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To Confront Cyber Threats, We must Rethink the Law of Armed Conflict Introduction
An emerging thre ats ES SAY
To Confront Cyber Threats,
We Must Rethink the
Law of Armed Conflict
task force on national security and law
by Jeremy A. Rabkin and Ariel Rabkin
Koret-Taube Task Force on National Security and Law
www.emergingthreatsessays.com
For almost two decades, military analysts have worried that foreign powers might use
computer networks to inflict harm on the United States. Politicians quickly translated
those concerns into warnings of a "cyber Pearl Harbor."1 Almost as promptly, legal
analysts began dutifully charting the limits on how we would fight the cyber war that
might follow such an attack—if we chose to conform to the UN Charter and various
post-war Geneva Conventions.2
But cyber attacks are already a persistent and disturbing aspect of international relations
in the twenty-first century. At moments of particular tension between hostile states,
computer network attacks have been launched against national infrastructure, causing
large-scale disruptions. It happened in Estonia in 2007, Georgia in 2008, and South
Korea in 2011. Meanwhile, large and important American companies, including Google,
Lockheed Martin, and RSA, have fallen victim to highly sophisticated, multi-stage attacks.
These attacks appear to have been encouraged or aided by national governments
seeking economic or strategic advantages.3 So-called "advanced persistent threats"—
from highly skilled attackers with deep knowledge of the target—are a major headache
for American companies.
So far, the United States government has responded with earnest but vague calls to
strengthen international norms of good behavior in the cyber realm. Hostile forces
are already probing our defenses and testing the limits of our patience. The Obama
administration's International Strategy for Cyberspace suggests the U.S. could retaliate
with "military force"—implying that if there really is a devastating cyber attack, we
might respond with conventional bombing.4 As a general strategy, that has some
obvious limitations. Would we actually risk war with China or Russia in response to a
Jeremy A. Rabkin and Ariel Rabkin
To Confront Cyber Threats
cyber attack? What if we traced the attack to a state that officially denied any role in it?
What if American intelligence could not prove that the government of that state had
condoned the attack? While it threatens military responses, the administration's strategy
document makes no mention of the possibility of responding to cyber attacks from
foreign countries with counter attacks in the cyber realm.
Meanwhile, Congress—on its own initiative—enacted legislation that "affirms" that
the Department of Defense, "upon direction of the President, may conduct offensive
operations in cyberspace to defend our Nation, Allies and interests. . . ." This provision
in the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act stipulates that such "offensive operations"
are "subject to the policy principles and legal regimes that the Department follows for
kinetic capability, including the law of armed conflict."5 But it does not say whether
other agencies of government can also undertake or sponsor cyber attacks—nor whether
other agencies would be subject to the same "policy principles and legal regimes."
There are good reasons for hesitation or equivocation. The world has never experienced
a sustained conflict between major powers in cyberspace. We don't know how far such
a conflict might escalate or how easily it might trigger responses with more destructive
weapons. We don't know how third parties might react, or all the ways they might be
affected. There are good grounds for assessing our options with caution, for not waving
cyber swords at potential adversaries, for not trying to defend cyberspace with bloggingstyle bluster.
But some part of our current hesitation seems to reflect the influence of legal cautions
that are not really appropriate. Stewart Baker, former Assistant Secretary for Policy
at the Department of Homeland Security, warns that government lawyers have been
"tying themselves in knots of legalese . . . to prevent the Pentagon from launching
cyberattacks" so the Defense Department has "adopted a cyberwar strategy that
simply omitted any plan for conducting offensive operations."6 Concerns about
disrupting international law seem to be a major inhibiting factor in formulating a
serious cyber strategy. Or perhaps, as Columbia University law professor Matthew
Waxman has argued, appeals to international law limitations are simply convenient
trumps for bureaucratic rivals to play against each other in the endemic turf wars of
American security policy.7
In exploring the options for dealing with a cyber attack from abroad, we should at least
try to shake off the constraints of outdated or irrelevant legal norms. The UN Charter
was designed to prevent another world war. Whatever benefits we have obtained
from that framework over the past sixty years, the Charter regime has coincided with
hundreds of small wars and a number of large wars to which the Security Council
remained largely irrelevant. The post-war Geneva Conventions sought to repress the
worst atrocities of the Second World War. Whatever their success in that respect, they
have not been conscientiously observed even in conventional wars. It is highly unlikely
that these arrangements—designed for military warfare in a far different world—will
more effectively contain cyber conflicts today. We would do better to heed the words
of our greatest wartime president, Abraham Lincoln: "As our case is new, so we must
think anew and act anew."
We do not argue that cyber conflict should be viewed as something so novel that it
transcends all previous legal categories. To the contrary, past experience can be
instructive in framing strategies and categories for dealing with cyber attacks. Cyber
conflict bears some similarities to past methods of warfare and might be usefully
regulated under legal categories used in international law in earlier times. But cyber
conflict does not resemble the kinds of land-based military incursions that the drafters
of the UN Charter and post-war Geneva Conventions were trying to control. When we
look for legal categories for controlling cyber conflict, we need to look even farther
back, to categories the framers of the U.S. Constitution would have recognized from
their experience with warfare in the eighteenth century.
"Armed Attack" vs. Intolerable Activity
Much has been written on the question of when—or whether—a cyber attack can
be considered an "armed attack." The issue concerns many commentators because
Article 51 of the UN Charter seems to limit the "inherent right of self-defence" to
situations where "an armed attack occurs." Under a strict reading of the Charter, states
can only deploy force when responding to an "armed attack" or when they are
authorized to act by formal resolution of the UN Security Council. On that view, before
we threaten forcible retaliation, we must first determine the kinds of attack for which
the Charter authorizes the use of force in self-defense.
On the one hand, individual hackers with no political motivation often launch computergenerated attacks that are equivalent to burglary or vandalism—mischief that is
annoying to the victims but not particularly damaging or costly to repair. No one
seriously imagines that the U.S. Department of Defense needs to be on call to respond
to attacks of that sort. But an attack that disabled the U.S. air traffic control system,
causing jet liners to crash and killing thousands of civilians, would be quite a different
challenge. It might be regarded as equivalent to the 9/11 attacks and might well be
thought to demand a decisive, even a devastating, military response. If we want to
think seriously about responding to cyber attacks, we will need to clarify the different
kinds of attacks that might justify various kinds of responses.
The UN Charter doesn't help us here. If we decide to retaliate in the cyber realm, the
ambiguities of classification will cut both ways. Michael Schmitt, a prominent scholar
of the law of armed conflict, has made this point on several occasions: If an attack in
cyberspace is not an "armed attack"—of the sort that triggers the right to use force in
self-defense, under Article 51—then counter-strikes in cyberspace would not require
any special justification, either.8 In fact, Article 41 of the UN Charter contemplates that
the Security Council might order "complete or partial interruption of . . . telegraphic,
radio and other means of communication" and characterizes such disruptions as
"measures not involving the use of armed force . . ." The same provision mentions
"severance of diplomatic relations" among such "measures." So skillful lawyers might
depict cyber attacks as equivalent to force—or to mere diplomatic friction.
Such labeling maneuvers do not address the underlying challenge of deciding what sort
of law we want to see in cyberspace. If we want norms for proper conduct, we need
sanctions for bad behavior: there must be some means of punishing infractions. The
existence of UN machinery does not obviate this need for cyber-specific norms because
the Security Council can rarely agree on effective measures to enforce international
standards. The Security Council is unlikely to impose sanctions in response to cyber
attacks because Russia and China, both quite active in developing means of cyber
attack, have veto power on the Council.
Long before the establishment of the United Nations, however, states recognized that
in most cases, all-out war would be an excessively risky and costly response to
provocations. Traditional international law therefore acknowledged the propriety of
lesser responses to enforce international obligations—or legitimate methods of
self-defense short of war. We can still apply the logic of these lesser responses to
deterring cyber attack, starting with "retorsion" and culminating in "reprisal."
Retorsion means something out of the ordinary but not necessarily unlawful, such as
denial of ordinary trade benefits. Reprisal embraces conduct not otherwise lawful but
justified as a means of forcing others to stop their unlawful practices. Traditionally,
wartime measures—so-called "belligerent reprisals"—were used to punish violations
of the law of armed conflict, by retaliation in kind. Professor Yoram Dinstein, one of the
foremost commentators on the law of armed conflict, insists that armed reprisals also
remain a lawful response to peacetime provocations.9 The State of Israel deploys
peacetime reprisals (claiming the right to do so in self-defense) when it launches air
strikes in retaliation for terror attacks. The United States has pursued similar measures
on occasion. The Reagan administration bombed Tripoli in 1987 in response to terror
attacks on off-duty U.S. soldiers in Germany that were traced to the Gaddafi regime. That
bombing was not authorized by the UN Security Council, nor was it aimed at repelling an
ongoing "armed attack" on the territory of the United States.
When faced with serious provocations, we don't want to be left with a stark choice
between utter passivity and all-out war. We need to think about expanding our range of
options. The goal should be to identify flexible and proportional responses, rather than
fretting about some fixed legal boundary between "attacks" that permit "self-defense"
under the UN Charter and those that allow only diplomatic protests. And we are better
off exploring those options in advance, before a cyber attack prompts a crisis.
Within the cyber realm, there is a wide range of potential responses that are proportional
to the provocation and can be graduated through successive stages of an ongoing
confrontation. For the least egregious cyber attack, we might start with a demonstration
of capacity—for example, penetrating computer networks operated by a foreign
government and leaving behind mocking messages, as the Chinese have done with
computers at the Pentagon and at offices of major American defense contractors. This
would be the cyber equivalent of sending a fleet to show the flag in a troubled region.
At a slightly higher level of intensity, we might conduct cyber attacks that are disruptive,
but that inflict little permanent damage. Denial-of-service attacks on web businesses
already illustrate the potential for attacks of this kind. During the attack, a targeted
firm suffers some losses, but the only permanent damage may be reputational. A more
severe, government-sponsored attack might disrupt financial or transportation
infrastructure for hours or days, without risking physical injury to human beings. So,
for example, people would not die if their credit cards were declined due to computer
problems. Still, an attack that caused widespread credit card malfunctioning would
send a very pointed message.
How far we go might depend not only on the scale of the provocation but also on how
sure we are about who should be blamed for it. Current literature on cyber conflict
features extensive discussion of "the attribution problem." Because cyber attacks can
easily be routed through a chain of networks on different continents, we may not
always be sure whether the ultimate responsibility for the attack lies with a particular
hostile state. Alternatively, we might trace an attack to a particular group of malicious
hackers, but not be sure whether or to what extent they are covertly sponsored by a
hostile government. Or we may have strong reasons to believe that a particular state
was involved but not want to risk betraying our intelligence sources by presenting our
evidence in public.
As novel as the technological setting may be, the underlying problem is not new. It is,
in fact, as old as the United States. Even in colonial times, British and French authorities
accused each other of conspiring with Indians to attack rival settlements, but it was
often difficult to establish "attribution" for any particular Indian raid. As late as the
1980s, U.S. officials protested Soviet and Cuban involvement with guerrilla insurgencies
in Central America, while Moscow and Havana routinely denied involvement.
American strategists long ago learned to turn such ambiguities to their own advantage.
In the early nineteenth century, the U.S. government cultivated its own ties with
Indian tribes in frontier regions and with pirate raiders in the Caribbean, who enjoyed
American support when attacking European powers—or at least benefitted from
American authorities' turning a blind eye to those attacks. In the 1980s, the United States
gave various forms of background assistance to anti-Marxist guerrillas in Nicaragua.
When Nicaragua protested to the International Court of Justice, the court acknowledged
the United States did not bear direct responsibility for the use of force by "Contra"
rebels, because the United States did not exercise direct control over these irregular
forces, even if it plainly sought to assist and encourage them.
Similarly, the United States could register its displeasure through a wide range of
measures without committing to direct confrontation. In the case of a less serious
cyber attack, this might mean funding research in anti-censorship technology or
turning a blind eye to private activists trying to breach Internet censorship in target
countries. While such measures may pose the risk of escalation, American policymakers have substantial experience with these risks—and are often willing to take
chances on aggressive security measures. For instance, the United States regularly
launches fatal drone strikes on terror suspects in countries with which we are not at
war. Is a cyber attack really a bigger provocation than bombing?
Permissible Military Targets vs. Protected Civilian Sites
A good deal of literature insists that retaliatory cyber attacks must remain within
limits set by the Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC). The most recent effort to codify LOAC
norms, the 1977 Additional Protocol I (AP I) to the Geneva Conventions, emphasizes
that attacks must not be launched on civilians or "civilian objects." Commentaries
sponsored by the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva have emphasized
that there are no permissible exceptions to these restrictions and that they apply to
cyber attacks just as they do to other methods of war.10 Quite a few American legal
analysts have endorsed this perspective.
But it is a mistake to try to fit cyber retaliation into this framework. Although the
United States acknowledges that many AP I provisions are now part of binding
customary law, the U.S. has not actually ratified AP I. And several American allies that
did ratify the protocol—including Britain, France, Germany, Canada and Australia—did
so with formal reservations, claiming the right to engage in reprisals in kind against
enemies who violate restrictions in the treaty. Even if we considered all cyber attacks
as legally equivalent to "armed attack," and then assumed that all restrictions on
armed conflict apply in the cyber realm, the ICRC claim that retaliatory cyber attacks
may never be launched at civilians or "civilian objects" is still not persuasive.
The ICRC view wrongly tries to extend rules designed for one kind of warfare to all
types of conflict. It is only in the past century that we have tried to codify rules of war
in international conventions, but the law of war goes back many centuries. It has long
provided separate rules for land war and sea war. The Hague Peace Conferences of
1899 and 1907 thus proposed a convention on "The Law and Custom of War On Land"
and a series of quite different conventions on naval warfare.
This legal distinction reflected the different ways conflicts were conducted on land
and sea. In conventional land war, the objective was to seize and hold enemy territory.
The dynamic of the struggle would invest particular locations with tactical or strategic
importance and the presence of civilians was typically a distracting challenge. If they
took up arms to resist, civilians could cause trouble for an invading army. So the
custom was to promise civilians immunity if they would refrain from participating in
hostilities. Restrictions on targeting civilians and civilian property arose from the
perceived common interest of the invading land army and the local citizens. Civilians
earned immunity by maintaining neutrality.
War on the sea was different. The purpose of fighting was not to seize and hold territory
but to harass the enemy. One method was to disrupt the enemy's commerce by seizing
and sometimes sinking enemy merchant ships. Belligerent states did not worry about
civilian residents, but a fellowship of the sea did guide the treatment of ships' crews.
Belligerents did not want to provoke neutral states, which might enter the fight if their
own ships were attacked or they felt threatened by violations of acceptable conduct for
naval warfare. So naval powers adhered to limits on the treatment of surrendered
crews, whether on warships or merchant ships.
Classic naval warfare thus distinguished permissible from impermissible targets, but
the distinction was not between military and civilian targets. Typically, commerce
raiders would board a merchant ship, determine its nationality, and if it belonged to the
enemy, would seize the ship and its cargo as a "prize of war." If a warship had to sink an
enemy ship, it did so only after trying to help the enemy crew to safety. Until the end of
the nineteenth century, naval technology made it feasible and safe for commerce
raiders to take such precautions when seizing an enemy vessel.
In the twentieth century, this system broke down because radio communication made
it possible for merchant ships under attack to request assistance from allied warships.
This made it dangerous for attackers to board the captured ship, search it, and see to
the crew's safety before sinking it. At the same time, submarines and aircraft proved
to be potent weapons—but they lacked any real capacity to board or search the ships
they attacked. As a result, lethal attacks without warning became common during the
world wars. Allied navies used their surface fleets to blockade enemy shipping lanes,
cutting off almost all neutral vessels, even those carrying food and fuel.
If we still recognize land and naval warfare as distinct categories, we must surely
classify cyber conflict with the latter. Indeed, cyber conflict has more in common with
early naval warfare than with twentieth century naval practices. In cyber conflict,
attackers bear little personal risk, and can impose significant economic harm without
threatening the lives of civilians. Like sea raiders of old, they will not typically interact,
in any direct way, with the civilian population in the target country. Accordingly, cyber
attackers do not face the same incentives as land armies to grant combat immunity to
enemy civilians.
In a cyber conflict, we still have good reason, of course, to observe humanitarian
constraints when civilian lives are at stake. But cyber attacks can inflict economic
hardship without bodily harm. So rules designed to prevent civilians from being killed
in crossfire make less sense if they are deployed to prevent civilians from suffering
economic hardship or personal inconvenience. Thus we need not extend complete
target immunity to what AP I calls "civilian objects"—equipment, installations, and
economic infrastructure not devoted to "military" purposes.
In twentieth century bombing campaigns, strategists viewed industrial facilities for
arms production as a sort of intermediate targeting case: more appropriate than other
civilian facilities, but less so than purely military infrastructure. Though some analysts
have claimed it would still be lawful to strike economic targets relevant to the enemy's
war-fighting capacity, that sort of analysis does not map very well onto the realities of
a conflict that remains in the cyber realm. Cyber conflict would not depend on specialized
infrastructure. The computers and software development tools that might be used
would be hard—often impossible—to distinguish from those used for purely commercial
purposes or civilian-oriented research. If we tried to attack an enemy's "high tech sector"
as a military target, we would inflict proportionally as much harm to civilian objects as
did World War II bombing, but with far less excuse, since we now have the capacity to
be more discriminating in our targeting.
It does not follow, however, that we should want to concentrate exclusively on military
computer networks. If anything, attacks on actual military objects, such as commandand-control links, are likely to be more destabilizing than attacks on civilian targets.
During a crisis, a mid-level officer who suddenly loses contact with superiors might
become jumpy and prone to an overly aggressive response. High-level commanders,
threatened with the loss of contact and control over their entire military, may start to
think in apocalyptic terms. That would be a particularly ominous development in
states where commanders have access to weapons of mass destruction. It would be
more prudent to leave enemy military targets alone, rather than risk goading enemy
commanders into panicky, "use it or lose it" decision-making.
Lawful Participants: Soldiers vs. Civilians
In earlier times, the Law of Armed Conflict sought to distinguish "military" from "civilian"
not only in terms of targets but also in terms of lawful participation in combat. In large
part, this was because the military combatants could not honor the targeting distinction
if civilians did not honor the participation exclusion: if every civilian might be a fighter
in disguise, armies would have to regard all civilians as potential enemies. So invading
armies treated armed civilians with great suspicion and those found using their weapons
for combat could be summarily executed. Older treatises described civilian combatants
as "war criminals" or perpetrators of "war treason."
Treaties acknowledged some exceptions, however, even in land warfare. The Hague
Conventions on Land Warfare and the 1949 Geneva Convention III extended protections
for prisoners of war to members of militias and others outside the regular army if they
met certain conditions. Those conditions for irregular combatants included carrying
arms openly and maintaining at least some insignia on their clothing, indicating their
combatant status. Even then, such fighters were only protected if they operated under
a defined command structure and obeyed the laws of war—in other words, if they
accepted the legal constraints applying to full-time soldiers.
There is dispute about whether and how these protections should be applied to
guerrilla fighters today. Additional Protocol I allows guerrillas to claim prisoner of
war status even if they do not carry arms openly nor display identifying insignia
before they enter combat operations. Such concessions to guerrilla warfare—which
might easily be interpreted to protect even terrorist networks—were a principal
reason the U.S. rejected AP I.
But none of these protections makes much sense in a cyber conflict. Cyber intrusion
is almost always conducted by stealth: the U.S. Department of Defense will not send
destructive cyber messages by email with a return address identifying itself as the
sender. There is so much cyber crime and cyber espionage on today's Internet that no
country can claim that it relies on the "civilian" character of incoming messages and
regards malicious messaging as "perfidy." Cyber warriors—if we want to think of them
as warriors—won't have a physical presence in enemy territory. They are highly unlikely
to be captured by enemies, let alone need to invoke Geneva Convention protections for
prisoners of war.
Nor are civilian hacktivists likely to operate with the military-style discipline of an
identifiable chain of command. While some degree of military training is required
for traditional combat units to function effectively, the same is not true for citizen
hacktivists. The skills they need are well developed in non-military sectors of the
information technology industry. Since there are so many non-military threats
to computer networks—from criminal gangs, vandals and others—commercial
developers and academics in computer science already focus on network security
for civilian use. Understanding computer security necessarily means understanding
attacks. Papers describing new attack techniques are routine in academic computer
security publications.11 The academic computer science curriculum increasingly
includes techniques relevant to cyber conflict. There are organized—and legal—
contests in which college students compete to quickly and effectively break into
designated computers.12 Indeed, there are calls for schools to require students to
understand malicious software and even to practice writing their own.13 We might
think of citizens with such skills as the high-tech equivalent of citizen militia fighters.
Certainly, if there is a cyber conflict with a publicly identified adversary, there will be
many individuals in the private sector who have the technical skills to participate in
retaliation—and who may feel a strong temptation to do so. A formal training and
command structure, for the purpose of enforcing basic discipline, may not be necessary.
Leaving such volunteers entirely without official guidance, however, would make it hard
to limit retaliatory attacks and prevent unwanted escalation.
Here, again, we might do well to think about cyber conflict in more imaginative ways,
by drawing on much earlier experience. Since cyber conflict has much in common with
traditional naval warfare, we should recall that governments often invoked the aid of
capable mariners who were not part of the regular navy. Before the mid-nineteenth
century, "privateers" were often commissioned to attack enemy ships. They were offered
a percentage of what they could seize from enemy commerce. They were distinguished
from mere pirates—with whom they had obvious similarities—by formal authorizations,
so-called "letters of marque," issued by the sponsoring state.
Privateering was once a common feature of naval warfare, partly for reasons of
economy: it allowed governments to extend their force at sea without the expense
of maintaining large fleets. There were also diplomatic or strategic advantages.
Commissioning privateer attacks was a means of imposing harm on another state
without committing to war. Thus the framers of the U.S. Constitution took care to specify
that Congress had the power to "declare war" but also the power to "issue letters of
marque," implying that the latter could proceed without the former. In interpreting
this clause in an early case, the U.S. Supreme Court cited the treatise of the Swiss jurist
Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui, who associated the practice with "imperfect war," in which
some hostilities are permitted but the conflict remains more constrained than all-out
war.14 In practice, letters of marque often were issued to those who had learned the
craft of capturing prize at sea without any government authorization. Governments
issuing authorization brought these raiders under more state control in return for
offering them more state protection.
Comparisons between cyber warriors and pirates of old are not fanciful. Cyber crime
is a pervasive aspect of today's Internet. Much like international drug dealers, cyber
criminals have sought protective relations with sympathetic or accommodating
governments. The so-called "Russian Business Network," active in a range of cyber
crime activities, seems to have received protection and support from the Russian
government.15 The Chinese government has openly encouraged private hackers and
may well have enlisted organized groups to probe Western business and government
networks—and then take or sell what they can.16
Professional computer criminals are a deep reservoir of technical talent. A government
seeking to conduct a cyber conflict on the cheap might tell criminals "we will protect
and aid you with our diplomatic and intelligence resources, provided you direct your
criminal enterprises against our enemies." Using proxy combatants of this sort may
reduce the risk of escalation. Criminals are restrained in ways that ideologicallymotivated combatants are not. A criminal's goal will not be to render cities uninhabitable,
or to cripple economic infrastructure, but rather to divert profits from ongoing
commercial activities.
Just as in past conflicts, the target state is likely to be highly affronted by direct attacks
from another government. Attacks by shadowy networks may be harder to retaliate
against. Elsewhere in the world, governments are already preparing and using such
hard-to-trace attacks by non-governmental cyber warriors. The United States should
consider ways to respond in kind. That means thinking about a range of possible
participants, with varying degrees of government sponsorship, control or encouragement.
Through a variety of actions, governments can encourage or discourage citizen
volunteers from engaging in a conflict. The spectrum starts with relaxing normal
enforcement standards and culminates with providing overt training and aid to the
volunteers. In the course of actual conflicts, the line between what we condone and
what we don't is likely to remain fuzzy. We may accept some practices—or retaliate
only indirectly—while issuing formal protests and open retaliation for others. Legal
analysts would be wise not to draw precise legal lines in this swampy terrain for the
time being. We need more experience with the range of possibilities before we start
marking them with precise legal tags.
Espionage vs. Theft and Destructive Action in Cyberspace
Much activity in cyberspace might be described as computer-based espionage. That
raises distinct legal challenges. Nations have always felt free to impose criminal penalties
for spying. But neither classic treatises on the law of armed conflict, nor the various
Hague or Geneva Conventions on the law of war, recognize espionage as an affront to
international norms. Even the Statute of the International Criminal Court, drafted in
1998, fails to include espionage in its compilation of war crimes and crimes against
humanity. Every modern state feels free to field its own intelligence service.
Such indulgent attitudes are easily explained. No one expects these services to refrain
from seeking out the secrets of other states, even in peacetime. States can try to catch
and prosecute foreign spies, but it seems pointless to threaten reprisals in kind against
the state whose spies have been caught because all states must assume their friends
and enemies alike engage in spying. Why make a special fuss, then, about cyber spying?
The reason is that cyber spying often targets private entities. Traditional espionage
focused on acquiring military and diplomatic secrets from rival states. In earlier times,
private firms or private individuals rarely had secrets sought by foreign governments.
The Oxford English Dictionary reports no use of the term "industrial espionage" prior
to the 1960s.
Today, cyber attacks are routinely directed against information in private hands. Many
companies, particularly technology companies, rely on trade secrets to maintain their
competitive advantage. Foreign competitors sometimes attempt to catch up by stealing
these secrets. Intelligence agencies in the U.S., Britain, and Germany have all pointed
to concerted and sophisticated efforts by Chinese and Russian corporations to gain
commercial advantage by intellectual property theft.17
Other attacks have sought to disrupt e-commerce—or to demonstrate the capacity to
do so—by targeting databases with sensitive information about clients, such as credit
card numbers. Criminal gangs share such information with perpetrators of credit card
fraud or those who seek to extort protection payments from threatened corporations.
While many such attacks simply aim to extract a quick profit, others seek to inflict harm
on the target for ideological reasons.
Such ideologically-motivated and publicly-disclosed attacks have become increasingly
common. In December 2011, malicious hackers published several thousand Israeli
credit card numbers in a politically-motivated attack traced to Saudi perpetrators
protesting Israel's alleged abuse of Palestinians. In the United States, the politicalconsulting company Stratfor was the victim of a similar attack, which seems to have
had no larger purpose than to embarrass the conservative-leaning firm and its clients.
In January 2012, the hacktivist group Anonymous claimed credit for a mocking revision
of the mission statement on the website of the Susan G. Komen foundation to protest
that organization's suspension of contracts with Planned Parenthood. Similar attacks
have involved publication of internal corporate email to embarrass the target firm.18
Some of these attacks may be regarded as little more than high-tech vandalism, the
cyber equivalent of spray-painting profanity on a storefront or a factory gate. Improved
security practices or improved policing may deter some attackers. But the threat
is more challenging when perpetrators are in foreign countries and protected and
encouraged by foreign governments. Both Russia and China are known to have
organized economic espionage campaigns, supported by national intelligence agencies.19
At some point, stealing information from private firms looks less like traditional
espionage and more like high-tech looting. The United States government may have its
own forms of intelligence gathering, seeking to uncover secrets of foreign governments.
It may not want to make much fuss about other governments engaged in parallel
activities, because it may reasonably prefer to keep its own intelligence gathering in
the shadows. But the government has an obligation to protect its own citizens against
looting, against attempted blackmail and extortion, and against abusive revelation of
personal information ordinarily kept private. The United States government has a
particular responsibility to protect American firms and private citizens from attacks
launched by organizations operating from foreign countries and outside the reach of
American law.
In earlier times, the United States regarded attacks on Americans and even American
property as warranting military intervention. President Woodrow Wilson sent a small
army into northern Mexico in 1916 to hunt down Mexican bandits who had committed
arson in an American border town, killing or wounding a dozen American civilians. In
the early nineteenth century, General Andrew Jackson pursued hostile Indians into
Spanish Florida in retaliation for their raids on frontier settlements in Georgia.
Less direct responses were also available. As noted earlier, issuing letters of marque to
privateers allowed the government to respond without deploying public force. Letters
of marque and letters of reprisal (also authorized in the Constitution) were originally
conceived as authorizations to private parties to indemnify themselves for injuries by
seizing (or destroying) property from the home state of the original attacker.
Today, we have good reason to be wary about resorting to armed force against foreign
states, but we may well choose to retaliate electronically against states that sponsor
or condone cyber attacks on American computer networks. Authoritarian states have
many secrets that could serve as targets for retaliation. Groups that want to publicize
information about the wealth or high-living of government officials in such countries
may violate American law if they do so from sites in the United States. We might
change our laws to accommodate such groups and allow our government to promise
immunity for such actions in appropriate circumstances. At the same time, as cyber
policy evolves in the United States, it should acknowledge that active retaliation—
using cyber weapons, not military ones—may sometimes be appropriate as a way to
deter foreign governments from supporting attacks on our own citizens and our own
economic infrastructure.
As cyber attackers grow bolder in menacing a wide variety of targets around the world,
our law must evolve to meet these new threats. While we can draw on some of the
categories in existing legal norms, cyber attacks are a new phenomenon in the history
of conflict that requires new norms as well. Prior to the twentieth century, international
law had to cope with many gray areas in a world that was not so neatly ordered as that
envisioned by the UN Charter and post-war Geneva Conventions. In the cyber realm,
the lines of conflict have again become blurred. We can begin to meet future cyber
challenges by adapting old practices and institutions.
We will have to sort out a great many questions about matching cyber strategy with
our internal institutional controls. Which actions should require presidential direction
and which should require authorization from Congress? Which measures should be
publicly avowed and which should be left in the shadows? What should be regarded as a
military tactic under Pentagon control and what is better trusted to non-military actors?
Before we become embroiled in these procedural debates, however, we must first try to
clarify the range of possible responses available to us in the cyber realm. We must first
decide what kinds of cyber attacks require an American response and what kinds of
retaliation we are prepared to deliver.
1 Defense Secretary Leon Panetta used the phrase at a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee on
June 9, 2011. For one account of the receptive reaction, see Anna Mulrine, "Panetta: The next Pearl Harbor could
be a cyber attack," Christian Science Monitor, June 9, 2011. A Google search of "cyber Pearl Harbor" now generates
nearly 3 million results.
2 See, e.g., Scott Shackelford, "From Nuclear War to Net War: Analogizing Cyber Attacks in International Law,"
Berkeley Journal of International Law, Vol. 27 (2008), p. 191, esp. pp. 239–45; Thomas C. Wingfield, The Law of
Information Conflict, National Security Law in Cyber Space (Falls Church, Va.: Aegis Research, 2000), esp.
pp. 44–46; Duncan Hollis, "Why States Need an International Law for Information Operations," Lewis and Clark
Law Review, Vol. 11 (2007), p. 1023.
3 Mathew J. Schwartz, "Lockheed Martin Suffers Massive Cyberattack," Information Week, May 31, 2011.
4 "International Strategy for Cyberspace: Prosperity, Security and Openness in a Networked World," May 2011,
p. 14. Available from White House website: http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/rss_viewer/international
_strategy_for_cyberspace.pdf.
5 2012 National Defense Authorization Act, Sec. 954. The accompanying conference report (H. Rept. 112–329,
Cong. Rec., Dec. 12, 2011) explains that the provision originally appeared in the House bill without the restrictive
proviso. The Senate bill had no parallel provision but Senate conferees accepted the authorization, only after House
conferees agree to the cautionary addition.
6 Stewart Baker, "Denial of Service: Lawyers are crippling America's ability to defend against cyberwar with arcane
rules and regulations," Foreign Policy, Sept. 30, 2011.
7 Matthew Waxman, "Cyber-Attacks and the Use of Force," 36 Yale J. Int'l L. 421 (2011).
8 The argument seems to have first been developed by Michael Schmitt in "Computer Network Attack and
International Law," Naval War College International Law Studies (2002).
9 Yoram Dinstein, War, Aggression and Self-Defense (New York: Cambridge University Press, 4th ed., 2005),
pp. 221–31.
10 International Committee of the Red Cross, "Cyber warfare, 29-10-2010 Overview," available at http://www.icrc.org.
For elaboration of the arguments behind this conclusion, see Knut Doermann, "Computer Network Attack and
International Humanitarian Law," Cambridge Review of International Affairs, May 2001, available at http://www
.icrc.org.
11 "Attacks against networks and machines" is the fourth category of papers listed in the Call for Papers at the
recent USENIX Security conference, among the top venues for computer security research. (http://www.usenix.org
/events/sec11/cfp/topics.html)
12 "The UCSB iCTF," accessed September 20, 2011, http://ictf.cs.ucsb.edu.
13 George Ledlin, "The Growing Harm of Not Teaching Malware," Communications of the ACM, February 2011,
pp. 32–34.
14 Bas v. Tingy, 4 Dall. 37 (1800).
15 Peter Warren, "Hunt for Russia's web criminals," The Guardian, Nov. 14, 2007, available at http://www.guardian
.co.uk/technology/2007/nov/15/news.crime; Brian Krebs, "Shadowy Russian Firm Seen as Conduit for Cybercrime,"
The Washington Post, Oct. 13, 2007, available at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/12
/AR2007101202461.html.
16 Ryan Paul, "Researchers identify command servers behind Google Attack," ars technica, available at
http://arstechnica.com/security/news/2010/01/researchers-identify-command-servers-behind-google-attack.ars.
17 Kate Connolly, "Germany accuses China of industrial espionage," The Guardian, July 22, 2009, available at
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jul/22/germany-china-industrial-espionage.
18 Such attacks have targeted law firms (see http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2012/02/100000-emails
-leaked-haditha-marines-lawyers-now-what/48292/), banks (see http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/14/anon_bofa
_wikileak/) and other businesses (see http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/01/hbgary_ceo_resigns_over_anon_hack).
19 "Foreign Spies Stealing US Economic Secrets in Cyberspace," US Office of the National Counterintelligence
Executive, October 2011.
Copyright © 2012 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
This publication is for educational and private, non-commercial use only. No part of this publication may be reprinted,
reproduced, or transmitted in electronic, digital, mechanical, photostatic, recording, or other means without the written
permission of the copyright holder.
The publisher has made an online version of this work available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs
license 3.0. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0.
The preferred citation for this publication is
Jeremy A. Rabkin and Ariel Rabkin, "Why the Current Law of Armed Conflict Should Not Fetter U.S. Cyber Strategy
(2012)," in Emerging Threats in National Security and Law, edited by Peter Berkowitz, http://www.emergingthreats
essays.com.
Koret-Taube Task Force on National Security
and Law
The National Security and Law Task Force examines the rule of
law, the laws of war, and American constitutional law with a view
to making proposals that strike an optimal balance between
individual freedom and the vigorous defense of the nation
against terrorists both abroad and at home. The task force's
focus is the rule of law and its role in Western civilization, as
well as the roles of international law and organizations, the laws
of war, and U.S. criminal law. Those goals will be accomplished
by systematically studying the constellation of issues—social,
economic, and political—on which striking a balance depends.
Jeremy A. Rabkin
Jeremy A. Rabkin is currently
a professor of law at George
Mason University (GMU),
where he teaches courses
including International Law
and The Law of War. He
holds a PhD in political
science from Harvard
University. Before coming to
GMU in 2007, he taught for
many years in the Department
of Government at Cornell
University. His most recent
book is Law without Nations?
(Princeton University Press).
The core membership of this task force includes Kenneth
Anderson, Peter Berkowitz (chair), Philip Bobbitt, Jack
Goldsmith, Stephen D. Krasner, Jessica Stern, Matthew
Waxman, Ruth Wedgwood, Benjamin Wittes, and Amy B. Zegart.
For more information about this Hoover Institution Task
Force please visit us online at www.hoover.org/taskforces
/national-security.
Ariel Rabkin
Ariel Rabkin received his
from UC Berkeley in 2012,
where he was advised by
Randy Katz. His dissertation
concerns making software
systems easier to configure
and manage; he is also
interested in security and
cloud computing. Rabkin
obtained his bachelor's
degree in 2006 and his
master's in engineering
in 2007, both from
Cornell University.
Employing ANP Approach to Evaluate the Economic Value Added of
How to protect the substations from physical or cyber intrusion Chicago
How to participate in the CDT in Cyber Security supporter
Cyber terrorism: a clear and present danger, the sum
AttAcks the impact of conflict and grave violations on children's futures
TALLINN MANUAL ON THE INTERNATIONAL LAW APPLICABLE TO CYBER WARFARE
The role of Ace inhibitors in prophylaxis of migraines: a
Her Majesty's Armed Forces Application Form Guidance Notes
Attack Patterns as a Knowledge Resource for Building Secure Software Sean Barnum
ABC of International Humanitarian
27153 Federal Register
TRICARE Evaluation of the Program
build a cantenna and steal wireless internet access • announce
SAINIK KALYAN VIBHAG : RAJASTHAN CHAPTER - 1
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How the Squid Sings (It Screams) – Bhob Rainey | MEGAPOLIS!!! SOUND ART!!! HURRAY!!!
We have visualizations, models, and mathematical abstractions to help us grasp patterns and feign predictions of clouds of data, weather systems, and markets. But perhaps the dynamic and uncanny medium of sound can best express the excessive experience of utter contingency arcing through each quark. See (and hear) several approaches to sonifying complex phenomena, building from small parts to larger systems.
Bhob Rainey, a recipient of the Pew Fellowship in the Arts, is a composer, improvisor, and computer programmer. He founded the seminal improv duo, Nmperign, directed The BSC, an improvising large ensemble, for fifteen years, and created a series of multichannel electronic works as Prants (with Chris Cooper). His compositions work with large data systems, chaos, and the teeming underside of everyday communication technology.


text:
Q: How to draw a sliced image in Cairo? I am currently using the following code to draw sliced images:
static void DrawImage(cairo_t *ctx,int x,int y,int w,int h,cairo_surface_t *img){
    cairo_set_source_surface(ctx, img, 0, 0);
    cairo_rectangle(ctx, x, y, w, h);
    cairo_clip(ctx);
    cairo_paint(ctx);
    cairo_reset_clip(ctx);
}

void DrawThreeSliceImage(cairo_t* ctx,Point p,int width,cairo_surface_t *a,cairo_surface_t *b,cairo_surface_t *c){
    DrawImage(ctx, p.x, p.y, cairo_image_surface_get_width(a), cairo_image_surface_get_height(a),a);
    DrawImage(ctx, p.x+cairo_image_surface_get_width(a), p.y, width-(cairo_image_surface_get_width(a)+cairo_image_surface_get_width(c)), cairo_image_surface_get_height(b),b);
    DrawImage(ctx, p.x+(width-cairo_image_surface_get_width(c)), p.y, cairo_image_surface_get_width(c), cairo_image_surface_get_height(c),c);
}

However, there is no output. I have tried rendering to both xlib and png surfaces, neither seems to work, that is nothing is drawn. Also, I have written the input surfaces to png files, and they appear to be working.
Thanks.

A: For those who may be having a similar problem, this code worked for me:
void DrawImage(cairo_t *ctx,int x,int y,int w,int h,cairo_surface_t *img){
    /*if((w||h) || (w==cairo_image_surface_get_width(img)&&h==cairo_image_surface_get_height(img))){
        cairo_save(ctx);
        cairo_translate(ctx, x, y);
        cairo_scale(ctx, ((double)w)/((double)cairo_image_surface_get_width(img)), ((double)h)/((double)cairo_image_surface_get_height(img)));
        cairo_pattern_t *pattern=cairo_pattern_create_for_surface(img);
        cairo_pattern_set_extend(pattern, CAIRO_EXTEND_PAD);
        cairo_set_source(ctx, pattern);
        cairo_rectangle(ctx, 0,0, cairo_image_surface_get_width(img), cairo_image_surface_get_height(img));
        cairo_fill(ctx);
        cairo_pattern_destroy(pattern);
        cairo_restore(ctx);
    }else{
        cairo_set_source_surface(ctx, img, x,y);
        cairo_rectangle(ctx, x,y, cairo_image_surface_get_width(img), cairo_image_surface_get_height(img));
        cairo_fill(ctx);
    }*/
    cairo_save(ctx);
    cairo_translate(ctx, x, y);
    cairo_pattern_t *pattern=cairo_pattern_create_for_surface(img);
    cairo_pattern_set_extend(pattern, CAIRO_EXTEND_PAD);
    cairo_set_source(ctx, pattern);
    cairo_rectangle(ctx, 0, 0, w?w:cairo_image_surface_get_width(img), h?h:cairo_image_surface_get_height(img));
    cairo_fill(ctx);
    cairo_pattern_destroy(pattern);
    cairo_restore(ctx);
}

void DrawThreeSliceImage(cairo_t* ctx,Point p,int width,cairo_surface_t* imgs[3]){
#define a   (imgs[0])
#define b   (imgs[1])
#define c   (imgs[2])
    DrawImage(ctx, p.x, p.y, cairo_image_surface_get_width(a), cairo_image_surface_get_height(a),a);
    DrawImage(ctx, p.x+cairo_image_surface_get_width(a), p.y, width-(cairo_image_surface_get_width(a)+cairo_image_surface_get_width(c)), cairo_image_surface_get_height(b),b);
    DrawImage(ctx, p.x+(width-cairo_image_surface_get_width(c)), p.y, cairo_image_surface_get_width(c), cairo_image_surface_get_height(c),c);
#undef a
#undef b
#undef c
}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


It's that time again. Time to pop over to Starbucks and order a hot, cosy cup of Autumn…and by that, we mean Pumpkin Spice Lattes of course! There's definitely something comforting about perusing through shops with a warm cup between your hands.
Don't forget to get cinnamon dusted cream on top! Perfect.


If you love the look and feel of jute as much as I do, then you are going to enjoy this DIY crafting adventure! I love upcycling things around my home that I either fell out of love with or just want to bring to life, and since I enjoy working with jute and making so many beautiful projects with it, I knew this metal basket with woven jute would be a fun project. I'm going to show you how to easily weave a beautiful jute metal basket!
I always get my jute and other crafting products from Oriental Trading – they have a terrific assortment of crafting supplies and their jute is simply the best! The prices are pretty outstanding too!
Jute is a natural fiber that can be spun and woven into a variety of textures. It is also one of the most versatile choices for any aspect of home decor. It is durable and strong, yet can be surprisingly soft to the touch (depending on the treatment and tightness of the weave).
I started with an old metal basket I had and simply knotted one end of the jute and started weaving.
This project is so super easy – all you do is weave the jute around the metal basket. You don't need glue to hold the pieces together. All you do is make small knots and weave around them to hold them in place.
It's so relaxing to work with jute too. You can take any basket you have on hand and transform it into a beautiful upcycled jute masterpiece. You can space the jute out or pull it close together – it all depends on the look you are after. There's something so charming about a jute metal basket.
I love the results. I can't wait to try different patterns too. Be sure to check out my other jute crafting projects too.
Let me show you some of the other projects I made with jute. I made Stunning Farmhouse Mason Jars with jute and love the way they turned out. Again, you are free to make any jute pattern you like.
I also create a Pier 1 Lamp Knock Off too. This project turned out so beautifully!
Can you tell I love jute yet? I also recently created A Stunning Braided Jute Centerpiece too and this has to be my favorite jute creation.
I was so annoyed by my medicine cabinet items falling into the sink and onto the floor that I created a way to Stop Your Medicine Cabinet Items From Falling Out with jute too. Again, you can create the faux shelving to look any way you like with a little imagination.
I love how this metal basket was transformed using jute. I hope you get to create one soon too!
The jute also helps keep my fruits and veggies from getting dents and dings on the side when they touch the basket. It's a win-win!
Let me know if you have any questions about the process. It's super easy and so much fun. Very therapeutic too!
The natural detail in jute is what brings these pieces to life! You can paint, dye, or stain jute too! I love how you can braid it and make detailed designs with it as well.
I love storing this jute metal basket in my beautiful pantry cabinet now. This metal basket looks beautiful compared to my other baskets.
Next time I work with jute, I'm going to try staining it.
Let me know if you have any questions about this process! Have fun creating!
And as always, thanks so much for stopping by! If you like this post, How To Easily Weave A Beautiful Jute Metal Basket, subscribe via email below and never miss a post again!
Chris Evert's Florida Tennis Home – It's A Deuce!
Jute is such a perfect texture for fall. It reminds me of vintage somehow and harvest. I love the natural colour as well. Perfect for the little vegetable garden basket you updated.
I did not know where to purchase jute and all too long ago I use to be fantastic at macrame. Its made a revival but I did not know where to get the supplies.
Thank you for the referral.
Hi Leanna, Thank you so much! It took about three hours to make and I have to say, I was lost in time when I was weaving it. This has to be one of the most relaxing crafts I've made in a while. I do love the look of jute. I can't wait to try another fun project with it! Oh yes, I love macrame! I totally forgot about how beautiful it is. I like getting my jute at Oriental Trading it's great quality and good prices.
I am in awe how you wove or weaved this metal basket with jute. I know it is the easiest you have done, but at first glance it looks ingenious. I have a few things done in jute and am falling in love with it too.
Thanks so much Sue. It took about three hours to make and I have to say, I was lost in time when I was weaving it. This has to be one of the most relaxing crafts I've made in a while. I do love the look of jute. I can't wait to try another fun project with it!
Carolann this is beautiful as well as all of your other jute projects. Oriental Trading is great for craft products too. Thanks for the awesome tutorial!
Thanks Michelle, I love working with jute. It's so relaxing and the results are always so pretty!
What a super clever way to update an old basket!! I'm a jute lover like you and will be looking for some wire baskets to play with!! Thank you so much for the inspiration.
Oh yes, I love jute too. It really pretties up any crafting project!
Wow those are super cute and make such a pretty display!! I'm a lover of jute too. thanks for sharing!
Thank you, Yuni! I love jute too. There's so much you can do with it. It really pretties up any crafting project!


This section is being developed in order to share information about homeopathy with our members and to provide them with news and updates about Society activities. We also plan to incorporate opportunities for members to communicate among themselves. These pages are currently under construction.
Members can access membership renewal forms HERE.
Benefits of membership with Canadian Society of Homeopathy are listed HERE.
For other information pertaining to our members click HERE.
Keep up with daily news and happenings on our facebook page!


It is beneficial to know your hair growth rate. The hair growth rate is how much your hair grows each month. On average, hair grows 1/2 inch per month. Some people grow more, while some grow less. Not knowing your normal hair growth rate, makes it harder to know when your growth slows or if a growth product or technique is working for you.
Measure you hair in 3 different areas, every month, for 7 months. Take the average from those 7 months of growth. That will give you a good ideal as to how much your hair grows each month.
Make note of anything major you do to your hair during this time. Things such as: trims, hair color, extensions, major breakage, health issues, etc. Depression, menstral cycles, anemia, thyroid issues, pregnancy can also greatly affect your hair growth.
Since you are tracking hair growth it would be best to not trim you hair during the 7 months. Trim your hair before you begin, if you need a trim.
It is unnecessary to heat straighten your hair, for simply checking the length. You can do a length check on your hair in its natural curly state. You can also stretch your hair by two strand twisting it, letting it air dry in a ponytail or air dry in magnetic rollers.
Measure your length on one side. Make a clear note as to the side you choose. Left side or the right side. Take pictures of your measurements if that works better for you.
Measure the bottom back area. Choose left or right side. Record all your starting measurements. Repeat these measurements every 30 days, for 7 months. Record how much growth you gain in each area.
Do this for 7 months and that will tell you how much your hair grows on average per month. Your HGR which stands for hair growth rate.


COMMENTARY: The Xbox One, it must be said, is doing OK. Microsoft hasn't released official sales numbers since 2014, but the generally accepted theory is that there are about 30 million Xbox Ones in circulation. In conjunction with the 59 million active Xbox Live subscribers that Microsoft claims it has, it's a story of reasonable success.
That being said, in the greater marketplace, it's getting trounced. The PlayStation 4 has sold roughly two-and-a-half times as well, as far as industry analysts can figure (although Microsoft, as you can see in this Variety piece, disputes those numbers), and the Nintendo Switch is on track to catch up to the Xbox One by the end of 2018. The Xbox has a beachhead in the marketplace and it's probably profitable, but Sony has a dead lock on roughly 70 percent of the console market right now and that gap is only getting wider.
This largely comes down to a question of exclusivity. Both the PlayStation 4 and Nintendo's various consoles have the advantage of a healthy lineup of titles that simply will not appear anywhere else. If you want to play God of War or Uncharted, you have to own a PlayStation. If you're a Mario or Legend of Zelda fan, you better buy a Switch. Part of the reason why the original Xbox succeeded in the first place was due to a strong lineup of titles that could not be played on any other platform, such as the first two Halo games, Dead or Alive 3, Jade Empire, Breakdown, and the Project Gotham Racing series.
With the Xbox One in particular, there aren't more than a handful of games for it that aren't also available on the Microsoft Store that's packed in with Windows 10, as noted in this previous commentary of the broader PC games market. Microsoft has a robust lineup of exclusives for its platforms, but one of those platforms is an operating system that runs a large number of the computers on the planet … and the other's the Xbox One.
Microsoft has effectively made its own console irrelevant, because even with the Windows Anywhere initiative, there's no particular reason for a dedicated enthusiast to own an "Xbone" if you already have a PC. There are certainly advantages, such as ease of use, simplicity of play, and couch gaming, but the same money you spend on the Xbox could be going to tune up your computer so you can play the same games in a higher resolution.
As such, there was a lot of soft pressure on Microsoft going into this year's E3 to, if not right the ship entirely, at least show signs of life. After all, the Xbox has the advantages of brand recognition, several big franchises, marketing muscle, and Microsoft money. There's no particular reason why it couldn't regain some of its lost ground.
Instead, what we got was essentially a greatest-hits album, the kind of thing that a company might produce when it's already confident it's in the lead. None of what Microsoft showed off at its briefing this year was a bad idea — a new back-to-basics sort of Halo (although it's pure dumb bad luck that both Halo and Doom have a new forthcoming sequel subtitled Infinite), new Gears of War (with a female protagonist, which is not something I ever thought I'd see out of that franchise), new Forza, the new Ori and the Will of the Wisps, and an actual release date for the long-delayed Crackdown 3 — but none of it was what's needed.
In fact, since these games still aren't Xbox exclusives, it's simply more of the same problem. Every new Microsoft blockbuster is likely to be a fun game, polished to a mirror sheen, but they won't be reasons to own an Xbox.
That being said, the list of Microsoft's acquisitions announced Sunday — Playground Games, Undead Labs, Ninja Theory, and Compulsion Games — includes some smart choices. One of Sony's primary advantages as a publisher has traditionally been its strong bench of third-party exclusive developers, such as its various internal studios, Naughty Dog, and the Bellevue, Wash.-based Sucker Punch. Microsoft needed to generate its own comparable studio network about four years ago, and any movement forward on that is a good idea.
Every new Microsoft blockbuster is likely to be a fun game, polished to a mirror sheen, but they won't be reasons to own an Xbox.
In particular, Ninja Theory has been out in the third-party wilderness working without a net for some time, ever since it made the well-liked but underselling Heavenly Sword as a launch title for the PlayStation 3. It recently scored its first original hit, both commercially and critically, with Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, and picking it up as an exclusive developer was a smart move by Microsoft. I'm genuinely excited to see what Ninja Theory can do with some serious muscle behind it, and hope that Microsoft is smart enough to sign the checks and leave NT alone to do its thing. By the same token, Compulsion Games is a brilliantly weird developer (their We Happy Few is an experience much like having someone else's fever dream), and there's always room for a few more games that have the courage to be unique and insane.
That offers some degree of hope for the future, if you happen to be a dedicated Xbox One fan for some reason. However, as of right now, Microsoft has provided a healthy lineup of interesting games that all utterly fail to give the Xbox One what it so desperately needs: a reason to continue to exist.
If Microsoft seriously intends to continue to participate in the worldwide console market, it has to make the Xbox One worth owning in its own right, and not just as a satellite product for Windows 10, or else it's playing internal product kumite against itself. If there's a real way forward here, it's to come up with a few brilliant titles in the next couple of years, real classics in the making that need to be experienced by any serious fan of the medium … and let them stay on the Xbox One, for better or for worse. Otherwise, this generation of the Xbox will struggle to keep up with its competitors.


text:
Q: Symfony Composer Generating autoload files I recently inherited a bunch of Symfony2 projects from a former colleague. I'm trying to get up to speed with them but without any documentation on specifically what he did I'm struggling to even get them up and going. At this point I've installed the vendors/bin via composer install but at the last minute I get the following error
Loading composer repositories with package information
Installing dependencies (including require-dev) from lock file
Nothing to install or update
Generating autoload files
PHP Warning:  require(/Users/[path to symfony project]/vendor/tobie/ua-parser/php/uaparser.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /Users/[path to symfony project]/vendor/composer/autoload_real.php on line 54
PHP Fatal error:  require(): Failed opening required '/Users/[path to symfony project]/vendor/tobie/ua-parser/php/uaparser.php' (include_path='.:') in /Users/[path to symfony project]/vendor/composer/autoload_real.php on line 54
Script Sensio\Bundle\DistributionBundle\Composer\ScriptHandler::buildBootstrap handling the post-install-cmd event terminated with an exception

  [RuntimeException]
  An error occurred when generating the bootstrap file.

As a note, I've confirmed I'm running the newest version of Composer.
Has anyone run into this before? I've been searching google for the past 2 days have yet to find a solution.
Thanks!


text:
Nasdaq 100 Futures Extend Loss on Rate Concerns, Netflix Plunge
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China abandons hard growth target, shifts stimulus focus to jobs
China puts investors on edge by skipping formal GDP target
The Chinese government abandoned its decades-long practice of setting an annual target for economic growth amid the storm of uncertainty unleashed by the coronavirus pandemic, and said it would continue to increase stimulus.
Speaking Friday morning at the National People's Congress in Beijing, Premier Li Keqiang delivered an annual policy address that laid out a renewed focus on maintaining employment and investment. Against a backdrop of escalating tensions with the U.S., Li said Beijing remains committed to implementing the terms of the 'phase one' trade deal.
With more than US$500 billion in infrastructure bonds to be issued this year and more monetary easing on the horizon, China is trying to cement a fragile domestic recovery without indulging in the kind of debt blowouts seen in the U.S. and Europe. The world's largest exporter is therefore still reliant on other countries reining in the pandemic and on a reboot of global trade.
"We have not set a specific target for economic growth this year," Li said, speaking in the Great Hall of the People. "This is because our country will face some factors that are difficult to predict in its development due to the great uncertainty regarding the COVID-19 pandemic and the world economic and trade environment."
Shifting away from a hard target for output growth breaks with decades of Communist Party planning habits and is an admission of the deep rupture the pandemic has caused. Economists surveyed by Bloomberg expect China's economy to expand just 1.8 per cent this year, its worst performance since the 1970s.
At the same time, Li gave a precise figure for the targeted budget deficit, widening it to more than 3.6 per cent of gross domestic product. Including the issuance of special bonds, that brings a broader measure of the deficit to more than eight per cent, according to Bloomberg Economics.
Analysts including Goldman Sachs Group Inc. economist Yu Song said the package was less aggressive than expected. Market sentiment was overshadowed by the announcement Friday that Beijing would impose national security legislation on Hong Kong, risking further confrontation with the U.S.
The CSI 300 Index fell 2.3 per cent on Friday, its worst reaction to the opening of the country's annual National People's Congress since the stock benchmark started in 2005.
What Bloomberg's Economists Say...
"Setting a target in such an uncertain economic environment would have been risky. Abandoning the decades-long tradition relieves the government of the straitjacket the annual target placed on economic policy. The challenge now will be to effectively guide expectations in the absence of the GDP target."
Chang Shu and David Qu, Bloomberg Economics
Li said the government is setting a target for urban job creation of more than 9 million jobs, lower than the 2019 target of around 11 million, and a target for the urban surveyed unemployment rate of around six per cent, higher than 2019's goal, according to the document.
The government's official measures don't capture the full extent of unemployment caused by the pandemic, which has hit both manufacturing and services hard. With jobs and income growth vital for the unelected Communist Party's political legitimacy, stabilizing employment has become Li's first priority.
"We will make every effort to stabilize and expand employment," Li said. "We will strive to keep existing jobs secure, work actively to create new ones, and help unemployed people find work."
Reflecting recent controversy over the 'phase one' trade deal with the U.S. signed earlier this year, before the pandemic broke out, Li said China will work with the U.S. to implement the agreement.
The wider budget deficit target implies a significantly larger shortfall than 2019's target of 2.8 per cent. Greater spending on efforts to restart the economy and control the spread of coronavirus will be funded by issuing 1 trillion yuan (US$140 billion) in sovereign debt.
To help finance infrastructure investment, local governments will issue 3.75 trillion yuan in local special bonds this year, up from 2019's quota of 2.15 trillion. Economists had forecast issuance of as much as 4 trillion yuan.
The government's language on monetary policy was kept basically unchanged, with the stance remaining "prudent," as well as "flexible" and "appropriate." The English-language report said new monetary policy tools would be developed to "directly stimulate the real economy."
"It is crucial that we take steps to ensure enterprises can secure loans more easily and promote steady reduction of interest rates," according to the report. Li added that money supply will be guided "significantly" higher this year and that reserve ratios and interest rates will continue to be cut.
Key leaders sat in two rows behind Li's podium, well spaced and without face masks. Officials behind were more closely packed and wearing masks, as were the hundreds listening in the hall. The Congress represents the centerpiece of China's political calendar, though it has a rubber-stamp role. The meeting was delayed more than two months by the virus shutdowns.
Li detailed measures including continued implementation of VAT cuts, and a further 500 billion yuan in tax and fee reductions. The target for consumer price inflation was set at 3.5 per cent, higher than the usual ceiling and a reflection of continued high food-price gains.
Analysts said that while more stimulus was announced, the government's ambitions for growth remain limited given the dangers of another run up in debt. China borrowed heavily to stabilize the economy after the 2008 crisis, and is taking a markedly different tack this time. At the same time, rising unemployment may force the government's hand.
"I think the central government would like local governments to play a much more active role in relieving domestic unemployment and boosting domestic consumption," Michael Pettis, a finance professor at Peking University, said Friday on Bloomberg Television. "The problem is, local governments are indebted up to their eyebrows. There's really not much room for them significantly to increase debt."
--With assistance from Miao Han, Lin Zhu, Yinan Zhao, Michelle Jamrisko, Jiyeun Lee and Michael S. Arnold.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
QUEEN's catalogue, from bottom to top
| November 1, 2018
REVIEW: AD ASTRA is a visual and storytelling masterpiece
The year has been a bit lean on hard science fiction stories. We've had plenty that were space-fantasy, with big sweeping action scenes and big, bombastic soundtracks, but I'm talking about the kind of contemplative, meditative, "Science" fiction stories that used to define the genre.
Ad Astra fills the void nicely.
The movie was originally scheduled to release in May, but the Disney-Fox merger caused a lot of shuffling to be done and while some movies suffered because of it (New Mutants is, laughably, still awaiting release), Ad Astra was moved to a much more reasonable date. A May release would have given the impression of a summer blockbuster, the kind of "action in space" movie you would expect for a Memorial Day holiday-window release. This is not that kind of movie, not by a longshot. This one feels much more at home in Autumn; even its color scheme is predominantly yellow and orange.
After a great initial trailer that gave very little away…
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And some great, subtle marketing that conveyed the visual feast in store for the viewer…
Ad Astra finally releases.
Though it lacks "blockbuster" levels of hype, it has been steadily growing in buzz and interest. Now that it's out, did it justify the excitement?
Here are four reflections on Ad Astra, succinctly stated and relatively spoiler-free…
On Brad Pitt as a leading man vs a character actor
It's been repeated so often lately it's become needless to say: "Brad Pitt is a supporting/character actor in a leading man's body." It sounds like an insult, as if you're saying "he doesn't have the chops to put on a great performance but he's pretty to look at so it's okay, though he'd do better being a side-character where he can stretch those comedic chops of his."
It's true that Brad Pitt is everything you would want a Hollywood leading man to look like. He's well-built, got a good head of hair, a square jawline, expressive eyes, etc. He's a star, no doubt about it. But on those rare occasions where he gets to stretch out into something more unconventional, such as in Inglorious Basterds or Burn After Reading (the movie that really kicked off the "character actor in a lead's body" meme), Pitt regularly displays a talent he rarely shows in his other, leading, parts. That's not his fault; it's simply the result of his being cast into roles that don't take advantage of his whole skill-set, simply because that skill-set isn't often relied on in the kind of roles a man who looks like that tends to do.
Ad Astra offers him the chance to be both a leading man and stretch his acting chops. With a great, albeit atypical, screenplay to work with, and a confident director guiding him, Pitt puts on his best performance since The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. I hope Pitt keeps taking smaller, oddball supporting roles, but I also hope he continues to work as a leading man because he's proven more than twice that he's more than just a pretty face. Ad Astra demanded a lot of its star—Pitt has 80% of the speaking lines, and is in 99% of the shots—and its star rose to the occasion and then some.
The tradition of one great space movie a year
Maybe you've noticed this too: It seems like we've been getting one big space-set film a year from Hollywood, going back a while. Gravity blew everyone away in 2013. Interstellar followed in 2014. The Martian was a big hit in 2015. Can we call 2016's Arrival a space movie? No, but it certainly feels like it belongs in the same category. That might be the lone exception. Life was a modest hit in 2017. Last year, of course, saw the release of the excellent and shamefully underrated First Man.
There's no shortage of big, loud, action-heavy sci-fi movies. I certainly love them when they're well made. Shoot, I occasionally even love them when they're trash. Ad Astra serves as this year's entry in the "one big Hollywood space movie a year" category, and it serves it well. It has the tension of Gravity, the feeling of emptiness in space that Interstellar did so well, the focus on one main character out in space that The Martian hit with, and even—in one terrifying scene—the horror that Life offered. It checked a lot of boxes and just about anyone who loves a good movie will find something to enjoy.
Incidentally, and this ventures close to spoiler territory, though it doesn't ruin the movie by any means (you can skip to the next section if you must), but three of the aforementioned movies have one thing in common: They all speculate on alien life, and they all embrace the idea that alien life is out there. It might be scary (Life) or hard to understand (Arrival) but it's out there.
Ad Astra also cares about answering the question of "are we alone out here" but its answer is far more cynical. To quote Arthur C. Clarke, "either we are alone in the universe or we are not, and both possibilities are equally terrifying." Ad Astra says "we are alone" and then shows us a hint of what that reality means to someone who devoted their life to searching for…anyone else. You won't find many "science fiction" movies willing to go there. Bravo to this one for doing it.
Not a novel, but close
The movie is the product of writer-director James Gray, who previously made The Lost City of Z, and The Immigrant, among others. He describes this movie as "Heart of Darkness in space." That's a heck of an ambitious idea. Heart of Darkness is, of course, the famous Joseph Conrad story that later inspired Coppola's Apocalypse Now. Unlike Apocalypse Now, this isn't in any way an adaptation. It merely adopts the core idea and does its own thing entirely. Despite that, the movie feels like you're watching a book. I don't mean it's like a book adaptation, I mean it tells its story the way a novel does, albeit visually.
The ways it's like a book are numerous:
(1) The movie features a lot of character-defining (not exposition) narration. (2) It has a very patient way it unfolds its plot, giving you only what you need to know as the story progresses. (3) There's a ton of world-building going on behind the scenes: I appreciated the fact that this story is set in the future, but the plot didn't dwell on it; it didn't take for granted that it was set in the future but it also didn't beat you over the head with it, either. The fact that our first real look at the moon is of a quasi-airport filled with Las Vegas-esque billboards and even a freaking Applebees is probably, sadly, on point. Even in the future, even in SPACE, Applebees will not die.
(4) Additionally, there's a very deliberate partitioning in the way the scenes are edited and presented, like they are little self-contained chapters in the story. (5) The screenplay is also very wordy, which reverses the trend of modern movies which tend to favor more, shorter sentences. This script had a few, longer ones. It was like a book, albeit one with some stunning visuals.
Front-loaded storytelling and a pat ending
If I had a criticism, it's that I think the story would have been better told as a book instead of a movie. The pacing of the first hour felt like it was setting you up for a three-hour epic. Instead, it rushed through its second hour, hitting its important story points and not letting many of its heavier scenes breathe (until the climax). I would have preferred a longer cut with more patience given to the second half. I suppose keeping it two hours was a studio mandate, which is something a novel wouldn't have had to worry about.
As for the conclusion, without spoiling anything I will say that, while it didn't disappoint me, I do see it being one that many viewers might dislike. A film like this isn't going to appeal to casual audiences. It's too slow, too deliberate, too character-driven. It has an ending that feels very safe, very expected, very pat. Again, it doesn't betray the story leading up to it, but a more sour ending might have been better-received by the movie's primary audience.
That's a minor quibble, though, and barely worth mentioning in a film this magnificent.
10/10 – People going in expecting a big dumb action movie in space are going to be disappointed. People going in expecting a contemplative, meditative, beautiful, character-driven film set in space will be very happy indeed.
Movies that are still awesome…
1983 Movies 1993 Movies 1999 Movies
Arrival Review: Making a baby and a killer adaptation (Spoilers)
Review: LIFE is tense, tight and almost terrific.
Review: Ridley Scott's The Martian is a major minor masterpiece
| October 4, 2015
Review: The Space Between Us fails to do its premise justice
| February 8, 2017
Fight Club is still awesome…twenty years later
SPOILER-FILLED THOUGHTS: Star Wars – The Rise of Skywalker
SPOILER-FREE REVIEW: Star Wars – The Rise of Skywalker
Your official RISE OF SKYWALKER refresher: Part three
Kevin McAllister's family are the true villains of Home Alone
| December 1, 2019
REVIEW: Knives Out is delightfully convoluted! (spoilers abound)
Galaxy Quest is still awesome…twenty years later
What's next for the DCEU?
The Fox X-Men movie series is dead. What went right?
Where have you gone, Rick Moranis?
Every Quentin Tarantino movie ranked!
MCU Phase Four WILD SPECULATION!
On Disney buying Fox: What ELSE they gained (part two)


text:
Q: Transfer an email with Python I've tried with no conclusions to resend emails with Python.
Once I've logged in SMTP and IMAP with TLS, this is what I have written:
status, data = self._imapserver.fetch(id, "(RFC822)")
email_data = data[0][1]

# create a Message instance from the email data
message = email.message_from_string(email_data)

# replace headers (could do other processing here)
message.replace_header("From", 'blablabla@bliblibli.com')
message.replace_header("To", 'blobloblo@blublublu.com')

self._smtpserver.sendmail('blablabla@bliblibli.com', 'blobloblo@blublublu.com', message.as_string())

But the problem is that the variable data doesn't catch the information from the email, even if the ID is the one I need.
It tells me:
b'The specified message set is invalid.'

How can I transfer an email with Python?

A: Like the error message says, whatever you have in id is invalid. We don't know what you put there, so all we can tell you is what's already in the error message.
(Also, probably don't use id as a variable name, as you will shadow the built-in function with the same name.)
There are additional bugs further on in your code; you need to use message_from_bytes if you want to parse it, though there is really no need to replace the headers just to resend it.
status, data = self._imapserver.fetch(correct_id, "(RFC822)")
self._smtpserver.sendmail('blablabla@bliblibli.com', 'blobloblo@blublublu.com', data[0][1])

If you want to parse the message, you should perhaps add a policy argument; this selects the modern EmailMessage API which was introduced in Python 3.6.
from email.policy import default
...
message = email.message_from_bytes(data[0][1], policy=default)
message["From"] = "blablabla@bliblibli.com"
message["To"] = "blobloblo@blublublu.com"
self._smtpserver.send_message(message)

The send_message method is an addition to the new API. If the message could contain other recipient headers like Cc:, Bcc: etc, perhaps using the good old sendmail method would be better, as it ignores the message's headers entirely.


text:
More counterfeit Honeywell refrigerants found
Phil Taylor, 12-Feb-2013
Saudi Arabia authorities have seized nearly 3,500 cylinders of counterfeit refrigerant being fraudulently sold under the Honeywell Genetron brand name.
Honeywell said the operation was a joint effort between the company and local law enforcement. The counterfeit refrigerant was marked as Honeywell's Genetron 134a and was seized at Saudi Arabia's Dammam Port en route from China.
Fake refrigerants have been hitting the headlines over the last couple of years in the wake of a notorious incident in 2011 in which shipping line Maersk reported three cases in which refrigeration units had exploded for no apparent reason.
The explosions occurred on three separate occasions Brazil and Vietnam, with three fatalities resulting from the blasts. Subsequent investigations revealed that they were caused by contamination of a refrigerant gas called tetrafluoroethane-1,1,1,2 (R134a) with methyl chloride (R40).
The problem has affected all the leading refrigerant manufacturers, including not only Honeywell but also DuPont, Harp and Bock, with the Middle East said to have become a central hub for the distribution of fake products from China. Harp announced recently it had started adding holograms to its containers in an effort to deter the counterfeiters.
"We continue to take the necessary aggressive actions in cooperation with law enforcement and other government authorities to ensure that users get the high-quality product they need as well as ensuring its safety," said Paul Sanders, managing director for Honeywell Fluorine Products in Europe, Middle East, Africa and India. "These efforts have resulted in seizures around the world."
Honeywell said it has intensified its anti-counterfeit efforts in the Middle East over the past two years. In 2011, the police, customs, local municipalities and other government officials resulted in the seizure of approximately 6,000 cylinders in the United Arab Emirates.
During the last two years alone, Honeywell says it has seized more than 200,000 counterfeit products in collaboration with authorities.


text:
Editions 75
Works by Tom Johnson
Music with text
A collection of mathematical rhythms played on pieces of wood. More details may be found in the percussion section.
Author: Tom Johnson
Publisher: Editions 75
Counting to Seven
A large scale work expanding on the concept of the earlier piece Counting Languages; seven voices count to seven in about 30 different languages from all over the world.	Each piece explores a way of counting as well as a language sonority, giving birth to a new musical form.
Languages include: French, Georgian, German/Japanese/Turkish/Irish, Indonesian, Italian, Kikuyu, Krobo, Malinké, Muruwari, Okinawan dialect, Swahili and Tadjik. Special pieces are dedicated to dying languages from North and South America	(as a matter of abbreviation, only languages whose name begins with A have been included: Abenaki, Abenski, Achagua, Achumawi, Adai, Aguacatec, Akawaio, Alabama, Algonkin, Allentiac, Amuesha, Apache, Aracaju, Arapaho, Arawak, Arikara, Atakapa, Athabaskan, Aymara, Ayoreo and Aztec), and rare languages from South Pacific islands. Some of these pieces may be accompanied with small percussion instruments.
Didier Aschour, of the Dedalus Ensemble: `Counting to Seven relates to sound poetry, minimal music and mathematical processes, but what emerges from the work is a moving celebration of human invention in all its singularity and universality.'
A collection of about 10 scores is available. Ensembles wishing to perform Counting to Seven in some way should write to us for permission. We will only ask royalties if performances are long and/or in prominent situations, but we will be pleased to give advice to all.
Dropping Balls
A difficult piece for a talking and singing juggler, who normally doesn't drop balls but eventually will. About 15 minutes, 12€.
Squares: didactic music for a solo instrument
Each of the eight sections consists of 9 phrases of 9 notes. These formations are musical equivalents of what are known as Latin Squares, a phenomenon first explained by Leonhard Euler. The music allows you to hear lovely symmetries, all notes equally frequent and to learn something about Latin squares at the same time. Duration about 10 minutes, 10€.
Available in CD
Harmonies derived from block designs for flexible instrumentation with lots of explanation. Play as long as you want. 15€.
Counting Fives
One person counts to five on several levels. Open duration, 5€.
Recycled Ostinato
Baritone sax, guitar, and bass make their way through 20 different musical fragments, following signals called out by the leader. Usually about 10 minutes, 5€.
Maximum Efficiency
Three unspecified instruments in three octaves produce as much music as possible with as little effort as possible, thus achieving "maximum efficiency." The most efficient interpretation we know of was by Dortmund New Music Ensemble, with only four pieces of bamboo. Seven minutes, 14€.
Narayana's Cows
Narayana's Cows are the product of a formula devised by a 14th-century Indian mathematician. Music in three voices for an unspecified (but preferably large) ensemble and a narrator. 16 minutes, 8€.
CD recordings available:
Cows, Chords and Combinations (2011) by Ensemble Klang
Kientzy plays Johnson (2004) by Daniel Kientzy
Music And Questions (1988)
There are 120 permutations of five notes to play with bells or glockenspiel, and a question to be asked after each one. The text is given in English, French and German, and the piece lasts 25 minutes. 10€.
CD recording:
Music and Questions was originally broadcast on ABC Radio programme "The Listening Room" and it was included in the Gamma / The Listening Room CD with three other pieces. Published by ABC Classics — 1994 [4797602], out of print, but available here as a recording of the broadcast.
Also released in a World Edition record with Carol Robinson, Dante Boon and Tom Johnson himself.
Eggs and Baskets
One explains how many ways there are of putting six eggs into two baskets, with the help of a narrator and two unspecified instrumentalists, who play the permutations as melodies. Also published in French as Les oeufs et les paniers, and in German as Eier und Körbe. 12 min, 8€.
CD Recording available: Tom Johnson - correct music (2012)
Piano Problems
A young pianist can play a particular exercise 216 times in a single practice session of 45 minutes. How many times can he play the exercise in one minute?
This and 13 other "piano problems," originally presented as a radio piece with producer Kaye Mortley, may also be resolved by pianist and narrator in concert hall in 28 minutes. 15€.
Twelve pieces for clarinet and narrator, or clarinetist/narrator. Also available in French as Histoires à dormir debout, and in German as Gutenachtgeschichten. 14€.
Available on CD in a Spanish version
A dialogue between two speakers, A and B, who talk mostly about talking, with regular interludes of harpsichord music. A French version, known as Parler, is also available since 1993.
Originally a radio piece, but also possible in concert. 30 minutes, 15€.
Eight notes are written on eight cardboard boxes. The "box mover" places the boxes in different positions while two to 10 unspecified instrumentalists play what they see. 20 minutes, 8€.
Counting Languages
An early piece of counting music (see also Counting Duets below) that was only made available in 2014 thanks to the recent edition compiled by Javier Ruiz.
The music counts to seven in 12 languages (English, French, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Indonesian, German, Russian, Basque, Irish, Hungarian, Malinké) normally in a speaking voice. 12 short pieces, 12€.
As a curiosity rather than a reference, performances in some of these languages by the composer are available as audio files.
Counting Duets
Five movements, two speaking voices, text in numbers. One may speak the numbers/music in whatever language one wishes. 8 minutes, 8€.
Monologue For Tuba
A tubist talks to and plays with his instrument for seven minutes, in English. 8€.
Failing, A Very Difficult Piece For Solo String Bass
One of Johnson's most often performed pieces, written for Jon Deak, and also interpreted by Bertram Turetzky, Gary Karr, and many other virtuosos. 7 minutes, 15€.
CD recording available: Performed by Robert Black and included in Bang on a Can: LIVE Vol. 1
Scene For Piano And Tape
The pianist talks and plays with his collaborator, a loudspeaker. A performance tape, made by the composer in 1969, is available, but it is preferable to make a new one, with the performer's own voice and piano playing. Score in English, 20 minutes, 8€.
Bang on a can (Vol 1)
© 2019 Editions 75
info [at] editions75.com
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Exfoliating body scrub towel made from mesh Sasawashi fabric.
Finely woven from Sasawashi fabric, the Mesh Body Scrub Towel powerfully buffs and exfoliates calluses and dry patches on the skin. Sasawashi fabric is 100% natural and made from absorbent washi threads woven with deodorizing kumazasa plant fibers. Rough to the touch when dry, this mesh style becomes soft and comfortable in the shower. Use daily to cleanse, exfoliate, and scrub away impurities from the skin.
Care: Machine wash in a garment bag with similar colors. Do not bleach or tumble dry.


MidWest America Federal Credit Union is a not-for-profit financial institution that has been committed to providing competitive, quality services for our members' financial success since 1936. As a credit union, we have members, not customers. Each person who deposits money in a credit union becomes a member of the credit union because his or her deposit is considered their share of the ownership. That means that credit unions and MidWest America are owned by members, not stockholders, like most banks!
"Customers" have no voice in how a bank operates.
Members of a credit union can vote and elect individuals to the credit union's board of directors and certain committees that make decisions that are best for all members of the credit union. Credit unions are not-for-profit organizations that operate solely for the financial well-being of the communities that they serve; whereas banks only serve to make a profit for their stockholders.
Credit unions are able to offer, on average, better rates and lower fees than any bank.
This is because all credit union profits are passed directly back to their members. What that means for a member of MidWest America is higher rates on savings and certificates and much lower rates on loans!
We believe becoming a member should be a simple process.
We have a series of steps that will make your switch from your existing financial institution to MidWest America simple. To get started, visit Open an Account or check out the links below for more information on our products and services. If you have questions along the way or can't find the information you want, feel free to contact us.
All personal checking accounts offer free debit cards and no-surcharge access to MidWest ATMs.
Whether you're shopping for a 1st or 2nd mortgage, MidWest America offers you low rates and the right tools to help you make the best financial decision.
Whether you use Mobile, Online or Phone Banking, you'll have complete "real-time" control over your accounts.
New or used, our vehicle loans offer low rates, flexible payment terms and convenient financing right at the dealership.
Because all credit union profits are passed directly back to our members, you'll receive higher rates on savings and certificates and much lower rates on loans!
On average our savings accounts offer better rates and lower fees than any bank.


To be exempt from minimum wage and overtime rules under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) an employee must meet both the salary basis and duties test under the FLSA. We reported on the change to the rules that were published last month. Specifically, the new rules applicable to the White Collar Exemptions under the FLSA become effective as of December 1, 2016.
The rules raise the salary basis test from $455 per week to $913 per week. This means that if you want an employee to remain exempt from minimum wage and overtime provisions of the FLSA, that employee needs to be paid at least $913 per week and meet the duties test under the FLSA. It is not enough, however, to simply meet the salary basis test.
The six-month delay in implementation gives employers an opportunity and the time to analyze their workforce to ensure compliance with the FLSA in light of the changes. What should you be doing now?
Take a look at your current exempt employees; if they make at least $913 per week now, and continue to meet the duties test, they will remain exempt. The duties test did not change but now is the perfect time to review job duties and responsibilities as well as job descriptions to ensure that employees really do meet the requirements and to correct any errors that you identify. Job descriptions are not controlling here. The important thing is what your employee actually does.
Next, look at those employees who are exempt now but who will likely fall into the gap between the current $455 per week and new $913 per week. If an employee is near the top of this range, raising the employees pay to the minimum will be necessary if you want to have that employee remain exempt. If the employee is not close to the $913, the decision to increase will be more expensive for you, and you may consider converting those employees to hourly compensation.
Remember that under the new rules, bonus compensation, incentives and commissions may be counted toward the salary basis test but only up to 10% of compensation. For these payments to count, they must be non-discretionary, paid at least quarterly and paid by the last pay period of the quarter.
Don't forget to also determine the average hours worked for your employees. If they never work more than 40 hours a week, the issue of whether they are exempt is less significant as the threshold for overtime compensation has not been crossed.
When making your decisions today, keep in mind that the salary basis will be adjusted every three years, likely upward. Accordingly, employers should plan for continued increases to base salaries in the near future and account for such increases in their budgets.