Saturday, 16 January 2010
Duck hunters spark nuclear weapons plant lockdown in Texas
A pair of duck hunters have trigged a security alert at a nuclear weapons assembly plant in Amarillo, Texas.
Officials locked the plant after getting reports of individuals in camouflage gear stalking across the road from the factory. They turned out to be two plant employees who had decided to spend their day off hunting fowl.
The plant was briefly shut as a "precautionary measure," a plant official said.
"They were just doing what people do around here," said Carson County Sheriff Tam Terry.
"They just had a lot more company than they were planning on."
The pair, who sparked the alert when spotted early in the morning carrying arms and dressed in camouflage gear, were later found in a nearby field setting up goose decoys.
No charges will be filed against the men who both had permission to hunt from the local landowner.
(Thanx Carolyn!)
WTF???
Was just reading in the 'Guardian Weekly' from a couple of weeks ago that in certain parts of the UK, kids at school are being forced to wear goggles when playing conkers!!!
We are producing an entire generation of children with absolutely no sense of resilience and coping skills...
Thinking of the children? Hmmm!
(And the school that enforces that kids have to wear goggles when using blue-tac... JeebusHfugnchrist!!!)
(And the school that enforces that kids have to wear goggles when using blue-tac... JeebusHfugnchrist!!!)
OiNK Admin Found Not Guilty, Walks Free
Lawyers have presented their final arguments in the trial of Alan Ellis. The prosecution slammed the ex-OiNK admin, saying that the site was set up with dishonest and profiteering intentions right from the start. The defense tore into IFPI and countered by calling Ellis an innovator with talents to be nurtured. Today the jury returned a unanimous verdict of not guilty, and Ellis walked free.
After a very long wait of more than two years, last week the OiNK trial got underway with the prosecution making their case against Alan Ellis. This week it was the turn of the defense and yesterday both sides had the opportunity to summarize their positions by submitting their closing arguments to the jury at Teesside Crown Court.
Peter Makepeace, prosecuting, naturally painted an extremely negative picture, labeling the Pink Palace as a place designed from the ground up as a personal money-making machine for Ellis.
“21 million downloads. 600,000-plus albums. £300,000. This was a cash cow, it was perfectly designed to profit him and it was as dishonest as the day is long,” said Makepeace.
It is common sense to come to the conclusion that Oink was dishonest, claimed the prosecution lawyer, adding that Ellis knows that it’s dishonest “to promote, encourage and facilitate criminal activity,” and accusing him of telling the jury “persistent, cunning, calculated lies.”
It would, of course, be dishonest to promote “criminal activity”, but Mr Makepeace should be very well aware that the activity engaged in by OiNK’s users is covered under civil law.
Switching momentarily from criticism to praise and then back again, Makepeace said that the OiNK website was a “wonderful machine” for sharing music but noted that while the site had a really good brand name, it was a brand synonymous with “ripping off music.”
University of London professor Birgitte Andersenok gave evidence earlier in the trial, stating that file-sharing didn’t hurt the music industry and led to more sales. Mr Makepeace trashed her evidence.
“It’s nonsense, it’s flannel, it’s verbiage, it’s garbage,” he told the Court.
For the defense, Alex Stein said that Ellis had never knowingly acted dishonestly and that in 2004 when OiNK was launched, it was a “brave new world” on the Internet.
“In many societies he’d be an innovator, a creator, a Richard Branson. His talent would be moulded, not crushed by some sort of media organization,” he said.
The media organization being referred to by Stein was the IFPI, who he said had never requested that OiNK be shut down, and had instead “sat and watched.”
Gazette Live reports that Stein went on to launch a scathing attack on the IFPI.
“They used this site. Their own members used this site to promote their own music and now they’re crushing him. Maybe he grew too big for them, maybe they’ve taken a different marketing approach. I don’t know. But it was decided that this site should be taken down.
“All of us here are being manipulated to some sort of marketing strategy by the IFPI. If anybody’s acting dishonestly it’s them,” he said.
At the end of the two week trial the jury returned a unanimous verdict (12 to 0). Alan Ellis is not guilty of Conspiracy to Defraud the music industry. He walked out of Teesside Crown Court a free man today, his name cleared.
The verdict cannot be appealed and Ellis can finally put the past behind him and move on.
Scaling the Digital Wall in China
The Great Firewall of China is hardly impregnable.
Just as Mongol invaders could not be stopped by the Great Wall, Chinese citizens have found ways to circumvent the sophisticated Internet censorship systems designed to restrict them.
They are using a variety of tools to evade government filters and to reach the wide-open Web that the Chinese government deems dangerous — sites like YouTube, Facebook and, if Google makes good on its threat to withdraw from China, Google.cn.
It’s difficult to say precisely how many people in China engage in acts of digital disobedience. But college students in China and activists around the world say the number has been growing ever since the government stepped up efforts to “cleanse” the Web during the Beijing Olympics and the Communist regime’s 60th anniversary last year.
As part of that purge, the Chinese government shut down access to pornography sites, blogs, online video sites, Facebook, Twitter and more.
While only a small percentage of Chinese use these tools to sidestep government filters, the ease with which they can do it illustrates the difficulty any government faces in enforcing the type of strict censorship that was possible only a few years ago.
Jason Ng, a Chinese engineering school graduate who will say only that he works in the media business, wakes every day at 8:30 a.m., and then begins his virtual travels through an open, global network by fanqiang, or “scaling the wall.” He connects to an overseas computer with a link, called a proxy server, that he set up himself. It costs 15 renminbi, or around $2, a month to share with about two dozen other friends.
Mr. Ng then works on his blog and checks the news on Google Reader and Twitter to “officially start my day of information.” Chinese citizens engaged in such practices say the government rarely cracks down on them individually, preferring instead to go after prominent dissidents who publish information about forbidden topics online.
As a result, college students, human rights activists, bloggers, journalists and even multinational corporations in China are rushing to use tools that go over or around barriers set up by Chinese regulators, in part because they feel it is the only way to participate in a global online community.
Isaac Mao, a well-known blogger and activist in China, says the number of people seeking access to blocked sites has grown as more and more popular Web sites have been shut down by Beijing.
These digital dissidents have begun to organize small conferences and networks to share information and tricks about how to get access to banned material. “People start to hold a grudge against the government for depriving them of access to the Web sites they regularly visit,” Mr. Mao says.
But as the government has expanded its control over Internet, it has also intensified efforts to close some of the channels being used to evade the online blockade. The result has been a technological game of cat and mouse between the Chinese government and a global contingent fighting for online freedoms...
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WARNING!!! Update re: Ultrareach
Internet anti-censorship technology was thought of as "mission impossible" two years ago. We started thorough R&D on other existing technologies as well as from end users' perspective. While other existing technologies were developed for user's privacy and anonymity on Internet, we solved the connection and reconnection problem, which is the key issue for user to access web site without being blocked. Built on solid theoretical analysis and professional quality, UltraReach has successfully invented the technology platform called the GIFT system, which offers guaranteed connection and reconnection service to users inside these censor countries and capability of serving very large number of users with affordable resource. More than one year live service performance has proved that the GIFT technology has successfully broken through the so-called "Great Firewall" which is built with state-of-art firewall equipments and softwares with virtually unlimited resource from government.
Powered by GIFT technology, UltraReach.Net portal is the first home page for users to visit when they are connected to our service. Through the web portal users inside the censored zones can surf any public web sites in the free world. It naturally becomes a precious window for users inside China to look out for world news and other web contents that are blocked. The UltraReach.Net attracts thousands of users in China with daily news stories, featured articles and links from world media, governmental and non-governmental organizations, different groups and individual sites.
The outstanding performance of our service has made UltraReach Internet well known among the users who seek the Internet freedom in the censored country, and at the meantime attracted heavy attacks from Chinese Internet police. The GIFT system has survived various assaults including DNS hijacking, IP blocking, DOS attacking etc. We've taken the threats from the censor as opportunities to continuously improve the performance and reliability of our technology. In fact, the GIFT system has been mature enough for reliable service and it depends on the financial resource to expand its user base.
The next-level solution from UltraReach Internet as well as the real time performance has proved that our system and service is by far superior to other existing technologies. The main differentiators consist of anti-blocking power, connection and re-connection capability and the ability to serve and maintain a very large number of users from inside China. As the clear leader among the Internet anti-jamming technology and service providers, we are currently the only one that can offer reliable service to deliver web contents to the massive number of users in China.
My son did a bit of research into 'Ultrareach' and warning bells started to ring!
Face of the day
He Pingping of China holds the hand of Sultan Kosen of Turkey as they attend the Guinness World Records Roadshow, on January 14, 2010 in Istanbul, Turkey. He, standing at 73 cm (2 feet 5 inch), and Kosen, at 246.5 cm (8 feet 1 inch), are both in the Guinness World Records for their statures. By Burak Kara/Getty Images.
Dopplereffekt @ Arena Club, Berlin [28.11.09]
Dopplereffekt @ Arena Club, Berlin
28 Nov 2009
Dopplereffekt: Gerald Donald, Kim Karli, Michaela To-Nhan Bertel, Rudolf Klorzeiger, William Scott
Download @'New Technoid'
Friday, 15 January 2010
Tensions Mount in Devastated Capital as Nations Step Up Aid Pledges to Haiti
“Get me out!” came the haunting voice of a teenager, Jhon Verpre Markenley, from a dark crevice of the trade school that collapsed around him and fellow students.
Mr. Verpre’s father risked his own life to save his son’s, crouching deep into the hole with a blowtorch to try to wear away the metal that had his son’s leg pinned down inside. Hours later, the young man was free. His mother danced.
By Thursday evening, the Haitian president, René Préval, said that 7,000 people had already been buried in a mass grave. Hundreds of corpses piled up outside the city’s morgue, next to a hospital struggling to prevent those numbers from rising. On street corners, people pulled their shirts up over their faces to filter out the thickening smell of the dead.
With reports of looting and scuffles over water and food, President Obama promised $100 million in aid, as the first wave of a projected 5,000 American troops began arriving to provide security and the infrastructure for the expected flood of aid from around the world.
“You will not be forsaken, you will not be forgotten,” Mr. Obama told the Haitian people in an emotional address at the White House on Thursday. “In this, your hour of greatest need, America stands with you.”
Help was only beginning to arrive Thursday as the United States military took over the wrecked air traffic control system to land cargo planes with food and water, though the airport was clogged and chaotic with little or no fuel for planes to return. Doctors and search-and-rescue teams worked mostly with the few materials in hand and waited, frustrated, for more supplies, especially much needed heavy equipment.
“Where’s the response?” asked Eduardo A. Fierro, a structural engineer from California who had arrived earlier in the day to inspect quake-damaged buildings. “You can’t do anything about the dead bodies, but inside many of these buildings people may still be alive. And their time is running out.”
United Nations officials said that Haitians were growing hopeless — and beginning to run out of patience.
“They are slowly getting more angry,” said David Winhurst, the spokesman for the United Nations mission in Haiti, speaking by video link from the Port-au-Prince airport. “We are all aware of the fact that the situation is getting more tense.”
The Haitian National Police had virtually disappeared, Mr. Winhurst and another senior United Nations official said, and no longer had a presence on the streets, though witnesses at the city’s already filled main morgue reported seeing police pickup trucks dropping off bodies collected from around the city.
The United Nations officials said that the 3,000 peacekeeping troops around the capital would probably be sufficient to handle any unrest, but that plans were being made to bring in reinforcements from the 6,000 others scattered around the country...
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