Cryptogon Reader Sends Contribution
December 31st, 2011JF sent $100. Wow! This is a nice way to ring in the new year. Thank you.
CFR Rag: ‘Time to Attack Iran’
December 31st, 2011Via: Council on Foreign Relations / Foreign Affairs:
The truth is that a military strike intended to destroy Iran’s nuclear program, if managed carefully, could spare the region and the world a very real threat and dramatically improve the long-term national security of the United States.
‘The First Goal Is an Uncensorable Internet in Space’
December 31st, 2011Here’s one for your Don’t-Hold-Your-Breath file folder.
Via: BBC:
Computer hackers plan to take the internet beyond the reach of censors by putting their own communication satellites into orbit.
The scheme was outlined at the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin.
The project’s organisers said the Hackerspace Global Grid will also involve developing a grid of ground stations to track and communicate with the satellites.
Longer term they hope to help put an amateur astronaut on the moon.
Hobbyists have already put a few small satellites into orbit – usually only for brief periods of time – but tracking the devices has proved difficult for low-budget projects.
The hacker activist Nick Farr first put out calls for people to contribute to the project in August. He said that the increasing threat of internet censorship had motivated the project.
“The first goal is an uncensorable internet in space. Let’s take the internet out of the control of terrestrial entities,” Mr Farr said.
Cryptogon Reader Sends Contribution
December 31st, 2011JS sent $25. Thank you.
Raspberry Pi Cases
December 31st, 2011Hint to any enterprising Cryptogon readers out there: People are already searching for cases for the inexpensive Raspberry Pi computers. Google is sending people who are searching for those cases—which I don’t think exist yet—to Cryptogon.
U.S. Court Upholds Telecom Immunity for Surveillance of Americans
December 30th, 2011Searching for Mark Klein on Cryptogon will bring up several references to the NSA’s mass surveillance operations.
Via: Reuters:
A U.S. appeals panel on Thursday upheld the constitutionality of a federal law that grants immunity to telecommunications companies that assist the U.S. government in conducting surveillance of American citizens.
…
Several lawsuits filed in the wake of revelations about warrantless wiretapping alleged that telecom companies provided authorities with direct access to nearly all communications passing through their domestic facilities.
Besides the government itself, defendants included AT&T, Sprint Nextel and Verizon Communications Inc.
In 2008, Congress granted telecoms immunity for cooperating with the government’s intelligence-gathering activities. A district judge in San Francisco upheld the law as constitutional, and dismissed the claims against the companies.
In a ruling on Thursday, a unanimous three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit agreed. The appeals court covers nine Western U.S. states.
…
In a separate ruling, the 9th Circuit on Thursday allowed a separate case against the government to proceed, in which plaintiffs allege a communications dragnet of ordinary citizens.
That lawsuit claims the National Security Agency diverted Internet traffic into secure rooms in AT&T facilities across the country. The proposed class action alleges “an unprecedented suspicionless general search” throughout the communications network.
FDA Won’t Regulate Use of Antibiotics in Healthy Livestock Intended for Human Consumption
December 30th, 2011Via: Guardian:
Environmental and consumer groups have condemned the US Food and Drug Administration’s move to renege on its long-held policy to regulate the use of human antibiotics in animal feed.
Last week, the agency quietly announced it was withdrawing its plan to limit the use of antibiotics fed to healthy livestock intended for human consumption.
Critics say the U-turn, which comes amid the FDA’s own stated concerns over food safety, is at odds with its obligations to protect the public.
The groups also criticised the timing of the announcement, which was made during the holiday season and disclosed only in the federal register.
The use of low doses of antibiotics in agricultural animal feed contributes to drug-resistant superbugs, according to food and health experts.
One leading food policy writer described the policy reversal as “pathetic” and “dismaying.”
“It’s dismaying, and obviously something they felt sheepish about, otherwise it wouldn’t have been released this week,” Michael Pollan, author of the Onmivore’s Dilemma and Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual, told the Guardian.
“When Margaret Hamburg became the head of the FDA, she indicated this was a high priority for them and that she realised how much of a problem the profligate use of antibiotics was. She said she was going to treat this issue as if her hair was on fire. This isn’t the way someone acts when their hair is on fire.”
Pollan said there was “no question” that meat could be produced without human antibiotics, as the EU has already banned them.
The FDA first acknowledged in 1977 that the overuse of antibiotics in healthy livestock for growth promotion and disease prevention was unsafe and could promote antibiotic resistant bacteria that could infect people. An advisory committee at the time recommended that the FDA immediately withdraw approval for two drugs, penicillin and tetracycline, for subtherapeutic uses of the drugs in livestock.
Last week, in a statement in the Federal Register, the FDA says it plans instead to allow the industry to self-regulate and “focus its efforts for now on the potential for voluntary reform and the promotion of the judicious use of antimicrobials in the interest of public health”.
The problem, said Pollan, boils down to a lack of political will in the face of powerful industry interests. “There’s a lot of corporate money in politics these days,” he said. “Here you’re going up against not just one powerful industry, but two. This administration has had enough trouble going after individual powerful industries. That they would prevail against two of them joined together was too much to hope for.”
Livestock consume about 80% of the antibiotics sold in the US.
The History of MIT’s Blatant Suppression of Cold Fusion
December 30th, 2011Every citizen who is concerned about the future of clean energy generation and the future of our environment should read this report. Every MIT student, every MIT graduate, and every financial contributor to MIT should read it. Judge for yourself where the facts lead.
—Dr. Eugene F. Mallove, MIT and Cold Fusion: A Special Report
Via: PESN:
I am very interested in the events that took place immediately after the birth of Cold Fusion in 1989, when Pons and Fleischmann announced the existence of their technology to the world. Although cold fusion systems at the time were not ready for the market place, they proved the effect was real — a fact the establishment could not allow the public to accept.
Immediately after the announcement was made, the “mainstream” scientific community went on the attack. The late Eugene Mallove was in the middle of it, being employed at MIT in the news office — before resigning in protest of the institution’s misconduct. In a featured article for Infinite Energy Magazine, Mallove detailed exactly what took place that led to his resignation, and the depth of hatred that many professors at MIT had for Pons and Fleischmann’s work. The article titled, “MIT and Cold Fusion: A Special Report” also looks at how the replication performed by the institution’s Plasma Fusion Center actually did produce positive results, how data from the experiment was altered by unknown individuals at least twice, and how the hot fusion scientists in charge of such tests were far too biased to conduct proper research.
Related: Murdered: Dr. Eugene F. Mallove
Much of What Transpires in the Name of Military Research and Development…
December 30th, 2011Via: Bulletin of Atomic Scientists:
But much of what transpires in the name of military research and development is not research in the sense that it produces scientific and technical knowledge widely applicable inside and outside the Defense Department. A large part of defense R&D activity revolves around building very expensive gadgets that are often based on unsound technology and frequently fail to perform as required.
‘EM fields initiate the stress response by interacting with electrons moving within DNA’
December 30th, 2011Via: Martin Blank, PhD – Columbia University:
Electromagnetic (EM) fields have been used therapeutically for accelerated healing and pain control, but they have also been associated with adverse health effects. To understand these biological effects, we have been studying the interaction of low frequency EM fields with cells at both the cellular and molecular levels. Our studies with cells have shown that 60Hz EM fields induce stress genes and stress response proteins in cells. The stress response is a protective mechanism induced by many potentially harmful environmental stimuli and characterized by the synthesis of specific proteins that assist the renaturation and transport of other proteins. Our studies suggest that EM fields initiate the stress response by interacting with electrons moving within DNA. We have identified a 900 base pair segment associated with the response to EM fields, that when removed eliminates the response, and when transfected into a reporter construct, causes the construct to become EM field responsive. We have also investigated the mechanism of EM field interactions at the molecular level through effects on three reactions, electron transfer in cytochrome oxidase, ATP hydrolysis by the Na,K-ATPase, and the Belousov-Zhabotinski (BZ) reaction (the catalyzed oxidation of malonic acid). The BZ reaction is studied with ordinary reagents, so there is no problem of impurities as with biological preparations. All three reactions show:
• EM accelerates the reaction rate, i.e., electron transfer rate
• EM competes with the chemical force, so its effect varies inversely with the reaction rate
• Thresholds for interaction are low, comparable to levels found by epidemiology
• Effects vary with frequency, and there are different optima for the reactions studied: ATPase (60Hz), cytochrome oxidase (800Hz), BZ (250Hz)
These properties are consistent with the idea that EM fields affect many biological systems by interacting with electrons moving during redox reactions and also within DNA.
Research Credit: RG
