A pressing case for standing up to Rupert Murdoch's bullying

Notes from the Underground

Charles Schulz Draws Charlie Brown

Charles "Sparky" Schulz talks about Charlie Brown as he draws him playing the piano in this official video clip from the never released documentary, "A Boy Named Charlie Brown."
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Heroin is perhaps the most widely recognised drug from the group known as opioids.
Others are opium, morphine, codeine, oxycodone, buprenorphine and methadone.
Of all these drugs, heroin is probably the one perceived to be the most dangerous. But what do we really know about who's likely to even try heroin or become addicted to it?
In his new book Professor Shane Darke, from the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre, takes a biographical approach to the lifecycle of the heroin user from birth until death.

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@'ABC'

LulzSec Kayla suspect(s) held in UK

Officers from the Metropolitan Police Service's Central e-Crime Unit (PCeU) have today arrested two men for conspiring to commit offences under the Computer Misuse Act 1990.
The arrests - [E] 24ys and [F] 20ys - are part of an ongoing investigation in collaboration with the FBI, South Yorkshire Police and other law enforcement bodies in the UK and overseas, into the activities of the online 'hacktivist' groups Anonymous and LulzSec - in particular in connection with suspected offences conducted under the cover of the online identity 'Kayla'.
The men were arrested separately at addresses in Mexborough, Doncaster, South Yorkshire and Warminster, Wiltshire. The Doncaster address was searched by police and computer equipment was removed for forensic examination.
The arrested men have been detained at police stations in South Yorkshire and central London whilst further enquiries and interviews are conducted.
Detective Inspector Mark Raymond, from the PCeU, said: "The arrests relate to our enquiries into a series of serious computer intrusions and online denial-of-service attacks recently suffered by a number of multi-national companies, public institutions and government and law enforcement agencies in Great Britain and the United States.
"We are working to detect and bring before the courts those responsible for these offences, to disrupt such groups, and to deter others thinking of participating in this type of criminal activity."
@'The Met'

Anonymous and Lulzsec: Two Men held in hacking inquiry

Ode To Vinyl

(Thanx Stan!)

What has happened to WikiLeaks?

The Murdoch Media Empire Has Cost Humanity Decades in the Battle Against Climate Change

Reality becomes so distorted that The Australian was able to state earlier this month, “it is in keeping with this newspaper’s rationalist pedigree that we have long accepted the peer-reviewed science on anthropogenic climate change,” while at the same time engaging in a campaign to misrepresent and distort climate science.

Other editorials have made it clear that The Australian believes it is treating its readers as mature adults who should be able to make up their own minds based on arguments from “both sides” of the debate.

The problem is that on one side of the debate you have 97% of the world’s published climate scientists and the world’s major scientific organisations, and on the other side you have fools.

Excuse my bluntness, but it is past time to acknowledge that the science underpinning anthropogenic climate change is rock solid. The sceptics have had the time and opportunity to come with up a convincing case, but their best efforts read like arguments that NASA faked the moon landing.

My colleagues working in the climate sciences have largely given up trying to correct the constant stream of misinformation from The Australian, in frustration.

The Australian’s anti-science campaign takes many forms.

One is the inflation of the credentials of their fake experts. For example, OpEd writer and member of the Outdoor Recreation Party Jon Jenkins was referred to as an “Adjunct Professor”. Bond University wrote to The Australian informing them that this was not true...

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Michael Ashley @'truthout'

The money shot!

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But is WikiLeaks now a spent force..?

Clinton Fearon - 2011 06 18 @ Saint Gratien Centre culturel du forum

Former Gladiators lead singer Clinton Fearon playing The Gladiators "On the other side" and 2 solo tracks "Who cares" & "Vision"

All Leaked U.S. Cables Were Made Available Online as WikiLeaks Splintered

A Dispatch Disaster in Six Acts

Some 250,000 diplomatic dispatches from the US State Department have accidentally been made completely public. The files include the names of informants who now must fear for their lives. It is the result of a series of blunders by WikiLeaks and its supporters.
In the end, all the efforts at confidentiality came to naught. Everyone who knows a bit about computers can now have a look into the 250,000 US diplomatic dispatches that WikiLeaks made available to select news outlets late last year. All of them. What's more, they are the unedited, unredacted versions complete with the names of US diplomats' informants -- sensitive names from Iran, China, Afghanistan, the Arab world and elsewhere.
SPIEGEL reported on the secrecy slip-up last weekend, but declined to go into detail. Now, however, the story has blown up. And is one that comes as a result of a series of mistakes made by several different people. Together, they add up to a catastrophe. And the series of events reads like the script for a B movie. Act One: The Whistleblower and the JournalistThe story began with a secret deal. When David Leigh of the Guardian finally found himself sitting across from WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, as the British journalist recounts in his book "Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy", the two agreed that Assange would provide Leigh with a file including all of the diplomatic dispatches received by WikiLeaks.
Assange placed the file on a server and wrote down the password on a slip of paper -- but not the entire password. To make it work, one had to complete the list of characters with a certain word. Can you remember it? Assange asked. Of course, responded Leigh.
It was the first step in a disclosure that became a worldwide sensation. As a result of Leigh's meeting with Assange, not only the Guardian, but also the New York Times, SPIEGEL and other media outlets published carefully chosen -- and redacted -- dispatches. Editors were at pains to black out the names of informants who could be endangered by the publication of the documents.
Act Two: The German Spokesman Takes the Dispatch File when Leaving WikiLeaks
At the time, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, who later founded the site OpenLeaks, was the German spokesman for WikiLeaks. When he and others undertook repairs on the WikiLeaks server, he took a dataset off the server which contained all manner of files and information that had been provided to WikiLeaks. What he apparently didn't know at the time, however, was that the dataset included the complete collection of diplomatic dispatches hidden in a difficult-to-find sub-folder.
After making the data in this hidden sub-folder available to Leigh, Assange apparently simply left it there. After all, it seemed unlikely that anyone would ever find it.
But now, the dataset was in the hands of Domscheit-Berg. And the password was easy to find if one knew where to look. In his book Leigh didn't just describe his meeting with Assange, but he also printed the password Assange wrote down on the slip of paper complete with the portion he had to remember.
Act Three: Well-Meaning Helpers Accidentally Put the Cables into Circulation
Immediately after the first diplomatic dispatches were made public, WikiLeaks became the target of several denial-of-service attacks and several US companies, including Mastercard, PayPal and Amazon, withdrew their support. Quickly, several mirror servers were set up to prevent WikiLeaks from disappearing completely from the Internet. Well-meaning WikiLeaks supporters also put online a compressed version of all data that had been published by WikiLeaks until that time via the filesharing protocol BitTorrent.
BitTorrent is decentralized. Data which ends up on several other computers via the site can essentially no longer be recalled. As a result, WikiLeaks supporters had in their possession the entire dataset that Domscheit-Berg took off the WikiLeaks server, including the hidden data file. Presumably thousands of WikiLeaks sympathizers -- and, one supposes, numerous secret service agents -- now had copies of all previous WikiLeaks publications on their hard drives.
And, what they didn't know, a password-protected copy of all the diplomatic dispatches from the US State Department...