American Hunger Rising

NYPD cop decides to pay for food a woman 

was caught trying to steal 

The New York Times reports:

Early in the pandemic, Joo Park noticed a worrisome shift at the market he manages near downtown Washington: At least once a day, he’d spot someone slipping a package of meat, a bag of rice or other food into a shirt or under a jacket. Diapers, shampoo and laundry detergent began disappearing in bigger numbers, too.

Since then, he said, thefts have more than doubled at Capitol Supermarket — even though he now stations more employees at the entrance, asks shoppers to leave backpacks up front and displays high-theft items like hand sanitizer and baking yeast in more conspicuous areas. Park doesn’t usually call the police, choosing instead to bar offenders from coming back.

“It’s become much harder during the pandemic,” he said. “People will say, ‘I was just hungry.’ And then what do you do?”

Shoplifting is up markedly since the pandemic began in the spring and at higher levels than in past economic downturns, according to interviews with more than a dozen retailers, security experts and police departments across the country. But what’s distinctive about this trend, experts say, is what’s being taken — more staples like bread, pasta and baby formula.

Meanwhile, an estimated 54 million Americans will struggle with hunger this year, a 45 percent increase from 2019, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. With food aid programs like SNAP and WIC being reduced, and other federal assistance on the brink of expiration, food banks and pantries are being inundated, reporting hours-long waits and lines that stretch into the thousands.

With no stimulus aid and her savings gone by May, Jean said she was out of options. So she began sneaking food into her son’s stroller at the local Walmart. She said she’d take things like ground beef, rice or potatoes but always pay for something small, like a packet of M&M’s. Each time, she’d tell herself that God would understand.

“I used to think, if I get in trouble, I’d say, ‘Look, I’m sorry, I wasn’t stealing a television. I just didn’t know what else to do. It wasn’t malicious. We were hungry,’ ” said Jean, 21, who asked to be identified by her middle name to discuss her situation freely. “It’s not something I’m proud of, but it’s what I had to do.”  

But the coronavirus crisis, she said, ushered in a new level of desperation. Finding a job and child care became increasingly difficult. When money became tight, she prioritized rent and car payments over groceries. “My car, my apartment were things that could be taken from me — and then where would that leave me and my son?” she said. “This is going to sound bad, but at least I could try to get food in other ways.” 

Nearly 26 million adults — or 1 in 8 Americans — reported not having enough food to eat as of mid-November, according to the latest data from the Census Bureau. That figure has climbed steadily during the pandemic, and has hit record highs since the government agency began collecting such data in 1998.

Other reports on negotiations between the McConnell and House democrats indicate that democrats have moved from asking for about $2-3 trillion in aid to about $905 billion. McConnell has gone from $500 billion to about $905. It is not clear how likely it is that the two sides will reach a compromise. Both sides blame each other for not compromising. McConnell accusing democrats of being controlled by lawyers. Democrats blame the GOP for being more interested in helping and protecting businesses against consumers, while not having much concern for unemployed workers who are in increasingly desperate straits.

So, while politicians are unable to compromise, increasing numbers of Americans are forced to resort to stealing food because they are hungry.

What an unnecessary mess. It's a disgrace. Guess I need to find a local food bank to donate money to. Since our government is broken and the GOP really does not care about human suffering, regular people have to step in and try to help. 

Fun With Computer Security: Three Levels of Hell

FireEye needs to reimagine it's security protocols 'cause 

those sneaky Russkis stole 'em

I hope this isn't TL/DR.

The first level

The New York Times reports that a top cybersecurity firm, FireEye, has been hacked, probably by the Russian government. The attack is thought to probably be in retaliation for the firm's past anti-hacking successes against businesses and governments. The NYT writes: 

WASHINGTON — For years, the cybersecurity firm FireEye has been the first call for government agencies and companies around the world who have been hacked by the most sophisticated attackers, or fear they might be.

Now it looks like the hackers — in this case, evidence points to Russia’s intelligence agencies — may be exacting their revenge.

FireEye revealed on Tuesday that its own systems were pierced by what it called “a nation with top-tier offensive capabilities.” The company said hackers used “novel techniques” to make off with its own tool kit, which could be useful in mounting new attacks around the world.

It was a stunning theft, akin to bank robbers who, having cleaned out local vaults, then turned around and stole the F.B.I.’s investigative tools. In fact, FireEye said on Tuesday, moments after the stock market closed, that it had called in the F.B.I. 

The $3.5 billion company, which partly makes a living by identifying the culprits in some of the world’s boldest breaches — its clients have included Sony and Equifax — declined to say explicitly who was responsible. But its description, and the fact that the F.B.I. has turned the case over to its Russia specialists, left little doubt who the lead suspects were and that they were after what the company calls “Red Team tools.”

That is is just a reminder of the reality and intensity of forever cyberwar. Now Russia (or whoever hacked the company) can use the company's tools to hack everyone else. 

Being a fairly regular critic of Putin and his endless lies and kleptocratic thuggery, Dissident Politics has gone to permanent Red Alert! status. (Shields up Warf! Warf: Huh?)

The next level: This is even more disturbing 

China is reporting exciting news about a new generation of quantum computers that is fast at doing some specifically hard-wired calculations & stuff. The Chinese government has developed a new way to do quantum computing using a few photons, optical fibers and mirrors. It's almost smoke and mirrors. LiveScience reports:

A team of Chinese scientists has developed the most powerful quantum computer in the world, capable of performing at least one task 100 trillion times faster than the world's fastest supercomputers.

In 2019, Google said it had built the first machine to achieve "quantum supremacy," the first to outperform the world's best supercomputers at quantum calculation, Live Science previously reported. (IBM disputed Google's claim at the time.) The Chinese team, based primarily at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei, reported their quantum computer, named Jiuzhang, is 10 billion times faster than Google's. [That's pretty darn fast]

Success is measured in terms of number of photons detected. Jiuzhang, which itself is an optical circuit, detected a maximum of 76 photons in one test and an average of 43 across several tests. Its calculation time to produce the list of numbers for each experimental run was about 200 seconds, while the fastest Chinese supercomputer, TaihuLight, would have taken 2.5 billion years to arrive at the same result. That suggests the quantum computer can do GBS 100 trillion times faster than a classical supercomputer.

In the future: Experts believe that quantum computers will be able to hack essentially all encryption keys in use today, making everything available to thieving hackers and hostile nations at cyberwar with any nation, group, company or person they choose to go to attack. Quantum computing technology keeps inching toward that glorious day when essentially all encryption fails and most everything encrypted becomes hackable. 

Countermeasures today: Fortunately, changes to cope are underway. Experts are working on an old technology called the sneakernet. Sneakernet is people typing on typewriters, and walking to deliver stacks of their typed papers to other people. So far, it is believed that quantum computers cannot hack that kind of a high tech, paper-based security system, which was invented whenever the typewriter was invented. Of course, burglars can still potentially hack that kind of a system.

Digression: The new Chinese computer works so fast that reality is distorted and a landscape looks like this to a human:

Well, not really. Landscapes still look like this:

Going to play Donkey Kong

(staring at that makes me dizzy - gotta stop)

The third level: This one is the worst

At present, essentially all important government, business, staches of private kiddy porn and other kinds of criminal information is maintained under some sort of encryption that cannot be hacked or decrypted** by technology in existence today. That's good, sort of, I think. Maybe.

** In this context, decrypting does not refer to stealing or otherwise removing dead bodies from a crypt. It refers to the process to of breaking encryption of electronic data or other information that makes it unreadable to anyone without a key to unlock the encryption. Applying logic, it is clear that encryption in this context does not refer to putting bodies into a crypt.[1]

Among the high jinks that modern hackers employ is a complex technique called harvesting attacks. Actually, it's a simple technique. In this method, hackers steal encrypted information, the encryption key and store it. Then they wait for quantum computers or some other new technology to develop to the point that the encryption key can be decrypted or broken. Once that happens, the thieves can read, use and/or and sell all the previously stolen content. All that data, information and naughty videos can then be sold on whatever market it can be sold on, probably the black market. Harvesting attacks have been around for years and years. Some hackers read things and gain foresight therefrom.

RSA (Rivest–Shamir–Adleman) = a public-key cryptosystem that is widely used for secure data transmission

A well-known source to all of us, PSBE Cyber News Group, reports: 

China now joins Google in claiming ‘quantum supremacy’ with new technology, creating RSA decryption concerns.

China’s top quantum-computer researchers have reported that they have achieved quantum supremacy, i.e., the ability to perform tasks a traditional supercomputer cannot. Although an exciting development, the inevitable rise of quantum computing means security teams are nearer to facing a threat more challenging than anything previous.

Quantum computing is not there quite yet. The Chinese are no closer to being able to decrypt RSA than Google or IBM, but it is only a ‘matter of time’, predicted experts.

A harvesting attack right now could grab an RSA encryption key to be filed away until quantum computing catches up, he added.

“There is no time to waste, because of other classical security problems like harvesting attacks which occur today,” Prisco explained.

“A harvesting attack is the theft of encrypted data & the RSA encryption key used to encrypt that data. While the key cannot be hacked today with the currently available quantum computer, an adversary can steal the data & the key, store it inexpensively in memory, & decrypt the info when they have access to a more powerful quantum computer that can break the key.”

Wait! What?: If hackers have stolen massive amounts of encrypted information and in time the encryption key gets cracked, what will that mean? That will mean that highly capable criminal groups and adversary countries like Russia and China will have additional boatloads of stolen information to use for themselves and/or to use against us. The value of that could run to the hundreds of billions, or more likely trillions. In February 2018, the US Council of Economic Advisers estimated that malicious cyber activity cost the U.S. economy between $57 billionand $109 billion in 2016. Because companies tend to not be honest about their losses to cybercrooks, my estimate is that the cost was at least $200 billion for 2016.

In general, the data theft will be from advanced western democracies, which tend to have the best and most valuable technologies and secret information. Lots of data is not encrypted, so all the advanced stuff is beside the point.[2]

Footnotes: 

1. This is completely unrelated to stealing bodies from the crypt or putting them in. 

Wikipedia: Crypto Wars is an unofficial name for the U.S. and allied governments' attempts to limit the public's and foreign nations' access to cryptography strong enough to resist decryption by national intelligence agencies (especially USA's NSA). Crypto wars implicates free speech concerns and is the subject of ongoing lawsuits.

An export-restricted munition or weapon

Wikipedia's caption: Export-restricted RSA encryption source code printed on a T-shirt made the T-shirt an export-restricted munition, as a freedom of speech protest against US encryption export restrictions. (The shirt's back shows relevant clauses of the United States Bill of Rights under a 'VOID' stamp.) Changes in the export law means that it is no longer illegal to export this T-shirt from the US, or for US citizens to show it to foreigners.

2. The Varonis data security blog writes: As more and more companies experience crippling security breaches, the wave of compromised data is on the rise. Data breach statistics show that hackers are highly motivated by money to acquire data, and that personal information is a highly valued type of data to compromise. It’s also apparent that companies are still not prepared enough for breaches even though they are becoming more commonplace. In fact, the 2019 Data Risk Report found that companies still keep thousands of files unprotected and open for anyone inside the company to access.

Global Leader Approval Rating Tracker

 

UPDATED: DEC. 3, 2020

Morning Consult Political Intelligence is currently tracking the approval rating for governmental leaders in Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, South Korea, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States. On a weekly basis, this page will be updated with the latest data for all 13 countries, offering real-time insight into the shifting political dynamics across the globe. Approval ratings are based on a seven-day moving average of adult residents in each country, and samples sizes vary by country.

NET APPROVAL FOR ALL LEADERS

The share of each country's residents that approve minus the share that disapprove of their respective head of state

The charts here:

https://morningconsult.com/form/global-leader-approval/

Trump Is Killing People on His Way Out of the White House

 At this time of year, most people are making holiday plans. Donald Trump will mark the season a different way: by killing people. The Associated Press reported on Monday that Trump’s administration will ramp up federal executions ahead of departing the White House. The Justice Department plans to execute five people in federal prison sentenced to death before President-elect Joe Biden assumes office on January 20. If all five executions take place, the administration will have killed 13 people since July alone. That would “cement Trump’s legacy as the most prolific execution president in over 130 years,” the AP observed.

It’s difficult to imagine a more fitting epitaph for the Trump presidency. To Trump and his enablers, the lives of others were never worth much. When migrants died in ICE custody, the administration remained silent. The COVID-19 dead he barely acknowledges and, indeed, really can’t, as long as he wants to pretend that the pandemic isn’t so bad. But a handful of deaths could matter. When Trump needed proof of the innate criminality of immigrants, he turned to Angel Moms, the parents of children killed by undocumented immigrants.

Death has another use for Trump, and it’s to prove his mettle as a law-and-order president. But his administration’s approach to capital punishment may further undermine arguments in its favor. Trump’s intense commitment to the death penalty reveals the risks inherent in granting the state the power to kill. At both the state and federal levels, the application of capital punishment is “capricious,” as Intelligencer’s Zak Cheney-Rice wrote earlier this year. The fickle qualities of this form of justice were advertised as soon as the Trump administration resumed federal executions in July after a 17-year hiatus.

When the federal government put Daniel Lewis Lee to death in July for his role in the 1996 slaying of an Arkansas family, it did so over the objections of the victims’ relatives. In statements to the press, they observed a disparity between the sentences given to Lee and to his co-conspirator, who received life in prison despite planning and initiating the brutal crime. Despite the family’s sentiments, Attorney General Bill Barr justified the execution as an act of closure intended specifically for them. “Lee finally faced the justice he deserved,” Barr said at the time. “The American people have made the considered choice to permit capital punishment for the most egregious federal crimes, and justice was done today in implementing the sentence for Lee’s horrific offenses.”

But in Barr’s mouth, justice means little. Killing a man who is already caged, over the protestations of those he’s alleged to have harmed, remedies no wrong and makes nothing whole. No one is safer because Lee is dead, and no one will be safer on January 20, after the administration finishes killing five more people. There is no evidence that the death penalty effectively deters violent crime. What matters to Trump, and to Barr, is the way things look. The executions are a way to show strength: Conservatives enforce order; liberals are too weak to bother.

Biden opposes the death penalty and has said he’ll work to end it at the federal level upon taking office. Trump’s killing spree might help Biden make his case. All presidents have power over life and death; the ability to lead us into war or out of it, to shape domestic policy in ways that either reduce or exacerbate suffering. They don’t need the death penalty, too.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/12/trump-cranks-up-executions-on-his-way-out-of-the-white-house.html#comments