Dave Kordalewski

In shul this morning, the second day of Rosh Hashanah, the rabbi spoke at length about the State of Israel. This is more surprising than you might think. I’ve been going to this shul since I moved to Brooklyn in 1999, and if memory serves, it’s only been in the last two or three years that the rabbi has devoted at least one of her High Holy Days talks to Israel.

Throughout the aughts, Israel didn’t come up much in shul. During flash points of the Second Intifada, you might hear a prayer for Jewish Israelis or nervous temporizing about some action in Jenin or Gaza. But I can’t recall an entire sermon devoted to the State of Israel and its meaning for Jews.

That’s also how I remember much of my synagogue experience as a kid. Don’t get me wrong: Israel was central to my Jewish education. My entire family—my five sisters, my parents, and my grandfather—visited there with our synagogue in 1977. Several of my sisters, as well as my parents, have been back. The safety of Israel was always on my mind; I remember spending many a Friday night service imagining a terrorist attack on our synagogue, so short seemed the distance between suburban New York and Tel Aviv. I wrote about Israel in school essays (I actually defended its role in the Sabra and Shatila massacre). I had a strong feeling for Israel (or what I thought was Israel): a combination of hippie and holy, Godly and groovy, a feeling well captured by Steven Spielberg in Munich.

But for all of Israel’s role in my Jewish upbringing, I don’t remember my rabbi talking about the state all that much. In fact, the only time I remember him bringing it up was in 1982, not long after Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. This was the first time that I became aware of international criticism of Israel. I had known, of course, about Arab and Palestinian opposition to the state, but in the world of American Jewry, that was all too easy to dismiss. The 1982 invasion, however, was especially controversial and brought Israel intense criticism from across the globe. Or at least sufficiently intense that I noticed.

Our rabbi—Chaim Stern, who edited the prayer book that’s now used at Reform synagogues across the country—was wry and erudite, not given to hot pronouncements. But something in the air that year stirred him to defend the State of Israel against its many critics. I’ve forgotten most of what he said, but one comment stuck with me: Israel should be allowed to be a normal state. We shouldn’t demand of Israel that it be a nation above others; we should let it be a state among others. Stern didn’t mean what many of us would now take that statement to mean: that Israel should be held to the same standard as other states, particularly states that claim to be liberal democracies. He meant that it should be free to hunt and kill its enemies. Just like any other state.

But aside from this one instance, my memory of my rabbi is that he was relatively silent on the topic. Israel was so much a part of the moral and material fabric of our lives that it didn’t require elaborate sermons and defenses or justifications. It (or an image of it) was something we lived rather than something we were lectured about.

And that’s how it had mostly been at the shul I now attend in Brooklyn. Until about two years ago. I remember the rabbi first taking up the topic in earnest in 2011 (or was it 2010?), almost apologetically, saying that we in the shul had been too quiet about Israel. It was time to talk. And by talk, she meant defend. Israel was under attack, politically and ideologically; its status in the culture could no longer be taken for granted. We had to speak up on its behalf. I remember wondering at the time whether she wasn’t responding to some specific call from other rabbis, a sense that Israel was beginning to lose control of the conversation not just internationally but in the US as well.

But what’s become clear to me since then—and this morning’s sermon confirmed it—is that it’s not the goyim the rabbis are worried about; it’s Jews. And not merely anti-Zionist, middle-aged lefty Jews like me but also younger Jews who are indifferent to Zionism.

In her talk this morning, the rabbi cited a statistic: where 80 percent of Jews over 65 feel that the destruction of the State of Israel would be a personal tragedy, only 50 percent of Jews under 35 feel the same way. I have no idea if this is true or what study it’s based on (this article in Tablet cites the same statistic), and admittedly it’s a high (and kind of weird) bar upon which to hang and measure support for the State of Israel. But my anecdotal sense is that there is something to it. Earlier this year, I had a drink with a 20-something journalist who’s Jewish. He said most Jews his age didn’t think or care all that much about Israel. Where Jews my age had to work toward our opposition to Israel—overcoming heated criticism and feelings of betrayal from friends and family—Jews his age, he suggested, could simply slough off the state as if it were so many old clothes.

But what most stood out for me from this morning’s sermon was how nervous the rabbi was about bringing up the topic. After talking a bit about how Israel felt to her as a kid (her memories are much like mine), she said that nowadays it seemed as if one couldn’t have a conversation with another Jew about Israel without fearing that it would explode into an argument. So fraught is the topic, she said, that many of us have opted not to talk about it at all. An uneasy silence had descended upon the Jewish community—an anxious modus vivendi in which we don’t agree to disagree but agree not to discuss—and it was this, more than anything, that worried her.

Now there are many reasons why a Jew would be made nervous by such a silence. Jews like to pride themselves on their tradition of argument and internal dissent. For every two Jews, three opinions, and so on. (That’s often not been my experience of Jews and Judaism, but it’s certainly a part of our sense of ourselves). Judaism, moreover, is not a religion of inner lights, of atomistic individuals who do their own thing. Ours is the religion of a people, a people with a rather insistent sense of collectivity. We do not shuffle into private confessionals; we declare our guilt publicly and communally. On Yom Kippur, we recite all the offenses we have committed against God and to each other (my personal favorite is “stiff-neckedness”). Individually, we may not have committed all of them, but that doesn’t matter. Somewhere, someone in the community did, and we’re all responsible.

But the rabbi wasn’t concerned about the conversation about Israel for these reasons. Something else seemed to be bothering her. If Jews can’t speak to each other about Israel, how can they defend the state to the rest of the country, much less the world? If defenders of Israel can’t make the case to the Jewish people, to whom can they make the case? Instead of issuing a call to arms, the rabbi pleaded for civility: let’s learn to speak to each other with mutual regard and respect, not to demonize each other simply because we take different positions on the State of Israel. Though she framed this as a universal injunction, I suspect she was speaking more personally. It seemed as if she felt like she had been demonized for her support for Israel (which is not, I should hasten to add, uncritical support but probably something closer to Peter Beinart’s liberal Zionism). And not by Arabs or the French, but by other Jews, perhaps even Jews in her own congregation.

I know how she feels. Though I grew up in a Zionist family, my position on Israel began to shift during my last years as an undergraduate in the late 1980s. In my junior year, I studied at Jesus College, Oxford. On the one hand, the experience solidified my identity as a Jew. Growing up in suburban Westchester, I never felt marked as other, as exotic or alien or strange. But at Oxford I did (I remember visiting a friend’s family over the Christmas holiday. Upon my arrival, the first thing they remarked upon was my being Jewish. It was as if they had been talking about it for weeks, wondering what they would do with this Jew once he crossed the threshold.) I came away from my year in England not only more identified as a Jew but also more interested in being Jewish.

On the other hand, that was the year of the Intifada, which set me on a path of questioning the State of Israel. When I returned to the States, I heard Edward Said speak on campus. I was mesmerized (anyone who had the privilege of hearing Said on Israel/Palestine knows what I’m talking about).

Coming out of these experiences, I recommitted myself to Judaism while rejecting Zionism. I learned how to be a Jew without Israel.

My break with Israel didn’t happen all at once. It was a process, but it did have an end point. In the summer of 1993, I was in Tennessee with my then-girlfriend, who was doing dissertation research there. Toward the end of the summer, I bought a copy of Said’s The Question of Palestine and read it in two days. As we drove back to New Haven, all hell broke loose. She was Jewish and at the time a firm if critical believer in Israel as a Jewish state. I began the car ride by voicing some tentative criticisms, but the conversation quickly escalated. It ended with me declaring that no child of mine would ever step foot in the State of Israel (I was kind of melodramatic in those days). We didn’t speak for a week.

That was my last experience of really getting into it with another Jew over Israel. I learned my lesson. I kept quiet. For about a decade and a half. The topic was simply too painful. I would only talk about it with ideologically sympathetic friends (and a couple of my sisters, who had come around to the same position as me) or with non-Jews. I couldn’t bear the feeling that I was being disloyal to the Jewish people; it was as if I had turned my back on my own family. I didn’t change my position; I just didn’t publicize or push it.

But something has changed in the last few years. The BDS movement has made great strides, critics like Ali Abunimah provide thousands of followers on Twitter with a constant stream of vital information we wouldn’t get elsewhere, books like Mearsheimer and Walt’s The Israel Lobby (whatever you think of its thesis) have blown open a topic long considered taboo, and respected voices in the mainstream media like Glenn Greenwald (and before him, Tony Judt) have made it possible for Jews to speak our minds on the topic. Now my little tribe within a tribe is more vocal, and suddenly it is our opponents who feel like they have to be careful around us and not vice versa.

I don’t want to overstate things. The pro-Israel forces still have an iron grip on the conversation in Congress (not to mention the expenditures and actions of the American state as a whole); critics of Israel are still vulnerable on college campuses; and lock-step support for Israel is still a requirement for mainstream respectability in most of the mainstream media.

I also wouldn’t want to make too much of a few sermons at my shul in Brooklyn, which despite being Conservative is politically progressive. I suspect the conversation in other shuls is rather different.

Still, if what my rabbi says is any indication, something may be happening in the Jewish community. If we look beneath the world of AIPAC and high politics, if we pay attention to the everyday conversation and its unspoken rules of discretion, we may be seeing a subtle shift in manners and mores that portends something larger and more fundamental.

I don’t know what that something larger is, or will be, and despite what Montesquieu and Tocqueville taught us, the politics of politesse is just that. Even so, for the first time in 20 years, I’m hopeful.

Shanah Tovah.

Update (Sept. 9): Reading more about these things, and talking to friends who are experts in applied cryptography, has caused me to do the unthinkable, and change my mind somewhat.  I now feel that, while the views expressed in this post were OK as far as they went, they failed to do justice to the … complexity (har, har) of what’s at stake.  Most importantly, I didn’t clearly explain that there’s an enormous continuum between, on the one hand, a full break of RSA or Diffie-Hellman (which still seems extremely unlikely to me), and on the other, “pure side-channel attacks” involving no new cryptanalytic ideas.  Along that continuum, there are many plausible places where the NSA might be.  For example, imagine that they had a combination of side-channel attacks, novel algorithmic advances, and sheer computing power that enabled them to factor, let’s say, ten 2048-bit RSA keys every year.  In such a case, it would still make perfect sense that they’d want to insert backdoors into software, sneak vulnerabilities into the standards, and do whatever else it took to minimize their need to resort to such expensive attacks.  But the possibility of number-theoretic advances well beyond what the open world knows certainly wouldn’t be ruled out.  Also, as Schneier has emphasized, the fact that NSA has been aggressively pushing elliptic-curve cryptography in recent years invites the obvious speculation that they know something about ECC that the rest of us don’t.

And that brings me to a final irony in this story.  When a simpleminded complexity theorist like me hears his crypto friends going on and on about the latest clever attack that still requires exponential time, but that puts some of the keys in current use just within reach of gigantic computing clusters, his first instinct is to pound the table and shout: “well then, so why not just increase all your key sizes by a factor of ten?  Sweet Jesus, the asymptotics are on your side!  if you saw a killer attack dog on a leash, would you position yourself just outside what you guesstimated to be the leash’s radius?  why not walk a mile away, if you can?”  The crypto experts invariably reply that it’s a lot more complicated than I realize, because standards, and efficiency, and smartphones … and before long I give up and admit that I’m way out of my depth.

So it’s amusing that one obvious response to the recent NSA revelations—a response that sufficiently-paranoid people, organizations, and governments might well actually take, in practice—precisely matches the naïve complexity-theorist intuition.  Just increase the damn key sizes by a factor of ten (or whatever).

Another Update (Sept. 20): In my original posting, I should also have linked to Matthew Green’s excellent post.  My bad.

Last week, I got an email from a journalist with the following inquiry.  The recent Snowden revelations, which made public for the first time the US government’s “black budget,” contained the following enigmatic line from the Director of National Intelligence: “We are investing in groundbreaking cryptanalytic capabilities to defeat adversarial cryptography and exploit internet traffic.”  So, the journalist wanted to know, what could these “groundbreaking” capabilities be?  And in particular, was it possible that the NSA was buying quantum computers from D-Wave, and using them to run Shor’s algorithm to break the RSA cryptosystem?

I replied that, yes, that’s “possible,” but only in the same sense that it’s “possible” that the NSA is using the Easter Bunny for the same purpose.  (For one thing, D-Wave themselves have said repeatedly that they have no interest in Shor’s algorithm or factoring.  Admittedly, I guess that’s what D-Wave would say, were they making deals with NSA on the sly!  But it’s also what the Easter Bunny would say.)  More generally, I said that if the open scientific world’s understanding is anywhere close to correct, then quantum computing might someday become a practical threat to cryptographic security, but it isn’t one yet.

That, of course, raised the extremely interesting question of what “groundbreaking capabilities” the Director of National Intelligence was referring to.  I said my personal guess was that, with ~99% probability, he meant various implementation vulnerabilities and side-channel attacks—the sort of thing that we know has compromised deployed cryptosystems many times in the past, but where it’s very easy to believe that the NSA is ahead of the open world.  With ~1% probability, I guessed, the NSA made some sort of big improvement in classical algorithms for factoring, discrete log, or other number-theoretic problems.  (I would’ve guessed even less than 1% probability for the latter, before the recent breakthrough by Joux solving discrete log in fields of small characteristic in quasipolynomial time.)

Then, on Thursday, a big New York Times article appeared, based on 50,000 or so documents that Snowden leaked to the Guardian and that still aren’t public.  (See also an important Guardian piece by security expert Bruce Schneier, and accompanying Q&A.)  While a lot remains vague, there might be more public information right now about current NSA cryptanalytic capabilities than there’s ever been.

So, how did my uninformed, armchair guesses fare?  It’s only halfway into the NYT article that we start getting some hints:

The files show that the agency is still stymied by some encryption, as Mr. Snowden suggested in a question-and-answer session on The Guardian’s Web site in June.

“Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on,” he said, though cautioning that the N.S.A. often bypasses the encryption altogether by targeting the computers at one end or the other and grabbing text before it is encrypted or after it is decrypted…

Because strong encryption can be so effective, classified N.S.A. documents make clear, the agency’s success depends on working with Internet companies — by getting their voluntary collaboration, forcing their cooperation with court orders or surreptitiously stealing their encryption keys or altering their software or hardware…

Simultaneously, the N.S.A. has been deliberately weakening the international encryption standards adopted by developers. One goal in the agency’s 2013 budget request was to “influence policies, standards and specifications for commercial public key technologies,” the most common encryption method.

Cryptographers have long suspected that the agency planted vulnerabilities in a standard adopted in 2006 by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and later by the International Organization for Standardization, which has 163 countries as members.

Classified N.S.A. memos appear to confirm that the fatal weakness, discovered by two Microsoft cryptographers in 2007, was engineered by the agency. The N.S.A. wrote the standard and aggressively pushed it on the international group, privately calling the effort “a challenge in finesse.”

So, in pointing to implementation vulnerabilities as the most likely possibility for an NSA “breakthrough,” I might have actually erred a bit too far on the side of technological interestingness.  It seems that a large part of what the NSA has been doing has simply been strong-arming Internet companies and standards bodies into giving it backdoors.  To put it bluntly: sure, if it wants to, the NSA can probably read your email.  But that isn’t mathematical cryptography’s fault—any more than it would be mathematical crypto’s fault if goons broke into your house and carted away your laptop.  On the contrary, properly-implemented, backdoor-less strong crypto is something that apparently scares the NSA enough that they go to some lengths to keep it from being widely used.

I should add that, regardless of how NSA collects all the private information it does—by “beating crypto in a fair fight” (!) or, more likely, by exploiting backdoors that it itself installed—the mere fact that it collects so much is of course unsettling enough from a civil-liberties perspective.  So I’m glad that the Snowden revelations have sparked a public debate in the US about how much surveillance we as a society want (i.e., “the balance between preventing 9/11 and preventing Orwell”), what safeguards are in place to prevent abuses, and whether those safeguards actually work.  Such a public debate is essential if we’re serious about calling ourselves a democracy.

At the same time, to me, perhaps the most shocking feature of the Snowden revelations is just how unshocking they’ve been.  So far, I haven’t seen anything that shows the extent of NSA’s surveillance to be greater than what I would’ve considered plausible a priori.  Indeed, the following could serve as a one-sentence summary of what we’ve learned from Snowden:

Yes, the NSA is, in fact, doing the questionable things that anyone not living in a cave had long assumed they were doing—that assumption being so ingrained in nerd culture that countless jokes are based around it.

(Come to think of it, people living in caves might have been even more certain that the NSA was doing those things.  Maybe that’s why they moved to caves.)

So, rather than dwelling on civil liberties, national security, yadda yadda yadda, let me move on to discuss the implications of the Snowden revelations for something that really matters: a 6-year-old storm in theoretical computer science’s academic teacup.  As many readers of this blog might know, Neal Koblitz—a respected mathematician and pioneer of elliptic curve cryptography, who (from numerous allusions in his writings) appears to have some connections at the NSA—published a series of scathing articles, in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society and elsewhere, attacking the theoretical computer science approach to cryptography.  Koblitz’s criticisms were varied and entertainingly-expressed: the computer scientists are too sloppy, deadline-driven, self-promoting, and corporate-influenced; overly trusting of so-called “security proofs” (a term they shouldn’t even use, given how many errors and exaggerated claims they make); absurdly overreliant on asymptotic analysis; “bodacious” in introducing dubious new hardness assumptions that they then declare to be “standard”; and woefully out of touch with cryptographic realities.  Koblitz seemed to suggest that, rather than demanding the security reductions so beloved by theoretical computer scientists, people would do better to rest the security of their cryptosystems on two alternative pillars: first, standards set by organizations like the NSA with actual real-world experience; and second, the judgments of mathematicians with … taste and experience, who can just see what’s likely to be vulnerable and what isn’t.

Back in 2007, my mathematician friend Greg Kuperberg pointed out the irony to me: here we had a mathematician, lambasting computer scientists for trying to do for cryptography what mathematics itself has sought to do for everything since Euclid!  That is, when you see an unruly mess of insights, related to each other in some tangled way, systematize and organize it.  Turn the tangle into a hierarchical tree (or dag).  Isolate the minimal assumptions (one-way functions?  decisional Diffie-Hellman?) on which each conclusion can be based, and spell out all the logical steps needed to get from here to there—even if the steps seem obvious or boring.  Any time anyone has tried to do that, it’s been easy for the natives of the unruly wilderness to laugh at the systematizing newcomers: the latter often know the terrain less well, and take ten times as long to reach conclusions that are ten times less interesting.  And yet, in case after case, the clarity and rigor of the systematizing approach has eventually won out.  So it seems weird for a mathematician, of all people, to bet against the systematizing approach when applied to cryptography.

The reason I’m dredging up this old dispute now, is that I think the recent NSA revelations might put it in a slightly new light.  In his article—whose main purpose is to offer practical advice on how to safeguard one’s communications against eavesdropping by NSA or others—Bruce Schneier offers the following tip:

Prefer conventional discrete-log-based systems over elliptic-curve systems; the latter have constants that the NSA influences when they can.

Here Schneier is pointing out a specific issue with ECC, which would be solved if we could “merely” ensure that NSA or other interested parties weren’t providing input into which elliptic curves to use.  But I think there’s also a broader issue: that, in cryptography, it’s unwise to trust any standard because of the prestige, real-world experience, mathematical good taste, or whatever else of the people or organizations proposing it.  What was long a plausible conjecture—that the NSA covertly influences cryptographic standards to give itself backdoors, and that otherwise-inexplicable vulnerabilities in deployed cryptosystems are sometimes there because the NSA wanted them there—now looks close to an established fact.  In cryptography, then, it’s not just for idle academic reasons that you’d like a publicly-available trail of research papers and source code, open to criticism and improvement by anyone, that takes you all the way from the presumed hardness of an underlying mathematical problem to the security of your system under whichever class of attacks is relevant to you.

Schneier’s final piece of advice is this: “Trust the math.  Encryption is your friend.”

“Trust the math.”  On that note, here’s a slightly-embarrassing confession.  When I’m watching a suspense movie (or a TV show like Homeland), and I reach one of those nail-biting scenes where the protagonist discovers that everything she ever believed is a lie, I sometimes mentally recite the proof of the Karp-Lipton Theorem.  It always calms me down.  Even if the entire universe turned out to be a cruel illusion, it would still be the case that NP ⊂ P/poly would collapse the polynomial hierarchy, and I can tell you exactly why.  It would likewise be the case that you couldn’t break the GGM pseudorandom function without also breaking the underlying pseudorandom generator on which it’s based.  Math could be defined as that which can still be trusted, even when you can’t trust anything else.

Eli Roth (USA, Midnight Madness)

Monday, September 9, 1:30 p.m.
Scotiabank 13 (259 Richmond Street West)

The most disreputable of grindhouse genres, the Italian cannibal film, receives a loving homage in Eli Roth’s The Green Inferno. Justine (Lorenza Izzo) crushes out on activist leader Alejandro (Ariel Levy), who is planning a group trip to Peru to stop some forest clear-cutting that’s imperiling an uncontacted Amazon tribe. Justine joins the activists, only to be abducted along with the others by the very tribe they were protecting. Oh, and surprise: she and her friends are staying for dinner.

Diehard shock cinema fans will want to know just one thing, and the answer is yes: while not as horrific as its notorious brethren, Roth’s film does indeed deliver the goods—eyeballs, tongues, and severed limbs among them. In a concession to modern sensibilities, Roth introduces a soupçon of racial sensitivity (with mixed success), underscoring who the real cannibals are while ensuring the requisite blood and gore remain prominent on the menu. In short, you already know if you want to see this: go with your gut.

On the outside, I seem like a clean-cut, normal guy. My friends and neighbors no doubt think of me as a healthy, productive member of my community. But I’m tired of living my double life. I’m going to make a confession that may surprise you.

I have a private, windowless room in my house. I’ve had the floor and parts of the walls covered in plain white tile, which gives it a certain antiseptic appearance.

But that appearance is almost hideously deceiving. With appalling frequency, I enter this room alone and use it to deposit the foulest-smelling ejecta possible from my body cavity right out into the open, befouling a small pool of clear, clean water. You wouldn’t believe the sounds and facial expressions I can make in the process. At times, they’re almost akin to those associated with great physical pleasure or exquisite pain.

The worst part is that I have to do this. It’s like a physical need. If I haven’t seated myself in my private little room in a while, I can feel the urge within me build and finally I just have to give in and do the filthy, nauseating deed. Afterwards, once the repulsive ordure has been produced, the compulsion is gone. I can meticulously take care of any residue and pretend that I am once again clean. But the need always comes back. Sometimes I feel compelled to return to my private room more than once a day.

There’s nothing pleasant about this confession, believe me. I’m as disgusted as you or anyone else would be, when I catch a glimpse of the feculent results of my secret little practice. But I’m tired of the lies. I’m tired of the years of pretending to everyone that I meet that I don’t have to do this. But I do. Oh, how I do. Oh, the shame of it.

Even in making this confession, I know that it will change nothing about my perverse, loathsome condition. Soon I will return to my little room and, once the deed is done, I’ll send the abhorrent evidence away as soon as possible, through a cunningly devised series of underground pipes. (How complete, how complicated my design! How monumental my deception!) I’m afraid I feel the need building even now. Even now.

I am so sorry.

In August 1942 a students’ nursing brigade discovered 12-year-old Tanya Savicheva, weak with hunger, living alone in an apartment in Leningrad, which had been besieged by Hitler since September 1941. She had kept this diary:

1. Zhenya died on December 18, 1941, at twelve noon.
2. Grandma died on January 25, 1942, at three in the afternoon.
3. Leka died on March 17, 1942, at five o’clock in the morning.
4. Uncle Vasya died on April 13, 1942, at two o’clock at night.
5. Uncle Lesha on May 10, 1942, at four o’clock in the afternoon.
6. Mama died on May 13, 1942, at 7:30 in the morning.
7. The Savichevs are dead.
8. Everyone is dead.
9. Only Tanya is left.

The nurses evacuated her along the narrow lifeline that had been opened that summer by the Soviet army and placed her in an orphanage in a nearby village, but she died there, probably of chronic dysentery, in July 1944. The diary is kept today in the St. Petersburg Museum of History.

It’s even worse at the community college level.

This is not a rhetorical question, nor is it intended to be snarky or otherwise disingenuous.

Why is killing a lot of people with chemical weapons considered so much worse, in terms of international law and geopolitical rhetoric (if not action, c.f. Kevin Drum’s excellent points here), than blowing the same number of people up with high explosive munitions, or machine-gunning them, or hacking them to death with machetes?

Don’t close your browser tab! It’s not real poop! It’s soap! Soap that’s been meticulously crafted to look like a corn turd. In a dark factory somewhere across the planet, an elderly woman shaves brown and yellow scraps of soap from a large block, forming soap turds in her hands one by one, wondering who would buy a poop soap. 

This is not a joke. The next version of Android will be called "KitKat." The above picture is not a photoshop, it's an actual picture shared by Sundar Pichai, the head of Android, on Google+. Google has also launched a website for KitKat at android.com/kitkat/. Right now the site only features a small history of Android and the following announcement:

Android is the operating system that powers over one billion smartphones and tablets. Since these devices make our lives so sweet, each Android version is named after a dessert: Cupcake, Donut, Eclair, Froyo, Gingerbread, Honeycomb, Ice Cream Sandwich, and Jelly Bean. As everybody finds it difficult to stay away from chocolate, we decided to name the next version of Android after one of our favorite chocolate treats, Kitkat®!

Yes, this is an actual cross-branding initiative with Nestle's KitKat. The Android site links back to kitkat.com, and KitKat is celebrating the renaming with a new Facebook Profile picture. Nestle will be releasing a limited edition Android KitKat bar, with Willy Wonka-style winning tickets for a new Nexus 7 or Google Play credits.

For almost a year, the community believed the next version of Android would be called "Key Lime Pie," but apparently Google just loves to keep its fanbase guessing.

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Have you visited Pleated Jeans today?

Vice has a sneak peak at Errol Morris' new documentary on Donald Rumsfeld, in what looks like a sequel of sorts to The Fog of War.

Morris has Rumsfeld perform and explain his "snowflakes," the enormous archive of memos he wrote across almost 50 years in Congress, the White House, in business, and twice at the Pentagon. The memos provide a window into history -- not as it actually happened, but as Rumsfeld wants us to see it.

Jesus, that little smile at the end. The Daily Beast has an interview with Morris about the film.

THE DAILY BEAST: How the hell did you get Rumsfeld to agree to do this? Were you chasing him down?

ERROL MORRIS: No, not at all. I wrote him a letter, enclosed a copy of The Fog of War, heard back from him very quickly, went to Washington, and spent a good part of the day with him. We started it under the premise that he would do two days of interviews, I would edit it, and if he liked it, we'd sign a contract and continue. If he didn't, I'd put the footage in a closet and it would never see the light of day.

The name of the film, The Unknown Known, is a reference to a statement Rumsfeld made at a press briefing about WMDs, terrorism, and Iraq:

There are known knowns; there are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns; that is to say, there are things that we now know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- there are things we do not know we don't know.

A man suffered serious injuries after being struck by a vehicle in Toronto's Little Italy neighbourhood on Sunday afternoon.

Ron Amadeo

Android 4.3 was released to Nexus devices a little over a month ago, but, as is usual with Android updates, it's taking much longer to roll out the general public. Right now, a little over six percent of Android users have the latest version. And if you pay attention to the various Android forums out there, you may have noticed something: no one cares.

4.3's headline features are a new camera UI, restricted user profiles, and support for new versions of Bluetooth and OpenGL ES. Other than the camera, these are all extremely dull, low-level enhancements. It's not that Google is out of ideas, or the Android team is slowing down. Google has purposefully made every effort to make Android OS updates as boring as possible.

Why make boring updates? Because getting Samsung and the other OEMs to actually update their devices to the latest version of Android is extremely difficult. By the time the OEMs get the new version, port their skins over, ship a build to carriers, and the carriers finally push out the OTA update, many months pass. If the device isn't popular enough, this process doesn't happen at all. Updating a phone is a massive project involving several companies, none of which seem to be very committed to the process or in much of a hurry to get it done.

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It’s impossible for me to say anything about this book that it doesn’t say itself. You can hit the “Look Inside” button on the listing, if you want to read more of this, whatever it is.

Ass Goblins of Auschwitz is by the author of Abortion Arcade.