On the IS' destruction of history in the land it conquers: "The Islamic State, he added, has invented an entirely new, ahistorical vision of society, misleadingly packaged as Islamic and which it is willing to go to any length to force into being."
Longreads with an excerpt from Rithy Panh's memoir of his interview with Kaing Guek Eav, known as Comrade Duch, for his documentary The Missing Image on the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.
Trading drones is a booming business.
The results of the Israeli Parliamentary elections are coming in.
Here's an excerpt from a Wired article on a "Manhattan project for cyber attacks":
The top tier of NSA malware discovered by Kaspersky is a generation ahead of anything previously reported in the wild. It uses a well-engineered piece of software called a bootkit to control the operating system from the ground up. It hides itself encrypted in the Windows registry, so that anti-virus software can’t find it on the computer’s disk. It carves out its own virtual file system on your machine to store data for exfiltration.
There are update mechanisms, dozens of plug-ins, a self-destruct function, massive code obfuscation, hundreds of fake websites to serve as command-and-control. One of the NSA’s malware plug-ins can even reprogram your hard drive’s firmware, allowing the implant to survive a complete disk wipe—a feat that’s been demonstrated by computer scientists under laboratory conditions but never before seen in the wild.
Wired: Surprise! America already has a Manhattan Project for developing cyber attacks, February 18, 2015ProPublica lists some of Hillary Clinton's previous clashes over secrecy and transparency.
Pop Culture:
After that weird but insightful conversation - or rather, one-sided interview, between Carrie Brownstein (who will publish her own memoir in a couple of months) and Kim Gordon, here's Kim Gordon interviewing Kathleen Hanna (fittingly, since she's been asked a lot of questions about her relationship to riot grrrl), and this is Sleater-Kinney in concert at the 9:30 Club last month.
(and talking about interviews, I highly recommend reading the Complete Rolling Stone Interview with Susan Sontag, which is insightful, clear, inspiring, and the perhaps introduction to Sontag's writing.)
