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By 10-7, the Committee on Foreign Relations moved the measure to a full Senate vote, expected next week.

The proposal allows the use of force in Syria for 60 days with the possibility to extend it for 30 days. It prevents the use of US troops on the ground.

President Barack Obama is battling to build support at home and abroad for military action.

But what if the real problem is school itself? The unfortunate fact is that one of our most cherished institutions is, by its very nature, failing our children and our society.

School is a place where children are compelled to be, and where their freedom is greatly restricted — far more restricted than most adults would tolerate in their workplaces. In recent decades, we have been compelling our children to spend ever more time in this kind of setting, and there is strong evidence (summarized in my recent book) that this is causing serious psychological damage to many of them. Moreover, the more scientists have learned about how children naturally learn, the more we have come to realize that children learn most deeply and fully, and with greatest enthusiasm, in conditions that are almost opposite to those of school.

Compulsory schooling has been a fixture of our culture now for several generations. It’s hard today for most people to even imagine how children would learn what they must for success in our culture without it. President Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan are so enamored with schooling that they want even longer school days and school years. Most people assume that the basic design of schools, as we know them today, emerged from scientific evidence about how children learn best. But, in fact, nothing could be further from the truth.

Schools as we know them today are a product of history, not of research into how children learn. The blueprint still used for today’s schools was developed during the Protestant Reformation, when schools were created to teach children to read the Bible, to believe scripture without questioning it, and to obey authority figures without questioning them. The early founders of schools were quite clear about this in their writings. The idea that schools might be places for nurturing critical thought, creativity, self-initiative or ability to learn on one’s own — the kinds of skills most needed for success in today’s economy — was the furthest thing from their minds. To them, willfulness was sinfulness, to be drilled or beaten out of children, not encouraged.

The traffic correlation problem in Tor has seen much attention in the literature. Prior Tor security analyses often consider entropy or similar statistical measures as metrics of the security provided by the system at a static point in time. In addition, while prior metrics of security may provide useful information about overall usage, they typically do not tell users how secure a type of behavior is. Further, similar previous work has thus far only considered adversaries that control either a subset of the members of the Tor network, a single autonomous system (AS), or a single Internet exchange point (IXP). These analyses have missed important characteristics of the network, such as that a single organization often controls several geographically diverse ASes or IXPs. That organization may have malicious intent or undergo coercion, threatening users of all network components under its control.

Given the severity of the traffic correlation problem and its security implications, we develop an analysis framework for evaluating the security of various user behaviors on the live Tor network and show how to concretely apply this framework by performing a comprehensive evaluation of the security of the Tor network [41] against the threat of complete deanonymization. To enable such an analysis, we develop a detailed model of a network adversary that includes (i) the largest and most accurate system for AS path inference yet applied to Tor and (ii) a thorough analysis of the threat of Internet exchange points and IXP coalitions. We also develop realistic metrics that inform this analysis, considering the network topology as it evolves over time, for example, as new relays are
introduced and others go offline.

“No one updates their routers,” he says. “If you think people are bad about patching Windows and Linux (which they are) then they are … horrible about updating their networking gear because it is too critical, and usually they don’t have redundancy to be able to do it properly.”

He also notes that routers don’t have security software that can help detect a breach.

“The challenge [with desktop systems] is that while antivirus don’t work well on your desktop, they at least do something [to detect attacks],” he says. “But you don’t even have an integrity check for the most part on routers and other such devices like IP cameras.”

Hijacking routers and switches could allow the NSA to do more than just eavesdrop on all the communications crossing that equipment. It would also let them bring down networks or prevent certain communication, such as military orders, from getting through, though the Post story doesn’t report any such activities. With control of routers, the NSA could re-route traffic to a different location, or even alter it for disinformation campaigns, such as planting information that would have a detrimental political effect or altering orders to re-route troops or supplies in a military operation.

According to the budget document, the CIA’s Tailored Access Programs and NSA’s software engineers possess “templates” for breaking into common brands and models of routers, switches and firewalls.

The article doesn’t say it, but this would likely involve pre-written scripts or backdoor tools and root kits for attacking known but unpatched vulnerabilities in these systems, as well as for attacking zero-day vulnerabilities that are yet unknown to the vendor and customers.

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In 2005, security researcher Mike Lynn found a serious vulnerability in Cisco IOS, the operating system running on millions of Cisco routers around the world.

Lynn discovered the vulnerability after his employer, Internet Security Systems, asked him to reverse-engineer the Cisco operating system to see if he could find security problems with it. Cisco makes the majority of the routers that operate the backbone of the internet as well as many company networks and critical infrastructure systems. The Cisco IOS is as ubiquitous in the backbone as the Windows operating system is on desktops.

The vulnerability Lynn found, in a new version of the operation system that Cisco planned to release at the time, would have allowed someone to create a router worm that would shut down every Cisco router through which it passed, bringing down a nation’s critical infrastructure. It also would have allowed an attacker to gain complete control of the router to sniff all traffic passing through a network in order to read, record or alter it, or simply prevent traffic from reaching its recipient.

Once Lynn found the vulnerability, it took him six months to develop a working exploit to attack it.

Lynn had planned to discuss the vulnerability at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, until Cisco intervened and forced him to pull the talk under threat of a lawsuit.

But if Lynn knew about the vulnerability, there were likely others who did as well — including intelligence agencies and criminal hackers.

Canon, the industry leader, has been hit with a sudden downturn in shipments of its top-end digital cameras, an increasingly saturated market sensitive to the recent slowdown in emerging economies and with a receding pace of innovation.

Add to that a compact camera market that has been battered by smartphones with increasingly high-resolution cameras, and companies like Canon have been left scrambling for new markets.

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The systems accessed by Snowden limit access by user role, so he could not have used his own credentials on them without overriding access controls. Officials familiar with the case told NBC that Snowden had obtained the “profiles” of a number of NSA employees that have been identified through forensic examination of logs, finding periods when the employees were traveling but their accounts were still used to access the intranet. If Snowden used administrative privileges to reset their passwords, failed logins might have flagged a problem—but they might have simply been shrugged off as passwords forgotten over vacation.

Israel initially denied knowledge of the missile launch, but soon after said in a statement to Reuters that it had carried out one joint missile test with the US, of an “anchor” target missile used in anti-missile systems, the news agency reported on Tuesday.

Israel said it carried out a test of a missile, used as a target in a US-funded anti-missile system, in the Mediterranean at (9:15am) 06:15GMT, around the same time quoted by Russian state-run news agency, RIA.

An official from the Israeli Defence Ministry later confirmed that both Israel and the US carried a joint missile test in the Mediteranean today.

Al Jazeera’s Paul Brennen, reporting from Jerusalem, said that the confirmation by Israel was unusual.

Public funding is part of several measures the government adopted Tuesday. Most had already been announced but they are widely seen as a safety appeal before the International Olympic Committee votes on which city will host the 2020 Olympics. Tokyo is a front-runner.

“Instead of leaving this up to TEPCO [Tokyo Electric Power Company], the government will step forward and take charge,” Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said after adopting the outline. “The world is watching if we can properly handle the contaminated water but also the entire decommissioning of the plant.”

The government plans to spend an estimated $470 million US through the end of 2014 on two projects — the ice wall and upgraded water treatment units that is supposed to remove all radioactive elements but tritium — according to energy agency official Tatsuya Shinkawa.

The government is not paying for urgently needed water tanks and other equipment that TEPCO is using to stop leaks.

The ice wall would freeze the ground to a depth of up to 30 metres through a system of thin pipes carrying a coolant as cold as minus -40 C. It would thus block contaminated water from escaping the facility’s immediate surroundings, as well as keep underground water from entering the reactor and turbine buildings, where most contaminated radioactive water has collected.