SEC Bringing Lowest Number of Corporate Accounting Fraud Cases in a Decade
June 3rd, 2013Post 2008, what’s fraud?
Via: New York Times:
In April 2003, a New York Times article discussed the push by federal prosecutors to crack down on accounting fraud in which one expert said, “These have become the hot, sexy cases.”
What followed were the convictions of chief executives including Jeffrey K. Skilling of Enron, Bernard J. Ebbers of WorldCom and John J. Rigas of Adelphia Communications.
The attraction seems to have worn off. The number of corporate accounting cases at the Securities and Exchange Commission has dropped to its lowest level in a decade, with only 79 such cases filed in the most recent fiscal year.
Fire Kills 119 at Poultry Plant in Northeast China
June 3rd, 2013Via: AP:
A fire at a poultry plant in northeastern China trapped workers inside a cluttered slaughterhouse, killing at least 119 in one of China’s worst industrial disasters in years despite recent work safety improvements.
Several dozen other people were hurt in Monday’s blaze in Jilin province’s Mishazi township, which appeared to have been sparked by three early morning explosions, the official Xinhua News Agency said. The provincial fire department attributed the blasts to an ammonia leak. The chemical is kept pressurized as part of the cooling system in meat processing plants.
The fire was one of China’s worst recent industrial disasters, with the death toll the highest since a September 2008 mining cave-in that claimed 281 lives.
It was the third major industrial blaze to be reported in China in the past four days. The two earlier fires were an oil tank explosion in Liaoning province that caused another oil tank to catch fire, killing two, and a blaze in a large granary in Heilongjiang province that wiped out 1,000 tons of grain.
Monday’s accident highlighted the high human costs of China’s lax industrial safety standards, which continue to plague workplaces despite improvements in the country’s work safety record in recent years.
SUPREME COURT: POLICE MAY TAKE DNA FROM EVERYONE THEY ARREST
June 3rd, 2013Via: CBS:
A sharply divided Supreme Court on Monday said police can routinely take DNA from people they arrest, equating a DNA cheek swab to other common jailhouse procedures like fingerprinting.
“Taking and analyzing a cheek swab of the arrestee DNA is, like fingerprinting and photographing, a legitimate police booking procedure that is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the court’s five-justice majority.
But the four dissenting justices said that the court was allowing a major change in police powers.
“Make no mistake about it: because of today’s decision, your DNA can be taken and entered into a national database if you are ever arrested, rightly or wrongly, and for whatever reason,” conservative Justice Antonin Scalia said in a sharp dissent which he read aloud in the courtroom.
At least 28 states and the federal government now take DNA swabs after arrests.
New Affiliate Programs
June 3rd, 2013Disclosure: I am an affiliate for both AstaSupreme and Deca Aloe Arborescens. I will be paid a commission if you click through to the companies from Cryptogon and place an order.
Warning: Nothing that appears on Cryptogon should be considered medical advice.
Pookie let me know about some supplements that she was interested in buying, and that the companies have affiliate programs. I signed up for both of them:
For those who are interested, here are a couple of links about Astaxanthin:
LifeExtension: Astaxanthin Overview
LifeExtension: Astaxanthin Provides Broad Spectrum Protection
And here’s a Rural Delivery piece that goes into how AstaSupreme got started. (I like small business stories.)
There is a lot of info on the Aloe Arborescens product at the site.
I don’t have any personal experience with either of these products. I’m posting them mainly for FYI purposes, because I know, from personal communications with many of you, that you’re going through some hard stuff. As for my own family, my dad is in a cardiac care unit at the moment and he’s also suffering from very debilitating rheumatoid arthritis. He’s not the sort of guy to ever ask for help, but he knew he was a dead man walking… or not walking, actually, and he let my sister intervene. He’s still alive because of her.
He’s 80 years old and he did a demolition project on his house back in September 2012. He demmoed the balcony on his house that was dry rotted and needed to come down. He would have been breathing a lot of lead dust, mold and rodent feces/urine particles. He’s the last person on earth who would consider using a respirator for such an activity.
Over the last couple of months, he started depending more and more on aspirin for pain and stiffness. You have to understand, I don’t think he ever took pain medication for anything, ever. I walked in on him once as he was pulling one of his own teeth out of his jaw with a pair of pliers.
“Holy sh*t! WTF are you doing?”
“Getting relief, man. It feels better now.”
Ok, so flash forward to the present: to hear him straining to talk through the arthritis pain and jonesing for aspirin was very strange. It just got worse and worse. My sister took him over to her place, and one morning, he couldn’t get out of bed.
Emergency room. Cardiac care unit. Carvedilol, Prednisone, Rivaroxaban, Sotalol. etc. etc.
I’m not saying that the lead, mold and rat shit caused this situation, but he went from doing heavy construction and yard work to clinging to life inside of eight months. Anyway, this is my way of saying that my interest in these products goes beyond simply trying to earn a commission.
Most of you have seen Pookie on Cryptogon over the years. She’s actually a close family friend of ours, and we discuss a lot of things in private. Pookie knows a lot about alternative medicine. She’s on the front lines, every day. If she wants to tell you more, that’s up to her. But my point is, if Pookie tells me that she’s interested in something, I check it out.
Situation in Turkey
June 3rd, 2013Amnesty International Turkey has ongoing coverage of the protests.
Desktop Version of Google Chrome Now Able to Take Voice Commands
June 3rd, 2013No mic plugged into my PC: Check.
No camera plugged into my PC: Check.
Use Firefox: Check.
GCSB/NSA seeing most of what I do: Oh.
But I’ll tell ya: When I’m out and about with my SamDroid panopticon backorifice personal tracking unit, I do partake of voice search and voice input for emails once in a while and it works pretty well.
Oh, I have to tell you a funny one: My mother in law, who’s from New Zealand, bought an Apple iPhone 4s last year. I tried to teach her to use Siri.
“Ok,” I said, “Tell it to create a reminder for something that you need to do later.”
Off she went. This is how it sounded.
“Remind me to chick the riced at five thirty.”
Siri came back with something like: “Ok, reminder for chicken and rice.”
Now, instead of chicking the riced, an American, for example, might check the roast instead.
I wound up laughing so hard that I had coffee dripping out of my nose and she laughed so hard that it brought on an asthma attack. *chortle* I’d set the iPhone for Australian English, but it pretty much doesn’t work with New Zealanders.
This woman’s accent is much softer than my mother in law’s and watch what happens:
Anyway, back to our regularly scheduled programming.
Via: IT Pro Portal:
At the Google I/O conference last week, the company rolled out “OK, Google,” which is a universal version of the Siri-style of conversational interaction. But instead of being solely on the phone, it will also work on your desktop via Chrome…
I’m still concerned because if the browser can somehow open my microphone with the “OK, Google” command, when else can the browser open the mic?
More: Conversational Search Comes with Chrome Update
Research Credit: almaverdad2 and alvinroasting
May Earnings
June 3rd, 2013Total earnings in May came to $1383.31. That’s a great result.
Near the end of May, I was almost sure that Cryptogon was headed for a wide miss of the earnings goal of $1000. I mentioned this after DE made his generous $100 contribution. By the end of the month, however, you guys really seemed to pull hard with Amazon and these readers came in to show their support:
RT AU$50
Uncle Remus $50
CS GBP20
JS $20
AH $50
GB $50
Windhorse NZ$250 [!!!]
Anon BTC1.025
Thank you all very much.
Any iOS Device Can Be Compromised Within One Minute
June 3rd, 2013Via: BlackHat:
Apple iOS devices are considered by many to be more secure than other mobile offerings. In evaluating this belief, we investigated the extent to which security threats were considered when performing everyday activities such as charging a device. The results were alarming: despite the plethora of defense mechanisms in iOS, we successfully injected arbitrary software into current-generation Apple devices running the latest operating system (OS) software. All users are affected, as our approach requires neither a jailbroken device nor user interaction.
In this presentation, we demonstrate how an iOS device can be compromised within one minute of being plugged into a malicious charger. We first examine Apple’s existing security mechanisms to protect against arbitrary software installation, then describe how USB capabilities can be leveraged to bypass these defense mechanisms. To ensure persistence of the resulting infection, we show how an attacker can hide their software in the same way Apple hides its own built-in applications.
To demonstrate practical application of these vulnerabilities, we built a proof of concept malicious charger, called Mactans, using a BeagleBoard. This hardware was selected to demonstrate the ease with which innocent-looking, malicious USB chargers can be constructed. While Mactans was built with limited amount of time and a small budget, we also briefly consider what more motivated, well-funded adversaries could accomplish. Finally, we recommend ways in which users can protect themselves and suggest security features Apple could implement to make the attacks we describe substantially more difficult to pull off.
Doing the ‘Absolute Opposite’ of So-Called Green Revolution Techniques, Poorest Indian Farmers Growing Record Amounts of Food
June 2nd, 2013Via: Guardian:
What happened in Darveshpura has divided scientists and is exciting governments and development experts. Tests on the soil show it is particularly rich in silicon but the reason for the “super yields” is entirely down to a method of growing crops called System of Rice (or root) Intensification (SRI). It has dramatically increased yields with wheat, potatoes, sugar cane, yams, tomatoes, garlic, aubergine and many other crops and is being hailed as one of the most significant developments of the past 50 years for the world’s 500 million small-scale farmers and the two billion people who depend on them.
Instead of planting three-week-old rice seedlings in clumps of three or four in waterlogged fields, as rice farmers around the world traditionally do, the Darveshpura farmers carefully nurture only half as many seeds, and then transplant the young plants into fields, one by one, when much younger. Additionally, they space them at 25cm intervals in a grid pattern, keep the soil much drier and carefully weed around the plants to allow air to their roots. The premise that “less is more” was taught by Rajiv Kumar, a young Bihar state government extension worker who had been trained in turn by Anil Verma of a small Indian NGO called Pran (Preservation and Proliferation of Rural Resources and Nature), which has introduced the SRI method to hundreds of villages in the past three years.
While the “green revolution” that averted Indian famine in the 1970s relied on improved crop varieties, expensive pesticides and chemical fertilisers, SRI appears to offer a long-term, sustainable future for no extra cost. With more than one in seven of the global population going hungry and demand for rice expected to outstrip supply within 20 years, it appears to offer real hope. Even a 30% increase in the yields of the world’s small farmers would go a long way to alleviating poverty.
“Farmers use less seeds, less water and less chemicals but they get more without having to invest more. This is revolutionary,” said Dr Surendra Chaurassa from Bihar’s agriculture ministry. “I did not believe it to start with, but now I think it can potentially change the way everyone farms. I would want every state to promote it. If we get 30-40% increase in yields, that is more than enough to recommend it.”
The results in Bihar have exceeded Chaurassa’s hopes. Sudama Mahto, an agriculture officer in Nalanda, says a small investment in training a few hundred people to teach SRI methods has resulted in a 45% increase in the region’s yields. Veerapandi Arumugam, the former agriculture minister of Tamil Nadu state, hailed the system as “revolutionising” farming.
…
“It is a set of ideas, the absolute opposite to the first green revolution [of the 60s] which said that you had to change the genes and the soil nutrients to improve yields. That came at a tremendous ecological cost,” says Uphoff. “Agriculture in the 21st century must be practised differently. Land and water resources are becoming scarcer, of poorer quality, or less reliable. Climatic conditions are in many places more adverse. SRI offers millions of disadvantaged households far better opportunities. Nobody is benefiting from this except the farmers; there are no patents, royalties or licensing fees.“
More: Miracle Grow: Indian Farmers Smash Crop Yield Records Without GMOs
Submersible Structures, Habitats, & Sea-Floor Living Spaces
June 2nd, 2013I have just one question: Is a Big Daddy included?
Big Daddy from Bioshock
Via: Hardened Structures of America (.pdf):
Your H2OME comes complete with push-button fish feeders so that you and your guests can feed the fish as well as underwater lights to light up the sea floor for a limited period of time each evening.
Research Credit: Pookie
