1) Close the embassy, expel the diplomats and arrest Assange as his diplomatically protected bubble evaporates. 2) The status quo where they keep a watch on the embassy and arrest him if he leaves 3) Allow him to leave unmolested.
I think 1) is dangerous because it would allow foreign governments to do the same to arrest a fugitive who took refuge in a UK embassy and claim this case as a precedent, so they've decided not to do it. Also 1) implies the UK will probably lose diplomatic relations with Ecuador. British personnel would be expelled from the British embassy there. Some might be arrested or otherwise harassed. The Foreign Office is a cautious place and would probably advise the government this is opening a can of worms. The UK did close one embassy and expel the diplomats but that was in a very extreme situation where Libyan diplomats literally murdered a UK policewoman. Merely shielding Assange doesn't justify such extreme measures.
If the UK allows Assange to avoid justice by spending a couple of years in the Ecuadorian embassy then it would be setting a precedent that anyone (in)famous enough to get in there would be literally above the law which rules out 3)
So they've decided on 2) by a process of elimination. Sure there are costs to it in police time but it's better than the other two. Assange is locked up, just in better conditions than he probably deserves. And if he doesn't like that he's free to come out, get prosecuted for skipping bail, serve his time and get deported.
And its absurd to say just because someone broke UK law they should be held to account. I break Chinese law all the time when I criticize the Chinese government. I've never been to China though so why should I be held to account for unconscionable laws or under an unconscionable state such as the UK where you can't possibly get a fair trial?
That's a ridiculous thing to say. Criticizing China outside of China is not the same as going to Sweden and raping someone.
Assange committed offences in Sweden that met the dual criminality test they needed to meet for him to be extradited.
If Assange didn't think he could get a fair trial in Sweden or the UK then he shouldn't have visited them and broke the law.
And any state that prosecutes someone where there is no victim of actual violence is not a conscionable state.
SW and AA were victims of violence, and the Swedish and British legal systems are doing the right thing in prosecuting Assange.
The state is violence and the only justification for violence is when acted upon from a reasonable self defense position. ie government attacks you then fighting back is reasonable.
Well if you think like that then you're going to spend a lot time either in court or in prison.
The allegations centre on a 10-day period after Assange flew into Stockholm on Wednesday 11 August. One of the women, named in court as Miss A, told police that she had arranged Assange's trip to Sweden, and let him stay in her flat because she was due to be away. She returned early, on Friday 13 August, after which the pair went for a meal and then returned to her flat.
Her account to police, which Assange disputes, stated that he began stroking her leg as they drank tea, before he pulled off her clothes and snapped a necklace that she was wearing. According to her statement she "tried to put on some articles of clothing as it was going too quickly and uncomfortably but Assange ripped them off again". Miss A told police that she didn't want to go any further "but that it was too late to stop Assange as she had gone along with it so far", and so she allowed him to undress her.
According to the statement, Miss A then realised he was trying to have unprotected sex with her. She told police that she had tried a number of times to reach for a condom but Assange had stopped her by holding her arms and pinning her legs. The statement records Miss A describing how Assange then released her arms and agreed to use a condom, but she told the police that at some stage Assange had "done something" with the condom that resulted in it becoming ripped, and ejaculated without withdrawing.
When he was later interviewed by police in Stockholm, Assange agreed that he had had sex with Miss A but said he did not tear the condom, and that he was not aware that it had been torn. He told police that he had continued to sleep in Miss A's bed for the following week and she had never mentioned a torn condom.
On the following morning, Saturday 14 August, Assange spoke at a seminar organised by Miss A. A second woman, Miss W, had contacted Miss A to ask if she could attend. Both women joined Assange, the co-ordinator of the Swedish WikiLeaks group, whom we will call "Harold", and a few others for lunch.
Assange left the lunch with Miss W. She told the police she and Assange had visited the place where she worked and had then gone to a cinema where they had moved to the back row. He had kissed her and put his hands inside her clothing, she said.
That evening, Miss A held a party at her flat. One of her friends, "Monica", later told police that during the party Miss A had told her about the ripped condom and unprotected sex. Another friend told police that during the evening Miss A told her she had had "the worst sex ever" with Assange: "Not only had it been the world's worst screw, it had also been violent."
Assange's supporters point out that, despite her complaints against him, Miss A held a party for him on that evening and continued to allow him to stay in her flat.
On Sunday 15 August, Monica told police, Miss A told her that she thought Assange had torn the condom on purpose. According to Monica, Miss A said Assange was still staying in her flat but they were not having sex because he had "exceeded the limits of what she felt she could accept" and she did not feel safe.
The following day, Miss W phoned Assange and arranged to meet him late in the evening, according to her statement. The pair went back to her flat in Enkoping, near Stockholm. Miss W told police that though they started to have sex, Assange had not wanted to wear a condom, and she had moved away because she had not wanted unprotected sex. Assange had then lost interest, she said, and fallen asleep. However, during the night, they had both woken up and had sex at least once when "he agreed unwillingly to use a condom".
Early the next morning, Miss W told police, she had gone to buy breakfast before getting back into bed and falling asleep beside Assange. She had awoken to find him having sex with her, she said, but when she asked whether he was wearing a condom he said no. "Ac
One: "The allegation of rape would not be rape under English law" This is flatly untrue. The Assange legal team argued this twice before English courts, and twice the English courts ruled clearly that the allegation would also constitute rape under English law.
(See my post at Jack of Kent for further detail on this.)
The position with offence 4 is different. This is an allegation of rape. The framework list is ticked for rape. The defence accepts that normally the ticking of a framework list offence box on an EAW would require very little analysis by the court. However they then developed a sophisticated argument that the conduct alleged here would not amount to rape in most European countries. However, what is alleged here is that Mr Assange "deliberately consummated sexual intercourse with her by improperly exploiting that she, due to sleep, was in a helpless state". In this country that would amount to rape.
Just for the record, be very careful with women if you visit Sweden. Pressing false rape-charges is apparently a thing these days, even if you're not famous.
Bullshit. I've been to Sweden and dated women there. So long as you don't rape anyone you'll won't be charged with rape. What got Assange on trouble was that he was dating someone who consented to sex with a condom. They slept in the same bed. He woke her up having sex without a condom. She wanted him to get an aids test. He refused. She went to the police. He got charged with rape. And the UK courts ruled that since what he did in Sweden would count as rape if he had done it in the UK, he could be extradited. Then he skipped bail.
Oh I agree. My point is that people saying he 'was in Ecuador' are wrong. He was in the UK. I actually thought embassies were the territory of the country who run them but it turns out that is not the case
The UK can't easily[1] arrest him in the Ecuadorian embassy but he's still in the UK.
And he skipped bail, which is illegal. So if he came out he'd be immediately arrested.
[1] There are various ways it could arrest him, but they probably mean severing diplomatic relations with Ecuador which the UK government in unwilling to do. In practice unless the embassy is closed and all the diplomats expelled he's probably safe from arrest. However accepting that is not the same as accepting that he can leave without being arrested.
He was accused of rape in Sweden. He fought extradition right up the UK Supreme Court where he lost. He then skipped bail and fled to the Ecuadorian embassy, the Ecuadorians being keen to tweak the nose of the US.
Now even if the Swedes have dropped charges he's still got a problem of skipping bail. So he claims to be depressed, have a bad tooth and so on.
I say let him spend the rest of his life in the Ecuadorian embassy. If he comes out, nail him for skipping bail.
It's absurd how he claims that because of his work on Wikileaks he should be immune to any sort of legal process. Even the corrupt politicians that Wikileaks was set up to expose didn't have as Louis XIV view of the privileges of their position as that.
He said this was always part of our agreement, now if heâ(TM)d said that to you or somebody else it would have been a lie but he might have had some chance of being believed, but he was saying it to me. Iâ(TM)m the guy that made the agreement with him; Iâ(TM)d had multiple conversations about this agreement. He made it up, but I thought what was interesting was I think he believes the things that he invents, so when he says that to me I think at that moment he believes it which makes it worth saying. And itâ(TM)s the same when for example heâ(TM)s talking about the two women in Sweden and tries to pretend that this is all dirty tricks by the Pentagon. I think he believes it.
I think most people who get close to him goes through this process, you start off liking and trusting him and then suddenly this kind of monster appears from behind the scenes and youâ(TM)re where on earth did that come from? You suddenly discover this this extraordinary dishonest man. I donâ(TM)t, I donâ(TM)t know that Iâ(TM)ve ever met a human being as dishonest as Julian.
The Guardian said that when he was asked about redaction of the names of informants he said ""They are American informants - they deserve to die". He denies this, but look at this OfCom report and his comments on 'villagers':
Interviewer: "So come on, redactions are going on at the same time, now there is or isn't a row going on about redaction, I haven't the faintest clue whether there is or isn't...?
Mr Assange: No, there's no row going on about redactions at all....There was a group of reports where although they were not really intelligence informants there were sort of hotline tips...something called threat reports comprised one in five of the Afghan War Logs and so we held them back for a line by line redaction...But what we didn't do was redact one in five lines, putting black marker through it, we just removed them, and so it looked like we hadn't redacted everything but in fact we had redacted a fifth of all material, and this permitted an attack, a political attack, to come from The Times of London.... So The Times did a proxy war on The Guardian through us by attacking us.... So most of those names were meant to be there, it is right for them to be published, it is right to publish the names of politicians, generals bureaucrats, etc, who are involved in this sort of activity, it is right even to publish the names of corrupt radio stations in Kabul that were taking SYOPS programme content. It is also right to publish the names of those people who have been killed and murdered and who need to be investigated and it is right to publish the names of all incidental characters who themselves are not at serious and probable risk of physical harm. Those incidental characters are someone who owns a company for example is just involved in shipping operations.... So then there is the question were there any sort of villagers or so on who gave informat
The sad thing is even though Apple sell about 15% of phones and about 8% of desktops everyone else seems to think if they copy Apple they'll sell more stuff.
It never seems to occur to them that when people buy an Android or Windows device instead of an Apple one, it might be because they don't like the way Apple do stuff and therefore copying Apple is not a good idea.
The problem is all the tech journalists are Apple fanboys and if they see other platforms copying Apple they shower them with praise. And then keep buying only Apple stuff.
On August 8, 2003, the seventh European Union (EU) reform package went into effect in Turkey, significantly curbing the role of the military in politics. This legislation, passed by the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government on August 4, follows six previous packages adopted since February 2002. Collectively, these reform measures have vastly liberalized the country's political system, facilitating Kurdish broadcasting and education, abolishing the death penalty, and subjecting Turkish courts to the European Court of Human Rights. Turkey now has laws guaranteeing freedom of speech, and the military is no longer the kingmaker in Ankara. As a result, AKP -- a self-styled "conservative democratic" party with an identifiable "Islamist pedigree" -- anticipates that Turkey will pass muster when Brussels reviews its candidacy for EU membership in June 2004. Ankara hopes that the EU will establish an accession calendar, opening the way for Turkey's eventual entry into the union, perhaps within the next decade. These developments are crucial to Turkey's future. Which path will the country take now that the military is stripped of its role as a decision making body? Will the EU open its doors to Turkey?
The basic problem is that the EU and the West push freedom and democracy and do things like push Turkey to curb the power of the military. But the government curbing the military in Turkey won't lead to a democratic government in charge because Turkey is fundamentally different from EU countries. Traditionally the main counter balance to Islamism has been the military having a coup every few years.
The EU have removed what was essentially an authoritarian check on the political aspirations of the Islamists and not replaced it with a more democratically correct one.
And of course the EU screwed Turkey - it forced a bunch of reforms on Turkey as part of the price of EU membership. Turkey made the reforms and then the EU welched on the membership. And Turkey knows the EU is dependent on it to stop another wave of refugees
Different health care systems have different costs. And pulling all health care into a government run health care system pushes up the debt to GDP ratio. At some level of debt to GDP ratio you get a sovereign debt crisis.
It's more like you go into work with a bit of a hangover and your boss who is a teetotal Islamist is telling you to get rid of all the liberals. So you do the equivalent of 'rm - rf/turkey/liberals". And then you realise that has side effects and a high false positive rate. So you tell your boss the Jews hacked the system and flee to Germany where you tell the authorities you're being persecuted by Islamists and tell all the expat Turks it was the Jews.
Meanwhile the influx of Turks cause a rise of the far right, and some guy comes into work and his boss who is an austere vegan far leftist tells him to get rid of all the far right. So he does the equivalent of "rm -rf/germany/farright" and then realises that has both a high false positive and a false negative rate and support for the far right goes up, not down.
So the far right come to power and try a "rm -rf/germany/turks" but as expected this has a high false positive/false negative rate and Germany has a civil war.
Basically hungover IT drones cause all the pain and suffering in the world.
The Ku Klux Klan was resurrected after the 1915 release of D.W. Griffith's very popular motion picture The Birth of a Nation. After World War I, the popularity of the Klan surged due to connections of its public relations leadership to those who had promoted the successful Prohibition Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, becoming a political power throughout many regions of the United States, not just in the South. Its local political strength throughout the country gave it a major role in the 1924 Democratic Party National Convention (DNC). The 20th Century Ku Klux Klan was notoriously anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic, in addition to being anti-black. The Klan advocates opposed those supporting Catholics from the major cities of the Northeast and Midwest. The tension between pro- and anti-Klan delegates produced an intense and sometimes violent showdown between convention attendees from the states of Colorado and Missouri. Klan delegates opposed the nomination of New York Governor Al Smith because Smith was a Roman Catholic. Smith campaigned against William Gibbs McAdoo, who had the support of most Klan delegates.
KKK platform plank
The second dispute of the convention revolved around an attempt by non-Klan delegates, led by Sen. Oscar Underwood of Alabama, to condemn the organization for its violence in the Democratic Party's platform. Klan delegates defeated the platform plank in a series of floor debates. The final vote on condemning the Klan was 542.85 in favor, 546.15 against, so the plank was not included in the platform. To celebrate, tens of thousands of hooded Klansmen rallied in a field in New Jersey, across the river from New York City. This event, known subsequently as the "Klanbake",[1] was also attended by hundreds of Klan delegates to the convention, who burned crosses, urged violence and intimidation against African-Americans and Catholics, and attacked effigies of Smith.[citation needed]
Impact
The notoriety of the "Klanbake" convention and the violence it produced cast a lasting shadow over the Democratic Party's prospects in the 1924 election and contributed to their defeat by incumbent Republican President Calvin Coolidge.
DKIM's non-repudiation feature prevents senders (such as spammers) from credibly denying having sent an email. It has proven useful to news media sources such as WikiLeaks, which has been able to leverage DKIM body signatures to prove that leaked emails were genuine and not tampered with, definitively repudiating claims by Hillary Clinton's 2016 US Presidential Election running mate Tim Kaine, and DNC Chair Donna Brazile.
Payment is unclear. A generous plan that covers all Americans is going to require more revenue. There's no exact plan for how to pay for Sanders' bill, but he did on Wednesday afternoon release a list of potential payment options. Among the proposals: a 7.5 percent payroll tax on employers, a 4 percent individual income tax and an array of taxes on wealthier Americans, as well as corporations. In addition, Sanders' plan says the end of big health insurance-related tax expenditures, like employers' ability to deduct insurance premiums, would save trillions of dollars.
But even with all of those potential revenue-boosters, Sanders may still fall far short of the total amount of money needed to pay for his ambitious program. Altogether, his estimates of how much money his funding mechanisms would generate totals up to around $16 trillion over 10 years. In a 2016 report on his presidential campaign's "Medicare for All" plan, the Urban Institute estimated that the plan would cost $32 trillion over 10 years.
So you're looking at adding another $16-$32 trillion to that over ten years depending on how overly optimistic his plan turns out to be. I'm sure that won't cause any problems, like a sovereign debt crisis for example, at all.
After all single payer for all worked out fine in Vermont. Oh wait, not it didn't.
What shocks me in all of these e-mail leak scandals is how un verified it is. I remember being able to telnet to open port 25s and send e-mail to anyone as anyone. PGP encryption and signing should be standard by anyone at that level.
There were DKIM signatures on the Hillary Clinton emails
This Politifact post muddles over whether the Wikileaks leaked emails have been doctored, specifically the one about Tim Kaine being picked a year ago. The post is wrong -- we can verify this email and most of the rest.
In order to bloc spam, emails nowadays contain a form of digital signatures that verify their authenticity. This is automatic, it happens on most modern email systems, without users being aware of it.
This means we can indeed validate most of the Wikileaks leaked DNC/Clinton/Podesta emails. There are many ways to do this, but the easiest is to install the popular Thunderbird email app along with the DKIM Verifier addon. Then go to the Wikileaks site and download the raw source of the email https://wikileaks.org/podesta-....
As you see in the screenshot below, the DKIM signature verifies as true.
If somebody doctored the email, such as changing the date, then the signature would not verify. I try this in the email below, changing the date from 2015 to 2016. This causes the signature to fail.
Fixing Meltdown is relatively easy (compared to Spectre), although it probably can't be done with a microcode update. As well as setting a fault-if/when-this-reaches-retirement bit on the uop, a TLB lookup could gate the page-address bits (to all ones) with the privilege-check. e.g. a load in user-space from any kernel page could micro-architecturally execute as a load from the very top physical page. (And systems with less than the max amount of RAM wouldn't have any physical RAM at that physical address.)
I.e. you do the virtual to physical translation using the TLB but you make invalid addresses map to an address with all ones. Since you have to do the V to P translation anyway, that seems like a good option.
So illegal addresses would map to address (all ones). So that address would be loaded into the cache but the operation would later fault. Since all the addresses you don't have access to map to (all ones) you can't later do a side channel attack to find out if they're cached. And you have to do the virtual to physical translation anyway, so it doesn't cost you anything.
The difference between physics and other, lesser forms of science like the social sciences and, God forbid, computer "science" is that with physics there are things the theories understand and they can make spectacularly accurate predictions. I.e. the 'known knowns' are very well known.
Then there are things physics doesn't know. I.e. it 'known unknowns'. And it has ruled out a lot of explanations but knows it doesn't know.
Going down the Rumsfeld hierarchy you get to unknown unknowns i.e. 'the ones we don't know we don't know'. Of course these exist but once they are discovered it often causes a dramatic shift in what theories are viable. E.g. the classical tests of General Relativity
Physics had a few 'known unknowns' before General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics and most of those are now 'known knowns'. Ironically it's a lack of 'known unknowns' that caused it to stagnate. E.g. with the LHC there was hope to find a few experimental results that didn't agree with the Standard Model and which would narrow down the viable post Standard Model theories but that didn't happen.
But hey, how can you complain if the best theory you've got is so good that you can't find any experimental results it can't explain?
Now compare to fake science. Fake science claims to know everything and just rationalises away anywhere its predictions are wrong. Or maybe it doesn't even try to make any predictions in the first place, claims to be completely right but keeps changing radically.
I'm sure we can all think of examples of pseudoscience that does the things in the last paragraph.
At least physicists admit they don't know what dark matter/dark energy is at present.
In fact I remember a memorable rant by a physicist at Richard Dawkins where he said that he was bothered by Dawkins' belief that science understands everything when dark matter and dark energy make up most of the mass in the universe and we've got very little idea of what either is.
Damn right.
Physics works pretty well for things you can do experiments on. It doesn't work very well for things you can't. But then how could it?
Slashdot Mirror
The UK government basically has three options
1) Close the embassy, expel the diplomats and arrest Assange as his diplomatically protected bubble evaporates.
2) The status quo where they keep a watch on the embassy and arrest him if he leaves
3) Allow him to leave unmolested.
I think 1) is dangerous because it would allow foreign governments to do the same to arrest a fugitive who took refuge in a UK embassy and claim this case as a precedent, so they've decided not to do it. Also 1) implies the UK will probably lose diplomatic relations with Ecuador. British personnel would be expelled from the British embassy there. Some might be arrested or otherwise harassed. The Foreign Office is a cautious place and would probably advise the government this is opening a can of worms. The UK did close one embassy and expel the diplomats but that was in a very extreme situation where Libyan diplomats literally murdered a UK policewoman. Merely shielding Assange doesn't justify such extreme measures.
If the UK allows Assange to avoid justice by spending a couple of years in the Ecuadorian embassy then it would be setting a precedent that anyone (in)famous enough to get in there would be literally above the law which rules out 3)
So they've decided on 2) by a process of elimination. Sure there are costs to it in police time but it's better than the other two. Assange is locked up, just in better conditions than he probably deserves. And if he doesn't like that he's free to come out, get prosecuted for skipping bail, serve his time and get deported.
And its absurd to say just because someone broke UK law they should be held to account. I break Chinese law all the time when I criticize the Chinese government. I've never been to China though so why should I be held to account for unconscionable laws or under an unconscionable state such as the UK where you can't possibly get a fair trial?
That's a ridiculous thing to say. Criticizing China outside of China is not the same as going to Sweden and raping someone.
Assange committed offences in Sweden that met the dual criminality test they needed to meet for him to be extradited.
If Assange didn't think he could get a fair trial in Sweden or the UK then he shouldn't have visited them and broke the law.
And any state that prosecutes someone where there is no victim of actual violence is not a conscionable state.
SW and AA were victims of violence, and the Swedish and British legal systems are doing the right thing in prosecuting Assange.
The state is violence and the only justification for violence is when acted upon from a reasonable self defense position. ie government attacks you then fighting back is reasonable.
Well if you think like that then you're going to spend a lot time either in court or in prison.
https://www.theguardian.com/me...
The allegations centre on a 10-day period after Assange flew into Stockholm on Wednesday 11 August. One of the women, named in court as Miss A, told police that she had arranged Assange's trip to Sweden, and let him stay in her flat because she was due to be away. She returned early, on Friday 13 August, after which the pair went for a meal and then returned to her flat.
Her account to police, which Assange disputes, stated that he began stroking her leg as they drank tea, before he pulled off her clothes and snapped a necklace that she was wearing. According to her statement she "tried to put on some articles of clothing as it was going too quickly and uncomfortably but Assange ripped them off again". Miss A told police that she didn't want to go any further "but that it was too late to stop Assange as she had gone along with it so far", and so she allowed him to undress her.
According to the statement, Miss A then realised he was trying to have unprotected sex with her. She told police that she had tried a number of times to reach for a condom but Assange had stopped her by holding her arms and pinning her legs. The statement records Miss A describing how Assange then released her arms and agreed to use a condom, but she told the police that at some stage Assange had "done something" with the condom that resulted in it becoming ripped, and ejaculated without withdrawing.
When he was later interviewed by police in Stockholm, Assange agreed that he had had sex with Miss A but said he did not tear the condom, and that he was not aware that it had been torn. He told police that he had continued to sleep in Miss A's bed for the following week and she had never mentioned a torn condom.
On the following morning, Saturday 14 August, Assange spoke at a seminar organised by Miss A. A second woman, Miss W, had contacted Miss A to ask if she could attend. Both women joined Assange, the co-ordinator of the Swedish WikiLeaks group, whom we will call "Harold", and a few others for lunch.
Assange left the lunch with Miss W. She told the police she and Assange had visited the place where she worked and had then gone to a cinema where they had moved to the back row. He had kissed her and put his hands inside her clothing, she said.
That evening, Miss A held a party at her flat. One of her friends, "Monica", later told police that during the party Miss A had told her about the ripped condom and unprotected sex. Another friend told police that during the evening Miss A told her she had had "the worst sex ever" with Assange: "Not only had it been the world's worst screw, it had also been violent."
Assange's supporters point out that, despite her complaints against him, Miss A held a party for him on that evening and continued to allow him to stay in her flat.
On Sunday 15 August, Monica told police, Miss A told her that she thought Assange had torn the condom on purpose. According to Monica, Miss A said Assange was still staying in her flat but they were not having sex because he had "exceeded the limits of what she felt she could accept" and she did not feel safe.
The following day, Miss W phoned Assange and arranged to meet him late in the evening, according to her statement. The pair went back to her flat in Enkoping, near Stockholm. Miss W told police that though they started to have sex, Assange had not wanted to wear a condom, and she had moved away because she had not wanted unprotected sex. Assange had then lost interest, she said, and fallen asleep. However, during the night, they had both woken up and had sex at least once when "he agreed unwillingly to use a condom".
Early the next morning, Miss W told police, she had gone to buy breakfast before getting back into bed and falling asleep beside Assange. She had awoken to find him having sex with her, she said, but when she asked whether he was wearing a condom he said no. "Ac
Look it doesn't matter if the Ecuadorian embassy is Ecuadorian territory or not. Assange broke UK law, in the UK, when he broke his bail conditions.
Of course there is that part where the so called "rape charges" where absolute bullshit.
Not true
https://www.newstatesman.com/d...
One: "The allegation of rape would not be rape under English law"
This is flatly untrue. The Assange legal team argued this twice before English courts, and twice the English courts ruled clearly that the allegation would also constitute rape under English law.
(See my post at Jack of Kent for further detail on this.)
http://jackofkent.com/2012/06/...
The Magistrates' Court ruled (emphasis added):
The position with offence 4 is different. This is an allegation of rape. The framework list is ticked for rape. The defence accepts that normally the ticking of a framework list offence box on an EAW would require very little analysis by the court. However they then developed a sophisticated argument that the conduct alleged here would not amount to rape in most European countries. However, what is alleged here is that Mr Assange "deliberately consummated sexual intercourse with her by improperly exploiting that she, due to sleep, was in a helpless state". In this country that would amount to rape.
Just for the record, be very careful with women if you visit Sweden. Pressing false rape-charges is apparently a thing these days, even if you're not famous.
Bullshit. I've been to Sweden and dated women there. So long as you don't rape anyone you'll won't be charged with rape. What got Assange on trouble was that he was dating someone who consented to sex with a condom. They slept in the same bed. He woke her up having sex without a condom. She wanted him to get an aids test. He refused. She went to the police. He got charged with rape. And the UK courts ruled that since what he did in Sweden would count as rape if he had done it in the UK, he could be extradited. Then he skipped bail.
Skipping bail
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...
Oh I agree. My point is that people saying he 'was in Ecuador' are wrong. He was in the UK. I actually thought embassies were the territory of the country who run them but it turns out that is not the case
The UK can't easily[1] arrest him in the Ecuadorian embassy but he's still in the UK.
And he skipped bail, which is illegal. So if he came out he'd be immediately arrested.
[1] There are various ways it could arrest him, but they probably mean severing diplomatic relations with Ecuador which the UK government in unwilling to do. In practice unless the embassy is closed and all the diplomats expelled he's probably safe from arrest. However accepting that is not the same as accepting that he can leave without being arrested.
He was accused of rape in Sweden. He fought extradition right up the UK Supreme Court where he lost. He then skipped bail and fled to the Ecuadorian embassy, the Ecuadorians being keen to tweak the nose of the US.
Now even if the Swedes have dropped charges he's still got a problem of skipping bail. So he claims to be depressed, have a bad tooth and so on.
I say let him spend the rest of his life in the Ecuadorian embassy. If he comes out, nail him for skipping bail.
It's absurd how he claims that because of his work on Wikileaks he should be immune to any sort of legal process. Even the corrupt politicians that Wikileaks was set up to expose didn't have as Louis XIV view of the privileges of their position as that.
Look at this documentary
http://vimeo.com/38670049
Nick Davies of the Guardian said
He said this was always part of our agreement, now if heâ(TM)d said that to you or somebody else it would have been a lie but he might have had some chance of being believed, but he was saying it to me. Iâ(TM)m the guy that made the agreement with him; Iâ(TM)d had multiple conversations about this agreement. He made it up, but I thought what was interesting was I think he believes the things that he invents, so when he says that to me I think at that moment he believes it which makes it worth saying. And itâ(TM)s the same when for example heâ(TM)s talking about the two women in Sweden and tries to pretend that this is all dirty tricks by the Pentagon. I think he believes it.
I think most people who get close to him goes through this process, you start off liking and trusting him and then suddenly this kind of monster appears from behind the scenes and youâ(TM)re where on earth did that come from? You suddenly discover this this extraordinary dishonest man. I donâ(TM)t, I donâ(TM)t know that Iâ(TM)ve ever met a human being as dishonest as Julian.
The Guardian said that when he was asked about redaction of the names of informants he said ""They are American informants - they deserve to die". He denies this, but look at this OfCom report and his comments on 'villagers':
https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__dat... page 115-116
Interviewer: "So come on, redactions are going on at the same time, now there is or isn't a row going on about redaction, I haven't the faintest clue whether there is or isn't...?
Mr Assange: No, there's no row going on about redactions at all....There was a group of reports where although they were not really intelligence informants there were sort of hotline tips...something called threat reports comprised one in five of the Afghan War Logs and so we held them back for a line by line redaction...But what we didn't do was redact one in five lines, putting black marker through it, we just removed them, and so it looked like we hadn't redacted everything but in fact we had redacted a fifth of all material, and this permitted an attack, a political attack, to come from The Times of London.... So The Times did a proxy war on The Guardian through us by attacking us.... So most of those names were meant to be there, it is right for them to be published, it is right to publish the names of politicians, generals bureaucrats, etc, who are involved in this sort of activity, it is right even to publish the names of corrupt radio stations in Kabul that were taking SYOPS programme content. It is also right to publish the names of those people who have been killed and murdered and who need to be investigated and it is right to publish the names of all incidental characters who themselves are not at serious and probable risk of physical harm. Those incidental characters are someone who owns a company for example is just involved in shipping operations.... So then there is the question were there any sort of villagers or so on who gave informat
He was in the UK until he stepped over the threshold to the Ecuadorian embassy.
The sad thing is even though Apple sell about 15% of phones and about 8% of desktops everyone else seems to think if they copy Apple they'll sell more stuff.
It never seems to occur to them that when people buy an Android or Windows device instead of an Apple one, it might be because they don't like the way Apple do stuff and therefore copying Apple is not a good idea.
The problem is all the tech journalists are Apple fanboys and if they see other platforms copying Apple they shower them with praise. And then keep buying only Apple stuff.
I remember an exchange here that went something like this in a thread where a load of people were saying how great the macOS UI is
Primus: The macOS UI isn't that good. For example the window border is very narrow and you have to click on it to resize.
Secundus: Narrow border? Hard to click on? What are you, some kind of spastic?
Tertius: Apple fans show their people skills once again.
I was laughing about that for ages.
The dumbest thing about it is that the EU cheered on Erdogan's attempt to curtail the power of the military because of 'freedom and democracy'.
http://www.washingtoninstitute...
On August 8, 2003, the seventh European Union (EU) reform package went into effect in Turkey, significantly curbing the role of the military in politics. This legislation, passed by the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government on August 4, follows six previous packages adopted since February 2002. Collectively, these reform measures have vastly liberalized the country's political system, facilitating Kurdish broadcasting and education, abolishing the death penalty, and subjecting Turkish courts to the European Court of Human Rights. Turkey now has laws guaranteeing freedom of speech, and the military is no longer the kingmaker in Ankara. As a result, AKP -- a self-styled "conservative democratic" party with an identifiable "Islamist pedigree" -- anticipates that Turkey will pass muster when Brussels reviews its candidacy for EU membership in June 2004. Ankara hopes that the EU will establish an accession calendar, opening the way for Turkey's eventual entry into the union, perhaps within the next decade. These developments are crucial to Turkey's future. Which path will the country take now that the military is stripped of its role as a decision making body? Will the EU open its doors to Turkey?
Of course the EU turned down Turkey's membership.
Then the coup happened and the EU condemned it
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-...
Erdogan used the excuse of the coup for a full on crackdown of critics of his regime, and even convinced EU countries to arrest EU citizens
https://www.yahoo.com/news/ger...
And then threatened to unleash a wave of refugees on the EU unless Turks get free movement
http://nationalpost.com/news/w...
And big pile of cash.
https://www.independent.co.uk/...
The basic problem is that the EU and the West push freedom and democracy and do things like push Turkey to curb the power of the military. But the government curbing the military in Turkey won't lead to a democratic government in charge because Turkey is fundamentally different from EU countries. Traditionally the main counter balance to Islamism has been the military having a coup every few years.
The EU have removed what was essentially an authoritarian check on the political aspirations of the Islamists and not replaced it with a more democratically correct one.
And of course the EU screwed Turkey - it forced a bunch of reforms on Turkey as part of the price of EU membership. Turkey made the reforms and then the EU welched on the membership. And Turkey knows the EU is dependent on it to stop another wave of refugees
Different health care systems have different costs. And pulling all health care into a government run health care system pushes up the debt to GDP ratio. At some level of debt to GDP ratio you get a sovereign debt crisis.
It's more like you go into work with a bit of a hangover and your boss who is a teetotal Islamist is telling you to get rid of all the liberals. So you do the equivalent of 'rm - rf/turkey/liberals". And then you realise that has side effects and a high false positive rate. So you tell your boss the Jews hacked the system and flee to Germany where you tell the authorities you're being persecuted by Islamists and tell all the expat Turks it was the Jews.
Meanwhile the influx of Turks cause a rise of the far right, and some guy comes into work and his boss who is an austere vegan far leftist tells him to get rid of all the far right. So he does the equivalent of "rm -rf /germany/farright" and then realises that has both a high false positive and a false negative rate and support for the far right goes up, not down.
So the far right come to power and try a "rm -rf /germany/turks" but as expected this has a high false positive/false negative rate and Germany has a civil war.
Basically hungover IT drones cause all the pain and suffering in the world.
So death
Please send $2800 in DogeCoin to stop
Wow
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The Ku Klux Klan was resurrected after the 1915 release of D.W. Griffith's very popular motion picture The Birth of a Nation. After World War I, the popularity of the Klan surged due to connections of its public relations leadership to those who had promoted the successful Prohibition Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, becoming a political power throughout many regions of the United States, not just in the South. Its local political strength throughout the country gave it a major role in the 1924 Democratic Party National Convention (DNC). The 20th Century Ku Klux Klan was notoriously anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic, in addition to being anti-black. The Klan advocates opposed those supporting Catholics from the major cities of the Northeast and Midwest. The tension between pro- and anti-Klan delegates produced an intense and sometimes violent showdown between convention attendees from the states of Colorado and Missouri. Klan delegates opposed the nomination of New York Governor Al Smith because Smith was a Roman Catholic. Smith campaigned against William Gibbs McAdoo, who had the support of most Klan delegates.
KKK platform plank
The second dispute of the convention revolved around an attempt by non-Klan delegates, led by Sen. Oscar Underwood of Alabama, to condemn the organization for its violence in the Democratic Party's platform. Klan delegates defeated the platform plank in a series of floor debates. The final vote on condemning the Klan was 542.85 in favor, 546.15 against, so the plank was not included in the platform. To celebrate, tens of thousands of hooded Klansmen rallied in a field in New Jersey, across the river from New York City. This event, known subsequently as the "Klanbake",[1] was also attended by hundreds of Klan delegates to the convention, who burned crosses, urged violence and intimidation against African-Americans and Catholics, and attacked effigies of Smith.[citation needed]
Impact
The notoriety of the "Klanbake" convention and the violence it produced cast a lasting shadow over the Democratic Party's prospects in the 1924 election and contributed to their defeat by incumbent Republican President Calvin Coolidge.
So what you're saying is he hated women and brown people and thought we should become lobsters?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
DKIM's non-repudiation feature prevents senders (such as spammers) from credibly denying having sent an email. It has proven useful to news media sources such as WikiLeaks, which has been able to leverage DKIM body signatures to prove that leaked emails were genuine and not tampered with, definitively repudiating claims by Hillary Clinton's 2016 US Presidential Election running mate Tim Kaine, and DNC Chair Donna Brazile.
https://www.npr.org/2017/09/14...
Payment is unclear. A generous plan that covers all Americans is going to require more revenue. There's no exact plan for how to pay for Sanders' bill, but he did on Wednesday afternoon release a list of potential payment options. Among the proposals: a 7.5 percent payroll tax on employers, a 4 percent individual income tax and an array of taxes on wealthier Americans, as well as corporations. In addition, Sanders' plan says the end of big health insurance-related tax expenditures, like employers' ability to deduct insurance premiums, would save trillions of dollars.
But even with all of those potential revenue-boosters, Sanders may still fall far short of the total amount of money needed to pay for his ambitious program. Altogether, his estimates of how much money his funding mechanisms would generate totals up to around $16 trillion over 10 years. In a 2016 report on his presidential campaign's "Medicare for All" plan, the Urban Institute estimated that the plan would cost $32 trillion over 10 years.
Right now the total US debt is $20 trillion
https://www.treasurydirect.gov...
So you're looking at adding another $16-$32 trillion to that over ten years depending on how overly optimistic his plan turns out to be. I'm sure that won't cause any problems, like a sovereign debt crisis for example, at all.
After all single payer for all worked out fine in Vermont. Oh wait, not it didn't.
https://www.politico.com/story...
What shocks me in all of these e-mail leak scandals is how un verified it is. I remember being able to telnet to open port 25s and send e-mail to anyone as anyone. PGP encryption and signing should be standard by anyone at that level.
There were DKIM signatures on the Hillary Clinton emails
http://blog.erratasec.com/2016...
This Politifact post muddles over whether the Wikileaks leaked emails have been doctored, specifically the one about Tim Kaine being picked a year ago. The post is wrong -- we can verify this email and most of the rest.
In order to bloc spam, emails nowadays contain a form of digital signatures that verify their authenticity. This is automatic, it happens on most modern email systems, without users being aware of it.
This means we can indeed validate most of the Wikileaks leaked DNC/Clinton/Podesta emails. There are many ways to do this, but the easiest is to install the popular Thunderbird email app along with the DKIM Verifier addon. Then go to the Wikileaks site and download the raw source of the email https://wikileaks.org/podesta-....
As you see in the screenshot below, the DKIM signature verifies as true.
If somebody doctored the email, such as changing the date, then the signature would not verify. I try this in the email below, changing the date from 2015 to 2016. This causes the signature to fail.
AMD apparently do a privilege check which either stops the speculated code running or at least makes it side effect free.
I found this interesting comment on how Intel could fix it
https://security.stackexchange...
Fixing Meltdown is relatively easy (compared to Spectre), although it probably can't be done with a microcode update. As well as setting a fault-if/when-this-reaches-retirement bit on the uop, a TLB lookup could gate the page-address bits (to all ones) with the privilege-check. e.g. a load in user-space from any kernel page could micro-architecturally execute as a load from the very top physical page. (And systems with less than the max amount of RAM wouldn't have any physical RAM at that physical address.)
I.e. you do the virtual to physical translation using the TLB but you make invalid addresses map to an address with all ones. Since you have to do the V to P translation anyway, that seems like a good option.
So illegal addresses would map to address (all ones). So that address would be loaded into the cache but the operation would later fault. Since all the addresses you don't have access to map to (all ones) you can't later do a side channel attack to find out if they're cached. And you have to do the virtual to physical translation anyway, so it doesn't cost you anything.
Very elegant.
You can actually make a case that Frank Herbert's "Dune" predicted the rise of Al Qaeda
http://www.volokh.com/posts/11...
But, at least on Intel's microarchitecture, they still affect the cache, which is the reason Meltdown works.
It's different on AMD's microarchitecture.
The difference between physics and other, lesser forms of science like the social sciences and, God forbid, computer "science" is that with physics there are things the theories understand and they can make spectacularly accurate predictions. I.e. the 'known knowns' are very well known.
Then there are things physics doesn't know. I.e. it 'known unknowns'. And it has ruled out a lot of explanations but knows it doesn't know.
Going down the Rumsfeld hierarchy you get to unknown unknowns i.e. 'the ones we don't know we don't know'. Of course these exist but once they are discovered it often causes a dramatic shift in what theories are viable. E.g. the classical tests of General Relativity
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Physics had a few 'known unknowns' before General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics and most of those are now 'known knowns'. Ironically it's a lack of 'known unknowns' that caused it to stagnate. E.g. with the LHC there was hope to find a few experimental results that didn't agree with the Standard Model and which would narrow down the viable post Standard Model theories but that didn't happen.
https://www.wired.com/2016/08/...
But hey, how can you complain if the best theory you've got is so good that you can't find any experimental results it can't explain?
Now compare to fake science. Fake science claims to know everything and just rationalises away anywhere its predictions are wrong. Or maybe it doesn't even try to make any predictions in the first place, claims to be completely right but keeps changing radically.
I'm sure we can all think of examples of pseudoscience that does the things in the last paragraph.
At least physicists admit they don't know what dark matter/dark energy is at present.
In fact I remember a memorable rant by a physicist at Richard Dawkins where he said that he was bothered by Dawkins' belief that science understands everything when dark matter and dark energy make up most of the mass in the universe and we've got very little idea of what either is.
Damn right.
Physics works pretty well for things you can do experiments on. It doesn't work very well for things you can't. But then how could it?