Too many roads

Time for the Liberal Party of Canada to live up to its promises[1] and "repeal the problematic elements of Bill C-51". This story[2] suggests that Canadian journalists are being intimidated and spied upon.
1. https://www.liberal.ca/realchange/bill-c-51/
2. http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/la-presse-patrick-lagace-cjfe-edward-snowden-1.3829383

This Monbiot article[1] references the NOAA reported [2]1.3C increase. I'm going to go switch off some lights.

1.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/aug/03/climate-crisis-media-relegates-greatest-challenge-hurtle-us-collapse-planet

2. http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/201606

"Eight months ago in Paris, 177 nations promised to try to ensure the world’s average temperature did not rise by more than 1.5C above the pre-industrial level. Already it has climbed by 1.3C – faster and further than almost anyone predicted. In one respect, the scientists were wrong. They told us to expect a climate crisis in the second half of this century. But it’s already here."

Amusing and potentially useful course http://callingbullshit.org/syllabus.html. I have only skimmed the links but among them was this nice interactive visualization of Simpson's Paradox http://vudlab.com/simpsons/

Bruce Schneier on why the prioritizing of surveillance inevitably leads to less security for all of us:

"The National Security Agency is lying to us. We know that because of data stolen from an NSA server was dumped on the Internet. The agency is hoarding information about security vulnerabilities in the products you use, because it wants to use it to hack others' computers. Those vulnerabilities aren't being reported, and aren't getting fixed, making your computers and networks unsafe.

On August 13, a group calling itself the Shadow Brokers released 300 megabytes of NSA cyberweapon code on the Internet. Near as we experts can tell, the NSA network itself wasn't hacked; what probably happened was that a "staging server" for NSA cyberweapons -- that is, a server the NSA was making use of to mask its surveillance activities -- was hacked in 2013."

Two of the best resources on climate change:
* Brett Victor's exploration of potential solutions includes a look at transportation:
http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/

* David MacKay's ballpark estimations produced as part of his work as an advisor for the UK government help anyone to evaluate potential solutions. It's an interesting read: http://www.withouthotair.com/c20/page_118.shtml

Replacing car-trips with bicycle-trips seems like the lowest hanging fruit here for someone that just "wants to do something now." A US-centric graph of energy flows (from the Lawrence-Livermore) is quoted in the Brett Victor page:

`To the right is how the U.S. currently generates energy. The most conspicuous source of carbon emissions is the thick green bar from “petroleum” to “transportation”. We need to erase that.

While we’re at it, we also ought to erase the thick grey bar from “transportation” to “wasted”.'

A 2011 Canadian equivalent is available here:
https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/content/assets/images/charts/Energy/ENERGY_2011_CANADA.png

In 2013 the Tor Project made a prediction concerning the future direction of malware distribution. I wonder which other projects use mechanisms like deterministic builds to counter "watering hole attacks"? Chromium, Debian and a bunch of others seems to have got there at least for parts of their projects, but it's not easy to find a complete list. http://mrrrgn.com/18/

"Current popular software development practices simply cannot survive targeted attacks of the scale and scope that we are seeing today. In fact, I believe we're just about to witness the first examples of large scale "watering hole" attacks. This would be malware that attacks the software development and build processes themselves to distribute copies of itself to tens or even hundreds of millions of machines in a single, officially signed, instantaneous update. Deterministic, distributed builds are perhaps the only way we can reliably prevent these types of targeted attacks in the face of the endless stockpiling of weaponized exploits and other "cyberweapons"."
-- Mike Perry, Tor Project blog 2013 https://blog.torproject.org/blog/deterministic-builds-part-one-cyberwar-and-global-compromise