When Lenovo preinstalled Superfish adware on its laptops, it betrayed its customers and sold out their security.

It did it for no good reason, and it may not even have known what it was doing. I’m not sure which is scarier. 

The various news reports of this catastrophe don’t quite convey the sheer horror and disbelief with which any technically minded person is now reacting to Lenovo’s screw-up. 

Security researcher Marc Rogers wrote that it’s “quite possibly the single worst thing I have seen a manufacturer do to its customer base. … I cannot overstate how evil this is.” He’s right. The Lenovo Superfish security hole is really, really bad.

To recap: Since at least September, Lenovo has been shipping OEM Windows laptops preloaded with Superfish “adware,” which would rudely inject its own shopping results into your browser when you searched on Google, Amazon, and other websites.

This sort of behavior is associated more with spyware than with factory-shipped operating-system installs, and by itself would be a new low for Lenovo. But Superfish is more than just pesky. It’s the most virulent, evil adware you could find.

By installing a single self-signed root certificate (trust me: That’s really bad) across all of Lenovo’s affected machines, Superfish intentionally pokes a gigantic hole into your browser security and allows anyone on your Wi-Fi network to hijack your browser silently and collect your bank credentials, passwords, and anything else you might conceivably type there.

As Errata Security’s Robert Graham put it, “I can intercept the encrypted communications of SuperFish’s victims (people with Lenovo laptops) while hanging out near them at a cafe wifi hotspot.”

If you have a Lenovo laptop that has Superfish on it (try Filippo Valsorda’s Superfish test to see), I would advise nothing short of wiping the entire machine and installing vanilla Windows — not Lenovo’s Windows. Then change all of your passwords.

So ghastly a perversion is Superfish’ self-signed root certificate that many of us have practically been walking around with our jaws on the floor since the news broke Wednesday night. My Facebook wall is filled with outraged profanity from software engineers.

Installing Superfish is one of the most irresponsible mistakes an established tech company has ever made. Reckless, careless, and appalling don’t even come close to covering it.

The closest antecedent is the Sony DRM rootkit scandal of 2005, in which Sony automatically installed malware onto users’ computers whenever someone loaded certain versions of their CDs. That rootkit malware could be hijacked by another hacker, and in its shortsighted greed Sony did nothing to stop piracy while compromising the security of millions of users.

But at least Sony had a clear (though futile) motive — stopping people from freely ripping its CDs. Lenovo claims it installed Superfish to “enhance our users’ shopping experience.” Whatever commissions Lenovo mighthave received from Superfish must have been paltry, especially compared with the severity of Superfish’s root-certificate hole — which, stunningly, leaves users even more exposed than Sony’s rootkit did.

Lenovo sold its soul to the devil and forgot to get much of anything in return. Homer Simpson would’ve made a better Faustian bargain.

Lenovo must have known about this problem since at least Jan. 21, when an apoplectic user posted a detailed description of Superfish and its problems to a Lenovo forum and incredulously requested a refund. His post went unanswered (until Thursday), leaving a month for hackers around the world to get busy trying to exploit this incredibly exploitable malware.

And sure enough, Lenovo’s subsequent behavior has reached “What, me worry?” levels of denial, with the company bringing the same skill to damage control that it brought to factory installations. Lenovo’s initial statement on Thursday was utter bull: It claimed Superfish had been disabled and posed no threat, even though merely uninstalling Superfish doesn’t remove the evil root certificate.

As the outrage grew, Peter Hortensius, Lenovo’s chief technology officer, proceeded to insult my intelligence and yours in an interview with the Wall Street Journal in which he vaguely acknowledged a problem and then brushed it away: “We’re not trying to get into an argument with the security guys. They’re dealing with theoretical concerns. We have no insight that anything nefarious has occurred.”

This is akin to saying that, yes, your security company left your house unlocked, but we just don’t know if anyone walked right in. Any self-respecting Lenovo security engineer would have vetoed those words, the disingenuous and infuriating statement of an unprepared executive who doesn’t care enough about the safety of his customers to get the facts straight. 

There’s plenty more blame to go around. There is Superfish, a Palo Alto, California-based company that also makes visual search apps, and that would shock Edward Snowden and make the NSA blush. Led by shady surveillance veteran Adi Pinhas, the company has a long history of disseminating adware, spyware, malware, and crapware, as chronicled by Forbes’ Thomas Fox-Brewster, who traced Pinhas’ ties to a whole host of privacy-violating companies.

Residing somewhere in the bottom-feeding nether-regions of the tech ecosystem, such companies contribute less to society than Farmville did. Pinhas denied any malfeasance on Thursday, agreeing with Lenovo’s initial statement and then going silent. With any luck, he’ll be a Cinnabon manager before long.

Superfish had five primary enablers in the form of venture capital firms that financed the startup to the tune of $20 million: Vintage Investment Partners, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, DFJ Tamir Fishman Ventures, Xenia Venture Capital, and the Individuals’ Venture Fund. Did the VCs know they were fueling what is essentially an expensive Trojan horse? Did they care?

When Forbes ranked Superfish 64th on a list of America’s most promising companies, it misclassified it under “IT Software & Services” instead of “Technological Malevolence.”

Yet literally nothing I can say here could be as insulting as what Lenovo and Superfish said to the world on Thursday. You had one job, Lenovo: Give me a computer that doesn’t compromise my basic security.

I happen to own a 2014 Lenovo machine, a ThinkServer. It’s definitely one of the company’s better machines, because it didn’t come with a hard drive, much less Windows, much less Superfish. Yet part of me still thinks I should stuff it into a hazmat container and blast it into the sun — just in case.

Lenovo says it’ll have a removal tool out Friday that will actually fix the Superfish problem. Who cares? The company might as well promise us jetpacks, for all its word is worth right now.

When it comes to parents, it seems that three or even four is no longer a crowd.

At least, that’s the conclusion one might draw from the case of Sheena and Tiara Yates, a married lesbian couple in New Jersey.

They’ve had their parenting expectations upended — twice — by the sperm donors of their two kids.

Both men agreed, in writing, to provide their raw materials and to leave the parenting to the women.

But then they decided that, after all, they’d like to have some role in the lives of their biological children, so they applied for visitation rights.

As of now, the bio dads are winning. Their case is just the latest reminder of how perilous and confusing assisted reproduction cases can become.

How did this happen? It’s tempting to blame the women’s do-it-yourself approach to the agreement, which they crafted without legal assistance. But that’s not the problem: Attorney or no attorney, under New Jersey law, even if the sperm donor renounces his rights with a ritual blood oath and a document sealed with wax, the agreement won’t be enforced unless the sperm donation takes place under the direct supervision of a physician.

Of course, going the clinical route is more expensive than the more informal methods used by some couples, who might be ignorant of the law, or of limited financial means, or both. Since the Yates’ kids were conceived at home, the physician supervision law doesn’t apply — and the bio dads have been able to come forward to claim rights to see their kids.

And it’s not only the fathers who can reinsert themselves into a family snapshot that one might reasonably think they’d been Photoshopped out of. 

A Kansas case currently making its way through the courts involves the state itself, which has come forward to demand that one William Marotta, another sperm-supplying bio dad, pay back the public assistance money that two moms had received for their daughter. (The guy had helped the couple out after answering an ad on Craigslist.)

The Kansas law is similar to New Jersey’s, and the state’s demand is a logical extension of the two biological fathers’ visitation petitions in the Yates cases: If Marotta is the dad, then he has both the usual rights and the usual obligations of a parent, which include supporting his children. (Indeed, the New Jersey county judge who granted visitation rights to Shawn Sorrell, the father of the younger of the Yates children, also required him to pay child support of $83 a week for his biological son.)

Would these cases be any different if the couples consisted of a man and a woman? Not necessarily. To see why, it’s instructive to separate the Yates’ first and second cases.

When they found the first sperm donor, their relationship wasn’t legally recognized, and after losing their argument that the agreement should be enforced, they acceded to the (unnamed) bio dad’s visitation request.

But at the time of the second insemination in 2013, Sheena and Tiara were in a civil union, which confers all the legal benefits of marriage. (They married in 2014, after doing so became legal in New Jersey.) And they’re appealing the judge’s order in this more recent case, claiming that their legal union should mean they’re the only parents with legal rights. They’re also focusing on the fact that a doctor signed the agreement. Since they didn’t follow the rules, though, it’s possible they’ll lose.

The same thing could happen to a married, opposite-sex couple, in a case where, say, the couple sought an outside contribution because the husband was infertile.

Does this make sense? From one perspective, no: Shouldn’t a legally married couple — straight or gay — be able to use the services of an outside party to conceive in any way that makes sense to them, and perhaps by the only means that work for them financially? And shouldn’t that third party expect that, when it comes to parenting, three’s a crowd and that he would be the odd one out — especially when the sperm donor expressly agreed to butt out?

In fact, the rule that a sperm donor is fenced out of a family only when certain procedures are followed is in sharp tension with an older, firmer rule of family law — the presumption of paternity. In general, the husband is legally assumed to be the father of any child born to his wife. But it’s unclear that the presumption will apply in the case of a couple that conceives with the help of a donor, for two reasons.

First, in most states, including New Jersey, the presumption can be overcome if there’s strong evidence that someone else was the dad — and there’s obviously such evidence in many cases involving outside sperm donors. In that sense, too, the Yates are no different from any straight couple.

But of course there’s another challenge for lesbian parents — the presumption of “paternity” doesn’t fit, at least not literally. A mater isn’t a pater.

While the New Jersey Supreme Court hasn’t addressed this issue, courts in some states, like California, have read presumptive paternity laws broadly, to include lesbian-headed families. That’s because the presumption is intended to strengthen families and marriages, keeping third-party interlopers out.

And because same-sex couples share those interests, once marriage equality is achieved, gay and lesbian spouses should be entitled to the same deference as their opposite-sex counterparts.

Still, I expect lesbian couples to continue to have problems in these cases. States will come after any money they sniff, and at least some men will become uncomfortable with the renunciation agreements they’ve entered.

The Yates and Marotta cases provide yet another illustration of the plain fact that marriage equality hasn’t solved all the problems that same-sex couples will face. In Kansas, if the couple were a straight couple, the state probably would never have learned that a third party was involved.

And had the Yates been a male-female couple, Sorrell would have needed to make a reasonable case that he was the bio dad before a court would even order genetic testing that might substantiate his claim.

Where two women are involved, though, it’s clear from the get-go that outside help was needed, and often — as in these cases — the father’s identity is clear. (It’s worth pointing out that this whole mess could have been avoided if the couple had used the services of an anonymous donor, usually through a sperm bank.)

Don’t underestimate, either, the likelihood that a judge will look at the child of lesbian parents as missing one of the necessary ingredients for a family — a father.

So it's possible that courts in New Jersey and elsewhere could end up following the lead of one state legislature — California, again — and formally recognize three legal parents.

Sheena and Tiara Yates have appealed the visitation award, and the case seems ticketed for the state supreme court. Whatever rules the court establishes for these complex cases, it needs to recognize the legitimacy and equality of couples like the Yates, and to begin to advance the tough task involved in sorting out the complexities of assisted reproduction cases.

Thanks to professor Kimberly Mutcherson of Rutgers School of Law–Camden and my colleague professor Alicia Kelly of the Widener University School of Law in Delaware for their valuable assistance in the preparation of this article.

I’ve been a fan of The Simpsons for a long time. Obviously. So when I heard that SpaceX’s head guy Elon Musk was guest-starring on the show, I hoped it would be a good episode. And it was! As I watched I marveled at how funny the show was even after all these decades, and laughed quite a bit as the story unfolded.

… until a scene came up that chilled me to the bone. I was so shocked that I had to rewind and watch it again, then freeze frame it to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating.

This is the moment that changed everything for me. The frozen moment of time when I realized that for 22 years, The Simpsons has been lying to us.

This shows Musk standing at the dining room window of the Simpson’s house, looking out and pontificating at the night sky as the family behind him eats dinner.

But look at the Moon. LOOK AT THE MOON!

It’s backwards. The scene is clearly at dinner, early evening, so that’s the setting crescent new Moon. But in the northern hemisphere, the tips of a waxing crescent Moon point to the left, away from the Sun. Here’s a photo I took myself in November 2013:

See? I took that picture shortly after sunset, around dinner time. It was new Moon, and the crescent's tips point to the left. But in that scene with Musk, they point to the right! How can that be?

There’s only one way. Springfield is not in the United States at all. It’s not even in our half of the world. Springfield is in the southern hemisphere!

I don’t even know how to react to this information. It’s as if … my whole world has been turned upside down.

For what it’s worth, Greenwald—who joined Snowden and Citizenfour director Laura Poitras on the Reddit AMA—insisted on Reddit that he had laughed it off too, despite earlier calling it “stupid and irresponsible” to a BuzzFeed reporter.

Another top question for Snowden on Monday was potentially a little more substantive. Reddit user TheJackal8 asked him: “Mr. Snowden, if you had a chance to do things over again, would you do anything differently? If so, what?”

Snowden’s response displayed the sort of nimble job-interview skills that one imagines helped him land that fateful Booz Allen gig in the first place. Regrets? Sure, Snowden has one:

Had I come forward a little sooner, these programs would have been a little less entrenched, and those abusing them would have felt a little less familiar with and accustomed to the exercise of those powers. … Once you grant the government some new power or authority, it becomes exponentially more difficult to roll it back.

We can devise means, through the application and sophistication of science, to remind governments that if they will not be responsible stewards of our rights, we the people will implement systems that provide for a means of not just enforcing our rights, but removing from governments the ability to interfere with those rights.

You can see the beginnings of this dynamic today in the statements of government officials complaining about the adoption of encryption by major technology providers. The idea here isn’t to fling ourselves into anarchy and do away with government, but to remind the government that there must always be a balance of power between the governing and the governed …

Two twentysomethings hop out of a cab. They get dinner. They grab drinks at a bar. Neither stops to worry about splitting the tab. “Just Venmo me,” one says.

That’s how most stories about Venmo, the popular mobile-payment app, begin. First there’s a short anecdote illustrating how Vemno is fast, casual, convenient, and trendy. There might be a moment of conversion: At first, one of those twentysomethings is nervous about sending real money through a mobile app, but after trying Venmo and witnessing its amazing ease and speed, he becomes a proponent of the service as quickly as Venmo became a verb.

This is not one of those stories.  It starts, instead, with Chris Grey, a 30-year-old Web developer in New York City, waking up last Thursday to a notification from Chase bank that his account had a pending transaction involving a large sum of money. At first glance, he thought his tax refund must have come through. He’d already paid his rent for the month, so he figured the alert must be for an incoming amount. “Then I did a double take,” he says.

Chase had pinged Grey not about a credit to his account, but a debit for $2,850, through Venmo. Confused, Grey tried to pull up his Venmo account, but his password no longer worked. He used the reset option to get in, then inspected his settings. Under email authentications, a new address appeared. Notifications were disabled. Grey’s payment history showed that the funds—slightly below Venmo’s weekly sending limit of $2,999.99—had been sent at 3:09 p.m. the day before to a user he didn’t recognize. Some text listed the transaction’s ominous-sounding purchase: “for about time.”

Clearly, something was wrong—yet Venmo hadn’t notified Grey that anything suspicious could be going on. “I never got an email that my password had changed, that another email was added to my account, that another device was added to my account, or that a lot of my settings had changed,” he says. A colleague and I were able to duplicate this lack of notification with a quick test: Venmo doesn’t alert you if your password or email credentials change from within the account. “There are basic security holes that you could drive a truck through,” Grey says.

These shortcomings should be concerning for any service that handles sensitive financial information, but particularly so for Venmo, which has set its sights on becoming the dominant mobile app for peer-to-peer financial transactions in the United States. In the third quarter of 2014, Venmo processed $700 million in payments—nearly five times the transaction volume it did in the same period a year earlier. Venmo doesn’t share its user numbers, but eBay chief executive John Donahoe has dropped hints. “Venmo is on fire,” he said last month during eBay’s fourth-quarter earnings call. “If you go to any college campus across America, they talk about Venmoing money to each other.”

By making the money transfers quick, uncomplicated, and even cool, Venmo is winning. But for all its promise as a smooth and efficient financial service, Venmo’s popularity seems to be outpacing its customer-support capabilities. As of November, Venmo only had around 70 full-time employees. (Its parent PayPal, which oversaw $64.3 billion in transactions in the last quarter of 2014, has more than 10,000.) Three years after the service left its beta phase, Venmo doesn’t have a dedicated phone line for customer issues. Urgent emails about stolen funds receive slow responses. It doesn’t offer two-factor verification, an increasingly common security layer that requires users to provide a secondary passcode to access an account, though it’s working to implement it. Venmo says its mobile-transfer infrastructure “uses bank-grade security systems and data encryption to protect you and guard against any unauthorized transactions and access to your personal or financial information.” But when a hacker who breaches an account using your password can send $2,850 as quickly and conveniently as a twentysomething can repay $7 for a burrito, that’s clearly not enough.

“These are big problems,” says Rob Shavell, co-founder and CEO of Abine, a data-privacy firm that helps users secure personal information. “There ought to be email warnings, there ought to be two-factor authentication. It’s true for us, it’s true for Venmo, it’s true for all these services.”

Venmo did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Lisa Kornblatt, a spokeswoman for Braintree, the company that acquired Venmo in 2012 and was subsequently bought by PayPal in 2013, on Monday pointed me to PayPal’s security and privacy policies, and didn’t respond to further inquiries. Venmo also declined to speak with me when I stopped by its New York headquarters (which happens to be located one floor above Slate’s office), directing me instead to email press@venmo.com.

Once he realized his account had been hacked, Grey contacted Chase first. To his horror, the bank informed him he’d need to close out the account. Because he’d linked Venmo to his Chase routing number—rather than to a debit or credit card—the account, which he’d had since college, was irreversibly compromised. That meant, in the short term, no access to his money. Grey got to work filing a claim with Chase to dispute the $2,850 withdrawal.

If nothing else, dealing with fraud is something banks are very good at. They have fraud departments to handle problems like Grey’s, and dedicated hotlines for customers to call if something happens. One of the great promises of a credit card is the small customer service number printed on the back. Venmo doesn’t offer that level of assistance. You won’t find a phone number on the contact portion of its website. On the security page, the company advises customers who “suspect that there has been any unauthorized activity” to “contact us immediately a support@venmo.com—we’re here to help.” (You can also tweet @VenmoSupport.) What’s not noted on the security page—but is buried in section C, part 1, small letter n, roman numeral iv of Venmo’s user agreement—is that you should do this immediately, because if “you contact the Company within two Business Days after learning of the loss or theft, then your liability shall not exceed the lesser of $50.00 USD or the amount of unauthorized transfers that took place on your account before you provided notice to the Company.” After two business days, your liability can jump as high as $500, per Venmo’s terms.

Grey says he went ahead and contacted Venmo almost immediately after learning of the unauthorized activity and reaching out to Chase, at first via the company’s online contact form and then to support@venmo.com. Grey provided Slate with email correspondence showing that he first wrote to the support email address at 11:55 a.m. on Thursday, then again at 6:50 p.m., 7:43 p.m., and finally at 9:38 a.m. on Friday. More than 24 hours after he first contacted Venmo, Grey was still waiting.

Grey isn’t the only one to report an experience like this. Peruse replies to the @VenmoSupport Twitter feed and you’ll find plenty of users complaining that the company has not answered their emailed requests for assistance. One of those frustrated users, Mohsin Charania, a professional poker player, told me a story similar to Grey’s. In December, Charania says, his account was hacked for more than $2,000. The email and password associated with the account were changed, though he was never notified of any resets, and he had to use the “forgot password” option to regain access. Charania says he filled out Venmo’s “Contact Us” support form and waited, but hours passed without any response. The next morning, “I tweeted at support, and I was like, this is ridiculous,” he says. “I have a friend who writes for Huffington Post, and he tweeted at them too being like, this is very scary, that you’re a financial services company, and someone could get hacked and you’re not around to help them.” Shortly after calling Venmo out publicly on Twitter, Charania finally got an answer, and the company eventually reimbursed him.

For many Venmo users, the most disconcerting thing about these tales should be that what happened to Grey and Charania could just as easily happen to you. I don’t link my Venmo account to anything—I simply try to maintain a balance of around $30 that I can use to pay friends and co-workers for small things as needed. I’m almost certainly an outlier. Most people connect their Venmo account to either their debit card, credit card (the only nonfree option, with a standard 3 percent fee), or directly to their bank accounts. This is what Venmo wants. The company’s ultimate vision, as Braintree CEO Bill Ready told Bloomberg in November, is to build a user base so large that Venmo becomes a default mobile checkout option at stores, and can charge merchants for the privilege of accepting Venmo payments.

To create such a network, Venmo has gone to great lengths to make its sign-up process as easy as possible. Late last year, it added features that let iOS and Android users who downloaded the Venmo app link it directly to their bank accounts using their existing online-banking credentials. This more “frictionless” process, as Fast Company dubbed it, eliminated the previous need for users to manually enter their bank routing information into the app. Venmo has also marketed itself not just as a finance app, but as a social one. Sign up for a Venmo account and you’re immersed in a feed of your friends’ public transactions. Bruce paid Joe for pizza. Abe charged John for IKEA furniture. Henry paid Julie for coffee. To be on Venmo, as a Matter article succinctly put it in July, is to take part in “public displays of transaction.”

Of course, what gets lost in all this—in the streamlined interface, simple onboarding process, and social pressure to join a service that lets you pay friends with a quick tap—is a sense of the trade-offs. The last three steps on Venmo’s six-part “Getting Started” checklist prompt new users to “Link your bank,” “Add a card,” and “Increase your spending limit.” If you ranked the risk of those options from lowest to highest, “it would certainly be credit card, then debit card, then the routing number,” says Matt Schultz, senior industry analyst at CreditCards.com. At no point does Venmo indicate this—in fact, by requesting a bank account before a card, it might even be encouraging users to take that riskier route.

The defining social quality of Venmo’s platform also creates unique security challenges. Last May, three students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology noted in a paper that Venmo’s interface and social-networking component made it vulnerable to “social engineering attacks.” Because Venmo doesn’t distinguish visually between a user’s friends and others on the app, a benign payment request from a hacker might not immediately stand out. More importantly, since Venmo users can quickly change things like their name and profile picture, it’s easy for hackers to impersonate users’ actual contacts and trick them into sending money to the wrong accounts.

“I know tons of people that use it and I thought it was safe,” Grey says. “But with something that has your bank account number and your routing number, that's super personal and I don't think that's an option that should even be there.”

A day and a half after he first discovered the fraudulent transaction and contacted Venmo, Grey finally got a response. The email, sent from “Michael” from Venmo’s “Fraud & Risk” department, outlined basic steps he should take to protect the account (change passwords, revoke access to unauthorized sessions, add a PIN), and said the company was “working to prevent this unauthorized account access in the future.” Grey emailed back and asked the representative to cancel his account. Many of his friends and colleagues are doing the same.

Chase, for its part, reimbursed Grey’s money last Friday morning. “I thought I would have like no money for the weekend,” he says. Once the fix came through, “I was able to buy lunch.”

Read the original article here.

It's been a decent couple of weeks for America's underpaid retail workers.

First, Walmart announced it was raising wages for 500,000 of its associates — up to a minimum of $9 an hour this spring, and $10 next year — in a bid to increase morale and performance.

Wednesday, TJX, the owner of clothing discounters T.J. Maxx and Marshalls, said that it was following suit.

Target is still holding out, but companies are obviously feeling some pressure to up their remuneration for the people who make their stores run.

Why now? There are lots of little reasons, to start. States are hiking their minimum wages — in all-important California, the floor will be $10 in 2016 — meaning that these companies would have faced higher payroll costs regardless.

Meanwhile, Walmart is trying to combat its toxic public image as the king of low-wage employment, which hasn't been helped by the steady protests organized by the worker group OUR Walmart.

At the same time, its labor practices, designed to ruthlessly minimize expenses, have become a major business liability in recent years, as badly understaffed supercenters haven't been able to keep merchandise stocked on shelves, leaving it to stack up in storage while customers head elsewhere.

The company's new chief executive, Doug McMillon, thinks that improving customer service is key to turning around its performance and is betting higher pay will lead to happier, more productive staff (and the best research suggests he's right). And if Walmart is offering higher wages, its competitors will probably need to do the same to compete.

But that brings us to the big issue. The job market isn't just healing. It's now getting somewhere close to normal again. There are about 1.7 unemployed workers per job opening now, close to the lows of early 2007. That line you're looking at?

The lower it falls, the more impetus companies will have to raise their compensation, since employees will feel more comfortable quitting to go looking for a higher paycheck elsewhere. And indeed, as Matt Yglesias notes today, more and more Americans have been saying "so long" to their bosses lately.

We want those missing workers to return to job market. If they do, that should help alleviate the need for companies to increase wages. If they don't, well, at least a few more Americans should be in for a raise.

Red double-decker buses still cruise up and down the Strand, the guards stand up straight in front of Buckingham Palace, and the queen rides her horse-drawn carriage to the opening session of Parliament every year.

But beneath this seemingly immutable surface, Britain is changing with surprising speed.

For one, the discontent with “establishment” politics that has convulsed so many European countries has finally reached the British Isles.

There have been no mass marches here, as in Spain, and no anarchist riots, as in Greece.

Instead, large numbers of Britons are cheerfully telling pollsters that they aren’t planning to vote for the Conservative Party in May’s general election, and that they don’t like the Labour Party or the Liberal Democrats either.

If they are Scottish, they might be planning to vote for the Scottish National Party, which hopes to immediately reinvigorate its campaign for Scottish independence. If they are English, they might vote for the anti-European, anti-immigration United Kingdom Independence Party, or maybe for the Greens.

Nothing wrong with that in principle, but it’s hard to imagine how a four- or five-way split could produce a stable government, especially in a country that has been ruled by Labour or the Tories for most of the past century.

Priorities could change dramatically. At a recent London breakfast meeting, a room full of experts spun out every possible scenario — Tory-UKIP coalition? Lab-Lib-ScotNat coalition? Minority government, with new elections soon after? — and tried to work out what each would mean.

The conclusion: Britain might take a radical step to the left, it might take a radical step to the right, it might leave the European Union, it might break up altogether. In other words, no one could predict anything, except that Britain would be occupied by its own internal arguments for a very long time.

This second development is not unrelated to the first: Suddenly, without much discussion, it seems as if Britain — a nuclear and conventional military power, a staunch U.S. ally, a pillar of NATO — has lost its historic interest in foreign policy.

The drift began in 2009, when David Cameron withdrew his Conservative Party from the Christian Democratic mainstream in the European Parliament, a decision that instantly gave him less access to the most important European leader, Angela Merkel.

Soon after, he announced his intention to hold a referendum on Britain’s EU membership, immediately affording him less credibility in Europe, too: If the British were already halfway out the door, why bother talking to them at all?

But Britain’s gradual fade from the world stage was abruptly accelerated in 2013, when Cameron declared he would support U.S. airstrikes in Syria, called a parliamentary vote for support — and lost. He dropped that idea, apparently spooking President Obama, who dropped it, too. Both were forced to reconsider after ISIS captured large chunks of Syrian and Iraqi territory.

But even now the British contribution to the anti-ISIS campaign consists of eight planes, hardly an overwhelming commitment. Defense spending is likely to be frozen next year. And when Merkel flew to Minsk to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin last month, she took the French president along as a fig leaf, leaving the British behind.

Political weakness is part of the problem: The Conservatives are by no means guaranteed re-election, and the foreign secretary is of the opinion, he reportedly recently said, that there are “no votes in defence.”

The Iraq war turned many in Britain off the idea of ever cooperating with Americans, and the European recession explains a lot of the doubts about Europe. Provincialism is a factor, too. In a country where the political class is consumed by an argument over the constitutional status of Scotland, events in the Middle East or Ukraine seem far away.

It’s hard to say, since none of them is really talking about it. Once upon a time, Britain was said to have acquired its empire in a “fit of absent-mindedness.” It may be about to lose its place on the world stage in exactly the same way.

Rania Matar worked as an architect for many years, but while pregnant with her fourth child, she began taking photography classes in order to get better pictures of her children. It turned out to be a career-changing moment, launching a body of work that looks at transitional moments in the lives of women.

Matar, who is Lebanese and American, was also influenced by her connection to both cultures, especially in light of the events of Sept. 11 that left her feeling confused. “I’m American and I’m Lebanese,” Matar recalled about how she felt during that time.

“I thought where am I fitting in on this? I’m both. I was the two [cultures] and identified with the two equally so I had a hard time with the media portraying people so differently, you’re either with us or against us—I was them and us!”

She embarked on a project that eventually became the book Ordinary Lives, a collection of images that shows women and children in Lebanon living lives that were exactly what the title implies—something different from what was shown in American media. It also became the prevailing theme throughout Matar’s work: looking at the lives of women in both the United States and Lebanon.

Watching her daughters grow up brought back similar emotions she had felt as a child moving into adulthood. She created “A Girl and Her Room” as well as a look at girls about to begin puberty, “L’Enfant-Femme.” 

“There is something universal about being a teenage girl,” Matar said. “Being a girl, being a mother, being a woman. I include both cultures, not to compare them but to show the universality about it. All my projects are on some level autobiographical; I’m photographing what I’m going through in my life through other people.”

When her daughter left for college, Matar began to work on a series about women her own age, “Women Coming of Age.” While she was working with the women, their daughters were often present. Since Matar’s daughters are in college and high school, her dynamic with both of them was completely different; not only were her daughters changing, but her relationship with them was as well.

While she was photographing the older women, her focus began to shift from the individual to a more collective portrait that included the daughters. It began an ongoing series she titles “Unspoken Conversations” that conveys, she says, through “glances and emotions of the individuals,” both the personal and the universality of the complex mother-and-daughter relationship.  

Matar continues to find people to photograph in a variety of ways, including sometimes introducing herself to potential subjects after taking an exercise class. 

Netanyahu has blamed “European states” for some of his election troubles. Until recently, he had left the most explicit America-bashing to surrogates such as his intelligence minister, who warned Israelis on Tuesday of a “mobilization … by elements in the United States against us.”

But in the last two days, Netanyahu has sharpened his attacks. In an interview with theJerusalem Post on Thursday, he accused his rivals of suggesting that “we should bow our heads to the U.S.” Under his own leadership, Netanyahu pledged, “The days when Jews bow their heads are over.” He argued that an Israeli prime minister must “draw the line” not only against Iran’s nuclear program, but also against dividing Jerusalem and withdrawing to Israel’s pre-1967 borders.

On Friday, speaking with the Times of Israel, Netanyahu implied that some Americans and their government were targeting him for his resistance. He denounced “an effort by leftist NGOs throughout the world, and left-leaning tycoons and consultants from various political parties, including from the United States, to try to bring down the Likud and me.” The Times asked him: “Do you think the Obama administration wants to see the back of you as prime minister?” Netanyahu replied: “Well, it’s not a tremendous leap of imagination, don’t you think?” He pointed to the “enormous campaign here from abroad … to get out the Arab vote in vast numbers, get out the left vote in vast numbers, and conduct a negative campaign against me.”

Sometimes, Netanyahu pretends that his defiance is just about an existential threat from Iran. But then he brags about standing up for settlements, which every U.S. administration has opposed. On Thursday, in a letter to right-wing voters, Netanyahu touted his refusal to halt Jewish construction in the West Bank, not just during his current term, but also in his prior term, when Bill Clinton was president. “We stood up against great international pressure to withdraw,” he crowed. “We built thousands of housing units in Judea, Samaria, and Jerusalem.”

Arkansas: It's for the kinds of lovers who sometimes need a mulligan on their relationships.

This week, U.S. Census Bureau researchers reported that, of Americans who have ever wedded, nearly a quarter had been married at least two separate times in their lives. But, as always, there were some stark differences state to state.

In the Northeast, for instance, second and third marriages are relatively uncommon. In the South and West, on the other hand, people walk down the aisle both early and often. Nowhere is this more the case than in the Razorback State, where around 35 percent of ever-married adults have said "I do" more than once.

But the numbers do provide one useful illustration of and commentary on a concept that sociologist Andrew Cherlin calls "the marriage-go-round"—the idea that Americans are uniquely prone to cycling in and out of relationships, whether they're just living together or married, and that the constant churning ultimately takes a toll on children.

While that might be part of our romantic character nationally, the issue is far more severe in some corners of the country than others. In the Northeast, you might not hear as much preaching about family values. But people seem to live up to them relatively well.

In 2013, the Federal Trade Commission cleared Google of charges that the company had stifled competition by rigging its search results to promote its own content and services (like restaurant recommendations and flight results). But an FTC staff report obtained by the Wall Street Journal provides evidence that the company did exactly that.

The report gives examples of times when this practice led to inferior results ranking above better-quality ones, like when Google flight data came up first even though other services had more extensive flight offerings.

This practice has long been rumored, and companies like Yelp (that are negatively impacted by it) have publicly aired their suspicions. Even a casual user of Google search has probably seen anecdotal evidence that the company could be promoting its own services and links above others.

As the Journal reports, Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt told a Senate panel in 2011 (when he was chief executive) that “he was not aware of any strange boosts or biases” in the company's search results. And Google General Counsel Kent Walker echoed this on Thursday, noting that the FTC never took action on the issue. Walker also said that Google frequently makes legitimate changes to its search algorithm.

Since Google search is so much more popular than other search alternatives, and has so many users every day, it's important to understand the company's methods. Richard Gingras, the head of Google News, told Slate last week that Google’s main priority in search is to “recommend the best possible sources based on all the signals we have.” But there may have been other motivators at work.