Month: December 2016

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The past five years have witnessed a seemingly unending series of high-profile account take-overs. A growing consensus has emerged among security practitioners: even long, randomly generated passwords aren't sufficient for locking down e-mail and other types of online assets. According to the consensus, these assets need to be augmented with a second factor of authentication.

Now, a two-year study of more than 50,000 Google employees concludes that cryptographically based Security Keys beat out smartphones and most other forms of two-factor verification.

The Security Keys are based on Universal Second Factor, an open standard that's easy for end users to use and straightforward for engineers to stitch into hardware and websites. When plugged into a standard USB port, the keys provide a "cryptographic assertion" that's just about impossible for attackers to guess or phish. Accounts can require that cryptographic key in addition to a normal user password when users log in. Google, Dropbox, GitHub, and other sites have already implemented the standard into their platforms.

Enlarge / Detail from the cover of The End of Ownership, by Aaron Perzanowski and Jason Schultz. (credit: Design by Heidi M. Rolf)

Sometimes you just want to escape into another world... of facts. That's why the best way to round out your holidays is to snuggle up with a book that is both entertaining and true. We're here for you with some suggestions for great new nonfiction books that came out in 2016.

I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life, by Ed Yong.

Ed Yong has delighted readers for years with his blog Not Exactly Rocket Science and his stories about science for The Atlantic. With his dry wit and kaleidoscopic knowledge of biology, he can make anything fascinating—whether it's duck penises or parasite lifecycles. In this bestselling book, he explores the microbiome, or the massive ecosystems that live inside our bodies and keep us (mostly) healthy. Come for the poop transplant jokes and stay to have your view of nature turned upside down.

Enlarge (credit: Photo by Raquel Meyers, used with permission)

Glitch art resonates with the increasingly complex love-hate relationship humans have with technology. Errors, and by extension the changes, that can occur within software source code and data can provide a fertile foundation for the imagination.

In an attempt to explain this nascent artform, Martino Prendini wrote: “The error becomes image and movement, system errors are exploited, and it has a certain punk nature. At the same time, this kind of art exploits the glitch and uses it, so its nature is also entropic, dadaist... Glitch art is therefore the contradictory relationship between man and machine losing his functionality."

Multiple initiatives have already sprung from, inspired, and built on the idea that errors are human—and beautiful. Glitch artists take it further, and attempt to challenge the common belief that technology and algorithms are flawless and cannot malfunction. Take Poxparty by Jon Satrom for instance: it develops "funware," Apple-inspired software products which have flaws before reaching to the market and are sold with those unchanged. Outside of the simple quest for aesthetics, glitch art questions the cultural values that are associated with technology.