The Rise of the Meta-Criminal
June 2nd, 2016Via: Jon Rappoport:
Trevor Timm of the Electronic Freedom Frontier dug up a very interesting nugget. It was embedded in the heralded December 2013 White House task force report on spying and snooping.
Under Recommendations, #31, section 2, he found this:
“Governments should not use their offensive cyber capabilities to change the amounts held in financial accounts or otherwise manipulate financial systems.”
Timm quite rightly wondered: why were these warnings in the report?
Were the authors just anticipating a possible crime? Or were they reflecting the fact that the NSA had already been engaging in the crime?
If this was just a bit of anticipation, why leave it naked in the report? Why not say there was no current evidence the NSA had been manipulating financial systems?
Those systems would, of course, include the stock market, and all trading markets around the world.
Related: They Made a Killing: The Use of Knowledge of Covert Operations in the Stock Market
Research Credit: KA
Wal-Mart Testing Drones in Warehouses to Manage Inventory
June 2nd, 2016Via: AP:
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is testing drones that it says will help it manage its warehouse inventory more efficiently, and which it said Thursday could be rolled out in the next six to nine months across its distribution centers.
The move is another sign of how the nation’s largest retailer is seeking to compete against online leader Amazon.com, which is testing drones to deliver packages.
During a media tour Thursday at a distribution center, Wal-Mart offered a peek at a drone that flies around the massive center, captures images in real time and flags the misplaced items.
Wal-Mart says using the drones enables it to check inventory in about a day or less, instead of a month that it takes manually.
The Untold Story Behind Saudi Arabia’s 41-Year U.S. Debt Secret
May 31st, 2016Via: Bloomberg:
The basic framework was strikingly simple. The U.S. would buy oil from Saudi Arabia and provide the kingdom military aid and equipment. In return, the Saudis would plow billions of their petrodollar revenue back into Treasuries and finance America’s spending.
It took several discreet follow-up meetings to iron out all the details, Parsky said. But at the end of months of negotiations, there remained one small, yet crucial, catch: King Faisal bin Abdulaziz Al Saud demanded the country’s Treasury purchases stay “strictly secret,” according to a diplomatic cable obtained by Bloomberg from the National Archives database.
With a handful of Treasury and Federal Reserve officials, the secret was kept for more than four decades—until now. In response to a Freedom-of-Information-Act request submitted by Bloomberg News, the Treasury broke out Saudi Arabia’s holdings for the first time this month after “concluding that it was consistent with transparency and the law to disclose the data,” according to spokeswoman Whitney Smith. The $117 billion trove makes the kingdom one of America’s largest foreign creditors.
Yet in many ways, the information has raised more questions than it has answered. A former Treasury official, who specialized in central bank reserves and asked not to be identified, says the official figure vastly understates Saudi Arabia’s investments in U.S. government debt, which may be double or more.
The current tally represents just 20 percent of its $587 billion of foreign reserves, well below the two-thirds that central banks typically keep in dollar assets. Some analysts speculate the kingdom may be masking its U.S. debt holdings by accumulating Treasuries through offshore financial centers, which show up in the data of other countries.
Neocon Ghoul Announces Plan Underway to Ensure Hillary Clinton Becomes President
May 30th, 2016Wealthy Republicans Planning to Run Third Party Candidate to Stop Trump:
Some other flunky Republican-as-3rd-Party candidate would simply take votes from Trump, making it more likely that Clinton would win. These guys don’t think that their candidate will have a snowball’s chance in Hell of winning.
In other words, these Republicans would rather have Clinton for President than Trump, and they’re working to make that happen.
And if some vote fraud happens on election day… *meh* I guess the 3rd party candidate took some votes away from the Donald.
So… Three candidates.
Do you want Hillary, Hillary or Hillary?
Via: Independent:
A leading conservative has claimed that Donald Trump will be challenged for the presidency by a impressive independent candidate with a “real chance” of beating the Republican nominee.
In a tweet on Sunday evening, Bill Kristol, an outspoken critic of Mr Trump and editor of the Weekly Standard, a respected conservative magazine, declined to give further details.
“Just a heads up over this holiday weekend: There will be an independent candidate—an impressive one, with a strong team and a real chance,” he said.
Building Blocks of Life Found in Comet’s Atmosphere
May 30th, 2016Via: Space:
For the first time, scientists have directly detected a crucial amino acid and a rich selection of organic molecules in the dusty atmosphere of a comet, further bolstering the hypothesis that these icy objects delivered some of life’s ingredients to Earth.
The amino acid glycine, along with some of its precursor organic molecules and the essential element phosphorus, were spotted in the cloud of gas and dust surrounding Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko by the Rosetta spacecraft, which has been orbiting the comet since 2014. While glycine had previously been extracted from cometary dust samples that were brought to Earth by NASA’s Stardust mission, this is the first time that the compound has been detected in space, naturally vaporized.
The discovery of those building blocks around a comet supports the idea that comets could have played an essential role in the development of life on early Earth, researchers said.
Former Zurich Insurance Boss Martin Senn Kills Himself
May 30th, 2016Via: Reuters:
Former Zurich Insurance boss Martin Senn has committed suicide six months after leaving the company under a cloud, a tragedy that comes less than three years after Zurich’s finance chief took his own life.
Senn, 59, shot himself at his family’s Alpine resort home in Klosters, Swiss newspaper Blick reported. He had quit as chief executive of Zurich in December following a series of profit warnings and a botched takeover of British rival RSA.
“Martin Senn’s family has informed us that Martin committed suicide last Friday,” the company said in a statement on Monday, adding it was “stunned and deeply shaken”.
His death follows the suicide of Zurich’s finance chief Pierre Wauthier in August 2013, which brought into sharp focus the pressures facing senior corporate executives in Switzerland and elsewhere.
Wauthier, 53, killed himself after writing a suicide note addressed “To whom it may concern” in which he described becoming demoralised by what he called a new, more aggressive tone at Zurich under then-Chairman Josef Ackermann.
Research Credit: DF
Rumor: After Dieselgate Disaster, VW Planning Big Move to Electric Vehicles
May 30th, 2016Via: Quartz:
VW is in trouble. Its multi-year deception to hoodwink US environmental laws is costing it billions of dollars, in addition to inestimable public good will. Worse, the scandal has threatened the company’s future. Until last year the maker of the world’s best-selling cars, VW has had to pivot away from its long-term strategic bet on diesel-fueled vehicles, which are at issue in the deception, and to electrics.
Now, in what would seek to eclipse Tesla’s pathmaking electric strategy, VW appears to be poised for a gigantic down-payment on that new future with a possible $11 billion battery factory.
…
VW’s own plans are sketchy—a story broken by Handelsblatt, the respected Dusseldorf-based business newspaper, said the idea is to get past Dieselgate, as many call it, and become an industry leader in electric industry technology.
One More Time: Facebook Tracks Everyone
May 27th, 20162011: Facebook Is Building Shadow Profiles of Non-Users
Countermeasures, EasyPrivacy:
EasyPrivacy is an optional supplementary filter list that completely removes all forms of tracking from the internet, including web bugs, tracking scripts and information collectors, thereby protecting your personal data.
Via: Gizmodo:
There is no escaping Facebook’s advertising reach. The social network has announced that it will now be foisting ads on to every single person who uses third-party sites that are signed up to its advertising scheme, regardless of whether the user has a Facebook account or not.
Until now, Facebook showed ads only to its members when people landed on third-party sites that were signed up to its Audience Network ad system. That meant that it only ever bothered tracking what Facebook users did, in order to learn about them and better target advertising.
Now, though, reports the Wall Street Journal, it will use the same techniques—largely plug-in and cookies, but also Like buttons too— in order to track what everyone does when visiting those web pages. Andrew Bosworth, vice president of Facebook’s ads and business platform, explained to the Journal:
“Our buttons and plugins send over basic information about users’ browsing sessions. For non-Facebook members, previously we didn’t use it. Now we’ll use it to better understand how to target those people.”
MIT: Gravity Assisted Flow Battery
May 27th, 2016Definitely not coming soon, but very interesting.
Via: MIT News:
A new approach to the design of a liquid battery, using a passive, gravity-fed arrangement similar to an old-fashioned hourglass, could offer great advantages due to the system’s low cost and the simplicity of its design and operation, says a team of MIT researchers who have made a demonstration version of the new battery.
Liquid flow batteries — in which the positive and negative electrodes are each in liquid form and separated by a membrane — are not a new concept, and some members of this research team unveiled an earlier concept three years ago. The basic technology can use a variety of chemical formulations, including the same chemical compounds found in today’s lithium-ion batteries. In this case, key components are not solid slabs that remain in place for the life of the battery, but rather tiny particles that can be carried along in a liquid slurry. Increasing storage capacity simply requires bigger tanks to hold the slurry.
But all previous versions of liquid batteries have relied on complex systems of tanks, valves, and pumps, adding to the cost and providing multiple opportunities for possible leaks and failures.
The new version, which substitutes a simple gravity feed for the pump system, eliminates that complexity. The rate of energy production can be adjusted simply by changing the angle of the device, thus speeding up or slowing down the rate of flow.
Britain: Plans to Create an EU Army ‘Kept Secret’ from Voters
May 27th, 2016Via: Telegraph:
Plans to move towards the creation of a European army are reportedly being kept secret from British voters until the day after next month’s referendum.
Drawn up by the EU’s foreign policy chief, the Global Strategy on Foreign and Security Policy foresees the formation of new European military and operational structures.
This first step towards an EU army is supported by Germany and other countries, The Times reports.
In 2011, similar proposals were vetoed by Britain, although there were concerns that a loophole could allow nine states to group together to bypass opponents.
In an effort to avoid derailing the Prime Minister’s Remain campaign, the policy plans will not be sent to national governments until the day after Britons vote.
