Vatican Archbishop Accused of Storing Tens of Thousands of Child Porn Files on Computer
September 29th, 2014Via: Inquisitr:
The Vatican is facing a child porn scandal after former archbishop Jozef Wesolowski was accused of storing tens of thousands of illicit videos and photos featuring children.
The 66-year-old Wesolowski was arrested earlier this week at the Vatican, making him the highest-ranking Vatican official to be investigated for child sex abuse. He is charged with sexually abusing minors and possessing child pornography.
Investigators within the Vatican analyzed a computer that Jozef Wesolowski used in his Santo Domingo home, where he served as Holy See envoy from 2008 to 2012.
Investigators found more than 100,000 files showing underage children in sexually explicit situations, Il Corriere della Sera newspaper reported. Close to 160 videos showed teenage boys were forced to perform sexual acts on themselves and adults, the newspaper reported.
It appears that Wesolowski may have tried to destroy some of the evidence. Investigators said that at least 45,000 other photos were deleted.
They are now trying to determine if Jozef Wesolowski may have went beyond just possessing and storing photos and videos. Investigators are looking into whether others may have arranged sexual encounters, and whether Wesolowski may have committed other abuses beyond the Vatican.
Curry Spice May Boost Brain Repair
September 29th, 2014Via: BBC:
A spice commonly found in curries may boost the brain’s ability to heal itself, according to a report in the journal Stem Cell Research and Therapy.
The German study suggests a compound found in turmeric could encourage the growth of nerve cells thought to be part of the brain’s repair kit.
Scientists say this work, based in rats, may pave the way for future drugs for strokes and Alzheimer’s disease.
But they say more trials are needed to see whether this applies to humans.
Research Credit: almaverdad2
Hong Kong: Streets Blocked as Pro-Democracy Protests Spread
September 28th, 2014Via: BBC:
Thousands of people have remained on the streets of Hong Kong for another day of pro-democracy protests, defying tear gas and ignoring appeals to leave.
Overnight, riot police advanced on crowds who ignored official warnings that the demonstrations were illegal.
Protesters are angry at Chinese government plans to vet candidates in Hong Kong’s 2017 elections.
Hong Kong’s chief executive reassured the public that rumours the Chinese army might intervene were untrue.
Mystery Man Who Moves Japanese Markets Made More Than 1 Million Trades
September 28th, 2014This is an entertaining piece about a Japanese daytrader who goes by the alias CIS.
Via: Bloomberg:
Betting on rebounds was dangerous, but he’d watched SoftBank lose a fifth of its value over nine days, and a drop in U.S. markets overnight had driven the shares even lower. The odds were tilting further in favor of a bounce, by his reckoning. He decided to pull the trigger, rat-a-tat-tatting the orders in, Bloomberg Markets magazine will report in its November issue.
Ninety minutes later, he cashed out with a profit of 140.6 million yen. Then it was on to the next trade for the former video game champion and pachinko gambler who goes by the name CIS. The 35-year-old day trader says he made 6 billion yen, after taxes, betting on Japanese stocks last year.
Tinkering with Brain’s Decision Circuits Makes Rats Go Random
September 27th, 2014Via: Los Angeles Times:
“Our brains have evolved to be strategic, so we have evolved to use our past experience to optimize future choice,” said lead investigator Alla Y. Karpova, a neuroscientist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus in Virginia.
“Against weak competitors, a strategic approach is probably useful, because if you figure out the approach of the opponent, you can actually do better than when you’re just random. You can even out-compete them,” Karpova said.
But random exploration may be more appropriate to a new situation full of mixed signals, where experience offers no guide. Some part of the brain has to decide how to decide.
Researchers set out to find how and where such choices are made. They created three computer opponents with increasingly tough strategies to punish patterns in how rats sought selected holes to poke their noses in, looking for food. One was a bit lenient; the second, a bit less forgiving; and the third, strict — it was programmed to learn from the rat and thwart its strategy.
“When animals initially played against the weak competitors, they appeared to maintain a strategic approach, just like people have observed before with primates,” Karpova said. “But when we put them up against a very sophisticated competitor … the animals switched to the random mode.”
And they got stuck there, for hundreds of trials.
Researchers weren’t done. They created a new brain-buster. It gave higher rewards for a certain pattern of pokes (such as right-right-left) but also mild reward rates (16%) for non-patterned responses.
The “strategic” rodents that had played against competitors one and two beat the odds at the hidden pattern task. Their reward rates, about 20%, indicated that sticking to strategic thinking helped them uncover the hidden pattern. Those that had first played the sternest computer taskmaster earned just a 14.5% reward rate, below even the random rate.
“They were completely blind to the sudden availability of a simple strategy that would be beneficial,” Karpova said. “They got stuck in this random mode.”
Ello: Something’s Missing from the About Page
September 27th, 2014I was looking for some sort of social networking site or software that Cryptogon contributors could use in a post-Cryptogon era. I thought Ello might be worth considering—until I researched it a bit more.
Check this out.
Via: Aral Balkan:
What I didn’t know at the time was that they’d taken $435,000 in seed funding from FreshTracks Capital, a Vermont-based Venture Capital firm. This had apparently been announced by FreshTracks Capital in March.
…
Let me put it bluntly: if a company has taken venture capital, you have already been sold. It’s not a matter of if, it’s simply a matter of when. (Unless the company goes under before it can exit, that is.)
NY Fed Fired Examiner Who Took on Goldman Sachs
September 26th, 2014Via: ProPublica:
In the spring of 2012, a senior examiner with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York determined that Goldman Sachs had a problem.
Under a Fed mandate, the investment banking behemoth was expected to have a company-wide policy to address conflicts of interest in how its phalanxes of dealmakers handled clients. Although Goldman had a patchwork of policies, the examiner concluded that they fell short of the Fed’s requirements.
That finding by the examiner, Carmen Segarra, potentially had serious implications for Goldman, which was already under fire for advising clients on both sides of several multibillion-dollar deals and allegedly putting the bank’s own interests above those of its customers. It could have led to closer scrutiny of Goldman by regulators or changes to its business practices.
Before she could formalize her findings, Segarra said, the senior New York Fed official who oversees Goldman pressured her to change them. When she refused, Segarra said she was called to a meeting where her bosses told her they no longer trusted her judgment. Her phone was confiscated, and security officers marched her out of the Fed’s fortress-like building in lower Manhattan, just 7 months after being hired.
“They wanted me to falsify my findings,” Segarra said in a recent interview, “and when I wouldn’t, they fired me.”
Today, Segarra filed a wrongful termination lawsuit against the New York Fed in federal court in Manhattan seeking reinstatement and damages. The case provides a detailed look at a key aspect of the post-2008 financial reforms: The work of Fed bank examiners sent to scrutinize the nation’s “Too Big to Fail” institutions.
Related / Must Listen: The Secret Recordings of Carmen Segarra
Hungary Suspends Gas Supplies to Ukraine
September 26th, 2014Via: BBC:
Hungary’s gas pipeline operator, FGSZ, says it has suspended delivery of gas to neighbouring Ukraine “indefinitely”.
Ukraine has been receiving gas from Hungary, Poland and Slovakia since Russia cut off supplies to Ukraine in June in a dispute over unpaid bills.
Ukraine’s state-owned gas firm, Naftogaz, confirmed the stoppage. It called the move “unexpected and unexplained”.
FGSZ said it cut deliveries to Ukraine to raise the flow of gas to Hungary.
With winter approaching fears are mounting that Ukraine will be unable to heat homes and power industry without Russian gas.
On Friday Russian and Ukrainian energy ministers are meeting in Berlin for European Union brokered talks, aimed at heading off such a crisis.
Argentina Uses Drones to Spot Wealthy Tax Cheats
September 26th, 2014Via: AP:
Argentine tax evaders beware: The government is using a drone to spot you.
The Buenos Aires province’s tax agency said Wednesday that it has used drones to identify some 200 mansions and about 100 swimming pools that haven’t been declared by their owners.
Bash Bug May Pose Bigger Threat Than Heartbleed
September 26th, 2014Unbelievable.
Via: Reuters:
A newly discovered security bug in a widely used piece of Linux software, known as “Bash,” could pose a bigger threat to computer users than the “Heartbleed” bug that surfaced in April, cyber experts warned on Wednesday.
Bash is the software used to control the command prompt on many Unix computers. Hackers can exploit a bug in Bash to take complete control of a targeted system, security experts said.
The Department of Homeland Security’s United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team, or US-CERT, issued an alert saying the vulnerability affected Unix-based operating systems including Linux and Apple Inc’s (AAPL.O) Mac OS X.
The “Heartbleed” bug allowed hackers to spy on computers but not take control of them, according to Dan Guido, chief executive of a cybersecurity firm Trail of Bits.
“The method of exploiting this issue is also far simpler. You can just cut and paste a line of code and get good results.”
Tod Beardsley, an engineering manager at cybersecurity firm Rapid7, warned the bug was rated a “10” for severity, meaning it has maximum impact, and rated “low” for complexity of exploitation, meaning it is relatively easy for hackers to launch attacks.
“Using this vulnerability, attackers can potentially take over the operating system, access confidential information, make changes, et cetera,” Beardsley said. “Anybody with systems using Bash needs to deploy the patch immediately.”
US-CERT advised computer users to obtain operating systems updates from software makers. It said that Linux providers including Red Hat Inc (RHT.N) had already prepared them, but it did not mention an update for OS X. Apple representatives could not be reached.


