Linked List: March 24, 2018

Saturday, 24 March 2018

The Talk Show: ‘Our Name Is Our Address’ ★

Finally. Jason Kottke is on the show to talk about 20 years of writing his eponymous website.

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Not The Onion: Pennsylvania School to Arm Kids With Buckets of Rocks as Defense Against School Shooters ★

Matt Coughlin, reporting for The Morning Call:

Officials in Schuylkill County are planning to teach students to throw rocks at school shooters.

The superintendent of Blue Mountain School District testified to a state committee in Harrisburg last week that each classroom in the school has been equipped with a five-gallon bucket of river stone, according to WNEP TV.

“If an armed intruder attempts to gain entrance to any of our classrooms, they will face a classroom full of students armed with rocks and they will be stoned,” Superintendent David Helsel said to the House Education Committee in Harrisburg.

This is not a fabricated story. This is real.

This, on the other hand, was The Simpsons.

U.S. Justice Department Revives Push to Mandate a Way to Unlock Phones ★

Charlie Savage, reporting for The New York Times:

Craig Federighi, the senior vice president of software engineering at Apple, stressed the importance of strengthening — not weakening — security protections for products like the iPhone, saying threats to data security were increasing every day and arguing that it was a question of “security versus security” rather than security versus privacy.

“Proposals that involve giving the keys to customers’ device data to anyone but the customer inject new and dangerous weaknesses into product security,” he said in a statement. “Weakening security makes no sense when you consider that customers rely on our products to keep their personal information safe, run their businesses or even manage vital infrastructure like power grids and transportation systems.”

Hurrah. Nailed it.

But some computer security researchers believe the problem might be solvable with an acceptable level of new risks.

A National Academy of Sciences committee completed an 18-month study of the encryption debate, publishing a report last month. While it largely described challenges to solving the problem, one section cited presentations by several technologists who are developing potential approaches.

They included Ray Ozzie, a former chief software architect at Microsoft; Stefan Savage, a computer science professor at the University of California, San Diego; and Ernie Brickell, a former chief security officer at Intel.

Boo. Really disappointed to see Ray Ozzie’s name on this list.