Eideard

Candles float in the Motoyasu River before the Peace Memorial Park
Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

The United States has confirmed that the ambassador to Japan will attend a ceremony marking the anniversary of the Hiroshima atom bomb drop for the first time.

PJ Crowley, a spokesman for the US State Department, said it would be the first time a US ambassador will attend the August 6 anniversary.

About 140,000 people were killed or died within months when an American B-29 bombed Hiroshima.

Mr Crowley would not say if US officials would attend ceremonies in Nagasaki, where 80,000 people died after the United States attacked three days later. Japan surrendered on Aug 15, ending World War II.

Embassy officials from wartime allies and currently nuclear-armed Britain and France also plan to attend the event for the first time, state broadcaster NHK and Kyodo News said, citing unidentified diplomatic sources.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon will also attend the ceremony this year, becoming the first chief of the world body to do so…

Many Japanese – including survivors of both atomic bombings known as “hibakusha” – hope Mr Obama will visit Hiroshima in November when he travels to Japan for a summit of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum.

In a related note [does that sound diplomatic enough], I believe the people of China are still awaiting a visit from Japan’s head of state at the ceremonies honoring the anniversary of the Nanjing Massacre.

300,000 Chinese were murdered by invading Japanese soldiers – well before the United States entered the war in the Pacific.

Refrigerator magnets
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

Anticipating California voters will back a November ballot measure to legalize casual marijuana use, officials in Oakland have approved two tax rates on pot sales in their city, already a hub of the state’s medicinal marijuana scene.

Oakland’s city council…approved the rates — a 5 percent gross receipts tax on licensed marijuana growers and on businesses selling marijuana for medical purposes, and a 10 percent rate on sales of marijuana used for recreational purposes.

California voters in 1996 approved a measure allowing marijuana use for medical purposes and would legalize its recreational use if they approve Proposition 19 in November.

The measure would allow marijuana possession for personal use and would authorize local governments to issue permits for pot production and sales and to tax it under state law. Selling marijuana would remain illegal under federal law…

Federal authorities have not aggressively interfered with sales of medicinal marijuana sales in California.

Cripes. I’ll bet that even bible-thumper/stoners living in Oakland will vote for Prop 19. Sooner or later, enlightened self-interest has to overcome hypocrisy.

Only the “saved” who want to stick with alcohol for their highs and resent anyone having alternatives will fight to jail people for possession.

A legal challenge has been launched in the US against a number of websites amid claims that they were engaged in “covert surveillance” of users. The lawsuit alleges that a number of firms, including Hulu, MTV, and Myspace, used a Quantcast Flash application to restore deleted cookies…

The lawsuit says that the application was creating so-called “zombie cookies” from deleted files.

Quantcast has not responded to a BBC News request for comment.

The term “zombie cookie” was coined after the issue of traditional browser cookies being undeleted by Flash was brought to light in a 2009 paper by US researchers.

The study found that more than half of sites surveyed used flash cookies to store information about the user, with some using it to “respawn or re-instantiate cookies deleted by the user”…

However, while most browsers have simple commands to delete text cookies, Flash cookies are neither listed nor controlled by the browser…

Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at the internet security firm Sophos, told BBC News that the source of the trouble was Adobe Flash itself, which he called “one of the weirdest programs on the planet”.

“I think it’s highly unlikely that these large companies have abused Flash cookies – which are different from browser cookies – with malicious intent,” he said. “I think it’s much more likely that the vast majority of users are simply oblivious to the bizarre way in which Adobe allows them to configure the software…”

The security settings for Flash are hosted on Adobe’s own website, rather than your own computer. …These settings are changed by logging onto Adobe’s website, right-clicking on a Flash object and selecting “Global Settings” and then adjusting the security settings via the “Global Privacy Settings” panel.

Golly gosh. Seems thoughtful and easy to me. I can come up with a spare hour or two – just to diddle with Flash cookie settings over at Adobe’s website. Every day!

UPDATE: Predictably, Adobe is a royal PITA. I went to the adobe.com website and logged-in. Fortunately, I’m still registered there from days of yore.

I have no idea – yet – whether this worked; but, it just moves me one-click closer to the Steve Jobs camp on “Flash is useless crap”.

The former German football captain, Lothar Matthaeus, is fighting demands from his estranged wife that he pays for a breast enlargement reversal.

Ukrainian-born, Liliana, 22, claims Mr Matthaeus, 49, should foot the €2,800 bill for the reduction, which has already taken place, as he paid for the original operation as a school-leaving present for her in 2008.

“I fail to see why I should pay for this and other plastic surgery bills,” Matthaeus said. Mrs Matthaeus has also had her lips enlarged and liposuction.

I imagine he didn’t mind paying for them on the way up – so to speak.

The collapse of the former Bayern Munich and Inter Milan star’s fourth marriage has been given extensive coverage in Germany.

As ye sow, so shall ye reap. She just wants crop yield requirements back to normal.

A security expert said he has devised a simple and relatively inexpensive way to snoop on cellphone conversations, claiming that most wireless networks are incapable of guaranteeing calls won’t be intercepted.

Law enforcement has long had access to expensive cell-phone tapping equipment known as IMSI catchers that each cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. But Chris Paget, who does technology security consulting work, says he has figured out how to build an IMSI catcher using a $1,500 piece of hardware and free, open-source software.

Paget will teach other hackers how to make their own IMSI catchers on Saturday during in a presentation at the annual Defcon security conference in Las Vegas.

His technique only works with wireless systems based on GSM technology, which is used by most of the world’s wireless carriers. In the United States, AT&T and T-Mobile USA, a unit of Deutsche Telekom AG operate on GSM systems.

Thousands of hackers will attend the Defcon conference in Las Vegas that starts on Friday, where researchers like Paget will disclose security vulnerabilities in systems from cell phones and business software to systems that run the electrical grid.

They will all swear fealty to the vaguely religious rationale that they’re only involved in proving to hardware and software manufacturers better ways to provide security.

One would hope that advances in contemporary sophistry might eventually provide them with more believable rationales. Something better than the usual crap copouts.

The Justice Department is investigating whether hundreds of FBI agents cheated on a test of new rules allowing the bureau to conduct surveillance and open cases without evidence that a crime has been committed.

In some instances, agents took the open-book test together, violating rules that they take it alone. Others finished the lengthy exam unusually quickly, current and former officials said.

In Columbia, S.C., agents printed the test in advance to use as a study guide, according to a letter to the inspector general from the FBI Agents Association that summarized the investigation. The inspector general investigation also was confirmed by current and former officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the case.

“There are similar stories for practically every office, demonstrating the pervasive confusion and miscommunication that existed,” Konrad Motyka, the association’s president, wrote May 13 in the letter obtained by The Associated Press.

“Confusion and miscommunication” is almost as good an excuse as “the dog ate my homework”.

Depending on the outcome of the investigation, agents could be disciplined or even fired…

Read the rest of this entry »

Now, do we get the Kool-Aid?

1,200 investors, and more than $190 million lost in just 3 years. It all began as market turmoil gained momentum in the run-up to the Great Recession, and investors were searching for a safe haven for their savings.

Minnesota money manager Trevor Cook and radio show host Pat Kiley said they had the answer, with the promise of solid returns and a no-loss guarantee. The Securities and Exchange Commission, however, calls it a “scheme to defraud perpetrated by Cook and Kiley…”

Kiley, 72, used the airwaves to get the word out on his weekly Christian radio program, “Follow the Money.” Kiley called his listeners “truth seekers” and appealed to their distrust of Wall Street and the government…

Cook and Kiley told investors that they could withdraw their money at any time. Now almost all the money is gone, and investors are out of luck…

Cook, according to the SEC, used $51 million collected from investors in later years to pay off early investors — a classic Ponzi scheme structure similar to the one orchestrated by Bernie Madoff. As with Madoff, Cook’s investors were given phony account statements that “falsely reported substantial, continuing gains,” according to the SEC.

In its complaint, the SEC says that Cook and Kiley diverted nearly $43 million, “of their victims’ money to their own personal purposes … and for other illegal purposes…”

Some investors were drawn in through Kiley’s radio show. In fact…Kiley claims his radio program brought in 75% of the funds raised in the foreign currency program…

Merri Jo Gillette, who heads the SEC’s Midwest division in Chicago, says even with an enforcement staff of 100 overseeing a 9-state region, the agency is understaffed and is “light-years behind the industry” technologically due to lack of funding. “Nobody’s gonna protect you from these folks except yourself,” Gillette told CNNMoney.

If it sounds too good to be true, it probably isn’t.

If it sounds too good to be true – but, “God says it’s safe” – run for the nearest exit!

Here’s the story. Remind me to tell KB never to go fishing at the Stephen Foster State Park.

Republican Flag of Freedom

In a blow to President Barack Obama and his fellow Democrats, Republicans blocked a bill on Tuesday to require an unprecedented level of public disclosure of who pays for political campaign advertising.

On a Senate vote of 57-41, Democrats fell short of the needed 60 to clear a procedural hurdle Republicans set up against The Disclose Act, likely killing the measure for the year…

Transparency and democracy fail once again in the U.S. Senate.

With Obama’s support, Democrats crafted the campaign finance bill in response to a Supreme Court decision in January that overturned federal and state limits on independent expenditures by corporations to support or oppose candidates.

The Democratic-backed bill would require corporate as well as union and advocacy group leaders to disclose their names in campaign ads rather than allow so-called front groups to take responsibility for the political advertising.

Assistant Senate Democratic Leader Dick Durbin pointedly noted that many Republicans had earlier favored more disclosure.

But this year, Durbin said, “They’re betting that most of these ads are going to be on behalf of their candidates and against Democrats. That’s what it comes down to…”

Voters will be left clueless as to who is funding the ‘independent’ TV ads promoting and attacking candidates and how much these secretive funders are paying for these ads,” Public Citizen’s Craig Holman said. The non-partisan advocacy group urged the Senate to reconsider the bill after the August recess.

The measure would also ban election spending by companies with more than 20 percent foreign ownership and recipients of U.S. bank bailouts…

Polls show broad public support for the aim of the bill to provide greater disclosure of donors to campaigns. But Republicans dismiss such surveys, saying they were conducted before Democrats drafted their bill behind closed doors.

Every bill in Congress is drafted behind closed doors. They keep the public out – and the stink in.

The issue is that the Republicans, once again, use 19th Century century rules to prevent a democratic vote on the issue.

Since the time of Nicolaus Copernicus five centuries ago, people have wondered whether there are other planets like Earth in the universe. Today scientists are closer than ever to an answer — and it appears to be that the Milky Way galaxy is rich in Earth-sized planets, according to astronomer Dimitar Sasselov.

Drawing on new findings from a NASA telescope, he told the TED Global conference in Oxford, England earlier this month that nearly 150 Earth-sized planets have been detected so far. He estimated that the overall number of planets in the galaxy with “similar conditions to the conditions that we experience here on Earth is pretty staggering. It’s about 100 million such planets…”

Until technology was developed to detect planets outside the solar system 15 years ago, scientists were only able to speculate about the existence of Earth-like planets. The new technology paid off in the discovery of some 500 planets.

The disappointing fact though was that very few of the newly identified planets were the size of Earth.

“There was of course an explanation for it. We only see the big planets. So that’s why most of those planets are really in the category of ‘like Jupiter,’ ” he said…

In March 2009, NASA launched Kepler, a telescope-carrying satellite that can detect the dimming of light caused by a planet orbiting around a star…

The discovery of many potential planets means “we can go and study them — remotely, of course — with all the techniques that we already have tested in the past five years. We can find what they’re made of, would their atmospheres have water, carbon dioxide, methane.”

At the same time, Sasselov believes, scientists can make progress in the laboratory on better understanding how chemicals can produce life. “And in one of our labs, Jack Szostak’s labs, it was a series of experiments in the last four years that showed that the environments — which are very common on planets, on certain types of planets like the Earth — where you have some liquid water and some clays, you actually end up with naturally available molecules which spontaneously form bubbles. But those bubbles have membranes very similar to the membrane of every cell of every living thing on Earth. …. And they really help molecules, like nucleic acids, like RNA and DNA, stay inside, develop, change, divide and do some of the processes that we call life…”

But, please, don’t let reality and science, progress and knowledge, get in the way of whichever superstition makes you feel all warm and safe inside.

We’ll probably discover an ogre or a banshee for you to fear somewhere in outer space.