News (blog)

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The shocking truth about the crackdown on Occupy[edit]

Posted by Infomaniac on 26 November 2011 at 20:59
This post has the following tags: News
The shocking truth about the crackdown on Occupy 
by Naomi Wolf (The Guardian)

See also[edit]

Perfect Storm of Internet Censorship[edit]

Posted by Infomaniac on 10 November 2011 at 21:27
This post has the following tags: News
From Corbett Report
Video GlobalResearchTV

by James Corbett

GlobalResearchTV YouTube channel

November 10, 2011

In recent weeks the governments of Britain, Israel, the US, Japan, India and China have reported alleged cyber attacks by foreign militaries, hackers, and malicious software like Duqu, a virus similar to the Stuxnet cyber weapon constructed by Israel and the US for use against Iran’s nuclear program. Although the nature and origin of the attacks or even whether they took place at all cannot be independently confirmed, the supposed threats are being used to propose punishing new legislation aimed at stifling internet freedoms and are igniting new rivalries in what many see as the battlefield of the 21st century: cyberspace.

In the US, a report to congress by the National Counterintelligence Executive is touting cyber-espionage as a major threat to the American economy. In a section entitled “Pervasive Threat from Adversaries and Partners” the report reads:

“Chinese actors are the world’s most active and persistent perpetrators of economic espionage” and “Russia’s intelligence services are conducting a range of activities to collect economic information and technology from US targets.”

In the wake of the report, DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency tasked with maintaining the US military’s technological advantage, has asked for a 73% funding increase in fiscal 2012, from $120 million to $208 million. Meanwhile, China has lashed out at the report, calling such allegations “irresponsible.”

Now, governments around the world are using fears over cyber attacks as an excuse to crack down on the internet freedoms of their own populations.

Last month, China vowed a crackdown on social media websites and microblogs as a response to increased boldness in Chinese bloggers in criticizing the government. Beijing’s poor response to the high-speed rail crash in Wenzhou earlier this year led to such an outpouring of abuse on the internet that the story was picked up by China’s mainstream broadcasters. A statement from the State Internet Information Office is vowing that such criticism will not be tolerated however, with Xinhua reporting that three of the offending bloggers have been punished by local authorities.

Just days after that announcement, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security announced that it’s considering using social media to track and surveil its own population. DHS Undersecretary Caryn Wagner said that the government fears social unrest like that seen in Tunisia last December and wants to use social media services like Twitter to monitor its own population. Last January, Senators Lieberman and Collins renewed calls to give the president a kill switch over the internet to protect the government in times of emergency, a call echoed by Senator McCain last July.

Last week, British Prime Minister David Cameron spoke of the need to strike a balance between cybersecurity and freedom of speech. Speaking at a London cyberspace conference, he renewed British calls for an international framework for cybersecurity. Internet security expert Eugene Kaspersky, speaking at the same conference, defended his own idea for 'internet passports' as a requirement for logging on to the internet and an internet police force for cracking down on unwanted behaviour, adding that countries that did not agree to such a framework should simply be cut off from the internet.

Kaspersky is not the only one arguing for a so-called passport or license to access the internet. In the past, the idea has been proposed by Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s chief technology officer, and the White House drafted a proposal earlier this year encouraging the private-sector development of an Internet ID.

Critics say that such a plan would be the end of the internet as we know it, making legitimate political protest and government crticism impossible. In a scathing critique of Kaspeserky’s proposal, security technologist Bruce Schneier lashed out at attempts to end anonymity on the internet:

“Universal identification is impossible. Even attribution – knowing who is responsible for particular internet packets – is impossible. Attempting to build such a system is futile, and will only give criminals and hackers new ways to hide,” he wrote. “Attempts to banish anonymity from the internet won’t affect those savvy enough to bypass it, would cost billions, and would have only a negligible effect on security.”

Facebook Censoring Some Alternative News Sites While Allowing Hackers To Attack Others[edit]

Posted by Infomaniac on 20 June 2011 at 13:42
This post has the following tags: News
; Facebook Censoring Some Alternative News Sites While Allowing Hackers To Attack Others : The Intel Hub - By Alexander Higgins - Contributing Writer - June 14th, 2011

Facebook now appears to be censoring some alternative news sites while allowing hackers to go after others. It is no wonder they lost 6 Million users in the US last month. I recently talked to Alex Thomas from The Intel Hub who was listed as an honorable mention in the top 10 most influential people in alternative media list published by Activist Post. I am frequently a guest contributor on the site and during our conversation he told me that Facebook is starting to ban articles from the site. At that point I figured most likely his account was flagged and left it at that.

Netherlands mint scannable coins[edit]

Posted by Infomaniac on 24 June 2011 at 00:34
This post has the following tags: News

Dutch Royal Mint has made what appears to be world’s first coin to feature the Quick Response (QR) Code, a matrix of black and white squares, which can be scanned by a mobile phone camera and recognized by an app. The codes, which are increasingly used in trade and advertising, usually serve as links to a website with more information about the product.

The code featured on the tail side of the coin made to celebrate the Royal Dutch Mint’s 100th anniversary, leads to a website dedicated to the event.

The coin comes in two varieties – the 5-euro silver version and the 10-euro gold one.

24hrgold[edit]

Posted by Infomaniac on 15 December 2010 at 01:16
This post has the following tags: News
http://www.24hgold.com/
  • one of the best economic analytics and editorial news sources.
  • fed watchdog
  • they 'get' Misesian economics

Facebook Unfriends Third-Party Friend Exporter[edit]

Posted by Infomaniac on 14 July 2011 at 13:23
This post has the following tags: News
Quote.pngOpen-source software engineer Mohamed Mansour developed Chrome extension Facebook Friend Exporter to allow Facebook users to easily import all of their friend data into other applications, like Google Plus, but, as reported by ZDNet’s Friending Facebook blog and CNET’s DeepTech, the extension is being blocked by the leading social network. Facebook Friend Exporter was not developed specifically for Google Plus. According to CNET, the extension works by allowing users of the social network to save their contacts’ email addresses, birthdays, phone numbers, and other information as text files, or to import them directly into Gmail, simplifying the process of rebuilding a contact network.
— All Facebook


  • Here we see Facebook reacting to the data leaching by removing email from the profile API. That might be a good thing:
Quote.pngFacebook is trying so hard to not allow you to export your friends. They started to remove emails of your friends from your profile by today, July 5, 2011. It will no longer work for many people. New version with a different design is currently deploying.

... This is what happens when your extension becomes famous : sigh. Facebook just removed the emails from their mobile site. They implemented a throttling mechanism that if you visit your ~5 friends in a short period of time, it will remove the email field. No worries, a new version is on the making … I am bloody annoyed now, because this proves that Facebook owns every user’s data on Facebook. You don’t own anything! If I were you, I would riot this to the media outlets again. ...

Facebook is actually hiding data (email) from you to see when your friends explicitly shared that to you. Making it really hard to scrape because the only missing data is your emails, and that is your friends identity. Nothing else is.
— Mohamed Mansour