Jakob Augstein:

Is Barack Obama a friend? Revelations about his government’s vast spying program call that assumption into doubt. The European Union must protect the Continent from America’s reach for omnipotence.

On Tuesday, Barack Obama is coming to Germany. But who, really, will be visiting? He is the 44th president of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office. He is an intelligent lawyer. And he is a Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

But is he a friend? The revelations brought to us by IT expert Edward Snowden have made certain what paranoid computer geeks and left-wing conspiracy theorists have long claimed: that we are being watched. All the time and everywhere. And it is the Americans who are doing the watching.

Matthew Schofield:

Wolfgang Schmidt was seated in Berlin’s 1,200-foot-high TV tower, one of the few remaining landmarks left from the former East Germany. Peering out over the city that lived in fear when the communist party ruled it, he pondered the magnitude of domestic spying in the United States under the Obama administration. A smile spread across his face.
“You know, for us, this would have been a dream come true,” he said, recalling the days when he was a lieutenant colonel in the defunct communist country’s secret police, the Stasi.

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/06/26/195045/memories-of-stasi-color-germans.html#.Ucwg81W9LCR#storylink=cpy

Filip Molcan:

I live in The National Park Bohemian Switzerland in Czech Republic. In the last few years of my life I had spent almost one of it in USA. My relationship to this country where nearly everybody wants to live went through several stages:

1st visit “Superb nature, superb country, however those Americans are really a bit crazy.”

2nd visit “I want to live here!”

3rd visit “Everything has its pluses and minuses.”

I had seen more of USA than most of the Americans, I had visited Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, Florida, California, Arizona, Nevada, Oregon, Montana, Idaho, Washington, Utah, Colorado and Wyoming but most of my time I had spent in California, therefore I will relate all my conclusions to it. It is my own opinion formed from my own experience and conversations with locals. Sure enough the situation will be different in other states and you also will have different point of view.

What is my relationship to the United States then? Would I live there? What is great about it and what kind of things I don’t like?

Douglas Sternberg at Lumosity.com:

Economists and urban researchers tend to analyze the collective intelligence of cities based on socioeconomic variables like income and education levels. Last year, Lumosity published its first Smartest Cities rankings based on our own database of users’ performance on cognitive training exercises. Our 2012 rankings measured the cognitive performance of over a million people around the country. The 2013 rankings are based on data from nearly three times as many people, with over 3 million users included in the study. Given the larger scale, this year we introduce additional and more granular rankings, including Core-Based Statistical Areas (CBSAs, also known as Metropolitan and Micropolitan Statistical Areas), Combined Statistical Areas, and the direct city and state output by the IP geolocation database, in addition to the Designated Marketing Areas used in the 2012 list. We have also made some adjustments to our methods that we hope will improve the validity and reliability of our results, and provide new lists separated by age group. This whitepaper provides information about the methods employed in creating the rankings, along with summary tables. Our data is also available in the form of an interactive map that makes it easy to explore how cognitive performance varies geographically across the United States. The full rankings for CBSAs are provided in the appendix of this document. If you are a researcher who is interested in using the complete set of aggregated scores and rankings for your own research and analysis, please contact us.

Margareta Pagano:

Nassim Nicholas Taleb has a dream. It’s this: he wants us to celebrate the restaurant owners, the taxi drivers, the market traders and carpenters and all the other risk-takers who put their skin in the game and who drive the economy for the rest of us.

“Let’s call it a National Entrepreneur Day,” declares the author of the best-selling The Black Swan, and have a day devoted to entrepreneurs, because they are the heroes who at times take suicidal risks for the mere survival of the economy: “Optionality makes things work and grow – the UK and the US have a fantastic history in risk-taking, in trial and error, without shame in failing and starting again. We need to recover that spirit.”

Indeed, if modern society is to progress, Taleb says we must honour the “ruined” risk-takers with as much respect as we do soldiers. Just as there is no such thing as a failed soldier – dead or alive, so there is no such thing as a failed entrepreneur.

It’s a sweet dream and a great idea – No 10 are you reading – and just one of many secrets for success that Taleb sets out in his latest work, Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder, which is published in paperback next month. And after reading the book, which draws so much on his exotic Levant background, it’s no surprise that skin in the game is so vital to his radical world view. In Antifragile he tells the story of when he was a child and his father was stopped at a road check during the Lebanese civil war. His father refused to do as demanded and the militiaman got angry with him for being disrespectful. So he shot him in the back and the bullet stayed in his chest for the rest of his life.

Karl Koscher, Alexei Czeskis, Franziska Roesner, Shwetak Patel, and Tadayoshi Kohno

Modern automobiles are no longer mere mechanical devices; they are pervasively monitored and controlled by dozens of digital computers coordinated via internal vehicular networks. While this transformation has driven major advancements in efficiency and safety, it has also introduced a range of new potential risks. In this paper we experimentally evaluate these issues on a modern automobile and demonstrate the fragility of the underlying system structure. We demonstrate that an attacker who is able to infiltrate virtually any Electronic Control Unit (ECU) can leverage this ability to completely circumvent a broad array of safety-critical systems. Over a range of experiments, both in the lab and in road tests, we demonstrate the ability to adversarially control a wide range of automotive functions and completely ignore driver input including disabling the brakes, selectively braking individual wheels on demand, stopping the engine, and so on. We find that it is possible to bypass rudimentary network security protections within the car, such as maliciously bridging between our car’s two internal subnets. We also present composite attacks that leverage individual weaknesses, including an attack that embeds malicious code in a car’s telematics unit and that will completely erase any evidence of its presence after a crash. Looking forward, we discuss the complex challenges in addressing these vulnerabilities while considering the existing automotive ecosystem.

Henry David Thoreau, via Fabius Maximus:

Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents on injustice.

… In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgement or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs.

Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens. Others — as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders — serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as the rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the devil, without intending it, as God. A very few — as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men — serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated as enemies by it.

“Burn the Ships“.

Apple has a habit or one might credibly argue a devotion to changing adaptors, interfaces, parts and connectors. The change may be required to support a new standard (such as Thunderbolt – a high speed peripheral interface – soon to be replaced by Thunderbolt 2…), be necessary to enable a smaller form factor or simply to pursue emerging strategic interests. Victims of Apple’s devotion to progress, include the floppy disc, cd-rom/dvd drive, iPhone/iPad/iPod connectors, Firewire and PowerPC CPU’s.

One such change caught me unawares last week.

Apple quietly introduced MagSafe 2 at the 2012 Apple Worldwide Developer Conference. A clever invention, the original “MagSafe” uses a magnet to connect a power supply to a laptop. Older readers might recall the curse of laptop power connectors past. Inadvertently kick a power cable and the connected laptop tests its strength with a free fall to the floor.

MagSafe equipped MacBooks mean that a power supply kick disconnects the cable without physically moving or damaging the laptop. Useful.

Yet last week, I attempted to connect a just released 2013 MacBook air to my desktop Thunderbolt display. The latest MacBook Air sports a MagSafe 2 power adaptor, which is unfortunately incompatible with the still for sale (and premium priced) Thunderbolt display featuring the original MagSafe connector.

The Apple online store missed an opportunity to tell me, when ordering: “Jim. Add a MagSafe 2 adaptor for $9.99. You’ll need it”. Apple knows that I have a Thunderbolt display. Apple also knows the software that I’ve purchased through the App Store along with my other products, such as an iPhone and iPad.

Reflecting on my wasted time last week over a trivial adaptor, (the nearby Apple Store did in fact, have the $9.99 MagSafe 2 adaptor in stock, but I loathe malls; Disappointment) I am surprised that Apple has not implemented a more personal online shopping experience. Why not use the data they have and offer a suggestion or three along the purchase route?

A few lessons:

1. Apple continues to have the intestinal fortitude to burn the ships, even for the smallest interface, in this case MagSafe to MagSafe 2.
2. Apple has the supply chain power to deliver the necessary adaptors and connectors at the right place and at the right time. I can think of countless other purchase experiences where a key item was missing or out of stock. The Apple Store appeared to have a reasonable supply of MagSafe to MagSafe 2 adaptors.
3. Apple is missing an opportunity to tie my purchasing history into the online shopping experience. Understanding that my MacBook Air purchase required a $9.99 adaptor would have been helpful. My years of Apple customer service experience generally reveals a well run organization. I am surprised that someone has not put this CRM style enhancement in place.
4. It would be interesting to understand Apple’s internal calculations when contemplating such changes. There are a host of issues worth consideration, from aesthetics, customer experience, hassle, supply chain, retail, staff awareness, support and SKU bloat.

Spiegel:

All of these motives probably play a role. The truth is that the Germans would love to be able to engage in more online espionage. Until now, the only thing missing has been the means to do so. Consequently, an outraged reaction from Berlin would have seemed fairly hypocritical.

Roughly half a dozen countries maintain intelligence agencies like the NSA that operate on a global scale. In addition to the Americans, this includes the Russians, Chinese, British, French and — to a lesser extent — Israelis and Germans. They have all placed the Internet at the heart of their surveillance operations. The vision of a wildly proliferating, grassroots, democratic Internet with totally secluded niches has long since become a thing of the past. Tomorrow’s world is a digital habitat where even the most far-flung corners are exposed to outside eyes, and where everything can be stored for posterity — and actually is stored, as with Prism.

What is surprising about the NSA’s program is its size and professionalism. The objective here is also shared by agencies in other countries, above all the BND, Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, which is currently significantly extending its capabilities. Last year, BND head Gerhard Schindler told the Confidential Committee of the German parliament, the Bundestag, about a secret program that, in his opinion, would make his agency a major international player. Schindler said the BND wanted to invest €100 million ($133 million) over the coming five years. The money is to finance up to 100 new jobs in the technical surveillance department, along with enhanced computing capacities. This may sound like a pauper’s version of the Prism program, but it represents one of the most ambitious modernization projects in the BND’s history, and has been given the ambitious German name Technikaufwuchsprogramm (literally “Technological Coming-of-Age Program”).

Ed Wallace:

Even more important to the story line could be the fact that farm prices would explode again in corn country, thanks to the increasing prices the futures markets were bidding for that particular commodity. As Fortune magazine reported this May 10, the Kansas City Federal stated, “despite the drought in Iowa last year, farmland prices have nearly doubled since 2009 to an average price of $8,296 an acre.”

So that 1989 movie’s charming idealism could be updated to today’s more cynical and extremely profitable reality: Between the near tripling of the price of corn and the bubble-level price of $8,296 an acre for Iowa farmland, Kinsella and his family find that their windfall is far greater than watching the ghosts of the 1919 White Sox play yet another boring game.

In the film’s climax, Kinsella would walk proudly out onto the field. There he would inform his father and Shoeless Joe Jackson that they’ve played their last game on his farm because, after he sells the final corn crop for a fortune on the commodities market, he will be selling the farm for eight grand an acre. And with that line the idealistic Ray Kinsella would become the Gordon Gekko of Iowa.