NYU’s Daily Student Newspaper
washington square news Vol. 39, No. 27
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 26, 2011
nyunews.com
Tisch prof Swados tells her story in new memoir
NY to open first center for LGBT seniors
By Gentry Brown
By Claire Zajdel
Tisch professor Elizabeth Swados has done it all. She’s a Tonynominated director, a composer, professor and most recently, an author. Robert Hershon, co-editor of the Brooklyn-based Hanging Loose Press, may have put it best when he introduced Swados at the NYU Bookstore Monday night. “There are many different Lizs, and each one wears a different hat,” he said. Swados stopped by the bookstore to talk about her new book, “Waiting: Selected NonFiction,” which does its best to display her “different hats.” The book is a collection of stories from her life and sheds light on everything from her schizophrenic brother to what it’s like to work with celebrities like Sean Penn.
The nation’s first ever senior center for the LGBT community is set to open in Chelsea January of next year. The center, which will be located on 27th Street and Seventh Avenue, will serve the needs of the estimated 100,000 elderly LGBT New Yorkers. The center will be opened by Services and Advocacy for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Elders, and will eventually help up to 300 people every day. It will provide special programs and about 130 hot meals per day. SAGE hopes the center will increase awareness of the services they offer to the elderly LGBT community. “These Innovative Senior Centers will make New York City an age-friendly city for all New Yorkers,” Department for the Aging commissioner Lilliam Bar-
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AARUSHI CHOPRA/WSN
Commuter Idol
For the first time ever, NYU commuters competed for a solo spot in this year’s Ultra Violet Live talent show. Tisch senior Thais Francis took home first prize with his bongo medley of pop songs.
Skype security under scrutiny By Eric Benson The next time you decide to use Skype, beware — someone may know exactly where you are. A recent study conducted by Polytechnic Institute of NYU professor of computer science and engineering Keith Ross showed that Skype users, and possibly users of other peer-to-peer sharing systems, can obtain IP addresses
VIA SKYPE.COM
Skype may put users at risk.
of other users without making a single call. “The most important vulnerability of Skype is that an arbitrary stranger can track the locations of any Skype user,” Ross said. According to Ross, the process of using Skype to obtain someone else’s IP address was not particularly hard to do. “Once you know that the vulnerability is there, it is not very difficult,” he said. “Any talented high school hacker could launch the attack.” The study, which tracked thousands of Skype users over a twoweek period, took place during the summer of 2010 at the Polytechnic Institute at NYU, along with a partner team in France. Ross explained that while Skype is running on a computer, an attacker can call a user by blocking network packets — blocks of data
carried by the computer network. The attacker was then able to gain access to the user’s IP address. Obtaining an individual’s IP address allows infiltrators to determine his or her exact location. In fact, users do not even have to be on the same contact list in order to learn each other’s IP addresses. To Ross, who has spent years studying peer-to-peer technologies, the results of the study came as a jarring surprise. “I hope Skype, at the very least, modifies its software, so the IP address is not as readily available,” he said. “If this is true, it is a big problem for Skype because folks may avoid using it,” said Tucker Balch, associate professor of interactive computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “This attack
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Exhibit looks at the jewelry behind history’s finest artists By Erin Kim Twenty-five years ago, sculptor Bernar Venet rolled a piece of silver into an engagement ring for his soon-to-be wife Diane. Through this encounter, not only did Diane’s relationship with Bernar grow, but so did her love for the art of collecting jewelry. Now, Venet is the guest curator of a new exhibit at the Museum of Art and Design devoted to that passion. Titled “Picasso to Koons: The Artist as Jeweler,” the exhibit boasts more than 180 bejeweled masterpieces from some of the 20th century’s greatest artists. “Really, I do not talk about jewelry, I talk about art,” Diane said. “It is art in miniature [form] and it is a miniature museum that I have and I enjoy
[sharing] so much.” But few of the world-renowned artists featured at the exhibit were known for the splendid jewelry they made behind the scenes. “Almost all of these pieces were made by the artists for friends,” exhibit guide Leila Zogby said. “They are tokens of affection and very few of them were made for commercial purpose. The artists had to come out of their comfort zones and design [using] material they were really not familiar with.” Among the most memorable pieces on display are Andy Warhol’s Times/5 watch and Roy Lichtenstein’s brooches, which serve as a testament to the pop art world. Warhol’s watch, a collabo-
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