Daily Archives: April 13, 2015

FCC CHAIRMAN TOM WHEELER. NO NET NEUTRALITY = INTERNET CENSORSHIP. – Video

Posted: April 13, 2015 at 11:43 am


FCC CHAIRMAN TOM WHEELER. NO NET NEUTRALITY = INTERNET CENSORSHIP.
Massive Double Speak here. Tom Wheeler recently said that if we don #39;t make up a bunch of new regulations that the ISP #39;s are going to suddenly have total power over the internet and will be...

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FCC CHAIRMAN TOM WHEELER. NO NET NEUTRALITY = INTERNET CENSORSHIP. - Video

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'Great Cannon of China' turns internet users into weapon of cyberwar

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A receptionist works behind the logo for Baidu.com, the Chinese search engine whose customers were hijacked by the first firing of the Great Cannon. Photograph: NG HAN GUAN/AP

The Great Cannon has entered the cyberwar lexicon alongside the Great Firewall of China after a new tool for censorship in the nation was named and described by researchers from the University of Toronto.

The first use of the Great Cannon came in late March, when the coding site GitHub was flooded by traffic leaving it intermittently unresponsive for multiple days. The attack, using a method called distributed denial of service or DDoS, appeared to be targeting two specific users of the site: the New York Times Chinese mirror, and anti-censorship organisation GreatFire.org.

Both users focus their efforts on allowing Chinese residents to bypass the countrys Great Firewall the system China uses to restrict access to parts of the internet.

The attack, which continued for almost two weeks, was observed by researchers led by the University of Torontos Bill Marczak. They concluded that it provides evidence of a new censorship tool above and beyond the Great Firewall.

While the attack infrastructure is co-located with the Great Firewall, the attack was carried out by a separate offensive system, with different capabilities and design, that we term the Great Cannon, the researchers write.

The Great Cannon is not simply an extension of the Great Firewall, but a distinct attack tool that hijacks traffic to (or presumably from) individual IP addresses, and can arbitrarily replace unencrypted content as a man-in-the-middle.

Where the Great Firewall was a tool for largely passive censorship preventing access to material and providing the Chinese state with the ability to spy on its residents the Great Cannon provides the ability to effectively rewrite the internet on the fly.

When used offensively, that ability can turn a normal internet user into a vector of attack. In the case of the GitHub attacks, the Great Cannon intercepted traffic sent to Baidu infrastructure servers, web servers run by Chinas largest search engine that host commonly used analytics, social, or advertising scripts. Roughly 1.75% of the time it took that traffic and returned a malicious script, unwittingly enlisting the web surfer in the hacking campaign against GitHub. The scripts were not complex, doing little more than sending requests for content to GitHub; but the sheer quantity of users affected proved difficult for the site to handle.

The researchers conclude that the Great Cannon, like the Great Firewall before it, is likely to be operated by the Chinese government. Both systems appear to be hosted on the same servers, and appear to share source code for intercepting communications. As such, its operation points to a shift in Chinese censorship tactics, and has a highly visible impact, the research says. It is likely that this attack, with its potential for political backlash, would require the approval of high-level authorities within the Chinese government.

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Ron Paul: Iran Fighting ISIS: Is it Really a Problem? – Video

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Ron Paul: Iran Fighting ISIS: Is it Really a Problem?
Iran Fighting ISIS Is it Really a Problem? by Ron Paul As Iran continues to take an active role in helping Iraq fight ISIS, many US neocons are upset that the US military is not over there...

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Ron Paul The Paris Killers and the Tragedy of Blowback 01 12 15 – Video

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Ron Paul The Paris Killers and the Tragedy of Blowback 01 12 15
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Ron Paul US dollar debt crisis 7 29 14 – Video

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Ron Paul US dollar debt crisis 7 29 14
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Ron Paul President

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Rand Paul is winner of Conservative Political Action Conference presidential straw poll of 2014 Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., speaks at the Conservative Political Action Committee annual conference in National Harbor, Md., Friday, March 7, 2014. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

OXON HILL, Md. Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul has won the Conservative Political Action Conference's presidential preference poll.

The overwhelming win is purely symbolic, but reflects the Republican senator's popularity among conservatives who typically hold outsized influence in the GOP's presidential selection process.

Paul captured 31 percent of the vote. He won the poll last year as well.

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz finished second place with 11 percent, followed by neurosurgeon Ben Carson, and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.

None of the Republicans in the poll have formally entered the 2016 race yet.

The victory was announced Saturday evening as the annual conservative conference wrapped up. Thousands of activists flocked to suburban Washington for the three-day gathering.

Nearly 2,500 hundred activists voted. They were younger and more male than the typical electorate.

Both Mr. Rubio and Mr. Paul were elected to the Senate in the 2010 tea party wave that served as a rebuke both to President Obama and to the legacy of President George W. Bush, and this past weekends results suggest a conservative movement trying to move past the last decades fights. The results also captured the youthful and libertarian bent of the CPAC audience, where more than half of attendees were between 18 and 25 years of age, and where combatting government overreach was the most dominant philosophy. Following Mr. Paul and Mr. Rubio in the balloting was former Sen. Rick Santorum in third with just 8 percent, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie who was not invited to speak at this years CPAC with 7 percent, and Rep. Paul Ryan, the GOPs vice presidential nominee last year, in fifth place with 6 percent. Mr. Pauls victory puts him in the footsteps of his father, former Rep. Ron Paul, who won in 2010 and 2011. Ive been standing with Rand since I came out of the womb, said Austin Alexander, a 26-year-old consultant from New York who voted for the senator in the straw poll, and who volunteered for the elder Mr. Pauls presidential campaign in 2012. Mr. Alexander said he believes the GOP is moving in the direction the Pauls espouse. Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/mar/16/rand-paul-washington-times-cpac-2013-straw-poll/#ixzz2OZOjg0zi

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Ron Paul President

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Rand Paul Slams Hillary Clinton's 'Grand Hypocrisy'

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Republican presidential candidate Rand Paul says that the Clintons "think they're above the law" and that there is "a grand hypocrisy" to Hillary Clinton's acceptance of donations from countries with poor records on women's rights.

"I think the thing is about the Clintons is that there's a certain sense that they think they're above the law," he said in an interview with NBC's Chuck Todd on "Meet the Press."

Paul argued that Clinton is wrong to say that Republicans are waging a "war on women" even as the Clinton Foundation receives funding from Saudi Arabia.

"Hillary Clinton has taken money from countries that rape victims are publicly lashed," he said, describing a recent case of a woman in Saudi Arabia who was whipped after being gang raped by seven men. "We should be boycotting, voluntarily boycotting a country, not buying stuff from a country that does that to women," he said.

Paul stopped short of saying that the United States should officially dissolve alliances with Saudi Arabia but suggested that individuals should consider a "voluntary boycott" of the country akin to America's view towards South Africa during apartheid.

"I would expect Hillary Clinton if she believes in women's rights, she should be calling for a boycott of Saudi Arabia. Instead, she's accepting tens of millions of dollars," he said. "And I think it looks unseemly. And there's going to be some explaining she's going to have to come up with."

Paul's campaign also announced a new anti-Clinton ad that will air on cable television in key primary states. The ad calls Clinton's run "a path to the past" and derides her as "the worst of the Washington machine."

- Carrie Dann

First published April 12 2015, 6:45 AM

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Volokh Conspiracy: Paul Krugman claims there basically arent any libertarians

Posted: at 11:42 am

In a recent post , famed economist Paul Krugman claims that there basically arent any libertarians out there because public opinion breaks down neatly along a liberal-conservative spectrum where almost everyone who favors government intervention in the economy is a social liberal and almost everyone who is skeptical of it is a social conservative. But Krugman cites no data to support his conclusion. And, in fact, extensive survey data contradicts it.

The relevant evidence has been catalogued by David Boaz, polling guru Nate Silver (who is far from being a libertarian himself), and economist Bryan Caplan. Depending on what measures you use, anywhere from about 10% to as many as 44 percent of Americans hold generally libertarian views in the sense that they favor strict limits on government power in both the economic and social spheres. I believe the lower estimates are more credible than the higher ones. But even the former are still a substantial fraction of the population.

Most of these people arent as consistent and thoroughgoing in their views as libertarian intellectuals are. But the same can be said of most conservatives and liberals in the general public relative to intellectual advocates of those viewpoints. At least within the Republican Party (which is a major focus of Krugmans post), the percentage of libertarians is rapidly increasing; younger Republicans are much more libertarian on social issues than their elders, while still being skeptical of government intervention in the economy.

Krugman also claims that almost no one holds views that are the opposite of libertarianism: combining social conservatism with support for extensive government intervention in the economy (he calls such people hardhats, though public opinion researchers more commonly call them populists). This too is clearly false. As Boaz and Caplan note, surveys show a substantial number of people who fall into that category. In recent years, Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum both ran campaigns for the GOP presidential nomination on such a platform, and both attracted substantial support. Perhaps even more telling, George W. Bushs policies as president included a combination of social conservatism and the biggest new welfare state program in some forty years, as well as a major expansion of federal government involvement in education. Bush and his advisers clearly believed there were enough hardhats out there to make this program politically viable. In Europe, the combination of social conservatism and economic interventionism is even more common than in the US, as witness the recent resurgence of parties such as Frances National Front, which combine right-wing nationalism with support for a large welfare state. As a libertarian myself, Im no fan of hardhat/populist ideologies. But I cant deny that there are large numbers of people who support them.

Admittedly, Krugmans claim might be right if we interpret his framework literally. He defines libertarians as people who combine social liberalism with the view that there should be no social insurance. As David Boaz notes in his critique, the latter is an extreme definition that would exclude such prominent libertarian thinkers as Milton Friedman and F.A. Hayek (both of whom were willing to accept a strictly limited welfare state); it would also rule out the vast majority of those people who hold roughly libertarian views in the general population. But if Krugman means that definition literally, it would also prove there are no conservatives either. After all, very few people who consider themselves to be conservatives favor the complete abolition of the welfare state, as opposed to its restriction to levels smaller than that favored by the left. In the 2012 election, the GOP even ran on a platform attacking Obama for supposedly cutting Medicare too much.

Its also possible to try to justify Krugmans claim by arguing that most of those people who hold seemingly libertarian views havent thought carefully about their implications and are not completely consistent in their beliefs. This is likely true. But it is also true of most conservatives and liberals. Political ignorance and irrationality are very common across the political spectrum and only a small minority of voters think carefully about their views and make a systematic attempt at consistency. Libertarian-leaning voters are not an exception to this trend. But it is worth noting that, controlling for other variables, increasing political knowledge tends to make people more libertarian in their views than they would be otherwise.

Finally, Krugman is wrong to suggest that the difference between supporters and opponents of more extensive government intervention in the economy is solely or even primarily about social insurance that breaks down traditional structures of authority. In many places, early expansions of government intervention in the economy were in part intended to reinforce rather than break down traditional structures of authority, which is one reason why it was often pioneered by right-wingers like Otto von Bismarck. More recently, there are have been many forms of government intervention that tend to benefit the relatively affluent and and well-connected interest groups at the expense of the poor. If you dont want to take my word for it, read Krugmans own recent columns on zoning and farm subsidies.

In his critique of Krugmans post, Bryan Caplan suggests that Krugmans neglect of readily available evidence in this case gives us reason to doubt his reliability more generally. I dont go quite that far. As I see it, this is yet another case where a pundit gets into trouble by pontificating on issues outside their expertise.

Even if you are a brilliant Nobel Prize-winning economist like Krugman, its easy to go wrong in commenting on a subject you may not have much knowledge about. Moreover, in dealing with such issues, we are more likely to act like political fans and default to simplistic frameworks that make it easy to feel good about our own views, while dismissing those of the opposition.

In this case, postulating a simplistic one-dimensional distribution of political opinion enables Krugman to claim that virtually all of the people who oppose his views on government intervention in the economy do not, in reality, love liberty, and also to ignore the fact that many people who endorse a large welfare state also have illiberal social views. These assumptions make it easy to divide the world into good guys who want to break down traditional forms of authority and bad guys who want to maintain them. But, however comforting it might be, this approach fails to capture the true distribution of political opinion.

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The Age of Transhumanist Politics Has Begun

Posted: at 11:41 am

The founding of the Transhumanist Party of the United States, the intensifying of the U.S. BRAIN-Initiative and the start of Google's project "Ending death" were important milestones in the year 2014, and potential further steps towards "transhumanist" politics. The most significant development was that the radical international technology community became a concrete political force, not by chance starting its global political initiative in the U.S. According to political scientist and sociologist Roland Benedikter, research scholar at the University of California at Santa Barbara, "transhumanist" politics has momentous growth potential but with uncertain outcomes. The coming years will probably see a dialogue between humanism and transhumanism in - and about - most crucial fields of human endeavor, with strong political implications that will challenge, and could change the traditional concepts, identities and strategies of Left and Right.

Roland Benedikter is the co-author of two Pentagon and U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff White Papers concerning the future of Neurotechnology and the Ethics of Neurowarfare (2013 and 2014), several books about global strategic matters (two of those on Xi Jinping's China) and of the upcoming book Neuroscience and Neuroethics: Impacting Human Futures (in cooperation with James Giordano, Springer New York) which will be published in 2015. He has co-authored the commentary "Neuroculture: How to keep ethical pace with the current 'deep' transformations through neurotechnology? for "Leftist Review" with James Giordano in March 2012. Katja Siepmann and Annabella McIntosh conducted the interview.

In the book you co-authored with Pentagon-advisor and Georgetown-neuroscientist and neuroethicist James Giordano "Neuroscience and Neuroethics: Impacting Human Futures" you state that these two fields at the interface between science and politics might lead to bigger changes in the coming years than either conventional politics or science. The reason: Technology is becoming an increasingly more powerful political and social force - not only sectorially or nationally, but globally.

Roland Benedikter: In recent years technology has indeed emerged as a concrete social and political force. 2014 has seen a noticeable intensification of that trend. The traditional political players are poorly prepared for it. What, for example, nowadays takes place in just one year at the interface between the human brain and technology, until recently required a decade. It is an exponential development. The mechanization of society and humanity is occurring within many disciplines- for example, in the form of neurotechnology, which is increasingly used for medical and both dual-use and direct military purposes. But there are other fields too. From neuroeconomics to, neuroaesthetics, neurosprituality, neurosociology and even neuropolitics, the "neuro"-prefix is becoming omnipresent in the understanding and meaning of our time and civilization - and with regard to its self-ascribed identity.

What exactly is going on?

Roland Benedikter: Supporters of "human enhancement"[1], which encompasses scientists, entrepreneurs and politicians and transcends language, cultural and ideological barriers, advocate mechanization of the human body in general and the broad "culturalization" of brain-machine interfaces in particular as the progressive, transformative path for humanity in the 21st century. By playing a consulting role in the "high spheres" of politics, science, and management, representatives of the transhumanist movement (including the World Transhumanist Association), which was initiated in the 1980s, are promoting the fusion of humans and computers. Among other things, they recommend the broad use of implants to enhance cognitive abilities, neural engineering to expand human consciousness and the cyborgization of the body and its tissues and systems in order to increase resilience, flourishing and lifespan.

Sounds gruesome at first. What is the idea behind all this?

Roland Benedikter: The name "transhumanism" is the basic concept that tells it all. Its followers want to go beyond the present human condition. At its core it means to overcome the "natural" limitations inherent in human existence, which is to be born, live relatively short, half-conscious lives, and then die. The supporters of "human enhancement" and "transhumanism" intend to break through these current physical and cognitive (and perhaps even spiritual) barriers. In order to do that, they will pursue biotechnological upgrades to the human body and thus, conceivably, try to eliminate the negative effects of ageing and eventually (at least in their aspiration) even death.

You state (in a scientifically "neutral" sense) that the first breakthrough of this development could now be imminent, but there will also be inescapable associated ethical problems?

Roland Benedikter: Possibly. Those who view the future human being as a technoid being, if not as a body fully integrated into technology - as seem to do, for example, Google's chief engineer Ray Kurzweil or the Oxford professor of philosophy Nick Bostrom, who is the head of the "Future of Humanity Institute" at the faculty of philosophy and the Oxford James Martin 21st Century School -- regard the mid of the century as a probable date for reaching the "singularity." That's the moment when artificial intelligence allegedly surpasses that of human intelligence and becomes in some way "self-conscious", as these thinkers expect.[2] Kurzweil has recently even referred to the year 2029 as the date when technology could reach a level of self-conscious "intelligence".[3] If that happens, even on an approximate basis, it will without doubt affect virtually everything, even though it will likely not occur in as spectacular ways as predicted.

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The Age of Transhumanist Politics Has Begun

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Moldovan oligarch offers $1m to the first person that lives to 123

Posted: at 11:41 am

The large prize is being offered by businessman, Dmitry Kaminskiy He hopes money will help create a new group of 'supercenternarians' Jeanne Calment holds the record of oldest person, dying aged 122.5 He has made a $1m bet with Dr Alex Zhavoronkov on who will die first

By Zoltan Istvan For Dailymail.com

Published: 17:02 EST, 10 April 2015 | Updated: 19:32 EST, 12 April 2015

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Dmitry Kaminskiy is hoping his million dollar gift will trigger a new group of 'supercenternarians'

A Moldovan multi-millionaire whose dream it is to live forever has promised to give $1 million to the first person to reach the age of 123.

Dmitry Kaminskiy, a senior partner of Hong Kong-based firm, Deep Knowledge Ventures, is hoping his million dollar gift will trigger a new group of 'supercenternarians'.

He says research into stem cells, tissue rejuvenation and regenerative medicine will allow people to live beyond 120 - an age that has been quoted as the 'real absolute limit to human lifespan'.

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