Security experts like myself have been explaining carefully why Apple is doing the right thing. We kind of have to when Snowden takes it upon himself to generate baseless controversy that offers little logical value.

Beware privacy extremists who incoherently draw a line at children’s rights; somehow they rationalize adults must have absolute “freedom” to deny privacy to others if their victims are children.

Also Snowden calling someone a “Ken doll” and saying “every security expert in the world is screaming themselves hoarse now, imploring Apple to stop” are just over-the-top obvious fallacies.

Either I’m not a security expert or Snowden is an unrepentant liar. I’ll leave it to you gentle reader to decide.

Seriously, what kind of average white man goes around calling another average white man he looks like… a Ken doll? Is that a jealously thing?

Maybe this new Atlantic piece explains why Snowden tends to organize Puritain-like reputational attacks:

Once it becomes clear that attention and praise can be garnered from organizing an attack on someone’s reputation, plenty of people discover that they have an interest in doing so.

Update September 14: research also suggests that Snowden is using a method of playing into crowd ignorance to generate engagement using false pretense.

… popularity bias is more likely to lower the overall quality of content…engagement generates a noisy signal, and the algorithm is likely to amplify this initial noise. Once the popularity of a low-quality item is large enough, it will keep getting amplified…Evidence shows that information is transmitted via “complex contagion,” meaning the more times someone is exposed to an idea online, the more likely they are to adopt and reshare it. When social media tells people an item is going viral, their cognitive biases kick in and translate into the irresistible urge to pay attention to it and share it…We found that players are more likely to like or share and less likely to flag articles from low-credibility sources when players can see that many other users have engaged with those articles. Exposure to the engagement metrics thus creates a vulnerability… The wisdom of the crowds fails because it is built on the false assumption that the crowd is… [rational and intelligent]

Apple showed responsibility and diligence in addressing its own cloud space with distributed technology. It is BETTER than the alternatives and academic THEORY of control tampering doesn’t hold a candle to the REALITY of children abused.

Snowden reveals mostly how his opinions are a bunch of heated emotional rhetoric with little to no ethical or technical substance.

Read his crazy ranting if you must, but if you’re an expert in anything involving analysis and logic beware the awful taste it might leave you with.

The unexpected reversal of prey and predator was observed in a science lab.

“I thought, ‘Okay, there’s a bunch of sea urchins in there, these guys are predators of urchins, nothing’s gonna happen,’” recalls Clements, of Fisheries and Oceans Canada in Moncton. The urchins, he says, hadn’t eaten anything in two weeks.

The next day, when Clements came into the lab, he couldn’t find the sun star. There was a pile of urchins on the side of the tank, with something red barely visible underneath. Clements pried the urchins off, revealing the victim.

“The sea star was absolutely decimated,” he says. “The urchins had just ripped it apart.”

It’s the next section that really puzzles me. On the one had it says intentional coordinated attack isn’t possible, and then right after that it suggests a mechanism for intentional coordinated attack.

…urchin attacks can’t be intentional since the animals don’t have a brain or central nervous system, she says. “Urchins doing a coordinated predatory attack is not biologically feasible.”

The synchronized attacks may be based on chemical consequences of the ongoing feeding releasing smells into the water, Clements says. Once the first urchin starts chewing on the sun star, the other urchins may start recognizing the sun star as food…

Eating seems like intent. Signaling seems like coordination.

Definitely food for thought (pun intended, of course) when thinking about drone swarms.

Let me start this crazy story by saying in 2007 there was a huge debate in Arizona about water washing away the border wall.

Yes, you read that right. Nearly 15 years ago — FIFTEEN — federal officials were sternly warned their wall designs would fail catastrophically due to basic water runoff.

In October 2007, before the fence was built by Kiewit Western Co. for $21.3 million, Organ Pipe officials told the U.S. Department of Homeland Security they were worried that the design would impede the movement of floodwater across the border; that debris would get trapped in the fence; that water would pool; and that the lateral flow of water would cause damage to the environment and patrol roads, according to a report issued by Organ Pipe in August 2008 about flooding that summer.

In response, the Border Patrol issued a final environmental assessment with a finding of no significant impact. It also said the fence would not impede the natural flow of water or cause flooding. […] At a December 2007 meeting, Kiewit officials stated in a handout that the fence design “would permit water and debris to flow freely and not allow pounding of water on either side of the border” because the drainage crossing grates “met hydraulic modeling requirements.”

“Now we know who’s right,” said Matt Clark, Southwest representative for Defenders of Wildlife. “Period. End of story.”

End of story? Sadly not.

Matt Clark was talking about the wall three years later in 2011 when that fancy $20 million “hydraulic modeling” wall, as predicted, simply washed away. Problems started immediately in 2008, prompting lawsuits and complaints about the wall operating like a weak dam and then it came down exactly as predicted.

It begs the question of whether people who had been advocating for these walls were taking a slice of $20 million; really didn’t mind if their overpriced wall malfunctioned or fell.

They may as well be building monuments to corruption and stupidity for all they care.

Lesson learned from this 2007 debacle? Not so fast.

Take a look at the big story now coming from Arizona.

José Manuel Pérez Cantú, the director of the nonprofit Cuenca de Los Ojos, said in an email that six gates were washed out at this location alone. Other gates were also reportedly impacted by the heavy rainfall and flooding. The power and height of the waters can be seen in not just the heavy gates ripped open but the debris that wrapped around intact portions of the wall.

Who could have predicted this? Ah yes, just about everyone.

Indeed. Anyone could have predicted this.

The border wall is becoming the standard for illustrating how to fail at security, but behind the obvious failure of the wall to function longer than a year are the massive corruption and ecological disaster stories that make it even worse.

Let me add a little more context to just how stupid the corruption was, from another section of the wall that failed.

1. …boasted at a campaign event in New Jersey that the wall was ‘going up at record speed’…
2. Steel panels from the fence in the town of Calexico, California were knocked down on Wednesday morning. The concrete used to anchor the 30ft-tall (9m) panels in place had not yet set.

You see boasts about how quickly the wall goes up, while the wall being a poorly-planned rush job is given as the excuse for it falling right back down.