Peter Thiel to Write Book on Building Companies

Training a general-purpose military force is highly risky and could throw the country deeper into strife.

I owe much of my understanding of suspense and fear on the page to one single terrifying experience.

Bits Blog: Apple’s Peter Oppenheimer Is Highest Paid Finance Chief

Apple Peter Oppenheimer, Apple’s chief financial officer.

Being a tax ninja pays off at Apple. Its chief financial officer, Peter Oppenheimer, who has helped the company sidestep billions of dollars in taxes, was the highest paid chief financial officer of 2012, according to data compiled by Bloomberg News.

Mr. Oppenheimer was awarded a $68.6 million package, much higher than the $4.17 million that went to Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, says Bloomberg. Oracle’s financial chief, Safra Catz, was the second highest paid with $51.7 million; Google’s Patrick Pichette was third with $38.7 million.

Of course, all corporations do their best to minimize taxes. Apple’s Mr. Oppenheimer has done an exceptional job managing the company’s cash, finding legal ways to side step billions of dollars in taxes, allocating about 70 percent of its profits overseas, where tax rates are often much lower.

Last month, Apple’s Mr. Oppenheimer raised a bond deal of $17 billion to fund a $100 billion payout to shareholders. By borrowing money, or issuing debt, Apple avoided $9.2 billion in United States taxes.

Profiles in Science Peter G. Neumann: Rethinking the Computer at 80

One of those is Peter G. Neumann, now an 80-year-old computer scientist at SRI International, a pioneering engineering research laboratory here.

As an applied-mathematics student at Harvard, Dr. Neumann had a two-hour breakfast with Einstein on Nov. 8, 1952. What the young math student took away was a deeply held philosophy of design that has remained with him for six decades and has been his governing principle of computing and computer security.

For many of those years, Dr. Neumann (pronounced NOY-man) has remained a voice in the wilderness, tirelessly pointing out that the computer industry has a penchant for repeating the mistakes of the past. He has long been one of the nation’s leading specialists in computer security, and early on he predicted that the security flaws that have accompanied the pell-mell explosion of the computer and Internet industries would have disastrous consequences.

“His biggest contribution is to stress the ‘systems’ nature of the security and reliability problems,” said Steven M. Bellovin, chief technology officer of the Federal Trade Commission. “That is, trouble occurs not because of one failure, but because of the way many different pieces interact.”

Dr. Bellovin said that it was Dr. Neumann who originally gave him the insight that “complex systems break in complex ways” — that the increasing complexity of modern hardware and software has made it virtually impossible to identify the flaws and vulnerabilities in computer systems and ensure that they are secure and trustworthy.

The consequence has come to pass in the form of an epidemic of computer malware and rising concerns about cyberwarfare as a threat to global security, voiced alarmingly this month by the defense secretary, Leon E. Panetta, who warned of a possible “cyber-Pearl Harbor” attack on the United States.

It is remarkable, then, that years after most of his contemporaries have retired, Dr. Neumann is still at it and has seized the opportunity to start over and redesign computers and software from a “clean slate.”

He is leading a team of researchers in an effort to completely rethink how to make computers and networks secure, in a five-year project financed by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, with Robert N. Watson, a computer security researcher at Cambridge University’s Computer Laboratory.

“I’ve been tilting at the same windmills for basically 40 years,” said Dr. Neumann recently during a lunchtime interview at a Chinese restaurant near his art-filled home in Palo Alto, Calif. “And I get the impression that most of the folks who are responsible don’t want to hear about complexity. They are interested in quick and dirty solutions.”

An Early Voice for Security

Dr. Neumann, who left Bell Labs and moved to California as a single father with three young children in 1970, has occupied the same office at SRI for four decades. Until the building was recently modified to make it earthquake-resistant, the office had attained notoriety for the towering stacks of computer science literature that filled every cranny. Legend has it that colleagues who visited the office after the 1989 earthquake were stunned to discover that while other offices were in disarray from the 7.1-magnitude quake, nothing in Dr. Neumann’s office appeared to have been disturbed.

A trim and agile man, with piercing eyes and a salt-and-pepper beard, Dr. Neumann has practiced tai chi for decades. But his passion, besides computer security, is music. He plays a variety of instruments, including bassoon, French horn, trombone and piano, and is active in a variety of musical groups. At computer security conferences it has become a tradition for Dr. Neumann to lead his colleagues in song, playing tunes from Gilbert and Sullivan and Tom Lehrer.

Until recently, security was a backwater in the world of computing. Today it is a multibillion-dollar industry, though one of dubious competence, and safeguarding the nation’s computerized critical infrastructure has taken on added urgency. President Obama cited it in the third debate of the presidential campaign, focusing on foreign policy, as something “we need to be thinking about” as part of the nation’s military strategy.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: October 31, 2012

An earlier version of this article misstated the name of the organization whose Risks Forum newsgroup is edited by Peter G. Neumann. It is the Association for Computing Machinery, not the Association of Computing Machinery.

Peter Rosenberg Talks About Lil Wayne

When Lil Wayne spoke his mind about Peter Rosenberg‘s beef with Nicki Minaj, Peter just fought back.

Peter even explained how the “F” in “Weezy F. Baby” doesn’t stand for feminist. In a recent interview Lil Wayne explained that he pulled Nicki Minaj out last minute was because people need to respect women.

Peter Rosenberg, Hot 97's DJ, insulted Minaj by stating that her hit single “Starship” as “bullshit,” quickly Wayne takes action and removes Minaj from Summer Jam and didn’t perform.

Peter spoke about Lil Wayne’s comments on the radio by stating, “Lil Wayne thinks that I don’t show respect for women. Wayne is right about something—Women are mothers, are sisters, are daughters. But I have a question. Is me giving my opinion that one song is wack, is that showing a lack of respect for women?”

To make it more clear to Wayne and to express how Peter felt he played Lil Wayne’s single “6 Foot, 7 Foot” and stated on the track where Wayne says “hoes gon’ be hoes.” He even questioned Nicki by playing her single “Stupid Hoe” and said “You want respect for women yet you can’t sing a good song.”

Peter Rosenberg even suggested that Young Money should come and speak to him in person rather than hiding behind reporters. “Instead of talking to everyone else about Hot 97, how about…Young Money just come on down and come see us and talk to us? Oh, that’s because then they’d have to hear the truth. And they can’t handle the truth.”

Photo Source:thisiswalder.com