Cryptogon Readers Send Contributions in October
October 28th, 2012Thanks to Pookie for sending $75 and to TM for sending $15.
Thanks also go out to the owners of the following domains for signing up for hosting with BlueHost:
These folks earned Cryptogon $270.
Finally, I’d like to mention B. He let me know that he was going to start making some very large Amazon purchases and wanted to make sure that they would count for commissions.
They counted.
Roughly half of the current U.S. Amazon total is there because of B. Thanks, B, and thanks to the rest of you who make sure to start your Amazon sessions via Cryptogon’s affiliate links.
Pennsylvania May Force Workers to Pay Taxes to Their Employers
October 28th, 2012Via: Raw Story:
A bill that landed on Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett’s (R) desk this week would give companies that hire more than 250 new workers a gobsmacking tax incentive: 95 percent of those workers’ state income taxes would be paid to the employer, and not the state.
It’s a bizarre strategy meant to attract companies from other states, specifically designed to lure California-based software maker Oracle into Pennsylvania. It’s also, as Philadelphia City Paper put it, “lavish corporate welfare” writ large across state government.
Research Credit: HongPong
Psychopathy’s Double Edge
October 28th, 2012Via: Chronicle of Higher Education:
What I’m planning is a psychopath makeover, to find out firsthand, for better and for worse, what it’s like to see the world through devil-may-care eyes.
Research Credit: HPLovecraft666
Use of Novartis Flu Vaccines Suspended in Several Countries
October 28th, 2012Via: CBC:
Canada is following the lead of several European countries and suspending distribution of flu vaccine made by the pharmaceutical firm Novartis.
The decision relates to the discovery by the company of tiny clumps of virus particles in some batches of flu vaccines made at the Novartis production facility in Italy.
Health Canada, which announced the move, said Novartis has agreed to suspend distribution of its vaccines — sold in Canada as Fluad and Agriflu — while the department investigates the situation. All the Novartis vaccine Canada purchases is made at the Italian plant.
The department is also telling doctors and others who administer flu shots to hold off using Novartis product for the time being.
“We think it’s prudent, given the response of certain European countries to . . . request of Novartis — and they will be complying — to stop distributing and then to recommend to practitioners to refrain from using the (Novartis) vaccine just until this review is completed,” Dr. Paul Gully, senior medical advisory for Health Canada, said Friday.
GNUs Trick-or-Treat at Windows 8 Launch
October 28th, 2012There were lines of people waiting to buy Windows 8???
Via: Free Software Foundation:
Yesterday morning, the Free Software Foundation crashed the Windows 8 launch event in New York City. A cheerful GNU and her team handed out DVDs loaded with Trisquel, FSF stickers, and information about our new pledge, which asks Windows users to upgrade not to Windows 8, but to GNU/Linux.
U.S. Expands Secretive Drone Base for African Shadow War
October 28th, 2012Via: Wired:
The Pentagon’s secretive drone and commando base in the Horn of Africa is getting a lot bigger and a lot busier as the U.S. doubles down on its shadowy campaign of air strikes, robot surveillance and Special Operation Forces raids in the terror havens of Yemen and Somalia.
Camp Lemonnier, originally a French colonial outpost in Djibouti, a tiny, impoverished nation just north of Somalia, has been the epicenter of America’s Indian Ocean shadow war since just after 9/11. What was once little more than a run-down compound adjacent to Djibouti city’s single-runway international airport is now a sprawling complex of hangars and air-conditioned buildings housing eight Predator drones and eight F-15E fighter-bombers plus other warplanes, as well as around 300 Special Operations Forces and more than 2,000 other U.S. troops and civilians.
According to an investigation by The Washington Post, the Pentagon is spending $1.4 billion to expand the base’s airplane parking and living facilities. The extra housing could accommodate another 800 commandos, the Post reports. The military is also adding new lighting to a emergency landing strip a few miles from Camp Lemonnier — an urgent precaution as more and more planes and drones pack onto the main base’s sole runway.
The Djibouti base is just one of a constellation of hush-hush U.S. drone, commando or intelligence facilities in East Africa. Others are located in Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia and the island nation of the Seychelles. But “those operations pale in comparison to what is unfolding in Djibouti,” the Post’s Craig Whitlock notes.
More: Remote U.S. Base at Core of Secret Operations
World’s Most Powerful Laser Beams to Zap Nuclear Waste, Cure Cancer [???]
October 27th, 2012Via: Bloomberg:
The European Union will spend about 700 million euros ($900 million) to build the world’s most powerful lasers, technology that could destroy nuclear waste and provide new cancer treatments.
The Extreme Light Infrastructure project has obtained funding for two lasers to be built in the Czech Republic and Romania, Shirin Wheeler, spokeswoman for the European Commission on regional policy, said in a phone interview. A third research center will be in Hungary.
The lasers are 10 times more powerful than any yet built and will be strong enough to create subatomic particles in a vacuum, similar to conditions that may have followed the start of the universe. Eventually, the power of the light beams could be used to deteriorate the radioactivity of nuclear waste in just a few seconds and target cancerous tumors, the projects’s Romanian coordinator Nicolae-Victor Zamfir said in an interview.
“We can’t find in nature any phenomenon with such an intense power like the one that will be generated with this laser,” Zamfir said in a phone interview from Romania. “We expect to see the first results of our research in one or two years after the centre becomes operational.”
Surveillance Cameras and ‘Activity Forecasting’
October 27th, 2012Via: Cnet:
Computer software programmed to detect and report illicit behavior could eventually replace the fallible humans who monitor surveillance cameras.
The U.S. government has funded the development of so-called automatic video surveillance technology by a pair of Carnegie Mellon University researchers who disclosed details about their work this week — including that it has an ultimate goal of predicting what people will do in the future.
“The main applications are in video surveillance, both civil and military,” Alessandro Oltramari, a postdoctoral researcher at Carnegie Mellon who has a Ph.D. from Italy’s University of Trento, told CNET yesterday.
Related:
Mobile Phone Data Used to Predict Where People Will Be Tomorrow
AT&T Invents Programming Language for Mass Surveillance
Research Credit: HongPong
China Unicom Replaces Cisco Devices Over Security Concerns
October 27th, 2012Via: Morning Whistle:
China Unicom has replaced Cisco Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ.CSCO) in one of the country’s most important backbone networks, citing security reasons, the 21st Century Business Herald reported.
The replacement project targets “China169,” Cisco’s backbone network router of Wuxi node, in Jiangsu province. Analysts indicated that the product vulnerability and back door problems are the main worries of China Unicom.
The move came after a congressional report branded Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. and ZTE Corp. security threats in the United States. Chinese domestic operators have begun to intensify network security since then, the report said.
Berlusconi Convicted of Tax Fraud
October 26th, 2012Via: Reuters:
An Italian court on Friday sentenced former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi to four years in jail for tax fraud in connection with the purchase of broadcasting rights by his Mediaset television company.
Berlusconi has the right to appeal the ruling two more times before the sentence becomes definitive and will not be jailed unless the final appeal is upheld. Prosecutors had asked for a jail sentence of three years and eight months.
The court also ordered damages provisionally set at 10 million euros ($12.96 million) to be paid by Berlusconi and his co-defendants to tax authorities.
