Bruce Schneier says “we as a society are heading down a dangerous path”

Whenever I start pursuing a story about a technology that purports to make the Internet more secure, or about a privacy-protecting measure that an Internet company is promoting, I try to check in with the cryptologist and security expect Bruce Schneier. It’s always a good day when Schneier gets back to you–but what he says is usually sobering.

And lately, what he says is downright dystopian.…

Smartphone apps that send disappearing messages are gaining in popularity.

By Rachel Metz on April 4, 2013

WHY IT MATTERS

Your digital past has a longer life than you’d probably prefer.

You’ve heard it an eye-rolling number of times: anything you post online, or any message you send—be it a seemingly benign text or a photo taken when you were drunk—can come back to haunt you.

Does it have to be true, though? A growing number of startups, led by rapidly…

NEW YORK -- East Coast residents were buzzing on social media sites and elsewhere Friday night after a brief but bright flash of light streaked across the early-evening sky _in what experts say was almost certainly a meteor coming down.

Bill Cooke of NASA's Meteoroid Environmental Office said the flash appears to be "a single meteor event." He said it "looks to be a fireball that moved roughly toward the southeast, going on visual reports."

"Judging from the brightness, we're…

Justin Thomas and his colleagues at the GRASP Lab have produced an �avian-inspired� claw drone that mimics the way an eagle uses its talons to grab a fish out of the ocean.



A video clip of the drone shows the UAV swooping down at high speed to snatch an object using its 3D printed mechanical claw. By mimicking how a bald eagle sweeps its legs and claws backwards to aerodynamically close in on its prey without the need to slow down, the drone is able to grasp a stationary object…

Cyprus is a beta test. The banksters are trying to commit bank robbery in broad daylight, and they are eager to see if the rest of the world will let them get away with it. 



Cyprus was probably chosen because it is very small (therefore nobody will care too much about it) and because there is a lot of foreign (i.e. Russian) money parked there. 



The IMF and the EU could have easily bailed out Cyprus without any trouble whatsoever, but they purposely decided not to do…

Passenger pigeons once darkened the skies over the eastern United States. Huge flocks would roost on chestnut trees, their weight snapping off branches. By 1914, though, humans had hunted the bird to extinction.

Now, a project to reanimate the pigeon using genetic engineering is drawing new attention to the question of “de-extinction,” or whether biotechnology can help conserve rare animals and even restore others that dissapeared eons ago.

The passenger pigeon effort, known as…

(Reuters) - An ally of disgraced Chinese politician Bo Xilai has received a suspended death sentence for taking millions of yuan in bribes, a Beijing lawyer said on Thursday, in the latest fallout from one of China's biggest political scandals.

Tang Jianhua, once deputy police chief in the southwestern city of Chongqing, where Bo was Communist Party chief, was found guilty of taking 17 million yuan ($2.7 million) in bribes, according to Li Zhuang, a lawyer and prominent opponent of Bo…

North Korea on Friday accused the United States and South Korea of carrying out a "persistent and intensive" cyber attack against its official websites in recent days.

A number of official North Korean websites, including those of the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), the daily Rodong Sinmun newspaper, and Air Koryo airline became inaccessible early Wednesday.

"Internet servers operated by our republic have come under daily cyber attack(s) which are persistent and intensive",…

LONDON, March 15 (Reuters) - Archaeologists said on Friday they had found a graveyard during excavations for a rail project in London which might hold the remains of some 50,000 people killed by the "Black Death" plague more than 650 years ago.

Thirteen skeletons laid out in two neat rows were discovered 2.5 metres (8 feet) below the road in the Farringdon area of central London by researchers working on the 16 billion pound ($24 billion) Crossrail project.

Historical records…

The increasing amount of personal information that can be gleaned by computer programs that track how people use Facebook has been revealed by an extensive academic study.

Such programs can discern undisclosed private information such as Facebook users’ sexuality, drug-use habits and even whether their parents separated when they were young, according to the study by the University of Cambridge academics.

In one of the biggest studies of its kind, scientists from the…

China is building one of the world's largest drone fleets aimed at expanding its military reach in the Pacific and swarming U.S. Navy carriers in the unlikely event of a war, according to a new report. The Chinese military — known as the People's Liberation Army (PLA) — envisions its drone swarms scouting out battlefields, guiding missile strikes and overwhelming opponents through sheer numbers. China's military-industrial complex has created a wide array of homegrown drones to accomplish…

Researchers from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum have concluded that over 40,000 Nazi camps and ghettos existed during Hitler's reign of terror between 1933 to 1945.

The total is far higher than most historians had previously estimated, according to The New York Times.

Geoffrey Megargee and Martin Dean, the lead editors of…

from the it's-all-about-the-public-perception dept

As the Congressional investigation into the DOJ's prosecution of Aaron Swartz has continued, apparently a DOJ representative has admitted that part of the reason it insisted on having Swartz plead guilty to a felony and go to jail, no matter what, was that it feared the public backlash for the original arrest if they couldn't then show a felony conviction and jailtime. According to a Huffington Post article, quoting various…

Even though this could be great in the health world, what evil could come of this later, by our wonderful government?  Can you see where this will probably lead??

"Cyborg tissue could allow us to put multifunctional prosthetics in humans,” says Bozhi Tian. That goal is still a long way off, but Tian has taken a key step by creating artificially grown tissue that’s intelligent. So far, he’s developed a synthetic blood vessel that can detect the pH of solutions flowing through it. And…

GOP, media put White House on sequester defensive

GOP leaders and PR officials are slamming the White House’s effort to shield itself from the decision to release hundreds of illegal immigrants from federal jail, even prior to the arrival of the sequester budget trims.

Late Wednesday afternoon, the GOP criticism stepped up their criticism of the jailhouse release, and…

but if he wins, we lose.

These have been around for awhile, but figured I would put this info out there for anyone that hasn't seen one of these bump stocks in action, or used one before. They are a great tool to add to your gun.

Check out the videos here

 Bump stocks click here

This actual info is a couple years old, but look at the facts after the patriot act was passed. 

Hastily passed 45 days after 9/11 in the name of national security, the Patriot Act was the first of many changes to surveillance laws that made it easier for the government to spy on ordinary Americans by expanding the authority to monitor phone and email communications, collect bank and credit reporting records, and track the activity of innocent Americans on the Internet. While most…

Please take a few min and see the video.

click here to watch video

Will oil soon be traded in a currency that is thousands of years old? What would a "gold for oil" system mean for the petrodollar and the U.S. economy? Are Russia and China hoarding massive amounts of gold because they plan to kill the petrodollar? 



Since the 1970s, the U.S. dollar has been the currency that the international community has used to trade oil around the globe. This has created an overwhelming demand for U.S. dollars and U.S. debt. But what happens when the rest of the…