Archive for the ‘Cryptogon’ Category
MIT: A Camera that Peers Around Corners
March 21st, 2012
Via: MIT:
A new imaging system could use opaque walls, doors or floors as ‘mirrors’ to gather information about scenes outside its line of sight.
In December, MIT Media Lab researchers caused a stir by releasing a slow-motion video of a burst of light traveling the length of a plastic bottle. But the experimental setup that enabled that video was designed for a much different application: a camera that can see around corners.
In a paper appearing this week in the journal Nature Communications, the researchers describe using their system to produce recognizable 3-D images of a wooden figurine and of foam cutouts outside their camera’s line of sight. The research could ultimately lead to imaging systems that allow emergency responders to evaluate dangerous environments or vehicle navigation systems that can negotiate blind turns, among other applications.
The principle behind the system is essentially that of the periscope. But instead of using angled mirrors to redirect light, the system uses ordinary walls, doors or floors — surfaces that aren’t generally thought of as reflective.
One Response to “MIT: A Camera that Peers Around Corners”
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Article source: http://cryptogon.com/?p=28171
Afghanistan: U.S. Soldier Involved in Massacre Recalls Little About Incident, Also a Stock Swindler [???]
March 20th, 2012
Via: ABC:
Robert Bales, the staff sergeant accused of massacring Afghan civilians, enlisted in the U.S. Army at the same time he was trying to avoid answering allegations he defrauded an elderly Ohio couple of their life savings in a stock fraud, according to federal documents reviewed by ABC News.
“He robbed me of my life savings,” Gary Liebschner of Carroll, Ohio told ABC News.
Financial regulators found that Bales “engaged in fraud, breach of fiduciary duty, churning, unauthorized trading and unsuitable investments,” according to a report on Bales filed in 2003. Bales and his associates were ordered to pay Liebschner $1,274,000 in compensatory and punitive damages but have yet to do so, according to Liebschner.
“We didn’t know where he was,” Liebschner told ABC News. “We heard the Bahamas, and all kinds of places.”
Liebschner says he recognized Bales after news reports named him as the American soldier accused of killing 16 Afghan villagers in a shooting rampage.
Liebschner filed a complaint against Bales in May 2000, claiming Bales took his life savings of $852,000 in ATT stock and through a series of trades reduced its value to nothing.
Related: Lawyer Says Afghan Killings Suspect Recalls Little
One Response to “Afghanistan: U.S. Soldier Involved in Massacre Recalls Little About Incident, Also a Stock Swindler [???]”
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tal Says:
March 20th, 2012 at 8:13 pmAnother “Lone Gunman”, eh?
Top officials in Afghanistan say the assassinations were premeditated executions carried out by death squads, who were flown in by helicopter and given air support during the mass murder and the death squads conducted the civilian slaughter in retaliation for attacks on US troops.
The killings have been found to have been conducted nearly simultaneously at two separate locations which cast major doubts the US narrative that a single gunman carried out the atrocities.
Further adding to the credibility of the Afghan narrative is these killings were conducted in less than a one hour time period during which time two Afghan woman were raped before they were murdered execution style.
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Article source: http://cryptogon.com/?p=28156
Call to Examine MI5 Link to Murder of Nuclear Activist
March 20th, 2012
Via: Guardian:
One of Britain’s leading human rights lawyers has demanded a fresh police inquiry to establish what the British intelligence services knew about the murder of a prominent anti-nuclear campaigner.
Michael Mansfield QC said new evidence meant that an independent police force should be appointed to examine enduring concerns and inconsistencies relating to the death of Hilda Murrell in March 1984.
Murrell, 78, was abducted from her home in Shrewsbury and her body was discovered days later in a nearby copse. A high-profile campaigner against nuclear weapons, she had been due to present evidence to the public inquiry into the proposed Sizewell B nuclear reactor in East Anglia. Her death triggered numerous conspiracy theories and allegations relating to the involvement of MI5, with one MP, Tam Dalyell, telling parliament that “men of British intelligence” were involved.
Subsequent claims from intelligence sources that they never even opened a file on the rose-growing anti-nuclear campaigner have now been dismissed by Mansfield as “completely ludicrous”.
He said: “There must have been a file for a number of reasons. One of them being that she plainly was very active and very outspoken about a government policy that was extremely sensitive at that time – nuclear power.
“It was central to Margaret Thatcher’s thinking. They would have been watching closely what she was up to, who she was associating with and so on.
“The victim was consumed with anxiety that something was going to happen to her. A look at why that might be involves the evidence she was about to give to the Sizewell inquiry.”
The involvement of Mansfield, whose past cases include the Stephen Lawrence murder, follows the painstaking accumulation of evidence on the case by Murrell’s nephew, Commander Robert Green.
The former naval intelligence officer was one of a handful of people privy to details of the sinking of the Argentinian ship the General Belgrano, during the 1982 Falklands conflict. Green became embroiled in allegations that he leaked intelligence to Dalyell that the Belgrano had been attacked while steaming away from the Falklands, a revelation that undermined Britain’s justification for the sinking.
Just two days before Murrell was abducted, Dalyell began asking ministers detailed questions about the movements of the Belgrano when it was sunk.
Murrell’s links to Green and her outspoken nature may have placed her in the spotlight of the intelligence agencies. “They [the security services] must have noticed his connection with her. Therefore they might have thought that she possessed information of a sensitive nature,” said Mansfield.
Despite 28 years having passed since her death, Green will this week reveal details of what he claims are attempts to intimidate him in order to prevent him from investigating the case. Despite having moved to New Zealand, Green says he is the subject of continuing surveillance and that the tyres of his car have been slashed, his mail intercepted and, occasionally, his house broken into.
He has continued to investigate, arriving in London this week to share fresh evidence collated for his book on the murder, A Thorn In Their Side.
Among questions raised about the case are those casting fresh doubts on the conviction of a burglar, Andrew George, who was jailed for life in 2005 for Murrell’s murder. George was aged 16 at the time and in care at a children’s home near her home. The prosecution believed that he panicked during a burglary before abducting Murrell.
George’s DNA was found to match samples taken from the scene, yet a previously undisclosed witness statement made by a forensic scientist in the case, Michael Appleby, indicates that he found DNA under Murrell’s fingernails from another man.
Green claims that this information was withheld from the trial jury.
Another troubling aspect of the case relates to the testimony of the owner of the copse where the body was discovered. On the day after the murder, Captain Ian Scott visited the copse to check for trees that needed felling. Despite visiting the exact spot where her body was found, Scott somehow missed it. Yet photographs clearly show the body being visible from a distance. Subsequent police inquiries suggested that he was looking up at trees and would not have been studying the ground.
“There was no way that somebody of his calibre, of his knowledge, would have overlooked Hilda’s body,” said Mansfield. “Together, these factors require a reinvestigation in relation to material that never really surfaced in any of the judicial proceedings, either the inquest or the trial itself.”
One Response to “Call to Examine MI5 Link to Murder of Nuclear Activist”
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djc Says:
March 21st, 2012 at 8:02 amIf you’d like to listen to an interview with Commander Green paste the following in your browser …
http://www.radionz.co.nz/searc…..bert+green
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Article source: http://cryptogon.com/?p=28161
Flying Like a Bird
March 21st, 2012
Via: Human Bird Wings:
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Article source: http://cryptogon.com/?p=28164
Dutch Roman Catholic Church ‘Castrated at Least 10 Boys’
March 20th, 2012
Hmm. Maybe they should try it on the child raping priests…
Via: Telegraph:
At least 10 teenage boys or young men under the age of 21 were surgically castrated “to get rid of homosexuality” while in the care of the Dutch Roman Catholic Church in the 1950s.
Evidence of the castrations has emerged amid controversy that it was not included in the findings of an official investigation into sexual abuse within the church last year.
The NRC Handelsblad newspaper identified Henk Heithuis who was castrated in 1956, while a minor, after reporting priests to the police for abusing him in a Catholic boarding home.
Joep Dohmen, the investigative journalist who uncovered the Heithuis case, also found evidence of at least nine other castrations. “These cases are anonymous and can no longer be traced,” he said. “There will be many more. But the question is whether those boys, now old men, will want to tell their story.”
Mr Heithuis died in a car crash in 1958, two years after being castrated at the age of 20, while under the age of majority, which was then 21.
In 1956 he had accused Catholic clergy of sexually abusing him in his Church run care home.
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Article source: http://cryptogon.com/?p=28143
The One About Jim Rawles and the FBI Cookie Caper
March 20th, 2012
Several people have submitted this one, and, as usual when non technical people offer technical advice on their blogs, I hold my head in my hands and ask, “When is this going to stop?”
Rawles saying that using a VPN, “Will allow you to surf the Internet anonymously,” is VERY reckless. He goes on to recommend HideMyAss, among other VPN providers.
HideMyAss. Really?
HideMyAss has defended its role in handing over evidence that resulted in the arrest of a suspected LulzSec member last week.
UK-based HideMyAss, which offers freebie web proxy and paid-for VPN services, said it handed over potentially incriminating data to the feds only in response to a court order.
Ok, I’m not going to rehash all of this again. If you’re interested in this topic, see my 2007 post, High-Traffic Colluding Tor Routers in Washington, D.C., and the Ugly Truth About Online Anonymity, and know that the situation has only gotten worse since then.
Via: Survival Blog:
It has come to my attention that from August of 2011 to November of 2011, the FBI secretly redirected the web traffic of more than 10% of SurvivalBlog’s US visitors through CJIS, their sprawling data center situated on 900 acres, 10 miles from Clarksburg, West Virginia. There, the Feebees surreptitiously collected the IP addresses of my site visitors. In all, 4,906 of 35,494 selected connections ended up going to or through the FBI servers. (Note that this happened several months before we moved our primary server to Sweden.) Furthermore, we discovered that the FBI attached a long-lived cookie that allowed them to track the sites that readers subsequently visited. I suspect that the FBI has done the same to hundreds of other web sites. I find this situation totally abhorrent, and contrary to the letter of 4th Amendment as well as the intent of our Founding Fathers.
Research Credit: HPLovecraft666
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Article source: http://cryptogon.com/?p=28149
TSA Patdown of Toddler in Wheelchair
March 19th, 2012
Via: YouTube:
A toddler in a wheelchair is stopped by the TSA at ORD (O’Hare Airport in Chicago) and forced to into a sequestered area. On his way to a family vacation in Disney, this 3 year old boy is in a body cast for a broken leg.
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Article source: http://cryptogon.com/?p=28134
In Sweden, Cash Is King No More
March 19th, 2012
Maybe the Greeks are on to something with the tems, which is quite different from other schemes in that each account may only hold a limited amount of the currency. This is a very interesting idea because it prevents speculation, encourages commerce and eliminates large targets for thieves.
Via: AP:
Sweden was the first European country to introduce bank notes in 1661. Now it’s come farther than most on the path toward getting rid of them.
“I can’t see why we should be printing bank notes at all anymore,” says Bjoern Ulvaeus, former member of 1970′s pop group ABBA, and a vocal proponent for a world without cash.
The contours of such a society are starting to take shape in this high-tech nation, frustrating those who prefer coins and bills over digital money.
In most Swedish cities, public buses don’t accept cash; tickets are prepaid or purchased with a cell phone text message. A small but growing number of businesses only take cards, and some bank offices — which make money on electronic transactions — have stopped handling cash altogether.
“There are towns where it isn’t at all possible anymore to enter a bank and use cash,” complains Curt Persson, chairman of Sweden’s National Pensioners’ Organization.
…
Bills and coins represent only 3 percent of Sweden’s economy, compared to an average of 9 percent in the eurozone and 7 percent in the U.S., according to the Bank for International Settlements, an umbrella organization for the world’s central banks.
Three percent is still too much if you ask Ulvaeus. A cashless society may seem like an odd cause for someone who made a fortune on “Money, Money, Money” and other ABBA hits, but for Ulvaeus it’s a matter of security.
After his son was robbed for the third time he started advocating a faster transition to a fully digital economy, if only to make life harder for thieves.
“If there were no cash, what would they do?” says Ulvaeus, 66.
The Swedish Bankers’ Association says the shrinkage of the cash economy is already making an impact in crime statistics.
The number of bank robberies in Sweden plunged from 110 in 2008 to 16 in 2011 — the lowest level since it started keeping records 30 years ago. It says robberies of security transports are also down.
“Less cash in circulation makes things safer, both for the staff that handle cash, but also of course for the public,” says Par Karlsson, a security expert at the organization.
The prevalence of electronic transactions — and the digital trail they generate — also helps explain why Sweden has less of a problem with graft than countries with a stronger cash culture, such as Italy or Greece, says economics professor Friedrich Schneider of the Johannes Kepler University in Austria.
“If people use more cards, they are less involved in shadow economy activities,” says Schneider, an expert on underground economies.
In Italy — where cash has been a common means of avoiding value-added tax and hiding profits from the taxman — Prime Minister Mario Monti in December put forward measures to limit cash transactions to payments under €1,000 ($1,300), down from €2,500 before.
The flip side is the risk of cybercrimes. According to the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention the number of computerized fraud cases, including skimming, surged to nearly 20,000 in 2011 from 3,304 in 2000.
Oscar Swartz, the founder of Sweden’s first Internet provider, Banhof, says a digital economy also raises privacy issues because of the electronic trail of transactions. He supports the idea of phasing out cash, but says other anonymous payment methods need to be introduced instead.
“One should be able to send money and donate money to different organizations without being traced every time,” he says.
Research Credit: Timbooch
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Article source: http://cryptogon.com/?p=28130
Latest Attack in France Kills 4 Outside Jewish School
March 19th, 2012
[???]
Via: ABC:
A motorcycle gunman opened fire Monday in front of a Jewish school in the French city of Toulouse, killing a rabbi, his two young sons and a schoolgirl, the prosecutor’s office said. It was the third deadly motorcycle shooting in the same area in recent days.
French prosecutors were studying possible terrorist links but the motive for the attack was unclear. The attack shocked the country and prompted strong emotions and high-level discussions in Israel.
Concerns emerged about a possible serial killer with racist motivations, as investigators examined whether the attack was linked to two other shooting attacks in the Toulouse region that killed three French paratroopers and left another seriously injured.
Religious minorities and issues of race have emerged as a prominent issue in France’s current presidential campaign. The paratroopers killed and injured were of North African and French Caribbean origin, and the targets Monday were Jewish.
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Article source: http://cryptogon.com/?p=28137
China: 30 Million People Live in Caves
March 19th, 2012
One for your Doomstead Ideas file folder.
Via: Los Angeles Times:
Like many peasants from the outskirts of Yanan, China, Ren Shouhua was born in a cave and lived there until he got a job in the city and moved into a concrete-block house.
His progression made sense as he strove to improve his life. But there’s a twist: The 46-year-old Ren plans to move back to a cave when he retires.
“It’s cool in the summer and warm in the winter. It’s quiet and safe,” said Ren, a ruddy-faced man with salt-and-pepper hair who moved to the Shaanxi provincial capital, Xian, in his 20s. “When I get old, I’d like to go back to my roots.”
More than 30 million Chinese people live in caves, many of them in Shaanxi province where the Loess plateau, with its distinctive cliffs of yellow, porous soil, makes digging easy and cave dwelling a reasonable option.
Each of the province’s caves, yaodong, in Chinese, typically has a long vaulted room dug into the side of a mountain with a semicircular entrance covered with rice paper or colorful quilts. People hang decorations on the walls, often a portrait of Mao Tse-tung or a photograph of a movie star torn out of a glossy magazine.
The better caves protrude from the mountain and are reinforced with brick masonry. Some are connected laterally so a family can have several chambers. Electricity and even running water can be brought in.
“Most aren’t so fancy, but I’ve seen some really beautiful caves: high ceilings and spacious with a nice yard out front where you can exercise and sit in the sun,” said Ren, who works as a driver and is the son of a wheat and millet farmer.
Research Credit: Timbooch
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Article source: http://cryptogon.com/?p=28128
March 21st, 2012 at 4:27 pm
Video that simulates how projected laser light is scattered off surfaces to peer around corners.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?f…..DocXPy-iQ#!