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Conservative commentator Steven Crowder vs. comedian Christopher Titus re: gun control. Nick reckons no one wins this one. Dan says it’s MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction). I say it’s fun. What say you? Props to anyone who can make it all … Read More
The post Epic Gun Debate Between Steven Crowder and Christopher Titus appeared first on The Truth About Guns.
via The Truth About Guns
Epic Gun Debate Between Steven Crowder and Christopher Titus
WikiLeaks firmly believes in radical transparency, the idea that the world would be better if there were no secrets. That level of transparency can be used for good, like the time the site published a video called “Collateral Murder” showing innocent journalists shot to oblivion by US troops in 2010. But not always.
The organization has also used that tradition of transparency for less just causes, like today when the site published 19,252 emails from top US Democratic National Committee members, many of which included personal information about innocent donors including credit card, social security numbers, and passport numbers.
If you visit the WikiLeaks DNC emails website, you can browse the emails using a simple boolean search. Typing a word like “contribution” will actually turn up hundreds of results. The emails include unencrypted, plain-text listings of donor emails addresses, home addresses, phone numbers, social security numbers, passport numbers, and credit card information. WikiLeaks proudly announced the data dump in a single tweet.
The new leak is part of the organizations ongoing Hillary Leaks series, which launched in March as a searchable archive of more than 30,000 emails and attachments sent to and from Clinton’s private email server, while she was Secretary of State. The original email dump included documents from June 2010 to August 2014. The new release includes emails from January 2015 to May 2016.
This isn’t the first time WikiLeaks has recklessly published personal information of innocent civilians, either. Human rights groups such as Amnesty International and Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission have previously requested that WikiLeaks remove names of Afghan civilians in 77,000 classified military documents published online. The civilians were (ironically) collateral damage in the same leak that spurred the “Collateral Murder” video obtained by Wikileaks.
Exactly why Wikileaks decided not to redact the private information of unsuspecting Americans remains unclear. We’ve reached out for comment and will update as soon as we hear back.
via Gizmodo
WikiLeaks Just Published Tons of Personal Data Like a Bunch of Dickheads
Trump gave his nomination acceptance speech last night. I grade it an A-. It wasn’t a speech for the ages, but it was presidential enough. As convention speeches go, it was solid.
As I have already blogged, all Trump needs to do is NOT act like a crazy racist for the next few months and he will win bigly. This speech introduced no new outrages, and voters are starting to get used to the old ones. So on a strategic level, it was a strong performance. If Trump does more of this, and adds no new outrages, he’ll glide to a comfortable victory.
Persuasion-wise, Trump’s family was the big story of the convention. People seem to love them in the same way the public loved the Kennedys. And notice how Donald Jr. and Eric both have the speaking cadence of John and Jack Kennedy. Notice also how Melania reminds you of Jackie Kennedy – quiet, smart, and classy. These are coincidences, but your irrational brain doesn’t care. It sees a new batch of Kennedys and wants to see more of them. That’s powerful election magic for a nation that only pretends to care about policies.
A week ago you compared ugly Donald Trump with ugly Hillary Clinton and declared them a visual tie. That matters because our visual “brain” generally wins against whatever part of the brain is pretending to be logical that day. But once we got a look at the entire Trump family, acting as a group, our visual brains started seeing them as a package deal. And when you compare the entire Trump family’s visual appeal to the entire Clinton family’s visual imagery it’s a massacre.
Would you prefer seeing Bill and Hillary Clinton decompose in front of your eyes for eight years, or watch the Trump family develop their dynasty? Entertainment-wise, that’s no contest. And people usually vote for entertainment over policy. They just don’t realize it. That’s the biggest news from the convention, and you won’t see it in any headline.
I watched Trump’s entire 90-minute speech and don’t remember any of the boring policy statements. No one cares about that stuff. But on the persuasion dimension, I recall the following impressions.
1. Trump made a credible case that he is the better protector of the LGBTQ community because he takes a harder line against Muslim immigration. Even the fact-checkers will ignore that claim. It’s too true to check. And it makes whatever-the-hell Clinton says about protecting LGBTQ citizens look disingenuous.
2. Trump’s best unscripted moment came when he humbly acknowledged that he probably didn’t deserve the support of evangelicals. That was persuasion genius. Nothing will make religious people love you harder than admitting you are not worthy of their affection. Boom. That’s a ten-out-of-ten on the persuasion scale, and you probably thought it was just an unscripted aside. They’re locked in now.
3. Trump made multiple references to inclusiveness. But the best, in terms of persuasion, was his twist on Clinton’s “I’m with her” slogan. Trump says “I’m with you.” That’s good idea-judo. He acknowledges the truth of the other side’s slogan then makes it look ridiculous.
4. I expected more from Trump in terms of dispelling Clinton’s accusations of racism. Instead of producing some quotable speech moments on the topic he wove lots of visual evidence into the entire convention. For example…
My favorite moment of the convention was the other night when a prominent Muslim leader in a business suit gave the benediction. He asked the assembled Republicans to pray to God, and you could almost hear the crowd wondering if they would be praying to the right God in this situation. But they played along.
As things stand now, Trump is on a glide path to the presidency. Something new would have to happen to stop him.
—
If you pray to the right God, you probably already know about my book.
via Scott Adams’ Blog
My Opinion of Trump’s Convention Speech
I recently came across a project where we had to evaluate different techniques suited for encryption of PII data at rest. Database is MySQL community 5.6, Red Hat enterprise OS. We had to encrypt (mask) PII information of customers. As of now data is hosted in local cloud. But we may have future plans to move to a third party cloud like Amazon.
We are talking about two threats, internal and external. Internal – we have support team accessing the database the data for fixes and reporting (slave) Also DBA or Linux root user who have special privileges. So PII needs to be masked from them. External – Mainly hackers, Amazon cloud admins if we move to their cloud environment. Finally we decided to have application layer to do the encryption/decryption. Here are the major factors that lead to the decision
|
Encryption Type
|
|||||
|
#
|
File system Encryption
|
Database level (TDE)
|
Application level
|
Column level privilege(with views)
|
|
|
1
|
Who is responsible
|
OS
|
MySQL EE
|
Application
|
DBA
|
|
2
|
who can access data
|
MySQL user(s)
|
MySQL users
|
application
|
Application, root, DBA
|
|
3
|
protects data from
|
stolen disk, hackers
|
file system hackers
|
everything
|
non Admin MySQL users
|
|
4
|
does not protect from
|
DBA, OPS
|
DBA, root user, OPS
|
DBA, root, access during changes
|
|
|
5
|
what can be encrypted
|
all required file systems
|
database file system
|
required fields
|
required fields
|
|
6
|
performance penalty
|
high
|
low
|
very low
|
nothing
|
|
7
|
protection strength
|
weak
|
strong
|
very strong
|
medium
|
|
8
|
application change required
|
No
|
No
|
Yes
|
No
|
|
9
|
Is backup encrypted
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depends on the method (e.g. sqldump is not)
|
depends on the method
|
yes
|
No
|
|
10
|
protects from internal threat
|
no
|
no
|
yes
|
yes
|
|
11
|
protects from external threat
|
yes
|
yes
|
yes
|
depends
|
|
12
|
duration to encrypt existing data
|
long time
|
long time
|
depends which all fields
|
no time
|
|
OPS : support + dev team having mysql connectivity to the database
|
|||||
|
column level privilege – create views excluding PII data for support folks, this can be a different schema as well with only views present in there
|
|||||
This may not be very explanatory so let me know if you have any questions, I’ll try my best to answer them..
Praji
PlanetMySQL Voting: Vote UP / Vote DOWN
via Planet MySQL
Comparison of database encryption methods (for data at rest)
CIStud writes: This $1.5 million "Star Trek" home theater is the envy of every geek on the planet. The theater is a reconstruction of the bridge of the Starship Enterprise from "Star Trek: Next Generation" and also includes $1 million worth of memorabilia from the classic sci-fi TV show. The home theater was created by financier Marc Bell with the help from Jay Miller of Boca Raton-based Acoustic Innovations. The two started working on the home cinema in 2002 — before construction of Bell’s house even began — and it took them four years to complete. CEPro reports: "A D-Box controller manipulates hydraulics installed beneath the floorboards, meaning the entire room shakes when anything loud happens on screen. The room also includes a JBL Synthesis sound system, which at the time of installation was only used in commercial theaters. The audio system is currently being upgraded to Dolby Atmos specifications and Bell plans to install a 4K projector. A big movie fan, Bell has had over 3,500 films digitized, which are stored and streamed through a Kaleidescape server. He also spent approximately $35,000 on a Prima Cinema system, allowing him and his family to watch films at home the day they are released in commercial cinemas. A wraparound control center surrounds the 11 custom leather chairs in the theater, eight of which recline into beds, while the doors that open into the theater are exact replicas of the Turbolift doors as seen on the TV show. When someone steps on the circular "transporter," the doors open with that familiar "whoosh" sound." Bell apparently likes to spend his money on others too. He has rented a local movie theater for every Star Trek film released in the past 25 years and has taken all of his employees, friends and their children along on opening night. The Wall Street Journal posted a video on YouTube of the home theater.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
via Slashdot
Man Builds $1.5 Million Star Trek-Themed Home Theater
I’m probably not alone in saying I was always curious what else was in the Millennium Falcon. We saw the cockpit, the large hangout area, some hallways and guns, but what else is there? A new collectable revealed at Comic-Con shows exactly that.
On the floor of San Diego Comic-Con, I happened to stumble upon this Cutaway Ship Replica of the Falcon at the QMx booth. Now, I’m sure plenty of people on the internet have drawn detailed maps of the Falcon but, having never searched them out before, I was in awe at this piece.
So yes, the piece has a top that you can put on it and then it’s just a sweet replica of the Falcon. But look at this detail. How do you NOT display it like this?
In that last photo, you get your best look at the cockpit’s relationship to the main area, where the smugglers panels are, and their relation to the rest of the ship which we never see in the movies.
Unfortunately, according to QMx, this is still in the prototype phase so there’s no guarantee it’ll ever get released. But it’s still just insanely cool.
via Gizmodo
So That’s How the Inside of the Millennium Falcon Is Laid Out
The prospect of a new, big scale scifi movie from The Fifth Element director Luc Besson is exciting enough. After seeing footage and images from Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets in Hall H at San Diego Comic-Con this Thursday, it seems that excitement is fully warranted.
Valerian doesn’t open until July 21, 2017 ,but Besson was on hand with stars Dane DeHaan and Cara Delevingne to show a few quick scenes from the film, and explain the world the director has dreamed of making a reality for decades.
Besson fell in love with the original comic books, Valérian and Laureline, as a child. Later in life, he met the original artist, Jean-Claude Mézières and the two collaborated on The Fifth Element. Mezieres begged Besson to adapt Valerian, but the director didn’t think it was possible. With a cast made up of 10 percent humans and 90 percent aliens, and set on a super futuristic world called Alpha, technology wasn’t ready for Valerian in 1999.
Besson felt technology was ready around 2008… but then he saw James Cameron’s Avatar, and realized he wasn’t ready anymore. In awe of the kind of world-building he wanted to accomplish himself, he threw out the script he’d written and started again. The result is the film he finished shooting five weeks ago, but still has 10 months of post-production on.
Because most of the over 2,700 visual effects shots in Valerian aren’t done yet (to compare, Fifth Element only had 200), the scenes shown were mostly just practical sets and dialogue. But they were funny, light, and very Luc Besson—lots of quippy jokes in a hyper-realized environment. One scene showed Laureline beating up two guards and leaving them tied in knots. Another had the pair flying their ship, which is shaped like an asterix, down to a sandy planet on a mission where they have to dress like local tourists. A third scene was set to “Staying Alive” by Wyclef Jean as Valerian is lured into a club run by a character played by Ethan Hawke, containing an exotic dancer played by Rihanna.
The fourth scene was an action set-piece that felt a little like Mad Max. On a desert planet, Valerian and Laureline are running from a massive creature and several humans pick them up in a bus to help them escape. To cover them, one of those humans uses a VR-like helmet to fire up a Gatling gun drone. The alien dodges the fire and jumps onto the bus, resulting in a huge gun battle, until Valerian summons his ship and he and Laureline jump onto it in slow motion, just out of the alien’s reach.
All the scenes were cool and fun, but the best was yet to come. Describing it doesn’t really do it justice, but here goes: Valerian is on a mysterious ship, she’s talking in his ear, while Laureline tells him where to go. One of her directions runs directly into a wall. “You said the quickest way,” she replies. So Valerian smashes through it and into a completely new environment on the ship.In a single long take, he smashes through another wall, and another wall, and another wall, and in-between each wall is an entirely new scene—something industrial, something agricultural, a bottomless pit, etc. The shot is absolutely amazing.
Besides the footage, there was a bit of information on the world of Valerian as well. The opening credits cover several centuries of history starting with actual footage of a U.S. space mission linking up with a Russian space station in 1975. From there, more countries join, until the entire world has a section up there. But then an alien race joins, and then more, and by the year 2300 this mass of humanity, called Alpha, has become too big to be so close to Earth, so it has to go out into the cosmos. The film takes place 400 years later… but it also takes place in a single day.
There are over 200 alien species in the film, some made by motion-capture, others with practical effects.
Valerian opens in exactly one year, and if it lives up to the footage and scope of imagination shown in Hall H Thursday, we’re in for something special.
via Gizmodo
Luc Besson’s Scifi Epic Valerian Looks Like The Fifth Element to the Fifth Power
The Princeton Review and U.S. News & World Report recently published rankings of university entrepreneurship. Among the top 12 schools, the two lists share but a single institution — Babson College. How can two highly regarded agencies compile lists of excellence that have virtually no overlap?
At one level, the answer is obvious: The two groups use different criteria and so arrive at different rankings. But the use of two sets of criteria that yield such wildly differing results suggests a much deeper problem. A lack of consensus regarding what to measure implies a lack of consensus about the goals of university entrepreneurship: It’s hard to measure success when you don’t know what that success looks like. So what is the role of entrepreneurship at the university?
The relationship of the university with society changes continuously. In his classic treatise on the university, John Henry Newman made the case for an educational mission; more particularly, liberal education. The rise of the research university, first in Germany and later in America, provided another role for the university — that of the search for knowledge. The Morrill Act of 1862 and the creation of the land-grant university offered yet another role for the university — to “promote the practical education of the industrial classes.”
Finally, the democratization of the American university through the middle of the 20th century brought education to the masses, along with the creation of programs more akin to training than enlightenment. Today, most universities accept, in varied measures, the dual roles of creation and dissemination of knowledge.
Today, too, the university seeks to engage the world around it, and to use the university as a means to do good in the world. At Duke, for example, we list Knowledge in the service of society as one of our enduring values. “Our work forms an arc, spanning from inquiry through discovery on the one end and translation into practice on the other.”
Newman’s notions of the interrelatedness of knowledge are as relevant today as they were in 1853.
MIT’s recently announced $5 billion Campaign for a Better World includes Innovation and Entrepreneurship to accelerate “the path from idea to impact.” The university does good in the world through that translation into practice — converting the fundamental knowledge that grows at the university into real things and real actions that have real consequences for real people. And that translation at the university is entrepreneurship.
This conception of university entrepreneurship does not divert attention from the long-established roles of teaching and research. Nor does it turn faculty into business men and women. Rather, it asserts that ideas form the basis of human advancement, whether in science and engineering, the arts, public policy or law. It holds that the means by which those ideas are converted into action are understood and can be taught. And it proposes that the impact and relevance of the university is enhanced by creating an infrastructure and a culture that allows the ideas that grow at the university to be converted to action, whether or not the conversion involves those who conceived the ideas.
This formulation of entrepreneurship does not turn from the ethos of liberal education. Newman’s notions of the interrelatedness of knowledge are as relevant today as they were in 1853. But surely the application of knowledge, the use of that knowledge to solve real-world problems, is a part of the learning. In 1936 Alfred North Whitehead recognized and embraced such a notion explicitly:
“The applications are part of the knowledge. For the very meaning of the things known is wrapped up in their relationships beyond themselves. Thus unapplied knowledge is knowledge shorn of its meaning.”
The 21st-century university will engage more fully with society than at any time in its past.
Powerful examples of university entrepreneurship abound, from the hepatitis vaccine to the Honey Crisp apple. University entrepreneurship is CalTech’s Carver Mead, father of the modern VSLI computer chip and founder of at least 20 companies in all aspects of microelectronics. University entrepreneurship is Matthias Gromeier, an associate professor of neurosurgery, and his team that developed an oncolytic poliovirus that provides a cure for the deadliest form of brain cancer — malignant glioblastoma. Today, patients treated with the virus are alive nearly three years after diagnosis; untreated one-year survival rates are near zero.
University entrepreneurship is Suhani Jalota, a Duke undergraduate who constructed a factory in India to provide low-cost sanitary pads for women living in the vast slums of Mumbai. Suhani and her co-workers aim to replicate the model in 500 slums across the globe. University entrepreneurship is Eli Sachs, an MIT professor of engineering who developed a new low-cost way to make silicon solar cells. Sachs left MIT to build 1366 Technologies, a company with production facilities in upstate New York that aims to make solar power cheaper than coal. University entrepreneurship is Michael Prywata and Hermano Krebs, whose startup Bionik Laboratories from Ryerson University in Toronto is developing exoskeleton robots that will allow victims of neurological disease and accidents to walk again.
The 21st-century university will engage more fully with society than at any time in its past. Our value proposition is that knowledge enables a better tomorrow. We realize that promise through the translation of great discoveries into new cures, new technologies and new practices. We realize that promise by training young men and women after the liberal tradition of Newman, but at the same time instilling in them the notion that ideas have power in their application, and that knowledge enables progress through action. Entrepreneurship — the translation of ideas into products and actions — will live at the core of that university.
Featured Image: Prasit Rodphan/Shutterstock
via TechCrunch
The role of higher education in entrepreneurship
An eerily detailed database containing a list of suspected and convicted criminals and terrorists is reportedly being sold online for 10 bitcoin (about $6,600) and 3.5 bitcoin ($2,300.)
The database, colloquially known as "World-Check," is typically sold by Thomson Reuters to a wide variety of agencies in a bid to offer a screening tool to weed out those who might be involved in criminal organizations. The fact that it exists is strange enough, but the fact that it could be selling online to the general public is even more bizarre.
The information comprising World-Check is taken from a vast amount of public data sources and even includes entries for figures who don’t even appear to be charged with the "terrorism" they’re listed with in the database.
The leaks have occurred after last month when security researcher Chris Vickery stumbled upon a copy of the database, which Thomson Reuters then referred to as "outdated." It was supposedly "exposed by a third party," but by then Vickery hadn’t been the only person to get to it. That honor belongs to "Bestbuy," an individual who supposedly accidentally found the database, and has sold it three times over for 10 bitcoin apiece.
Thomson Reuters is aware of the latest leak of this information and has said in response to Motherboard that they’re "engaging with the appropriate authorities" as far as the databases go.
Via: Motherboard
via Engadget
Hackers reportedly selling leaked terrorism watchlist
Here we go again.
Shots were fired in Columbus, Ohio last night in another apparent attempt to ambush police officers.
A large section of Columbus, Ohio was under lockdown last night after police were shot at by a man with a rifle. The police were responding to a call about shots fired near Columbus circle. When they arrived at scene, they came under fire. Police cordoned off a large section of town, including a long stretch of Cleveland Avenue.
Police assigned a SWAT team and a helicopter to aid in the search. Later, a man in an SUV was identified as a suspect, which led to a standoff . During the standoff, the suspect threw what turned out to be a hoax bomb. His SUV was blocked in by police.
Based upon reports for various media sources, the would-be cop-killer appears to have randomly fired shots into local businesses and vehicles to lure police into the area, and then engaged officers as they arrived on the scene. Fortunately for the responding officers, the suspect was unable to make any hits.
He then fled the scene, but was soon spotted and boxed in by three police armored cars and SWAT officers behind a heavy wheeled shield.
The suspect surrendered after a lengthy standoff and was taken into custody.
We’ll update this story as we have more information.
The post Breaking: Columbus SWAT Capture Man Who Attempted Ambush Of Officers appeared first on Bearing Arms.
via Bearing Arms
Breaking: Columbus SWAT Capture Man Who Attempted Ambush Of Officers