Jeff Walzer's Public Library

But as Revel astutely notes, the deeper bond is what he calls the "excommunication of modernity," a mark of the left going back to the primitivist and anti-civilizational musings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The Islamists understand this commonality as well: Among the doctrinal sources cited by Osama bin Laden, one finds not only the Quran but also the works of Noam Chomsky.

Anyone who thinks the totalitarian temptation lies buried in Lenin's mausoleum would do well to read this book, a fitting literary capstone in the career of one of France's true immortals.

The social characteristic of deciding who to trust is a key feature of authority — were you to say “I have it on good authority that Khotyn is a town in Moldova”, you’d be saying that you trust me to know and disclose that information accurately, not just because you trust me, but because some other group has vouched, formally or informally, for my trustworthiness.

This is a compressed telling, and swerves around many epistemological potholes, such as information that can’t be evaluated independently (”I love you”), information that is correct by definition (”The American Psychiatric Association says there is a mental disorder called psychosis”), or authorities making untestable propositions (”God hates it when you eat shrimp.”) Even accepting those limits, though, the assertion that Khotyn is in Moldova provides enough of an illustration here, because it’s false. Khotyn is in Ukraine.

And this is where authority begins to work its magic. If you told someone who knew better about the Moldovan town of Khotyn, and they asked where you got that incorrect bit of information, you’d have to say “Some guy on the internet said so.” See how silly you’d feel?

Algorithmic authority is the decision to regard as authoritative an unmanaged process of extracting value from diverse, untrustworthy sources, without any human standing beside the result saying “Trust this because you trust me.” This model of authority differs from personal or institutional authority, and has, I think, three critical characteristics.

First, it takes in material from multiple sources, which sources themselves are not universally vetted for their trustworthiness, and it combines those sources in a way that doesn’t rely on any human manager to sign off on the results before they are published.

“It really is a problem of definition,” Ghose says. “This is what we as a community ultimately have to pin down: what we mean by quantum chaos.”

What this experiment has shown is that the actions that cause a difference in a system’s behavior on a classical level—a difference we would call chaos—cause a difference in a quantum system’s behavior as well. According to Ghose, that indicates that some underlying property is at the roots of chaos, a property that can produce hypersensitivity but whose definition shouldn’t be limited to it.

SQL injection attacks were one of the most common methods of breaching systems in the cases that are highlighted in the Verizon report. They were used in 19 percent of the cases and accounted for 79 percent of the breached records.

A SQL injection attack is generally conducted through a website to its backend database and is often the first simple step in what becomes a more sophisticated attack once the hacker is in the network. By sending special attack commands through a vulnerable website to the backend database, a hacker can obtain access to the database, change data in it or use it as a jumping off point to install a sniffer, keystroke logger or backdoor on the network.

Another card processor was also breached through a SQL injection attack. In this case, the attackers installed “an extensive array” of packet sniffers on the processor’s network to map it out and locate card data. Then they installed keystroke loggers to record administrative passwords to get into the core payment system and installed other sniffers that siphoned millions of transactions records.

Point-of-sale (POS) systems were another popular target in Verizon’s caseload.

The Americans also say they will tie them directly to the Afghan government.

These checks aim to avoid repeating mistakes of the past — either creating more Afghan warlords, who have defied the government’s authority for years, or arming Islamic militants, some of whom came back to haunt the United States.

First, it is reminiscent of the Anbar Awakening in 2006-07, when Sunni tribal leaders in western Iraq formed alliances with U.S. forces—whom the Sunnis had been shooting just months earlier—to beat back the bigger threat of al-Qaida.

Second, it has drawn high-level attention to a 45-page paper by Army Maj. Jim Gant, the former team leader of a special-ops detachment stationed in Konar province. The paper, called "One Tribe at a Time: A Strategy for Success in Afghanistan," recounts his experiences with organizing "tribal engagement teams" to help local fighters beat back the Taliban—and it spells out a plan to replicate these teams across the country.