GostHacked

http://www.nytimes.c...anted=all&_r=2

WASHINGTON A nonpartisan, independent review of interrogation and detention programs in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks concludes that it is indisputable that the United States engaged in the practice of torture and that the nations highest officials bore ultimate responsibility for it.

So to get around the torture classification, one terms it 'enhanced interrogation' and you can circumvent calling it torture.

But the reports main significance may be its attempt to assess what the United States government did in the years after 2001 and how it should be judged. The C.I.A. not only waterboarded prisoners, but slammed them into walls, chained them in uncomfortable positions for hours, stripped them of clothing and kept them awake for days on end.

The question of whether those methods amounted to torture is a historically and legally momentous issue that has been debated for more than a decade inside and outside the government. The Justice Departments Office of Legal Counsel wrote a series of legal opinions from 2002 to 2005 concluding that the methods were not torture if used under strict rules; all the memos were later withdrawn. News organizations have wrestled with whether to label the brutal methods unequivocally as torture in the face of some government officials claims that they were not.

In addition, the United States is a signatory to the international Convention Against Torture, which requires the prompt investigation of allegations of torture and the compensation of its victims.

So Bush and Co clearly were doing the torture, going against everything they said and everything that is legal even within the US law.

The panel found that the United States violated its international legal obligations by engineering enforced disappearances and secret detentions. It questions recidivism figures published by the Defense Intelligence Agency for Guantánamo detainees who have been released, saying they conflict with independent reviews.

It describes in detail the ethical compromise of government lawyers who offered acrobatic advice to justify brutal interrogations and medical professionals who helped direct and monitor them. And it reveals an internal debate at the International Committee of the Red Cross over whether the organization should speak publicly about American abuses; advocates of going public lost the fight, delaying public exposure for months, the report finds.

Bush should be tried for war crimes. It's clear he lied when he said that 'we don't torture'. So now can we hold him responsible for it? Or should Obama now take the blame?

So when can we send Bush, Cheney, Obama and Biden off to Gitmo?

Not sure how far I am along in this game, but I would say that this thing is damn near perfection as an FPS goes. I've never seen anything more surealistic and fantastic as what is portrayed in this game.

In the opening moments and when you end up getting to Columbia, I must have spent about 90 minutes looking around the place. The visuals are stunning, the ambiance and soundtrack are incredible. Everything is perfect.

We have seen WWII shooters done over and over, same with futuristic shooters, and paranormal ones. But this ... this ... is .. something else altogether. Surreal is a good description, but to me , it seems to just go way beyond it.

I think I know what this game is based on in some fashion. But it was only when I got to a certain part of the game (trying not to spoiler anything) that I realized what was going on.

Ever watch an old movie from the early 1900's called Metropolis? Yeah... Also heard that it has elements of Ayn Rand's novels in it too. But have not read anything by her to compare. But then there is another element of duality which is playing out quite well and works with the whole concept.

I think I am more impressed with it considering I did not know much about it before hand. I had played Bioshock 1 (awesome) and 2 (skippable) and was taken by complete surprise as to what was going to take place in Infinite.

The story is quite good, the voice acting is some of the best I have heard in any game. And the visuals just make it that much better. Hats off to the team at Irrational Games. This is a winner and a contender for game of the year.

http://www.cbc.ca/ne...eign-visit.html

As part of the mission, he is opening a diplomatic office that will be an offshoot of Canada's embassy in Amman, Jordan. The new office, however, will operate out of the British Embassy in Baghdad. It will be run by charge d'affairs Stephanie Duhaime, who had served in Iraq, Lebanon, Bangladesh and Syria and who played a role in developing NATO and Canadian counter-insurgency efforts in Afghanistan in 2009-2010.

"Today's opening is a historic milestone in Canadian relations with Iraq and comes at a pivotal moment," Baird said in a release Monday from the Department of Foreign Affairs in Ottawa. "Ten years after the Iraqi intervention, Iraq is one of the fastest-growing economies in the world, despite deep and lingering sectarian tensions."

So Iraq is one of the fastest growing economies on the planet. There was no to little growth under UN sanctions so as soon as those are lifted, yes the economy will 'boom' in a way. But not for the reasons people thing. I would guess that many have a different view of the new Iraq, where people think the war is over and Iraq is completely rebuilt.

This is about resources in Iraq and nothing more.

This new diplomatic mission ends a 30+ year Canadian absence from Iraq. Not sure if it's a good idea.

http://www.bbc.co.uk...nology-21875127

A surreptitious scan of the entire internet has revealed millions of printers, webcams and set-top boxes protected only by default passwords.

An anonymous researcher used more than 420,000 of these insecure devices to test the security and responsiveness of other gadgets, in a nine-month survey.

Using custom-written code, they sent out more than four trillion messages.

The net's current addressing scheme accommodates about 4.2 billion devices. Only 1.3 billion addresses responded.

The number of addresses responding was a surprise as the pool of addresses for that scheme has run dry. As a result, the net is currently going through a transition to a new scheme that has a vastly larger pool of addresses available.

Based on this paper.

http://internetcensu....org/paper.html

Internet Census 2012


Port scanning /0 using insecure embedded devices


Carna Botnet





Abstract While playing around with the Nmap Scripting Engine (NSE) we discovered an amazing number of open embedded devices on the Internet. Many of them are based on Linux and allow login to standard BusyBox with empty or default credentials. We used these devices to build a distributed port scanner to scan all IPv4 addresses. These scans include service probes for the most common ports, ICMP ping, reverse DNS and SYN scans. We analyzed some of the data to get an estimation of the IP address usage.

All data gathered during our research is released into the public domain for further study.



1 Introduction

Two years ago while spending some time with the Nmap Scripting Engine (NSE) someone mentioned that we should try the classic telnet login root:root on random IP addresses. This was meant as a joke, but was given a try. We started scanning and quickly realized that there should be several thousand unprotected devices on the Internet.

After completing the scan of roughly one hundred thousand IP addresses, we realized the number of insecure devices must be at least one hundred thousand. Starting with one device and assuming a scan speed of ten IP addresses per second, it should find the next open device within one hour. The scan rate would be doubled if we deployed a scanner to the newly found device. After doubling the scan rate in this way about 16.5 times, all unprotected devices would be found; this would take only 16.5 hours. Additionally, with one hundred thousand devices scanning at ten probes per second we would have a distributed port scanner to port scan the entire IPv4 Internet within one hour.

hack hack hack hack hack.

1 - Change the default passwords.
2 - If you are worried about security, do NOT connect the device to the Internet.

The more things are connected the more problems we are going to see with all this technology.

http://www.cbc.ca/ne...e-mortgage.html

 

I screwed up on the title spelling mistake .. damn..

 

Manulife has rescinded a promotional offer it had been offering
consumers of a record-low five-year mortgage rate after Finance Minister
Jim Flaherty indicated his displeasure with the lender's decision.

On Tuesday, Manulife Bank dropped its posted interest rate for a
five-year fixed-rate mortgage to 2.89 per cent. That's the lowest posted
rate for that time frame the company has ever offered. But in an
about-face later in the day, the company pulled the offering and
reverted to its former rate above three per cent.

 

Kind of a weird situation. Low interest rates and direct/indirect manipulation of markets south of the border along with deregulation allowed the housing crisis to come about.

 

Now from guys that I like , like Gerald Celente, is indicating that interest rates to need to be high in order to prevent the same thing happening here.  Not that I like the finance minister to directly get involved with the banks business, it's kind of a nice thing to see the government take some pre-emptive action in order to prevent a crisis.

 

I think the difference here is that overall it's been touted that Canada's bank regulations are better. But then last year we saw the bailout that was not a bailout.

 

So are Canadian banks at risk of a mortgage style crisis like in the USA, and are we at risk to seeing the same things we are seeing in the EU....??  I don't really know how I feel about this.