"I'm not ashamed. Cowards live longer."

Security.
In information security there are surprisingly few options. Generally it comes down to encryption, either of specific files and folders or of entire hard drives or flash sticks. It is quite sensible if you have information you would rather keep secret.

Lately, there has been a blooming of applications that allow the tracking and monitoring of stolen devices, even Avast! has a free solution for Android devices. If the device is stolen, its location can be tracked from a web browser using your account linked to the device, and if lucky, the camera might be opportune enough to give additional useful information. This is a great way to get your stuff back from ignorant thieves. It does not, however, help in the case of thieves that can anticipate it. The crux is that it only works if the thief tries to use the device with no previous fiddling.

In the case of computers (pun intended), the hard drive can be taken out and connected to an another computer, thus effectively not starting or running the tracking application. All not encrypted information can be accessed with ease, as would be the case if a Live CD or a Live DVD (or a stick, for that matter) were entered to the original device and an OS was run from that, so an another computer would not be necessary. This is what I imagine would be the least care taken by crooks to make sure they don't get caught, nevertheless there are plenty of cases where thieves check their own Facebook profiles on random computers, even in the house they are burgling in.

To keep your data safe from any prying eyes, you have to hide the information, that means encrypting it. Encrypting single files is good, but having single encrypted files on your data storage device causes unwanted attention on them. Encrypting the whole hard drive, a feature that does not rely on random applications, but rather included in the BIOS, is a neat alternative. It has its downsides, such as in the case of a computer failure, recovering your own data could prove to be troublesome. But that is exactly why we have encrypted spare copies of the important stuff. Encrypting your storage devices and important files on them adds that extra bit of security. Though the only reason why you would need that much information is when you really, really want nobody besides you to ever get to the information your have.

The popular 'activate-when-stolen' applications are neat, but they only work if the criminal is ignorant. Fortunately many of them are, especially those that are opportunistic in their nature. They could help get your device back, but they do not protect the information (passwords, files) stored on that device. To protect those, you have to turn the applications effectively impotent. That means you are unlikely to get your device back, but at the very least your data is safe - the device will be rather useless to the thieves unless they make a complete wipe. Then again, as with humans, two can keep a secret if one of them is dead. The question is, would you rather have your device back from a stupid crook or protect it from all crooks?

Existence is a problem. The existence of a soul doubly so.

What is the difference between a duchess and a flower girl? It is the idea around which Pygmalion was written, and almost a century ago, made a movie about.

Is it about the way they carry themselves, their posture, their speech, their used vocabulary? In this case it would be from within, a way of acting. Actually, it is the impression they make on other people, but an impression can be created, faked. It is what was tried in Pygmalion and it worked to a point. The real person was still left inside the fake shell of a person, a sad remnant of that which was. Sure, the quality of life was improved, even love was found, but it was the flower girl who grew on the love interest, not the fake duchess. In any case, what changed was people's perception of the flower girl, which is an another facet of this question.
Colonel Pickering had a nice attitude towards people. Pleasant, respective, everything you would hope for in a man. He treated even the most common flower girl as if she were a duchess. He was the kind of person that could be liked by everyone who met him. Henry Higgins was the opposite, he would treat any duchess as if they were common flower girls, unworthy of his great intellect. He had no time for common courtesy, all he cared about was getting the information through without a chance of misunderstandings or needless communication. Neither of them really cared who they were speaking to, they treated everyone the same regardless of status, behavior, attitude or the way they looked. They were the 'gods' of the tale, uninfluenced by outside happenstances, yet vulnerable to caring about their creation. That is the only thing that could change Higgins' attitude.
In the question of 'who are we' we then have the following observances: the way we act and look change people's attitudes towards us, people's attitudes towards us change the way we act, our actions show our attitudes. Therefore let it be known that actions and attitudes change the shell of the person at the very least. However, let's not leave the effect different attitudes have on the personalities these attitudes are directed towards marginalized. After all, every encounter, every happenstance that crosses us changes us, and we are the result of all past events that have occurred in our lives.

But who are we? Are we the shell of appearance and action that can be observed by others? Are we the attitudes incited by our presence? Or are we something deeper, some kind of hidden variable that could be defined as a 'soul'?

Scientia est potentia

Big Brother. The entity that allegedly keeps tabs on every one of us, even on the people who are it. The mysterious entity that apparently knows everything about us. It is an eerie feeling to be under constant surveillance, having your actions tracked, your secrets spied on.

You could say governments exceed their privileges by spying on its citizens. Espionage has been a formidable weapon against opposing nations, a tool that simplifies negotiations and an excuse to initiate hostilities for a very long time. It is an accepted practice that has been around for as long as we can remember. Even Sun Tzu wrote that half of winning a battle is knowing your enemy. The other half is knowing thyself, thus knowing what is going on in your own backyard. That means counterintelligence, spying on your own people to reveal threats from within. It is necessary to refrain your enemies the knowledge of your strength as ignorance can only mean guessing. Guessing means uncertainty, and it is generally an unwise decision to be the aggressor unless you know that it is a slam dunk, a certain victory. A wise man only goes to battle when the war has already been won.

Then again, Big Brother can only know what we give out, what we tell it. The details we share on Facebook, the thoughts we write to our blogs, the comments we make on forums, the transactions we do in banks. We are the ones who create the information trail that can be traced back to us. By openly revealing it to the world we are making it easily accessible to those that we want knowing about our private lives as well as we do not. Writing a blog inherently includes the desire to share it, otherwise it would not be up on some server that we have no control of and used by millions of other people. Otherwise it would not be online. A lot of people lack this understanding.

PRISM is a program that is run by the NSA and its task is to collect, store and comb through massive amounts of data from both passing packets as well as online information. It gains a lot of its current information from so-called network traffic crossroads, places where more information goes through. Data on the internet does not necessarily take the quickest or the most direct path, but it generally takes the cheapest. This is why these crossroads have been built, to enable huge quantities of packets run through as cheaply as possible as efficiently as possible. They are also perfect places for information gathering, every packet can be read as it goes through, on its way from the user to the server and vice versa. Many crossroads are located in the United States, which is why PRISM has an impressive field where to hunt for information. It is also known that some of these crossroads reside in the UK as well as elsewhere in Europe, and it has become known that the people who maintain these crossroads not only keep an eye on the traffic themselves (hunting for keywords as one example), also cooperate with CIA. The extent of the cooperation is not known, but there is no doubt in that some information is definitely shared. In fact, the EU is currently complaining about the US having spied on the EU while EU was giving the US the information and wherewithal to do it.

Officially, PRISM was created to detect terrorist threat online and if found, be able to show a trace of the possible terrorists' activities in the past. This means keeping logs on every person that becomes part of the system being observed, and as anyone is a possible terrorist, it can contain anybody. Officially, it is not collecting information about foreign citizens, and if it is, it is not its main goal but rather collateral action. When you are looking at internet traffic, it is difficult to say whose citizen is sending out the information gathered. Often all you get is an IP of the user, just a location where the user is currently situated. But the IP could be anyone's. The IP also only shows up if it has a reason to, packets to send, information to share and request.

In essence, PRISM is Big Brother's way of collecting information from users who have expressed the will to share information with the rest of the world, including the PRISM program. Allegedly this information has been thus far used to foil terrorist plots, and probably detect some espionage aimed at the United States. After all, it is a counterintelligence program, and it has to be used as such. As far as the users' privacy goes, think about what the information actually is that can be obtained by such surveillance. It is the users' own shared information, users' public activities, web searches, stuff people do by communicating with dozens of other machines. What's a couple more in the mix?

The good part of counterintelligence programs that survey information flow created by those surveyed is exactly that - the user controls what is surveyed. If you do not wish PRISM to know your date of birth, do not post it on some random server. If you do not want PRISM to know you have a keen interest in Justin Bieber, use more than one device to keep up with the latest news on him. PRISM might be able to connect a data flow to a device, but probably not a device to a specific user. With so much information going through it is probably searching for keywords that raise red flags, something suspicious to look at more closely, the rest goes by as if it were noise. Using multiple devices masks your identity because they might be able to profile the user of a single device, the users using multiple devices will undoubtedly create pockets of information impossible to be gleaned through a single device. Security through obscurity.

When user privacy is a problem, it is more of a problem about things that the user cannot control. These include but are not limited to security cameras, actions of other people, satellite footage. We can hardly influence what other people share with everybody else, and we can change the placement or existence of security cameras and public webcams. Yet they record our activities without our direct consent. But they are necessary for out safety, as is counterintelligence. We accept being recorded wherever we go, we've long accepted the United States' role as the world police that acts first and asks questions later, why should this be any different? I am not saying 'deal with it', I'm saying this is an inevitable situation, what matters is how we react to it. Surely it is no surprise that with all the information floating around on the interwebs, someone gets the idea of observing it. I could care less.

Globs of jelly are incredibly ludacris in their composition

I've mentioned neurolinguistic programming before. The idea being that a language that a person is fluent in has the language pretty much wires into his or her brain pattern, thus making the person vulnerable to attacks that abuse these predictable patterns in order to rewire the brain. The easiest language to do this in is, of course, binary. With other languages that people use more than just for an odd conversation with an URAL computer there is a distinct problem.

Redundancy. 'Rogue', 'mendicant', 'shake-rag', 'beggar'. All words that signify the same, but are different. 'A vile rascal', 'a miserable caitiff', 'crafty knave', 'idle truant', 'fornicating whore', 'filthy sloven', 'perfidious traitor'... word combinations that cause educated listeners to cringe. Having more than one word to signify a single idea, and the possibility to use two words signifying the same idea together is a huge mayhem for any programmer. There are just too many unnecessary surplus words in any language for anyone to be able to predict the specific neural activity for any single word - the neural patterns are connections, ideas linked to other ideas, and sometimes, ideas linked to the same ideas as with the case of synonyms. Any redundancy can create its own link, thus changing the pattern. In the end, it is like looking up 'recurrence' in a dictionary. For this reason, John Wilkins set out to create a language, a 'philosophical language' that would contain a single word for a single idea. This was necessary to achieve the next level of language - a language in which an untrue statement would be grammatically impossible. In essence, an universal language, a divine language for everyone to use to express ideas without any chance of misinterpretation or misleading. A language where meaning is possible only in its purest form.

A language that is hackable. If every word signifies a thought, and every thought is signified by a single word, the consequences of a word become predictable, mappable. The effect of having each word as an input, something heard or read, becomes accurately measurable, thus simplifying the hack - the easier it is to predict the outcome of a hack, the more efficient hack can be created. And really, what better hack to wreak havoc than a hack that alters this encryption, changes the way the words are linked. A new Bable.

Wilkins never achieved his goals because language is a tricky devil. Words have nuances, sentences have innuendos (if you do not believe me, try watching a some Japanese anime), stories have greater meanings. It is safety through security, a meaning between the lines. This is unfortunate, but it is how language has been created.

People are tricky as well. Even if there was a language in which a lie would constitute incorrect grammar, there would still be ways to go around the truth. Even now, officials in large companies keep saying they have not heard of PRISM, they have respected users' privacy (yeah, right, Google), they have not allowed backdoor entrance for CIA or FBI into their servers. But they do not say they have not given out personal information freely, they do not say they have not allowed any access to their servers. In almost everything they say there are loopholes. They do not lie per se, but they are not exactly telling the whole truth either. They might not have known that they were giving the information to PRISM, they might have known they were giving it to NSA. The fact that they might not be lying does not mean we get the information we are asking for. It is the age-old problem with truth serums, they may stop the lies but they do not guarantee cooperation.

Neurolinguistic programming would be a nifty idea, if we could simplify language. Alas, that is impossible as language is inherently complex, full of hidden messages and codes, mysteries wrapped in riddles wrapped in codes. Language is complicated because the users of it are complicated, devious and illogical. They have a tendency not to do what they believe is best for them and even if they do, they often think wrong. Ponder about it as I leave a quotation from Douglas Adams to ease your souls as you go on to your future endeavors.

"You live and learn. At any rate, you live."