Thursday, February 7, 2013
Friday, November 11, 2011
What You Should Do to Protect Yourself in the Wake of the Steam Hack via lifehacker.com
If you're a user of the popular Steam gaming platform, you've likely heard about the hack that potentially compromised passwords and credit card information. Although much of the damage has been done, but there are still things you can do to protect yourself. Here's a look at your options moving forward.
Change Your Passwords
Perhaps you use a good, strong, unique password on your steam account and, despite being stolen in the hack, it still remains safe and encoded. You may not be so lucky if you have a weak password. Either way, now is a good time to change it if you haven't already. When you're choosing a new password, it helps to know what the pros look for when they try to guess and methods hackers use to crack them so you can avoid falling into those traps. There are also a few good practices to follow. The most secure password is often one you don't even know. If you'd prefer something memorable, however, a multi-word password is generally considered to be among the most secure types. When you've come up with a password you like, be sure to test it so you know you didn't come up with one that's easy to guess or hack. Change it on your Steam account and you'll be in better shape.Change Your Email Password, Too
If you're feeling a little worried, one thing worth noting is that Steam pays attention to when you access it from new computers. You have to enter a new code each time that is delivered via email, so even if your password was compromised the person trying to use it would also need access to your email account. It's best to have unique passwords for all your accounts, but if you've been using the same password this might be a good time to change. At the very least, make sure your email password doesn't match the one you use for any other service.
Monitor Your Credit and Debit Cards
It is still unclear whether or not any credit cards associated with Steam accounts were actually compromised, but you're going to want to keep a close eye on your statements to make sure there are no fraudulent charges. You may also want to call your bank and see what they suggest you do in this situation. They'll likely err on the side of security and suggest a replacement card with a new number. This can be a little inconvenient as it means being without your card for awhile, but if you go into one of your bank's branches you can usually get a temporary ATM card so you'll at least have easy access to your money.Additionally, one of the best ways to protect yourself in the future is to use virtual credit cards. These virtual numbers often allow you to set specific spending limits so that if they're stolen your risk is minimized. Usually you can also specify timeframes and set them as single-use cards so you don't get any surprise charges. This is one of the best ways to protect yourself from credit card fraud when paying online, but it does require a bit of upkeep when it comes to recurring payments.
If you're a user of the popular 
Steam gets hacked: Here's how to keep safe | Macworld
by Elizabeth Fish, PCWorld Nov 11, 2011 9:16 am
Editor’s Note: The following article is reprinted from the Security Alert blog at PCWorld.com.If you're a gamer who plays titles that use the Steam platform from Valve, you may want to keep a close eye on your personal data.
On Sunday November 6, Steam servers got hacked, and the hackers gained access to the user database. Initially the attack appeared to be against the Steam forums, but Valve later discovered the attack had run deeper than the online community. Details are still a little thin on the ground, but on Thursday Valve, the company behind Steam, posted the following message to its forums:
"We learned that intruders obtained access to a Steam database in addition to the forums. This database contained information including user names, hashed and salted passwords, game purchases, email addresses, billing addresses and encrypted credit card information. We do not have evidence that encrypted credit card numbers or personally identifying information were taken by the intruders, or that the protection on credit card numbers or passwords was cracked. We are still investigating.
We don't have evidence of credit card misuse at this time. Nonetheless you should watch your credit card activity and statements closely.
While we only know of a few forum accounts that have been compromised, all forum users will be required to change their passwords the next time they login. If you have used your Steam forum password on other accounts you should change those passwords as well."
The compromise comes at a pretty bad time for PC gamers due to the imminent release of Skyrim: The Elder Scrolls V, which is supposed to be ready for download at midnight Friday morning.
Valve suggests that you change your Steam password and keep a close eye on your credit card and bank statements. See our previous story on what to do if you're a victim of a data breach for more steps you can take to protect your personal information.
Now would also be a good time to look at using Steam Guard. Steam Guard is available to all account holders, and prevents others from accessing Steam from an unknown computer unless you enter a code, which is delivered to your email.
Also, you should make sure your email address is verified with Steam in order to set up security features like secure questions.
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Thursday, November 10, 2011
Firesheep Sniffs Out Facebook and Other User Credentials on Wi-Fi Hotspots via lifehacker.com
Firefox: Firesheep sniffs out and steals cookies—and the account and identity of the owner in the process—of popular web sites (like Facebook and Twitter) from the browsing sessions of other users on the Wi-Fi hotspot you're attached to.
Firesheep is a proof-of-concept Firefox extension created by Eric Butler to show how leaky the security many popular web sites (like Facebook, Flickr, Amazon.com, Dropbox, Evernote, and more) employ is. The problem, as Firesheep shockingly demonstrates, is that many web sites only encrypt your login. Once you are logged in they use an unsecured connection with a simple cookie check. Anyone from your IP address (that of the Wi-Fi hotspot) with that cookie can be you. When using Firesheep on a public hot spot any session it can intercept is displayed in the Firesheep pane with the user's name and photograph (when available). Simply click on their name to intercept the session and start browsing the website as though you are them.
What can you do to protect yourself against such a painfully easy attack against your privacy and security? You can set up an SSH SOCKS proxy to encrypt your traffic, effectively sending your site sessions and accompanying cookies through a sniff-proof tunnel. For a less involved alternative, however, you could use something like the previously mentioned HTTPS Everywhere Firefox extension or Force-TLS (highlighted by TechCrunch). Essentially, these extensions will force popular sites to send data via the more secure HTTPS protocol, which encrypts data as it's sent, and while it's slightly slower, it's definitely worth using HTTPS when available.
Firesheep is free, works wherever Firefox does, and requires a wireless card capable of operating in promiscuous mode.
Firesheep [Code Butler via TechCrunch]
How to Protect Yourself from Online Fraud and Identity Theft via lifehacker.com
This week is International Fraud Awareness Week, and there's no better time to brush up on your skills to make sure you don't fall for online trickery designed to fleece you or convince you to give up sensitive personal information. Here are some tips to stay safe.
Learn to Identify Phishing and Spear Phishing Attempts
Phishing attacks cast a net wide with generic offers and promises in the hope of luring you into providing personal information before you realize there's a problem. Spear phishing are targeted attacks to try and get additional information from individuals who may be at risk because their account at another organization may have been hacked, their employer suffered a data breach, or some other information is already available about them. In both cases, the most beneficial skill you can learn is a healthy sense of internet skepticism.
As always, give out the minimum amount of information when required and nothing more when asked by companies or businesses that present you with forms to fill out, and never give out information—even if the requester is legit—unless you understand why they need the information and what they'll do with it. Any reputable organization will be able to answer your questions. Trust your instincts, and remember that if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
Beware Suspicious Emails and Attachments
It should be common knowledge at this stage, but you should never open attachments from untrusted sources, and even if you get one from a trusted source, you should pay attention to the file extension of the attachment before downloading and opening it. If you get an official-looking email from your bank, credit union, or another company you do business with telling you to log in and review your account, be careful. Even if it's legit, it's always safer to visit the business' web site by typing in the URL instead of clicking the link in the email.
Most companies will never email you to say you need to "verify your account information" and beg you to click a link in the message. If your email client supports it, you can hover your mouse over the link in the suspicious email to see where it really leads. Odds are it's not actually your bank's web site. Don't click, and visit your bank's web site manually or call them instead. Remember email addresses can be very easily spoofed, so even if you get a note from a name or business you trust, it could be spoofed and the URL could lead you to an unexpected location.
Photo by Jeff Nelson.
Keep Your Anti-Malware Software Up-To-Date
Even though viruses and trojans don't make headlines as often as they used to doesn't mean you can get away without some anti-malware software installed on your system. Once installed, it's equally important to keep it up to date. Out of date antivirus and anti-malware suites are effectively useless. Besides, with options like Microsoft Security Essentials for Windows and ClamXAV for Mac out there that are free, light on system resources, and both scan and update in the background without your help, there's no reason not to have something installed. If your school, office, or ISP offers an anti-malware package to you for free, make use of it.
Use HTTPS Everywhere (Or At Least Everywhere You Can)
While it's not foolproof, making sure you're connected to as many of your favorite sites over SSL is the best way to make sure you're actually talking to the site you think you're talking to, and to make sure your communications with that site are encrypted. You can use the previously mentioned HTTPS Everywhere extension for Firefox to force hundreds of sites to HTTPS, enable HTTPS on Facebook, do the same at Twitter, and check to make sure to look for the lock or the green box next to the URL in your browser's address bar to make sure the version of the site you're on is secure. If it's not, try the site address with https:// in front of it to see if it works.
Use Strong, Secure Passwords, and Different Ones On Different Sites
Good password management is a topic we've covered several times but if you're still using the same password on multiple sites or you're still using a dictionary word or your dog's name as your password, there's no time like now to make the change to a strong password that uses letters, numbers, caps, and special characters if possible. Still, even though you have a good strong password it's worthless if you use it on multiple sites and one of them is compromised. Use a service like Keepass, LastPass or another similar password manager to create, keep, and manage multiple strong passwords for all of the sites and services you use on the internet.
Be Skeptical, Be Informed, and Be Careful
That sense of internet skepticism we mentioned earlier will serve you well in many regards. It may be more inconvenient to pick up the phone and call a business that just emailed you asking for your credit card number to process a payment than it is to just reply and email it to them, but speaking as someone who used to work in corporate IT, we paid close attention when our network monitors noticed outbound emails with credit card numbers in them. Don't do it—if we could see it, others can as well. When someone asks you for something that just doesn't seem right, set it aside until you can clear up why they need the information.
If you get an message promising something—anything from a multi-million dollar cut from a foreign prince's international investments to a discount code to your favorite online retailer just for filling out a survey—learn to second-guess the offers and promotions you see on the internet and double-check their sources. Often a quick Google search for the sender or the general gist of the message with the word "scam" at the end will reveal what's really going on.
Brush up on The Federal Trade Commission's guidelines on protecting yourself from identity theft, and take a look at the federal government's tips for avoiding internet fraud at USA.gov. If it's too late or your identity is stolen anyway, both sites also have guidelines for reporting identity theft and recovering from it.
Photo by Yi Chen.
Do you have tips for avoiding fraud and identity theft online that we missed? How do you protect yourself on the web without completely disrupting your normal activities? Share your tips in the comments below.
You can reach Alan Henry, the author of this post, at alan@lifehacker.com, or better yet, follow him on Twitter or Google+.
This week is 
Wednesday, November 9, 2011
Apple’s App store security breached via geeksaresexy.net
A man who created a bogus stock price tracker app for the iPhone that was in fact malware has been thrown out of Apple’s developer program. That would seem uncontroversial until you discover the app was designed to highlight a security flaw rather than cause damage or steal data.
Charlie Miller was told his right to create and upload apps had been terminated “effective immediately.”
If Miller’s name seems familiar, that may be because he’s a perennial winner at the PWN2OWN competition, held at the CanSecWest security event in Vancouver each year. Contestants can ask judges to visit a URL using various combinations of hardware, operating system and browser, with the latest publicly available security updates applied. Last year was a particularly bad day for Apple with a MacBook Pro running Safari the first computer to fall (Miller being the successful attacker) and the iPhone the first smartphone hacked.
According to Miller, his latest “attack” came after he spotted a security flaw in iOS. The flaw, unwittingly introduced in a recent iOS update, appeared to allow code to be added to an app after it had already been vetted by Apple and installed on devices.
To prove this was a genuine threat, Miller released an app named InstaStock in September. Using a post-approval update, he says he was in a position where he could have remotely downloaded contacts and pictures from phones running the app.
Miller says he reported the flaw to Apple in mid-October. He went public yesterday and was barred from the program a few hours later. He’s scheduled to unveil more details of the flaw at a security conference next week.
The BBC quotes one possible overenthusiastic analyst who calls the revelation the “the most significant threat yet to Apple’s app store economy.”
Meanwhile The Register has more details on the flaw, making the important point that it merely allows would-be attackers the same opportunities they’ve had on Android devices for some time.
(Image credit: Garret Gee)
Marvel Starts Digital Relationship With Barnes and Noble | Geeks of Doom
Marvel Comics announced this week that the popular comics company would be bringing collected digital editions of their line of graphic novels to both the upcoming Barnes and Noble Nook tablet, as well as the Nook Color.
With the release of Barnes and Noble’s Nook tablet hitting stores (and digital storefronts) next week, considering the success of digital comics, it was only a matter of time before we heard some news regarding comics on the device. Do you remember when DC Comics took their digital collections exclusively to Amazon’s Kindle line, and then how Barnes and Noble got all mad that they didn’t get to play with DC’s toys? Well, it looks like Marvel has stepped in to fill the hole in Barnes and Noble’s heart.
Starting next week, Marvel will bring several digital collected editions of their most popular story lines to the Nook store including Civil War, Invincible Iron Man, Captain America, John Michael Straczynski’s Thor, Astonishing X-Men, New Avengers, and many more. Whether or not these collected editions will be in “volume” style, or if they’re going to be complete collections is unknown, but either way, as someone who follows the progress in digital media, this is really exciting news. Marvel was the last major publisher to put both feet in the digital realm, but alongside their recently announced expanded day and date single issue initiative, they’re adding the final bit of legitimacy in the digital comic sphere.
Now, it appears as though Marvel will be using the Nook exclusively for the time being, but in two weeks, they could very well announce availability for the Kindle, as well. So be on the look out here at Geeks of Doom for more info regarding this news. But until then, if you want to just read digital comics collections, you’re going to need a Nook and a Kindle. These holidays are definitely not going to be wallet friendly.
[Source: Marvel]
Exclusive: Virgin's Branson invests in payment startup Square - Yahoo! News
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Square, the mobile payment startup that counts former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers on its board of directors, has a new big-name backer: British billionaire Richard Branson.
Branson has made a "multimillion" dollar investment in Square, according to a Square spokeswoman who declined to disclose the exact amount.
Branson's investment in Square follows a $100 million investment in June led by venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and an investment for an undisclosed amount by credit card company Visa in April.
Square's technology lets merchants accept payments using tablet PCs or mobile phones. The company recorded $10 million in daily transactions for the first time this past weekend, spokeswoman Katie Baynes told Reuters, up from the $4 million per day in gross payment volume that it announced during the summer.
Square has said it is on track to process $2 billion worth of transactions on an annual basis.
The two-year-old company, led by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, faces deep-pocketed competitors eager for a slice of the nascent mobile payment business. Search giant Google Inc recently introduced a digital wallet that lets people use their smartphones to pay for clothing, food and other items.
Branson's investment in Square is a "personal investment," said Baynes.
Branson is the founder and highly public face of the Virgin Group, which has created more than 300 businesses that range from air travel to mobile phones.
Virgin Money, the group's financial services arm, recently submitted a bid proposal to acquire the nationalized British bank Northern Rock, sources have told Reuters.
(Reporting by Alexei Oreskovic; Editing by Gary Hill)
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
There a people in the world that don't give a shit!! (Graphic video)
There are people in the world that don't give a shit!!! REALLY, they don't. This is the world we live in. Each of us, including myself, are responsible to bring light in a dark world. This is one of many tragic events that happen everyday.
Thursday, October 13, 2011
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
Monday, September 26, 2011
Faster-Than-Light Discovery Raises Prospect of Time Travel | CERN Neutrino Experiment | Time Travel Potential & Barriers | LiveScience
If subatomic particles called neutrinos can go faster than the speed of light, as scientists reported Sept.22, it would require a rethinking of the basics of physics, including the possibility of time travel.
CREDIT: Willem Dijkstra, Shutterstock
If a report of particles traveling faster than the speed of light turns out to be true, it will rock the foundations of modern physics — and perhaps even change the way scientists think about time travel.
But don't fire up the DeLorean just yet. Physicists are skeptical that the tiny subatomic particles, called neutrinos, really are breaking the cosmic rule that nothing goes faster than light. And even if they are, neutrinos don't make the best vessel for sending signals to the past because they pass through ordinary matter almost unaffected, interacting only weakly with the wider world. [Countdown of Bizarre Subatomic Particles]
So you may be able to send neutrinos back in time, but would anyone notice? "If you're trying to get people's attention by bouncing neutrinos off their head, you could wait for quite awhile," Seth Lloyd, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told LiveScience.
'; } s += '' if (google_ads[0].bidtype == "CPC") { google_adnum = google_adnum + google_ads.length; } document.write(s); return; } google_ad_client = 'pub-1894578950532504'; google_ad_output = 'js'; google_max_num_ads = '3'; google_ad_type = 'text_html'; google_feedback = 'on'; google_skip = google_adnum;' + google_ads[i].line2 + ' ' + google_ads[i].line3 + 'Discover Why Thousands of People are "Jumping" to Change Their LifeSave Thousands with Solar Energy. Try Our Solar Savings CalculatorAdam, first man per Bible records, archaeology dates him to 14,000 BPThat hasn't stopped physicists from imagining the possibilities in a world where faster-than-light travel is possible. If the neutrino experiment is confirmed, it opens the door to at least sending messages through time using those neutrinos, physicists say. You might even be able to send messages to "past you" with neutrinos, one physicist suggests. Experiencing time backwards, once thought impossible, might be outside the realm of sci-fi, another imagines. Of course, this is all predicated on the finding being true — and it raises thorny questions of how the universe would work if people were able to go back in time and, say, erase their own existence.
Physics shocker
The news that European researchers had detected neutrinos traveling faster than light broke yesterday (Sept. 22), triggering both typical scientific skepticism and pure amazement in the physics world. In an experiment that zaps neutrinos from CERN in Geneva to the INFN Gran Sass Laboratory in Italy, scientists clocked the particles outrunning light by 60 nanoseconds over 453.6 miles (730 kilometers) — a neck-and-neck race to be sure. [Infographic: See How Neutrino Experiment Works]
According to Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity, neutrinos shouldn't even be able to match light speed, much less break it. Neutrinos have (very small) mass, and as Einstein posited in his famous E=mc squared equation, mass is equal to energy. As something speeds up, its energy increases, too. Because energy is equivalent to mass, its mass increases. Now you've got a heavier object, so you've got to add even more energy to get it going faster. Before you know it, you need "completely unreasonable" amounts of energy to keep inching your object toward light speed, said Harvard University physicist Gary Feldman.
"You keep accelerating but you just incrementally approach [light speed], so you have to add more and more energy to go faster and faster, but it becomes less and less effective," Feldman told LiveScience.
Some particles have been shown to exceed the speed of light when traveling in a medium rather than a vacuum, but neutrinos pass through the Earth as if it were a vacuum, so they shouldn't ever be able to zip past light speed. The buzz in the physics community is that they probably haven’t.
"Even though the experimenters have done a very careful job and it's a very impressive paper … it was a very complicated analysis and there's always a possibility that there's just an error in what they did," Feldman said.
One possible error could be in the calculations the scientists used to correct for the effect of the atmosphere in their experiment, Lloyd said. Light actually gets a bit bogged down when it isn't in a vacuum, while neutrinos zip through the atmosphere without any effect. It's possible that the CERN researchers miscalculated in correcting for the atmospheric effect and that neutrinos aren't actually going faster, but the light is just going a smidge slower than they realize.
If it's true ...
But if the results do hold, "it's major, it's humongous, it's the biggest thing in 100 years," said Michio Kaku, a theoretical physicist at the City University of New York.
"You're talking about a tidal wave hitting physics if it's true," Kaku told LiveScience. "There are two rocks upon which modern physics is based. One is quantum theory and one is relativity. If one of the pillars falls, we're in deep trouble."
What does that mean for time travel? In theory, it might be more possible than scientists had thought. Einstein pointed out that time is relative: As you approach light speed, your experience of time is not the same as it is for the folks chugging along at their usual speed. What feels like a second to you will feel like much longer to them. This idea, called "time dilation," spawned such sci-fi classics as 1968's "Planet of the Apes," in which what feels like 18 months to Charleton Heston and his crew is enough time for gorillas, chimps and orangutans to evolve language and complex societies back on Earth. [Top 10 Scary Sci-Fi Series]
There are a lot of barriers to approaching light speed, much less breaking it, but if you could, you could theoretically experience time running backward, Kaku said. Here's how it would work: As you approach light speed, you might time goes slower in the outside world than it does for you. When you hit light speed, the outside world goes so slow in relation to you that it stops (again, in relation to you; people in the outside world feel as if time is the same as always). So if you could push past that speed limit, the outside world would be so slow as to be moving backward in relation to you.
So far, this seems pretty much impossible, not least because some other side effects of faster-than-light travel should include reducing your weight and width to less than nothing, Kaku said. [Watch: Can You Time Travel?]
If the neutrinos are actually going faster than light, though, it might be possible to use them to communicate with the past, Lloyd said. You could send off a faster-than-light message to someone moving at a rapid velocity with respect to you. They could then bounce the faster-than-light message back, and it would arrive before the signal you sent to them.
One way to think of this is like a mirror, Lloyd said. You send a message to the mirror, and it reflects it back, but so quickly that "past you" is the one who receives it.
Stuck in time
But all of this is moot if it's only neutrinos that can be coaxed past the speed of light, Lloyd said. Because they don't interact with much, your messages would likely go unnoticed by past generations. An April 13, 1865, warning to Abraham Lincoln not to go into Ford's Theater the next day would pass through the president like a ghost. [Read: 'Time Traveler' Spotted?]
Doing away with Einstein's theory would also complicate causality, the idea that things influence each other in chronological order. When you allow the past, present and future to interact, "that gets all messed up," Lloyd said, and you start to get paradoxes. A classic is the Grandfather Paradox: What if you went back in time and shot your grandfather, preventing your own birth and thus preventing yourself from ever shooting your grandfather?
It's a headache, to say the least. And not all researchers are convinced that the finding, even if true, would ultimately overturn the well-tested, century-old Special Theory of Relativity that keeps things from getting so messy.
"This effect is very small, it's two parts in 100,000," Feldman said. "If this is true, what it means is that there is some aspect of the Special Theory of Relativity that's been overlooked or not understood well, but I can't imagine that it really overtakes the Special Theory of Relativity."
You can follow LiveScience senior writer Stephanie Pappas on Twitter @sipappas. Follow LiveScience for the latest in science news and discoveries on Twitter @livescience and on Facebook.
Tuesday, September 6, 2011
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
Goodbye Religion? How Godlessness Is Increasing With Each New Generation | Belief | AlterNet
August 10, 2011 |
Photo Credit: apdk via flickr
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Something strange is happening to American teenagers. If you believe popular wisdom, young people are apathetic, cynical and jaded; or, they're supposed to be conformists whose overriding desire is to fit in and be popular. But if you've been paying close attention over the past decade, you might have seen any of a growing number of cases that conspicuously defy these stereotypes: stories of teenagers who have strong principles they're unashamed to display and which they're committed to defending, even at great personal cost, against the bullying of a hostile establishment.
For example, in 2002, an Eagle Scout named Darrell Lambert was threatened with expulsion from the Boy Scouts, despite his having earned dozens of merit badges and having held literally every leadership position in his troop. His crime? He's an outspoken atheist. When the news of his beliefs reached scouting officials, they demanded that he change his mind. He was given a week to think it over. All he had to do was lie, but if he did that, he said, "I wouldn't be a good Scout then, would I?" For his honesty, he was kicked out of the organization he'd devoted his life to.
In New Jersey in 2006, a public high school teacher named David Paskiewicz was openly preaching Christianity in the classroom, advocating creationism and telling a Muslim student she would burn in hell if she didn't convert. A junior named Matt LaClair reported this illegal government preaching to the school administration. In a meeting with the principal, Paskiewicz denied everything -- whereupon LaClair produced audio recordings of him saying the things he specifically denied having said.
In Indiana in 2009, the senior class at a public school was asked to vote on whether to have a prayer as part of their graduation ceremony. A senior named Eric Workman, knowing full well that school-sponsored prayer is illegal even if a majority votes for it, filed a lawsuit and won an injunction against the prayer. The school administration responded by announcing it wouldn't review graduation speeches in advance, clearly hoping that some student would use the opportunity to say the same prayer -- except that the class valedictorian was Eric Workman, and he used his graduation speech to explain why the school's actions were unconstitutional and to explain the importance of the First Amendment.
Stories like these are multiplying all over the nation. In South Carolina just this year, a graduating senior named Harrison Hopkins put a stop to school prayer with help from the Freedom from Religion Foundation. In Louisiana, a senior named Damon Fowler fought against similar school-sponsored prayers at his graduation. In Rhode Island, an amazing sophomore named Jessica Ahlquist is leading the fight to get an illegal "School Prayer" banner removed from her school's auditorium.
Granted, stories like these aren't entirely a new phenomenon. There have always been brave young free thinkers who dared to stand up for their rights, and there has always been a hostile, prejudiced religious majority that's tried to silence them with bullying, persecution and harassment.
For instance, when church-state hero Ellery Schempp prevailed in a landmark First Amendment case against school-sponsored Bible reading, his principal wrote to the colleges he had applied to and asked them not to admit him. (It didn't work: Ellery was accepted to Tufts University, graduated with honors and became a successful scientist.) Likewise, when Jim McCollum and his mother Vashti challenged their school over a released-time program, raving bigots assaulted him, got her fired from her job, pelted their home with rotten fruit and killed their cat. (The McCollums didn't relent, and won a precedent-setting Supreme Court decision striking down religious instruction on public school time.)
Regrettably, this hasn't changed as much as I'd like. Most of the student activists I named earlier have faced harassment, some from peers, some from the teachers and authority figures who are supposed to be the responsible ones. Damon Fowler was demeaned by a teacher and disowned by his own parents for opposing prayer at his graduation. But what's different now is that young people who speak out aren't left to face the mob alone. Now more than ever before, there's a thriving, growing secular community that's becoming increasingly confident, assertive, and capable of looking out for its own.
When Fowler was kicked out of his house, a fundraiser on Friendly Atheist netted over $30,000 in donations to pay for his living expenses and college tuition. The Secular Student Alliance, a national organization that supports student atheist and freethought clubs, is growing by leaps and bounds in colleges and high schools. (This is especially important in the light of psychological experiments which find that it's much easier to resist peer pressure if you have even one other person standing with you.) Student activists like the ones I've mentioned are no longer just scattered voices in the crowd; they're the leading edge of a wave.
All these individual facts add up to a larger picture, which is confirmed by statistical evidence: Americans are becoming less religious, with rates of atheism and secularism increasing in each new generation. This demographic transformation has been in progress ever since World War II, but in recent years it's begun to seriously pick up steam. In the generation born since 1982, variously referred to as Generation Y, the Millennials, or Generation Next, one in five people identify as nonreligious, atheist, or agnostic. In the youngest cohort, the trend is even more dramatic: as many as 30% of those born since 1990 are nonbelievers. Another study, this one by a Christian polling firm, found that people are leaving Christianity at four times the rate that new members are joining.
What could be causing this generational shift towards godlessness? There are multiple theories, but only one of them that I'm aware of both makes good sense and is corroborated by the facts.
Over the last few decades, society in general, and young people in particular, have become increasingly tolerant of gays and other minorities. For the most part, this is a predictable result of familiarity: people who've grown up in an increasingly multicultural society see less problem with interracial relationships (89% of Generation Nexters approve of interracial marriage, compared to 70% of older age groups) and same-sex marriage (47% in favor among Nexters, compared to 30% in older groups). When it comes to issues like whether gays and lesbians should be protected from job discrimination or allowed to adopt, the age gap in support is even more dramatic (71% vs. 59% and 61% vs. 44%, respectively).
But while American society is moving forward on all these fronts, many churches not only refuse to go along, they're actively moving backward. Most large Christian sects, both Catholic and Protestant, have made fighting against gay rights and women's rights their all-consuming crusade. And young people have gotten this message loud and clear: polls find that the most common impressions of Christianity are that it's hostile, judgmental and hypocritical. In particular, an incredible 91% of young non-Christians say that Christianity is "anti-homosexual", and significant majorities say that Christianity treats being gay as a bigger sin than anything else. (When right-wing politicians thunder that same-sex marriage is worse than terrorism, it's not hard to see where people have gotten this impression.)
On other social issues as well, the gap between Gen Nexters and the church looms increasingly wide. Younger folks favor full access to the morning-after pill by a larger margin than older generations (59% vs. 46%). They reject the notion that women should return to "traditional roles" -- already a minority position, but they disagree with it even more strongly than others. And they're by far the least likely of all age groups to say that they have "old-fashioned" values about family and marriage (67% say this, as compared to 85% of other age groups).
In a society that's increasingly tolerant and enlightened, the big churches remain stubbornly entrenched in the past, clinging to medieval dogmas about gay people and women, presuming to lecture their members about how they should vote, whom they should love, how they should live. It's no surprise that people who've grown up in this tolerant age find it absurd when they're told that their family and friends don't deserve civil rights, and it's even less of a surprise that, when they're told they must believe this to be good Christians, they simply walk away. This trend is reflected in the steadily rising percentages of Americans who say that religion is "old-fashioned and out of date" and can't speak to today's social problems.
The Roman Catholic church in particular has been hit hard by this. According to a 2009 Pew study, "Faith in Flux," one in ten American adults is a former Catholic, and a majority of ex-Catholics cite unhappiness with the church's archaic stance on abortion, homosexuality, birth control or the treatment of women as a major factor in their departure. But evangelical and other Protestant denominations are feeling the same sting. According to a survey by the sociologists Robert Putnam and David Campbell, moderates and progressives are heading for the exits as the churches increasingly become the domain of conservatives:
From the early 1970s to the late 1980s the fraction of Americans age 18 to 29 who identified with evangelical Protestantism rose to 25% from 20%, but since 1990, that fraction has fallen back to about 17%....Today, 17% of Americans say they have no religion, and these new "nones" are very heavily concentrated among Americans who have come of age since 1990. Between 25% and 30% of twentysomethings today say they have no religious affiliation -- roughly four times higher than in any previous generation.
Even the mainstream, relatively liberal Protestant churches are dwindling and dying at an astonishing rate: collateral damage, perhaps, in a political war that's led young people to view them as guilty by association. As the journal First Things observes in an article titled "The Death of Protestant America," the mainline churches have fallen from more than 50% of the American population in 1965 to less than 8% today.
What all this means is that the rise of atheism as a political force is an effect, rather than a cause, of the churches' hard right turn towards fundamentalism. I admit that this conclusion is a little damaging to my ego. I'd love to say that we atheists did it all ourselves; I'd love to be able to say that our dazzling wit and slashing rhetorical attacks are persuading people to abandon organized religion in droves. But the truth is that the churches' wounds are largely self-inflicted. By obstinately clinging to prejudices that the rest of society is moving beyond, they're in the process of making themselves irrelevant. In fact, there are indications that it's a vicious circle: as churches become less tolerant and more conservative, their younger and more progressive members depart, which makes their average membership still more conservative, which accelerates the progressive exodus still further, and so on. (A similar dynamic is at work in the Republican party, which explains their increasing levels of insanity over the past two or three decades.)
That doesn't mean, however, that that there's nothing we freethinkers can contribute. On the contrary, there's a virtuous circle that we can take advantage of: the more we speak out and the more visible we are, the more familiar atheism will become, and the more it will be seen as a viable alternative, which will encourage still more people to join us and speak out. This is exactly the same strategy that's been used successfully by trailblazers in the gay-rights movement and other social reform efforts.
At the same time, the churches aren't entirely oblivious to what's happening. The rising secular tide of Generation Next hasn't gone unfelt or unnoticed, but is increasingly being reflected in dwindling donations, graying congregations, and empty churches across the land. As John Avant, a vice president for evangelization of the Southern Baptist Conference, lamented:
A study by New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary's Leavell Center for Evangelism and Church Health showed that only 11 percent of SBC churches are healthy and growing... And we are doing worse with young people, with 39 percent of Southern Baptist churches in 2005 reporting baptizing no teens. (source)
The Catholic church is experiencing a similar slow fade, with declining Mass attendance and a crippling shortage of priests worldwide. Land once owned by religious orders is being sold off for conservation or public use, turned into schools or nature preserves. The Pope's response, meanwhile, is to accelerate the decline by ordering bishops not even to discuss the possibility of ordaining women or married men, even as he welcomes Holocaust deniers and ex-Angelican misogynists.
And religious giving has declined as well, leaving shrinking churches grappling with layoffs and angry creditors. The recession has worsened this trend, but didn't create it; like all the other patterns, it's generational, with each increasingly secular age group giving less than the last. As one conservative rabbi says, the dip in giving stems from a "growing disinterest in organized religion."
Of course, Christianity is still by far the largest religious affiliation in America, and likely will be for some time. But the numbers don't lie, and the trends of the last several decades show more and more evidence of the same secularizing wave that's overtaking most countries in Europe. The major churches, clinging to the inferior morality of long-gone ages, are increasingly out of step with a world that's more enlightened, rational and tolerant than it once was. And the more they dig in their heels, the more we can expect this process to accelerate. I, for one, can't wait to see the young atheist activists who will emerge in the next few decades.
Adam Lee is the author and creator of Daylight Atheism, one of the largest and most popular weblogs on the Internet whose primary focus is on atheism. His original essays written for the site explore issues in politics, science, history, philosophy, and popular culture. Lee is the author of a forthcoming book, also titled Daylight Atheism, which advances the atheist viewpoint and argues that lack of religious belief is a positive liberation and the gateway to a moral life filled with purpose and joy.
Could Rick Perry really beat Obama? - The Week
Burning QuestionCould Rick Perry really beat Obama?
His credentials impress Christians and fiscal conservatives. But how would the Texas governor's politics go over in a general election?
posted on August 15, 2011, at 12:57 PMTexas Gov. Rick Perry jumped into the presidential race, Saturday, offering Republicans a more conservative alternative to Mitt Romney. Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images SEE ALL 11 PHOTOS
Best Opinion: Mother Jones, Hot Air, Daily Beast
Texas Gov. Rick Perry launched his long-anticipated presidential campaign on Saturday, instantly shaking up the race for the Republican nomination. In a year when conservatives complain that Mitt Romney is too moderate, and centrists consider Michele Bachmann a Tea Party extremist, Perry boasts a resume that offers something to both crowds. Is Perry the "superhero" Republicans have been waiting for to take on President Obama?
No way. He is too extreme: "Perry may come out of the gate strong," says Kevin Drum at Mother Jones, "but he might not wear well once the national spotlight is on him." His overt, "fire-and-brimstone" Christianity won't go over well outside the Bible Belt. And some of his more outrageous declarations — "Social Security is a Ponzi scheme," Texas might secede from the union — are too extreme, even for most Republicans. He'd never survive a general election.
"Why Rick Perry won't win"Actually, Perry could be the guy to defeat Obama: Rick Perry didn't come out of nowhere, says Ed Morrissey at Hot Air. He has spent the last year "picking very national fights with the Obama administration" over regulation and federal trampling of states' rights. His legislative agenda has included border security and abortion, plus he has a "jobs record for which Obama will have no answer at all." This guy's the "real deal."
"Why Perry may be the real deal"One thing is certain — Perry vs. Obama would not be pretty: Rick Perry is just the kind of Texas "shit-kicker" Republicans love, says Michael Tomasky at The Daily Beast, which is precisely why he makes liberals' skin crawl. And I know full well that Republicans' "conservatives feel similarly about Obama," whom they see as a Chardonnay-swilling elitist. That's why I don't relish the prospect of a general election pitting Perry against Obama. "We're divided enough, thanks."
"Rick Perry: Red-state warrior"
Tuesday, August 2, 2011
The Mission to Get Osama Bin Laden : The New Yorker
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