU citizens. Those companies have already demonstrated that they can comply with those more stringent regulations.
Credit bureaus, and data brokers in general, are deliberately not implementing these 21st-century security solutions, because they want their services to be as easy and useful as possible for their actual customers: those who are buying your information. Similarly, companies that use this personal information to open accounts are not implementing more stringent security because they want their services to be as easy-to-use and convenient as possible.
9. This has foreign trade implications.
The Canadian Broadcast Corporation reported that 100,000 Canadians had their data stolen in the Equifax breach. The British Broadcasting Corporation originally reported that 400,000 UK consumers were affected; Equifax has since revised that to 15.2 million.
Many American Internet companies have significant numbers of European users and customers, and rely on negotiated safe harbor agreements to legally collect and store personal data of EU citizens.
The European Union is in the middle of a massive regulatory shift in its privacy laws, and those agreements are coming under renewed scrutiny. Breaches such as Equifax give these European regulators a powerful argument that US privacy regulations are inadequate to protect their citizens' data, and that they should require that data to remain in Europe. This could significantly harm American Internet companies.
10. This has national security implications.
Although it is still unknown who compromised the Equifax database, it could easily have been a foreign adversary that routinely attacks the servers of US companies and US federal agencies with the goal of exploiting security vulnerabilities and obtaining personal data.
When the Fair Credit Reporting Act was passed in 1970, the concern was that the credit bureaus might misuse our data. That is still a concern, but the world has changed since then. Credit bureaus and data brokers have far more intimate data about all of us. And it is valuable not only to companies wanting to advertise to us, but foreign governments as well. In 2015, the Chinese breached the database of the Office of Personal Management and stole the detailed security clearance information of 21 million Americans. North Korea routinely engages in cybercrime as way to fund its other activities. In a world where foreign governments use cyber capabilities to attack US assets, requiring data brokers to limit collection of personal data, securely store the data they collect, and delete data about consumers when it is no longer needed is a matter of national security.
11. We need to do something about it.
Yes, this breach is a huge black eye and a temporary stock dip for Equifax -- this month. Soon, another company will have suffered a massive data breach and few will remember Equifax's problem. Does anyone remember last year when Yahoo admitted that it exposed personal information of a billion users in 2013 and another half billion in 2014?
Unless Congress acts to protect consumer information in the digital age, these breaches will continue.
Thank you for the opportunity to testify today. I will be pleased to answer your questions.
Children are meant to be cared for by whole communities and the nuclear family is inherently toxic to parent and child alike.
The comments are full of people who had the wonderful experience of growing up in non-abusive households, and that’s great. But for many kids I knew growing up, that nuclear family hid secret horrors that a more tribal family would have exposed and could have prevented.
Plus, like, even if you had an amazing nuclear family, how would having more people helping care for the kid be a bad thing?
^ this ^
If the concern is for introverts and such, well, having a greater diversity of caretakers doesn’t have to mean spending more time with them. Kid wants to be left alone? Cool. Good nuclear parents shouldn’t force contact, either.
What I wouldn’t have given for someone to notice what was happening and given a shit about it
I was raised by an amazing nuclear family (sorta, we only had the one kid because I’m awesome), but you know what that amazing nuclear family also did? Gave even a tiny semblance of a safe and happy home life to friends of mine who were not so lucky. I used to joke that we were the “Quintal Home for Wayward Children” (and now we’re the “Quintal Home for Akward Bachelors”), but really, so many people I knew had some form of unpleasant home life and my goofy nerdy loving parents with too much space under their roof became the “village” those folks needed. Whether it was just crashing on the sofa for a night or two, making a home-cooked meal, or in one memorable instance sitting under the kitchen table with a friend of mine while he talked to the cat and got overwhelmed by other people, my parents had the love and the stability to share with other people.
The only thing that let me survive a toxic childhood and even preserve a loving relationship with my dad was the fact that my parents took a very “it takes a village” mentality. I have so many uncles, I grew up with a couple extra moms and extraneous siblings and it didn’t make everything magically okay but it made it bearable and it’s probably the reason my younger sister is the phenomenal, functional woman she is today.
The idea that “it takes a village to raise a child” is important and it fucking works.
They compared his legacy to Picasso’s and called him the “King of Fashion” in America and Le Magnifique in Paris. He liberated women from corsets, dominated Belle Epoque fashion with his lavish draped designs and was the first French couturier to commercialise his own perfumes, now an industry standard marketing concept. Paul Poiret should be a household name, but instead he died in poverty, his genius rejected, his leftover stock sold by the kilogram as rags. I thought we could take a minute to remember this forgotten oracle of fashion…
Born in working class Paris to a cloth merchant, as a teenager, Paul Poiret apprenticed in an umbrella shop where he collected scraps of silk to fashion clothes for one of his sister’s dolls.
Two private investigators from Black Cube, using false identities, met
with the actress Rose McGowan, who eventually publicly accused Weinstein
of rape, to extract information from her. One of the investigators
pretended to be a women’s-rights advocate and secretly recorded at least
four meetings with McGowan. The same operative, using a
different false identity and implying that she had an allegation against
Weinstein, met twice with a journalist to find out which women were
talking to the press. In other cases, journalists directed by Weinstein
or the private investigators interviewed women and reported back the
details.
The explicit goal of the investigations, laid out in one contract with Black Cube, signed in July, was
to stop the publication of the abuse allegations against Weinstein that
eventually emerged in the New
York Times and The
New
Yorker.
Over the course of a year, Weinstein had the agencies “target,” or
collect information on, dozens of individuals, and compile psychological
profiles that sometimes focussed on their personal or sexual histories.
Weinstein monitored the progress of the investigations personally. He
also enlisted former employees from his film enterprises to join in the
effort, collecting names and placing calls that, according to some
sources who received them, felt intimidating.
Vincent van Gogh, “Olive Trees” (1889) (all images courtesy The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art)
There’s a grasshopper in the van Gogh. The artist didn’t intend to embed the critter in his canvas when he was painting olive groves in the south of France, but the insect is there, buried in a swirl of paint. For over a century, it went unnoticed in the finished work, “Olive Trees” (1889), now owned by the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, but a recent study by the museum’s curators, conservators, and outside scientists has revealed its old, brown carcass. It’s a small but telling trace of van Gogh’s practice of painting outdoors, where conditions were often windy enough to send flies, dust, sand — and, apparently, crickets — blowing around the artist and his canvas.
Image taken through a microscope of the grasshopper embedded in the paint of “Olive Trees”
The grasshopper came to light while Paintings Conservator Mary Schafer was examining the work under magnification, as part of the museum’s ongoing research for a catalogue of its collection of French paintings. Buried in the lower foreground of the landscape, it escaped notice for so long because the thickness of the paint makes it practically unobservable to the naked eye, as museum spokesperson Kathleen Leighton told Hyperallergic. Traces of the grasshopper are also small: the body is incomplete, with the bug’s thorax and abdomen missing.
It’s unlikely that the strong-legged grasshopper got stuck in the paint, failed to jump out of a sticky dollop, and experienced a slow, horrible death. Invited by the museum to take a closer look at the insect, paleo-entomologist Dr. Michael S. Engel noticed that there was no sign of movement in the paint surrounding its body, indicating that no struggle took place.
“The entomologist we consulted determined that the grasshopper was dead when it became stuck in the thick paint, so it’s likely it was blowing in the wind when it became stuck,” Leighton said.
Schafer had been curious as to whether the grasshopper could be used to identify the season during which van Gogh executed the painting, but no more precise dating, unfortunately, could be made from her surprise finding. The grasshopper was left in its inadvertent burial site, and now rests in peace in the museum’s Bloch Galleries, where “Olive Trees” is on display.
They exist in Haiti. Thats how my great great great grandfather died.
Wait hold on someone explain this to me I’m so lost lol
The belief is Haiti is that certain women can live under water and will lived there for years… These women are extremely beautiful and men being men can’t stay away from a good looking women are seduce and then dragged under water and are never to be seen again… My great grandmother was one of these women… One day her mother sent her to go get water from the river and she never came back 10 years later they see her come up the road in all white with beautiful jewelry all around her body sing up a storm.. When her family asked her where she was she told them she was under water… thats the story my grandma always use to tell me growing up
what other animals have we bred to have a huge variation in sizes like dogs?
why must we play god
let’s not forget cats
Pigs.
Fully grown healthy small breeds clock in between 70-150 lbs. Extreme situation pigs (AKA minimicro teacup etc, which btw teacup puppies are also extreme situations and are not healthy) show up sometimes at less than 50lbs. There are lab breeds (pigs are used in human medical research because of their similarity in organs and tissue composition) that are rumored to be bred “safely” down to 50 lbs but lab pig breeds are pretty tightly kept confidential.
gigantic commercial breeds can weigh 700+lbs when allowed to reach full size. extreme individuals have been recorded over 1500lbs.
here’s a farm pig and a potbelly, but that farm pig is just a regular farm pig. not even one of the huge ones.
And cattle too.
Chianina (an italian draught breed now raised for meat). this is the tallest and heaviest pure breed of cattle.
But holstein-friesians are ridiculously tall. They don’t weigh as much, but they’re suuuuuuuuper tall.
vs a wide variety of mini breeds.
mini zebus
mini texas longhorns
there’s a ton of miniature breeds. A TON. Some are traditional/natural breeds, IE the entire breed is that small. Some are miniaturized versions of full sized breeds (like the longhorns above. There’s also mini holsteins, mini angus, mini herefords, you name it)
whoever timed the film to the music is fucking brilliant this is gorgeous and oh my god i know they’re made of a lot of fat/blubber but this gave me like seven heart attacks
When we think of 3D technology, we don’t often think of the
sixteenth century books. However, printers have found ways to creative
interactive texts since printing began. For example, Euclid’s The Elements of Geometrie included
shapes that buyers could cut out and glue onto the pages of their book. These
cut-outs would then form the three-dimensional shapes described in the text,
like the pyramid above!
Euclid, The Elements
of Geometrie of the Most Auncient Philosopher Euclide of Megara (Imprinted
at London: by John Daye, 1570). Q. 516.2
Eu2:E1570.
