Living in a Code Yellow World →

In the 1980s, handgun expert Jeff Cooper invented something called the Color Code to describe what he called the "combat mind-set."...
Cooper talked about remaining in Code Yellow over time, but he didn't write about its psychological toll. It's significant. Our brains can't be on that alert level constantly. We need downtime. We need to relax. This is why we have friends around whom we can let our guard down and homes where we can close our doors to outsiders. We only want to visit Yellowland occasionally.
Since 9/11, the US has increasingly become Yellowland, a place where we assume danger is imminent. It's damaging to us individually and as a society.
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The same effects occur when we believe we're living in an unsafe situation even if we're not. The psychological term for this is hypervigilance. Hypervigilance in the face of imagined danger causesstress and anxiety. This, in turn, alters how your hippocampus functions, and causes an excess of cortisol in your body. Now cortisol is great in small and infrequent doses, and helps you run away from tigers. But it destroys your brain and body if you marinate in it for extended periods of time.
Not only does trying to live in Yellowland harm you physically, it changes how you interact with your environment and it impairs your judgment. You forget what's normal and start seeing the enemy everywhere. Terrorism actually relies on this kind of reaction to succeed.

Hacking Team, Computer Vulnerabilities, and the NSA →

When the National Security Administration (NSA) -- or any government agency -- discovers a vulnerability in a popular computer system, should it disclose it or not? The debate exists because vulnerabilities have both offensive and defensive uses. Offensively, vulnerabilities can be exploited to penetrate others' computers and networks, either for espionage or destructive purposes. Defensively, publicly revealing security flaws can be used to make our own systems less vulnerable to those same attacks. The two options are mutually exclusive: either we can help to secure both our own networks and the systems we might want to attack, or we can keep both networks vulnerable. Many, myself included, have long argued that defense is more important than offense, and that we should patch almost every vulnerability we find. Even the President's Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies recommended in 2013 that "U.S. policy should generally move to ensure that Zero Days are quickly blocked, so that the underlying vulnerabilities are patched on U.S. Government and other networks."
Both the NSA and the White House have talked about a secret "vulnerability equities process" they go through when they find a security flaw. Both groups maintain the process is heavily weighted in favor or disclosing vulnerabilities to the vendors and having them patched.
An undated document -- declassified last week with heavy redactions after a year-long Freedom of Information Act lawsuit -- shines some light on the process but still leaves many questions unanswered. An important question is: which vulnerabilities go through the equities process, and which don't?

The Security Risks of Third-Party Data →

The Internet is more than a way for us to get information or connect with our friends. It has become a place for us to store our personal information. Our e-mail is in the cloud. So are our address books and calendars, whether we use Google, Apple, Microsoft, or someone else. We store to-do lists on Remember the Milk and keep our jottings on Evernote. Fitbit and Jawbone store our fitness data. Flickr, Facebook, and iCloud are the repositories for our personal photos. Facebook and Twitter store many of our intimate conversations.
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Many people don't think about the security implications of this information existing in the first place. They might be aware that it's mined for advertising and other marketing purposes. They might even know that the government can get its hands on such data, with different levels of ease depending on the country. But it doesn't generally occur to people that their personal information might be available to anyone who wants to look.
In reality, all these networks are vulnerable to organizational doxing. Most aren't any more secure than Ashley Madison or Sony were. We could wake up one morning and find detailed information about our Uber rides, our Amazon purchases, our subscriptions to pornographic websites -- anything we do on the Internet -- published and available. It's not likely, but it's certainly possible.
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Privacy isn't about hiding something. It's about being able to control how we present ourselves to the world. It's about maintaining a public face while at the same time being permitted private thoughts and actions. It's about personal dignity.

Colombia, FARC rebels vow to end 50-year war within six months →

Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos and the top FARC rebel commander pledged on Wednesday to end their 50-year war within the next six months, sealing their pact with a handshake likely to stand as a lasting image in the South American nation.
Santos and FARC rebel leader Rodrigo Londono, better known by the nom de guerre Timochenko, also agreed the leftist guerrillas would lay down arms within 60 days of signing the deal, which now has an official deadline of March 23, 2016.
If successful, it would end a conflict that has killed 220,000 and displaced millions over half a century.
A lasting peace would also mark a huge advance for one of Latin America's star emerging economies and could deal a setback to illegal narcotics trafficking. Some FARC units have formed an alliance with drug cartels, exchanging protection for money.
The government and the rebels have been in talks in Havana for nearly three years, but this was the first time Santos had come to Cuba and the first time he had met Timochenko.

China May Never Get Rich →

Some great analysis from Noah Smith using a few basic economic theories.

China is already the world's largest economy by some measures, such as purchasing power parity. It's clear, however, that the country's growth is slowing. Growth dipped from roughly 10 percent to about 8 percent in 2012, and is falling again amid the current slowdown. 
When the country recovers from its slump, how much more expansion can we expect before it settles down into a nice, slow, steady pace like every other fast-growing "miracle" country eventually does? 
That leaves open the big question of how wealthy China will become relative to developed nations such as Japan, France or the U. S...

New Software and Genetic Analyses Aim to Reduce Problems with Multiple-Drug Combinations →

Pines is among the 40 percent of Americans who are 65 years of age or older and take more than five prescription drugs. Although older individuals account for the majority of prescription drug users, they are hardly alone. More than four billion prescriptions were filled at U.S. pharmacies in 2014—an average of nearly 13 per citizen at that time.
The need to take multiple drugs poses a special risk that too often goes unrecognized by doctors and patients: certain combinations of medicines (prescription or otherwise) cause side effects that do not arise when the individual substances are taken alone. Studies published over the past two decades suggest that such “drug interactions” cause more than 30 percent of side effects from medications. Unfortunately, pharmaceutical manufacturers cannot always predict when a new agent will mix badly with other medicines—not to mention supplements or foods—and so unexpected deaths are sometimes the first sign of danger.
Not all side effects are lethal, but the widespread danger from drug interactions is prompting new efforts to prevent people from taking risky combinations...

A hydra-headed scourge: How the Midwest is battling a drug epidemic →

The heroin epidemic in the Midwest is closely linked to the rampant opiate epidemic. As doctors prescribed opioid painkillers such as OxyContin more and more liberally, their abuse grew. Sales of prescription opioid painkillers have increased 300% since 1999, according to the federal Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), even though the amount of pain Americans report to their physicians has not changed.
Three-quarters of heroin addicts used to take prescription drugs and switched to heroin, which is cheaper and more easily available on the black market. A gram of pure heroin costs less than half what it did in the 1980s, in real terms. “This is a doctor-caused epidemic,” says Tom Frieden, boss of the CDC. In states with higher prescription rate of opioid painkillers, such as Michigan, Ohio and Indiana, the number of heroin addicts is higher too.

U.S. and China Seek Arms Deal for Cyberspace →

The United States and China are negotiating what could become the first arms control accord for cyberspace, embracing a commitment by each country that it will not be the first to use cyberweapons to cripple the other’s critical infrastructure during peacetime, according to officials involved in the talks.
While such an agreement could address attacks on power stations, banking systems, cellphone networks and hospitals, it would not, at least in its first version, protect against most of the attacks that China has been accused of conducting in the United States, including the widespread poaching of intellectual property and the theft of millions of government employees’ personal data.