Cell phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs) have become indispensable tools for today's highly mobile workforce. Small and relatively inexpensive, these devices can be used for many functions, including sending and receiving email, storing documents, delivering presentations, and remotely accessing data. While these devices provide productivity benefits, they also pose new risks to an organization’s security.

This document provides an overview of cell phone and PDA devices in use today and offers insights into making informed information technology security decisions on their treatment. The document gives details about the threats and technology risks associated with these devices and the available safeguards to mitigate them. Organizations can use this information to enhance security and reduce incidents involving handheld devices.

Draft Guidelines on Cell Phone and PDA Security

Over the last decade, they cropped up in cities throughout China, tucked into raucous markets or along forgotten side streets, their interiors smelling of musty canvas and crammed with bounty for aspiring young soldiers: illicit weapons shops with names like ARMY GOODS STORE and GUNCOOL. For a few thousand yuan--a few hundred dollars--assault rifle-like air guns await in dirty back rooms, along with fatigues, bulletproof vests, kneepads, long underwear, camouflage t-shirts, rucksacks, bandoliers, helmets, helmet sleeves, walkie-talkies, and two-liter CamelBaks. Once outfitted, China's militiamen organize into clubs--Guangzhou Fight Men, Shanghai Band of Brothers, Tianjin Seals--and storm remote lots or abandoned warehouses, shooting at each other with pellets, to stage what they call "war games."

In gun-happy America, this hobby might not rise above the level of eccentricity; but, in China, where most weapons are illegal, it requires a special degree of passion.

The macho violence spurting forth through outlets like war games is a growing trend in Chinese society--and China's one-child policy, in effect since 1979, is partly responsible.

China now has the largest gender imbalance in the world, with 37 million more men than women and almost 20 percent more newborn boys than girls nationwide.

By the time these newborns reach puberty, war games may seem like a quaint relic.

The one-child policy was instituted in an attempt to hamper the wild growth of the Chinese population. But, in the process of plugging one hole, the government may have left another open. The coming boom in restless young men promises to overhaul Chinese society in some potentially scary ways.

From the archive:

Demographers estimate that declines in dependency ratios are responsible for about a third of the East Asian economic miracle of the postwar era; this is a part of the world that, in the course of twenty-five years, saw its dependency ratio decline thirty-five per cent. Dependency ratios may also help answer the much-debated question of whether India or China has a brighter economic future. Right now, China is in the midst of what Joseph Chamie, the former director of the United Nations’ population division, calls the “sweet spot.” In the nineteen-sixties, China brought down its birth rate dramatically; those children are now grown up and in the workforce, and there is no similarly sized class of dependents behind them. India, on the other hand, reduced its birth rate much more slowly and has yet to hit the sweet spot. Its best years are ahead.

No Country for Young Men

Good recent Walrus.

I continue to be baffled by why the strike that hit my tent was so glancing. Was it side splash, the point coming to ground somewhere nearby, leaping a fallen log or tag alder and hitting my tent somewhat tired out? Or was it the speed of the bolt that spared me, current zooming through the poles at 220,000 kilometres an hour? But if lightning’s temperature is thousands of degrees, why didn’t my tent simply vaporize?

I’ll never know. What was plain in that particular storm, in that particular place, is that my aluminum poles acted similar to a Faraday cage around me and took the heat. Another time, who knows?

The more we learn, the more capricious and imponderable lightning becomes. It’s the wild card, familiar but eternally a wonder. How many imponderables do we have left? We have so mastered, so paved over this world, but there is still something ungovernable we must live with, a supremely random force of nature, quite outside ourselves.

Struck By Lightning

When all of the upmarket humans depart for the offworld, there will be plenty of abandoned housing.

Atlanta real estate agents trying to weather the slumping market by selling foreclosures have run into an unexpected problem with a city government tired of neighborhoods overrun with derelict properties.

City code inspectors have begun ticketing some listing agents, holding them liable for code violations on run-down properties they are selling, often for out-of-state institutions.

"The situation in several neighborhoods in Atlanta is tragic," Broome said.

Buildings like the ones on Garibaldi and Bolton are scattered around the city but heavily concentrated in communities like Riverside, Vine City, Pittsburgh and English Avenue.

Many sit vacant and dilapidated for months as lenders go through the process of taking them back through foreclosure and then putting them on the market.

Hawkins said the department is doing its best to ensure someone cleans up and secures some of the worst properties in the city. She noted there are hundreds of homes and other buildings in distress in various neighborhoods and lots of pressure on the department for action.

"The city is desperate for all of us to take whatever steps we need to resolve this," Hawkins said.

From the archive:

Cities are the future of the world, and slums are the future of the city.

More recently:

Fundamental changes in American life may turn today’s McMansions into tomorrow’s tenements.

In the Franklin Reserve neighborhood of Elk Grove, California, south of Sacramento, the houses are nicer than those at Windy Ridge—many once sold for well over $500,000—but the phenomenon is the same. At the height of the boom, 10,000 new homes were built there in just four years. Now many are empty; renters of dubious character occupy others. Graffiti, broken windows, and other markers of decay have multiplied.

Real estate agents take rap for run-down houses | ajc.com

The movement has no single charismatic leader, no institutional center, and no specific goals. It doesn’t even have a name. But it is nonetheless posing the first major challenge to the religious right in a quarter of a century.

Annals of Religion: The New Evangelicals

Athan Theoharis: (h/t TLF, [2])

FBI officials were interested in the sexual indiscretions of elected members of Congress. FBI agents were specifically encouraged to report and record any such discoveries and to do so discreetly. During an interview with the so-called Pike Committee in 1975, a former FBI agent described this practice. Puzzled over why such information was being collected, the agent claimed to have consulted his boss, FBI Assistant Director Cartha DeLoach. He then recounted DeLoach’s response: “The other night we picked up a situation where the Senator was seen drunk, in a hit-and-run accident, and some good-looking broad was with him. He [DeLoach] said, ‘We got the information, reported it in a memorandum’ and DeLoach—and this is an exact quote—he said ‘by noon of the next day the good Senator was aware that we had the information and we never had any trouble with him on appropriations since.’”

From the archive:

The evidence suggests that from an executive perspective, the most desirable employees may no longer necessarily be those with proven ability and judgment, but those who can be counted on to follow orders and be good "team players."

The FBI & American Democracy: A Brief Critical History

Biologists have a pretty good idea of both how flies become resistant to DDT and how humans and primates have diverged over time.

We do not understand how cultures evolve nearly so well. The majority of human evolution does not involve changes in our DNA, but rather alterations in the gigantic library of nongenetic information, the culture, that our species possesses. This library is orders of magnitude larger than that of our genetic information, and the elements on its diverse shelves usually have meaning only in connection with other elements. Indeed, there has been a long, bitter debate about whether it is sensible even to use the term evolution to describe changes in culture.

Despite the great difficulties of building a comprehensive theory of cultural change deserving of the label of "evolution," progress in that direction has begun. We are finally starting to understand the patterns of culture change and the role of natural selection in shaping them. And since everything from weapons of mass destruction to global heating are the results of changes in human culture over time, acquiring a fundamental understanding of cultural evolution just might be the key to saving civilization from itself.

Cultural Evolution

Atlanta is just as hosed as ... Dallas?

The South Shall Snack Again

Protocol buffers are Google's language-neutral, platform-neutral, extensible mechanism for serializing structured data – think XML, but smaller, faster, and simpler. You define how you want your data to be structured once, then you can use special generated source code to easily write and read your structured data to and from a variety of data streams and using a variety of languages – Java, C++, or Python.

Protocol Buffers - Google Code

In the four minutes it probably takes to read this review, you will have logged exactly half the time the average 15- to 24-year-old now spends reading each day. That is, if you even bother to finish. If you are perusing this on the Internet, the big block of text below probably seems daunting, maybe even boring. Who has the time? Besides, one of your Facebook friends might have just posted a status update!

Such is the kind of recklessly distracted impatience that makes Mark Bauerlein fear for his country. "As of 2008," the 49-year-old professor of English at Emory University writes in "The Dumbest Generation," "the intellectual future of the United States looks dim."

The way Bauerlein sees it, something new and disastrous has happened to America's youth with the arrival of the instant gratification go-go-go digital age. The result is, essentially, a collective loss of context and history, a neglect of "enduring ideas and conflicts." Survey after painstakingly recounted survey reveals what most of us already suspect: that America's youth know virtually nothing about history and politics. And no wonder. They have developed a "brazen disregard of books and reading."

Things were not supposed to be this way.

'The Dumbest Generation', by Mark Bauerlein