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A new study shows that Doryteuthis pealei in pain—or whatever passes for pain in that species—has heightened sensory sensitivity and heightened reactions.
The idea, although this is a major extrapolation at this point, is that pain is a security mechanism. It helps us compensate for our injured—i.e. weakened—state.
As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.
Interesting experiment shows that the retelling of stories increases conflict and bias.
For their study, which featured 196 undergraduates, the researchers created a narrative about a dispute between two groups of young people. It described four specific points of tension, but left purposely ambiguous the issue of which party was the aggressor, and “depicted the groups as equally blameworthy.”
Half of the participants read a version of the story in which the two hostile groups were from two Maryland cities. The other half read a version in which one group was from the city of Gaithersburg, but the other was identified as “your friends.”
Participants were assigned a position between one and four. Those in the first position read the initial version of the story, and then “re-told” it in their own words by writing their version of the events. This was passed on to the person in the second position, who did the same.
The procedure was repeated until all four people had created their own versions of the story. Each new version was then examined for subtle shifts in emphasis, blame, and wording.
The results: Each “partisan communicator”—that is, each student who wrote about the incident involving his or her “friends”—”contributed small distortions that, when accumulated, produced a highly biased, inaccurate representation of the original dispute,” the researchers write.
Standard disclaimer—that American undergraduates might not be the best representatives of our species—applies. But the results are not surprising. We tend to play up the us vs. them narrative when we tell stories. The result is particularly interesting in light of the echo chamber that Internet-based politics has become.
The actual paper is behind a paywall.
Someone has finally proven how:
How do these squid go from swimming to flying? Four phases of flight are described in the research: launching, jetting, gliding and diving.
While swimming, the squid open up their mantle and draw in water. Then these squid launch themselves into the air with a high-powered blast of the water from their bodies. Once launched by this jet propulsion, these squid spread out both their fins and their tentacles to form wings. The squid have a membrane between their tentacles similar to the webbed toes of a frog. This helps them use their tentacles as a wing and create aerodynamic lift so they can glide similar to a well-made paper airplane.
As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.
Detailed response and analysis of the inspectors general report on the Boston Marathon bombings:
Two opposite mistakes in an after-the-fact review of a terrorist incident are equally damaging. One is to fail to recognize the powerful difference between foresight and hindsight in evaluating how an investigative or intelligence agency should have behaved. After the fact, we know on whom we should have focused attention as a suspect, and we know what we should have protected as a target. With foresight alone, we know neither of these critically important clues to what happened and why. With hindsight, we can focus all of our attention narrowly; with foresight, we have to spread it broadly, as broadly as the imagination of our attackers may roam.
The second mistake is equally important. It is to confuse the fact that people in official positions, like others, will inevitably make mistakes in carrying out any complicated task, with the idea that no mistakes were really made. We can see mistakes with hindsight that can be avoided in the future by recognizing them clearly and designing solutions. After mistakes are made, nothing is more foolish than to hide them or pretend that they were not mistakes.
Interesting research on the security of code written in different programming languages. We don’t know whether the security is a result of inherent properties of the language, or the relative skill of the typical programmers of that language.
The report.
EDITED TO ADD (5/14): Direct link to The report.
There’s a new study looking at the metaphors we use to describe surveillance.
Over 62 days between December and February, we combed through 133 articles by 105 different authors and over 60 news outlets. We found that 91 percent of the articles contained metaphors about surveillance. There is rich thematic diversity in the types of metaphors that are used, but there is also a failure of imagination in using literature to describe surveillance.
Over 9 percent of the articles in our study contained metaphors related to the act of collection; 8 percent to literature (more on that later); about 6 percent to nautical themes; and more than 3 percent to authoritarian regimes.
On the one hand, journalists and bloggers have been extremely creative in attempting to describe government surveillance, for example, by using a variety of metaphors related to the act of collection: sweep, harvest, gather, scoop, glean, pluck, trap. These also include nautical metaphors, such as trawling, tentacles, harbor, net, and inundation. These metaphors seem to fit with data and information flows.
The only literature metaphor used is the book 1984.
This is sad. I agree with Daniel Solove that Kafka’s The Trial is a much better literary metaphor. This article suggests some other literary metaphors, most notably Philip K. Dick. And this one suggests the Eye of Sauron.
Recently, Matthew Green has been leading an independent project to audit TrueCrypt. Phase I, a source code audit by iSEC Partners, is complete. Next up is Phase II, formal cryptanalysis.
Quick summary: I’m still using it.
This headline is provocative: “Human biology inspires ‘unbreakable’ encryption.”
The article is similarly nonsensical:
Researchers at Lancaster University, UK have taken a hint from the way the human lungs and heart constantly communicate with each other, to devise an innovative, highly flexible encryption algorithm that they claim can’t be broken using the traditional methods of cyberattack.
Information can be encrypted with an array of different algorithms, but the question of which method is the most secure is far from trivial. Such algorithms need a “key” to encrypt and decrypt information; the algorithms typically generate their keys using a well-known set of rules that can only admit a very large, but nonetheless finite number of possible keys. This means that in principle, given enough time and computing power, prying eyes can always break the code eventually.
The researchers, led by Dr. Tomislav Stankovski, created an encryption mechanism that can generate a truly unlimited number of keys, which they say vastly increases the security of the communication. To do so, they took inspiration from the anatomy of the human body.
Regularly, someone from outside cryptography—who has no idea how crypto works—pops up and says “hey, I can solve their problems.” Invariably, they make some trivial encryption scheme because they don’t know better.
Remember: anyone can create a cryptosystem that he himself cannot break. And this advice from 15 years ago is still relevant.
Interesting research:
Abstract: We investigate the ability of a passive network observer to leverage third-party HTTP tracking cookies for mass surveillance. If two web pages embed the same tracker which emits a unique pseudonymous identifier, then the adversary can link visits to those pages from the same user (browser instance) even if the user’s IP address varies. Using simulated browsing profiles, we cluster network traffic by transitively linking shared unique cookies and estimate that for typical users over 90% of web sites with embedded trackers are located in a single connected component. Furthermore, almost half of the most popular web pages will leak a logged-in user’s real-world identity to an eavesdropper in unencrypted traffic. Together, these provide a novel method to link an identified individual to a large fraction of her entire web history. We discuss the privacy consequences of this attack and suggest mitigation strategies.
Blog post.
Interesting research.
Both vocabulary and question comprehension were positively correlated with generalized trust. Those with the highest vocab scores were 34 percent more likely to trust others than those with the lowest scores, and someone who had a good perceived understanding of the survey questions was 11 percent more likely to trust others than someone with a perceived poor understanding. The correlation stayed strong even when researchers controlled for socio-economic class.
This study, too, found a correlation between trust and self-reported health and happiness. The trusting were 6 percent more likely to say they were “very happy,” and 7 percent more likely to report good or excellent health.
Full study results.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.