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Don Featherstone, 1918-2013

NavalWarGames_Featherstone.jpgIt's interesting how discoveries are often serendipitous.

I've long had a fascination with the history of role playing games, and have recently been delving into the history (and prehistory) of the role playing hobby. In the course of my reading, famed "Appendix N" author Fletcher Pratt's 1940's vintage naval war game rules were mentioned several times as being popular and influential in the wargaming scene of the 1960s. Additionally, Pratt's games just sound fascinating; they often occupied the floor of an entire ballroom, with people crouching on the floor sighting their targets and pointing little paper arrows to indicate their intended direction of cannon fire. People running submarines were relegated to another room.

I wanted to track down a set of these rules to see what all the fuss was about back in the early '60s when the rules were revived by the wargaming scene of the time (particularly by a couple of Midwesterners by the names of Arneson and Gygax). I don't plan on playing Pratt's naval war game, but I was interested in reading the rules partly out of historical interest and partly to mine for ideas for my own game designs. Well, original copies of the rules proved difficult to find, but I came across a book called "Naval War Games" by British author Don Featherstone, which contained a summary and restatement of Pratt's rules, along with a number of other rulesets used to simulate different eras of naval warfare.

Well, I ordered the book and it arrived on August 31. Published in 1965, it's a time capsule of an era in gaming I was not around to experience. I did a little more research and found that Mr. Featherstone was 95 years old and had authored dozens of books on wargaming. He was also none too fond of the introduction of fantasy elements into wargaming, which put him at odds with a certain gaming trend of the mid '70s. In fact, in his 1975 book "Skirmish Wargaming," Don refers to a concept in which players assuming the role of a single character on the gaming table as "Individual Wargaming," which given the timing of the book (published one year after Dungeons & Dragons), can't help but seem like a snub to role playing games.

In any case, a few days later, I checked the Wikipedia entry to review Featherstone's bibliography, only to find that he had passed away on September 3. Thanks for your contributions to the hobby, Don, even if I was late to the game.

Featherstone, Donald F. Naval War Games; Fighting Sea Battles with Model Ships. London: S. Paul, 1965. Print.

A Field Guide to the Little People

"A Field Guide to the Little People" by Nancy Arrowsmith and George Moorse is a great little book in the "fairies and elves" genre of the '70s. Published in 1977, this book is structured like a naturalists' field guide. It describes approximately 80 creatures, divided into Light Elves, Dark Elves, and Dusky Elves. Each creature entry begins with an overview of its place in folklore, followed by a description of the creature's physical appearance and habitat. Many of the entries also include a few short folktales to put the creature in their cultural context.

What really sets this book apart and makes it one of my favorites is the layout and artwork. First of all, the section headers in the book are calligraphy instead of type. The true stars of the book, however, are the pen and ink illustrations. They're done in a loose, gestural style that complements the primitive darkness inherent in much of the folklore described in the book. They're occasionally indistinct, like the vague afterimage of a nightmare left after waking. These are not sweetness-and-light pastel watercolor fairies. These are the dark, mischievous and occasionally downright evil creatures that lurk in the dark corners of the Dark Ages. In some ways, the illustrations remind me a bit of Goya's phantasms in "Los Caprichos," but that is another post for another time.

I bought this book a number of years ago and always loved the illustrations, but it was only recently that I realized that the illustrator, Heinz Edelmann, is the artist responsible for the visual design of the Beatles' "Yellow Submarine" animated film. Now, I'm not exactly the world's biggest Beatles fan, but as a kid, I always thought the psychedelic visual design of that film was, well, more than a little creepy (just look at the Blue Meanies and the giant pointing hand and you'll see what I mean). The fact that the same artist is responsible for the disturbing, primitive and borderline obscene creatures found in this book confirms that Edelmann had a knack for combining the whimsical and the disturbing.

Several of my favorite illustrations from the book are reproduced here, including the Night Elves (which look like they're straight out of a Goya etching), the Rusalka from the Ukraine and the Callicantzaro and the Koutsodaimonas from Greece. There are too many excellent illustrations in the book to reproduce here, so I recommend picking up a copy if you feel so inclined. Who knows, maybe I'll do my own interpretation of one of the creatures from this book at some point.

Arrowsmith, Nancy, and George Moorse. Illus. Heinz Edelmann. A Field Guide to the Little People. New York: Pocket, 1977. Print.

Weighing In...

In the ongoing quest to quantify the imaginary, I found myself wondering if there's a way to approximate the weight of a monster. I came across an article at the University of Arizona's website which provides formulas used in the estimation of livestock weight. They seemed like they might be useful in the approximation of monster weights. For the math behind the formula, check out the article.

Basically, to approximate the weight, you need two cross sectional diameters and the length of the torso (in feet). We'll use the monsters in the above sketch as an example. The illustration depicts an intrepid adventurer fighting off a razorbacked wormhound while a giant orthoceras surfaces behind him. Depending on which way the combat goes, it's either crunchy monster snack time or the knight is going to be having king-size calamari for dinner.

We'll start with the orthoceras (my favorite extinct nautiloid cephalopod). If the adventurer is approximately 6' tall, then the orthoceras is approximately 18' long and has a cross sectional diameter of 3' at the front tapering towards the back. So the numbers we'll use in the calculator are: 3, 1 and 18. JavaScript crunches the math for us and we find that the giant orthoceras is approximately 2,302 lbs, which seems reasonable for an eighteen foot armored squid.

Now we'll turn to the wormhound. I'll approximate that the creature's torso is 3.5' in length and the relevant cross sectional diameters are 2' and 1'. Plugging those numbers into the calculator gives us an estimated weight of 298 lbs., which also seems reasonable.

Is this useful? Probably not. Are these results scientifically accurate? No. Are they based on real world principles? Certainly. But when your gaming group insists on dragging that monster corpse back to town to the village taxidermist as a trophy, you can give them an idea as to how difficult the task will actually be.

Monster Weight Calculator
All measurements in feet
Cross Sectional Diameter 1:
Cross Sectional Diameter 2:
Torso Length:
Monster Weight (Pounds):

Pater, Susan. "How Much Does Your Animal Weigh?" Backyards & Beyond. 1.3 (2007): 11-12. Print.

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Mrs. Taylor-Hicks brought in a suitcase. We had to decide who it belonged to, based on what it looked like, and then justify these ideas. Then, we saw what was packed inside the suitcase, one item at a time. It was really interesting to see how our ideas on who it belonged to changed as the task went on. We had to use clues such as ages on items of clothing, the size of shoes and the type of objects. Evantually, we learnt that it belonged to an evacuee child from WW2! Then, we carried out some research about evacuation - what it was, when and why it happened, and we also listened to some radio clips from the time about the children who had been evacuated.


WARNING: Never Reheat These 7 Foods, They Can Poison Your Family

You must be very careful when we have leftovers, we like to reheat and consume them for the second time. Some foods are safe to consume after reheating, and others aren’t and can cause damage to our organism.

Avoid reheating the foods on this list in order to avoid potential health problems.

7 Foods that shouldn’t be warmed and eaten again.

Reheated mushrooms present the highest health risk. They should be eaten immediately after being prepared, or eaten cold the following day. When you eat reheated mushrooms, you put yourself at risk of having digestive, and even heart, problems.

Reheating fried and boiled eggs makes them lethal for your organism, so never do that.

Potatoes are very useful because they have many health benefits. However, those benefits and their dietary quality are lost if you don’t eat them the same day that you’ve cooked them. Eating them on another day and reheating them makes them dangerous for your body, instead of useful.

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Review of Susan Landau’s — Surveillance or Security?

I’ve been going through my files recently, and discovering some that I had forgotten. A couple of times now I’ve had submissions to journals fall into a void. Ideally, when this happens the piece can still find a home somewhere else, but this was a review of book from 2010 written in 2012, and in 2013 Snowden changed the world and I felt the need move on. Still, Landau’s book remains valuable and some of these issues are even more salient today (also of note, in the 1990s Landau co-wrote Privacy on the Line with Whitfield Diffie).

Book Review: Landau, Susan. 2010. Surveillance or Security?: The Risks Posed by New Wiretapping Technologies. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

The choice between security and civil liberties remains a commonplace way of framing many surveillance debates. Susan Landau’s argument in Surveillance or Security? is that many surveillance technologies and systems not only compromise privacy, but may actually make us less secure. This thesis, while worth repeating, will not be novel for some readers familiar with surveillance and security debates. However, readers who are already well-versed in criticisms of the freedom-security opposition will still find a great deal of value in Landau’s book, including the nuance of her more policy and technology-specific arguments and the wealth of detail she provides on various electronic surveillance practices. The patience and clarity with which Landau walks readers through this detail is commendable, and the book makes many technical and legal matters understandable to those unfamiliar with telecommunications, electronic surveillance, or U.S. law. Despite this, reading Surveillance or Security? from beginning to end requires a considerable interest in the subject matter, and much of its detail will be superfluous to those interested in more general surveillance questions or electronic surveillance in a non-U.S. context.

The nuance of Landau’s argument preserves a legitimate and lawful role for surveillance by state actors, and her critique is targeted specifically at emerging forms of surveillance made possible in the age of digital networks. Of greatest concern is the ability to embed surveillance capabilities into our increasingly-capable communications infrastructures. Justifications for expanded or “modernized” police and national security surveillance capabilities are often premised on the need to bring telephone-era laws and abilities up to date with the internet. Landau provides a very effective introduction to telephone and packet-switching networks, the development of the internet, and the contemporaneous changes to U.S. surveillance law and practice. In the process, she shows how the nature of communication and surveillance has been transformed, and how inappropriate the application of telephone-era surveillance logic can be for internet architecture. While telephone and packet-switching networks are now deeply integrated, the reader will learn just how difficult “wiretapping the internet” is when compared to traditional telephone wiretaps. On the other hand, the book also discusses the vast amounts of information available about our digital flows, and how these possibilities of data collection introduce new dangers.

The most forceful of Landau’s arguments are against the embedding of surveillance capabilities into our networked communications infrastructure, as this amounts to an “architected security breach” (p.234) that can be exploited or misused. The main example provided by the author of such modern wiretapping gone wrong is the activation of surveillance capacities embedded in the software of an Athens mobile phone network during 2004 and 2005, wherein parties unknown targeted the communications of Greek government officials. While this case of wiretapping was highly selective, Landau also cites the current U.S. “warrantless wiretapping” program to illustrate the dangers of overcollection. A third case, the FBI’s misuse of “exigent letters” to acquire telephone records after September 11, shows how the risk of overcollection is exacerbated when wiretapping cannot be audited and fails to require “two-organizational control”. In the exigent letters case, FBI investigators and telephone company employees working closely alongside one other were able to nullify institutional boundaries and circumvent legal requirements. From these cases, Landau concludes that “making wiretapping easy from a technical point of view makes wiretapping without proper legal authorization easy” (p.240). Among her chief concerns is the historical propensity to take advantage of surveillance-ready technologies to target journalists and political opponents, and the possibility of “nontargets” being caught up through overcollection.

Surveillance or Security? offers solutions as well as warnings, and these are primarily oriented towards safeguarding communications security. As a general prescription, Landau argues for partitioning our networks to a greater and more sophisticated degree. This includes increased use of identity authentication and attribution for particular networks, and keeping others entirely inaccessible from the public internet. But Landau expressly opposes building identity authentication and surveillance mechanisms (such as deep packet inspection) into the internet itself. Overall, this is a sensible solution that can address “digital Pearl Harbor” fears while preserving the general openness of the internet. Our networks already have “walled gardens” for governments and corporations, and Landau calls for more effective partitions as well as open public vetting of security mechanisms (pp.240-241). Sanctioned wiretaps should also be auditable and not under the independent control of any one organization.

Ultimately, questions about how the internet should be designed and governed boil down to what we value in the network. Many have pointed out that that the values which drove the development of the internet did not include ensuring its security, so that concerns over identification, authentication, malware and cyberattack surfaced later in its development and are difficult to resolve. The debate over whether internet governance and internet architecture needs to be revised in the interests of security continues to this day, but the choice is not simply between security and openness. Rather, “security” can point to a whole host of challenges, some of which can be in opposition to one another. Landau does indeed distinguish between different security threats, but while there is a chapter entitled Who are the intruders?, no equivalent breakdown is given of “whose security” is of primary interest. Instead, Landau treats personal security, national security, and corporate security as compatible and amenable to some of the same solutions. She explicitly values personal privacy and the open innovation made possible by the internet, but also warns against growing foreign threats to the economy and critical infrastructure of the United States. The closing sentence of the book calls for communication security “to establish justice, maintain domestic tranquility, and provide for common defense” (p.256), and it is in the tensions between these three objectives that the supposedly false choice between freedom and security materializes once again.

Landau promotes the value of privacy and journalistic freedom, puts the danger of terrorism “in context” (p.222), and warns against heavy-handed approaches to illegal file-sharing (pp.34-35). But in debating the appropriateness of embedded surveillance or privacy-enhancing cryptography, the reader also learns that “we must weight the costs” (p.35) or the advantages against the disadvantages (p.219) of such technologies and practices. The problem is that different readers may have rather different conception of who is denoted by the “we” in such a formulation, and where the costs accrue. If the security threat is the “havoc” that can be wreaked through an internet connection multiplied by the size of the cyber-capable Chinese army (as Landau suggests in the epilogue, p.255), then Richard Clarke and Robert Knake’s (2010) proposal to embed surveillance and filtering at internet service providers (ISPs) to deal with foreign cyberattacks might seem quite reasonable (such surveillance would receive “rigorous oversight by an active Privacy and Civil Liberties Protection Board to ensure that neither the ISPs nor the government was illegally spying on us” [Clarke & Knake 2010, p. 162]). The principles which guide Landau’s judgments are those embodied in the U.S. Constitution, the open and innovative possibilities of our networks, the right to privacy in communication, and the need to be protected from electronic “intruders” and “threats”. But in making these various appeals Landau is also providing the means to undercut her argument against embedded surveillance, if one values a particular type of security or fears a threat to security over others. She closes with an appeal to consider communications security as vital to both national and personal security, to democracy as well as defense (p.256), but the argument that embedded surveillance makes us less secure is on weaker footing when faced with the catastrophic specter of a cyber-war with China.

In the end, readers may find themselves confronting the dilemma identified by Jonathan Zittrain (2008, pp.60-61), who argues that “the cybersecurity problem defies easy solution, because any of the most obvious solutions to it will cauterize the essence of the Internet”. Like Zittrain, Landau thinks we can improve cybersecurity without sacrificing the internet’s propensity for openness and innovation, but at times she seems to address her arguments more at U.S. policy makers, security officials, and American citizens than at a general readership. The book includes a chapter devoted to analyzing “the effectiveness of wiretapping” in the furtherance of national security and criminal investigations, and the threat of China’s espionage and cyberattack capabilities looms large against a “United States that is being weakened by the very information technologies that brought the nation such wealth” (p.171). Landau’s approach may appeal to those Americans in greatest need of convincing, but it marginalizes arguments based on more critical premises, such as the potential of open networks and private communications to facilitate valuable forms of disruption and social change.

Surveillance or Security? focuses on the U.S. because the complexity of wiretapping policy is better explored through one nation’s economic and legal perspective, and Landau claims that “it should not be hard to reinterpret the issues from the perspective of other nations” (p.10). The networks that constitute the internet certainly warrant analysis on the level of the nation-state, in particular due to the increased assertion of territorially-based state power over and through the internet. The U.S. also deserves study in its own right by anyone interested in global telecommunications, not only because of the influential role of the U.S. in the history of telecom, but because the world’s telecom networks remain disproportionately dependent on U.S.-based institutions and infrastructure. The layout of global fiber-optic cable makes the U.S. “a communications transit point for the entire world” (p.87), and the overall layout of the World Wide Web also remains largely U.S.-centric.

However, many of the details of U.S. wiretapping legislation and practice will not be of interest either to the general reader or to the scholar interested in broader questions of surveillance and telecommunication. The book’s detailed analysis of the U.S. case is therefore its greatest strength, or, for a more general audience, its greatest weakness. Among other strengths are the clarity of Landau’s descriptions of network architecture and internet history, which do not presume prior knowledge on the reader’s part. Surveillance or Security? is clear and approachable, and contributes some much-needed scholarship on the intersection between state and private institutions underpinning contemporary surveillance systems. At its best, it pours cold water on the need to overhaul the internet and expand the scope of electronic surveillance, but Landau is not above fanning the flames to give the issue of communication security some added urgency. In between, surveillance scholars will find plenty of value in the book’s well-researched detail and Landau’s considerable expertise.

One of the headings in the book, What it means to “get communication security right”, remains an open question, with governments moving slowly on the issue, and private institutions largely pursuing their own policies. While it seems clear that securing our communications networks will not be quick or easy, a more immediate concern are poorly-considered proposals to embed and institutionalize surveillance regimes and their attendant harms. Surveillance or Security? contributes to an important conversation, injects caution into a frequently overheated discussion, and offers much of substance for those acquainting themselves with communications security and surveillance.

Clarke, Richard. A., & Knake, Robert. (2010). Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It. New York: Ecco.

Zittrain, Jonathan. 2008. The future of the internet–and how to stop it. New Haven: Yale University Press.

CSE’s Cyber Shakeup

The House of Commons is now on summer break, but before everyone headed off, the The Trudeau/Goodale Liberals introduced a monumental rework of Canadian intelligence and security institutions. This accomplishes some of what the Liberals previously indicated, but as Wesley Wark points out, such substantial changes to Canada’s national security bureaucracy are surprising. The implications are complex, with major reform for those overseeing CSIS and CSE (two new institutions: the National Security and Intelligence Review Agency and the Intelligence Commissioner) and changes to CSE’s mandate.

Experts and politicians have some time to chew on this bill’s different aspects, and for all things CSE, an important view is the Lux Ex Umbra blog. However, here I want to offer a couple of thoughts on the cyber aspects of the reforms.  As others have pointed out, these reforms will help to normalize certain types of acts (network exploitation and attack). One argument is that Canada’s new framework will help normalize in the international arena what a lot of states have been doing covertly, under dubious legal authority — “effects” like hacking and exerting influence in various domestic and foreign jurisdictions. The Canadian approach could either be a model for others interested in legal reform, or contribute to making these actions more acceptable and legitimate around the world. Domestically, this is also a normalization of the sorts of things that CSE has done, or wanted to do, for some years now.

There’s an upside and downside here. If you assume that this is the sort of stuff the Five Eyes and CSE would be doing anyway, it’s good to have it under an explicit legal framework that can “reflect the reality of global communications today and participation in international networks such as Five Eyes”. From this view, the reforms are an improvement in accountability and oversight. On the other hand, if you think this is precisely the sort of thing governments should reject (and the focus should be purely on cyber defence and passive techniques), then the last thing we should do is put a government stamp on it. Instead of updating the law to legitimate what has been going on, we need to stop the most controversial activities revealed by Snowden (weakening crypto, hacking Google data links and compromising LinkedIn accounts of Belgian telecom engineers).

In Canada, we have never had a debate about these questions. The national security consultation that ostensibly informs this move was not designed to ask them. Canada’s role in the Five Eyes is not under revision, and Bill C-59 is meant to better “align ourselves” with these cyber “partners”. The partners are meeting this week, amid an active push by allies (specifically, Australia) to get Canada’s cooperation in countering encryption. There’s little indication where Canada stands on these questions today. However, given what appears to be our holding-steady with the Five Eyes and C-59’s new legal framework, CSE can still end up promoting insecurity, in secret, at our allies’ request.

Ultimately, the success of C-59 will depend on how effective the new accountability mechanisms are. Canada’s previous experience includes government assurances about legal compliance and oversight, while routine illegality and surprising legal interpretations are carried out in secret. Some of this previous experience (like the CSIS ODAC database) is addressed in C-59, but on the must fundamental question — what kind of security will Canada promote in the world? — we seem to be doing what Canada has done since we hitched our national security to the U.S. in late WWII: defaulting to our allies. We may have some bold new security legislation (and a Minister of Foreign Affairs who recently made big statements about the need to “set our own clear and sovereign course“),  but old concerns about the lack of a distinctly Canadian approach to international and cyber security are as relevant as ever.

Canada’s Cyber Security Seeks Public Input — Here’s Mine

cybThe Government of Canada is carrying out a public consultation on cyber security. Specifically, the consultation is being administered by Public Safety Canada’s National Cyber Security Directorate (NCSD). NCSD’s role is sometimes described as cyber policy and coordination, such as designing and implementing Canada’s Cyber Security Strategy, and the consultation asks for the public’s help in addressing some really thorny cyber security challenges.

On its face, it’s hard to know what to make of this consultation. PSC/NCSD wants to hear from “experts, academics, business leaders, and provincial, territorial and municipal governments” on the topic, but they also want “all citizens to get involved in a discussion about the security and economic dimensions of Canada’s digital future.” There are four main topics the government is consulting on, and a workbook has also been created to accompanies the process. The workbook breaks the consultation down into trends, themes, and related questions for consideration, but the contents seem designed to steer answers in particular directions, and the one topic that doesn’t include any specific questions is Canada’s “way forward”, the outlines of which seem to have already been decided.

Some of the questions in the workbook are ones that I imagine Government would love an innovative answer for (How can public and private sector organizations help protect themselves from cybercrime… and what tools do they need to do so?), while others seem loaded to produce a particular response (with “example” answers provided). I only hope that the responses to this consultation won’t be quantified as statistics (since this isn’t a methodologically-sound survey), or used to support decisions that have already been made. So let’s give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that NCSD really does want some help from Canadians in dealing with one of society’s most important challenges, and they’re open to all sorts of ideas.

To that end, I’ve provided my response to the consultation’s four “topic areas”:

The Evolution of the Cyber Threat
I think a lot of this has been covered in broad strokes by Canada’s Cyber Security Strategy and related documents. The threat has certainly evolved, in terms of actors, motives, and potential harm. State actors are increasingly involved around the world, and there are dedicated industries of criminals profiting from vulnerabilities. The most interesting way that I think the cyber threat has evolved in recent years is a recognition of the Five Eyes (Canada’s alliance with the US, UK, Australia and New Zealand) as a security threat. This recognition has certainly not come from the Canadian government, or even much of the Canadian population (as we really have yet to talk about this issue). Instead, the changing nature of the threat has been expressed most publicly by the likes of Microsoft and Google, after they learned through the Snowden documents that the Five Eyes were compromising their infrastructure and the relationships of trust these companies have established with their users.

The Increasing Economic Significance of Cyber Security
I don’t consider this to be much of a topic in need of public consultation, since it seems like Public Safety is already aware that cyber security is vital to the economy. It’s hard to put a dollar value on security, but it’s pretty obvious that the value of maintaining information security and the “losses” that result from various kinds of threats are enormous. Huge numbers are estimated and cited to justify the need for cyber security,  and I’m not sure that we need more accurate numbers (since we know they’re big), or that bigger numbers will compel action. We can talk about how better to communicate the seriousness of the issue, but I’m more interested in finding perspectives other than the economic lens to talk about threats. Government ideas about the value of the internet in Canada too often lapse into talk of the “digital economy”, and harms that don’t involve children are often expressed in economic terms. As people like Ron Deibert point out, we need to think more about the democratic/political dimensions of cyber security. This means articulating the value of connectivity in a way that doesn’t translate into dollars, but instead relates to our values as Canadians (like those “rights and freedoms” mentioned at the end of the workbook).

The Expanding Frontiers of Cyber Security
While the workbook discusses this in terms of the need for “cyber security [to] evolve at the same rate as new technologies” (p. 17), I want to use this topic to discuss the expanding scope of cyber security.

The workbook defines cyber security as “the protection of digital information and the infrastructure on which it resides. Cyber security addresses the challenges and threats of cyberspace in order to secure the benefits and opportunities of digital life” (p. 5). The first part of this definition is relatively straight-forward, and encompasses the domain of IT security. However, cyber security is not limited to these concerns, and Canada’s closest allies have used the language of cyber security to justify creating and preserving technological vulnerabilities in the service of strategic objectives. Meanwhile, it seems that Public Safety Canada considers “threats of cyberspace” to include more than just threats to digital information and infrastructure.

Internationally, cyber security now includes a variety of concerns, including over public order and morality. For instance, in Canada cyberbullying is sometimes listed as a cyber security threat alongside phishing and malware (particularly in Get Cyber Safe resources). Cyberbullying can certainly involve personal information being compromised, but it can also refer to the hateful and abusive comments found in many online media. The danger is that cyber security can be equated with online “safety”, which can mean safety from content that might insult, harm, or disturb.

The more concerning expansion of cyber security is as a justification for whatever actions serve national security or the priorities of state agencies. This is a worry because the goals of some state “partners” in cyber security are not to provide the public with the most secure technologies. In the US for instance, secret efforts to make commercial technologies (the same technologies widely used by Canadians) more vulnerable and less secure were justified as part of an ostensibly-defensive cyber security program (the CNCI). As discussed below, there is no reason to believe that Canadian agencies are an exception to the same tendencies demonstrated by their closest international allies in cyber security.

One the few things that all cyber security threats have in common is that they all involve a computer, or digital networks. Since we are supposedly moving towards a world covered in networked computers, the potential for cyber security’s expansion is a major cause for concern. I feel a lot more comfortable talking about information (IT), network, or computer security, because at least there the subject matter is relatively defined. Cyber security is more of a mixed bag, and I hope that the Government of Canada will keep the expansionist tendency of cyber security in check. Focus on the threats we know and are having difficulty defending against, don’t go looking for new forms of troublesome conduct involving a computer that can be listed as a cyber security threat, and let’s talk about whether the government’s idea of cyber security includes purposefully maintaining certain kinds of insecurity.

Canada’s Way Forward on Cyber Security
As part of Canada’s way forward, we need to take an explicit position on the extent to which we want to promote information/IT security at the expense of other conceptions of security, particularly those  favored by police and national security agencies. It seems disingenuous to promote the security of information and infrastructure, without acknowledging the limits that government agencies are comfortable allowing such developments. Police in Canada and around the world are well aware of this conflict, particularly after the Snowden revelations led to widespread adoption of more secure technologies, which are now an obstacle to their ability to investigate crime. The recent showdown between Apple and the FBI is a recent manifestation of this tension, and Canada should not simply sit on the sidelines and wait for these new “crypto wars” to play out in the US and Europe.

We also need to discuss our membership in the Five Eyes, because Canadians have never had a real opportunity to do so. Predicated on a secret treaty, the Five Eyes often acts as a coordinated group and an exclusive club, supposedly based on its members’ “common Anglo-Saxon culture, accepted liberal democratic values and complementary national interests”. Originally formed to further intelligence collection and the sharing of information in the interests of national security, today the Five Eyes also includes collaboration of a more defensive nature in the realm of cyber security. We know that Canada’s membership in the Five Eyes can be a privacy threat to Canadians, because of last year’s revelation that CSE had for years violated the law by sharing Canadians’ personal information with these allies. We know that the Five Eyes can pose a security threat to our information infrastructure, because of documents revealed by Edward Snowden showing how the NSA worked to weaken the security of commonly-used systems in order to more easily obtain intelligence (efforts in which Canada appears to have been complicit).

In the US, the Snowden disclosures resulted in the President’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies recommending the separation of the NSA’s offensive and defensive roles, through the creation of a new agency to take over the NSA’s defensive “information assurance” mission. Canada has yet to acknowledge the contradiction at the heart the Five Eyes – where government agencies work simultaneously (or at cross-purposes) to both secure infrastructure and make it more vulnerable. In the US, the NSA is currently merging its offensive and defensive capabilities. This NSA reorganization contradicts the recommendations of the President’s Review Group, strains trust with non-government partners, but is at least being openly acknowledged and discussed. In Canada, a similar process of merging offensive and defensive capabilities may very well be underway at CSE, but this is just what we can deduce from five-year old Snowden documents, and the government’s position on this topic is limited to CSE’s statements about the same news story.

Can the Canadian government be a trusted partner in cyber security when it has never even acknowledged its role (or the conduct of its closest allies) in making information infrastructure less secure? Is it permissible to have one cyber security agency (CCIRC) responding to threats and vulnerabilities, some of which may have been created or kept secret by CSE and its Five Eyes allies? These are not hypothetical questions — just last week CCIRC issued an advisory to correct a vulnerability that the NSA had likely exploited for over a decade. If the attributions of security experts are correct, this means that the Canadian public is being notified about a security vulnerability that was kept secret and exploited by our closest cyber security ally, and we are learning about it through foreign actors whose motivations are unknown, but presumably do not include a desire to make our infrastructure more resilient.

Certainly, most Canadians have more to fear from more mundane threats, like phishing, ransomware, and others listed as part of the government’s consultation. But I wanted to focus on the Five Eyes because these are precisely the sorts of blind spots that need to be uncovered through public consultation. If government agencies will not acknowledge this threat, either because of secrecy or the failure to recognize what those outside government perceive, then it becomes the responsibility of Canadians to point out how the government’s version of reality is different than the one we are reading about in the news. However, at that point we are no longer having a shared discussion of cyber security, but two parallel discussions, with very different ideas of what constitutes a cyber threat.

These tensions at the heart of cyber security are not going anywhere, but by acknowledging them, the Government of Canada can at least take an explicit policy position, rather than the implicit one we can deduce from its former conduct. The Government of Canada has already taken the historic step of suspending metadata sharing with the Five Eyes until it is confident that this no longer threatens the privacy of Canadians. Before Canada resumes its full participation in a secretive alliance that works to both strengthen and weaken the security of systems we depend on, we need a stated position on such conduct. Specifically, are security vulnerabilities ever acceptable or desirable? Is it ever appropriate for government agencies such as CSE and the RCMP to use vulnerabilities that might otherwise be disclosed and corrected? What should we do when our closest cyber security allies are repeatedly found exploiting vulnerabilities and weakening security?

In response to the last of these questions, I would answer that Canada needs to either openly declare its support for government efforts to compromise security, including any limits or conditions, or it needs to publicly oppose these efforts. Only by working to strengthen IT security against all threats can the Government of Canada be a trusted partner in cyber security. To take no position at all by failing to acknowledge the issue is untenable, will weaken trust in government, and will continue the post-Snowden bifurcation of security into two separate discussions — one that includes government as a partner and one that does not.

Canada’s cyber security and the changing threat landscape

My article, Canada’s cyber security and the changing threat landscape has just been published online by Critical Studies on Security.

Broadly, it grapples with what cyber security has come to mean in the Canadian context. The article deals partly with Canada’s Cyber Security Strategy, the operations of the Canadian Cyber Incident Response Centre (CCIRC) between 2011 and 2013 (a time of great concern over hacktivism [Anonymous] and Advanced Persistent Threats [China]), and what we can say about Canada’s cyber security orientation in the “post-Snowden era”. It is based on publicly-available texts and several years of Access to Information requests (the requests were informal, for documents already released to other people, giving me several thousand pages to work with).

What is cyber security, and why should we care?

Cyber security emerged from a narrow set of concerns around safeguarding information and networks, but in recent years it has become intimately tied to foreign and domestic political objectives. This means that cyber security cannot be defined and delimited in the same way as the field of information security (as protecting the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of information). Instead, cyber security is a collective endeavor, typically tied to the larger project of national security, but also encompassing a broader set of social and ethical concerns. This is why hateful messages sent by teens are now treated as a cyber security problem, while Canada’s government fails to acknowledge the international cyber threat posed by its foreign allies.

One of the key effects of cyber security strategies and classifications is that they specify the boundaries of what is to be secured. As the line between ‘cyber’ and ‘non-cyber’ continues to blur, the scope of cyber security’s concerns can expand to cover new kinds of threats. If it is true, as the opening of Canada’s Cyber Security Strategy 2010 declares, that our “personal and professional lives have gone digital”, that we now “live, work, and play in cyberspace”, then cyberspace is not just a new domain to be secured, but a fundamental part of our lived reality. This means that it is now possible to conceive of cyber threats as existential threats of the highest order, but also that the project of cyber security will have deepening implications for our daily lives. Some of these implications can only be discussed by referencing the work of security professionals – work which typically takes place out of public view.

Operational and Technocratic Discourse

My article began as a work of discourse analysis, but over time I turned increasingly to international relations (IR) and what has been called the “Paris School” of security studies. I found that previous analyses of cyber security discourse, influenced by the Copenhagen School, focused largely on public discourse, and how political actors work to get cyber security on the political agenda (as a response to new, existential threats). The Paris School meanwhile, emphasizes that new security issues can arise and be defined in the hidden world of security professionals and their technocratic practices. The volumes of internal threat reports, alerts, and government emails accessible through Access to Information became a rich source for this technocratic and operational discourse, providing a sense of how the moving parts of cyber security fit together in practice.

Hacktivism is an interesting threat category to consider because, at least in Canada, it has never been subject to visible politicization. Unlike cyberbullying, no new laws have been proposed to deal with hacktivists, and public officials have avoided referencing the threat in their public proclamations. The Government seems more willing to deal with hacktivism quietly than to engage in a public fight against Anonymous, or to publicly condemn tactics that some see as a legitimate form of protest.

Nevertheless, hacktivism has become a major preoccupation for Canadian security agencies, as evident through volumes of operational discourse, including detailed reports and responses to hacktivist campaigns. Where cyberbullying can be reduced to a problem of ethical conduct, common forms of hacktivism such as DDoS reduce to a technical problem. A DDoS attack becomes hacktivism by virtue of its political motivation, and not its methods. While DDoS actions have typically been handled by CCIRC and CTEC as individual incidents, the operational threat category of hacktivism makes these events legible as part of a larger and pathological social trend, and the growing concern with hacktivism since 2010 indicates cyber security’s opposition to disruptive forms of online activism and politically-motivated hacking.

Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs)

As actors define and redefine cyber security’s terminology, they produce new conceptions, repurpose old ones, and experiment with metaphors. Sometimes, a term becomes a prolific ‘buzzword’, securing regular usage in cyber security discourse, and also inevitably becoming a point of contention. One of the best recent examples is the Advanced Persistent Threat (APT). This is the threat category that best represents cyber security’s oblique treatment of international affairs and the new strategic stakes of cyber security. Where hacktivism is the intersection of cyber security and protest in operational discourse, APTs bring cyber security into opposition against state actors. The term usually refers to a well-resourced threat actor willing to devote considerable effort to compromise a particular target, and is often understood to mean a state-backed attacker – sometimes becoming simply a shorthand for “China”.

In tracing the emergence and proliferation of this new threat category, it is possible to get some sense of the multiple constituents and channels of cyber security discourse. In this case, a category emerged in the operational discourse of the US military, spread rapidly through the North American security industry, and was adopted for internal use by CCIRC in the aftermath of a major security breach in 2011. Along the way it was used to classify a growing number of intrusions and data breaches, sell security products and services, and make intelligible a world of online geopolitical contestation. APTs could be invoked to specify a threat, while eliding the attribution problem and preserving nominal ambiguity in the international political arena. For CCIRC, APTs became an operational threat category at a time when Chinese hackers were widely suspected of compromising Canadian government systems, and the term proliferated into public discourse through Mandiant’s reporting of Chinese cyber espionage in 2013. Not long after, the Snowden disclosures had a dramatic impact on how we understand and talk about cyber security.

After Snowden

One of the most important revelations of the Snowden documents has been that the project of cyber security (at least as interpreted by signals intelligence agencies like NSA, GCHQ and CSE) can include compromising the very digital infrastructure it is tasked to protect. Domestic cyber security programs can become an “advanced persistent threat” – a term once reserved for foreign hackers. Given these developments, it is worthwhile to reflect on how the governmental project of cyber security has evolved in recent years, and what cyber security has come to mean. This is particularly important in Canada, a country closely implicated in US cyber security efforts, but where post-Snowden commentary has made comparatively little impact.

The lack of visible concern by Canada’s government about the security threat posed by its closest allies (a threat that Canada has apparently facilitated), speaks to how foreign policy shapes the nation’s cyber security priorities. It also sends the dangerous message that while Canada is unable to clearly define a vision of what it is trying to secure, cyber security is somehow compatible with pervasive surveillance and widespread hacking.

State cyber security agencies work to guard us from new threats, but seem blind to the possibility that they or their partners might also threaten our security. To paraphrase Google’s chairman, an attack is an attack, whether it comes from China or the NSA. For Canada’s CSE and the other Five Eyes members, the equivalence may not be as clear. If cyber security is subordinated to national security interests and compatible with government hacking, then threats will continue to be defined very differently by those inside and outside government. In addition to a broadening scope for cyber security’s concerns, the current trend is one of growing division between government cyber security efforts and more clearly circumscribed approaches to information security by private companies and civil society.

The idea that cyber security can be compatible with hacking domestic companies and maintaining vulnerabilities in commonly-used technologies might be seen as a continuation of the exceptional measures justified by 9/11. But more fundamentally, it reflects the technocratic imperatives of agencies tasked with gaining and maintaining access to communications infrastructure. The Five Eyes’ objectives go far beyond countering terrorism, and surreptitious access to communications infrastructure is increasingly part of the larger cyber security project. This dangerous vision of cyber security has evolved in secret, establishing procedures for who can be targeted, what can be collected, and where compromising security might help to make us safer. We did not learn of these measures through visible political discourse or securitizing rhetoric (the traditional focus of the Copenhagen School), but through operational documents and presentation slides from closed meetings of security professionals.


Getting Started with Acr - Manage Container Registry - in .Net

par Milis
Dernière mise à jour : 26/03/2018
Modifier sur GitHub
      Azure Container Registry sample for managing container registry.
       - Create an Azure Container Registry to be used for holding the Docker images
       - If a local Docker engine cannot be found, create a Linux virtual machine that will host a Docker engine
           to be used for this sample
       - Use Docker DotNet to create a Docker client that will push/pull an image to/from Azure Container Registry
       - Pull a test image from the public Docker repo (hello-world:latest) to be used as a sample for pushing/pulling
           to/from an Azure Container Registry
       - Create a new Docker container from an image that was pulled from Azure Container Registry

Running this Sample

To run this sample:

git clone

cd acr-dotnet-manage-azure-container-registry

dotnet restore

dotnet run

More information


The accuracy of a diagnostic test is often evaluated with the measures of sensitivity and specificity, and the joint dependence between these two measures is captured by receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve. To combine multiple testing results from studies that are assumed to follow the same underlying probability law, a smooth summary receiver operating characteristic (SROC) curve can be fitted. Moses, Shapiro, and Littenberg (1993) proposed a least-squares approach to fit the smooth SROC curve, and the variances of the estimated parameters were derived by ignoring the variance of the independent variable. Since the independent variable was in fact random, the variances were likely underestimated. Hence we propose another way to estimate the variances of the statistics of interest, and use a real example to demonstrate the differences. We also perform a simulation study to examine these two approaches. The results suggest that the least squares estimates of the coefficients are biased, and that the averaged confidence coverage is not equal to its nominal level, regardless of the methods. While Moses et al.'s method tends to underestimate the confidence interval, our method sometimes overestimates the interval, depending on the ratio of the intra-study variation over the inter-study variation. Our estimation of the variances appears to be slightly better than the method proposed by Moses et al. because the coverage probability of the confidence interval is closer to the nominal level.


Archive for the 'Contextualisation Term 1' Category

A pure non-place…..?

One of my objectives is to research various ideas of the non-place, with the intention of eventually focusing on just one.  Currently I am looking at non-places that have the most relevance to me, the motorway, the train and the supermarket.

One of the things I found interesting about Iain Sinclair and Chris Petits ‘London Orbital’ was the observation of the M25 as a continuous circle with no beginning or end to the journey, there is no destination.  Because it is continuity  the road perpetuates the boredom that we may associate with being in transit, this characterises a conventional attitude to such non-places.

Sinclair like Petit set out to challenge this notion of the M25 being the ‘worlds biggest car park’ and to find some interest and meaning behind it.  The M25 is about continuous repetition, the very nature of this perpetuates a boredom that becomes a constant battle compete with it.  Through time. at some point, Sinclair and Petit became consumed by the very entity they set out to challenge.  This is an affect I find particularly interesting.  Is this an example of a more pure non-place?

For comparison, if we were to look at the A13 which is a road that I use to journey in and out of London, this road has a destination, it has an end, it is not like the M25 that is trapped in a cycle of infinity.  The following excerpt is from an interview with Iain Sinclair and Chris Petit talking about an exhibition they collaborated on about a journey down the A13.

 What I find interesting is that when walking or driving down the A13 you will reach the end.  At some point your movement on the A13 will stop as you enter in this case either Aldgate or Southend-on-sea,  your experience of the A13 has ended and your movement within that space does not exist anymore.  One of my objectives is to try and understand what enables a non-place to exist, and I’m starting to think that movement is an important element that I should look into in more detail.

How is our experience of the space affected and defined by the movement of other people through the space, this transient collective?

What happens to a non-place when this movement is removed?

Time is measured by the movement of the earth around the sun, so how does this cycle affect the non-place? and in what ways do they change from day to night?

J.G. Ballard……

‘I believe in the limitless geometry of the cinema screen, in the hidden universe within supermarkets, in the loneliness of the sun, in a garrulousness of planets, in the repetitiveness of ourselves, in the in-existence of the universe and the boredom of the atom.  I believe in the power of the imagination, to remake world, to release the truth within us, to hold back the night, to transcend death, to charm motorways, to ingratiate ourselves with birds, to enlist the confidences of madman.  I believe in my own obsessions, in the beauty of the car crash, in the peace of the submerged forest, in the excitements of the deserted holiday beach, in the elegance of automobile graveyards, in the mystery of the multistory car parks, in the poetry of abandoned hotels.  I believe in the light cast by video recorders in department store windows, in the messianic insides of radiator grills of showroom automobiles, in the elegance of the oil stains on the micelles of 747’s parked on airports tarmacs.  I believe in the non-existence of the past, in the death of the future, of infinite possibilities of the present.  I believe in the death of tomorrow, in the exhaustion of time, in our search for a new time within the smiles of autoroute waitresses, the tired eyes of air traffic controllers at out of season airports.’ J.G. Ballard

London Orbital by Iain Sinclair and Chris Petit (vs Marc Auge?….PGPD???)

Iain Sinclair is the author of the book ‘London Orbital’.  This book documents his 12o mile walk around the ringroad of London, the M25.  I haven’t read the book, it is a beast at 450 pages!..especially when you have so much else on the go as I do right now, but i would like to read it, it looks like a real journey.   Sinclair looks at a rather mundane entity,the M25, and seeks for a connection with it.

London Orbital gets under the skin.  What looks at first like a dull and deeply unappealing journey is actually a multi-layered, lyrical, ugly, mythical, engaged and engaging excursion from the present into the past and back again.  A filmmaker sets out to make a voyage of discovery on London’s orbital motorway, the M25.  He enlists the help of several others to film the motorway from several points, drive endlessly around it and dig up stories and potential beauty behind the motorway. London Orbital takes off from Iain Sinclairs visionary book of the same title, which took the writer on a walk around the 120-mile route of this infernal circuit, excavating the histories of the sites through which it passes [or which were destroyed to enable its passage]. But rather than recreate Sinclair’s perverse perambulations, Petit took to the road, holding out until the tediousness of a drive without beginning or end began to produce visions: of Stokers vampires; of J.G. Ballards Shepperton; of Margaret Thatchers cozy conversations with Augusto Pinochet; of secret toxic dumps and ragged, dazed wanderers at the edge of the future’s past.’

Petit almost endlessly drives around ‘in orbit’ attempting to find a narrative within the M25 that we can connect to.  To uncover the history within the places that he passes through and to create a ‘museum of memory’, to find the lost voices of London and create a visual map of ‘all of the M25’s secrets’.  Yet in conclusion Petit finds that all the cultural and historical associations that may define this space become overwhelmed by the senseless repetition and true boredom of continuous transience.  We become ‘ a patient of the M25, we become like Bram Stokers ‘undead’.  Our personal experiences that collectively could become the essence of how we define that space get lost in this lack of feeling, it subdues our senses, it diminishes our experience and erases our memory, it continues to be a negative space.

Petit meets Ballard on part of his journey, here is an excerpt from the film:

Researching artists and the non-place…..

I’ve been looking into contemporary artists who have dealt with the concept of the non-place, and found work that I think is worth blogging for contextualisation.  ‘Ruhrtal’ by Andreas Gursky is a series of large photographs that deals with the motorway as a non-place of supermodernity.  This work is kind of unsettling showing a vast motorway flyover that looms over the almost idyllic green field that lies beneath it.  An individual is dwarfed by the gigantic product of supermodernity.  It personifies an alienation and a loss of identity with our landscape yet it portrays these premises’ with a certain poetic quality.

Another work that that has offered a new perspective on the idea of the non-place is Wim Wenders’ ‘Safeway’.  On the outset this photograph seem to portray something quite gloomy and uninspiring.  It shows the back wall of a supermarket and (what I assume is) the employees door for which they enter this non-place.  This throws up images’ of anonymity and repetition yet the work has a certain warmth to it.  Our attention is drawn to the deep blue sky, the inviting tones’ that radiate from the small yellow doorstep and even the shadowed letters that are created by the sunshine.  Wender shows’ the non-place in a different light, he breathes life into the scene as we create our own little narratives to what may have happened on this yellow doorstep.  Even though these places have no particular identity Wender metaphorically emphasises the human-ness that exists’ beneath this shield of supermodernity.  He makes us look through the non-place.  A premise that I find particularly interesting.

Mark Wallingers’ video work ‘Threshold to the Kingdom’ focuses on how we experience the non-place.  This work looks’ at the sensations that embody us when we enter, in this case, the airport.  A camera is placed in front of the exit for international arrivals.  These individuals’ enter with a certain bewilderment, they search for their documentation (an example of identity?) and look to find the right door to continue their journey under the beady eyes of airport security.  It shows how we can become emotionally lost among the numbers of all the other transient bodies that inhabit the space.

An artist that I have found whose work looks’ at many different aspects of the non-place is Hans Op de Beeck.  One of his works in particular that I found quite inspiring is his installation ‘Location 1’.  The scene depicts a desolate landscape of a cross roads consumed by a dull blue light.  The traffic lights repeatedly blink through their automated program of red to amber to green and back again even though there is nobody present to obey their commands.  This installation is, for me, a more obvious example of what a non-place represents, but it does successfully characterise an environment that has no particular identity.  It depicts a state of limbo.  I find it quite unsettling.

All these artists’ approach the non-place from different angles.  I feel I can take inspiration from this.  These works show how the environment can be experienced and portrayed (Gursky, Op de Beeck) and also observes how the individual reacts to this phenomena (Wallinger) Now I want to absorb these works and their intentions’ and try to think about how I am going to approach the non-place from my own perspective.  How am I going to go about this subject and create something different?  I need to do a LOT more research before I can approach this question, and with that in mind……..back to the Auge.

The beginning of the non-place and Italo Calvino….

I’m reading Marc Auges’ ‘non-places – introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity’.  He addresses the non-place as an indeterminate state.  Supermodernity perpetuates a state of transience caused by an excess of time, space and ego.  But as I am reading my mind is thrown back to a book I read earlier this year called ‘Invisible Cities’ By Italo Calvino.  Some of Calvinos’ conclusions could be seen as a foundation for Auges’ writings’.  So before I reflect upon what Auges’ interpretation is of the non-place, I think it would be beneficial for me to refresh myself on this book.

 I love the way Calvino writes, his style is fluid, fictitious storylines that also throw a speculative view over the position of reality.  Marc Auges’ writing style in similar in some ways, yet Auge prefers to predominantly focus on the real.

Calvino observes that modernity perpetuated a new capacity for travel, via airplanes, cars etc. He suggests that this causes a disillusionment to travel and presents us with a very bleak view of a world of continuous uniformity, where our experiences of transit leave us with a feeling of numbness and a lack of fulfillment.  Modern life is epitomised by speed and continuous movement.

Calvino suggests a homogeneity of cities, where the capacity for movement transforms the identity of the city, he writes ‘cities are turning into one single city; a single endles city where the differences which once characterised each of them are dissappearing’

Calvino writes of the ‘empty interval‘, the space that exists when in transit between these locations that we visit almost ephemerally.

This ‘empty interval‘ that Calvino refers to is the non-place, which is the focal point and foundation of Marc Auges’ writings.

It makes me think about to what extent this transient collective can affect how a place is defined.  Because we can now move easily and continuously from to place to place.  Does an influx of transient bodies moving through the space dilute the historical and relational connections that initially defined it?

If the space is predominantly occupied by individuals’ that personify the non-place, that are only there as a result of experiencing a non-place, can this potentially redefine the place? and alter other individuals’ perception of it?

This observation adds’ context to the book I am currently reading and also gives me a foundation from which to work from.

I want to think about this idea further that the transient collective can affect the definition of a place, potentially redefining our own perception of that space.  I’ll think about how this concept relates’ to Darnell M. Hunts viewpoint that the urban environment is shaped by the peoples experiences with it.  To what extent are our experiences affected by the presence a transient collective that personify the non-place?

Back to the Auge……

Driving Dreams…and the non-place

I went to see a film the other night at Chelsea, it was called ‘Driving Dreams’ by an artist called Boris Gerrets.  Heres’ an excerpt about the film from the e-mail Andy sent us:

Driving Dreams (Netherlands, 2006, 51 minutes) is a portrait of the anonymous zone that lies between motorway, petrol station, carwash and carpark. Impersonal observations – wheels, roadmarkings, shadows behind windshields, cars flying past and security camera footage  –  alternate with short interviews and personal portraits of people in their cars and along the road. Meeting various motorists in the course of the film, the viewer also shares the viewpoint of a petrol station cashier and a cleaner who changes car park bin bags. The final stop is a snack bar on wheels, parked in a rest area in the early morning, close to the sea.

 The films’ intention was to portray the loneliness of anonymity and also the pleasure one can get from being anonymous on a motorway, one of our man made middle landscapes, or a non-space.

What I really took away from this film was the interpretation of the motorway as a transient space that is shaped by the peoples experiences with it, yet it remains undefinable.

My interpretation of this film coupled with conversations with Andy and all you guys has really made me think about the non-place and its’ effect on the individual, and also the individuals affect on it.

I think this could be a good focus for my work.  I may look for non-places and explore what ways that space can change the way the individual conducts themselves within that environment.  Do these non-places perpetuate a sense of anonymity? Do these places alter our perception of normal social conduct? Do we create this sense of anonymity or does the space create this for us?

In conjunction with this, if I was to take away the mediated experience from a space, for example to film Tescos supermarket and digitally remove all the Tescos signs, by removing what that place actually represents would that then become non-place?

I got a book out today called ‘non-places: Introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity’ By Marc Auge.  Will give this a read and continue to think about what I have just written and see where this takes me…. but I think I may be finally getting somewhere with this project..!.. signing off…

Mariko Mori and Matthew Barney

I’ve found that Mariko Mori’s work embraces the digital.  She focuses on how humans may evolve and what brave new world technology awaits us.  In ‘Wave UFO’(1999-2002) you were invited to enter a gleaming interactive space pod to be connected to electrodes and have your brainwaves analysed and visualised on screen.  This is a more aesthetic example of how to digitally interact with the viewer.

Digital art, whether it be a through a narrative, an interface or a collection of shapes and colours has the ability to shift your perception and interact with you on a new level.  I feel that this ability for it to redefine itself as it progresses facilitates a greater scope for aesthetically realising a theoretical approach.  Visual imagery can run concurrently or consecutively enhancing the communication between the work and the viewer.

Matthew Barney’s work is an ongoing non linear narrative that needs to be broken down into cellular divisions to reveal its’ meanings.  The ‘Cremaster Cycle’ is five films, a 300-minute long project that consumed 8 years of his life and addresses many varied themes such as gender, sexual reproduction, Celtic mythology and opera.

The last picture is from ‘Drawing Restraint 9’ currently showing at the Notting Hill Gate Cinema starring his long time partner Bjork, and this work continues Barneys investigation into religious rite, this piece focusing on the Japanese religion ‘Shinto’

April 2018
« Nov


Swap out fading annuals for summer stars

May 27, 2015 Updated: May 29, 2015 4:21pm

Cool-weather annuals such as cyclamen and especially primula are wrapping up a great run. Now it’s time to replace them with plants that provide heat-tolerant color.

A selection of hot-weather annuals will perform well.

Waxleaf begonias

Waxleaf, or semperfloren, begonias are a versatile group of blooming plants for summer. We generally think of them as shade-loving plants, but they tolerate sunny locations if they have time to develop a strong root system before the heat arrives.

The begonias grow to about 12 inches tall with small pink, white or red blooms. The foliage is just as decorative as the blooms. The leaves are waxy and can be light green, dark green and even maroon.

Waxleaf begonias are relatively drought tolerant and pest free.

You can expect pentas to provide showy blooms from the day you carry them home from the nursery until cold weather arrives in late November.

Like begonias, pentas do well in partially sunny settings as well as deep shade. There are dwarf varieties that grow to about 8 inches tall, but my favorites grow to 18 inches tall. The blooms are arranged in rounded clusters above the foliage. The flowers can be lavender, white, red or pink. Butterflies and hummingbirds like pentas for their nectar. They make excellent container plants.

Pentas are not xeriscape plants and sometimes are attacked by tomato hornworms but usually they are trouble-free bloomers when planted en masse or as individual specimens.

Caladiums provide their color with decorative foliage arranged on interestingly shaped leaves. Leaves are thin or wide arrowhead-shaped in variations of white to maroon backgrounds decorated with etchings of a contrasting color.

Coleus is also a foliage plant. The plants can be from 1 to 3 feet tall, depending on the selection. The color variation ranges from yellow-green to dark maroon. Most selections have patterns of contrasting colors on the leaves. Coleus definitely is not a xeriscape plant, so be prepared to provide plenty of water.

Calvin Finch is a retired Texas A&M horticulturist. calvin.finch@tamu.edu.


My son was asked at his new place of work by a colleague, "Are you Jewish?"

He answered, "Yes."

Then his colleague asked him, "Are you a good Jew or a bad Jew"?

My son reported that his response was rather instantaneous and he said, "somewhere in-between good and bad."

When I explored the answer with him, I asked why he didn't think he was a "good" Jew? He told me that he doesn't keep all the rituals, so he figures he's somewhere in between. I told him that if he loved being Jewish, was proud of being Jewish and remained committed to being Jewish, I thought he could always say he was a "good Jew."

Too often we define the quality of our "Jewishness" by the quantity of the ritual behaviors we follow. I love Jewish ritual, but we need to remember that the purpose of ritual is to provide us a particular mechanism that can bring us closer to God and to our fellow Jews.

Conservative Judaism's core essence is the attempt to best balance tradition and modernity within our lives. If certain rituals speak to us more loudly than others, then this is where we begin. Rituals that are more distant in "voice" can be placed aside where the echoes can always be heard and perhaps someday brought closer.

Jewish law (Halacha) is our specific pathway toward God. The ethical laws are always embraced 100 percent, but ritual laws by their very nature have to evolve with the times. The human being can be "good" without ritual. But, a Jew needs ritual to possess the mechanism by which to not just connect with God, but also to forge a common bond with their Jewish people.

Jewish ritual is the lens by which we can effectively see and react within our Jewish relationship with God (spiritual), Torah (laws, traditions and customs) and Israel (land and people).

Jewish mysticism (Kabbalah) perceives Jewish ritual observance as each mitzvah having the potential to be a "tikkun," a positive effect upon God's universe. In other words, every ritual embraced with loving care can change the cosmic universe for the better.

I prefer the mystical approach to ritual life; every mitzvah performed by us has the potential to alter creation for the better. The mystical focus empowers each and every ritual to which we gravitate to be meaningful.

The Talmud taught that when we perform a mitzvah, we perceive that with this observance our world's fate hangs in the balance; that a single mitzvah can save the world. The "good Jew" wants to explore their ritual life and find the different ways by which to more greatly view and interact with their world.

As I dwelled on the conversation with my son and his assumption of being between a good and bad Jew, Roseanne asked me a question. She asked: "Do we own our lives, or is that an illusion?"

My answer was instinctive: "We rent our lives from God and some of the ways that our lives are Jewish lives are through our history, our culture, our ritual expression, our sensibilities and our attempts to live a life of holiness and purpose."

The "good Jew" continues to reach toward God, their fellow Jew and their fellow human being. Rituals become some of the Jewish tools by which to most effectively reach.


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Friends of ArtMalaysia

Anahita Ghazanfari

Anahita is a painter and photographer living and working in Kuala Lumpur. Born and bred in the history rich
Iran, she grew up around a lot of creativity, greatly immersed in the magnificent culture and heritage of the
Her love for art developed from growing up with an archaeologist father with a passion for artistic artefact.
He believed that self knowledge comes from an understanding of one’s past, and encouraged his daughter
to learn and understand the country’s culture and traditions.
Her parents fostered her love for art from an early age, allowing her to express her art in paintings and
drawings in the walls of the house. They travelled around the country visiting museums, reading her a lot of
history books and poems, and listening to folklore music at home. These experiences still features greatly in
her artwork up to date
Her parents were very supportive of her choice of art as a career path, and for her 18 th birthday, her father
got her an analogue camera. This was the beginning of the most exciting and fulfilling journey of her life.
Through her camera lens, she learnt to search, study, and see beyond the obvious. Photography became
her means of artistic expression.
Her photography is heartfelt and communicative; freezing precious moments in time, telling poetic stories of
the people in front of her lens. Her favourite photography subject is people and nature, and she always tries
to bring them together in perfect sync to create a long gone ethereal harmony that nowadays has to be
staged in order to capture it in camera.
She remains authentic to painting, bringing to life a fresh perspective of modern living with each
brushstroke, also focusing on people and nature. Her brilliant artwork brings about a nostalgic sense of
serenity that makes one long to spend eternity there. Her canvas becomes a door to thousands of possible
worlds only the mind of a true artist can conceive.
To her, artwork is beyond medium; sometimes camera and brush coming together in magnificent
synchronisation to create a breathtaking masterpiece that tells a wonderfully poetic story. She finds both
photography and painting powerful each in its own unique ways, and she always aims at making the best of
both crafts.
She studied a Bachelor of Arts in Painting, and then pursued a Master of Illustration at one of the best art
universities in Iran. While studying her Masters, she taught art part time, imparting the skills and knowledge
she gained from her experienced professors to her young students.
She eventually moved to Malaysia to expand her horizon and see art from a perspective beyond her
country. Living in the melting pot of culture and diversity, she met a lot of people from all walks of life,
which taught her a lot more about art and inspired her in exciting ways. She joined international group
exhibitions where she met artists from around the world and shared in on their experiences. She also
worked with an international University which focuses on art and creativity, and got to meet some of the
most innovative and artistic young minds from around the globe.
Her love for art grows every day; one brushstroke at a time, a click at every moment. She has learnt to see
the world with a curious eye, where everything can be a still caught in camera, or a scene recreated with
the talented hand of a painter; a story told in a single image.


It Is Recommended To Drink It To Lose Weight, As It Is Not High In Sugars, As Soda And Most Juices Are.

Note that the costs mentioned here are solely per phase, and do not include it is not guaranteed , and will take into consideration any health problems you are already suffering from. People usually do this so that they can cope with emotional problems, types of efforts, they never succeed in losing weight. Further, under the guidance of a health care professional, who also provides that the extremely low calorie diet impedes their brain function. Among the various symptoms of depression, the most primary one is the weight vinegar 1 tbs , honey 1 tbs and 10 oz of water. This is especially used by body builders, who want to get rid of eating disorders, particularly bulimia, often resort to laxative diet.

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Jul 14, 2009

1. Are you stressed out? Depressed? Sad? A Chronic Worrier? Have a Low Self-Esteem?

2. Are you ashamed of the way you look and find yourself constantly comparing yourself to others?

3. Do you find comfort in food, specifically carbohydrate-rich foods?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, it’s safe for me to assume that you are either overweight or have a very difficult time in maintaining your weight.

Studies have shown that human eating behavior IS greatly influenced by the amount of psychological distress people have.

Individuals who have a low self-esteem, high anxiety (worry/stress), and who are constantly depressed tend to be obese, and to also seek comfort in foods that are mainly carbohydrates.

What could possibly be occurring in our brain to make us feel and behave this way?

SEROTONIN – one of the primary neurotransmitters responsible for mood regulation and eating behavior.

It is important to first explain that neurotransmitters are chemical messengers in our brain and nervous system that help us to talk, move, breath, think, feel, and to exist.

When we are psychologically distressed, our body experiences internal changes in normal neurotransmitter functioning and in various hormonal and intestinal behaviors.

These changes influence our body weight because of their influential effects on our appetite, our food portions, our food preferences and finally on our body’s ability to burn the calories we consume.

Serotonin is a major neurotransmitter involved in these processes and is found in the Central Nervous System.

It is responsible for the following bodily functions: mood regulation, blood flow, pain sensitivity in our lungs, brain and our hearts.

Other factors that are regulated by serotonin include our sleeping patterns, blood pressure and as previously mentioned, our appetite, food portions and food preferences.

A lack of serotonin in the brain is associated with depression.

Thus, low levels of serotonin can cause us to feel depressed, sad, sensitive to pain, insomnia and headaches, and can decrease our ability to concentrate.

This in turn can cause an increase in the potential for a person to seek relief in addictive substances such as alcohol and drugs.

It can even make them more susceptible to impulsive behavior such as binge-eating, over-eating, and spontaneous eating, which in the end leads to fatigue and inactivity.

Many people fall prey to this vicious cycle of emotional eating and before long, they are left trying to figure out where the extra 20 pounds came from or how it is they put on weight to begin with.


Rootless - Chris   Howard So I was really looking forward to Rootless by Chris Howard. I enjoyed it quite a bit but there were some issues that held it back from being as spellbinding as it could be. The one thing I can say is that this book for the most part was completely not what I was expecting it to be. It was unique, fairly original, and for the subject matter, completely not preachy. There is an underlying environmental theme that runs throughout the whole book and I found it to be believable and compelling. It was a unique take on the dystopian genre and that's saying something considering there are so many of them out there. I truly did feel that Rootless brought something new to the table. That being said, I DID have a few issues with the world-building. I wondered at first how civilization could still be surviving on earth with all the trees and all the vegetation (except for corn) gone. But then I found this: and a lot was explained for me. I still cant figure out how there aren't more water shortages though. How do they water ALL of that corn? And that is a lot of freaking corn. If you go by the information on the site I linked, the lack of trees should have caused severe droughts and yet somehow there doesn't seem to be a huge issue with the water supply. And that confused me. Moving on. I liked the characters quite a bit, but I didn't feel as attached to them as I wanted to. I'm not sure why because this book is incredibly well-written and I enjoyed the author's writing style quite a bit, but something was off with the characters. They weren't as likable as they could have been, for one, but also their connections to each other weren't working for me either. I just didn't have that emotional connection. The relationship between Alpha and Banyan lacked chemistry, not to mention the STUPID make out scene right after they almost get decimated by flesh-eating locusts. They should be saving their butts and getting back to the car but they decide to suck each others' faces off instead. The locusts were still in the area. C'MON! The evil character was really evil and I did like the other characters enough (Zee, Alpha, Crow), but they still needed work. More backstory. More personality. More something. I loved the story though. It took me a while to really get into it and I found the first 120 or so pages to be a little dull, but once it got going, I was with the plot all the way until the end. The final climax and the last few chapters were completely spellbinding and cinematic. This author knows how to write action scenes and make you feel like you are right there next to the characters with your life at stake. I loved that Banyan built lifelike trees out of metal scraps and salvage. I loved trying to picture what he was doing as he worked. I enjoyed trying to figure out the different mysteries that were presented, and can I just say that I was completely off? There was NO WAY I could have predicted what happened, but maybe if I thought a little more I could have. I was so sucked in to the story though that I didn't sop to think and analyze and try to figure it out. Which is okay by me. It doesn't always need to be that way. Parts of this book completely disturbed me and made me so uncomfortable I was squirming. It was all of the violence, but some of the deaths (WHOA) made me almost have to put down the book and walk away for a little bit. I didn't like it. It was unsettling and it made me nauseous. But I suppose that was the purpose there. And I get it even though I am not necessarily a fan of authors writing things for the shock factor.You know what was disappointing though? The fact that I thought this was a standalone. And it's not. There's not a whole lot of resolution at the end of this one, folks. It wraps up the best that it can and I wouldn't say there is a cliffhanger, but it was hardly satisfying either. That was disappointing. Not the author's fault, I know, but it would have been nice if that information was posted somewhere so I didn't LOSE MY MIND!!!Do I recommend it? I do! Despite the 3-star rating, I really did enjoy this one, I just had to many problems to rate it higher than a 3. But I did like it quite a bit and I probably will read the sequel when it comes out. Incidentally, NO IDEA when that is coming out. But if anyone knows, please feel free to let me know.


Budding Farmers was launched in 2013 by farmer-educator Monica Irwin after her years of experience working within the local food system as a farmer, farmer’s market manager, community educator, and good food activist.  It was founded on the premise that all kids should know where their food comes from and why they should be eating healthy food.  The intention of Budding Farmers is to make fruits and vegetables fun thus creating a culture where children want to eat their veggies!

Great kid-friendly recipes from Budding Farmers!


Games – Getting Started & Next Steps

Why you Need to Encourage your Family to Play

PC and video games make a significant part of a child’s upbringing. Parents usually have a fear of negative influence form these games, when they can also be positive. These games are a powerful tool and a way to develop many skills in a child. There are many great things that can come out of playing PC and video games.
With these games, they learn how to solve problems they might be facing. The games usually need the player to use their brains to get to several levels. This helps in developing the skills of the player in solving problems in life. They will know the best way to act from the plans they make. Their problem-solving skills shall be immediately felt.
These games make it easier for them to socialize. They have multiplayer games in which there are many participants. They shall with time become friends and hang out together. This is also made easier through the similar interests they share. There is no barrier to having conversations. Even the shy ones will find a safe place to express themselves.
These games foster the spirit of healthy competition. We all love to compete. PC and video games have always encouraged this. Boys like to do this more. This is also an area where those who are not so athletic can still express their spirit of competition.
It is also a way of developing leadership qualities. Those multiplayer games are an opportunity for them to take turns leading each other through the course of the game. They shall all do what they need to for them to win together. Children will learn to support and motivate each other to succeed.
Families that play together stick together. There is a tendency for there to be fewer barriers between parents who play with their kids. It is also a great place to share their skills and experiences. Seeing as kids are generally more skilled than their parents, they shall teach them a few neat tricks. This is the reverse of the usual setup. As they are playing, a child will feel no pressure in telling their parent how they feel. This may not have been the case, had they been distant with each other.
These games also shoe them why they need to exercise. There are many moves shown on these games, especially sports games, which shall encourage young ones to go out and try to master them. This helps their efforts in getting better at a certain sport or activity.
What we all need to do is check the tiles that we and our kids are playing, and we shall all be fine.

Getting To The Point – Downloads

5 Uses For Computers


Technology Reinforcing Transportation

The transportation systems around which the modern world has been built are on the verge of a significant transformation. India, lingering in the transport industry have seen surge in recent years with new technology advancements. Transport plays a very vital role in the development of a country’s economy by determining overall productivity, quality of life of citizens, access to goods and services and the pattern   for distribution of economic activity. Need for transportation have never been less for the people travelling through public transports.

New technologies are transforming the way citizens are planning, designing, building, and operating transportation systems. Travelers depend on traffic condition reports, electronic maps, on-board vehicle performance monitors, real-time transit arrival information, and a host of other services that did not exist a generation ago. People counting on additional advances in transportation technology, not just to get where want to go, but also to reduce greenhouse gases, improve air quality, and support economic development.

 Advancement in the technological sector is a concatenation of developments in many sectors. For Instance, Technological development have led to advancement in the cities and towns along with development in transportation sector either it is roadways, waterways, or airways. Blooming in transportation sector also impacts directly on the accessibility of backward towns and cities with time passage, thus flourishing the trade within the economy. Hence disgracing inflation and towards a healthy economy.

The introduction of smartphones through development in telecom sector has boosted the transportation in many folds. Ever thought of the app serving technologies helping people in fewer seconds to light up their day-to-day tasks with minimal hindrance? Yes it is, you may say! Instigation of app based technologies has minimized the long-distance travelling of people very plain sailing. These services running handy through smart phone have seen an instant growth in following years. People now don’t need to wait long hours to hire cab services or taxies or auto-rickshaws, they just need to handy the app and enjoy the rides.

Attached is an authored article by Mr. Rahul Mishra, CEO, U-RYD Transport Solutions Pvt. Ltd.


Crack Raylectron (64-bit) 3.0 or Keygen

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With the tragedy of losing a loved one unexpectedly, it is difficult to think clearly about filing a wrongful death claim.

The statute of limitations for filing a claim in Covington, Kentucky is one year from the appointment of a personal representative. If one is not appointed within the first year from death, then the time period is two years from the time of death. For a motor vehicle accidental death, the statute of limitations is two years.

The sooner you contact a lawyer to assist you in filing a claim, the better. As time goes on, the recall of evidence becomes more difficult, and it becomes harder for a wrongful death attorney to investigate the circumstances surrounding the death of your loved one.

The process is overwhelming on its own, even more so when you are in a state of mourning. The following is a brief overview of the steps you can expect:

  1. If your loved one was pursuing a personal injury claim prior to his or her death, there are survivor statutes which allow you to take over the lawsuit in place of the deceased. While this claim is separate from a wrongful death claim, it can be settled or tried together.
  2. Determine if you are permitted by law to file the wrongful death claim. In Covington, Kentucky, this person is the one designated as the representative of the estate if there is a will. In many cases, this could be a spouse or a surviving child.

If you are the right person to file a claim, your first step should be to contact a wrongful death lawyer. The right lawyer can help you fight the big insurance companies that you will most likely face. In addition, an experienced attorney can help prove that the defendant is responsible for committing a mistake that led to the death of your loved one.

Contact the offices of Paul Dickman for a free consultation.