Links - 9th May 2019 (1)

Visit the Wrong Website, and the FBI Could End Up in Your Computer - "Security experts call it a “drive-by download”: a hacker infiltrates a high-traffic website and then subverts it to deliver malware to every single visitor. It’s one of the most powerful tools in the black hat arsenal, capable of delivering thousands of fresh victims into a hackers’ clutches within minutes... “It was really impressive how quickly they took this vulnerability in Firefox and extrapolated it to the Tor browser and planted it on a hidden service,” says Andrew Lewman, executive director of the nonprofit Tor Project, which maintains the code.The Freedom Hosting drive-by has had a lasting impact on the Tor Project, which is now working to engineer a safe, private way for Tor users to automatically install the latest security patches as soon as they’re available"

Mumbai Man's Second Wife Kills Third Wife With Help Of First Wife’s Daughter & Her Boyfriend - "In a twisted tale of events, a family in Mumbai bonded over a murder. A 32-year-old Nalasopara woman allegedly killed her husband’s third and latest wife with the help of her two minor stepdaughters. The body of Yogita Devre, 35, was found in a secluded spot in Nalasopara on March 1.The perpetrator, identified as Parvati Mane, has been arrested by the police. She is the second wife of Sushil Mishra, 45, a contract labourer"

People Are Sharing Pics Of Boyfriends “Forced” To Take Perfect Pictures Of Their Girlfriends (New Pics)

Asian Guys Like Stupid Girls - "my final understanding of the conversation was that stupid=cute. Chinese women seemed happy or completely fine with the fact that their boyfriends called them stupid. “Well I wouldn’t be happy to be called 笨笨的,” I interjected. “It’s kind of insulting in the USA.” He went on his long ramble about how China and the USA are different, but the point remained the same: As a woman in China, being called stupid was not only normal, it was a compliment, and it was something to strive for...
Mannerly, obedient, cute, giggly—she is the epitome of what every Japanese man wants.So, I asked the dudes yesterday, “Have you met K’s girlfriend?”“Yeah, she’s really polite,” said one. “Very cute.”“What do you think, TK?” K said to friend no.2.“ちょっと天然かな”That’s Japanese for:“Kind of an airhead.”...
My conclusion just adds to the evidence as to why western women just don’t get Asian men very often. Us American are straightforward and loud and we don’t (well, most of us) wear cute floral pattern dresses with hair bands decorated in butterflies and rainbows while giggling at every single thing. Compared to a Japanese woman, us westerners are rough, tough, mean, loud, bossy and annoying. I mean, why date a woman who’s going to argue with you about Chinese and Japanese governmental policies when you could just have someone that smiles, laughs and brightens your day with her clothing–all without challenging your ideals? I kind of see the appeal. Maybe."

How to Get An Asian Boyfriend in China and Japan - "“Forget it,” my senpai, the veteran English teachers in the area, told me. “Japanese men aren’t interested in foreigners. Especially ones that have black hair, like you. Japanese men want exotic. They want blondes.” “We’ve been here five years and have yet to go on a date,” the other teacher said, the cynicism thick in her voice. “Japanese women love white guys, but the same can’t be said about the Japanese men.”... don’t wait for a man to come by and buy you a drink. In the west it’s normal for men to approach women they don’t know for a date, but in Asia this is still very much a foreign concept... My best pick up line in Japan was literally “hello.” If I was sitting at a bar and a cute Japanese guy was next to me, I’d smile and say “hello.” These simple greetings of hello led to fun conversation, phone numbers, and a few dates (one of these encounters is still my friend—we’ve been talking now for 5 years!).Don’t wait for love to come to you in Asia. Asian men are probably interested in you, but the combination of being shy and the taboo around asking out a stranger probably make it difficult for him to get the guts to talk to you. A little hello never hurt anyone... While many Japanese and Chinese people speak English rather well nowadays, it’s still very crucial to speak their language. In Japan, many of the men I went on dates with were thoroughly interested in me because I spoke Japanese—and spoke it well. More than that, I think they were touched that someone from afar was so interested in their country and culture... Step 3: Don’t Find Love in a Club (or anywhere where you’re quite drunk)"

Mike Cernovich on Twitter - "She led him to the dance floor. They made out. They walked back to his apartment. Five minutes later they left. No DNA evidence showing sex. 12 years in prison."

CO09125 | Relevance of the Singapore Armed Forces: A Journey into Singaporeaness - "A refrain from a popular military cadence of the 1980s went: ‘down by the river, took a little walk, ran into some communists, had a little talk’. A post- September 11 SAF Serviceman would be familiar with the tune – except that terrorists rather than communists are now the featured enemies of the state... Jean-Jacques Rousseau once asked: “How can they love it, if their native land means no more to them than it does to foreigners, and if what it does for them is only what cannot be refused to anyone?” Perceptions of ‘NS for Singaporeans, jobs for foreigners’ is a well-articulated concern of Generation Y Singaporeans on youtube, online blogs and social networking sites... The conscription of female citizens alongside their male counterparts and the recruitment of non-citizens as career soldiers are issues that cannot be dismissed lightly in the near future.The United Kingdom, the United States, Israel, Spain and France are well-known examples of countries that actively recruit non-citizens as professional soldiers."

University of Kansas to offer course on 'Angry White Male' - "Estes wrote on Twitter Wednesday that the course “divides the student population” and lamented that the university did not offer a class to “unite people and empower women.”"
If it were about any other group...

Britain isn't a European country, but our politicians are desperate to make it one - "I’ve never felt European. We are a more globally minded people, more likely to emigrate to other English-speaking countries than to France or Spain, and our history would seem to have set us on a different course to those nations that haven’t got over defeat or devastation during the 20th century.This isn’t an old-fashioned view: one argument for why so many ethnic minority voters backed Brexit, for example, is that they happily feel part of an evolving and open-minded British, or English, identity, rather than a European one."

Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand - "With so many shutdowns, tracking Google's bodycount has become a competitive industry on the Internet. Over on Wikipedia, the list of discontinued Google products and services is starting to approach the size of the active products and services listed. There are entire sites dedicated to discontinued Google products, like killedbygoogle.com, The Google Cemetery, and didgoogleshutdown.com... The amount of people I see still bringing up Google Reader's shutdown is incredible—having a frequently used Web service snatched away from you sticks with people. If people lose confidence in Google's ability to host a stable lineup of services, more and more users will move out of the Google ecosystem. Then, like we're already seeing with Stadia, the company would face an uphill battle to get people to use its new products."

Are men boring? - "Typical male strengths – focus, dedication, self-belief – might thrust men up the ladder at work, and lead them to do most of the talking in certain contexts – in meetings, in parliament, in the law courts, in tutorials, in panel discussions on the television: contexts in which conversation has a purpose. But the same qualities are more likely to transmute into weaknesses – tunnel vision, limited interests, self-absorption – in social situations, where talking is just an end in itself... Deborah Tannen, professor of linguistics at Georgetown University, Washington, DC, imagined in her book “You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation” (1990) a simple scenario of a man and a woman driving along in a car. The woman says, “Would you like to stop for a coffee?” The man says, “No”, and the woman seethes for the rest of the journey because she would have quite liked to stop for a coffee. In her mind, her enquiry was the opening to a negotiation. In his, it was a question requiring a simple yes or no... "For males”, she writes, “conversation is the way you negotiate your status in the group and keep people from pushing you around; you use talk to preserve your independence. Females, on the other hand, use conversation to negotiate closeness and intimacy.”... Men have a wider bell curve. Therefore one can say there are more interesting men, and more boring men. Women are averagely boring, but when men are boring they are spectacularly boring.”
Another way to explain the gender pay gap and other gender differences

Melania Trump’s nude modelling pictures surface - "When asked about the photos, Trump told The New York Post: “Melania was one of the most successful models and she did many photo shoots, including for covers and major magazines. This was a picture taken for a European magazine prior to my knowing Melania. In Europe, pictures like this are very fashionable and common.”"

'They All Look Alike': The Other-Race Effect - "we humans are notoriously poor at distinguishing between the members of races different from our own.The Other-Race Effect, as this psychological shortcoming is called, has been studied for decades... "Studies have found that racial attitudes don’t predict performance in cross-race identification tasks; prejudiced and non-prejudiced people are equally likely to fall victim to the other-race effect""

BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, The Morality of Friendship - "Shadow Chancellor John McDonald... was pretty firm about it. Under no circumstances he said this week, could ever be friends with a Tory. The Conservatives hit their disappointment well, but there was some nostalgia for the day when even politicians could manage to like those with whom they disagreed. And much more serious concern about what many see as a new intolerance in our public discourse, an increasing tendency to regard those with a different point of view as not just wrong, but ill-intentioned, even downright evil. Brexit is the obvious example where even family members on opposing sides aren't talking to each other. The transgender kerfuffle is another, with activists refusing to be in the same Radio Four studio this week with even moderate opponents, so toxic do they regard the views of those who don't think the way they do...
I agree with Socrates when he says, be slow to fall into friendship. But when you’re in continue firm and constant...
Sylvia Plath’s got this great line. She said, you know, if you've, if you've thrown up with somebody, you know, you’re sort of bonded forever...
‘In your blog, practical ethics you boasted of cutting off, unfriending, defriending, anybody who'd supported the Tories is in the 2015 election’...
'At the last election, say, there were some people who felt safe because they were Jewish, they felt uncomfortable voting for Jeremy Corbyn. Now you wouldn't dump someone because they made that kind of value judgment, that comes from personal experience, it can be a deeply moral position to take'...
Why do we talk about politics all the time? Why don't we, why don't the example, those been the examples, someone's going out and robbed a bank or someone's gonna, we haven't talked about, you know I've got a friend who robbed a bank. That's terrible..
I think the reason politics are so, one of the reasons it's so divisive and so huge now is it's the new religion. So as religion has fallen away politics has taken its place. It's filled that vacuum and all that, you know I'm a religious person but all that zealotry that you may have gotten- previously people say don't talk about religion and there is a good reason for that and... particularly in America it is absolutely the new religion"

People with high moral standards 'less likely' to be funny - "The results suggested that people with high moral standards were less likely to make jokes or laugh at other people’s jokes, subsequently making them less likeable... The team tested the theory that humour which relies on violating social boundaries can lead to tension in people who strongly adhere to those rules"

The Retirement Community Where Seniors Have Sex In Town's Main Mode Of Transport: Golf Carts - "Free, consensual, noncommittal sex with a new partner every night is an option"

Portland progressives see police as a greater threat than rising disorder. - "Portland police officer Jeff Niiya has been accused of “collusion with right-wing extremist” after exchanging text messages with Joey Gibson, the founder of Patriot Prayer, a group of right-wing provocateurs who mostly demonstrate at leftist gatherings. It’s standard practice for police to communicate with leaders of fringe groups on the right and left, but Niiya’s texts appear to have been overly friendly.Portland progressives have seized the opportunity to tar the city’s entire police force as sympathetic with right-wing groups at the expense of liberals and leftists. City commissioner and liberal firebrand Jo Ann Hardesty released a statement claiming, without evidence, that “this story simply confirms that . . . there are members of the Portland police force who work in collusion with right-wing extremists.” Progressive activists massed outside City Hall days later, demanding the ouster of police chief Danielle Outlaw. Anti-police sentiment is pervasive in progressive-leaning cities across the United States. Advocates against “overpolicing” put pressure on cops to take a hands-off approach to public order. In response, law-enforcement agencies have scaled back the tactics and resources that combat crime and maintain stability... Portland today is much changed from the city that I grew up in. Signs of urban decay and degradation are everywhere. Streets are littered with trash, human feces, and drug needles. Transient camps and villages dot the city. Vagrants roam the streets and threaten pedestrians and businesses owners. A Portland resident calls the police every 15 minutes to report an incident involving a homeless person.Still, the city’s progressive politicians and activists would like residents to believe that law-enforcement officials pose a greater threat than public anarchy. Portland’s attitude toward law enforcement has become so negative, in fact, that neighboring Washington County will no longer offer coordination or support to the Portland Police Bureau... Fear of repercussion have caused some Portland police to avoid upholding order altogether. Footage captured members of the far-left Antifa protest group directing traffic and harassing commuters in October 2018. The video shows protestors stopping drivers from entering certain intersections, and chasing and bashing the vehicles of drivers who refused to obey their commands. Less than a block away, cops stood and watched the chaos unfold. Portland mayor Ted Wheeler praised them for not intervening. Local officers will also no longer be able to take part in federal counterterrorism efforts, thanks to the city council, which has nixed Portland’s partnership efforts with the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force. Hardesty, who made leaving the JTTF a key campaign promise and who cast the deciding vote on exiting the agreement, justified her decision— despite strong opposition from Portland’s police chief, liberal mayor, and senior federal law enforcement officials—by defending Portland’s status as a sanctuary city for illegal aliens"