German Officials: Bailout Fund Will Top €1 Trillion
October 24th, 2011Via: AP:
The eurozone bailout fund will see its firepower increased to more than €1 trillion ($1.39 trillion) to enable it to contain the debt turmoil that threatens to rip apart the 17-nation eurozone, according to German lawmakers briefed Monday by Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Eurozone governments hope the €440 billion ($600 billion) European Financial Stability Fund, or EFSF, will be able to protect countries like Italy and Spain from being engulfed in the debt crisis.
Vatican Calls for ‘Global Public Authority’ and ‘Central World Bank’
October 24th, 2011Via: Reuters:
The Vatican called on Monday for the establishment of a “global public authority” and a “central world bank” to rule over financial institutions that have become outdated and often ineffective in dealing fairly with crises.
The document from the Vatican’s Justice and Peace department should please the “Occupy Wall Street” demonstrators and similar movements around the world who have protested against the economic downturn.
“Towards Reforming the International Financial and Monetary Systems in the Context of a Global Public Authority,” was at times very specific, calling, for example, for taxation measures on financial transactions.
“The economic and financial crisis which the world is going through calls everyone, individuals and peoples, to examine in depth the principles and the cultural and moral values at the basis of social coexistence,” it said.
It condemned what it called “the idolatry of the market” as well as a “neo-liberal thinking” that it said looked exclusively at technical solutions to economic problems.
“In fact, the crisis has revealed behaviours like selfishness, collective greed and hoarding of goods on a great scale,” it said, adding that world economics needed an “ethic of solidarity” among rich and poor nations.
“If no solutions are found to the various forms of injustice, the negative effects that will follow on the social, political and economic level will be destined to create a climate of growing hostility and even violence, and ultimately undermine the very foundations of democratic institutions, even the ones considered most solid,” it said.
It called for the establishment of “a supranational authority” with worldwide scope and “universal jurisdiction” to guide economic policies and decisions.
Repost: Gaddafi Gold-for-Oil, Dollar-Doom Plans Behind Libya ‘Mission’?
October 24th, 2011Via: Russia Today:
And Now: ‘The Gates Foundation Uses Genetic Modification For Good’
October 24th, 2011Wow. Just… Wow.
Breathtaking.
Via: FastCompany:
It’s easy to demonize genetically modified crops. After all, we don’t exactly know what their long-term health effects are, and they have the nasty habit of cross-pollinating with non-GMO crops. When new stories come out about advances in the field, many people react with anger and fear. But the Gates Foundation (and Bill Gates himself) has long supported the use of GMO foods to increase crop yields and nutrition in the developing world. And now the foundation has joined the Monsanto Fund and the Howard Buffett Foundation in giving $11.9 million to the Virus Resistant Cassava For Africa (VIRCA) project, which is developing cassava varieties that can resist deadly viruses. Is it possible, then, that Gates can use GMO technology for good?
Research Credit: noncompliant
Coming Soon: Web Ads That Use Your Webcam and Display Content Based on Biometric Data
October 24th, 2011Yeah, whatever, buddy.
No webcam: Check.
Multiple, independent filters prevent crap (by source and by type) from even reaching my computer in the first place: Check.
Besides, what idiot would voluntarily allow an ad on a website to turn on his webcam? Give me a break.
Wait. Never mind. Don’t answer that.
Via: Economist:
IMAGINE browsing a website when a saucy ad for lingerie catches your eye. You don’t click on it, merely smile and go to another page. Yet it follows you, putting up more racy pictures, perhaps even the offer of a discount. Finally, irked by its persistence, you frown. “Sorry for taking up your time,” says the ad, and promptly desists from further pestering. Creepy. But making online ads that not only know you are looking at them but also respond to your emotions will soon be possible, thanks to the power of image-processing software and the ubiquity of tiny cameras in computers and mobile devices.
…
One of the companies doing such work, Realeyes, which is based in London, has been developing a system that combines eye-spying webcams with emotional analysis. Mihkel Jäätma, who founded the company in 2007, says that his system is able to gauge a person’s mood by plotting the position of facial features, such as eyebrows, mouth and nostrils, and employing clever algorithms to interpret changes in their alignment—as when eyebrows are raised in surprise, say. Add eye-movement tracking, hinting at which display ads were overlooked and which were studied for any period of time, and the approach offers precisely the sort of quantitative data brand managers yearn for.
At present the system is being used on purpose-built websites with, for instance, online research groups testing the effect of various display ads. The next step is to make interactive ads. Because they can spot the visual attention given to them, as well as the emotional state of the viewer, these ads could tailor their responses.
As similar gimmicks become widespread, privacy concerns will invariably mount. People would need to give consent to their webcams being used in this way, Mr Jäätma admits. One way to persuade internet users to grant access to their images would be to offer them discounts on goods or subscriptions to websites.
Research Credit: almaverdad2
First Mexican Truck Set to Enter U.S. Interior
October 24th, 2011Via: MSNBC:
The first Mexican carrier is set to roll into the U.S. interior Friday, but the Teamsters union and two California congressmen haven’t given up on stopping the cross-border trucking program that had been stalled for years by safety concerns and political wrangling.
U.S. Reps. Duncan Hunter and Bob Filner joined Teamsters President James Hoffa at the border Wednesday to take a bipartisan stand against the pilot project that will allow approved Mexican trucks to come deep into the United States. The first one will enter Texas.
Hunter is a San Diego-area Republican, while Filner is a Democrat whose district includes California’s border with Mexico.
They were surrounded at a news conference by more than 75 union members from at least five states.
Allowing Mexican trucking companies to deliver goods rather than transfer them to U.S. haulers at the border will put American jobs and highway safety at risk, they said.
“We’re literally taking good jobs here in America and passing them over the line to Mexico,” Hunter told the crowd, many holding signs reading “NAFTA kills” and “Stop the war on workers.”
Washington on Friday last week approved the first Mexican trucking company, Transportes Olympic, nearly two decades after the hotly contested provision of the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement set off lawsuits and a costly trade dispute between the neighboring countries.
Research Credit: alvinroast
Researchers Crack W3C Encryption Standard for XML
October 23rd, 2011Via: Ars Technica:
There’s new reason to be leery about relying on Web-based services to handle sensitive data. A pair of German researchers revealed at the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security in Chicago this week that they have discovered a way to decrypt data within XML documents that have been encrypted using an implementation of the World Wide Web Consortium’s XML Encryption standard.
XML Encryption is used widely as part of server-to-server Web services connections to transmit secure information mixed with non-sensitive data, based on cipher-block chaining. It can be used, for example, to encrypt credit card information for a payment within an XML-based purchase order, so that the general data can be accessed by everyone who needs to have access to it while access to the financial data is limited to the people or systems authorized to process it.
But that encryption is apparently very weak, as Juraj Somorovsky and Tibor Jager of Ruhr University Bochum demonstrated. “We were able to decrypt data by sending modified ciphertexts to the server, by gathering information from the received error messages,” the pair wrote in their paper, presented at ACM. They were able to demonstrate that the exploit worked on both a popular open-source implementation of W3C XML Encryption and on the implementation of every company that responded to their disclosure.
Fixing the vulnerability will require a total rewrite of the W3C standard. “There is no simple patch for this problem,” Somorovsky said in a statement issued by Ruhr University Bochum. “We therefore propose to change the standard as soon as possible.”
Research Credit: Unwelcome Guests
Some Parents Who Work for Elite Silicon Valley Firms Send Their Children to School with No Computers
October 23rd, 2011Via: New York Times:
The chief technology officer of eBay sends his children to a nine-classroom school here. So do employees of Silicon Valley giants like Google, Apple, Yahoo and Hewlett-Packard.
But the school’s chief teaching tools are anything but high-tech: pens and paper, knitting needles and, occasionally, mud. Not a computer to be found. No screens at all. They are not allowed in the classroom, and the school even frowns on their use at home.
Schools nationwide have rushed to supply their classrooms with computers, and many policy makers say it is foolish to do otherwise. But the contrarian point of view can be found at the epicenter of the tech economy, where some parents and educators have a message: computers and schools don’t mix.
This is the Waldorf School of the Peninsula, one of around 160 Waldorf schools in the country that subscribe to a teaching philosophy focused on physical activity and learning through creative, hands-on tasks. Those who endorse this approach say computers inhibit creative thinking, movement, human interaction and attention spans.
The Waldorf method is nearly a century old, but its foothold here among the digerati puts into sharp relief an intensifying debate about the role of computers in education.
“I fundamentally reject the notion you need technology aids in grammar school,” said Alan Eagle, 50, whose daughter, Andie, is one of the 196 children at the Waldorf elementary school; his son William, 13, is at the nearby middle school. “The idea that an app on an iPad can better teach my kids to read or do arithmetic, that’s ridiculous.”
Mr. Eagle knows a bit about technology. He holds a computer science degree from Dartmouth and works in executive communications at Google, where he has written speeches for the chairman, Eric E. Schmidt.
Gaddafi Salted Away About $200 Billion
October 23rd, 2011Via: The Age:
Muammar Gaddafi secretly salted away more than $US200 billion ($A196 billion) in bank accounts, real estate and corporate investments around the world before he was killed, according to senior Libyan officials.
That’s about $US30,000 for every Libyan citizen and double the amount that Western governments previously had suspected.
The new estimates of the deposed dictator’s hidden cash, gold reserves and investments are “staggering”, one person who has studied detailed records of the asset search said Friday.
“No one truly appreciated the scope of it.”
Did You Know Feds Will Temporarily Cut Off All TV and Radio Broadcasts on November 9?
October 23rd, 20119th day of the 11th month.
Via: The Blaze:
If you have ever wondered about the government’s ability to control the civilian airwaves, you will have your answer on November 9th.
On that day, federal authorities are going to shut off all television and radio communications simultaneously at 2:00PM EST to complete the first ever test of the national Emergency Alert System (EAS).
This isn’t a wild conspiracy theory. The upcoming test is posted on the Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau website.
Only the President has the authority to activate EAS at the national level, and he has delegated that authority to the Director of FEMA. The test will be conducted jointly by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) through FEMA, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) National Weather Service (NWS).
