The RISKS Digest
Volume 28 Issue 18

Monday, 18th August 2014

Forum on Risks to the Public in Computers and Related Systems

ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy, Peter G. Neumann, moderator

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Contents

Human cryptography is the key to online voting
Xavier Boyen
Vote! You Just Might Win $50,000
Lauren Weinstein
E-mail Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet
*The Atlantic*
What caused today's Internet hiccup & how stable is the Internet?
bgpmon via geoff goodfellow
Smarter than Siri: Viv promises a truly intelligent assistant
Caroline Craig via Gene Wirchenko
Pervasive Medicare Fraud Proves Hard to Stop
Abelson/Lichtblau
Humans Need Not Apply, and Robot Swarms
Rodney Van Meter via Dave Farber
In Exposing Followers, Medium Fails Readers
ReadWrite via Lauren Weinstein
Community Health Systems hacked. 4.5M Records with PII compromised
Bob Gezelter
Shaw Star Market Admit Credit Card Data Breach
Monty Solomon
EFF Cell Phone Guide For US Protesters, Updated 2014 Edition
EFF
Re: Informed consent for resuscitation trials
Robert R. Fenichel
Re: Meet MonsterMind, the NSA Bot That Could Wage Cyberwar
Peter Houppermans
Re: Some taking a hard line against paying by E-ZPass
Chris Drewe
Scott Miller
Re: Breach of 1.2 billion user names and passwords
Barry Gold
Re: Computer Programming Is a Trade; Let's Act Like It
Richard A. O'Keefe
Re: Cybersecurity as Realpolitik: Black Hat keynote
Barry Gold
Re: NSA Is Funding a Project to Roll All Programming Languages Into One
Amos Shapir
Re: Google scanning e-mail for child porn
Bob Brown
Info on RISKS (comp.risks)

Human cryptography is the key to online voting (Xavier Boyen)

"Peter G. Neumann" <neumann@csl.sri.com>
Mon, 18 Aug 2014 13:44:40 PDT
  [All quotes below are attributable to Assoc. Prof. Xavier Boyen, at the
  Queensland University of Technology, who has received an Australian
  Research Council Future Fellowship worth almost $800,000 to build
  user-owned passwords.  PGN]

HUMAN-POWERED cryptographic protocols could be used to secure online
transactions and electronic voting following a new research project.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/technology/human-cryptography-the-key-to-online-voting/story-e6frgakx-1227028546184

Cryptography provides unbreakable data security between computer nodes,
but leaves human owners helpless.

“The problem is cryptography, in order to be secure, requires heavy
computer-assisted calculations to make it efficient and is very impractical
for humans to do.  We have a lot of new techniques that would be much more
amenable to human operations while retaining the proven security that we
seek in terms of mathematical cryptography. [...]  The goal is to come up
with a fairly simple but secure way to get the person involved in the very
act of authenticating with a remote server or something like that.''

The project aims to build public-key ciphers that can be operated manually
from a mental key in seconds to let users regain their Internet privacy,
even defending against spyware and malware lurking on their very own mobiles
and computers.  It would also build security protocols with full end-to-end
coverage all the way to the human users.

“It could be the case that when you authenticate to a bank, instead of
typing in your password the bank will send you a list of numbers and you
know that you have to pick the second, the fourth and the fifth of those
numbers and add them together.  Using these kinds of techniques, as one
example, it is possible to actually hide from the phone—which may not be
working in your best interests—what your password is, what your secret
is.''

Electronic voting provides a strong motivation for the research.  “There is
a concern that the voting machines might confirm one vote to the voter, but
secretly record another one.  This could be prevented by binding the vote to
some little secret piece of information known only to the voter.''

  [Interesting approach to passwords, although still may not address the
  Internet voting problems with respect to vote selling/buying/coercion.
  PGN]


Vote! You Just Might Win $50,000

PRIVACY Forum mailing list <privacy@vortex.com>
Sat, 16 Aug 2014 21:13:12 -0700
*TIME* via PRIVACY Forum
http://time.com/money/3117303/vote-lottery-cash-prizes/

  To get people more involved—and prevent further embarrassment—the
  city is now considering a pilot program that would use lottery-type cash
  prizes as enticement to get locals to participate in elections.  The Los
  Angeles Times reported that on Thursday night, the Los Angeles Ethics
  Commission voted unanimously to recommend that the city council begin
  offering cash prizes to voters randomly as soon as next year.  "Maybe it's
  $25,000 maybe it's $50,000," said [Ethics] Commission President Nathan
  Hochman. "That's where the pilot program comes in—to figure out what
  ... number and amount of prizes would actually get people to the voting
  box." ... "Wouldn't we get a lot of people who know nothing about politics
  or the candidates jumping in and voting and just checking the box so they
  could get a million bucks?" the radio host asked Guerra.  "Absolutely,"
  Guerra responded. But, he added, that might not be a bad thing. "That
  might produce better results. There is no data to show that uninformed
  voters make worse decisions than informed voters."

The technical term for this proposal is IDIOTIC.
And the technical term for Mr. Guerra is IDIOT.


E-mail Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet

Lauren Weinstein <lauren@vortex.com>
Sat, 16 Aug 2014 09:53:25 -0700
*The Atlantic* via NNSquad
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/08/why-email-will-never-die/375973/

  Yet, despite all the prognosticators predicting it will--choose the
  violence level of your metaphor--go out of style, be put out to pasture,
  or taken out back and shot, e-mail grinds on.

  You can't kill e-mail! It's the cockroach of the Internet, and I mean that
  as a compliment. This resilience is a good thing.

  "There isn't much to sending or receiving e-mail and that's sort of the
  point," observed Aaron Straup Cope, the Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum's
  Senior Engineer in Digital and Emerging Media. "The next time someone
  tells you e-mail is 'dead,' try to imagine the cost of investing in their
  solution or the cost of giving up all the flexibility that e-mail affords."

  E-Mail is actually a tremendous, decentralized, open platform on which new,
  innovative things can and have been built. In that way, e-mail represents a
  different model from the closed ecosystems we see proliferating across our
  computers and devices.


What caused today's Internet hiccup & how stable is the Internet?

geoff goodfellow <geoff@iconia.com>
Wed, 13 Aug 2014 17:51:47 -1000
http://www.bgpmon.net/what-caused-todays-internet-hiccup/

Geoff.Goodfellow@iconia.com  http://geoff.livejournal.com


Smarter than Siri: Viv promises a truly intelligent assistant (Caroline Craig)

Gene Wirchenko <genew@telus.net>
Mon, 18 Aug 2014 09:43:31 -0700
Caroline Craig | InfoWorld, 15 Aug 2014
AI's promise has been dangled for decades, but a startup founded by
the creators of Siri may be poised to finally deliver
http://www.infoworld.com/t/mobile-apps/smarter-siri-viv-promises-truly-intelligent-assistant-248405

selected text:

The company wants Viv to be not only smart but omnipresent, embedded in a
plethora of Internet-connected objects and helping to power a million
different apps. "Wouldn't it be nice if you could talk to everything, and it
knew you, and it knew everything about you, and it could do everything?"
Kittlaus said.

      Ah, no.

   1) Security risks.
   2) What does "truly intelligent" mean?  Would I be able to
      understand why it decided a particular way, or will this be
      opaque?  Would it be reliably correct *for me*?
   3) Whose life is it anyway?


Pervasive Medicare Fraud Proves Hard to Stop (Abelson/Lichtblau)

Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne@warpspeed.com>
August 16, 2014 at 7:43:53 AM EDT
Reed Abelson and Eric Lichtblau, *The New York Times*, 15 Aug 2014 (via DF)
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/16/business/uncovering-health-care-fraud-proves-elusive.html

The ordinary looking office building in a suburb of Baltimore gives no hint
of the high-tech detective work going on inside. A $100 million system
churns through complicated medical claims, searching for suspicious patterns
and posting the findings on a giant screen.

Hundreds of miles away in a strip mall north of Miami, more than 60 people
-- prosecutors, F.B.I. agents, health care investigators, paralegals and
even a forensic nurse—sort through documents and telephone logs looking
for evidence of fraudulent Medicare billing. A warehouse in the back holds
fruits of their efforts: wheelchairs, boxes of knee braces and other medical
devices that investigators say amount to props for false claims.

The Obama administration's declared war on health care fraud, costing some
$600 million a year, has a remarkable new look in places like Baltimore and
Miami. But even with the fancy computers and expert teams, the government is
not close to defeating the fraudsters. And even the effort designed to
combat the fraud may be in large part to blame.

An array of outside contractors used by the government is poorly managed,
rife with conflicts of interest and vulnerable to political winds, according
to interviews with current and former government officials, contractors and
experts inside and outside of the administration. Authority and
responsibilities among the contractors are often unclear and in competition
with one another. Private companies—like insurers and technology
companies—have responsibility for enforcement, often with little
government oversight.

Fraud and systematic overcharging are estimated at roughly $60 billion, or
10 percent, of Medicare's costs every year, but the administration recovered
only about $4.3 billion last year. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid
Services, which is responsible for overseeing the effort, manually reviews
just three million of the estimated 1.2 billion claims it receives each
year.

“It's pretty dysfunctional because the contractors don't communicate with
each other,'' said Orlando Balladares, a fraud investigator who has worked
for both the government and private firms.

Dr. Shantanu Agrawal, who oversees Medicare's antifraud center, the Center
for Program Integrity, said the administration had made fighting fraud a top
priority.  “The focus is higher than it ever has been,'' said Dr. Agrawal,
an emergency medicine physician and former McKinsey consultant who took the
Medicare job this year. But even some of the administration's successes shed
light on the crackdown's limitations.

So-called recovery audit contractors, hired to reduce hospital overbilling,
have an unparalleled record of returning money to Medicare, accounting for
$8 billion in returned money since 2009. But hospital resistance to the
contractors and an overburdened appeals process have largely stopped the
recovery efforts.

“They've been brought to a halt by their very success,'' said Marsha Simon,
an expert on health policy and legislative strategy in Washington.

Just this summer, Medicare shut down a successful hotline in fraud-plagued
South Florida, saying it was no longer necessary. The hotline is credited
with leading to more than 1,000 fraud investigations and identifying tens of
millions of dollars in questionable payments in the last five years. Trained
staff members hired by an outside contractor answered calls and passed
relevant tips to investigators within 48 hours. [...]


Humans Need Not Apply, and Robot Swarms (via Dave Farber)

Rodney Van Meter <rdv@sfc.wide.ad.jp>
August 15, 2014 at 10:40:30 PM EDT
Dave, two things came across my radar in the last couple of days that will
no doubt interest IPers:

"Humans Need Not Apply" is a fifteen minute video describing the rise of the
robots.  Fairly intelligently put together, if unyielding in its point of
view.  Sort of intermediate in terms of depth in both technology and
philosophy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU&list=UU2C_jShtL725hvbm1arSV9w
The video asserts that 45% of the U.S. workforce is in jobs that are
vulnerable to replacement by robots in the very near future, with
transportation being at the top of the list but white collar, professional
and even many creative jobs not so far behind.  This is from CGP Grey
(http://www.cgpgrey.com/), who list Tyler Cowen's book as `further reading'
on their front page.  I'm deeply skeptical of the level of scholarship on
Cowen's book, which I've articulated here on IP before, but the issues are
decidedly worth discussing.

Second, Harvard's Self Organizing Systems Group has released a fantastic
video of a *thousand* small robots organizing themselves on a plane:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKCmhGbVd-o I saw a far more primitive
version of something like this, oh, a decade ago, from Seth Copen
Goldstein's group there at CMU.  It has taken a while to get to here, but
this is amazing, and I'm sure only the tip of the iceberg.  It reminds me of
MIT's self-assembling cubes from last year:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?vjZbJS6LZbs and the nano-quadrotors from
Penn from the year before: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQIMGV5vtd4 We
live in amazing times, and getting more amazing every day.


In Exposing Followers, Medium Fails Readers

Lauren Weinstein <lauren@vortex.com>
Fri, 15 Aug 2014 22:03:55 -0700
ReadWrite via NNSquad
http://readwrite.com/2014/08/15/medium-public-followers

  What if the parents of a teenager discover that she's following That's So
  Gay, a collection of articles on "unstraight issues by unstraight people,"
  and thereby deduce her sexual orientation before she's disclosed it to
  them?  Though its founder created Twitter, Medium is nothing like it. As
  sharing everything with everyone becomes the standard across the Web,
  there are fewer places where people can be themselves, without every
  action disclosing some portion of their identity.  Before this latest
  move, Medium was a quiet, well-lit place where you could explore ideas
  with some sense of privacy. Now, in the name of "discovery," we've been
  exposed.


Community Health Systems hacked. 4.5M Records with PII compromised

"Bob Gezelter" <gezelter@rlgsc.com>
Mon, 18 Aug 2014 09:06:25 -0700
Community Health Systems, which operates over 206 hospitals in 28 states
reports that their network was infiltrated by hackers, believed to be
operating from the People's Republic of China.  The hackers are believed to
have gained access to their names, Social Security numbers, physical
addresses, birthdays and telephone numbers of patients who had contact with
hospital network during the last five years.  The Money article can be found
at:
http://money.cnn.com/2014/08/18/technology/security/hospital-chs-hack/index.html

Bob Gezelter, http://www.rlgsc.com


Shaw Star Market Admit Credit Card Data Breach

Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com>
Fri, 15 Aug 2014 19:22:02 -0400
http://www.boston.com/business/news/2014/08/15/shaw-star-market-admit-credit-card-data-breach/Fi4TunMOtrWm9osL6ibDrL/story.html


EFF Cell Phone Guide For US Protesters, Updated 2014 Edition

"David Farber via ip" <ip@listbox.com>
Mon, 18 Aug 2014 08:59:12 -0400
  [Long item truncated for RISKS.  PGN]

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/08/cell-phone-guide-protesters-updated-2014-edition

With major protests in the news again, we decided it's time to update our
cell phone guide for protestors. A lot has changed since we last published
this report in 2011, for better and for worse. On the one hand, we've
learned more about the massive volume of law enforcement requests for cell
phone—ranging from location information to actual content—and
widespread use of dedicated cell phone surveillance technologies. On the
other hand, strong Supreme Court opinions have eliminated any ambiguity
about the unconstitutionality of warrantless searches of phones incident to
arrest, and a growing national consensus says location data, too, is
private.

Protesters want to be able to communicate, to document the protests, and to
share photos and video with the world. So they'll be carrying phones, and
they'll face a complex set of considerations about the privacy of the data
those phones hold. We hope this guide can help answer some questions about
how to best protect that data, and what rights protesters have in the face
of police demands.


Re: Informed consent for resuscitation trials (RISKS-28.17)

"Robert R. Fenichel, MD" <bob@fenichel.net>
Thu, 14 Aug 2014 21:54:12 -0700
The ethics of randomized medical trials is not a new subject of discussion.

As always, the care providers involved must be in a state of equipoise: they
must be genuinely uncertain as to which of two treatments is better.  When
one of the two treatments has been in long use, some care providers may be
diffident about randomized, blinded trials.  Often enough, that diffidence
has delayed abandonment of interventions now known to be useless (gastric
freezing for ulcers, internal-mammary artery ligation for angina) or even
harmful (look up flecainide, encainide, and lidocaine for arrhythmias after
heart attacks).

The ethics of resuscitation trials, in which informed consent cannot be
obtained, has also been discussed in the ethical and medical literature for
many years (for example, see Abramson NS, Safar P, et al, Annals of
Emergency Medicine 19(7):781-784 (1990) or
http://www.google.ca/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&vedCMQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.fda.gov%2Fohrms%2Fdockets%2Fac%2F04%2Fbriefing%2F2004-4073b1_01_IDE%2520presentation.ppt&ei'3tU4vfPKOcjALE0oCgAw&usg¯QjCNGVdMfaTogQyH27oqKzWm_DjWsP8A&sig2=jzR6NMx6DxNmShLLfawdSQ&bvm=bv.73231344,d.cGE
(2004)).  In the United States, FDA guidelines covering such studies have
been in place since about 2000, with ongoing revision.  The physicians who
initiated these discussions were concerned that the only alternative to
proper trials in unresponsive patients was to proceed in ignorance, possibly
doing harm as they had long been doing, or possibly doing harm in an
appealing new way.  In the absence of magical interventions of self-evident
benefit, the alternative to randomized trials is ignorant guesswork.

As to the specific matter of the UK study, looking at the use of adrenaline
(called epinephirine in some parts of the world, including the US) in
cardiac arrest: I don't know exactly what is being done in the UK, but the
story suggests that the study was screened by medical experts, ethicists,
and first responders, and that there was at least some attempt at public
notice.  That's about as good as it gets in outpatient resuscitation.

It seems from the story --- I no longer follow the literature of advanced
cardiac life support, but I assume that those who proposed the study do
follow it --- that when people say that they *know* that it's better to use
adrenaline in cardiac arrest than to avoid it, they don't know what they're
talking about, nor do those who say they *know* the opposite.

If I were in the target population, I'd opt in.  In the event of my cardiac
arrest, the experts believe that I'd be better off with adrenaline, or that
I'd be better off without it, but they don't know which, and my expected
outcome is therefore the same in the two arms, with confidence limits they'd
like to tighten.  The only consequential choice I might make would be to opt
out; then I could guarantee that the public-health consequence of my cardiac
arrest would be zero.


Re: Meet MonsterMind, the NSA Bot That Could Wage Cyberwar (Trei, RISKS-28.17)

Peter Houppermans <peter@houppermans.net>
Fri, 15 Aug 2014 11:35:42 +0200
> Personally, I think if you've got to trust that an automated system will
> "hack back" in faster-than-human cycles, you're playing with fire.

It appears lessons learned in an already existing environment -the stock
markets with their algorithmic trading- are enthusiastically ignored.  I
agree, this is a seriously dangerous idea - just imagine someone spoofing
the attack origin.

Personally, I have always preferred a human in or near any sensor-to-shooter
link, even though it is not always clear if that has a positive or negative
influence on the overall intelligence of the system.  :)


Re: Some taking a hard line against paying by E-ZPass (Powers, RISKS-28.17)

"Chris Drewe" <e767pmk@yahoo.co.uk>
Mon, 18 Aug 2014 19:44:53 +0100
The Dartford River Crossing is a very busy toll bridge and tunnel road
crossing the River Thames to the east of London, UK.  Currently drivers
generally pay cash at toll booths, but to reduce long lines of waiting
vehicles, work is under way to change to a cashless system:

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/dart-charge-dartford-crossing-remote-payment

> From October 2014 we are changing the way you pay the Dartford Crossing
> charge. You will no longer pay at the barriers; instead you'll be able to
> pay in advance, or before midnight the day after crossing. Drivers who
> don't pay will face a penalty charge.  The new scheme is known as Dart
> Charge and will help to reduce congestion at the crossing.  It will still
> be free to use the crossing between 10pm and 6am.  There will be lots of
> ways to pay: with a pre-pay account online by text at retail outlets over
> the phone by post.

Vehicles will be identified by number (license) plate recognition cameras
(as with the London Congestion Charge).

This appears to have similar risks to the E-ZPass scheme, such as
surveillance and incorrect charging, but one potential problem could be
timing your payment; if you buy a ticket well in advance but then don't make
your journey you will have wasted the money, while if you cross but are then
unable to pay within the deadline you will pick up a fine.  At least with
cash you just pay for what you use, and you know that your payment has been
accepted (though cashless systems can be a convenience for regular users).

PS: I've only used the Dartford crossing a few times in my entire life, but
a cashless system would be an advantage for me; my car is a left-hand-drive
Chevrolet Caprice station wagon, so the driver's seat is on the wrong side
for UK tollbooths...  :o)


Re: Some taking a hard line against paying by E-ZPass (Reisert, RISKS-28.17)

"Scott Miller" <SMiller@unimin.com>
Fri, 15 Aug 2014 08:21:40 -0400
I am one of the "hard liners" the article refers to.  My reasons are the
potential for invasions of privacy and other erosions of rights. The obvious
attempts by some toll authorities to increase E-ZPass use by deliberately
inconveniencing cash toll payers (observed for several years on the NJ
Garden State Parkway and elsewhere—those practices do seem to have
diminished lately on the GSP) have only cemented my determination to avoid
E-ZPass—I am by nature extremely stubborn. I hang a conductor style coin
changer on my dash when I drive long distances. The funny thing is that each
denomination of Federal Reserve Note in my wallet still bears the promise
"This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private'.  Maybe
someone should sue for fraud.


Re: Breach of 1.2 billion user names and passwords

Barry Gold <BarryDGold@ca.rr.com>
Thu, 14 Aug 2014 17:02:55 -0700
At least one of the commentaries I read on this said not to keep your
passwords in a file on your computer.

Well, I've taken to using long, randomly-generated passwords (24
characters). Typing those would be incredibly error-prone, so I keep them in
a non-obvious file.

After reading that, I started working on a "password vault": a piece of
custom software that would let me store passwords, associated with a
specific site (by whatever name or mnemonic I choose).  The file would be
encrypted with a common cryptosystem (e.g., Twofish or AES).

I figured that should be safe enough.  Sure, somebody could build software
to do a flow analysis of the program, find the crypto-calls, and extract the
key.  But it's custom software, so there aren't a lot of good targets to
make it worthwhile for crackers.

I got partway through all that, then realized that the whole idea was
flawed: If somebody can put malware on your system that scans your disk and
finds where you've stored your passwords, they can *also* put a keytracker
into the OS.  So even if you kept them on a sheet of paper or memorized
them, the crackers could _still_ obtain the password when you type it into
the browser or other application.

Screw this.  I'm going back to storing them in a Word file.


Re: Computer Programming Is a Trade; Let's Act Like It (RISKS-28.14)

"Richard A. O'Keefe" <ok@cs.otago.ac.nz>
Mon, 18 Aug 2014 11:42:06 +1200
As a lecturer in a Computer Science department, I clearly have some
bias here.  The claim that "Computer programming is now a trade that
someone can develop a basic proficiency in within weeks or months"
contains two propositions and implies two others:

(1) Computer programming is now a trade.
(2) You can develop a basic proficiency very quickly.
(3) Trades are "banausic" and therefore contemptible.
(4) As mere artisans with very little skill, programmers should
    be produced in large numbers and paid little.

I have to say, therefore, that the image of a "trade" as something for
thickos to pick up in weeks to months could not be further from the truth.
Quoting, as an act of filial piety (because my father used to boast of being
the only qualified plumber and drainlayer in the Law Society, from
http://www.careers.govt.nz/jobs/construction/plumber-gasfitter-and-drainlayer/how-to-enter-the-job

"To become a qualified drainlayer, you need to complete a drainlaying
apprenticeship and gain a National Certificate in Drainlaying Level 4, which
takes about 18 months to two years. This involves on-the-job training and
completing block courses at a polytechnic."  And "to become registered as a
licensed plumber and gasfitter you must: do an apprenticeship and complete a
National Certificate in Plumbing and Gasfitting (this usually takes four
years); and sit and pass the Plumbers, Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board
examinations."

That is, it can take LONGER to get a decent trade qualification than to get
a BSc in Computer Science (which takes 3 years).

But maybe programming really *is* unskilled compared with plumbing (a
proposition that could be argued in earnest either way).  Let's see what a
reputable "trade school" actually does with it.

In my city there are three ways to get NZQA-approved qualifications
in programming:

 - in the Information Science department at the University
   (part of Commerce)

 - in the Computer Science department at the University
   (part of Science, and where I am)

 - in the Business, Tourism, and IT unit at Otago Polytechnic.

The Polytechnic (www.op.ac.nz/) is where you would go to learn to be a motor
mechanic, an electrician, a plumber, &c, so it's not unfair to call it a
school of trades.  They are right across the road from the building I work
in.  They put a huge amount of effort into looking after their students.  I
respect them a lot.  Their offerings include

Certificate in Information Technology (Level 3), 1 semester.  This is what
you would have got at school, roughly.

Certificate in Information Technology (Level 4), 1 semester.  This covers
how to use Word, how to use Excel, blogs, wikis, what's an operating
system, what's inside the box, and introductory programming (again, roughly
school level).

Certificate in IT Service and Support (Level 4).  This is "how to be a
technician" + "professional communication".  It takes a year.  People with
this qualification are valuable, no question.  They are the IT equivalent of
"roadies".  You can go and look for a job, or you can convert it to

Bachelor of IT (Level 7).  Level 7 means it's an honest-to-goodness
Bachelor's degree.  It takes 3 years.  Not "weeks to months".  YEARS.

How does their BIT compare with our BSc?  They'd be the same amount of
effort.  They're comparable prices.  We have AI and bioinformatics, the
Polytechnic have PC maintenance.  Their graduates would probably have done
as much programming as ours.

I personally would call the skill level they come out with 'basic
proficiency'.  They have a heck of a lot yet to learn, but they have the
foundations and have demonstrated willingness and ability to learn.

If that's what 3 years does, "weeks to months" is not going to produce
*good* programmers.  Mr Mims, in short, appears to be calling for the bulk
production of not-yet-competent programmers.

He is of course right that the qualification programmers get does not have
to be a degree of the kind currently on offer.  Some sort of apprenticeship
scheme could well be a good way to go.  To the best of my belief, the main
obstacle is the way businesses want to hire programmers who need no further
training.  Change *that*, and we can do interesting things.


Re: Cybersecurity as Realpolitik: Black Hat keynote (Dan Geer)

Barry Gold <BarryDGold@ca.rr.com>
Thu, 14 Aug 2014 21:47:43 -0700
Dan Geer wrote:
> 7. Right to be forgotten—YES [...]

I agree with most of what Dan wrote.  Only this one section gives me
heartburn, and most of that is with the title.

A "right to be forgotten" as implemented in the European Community, is a
really bad idea.

First, it destroys the essential distinction between public and private.  If
  you want to be private, do it indoors in your own home or somewhere else
  that you have the right to control.  What you do in public is public, and
  the public has the right to know about it.

Second, it transfers the costs to the wrong party.  The EC demands that
Google and other search engines and indexing systems maintain an
infrastructure—at their own expense—to allow people to "be forgotten"
by having specific pages removed from search results.

In the old days, you could move to a new town, change your name, and start
over.  But it was _not_ cheap.  Travel was expensive.  You had to sell
whatever you couldn't carry, and that usually meant losing some of the
value.  And then you arrived in a new place where everybody looked
suspiciously at you, because they know one of the reasons people move is to
get away from what they've done in the past.  So you have to start all over
building a reputation.

The EC wants the index services to pay for that privilege.

It is not surprising that Google's response has been to make it virtually
useless:

* If you ask Google to remove something about you, they will remove
  it only when the search terms include your name or other PII.
* When they do this, they notify people that results have been
  redacted.  [Error 451: not available for legal reasons]
* They remove only the page(s) identified (how else are they to
  identify what should be removed?)

So, third, It seems inevitable to me that this will result in a new version
of the Streisand effect.  Somebody demands that some page(s) be removed from
search results.  Other people see the 451 notification and find alternate
search terms to see the page(s) in question.  Then they multiple copies of
them appear all over the Internet.

But a right to mislead, that makes sense.  At least, in the sense that you
should be able to create a new online identity.  And, really, all we need
for that to happen is for the government to get out of the way.  A lot of
the rules about identification come from the government, wanting to make
sure you don't get benefits you're not entitled to, or that you don't
"launder" money from something the government has made illegal which it
really should keep its nose out of.

So that's what we need.  A right to change your name and start over,
possibly in a new place or at least a new website and/or ISP.  Yes?


Re: NSA Is Funding a Project to Roll All Programming Languages Into One

Amos Shapir <amos083@gmail.com>
Sun, 17 Aug 2014 17:37:36 +0300
This sounds a bit like TheLastOne project, see:
 http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TheLastOne


Re: Google scanning e-mail for child porn (RISKS-28.16)

Bob Brown <bb@emorycottage.net>
Thu, 14 Aug 2014 20:30:45 -0400
>> Why do you immediately rule out the obvious and completely effective
>> fix of having Google stop conducting what appear to be searches of
>> my private e-mail for potential criminal activity? ...

> There's a very simple reason why not: Google isn't scanning every
> e-mail message for child porn. It isn't even scanning them for spam.
> It is scanning them for targeted advertising, which is where it gets
> its money from. Spam detection, or child porn detection are the
> side-effects.

I call bogus.  *Of course* Google is scanning e-mail messages for child porn.
They probably do not have to compute hashes of images to further their
advertising business model, and they certainly don't have to spend CPU
cycles comparing those hashes to hashes of known child porn images in order
to make advertising dollars.

Scanning for spam, on the other hand, does further their advertising
business.  If they didn't do it, Google mail accounts would become
unusable.  No users == no advertisers == no money.

Sadly, this is a case of camel, nose, tent.  I agree that child
pornography is reprehensible as well as illegal.  I happen to think that
use of illicit drugs is reprehensible as well as illegal.  Should Google
be looking for drug deals, too?

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