In 2012, Jeremy Hammond was arrested by the FBI for infiltrating security think tank Stratfor. As a main driver of Anonymous in Chicago, Hammond was tracked by authorities and eventually given up by informant Hector Xavier Monsegur, or Sabu. At the time, Hammond was the FBI’s most wanted cybercriminal.

It’s never been clear, though, how the FBI was able to search Hammond’s computer, because it was protected by strong encryption and Hammond had time to fully secure it before agents raided his home (assault rifles and all). But Ars Technica may have found a clue.

As the site points out, an Associated Press profile of Hammond states that his password was “Chewy 123.” With the hashing algorithms Hammond had protecting his data, it would have taken the FBI a long time to crack his password. Unless it was something that was easy to guess. And given that Chewy was the name of Hammond’s cat, it would have come up quickly in a systematic effort to access the computer. “My password was really weak,” Hammond told the AP.

Choosing strong passwords is really important. You already know that if you regularly read Slate or the countless other sites that have been talking about data security lately. But just to cement the idea, here’s a pro tip: If you’re the FBI’s most wanted cybercriminal, stay away from the pet-name passwords.

With 1.35 billion users, Facebook is sitting on a mountain of data. In February, as an idea that came out of its 10^th anniversary, the company started offering customizable “Look Back” videos that populated a heavily designed, slide show-type thing with photos froms users’ personal data troves. At the time Facebook hinted that it wanted to create other user data-driven projects. Today the company unveiled “Say Thanks.”

This new type of video is all about expressing gratitude to “a close friend, your significant other, a relative, a coworker, an old friend—or anyone else in your life who you’d like to celebrate.” As Facebook says in its announcement, “Your friends are at the core of your Facebook experience, and we are always looking for new ways to help you celebrate those friendships.”

But the problem with “Say Thanks” is that it’s really not a good way to say thanks. It’s true that thank-you notes have been placed in a strange purgatory by remaining in the physical realm of paper and pen, but it may be because saying thank you feels like it means more if someone put in effort beyond just typing a quick email or text. As Julia Turner once wrote in Slate, “The thank-you note ... is a difficult form, only slightly less tricky than the villanelle. The smallest notecard can seem a yawning canvas and reduce even the best writer to adverbs and redundancies.”

The fact that society still values written thank-you notes doesn’t mean that a heartfelt digital thank-you isn’t possible. But, as you can see above, “Say Thanks” is just an amalgam of everything that’s impersonal about digital gratitude. It’s full of clichés like thanks “for the good times we’ve had” and for “being a friend.” And even with the personal images, the background graphics make the videos seem more like Facebook proper than an intimate mode of communicating gratitude to a friend.

It’s hard to say what we really feel, and when people make “Say Thanks” videos they will presumably be doing it for the right reasons. But it’s one thing to wish someone a happy birthday on Facebook, and another altogether to call them, write them, or see them on that day. “Say Thanks” has the same limitation.

A defining feature of the landmark climate agreement announced by the United States and China on Wednesday is its asymmetry. The United States must reduce its carbon emissions substantially by 2025; China’s can keep growing until 2030.

There’s a good reason for that imbalance. The United States has polluted far more than China, historically, and by now its economy is fully mature. In fact, U.S. emissions are already trending downward despite a slight bump last year. The question now is, how far down can they go?

China, in contrast, is in a much earlier stage of economic development, and its emissions have been rising quickly from their historically low per capita levels. But they’re still far lower than those of the United States—again, on a per capita basis, which is the only fair way to calculate them. China also remains much poorer than the U.S. and faces soaring energy demand for decades to come. So for China, reining in its emissions growth is a challenge comparable to reducing emissions for the United States. China’s question is not how far down its emissions can go, but how far up they will go before they finally start to go down.

The real asymmetry in the deal, then, is not about which side’s targets are harder. It’s about which side is more likely to meet those targets. And the answer to that is almost certainly the opposite of what Republican leaders were quick to assume. Spoiler: It’s China.

This isn’t to say that China’s government is more trustworthy than ours on the whole. But there are three good reasons why China is a better bet than the United States to hold up its end of this particular bargain.

1. China’s government has more power to implement its agreements.

President Obama has taken some big steps that are likely to significantly cut U.S. emissions, most notably passing new EPA restrictions on coal-fired power plants. But those alone will not be enough to reduce emissions to the agreed-upon target of 26 percent below 2005 levels in the next 10 years. Further action will require acts of Congress, whose Republican leaders are already pledging to fight Obama every step of the way.

Even the rules Obama has already enacted could be undermined by future legislative or executive actions, especially if a Republican takes the White House—which is highly likely to happen at some point between now and 2025. Remember, the Clinton administration had signed an even bigger climate agreement, the Kyoto Protocol, before George W. Bush unilaterally scuttled it shortly after taking office.

China’s national government does not wield the absolute power that Westerners sometimes attribute to it. But it does have much freer rein to implement sweeping policy changes than does the U.S. government, because there is no opposition party to block its initiatives. Whereas Obama is making an agreement that will be left largely to his successors to uphold, China’s Communist Party expects to remain in power for the duration of the deal.

2. China’s government has greater incentives to implement its agreements.

A corollary to the Chinese government’s greater ability to reduce the country’s emissions is that it will also bear greater political costs if it fails. Look at it this way: If the United States falls short of its targets, Democrats will be able to blame Republicans for tying their hands. “It wasn’t our fault,” they’ll say. “We did everything we could.” Republicans, meanwhile, will blame the Democrats for making the deal in the first place. Their leader in the Senate is already calling it “unrealistic” and complaining that meeting the targets “would ensure higher utility rates and far fewer jobs.”

China’s government knows it will have no such excuses handy if it fails to live up to its word. The Communist Party would bear the full brunt of the embarrassment. And so it would be unlikely to take on this sort of voluntary commitment if it weren’t highly confident that the targets were attainable.

Besides, as my colleague Joshua Keating points out, China already had ample incentive to take serious action on its carbon emissions. It has invested heavily in renewable energy technology, becoming the world’s largest supplier of solar panels. More importantly, the pollution from coal power plants in the country’s major cities has become unbearable at times, creating domestic political pressure to shift to cleaner technologies.

3. China may already be on track to meet its targets.

As noted above, China is already moving aggressively to curb its carbon-spewing ways. In addition to its renewable energy investments, it has announced plans for the world’s largest carbon-trading market, scheduled to start in 2016.

But it might not even take a big policy shift in order for the country to meet the targets it agreed to on Wednesday. Thanks to broader development trends, like a projected slowing of population growth and urbanization, some analysts were already forecasting that China’s emissions would peak by 2030. In fact, my colleague Jordan Weissmann notes that the country’s coal consumption actually decreased in 2013 even as its economy continued to grow. There is some ground for skepticism about the accuracy of the country's carbon accounting, but there’s little doubt that China’s government is sincere in its desire to clean up its act. It sees cleaner air as conducive to its long-term economic rise, rather than at odds with it.

For all of these reasons, the smart money is on China to make good on its promises. The United States is a much shakier bet, especially since Republicans are already laying the groundwork to sabotage our end of the deal. Their excuse for opposing the agreement is sadly ironic: China, they insist, can’t be trusted.

Previously in Slate: 

• The U.S.-China Deal Won't Stop Climate Change. But It's Exactly What We Need.
• How China's "Airpocalypse" Might Have Helped Save the Planet
• China and the U.S. Just Struck a Historic Climate Deal. So Why Are Coal Stocks Rising?
  

The Netizen Report originally appears each week on Global Voices Advocacy. Ellery Roberts Biddle, Hae-in Lim, Bojan Perkov, and Sarah Myers West contributed to this report.

Global Voices Advocacy’s Netizen Report offers an international snapshot of challenges, victories, and emerging trends in Internet rights around the world. We begin this report with a look at policy making on network neutrality in Argentina and the United States.

Argentina’s Congress is preparing to review the Argentina Digital Bill, a broad-based law intended to address various online content issues including copyright and net neutrality. Although the bill was originally regarded as a positive step toward protecting net neutrality, the current language simply “guarantees net neutrality”—a stipulation far too vague to ensure that Internet service providers will actually treat all online content and traffic equally. Global Voices contributor and Buenos Aires-based legal scholar Eduardo Bertoni told the Buenos Aires Herald, “[T]o say the country ‘guarantees’ net neutrality without saying what they understand by that is a serious legislative deficiency.”

Meanwhile in the United States, President Barack Obama called on the Federal Communications Commission to “answer the call of almost 4 million public comments, and implement the strongest possible rules to protect net neutrality” by classifying Internet service providers as a public utility, similar to electricity or telephone service.

Nigeria joins the worldwide cybercrime law craze
Senators in Nigeria approved a new cybercrime law that criminalizes identity theft, child pornography possession, and various forms of online fraud, among other activities. Written in an effort to raise meet international standards and encourage foreign investment in the country, the law also punishes Internet cafe owners who “knowingly allow their premises to be used for committing a crime.” Violators will face a minimum prison sentence of seven years or a fine of approximately $350,000. As with many laws intended to reduce online crime, critics fear the policy could be abused to punish online activists. The bill awaits approval from the House of Representatives and may be amended before it reaches President Goodluck Jonathan for final sign-off.

Tor crackdown in the U.S.
Seventeen people were arrested and 414 .onion domains were seized by the FBI in a major crackdown on black market websites operating over the Tor anonymity network, including the Silk Road 2, Cloud 9, and Hydra. It remains unclear what vulnerabilities law enforcement authorities exploited in order to seize the domains. Foreign Policy speculates American and European authorities may be overplaying their ability to break Tor in order to prevent others from using it, while the Tor Project has offered possible scenarios through which the authorities may have located the hidden services. Either way, the raid raises serious concerns about the preservation of anonymity and security online.

Surveillance is a “highly intrusive act,” say Germany and Brazil
Germany and Brazil are calling for changes to a United Nations draft resolution on state surveillance that would define metadata collection as a “highly intrusive act.” A vote on the draft will take place in the U.N. General Assembly’s Third Committee, which deals with human rights, later this month before proceeding to the resolution stage in December.

Rough Consensus or “U.N. Security Council of the Internet”?
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the World Economic Forum, and CGI.br announced the launch of the NetMundial Initiative this week, a new group that aims to find solutions to Internet governance issues through crowd-sourcing and crowd-funding initiatives. The initiative will be run by a 25-member coordination council that will make decisions based on rough consensus. Spearheaded by ICANN, the initiative has received criticism from members of the Internet community due to a lack of transparency around the organization’s development, and has been called the “U.N. Security Council of the Internet.”

Cool Things
Enterprising artist Carla Gannis re-created Hieronymous Bosch’s 1505 masterpiece painting “The Garden of Earthly Delights” using emoji.

New Research

• “Out of the Shadows, Into the Streets”—Sasha Costanza-Chock
• “Communities @ Risk: Targeted Digital Threats Against Civil Society”—Citizen Lab

When flip phones ruled, the best way to quickly send text messages was a predictive typing system called T9. If you sent more than a few texts during the ’90s/early 2000s, then you know what I’m talking about. And all of us still have that T9 muscle memory buried somewhere deep inside. It’s time to bust it out.

Thanks to iOS 8’s support of third-party keyboards, an option called Type 9 now allows you to use your iPhone like the flip phones of yore. We don’t all have undying love for T9, so the $1 keyboard may not seem worth it to everyone—usually I would never pay for a novelty app—but T9 was something many of us communed with over many years. It was a little piece of software that started to feel familiar and comfortable.

Smartphones have fancier and better (sort of) predictive text features today, but they don’t have the personality and charm of T9.

The Washington Post has a stunning reveal today: For several days in September and October, the U.S. National Weather Service was allegedly subject to a cyber-attack from China that forced the agency to shut down critical data systems. Worse yet, it appears the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency, which the National Weather Service is part of, kept the breach to itself for days. From the Post:

The intrusion occurred in late September but officials gave no indication that they had a problem until Oct. 20, according to three people familiar with the hack and the subsequent reaction by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or NOAA, which includes the National Weather Service. Even then, NOAA did not say its systems were compromised.

The inspector general of the Commerce Department—the part of the executive branch NOAA falls under—is currently investigating the incident.

The Post’s revelations come during a particularly difficult year for technical glitches at the National Weather Service. In May, an outage prevented weather warnings from being issued—in the middle of a tornado outbreak. In August, a rogue Android app took down the agency’s main forecasting website. At that time, in an open letter to NWS Director Louis Uccellini, I wondered what might happen if someone deliberately tried to cripple the country’s weather service during a major disaster. Turns out, that was more of a possibility than I realized.

The National Weather Service, in its current state, is broken. I can understand if the agency is having problems keeping up with the 21^st century on a limited budget, but intentionally withholding information about its critical vulnerabilities? Come on. The people in the Weather Service do heroic, life-saving work every day. It’s time their leadership gives them the tools to do their job.

Just hours before the news of the Chinese data hack broke, there was yet another glitch: Late Tuesday and early Wednesday, spurious tornado watches from 2010 were issued across several Southeast states.*

It was not immediately whether any of these glitches might have been the result of Chinese hacking. Perhaps, as the Post speculates, hackers were just looking for the easiest way into official U.S. government computers, and found NOAA particularly unguarded*:

The hack may have been aimed less at manipulating weather data, then [sic] finding an opening in a U.S. system to exploit, said Jacob Olcott, a cybersecurity consultant now with Good Harbor Security Risk Management and former Senate staffer on cybersecurity legislation. “The bad guys are increasingly having a hard time getting in the front of these agencies,” he said. “So they figure if I can’t get in the front door, I’d ride along in with someone who has trusted access and maybe ride that connection to bigger agencies.”

The full NOAA statement on the attacks was short on details:

In recent weeks, four NOAA websites were compromised by an internet-sourced attack. NOAA staff detected the attacks and incident response began immediately. Unscheduled maintenance was performed by NOAA to mitigate the attacks. The unscheduled maintenance impacts were temporary and all services have been fully restored. These effects did not prevent us from delivering forecasts to the public. The investigation is continuing with the appropriate authorities and we cannot comment further.

In a follow-up email to Slate, NOAA representative Scott Smullen said there was “no word” yet as to when more details might be available, such as whether additional security systems have been put in place since the initial breach was identified.

I’m by far the only one to point out the growing woes in the government weather world. Last month, author Kathryn Miles wrote a strongly worded op-ed in the New York Times:

An underfunded weather program will ensure that future disasters could be equally catastrophic. This is a matter of national security. If we don’t empower forecasters to do their work, our nation is at risk of losing billions in property and untold numbers of lives. What will make that eventuality all the more tragic is the fact that it will have been almost entirely preventable.

After today’s news, I completely agree.

*Correction, Nov. 12, 2014: This post originally misstated that the National Weather Service was hacked and covered it up. It was the NOAA, the parent organization of the NWS. This post also misstated that spurious tornado warnings were sent by the National Weather Service. They were tornado watches.

On Monday, President Obama came out in strong support of net neutrality and advised the FCC to reclassify Internet service as a utility under Title II of the Telecommunications Act. Later that day, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, an Obama appointee and former cable/telecom lobbyist, met with tech company representatives to say that he did not plan to follow all of the president’s proposals. Sounds about right.

According to the Washington Post, Wheeler told the group, “What you want is what everyone wants: an open Internet that doesn’t affect your business. ... What I’ve got to figure out is how to split the baby.” Because if the Judgment of Solomon taught us anything, it’s that you can split the baby and make everyone happy! And with the possibility of this showdown looming, some are speculating that Obama’s involvement—though perhaps necessary—will make a formerly nonpartisan issue into the latest battle between left and right. As Ted Johnson put it in Variety, “Will a decade-long, wonkish policy debate morph into something that will mobilize the right on an entirely new issue?”

When he entered the fray, though, Obama knew that he had almost 4 million supporting opinions on his side from the FCC public comment period on net neutrality. (Thanks, John Oliver!) And polling is backing this assessment up. A new survey by the University of Delaware’s Center for Political Communication showed broad support for net neutrality across age, gender, education, and race demographics. The survey, which had a margin of error of 3.2 percentage points, found that roughly 81 percent of Americans oppose “fast lane” deals brokered by Internet service providers. And when you break that number down by party affiliation, 81 percent of Democrats and 85 percent of Republicans were opposed to fast lanes.

And as Time points out, though some Republican lawmakers like Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, and House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., all came out strongly against Obama’s net neutrality stance, other polls agree with the one conducted at University of Deleware.

One by the Internet Freedom Business Alliance found, with a 2.8 percentage point margin of error, that about 83 percent of voters who self-identified as “very conservative” didn’t want ISPs to have power over online content. And 83 percent of conservatives thought that Congress should be able to take action against ISPs that could “monopolize the Internet or reduce the inherent equality of the Internet.” The IFBA is a pro-net neutrality lobbying group, so take their study with a grain of salt. But the group’s leader is former Rep. Chip Pickering, R-Miss., so maybe the issue really does reach both sides of the aisle.

By now we all know, or ought to know, that just because something is published in a peer-reviewed academic journal doesn’t mean it’s true. But we can at least assume it's been proofread, right?

Apparently not. A priceless gaffe, which has been making the rounds of academic Twitter this week, is Exhibit A.

It comes in the main text of a paper titled “Variation in Melanism and Female Preference in Proximate but Ecologically Distinct Environments,” which was published in a recent issue of the journal Ethology. Here’s the unintentionally candid passage, as highlighted by UC–Davis grad student Dave Harris:

The blooper was picked up by Retraction Watch, which contacted both the authors and the publisher for comment. The corresponding author told Retraction Watch the Gabor line “was added into the paper by a co-author during revision (after peer review),” and no one spotted it in the course of the final proofreading process. He apologized for the put-down, adding, “I would never condone this sentiment towards another person or their work.”

Wiley, the publisher, responded by removing the paper and says it will republish it with the line removed and the change noted. “We are in the process of investigating how this line made it to publication,” the Wiley spokesperson said.

That’s a good question. Typos and editing mistakes are common on blogs and even in print newspapers, where reporters and editors are working on tight deadlines. But academics typically have weeks or even months to edit a paper before the journal goes to press, and the peer review process means that it has to go through close reads by multiple experts in the relevant field.

For that reason, errors this glaring in the main text of an article are relatively rare, says Meredith Carpenter, a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford and co-author of the science humor blog Seriously, Science? As Carpenter and co-author Lillian Fritz-Laylin explained in a Slate post last year, overly honest asides are more commonly found in the acknowledgements section, which tends not to be peer-reviewed.

Still, slip-ups do happen, and Carpenter pointed me to another example that might be even more mortifying than the “crappy Gabor paper” mishap. This one is in the abstract of a paper published in 2011 in the peer-reviewed open-access journal BMC Systems Biology (emphasis mine):

RESULTS: In this study, we have used (insert statistical method here) to compile unique DNA methylation signatures from normal human heart, lung, and kidney using the Illumina Infinium 27 K methylation arrays and compared those to gene expression by RNA sequencing.

The journal later apologized and corrected the mistake, noting that the statistical methods were adequately explained later in the article.

Carpenter says the most prominent academic journals usually copy edit papers prior to publication. But smaller journals don’t always look as closely at the final version of a paper once it has been peer-reviewed and revised. In that case, it’s at least partly the responsibility of the paper’s authors to make sure they haven’t introduced any mistakes in the editing process. This one looks like what we might call a track-changes fail.

The paper’s authors aren’t the only ones taking flak for it. Commenters and Twitter wags were quick to hunt down the “crappy paper” in question, since after all a paper with a major typo is still better than one that’s crappy all around. But at least one considerate observer warned against a rush to judgment:

It’s tempting to view this real-life corollary to #overlyhonestmethods as an indictment of the academic publication process. But Carpenter suggested a more optimistic take: “Instead of a failure of the system, you could also consider this a success of post-publication peer review.”

In that spirit, I’d like to reiterate Slate’s standing call for our readers to alert us to our own mistakes both new and old. (Should I cite the crappy Oremus Encyclopaedia Britannica error here?)

Previously in Slate:

• The Snarky, Clever Comments Hidden in the “Acknowledgements” of Academic Papers
• College Students’ Thesis Topics Are Hilarious, Depressing