ללא מחבר No Author

How to Protect Your Data From Thieves Both Public and Private

Akiva’s Latest ‘Net Security Primer

by Reb Akiva at Mystical Paths

Being of the techie genre, I’m frequently asked by friends and family about computer/internet/phone security advice.  Here’s my latest advice… and it’s kind of long and detailed, but since everyone is now managing many life activities through their phone and computer — YOU ARE A TARGET for criminals because that’s where the money is!

Security Tip #1 – use 2-factor authentication on any service that offers it.

What does this mean?  It means you can’t just log in to a service with your password, the service will require either another special code or send you an SMS with another code (or call you with it).

How do I do this?  Each service has it’s own option you have to find and turn on in settings.  For Google (Gmail, etc), go here.  Facebook go here.  For any other service, check for a 2 factor or multi-factor option in settings.

This is a major security control to immediately put in place!  Also make sure there is a recovery or work-around option in case the device (usually phone) is lost or stolen, and keep track of the recovery information.

Security Tip #2 – 2-factor authentication usually offers an option to use an “Authentication App” (here’s Google’s), which is much more convenient that having to receive an SMS – and therefore I recommend.  But what if your phone is stolen or hacked (and the app is on your phone)?  I use Authy, an authentication app that works with everyone (Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc), and requires a pin code to enter – so the app is protected if your phone is stolen or hacked.  A further advantage of Authy is it can be shared on multiple phones, so your spouse and you can have access.  (Other authentication apps only work on one phone at a time, so if the phone is lost or stolen – or the person is unavailable to unlock it, then the access is unavailable.).  Here’s Authy for Android, and here it is for iPhone.

Security Tip #3 – Your internet browser is a weak point, select a new one focused on security and control.  Chrome used to be the fast and secure browser, and it’s the default on all Android phones.  But between hacks, attacks, and Google tracks, it’s become a risk point and a way to track you.  I currently recommend Brave browser, which has many security and privacy capabilities built in and turned on by default.  Brave is available for all platforms – Windows, Mac, Android, iPhone and iPad.

If you are on a Mac, then Safari is an ok choice…with some adjustments (see Ghostery below).

BUT, if/when you must use Chrome… there are a few sites that only work correctly in Chrome.  Since sometimes Chrome must be used, I recommend installing the following Chrome Extensions – get them here – to improve security and the browsing experience.  (But note, the extensions can also cause some rare sites to have issues and may need to be disabled for that site – click on each extension icon to ‘disable or trust this site’).  Chrome extensions work on all versions of Chrome – Windows, Mac, phone.

Extension – uBlock Origin.  This add-on blocks most ads and some forms of attack.

Extension – Ghostery.  This add-on blocks tracking and data leakage.  I strongly recommend this one also if you are using Safari, special version for Safari available here.

Extension – Poper Blocker.  This add-on blocks pop ups, pop under, and overlays.  Stops both ads and attempts to fake you out by laying things on top of a page without you knowing it.

Continue reading…

From Mystical Paths, here.

 

The Welfare State Must Die So the Family May Live

The Welfare State’s Attack on the Family

07/12/2006 Vedran Vuk

Most people listening to libertarian ideas are thrown off by the thought that private charity, in absence of government programs, will handle problems involving truly helpless people. Charitable organizations are active but no one knows for sure how much donations would increase in a tax-free society.

When a person becomes old without savings, what is he or she supposed to do without socialist programs such as Social Security? The forgotten institution of charity here is the family. When libertarians talk of charity, we don’t just mean the Salvation Army, but taking care of your relatives as well.

When my brother and I were babies, my grandparents stepped in to take care of us while my mother and father worked. My parents in turn provided for the whole household living under one roof to save money. When my father moved to the United States and made more money, he made sure that my grandparents would be taken care of.

During the Balkan War, members of my family were forcefully removed and became refugees due to the conflict. When they lost everything, guess who took care of them? The whole family together sent money and whatever supplies that they could.

So was the rule everywhere before the welfare state: your parents who took care of you financially as a child — you may need to help them in the future. This basic element of family life seems to be mind-boggling to supporters of the welfare state. Proponents of the welfare state constantly speak about our responsibility to society through redistributionist taxes.

I have no responsibility to society as a whole, to some stranger I’ve never met. I personally feel that I do have a responsibility toward my immediate family. Programs like TANF (“Temporary Assistance for Needy Families”), Social Security, and unemployment insurance take away our responsibility to the family and place it in the hands of the state. They crowd out our sense of moral responsibility.

Family was an integral way of caring for individuals as a whole for centuries. Supporters of the welfare state forget the past.

Before the advent of Social Security, what happened to people who lived past 65 years? Did these people just starve to death from hunger by the tens of thousands? No. Did a huge wave of charitable organizations come to their rescue? Not always. So, how did they survive? Everyone can agree that there were no mass deaths of 65-year-old people recorded in the Great Depression before Social Security took effect.

These people survived under a basic principle in life. You take care of your kids, and one day, they will take care of you. In the past, having children was an investment in your future. You knew that one day your children would take care of your needs as you took care of theirs.

This created many incentives that produced a healthy family. For one thing, you had to be somewhat nicer to your children and make sure that you instilled good values. Children without a good work ethic or good values are not likely to perform well in the job market. A parent would have to teach these values to children to insure his or her own needs at a later time. Responsibility to the family ranked highly. Without this ingrained in a child, he or she might grow up one day and never return the nurturing given by parents early in life.

With government attempting to smooth over every mistake in life, we get very different incentives. If your parents are entirely subsidized on welfare, how much do they really care about your future? Parents usually care for their children and want the best for them. But parents who know that they either raise their child right or don’t eat in the future will try many times harder to make sure their child stays away from drugs, crime, and other bad decisions.

The standard abortion excuses also play a major role in the issue. The welfare state has destroyed the culture of hard work and family. I cringe every time I hear someone talk about poverty as an excuse for abortion.

I don’t want to discuss here the rights and wrongs of abortion, but how can you make an excuse that you are too poor to have a child and you have to abort? During much harder economic times, families were having ten or twelve children. Huge families were not uncommon. Today, these abortionists want me to believe that with economic conditions a hundred times better than before, they can’t afford to have a child. They’re going to have to do better than that.

It’s not easy to have a child whether you are rich or poor. At any point in life a baby is difficult to raise and deal with. Even with a college degree, a young mother will have just as much difficulty as a teenager. These are facts of life. Raising children is hard work! The welfare state has reinforced the idea that if anything is hard, it must be wrong.

Doing the right thing is not easy. Difficulty does not justify immoral actions. Sure, taking care of your elderly parents is harder on you than having the state do it. But is it your moral responsibility? Yes. It is not the responsibility of some other taxpayer who does not even know your parents. Anyone who would leave it to strangers to care for their elderly parents should be ashamed.

Before the welfare state, there existed incentives to have children and insure your own future. Now, we have incentives to break the family apart. TANF actually gives more money to single moms. This may seem like a great program to help single mothers in need, but in reality, the program makes it easier for the man in the family to leave. It reduces the man’s practical responsibility to stay and raise the child. The program creates more single mothers!

And some day, it will be the government, not his offspring, who will provide for the man who left. This brings even fewer incentives to raise kids properly.

Unemployment insurance has also undermined society. During the Great Depression, there were great movements of people to find jobs. If there was a job somewhere, people went. Now, with unemployment and welfare people stay in the same city watching everything around them rot and decay. Government housing keeps them complacent as they beg for yet more assistance. When times get tough, people will move to get jobs. The Great Depression has already proved this. Did millions die without welfare or unemployment insurance? No. Does it improve people’s lives to subsidize their staying in one place? No.

I can speak from experience. I’ve seen charity and love within my own family overcoming all obstacles in our times. Being born in former Yugoslavia, my family was accustomed to scarcity and socialist poverty. But I saw the family working together to achieve the greater ends of each member. This was not a socialist kind of responsibility. A family member cared for you at a point in time; later you cared for them.

My father’s mother spent all her savings of thirty years to send my father to medical school. There was no government help there. When, years down the road, she had to retire because of breast cancer, guess who paid her bills and medical treatments. My aunt and uncle also assisted by living with her and taking care of her on a daily basis. There was no dependable national healthcare. There was no subsidized retirement home or social security. The children she gave birth to and raised responsibly made sure that she was well taken care off until her final days. Each was fulfilling his responsibility of a child to his mother.

The agenda of the state is to break up the family. The more you depend on the state, the more you justify its existence, and the larger it grows. The idea that people can provide things for themselves either individually or through the family frightens the state. It delegitimizes its role. The role of the family is dangerous to its survival.

Movement away from the welfare state is movement toward better family values and better family cohesiveness.

The death of the family is the life of the state.

From Mises.org, here.

After Graduating the ‘Most Moral Army in the World’, They Head to Africa…

Another powerful Israeli commits crimes in Africa — and again his government does nothing

 on 

Once again, a powerful Israeli commits serious crimes in Africa. Once again, there are no consequences in Israel.

This time, the alleged criminal is a former major general named Israel Ziv, who once headed the Israeli army’s Operations Directorate. The scene of his crimes is the nation of South Sudan, which has been torn by a civil war since 2013, in which some 400,000 people have already died. The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) has just added more details to the terrible story.

The story is complicated, but here is a summary: in 2015, ex-General Ziv’s “security services firm” contracted with the South Sudanese government to run a farming project, intended to alleviate hunger there. The need is obvious; some 7 million South Sudanese face hunger, mainly due to the disruption of the civil war, and 1.8 million of them are on the brink of starvation.

In fact, the farming project was a fraud. Ziv allegedly used it as cover to sell the government $150 million worth of weapons, “rifles, grenade launchers, and shoulder-fired rockets.” The OCCRP just found that he worked with a big international oil trader, Trafigura, to cover his tracks.

But the story gets even worse. Ziv wasn’t apparently content with his profits —  so he allegedly also stoked the conflict. The U.S. government, which blacklisted him last December, charged that “he has also reportedly planned to organize attacks by mercenaries on South Sudanese oil fields and infrastructure, in an effort to create a problem that only his company and affiliates could solve.”

Ziv’s activities are so reprehensible that even the Trump administration’s Treasury Department sanctioned him and three of his companies.

But Israel’s government? So far, nothing. Larry Derfner, a leading Israeli journalist, said Ziv appeared briefly in the Israeli press when the U.S. sanctioned him, but since then not a word. Derfner, author of the acclaimed memoir, No Country for Jewish Liberals, added that Ziv “is just another Israeli mercenary living his life.”

Ex-general Ziv is hardly the first Israeli to commit crimes in Africa with no punishment in Israel. Dan Gertler, an Israeli billionaire, has teamed up with Joseph Kabila, the former president of the Democratic Republic of Congo, to loot that desperately poor country of billions. Another Israeli super-wealthy businessman, Beny Steinmetz, was mixed up in corruption over mining deals in the West African nation of Guinea.

Israel’s silence is the more surprising given that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been conducting a diplomatic offensive to improve relations with Africa. Israel must hope that more Africans do not learn that Israel looks the other way when its citizens commit terrible crimes on the continent.   

From Mondoweiss, here.

Milchemes Reshus, Milchemes Mitzva, and War of VENGEANCE

Matot: The War Against Midyan: Classic War Of Vengeance

We find in Parshat Mattot, that when Pinchas and the Israeli army return from battling Midyan (after the Midyanite women caused Israel to sin), Moshe angrily questions Pinchas: “Have you saved all the women alive?!” Concerning this, the Ramban quotes the “Sifri”: “Pinchas answered Moshe: As you commanded us, so we did!”

The Ramban then asks the following: Nowhere in the Torah do we find that Moshe commands whom to kill and whom to leave alive. If so, what did Pinchas mean, “as you commanded us, so we did”? If Pinchas was given explicit instructions by Moshe whom to kill, surely he would have carried out the orders. What then happened here? That is, what is Moshe’s complaint, and what is Pinchas’s response?

Ramban’s answer to this question is that a misunderstanding occurred. Pinchas assumed that this war was the same as any other obligatory war (“Milchemet Mitzvah”) or permissible war (“Milchemet Rishut”), whose laws are outlined in Deuteronomy 20:10. In most of these wars, only males are to be killed (with the exception of obligatory wars against Amalek or against the nations who dwelled in the land previously, where all are to be killed including women and children). We can now understand what Pinchas meant when he said, “as you commanded, so we did.” He meant, as you commanded us in the Torah.

Circumstances Determine the Reaction

And so when Moshe saw that Israel left the females alive, he explains, “Behold, these (specifically the females) caused the children of Israel, through the counsel of Bilaam, to revolt against the Lord in the matter of Peor, and there was a plague among the congregation of the Lord.” Moshe is teaching us a vital lesson here: There is another category of war – a war of vengeance. As opposed to the regular wars (both permissible and obligatory), where the laws are pre-set regarding who is to killed or spared (see Rambam, Laws of Kings, Chapter 6), the wars of vengeance are a direct response to what was done to Israel. It takes into consideration specific actions of the enemy in the past. Therefore, the way in which the enemy is treated varies from one war to another, depending on the specific circumstances. In the case of the war against Midyan, which was fought to avenge what the women of Midyan did, it would have been proper for the Jewish army to make the women of Midyan the very first victims. And so, we have learned a principle regarding a “war of vengeance” – that the type of vengeance which is exacted depends on what or who is being avenged.

“As They Did to Me, So I Do to Them”

This same concept appears in the form of Shimshon HaGibor (the mighty Samson) who avenged the honor of Israel. In the book of Judges, we learn that when the men of Judah come to arrest Shimshon and hand him over to the Philistines, they inquired to know why he terrorizes the Philistines so. Shimshon answered: As they did to me, so I do to them. (Judges 15:11) In other words: Measure for measure. This is similar to what the prophet Shmuel says to Agag, the Amalekian King, as he takes him out to be executed: “Just as your sword made women childless, so shall your mother be childless among women”. (Shmuel 1, 15:33) It is incumbent upon the haters of Israel to know: Punishment will be exacted from them precisely according to the measure they oppress Israel!!

Such is the case with King David, warrior and conqueror. Our sages tell us that David’s war against the nation of Moav was retribution for the killing of David’s parents and brothers by the King of Moav after David had sent his family there when he fled Saul. His subsequent treatment of the Moavites was quite unconventional: “David measured his captives with a rope, laying them down on the ground and measuring two rope lengths to be put to death, and one rope length to be kept alive…” The commentator Radak explains: “It was an act of revenge and humiliation.” Once again, we see that treatment of the enemy during a war is tailored according to the circumstances at hand.

Israel’s Revenge = G-d’s Revenge

It is imperative to understand the concept of revenge in depth, especially in this generation when alien westernized culture has seeped into the yeshiva halls, turning the awesome concept of revenge into a dirty word. As opposed to personal revenge between one Jew against another, which is wrong and falls under the heading, “thou shall not take revenge”, here we are dealing with revenge by Israel against her enemies. This is not a personal matter! It is a matter of sanctifying G-d’s Name! You may ask: What does vengeance have to do with sanctifying G-d’s Name? This is what our sages ask, too. We find in our parsha, that when G-d appears to Moshe, He tells him, “take vengeance for the children of Israel against Midyan.” However, when Moshe relays the orders to Israel, he says, “arm men to inflict G-d’svengeance against Midyan.” Nu, so which is it? G-d’s revenge, or Israel’srevenge? Rashi answers the riddle: “Those who fight against Israel, it is as if they fight against G-d Himself.” It’s that simple. Since the nation of Israel is G-d’s Chosen Nation and His representative in the world, when someone hurts or degrades them, the name of G-d is desecrated. Revenge is not a primitive or Fascist matter, it is a lofty matter of Kiddush Hashem!

Moshe’s Craving…

Now we can understand why Moshe was so furious when the Midyanite women were kept alive. When the desecration of G-d’s Holy Name is at stake, there is no time to waste! Our sages teach: “Moshe craved to see vengeance taken against Midyan before his death.” When he saw that the vengeance he craved was not completed, he became furious. The sages continue: “If Moshe wanted to live a few more years, the power was in his hands. G-d had said to him, take vengeance, and then you will gathered amongst your people. The Torah stipulates Moshe’s death on his taking revenge against Midyan. This is to teach you Moshe’s greatness. He said, so that I shall live shall I delay the vengeance of Israel?!” (BaMidbar Raba 22:2)

From Kahane Resources, here.

Judaism: Fighting TODAY’S War

Responding To The Times

By Rabbi Yaacov Haber

There was once a Chasidic Rebbe known as the ‘Rebbe Ha’Katan’. He was six years old when he inherited the mantle of the rebbe. Because of his age, he was assigned an uncle, a great person in his own right, to guide and teach him until he was ready to take over the full mantle of leadership.

His uncle once found him packing a suitcase on a Friday morning and asked the young Rebbe where he was going. The young Rebbe explained that he had just received an urgent message from a poor farmer in an isolated area. The message said that his only cow, the only means of the family’s sustenance, was due to give birth that Shabbos. He therefore requested that the Rebbe come to spend Shabbos to pray for the well-being of the cow.

The astonished uncle explained that the custom of the great Chasidic Rebbes was never to travel anywhere on Erev Shabbos. “In any case,” asked the uncle, “why can’t you just daven for the cow from here!?”

The young Rebbe responded: “I understood from the message I received that the cow was not the real issue. The family is isolated, poor and needed the inspiration of a shabbos in the presence of a Rebbe. He wants his children to know the Rebbe and make Kiddush together. I feel that this is the real issue and that is why I am traveling on Erev Shabbos.”

“If you can read that telegram and understand what it is REALLY asking you are a real Rebbe! You no longer need a mentor!”

Leadership is the ability to see the need of the moment. to see beneath the surface and read between the lines. To depart, if need be, from the ancient custom and respond to the need of the moment.

Pinchas is mentioned in our parsha as the grandson of Aharon. He could be presumed to have a similar approach to the world. Yet, his act of zealotry is the polar opposite of what we know of the peace-loving Aharon, who gently draws people to the Torah.

Not only that, but even in a comparable situation, their responses are worlds apart. When Aharon encounters the mass idolatry of the Golden Calf his response was calm. He didn’t rail and rage or charge with a spear. He took no action to stop the Golden Calf in its tracks. He gently and subtly tried to cause a delay, in order to give time for Moshe to return. Why didn’t he act like Pinchus?

Pinchas, in contrast, when faced with mass, public transgression, takes definitive, aggressive action which halts the problem immediately risking his own life.  The Zohar comments that Pinchas was the tikkun for Aharon.

I would suggest that each response was entirely correct, each for its own generation. The generation who made the Golden Calf had just left Egypt a few weeks earlier; they were spiritually immature. The Jewish people which Pinchas encountered, had been eating from Hashem’s hand for forty years and were ready to enter Eretz Yisrael. They warranted a different type of response.

The Talmud explains, that ‘Yiftach in his generation was as great as the Prophet Shmuel was for his generation’. The point is not to reminisce about the greatness of previous generations since the leadership G-d sends is generation-specific. The question of whether previous leaders were of greater stature is meaningless. The appropriate leadership for a generation is that which fully understands the context and needs of the people, and therefore how to respond.

From Torah Lab, here.