The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
A film by Helena Norberg-Hodge, Steven Gorelick & John Page
‘Going local' is a powerful strategy to help repair our fractured world – our ecosystems, our societies and our selves. Far from the old institutions of power, people are starting to forge a very different future…
FeaturingVandana Shiva, Bill McKibben, David Korten, Michael Shuman, Juliet Schor, Richard Heinberg, Rob Hopkins, Andrew Simms, Zac Goldsmith, Samdhong Rinpoche
See Also:
Today, we know more about the universe than about our society. It's time to use the power of information to explore social and economic life on Earth and discover options for a sustainable future. Together, we can manage the challenges of the 21st century, combining the best of all knowledge.
The FuturICT Knowledge Accelerator is a previously unseen multidisciplinary international scientific endeavour with focus on techno-socio-economic-environmental systems. The three main achievements of the FuturICT flagship will be the establishment of
Comment: This is not a new idea but has expanded to a great extent. The 2004/2005 proposal “Re-configuring the Global Organisms' Operating System Through Mobile Democracy” mentions a whole earth simulation of knowledge layers + mobile connectivity to access & add to systems so that more people are involved in the shaping of our world. The Earth Intelligence Network in connection with Medard Gabel has been advocating an EarthGame + a strategic analytic model to jump-start a prosperous world @peace.
Below was posted at the Games for Change forum on the subject:
Continue reading “FuturICT Living Earth Simulator; EarthGame / Whole Earth Strategic Analytic Model”
DDoS Attacks Continue to Plague Human Rights Sites
By: Chloe Albanesius
PC Magazine, 12.22.2010
WikiLeaks and Operation Payback have put distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks in the news recently, but independent media and human rights Web sites have been battling these attacks on a consistent basis with no easy solution in sight, according to a Wednesday study.
While major sites can fend off a DDoS or recover quickly, smaller sites can be crippled by these attacks, which often hit in conjunction with other attacks like filtering, intrusions, and defacements, according to the Berkman Center for Internet & Society.
“DDoS is an increasingly common Internet phenomenon capable of silencing Internet speech, usually for a brief interval but occasionally for longer,” the report said. “Our report offers advice to independent media and human rights sites likely to be targeted by DDoS but comes to the uncomfortable conclusion that there is no easy solution to these attacks for many of these sites, particularly for attacks that exhaust network bandwidth.”
The report's authors suggest that DDoS attacks will become more common amidst news about similar WikiLeaks and Operation Payback attacks. Even before that, however, DDoS attacks on independent media and human rights sites were quite common during the last year, happening even outside of major events like elections, protests, and military operations.
These sites are being hit with two types of DDoS: application and network. Application attacks exhaust local server resources and can usually be rectified with the help of a skilled system admin. Network attacks, however, exhaust network bandwidth and can usually only be fixed with the (costly) help of a hosting provider.
Why Civilians Must Reclaim Stabilization Aid
Michael Young
Foreign Affairs, December 19, 2010
Summary: Today, billions of dollars in aid is delivered by soldiers and private contractors at the behest of the political and military leadership. But this so-called “militarized aid” is ineffective, wasteful, and puts lives at risk.
MICHAEL YOUNG is Regional Director for Asia, Caucasus, and the Middle East at the International Rescue Committee. He has worked in Afghanistan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Chechnya, and Pakistan.
Open Minds (formerly known as March Madness for the Mind) is the acclaimed annual exhibition of cutting-edge innovation from NCIIA's (National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance) best student teams. The exhibition takes place each year during NCIIA's annual conference, and is an opportunity for student teams to demonstrate their products and companies, and receive local and national media coverage. 10-15 teams are selected to participate in this high profile event, which involves an evening exhibition for NCIIA conference attendees as well as an exhibition open to the general public and an exciting video competition.
Open Minds 2011 will be held in Washington, D.C. at the National Museum of American History, March 25-26, 2011. Learn about participating 2010 teams here.
The Open Minds online application deadline has been EXTENDED until Friday, January 14, 2011.
Sudan: Sudanese media broadcast the following decree on Monday.
Marshal Umer Hassan Al-Bashir the President of the Republic, the president of the National Congress Party has authorized the state governors to expel NGOs and persons that do not respect the country's sovereignty, work guidelines within 24 hours. He added we respect the NGOs that come to assist us and we reject whoever intends to control us. He indicated that some NGOs have spread rumors that they work in Sudan without the need of the government approvals. He directed the governors to expel the NGOs that do not adhere to their authorities on the same day.
NIGHTWATCH Comment: The government in Khartoum remains highly suspicious of western aid organizations that it suspects of encouraging separatism in Darfur and the South. This decree is a manifestation of that suspicion because it mentions rumor mongering. A government has a right to control foreigners without further justification. Odd behavior…
Phi Beta Iota: This is the beginning of the end for predatory NGO's including the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and of course all the religious NGOs and the corporate pseudo-NGOs. They have lost all trust for a good reason. On the one hand, they have been spending less than 10% of what they have collected under the various guises (Katrina, Haiti, etcetera) and on the other they are now demonstrably untrustworthy and ineffective. The next big step forward will be hybrid arrangements in which public intelligence both validates every move, every expense, every bona fides, and harmonizes a diversity of efforts toward a common publicly-appraised and accepted purpose.
