Shared posts

23 Jul 16:11

Research Authorization

by submission

Author : David Atos

Professor Samuel fidgeted excitedly as the chroniton engines whined down. His movements caused showers of Cherenkov radiation in the chamber of the time machine. In his left hand was an audio recorder filled with his observations of early Macedonian pottery techniques. He was certain that his discoveries would earn him tenure at his university, and turn the field of anthropology on its head. His right hand held a simple USB thumbdrive, filled with the contents of an online encyclopedia, change history and all, from the moment before he was sent back to the Greek peninsula, circa 827BC.

“Okay, Professor Samuel. You’re back. Insert the thumbdrive for validation, please.”

The professor thought back to his training, the culmination of a ten-year application process. The technician would compare the data on that USB stick to a live version of the encyclopedia, to ensure that nothing he had done in the past had changed the present. And he had been meticulous about the required precautions. Remain out of sight. No communication with anyone. No food, no drink, leave no waste. The sterilization of all bacterial fauna in his body would take months to recover from, but it was all worth it for his research.

Professor Samuel was snapped out of his reverie by a blaring alarm and a flashing light.

“Professor, we’re showing a discrepancy on the order of 10^-16.”

“10^-16? No! That can’t be more than a couple of characters! Surely that’s too small a change for–”

“You know the rules, Professor. I’m sorry.” The operator reached towards a large red button on his control console

— FLASH —

The operator reached towards a large red button on his control console, and depressed it. But the machine made no sounds. The chroniton engines remained still. A small orange LED blinked rhythmically on the display.

“What is it? What’s wrong?” asked the Professor.

“It appears that your trip has been retroactively denied. Sorry, Professor.”

“But, the years I spent getting it approved! It took me over a decade! I need to go back for my research!”

“You know the rules, Professor. The machine locks us out in the event of a post-factum revocation. There’s nothing I can do now.”

“But . . . my research,” the Professor said in a weak voice.

“Don’t worry, professor. You can always apply for another trip.”

Discuss the Future: The 365 Tomorrows Forums
The 365 Tomorrows Free Podcast: Voices of Tomorrow
This is your future: Submit your stories to 365 Tomorrows

22 Jul 18:22

Hard Case

by submission

Author : Bob Newbell

The passport control agent looks at me and sighs. “Another one,” he says succinctly. His use of “one” rather than the epithet “shellhead” probably has little to do with concern that I might be offended. The woman in front of me got a “Have a nice day” from the man. I get a jerked thumb over his left shoulder to indicate I can proceed.

I’ve gotten used to it. I received a similar reception at Bradbury Station. It wasn’t always like this. Ten years ago, right after I got shelled, the reaction I and the small number of people who had undergone the procedure got tended to be more curiosity than jealously and bigotry.

“Can you feel anything?” a skinny twentysomething on the RFS Valentina Tereshkova had asked me nine years earlier.

“Yes,” I’d told the young Russian. “There are sensors that feed into transducers that connect to my nerve endings. Everything feels a bit different from what skin feels. But, yes, I still have sensation.”

“So, you can feel everywhere? And, uh, everything…works?”

I’d smiled. “Everything works,” I’d said.

Shelling was novelty back then. The first patients who underwent the procedure had nanocomposite plates glued to their skin. In addition to being impractical and dysfunctional, they looked like early sci fi movie robots. Astronautical physicians soon realized that replacing the skin itself with a microtessellated armor was the only viable solution. It can flex and distend as well as human skin and it solved an important problem: cancer.

In the 2160s, significant numbers of people started migrating beyond Earth orbit to the Moon and Mars and the Lagrange V station. Outside of the protection of Earth’s geomagnetic field, solar and cosmic radiation caused cancer rates among space travelers to be seven to ten times that of their terrestrial peers. Trying to protect off-world settlements and ships with massive shielding or high-powered EM fields proved to be expensive and difficult. It was noted that travelers who spent more time in their spacesuits tended to have lower cancer rates. But suits are cumbersome. A more intimate solution was required.

“What have you done to yourself?!” my mother had said to me when I first saw her after my shelling. My uniformly gray skin with its subtle sheen made me some kind of a freak in her eyes.

“My job keeps me in space most of the time,” I’d explained. “If you can’t go outside the Van Allen Belt for any length of time you can’t advance your career.” After that afternoon, we didn’t talk again for nearly three years. And even to this day, things aren’t like they used to be between us.

“Welcome to Amazonis Planitia!” says a cheerful voice that snaps me out of my reverie. The voice comes from a smiling black man who extends his hand as he walks up to me. But the man’s coloration is not that of a person representing the darker hued races of the human species. I see my reflection in his ebony shell as he pumps my hand. His features and accent are Chinese.

“Dr. Cheng? Sorry if I was a bit distracted. I got a somewhat chilly reception upon arriving here.”

“From the 软壳,” he says. The term he uses sounds roughly like “ruan ke”. He notes my confusion. “The ‘soft shells’,” he reiterates. “An impolite term, perhaps, but one that is catching on.”

“Guess they don’t like us too much.”

“They don’t like what we represent: a higher level of commitment to be out here. Our resolve is more than skin deep.”

Discuss the Future: The 365 Tomorrows Forums
The 365 Tomorrows Free Podcast: Voices of Tomorrow
This is your future: Submit your stories to 365 Tomorrows

19 Jul 15:00

Behold Ragnarök

by Jae Miles

Author : Jae Miles, Staff Writer

There is an unacknowledged transcript of the end of Twentieth Fleet. It surfaced a few years after the event that removed a small star system at the far edge of the Milky Way from existence in a flash of glorious colours and strange radiation.
We suspect that the lost system contained the origin planet of Homo sapiens, our predecessors, but as data transfer is notorious for inherent corruption, we cannot state with certainty from the records we have left.
Why exactly this transcript remains unacknowledged is a puzzling thing, because it hints at a starfaring race of immense antiquity and divergent technologies.
But I am not here to draw conclusions. I am here to disseminate the transcript so greater minds than mine can do that.

The last transmission of the Assault Cruiser Hyperdyne, as transcribed by the deadfall recording array in the quadrant monitoring station at Upervant:

“It looked like a short-handled sledgehammer!”
“Did it go through the Hyperdyne’s stellar drive before or after the enormous lupine entity appeared and ate your escorts?”
“After. The being named Azbragh who appeared did apologise – he had been aiming at the lupine entity, which he named a ‘Fenreer’. He set off after it when I told him our ship was doomed anyway.”
“That was when you long range sensors detected the silver missile with prismatic drive emissions?”
“No, that was when we saw a giant metallic serpent wrapping itself around a rainbow-hued freespace edifice of some kind.”
“Really? Very well. You moved to investigate, I presume?”
“No sir, we did not. There were too many freespace entities of types similar and dissimilar to Azbragh appearing and engaging in pitched battle with unknown energy technologies and primitive melee weapons.”
“In your opinion, were they similar to any previously encountered group, or even historical reports like those about the Olympus Theocracy?”
“I would agree a similarity between accounts of the Theocracy’s Guardforms and the Fenreer, sir. Apart from that, these beings seemed to be completely novel alien forms.”
“And this Azbragh being returned to warn you?”
“Yes. He looked to be badly wounded on his second visit.”
“And as you completed the withdrawal, the entire planetary system collapsed in upon itself?”
“Yes. There were some odd visual effects, like a great tree of lightning connecting the planets and such, but there were no adverse gravitational effects, which we expected from proximity to what we assumed to be a nascent black hole.”
“Your current status?”
“We appear to have suffered some unquantifiable irradiation, sir. Hallucinations and deliria are getting worse. I regretfully recommend that you write the Twentieth off and place this sector under ban.”

It is recorded that the Hyperdyne was lost to a ‘catastrophic stellar drive malfunction’; the aberrant drive field emitted by that moment inducing a detrimental resonance effect with the rest of Fleet Twenty’s stellar drives, causing them to detonate in a freakish chain reaction. No record of the Twentieth Fleet’s actual co-ordinates when this catastrophe occurred is available.

Discuss the Future: The 365 Tomorrows Forums
The 365 Tomorrows Free Podcast: Voices of Tomorrow
This is your future: Submit your stories to 365 Tomorrows

12 Jul 15:04

Spying on the Internet is Orders of Magnitude More Invasive Than Phone Metadata

by Micah Lee

When you pick up the phone, who you’re calling is none of the government’s business. The NSA’s domestic surveillance of phone metadata was the first program to be disclosed based on documents from whistleblower Edward Snowden, and Americans have been furious about it ever since. The courts ruled it illegal, and Congress let the section of the Patriot Act that justified it expire (though the program lives on in a different form as part of the USA Freedom Act).

Yet XKEYSCORE, the secret program that converts all the data it can see into searchable events like web pages loaded, files downloaded, forms submitted, emails and attachments sent, porn videos watched, TV shows streamed, and advertisements loaded, demonstrates how Internet traffic can be even more sensitive than phone calls. And unlike the Patriot Act’s phone metadata program, Congress has failed to limit the scope of programs like XKEYSCORE, which is presumably still operating at full speed. Maybe Verizon stopped giving phone metadata to the NSA, but if a Verizon engineer uploads a spreadsheet full of this metadata without proper encryption, the NSA may well get it anyway by spying directly on the cables that the spreadsheet travels over.

The outrage over bulk collection of our phone metadata makes sense: Metadata is private. Americans call suicide prevention hotlines, HIV testing services, phone sex services, advocacy groups for gun rights and for abortion rights, and the people they’re having affairs with. We use the phone to schedule job interviews without letting our current employer know, and to manage long-distance relationships. Most of us, at one point or another, have spent long hours on the phone discussing the most intimate details about our lives. There isn’t an American alive today who didn’t grow up with at least some access to a telephone, so Americans understand this well.

But Americans don’t understand the Internet yet. Bulk collection of phone metadata is, without a doubt, a violation of your privacy, but bulk surveillance of Internet traffic is orders of magnitude more invasive. People also use the Internet in all the ways they use phones — often inadvertently sharing even more intimate details through online searches. In fact, the phone network itself is starting to go over the Internet, without customers even noticing.

XKEYSCORE, as well as NSA’s programs that tap the Internet directly and feed data into it, have some legal problems: They violate First Amendment rights to freedom of association; they violate the Wiretap Act. But the biggest and most obvious concerns are with the Fourth Amendment.

The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is short and concise:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

It means that Americans have a right to privacy. If government agents want to search you or seize your data, they must have a warrant. The warrant can only be issued if they have probable cause, and the warrant must be specific. It can’t say, “We want to seize everyone’s Internet traffic to see what’s in it.” Instead, it must say something like, “We want to seize a specific incriminating document from a specific suspect.”

But this is exactly what’s happening:

The government is indiscriminately seizing Internet traffic to see what’s in it, without probable cause. The ostensible justification is that, while tens of millions of Americans may be swept up in this dragnet, the real targets are foreigners. In a legal document called USSID 18, the NSA sets out policies and procedures that purportedly prevent unreasonable searches of data from U.S. persons.

But it doesn’t prevent, or even claim to prevent, unreasonable seizures.

Kurt Opsahl, general counsel of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, explains: “We have a fundamental disagreement with the government about whether [data] acquisition is a problem. Acquisition is a seizure and has to be compliant with the Fourth Amendment.”

If you read USSID 18 carefully, you’ll see that it appears to limit, with many exceptions, the government’s ability to intentionally collect data concerning U.S. persons. But the Department of Defense, under which the NSA operates, defines “collection” differently than most of us do. It doesn’t consider seized data as “collected” until it’s been queried by a human.

If you email your mom, there’s a good chance the NSA will intercept the message as it travels through a fiberoptic cable, such as the ones that make up the backbone of the Internet, eventually making its way to an XKEYSCORE field site. You can thwart this with encryption: either by encrypting your email (hopefully someday all parents will know how to use encrypted email), or by using email servers that automatically encrypt with each other. In the absence of such encryption, XKEYSCORE will process the email, fingerprint it and tag it, and then it will sit in a database waiting to be queried. According to the Department of Defense, this email hasn’t been “collected” until an analyst runs a query and the email appears on the screen in front of them.

When NSA seizes, in bulk, data belonging to U.S. citizens or residents, data that inevitably includes information from innocent people that the government does not have probable cause to investigate, the agency has already committed an unconstitutional “unreasonable seizure,” even if analysts never query the data about innocent U.S. persons.

The NSA has legal justifications for all their surveillance: Section 215 of the Patriot Act, now expired, was used to justify bulk collection of phone and email metadata. Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) is currently used to justify so-called “upstream” collection, tapping the physical infrastructure that the Internet uses to route traffic across the country and around the world in order to import into systems like XKEYSCORE. Executive Order 12333, approved by President Reagan, outlines vague rules, which are littered with exceptions and loopholes, that the executive branch made for itself to follow regarding spying on Americans, which includes USSID 18.

But these laws and regulations ignore the uncomfortable truth that the Fourth Amendment requires surveillance of Americans to be targeted; it cannot be done in bulk. Americans are fighting to end bulk surveillance in dozens of lawsuits, including Jewel v. NSA, which relies on whistleblower-obtained evidence that NSA tapped the fiber optic cables that carry Internet traffic in AT&T’s Folsom Street building in San Francisco. It’s easy for the government to stall cases like this, or get them dismissed, by insisting that talking about it at all puts our national security at risk.

And, of course, let’s not forget the 6.8 billion people on Earth who are not in the United States. Article 12 of the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights states:

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

The NSA has very few restrictions on spying on non-Americans (it must be for “foreign intelligence” or “counterintelligence” purposes, and not other purposes), despite XKEYSCORE and the bulk collection programs that feed it being an “arbitrary interference” with the privacy of such persons. NSA doesn’t even have restrictions on spying on allies, such as Germany and France.

Facebook feeds everywhere are decorated with baby pictures. When those babies are grown up and getting elected to Congress, maybe then Americans will understand how the Internet works, and that bulk surveillance of phone metadata is just a tiny sliver of the enormous “collect it all” bulk surveillance pie.

Photo: Getty

The post Spying on the Internet is Orders of Magnitude More Invasive Than Phone Metadata appeared first on The Intercept.

11 Jul 14:07

US government’s reported number of wiretaps don’t add up

by David Kravets
Albert Gidari.

The government published its latest Wiretap Report on July 1. The headline finding was that encryption wasn't foiling federal and state law enforcement officials, despite a growing chorus of people suggesting that we're all gonna die unless the tech sector builds backdoor access into their products to enable government access.

In all, the federal agency that oversees the courts reported to Congress that there were 3,554 wiretaps in 2014, about 1 percent less than the year prior. Of the total, only four were thwarted via encryption.

But the reported number of wiretaps by the Administrative Office of the US Courts (AO) simply doesn't add up. That's according to Albert Gidari, one of the nation's top privacy lawyers. He says "there is a bigger story" that calls into question the AO's accounting:

Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

10 Jul 23:14

Photo

tumblr_nc2sq39tiy1sejo7ro1_500.jpg

10 Jul 17:38

So... That's a No

by Brad
7ea
10 Jul 17:31

Parody Game NotGTAV Vanishes From Steam After Strange Copyright Claim

by Nathan Grayson on Steamed, shared by Nathan Grayson to Kotaku

Parody Game NotGTAV Vanishes From Steam After Strange Copyright Claim

NotGTAV, which is not GTA V, was a hit when it released on Steam last week. Then it disappeared, because someone thought it violated copyright. Who, exactly? Well, that’s not entirely clear.http://kotaku.com/big-steam-sell...

Here’s what we know: NotGTAV, the cheap, funny parody game that was donating money to charity, disappeared from Steam. As developer NotGames wrote in a blog post, Valve apparently removed the game from Steam after receiving a DMCA copyright claim. Originally, they assumed it came from Rockstar. However, as it turns out, things are much more complicated—and stranger—than that.

I got in touch with NotGames, and they sent me the full message they allegedly received from Valve:

Advertisement

Valve received a DMCA copyright take down notice about your NotGTAV game on Steam, at [infringing Steam Link].

Andrew Youngs, on behalf of Rockstar Games, alleges that your game uses the Grand Theft Auto V acronym and title GTAV, and your game title infringes its copyright in http://store.steampowered.com/app/271590/.

As a result, we have unpublished your game from Steam.

NotGames told me they always knew something like this might happen, given the hallowed ground they were treading on. They did, however, find it regrettable given that NotGTAV is a parody game, and NotGames claims that they contacted Rockstar about its existence a year ago. “We made sure we’d taken all reasonable steps from our side to let them know what we were doing,” NotGames’ Emma Kendall told me.

In the wake of NotGTAV’s removal from Steam, NotGames came up with a quick contingency plan.

“We’re currently in the process of getting our game back on Steam, by re-branding to NotDMCAV,” Kendall said earlier today, shortly after NotGTAV’s removal from Steam. “The issue that Rockstar took was with the usage of ‘the Grand Theft Auto V acronym and title GTA’—apparently you can now own a series of letters, even it’s already a police crime in the first place. Our initial reaction was—and remains—that we’re protected under parody protection laws, and we’ve made it clear that we’re not accepting in any way, shape or form that we’ve infringed copyright, we’re just trying to be as compliant as possible right now.”

“After a reasonably frantic meeting, we decided that the priority was to get the content back up on the store for all the disgruntled players and people who’ve got in contact asking how the can buy the game. The easiest way to do this was to remove all references to GTA V in our content, branding, sound, and music. We’re therefore currently going through every asset and re-branding using a different acronym: NotDMCAV.”

Rockstar declined to comment on the record about what was happening.

According to NotGames, Valve decided to investigate the possibility of a fake DMCA claim, as opposed to one filed by an actual GTA V rights holder. And, sure enough, apparently someone pulled a fast one on Valve. Less than an hour after I got in touch with NotGames—and only a few hours after NotGames first posted their blog about NotGTAV’s removal from Steam—Valve apparently reversed their decision. NotGames explained in a frantic Steam post:

In what has quickly become the weirdest day of our lives, and one of the most hectic, we’ve just received news from Valve that the plaintiff of our DMCA is now being treated as a false complainant.

NotGTAV lives!!!!!!

We’re half-way through rebranding the game as NotDMCAV, and the store page we’ve designed gives us a huge giggle, so we’re leaving you some of our new artwork (you may be able to tell it was done in a bit of a hurry) for a couple of days but, as we’re not being sued, the name and game will be remaining the same.

Phew. What a ride. As of a few minutes ago, NotGTAV is back up on the Steam store. Still, questions remain: who did file the DMCA claim, and why? Was it just for shits and giggles, to see if they could stick it to The Man (The Man in this case being Valve and a small, well-meaning charity parody game)? Or did they have something more purposeful/malicious in mind? And why did Valve fall for it? Why didn’t they do a more thorough check on the person who submitted the complaint before yanking NotGames’ magnum opus full of hand-drawn magnums that look kinda like octopuses from their store?

Clearly, some processes broke down here. Let us hope that everybody involved takes the necessary steps to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

You’re reading Steamed, Kotaku’s page dedicated to all things in and around Valve’s stupidly popular PC gaming service. Games, culture, community creations, criticism, guides, videos—everything. If you’ve found anything cool/awful on Steam, send us an email to let us know.

To contact the author of this post, write to nathan.grayson@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter @vahn16.

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service - if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers.

10 Jul 17:03

Dragon Ball Kill Counts, Visualized

by Gergo Vas
Bewarethewumpus

The Yamcha one does not disappoint.

Dragon Ball Kill Counts, Visualized

Characters die and come back to life all the time in Dragon Ball. It’s a pretty bloody series overall and it can be hard to keep track of everything after hundreds of episodes. The pictures of Spanish artist Alberto Cubatas help in that. He visualized all the kills of main characters.

Well, Vegeta and Trunks killed almost everything in Dragon Ball Z, as you can see, and Goku did the same thing in the original series. But not everyone’s as efficient as the Saiyans...

Check out the artist’s DeviantART page for more, including Piccolo.

Advertisement

Dragon Ball Kill Counts, Visualized

Dragon Ball Kill Counts, Visualized

Dragon Ball Kill Counts, Visualized

Dragon Ball Kill Counts, Visualized

Dragon Ball Kill Counts, Visualized

To contact the author of this post, write to: gergovas@kotaku.com

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service - if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers.

09 Jul 21:53

Senate Advances Bill That Would Require Social Media Sites To Report “Terrorist Activities”

by Kate Cox

If it seems like everyone uses social media, well, that’s because basically everyone does. But it’s not just cake recipes and birthday party meet-ups people plan online; plenty of illegal activity gets talked about in digital space, too. And now members of the Senate want to make sure that when certain kinds of no-no topics pop up, the platform owners let the feds know.

The language that would require social media sites to alert authorities if terrorists are talking is in a bill that just cleared committee, Reuters reports.

It’s part of the appropriations bill (S. 1705) that would authorize all intelligence activity and spending for the next fiscal year — so, kind of important for Congress to actually move through, in some form or other. As such, the full text is quite long, but Reuters noticed the reporting requirements deep in section 603.

Specifically, that section of the bill outlines a duty to “report terrorist activities and the unlawful distribution of information relating to explosives.” The actual requirement reads:

Whoever, while engaged in providing an electronic communication service or a remote computing service to the public through a facility or means of interstate or foreign commerce, obtains actual knowledge of any terrorist activity, including the facts or circumstances described in subsection (c) shall, as soon as reasonably possible, provide to the appropriate authorities the facts or circumstances of the alleged terrorist activities.

In plain English, that means that the defined set of services — which include all the big social media sites and networks like Twitter and Facebook — would be legally obliged to tell law enforcement ASAP if anyone making terroristic threats or talking about illegal “explosives, destructive devices, and weapons of mass destruction” floated across their networks.

An unnamed Congressional official told Reuters that the purpose was to protect social media companies that report certain traffic to the authorities, rather than to compel them to spy on their users.

In a committee hearing about the bill yesterday, Sen. Dianne Feinstein said that social media companies should work with the government to prevent violent militants from using their sites.

“Twitter, FB and YouTube all, as I understand it, remove content on their sites that come to their attention if it violates their terms of service, including terrorism,” said Feinstein. “The companies do not proactively monitor their sites to identify such content nor do they inform the FBI when they identify or remove their content. I believe they should.”

The bill does specifically say that nothing in it should be construed to read as a requirement for sites to monitor particular users or their communications, as a “protection of privacy,” so it’s not that Twitter or Facebook would suddenly start intently watching each and every one of their 236 million or 1.44 billion respective active users. It’s that if certain communications made on those platforms seemed too suspicious and caught their eye — or, let’s say, an algorithmic text filter — they’d have to call the feds and report it.

A Facebook representative told Reuters, “”We share the government’s goal of keeping terrorist content off our site. Our policies on this are crystal clear: we do not permit terrorist groups to use Facebook, and people are not allowed to promote or support these groups on Facebook. We remove this terrorist content as soon as we become aware of it.”

The bill has been reported out of committee and will go to the Senate floor for a vote at some as-yet-undetermined time in the relatively near future.

Senate bill would make social media report ‘terrorist activity’ [Reuters]

09 Jul 21:30

Get Nostalgic With This 1990s Disney Supercut

by Don
Dba

YouTuber and professional trailer editor indrancole3 pieced together this montage of his favorites scenes from various animated Disney films from the 1990s.

09 Jul 15:53

Episode 1220: Shock and Roll

Episode 1220: Shock and Roll

Normally roleplayers wouldn't let anyone else make a dice roll for them, doubly so a critical roll such as this. But extreme circumstances sometimes dictate equally extreme measures.

09 Jul 14:34

MeFi: Inside JFK's amazing, abandoned TWA terminal

by SpookyFish
A pristine time capsule from 1962. Stunning pictures and video from this classic terminal, designed by famed Finnish architect Eero Saarinen. [via]

JetBlue has been working with the Port Authority with the intent to turn it into a boutique hotel.
09 Jul 03:18

Ultimate guided meditation video

by Rob Beschizza

[unable to retrieve full-text content]

Join with your inner stillness, where those fucks can't get under your skin with all their horseshit.

waves

08 Jul 23:02

Today’s Civilian Victims in Yemen Will be Ignored Because U.S. and its Allies Are Responsible

by Glenn Greenwald

In Fayoush, Yemen this morning, just outside of Aden, “a massive airstrike” hit a marketplace and killed at least 45 civilians, wounding another 50. Officials told the AP that “bodies were strewn about following the strike.” The bombing was carried out by what is typically referred to as a “Saudi-led coalition”; it is rarely mentioned in Western media reports that the U.S. is providing very substantial support to this “Saudi-led” war in Yemen, now in its fifth month, which has repeatedly, recklessly killed Yemeni civilians.

Because these deaths of innocents are at the hands of the U.S. government and its despotic allies, it is very predictable how they will be covered in the U.S. None of the victims will be profiled in American media; it’ll be very surprising if any of their names are even mentioned. No major American television outlet will interview their grieving families. Americans will never learn about their extinguished life aspirations, or the children turned into orphans, or the parents who will now bury their infants. There will be no #FayoushStrong Twitter hashtags trending in the U.S. It’ll be like it never happened: blissful ignorance.

This is the pattern that repeats itself over and over. Just see the stone-cold media silence when President Obama, weeks after winning the Nobel Peace Prize, ordered a cruise missile strike in Yemen, complete with cluster bombs, which ended the lives of 35 women and children, none of whose humanity was acknowledged in virtually any Western media reports.

All of that stands in the starkest contrast to the intense victim focus whenever an American or Westerner is killed by an individual Muslim. Indeed, Americans just spent the last week inundated with melodramatic “warnings” from the U.S. government — mindlessly amplified as always by their media — that they faced serious terror on their most sacred day from ISIS monsters: a “threat” that, as usual, proved to be nonexistent.

This media imbalance is a vital propaganda tool. In U.S. media land, Americans are always the victims of violence and terrorism, always menaced and threatened by violent Muslim savages, always targeted for no reason whatsoever other than primitive Islamic barbarism. That mythology is sustained by literally disappearing America’s own victims, pretending they don’t exist, denying their importance through the casual invocation of clichés we’ve been trained to spout (collateral damage) and, most importantly of all, never humanizing them under any circumstances.

This is how the American self-perception as perpetual victim of terrorism, but never its perpetrator, is sustained. It’s also what fuels the belief that They are propagandized but We aren’t. While these deaths will be concealed from the American public, people in that part of the world will hear much about them: just as Americans heard almost nothing about the Al Jazeera journalist imprisoned for years in Guantanamo with no charges, Sami al-Hajj, while he was a cause celebre in the Muslim world, leading Americans to believe that only the Bad Countries, but never Us, imprison journalists. From this latest Yemen bombing and so many like it, the resulting differences in worldviews and perspectives isn’t be because “they” are propagandized, but because “we” are.

Photo: House destroyed by Saudi-led airstrike in Saana, July 3; Hani Mohammed/AP

The post Today’s Civilian Victims in Yemen Will be Ignored Because U.S. and its Allies Are Responsible appeared first on The Intercept.

08 Jul 22:55

FBI Director Says Scientists Are Wrong, Pitches Imaginary Solution to Encryption Dilemma

by Jenna McLaughlin

Testifying before two Senate committees on Wednesday about the threat he says strong encryption presents to law enforcement, FBI Director James Comey didn’t so much propose a solution as wish for one.

Comey said he needs some way to read and listen to any communication for which he’s gotten a court order. Modern end-to-end encryption — increasingly common following the revelations of mass surveillance by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden — doesn’t allow for that. Only the parties on either end can do the decoding.

Comey’s problem is the nearly universal agreement among cryptographers, technologists and security experts that there is no way to give the government access to encrypted communications without poking an exploitable hole that would put confidential data, as well as entities like banks and power grids, at risk.

But while speaking at Senate Judiciary and Senate Intelligence Committee hearings on Wednesday, Comey repeatedly refused to accept that as reality.

“A whole lot of good people have said it’s too hard … maybe that’s so,” he said to the Intelligence Committee. “But my reaction to that is: I’m not sure they’ve really tried.”

In a comment worthy of climate denialists, Comey told one senator: “Maybe the scientists are right. Ennnh, I’m not willing to give up on that yet.”

He described his inability to make a realistic proposal as the act of a humble public servant. “We’re trying to show humility to say we don’t know what would be best.”

Comey said American technologists are so brilliant that they surely could come up with a solution if properly incentivized.

Julian Sanchez, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, was incredulous about Comey’s insistence that experts are wrong: “How does his head not explode from cognitive dissonance when he repeats he has no tech expertise, then insists everyone who does is wrong?” he tweeted during the hearing.

Prior to the committee hearings, a group of the world’s foremost cryptographers and scientists wrote a paper including complex technical analysis concluding that mandated backdoor keys for the government would only be dangerous for national security. This is the first time the group has gotten back together since 1997, the previous instance in which the FBI asked for a technical backdoor into communications.

But no experts were invited to testify, a fact that several intelligence committee members brought up, demanding a second hearing to hear from them.

Comey got little pushback from the panel, despite his lack of any formal plan and his denial of science. Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., thanked him for his display of “humility” in not presenting a solution, while Committee Chairman Richard Burr, R-N.C., said “I think you deserve a lot of credit for your restraint.”

Comey at one point briefly considered the possibility of a world not like the one he imagined, then concluded: “If that’s the case, then I think we’re stuck.”

(This post is from our blog: Unofficial Sources.)

Photo: Getty

The post FBI Director Says Scientists Are Wrong, Pitches Imaginary Solution to Encryption Dilemma appeared first on The Intercept.

08 Jul 22:44

One-Minute Time Machine

by Brad
823

In this cleverly crafted sci-fi comedy short film about a woman, a man and his quirky one-minute time machine, James gets all too trigger-happy with rewinding back in time while trying to swoon a beautiful woman at a park, all the while unaware of the gruesome consequences of his actions.

08 Jul 19:08

Rep. John Sarbanes and a Campaign Finance Reform Plan That Might Actually Work

by Jon Schwarz

For most people, I think, the unremitting news about how the richest 0.01 percent own American politics is like a doctor who tells you you have a terrible disease — and when you ask what the treatment is, says I have absolutely no idea.

Then the doctor starts calling you up first thing every morning at 8 a.m. to say I just want to remind you that you have a terrible disease. Around the 10th call you stop answering the phone, no matter how awful you feel.

That’s especially so ever since the Supreme Court declared even the flimsy restrictions on money in politics put in place since the 1970s to be unconstitutional. If our only hope is to amend the Constitution — which requires first a two-thirds vote in both the House and Senate and then approval from three-fourths of the 50 state legislatures — then it feels like we’re doomed.

But what if there were a way to approach this hellish problem from the opposite direction? If we’re forbidden by the Supreme Court from limiting money coming from the 0.01 percent, what about amplifying money from the bottom 99.99 percent?

That’s the basis for the Government by the People Act, introduced last year by Rep. John Sarbanes, a Democrat from Maryland’s 3rd District. (If the name sounds familiar, that’s probably because his father, Paul, was a five-term senator from Maryland.)

Sarbanes has quietly garnered 160 co-sponsors for the bill and support from House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, and a companion bill in the Senate introduced by Dick Durbin (D–Ill.) has 19 co-sponsors.

The bill has three main parts:

  •  Everyone gets $25 to donate to candidates

All voters receive $25 per year to give to political campaigns, provided in the form of a refundable tax credit equal to half of donations up to $50. (For instance, if you donate $30 to a candidate, you get $15 of that back; to get the full $25 you have to donate $50.)

  • 6 to 1 matching funds (at least) for small donors 

Donations up to $150 to qualifying House and Senate candidates are matched 6 to 1 with public money. In other words, if your next door neighbor is running for Congress and you give her $50, she’ll get another $300, making $350 total.

And donations are matched 9 to 1 for candidates who completely renounce big money and take only donations of $150 or less. So if your neighbor is willing to do that, your $50 donation would turn into $500 total for her. (Moreover, if you use your $25 tax credit, that $500 she received would only cost you $25 total.)

  • Help for candidates facing an onslaught of SuperPAC money, dark money, etc.

Candidates would be eligible for enhanced matching funds in the last 60 days before an election, with incentives so they would only access the funds if it’s a particularly high-cost race.

• • •

I recently spoke with Rep. Sarbanes in depth about the Government by the People Act. In the first part of the interview he explains the rationale for his bill, how it would change politicians’ behavior and how similar systems are already having an impact on a state and local level. In part two Sarbanes describes how he markets this idea, why it could not just change campaign financing but plausibly diminish the impact of big-money lobbying, and how it would keep incumbents like himself on their toes.

(This post is from our blog: Unofficial Sources.)

Photo: Timothy Jacobsen/AP

The post Rep. John Sarbanes and a Campaign Finance Reform Plan That Might Actually Work appeared first on The Intercept.

08 Jul 15:30

(706): He dared you to draw a map...

(706): He dared you to draw a map of the USA on your wall in mustard. You drew something that vaguely resembled a velociraptor eating Oklahoma, got embarrassed because you forgot how to spell America, then hid out in the coat closet until everybody left.
08 Jul 14:50

Computer scientists on the excruciating stupidity of banning crypto

by Cory Doctorow

A paper from some of the most important names in crypto/security history scorchingly condemns plans by the US and UK governments to ban "strong" (e.g. "working") crypto.

Twenty years ago, law enforcement organizations lobbied to require data and communication services to engineer their products to guarantee law enforcement access to all data. After lengthy debate and vigorous predictions of enforcement channels “going dark,” these attempts to regulate the emerging Internet were abandoned. In the intervening years, innovation on the Internet flourished, and law enforcement agencies found new and more effective means of accessing vastly larger quantities of data. Today we are again hearing calls for regulation to mandate the provision of exceptional access mechanisms. In this report, a group of computer scientists and security experts, many of whom participated in a 1997 study of these same topics, has convened to explore the likely effects of imposing extraordinary access mandates.

We have found that the damage that could be caused by law enforcement exceptional access requirements would be even greater today than it would have been 20 years ago. In the wake of the growing economic and social cost of the fundamental insecurity of today’s Internet environment, any proposals that alter the security dynamics online should be approached with caution. Exceptional access would force Internet system developers to reverse “forward secrecy” design practices that seek to minimize the impact on user privacy when systems are breached. The complexity of today’s Internet environment, with millions of apps and globally connected services, means that new law enforcement requirements are likely to introduce unanticipated, hard to detect security flaws. Beyond these and other technical vulnerabilities, the prospect of globally deployed exceptional access systems raises difficult problems about how such an environment would be governed and how to ensure that such systems would respect human rights and the rule of law.

Keys Under Doormats: Mandating insecurity by requiring government access to all data and communications [Harold Abelson, Ross Anderson, Steven M. Bellovin, Josh Benaloh, Matthew Blaze, Whitfield Diffie, John Gilmore, Matthew Green, Peter G. Neumann, Susan Landau, Ronald L. Rivest, Jeffrey I. Schiller, Bruce Schneier, Michael Specter, and Daniel J. Weitzner/MIT]

Security Experts Oppose Government Access to Encrypted Communication [Nicole Perlroth/NYT]

(via /.)

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service - if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers.

07 Jul 18:08

Seven Ways to Chop an Onion

by Ari Spool
D6a

So many of these onion-chopping methods seem so obvious after you learn about them. Stop being ignorant of all the special ways to dice an onion!

07 Jul 16:11

Kpop Dance Move Is So Attack on Titan

by Brian Ashcraft

Kpop Dance Move Is So Attack on Titan

The Korean pop group Sistar has a smash hit on their hands with “Shake It.” The YouTube video has racked up over five million views. Congrats on that! Ditto for the Attack on Titan comparisons. Wait. What?

As folks online in South Korea recently pointed out (via the Entasia Forums), one of the group’s dance moves looks like a Titan running in the anime Attack on Titan. Here, compare for yourself:

Advertisement

Running through villages, devouring humans, singing pop songs. You know, the usual.

Top GIF via starshipTV

To contact the author of this post, write to bashcraftATkotaku.com or find him on Twitter@Brian_Ashcraft.


Kotaku East is your slice of Asian internet culture, bringing you the latest talking points from Japan, Korea, China and beyond. Tune in every morning from 4am to 8am.

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service - if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers.

07 Jul 15:22

Episode 1219: Hanless

Episode 1219: Hanless

Act before you think! The motto of at least one fabulous roleplaying game.*

* Okay, it's Toon, but still, advice that many players seem to take to heart, no matter what system they're playing.

07 Jul 15:05

Amazon Is Data Mining Reviewers’ Personal Relationships

by Chris Morran

In spite of her assertions to the contrary, Amazon insists that Imy is a personal friend of an author whose book she tried to review, but the site won't disclose how it came to this conclusion.

In spite of her assertions to the contrary, Amazon insists that Imy is a personal friend of an author whose book she tried to review, but the site won’t disclose how it came to this conclusion.

Any Amazon customer is likely aware that the e-tail giant knows a lot about them. That’s how it personalizes product suggestions and customizes the marketing e-mails it sends. But some Amazon users are now finding out that the site knows — or at least it thinks it knows — who your friends are, and is restricting their reviews accordingly.

Blogger Imy Santiago writes of a particularly odd experience with Amazon that resulted after she tried to review an e-book she’d recently read.

“Your review could not be posted to the website in its current form,” stated an automated message from Amazon, saying her review had violated the site’s review guidelines, but without saying where she’d gone wrong.

After another failed attempt to post the review — also denied without giving a specific explanation — Imy wrote to Amazon hoping to get some more details on why her write-up was being blocked.

“We cannot post your Customer Review… to the Amazon website because your account activity indicates that you know the author,” explained the response from the company. “Customer Reviews are meant to give customers unbiased product feedback from fellow shoppers. Because our goal is to provide Customer Reviews that help customers make informed purchase decisions, any reviews that could be viewed as advertising, promotional, or misleading will not be posted.”

According to Imy, Amazon is making an “erroneous and quite presumptuous assessment” in asserting that she knows the author of the book she’s trying to review.

In her appeal to Amazon, she concedes that the independent publishing community is a small one and that she may have had social media interactions with the author, but “knowing of an author online, and personally knowing an author in real life are two different things. By your definition it would mean that bloggers such as myself are being barred from reviewing books they legitimately purchased, which in turn contravenes with the notion that reviews for a verified purchase are highly encouraged.”

Imy says it is “unfair to the authors whose work I love, to be punished for a claim that simply cannot stand. I don’t know any authors on a personal level.”

Her appeal fell on deaf ears, as the response from Amazon simply restated, “We removed your Customer Reviews because you know the author personally.”

As to how the company came to this conclusion, we’ll never know.

“Due to the proprietary nature of our business, we do not provide detailed information on how we determine that accounts are related,” concludes the denial of Imy’s appeal. “We cannot share any further information about our decision and we may not reply to further emails about this issue.”

We’ve written to Amazon for comment on this story and will update if we hear anything back.

07 Jul 00:58

Senate advances secret plan forcing Internet services to report terror activity

by David Kravets

The Senate Intelligence Committee secretly voted on June 24 in favor of legislation requiring e-mail providers and social media sites to report suspected terrorist activities.

The legislation, approved 15-0 in a closed-door hearing, remains "classified." The relevant text is contained in the 2016 intelligence authorization, a committee aide told Ars by telephone early Monday. Its veil of secrecy would be lifted in the coming days as the package heads to the Senate floor, the aide added.

Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

07 Jul 00:56

Massive leak reveals Hacking Team’s most private moments in messy detail

by Dan Goodin

Privacy and human rights advocates are having a field day picking through a massive leak purporting to show spyware developer Hacking Team's most candid moments, including documents that appear to contradict the company's carefully scripted PR campaign.

"Imagine this: a leak on WikiLeaks showing YOU explaining the evilest technology on earth! :-)," Hacking Team CEO David Vincenzetti wrote in a June 8 e-mail to company employees including Walter Furlan, whose LinkedIn profile lists him as the international sales engineer of the spyware developer. "You would be demonized by our dearest friends the activists, and normal people would point their fingers at you."

Other documents suggested the US FBI was among the customers paying for software that allowed targets to be surreptitiously surveilled as they used computers or smartphones. According to one spreadsheet first reported by Wired, the FBI paid Hacking Team more than $773,226.64 since 2011 for services related to the Hacking Team product known as "Remote Control Service," which is also marketed under the name "Galileo." One spreadsheet column listed simply as "Exploit" is marked "yes" for a sale in 2012, an indication Hacking Group may have bundled some sort of attack code that remotely hijacked targets' computers or phones. Previously, the FBI has been known to have wielded a Firefox exploit to decloak child pornography suspects using Tor.

Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

06 Jul 17:00

All 40 of the FBI & DHS's post-9/11 terror attack warnings fizzled

by Cory Doctorow


And yet, the press keeps on reporting these "reliable intelligence-based" reports of impending attacks on the "homeland" as though you should believe them.

Salted with the FBI's warnings are triumphant announcements of terrorists who were interrupted mid-plot, who inevitably turn out to be some mix of not-actually-terrorists or gormless-nuts-without-a-hope who've been entrapped by FBI provocateurs. The most recent example is the "50 ISIS arrests" leading up to July 4.

Actual attacks -- the Times Square Bomber, the underwear bomber, the shoe bomber, the Boston Marathon bombers -- occurred with no warning.

The problem is three fold:

1. The FBI has all the incentive in the world to issue warnings and no incentive whatsoever to not issue warnings. Issuing warnings has no downside, while not doing so is all downside.

2. The FBI, like all agencies of the government, does not operate in a political vacuum. Emphasizing the “ISIS threat” at home necessarily helps prop up the broader war effort the FBI’s boss, the president of the United States, must sell to a war-weary public. The incentive is to therefore highlight the smallest threats. This was a feature that did not go unnoticed during the Bush years, but has since fallen out of fashion.

3. It has no actual utility. What does it mean to be “more vigilant”? It’s a vague call to alertness that officials, aside from “beefing up security” by local police, never quite explain what it means. If the FBI wanted to tell local police departments to up their security of the 4th of July weekend, surely they could do so quietly, without the chair of the House Committee on Homeland Security having to go on all major networks talking over b-roll of ISIS in apocalyptic terms.

Zero for 40 at Predicting Attacks: Why Do Media Still Take FBI Terror Warnings Seriously? [Adam Johnson/FAIR]

(via Wil Wheaton)

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service - if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers.

06 Jul 04:16

Who Doesn't Like Pickles

school,burger,idiots,funny

Submitted by: Unknown

Tagged: school , burger , idiots , funny
05 Jul 14:11

Not a bug

by Cory Doctorow


[source]

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service - if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers.

04 Jul 22:44

Celebrate the 4th of July with Video Gaming's Finest Fireworks!

by Stephen Totilo
Bewarethewumpus

For the Minecraft example, I would have offered this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxHyso8m6l4

There's more going on than fireworks, but they're a helluva lot better than the video in the post.

Celebrate the 4th of July with Video Gaming's Finest Fireworks!

The evening sky is overrated. Don’t go there for awesome fireworks. Look at these clips of video gaming’s best fireworks. We’ve got to start with Mario.

Fantavision, the PlayStation 2’s fireworks-gaming classic.

Advertisement


Final Fantasy XIII: Fireworks Edition


Boom Boom Rocket (Like DDR but with fireworks)


Uh.. Disney Fireworks, anyone?


Big Bang Mini, an obscure one on the Nintendo DS.


Left 4 Dead? This seems wrong.


Assassin’s Creed II. Just the last bit of this clip.


Gran Turismo 5. Go figure.


Colonization (I love the name of this video: “Colonization Gameplay (SPOILER) - Video 18: INDEPENDENCE (End sequence)“ ... it’s like, spoiler: The British Empire loses!


Minecraft, of course.


Batman: Arkham Asylum. I forgot this game had any. Thanks, Giant Bomb, for your awesome fireworks-in-games list. I had to peek to remember this one.


Peggle. Well, Peggle hacked.

Animal Crossing.

Forza Horizon 2

Majora’s Mask, of course.

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service - if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers.