Slashdot Mirror

Hmmmm. Uk.... terror plots.... IMs to Pakistan.... web based training.... emails to cell members.... "Jihadi" web sites.... So I guess it's funny because it could be true?

Police have foiled 15 terror plots in Britain since the 2000, Ian Blair reveals

The suicide bombers who met at McDonald's: Image shows meeting with '7/7 terror plotter'

Car Bomb Found in London 20 Days After al Qaeda Suicide Bomber 'Graduation Ceremony'

Training camps for terrorists in UK parks

UK camps 'preparation for terror'

Men 'planned airliner explosions'

Airline terror trial shown liquid bomb exploding

[Channel 4 News] UK airline plot martyrdom videos released

Fertiliser bomb plot: The story
Five men have been convicted of plotting to build a bomb which police say could have killed hundreds of British people. The men were caught after police and MI5 launched a massive surveillance operation.

I would think most people would prefer avoiding another 7/7 attack.

Well, carry on with the snarky comments then. After all, that's what keeps us all safe, isn't it? Certainly it couldn't have anything to do with the security services based on the typical post on Slashdot. And never forget Bin Laden's gracious peace offer. All we have to do is convert to Islam as nations, abolish our respective constitutions and replace them with Sharia, start enforcing strict Islamic morality (which will mean killing homosexuals and blasphemers, no more alcohol, drugs, charging interest on loans, pornography, fornication, etc., etc.), then Bob's your uncle - peace! And look, the necessary infrastructure and supporting institutions are already coming into place, supported by leading religious figures. If converting to Islam is too high a price for you, there is even an Islamic alternative for many of you.

Hmmmm. Uk.... terror plots.... IMs to Pakistan.... web based training.... emails to cell members.... "Jihadi" web sites.... So I guess it's funny because it could be true?

Police have foiled 15 terror plots in Britain since the 2000, Ian Blair reveals

The suicide bombers who met at McDonald's: Image shows meeting with '7/7 terror plotter'

Car Bomb Found in London 20 Days After al Qaeda Suicide Bomber 'Graduation Ceremony'

Training camps for terrorists in UK parks

UK camps 'preparation for terror'

Men 'planned airliner explosions'

Airline terror trial shown liquid bomb exploding

[Channel 4 News] UK airline plot martyrdom videos released

Fertiliser bomb plot: The story
Five men have been convicted of plotting to build a bomb which police say could have killed hundreds of British people. The men were caught after police and MI5 launched a massive surveillance operation.

I would think most people would prefer avoiding another 7/7 attack.

Well, carry on with the snarky comments then. After all, that's what keeps us all safe, isn't it? Certainly it couldn't have anything to do with the security services based on the typical post on Slashdot. And never forget Bin Laden's gracious peace offer. All we have to do is convert to Islam as nations, abolish our respective constitutions and replace them with Sharia, start enforcing strict Islamic morality (which will mean killing homosexuals and blasphemers, no more alcohol, drugs, charging interest on loans, pornography, fornication, etc., etc.), then Bob's your uncle - peace! And look, the necessary infrastructure and supporting institutions are already coming into place, supported by leading religious figures. If converting to Islam is too high a price for you, there is even an Islamic alternative for many of you.

I think of the government as a loose collection of individuals employed by me, paid out of my taxes to run my country. They aren't separate from the citizenry, they are a part of it.

Government is force. It's a bunch of people who will beat you or shoot you if you do not do as they want. This is as true in a "democracy" as in a dictatorship, and is what distinguishes government from "individuals employed by me". The guy I hire to cut my lawn or paint my house does not claim a right to force me into a cage at gunpoint if he doesn't like my actions. The government does.

The government is indeed separate from the citizenry. If three average citizens shot a unarmed man fifty times, they'd go to jail; three government agents do it, it's business as usual. If a couple of average citizens kidnapped, drown, and beat people, they'd go to jail; government agents do it, it's business as usual.

They do not have power over my mind

They certainly do, as demonstrated by your attitude toward them.

The government also does not have a collective will (or a 'mind').

Of course it does. Any organized group has a collective will. It is entirely appropriate to say "the government wants to blah blah blah."

Also I think a major feature of the Panopticon prison was that every cell could be easily seen into. Without cameras in private places that analogy holds no water.

What, turning public space into a jail isn't bad enough?

See? They should have Googled it.

Did they have reason to believe that the man would have been treated this way? I don't know much about the conditions of jails in most other parts of the world. I suspect that jails in, say, Belgium are fairly clean and suspects' rights are generally respected

"...Alain Grignard, an OCSE prisons specialist who has evaluated Guantanamo on several occasions, including earlier this year, has concluded that Guantanamo's facilities and cultural sensitivity to Muslims is superior to that found in Belgian jails...."

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/clive_stafford_smith/2006/06/cultural_sensitivity_guantanam.html

"Vegans have way smaller carbon footprint because they don't eat meat, nor any animal based foods."

Where food comes from has a far greater effect on its carbon footprint than the type of food. A vegan who eats fruit, nuts, and vegetables that are have to be transported over long distances will for example have a much higher carbon footprint than somebody who eats meat, eggs, etc, that are produced locally by animals that eat locally grown animal fodder.

"Animals consume way way way more food during their lifespan than what you get to eat"

Much of that food is however things we cannot eat, e.g. grass, hay (a by-product of wheat production), and various other things that they're equipped to handle, but we aren't. Some (e.g. pigs, chickens) are primarily fed on stuff that's not fit for human consumption, and would therefore be thrown away, to become food for colonies of bacteria that produce heat, methane, and CO2 without benefiting us in any way.

"What are they really good producing, constantly?"

The same stuff that the rotting plant matter would be producing if it wasn't consumed by animals whose stomachs contain bacteria which are similar to those that produce methane when breaking down dead plants outside the stomachs of animals. This is why swamps (which by their nature have few if any large grazing animals living in them) produce extremely large amounts of methane, and also the reason that pockets of it have always been a hazard in coal mines, as well as becoming a source of natural gas in the 20th century (clue: natural gas reserves were produced at a time when there were no animals more complex than insects on land).

"The point is, that it's eating meat whats the true biggest cause of global warming"

But shipping bananas over long distances in high-speed refrigerated ships is environmentally friendly because vegans eat them.

You should be rated Troll :)

Sure, some things comes over very long distances, but you completely bypass that the stuff those animals eat could be used in other things as well than feeding animals :)

Furthermore, it has been studied which is more environmentally friendly. Here's an article in Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/nov/11/food.climatechange

Nevermind the vast amount of fossil fuels used by animal agriculture, sure totally vegetarian uses some too, but not as much. See: http://vegetarian.about.com/od/vegetarianvegan101/f/fossilfuels.htm

New scientist article says:
"A kilogram of beef is responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions and other pollution than driving for 3 hours while leaving all the lights on back home." http://environment.newscientist.com/article/mg19526134.500

You also bypass completely the fact that vegans do not eat exotic foods only, yes they are part as some things are simply not grown locally even if the climate would suit. You also completely bypass that vegans are not the only ones who eat stuff which comes over long distances, like bananas, rice, quite often soy. Furthermore, freighters quite often, or rarely are high-speed, more like tuned for fuel economy :) Have you ever seen a freighter go actually fast?

Furthermore, there's ongoing research to turn into alcohol all kinds of compostable stuff, a lot of the stuff which could have been fed to animals. And alcohol is good for what else than drinking and disinfectant? Yes, that's right, as a fuel. Atleast where i live was it 5% of all gas sold has to be alcohol, mixed into your normal DIN 95 octane or DIN 98 octane.

Which of these are more environmentally friendly:
- Meat produced locally
- Vegetary foods produced locally
- Regular vegan diet wh

use of compromised average computers as a tool of cyberwarfare is hardly a new thing: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/may/17/topstories3.russia . Seems the US military is only just waking up to how powerful a tool this can be.

It has been widely reported that two of the top three factors that influence people who have never before owned a Mac to buy one are appearance (of the hardware) and "look and feel" of the OS. (The third is "ease of use").

Vietnam? didn't need to be done. This shit in the middle east? Definitely didn't need to be done like this, if at all. It's called responsibility. It's called a conscience.

I've discussed this situation at length with my father and he agrees with my assertion that we could not and would not be acting in an illegal war without all the poor dumb kids who signed up because they felt like they were trapped and had no other option. He wishes that he had never signed up - and he never even had to see combat.

My Niece is the child of an alcoholic, who is the child of my father. Like me, she lives (lived?) in a town where unemployment is over 15%.

The US Military is never interested in just "doing good". We knew what Hitler was up to for years and did nothing; now our president is the grandson of the money behind the SS.

"At various times, the Bush family has tried to spin it, saying they were owned by a Dutch bank and it wasn't until the Nazis took over Holland that they realised that now the Nazis controlled the apparent company and that is why the Bush supporters claim when the war was over they got their money back. Both the American treasury investigations and the intelligence investigations in Europe completely bely that, it's absolute horseshit. They always knew who the ultimate beneficiaries were."

The simple truth is that we are not involved in this war for justice, but only so that certain people can make money - and this conflict is hardly unique in this regard.

Do this too much, and this is where you end up:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/may/11/iraq.humanrights

Where murder is not really murder, if its done by the right people with the right motives.

>If you read the article, the reader claims he never downloaded the game in the first place, nor can he find an evidence of it.

Your honor, the gloves clearly dont fit! Putting the defendant in charge of evidence usually produces the same results.

Sure there is, one is called Global Warming. And the Inuit in the Arctic Circle are paying for it, with their lives. Southeast Asia will pay for it when ocean level rise. People in Appalachia are paying for it. Try again.

>You're assuming 1) Biofuels are using areable land

``Spurred by generous subsidies and an EU commitment to increase the use of biofuels to counter climate change, at least 8m hectares (20m acres) of maize, wheat, soya and other crops which once provided animal feed and food have been taken out of production in the US.''

``This year 18% of all US grain production will go to biofuels. In the last two years the US has diverted 60m tonnes of food to fuel.''

Crop switch worsens global food price crisis

The Guardian's Jonathan Steele cites four different translations , from professors to the BBC to the New York Times and even pro-Israel news outlets, in none of those translations is the word "map" used. The closest translation to what the Iranian President actually said is, "The regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time," or a narrow relative thereof. In no version is the word "map" used or a context of mass genocide or hostile military action even hinted at.

He was not making a military threat. He was calling for an end to the occupation of Jerusalem at some point in the future. The "page of time" phrase suggests he did not expect it to happen soon. There was no implication that either Khomeini, when he first made the statement, or Ahmadinejad, in repeating it, felt it was imminent, or that Iran would be involved in bringing it about.

Prescott Bush Nazi connection:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/sep/25/usa.secondworldwar

US detention centers/ENDGAME:
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8572

HTH

Funny, we kill people "accidentally" left and right. Are we "fixing the government" of Iraq?

The USA is the world's largest consumer of Cocaine, but we are continually fucking with cocaine-producing nations. We are the largest consumer of Afghani heroin, but we paid the Taliban to combat Opium production, no joke. The Bush family has been doing business with the Bin Laden family for many years (and long before that, they did business with Hitler) Note that I have included links only from reputable publications. Note also that if you search for documents related to these particular scandals, you have a very hard time finding documents in the US news. That's because 10 megacorporations control 95% of the media in the USA, and they're all owned or controlled by rich people getting richer on the status quo.

We're well past that point today. We've currently got a president who the people never elected. He wouldn't have even had the electoral college in the last election (he already didn't have the majority vote) if all votes had been counted. And the electoral college is unnecessary and inherently undemocratic. Only four times has it overridden the will of the American people, and in at the very least the last occasion it was both unwarranted and, simply, the wrong decision. We ended up with an AWOL DUI puppet instead of a genuine war hero without whom we might not have the internet today. The massive attempts to make Gore look like a whiny bitch worked and distracted all the sheeple away from the reality of what was occurring.

I'm not claiming that the Republicans are the problem. The populists are the problem, and unfortunately, that's most of our representatives - and most of our population.

Starbucks should also start charging 1/3 of what they do for their coffee. I don't think either is hurting them much, though.

Wish I had mod points for you. Anyone who doesn't understand, check this out: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/mar/04/usa.israelandthepalestinians

Regarding the "slippery slope" as a logical fallacy (which it is) is exactly how the people in power are able to do such power-grabs. So long as X + 1 does not infer x + 10, then there's nothing wrong with X+1.

The real logical fallacy is ignoring psychology. Put a frog in a pot of boiling water, and it'll jump out. Put a frog in room temperature water, and let it boil, it'll never notice as it boils to death.

We won't notice, x+1, so we'll ignore it. Then tomorrow when it's x+1 again, we'll be fine. The reason the "slippery slope" is relevant, despite it's inherent logical flaws is that it refers to a real strategy that actually exists, and is used against the population.

Simply grabbing as much power as you can by claiming it's against a common enemy is a common strategy for gaining powers that can later be used to control the very people who thought it was protecting them. See step 1

How would Duck Tape be applied in this scenario to protect the pursued duck?

"The strange case of the homosexual necrophiliac duck pushed out the boundaries of knowledge in a rather improbable way when it was recorded by Dutch researcher Kees Moeliker. ..."

from:

http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/research/story/0,9865,1432991,00.html

Regards, Non.

Not true - in the UK it is actually illegal to rip a CD in itunes.. format shifting is illegal.

For the last time this was looked at see http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2006/oct/30/copyright.news and http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6095612.stm (both seem to be from the same source).

It was only in 2003 that the law was amended to allow timeshifting (recording broadcasts) and make transient (in-memory) copies legal.

See http://www.opsi.gov.uk/si/si2003/20032498.htm

The real problem is not scientific, it is political. Vast amounts of data have been lost over the last millenium and the things that get preserved are done so by institutions such as Churches that are wealthy and can survey the vaguaries of pollitical whim (even they loose a lot when some dictator changes his mind).

1400 years is a very long time. Whole civilistations have risen and disappeared in less, I'm sure none of those could ever imagine their society ending.

The Guardian isn't bad: http://www.guardian.co.uk/

Germany apparently gets 15% of its energy from renewables because they guarantee a high rate of payback. They are actively trying to force their own hand to the point where they have to deal with the energy storage problem; in fact, the pricing structure practically guarantees that companies will be falling over themselves to provide storage solutions.

In other words, their attitude is identical to Richard Nixon's. He claimed that "when the president does it, that means it is not illegal" in a 1977 interviewwith David Frost .

You might want to rethink that. The guardian looked into the company and found that there is no evidence they have ever sold anyone anything. The original address listed was a private home and the new one is a shipping company who claims to have never heard of them. In light of this, I'd hold onto my credit card number a bit longer and wait to see if they are a legit business going forward.

My suspicion is this is a one or two man attempt to start a new business and they obviously did not consult a lawyer before launching their new scheme.

Anyway, city workers compete mostly with each other for the same kinds of property.

Once they have moved into an area I would agree, but it's when a particular area changes character or price, it is obvious:

School lotteries in Brighton

240,000 Second-home owners targeted in bid to save rural areas from turning into ghost towns

Nottingham's forest of housing despair

But it is in Greater Nottingham "family areas" such as Lenton, Radford, Dunkirk and Beeston where buy-to-let blight has struck the worst. Estate agents turn what would elsewhere be a three-bedroom semi into a "five to six letting room property", and a four-bedroom house is marketed as "seven to eight letting rooms".

"Nothing is sold in the normal way," says Ms Fletcher. "With each student paying around £3,500 a year, landlords can earn about 8.5% on their investments. Even before tax relief, that's substantially more than the cost of borrowing, so they can outbid families. Estate agents have no interest in selling to parents with children. Investors pay more so there is more commission."

City chiefs crack down on buy-to-let

Even if people try and move to the other end of the country, houses in good area of the city are still expensive:

Highland House Prices

For Highland as a whole the median price for a previously owned house by 2006 was £136,000 - an increase of £33,000.

The Scottish figure was £114,000, a £24,000 increase.

Two of the most expensive areas for houses are Inverness Ness-side and Inverness South where median prices are about £140,000 and £160,000.

Our current energy infrastructure cost trillions of dollars to build

Citation, please. Else, don't cite figures.

and solar thermal would be more expensive.

Citation, please. Certainly the article cited in the OP didn't make such claims. I'm not saying you're wrong, but you'll be a whole lot more convincing if you'd provide some citations.

By comparison the Iraq war has not cost a trillion (unless you do a lot of hand waving and use funny numbers).

In 2005, the Congressional Budget Office estimated the cost of the war at $500 billion. That was three years ago. Others put the cost at $1 to $2 trillion in 2006. See this article from The Guardian (UK) for details. If you would like to provide some citations refuting these figures, please do so.

The article does not mention the installed cost of such a system, but it's probably tens of trillions of dollars.

And your basis for this claim is...what, exactly?

More if you factor in the need to store energy overnight and on overcast days.

From the article cited in the OP, "Commercial projects have already demonstrated that CSP systems can store energy by heating oil or molten salt, which can retain the heat for hours." That covers overnight hours. You'd locate the facilities in areas that typically don't have extended periods of overcast days (e.g., US Southwest, as mentioned in the article). Neither will provide 100% coverage, and so you'll probably still need existing power generation facilities, but they can be scaled back in operation the vast majority of time. What isn't discussed and probably needs to be is whether it is more effective to keep those facilities operating at bare minimum levels vs. come up with some other means to deal with extended poor generation periods.

Is it even possible to build one that big?

First, the reference to the 92x92 mile grid says "Solar thermal plants covering the equivalent of a 92-by-92-mile square grid in the Southwest..." You might note that "plants" is plural. So we're not talking a single 92x92 mile plant, but a large number of plants that cover an equivalent area. However, it's unclear how large an individual plant in this scheme would be vis a vis the ones in operation today.

You are IMHO robbing from society as a whole by buying stolen goods.

Move over eBay - this is the police...
This website disposes of property that the police have seized or has been handed in, and where the police can't locate the original owner. Stuff on sale reflects criminal tastes; lots of mountain bikes (many "as new"), Nike trainers (new, boxed), jewellery and electrical goods such as laptops and iPods.

And George Bush bought 100000 acres in Paraguay,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/oct/23/mainsection.tomphillips

If GWB has really been setting up a post election bolthole, eg. Paraguay in a spin about Bush's alleged 100,000 acre hideaway, then some of his friends (particularly those in the intelligence community) may be working to keep Paraguay at the appropriate level of corruption.

That level of skill may be hard to fight.

Makes me glad the author of the book (above), Rob Beckstrom, was appointed to the newly created department of Cyber Security. He'll probably be able to help the President sync his iPod as well.

That being said - he strongly believes in GW/CC. I am unsure as to the cause of the data points, but think that we should examine them as an interesting trend in our environment.

I linked this in another post in this thread.
The Home Office made available their views on whether phorm's user-profile-based tracking is legal w.r.t. the interception of communication legislation.

" Targeted online advertising services should be provided with the explicit consent of ISPs' users or by the acceptance of the ISP terms and conditions. The providers of targeted online advertising services, and ISPs contracting those services and making them available to their users, should then - to the extent interception is at issue - be able to argue that the end user has consented to the interception (or that there are reasonable grounds for so believing)."
And:
" Targeted online advertising can be regarded as being provided in connection with the telecommunication service provided by the ISP in the same way as the provision of services that examine e-mails for the purposes of filtering or blocking spam or filtering web pages to provide a specifically tailored content service."
Finally:
" Targeted online advertising undertaken with the highest regard to the respect for the privacy of ISPs' users and the protection of their personal data, and with the ISPs' users consent, expressed appropriately, is a legitimate business activity. The purpose of Chapter 1 of Part 1 of RIPA is not to inhibit legitimate business practice particularly in the telecommunications sector. "

If the ISP has put the tracking details into the TERMS and CONDITIONS and the user has OK'd the tracking, then the tracking is legal.

Here is the original article of the Home Office on Phorm.

What i don't know at this time, is whether BT does list the tracking in the T&C....

Cheers.

The Home Office indicated their position on the usage of Phorm. Phorm's data collection was declared to be legal and lawful if the end-user gave consent for collecting the information.

Here's a reference from the guardian blogs of March the 12th.

Article says that end-users were not not made aware of the phorm tracking. This will be an interesting case.

Cheers.

talktalk are going to make phorm opt-in http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/03/10/talktalk_to_make_phorm_use_optin_not_optout.html

A cybercriminal is a criminal, not an invading horde of huns.

There is a point, where quantity changes quality: a criminal becomes group of criminals, group turns into a gang, and gang — into a horde.

But yes, if you re-read my original posting in this thread, you'll see, that legal counter-attacks are what I'm recommending.

hackers, it shouldn't be difficult to get the local courts of their country of origin to deal with them

Foreign litigation is extremely difficult — on top of the regular hurdles associated with litigation (RIAA-cough-MPAA), you run into patriotism of the foreign country's inhabitants. It took two years to extradite three corrupt bankers from UK (a country with the closest ties to US)...

and if they're state-employed saboteurs, any damage you can cause their systems are trivially dealt with - computers are cheap.

See, here we are already discussing possible ways to retaliate... That's all the officer in the article is asking for (right now) — that we look into retaliation, rather than limit ourselves to pure battoning down of the hatches.

I don't need to buy a SAM, because my country's military (is supposed to) protect(s) me from foreign bombers. I hardly even lock my front door during the day, because my police keeps me safe from criminals. Why am I supposed to spend so much time and effort "securing" my computer?..

..at least in terms of brainwashing and branding.

Somehow, Apple got people to think it is somehow related to one of their products, the iPod, and worked the word "pod" into a brief, catchy term that merely means "a hyperlink to an audio file." I haven't kept up with the latest iPod models (can they play Vorbis yet?) but all the ones I've seen, don't have networking capability, so the machines aren't (weren't?) even able to downloading a podcast -- and yet a hyperlink to an audio file is named after their product.

That's pretty fucking spectacular.

The Grauniad has an excellent description of the dig and what they expect to find. Knowing they are making such a small dig and that holes are involved likely means they used GPR to sweep the area and find sections of ground that were clearly disturbed in ancient times and were about the right size and depth.

NDS was accused of cracking the ITV Digital cards in the UK shortly after the released of terrestrial digital TV. NDS UK alledgedly posted the crack on a pay-TV hacking web site (House of Ill Compute) which it had some shady financial links to. This led to widespread counterfeit cards, and was blamed for the financial collapse of ITV Digital. The major beneficiary of the ITV Digital collapse was the other pay-TV service launching at the time - Sky Digital, which was, funnily enough, also owned by Murdoch. Shady stuff. (source)

Shortly before the Sky Digital release Boris Floricic (aka Tron) gave a talk at a conference in the Netherlands on cracking pay-TV smart cards, and mentioned how much he was looking forward to the upcoming released of Sky Digital for a new challenge. A few months later he was found hanging dead in a park - supposedly going missing for five days, and then killing himself. The timing was very suspicious. Sky Digital remains uncracked.

Not only is it Netscape's revenge for Firefox's increase in market-share or financial success, but it now it seems that Firefox is working to achieve Netscape's greater vision. This vision is worse to Microsoft than the mere thought of losing market-share: running applications through a web browser and making the OS obsolete. Microsoft's infamous monopoly case before the DOJ was due to extreme tactics they undertook to kill Netscape's vision. They have even killed IE itself for a while before the second browser war in order to keep IE from getting there. Now other browsers like Firefox, Opera, and Safari are able to get to the point where the OS matters less and less despite MS best efforts.