BMW spokesperson:

Like all electronic and cyber attacks on a vehicle, whatever form they may take, BMW continuously assesses its level of car security and enhances the level of defence where possible. For obvious security reasons the details of such enhancements are something we will not discuss, suffice to say the issue has been fixed.

Douglas Bonderud:

Patching and secure code development [once] offered a potential solution to advanced threats, but the sheer number of zero-day exploits and software vulnerabilities makes it nearly impossible for enterprises to fully protect their assets. Protection in the form of patches requires constant updating and does no good against zero-day threats that have no immediate fix. Meanwhile, secure coding practices hold promise, but despite widespread adoption several years ago, the number of reported software vulnerabilities continues to rise: There was a 26 percent increase in 2012, the largest increase in five years.

Richard Bejtlich:

We're making progress, but intruders still spend about seven months inside a victim's network before anyone notices.

Decius:

Noticing is easier in a foreign place because mundane things are unusual. It's the sameness of the familiar that closes minds.

Richard Hamming:

It is not the amount, it is the way you read that counts. You need to keep up more to find out what the problems are than to read to find the solutions.

Marcus Colon:

An annual report released by the Pentagon's chief weapons tester indicates that a majority of the government's weapons programs contain "significant vulnerabilities."

Johannes (Hanno) Bock:

The number of vulnerabilities is huge. Making a promise that you will scan all this information for security vulnerabilities and backport the patches to your operating system is a big promise. And I doubt anyone can fulfill that.

White House:

On February 13, 2015, the White House will host a Summit on Cybersecurity and Consumer Protection at Stanford University, to help shape public and private sector efforts to protect American consumers and companies from growing threats to consumers and commercial networks.

Chas Freeman:

The notion that Americans can indefinitely sustain military supremacy along the frontiers of a steadily modernizing and strengthening China is a bad bet no sober analyst would accept. Extrapolating policy from that bet, as we do in the so-called "pivot to Asia," just invites China to call or raise it. We would be wiser and on safer ground, I think, to study how Britain finessed the challenge of America's emergence as a counter to its global hegemony.

Paul Mozur:

The Chinese government has adopted new regulations requiring companies that sell computer equipment to Chinese banks to turn over secret source code, submit to invasive audits and build so-called back doors into hardware and software, according to a copy of the rules obtained by foreign technology companies that do billions of dollars' worth of business in China.

Steven Shapin:

Max Weber represented what he was doing as science. He put himself in the same institutional and cultural boat as chemists and zoologists. Addressing the Munich students who were his audience, he said that people like them expected people like him to tell them what to do. But they were making a mistake. There was nothing in what he knew as a scientist that gave him any authority to define moral action, the right thing to do. If he did so, he would be abandoning the very thing that gave his calling its meaning. Putting himself professionally on the fact side of the fact-value distinction, Weber suggested that the only morality or meaning arising from the practice of science was the manly embrace of amorality and meaninglessness. Allying himself with Leo Tolstoy, he insisted that science gives no answer to the question "how to live" -- or, as the existentialists later liked to say, "Everything has been figured out, except how to live."

Niels Bohr:

An expert is a person who has found out by his own painful experience all the mistakes that one can make in a very narrow field.

Joseph Stromberg:

This finding does not disprove the existence of gravitational waves or the broader cosmic inflation theory -- any more than digging into the ground and not finding any dinosaur fossils would mean that dinosaurs never existed.

Instead, it spurs scientists to keep looking. And one positive aspect of the Planck data published in September it pointed out areas of the sky with lower levels of dust.

Savas Dimopoulos:

Jumping from failure to failure with undiminished enthusiasm is the big secret to success.

Maria Konnikova:

It's when [a] change contradicts something we've long held as important that problems occur.

Even when we think we've properly corrected a false belief, the original exposure often continues to influence our memory and thoughts.

"It's depressing," Brendan Nyhan said. "We were definitely depressed," he repeated, after a pause.

Alex Balk:

We're at the point in the calendar year where the pervasive hopelessness of nature sends a signal to your brain to start a steady leak from its carafe of chemicals that more than ever makes you realize just how bleak and futile life really is and that there is no amount of alcohol or television or sex or expensive noodle dishes and the photos you post thereof that can keep you from confronting just how alone you are no matter how many people you number in your life.

It is an endless cycle of suffering only occasionally interrupted by your brain's begrudgingly allowing you to pretend things might work out while the weather is warm. That said, I hear flights to L.A. are not super-exorbitant these days; if you can swing it, it might make you okay for a week or two, which is really all you can ask for.

John E. Michel:

In a recent article in Fortune magazine, Joe Dunford shared the best leadership advice he ever received came from his first battalion commander when he was a young Marine. His commander told him there are three rules to success. The first? Surround yourself with good people. "Over the years," says Dunford, "I've forgotten the other two."

Ben Cohen:

A firm called SBD Advisors has advertised itself as working in Washington's shadows so that "only the inner circle knows that we were involved," according to the company.

Choire Sicha:

We never destroy the soulless careerists. This is, I think, the number one mistake that we make in the world of work.

It is incumbent upon you to put a fucking boot in the face of the soulless careerist.

Harvey M. Sapolsky:

Instead of revealing the weaknesses of each other's programs, the services collude to prevent civilians from knowing options that could undermine their favorite systems or reduce their numbers.

Richard Hamming:

If you want a decision 'No', you just go to your boss and get a 'No' easy. If you want to do something, don't ask, do it. Present him with an accomplished fact. Don't give him a chance to tell you 'No'. But if you want a 'No', it's easy to get a 'No'.

Werner Herzog:

Thwart institutional cowardice.

Ben Casnocha:

How do you know if you have A-players on your project team? You know it if they don't just accept the strategy you hand them.

Isaac Newton:

If others would think as hard as I did, then they would get similar results.

Marcus Colon:

An annual report released by the Pentagon's chief weapons tester indicates that a majority of the government's weapons programs contain "significant vulnerabilities."

Patricia Princehouse's friend:

It takes half a second for a baby to throw up all over your sweater. It takes hours to get it clean.

The Economist:

It costs terrorists nothing to send a threatening message. But landing a plane, swarming it with sniffer dogs, and checking all the passengers is immensely expensive.

Unfortunately, there is no easy response to this.

Everyone:

Terrorists terrorists terrorists terrorists terrorists terrorists terrorists.

Bruce Hoffman:

There will always be a fundamental asymmetry in the dynamic between insurgency and counterinsurgency.

Richard Hamming:

What appears to be a fault, often, by a change of viewpoint, turns out to be one of the greatest assets you can have.

The Economist:

If their leisure time is so scarce, why are these people spending so much of it doting on their sprogs, shepherding them from tutors to recitals to football games? Why aren't successful professionals outsourcing more of the child-rearing?

Anil Dash:

Sometimes, you don't go to that amazing event because you're just going to stay home and read a book or watch TV or flick away idly at your phone, only realizing you've missed the moment when it's already too late. And then, when you get old and wonderfully, contentedly boring like me, you stay home because you'd rather be there for bathtime and bedtime with the baby than, well, anywhere else in the world.

This is the Joy of Missing Out.

Being the one in control of what moves me, what I feel obligated by, and what attachments I have to fleeting experiences is not an authority that I'm willing to concede to the arbitrary whims of an app on my mobile phone.

Jony Ive:

What focus means is saying no with every bone in your body to something you know is a good idea but you say no because you're focused on something else.

Andrew Sullivan:

It isn't how long you live that matters. What matters is what you do when you're alive.

Samantha Power:

There are great benefits to connectedness, but we haven't wrapped our minds around the costs.

Martin Enserink and Gilbert Chin:

Privacy as we have known it is ending, and we're only beginning to fathom the consequences.

Verlyn Klinkenborg:

Someone from the future, I'm sure, will marvel at our blindness and at the hole we have driven ourselves into, for we are completely committed to an unsustainable technology.

Brennan Center:

Questions have been raised, however, about whether data can be used to predict terrorism. And serious concerns have been voiced about the impact of developing technologies on individual liberties and on community-law enforcement relations.

Niels Bohr (and others):

Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.

Douglasville Deputy Chief Gary E. Sparks:

It's better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it.

Marco Rubio:

The U.S. government should implore American technology companies to cooperate with authorities so that we can better track terrorist activity and monitor terrorist communications as we face the increasing challenge of homegrown terrorists radicalized by little more than what they see on the Internet.

Ewen MacAskill:

The British army is creating a special force of Facebook warriors, skilled in psychological operations and use of social media to engage in unconventional warfare in the information age. Against a background of 24-hour news, smartphones and social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, the force will attempt to control the narrative.

Ted Cruz:

If you can frame the narrative, you win.

Olivia Snaije:

In the end, said Sjon, "Man is a narrative animal."

Diego Gambetta:

A threat does not now need to manifest itself or even be proven imminent to motivate a war. This approach ... is an intentional way of framing the situation and turning it into a political strategy.

Peter Pomerantsev:

The aim is to confuse rather than convince, to trash the information space so the audience gives up looking for any truth amid the chaos.

Chas Freeman:

It says more about us than about China that we have chosen to treat its rise almost entirely as a military challenge and that we have made countering Chinese power and perpetuating our quasi-imperial, post-1945 dominance of the Western Pacific the organizing principles of our Asia policy.

Robert Lee Hotz:

Using a new analytic formula, they needed only four bits of secondary information -- metadata such as location or timing -- to identify the unique individual purchasing patterns of 90% of the people involved, even when the data were scrubbed of any names, account numbers or other obvious identifiers. The new technique is likely to be of interest to [those] that build and buy extensive data bases ...

Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye:

The old model of anonymity doesn't seem to be the right model when we are talking about large-scale metadata.

Johannes (Hanno) Bock:

In many cases it's far from clear what is a security vulnerability.

Loren Brichter:

Maybe it's the Graybeard engineer in me, but the more I learn, the more terrible I think programming is. I'd love to rip everything up and start over.

Richard Hamming:

You can tell other people all the alibis you want. But to yourself try to be honest.

Ben Thompson:

Apple lost more money to currency fluctuations than Google makes in a quarter. And yet it's Google that is feared, and Apple that is feared for.

Horace Dediu:

In 2014 iOS app developers earned more than Hollywood did from box office in the US.

Binyamin Appelbaum:

Disney estimates that "Frozen" brought in more than $1 billion in retail revenue over the last year. In most years, Disney makes more money from selling branded movie merchandise than from the actual movies.

Kelsey McKinney:

Taylor Swift has trademarked everything from "public appearances" and "clothing" to "ornaments" under the phrase "This Sick Beat" which comes from the first single to her album 1989 "Shake it Off."

For many (not necessarily for Swift), album sales and streaming are no longer ways to make money as a career. One of the dominant income sources for many artists -- whether they're top sellers like Swift or tiny singer-songwriters -- is merchandise sales.

Rapid7:

The inability to find skilled staff to grow security programs remains one of the key challenges for the industry. By contrast, criminal hacking teams seem to be fully staffed.

Richard Hamming:

What appears to be a fault, often, by a change of viewpoint, turns out to be one of the greatest assets you can have.

Alan Kay:

At PARC we had a slogan: "Point of view is worth 80 IQ points."

Michael D. Shear:

He said that much of the blame belonged to the drone itself, a DJI Phantom, which he said has a history of losing contact with its operator.

Michael Perry, of SZ DJI:

We want to make sure people are being innovative and creative with the technology, but at the same time we want to make sure people are using it responsibly.

Martyn Williams:

The incident highlights what is likely to be a big issue for auto makers in the coming years: identifying and patching software vulnerabilities and securing the technology going into modern cars.

Dan Goodin:

A recently fixed vulnerability in the BlackPhone instant messaging application gave attackers the ability to decrypt messages, steal contacts, and control vital functions of the device, which is marketed as a more secure way to protect communications from government and criminal snoops.

Johannes (Hanno) Bock:

The thing I want to elaborate here is something different about GHOST: It turns out that it has been discovered independently three times.

Ted Unangst:

[With OpenBSD,] there can be latent two year old bugs, but there can't be latent fixed two year bugs.