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Sunday, January 20, 2013
Saturday, January 19, 2013
Ned Kelly, Australian bushranger and outlaw, finally laid to rest...
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| English: The Kelly house at Beveridge, Victoria. The house was built by John Kelly in about 1859. This was the house that bushranger Ned Kelly lived in as a young boy. His brother Dan was born here. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
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| Ned Kelly the day before his execution (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21077457
Friday, January 18, 2013
Man quotes bible in answering drugs charges...
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| New Zealand - New Zealand Police (dark blue, woven) (Photo credit: conner395) |
Shane Taoho, 44, of Ruatahuna, told a jury in the Rotorua District Court he was a sovereign being and tangata whenua and the Bible's book of Genesis said a person could grow seeds and plants.
Taoho is charged with cultivating cannabis in 2009 and 2010 and selling cannabis in 2009, The Daily Post reported.
The court entered pleas of not guilty after Taoho told Judge Phillip Cooper he did not recognise his jurisdiction.
For the Crown, Rotorua Crown prosecutor Laura Owen told the jury that whatever they thought they had to follow the law of New Zealand which said growing and selling cannabis was illegal.
Taoho, representing himself, said in his opening statement that New Zealand jurisdiction had been forced on him.
"I am jurisdiction ...
"I don't answer to New Zealand laws. That law was forced [on me] by intimidation, cohesion and even violence.
"I don't like this law."
Judge Cooper said New Zealand law applied to everyone including tangata whenua.
Acknowledgements: - NZPA
Thursday, January 17, 2013
Taking outsourcing of work to a new level...
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| Montage of various Shenyang images (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
- Taking outsourcing of work to a new level. Got an A for initiative though...
A security check on a US company has reportedly revealed one of its staff was outsourcing his work to China.
The software developer, in his 40s, is thought to have spent his workdays surfing the web, watching cat videos on YouTube and browsing Reddit and eBay.
He reportedly paid just a fifth of his six-figure salary to a company based in Shenyang to do his job.
Operator Verizon says the scam came to light after the US firm asked it for an audit, suspecting a security breach.
According to Andrew Valentine, of Verizon, the infrastructure company requested the operator's risk team last year to investigate some anomalous activity on its virtual private network (VPN) logs.
"This organisation had been slowly moving toward a more telecommuting oriented workforce, and they had therefore started to allow their developers to work from home on certain days. In order to accomplish this, they'd set up a fairly standard VPN concentrator approximately two years prior to our receiving their call," he was quoted as saying on an internet security website.
The company had discovered the existence of an open and active VPN connection from Shenyang to the employee's workstation that went back months, Mr Valentine said.
And it had then called on Verizon to look into what it had suspected had been malware used to route confidential information from the company to China.
"Central to the investigation was the employee himself, the person whose credentials had been used to initiate and maintain a VPN connection from China," said Mr Valentine.
Further investigation of the employee's computer had revealed hundreds of PDF documents of invoices from the Shenyang contractor, he added.
The employee, an "inoffensive and quiet" but talented man versed in several programming languages, "spent less than one fifth of his six-figure salary for a Chinese firm to do his job for him", Mr Valentine said.
"Authentication was no problem. He physically FedExed his RSA [security] token to China so that the third-party contractor could log-in under his credentials during the workday. It would appear that he was working an average nine-to-five work day," he added.
"Evidence even suggested he had the same scam going across multiple companies in the area. All told, it looked like he earned several hundred thousand dollars a year, and only had to pay the Chinese consulting firm about $50,000 (£31,270) annually."
The employee no longer worked at the firm, Mr Valentine said.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21043693
Wednesday, January 16, 2013
The Paper Shredder...
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| English: A paper shredder (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
The Paper Shredder...
A young executive is working late one evening. As he comes out of his office about 8 PM he sees the Big Boss standing by the shredder in the hallway, a piece of paper in his hand. "Do you know how to work this thing?" the older man asks. "My secretary’s gone home and I don’t know how to run it."
"Yes, sir," says the young executive, who turns on the machine, takes the paper from the other man, and feeds it in.
"Now," says his boss, "I just need the one copy."
A young executive is working late one evening. As he comes out of his office about 8 PM he sees the Big Boss standing by the shredder in the hallway, a piece of paper in his hand. "Do you know how to work this thing?" the older man asks. "My secretary’s gone home and I don’t know how to run it."
"Yes, sir," says the young executive, who turns on the machine, takes the paper from the other man, and feeds it in.
"Now," says his boss, "I just need the one copy."
The UN launches a new attempt to control the Internet...
Only weeks after a meeting of the International Telecommunication Union in Dubai sparked worldwide outrage, the UN’s telecom branch remains adamant about re-writing the rules of the Web.
Following a meeting of ITU members last year, participants involved in the United Nation’s telecom group announced that they hoped to re-write a multilateral communications treaty, in turn causing a whole new set of international laws to structure the way the Internet works.
Although the United States and dozens of other countries have refused to sign the proposal, the ITU is nevertheless powering through with plans to put new rules and regulations on the world’s Internet, including implement sweeping deep-packet inspection powers and other efforts that could censor the Web.
With the US contributing the lion’s share of the organizations funding, advocates for an open Internet are asking for all that to change.
According to the just-launched website defundtheitu.org, the UN group currently spends around $180 million annually to advocate for that revamped treaty. But while the United States opposes the very actions the ITU seeks, they at the same time contribute a massive amount of the group’s resources.
“The ten most oppressive countries in the Open Net Initiative's ranking of online freedom all sided against the Internet, and none of them are giving the ITU as much as the US is,” the site claims. In fact, insists the site, the US government gave nearly $11 million to the ITU in 2010 — almost 8 percent of its total budget — all the while opposing the group’s attempt at creating a bill that some say would change the Web as we know it.
“It’ll be the biggest power grab in the UN’s history, as well as a perversion of its power,” blogger Arthur Herman wrote for Fox News last month.
Dr. Hamadoun I. Toure, the general secretary of the ITU, has said his group has no interest in threatening free speech and instead insists a new treaty is a “chance to chart a globally-agreed roadmap to connect the unconnected, while ensuring there is investment to create the infrastructure needed for the exponential growth in voice, video and data traffic.” US lawmakers say the ITU would do so much more, though — censor the Web, in fact — which caused the US House of Representatives to unanimously agree to reject the proposal.
“The unanimous vote is meant to send a signal – as a show of strength – to other countries meeting at the telecommunications summit that both the White House and its lawmakers oppose any role the U.N. might take in Internet governance or regulation,” ZDNet reported in December.
With the ITU still bankrolled by millions of dollars from around the world, though, their plans for an international Internet treaty is still a possibility. While the US formally opposes their plan, they continue to fund the group regardless. On the just-launched petition, some aim to change that.
“This petition seeks to cut this self-defeating expenditure from the State Department’s budget, allocating the savings to constructive work supporting a free and open Internet. By reducing the budget the ITU uses to oppose us both government and private sector will realize indirect savings in time and money as a result of having to spend less to defend ourselves and the Internet against the ITU’s attacks,” the website says. “This is merely the logical follow-through to the Senate and House resolutions condemning the ITU’s attack against the Internet and directing the State Department to combat it.Paying for both sides of a conflict is unsustainable and illogical, and should simply be corrected.”
On WhiteHouse.gov, a separate petition by the same people behind the ‘Defund the ITU’ website has been created imploring US President Barack Obama to immediately reduce his government’s funding of the group by half. So far it has accumulated only 338 signatures.
The ITU is expected to next meet in February 2013.
Following a meeting of ITU members last year, participants involved in the United Nation’s telecom group announced that they hoped to re-write a multilateral communications treaty, in turn causing a whole new set of international laws to structure the way the Internet works.
Although the United States and dozens of other countries have refused to sign the proposal, the ITU is nevertheless powering through with plans to put new rules and regulations on the world’s Internet, including implement sweeping deep-packet inspection powers and other efforts that could censor the Web.
With the US contributing the lion’s share of the organizations funding, advocates for an open Internet are asking for all that to change.
According to the just-launched website defundtheitu.org, the UN group currently spends around $180 million annually to advocate for that revamped treaty. But while the United States opposes the very actions the ITU seeks, they at the same time contribute a massive amount of the group’s resources.
“The ten most oppressive countries in the Open Net Initiative's ranking of online freedom all sided against the Internet, and none of them are giving the ITU as much as the US is,” the site claims. In fact, insists the site, the US government gave nearly $11 million to the ITU in 2010 — almost 8 percent of its total budget — all the while opposing the group’s attempt at creating a bill that some say would change the Web as we know it.
“It’ll be the biggest power grab in the UN’s history, as well as a perversion of its power,” blogger Arthur Herman wrote for Fox News last month.
Dr. Hamadoun I. Toure, the general secretary of the ITU, has said his group has no interest in threatening free speech and instead insists a new treaty is a “chance to chart a globally-agreed roadmap to connect the unconnected, while ensuring there is investment to create the infrastructure needed for the exponential growth in voice, video and data traffic.” US lawmakers say the ITU would do so much more, though — censor the Web, in fact — which caused the US House of Representatives to unanimously agree to reject the proposal.
“The unanimous vote is meant to send a signal – as a show of strength – to other countries meeting at the telecommunications summit that both the White House and its lawmakers oppose any role the U.N. might take in Internet governance or regulation,” ZDNet reported in December.
With the ITU still bankrolled by millions of dollars from around the world, though, their plans for an international Internet treaty is still a possibility. While the US formally opposes their plan, they continue to fund the group regardless. On the just-launched petition, some aim to change that.
“This petition seeks to cut this self-defeating expenditure from the State Department’s budget, allocating the savings to constructive work supporting a free and open Internet. By reducing the budget the ITU uses to oppose us both government and private sector will realize indirect savings in time and money as a result of having to spend less to defend ourselves and the Internet against the ITU’s attacks,” the website says. “This is merely the logical follow-through to the Senate and House resolutions condemning the ITU’s attack against the Internet and directing the State Department to combat it.Paying for both sides of a conflict is unsustainable and illogical, and should simply be corrected.”
On WhiteHouse.gov, a separate petition by the same people behind the ‘Defund the ITU’ website has been created imploring US President Barack Obama to immediately reduce his government’s funding of the group by half. So far it has accumulated only 338 signatures.
The ITU is expected to next meet in February 2013.
 Pentagon admits: Navy's newest warship can't survive combatThe Navy is sending one if its newest combat ships overseas, even though the Pentagon knows the ship's guns don’t properly function and is unsure whether the ship can even survive combat. |  FAA grounds Boeing 787 DreamlinersThe US Federal Aviation Administration has ordered a temporary halt of operations of Boeing 787 jets following a series of technical failures that struck the model within a matter of days. |
Monday, January 14, 2013
The CST-01 the world's thinnest watch makes its debut (hands on)...
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| Watched items (Photo credit: practicalowl) |
- The CST-01 clamps around the wrist of its latest customer. How cool is this watch? Pretty awesome!
(Credit: Eric Franklin/CNET)
LAS VEGAS: The fight to build the thinnest watch has finally been won, folks. At least for now. Central Standard Timing has partnered with E Ink to create the CST-01; purportedly the world's thinnest watch.
At 0.80mm the watch is thinner than a credit card. I briefly got a chance to hold the extremely light watch and it is indeed the thinnest I've ever seen.
According to Central Standard Timing, the patent-pending CST-01 is assembled by laminating thin, flexible components into a 0.5mm pocket etched into a single piece of flexible stainless steel. This is different from traditional digital watches, which typically use the same chassis used for analog watches.
The CST-01 also uses an embedded Thinergy Micro-Energy Cell that charges in 10 minutes from an external dock and has a lifetime of 15 years. All CST-01 watches are planned to be assembled in the USA.
http://reviews.cnet.com/watches-and-wrist-devices/central-standard-timing-cst/4505-3512_7-35567339.html?ttag=fbwp
http://www.dudeiwantthat.com/style/watches/worlds-thinnest-watch.asp 'View video'
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