Computer Security Vanishing: Hackers Exploit Vulnerabilities for NSA, Governments

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Photo Credit: Gianni CiprianoOn the tiny Mediterranean island of Malta, two Italian hackers have been searching for bugs — not the island’s many beetle varieties, but secret flaws in computer code that governments pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to learn about and exploit.

The hackers, Luigi Auriemma, 32, and Donato Ferrante, 28, sell technical details of such vulnerabilities to countries that want to break into the computer systems of foreign adversaries. The two will not reveal the clients of their company, ReVuln, but big buyers of services like theirs include the National Security Agency — which seeks the flaws for America’s growing arsenal of cyberweapons — and American adversaries like the Revolutionary Guards of Iran.

All over the world, from South Africa to South Korea, business is booming in what hackers call “zero days,” the coding flaws in software like Microsoft Windows that can give a buyer unfettered access to a computer and any business, agency or individual dependent on one.

Just a few years ago, hackers like Mr. Auriemma and Mr. Ferrante would have sold the knowledge of coding flaws to companies like Microsoft and Apple, which would fix them. Last month, Microsoft sharply increased the amount it was willing to pay for such flaws, raising its top offer to $150,000.

But increasingly the businesses are being outbid by countries with the goal of exploiting the flaws in pursuit of the kind of success, albeit temporary, that the United States and Israel achieved three summers ago when they attacked Iran’s nuclear enrichment program with a computer worm that became known as “Stuxnet.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Leno Asks NY’s Spitzer: ‘How Could You Be This Stupid?’ (+video)

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Photo Credit: APEliot Spitzer, the former New York governor who is now attempting a political resurrection, is willing to talk about the prostitution scandal that forced him to resign, but perhaps not crack a joke about it.

Spitzer, who announced on Sunday he would run for New York City comptroller, traveled to California on Friday to appear on “The Tonight Show” with Jay Leno, one of many TV comedians who has steadily made him the butt of jokes in the five years since the scandal.

Leno praised the former governor before asking Spitzer: “How can you be this stupid?”

“I don’t say that glibly. I don’t say that glibly,” Leno said. “You were a guy that seemed to have – every time they tried to get you – you seem to be the guy who crossed every “T” and dotted every “I.” How did you make this big a blunder?”

The former governor offered a somewhat serious defense: “Hubris is terminal.”

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Zimmerman Trial Exposes the Failure of Law Enforcement to Protect Us From Crime

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Photo Credit: Irish CentralWhen you get run over by a freight train, the cause of death is usually delivered by the locomotive…Not the caboose.

The rainy night of February 26, in Sanford Florida, Trayvon Martin was shot by George Zimmerman, neighborhood watch captain for the Twin Lakes community. Zimmerman is the figurative caboose in the tragic tale in the shooting of Trayvon Martin.

The Twin Lakes neighborhood that George Zimmerman became neighborhood watch captain had suffered eight burglaries plus other crimes, in the 15 months prior to Trayvon Martin’s shooting.

One of the burglaries was a brazen, horrific day time break in to the home of Olivia Bertalan who was alone with her infant as two men broke in and ransacked her home, while she and her baby huddled in terror in a bedroom. The two criminals left with her valuables before police arrived.

This was the final straw for citizens in the community and it was decided to organize a Neighborhood Watch because police were not preventing the crime being inflicted on them. So the community resorted to tactics to try to defend themselves.

Perhaps if the Sanford Police Department had more resources, it could have sent extra patrols to the Twin lakes community and focused on crime abatement…Rather than citizens taking it upon themselves to enhance their protection.

The saying when danger is seconds away, the police are just minutes away, could not have been any more evident as the Twin lakes community was assailed by crime. Time after time police came after the crime was committed; to take reports and statements….But this did nothing to prevent the crime in the first place.

The Zimmerman trial spotlighted detective work, forensic experts, medical examiners and skilled attorneys trying to persuade a jury of George Zimmerman’s guilt or innocence in the death of Trayvon Martin.

Perhaps what should be on trial is how law enforcement failed to protect the Twin Lakes community from crime in the first place and why certain steps weren’t followed by law enforcement to help the community to protect itself…The legal system turned on this community and George Zimmerman for only trying to defend themselves from crime: Zimmerman is on trial for his freedom and the Twin Lakes community had to pay a one million dollar judgement

The freight train that killed Trayvon Martin that night was the legal systems failure to protect citizens from crime. George Zimmerman and the Twin Lakes community were only the caboose in that long train of events.

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Ed Farnan is the conservative columnist at IrishCentral, where he has been writing on the need for energy independence, strong self defense, secure borders, 2nd amendment, smaller government and many other issues. His articles appear in many publications throughout the USA and world. He has been a guest on Fox News and a regular guest on radio stations in the US and Europe.

US and China Smile for Cameras While Pentagon, PLA Prep for All Out War

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Photo Credit: Reuters Rarely have relations between China and the United States been so cordial. On Wednesday, the superpowers agreed to an impressive slate of measures to fight climate change by cutting emissions. Last month’s summit between Barack Obama and Xi Jinping saw the leaders finally agree on an approach to North Korea. China is allowing its currency to rise in value, reducing the danger of global imbalances. And while spying and dirty tricks are rife, recent revelations about U.S. Internet surveillance have placed the countries on a level playing field. It’s a period of peaceful cohabitation.

So why are the two countries’ militaries preparing to do battle with each other?

Both the Pentagon and the People’s Liberation Army are arming for an all-out war and pursuing enormously expensive master strategies that assume that such a war will occur.

In the case of the United States, this appears to be taking place without any authorization or approval from the White House or Congress. The Pentagon is now basing its global strategy on a detailed plan known as the AirSea Battle concept, in which the U.S. Army and Air Force defend the presence of 320,000 U.S. troops in the area by readying themselves for a full-scale land and air assault on China in the event of a threat in the South China Sea or its surroundings.

In a detailed analysis paper in this summer’s issue of the Yale Journal of International Affairs, the famed sociologist and military-policy expert Amitai Etzioni asks, “Who authorized preparations for war with China?” His answer is stark: Mr. Obama has spoken of a “pivot to Asia,” but there has been no political intent or desire to have such an active military confrontation with China – in fact, the politics and diplomacy have been moving in the opposite direction.

Read more from this story HERE.

Mark Steyn: The Legal Absurdities of the George Zimmerman Trial

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By Mark Steyn. Just when I thought the George Zimmerman “trial” couldn’t sink any lower, the prosecutorial limbo dancers of the State of Florida magnificently lowered their own bar in the final moments of their cable-news celebrity.

In real justice systems, the state decides what crime has been committed and charges somebody with it. In the Zimmerman trial, the state’s “theory of the case” is that it has no theory of the case: Might be murder, might be manslaughter, might be aggravated assault, might be a zillion other things, but it’s something. If you’re a juror, feel free to convict George Zimmerman of whatever floats your boat.

Nailing a guy on something, anything, is a time-honored American tradition: If you can’t get Al Capone on the Valentine’s Day massacre, get him on his taxes. Americans seem to have a sneaky admiration for this sort of thing, notwithstanding that, as we now know, the government is happy to get lots of other people on their taxes, too. Ever since the president of the United States (a man so cautious and deferential to legal niceties that he can’t tell you whether the Egyptian army removing the elected head of state counts as a military coup until his advisors have finished looking into the matter) breezily declared that if he had a son he’d look like Trayvon, ever since the U.S. Department of so-called Justice dispatched something called its “Community Relations Services” to Florida to help organize anti-Zimmerman rallies at taxpayer expense, ever since the politically savvy governor appointed a “special prosecutor” and the deplorably unsavvy Sanford Police Chief was eased out, the full panoply of state power has been deployed to nail Zimmerman on anything.

How difficult can that be in a country in which a Hispanic Obama voter can be instantly transformed into the poster boy for white racism? Who ya gonna believe – Al Sharpton or your lying eyes? As closing arguments began on Thursday, the prosecutors asked the judge to drop the aggravated assault charge and instruct the jury on felony murder committed in the course of child abuse. Felony murder is a murder that occurs during a felony, and, according to the prosecution’s theory du jour, the felony George Zimmerman was engaged in that night was “child abuse,” on the grounds that Trayvon Martin, when he began beating up Zimmerman, was 17-years-old. This will come as news to most casual observers of the case, who’ve only seen young Trayvon in that beatific photo of him as a 12-year-old.

In that one pitiful closing moment, the case achieved its sublime reductio ad absurdum: After a year’s labors, after spending a million bucks, after calling a legion of risible witnesses, even after the lead prosecutor dragged in a department store mannequin and personally straddled it on the floor of the court, the state is back to where it all began – the ancient snapshot of a smiling middle-schooler that so beguiled American news editors, Trayvon Martin apparently being the only teenager in America to have gone entirely unphotographed in the second decade of the 21st century. And, if Trayvon is a child, his malefactor is by logical extension a child abuser. Read more from this story HERE.

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‘Justice for Trayvon’: Audio released of DOJ member urging action against George Zimmerman

By Jessica Chasmar. The legal watchdog Judicial Watch released an audio recording Thursday of a Department of Justice staffer urging Sanford, Fla., city officials and the minority advocacy group Dream Defenders to seek justice for Trayvon Martin, because “if a community perceives that there’s something wrong in the black community, there’s something wrong”…

Mr. Thomas Battles [regional director of the DOJ’s Community Relations Service] then introduced a member of the Dream Defenders.

“When Trayvon happened, for many of us, it was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back,” the man said. “We had grown up in a state and environment where race is a way of life … We’re not from Sanford, but what Sanford represented to us was the very real problems going around this state and this country. We wanted to figure out how could we stand in solidarity, and how could we make this about not just justice for Trayvon, but using this moment and using the opportunity to honor his memory, to honor his spirit by working to bring down the various structures and the various systems that allow something like this to happen.” Read more from this story HERE.

GOP Address: Permanently Delay ‘Massive, Burdensome’ Obamacare for Everybody (+video)

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Obamacare should be permanently delayed for everybody, not just for businesses, because it is “so massive, burdensome, bureaucratic and confusing that it’s collapsing under its own weight,” Wyoming Sen. Mike Enzi said in Saturday’s GOP weekly address.

Enzi pointed out that in 2009, he warned that President Barack Obama and Democrats were moving ahead with a healthcare reform plan that would cost all Americans for generations to come, and said his predictions are now coming true.

“All across the country health insurance rates are skyrocketing,” the Wyoming Republican said. “Employees are losing coverage through their employers. Families are struggling to cope with higher costs and less choice. Businesses aren’t hiring full-time employees.”

He said nobody likes to be right when their predictions come true in ways that are harmful, but “it’s time to admit that this partisan experiment in government-run health care is failing.”

When the Obama administration pulled back on the employer mandate, delaying it by an extra year, it had to admit that one of the key pieces of the law isn’t working.

Read more from this story HERE.

Texas Democrats Vow Legal Challenge Against Recently-Passed Abortion Restrictions (+video)

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Photo Credit: Fox NewsTexas Democrats vowed to fight one of the most restrictive abortion bills in the nation passed by the state legislature late Friday in front of more than 2,000 protesters.

“There will be a lawsuit. I promise you,” Dallas Sen. Royce West said on the Senate floor, raising his right hand as if taking an oath.

Democrats offered 20 amendments to the bill, which will ban abortions after 20 weeks, require abortion doctors to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital and require all abortions to take place in surgical centers. They ranged from exceptions for rape and incest to allowing doctors more leeway in prescribing abortion-inducing drugs. But Republicans would have none of it.

The Republican majority passed the bill unchanged just before midnight with all but one Democrat voting against it.

The bill has sparked protests across Texas with thousands of abortion rights supporters flooding the Capitol to draw out committee hearings and disrupting key votes. Protesters finished a filibuster started by Democratic Sen. Wendy Davis of Fort Worth by jeering for the last 15 minutes of the first special session, effectively killing the bill.

Read more from this story HERE.

NIH Spends $3 Million To Study Health Risks of “Dating” Mexican Prostitutes

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Photo Credit: APJust how dangerous is it to your health to shack up with a Mexican hooker? That’s the question at the heart of a five-year, $3,029,663 study by researchers at the University of California San Diego funded by the National Institutes of Health.

The five-year study is taking the first-ever look at the love lives – and sexually transmitted diseases – of 200 prostitutas mexicanas and their “non-commercial” male partners.

Based on previous research, UCSD scientists have been able to determine conclusively that the “non-commercial male partners” of Mexican prostitutes are very likely to pick up and spread their partners’ sexually-transmitted diseases, and may in fact be “significant drivers of HIV/STI acquisition and/or their re-infection.”

Begun in 2009, the Mexican prostitute study has already been receiving federal funding of over half a million dollars annually, and the $3 million price tag does not include the as-of-yet undetermined 2014 grant for the study’s final year.

Read more from this story HERE.

Small British Start Up Company May Have Found Cure for Cancer

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Photo Credit: independent.co.ukA single-storey workshop on a nondescript business park in Oxfordshire is not the sort of place where you would expect scientific revolutions to take place. But behind the white-painted walls of this small start-up company, scientists are talking about the impossible – a potential cure for cancer.

For the past 20 years, the former academics who set up Immunocore have worked hard on realising their dream of developing a totally new approach to cancer treatment, and finally it looks as if their endeavours are beginning to pay off. In the past three weeks, the company has signed contracts with two of the biggest players in the pharmaceuticals industry which could lead to hundreds of millions of pounds flowing into the firm’s unique research on cancer immunotherapy – using the body’s own immune system to fight tumour cells.

Immunocore is probably the only company in the world that has developed a way of harnessing the power of the immune system’s natural-born killer cells: the T-cells of the blood which nature has designed over millions of years of evolution to seek out and kill invading pathogens, such as viruses and bacteria. T-cells are not nearly as good at finding and killing cancer cells, but the hard-nosed executives of the drugs industry – who are notoriously cautious when it comes to investments – believe Immunocore may have found a way around this so that cancer patients in future are able to fend off their disease with their own immune defences.

“Immunotherapy is radically different,” said Bent Jakobsen, the Danish-born chief scientific officer of Immunocore who started to study T-cells 20 years ago while working at the Medical Research Council’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. “It doesn’t do away with the other cancer treatments by any means, but it adds something to the arsenal that has one unique feature – it may have the potency to actually cure cancer,” Dr Jakobsen said.

It is this potency that has attracted the attention of Genentech in California, owned by the Swiss giant Roche, and Britain’s GlaxoSmithKline. Both companies have independently signed deals with Immunocore that could result in up to half a billion pounds being invested in new cancer treatments based on its unique T-cell therapy.

Read more from this story HERE.

Teachers Denied Schoolboy, 10, Water on the Hottest Day of the Year to Avoid Upsetting Muslim Pupils During Ramadan’

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Photo Credit: Matt Scott-JoyntAn angry mother has accused a primary school of denying her child water on one of the hottest days of the year for fear of upsetting pupils observing Ramadan.

Kora Blagden, 32, claimed a teacher at her son Luke’s school refused to let the 10-year old drink from his water bottle because it was unfair to fasting classmates.

Many pupils at Charles Dickens Primary School, Portsmouth, Hampshire, are fasting during Ramadan, which means they refrain from taking food or water between sunrise and sunset for around 30 days, depending on the moon.

Mother-of-four Kora said: ‘Just before bedtime me and my sons Luke, ten, and Alfie, eight, were talking about Ramadan as we had seen it on the news.

‘Luke said to me he was told he wasn’t allowed to drink in class by his teacher.

‘The reason being, a child who is fasting had a headache and the teacher said it would be unfair if the other children drank in front of the pupil.

Read more from this story HERE.