News (blog)

From Organic Design wiki

18 May 2007[edit]

Posted by Nad on 18 May 2007 at 11:19
This post has the following tags: News
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SemanticMediaWiki Extension Installed[edit]

Now that we've upgraded to MediaWiki 1.10 we're able to install the SemanticMediaWiki (SMW) extension without needing to modify any of the MediaWiki include files.

SMW is an extension of MediaWiki with semantic technology, thus turning it into a semantic wiki. While articles in MediaWiki are just plain texts, SMW allows users to add structured data, comparable to the data one would usually store in a database. SMW uses the fact that such data is already contained in many articles: users just need to "mark" the according places so that the system can extract the relevant data without understanding the rest of the text. With this information, SMW can help to search, organise, browse, evaluate, and share the wiki's content.

As well as adding the ability to include relational links within article content, SMW adds many new special pages for querying and maintaining the data, such as Export pages to RDF, Search by relation and Semantic search.

Semantic MediaWiki is used on many other sites and has also been featured in the press. I've also installed a companion extension called SemanticForms which allows you to have forms for adding and editing data on your wiki, without any programming.

7 November 2010[edit]

Posted by Nad on 8 November 2010 at 01:17
This post has the following tags: News
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Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11[edit]

Ubuntu has traditionally used the full GNOME desktop environment and its bundled shell; founder Mark Shuttleworth cited philosophical differences with the GNOME team over the user experience to explain why Ubuntu would move away from it. Unity still uses aspects of GNOME desktop environment and GNOME-based applications will continue to be supported.

The Unity shell interface will include the Compiz window manager, which Canonical states is faster than Mutter, the window manager included in the next version of the GNOME Shell interface. The main reason for the switch from Gnome Shell to the Unity shell is the speed of Compiz vs. Mutter. Canonical announced it had engineered Unity for desktop computers as well and is making Unity the default shell for Ubuntu in version 11.04.

9 July 2007[edit]

Posted by Nad on 9 July 2007 at 03:14
This post has the following tags: News
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ImageMap Extension Installed[edit]

The ImageMap extension was installed on OrganicDesign today which allows images to link to different URL's depending on what location the image is clicked on. A default link can also be specified which is the link used if none of the defined areas are clicked on. The image to the right is an example of ImageMap use, where areas have been defined around the people in the picture linking to their user pages.

The areas are defined with co-ordinates based on the full sized version of the image. It's very tedious working out the co-ordinates manually, but there are tools to help with this such as this online image-map editor which even generates the syntax required for the ImageMap extension.

24 March 2009[edit]

Posted by Nad on 24 March 2009 at 10:21
This post has the following tags: News
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Upgraded site security from version 3 to 4[edit]

The site was running SimpleSecurity 3.4.8 which was an older version that hasn't been updated since July 2007. We hadn't been able to upgrade to the most recent version because it requires at least MediaWiki version 1.12, but since we've recently upgraded the site to MediaWiki 1.14 the upgrade to the latest version of SimpleSecurity was finally possible. So today the upgrade was made and we're now running the latest version (SimpleSecurity 4.3.0 from the MediaWiki subversion repository).

One of the issues with the upgrade from SimpleSecurity 3.x to 4.x is that the older version uses the #security parser function to apply permissions settings to articles, whereas the newer 4.x versions extend the native MediaWiki protection page. So to ensure that all the articles which had been protected with the old parser function would still remain protected, the SS3Dummy extension was created to make the #security parser function act as a category link. The result of this is that all articles containing the old #security parser function are automatically categorised into Category:Private which has been made readable only by administrators using SimpleSecurity4.

15 October 2010[edit]

Posted by Nad on 15 October 2010 at 03:09
This post has the following tags: News
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Move Completed![edit]

We're now running from the Codero server! All the sites, email, services and robot framework are up and running. The move went pretty smoothly over all apart from the initial Ubuntu upgrade problems. If you have a site hosted by Organic Design, remember to point your domain to the new IP address of the server: 69.64.87.188

2 October 2012[edit]

Posted by Nad on 6 October 2012 at 00:57
This post has the following tags: News
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NIST Selects Winner of SHA-3 Competition![edit]

Sponge functions.jpg
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) today announced the winner of its five-year competition to select a new cryptographic hash algorithm, one of the fundamental tools of modern information security.

The winning algorithm, Keccak (pronounced “catch-ack”), was created by Guido Bertoni, Joan Daemen and Gilles Van Assche of STMicroelectronics and Michaël Peeters of NXP Semiconductors. The team’s entry beat out 63 other submissions that NIST received after its open call for candidate algorithms in 2007, when it was thought that SHA-2, the standard secure hash algorithm, might be threatened. Keccak will now become NIST’s SHA-3 hash algorithm.

See also:

8 September 2007[edit]

Posted by Nad on 8 September 2007 at 08:54
This post has the following tags: News
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Category Trees[edit]

TreeView4 allows more advanced queries to be used in the composition of trees, and also allows them to be syntactically simpler by handling template transclusion properly. The first new template to take advantage of the new tree view is CatTree which generates a tree of categories and sub-categories starting at the specified category. Here are a few examples:

{{CatTree|Help}} {{CatTree|Software}} {{CatTree|Glossary}}

[edit]

Posted by Nad on 10 March 2015 at 17:01
This post has the following tags: News
The vast majority of the mainstream media is owned and controlled by a small group of corporations (applies to NZ too) and as such, are not delivering truthful information - in fact, a lot of news these days pre-packaged by government and given to all mainstream channels to deliver to their viewers without question or moderation, and much of this content is outright fabrication.

Even the popular user-contributed information sources such as Wikipedia and other "web 2.0" sources can be severely biased due to mass ignorance and corporate vandalism, which is a new phenomenon whereby corporations that benefit from a particular point of view use their enormous financial wealth to fund masses of people to support it and to argue against anything else - essentially a Web 2.0 evolution of astroturfing. In addition to this sneaky underhanded way of manipulating the truth on the web, the powers that be are working on the ability to regulate content, especially political.

Conspiracy theorists

People who disagree with the mainstream view of events such as 9/11 are viewed as delusional conspiracy theorists. What many people don't know is that the term "conspiracy theorist" was invented and put into wide circulation by the CIA to smear and defame people questioning the JFK assassination! “The CIA’s campaign to popularize the term ‘conspiracy theory’ and make conspiracy belief a target of ridicule and hostility must be credited, unfortunately, with being one of the most successful propaganda initiatives of all time.” In other words, people who use the terms “conspiracy theory” and “conspiracy theorist” as an insult are doing so as the result of a well-documented, undisputed, historically-real conspiracy by the CIA to cover up the JFK assassination. That campaign, by the way, was completely illegal, and the CIA officers involved were criminals; the CIA is barred from all domestic activities, yet routinely breaks the law to conduct domestic operations ranging from propaganda to assassinations. Fortunately thanks to the internet, this is changing and it's now becoming those who support the mainstream who are being seen as the delusional ones.

Good information sources

There are still good objective information sources available though, for example (in no particular order):

These all have very accessible and well-researched knowledge that we can share amongst ourselves and the groups we're involved with.

Turning a blind eye

Human societies see what they want to see. They create national myths of identity out of a composite of historical events and fantasy. They ignore unpleasant facts that intrude on self-glorification. They trust naively in the notion of linear progress and in assured national dominance. This is what nationalism is about—lies. And if a culture loses its ability for thought and expression, if it effectively silences dissident voices, if it retreats into what Sigmund Freud called "screen memories," those reassuring mixtures of fact and fiction, it dies. It surrenders its internal mechanism for puncturing self-delusion. It makes war on beauty and truth. It abolishes the sacred. It turns education into vocational training. It leaves us blind. And this is what has occurred. We are lost at sea in a great tempest. We do not know where we are. We do not know where we are going. And we do not know what is about to happen to us. The psychoanalyst John Steiner calls this phenomenon "turning a blind eye." Read More...

Quote.pngThe conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. …We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. …In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons…who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.
— Edward Bernays – Propaganda – 1928

Journalism[edit]

Leaks[edit]

The Arab proverb says that a wise person does not get bitten twice from the same place. We must admit that we have been bitten more than once and from many places and God knows what’s ahead of us. The difficulty comes from the multiple roles the Intelligence Services of this world have been playing since they discovered that the most efficient weapon in their possession is their capacity to cater to our tastes and complacency.

We - as Arabs - are not close to forget the number that the world Intelligence and the world media played on us and the ride they took us for when they introduced Al Jazeera channel to our houses and homes making us believe that we finally got our professional objective media that can open new horizons and give us a larger scope and a deeper insight into what was happening in our world. For years we enjoyed this fallacy, we watched every program, followed each topic, delighted in every debate, we seldom shifted to another channel or listened to other sources. We followed minute by minute the assault on Gaza, we held our breath, we became fixed on the screen not able to move for one inch, we were so grateful that we had a channel like al Jazeera. We turned a deaf ear and a blind eye to the fact that it hosted Israelis or that it was funded by Qatar -the country that hosted one of the biggest US military bases in the Gulf -and, even when we noticed that it imposed a total black on what was happening in Qatar, we did not give this fact a great importance.

All these facts we overlooked and we raised the banner of the first evolved media channel the Arab world ever had, praising its high professionalism along with its skilful crew and - above all - its progressive stands. The channel had acquired thus an unquestionable credibility regarding matters of great concern to the Arabs and Muslims. What happened next does not need too much elaboration; what happened when the spring revolutions started was simply the other side of the coin, the hidden side that bore the whole truth. The first side of the coin was the bait offered by the channel in order to hook us, and the second side was the poison given to us. After that, especially after what happened in Libya, and the great direct involvement of Qatar in the Libyan bloody events, we realized that we had to disentangle ourselves from al Jazeera.

This is when we realized that the whole thing was a set up, and that the wolf had again dressed as grand ma. All what preceded was but a step and a preparation for the major event where we will be partaking and witnessing the toppling of Arab rulers - one after the other - in what was called the Arab spring, to reach finally the core of the matter that is: Syria. And as we remained hooked following step by step the bloody massacres in Gaza, we were supposed to remain hooked partaking in the so called democratization of Syria. The channel had turned into its opposite. It had become, biased, unprofessional, prejudiced and fake, disseminating misinformation and fabricating lies about what was happening on the ground

We will not go into the details of how al Jazeera became corrupt; how it distorted facts and falsified evidence and brought fake witnesses and altered videos and resorted to lies and made up events and staged demonstrations and bribed protesters, but we can say that there isn’t one infraction that the idol channel did not commit, to our great shock and surprise sharing directly in instigating various acts of killing and destabilizing.

So much for al Jazeera, and so long; but the tricks of the masters has not ended yet; because, as we are busy making a livelihood and carrying on our multiple duties and responsibilities in life, the rulers of this world were carrying on their multiple schemes and dubious endeavors to disrupt the life of people one way or another. The last born to the administration of this world was something called Wikileaks that kept the whole media busy and so many people mobilized. The Wikileaks acted like a dropped bomb, they were like a media explosion, catering to the great urge of people to know what really happened and how it happened and who was behind what has happened. Finally, truth was no more in a remote place but here at hand, directly on the screen to our great delight. Regarding this, Wikileaks held major answers and not any answers, they are official documents leaked - or released - from the Pentagon and other official departments by a supposed truth seeker whose aspirations were to make truth accessible to the American and other public.

This legendary truth seeker by the name of Bradley Manning did not act alone but leaked the information to another legendary figure with a legendary name this time Master Julian Assange whose legendary looks seem to come straight from a legendary tale. Master Assange is not a conformist Zionist like Mike Zuckerberg of the CIA, consecrated as the head of the largest internet utility in the world, friend of Israelis and Peres; Master Assange is something else, is a revolutionary, a person seeking truth, justice and real change. He is not the idol of the US administration but its enemy, because tracked and chased and sued and pursued seeking asylum from one place to another as a truth seeker threatened by the world order. And even if what Wikileaks reveals in this huge number of documents that touches on many subjects, is mostly insignificant or irrelevant or even flagrant, and even if it made more noise than it revealed truth, still it has acquired a reputation and a credibility that is beyond question.

Finally whether Assange, Manning or al Jazeera, the goal is to have the public hooked and have these people or channels of information acquire a level of credibility that will consecrate them as a trustworthy source of information, after which this channel or person will become qualified to handle and present any event on the world stage, and get the expected reaction from the public. This way we are being treated by the world order like Pavlov’s dog and being manipulated rather than informed; but we are supposed to have grown wise and aware, and we are supposed to get ourselves prepared as to avoid the next poisonous bite coming from the same place that any wise person should avoid as the Arab saying goes.

Monsanto & GM[edit]

Banksters[edit]

ISIS[edit]

See also[edit]

Italy[edit]

Posted by Nad on 10 March 2015 at 16:44
This post has the following tags: News
== News ==

Alternative news sources[edit]

Posted by Infomaniac on 4 December 2011 at 20:11
This post has the following tags: News
#REDIRECT Truth

Preparing for a better way of doing the News