IO Impotency – Page 210 – Public Intelligence Blog

Karl Rove Loses Election After Being Checkmated By Cyber Sleuths?

OccupyforAccountability, 15 November 2012

Last month, we offered a million dollar reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of anyone who rigged a federal election on November 6th. We urged computer experts to contact us with information about any election manipulation of the tabulation results.

We Received A Letter

On November 12th, we received a letter from “The Protectors,” apparently a group of white hat cyber sleuths, mentioning our reward and stating that two months ago, they began monitoring the “digital traffic of one Karl Rove, a disrespecter of the Rule of Law, knowing that he claimed to be Kingmaker while grifting vast wealth from barons who gladly handed him gold to anoint another King while looking the other way.”

“The Protectors” said that they had identified the digital structure of Rove’s operation and of ORCA, a Republican get out the vote software application. After finding open “doors” in the systems, they created a “password protected firewall” called “The Great Oz,” and installed it on servers that Rove planned to use on election night to re-route and change election results “from three states.”

Continue reading “John Steiner: Cyber Dirty Tricks Crashed Karl Rove / ORCA?”

2012/11/182012/11/18

SchwartzReport: Big Sugar Does a Big Tobacco — True Cost of Sugar to Society

03 Economy, 06 Family, 07 Health, 11 Society, Communities of Practice, Corruption, IO Impotency, Lessons

Does Sugar Kill? How the Sugar Industry Hid the Toxic Truth

For decades, the industry kept scientists from asking: Does sugar kill?

GARY TAUBES and CRISTIN KEARNS COUZENS – AlterNet (U.S.)

November 15, 2012 |

This article first appeared in Mother Jones Magazine. Get your magazine subscription here.

ON A BRISK SPRING Tuesday in 1976, a pair of executives from the Sugar Association stepped up to the podium of a Chicago ballroom to accept the Oscar of the public relations world, the Silver Anvil award for excellence in ” the forging of public opinion. ” The trade group had recently pulled off one of the greatest turnarounds in PR history. For nearly a decade, the sugar industry had been buffeted by crisis after crisis as the media and the public soured on sugar and scientists began to view it as a likely cause of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. Industry ads claiming that eating sugar helped you lose weight had been called out by the Federal Trade Commission, and the Food and Drug Administration had launched a review of whether sugar was even safe to eat. Consumption had declined 12 percent in just two years, and producers could see where that trend might lead. As John “JW” Tatem Jr. and Jack O'Connell Jr., the Sugar Association's president and director of public relations, posed that day with their trophies, their smiles only hinted at the coup they'd just pulled off.

Continue reading “SchwartzReport: Big Sugar Does a Big Tobacco — True Cost of Sugar to Society”

2012/11/142012/11/14

Bill Gertz: Ideological war on terror needed

IO Impotency

Inside the Ring: Ideological war on terror needed

Bill Gertz

Washington Times, 14 November 2012

The U.S. military made impressive gains on the battlefield and covertly in countering Islamist terrorists since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. But the military and government at large so far have failed to strike the religiously motivated ideology behind al Qaeda and other Islamic extremists.

That’s the conclusion of a new book, Fighting the Ideological War: Winning Strategies From Communism to Islamism, by a group of specialists urging the U.S. government to apply the lessons of the Cold War defeat of the Soviet Union to Islamist terrorism.

One of the authors, irregular warfare specialist Sebastian L. Gorka, stated that the United States in the past 10 years successfully degraded al Qaeda’s ability to inflict harm on the United States. However, he writes,”al Qaeda has become even more powerful in the domain of ideological warfare and other indirect forms of attack.”

The problem for the U.S. government is “political correctness” toward Islam that has the prevented accurate identification of the enemy’s threat doctrine. For example, the Obama administration’s insistence on calling the Fort Hood, Texas, terrorist attack by Army Maj. Nidal M. Hasan “workplace violence” is crippling efforts to strike at the ideology Mr. Gorka calls “global jihadism” – defined as both the violent and nonviolent theory and practice of imposing Islamic supremacy globally.

“Although we have proven our capacity in the last 10 years kinetically to engage our enemy at the operational and tactical level with unsurpassed effectiveness, we have not even begun to take the war to al Qaeda at the strategic level of counter-ideology, to attack it at its heart – the ideology of global jihad,” he states.

Continue reading “Bill Gertz: Ideological war on terror needed”

2012/11/11

Yoda: Data Producing Intelligence — But Not in the “Intelligence” Community

Corruption, Government, Ineptitude, IO Impotency

yoda with light saber — Got Crowd? BE the Force!

Intelligence, this is.

Predicting presidents, storms and life by computer

Associated Press, Saturday, November 10, 2012

WASHINGTON (AP) — Forget political pundits, gut instincts, and psychics. The mightier-than-ever silicon chip seems to reveal the future.

In just two weeks this fall, computers models displayed an impressive prediction prowess.

It started when the first computer model alerted meteorologists to the pre-Halloween disaster headed for the Northeast from a bunch of clouds in the Caribbean. Nearly a week later, that weather system became Hurricane Sandy and grew into a superstorm after taking a once-in-a-century sharp turn into New Jersey.

Then, statistician and blogger Nate Silver correctly forecast on his beat-up laptop how all 50 states would vote for president. He even predicted a tie in Florida and projected it eventually would tip to President Barack Obama, which is the equivalent of predicting a coin landing on its side. He did it by taking polling data, weighing it for past accuracy and running 40,000 computer simulations at a time.

He then gave his forecast in terms of percentages, saying that Obama had a 91 percent chance of being re-elected.

In the case of Sandy, lives were at stake. With the election, reputations were on the line and some pundits were dismissive of the computer modeling. Bets were made. Challenges issued.

The math majors came out on top thanks to better and more accessible data and rapidly increasing computer power.

Continue reading “Yoda: Data Producing Intelligence — But Not in the “Intelligence” Community”

2012/11/092012/11/09

Yoda: Research Fraud Has Exploded in Past Decade — Pattern of Fraud in Education, Intelligence, & Research

Academia, Commerce, Corruption, IO Impotency

Sad, this is.

Research fraud exploded over the last decade

And retractions don't always mention when data's fraudulent (43% of the time, in fact).

A number of studies have spotted a worrisome trend: although the number of scientific journals and articles published is increasing each year, the rate of papers being retracted as invalid is increasing even faster. Some of these are being retracted due to obvious ethical lapses—fraudulent data or plagiarism—but some past studies have suggested errors and technical problems were the cause of the majority of problems. (…) The authors find that, since 1975, the rate of retracted articles as a percent of total publications has increased nearly tenfold. Duplicate publications and plagiarism, which didn't use to be a significant problem, have boomed since 2005. And while retractions due to errors have increased, those due to fraud have increased much faster.

. . . . . . . .

Patterns of deceit

When it comes to fraud, the traditional research powers are leading the way. The US has the largest number of cases, followed by Germany and Japan. But things like plagiarism and duplicating publications are quite different, with China being a major player, and India having a large presence. These sorts of copying problems are rare in high-profile journals like Nature and Science. Instead, there was a strong correlation between the incidence of fraud and the prominence of the journal, as measured by its impact factor.

Continue reading “Yoda: Research Fraud Has Exploded in Past Decade — Pattern of Fraud in Education, Intelligence, & Research”

2012/11/032012/12/03

Eagle: Facebook Actively Cheating 85% of Followers in Effort to Force Revenue from “Promote” Option

IO Impotency

The New Facebook Buttons: Promote, Despise, Abandon

Charles Hugh Smith Of Two Minds, November 1, 2012

How many people would click “despise FB” and “abandon FB” if those were offered alongside the new “promote for a fee” button?

Just in case you haven't noticed, your Facebook activity may not be reaching the FB audience you enjoyed a few months ago.

If you want to reach your previous audience, you need to click that little “promote” button and pay the fee.

My friend Richard Metzger of Dangerous Minds alerted me to a remarkable coincidence: shortly after Facebook's May launch of the “promote” option for business accounts, business users noticed an 85% reduction in their FB reach. Facebook: I Wany My Friends Back.

Like many other “stealth” revenue campaigns in social media, the “promote” revenue stream was first introduced as a marketing tool for enterprises and groups: Facebook's tempting ‘Promote' button for business (CNET).

It was presented as a way to expand one's reach on FB, to friends of friends, etc. What was not highlighted was the “stealth” reduction in reach to “encourage” use of the “promote” option: Broken on Purpose: Why Getting It Wrong Pays More Than Getting It Right:

Continue reading “Eagle: Facebook Actively Cheating 85% of Followers in Effort to Force Revenue from “Promote” Option”

2012/10/282012/10/28

Rickard Falkvinge: Wendy Cockcroft on The Next Big Battles – Secret Trade Agreements Bad for People

01 Poverty, 03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 11 Society, Commerce, Corporations, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Government, IO Impotency

The Next Big Battles

Posted: 27 Oct 2012 11:26 AM PDT

Activism – Wendy Cockcroft: Since ACTA was decisively beaten on 4th July 2012, the first time a free trade agreement had been scuppered by the people of EU member nations, the big business lobbyists have taken heed and resolved to change in order to be more successful. Hence the secrecy. CETA and the EU-India trade agreement are the next big battles. We need your help.

The term “Free Trade Agreement” is a misnomer. The idea is to remove barriers, taxes, and tariffs, but since people can end up being shackled to a multinational corporation’s agenda, the only freedom is in the ability of the corporations to operate in ways that often end up utterly destroying local economies or harnessing law enforcement agencies to protect their interests. The worst part is that we the taxpayers have to foot the bill for our losses of national sovereignty and civil rights. We saw ACTA off in July, but there are two more major agreements to deal with and we need to be ready to contact our M.E.P.s when the time comes.

Continue reading “Rickard Falkvinge: Wendy Cockcroft on The Next Big Battles – Secret Trade Agreements Bad for People”