The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
Tobacco Smoke Enemas (1750s-1810s)
The tobacco enema was used to infuse tobacco smoke into a patient's rectum for various medical purposes, primarily the resuscitation of drowning victims. A rectal tube inserted into the anus was connected to a fumigator and bellows that forced the smoke towards the rectum. The warmth of the smoke was thought to promote respiration, but doubts about the credibility of tobacco enemas led to the popular phrase “blowin'smoke up your ass.” Marcus Aurelius
How the U.S. Government Hacks the World
Michael Riley
BloombergBusinessWeek, 23 May 2013
EXTRACT:
The men and women who hack for the NSA belong to a secretive unit known as Tailored Access Operations. It gathers vast amounts of intelligence on terrorist financial networks, international money-laundering and drug operations, the readiness of foreign militaries, even the internal political squabbles of potential adversaries, according to two former U.S. government security officials, who asked not to be named when discussing foreign intelligence gathering. For years, the NSA wouldn’t acknowledge TAO’s existence. A Pentagon official who also asked not to be named confirmed that TAO conducts cyber espionage, or what the Department of Defense calls “computer network exploitation,” but emphasized that it doesn’t target technology, trade, or financial secrets. The official says the number of people who work for TAO is classified. NSA spokeswoman Vaneé Vines would not answer questions about the unit.
The two former security officials agreed to describe the operation and its activities without divulging which governments or entities it targets. According to the former officials, U.S. cyberspies, most from military units who’ve received specialized training, sit at consoles running sophisticated hacking software, which funnels information stolen from computers around the world into a “fusion center,” where intelligence analysts try to make sense of it all. The NSA is prohibited by law from spying on people or entities within the U.S., including noncitizens, or on U.S. citizens abroad. According to one of the former officials, the amount of data the unit harvests from overseas computer networks, or as it travels across the Internet, has grown to an astonishing 2 petabytes an hour—that’s nearly 2.1 million gigabytes, the equivalent of hundreds of millions of pages of text.
Phone Data Value And What Companies Are Doing With It
May 23, 2013
Smartphones are an extension of a person’s life and they record it every time a person uses it. Smithsonian Magazine takes a look at how phone companies are tracking and using the data from phones in, “What Phone Companies Are Doing With All That Data From Your Phone.” Verizon Wireless is aware of the phone data goldmine and has added a new division called Precision Market Insights and Telefonica is adding a new business unit Telefonica Dynamic Insights to do the same thing. Phone data is being used for market, medical, and social science research. The biggest usage is tracking how people move in real time. The data collected is supposed to remain anonymous, but that is not happening.
People can be tracked:
“But a study published in Scientific Reports in March found that even data made anonymous may not be so anonymous after all. A team of researchers from Louvain University in Belgium, Harvard and M.I.T. found that by using data from 15 months of phone use by 1.5 million people, together with a similar dataset from Foursquare, they could identify about 95 percent of the cell phones users with just four data points and 50 percent of them with just two data points. A data point is an individual’s approximate whereabouts at the approximate time they’re using their cell phone.”
People’s travel and cell phone patterns are repetitive and unique, making it easy to narrow down results to an individual user. Anonymity is a hard thing to achieve with a smartphone. To confuse the data, a person could get two mobile phones, but then does that increase the fun or increase the risk?
Whitney Grace, May 23, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Apologies to all who could not access the site for half the day today. Our understanding is that Network Solutions has realized its capabilities in India are not up to the requirement, and that they are building out a completely new solution for roll-over in June or July. However, Network Solutions has failed to communicate to its many customers — including Gold customers — its recognition of the problem and its plans with date certain for resolving them.
At this time Network Solutions has dropped from #1 to #10. We are planning to migrate all of our web sites including this one in June. The switch over will not be visible nor will it interrupt service, it will simply eliminate all these overly frequent collapses in service.
U.S. encouraged to allow firms to retaliate against hackers
Throwing money at creating cyberpolice forces and technology to keep up with digital threats may not be the only tactics the U.S. will employ in the future.
As a meeting between President Obama and the new president of China, Xi Jinping, draws near, former senior officials in the Obama Administration will recommend a series of steps to deter hackers from the country from stealing U.S. industrial secrets.
Dennis C. Blair and Jon M. Huntsman Jr., leaders of the private Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property, suggest that if less forceful measures to deter hackers fail, then companies should be granted the right to protect their systems on their own terms.
The right to retaliate against cyberattackers is detailed in the commission’s report, due for release today.
China and the United States have constantly clashed over the prevalence of cyberattacks. A recent report issued by the U.S. Department of Defense laid the blame for widespread cyber espionage campaigns against U.S. targets squarely at the Chinese government and military’s feet.
China denies these claims, and has said that accusations are “groundless.”
If hacking counterattacks are made legal, the report argues, then “there are many techniques that companies could employ that would cause severe damage to the capability” as long as law enforcement agencies are aware of what’s going on. However, if attacking becomes the best defense, then some government officials fear that the cyberwar between nations will quickly escalate and could end up out of control.
As a last resort, the report says that tariffs or restrictions could be placed on the import of Chinese products, a measure that Senators have already considered. This month, a new bill was proposed that would block the import of products which contain U.S. technology stolen through cybercrime.
Read More at ZDNet which in turn riffed off NYT.
From Marketplace Tech comes an interesting article on Google Glass and the projections into the future in regards to similar projects. The article, “Google’s Ray Kurzweil on the Computers that will Live in our Brains,” discusses how everything Google puts its hands on is changing how we search, retrieve and interact with information. As in nearly all articles these days discussing Google Glass Ray Kurzweil, the director of engineering at Google, leads the conversation.
Kurzweil posits that we will eventually move beyond devices that simply allow us to look at the world through a keyhole. Instead, he forecasts that people will be online all the time. He projects that devices post-Glass will ultimately be the size of blood cells able to be sent inside the brain and connect to the cloud around the mid-2030’s.
The article tells us more:
“In Kurzweil’s vision, these advances don’t simply bring computers closer to our biological systems. Machines become more like us. ‘Your personality, your skills are contained in information in your neocortex, and it is information,’ Kurzweil says. ‘These technologies will be a million times more powerful in 20 years and we will be able to manipulate the information inside your brain.’ As that data locked up inside our brain becomes searchable, inimitable human qualities suddenly become easier to emulate. Kurzweil denies that the searching and backup up of the brain itself is a bloodless pursuit, depleted of human emotion.”
Artificial intelligence and the melding of biology and machine is increasingly discussed in the media in reference to Google Glass. Will Glass evolve to Google impants? The bigger question is touched upon in this particular article: is it altruistic intentions or advertising that is driving this kind of technology?
Megan Feil, May 20, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
The attack on science by the Theocratic Right and the corporate interests destroying the earth have done great damage, but finally science is pushing back. We'll see.
Corporations Are Manufacturing Uncertainty About Scientific Findings. Now Scientists Are Fighting Back.
BILL MOYERS & COMPANY – The Raw Story
