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Conjured by o~ SeMeN SPeRmS ~o on November 26, 2011
No Privacy Facial Recognition Police State – Welcome To Your Future
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An uncontacted Amazon tribe that made headlines earlier this year after being filmed from the air is feared missing after presumed drug traffickers overran the Brazilian guards posted to protect the tribe’s lands.According to tribal advocacy group Survival International, Brazilian officials can find no trace of the Indians in the area after heavily armed men ransacked the guard post in western Brazil about 32 miles (20 kilometers) from the Peruvian border. Like other uncontacted tribes, the Indians live a traditional life in the forest and does not have contact with the outside world.
Workers from FUNAI, the government bureau of Indian affairs, found a broken arrow in one of the men’s backpacks, raising fears for the tribe’s safety.
“We think the Peruvians made the Indians flee,” Carlos Travassos, the head of the government’s isolated Indians department, said in a statement. “Now we have good proof. We are more worried than ever.”
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Homeland Security plans to operate a massive new database of names, photos, birthdays and biometrics called Watchlist Service, duplicated from the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Database which has proven not to be accurate many times in the past. DHS wants to exempt the Watchlist Service from Privacy Act provisions, meaning you will never know if you are wrongfully listed. Privacy groups worried about inaccurate info and mission creep have filed a protest, arguing the Privacy Act says DHS must notify subject of government surveillance.
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The new role for dogs as testimony enablers can, however, raise thorny legal questions. Defense lawyers argue that the dogs may unfairly sway jurors with their cuteness and the natural empathy they attract, whether a witness is telling the truth or not, and some prosecutors insist that the courtroom dogs can be a crucial comfort to those enduring the ordeal of testifying, especially children.
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A self-proclaimed UFO researcher has found what he believes to be alien outposts in Antarctica. Posting at a blog and YouTube channel under the moniker “americanbunker,” he has “analyzed” satellite photos of Antarctica via Google Earth, and says the photos show UFOs and other creatures.He strings together highlights of his Antarctic objects in a 12-minute video. However, the objects visible in the stream of pixellated photos look much more like ice floes, rocky outcroppings and shadows cast by bumps in the terrain than they do flying spacecraft or structures built by Martians. [See the video]
Instead of an alien invasion or a cover-up by the U.S. Geological Survey (many of the photos were made public by the USGS), there’s probably a psychological phenomenon at play here: “Pareidolia” is the scientific term for the common human tendency to find patterns in random shapes. We’re especially susceptible to perceiving faces or figures where they aren’t.
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An Aberdeenshire shop worker has been treated in hospital after being stung by a scorpion.William Clarke, 48, was unpacking a box of Colombian bananas at Farmfoods in Stonehaven on Monday afternoon when the incident happened.
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The U.S. housing crash has lured some marijuana growers to move their operations south of the border, according to an internal RCMP report obtained by the Vancouver Sun.”Some VOC (Vietnamese Organized Crime) groups have moved their marijuana grow operations to the United States where the lower cost of real estate (in some regions) allows them to operate a more profitable enterprise and where they can also avoid police/customs detection at the border,” states the RCMP report.
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Or consider what American computer specialists are doing on the Internet, perhaps terrorist leaders’ greatest safe haven, where they recruit, raise money and plot future attacks on a global scale. American specialists have become especially proficient at forging the onscreen cyber-trademarks used by Al Qaeda to certify its Web statements, and are posting confusing and contradictory orders, some so virulent that young Muslims dabbling in jihadist philosophy, but on the fence about it, might be driven away.And in a classified tactic used multiple times across the Middle East, American military and intelligence officers have hacked the cellphones of terrorist leaders using computer code, to lure them into an ambush or spread the word that fellow cell members were embezzling money or plotting against their comrades. Distrust of secure communications disrupts and even deters action.
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A registered sex offender wore a Cookie Monster costume as he handed out fliers to children at the Mississippi Valley Fair over the weekend, police said.James Lester Rogers, 25, of 611 Perry St., Apt. 1, Davenport, was in the Scott County Jail on Monday on an aggravated misdemeanor charge.
Police said that on Saturday he wore a full Cookie Monster costume and handed out fliers for a company called Q.C. Characters. If children wanted their pictures taken with “Cookie Monster,” Rogers stood for the photographs.
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The components of DNA have now been confirmed to exist in extraterrestrial meteorites, researchers announced.A different team of scientists also discovered a number of molecules linked with a vital ancient biological process, adding weight to the idea that the earliest forms of life on Earth may have been made up in part from materials delivered to Earth the planet by from space.
Past research had revealed a range of building blocks of life in meteorites, such as the amino acids that make up proteins. Space rocks just like these may have been a vital source of the organic compounds that gave rise to life on Earth.
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About 250 T-shirts were distributed at the rock concert
Hundreds of free T-shirts handed out at a weekend right-wing rock festival in the eastern German state of Thuringia contained a secret surprise. Upon washing, the original graphic faded to reveal a clandestine message. -
Hacktivist group Anonymous, which has been responsible for cyber-attacks on the Pentagon, News Corp, and others, has vowed to destroy Facebook on November 5th (which should ring a bell).Citing privacy concerns and the difficulty involved in deleting a Facebook account, Anonymous hopes to “kill Facebook,” the “medium of communication [we] all so dearly adore.”
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Don’t believe it. Soon, face recognition will be ubiquitous. While the police may promise to tread lightly, the technology is likely to become so good, so quickly that officers will find themselves reaching for their cameras in all kinds of situations. The police will still likely use traditional ID technologies like fingerprinting—or even iris scanning—as these are generally more accurate than face-scanning, but face-scanning has an obvious advantage over fingerprints: It works from far away. Bunch of guys loitering on the corner? Scantily clad woman hanging around that run-down motel? Two dudes who look like they’re smoking a funny-looking cigarette? Why not snap them all just to make sure they’re on the up-and-up?
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Before we talk about the facial recognition technology thats being rolled out to police stations nationwide next month, here’s a question for you: Who would you rather have access to face recognition tech: cops or that weird heavy-breather on the subway? Do you want it? You know, to check out that weird heavy-breather on the subway: what’s his deal? Maybe you are the heavy-breather. In the beginning, that face recognition app might just send you to some photos on Picasa or Facebook—but that’s all it takes to get to the top of the hill in figuring out a whole lot of stuff about someone.
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A new Google Group called “London Riots Facial Recognition” has appeared online, in the wake of the riots that rocked the U.K. capital over the weekend. The group’s goal is to use facial recognition technologies to identify the looters who appear in online photos.The group appears to be thoughtfully considering its actions, in threads titled “Ethical Issues,” and “Keeping Things Legal,” for example. They’ve also stated that “it’s important we only use legal sources for images.”
However, there’s a major “creepy” factor to this undertaking, too. The idea that a group of people would team up online to use (misuse?) facial recognition technologies in this way, notably outside professional law enforcement channels, seems like a modern take on vigilante style justice, where the torches of the angry villagers have turned into APIs and algorithms.
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The London Street Photography Festival had six photographers attempt to take pictures in various locations on public streets in Britain’s capital. Despite being perfectly within their rights, all six were stopped by private security forces who made vague allusions to “terrorism” and “security” and tried to intimidate them. The Festival filmed the encounters and what happened when the photographers politely refused to back down:
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Let’s make one thing crystal clear, no member of the US military contributes in any way whatsoever to protecting the freedoms of the American people. As a matter of fact, they are more likely to turn their weapons on you than they are to defend your Constitutional rights.The only people on this planet Earth who can affect your freedom are members of Congress, local legislators and the members of enforcement institutions who will blindly follow the rulers who sign their paychecks. And, while your beloved troops are murdering people around the globe, yes, I said murdering, your Congress and local legislators are eliminating your freedoms, en masse, without any intervention by our so-called protectors in the armed forces.
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Given no guidance from Tokyo, town officials led the residents north, believing that winter winds would be blowing south and carrying away any radioactive emissions. For three nights, while hydrogen explosions at four of the reactors spewed radiation into the air, they stayed in a district called Tsushima where the children played outside and some parents used water from a mountain stream to prepare rice.The winds, in fact, had been blowing directly toward Tsushima — and town officials would learn two months later that a government computer system designed to predict the spread of radioactive releases had been showing just that.
But the forecasts were left unpublicized by bureaucrats in Tokyo, operating in a culture that sought to avoid responsibility and, above all, criticism.
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✪ “A Perfect Product of the Religious Right”: Deconstructing Michele Bachmann’s GOP Presidential BidThe former tax lawyer identifies as a conservative Christian and is a fierce opponent of abortion and gay marriage. Bachmann also supports teaching intelligent design in public schools, and she’s claimed that global warming is a hoax. She has largely built her campaign around accusing Obama of favoring government intervention, pushing the U.S. toward socialism, and having “anti-American views,” and is a particularly fierce critic of Obama’s healthcare overhaul. While Bachmann is known for advocating a limited government, she has recently come under scrutiny for allegedly accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in agricultural subsidies for her family farm in Wisconsin.
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A desperate Israeli family won a court decision that lets them extract and freeze the eggs from their dead daughter. The teenage girl died unexpectedly after a recent car crash.The parents wanted her eggs to be fertilized before storage, but that request was denied by the court. If the parents prove their daughter expressed an interest in bearing children, her eggs could be fertilized and a grandchild could be created at their discretion.
Though creepy, this isn’t the first time a baby was made post-mortem. Another Israeli couple used sperm from their deceased son to create a grandchild using a surrogate mother.
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Danny Panzella, an activist and independent journalist, has revealed that the U.S. government and local police are monitoring Facebook for Federal Reserve protests.On June 22nd, 2011 , the night before the rally, Danny announced a spur of the moment End the Fed Rally/Flash Mob on Facebook. When he arrived in the morning close to 40 police officers were waiting for him.
This is clear evidence that the government is actively monitoring Facebook for signs of activism directed against the private Federal Reserve.
As our economy teeters on the verge of collapse, our government and local law enforcement are spending time and most likely tax power dollars to protect the private banking cartel that created the crisis in the first place!
As the White House attempts to blame the Tea Party for the problems with the economy, the real culprits are being protected by police nationwide.
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“The idea that I had Mr. Lallana’s semen in my mouth, without my knowing, against my will, for his sexual pleasure, sickens me,” the victim said during her victim-impact statement in February. “What I experienced was not rape, but I feel it was a form of rape. I ultimately experienced sexually inflicted harm without my consent.”Deputy District Attorney Brock Zimmon argued that Lallana twice set a trap for his co-worker at Northwestern Mutual Financial Network by discharging his semen into a water bottle she kept on her desk.
The woman first became aware of something unusual in her water when she took a sip from her water bottle on Jan. 14, 2010, while she was working in Northwestern’s Newport Beach branch. She testified that she immediately noticed an odd taste and held the bottle away from her face and saw something in the water.
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Hairiest bushes in mainstream movies
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Post a picture of yourself with looted booty on the internet, a real genius here
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This is the shocking moment a young man is apparently forced to hand over all of his clothes after appearing to be stripped naked during lawless riots overnight.Internet rumours last night claimed that on top of the widespread destruction across London and Birmingham, people were having their clothes removed by looters as police attempted to contain the criminality.
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The gunmen hanged men and shot them in 60 times with AK-47. Victor’s chest marked with the letters “CDG” spray. In commercial premises located near the pedestrian bridge also left a narcopinta, “THIS will happen to X to kill innocent people,” said the deed had been done by members of the Gulf Cartel. The bodies remained at the sight of many for over two hours.
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Whenever hypnosis is discussed with a layman, one question inevitably comes up: “Can you make your subject do whatever you want?”In posing that question some people think of the crimes which evil characters in cheap thrillers force their victims to commit. Most of them, however, have sex in mind. Women want to know whether they could be taken advantage of. Young men usually mean: “Would a girl undress if I told her it’s bed-time?”
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Scientists have identified an orange-colored gunk that appeared along the shore of a remote Alaska village as millions of microscopic eggs filled with fatty droplets.
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Conjured by o~ SeMeN SPeRmS ~o on August 10, 2011
Puppets ‘n Dummies
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A gang of hackers known as SwagSec announced at the tail end of last week that they had hacked into Lady Gaga’s UK website and made off with a database of names and email addresses of fans. To prove their point, they published the stolen data online.
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Ventriloquism creeps me out as it is, but these vaudeville era portraits of ventriloquists with their creepy dummies are, well, creepy. This first one is quite possibly the most unsettling thing I have ever seen. Enjoy the rest, including the random police booking photo of “The Great Lester”.
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For decades, farmers had it relatively easy when it came to weeds infesting their soil: apply herbicides, wait for the weeds to die and grow more crops. Those salad days, alas, are coming to an end.
A new series of studies released by Weed Science this month finds at least 21 weed species have become resistant to the popular herbicide glyphosate (sold as Monsanto’s Roundup), and a growing number survive multiple herbicides, so-called “super-weeds.” The same selection pressure creating bacteria resistant to multiple antibiotics is leading to the rapid evolution of plants that survive modern herbicides. If the trend continues, yields could drop and food costs climb as weeds grow more difficult to uproot.
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NAMING your new bundle of joy Lucifer has been effectively banned by New Zealand’s names registrar after three parents had the odd request knocked back.
The country’s Registrar of Births, Deaths and Marriages has been cracking down on mothers and fathers getting too creative with their children’s names, ruling out punctuation marks such as . (Full Stop), * (Asterisk) and / (presumably ”Slash”).
The list of 102 names rejected in the past two years includes Baron, Bishop, Duke, General, Judge, Justice, King, Knight and Mr, all deemed too similar to titles.
Advertisement: Story continues belowMessiah was also turned down, as was 89, and the single letters, C, D, I and T, although Q and J were accepted after being queried.
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RAGING pop star Roger Daltrey claims PM David Cameron does not have “the balls” to tackle mass immigration.
The Who’s working class hero Roger Daltrey sparked a storm a fortnight ago when he blasted Labour for “screwing” Brits by opening the floodgates to foreigners.
Yesterday he turned on the Tories, saying Mr Cameron and his team lacked the guts to deal with the issue.
He also took a pop at leftie rocker Bono for claiming he is a socialist while dodging taxes in his homeland.
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After getting a pie in the face, Rupert Murdoch inadvertently gets a pair of devil horns.
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After “Dare to Dream” was put up on YouTube one of its early listeners was Jimmy Iovine, founder of Interscope records. Recognizing quality, Iovine had plans in his mind for Skepta’s track so, with help from parent company Universal, they had YouTube remove the song on copyright grounds.
Armed with cash Interscope approached Boy Better Known, a group and record label founded in 2005 by Skepta and the team behind Dare to Dream.
“Being in an industry where money talks, everybody involved in the ‘Dare To Dream’ project came to a conclusion to sign it to Interscope,” says Skepta.
So who is the lucky recipient of the track? None other than Interscope giant Eminem.
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For years, it has been a poorly-kept secret that some of the world’s largest wireless providers rely on caller ID information to verify that a call to check voicemail is made from the account holder’s mobile phone. Unfortunately, this means that if you haven’t set up your voicemail account to require a PIN for access, your messages may be vulnerable to snooping by anyone who has access to caller ID “spoofing” technology. Several companies offer caller ID spoofing services, and the tools needed to start your own spoofing operation are freely available online.
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Last month, however, John Brennan, the White House’s top counterterrorism advisor broke this silence, telling reporters that “in the last year ‘there hasn’t been a single collateral death because of the exceptional proficiency, precision of the capabilities that we’ve been able to develop.’”
Zero civilian casualties — during a period when there were more than 100 CIA drone strikes — sounded almost too good to be true. As it turns out, it was. According to a new report from the UK’s award-winning Bureau of Investigative Journalism, released last night, at least 45 civilians were killed in 10 strikes since August 2010. Among these, the Bureau reports that it has identified, by name, six children killed in drone strikes. More civilians are likely to have been killed in an additional 15 strikes for which precise information is not available.
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The FBI has released its files on two famously controversial publishers, Paladin Press and Loompanics Unlimited, following a FOIA request filed by Government Attic. The files suggest that the booksellers’ huge libraries of books on drugs, guns and other ultra-libertarian issues only rarely drew the FBI’s attention.
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A series of adverts for a range of women’s hygiene products by Summer’s Eve have sparked a massive backlash from viewers.
The use of ‘talking’ hands of black, white and Latina women to represent female genitalia was always meant to be provocative, but have been branded racist by some.
Hundreds of negative comments have been posted online, with some arguing that the distinctive voice-overs adhere to racial stereotypes.
The commercials were made with the intention of promoting cleanliness, but for many women it’s the image of Summer’s Eve that needs a good scrub.
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Seventeen people were indicted on Wednesday on charges of running a high-end prostitution ring that catered to Wall Street clients who often spent more than $10,000 in a night, authorities said.
The ring pulled in more than $7 million over three years, Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes said at a news conference.
“The business of high-end prostitution is enormously profitable,” Hynes said.
The prostitution service, named High Class NY, was run 24 hours a day out of an office in Brooklyn and charged from $400 to $3,600 an hour for its services, according to the 144-count indictment. It also provided customers with cocaine and other narcotics, the indictment said.
Hynes said clients often spent in excess of $10,000 in a single night.
They were “all high-end customers coming from the financial markets. People with nothing but money,” he said.
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Backers of Israel worried that a diminished Rupert Murdoch presence may mute the strongly pro-Israel voice of many of the publications he owns.
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A bottled liter of water with a few teaspoons of bleach is proving to be a successful recipe for dwellers in the light-deprived slums of the Philippines. The simple technology is spreading sunlight in places where it has never been, and saving residents money at the same time.
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Police in Nigeria are holding a goat on suspicion of attempted armed robbery.
Vigilantes seized the black and white goat, saying it was an armed robber who had used black magic to transform himself into an animal to escape after trying to steal a Mazda 323.
‘The group of vigilante men came to report that while they were on patrol they saw some hoodlums attempting to rob a car. They pursued them.
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The store owner quickly begins placing money in a robber’s backpack. As he does, his Chihuahua erupts into ferocious barking at the two men, who beat a hasty retreat, running out of the store with the backpack but taking less money than they could’ve gotten.
At one point, one of the robbers even points his rifle at the diminutive but undaunted pooch, who chases the pair out of the store and down the street.
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Pro-abortion activists from Holland who took a seaborne clinic to staunchly Catholic Poland have been forced to pull out after a fortnight of furious protests and official pressure.
Women on Waves, a group of radical campaigners seeking to spread their doctrine of “free abortions” throughout Europe, had hoped to bypass Poland’s tough anti-abortion laws by ferrying women to international waters aboard a converted tug, the Langenort, to undergo abortions.
Last week, however, they abandoned their efforts and left Polish waters after providing “counselling” to only 20 women. Rebecca Gomperts, a former Greenpeace activist who heads Women on Waves, refused to say whether they had performed any abortions.
The arrival of the Langenort in the northern Polish port of Wladyslawowo provoked outrage from the Roman Catholic Church, and the vessel was met by furious demonstrators when it docked.
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Japan’s science ministry says air above the ground about 150 kilometers from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant is as radioactive as areas 50 kilometers from the source of radioactivity.
The ministry on Wednesday released a map showing radiation levels at locations one meter above the ground in Miyagi Prefecture, north of Fukushima, based on the results of an aerial survey from June 22nd through 30th.
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They looked like Apple products. It looked like an Apple store. It had the classic Apple store winding staircase and weird upstairs sitting area. The employees were even wearing those blue t-shirts with the chunky Apple name tags around their necks.
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It might be among the hardest materials known, but place a diamond in a patch of sunlight and it will start to lose atoms, say a team of physicists in Australia. The rate of loss won’t significantly trouble tiara wearers or damage diamond rings, but the discovery could prove a boon for researchers working to tap diamond’s exceptional optical and electronic properties.
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Certain species of Timema stick insects were known to reproduce asexually, with females producing young in “virgin births” without the need for egg fertilisation by males.
The insects instead produce genetic clones of themselves.
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A new doll, called the “Breast Milk Baby,” is slated to make a debut sometime this year in US toy stores. A sensation in Europe, the doll has already polarized many groups at odds over issues like breastfeeding in public and those who feel young girls are already growing up too fast.
The doll comes with a halter which is worn by a young girl as she holds the baby up to a pair of rose petal “nipples” on the front. When the doll is placed near the petals, it begins to make suckling sounds.
Naturally, when asked what they thought about a breast milk baby doll, some shoppers in NYC were astounded, even offended. But the company who makes it remains philosophical.
“I think that it’s totally bizarre to teach a prepubescent child how to breastfeed,” said one Manhattanite woman. “Quite strange.”
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With increasing frequency it seems agencies of the government are looking to tap into the public consciousness to gather information on everything from how you surf the Web to how they can use information generated by you to predict the future. It’s all a little creepy, really. Here we take a look at seven programs announced this year that in some cases really want to crawl into your brain to see what’s happening in the world.
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New Yorkers have witnessed an urban solar phenomenon, with the Sun setting in alignment with the city’s skyscrapers and giving an effect fans say is reminiscent of Wiltshire’s Stonehenge. Welcome to Manhattanhenge.
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A good journalist brings that depth of commitment to a story, along with the appropriate contextual information, public memory, and reportorial skill. When a reporter from the German magazine Der Spiegel told me in 2003 that Fox News reporters in Baghdad had borrowed sandbags from American soldiers and piled them on the roof of their hotel to stage an on-camera impression that they were reporting from a battle elsewhere, I was reminded that Murdoch’s News Corporation isn’t so interested in serious journalism.
No large news organization in the world, in fact—at least none that’s as large as or larger than those influenced by Vladimir Putin in Russia or Silvio Berlusconi in Italy or the Communist Party in China—tries as brazenly as Murdoch’s globe-straddling News Corporation to generate and even fabricate news or to subvert good reporting of news so cynically and powerfully—and hurtfully, to both its subjects and its audiences.
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Walter Bagdasarian was found guilty two years ago of making threats against a major presidential candidate in comments he posted on a Yahoo.com financial website after 1 a.m. on Oct. 22, 2008, as Obama’s impending victory in the race for the White House was becoming apparent. Bagdasarian told investigators he was drunk at the time.
A divided panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned that conviction Tuesday, saying Bagdasarian’s comments were “particularly repugnant” because they endorsed violence but that a reasonable person wouldn’t have taken them as a genuine threat.
The observation that Obama “will have a 50 cal in the head soon” and a call to “shoot the [racist slur]” weren’t violations of the law under which Bagdasarian was convicted because the statute doesn’t criminalize “predictions or exhortations to others to injure or kill the president,” said the majority opinion written by Judge Stephen Reinhardt.
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Conjured by o~ SeMeN SPeRmS ~o on July 21, 2011
