http://www.liveleak.com/browse?q=Telecommunications Fri, 24 May 2013 17:35:09 -0400 Liveleak http://edge.liveleak.com/80281E/u/u/ll2/logo.gif http://www.liveleak.com/browse?q=Telecommunications Fri, 26 Apr 2013 14:59:46 -0400 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=876_1367002138 czo A cool ad for Orange ( a French multinational telecommunications corporation ) http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=876_1367002138 czo Orange ad ad Orange French multinational telecommunications corporation Thu, 16 May 2013 12:32:27 -0400 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=157_1368720817 omniradar Six Jewish Companies Control 96% of the World's MediaThe power of lies, deceptions and disinformation as Americans pay the price of collective stupidity. "You know very well, and the stupid Americans know equally well, that we control their government, irrespective of who sits in the White House. You see, I know it and you know it that no American president can be in a position to challenge us even if we do the unthinkable. What can they (Americans) do to us? We control congress, we control the media, we control show biz, and we control everything in America. In America you can criticize God, but you can't criticize Israel..." Israeli spokeswoman, Tzipora Menache Facts of Jewish Media Control The largest media conglomerate today is Walt Disney Company, whose chairman and CEO, Michael Eisner, is a Jew. The Disney Empire, headed by a man described by one media analyst as a "control freak", includes several television production companies (Walt Disney Television, Touchstone Television, Buena Vista Television), its own cable network with 14 million subscribers, and two video production companies. As for feature films, the Walt Disney Picture Group, headed by Joe Roth (also a Jew), includes Touchstone Pictures, Hollywood Pictures, and Caravan Pictures. Disney also owns Miramax Films, run by the Weinstein brothers. When the Disney Company was run by the Gentile Disney family prior to its takeover by Eisner in 1984, it epitomized wholesome, family entertainment. While it still holds the rights to Snow White, under Eisner, the company has expanded into the production of graphic sex and violence. In addition, it has 225 affiliated stations in the United States and is part owner of several European TV companies. ABC's cable subsidiary, ESPN, is headed by president and CEO Steven Bornstein, a Jew. This corporation also has a controlling share of Lifetime Television and the Arts & Entertainment Network cable companies. ABC Radio Network owns eleven AM and ten FM stations, again in major cities such as New York, Washington, Los Angeles, and has over 3,400 affiliates. Although primarily a telecommunications company, Capital Cities/ABC earned over $1 billion in publishing in 1994. It owns seven daily newspapers, Fairchild Publications, Chilton Publications, and the Diversified Publishing Group. Time Warner, Inc, is the second of the international media leviathans. The chairman of the board and CEO, Gerald Levin, is a Jew. Time Warner's subsidiary HBO is the country's largest pay-TV cable network. Warner Music is by far the world's largest record company, with 50 labels, the biggest of which is Warner Brothers Records, headed by Danny Goldberg. Stuart Hersch is president of Warnervision, Warner Music's video production unit. Goldberg and Hersch are Jews. Warner Music was an early promoter of "gangsta rap." Through its involvement with Interscope Records, it helped popularize a genre whose graphic lyrics explicitly urge Blacks to commit acts of violence against Whites. In addition to cable and music, Time Warner is heavily involved in the production of feature films (Warner Brothers Studio) and publishing. Time Warner's publishing division (editor-in-chief Norman Pearlstine, a Jew) is the largest magazine publisher in the country (Time, Sports Illustrated, People, Fortune). When Ted Turner, a Gentile, made a bid to buy CBS in 1985, there was panic in media boardrooms across the nation. Turner made a fortune in advertising and then had built a successful cable-TV news network, CNN. Although Turner employed a number of Jews in key executive positions in CNN and had never taken public positions contrary to Jewish interests, he is a man with a large ego and a strong personality and was regarded by Chairman William Paley (real name Palinsky, a Jew) and the other Jews at CBS as uncontrollable: a loose cannon who might at some time in the future turn against them. Furthermore, Jewish newsman Daniel Schorr, who had worked for Turner, publicly charged that his former boss held a personal dislike for Jews. To block Turner's bid, CBS executives invited billionaire Jewish theater, hotel, insurance, and cigarette magnate Laurence Tisch to launch a "friendly" takeover of the company, and from 1986 till 1995 Tisch was the chairman and CEO of CBS, removing any threat of non-Jewish influence there. Subsequent efforts by Turner to acquire a major network have been obstructed by Levin's Time Warner, which owns nearly 20 percent of CBS stock and has veto power over major deals. Viacom, Inc, headed by Sumner Redstone (born Murray Rothstein), a Jew, is the third largest megamedia corporation in the country, with revenues of over $10 billion a year. Viacom, which produces and distributes TV programs for the three largest networks, owns 12 television stations and 12 radio stations. It produces feature films through Paramount Pictures, headed by Jewess Sherry Lansing. Its publishing division includes Prentice Hall, Simon & Schuster, and Pocket Books. It distributes videos through over 4,000 Blockbuster stores. Viacom's chief claim to fame, however, is as the world's largest provider of cable programming, through its Showtime, MTV, Nickelodeon, and other networks. Since 1989, MTV and Nickelodeon have acquired larger and larger shares of the younger television audience. With the top three, and by far the largest, media companies in the hand of Jews, it is difficult to believe that such an overwhelming degree of control came about without a deliberate, concerted effort on their part. What about the other big media companies? Number four on the list is Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, which owns Fox Television and 20th Century Fox Films. Murdoch is a Gentile, but Peter Chermin, who heads Murdoch's film studio and also oversees his TV production, is a Jew. Number five is the Japanese Sony Corporation, whose U.S. subsidiary, Sony Corporation of America, is run by Michael Schulhof, a Jew. Alan Levine, another Jew, heads the Sony Pictures division. Most of the television and movie production companies that are not owned by the largest corporations are also controlled by Jews. For example, New World Entertainment, proclaimed by one media analyst as "the premiere independent TV program producer in the United States," is owned by Ronald Perelman, a Jew. The best known of the smaller media companies, Dreamworks SKG, is a strictly kosher affair. Dream Works was formed in 1994 amid great media hype by recording industry mogul David Geffen, former Disney Pictures chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg, and film director Steven Spielberg, all three of whom are Jews. The company produces movies, animated films, television programs, and recorded music. Two other large production companies, MCA and Universal Pictures, are both owned by Seagram Company, Ltd. The president and CEO of Seagram, the liquor giant, is Edgar Bronfman Jr., who is also president of the World Jewish Congress. It is well known that Jews have controlled the production and distribution of films since the inception of the movie industry in the early decades of the 20th century. This is still the case today. Films produced by just the five largest motion picture companies mentioned above-Disney, Warner Brothers, Sony, Paramount (Viacom), and Universal (Seagram)-accounted for 74 per cent of the total box-office receipts for the first eight months of 1995. The big three in television network broadcasting used to be ABC, CBS, and NBC. With the consolidation of the media empires, these three are no longer independent entities. While they were independent, however, each was controlled by a Jew since its inception: ABC by Leonard Goldenson, CBS first by William Paley and then by Lawrence Tisch, and NBC first by David Sarnoff and then by his son Robert. Over periods of several decades, these networks were staffed from top to bottom with Jews, and the essential Jewishness of network television did not change when the networks were absorbed by other corporations. The Jewish presence in television news remains particularly strong. As noted, ABC is part of Eisner's Disney Company, and the executive producers of ABC's news programs are all Jews: Victor Neufeld (20-20), Bob Reichbloom (Good Morning America), and Rick Kaplan (World News Tonight). CBS was recently purchased by Westinghouse Electric Corporation. Nevertheless, the man appointed by Lawrence Tisch, Eric Ober, remains president of CBS News, and Ober is a Jew. At NBC, now owned by General Electric, NBC News president Andrew Lack is a Jew, as are executive producers Jeff Zucker (Today), Jeff Gralnick (NBC Nightly News), and Neal Shapiro (Dateline). The Print Media After television news, daily newspapers are the most influential information medium in America. Sixty million of them are sold (and presumably read) each day. These millions are divided among some 1,500 different publications. One might conclude that the sheer number of different newspapers across America would provide a safeguard against Jewish control and distortion. However, this is not the case. There is less independence, less competition, and much less representation of our interests than a casual observer would think. The days when most cities and even towns had several independently owned newspapers published by local people with close ties to the community are gone. Today, most "local" newspapers are owned by a rather small number of large companies controlled by executives who live and work hundreds or ever thousands of miles away. The fact is that only about 25 per cent of the country's 1,500 papers are independently owned; the rest belong to multi-newspaper chains. Only a handful are large enough to maintain independent reporting staffs outside their own communities; the rest depend on these few for all of their national and international news. The Newhouse empire of Jewish brothers Samuel and Donald Newhouse provides an example of more than the lack of real competition among America's daily newspapers: it also illustrates the insatiable appetite Jews have shown for all the organs of opinion control on which they could fasten their grip. The Newhouses own 26 daily newspapers, including several large and important ones, such as the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Newark Star-Ledger, and the New Orleans Times-Picayune; the nation's largest trade book publishing conglomerate, Random House, with all its subsidiaries; Newhouse Broadcasting, consisting of 12 television broadcasting stations and 87 cable-TV systems, including some of the country's largest cable networks; the Sunday supplement Parade, with a circulation of more than 22 million copies per week; some two dozen major magazines, including the New Yorker, Vogue, Madmoiselle, Glamour, Vanity Fair, Bride's, Gentlemen's Quarterly, Self, House & Garden, and all the other magazines of the wholly owned Conde Nast group. This Jewish media empire was founded by the late Samuel Newhouse, an immigrant from Russia. The gobbling up of so many newspapers by the Newhouse family was in large degree made possible by the fact that newspapers are not supported by their subscribers, but by their advertisers. It is advertising revenue-not the small change collected from a newspaper's readers-that largely pays the editor's salary and yields the owner's profit. Whenever the large advertisers in a city choose to favor one newspaper over another with their business, the favored newspaper will flourish while its competitor dies. Since the beginning of the 20th century, when Jewish mercantile power in America became a dominant economic force, there has been a steady rise in the number of American newspapers in Jewish hands, accompanied by a steady decline in the number of competing Gentile newspapers-primarily as a result of selective advertising policies by Jewish merchants. Furthermore, even those newspapers still under Gentile ownership and management are so thoroughly dependent upon Jewish advertising revenue that their editorial and news reporting policies are largely constrained by Jewish likes and dislikes. It holds true in the newspaper business as elsewhere that he who pays the piper calls the tune. Three Jewish Newspapers The suppression of competition and the establishment of local monopolies on the dissemination of news and opinion have characterized the rise of Jewish control over America's newspapers. The resulting ability of the Jews to use the press as an unopposed instrument of Jewish policy could hardly be better illustrated than by the examples of the nation's three most prestigious and influential newspapers: the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. These three, dominating America's financial and political capitals, are the newspapers which set the trends and the guidelines for nearly all the others. They are the ones which decide what is news and what isn't, at the national and international levels. They originate the news; the others merely copy it, and all three newspapers are in Jewish hands. The New York Times was founded in 1851 by two Gentiles, Henry Raymond and George Jones. After their deaths, it was purchased in 1896 from Jones's estate by a wealthy Jewish publisher, Adolph Ochs. His great-grandson, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr., is the paper's current publisher and CEO. The executive editor is Max Frankel, and the managing editor is Joseph Lelyveld. Both of the latter are also Jews. The Sulzberger family also owns, through the New York Times Co., 33 other newspapers, including the Boston Globe; twelve magazines, including McCall's and Family Circle with circulations of more than 5 million each; seven radio and TV broadcasting stations; a cable-TV system; and three book publishing companies. The New York Times News Service transmits news stories, features, and photographs from the New York Times by wire to 506 other newspapers, news agencies, and magazines. Of similar national importance is the Washington Post, which, by establishing its "leaks" throughout government agencies in Washington, has an inside track on news involving the Federal government. The Washington Post, like the New York Times, had a non-Jewish origin. It was established in 1877 by Stilson Hutchins, purchased from him in 1905 by John McLean, and later inherited by Edward McLean. In June 1933, however, at the height of the Great Depression, the newspaper was forced into bankruptcy. It was purchased at a bankruptcy auction by Eugene Meyer, a Jewish financier. The Washington Post is now run by Katherine Meyer Graham, Eugene Meyer's daughter. She is the principal stockholder and the board chairman of the Washington Post Co. In 1979, she appointed her son Donald publisher of the paper. He now also holds the posts of president and CEO of the Washington Post Co. The Washington Post Co. has a number of other media holdings in newspapers, television, and magazines, most notably the nation's number-two weekly newsmagazine, Newsweek. The Wall Street Journal, which sells 1.8 million copies each weekday, is the nation's largest-circulation daily newspaper. It is owned by Dow Jones & Company, Inc., a New York corporation which also publishes 24 other daily newspapers and the weekly financial tabloid Barron's, among other things. The chairman and CEO of Dow Jones is Peter Kann, who is a Jew. Kann also holds the posts of chairman and publisher of the Wall Street Journal. Most of New York's other major newspapers are in no better hands than the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. The New York Daily News is owned by Jewish real-estate developer Mortimer B. Zuckerman. The Village Voice is the personal property of Leonard Stern, the billionaire Jewish owner of the Hartz Mountain pet supply firm. Other Mass Media The story is pretty much the same for other media as it is for television, radio, and newspapers. Consider, for example, newsmagazines. There are only three of any note published in the United States: Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News and World Report. Time, with a weekly circulation of 4.1 million, is published by a susidiary of Time Warner Communications. The CEO of Time Warner Communications, as mentioned above, is Gerald Levin, a Jew. Newsweek, as mentioned above, is published by the Washington Post Company, under the Jewess Katherine Meyer Graham. Its weekly circulation is 3.2 million. U.S. News & World Report, with a weekly circulation of 2.3 million, is owned and published by Mortimer Zuckerman, a Jew. Zuckerman also owns the Atlantic Monthly and New York's tabloid newspaper, the Daily News, which is the sixth-largest paper in the country. Among the giant book-publishing conglomerates, the situation is also Jewish. Three of the six largest book publishers in the U.S., according to Publisher's Weekly, are owned or controlled by Jews. The three are first-place Random House (with its many subsidiaries, including Crown Publishing Group), third-place Simon & Schuster, and sixth-place Time Warner Trade Group (including Warner Books and Little, Brown). Another publisher of special significance is Western Publishing. Although it ranks only 13th in size among all U.S. publishers, it ranks first among publishers of children's books, with more than 50 percent of the market. Its chairman and CEO is Richard Snyder, a Jew, who just replaced Richard Bernstein, also a Jew. The Effect of Jewish Control of the Media These are the facts of Jewish media control in America. Anyone willing to spend several hours in a large library can verify their accuracy. I hope that these facts are disturbing to you, to say the least. Should any minority be allowed to wield such awesome power? Certainly, not and allowing a people with beliefs such as expressed in the Talmud, to determine what we get to read or watch in effect gives this small minority the power to mold our minds to suit their own Talmudic interests, interests which as we have demonstrated are diametrically opposed to the interests of our people. By permitting the Jews to control our news and entertainment media, we are doing more than merely giving them a decisive influence on our political system and virtual control of our government; we also are giving them control of the minds and souls of our children, whose attitudes and ideas are shaped more by Jewish television and Jewish films than by their parents, their schools, or any other influence. http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=157_1368720817 omniradar Six Jewish Companies Control 96% of the World's Media ! Zionist Control Of Our Media Thu, 02 May 2013 17:11:41 -0400 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=644_1367528814 Setright All sorts of people are hurling all sorts of criticisms at former Vice President Al Gore over the $500 million sale of his Current TV network to Al Jazeera. Gore is helping a foreign government spread propaganda in the U.S.! He's doing business with a network that's sympathetic to terrorists ! He's taking oil money ! He's trying to avoid paying taxes ! These accusations range from borderline silly to flat-out wrong. The real problem here is that Gore, in pocketing an estimated $100 million from the sale, provides a textbook reminder of the conflicts of interest that arise when politicians hopscotch between high office and the private sector. For a channel available in 60 million households, Current has a tiny audience, a fact reflected in the paltriness of its advertising revenues (less than $20 million annually, according to SNL Kagan). Move up http://i.forbesimg.com t Move down Current TV's Sale to Al Jazeera The End of Era Steven Rosenbaum Contributor Current TV Sold To Al Jazeera; $500 Million Deal For Al Gore and Co. Jeff Bercovici Forbes StaffAlmost all of its value, therefore, was tied up in its reach. That distribution to 60 million homes was what underlay Al Jazeera's willingness to spend a half billion dollars. (This even though some 9 million homes fell out of the deal after Time Warner Cable, which controlled them, balked at carrying a new Al Jazeera channel.) Distribution is dear because it's hard to build. So how did Current succeed in building so much so fast? Through "a combination of personal lobbying and arm-twisting of industry giants" by Gore himself, according to Brian Stelter of The New York Times . Gore "leaned on" Rupert Murdoch, then in control of DirecTV, and other operators of cable and satellite systems, not only to carry Current but to pay it a carriage fee out of proportion to its actual viewership. If Murdoch et al didn't push back too hard, it's because they knew they could simply pass the carriage fee along to their subscribers. That's been standard operating procedure for pay TV operators since 1999, when a provision of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 removed price controls that had previously governed the rates they could change for expanded basic services. The results have been dramatic. According to the FCC, between 1995 and 2010, the average cost of expanded basic services rose from $22.35 to $54.44. That's a 6.1% compound average annual increase, versus 2.5% for inflation over that period. That's a lot of extra money flowing into the coffers of pay TV operators. And whom do they have to thank for it? Among others, Al Gore, who, at the ceremony marking the signing of the bill into law, "stressed how public interest was central to the telecommunications revolution," according to Salon . This is exactly the kind of conflict of interest Congress was hoping to prevent when, in 1958, it passed the Former Presidents Act , which established a pension in order to ensure that no ex-Commander in Chief would be tempted to "demean the office he has held or capitalize upon it in any way deemed improper." Gore, of course, was vice president, not president, but the principle holds. There's no conspiracy here, no dark secret. All of this has unfolded in plain sight over a period of years. But when it looked like Gore was truly in it to build a durable, independent, public-minded news institution, it was hard to be too critical of him for leveraging the prestige and connections of the office he once held to achieve that aim. Now that he's decided the mission is worth less than the windfall to be made from abandoning it, the whole thing takes on a somewhat different tint, doesn't it? http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=644_1367528814 Setright The Real Problem With Al Gore's $100 Million Payday From Selling Current To Al Jazeera WORLD NEWS, MIDDLE EAST, SYRIA Tue, 30 Apr 2013 05:34:20 -0400 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=589_1367313695 My_Friend Arrest of Dutch suspect Sven Kamphuis in his appartment in Granollers, Barcelona. Suspected to initiate one of the biggest DDOS attacks in Internet history. Looks like someone with... no life Curious stuff : 3 27 MHz portofones Midland ALAN 42 Multi, a Midland 27 MHz transmitter/receiver, German and NATO stamps, a Commodore 64 manual, Vodafone modem, Thomson modem, very old Lenovo notebook, old HP server and Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver, about the shift to science in the 17th century... The man suspected of participating in a large DDoS attack on an antispam organization that caused intermittent Internet hiccups drove around Spain in a van he used as a mobile office, Spain's Interior Ministry said Sunday. The van was equipped with "various antennas" that were used to scan frequencies, the ministry said in a news release. On Thursday, Spanish police arrested a 35-year-old Dutch man in Barcelona suspected of conducting cyberattacks against Spamhaus, a nonprofit group that develops widely used lists of networks identified as sending spam. Spanish police published a video of a sparse residence they raided. Images showed the room was strewn with wires and computer equipment, including routers, a Mac Mini computer, laptops, an antennae and a single cot with the book "Quicksilver" by Neal Stephenson on it. Also shown were several rubber stamps, two of which were emblazoned "NATO secret" and "NATO unclassified." Spain Interior MinistryPolice in Barcelona arrested a man suspected of participating in a large DDoS attack on an antispam organization. The man has been identified by an official close to the investigation as Sven Kamphuis, who has denied involvement. Dutch authorities only identified the suspect by the initials "S.K." for privacy reasons. Kamphuis has said he believes the attacks originated with members of Stophaus, a group aiming to shutdown Spamhaus for its antispam work. The DDoS attack was estimated to peak at more than 300Gbps, making it one of the largest attacks on record, but computer security experts disagreed somewhat over its broader effect on the Internet. The attack caused problems for some European Internet exchanges nodes, or places where ISPs link to transfer traffic to one another. The Interior Ministry, which did not name the suspect, said they seized two laptops and documents from the residence. At the time of his arrest, the man, from Alkmaar, Netherlands, claimed to be the minister of telecommunications and foreign affairs of the Republic of CyberBunker, Spanish police said. CyberBunker.com is a hosting provider based in a former military facility in the Netherlands. It specializes in so-called "bulletproof" hosting, or one that resists law enforcement efforts to remove certain content from the Internet. It claims it has no involvement in spam and does not allow SMTP traffic, the protocol used to send email. Kamphuis runs a network provider called CB3ROB, which provided services for CyberBunker. CB3ROB had been blacklisted by Spamhaus for activity related to spamming botnets and extortion scams. http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=589_1367313695 My_Friend Arrest of Spamhaus DDoS suspect in his appartment ddos,dutch,spain,attack,wifi,hack,hackers Mon, 22 Apr 2013 10:37:38 -0400 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=5e4_1366641037 english-patriot33 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2312711/Warning-UK-open-door-fanatics-Russian-government-says-MI5-watch-extremist-Islamic-exiles-country-wake-Boston-bombing.html Warning to UK on its 'open door to fanatics': Russian government says MI5 should watch 'extremist Islamic' exiles from the country in wake of Boston bombing :MI5 should play far closer attention to immigrants, said security specialist :Igor Korotchenkosaid has claimed Britain has created a 'ticking timebomb' :Said some admitted as asylum-seekers, and are enemies of Vladimir Putin Britain is at risk from 'extremist Islamic' exiles from the North Caucasus who have been allowed to live in the UK, claimed an advisor to the Russian government last night. The lessons from the Boston marathon bombing is that MI5 should play far closer attention to these immigrants, some who have been admitted as asylum-seekers, and are seen as enemies of Vladimir Putin, said security specialist Igor Korotchenko. He has claimed Britain has created a 'ticking timebomb' for allowing radicalised Muslims into this country. He claimed an FBI 'failure' to heed Russian secret services warnings about Tamerlan Tsarnaev could be repeated in Britain where intelligence co-operation with Moscow has been curtailed due to the diplomatic dispute over the 2006 'murder' of Alexander Litvinenko in London. 'It was a professional failure by American counter-intelligence,' said Korotchenko, who is also editor in chief of The National Defence journal in Moscow, and an advisor to military chiefs. 'The question we should ask America is why are they not co-operating as much as the Russian secret services want them to on matters of terrorism.' The same threat applies to Britain, he said, 'which has been willingly accepting terrorists and extremists from the North Caucasus. 'This is despite the fact that four telecommunications workers from Britain were beheaded in 1998.' He singled out Britain's 'mistake' in giving asylum to Akhmed Zakayev, 53 year old prime minister of the independent Chechen government in exile who is labelled a terrorist by Moscow, but stressed others had also received a safe haven in London. A friend of actress Vanessa Redgrave and the late Boris Borezovsky, courts in London have refused to extradite Zakayev to Russia claiming he would not receive a fair trial. 'Britain has created a ticking timebomb which could explode at any time by accepting these people,' he claimed. 'If MI5 believes that people who have terrorist experience in the North Caucasus will - coming to London - become decent members of society, they are wrong.' Britain had allowed in "people who tasted blood and explosions and have learned the skills of terror", he said. 'It is very dangerous that a potential terrorist underground network is being created, more dangerous than the IRA.' At the same time, Britain - like the US - had failed to co-operate closely with Russian secret services in exchanging intelligence on potential terrorist threats linked to the North Caucasus. 'Russian intelligence in every question related terrorism are prepared to have the most open possible relations with any Western special services,' he said. But co-operation had become stymied by difficult 'political relations and unresolved questions' in relation to Britain, he said. http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=5e4_1366641037 english-patriot33 Warning to UK on its 'open door to fanatics': Russian government says MI5 should watch 'extremist Islamic' exiles islam, muslims, terrorists, russia, england, boston, outlaw islam, Mon, 15 Apr 2013 21:49:32 -0400 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=b02_1366076692 dcmfox (second pic: Neuhardenberg Solar Park, Germany Coordinates: 52^036'50''N 14^014'33''E ) By David Roberts Solar power and other distributed renewable energy technologies could lay waste to U.S. power utilities and burn the utility business model, which has remained virtually unchanged for a century, to the ground. That is not wild-eyed hippie talk. It is the assessment of the utilities themselves . Back in January, the Edison Electric Institute - the (typically stodgy and backward-looking) trade group of U.S. investor-owned utilities - released a report that, as far as I can tell, went almost entirely without notice in the press. That's a shame. It is one of the most prescient and brutally frank things I've ever read about the power sector. It is a rare thing to hear an industry tell the tale of its own incipient obsolescence. I've been thinking about how to convey to you, normal people with healthy social lives and no time to ponder the byzantine nature of the power industry, just what a big deal the coming changes are. They are nothing short of revolutionary ... but rather difficult to explain without jargon. So, just a bit of background. You probably know that electricity is provided by utilities. Some utilities both generate electricity at power plants and provide it to customers over power lines. They are "regulated monopolies," which means they have sole responsibility for providing power in their service areas. Some utilities have gone through deregulation; in that case, power generation is split off into its own business, while the utility's job is to purchase power on competitive markets and provide it to customers over the grid it manages. This complexity makes it difficult to generalize about utilities ... or to discuss them without putting people to sleep. But the main thing to know is that the utility business model relies on selling power . That's how they make their money. Here's how it works: A utility makes a case to a public utility commission (PUC), saying "we will need to satisfy this level of demand from consumers, which means we'll need to generate (or purchase) this much power, which means we'll need to charge these rates." If the PUC finds the case persuasive, it approves the rates and guarantees the utility a reasonable return on its investments in power and grid upkeep. Thrilling, I know. The thing to remember is that it is in a utility's financial interest to generate (or buy) and deliver as much power as possible. The higher the demand, the higher the investments, the higher the utility shareholder profits. In short, all things being equal, utilities want to sell more power. (All things are occasionally not equal, but we'll leave those complications aside for now.) Now, into this cozy business model enters cheap distributed solar PV, which eats away at it like acid. First, the power generated by solar panels on residential or commercial roofs is not utility-owned or utility-purchased. From the utility's point of view, every kilowatt-hour of rooftop solar looks like a kilowatt-hour of reduced demand for the utility's product. Not something any business enjoys. (This is the same reason utilities are instinctively hostile to energy efficiency and demand response programs, and why they must be compelled by regulations or subsidies to create them. Utilities don't like reduced demand!) It's worse than that, though. Solar power peaks at midday, which means it is strongest close to the point of highest electricity use - "peak load." Problem is, providing power to meet peak load is where utilities make a huge chunk of their money. Peak power is the most expensive power. So when solar panels provide peak power, they aren't just reducing demand, they're reducing demand for the utilities' most valuable product . But wait. Renewables are limited by the fact they are intermittent, right? "The sun doesn't always shine," etc. Customers will still have to rely on grid power for the most part. Right? This is a widely held article of faith, but EEI (of all places!) puts it to rest. (In this and all quotes that follow, "DER" means distributed energy resources, which for the most part means solar PV.) Due to the variable nature of renewable DER, there is a perception that customers will always need to remain on the grid. While we would expect customers to remain on the grid until a fully viable and economic distributed non-variable resource is available, one can imagine a day when battery storage technology or micro turbines could allow customers to be electric grid independent . To put this into perspective, who would have believed 10 years ago that traditional wire line telephone customers could economically "cut the cord?" Indeed! Just the other day, Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers said , "If the cost of solar panels keeps coming down, installation costs come down and if they combine solar with battery technology and a power management system, then we have someone just using for backup." What happens if a whole bunch of customers start generating their own power and using the grid merely as backup? The EEI report warns of "irreparable damages to revenues and growth prospects" of utilities. Utility investors are accustomed to large, long-term, reliable investments with a 30-year cost recovery - fossil fuel plants, basically. The cost of those investments, along with investments in grid maintenance and reliability, are spread by utilities across all ratepayers in a service area. What happens if a bunch of those ratepayers start reducing their demand or opting out of the grid entirely? Well, the same investments must now be spread over a smaller group of ratepayers. In other words: higher rates for those who haven't switched to solar. That's how it starts. These two paragraphs from the EEI report are a remarkable description of the path to obsolescence faced by the industry: The financial implications of these threats are fairly evident. Start with the increased cost of supporting a network capable of managing and integrating distributed generation sources. Next, under most rate structures, add the decline in revenues attributed to revenues lost from sales foregone. These forces lead to increased revenues required from remaining customers ... and sought through rate increases. The result of higher electricity prices and competitive threats will encourage a higher rate of DER additions, or will promote greater use of efficiency or demand-side solutions. Increased uncertainty and risk will not be welcomed by investors, who will seek a higher return on investment and force defensive-minded investors to reduce exposure to the sector. These competitive and financial risks would likely erode credit quality. The decline in credit quality will lead to a higher cost of capital, putting further pressure on customer rates. Ultimately, capital availability will be reduced, and this will affect future investment plans. The cycle of decline has been previously witnessed in technology-disrupted sectors (such as telecommunications) and other deregulated industries (airlines). Did you follow that? As ratepayers opt for solar panels (and other distributed energy resources like micro-turbines, batteries, smart appliances , etc.), it raises costs on other ratepayers and hurts the utility's credit rating. As rates rise on other ratepayers, the attractiveness of solar increases, so more opt for it. Thus costs on remaining ratepayers are even further increased, the utility's credit even further damaged. It's a vicious, self-reinforcing cycle: One implication of all this - a poorly understood implication - is that rooftop solar fucks up the utility model even at relatively low penetrations , because it goes straight at utilities' main profit centers. (It's already happening in Germany.) Right now, distributed solar PV is a relatively tiny slice of U.S. electricity, less than 1 percent. For that reason, utility investors aren't paying much attention. "Despite the risks that a rapidly growing level of DER penetration and other disruptive challenges may impose," EEI writes, "they are not currently being discussed by the investment community and factored into the valuation calculus reflected in the capital markets." But that 1 percent is concentrated in a small handful of utility districts, so trouble, at least for that first set of utilities, is just over the horizon. Utility investors are sleepwalking into a maelstrom. ("Despite all the talk about investors assessing the future in their investment evaluations," the report notes dryly, "it is often not until revenue declines are reported that investors realize that the viability of the business is in question." In other words, investors aren't that smart and rational financial markets are a myth .) Bloomberg Energy Finance forecasts 22 percent compound annual growth in all solar PV, which means that by 2020 distributed solar (which will account for about 15 percent of total PV) could reach up to 10 percent of load in certain areas. If that happens, well: Assuming a decline in load, and possibly customers served, of 10 percent due to DER with full subsidization of DER participants, the average impact on base electricity prices for non-DER participants will be a 20 percent or more increase in rates, and the ongoing rate of growth in electricity prices will double for non-DER participants (before accounting for the impact of the increased cost of serving distributed resources). So rates would rise by 20 percent for those without solar panels. Can you imagine the political shitstorm that would create? (There are reasons to think EEI is exaggerating this effect, but we'll get into that in the next post.) If nothing is done to check these trends, the U.S. electric utility as we know it could be utterly upended. The report compares utilities' possible future to the experience of the airlines during deregulation or to the big monopoly phone companies when faced with upstart cellular technologies. In case the point wasn't made, the report also analogizes utilities to the U.S. Postal Service, Kodak, and RIM, the maker of Blackberry devices. These are not meant to be flattering comparisons. Remember, too, that these utilities are not Google or Facebook. They are not accustomed to a state of constant market turmoil and reinvention. This is a venerable old boys network, working very comfortably within a business model that has been around, virtually unchanged, for a century. A friggin' century, more or less without innovation, and now they're supposed to scramble and be all hip and new-age? Unlikely. So what's to be done? You won't be surprised to hear that EEI's prescription is mainly focused on preserving utilities and their familiar business model. But is that the best thing for electricity consumers? Is that the best thing for the climate? We'll dig into those questions in my next post . http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=b02_1366076692 dcmfox Solar panels could destroy U.S. utilities, according to U.S. utilities solar, destroy, utility, companies Fri, 05 Apr 2013 18:02:19 -0400 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=eb4_1365199242 SAPD_HRT CNET.com - Thu, Apr 4, 2013 Encryption used in Apple's iMessage chat service has stymied attempts by federal drug enforcement agents to eavesdrop on suspects' conversations, an internal government document reveals. An internal Drug Enforcement Administration document seen by CNET discusses a February 2013 criminal investigation and warns that because of the use of encryption, "it is impossible to intercept iMessages between two Apple devices" even with a court order approved by a federal judge. The DEA's warning, marked "law enforcement sensitive," is the most detailed example to date of the technological obstacles -- FBI director Robert Mueller has called it the "Going Dark" problem -- that police face when attempting to conduct court-authorized surveillance on non-traditional forms of communication. When Apple's iMessage was announced in mid-2011, Cupertino said it would use "secure end-to-end encryption." It quickly became the most popular encrypted chat program in history: Apple CEO Tim Cook said last fall that 300 billion messages have been sent so far, which are transmitted through the Internet rather than as more costly SMS messages carried by wireless providers. A spokeswoman for the DEA declined to comment on iMessage and encryption. Apple also declined to comment. The DEA's "Intelligence Note" says that iMessage came to the attention of the agency's San Jose, Calif., office as agents were drafting a request for a court order to perform real-time electronic surveillance under Title III of the Federal Wiretap Act. They discovered that records of text messages already obtained from Verizon Wireless were incomplete because the target of the investigation used iMessage: "It became apparent that not all text messages were being captured." This echoes what other law enforcement agencies have been telling politicians on Capitol Hill for years. Last May, CNET reported that the FBI has quietly asked Web companies not to oppose a law that would levy new wiretap requirements on social-networking Web sites and providers of VoIP, instant messaging, and Web e-mail. During an appearance two weeks later at a Senate hearing, the FBI's Mueller confirmed that the bureau is pushing for "some form of legislation." Andrew Weissmann, the FBI's general counsel, said last month at an American Bar Association event that enacting a new law to amend a 1994 law called the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act is a "top priority" this year. CALEA requires telecommunications providers to build in backdoors for easier surveillance, but does not apply to Internet companies, which are required to provide technical assistance instead. What's difficult, Weissmann said, "is trying to come up with the fairest and most sort of narrowly tailored means to do this." He added: "We don't want to have a system where you're needlessly imposing burdens on thriving industries or even budding industries... So what the bureau has been spending quite a bit of time on, and certainly has as a top priority this year, is coming up with a proposal with other members of the intelligence community that tries to balance all of that. That does tackle the problem of trying to modernize where we were from 1994, given how much technology has advanced." 'Not designed to be government-proof' Apple has disclosed little about how iMessage works, but a partial analysis sheds some light on the protocol. Matthew Green , a cryptographer and research professor at Johns Hopkins University, wrote last summer that because iMessage has "lots of moving parts," there are plenty of places where things could go wrong. Green said that Apple "may be able to substantially undercut the security of the protocol" -- by, perhaps, taking advantage of its position during the creation of the secure channel to copy a duplicate set of messages for law enforcement. Christopher Soghoian, a senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union, said yesterday that "Apple's service is not designed to be government-proof." "It's much much more difficult to intercept than a telephone call or a text message" that federal agents are used to, Soghoian says. "The government would need to perform an active man-in-the-middle attack... The real issue is why the phone companies in 2013 are still delivering an unencrypted audio and text service to users. It's disgraceful." The DEA says that "iMessages between two Apple devices are considered encrypted communication and cannot be intercepted, regardless of the cell phone service provider." But, if the messages are exchanged between an Apple device and a non-Apple device, the agency says, they "can sometimes be intercepted, depending on where the intercept is placed." This isn't the first time that federal agencies have warned of surveillance woes. An FBI staff operations specialist in the bureau's Counterterrorism Division complained in 2010 of difficulties in "obtaining information from Internet service providers and social-networking sites." And a Homeland Security report obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation shows that a working group convened by an FBI office in Chantilly, Va. requested details about how "investigations have been negatively impacted" by companies' delays or inability to comply with surveillance requests. Going Dark has emerged as a significant effort inside the FBI, which employed 107 full-time equivalent people on the project as of 2009, commissioned a RAND study, hired consultants from Booz, Allen and Hamilton, and sought extensive technical input from its secretive Operational Technology Division in Quantico, Va. "There is a growing and dangerous gap between law enforcement's legal authority to conduct electronic surveillance, and its actual ability to conduct such surveillance," FBI director Mueller told a House of Representatives committee two weeks ago. "We must ensure that the laws by which we operate and which provide protection to individual privacy rights keep pace with new threats and new technology." As CNET was the first to report in 2003 , representatives of the FBI's Electronic Surveillance Technology Section in Chantilly, Va., began quietly lobbying the Federal Communications Commission to force broadband providers to provide more-efficient, standardized surveillance facilities. The FCC approved that requirement a year later, sweeping in Internet phone companies that tie into the existing telecommunications system. The regulations were upheld in 2006 by a federal appeals court. But the FCC never granted the FBI's request to interpret the law to cover instant messaging and VoIP programs that are not "managed"--meaning peer-to-peer programs like Apple's Facetime and iMessage, Facebook Chat, Gmail's video chat, and Xbox Live's in-game chat that do not use the public telephone network. If Congress does nothing, law enforcement still has options. Police can obtain a special warrant allowing them to sneak into someone's house or office, install keystroke-logging software, and record passphrases. The DEA adopted this technique in a case where suspects used PGP and the encrypted Web e-mail service Hushmail.com. They can also send a suspect malware , purchase a so-called zero day vulnerability to gain control of a target device and extract the contents, or obtain a warrant to seize the physical device and perform a traditional forensics analysis. Apple's privacy policy authorizes the company to divulge customers' information about customers to law enforcement when "reasonably necessary or appropriate" or to "comply with legal process. http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=eb4_1365199242 SAPD_HRT Apple's iMessage encryption trips up feds' surveillance Iphone, Imessage, Fed Thu, 04 Apr 2013 09:30:43 -0400 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=225_1365081602 IranIsNext Internal document from the Drug Enforcement Administration complains that messages sent with Apple's encrypted chat service are "impossible to intercept," even with a warrant. Encryption used in Apple's iMessage chat service has stymied attempts by federal drug enforcement agents to eavesdrop on suspects' conversations, an internal government document reveals. An internal Drug Enforcement Administration document seen by CNET discusses a February 2013 criminal investigation and warns that because of the use of encryption, "it is impossible to intercept iMessages between two Apple devices" even with a court order approved by a federal judge. The DEA's warning, marked "law enforcement sensitive," is the most detailed example to date of the technological obstacles -- FBI director Robert Mueller has called it the "Going Dark" problem -- that police face when attempting to conduct court-authorized surveillance on non-traditional forms of communication. When Apple's iMessage was announced in mid-2011, Cupertino said it would use "secure end-to-end encryption." It quickly became the most popular encrypted chat program in history: Apple CEO Tim Cook said last fall that 300 billion messages have been sent so far, which are transmitted through the Internet rather than as more costly SMS messages carried by wireless providers. A spokeswoman for the DEA declined to comment on iMessage and encryption. Apple also declined to comment. The DEA's "Intelligence Note" says that iMessage came to the attention of the agency's San Jose, Calif., office as agents were drafting a request for a court order to perform real-time electronic surveillance under Title III of the Federal Wiretap Act. They discovered that records of text messages already obtained from Verizon Wireless were incomplete because the target of the investigation used iMessage: "It became apparent that not all text messages were being captured." This echoes what other law enforcement agencies have been telling politicians on Capitol Hill for years. Last May, CNET reported that the FBI has quietly asked Web companies not to oppose a law that would levy new wiretap requirements on social-networking Web sites and providers of VoIP, instant messaging, and Web e-mail. During an appearance two weeks later at a Senate hearing, the FBI's Mueller confirmed that the bureau is pushing for "some form of legislation." Andrew Weissmann, the FBI's general counsel, said last month at an American Bar Association event that enacting a new law to amend a 1994 law called the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act is a "top priority" this year. CALEA requires telecommunications providers to build in backdoors for easier surveillance, but does not apply to Internet companies, which are required to provide technical assistance instead. What's difficult, Weissmann said, "is trying to come up with the fairest and most sort of narrowly tailored means to do this." He added: "We don't want to have a system where you're needlessly imposing burdens on thriving industries or even budding industries... So what the bureau has been spending quite a bit of time on, and certainly has as a top priority this year, is coming up with a proposal with other members of the intelligence community that tries to balance all of that. That does tackle the problem of trying to modernize where we were from 1994, given how much technology has advanced." 'Not designed to be government-proof' Apple has disclosed little about how iMessage works, but a partial analysis sheds some light on the protocol. Matthew Green, a cryptographer and research professor at Johns Hopkins University, wrote last summer that because iMessage has "lots of moving parts," there are plenty of places where things could go wrong. Green said that Apple "may be able to substantially undercut the security of the protocol" -- by, perhaps, taking advantage of its position during the creation of the secure channel to copy a duplicate set of messages for law enforcement. Christopher Soghoian, a senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union, said yesterday that "Apple's service is not designed to be government-proof." "It's much much more difficult to intercept than a telephone call or a text message" that federal agents are used to, Soghoian says. "The government would need to perform an active man-in-the-middle attack... The real issue is why the phone companies in 2013 are still delivering an unencrypted audio and text service to users. It's disgraceful." The DEA says that "iMessages between two Apple devices are considered encrypted communication and cannot be intercepted, regardless of the cell phone service provider." But, if the messages are exchanged between an Apple device and a non-Apple device, the agency says, they "can sometimes be intercepted, depending on where the intercept is placed." This isn't the first time that federal agencies have warned of surveillance woes. An FBI staff operations specialist in the bureau's Counterterrorism Division complained in 2010 of difficulties in "obtaining information from Internet service providers and social-networking sites." And a Homeland Security report obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation shows that a working group convened by an FBI office in Chantilly, Va. requested details about how "investigations have been negatively impacted" by companies' delays or inability to comply with surveillance requests. Going Dark has emerged as a significant effort inside the FBI, which employed 107 full-time equivalent people on the project as of 2009, commissioned a RAND study, hired consultants from Booz, Allen and Hamilton, and sought extensive technical input from its secretive Operational Technology Division in Quantico, Va. "There is a growing and dangerous gap between law enforcement's legal authority to conduct electronic surveillance, and its actual ability to conduct such surveillance," FBI director Mueller told a House of Representatives committee two weeks ago. "We must ensure that the laws by which we operate and which provide protection to individual privacy rights keep pace with new threats and new technology." As CNET was the first to report in 2003 , representatives of the FBI's Electronic Surveillance Technology Section in Chantilly, Va., began quietly lobbying the Federal Communications Commission to force broadband providers to provide more-efficient, standardized surveillance facilities. The FCC approved that requirement a year later, sweeping in Internet phone companies that tie into the existing telecommunications system. The regulations were upheld in 2006 by a federal appeals court. But the FCC never granted the FBI's request to interpret the law to cover instant messaging and VoIP programs that are not "managed"--meaning peer-to-peer programs like Apple's Facetime and iMessage, Facebook Chat, Gmail's video chat, and Xbox Live's in-game chat that do not use the public telephone network. If Congress does nothing, law enforcement still has options. Police can obtain a special warrant allowing them to sneak into someone's house or office, install keystroke-logging software, and record passphrases. The DEA adopted this technique in a case where suspects used PGP and the encrypted Web e-mail service Hushmail.com. They can also send a suspect malware, purchase a so-called zero day vulnerability to gain control of a target device and extract the contents, or obtain a warrant to seize the physical device and perform a traditional forensics analysis. Apple's privacy policy authorizes the company to divulge customers' information about customers to law enforcement when "reasonably necessary or appropriate" or to "comply with legal process." http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=225_1365081602 IranIsNext Apple's iMessage encryption trips up feds' surveillance Apple, iPhone, DEA, USA, Wire-Tap Tue, 02 Apr 2013 10:06:34 -0400 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=89b_1364910294 Nu3a http://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Qatar-Rich-and-Dangerous.html The first concern of the Emir of Qatar is the prosperity and security of the tiny kingdom. To achieve that, he knows no limits. Stuck between Iran and Saudi Arabia is Qatar with the third largest natural gas deposit in the world. The gas gives the nearly quarter of a million Qatari citizens the highest per capita income on the planet and provides 70 percent of government revenue. How does an extremely wealthy midget with two potentially dangerous neighbors keep them from making an unwelcomed visit? Naturally, you have someone bigger and tougher to protect you. Of course, nothing is free. The price has been to allow the United States to have two military bases in a strategic location. According to Wikileak diplomatic cables, the Qataris are even paying sixty percent of the costs. Having tanks and bunker busting bombs nearby will discourage military aggression, but it does nothing to curb the social tumult that has been bubbling for decades in the Middle Eastern societies. Eighty-four years ago, the Moslem Brotherhood arose in Egypt because of the presence of foreign domination by Great Britain and the discontent of millions of the teaming masses yearning to be free. Eighty-four years later, the teaming masses are still yearning. Sixty-five percent of the people in the Middle East are under twenty-nine years of age. It is this desperate angry group that presents a danger that armies cannot stop. The cry for their dignity, "I am a man," is the sound that sends terror through governments. It is this overwhelming force that the Emir of Qatar has been able to deflect. A year after he deposed his father in 1995, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani established the Al-Jazeera television satellite news network. He invited some of the radical Salafi preachers that had been given sanctuary in Qatar to address the one and a half billion Moslems around the world. They had their electronic soapbox and the card to an ATM, but there was a price. The price was silence. They could speak to the world and arouse the fury in Egypt or Libya, but they would have to leave their revolution outside of Qatar or the microphone would be switched off and the ATM would stop dispensing the good life. The Moslem Brotherhood, that is a major force across the region, dissolved itself in Qatar in 1999. Jasim Sultan, a member of the former organization, explained that the kingdom was in compliance with Islamic law. He heads the state funded Awaken Project that publishes moderate political and philosophical literature. How Qatar has benefited from networking with the Salafis is illustrated by the connections with Tunisia where Qatar is making a large investment in telecommunications. Tunisian Foreign Minister Rafiq Abdulsalaam was head of the Research and Studies Division in the Al Jazeera Centre in Doha. His father-in-law Al Ghanouchi is the head of the Tunisian Muslim Brotherhood party. Over much of the time since he seized power, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani has followed the policy of personal networking, being proactive in business and neutral on the international stage. The Emir is generous with the grateful, the Qatar Sovereign Wealth Fund bargains hard in the board room and the kingdom makes available Qatar's Good Offices to resolve disputes. Qatar's foreign policy made an abrupt shift when the kingdom entered the war against Qaddafi. The kingdom sent aircraft to join NATO forces. On the ground, Qatari special forces armed, trained, and led Libyans against Qaddafi's troops. The head of the National Transition Council Mustafa Abdul Jalil attributed much of the success of the revolution to the efforts of Qatar that he said had spent two billion dollars. He commented, "Nobody traveled to Qatar without being given a sum of money by the government." Qatar had ten billion dollars in investments in Libya to protect. The Barwa Real Estate Company alone had two billion committed to the construction of a beach resort near Tripoli. While the bullets were still flying, Qatar signed eight billion dollars in agreements with the NTC. Just in case things with the NTC didn't work out, they financed rivals Abdel Hakim Belhaj, leader of the February 17 Martyr's Brigade, and Sheik Ali Salabi, a radical cleric who had been exiled in Doha. If Qatar's investments of ten billion dollars seem substantial, the future has far more to offer. Reconstruction costs are estimated at seven hundred billion dollars. The Chinese and Russians had left behind between them thirty billion in incomplete contracts and investments and all of it is there for the taking for those who aided the revolution. No sooner had Qaddafi been caught and shot, Qatar approached Bashar Al-Assad to establish a transitional government with the Moslem Brotherhood. As you would expect, relinquishing power to the Brotherhood was an offer that he could refuse. It didn't take long before he heard his sentence pronounced in January 2012 on the CBS television program, 60 Minutes by Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani. The Emir declared that foreign troops should be sent into Syria. At the Friends of Syria conference in February, Prime Minister Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani said, "We should do whatever necessary to help , including giving them weapons to defend themselves." Why would Qatar want to become involved in Syria where they have little invested? A map reveals that the kingdom is a geographic prisoner in a small enclave on the Persian Gulf coast. It relies upon the export of LNG, because it is restricted by Saudi Arabia from building pipelines to distant markets. In 2009, the proposal of a pipeline to Europe through Saudi Arabia and Turkey to the Nabucco pipeline was considered, but Saudi Arabia that is angered by its smaller and much louder brother has blocked any overland expansion. Already the largest LNG producer, Qatar will not increase the production of LNG. The market is becoming glutted with eight new facilities in Australia coming online between 2014 and 2020. A saturated North American gas market and a far more competitive Asian market leaves only Europe. The discovery in 2009 of a new gas field near Israel, Lebanon, Cyprus, and Syria opened new possibilities to bypass the Saudi Barrier and to secure a new source of income. Pipelines are in place already in Turkey to receive the gas. Only Al-Assad is in the way. Qatar along with the Turks would like to remove Al-Assad and install the Syrian chapter of the Moslem Brotherhood. It is the best organized political movement in the chaotic society and can block Saudi Arabia's efforts to install a more fanatical Wahhabi based regime. Once the Brotherhood is in power, the Emir's broad connections with Brotherhood groups throughout the region should make it easy for him to find a friendly ear and an open hand in Damascus. A control centre has been established in the Turkish city of Adana near the Syrian border to direct the rebels against Al-Assad. Saudi Deputy Foreign Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Abdullah al-Saud asked to have the Turks establish a joint Turkish, Saudi, Qatari operations center. "The Turks liked the idea of having the base in Adana so that they could supervise its operations" a source in the Gulf told Reuters. The fighting is likely to continue for many more months, but Qatar is in for the long term. At the end, there will be contracts for the massive reconstruction and there will be the development of the gas fields. In any case, Al-Assad must go. There is nothing personal; it is strictly business to preserve the future tranquility and well-being of Qatar. By Felix Imonti Hopefully this article will bring more insight to the current events in Syria, the true causes of the western involvement are unfolding and I hope it's only a matter of time when the general public will become aware of the machinations a scheming of these foreign affairs. http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=89b_1364910294 Nu3a Qatar and it's involvement in Syria Syria, Qatar, LNG, Muslim Brotherhood Sun, 31 Mar 2013 06:28:26 -0400 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=d54_1364725525 weshard Congress might be at loggerheads, the unemployment rate might be too high and America's infrastructure might be crumbling - but Americans of all political viewpoints comfort themselves with the notion that at least they lead the world in high technology and always will. It's a pleasing, convenient idea. China can't outrun the United States, because it's not creative enough. It's authoritarian. Democracy is central to innovation, according to this comforting scenario. Although America has accounted for a sizable share of all technological innovations that have shaped our modern world, the wider historical evidence is disappointing for anyone who thinks political freedom is a fundamental precondition for innovation. Few of the most creative societies of the ancient world were free. Certainly not Mesopotamia or Egypt. As for the spectacular creativity of early modern Europe, this somehow flourished alongside bloodcurdling efforts at mind control. More recently, both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, with authoritarian cultures, punched well above their weight in innovation. Even the evidence of America's own history undercuts the "all you need is freedom" story. Though from the start freedom was central to the country's political culture, Americans have not always ranked as technological leaders. America's technological coming of age was remarkably recent. As Ralph Gomory, former head of I.B.M.'s research department pointed out to me in an interview, America was noted up to the 1930s mainly as an inspired adapter of other nations' technologies - a role similar to that of Japan and other East Asian nations in more recent times. How do we explain America's sudden mid-20th-century ascent to technological glory? The credit goes not to freedom but to something more prosaic: money. With World War II, the United States government joined corporations in ramping up spending on R&D, and then came the cold war and the Soviets' launch of Sputnik in 1957, which gave further impetus to government-funded research. One result was Darpa, which helped develop the Internet. Throughout history, rich nations have gotten to the future first. Their companies can afford to equip their tinkerers and visionaries with the most advanced materials, instruments and knowledge. This raises an epochal question: as China becomes richer, is it destined to pass the United States as the world's most inventive nation? The question is all the more pertinent because many experts contend that America's inventive spirit is already flagging. As the Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel put it to me in an interview, American innovation in recent decades has been remarkably narrowly based. "It has been confined largely to information technology and financial services," he said. "By contrast in transportation, for instance, we are hardly more advanced today than we were 40 years ago. The story is similar in treating cancer." Rob Atkinson, president of the Washington-based Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, points out that China is rapidly ramping up its research spending. "The Chinese have the ability to throw a lot of resources at this, and some will stick to the wall," he says. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, China's research spending increased from 0.9 percent of gross domestic product in 2000 to 1.7 percent in 2009. Meanwhile, China's total number of researchers in R&D more than doubled from 2000 to 2007. During that period in the United States, the number of researchers in R&D grew less than 10 percent. The Battelle Institute, based in Columbus, Ohio, predicts that China may pass the United States in R&D spending by 2023 . Meanwhile the evidence of international patent filings is looking increasingly ominous. According to data compiled by the World Intellectual Property Organization, the world's single most prolific filer of international patents as of 2011 was ZTE, a Chinese telecommunications corporation. Its filings were up an astounding fivefold from 2009. Another Chinese corporation, Huawei, moved up to third in the 2011 league table. The only United States corporation to make the Top 10 was Qualcomm. All this is the more troubling because United States patent law has now been drastically weakened. Congress has made it much harder for small American inventors to protect their intellectual property from infringement and theft. Pat Choate, the author of "Hot Property," a book on the theft of intellectual property, maintains that if the new patent regimen had existed when corporations like Apple and Microsoft first got going, they might never have made it out of the little leagues. Their patents would have been quickly infringed by predatory larger corporations, and rather than engage in unequal litigation battles against deep-pocketed and ruthless opponents, they could have felt forced to share their technology on concessionary terms. Another concern is that American corporations have been moving their R&D operations offshore. According to the National Science Foundation, fully 27 percent of all employees in United States multinational corporations' research departments were based abroad as of 2009, up from 16 percent in 2004. China seems to be benefiting from the trend. Both Intel and Applied Materials are developing major research facilities there. According to Paul Michel, a former federal appellate judge who is an authority on patent law, these operations will be larger than anything either corporation has in the United States. He adds: "Most of the staff in these labs will be Chinese, and undoubtedly many of the resulting manufacturing jobs will be located in China." But if East Asian culture is not a serious hindrance to technological creativity - and presumably neither Intel nor Applied Materials think it is - why are East Asian scientists and engineers generally typecast as underachievers? Part of the explanation is that there are different kinds of technological creativity. Fundamental breakthroughs generate headlines and win Nobel Prizes, but as Ralph Gomory pointed out, it is the more mundane task of turning breakthroughs into affordable products that matters economically. East Asian corporations tend to focus on this second task, and though the details of their "continuous improvement" in production technology are rarely noted in the press, their success has been a driver of the region's spectacular enrichment in the last 60 years. James Wilsdon , a British professor who has studied Chinese technological creativity, sees a parallel between China's scientific agenda and its sporting one. China ranked a distant 11th for the number of gold medals at the Seoul Olympics in 1988. Twenty years later, it topped the table. "If this is what China can achieve in sport," he said, "how quickly can it become a leader in science and innovation?" Eamonn Fingleton is the author of "In the Jaws of the Dragon: America's Fate in the Coming Era of Chinese Hegemony." http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/31/sunday-review/america-the-innovative.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130331 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=d54_1364725525 weshard America the Innovative? United States, China, technology, innovation, Research & Development Mon, 25 Mar 2013 02:57:03 -0400 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=c41_1364194568 jason16 South Korea will push to increase its cyber warfare forces to more than 1,000 to enhance preparedness against an unprovoked attack, as this week's massive hacking highlighted the potential danger of cyber terror by North Korea. It may seem unlikely that impoverished North Korea, with one of the most restrictive Internet policies in the world, would have the ability to threaten affluent South Korea, a country considered a global leader in telecommunications. For several years, North Korea has poured money into science and technology. The cyber attack against three major broadcasters and three banks, the biggest in two years, brought fresh attention to potential cyber attacks in South Korea, one of the world's most wired nations. Initial investigations found malware code used in the attack was from China. Authorities are focusing on possible links with North Korea as it has repeatedly threatened to launch various attacks on Seoul in light of new sanctions for its nuclear test and annual joint drills with the U.S. South Korea has about 400 personnel under the Cyber Command, a special unit launched in early 2010, but the military will increase the number of personnel to more than 1,000 in the wake of the growing cyber threat. (http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/seoul-and-pyongyang-engage-in-cyber-warfare.aspx?pageID=238&nID=43342&NewsCatID=356) http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=c41_1364194568 jason16 Cyber warfare between the two Koreas north korea parody Fri, 22 Mar 2013 16:49:08 -0400 http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=82f_1363985066 Catalytic Bernie M. Farber, Nate Leipciger and Avrum Rosensweig, Special to National Post 12/09/25 Last Updated: 12/09/25 3:20 PM ET These are Jews, a culture synonymous with swindlers. The phrase 'Jew' and 'cheater' have been so interchangeable historically that they have entered the English language as a verb. 'He jewed me!' Well the Jews have jewed us too. And come here to jew us again, to rob us blind, as they have done in Europe for centuries. These words are shocking and offensive, aren't they? And yet, last week, this contemptible screed was uttered and aired by a national broadcaster in Canada, with just one difference from the language cited above: Instead of "Jews," the broadcast was describing "gypsies" - an obsolete term for the European people known as Roma. Here is the full, actual quote, as it was aired on September 5: "These are gypsies, a culture synonymous with swindlers. The phrase gypsy and cheater have been so interchangeable historically that the word has entered the English language as a verb: he gypped me. Well the gypsies have gypped us. Too many have come here as false refugees. And they come here to gyp us again and rob us blind as they have done in Europe for centuries ... They're gypsies. And one of the central characteristics of that culture is that their chief economy is theft and begging." The TV host who said these words was Ezra Levant, and the broadcaster was the Sun News Network. Gina Csanyi-Robah, the executive director of Toronto's Roma Community Centre, has laid complaints with the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council (CBSC) and the Alberta Law Society. She is also considering further legal action as is permitted under Canadian law. If the Sun News Network had aired an attack on Jews, the whole country would be outraged. Yet we have seen little support for the Roma from other faith and ethno-cultural groups, politicians and community leaders in the wake of Levant's on-air rant. Even the media has remained mysteriously silent. The Roma are a small community in Canada, numbering roughly 80,000. Some families have been living here since the early 20th century. These families, which still speak the native Romani language and share a culture dating back to the eastern and central Europe of the 16th century, are now into fifth and sixth generations. Many more Roma came to Canada during the Hungarian Revolution in 1956; and numerous others have arrived in the last two decades to escape vicious and violent attacks from neo-Nazi groups in Hungary and the Czech Republic. There will always be those who claim the Roma engage in lawlessness and crime. Yet to ascribe such negative characteristics to an entire people is grossly unfair. Jewish history is replete with Jews described as thieves, beggars and cheats. Many Jews trying to come to North America from Europe in the early 20th century were denied entry as a result. Poverty and discrimination may beget lawlessness. But targeting an entire identifiable group for the actions of some is not the answer. In the late 1990s, a group of Roma refugees arrived in Canada and were temporarily housed in a downtown motel. In short order, members of the neo-Nazi Heritage Front demonstrated in front of the hotel with hateful pickets and the straight-arm Nazi salute, terrorizing the new arrivals. Police acted, and anti-hate charges were laid. It took almost a decade, but the demonstrators eventually were convicted. To the credit of the Sun News Network, a full apology and retraction was run late last week. As for Mr. Levant himself: no apology, no retraction - only silence. The time has come for all of us to reject hate and bigotry - against any group. http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2012/09/25/bernie-m-farber-et-al-hating-the-jew-hating-the-gypsy/ http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=82f_1363985066 Catalytic Hating the Jew, hating the 'gypsy': Canadian Jewish TV Host Ezra Levant's Hateful Rant Jews, rant, hate, Ezra, Levant, Canada, anti-semitic, gypsies, Roma