After Cyprus, Is Slovenia Next Euro Zone Domino?
April 7th, 2013Via: Reuters:
Successive Slovenian governments have refused to privatize the country’s banks, which made disastrous loans to politically connected business interests and now threaten to drag the country center stage in the euro zone debt crisis.
A span of unfinished apartment blocks in the Siska complex on the outskirts of Ljubljana is emblematic of the former Yugoslav republic’s woes, just as many such ghost neighborhoods in Europe’s debt-choked south stand testament to the depth of the broader continent’s economic problems.
The rows of buildings, housing 833 flats in all, stand mostly empty, casualties of a property boom turned bust and a subsequent recession. Alongside, Vegrad, a company once led by a well-placed politician, also planned to build a hotel, but got no further than digging an enormous hole. An apt symbol, as Slovenia comes under growing pressure to seek a bailout to fill a financial hole, just as Cyprus did last month.
The countries are different in many ways, but they have at least two things in common: like Cyprus, Slovenia needs to recapitalize its biggest banks, and it does not have the money to do so.
Fukushima: Highly Radioactive Water ‘Possibly’ Leaking Into Soil
April 7th, 2013In other news: Radiation from Japan’s Nuclear Disaster a Possible Cause for “Unusual Mortality Event” Involving Sea Lions in Southern California
Via: AP:
The operator of Japan’s crippled nuclear plant said Saturday that it was moving tons of highly radioactive water from a temporary storage tank to another after detecting signs of leakage, in a blow to the plant’s struggles with tight storage space.
Tokyo Electric power Co. said about 120 tons of the water are believed to have breached the tank’s inner linings, some of it possibly leaking into the soil. TEPCO is moving the water to a nearby tank at the Fukushima Dai-chi plant — a process that could take several days.
TEPCO detected the leak earlier in the week, when radiation levels spiked in water samples collected in between the inner linings of the tank. Radiation levels in water samples taken outside the tank also have increased, an indication of the water leak, TEPCO spokesman Masayuki Ono said.
Detecting TOR Communication in Network Traffic
April 7th, 2013That’s a pretty good one. I wonder what it can tell about what’s running over VPN links…
Via: Netresec:
Notice how the flows to TCP ports 80, 9101 and 443 are classified as Tor? The statistical method for protocol detection in CapLoader is so effective that CapLoader actually ignores port numbers altogether when identifying the protocol.
France Tries to Censor Article on Military Communications Facility—Hilarity Ensues
April 7th, 2013Via: Wikipedia:
The military radio station of Pierre-sur-Haute is a 30 ha (0.3 square kilometre) site used for French military communications. It is located on the Sauvain and Job communes, with the boundary between the Rhône-Alpes and Auvergne regions passing through the site.
…
In April 2013, the radio station attracted attention after the French interior intelligence agency Direction centrale du renseignement intérieur (DCRI) attempted to have the article removed from the French language Wikipedia. The Wikimedia Foundation asked the intelligence agency what precise part(s) of the article were a problem in the eyes of the intelligence agency. The DCRI refused to give these details, and repeated its demand for total deletion of the article. The Wikimedia Foundation refused to delete the article, and the DCRI pressured a volunteer administrator[5] of the French language Wikipedia and resident of France into removing the article.[6] The administrator obeyed.
…
Later, the article was restored by another Wikipedia contributor.[7][8] The French ministry of the interior told the Agence France-Presse that for the moment it did not wish to comment on the incident.[9] As a result of the controversy, the article became the most-read page on the French Wikipedia.[10][11] It was translated into multiple other languages.[12]
ATF Wants Database to Find Out Who Your Friends Are
April 7th, 2013Via: Wired:
The ATF doesn’t just want a huge database to reveal everything about you with a few keywords. It wants one that can find out who you know. And it won’t even try to friend you on Facebook first.
According to a recent solicitation from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the bureau is looking to buy a “massive online data repository system” for its Office of Strategic Intelligence and Information (OSII). The system is intended to operate for at least five years, and be able to process automated searches of individuals, and “find connection points between two or more individuals” by linking together “structured and unstructured data.”
Primarily, the ATF states it wants the database to speed-up criminal investigations. Instead of requiring an analyst to manually search around for your personal information, the database should “obtain exact matches from partial source data searches” such as social security numbers (or even just a fragment of one), vehicle serial codes, age range, “phonetic name spelling,” or a general area where your address is located. Input that data, and out comes your identity, while the computer automatically establishes connections you have with others.
Many other specific requirements are also to be expected for a federal law enforcement agency: searching names, phone numbers, “nationwide utility data” and reverse phone searches. The data will then be collected to help out during investigations and provide “relevant information and intelligence products.” There’s no hint the database is to be used to track gun sales, which is a big part of the ATF’s job, as the bureau is prohibited by law from establishing a centralized electronic database for gun purchases.
It’s necessary to note, however, that the ATF already does most of these things. Tracking down your identity, financial data, and finding connections between you and your kinfolk — your relatives, friends and business associates — is what criminal investigations are all about. And the bureau’s intelligence analysts already use a number of databases to help piece this information together.
But hunting through them for information that’s relevant and timely is a mind-numbing and time-consuming job. “Many of these tasks are performed manually,” the solicitation states, “resulting in longer turnaround times on important information and intelligence research and analysis requests.”
The bureau wants this new system to do all that gathering and research automatically.
‘The Labor Market Is in Worse Shape Than You Think’
April 7th, 2013Via: Daily Ticker:
Harding says the shift to low-wage jobs from “good, middle-class” jobs such as construction workers, bookkeepers, typists, bank tellers and data entry employees, has led to growing income inequality. These positions have been replaced by modern IT systems that companies are using to cut costs and increase their bottom lines.
“Companies are finding ways to automate these office processes,” Harding says, and this leads “to a lot fewer of the steady office jobs that the middle class has been relying on since the second world war.”
Harding analyzed salaries for fast-growing occupations over the past year. He found that the average wage for a clerical job in 2012 was $34,410. But the positions that are being created in this economy – like a personal care aid – paid on average of $24,550.
Bank Of Cyprus CEO Hard Drives Sanitized
April 7th, 2013This doesn’t make any sense. What about the servers? Were those drives sanitized too?
Well, come to think of it, this might make sense if the bank was a criminal enterprise from the start.
Via: ZeroHedge:
As the investigation into unusual loan write-downs and the ‘premature’ movement of capital away from Cyprus by the elites of that nation progresses, Cyprus Mail reports that the investigators – Alvarez and Marsal (A&M) – have found that the information provided by Bank of Cyprus (BoC) was incomplete and data deleting software were found on the computers of two senior executives. “Our computer forensic technologists have found that the computers of two employees, (former CEO) Mr. (Andreas) Eliades and (senior manager group treasury and private banking) Christakis Patsalides, have had wiping software loaded, which is not part of the standard software installations at the BoC.” Investigators found no e-mail files, mailboxes or user documents on Eliades’ desktop computer – “we had significant gaps in the e-mail data received from BoC for the period 2007 to 2010, a key period for our scope of investigation,” and no email backups were performed.
Research Credit: latitude38
U.S. Apparently Amassing B-1 Bombers on Guam [Update: Or Not]
April 6th, 2013U.S. Air Force says B-1s were not deployed to Guam. So, where did five big bombers go last night?
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As you may have noticed, I don’t post much about North Korea’s hissy fits.
But…
If up to seven B-1 bombers were moved to Guam together, that’s finally got my attention.
Via: The Aviationist:
It seems like Washington has taken Kim Jong Un threat seriously.
After moving two Langley’s F-22 Raptor stealth fighters to Osan airbase, in South Korea, launching a B-2 Spirit stealth bomber on a round-trip training mission over a South Korean’s gunnery range from the Continental U.S., and deploying THAAD anti-ballistic missile defense system to Guam, positioning two guided-missile destroyers in the waters near the Korean peninsula, the Pentagon has decided to strengthen its presence in the region by deploying several B-1 Lancer long range bombers to Andersen Air Force Base, Guam.
But, for the first time in the last few weeks, the deployment of the “Bones” to the Pacific atoll was not made public (at least, not yet), a fact that could be the sign that the U.S. is not only making symbolic moves (as the above mentioned ones), but it is preparing for the worst scenario: an attack on North Korea.
‘Bitcoin Really Is an Existential Threat to the Modern Liberal State’
April 6th, 2013Via: Bloomberg:
So far, Bitcoin is not a big deal. Its total value in circulation was $1.4 billion as of this week. That’s equivalent to the currency stock of a small nation — somewhere between Iceland and Uruguay — and just one-thousandth of the total value of U.S. dollars in circulation. The volume of transactions in Bitcoin is growing only slowly, relative to the massive increase in demand for the currency: This discrepancy is strong evidence that Bitcoin’s rise is a speculative bubble.
Nonetheless, Bitcoin raises some interesting questions. One is whether it might undermine the modern state — which, for many of its libertarian-anarchist advocates, is the whole idea.
Technology enabled governments to grow more powerful and more centralized in the 19th and 20th centuries, as Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University, has argued. The intriguing possibility is that technologies of the 21st century — such as Bitcoin — might push the other way.
Physical cash is used in a rapidly shrinking share of transactions: 27 percent in 2011, 23 percent by 2017, and so on, according to Javelin Strategy & Research, a financial-services research firm. The central banks of Sweden and Nigeria have both declared goals of a cashless economy. In Europe, the volume of non-cash transactions is forecasted to rise by 7 percent per year, despite economic stagnation.
What’s going on? First, a global shift to mobile payments and credit and debit cards. Second, a rise in online retail — one that could put 15 to 20 percent of all retail sales online in the U.S., U.K., China, and Europe, according to Bain & Company.
Electronic payments aren’t new. Bitcoin’s only innovations are its status as an independent currency and its decentralized network design. But those differences might make Bitcoin — or rather, crypto-currency in general — an existential threat to the modern liberal state. If widely adopted, crypto-currencies would cripple government in three central functions: taxation, police and macroeconomic stabilization. That is exactly what Bitcoin’s biggest fans are hoping.
Labor Force Participation Rate At 1979 Levels
April 5th, 2013Via: Zero Hedge:
Things just keep getting worse for the American worker, and by implication US economy, where as we have shown many times before, it pays just as well to sit back and collect disability and various welfare and entitlement checks, than to work .The best manifestation of this: the number of people not in the labor force which in March soared by a massive 663,000 to a record 90 million Americans who are no longer even looking for work. This was the biggest monthly increase in people dropping out of the labor force since January 2012, when the BLS did its census recast of the labor numbers. And even worse, the labor force participation rate plunged from an already abysmal 63.5% to 63.3% – the lowest since 1979! But at least it helped with the now painfully grotesque propaganda that the US unemployment rate is “improving.”
