"Tis the season...

Check out this great video by Stefan Molyneux. This video discusses the dangers of Bitcoin for central banks, governments, and also Bitcoin users as well. Must see.

Darkmarket crackdown: Onymous

"A full-blown dark web drug crackdown is in the works, and it’s not stopping with the Silk Road.
On Thursday the FBI along with other law enforcement agencies including the Department of Homeland Security and Europol announced that it had seized the Silk Road 2, perhaps the most well-known drug market to appear on the Dark Web since the takedown of the original Silk Road last year. What it didn’t announce is that at least two other drug market sites have also been busted, and more takedowns are likely coming. The drug markets Hydra and Cloud 9 now both display the same “This Hidden Site Has Been Seized” notices as the Silk Road 2, emblazoned with the logos of the FBI and Europol. Several other popular dark net markets were down Thursday morning, as well, though they didn’t display that banner. An FBI spokesperson tells WIRED that there will be more than three market seizures in total, with the full extent of the operation set to be revealed by Friday."--from Wired

The control freaks just can't stand the fact that people are using technology to liberate themselves and circumvent prohibitionist measures in a way that reduces violence and provides better quality products. That scares them because it refutes some of the largest reasons for the drug war; the secondary effects of violence and theft that is often correlated with use.

Dark markets are removing this, and the statists can't stand it. They are losing control and losing the argument, simultaneously.

Despite this large push, a few darkmarkets are still operating. And just like the last push, I expect Silk Road 3.0 to be up and running in no time. People will always try to get what they want.

BlackEnergy

" A destructive “Trojan Horse” malware program has penetrated the software that runs much of the nation’s critical infrastructure and is poised to cause an economic catastrophe, according to the Department of Homeland Security. National Security sources told ABC News there is evidence that the malware was inserted by hackers believed to be sponsored by the Russian government, and is a very serious threat. The hacked software is used to control complex industrial operations like oil and gas pipelines, power transmission grids, water distribution and filtration systems, wind turbines and even some nuclear plants. Shutting down or damaging any of these vital public utilities could severely impact hundreds of thousands of Americans."-- From ABCnews.

It was only a matter of time. Just one more reason to develop robust, local infrastructure.

H/T-- http://market-ticker.org/

 

Casper gets his piece

Dude does it again.

Brigitta Jonsdottir and Iceland's Pirate Party

I'm quite impressed with the political movements in Iceland and their ability to achieve results.

I knew that they kept their government from approving a banker bailout like the TARP program here in the U.S. I've also heard a bit about the Pirate Party but I guess I need to do some more research.

I'd like to see peaceful political change along these lines here but, after the disappointment of both the Tea Party and the Occupy movement it appears that we are missing something.

I hold out hope that what's missing isn't 2nd amendment remedies.

Maybe we just need more folks like Birgitta Jonsdottir.

Check out this Motherboard article on Brigitta and the Pirate Party's stance that Iceland should be a safe haven for data. Interesting stuff.

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-pirate-partys-poetician-plans-to-make-iceland-a-data-haven

Kardashian Krypt

"“Kim's image is everywhere. You think of selfies and you think of Kim Kardashian,” Varner told me over the phone. “She's the number one most followed woman on Instagram. Her image is already in the back of everyone's mind, whether you want her to be or not. So the fact that her image is everywhere makes it easier to slip in a few secret messages.”

That's exactly what Varner's Chrome extension Kardashian Krypt, which was developed as part of her internship at FAT Lab, allows you to do."

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/finally-a-way-to-send-secret-messages-inside-pictures-of-kim-kardashian

Meet Truthy

I don't know about you, but this gives me the creeps...

"The federal government is spending nearly $1 million to create an online database that will track “misinformation” and hate speech on Twitter.
The National Science Foundation is financing the creation of a web service that will monitor “suspicious memes” and what it considers “false and misleading ideas,” with a major focus on political activity online.
The “Truthy” database, created by researchers at Indiana University, is designed to “detect political smears, astroturfing, misinformation, and other social pollution.”"---Source

Truthy website

I wonder how long it is before it is adapted to automate censorship. Maybe the ChiComs can help on that end.

McMoon's--"Dumpster diving for science"

"From an abandoned McDonald's in the backyard of NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, a dozen or so volunteer scientists and engineers have taken control of a decommissioned, still running, 70s-era space satellite, currently some 20,000 kilometers away, by using discarded vintage space computers and a few sweet eBay finds.

The so-named "McMoon's" Control Center is some sort of bizarre testament to human ingenuity and what a bunch of very smart people with virtually no budget or proper authorization can pull off."

Read the rest at Motherboard.

Great articles

Two from WRSA.

On the Open Source Revolution.

And on lessons from a deep-web drug dealer.

Both are worth a read and your consideration.

I know Dylan said it in the 60's but it's as true now as then.

Upcycling

"Sustainability, biomimicry, biology, futurism, ecology, ecosystems: these terms have recently begun to have more weight in public discourse signaling a change in questions being asked and thinking about how humans should live on and interact with the Earth.

Crises abound around the world, many related to farming, food and water. For example, untreated human waste is reportedly used by 200 million farmers to irrigate and fertilize farm land to produce vegetables and grains for human consumption. The primary reason farmers resort to these methods is the shortage of fresh water and high fertilizer costs. Unfortunately this process involves health risks reportedly leading to 2.2 million deaths worldwide a year from intestinal illnesses; allowing people to starve to death is not an alternative either."

http://www.industrytap.com/wasting-150-billion-annually-in-top-soil-how-will-upcycling-change-that/4104

I can't believe I read that article and didn't see the word "permaculture" anywhere.  "Upcycling" and permaculture are very convergent ways of thinking. So much so that I would be surprised if the authors, William McDonough and Michael Braungart, had not had some exposure to it. The principles and ethics of these two systems so are strongly aligned that they are basically the same thing.

Their book just made my Amazon shopping list.

Bitcoin inspired art work

Hit the link to see some really awesome and innovative pieces inspired by Bitcoin.

This one is my favorite. What's yours?

http://www.coindesk.com/10-impressive-bitcoin-inspired-art-pieces/

Could Cody Wilson and Amir Taaki's Dark Wallet help fulfill Second Realm Strategy?

If you are not familiar with these characters and their project, Dark Wallet, read this excellent Wired article.

"Wilson and Taaki intend Dark Wallet to be the most user-friendly method yet to spend bitcoins under the cover of anonymity’s shadow—without switching to a niche alternative coin or trusting any shady middleman.
Every coin spent through the program, an add-on to Google’s Chrome browser, gets matched up and merged with another transaction in a process called CoinJoin. The trick is a bit like Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train, who agree to murder each other’s victims: When Dark Wallet combines two transactions on behalf of two users, their coins are spent simultaneously. The blockchain only records one movement of money, and since the CoinJoin negotiation is encrypted, there’s no way to tell whose coins end up where. As Dark Wallet’s user base grows—today it’s already in the low thousands despite still being in development—those CoinJoins will grow to combine three or even more transactions. Add enough users and the system becomes “a magnificent layer of uncertainty” over “a massive confusion of addresses,” as one early tester describes it.
Dark Wallet also offers what it calls “stealth addresses” that allow a user to receive bitcoins at an encrypted address, where only he or she can retrieve them using a private key. When a coin passes through either a CoinJoin transaction or a stealth address, it becomes vastly more difficult to track, making taxation, regulation, and prosecution virtually impossible. “We want a bitcoin that laughs at the regulatory pageantry,” Wilson says. “We’re going to permanently problematize bitcoin’s reputation.”"

Seriously, though, read the whole thing because it is excellent. With this article and the implications of Dark Wallet in mind, read(or re-read) the Second Realm Strategy paper.

Wilson and Taaki may have developed the tool to bring about crypto-anarchists' greatest wish.

Whaddya gonna do bout it?

"Just days after a report published by researchers at Facebook revealed that users of the social media site had been manipulated for science, The Guardian reports that DARPA - the Pentagon-run Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency - has in one way or another funded several studies recently that set out to explore that social networking site, as well as users of Twitter, Pinterest, Kickstarter and others. DARPA told the Guardian that the studies it has funded are essential to US defense interests."

It seems that what was discussed in my previous post on social engineering and Facebook has been admitted to by the DOD.

Also, the implications that I supposed are validated by Edward Snowden, 

"papers leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden indicate that US and British intelligence agencies have been deeply engaged in planning ways to covertly use social media for purposes of propaganda and deception."

Read more at Zerohedge.

Encryption for dummies

This is something I've been hoping to see for some time.

"Encryption is hard. When NSA leaker Edward Snowden wanted to communicate with journalist Glenn Greenwald via encrypted email, Greenwald couldn’t figure out the venerable crypto program PGP even after Snowden made a 12-minute tutorial video.

Nadim Kobeissi wants to bulldoze that steep learning curve. At the HOPE hacker conference in New York later this month he’ll release a beta version of an all-purpose file encryption program called miniLock, a free and open-source browser plugin designed to let even Luddites encrypt and decrypt files with practically uncrackable cryptographic protection in seconds."

Read more at Wired.

3-D printed 10/22

"Published at LiveLeak by Buck O'Fama (just possibly a pseudonym) is this video demonstration of a 3D-printed pistol version of a Ruger 10/22—a popular semiautomatic .22 rifle. The receiver is 3D printed and glued together, with metal parts added, including what appears to be the bolt (and, I assume, a synthetic after-market stock*).

The text reads: The pistol version of the popular Ruger 10/22 rifle, the Ruger Charger comes standard with 10-round flush magazines and can accept high-capacity mags holding 30 rounds or more. As demonstrated, making one with a cheap small-format 3D printer and some parts purchased on the internet (with no paperwork) is trivially easy."

Read more and check out the embedded video at Reason.com.

New app tracks congressional corruption

"thanks to 16-year-old Nick Rubin, keeping track of just how much politicians have sold out has become a lot easier. He created Greenhouse, a new browser plug-in that operates under the motto "Some are red. Some are blue. All are green." The plugin aims "to shine light on a social and industrial disease of today: the undue influence of money in our Congress."

Read more at Vice.

This thing sounds pretty awesome if it works as reported.

Social engineering and the continued emergence of Fascism in the USA

In case you missed the recent news that Facebook has been conducting an experiment by altering the feeds of their users to see how positive or negative information affects the moods and content created by the recipients of the altered feeds, new information has come out that the U.S. military may have been funding and supporting the effort. 

"There has been quite a bit of chatter this past week after it was revealed that a recent Facebook outage was the result of a psychological experiment that the company conducted on a portion of its users without their permission. The experiment, which was described in a paper published by Facebook, and UCSF, tested the contagion of emotions on social media by manipulating the content of personal feeds and measuring how this impacted user behavior.

Over 600,000 users were used as guinea pigs without their consent, which raises a number of serious ethical and legal questions (particularly due to the fact that this study received federal funding), however there is an even more disturbing angle to this story. It turns out that this research was connected to a Department of Defense project called the Minerva Initiative, which funds universities to model the dynamics, risks and tipping points for large-scale civil unrest across the world."

--From SCGnews.

Here's a bit on the Cornell researcher who leads the study and some sketchy-looking track covering.

"Initially, the press release from Cornell highlighting the study said at the bottom: “The study was funded in part by the James S. McDonnell Foundation and the Army Research Office.” Once people started asking questions about this, Cornell claimed it had made a mistake, and that there was no outside funding. Jay Rosen, Journalism Professor at NYU, seems to find this highly questionable. He wrote on his Facebook page that:

Strange little turn in the story of the Facebook “emotional contagion” study. Last month’s press release from Cornell highlighting the study had said at the bottom: “The study was funded in part by the James S. McDonnell Foundation and the Army Research Office.”

Why would the military be interested? I wanted to know. So I asked Adam D.I. Kramer, the Facebook researcher, that question on his Facebook page, where he has posted what he called a public explanation. (He didn’t reply to my or anyone else’s questions.) See:https://www.facebook.com/akramer/posts/10152987150867796

Now it turns out Cornell was wrong! Or it says it was wrong. The press release now reads: “Correction: An earlier version of this story reported that the study was funded in part by the James S. McDonnell Foundation and the Army Research Office. In fact, the study received no external funding.”

Why do I call this strange? Any time my work has been featured in an NYU press release, the PR officers involved show me drafts and coordinate closely with me, for the simple reason that they don’t want to mischaracterize scholarly work. So now we have to believe that Cornell’s Professor of Communication and Information Science, Jeffrey Hancock, wasn’t shown or didn’t read the press release in which he is quoted about the study’s results (weird) or he did read it but somehow failed to notice that it said his study was funded by the Army when it actually wasn’t (weirder).

I think I would notice if my university was falsely telling the world that my research was partially funded by the Pentagon… but, hey, maybe there’s an innocent and boring explanation that I am overlooking.

It gets even more interesting from here. The Professor of Communication and Information Science, Jeffrey Hancock, who Mr. Rosen mentions above, has a history of working with the U.S. military, specifically the Minerva Institute. In case you forgot what this is, the Guardian reported on it earlier this year. It explained:

A US Department of Defense (DoD) research program is funding universities to model the dynamics, risks and tipping points for large-scale civil unrest across the world, under the supervision of various US military agencies. The multi-million dollar program is designed to develop immediate and long-term “warfighter-relevant insights” for senior officials and decision makers in “the defense policy community,” and to inform policy implemented by “combatant commands.”

Launched in 2008 – the year of the global banking crisis – the DoD ‘Minerva Research Initiative’ partners with universities “to improve DoD’s basic understanding of the social, cultural, behavioral, and political forces that shape regions of the world of strategic importance to the US.”

-- From Zerohedge.

Interesting stuff, eh? And remember the Minerva project? I linked to another ZeroHedge article that describes it in detail in "Well, I'm screwed".

What about this story from a few months back? The State Department created a social media platform aimed solely at undermining another sovereign nation. In case you missed it, "Cuban Twitter":

"The U.S. government masterminded the creation of a "Cuban Twitter" — a communications network designed to undermine the communist government in Cuba, built with secret shell companies and financed through foreign banks, The Associated Press has learned.
The Obama administration project, which lasted more than two years and drew tens of thousands of subscribers, sought to evade Cuba's stranglehold on the Internet with a primitive social media platform. First, the network would build a Cuban audience, mostly young people; then, the plan was to push them toward dissent."--- From the AP.

So it seems that the Military/Industrial/Information complex (that sure is a mouthful for plain old fascism) is joining together to do social engineering experiments on an unsuspecting populace with the aims of creating or stopping Arab Spring style unrest depending on where and when it is useful to their aims. In Cuba, Ukraine, and numerous Middle Eastern countries it would seem to be useful to create social unrest. But here at home, with a stagnant economy, wealth inequality, and little confidence in government or financial institutions to meet our needs, a stealth campaign of pacification is more the order of the day.

So, what to do about it? I would advise against abstaining from social media altogether. It is a useful tool to liberate minds and people, but it is obviously being weaponized against us. I think simply being aware that some parties are trying to manipulate you will go a long way toward avoiding the consequences they may desire. Be mindful, use this technology as a tool for good, and beware of the risks. You gotta fight for your mind.

New windmill technology

From Silicon Graybeard's place:

"German physicist Albert Betz long ago (1909) calculated the maximum efficiency that a wind turbine could achieve, today called the Betz limit.  According to Betz's law, no turbine can capture more than 16/27 (59.3%) of the kinetic energy in wind.  Those monstrous infrastructure-sized turbines that we've all seen achieve about 80% of the Betz limit, or about 47% of the energy in the wind.  But what about other shapes?  The Dutch firm Archimedes tried the shape they named themselves after, the expanding spiral Archimedes' screw that has been used for pumping water since Archimedes' time.  They claim an efficiency of 80% - not 80% of 59% - a true 80% of the energy in the wind.  But it's better than even that:
Marinus Mieremet, cofounder of Archimedes, puts it this way: "Generally speaking, there is a difference in pressure in front and behind of the rotor blades of a windmill. However, this is not the case with the Liam F1. The difference in pressure is created by the spatial figure in the spiral blade. This results in a much better performance. Even when the wind is blowing at an angle of 60 degrees into the rotor, it will start to spin. We do not require expensive software: Because of its conical shape, the wind turbine yaws itself automatically into the optimal wind direction. Just like a wind vane. And because the wind turbine encounters minimal resistance, it is virtually silent."

Google's street art project

For an overview visit This is Colossal.

For more see Google Cultural Institute.