The Deutsche Welle reports on some interesting work on culture and security.

First, one story highlights how the new social infrastructure that immigrants find becomes the key to formation of a new identity:

The study is the first of its kind worldwide because it focuses on the current social environments of migrants rather than their backgrounds, said Deputy Family Minister Gerd Hoofe, who presented the report on Tuesday.

While factors such as ethnicity, religion and migration history do play a role for migrants, their current social environments are much more important in term of people’s identity, Hoofe said.

The first of it’s kind worldwide? I find that hard to believe.

Anyway, the point seems to be that where a person comes from can be less influential to the formation of their identity than the place they believe they are going, or able to go…not such a surprise when you think about the impact to our feelings when we go someplace new versus stay where we have been. Marketing in American retail is a good example of how susceptible humans can be to a new identity. Makes me wonder about who has been appointed to handle the social environments, let alone the “welcome to our country, now go home” campaigns, for immigrants to America.

On a very related note, the second story is about how a city’s security (e.g. police) sought to extend a hand to a community of immigrants and bring them together in an effort to reduce crime:

The agreement has also helped police, according to Chief Commissioner Frank Matuszek. The youth in Essen-Katernberg understand that there is no more space beyond the reach of the law.

Matuszek said the cooperation has also helped break down barriers between mosque members and police officers.

“We have learned more about each other in this project and have thus been able to dispel a lot of fears,” he said. “The mosque community was able to see that police officers are only citizens in uniform and are also family fathers with the same concerns.”

Now 10 years old, the Essen project is being copied and adapted by cities across Germany with Czarnyan often holding lectures about his work in large German cities, and Pismek passing on his experiences to other religious leaders.

Nice examples of how to leverage differences to find a more secure and better standard of living. Canada also probably has some useful data on this, given that over 20% of their population is foreign-born.

Apologies for the absence. I have so much to write about, we will see what makes it to the blog.

To get things back on track, I think we should take a minute to appreciate the amazing news about Chimpanzees:

Chimpanzees have an extraordinary photographic memory that is far superior to ours, research suggests.

Young chimps outperformed university students in memory tests devised by Japanese scientists.

Really? Were the students sober? Were the Chimpanzees?

“Young chimpanzees have a better memory than human adults,” Dr Matsuzawa told BBC News.

“We are still underestimating the intellectual capability of chimpanzees, our evolutionary neighbours.”

Sounds like a security threat to me. Can they see ATM keypads from their cage in the zoo? Who is doing something about these neighbors?

I thought this advertisement from PGP was funny. See if you can figure out why:

Light Blue Touchpaper does a nice job explaining the utility of a giant online cache of password hashes:

In both the webpages, the target hash was in a URL. This makes a lot of sense — I’ve even written code which does the same. When I needed to store a file, indexed by a key, a simple option is to make the filename the key’s MD5 hash. This avoids the need to escape any potentially dangerous user input and is very resistant to accidental collisions. If there are too many entries to store in a single directory, by creating directories for each prefix, there will be an even distribution of files. MD5 is quite fast, and while it’s unlikely to be the best option in all cases, it is an easy solution which works pretty well.

Because of this technique, Google is acting as a hash pre-image finder, and more importantly finding hashes of things that people have hashed before. Google is doing what it does best — storing large databases and searching them. I doubt, however, that they envisaged this use though.

Maybe they thought weak passwords are not their problem to solve, and for good reason. The fact that MD5 hashes are now considered weak and common makes them about as “secret” as the origin words they try to obfuscate. It is like MD5 hashes have become as common as words themselves, since there are so many computers “speaking” them, sort of like Chinese becoming common as there are more Chinese people.

Thus, this is similar to asking whether a library should have any vision of how people will use the popular words they collect in their shelves. If we are to say Google should be regulated and hide or destroy the MD5 hashes, just like pornography or other sensitive and offensive material, they will have the interesting task of correctly identifying MD5 hashes to remove from their databases. The more practical answer is for people to use better secrets, with better hashing (e.g. use salts and SHA1), and realize that Google collects everything, or just move away from secrets towards multi-factor authentication. WordPress needs a plugin that gives better authentication options, for sure.