Google Goes Offline After Fibre Cables Cut
December 20th, 2019Via: BBC:
Severed fibre optic cables disrupted internet access in parts of eastern Europe, Iran and Turkey on Thursday.
The issue, which lasted for about two hours, was caused by multiple fibre cables being physically cut at the same time, a highly unusual thing to happen.
Google said its services were among those unavailable in the region for about 30 minutes.
The company told internet service providers to connect to its other servers to “route around the problem”.
In a statement, the company blamed “multiple simultaneous fibre cuts”, which are very rare.
BBC Monitoring confirmed that internet access in Bulgaria, Iran and Turkey had been disrupted for about two hours on Thursday morning.
Sadjad Bonabi, a director at Iran’s Communications Infrastructure Company, said two cuts happened at once, one between Iran and Bucharest and the other on a line to Munich.
This disrupted traffic on one of the major fibre cables in the region. But Mr Bonabi said traffic had been routed on to “healthy” connections in western and southern Iran.
No explanation for the cut cables has been offered.
Pig Ebola: Chinese Banks Offer Pork to Reward Customers for Opening New Accounts
December 19th, 2019Via: South China Morning Post:
Handing out servings of expensive pork as a reward for opening an account is the latest gimmick being used by a growing number of small local banks across China to lure new depositors.
Banks are being forced to go to greater lengths to attract new deposits, since they generally earn less money from lending and have fewer funding options than their larger peers.
The fact that pork could be seen as a desirable reward for opening a bank account also speaks to the country’s massive shortage of its favourite staple meat.
Warrant Not Always Needed for ‘Inadvertent’ NSA Surveillance of Americans
December 19th, 2019This sort of fluff is nothing compared to: “It’s just like laundering money – you work it backwards to make it clean.”
Enjoy your 4th Amendment.
Via: Reuters:
The U.S. government may collect information about U.S. citizens without obtaining a warrant if the information is gathered inadvertently while legally carrying out surveillance of non-nationals abroad, a U.S. appeals court ruled on Wednesday.
Vampire Squid May Admit Guilt, Pay $2 Billion Fine in Corruption Scandal
December 19th, 2019Via: Reuters:
Goldman Sachs Group Inc is in talks with the U.S. government and a state regulator to possibly pay up to $2 billion and admit guilt to resolve investigations into its role in the 1MDB Malaysian corruption scandal, according to a source familiar with the matter.
The bank and U.S. officials have discussed a deal in which a Goldman subsidiary in Asia would plead guilty to violating U.S. bribery laws, the Wall Street Journal first reported on Thursday.
3 Victims & 3 Shooters Dead After “Terrorist” Attack On FSB HQ In Moscow
December 19th, 2019Via: ZeroHedge:
RT reports that three gunmen entered the lobby at FSB headquarters in Moscow and opened fire, killing three security guards. All three of the shooters have now been neutralized in what officials are calling a terrorist attack.
Robot Can Make 300 Pizzas an Hour
December 19th, 2019Via: Fox 5 NY:
A robot will be serving food to thousands of guests at next month’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.
Seattle-based Picnic says its automated food assembly system will produce up to 300 12-inch customized pizzas an hour on the CES show floor.
…
The company ran a test pilot with the robot at Seattle’s T-Mobile Park baseball stadium in October.
The robot is initially focused on the production of high-volume, customizable pizzas. But the company says it could be used for many types of food, whether it uses a bun, bowl, tortilla or plate.
The machine uses deep learning AI technology to continually learn as it functions.
Open Thread: Donald Trump Impeached on Two Charges
December 18th, 2019My guess: This is noise, which I’ve mostly ignored.
The people involved with this, on all sides, are so corrupt that I physically can’t stand trying to pretend to be interested one way or the other. As the public facing bipartisan goon squad tries to out ratfuck each other, the Military Industrial Complex quietly swallows another another trillion dollars.
Why isn’t there ceaseless outrage in the media about this?
*crickets* *blank stares* “Conspiracy theorist!”
Yep, so, back to the Trump impeachment circus. Enjoy the show!
Via: DailyMail:
Donald Trump became the third president in American history to be impeached on Wednesday on a largely party line vote, setting up a formal trial next year in the Senate.
The impeachment vote capped off a three month investigation into the president’s actions in regard to the Ukraine. The vote came at the end of a day long partisan debate on the House floor with Republicans charging Democrats with wanting to over turn the last presidential election and Democrats arguing the president tried to use a foreign power to help him win re-election.
Surveillance Footage Outside of Jeffrey Epstein’s Cell During Suicide Attempt Is Missing
December 18th, 2019Maybe prison officials handed the data over to NASA for safekeeping.
Via: New York Daily News:
Surveillance footage of the outside of Jeffrey Epstein’s cell at the troubled Metropolitan Correctional Center during his suicide attempt has gone missing, prosecutors revealed Wednesday.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Jason Swergold admitted nobody can find the footage of the outside of the cell the multimillionaire perv shared with accused quadruple murderer Nick Tartaglione during a hearing in White Plains District Court. Tartaglione, a former Briarcliff Manor cop, faces the death penalty for the alleged murders in a drug deal gone bad.
Bruce Barket, an attorney for Tartaglione, confirmed the stunning revelation that the footage was not preserved. The Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s Office declined comment.
Afghanistan War – The Crime of the Century
December 17th, 2019Via: Ron Paul:
“We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan. We didn’t know what we were doing.” So said Gen. Douglas Lute, who oversaw the US war on Afghanistan under Presidents Bush and Obama. Eighteen years into the longest war in US history, we are finally finding out, thanks to thousands of pages of classified interviews on the war published by the Washington Post last week, that General Lute’s cluelessness was shared by virtually everyone involved in the war.
What we learned in what is rightly being called the “Pentagon Papers” of our time, is that hundreds of US Administration officials – including three US Presidents – knowingly lied to the American people about the Afghanistan war for years. This wasn’t just a matter of omitting some unflattering facts. This was about bald-faced lying about a war they knew was a disaster from almost day one.
Remember President Bush’s Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld? Remember how supremely confident he was at those press conferences, acting like the master of the universe? Here’s what he told the Pentagon’s special inspector general who compiled these thousands of interviews on Afghanistan: “I have no visibility into who the bad guys are.”
It is not only members of the Bush, Obama, and Trump Administrations who are guilty of this massive fraud. Falsely selling the Afghanistan war as a great success was a bipartisan activity on Capitol Hill. In the dozens of hearings I attended in the House International Relations Committee, I do not recall a single “expert” witness called who told us the truth. Instead, both Republican and Democrat-controlled Congresses called a steady stream of neocon war cheerleaders to lie to us about how wonderfully the war was going. Victory was just around the corner, they all promised. Just a few more massive appropriations and we’d be celebrating the end of the war.
NASA’s X-59 Quiet Supersonic Research Aircraft Cleared for Final Assembly
December 16th, 2019For some of the black world context, definitely see: Lockheed Martin SR-72.
Via: NASA:
NASA’s first large scale, piloted X-plane in more than three decades is cleared for final assembly and integration of its systems following a major project review by senior managers held Thursday at NASA Headquarters in Washington.
The management review, known as Key Decision Point-D (KDP-D), was the last programmatic hurdle for the X-59 Quiet SuperSonic Technology (QueSST) aircraft to clear before officials meet again in late 2020 to approve the airplane’s first flight in 2021.
