Best idea of 2014: Activist vows to float balloons carrying DVDs of The Interview over North Korea

South Korean campaigner says he plans to drop 100,000 copies of the film over the neighbouring country to break ‘cult of Kim Jong-un’

Sony hack: former employees could be to blame

South Koreans walk past a TV screen showing a news report about The Interview at Seoul railway station. Photograph: Ahn Young-joon/AP

A South Korean activist is planning to launch balloons carrying DVDs of Sony’s movie The Interview over North Korea as the propaganda war over the controversial film continues.

The comedy depicting an assassination attempt on the North Korea president Kim Jong-un is at the centre of tension between North Korea and the US, with Washington blaming Pyongyang for crippling hacking attacks on Sony. Pyongyang denies the allegations and has vowed to retaliate.

Park Sang-hak said he will start dropping 100,000 DVDs and USBs of the movie by balloon in North Korea as early as late January. Park, a North Korean defector, said he was partnering with the US-based non-profit Human Rights Foundation, which is financing the making of the DVDs and USB memory sticks of the movie with Korean subtitles.

Park said foundation officials plan to visit South Korea around 20 January to hand over the DVDs and USBs, and that he and the officials will then try to float the first batch of the balloons if weather conditions allow.

“North Korea’s absolute leadership will crumble if the idolisation of leader Kim breaks down,” Park told Associated Press.

If successful, he stunt will enrage North Korea, which expressed anger over the movie. In October, the country opened fire at giant balloons carrying anti-Pyongyang propaganda leaflets floated across the border by South Korean activists, trigging an exchange of gunfire with South Korean troops.

But it is not clear how effective the plan will be, as only a small number of ordinary North Korean citizens are believed to own computers or DVD players. Many North Koreans would not probably risk watching the movie as they know they would get into trouble if caught. Owning a computer requires permission from the government and costs as much as three months’ salary for the average worker, according to South Korean analysts.

Not everyone supports sending balloons into the North, with liberals and border town residents in South Korea urging the activists to stop. North Korea has long demanded that South Korea stop the activists, but Seoul refuses, citing freedom of speech.

Park said the ballooning would be done clandestinely, with the pace picking up in March when he expects the wind direction to become more favourable.

Calls to the Human Rights Foundation on Wednesday were not immediately answered. The foundation says on its website that it works with North Korean defectors to use hydrogen balloons to send material across the border, as well as smuggling items through China and broadcasting radio transmissions to reach those who own illegal short wave radios.

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The Biggest Reason We Steal Other People’s Ideas

by Adam Grant–

Chances are that at some point in your career, you’ve taken an idea from someone else. I want to know why.

There’s a clue in a story about one of the great bands of our time.

All good things come to an end, and by 1970, the beloved Beatles had decided to go their separate ways.

Within a year, George Harrison reached No. 1 with a solo song, “My Sweet Lord.” But his sweet time at the top was short-lived. Within a month, a lawsuit was filed. Harrison’s song had original lyrics, but shared a melody and harmony with the 1963 hit song by the Chiffons, “He’s So Fine.”

Was the Beatles’ lead guitarist guilty of plagiarism?

Judge Richard Owen, who happened to be a music aficionado, ruled that Harrison was guilty. But he said Harrison’s theft wasn’t intentional; it was accidental and subconscious.

Eventually, Harrison conceded that Owen was right. “I wasn’t consciously aware of the similarity between ‘He’s So Fine’ and ‘My Sweet Lord’,” Harrison wrote in his autobiography. “Why didn’t I realize?”

The psychologist Dan Gilbert calls this kleptomnesia: generating an idea that you believe is novel, but in fact was created by someone else. It’s accidental plagiarism, and it’s all too common in creative work.

In a classic demonstration, psychologists Alan Brown and Dana Murphy invited people to brainstorm in groups of four. They took turns generating lists of sports, musical instruments, clothes, or four-legged animals. Each participant generated four ideas from each category. Next, the participants were asked to write down the four ideas that they personally generated for each category.

Alarmingly, a full 75% of participants unintentionally plagiarized, claiming they generated an idea that was in fact offered by another member of their group. And later, the participants wrote down four new ideas for each category. The majority wrote down at least one idea that had already been generated by another group member—usually the group member who’d generated ideas immediately before them.

Were they not paying attention? If so, then surely they’d have been just as likely to plagiarize from their own ideas. But that didn’t happen. While 71% of participants took credit for an idea that a group member had generated, only 8% generated one of their own previous ideas.

Kleptomnesia happens due to a pragmatic, but peculiar, feature of how human memory is wired. When we encode information, we tend to pay more attention to the content than the source. Once we accept a piece of information as true, we no longer need to worry about where we acquired it.

It’s especially difficult to remember the source of information when we’re busy, distracted, or working on a complex task. (Sound familiar in today’s workplace?) And the more our attention is divided, the less we notice who’s responsible for the ideas that get raised. This explains why people are most likely to take credit for ideas generated immediately before their own. When it’s almost their turn, they’re maximally busy trying to come up with a good idea, so they never really pay attention to the source of the ideas that come right before their own.

To combat kleptomnesia, psychologists recommend reducing distractions and cutting down on multitasking. It can also be useful to minimize exposure to similar work. For example, comedy writer George Meyer avoided watching Seinfeld while writing for The Simpsons (16 seasons!). “I was afraid I might subconsciously borrow a joke,” Meyer told me.

Had George Harrison taken these steps, he might have avoided a serious financial loss and heartbreak. At minimum, when generating ideas, it could be wise to identify a few existing ideas that are similar, scrutinize the overlap, and give credit where it’s due. Otherwise, in Harrison’s words, “We all tend to break each other’s hearts, taking and not giving back.”

In everyday life, the most important corrective action may involve training ourselves to focus not only on what was said, but also who said it. As the psychologists Neil Macrae, Galen Bodenhausen, and Guglielmo Calvini put it, “May the source be with you.”

 

Just how afraid of North Korea should we be?

 

I think every “good red-blooded American” (whatever that is) has pretty much the same reaction to being threatened by the little boy with the egg head – Fuh-Kim!” but before we over-react to statements like the one below, we might want to take the second picture.

North Korea demands joint inquiry with US into Sony Pictures hack

Pyongyang denies responsibility for cyber-attack and threatens grave consequences if Washington continues to blame it

My initial reaction was to think that they are really not in any position to demand anything.  Then I began to think about it. This might be all about positioning right now, but A new analysis of North Korea’s nuclear program by a group of top U.S. experts, led by David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, estimates that North Korea could have enough material for 79 nuclear weapons by 2020.

I believe that one of the major reasons the cold war ended was not a diplomatic one, as much as we had a president in Regan that not only had an itchy finger on the “red button” but  his dementia was being fairly well accepted and it was almost universally understood that he was just crazy enough to push the damn thing out of spite.

Kim Jong-un is just pissed off enough about being short, ugly, and oblong that he might just feel the same way.  What does HE have to loose?  Then there are the neighbors.  With Russia, one of our strongest allies (just ask Putin as he moves more troops across his other boarders on “peace keeping” exercises) on the North East, and China (the worlds largest economy having recently overtaken the US) on the other, he is not alone.

Crowd Mentality:  When you have people alone, one on one, they are generally cordial.  When you get a bunch of “like minded” people together their collective influence is usually more powerful than the sum of the parts.  This is called synergy.  It could also be called trouble for US – literally.It is good timing for this little group to be considering all the years of being treated like the third world countries they were, to think that circumstances have changed enough to turn the tables.

Its not about the movie:  We know damn well that the cyber hackers that hit Sony had a bit of help from China. Most in North Korea dont have access to reliable electricity, let alone a sophisticated hacking station.  The demands that we never show a comedy even in bootleg form or post it on the internet, or let HBO get hold of it, or look at the trailers….are so ridiculous it makes me wonder if they are just an excuse to do some more saber rattling.

They have two more years of a lame-duck president who has allowed the military to get to a point that we are unable to launch any kind of attack that would remotely rival desert storm.

Would this be a good time to “re-negotiate” the term “the most powerful nation in the world.”

 

Right of way

Right of way by Seth Godin

It started with boats, but over the centuries, it is practiced everywhere… we establish cultural rights of way, a hierarchy of precedence about who gets to go first. We need a default because we can’t always have a discussion about who goes next in the moment.

Motorboats, for example, are generally expected to veer out of the way of a sailboat (instead of the other way around). This makes sense, of course, because they have more options and can recover more easily.

That’s one way to prioritize who gets to go first: the small over the big, the one who needs it over the one would could handle the interruption. It’s annoying for the motorboat, but vital for the sailboat.

Lately, we seem to be making some new decisions about right of way that change this perspective. That cars ought to have right of way over pedestrians and bicycles. That huge corporations have right of way over individuals. That the authorities have the right of way over the presumed innocent, and that the marketer’s infinite need-for-attention has right of way over quiet and privacy.

What would happen if the default was that roads are for pedestrians and bicycles unless otherwise stated, and what would happen if pleasing corporations was seen as an exception in the priorities of those that regulate them?

[There’s no right answer in issues of societal right of way, there is nothing but compromises and judgment calls. At either extreme, everything breaks down, and so the question is: where do you want us to be? Where do you draw the line? Is it up to us?]

It’s possible to argue that roads are more efficient when bikes don’t clog them up, and that our illusion of security increases when the default is to know everything about everyone. Most of all, that corporations are more profitable when they don’t have to worry about the people who don’t fit their model.

It doesn’t seem like much of a cost to ask individuals to get out of the way, until, all at once, we realize just how expensive it was to totally prioritize power and efficiency over humanity and justice.

 

What If The Supreme Court Drops A Bombshell On Obamacare?

 

The Supreme Court case King v. Burwell will determine whether the IRS overstepped in saying (Obamacare) subsidies are available for health insurance bought through the federal exchange.If the administration loses the case, more than half the states will lose an estimated $65 million in subsidies and an estimated 4 million people will probably lose their health insurance coverage.

How should Congress respond?

Yuval Levin and James Capretta have an editorial in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal with a suggested way forward. Because I was critical of a previous reform plan of theirs, let me say how much I really like the current version.

Under the plan, every state would have the option to opt out of Obamacare and establish a different kind of health reform. In particular:

There would be no federal mandates – either for individuals or for employers.
People could buy insurance inside an exchange or outside of it, with the states choosing their own regulations.
Everyone in the individual market would get a fixed sum tax credit for the purchase of health insurance. The credit would increase by age, but would not vary by income.
People who have continuous insurance coverage could not be discriminated against because of pre-existing conditions, but this protection is lost for those who try to game the system by remaining uninsured while they are healthy and buying insurance only after they get sick.
People on Medicaid would be free to leave the program, claim the subsidy and buy private insurance instead.
The repeal of the mandates is huge. All of the anti-job parts of ObamaCare go away once you abolish the employer mandate. And with the abolition of the individual mandate, we can ensure President Obama’s promise: if you like your health insurance you can keep it.
Letting the states regulate insurance markets may seem inadvisable, given all the mandated benefits the states have piled on commercial insurers in the past. But Obamacare didn’t get rid of any of these. As Austin Frakt has pointed out, Obamacare doesn’t mandate a nationwide benefits package. There are fifty different packages – each one reflecting the mandates in the state where it is offered.

Obamacare then piles on with additional cost-increasing mandates – such as the requirement that questionable preventive procedures be offered without any out-of-pocket payment. Under Obamacare, healthy women are entitled to mammograms free of charge, but a woman with symptoms (who really needs a mammogram) can be forced to pay the full cost. With the Levin/Capretta plan, the states would be free to avoid such nonsense.

The third item is also huge. Because Obamacare conditions its subsidies on income, it raises the marginal tax rate for middle income families by six percentage points and in some cases far more. At 400 percent of poverty, a family can lose more than $10,000 in subsidies if it earns one additional dollar. At other “cliff” points, families can be subjected to thousands of dollars of additional exposure (higher deductibles and copayments) as a result of earning one more dollar. All these perversions vanish if everyone gets the same subsidy regardless of income.

And there is more. If the subsidy doesn’t vary by income, all kinds of technical problems with healthcare.gov would vanish in a heartbeat. If every one of the same age gets the same subsidy, the exchange doesn’t have to check with the IRS to verify income. And next April 15th, there won’t be a plethora of additional taxes and refunds because almost everyone wrongly predicted his income for the previous year. (See “Can Obamacare be Fixed?”)

 

U.S. Said to Find North Korea Ordered Cyberattack on Sony

By DAVID E. SANGER and NICOLE PERLROTH –

Sony dropped plans to release “The Interview.” CreditDavid Goldman/Associated Press

WASHINGTON — American officials have concluded that North Korea was “centrally involved” in the hacking of Sony Pictures computers, even as the studio canceled the release of a far-fetched comedy about the assassination of the North’s leader that is believed to have led to the cyberattack.

Senior administration officials, who would not speak on the record about the intelligence findings, said the White House was debating whether to publicly accuse North Korea of what amounts to a cyberterrorism attack. Sony capitulated after the hackers threatened additional attacks, perhaps on theaters themselves, if the movie, “The Interview,” was released.

• North Korea Denies Role in Sony Pictures HackingDEC. 7, 2014

Officials said it was not clear how the White House would respond. Some within the Obama administration argue that the government of Kim Jong-un must be confronted directly. But that raises questions of what actions the administration could credibly threaten, or how much evidence to make public without revealing details of how it determined North Korea’s culpability, including the possible penetration of the North’s computer networks.

Other administration officials said a direct confrontation with the North would provide North Korea with the kind of dispute it covets. Japan, where Sony is an iconic corporate name, has argued that a public accusation could interfere with delicate diplomatic negotiations for the return of Japanese citizens kidnapped years ago.

The government is “considering a range of options in weighing a potential response,” said Bernadette Meehan, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council.

The administration’s sudden urgency came after a new threat was delivered this week to desktop computers at Sony’s offices, warning that if “The Interview” was released on Dec. 25, “the world will be full of fear.”

“Remember the 11th of September 2001,” it said. “We recommend you to keep yourself distant from the places at that time.”

Hours before Sony canceled the movie, the four largest theater chains in the United States — Regal Entertainment, AMC Entertainment, Cinemark andCarmike Cinemas — and several smaller chains said they would not show “The Interview” as a result of the threat. The cancellations virtually killed the movie as a theatrical enterprise, at least in the near term, one of the first known instances of a threat from another nation pre-empting the release of a movie.

While intelligence officials have concluded that the cyberattack was both state-sponsored and far more destructive than any seen before on American soil, there are still differences of opinion over whether North Korea was aided by Sony insiders with knowledge of the company’s computer systems, senior administration officials said.

“This is of a different nature than past attacks,” one official said.

An attack that began by wiping out data on corporate computers — something that had been previously seen in South Korea and Saudi Arabia— had turned “into a threat to the safety of Americans,” the official said. But echoing a statement from the Department of Homeland Security, the official said there was no specific information that an attack was likely.

It is not clear how the United States determined that Mr. Kim’s government had played a central role in the Sony attacks. North Korea’s computer network has been notoriously difficult to infiltrate. But the National Security Agency began a major effort four years ago to penetrate the country’s computer operations, including its elite cyberteam, and to establish “implants” in the country’s networks that, like a radar system, would monitor the development of malware transmitted from the country.

It is hardly a foolproof system. Much of North Korea’s hacking is done from China. And while the attack on Sony used some commonly available cybertools, one intelligence official said, “this was of a sophistication that a year ago we would have said was beyond the North’s capabilities.”

It is rare for the United States to publicly accuse countries suspected of involvement in cyberintrusions. The administration never publicly said who attacked White House and State Department computers over the past two months, or JPMorgan Chase’s systems last summer. Russia is suspected in the first two cases, but there is conflicting evidence in the JPMorgan case.

But there is a long forensic trail involving the Sony hacking, several security researchers said. The attackers used readily available commercial tools to wipe data off Sony’s machines. They also borrowed tools and techniques that had been used in at least two previous attacks, one in Saudi Arabia two years ago — widely attributed to Iran — and another last year in South Koreaaimed at banks and media companies.

The Sony attacks were routed from command-and-control centers across the world, including a convention center in Singapore and Thammasat University in Thailand, the researchers said. But one of those servers, in Bolivia, had been used in limited cyberattacks on South Korean targets two years ago. That suggested that the same group or individuals might have been behind the Sony attack.

The Sony malware shares remarkable similarities with that used in attacks on South Korean banks and broadcasters last year. Those intrusions, which also destroyed data belonging to their victims, are believed to have been the work of a cybercriminal gang known as Dark Seoul. Some experts say they cannot rule out the possibility that the Sony attack was the work of a Dark Seoul copycat, the security researchers said.

The Sony attack also borrowed a wiping tool from an attack two years ago at Saudi Aramco, the national oil company, where hackers wiped off data on30,000 of the company’s computers, replacing it with an image of a burning American flag.

Security experts were never able to track down those hackers, though United States officials have long said they believed the attacks emanated from Iran, using tools that are now on the black market.

At Sony, investigators are looking into the possibility that the attackers had inside help. Embedded in the malicious code were the names of Sony servers and administrative credentials that allowed the malware to spread across Sony’s network.

“It’s clear that they already had access to Sony’s network before the attack,” said Jaime Blasco, a researcher at AlienVault, a cybersecurity consulting firm.

What is remarkable in this case is that after three weeks of pressure, the attack forced one of Hollywood’s largest studios and Japan’s most famous companies to surrender.

Many attacks have been aimed at stealing credit card data, like the intrusions on the Home Depot and Target networks — and others at disrupting ATMs. An American and Israeli attack known as Olympic Games that targeted Iran’s nuclear program was a rare attack on infrastructure.

Sony has tried to put the best face on the situation, saying it understood that movie theaters had to be worried about the safety of their customers.

But the precedent set Wednesday could be damaging. Other countries or hacking groups could try similar tactics over movies, books or television broadcasts that they find offensive.

The cost of the assault was small: The attackers used readily available tools to steal data and then wipe it off Sony’s machines. Representative Mike Rogers, the Michigan Republican who leads the House Intelligence Committee, said the hackers had “created a backdoor to Sony’s systems” that they repeatedly re-entered to send threatening messages to Sony employees.

The North Koreans have half-denied involvement, but have left open the possibility that the attacks were the “righteous deed of supporters and sympathizers.”

But that leaves open the question of what to do about the Sony attack. The North is under some of the heaviest economic sanctions ever applied. A large-scale American cyberattack would require a presidential order, and Mr. Obama has been hesitant to use the country’s cyberarsenal for fear of retaliation.

 

Super Sub: Why The Navy’s Next ‘Boomer’ Is The Most Important Program In The Pentagon Budget

As Congress raced to complete work last week on spending measures that would fund the military in 2015, barely a word was said about the most important technology program in the whole defense budget. In fact, there are probably plenty of legislators who have never even heard of it. It’s called the Ohio Replacement Program, and there is a real possibility that at some point later in the century, it will make the difference between whether our Republic lives or dies.

I wish I was exaggerating, but I’m not. The Ohio Replacement Program was conceived to modernize the sea-based part of the nation’s nuclear force — the only part of that force that is certain to survive if Russia, China or some other major nuclear power launches a surprise attack in, say, 2050. The reason why is that the Navy’s ballistic-missile subs patrol silently beneath the surface of the world’s oceans, where enemies cannot find them; the Air Force’s bombers and silo-based missiles, on the other hand, are in known locations that can be easily targeted.

(Disclosure: Several companies likely to build the Ohio Replacement or provide on-board equipment contribute to my think tank; some are consulting clients.)

Collectively, these three types of long-range nuclear systems are called the nuclear “triad,” and the sole purpose for their existence is to convince potential adversaries that any attempt to launch a nuclear attack against America would be suicidal. But what makes that threat credible is not the number of nuclear weapons America has before an attack occurs; it’s how many survive the attack so they can be used to retaliate against an aggressor. That’s what convinces him not to attack in the first place. Strategists used to call this “the delicate balance of terror,” and it is probably the main reason why Russia and America never fought during the Cold War.

However, the Cold War ended a quarter century ago, and many Americans have stopped thinking about the fact that the U.S. and Russia still have thousands of nuclear warheads aimed at each other — despite Moscow’s best efforts to remind us during the Ukraine crisis (Russia’s strategic rocket forces staged their biggest nuclear exercises in years, showing off just how potent their long-range arsenal remains). With only one in five members of Congress having served in the military and nearly half elected in the 2010 election or later, it’s a safe bet that few legislators are conversant with the requirements of effective nuclear deterrence.

Perhaps that explains why the Ohio Replacement Program — so named because it would replace all 14 of the nation’s Ohio-class ballistic-missile subs — was delayed two years by implementation of the Budget Control Act. The delay was a Navy decision, but one made under duress when Congress imposed spending caps with little thought as to the impact on military readiness or modernization. Now a further delay looms because spending caps slowed development of a nuclear reactor that will power the propulsion system of the future subs. That’s a serious problem, because any further delays in developing an Ohio Replacement would result in numbers dipping below the Navy’s stated requirement for ten operational subs.

I should mention that most of the Navy’s subs do not carry nuclear weapons at all. Instead, they are conventionally armed (but nuclear-powered) attack subs that protect the sea lanes, collect intelligence, and perform various other secret missions. The Virginia class of attack subs currently being built at the rate of two per year is the most versatile undersea warship ever designed, and is constantly being improved with new technology. Ballistic-missile subs, on the other hand, aren’t supposed to be versatile. They’re supposed to be as good as possible at doing one thing: hiding beneath the waves until the fateful day when they must launch retaliation against a nuclear aggressor, and then doing so in a tailored and 100% reliable fashion.