Vijay Srinivasan, John Stankovic, and Kamin Whitehouse via Bruce Schneier:

Abstract: In this paper, we first present a new privacy leak in residential wireless ubiquitous computing systems, and then we propose guidelines for designing future systems to prevent this problem. We show that we can observe private activities in the home such as cooking, showering, toileting, and sleeping by eavesdropping on the wireless transmissions of sensors in a home, even when all of the transmissions are encrypted. We call this the Fingerprint and Timing-based Snooping (FATS) attack. This attack can already be carried out on millions of homes today, and may become more important as ubiquitous computing environments such as smart homes and assisted living facilities become more prevalent. In this paper, we demonstrate and evaluate the FATS attack on eight different homes containing wireless sensors. We also propose and evaluate a set of privacy preserving design guidelines for future wireless ubiquitous systems and show how these guidelines can be used in a hybrid fashion to prevent against the FATS attack with low implementation costs.

The group was able to infer surprisingly detailed activity information about the residents, including when they were home or away, when they were awake or sleeping, and when they were performing activities such as showering or cooking. They were able to infer all this without any knowledge of the location, semantics, or source identifier of the wireless sensors, while assuming perfect encryption of the data and source identifiers.

Andrew Martin:

The only new start-up bank to open in the United States this year operates out of a secondhand double-wide trailer, on a bare lot in front of the cavernous Trinity Baptist Church. A blue awning covers the makeshift drive-through window.
Called Lakeside Bank, it is run by a burly and balding former tackle for Louisiana State’s football team named Hartie Spence, who doles out countrified humor along with deposit slips and the occasional loan.
“This is the one place where the cause of death is mildew,” he quipped, standing outside the trailer in withering heat.

Carolyn Lyons:

Meetings of the five-member Transportation Committee of the Los Angeles City Council tend to be rather quiet affairs. But earlier this month, 150 people crammed into Room 1010 at City Hall to debate LA’s latest gastronomic craze: gourmet food trucks.
To their fans, the trucks are a welcome addition to the city’s food scene, parking outside shops and offices at lunchtimes and congregating on Friday nights to create mini food festivals. To their critics, they are a menace, stealing trade from restaurants, creating litter, lacking proper licences and regulation, and clogging the parking places of entire streets.
“We don’t want to shut down the trucks but we do need to work this out,” says councillor Tom LeBonge. “Many of the truck operators want free enterprise and don’t like government regulation, but we have to act before it becomes a bigger problem.”

Eric Bland:

New crime prediction software being rolled out in the nation’s capital should reduce not only the murder rate, but the rate of many other crimes as well.
Developed by Richard Berk, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, the software is already used in Baltimore and Philadelphia to predict which individuals on probation or parole are most likely to murder and to be murdered.
In his latest version, the one being implemented in D.C., Berk goes even further, identifying the individuals most likely to commit crimes other than murder.
If the software proves successful, it could influence sentencing recommendations and bail amounts.

Shades of Minority Report.

Robert Bryce:

They like everything big in Texas, and wind energy is no exception. Texas has more wind generation capacity than any other state, about 9,700 megawatts. (That’s nearly as much installed wind capacity as India.) Texas residential ratepayers are now paying about $4 more per month on their electric bills in order to fund some 2,300 miles of new transmission lines to carry wind-generated electricity from rural areas to the state’s urban centers

James Pethokoukis:

Main Street may be about to get it’s own gigantic bailout. Rumors are running wild from Washington to Wall Street that the Obama Administration is about to order government-controlled lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to forgive a portion of the mortgage debt if millions of Americans who owe more than what their homes are worth.

Fascinating. I don’t think this will help during the November election.

Allen Beattie:

Escaping the latest of a string of steaming hot summer days, I duck gratefully into the cool interior of Tosca, an Italian restaurant in the lobbyist quarter of Washington DC. From the pavement it is not prepossessing, curtains entirely screening off the interior and presenting a blank face to the world. But the busy, clubby interior hums with power. Situated conveniently between Capitol Hill and the White House, and in the neighbourhood of some of Washington’s most powerful political consultancies, it has a reputation as a location for political deals and power-broking at the highest levels. It was here, legend has it, that Tom Daschle spent a five-hour dinner persuading Barack Obama to run for the US presidency. It is very DC.

Chris Gulker:

Your neuro-oncologist, after scanning your most recent MRI, puts her arms around you, and gives you a solemn hug, which was the case with me this past Wednesday. Not that we didn’t guess that something was up – we haven’t been feeling particularly great lately, and we had some weirdness the previous Thursday, falling twice, inexplicably, in a short period. Friday morning our left leg was numb from the knee down and we had a minor, local motor seizure.
Anyway, the MRI reveals 3 new tumors that weren’t in my brain 12 weeks ago. In my understanding of Glioma, this represents a not-untypical course for the end stage of this almost invariably fatal disease. Prognosis at this point? A few months, at best.

God be with Chris and his family.

Eric Pianin

This summer is fast turning into a bittersweet swan song for David Obey, the veteran Democratic House member from Wisconsin.
The mercurial chairman of the House Appropriations Committee and stalwart champion of liberal economic and social policy is set to retire after more than 40 momentous years in Congress. But instead of celebrating, Obey is locked in a bruising and highly personal budget battle – not with his Republican adversaries, but with Democratic President Obama and a prominent cabinet member.
In the greater scheme of things, the spending controversy is “small potatoes,” a “lousy little fight” over an asterisk in a multitrillion-dollar annual budget, as Obey describes it. At issue is whether to trim $500 million from Obama’s signature “Race to the Top” education initiative to help avert the threatened layoff of 140, 000 school teachers across the country. Obey believes the proposed trim of about 15 percent of funding for future programs is a small price for the administration to pay to keep teachers on the job now, amid a stubborn recession. But Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan are treating it as a potentially devastating assault on their new education program, and have threatened a veto.

Tim O’Reilly:

Tim O’Reilly:

On Friday, my latest tweet was automatically posted to my Facebook news feed, as always. But this time, Tom Scoville noticed a difference: the link in the posting was no longer active.


It turns out that a lot of other people had noticed this too. Mashable wrote about the problem on Saturday morning: Facebook Unlinks Your Twitter Links.

if you’re posting web links (Bit.ly, TinyURL) to your Twitter feed and using the Twitter Facebook app to share those updates on Facebook too, none of those links are hyperlinked. Your friends will need to copy and paste the links into a browser to make them work.


If this is a design decision on Facebook’s part, it’s an extremely odd one: we’d like to think it’s an inconvenient bug, and we have a mail in to Facebook to check. Suffice to say, the issue is site-wide: it’s not just you.

As it turns out, it wasn’t just links imported from Twitter. All outbound links were temporarily disabled, unless users explicitly added them as links via an “attach” dialogue. I went to Facebook, and tried posting a link to this blog directly in my status feed, and saw the same behavior: links were no longer automatically made clickable. You can see that in the image that is the destination of the first link in this piece.



The problem was quickly fixed, with URLs in status updates automatically now linkified again. The consensus was that it was in fact a bug, but it’s little surprise that people suspected otherwise, given the increasing amount of effort Facebook puts into warning people that they are leaving Facebook for the big bad unsafe Internet: