Encryption, Privacy Are Larger Issues Than Fighting Terrorism, Clarke Says →

CLARKE: Well, I don't think it's a fierce debate. I think the Justice Department and the FBI are on their own here. You know, the secretary of defense has said how important encryption is when asked about this case. The National Security Agency director and three past National Security Agency directors, a former CIA director, a former Homeland Security secretary have all said that they're much more sympathetic with Apple in this case. You really have to understand that the FBI director is exaggerating the need for this and is trying to build it up as an emotional case, organizing the families of the victims and all of that. And it's Jim Comey and the attorney general is letting him get away with it.
GREENE: So if you were still inside the government right now as a counterterrorism official, could you have seen yourself being more sympathetic with the FBI in doing everything for you that it can to crack this case?
CLARKE: No, David. If I were in the job now, I would have simply told the FBI to call Fort Meade, the headquarters of the National Security Agency, and NSA would have solved this problem for them. They're not as interested in solving the problem as they are in getting a legal precedent.

Why Are We Fighting the Crypto Wars Again? The iPhone Crisis reignited a conflict that should have been settled in the 90s. The loser is our national security. →

...In theory at least, intelligence and law enforcement agreed to accept the fact that crypto was here to stay, and if they wanted to gain access to encrypted communications and files, they would do so by warrants and their own cryptanalysis, and not by demanding that the systems themselves should be weakened.
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Three big things have happened since the first round of the Crypto Wars. First, of course, was 9/11. The second was the Snowden revelations, which exposed how the government had stepped up its surveillance of communications, greatly increasing its cache of private information despite the existence of crypto. And the third, definitely related to factor two, was the explosion of new technologies — notably the iPhone and its progeny — that put even more of our personal information in the cloud. (In 2001, Google was just getting started.) All of these things make the stakes much higher this time around.
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...Once again, the government is seeking to control that genie first released by Diffie and Hellman. But the physics of computer security have not changed. Last July, a panel of fifteen eminent security specialists and cryptographers — many of whom are veterans of the first crypto war — released a report confirming there was no way for the government to demand a means of bypassing encryption without a dire compromise of security. It just doesn’t work.

Apple VP: The FBI wants to roll back safeguards that keep us a step ahead of criminals →

That’s why it’s so disappointing that the FBI, Justice Department and others in law enforcement are pressing us to turn back the clock to a less-secure time and less-secure technologies. They have suggested that the safeguards of iOS 7 were good enough and that we should simply go back to the security standards of 2013. But the security of iOS 7, while cutting-edge at the time, has since been breached by hackers. What’s worse, some of their methods have been productized and are now available for sale to attackers who are less skilled but often more malicious. 
To get around Apple’s safeguards, the FBI wants us to create a backdoor in the form of special software that bypasses passcode protections, intentionally creating a vulnerability that would let the government force its way into an iPhone. Once created, this software — which law enforcement has conceded it wants to apply to many iPhones — would become a weakness that hackers and criminals could use to wreak havoc on the privacy and personal safety of us all.

Hundreds of thousands protest throughout Brazil →

Hundreds of thousands of Brazilians filled streets across the country Sunday to protest corruption and call for the impeachment of deeply unpopular President Dilma Rousseff and the jailing of her predecessor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
Protests were reported in every state in Brazil.
Wearing yellow and green Brazil national soccer team shirts and singing the national anthem, protesters denounced a multibillion-dollar corruption scandal involving bribes and kickbacks on fat contracts at the state-run oil company, Petrobras. That scandal has led to the jailing of politicians from Rousseff’s Workers’ Party and its coalition allies.
It was the fifth time in a year that protesters filled city streets across Brazil, and indications were that the number of protesters was higher than before. At least 450,000 people filled Sao Paulo’s central Paulista Avenue — more than in a 1984 human rights march that helped bring about the fall of Brazil’s dictatorship, the Datafolha polling institute reported.

What Happens When the Surveillance State Becomes an Affordable Gadget? →

The StingRay is a suitcase-size device that tricks phones into giving up their serial numbers (and, often, their phone calls and texts) by pretending to be a cell phone tower. The technical name for such a device is IMSI catcher or cell-site simulator. It retails for about $400,000. Harris and competitors like Digital Receiver Technology, a subsidiary of Boeing, sell IMSI catchers to the military and intelligence communities, and, since 2007, to police departments in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and more than 50 other cities in 21 states. The signals that phones send the devices can be used not just to locate any phone police are looking for (in some cases with an accuracy of just 2 meters) but to see who else is around as well. IMSI catchers can scan Times Square, for instance, or an apartment building, or a political demonstration.
Rigmaiden built a file hundreds of pages thick about the StingRay and all its cousins and competitors—Triggerfish, KingFish, AmberJack, Harpoon. Once he was able to expose their secret use—the FBI required the police departments that used them to sign nondisclosure agreements—the privacy and civil-liberties world took notice...
In the ongoing scrum over cell phone privacy, there are at least two major fields of play: phone-data encryption, in which, right now, Apple is doing its best not to share its methods with the government; and network security, in which the police and the military have been exploiting barn-door-size vulnerabilities for years. And it’s not just the government that could be storming through. The same devices the police used to find one low-rent tax fraudster are now, several years later, cheaper and easier to make than ever.

Are you pre-diabetic? 46% of California adults are, UCLA study finds →

Rates of diabetes have increased more than 175% nationally since 1980, according to federal data. It's now the seventh-leading cause of death in California.
The UCLA researchers used data from theNational Health and Nutrition Examination Survey to create a model that predicts pre-diabetes, based on factors such as race, height and weight. That model was then applied to data from the California Health Interview Survey, determining that 13 million adults in the state have either pre-diabetes or undiagnosed diabetes.
Up to 70% of those with pre-diabetes develop diabetes in their lifetime.
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But experts say there's hope of curbing the disease's spread. The vast majority of diabetes cases in California — upward of 90% — are Type 2, which is preventable. People can stave off developing diabetes by adopting a healthier diet and increasing physical activity, experts say.
The difficulty is that most people don't take action until it's too late.
"One of the biggest problems with pre-diabetes is that most people don't know they have it," said Dr. Susan Babey, the paper's lead researcher and a co-director of the Chronic Disease Program at the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research.

More Than Half of What Americans Eat Is 'Ultra-Processed' →

“Processed” is not inherently an evil word. According to the Food and Drug Administration, the only time a food can be called fresh is when you’ve just ripped it out of the ground or off a tree and shoved it in your mouth. (Ok, you’reallowed to wash it, coat it, and use pesticides, too.) So bread, even the whole-wheat kind with the weird seeds in it, is processed. Frozen spinach is processed.
But that is not the kind of processing they’re talking about in this study. The researchers, from the University of São Paulo and Tufts University, defined “ultra-processed” as:
Formulations of several ingredients which, besides salt, sugar, oils, and fats, include food substances not used in culinary preparations, in particular, flavors, colors, sweeteners, emulsifiers and other additives used to imitate sensorial qualities of unprocessed or minimally processed foods and their culinary preparations or to disguise undesirable qualities of the final product.

Not to mention "fillers" which serve no value, whatsoever; they make us feel full, but offer no nutrition, so we get hungrier quicker, making us buy and consume more "food".

Setting the Record Straight on Fracking and Earthquakes →

Last year the U.S. Geological Survey released a flurry of reports on the topic of human-induced earthquakes. It is now clear there is a connection between oil/gas extraction and earthquake activity. However, the nature of that connection has been widely misunderstood and misreported, even by some of the most reputable publications in the world.
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Specifically, the connection between oil/gas extraction and earthquakes has been generally accepted since at least the 1960’s and plainly obvious for about the last decade. Although some politicians may still question the connection, I was building earthquake models during that time and can say with confidence that science does not.
If there was any question remaining, the recent case of Oklahoma should remove all doubt...