Hackers Attack US Water Supply?

11/18/2011

Washington Post

Foreign hackers targeted U.S. water plant in apparent malicious cyber attack, expert says

By Ellen Nakashima

Foreign hackers caused a pump at an Illinois water plant to fail last week, according to a preliminary state report. Experts said the cyber-attack, if confirmed, would be the first known to have damaged one of the systems that supply Americans with water, electricity and other essentials of modern life.

Companies and government agencies that rely on the Internet have for years been routine targets of hackers, but most incidents have resulted from attempts to steal information or interrupt the functioning of Web sites. The incident in Springfield, Ill., would mark a departure because it apparently caused physical destruction.

Federal officials confirmed that the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security were investigating damage to the water plant but cautioned against concluding that it was necessarily a cyber-attack before all the facts could be learned. “At this time there is no credible corroborated data that indicates a risk to critical infrastructure entities or a threat to public safety,” said DHS spokesman Peter Boogaard.

News of the incident became public after Joe Weiss, an industry security expert, obtained a report dated Nov. 10 and collected by an Illinois state intelligence center that monitors security threats. The original source of the information was unknown and impossible to immediately verify.

The report, which Weiss read to The Washington Post, describes how a series of minor glitches with a water pump gradually escalated to the point where the pump motor was being turned on and off frequently. It soon burned out, according to the report.

The report blamed the damage on the actions of somebody using a computer registered to an Internet address in Russia. “It is believed that hackers had acquired unauthorized access to the software company’s database” and used this information to penetrate the control system for the water pump.

Experts cautioned that it is difficult to trace the origin of a cyber-attack, and that false addresses often are used to confuse investigations. Yet they also agreed that the incident was a major new development in cyber-security.

“This is a big deal,” said Weiss. “It was tracked to Russia. It has been in the system for at least two to three months. It has caused damage. We don’t know how many other utilities are currently compromised.”

Dave Marcus, director of security research for McAfee Labs, said that the computers that control critical systems in the United States are vulnerable to attacks that come through the Internet, and few operators of these systems know how to detect or defeat these threats. “So many are ill-prepared for cyber-attacks,” Marcus said.

The Illinois report said that hackers broke into a software company’s database and retrieved user names and passwords of control systems that run water plant computer equipment. Using that data, they were able to hack into the plant in Illinois, Weiss said.

Senior U.S. officials have recently raised warnings about the risk of destructive cyber-attacks on critical infrastructure. One of the few documented cases of such an attack resulted from a virus, Stuxnet, that caused centrifuges in an Iranian uranium enrichment facility to spin out of control last year. Many computer security experts have speculated that Stuxnet was created by Israel — perhaps with U.S. help — as a way to check Iran’s nuclear program.

cyber

Could the Net be killing the planet one web search at a time?


By Alex Roslin
For Postmedia News
June 3, 2011






It's Saturday night, and you want to catch the latest summer blockbuster. You do a quick Google search to find the venue and right time, and off you go to enjoy some mindless fun.

Meanwhile, your Internet search has just helped kill the planet. Depending on how long you took and what sites you visited, your search caused the emission of one to 10 grams of carbon into the atmosphere, contributing to global warming.

Sure, it's not a lot on its own — but add up all of the more than one billion daily Google searches, throw in 60 million Facebook status updates each day, 50 million daily tweets and 250 billion emails per day, and you're making a serious dent in some Greenland glaciers.

The Internet has long promised a more efficient and greener world. We save on paper and mailing by sending an email. We can telecommute instead of driving to work. We can have a meeting by teleconference instead of flying to another city.

Ironically, despite the web's green promise, this explosion of data has turned the Internet into one of the planet's fastest-growing sources of carbon emissions. The Internet now consumes two to three per cent of the world's electricity.

If the Internet was a country, it would be the planet's fifth-biggest consumer of power, ahead of India and Germany. The Internet's power needs now rival those of the aviation industry and are expected to nearly double by 2020.

"The Internet pollutes, but people don't understand why it pollutes. It's very, very power-hungry, and we have to reduce its carbon footprint," said Mohamed Cheriet, a green IT expert and professor in the engineering and automation department at Montreal's Ecole de Technologie Superieure (ETS).

The bulk of all this energy is gobbled up by a fast-growing network of huge "server farms" or data centres that form the backbone of the Internet. They are hush-hush facilities, some the size of five Wal-Marts, packed from floor to ceiling with tens of thousands of computers.

These are the computers that make the Internet run — routing traffic and storing much of those ever-expanding heaps of data.

Say you do a Google search. Your query kicks into action about 1,000 servers at various Google data centres. Those computers scan billions of web pages already in Google's archives and spit out an answer.

Total time elapsed: 0.2 seconds on average. Meanwhile, Google's data centres are also constantly combing the Internet to update their archives of web pages.

All those computers have a voracious appetite for energy, especially for cooling equipment to prevent overheating.

Apple's 46,000-square-metre iDataCenter is set to open in North Carolina this spring with a price tag of $1 billion U.S.. It will use an estimated 100 megawatts of power — as much as about 100,000 Canadian homes.

Apple's mega-facility is part of a cluster of gigantic new data centres coming on line in North Carolina that are powered largely by cheap and highly polluting coal power. Google has a 44,000-square-metre data centre in the state that eventually will consume an estimated 60 to 100 MW. Facebook has a 28,000-square-metre facility under construction there that will eat up 40 MW.

Greenpeace calls the three facilities "North Carolina's dirty data triangle." Coal, it says, is the most polluting of all fossil fuels and the world's single largest source of greenhouse gas emissions.

"The technologies of the 21st century are still largely powered by the dirty coal power of the past," the environmental group said in a report card on the IT sector in April, titled How Dirty is Your Power?

"People are pretty concerned about it," David Kessler, a Greenpeace spokesman in San Francisco.

In Lenoir, North Carolina, Google's $600-million, super-sized data centre offers employees the kind of unusual perks that were the hallmark of the high-flying dot-com era.

But Google chose Lenoir for more than just some nice handouts. It also wanted cheap electricity for those power-hungry servers.

North Carolina offers industrial customers one of the lowest electricity rates in the U.S. — 5.8 cents per kilowatt hour, versus the U.S. average of 6.7 cents.

It just so happens that the state's electricity is also some of the dirtiest in the country. Nearly two-thirds of the state's electricity comes from coal.

The IT industry is now responding by starting to improve the energy efficiency of its data centres.

But that's not enough, said Bill St. Arnaud, an engineer and green IT consultant in Ottawa. The Internet is growing so fast, he said, it's overtaking such efficiency gains. Besides, efficiency improvements alone won't wean the IT industry from using inexpensive and polluting coal, he said.

The real solution, he said, is for governments to impose measures like carbon taxes and emissions caps that make dirty energy less attractive financially.

"The planet is warming up, and it's going to get very bad. We need a price on carbon. It's the only way to get people to move off coal because coal is currently so cheap," he said.

"We have to move from this fossil fuel fiesta to a smarter economy."

Some seeking to reduce the Internet's carbon footprint point to a homegrown solution: the GreenStar Network.

GreenStar, which is based at Montreal's ETS, is an alternative Internet that runs on small data centres powered solely by cleaner renewable energy, like wind, solar and hydroelectric power.

GreenStar is growing quickly because of the huge worldwide demand for green IT, St. Arnaud said. Since being launched last fall with a core of five green data centres in Canada, the network has expanded to include 15 other data centres in Europe and the U.S., mostly at universities and a few small industrial partners. Others are planned for China and Africa.

"Our biggest problem is meeting demand. We've demonstrated that we can build an Internet that's as reliable as the normal Internet, but without using dirty energy," St. Arnaud said.

The province says the market for green IT will be worth $600 billion annually worldwide by 2013.













internet

China: Sinister by any name

We can attribute stealing passwords to those Nigerian 419 Scams - come save me, I'm stuck in.  Or perhaps it is the 'you just won a billion dollars in a lotto your great grandfathers 3rd cousin bought a ticket for you to play, and you did, and won' ... but those attempts are stupid.  While they suck away money from people who are neither bright nor deserving of whatever money they have, these sorts of attacks and others emanating from Russia, are far more sinister and dangerous.

Christopher McNally, a fellow and political economist stated that “a lot of this goes on internationally," and  “in most situations, it’s certain rogue organizations or even individuals that are doing it for profit.”   In China one does not access the internet unless the government has approved you to own a mouse and a computer, an apartment to live in from which to access the internet.  You must be extra special to access the internet from your abode, and to access the real WWW and not the WWW the Chinese government created for their educated masses, requires you to be among the elite - and from all of these people, all 50,000 of the billion possible, maybe 2,000 have the technical expertise to hack and they all work for the Chinese government.









Google Suspects China in Passwords Incident



By Douglas MacMillan and Brian Womack
Jun 1, 2011


Google Inc. (GOOG), owner of the world’s most popular search engine, said hackers tried to steal passwords from hundreds of Gmail users, targeting the accounts of government officials in the U.S. and Asia.

The campaign, which appears to have originated in Jinan, China, probably used a so-called phishing scam to collect passwords with the goal of monitoring e-mail content, Eric Grosse, engineering director on the Google Security Team, said in a blog post today. The company said it detected and disrupted the campaign, secured users’ accounts and notified authorities.

“We believe that being open about these security issues helps users better protect their information online,” Grosse said on the blog.

The campaign against Gmail users comes amid growing concern about network security, prompted by recent cyber attacks against Sony Corp. and Lockheed Martin Corp. Google said last year it was the victim of attacks against its systems that originated in China and focused on human-rights activists’ accounts. Google said it was no longer willing to censor search results in China, and then started redirecting users there to its Hong Kong service.

“A lot of this goes on internationally,” said Christopher McNally, a fellow and political economist at the East-West Center in Honolulu. “In most situations, it’s certain rogue organizations or even individuals that are doing it for profit.”

In the recent case, Google’s internal systems weren’t affected, and the attempts didn’t involve a security problem with Gmail, Grosse said.

Tricking Users

Phishing scams typically involve tricking users into sharing passwords that can then be used to obtain information. While most of these kinds of attacks aren’t very targeted, these “hijackings” went after senior U.S. government officials, Chinese political activists, officials in several Asian countries, military personnel and journalists.

Users should protect themselves by adopting such safeguards as multistep verifications for their accounts, strong passwords and checking for suspicious forwarding addresses, Grosse said.

Google, based in Mountain View, California, fell $3.42 to $525.60 at 4 p.m. New York time on the Nasdaq Stock Market. The shares have declined 12 percent this year.










Cina

Hero to us all: Someone we all wish worked for us

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

DHS (ICE) Seize Website Domain Names

One question might be - if Congress is considering an act authorizing action on internet infringement, I have to wonder, by what authority are they seizing these sites (I am sure there must be authority or they would not do it).




Homeland Security seizes domain names


The Hill
By Sara Jerome - 11/26/10 04:25 PM ET



The investigative arm of the Homeland Security Department appears to be shutting down websites that facilitate copyright infringement.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has seized dozens of domain names over the past few days, according to TorrentFreak.

ICE appears to be targeting sites that help Internet users download copyrighted music, as well as sites that sell bootleg goods, such as fake designer handbags.

The sites are replaced with a note from the government: "This domain named has been seized by ICE, Homeland Security Investigations."

For instance, 2009jersey.com, 51607.com, and amoyhy.com have each been seized.

One of the site owners told TorrentFreak that his site was shut down without any notice or warning.

The effort come as Congress considers the Combatting Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA). Critics, including Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) say it is too heavy-handed. He has vowed to put a formal hold on the bill.








 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
internet

Small Win: FCC Does NOT have authority to regulate internet.

Court: FCC has no power to regulate Net neutrality


April 6, 2010 8:15 AM PDT

by Declan McCullagh
CNET


The Federal Communications Commission does not have the legal authority to slap Net neutrality regulations on Internet providers, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday.

A three-judge panel in Washington, D.C. unanimously tossed out the FCC's August 2008 cease and desist order against Comcast, which had taken measures to slow BitTorrent transfers before voluntarily ending them earlier that year.

Because the FCC "has failed to tie its assertion" of regulatory authority to an actual law enacted by Congress, the agency does not have the power to regulate an Internet provider's network management practices, wrote Judge David Tatel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

Tuesday's decision could doom one of the signature initiatives of FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, a Democrat. Last October, Genachowski announced plans to begin drafting a formal set of Net neutrality rules--even though Congress has not given the agency permission to do so. That push is opposed by Verizon and other broadband providers.

"Our primary goal was always to clear our name and reputation," Comcast said in a statement. "We have always been focused on serving our customers and delivering the quality open-Internet experience consumers want."

Net neutrality proponents responded to Tuesday's ruling by saying the FCC should slap landline-style regulations on Internet providers, which could involve price regulation, service quality controls, and technological mandates. The agency "should immediately start a proceeding bringing Internet access service back under some common carrier regulation," Public Knowledge's Gigi Sohn said. The Media Access Project said, without mentioning common carrier regulations directly, that the FCC must have the "ability to protect the rights of Internet users to access lawful content and services of their choice."

In a statement on Tuesday, the FCC indicated that it was thinking along the same lines. The DC Circuit did not "close the door to other methods for achieving this important end," the agency said. A spokeswoman declined to elaborate.

Early reaction on Capitol Hill cleaved along party lines. Kay Bailey Hutchison, the Texas senator and senior Republican on the Senate Commerce Committee, said: "It would be wrong to double down on excessive and burdensome regulations, and I hope the FCC chairman will now reconsider his decision to pursue expanded commission authority over broadband services."

But Rep. Ed Markey, the Massachusetts Democrat who had drafted one of the unsuccessful Net neutrality bills, said: "I encourage the (FCC) to take any actions necessary to ensure that consumers and competition are protected on the Internet." Markey noted that he reintroduced similar legislation last summer -- it's been stuck in a House subcommittee even though House Speaker Nancy Pelosi once said there was an urgent need to enact it.

The FCC had known all along that it was on shaky legal ground. Its vote to take action against Comcast was a narrow 3-2, with the dissenting commissioners predicting at the time that it would not hold up in court. FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell, a Republican, said at the time that the FCC's ruling was unlawful and the lack of legal authority "is sure to doom this order on appeal."

The ruling also is likely to shift the debate to whether Congress will choose to explicitly grant the FCC the authority to regulate companies' network management practices. It will also likely revive lobbying coalitions that have been defunct for the last few years.

In 2006, Congress rejected five bills, backed by groups including Google, Amazon.com, Free Press, and Public Knowledge, that would have handed the FCC the power to police Net neutrality violations. Even though the Democrats have enjoyed a majority on Capitol Hill since 2007, the political leadership has shown little interest in resuscitating those proposals.

"We must decide whether the Federal Communications Commission has authority to regulate an Internet service provider's network management practices," Tatel wrote in his 36-page opinion. "The Commission may exercise this 'ancillary' authority only if it demonstrates that its action--here barring Comcast from interfering with its customers' use of peer-to-peer networking applications--is 'reasonably ancillary to the...effective performance of its statutorily mandated responsibilities.'"

In August 2005, the FCC adopted a set of principles saying "consumers are entitled to run applications and use services of their choice." But the principles also permit providers' "reasonable network management" and, confusingly, the FCC admitted on the day of their adoption that the guidelines "are not enforceable."

The FCC's 2008 vote to punish Comcast stems from a request from Free Press and its political allies, including some Yale, Harvard, and Stanford law school faculty.

This is not the first time that the FCC has been rebuked for enacting regulations without any actual legal authority to do so. In 2005, the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled the agency did not have the authority to draft its so-called broadcast flag rule. And a federal appeals court in Pennsylvania ruled in the Janet Jackson nipple exposure incident that the FCC's sanctions against CBS--which publishes CNET News--amounted to an "arbitrary and capricious change of policy."

Update at 9:15 a.m. PDT: History and more details added.

Update at 11:21 a.m. PDT: More reactions, including Comcast statement, added.

Update 11:25 a.m. PDT: Here's e-mail I received from Sam Feder, a former FCC general counsel who's now a partner at the Jenner and Block law firm in Washington: "There are no great paths forward. The court decision is not broad enough to have a good shot at overturning it in the Supreme Court, and for the same reason, it is unlikely to prod Congress into enacting legislation. Reclassifying broadband under Title II -- a path advocated by some public interest groups -- might provide a more sound legal basis for moving forward, but the politics of that move are awful. The ISPs would fight tooth and nail to avoid reclassification, and the public interest groups are unlikely to be happy unless reclassification is accompanied by significant regulation. In the end, that move makes nobody happy. I think the best path forward is to try to articulate different grounds for exercising ancillary jurisdiction, a path the court left open, and then taking your chances in court. I give that path a 50-50 shot at success."

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
internet

Al Gore's Internet Just Went Global

US relinquishes control of the internet




Bobbie Johnson in San Francisco
guardian.co.uk

Wednesday 30 September 2009




After complaints about American dominance of the internet and growing disquiet in some parts of the world, Washington has said it will relinquish some control over the way the network is run and allow foreign governments more of a say in the future of the system.


Icann – the official body that ultimately controls the development of the internet thanks to its oversight of web addresses such as .com, .net and .org – said today that it was ending its agreement with the US government.


The deal, part of a contract negotiated with the US department of commerce, effectively pushes California-based Icann towards a new status as an international body with greater representation from companies and governments around the globe.


Icann had previously been operating under the auspices of the American government, which had control of the net thanks to its initial role in developing the underlying technologies used for connecting computers together.


But the fresh focus will give other countries a more prominent role in determining what takes place online, and even the way in which it happens – opening the door for a virtual United Nations, where many officials gather to discuss potential changes to the internet.


Icann chief Rod Beckstrom, a former Silicon Valley entrepreneur and Washington insider who took over running the organisation in July, said there had been legitimate concerns that some countries were developing alternative internets as a way of routing around American control.


"It's rumoured that there are multiple experiments going on with countries forking the internet, various countries have discussed this," he said. "This is a very significant shift because it takes the wind out of our opponents."


He added that the changes would prove powerful when combined with upcoming plans to allow web users to use addresses with names in Chinese, Arabic or other alphabets other than Latin.



Many countries have lobbied for the shift in recent years, as the expansion of the web reaches out deeper into society and business.


While the issue reached critical mass in emerging economies such as China, it is not the only country that has lobbied for a change. Earlier this year European officials said that they did not think it was proper for America to retain so much control over the global computer network.


Viviane Reding, the EU's commissioner for information society and media, said she was pleased that Washington chose to make the shift.


"I welcome the US administration's decision to adapt Icann's key role in internet governance to the reality of the 21st century," she said. "If effectively and transparently implemented, this reform can find broad acceptance among civil society, businesses and governments alike."


Meanwhile Nominet - the British organisation that handles the day-to-day running of .uk domain names - said that Icann had started a trend for companies with internet influence to appear more open and accountable.


"Putting public interest first will also be a focus for the UK internet community over the coming months as there is growing support for Nominet to develop more of a public interest role," said Nominet's chief executive, Lesley Cowley.


The new agreement comes into force immediately. It replaces the old version which had been in place since 1998 and was scheduled to expire today.


Beckstrom suggested that bringing more countries to the table was the best way of ensuring the long term future of the internet.


"We're more global, period. The chances of the internet holding together just went up, the cohesion just went up," he said. "We expect more active involvement from governments, a higher level of participation from many governments and we're already hearing about more governments joining the team… This was, ironically, a power move from the US."

**********************************

A good thing?



From PC World, June 27, 2009

[...]

Axel Pawlik, managing director of European RIR, RIPE NCC, told Techworld that there was no cohesion between the EU call and the RIRs' position. "We didn't confer with each other, we seen several ideas from the EU, some of which that we thought we were good, but there's no question of this being coordinated in any way.

Pawlik stressed that all the RIRs -- including the north American registry, ARIN, were in full agreement on this issue. He also made it plain that the RIRs had no complaints about the way that ICANN was run, merely the problems that Internet governance structure caused.
"It's purely a political issue," he said. "We have an excellent opinion of ICANN based on the way that it runs things, but it's the political dimension can cause problems," he said.

[Which translates - we don't like the US government having control.]


The RIRs said that the existing Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) should be given great power. "It's purely advisory at the moment," said Pawlik, "there are some countries -- notably China -- that don't get involved but the GAC could be taken more seriously, giving stakeholders a greater say." He also said that European Commissioner Reding's idea of a G-12 for Internet governance was an interesting idea "but we'd still be arguing as to who the 12 countries would be in 50 years' time."


[The desired goal - a G12 of internet countries - say with China, Russia, UK, US ... you know, all the countries on the Security Council, and they will determine the content, what will be allowed, what will not be allowed, what will be against the laws of the world and ... ]

























internet

Al Gore's Internet

On occasion I give thanks to Al Gore for inventing the Internet. We have reaped the benefit many times over, and were it not for him, we would still be writing letters, making phone calls to friends, watching network news on television, and reading news in the newspapers. The Internet has inextricably changed us. I give thanks that I no longer need to sit with my family to watch the news or write tiresome letters to friends and family - now I sit alone in a room, send emails and look at news stories online. So much easier, more streamlined - and best of all no dirty hands from reading the newspapers.

The blog - a derivative of having web pages, made it easy to keep online journals, tell friends what it is you are doing at any given moment, link your favorite things so everyone can see them, and best of all, you don't have to actually see anyone - you can send it into the ether and someone in Nepal will read it.

Mr. Gore probably never realized what it was he had invented way back in the day. Today we know. Now we have Twitter, where everyone can, minute by minute, tell us what they are doing. The world's news is but a click away and not old news like on the news pages of the Internet, now this news is seconds old, by people at the place, doing the deed.

Now we can know within seconds of an event occurring anywhere in the world, and some of us have twitter send us updates on specific interests - wherever we are, whatever we are doing (eating, sleeping, potty breaks, sex) we can keep abreast of the latest events. And not to forget about those of us who don't care about events, we just want to keep in touch with friends - we can stay in touch with every friend we have and know virtually to the second what they are doing or thinking. How cool is that! Whether they are eating or sleeping or heading to the bathroom, we can know - and we can know what they think of whatever it is they are doing.

I do have a question and this has been raised before - back in the dinosaur days of CNN starting up - if we have become addicted to knowing and getting the latest, this second, this nanosecond of news and details ... what happens when we ask someone a question - say, will you marry me, and they have to think about it for a few days. What will that do to our ability to function.

There was a reason we didn't want to call our friends all the time. There was a reason we didn't want to know what our family was doing - many many many of us are borderline morons. I could care less what 80% of the masses have to say on anything. Nor do I ever want to know what you think about anything, if I did, I would most likely explain to you what your opinion should be and then we would both be happier, and wiser.

A recent study came up with a startling revelation concerning twitter (and us):


Forty percent of the messages on Twitter are "pointless babble" along the lines of "I am eating a sandwich now," according to a study conducted by a US market research firm.



Pointless babble. How revelatory, and very representative of virtually everything that has oozed out of Al Gore's mouth for the last 20 years.




[And before you go on to expplain how Gore didn't invent the internet, he was misunderstood, that he was not clear, and it was unfair to continue this misstatement - I would remind you of eight years of liberals, and their misquoting Bush / taking out of context / lying about what he said, or did not say, and then perpetuating that lie years later.]


















babble

Twitter: Immoral say scientists

Twitter can make you immoral, claim scientists


By Jenny Hope

14th April 2009
Daily Mail




Social networks such as Twitter may blunt people's sense of morality, claim brain scientists.
New evidence shows the digital torrent of information from networking sites could have long-term damaging effects on the emotional development of young people's brains.

A study suggests rapid-fire news updates and instant social interaction are too fast for the 'moral compass' of the brain to process.

The danger is that heavy Twitters and Facebook users could become 'indifferent to human suffering' because they never get time to reflect and fully experience emotions about other people's feelings.

US scientists from the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California (USC) say the brain can respond in fractions of seconds to signs of physical pain in others.


But they show it takes longer to activate processing of social emotions such as admiration and compassion, which are critical for developing a sense of morality.

The study raises questions about the emotional cost of heavy reliance on a rapid stream of news snippets obtained through television, online feeds or social networks such as Twitter.

The impact could be most damaging for youngsters whose brains are still developing.


USC researcher Mary Helen Immordino-Yang said 'For some kinds of thought, especially moral decision-making about other people's social and psychological situations, we need to allow for adequate time and reflection.









[To read the rest of the article, click on the title link.]

























USC

RIAA - ISPs Must Keep ALL DATA FOREVER or until we tell them

And you all were afraid of Bush ...





February 23rd, 2009

Senators cry 'child abuse' as they seek to dismantle the Net

Posted by Richard Koman @ February 23, 2009 @ 10:11 AM

Is the “Internet SAFETY Act” (otherwise known as S.436 and HR.1076 reallyabout stopping online child abuse? Or is it a way to give copyright holders what they have long been crying for: a legal requirement that ISPs retain user data forever?

Tamils on the Net

Sri Lankan troops seize Tigers camps: military

January 23, 2009

COLOMBO (AFP) — Sri Lankan security forces captured two Tamil Tiger guerrilla camps after heavy fighting in the island's northeast, the military said Saturday.

Government forces have been steadily advancing into the remaining territory held by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in the coastal district of Mullaittivu.

"Sri Lanka army Task Force Four operating in the Puthukkudiriruppu south yesterday captured two LTTE camps located in the area," a military statement said.

The military did not say if troops had suffered any casualties in the latest fighting.
Sri Lanka's army has said it hopes to crush remaining rebel resistance by April.

The Tigers have not commented on the fighting, but the pro-rebel Tamilnet.com website had accused the military of shelling civilians trapped inside rebel-held areas.





Tamils

Google NOT the Government

Some people have nightmares of our government spying on them, intruding in to their personal lives ... they fear the patriot act and any other act. They protest this administration and every action it takes to save their lives, yet these same simple people go on about their business while private industry violate their privacy rights in a far more intrusive manner than any governmental organization ever could without some oversight and authorization.

You want something to fear - fear the internet, fear private industry that has NO restrictions or impediments on it.

Google makes health service publicly available
Monday May 19, 10:24 pm ET By Rachel Metz, AP Business Writer

Google makes public service that gives consumers electronic medical record access

NEW YORK (AP) -- Google's online filing cabinet for medical records opened to the public Monday, giving users instant electronic access to their health histories while reigniting privacy concerns.
Called Google Health, the service lets users link information from a handful of pharmacies and care providers, including Quest Diagnostics labs. Google plans to add more.

The Internet that Gore Built

To see the internet, click.

Coming soon, to a computer near you

Let them do their darndest to destroy and attack the internet ... a replacement is at hand.


By the way, will Gore also take credit for this?




The Sunday Times, London
April 6, 2008

Coming soon: superfast internet

Jonathan Leake, Science Editor

THE internet could soon be made obsolete. The scientists who pioneered it have now built a lightning-fast replacement capable of downloading entire feature films within seconds.
At speeds about 10,000 times faster than a typical broadband connection, “the grid” will be able to send the entire Rolling Stones back catalogue from Britain to Japan in less than two seconds.
The latest spin-off from Cern, the particle physics centre that created the web, the grid could also provide the kind of power needed to transmit holographic images; allow instant online gaming with hundreds of thousands of players; and offer high-definition video telephony for the price of a local call.

David Britton, professor of physics at Glasgow University and a leading figure in the grid project, believes grid technologies could “revolutionise” society. “With this kind of computing power, future generations will have the ability to collaborate and communicate in ways older people like me cannot even imagine,” he said.

The power of the grid will become apparent this summer after what scientists at Cern have termed their “red button” day - the switching-on of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the new particle accelerator built to probe the origin of the universe. The grid will be activated at the same time to capture the data it generates.

Cern, based near Geneva, started the grid computing project seven years ago when researchers realised the LHC would generate annual data equivalent to 56m CDs - enough to make a stack 40 miles high.

This meant that scientists at Cern - where Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the web in 1989 - would no longer be able to use his creation for fear of causing a global collapse.

This is because the internet has evolved by linking together a hotchpotch of cables and routing equipment, much of which was originally designed for telephone calls and therefore lacks the capacity for high-speed data transmission.

By contrast, the grid has been built with dedicated fibre optic cables and modern routing centres, meaning there are no outdated components to slow the deluge of data. The 55,000 servers already installed are expected to rise to 200,000 within the next two years.

Professor Tony Doyle, technical director of the grid project, said: “We need so much processing power, there would even be an issue about getting enough electricity to run the computers if they were all at Cern. The only answer was a new network powerful enough to send the data instantly to research centres in other countries.”

That network, in effect a parallel internet, is now built, using fibre optic cables that run from Cern to 11 centres in the United States, Canada, the Far East, Europe and around the world.
One terminates at the Rutherford Appleton laboratory at Harwell in Oxfordshire.

From each centre, further connections radiate out to a host of other research institutions using existing high-speed academic networks.

It means Britain alone has 8,000 servers on the grid system – so that any student or academic will theoretically be able to hook up to the grid rather than the internet from this autumn.

Ian Bird, project leader for Cern’s high-speed computing project, said grid technology could make the internet so fast that people would stop using desktop computers to store information and entrust it all to the internet.

“It will lead to what’s known as cloud computing, where people keep all their information online and access it from anywhere,” he said.

Computers on the grid can also transmit data at lightning speed. This will allow researchers facing heavy processing tasks to call on the assistance of thousands of other computers around the world. The aim is to eliminate the dreaded “frozen screen” experienced by internet users who ask their machine to handle too much information.

The real goal of the grid is, however, to work with the LHC in tracking down nature’s most elusive particle, the Higgs boson. Predicted in theory but never yet found, the Higgs is supposed to be what gives matter mass.

The LHC has been designed to hunt out this particle - but even at optimum performance it will generate only a few thousand of the particles a year. Analysing the mountain of data will be such a large task that it will keep even the grid’s huge capacity busy for years to come.

Although the grid itself is unlikely to be directly available to domestic internet users, many telecoms providers and businesses are already introducing its pioneering technologies. One of the most potent is so-called dynamic switching, which creates a dedicated channel for internet users trying to download large volumes of data such as films. In theory this would give a standard desktop computer the ability to download a movie in five seconds rather than the current three hours or so.

Additionally, the grid is being made available to dozens of other academic researchers including astronomers and molecular biologists.

It has already been used to help design new drugs against malaria, the mosquito-borne disease that kills 1m people worldwide each year. Researchers used the grid to analyse 140m compounds - a task that would have taken a standard internet-linked PC 420 years.

“Projects like the grid will bring huge changes in business and society as well as science,” Doyle said.

“Holographic video conferencing is not that far away. Online gaming could evolve to include many thousands of people, and social networking could become the main way we communicate.
“The history of the internet shows you cannot predict its real impacts but we know they will be huge.”

Bye Bye Goo gle

Or so says web inventor Tim Berners-Lee.

Google could be superseded using a semantic web.
March 12, 2008, TimesOnLine

Amazing technology awaits ... and so do those who will watch.

(the secret to making money on this next google-type stock - be aware)