jmcmichael

U.N. Makes Dictator Robert Mugabe An Ambassador For Tourism

Thu, 31 May 2012 07:43:48 -0500

U.N. Makes Dictator Robert Mugabe An Ambassador For Tourism:

He has killed scores of his own citizens and political opponents. He has devastated a nation, reducing it to unspeakable poverty while he and his family live in unrivaled luxury. He has denied everyone in his country every basic right and liberty. He has turned Zimbabwe into a pariah nation. And now Robert Mugabe is the newest ambassador for tourism for the United Nations. He will now work with the World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) which appears interested in enlisting the help of dictators on vacation.

IEEE Spectrum - Bitcoin: The Cryptoanarchists’ Answer to Cash

Thu, 31 May 2012 07:08:00 -0500

IEEE Spectrum - Bitcoin: The Cryptoanarchists’ Answer to Cash:

Science and technology writer Morgen E. Peck (@MorganPeck) authored an article on Bitcoin in the June 2012 IEEE Spectrum. Excerpts:

In the long run, a system like this, which restores privacy to electronic payments, could do more than just put the sneak back into the peek. If enough people take part, Bitcoin or another system like it will give political dissidents a new way to collect donations and criminals a new way to launder their money—while causing headaches for traditional financial gatekeepers.

The dream of an anonymous, independent digital currency—one where privacy is maintained for buyers and sellers—long predates Bitcoin.

‘I started thinking about the analogy between difficult-to-solve problems and the difficulty of mining gold,’ said [Nick Szabo]. If a puzzle took time and energy to solve, then it could be considered to have value, he reasoned. The solution could then be given to someone as a digital coin.

The ‘miner’ whose computer first finds an acceptable hash value is rewarded with newly minted bitcoins. The Bitcoin system adjusts the difficulty of the hashing requirements to control the minting rate. To its proponents, this is one of Bitcoin’s biggest attractions.

(via bitcoinnews)

How a BitCoin transaction works, an infographic

Thu, 31 May 2012 06:39:14 -0500

How a BitCoin transaction works, an infographic

Songs of War: We follow a Sesame Street composer as he learns how his music has been used to torture detainees at Guantanamo Bay.

Wed, 30 May 2012 22:07:00 -0500

Songs of War: We follow a Sesame Street composer as he learns how his music has been used to torture detainees at Guantanamo Bay.:

Award-winning musician Christopher Cerf has composed music for the famous children’s television show Sesame Street for 40 years. During this time, he has written more than 200 songs intended to help children learn how to read and write.

But these innocent children’s songs were abused for inhumane purposes.

“It is music’s capacity to take over your mind and invade your inner experience that makes it so terrifying as a potential weapon.”

- Thomas Keenan, the director of the Human Right’s Project at Bard College

In 2003, it transpired that US intelligence services had tortured detainees at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib with music from Sesame Street.

Human rights researcher Thomas Keenan explains: “Prisoners were forced to put on headphones. They were attached to chairs, headphones were attached to their heads, and they were left alone just with the music for very long periods of time. Sometimes hours, even days on end, listening to repeated loud music.”

“The music was so loud,” says Moazzam Begg, a former detainee at Guantanamo Bay and Bagram. “And it was probably some of the worst torture that they faced.”

Stunned by this abuse of his work, Cerf was motivated to find out more about how it could happen.

- Al Jazeera World

Bill Murray rambles hilariously through a preview of Moonrise...

Wed, 30 May 2012 20:04:08 -0500

Bill Murray rambles hilariously through a preview of Moonrise Kingdom.

Massive state-sponsored malware network has been vaccuuming up sensitive data since Aug. 2010

Mon, 28 May 2012 09:37:00 -0500

Massive state-sponsored malware network has been vaccuuming up sensitive data since Aug. 2010:

A complex targeted cyber-attack that collected private data from countries such as Israel and Iran has been uncovered, researchers have said.

Russian security firm Kaspersky Labs told the BBC they believed the malware, known as Flame, had been operating since August 2010.

The company said it believed the attack was state-sponsored, but could not be sure of its exact origins.

The Butler Did It: Vatican faces a widening scandal after Pope's butler tries to publish book describing corruption among Cardinals

Mon, 28 May 2012 07:53:19 -0500

The Butler Did It: Vatican faces a widening scandal after Pope's butler tries to publish book describing corruption among Cardinals:

The Vatican faces a widening scandal that in one short week has seen the butler of Pope Benedict XVI arrested, the president of its bank unceremoniously dismissed and the publication of a new book alleging conspiracies among cardinals.

On Saturday his personal butler, Paolo Gabriele, 46, was formally charged with stealing confidential papal documents in the scandal that has come to be known as “Vatileaks.” Some of the documents allege cronyism and corruption in contracts with Italian companies.

One prominent cardinal, illustrating the growing emotion of the debate in Vatican circles, wrote in an Italian newspaper that the Pope had been betrayed just as Jesus was 2,000 years ago.

Cambridge Security Lab: Backdoor found in US military chip

Sun, 27 May 2012 18:01:00 -0500

Cambridge Security Lab: Backdoor found in US military chip:

Our findings. Claims were made by the intelligence agencies around the world, from MI5, NSA and IARPA, that silicon chips could be infected. We developed breakthrough silicon chip scanning technology to investigate these claims. We chose an American military chip that is highly secure with sophisticated encryption standard, manufactured in China. Our aim was to perform advanced code breaking and to see if there were any unexpected features on the chip. We scanned the silicon chip in an affordable time and found a previously unknown backdoor inserted by the manufacturer. This backdoor has a key, which we were able to extract. If you use this key you can disable the chip or reprogram it at will, even if locked by the user with their own key. This particular chip is prevalent in many systems from weapons, nuclear power plants to public transport. In other words, this backdoor access could be turned into an advanced Stuxnet weapon to attack potentially millions of systems. The scale and range of possible attacks has huge implications for National Security and public infrastructure.

(UPDATE: looks like this might a standard debugging tool left in by chip developers, not a Chinese plot)

Iran designs alternative system for SWIFT: CBI

Sun, 27 May 2012 17:28:27 -0500

Iran designs alternative system for SWIFT: CBI:

Governor of the Central Bank of Iran (CBI) Mahmoud Bahmani says the country has designed and implemented a new system for conducting international transactions.

Bahmani said on Saturday the new system, which has already been activated, would replace Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT)

On March 15, SWIFT CEO Lazaro Campos said in a statement that the society has decided to discontinue offering services to Iranian banks which are subject to financial sanctions imposed by the European Union.

Greatest Wedding Proposal Ever: Isaac’s Live Lip-Dub...

Sun, 27 May 2012 07:53:30 -0500

Greatest Wedding Proposal Ever: Isaac’s Live Lip-Dub Proposal

Shit’s Everywhere, by Mercer Mayer

Sun, 27 May 2012 06:55:18 -0500

Shit’s Everywhere, by Mercer Mayer

The Imperial Mind - American rage at Pakistan over the punishment of a CIA-cooperating Pakistani doctor is quite revealing

Sun, 27 May 2012 06:45:10 -0500

The Imperial Mind - American rage at Pakistan over the punishment of a CIA-cooperating Pakistani doctor is quite revealing:

Americans of all types — Democrats and Republicans, even some Good Progressives — are just livid that a Pakistani tribal court (reportedly in consultation with Pakistani officials) has imposed a 33-year prison sentence on Shakil Afridi, the Pakistani physician who secretly worked with the CIA to find Osama bin Laden on Pakistani soil. Their fury tracks the standard American media narrative: by punishing Dr. Afridi for the “crime” of helping the U.S. find bin Laden, Pakistan has revealed that it sympathizes with Al Qaeda and is hostile to the U.S. (NPR headline: “33 Years In Prison For Pakistani Doctor Who Aided Hunt For Bin Laden”; NYT headline: “Prison Term for Helping C.I.A. Find Bin Laden”). Except that’s a woefully incomplete narrative: incomplete to the point of being quite misleading.

What Dr. Afridi actually did was concoct a pretextual vaccination program, whereby Pakistani children would be injected with a single Hepatitis B vaccine, with the hope of gaining access to the Abbottabad house where the CIA believed bin Laden was located. The plan was that, under the ruse of vaccinating the children in that province, he would obtain DNA samples that could confirm the presence in the suspected house of the bin Laden family. But the vaccine program he was administering was fake: as Wired‘s public health reporter Maryn McKenna detailed, “since only one of three doses was delivered, the vaccination was effectively useless.”

- Glenn Greenwald

Coming in 2018, James Cameron’s sequel to Ridley...

Sat, 26 May 2012 14:25:00 -0500

Coming in 2018, James Cameron’s sequel to Ridley Scott’s Prometheus

Africa developing its first supercomputer outside South Africa

Fri, 25 May 2012 12:41:14 -0500

Africa developing its first supercomputer outside South Africa:

The first 24-node HPC cluster should launch at iHub in Nairobi this summer.

Rise of the New Economy Movement - a growing number of theorists and activists are experimenting with new business models that go beyond profit

Tue, 22 May 2012 08:22:12 -0500

Rise of the New Economy Movement - a growing number of theorists and activists are experimenting with new business models that go beyond profit:

Just beneath the surface of traditional media attention, something vital has been gathering force and is about to explode into public consciousness. The “New Economy Movement” is a far-ranging coming together of organizations, projects, activists, theorists and ordinary citizens committed to rebuilding the American political-economic system from the ground up.

Revisiting Assange's Show: comparing the first six episodes to the vapid tripe emanating from American political television

Tue, 22 May 2012 07:45:31 -0500

Revisiting Assange's Show: comparing the first six episodes to the vapid tripe emanating from American political television:

Glenn Greenwald briefly summarizes the first six episodes of Julian Assange’s interview show, and asks:

Would someone learn more, be more informed about the world, from watching these episodes as opposed to, say, a standard American cable news program? Which is doing a better job of fulfilling the key journalistic functions of airing otherwise suppressed perspectives, highlighting highly consequential issues that are otherwise ignored, and shining a light on the world’s most powerful political factions? To ask the questions is to answer them. It’s also to explain why there is such intense animus toward Assange and WikiLeaks generally from America’s media stars.

What is the Pure Salvage Living Movement?

Sun, 20 May 2012 19:29:03 -0500

What is the Pure Salvage Living Movement?

Swedish Telcom Giant Teliasonera Caught Helping Authoritarian Regimes Spy on Their Citizens

Sat, 19 May 2012 12:30:06 -0500

Swedish Telcom Giant Teliasonera Caught Helping Authoritarian Regimes Spy on Their Citizens:

According to a recent investigation by the Swedish news show Uppdrag Granskning, Sweden’s telecommunications giant Teliasonera is the latest Western country revealed to be colluding with authoritarian regimes by selling them high-tech surveillance gear to spy on its citizens. Teliasonera has allegedly enabled the governments of Belarus, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Georgia and Kazakhstan to spy on journalists, union leaders, and members of the political opposition. One Teliasonera whistle-blower told the reporters, “The Arab Spring prompted the regimes to tighten their surveillance. … There’s no limit to how much wiretapping is done, none at all.”

The investigative report, titled “Black Boxes,” in reference to the black boxes Teliasonera allowed police and security services to install in their operation centers—which granted them the unrestricted capability to monitor all communications—including Internet traffic, phone calls, location data from cell phones, and text messages—in real-time. This has caused concern among Swedish citizens and Teliasonera shareholders, who had previously been assuaged by assurances from the telecommunications company that they follow the law in the countries in which they are operating.

Eva Galpin

approaching shadowby fan ho (via picquaint)

Thu, 17 May 2012 18:26:47 -0500

approaching shadow
by fan ho

(via picquaint)

Explaining privilege: being a straight white male is like playing the game of life on 'easy'

Wed, 16 May 2012 08:53:00 -0500

Explaining privilege: being a straight white male is like playing the game of life on 'easy':

I’ve been thinking of a way to explain to straight white men how life works for them, without invoking the dreaded word “privilege,” to which they react like vampires being fed a garlic tart at high noon. It’s not that the word “privilege” is incorrect, it’s that it’s not their word. When confronted with “privilege,” they fiddle with the word itself, and haul out the dictionaries and find every possible way to talk about the word but not any of the things the word signifies.

So, the challenge: how to get across the ideas bound up in the word “privilege,” in a way that your average straight white man will get, without freaking out about it?

-John Scalzi in Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is (via BoingBoing)