The scanners are safe until they aren’t

by ARTS

TSA Claims Naked Scanners Are Safe, But Exaggerated How They Make Sure That’s True
[Via Techdirt]

I’ve said in the past that of all the complaints with the TSA’s naked scanners, the one that initially concerned me the least was the “safety” claims about the x-rays used in the scanners. However, the more I hear, the more questionable it is to believe the TSA’s claims that the machines are safe. As a bunch of you sent in over the past few weeks (but which I just had a chance to read through completely), the TSA is being exceptionally misleading when it claims that the machines are harmless, because it includes a little caveat that most people miss which potentially changes everything.

That is, it claims that the machines are perfectly safe “when they’re working properly.” But as AOL’s senior public health reporter discovered, “the TSA offers no proof that anyone is checking to see if the machines are ‘working properly.’” Well, it pretends to offer proof, in saying that a variety of groups, including the FDA, the US Army, Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab and something called the Health Physics Society all work with the TSA to make sure the devices are safe. But, Schreiber contacted all the groups listed and found that it’s not what you’d think. Those groups do not make sure that the machines are properly maintained and calibrated. Basically, it sounds like most of these groups tested or examined one or a small number of these machines — often not the ones actually installed at the airport, to see if, conceptually, the machines are safe. But none of them have anything to do with making sure the machines are maintained and calibrated safely, such that passenger safety is not put at risk. In fact, one of the groups listed — the Health Physics Society — noted that the TSA actually refused to provide data that the TSA collects on radiation exposure from the scanners.

[More]

I’ve written about this before – machines that are fine in the lab may not be fine in the airport. We have no way of knowing which is worrisome.

And the ones who should be most worried should be the TSA workers.

A trillion dollar company and no leaks

Why Apple will be the first company to achieve a trillion dollar market cap
[Via MacDailyNews]

Apple is the dream company we always wished for when we were children…

[More]

The first trillion dollar company and yet it also has been able to strictly control leaks. HOw does such a large, well capitalized company maintain such innovation while preventing that innovation from being leaked?

Wikileaks and Assange do not think that should be possible. I’d love to know how Apple has organized itself to be innovative, accurately predict how many units it will sell and actually get the millions of devices made without leaks and without the iron domination usually needed to prevent them.

Certain to be a constant refrain from the open wilderness that is the Android

Security firm warns of new Android trojan that can steal personal information; iPhone unaffected
[Via MacDailyNews]

Lookout, a mobile security company, is warning Android settlers of a new trojan…

[More]

How about this:

Geinimi is also the first Android malware in the wild that displays botnet-like capabilities. Once the malware is installed on a user’s phone, it has the potential to receive commands from a remote server that allow the owner of that server to control the phone.

How is a user supposed to know whether the Android app being downloaded contains this malware or one similar that really could control the phone?

One reason for the walled garden that is the iOS App store is to prevent such malware from getting a large beachhead in mobile devices. This software can just be bolted on to almost any Android App and there seems to be little to prevent it or to protect the user.

Apple wanted to make sure that the iPhone would always be able to act as a phone, no matter what. The Android phones more and more appear vulnerable to act as someone else’s phone.

And Windows claims another victim – Skype

Skype brought down by double whammy of overloaded servers, client bugs
[Via Ars Technica]

Skype’s substantial period of downtime last week has been traced to overloaded servers triggering a bug in the most widespread version of the Windows Skype client, the company has reported on its blog. At the height of the problem, only a few hundred thousand users were showing up online; normally, the voice and video chat boasts in excess of 20 million online users.

More]

Well, not Windows per se but a specific Windows client for Skype that makes up 50% of the Windows users of Skype. This crashed the computer and the way Skype is set up, resulted in bringing the whole network to a standstill.

The Skype network, and the Web as a whole, is usually configured as a small world network, with a most nodes having just a few connections and a few nodes having a lot. There are some really important advantages to these sorts networks, such as scalability. These networks can be very robust as nodes disappear or crash. Since the crashes happen randomly, most of the super-nodes are not touched and the connections can then route around any damage.

But as more nodes crash, the chances of super-nodes going down increases. If a few of these go down, then it become impossible to move information around the network at all and the network fails catastrophically. This is what happened here.

All because too many people were using a version of the client that crashed. Solving this problem could be tough. It is hard to maintain any sort of small world network when large numbers of super-nodes start failing. The increased traffic to the functional ones makes them unstable and liable to go down.

I wonder what they will do?