1 There’s nothing called a digital fortress (Allan
Jacob in Khaleej Times) Downloading a smart government utility app and paying
your bills may be easy, but the recent hack attack on the US Office of
Personnel Management, which experts term the largest ever breach of American
federal employee information, makes you wonder if the digital infrastructure is
equipped to ward off such threats.
The US attack has been traced to China; 4 million
records of current and past US government employees that were stolen are a
treasure trove of information that can give hackers the ability to commit
identity fraud on a grander scale. With the information in their possession,
they can create new phishing scams via email which can lead to bigger cyberattacks
that targets more users.
‘‘It is important to understand that if our
infrastructure is affected then it is not just our ability to surf the internet
and check Facebook that is impacted, but also our ability to put fuel in our
cars, have a shower and turn on our light,’’ says Nicolai Solling, who has
worked with different sectors of the economy on cyber security.
An organisation may build the most secure
application, but if the user has no awareness on security they may still be
tricked into transacting with a rogue third party disguising as a government
entity. Then there’s the rise of social media which gives hackers more windows
of opportunity to penetrate important systems that keep a country running.
What’s most worrying is that information people give
away on themselves can be utilised in social engineering attacks, where users
are tricked into a level of trust. Yes, smart government systems are vulnerable
just like any others to hackers.
2 Over 100,000 migrants cross Mediterranean this year
(San Francisco Chronicle) More than 100,000 migrants — many fleeing the war in
Syria — have crossed the Mediterranean Sea to Europe so far this year, the UN
refugee agency has said — and the arrivals in Greece have reached their highest
level since the crisis began.
Citing national figures, the UNHCR said 54,000
people had traveled illegally to Italy and 48,000 to Greece so far in 2015,
with another small fraction heading for Spain and Malta. The numbers were
announced as the European Union is struggling to persuade its 28 nations to
adopt a quota system aimed at making the crossings less dangerous and easing
the burden on Mediterranean countries.
The UN agency said about half of the 600 people who
arrive daily in Greece are heading to Lesvos — where numbers have shot up from
737 in in January to 7,200 in May. Few migrants want to remain in debt-stricken
Greece, where unemployment runs above 26 percent. Most aim to make their way to
the more prosperous countries of Europe's center and north. They usually travel
by land across Greece's northern border with Macedonia or cross the Ionian and
Adriatic seas smuggled aboard ferries into Italy.
The International Organization for Migration said
Greek arrivals this year have already exceeded the 2014 total. According to the
European Union's border protection agency, Frontex, Syrians made up the largest
group of people crossing illegally into the EU last year, followed by Afghans
and Iraqis.
3 Aspirational parents and joyless children (George
Monbiot in The Guardian) We know that our conditions of life are deteriorating.
Most young people have little prospect of owning a home, or even of renting a
decent one. Interesting jobs are sliced up, through digital Taylorism, into
portions of meaningless drudgery. The natural world, whose wonders enhance our
lives, and upon which our survival depends, is being rubbed out with horrible
speed.
An article in Financial Times marked a new form of
employment: the nursery consultant. These people, who charge from £290 an hour,
must find a nursery that will put their clients’ toddlers on the right track to
an elite university. They spoke of parents who had already decided that their
six-month-old son would go to Cambridge then Deutsche Bank. In New York,
playdate coaches charging $450 an hour train small children in the social
skills that might help secure their admission to the most prestigious private
schools.
From infancy to employment, this is a life-denying,
love-denying mindset, informed not by joy or contentment, but by an ambition
that is both desperate and pointless, for it cannot compensate for what it
displaces: childhood, family life, the joys of summer, meaningful and
productive work, a sense of arrival, living in the moment. For the sake of this
toxic culture, the economy is repurposed, the social contract is rewritten, the
elite is released from tax, regulation and the other restraints imposed by
democracy.
Governments used to survey the prevalence of
children’s mental health issues every five years, but this ended in 2004.
Imagine publishing no figures since 2004 on, say, childhood cancer, and you
begin to understand the extent to which successive governments have chosen to
avoid this issue. If aspirational pressure is not enhancing our wellbeing but
damaging it, those in power don’t want to know.
In the cause of self-advancement, we are urged to
sacrifice our leisure, our pleasures and our time with partners and children,
to climb over the bodies of our rivals and to set ourselves against the common
interests of humankind. And then? We discover that we have achieved no greater
satisfaction than that with which we began.
In 1653, Izaak Walton described in the Compleat
Angler the fate of “poor-rich men”, who “spend all their time first in getting,
and next in anxious care to keep it; men that are condemned to be rich, and
then always busie or discontented”. Today this fate is confused with salvation.
Finish your homework, pass your exams, spend your 20s avoiding daylight, and
you too could live like the elite. But who in their right mind would want to?
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