Prompted by “The Latest Flash 0-day is no Joke”: http://alistapart.com/blog/post/the-latest-flash-0-day-is-no-joke
I’m guessing there’s a better than decent chance that you’ve already heard about this, but this is such a bad one I thought I would just make sure: The appropriately-named Hacking Team was hacked earlier this week, and in the 400 gigs of data stolen from them was a previously unknown 0-day Flash exploit. The exploit allows web sites to execute arbitrary code on vulnerable machines.
The Hacking Team makes a living selling tools that allow their clients, mainly governments and law enforcement, to surveil internet users and snoop on encrypted internet traffic. An important part of their service is collecting unknown exploits and keeping them a secret so they don’t get patched, and can continue to be exploited.
Importantly note that I believe in the thin blue line, but remain concerned over the clarity of that line. Whether we’re talking about effective persecution in the war on some drugs, arrest quotas for job promotion (or such), and/or police hacking into non-rights-infringing citizens’ lives, law abuse strides around like a large wild dog or cat — ready to show us all that the amygdala (i.e. “fight or flight” part of the brain) is not deprecated, as some academic folks questionably claim it to be apparently for some false sense of peace and intellectual civility (or such actually nonacademic nonsense).
We’re not a society dominated by cannibalism, but we are indeed a society dominated by people abusing fellow human beings in many ways (some sanctioned, if not also encouraged). The amygdala is not for dealing with tigers (or such) much these days (as it was for human beings roughly thousands of years ago), but the decision to fight (engage) or flight (retreat) remains powerfully necessary throughout our lives.
If humanity can’t get over the “clever” acceptance of reason abuse (e.g. lies, spin, etc.), and its very agonizing reach in the form of law abuse — like all of the cells in your body trying to fight it out for dominance, which I’m guessing would probably kill you — our species is at terrible risk of self-destruction. That most serious threat (often hideously and pathetically disguised to “protect the children”) matches the aforementioned false sense.
Back to the serious exploit against your computer, and as the article finally states (with the right link for your convenience)…
And now you should go patch Flash.
I am an honest freak (or reasonably responsibly balanced "misfit", if you prefer) of an artist working and resting to best carefully contribute towards helping society. Too many people abuse reasoning (e.g. 'partial truth = whole truth' scam), while I exercise reason to explore and express whole truth without any conflict-of-interest -- all within a sometimes offbeat style of psychedelic artistry.
Spirit Wave Journal 
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