technology – 35-Year Public Affairs & IT Professional

Intimate Internet Violence – It All Started with Revenge Porn

Marines United led to many investigations and the first modification of the Uniformed Code of Military Justice in decades. “Article 117a, UCMJ, colloquially referred to as the UCMJ’s “revenge porn” article, criminalizes the wrongful broadcast or distribution of intimate visual images. Article 117a was codified in response to the 2017 “Marines United” scandal in which nude images of female service members and civilians were posted on Facebook by military members

It all started with revenge porn. Intimate Internet violence. That no laws could stop.

When I began serving as the Public Web lead for the USAF in 2011, I became aware of a bizarre, but serious problem on official government social media accounts. Some couples who broke up practiced what was referred to as “revenge porn.” But they leveled up the game because publishing on their own social media accounts might only reach a few hundred followers. Since the goal was public shaming as a blood sport, many tried to leverage official government social media accounts for the military base or installation where they and their friends lived. So, the admins of the official social media sites of government organizations were playing virtual whack-a-mole denying the publication of insidious invasions of deeply private moments.

Revenge porn is the nonconsensual distribution of sexually explicit images or videos and sometimes without their knowledge that the images or videos exist.

Early Isolated Examples of “Revenge Porn”

A theater manager and photographer secretly took a revealing photo of Marion Manola, a Broadway star, and turned it into an erotic postcard in 1890. Manola sued the men, not wanting to be depicted as a sexual object. “Manola’s case was used as an example by jurists Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis when they argued for a new legal “right to privacy” in their landmark Harvard Law Review article that same year. https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/privacy/Privacy_brand_warr2.html

In 1903, because of another case involving the unauthorized use of a woman’s photograph, the New York Legislature enacted the first right to privacy in the US and across the common law world, including Australia and the United Kingdom.” https://theconversation.com/in-the-19th-century-a-man-was-busted-for-pasting-photos-of-womens-heads-on-naked-bodies-sound-familiar-168081

In the 1950s when Marilyn Monroe agreed to be photographed nude, but the photos were published in Playboy magazine without her consent in 1953. https://www.biography.com/actors/marilyn-monroe-playboy-first-issue-didnt-pose

In the 1980s, Hustler magazine ran a monthly feature called “Beaver Hunt” which featured nude photos of women submitted by readers. The images often included personal details about the women, such as their hobbies, sexual fantasies, or names, and some women sued the magazine for publishing their photos without permission.

Of course, when the ability to publish was limited by people who had money, means and magazines, the amount of revenge porn was relatively limited. Its explosive growth grew with the Internet. While the individual efforts to post partner porn on official Facebook accounts were usually successfully squashed by the admins or algorithms, the Marines United private Facebook group managed to slide under the radar for a while.

Marines United Facebook – Sharing Sexual Secret Braggadocio Videos

The Marines United scandal became national news in the spring of 2017. A closed Facebook group of some 40,000 members sharing bragging rights by sharing explicit images of their mostly female partners, many of whom were unaware their most intimate moments had been recorded. I wonder if they got their inspiration from the 1990s film Flatliners where one guy records a series of tristes and his fiancé discovers the video evidence of his indiscretions.

The victims from Marines United indicated horrible results from their undesired fame, including stalkers.

Intimate Internet violence through public shame and embarrassment didn’t stop there. It has resulted, not surprisingly, in several suicides.

Fatal Fallout From Publishing Private Sexual Secret Videos

Tyler Clementi’s suicide in the fall of 2022 was a tragic event that brought attention to the issue of cyberbullying and harassment of LGBTQ+ youth. He jumped to his death after his roommate secretly recorded a kiss between Tyler and another young man and posted the covert video to Twitter. His death sparked national conversations about privacy, bullying, and the need for greater acceptance and understanding.

His story also led to increased efforts to prevent bullying and support LGBTQ+ individuals. The Tyler Clementi Foundation, founded by his family, works to prevent bullying and promote safe and inclusive spaces for LGBTQ+ youth.

In 2024, Generative AI became a force for “mutilating” people’s images, creating fake pornographic images of them. This was a new “deep fake” twist on revenge porn, but the public shaming as a blood sport remained overwhelmingly painfully real.

Mia Janin, 14, took her own life after a group of boys bullied her, reportedly pasting girls’ faces on porn stars’ bodies and calling her and her friends the “suicide squad.” https://www.eviemagazine.com/post/girl-14-commits-suicide-boys-shared-fake-nude-photo-suicide-squad

Producing Porn Stars from Public Pics of Random People

In April 2024, Laguna Beach High School administrators launched an investigation after a student allegedly created and circulated “inappropriate images” of other students using artificial intelligence.

While some states have made laws specific to nonconsensual sharing of intimate images and the military’s Uniformed Code of Military Justice has criminalized this act, it seems like we could use better federal criminal law to cover this nationally trending trouble.

Completely reimagine early education – outside the bell curve

What if we completely reimagined education with a healthy dose of AI? What if a standard classroom of 30 kids were broken into groups of ten that rotated through options like a gym circuit course?

10 kids on computers studying math via AI like AdapatedMind where the algorithm automatically moves up or down according to how many correct answers the kids get and offers videos or hints when there’s clearly some problem in understanding and maybe it triggers teacher attention if someone gets a lot of questions wrong and/or stops answering

10 kids in a room with mats and gymnastics equipment and, of course, supervision.

10 kids at a crafts station.

Then they all move every 20 to 25 minutes until everyone has completed all 3 stations twice.

Then another set of 3 stations including 1 AI reading comprehension, 1 outside on the playground, and one at a science experiments station

Same thing rotate until they all do the stations 2x.

Then another set of 3 stations, 1 includes AI science videos with comprehension questions, another kinetic education option for math like measuring things and a writing station where they journal.

Same thing rotate until they all do the stations 2x.

PJ Generation

Things that are changing: Rural to Urban Migration
Up to 40% could telework fulltime
More neighborly
More Walking, Fitness, Less Car, Gas & Pollution?
Death of the Office Building
Death of the Dry Cleaners and Business Suits
Increased Productivity, More Energy Focused on Work/Family, Less Driving
Possible Rise in Domestic Violence
Increased Learning Curve for Middle Class Kids
More Home Office, Home Improvement, IOT and More Screen Time
More eCommerce

We had a great opportunity to chat with Dror Shaked of Wix this week and asked him what the future of digital publishing holds. He said his latest public presentation was titled the pajama era. I started thinking what does that really mean across the social spectrum?

Urban to Rural Migration

For a dozen generations or more, the world’s population has been moving from rural to urban. The PJ Generation may reverse that. A new poll shows that nearly 40% of urbanites are considering fleeing the city as the coronavirus pandemic rages on. https://www.millersd.org/news/article/people-are-on-the-move-to-rural-251-415/ In the simple map above lies a stark spatial imbalance: half the people in the world cram into just 1 percent of the Earth’s surface. https://www.businessinsider.com/maps-show-worlds-insane-population-concentration-cities-2016-1

Historically, rural poor move to concentrated areas of population to find better employment. This includes the American farmer and the Chinese factory girls. Even in Egypt, where some 90+ percent of the population lives in that nation’s capital.

One of the many socio-economic elements that the rural to urban migration has had around the world is a shockingly high real estate cost in areas of concentration like Tokyo, Shanghai, London, San Francisco, Vancouver and DC. Obviously, the lure of cheap and spacious housing is attractive, but historically, rural areas with low cost housing had no industrial base, and thus, no substantive income opportunities.

As much as 40% of the workforce could telework fulltime

COVID-19 may yet do what years of advocacy have failed to: Make telework a benefit available to more than a relative handful of U.S. workers. Only 7% of civilian workers in the United States, or roughly 9.8 million of the nation’s approximately 140 million civilian workers, have access to a “flexible workplace” benefit, or telework, according to the 2019 National Compensation Survey (NCS) from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. And those workers who have access to it are largely managers, other white-collar professionals and the highly paid. (“Civilian workers” refers to private industry workers and state and local government workers combined.) https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/03/20/before-the-coronavirus-telework-was-an-optional-benefit-mostly-for-the-affluent-few/

However, according to a Bureau of Labor Statistics report, “The authors find that 37 percent of U.S. jobs can be performed entirely at home—a number that greatly exceeds any recent estimate of how many workers telecommute on an average day. According to the 2018 American Time Use Survey, ‘less than a quarter of all full-time workers work from home on an average day, and even those workers typically spend well less than half of their working hours at home.'” https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2020/beyond-bls/the-number-of-people-who-can-telework-is-higher-than-was-estimated.htm

We May See More of Our Neighbors

I’m scratching my brain trying to remember which book I read in grad school talked about the elimination of the neighborhood as a result of women joining the work force. It might have been one of those Bowling Alone dystopian view books. I read Turkle’s Alone Together and wasn’t impressed. I was more impressed by Clay Shirky Here Comes Everybody, Cognitive Surplus and Don Tapscott’s Growing Up Digital because they focused on how technology was remaking our social connections based on passions and shared interests. This seemed more compelling to me than just hanging out with whoever happened to be born in a geographically co-located residence.

But the dystopian authors bemoaned the time lost in face to face interactions. This summer and fall, I’ve seen a LOT of my neighbors. We are all walking circles around the same blocks and hanging out with kids and dogs at the same neighborhood parks. I’m learning names of neighbors and kids and dogs. This is the kind of community that was apparently lost when women joined the work force because the book whose name I can’t recall talked about how housewives used to spend time together watching kids, sharing recipes, pantry items, etc.

So work from home, some 40-ish percent who may also be moving to rural areas for cheaper, more spacious housing could change the national landscape, including house prices and social fabric, allowing for more awareness of neighbor’s names and lives.

More Walking, Fitness, Less Car, Gas & Pollution?

For me and from what I hear, many of my coworkers, often walk around the neighborhood while on teleconference discussions. I do it mainly so I can resist the temptation to read that email that just popped up. I find I remain more deeply engaged in telephonic conversations or Google Meets if I’m not sitting at a computer. And like many of my peers, I’ve become an obedient slave to my smart watch that complains if I sit too long, warns me that I haven’t yet walked as many steps as I had yesterday at this time and I need 30 minutes of elevated heart rate, so I should get moving. Walking around the neighborhood while teleworking means I see and wave at more neighbors, their kids and dogs.

The PJ Generation almost certainly means a sharp reduction in gas use and car mileage, cleaner air and less pollution. It means less cafeteria food. It might even mean a reduction in our nation’s growing waist lines. My iWatch often complained at me while I was driving home from the Pentagon that I’d been stationary for too long, but I couldn’t very well get up and walk around while stuck in beltway traffic.

Death of the Office Building

And corporations and local, state and federal governments don’t need huge buildings. We don’t need all those wider highways.

Death of the Dry Cleaners and Business Suits

Obviously, less suits, which means the decline of the dry cleaner and Ann Taylor, the only real women’s professional suit maker. Yesterday, Bloomberg featured an article: Work from Home Crushes Dry Cleaners. If you want to know the state of the return to office, take a look at U.S. dry cleaners. 1 in 6 have closed or gone bankrupt as more people work in their sweatpants instead of freshly pressed dress slacks.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2020-11-25/work-from-home-crushes-u-s-dry-cleaners-video

Of course, Zuckerberg and Bezos had already changed the nation’s social expectations of the dress code for the smartest guys (and gals) in the room. So, Americans go even more casual that we always were. I think this is great. Since I was a kid in a Catholic Church, I hated the pageantry and wealth displayed in our clothes.

So we down-cost our homes and dress down our clothes. Get out and see our neighbors. What else?

Increased Productivity, More Energy Focused on Work/Family, Less Driving

I think the workplace is going to gain a significant boost in productivity. Some reports have already talked about this. Since people aren’t spending an average of an hour each way in traffic, they have more energy to focus on work and home. There has been some discussion about the lack of work/life balance because work never ends, but I find that something like a split shift works well for our household. I hit the computer as soon as I wake up, sometimes as early at 5:30, when had I been driving to the Pentagon, I would have wasted time, showering, suiting up and driving. I work until my daughter takes a break from her teleschool and we do something together – eat lunch, LEGOs, tennis, read a book. Then back to work until she’s finished with school. Another break until she goes to tae kwon do or pony riding class or when she hits the bath. Then just before bed, I hit the computer again.

The previous work day was 8 hours at the office, 1 hour of lunchbreak that I couldn’t share with my family or neighbors and at least an hour each way driving, sometimes more. Even if work infringes a bit outside of the 8 hours required, I should still get more family time. After all, the total work day used to require 12 hours outside the house.

Possible Rise in Domestic Violence

One possibly negative impact of all the PJ Generation is domestic violence. https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20200818/radiology-study-suggests-horrifying-rise-in-domestic-violence-during-pandemic#1

For kids in healthy families, more time with parents could help increase their learning curves. However, some kids, myself included, saw school as an escape from an uncomfortable home life. We’re already seeing an increase in the income gap as a result of COVID. The PJ Generation might see a greater separation between low and upper middle income which is exasperated by triumvirate of income, mental and physical wellness, and substance abuse. It’s a well know and understood element of life for people struggling with debilitating illnesses like depression and PTSD that “self medication” is often a logical extension of the mental misery. Domestic violence is often related to alcohol or other substance consumption. Additionally, mental and physical illnesses can interfere with a person’s income generating capabilities. As a result the 3 elements interact together in a terrible way to bring people and families down.

One possibility is that people who suffer might be able to find gainful online employment and/or education that they would never have been able to engage in due to their illness. But another possibility is this cohort falls further away from the social fabric.

Increased Learning Curve for Middle Class Kids

For my daughter, she loves having all 3 adults in the house with her – grandma, dad and mom. And it allows us to tag team with her insatiable need for attention that is exhausting for any one person. So, for the middle class, I think kids will benefit from the PJ generation.

More Home Office, Home Improvement, IOT and More Screen Time

More time at home means more IOT. More voice interactive speakers, TVs, lights and thermostats. More smart homes and more home offices. We’ve already seen a sharp uptick in home improvement during COVID. Americans spent over $6B more dollars this year than previously on home improvement at Home Depot alone. https://thehill.com/policy/finance/526305-home-depot-sales-surge-as-americans-spend-on-home-improvement-amid-covid-19

We’ll probably see an increase in screen time. “Zoom meetings. Distance learning. Online shopping. The coronavirus pandemic has caused us to spend more hours than ever facing a screen. While that allows us to carry on many of our daily activities safely, it may also bring with it some concerns.” https://www.rivertowns.net/news/education/6749222-Screen-time-increases-with-pandemic-adjustments

More eCommerce

During the first two quarters of 2020, stores like Ulta, Macy’s and Kohl’s experienced dramatic spikes in their ecommerce revenue, rising roughly 200%, 53% and 60% respectively. The International Council of Shopping Centers predicts a 25% rise in ecommerce sales in 2020. https://insights.digitalmediasolutions.com/news/ecommerce-transactions-rising

Laws on what government agencies are required to publish

government agencies required to budgets, budget justification, grants

TITLE VI—EXECUTIVE BRANCH TRANSPARENCY Subtitle A—Public Availability Of Information
Sec. 601. Requirement for disclosure of Federal sponsorship of all Federal advertising or other communications.
Sec. 602. Improving access to influential executive branch official’s visitor access records.
Sec. 603. Public availability of budget justifications and appropriation requests.
Sec. 604. Improving rulemaking disclosure for the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.
Sec. 605. Improving registration information from agents of foreign principals.
Sec. 606. Agency defined.
Sec. 607. Government-wide entity identifier.
Sec. 608. Grants transparency requirements.

https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/5150/text?r=7&s=1

SEC. 601. REQUIREMENT FOR DISCLOSURE OF FEDERAL SPONSORSHIP OF ALL FEDERAL ADVERTISING OR OTHER COMMUNICATIONS.
(a) Requirement.—Except as provided for in subsection (b), each advertisement or other communication paid for by an agency, either directly or through a contract awarded by the agency, shall include a prominent notice informing the target audience that the advertisement or other communication is paid for by that agency.
(b) Exceptions.—The requirement in subsection (a) shall not apply to an advertisement or other communication—
(1) that is 200 characters or less; or
(2) that is distributed through a short message service.
(c) Advertisement Or Other Communications Defined.—In this section, the term “advertisement or other communication” includes—
(1) an advertisement disseminated in any form, including print or by any electronic means; and
(2) a communication by an individual in any form, including speech, print, or by any electronic means.

Budgets and Budget justification

SEC. 603. PUBLIC AVAILABILITY OF BUDGET JUSTIFICATIONS AND APPROPRIATION REQUESTS.

(a) In General.—Section 3 of the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006 (31 U.S.C. 6101 note) is amended to read as follows:

“SEC. 3. FULL DISCLOSURE OF FEDERAL FUNDS.

“(a) In General.—Not less frequently than monthly when practicable, and in any event not less frequently than quarterly, the Secretary (in consultation with the Director and, with respect to information described in subsection (b)(2), the head of the applicable Federal agency) shall ensure that updated information with respect to the information described in subsection (b) is posted on the website established under section 2.

“(b) Information To Be Posted.—

“(1) FUNDS.—For any funds made available to or expended by a Federal agency or component of a Federal agency, the information to be posted shall include—

“(A) for each appropriations account, including an expired or unexpired appropriations account, the amount—

“(i) of budget authority appropriated;

“(ii) that is obligated;

“(iii) of unobligated balances; and

“(iv) of any other budgetary resources;

“(B) from which accounts and in what amount—

“(i) appropriations are obligated for each program activity; and

“(ii) outlays are made for each program activity;

“(C) from which accounts and in what amount—

“(i) appropriations are obligated for each object class; and

“(ii) outlays are made for each object class; and

“(D) for each program activity, the amount—

“(i) obligated for each object class; and

“(ii) of outlays made for each object class.

“(2) BUDGET JUSTIFICATIONS.—

“(A) DEFINITIONS.—In this paragraph—

“(i) the term ‘agency’ has the meaning given that term in section 101 of title 31, United States Code; and

“(ii) the term ‘budget justification materials’ means the annual budget justification materials of an agency that are submitted to Congress in support of the budget of the agency, in conjunction with the budget of the United States Government submitted under section 1105(a) of title 31, United States Code, but does not include budget justification materials that are classified.

“(B) INFORMATION.—The information to be posted shall include the budget justification materials of each agency—

“(i) for the second fiscal year beginning after the date of enactment of this paragraph, and each fiscal year thereafter; and

“(ii) to the extent practicable, that were released for any fiscal year before the date of enactment of this paragraph.

“(C) FORMAT.—Budget justification materials shall be posted under subparagraph (B)—

“(i) in an open format machine readable and text searchable;

“(ii) in a manner that enables users to download individual reports, download all reports in bulk, and download in bulk the results of a search, to the extent practicable; and

“(iii) in a structured data format, to the extent practicable.

“(D) DEADLINE.—The budget justification materials required to be posted under subparagraph (B)(i) shall be posted not later than 2 weeks after the date on which the budget justification materials are first submitted to Congress.

SEC. 604. IMPROVING RULEMAKING DISCLOSURE FOR THE OFFICE OF INFORMATION AND REGULATORY AFFAIRS.

(a) Inclusion In The Rulemaking Docket Of Documents And Communications Related To The Implementation Of Centralized Regulatory Review.—As soon as practicable, and not later than 15 days after the conclusion of centralized regulatory review for a draft proposed or draft final rule, the Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs shall include in the rulemaking docket the following:

(1) A copy of the draft proposed or draft final rule and supporting analyses submitted to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs for review.

(2) A copy of the draft proposed or draft final rule that incorporates substantive changes, if any, made to the rule as part of implementing centralized regulatory review.

(3) A document describing in a complete, clear, and simple manner all substantive changes made by the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs to the draft proposed or draft final rule submitted by the agency to Office for review.

(4) A copy of all documents and written communications (including all electronic mail and electronic mail file attachments), and a summary of all oral communications (including phone calls, phone conferences, and meetings), exchanged as part of the implementation of the centralized regulatory review between or among any of the following:

(A) The agency responsible for the rule.

(B) The Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.

(D) An agency that is not the agency responsible for the rule.

(E) An individual who is not employed by—

(i) the executive branch of the Federal Government; or

(ii) an agency that is not the agency responsible for the rule.

(b) Definitions.—In this section:

(1) CENTRALIZED REGULATORY REVIEW.—The term “centralized regulatory review” means the institutional process of Presidential oversight of individual agency rules governed by Executive Order 12866 (58 Fed. Reg. 51735; relating to regulatory planning and review), or any successor to such Executive order.

(2) RULE.—The term “rule” has the meaning given that term in section 551 of title 5, United States Code.

(c) Rule Of Construction.—Nothing in this section shall be construed to preempt or displace the disclosure requirements under any other provision of law affecting administrative procedure, if such requirements are not inconsistent with the requirements of this section.

(c) Publication Of Information Categorized Using Government-Wide Entity Identifier.—Each agency shall, to the extent practicable, publish all public regulatory, procurement, assistance, and other reported information categorized using the unique entity identifier required under this section.

“CHAPTER 74—GRANTS TRANSPARENCY REQUIREMENTS
“Sec.
“7401. Definitions.
“7402. Pre-award evaluation requirements.
“7403. Website relating to Federal grants.
“7404. Postdecision explanation for failed applicants.
“7405. Inspector General review of peer review process.

Cybersecurity as a warfighting domain – timeline

In 2007, a nation was hacked offline via inaccurate information in their news cycle which caused protests that devolved into rioting. Then before the government could counter the inaccurate information, their media and power were hacked offline including all government websites.

https://www.bbc.com/news/39655415

In 2015, the Ukrainian power grid was hacked offline.

https://www.wired.com/2016/03/inside-cunning-unprecedented-hack-ukraines-power-grid/

In 2018, the Secretary of the Air Force announced cyber was a new warfighting domain joining air, land and sea. https://www.fifthdomain.com/newsletters/digital-show-daily/2019/09/20/how-the-air-force-has-reorganized-its-cyber-staff/

This website calls it the 5^th domain because space is also considered a warfighting domain.

However, information remains a contested space which is not yet formally labelled a warfighting domain.

Can CoronaVirus Improve US Quality of Life?

My husband was in China for SARS and Avian flu. He said all the gyms, clubs, community centers were closed. There were police outside the grocery stores taking people’s temperature. No one allowed inside with a fever.
He said a lot of people lost their jobs; homelessness increased. Many people couldn’t pay mortgages and committed suicide. He also says I’m naively optimistic.
But I wonder if there isn’t a silver lining in this cloud. We have a lot of technologies we have been experimenting with, but haven’t yet brought online.
We telework, but have only exploited that option to about 10% or 20% of its potential. And teleworking has so many advantages, including reduced pollution and greenhouse gas emissions due to lack of physical transportation. In major cities, the majority of people spend an hour on average just getting to or from work. All that time could be put to better use and the reduction in fossil fuels could be great.
People driving to work every day to stare at a computer screen for 8 hours is idiotic. Oh, but the meetings! Yes, those can be done online too. Our problem is a human bum in every chair is the way we’ve always done it. Maybe it’s time to do it differently to the improvement of quality of life for Dilbertville dwellers everywhere.
We have self-driving electric cars, but haven’t yet authorized them on the roads. Maybe if we trade out our taxis with people for taxis without people and create some kind of automatic sterilization process, we could get electric self-driving cars on the roads sooner.
Doctors can and probably should videoconference patients at home. I can certainly have the same conversation with my doctor via video conference that I had yesterday when she suspected I had strep, but determined it was just post nasal drip from seasonal allergies. I can dial in by videoconference, talk; she can order tests and I can go to a local kiosk for vitals and test. She can call me back and tell me her diagnosis, order prescriptions online and CVS delivers meds to my door.
We can shop online even more than we already do. Someone commented on one of my FB posts that we should all handle packages delivered to our homes with plastic gloves, but the truth of the matter is, most packages are mostly handled by robotic machines. There is one guy or gal who actually brings it to your door, but the number of human hands that is involved is remarkably few compared with going into a major supermarket. Amazon’s fulfillment warehouses are a marvel of modern technology with relatively few humans in sight. Items are pulled off the shelves, boxed, labelled and sent out without touching a human.
More online customized classes not only at the university level, but for high school, middle school and elementary school too. Yes, students need socialization, but much of school time is sitting silently in a chair which is hardly a social experience. My daughter’s piano teacher offers online piano classes for times when students or more often parents are unable to attend class. I doubt we’ll find any replacement for gymnastics, Tae Kwon Do or pony riding classes, but those are fun enough to warrant attending in person anyway.
My hope is that coronavirus creates a new standard for the use of the new technologies we have, but haven’t actually leveraged.

Concluding that humans need less than 7 hours of sleep is a tabloid myth

A short section from a book that changed my priorities and my life. Nothing is more important than high quality sleep!
De-mythifying sleep: Concluding that humans, modern-living or pre-industrial, need less than 7 hours of sleep is a tabloid myth.
“sleep study on modern day hunter-gatherers dispels notion that we’re wired to need 8 hours a day”
First, when you read the research paper, you learn that the tribes people actually give themselves a 7 to 8.5 hour sleep opportunity each day with an estimated range of 6 to 7.5 hours of sleep. The sleep opportunity that these tribes people provide themselves is therefore almost identical to what the National Sleep Foundation and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend for all adult humans: 7 to 9 hours of time in bed.
The problem is that people confuse time slept with sleep opportunity. Many people conclude they only need 6 hours so they give themselves 6 hours sleep opportunity which means they will only obtain 4.5 to 6 hours of actual sleep.
Need is not defined by what is obtained (as the disorder of insomnia teaches us), but rather or not the amount of sleep is sufficient to accomplish what sleep does. The most obvious need then, would before life – and healthy life. The average lifespan of these hunter-gatherers is jut 58. Epidemiological data says any adult sleeping an average of 6.75 hours a night would be predicted to live only into their early 60s, close to the median life span of the .
More prescient, however, is what kills people in these tribes. The most common immune system failures that kill hunter-gather members are intestinal infections. This is the same fatal consequence of keeping rats alive for 15 continuous days in a lab. No sleep for 15 days kills rats by striping their immune system and killing them by infection.
Finally, one of the few universal ways of forcing animals of all kinds to sleep less than normal is to limit food. When food becomes scarce, sleep becomes scarce as animals try to stay away longer to forage. The Hadza will face days when they obtain 1,400 calories or less and routinely eat 300 to 600 fewer calories than those of us in Western cultures. A large portion of their year is therefore spent in a state of lower-level starvation, on that can trigged well-characterized biological pathways that reduce sleep even though the sleep need remains high. Concluding that humans, modern-living or pre-industrial, need less than 7 hours of sleep is a tabloid myth.

Significant Cyber: Hack a Nation Offline

In 2007, Estonia, a small European country decided to move a controversial statue to a cemetery on the outskirts of the metro area. Someone posted inaccurate news stories that the statue was going to be destroyed and the cemeteries along with it. Riots ensued.

On 26 April 2007 Tallinn erupted into two nights of riots and looting. 156 people were injured, one person died and 1,000 people were detained.

From 27 April, Estonia was also hit by major cyber-attacks which in some cases lasted weeks.

Online services of Estonian banks, media outlets and government bodies were taken down by unprecedented levels of internet traffic.

Massive waves of spam were sent by botnets and huge amounts of automated online requests swamped servers.

The result for Estonians citizens was that cash machines and online banking services were sporadically out of action; government employees were unable to communicate with each other on email; and newspapers and broadcasters suddenly found they couldn’t deliver the news.

https://www.bbc.com/news/39655415

Compiling Significant Cyber Events

I’m at a cyber conference this week and applying for federal cyber security training, so I’m doing some homework. Here’s some snippets from books and articles I read recently.

Let’s consider a few recent examples to better illustrate the universe of cyber warfare. Perhaps the most famous is the Stuxnet worm, which was discovered in 2010 and was considered the most sophisticated piece of malware ever revealed, until a virus know as Flame, discovered in 2012, claimed that title. Designed to affect a particular type of industrial control system that ran on Windows operating system, Stuxnet was discovered to have infiltrated the monitoring systems of Iran’s Natanz nuclear-enrichment facility, causing centrifuges to abruptly speed up or slow down to the point of self-destruction while simultaneously disabling the alarm systems. Because the Iranian systems were not linked to the Internet, the worm must have been uploaded directly, perhaps unwittingly introduced by a Natanz employee on a USB flash drive. The vulnerabilities in the Windows systems were subsequently patched up, but not until after causing some damage to the Iranian nuclear effort, as the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, admitted.
Initial efforts to locate the creators of the worm were inconclusive, though most believed that is target and the level of sophistication pointed to a state-backed effort. Among other reasons, security analysts unpacking the worm (their efforts made possible because Stuxnet had escaped “into the wild” — that is, beyond the Natanz plant) noticed specific references to dates and biblical stories in code that would be highly symbolic to Israelis. (Others argued that the indicators were far too obvious, and thus false flags.) The resources involved also suggested government production: Experts thought the worm was written by as many as 30 people over several months. And it used an unprecedented number of “zero-day” exploits, malicious computer attacks while exposing vulnerabilities in computer programs that were unknown to the program’s creator (in this case, the Windows OS) before the day of the attack, thus leaving zero days to prepare for it. The descovery of one zero-day exploit is considered a rare event– and exploited information can be sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars on the black market — so security analysts were stunned to discover that an early variant of Stuxnet took advantage of FIVE.
Sure enough, it was revealed in June 2012 that not one but two governments were behind the deployment of the Stuxnet worm. Unnamed Obama administration officials confirmed to the New York Times journalist David E. Sanger that Stuxnet was a joint U.S. and Israeli project design to stall and disrupt the suspected Iranian nuclear-weapons program.
In the book The New Digital Age: Transforming Nations, Businesses, and Our Lives
by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen | Apr 23, 2013

For example, when the CENTCOM (US Central Command)Twitter account was compromised for 40 minutes by the Islamic State in January 2015, the motive was not monetary; it was political. The objective was to create discomfort and a sense of insecurity by openly demonstrating a security gap and sending out political messages through it.
In the book Cybersecurity for Beginners by Raef Meeuwisse Second Edition published in March 2017

According to Norton Anti-virus website, the previous mentioned Flame doesn’t make the list of the 8 most amazing viruses ever. Norton’s website listed
1) CryptoLocker. Released in September 2013, CryptoLocker spread through email attachments and encrypted the user’s files so that they couldn’t access them.

The hackers then sent a decryption key in return for a sum of money, usually somewhere from a few hundred pounds up to a couple of grand.

2) ILOVEYOU. 2000. The malware was a worm that was downloaded by clicking on an attachment called ‘LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.TXT.vbs’.

ILOVEYOU overwrote system files and personal files and spread itself over and over and over again. ILOVEYOU hit headlines around the world and still people clicked on the text—maybe to test if it really was as bad as it was supposed to be. Poking the bear with a stick, to use a metaphor.

ILOVEYOU was so effective it actually held the Guinness World Record as the most ‘virulent’ virus of all time. A viral virus, by all accounts. Two young Filipino programmers, Reonel Ramones and Onel de Guzman, were named as the perps but because there were no laws against writing malware, their case was dropped and they went free.

3) MyDoom 2004. MyDoom is considered to be the most damaging virus ever released—and with a name like MyDoom would you expect anything less?

MyDoom, like ILOVEYOU, is a record-holder and was the fastest-spreading email-based worm ever. MyDoom was an odd one, as it hit tech companies like SCO, Microsoft, and Google with a Distributed Denial of Service attack.

25% of infected hosts of the .A version of the virus allegedly hit the SCO website with a boatload of traffic in an attempt to crash its servers.

In 2004, roughly somewhere between 16-25% of all emails had been infected by MyDoom.

4)Storm Worm. 2006. Storm Worm was a particularly vicious virus that made the rounds in 2006 with a subject line of ‘230 dead as storm batters Europe’. Intrigued, people would open the email and click on a link to the news story and that’s when the problems started.

Storm Worm was a Trojan horse that infected computers, sometimes turning them into zombies or bots to continue the spread of the virus and to send a huge amount of spam mail.

5) Sasser & Netsky. 2004. Sasser spread through infected computers by scanning random IP addresses and instructing them to download the virus. Netsky was the more familiar email-based worm. Netsky was actually the more viral virus, and caused a huge amount of problems in 2004.

6) Anna Kournikova. 2001. Not sure why this one is on the list. The description says it didn’t cause much damage, was created as a joke the author turned himself over to the police. Jan De Wit, a 20-year-old Dutch man, wrote the virus as ‘a joke’. The subject was “Here you have, ;0)” with an attached file called AnnaKournikova.jpg.vbs. Anna was pretty harmless and didn’t do much actual damage, though.
7) Slammer. 2003. Slammer is the kind of virus that makes it into films, as only a few minutes after infecting its first victim, it was doubling itself every few seconds. 15 minutes in and Slammer had infected half of the servers that essentially ran the internet.

The Bank of America’s ATM service crashed, 911 services went down, and flights had to be cancelled because of online errors. Slammer, quite aptly, caused a huge panic as it had effectively managed to crash the internet in 15 quick minutes.

As described in a wired magazine article: An inside view of the worm that crashed the Internet in 15 minutes. “Gah!” Owen Maresh almost choked when the Priority 1 alert popped up on his panel of screens just after midnight on Saturday, January 25. Sitting inside Akamai’s Network Operations Control Center, the command room for 15,000 high-speed servers stationed around the globe, he had a God’s-eye view of the Internet, monitoring its health in real time. His job was to watch for trouble spots and keep Akamai’s servers – and the sites of its clients like Ticketmaster and MSNBC – open for business. This was big trouble.
The tiny worm hit its first victim at 12:30 am Eastern standard time. The machine – a server running Microsoft SQL – instantly started spewing millions of Slammer clones, targeting computers at random. By 12:33 am, the number of slave servers in Slammer’s replicant army was doubling every 8.5 seconds.
8) Stuxnet, described above by Cohen in the New Digital Age.

I’m going to dig up some data on the Marines.com hack as well. But what’s odd about most of these notable events is they are a decade or more old. What’s happened recently?

What if? Mao manufactured the Korean Conflict?

A close reading of Kissinger’s On China includes solid data regarding the Chinese deception of Moscow. The Chinese Army was already marching south on the peninsula when Mao cabled Moscow to tell them the Chinese would not interfere in the war between North and South Korea. Moscow and Beijing both blame the other for having originated the idea of North Korea invading South Korea.

Kissinger documents Chinese history, philosophy and tactics which include playing the barbarians against each other and using chess-like or Goban-like political moves to diminish an enemy’s national funds, national clout and domestic popularity. Kissinger notes clearly that the real winner in the Korean Conflict was China. At the end of WWII, the two most powerful global forces were Washington, DC and Moscow. At the end of the Korean Conflict, both had lost considerable domestic confidence, national financial reserves, human lives and global confidence.

However, Kissinger stops short of blaming the creation of the Korean Conflict on Mao. If Mao was able to manufacture a global event that cost, by some estimates 3 million lives both civilian and military, it was his crowning achievement as the ultimate political manipulator. It’s hard to imagine from a JudeoChristian ethic that someone could care so little for human lives as to use 3 million people as pawns in a political maneuver. However, in the military strategic view of classic Chinese texts, rather than be a horrific violation of ethics on a near genocidal level, it could be viewed as a master stroke of genius.

Terrifying to think of, really.