Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/315324149?client_source=feed&format=rss
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Thursday, June 27, 2013
Monday, June 10, 2013
Globally, people resigned to little privacy online
CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) ? U.S. government snooping does not surprise global Internet users, who say they already have few expectations of online privacy as governments increasingly monitor people's digital lives and Internet companies often acquiesce.
Privacy activists concerned over the U.S. National Security Agency's selective monitoring of Internet traffic called on people to better protect their digital data. But most people eschew encryption and other privacy tools and seemed resigned to the open book their online lives have become.
"It doesn't surprise me one bit. They've been doing it for years," said Jamie Griffiths, a 26-year-old architect working on his laptop in a London cafe. "I wouldn't send anything via email that I wouldn't want a third party to read."
From Baghdad, to Bogota, Colombia, many said they already censor what they write online and assume governments are regularly spying, be it as part of global counter-terrorism or domestic surveillance efforts.
"The social networks and email have always been vulnerable because tech-savvy people know how to penetrate them," said Teolindo Acosa, a 34-year-old education student at Venezuela's Universidad Central who was leaving a cybercafe in Caracas.
Leaked confidential documents show the NSA and FBI have been sifting through personal data by directly accessing the U.S-based servers of Google, Facebook, Microsoft, AOL, Skype, PalTalk, Apple and YouTube.
U.S. President Barack Obama said Friday that the surveillance did not "target" U.S. citizens or others living in the U.S. ? which does not mean their communications were not caught up in the dragnet.
But that didn't dampen the outrage of people who resent what they consider Washington's self-anointed role as the world's policeman.
"To the United States, everyone is suspicious, even the pope!" said leftist Colombian Sen. Alexander Lopez. "Everyone is under observation these days and this should be taken up by the United Nations."
Lopez said he has no plans to close his Google and Microsoft email accounts. He figures he'll be spied on no matter what he does.
The revelation of global data vacuuming could hurt U.S. technology companies if Internet users become disillusioned and abandon them in favor of homegrown alternatives that offer greater security.
U.S. privacy activist Christopher Soghoian said he finds it "insane" that so many politicians outside the United States use Gmail accounts.
"This has given the NSA an advantage over every other intelligence system in the world. The Americans don't have to hack as much, because everyone in the world sends their data to American companies," he said.
Hossam el-Hamalawy, a blogger with Egypt's Revolutionary Socialists, one of the Egyptian groups that helped spearhead the 2011 uprising, said the dearth of locally developed Web tools means many are simply stuck with U.S. sites, even if they know the government is monitoring them.
"The problem is that there is no alternative," he said. "If you don't use Facebook, what is the alternative social network available for the Internet user who is not an IT geek?"
Soghoian predicted an increasing push by governments and companies in Europe in particular, where privacy has been a much bigger issue for voters than in the United States, away from storing data in U.S.-based server farms.
Indeed, under U.S. law it is not illegal for the NSA to collect information on foreigners.
The disclosure of the NSA data-vacuuming program known as PRISM is only the latest "of many U.S. government programs created to infringe on personal freedoms," said Carlos Affonso Pereira de Souza, a technology policy professor at FGV think tank in Rio de Janeiro.
Going back well into the 20th century, the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand ran a secret satellite communications interception network that became known as Echelon and searched information including telexes, faxes and emails, according to experts including U.S. journalist James Bamford. The system was the subject of a 2001 European Parliament inquiry.
According to a U.N. report released this week, such surveillance has been on a global upsurge with governments increasingly tapping into online personal data and even discouraging online anonymity by passing laws prohibiting it.
The governments of China, Iran, Bahrain are among other nations that already aggressively oversee online activity, in many cases putting people in prison for political blog posts and other messages.
Israel's attorney general in April upheld a practice allowing security personnel to read email accounts of suspicious individuals when they arrive at the airport, arguing it prevents militants from entering the country.
China has long imposed tight control over media and spied on private communications among its citizens, especially government critics and activists, sifting through their email, listening in on their phone conversations and snooping on their cyber activities.
Major Internet companies employ internal reviewers who regularly censor content posted by users and scrub off offensive language, including political topics the authorities do not wish to be publicly discussed.
South Korea, one of the most wired countries in the world, has a law that allows authorities to ask telecommunications companies without a court order to provide information such as names, resident registration numbers, addresses and phone numbers of their subscribers. But this doesn't involve the substance of conversations users had using communications software provided by the companies.
Ko Young-churl, a journalism professor and communications expert at Jeju National University in South Korea, said most South Koreans are complacent about security for their personal data online ... "and most South Koreans don't realize authorities could use such tools against them."
The U.N. report said such activity has been expanding as technology advances, and that countries should prioritize protecting people's online rights.
"In order to meet their human rights obligations, States must ensure that the rights to freedom of expression and privacy are at the heart of their communications surveillance frameworks," the report reads.
Its author, Guatemalan Frank La Rue, calls for legal standards to ensure "privacy, security and anonymity of communications" to protect people including journalists, human rights defenders and whistleblowers.
___
Associated Press writers Vivian Sequera in Bogota, Ian Deitch in Jerusalem, Jill Lawless in London, Bradley Brooks in Sao Paulo, Fabiola Sanchez in Caracas, Sameer N. Yacoub in Baghdad and Tony G. Gabriel in Cairo contributed to this report. Jack Chang contributed from Mexico City.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/globally-people-resigned-little-privacy-online-103112367.html
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Sunday, June 9, 2013
Turkish prime minister convenes party leadership
ISTANBUL (AP) ? Turkey's prime minister convened his party leadership Saturday as anti-government protests entered their ninth day, with thousands of people still occupying Istanbul's central Taksim Square.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has said the protests must end immediately, will meet with top officials from his Justice and Development Party in Istanbul.
The protests began as a sit-in at a park in Taksim Square to prevent a redevelopment project that would replace the park with replica Ottoman barracks and a shopping mall. The mall idea seems to have fallen by the wayside, with Erdogan recently saying an opera house, theater and possibly a museum would be built instead.
But violent intervention by police to eject the protesters on May 31 outraged many, and the protests spread to dozens of cities across Turkey.
Over the past nine days of demonstrations and frequent violent confrontations with police, three people have been killed ? two protesters and a policeman ? and thousands have been injured.
The protests have attracted a broad array of people angered by what they say are Erdogan's increasingly authoritarian ways and his intervention in private lives. They point to attempts to curtail the selling and promotion of alcohol, his comments on how women should dress and statements that each woman should have at least three children.
A devout Muslim who says he is committed to upholding Turkey's secular tradition, Erdogan vehemently rejects charges of autocracy and points out that he enjoyed 50 percent support in the last elections in 2011.
Over the past week, protesters ? mainly young, secular and middle-class, but also including some religious Muslims who were formerly Erdogan supporters ? have set up camp in Taksim Square and its Gezi Park. They have vowed to remain there until the development project for the area is canceled ? something Erdogan has shown no signs of being willing to do.
On Saturday, police removed about a dozen tents erected by protesters at a park in the capital, Ankara. No trouble was reported. Police in the city set up barricades as thousands of people began a march toward a central square.
While Taksim Square has been generally quiet for the past few days, clashes have broken out in other parts of the city. Riot police used water cannon and tear gas against protesters who set up street barricades in the Sultangazi neighborhood on the outskirts of Istanbul overnight.
Witnesses said at least one person was injured, hit in the face by a tear gas canister. Early Saturday, bloodstains could be seen on the ground amid debris from burned garbage bins and damaged shops.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/turkish-prime-minister-convenes-party-leadership-112716994.html
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Did Comet Impacts Spur Life on Earth?
The impact of comets crashing into Earth's surface may have provided the energy to create simple molecules that formed the precursors to life, a new study suggests.
That conclusion, published in the June 20 issue of the Journal of Physical Chemistry A, was based on a computer model of such an impact's effect on a comet crystal initially made up of water, carbon dioxide and other simple molecules.
"Comets carry very simple molecules in them," said study co-author Nir Goldman, a physical chemist at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California. "When a comet hits a planetary surface, for example, that impact can drive the synthesis of more complicated things that are prebiotic ? they're life-building."
Comet collision
The notion that life-building molecules were carried to Earth via comets or asteroids, a hypothesis known as panspermia, has been around for decades. But the idea that the comet impact itself could have created the molecules is newer.
When the Earth was young, comet bombardments may have brought 22 trillion pounds (10 trillion kilograms) of carbon-based material to the planet every year, Goldman said. That would have provided a rich source for the building blocks of life to form. In a separate recent study, scientists zapped a mini-comet in the lab to prove that precursor molecules could form far from Earth. [7 Theories on the Origin of Life]
To test their hypothesis, Goldman and his colleagues used a computer model to simulate a single comet crystal of hundreds of molecules. Comets are mostly "dirty snowballs," Goldman said, so the simulated crystal started with mostly water molecules, but also included methanol, ammonia, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide.
The researchers then simulated the effects of the crystal hitting the Earth's surface at various angles, from crashing into it directly to making a glancing blow. They followed the chemical changes in the crystal for about 250 picoseconds, about the amount of time the system needed to reach a steady state, where the proportion and type of chemicals in the system is stable. The huge jolt from the impact provided the energy needed to make complicated chemicals.
"Certain conditions were a sweet spot for complexity," Goldman told LiveScience.
For instance, at pressures of about 360,000 times the atmospheric pressure at sea level and temperatures of 4,600 degrees Fahrenheit (2,538 degrees Celsius), the molecules in the crystals formed complex species called aromatic rings. These types of circular, carbon-based molecules could have been precursors to the letters in DNA.
At higher pressures, the molecules produced methane, formaldehyde and some long-chain carbon molecules.
"Every time there was an impact hard enough to get chemical reactivity, it produced interesting stuff," Goldman said.
As a follow-up, Goldman and his colleagues want to test different initial chemical concentrations in the comet to see how that affects the formation process.
No way to prove
The findings are fascinating, said Ralf Kaiser, a physical chemist who studies astrochemistry at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
"It opens another pathway to explain how these biological, or precursor molecules can be formed," Kaiser, who was not involved in the study, told LiveScience.
The team has shown that such precursor molecules "absolutely could be formed this way, no question," Kaiser said.
But it's not all or nothing: Some molecules could have been carried here by comets from outer space, while some formed on impact, and still others formed completely from home-grown materials. The tricky question is to determine what percentage of life's building blocks arose during each process, Kaiser said.
Follow Tia Ghose on Twitter and Google+.?Follow?LiveScience @livescience, Facebook?& Google+. Original article on?LiveScience.com.
Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Source: http://news.yahoo.com/did-comet-impacts-spur-life-earth-124329616.html
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Insider attack kills 3 US troops in Afghanistan
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) ? A man in an Afghan army uniform turned his weapon on the American troops working with him in the country's east on Saturday, killing three of them, while an attacker with a grenade killed an Italian soldier in the west, officials said.
The shooting in Paktika province was the latest in a string of so-called "insider attacks" in which Afghan forces open fire on their own comrades or international troops. The incidents threaten to shake the confidence and trust of the two sides as the 2014 withdrawal of most of the international forces approaches.
An argument between the Afghan soldier and his trainers appeared to have led to Saturday's shooting on an Afghan National Army base in Paktika's Kher Qot district, according to a statement from the provincial governor's office. The international military coalition in Afghanistan confirmed that three U.S. service members died in an insider attack but gave few other details.
The angry Afghan soldier opened fire during the argument, killing the three foreign trainers and wounding three others, according to the governor's statement. The foreigners returned fire and killed the Afghan soldier, who had no known connection to the insurgency.
So far this year, there have been five insider attacks on foreign forces, with a total of eight troops and one U.S. contractor killed. Afghan security forces also are targets of such attacks. Last month, two recently rehired Afghan police opened fire on their commander at a checkpoint in a remote district in the country's south, killing him and six of his men.
The Taliban insurgents claim most of the insider attacks, saying they have infiltrated Afghan security forces or persuaded soldiers and police to join their side. However, the international coalition has said many of them are sparked by personal disputes.
In the western province of Farah, meanwhile, an Italian soldier was killed and three others wounded when an attacker lobbed explosives into their armored vehicle in western Afghanistan, Italy's government said.
The Defense Ministry said the attack in Farah province came as the Italian soldiers were returning to their base from training Afghan security forces.
The Italian convoy of three armored vehicle apparently had been slowed by traffic near an intersection when an attacker ran up and threw an explosive device into the lead vehicle, the ministry said. It added that the three wounded soldiers' injuries were not life-threatening.
The Taliban quickly took responsibility for the attack, with spokesman Qari Yousef Ahmadi claiming that the attacker was an 11-year-old boy.
But Farah province provincial government spokesman Abdul Rahman Zhawandai says an adult man was seen throwing a grenade, then escaping by blending into the crowd at a nearby vegetable market.
Taliban insurgents have launched intense attacks across the country as Afghan forces take over most security responsibility ahead of most foreign troops' withdrawal next year.
Saturday's deaths brought to 16 the number of international troops killed in Afghanistan this month. On Thursday, seven Georgian soldiers died in a truck bombing at their base in the south.
___
Rahim Faiez in Kabul and Frances D'Emilio in Rome contributed to this report
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Apple reportedly lands radio service deal with Sony ahead of WWDC
Apple was supposedly waiting for a deal with Sony before it could launch its rumored internet radio service. That roadblock may have just been cleared: AllThingsD claims that Apple has reached an agreement at the last minute, which gives it the all clear to announce the streaming feature at WWDC. Other details aren't immediately available, but previous rumors have suggested that Apple won't deploy the ad-backed service right away; we may end up waiting a few months before we can tune in. If the rumors are true, though, Monday's keynote will be more interesting than we first thought.
Filed under: Cellphones, Tablets, Internet, Software, Apple, Sony
Source: AllThingsD
Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/r-ujztcMrio/
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Relay for Life raises $45,000 for cancer research - WANE.com
FORT WAYNE, Ind. (WANE) - The Relay for Life event in west Allen County raised more than $45,000 for the American Cancer Society Saturday.
Chrissy Buchanan, a colon cancer survivor, said it was a big day for all cancer survivors.
The event involves teams of people taking turns walking or running around a track or path for up to a 24-hour time period. The event also features a dunk tank, kids games, and food. Cancer survivors are honored in a ceremony at 5 p.m.
Melissa Stephens, a community representative for the American Cancer Society, said they reached their $45,000 goal before the event even started Saturday. She is hoping to raise $50,000 by the end of the Relay on Sunday morning.
"The relay itself is just a great way to empower people to fight back against cancer and get involved in the community," Stephens said.
In northeast Indiana, the American Cancer Society scheduled Relay for Life events in Adams, Allen, Blackford, DeKalb, Huntington, LaGrange, Miami, Noble, Steuben, Wabash, Wells, and Whitley counties.
Buchanan said she hopes all of those events will merge into one big event in the future.
The American Cancer Society is the nationwide community-based voluntary health organization dedicated to eliminating cancer as a major health problem by preventing cancer, saving lives and diminishing suffering from cancer through research, education, advocacy and service. ACS celebrated its 100th anniversary this year.
For more information on the west Allen County Relay for Life event, click here .
Source: http://www.wane.com/dpp/news/local/relay-for-life-raises-45000-for-cancer-research
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