89% In the House

All Critics (70) | Top Critics (24) | Fresh (62) | Rotten (8)

The film treats imagination-and talent-in certain hands as an almost mystical force.

Ozon and the script move a little too far afield and hold on a bit too long as the film approaches its end. Still, "In the House" has enough trippy truth to it to grab your interest and shake your mind.

It's fiction about life that becomes fiction that might be life - and the viewer happily dives in.

The expected punch line... never materializes, so I guess this must be a drama after all.

Savor In the House for its meta-exploration of adolescence, class resentment and suppressed desire, but don't expect much more.

The seductions of storytelling drive "In the House," a cleverly structured comic thriller rich with narrative trickery and macabre humor.

Provocative, playful, entertaining and audacious, In the House is a writer showing us the inner workings of writing, complete with its power to subvert, to imagine and to deceive

Occasionally too clever for its own good, the film may go one step too far, but Ozon manages the hybrid of genres beautifully and ultimately it is his superb cast that sells the nuances and the concept

A sly, stylish blend of melodrama and suspense that's also a cunning commentary on the seductiveness and danger inherent in storytelling itself.

Director/scriptwriter Francois Ozon knows his Hitchcock well. He employs him effectively, but the clutter is his own.

An almost perverse delight, an egghead thriller that slyly shell-games its truer purpose as an inquiry into the construction -- and deconstruction -- of fiction. Scratch deconstruction: Make that tear-the-house-down demolition.

It's partly real and partly a fable, full of events that might have happened or could never have happened, with intrigues that defy us to take them seriously.

In the House is a structurally solid thriller that is both inventive and absolutely seductive in nature.

Inviting photography and a relentless pace complement Claude's unfolding narrative, but the big thrills are in the deftly drawn characters...and the incisive satire...

A slick psychological thriller that veers into dark comedy the more absurd it gets, "In the House" demonstrates the dangers of addiction -- not to sex or drugs, but to story.

Captures why we do what we do, and the extent to which stories reflect both the writer and the reader.

It's amusing and unexpected, capturing the compulsive spirit of writing with wit and attention to mischief that keeps it unpredictable to the very end.

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Source: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/in_the_house_2013/

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Will new British surveillance revelations fuel another hacking backlash?

British agency GCHQ's involvement in the NSA's global surveillance have some drawing parallels with the phone-hacking scandal that rocked the British media.

By Sara Miller Llana,?Staff writer / June 17, 2013

Rebekah Brooks (c.), former News International chief executive, leaves Southwark Crown Court in London where she appeared to face charges related to phone hacking earlier this month. Some are drawing parallels between the phone hacking scandal and the revelations of broad surveillance of phone calls and email by British spy agency GCHQ and its US counterpart, the NSA.

Sang Tan/AP

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The Guardian newspaper?s allegations that British intelligence agents spied on foreign diplomats at a G20 summit surely comes at an awkward moment in foreign policy circles: just as leaders gathered for the G8 in Northern Ireland.

Skip to next paragraph Sara Miller Llana

Europe Bureau Chief

Sara Miller Llana?moved to Paris in April 2013 to become the Monitor's Europe Bureau?Chief. Previously she was the?paper's?Latin America Bureau Chief, based in Mexico City, from 2006 to 2013.

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But it also comes at a sensitive moment for Britain itself, still reeling from the phone hacking of British media giants that has brought privacy issues to the fore of the public debate.

?The issue of the ease with which organizations can both collect and then publicize information is transforming society?s understanding about what is and what is not confidential,? says?Martin Moore of the London-based Media Standards Trust, a charity advocating more ethical practices in the British press.

The most recent allegations, against the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), are based on documents provided by former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward?Snowden. The British newspaper reported Sunday night that the agency?spied on the phone calls and emails of diplomats who were visiting London during a G20 summit in 2009. This included setting up and tapping an Internet?caf??and?hacking the communications of the South African foreign ministry and a Turkish delegation.

The revelation comes after Mr.?Snowden?provided documentation, also to the Guardian and The Washington Post, disclosing the surveillance of common citizens by the US government in its ongoing anti-terrorism fight ? a revelation that had dismayed Europe.

But the GCHQ?scandal raises questions that relate to the 2011 phone-hacking scandal in British media, says Mr. Moore. In the earlier scandal, information that public figures and newsmakers considered private was accessible by corporations, creating a "digital footprint" and the ?potential for misuse,? he says ? much like the GCHQ spying, just with the government, instead of media corporations, doing the hacking of the public's data.

This case will turn attention to the access that governments?have to information considered private. ?We?re going to see many more conversations about what the safeguards ought to be and whether there ought to be greater openness from governments as to what [information] they are collecting and how they are using it,? Moore says.

Just this month, Rebekah Brooks, the former chief executive of News International, pleaded not guilty in court in London to charges including intercepting voice-mail messages in a scandal that eventually spread to officials and other news organizations.

?The phone-hacking scandal produced massive reaction," says James Curran, director of the media studies center at the University of London, and left a society sensitive to the powers of new technologies.?

?Powerful institutions in society are now enabled through new communications technology to probe private letters without sufficient public-interest justification,? he says. The discontent has spanned the political spectrum, with both the right and left condemning an erosion of privacy. ?My hunch is there will be enormous fuss, like a snowball that gets bigger and bigger.?

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/csmonitor/globalnews/~3/0h_2ezSpbsk/Will-new-British-surveillance-revelations-fuel-another-hacking-backlash

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Indexes edge up as Fed slowdown fears ebb

NEW YORK (AP) ? Stocks are ending slightly higher after a report of tepid U.S. economic growth raised expectations that the Federal Reserve will continue its stimulus program.

The government lowered its estimate for growth in the first three months of the year to 2.4 percent from 2.5 percent.

Stocks slid last week on concerns that the Fed might slow its bond purchases.

The Dow Jones industrial average rose 21 points to 15,324 Thursday, or 0.1 percent. The Dow was up 95 points in the afternoon, then faded in the last hour.

The Standard & Poor?s 500 rose six to 1,654, or 0.4 percent. The Nasdaq rose 23 points to 3,491.

Three stocks rose for every two that fell on the New York Stock Exchange. Volume was average at 3.5 billion shares.

Source: http://feeds.salon.com/salon/index

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Cities work sort of like stars, one theory says

Andy Ryan / Getty Images

Cities have been a source of philosophical fascination since the time of the ancient Greeks. Even Aristotle wrote about the purpose of cities.

By Emily Sohn
Discovery News

Cities have been compared to living organisms, machines, river networks and insect colonies. Instead, suggests a new study, urban centers are more like stars, fusing human connections as if they were hydrogen atoms.

But only sort of. Using mathematical equations to synthesize mounds of data, a researcher concluded that cities are vastly more complex and open-ended than any system in nature.

Still, by developing a unified theory of urbanization that explains the essence of how cities grow and function, the hope is to help policy-makers and planners design better, more efficient cities that prioritize social connections and induce innovation.

The Hunt For Lost Cities: Photos

?At the center of a star, the core is so dense that nuclear interactions take place and as a result, light comes out. And basically, the light that comes out of a star is brighter and reactions are faster the larger the star is,? Bettencourt said. ?That?s a little bit like what cities do, too. It?s mathematically different, but the larger the population is, the faster the rates of social interaction.?

?Stars are nuclear reactors and cities are a different kind of reactor,? he added. ?They are social reactors.?

Cities have been a source of philosophical fascination since the time of the ancient Greeks. Even Aristotle wrote about the purpose of cities. He observed that people are more political than any other animal and he explored the virtue of public life.

For the past decade, Bettencourt and colleagues have taken a more systematic and quantitative approach to understanding cities by gathering data from a wide variety of disciplines, including economics, urban geography and social psychology.

Instead of focusing on form and what cities look like, Bettencourt said, he was more interested in function and how cities work.

Among other details, he considered land-use, area of roads and other aspects of infrastructure. He collected information on electricity consumption, pipe volumes and measures of innovation, such as numbers of patents and people in creative professions. And to round out the big picture, he factored in incidences of disease, violence and crime. Then, he crunched the numbers.

The bigger a city is, the more social interactions become possible, Bettencourt reported Thursday in the journal Science. And, he concludes, the cities that work the best manage to maximize these interactions while minimizing crime, costs and the effort required for people to connect.

Cities such as New York and Chicago, for example, do pretty well at efficiently bringing people together and fostering innovation. Los Angeles scores slightly lower because of the greater amount of effort required to get around and interact with others.

NEWS: Lost' City Found Beneath Cambodian Jungle

Places like Riverside, Calif., and Phoenix do much worse, often as a result of growing too quickly. In these places, the costs of mobility often outweigh the benefits of getting places to make connections.

By focusing on planning details that prioritize social connections, Bettencourt suggests, cities could grow in smarter, more deliberate ways.

?In practice, you cannot really manage a city well if you don?t understand its primary function,? Bettencourt said.

?The management of cities often has to do with very practical things -- fix the roads, get the buses running on time,? he added. ?All of these things are supportive structures to realize social interactions and promote good ones instead of bad ones. You should think about running the buses on time, but to what extent does this contribute to social interactions that may lead to innovation??

Experts have long known that cities get richer, both economically and creatively, as they get bigger, with a simultaneous boost in crime rates, congestion, cost of living and other negatives, said Michael Batty, an urban planner at University College London?s Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis.

The new study begins to pick apart the details of what happens when cities grow, Batty said, offering insight into why some cities function better than others of the same size.

?This theory is explaining why big cities do generate more income and creativity than small cities do,? Batty said.

?The simplest way of thinking about it is that if you think about all the connections you can make in a city, it?s population squared. So if there are 10 people, there are 1,000 possible links and if there are 100 people, it?s possible to make a million links. We can?t realize all of those links and networks, but generally speaking, big cities give opportunities for more contact.?

Source: http://feeds.nbcnews.com/c/35002/f/653377/s/2da0dafa/l/0Lscience0Bnbcnews0N0C0Inews0C20A130C0A60C210C190A761830Ecities0Ework0Esort0Eof0Elike0Estars0Eone0Etheory0Esays0Dlite/story01.htm

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Court documents reveal secret rules allowing NSA to use US data without a warrant

NSA's information gathering practices have been further detailed in court papers revealed by The Guardian. While the agency has continued to reiterate that it doesn't collect its data indiscriminately, the leaked papers detail several loopholes that allow it to gather data from both American and foreign origins without the need for a warrant. If you use data encryption or other privacy tools, your communications are likely to receive extra attention, and the agency can indefinitely keep any information assembled for "crypto-analytic, traffic analysis or signal exploitation purposes" -- in short, if the NSA believes may be relevant in the future.

One reason to hold onto said files could simply be the fact that the data is encrypted and NSA wants to be able to analyze its protection. The security agency can also give the FBI and other government organizations any data if it contains a significant amount of foreign intelligence, or information about a crime that has (or will be) committed. Any data that's "inadvertently acquired" through the NSA's methods -- and could potentially contain details of US citizens -- can be held for up to five years before it has to be deleted. The Guardian's uploaded the leaked papers in full -- hit the source links for more.

Filed under: Internet

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Via: The Guardian, Forbes

Source: The Guardian (1), (2)

Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/BAbBHrDexvk/

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Three Steps You Can Take to Protect Yourself From Online Spying

The recent PRISM scandal has validated both the general public's growing unease with federal law enforcement agencies, and many of the fringe element's accusations about Big Brother's online behavior. Whether or not it's legal under the PATRIOT Act, just knowing that the government can rummage through your online life doesn't sit well with many folks. Here are some simple and effective ways of keeping your digital identity anonymous and your data your own.

Encrypt Everything

Encryption has been around as long as the written word. In fact, written language itself is a form of encryption, albeit with a widely understood and publicly available decoding key (ie the ability to read Mandarin or Portuguese or English). Private data encryption, on the other hand, encodes the information on a hard drive, memory stick, cloud locker, or other storage medium so that without the proper "key" (that hopefully only the sender and intended recipient have access to), all the data appears as gibberish (same as trying to read Mandarin).

Encrypting your drives, both local and remote, is a really easy way to shield your personal data from prying eyes. Both Windows and Mac OS have built-in encryption systems known as Bitlocker and FileVault, respectively. On Mac:

1. Security and Privacy
2. FileVault
3. Turn on FileVault.

For Windows 7 Ultimate or Enterprise and Windows 8 Pro or Enterprise users with computers running Trusted Platform Module chip:

1. Control Panel
2. System and Security
3. BitLocker Drive Encryption
4. Turn on BitLocker

If your system isn't equipped with a TPM chip, Bitlocker can't help you. TrueCrypt, an open-source full-disk encryption program that hides your data on a virtual encrypted drive, and DiskCryptor, which can use any combination of AES, Twofish, and Serpent algorithms, however they aren't nearly as picky about your hardware.

Plus they're both free and you can use them to encrypt your cloud lockers and mobile drives with them as well. I mean, services like Dropbox and, um, just Box already encrypt the data on their servers, but it's still readable to the service's employees and, consequently, law enforcement. Using TC or DC to generate a virtual drive to store files within the cloud service would prevent that.

Surf Safely

Google's homepage sees roughly 20 billion traffic hits every month, according to Comscore, and every one of those searches is potentially up for federal scrutiny with the right court order (*snicker*) or just whenever some NSA analyst feels like it. Doing so is easy for law enforcement because Google logs user search data (along with massive troves of voice data). DuckDuckGo, on the other hand, does not. And with no data to store, there's no data to hand over to the Feds.

If you simply can't live without your Google Doodles, but also don't want to leave behind a trail of digital breadcrumbs during your surfing sessions, take a look at Tor. Short for "The Onion Router," Tor was originally developed by the Office of Naval Research as a means of protecting sensitive naval communications (say, the exact coordinates of our Pacific carrier fleet) from electronic eavesdropping. Since 2006, however, the program has been developed and maintained by the nonprofit Tor Project with funding from everyone from the State Department to the National Science Foundation and its user base is similarly diverse. The military still uses it, as well as civilians, journalists, whistleblowers, tipsters, hackers, and anybody else with something to hide on the Internet (read: all of us).

Tor works by encrypting the original message and destination information multiple times, like the layers of an onion, before sending the packet through a randomly selected series of relays (similar to proxy servers) around the Internet until it reaches the destination server. Every relay removes a layer of onion/encryption until the last relay sends over the decrypted message. Every communication back and forth between the originating and destination computers follows this protocol and each follows a different route through the digital ether so that eavesdroppers cannot guess where the decrypted message is coming from.

This form of electronic spying is known as "traffic analysis" and can be used to infer who you know, what your online habits are, where you're from, and all sorts of stuff. That's what makes it so valuable to legitimate law enforcement efforts and so skeevy to private citizens. And since traffic analysis only looks at the message header information (source, destination, file size, etc), encrypting the message itself does nothing.

And if you are on a public computer, the browser-based HideMyAss proxy service allows for both free anonymous web surfing and more extensive encryption and VPN (virtual private network) services for a monthly fee. Of course, HideMyAss isn't the only VPN game in town. For more information on how to use VPNs, take a look at VPNs: What They Do, How They Work, and Why You're Dumb for Not Using One.

Use Common Sense

Don't stay logged in to your accounts if you're just randomly surfing the web. Also, use your browser's incognito function whenever possible. This helps reduce law enforcement tracking, though it's more useful against criminal snooping. The same is true for two-factor authentication. It's a given for protecting your accounts from hackers but doesn't do much to thwart Uncle Sam's snooping. Instead, minimize what you share on the Internet, duh. If it's not there, it can't get leaked, stolen, spied on, or otherwise messed with. I understand that sharing every little minute asinine detail of your life is commonplace nowadays, but look at what happened to those dumb criminals posting their exploits on FB or the Rich Kids on Instagram. They shared way too much information and paid for it. Don't be a schmuck like those guys, lock down your Facebook privacy settings instead:

1. Go to Settings (the little gear in the upper right corner)
2. Select Privacy Settings from the dropdown menu
3. Select Security from the left menu
4. Turn on everything: secure browsing, login notifications, the code generator, and app passwords. Clear out any Trusted Devices you no longer use.

And, this should go without saying, but clear your browser history and cookies regularly. Run routine virus scans to catch trojans, key loggers, and their ilk. Don't download email attachments from people you don't know. Generally, be smart about what you share online?and who you're sharing it with?and you'll be fine. [PC World - Forbes - GigaOm - Tor Project - Wikipedia - Top Image: mtkang, encryption: m00osfoto, surfing: Pavel Ignatov, common sense: ollyy]

Source: http://gizmodo.com/three-steps-you-can-take-to-protect-yourself-from-onlin-514329818

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Doctors make progress toward 'artificial pancreas'

This October 2012 image provided by Medtronic shows the MiniMed Integrated System device, which doctors are reporting as a major step toward an "artificial pancreas." The device that would constantly monitor blood sugar in people with diabetes and automatically supply insulin as needed. According to the company-sponsored study announced Saturday, June 22, 2013 at an American Diabetes Association conference in Chicago the device worked as intended in a three-month study of 247 patients. (AP Photo/Medtronic)

This October 2012 image provided by Medtronic shows the MiniMed Integrated System device, which doctors are reporting as a major step toward an "artificial pancreas." The device that would constantly monitor blood sugar in people with diabetes and automatically supply insulin as needed. According to the company-sponsored study announced Saturday, June 22, 2013 at an American Diabetes Association conference in Chicago the device worked as intended in a three-month study of 247 patients. (AP Photo/Medtronic)

Doctors are reporting a major step toward an "artificial pancreas," a device that would constantly monitor blood sugar in people with diabetes and automatically supply insulin as needed.

A key component of such a system ? an insulin pump programmed to shut down if blood-sugar dips too low while people are sleeping ? worked as intended in a three-month study of 247 patients.

This "smart pump," made by Minneapolis-based Medtronic Inc., is already sold in Europe, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is reviewing it now. Whether it also can be programmed to mimic a real pancreas and constantly adjust insulin based on continuous readings from a blood-sugar monitor requires more testing, but doctors say the new study suggests that's a realistic goal.

"This is the first step in the development of the artificial pancreas," said Dr. Richard Bergenstal, diabetes chief at Park Nicollet, a large clinic in St. Louis Park, Minn. "Before we said it's a dream. We have the first part of it now and I really think it will be developed."

He led the company-sponsored study and gave results Saturday at an American Diabetes Association conference in Chicago. They also were published online by the New England Journal of Medicine.

The study involved people with Type 1 diabetes, the kind usually diagnosed during childhood. About 5 percent of the 26 million Americans with diabetes have this type. Their bodies don't make insulin, a hormone needed to turn food into energy. That causes high blood-sugar levels and raises the risk for heart disease and many other health problems.

Some people with the more common Type 2 diabetes, the kind linked to obesity, also need insulin and might benefit from a device like an artificial pancreas, too. For now, though, it's aimed at people with Type 1 diabetes who must inject insulin several times a day or get it through a pump with a narrow tube that goes under the skin. The pump is about the size of a cellphone and can be worn on a belt or kept in a pocket.

The pumps give a steady amount of insulin, and patients must monitor their sugar levels and give themselves more insulin at meals or whenever needed to keep blood sugar from getting too high.

A big danger is having too much insulin in the body overnight, when blood-sugar levels naturally fall. People can go into comas, suffer seizures and even die. Parents of children with diabetes often worry so much about this that they sneak into their bedrooms at night to check their child's blood-sugar monitor.

In the study, all patients had sensors that continuously monitored their blood sugar. Half of them had ordinary insulin pumps and the others had pumps programmed to stop supplying insulin for two hours when blood-sugar fell to a certain threshold.

Over three months, low-sugar episodes were reduced by about one-third in people using the pump with the shut-off feature. Importantly, these people had no cases of severely low blood sugar ? the most dangerous kind that require medical aid or help from another person. There were four cases in the group using the standard pump.

"As a first step, I think we should all be very excited that it works," an independent expert, Dr. Irl Hirsch of the University of Washington in Seattle, said of the programmable pump.

The next step is to test having it turn off sooner, before sugar falls so much, and to have it automatically supply insulin to prevent high blood sugar, too.

Dr. Anne Peters, a diabetes specialist at the University of Southern California, said the study "represents a major step forward" for an artificial pancreas.

One participant, Spears Mallis, 34, a manager for a cancer center in Gainesville, Ga., wishes these devices were available now. He typically gets low-sugar about 8 to 10 times a week, at least once a week while he's asleep.

"I would set an alarm in the middle of the night just to be sure I was OK. That will cause you to not get a good night of rest," he said.

His "smart pump" stopped giving insulin several times during the study when his sugar fell low, and he wasn't always aware of it. That's a well-known problem for people with Type 1 diabetes ? over time, "you become less and less sensitive to feeling the low blood sugars" and don't recognize symptoms in time to drink juice or do something else to raise sugar a bit, he said.

Besides Medtronic, Johnson & Johnson and several other research groups are working on artificial pancreas devices.

___

Online:

Diabetes info: http://diabetes.niddk.nih.gov/

___

Marilynn Marchione can be followed at http://twitter.com/MMarchioneAP

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/bbd825583c8542898e6fa7d440b9febc/Article_2013-06-22-Diabetes-Artificial%20Pancreas/id-c3bdaaf4f42948ba91d793ae9cf9ca62

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