Apple Makes Deal With IBM to Bolster Its Enterprise Presence
July 16th, 2014Incredible. Anyone remember this?
Via: Wall Street Cheat Sheet:
In a joint press release, Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) and IBM (NYSE:IBM) announced a partnership to collaborate on mobile tools for enterprise, developing new apps to provide big data and analytics tools for iPhones and iPads.
Under the partnership, the companies will develop more than 100 “industry-specific” iOS apps for businesses in areas like retail, healthcare, banking, travel and transportation, telecommunications, and insurance. IBM will introduce the MobileFirst Platform for iOS, which will integrate cloud services, device management, security, analytics, productivity, and mobile integration, optimized specifically for iOS. Apple will offer business-tailored AppleCare service and support, which will be available to IT departments and users 24/7. And IBM will sell iPhones and iPads, along with new and industry-specific services, to help businesses worldwide more easily buy and manage iOS devices.
2009: Robots Evolve to Deceive One Another
July 16th, 2014Via: Science Blogs:
In a Swiss laboratory, a group of ten robots is competing for food. Prowling around a small arena, the machines are part of an innovative study looking at the evolution of communication, from engineers Sara Mitri and Dario Floreano and evolutionary biologist Laurent Keller.
They programmed robots with the task of finding a “food source” indicated by a light-coloured ring at one end of the arena, which they could “see” at close range with downward-facing sensors. The other end of the arena, labelled with a darker ring was “poisoned”. The bots get points based on how much time they spend near food or poison, which indicates how successful they are at their artificial lives.
They can also talk to one another. Each can produce a blue light that others can detect with cameras and that can give away the position of the food because of the flashing robots congregating nearby. In short, the blue light carries information, and after a few generations, the robots quickly evolved the ability to conceal that information and deceive one another.
Perfect Pilfering
July 16th, 2014The liquidity that you think exists doesn’t.
Via: Nanex:
We received trade execution reports from an active trader who wanted to know why his large orders almost never completely filled, even when the amount of stock advertised exceeded the number of shares wanted. For example, if 25,000 shares were at the best offer, and he sent in a limit order at the best offer price for 20,000 shares, the trade would, more likely than not, come back partially filled. In some cases, more than half of the amount of stock advertised (quoted) would disappear immediately before his order arrived at the exchange. This was the case, even in deeply liquid stocks such as Ford Motor Co (symbol F, market cap: $70 Billion, NYSE DMM is Barclays). The trader sent us his trade execution reports, and we matched up his trades with our detailed consolidated quote and trade data to discover that the mechanism described in Michael Lewis’s “Flash Boys” was alive and well on Wall Street.
Research Credit: afterhours
Israel Can’t Win This or Any Future Conflicts by Bombing Gaza
July 15th, 2014In other news: Hamas Was Founded by Mossad.
Via: Los Angeles Times:
The heavy bombardment of Gaza only deepens the Israelis’ problem rather than solving it. Over the last 47 years, Israel has systematically created one of the worst humanitarian disasters in the world in the Gaza Strip. The more targets Israel destroys, the more frustration grows among the Gazans. The surviving relatives, neighbors and friends of those killed, and the rest of Gazan society, are more exasperated than ever by the Israeli blockade. Increased frustration within a besieged Gaza is what pushed things to the edge in the first place.
It is delusional to assume that when the current battle ends, both parties will return to their communities to resume normal lives. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has created two meanings of normality. The 40,000 Israeli reservists who were called up this time will, for the most part, go back to their jobs and homes when the fighting ends. But Gazans, 39% of whom are unemployed, will go back to their “normal” lives under the brutal conditions of the Gaza blockade and be at the mercy of Israel’s rules about what type and quantity of food and other basics are allowed into Gaza. The Palestinians in the West Bank will go back to their daily humiliation of roadblocks and expanding Israeli settlements at the expense of their livelihoods.
In fact, the two sides are more equal under the conditions of war than those of peace; although the Israelis are much stronger militarily and inflict more damage, both sides feel the effects of being under attack. But when the fighting ends, the Palestinians’ version of normality gives them every incentive to defy Israeli roadblocks and blockades. When the choice for Gazans is either accepting the blockade and life in what some have called the largest open-air prison in the world or fighting back, no sane person would consider anything other than the latter option.
To prevent another tragic war in the future, things must change. Palestinians mainly need two things: dignity and bread. Israel must end the occupation in general and the Gaza blockade in particular. The mistake of the 2008 and 2012 mediation efforts was that they produced cease-fires that allowed the Israelis to go back to business as usual — but left the Gaza blockade intact and perpetuated untenable conditions, which led to further and bloodier fighting.
Israel cannot win this or any future conflicts by bombing Gaza. Without addressing the root causes, even crippling Hamas — which was able to impose calm after 2012 — would not be a victory. Instead, it would merely set the stage for the next time, against whatever group or groups — perhaps even more radical than Hamas — that would inevitably emerge to take up its mantle.
Research Credit: almaverdad2
Britain: “Secret Service Infiltrated Paedophile Group to ‘Blackmail Establishment'”
July 15th, 2014Via: Express:
BRITISH security services infiltrated and funded the notorious Paedophile Information Exchange in a covert operation to identify and possibly blackmail establishment figures, a Home Office whistleblower alleges.
The former civil servant has told detectives investigating the activities of paedophiles in national politics that the Metropolitan Police’s Special Branch was orchestrating the child-sex lobbying group in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
The whistleblower, who has spoken exclusively to the Sunday Express, says he was also warned off asking why such a notorious group was being handed government money.
It emerged late last year that PIE was twice gave amounts of £35,000 in Home Office funding between 1977 and 1980, the £70,000 total equivalent to over £400,000 in today’s money.
Related:
“Senior Tory Cabinet Ministers Were Supplied with Underage Boys for Sex Parties”
Warnings of Westminster Paedophile Network ‘Ignored’ Because ‘There Were Too Many’
Research Credit: alvinroast
‘Human Props’ Stay in Luxury Homes but Live Like Ghosts
July 15th, 2014Via: Tampa Bay Times:
When the Mueller family sits for dinner, the leftover broccoli and crepes are already wrapped in plastic, the kitchen is beyond spotless, and the rest of the home is so tucked-away tidy it looks like they just moved in. In a way, they have: Every inch of furnishing, every little trinket and votive candle, sits precisely as designers placed it five months ago. That would make them the most perfect suburban ideal, except for one catch: This isn’t actually their home. Bob and Dareda Mueller and their three grown sons are, instead, part of an “elite group” of middle-class nomads who have agreed to an outlandish deal. They can live cheaply in this for-sale luxury home if it looks as if they never lived here at all.
The home must remain meticulously cleaned and preserved: the temperature precisely pleasant, the mirrors crystalline clear. If a prospective buyer wants to see the home, they must quickly disappear. And when the home sells, they must be gone for good, off to the next perfect place.
That they do everything an owner would do — sleeping, making memories, learning the home’s quirks and secrets — imbues an otherwise-empty home with an unmistakable energy, say executives with Showhomes Tampa, the home-staging firm that moves them in. It also helps the homes sell faster, and for more money.
“They have to live a very different, very difficult life,” said Kim Magnuson, a sales director. Added franchise owner Linda Saavedra, “The home managers act like human props … and (with buyers) it’s like magic. It works phenomenally well.”
“An FBI Counterterrorism Agent Tracked Me Down Because I Took a Picture of This”
July 15th, 2014Via: ACLU:
So, consider this: A professional photographer taking a photo of a well-known Boston landmark is now considered to be engaged in suspicious terrorist activity?
I lived through the McCarthy era, so I know how false accusations, surveillance, and keeping files on innocent people can destroy their careers and lives. I am deeply troubled that the SAR program may be recreating that same climate of false accusation and fear today.
German NSA Committee May Turn to Typewriters
July 15th, 2014Via: Ars Technica:
Patrick Sensburg, chairman of the German parliament’s National Security Agency investigative committee, now says he’s considering expanding the use of manual typewriters to carry out his group’s work.
In an appearance (German language) Monday morning on German public television, Sensburg said that the committee is taking its operational security very seriously. “In fact, we already have [a typewriter], and it’s even a non-electronic typewriter,” he said.
If Sensburg’s suggestion takes flight, the country would be taking a page out of the Russian playbook. Last year, the agency in charge of securing communications from the Kremlin announced that it wanted to spend 486,000 rubles (about $14,800) to buy 20 electric typewriters as a way to avoid digital leaks.
GCHQ Has Developed Covert Tools to Seed the Internet with False Information
July 15th, 2014The headline is a huge understatement. Go through the document for a laundry list of stuff they’re up to.
Via: First Look:
The secretive British spy agency GCHQ has developed covert tools to seed the internet with false information, including the ability to manipulate the results of online polls, artificially inflate pageview counts on web sites, “amplif[y]” sanctioned messages on YouTube, and censor video content judged to be “extremist.” The capabilities, detailed in documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, even include an old standby for pre-adolescent prank callers everywhere: A way to connect two unsuspecting phone users together in a call.
The tools were created by GCHQ’s Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group (JTRIG), and constitute some of the most startling methods of propaganda and internet deception contained within the Snowden archive. Previously disclosed documents have detailed JTRIG’s use of “fake victim blog posts,” “false flag operations,” “honey traps” and psychological manipulation to target online activists, monitor visitors to WikiLeaks, and spy on YouTube and Facebook users.
But as the U.K. Parliament today debates a fast-tracked bill to provide the government with greater surveillance powers, one which Prime Minister David Cameron has justified as an “emergency” to “help keep us safe,” a newly released top-secret GCHQ document called “JTRIG Tools and Techniques” provides a comprehensive, birds-eye view of just how underhanded and invasive this unit’s operations are. The document—available in full here—is designed to notify other GCHQ units of JTRIG’s “weaponised capability” when it comes to the dark internet arts, and serves as a sort of hacker’s buffet for wreaking online havoc.
A Contraceptive Implant with Remote Control
July 14th, 2014Date check: Nope, it’s not April Fool’s Day.
Just make sure the firewall on your birth control chip is up to date…
Via: MIT Technology Review:
A startup has developed a contraceptive chip that could be deactivated and reactivated using a wireless remote.
…
Developed by MicroCHIPS of Lexington, Massachusetts, the device will begin pre-clinical testing next year in the U.S. The goal is to have it on the market by 2018.
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To conceive, women turn off the implant with a remote control; another click of the remote restarts it. After 16 years, it could be removed. Doctors could also adjust dosages remotely. Currently, no hormonal birth control lasts over five years.
The idea for the device originated two years ago in a visit by Bill Gates and his colleagues to Robert Langer’s MIT lab. Gates and his colleagues asked Langer if it were feasible to create birth control that a woman could turn on and off and use for many years. Langer thought the controlled release microchip technology he invented with colleagues Michael Cima and John Santini in the 1990s and licensed to MicroCHIPS might offer a solution.
Few private companies step up to the challenge of creating new contraceptives. MicroCHIPS’ timing could be good. An international coalition of governments, companies, philanthropies, and nonprofits recently committed to providing family planning to 120 million more women in the world by 2020.
More work remains before MicroCHIPS files an application with the Food and Drug Administration.
For example, it will be necessary to encrypt the chips to keep their wireless data flow private and secure.
