[RISKS] Risks Digest 26.67

From: RISKS List Owner <risko_at_private>
Date: Tue, 20 Dec 2011 18:21:34 PST
RISKS-LIST: Risks-Forum Digest  Tuesday 20 December 2011  Volume 26 : Issue 67

ACM FORUM ON RISKS TO THE PUBLIC IN COMPUTERS AND RELATED SYSTEMS (comp.risks)
Peter G. Neumann, moderator, chmn ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy

***** See last item for further information, disclaimers, caveats, etc. *****
This issue is archived at <http://www.risks.org> as
  <http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/26.67.html>
The current issue can be found at
  <http://www.csl.sri.com/users/risko/risks.txt>

  Contents:
Qantas Terror Blamed on Software (Andrew Heasley)
Why data matters for public policy (Vint Cerf via Lauren Weinstein)
Internet Hysteria: Is the US Losing Its Edge? (Brent Glass)
BufferBloat: What's Wrong with the Internet? A discussion (Dave Farber)
Can the U.S. Government close social media accounts? (Salon)
Computing On Encrypted Databases Without Ever Decrypting Them (Forbes)
4 Romanians Indicted for Hacking Subway, Other Retailers (Kim Zetter via
  Jim Reisert)
Ambulances turned away as computer virus infects Gwinnett Medical Center
  computers (Misty Williams/Joel Anderson via Jim Reisert)
Hollywood's pirate cure is worse than the disease (Jack Shafer)
Protect Yourself from Intrusive Laptop/Phone Searches at U.S. Border (EFF)
Daniel Kahneman: Thinking, Fast and Slow (PGN)
Abridged info on RISKS (comp.risks)

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Tue, 20 Dec 2011 12:44:26 PST
From: "Peter G. Neumann" <neumann_at_private>
Subject: Qantas Terror Blamed on Software (Andrew Heasley)

On 7 Oct 2008, at 37,000 feet off Western Australia, a Qantas A330
experienced two sudden nosedives, injuring one-third of the 110 passengers
and nine crew members.  The first was a drop of 150 feet in two seconds
during a 690-foot 23-second dive.  Two minutes later, the second was a
400-foot drop in 15 seconds.  12 were injured seriously, and 39 were
hospitalized.  (At least 60 passengers were reportedly not wearing seat
belts.)  A three-year-long investigation has determined that one of the
three airspeed sensors malfunctioned, giving erroneous data intermittently.
The cabin pressurization and the plane's auto-braking system also failed.
(This malfunction was one of only three known worldwide in 128 million
operating hours, although one of the others involved the same sensor unit on
an A330, on 12 Sep 2006.)  [Source: Andrew Heasley, PGN-ed; thanks to Lauren
Weinstein for this item.]
http://www.stuff.co.nz/travel/australia/6163633/Qantas-terror-blamed-on-computer

------------------------------

Date: Tue, 6 Dec 2011 16:06:27 -0800
From: Lauren Weinstein <lauren_at_private>
Subject: Why data matters for public policy (Vint Cerf)

Vint Cerf, Why data matters for public policy
First posting in the new Google "Policy by the Numbers" Blog
http://j.mp/ucuW0U  (Google - Policy by the Numbers) [via NNSquad]

  "As a computer scientist and engineer, I've always been fascinated by the
  process that determines how policies and institutions are created.  Unlike
  computing systems, policymaking is anything but binary. An unpredictable
  combination of special interests, money, hot topics, loyalties and many
  other factors shape legislation that passes into law.  Now, more than
  ever, we need to use data to build sound policy frameworks that facilitate
  innovative breakthroughs. In order to inspire confidence in the future
  (and the markets), governments have to lead by using today's facts to
  place big bets on-not against-a better tomorrow."

------------------------------

Date: December 19, 2011 4:26:31 PM PST
From: Brett Glass <brett_at_private>
Subject: Internet Hysteria: Is the US Losing Its Edge?

  [Brent Glass via Dewayne Hendricks via Dave Farber's IP]
Here's an article that might interest readers of the your list. In it, Scott
Wallsten and Amy Smorodin track the incidence of claims that an event, a
technology, or a piece of legislation will be the "end of the Internet" or
"break the Internet," and propose an Internet Hysteria Index (IHI) to
measure the level of Internet hysteria. The article also expresses concern
that the US may be lagging in the business of spreading Internet hysteria
and could soon be surpassed by other nations, including the UK.  Excerpt and
link below.  Brett Glass

Scott Wallsten, Internet Hysteria: Are We Losing Our Edge?, 15 Dec 2011

>From Anthony Wiener's wiener to the FCC's brave stand on Americans' shameful
inability to turn down the damn volume by themselves, 2011 has been a big
year for tech and communications policy. But how has one of the Washington
tech crowd's most important products -- Internet hype -- fared this
year?  In this post, we seek to answer this crucial question.

The Internet Hysteria Index

The Internet is without doubt the most powerful inspiration for hyperbole in
the history of mankind. Some extol the Internet's greatness, like Howard
Dean, who called the Internet "the most important tool for re-democratizing
the world since Gutenberg invented the printing press."[1] Others fret about
the future, like Canada's Office of Privacy Commissioner, who claimed,
"Nothing in society poses as grave a threat to privacy as the Internet
Service Provider."[2]

Sometimes the hyperbole is justified. For example, thanks to Twitter,
attendees at this past summer's TPI Aspen Summit were privy to a steady
stream of misinformation even before the DC-area earthquake stopped.[3]

In the same spirit, we present the Internet Hysteria Index (IHI). The IHI,
which the DOJ and FCC should take care not to confuse with the HHI, is the
most rigorous and flexible tool ever conceived for gauging the Internet's
"worry zeitgeist". It's rigorous[4] because it uses numbers and flexible[5]
because you can interpret it in so many different ways that it won't
threaten your preconceived ideas no matter what you believe.

The IHI has two components. The first tracks fears of an unrecognizable, but
certainly Terminator-esque, future Internet. We count the number of times
the exact phrases "the end of the internet as we know it" and "break the
internet" appear in Nexis news searches each year since 2000.

Figure 1 shows that 2011 produced a bumper crop of "break the internet"
stories, mostly related to the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP
Act. The spike in 2006 reflects a wave of Net Neutrality stories after
AT&T's then-CEO proclaimed that "what they [content providers] would like
to do is use my pipes free, and I ain't going to let them do that because
we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it."

As our research illustrates, the "End of the Internet" hyperbole shows a
healthy, generally upward trend, reflecting the effectiveness of our
collective fretting and hand-wringing. Our data do not allow us to
identify[6] whether the trend is due to clever Washington PR, lazy hacks
retreading old lines, real concerns, or collusion among interest groups
simply ensuring they can all stay in business by responding to each other.

More at:

http://www.techpolicyinstitute.org/blog/2011/12/internet-hysteria-%E2%80%93=
-are-we-losing-our-edge/

------------------------------

Date: Fri, 9 Dec 2011 09:52:45 -0500
From: Dave Farber <dave_at_private>
Subject: BufferBloat: What's Wrong with the Internet?

BufferBloat: What's Wrong with the Internet?
A discussion with Vint Cerf, Van Jacobson, Nick Weaver, and Jim Gettys
<http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2076798> [via Dave Farber's IP]

Internet delays are now as common as they are maddening. That means they end
up affecting system engineers just like all the rest of us. And when system
engineers get irritated, they often go looking for what's at the root of the
problem. Take Jim Gettys, for example. His slow home network had repeatedly
proved to be the source of considerable frustration, so he set out to
determine what was wrong, and he even coined a term for what he found:
bufferBloat.

BufferBloat refers to excess buffering inside a network, resulting in high
latency and reduced throughput. Some buffering is needed; it provides space
to queue packets waiting for transmission, thus minimizing data loss. In the
past, the high cost of memory kept buffers fairly small, so they filled
quickly and packets began to drop shortly after the link became saturated,
signaling to the communications protocol the presence of congestion and thus
the need for compensating adjustments.

Because memory now is significantly cheaper than it used to be, buffering
has been overdone in all manner of network devices, without consideration
for the consequences. Manufacturers have reflexively acted to prevent any
and all packet loss and, by doing so, have inadvertently defeated a critical
TCP congestion-detection mechanism, with the result being worsened
congestion and increased latency.

Now that the problem has been diagnosed, people are working feverishly to
fix it. This case study considers the extent of the bufferbloat problem and
its potential implications. Working to steer the discussion is Vint Cerf,
popularly known as one of the "fathers of the Internet." As the co-designer
of the TCP/IP protocols, Cerf did indeed play a key role in developing the
Internet and related packet data and security technologies while at Stanford
University from 1972-1976 and with DARPA (the U.S. Department of Defense's
Advanced Research Projects Agency) from 1976-1982. He currently serves as
Google's chief Internet evangelist.

Van Jacobson, presently a research fellow at PARC where he leads the
networking research program, is also central to this discussion. Considered
one of the world's leading authorities on TCP, he helped develop the RED
(random early detection) queue management algorithm that has been widely
credited with allowing the Internet to grow and meet ever-increasing
throughput demands over the years. Prior to joining PARC, Jacobson was a
chief scientist at Cisco Systems and later at Packet Design Networks.

Also participating is Nick Weaver, a researcher at ICSI (International
Computer Science Institute in Berkeley where he was part of the team that
developed Netalyzr, a tool that analyzes network connections and has been
instrumental in detecting bufferbloat and measuring its impact across the
Internet.

Rounding out the discussion is Gettys, who edited the HTTP/1.1 specification
and was a co-designer of the X Window System. He now is a member of the
technical staff at Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs, where he focuses on systems
design and engineering, protocol design, and free software development.

VINT CERF What caused you to do the analysis that led you to conclude you
had problems with your home network related to buffers in intermediate
devices?

JIM GETTYS I was running some bandwidth tests on an old IPsec (Internet
Protocol Security)-like device that belongs to Bell Labs and observed
latencies of as much as 1.2 seconds whenever the device was running as fast
it could. That didn't entirely surprise me, but then I happened to run the
same test without the IPsec box in the way, and I ended up with the same
result. With 1.2-second latency accompanied by horrible jitter, my home
network obviously needed some help. The rule of thumb for good telephony is
150-millisecond latency at most, and my network had nearly 10 times that
much.

My first thought was that the problem might relate to a feature called
PowerBoost that comes as part of my home service from Comcast. That led me
to drop a note to Rich Woundy at Comcast since his name appears on the
Internet draft for that feature. He lives in the next town over from me, so
we arranged to get together for lunch. During that lunch, Rich provided me
with several pieces to the puzzle. To begin with, he suggested my problem
might have to do with the excessive buffering in a device in my path rather
than with the PowerBoost feature. He also pointed out that ICSI has a great
tool called Netalyzr that helps you figure out what your buffering is.
Also, much to my surprise, he said a number of ISPs had told him they were
running without any queue management whatsoever=97that is, they weren't
running RED on any of their routers or edge devices.

The very next day I managed to get a wonderful trace. I had been having
trouble reproducing the problem I'd experienced earlier, but since I was
using a more recent cable modem this time around, I had a trivial one-line
command for reproducing the problem. The resulting SmokePing plot clearly
showed the severity of the problem, and that motivated me to take a
packet-capture so I could see just what in the world was going on. About a
week later, I saw basically the same signature on a Verizon FiOS [a bundled
home communications service operating over a fiber network], and that
surprised me. Anyway, it became clear that what I'd been experiencing on my
home network wasn't unique to cable modems.

VC I assume you weren't the only one making noises about these sorts of
problems?

JG I'd been hearing similar complaints all along. In fact, Dave Reed
[Internet network architect, now with SAP Labs] about a year earlier had
reported problems in 3G networks that also appeared to be caused by
excessive buffering. He was ultimately ignored when he publicized his
concerns, but I've since been able to confirm that Dave was right. In his
case, he would see daily high latency without much packet loss during the
day, and then the latency would fall back down again at night as flow on
the overall network dropped.

Dave Clark [Internet network architect, currently senior research scientist
at MIT] had noticed that the DSLAM (Digital Subscriber Line Access
Multiplexer) his micro-ISP runs had way too much buffering=97leading to as
much as six seconds of latency. And this is something he'd observed six
years earlier, which is what had led him to warn Rich Woundy of the
possible problem.

VC Perhaps there's an important life lesson here suggesting you may not
want to simply throw away outliers on the grounds they're probably just
flukes. When outliers show up, it might be a good idea to find out why.

NICK WEAVER But when testing for this particular problem, the outliers
actually prove to be the good networks.

JG Without Netalyzr, I never would have known for sure whether what I'd
been observing was anything more than just a couple of flukes. After seeing
the Netalyzr data, however, I could see how widespread the problem really
was. I can still remember the day when I first saw the data for the
Internet as a whole plotted out. That was rather horrifying.

NW It's actually a pretty straightforward test that allowed us to capture
all that data. In putting together Netalyzr at ICSI, we started out with a
design philosophy that one anonymous commenter later captured very nicely:
"This brings new meaning to the phrase, 'Bang it with a wrench.'"
Basically, we just set out to hammer on everything=97except we weren't
interested in doing a bandwidth test since there were plenty of good ones
out there already.

I remembered, however, that Nick McKeown and others had ranted about how
amazingly over-buffered home networks often proved to be, so buffering
seemed like a natural thing to test for. It turns out that would also give
us a bandwidth test as a side consequence. Thus we developed a pretty
simple test. Over just a 10-second period, it sends a packet and then waits
for a packet to return. Then each time it receives a packet back, it sends
two more. It either sends large packets and receives small ones in return,
or it sends small packets and receives large ones. During the last five
seconds of that 10-second period, it just measures the latency under load
in comparison to the latency without load. It's essentially just a simple
way to stress out the network.

We didn't get around to analyzing all that data until a few months after
releasing the tool. Then what we saw were these very pretty graphs that
gave us reasonable confidence that a huge fraction of the networks we had
just tested could not possibly exhibit good behavior under load. That was a
very scary discovery.

JG Horrifying, I think.

NW It wasn't quite so horrifying for me because I'd already effectively
taken steps to mitigate the problem on my own network=97namely, I'd paid for
a higher class of service on my home network specifically to get better
behavior under load. You can do that because the buffers are all sized in
bytes. So if you pay for the 4x bandwidth service, your buffer will be 4x
smaller in terms of delay, and that ends up acting as a boundary on how bad
things can get under load. And I've taken steps to reduce other potential
problems =97 by installing multiple access points in my home, for example.

JG The problem is that the next generation of equipment will come out with
even larger buffers. That's part of why I was having trouble initially
reproducing this problem with DOCSIS (Data over Cable Service Interface
Specification) 3.0 modems. That is, because I had even more extreme
buffering than I'd had before, it took even longer to fill up the buffer
and get it to start misbehaving.

VC What I think you've just outlined is a measure of goodness that later
proved to be exactly the wrong thing to do. At first, the equipment
manufacturers believed that adding more buffers would be a good thing,
primarily to handle increased traffic volumes and provide for fair access
to capacity. Of course, it has also become increasingly difficult to buy a
chip that doesn't have a lot of memory in it.

NW Also, to the degree that people have been testing at all, they've been
testing for latency or bandwidth. The problem we're discussing is one of
latency under load, so if you test only quiescent latency, you won't notice
it; and if you test only bandwidth, you'll never notice it. Unless you're
testing specifically for behavior under load, you won't even be aware this
is happening.

VAN JACOBSON I think there's a deeper problem. We know the cause of these
big queues is data piling up wherever there's a fast-to-slow transition in
the network. That generally happens either going from the Internet core out
to a subscriber (as with YouTube videos) or from the subscriber back into
the core, where a fast home network such as a 54-megabit wireless hits a
slow 1- to 2-megabit Internet connection.

[snip]

Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: <http://www.warpspeed.com/wordpress>
Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=3Dnow

------------------------------

Date: Tue, 20 Dec 2011 10:53:56 -0800
From: Lauren Weinstein <lauren_at_private>
Subject: Can the U.S. Government close social media accounts?

Can the U.S. Government close social media accounts? [via NNSquad]
http://j.mp/s4Ek1i  (Salon)

  "The Obama administration and *The New York Times* are teaming up to
  expose and combat the grave threat posed by a Twitter account, purportedly
  operated by the Somali group Shabab, and in doing so, are highlighting the
  simultaneous absurdity and perniciousness of the War on Terror. This
  latest tale of Dark Terrorist Evil began on December 14 when the NYT's
  Jeffrey Gettleman directed intrepid journalistic light on the Twitter
  account maintained under the name "HSMPress," which claims to be the press
  office of Harakat al-Shabab al-Mujahedeen, the Shabab's full name."

------------------------------

Date: Mon, 19 Dec 2011 14:07:34 -0800
From: Lauren Weinstein <lauren_at_private>
Subject: Computing On Encrypted Databases Without Ever Decrypting Them

Computing On Encrypted Databases Without Ever Decrypting Them
http://j.mp/w0NLE3  (Forbes)

  "Now the Google- and Citigroup-funded work of three MIT scientists holds
  the promise of solving that long-nagging issue in some of the computing
  world's most common applications. CryptDB, a piece of database software
  the researchers presented in a paper (PDF here) at the Symposium on
  Operating System Principles in October, allows users to send queries to an
  encrypted set of data and get almost any answer they need from it without
  ever decrypting the stored information, a trick that keeps the info safe
  from hackers, accidental loss and even snooping administrators. And while
  it's not the first system to offer that kind of magically flexible
  cryptography, it may be the first practical one, taking a fraction of a
  second to produce an answer where other systems that perform the same
  encrypted functions would require thousands of years."

CryptDB: Protecting Confidentiality with Encrypted Query Processing
http://j.mp/u1INfV  (MIT [PDF])

  "It works by executing SQL queries over encrypted data using a collection
  of efficient SQL-aware encryption schemes. CryptDB can also chain
  encryption keys to user passwords, so that a data item can be decrypted
  only by using the password of one of the users with access to that
  data. As a result, a database administrator never gets access to decrypted
  data, and even if all servers are compromised, an adversary cannot decrypt
  the data of any user who is not logged in."

Potentially a *very* big deal.
  [Network Neutrality Squad: http://www.nnsquad.org]

------------------------------

Date: Sat, 10 Dec 2011 23:56:09 -0700
From: Jim Reisert AD1C <jjreisert_at_private>
Subject: 4 Romanians Indicted for Hacking Subway, Other Retailers (Kim Zetter)

Kim Zetter, WiReD.com, 8 Dec 2011

Four Romanian nationals have been charged with hacking card-processing
systems at more than 150 Subway restaurants and 50 other unnamed retailers,
according to an indictment unsealed Thursday.

The hackers compromised the credit-card data of more than 80,000 customers
and used the data to make millions of dollars of unauthorized purchases,
according to the indictment (.pdf).  From 2008 until May 2011, the hackers
allegedly hacked into more than 200 point-of-sale (POS) systems in order to
install a keystroke logger and other sniffing software that would steal
customer credit, debit and gift-card numbers. They also placed backdoors on
the systems to provide ongoing access.

The hackers allegedly scanned the Internet to identify vulnerable POS
systems with certain remote desktop software applications installed on them,
and then used the applications to log into the targeted POS system, either
by guessing the passwords or using password-cracking software programs.

  http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/12/romanians-subway-hack/

Jim Reisert AD1C, <jjreisert@private>, http://www.ad1c.us

------------------------------

Date: Sat, 10 Dec 2011 23:31:50 -0700
From: Jim Reisert AD1C <jjreisert_at_private>
Subject: Ambulances turned away as computer virus infects Gwinnett Medical
  Center computers (Misty Williams and Joel Anderson)

Misty Williams and Joel Anderson, *The Atlanta Journal-Constitution*,
9 Dec 2011

Gwinnett Medical Center on Friday confirmed it has instructed ambulances to
take patients to other area hospitals when possible after discovering a
system-wide computer virus that slowed patient registration and other
operations at its campuses in Lawrenceville and Duluth.

Staff members discovered the virus Wednesday afternoon and have been working
since then with outside I.T. experts to fix the problem, spokeswoman Beth
Okun said. In the meantime, the health system has been forced to switch back
to paperwork.

https://www.ajc.com/news/gwinnett/ambulances-turned-away-as-1255750.html

1. The article doesn't say how the virus was able to infect the medical
   center's computers.  [Does that need much explanation for RISKS readers?]

2. Why didn't they have adequate anti-virus protection?  If one of our
   computers at home gets infected, no one is likely to die as a result.
   [AV "protection" typically fails to give complete coverage.]

3. The article was posted on Friday night, and the virus was discovered on
   Wednesday afternoon, so almost 2 days later they still don't have things
   patched up?  [Surprise?]

Jim Reisert AD1C, <jjreisert@private>, http://www.ad1c.us
  [Inserted comments from PGN, who could not resist.]

------------------------------

Date: Sun, 18 Dec 2011 20:57:09 -0800
From: Lauren Weinstein <lauren_at_private>
Subject: Hollywood's pirate cure is worse than the disease (Jack Shafer)

Jack Shafer, Reuters blog 16 Dec 2011
http://j.mp/w1Ja2U  (Reuters)  [via NNSquad]

  "So grand is the entertainment complex's umbrage that I half expect its
  next move will be to petition the Department of Justice for the authority
  to shut down the electric utilities that provide power to any and all
  computers it suspects are pinching its intellectual property."

------------------------------

Date: Tue, 20 Dec 2011 6:10 PM
From: EFF Press <press_at_private>
Subject: Protect Yourself from Intrusive Laptop/Phone Searches at U.S. Border

Electronic Frontier Foundation Media Release

Marcia Hofmann, Senior Staff Attorney Electronic Frontier Foundation
   marcia_at_private +1 415 436-9333 x116

Seth Schoen, Senior Staff Technologist Electronic Frontier Foundation
   seth_at_private +1 415 436-9333 x107

Protect Yourself from Intrusive Laptop and Phone Searches at the U.S. Border
EFF's New Guide Helps Travelers Defend Their Data Privacy

San Francisco - Anytime you travel internationally, you risk a broad,
invasive search of your laptop, phone, and other digital devices --
including the copying of your data and seizing of your property for an
indefinite time.  To help travelers protect themselves and their private
information during the busy holiday travel period, the Electronic Frontier
Foundation (EFF) released a new report today with important guidance for
safeguarding your personal data at the U.S border.

Thanks to protections enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, the government
generally can't snoop through your laptop for no reason.  But the federal
government claims those privacy protections don't cover travelers at the
U.S. border, allowing agents to take an electronic device, search through
all the files, and keep it for further scrutiny -- without any suspicion of
wrongdoing whatsoever.  For business travelers, that could expose sensitive
information like trade secrets, doctor-patient and attorney-client
communications, and research and business strategies.  For others, the data
at risk includes personal health histories, financial records, and private
messages and photos of family and friends.  EFF's new report, "Defending
Privacy at the U.S. Border: A Guide for Travelers Carrying Digital Devices,"
outlines potential ways to protect that private information, including
minimizing the data you carry with you and employing encryption.

"Different people need different kinds of precautions for protecting their
personal information when they travel," said EFF Senior Staff Technologist
Seth Schoen.  "Our guide helps you assess your personal risks and concerns,
and makes recommendations for various scenarios.  If you are traveling over
the U.S. border soon, you should read our guide now and get started on
taking precautions before your trip."

Over the past few years, Congress has weighed several bills to protect
travelers from suspicionless searches at the border, but none has had enough
support to become law.  You can join EFF in calling on the Department of
Homeland Security to publish clear guidelines for what they do with
sensitive traveler information collected in digital searches by signing our
petition.  You can also test your knowledge about travelers' privacy rights
and help spread the word about the risks by taking our border privacy quiz.

"We store detailed records of our lives on our laptops and our phones.  But
the courts have diminished our constitutional right to privacy at the
border," said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Marcia Hofmann.  "It's time for
travelers to take action and protect themselves and their private
information during international trips."

For Defending Privacy at the U.S. Border: A Guide for Travelers Carrying
Digital Devices:
https://www.eff.org/wp/defending-privacy-us-border-guide-travelers-carrying-digital-devices

To take the border privacy quiz:
https://www.eff.org/pages/border-search-quiz

To sign the petition:
https://action.eff.org/o/9042/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=8341

For this release:
https://www.eff.org/press/releases/protect-yourself-intrusive-laptop-and-phone-searches-us-border

------------------------------

Date: Mon, 12 Dec 2011 10:21:49 PST
From: "Peter G. Neumann" <neumann_at_private>
Subject: Daniel Kahneman: Thinking, Fast and Slow

Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 499 pp., 2011
  [with extensive appendices, notes and index]

Kahneman is a Nobel Prize winner in economics, challenging the rational
model of judgment and decision making.  This book examines interrelations
between fast, intuitive, and emotional thinking on one hand, and slow, more
deliberative and logical thinking on the other hand.  The book will
"transform the way you think about thinking."

The RISKS connection is quite evident.  (The index has two dozen lines of
entries on risk assessment, risk aversion, and risk seeking.)  However, the
book is written from a holistic perspective that is extraordinary in its
scope.  To me, the fast-slow dichotomy seems to bear a resemblance to
right-brain (e.g., intuitive) vs left-brain (e.g., logical, rational,
linear) behavior, but goes much deeper than anything I had seen along those
lines before.

The back jacket has a strong set of squibs, including this one;

 * This book is a tour de force by an intellectual giant; it is readable,
   wise and deep.  Buy it fast.  Read it slowly and repeatedly.  (Richard
   H. Thaler)

------------------------------

Date: Mon, 6 Jun 2011 20:01:16 -0900
From: RISKS-request_at_private
Subject: Abridged info on RISKS (comp.risks)

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 address from which you NEVER send mail!
=> SUBMISSIONS: to risks_at_private with meaningful SUBJECT: line.
 *** NOTE: Including the string "notsp" at the beginning or end of the subject
 *** line will be very helpful in separating real contributions from spam.
 *** This attention-string may change, so watch this space now and then.
=> ARCHIVES: ftp://ftp.sri.com/risks for current volume
     or ftp://ftp.sri.com/VL/risks for previous VoLume
 http://www.risks.org takes you to Lindsay Marshall's searchable archive at
 newcastle: http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/VL.IS.html gets you VoLume, ISsue.
   Lindsay has also added to the Newcastle catless site a palmtop version
   of the most recent RISKS issue and a WAP version that works for many but
   not all telephones: http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/w/r
 <http://the.wiretapped.net/security/info/textfiles/risks-digest/> .
==> PGN's comprehensive historical Illustrative Risks summary of one liners:
    <http://www.csl.sri.com/illustrative.html> for browsing,
    <http://www.csl.sri.com/illustrative.pdf> or .ps for printing
  is no longer maintained up-to-date except for recent election problems.
==> Special Offer to Join ACM for readers of the ACM RISKS Forum:
    <http://www.acm.org/joinacm1>

------------------------------

End of RISKS-FORUM Digest 26.67
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Received on Tue Dec 20 2011 - 18:21:34 PST

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