Category Archives: Security

Food, History, Security

Breaking the Law with Corn Syrup: 1910 Edition

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A tip by one of my readers has uncovered a fascinating report from 1910 in the Journal of the American Medical Association

One of the first breaches made in the defenses raised in the interest of the public by the passage of the national Food and Drugs Act, was that secured by the manufacturers of glucose. While the pure food law demands that the label shall tell the truth, the makers of glucose protested that they should be permitted to call their product by the more euphemistic term “corn syrup.” Permission to do this was granted, though the reason for such a liberal interpretation of the law in favor of the manufacturer and so evidently against the interests of the consumer, is not known.

Fortunately for the consumer, however, some of the states are not so accommodating to special interests. The state of Wisconsin, for instance, has a pure food law which requires that the label shall contain the naked truth rather than the skilfully adorned euphemism.

Speaking of compliance and consumer interests, today I presented an abridged history of meat packing plants and the Food and Drugs Act to one of the largest cloud providers. Now I am contemplating turning it into a full-blown presentation. Not sure if anyone else sees the connection, though, between VLANs and ground beef.

An ABC News investigation has found that 70 percent of ground beef sold in the U.S. contains “pink slime,” a meat filler that was once used only in cooking oil and dog food.

Yuck. And no, VLANs will never be sufficient on their own.

Speaking of history, in 1910 Wisconsin was influenced heavily by German political thought. It not only passed a pure food law but also elected the first Socialist mayor of any major US city, Emil Seidel. Called a “sewer socialist” for a preoccupation with keeping the city clean, he used regulations to close down brothels and casinos while creating parks, public works and a fire and police commission.

He left office after just two years when the Democrats and Republicans combined their votes into a single candidate and campaign effort. Milwaukee’s infrastructure improvements lived on but the moderate socialists and a pure food law that banned corn syrup are just a distant memory.

History, Security

Kandel on Memory and Identity

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The NYT gives an interesting example of how identity fits with memory in an interview of Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Dr. Kandel:

So what’s the biggest problem in psychoanalysis? It’s memory!

What does he mean? Take his own memory as an example. His Nazi neighbours in Austria forced him to change his identity as a young boy.

I was 8 ½. Immediately, we saw that our lives were in danger. We were completely abandoned by our non-Jewish friends and neighbors. No one spoke to me in school. One boy walked up to me and said, “My father said I’m not to speak to you anymore.” When we went to the park, we were roughed up. Then, on Nov. 9, 1938, Kristallnacht, we were booted out of our apartment, which was looted. We knew we had to get out.

Then, when awarded a Nobel prize, his childhood memories blocked him from accepting Austrian efforts to give his identity back (or to claim his prize as their own).

Their newspaper people said, “Oh, wonderful, another Austrian Nobel Prize!” I said: “You’ve got this wrong. This is an American, an American Jewish Nobel Prize.” The president of Austria wrote me a note: “What can we do to recognize you?” I said, “I do not need any more recognition, but it would it be nice to have a symposium at the University of Vienna on the response of Austria to National Socialism.” He said, “That’s fine.” I’m very close to Fritz Stern, the historian, and he helped me put the symposium together. Ultimately, a book came out of it. It had a modest impact.

Insertion of memories is apparently easier than removal. Yet at the end of it all he indicates he does not approve of removing bad memories.

To go into your head and pluck out a memory of an unfortunate love experience, that’s a bad idea. You know, in the end, we are who we are. We’re all part of what we’ve experienced. Would I have liked to have had the Viennese experience removed from me? No! And it was horrible. But it shapes you.

Poetry, Security

“Unfollow” Nokia N9 Ad with Fan Bingbing

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Here’s an advertisement from China, which emphasises individual freedom and innovation, based on my current favourite phone, the linux-based N9 “swipe” made by Nokia:

You may think I’m crazy
As I think everyone else is too ordinary…

I found this video as I noticed an unlocked black 64GB model can now be purchased new in the US for $500.

Nokia also has launched an “augmented reality” site, which emphasises simplicity in design and allows you to use your webcam to interact with an N9 simulation.

Security

Collusion Add-on for Firefox

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Mozilla has released an interesting link-analysis tool (like those used for police investigations but without events) called Collusion

Collusion is an experimental add-on for Firefox and allows you to see all the third parties that are tracking your movements across the Web. It will show, in real time, how that data creates a spider-web of interaction between companies and other trackers.

I fired it up to do a simple test with a blog site. A plugin called Sexybookmarks, infamously found in “over 200,000 websites,” seemed like a good place to start. It supposedly makes it easier for readers to share posts to Twitter, Facebook, and so forth but it also gives blog administrators a vague “track performance” option.

Notice how they put a “recommended” note next to the yes option to persuade a blog owner to leave it on. Other options do not say whether they are recommended or not. Suspicious, no?

It turns out there is reason to be concerned about the “recommended” option. I clicked on yes, reloaded and Collusion immediately picked up traffic being sent to media6degrees.com.

Very easy now for any Firefox user to visualise their traffic to other hidden sites when they visit familiar ones. More importantly it shows a single central repository of user actions formed from multiple sites that present themselves to a user as separate and distinct.

You may think you are going to site Alice and site Bob, which have nothing in common, but they could actually share an innocent-looking tool that (even unbeknownst to them) sends your information off to a third-party managed by authors of Sexybookmarks who then use your “performance” data to post stories and graphs to illustrate your online behavior and interests.

Our statistics, based on aggregate search data from more than 270 million unique monthly readers reached by more than 200,000 Shareaholic publishers, reveal that Hugo is favored for Best Picture with 33% of searches…

Now the tool just needs the ability to right-click and select “block” or “deny”.