smashcrab's shared items in Google Reader

Cheap cup holder laptop tray

2009-07-11T19:35:55Z

[Michael Davis] sent in his homemade laptop tray. He does a lot of traveling in his Toyota Tacoma and was looking for a good way to mount his laptop inside. Unfortunately, [Michael] soon discovered that commercial laptop trays can be very expensive and difficult to install. He saw an opportunity in the empty cup holder in his car. Fifteen dollars worth of PVC pipe fittings and a piece of plywood later he had a laptop tray.

Censordyne: GetUp’s anti net censorship TV ad

2009-07-04T11:03:15Z

Update 11:20PM: Ilic has made the video private and unfortunately can no longer be viewed. Way to put an end to any sort of viral campaign taking off. The ad will now launch Tuesday and it’s anticipated that GetUp! will request further donations. That’s unlikely to go over well with those who donated to their first ad campaign, many of which are angry about the campaigns lack of exposure.

Dan Ilic’s anti net censorship ad for GetUp!:

Ilic’s YouTube page states ‘Please go to http://www.getup.org.au to donate a small amount to help get this video up on TV’, but I think that’s a pretty big ask when you consider the amount of money already given to the group’s Save The Net campaign.

Stun gun policies vary around Australia

2009-07-07T00:40:13Z

Rules and guidelines on using stun guns varies widely around Australia, from the sensible, cautious policy of the Tasmanian Prison Service to more gung ho approaches elswhere, including in Queensland. There, the policy is being reviewed after a man died after police stunned him numerous times near Townsville in June 09.
Read more »...

This article was posted on the Civil Liberties Australia website.

Censorsdyne launched as Children’s groups oppose filter (but Conroy says they’re wrong)

2009-07-09T10:44:57Z

GetUp! has officially launched Censordyne, an ad and website campaign combo to help stop the Government from introducing Internet censorship in Australia. The group hopes to show the ad on Qantas flights in August when politicians are on flights to Canberra as Parliament resumes.

Watch here:

Children’s welfare groups Save the Children and the National Children’s & Youth Law Centre joined GetUp! in the campaign, issuing a joint statement (PDF):

We argue that the tens of millions of dollars that such a scheme will cost should instead be diverted to appropriate child protection authorities and police to prevent the abuse of children, and towards effective community-based education strategies that give children and parents the skills to protect themselves.

Further, PC-level filtering software should be promoted to and provided to parents that wish to protect their children from inappropriate internet content.

The Australian Library and Information Association, Civil Liberties Australia, Liberty Victoria, National Association for the Visual Arts, NSW Council for Civil Liberties, QLD Council for Civil Liberties and Dr Alex Byrne FALIA, University Librarian, UTS, also signed the statement.

Read it all here. (PDF)

Senator Conroy’s office responded, saying GetUp’s campaign misrepresents the Government’s position:

“For its last campaign on the issue, GetUp! falsely claimed that any form of filtering would slow internet speeds by 87 percent,” the statement said.

“Now it resorts to spurious claims about the future expansion of the list of content that may be filtered.

“The Government regards freedom of speech as very important and the Government’s cyber-safety policy is in no way designed to curtail this.”

Restricting the access of Australian Internet users to legal content is certainly an attack on freedom of speech.

With respect to the Internet filtering trial currently underway, IT News today reported that Senator Conroy said it was too early to determine how or if the Government’s policy direction on filtering might shift as a result of the trial. The final report on the trial will likely be available in September.

Donations to the GetUp! campaign can be made here.

Keel Knew

2009-07-08T14:16:00Z

At Fortfest 1992, John A. Keel discusses his research findings (mostly ufological & hints of the cryptozoological) keyed to "pivotal years," e.g. 1848, 1968, 1973, and 1975. In the last 30 seconds of this video, Keel talks about the interrelationship of Forteana and economic collapses.

Anomalist Books Editor-in-Chief Patrick Huyghe remarked after hearing of the death, "John Keel was our Michael Jackson."

After Keel's 1975 book was adapted into the 2002 film, The Mothman Prophecies, "Mothman" became a household name. However, among a select few, it was John Keel that was the star, not the monster. One of our own had crossed over and had a big tent Hollywood movie made from one of his books.

In January 2002, when the film was first released, Fortean historian and author Jerome Clark said that he felt a sense of sincere pride for John Keel when he saw Keel's name flash on the movie theater screen. It was a good moment.

Among the press, the Point Pleasant Daily Register shared this: "As several celebrity deaths have swept the nation in recent weeks, perhaps the closest to the area is the death of John Keel."

John Keel, The Mothman Prophecies author, stood with Point Pleasant, West Virginia's Main Street Director Charles Humphreys prior to the official unveiling of the Mothman Statue at Gunn Park in 2002. Keel died on Friday, July 3, 2009.

Certainly a focus among the Fortean, cryptozoological, and ufological communities for three days now, Keel's passing is beginning to be acknowledged in the mainstream media:

"Keel, writer of 'Mothman Prophecies,' dies at 79."
Newsday, New York.

"'Mothman Prophecies' Writer, Keel, Dies At 79."
WCBS-TV New York

"John Keel."
Associated Press.

"Keel, writer of 'Mothman Prophecies,' dies at 79."
WTEN - Albany, New York

+++
Cryptomundo links have included:

John A. Keel Has Died, July 6, 2009.

Keel Ends Life Rather Alone, July 7, 2009.

C2C: Keel Tribute, July 7, 2007.

Vallée & Keel, July 7, 2009.

Garuda: Harbinger of Doom, from an Indian postcard, being sold by a New York City vendor on a walk home from Keel's apartment. Credit: Doug Skinner.

In 1994, John A. Keel is the demonologist, the man in black in the middle, in between ufologist J. Antonio Huneeus and cryptozoologist Loren Coleman. Photo by anomalist Patrick Huyghe.

On July 3rd, in 1969, Brian Jones, English musician and member of The Rolling Stones died. On July 3rd, in 1971, Jim Morrison, the Lizard King and American leader of The Doors died. On July 3rd, in 2009, another kind of rock star, the Mothman king, John A. Keel died.

Halliburton Confirms Concentration Camps Already Constructed

2009-07-08T17:16:00Z

Halliburton Confirms Concentration Camps Already Constructed

This 6-page document runs through the evidence of concentration camps in America and the intention to use them against political dissidents. Included are pictures of the camps themselves, 3 story railway cars, and millions of plastic coffins.

The italian G8 summit and other stupidity.

2009-07-09T14:05:00Z

With President Obama in L'Aquila, Italy for the G8 Summit, three (hopelessly brainwashed) Greenpeace activists unfurled a banner on Mount Rushmore, next to Abraham Lincoln's likeness. The Washington Post reports, "The banner showed President Obama's face -- Greenpeace said it was an unfinished portrait, implying that Obama's legacy was in question -- and the words 'America honors leaders not politicians: Stop Global Warming.'" And soon after, the three climbers and other Greenepace activists were arrested. Little did those poor saps know, that the G8 leaders were already on the level.

G-8 leaders focus on global warming

While the leaders focused on "Global warming", Berlusconi had something else on his mind. Carla Bruni (slave?) knowing of his exploits, refused Berlusconi's tour of Rome.

Thanks to "tommy" for finding this picture of Obama's wandering eyes.

The pope not really liking blacks, was happy to present Michelle Obama with this racist handbag.
"Women Who Face Up to Challenges": that is the proud claim embroidered by a group of girls from Cameroon on this "ethical fashion" handbag.
This is one of the buildings used, the main conference hall overlooks the water.

The pictures speak for themselves.

Nice little eye motif, in the "family" photo.

Obama and his "zodiac killer" signature.

Elluminati the new world order resource. Open 24 hours a day for the latest Conspiracy News and events. Now with 50% more syncromystic flava!

More on Nikola Tesla

2009-07-10T23:00:09Z

You can thank Nikola Tesla for helping you read this. Before his harnessing of the energy of Niagara Falls, most electricity was transmitted via direct current. Tesla pioneered the use of alternating current that is used in our electric grid. Check into the documentary film excerpted above for more info and links.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Science | Digg this!

The Dawning of Internet Censorship in Germany

2009-06-17T02:02:04Z

Summary:

{{analysis|country=Germany}}
{{date|2009-6-16}}

By Markus Beckel ([http://netzpolitik.org/2009/the-dawning-of-internet-censorship-in-germany/ NetzPolitik])

Germany is on the verge of censoring its Internet: The government – a grand coalition between the German social democrats and conservative party – seems united in its decision: On Thursday the parliament is to vote on the erection of an internet censorship architecture.

[[Image:zensursula-231x300.png|231px|zensursula-231x300.png|left]] The Minister for Family Affairs [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_von_der_Leyen Ursula von der Leyen] kicked off and lead the discussions within the German Federal Government to block Internet sites in order to fight child pornography. The general idea is to build a censorship architecture enabling the government to block content containing child pornography. The Federal Office of Criminal Investigation (BKA) is to administer the lists of sites to be blocked and the internet providers obliged to erect the secret censorship architecture for the government.

A strong and still growing network opposing these ideas quickly formed within the German internet community. The protest has not been limited to hackers and digital activist but rather a mainstreamed effort widely supported by bloggers and twitter-users. The HashTag used by the protesters is [http://search.twitter.com/search?q=zensursula <nowiki>#zensursula</nowiki>] – a German mesh up of the Ministers name and the word censorship equivalent to #censursula.

As part of the public’s protest an official e-Petition directed at the German parliament was launched. Within three days 50,000 persons signed the petition - – the number required for the petition titled „[https://epetitionen.bundestag.de/index.php?action=petition;sa=details;petition=3860 No indexing and blocking of Internet sites]“ to be heard by the parliament. The running time of an e-Petition in Germany is 6 weeks – within this time over 130,000 people signed making this e-Petition the most signed and most successful ever.

During the past weeks, protests became more and more creative – countless blogs and twitter-users followed and commented the discussions within governments and opposing arguments. Many mainstream media picked up on this and reported about the protest taking place on-line. [http://www.ak-zensur.de A working group on censorship] was founded and the protest coordinated with a [http://www.thomasmoehle.de/zensur/index.php/Hauptseite wiki], mailing lists, chats and of course employing twitter and blogs. One website „[http://www.zeichnemit.de/ Zeichnemit.de]“ created a landing page explaining the complicated petitioning system and making signing the petition easier and more accessible for non net-experts.

Over 500 people attended the governments official press conference on the planed internet censorship – a number of whom used this occasion to demonstrate and voice their concerns. In fact, demonstrators began attending some of the Minister von der Leyens public appearances, [http://netzpolitik.org/2009/zensursula-aktion-an-der-uni-hannover/ carrying banners and signs to raise attention] to the stifling of information freedom in Germany.

<center>[[Image:2mahnwach2.jpg|430px|2mahnwach2.jpg]]</center>

The net community did not only oppose the governments plans, but also made constructive suggestions how to deal with the problem of child pornography without introducing a censorship architecture and circumcising constitutional freedoms. The working group on censorship demonstrated the alternatives for instance by actually removing over 60 websites containing child pornographic content in 12 hours, simply by emailing the international providers who then removed this content from the net. The sites were identified through the black lists of other countries documented on Wikileaks. This demonstration underlines the protesters main arguments: instead of effectively investing time and efforts to have illegal content removed from the internet, the German government is choosing censorship and blocking – an easy and dangerous way out. The greatest fear of the protesters is that once in place, the infrastructure will be used to censor other forms of unwanted content, not only child pornography. German politicians already seem to be lining up with their wish-list of content to be censored in future – the suggestions ranging form gambling sites, islamist web pages, first person shooters, and the music industry cheering up with the thought of finally banning pirate bay and p2p.

You can find a detailed linklist of the [http://netzpolitik.org/2009/kommentierte-zensursula-linkliste/ zensursula-debate here] (in german). Thanks to Geraldine de Bastion for the translation.

== Source documents: ==
* [[1,203 new websites censored by Thailand]]
* [[Green Dam censorship system internal brief to Chinese government, doc, Jan 2008]]
*[[Chinese Green Dam Falun Gong related censorship keywords, June 2009]]
*[[Green Dam censorship system internal brief to Chinese government, Jan 2008]]
*[[Australian government secret ACMA internet censorship blacklist, 6 Aug 2008]]
*[[Australian government secret ACMA internet censorship blacklist, 11 Mar 2009]]
*[[Australian government secret ACMA internet censorship blacklist, 18 Mar 2009]]
* [[Thailand blocklist for 408 new articles and videos including Harry Nicolaides imprisonment reportage, 14 Jan 2009]]
* [[797 domains on Finnish Internet censorship list, including censorship critic, 2008]]
* [[Australia secretly censors Wikileaks press release and Danish Internet censorship list, 16 Mar 2009]]
* [[Denmark: 3863 sites on censorship list, Feb 2008]]
* [[Norwegian secret internet censorship blacklist, 3518 domains, 18 Mar 2009]]
* [[US site Abortion TV photos censored by Australian government, 15 Mar 2009]]
* [[Thailand official MICT censorship list, 20 Dec 2008]]
* [[MICT blocklist 11 Jan 2007]]
* [[MICT blocklist 12 Oct 2006]]
* [[MICT blocklist 16 May 2006]]
* [[MICT blocklist 28 May 2007]]
* [[United Arab Emirates Internet censorship plan (2006)]]
* [[Wikileaks releases over 150 censored videos and photos of the Tibet uprising]]

== See also ==

* [[Von Zensur und der Gesellschaft]]
* [[Westliche Internetzensur: Anfang vom Ende oder Ende vom Anfang?]]
* [[Western internet censorship: The beginning of the end or the end of the beginning?]]
* [[Wikileaks and Internet Censorship - a comparative study]]
* [[A Blacklist for Websites Backfires in Australia]]
* [[Australian Government censorship of US anti-abortion site abortiontv.com, 21 Jan 2009]]
* [[Australian government secret ACMA internet censorship blacklist, 11 Mar 2009]]
* [[Banned hyperlinks could cost you 11,000 dollars a day]]
* [[Dentist's website on leaked blacklist]]
* [[Experten greifen von der Leyen an]]
* [[Hausdurchsuchung bei WikiLeaks.de Domaininhaber]]
* [[Internet Censorship in Thailand]]
* [[It certainly looks like the ACMA blacklist, eh Senator Conroy]]
* [[Leaked Australian blacklist reveals banned sites]]
* [[Lists of allegedly illegal websites always leak]]
* [[Media freedom group calls for an end to Thai internet censorship]]
* [[Police raid home of Wikileaks.de domain owner over censorship lists]]
* [[There is no bigger issue than net censorship]]

The coming age of censorship

2009-06-18T20:54:01Z

Summary:

{{analysis|country=Syria}}
{{date|2009-6-18}}

Today, Germany's lower house passed the first Western national internet censorship law. As every news organization, political newsletter and discussion between friends relocates onto the internet, censorship systems are being rolled out to interpose themselves between every communicator and their audience.
{{Contents/Right}}

By Claire Ulrich (translated from the French, [[Les censeurs du net]])

In Internet history, 1994-2004 was the era of the pioneers. 2004-2007 was the era of the merchants. Now we’re entering the era of the bullies. Everywhere in the world, sites are going dark, arrests are increasing, more people are going to prison. The Web just celebrated its 20th birthday. Nobody used to take it seriously, but those days are gone.

Nacer (all first names of Internet users in this article have been changed) remembers the first computer with Internet access in the national library of Damas, in Syria. A guard who didn’t speak a word of English came and sat next to you while you were at the computer, to keep an eye on this unfamiliar volatile. Those were the good old days. Today, in the comfort of their homes, Syrians surf a censored Web. However, cybercensorship, and collecting data about Internet users, are not practices limited to dictatorships.

Italy is right up there with Beijing and Shanghai, where cybercafés are required by law to check the IDs of every single client. In Kazakhstan at the moment, people are strongly advised not to publish the words “economic crisis” online. The president doesn’t want them to. This is quaint compared to the tests going on in Australia to purge the domestic Web of “pedo-pornographic content.” All governments are anxious about the Hydra that is the Internet, but they all act on their concerns according to their culture. Great Britain is preparing to monitor and archive all electronic communications in the name of the War on Terror. In France, the battle between the government and Internet users is over the downloading of copyrighted material. When the dust settles on the legal battlefields, there remains an unequal power relationship: governments and Internet service providers (ISP) now have the technological means to detect and block access to sites they find objectionable on a countrywide scale. When this happens, it’s called Web “filtering.”

=== ERROR 404 – PAGE NOT FOUND ===

Web filtering is most often indicated by the “Page Not Found” message familiar to all Internet users, free or monitored. In computer lingo, it’s called a “404 error.” The 404 page has always been a problem. According to a charming tech legend, in the early days of the Web, at CERN in Switzerland, researchers who were sick of continually having to restart a failing server located in office number 404 named the failure-to-connect error after this unlucky office. Whether the story is true or not, this error page really does have bad karma.

In Oman, in Bahrain, in Dubai, the 404 page works overtime: you are redirected to a message informing you, in English and Arabic, that the site you are looking for is not authorized in the kingdom. In China, the 404 page doesn’t come with an explanation. There’s no point; the sites are censored. American soldiers in Iraq see it when they try to access YouTube while on base, which is prohibited by the US Army. They don’t have that problem in cybercafés in Baghdad. In Algeria and Egypt, it indicates an actual technical problem. The Web isn’t filtered there, though it is closely monitored. You get it in Syria if you try to go to a site that ends in .il, the top-level domain for Israel. But you’ll have no trouble getting to a porn site. And in Tunisia, the 404 page is just fake. You’ll get an Internet Explorer or Firefox page informing you that your connection failed. The only problem is that the Firefox logo displayed when you’re using Internet Explorer (or vice versa) makes it clear that you’ve landed on a phony page. In Tunisia, this gave birth to the expression a “404 bâchee” (canvas-covered) for the censored pages, a reference to the little canvas-back Peugot pickup truck so popular in Africa. Tunisian Internet users exclaim in unison, “And the driver’s name is Ammar!” Ammar, for the first letter of the ATI (Tunisian Internet Agency), an arm of the Tunisian Ministry of the Interior.

=== FIRST STOP, TUNISIA ===

On our cruise through Censorland, we must stop over in Tunisia, the first African country to have access to the Internet, that shining gateway to a computerized citizenry and new technologies. Praised by Bill Gates (”I am amazed by Tunisia”), this country is at the forefront of cybercensorship. Back in 2000, when the blogosphere was still deserted, the country led the charge by censoring the forum Takriz.org (”fed up”.org) within its borders. That same year, its first cyber-dissident, Zouhair Yahyaoui, was arrested in a cybercafé and condemned to 18 months in prison for having published on his site, Tunezine, a survey that asked, “Is Tunisia a kingdom, a republic, a zoo, a prison?”

The 10-year marriage of the latest cyber-surveillance technologies and a police state has declined into a sad routine – imprisonment of cyber-dissidents and automatic suppression of foreign press sites if even a paragraph is deemed undesirable. Lofti, a Tunisian who lives in Europe, recalls that he was never able to connect to the site Voila.fr when he was in the country. Why? Because of the AFP dispatches published on the portal? Photos that were too sexy? Asking questions is also frowned upon. Interestingly, the ATI has always, from the beginning, been run by a woman. Khadija Ghariani, an engineer, Ecole nationale supérieure des telecommunications, Paris, class of ‘84; Feriel Béji, who has a doctorate in artificial intelligence; and Lamia Cheffai Sghaier, an electrical engineer, each took turns running the agency. Among dissidents, they’re called Ben Ali’s Angels, a local show with the tagline, “We’re here to make you hate the Internet!” Tunisia is also a master of cyber-humor.

=== “WRITE ‘JI/AN/G ZE/MIN’” ===

The other old soldier of cybercensorship is China. Everyone knows that a Great Firewall shields the eyes of the Chinese from millions of sites. Accessing Web content freely is just not an option, but the Chinese don’t complain much; they’re used to it. Writing and conversing online is what they love to do. It’s ‘harmonization” that aggravates them.

Ever since the Communist Party in China decided to “construct” a “harmonious society” in 2007, the Web is not only censored there, it’s “harmonized.” An automatic filter, an invisible hand, suppresses a word here, a name there, any phrases, comments, blogs, or images that are undesirable. So they say, “I’ve been harmonized.” A little lesson learned by e-mail from Edwin, an English-Chinese interpreter who has lived in Wenzhou for a long time: “Take, for example, the name of the former president Jiang Zemin, the one of Tiananmen fame, which has been meticulously erased from the Chinese Web. If you write it on a blog or a forum, sometimes it’s automatically replaced by stars or a blank space, or it could be that you won’t even be able to send the message. It might also be removed after publication. But you just have to be a little creative. “Write ‘Ji/an/g Ze/min’ and you’re good to go.”

The censorship robots don’t understand words with slashes, paraphrases, or the double phonetic meaning of a Chinese character. What are the notorious forbidden words that they track? No one knows but the Party, which chooses them, and the ISPs, which do housework. Occasionally, a pirated list of prohibited words shows up on the Web. The latest one contained 1,041 words (chinadigitaltimes.net/tag/banned-words). These included sex, Tibet, Falun Gong (a forbidden religious movement), Tiananmen, play-boy, fuck, multiple parties, Taiwan independence, police, whore, corruption, torture, public funds, anus, Jesus Christ, riot, insurrection, air disaster, 89, tyranny, North Korea, scrotum, dictatorship, pigeon, timeshare, penitentiary, Voice of America, bra, Geneva finance, shit.

Even China is starting to have trouble managing its 300 million restless Internet users – the population of the United States – and the flood of their insolent comments, which disturb the general harmony. Why else would they have hired the “50 Cent Gang” to harmonize opinions on the Web? This mysterious group was so named because it is made up of innumerable anonymous workers who are said to be paid a half Yuan (0.05 €, the price of a subway ticket) for every pro-government comment left on forums, chat rooms, and blogs. Our man in Wenzhou confirms this by e-mail: “It’s pretty easy to spot them. When someone publishes 50 messages in the afternoon of the same day he created a profile, we assume it’s one of them.” Some of these part-timers who lack imagination even give blatant clues, choosing obvious usernames like “Morning Harmony” and “Harmony of the Geranium.”

=== THE “MYANMAR JUNTA OPTION” ===

Not all countries have the conviction, or the inexhaustible labor pool that the Chinese censorship industry has. But there is nonetheless a wide variety of techniques to choose from. Computer complexities aside, the Web can be compared to a telephone exchange. To censor it, the easiest thing to do is still to simply pull out the plug connecting the domestic Web to international traffic. This is the “Myanmar Junta Option,” used during the demonstrations in 2007.

Another method is to throttle the connection speed of individual users. In Iran, President Ahmadinejad has a blog, but only the government and the clergy have high-speed Internet access. The average Iranian has to make do with 256k/second, which makes it unlikely that he’ll be downloading racy films or speeches glorifying atheism, which he couldn’t find anyway. (Just for comparison, a basic ADSL connection in France is 10 times faster.)

Censors can also choose to place the clamp where their domestic Web meets the Worldwide Web, as they do in Saudi Arabia, in order to sift the vice from the virtue at their convenience before allowing content through. Among the techniques considered outdated today is DNS poisoning, which is practiced in Thailand. That explains why, in Bangkok, you can pull up a BBC article online and find yourself on the home page of a local government office.

But for your more modern censors, with money to invest, those days are over. Censorship is selective and flexible, recognizing and suppressing sites or domains with the help of robots that seek out keywords or entire categories of sites. To do this, of course, you need specialized software. Tools that behave like parental control software raised to the millionth power, and produce the same result. And most of these are manufactured in Western countries.

=== FILTERS “MADE IN USA” ===

In the United States, three serious companies are on the rise, with steadily increasing sales: Secure Computing, Websense and Blue Coat. Their specialty is the security of business networks and intranets. According to the OpenNet Initiative, a collaborative research project among Harvard, Toronto, Cambridge, and Oxford Universities that studies cybercensorship, these are the three main providers of filtering tools to governments.

There’s nothing illegal about selling computer security tools. The product page of SmartFilter, the leading software product, says “SmartFilter removes all inappropriate content from the workplace and educational environment, limits your liability, manages bandwidth, and ensures protection against security risks.” It’s thanks to them that office workers can’t go to Facebook at work, and that gaming, gambling and pornographic sites can’t be accessed by computers in libraries and schools. But selling these tools to governments of countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia, which we know aren’t too concerned about human rights? Secure Computing has always denied these contracts, even going so far as to accuse Iran of “illegally acquiring” their software.

Helmi Noman, a Harvard researcher in charge of the Middle East for the OpenNet Initiative, consistently sees the signs of these filtering specialists during the tests that the organization conducts regularly in all the countries of the world. And if they’re not the culprits, their partners are. These tools are also distributed by the biggest names in the computer industry: Microsoft, Sun, Cisco, McAfee, Dell. Evidently the Emirate of Bahrain has recently done some shopping.

=== IN BAHRAIN, ONE SIMPLE RULE: WE DON’T TALK ABOUT THE EMIR ===

In this little Gulf country, described by expatriates as “pretty cool,” the rule was short and simple: don’t talk about the Emir. Since January, Bahrain has switched into high gear. Ahmed is a software engineer in Manama, the capital. He’s lived through old-school censorship and the new kind too. He likes taking risks; one of his pastimes for the last 10 years has been publishing a blog on local news, which regularly causes problems for him. The worst, in 2005, ended in 15 days of jail time because he published a photo of the Emir’s son drinking champagne at the finish line of a Formula 1 race. At times, his blog has been crudely censored, in a way that was easy to get around. Since January, and a decree promising to remove from the Web elements that are “contrary to the culture” (pornography, anti-religious material), the Web throughout the entire kingdom has been paralyzed.

According to Ahmed, up to 40% of sites are inaccessible in Bahrain, including advertising, cooking blogs, Google Translate, and technical engineering sites. It’s reached the point where foreign companies are complaining because they can’t work.

What happened? It’s a classic scenario, one that Helmi Noman has often seen when a government decides to use these tools. Overwhelmed by the power of the filtering software that the government has bought and imposed on them, the ISPs make one mistake after another. However, when it comes to one category of sites in Bahrain, there is no question of an accident on the part of the ISPs or the palace technicians. Ever since January, all Shiite sites and blogs, though hardly pornographic, have disappeared from the Sunni kingdom. Ahmed is a Shiite. He still writes on his blog occasionally, for his foreign readers, and wonders if he’ll be allowed to leave the country the next time he goes to the airport.

From Doha, in Qatar, where he’s giving a lecture, Helmi Noman warns about these false-bottomed filtering tools. “Western societies are selling ISPs not only filtering software, but also decisions about freedom of expression.” The censorship package includes the software plus a database of 20 million sites and updates that can be regularly downloaded, as with antivirus software. SmartFilter places these sites in 91 categories. It’s up to the client to choose the categories he wants to prohibit. “When an ISP buys SmartFilter, he is buying 20 million decisions and 91 categories that could be wrong.”

These “mistakes” are fairly common, according to what Helmi Noman has found. On the day that sites as varied as Orkut (a social network very popular in India and Brazil), Last.fm (online music), LiveJournal (the most popular blog platform in the former Soviet Union), and Twitter (microblogging) were labeled “dating sites” – for what reason we don’t know – it was temporarily impossible to access them from different parts of the globe. In April, 2007, the video site Dailymotion spent several days in Category V4 (pornography). Internet users in Oman, Yemen and Tunisia were the ones who felt that: no Dailymotion for them. The database that feeds the filters can be accessed online (www.trustedsource.org/urlcheck). It’s collaborative. Anyone – a company, an individual, or the league of virtue of any religion – can flag a site and label it according to his own beliefs, from anywhere in the world, anonymously.

Secure Computing isn’t feeling the recession. It was just bought by the antivirus giant, McAfee, for 465 million dollars (around 350 million Euros). The new management is noncommittal in its response to any question about government cyber-surveillance: “The governments that are our clients can use all of the categories [which we provide] to shape the Internet to suit their cultural needs. McAfee has no control over, or any say in the way an organization implements its own filtering strategy.” To be fair, Europe is doing its share too. Siemens offers a catalog of solutions for intercepting and monitoring communications. China is one of their biggest clients.

=== TALKING BACK WITH TECHNOLOGY ===

Nobody wants a Web crawling with pedophiles, terrorists and criminals. But the perfectly democratic example of Australia and its costly offensive against online pedophilia (budget: 125 million Australian dollars over four years, about 70 million Euros) got off to an appallingly amateurish start. In March, during the filtering tests, the ultra-secret blacklist of 2,395 blocked pedophile sites was leaked and ended up on the site for such slip-ups, WikiLeaks. Fortunately. The leak revealed that only half of the sites fell into that category. Some unfortunate errors: the sites of a dentist’s office, a dog boarding facility, and a travel agency were also on the list.

To create its blacklist, the Australian government – like others – relied on information from the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), a British organization based in Cambridge that has been cataloging sites flagged as pedophile since 1995. The IWF is one of 20 such organizations around the world, subsidized mainly by players in the Internet sector. Little by little, without any oversight, or anything to recommend it but its good intentions, it has become the pedophilia police for the authorities. In December, an IWF flag resulted in the censorship in Great Britain of the Wikipedia page for Virgin Killer, an album by the German hard rock group, Scorpions. The cover of this old album, which was never the object of any legal action, shows a nude teenage girl.

The Web has no central government, no universal law, no Red Cross, no seat at the UN. Every Internet user must deal with the legal whims of his country on his own. In case of trouble, he might have recourse to a few organizations that defend freedom of expression. A worthy cause, but a luxury in time of recession. Once again, the response comes in the form of technology, and it’s Internet users the world over who come to the rescue. In Iran, photographer Hamed Saber developed, by himself, a little tool that bypasses the block on the photo site Flickr, which he then made available to the community. The Berkman Center at Harvard just launched Herdict.org, a site where anyone can flag a site that is inaccessible from a given country, so that they will have real-time data on the Web’s blind spots.

=== HUMOR AS A WEAPON ===

Because they are tech savvy, Edwin in China and Ahmed in the Emirates can read and write whatever they want to, while remaining under the censors’ radar. They use “proxy anonymizers,” the unattractive name for encryption tools that allow you to discreetly borrow the address of a computer somewhere else in the world just long enough to launch yourself onto the open seas of the uncensored Web. They are called Ultrareach, Psiphon, TOR, Dynaweb, Anonymizer, and they can all be downloaded.

One of the most popular and activist of these is TOR. In 2001, the US Navy released one of its tools for encrypting communications to the public domain. Robert Dingledine, then a student at MIT, has the long hair and little round glasses of freeware activists. It was he who decided to adapt the tool to the Web and distribute it for free. TOR, managed in the United States by a nonprofit organization, has been downloaded millions of times. “We don’t know where they’re downloading from, we don’t keep any data. But we estimate that at any given moment of the day, around the world, between 300,000 and half a million people use one of our connection addresses and encryption to remain anonymous.” Encrypting communications on the Web is not illegal anywhere. But the sites where you can download the “anonymizers” are often prohibited.

In Thailand, using a proxy can land you in prison. The software gets around nonetheless, on USB keys or disks, competing these days with virtual private networks (VPN), encrypted gateways that are used, for example, by multinationals for secure online communication with their foreign branches. The solution is so simple that Edwin, in Wenzhou concludes, “If we really wanted to fight cybercensorship, all we’d have to do is invest a few million dollars in a massive VPN and distribute the links and keywords for free to Internet users. End of story.”

A Thai organization, Freedom Against Censorship (FACT), is already doing that on a small scale, to give Thai Internet users a breath of fresh air. Fifty-thousand sites were shut down during the country’s various political upheavals, thanks to a legislative Trojan horse: the crime of lèse majesté (offense) against King Bhumibol. This misdeed is no joke (three to 15 years of prison) and foreigners can also be prosecuted for it. An Australian writer and a BBC journalist have had a taste of Thai prisons in the king’s name.

The free Web has many enemies, but new legions of allies are rising, and giving ministries of information pause. They are the young people, for whom life without YouTube or Facebook is inconceivable. The Web 2.0, that of social networks and photo, video and music sharing, is continually tripping up the censors, whose blunders are much too visible and very unpopular. On these gargantuan sites, where millions of people, files and links are interconnected, it’s not easy to isolate a single video, or profile, or conversation. Had the Turkish government been able to, it would have blocked only one video that was “insulting” to the national icon, Ataturk, rather than the entire YouTube site, and thus spared itself the wrath of the under 30s. In Tunis, when Facebook was completely blocked in September of 2008, it roused the population for the first time. It was unheard of; even the press talked about it.

The last weapon in the Internet users’ arsenal is humor, and it can be devastating. Ridicule always kills a policy’s credibility. In China, since February, a tough “antivulgarity” campaign for a Web without crude language or photos forced ISPs to ask public forgiveness for the “indecent content” they had provided and to sanitize thousands of sites and social networks.

It took only a few days to prepare a response. It came in the form of a little online video of a fluffy alpaca, with an exuberant children’s chorus singing about the wonders of a mythical Chinese animal, the “Grass Mud Horse” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKx1aenJK08). In Chinese, “alpaca” also means, almost to the tone, “screw your mother.” So does “grass mud horse.” “He Xie” (harmony, and therefore censorship) is phonetically very close to “river crab.” Here is the alpaca song: The “grass mud horse” (screw your mother) lives in the Ma Le desert (your mother’s twat). This creature fights the “river crabs” (harmony/censorship) in order to save the “prairies” (homonym of “freedom of expression”). It was a very crude and joyful protest. But since then, harmony reigns once more, over the living as well as the dead. Any reference to the children who died in the Sichuan earthquake last year is immediately harmonized.

Thanks to Claire Ulrich and Le Monde for covering this material. Copyright, other than the translation itself, remains with the aforementioned.

== Source documents ==
* [[1,203 new websites censored by Thailand]]
* [[Green Dam censorship system internal brief to Chinese government, doc, Jan 2008]]
*[[Chinese Green Dam Falun Gong related censorship keywords, June 2009]]
*[[Green Dam censorship system internal brief to Chinese government, Jan 2008]]
*[[Australian government secret ACMA internet censorship blacklist, 6 Aug 2008]]
*[[Australian government secret ACMA internet censorship blacklist, 11 Mar 2009]]
*[[Australian government secret ACMA internet censorship blacklist, 18 Mar 2009]]
* [[Thailand blocklist for 408 new articles and videos including Harry Nicolaides imprisonment reportage, 14 Jan 2009]]
* [[797 domains on Finnish Internet censorship list, including censorship critic, 2008]]
* [[Australia secretly censors Wikileaks press release and Danish Internet censorship list, 16 Mar 2009]]
* [[Denmark: 3863 sites on censorship list, Feb 2008]]
* [[Norwegian secret internet censorship blacklist, 3518 domains, 18 Mar 2009]]
* [[US site Abortion TV photos censored by Australian government, 15 Mar 2009]]
* [[Thailand official MICT censorship list, 20 Dec 2008]]
* [[MICT blocklist 11 Jan 2007]]
* [[MICT blocklist 12 Oct 2006]]
* [[MICT blocklist 16 May 2006]]
* [[MICT blocklist 28 May 2007]]
* [[United Arab Emirates Internet censorship plan (2006)]]
* [[Wikileaks releases over 150 censored videos and photos of the Tibet uprising]]

== See also ==
* [[The Dawning of Internet Censorship in Germany]]
* [[Von Zensur und der Gesellschaft]]
* [[Secret gag orders undermine core Western values]]
* [[Westliche Internetzensur: Anfang vom Ende oder Ende vom Anfang?]]
* [[Western internet censorship: The beginning of the end or the end of the beginning?]]
* [[Wikileaks and Internet Censorship - a comparative study]]
* [[A Blacklist for Websites Backfires in Australia]]
* [[Australian Government censorship of US anti-abortion site abortiontv.com, 21 Jan 2009]]
* [[Australian government secret ACMA internet censorship blacklist, 11 Mar 2009]]
* [[Banned hyperlinks could cost you 11,000 dollars a day]]
* [[Dentist's website on leaked blacklist]]
* [[Experten greifen von der Leyen an]]
* [[Hausdurchsuchung bei WikiLeaks.de Domaininhaber]]
* [[Internet Censorship in Thailand]]
* [[It certainly looks like the ACMA blacklist, eh Senator Conroy]]
* [[Leaked Australian blacklist reveals banned sites]]
* [[Lists of allegedly illegal websites always leak]]
* [[Media freedom group calls for an end to Thai internet censorship]]
* [[Police raid home of Wikileaks.de domain owner over censorship lists]]
* [[There is no bigger issue than net censorship]]

[[category:Australia]]
[[category:Tunisia]]
[[category:Turkey]]
[[category:United States]]

{{eu-countries}}

287 sites from the Italian internet censorship list, 21 Jun 2009

2009-06-21T00:36:03Z

Summary:

{{leak
|country=Italy
|summary=
This list presents 287 internet sites currently censored by Italy. This quasi-voluntary system, which was introduced under the banner of fighting "child pornography" relies on a secret, unaccountable list of site names. Because of this lack of transparency, and the power of the censorship system, the blacklist is of intense interest.

Secret "child pornography" censorship blacklists in other countries, such as China, Thailand, Australia, Finland and Denmark have all been shown by WikiLeaks to have been corrupted into censoring non-child pornographic content, including political content (all but Denmark). It seems to be a law of human affairs that when such powerful, unaccountable, systems are introduced, they soon stray from their stated purpose.

The majority of sites on the Italian list seem to be unrelated to child pornography. While some do appear to relate to the images of teenagers, the vast majority of sites are related to what appears to be legal young-adult pornography. Some sites are unrelated to any type of pornography.

These include businesses or institutes outside of Italy, and discussion forums, used by tens of thousands for all purposes. While it is possible these sites had an unauthorized user briefly upload an underage image or link to such an image, the continued presence of the sites on this list likely reflects the lack of any censorship notification or appeal mechanism.

The Australian government admitted during a Senate estimates hearing that fewer than one third of its May 2009 blacklist was related to images of those under the age of 18.

During 2008, the government of Thailand added over 1100 pages to its censorship blacklist for "lese majeste" (criticizing the royal family).

Both the Australian and Thai blacklists have been going for a longer than the Italian system and are possibly substantially more corrupt as a result.

We checked the Italian censorship system against the top 1,000,000 most popular Internet domains (as measured by [http://alexa.com Alexa.com] in November, 2008), together with selected blacklists from other countries to discover a portion of those sites censored by Italy. Botique sites and sites only recently popular do not appear in our list due to limitations in our methodology. That said, our list represents an accurate, current subset of the full list.

In Italy, blocking of content is done through DNS servers - when request for blocked site is made, user is redirected to IP 212.48.170.80 instead of original address. Two nameservers involved in the blocking are 212.48.160.5 and 212.48.160.6.

The list can be reproduced by using the Unix "dig" utility, using a command such as "dig @212.48.160.6 -f list +noall +answer" where "list" is a file containing list of domains to be checked (one per line). We then search for results which lead to IP 212.48.170.80, the site which displays the "censorship page". This is a universal method, which can be applied to all DNS based blocking systems.

A hyperlinked version of the list follows for easy assessment.
|file_digest=SHA256 89636b09f65122f4e573eb0659bf4bacd8b685ada35ea5ee08028f658a78f7a9
|file_info=ASCII text, with CRLF, LF line terminators
|file_name=italian-censorship-list-2009.txt
|file_size=4816
|lang=en
|organization=
|organization_type=
|release_date=2009-6-21
|title=287 sites from the Italian internet censorship list, 21 Jun 2009
}}

== Italian secret internet censorship list, 287 site subset ==

*http://10gay.com
*http://18shame.com
*http://1sexin18.com
*http://24x7pornmovies.com
*http://4chan.nu
*http://69xxxmovies.com
*http://700xxx.com
*http://adultshare.com
*http://ah-teens.com
*http://amateurs-xxx-teens.com
*http://amateursclips.net
*http://amour-xxx-angels.com
*http://ananist.info
*http://artyboys.com
*http://azureteens.com
*http://babemodels.info
*http://babes-fuck.com
*http://bannedfuckers.com
*http://bc-series.com
*http://beautyporndump.com
*http://bella-model.com
*http://bestfamilyincest.org
*http://blogforadults.com
*http://board3.cgiworld.dreamwiz.com
*http://boyfucksboys.com
*http://boywiki.org
*http://boyxpic.com
*http://brightgirls.net
*http://by.ru
*http://byethost7.com
*http://canalblog.com
*http://candycoatedteens.com
*http://chueca.com
*http://chutneysboys.blogspot.com
*http://clsite.in
*http://cpfansclub.com
*http://dads-fuck-babe.com
*http://desiredyoungass.com
*http://dianalove.com
*http://dicklovers.biz
*http://digiteens.net
*http://doctorslick.com
*http://domoteens.com
*http://dreamwiz.com
*http://drocha.ru
*http://easysextv.com
*http://enjoysextube.com
*http://extreme-mpeg.com
*http://extremetube09.com
*http://family-porn-album.com
*http://familyincesttree.com
*http://familysuper.com
*http://fc2.com
*http://fierybabes.com
*http://filthybrats.com
*http://firstsextube.com
*http://flowerfucker.com
*http://fpc.li
*http://fpixx.com
*http://frank-teens.com
*http://free-adult-zone.com
*http://freeforum.tw
*http://freegayspic.com
*http://freehostpage.com
*http://freepimphost.com
*http://freepublicvoyeur.com
*http://freeteenboy.com
*http://freshsextv.com
*http://freshsexvideo.com
*http://freshteenz.net
*http://freshxxxclips.com
*http://fruityboys.net
*http://fullporn.tv
*http://fuzztime.com
*http://gaybdsmworld.com
*http://gayboysfun.com
*http://gayporntown.com
*http://gayteensex.net
*http://girlstested.com
*http://glenda-model.com
*http://gold-file.com
*http://gossip-city.com
*http://gracefulgirls.net
*http://grimsex.com
*http://hardporncontent.com
*http://home-xxx-videos.com
*http://homegirl-sex.com
*http://homeprivatevids.com
*http://hotbox.ru
*http://hotlinkimage.com
*http://hotpapai.com
*http://iamgay.us
*http://icesexpix.com
*http://ilust.org
*http://incest2006.com
*http://incestholidays.com
*http://incestpoint.com
*http://incesttrailers.com
*http://ipicture.ru
*http://japaipak.freehostpage.com
*http://jizzhut.com
*http://johnyjournal.com
*http://juicypornhost.com
*http://just-vids.com
*http://justyoungteens.com
*http://keep4u.ru
*http://kingsizevideos.com
*http://legal-models.info
*http://little-lupe.net
*http://little-models.org
*http://littleliana.com
*http://littlevirginteens.net
*http://lust-tgp.com
*http://lustgal.com
*http://madrabbitsex.com
*http://majorpervert.com
*http://mary18.net
*http://miateens.com
*http://mikerape.com
*http://mobilezzz.com
*http://modelmania4u.com
*http://momboydadbaby.com
*http://mpgfunclub.com
*http://mpgfuns.com
*http://mrbigcock.net
*http://myboyssite.com
*http://myeroticdiary.net
*http://myexbaby.com
*http://mypornozone.com
*http://nabokov-lola.cn
*http://narod.ru
*http://nastyyoungass.com
*http://new-teen-video.com
*http://newincest.com
*http://newsfilter.org
*http://newthumbs.net
*http://nfsx.com
*http://niceyoungteens.com
*http://nm.ru
*http://no-nude.biz
*http://nonku.com
*http://nude-teens.ws
*http://nutsmpegs.com
*http://obscenethumbs.com
*http://ohmygirl.biz
*http://okvids.com
*http://olateens.com
*http://orbita.starmedia.com
*http://origintv.com
*http://oteenz.info
*http://parentalxxxsecrets.net
*http://perversionxxx.com
*http://petiteinnocence.com
*http://petitetighties.com
*http://pixpictures.com
*http://popeyemovies.com
*http://popupgirls.net
*http://porkyhost.com
*http://pornenjoy.net
*http://pornhome.com
*http://pornoxmania.org
*http://pornparade.net
*http://pornru.net
*http://pornspaces.com
*http://porntours.com
*http://potahka.com
*http://pridesites.com
*http://privatehomearea.com
*http://privatepornfilms.com
*http://pussycute.com
*http://putfile.com
*http://qualityporn.biz
*http://racydaddy.com
*http://radikal.ru
*http://realitympegs.com
*http://reducki.cn
*http://russ-girl.biz
*http://sakura.ne.jp
*http://schoolgirlsecrets.com
*http://secretxxxvideo.com
*http://sexdruid.com
*http://sexplanet.name
*http://sexpornhost.com
*http://sexprof.net
*http://sexshit.net
*http://sexualteenplanet.com
*http://special-movies.com
*http://spicysexvideo.com
*http://splifyxxxclips.com
*http://spunkyyounggirls.com
*http://spy-clips.com
*http://starmedia.com
*http://stodevok.ru
*http://superpornovoyeur.com
*http://svetamodel.net
*http://sweethotteens.com
*http://sweetlissy.com
*http://sweetlollipops.com
*http://sweetschoolgirls.net
*http://sweetvirginteens.com
*http://sxplanet.com
*http://sxyoung.com
*http://tabooarchive.net
*http://tailteens.com
*http://teen-mov.net
*http://teen-sweet.com
*http://teenagemovs.com
*http://teenboyspics.net
*http://teenempires.com
*http://teengaypictures.com
*http://teengirlspics.net
*http://teenielips.com
*http://teeniesxxx.com
*http://teenkey.com
*http://teenlib.com
*http://teenorange.com
*http://teenpornfun.com
*http://teens18.ru
*http://teensart.com
*http://teensblossom.com
*http://teensexmovs.com
*http://teensfingering.net
*http://teensvideo.biz
*http://teentilo.com
*http://teenums.com
*http://thefuckdolls.com
*http://thetelki.biz
*http://tiptopteens.net
*http://toplist4free.com
*http://touchofteen.com
*http://triplexstuff.com
*http://tut-min.net
*http://twinkgallerypost.com
*http://uncensored-sex.org
*http://unclevids.com
*http://unlimitedtgp.com
*http://untouchedgirl.com
*http://usercash.com
*http://v-teens.com
*http://vestalgirls.com
*http://vickyfuck.com
*http://vickyglam.com
*http://virginbeach.com
*http://virginmedianet.com
*http://watchsexonline.net
*http://wetmike.com
*http://white-toons.com
*http://wildcherriesteentgp.com
*http://worldsexa.com
*http://www.adultshare.com
*http://www.blogforadults.com
*http://www.fashionbimbo.com
*http://www.fpixx.com
*http://www.frank-teens.com
*http://www.fullporn.tv
*http://www.gayporntown.com
*http://www.gossip-city.com
*http://www.ilust.org
*http://www.incest2006.com
*http://www.jizzhut.com
*http://www.modelmania4u.com
*http://www.pornhome.com
*http://www.pridesites.com
*http://www.tabooarchive.net
*http://www.teencasting.com
*http://www.teensfingering.net
*http://www.virginbeach.com
*http://www.xlovelygirls.com
*http://x-orgy.com
*http://xd03.net
*http://xhostar.com
*http://xixtube.com
*http://xteenboy.com
*http://xxxschoolsex.com
*http://yoslut.com
*http://young-gay-boy-pics.com
*http://young-girls.org
*http://young12.nm.ru
*http://youngboysdb.com
*http://younger18.com
*http://youngorchids.com
*http://youngpornmovies.com
*http://youngteengalleries.com
*http://youngteensonly.com
*http://yourfavoriteteens.com
*http://yourteenstgp.com
*http://zmoviez.com

Twittering keylogger

2009-07-01T19:15:00Z

[Kyle McDonald] sent in his latest project, a software keylogger that twitters what you type. He wrote it using C++ and OpenFrameworks. It logs each keystroke, then it posts to twitter 140 characters at a time. To protect himself, he set up a whitelist of private strings like passwords and credit card numbers that would be stripped before posting. If the twypewriter followed him, his keystrokes could be recreated.

[thanks Kyle]

WTF-O-meter

2009-07-03T14:19:28Z

Here’s something every office probably needs. Ours does at least. It’s a WTF counter. When the office gets just a little too weird, someone hits the button and it gets logged. It’s probably pretty easy to judge the day by the WTF chart. The button is connected to an Arduino that updates the status on a local web server. We can imagine a nice bar graph of WTFs per day, or possibly a pie chart with normal time vs WTF time. Unfortunately, imagining is all we’re going to do. They didn’t include any examples of the visualizations. Can you imagine saying something to a co worker just for them to promptly march over and slap the WTF button? Maybe we don’t need one.

How To Legally Say 'NO' To All Vaccines

2009-06-29T13:43:00Z

Millions of Americans have come to distrust vaccines and mainstream medicine's vaccine agenda. There is a growing movement in this country and around the world that questions the safety and effectiveness of all vaccines for obvious reasons. Many childhood disorders such as autism, ADD/ADHD, SIDS and others have been linked to vaccines. Thousands of soldiers who served in the military have been severely disabled or in some cases even died after receiving their mandated shots. Vaccines are the most controversial subject in all of medicine.

Read the rest of the article here at Rense.com!

Big Brother is PAYING You!

2009-06-29T16:54:00Z

The Recession is one of the two biggest fears in Britain; see: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2009/04/britons-more-fearful-than-ever.html . Everybody’s worried about not making ends meet. I saw the above poster on a bus last week. It’s advertising the Trent-Barton Mango Card (https://www.netescape-secure.co.uk/mango/index.aspx?ReturnUrl=%2fmango%2fmembers%2findex.aspx) It’s a system for cashless bus travel that can be found in one form or another in many places all over the world. The schemes often have gimmicky and attractive names like The London Underground Oyster Card. It functions as a part season ticket, part loyalty card, just like supermarket ones. The incentives for using it are summarized on the poster; it’s more convenient, quicker and above all, it carries a monetary discount on travel and in this day and age that is very persuasive. But the benefits come at a price: a loss of privacy and civil liberties that our rulers can use to their advantage, and our detriment. What the poster doesn’t tell you is that when you pay for a bus journey with your Mango Card a lot more happens than your fare simply being deducted from your account. The system also records which bus you boarded on which route; it records the time of day you boarded too. So whoever controls the system has all the data necessary to build up a profile of your traveling activities and even trace your movements. Travelcards like Mango are just one part of a much larger change in society towards more and more technological control and snooping. Other aspects are the encouragement of the cashless society; see: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2008/11/coins-are-dropped.html and the fingerprinting of children in school; see: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2007/11/this-is-drawing-done-by-my-12-year-old.html and National ID Cards: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2008/01/papiere-bitte-snaps-fingers.html .

The Big Brother controllers and using a new tactic now which they’ve introduced more and more since that start of the Recession (I sometimes wonder if they’re over-hyping the Recession for this reason... among others!). They’re exploiting people’s fear of money-problems by offering them the chance to save money. This is the case with supermarket loyalty cards. When you register a purchase with your Sainsbury’s Nectar Card all the items you buy are recorded on the database so your reward points can be calculated. This means that Big Brother can see what you buy and build up a file about your shopping habits. These kinds of profiles are already in operation for Internet shoppers. On several occasions now I’ve made a purchase online and soon afterwards I get some email spam or junk-mail through my letterbox that is related in theme to the product I bought. This can only be possible if my contact details have been stored on some database that allows advertisers to target me with wares they think I’d like. The potential for the abuse of this practice is unfathomable. We have to be aware of that whenever somebody offers us the chance to save a few bob on our groceries by joining some reward card scheme. It could be an example of what David Icke calls Problem-Reaction-Solution. Yes, the consequences of the current economic climate are worrying for nearly everybody, but it’s not worth trading in our freedom from electronic tyranny for a bit of financial security. Our freedom is so valuable that surely we're not going to let Big Brother bribe us out of it!

(Latest HPANWO Voice article: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2009/06/armed-forces-day.html)

The Russian Roswell

2009-06-30T04:00:00Z

The Tunguska event on June 30, 1908 has come to be known as the "Russian Roswell," with almost as many wild theories circulating about it as about the 1947 incident. Like this one:

Dr. Yuri Labvin, president of the Tunguska Spatial Phenomenon Foundation, insists that an alien spacecraft sacrificed itself to prevent a gigantic meteor from slamming into the planet above Siberia on June 30, 1908.

Most scientists think the blast was caused by a meteorite exploding several miles above the surface. But Labvin thinks quartz slabs with strange markings found at the site are remnants of an alien control panel, which fell to the ground after the UFO slammed into the giant rock.

Of course, scientists scoff at this kind of thing but still have no definitive theories as to what caused it, only their own speculations. The latest speculation is making the rounds today, as we see in the Space.com headline, "Space Shuttle and Strange Clouds Key to Mysterious 1908 Explosion:"

New evidence from an unlikely source -- water vapor in the exhaust plumes of space shuttles launched a century later -- points to a comet. The potential solution comes courtesy some strange clouds that scientists have only recently begun to understand.

Noctilucent clouds are brilliant, and visible only at night. Made of ice particles, they are Earth's highest clouds...in fact, space shuttle launches have been found to cause or enhance the formation of noctilucent clouds.

The article goes on to add that scientists have been able to observe these clouds during a shuttle mission:

Noctilucent clouds were tied to the launch of Endeavour (STS-118) on Aug. 8, 2007. And high-altitude clouds were detected over Antarctica shortly after the fateful launch of Columbia, which along with its crew was lost during re-entry. Columbia's plume was 650 miles long and 2 miles wide and reached Antarctica in three days.

OK, help me out here, I'm not a scientist. We're being told here that the Tunguska event was the result of a comet and not an exploding spaceship.

And what are we being offered as the observable evidence of this theory?

An exploding spaceship.

Michael Jackson's Father Continues To Pimp Out His New Record Label

2009-06-30T04:21:00Z

NCINO, CA (Hollywood Today) 6/30/09 — So, what the heck is this new Blu-ray company that Michael Jackson’s father Joe Jackson was mentioning on the red carpet of the BET Awards Sunday that caused such backlash by those who felt it was bad form in light of his son’s death only a couple days earlier?
Joe sat down to provide details exclusively to Hollywood Today Monday evening at a hotel not far from the family home in Encino with Jackson’s two partners in the new venture, Erick Hansen and Marshall Thompson.
The bottom line, plans are in the works for some music of Jackson’s children to be released on Blu-ray (the elder Jackson does not have any claim to recent rehearsal footage, according to legal representatives for the family who asked not to be quoted), but no discussion of anything to do with Michael was permitted as you’ll see in the accompanying 3 ½-minute video condensation of the half-hour interview.
As for the anger over Jackson’s timing of this announcement, the public will have to make up their own minds. The attorney said Jackson may be in a kind of post-traumatic stress haze where the death of his son has yet to sink in emotionally and will likely not truly hit him until Michael’s funeral service, which has yet to be scheduled by the family.

Hansen suggested (it’s in the video) that the elder Jackson needs to have this business venture to focus on as a distraction and a relief from the intense emotional strain and that getting back in the studio recording business will do him good.
Thompson, a founding member of the 1970s soul group The Chi-Lites, was with Jackson earlier Monday at a media briefing in front of the Jackson home as he tried to explain his perceived insensitivity Sunday while further plugging his new company and introducing Thompson as his partner.
Most viewers and many media members were so stunned and distracted by Jackson’s seeming exacerbating of the initial problem on Monday that even reputable news outlets were butchering the name of the companies involved with the new venture. CNN.com has several postings listing the name of the record company as “Ranch” or “The Ranch” and the Blu-ray company involved as Blue “Saw.”
In fact, as you can see in the video, the music label involving the partners is not “The Ranch” but Marantz, for which the Chicago-based Thompson is president and Jackson is chairman of the board.
The new label is set up to work in partnership with Hansen, who created a company called BlueStar Technologies in Spokane, Wash., in 2007, and calls his new venture with Jackson BlueStar (not “Blue Saw”) Disc Technologies.
The idea is to create a new music label that will find and launch new singers on all audio formats, including Blu-ray with enhanced features such as live Internet-connected chats with the artists as well as Jackson and Thompson. Hansen, a pioneer of such things as the first DVD-ROM videogame (1997’s “Wing Commander”) and the first use of the multi-angle feature of DVDs, said the new venture will soon introduce new technological innovations exploiting the more robust Blu-ray Disc format.
The partners are also working on the soundtrack to a feature film and are in negotiations with Italian soccer team AC Milan about creating a theme song for the club.
Although the primary focus of the new venture will be on original music, sources close to the family said that plans are being developed to tap the family’s rich mine of music from the 1970s that would include Michael, all to be announced in the near future.

Elluminati the new world order resource. Open 24 hours a day for the latest Conspiracy News and events. Now with 50% more syncromystic flava!

MJ moonwalking funeral live.

2009-07-07T17:44:00Z

The "brightest star" on earth in his Gold chariot. Today's full moon is fitting for a moonwalker ritual.

Online TV Shows by Ustream

Elluminati the new world order resource. Open 24 hours a day for the latest Conspiracy News and events. Now with 50% more syncromystic flava!

CHILDREN OF GOD cult announces come back as “The Family International”

2009-07-01T16:32:43Z

FACTNet News editor’s note: 30 years ago a close friend of my family lost a daughter to David Berg and this group only to have her return after several years and then commit suicide. Now the question at hand is “Can a tiger change it’s stripes?”

Once dismissed as ’sex cult,’ Family International launches image makeover
Cult announces comeback plans at conference of cult apologists

It’s a time of intense self-scrutiny for the Family International (formerly known as the Children of God), a tiny Christian fellowship that advocates communal living, extramarital sex and an apocalyptic worldview.

Some 40 years after David Berg, a charismatic evangelical preacher, garnered thousands of hippie followers in Southern California with his messages about sharing bodies, food, children and homes, the movement is struggling to reinvent itself. The 1960s church has battled allegations of past child sexual abuse, complaints from disaffected and aging members and dissatisfaction with an outdated theology.

All new religious groups face essentially the same question if they hope to endure: How do you revise some teachings and practices for wider appeal without forsaking the faith’s unique identity and unconventional doctrines?

“Many desire to see innovation, professionalization and modernization,” Karen “Maria” Zerby, one of the Family’s spiritual and administrative leaders, said last week in her first-ever public address. “We must determine what elements of our theology, culture and context are rooted in the past and no longer hold relevance.”

Zerby, who was Berg’s wife and his successor after his death in 1994, shared her plans for reshaping the Family at the annual meeting of the Center for the Study of New Religions in Salt Lake City.

This is no small task for Zerby and her co-leader, Steve Kelly (who goes by “Peter Amsterdam”). The Family now has about 15,000 members gathered in small communal centers in 90 nations — none in Utah.

There is a core group of followers, including some second- and third-generation members, but fewer than 20 percent of the original participants remain, and many of the those are in poor health with no medical insurance or retirement plans.

The church made headlines in 2005 when Zerby’s son, Ricky Rodriguez, murdered Angela Smith, his former nanny and confidante of his mother, and then shot himself. Rodriguez blamed the Family for ruining his life.

That’s all behind us, said two public-affairs representatives for the church who were in Salt Lake City for the conference.

“We acknowledge that mistakes were made and that there were excesses,” said Claire Borowik, who has been with the Family International for 30 years. “We’ve taken stringent measures to right those wrongs and apologized to former members.”

Thus, she said, “we find it disheartening for people to focus so much on the past.”
[…]

Zerby’s speech in Utah was part of the Family’s coming-out party, said Utah attorney Michael Homer, one of the conference sponsors.

“The Family has made a decision to begin constructing a more public profile,” he said. “It plans to enhance its Internet presence and adapt its message to the cultures in which it lives. It also plans to open the membership to persons who are not full-time missionaries and do not want to necessarily commit their entire day to Family activities. This may include allowing members to live outside homes and not participate in communal living.”
[…]

- Source / Full Story: Family International: Once dismissed as ’sex cult,’ tiny church launches image makeover, Peggy Fletcher Stack, The Salt Lake Tribune, June 25, 2009 — Summarized by Religion News Blog
Special thanks to RNB and ApologeticsIndex.org

Buyer Beware:
• Learn more about The Family International
• CESNUR, the organization at whose conference The Family announced its plans, is known for its support of a wide variety of cults ranging from relatively benign to destructive. Among cult experts interested in helping people leave — or avoid — cults, CESNUR is known as an organization of cult apologists.
• Jesus Freaks: A True Story of Murder and Madness on the Evangelical Edge

*more articles on this group…

IMHO
FACTNet

This editorial/opinion/news alert has been provided or distributed by FACTNet, Inc. (Fight Against Coercive Tactics Network.) Please visit our web site at http://www.factnet.org if you would like to comment on this editorial/opinion/news alert or to share your personal experiences. Re-distribution and re-posting of this document using proper net etiquette when doing so, is appreciated! If you have something you would like Factnet to consider posting in our editorial/opinion/news story email it to manage@factnet.org . Be sure to put Factnet Story Submission in the subject line so it gets to the proper editors.
Factnet’s mission is to be the largest online news and referral service as well as research archive for defending freedom of thought and mind from all forms of unethical influence tactics, mind control and mental coercion/torture used in destructive cults and fundamentalist groups. Since 1993 millions have been helped. FACTNet is a tax deductible, IRS Approved 501(c)(3) non profit organization. For breaking news, personal stories, recovery information, support groups, and expert referrals relating to our mission please visit our web site at http://www.factnet.org If you would like to view over 350,000 postings on various cults, comment on this editorial/opinion/news or to share your personal experiences, go to one of our many various message boards at http://www.factnet.org/vbforum
F.A.C.T.Net, Inc. PO Box 1315 , Ignacio, CO. 81137 USA, E-mail: manage@factnet.org

This editorial/opinion/news alert has been provided or distributed by FACTNet, Inc. (Fight Against Coercive Tactics Network.) Re-distribution and re-posting of this document using proper net etiquette when doing so, is appreciated!

'Jackson to live on in Greenwich...'

2009-06-27T13:09:00Z

'Michael Jackson will live on as a 'plastinated' creature preserved by German doctor Gunther von Hagens.

Von Hagens has caused controversy with everyone from the Pope to the chief rabbi in Israel with his practice of embalming corpses with preserving polyurethane.

Yesterday, he declared: 'An agreement is in place to plastinate the King of Pop.'

Von Hagens said that he spoke with representatives of the Jackson family 'many months ago' and it was agreed that his body will be plastinated and placed next to Bubbles, his late pet monkey who was plastinated a number of years ago and is exhibited at The Body Worlds & Mirror Of Time exhibition at the O2 Centre in London.

Von Hagens also confirmed it was one of Michael's final requests to be reunited with Bubbles.

'There is no better place than to do this at the venue where Jackson was due to perform his world record 50-date tour,' said a spokesman for Von Hagens.

He added: 'Von Hagens has hinted that a moonwalk pose would naturally be favoured. 'It is hoped the exhibit will be unveiled towards the end of July.''

More: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1195750/Michael-Jackson-set-plastinated-missing-deadline-cryogenic-freezing.html