Breaking news, latest news, and current events. David Simon | The Audacity of Despair. Alain De Botton - Religion For Atheists (Ideas at the House) How Covert Agents Infiltrate the Internet to Manipulate, Deceive, and Destroy Reputations. One of the many pressing stories that remains to be told from the Snowden archive is how western intelligence agencies are attempting to manipulate and control online discourse with extreme tactics of deception and reputation-destruction. It’s time to tell a chunk of that story, complete with the relevant documents. Over the last several weeks, I worked with NBC News to publish a series of articles about “dirty trick” tactics used by GCHQ’s previously secret unit, JTRIG (Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group). These were based on four classified GCHQ documents presented to the NSA and the other three partners in the English-speaking “Five Eyes” alliance.
Today, we at the Intercept are publishing another new JTRIG document, in full, entitled “The Art of Deception: Training for Online Covert Operations.” Other tactics aimed at individuals are listed here, under the revealing title “discredit a target”: Then there are the tactics used to destroy companies the agency targets: Global Voices · Citizen media stories from around the world. Venezuelanalysis.com | Venezuela News, Views, and Analysis. Aeon Magazine – nature, culture and ideas. SpunOut.ie / Ireland's Youth Website. INFORMATION CLEARING HOUSE. NEWS, COMMENTARY & INSIGHT.
Newsmap. The antioxidant myth is too easy to swallow | Henry Scowcroft. When the press release arrived in our inboxes, we knew what would happen next. A controversial Nobel laureate had stated, in a peer-reviewed paper he described as "among my most important work", that antioxidant supplements "may have caused more cancers than they have prevented". Even the most fad-friendly sections of the UK media were bound to cover the story. In reality, Professor James Watson – one of the DNA double-helix's founding fathers – was only restating what we at Cancer Research UK (along with many others) have been pointing out for years. Large studies have repeatedly shown that, with the possible exception of vitamin D, antioxidant supplements have negligible positive effect on healthy people, at least in terms of important things such as preventing people getting cancer or dying prematurely.
And some supplements – notably vitamins A, E and beta-carotene – even seem to slightly raise the risk of disease and early death. Ars Technica. Mac Rumors: Apple Mac iOS Rumors and News You Care About. What Apple's patents reveal about its plans. For anybody who wants to know what a company is thinking, just look at its patent portfolio. Patents are about protection: without them there's nothing to stop your rivals from copying your best ideas and making money from your hard work. If you patent your revolutionary unicorn-powered laptop and a rival copies you, you'll be able to sue them until they squeak - and possibly get their product pulled from the shelves too. Smart companies patent everything, and Apple is a smart company - so a trawl through Apple's worldwide patent applications can uncover future products.
Back in 2006, patent application 20,060,268,528 showed what was described as a "portable computing device capable of wireless communications... [that] is a media player". A few months later, Steve Jobs unveiled it: the iPhone. If you'd seen the patents Apple was filing in 2004 and 2005, the iPad wouldn't have been a big surprise either. So can you use the patent offices as crystal balls for Apple kit? The iMac touch. Unreported World.