Kevin Buchanan

What I'm Reading | 2016-06-05 - 2016-06-11

The Obama Doctrine - Jeffrey Goldberg

  1. “The world is ever-shrinking,” he said. “Withdrawal is untenable.” The other boxes he labeled realism, liberal interventionism, and internationalism. “I suppose you could call me a realist in believing we can’t, at any given moment, relieve all the world’s misery,” he said. “We have to choose where we can make a real impact.

  2. the Israeli prime minister launched into something of a lecture about the dangers of the brutal region in which he lives, and Obama felt that Netanyahu was behaving in a condescending fashion, and was also avoiding the subject at hand: peace negotiations. Finally, the president interrupted the prime minister: “Bibi, you have to understand something,” he said. “I’m the African American son of a single mother, and I live here, in this house. I live in the White House. I managed to get elected president of the United States. You think I don’t understand what you’re talking about, but I do.

  3. “It is literally in my DNA to be suspicious of tribalism.”

  4. Obama has come to a number of dovetailing conclusions about the world, and about America’s role in it. The first is that the Middle East is no longer terribly important to American interests. The second is that even if the Middle East were surpassingly important, there would still be little an American president could do to make it a better place. The third is that the innate American desire to fix the sorts of problems that manifest themselves most drastically in the Middle East inevitably leads to warfare, to the deaths of U.S. soldiers, and to the eventual hemorrhaging of U.S. credibility and power. The fourth is that the world cannot afford to see the diminishment of U.S. power.

The Machiavelli of Maryland - Thomas Meaney

  1. “I believe that one ought to have only as much market efficiency as one needs,” Luttwak told Robin. “Because everything that we value in human life is within the realm of inefficiency – love, family, attachment, community, culture, old habits, comfortable old shoes.”

  2. As a historian of the ancient world, he is too alive to the prospect of civilisational ruin to put any faith in the idea that capitalism contains its own solution.

  3. In the Italian port city of Bari, Luttwak says his work included helping the police fight off the local mafia, who were helping Albanian smugglers deliver rafts that included al-Qaida operatives onto the country’s shores.

The Empty Brain - Robert Epstein

  1. here is what we are not born with: information, data, rules, software, knowledge, lexicons, representations, algorithms, programs, models, memories, images, processors, subroutines, encoders, decoders, symbols, or buffers – design elements that allow digital computers to behave somewhat intelligently. Not only are we not born with such things, we also don’t develop them – ever.

  2. The faulty logic of the IP metaphor is easy enough to state. It is based on a faulty syllogism – one with two reasonable premises and a faulty conclusion. Reasonable premise #1: all computers are capable of behaving intelligently. Reasonable premise #2: all computers are information processors. Faulty conclusion: all entities that are capable of behaving intelligently are information processors.

  3. even if we had the ability to take a snapshot of all of the brain’s 86 billion neurons and then to simulate the state of those neurons in a computer, that vast pattern would mean nothing outside the body of the brain that produced it. This is perhaps the most egregious way in which the IP metaphor has distorted our thinking about human functioning. Whereas computers do store exact copies of data – copies that can persist unchanged for long periods of time, even if the power has been turned off – the brain maintains our intellect only as long as it remains alive.

  4. We are organisms, not computers. Get over it. Let’s get on with the business of trying to understand ourselves, but without being encumbered by unnecessary intellectual baggage.

Security and the Null Hypothesis - Aaron Bedra

  1. One of the most important questions you can ask of your security leadership is of their understanding and pursuit of normal. If they can talk about their approach to this or better yet, show you, then you are on the right track. If you get silence and strange looks, it’s time to press harder.

  2. Successful logins, Failed logins, Time of login event, Location of the login (geographic) Device (if possible). Collecting these data points gives us a way to understand normal. Defining normal includes answering questions like “when do my users login?”, “are there times when they don’t or shouldn’t?”, and “do I have users that typically mistype their password?”.