07.15.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 3:34 pm by George Smith
More accurately, the owners of capital are the only ones capable of leveraging benefits from the new technological order. Jaron Lanier has apparently written a book on it, as have others. But most don’t have to read a book to have it explained because they’ve experienced it first hand.
Take, for example, YouTube, the use of visual and audio content, and digital rights tracking.
YouTube/Google runs a scanner that the big mega-corporations contribute content signature IDs to. (They also use personal reporting, aka the “fink button.”) When one hits a match, your video is flagged. At that point a number of things can happen.
It can be simply tracked and later monetized with overlay advertising.
Or the holder may ask it to be flagged and removed, at which point the user gets a penalty stroke.
In practice, the monetization part allows the holders of capital, or the owners of copyright, to extend ownership to creative and novel pieces which use only a portion of their content for purposes of entertainment, enlightenment or fun socio-cultural art.
So if you have recorded a song and made a little video for it, something a minute and a half to two minutes long, which partially cuts from a famous movie as a bit of humorous tribute, you can have it taken off you by the faceless super-corporation that owns one piece of it.
The average person, little people, have no way to monetize their creative work in cyberspace in this manner. They simply don’t.
And this opens up new streams of revenue, streams which require no work except content matching, for those who are already among the 1 percent.
That is the power of the Google digital ecology. It distributes the risk of digital creation to all the grains of sand in the world making content. And reserves the monetization of all of it to itself or business partners.
It’s no model for a viable future unless by such a future one means a handful or super-corporations and business entities that get almost everything from the virtual economy while everyone else sees nothing.
The reason for that is simple. The average person doesn’t have the capital to make a difference, except through blind luck. The numbers, in terms of raw popularity and ranking in search, are just never there. However, by controlling the entire pool of such things through the digital tools of universal aggregation, you can extract worth from everyone else without returning a thing. Except maybe a threat in a digital notice.
Search DD and “Rumble” to see an illustration. Note overlay.
Fair dinkum or not? You tell me.
Rigging counts and the winner-take-all virtual economy — from the archives.
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Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, WhiteManistan at 11:08 am by George Smith
From Krugman, today, on the GOP push to kill food stamp programs:
But these days almost half of food stamp recipients are non-Hispanic whites So [food stamps are] not all about race … What is it about, then? Somehow, one of our nation’s two great parties has become infected by an almost pathological meanspiritedness, a contempt for what CNBC’s Rick Santelli, in the famous rant that launched the Tea Party, called “losers.??? If you’re an American, and you’re down on your luck, these people don’t want to help; they want to give you an extra kick. I don’t fully understand it, but it’s a terrible thing to behold.
List of states, by population, from least to most, that total the number of people on food stamps in the US:
Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Delaware, Montana, Rhode Island, Hawaii, New Hampshire, Maine, Idaho, Nebraska, West Virginia, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Arkansas, Kansas, Mississippi, Iowa, Connecticut, Oregon, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Kentucky. That’s 26. Counted here last year.
Image collection for “food stamps.” Illustrative and not in any good way.
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Posted in Bioterrorism, Crazy Weapons, Culture of Lickspittle, War On Terror at 9:19 am by George Smith
Plate 4, Irhabi007. Seven years ago, now jailed aspiring al Qaeda chemical and biological terrorist Younis Tsouli, aka Irhabi007, password-protected this .pdf jihadist translation of Maxwell Hutchkinson’s The Poisoner’s Handbook by combining the initials of the Islamic Media Center and part of his handle to make “IMC007.” Tsouli believed himself to be a secret agent.
Full size.
Plate 5, Chemical Terrorism — Easy to Do!The same summer, a U.S. Army expert on chemical attack, James A. Genovese, was using this as a slide in a presentation on the alleged capabilities of terrorists.
Al Qaeda never launched a chemical or biological attack in the United States.
A word about the series, Fine Art from the War on Terror. In pictures taken from the archives of DD blog, it attempts to show the attitudes, beliefs and thinking from a time when the bad news on what terrorists could allegedly do came daily.
There are probably no similar examples on the web. Share with your friends.
Real life: Careless overuse of pesticide chemical bug bombs in NYC cause catastrophic fire at beauty salon.
OFAWOT
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Posted in Bioterrorism, Crazy Weapons, Culture of Lickspittle, War On Terror at 2:35 pm by George Smith
Plate 1, The Botox Shoe of Death, un-reduced scan of the original from the summer, seven years ago. Made by your host at height of war on terror. The Washington Post newspaper ran a story on how al Qaeda was planning to strike with biological weapons, including botulism, citing one then newly discovered enemy web memo on the matter. They did not inform readers of the fine print which imagined putting botox on the shoes, a gaily laughable proposition.
Actual size — really big.
Plate 2, The
Mubtakkar of Death. About the same time as the al Qaeda Botox Shoe of Death Plan, journalist Ron Suskind revealed an al Qaeda plot in TIME, the Mubtakkar of Death, which was allegedly a cyanide bomb for use on the NY subway. But Ayman Zawahiri spared NYC, it was said.
I had to analyze whether the Mubtakkar was real. There was no evidence that it was although an al Qaeda drawing of a theoretical poison gas bomb that was not like the described Mubtakkar was found in the hands of DHS and distributed around the country as something to look out for. As GlobalSecurity.Org Senior Fellow I was asked to go on NPR to discuss the alleged weapon. The segment was cancelled because I would not tell the host a scary story.
While there is a famous distasteful video of al Qaeda putting a puppy to death with poison gas, there is no public record of the terror organization ever deploying a cyanide bomb although an apocryphal tale, known only to a few, says an attempt was made at one in Afghanistan and that it did not work.
Actual size — really big.
Scan with an aged paper, almost like papyrus, look. Both prints suitable for framing or silk-screening onto T-shirts as educational slices of real American history.
Proof that truth is stranger than fiction. Suitable for any modern iteration of Ripley’s Believe It or Not!
OFAWOT
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Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Cyberterrorism, Shoeshine at 10:58 am by George Smith
NSA director, Mr. Keith Alexander, encouraging young hackers to save the US from economic crippling and mass loss of life in the immediate future at the 2012 DefCon meeting in Las Vegas.
From Reuters:
The annual Defcon hacking convention has asked the federal government to stay away this year for the first time in its 21-year history, saying Edward Snowden’s revelations have made some in the community uncomfortable about having feds there.
“It would be best for everyone involved if the feds call a ‘time-out’ and not attend Defcon this year,” Defcon founder Jeff Moss said in an announcement posted Wednesday night on the convention’s website …
Moss, who is an advisor on cyber security to the Department of Homeland Security, told Reuters that it was “a tough call,” but that he believed the Defcon community needs time to make sense of the recent revelations about U.S. surveillance programs.
They need time to make sense of the recent revelation about US surveillance programs. Adorable.
It’s all eyewash and balderdash, anyway.
The NSA and Keith Alexander, of course, will be there. Everyone will. And that’s because everyone knows guvmint security agencies have money, lots of money.
The real affair is the $2000/ticket Black Hat conference, on July 31, a two day affair just before DefCon. The latter, on August 2 is $180 to get in.
Jeff Moss, DefCon founder, maintaining good public relations.
Keith Alexander — from the archives.
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07.10.13
Posted in Bioterrorism, Ricin Kooks at 2:07 pm by George Smith
The trial of accused ricin mailer Matthew Buquet has been pushed off until next year. The reason? Because there is only one lab in the country that does the forensic ricin determinations needed in the case, according to the judge.
But is this really true? It’s an interesting story.
From the wire:
The federal trial of a Spokane man charged with sending a poison letter to President Barack Obama has been delayed until next year because of the complexity of the case, U.S. District Court Judge Lonny Suko ruled on Tuesday.
Suko pushed back the trial of Matthew Ryan Buquet, 37, until May 5. It was supposed to begin later this month.
Suko agreed with lawyers on both sides that the complexity of the case, including dealing with a deadly poison called ricin, made a speedy trial impossible.
“There is only one lab that can process this evidence because of the nature of the toxin involved,” assistant U.S. Attorney Stephanie Van Marter told the judge.
Prosecutors hoped to have most of their evidence turned over to defense lawyers within the next month, she said.
Defense attorney Matthew Campbell, of the Federal Defenders of Eastern Washington, said that his office would then have to undertake complex analysis of that evidence.
“There can be no trial in a speedy time,” Campbell said.
The lab being referred to is the National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center and, more specifically, its National Bioforensic Analysis Center, or NBFAC.
The NBACC homepage does not list the cost of construction but material from the web pegged its estimated price from 120-150 million dollars. It is run by Battelle under a contract for 500 million.
“NBACC’s National Bioforensic Analysis Center (NBFAC) conducts bioforensic analysis of evidence from a bio-crime or terrorist attack to attain a ‘biological fingerprint’ to identify perpetrators and determine the origin and method of attack,” reads its homepage.
“NBFAC is designated by Presidential Directive to be the lead federal facility to conduct and facilitate the technical forensic analysis and interpretation of materials recovered following a biological attack in support of the appropriate lead federal agency. On January 12, 2007, NBFAC achieved ISO 17025 accreditation, the most rigorous international standard of testing and calibration by which a laboratory can be assessed. Through this achievement, NBFAC has established itself as a model for bioforensic laboratory practices.”
It certainly sounds like the expensive NBACC has all the tools necessary to process ricin samples.
But does it?
In a recent domestic ricin case dating from last year, I was consulted as Senior Fellow at Globalsecurity.Org for my expertise in ricin terrorism.
In that case the NBACC outsourced the government’s ricin analysis and characterization to another lab, American International Biotechnology Services (AIBiotech) in Richmond, VA.
This was a startling thing. Why did the country’s premier bioterrorism research facility outsource its lab work to another firm? The NBACC was built, and — indeed — its homepage explicitly states that its mission was to have its highly accredited facilities be a model for bioforensic laboratory practice.
A colleague, Milton Leitenberg, when hearing of the NBACC procedure, asked sources in the US biodefense community why this was done. No answers were provided.
So, yes — indeed, with all the shuffling of samples and evidence through offices and labs, it is easy to understand why a ricin trial would be put off.
But, strictly speaking, it’s not because only one lab can (or does) the work.
And it shows that, as in many things, the taxpayer does not get good value for dollar, or even cheaper work, when everything is outsourced as knee-jerk procedure. In fact, the opposite.
Today’s Washington Post featured a news piece on Booz Allen Hamilton and the outsourcing of work in the national security megaplex.
Near the end, there was this:
But the growth in contracting in defense and homeland security work continues. That has been fueled by several factors — ongoing public worry about terrorism, antipathy toward big government and an evolution in Washington’s revolving-door culture that provides extraordinary rewards to top government officials who go private, experts say.
Yet even outsourcing’s most vocal skeptics agree contractors are here to stay, despite what they contend are illusory savings.
“Curbing the use of contractors would be difficult or impossible,??? said Chuck Alsup, a retired Army intelligence officer and vice president of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance, an Arlington County-based association of private companies and individual experts. “It would be, frankly, unwise.???
BioWatch is a now infamous and expensive government program, put together in the aftermath of the anthrax mailer, to detect aerial release of pathogens in major American cities.
After ten years, it does not work.
In 2012, the Los Angeles Times ran a series of news stories on it that tore apart the program’s reputation.
Last year, David Willman of the Los Angeles Times wrote:
President George W. Bush announced the system’s deployment in his 2003 State of the Union address, saying it would “protect our people and our homeland.” Since then, BioWatch air samplers have been installed inconspicuously at street level and atop buildings in cities across the country — ready, in theory, to detect pathogens that cause anthrax, tularemia, smallpox, plague and other deadly diseases.
But the system has not lived up to its billing. It has repeatedly cried wolf, producing dozens of false alarms in Los Angeles, Detroit, St. Louis, Phoenix, San Diego, the San Francisco Bay Area and elsewhere, a Los Angeles Times investigation found.
Worse, BioWatch cannot be counted on to detect a real attack, according to confidential government test results and computer modeling.
The false alarms have threatened to disrupt not only the 2008 Democratic convention, but also the 2004 and 2008 Super Bowls and the 2006 National League baseball playoffs. In 2005, a false alarm in Washington prompted officials to consider closing the National Mall.
Federal agencies documented 56 BioWatch false alarms — most of them never disclosed to the public — through 2008. More followed.
The ultimate verdict on BioWatch is that state and local health officials have shown no confidence in it. Not once have they ordered evacuations or distributed emergency medicines in response to a positive reading.
“I just think it’s a colossal waste of money … It’s a stupid program,” one scientist for the Colorado Department of Health and the Environment told the newspaper.
Even my hometown has been affected by BioWatch’s failures.
Wrote the Times:
Dr. Takashi Wada, health officer for Pasadena from 2003 to 2010, was guarded in discussing the BioWatch false positive that occurred on his watch. Wada confirmed that the detection was made, in February 2007, but would not say where in the 23-square-mile city.
“We’ve been told not to discuss it,” he said in an interview.
Despite its failures and increasing news of such, no one can halt the BioWatch program. Put together by the federal government and under the control of the Department of Homeland Security, BioWatch is also run by private sector national security contractors.
One such contractor is a business virtually no Americans have heard of called the Tauri Group.
It’s website is bland, revealing little except that it’s a great company to work for and that one of its specialties is combating weapons of mass destruction. A page mentioning its involvement in BioWatch is
here.
In e-mail discussions between your GlobalSecurity.Org Senior Fellow earlier this year on the money spent battling the threat of bioterrorism (not counting the recent goofball ricin mailers, there have been no deadly bioterror attacks since Bruce Ivins) an insider with knowledge of the BioWatch program had this to say:
“Some of the Tauri Group contractors running BioWatch were making $350K on top of their military pensions.”
BioWatch has cost one billion dollars to date. The sum indicates why there is intense effort to sustain it.
Outsourcing, from the NBACC and trivial ricin mail cases, to BioWatch, does not necessarily save taxpayer dollars.
In fact, just the opposite.
Is there an echo in here? (Just joking.)
Los Angeles Times reporting on BioWatch.
A Tauri Group profile and partial employee roster can be visualized at LinkedIn.
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