Kim Dotcom Gets Access To FBI's Megaupload Documents - Security - Attacks/breaches Dotcom's defense campaign won a boost when a New Zealand judge refused to rubber-stamp U.S. prosecutors' request for extradition. If Department of Justice officials were hoping that extraditing the leaders of Megaupload from New Zealand to the United States would involve little more than a judge rubber-stamping their request, they were wrong. Four of the defendants in the Megaupload case--founder Kim Dotcom, along with Mathias Ortmann, Bram Van Der Kolk, and Finn Batato--had filed a motion requesting access to the evidence that prosecutors were using to make their case. The men argued that their inability to access that information made it impossible for them to contest the charges, and by extension the U.S. extradition request. New Zealand Judge David J. [ What do we know about Flame? Prosecutors' strategy in the Megaupload case suggests that they expected the extradition request to sail through. The Megaupload extradition hearing has been scheduled for August 6, 2012. More Insights
through europe Culture splits climate views, not science smarts By Dan Vergano, USA TODAY Updated 2012-05-29 12:15 PM Support for climate science doesn't increase with science literacy, a survey suggests. Rather, people with technical backgrounds just dig in harder on their views about global warming, finds the study in the Nature Climate Change journal. An iceberg floats in a bay off Ammassalik Island, Greenland, in July 2007. Overall, technically astute people are more "culturally polarized" than other folks and tend to side with the views of people in their social setting about global warming, concludes the survey of 1,540 people nationwide. Testing science literacy with questions from the National Science Foundation's annual assessment of technical knowledge, the survey also collected cultural viewpoints from people in the study. A great deal of climate science evidence supports the conclusion that global warming has occurred in the last century, driven by greenhouse gasses released by burning fossil fuels, as documented by the U.S.
Running Along the Disaster: A Conversation with Franco “Bifo” Berardi LaborinArt Önder Özengi & Pelin Tan (LaborinArt): You wanted to speak about the European crisis, especially its effect on the Mediterranean, the Near East, and the Middle East. What does the collapse of social welfare mean for these territories and countries? Franco “Bifo” Berardi (FBB): After May 25, we must be able to say that the “European experiment” is over. The financial system has pushed the EU into the abyss, provoking the resurgence of French nationalism: the EU is now a dead man walking. Istubalz, Untitled, 2014. LiA: Europe is heterogeneously filled with migrant workers and refugee labor economies. FBB: In general, European politics is now polarized between financial capitalism and the resurgence of nationalism. Society has been crushed, precarized, impoverished. Hewsel, Diyarbakır, March 2014. LiA: Are there new forms of resistance coming out of these new movements? FBB: Resistance is futile, as the mutation is transforming everything in the deep fabric of subjectivity.
After the Quilligan Seminars The School of Commoning recently coordinated a series of 12 seminars on the commons, hosted in London by the renowned commons theorist James B. Quilligan. Here George Pór and Quilligan share some thoughts on what happened during this unique event, and where next for the commons community. After the Quilligan Seminars: how to bring the Commons alive in our life and work - George Pór The London Seminars: Emergence of a Commons-Based Economy - James Quilligan 28th May 2012 After the Quilligan Seminars: how to bring the Commons alive in our life and work 24th May 2012 - By George Pór, The School of Commoning James Quilligan conducted a 12-day seminar series on the Commons, in London, May 2012. Quilligan emphasized that the “commons are not just resources but the set of relationships they create, including the communities that use them, and the cultural and social practices and property regimes that manage them. "I thought that was very really inspirational. Link to original source
Consigli per riconoscere la destra sotto qualunque maschera | Giap [Un montaggio di cose scritte (non solo da noi WM) in diversi post e interviste, utile a riprendere e mostrare il filo della questione. Prendetelo come il nostro contributo alla fine della campagna elettorale più brutta e angosciante dal 1946 a oggi. I link alle fonti sono nei “cancelletti”. # Le categorie di «destra» e «sinistra», nate durante la Rivoluzione francese, furono date per morte già sotto il Direttorio, nel periodo 1795-1799. La divisione destra-sinistra ha basi cognitive profonde, se ne occupano anche le neuroscienze. Tagliando con l’accetta, «di sinistra» è chi pensa che la società sia costitutivamente divisa, perché al suo interno giocano sempre interessi contrapposti, prodotti da contraddizioni intrinseche. Non c’è dubbio che nell’Italia di oggi il discorso egemone, anche tra persone che si pensano e dichiarano di sinistra, sia quello di destra. Dietro questo punto di vista, che è molto diffuso, c’è una buona dose di mistificazione. Osserva Salvemini:
Technology - Rebecca J. Rosen - How to Get Yourself Noticed on Twitter ... by Homeland Security According to a document released by the Department of Homeland Security and posted to Scribd by Huffington Post reporter Andrea Stone, words and phrases ranging from "nuclear" to "ice" are used as search terms by DHS to detect potentially dangerous incidents, such as acts of terrorism, extreme weather, traffic accidents, and hazardous spills. The terms come from a 2011 binder that guides DHS analysts working on the agency's "Media Monitoring Capability Mission" (MMC), DHS's effort to cull clues from open sources -- such as Twitter, media reports, and news stories -- to develop what it calls "situational awareness." The binder instructs analysts not to include "Personally Indentifiable Information" (PII) -- information that could point to a specific individual source -- in their incident reports: "Before sending out ANY reports ... analysts must ensure that if there is any PII included in a media article, that information must be removed, due to privacy issues!" Here's the complete list:
Fracking boom spurs environmental audit Les Stone/REUTERS A gas flare burns at a fracking site in Bradford County, Pennsylvania. For Ohio, a Midwestern state hit hard by recession, the promise of an energy boom driven by hydraulic fracturing, or ‘fracking’, would seem to be a sure route to financial health. Far less certain is whether the technique has an impact on human health. In a nod to those concerns, Ohio’s legislature passed a bill on 24 May, awaiting signing by the state governor as Nature went to press, that requires companies to disclose the chemicals they use during the fracking process and during the construction and servicing of the wells. “There is a real lack of data,” says John Balbus, senior adviser on public health at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland, who spoke at a workshop organized by the Institute of Medicine in Washington DC last month to discuss research strategies for studying the health impacts of gas extraction. His case survey, published in January (R.
Anarchists attack science Investigations of the shooting of nuclear-engineering head Roberto Adinolfi have confirmed the involvement of an eco-anarchist group. A loose coalition of eco-anarchist groups is increasingly launching violent attacks on scientists. A group calling itself the Olga Cell of the Informal Anarchist Federation International Revolutionary Front has claimed responsibility for the non-fatal shooting of a nuclear-engineering executive on 7 May in Genoa, Italy. The same group sent a letter bomb to a Swiss pro-nuclear lobby group in 2011; attempted to bomb IBM’s nanotechnology laboratory in Switzerland in 2010; and has ties with a group responsible for at least four bomb attacks on nanotechnology facilities in Mexico. Security authorities say that such eco-anarchist groups are forging stronger links. “Science in centuries past promised us a golden age, but it is pushing us towards self-destruction and total slavery,” the letter continues. “These people do not represent mainstream opinion.
Let's mine asteroids — for science and profit Two events in quick succession have transformed the prospects for commercial space activities: the successful rendezvous last week of California-based SpaceX's privately developed Dragon capsule with the International Space Station; and the bold announcement last month of a new asteroid-mining company, Planetary Resources in Bellevue, Washington, backed by deep-pocketed billionaires. Trawling space for valuable resources may seem an unlikely concept, especially when discussed in the pages of this serious journal, but suspend your disbelief for a moment. We scientists should take the idea seriously, for it could offer two benefits: a burgeoning of planetary sciences, including the discovery of exotic new cosmic materials, and much cheaper space missions to explore the Solar System and the distant Universe. And government agencies, not least NASA, should pay attention too. Asteroids are directly useful in a wide variety of sciences. “Greed is a powerful motivator to get things done.”
Anonymous targets Montreal Grand Prix to back students The global group of computer hackers known as Anonymous threw its support behind Quebec students protesting hikes in tuition fees by threatening to disrupt the Montreal Grand Prix. The activists, who earlier this month claimed responsibility for downing a dozen Quebec government websites, blasted organizers for intending to run the race in the Canadian province that recently passed an emergency law restricting protests. Special Law 78, it said, has been "universally condemned by human rights watchers around the world as tyrannical, draconian -- and (has left) Quebec in clear violation of its basic human rights obligations." "Beginning on June 7th and running through race day on June 10th, Anonymous will take down all the F1 websites, dump the servers and databases -- and wreck anything else F1-related we can find on the Internet," said a statement. Special Law 78 was passed on May 18 in an effort to quell the unrest, but has only served to galvanize opposition to the government.