Scott Kitterman: Future of secure systems in the US
As a rule, I avoid writing publicly on political topics, but I m making an exception.
In case you haven t been following it, the senior Republican and the senior Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee recently announced a legislative proposal misleadingly called the Compliance with Court Orders Act of 2016. The full text of the draft can be found here. It would effectively ban devices and software in the United States that the manufacturer cannot retrieve data from. Here is a good analysis of the breadth of the proposal and a good analysis of the bill itself.
While complying with court orders might sound great in theory, in practice this means these devices and software will be insecure by design. While that s probably reasonably obvious to most normal readers here, don t just take my word for it, take Bruce Schneier s.
In my opinion, policy makers (and it s not just in the United States) are suffering from a perception gap about security and how technically hard it is to get right. It seems to me that they are convinced that technologists could just do security right while still allowing some level of extraordinary access for law enforcement if they only wanted to. We ve tried this before and the story never seems to end well. This isn t a complaint from wide eyed radicals that such extraordinary access is morally wrong or inappropriate. It s hard core technologists saying it can t be done.
I don t know how to get the message across. Here s President Obama, in my opinion, completely missing the point when he equates a desire for security with fetishizing our phones above every other value. Here are some very smart people trying very hard to be reasonable about some mythical middle ground. As Riana Pfefferkorn s analysis that I linked in the first paragraph discusses, this middle ground doesn t exist and all the arm waving in the world by policy makers won t create it.
Coincidentally, this same week, the White House announced a new Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity . Cybersecurity is certainly something we could use more of, unfortunately Congress seems to be heading off in the opposite direction and no one from the executive branch has spoken out against it.
Security and privacy are important to many people. Given the personal and financial importance of data stored in computers (traditional or mobile), users don t want criminals to get a hold of it. Companies know this, which is why both Apple IOS and Google Android both encrypt their local file systems by default now. If a bill anything like what s been proposed becomes law, users that care about security are going to go elsewhere. That may end up being non-US companies products or US companies may shift operations to localities more friendly to secure design. Either way, the US tech sector loses. A more accurate title would have been Technology Jobs Off-Shoring Act of 2016.
EDIT: Fixed a typo.
We look forward to more remixes and analysis of this data. The plan of the GitHub repository is to keep the data set updated as new data points are published.
What happened in the 
Over a hundred years ago, Russian leaders proposed a treaty 
The other day I received from my Japanese teacher an interesting article by Yamazaki Masakazu 
The author describes his feelings and thoughts about the shishiodoshi, in particular connects human life (stress and relieve, cycles), the flow of time, and some other concepts with the shishiodoshi. Up to here it is a wonderful article providing interesting insights into the way the author thinks. Unfortunately, then the author tries to underline his ideas by comparing the Japanese shishiodoshi with European style water fountains, describing the former with all favorable properties and full of deep meaning, while the latter is qualified as beautiful and nice, but bare of any deeper meaning.
I don t go into details that the whole comparison is anyway a bad one, as he is comparing Baroque style fountains, a very limited period, and furthermore ignores the fact that water fountains are not genuinely European (isn t there one in the Kenrokuen, one of the three most famous gardens in Japan!?), nor does he consider any other water-installation that might be available. What really destroys the in principle very nice article is the tone:
The general tone of the article then can be summarized into: The shishiodoshi is rich on meaning, connects to the life of humans, instigates philosophical reflections, represents nature, the flow of time etc. The water fountain is beautiful and gorgeous, but that is all.
I don t think that this separation, or this negative undertone, was created on purpose by the author. A person of his stature is supposedly above this level of primitive comparison. I believe that it is nothing else but a consequence of upbringing and the general attitude that permeates the whole society with this feeling of separateness.
Us and They
Repeatedly providing sentences like Japanese people and Western people have different tastes.. ( ). About 10 times in this short article expressions like Japanese and Westerner appear, leaving the reader with a bitter taste of an author that considers first the Japanese a people (what about Ainu, Ryukyu, etc?), and second that the Japanese are exclusive in the sense that they are set apart from the rest of the world in their way of thinking, living, being.
What puzzles me is that this is not only a singular opinion, but a very general straight in the Japanese media, TV, radio, newspaper, books. Everyone considers Japan and Japanese as something that is fundamentally and profoundly different from everyone else in the world.
There is We the Japanese (and that doesn t mean nationality of passport, but blood line!), and there are They the Rest or, as the way of writing and and description on many occasion suggestions, They the Barbarians .
A short anecdote will underly this: One of the favorite TV talk show / pseudo-documentary style is about Japanese living abroad. That day a lady married in Paris was interviewed. What followed was a guided tour through Paris showing: Dirt in the gutter, street cleaning cars, waste disposal places. Yes, that was all. Just about the dirt . Of course, at length the (unfortunately only apparent) cleanliness of Japanese cities and neighborhoods are mentioned and shown to remind everyone how wonderful Japan is and how dirty the Barbarians. I don t want to say that I consider Japan more dirty than most other countries just the visible part is clean, the moment you step a bit aside and around the corner, there are the worst trash just thrown away without consideration. Anyway.
To return to the topic of Us and They I consider us all humans, first and foremost, and nationality, birthplace, and all that are just by chance. I do NOT reject cultural differences, they are here, of course. But cultural differences are one thing, separating one self and one s perceived people from the rest of the world is another.
Conclusion
I repeat, I don t think that the author had any ill intentions, but it would have been nicer if the article wouldn t make such a stark distinction. He could have written about Shishiodoshi and water fountains without using the Us They categorization. He could have compared other water installations, could have discussed the long tradition of small ponds in European gardens, just to name a few things. But the author choose to highlight differences instead of commonalities.
It is the Us against Them feeling that often makes life in Japan for a foreigner difficult. Japanese are not special, Austrians, too, are not special, nor are Americans, Russians, Tibetans, or any other nationality. No nationality is special, we are all humans. Maybe at some point this will arrive also in the Japanese society and thinking.
Wow. 3G delta. I haven t booted this laptop for a while I think I m finally ready to make the move from gnome2 to gnome3. There are bits that still annoy me, but I think it s off to a good start. Upgrading perl from 5.10 to 5.14.
Somalia's chief exports appear to be morally-ambiguous Salon articles about piracy and sophomoric evidence against libertarianism. However, it is the former topic that Captain Phillips concerns itself with, inspired by the hijacking of the 
