Run-off Stakes | Nasserist Darkhorse | Key Players
Jadaliyya Coverage | Tight margin for 2nd
SCAF to issue preliminary constitution
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At 9:56 AM Eastern Standard Time on Friday, May 25th, SpaceX’s Dragon became the first commercial spacecraft to dock with the International Space Station.
Israeli Settlers Fire on Palestinians while Police Look On
According to B’Tselem, which uploaded the footage to YouTube, a large group of settlers, some masked and armed, approached the village from the nearby settlement of Yitzhar and began throwing rocks and starting fires. After a group of Palestinians gathered and threw rocks in return at the settlers, Israeli police and soldiers arrived on the scene.
… “The soldiers did not try to remove the settlers and in fact are seen standing by settlers while they are shooting and stone throwing.” >continue<
![The words on the boy’s body read, “We will never kneel, O Bashar” [Reuters]
Syria Students Killed in Aleppo Campus Attack
Syrian security forces and students armed with knives have attacked a protest march at Aleppo University, killing at least four people who were protesting against President Bashar al-Assad’s rule, activists have said.
Several others were wounded during the pre-dawn raid early on Thursday, with activists saying that as many as 200 demonstrators were arrested. >continue<
Aljazeera Live Blog Syria | syriacomment.com](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m3h1m35tYA1qebfjho1_1280.jpg)
The words on the boy’s body read, “We will never kneel, O Bashar” [Reuters]
Syria Students Killed in Aleppo Campus Attack
Syrian security forces and students armed with knives have attacked a protest march at Aleppo University, killing at least four people who were protesting against President Bashar al-Assad’s rule, activists have said.
Several others were wounded during the pre-dawn raid early on Thursday, with activists saying that as many as 200 demonstrators were arrested. >continue<
America’s Stuxnet? Weakness found in Pentagon systems, power grid
Mark Clayton | CSMonitor »
An amateur cybersecurity researcher who bought industrial computer networking equipment on e-Bay for fun has discovered a critical weakness in equipment that helps run railroads, power grids, and even military installations nationwide.
The vulnerability means that hackers or other nations could potentially take control of elements within crucial American infrastructure – from refineries to power plants to missile systems – sabotaging their ability to operate from within.
Analysts say the problem is likely fixable, but the enthusiast says he has gone public only because the company that manufactures the equipment, RuggedCom of Concord, Ontario, has declined to address the issue since he made it known to them a year ago. >continue<
related: Stuxnet, dire warnings 1yr on | Cracking Stuxnet [TED talk]
“I am – how do you say it? – persona non grata,” said Lieutenant-Colonel Daniel Davis, as he sat sipping a coffee and eating a chocolate sundae in a shopping mall, just a subway stop from the Pentagon.
The career soldier is now a black sheep at the giant defence department building where he still works. The reason was his extraordinarily brave decision to accuse America’s military top brass of lying about the war in Afghanistan….
Davis, 48, drew up two reports containing research and observations garnered from his last tour. He was not short of material. As part of his job he had criss-crossed the country, travelling 9,000 miles and talking to more than 250 people. He had built up a picture of a hopeless cause; a country where Afghan soldiers were incapable of holding on to American gains. US soldiers would fight and die for territory and then see Afghan troops let it fall to the Taliban. Often the Afghans actively worked with the Taliban or simply refused to fight. One Afghan police officer laughed in Davis’s face when asked if he ever tried to fight the enemy. “That would be dangerous!” the man said. >continue<
Report: Dereliction of Duty II (pdf) | Truth Lies and Afghanistan
Neil Chenoweth - Australian Financial Review »
A four-year investigation by The Australian Financial Review has revealed a global trail of corporate dirty tricks directed against competitors by a secretive group of former policemen and intelligence officers within News Corp known as Operational Security….
…Operational Security, which is headed by Reuven Hasak, a former deputy director of the Israeli domestic secret service, Shin Bet, operates in an area which historically has had close supervision by the Office of the Chairman, Rupert Murdoch.
The security group was initially set up in a News Corp subsidiary, News Datacom Systems (later known as NDS), to battle internal fraud and to target piracy against its own pay TV companies. But documents uncovered by the Financial Review reveal that NDS encouraged and facilitated piracy by hackers not only of its competitors but also of companies, such as Foxtel, for whom NDS provided pay TV smart cards. The documents show NDS sabotaged business rivals, fabricated legal actions and obtained telephone records illegally. >continue<
Crypto shocker: four of every 1,000 public keys provide no security
Dan Goodin | arstechnica »
An astonishing four out of every 1,000 public keys protecting webmail, online banking, and other sensitive online services provide no cryptographic security, a team of mathematicians has found. The research is the latest to reveal limitations in the tech used by more than a million Internet sites to prevent eavesdropping.
The finding, reported in a paper (PDF) to be presented at a cryptography conference in August, is based on the analysis of some 7.1 million 1024-bit RSA keys published online…
The research is the latest to show the limitations of cryptographic systems that websites use to secure communications. In September, researchers unveiled an attack that silently decoded encrypted traffic as it passed between SSL-protected websites and a Web browser. Over the past few years, the much more standard way of defeating SSL has been to compromise one of the 600 or so entities authorized to mint certificates that are trusted by Firefox and other standard browsers. Given the success and ease of that method, the techniques laid out in the research paper would likely not be an attacker’s first choice of exploitation.
It remains unclear exactly what is causing large clusters of keys to use duplicated factors. >continue<
“The inner workings of a libertarian thinktank working to discredit the established science on climate change have been exposed by a leak of confidential documents detailing its strategy and fundraising networks.
DeSmogBlog, which broke the story, said it had received the confidential documents from an “insider” at the Heartland Institute, which is based in Chicago. The blog monitors industry efforts to discredit climate science.
The scheme includes spending $100,000 on commissioning an alternative curriculum for schoolchildren that will cast doubt on global warming.
It was not possible to immediately verify the authenticity of the documents. “There is nothing I can tell you,” Jim Lakely, Heartland’s communications director, said in a telephone interview. “We are investigating what we have seen on the internet and we will have more to say in the morning.” Lakely made no attempt to deny the veracity of information contained in the documents.
The Heartland Institute, founded in 1984, has built a reputation over the years for providing a forum for climate change sceptics. But it is especially known for hosting a series of lavish conferences of climate science doubters at expensive hotels at New York’s Time Square as well as in Washington DC.”
Read more at DeSmogBlog, and The Guardian
Russian Scientists reach ancient Antarctic lake
After decades of drilling , Russian scientists have finally managed to pierce through Antarctica’s ice sheet to reveal the secrets of a unique sub-glacial lake, Vostok, that has been sealed there for the past 20 million years…
…The discovery of the hidden lakes of Antarctica in the 1990s sparked much enthusiasm among scientists all over the world. Some think the ice cap above and at the edges have created a hydrostatic seal with the surface that has prevented lake water from escaping or anything else from getting inside.
Lake Vostok could also offer a glimpse of what conditions exist for life in similar extreme conditions on Mars and Jupiter’s moon, Europa, according to RedOrbit scientific news portal. >continue<
images via RIANOVSTI infographic
Anonymous Hacks FBI | Icing on ‘delicious caek’
“You’ve angered the hive” | Charting Highlights
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update 2/17: Anonymous hacks FTC website
Riots in Cairo over riot in Port Said | Anger focuses on military
Part of the Port Said puzzle is that the violence was initiated by supporters of al-Masry, the winning local team, against Cairo’s al-Ahali. Ahali’s fans, known as “ultras,” played a leading role in the anti-Mubarak uprising and the rallies against continuing military rule, and have a famously adversarial relationship with the police. >guardian live update<
Chaotic, unclear and current: See @Acarvin on Twitter
Russia is in talks with NASA and the European Space Agency to build a permanent research base on the Moon, the head of national space agency Roscosmos, Vladimir Popovkin, said today.
“We don’t want man to just step on the Moon,” Ria Novosti news agency quoted Roscosmos director Vladimir Popovkin as saying.
Recently, evidence that there may be water at the lunar poles has spurred scientific interest… >continue<
Today’s Zaman: Perry to drop campaign »
Perry entered the race last August to great fanfare and high poll numbers. But his standing quickly fell after a series of mistakes called into question whether the Texas politician, who had never lost a race during his three-decade career in elected office, was ready for the national stage.
Perry’s biggest error came in a nationally televised debate in early November, when he could not remember the name of the third Cabinet department he pledged to eliminate….[he] also angered many in Turkey when he said during earlier this week that Turkey was run by “Islamic terrorists,” that it should be expelled from NATO and that the US should cut foreign aid to Turkey, even though Ankara is not a recipient of US foreign aid.
The Turkish Foreign Ministry reacted with a harsh statement to Perry’s remarks, made on Monday night during a debate among Republican contenders in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, saying the Texas governor was a 2-year-old toddler when Turkey became a NATO member. >continue<
One suspects the bewildering Turkey commentary was the final nail in the coffin. And, if so, it is some consolation to know it is indeed possible to be too dumb in today’s GOP.
