For more than a decade, we’ve been studying dozens of organisations such as this management consultancy, employing people with high IQs and impressive educations. We have spoken with hundreds of people working for engineering firms, government departments, universities, banks, the media and pharmaceutical companies. We started out thinking it is likely to be the smartest who got ahead. But we discovered this wasn’t the case.
Organisations hire smart people, but then positively encourage them not to use their intelligence. Asking difficult questions or thinking in greater depth is seen as a dangerous waste. Talented employees quickly learn to use their significant intellectual gifts only in the most narrow and myopic ways.
The motivation:
Those who learn how to switch off their brains are rewarded. By avoiding thinking too much, they are able to focus on getting things done. Escaping the kind of uncomfortable questions that thinking brings to light also allows employees to side-step conflict with co-workers. By toeing the corporate line, thoughtless employees get seen as ‘leadership material’ and promoted. Smart people quickly learn that getting ahead means switching off their brains as soon as they step into the office.
This article is a pretty damning look at the mindlessness large corporations impose on employees. It may come across as a very cynical read, but I’ll stick my neck out a little and say that in my experience working with organizations in the private and government sectors, a lot of it rings true. Big, bureaucratic environments usually breed conformity and compliance rather than a dynamic environment that promotes frank discussion and real problem-solving. None of this is news, but this article goes into great detail.
A large part of this, in my view, is simply a lack of courage – on the part of the leadership as well as subordinates. It takes some courage to think critically about issues in a group setting and voice those thoughts, and even more to establish consensus in order to change things, even relatively minor things.
Hey listen, if you don’t trust each other enough to air out your differences, you are never going to have a team. If you are afraid of conflict within the team and afraid of confrontation within the team, you are never going to have a team. That’s not a team. That’s a bunch of guys soaking around wondering what the other guy is thinking.
Every time you type a number into your iPhone for a text conversation, the Messages app contacts Apple servers to determine whether to route a given message over the ubiquitous SMS system, represented in the app by those déclassé green text bubbles, or over Apple’s proprietary and more secure messaging network, represented by pleasant blue bubbles, according to the document. Apple records each query in which your phone calls home to see who’s in the iMessage system and who’s not.
Is this really news? Not for people versed in iMessage architecture, no.
While the first clause of The Intercept headline is true, the second is speculation, but likely also true. We know that law enforcement agencies routinely request data from Apple and other companies, and if Apple typically did not comply, we would probably have heard about it either from a government leak, or from Apple itself touting its principled stand on privacy. Remember, the FBI made a grand spectacle of Apple’s resistance to helping unlock the iPhone used by the San Bernardino shooter earlier this year, so it’s hard to believe they wouldn’t do it again if given another pretense (I use that word deliberately, since it appears the FBI’s long-term objective regarding encryption is to weaken it, an effort which will likely be restarted with another court battle).
When the case this past summer was reported in which authorities identified and arrested a torrent owner using, at least in part, iTunes purchase activity, I mentioned something that is widely known, “authorities can still determine a lot just by examining call, messaging, and other connection-related metadata and traffic analysis.” The logs mentioned in the article have this type of information, but if Apple decided not to share this data, it is very likely that government surveillance of network traffic could intercept it as it travels between a device and network routers and servers. Asking Apple for it would be much easier, though.
Today, the programmable chips that Burger and Lu believed would transform the world—called field programmable gate arrays—are here. FPGAs already underpin Bing, and in the coming weeks, they will drive new search algorithms based on deep neural networks—artificial intelligence modeled on the structure of the human brain—executing this AI several orders of magnitude faster than ordinary chips could. As in, 23 milliseconds instead of four seconds of nothing on your screen. FPGAs also drive Azure, the company’s cloud computing service. And in the coming years, almost every new Microsoft server will include an FPGA. That’s millions of machines across the globe. “This gives us massive capacity and enormous flexibility, and the economics work,” Burger says. “This is now Microsoft’s standard, worldwide architecture.”
Fascinating look into what Microsoft is doing with FPGAs. Seems like a clever use of an established technology and a different approach from Google and possibly others, i.e., choosing rapid reprogramming over optimized chip design to take advantage of changes in implementing artificial intelligence in software.
One company told me about a variety of probing attacks in addition to the DDoS attacks: testing the ability to manipulate Internet addresses and routes, seeing how long it takes the defenders to respond, and so on. Someone is extensively testing the core defensive capabilities of the companies that provide critical Internet services.
Who would do this? It doesn’t seem like something an activist, criminal, or researcher would do. Profiling core infrastructure is common practice in espionage and intelligence gathering. It’s not normal for companies to do that. Furthermore, the size and scale of these probes – and especially their persistence – points to state actors. It feels like a nation’s military cybercommand trying to calibrate its weaponry in the case of cyberwar. It reminds me of the US’s Cold War program of flying high-altitude planes over the Soviet Union to force their air-defense systems to turn on, to map their capabilities.
Who would do this, and who could do this? Most implications are China or Russia, and there are undoubtedly some other countries that are capable.
I wonder if cybersecurity will be discussed tonight at the first presidential debate, the topics of which include, “America’s Direction,” “Achieving Prosperity,” and “Securing America.”
On Thursday morning, exactly two weeks after Krebs published his first post, he reported that a sustained attack was bombarding his site with as much as 620 gigabits per second of junk data. That staggering amount of data is among the biggest ever recorded. Krebs was able to stay online thanks to the generosity of Akamai, a network provider that supplied DDoS mitigation services to him for free. The attack showed no signs of waning as the day wore on. Some indications suggest it may have grown stronger. At 4 pm, Akamai gave Krebs two hours’ notice that it would no longer assume the considerable cost of defending KrebsOnSecurity. Krebs opted to shut down the site to prevent collateral damage hitting his service provider and its customers.
“It’s hard to imagine a stronger form of censorship than these DDoS attacks because if nobody wants to take you on then that’s pretty effective censorship,” Krebs told Ars on Friday. “I’ve had a couple of big companies offer and then think better of offering to help me. That’s been frustrating.”
It is stunning to think that the capability exists to take nearly any website offline, and that that capability can be wielded by those with less expertise than ever before. And it seems like not much can be done to stop this. Along with the frequent reports of alleged state-sponsored hacking in the news, this is a troubling trend.
Sergei Skorobogatov has demonstrated that NAND mirroring—the technique dismissed by James Comey, the director of the FBI, as unworkable—is actually a viable means of bypassing passcode entry limits on an Apple iPhone 5C. What’s more, the technique, which involves soldering off the phone’s flash memory chip, can be used on any model of iPhone up to the iPhone 6 Plus, which use the same type of LGA60 NAND chip. Later models, however, will require “more sophisticated equipment and FPGA test boards.”
Later models starting with the iPhones 6s and 7 apparently cannot be hacked using this technique.
I wonder if this is the kind of attack that was used by whomever the FBI hired in March to break into the iPhone seized in the San Bernardino shooting case.
I made an appointment at the Genius Bar at the Apple Store in Tysons Corner, Virginia. A very helpful guy named Dave (imagine that) met me, took a look at the watch, and said since it’s out of warranty it would have to go in for service at the standard rate of $199/incident. The likely outcome was that the watch would be replaced with a new Apple Watch Series 1.
I was hoping for something more generous, like massive apologies and handing me a new watch, but I knew that was a dream. A new unit at a $70 discount isn’t the worst outcome, but I’m still pretty unhappy that the thing came apart in the first place.
Anyway, I declined the service and took the watch home. Before shelling out two-hundred bucks, I figured I’d try to fix it myself. I bought an adhesive kit and loosely followed the instructions on iFixit for replacing the adhesive. However, since the Force Touch sensor had completely detached and I only secured one face of that fragile part, the repair was incomplete. The screen started coming apart again after one day. So this morning I took it apart once more and put adhesive on both sides of the sensor, following a different set of instructions on iFixit for replacing the Force Touch sensor.
The watch now seems to mostly work and is staying together so far. I have definitely broken the Force Touch sensor, though. It is not responding at all, but that’s a small price to pay to hopefully keep the thing running for a while longer. Since I mostly use my Apple Watch for fitness tracking, notifications, remote photos, checking the weather, and other pretty mundane but useful stuff I’ve come to rely on, the lack of Force Touch and the fact that these kinds of gestures seem to be less necessary for accessing various features in watchOS 3 means I should be getting by pretty well for a while.
Of course, to get the most out of Google Trips, you need to log into it with a Google account. If you are uncomfortable with Trips scanning your Gmail and search history to customize what it presents to you, Trips is probably not the app for you.
Despite this appearing to be a cool app to check out, I think reviews of Google’s apps should start with this kind of disclaimer instead of concluding with it. But I guess people are really not too concerned with how much of a view Google has into their private lives.
If you have privacy concerns about Google tracking your every step around the world, Trips is likely not the app for you. But if you’re comfortable with the trade-offs, I suspect you’ll find Trips to be a tremendously useful travel companion…
