PrimariesForPalin.com aims to nominate Sarah Palin as the Republican presidential candidate by encouraging Democrats and Independents to purposefully vote for her in state primaries. In head-to-head polls with President Barack Obama, Palin consistently fares worse than other possible Republican candidates because of her divisiveness. If Palin is nominated, Obama has a much better chance of winning reelection in November 2012.
via Mission Statement « Primaries For Palin.
It sends your personal information, can be commanded from remote servers and comes packaged with legal software in certain compromised Chinese Android marketplaces…
The Official Lookout Blog | Security Alert: Geinimi, Sophisticated New Android Trojan Found in Wild.
This ZAP Stun Cane features an adjustable walking cane, an ultra-bright LED flashlight and a stun gun with an unheard of 1-million volt charge that will knock down any attacker. The cane has a weight capacity of 250 lbs and is adjustable from 32″ to 36″. They’ll think it is just a cane until it is too late! It is even rechargeable and includes a wall charger and carrying case.
Only $89,99
via ZAP Cane With Flashlight – BUDK.
For the past 20 weeks I have been engaged in a very strange dialogue with the two noble Lords, in the course of which I have been trying to bring to their attention the willing availability of a strange organisation which wishes to make a great deal of money available to assist the recovery of the economy in this country. For want of a better name, I shall call it foundation X. That is not its real name, but it will do for the moment. Foundation X was introduced to me 20 weeks ago last week by an eminent City firm, which is FSA controlled. Its chairman came to me and said, “We have this extraordinary request to assist in a major financial reconstruction. It is megabucks, but we need your help to assist us in understanding whether this business is legitimate”. I had the biggest put down of my life from my noble friend Lord Strathclyde when I told him this story. He said, “Why you? You’re not important enough to have the answer to a question like that”. He is quite right, I am not important enough, but the answer to the next question was, “You haven’t got the experience for it”. Yes I do. I have had one of the biggest experiences in the laundering of terrorist money and funny money that anyone has had in the City. I have handled billions of pounds of terrorist money.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham: Where did it go to?
Lord James of Blackheath: Not into my pocket. My biggest terrorist client was the IRA and I am pleased to say that I managed to write off more than £1 billion of its money. I have also had extensive connections with north African terrorists, but that was of a far nastier nature, and I do not want to talk about that because it is still a security issue. I hasten to add that it is no good getting the police in, because I shall immediately call the Bank of England as my defence witness, given that it put me in to deal with these problems.
The point is that when I was in the course of doing this strange activity, I had an interesting set of phone numbers and references that I could go to for help when I needed it. So people in the City have known that if they want to check out anything that looks at all odd, they can come to me and I can press a few phone numbers to obtain a reference. The City firm came to me and asked whether I could get a reference and a clearance on foundation X. For 20 weeks, I have been endeavouring to do that. I have come to the absolute conclusion that foundation X is completely genuine and sincere and that it directly wishes to make the United Kingdom one of the principal points that it will use to disseminate its extraordinarily great wealth into the world at this present moment, as part of an attempt to seek the recovery of the global economy.
And it just keeps getting better!
Lords Hansard text for 1 Nov 201001 Nov 2010 (pt 0003).
Yup, the little kids have to fork over the money if they want to sing modern songs covered by copyright.
Kindergartens ordered to pay copyright for songs | Germany | Deutsche Welle | 28.12.2010.
Using GnuRadio you record the data from the air, Airporbe parses the data, Kraken cracks the A5/1 key and Airprobe decodes voice.
GSM is broken. Fortunately, UMTS isn’t.
Decrypting GSM phone calls | srl.
The number of suspects who were identified using the cameras went up from 1,970 in 2009 to 2,512 this year.
The number of cameras in Britain has gone up from 21,000 in 1999 to 59,753 in 2010,
The Met said among the 2,512 suspects caught this year, four were suspected murderers, 23 rapists and sex attackers and five wanted gunmen.
“With VHS people held 31 tapes, one for each day of the month, and it did not require specialist officers to get hold of the stuff.
“People are now being confronted by computers and hard drives and told to get those images and it is not as easy.”
via BBC News – ‘Six crimes a day’ solved by CCTV, Met says.
Because a wish for privacy is extremely suspicious and counter to our overlords controlling intentions.
‘Afschermen IP-adres is verdacht gedrag’ | Webwereld.
The commission on human rights gently reminds governments that in order for people to be able to be part of a democracy they have a right to know what their governments are up to and there are only very strict exceptions to this.
UN defends human right to WikiLeaked info • The Register.
People use status updates to share what’s on their minds, to tell others what they’re doing, and to gather feedback from friends. The different ways people use status updates form some interesting patterns. In this study, we looked at the usage of words in different “word categories” in status updates. This led us to discover some patterns in how people use status updates differently, and how their friends interact with different status updates.
via What’s on your mind? (56).
Not only was it prepared by a recent college graduate, agent Andrew Reynolds basically just listened to the MPAA – who have a vested and misinformed agenda. This takedown is a horrible joke gone wrong: no one seems to have any idea of how technology, or indeed just surfing the internet, works, but they have the power to take down websites and only inform the owners months later.
Posing as a legitimate URL shortening service, it serves users the requested pages in an iFrame, while simultaneously participating in a DDoS attack in the background. No interaction is required beyond clicking the link and staying on the page. This makes it relatively trivial to quickly mount large-scale DDoS attacks, and affords willing participants plausible deniability in the assault
via D0z.me — the Evil URL Shortener – Slashdot.
Worms that were genetically modified by McGill University researchers not only survived exposure to a banned poison, they lived even longer than normal worms, challenging scientists’ understanding of the aging process.
Dr. Siegfried Hekimi and his student Dr. Wen Yang, who are in the Montreal university’s biology department, planned to test the so-called “free radical theory of aging” by genetically modifying wild worms in a lab to accelerate production of free radicals — toxic molecules generated as a byproduct of oxygen use.
Which basically means that using anti-oxidants probably won’t help you at all, when it comes to beating ageing.
via CBC News – Technology & Science – Mutant worms defy aging theory.
About a year ago, when Facebook set out to build its email-meets-chat-meets-everything-else messaging system, the company knew its infrastructure couldn’t run the thing. “[The Facebook infrastructure] wasn’t really ready to handle a bunch of different forms of messaging and have it happen in real time,” says Joel Seligstein, a Facebook engineer who worked on the project. So Seligstein and crew mocked up a multifaceted messaging prototype, tossed it onto various distributed storage platforms, and ran a Big Data bake off.
The winner was HBase, the open source distributed database modeled after Google’s proprietary BigTable platform. Facebook was already using MySQL for message storage, the open source Cassandra platform for inbox search, and the proprietary Haystack platform for storing photos. But in the company’s mind, HBase was better equipped to handle a new-age messaging system that would seek to seamlessly juggle email, chat, and SMS as well as traditional on-site Facebook messages.
via Facebook: Why our ‘next-gen’ comms ditched MySQL • The Register.
American Express Identifies ‘A New Era of Pause and Purchase’ With Five Key Trends Driving Consumer Spending in 2011 and Beyond
Report Finds Locally-Sourced Goods, Digital Shopping and “Give-a-nomics” Are Among Top Trends Re-Shaping the American Consumer
More Than Half (54%) of Americans Said They Try to Support Their Local Economy
Over a Third (38%) of Americans Equate Being Good and Ethical to Quality of Life, Far Higher Than Being Rich (5%)
41% of Americans Cite Internet Accessibility as the Biggest Factor Affecting Spending Habits in Years to Come
So basically the huge investment into backscatter porno scanners was a huge waste of money (as we all knew). The threat was (once again) thwarted through the use of good old fashioned investigative work.
Yemen Cargo Bombs Designed to Thwart DHS Detectors – Blog.
Section 4 of the Bill Loppsi 2, text tote on Homeland Security, was finally adopted. It will allow the government to filter the Internet using a blacklist issued by the Ministry of Interior, without the intervention of the judiciary. A measure that the government justify the need to better fight against child pornography sites and cybercrime in general.
Why is it that anything brought out to fight ‘child porn’ is generally a serious inhibition on our freedoms? Are we really such idiots that just shouting ‘but the kiddies’ empties our brains every time?!
On Sunday night, hackers posted online a trove of data from Gawker Media’s servers, including the usernames, email addresses and passwords of more than one million registered users. The passwords were originally encrypted, but 188,279 of them were decoded and made public as part of the hack. Using that dataset, we found the 50 most-popular Gawker Media passwords
123456, password, 12345678, qwerty all to be expected, but monkey – really??!
via The Top 50 Gawker Media Passwords – Digits – WSJ.
Tribler is a social community that facilitates filesharing through a peer-to-peer (p2p) network. A p2p network is different from a centralised service, where every user downloads his files from one central server. With p2p, the user/downloader is also an uploader to another user. This way, there is no central computer required that provides every file to all users.
When the Tribler application program is started it will automatically start searching other users that have Tribler running on their computer. When a connection is established it starts exchanging information. First it exchanges personal information (such as your avatar picture, your friends list, download history, etc.) and information about files that are available in the network. These files can be personal, shared files, but also files that one has received from another person (see image).
via whatIsTribler/2 – Tribler.
With the US Government suddenly having become a muscle-flexing player in the DNS root servers, many don’t trust DNS any more and are developing and using alternatives. This is a roundup of several possible contenders.
Gov’t crackdown spurs initiatives to route around DNS | ITworld.
FlyerTalk is an interactive community that provides up-to-date information on travel-related loyalty reward programs. It’s the hub that brings everyone together — from leisure travelers to mileage junkies — to converse about programs, get the latest program buzz or discuss how to maximize points or miles. You’ll even get some good general travel information!
via FlyerTalk – The world’s most popular frequent flyer community.
On Dec. 6 at 1:31 a.m. EST, NASA for the first time successfully ejected a nanosatellite from a free-flying microsatellite. NanoSail-D ejected from the Fast, Affordable, Science and Technology Satellite, FASTSAT, demonstrating the capability to deploy a small cubesat payload from an autonomous microsatellite in space.
via NASA ejects nanosatellite from microsatellite in space.
Plus, after the ‘sex by surprise’ (the charge isn’t for rape), she boasted about it on social media!
Revealed: Assange ‘rape’ accuser linked to notorious CIA operative | Raw Story.
Because if you discuss the material on there, obviously you can’t handle sensitive information and so are not fit to work in government. Or in other words, you have too much of an independent opinion and won’t fit in with the superconformist monkeys and thus are not fit to work in the US Government.
State Dept. warning prospective recruits to steer clear of Wikileaks – Blog – The Arabist.
Federal law enforcement agencies do not limit their surveillance of US residents to phone calls, emails and geo-location information. They are also interested in calling cards, credit cards, rental cars and airline reservations, as well as retail shopping clubs.
The document also reveals that DOJ’s preferred method of obtaining this information is via an administrative subpoena. The only role that courts play in this process is in issuing non-disclosure orders to the banks, preventing them from telling their customers that the government has spied on their financial transactions. No Fourth Amendment analysis is conducted by judges when issuing such non-disclosure orders.
via slight paranoia: DOJ’s “hotwatch” real-time surveillance of credit card transactions.