text:
National Federation of Postal Employees
1st Floor North Avenue Post Office Building, New Delhi-110 001
Phone: 011.23092771 e-mail: firstname.lastname@example.com
Mob: 9868819295/9810853981 website: http://www.nfpe.blogspot.com
No. PF-01(e)/2015 Dated – 31.10.2015
All General Secretaries/NFPE Office Bearers/All Circle, Divisional & Branch Secretaries of NFPE affiliated Unions
Dear Comrades,
NFPE alongwith AIPEUGDS (NFPE) has taken decision to go on 48 hours strike on 1st & 2nd December, 2015 on the four point\s charter of demands.
NFPE had requested Secretary (P) in writing and by meeting personally to resolve the issues which are pending since long. But it is a very sorry state of affairs on the part of Department of Posts that neither any issue is settled nor even a single line in reply is being given.
As you all are aware that NFPE along with PJCA had declared indefinite strike from 6th May-2015 onwards. On most of the items Secretary (P) gave positive assurance in writing in the meetings during negotiations on agenda of strike Charter of demands and the minutes were circulated among all and were published in all union journals. On 5th May Honourable Minister Communication also called meeting with both Secretary Generals NFPE & FNPO and he also gave positive assurances including GDS wage revision by 7th CPC and for Cadre restructuring he told that he has signed the file after approving the proposals and handed over to Secretary Post.
But after a lapse of 6 months period no progress is being noticed in any of the matter.
Earlier National Joint Council of Action of Constituent Organizations of National Council JCM had taken decision to go on indefinite strike from 23rd November -2015 in which our main demand of inclusion of GDS was also included in the Charter of demands
It was expected that Pay Commission will submit its report upto 30th September, 2015. Pay Commission requested to grant 2 months extension to bind up the office but the Government of India was very much generous to grant 4 months extension to Pay Commission. Pay Commission has completed its task but now Government is interfering and Secretary Finance Ministry has directed Pay Commission to give recommendations keeping in view the fiscal condition of the country and it should not give such recommendations which cannot be implemented. NJCA had deferred the decision of strike from 23rd November, 2015. We as NFPE told in the meeting of NJCA that we are going on indefinite strike in Postal. NJCA leadership requested to review and reconsider the decision and change the date as NJCA has given call of a grand Dharna by All India leaders of NJCA at Jantar Manter, New Delhi on 19 November,2015. Some of our Confederation leaders and senior leaders of NFPE also advised to review the decision. Accordingly NFPE Federal Secretariat meeting was held at Hyderabad on 11.10.2015 and reviewed the situation and unanimous decision was taken to organize 48 hours strike on 1st & 2nd December, 2015 on the following 4 points of Charter of demands:
(i) Include GDS in 7th CPC for wage revision and other service related matters.
(ii) Implement cadre Restructuring proposals in all cadres including Postal Accounts & MMS.
(iii) Fill up all vacant posts in all cadres of Department of Posts (i.e. PA, SA, Postmen, Mail Guard, Mail Man, GDS Mail Man, MMS Driver & other staff in MMS, PA CO, PA SBCO, Postal Accounts Staff, Civil & Electrical Wing Staff, as per actual sanctioned strength.
(iv) Stop all types of harassment in the name of implementation of various new services and schemes and Trade Union Victimization.
(i). INCLUDE GDS IN 7TH CPC FOR WAGE REVISION AND OTHER SERVICE RELATED MATTERS.
Gramin Dak Sewaks constitute 50% of Work Force in Department of Post. They run 89% Post Offices in Rural Areas. Since 2nd Pay Commission, every time a Committee headed by bureaucrats has been constituted to look into the wage revision and other service related matters except at the time of Vth Pay Commission when Justice Talwar Committee was formed which gave very favourable recommendations to the GDS but Government did not implement 25% of its recommendations. This time NFPE raised the issue to include GDS in 7th CPC and this was supported by Confederation and National Council JCM. But Government has not given any attention towards this demand. During the negotiation on Strike Charter of demands, Secretary (Post) assured to refer the matter to Government of India again third time with strong recommendations and on 05.05.2015 , Hon`ble Minister Communication had also assured to use his influence to get the GDS included in 7th CPC but nothing has been done so far. It is coming to the notice by some sources that Department of Post is going to form bureaucratic Committee again. We have requested several times that when Pay Commission complete its task than this matter should also be given to him . Now Pay Commission has been allowed to sit idol for 3 months. This period might have been utilized for the wage revision of GDS. But Government of India is not at all concerned about this poor deprived and exploited section of working class. We cannot tolerate this state. So we have to go to agitation to fight this injustice and discrimination.
(ii). CADRE RESTRUCTURING
Cadre Restructuring proposals were finalized by the Committee 2 years before. On 5th May 2015 Minister also approved. JS&FA also cleared the proposals. DOP&T has not raised any objection and suggested to take clearance from Finance Ministry. There is no more financial implications even that Finance Ministry has not cleared the proposal. We have asked Department of Post several times but nothing has been done so far. If it is not implemented before implementation of 7thCPC report. It will be of no use.
(iii). FILL UP ALL VACANT POSTS IN ALL CADRES OF DEPARTMENT OF POSTS.
Though Recruitment is going on in the Department of Posts here and there. But there is acute shortage of staff in all cadres because recruitment is not being done as per actual sanctioned strength. If recruitment is made as per actual sanctioned strength and shortage is met out then 50% problems will be solved automatically.
(iv). STOP ALL TYPES OF HARASSMENT IN THE NAME OF IMPLEMENTATION OF VARIOUS NEW SERVICES AND SCHEMES AND TRADE UNION VICTIMIZATION.
Our staff in all cadres is facing so much harassment and victimization. Every day any new service or scheme is being launched without proper infrastructure and sufficient man power. CBS and CSI biggest problem for P-III, 100% delivery for Postmen. Harassment of staff in RMS on OTA, More problems in Circle Office, Postal Accounts and Civil Wing and Electrical Wings are being faced due to staff shortage. If any Trade union leader raises his voice against these onslaughts, he is victimized. Holding of Melas and Meetings on every Sunday and Holiday has become the regular practice against the directions given by Secretary (Post).
So keeping in all these we have to fight against all these onslaughts and wrong policies of department of Posts and Government of India.
Whatever we have achieved that is due to struggle only. We have achieved so many things in past by struggles only. If we fight unitedly we will win sure.
For making the strike 100% successful please follow the following instructions:
1. Campaign programme of All India leaders have been declared and published in websites, all circle secretaries of NFPE affiliated unions are requested to consult each other and make all arrangements for the meetings of All India leaders. If any change is needed, can be made with consultation of all.
2. All India leaders should attend the programmes compulsorily.
3. Maximum publicity should be given to the campaign programme.
4. Strike notice will be served on 06.11.2015 to the Secretary (Posts) by NFPE leaders.It should be served at all levels by organizing mass demonstrations.
5. Joint campaign programme should be conducted by all Circle/Divisional Secretaries in their respective Circles and Divisions and make maximum efforts for grand success of strike by organizing Gate meetings and General Body meetings.
6. Circulars/Pamphlets /Hand bills and Posters should be published and send to all. These should be published in regional language also.
7. Please leave no stone unturned for success of strike.
8. Give Wide Publicity in local Press and Media.
Yours fraternally,
(R. N. Parashar)
Secretary General


text:
BOGOTÁ, Colombia — As class begins at Sanitas University, a cohort of young men gathers the supplies they'll need for the lesson: a plastic doll, rash ointment and diapers.
Felipe Contreras, 30, their teacher, guides the men through the steps. First, they name the dolls, then clean the dolls' bottoms, change the diaper, apply rash ointment and cradle the doll, remembering to hold the head gently.
At Bogotá's Care School for Men, an innovative city-led program, men learn how to tend to their families and homes and to step up to do their share of housework and child care — from changing a diaper to styling a ponytail. This latest class of participants consists of all medical students, but the usual enrollees are just ... dads.
The program, the first of its kind in Colombia, addresses one of the most lingering aspects of gender inequality globally. In countries around the world, women shoulder three-quarters of all unpaidcaregiving, according to a report by the International Labour Organization.
And in Bogotá, for instance, women on averagespend five hours and 30 minutes on unpaid work a day — more than twice the time that men do, according to a 2017 study conducted by Colombia's national statistics agency. This unequal division of home labor reduces women's time for paid work, education and self-care and is driving higher rates of female poverty, according to a study published in the Journal of Global Health.
Even as women enter the workforce in greater numbers and secure better pay, experts in Colombia say that the domestic gender gap has remained largely unchanged, citing differences in societal expectations of men and women. That's because prevailing cultural beliefs dictate "that women are naturally better suited to housework and caregiving, while men are better suited to paid work outside the home," says educator Juan David Cortés, the Care School for Men's strategy leader.
But the Care School is dedicated to the belief that such norms can be changed.
A school is born
The idea for the school originated, in part, during the COVID-19 pandemic when mothers, who usually undertake all family caregiving, often fell ill or, in some cases, died, leaving their male partners to assume their role. Distressed men called a city-run men's hotline, promoted online, for support.
"They called with the pain of losing their partners but also with frustration at being unable to take care of their children," says Cortés.
Because many men did not learn caregiving skills as boys and were never expected to carry out the housework, the callers would complain that they just didn't know what to do, says Cortés. The school opened in 2021 to help men learn basic caregiving and household skills and also gain confidence.
In the free one-day workshops, men practice how to change diapers and how to style hair on dolls and mannequins. In the longer six-to-eight-session programs, students learn to clean a bathroom, iron clothes and wash dishes. The training is also paired with conversations about defying gender norms and traditional notions of masculinity.
"Something fundamental that we talk about in the program is that there are diverse ways of being men, without having to fulfill expectations," says Cortés.
You're not the only guy who needs a diaper tutorial
The program's focus on men follows a global trend. For more than four decades, nonprofits in the United States have offered training to support men in their transition to fatherhood and have brought the model to countries around the world. A review by Equimundo, a research institute focused on gender equality, looked at eight such programs in 12 countries and found them to be effective in shifting men's attitudes and behaviors toward child care.
The Care School builds on this model and extends beyond the scope of a fatherhood program by inviting men of all ages to be caregivers. It's also city run, amplifying its reach. The city has spent the equivalent of half a million dollars on the program since 2021.
At first, enrollment was low. But it began to pick up in 2022. Since then, 7,300 men have attended in-person classes, according to Cortés. Another 50,000 men have completed the online version of the course, and 160,000 have viewed the city's video series on caregiving.
In part, the rates of participation are owed to its partnerships with private institutions that bring classes to universities, work offices, community centers and even prisons.
According to Cortés, another advantage is the program's messaging. Men who are new to caregiving may be ridiculed by male peers for engaging in activities usually associated with women — and even criticized by their partners for their poor caregiving skills.
But the Care School takes a different approach. The city describes the workshop as "educational and fun," engaging men in exercises that are inviting and challenging.
The overall vibe is upbeat. At a September workshop at Sanitas University, the teachers, all of them young and male, rewarded participants with prizes like aprons, cleaning supplies and reusable grocery bags — to encourage the men to do more chores. The students laughed as they fumbled through the lesson, quipping that the dolls resembled their respective "fathers" and taunting each other as they made mistakes. The teacher reassured students, with jokes of his own.
"Be careful," said Contreras, the instructor, teasing a participant who lifted the doll by the wrist. "If you hold the baby by the arm, its arm is going to fall off."
When students admit to not knowing how to change a diaper, Contreras emphasizes that they are not alone.
The program's designers also point out that there are benefits not only to the families but to the men as well.
"[We're] framing this as an opportunity to not only reduce gender gaps but also to improve relationships with our partners, with our families," says Cortés.
It's an argument that has resonated with Ferley Sáenz, a 40-year-old coordinator of Bogotá's transportation system, who took part in the Care School's six-session program. Along with 21 colleagues, Sáenz initially enrolled to improve his stress management skills but was pleased to engage in discussions about caregiving and masculinity.
A father reconnects with his sons
A husband and a father of two, Sáenz admits that his wife assumes most of the child care and household chores. For years, he considered this the norm, spending most of his days at work or with friends. Then his eldest son, 7-year-old Martin, began withdrawing from Sáenz, crying whenever his mother left the two alone. Their relationship deteriorated to the point that Sáenz could no longer eat with Martin, play with him or drop him off at the day care center unless his wife was present.
"I felt like a stranger in my own home," Sáenz says.
At the Care School, teachers convinced Sáenz that to repair his relationship with his son, he would need to take a more active role at home.
Since finishing the program, Sáenz says, becoming a better father has become his priority. He now helps Martin with his homework and visits his school for teacher-parent meetings. He also tends to the child care for a few hours on the weekends, freeing up time for his wife, who is a full-time caregiver for the family.
"Dedicating quality time to [my children], participating in their development and learning process, has made us closer. My eldest son tells me about his day at school, which he didn't do before," said Sáenz. "It's an incredible feeling."
While individual accounts from male participants of the program are promising, Cortés says the program is striving to transform attitudes toward caregiving at a societal level, a feat that he admits will require years of effort. Over the next six years, he hopes that the program will expand to cover 40% of the city's male population, a jump from the fewer than 1% enrolled now.
"This is like growing a bamboo plant. We are only now sowing the seed," said Cortés. So far, Bogotá's new mayor, Carlos Galán, who pledged to champion gender equality and caregiving programs after taking office on Jan. 1, is going along with the program, says Cortés.
Brigid Schulte, director of the Better Life Lab, the work-family justice program at New America, a nonpartisan think tank, says, "If the men who go through these classes become more equal partners in their families, that's a success on a private level." She emphasizes that "if you want to go to scale and you want to see more families and make a difference in gender equality, then you absolutely have to follow that with public policy and workplace culture change."
To meet its long-term goals, the Care School for Men is also running pop-up workshops, like the one at Sanitas University, to recruit new participants. Luis Rodríguez, a 17-year-old medical student, stopped for a Care School lesson at the encouragement of his friends. Rodríguez says he hadn't ever reflected on his mother's workload, caring for Rodríguez, his father and his younger sister.
But as he untangled a mannequin's tresses at the Care School, he thought of the long list of tasks his mother is responsible for. He says he felt the urge to do more at home.
Rodríguez scooped up the mannequin's hair into an elastic band and smoothed the bumps with a brush. He looked back at the doll, beaming with pride. Even though he had tried to do his sister's hair before, this was the first time he had felt confident about the final result. "It looked really, really good, the way my mom does it," he says.
And now he's asking himself: "I wonder what else I can do?"
Christina Noriega is a freelance journalist based in Colombia, where she reports on human rights, gender equality and the environment.
Copyright 2024 NPR

subset: commoncrawl


text:
In conjunction with its plan to target the global digital assets market in 2020, DB3 Digital Bank is setting up its 1st Asia Pacific VIP lounge in Bangkok, Thailand. This marks DB3's first foothold in the Asia Pacific Region and the VIP lounge provides a point of contact for its many high net-worth clients in this region.
DB3 International Holding Limited is an UK entity and its core businesses include digital currency, block-chain and banking. Its banking license is registered in The Dominican Republic with operations as a private offshore bank, primarily catering to institutions or High Net-Worth Individuals, providing them with global digital assets investment and management services.
According to source, DB3's VIP lounge will be housed in the Show DC Block-chain Shopping Arena at Rama 9 district. It is reported that Rama 9 District is a key business area the Thai government has been developing in recent years. They are said to be very committed in building this area into Bangkok's newest CBD cluster and position it as the new ASEAN Financial District. In addition to the many commercial buildings and hotels we can find in Rama 9, there are also many heavyweight companies and institutions such as the Thai Stock Exchange, Fortune E-Mall, and the Chinese Embassy in this area.
Responding to the Thai government's positioning of Rama 9 as the Asean Financial District, DB3 proceeded to set up its first Asia Pacific VIP lounge in the district as a show of support. The designing concept of DB3 Asia Pacific VIP Lounge will be a combination of elegance, comfy and serene. It is built as a get-together place for DB3 VIPs to come to relax or meet friends. Wines and refreshments are available for all VIPs and accompanied guests. Conference rooms are also available for business discussion use.
In addition, it is understood that this VIP lounge in Bangkok will be the first but not last in the long list of VIP lounges in the Group's long-term planning. DB3 plans to open multiple DB3 VIP lounges all over Asia to meet the upcoming demands of its high net-worth clients in this region.
We have now arrived at the second stage of the development of digital currency. The first stage where amateurs worldwide were starting to learn about digital currency investment is over. Now more and more people already knew about bitcoin and other digital currencies and how to invest in them. The digital currency market has officially entered into the second phase, Digital Currency Banking! DB3 Digital Bank, aided by this trend will continue to expand its business globally with a focus on the Asia Pacific Region. With its advance digital asset management model and its simple applications, DB3 looks to keep things simple for its clients as it continue its phenomenal rise to the top.
Contact Detail:
Company Name: DB3 Corporation
Contact Person: Allison lanyork
Email: email@example.com
Phone No: +44 (0) 2087983070
Address: 7 charlester street, Winsfield, North London
Country: United Kingdom
Website Url: www.db3bank.com
Source URL : https://kjnewswire.com/5468/db3-set-1st-asia-pacific-vip-lounge-bangkok<


text:
I had planned to move on to a post about sensors today, but my "Great Time for Photography" post the other day was the cause of some disputation, and I feel the need to clarify. A friend wrote a "rebuttal" in which he claimed that "this is unequivocally 'great times for photography' in just about every single respect," and "photography has never had better times, in almost every imaginable respect, for almost every single photographer, dilettante or consummate artist/professional."
Those statements are false. It might be possible to say that about enthusiasts and part-time independent artists; about the large number of photographers whose work is technically facilitated by our much-improved equipment; about people who were denied attention in the past and who found it on the Web; that list goes on. There are of course many ways in which this is a fantastic time. But these are hard times for many people who want to make a living taking pictures, or who want to make a living in the field to support their picture-taking. (Have I been that badly remiss in covering developments in photojournalism? Apparently so.)
But I'll get back to that in a minute.
What I meant by "photography itself, overall, as a whole" in my post might also be called the culture of photography. Now, as a blogger I don't have the luxury of writing in fully considered fashion—it's like newspaper writing, in that it has to be bashed out and set in type (figuratively speaking) to be ready for the daily edition—but let me take a provisional stab at defining that.
The culture of any discipline or field of study or pursuit encompasses many things. It includes its status in society and among practitioners (those can differ—my brother's interest is gem cutting, little known by the public but the subject of great passion amongst those who do it); its fan base, meaning the subset of people in the world who love it and follow it closely, as well as those who admire it or just are aware of it and know a little about it (like I know a little about horse racing); its communities, both overall and in microcosm, including specialized subsets (religion has many of the latter)—some of which might not get along; its history and traditions; how it is taught and learned; its major figures, who both represent the discipline to the broader society or catch peoples' imaginations, and also provide a model for what can be achieved within the field (what T. S. Eliot or Robert Frost were to English poetry when they were alive). It might have a literature (golf has such a huge literature, for example, that it's possible to be a fan of golf writing without really being much of a golfer, whereas billiards has a very meagre literature in comparison. Photography's literature is drawfed by that of art, but is still pretty decent). The way that a discipline "recruits" its adherents is part of its culture, as is the way that its adherents experience it...and when the subject is broad, those things can vary widely. "American Idol" is a long way from the Metropolitan Opera for many fans of singing. Certainly, the Internet has been busy connecting a lot of small communities of like-minded but formerly far-flung people.
A discipline might support scholarly activity, or debates about orthodoxy and heterodoxy. Scholarship might even be central to it, as it is in, say, literary theory. It might have guilds or membership organizations or certification procedures or a governing body, and there might be one of these, or many (and they might compete, as in boxing). It might require licensing (general aviation for instance). It might support institutions of various kinds, whether that's the Indianapolis Speedway or the National Building Museum or the NRA. It might support or be connected to various industries, whether crucially (people who are passionate about highway construction are almost certainly involved in building highways, I'd guess) or tenuously (knitters might teach classes, or sell products at craft fairs, but there's not a large scale call for their skills). There might be a split between large-scale professional or industrial activity and small-scale hobby, craft, or specialist involvement (farming or beer brewing might be examples). It might support clubs. It might be connected to wealth and access in some way (you need to have resources to field an America's Cup entry, and you can't live in Kansas if you want to surf), or require special skills or be limited to people with specific abilities (I am not healthy enough to be a mountaineer). All these things, and many more, contribute to what can collectively be called the culture of the pursuit or discipline.
Many disciplines have a lore, tales, myths, iconic stories, legendary figures, or signal or foundational events (the most famous distance running event, for example, is founded on a story about Pheidippides and the Battle of Marathon, although the standard tale is actually a myth).
Naturally, the culture of any art or activity has a fortune in the world and in time. It rises and falls. Its popularity waxes and wanes. Its meaning can change. It shifts and changes with technology (video gaming has come up in the world, I hear), with the generations (model railroading reached a peak among those who were ten years old in 1950, the year the #1 most desirable Christmas toy for boys was an electric train; with my generation the prestige gear was a stereo, an interest which has fallen on hard times and a certain degeneracy more recently), or associated resources and social mores (fox hunting in England has had to adapt, I hear).
So, getting back to my friend's Leibnitzian claims that this is the best of all possible worlds: I'll stick by my conclusion the other day. It's absolutely not the best of times "in almost every imaginable respect, for almost every single photographer." It's great in some ways and not very good in others. And somewhere in between in still others. And very good for some people, and very bad (in many obvious, well-documented ways) for other people. Is it the best of times for photojournalists? For photojournalism? For photography schools and teachers? For professionals at every level? No, no, no, and no. We have one friend who had a great career as a magazine photojournalist with dozens of covers to his credit. Then he got riffed and then the mag itself went bust. So then, who's going to be the next great cover photographer of that magazine? There isn't an Internet equivalent. These aren't the greatest-ever times for him (although he's doing well). A professional I talked to in the South billed $80,000 two years ago (that's when I talked to him). Which sounds okay until he tells you that he billed $280,000 in 2005. It ain't the greatest of times for him, either.
Nonprofessional news photo by Janis Krums
I could write a much longer essay than this one on the many ways that photography's culture is changing. It's changing in many ways, some very good (actually, some ways are really amazing and borderline spectacular) and some either disruptive or just sad. Let's take one brief "snapshot" (sorry) of photojournalism and let that stand for all the rest. On the one hand, the digital/Internet era provides absolutely remarkable one-the-scene reporting that traditional photojournalism just couldn't match—for instance, the shot above of Flight 1549 sinking into the Hudson River. Janis Krums had to be there, and the greatest photojournalists in the world couldn't be. On the other hand, there's a well-established value to news organizations with resources being able to dispatch well-trained, intelligent, experienced, and highly competent photographers to make extended and coherent visual reports and visual records of an unfolding news event or historical event. The gradual dismantling of the organizational structure for that activity—the decline of newspapers and magazines—is a definite setback for that very distinct and valuable form of photography, and for many of its practitioners. This is most likely just a temporary disruption, and what comes next—the system for visual news reporting that will evolve and be in place in ten or twenty years—might well be superior to what we had in the past. But it ain't here yet. And random crowd-sourcing of adventitious snapshots isn't a complete replacement.
I hear from many people my friend doesn't hear from. To quote a comment written here by Joseph Camosy, "it's a great time to make images, but not a great time to make a living making images." Keeping them anonymous, let me just itemize a few actual, real examples of people I have heard from:
The bottom line is that the culture of photography as a whole is changing, and quickly. That will be both good and bad, in various complex ways. (And in other ways, it will simply be different.) This is not to bemoan change; that would be asinine. (Who said "resistance is useless"?) But photography's culture has a great many aspects, and the disruption that's been occurring and is continuing to take place now has a great many effects, ramifications, and potentialities. Both for obvious good, and not so much.
(Thanks to He Knows Who He Is)
P.S. This essay could be ten times better if I'd had three months to write it and if some big magazine were going to pay me five grand for the result. As it is, I had one morning to write it, and most of my readers won't read the whole thing because it's too long. Blogging has great advantages. My life in photography as a whole is much better in the digital/Internet age. But there are a few disadvantages, too. :-)
Original contents copyright 2014 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:
Carl Schmidt: "I am a forensic pathologist (who grew up with a darkroom). We document what we see extensively with pictures. We use DSLRs. The expectation that a case will be documented with pictures is such that many people think it's a law, but its not. We had a couple of photographers, but budget problems forced us to lay them off. They were very good photographers too. Now the doctors take their own pictures. The difference in quality is appalling. Forensic photography is not art, but it sure helps to know what you're doing. It is its own kind of documentary photography. Most of the pathologists, with no formal training in photography, cannot take a decent picture to save their lives. They are often blurry because of hands shaking or out of focus. We often use flash, so pictures are either washed out or underexposed. The subject is not centered in the picture, or a camera strap is in the way, but no one notices as it's happening. I have tried all sorts of things to overcome this, but if you view picture taking as a chore that used to be done by someone else, your pictures are going to reflect it. I have thought about switching to a point-and-shoot camera, but even then you have to know about the macro setting and get it right for what we need to do.
"The worst part is that no one seems to notice, or care. When a lawyer looks at a picture, all these artefacts produced by bad technique don't matter as long as they think they can make out what they need to see. The key point here is that they think they can see what is important for them in the picture, but I have never heard anyone say something about it being a bad picture.
"This is a symptom of a widespread problem. I think we are culturally losing the ability to appreciate a good picture from a bad one. Maybe its because there are so many pictures out there because its so easy to take one today. Recently I started taking a close at the pictures in my family, and friends. They are mostly not very good. I see all these glib comments about equipment, lenses, etc. in the literature, but, so what? There is a technical virtuosity to taking a good picture which I think is a set of skills that is getting lost and few appreciate because it's so easy now to take a picture and post it somewhere even its crappy—but hey, I took it. It's the ability to see—people look through all this wonderful digital equipment, and they get instant feedback when they press the shutter. But they don't see.
"I want those photographers back so badly, it hurts."
Bill Frazer: "There is far less 'disposable income' in the U.S. economy than there was a generation ago. The American middle class is rapidly shrinking. If one has to choose between buying groceries or hiring a photographer, the choice is obvious."
Bill Danby: "We are awash in photographs. With almost everyone carrying a camera all the time and being able to share their photos for free, how could it be otherwise? And, in itself, how can that be a bad thing? But, as with many other endeavours (such as architecture, writing, interior design), the view from the crowd is, 'I can do that.' And, to a greater extent than ever, they can. This isn't going to change. Computer tools make it easier and easier for anyone to dip a toe in the photographic waters. And for those photographers, 'art' is a setting on the mode dial.
"On the other hand there will always be those who appreciate photography as art, and support it as art: Subscribing to fine art magazines, attending the galleries and shows, and (you'll like these, Mike) buying the books and the prints. As the tide of ubiquitous photography rises, let's hope that we can remain dry in our little boat."
David Dyer-Bennet: "Yes indeed, it's bad for some photographers, and at least questionable for some areas of photography. I've been saying for at least a decade that I'm really glad I didn't decide, back when, to go into photography professionally. Of course I don't know what kind of photographer I would have been if I'd done that, quite possibly very different from the one I am now. But, without meaning any ill to individual photographers, some of whom are my friends, I'm more concerned with the health of photography as a whole. That's largely startlingly exuberant, though photojournalism is in a troubling state (and it's an area that has wide social and political consequences). (I do nearly always read through to the end of your articles; I'm mostly like that, and if I didn't feel that way, I probably wouldn't come back checking for new ones regularly. I'm a dinosaur.)"
Robert Roaldi: "Back in the 1970s and 1980s, the futurists predicted that work and toil would be removed from our lives because of labour-saving technologies. Sounded like a good idea. They predicted we would all have gobs of leisure time and that we would have the freedom to do anything we wanted. Unfortunately, they never gave any thought to how people would earn a living in this brave new world. I watched a youtube talk (sorry, lost the link) by a academic media analyst who pointed out that various social media sites were migrating away from text in favour of imagery. How ironic that image makers can't get paid then."
Dave: "Another great post. We live in disruptive times, the losers are many, and the few winners are picked arbitrarily. I can't get anyone outside of my Facebook friends to view my work. At times I want to give it all up but then I can't think up of a more meaningful way to spend my idle time than flinging photos and blog posts into the void of the internet."
Randolf: "I wonder how many of the problems are due to the on-going depression and how much due to technological and sociological disruption?"
Mike replies: Very good point. Those threads are near impossible to untangle. Professional photography also experienced a distinct recession just after the Gulf War c. 1991, and it had nothing to do with digital or the Internet.
adamct: "FWIW, and to underline something that is implicit in Mike's posts: the decline of photography as a profession (photojournalism, wedding and fashion photography, and teachers of photography being the obvious examples) is more than just a sad human interest story. People who spend all their time on photography, who depend on photography for their livelihood, who risk their lives for photography and whose work is regularly seen by a large audience over years and years contribute to the culture of photography that is substantially different (not better) from how photography is experienced by amateurs, even (or especially) those amateurs who are extremely knowledgeable, supremely skilled and widely respected. If you surveyed 100 people on the street in various U.S. cities, how many could name a single photographer working today? Just one, whether a photojournalist, a fashion photographer, or whatever?"
Gary Nylander: "I am no writer, I wish I could write some kind of witty response. Your writing in this post is honest and heartfelt. I have been a newspaper photographer for over 35 years, but that is just the work I do that pays for fine art photography that I do on my time off. I can say with out a doubt that staying 'in the business' these days is a tough haul."
Ed Richards: "I suspect this is how painters felt as photography came into vogue. More to the point, those folks who have been bruised by the WWW comments and are trying to get visibility for their websites are hoping for something that did not even exist 30 years ago. Think of all the wonderful photographers you write about who lived lives of quiet desperation and were only appreciated after their deaths. Edward Weston barely made a living. WeeGee died lonely and penniless. I have one of those not very visible websites, yet in the six years it has been up I have had about 30,000 people visit and look at several images. A large, but unknown number have seen them on other photography forums. In the pre-Internet world, there were successful art photographers whose work was not seen by 30,000 people in their life times."
Mike replies: And a fine and interesting website yours is, too.
Tina Manley: "Photography as a hobby is alive and well. Photography as a profession is no longer a possibility for most."
[Tina is a distinguished photojournalist with a long list of publication credits who has photographed in more than 53 different countries over more than 30 years. Here is her fine art website. —Ed.]
Thom Hogan: "This is a deep topic that warrants further discussion. I have three quick comments:
"1. As traditional sources of income dry up, you have to be prepared to move to other things. Doesn't matter if you're a photographer or a writer or a software engineer or whatever. Nothing stays the same forever, and if you don't adapt to the market you die.
"2. Media is playing a dangerous game. By using more and more 'free' and amateur content to save money, they also lower their standards. Yet it was the quality of their product that generally got them to be giant cash cows in the first place. If you don't deliver quality, you can't charge as much (or sometimes anything) for it. The one thing working for a pro photographer is this: when push comes to shove they can always deliver quality, and consistently so.
"3. One problem is that we're removing the ability to grow into being a pro. You can find many outlets that'll take your images for free. You won't be able to train, buy equipment, wait out a shot, etc., if you're not making money. The real issue I keep seeing is I have no good answer for college students who say 'I want to be a pro photographer' as to how to get from Point A to Point B. Everything that does that is essentially a non-paying job these days. It's the Ogden Nash thing: you can't get there from here."
Rodger Kingston: "I can't disagree with anything you say here, Mike, and yet as a photographer I'm having the time of my life.
"I've been a photographer for over 40 years; in no particular order (as they occur to me), I've owned a photography gallery, been a dealer in 19th and 20th century photographs and books, taught photo history in a couple of good art and photography schools, spent nearly 30 years working in my own darkroom printing my own Cibachrome prints and earning my living printing for others.
"I've photographed weddings, done commercial work for universities and corporations, done appraisals of photo collections, curated exhibitions, run a matting business. I've worked as a volunteer professional photographer for the candidates of my choice in several state and national elections. I've tutored and mentored beginners of all ages.
"I've built two important photographic collections, one consisting of over 4,000 vernacular photographs and the other publications and ephemera by and about Walker Evans; I've written a major Evans bibliography.
"I've had many both solo and group museum and gallery exhibitions, a couple of museum catalogs, and have published two artist's books of my images, with a third about to be released next week. My work is in many museum, corporate, and private collections.
"This list isn't unique to me: anyone who has dedicated his or her life to photography for forty years or so will have a similar inventory. I've listed all these activities and accomplishments to make the point that I've been immersed up to my neck in the Culture of Photography for going on a half century, and during these years my wife and I—she's an artist too, a singer and voice teacher with a not dissimilar list of accomplishments of her own—have eked out a living since the early '70s, sometimes barely scraping by. As I once said to someone who wondered how we managed to survive living so hand-to-mouth, we have always been 'independently poor.'
"My life has been an unbelievable rollercoaster ride through the history of late 20th and early 21st century photography. I've met many of the modern photographic masters; a few of them have been my friends. I've lived my life in the company of countless artist contemporaries—photographers, painters, writers, actors, musicians—who have greatly enriched and enlivened my life. More recently I've switched to digital photography, and if I haven't yet mastered it, I've at least immersed myself in it thoroughly enough to thrive and grow toward mastery.
"And even though I haven't become a 'famous photographer' by any stretch, I'm told (often enough to continue believing it) that I and my work have had an impact on people's lives. Many people have told me that they see the world differently after discovering my work, that now they see 'Kingstons' everywhere they go. When I get reactions like these I know that for all these years I've been on the right track. The Culture of Photography, for all its outward manifestations, is within me. I'm a happy man."


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No. But this is what happens when a flawed scientific experiment is combined with generous helpings of public-relations nonsense.
Richard Chi and Allan Snyder from the University of Sydney have claimed that a form of brain
stimulation known as transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) can help
people "escape the tricks our minds impose on us". An extraordinary piece of PR
puffery from by the University of Sydney headlines with: 'Impossible' problem solved after non-invasive brain stimulation.
These are precisely the
kinds of claims that damage public
understanding of science. I'm getting deja vu just writing this.
In their latest
outing, published in the journal Neuroscience Letters, Chi and Snyder asked whether tDCS could help people solve a puzzle
called the 'nine dots problem', which requires people to connect a 3 x 3 grid of
dots using four straight lines. They report that participants who received tDCS of their anterior temporal lobes were better able to solve the
puzzle than those who had 'sham' stimulation. They conclude that this effect
was "due to inhibiting [brain] networks associated with top down imposition
of prior knowledge, knowledge that inclines us to join the dots up within the
Really? I've read their paper several times now, back to front, even sideways a couple of times. And I still can't find any evidence to support this claim. Instead all I found was a long list of flaws. Here are some of the worst offenders.
1. No control task for effects of "prior knowledge"
To conclude that tDCS
disrupted the imposition of "prior knowledge", they would need to include a
control task that is matched on every possible dimension (task difficulty, attentional
requirements, etc.) but which isn't prone to the imposition of "prior knowledge". They didn't. They also fail to
provide any cogent theoretical framework for what neural mechanisms are
responsible for "imposing prior knowledge". In the Discussion, the authors seem to acknowledge this lack of experimental control: "While there could well be alternative explanations, we
would like to emphasize that our results that tDCS enabled over 40% of
participants to solve the nine-dot problem stand on their own." I beg to differ.
2. Actually, no suitable control tasks at all
Participants could
have performed better because tDCS increased their alertness or arousal, or
altered their attentional state in any one of many possible ways. But the authors included no control tasks to test whether these processes were affected, either positively or
3. Claims based on mysterious pilot data
The authors describe in
handwaving fashion a pilot study that compared different forms of brain
stimulation, and then conclude that this pilot study confirms their previous
findings. But the results of the pilot study are not shown and are not
even statistically analysed. Did the reviewers of this paper even read it?
4. Dubious statistical analysis
Their use of one-tailed significance testing is highly questionable. A
directional prediction alone is not sufficient justification for one-tailed
tests. This is is because one-tailed testing is only legitimate if the opposite result to that expected is either impossible or irrelevant. Neither is the case here, or arguably ever in cognitive neuroscience: had
brain stimulation impaired rather than enhanced performance then the authors
would naturally still have interpreted their data. The authors also appear
confused about the nature of probabilities. For the key analysis, comparing the
number of participants who solved the puzzle between the sham and experimental
groups, they report a p
value of .018, and then conclude bizarrely that the likelihood of observing the
results by chance was less than one in 10,000. Pardon?
5. Bizarre inclusion of additional participants
The actual experiment
was undertaken on 22 participants. Eleven of these participants were in the
control group (they received 'sham' tDCS in which the current is switched off
soon after being started), and the other eleven were in the tDCS group. But in
the Results, the authors suddenly add another 11 participants to the sample
without providing any detail of the experimental procedures.
6. I don't even know what to call this problem. Appeal to...prose?
Part of the results
consists of an anecdote of what one participant had to say about his "cognitive style". This section is rather optimistically titled "Case Report".
I am honestly struggling
to find any reasonable explanation for how this paper could have survived even
a modestly critical peer-review process. I could give this paper to any one of my PhD students and they would find more flaws than I've even listed here. But perhaps I shouldn't be surprised, as Snyder's group have previously published a similarly uncontrolled study,
combined with a healthy dose of exaggeration and media hype. I wonder if the Editor
of Neuroscience Letters would care to
enlighten us on what went wrong this time.
For my part, I would advise scientists,
journalists and the public to treat this piece of research by Chi and Snyder with
extreme caution.
The press office at
the University of Sydney also has much to answer for. Many of us in the
scientific community are striving to improve the quality of science news by ensuring
that we avoid exaggeration and hyperbole in our dealings with the media. It helps nobody when press offices
produce cynical puff pieces with stupid, sensationalistic headlines.


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text:
Mass protests swept across dozens of cities in China over the weekend. Thousands of people gathered to call for the end of COVID controls, and some even voiced broad demands for democratic political reform. They did it in the face of heavy state surveillance and the threat of being arrested. So why did they come out and demonstrate despite the personal risks? NPR's Emily Feng reports.
EMILY FENG, BYLINE: To understand the extraordinary unrest in China this week, let's start with one man named Peng Lifa. On October 13, he quietly emailed off a 21-page PDF entitled "A Toolkit For The Removal Of Xi Jinping." Then he went to a Beijing bridge and unfurled two banners. Shocked onlookers recorded these videos.
FENG: The banners read, say no to COVID testing, yes to life; no to lockdown, yes to freedom. Peng was quickly arrested and has not been heard from since, but his slogans lived on during this weekend's protest.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Non-English language spoken).
UNIDENTIFIED GROUP: (Non-English language spoken).
FENG: No to COVID, yes to freedom, these people shout in Beijing. A 23-year-old Beijinger named J.C. was among those inspired by Peng. And when he saw people were gathering on the banks of a river in Beijing on Sunday, he rushed to join.
J C: (Through intepreter) The police cannot arrest all of us. Prisons don't have room for 1.4 billion people.
FENG: We're using only J.C.'s initials, and a voice actor is narrating his interview - a safety measure we're going to take with all protesters interviewed in this piece as China has been trying to identify and arrest demonstrators.
UNIDENTIFIED GROUP: (Non-English language spoken).
FENG: NPR met him at this protest. He's among a generation of 20- and 30-year-olds in China who have known nothing but the controls of the ruling Communist Party. And as a teenager, he was OK with that because China was prosperous even if it wasn't free. Then the pandemic came and broke that social contract. J.C. works in the music and film industry. It's been decimated by China's COVID controls.
J C: (Through interpreter) The entire industry is close to failing, especially Beijing. No one invests in the entertainment industry anymore. They know it's a losing business.
FENG: And he was among the demonstrators on Sunday night demanding broader democratic changes.
J C: (Through interpreter) The lockdowns are a result of political tyranny and a lack of checks and balances in China. I hope to be protesting in Tiananmen Square one day, directly sending a critical message to the ruling party.
FENG: Other young protesters had more concrete demands - an end to nearly three years of constant testing and lockdowns. One 29-year-old writer named Yi said he was simply exhausted by what his daily life had become.
YI: (Through interpreter) I wake up worried if my COVID test is up to date, if my digital health code is still green and where I can go to eat if the restaurants are even still open. Life is not normal anymore.
FENG: So he bought some flowers to mourn those killed during a deadly lockdown fire just last week and headed out to the streets.
YI: (Through interpreter) It was my first time ever buying flowers, actually. I held them as a silent protest. My wish is to return to the society we had before lockdown. But that fight will be step by step.
FENG: Many of the protesters say they were once supportive of zero-COVID because it protected them from an unknown virus. Now, the controls themselves are the danger. One woman listed off those who suffered due to pandemic controls.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: (Non-English language spoken).
FENG: "Remember the people lost when the COVID bus overturned," she shouted. "Remember the woman who miscarried in front of the hospital. Remember the Shanghai nurses who died." An elderly Beijinger heard the shouts and came out of his house. He told NPR he'd been a young, passionate demonstrator in the 1980s, during the Tiananmen Square protests. And he supported the country's youth this time as well.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: (Through interpreter) These young people are brave and clever. They have a clear goal they are working towards.
FENG: What they want is a better future, he said. And they care about their country. Emily Feng, NPR News, Taipei, Taiwan. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.


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The eyes are sometimes called the windows to the soul. That may be true, but for health purposes, they're also a window that provides a clearer view of your total body health.
Did you know that your optometrist can detect 20 or more health conditions that may be in the early stages and not yet detectable by other routine tests during a regular comprehensive eye exam?
Because of their delicate structures, including nerves, blood vessels and connective tissues, the eyes can show signs of many significant health risks in the early stages. That can be critically important to patients, because catching diseases early is often the key to preventing severe outcomes. When you visit your optometrist for your annual eye exam, he or she will carefully examine your eyes for telltale signs of disease that may be impacting other areas of the body.
Serious health issues an optometrist can detect include:
- The tiny blood vessels that supply your retina can be a telltale sign of diabetes—often before other symptoms have led to a formal diagnosis of the disease. These blood vessels can leak blood into the retina, which your optometrist can see during a dilated examination. With early detection, it's possible to stabilize blood sugar levels and avoid loss of vision and other serious complications of the disease. In 2017, optometrists diagnosed more than 400,000 patients with diabetic retinopathy in people who hadn't yet been diagnosed with diabetes.
- High Blood Pressure. Once again, the blood vessels of the eye are often the sign that alerts patients to this potentially life-threatening condition. Elevated blood pressure leads to specific changes to the eye's blood vessels and leaks in the back of the eye, which tell your optometrist that you may be suffering from high blood pressure. By getting your blood pressure under control, you can reduce the risk for related conditions, including cardiovascular damage and other eye diseases such as glaucoma, macular degeneration and diabetic retinopathy.
- Thyroid disease. If the eyeballs are bulging or protruding from eyelids that seem to be retracting, your optometrist will suspect an overactive thyroid gland (hyperthyroidism), which is often caused by Grave's Disease. This condition affects the tissues and muscles around the eye and symptoms may also include blurry vision, vision loss or dry eyes.
- Rheumatoid Arthritis. Patients who present with red eyes and severe pain may be exhibiting signs of RA – rheumatoid arthritis. Pain and redness are symptoms of scleritis, a painful inflammatory condition of the sclera, the white part of your eye. RA patients often also suffer from dry eye and are typically between the ages of 40 and 70.
- Brain tumors. When a brain tumor forms and causes swelling and increased pressure in the brain, your optometrist can see its impact in the back of your eye. There may also be pressure on the optic nerve that your eye doctor can detect. As a patient, you may notice double vision, loss of peripheral vision, or a change to your pupil size, sometimes on just one side.
- High cholesterol. Cholesterol is a naturally occurring waxy substance found in the blood. But too much of it can be a bad thing, especially when it attaches to the inside of blood vessels and blocks proper blood flow through your arteries. That's when it can lead to heart disease and stroke. Your optometrist can catch the early signs of high cholesterol in two ways:
- In patients under 40, one sign of high cholesterol is a blue or yellow ring around the cornea.
- In all patients, cholesterol deposits in the retina's blood vessels can indicate high levels of cholesterol throughout a patient's body.
- A comprehensive eye exam can detect multiple types of cancer that may be lurking in a patient. The most common skin cancers – basal cell, squamous cell, or melanoma—may be present on the outer surfaces of the eye or the eyelids. In addition, lymphoma or leukemia can cause changes in the interior of the eye. Breast cancer and other bodily cancers can metastasize and spread to the eye and its structures.
With so many potentially life-threatening diseases showing early signs in the structures of the eye, an annual comprehensive eye exam can help detect disease early. This empowers you to take action to prevent further complications that could significantly impact your quality of life.
Your optometrist cares for not only your vision health, but also your total body health. Have you scheduled your annual eye exam yet?


text:
Matt Agorist | The Free Thought Project
Inglewood, CA — On Sunday, police responded to a call of a suspicious vehicle parked on Manchester Boulevard around 3:10 am. When police arrived, they engaged in a 45-minute long standoff before opening fire on the man and woman inside the vehicle, killing them both.+
In the news release on Monday, following the shooting, police claimed that the woman in the car had a gun. Scott Collins, a spokesman for the Inglewood Police Department said that the couple refused to obey the officers' commands to exit the vehicle. The officers then feared for their safety and opened fire on the car — killing the couple.
The woman was pronounced dead shortly after the shooting, and the man succumbed to his injuries after paramedics transported him to a local hospital, according to the LA Times.
The shooting seemed like an open and shut case until the next day. Mayor James Butts, while responding to questions about the shooting, opened up a huge can of worms — both the man and the woman were unconscious.
For at least 45 minutes, police attempted "to rouse" them in an effort "to de-escalate the situation," said Butts.
After admitting that the couple was asleep, Butts quickly defended the officers, noting, "Obviously at some point they were conscious because somebody felt threatened."
However, that notion has yet to be proven and is particularly unlikely due to the fact that not a single officer received so much as a scratch, nor did the couple have any reason to be violent.
Both of the victims were parents; Kisha Michael, 31, a single mother of three sons, and Marquintan Sandlin, 32, a single father of four daughters.
Michael's twin sister Trisha stated the obvious when she said that it's possible that Kisha merely passed out on the way home from their night out.
Families for both described them as devoted parents who made arrangements for care of their children while they took a night off, according to NBC Los Angeles.
"The police ain't telling us nothing," said Trisha Michael after being met with tight lips from the department.
"He was a loving father," said Sandlin's sister Leandra Faulkner. "All he cared about was his girls, getting them right."
Of course, as is standard procedure for all those killed by police, their arrest records were released to shame them. Michael was on probation for a misdemeanor last year, and 7 years ago, Sandlin was charged with unlawful possession of a firearm in Los Angeles.
According to his relatives, Sandlin had a 'rough life' but had turned it around and was working as a successful truck driver.
Sadly, these children will now grow up knowing that their parents were taken from them by cops, scared of a sleeping couple.
Watch the video below:


text:
Tips, advice, and ideas on how to create a successful and engaging event.
A closer look at how our clients do it.
Updates on our products, features, and the Pigeonlab Team.
Meetings suck. Here's where we complain about them and tell you how to do it better.
Tips, opinions, and elucidations on building company culture.
Examples of how you could use Pigeonhole Live anywhere and everywhere.


text:
Wi-Fi Security: The Rise and Fall of WPS
Wireless local-area networks which are also referred to as WLANs or Wi-Fi are prevalent these days. They are so popular that they can be found installed in offices, colleges, hotels, cafes, and even homes. There are many Wi-Fi product vendors and service providers, providing different products with different services and features. The main reason behind them being so popular is the convenience, mobility and ease of implementation they provide compared to the wired network. The end user can easily access the network without the hassle of managing the wires.
Wireless networks are basically based on the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 802.11 set of standards for WLANs. Following is the list of the IEEE 802.11 network protocol standards.
Learn Network Security Fundamentals
Learn Network Security Fundamentals
802.11 network standards are shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1. 802.11 Network Standards (source: http://www.wikipedia.org)
Some years back, wireless networks were only a niche technology used for very specific applications. But nowadays they are everywhere and every now and then we find a new Wi-Fi access point through our smart phones, tablets or laptops - most of which are not even secure.
Most of us have used these access points at some point in time to access the Internet without realizing how much (In)security they provide.
An insecure Wi-Fi network poses a threat not only to the owner but to every user that accesses it. The first line of defense for a Wi-Fi network is encryption, which encrypts the data transmitted between the Wi-Fi enabled device (smart phone, tablet, laptop etc.) and the wireless router. The Wireless Protected Access (WPA) protocol and more recent WPA2 have replaced the older and less-secure practice of Wireless Encryption Protocol (WEP). It is better to go with WPA2 as WEP is relatively easy to crack. Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) and Wi-Fi Protected Access 2 (WPA2) are two security protocols and security certification programs developed by the Wi-Fi Alliance to secure wireless computer networks by providing encryption mechanisms. But common users know little about wireless security and are scared by the available options to set up these methods.
Because of this unawareness and implementation issues with these protocols, in 2007 Wi-Fi Alliance came up with Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS) which allowed home users to easily add new devices to an already existing Wi-Fi network without entering long passphrases.
Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS), originally known as Wi-Fi Simple Config, is a computing standard that attempts to allow easy establishment of a secure wireless home network. Almost all major Wi-Fi product vendors (Cisco/Linksys, Netgear, D-Link, Belkin, Buffalo, Technicolor, etc.) have WPS-certified devices. WPS is activated by default on almost all the WPS supporting devices. The main purpose of the standard is on providing usability along with security.
Usage Methods
WPS provides four usage modes for adding a new device to an existing network, which are explained below. But first some terminology that will used in the explanation:
Enrollee: A new device that needs to be added to the network and does not have settings for the wireless network.
Registrar: One which provides wireless settings to the enrollee.
Access Point (AP): One which provides normal wireless network hosting and acts as middleware to pass messages between the enrollee and the registrar.
The four modes provided by WPS can be classified into two groups: In-band and Out-of-band.
This classification is made based upon the channel utilized for the information transfer.
In-Band modes:
Currently only these two modes are covered by WPS certification.
Push-Button-Connect (PBC):
The user merely has to push a button, either an actual or virtual one, on both the Access Point (or a registrar of the network) and the new wireless client device (enrollee). Support of this mode is mandatory for Access Points but optional for connecting devices. Figure 2 shows a Windows 7 machine as an enrollee. PBC on the AP will only be active until authentication has succeeded or timed-out after two minutes (or whatever amount of time the vendor has specified). This option is called wps_pbc in wpa_cli (text-based frontend) which interacts with wpa_supplicant; wpa_supplicant is a WPA Supplicant for Linux, BSD, Mac OS X, and Windows with support for WPA and WPA2.
Figure 2. Activated virtual push button (Windows 7: Enrollee)
Source: http://sviehb.files.
PIN Mode:
In this method a Personal Identification Number (PIN) has to be read from either a label or the display unit on the new wireless device. Figure 3 shows a WPS PIN on the label of a D-Link router. This PIN must then be inputted at the representant of the network (usually AP). Alternately, a PIN on the Access Point may be entered into the new device. This can also be explained on the basis of registrar, as following.
Internal Registrar
The user enters the PIN of the Wi-Fi adapter into the web interface of the AP. This option is called wps_pin in wpa_cli.
External Registrar
The user enters the PIN of the AP into a form on the client device (e.g. computer).
This option is called wps_reg in wpa_cli.
The PIN Method is a mandatory standard method; every Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS) certified product needs to support it.
Figure 3.WPS PIN on D-Link router
Out-of-Band modes:
These two modes are not covered by WPS certification.
Near-Field-Communication (NFC) method:
In this method the user merely has to bring the new client adjacent to the Access Point to permit a near field communication among the two devices. The NFC method offers strong defense against adding an unintended device to the network. Support of this mode is optional and is not widely deployed.
USB method:
In this method the user uses a USB drive to transfer data between the new client device and the Access Point of the network. Support of this mode is optional, but denounced.
Wi-Fi Protected Setup doesn't enhance security features to devices. It simply makes the existing security features easy to enable and configure. One of the key elements of the WPS protocols is Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP). EAP is an authentication framework often used in wireless networks and Point-to-Point connections. It provides for the transport and usage of keying material and parameters generated by EAP methods.
The WPS protocol consists as a sequence of EAP message exchanges that are initiated by a user action and relies on an exchange of descriptive information that should precede that user's action. This descriptive information is transmitted through a new Information Element (i.e., an information component which when combined with other information provides the required information product) that is added to the beacon (periodically send management frame by AP), probe response and optionally to the probe request and association request/response messages.
IEs will hold the possible and the currently installed, configuration methods of the device other than purely informative type-length-values (TLV).
A human trigger is required to initiate the actual session of the protocol after the identification of the device's capabilities on both the ends. The session consists of 8 messages followed by a message to indicate the protocol is completed (in case of a successful session). The exact stream of messages may change when configuring various kinds of devices (AP or STA).
Until very recently this protocol was used to provide the users with a feature of easy implementation of security on their Wi-Fi networks, but a recently discovered flaw has again put the wireless networks, and hence the users, at risk.
Security Issue
In December 2011 a freelance information security researcher Stefan Viehböck reported a design and implementation flaw in WPS that makes it vulnerable to a very basic hacking technique: brute-force attacks, feasible to perform against WPS-enabled Wireless networks. It can be simply understood as an attacker trying thousands of combinations in rapid sequence until he/she happens on the correct 8-digit PIN that allows authentication to the device. A successful attack on WPS allows unauthorized user to gain access to the network. The research paper of Viehböck can be found at http://sviehb.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/viehboeck_wps.pdf. This vulnerability was also independently uncovered by Craig Heffner of Tactical Network Solutions, and involves how the router responds when incorrect PINs are inputted. When a PIN is entered, the router implementing WPS indicates whether the first or second halves of the PIN are correct or not.
The vulnerability revolves around the acknowledgement messages transmitted between the registrar and enrollee during the validation process of a PIN. The PIN, which is printed on the side label of each WPS-enabled Wi-Fi router, is an 8 digit number. As the last digit is a checksum of the previous digits,
there are seven unknown digits in each PIN, yielding a total of 107 = 10,000,000 possible combinations. The first and second halves of the PIN are separately validated and reported by the registrar when an enrollee tries to gain access through the PIN.
Now the maximum number of guesses required for PIN recovery is 11,000 (104=10,000 from the first half + 103=1,000 from the second half). This is a drastic reduction of the orders of degreea from the number of PINs that would have to be tested in the absence of the design flaw (i.e. 107=100,000,000). The result of this flaw is the presence of a practical attack which can be finished within hours. The difficulty of exploiting this flaw is that it is dependent on the implementation of WPS by the vendor, as Wi-Fi router manufacturers could guard against this attacks by slowing down or disabling the WPS feature after some failed PIN validation efforts.
Two tools have been developed as proof of concept to demonstrate that the attack is practical. Tactical Network Solutions, the Maryland based firm that released the first tool 'Reaver', states that they are aware of the vulnerability since early 2011. Tactical Network Solutions decided to release the tool after the vulnerability was made public. It is also selling a commercial version called 'Reaver Pro' with some more features. Reaver is hosted on Google Code at http://code.google.com/p/reaver-wps/. Its authors say that it can recover a router's plain-text WPA or WPA2 password in 4 to 10 hours, depending on the access point.
The second tool is a PoC brute force tool implemented in Python and is a bit faster than Reaver, but supports less wireless adapters, as stated on the author's website (http://sviehb.wordpress.com/). This tool can be found at http://dl.dropbox.com/u/22108808/wpscrack.zip.
Reaver, developed by Tactical Network Solutions, runs on Linux. It aims the external registrar functionality mandated by the Wi-Fi Protected Setup requirement. It executes a brute force attack against an access point's Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS) pin number. Once the WPS pin is found, an attacker can recover the WPA PSK and alternately reconfigure the AP's wireless settings which could lead towards an insecure network. Although Reaver does not support reconfiguring the AP, this can be accomplished with wpa_supplicant once the WPS pin is recovered. Reaver requires the libpcap (packet capture and transmission) and libsqlite3 (database) libraries and can be built and installed by running the command:
$ ./configure
$ make
# make install
To remove everything installed/created by Reaver, the following command can be used:
[sourcecode]# make distclean
Once installed the tool can simply be started using the command:
[sourcecode] # ./reaver
The '--help' argument can be used to show all the arguments available within the tool. Figure 4 shows the help list of the Reaver.
Figure 4. Help list of Reaver (source:
The only requirement it has is a wireless card capable of raw packet injection. To start the process the wireless card must be put on monitor mode. This can be easily done using the airmon-ng tool from the wireless security testing aircrack-ng tool suite as shown below.
# airmon-ng start wlan0
The only essential arguments to Reaver are the interface name and the BSSID of the target AP, an example of which is shown below.
# reaver -i mon0 -b 00:01:02:03:04:05
Sometimes Reaver just tries the same pin over and over again. This might be because WPS is not enabled on the AP. Run the walsh tool (included in the Reaver-1.3 release) to scan for WPS-enabled APs and make sure the target AP is listed.
For extra information output, the verbose option may be provided using the argument '–v'. Providing the verbose option twice (-vv) will increase verbosity and display each pin number as it is attempted as shown in Figure 5.
Figure 5. Reaver in action (source:
To speed up the attack the delay between pin attempts can be disabled by adding '–d 0' on the command line (default delay: 1 second).
# reaver -i mon0 -b 00:01:02:03:04:05 -vv -d 0
Another option that can speed up an attack is '--dh-small'. This option tells Reaver to use small Diffie-Hellman secret numbers in order to shrink the computational load on the target AP. In case the attacker does not want to reveal his/her MAC address, Reaver also supports MAC spoofing with the '--mac' option, but it must be ensured that the MAC address of your wireless card's physical interface (wlan0) must be changed - not the monitor mode interface (usually mon0) - otherwise the attack won't work. Reaver keeps on brute forcing the PINs until a successful attempt. It has been stated that some models/vendors/ISPs come pre-configured with a default pin. Some common pins are 12345670, 00005678, 01230000, etc. Reaver attempts known default pins first as a better heuristic. Figure 6 shows a successfully cracked WPS PIN in 32,286 seconds.
Figure 6. Successful Recovery (source:
Due to interference or low signal strength Reaver sometimes can't associate with the AP. It might also be a driver issue.
Below is a list of wireless drivers tested by Reaver:
The following wireless drivers have been tested or reported to work successfully with Reaver:
- ath9k
- rtl8187
- carl19170
- ipw2000
- rt2800pci
- rt73usb
Partially Supported:
The following wireless drivers have had mixed success, and may or may not work depending on your wireless card:
- ath5k
- iwlagn
- rtl2800usb
- b43
Not Supported:
The following wireless drivers/cards have been tested or reported to not work properly with Reaver:
- iwl4965
- Netgear WG111v3
Technically more than one instance of Reaver can be run against an AP, but this approach is flawed as it will only result in a double resource load on AP. Reaver advanced options (using '–a' attribute) can be utilized to speed up the attack.
End users can disable WPS to prevent an attack, but because of the unawareness most people do not turn it off. Some access points don't even provide an option to disable WPS.
Vendors can mitigate the flaw by introducing sufficiently long lock down periods (after unsuccessful attempts) to make the attack impractical to implement. This will require a new firmware release. Vendors also need to intensively test the protocols before implementing them on their devices, so that such flaws don't come up in the future.
Today we are all surrounded by many Wi-Fi networks and have used them at some point in time without realizing the issues of the security. The issues discussed in this article are not the only issues related to wireless security, but a recent and major one affecting the privacy of the end users.
As we already know, almost all major router/AP vendors have WPS-certified devices and WPS–PIN (External Registrar) is mandatory for certification, which makes a lot of devices vulnerable to such an attack.
Learn Network Security Fundamentals
Learn Network Security Fundamentals
Having a sufficiently long lock-down period (vendor mitigation method) is most likely not a requirement for WPS certification for the device. However it should be a requirement in the new specifications. The vendors need to release new firmware to eliminate the issue. The main argument this issue presents before us is that such other flaws might be already present in other devices/protocols and misused by malicious intruders, hence the only safeguard we need to take is awareness among end users. Also the certifying authorities and the vendors need to thoroughly test the devices/protocols before implementation so that security features ultimately don't lead towards insecurity.


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Cluck … cough … cluck.
Dear Word Detective: What is the origin of the expression "the pip" as in "I have the pip." I have seen it in used in old novels by one of the characters, and my mother used to say it (she would be 100 if she were still alive). I understood it to mean "not sick, just feeling miserable for no known reason," but maybe it was really was an illness now known by another name? — JS Rooney.
Hey, lookie there, another "pip." English has three distinct "pip" words, perhaps four if one stretches one's definition of "word," and that's not even counting "Pip," the protagonist of Charles Dickens' novel "Great Expectations."
One of the oldest sorts of "pip" is the use of the word to mean the small, hard seed of an apple or another fruit ("We divide This apple of life, and cut it through the pips," E.B. Browning, 1856). This "seed" sense is actually a shortened form of "pippin," an old word for "apple."
Another sort of "pip," meaning the kind of spots found on dice or playing cards, seems as though it should be related to the "seed" kind "pip," but comes instead from the old English dialect word "peep." (Personally, I'm convinced that the two are related, but no one listens to me.) In any case, this "pip" is also used to mean the stars or other small insignia found on military uniforms.
There's also the interjection "pip-pip," popular at one time in Britain, which was simply a stylized imitation of a bicycle horn. And then there's "pipsqueak," an insignificant person, which is probably imitative in origin, i.e., represents the kind of sad little sound such a loser would make under stress. Again, all these "pips" have a common sense of "something very small," so it's hard to say that they are not ultimately related.
The "pip" your mother used, however, is definitely an entirely different word. This "pip" is actually a disease of poultry and other birds, a respiratory illness that produces large amounts of phlegm in the poor birdie. This "pip" first appeared in English in the 15th century, adopted from the Middle Dutch "pippe" (mucus), ultimately from the Latin "pituita," meaning "phlegm." (The "pituitary" gland in humans was once thought to be the source of phlegm, thus the name, but it is not.)
Almost as soon as this "pip" appeared in English, people began humorously accusing each other of having the chicken disease, and "pip" came into use meaning "an undefined disease or malaise, especially one involving mucus," the sense in which your mother apparently used it ("Of a person with a short hecking cough it is often said 'Her'v a got the pip,'" 1879). In the 19th century "to get the pip" also meant "to become depressed," and "to give someone the pip" meant to severely annoy the person. Both uses are still occasionally heard today ("This camp musical about a monster child star is harmless and amusing enough, assuming you can stomach the little girl. She gave us the pip," The New Yorker, 1992).


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My Sixties were a little different from those of my contemporaries. Of course, I joined in the enthusiasm for the Beatles, mild drugs, political dissent, and sex (the latter imagined rather than practiced, but in this too I think I reflected majority experience, retrospective mythology notwithstanding). But so far as political activism was concerned, I was diverted from the mainstream in the years between 1963 and 1969 by an all-embracing engagement with left-wing Zionism. I spent the summers of 1963, 1965, and 1967 working on Israeli kibbutzim and much of the time in between was actively engaged in proselytizing Labour Zionism as an unpaid official of one of its youth movements. During the summer of 1964 I was being "prepared" for leadership at a training camp in southwest France; and from February through July of 1966 I worked full time at Machanayim, a collective farm in the Upper Galilee.
This decidedly intense sentimental education worked very well at first. At least through the summer of 1967, when I graduated from voluntary work on a kibbutz to auxiliary participation in the Israeli armed forces, I was the ideal recruit: articulate, committed, and uncompromisingly ideologically conformist. Like the circle dancers in Milan Kundera's Book of Laughter and Forgetting, I joined with fellow feelers in happy collective revels, excluding dissenters and celebrating our reassuring unity of spirit, purpose, and clothing. I idealized Jewish distinction, and intuitively grasped and reproduced the Zionist emphasis upon separation and ethnic difference. I was even invited—at the absurdly immature age of sixteen—to make a keynote speech to a Zionist youth conference in Paris denouncing smoking as a "bourgeois deviation" and threat to the healthy outdoor commitment of Jewish adolescents. I doubt very much whether I believed this even at the time (I smoked, after all): but I was very good with the words.
The essence of Labour Zionism, still faithful in those years to its founding dogmas, lay in the promise of Jewish work: the idea that young Jews from the diaspora would be rescued from their effete, assimilated lives and transported to remote collective settlements in rural Palestine—there to create (and, as the ideology had it, recreate) a living Jewish peasantry, neither exploited nor exploiting. Derived in equal measure from early-nineteenth-century socialist utopias and later Russian myths of egalitarian village communities, Labour Zionism was characteristically fragmented into conflicting sectarian cults: there were those who believed that everyone on the kibbutz should dress alike, raise their children and eat in common, and use (but not own) identical furniture, household goods, and even books, while deciding collectively upon every aspect of their lives at a mandatory weekly gathering. Softer adaptations of the core doctrine allowed for some variety in lifestyle and even a modicum of personal possessions. And then there were multifarious nuances between kibbutz members, often as not the product of personal or familial conflict recast as fundamentalist discord.
But all were agreed on the broader moral purpose: bringing Jews back to the land and separating them from their rootless diasporic degeneracy. For the neophyte fifteen-year-old Londoner encountering the kibbutz for the first time, the effect was exhilarating. Here was "Muscular Judaism" in its most seductive guise: health, exercise, productivity, collective purpose, self-sufficiency, and proud separatism—not to mention the charms of kibbutz children of one's own generation, apparently free of all the complexes and inhibitions of their European peers (free, too, of most of their cultural baggage—though this did not trouble me until later).
I adored it. Eight hours of strenuous, intellectually undemanding labor in steamy banana plantations by the shores of the Sea of Galilee, interspersed with songs, hikes, lengthy doctrinal discussions (carefully stage-managed so as to reduce the risk of adolescent rejection while maximizing the appeal of shared objectives), and the ever-present suggestion of guilt-free sex: in those days the kibbutz and its accompanying ideological penumbra still retained a hint of the innocent "free love" ethos of early-twentieth-century radical cults.
In reality, of course, these were provincial and rather conservative communities, their ideological rigidity camouflaging the limited horizon of many of their members. Even in the mid-1960s it was clear that the economy of Israel no longer rested on small-scale domestic agriculture; and the care that left-wing kibbutz movements took to avoid employing Arab labor served less to burnish their egalitarian credentials than to isolate them from the inconvenient facts of Middle Eastern life. I'm sure I did not appreciate all this at the time—though I do recall even then wondering why I never met a single Arab in the course of my lengthy kibbutz stays, despite living in close proximity to the most densely populated Arab communities of the country.
What I did, however, come quite quickly to understand if not openly acknowledge was just how limited the kibbutz and its members really were. The mere fact of collective self-government, or egalitarian distribution of consumer durables, does not make you either more sophisticated or more tolerant of others. Indeed, to the extent that it contributes to an extraordinary smugness of self-regard, it actually reinforces the worst kind of ethnic solipsism.
Even now I can recall my surprise at how little my fellow kibbutzniks knew or cared about the wider world—except insofar as it directly affected them or their country. They were chiefly concerned with the business of the farm, their neighbor's spouse, and their neighbor's possessions (in both cases comparing these enviously with their own). Sexual liberation, on the two kibbutzim where I spent extensive time, was largely a function of marital infidelity and the attendant gossip and recrimination—in which respect these model socialist communities rather closely resembled medieval villages, with similar consequences for those exposed to collective disapproval.
As a result of these observations, I came quite early on to experience a form of cognitive dissonance in the face of my Zionist illusions. On the one hand I wanted deeply to believe in the kibbutz as a way of life and as an incarnation of a better sort of Judaism; and being of a dogmatic persuasion, I had little difficulty convincing myself of its principled virtues for some years. On the other hand, I actively disliked it. I could never wait to get away at the end of a work week, hitchhiking or hopping a bus to Haifa (the nearest significant city) where I would while away the Sabbath gorging myself on sour cream and staring wistfully from the dock at the passenger ferries bound for Famagusta, Izmir, Brindisi, and other cosmopolitan destinations. Israel felt like a prison in those days, and the kibbutz like an overcrowded cell.
I was released from my confusions by two quite different developments. When my kibbutz colleagues learned that I had been accepted into Cambridge University and planned to attend, they were appalled. The whole culture of "Aliya"—"going up" (to Israel)—presumed the severing of links and opportunities back in the diaspora. The leaders of the youth movement in those days knew perfectly well that once a teenager in England or France was permitted to stay there through university, he or she was probably lost to Israel forever.
The official position, accordingly, was that university-bound students should forgo their places in Europe; commit themselves to the kibbutz for some years as orange pickers, tractor drivers, or banana sorters; and then, circumstances permitting, present themselves to the community as candidates for higher education—on the understanding that the kibbutz would collectively determine what if any course of studies they should pursue, with the emphasis upon their future usefulness to the collective.
With luck, in short, I might have been sent to college in Israel at the age of twenty-five or so, perhaps to study electrical engineering or, if very fortunate and indulged by my comrades, to train as an elementary teacher of history. At the age of fifteen, this prospect had rather appealed to me. Two years later, having worked hard to get into King's, I had no intention of declining the opportunity, much less abandoning myself to a life in the fields. The utter incomprehension and palpable disdain of the kibbutz community in the face of my decision served merely to confirm my growing alienation from the theory and practice of communitarian democracy.
The other stimulus to separation, of course, was my experience with the army on the Golan Heights after the Six-Day War. There, to my surprise, I discovered that most Israelis were not transplanted latter-day agrarian socialists but young, prejudiced urban Jews who differed from their European or American counterparts chiefly in their macho, swaggering self-confidence, and access to armed weapons. Their attitude toward the recently defeated Arabs shocked me (testament to the delusions of my kibbutz years) and the insouciance with which they anticipated their future occupation and domination of Arab lands terrified me even then. When I returned to the kibbutz on which I was then living—Hakuk in the Galilee—I felt a stranger. Within a few weeks I had packed my bags and headed home. Two years later, in 1969, I returned with my then girlfriend to see what remained. Visiting kibbutz Machanayim I encountered "Uri," a fellow orange picker of earlier days. Without bothering to acknowledge me, much less trouble himself with the usual greetings, Uri passed in front of us, pausing only to demand: "Ma ata oseah kan?" ("What are you doing here?") What indeed?
I don't regard those years as squandered or misspent. If anything, they furnished me with a store of memories and lessons somewhat richer than those I might have acquired had I simply passed through the decade in conformity with generational proclivities. By the time I went up to Cambridge I had actually experienced—and led—an ideological movement of the kind most of my contemporaries only ever encountered in theory. I knew what it meant to be a "believer"—but I also knew what sort of price one pays for such intensity of identification and unquestioning allegiance. Before even turning twenty I had become, been, and ceased to be a Zionist, a Marxist, and a communitarian settler: no mean achievement for a south London teenager.
Unlike most of my Cambridge contemporaries, I was thus immune to the enthusiasms and seductions of the New Left, much less its radical spin-offs: Maoism, gauchisme, tiers-mondisme, etc. For the same reasons I was decidedly uninspired by student-centered dogmas of anticapitalist transformation, much less the siren calls of femino-Marxism or sexual politics in general. I was—and remain—suspicious of identity politics in all forms, Jewish above all. Labour Zionism made me, perhaps a trifle prematurely, a universalist social democrat—an unintended consequence which would have horrified my Israeli teachers had they followed my career. But of course they didn't. I was lost to the cause and thus effectively "dead."
—"Kibbutz" is part of a continuing series of memoirs by Tony Judt, and appears along with two others in the February 11 issue of the Review.