The patched issues span core standard library components including archive/zip and net/http, as well as security-sensitive areas of the crypto/tls stack.
The patched issues span core standard library components including archive/zip and net/http, as well as security-sensitive areas of the crypto/tls stack.
When it comes to cognitive ability, not all dogs are created equal. Most dogs can learn simple action cues like “sit” or “down." But so-called “gifted word learner” (GWL) dogs exhibit a remarkable ability to learn the names of objects—for example, learning the names of specific toys so well that they can retrieve them from a large pile of toys on command. And according to a new study published in the journal Science, they can even learn labels for new toys just by overhearing their owners talking about those toys. Per the authors, this suggests that GWL dogs have sociocognitive skills that are functionally comparable to those of 18-month-old human toddlers.
Co-author Claudia Fugazza of Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary, has been studying canine behavior and cognition for several years as part of the Genius Dog Challenge. For instance, the group’s 2022 study discovered that dogs store key sensory features about their toys—notably what they look like and how they smell—and recall those features when searching for the named toy. Prior studies had suggested that dogs typically rely on vision, or a combination of sight and smell, to locate target objects. GWL dogs can also identify objects based on verbal labels.
In that 2022 study, all the dogs—regardless of whether they were GWL dogs or typical dogs—successfully picked out the target toys in both light and dark conditions, though it took them longer to locate the toys in the dark. Most relied on visual cues, even though dogs possess an excellent sense of smell. However, the dogs sniffed more frequently and longer when searching for the toy in the dark.
In the world of surveillance, there are rarely any absolutes — and that applies to guarantees, too. If NSA, GCHQ and associated agencies really want to get at your communications, and are prepared to invest their resources in doing so, they will usually succeed to some extent. But there is no need to be fatalistic about it: some common-sense steps will go a long way toward frustrating most kinds of electronic surveillance.
Above all, it is important to bear in mind that even in these days of highly automated surveillance, the final step at least has to be undertaken by humans. They remain a scarce resource. So, while it is true nowadays that your phone calls could quite easily be automatically transcribed with a fair degree of accuracy, the quality of that automatic transcript will take a nose dive if you vary the acoustic environment unpredictably.
For example, you could speak with some music playing in the background, or running the words into each other, or by hamming up a strong accent that does not have many millions of speakers and that therefore will trigger a less accurate response by voice transcription algorithms. If you speak obscure foreign languages, sprinkle expressions and sentences in those languages into your speech. Basically, imagine the crystal-cut delivery of news announcers in days of yore — their pitch, their speed, their intonation — and do the exact opposite of them.
You could also revert to old-fashioned techniques for obscuring words, such as playground methods of putting extra syllables into words (e.g. aygo-paygo language). Do not do this just when you have some gobbet of information to hide; instead, do it randomly and with a lot of furtiveness, while what you’re actually saying is junk or humorous information.
Another way of frustrating the humans at the end of the technological chain of voice retrieval is by gassing endlessly about irrelevant or insignificant things in your call — particularly at the beginning and end. That way, you can stuff your sensitive information carefully into the middle sections of long calls with more confidence than if you were just to call your contact quickly, drop the information purposefully and hang up. Needles are best hidden in haystacks, after all.
The choppier your communication patterns are, the harder they are for computers or human analysts to detect rhyme or reason in. Call a contact up and refer darkly to “the message I sent you last week on secure channels”. Make sure he is in on it, so that he plays along by muttering a conspiratorial acknowledgement. Any officers assigned to you will then have the chore of combing back through other data repositories in a wild goose chase for your non-existent message. Even better, you could send such a message with some DIY encipherment, only for that message to turn out to be gobbledegook. Such a profile will help to have you written off as a time-waster.
Now, assuming that an intelligence officer really is listening to your calls, after having seen that the automated transcript is garbage because of the countermeasures you’ve taken as above: how to bore the pants off him? The best ways to do this are to witter on at length about obscure hobbies or religious views. This might cause him to lose the will to live, or at least the will to listen to you again tomorrow and the day after that. You could even address him directly, offering an array of eyebrow-raising conspiracy theories to brighten his afternoon.
You can take this a step further. In a panicked voice, you could predict that something awful and perhaps illegal is going to happen on a certain day soon, which you could describe in lurid detail. Entirely made up, of course. Cometh the hour, happeneth nothing at all. You have just trashed your track record — and have put another nail in the coffin of intelligence agencies’ preparedness to follow your every word.
Of course, while these techniques might reduce the likelihood of intelligence officers wanting to stay on your case, you should also take serious steps to secure your communications where key information is involved. For that, encryption and the use of a wide range of communication methods — including written notes — is the winning combination.
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