Massa

Não, não se trata de um prato de bancs com pancs (bichos alimentícios não convencionais com plantas alimentícias não convencionais). É suco de extermínio mesmo. 

Tudo começou quando a leitora do Come-se Júlia foi lá no sítio com a família. Sua sogra, Dona Maria, comentou que antigamente tiravam-se manchas de roupas usando folhas de mamão esmigalhada sobre a roupa molhada a quarar, sempre molhando, virando de lado, não deixando secar. Depois bastava tirar as migalhas de folha e enxaguar. Perguntei se podia bater a folha no liquidificador, já pensando em simplificar a vida? E se em vez de ficar molhando a roupa para o sol não secar a gente botasse a roupa amarela dentro de um saquinho plástico? E se isto e se aquilo?  Ela não sabia responder porque naquele tempo era do jeito que falou. Fiquei com aquilo na cachola. No outro dia, assim que o sol nasceu, botei roupas para quarar do meu modo pensado. Peguei toalha de mesa e pano de prato com manchas e coloquei dentro de sacos imersos num suco feito com folhas de mamão e sabão batidos no liquidificador. Assim que o líquido esquentou, a cor verde sumiu. Virei o saco e deixei o sol agir do outro lado. De fato, os panos clarearam. 

Primeiro teste

Agora sempre uso em roupas brancas - bato com sabão e jogo sobre as roupas que deixo sob o sol

Mas antes disso, enquanto batia as folhas fiquei pensando na razão. Claro, deve ser por causa da papaína, que é uma enzima proteolítica - que quebra proteínas. Toda a planta do mamão tem papaína, assim como outras substâncias. Entre as enzimas proteolíticas há não só a papaína mas também a quimopapaína e papayproteinasa omega. Mas vamos pensar na papaína. Pensei nas utilidades da papaína como limpador de feridas, nas folhas usadas milenarmente para embalar carnes duras de caças a serem cozidas para torná-las mais macias, na seiva do mamão verde (que é um concentrado de papaína) que quando cai na córnea pode cegar, na papaína sobre machucados que faz arder, no mamão consumido por quem tem ferimentos na mucosa e que aumenta o estrago, no poder das enzimas proteolíticas sobre a proteína do leite e da gelatina. Gelatina de abacaxi, que também tem enzima proteolítica, a bromelina, só se faz com a fruta cozida,  que inativa a enzima, se não a gelatina não gelatiniza. E a gente só tem aftas quando come abacaxi porque ele é ácido e tem a bromelina - o ácido torna a mucosa mais sensível à enzima. Se a fruta é só ácida e não tem esta enzima ou se tem a enzima mas não é ácida, não causa aftas - exemplos: limão e mamão. Um é bem ácido e o outro tem papaína. Nenhum dos dois causam aftas porque não tem as duas coisas juntas.  Já kiwi tem os dois. Abacaxi também. 

Tudo isto pra chegar à conclusão, enquanto coava o suco verde, de que se estas enzimas proteolíticas não destroem a proteína da nossa pele íntegra mas come a carne quando a ferida está aberta ou as proteínas expostas.  Esta é uma visão bem simplista, digamos. Mas foi tudo o que me veio à cabeça no momento de decidir aplicar o resto daquele suco verde sobre os pulgões das couves. Vai que os pulgões sejam muito mais permeáveis que nós? Se a mucosa do nosso olho é sensível à seiva do mamão, vai que os pulgões, feitos de proteínas, sejam todos como mucosas expostas? Bem, não custa tentar. 

A esquerda, água. À direita, suco de folha de mamão

Com água, os pulgões se safaram, saíram do prato

Com suco de mamão, extermínio completo

Pulverizei num pé de couve - que plantei num solo pobre de terraplanagem, sem cuidados - que estava tomado de pulgões. Morte imediata!  Fiquei tão empolgada que fiz um teste, pois vai que eles simplesmente morreram afogados. Coloquei então duas partes de couves colonizadas por pulgão em pratos diferentes. Num pulverizei água e no outro, o suco de folhas de mamão. Depois de uns minutos, com água e suco secos no prato, os pulgões saíram rindo da água e se espalhavam pelo prato e pelo banco onde estavam. Os banhados pelo suco de mamão haviam sido exterminados! 

Fiquei com vontade de contar o feito imediatamente aqui, mas quis pesquisar mais se havia algum trabalho mostrando o uso de papaína sobre pulgões. Não achei nada. E isto não quer dizer que não exista. Se alguém tiver notícias sobre isto, me mande. E fui fazendo mais testes. 

E fui também ao Tratado de Fitofármacos Y Nutracéuticos, do argentino Jorge Alonso. E lá há vários trabalhos mostrando a eficácia do uso da planta em diferentes experimentos, usando frutos, seivas, ementes, raiz e córtex. Há bons resultados como antimicrobiano, antifúngico, contra larvas de Áscaris em cachorros, anticoagulante etc. E isto me diz então que não é muito loucura acreditar - e ter comprovado - que o uso de folhas de mamão verde é eficaz contra pulgões. Assim, podemos comer couves orgânicas tratadas sem substâncias tóxicas. Basta depois regar com um jato de mangueira que os pulgões caem mortinhos, secos, esturricados. E quanto a toxicidade do suco, nenhum. Nem pra nós, nem para as folhas, nem para a terra. 

Fiz outros testes pulverizando sobre uns bichinhos que estavam no broto da minha roseira (não sei que bicho é, mas é miudinho como pulgão), sobre formigas - todos morreram, e estou à espreita de uma lagarta.  

O que tenho feito ultimamente é bater no liquidificador 2 folhas e seus talos picados, com um pedaço - a ponta do dedão - de sabão. Meu liquidificador já coa e o sabão é caseiro, mas pode coar num pano e usar qualquer sabão. Fiz testes sem sabão e também funciona. O bom do sabão é que faz o líquido aderir aos bichinhos e à folha. Sem ele, o líquido escorre como gotas de orvalho por causa da oleosidade das folhas e dos bichos.  

Já tinha tentado usar calda de fumo com sabão. Também funciona, mas não é extermínio imediato como com as folhas de mamão. Experimente e depois me diga. 

Colha folhas de mamão bonitas ou feitas, com talos

Duas folhas e um pedacinho de sabão. Fórmula empírica

Coe e coloque em vidro com pulverizador. Use durante vários dias - o meu não perdeu a validade depois de uma semana. O mesmo suco verde, com mais sabão, pode ser usado como clareador de roupas brancas

Voltando à função de clarear roupas, aqui um trecho do livro do Jorge Alonso, sobre outros usos que fala também do uso das folhas em saladas.  "La pulpa del fruto tiene uso comestible dado sua agradable sabor. Con ella se elaboram jugos, mermeladas y tortas. Las hojas suelen comerse en ensaladas, empleandose además, para remover manchas como sustituto del jabón. La papaína, de amplio uso en la industria farmecéutica no solo en productos digestivos, también se emplea en cosmética formando parte de cremas faciales  lociones para limpieza de cutis. Se emplea tambíem para ablandar la carne, como clarificador de la cerveza, para el tratamiento de lana y seda antes de colorearlas, como coadjuvante de la fabricación de hule, como ingrediente en la formulación de pastas dentales y detergentes, y para mejorar el tanizado de cueros finos. La papaína forma parte de algunos productos destinados a la limpieza de lentillas corneales." (suprimi as referências que podem ser conferidas no livro citado lá em cima)
 

Leaks from the whistleblower Edward Snowden have catapulted the NSA into newspaper headlines and demonstrated that it has become one of the most powerful government agencies in the country. From the secret court rulings that allow it collect data on all Americans to its systematic subversion of the entire Internet as a surveillance platform, the NSA has amassed an enormous amount of power.

There are two basic schools of thought about how this came to pass. The first focuses on the agency's power. Like J. Edgar Hoover, NSA Director Keith Alexander has become so powerful as to be above the law. He is able to get away with what he does because neither political party -- and nowhere near enough individual lawmakers -- dare cross him. Longtime NSA watcher James Bamford recently quoted a CIA official: "We jokingly referred to him as Emperor Alexander -- with good cause, because whatever Keith wants, Keith gets."

Possibly the best evidence for this position is how well Alexander has weathered the Snowden leaks. The NSA's most intimate secrets are front-page headlines, week after week. Morale at the agency is in shambles. Revelation after revelation has demonstrated that Alexander has exceeded his authority, deceived Congress, and possibly broken the law. Tens of thousands of additional top-secret documents are still waiting to come. Alexander has admitted that he still doesn't know what Snowden took with him and wouldn't have known about the leak at all had Snowden not gone public. He has no idea who else might have stolen secrets before Snowden, or who such insiders might have provided them to. Alexander had no contingency plans in place to deal with this sort of security breach, and even now -- four months after Snowden fled the country -- still has no coherent response to all this.

For an organization that prides itself on secrecy and security, this is what failure looks like. It is a testament to Alexander's power that he still has a job.

The second school of thought is that it's the administration's fault -- not just the present one, but the most recent several. According to this theory, the NSA is simply doing its job. If there's a problem with the NSA's actions, it's because the rules it's operating under are bad. Like the military, the NSA is merely an instrument of national policy. Blaming the NSA for creating a surveillance state is comparable to blaming the US military for the conduct of the Iraq war. Alexander is performing the mission given to him as best he can, under the rules he has been given, with the sort of zeal you'd expect from someone promoted into that position. And the NSA's power predated his directorship.

Former NSA Director Michael Hayden exemplifies this in a quote from late July: "Give me the box you will allow me to operate in. I'm going to play to the very edges of that box."

This doesn't necessarily mean the administration is deliberately giving the NSA too big a box. More likely, it's simply that the laws aren't keeping pace with technology. Every year, technology gives us possibilities that our laws simply don't cover clearly. And whenever there's a gray area, the NSA interprets whatever law there is to give them the most expansive authority. They simply run rings around the secret court that rules on these things. My guess is that while they have clearly broken the spirit of the law, it'll be harder to demonstrate that they broke the letter of the law.

In football terms, the first school of thought says the NSA is out of bounds. The second says the field is too big. I believe that both perspectives have some truth to them, and that the real problem comes from their combination.

Regardless of how we got here, the NSA can't reform itself. Change cannot come from within; it has to come from above. It's the job of government: of Congress, of the courts, and of the president. These are the people who have the ability to investigate how things became so bad, rein in the rogue agency, and establish new systems of transparency, oversight, and accountability.

Any solution we devise will make the NSA less efficient at its eavesdropping job. That's a trade-off we should be willing to make, just as we accept reduced police efficiency caused by requiring warrants for searches and warning suspects that they have the right to an attorney before answering police questions. We do this because we realize that a too-powerful police force is itself a danger, and we need to balance our need for public safety with our aversion of a police state.

The same reasoning needs to apply to the NSA. We want it to eavesdrop on our enemies, but it needs to do so in a way that doesn't trample on the constitutional rights of Americans, or fundamentally jeopardize their privacy or security. This means that sometimes the NSA won't get to eavesdrop, just as the protections we put in place to restrain police sometimes result in a criminal getting away. This is a trade-off we need to make willingly and openly, because overall we are safer that way.

Once we do this, there needs to be a cultural change within the NSA. Like at the FBI and CIA after past abuses, the NSA needs new leadership committed to changing its culture. And giving up power.

Our society can handle the occasional terrorist act; we're resilient, and -- if we decided to act that way -- indomitable. But a government agency that is above the law... it's hard to see how America and its freedoms can survive that.

This essay previously appeared on TheAtlantic.com, with the unfortunate title of "Zero Sum: Americans Must Sacrifice Some Security to Reform the NSA." After I complained, they changed the title to "The NSA-Reform Paradox: Stop Domestic Spying, Get More Security."

Now that we have enough details about how the >NSA eavesdrops on the Internet, including today's disclosures of the NSA's deliberate weakening of cryptographic systems, we can finally start to figure out how to protect ourselves.

For the past two weeks, I have been working with the Guardian on NSA stories, and have read hundreds of top-secret NSA documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden. I wasn't part of today's story -- it was in process well before I showed up -- but everything I read confirms what the Guardian is reporting.

At this point, I feel I can provide some advice for keeping secure against such an adversary.

The primary way the NSA eavesdrops on Internet communications is in the network. That's where their capabilities best scale. They have invested in enormous programs to automatically collect and analyze network traffic. Anything that requires them to attack individual endpoint computers is significantly more costly and risky for them, and they will do those things carefully and sparingly.

Leveraging its secret agreements with telecommunications companies—all the US and UK ones, and many other "partners" around the world -- the NSA gets access to the communications trunks that move Internet traffic. In cases where it doesn't have that sort of friendly access, it does its best to surreptitiously monitor communications channels: tapping undersea cables, intercepting satellite communications, and so on.

That's an enormous amount of data, and the NSA has equivalently enormous capabilities to quickly sift through it all, looking for interesting traffic. "Interesting" can be defined in many ways: by the source, the destination, the content, the individuals involved, and so on. This data is funneled into the vast NSA system for future analysis.

The NSA collects much more metadata about Internet traffic: who is talking to whom, when, how much, and by what mode of communication. Metadata is a lot easier to store and analyze than content. It can be extremely personal to the individual, and is enormously valuable intelligence.

The Systems Intelligence Directorate is in charge of data collection, and the resources it devotes to this is staggering. I read status report after status report about these programs, discussing capabilities, operational details, planned upgrades, and so on. Each individual problem -- recovering electronic signals from fiber, keeping up with the terabyte streams as they go by, filtering out the interesting stuff -- has its own group dedicated to solving it. Its reach is global.

The NSA also attacks network devices directly: routers, switches, firewalls, etc. Most of these devices have surveillance capabilities already built in; the trick is to surreptitiously turn them on. This is an especially fruitful avenue of attack; routers are updated less frequently, tend not to have security software installed on them, and are generally ignored as a vulnerability.

The NSA also devotes considerable resources to attacking endpoint computers. This kind of thing is done by its TAO -- Tailored Access Operations -- group. TAO has a menu of exploits it can serve up against your computer -- whether you're running Windows, Mac OS, Linux, iOS, or something else -- and a variety of tricks to get them on to your computer. Your anti-virus software won't detect them, and you'd have trouble finding them even if you knew where to look. These are hacker tools designed by hackers with an essentially unlimited budget. What I took away from reading the Snowden documents was that if the NSA wants in to your computer, it's in. Period.

The NSA deals with any encrypted data it encounters more by subverting the underlying cryptography than by leveraging any secret mathematical breakthroughs. First, there's a lot of bad cryptography out there. If it finds an Internet connection protected by MS-CHAP, for example, that's easy to break and recover the key. It exploits poorly chosen user passwords, using the same dictionary attacks hackers use in the unclassified world.

As was revealed today, the NSA also works with security product vendors to ensure that commercial encryption products are broken in secret ways that only it knows about. We know this has happened historically: CryptoAG and Lotus Notes are the most public examples, and there is evidence of a back door in Windows. A few people have told me some recent stories about their experiences, and I plan to write about them soon. Basically, the NSA asks companies to subtly change their products in undetectable ways: making the random number generator less random, leaking the key somehow, adding a common exponent to a public-key exchange protocol, and so on. If the back door is discovered, it's explained away as a mistake. And as we now know, the NSA has enjoyed enormous success from this program.

TAO also hacks into computers to recover long-term keys. So if you're running a VPN that uses a complex shared secret to protect your data and the NSA decides it cares, it might try to steal that secret. This kind of thing is only done against high-value targets.

How do you communicate securely against such an adversary? Snowden said it in an online Q&A soon after he made his first document public: "Encryption works. Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on."

I believe this is true, despite today's revelations and tantalizing hints of "groundbreaking cryptanalytic capabilities" made by James Clapper, the director of national intelligence in another top-secret document. Those capabilities involve deliberately weakening the cryptography.

Snowden's follow-on sentence is equally important: "Unfortunately, endpoint security is so terrifically weak that NSA can frequently find ways around it."

Endpoint means the software you're using, the computer you're using it on, and the local network you're using it in. If the NSA can modify the encryption algorithm or drop a Trojan on your computer, all the cryptography in the world doesn't matter at all. If you want to remain secure against the NSA, you need to do your best to ensure that the encryption can operate unimpeded.

With all this in mind, I have five pieces of advice:

1. Hide in the network. Implement hidden services. Use Tor to anonymize yourself. Yes, the NSA targets Tor users, but it's work for them. The less obvious you are, the safer you are.

2. Encrypt your communications. Use TLS. Use IPsec. Again, while it's true that the NSA targets encrypted connections -- and it may have explicit exploits against these protocols -- you're much better protected than if you communicate in the clear.

3. Assume that while your computer can be compromised, it would take work and risk on the part of the NSA -- so it probably isn't. If you have something really important, use an air gap. Since I started working with the Snowden documents, I bought a new computer that has never been connected to the Internet. If I want to transfer a file, I encrypt the file on the secure computer and walk it over to my Internet computer, using a USB stick. To decrypt something, I reverse the process. This might not be bulletproof, but it's pretty good.

4. Be suspicious of commercial encryption software, especially from large vendors. My guess is that most encryption products from large US companies have NSA-friendly back doors, and many foreign ones probably do as well. It's prudent to assume that foreign products also have foreign-installed backdoors. Closed-source software is easier for the NSA to backdoor than open-source software. Systems relying on master secrets are vulnerable to the NSA, through either legal or more clandestine means.

5. Try to use public-domain encryption that has to be compatible with other implementations. For example, it's harder for the NSA to backdoor TLS than BitLocker, because any vendor's TLS has to be compatible with every other vendor's TLS, while BitLocker only has to be compatible with itself, giving the NSA a lot more freedom to make changes. And because BitLocker is proprietary, it's far less likely those changes will be discovered. Prefer symmetric cryptography over public-key cryptography. Prefer conventional discrete-log-based systems over elliptic-curve systems; the latter have constants that the NSA influences when they can.

Since I started working with Snowden's documents, I have been using GPG, Silent Circle, Tails, OTR, TrueCrypt, BleachBit, and a few other things I'm not going to write about. There's an undocumented encryption feature in my Password Safe program from the command line; I've been using that as well.

I understand that most of this is impossible for the typical Internet user. Even I don't use all these tools for most everything I am working on. And I'm still primarily on Windows, unfortunately. Linux would be safer.

The NSA has turned the fabric of the Internet into a vast surveillance platform, but they are not magical. They're limited by the same economic realities as the rest of us, and our best defense is to make surveillance of us as expensive as possible.

Trust the math. Encryption is your friend. Use it well, and do your best to ensure that nothing can compromise it. That's how you can remain secure even in the face of the NSA.

This essay previously appeared in the Guardian.

EDITED TO ADD: Reddit thread.

Someone somewhere commented that the NSA's "groundbreaking cryptanalytic capabilities" could include a practical attack on RC4. I don't know one way or the other, but that's a good speculation.

Caco Galhardo já destacou devidamente uma das frases, dita pelo ministro Manoel Dias (Trabalho), a respeito da Operação Esopo, da Polícia Federal.

Segue a outra:

“Todo cidadão tem direito a um segundo julgamento“, diz Aloizio Mercadante, ministro da Educação.

***

O pior é que parece que os ministros do STF concordam com ele [e cá estamos de olho em Celso de Mello].

Filed under: Noticiário Tagged: Aloizio Mercadante, Brasília, corrupção, frases, irregularidade, julgamento, Manoel Dias, mensalão, ministro, Planalto, Política

A drunk man arrives at his doorstep and tries to unlock his door. There are 10 keys on his key ring, one of which will fit the lock. Being drunk, he doesn’t approach the problem systematically; if a given key fails to work, he returns it to the ring and then draws again from all 10 possibilities. He tries this over and over until he gets the door open. Which try is most likely to open the door?

Surprisingly, the first try is most likely. The probability of choosing the right key on the first try is 1/10. Succeeding in exactly two trials requires being wrong on the first trial and right on the second, which is less likely: 9/10 × 1/10. And succeeding in exactly three trials is even less likely, for the same reason. The probability diminishes with each trial.

“In other words, it is most likely that he will get the right key at the very first attempt, even if he is drunk,” writes Mark Chang in Paradoxology of Scientific Inference. “What a surprise!”

A Apple anunciou ontem novos iPhones, que agora vem em novas cores. A novidade é o vermelho de raiva com o preço. O novo aparelho já vem com um leitor de impressões digitais, já que para comprar só roubando mesmo, aí você já toca o piano para ser fichado no próprio smartphone.

O novo iPhone é 40x mais rápido do que o primeiro, mas a bateria continua durando a mesma coisa. O iPhone também tem arquitetura de 64 bits o que em termos leigos significa que ele é capaz de assobiar e chupar cana ao mesmo tempo. Além de, é claro, espremer cravos de sua namorada.

Outra novidade são as capinhas. Você pode usar uma capinha de celular xing ling para disfarçar seu iPhone e andar com ele no Brasil sem ser assaltado.

buzzfeed:

Living a comfortable middle class lifestyle is so hard. 

Read the full comic in my series "Who Needs Art?" at Medium.com.

The latest Snowden document is the US intelligence "black budget." There's a lot of information in the few pages the Washington Post decided to publish, including an introduction by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. In it, he drops a tantalizing hint: "Also, we are investing in groundbreaking cryptanalytic capabilities to defeat adversarial cryptography and exploit internet traffic."

Honestly, I'm skeptical. Whatever the NSA has up its top-secret sleeves, the mathematics of cryptography will still be the most secure part of any encryption system. I worry a lot more about poorly designed cryptographic products, software bugs, bad passwords, companies that collaborate with the NSA to leak all or part of the keys, and insecure computers and networks. Those are where the real vulnerabilities are, and where the NSA spends the bulk of its efforts.

This isn't the first time we've heard this rumor. In a WIRED article last year, longtime NSA-watcher James Bamford wrote:

According to another top official also involved with the program, the NSA made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems employed by not only governments around the world but also many average computer users in the US.

We have no further information from Clapper, Snowden, or this other source of Bamford's. But we can speculate.

Perhaps the NSA has some new mathematics that breaks one or more of the popular encryption algorithms: AES, Twofish, Serpent, triple-DES, Serpent. It wouldn't be the first time this happened. Back in the 1970s, the NSA knew of a cryptanalytic technique called "differential cryptanalysis" that was unknown in the academic world. That technique broke a variety of other academic and commercial algorithms that we all thought secure. We learned better in the early 1990s, and now design algorithms to be resistant to that technique.

It's very probable that the NSA has newer techniques that remain undiscovered in academia. Even so, such techniques are unlikely to result in a practical attack that can break actual encrypted plaintext.

The naive way to break an encryption algorithm is to brute-force the key. The complexity of that attack is 2ⁿ, where n is the key length. All cryptanalytic attacks can be viewed as shortcuts to that method. And since the efficacy of a brute-force attack is a direct function of key length, these attacks effectively shorten the key. So if, for example, the best attack against DES has a complexity of 2³⁹, that effectively shortens DES's 56-bit key by 17 bits.

That's a really good attack, by the way.

Right now the upper practical limit on brute force is somewhere under 80 bits. However, using that as a guide gives us some indication as to how good an attack has to be to break any of the modern algorithms. These days, encryption algorithms have, at a minimum, 128-bit keys. That means any NSA cryptanalytic breakthrough has to reduce the effective key length by at least 48 bits in order to be practical.

There's more, though. That DES attack requires an impractical 70 terabytes of known plaintext encrypted with the key we're trying to break. Other mathematical attacks require similar amounts of data. In order to be effective in decrypting actual operational traffic, the NSA needs an attack that can be executed with the known plaintext in a common MS-Word header: much, much less.

So while the NSA certainly has symmetric cryptanalysis capabilities that we in the academic world do not, converting that into practical attacks on the sorts of data it is likely to encounter seems so impossible as to be fanciful.

More likely is that the NSA has some mathematical breakthrough that affects one or more public-key algorithms. There are a lot of mathematical tricks involved in public-key cryptanalysis, and absolutely no theory that provides any limits on how powerful those tricks can be.

Breakthroughs in factoring have occurred regularly over the past several decades, allowing us to break ever-larger public keys. Much of the public-key cryptography we use today involves elliptic curves, something that is even more ripe for mathematical breakthroughs. It is not unreasonable to assume that the NSA has some techniques in this area that we in the academic world do not. Certainly the fact that the NSA is pushing elliptic-curve cryptography is some indication that it can break them more easily.

If we think that's the case, the fix is easy: increase the key lengths.

Assuming the hypothetical NSA breakthroughs don't totally break public-cryptography -- and that's a very reasonable assumption -- it's pretty easy to stay a few steps ahead of the NSA by using ever-longer keys. We're already trying to phase out 1024-bit RSA keys in favor of 2048-bit keys. Perhaps we need to jump even further ahead and consider 3072-bit keys. And maybe we should be even more paranoid about elliptic curves and use key lengths above 500 bits.

One last blue-sky possibility: a quantum computer. Quantum computers are still toys in the academic world, but have the theoretical ability to quickly break common public-key algorithms -- regardless of key length -- and to effectively halve the key length of any symmetric algorithm. I think it extraordinarily unlikely that the NSA has built a quantum computer capable of performing the magnitude of calculation necessary to do this, but it's possible. The defense is easy, if annoying: stick with symmetric cryptography based on shared secrets, and use 256-bit keys.

There's a saying inside the NSA: "Cryptanalysis always gets better. It never gets worse." It's naive to assume that, in 2013, we have discovered all the mathematical breakthroughs in cryptography that can ever be discovered. There's a lot more out there, and there will be for centuries.

And the NSA is in a privileged position: It can make use of everything discovered and openly published by the academic world, as well as everything discovered by it in secret.

The NSA has a lot of people thinking about this problem full-time. According to the black budget summary, 35,000 people and $11 billion annually are part of the Department of Defense-wide Consolidated Cryptologic Program. Of that, 4 percent -- or $440 million -- goes to "Research and Technology."

That's an enormous amount of money; probably more than everyone else on the planet spends on cryptography research put together. I'm sure that results in a lot of interesting -- and occasionally groundbreaking -- cryptanalytic research results, maybe some of it even practical.

Still, I trust the mathematics.

This essay originally appeared on Wired.com.

EDITED TO ADD: That was written before I could talk about this.

EDITED TO ADD: The Economist expresses a similar sentiment.

“(tw:rape) If owning a gun and knowing how to use it worked, the military would be the safest place for a woman. It’s not.

If women covering up their bodies worked, Afghanistan would have a lower rate of sexual assault than Polynesia. It doesn’t.

If not drinking alcohol worked, children would not be raped. They are.

If your advice to a woman to avoid rape is to be the most modestly dressed, soberest and first to go home, you may as well add “so the rapist will choose someone else”.

If your response to hearing a woman has been raped is “she didn’t have to go to that bar/nightclub/party” you are saying that you want bars, nightclubs and parties to have no women in them. Unless you want the women to show up, but wear kaftans and drink orange juice. Good luck selling either of those options to your friends.

Or you could just be honest and say that you don’t want less rape, you want (even) less prosecution of rapists.”

-

A Short Post on Rape Prevention (via brute-reason)

this is one of always reblog kind

(via whatucinurselfllberealonearth)

By David Christopher Bell  Published: September 01st, 2013  In an effort to answer the burning question that nobody asked, PornHub recently released the top three most searched for words state to state in the U.S. The results have been enlightening, yet horrifying. #7. Montana and Oklahoma Are the Only States

Got a bald baby? Perfect unisex Captain Picard cosplay. (Geeks are Sexy)

Android: Google Now is our favorite virtual assistant for Android, and now it's even better. Google unveiled several new cards, including one for car rental details, one that shows you the last bus or train on your commute, another that notifies your loved ones when you're on the way home, and more.

The Car Rental card is designed for people who travel and don't want to fumble for paper or an email looking for a rental reservation number. The new card will just show you your rental information as soon as you arrive at your destination. The updated transit cards will show you when the last bus or train leaves your location for home so you don't miss it on the way home from a concert or late night show.

Speaking of concerts, the new Concert card displays your ticket information as soon as you get to the venue so if they accept digital tickets, yours will be right on-screen when you arrive. Plus, you'll know where your seats are and be able to get there quickly. When you leave, the new commute sharing card will notify your friends or loved ones that you're on the way home so they know when you'll get back.

Some other cards have been updated too. The TV card can now pick out news and other key phrases from shows you're watching and show you relevant news—so if you're watching local news and actually want to learn more about a topic, Google Now can show you. Similarly, the Search card has been updated with reminders, so if you're looking for a musician or an actor, you can tap "remind me" to be notified when they're in a new movie, release a new album, or otherwise make the news. Hit the link below to read all the updates, or to grab the latest version from Google Play.

Google Search (Free) | Google Play via The Android Community on Google+

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Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces, by Radley Balko, PublicAffairs, 2013, 400 pages.

War as a rhetorical concept is firmly embedded in American culture. Over the past several decades, federal and local law enforcement has been enlisted in a war on crime, a war on drugs and a war on terror. These wars are more than just metaphors designed to rally public support and secure budget appropriations. They change the way we think about what the police do. Wars mean shooting first and asking questions later. Wars require military tactics and weaponry. Wars mean civilian casualties.

Over the decades, the war metaphor has resulted in drastic changes in the way the police operate. At both federal and state levels, the formerly hard line between police and military has blurred. Police are increasingly using military weaponry, employing military tactics and framing their mission using military terminology. Right now, there is a Third Amendment case -- that's the one about quartering soldiers in private homes without consent -- making its way through the courts. It involves someone who refused to allow the police to occupy his home in order to gain a "tactical advantage" against the house next-door. The police returned later, broke down his door, forced him to the floor and then arrested him for obstructing an officer. They also shot his dog with pepperball rounds. It's hard to argue with the premise of this case; police officers are acting so much like soldiers that it can be hard to tell the difference.

In Rise of the Warrior Cop, Radley Balko chronicles the steady militarization of the police in the U.S. A detailed history of a dangerous trend, Mr. Balko's book tracks police militarization over the past 50 years, a period that not coincidentally corresponds with the rise of SWAT teams. First established in response to the armed riots of the late 1960s, they were originally exclusive to big cities and deployed only against heavily armed and dangerous criminals. Today SWAT teams are nothing special. They've multiplied like mushrooms. Every city has a SWAT team; 80% of towns between 25,000 and 50,000 people do as well. These teams are busy; in 2005 there were between 50,000 and 60,000 SWAT raids in the U.S. The tactics are pretty much what you would expect -- breaking down doors, rushing in with military weaponry, tear gas -- but the targets aren't. SWAT teams are routinely deployed against illegal poker games, businesses suspected of employing illegal immigrants and barbershops with unlicensed hair stylists.

In Prince George's County, MD, alone, SWAT teams were deployed about once a day in 2009, overwhelmingly to serve search or arrest warrants, and half of those warrants were for "misdemeanors and nonserious felonies." Much of Mr. Balko's data is approximate, because police departments don't publish data, and they uniformly oppose any attempts at transparency or oversight. But he has good Maryland data from 2009 on, because after the mayor of Berwyn Heights was mistakenly attacked and terrorized in his home by a SWAT team in 2008, the state passed a law requiring police to report quarterly on their use of SWAT teams: how many times, for what purposes and whether any shots were fired during the raids.

Besides documenting policy decisions at the federal and state levels, the author examines the influence of military contractors who have looked to expand into new markets. And he tells some pretty horrific stories of SWAT raids gone wrong. A lot of dogs get shot in the book. Most interesting are the changing attitudes of police. As the stories progress from the 1960s to the 2000s, we see police shift from being uncomfortable with military weapons and tactics -- and deploying them only as the very last resort in the most extreme circumstances -- to accepting and even embracing their routine use.

This development coincides with the rhetorical use of the word "war." To the police, civilians are citizens to protect. To the military, we are a population to be subdued. Wars can temporarily override the Constitution. When the Justice Department walks into Congress with requests for money and new laws to fight a war, it is going to get a different response than if it came in with a story about fighting crime. Maybe the most chilling quotation in the book is from William French Smith, President Reagan's first attorney general: "The Justice Department is not a domestic agency. It is the internal arm of national defense." Today we see that attitude in the war on terror. Because it's a war, we can arrest and imprison Americans indefinitely without charges. We can eavesdrop on the communications of all Americans without probable cause. We can assassinate American citizens without due process. We can have secret courts issuing secret rulings about secret laws. The militarization of the police is just one aspect of an increasing militarization of government.

Mr. Balko saves his prescriptions for reform until the last chapter. Two of his fixes, transparency and accountability, are good remedies for all governmental overreach. Specific to police departments, he also recommends halting mission creep, changing police culture and embracing community policing. These are far easier said than done. His final fix is ending the war on drugs, the source of much police violence. To this I would add ending the war on terror, another rhetorical war that costs us hundreds of billions of dollars, gives law enforcement powers directly prohibited by the Constitution and leaves us no safer.

This essay originally appeared in the Wall Street Journal.

Related essay.

O tema dessa postagem eu tinha guardado pra outro dia, mas é necessário que eu a faça o quanto antes. Por quê? Porque toda semana eu recebo um e-mail parecido com o abaixo, que aliás, eu respondi aqui.

“Ande, nao sei nem por onde começar. Primeiro de tudo quero que nao fale meu nome porque varias amigas minhas leem e amam seu blog e eu nao contei pra ninguém o que rolou. Sábado fui em uma balada aqui da minha cidade e conheci um cara lindo, deuso lá, minhas amigas fizeram sinal de positivo e eu fiquei com ele. Mas estava muito bebada, ele me convidou pra me levar pra casa e eu aceitei. No caminho disse que estava com dor nos pés e lembro dele ter me carregado no colo até o carro, então quando chegamos na frente da minha casa a situação ficou quente e a gente ficou mais forte, então ele me colocou de costas no banco e eu pedindo, implorando pra ele parar e ele nao parou, me segurou a força e transou comigo. depois de uns 2 minutos dessa situação eu voei para o banco de trás e comecei a falar pra ele que nao queria, que ele nao podia ter feito isso comigo e fui embora. Ontem ele me chamou pra sair e eu disse que ate gostaria, mas lembrei da noite passada e perdi a vontade, ele pediu mil desculpas e disse que nao queria ter feito nada que eu quisesse (esse papo de sempre). E aí? voce acha a situação grave? o que eu faço? muito obrigada”

Não é o primeiro e-mail que passa pelo Prazamiga no qual a leitora foi abusada e não faz ideia de que na verdade ela foi estuprada. Nas minhas contas já foram uns cinco e pelos comentários, é mais comum do que parece e isso me deixou muito preocupado porque como vocês sabem, eu quero que vocês sejam perigosas, saiam, bebam, se divirtam e não quero que isso continue acontecendo. Essa postagem é pra deixar vocês informadas sobre o que é estupro de vulnerável e quais as medidas legais que vocês podem tomar contra quem abusou de vocês.

Pra começar tudo, esse negócio de que cu de bêbado não tem dono só tem graça quando temos 13 anos, não bebemos, não saímos e não conhecemos o mundo. Cu de bêbado ou de sóbrio tem dono sim, não só o cu, como seu genital, sua boca e seu corpo. Tudo isso te pertence e você decide o que faz com ele e se faz. Independente de você estar com roupa comprida ou curta, sóbria ou alcoolizada, ter sido “fácil” ou só “provocado” alguém, nada justifica qualquer tipo de abuso contra você. Se você é vítima, você nunca vai ser a culpada. Entenda isso de uma vez por todas! Se você é homem e acha que se encher a cara da menina ela fica mais fácil e as chances de você dormir com ela são maiores, desculpa eu te informar, mas você pode ser um estuprador e nem sabe. Não sejamos moralistas, ainda mais aqui. Quem nunca tomou umas, ficou alegre e ficou com alguém que no fundo sabia que não deveria ter ficado? Isso é bem diferente de você estar sem consciência, ou sem controle do seu corpo, visivelmente frágil e manipulável por qualquer pessoa. É essa a diferença entre você ficar com uma pessoa alcoolizada e tirar proveito de uma pessoa totalmente fora de si.

O estupro de vulnerável é o sexo com ou sem consentimento com qualquer pessoa de qualquer idade que não está consciente do que está fazendo e não tem como oferecer resistência ao ato sexual.

O primeiro parágrafo do artigo 217-A diz exatamente isso.

Art. 217-A. Ter conjunção carnal ou praticar outro ato libidinoso com menor de 14 (catorze) anos:

Pena – reclusão, de 8 (oito) a 15 (quinze) anos.

§ 1º Incorre na mesma pena quem pratica as ações descritas no caput com alguém que, por enfermidade ou deficiência mental, não tem o necessário discernimento para a prática do ato, ou que, por qualquer outra causa, não pode oferecer resistência.

Logo, amiga, você estando sonolenta, ou bêbada, ou qualquer coisa que não te deixe pensar corretamente sobre o que está fazendo, ou qualquer situação em que não pode reagir, é encarado como estupro de vulnerável. Então se aquele seu amigo brincou com você enquanto você estava dormindo, ele é estuprador. Se o conhecido do seu amigo aproveitou que você tinha bebido e estava “fácil” e te levou pra um motel para transar contigo, ele te estuprou. Ainda mais! O estupro não é somente quando há o ato de penetração. Qualquer ato libidinoso sem o seu consentimento é estupro.

A maioria das pessoas tem essa imagem de que o estupro é algo violento, feito na escuridão e em um terreno abandonado enquanto a moça volta da faculdade ou do trabalho, mas não é. Pode ser feito às claras e ser encarado como algo normal. Olha mais um depoimento de uma leitora.

“Resolvi comentar sobre o caso da amiga que foi abusada sexualmente e ainda quer sair com o cara de novo.
Vou contar o que ouve comigo para resumir a história e a minha opinião em relação a isto: Fui em uma festa, bebi e acabei “fazendo sexo” com um garoto. Foi sem nenhuma segurança e eu era virgem. Não me lembro de quase nada e o pouco que me lembro hoje me dá nojo, ódio, vontade de vomitar, porém, hoje, pois depois do “sexo” o garoto me apoio, me chamou para sair, fez mais ou menos como o caso da amiga ali… E pasmem, chegou até a me pedir em namoro depois de algumas semanas. E eu? Eu caí, caí como uma idiota. Acreditei que ele realmente gostasse de mim e que ele realmente se sentisse mal por ter feito aquilo comigo, porém, não era nada real, era apenas o modo dele de se sentir menos culpado. Eu me apaixonei por ele, e me dei muito mal ao perceber quem ele era e o que ele realmente tinha feito comigo. Enfim, hoje, quase 3 anos depois, eu frequento terapias e psicólogos, para poder me entender e entender o que aconteceu comigo naquela noite, pois depois daquele dia, todas as coisas ruins como magoa, angustia, ódio, raiva despertaram em mim. Eu comecei a descontar minhas raivas nos meus pais, nos meus amigos e qualquer um que se aproximasse. Hoje eu namoro e o sexo ainda é uma barreira muito grande entre eu e meu atual, que realmente me apoia e principalmente me respeita em relação ao meu bloqueio sexual. Então, meninas, isto é mais que um desabafo, é principalmente um alerta!”

E mais um exemplo.

“Foi uma noite em que estavam todos os amigos numa festa e eu fiquei mto bêbada; tão bêbada que ainda eram 2h30 da manhã e depois disso não lembrava mais de nada. A condição, desde o início, era eu dormir na casa de uma das amigas. Sim, eu acordei na casa dessa amiga. Mas ao olhar pro lado, tinha mais um amigo do lado dela. Quando olhei pra ele, uma sensação horrível me subiu dos pés à cabeça. Pensa, eu ia ganhar carro nesse mesmo dia e eu fiquei super mal humorada pq sentia que algo mto grave tinha acontecido na noite passada – sendo que eu tinha a sensação de que tinha sido com esse amigo. Ande, eu estava SUPER bêbada e isso ficou mto visível. Eu me lembro até a parte em que quebrei 3 Absoluts e a cerveja de um aleatório; além disso, saí CARREGADA do lugar. Imagina o meu estado! Alguns dias depois, a minha amiga e o meu “amigo” me disseram o que aconteceu naquela noite depois que chegamos na casa dela, e era o que eu mais temia. Sim, eu e meu amigo “havíamos transado”, sendo que eu nunca havia dado a menor abertura, nunca havíamos ficado, nunca tinha rolado nem provocação verbal (da minha parte). Além de tudo, ele tinha namorada! Não tinha a menor condição pra termos transado. Eu juro, por tudo que há de mais sagrado, EU NÃO LEMBRO DE ABSOLUTAMENTE NADA DISSO. Por algumas questões, deixamos de ser amigos. Algumas pessoas que sabiam dessa história diziam que ele havia tirado proveito, somente. Que nunca tinha sido meu amigo. Depois de muito tempo a ficha tinha caído. Depois, inclusive, do post daqui sobre a leitora que foi abusada. Perguntei para um amigo, que não sabe de nada, se isso era abuso sexual (eu vulnerável demais e sem capacidade de resistência nem consciência do ato por algum motivo). Ele me disse que, de acordo com uma lei de 2009, foi acrescentada uma emenda de que isso era Estupro de Vulnerável. De qualquer forma, estou contribuindo pq isso aconteceu comigo e eu não tinha ideia da gravidade. Não denunciei, não fiz exames médicos pra comprovar, nada. Só sei que aconteceu isso.”

Viu? A pior parte é que o estupro de vulnerável quase sempre é cometido por pessoas conhecidas da gente e isso dificulta na hora de tomar uma atitude em relação a isso. Ou mesmo de prever. Uma coisa é você evitar andar sozinha em lugares pouco movimentados, outra coisa é você sair com seus amigos e não saber o que esperar. Só que amiga, você se ama? Se respeita? Tem noção de que isso foi uma ato violento e que pode desencadear problemas psicológicos sobre você? É exatamente por isso que você tem que denunciar. Como muitas meninas não sabem com quem e como tratar esse assunto, eu te conto o que você tem que fazer.

A primeira coisa é saber que você é vítima e como vítima, tem seus direitos. Não tem que se envergonhar de ter bebido, ou tomado um remédio ou não ter tido forças pra se livrar do cara. Você foi violentada e a lei de protege sobre qualquer circunstância, tá? Você vai até a delegacia ou delegacia da mulher o mais rápido possível e sem mesmo tomar banho outro trocar de roupas, se viável. Vai fazer o seu boletim de ocorrência sobre o caso e irão te encaminhar para fazer um exame de delito. Se você puder ir para a delegacia com um advogado, o processo é todo mais rápido. Caso neguem qualquer coisa, acione um advogado porque amiga, é seu direito e foi crime. Depois do boletim e dos exames é que o processo vai se desenrolar. Se tiver testemunhas, dê os nomes. Depois é bem importante que você faça exames para ver se contraiu alguma doença após o ato e até se não ficou grávida. Mesmo que achar desnecessário, um apoio psicológico iria te ajudar e contar com os amigos também.

O que não pode acontecer é você ficar calada e além de sofrer pela violência que cometeram contra você, viver com a culpa de não ter denunciado. Eu te imploro, amiga, que se isso acontecer com você, que você não deixe passar. Quem te estuprou não é seu amigo, muito menos preza por você. Não foi uma transa sem vontade, foi estupro. Denuncie sempre!

O post E você, amiga, já foi estuprada hoje? apareceu primeiro em Prazamiga.

Lembram de quando era necessário rootear o aparelho pra conseguir fazer qualquer coisa menos básica no Android?

Não deixa de ser interessante ver que, confrontado com o torniquete apertado pra conseguir root no 4.3 (não confundir com o root via adb shell) e com cada vez menos necessidade de acesso ao superusuário (exemplo), Steve Kondik contempla a morte do root (e promete fazer sua parte para isso acontecer).

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O papa foi informado que enquanto está no Brasil ocorre um evento chamado de Lingerie Day em que pessoas postam suas fotos na internet usando, obviamente, lingerie. Ele aproveitou uma missa para se dizer contra o evento, contra a exposição do corpo da mulher e contra o uso de lingeries sensuais. Segundo o papa, Jesus nunca precisou usar uma lingerie para ser amado e que ele próprio também nunca fez uso deste tipo de produto.

O que mais assustou o sumo pontífice foi a incrível quantidade de jovens que participam deste evento mesmo com todo o frio que assola o Brasil. Segundo o Vaticano, este frio é um sinal de Deus de que o evento é ruim. O papa declarou que passou toda a noite e madrugada de ontem na internet abrindo fotos do evento e rezando individualmente para que cada uma das meninas seja perdoada do pecado que está cometendo.

In an effort to lock the barn door after the horse has escaped, the NSA is implementing two-man control for sysadmins:

NSA chief Keith Alexander said his agency had implemented a "two-man rule," under which any system administrator like Snowden could only access or move key information with another administrator present. With some 15,000 sites to fix, Alexander said, it would take time to spread across the whole agency.

[...]

Alexander said that server rooms where such data is stored are now locked and require a two-man team to access them -- safeguards that he said would be implemented at the Pentagon and intelligence agencies after a pilot at the NSA.

This kind of thing has happened before. After USN Chief Warrant Officer John Walker sold encryption keys to the Soviets, the Navy implemented two-man control for key material.

It's an effective, if expensive, security measure -- and an easy one for the NSA to implement while it figures out what it really has to do to secure information from IT insiders.

And there’s still so much I’ve left off. Standards (the lack thereof, really) have failed us. There’s money to be made! Tell us what your biggest gripe is on Facebook, or Twitter, or you know, any of the other ten trillion services there are. I need a nap.

We've all heard it before when troubleshooting a router: unplug your router, wait ten seconds, and plug it back in. More often than not, this fixes whatever problem we have. But why is that? Superuser user Phoshi has an explanation.

Read more...

Interesting essay on the impossibility of being entirely lawful all the time, the balance that results from the difficulty of law enforcement, and the societal value of being able to break the law.

What's often overlooked, however, is that these legal victories would probably not have been possible without the ability to break the law.

The state of Minnesota, for instance, legalized same-sex marriage this year, but sodomy laws had effectively made homosexuality itself completely illegal in that state until 2001. Likewise, before the recent changes making marijuana legal for personal use in WA and CO, it was obviously not legal for personal use.

Imagine if there were an alternate dystopian reality where law enforcement was 100% effective, such that any potential law offenders knew they would be immediately identified, apprehended, and jailed. If perfect law enforcement had been a reality in MN, CO, and WA since their founding in the 1850s, it seems quite unlikely that these recent changes would have ever come to pass. How could people have decided that marijuana should be legal, if nobody had ever used it? How could states decide that same sex marriage should be permitted, if nobody had ever seen or participated in a same sex relationship?

This is very much like my notion of "outliers" in my book Liars and Outliers.

I am here to tell you about a recipe for pasta that you cook in one pan. One pan, people! Dried noodles, sauce ingredients, water—they all get thrown into a big pan and boiled for less than 10 minutes. You end up with a totally delicious dinner, and a party trick.

I know this recipe is making the rounds. I would even bet that it is blowing up in Pinterest (is it?). I imagine that anyone who saw this in Martha Stewart Living this month knew they needed to try it. It is such a simple idea that I am surprised we haven’t all been doing this the whole time.

I like the recipe because it allows you to get dinner on the table in less than 20 minutes. It is also fun for the cook. That first time you make it you wonder if it will all come together. Is this even possible? Then, the noodles begin to soften, the liquid reduces into a creamy sauce, and you know you’ve got a winner. The real brilliance of the recipe is that by cooking the noodles with the sauce, they absorb so much more flavor than a pot of salted water could ever provide.

Salt is your friend in this dish, don’t skimp! You need a big skillet, big enough for the linguine to lie flat across the bottom.

One-Pan Pasta (adapted slightly from Martha Stewart Living)

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Permalink to One-Pan Pasta | 150 comments so far

The day before her birthday, Emily in Baton Rouge was lamenting the fact that her husband had never once surprised me with a cookie cake. (Hint, hint.)

The next day, her husband “surprised” her with what Emily called “quite possibly the best present I’ve ever received — not only hilarious, but delicious as well!”

Meanwhile, writes Chanisa in Danbury, Connecticut: “This is what my husband wrote on my birthday cake after I nagged him about it for a week.”

related: I don’t want to hear another damn word about flowers

We have the internet in our pocket, and it runs on a tiny rectangular computer with more power and a higher resolution screen than anything we could buy 25 years ago. But despite all these powerful machines no larger than a bar of soap, some things were better in the old days. What do you miss?

Photo by Alan Light.

Evgeny Morozov makes a point about surveillance and big data: it just looks for useful correlations without worrying about causes, and leads people to implement "fixes" based simply on those correlations -- rather than understanding and correcting the underlying causes.

As the media academic Mark Andrejevic points out in Infoglut, his new book on the political implications of information overload, there is an immense -- but mostly invisible -- cost to the embrace of Big Data by the intelligence community (and by just about everyone else in both the public and private sectors). That cost is the devaluation of individual and institutional comprehension, epitomized by our reluctance to investigate the causes of actions and jump straight to dealing with their consequences. But, argues Andrejevic, while Google can afford to be ignorant, public institutions cannot.

"If the imperative of data mining is to continue to gather more data about everything," he writes, "its promise is to put this data to work, not necessarily to make sense of it. Indeed, the goal of both data mining and predictive analytics is to generate useful patterns that are far beyond the ability of the human mind to detect or even explain." In other words, we don't need to inquire why things are the way they are as long as we can affect them to be the way we want them to be. This is rather unfortunate. The abandonment of comprehension as a useful public policy goal would make serious political reforms impossible.

Forget terrorism for a moment. Take more mundane crime. Why does crime happen? Well, you might say that it's because youths don't have jobs. Or you might say that's because the doors of our buildings are not fortified enough. Given some limited funds to spend, you can either create yet another national employment program or you can equip houses with even better cameras, sensors, and locks. What should you do?

If you're a technocratic manager, the answer is easy: Embrace the cheapest option. But what if you are that rare breed, a responsible politician? Just because some crimes have now become harder doesn't mean that the previously unemployed youths have finally found employment. Surveillance cameras might reduce crime -- even though the evidence here is mixed -- but no studies show that they result in greater happiness of everyone involved. The unemployed youths are still as stuck as they were before -- only that now, perhaps, they displace anger onto one another. On this reading, fortifying our streets without inquiring into the root causes of crime is a self-defeating strategy, at least in the long run.

Big Data is very much like the surveillance camera in this analogy: Yes, it can help us avoid occasional jolts and disturbances and, perhaps, even stop the bad guys. But it can also blind us to the fact that the problem at hand requires a more radical approach. Big Data buys us time, but it also gives us a false illusion of mastery.