The new market for security vulnerabilities results in a variety of government agencies around the world that have a strong interest in those vulnerabilities remaining unpatched.

The Vulnerabilities Market and the Future of Security - Forbes

Hypponen says the job searches he began out of curiosity show a marked uptick in these self-described offensive hacker jobs for U.S. government contractors. “I think this is new,” he says. “The arms race has started, and this proves it. It’s a clear sign of the demand to stockpile cyber weapons and expand the operations underway.”

New Grad Looking For a Job? Pentagon Contractors Post Openings For Black-Hat Hackers - Forbes

When Charles Dickens wrote “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” to begin “A Tale of Two Cities,” he compared the years of the French Revolution to his own “present period.” Both were wracked with inequality. But he couldn’t have known that 75 years later inequality would cause the Great Depression. Or that 75 years after that, in our own present period, extreme inequality would return for a fourth time, to impact a much greater number of people. He probably didn’t know that the cycles of history seem to drag the developed world into desperate times about every 75 years, and then seek relief through war or revolution.

It’s that time again.

This observation is historically accurate although I think the attached blog post is a bit overdramatic. Policy makers in this age are fairly smart about avoiding these consequences by creating safety valves and ignoring the wining of libertarians. Something probably still needs to be done about housing.

War or Revolution Every 75 Years. It’s Time Again. | Brave New World

Last year, the psychologist Richard Wiseman bought a wide variety of bottles at the local supermarket, from a five-dollar Bordeaux to a fifty-dollar champagne, and asked people to say which wine was more expensive. (All of the taste tests were conducted double-blind, with neither the experimenter nor subject aware of the actual price.) According to Wiseman’s data, the five hundred and seventy-eight participants could only pick the more expensive wine fifty-three per cent of the time, which is basically random chance. They actually performed below chance when it came to picking red wines. Bordeaux fared the worst, with a significant majority—sixty-one per cent—picking the cheap plonk as the more expensive selection.

Having drunk a lot of wine, you can certainly tell the difference between varietals and you can certainly tell the difference between cheap wine and decent wine but rating decent wines of the same varietal is difficult. You can certainly tell if you've gone from a very nice wine down to a less complex wine in the same sitting! The key is finding something you like that doesn't cost too much...

Does Wine from New Jersey Taste the Same as Wine from France? : The New Yorker

The results were quite disturbing. For one thing, self-awareness was not particularly useful: as the scientists note, “people who were aware of their own biases were not better able to overcome them.” … All four of the measures showed positive correlations, “indicating that more cognitively sophisticated participants showed larger bias blind spots.”

Overcoming Bias : The Smart Are MORE Biased To Think They Are LESS Biased

On Sunday 11th June, Lancope were joint sponsors of the Redstone Racing BTCC team. We're sponsoring the team for 6 of the 30 races in the 2012 season.  The whole race meeting is covered live on the UK’s ITV4 TV station together with a highlights show on ITV1. The races are also streamed live via itv.com. 

Lancope at the 2012 British Touring Car Championship

In a cyber-age twist on Israel's vaunted history of airport security, the country has begun to force incoming travelers deemed suspicious to open personal email accounts for inspection, visitors say.

Targeting mainly Muslims or Arabs, the practice appears to be aimed at rooting out visitors who have histories of pro-Palestinian activism, and in recent weeks, has led to the expulsion of at least three American women.

Israel steps up email border checks | The Australian

What you do with a password hash is you design it in the opposite way you would design a standard cryptographic hash. A cryptographic hash wants to do the minimum amount of work possible in order to arrive at a secure result. But a password hash wants to deliberately be designed to do the maximum amount of work.

How Companies Can Beef Up Password Security — Krebs on Security

In case you missed it:

The Flame espionage malware that infected computers in Iran achieved mathematic breakthroughs that could only have been accomplished by world-class cryptographers, two of the world's foremost cryptography experts said.

Crypto breakthrough shows Flame was designed by world-class scientists | Ars Technica

On June 5 2012, SDO collected images of the rarest predictable solar event--the transit of Venus across the face of the sun.  This event happens in pairs eight years apart that are separated from each other by 105 or 121 years.  The last transit was in 2004 and the next will not happen until 2117.

The videos and images displayed here are constructed from several wavelengths of extreme ultraviolet light and a portion of the visible spectrum.  The red colored sun is the 304 angstrom ultraviolet, the golden colored sun is 171 angstrom, the magenta sun is 1700 angstrom, and the orange sun is filtered visible light.  304 and 171 show the atmosphere of the sun, which does not appear in the visible part of the spectrum.

NASA | SDO's Ultra-high Definition View of 2012 Venus Transit - YouTube