‘Syria Has Largely Disappeared from the Internet’
May 8th, 2013Via: Washington Post:
Both Google and a Web security company called Umbrella Security Labs are indicating that the entire country of Syria may have been severed from the Internet.
The outage appears to have begun at 2:45 p.m. Eastern time, or 9:45 p.m. in Syria. According to a blog post by Umbrella’s chief technology officer Dan Hubbard, “On closer inspection it seems Syria has largely disappeared from the Internet.”
Alabama School to Jail Program
May 8th, 2013Via: Courthouse News Service:
After a diabetic high school student fell asleep in study hall, the school police officer slammed her face into a filing cabinet, arrested her and took her to jail, she claims in court.
Tieshka Avery claims she was so violently abused that she vomited in the police car. And all because she fell asleep reading “Huckleberry Finn.”
(Public school districts in the South have been accused of operating de facto “school to jail” programs, targeting minority students for arrest for minor infractions. The ACLU and the federal government have filed lawsuits alleging the practice. See below.)
Related: U.S. Judge Receives 28-Year Jail Term for His Role in Private Prison Kids-for-Cash Scheme
Air Force’s Sexual Assault Prevention Chief Arrested for Sexual Assault
May 7th, 2013Via: CBS:
An Air Force officer was arrested for sexual assault. The remarkable thing is the accused man was the chief of the Air Force sexual assault prevention unit.
The mug shot of Lt. Col. Jeff Krusinski shows signs of struggle on his face. The police report alleges that a drunken Krusinski “approached a female victim in a parking lot and grabbed her breasts and buttocks.” The victim fought the suspect off as he attempted to touch her again and alerted police.
Obombya To Grads: Reject Voices That Warn About Government Tyranny
May 6th, 2013Via: Real Clear Politics:
PRESIDENT OBAMA: Unfortunately, you’ve grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that’s at the root of all our problems. Some of these same voices also do their best to gum up the works. They’ll warn that tyranny always lurking just around the corner. You should reject these voices. Because what they suggest is that our brave, and creative, and unique experiment in self-rule is somehow just a sham with which we can’t be trusted.
Alex Rovt, The Fertilizer Baron Of Manhattan
May 6th, 2013This is from 2012, but it’s a keeper.
Would someone out there please email this story to Joel and Ethan Coen? This could make Miller’s Crossing look like Sunday School.
Via: Bloomberg:
Everyone looking to unload overleveraged or overpriced property, another broker who dealt with Rovt told me, is now chasing a stereotype: the Ukrainian fertilizer billionaire. This frustrates Rovt, who hates nothing more than being portrayed as an oligarch. Yes, he capitalized on post-Soviet privatizations, and sure, he looks the type, with his bearish physique, slicked-back black hair, thick moustache, and fondness for cigars. True, he made his billions overseas, under the radar—yet he lived securely within U.S. borders the whole time. His story is, despite appearances, an American one, a tale that really begins in Brooklyn, where he moved nearly 30 years ago. “I am not an outsider,” Rovt says. He’s a consummate insider—a macher, as they say in Yiddish, his first language—a canny manipulator of the levers of power.
…
The initials IBE stood for international barter exchange. The founder, Sheldon Silverston, a Korean War veteran and former intelligence operative, shipped goods to pariah states with little hard currency—Uganda after its 1980s civil war, for instance, or Romania under Ceau?escu—and accepted payment in commodities like coffee or iron ore. “He was an old spook dude,” says Bill Grant, a former Republican congressman from Florida who worked in various capacities for IBE. “Shelly Silverston knows a lot of things, and a lot of people in a lot of places, that ordinary people don’t know.”
In Rovt, Silverston found an entrée into the closed economy of the Soviet Union, where Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika reforms were just beginning to take hold. Fertilizer was an ideal barter commodity, and the Soviet Union had made tons of it, due to its bountiful supplies of natural gas.
Rovt courted the local plant managers, who had found themselves newly empowered as the state loosened economic control. Their decaying factories needed upgraded technology, spare parts, even bricks. “[Rovt] got the concept of barter immediately,” Silverston says. “Once he met someone that had potential to do business with us, he was able to cultivate this person.” Many of IBE’s contacts wanted to send their children to America, and Silverston, a major Republican donor, says he used his influence to smooth the way, helping with visas, college placement, even jobs around the company’s office.
Research Credit: almaverdad2
Home Owned by Saudi Government Near CIA Raided for Possible Human Trafficking
May 6th, 2013Via: CBS:
Immigration officials have removed two domestic workers from a northern Virginia home owned by the government of Saudi Arabia as part of an investigation into a report of human trafficking.
Agents went to the home in McLean on Tuesday night, Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman Brandon Montgomery said Thursday. Fairfax County police were called in to help.
Montgomery said the investigation is in the early stages. The two women who were removed from the home are from the Philippines, Montgomery said, but there has been no formal determination that they needed to be rescued.
Officials received a tip that alleged two workers were being held in circumstances that amounted to human trafficking, said John Torres, ICE’s special agent in charge for Homeland Security Investigations in the Washington field office. But he declined in an interview Thursday to discuss the case in more detail.
Research Credit: cptmarginal
Breakthrough In Solar Panel Technology Wasn’t Expected for Another Decade
May 6th, 2013Via: Sydney Morning Herald:
Australian scientists have found a way of hugely increasing the efficiency of solar panels while substantially reducing their cost.
The University of NSW researchers have come up with improvements in photovoltaic panel design that had not been expected for another decade.
The breakthrough involves using hydrogen atoms to counter defects in silicon cells used in solar panels. As a consequence, poor quality silicon can be made to perform like high quality wafers.
The process makes cheap silicon “actually better than the best-quality material people are using at the moment”, the head of the university’s photovoltaics centre of excellence, Professor Stuart Wenham, said.
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Silicon wafers account for more than half the cost of making a solar cell. “By using lower-quality silicon, you can drastically reduce that cost,” he said.
“We’ve been able to figure out what the secret is that enables hydrogen to sometimes work the way people want it to, and sometimes doesn’t.”
At present, the best commercial solar cells convert between 17 per cent and 19 per cent of the sun’s energy into electricity. UNSW’s technique, patented this year, should produce efficiencies of between 21 per cent and 23 per cent.
German Euro Founder Calls For ‘Catastrophic’ Currency To Be Broken Up
May 6th, 2013Imagine what would happen if a neo-Deutsche Mark suddenly appeared on the scene. The value of that thing vs. every other currency would balloon, making German exports unaffordable in most other places.
No matter how you slice it, the situation is a shit sandwich.
Via: Telegraph:
Oskar Lafontaine, the German finance minister who launched the euro, has called for a break-up of the single currency to let southern Europe recover, warning that the current course is “leading to disaster”.
“The economic situation is worsening from month to month, and unemployment has reached a level that puts democratic structures ever more in doubt,” he said.
“The Germans have not yet realised that southern Europe, including France, will be forced by their current misery to fight back against German hegemony sooner or later,” he said, blaming much of the crisis on Germany’s wage squeeze to gain export share.
Mr Lafontaine said on the parliamentary website of Germany’s Left Party that Chancellor Angela Merkel will “awake from her self-righteous slumber” once the countries in trouble unite to force a change in crisis policy at Germany’s expense.
Lenticular Photo Used To Secretly Convey Hot Line Number To Abused Kids
May 6th, 2013I wonder if states have targeted children with this technology…
You can imagine how some of these might read in the U.S.
Via: DIY Photography:
The ANAR Foundation is a Spanish organization which helps kids in risk. They Operate a unique phone number – 116 111 – where minors at risk can get aid and consultation.
Anar did a campaign advertizing the number, but were facing a problem where they did not want potential aggressors to see that a kid was even looking at the ad.
The solution was using Lenticular printing on street signs. According to Wikipedia, Lenticular printing is a technology in which Lenticular lenses (a technology that is also used for 3D displays) are used to produce printed images with an illusion of depth, or the ability to change or move as the image is viewed from different angles.
So Lenticular prints are unique in the way that they display different images to viewers at different angles. You may remember Lenticular images from when you were a kid and everybody had a magic ruler that changed shape back at school.
Anar created a poster that conveys a secret message to people at different heights, even if accompanied by a potential aggressor.
This Is The World’s First Entirely 3D-Printed Gun (Needs a Nail for the Firing Pin)
May 5th, 2013Via: Forbes:
Eight months ago, Cody Wilson set out to create the world’s first entirely 3D-printable handgun.
Now he has.
Early next week, Wilson, a 25-year-old University of Texas law student and founder of the non-profit group Defense Distributed, plans to release the 3D-printable CAD files for a gun he calls “the Liberator,” pictured in its initial form above. He’s agreed to let me document the process of the gun’s creation, so long as I don’t publish details of its mechanics or its testing until it’s been proven to work reliably and the file has been uploaded to Defense Distributed’s online collection of printable gun blueprints at Defcad.org.
All sixteen pieces of the Liberator prototype were printed in ABS plastic with a Dimension SST printer from 3D printing company Stratasys, with the exception of a single nail that’s used as a firing pin. The gun is designed to fire standard handgun rounds, using interchangeable barrels for different calibers of ammunition.
