Art Coviello:

Our investigation has led us to believe that the attack is in the category of an Advanced Persistent Threat (APT).

It's troubling that the integrity of deployed SecurID systems is in any way dependent on information stored on the RSA intranet.

From the archive, a US analyst:

He would rather not have uniformed guys looking over his shoulder, but there is no way anyone of his skill level can get away from that kind of thing.

On John McCain:

In all his speeches, John McCain urges Americans to make sacrifices for a country that is both "an idea and a cause".

He is not asking them to suffer anything he would not suffer himself.

But many voters would rather not suffer at all.

BBC:

The dessert, called Baby Gaga, is churned with donations from London mother Victoria Hiley, and served with a rusk and an optional shot of Calpol or Bonjela.

Mrs Hiley, 35, said if adults realised how tasty breast milk was more new mothers would be encouraged to breastfeed.

Open Letter to RSA Customers

Randall Munroe:

What's more important? Games, or mosquito nets and medicine for kids?

Billy Hoffman:

There is nothing more important than how you spend your time.

Caterina Fake:

Much more important than working hard is knowing how to find the right thing to work on.

Mary Meeker, Scott Devitt, and Liang Wu:

Do humans want everything to be like a game?

Sarah Baxter and Michael Smith:

Obama asked: "What's the endgame?" and did not receive a convincing answer.

John Givings:

Plenty of people are onto the emptiness, but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness.

xkcd: Charity

Joe Brown:

The first Veyron is an engineering marvel. It required the intellectual might of one of the largest and arguably smartest car companies in the world to birth a car that was not only faster than anything on the road, but easy enough to pilot that anyone could drive it.

To make the Grand Sport, Bugatti's engineers had to do the same thing, only with a giant hole in the middle. It was like designing a picture frame to break rocks.

They had to bolster the floor, doors and B pillars (where the back edges of the windows rest) with acres of carbon fiber. They had to turn the topside air scoops into structural supports for protection during a rollover. Then they had to sacrifice 100 virgins and have the production facility in Molsheim, France, blessed by druids.

The result is the most structurally rigid convertible in the world, which, miraculously, weighs no more and goes no slower than the coupe on which it is based. With the transparent roof removed, air resistance limits the Grand Sport to 217 mph, but you'd want that roof on for a top-speed run anyway; the wind could rip your face off at around 245.

You can spend $600 on a steering wheel and pedal set to drive your Veyron in Gran Turismo 5, and that will buy you a lot of realism, but one thing it won't do is rip your face off.

Peak Oil: Bugatti Makes a Car for the Ages | Product Reviews | Wired.com

Mike Mike:

The Face of Tomorrow is a concept for a series of photographs that addresses the effects of globalization on identity.

Adam Harvey:

CV Dazzle is camouflage from computer vision (CV). It is a form of expressive interference that combines makeup and hair styling (or other modifications) with face-detection thwarting designs. The name is derived from a type of camouflage used during WWI, called Dazzle, which was used to break apart the gestalt-image of warships, making it hard to discern their directionality, size, and orientation. Likewise, the goal of CV Dazzle is to break apart the gestalt of a face, or object, and make it undetectable to computer vision algorithms, in particular face detection.

And because face detection is the first step in automated facial recognition, CV Dazzle can be used in any environment where automated face recognition systems are in use, such as FaceBook, Google's Picasa, or Flickr.

Insafe:

It's more than a game, it's your life.

Marco Arment:

Think of the crappiest iPhone app you ever saw that made it into the store. Now imagine what they must reject.

Mary Meeker, Scott Devitt, and Liang Wu:

Do humans want everything to be like a game?

Michael Lewis:

You can't forget to bear-proof the garbage cans, and expect the bears won't notice.

Higgins, via Kara Hansen:

One bear will teach another bear, and then that bear will do it.

Silvio Berlusconi:

I am not worried in the least.

David K. Shipler:

Digital information is different.

Digital inspections raise constitutional questions about how robust the Fourth Amendment's guarantee "against unreasonable searches and seizures" should be on the border, especially in a time of terrorism. A total of 6,671 travelers, 2,995 of them American citizens, had electronic gear searched from Oct. 1, 2008, through June 2, 2010, just a tiny percentage of arrivals.

Jerry Weinberger:

So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find a reason for every thing one has a mind to do.

Russell Feingold:

The policies ... are truly alarming.

Decius:

It has a loophole ... If the ACLU's characterization of this [watch] list is anywhere near accurate, the list is a complete joke. It simply is not objectively reasonable to suspect that someone on this list is dangerous.

Kelly Ivahnenko:

We're in the business of risk mitigation.

Tony Judt:

We appear to have lost the capacity to question the present, much less offer alternatives to it.

The question is, What do we do now, in a world where, in the absence of liberal aristocracies, in the absence of social democratic elites whose authority people accept, you have people who genuinely believe, in the majority, that their interest consists of maximizing self-interest at someone else's expense? The answer is, Either you re-educate them in some form of public conversation or we will move toward what the ancient Greeks understood very well, which is that the closest system to democracy is popular authoritarianism. And that's the risk we run. Not a risk of a sort of ultra-individualism in a disaggregated society but of a kind of de facto authoritarianism.

The Risk We Run

An exchange:

Andrew Keen: So why are you so popular?

Seth Godin: I notice things.

Sue Gardner:

Everyone brings their crumb of information to the table.

@missrftc:

The "everything bagel" really only has like three things.

Just what I want for breakfast.

Lies.

Joe Biden:

I think it's hilarious.

Greg Knauss, from April 2000:

If you need some color in your life, look into fingerpaints.

Steven Poole:

Won't you please join me in declaring a War on Chrome?

Sebastian Anthony:

Bearded purists will be interested to hear that the Debian 6 kernel is, for the first time, completely free.

Josh Harris:

Everything is free, except the video that we capture of you. That we own.

Devlin Barrett:

Hackers have repeatedly penetrated the computer network of the company that runs the Nasdaq Stock Market during the past year, and federal investigators are trying to identify the perpetrators and their purpose.

James Verini:

The officer didn't know why Jonathan James and his companion, a man named Christopher Scott, were sitting in a car with laptops and a giant radio antenna, but she suspected they weren't playing World of Warcraft.

An exchange:

Someone once accused Craig Venter of playing God.

His reply was, "We're not playing."

Ralf-Philipp Weinmann:

I will demo how to use the auto-answer feature present in most phones to turn the telephone into a remote listening device.

Decius:

The unavoidable conclusion is that you are spying on me.

Mike Cardwell:

When you visit my website, I can automatically and silently determine if you're logged into Facebook, Twitter, GMail and Digg.

Video Professor:

Try my product!

Chris Palmer, EFF:

Web application providers undermine their business models when, by continuing to use HTTP, they enable a wide range of attackers anywhere on the internet to compromise users' information.

Keith Alexander:

The Internet is fragile.

Sherry Turkle:

A behaviour that has become typical may still express the problems that once caused us to see it as pathological.

Ben Johncock:

People are starting to suspect that the internet connives against us. It sells us the lie that it's better to click or flick in idle spare time than it is to read a book. But after half an hour -- after you've exhausted your regular websites and blogs, and everyone on Twitter and Facebook is in bed -- you get the same feeling as you do from eating chocolate all day.

Joseph Perla:

Facebook is a Ponzi Scheme.

Discover HIP HOP:

Discover Hip Hop is sweeping the nation!

Everyone else is doing it! Now you can too!!!!!

Get With The Program!

Robin Wauters:

Remember Firesheep?

I'm currently at the DLD Conference in Munich, Germany, which is host to a whole lot of tech luminaries, executives, startups, press and investors alike. The organization has provided every attendee with access to a public WiFi network dubbed DLDpublic, and lo and behold, looks like many of them haven't taken any measures to prevent the above-described hijacking from happening.

Next time you're at an event with an open WiFi network, you might want to consider using a secure VPN to connect to the Internet anyway -- you never know who's sniffing.

Alex Rice:

Starting today we'll provide you with the ability to experience Facebook entirely over HTTPS.

Dr. Walker Brown, the director of the Center for Canine Cognition:

It's entirely conceivable that a dog could learn simple computer functions. Word processing, e-mailing, even surfing the web: for many dogs, the future is already here.

Julia Young:

I'm getting older, and I'm not always gonna be around the house to explain stuff to you. I know you have a lot of questions, and I want us to be open with each other. So, I think it's time you learned where blogs and tweets come from.

When a person loves a funny video very much, he or she may want to share it with someone special to them. This is called linking and if done properly, it can bring people together in a very special union of love: usually the love of sneezing animals, or bed intruders, or Bill O'Reilly having a temper tantrum. But it's important to be sparing when you send your links. You don't want to become the neighborhood outbox, constantly forwarding yourself around. Nobody wants that kind of reputation.

Everyone tries Facebook at least once in their life. It usually starts in college.

I hope this wasn't too embarrassing for you. We'll talk about what a meme is when we get to Grandma's. I don't want to have to explain it twice.

Allie:

As a 13-year-old boy, Benny probably did not relish the idea of wasting an entire day entertaining us. But he was a good-natured young man, and he had agreed to help keep us out of trouble, so he reluctantly asked us what we wanted to play.

Us: "Wolf pack!"

Benny: "How do you play 'wolf pack'?"

Us: "We're the wolves and you're the deer. We close our eyes and count to twenty and you run away. Then we try to find you and catch you!"

Benny: "Okay. Where do you want to play?"

Us: "In the forest!"

Benny probably would have tried harder if he knew that losing the game involved so much biting. But he did not expect that the game would be so true to life. I'm sure it was quite painful for him, but that was a necessary casualty for the game to feel convincing and fun.

The psychological torment of waiting to be attacked was almost worse than the attacks themselves. We darted around in the shadows, snapping twigs and making strange growling noises. We sounded like tiny chainsaws.

Have you seen Teeth?

Decius on Wikipedia, in 2003:

I've found myself using this more and more recently.

Matthew Ingram:

Most people will never edit a Wikipedia page.

Jimmy Wales:

A lot of people are literally afraid.

Monster Supply Store:

The shop was established in 1818, and ever since then has served the daily needs of London's extensive monster community. Step inside, and you'll find a whole range of essential products for monsters. You can pick from a whole range of Tinned Fears, a selection of Human Preserves, and a variety of other really rather fine goods.

Chuck Klosterman:

What if contemporary people are less interested in seeing depictions of their unconscious fears and more attracted to allegories of how their day-to-day existence feels?

Chuck Klosterman:

It's a present-day problem: There's just no escaping the larger, omnipresent puzzle of "reality." Even when people read fiction, they want to know what's real. But this, it seems, is not Franzen's concern. He disintegrates the issue with one sentence.

"Here's the thing about inauthentic people," he says on the train, speaking in the abstract. "Inauthentic people are obsessed with authenticity."

Nick Smyth:

One of the pesky things about real life is that you cannot really "opt out" of the picture, choosing to view it from the sidelines passively. For this is itself a choice, a decision with character and consequence. In real life, there are no audiences, only actors.

Mandy Brown:

No civilization has ever saved everything; acknowledging that fact does not obviate the need to try and save as much as we can.

The technological means to produce an archive are not beyond our skills; sadly, right now at least, the will to do so is insufficient.

Let's hope that doesn't last forever.

Rita King:

If people thought about dying more often, they'd think about living differently.

Jason Brand:

I think you want to look back on the way you were, and not the way you wanted to be.

Penelope Trunk:

Stop talking about time like you need to save it. You just need to use it better.

Freeman Dyson:

It's very important that we adapt to the world on the long-time scale as well as the short-time scale. Ethics are the art of doing that. You must have principles that you're willing to die for.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky:

I want to talk to you about hope. Hope -- the main thing in life.

Alas, this hope too has yet to be justified. Stability has come to look like stagnation. Society has stopped in its tracks. Although hope still lives.

It is not possible to reconcile oneself with the notion that people who call themselves patriots so tenaciously resist any change that impacts their feeding trough or ability to get away with anything.

I am not at all an ideal person, but I am a person with an idea. For me, as for anybody, it is hard to live in jail, and I do not want to die there.

But if I have to I will not hesitate. The things I believe in are worth dying for. I think I have proven this.

And you opponents? What do you believe in? That the bosses are always right? Do you believe in money? In the impunity of "the system"?

Your Honor!