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6/21/2003



Area 51: Watching Them Watch You :.

Don't watch Them too much, though, or you'll get a house call:

FBI agents have confirmed that a search warrant was served Thursday night on the home of a self-described military watchdog in the tiny town of Rachel, near the mysterious Area 51 military base. We've learned this action was initiated by the Joint Terrorism Task Force. The search warrant remains sealed and the FBI won�t say what was seized from the home of Rachel resident Chuck Clark. We believe the action was taken because Chuck Clark escorted the I-Team on a tour of the roads surrounding the base. During the visit, he showed us the location of military sensors, hidden on public land.


6/20/2003



The Party Is Over: Home Foreclosures Hit Record High :.

Two things have happened since the Federal Reserve began lowering rates three years ago.

1) Companies used that low interest money to finance the closure of plants and facilities in the U.S., fire their employees and move operations to other parts of the world where labor costs are a fraction of what they are in the U.S.

2) Individuals refinanced their existing loans, took out cash and went to WalMart.

The final swindle of wealth up to the top of the pyramid is now complete. The jobs are gone. The equity is gone. Financial ruin awaits most of us. The self sufficient people out in the hills should be laughing right about now.

U.S. mortgages in foreclosure climbed to a record high in the first three months of 2003 as job losses and personal bankruptcies forced more people out of their homes, a mortgage industry group said on Friday.

The housing market has been a pillar of strength for the sluggish U.S. economy. Ultra-low interest rates have fueled record home sales and an unprecedented mortgage refinancing boom that has freed up billions of dollars in cash for consumers to pay down debt, save or spend.


6/19/2003



Florida Connections to Missing 727 :.

This already stinks, and nothing has even happened yet:

Workers at Luanda Airport in Angola watched dumbfounded on May 25 as a Boeing 727 taxied down the runway and took off � without permission. The plane � which ABCNEWS has learned was refitted to haul diesel fuel tanks, making it a potential flying bomb � has not been seen since.

The man the U.S. government suspects of piloting the 727 is Benjamin Padilla � a U.S. citizen from Florida. Padilla, too, has vanished, and his family is worried.

"I am concerned that he might have been hijacked," Padilla's brother, Joseph, said in an exclusive interview with ABCNEWS.

"It's very painful," said Padilla's sister, Benita. "The whole family is in anguish, not knowing what happened to our brother."

The family believes Padilla, a licensed mechanic and pilot, flew to Angola on behalf of Aerospace Sales and Leasing, a Florida-based company that bought the 727 from American Airlines two years ago. The plane had not been moved for more than a year, and his family believes Padilla went to see whether it was fit to fly.

Neither Padilla's family nor ABCNEWS has been able to reach anyone at Aerospace Sales and Leasing. No one was at the office when ABCNEWS visited today and phone calls were not answered.





Scramble for Africa :.

Washington's determination to find an alternative energy source to the Middle East is leading to a new oil rush in sub-Saharan Africa which threatens to launch a fresh cycle of conflict, corruption and environmental degradation in the region, campaigners warn today.

The new scramble for Africa risks bringing more misery to the continent's impoverished citizens as western oil companies pour billions of dollars in secret payments into government coffers throughout the continent. Much of the money ends up in the hands of ruling elites or is squandered on grandiose projects and the military.


More: Big Whitie in the House :.

Step inside the air-conditioned lounge of the Viking Club and Luanda's squalor could be another universe. Here the oil executives and engineers sip beer and discuss geological reports, deals and money.

Beyond the shattered skyline of Angola's capital, buried beneath the Atlantic, is a vast store of oil, and their job is to extract it. The accents are British, Australian, French and, increasingly, American.

The "big whities", as the taxi drivers call them, have been coming for years but now the flights are fuller than ever: new offshore discoveries are expected to double output to 2 million barrels per day, prompting talk of a drilling El Dorado.


Research Credit: DG


6/17/2003



1984 Telescreen: Microsoft Athens :.

Digital Rights Management (DRM) computers are going to be a reality just as certainly as the sun will rise in the morning. The systems will be ubiquitous within two years. But what will they look like?

Microsoft has unveiled (unfurled) its hellish vision of the future of computing: Athens. Never mind the fact that Longhorn sees all and knows all. Never mind the fact that you are not root on Longhorn. Never mind the fact that the system is fully integrated with a thumbscanner, camera, telephone and microphone. Never mind the fact that there will be no way to run a non DRM operating system on Longhorn class hardware. (Cops will show up if you somehow manage to circumvent the DRM mechanisms.)

Make sure you're sitting down for this one:

Would you believe that Microsoft's system of the future has no "Off" state? From HardwareCentral.com:

Speaking of mute, Athens will be a whisper-quiet, small-form-factor machine, whose power button switches between on and standby modes rather than on and off -- resuming work in no more than two seconds. In the event of a power failure, a built-in battery will last long enough to hibernate or save system status to the hard disk.

Here is more on the no "Off" feature from a Microsoft document entitled, The �Athens� PC (Microsoft Word document):

The notion of "off" is confusing to users, because the PC can be in standby, hibernation or true �off� modes, Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) states S3, S4 and S5, respectively. Each of these states has a different latency when the user turns the PC on again: it takes longer to start the PC from S4 than from S3, and still longer to start the PC from S5.

In usability tests, participants preferred a two-state (on/standby) power model over a three-state (on/standby/off) model. They felt the two-state power model was more appealing than the power model used by today�s PCs. This research suggests that users would be more likely to put their PCs in standby mode if it were more convenient to do so.


Note: The system checks your email when in standby mode, i.e. the network interface and applications are operational in standby mode. That thing isn't off. Not by a long shot.

Yes, you can pull the plug out of the wall, and let the battery go dead.

Will Microsoft call you, though, wondering if your PC is being tampered with? Is the person who unplugged the PC from the power socket authorized to do so? Maybe you will just learn from habit --- from habit that will become instinct --- to never pull the plug out of the wall.

From 1984, by George Orwell:

The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live --- did live, from habit that became instinct --- in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.

Research Credit: TR





Mike Ruppert Raises Over 100K Dollars for 12 City Ad Run :.

FTW on Monday, June 16, passed the $100,000 goal to run its hugely popular, full-page, Washington Post ad in the twelve largest papers in the country.





Senator Orrin Hatch: Whore Seeks Vigilante Justice for His Pimps :.

As I type this, war is being declared on Utah Senator Orrin Hatch. His insane utterings are evoking a jihad from hackers. He probably doesn't have much to worry about from most of the posters on this Slashdot thread. Beware, though, of the greasy guys who sleep by day and code by night. They are almost certainly devising a response to the whore Hatch and the pimps who run him:

The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee said Tuesday he favors developing new technology to remotely destroy the computers of people who illegally download music from the Internet.

The surprise remarks by Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, during a hearing on copyright abuses represent a dramatic escalation in the frustrating battle by industry executives and lawmakers in Washington against illegal music downloads.

During a discussion on methods to frustrate computer users who illegally exchange music and movie files over the Internet, Hatch asked technology executives about ways to damage computers involved in such file trading. Legal experts have said any such attack would violate federal anti-hacking laws.

"No one is interested in destroying anyone's computer," replied Randy Saaf of MediaDefender Inc., a secretive Los Angeles company that builds technology to disrupt music downloads. One technique deliberately downloads pirated material very slowly so other users can't.

"I'm interested," Hatch interrupted. He said damaging someone's computer "may be the only way you can teach somebody about copyrights."

The senator acknowledged Congress would have to enact an exemption for copyright owners from liability for damaging computers. He endorsed technology that would twice warn a computer user about illegal online behavior, "then destroy their computer."

"If we can find some way to do this without destroying their machines, we'd be interested in hearing about that," Hatch said. "If that's the only way, then I'm all for destroying their machines. If you have a few hundred thousand of those, I think people would realize" the seriousness of their actions, he said.


More: Top Contributors to Orrin Hatch

Orrin Hatch is a real man of the people! From OpenSecrets.org:

ORRIN G. HATCH (R-UT)
Top Contributors
1 HealthSouth Corp $38,255
2 Pfizer Inc $34,000
3 Qwest Communications $29,000
4 Metabolife $27,250
5 AT&T $25,499
6 Torchmark Corp $25,000
7 AOL Time Warner $24,000
8 GlaxoSmithKline $21,000
9 Novell Inc $20,500
10 SmithKline Beecham $20,499
11 Oracle Corp $19,750
12 Global Crossing $19,500
12 Verizon Communications $19,500
14 Pharmaceutical Rsrch & Mfrs of America $18,775
15 Viacom Inc $18,750
16 Schering-Plough Corp $18,000
17 Bear Stearns $17,750
18 SBC Communications $17,500
19 Merck & Co $17,440
20 Rexall Sundown Inc $17,000
20 Walt Disney Co $17,000





Housing Market Bubble :.

The housing sector is the one prop supporting an economy struggling to recover for over two years as geopolitical tension has increased and the 1990s investment bubble has burst. Analysts are watching the sector carefully for signs of weakness.

Analysts?! Are the real estate analysts any different than the stock analysts that kept most people in their mutual funds as something like 8 trillion dollars went to money heaven!?

From the Boston Globe, today:

Nearly one in seven American households spend more than half their income just to keep a roof over their heads, and lenders are giving mortgages to people with weak credit. One result: a sharp increase in defaults, according to a study released yesterday by the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University.





Near the Top of the Shitlist: Eric Drexler :.

Luckily for all of us, the "establishment" seems to be turning on Eric Drexler. That's a good thing, because if his technological vision ever came to fruition, it would almost definitely lead to THE END of EVERYTHING. A nuclear bomb only explodes once. That's nothing compared to destructive capacity of malevolent, self-replicating nanobots:

This should be Eric Drexler's moment in the sun. Instead, his colleagues are treating him like the crazy uncle in the attic.

Nanotechnology, the field Drexler helped kick start, has become a far-flung, multibillion-dollar discipline, sparking innovations in medicine, consumer products and pure science. But most of today's nanotech specialists say Drexler's vision of molecule-sized robots is science fiction, not science fact. Others predict disaster if Drexler's dream ever comes to pass.




6/16/2003



U.S. Turns to the Taliban :.

Yawn:

Such is the deteriorating security situation in Afghanistan, compounded by the return to the country of a large number of former Afghan communist refugees, that United States and Pakistani intelligence officials have met with Taliban leaders in an effort to devise a political solution to prevent the country from being further ripped apart.





U.S. Economic Depression: Company Pays Homeless Workers With Pizza :.

World War II brought the U.S. out of the Great Depression. What will happen this time around?

Instead of going Dumpster-diving for maybe a half-eaten sandwich and some cold fries, Peter Schoeff, a 20-year-old homeless man, was served a slice of hot pizza dripping with cheese.

All he had to do was hold a sign for about 40 minutes that read: "Pizza Schmizza paid me to hold this sign instead of asking for money."

In a tactic that calls to the mind the hiring of unemployed men during the Depression to wear sandwich-board advertisements, a Portland pizza chain has hired homeless people off the street to promote the product. They are paid in pizza, soda and a few dollars.

"I think it's a fair trade," Schoeff said. "We're career panhandlers, that's the only other way we can get money."

The signs were meant to be humorous, said Andre Jehan, founder of Pizza Schmizza, a 26-restaurant business in Oregon and Washington.

"People don't have to feel guilty, while still appreciating the person is homeless. It's a gesture of kindness more than anything," he said.

From the sandwich board to cigarette girls to aerial banners, companies are forever searching for creative means to reach customers.

The search has become more frenetic lately as advertisers try to break through what is known in the industry "ad clutter" � the way people are bombarded by commercial messages from all sides.




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