Official blog of writer and enterpreneur-CHAMAKHE MAURIENI.
His latest work is titled FACEBOOK IS DECEPTION(VOLUME 1 AND 2) and it is available on Smashwords online bookstore,on the link below:
Volume 1:http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/149463
Volume 2:http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/149490
**Chamakhe Maurieni is a Moroccan born writer, author, student and graduate of psychology.
A new tool is allowing criminals across the world to break
into cars without leaving a trace, and now that device has made its way
to Winnipeg.
The new device can be purchased online for about $5 and sends an
electromagnetic pulse through a car’s key area to unlock the vehicle.
Winnipegger Rick Henzel had no idea the technology existed, until his car was broken into early Sunday morning.
“We did find the glove box open, insurance papers stolen,” said Henzel.
At first, he thought his wife had left the doors unlocked, but a
neighbour told him he had phoned the police early that morning when he
heard noise outside.
Luckily, the whole thing was caught on tape. Henzel had installed
security cameras on his property about a year ago when his car was
broken into previously.
“They come running up into the screen. It’s a free for all,” he said.
“They’re in that car as well and away they go. Just like that.”
Thieves can be seen applying a device to a car and then opening the door as if it is unlocked.
“It makes you feel a bit vulnerable to be honest with you because you feel like a victim,” said Henzel.
Michael Legary is a security expert with Seccuris. He said thieves
are using the $5 devices to hack into vehicles’ computer systems.
"So just like we have to worry about our computers being hacked, our
cars can be hacked as well,” said Legary. “That's something we didn't
have to worry about a decade ago."
The device sends an electromagnetic pulse into the vehicle, tricking
it into unlocking the door, much like a keyless entry key fob.
He said according to the device’s manufacturer, at least 19 of the
devices have been shipped to Winnipeg in the past three months.
Legary said while you can’t prevent thieves from getting into your
vehicle, you can keep them from getting your belongings, and he
recommends not leaving anything, even your insurance papers, in your car
unattended.
The device can be thwarted if the car’s keyless entry system is disabled, but you’ll have to visit a mechanic to have that done.
Henzel has reported the theft to police but said police officers appeared baffled by the device.
Two Australian researchers have found that CSIRO-developed GMO wheat which was created to
silence particular genes within the crop can also silence certain rNA
and DNA sequences in the human body, causing fatality as early as age
five or six. The researchers are calling the GMO wheat a
‘safety’ issue, which requires more profundity before the genetically
modified crop is planted in more areas of Australia and offered in
products in grocery stores.
Professor Jack Heinemann of the University of Canterbury, NZ, and
Associate Professor Judy Carman, a biochemist at Flinders University,
released their expert scientific opinions on
the safety of CSIRO’s GM wheat at a press conference in Melbourne. The
Safe Food Foundation & Institute has a video of their conference, here.
While studies on the wheat have been released by CSIRO, the
scientists point out that there are some grave holes in the overall
assessment of the crop that have serious repercussions for people who
consume it.
According to the Heinemann and Carman, extended testing should be performed before the wheat is put on store shelves.
“We firmly believe that long term chronic toxicological
feeding studies are required in addition to the detailed requests . . .
for the DNA sequences used. . .The industry routinely does feeding
studies anyway, so it should not be too much more difficult to do long
term (lifetime) studies and include inhalation studies.”
“The technology is too new,” the scientists said in the press
conference, “What we found is that the molecules created in this wheat
intended to silence wheat genes can match human genes and through
ingestion can possibly silence human genes. We found over 770 pages of
potential matches between the genes in wheat and the human genome.” This
is the cause for concern.
The issue may end up in Australian courts if the company does not
respond to the scientist’s and publics concerns about the GM wheat.
The greatest intellectual crisis in politicized scientific
issues is when inventors fail to anticipate the negative side effects of
their creations. For example, the biochemists who manufactured early
pesticides were not entirely aware of the ecological impacts of their
work. The scientists who created the technology to produce electricity
from fossil fuels could not have predicted the rise of acid rain, global
warming, and the public health impact of pollutants. Genetically
modified foods are the most recent example of this frightening trend.
Last week there was a massive protest against Monsanto,
one of the chief developers of genetically modified crops. While
Monsanto is a probelmatic company, and there are serious dangers
associated with genetically modified crops, there are situations when
the technology is appropriate. The question should not be whether or not
to create genetically modified crops, but when it is appropriate to do
so.
A genetically modified crop is a food that contains human-inserted
genes. Scientists select genes with a specific purpose in mind, such as
increasing a crop's resistance to heat. The food industry often takes
genes that would not otherwise be found in a species and inserts them
into the organism’s genetic makeup. It is a common misconception that
such gene insertion does not occur in nature, when in fact viruses are
capable of inserting genes into their hosts. What this all means is that
organisms can be designed to fulfill a variety of purposes.
The biggest problem with genetically modified crops is the threat
they pose to genetic diversity. When managing a species it is important
to consider the genetic diversity of the population. The genetic
diversity of a species can be thought of as the species' tool box for
dealing with threats. Evolution works by selecting genes that increase
the ability for a species to survive and reproduce. If a disease wipes
out a chunk of a population, the survivors will pass on their
disease-resistant genes to their offspring. However, if all the members
of a species possess similar genes, their ability to survive threats
becomes greatly diminished.
The scary thing about genetically modified organisms is that they
have the potential to reduce the already limited amount of genetic
diversity in individual crops to a miscroscopic level. If a small number
of strains of a GMO (genetically modified organism) became dominant in
agriculture, it would seriously imperil our food supply — a single
disease could wipe out an entire food group. Humans cannot possibly
anticipate every threat, so it's important to limit the spread of
genetically modified foods. Given the importance of genetic diversity,
genetically modified crops should only be used on a limited basis to
address specific problem.
The question then becomes what modifications, if any, are worth
considering. Genes that would increase the yield of crops would save
lives in countries with starving populations, and crops that could grow
in polluted or poor soils should be considered as well.
The merits of GMO technology must be considered on a case-by-case
basis. On one hand, GMOs pose a serious threat to crops' genetic
diversity. On the other, GMOs could allow us to feed the world's hungry
and grow crops in inhospitable soil. We must recognize the threat of
GMOs while also embracing the solutions they offer.
Black rice – revered in ancient China but overlooked in the West –
could be one of the greatest "superfoods", scientists believe.
The cereal is low in sugar but packed with healthy fibre and plant
compounds that combat heart disease and cancer. It was known as
"forbidden rice" in ancient China because only nobles were allowed to
eat it. Today black rice is mainly used in Asia for food decoration,
noodles, sushi and desserts.
"Just a spoonful of black rice bran contains more health-promoting
anthocyanin antioxidants than are found in a spoonful of blueberries,
but with less sugar, and more fibre and vitamin E antioxidants," said Dr
Zhimin Xu the food scientist who led the research.
"If berries are used to boost health, why not black rice and black
rice bran? Especially, black rice bran would be a unique and economical
material to increase consumption of health-promoting antioxidants."
Bran is the hard outer coating of a cereal grain. When rice is
processed, millers remove the outer layers of the grains to produce
brown rice or more refined white rice.
Research suggests that plant antioxidants, which mop up harmful
molecules, can help protect arteries and prevent the DNA damage that
leads to cancer.
Food manufacturers could potentially use black rice bran or bran
extracts to make breakfast cereals, beverages, cakes, biscuits and other
foods healthier, said Dr Xu, from Louisiana State University in Baton
Rouge, US.
The scientists presented their findings yesterday at the 240th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society in Boston.
I recently stumbled onto a book that opened my eyes in many ways to the
misinformation plaguing Americans regarding healthy eating, particularly
where it concerns brain health. The book, Grain Brain,
by Dr. David Perlmutter, is mind-blowing—no pun intended—and disruptive
to some long-standing beliefs about what our bodies require for optimal
health.
"The brain thrives on a fat-rich, low-carbohydrate diet,
which unfortunately is relatively uncommon in human populations today,"
he says. Carbohydrates typically thought of as healthy, even brown
rice, 100% whole grain bread, or quinoa—mainstays of many of the most
health-conscious kitchens—cause disorders like dementia, ADHD,
chronic headaches, and Alzheimer’s, over a lifetime of consumption. By
removing these carbohydrates from the diet—harbingers of inflammation,
the true source of problems that plague our brains and hearts—and
increasing the amount of fat and cholesterol we consume, we can not only
protect our most valuable organ, but also potentially, undo years of
damage. Cholesterol, for example, long vilified by the media and medical
community, actually promotes neurogenesis (the birth of new
brain cells) and communication between neurons, to the degree that
studies have shown that higher levels of serum cholesterol correlates to
more robust cognitive prowess.
The book is also not without serious consideration for
cardiovascular system, citing study after study to reaffirm that it’s
not fat and cholesterol, but carbohydrates and certain fats—and
not the fats that you would think—that are the true enemies of heart
and vascular health. Guidelines to eating for above-average health and
longevity are not without nuance, but Grain Brain lays out an
easy-to-understand roadmap packed with the latest science in a
colloquial writing style, never once doubting the ability of its
audience to keep up.
As the only doctor in the country who is both
a board-certified neurologist and Fellow of The American Board of
Nutrition, he deftly covers a topic rarely discussed: How what we eat
affects the health of our brain. And considering that deaths from Alzheimer's increased 68 percent between 2000 and 2010, the timing of Grain Brain couldn’t be better.
After reading it, I couldn't wait to sit down with him for a Q&A. (My questions are in bold.) You’ve
stated that carbs of any kind, from natural sugars in fruit to the
complex carbs in quinoa and a whole wheat bagel, are detrimental to the
brain, to the point that the most serious degenerative brain disorders,
including Alzheimer’s disease, are now being referred to as “Type 3
diabetes”. What’s the science behind this?
Carbohydrate
consumption leads to blood sugar elevation obviously in the short term,
but also, in the long term as well. Persistently challenging the
pancreas to secrete insulin to deal with dietary carbohydrate ultimately
leads to insulin resistance, a condition directly associated with
increased risk for dementia. What’s worse, insulin resistance is the
forerunner of type 2 diabetes, a condition associated with a doubling of
Alzheimer’s risk. In a recent report in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease.,
Mayo Clinic researchers showed that individuals favoring carbohydrates
in their diets had a remarkable 89% increased risk for developing
dementia as contrasted to those whose diets contained the most fat.
Having the highest levels of fat consumption was actually found to be
associated with an incredible 44% reduction in risk for developing
dementia.
So-called “complex carbs” may actually represent a more
significant threat to health than simple sugar in that they may not only
raise blood sugar, but keep it elevated for a more prolonged period of
time. Foods can be evaluated by their glycemic index which measures not
only how high blood sugar will be elevated by the consumption of a
particular food, but also takes into account how long it will have this
effect. So the higher the glycemic index, the more damaging are the
effects of elevated blood sugar. Whole grain bread for example has a
dramatically higher glycemic index when compared to pure table sugar.
Ultimately,
continued challenges of our bodies with high glycemic index foods leads
to elevation of fasting blood sugars. This is of paramount importance
as recently published in New England Journal of Medicine.
In this report, researchers found that a fasting blood sugar even in
the range that most doctors would consider to be normal, levels far
below what would qualify for the diagnosis, are powerfully associated
with developing dementia.
In your book you challenge some
of the most commonly accepted dogmas regarding nutrition, namely that
both saturated fat and cholesterol are not only benign, but imperative
to brain health. If someone is suffering from brain dysfunction, would
you actually recommend that they consume more red meat, whole eggs,
coconut oil as treatment?
Two forms of fat that are
vitally important for brain health are cholesterol and saturated fat. In
the Mayo Clinic study mentioned above, it was found that those
individuals consuming the most saturated fat experienced a 36% reduction
in risk for developing dementia. And this comes on the heels of data
now indicating that saturated fat consumption has absolutely no
relevance in the area of cardiovascular risk as recently described by
Dr. Glen Lawrence in the journal, Advances in Nutrition.
Saturated
fat is a fundamental building block for brain cells. It’s certainly
interesting to consider that one of the richest sources of saturated fat
in nature is human breast milk.
Similarly, cholesterol is vital for a well functioning brain. Cholesterol functions as a brain protective antioxidant.
It is the raw material from which our bodies make vitamin D, a
fundamental player in preserving brain function. In addition,
cholesterol is the precursor for the sexhormones estrogen, progesterone and testosterone
– all of which contribute to healthy brain function. While the brain
constitutes about 2-3% of our total body weight, an impressive 25% of
the body’s cholesterol is found in the brain. So when the FDA last year
began requiring consumer warnings on certain cholesterol lowering medications related to memory decline and other cognitive issues, it wasn’t surprising. Indeed, it has now been shown
that in the elderly, those folks whose cholesterol levels are the
highest may have as much as a 70% risk reduction for dementia.
So
yes, I am absolutely an advocate for grass-fed beef, pasture raised
eggs, and coconut oil is on the top of my list. Getting these life
sustaining, brain nurturing fats back on the plate while substantially
reducing carbohydrates paves the way to brain preservation, enhancement
of function and reducing the risk for Alzheimer’s disease – a disease
for which there is no treatment whatsoever.
I’ve read many reports about statins, drugs
commonly prescribed to lower cholesterol, like Lipitor—netting
pharmaceutical companies $35 billion in sales in 2010—producing
dementia-like effects in patients, which seems like an awful side
effect. Why has the public not made a bigger deal of this?
In general, the public knowledge base and thus decision-making
behaviors are far more influenced by advertisement than with current
science. The widespread demonization of cholesterol has been incredibly
monetized as you well point out. My mission is to offer up the other
side of this debate to the public forum so caveat emptor can more
appropriately apply.
You reference many studies that challenge conventional wisdom
about heart health, most interestingly that people with high
cholesterol and low cholesterol tend to have just as many heart attacks
and die just as frequently. Should a diagnosis of “high cholesterol”
from ones internist be alarming? Are there any cases in which it should
be controlled by medicine or diet?
Over the past decade
we have witnessed a changing landscape in terms of refinement of the
cholesterol markers as they relate to cardiovascular risk. Whereas
cholesterol itself was first targeted, emphasis soon moved to LDL as it
was given the name “bad cholesterol,” despite the fact that LDL’s role
is to deliver life sustaining cholesterol to every one of our body’s
cells. I’ll say parenthetically that whatever marketing team
attached the “bad “ surname to LDL must have been well rewarded! We
then saw emphasis move to the importance of so-called “particle size” as
being an important marker of cardiovascular risk – and rightfully so,
size really does matter.
Now the focus of attention has gone back
to LDL in recognizing that it truly represents a potent risk factor when
it has become oxidized. Oxidation represents the damage that can occur
to proteins by the action of chemicals called free radicals. So,
measurement of oxidized LDL is now showing up on comprehensive heart
disease blood panels, and with good reason. The empowering science here
is that LDL gets oxidized when it is bound to sugar, a process called
glycation. And this process is directly related to fasting blood sugar
and therefore relates to a person’s choice to consume carbohydrates – or
not. In evaluating cholesterol in and of itself, I do not define any
upper limit in terms of cardiac liability.
A recent report correlated higher intake of omega 3 fish oils—which we know from Grain Brain
to be very healthy and protective to the brain—with a greater incidence
of acquiring prostate cancer. I was always under the assumption that
the more omega 3's you could consume, the better (while minimizing omega
6's, their pro-inflammatory cousin). What's your take on the study?
The
study had actually nothing to do with taking fish oils or any
supplement for that matter. And yet spinmeisters would have you believe
that this report dealt with people taking supplements compared to those
who did not. What the study showed was that those men whose one time
measurement of the omega-3 DHA was higher than others were found to have
a miniscule increased risk for developing prostate cancer. The
explanation that the public did not get was that because most men get
their DHA from fish consumption as opposed to supplementation, and that
the vast majority of fish consumed is farm raised, eating farm raised
fish poses a risk for developing prostate cancer. And that is certainly
no surprise.
My grandmother is 96 years old and has never
even heard of gluten. Because of the seemingly overnight hysteria
surrounding this grain protein, some have written it off as a fad. How
do you refute this?
In writing Grain Brain, I reviewed
more than 250 peer-reviewed references, many of which specifically
address this issue and are discussed in great detail. Gluten free isn’t
new or a fad. It’s the diet that humans have consumed for more than
99.9% of our existence on this planet. I would direct your readers to
recent publication
by my friend and colleague Dr. Alessio Fasano from Harvard. I welcome
the hysteria as it is directing attention to an absolutely fundamental
issue in our modern nutrition.
If someone is not suffering
from celiac disease, and generally feels okay after consuming
bread—even 100% whole grain bread—how do you convince them that wheat is
as detrimental as you claim in the book?
I must and
should defer to the most well respected peer-reviewed literature that
now indicates that gluten consumption leads to the amplification of a
specific protein called zonulin which increases permeability of both the
gut and blood brain barrier as described by Dr. Fasano in the above
reference. Gut permeability activates inflammation and inflammation is a
cornerstone of some of the most pernicious brain disorders including
Alzheimer’s disease, multiple sclerosis, and Parkinson’s disease. What
is so compelling in a very positive light is that this occurs in all
humans and may be the key to a vast number of human maladies including a
vast number of other inflammatory disorders as well as autoimmune
diseases, and even cancer.
In addition, the gluten issue aside,
whole grain bread has an incredibly high glycemic index and this poses
an equally powerful threat to brain health.
What’s your daily diet like? What's currently in your fridge?
I really love to eat and maintain the diet described in Grain Brain.
I generally start my day with a three egg omelet made with kale or
spinach and covered with olive oil. I drink a cup of coffee with
breakfast along with water. At lunch I might have steamed vegetables,
salmon, a green salad and an iced tea. And at dinner I again load up
with above ground vegetables by themselves or along with wild fish or
grass fed beef. I drink one or two glasses of wine each week, but
statistically I should drink more. That’s a work in progress.
As
to your second question, there’s not much in my fridge at home as we try
to keep food as fresh as possible and as of this writing, my wife and I
are traveling.
We asked the most
privacy-aware people we could find what it would take to go off the
radar. Hint: You're going to need to do more than throw away your
laptop.
Nico Sell, the cofounder of a secure communication app called Wickr,
has appeared on television twice. Both times, she wore sunglasses to
prevent viewers from getting a full picture of what she looks like.
Sell, also an organizer of the hacker conference Def Con, places
herself in the top 1% of the “super paranoid.” She doesn’t have a
Facebook account. She keeps the device that pays her tolls in a
transmission-proof envelope when it’s not in use. And she assumes that
every phone call she makes and every email she sends will be searchable
by the general public at some point in the future.
Many of her friends once considered her habits to be of the
tin-foil-hat-wearing variety. But with this summer's revelations of the NSA's broad surveillance program,
they’re starting to look a little more logical. “For the last couple of
months,” Sell says, “My friends that are not in the security industry
come up to me, and I hear this all the time, ‘You were right.’ ”
But even as more people become aware they are being tracked
throughout their daily lives, few understand to what extent. In a recent
Pew Internet study, 37% of respondents said they thought it was
possible to be completely anonymous online. From experts like Sell,
you'll get a different range of answers about whether it's possible to
live without any data trail: "100% no," she says.
The people who have actually attempted to live without being
tracked--most often due to a safety threat--will tell you that security
cameras are just about everywhere, RFID tags seem to be in everything,
and almost any movement results in becoming part of a database. “It’s
basically impossible for you and I to decide, as of tomorrow, I’m going
to remain off the radar and to survive for a month or 12 months,” says
Gunter Ollmann, the CTO of security firm IOActive, who in his former
work with law enforcement had several coworkers who dedicated themselves
to remaining anonymous for the safety of their families. "The amount of
prep work you have to do in order to stay off the radar involves years
of investment leading up to that."
Fast Company interviewed the most tracking-conscious people
we could find about their strategies for staying anonymous to different
degrees. Here are just a handful of daily, offline tasks that get more
complicated if you're avoiding surveillance.
1. Getting Places
A few years ago, a man who goes by the Internet handle “Puking
Monkey” noticed devices reading his toll pass in places where there
weren’t any tolls. He assumed that they were being used to track
drivers’ movements. “People would say, 'Well you don’t know that,
because it doesn’t tell you when it tracks you,'” he tells Fast Company. “I said, 'Okay, I’ll go prove it.' ”
He rigged his pass to make a mooing cow noise every time a device
read his toll payment tag. And sure enough, it went off in front of
Macy’s, near Time Square, and in several other places where there was no
tollbooth in sight.
It turns out the city tracks toll passes in order to obtain real-time traffic information,
a benign enough intention. But what worries people like Puking Monkey
about being tracked is rarely a database’s intended purpose. It's that
someone with access to the database will misuse it, like when NSA
employees have spied on love interests, A U.K. immigration officer once put his wife on a list of terrorist suspects
in order to prevent her from flying into the country. Or that it will
be used for a purpose other than one it was built for, like when social security numbers
were issued for retirement savings and then expanded to become
universal identifiers. Or, most likely, that it will be stolen, like the
many times a hacker group called Anonymous gains access to someone's
personal data and posts it online for public viewing. By one security company's count, in 2012 there were 2,644 reported data breeches involving 267 million records.
In order to stop his toll pass from being tracked, Puking Monkey
keeps it sealed in the foil bag it came in when he's not driving through
a toll. That only stops that data trail (minus toll points). Automatic license plate readers,
often mounted to a police car or street sign, are also logging data
about where cars appear. They typically take photos of every license
plate that passes them and often these photos remain stored in a database for years. Sometimes they are linked with other databases to help solve crimes.
Puking Monkey avoids license-plate readers by keeping his old,
non-reflective license plate, which is more difficult to read than
newer, reflective models. Others who share his concerns salt their
license plates, add bumper guards or otherwise obscure the writing--say
by driving with the hatch down or driving with a trailer hatch
attached—in order to avoid being tracked.
But that still doesn’t account for the tracking devices attached to
the car itself. To identify tires, which can come in handy if they’re
recalled, tire manufacturers insert an RFID tag with a unique code that
can be read from about 20 feet away by an RFID reader. "I have no way to
know if it’s actually being tracked, but there are unique numbers in
those tires that could be used that way," Puking Monkey says.
He uses a camera flash to zap his tires with enough energy to destroy the chips.
2. Buying things
Depending on your level of concern, there are several ways to produce
less data exhaust when making purchases. None of the privacy experts
who I spoke with sign up for loyalty cards, for instance. “It’s the link
between your home address, what you’re purchasing, age, your movements
around the country, when you’re shopping in different locations, that is
tied to purchases you’re making in-store,” Ollmann says. In a recently
publicized example, Target used data collected from loyalty cards to deduce when its customers were pregnant--in some cases, before they had shared the news with their families.
Tom Ritter, a principal security consultant at iSEC Partners, has
come up with a creative way to subvert loyalty tracking without giving
up discounts. When he sees someone has a card on their key chain, he
asks if he can take a photo of the bar code to use with his own
purchases. They get extra points, and he gets discounts without giving
up any of his privacy.
What you buy can paint a pretty good picture of what you’re doing,
and many people aren’t willing to leave that information in a credit
card company's database either. Adam Havey, an artist who makes anti-surveillance gear,
puts all of his purchases on a credit card registered under a fake
name. Then he uses the credit card in his actual name to pay the bill (Update: Harvey clarified that this is a technique he heard about from Julia Angwin, who is writing a book about surveillance). Ollmann buys prepaid gift cards with no attribution back to him to do his online shopping.
The most intense privacy seekers have a strict cash-only
policy--which can mean they need to get paid in cash. At Ollmann’s old
law enforcement job, one employee didn’t get paid, but vaguely “traded
his services for other services.”
“A barter system starts to appear if you want to live without being tracked,” Ollmann says.
3. Having Friends
Friends can be an impediment to a life off the radar. For one, they
probably think they’re doing you a favor when they invite you to a party
using Evite, add you to LinkedIn or Facebook, or keep your information
in a contact book that they sync with their computer.
But from your perspective, as someone trying to remain as untraceable
as possible, they are selling you out. “Basically what they’ve done is
uploaded all of my contact information and connected it to them,” Sell
says.
Same goes for photos, and their geolocation metadata, when they're
added to social networking sites. Sell, with her sunglasses, is not
alone in being concerned about putting her appearance online. At some
security events, where there are often speakers and attendees with
reasons to keep off the radar, organizers distribute name tags with
different color stickers. The stickers indicate whether each attendee is
okay with having his or her photo taken.
Sure, it seems paranoid today. But Facebook and Twitter
already run photos posted on their sites through a Microsoft-developed
system called PhotoDNA in order to flag those who match known child
pornography images. Most would not argue with the intention to find and
prosecute child pornographers, though it's not difficult for privacy
activists to imagine how the same technology could be expanded to other
crimes. "Every time you upload a photograph to Facebook or put one on
Twitter for that matter you are now ratting out anybody in that frame to
any police agency in the world that’s looking for them," digital
privacy advocate Eben Moglen told BetaBeat
last year during a rant against one of its reporters. "Some police
agencies in the world are evil. That’s a pretty serious thing you’ve
just done."
Ritter says he (not his company) personally thinks someone will build
a facial recognition algorithm to scan the Internet within the next 10
years. “I can just imagine them opening it up where you would submit a
Facebook photo of your friend, and it would show all the images that
match it,” he says. “We have the algorithms, we know how to crawl the
Internet. It’s just a matter of putting the two together and getting a
budget.”
4. Just About Everything Else
It’s almost impossible to think of all the data you create on a daily
basis. Even something as simple as using electricity is creating data
about your habits. It’s more than whether or not you turned the lights
on--it’s how many people are in your house and when you’re usually
around.
RFID tags aren’t just in tires, they’re in your clothing, your tap-to-pay credit cards, and your dry cleaning. Ollmann zaps his T-shirts in the microwave. Others carry an RFID-blocking wallet to avoid having their RFID-enabled cards read when they're not making a purchase.
Maybe you've thought about the cameras that stores use to track
customer movements. But cameras are also in your television, in your
computer, and on the front of your phone. Earlier this year, security
experts discovered a way to hack into Samsung Smart TVs
and surreptitiously turn on the built-in camera, allowing anyone who
exploited the security hole to watch you as you watched TV. Though the
vulnerability has since been fixed, it demonstrated that the security of
connected objects isn't guaranteed. Sell responded by covering all of
the cameras in her household electronics with masking tape.
What makes totally avoiding surveillance really difficult is that
even if you've thought of everything--to the point where you're covering
your tablet's front-facing camera with masking tape--you can always
think of more ways your data could be misused. Because you're constantly
trying to prevent something that hasn't necessarily happened yet, the
precautions you can take are just as endless.
Sometimes, as in the case of the NSA scandal, you find out that they were warranted. Most of the time, you never really know.
Ritter, for instance, recently met an insurance executive who always
pays for meals with cash because he believes some day that data will be
linked to his coverage. “I’m not saying this is a definite thing that
happens,” Ritter says. “but I don’t see any definite reason why it
couldn’t."
The term superfood is thrown
around loosely, but it always points to the same thing: an incredibly
healthful, natural food that can boost your health in numerous ways.
Green tea, berries, and turmeric are just a few that could be considered
superfoods, but rarely do we think of onions when we are talking about
these dietary golden-children. Still, the health benefits of onions are what make this savory delight a potent health-booster.
Most of the benefits of onions come from something called quercetin. Quercetin is a powerful flavonoid,
or type of antioxidant, that provides numerous benefits throughout the
body by protecting cells from free radical damage. Onions are one of the
top dietary sources of this powerful compound.
Onions are also
rich in sulfur, vitamin C, manganese, fiber, vitamin B6, folate, and
potassium. All of these together add up to a wealth of benefits. Over
the past several years, scientists have begun to unlock all of the
health secrets of these layered veggies. Some of the benefits they’ve found include:
1. Reduced Cancer Risk - Several studies have connected quercetin with reduced cancer risk. One study in particular found that onions combined with turmeric
create a synergistic effect that reduced both the size and number of
precancerous legions in the intestine, reducing colon cancer risk. Another study, this one from France, found that women who ate more garlic and onions had a lesser chance of developing breast cancer.
2. Improved Oral Health - Contrary
to common sense, which tells us onions make your breath stink so can’t
be all that great for your teeth, chewing raw onion is known to improve
the strength of teeth and kill problem-causing bacteria that can lead to
tooth decay.
3. Cardiovascular Benefits - There are many cardiovascular benefits to eating onions. Researchers with the University of Utah
found that quercetin is able to significantly reduce high blood
pressure in hypertensive adults. The sulfur in onions may also be able
to improve cholesterol levels and red blood cell health.
4. Anti-Inflammatory Powers - Quercetin, the star of onions, is known to have powerful anti-inflammatory benefits. According to Arthritis Today,
this is why it can aid in the treatment of arthritis. But
anti-inflammatory benefits may also help fight off inflammatory diseases
like diabetes and more.
Onions are also good for relieving
clogged sinuses, soothing an earache, relieving the pain of a bee sting,
and detoxifying the body. As an added bonus, they are very versatile in
the kitchen and can be cooked with just about any dish or eaten raw on a
salad.
