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The sandbox is an environment that locks down the Mac in ways that match (and exceed) the limitations found on iOS. A sandboxed app doesn’t have direct access to any files or frameworks on the system. It can’t access the network or any devices.

For the app, nothing else exists on the system except for those files and APIs that the operating system explicitly makes accessible to it:

By default, the sandboxed app doesn’t really have anything of its own. Even files in its own Application Support subfolder may be deleted by the operating system if it wants to e.g. reclaim some disk space. The sandbox analogy is quite fitting indeed — inside it, an app’s data has all the permanence of a sand castle.

Do you feel entitled, punk?

Since the Mac isn’t a phone, most apps need to do something more persistent than e.g. rendering a nice image of a collapsing sand castle. To enable these apps to perform their job, Apple has created a list of permitted capabilities called “entitlements”.

Here is the complete list of available entitlements:

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That’s it. (There are also a couple of temporary exception entitlements that will be going away. If your app uses Apple Events or Mach ports, Apple may grant you a temporary license to keep doing so, if you can make your case convincingly.)

Need to access hardware using something else than USB, for example Thunderbolt, FireWire or Bluetooth? Tough luck. (Just because these interfaces are on your Mac doesn’t mean Apple wants anyone to use them via 3rd party software.)

Need to communicate with processes that your app didn’t directly start, or perhaps take screenshots? Not going to happen.

Starting today, the welcome screens on 1.2 million hotel television sets in Marriott, Hilton, Sheraton, Holiday Inn and other hotels in the USA will show a short public service announcement from DHS. The 15-second spot encourages viewers to be vigilant and call law enforcement if they witness something suspicious during their travels.

During the PSA, which starts with a woman exiting a yellow taxi in front of a train station, a narrator says, “Maybe you see something suspicious. Can you be sure? If you see something, say something to authorities.”

The PSA, which will be interspersed with other messages on the welcome screen, will be the same in all 5,400 hotels that LodgeNet serves. It ends by telling viewers to contact “local authorities.”

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano says that reaching the “millions of guests that stay at hotels and motels each year is a significant step in engaging the full range of partners in our Homeland Security efforts.”

The federal government gained access to hotel TV sets by forming a partnership with the hotel industry’s largest association — the American Hotel & Lodging Association — which connected DHS with LodgeNet, the industry’s largest TV-content provider.

By entering hotels at a time when the hospitality industry is on the rebound, the government has the power to tap a growing, captive audience. Recent research from LodgeNet says 98% of hotel guests turn on their hotel TV, and the average guest keeps it on for more than three hours per day.

Ann Parker, a LodgeNet spokeswoman, describes the PSAs as “well done and professional” and says the decision to air them was not difficult.

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You probably have never heard of System D. Neither had I until I started visiting street markets and unlicensed bazaars around the globe.

System D is a slang phrase pirated from French-speaking Africa and the Caribbean. The French have a word that they often use to describe particularly effective and motivated people. They call them débrouillards. To say a man is a débrouillard is to tell people how resourceful and ingenious he is. The former French colonies have sculpted this word to their own social and economic reality. They say that inventive, self-starting, entrepreneurial merchants who are doing business on their own, without registering or being regulated by the bureaucracy and, for the most part, without paying taxes, are part of “l’economie de la débrouillardise.” Or, sweetened for street use, “Systeme D.” This essentially translates as the ingenuity economy, the economy of improvisation and self-reliance, the do-it-yourself, or DIY, economy. A number of well-known chefs have also appropriated the term to describe the skill and sheer joy necessary to improvise a gourmet meal using only the mismatched ingredients that happen to be at hand in a kitchen.

I like the phrase. It has a carefree lilt and some friendly resonances. At the same time, it asserts an important truth: What happens in all the unregistered markets and roadside kiosks of the world is not simply haphazard. It is a product of intelligence, resilience, self-organization, and group solidarity, and it follows a number of well-worn though unwritten rules. It is, in that sense, a system.

It used to be that System D was small — a handful of market women selling a handful of shriveled carrots to earn a handful of pennies. It was the economy of desperation. But as trade has expanded and globalized, System D has scaled up too. Today, System D is the economy of aspiration. It is where the jobs are. In 2009, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a think tank sponsored by the governments of 30 of the most powerful capitalist countries and dedicated to promoting free-market institutions, concluded that half the workers of the world — close to 1.8 billion people — were working in System D: off the books, in jobs that were neither registered nor regulated, getting paid in cash, and, most often, avoiding income taxes.

The back-up city, which has been codenamed IRTBBC (Integrated Resort, Tourism, Business and Backup City) will sit 300 miles west of Tokyo on the site of Itami Airport, which is politically unpopular and has been largely superceded by other airports, including Kansai and Kobe.

The site, which is approximately five square kilometres in area, will contain facilities for parliament and ministries, so that government will be able to continue in the event of a disaster. However it will also include office complexes, resort facilities, casinos and parks, as well as a 652-metre-high office building.

The infrastructure has been planned for a population of 50,000 residents (which we should note is some way short of Tokyo’s population of 13 million) and a workforce of 200,000 — most of whom will commute from Osaka, Japan’s second city, which the site lies to the north of.

She was handcuffed. For the next 36 hours, she was moved from a cell in the 26th Precinct station house on West 126th Street to central booking in Lower Manhattan and then — because one of the officers was ending his shift before Ms. Zucker could be photographed for her court appearance, and you didn’t think he was going to take the subway uptown while his partner stayed with her at booking, did you? — she was brought back to Harlem.

There she waited in a cell until a pair of fresh police officers were rustled up to bring her back downtown for booking, where she spent a second night in custody.

The company, known as Tepco, began spraying boric acid on the No. 2 reactor at 2:48 a.m. Japan time to prevent accidental chain reactions, according to an e-mailed statement today. The detection of xenon, which is associated with nuclear fission, was confirmed today by the Japan Atomic Energy Agency, the country’s atomic regulator said.

“Given the signs, it’s certain that fission is occurring,” Junichi Matsumoto, a general manager at Tepco who regularly talks to the media, told reporters in Tokyo today. There’s been no large-scale or sustained criticality and no increase in radiation, he said.

Fission taking place in the reactor can lead to increases in radiation emissions and raises concerns about further leaks after another radioactive hot spot was discovered in Tokyo on Oct. 29. It’s possible there are similar reactions occurring in the No. 1 and No. 3 reactors, the other cores damaged at the station, Matsumoto said.