First, they protect against the "predecessor attack": if you choose new relays for each circuit, eventually an attacker who runs a few relays will be your first and last hop. With entry guards, the risk of end-to-end correlation for any given circuit is the same, but the cumulative risk for all your circuits over time is capped.
Second, they help to protect against the "denial of service as denial of anonymity" attack, where an attacker who runs quite a few relays fails any circuit that he's a part of and that he can't win against, forcing Alice (the user) to generate more circuits and thus increasing the overall chance that the attacker wins. Entry guards greatly reduce the risk, since Alice will never choose outside of a few nodes for her first hop.
Third, entry guards raise the startup cost to an adversary who runs relays in order to trace users. Without entry guards, the attacker can sign up some relays and immediately start having chances to observe Alice's circuits. With them, new adversarial relays won't have the Guard flag so won't be chosen as the first hop of any circuit; and even once they earn the Guard flag, users who have already chosen guards won't switch away from their current guards for quite a while.
But how long exactly? The first research question here examines vulnerability due to natural churn of entry guards. Consider an adversary who runs one entry guard with advertised capacity C. Alice maintains an ordered list of guards (chosen at random, weighted by advertised speed, from the whole list of possible guards). For each circuit, she chooses her first hop (uniformly at random) from the first G guards from her list that are currently running (appending a new guard to the list as needed, but going back to earlier guards if they reappear). How long until Alice adds the adversary's node to her guard list? You can use the uptime data from the directory archives, either to build a model for guard churn or just to use the churn data directly. Assuming G=3, how do the results vary by C? What's the variance?
Research question two: consider intentional churn due to load balancing too. Alice actually discards each guard between 30 and 60 days (uniformly chosen) after she first picks it. This intentional turnover prevents long-running guards from accumulating more and more users and getting overloaded. Another way of looking at it is that it shifts load to new guards so we can make better use of them. How much does this additional churn factor impact your answer from step one above? Or asked a different way, what fraction of Alice's vulnerability to the adversary's entry guard comes from natural churn, and what fraction from the proactive expiration? How does the answer change for different expiry intervals (e.g. between 10 and 30 days, or between 60 and 90)?
Research question three: how do these answers change as we vary G? Right now we choose from among the first three guards, to reduce the variance of expected user performance -- if we always picked the first guard on the list, and some users picked a low-capacity or highly-congested relay, none of that user's circuits would perform well. That said, if choosing G=1 is a huge win for security, we should work on other ways to reduce variance.
Research question four: how would these answers change if we make the cutoffs for getting the Guard flag more liberal, and/or change how we choose what nodes become guards? After all, Tor's anonymity is based on the diversity of entry and exit points, and while it may be tough to get around exit relay scarcity, my theory is that our artificial entry point scarcity (because our requirements are overly strict) is needlessly hurting the anonymity Tor can offer.
1) The relay needs to have first appeared longer ago than 12.5% of the relays, or 8 days ago, whichever is shorter.
2) The relay needs to advertise at least the median bandwidth in the network, or 250KB/s, whichever is smaller.
Today's guard cutoffs in practice are "was first sighted at least 8 days ago, advertises 100KB/s of bandwidth, and has 98% WFU."
Consider two relays, A and B. Relay A first appeared 30 days ago, disappeared for a week, and has been consistently up since then. It has a WFU (after decay, give or take a fencepost) of 786460 seconds / 824195 = 95.4%, so it's not a guard. Relay B appeared two weeks ago and has been up since then. Its WFU is 658517 / 658517 = 100%, so it gets the Guard flag -- even though it has less uptime, and even less weighted uptime. Based on the answers to the first three research questions, which relay would serve Alice best as a guard?
The big-picture tradeoff to explore is: what algorithm should we use to assign Guard flags such that a) we assign the flag to as many relays as possible, yet b) we minimize the chance that Alice will use the adversary's node as a guard?
All three requirements for entry guards are easy to fulfill for an organized adversary. What does prevent an adversary to throw 100 virtual servers in the pool with above median bandwidth and full uptime and wait one week? Is there a criteria not to select all entry guards from the same IP block?
The critical question is how long does Alice stay with advesaries entry guard she had the pity to select? How much time does advesary need to have a sure correlation?
(Brainstorm mode on) What about virtualizing the entry guards? Each circuit contains two entry guards as the first hop in the path. On the way back the middle hop randomly selects one of the two pre-selected entry guards of that circuit to send the packet back.
> All three requirements for entry guards are easy to fulfill for an organized adversary. What does prevent an adversary to throw 100 virtual servers in the pool with above median bandwidth and full uptime and wait one week?
Nothing prevents it. We once imagined we could run a Tor network only using relays run by people we knew. That approach doesn't scale, especially when anonymity is a function of network diversity. Instead, we need to grow a larger network: the more relays we have, the less impact a new attacking relay can have.
That said, with high probability, none of these 100 guards will be used by Alice after a week. That point is the main focus of this blog post.
> Is there a criteria not to select all entry guards from the same IP block?
Yes. No more than one guard in the same /16 network.
> The critical question is how long does Alice stay with advesaries entry guard she had the pity to select?
For many weeks. Bad news for Alice in this case.
> How much time does advesary need to have a sure correlation?
Open research question. My guess is "not much time".
> What about virtualizing the entry guards? Each circuit contains two entry guards as the first hop in the path. On the way back the middle hop randomly selects one of the two pre-selected entry guards of that circuit to send the packet back.
Maybe? I worry that two increases the attack surface over one, without much clear gain. See the discussion under https://blog.torproject.org/blog/one-cell-enough as well.
first excuse me because my english is not good.
this program is a nice job BUT really its not Secure for people in some countries that government forbid useing this kind of programs , the reason is this : its very easy for the Internet providers to download this program run that program and check the ip addresses that this program will use , if they do this 100 time then may be they have 100 (less or more ) ip addresses of tor servers . and after they will put this ip addresses in the system to check which clients are connecting or connected before to this ip addresses , and after they will arrest the people very easy !!!!
please if you really are thinking about internet freedom and wants to help people to access to free internet and safe internet just release the complete package of tor software (client and server ) for public use , after it will be 100000000 times safer specially for writers journalists and ..... because they will buy a vps (virtual private server ) or ded servers for themselves in the other countries and after they can connect to the spesific ip address that nobody knows any thing about that , and its not important to route over 10-20-or more servers .
people in groups of 5- 10 can buy one vps for just 20 Us$ and pay 2-5 $ per month .
LOOK THIS PROGRAM WITH SPECIFIC SERVERS NEVER CAN BE SECURE BECAUSE ITS VERY EASY TO FIND WHO IS USING THIS PROGRAM .
I am not clear if you are talking about Tor or not. All of Tor's code is free, the exact same software that is a client can be configured to be a server in 2 clicks or a few lines in a configuration file. You may also notice the tor software is free, as in free of cost and free as in freedom. I'm confused as to why you think the server-side isn't the same as the client, and why you think we charge for any part of the software?
However, assuming you are talking about Tor. Yes, if you do not use bridges, a sophisticated government can record every IP address connection between a user and the Internet. If they cross reference this list of IP addresses with Tor relays, they will see a user is possibly using Tor. However, this is one reason we developed bridges, https://torproject.org/docs/bridges.html.en. They are non-public tor relays that allow entry into the global Tor network.
Perhaps you should review how Tor works, https://torproject.org/about/overview.html.en#thesolution. You can already get tor, install it on a VPS, configure it as a non-published bridge, and give out that address to your friends. Lots of people do this already.
I always wondered how the entry guard flag system works. Thanks for sharing.
That said, if choosing G=1 is a huge win for security, we should work on other ways to reduce variance.
Every client needs to have at least two guard nodes, in two different 'families' and /16 netblocks. If a client has only a single guard node, the set of exit nodes that it uses is likely to be distinguishable from that of other Tor clients.
On the other side of this equation is the risk that somebody identifying your guards can use them as a fingerprint for you. There are an increasing set of papers that describe how to learn the relays in Alice's path (there's another one from Prateek Mittal coming up at CCS this year). If you can do the attack reliably over time, you can learn that whoever Alice is, she's picked these N relays as her guards. If G is small, this fingerprint is not very meaningful: plenty of other users have the same fingerprint. If G is large, I worry that some fingerprints will be rare.
As for G=1 vs G=2 and the risk that having only one guard could let a website fingerprint you as "that guy who never exits from 18.244.x.x", I think that's just another component of the tradeoff space that we need to evaluate.
Why trust an entry guard more than any other relay node though?
If an entry guard is compromised, then how does "UseEntryGuards 1" not make matters even worse for a client than choosing an entry point at random?
It seems like common sense to me that if I wanted to identify clients by monitoring traffic flows from entrance to exit, that that would be best served by me running 'entry guards' and mandating all Tor users to utilize those entry points by default. That's the prime position to be in, is it not?
I don't see how an entry point's uptime helps safeguard against this exploitation at all. Doesn't it just mean they're that much more dedicated to achieving their aim, having put the time and resources in?
Isn't the argument that entry guards provide more stability at the expense of a greater chance of your security being compromised due to the concentration of clients towards these nodes?
Seems to me you're mixing two issues together.
The second issue is what subset of the relays should be acceptable choices as entry guards. I agree with what I think you're saying, in that I suspect the subset should be larger than it is now. But when you say "entry guards provide more stability at the expense of greater chance of compromise", you're missing the subtlety -- the stability actually improves anonymity, because less churn in your entry guards means fewer chances to pick a bad one. So the choice is not between stability and security; it's between defending against one attack vs defending against another attack. I think we are choosing a not-very-good point in this tradeoff currently; we should use historical Tor network data to help us recognize where the better points for the tradeoff are.
Doesn't the current concept of sticking to a few entry guards for a long time sacrifies one for sure so the rest of the flock is save? The hunter is slowed down but Alice is a sitting duck when she gets in sight?
Instead of slowing down the hunter Tor could speed up the movement within the swarm.
I assume factors for correlation are connection time, transferred bytes and transfer time. There is little to be done about the connection time to the entry guard. Chance of correlation should increase with the number of bytes Alice receives over one circuit.
A: Changing first hops as soon a fixed number of bytes is transferred (which might be equal or smaller the size of an average web page). This number would be the same for all Tor users.
Or B: Individually, referring to the idea of virtual entry guards, by changing to the twin as soon as a random size of the current file is transferred (between 1/3 and 2/3).
Both A and B changes the number of bytes of a transferred file measured at adversary's entry guard. Transfer times for the file parts are also likely to differ by running over different first hops.
and basically none refuting it.
Conjecture #2: this attacker can confirm it in just a few packets or cells. This claim is shakier, in that there are fewer papers exploring it. But the rate of improvement for attack papers compared to defense papers makes me think it's unwise to doubt it. Or said another way, we're better off designing conservatively under the assumption it's true than designing a broken anonymity system on the hope that it's false.
Protecting against confirmation attacks is an open research topic that's gotten a *lot* of attention from researchers with basically no results. It's tough to produce a padding/morphing/etc design and also a proof that there are no practical attacks against it. Until somebody produces something more convincing than "surely this would work", I think it's best to assume we can't stop traffic confirmation attacks of any form.
Does the risk of correlation changes wether Alice is uploading or downloading?
If I understand the model right, choosing the best value for G depends on the ratio of how many nodes of the total are under control of an adversary. And this number is unknown and can only be estimated.
My guess is if less than half of the nodes are under control of an adversary then changing between more entry guards is better.
Maybe a mathematician can chime in and calculate the probabilities for different percentages of entry nodes under adversary control.
Another guess, if Alice uses only a part of her time on the Tor network for critical work she is better of with a higher number of entry guards.
Why not do the same thing with FTP files, allowing the user decide whether to enable the tor to the function?
to specify their adversary? Yet not allow obvious foot shooting?
some new metadata or lookup method too.
Do those entry guards persist as one moves from home to office, to airport, to internet cafe?
Yes. It would be nice to build "profiles" or something where Tor recognizes that now you're the office you and it switches to those guards. But how do we do that without keeping a nice set of profiles on disk, which is bad for other reasons? We don't want to just throw out the guards when you change location, since that would substantially defeat the purpose of them in the first place.


text:
Business » NCLAT drops Videocon resolution plan averse to DoT petition
NCLAT drops Videocon resolution plan averse to DoT petition
"Counsel for the parties agreed that this Appeal be also disposed off in terms of the judgment dated 05.01.2022. The Appeal is allowed in terms of the judgment dated 05.01.2022 ," the NCLAT said.
The National Company Law Appellate Tribunal (NCLAT) on Tuesday discarded a petition filed by the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) challenging the Rs 2,962-crore takeover bid by Anil Agarwal's Twin Star Technologies for Videocon Industries. A two-member bench saw that the appellate tribunal earlier this month had as of now saved the June 8 request passed by the Mumbai bench of the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) supporting Twin Star's bid and remanded the matter back to the Committee of Creditors (CoC) of Videocon.
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Earlier on January 5, the NCLAT set aside the NCLT order after observing that the approval to the takeover plan was "not in accordance with" Section 31 of the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC) and quashed "the approval of Resolution Plan by the Committee of Creditors (CoC) as well as Adjudicating Authority (NCLT)".
NCLAT had asked the creditors to initiate fresh sale of Videocon, a consumer durables company manufacturing products ranging from air-conditioners to washing machines, for recovery of their unpaid dues of Rs 64,637.6 crore.
The appellate tribunal's order had come over petitions filed by dissenting creditors Bank of Maharashtra, SIDBI and IFCI Ltd.
The Department of Telecommunications (DoT) had also challenged the NCLT order before the appellate tribunal and submitted that defaulting telecom firms cannot be permitted to wriggle out of their liability by the triggering of the corporate insolvency resolution process.
One of the group firms, Videocon Telecommunications, in order to carry on business as per the licence agreement for Unified Licence (Access Services) had secured dues with as many as 131 bank guarantees from SBI in favour of DoT to the tune of Rs 881.92 crore.
The state-owned lender's guarantees, however, have "illegally" not been allowed to be invoked due to pending proceedings before the NCLT, the DoT had submitted.
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
Killian by E.A. Weston (formerly Elizabeth Kelly)
Series: Avalon Series #1 Genre: Paranormal Romance Publication Date: March 16, 2015
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Growing up the son of a fairy King – Easy. Being accepted to the fiercest, strongest, fairy warrior army ever to protect the realm – Easy. Making the human girl, who holds your destiny in her hands, fall in love with you – Not so Easy. When the Fairy Kingdom of Avalon comes under attack, Prince Killian, Fairy warrior, and heir to the throne, prepares for battle. But when the prophesy of a Seer overshadows his fate and while his family is dying around him, he flees Avalon to the Human Realm. He vows to return and claim his destiny, only…he never thought his vengeance would mean fifty years stuck in the human realm with no way home. Reagan Lunasa is completely alone and she thinks she likes it that way. She buries her grief from her parents' mysterious disappearance, 3 years ago by keeping busy at her university art school and working at Faircrest's New Age shop. All while secretly spending every free moment on solving the mystery of what really happened to her parents. On a rare night out her attention is caught by a handsome, sexy bartender who seeks her out, asking for friendship, and maybe more. This stranger is unlike any man she's ever known. And when she discovers he's also hiding secrets her world turns upside down, all while she falls deeply in love with this protective, and patient Fairy prince. Reagan finds that learning to trust again is harder than she thought. Especially when the truth, and her love, leads her into a world unlike she has ever known. A world where fairies exist and humans are not welcome.
E.A. Weston (formerly Elizabeth Kelly)
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E.A. Weston was born and raised in Dublin Ireland, She now resides in southern California. She is the best-selling author of New Adult contemporary, paranormal, and Fantasy romance novels. By day she stays at home with her daughter but each night she slips away to spin her tales and gets lost in her fantasy worlds. As an avid reader, Elizabeth enjoys anything with a bit of romance and a paranormal twist. When she's not writing or devouring her latest read, she can be found spending time with her family or watching movies. Elizabeth loves to hear from readers and you can contact her on her social media pages.
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Yakshita October 8, 2021 at 12:40 PM
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text:
I'M SORRY I EVER MET YOU
Readers' guide
'High-Noon Shootout: Design vs. Implementation'
Liveblogging a presentation at @media2007 London by Drew McClellan and Simon Collison
Andy Clarke introduces the presenters at 2007.06.07 12:06 (because somebody has to). Despite the fact that I can't punch my way out of a paper bag – I'm a bit of a Wendy, actually – I'm a fan of heavyweight wrestling. Mr. Drew "The Dark Destroyer" McClellan and Mr. Simon "Collison" Collison.
SIMON: I've just found out I've got to use an ice cream [a handheld mike]. I'm going to be talking about design. Drew's going to be talking about implementation. Save your cigarette breaks for that bit or whatever.
It's a bit of an odd one for me, because I'm a Web-standards advocate. I love my code. I tend to do everything on a site, but design is what I love. I have an art background. I care about making things look good. Sometimes I achieve that, and I always try to improve design. Everything we do as designers or developers is design. We have problems and we seek to solve them. I'm just talking about visual design, and I'm quite sick of code, to be honest, at the moment.
I'm a businessman. I don't want to be, but I kind of co-run a company with my colleague Jamie. And I've never been more aware of pressures of designing for clients with timescales or budgets. It's certainly not as enjoyable for me, and it may be that design is not at the core of what I'm doing anymore. It can be a bit of a battle to bring it to the fore.
A bit of a manifesto today, really. I'm going to say a few things I can't really believe I'm going to say, but some of them are just going to be shots for Drew to volley back later.
A campaign for:
Common-sense approaches.
Designing with fewer restrictions: The Web is an angry teenager that storms off to its bedroom if you don't do things perfectly.
Creating attractive user experiences: Let's make the Web a richer, cooler place to be.
Taking risks.
Trying to actually enjoy what we do.
Programmers are ruling the roost these days. Designers are being marginalized. There are more and more regulations to follow with designing Web sites, and then suggested legislation or what is always in every single brief, like respecting Bobby and Cynthia, and some of them know about WCAG.
It's not utopia, this. The Internet in its public form in terms of really accessible to a lot of people is probably no more than 12 years (old), and there seems to be a desire to get it all right right off the bat. It worries me a little that we're tying to be too good; we're starting to stifle some of the creativity.
Limitations: (Slide: If it were 1976 there would be a punk revolution).
Timescale, budget, and ("bloody") clients: Clients always have a preconceived idea. Blandness? There's an opportunity to create, to move the brand forward, and it always seems to be stifled by a couple of guys in ties. Well, you've employed a designer and you've got these guidelines? You can't just read them and let us do it?
Platforms and agents: Macs, PCs, mobile phones with four million types of browsing systems.
Research and resources: Is somebody on the team ill? Did somebody's dog die?
Accessibility and usability, which I embrace, but I do find them constraining.
CMSs.
Andy (Clarke) is my friend, and he inspires me. He is the kind of guy who makes me think of taking risks. At my previous company, Agenzia, we did a site for Alan McGee's Poptones, and a lot of people said it looked broken, which was intentional. The feedback we got was very split, and I enjoyed that.
There seems to be an unwritten rule that every single time you do navigation it has to be an unordered list. Andy wants do so something a little different. It's quit clear there are three composite parts here. It could have been done with CSS, a definition list, but Andy wanted as much control as he could get, and it was his bloody site. (So he used a table.) He's captioned it and used all the right markup, so good decision, and typical of Andy for throwing off the hackles.
Why does the Internet have to be so bloody perfect? I'd like to be. More agencies are using standards, which is great. But think about these things (books, TV, radio, magazines): Why have we got to work so bloody hard? Joe Clark down here was talking about captioning video here a couple of years ago, making it accessible, three-dimensional in some ways. TV subtitles are 3% or 5%, a guy in the edge signing – it feels like a token gesture.
Magazines: How do you copy and paste without ruining the magazine? How do you increase the contrast? It's tricky. If you'd like a large-print version of this, please ring this really big number.
I don't think the Internet is as cool as it could be. I think we've been backed into a corner. I think it should be ruled by or made for somebody like this: (The Fonz). Sadly, he's not a Web developer. So we need somebody else: (Jon Hicks). Jon gets it. Jon picks design. He's a visual chap. If you don't know who he is, he did the Firefox logo. But sadly, the Internet is governed by these type of people (a nerd, Jakob Nielsen).
I don't dispute a lot of stuff that he has preached in slightly despot style. But if we just look at his Web site (shows teletext page, then the real one). It's dull to me. He has a particular niche, and he has every right to do this. I always feel everybody has every right to do what they want with each domain. Those blue things? I know that they're links. So job done!
Another thing that really frustrates me is hardware, software. Which browser can I resize text in pixels with? (Mentions colourblindness simulator.) I loved that. That's clearly a developer tool. Isn't there going to be a point where we can stop worrying about this? I certainly hope so, but I just hope that Microsoft isn't in charge.
What we need is a bit of a manifesto, really. Preserving our visual design integrity.
10. Visual design is not complex engineering.
9. Design interfaces visually, and don't be afraid to take risks. Worry about how they're going to be built later. What's the centre of this page? How should it work? There's this idea in Web design that you work on the most standards-compliant browser. I work in Safari. And then generally what you would do is then tweak it and refine for poor browsers and odd browsers and browsers that only Jon Hicks has heard of. You can do that with design – start without restrictions, then start to tweak before a soft launch.
8. Reserve the right to veto the decisions of "technologists." Just design.
7. Think, build, and design organically. This is a pet favourite of mine.
6. Don't pander to personal preferences. Work out what is an absolute accessibility must, but what is a personal preference, like a certain contrast version.
5. Deliver a rich, considered visual experience for all. Content is often repackaged for mobile devices or different browsers. Andy will deliver a B&W site to IE6 because he understands the limitations of it. He's making a bit of a statement there, which I like. Just the fact that it's a print stylesheet doesn't mean that it has to be white.
4. Be expressive with Web typography. It isn't just a case of using Verdana or Georgia, or Lucida Grande, my favourite. So long as you use replacement text, give it a go.
3. Layout decisions are the preserve of the designer. Fixed-width, elastic – it's vital you achieve a good experience for all users, regardless of window width, screen resolution. I myself love elastic layouts where we can define a minimum width and a maximum width.
2. Visual design makes the first impression – respect it! You've got about 0.1 of a second to see a site and think, wow, that's good, I'm interested. Don't marginalize it by putting too much focus on functionality.
1. Build everything with Flash! Just me tossing the ball (to Drew) to smash it back into the net. I have used Flash with XML feeds to take data from a CMS to package it with real URLs. I'd be interested in seeing more inspiration from Flash sites, seeing what we can do with HTML.
I just think it's important that we do consider design at all counts. It's hard work sometimes, but it's not working down a pit.
Your choice: (The Fonz or Jakob Nielsen).
DREW: Implementation. nxoc01.cern.ch: That's the first Web server, running on a Next.
Designers have come along with the idea that it doesn't matter how well it works, as long as it looks nice. Every branding doohickey is a layer that has to be peeled back to get to the core content. Perhaps it's time we, the people of the Internets, did something about it – it's time we embraced the Web for what it is, not what the turtleneck-wearing, latte-sipping (designers) think it is.
We, the people of the Internets, are implementers. It's our job to publish things in a way that's native to the Web. Each time we allow the frivolities of design to distract us, we have failed. Technical excellence, not pencil-twiddling guff. Therefore, we must know our enemies, and they come in various guises, enemies as such and incognito. They'll leave your users suffering whilst the designers responsible are off snowboarding.
10. Fixed-width layouts. Designers like these, as they claim it gives them a bit of control. We, the people of the Internets, know this is all an illusion. They have as little control over layout as they do over their badly-driven Audi TTs. They're taking constraints from other media and overlying them on the Web. (Runs quotes from Holzschlag, Rutter.)
9. Flash for non-media presentation. Yeah. It truly is a wonderful tool. There are, however, two fundamental and inescapable truths. Flash breaks the basic nature of the Web for anything other than a media player. HTML gives source to a browser to interpret in any way that fits. That Flash player has a monopoly on the content. It may look like the Web to an average designer in their orange sunglasses, but it isn't. Every instance of the Flash player has a tangible impact on the performance of a Web browser. The nature of the Web is to be light on resources.
8. Text replacement. Relies on Flash's elderly bedmate, Photoshop. Text on a Web page is a solved problem. It flows, scales, aligns, wraps. It can be read, restyled, printed, indexed, searched. It doesn't even require CSS to communicate at a fundamental level. We've got more than enough faces already.
7. Styled form elements. Forms are the base, underlying method of interaction on the Web. You don't want to mess with them until they fail to function as forms. User has to relearn.
6. Potent gets. get retrieves from server, post alters the server by placing something there. Designers try to rid themselves of forms completely. (Shows Facebook example that should be posts and forms but uses just get and links.) Google pre-caching would follow all those fake links masquerading as forms.
5. Controlled heights. Designers pine for the table-based era, a time that left us pretty much buggered for anything but aligning heights. If a visual effect cannot be achieved with a faux-columns-like background image, it is not a robust technical solution.
4. Controlled text size. The desire to control the uncontrollable. (Even worse with translations.)
3. Colour schemes and contrast. Corporate-branding documents, which are very expensive documents that tell you that red is big in China, tell you what colours to use. Colours often look very different onscreen than in print. Designers love low contrast and subtle shades.
2. The user agent. It can't be trusted. This manifests itself as being asked to write a site just for a certain browser.
1. The fold. This imaginary horizontal line that designers like to draw on a page similar to what a newspaper would have at an old-fashioned newsagent's like you'd see in 1940s films. The fold is symbolic of us as implementers folding to the will of designers. I think we all know what happens if we let designers have their own way: (Shows £400,000 London 2012 logo).
SIMON: There's a moral to this story. But should we take a vote, Drew? All you cool people who believe that design is important, relevant, makes a first impression, helps girls talk to you, or boys or whatever it may be –
— And hates the Web.
— Who wants to vote design? (Hands go up.)
DREW: People of the Internets, people who believe in the Web and what the Web stands for and what it should be, for making things accessible to all and not just visual guff. (Hands go up.) I think it was just half-and-half.
KATH MOONAN: How about abstaining? I'm against false dichotomies.
SIMON: That brings us to the moral of this tale. These things work in harmony.
DREW: You have to know the arguments for one side and the other. You have to walk the line and decide the best balance between the hard technological line and the wavy creative line. You can't find that balance unless you really know the arguments for and against.
— We have to be specialists in lots of things. We can't just be a designer. We can't just be the one who works in that horrible snow-blinding code. It's tough, but it is fun, and now you all know about how to get.
(Scribe stopped writing at 2007.06.07 11:57.)
Permanent link & datestamp ☞ 2007.06.12 17:31
Filed under ☞ @media London 2007 · Liveblogging · Web standards
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text:
Il parco nazionale della Mauricie () è un parco nazionale situato in Québec, in Canada, si trova nella regione Mauricie.

Altri progetti

Collegamenti esterni

Mauricie
Aree naturali protette del Québec
Mauricie

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


text:
King John of England a Werewolf?
by Buddy · Published September 5, 2010 · Updated September 5, 2010
A monarch – an actual king of England – a werewolf? After he died, King John of England became a werewolf (or at least that's what the rumors say).
King John (aka "Bad King John") was King of England over 800 years ago – from 1167 – 1216. The name should sound familiar to many as he was one of the most famous villains in literature – the evil king that Robin Hood rallied against. Much less known however are the werewolf rumors that haunted him after his death. It has been cited by some that King John was actually rumored to have been a werewolf. Some think that part of what started the rumors that he was a werewolf were that many people saw him as evil, and one of the creatures humans thought of as very evil at the time were werewolves. The idea that "Bad King John" was a werewolf was therefore very easy to spread. Others however, believe that there is some truth to the rumors, citing the following reports as evidence: they say that after the King's death, people heard sounds coming from his grave; other people also claimed they actually saw him roaming the countryside after he was dead. It is interesting that he was rumored to be a werewolf and not a vampire. Today typically, post-death tomb noises and dead-bodies-rising-from-the-grave stories are related to vampires. In ancient folklore however, some werewolves were attributed with some of these characteristics.
So, did Robin Hood fight a werewolf?
Well, the odd thing about the reports about King John being a werewolf is that the King was only rumored to have been a werewolf after he died. If he was indeed a werewolf, then why didn't these rumors haunt him during life? The fact that the stories started to spread after his death leads me to believe that the rumors did indeed actually start as a way to scare people (perhaps by his enemies), and that he was not in fact actually a werewolf either before or after his death.
Tags: ancient folkloredead bodiesenglandevil kingking john of englandking of englandliteraturemonarchrobin hoodVampiresvillains
Games that werewolves play
Don't call yourself a lunar-challenged human, you are a werewolf!
by Buddy · Published January 3, 2019
Dynomutt says:
I agree; I think it was just a "scary bed-time story" made up after his death to make the idea of his wickedness even more prevalent.
u suck
@Dynomutt:
koolkid says:
@lunar u r stupid
Judy Bradley says:
I hope not as my family is descended from him! Of course that might explain a couple of my sons being so hairy!! LOL How can people believe this stuff!?!
Sorath "Rayne" Coraxo says:
@Judy Bradley: you tell us. are you not the one who found this website? you obviously had some sort of interest in werewolves, otherwise this site never would have become a mere idea to you.
Why do people against the idea of werewolves existing even bother posting on this site?
Velix Hollow says:
You can't just go on a site and call somebody stupid.Lunar could sue your backside of for that.
@Name:
I'm stupid? Hmmm.. That post was in November and you post a response to me in May of the following year, taking a cheap shot at someone you didn't think would see it again. It's really sad that you think it's cool to sit behind the all mighty power of your keyboard where you THINK you are out of reach and fire off whatever crosses your tiny mind believing there are no reprocussions. Last I checked, I left the playground behind me. You should too.. the children would like their sandbox back.
@Velix Hollow: Sue? Eh.. no thanks. Not my style, but thanks for responding to him when I was unable to all the same.
The story also said he was dead when buried and in myth it says Werewolves were living creatures and not the undead. Sometimes vampire and werewolf stories become very mixed up. As in this tale is a man who should most likely be a vampire and not werewolf.
ArgharnaWelyn says:
@Lunar: i also agree
she wolf says:
"It's really easier to spread a myth than the truth"
-she wolf-
My own proverb.
Is the Royal Family descended from a werewolf? | werewolves
[…] King John of England however was really rumored to have become a werewolf after he died, not just have an odd medical condition… […]
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text:
Echo Dot and Amazon Tap bring Alexa's voice smarts to cheaper hardware
Amazon's Alexa virtual assistant hits the road and hooks up with external speakers.
By Jared Newman
TechHive Mar 3, 2016 7:44 am PST
Amazon's Alexa virtual assistant is turning up in more places with the Echo Dot and Amazon Tap.
The Echo Dot is a $90 puck that connects with external speakers, either via Bluetooth or 3.5 mm audio cable. Once connected, users can play music with voice commands, ask Alexa questions, control smart home devices, and order things from Amazon Prime. Essentially, it's a way to bring the Amazon Echo's voice controls to existing speakers and sound systems.
Alternatively, you can use Echo Dot without an external speaker connection. Its built-in speakers aren't powerful enough for music playback, but they can respond to voice commands and serve as a smart alarm clock.
Amazon's other new product is the Amazon Tap, a $130 Bluetooth speaker with the same Alexa voice controls as the Echo. But while the Echo must be plugged into an outlet, the Tap has a built-in battery for nine hours of audio playback. The tradeoff is that Amazon Tap doesn't do hands-free voice commands. Instead, you must press a button on the speaker to make Alexa listen.
As with the Echo, both of the new devices can stream tunes directly from Amazon Prime Music, Spotify, Pandora, iHeartRadio, and TuneIn. They can also connect to a phone or tablet to play other music sources over Bluetooth.
The Echo Dot is available now, but with restrictions: You must be an Amazon Prime member, and you must already own a Fire TV or Amazon Echo. (To make the purchase, users must say "Alexa, order an Echo Dot" using either device.) The Amazon Tap is up for pre-order now, and will start shipping on March 31.
Why this matters: Since its late-2014 debut, the Amazon Echo has gotten powerful enough that you could easily imagine installing several rooms throughout the house. But with each speaker costing $180, that becomes an expensive proposition, and doesn't make much sense if you already have a nice sound system. Along with the portable Amazon Tap, the Echo Dot should help Alexa become even more persistent, further advancing Amazon's vision of running your house on your behalf.


April 2019: Here you can find the latest The Personalised Gift Shop discount code and voucher codes. Save money when you shop and add these The Personalised Gift Shop codes at the checkout. Valid and tested.
The Personalised is a one of a kind gift shop offering a fantastic and varied selection of personalised gifts featuring products such as wedding gifts, baby gifts, mother�s day gifts, birthday gifts, photo albums, personalized tees, calendars, experience days and christening gifts among many others. With experience of 10 years providing personalised blessings, the company runs the UK�s top gifting site selling exactly what customers need � reasonable and practical gift items retailed at reasonable costs, delivered fast and offered with great administration. The store grew to become the large company it is today largely because it understands what people want and rely on technology to ensure that their gifts are the latest in the market. It is true to say that many people often have a difficulty selecting a gift for their loved one, but when you shop at The Personalised Gift Shop, you will never have to scratch your head thinking of what to gift someone special, no matter the occasion or your relationship. Whether you already know what you want to purchase and are just scouring the web for the best pricing deals on top quality items or are open to ideas and need to browse available products for something that will catch your eye, the store is the best place to shop as it has an easy to navigate dynamic website that makes it straightforward to search for specific items, browse through categories or go through recommended gift items based on your preferences, occasion, recipient etc. Once you find the perfect gift, there are many personalisation options you can choose such as themes or personalised photos, text and memories. Before you make payment, you should also know that one of the top reasons to come back and shop at this store the next time is their great pricing on trendy items and of course, the popular The Personalised discount codes that you can grab from us and use to redeem instant price cut discounts and other offers such as free bonus gifts and free wrapping and delivery of your order.


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text:
René Weissinger (Böblingen, Baden-Württemberg, 11 de desembre de 1978) és un ciclista alemany, professional des del 2002 al 2012. En el seu palmarès destaca la victòria a la Berner Rundfahrt el 2005.

Palmarès
 2005
 1r a la Berner Rundfahrt
 1r a la Völkermarkter Radsporttage
 2006
 Vencedor de 2 etapes a la Volta al llac Qinghai
 2008
 Vencedor de la classificació dels esprints a la Volta a Suïssa

Enllaços externs

 Fitxa de René Weissinger a sitiodeciclismo.net

Ciclistes de Baden-Württemberg


text:
Maintaining success at North Texas is hard, but Seth Littrell's doing just that
No one has jumped from North Texas to a power conference head coaching gig in nearly 40 years. With another strong year or two, Littrell will probably end that streak.
By Bill Connelly@SBN_BillC Mar 5, 2018, 11:20am EST
Share All sharing options for: Maintaining success at North Texas is hard, but Seth Littrell's doing just that
Ray Carlin-USA TODAY Sports
Head coach: Seth Littrell (14-13, third year)
2017 record and S&P+ ranking: 9-5 (62nd)
Projected 2018 record and S&P+ ranking: 7-5 (86th)
The North Texas job has not been much of a springboard in recent decades, but Littrell is well on his way to changing that.
Despite extreme youth in the passing game, UNT surged offensively in 2017, paving the way for a division title and the Mean Green's sixth nine-win season at the FBS level.
Quarterback Mason Fine has his top three receivers back, including Michael Lawrence, one of the nation's best possession men.
The defense ... has left something to be desired. And the front seven is awfully thin this year.
The schedule all but guarantees another bowl, but the home game against Louisiana Tech to start conference play could determine whether another division title run is in the works.
You can win in Denton, but you probably won't win for long there.
When Darrell Dickey took over in 1998, it took him five years to produce a genuinely good team. He went to four straight New Orleans Bowls — the modern model for sustained success in Denton — but had already begun to slide. In his last two seasons, he went 5-18.
After Dickey's replacement, Texas high school legend Todd Dodge, crashed and burned (UNT went 8-40 in his four seasons), it was up to Dan McCarney to pick up the pieces. It took him only three years to surge to 9-4, but he couldn't maintain the success, and in his last two seasons, UNT went 5-19.
McCarney's coaching career was basically over when he left Denton. Dodge was back in the high school ranks within a year or so of his departure. Dickey spent the last decade as a mid-major offensive coordinator or co-coordinator, which is what he was before UNT as well.
You have to go back nearly four decades to find a time when someone went from North Texas head coach to something bigger.
Jerry Moore went just 11-11 in 1979-80 but, combined with his success as a Tom Osborne assistant at Nebraska, managed to land the Texas Tech job in 1981. (He didn't fare well there but, starting in 1989, became a coaching legend at Appalachian State.)
Hayden Fry played things perfectly. Fired after a 7-4 season at SMU, Fry rehabilitated in Denton. He won 33 games from 1975-78 and got UNT to as high as 16th in the coaches' poll during a brilliant 1977. He parlayed this into two decades as Iowa head coach.
That Littrell took this job, then, was a bit of a risk. The draw is easy to describe — you're barely 30 miles from Dallas (where hundreds of potential FBS prospects live), Apogee Stadium is nice and rather new, Denton has an In-N-Out Burger* — but evidence of success has been hard to come by.
Littrell has already thrived. After inheriting a 1-11 team, he has won 14 games, with two bowl bids and a division title, in his first two years.
He's not blowing away the field from a recruiting perspective; per the 247Sports Composite, UNT's signing classes ranked just eighth in C-USA in 2018 and 11th in 2017. But the former Oklahoma fullback and Mark Mangino, Mike Leach, and Kevin Wilson protege didn't need long to begin establishing offensive success.
After averaging just 23.8 points per game in his first 10 games, the Mean Green have averaged 34.2 since. They were held under 29 points just three times in 14 games last year and topped 40 six times. And they did so with a sophomore throwing primarily to freshmen and sophomores. His offense actually has experience this year, which should be terrifying for C-USA defenses.
Granted, the defense could still use some work. The Mean Green had an average Def. S&P+ ranking of 109th in McCarney's last two seasons and have improved only to an average of 96th. But with a top-30 offense, you can afford shootouts.
* That's a draw for me, anyway, even if In-N-Out is no Shake Shack.
2017 North Texas advanced statistical profile
Littrell's offensive success is also Graham Harrell's success. The 32-year-old former Texas Tech quarterback came to Denton and figured out how to turn playing success into coaching success.
After a few years of backing up Aaron Rodgers in Green Bay, Harrell moved from Oklahoma State quality control coach to Washington State receivers coach (under Leach) to UNT OC. He could tell you all the ways in which his philosophy differs from that of Leach, but the footprint is similar: spread opponents out, throw more than the national average, and wreck opponents with efficiency.
Within C-USA, only FAU had a more efficient offense than UNT's, and that's a staggering statement considering the personnel in the passing game. Turnover in the receiving corps is generally a harbinger of regression, and the Mean Green had to replace four of their top six WRs from 2016.
But with three sophomores leading the way (slot receiver Michael Lawrence and wideouts Rico Bussey Jr. and Jalen Guyton combined to catch 158 passes for 2,271 yards and 20 touchdowns), plus three other freshmen or sophomores catching at least 18 passes, North Texas improved from 122nd to 36th in Passing S&P+.
Lawrence is one of the best possession men in the country. Of the 92 FBS players targeted at least 85 times last year, his plus-24.5 percent marginal efficiency was the best.
Michael Lawrence
A product of Sweetwater (Tex.), Lawrence walked on at UNT, and in 2017 he offered an efficiency outlet that hadn't existed.
The run game helped. Harrell leaned on it at least a smidge more (UNT's run rate increased from just 53 percent to 54 on standard downs but from 27 percent to 32 on passing downs) and was rewarded. Despite missing the last three games, Jeffery Wilson rushed for 1,215 yards. And in his absence, then-freshman Nic Smith held the fort, at least for a while. He rushed 26 times for 178 yards in a win over Rice but was limited to just 69 in 20 carries against FAU and Troy to finish.
Smith didn't flash the same level of explosiveness as Wilson or fellow sophomore-to-be Evan Johnson, but it appears he'll get the first crack at replacing Wilson all the same.
Running behind a line that returns four of last year's starters and six guys with at least 11 career starts will help. Center Sosaia Mose, left guard Elex Woodworth, and left tackle Jordan Murray are all back from a line that improved dramatically, in both run blocking and pass protection.
Mason Fine (6) and Nic Smith (21)
Troy Taormina-USA TODAY Sports
If either Smith, Johnson, Anthony Wyche, or JUCO transfer DeAndre Torrey can do a Wilson impression, then UNT will have an outstanding base of efficiency for Fine, who has already thrown for more than 5,600 career yards. And when you've got that in your back pocket, you can take some shots. While Lawrence did a lot of the dirty work nearer the line, Bussey and Guyton averaged 15.1 yards per catch with above-average marginal efficiency and excellent marginal explosiveness.
That trio will account for a majority of UNT's receptions if healthy, but there's still a chance for sophomore slot and star return man Jaelon Darden, tight end Kelvin Smith, three-star redshirt freshman Greg White, or three-star true freshmen Jyaire Shorter or Austin Ogunmakin to carve out a role. This is a deep corps.
With two more years like 2017, Fine could finish with more than 13,000 career yards — not quite Harrell's 15,793, but still top-20 all-time.
To his credit, coordinator Troy Reffett has indeed engineered improvement. An average Def. S&P+ ranking of 96.5 is better than what he inherited. But despite returning a chunk of his 2016 contributors, his Mean Green defense fell from 93rd to 100th last fall.
UNT vs. SMU, FAU (twice), Army, and Troy (1-4): 52.6 points per game | 7.9 yards per play | 11.4 percent average percentile performance (~top 115)
UNT vs. everyone else (8-1): 25.2 points per game | 4.8 yards per play | 63.2 percent average percentile performance (~top 50)
The Mean Green gave up nearly as many yards (2,926) in those five games as they did in the other nine (3,114). They handled other decent offenses (Iowa, Southern Miss) reasonably well but had no answers for SMU, FAU, Army, or Troy.
Will we see another step forward in 2018? It's hard to guarantee it.
North Texas could start seven or eight seniors, which generally foretells improvement, but depth could be a major concern in the front seven, where Reffett is a couple of injuries away from dipping heavily into the 2017 or 2018 recruiting classes.
The line returns three of its top four tacklers (positive spin) but also loses four of its top seven (negative spin). After senior tackles Roderick Young and Ulaisi Tauaalo and junior end LaDarius Hamilton, the leading returning tackler is sophomore end Dion Novil, who had 2.5 last year.
Littrell signed two JUCO transfers (end Darrian McMillan and tackle Tuulau Saafi) to shore up depth a bit, and Kansas State transfer Bryce English could finally be ready to contribute after sitting out his first two years at UNT (one per transfer rules, the other because of a camp injury). But if they aren't all ready to go, I'm not sure who will be.
The linebacking corps does bring back seniors E.J. Ejiya and Brandon Garner, who combined for 18.5 tackles for loss, nine sacks, and 18 percent of the team's havoc plays in 2017. But with two other starters gone, sophomore Joe Ozougwu (who made five of his 13.5 tackles behind the line), JUCO transfer Tim Faison, and at least one youngster will need to step up. Redshirt freshman Kody Fulp has been a spring standout so far, but spring just began, obviously.
E.J. Ejiya (22)
If the front seven holds up, the secondary should be solid. UNT held opponents to a 55.1 percent completion rate (27th in FBS), albeit with quite a few big plays mixed in, and of the 10 DBs to record at least seven tackles last year, eight return. Corner Kemon Hall led the way from a havoc perspective (one TFL, one interception, eight breakups, one forced fumble), and nickel back Ashton Preston thrived near the line of scrimmage with 4.5 TFLs.
Littrell has signed 17 three-star athletes in the last two classes, and five of them have been defensive backs. If one or two crack the rotation, that could only be considered a good thing.
Kemon Hall
Special teams did UNT a lot of favors, and they mostly came from two guys. Kicker Trevor Moore not only made all of his PATs and under-40-yard field goals, but he made nine of 11 beyond 40 as well. As soon as they entered the opponent's 30 or 35, the Mean Green were almost guaranteed at least three points.
Moore is gone, however, and could be replaced by Arkansas graduate transfer Cole Hedlund.
Jaelon Darden's back, though. The slot receiver averaged 11.9 yards per punt return as a freshman, which could pay off handsomely if, you know, UNT forces a few more punts this year.
1-Sep SMU 74 -0.2 50%
8-Sep Incarnate Word NR 42.2 99%
15-Sep at Arkansas 52 -9.9 28%
22-Sep at Liberty 115 5.7 63%
29-Sep Louisiana Tech 70 -0.7 48%
6-Nov at UTEP 130 14.2 79%
13-Oct Southern Miss 94 4.9 61%
20-Oct at UAB 91 -1.1 47%
27-Oct Rice 128 15.1 81%
10-Nov at Old Dominion 114 5.4 62%
17-Nov Florida Atlantic 31 -9.8 29%
24-Nov at UTSA 104 2.2 55%
Projected S&P+ Rk 86
Proj. Off. / Def. Rk 35 / 118
Five-Year S&P+ Rk -7.6 (102)
2- and 5-Year Recruiting Rk 99 / 106
2017 TO Margin / Adj. TO Margin* -11 / -8.6
2017 TO Luck/Game -0.9
Thanks to the thinned-out defense, S&P+ is only lukewarm on UNT in 2018. The offense is projected to again rank in the Off. S&P+ top 35 -- and it's such a young unit that it will return almost everyone from that top-35 unit in 2019 as well. But it's all about how many stops the Mean Green can make. For much of last season, that wasn't a major issue. But when it was a problem, it was a crippling one.
The schedule features a lot of dead weight, which all but guarantees a third bowl trip in three years. UNT faces likely losses at Arkansas and against FAU but is given a 47 percent win probability or greater in each of the other 10 games, six of which are against teams projected 104th or worse.
Both the non-conference and conference portions of the schedule start with huge home tossups -- SMU in Week 1, then Louisiana Tech in Week 5. Win those two, and the Mean Green are potentially on their way toward double-digit wins in Littrell's third season. Lose both, and coming anywhere close to last year's success will be nearly impossible.
Either way, Littrell is in position to do something that hasn't been done in Denton in nearly 40 years.


Protiviti's Jim DeLoach explores how to bolster internal audit's efforts in providing recommendations that are strong, actionable and in keeping with the board's expectations.
We've always believed that boards should ensure that their organizations maximize the full potential of internal audit. There are four C's directors should consider when evaluating the sufficiency of any risk-based audit plan: culture, competitiveness, compliance and cyber.
We're not suggesting they are the only things a board should consider, but they should be on the board's radar.
In 2015, the world's largest ongoing study of the internal audit profession – the Global Internal Audit Common Body of Knowledge (CBOK) – was conducted by The Institute of Internal Auditors (The IIA) and Protiviti to ascertain expectations from key stakeholders, including board members, regarding internal audit performance. There were several imperatives for internal audit gleaned from the directors participating in the CBOK Stakeholder Study, which is conducted every five years. Among them: Focus more on strategic risks, think beyond the scope of the audit plan and add more value through consulting.
Watch for signs of a deteriorating risk culture.
Approach its work with a strong business context that addresses the underpinnings of what makes an organization competitive in the marketplace; in other words, chief audit executives (CAEs) and their staff should "connect the dots" when considering the findings of multiple audits, particularly findings with significant implications for the efficiency and effectiveness of the operating model and the enhancement of the all-important customer experience.
Broaden the focus of the audit plan on important compliance matters and the quality of the related reporting.
Focus on risks of major importance. Cyber risk is center stage for many companies at this time and will continue to be in the forseeable future.
These four C's – culture, competitiveness, compliance and cyber – offer suggestions to directors regarding what they should expect of a risk-based audit plan. We discuss each of them further below.
Executives and directors alike agree that, in most cases, a breakdown in risk management, internal control or compliance is almost always due to a dysfunctional culture. They also know that cultural dysfunction doesn't develop overnight. The risks it spawns often require a lengthy incubation period before symptoms begin to appear and the inevitable consequences start manifesting themselves and potentially result in a reputation-damaging event.
Examples include an environment that isolates senior leaders from business realities, allows cost and schedule concerns to override legitimate public safety priorities, empowers falsification of emission reports or drives unacceptable risk-taking through inappropriate performance incentives. Once the culture is shaped in such a way to enable a toxic environment, it may take a long time for the consequences to emerge. But emerge they will, if the dysfunction is left unaddressed.
There is also a flip side to culture: Just as it is a source of unwanted consequences, it is likewise a source of all things good that drive and augment innovation, safety, diversity, customer focus and other distinctive aspects that define a company's reputation and brand image. Accordingly, culture is about creating and preserving enterprise value.
An organization's culture is much more than a commitment to ethical and responsible business behavior. It is the mix of shared values, attitudes and patterns of behavior that give the organization its particular character. In addition to corporate value statements and codes of conduct, as well as ethics programs, culture related to risk management is influenced by established policies and procedures, risk committee oversight activities, incentive programs, risk assessment processes, key risk indicator reporting and performance reviews and reinforcement processes, among other things. It also includes the risk appetite dialogue of the executive team and board, as well as the decomposition of risk appetite into risk tolerances and limit structures used day to day in executing the corporate strategy.
The question is, how does a board get its arms around culture? How do directors and executives know when cultural dysfunction exists? And most importantly, how do boards nip cultural dysfunction in the bud and improve the alignment of culture with the desired, on-strategy behaviors earlier rather than later, when it may be too late?
An opportunity we see is for boards to look to the CAE as independent "eyes and ears" with respect to the organization's culture, in addition to independent second-line functions such as the chief risk officer and chief compliance officer. Specifically, internal audit can be asked to understand the overall working environment; identify the unwritten norms and rules governing employee interactions and workplace practices; highlight possible barriers to an effective internal environment and communications flow; report unacceptable behaviors, decisions and attitudes toward taking and managing risk; and make recommendations for addressing any problems identified.
In addition, internal audit can post warning signs suggesting a need for further investigation (e.g., unrealistic performance metrics that potentially encourage undesirable risk-taking to hit short-term targets, complex and unclear legal/reporting structures, poorly executed takeovers that allow "pockets" of bad behavior to thrive, lack of financial discipline and employees constantly on edge about the fear of being fired, to name a few). Internal audit can assist in assessing whether the tone in the middle and at the bottom matches the leaders' perception of the tone at the top. This contrast can be quite revealing to a management team that really wants to listen and know the unvarnished truth.
This area poses an opportunity for internal audit to improve operating efficiency and effectiveness and the customer experience if business processes are not performing at a competitive level because practices are inferior relative to those of competitors or best-of-class performers. In essence, the board should expect internal audit to look beyond traditional compliance areas and financial reporting to help the organization improve its operations continuously.
Most organizations use some form of balanced scorecard when monitoring, whether they are establishing or sustaining competitive advantage in the marketplace. Key performance indicators address critical areas, such as quality, time, cost and innovation performance. They often include indicators of customer and employee satisfaction. Internal audit can assist with assessing the reliability of these metrics for decision-making. In addition, internal audit can benchmark selected metrics against competitors and best-of-class performers to identify performance gaps that need to be corrected in a timely manner.
Front-line operators and functional leaders whose activities have significant compliance implications (first line of defense) own the responsibility to identify and manage compliance risk and have effective controls in place to reduce the risk to an acceptable level.
The scope of the independent compliance function (second line of defense) is commensurate with the significance of the company's compliance issues and results in reliable and timely insights to executive management, the board and primary risk owners.
Regardless of whether there is a compliance function, internal audit can assess whether a cost-effective monitoring process is in place that addresses the top compliance risks, overall implementation of the compliance program and periodic updates of the compliance program in light of changes in applicable laws and regulations and the company's needs.
This area continues to be a significant concern to boards, and it's not going away. In a recent survey, cyber was cited as the third most critical uncertainty companies are facing. Internal audit can assist boards in this critical area in several ways. First, it can assess whether the company's processes give adequate attention to its high-value information and information systems. Rather than implement all-systems-are-equal protection measures, resulting in unnecessary costs and a lack of attention to the enterprise assets that really matter, internal audit can assess whether the IT organization and the company's business leaders agree on the organization's so-called "crown jewels." This evaluation includes identifying the organization's most critical data, information assets and information systems and understanding why they are of highest value, why the company cannot afford to lose them, where they are housed and who is authorized to access them.
Who are the likely adversaries, and how are they likely to attack?
Where are the enterprise's biggest vulnerabilities, and why?
How effective is the entity's current cybersecurity control structure?
Is penetration testing conducted, and if so, how often, and what are the results?
Answers to these and other questions help clarify the changing threat landscape.
Finally, internal audit can assess the organization's response readiness to a cyber incident. The question here is whether an effective incident response plan is in place. The underlying assumption that a cyberattack is not only a high-likelihood incident, but also an inevitable one is outdated. Today's reality is that companies fall into two groups: those who know they have been breached, and those who have been breached but don't know about it. Therefore, effective incident response processes are critical to a company's preparedness to reduce an attack's impact and proliferation. Internal audit can assist with evaluating incident response plans to ascertain whether strategies for reducing the risk of security incidents to an acceptable level are proportionate and targeted, the organization is being proactive in periodically testing the incident response plan to determine its effectiveness and the plan is complemented by procedures that provide direction as to the actions to take in response to specific types of incidents.
In summary, by focusing more broadly on the implications of audit findings and by thinking beyond the expressed or implied boundaries set by the audit plan, internal audit is better positioned to deliver stronger, more practical and harder-hitting recommendations aligned with what directors are seeking. The four C's provide a perspective as to areas boards should be looking at and CAEs should be delivering to.
Are we satisfied with the scope of internal audit's activities in view of changes in the business environment and the company's operations? Are we getting the assurances we need from internal audit in the appropriate areas?
Does the CAE provide insight to the board and executive management on potential blind spots and other issues with respect to the organization's culture?
Does the internal audit plan allocate sufficient resources to address key areas of emphasis in competitiveness, compliance and cyber?
 Executives Perspectives on Top Risks for 2018, Protiviti and North Carolina State University's ERM Initiative, available at www.protiviti.com/US-en/insights/protiviti-top-risks-survey.


text:
Q: Expo project error Could not connect to development server after updating expo SDK I created a project a while back and tried running it recently and got an error from expo saying that my SDK version is not up to date. So I followed this answer (The experience you requested uses Expo SDK v(null), but this copy of Expo Client requires at least v23.0.0) to fix it. However now I'm running into a new error where my project cannot run and I get this error:

Could no connect to development server

What can I do to fix this? I don't want to try a hundred different solutions and accidentally lose my project forever and have to start over, so I figured I'd ask on here.
Here is my package.json:
{
  "main": "node_modules/expo/AppEntry.js",
  "scripts": {
    "start": "expo start",
    "android": "expo start --android",
    "ios": "expo start --ios",
    "eject": "expo eject"
  },
  "dependencies": {
    "axios": "^0.19.0",
    "expo": "^33.0.0",
    "firebase": "^6.5.0",
    "formik": "^1.5.8",
    "global": "^4.4.0",
    "native-base": "^2.12.1",
    "react": "16.5.0",
    "react-native": "https://github.com/expo/react-native/archive/sdk-33.0.0.tar.gz",
    "react-native-elements": "^0.18.5",
    "react-native-keyboard-aware-scroll-view": "^0.9.1",
    "react-native-modal": "^11.3.1",
    "react-native-paper": "^2.16.0",
    "react-native-smart-carousel": "^1.1.0",
    "react-native-snap-carousel": "3.6.0",
    "react-native-vector-icons": "^6.6.0",
    "react-navigation": "^3.11.0",
    "styled-components": "^4.2.0",
    "truffle": "^5.0.34",
    "uuid": "^3.3.3",
    "web3": "0.19"
  },
  "devDependencies": {
    "babel-preset-expo": "^5.0.0"
  },
  "private": true
}

I ran expo-cli --version in my terminal and this is what I received:
3.0.4

Thank you

A: Please follow these steps:

*

*Run npm install -g expo-cli to install the latest Expo CLI globally.

*Close your Expo CLI server if you are using it.

*Make sure in app.json the sdkVersion is 33.0.0

*Change the react dependency in your package.json from 16.5.0 to 16.8.3

*Delete your project node_modules directory and package-lock.json file

*Run npm install or yarn install depending on your package manager.

*Run expo start -c to clear your cache and start your application.

Bonus
Now for any Expo based API or dependency you can install it by using expo install instead of npm install i.e. expo install @expo/vector-icons.
This is better than using the traditional npm install or yarn install as it will install the version of the dependency that's compatible with your current Expo SDK.
Hope this Helps!

A: The issue has to do with watchman & brew.
Follow these steps, by running:

*

*npm r -g watchman

*brew update && brew upgrade

*brew install --build-from-source python@3.10 (Optional)

*brew install watchman
Make sure to run sudo if you are having permission issues.

A: What worked for me (and others) is to remove watchman (on Mac):
brew uninstall watchman
See also https://github.com/facebook/react-native/issues/29587#issuecomment-886284902

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


text:
Romantic sea mood from maestro. Ralph Lauren collection
Inspired by French style, Ralph Lauren's spring-summer 2016 show opened with seafaring looks featuring plenty of nautical stripes in blue and white pairings. As the show progressed, Lauren introduced graphic prints in kaleidoscopic blue, yellow, red and green tones for an artistic moment. Then a return to serene white with menswear inspired shirting and relaxed silhouettes. For evening wear, Lauren looked to nautical stripes again with strapless gowns that would be perfect for yachting or a summer party.
Ralph Lauren, who would have awoken to headlines that Britain's Duchess of Cambridge wore one of his dresses to mark her return to official duties from maternity leave, is one of New York's most loved designers. "My Women's Collection for Spring 2016 is a modern expression of the glamorous spirit of the French Riviera," Lauren said on Twitter.
"It has a romantic rusticity, as well as a sleek and luxurious sportiness that represents to me both the cool insouciance and understated style of the women who inspire me."
IT was a combination of the French Riviera and Paris in springtime that played out on the Ralph Lauren catwalk today – with Julianne Moore, Jessica Chastain and Alec Baldwin among those there to take it all in, Frank Sinatra chiming away in the background. Quite the holiday. Ralph suggests bold graphic maxidresses, here they curved in lines of red and blue; wide palazzo pants and fine-knit bodysuits complete with cutouts. Of course, you'll need a ballgown – in stripes – and plenty of preppy shirting, for which the designer is so well-known.
And while that takes care of your wardrobe, you'll need to think about adding an extra bit of hand luggage for the accessories – here they really stood out: ladylike little box bags or raffia numbers with "Ralph" stitched on. Top that off with a pair of huge Eighties visor sunglasses and you have the Ralph Lauren mini-break done.


text:
Trump's defenders are in too deep
Jeff Chang's remarkable history tells the story of hip-hop, the most important music (and youth) movement of our time.
Peter L'Official
April 1, 2005 1:00AM (UTC)
Charlie Ahearn, famed writer-director of the 1982 old-school hip-hop film classic "Wild Style," broke my heart about a quarter of the way through Jeff Chang's "Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation." Asked about the double-edged impact of the Sugar Hill Gang's 1979 chart-topping, crossover hit "Rapper's Delight" on break dancing and DJ culture in the clubs, he observes, "Nobody was dancing. Period! Rap became the focal point. MCs were onstage and people were looking at them." The song, apart from enlivening the then-waning Bronx club scene, helped cast the DJ down from his heretofore prominent position as ruler, sole controller and cold-rocker of the party. The days of kids decked out in denim cut-sleeves sporting well-manicured 'fros at clubs "gettin' they dance on" were done. Dancers became spectators, DJs cut records for profit, and silver-tongued Bronx kids rhymed over those records, enacting the culture's transition from DJ-dominated live performance to the more formulaic, highly marketable, studio-ensconced iteration dominated by the rapper. This leads to Ahearn's heart-stopper: "This is 1980. In other words, hip-hop is dead by 1980. It's true."
Now, hip-hop's death has been decried so many times that it's become nearly a theme of the music itself (and not just every time Puffy re-reinvents the remix). But I was born in 1980. As a matter of fact, I was born in New York City, and have lived the greater part of my life in the Bronx, the internationally known and locally respected birthplace of hip-hop. It's a lil' badge of honor that I enjoy carrying around, and a fact that almost assuredly annoys friends and others alike due to my constant and often public claim to that heritage. My favorite music came from where I came from. It's a neat and simple bit of history that I keep close to my heart -- nothing more, considering I came rather late to hip-hop block-party consciousness, being blissfully pre-pubescent for its glory days -- and it's kept so close that I can't help but feel concern for the culture that's grown up, out, around and away from the two turntables and a microphone that helped start it. And no matter how many times hip-hop has "died," it's still troubling to hear from one of its elder statesmen that the music you grew up listening to was dead before you knew it existed.
But baby -- and I'm addressing hip-hop directly here -- I love you, as 50 Cent so playfully rapped once, "like a fat kid loves cake." And after completing Chang's epic endeavor (546 pages including appendices, indexes, notes and the obligatory shout-outs), I can tell that he does too.
Yet it's not just the music that he loves, because hip-hop isn't just about dope beats and rhymes, or at least it shouldn't be. In some strange and I suppose logically impossible way, Hip-Hop in the grand, elevated, generational sense is "bigger than hip-hop," in the words of the duo dead prez (a group so -- undeservedly -- under the mainstream radar that they don't even get capital letters). I know what you're saying, how can a thing be bigger than itself? I'll attempt to answer that with simple stoner logic: What if the thing is not the thing you thought it was in the first place? (Can I get a Keanu? "Whoa!" Thanks!)
Hip-hop in its purest sense offers both a means to decide whether you should cop that bangin' new mix tape from the cat on the corner, and a forum to decide whether you think Colin Powell's a punk for copping to the neocon playbook and selling us on those WMD. Hip-hop was born in the Bronx, yes, but it has been reborn countless times -- to borrow Secretary of Defense and hype-man extraordinaire D. Rummy's words -- north, south, east and west of there, too.
Like it or not, hip-hop's been co-opted by our media monopolies as both dominant mode and signifier of youth/outsider/disenfranchised culture. Having transcended its branding as a niche market of music, it has come to stand for -- and brand -- urban culture itself. (Referring to the seminal West Coast rap group N.W.A.'s meteoric rise to the top of Billboard's charts in the 1990s, Chang slyly writes, "Apparently lots of suburbanites and whites were down with a 'Niggaz 4 Life' program," keenly identifying the music's potential to both identify and define a lifestyle.) Hip-hop has become both universal aesthetic and adjective, from the Dirty South to South Africa, with its spirit manifesting itself in the unlikeliest of places, often in more unfamiliar guises.
Holler if you hear me. Allen Iverson is hip-hop, sure. But if you've ever watched the elegant, world-class French striker Thierry Henry celebrate after scoring a wonder goal, you'd know he's hip-hop, too -- and not merely because he's friends with San Antonio Spurs guard Tony Parker and once sat next to Spike Lee and Jay-Z at a Knicks game. Same goes for the kids chilling out in Tokyo's Harajuku district, sporting Nike sneaker styles that hip-hop heads in America would absolutely bug out over. Though he would no doubt protest, Stanley Crouch is a little bit hip-hop, too. Just ask critic Dale Peck.
Chang, a freelance hip-hop journalist with a background in ethnic studies and a decade-long investment in the art form (which includes co-founding an influential indie hip-hop label that helped launch acts like DJ Shadow and Blackalicious), approaches the palimpsest of hip-hop pedagogically. Which is to say, his scope is operatic, sprawling, and concerns itself with the people, places and politics that drove hip-hop from its infancy -- at a party thrown by DJ Kool Herc's sister on 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx -- to its now-ubiquitous and rather decadent cacophonic pimping of your TV, radio, cellphone and, of course, your ride. He writes, "My own feeling is that the idea of the Hip-Hop Generation brings together time and race, place and polyculturalism, hot beats and hybridity. It describes the turn from politics to culture, the process of entropy and reconstruction. It captures the collective hopes and nightmares, ambitions and failures of those who would otherwise be described as 'post-this' or 'post-that.'"
What hip-hop provides -- from Chang's perspective, and that of the downtrodden denizens of Rio's favelas and Paris' banlieues, marginalized and impoverished much like the South Bronx population of the 1970s -- is a way to look at the world. And that's exactly what "Can't Stop Won't Stop" does: It looks at the world through the words, eyes and deeds of the culture's true, oft-forgotten architects and revolutionaries over the past three and a half decades. Chang isn't interested in rap's big, boldfaced names and endlessly echoing voices as touchstones for his narrative. While he pays homage to founding fathers Grandmaster Flash, Afrika Bambaataa and Kool Herc (who writes the book's introduction) among many others, Chang grounds his copious research with those whose stories have been overlooked, co-opted or abandoned: the street gangs of 1960s-70s Bronx, the b-boys (break dancers) whose loose-limbed poppin' and lockin' became novelty once the MC grabbed the mike, and the graffiti artists whose brief brush with art world fame came, then went, with Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. These are but some of the heretofore ignored to whom Chang gives voice. There's nary a Diddy in sight.
It is what Chang calls "the politics of abandonment" that seemingly drove him to write the book, and which accounts for the seething menace -- masked by cool understatement -- he shows when dealing with real-life villains such as megalomaniacal urban builder Robert Moses, or pretty much anyone involved with the LAPD. A boombox Boethius, Chang employs a central metaphor not of a wheel, but instead, a loop -- of history, of a sample, of cassette tape -- around which he structures and organizes the book.
Chang begins his tale temporally in 1968, a time when youth and revolution seemed poised to seize the world by storm. But in the South Bronx, gang culture -- fueled by the influx of heroin and the mass exodus of whites to the suburbs made possible by Moses' destructive monstrosity, the Cross-Bronx Expressway -- took root, and street violence became the reality. After years of Nixon's and city officials' policy of "benign neglect" had taken its toll, the raging fires that razed communities and made the Bronx the nation's symbol for urban failure, the gangs themselves declared a stunning truce in 1971. That's when people like Herc, Flash, and Bambaataa (himself a member of a gang, then leader of the Zulu Nation) stepped in. The creative energy they unleashed in a seven-mile radius from the Bronx's Crotona Park in the late '70s rather fittingly "sampled" the same rebellious, avant-garde spirit of a decade before.
As Chang writes, in making his most trenchant point: "They were about unleashing youth style as an expression of the soul, unmediated by corporate money, unauthorized by the powerful and protected and enclosed by almost monastic rites, codes, and orders. They sprung from kids who had been born into the shadows of the baby boom generation, who never grew up expecting the whole world to be watching. What TV camera would ever capture their struggles and dreams? They were invisible.
"But invisibility was its own kind of reward; it meant you had to answer to no one except the others who shared your condition. It meant you became obsessed with showing and proving, distinguishing yourself and your originality above the crowd."
That these kids "never grew up expecting the world to be watching" perhaps accounts in part for why modern hip-hop has seemingly lost its way in comparison to the vibrant folk art it once was; today, everybody expects the world to be watching.
Regardless of hip-hop's inspirational woes today, it is this cyclical progression of events that forms Chang's loop, repeated in Los Angeles between the late '80s and early '90s, culminating in the post-Rodney King verdict riots, the 1992 Watts peace treaty, and a similar flowering of creativity, leading to hip-hop's eventual entry into the mainstream.
Chang's narrative ends, rather unfortunately, in the year 2000 at a demonstration at the Democratic convention, with fists raised defiantly in the air in front of the Ronald Reagan State Building. It's a conclusion, necessarily so I suppose, that completes the revolutionary loop from 1968, but so much has happened in these past years that I felt cheated to have taken such a remarkably detailed ride through history, then to be forced to get off earlier than I expected. It's a rather evasive and jarring ending to an otherwise comprehensively researched and well-written history.
The history of hip-hop music in many ways still mirrors the history told by rapper Common in "I Used to Love H.E.R.," a single from his 1994 classic "Resurrection." Employing a trope, well, common to the genre, Common raps as if hip-hop is a girl he grew up with. (The very fact that I'm citing Common will perhaps out my current musical allegiances with regards to the gangsta/poet, thug/backpacker debate, which Chang addresses intelligently in his book.)
I met this girl, when I was ten years old
And what I loved most she had so much soul
She was old school, when I was just a shorty
Never knew throughout my life she would be there for me
On the regular ...
And later ...
I might've failed to mention that the shit was creative
But once the man got you well he altered the native
Told her if she got an energetic gimmick
That she could make money, and she did it like a dummy
Now I see her in commercials, she's universal
She used to only swing it with the inner-city circle
Now she be in the burbs lickin rock and dressin hip
And on some dumb shit, when she comes to the city
Talkin about poppin' glocks servin' rocks and hittin' switches
Now she's a gangsta rollin with gangsta bitches
Always smokin blunts and gettin drunk
Tellin me sad stories, now she only fucks with the funk
Stressin how hardcore and real she is
She was really the realest, before she got into showbiz
All that is generally still true, and the cycle has repeated itself since then in some form or another -- and this rap is only 11 years old. (Some might remember that Common and Ice Cube didn't exactly see eye to eye after this song was released, since Cube thought himself obliquely referenced here -- so excuse me for one sec ... Cube, I ain't got nuthin' but love for ya baby!) So Chang's loop theory seems to hold water -- especially when put in context of a comment made by the Source magazine's co-founder and CEO David Mays in 1993: "This isn't a niche market, or just an ethnic market ... Hip-hop is like rock and roll twenty-five years ago. It's a music-driven lifestyle being lived by an entire generation of young people now ... This market is dying to be marketed to."
In the wake of 50 Cent and the Game's exquisitely timed "beef" (and 50's first-week sales massacre of all Billboard chart rivals), Mays' words might seem funny or prophetic, despite the fact that the threat of someone dying has become the marketing ploy. (Chang pays particular attention to Mays and the other co-founder of the Source, Ray "Benzino" Scott, both of whom have stakes in the music business and thus have more conflict-of-interest issues with the magazine than Dick Cheney has with Halliburton.) Who knows if we're truly at the nadir of Chang's loop, but if we are, then there's nowhere to go but up.
"Can't Stop Won't Stop" reads like a history textbook -- albeit one of the cooler history textbooks you could find -- and that's a good thing. It is essentially a people's history, a sociological text that delves deep into the racial and economic climates of the times that produced hip-hop culture. Of course, Chang gets to supplement his sociology with the occasional critical consideration of the lyrical stylings of a Rakim or an Ice Cube, but for the most part the focus is on cold, hard, often political fact, which is what makes it both fascinating and important. Chuck D, the famous Public Enemy frontman, was renowned for saying that hip-hop was black America's CNN. Given that CNN is now devoted to hard-hitting, 24-hour coverage of the Michael Jackson trial, that seems a less flattering comparison. But using that same analogy, perhaps Jeff Chang is hip-hop America's Howard Zinn.
Peter L'Official is a writer living in New York.
MORE FROM Peter L'Official
Check out this article! https://www.salon.com2005/03/31/chang/