Trevor Timm of the Electronic Freedom Frontier dug up a very interesting nugget. It was embedded in the heralded December 2013 White House task force report on spying and snooping.
Under Recommendations, #31, section 2, he found this:
“Governments should not use their offensive cyber capabilities to change the amounts held in financial accounts or otherwise manipulate financial systems.”
Timm quite rightly wondered: why were these warnings in the report?
Were the authors just anticipating a possible crime? Or were they reflecting the fact that the NSA had already been engaging in the crime?
Leila project, billed as a ‘library of things', has proved so popular it has spawned similar initiatives across the country
The most popular items in Berlin's first “borrowing shop” are the electric drills. At least one of the local people who have registered with Leila – a little shop on Fehrbelliner Strasse, north-east of the city centre – seems to be continually fixing shelves or hanging pictures.
Click on Image to Enlarge
But it's not worth buying that person their own tools, said founder Nikolai Wolfert. “The average electric drill is used for 13 minutes in its entire lifetime – how does it make sense to buy something like that? It's much more efficient to share it.”
Wolfert, 31, came up with the idea for Leila after the Green party failed to win the 2011 Berlin elections and he started looking for ways of doing politics at a more local level. Four hundred residents have signed up to the project, which he says is less a charity shop than a “library of things”.
Members can borrow anything from board games to wine glasses, fog machines to hiking rucksacks, juicers to unicycles. All they need to do to become members is drop off an item of their own. “This is not just about doing charity out of magnanimity – the shop makes sense because it's more efficient,” Wolfert said. “We think in a decentralised way – that's how the big supermarket chains think too.”
I have attended a couple of “open source” events over the year. Most of the attendees are male, serious, bright, and similar to the fellows in my advanced high school math class and our math club.
The few women present were notable because there were so darned few of them. I attended the first Lucene Revolution with two exceptionally competent females, one a law librarian and one a PhD in operations management.
Now you see the curtain pulled back. The Keystone pipeline is a classic example of profit for the few — the Koch's could make many many billions from Keystone — and potential disaster for the many. It is now completely transparent. And yet it could still happen.
Russia-Estonia: On 19 March at the U.N. Human Rights Council a Russian diplomat said Russia is concerned about Estonia's treatment of its ethnic Russian minority. He said, “Language should not be used to segregate and isolate groups.” comparing language policy in Estonia to language policy in Ukraine after the ouster of Yanukovych.
Comment: Estonia requires all citizens to learn Estonian. In February the new Ukrainian regime rescinded the law that allows local regions to use Russian as a second language to Ukrainian.
Old Russian hands know that under the Tsars and the Soviets language was politics. The leaders of all the former Warsaw Pact states know that as well. Many activist groups in the former Soviet republics made freedom to use local languages their first demand. In fact it always signified opposition to Russian/Soviet authority.
The Putin government is using the age old language issue in reverse to assert a protective umbrella over ethnic Russians anywhere in reach. Estonia has more than 321,000 ethnic Russians, who constitute 24 percent of the population.
It is pretty clear from Vladimir Putin’s recent speech regarding the Russian moves into Crimea that the expansion of NATO is a major grievance. Russians believe the quid pro quo for disbanding the Warsaw Pact and their withdrawing from Eastern Europe was a promise by the West not to expand NATO eastward. Putin’s speech drips with a sense of betrayal, and not entirely without reason, as Ambassador Jack Matlock explains here. It is not as if the problems of NATO expansion were unforeseeable. Attached herewith is a warning about NATO expansion made 16 years ago by my friend Lee Gaillard warned that NATO expansion might lead to problems.
