World News(Stuff to Discuss) Free For All

[Predator24]

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Jackson Remark Prompts Knife Threat
Suspect In Bus Confrontation Arrested

POSTED: Friday, June 26, 2009
UPDATED: 3:23 pm EDT June 26, 2009



BSO
Henry Wideman
NORTH LAUDERDALE, Fla. -- The Broward Sheriff's Office said a man's comment about the death of Michael Jackson prompted a confrontation on a Broward County Transit bus Thursday evening.

James Kiernan, 60, of Coral Springs was riding the bus near Kimberly Boulevard and State Road 7 when he received a text message saying that Jackson had died. He told the other passengers on the bus about Jackson's death.

The bus driver commented, saying Jackson should have been in jail long ago, BSO said.

"The world just lost a great musical talent," Kiernan said.

For some reason, BSO said, that comment enraged another passenger, 54-year-old Henry Wideman of North Lauderdale. Police said he told Kiernan to shut up, and Kiernan said, "I can say whatever I want."

According to BSO, Wideman started yelling profanities, pulled out a 6-inch folding knife, moved toward Kiernan and threatened him as Kiernan backed away.

The bus driver told his dispatcher of the situation and pulled over near Rock Island Road and Kimberly Boulevard to wait for police.

BSO said Wideman got off the bus and went to a nearby Quick Stop, where deputies arrested him. Wideman faces a charge of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.

[Predator24]

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This week, an open letter appeared on Chinese blogs and online bulletin boards. ?Hello, internet censorship institutions of the Chinese government,? it said. ?We are the anonymous netizens. We hereby decide that from July 1 2009, we will start a full-scale global attack on all censorship systems you control.?

Beijing?s attempts to manipulate the internet would, the message predicted, ?soon be swept on to the rubbish pile of history?.

Chinese internet users, although skilled at dodging the censors, are angrier than they have ever been. The anonymous declaration of war is just one sign of the strains emerging as the global spread of internet access, and its embrace by activists of all stripes, triggers an unprecedented crackdown by national governments that threatens to transform the way hundreds of millions of people communicate.

China is trying to force censorship software on to every new personal computer, while Iran succeeded this week in virtually eliminating the spread over the internet of first-hand accounts from protests in the streets at the handling of its presidential election.

That stifling of web freedoms that many people around the world take for granted are being accompanied by more novel means of combating cyber opponents. Those methods range from directing stealthy technological attacks that shut down dissident websites to unleashing swarms of paid commentators to argue the government position on supposedly independent blogs.

Both carry the added attraction of deniability: many regimes are employing advanced repressive techniques that are hard to identify in action, let alone circumvent. At a time when new communication technologies, from text messaging to Twitter, promise to put greater power in the hands of the individual, these techniques are having a chilling effect. Internet experts from more open societies fear that this will lead to greater self-censorship by organisations and individuals, which they see as the most effective tool of all.

Even the optimists warn of setbacks. ?In the end, the winners of the race are most likely to be citizens and activists who use these technologies for democratic purposes,? says John Palfrey of Harvard University, an authority on internet filtering. But he adds: ?With respect to individual battles, the states that practise censorship and surveillance are winning some of them.?

The number of such states is in the dozens, researchers say. In Burma and Moldova, governments recently resorted to pulling the plug on mobile phone networks amid unrest magnified by text messages; in Uzbekistan, there is widespread suspicion of internet monitoring but few ways to prove it. That is despite the fact that a lot of the surveillance and security software in the hands of governments across the world comes from western suppliers. In what is by its nature among the most globalised of industries, technology companies are seeing a revenue boost from governmental interest in data mining, search and storage products, though they periodically draw fire from activists for assisting repressive states.

The most gripping evidence of the change at hand has come from Iran. The theocratic regime has been in a protracted struggle over the free flow of information and communication with many of its largely young urban populace since the day after this month?s disputed election.

STRONG-ARM TECHNIQUES

How curbs on net users work:




Internet filters
Method: Set up on the main conduits of the internet, known as backbones, these software filters block traffic from websites on a proscribed list.
Example: ?Great Firewall of China?.


Deep packet inspection
Method: A layer of software that looks to identify the content of individual pieces of information, or ?packets?. This can be used to read, store or block individual messages and connections to websites.
Example: Commercial providers including Phorm and NebuAd.


Denial of service attacks
Method: Large numbers of PCs bombard a website with requests, making it inaccessible to other users.
Example:Sites in Estonia and Georgia during conflicts with Russia.


Toeing the party line
Method: Some regimes recruit people to present their case online, sometimes paying them.
Example: ?50-cent bloggers? in China.


Self-censorship
Method: Governments bring pressure on companies to restrict access to content. Bloggers must register.
Example:MSN Spaces, Microsoft?s blogging service in China, bans phrases including ?human rights?.


Edge-of-network restrictions
Method: Censors push control to a more local level. Internet providers? terms of service make them act as agents of the state. Restrictions at the edges of the network can reach all the way to curbs installed in PCs.
Example: China?s Green Dam/Youth Escort software.

Tehran has a decided advantage in that it runs the country?s leading internet service provider. Called DCI, it throttled back the amount of bandwidth available to its citizens so that web video traffic dropped by as much as 90 per cent and e-mail leaving the country fell by nearly as much.

Data assembled by Arbor Networks, a US internet security company, show the Iranian government was picking and choosing what types of traffic to let through and which parts of the net to leave unimpeded. Just as the security forces adjusted their response to counter the changing nature of the protests on the ground, Iran?s internet police changed which sites could be reached.

F acebook and other social networks were easy to block and fell quickly. Twitter, a web-accessible broadcasting service that can process messages from mobile phones, proved harder to take down without killing off all text messaging.

Activists proved agile at hopping from one medium to another. For more than a week, outsiders would send people in Iran the addresses of ?open proxies?, computers outside the country set up to relay traffic. That way, Iranians could still reach sites they were blocked from accessing directly. But the authorities hunted down most of those proxies and cut off access. Finally, on Thursday, they killed most outgoing traffic, including Twitter blasts.

?It?s a big problem when a government is just willing to shut down communications,? says John Perry Barlow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit organisation based in San Francisco, who was helping dissidents get the word out. ?If they do that, you?re down to smoke signals.?

Iran?s response evolved rapidly, aided by filtering technology in place long before the election. No country, though, has been as thoroughly policed through as many means as China, which has long been on the cutting edge of censorship.

Now, Beijing is trying to cement its control with a decree that from July 1, all computers sold in the country must come with a program called Green Dam/Youth Escort, which the government says will be used to block access to pornography sites. Dell, Hewlett-Packard and other computer makers are protesting and have won the support of US trade officials, who are threatening to bring the matter to the World Trade Organisation.

?Green Dam will be a game-changer, if in fact it goes into effect,? says Harvard?s Mr Palfrey. ?The desktop is the last bastion of personal freedom. It would change the way people use these devices in extraordinary ways.?

Beijing has for years blocked many sites by setting up filters on the country?s largest internet backbones, using a method nicknamed the Great Firewall of China. The central government has more recently heaped additional blocking and monitoring responsibilities on to internet service providers, web companies and local censors, all of which have been upgrading the technology they use.

TRS, a Chinese supplier of internet security products, says growing numbers of police departments are replacing their traditional search engine-based efforts with state-of-the-art data mining applications, which are capable of analysing large bodies of information.

All this has its limits. ?Controlling public networks is very, very difficult,? says Tony Yuan, chief executive of Netentsec, another Chinese security provider. ?Bandwidth and traffic are huge, so normally you don?t have the computing power.?

But the latest effort by China?s central authorities takes them further still, to the PCs that stand at the edge of the network. It is not clear they will succeed. The computer makers and US government are being joined in their opposition by security researchers who have identified flaws in Green Dam that could allow third parties to take control of PCs.

Even if the blanket order is delayed, circumvented or quietly forgotten, the Chinese government has already gained access to many PCs. Earlier this year, Beijing made the bundling of Green Dam a precondition for eligibility of PCs in its subsidy programme for PC sales to rural residents. In May, it ordered all schools to install the program. ?I would estimate that we?re already looking at more than 10m computers in China with Green Dam installed,? says an executive at a Beijing internet portal company.

An estimated 300m Chinese have online access. Though the more determined among them are likely to find ways around Green Dam, many may not even try to defy the message of disapproval being sent by Beijing.

Some of the surveillance and censorship technology in Iran and China is home-grown but much of it is western. Nokia Siemens Networks, a joint venture between the two European companies, says, for example, that it was required to sell Iran equipment for monitoring phone calls as part of a contract for a communications network. Cisco has periodically come under fire for selling its routers to China but says the same equipment is used in both open and closed internet systems.

Under laws in the US and elsewhere, telecommunications companies must make it easy for law enforcement agencies to conduct authorised wiretaps ? and equipment providers say they cannot shut that capability off depending on the customer.

Collection, in fact, is no longer so much the problem: analysing the masses of data is a bigger issue, as is massaging search technology to look for more than simple keywords that alarm officials, such as ?Tibet? and ?democracy?. That technology is becoming much better ? spurred in part by the increasing global attention to cyber security. Notably, the US defence department this week approved a new military cyber command that will answer to the National Security Agency, which in recent years has been exposed for mining Americans? e-mail without warrants.

Concerns about pernicious criminal software and ?denial of service? attacks, which have shut government websites in Estonia and elsewhere with bombardments of useless data, have prompted further efforts to scrutinise internet traffic. But according to some researchers, technologies developed to counter insidious attacks such as these will only serve to advance the techniques of information control ? to the eventual detriment of future mass revolts against oppressive political forces.

?If security starts becoming job one, then a lot of things being used by repressive states will become commercialised and normalised,? says Rafal Rohozinski, a founder of the OpenNet Initiative, which tracks filtering. ?We?ll be doing the same thing as Iran, or using the same technologies. And that?s what I worry about.?

[Predator24]

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Sunday, June 28th 2009
Billy Mays Is Dead!

NOOOOO!!!! What in the fuck is going on?! It has been confirmed that infomercial superstar Billy Mays was found dead at his home in Tampa, FL this morning. 50-year-old Billy was found by his wife at around 7:45 this morning. No cause of death is known at this time, but an autopsy on Billy's body is scheduled for tomorrow. Foul play is not suspected. Billy was supposed to have his third hip replacement surgery tomorrow. Billy's wife issued this statement:

"Although Billy lived a public life, we don't anticipate making any public statements over the next couple of days. Our family asks that you respect our privacy during these difficult times."

Billy had just returned to Tampa from Philadelphia where he was filming an infomercial for OxiClean. Billy's plane had a little issues during landing. Billy Twittered yesterday: "Just had a close call landing in Tampa. The tires blew out upon landing. Stuck in the plane on the runway. You can always count on US Air."

Source

Posted by: Michael K

[Striker]

^^ I was just about to post that shit.

[Predator24]

Ok, you get the next celebrity/quiet shouter death announcement

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[Predator24]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...901608_pf.html

High Court Rules for White Firefighters in Discrimination Suit
Ruling Reverses High-Profile Decision by Supreme Court Nominee Sonia Sotomayor

By Robert Barnes
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, June 29, 2009 12:07 PM



The Supreme Court today narrowly ruled in favor of white firefighters in New Haven, Conn., who said they were denied promotions because of their race, reversing a decision by Judge Sonia Sotomayor and others that had come to play a large role in the consideration of her nomination for the high court.

The city had thrown out the results of a promotion test because no African Americans and only two Hispanics would have qualified for promotions. It said it feared a lawsuit from minorities under federal laws that said such "disparate impacts" on test results could be used to show discrimination.

In effect, the court was deciding when avoiding potential discrimination against one group amounted to actual discrimination against another.

The court's conservative majority said in a 5 to 4 vote that is what happened in New Haven.

"Fear of litigation alone cannot justify an employer's reliance on race to the detriment of individuals who passed the examinations and qualified for promotions," wrote Justice Anthony M. Kennedy.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote for the liberals on the court and said the decision knocks the pegs from Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.

She read her dissent from the bench for emphasis. "Congress endeavored to promote equal opportunity in fact, and not simply in form," she said. "The damage today's decision does to that objective is untold."

On the last day on the bench for retiring Justice David H. Souter, the court failed to reach a decision on one of its most important cases of the term: whether a conservative group's production of a 90-minute film on Hillary Rodham Clinton amounted to a documentary, or merely a long commercial of the type restricted by the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform act.

Instead, the court took the unusual action of scheduling new arguments on the case for Sept. 9, before the court's new term begins next October. The court wants new briefings on issues that could lead to the justices declaring unconstitutional that part of the act, formally called the Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act of 2002.

The court's decision probably will lead Democrats to push efforts to have a vote on Sotomayor's confirmation so she can be in place before the September hearing, although it is unclear whether her replacement of Souter would affect the outcome of the case.

Senate hearings on her nomination are set to begin in two weeks.

The New Haven case, Ricci v. DeStefano, has become the ruling that Sotomayor's critics most point to for evidence that she lets her background influence her decisions, even though her role has been somewhat inflated.


The promotion test results produced a heated debate in New Haven, and government lawyers warned the city's civil service board that if it certified the test results, minority firefighters might have a good case for claiming discrimination under Title VII. Federal guidelines presume discrimination when a test has such a disparate impact on minorities.

The board split 2 to 2, which meant the exam was not certified. Those who opposed using the results said they worried the test must be flawed in some way that disadvantaged minorities. (The test questions have not been made public.)

The white firefighters filed suit, saying their rights had been violated under both the law and the Constitution's protections of due process.

District Judge Janet Bond Arterton dismissed their suit before it went to trial. She said in her 47-page decision that the city was justified under the law in junking the test, even if it could not explain its flaws.

The case then went to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, where Sotomayor and judges Robert Sack and Rosemary S. Pooler heard the appeal. Oral arguments lasted an hour, with Sotomayor leading the questioning, as is her reputation. But instead of issuing a detailed and signed opinion, the panel said in a brief summary that, although it was "not unsympathetic" to the plight of the white firefighters, it unanimously affirmed the lower court's decision for "reasons stated in the thorough, thoughtful, and well-reasoned opinion."

Kennedy's opinion referred to the judgment of Sotomayor and the other judges only by noting the short opinion.

Kennedy said the standard for whether an employer may discard a test is whether there is a strong reason to the employer to believe that the test is flawed in a way that discriminates against minorities, not just by looking at the results.

In New Haven's case, "there is no evidence -- let alone the required strong basis in evidence -- that the tests were flawed because they were not job-related or because other, equally valid and less discriminatory tests were available to the city," Kennedy wrote.

The case has drawn considerable attention not just because of Sotomayor's role but because of the sympathetic nature of the claim brought by the firefighters, who said they were discriminated against simply because of the color of their skin.

The lead plaintiff, Frank Ricci, is a veteran firefighter who said in sworn statements that he spent thousands of dollars in preparation and studied for months for the exam. Ricci said he is dyslexic, so he had tapes made of the test materials and listened to them on his commute to work.

[Predator24]

I'm watching coverage of this abortion and an elderly couple said they lost 2.5million dollars with Madoff.

Question for all....

Where does greed begin and saving for retirement end??

[Mr Handlebars]

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The new facts concerning the Madoff case has shown a new turn. It seems the Financial Advisors where directing ppl to Bernie Madoff fund in lew of large commissions. While many were greed, some where based on trust of experts.

While there are obvious greedy people involved in this plot, many were duped into investing their entire nest egg while any financial person will tell you is never advisable.

[Fever]

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Greed is at the heart of every aspect of this case.
The advisors were getting better than average commissions on a product that was too good to be true (up in a down market), the investors themselves were willing to forgo the usual checks and balances for the returns that were unrealistic, and Maddoff is just a fuckin' leech. The worst kind of con man - no moral compass at all.
$2.5M sounds like a huge number to most of us, so I understand where these people look greedy for chasing more, but that's our system - to acquire and horde. And really, for this level of investor, if that's their liquid position, that's not the extent of their assets. The pool of retirement funds for more middle class investors is where we'll see more pain.
And this whole thing really goes to why there has been so much backlash against the privatization of social security, etc. Because at its heart, our financial system is based upon greed. Despite some controversial ruling in recent administaration to the contrary, Corporations are not citizens in the sense that they will not make decisions based upon the greater good, but are beholden to their own survival, and the advisors that placed money with Maddoff worked for those types of entities.
Maddoff's just a bigger monster than most.

[maxbailey]

A Bristol man has described how he was hit by a block of ice which fell from an aeroplane as he sat in his garden.

David Gammon lives under the flight path for Bristol International Airport.

He said: "We heard a plane going overhead and then a whistling sound and all of a sudden a piece of ice the size of a grapefruit fell on my thigh."

Mr Gammon, 76, is bruised but recovering. Bristol International said there was no proof the ice had fallen from a plane using the airport.

In a statement, the airport said: "Bristol International will provide all possible support to the Civil Aviation Authority in the investigation of this matter.

"However, variables such as aircraft height, wind strength, air temperature and other factors indicate that the ice could have come from any aircraft overflying within approximately five miles.

"This includes inbound transatlantic flights to Heathrow, flights to Germany and northern Europe and aircraft flying to or from Bristol International."

"I've been told that if it had hit my head, I would no longer be with you," Mr Gammon added.