Stuxnet
Stuxnet is a computer virus that requires no action from the user other than the insertion of a memory stick. It is encrypted and complex, able to exploit security vulnerabilities across multiple levels, and may be the first virus intended to transition from the digital to the physical world.
But it gets worse. Since reverse engineering chunks of Stuxnet’s massive code, senior US cyber security experts confirm what Mr. Langner, the German researcher, told the Monitor: Stuxnet is essentially a precision, military-grade cyber missile deployed early last year to seek out and destroy one real-world target of high importance — a target still unknown.
“Stuxnet is a 100-percent-directed cyber attack aimed at destroying an industrial process in the physical world,” says Langner, who last week became the first to publicly detail Stuxnet’s destructive purpose and its authors’ malicious intent. “This is not about espionage, as some have said. This is a 100 percent sabotage attack.”
Operation Embarrass
A new book to be published next week entitled MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service 1909-1949, by the distinguished British historian Keith Jeffery, reveals the existence of Operation Embarrass, a plan to try to prevent Jews getting into Palestine in 1946-’48 using disinformation and propaganda but also explosive devices placed on ships. Nor is this some speculative spy story that can be denied by the authorities: Dr. Jeffrey’s book is actually, in their own words: “Published with the permission of The Secret Intelligence Service and the Controller of Her Majesty’s Stationery Office.”
failed college marketing
Drake officials asked for edgy and out-of-the-box when they hired Cedar Rapids, Iowa-based Stamats Communications, which specializes in higher education marketing, to help craft a new marketing campaign to high school students.
The D+ was intended to introduce a more conventional campaign touting “The Drake Advantage.” As Drake officials saw it, their recruits are smart enough to recognize Drake’s reputation is better than a D+ grade.
Elsewhere in the article:
But not everyone was charmed. Complaints under an online article last month in the campus paper said “wonk” called to mind a goose being hit over the head with a shovel or a sexual act.
Ken Block does things with cars that aren’t possible
Remember that dude I said did things with a motorcycle that were impossible? Meet his car driving twin.
(thanks, Aaron)
timing matters
I think that football hurts people, but if you’re going to do it… you should probably do it like this.
Therapeutic Communication, 2
Empathy does not imply losing yourself in someone else. You cannot get lost over there if no one is over here.
Two quotes
What is stupider and makes people more unhappy than cleverness!
— Hermann Hesse (Autobiographical Writings, Farrar 1972, translated by Denver Lindley)
For Texas letters, the forties and fifties were the Golden Age; that is, J. Frank Dobie was still alive. To Texas readers he was a notch above Homer and a notch below Shakespeare, while the outside world reckoned him almost as good as Carl Sandburg. One moderately good writer was all that was expected of a place like Texas.
–Larry McMurtry (In a Narrow Grave, 1968)
Image without context
Lace-Kerchiefed Star-Buggers
Joad Cressbeckler: NASA Honeyfuggling America With Nonsense Space Dreams
Jenny Owen Youngs – Last Person
Raymond Carver Mad Libs
Courtesy of Yankee Pot Roast, fill in the blanks to craft your own dark, gritty masterpiece of postmodern humanism. Easy! Fun! [Expletive!]
(h/t Maud Newton)
How Obama Thinks
Progressive readers of this blog will probably not like the Forbes’ article (I, personally, do not know what to think of it), but it’s been getting a ton of attention. The writer makes some well argued, radical claims:
It may seem incredible to suggest that the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. is espoused by his son, the President of the United States. That is what I am saying. From a very young age and through his formative years, Obama learned to see America as a force for global domination and destruction. He came to view America’s military as an instrument of neocolonial occupation. He adopted his father’s position that capitalism and free markets are code words for economic plunder. Obama grew to perceive the rich as an oppressive class, a kind of neocolonial power within America. In his worldview, profits are a measure of how effectively you have ripped off the rest of society, and America’s power in the world is a measure of how selfishly it consumes the globe’s resources and how ruthlessly it bullies and dominates the rest of the planet.
For Obama, the solutions are simple. He must work to wring the neocolonialism out of America and the West. And here is where our anticolonial understanding of Obama really takes off, because it provides a vital key to explaining not only his major policy actions but also the little details that no other theory can adequately account for.
Worth a read, if only for a counter perspective.
Either come, or else refuse, refuse.
Yesterday Lucy wrote me to say that she’d stumbled upon this image of me and the wanderer.
Read more
Blooks
Nora Young of CBC radio interviews clusterflock friend, Tim Carmody, about blooks (blog + book). You might also recall Nora’s interview of Jason Kottke last April where he mentions not only clusterflock as a favorite blog, but Snarkmarket, Tim’s springboard into the web. It’s great to see a friend hack his way through the jungle to find himself writing for Wired, the Atlantic, and getting interviewed on the radio; I can only hope there is more to come.
Like interviewing a cat
Interviewing Robert Mitchum was like interviewing a cat, said Roger Ebert.
a coherent defense of the liberal arts
Tyler Cowen on the value of Liberal Arts:
Liberal arts education forces us to decode systems of symbols. We learn how complex systems of symbols can be and what is required to decode them and why that can be a pleasurable process. That skill will come in handy for a large number of future career paths. It will even help you enjoy TV shows more.
For related reasons, I believe that people who learn a second language as adults are especially good at understanding how other people might see things differently.
We No Speak Americano
World-class Irish hand dancers. (hat tip to Sarah Pavis)
Pressley Hurt and Wayne Hurt of Van Horn, Texas
The weekend we told video stories, Aaron came for a visit and we had dinner with Cindy and Daryl. That evening, Cindy told this wonderful story, but everything unraveled — Jasper went on a lick-fest, I had to subdue him in the other room, and the next day, when I went to upload, some glitch interrupted repeatedly.
Yesterday, the stars aligned, though, and I was able to export without incident.
Cindy, I’m sorry for the delay and our spastic dog. The story deserves to be told.
Zadie Smith is the New Books columnist for Harper’s
“I think a good book review is a place to meet a book on its own terms not as an ideological vehicle or an academic plaything. Often people think of writing as primary and reading as the lesser art; in my life it’s the other way around. When I write about books I’m trying to honor reading as a creative act: as far as I’m concerned the job is not simply to describe an end product but to delineate a process, an intimate experience with a book which the general reader understands just as well as the professional critic.”
I love this woman’s perspective on writing as much as her writing.
from the comments
The night skies are remarkably the same in Hazel Green. So when I visit Alabama, I go for evening walks and sometimes end up stretched out on Mother’s driveway, staring into that infinite, star-splashed sky. Mother usually comes out and finds me, and sometimes my son follows. They don’t join me. They recognize the bliss strange and silent me, and quietly slip back inside.
Joyce Carol Oates and Mike Tyson
I like to imagine every Tuesday evening they had tea and book club.
tigers at altitude
The cats were spotted roaming in the hills in the remote Himalayan nation of Bhutan by a conservationist and a team from the BBC’s Natural History Unit at a height of 4,100 metres (13,450 feet), said the broadcaster on its website.
“Tigers are thought of as jungle creatures and there is pressure on their habitats from all sides. Yet we now know they can live and breed at this altitude which is a safer habitat for them,” said tiger expert and conservationist Alan Rabinowitz, who led the expedition.
spam name
Frances Latrisha.
Fire from the Heartland / Fix My Dick
Aaron sent me these yesterday. I had already seen Fire from the Heartland, and had successfully repressed it, but these two are worth watching in conjunction. And no, conservative women talking about ramming it in the throat is not safe for work, and neither is the first one.
flying with the fastest birds on the planet
You get a literal bird’s eye view of the Peregrine Falcon and Gos Hawk in flight.
