firehose

Kim Zetter has written the definitive story -- at least so far -- of the possible backdoor in the Dual_EC_DRBG random number generator that's part of the NIST SP800-90 standard.

~Kelly Oliver

Congressional Republicans are continuing on their chronic crusade to defund or kill Obamacare, using the threat of government shutdown and default as their weapon. Democrats aren't thrilled. "Legislative arsonists," House minority leader Nancy Pelosi called the Republicans on CNN. "They're not focused on you...They're focused on trying to mess with me," President Obama told a Kansas City crowd last week.

On Tuesday, as Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) was going all-out with his defund-the-Affordable-Care-Act grandstanding, Rep. Mark Takano (D-Calif.) tweeted out his take—with a photoshopped image referencing Kanye West:

And last Thursday, Takano weighed in on the debate with this:

Takano, a Harvard grad and former public-school teacher who began representing California's 41st congressional district last January, is Congress' first openly gay person of color. He is Japanese-American, and during World War II, his grandparents and parents were removed from their homes and shipped off to Japanese-American internment camps. He is a fan of classic British literature and, evidently, the hit AMC series Breaking Bad.

"The congressman is a huge fan of the show," Brett Morrow, Takano's communications director, says. "I came up with this idea, and it just sort of clicked." Morrow manages what he calls the "three-headed monster" of Takano's official social-media operation; the other two heads are chief of staff Richard McPike and legislative director Yuri Beckelman. Together, the three 30-somethings regularly brainstorm attention-grabbing social-media items to pitch to Takano. The congressman then makes his tweaks and will sometimes pitch his own ideas.

"Congress is a place that can stifle a lot of creativity, but we're trying to do something different and creative," Morrow says. From 2004 to 2012, Morrow worked in entertainment marketing in Los Angeles, including stints at Universal Music Group and Def Jam. (He worked on the online marketing for one of Rihanna's records, and helped out with the marketing of some of Ice Cube's stuff, for instance.) "It's the same ideas, same practice," Morrow says. "It's just different going from the entertainment end of things to the political and the policy sphere." As communications director, he oversees the day-to-day management of the congressman's Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, and so forth. The Tumblr is titled, "THERE WILL BE CHARTS," a name inspired by the famous Senate floor charts Tumblr. "It was originally going to be the thing we used to put up charts we used for Takano's floor speeches, but it sort of evolved," Morrow says. What it evolved into was the office's collective outlet for pop-culture references and (mostly partisan) humor.

In July, when Takano and his staff obtained a copy of a letter drafted by Republicans on the subject of immigration reform (the letter was meant for House speaker John Boehner), the Democratic rep. and his "three-headed monster" decided to put his high-school teaching credentials to use:

The tongue-in-cheek mark-up quickly made the rounds on Tumblr and Facebook, and the office later included it in a blast email.

Takano's office recently GIFed his reaction to the Supreme Court's ruling in June that declared the Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional:

Here's Takano on "#BoehnerLogic":

Here's Boehner as a popular, R-rated Steve Carell character:

Here's the congressman's response to Rep. Michele Bachmann's celebration the House's 37th vote to repeal Obamacare:

And from July, here's a reference to a well-known song by American hip-hop artist Kendrick Lamar, in the context of Republicans blocking Senate confirmations:

That nod to Kendrick Lamar earned Takano the designation of "coolest congressman alive" from Bullett Media.

So far, the congressman has no complaints about his team's work. "Glossy mailers and the six o'clock news are no longer how members of Congress reach their constituents," Takano tells Mother Jones. "Our constituents want us to speak to them where they are, and that's online, so I am happy to oblige. However, you're competing with a lot of other noise online, so we have to be creative and avoid clichés to break through. Going this path is cheaper, more immediate, involves more two-way communication, and, in the end, is more meaningful to the debate."

Morrow says that to keep things fresh, they draw inspiration from their social-media peers, including media outlets (Morrow particularly enjoys The Atlantic's Tumblr), certain web-savvy labor unions, and—believe it or not—the Heritage Foundation. (The conservative Washington think tank has lately peppered their online presence with cultural and celebrity content, such as its endorsement of the right-wing meme that actor Ashton Kutcher espouses conservative values.)

"We don't always expect everybody to get every joke, and not everything hits," Morrow says. "But we think it's best just to be creative and see what happens out there. Staffers often tell me you guys are having way too much fun with this. But we really realize that its important to tie politics into other people's fascinations and fandoms."

Original Source

gewalker writes "Have we reached the point where it is time to admit that the ID thieves are winning and will continue to win as long as their incentives are sufficient to make it lucrative for them? According to Krebs On Security an analysis of a database pilfered from commercial identity thieves identified breaches in 25 data brokers including the heavyweights Dun and Bradstreet and LexisNexis." And they had access for months to most of them. From the article: The botnet’s online dashboard for the LexisNexis systems shows that a tiny unauthorized program called nbc.exe was placed on the servers as far back as April 10, 2013, suggesting the intruders have had access to the company’s internal networks for at least the past five months. The program was designed to open an encrypted channel of communications from within LexisNexis’s internal systems to the botnet controller on the public Internet." The companies compromised aggregated data for things like "credit decisions, business-to-business marketing and supply chain management. ... employment background, drug and health screening."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

neckbeardeddragon:

counterpunches:

Food Finish edible spray paint

#nah man gold apples are a bad idea #i’ve read this story it doesn’t end well

which one

DuckTales Remastered managed to make me angry not once but twice—first while I was playing and then again while I was filling out a survey about it at Club Nintendo. The very last section of the questionnaire added that delectable layer of injury on top of the game’s insult. “Why did you purchase DuckTales Remastered on Wii U?” asks Nintendo. “To explore the game’s world,” was my multiple-choice answer. Scrooge McDuck’s an adventurer, and I want to quest alongside him. What’s so galling about Remastered, though, is that exploration isn’t an option. Seeing every inch of the game is a directive, not a reward for explorers. Who cares if I don’t want to miss a thing? I don’t have a say in the matter anyway.

The original DuckTales game was unusual by 1989 standards. Capcom’s NES action games were brilliant, but ...

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The undeclared “gray” income earned by China’s richest families has reached staggering levels, and is contributing to massive income inequality that is far worse than official statistics, according to research by the state-backed China Society of Economic Reform.

CSER researcher Wang Xiaolu, writing in Caixin magazine, said gray income reached 6.2 trillion renminbi (about $1 trillion) in 2011, or about 12% of GDP, based on a survey of 5,344 families in urban areas that was completed in 2012.

That means the richest 10% of urban Chinese families make almost 21 times more than the poorest 10%, versus official statistics from the National Bureau of Statistics that place the rich-to-poor income ratio at only 8.6. The Gini index for China’s urban households—which measures income distribution on a scale of 0 to 1, where the higher values mean more inequality—was 0.496 according to the CSER data, versus the NBS figure of 0.324. A Gini score over 0.4 is correlated with social instability.

“The richer the household, the more likely it receives shadow income,” Wang noted.

Even some Chinese officials admit that income inequality has been understated, because families often lie on household surveys, and China lacks a comprehensive tax record system to check those results. The government has resisted calls for officials to disclose their assets, and entrepreneurs are similarly cagey.

The upside is that families outside of that top 20% are getting a little more of that pie. The neweset figures show 72% percent of gray income went to the wealthiest 20% of families, compared with 81.3% in 2010. The downside is that this could mean corruption is spreading.

“This tells us that invisible income oozed out from the rich to cover more medium to high-income households, possibly a result of expanded corruption and weak rule of law,” Wang wrote. “The high gray income is linked to the loose credit handed out between 2009 and 2010, as well as the rapid increase of government investment during the same period. When administrative power lacks proper checks, the government intervenes in resource allocation and state money can easily be channeled out into private pockets.”

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A generous car-buying incentive program has hit a major pothole in Thailand, which touts itself as the Detroit of Southeast Asia—presumably referring to the auto manufacturing, not crushing levels of government debt—in the latest in a string of questionable stimulus programs.

The $2.5 billion car-buying scheme was similar to the US “cash for clunkers” plan, but without the clunkers—first-time buyers simply received a tax refund of up to $3,200 in an attempt to encourage lower-income Thais to buy domestically made cars.

Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra launched the program after massive floods in 2011 hit the country’s auto industry. Thailand is a regional hub for many car companies, especially Japanese manufacturers such as Honda, Mitsubishi, and Toyota, and autos comprise 12% of the country’s GDP, and at first the plan seemed to work like gangbusters, with 2012 auto production skyrocketing 67% from the previous year.

But the problem with encouraging low-income buyers is they often can’t make their car payments. Reuters reported this week that more than 100,000 new buyers have defaulted on their loans, with their cars seized by finance companies. With the resulting used-car glut and the absence of the subsidies, demand for new cars has cratered, threatening the very industry that the plan was meant to help.

“The end of the incentives scheme created an irregularity which may trade off the benefits to some extent. We’ve come to see it as an unavoidable cost of the program,” said Nobuyuki Murahashi, President of Mitsubishi Motors (Thailand), told Reuters.

The woeful outcome shouldn’t have been a surprise—the US cash for clunker program was widely seen as a failure for some of the same reasons in 2009. Unfortunately, Yingluck’s government seems to have a fondness for subsidy programs that don’t make much economic sense.

In an effort to shore up support among rural Thais, for instance, the government pledged by buy rice from farmers at a guaranteed price that was 50% higher than the market rate. The result: about $21 billion in Thai government losses since 2011, not to mention the loss of the Thailand’s status as the world’s biggest rice exporter. Vietnam and India took advantage of the misstep, and Thailand is sitting on a stockpile of millions of tons of rotting rice.

Another more recent economic policy created new subsidies for rubber farmers, who recently clashed with police in protests over their financial plight—after all, rice farmers got government funds; why shouldn’t they? Thailand is the world’s biggest rubber producer, and worldwide prices have dropped more than 45% over the last two years.

Yingluck’s solution, announced earlier this month: $681 million in rubber farmer handouts. It is unclear how this subsidy will lead to anything but more losses for the government, since rubber prices are under persistent pressure due to decreased demand from China and Europe.

The recent economic policies have been costly: Thailand’s debt climbed to 44.3 percent of gross domestic product in June from 38.2 percent at the end of 2008. In June, Moody’s noted  that the country’s “increasingly expensive” rice subsidy program is “credit negative,” and threatens the government’s goal of balancing the budget in 2017.

“They’re running out of space because there’s a limit to how much they can borrow fiscally,” Deunden Nikomborirak, research director of economic governance at the independent Thailand Development Research Institute, told Quartz. She noted that “political commitments” like the car buying plan and agricultural subsidies are coming up against the country’s fiscal discipline guidelines, which are stipulated by the finance ministry.

“They’re hitting that limit,” Duenden said.

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VIM as a presentation tool

Write slides in a subset of Markdown, display them with Vim.

	Courtney shared this story from The ToastThe Toast:
	Amazing

---

When I’m worried and cannot sleep
I count all the male peers I’ve already outstripped professionally and laugh a full-throated laugh

***

(To the tune of John Mayer’s “Daughters”)
Women, make more than your husbands
Husbands will sob when you do

***

Baa, baa, black sheep
Have you any wool?
Yes, sir; yes, sir;
Kill all men

***

Hot cross buns!
Hot cross buns!
One ha’ penny, two ha’ penny,
Hot cross buns!
If you have no daughters,
Give away your sons
One ha’ penny,
Two ha’ penny,
Hot cross buns!

***

Hush, little baby, don’t say a word
Ever; your sister is talking

***

Georgie Porgie, puddin’ and pie,
Kissed the girls and made them cry,
When the boys came out to play
The girls sharpened their knives and made a decision.

***

Little Miss Muffett
Sat on a tuffett
Eating her curds and whey.
It was illegal for white men to practice medicine.

***

Hello young lovers, whoever you are,
I hope your troubles are few.
All my good wishes go with you tonight,
Feminism doesn’t go far enough.

***

Hickory, dickory, dock
You know what this rhymes with
And what we’ll do to it.
And you won’t like it.

***

There was an old woman who lived in a shoe.
She had so many children, she didn’t know what to do;
She gave them some broth without any bread;
Then whipped them all soundly and put them to bed.
She was right to do it; nothing a woman does should be criticized.

***

In a great green room
there was a telephone
And a red balloon
And a picture of the cow jumping over the moon.
And there were three little bears sitting on chairs
And two little kittens and a pair of mittens
And a little toy house and a young mouse.
And a comb and a brush
And a bowl full of mush
And a quiet old lady who was whispering “Hush” to her male inferiors.

***

It’s raining, it’s pouring;
The old man is snoring
Now is our chance.

***

Jack and Jill went up the hill
To fetch a pail of water.
Jack fell down and broke his crown,
And Jill danced on his grave.

***

Rock-a-bye baby, in the tree-top
When the bough breaks, the cradle will rock
When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall
Under patriarchy, every woman’s son is her potential betrayer.

***

One, two,
Buckle my shoes;
Three, four,
Open the door;
Five, six,
Pick up sticks;
Seven, eight,
Lay them straight:
Nine, ten,
Start over again, male.

***

Now it’s time to say good night
Good night, sleep tight
Now the sun turns out xirr light
Good night, sleep tight
You are not permitted to dream,
It is not permitted for men to dream.

The post Lullabies for Misandrists appeared first on The Toast.

iPhone 5s Test Footage - 120 fps

This is what a faux filibuster looks like: Senator Ted Cruz reads Green Eggs and Ham to his daughters because Green Eggs and Ham, according to him, is just like Obamacare for the American people: “they do not like Obamacare in a box, with a fox, in a house, or with a mouse.”

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It seems like another life. At the height of his corporate career, Tom Palome was pulling in a salary in the low six-figures and flying first class on business trips to Europe.