The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
Botnets: Hi-tech crime in the UK [and Elsewhere]
By Mark Ward
Botnets are more than a nuisance, they are also a business. A very big business.
The millions of machines in these global networks are the powerhouse of the net's underground economy. Industries have sprung up dedicated to creating them and keeping them running.
But how do you make money from a botnet? Let us count the ways.
Panel Talks About Detecting, Thwarting Cyber Attack
Space Foundation, 04/08/2013
Can the U.S. detect, thwart and respond to a cyber offensive that would leave our nation vulnerable to other, possibly more conventional, offensive efforts? Visions of a “Cyber Pearl Harbor” are forcing decision makers to take steps to avoid such a calamity.
Continue reading “Berto Jongman: cyber pearl harbor panel discussion – 22 Years Late”
R D Laing came up with an amazingly creative way to express complex cognitive processes in a very simple and concrete way, so that the truth beneath them is revealed.
Cognitive psychology is the most influential and productive branch of contemporary psychology by far.
The point of this post is that all of the negative social dynamics that humankind suffers from are the result of skewed and irrational thinking. They can rightly be called cognitive knots. And that's what R. D. Laing's book “Knots” was all about. We have internal “knots” because we have the world inside us. Inside each of us is a representation of our known universe filtered through the lens of our subjective experience, which of course alter our “reality.”
Some of our knots are conflicts within ourselves (our subjective self and objective self), but they're all tangled up in we, because we are inextricable from society because we are a social species. So some of these knots are both internal arguments between aspects of ourselves and arguments between us and other individuals, or between our group and their group. But the dynamics are the same at every level, just like a fractal.
Here is the book free online, R. D. Laing, Knots.
It may seem like a pain in the ass to negotiate, at first, but it becomes simple if you look at the little square with the page number. All you have to do is keep typing the next page number. It's easier than scrolling.
Laing made a study of schizophrenics and their families. It was a long term study and he interviewed these families over a long period of time. What he found was that most of the families of schizophrenics engaged in double-bind communication. The most common example is, “You don't love me; you only pretend to.” The reason it's a double bind communication is that it's a demand for a demonstration of love, but at the same in makes it clear that no demonstration of love will ever be sufficient.
The central feature of cognitive psychology is the idea that most of our thought processes are below our conscious awareness. And it is because they are below our awareness that they have such control over us. It is only when they are unearthed that we can gain control over them. These cognitive “knots” come from his journals. In other words, he didn't invent them. They are schematics that he drew up to represent actual cases.
The reason I think they are important is because I have never seen a technique that can make complex cognitive knots so vivid and understandable. And that was exactly why he developed them, as a tool that he could use to untangle the cognitive knots he encountered so that he could understand them. In other words, this book is the expression of a teaching technique that he used to teach himself, so that he could untangle otherwise impenetrable social, cognitive knots.
And I think this technique could be used as a great tool for making complex social dynamics vivid and graspable. For example, I think I could work one up for the conflict dynamics between Palestinians and Israelis. And I think I could make the self-destructiveness (on both sides and interactively) clear to everyone.
That's why I think there is such genius in this book.
Continue reading “Theophillis Goodyear: RD Laing and Cognitive Knots”
Huh?
Google Alerts May Be Dead, and You Don’t Even Know It
Oh Google, you love to draw me in only to drop my favorite services. I have come to rely on Google Alterts to deliver relevant, timely content into my inbox on a broad array of subjects. Google Alerts may already be dead, and you don’t even know it. Especially, as I’ve been talking about content curation so much recently, Google Alerts is one of the top entry points into my content funnel.
The frequency and depth of my Google Alerts began to wane in December 2012, but in late January I noticed that the lag in reporting was far from “as it happens.” Ego alerts were taking 3-4 days to hit my inbox where they took minutes only months ago. So, when I saw Danny Sullivan’s post Dear Google Alerts: Why Aren’t You Working? I knew that I wasn’t alone:
One of Google’s oldest features is Google Alerts, where you can enter keywords you want to monitor and get an email report each day about any new search results that match those terms. It was awesome; but for several weeks, it’s become nearly useless. –
While Danny figures out the problem with Google, I thought I would do a quick roundup of Google Alerts Alternatives. Specifically, I am looking for the following criteria.
Table of Eight Alternatives:
Intelligence Budget Requests for 2014 Disclosed
Some $4 billion is being cut from the National Intelligence Program this year as a result of sequestration, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told the House Intelligence Committee at a hearing today. He said that the consequences will be severe. Acquisition programs will be “wounded,” ongoing programs will have to be curtailed, and the ensuing degradation of intelligence capabilities will be “insidious” with unforeseeable effects, he said.
Meanwhile, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence disclosed yesterday that the FY 2014 budget request for the National Intelligence Program (NIP) is $48.2 billion. However, this figure excludes the pending funding request for Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO), so it cannot be directly compared to previous budget allocations, such as the $53.9 billion that was appropriated in FY 2012, or the $52.6 billion that was requested for FY 2013. A summary of the FY 2014 budget request is here.
The Secretary of Defense also disclosed the FY 2014 budget request for the Military Intelligence Program (MIP) yesterday, which was $14.6 billion. It also did not include the funding request for Overseas Contingency Operations. This is a slight decline from the $14.7 billion base request for the MIP last year. (An additional $4.5 billion was known to have been requested for OCO in the past fiscal year.)
Total intelligence spending (NIP plus MIP) peaked in Fiscal Year 2010, and has been on a downward slope since then. Intelligence budget disclosures from the last several years are tabulated here.
The NIP intelligence budget request was publicly disclosed for the first time in February 2011, in response to a requirement enacted by Congress in the FY 2010 intelligence authorization act. The MIP intelligence budget request was disclosed for the first time in February 2012, even though there was no specific statutory requirement to do so.
| FISCAL YEAR | NIP BUDGET | MIP BUDGET | TOTAL |
| 2012 | 53.9 billion | 21.5 billion | 75.4 billion |
| 2011 | 54.6 billion | 24 billion | 78.6 billion |
| 2010 | 53.1 billion | 27 billion | 80.1 billion |
| 2009 | 49.8 billion | 26.4 billion | 76.2 billion |
| 2008 | 47.5 billion | 22.9 billion | 70.4 billion |
| 2007 | 43.5 billion | 20 billion | 63.5 billion |
Phi Beta Iota: With Special Operations now playing a greater intelligence role, one could argue that both the black and the green budgets should be considered together to get a true total of US Government secret and covert operations — and of course that is only what is on the books, not all the stuff funded by Saudi Arabia, indirectly via Israel, and other third party players. The “priorities” in the highlights are vapor — and reaffirm that the US IC is not at all interested in actually producing decision support for Whole of Government planning, programming, budgeting, and execution (PPBS/E).
Researcher hacks aircraft controls with Android smartphone
This may give the TSA some ideas
Posted in Security, 11th April 2013 01:12 GMT
Free whitepaper – IT infrastructure monitoring strategies
A presentation at the Hack In The Box security summit in Amsterdam has demonstrated that it's possible to take control of aircraft flight systems and communications using an Android smartphone and some specialized attack code.
Hugo Teso, a security researcher at N.Runs and a commercial airline pilot, spent three years developing the code, buying second-hand commercial flight system software and hardware online and finding vulnerabilities within it. will cause a few sleepless nights among those with an interest in aircraft security.
Teso's attack code, dubbed SIMON, along with an Android app called PlaneSploit, can take full control of flight systems and the pilot's displays. The hacked aircraft could even be controlled using a smartphone's accelerometer to vary its course and speed by moving the handset about.
“You can use this system to modify approximately everything related to the navigation of the plane,” Teso told Forbes. “That includes a lot of nasty things.”
CDC Claim of No Autism-Vaccine Link Based on Junk Science
The CDC has produced junk science that demonstrates absolutely nothing, but claims it shows no connection between autism and the vaccine schedule. It's now spinning it as if it proves that there's no link between the modern day nightmare of autism and the vaccines that they push for Big Pharma. Here's the evidence.
Heidi Stevenson
GreenMedInfo.com, 2 April 2013
