Some schools practice the concept of "mixed age groups" where each class is composed of 3 different ages in equal proportion. For instance my 5-yo son has 3-yo's and 4-yo's in his class.
Thing is, it's a constant battle for the school with parents who always want their kids to with same-age kids or older-ones, never smaller ones. Everyone thinks their kid's development will be "held back" because of the younger children in the class. Telling them about how older kids also learn from playing or working with younger kids is a hard sell, when all parents think today is academic progress.
Unfortunately what they do not understand is that teaching someone else is one of the best learning opportunities you can get, even if you think its not.
It both expands and cements your knowledge of a subject, and highlights the areas that you are unsure of.
I spent years training various technical topics, and the reason I was so fluent in them is because I was expected to be able to teach anyone around me on a dime.
the mixed-age classroom phenomenon is very common in Montessori schools. My son has gone from being the classroom baby (he started just after his third birthday, mid-year, due to the way special ed services are handled) to being the big kid (5 years old, with an extra half-year of school experience compared to others his age) who knows everything.
Montessori schools also really emphasize kids teaching each other. Since my son is kind of a math whiz [0] he gets to spend a lot of time showing other kids math concepts, while some of the more socially adept kids guide him through social situations.
There are some kids who don't do well in that environment, but it's great for a lot of young kids.
[0] he can coherently explain Graham's Number, knows pi to 206 places last I checked, and has started exploring limits
A state intelligence agency found spying on foreign private cos. in critical sectors like nuclear power plants, planes, high speed trains, telecommunications and energy, in order to pass on the intelligence and aid its own domestic firms.
For a minute I almost thought we were talking about China.
What strikes me after this revelation is how unique the United States is, because:
(a) it has dozens of companies that create technology the rest of the world uses, and
(b) it has a govt. that secretly works to undermine the technology developed by those companies.
You're not going to hear about many foreign govt's actively hacking their country's software products, simply because they could easily/secretly armtwist cos. into installing backdoors at the beginning. Take China for instance - do we think it needs to hack into, say, Huawei phones or Wechat? I don't think so.
As a foreigner, that is why this "fight" between US software cos. and its govt. is so fascinating. It's made possible through a unique combination of capital, freedom and history. And I hope it remains that way, for the sake of the rest of the world too.
Your example isn't a particular good one. Huawei has been accused of backdooring their products for the Chinese government on numerous occasions, including presentations at DEFCON exposing those backdoors. There are also numerous cases of backdoors in Chinese cell phones.
That's exactly what he's saying:
"You're not going to hear about many foreign govt's actively hacking their country's software products, simply because they could easily/secretly armtwist cos. into installing backdoors at the beginning"
Firstly, I'm amazed that a large global corporation has put out a press release saying it has "reasonable grounds to believe that an operation by NSA and GCHQ probably happened." Wow.
That said, I wonder if Gemalto really had any other option than to say its keys weren't stolen. What might be the cost of replacing all affected SIM cards?
> reasonable grounds to believe that an operation by NSA and GCHQ probably happened.
No kidding, they've been bought, under more-than-suspicious circumstances, by [inQtel](https://www.iqt.org/) and [Texas Partner Group](https://tpg.com/), which officially are CIA proxies.
I don't think they had to resort to tailored access to perform their heist, I'd rather bet that they still have enough former colleagues inside Gemalto to get whatever they want by simply entering the correct password on the correct keyboard.
Can you post a reference for TPG (which I assume you actually mean Texas Pacific Group) being an "official" CIA proxy, as you say? That is a pretty bold assertion...
But that just means they don't need to officially own it anymore: Alex Mandl, Gemalto's current chairman, is among others a former board member of intQtel, which presents its mission on its web page as:
We identify, adapt, and deliver innovative technology solutions to support the missions of the Central Intelligence Agency and broader U.S. Intelligence Community.
So the news that nobody wants spread is: nobody cares about how much the NSA stole from Gemalto: whatever Gemalto has and NSA wants, the NSA is most likely to get by simply asking NSA affiliates installed at every interesting node in Gemalto's hierarchy.
Incidentally, it's rather easy to find sources about this in French (Gemplus used to be a French company, before the fusion with Axalto which was forced by intQtel and TPG), but surprisingly hard to find in English.
> nobody cares about how much the NSA stole from Gemalto: whatever Gemalto has and NSA wants, the NSA is most likely to get by simply asking NSA affiliates
This seems at odds with the leaked documents though. Why going to the trouble of compromising a company you've already social-engineered to the max?
Not at all. GCHQ are not usually ones to try just one approach. They often try every approach at once: partly because they can; but mostly for compartmentation; to overwhelm layered defences; and to decrease sensitive source exposure by combining the results of everything they care to try.
The doctrine has been called "penetrating targets' defences" or PTD: that's also the name of their budget/office/department/contracting scheme which is broadly equivalent to NSA's Special Source Operations/Targeted Access Operations, only more aggressive and multi-pronged. It incorporates HUMINT as well as both R&D and operational deployment of advanced technical attacks.
You may see references in the Snowden documents of this (check the bottom), or in their tenders to BAE Detica for their modular botnet software, or elsewhere. Although much of the really juicy or operational stuff is STRAP3 and thus kept off the TS//STRAP2 wiki.gchq (which the NSA have shared access to via their ic.gov portal, and which Snowden dumped - and which, yes, runs a tweaked MediaWiki on PHP).
this is the key here: any company that has stakes within the US is subject to coercion
secondly soon news will be out (give it a couple more days ;-)) which is currently not on any news sites radar - on IMSI catchers (aka fake BTS) which will put the whole story into a new context.
It's a commercial business, they are afraid of loosing sales.
The statement made is pretty much a text book declaration of damage control. Personally I'm not buying their claims, but only they can proof it happened and they never will as the market will loose complete faith in buying from them.
As they point out, SIM churn is not an uncommon thing especially in the poorer countries these agencies were targeting. Even in the worst case scenarios where every SIM had to be replaced, they'd probably just allow natural rollover to occur over a multi-year period.
But it seems like that isn't really needed because the stolen keys were mostly replaced already anyway. Anyone who suspects they might be a person of interest can always just request a new one from their carrier.
> Anyone who suspects they might be a person of interest can always just request a new one from their carrier.
I doubt SIMs are manufactured just-in-time for each individual customer; more likely, carriers order batches of hundreds/thousands/millions SIMs. Without a recall program, it will take years before you can be confident that your freshly-acquired SIM is not compromised.
I'd say it's safe to assume that from now on, any cellphone communication can be trivially intercepted by NSA/GCHQ. The most paranoid already assumed that, but now we have confirmation.
Sure, but that's because most companies above a certain size are old, and department names are the last to change. Younger companies have 'people and culture' or similar.
They should have built youtube competitor in house rather than looking at dailymotion. Given yahoo user base and talented developers, it should have reached respectable market share and ad revenue.
The counter-Mayer argument is that Yahoo! should have focused on "media" and ad sales, two of their strengths and then maybe "dabbled" with enhancing their products.
This theory of course cannot be proven, however the closest evidence we may have is AOL.
The list of words is so mind-boggling. On the Chinese Internet you cannot talk about former leaders (Deng Xiaoping, Zhao Ziyang); current leaders (Xi Jinping, Hu Jintao, Wen Jiabao); communist party/army/Ministry of Truth/Police; porn/fuck/penis/vagina/sperm; protest/persecution/gang rape; Muslim/Tibet; freedom/democracy/revolution....
I wish there was a way to visualize at a high-level how language on the Chinese Internet is drifting over time and try and correlate it to the emotions/thoughts the Communist Party wants people to have. This is the Thought Police and Mind Control from 1984, only way, way more advanced and insidious and real.
Brrrr. Getting the chills just imagining being subjected to this!
You cannot control peoples thoughts this just makes the language evolve in order to bypass the firewall and people will find different words to mean the same thing in order to avoid the firewall.
And if that word gets banned they will just start using another one.
It makes communication a lot more cryptic if you're not part of the 'in' crowd but it doesn't stop people from talking about it.
It's about modifying the aggregate opinion of a population - not a specific individual. Politics is about statistics in the sense that you only need x percent of something to accomplish y goal. In other words, only x percentage of people need to think in a certain way to accomplish y goal. This is why, for example, VPNs aren't strictly enforced. Those who need them, get them. But it's such a pain in the ass for a regular person to subscribe to and deploy, that it doesn't matter on the aggregate level for 5% of people to break through.
Right. Also, banning all VPNs would make commerce very difficult. And the Party loves commerce.
I'm sure they'd love to stifle all non-party-endorsed political discussion, but they're in a difficult position which is getting more and more difficult with every year. It will be interesting to see how the situation evolves.
Theoretically, you can't stop people from talking a certain thing; but in practice in you can always increase the cost to reduce the efficiency of communication, especially you can gain a lot of advantages if the effect is on a massive scale, statistically...
And when you increase the cost to such a extent that people get more hassle from talking than get more benefits from this same act, people will simply stop doing it...
A simple example, I am right now typing on my tablet, and I do have to admit that I was a bit hesitant before I start writing this message...it's just much more comfortable to type on a real keyboard than the tablet screen...but I hate censorship and mind control so much that overcomes my reluctance to type on a tablet...
Btw, please don't downvote or upvote my post...I am currently at 256 karma units...I think it's cool and want to maintain this karma for a while...thanks...
This is exactly what the whole row over the Chinese government "banning puns" was about. The Daily Show did a pretty funny segment on it[1] but they sort of missed the point because something was lost in translation. The ban on puns is a ban on using puns / homophones to dodge keyword censorship in the media and online.
Our company is releasing a version of our game for the Chinese market(now that you can officially buy the consoles and everything...) and the list of things we had to censor out is staggering. Most recent one was having to cut out a few countries from the list of available ones on the user profile creation screen, because China doesn't recognize them(like Taiwan).
You can still include something like "Taiwan, province of China" can't you? It's infuriating, but still better than just removing any option for Taiwan users.
That would be technically correct, but they want you to select "China" if you live in Taiwan. "province of X" would not be a correct choice in the "country" selection box. Obviously I agree with you, but the censorship commission is incredibly strict about that and they wouldn't accept such measures to sidestep their restrictions.
Edit: I really do wonder why someone downvoted my comments. Is that because you support the Chinese censorship or for some other reason?
Since traditional is used in Hong-Kong which is in PRC, I doubt they would have an issue with it.
We're not talking about languages here however, but countries. A "traditional character option" wouldn't be enough to indicate Taiwan (since languages are not countries, just like you said).
1 - http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2015/09/bringing-the-internet...