G.O.O.D- U.S. consumers may pass on convenience and organic foodsSource: Reuters Cash-strapped U.S. consumers could be turning their backs on two of the biggest trends in the food business — organics and convenience — in order to save money. Food industry executives and analysts interviewed in the past week pointed to those two categories as among the most vulnerable to consumers trying to stretch food budgets. [...]
- Mexico’s Cantarell oil output falls again in JulyPeak oil anyone? Source: Reuters Crude output from Mexico’s struggling Cantarell oil field fell for the 10th month in a row in July to 974,000 barrels per day, energy ministry data showed on Tuesday. The fading jewel of Mexico’s oil industry, Cantarell is now producing half what it was yielding at its 2004 peak, pulling down overall output [...]
- FDIC may borrow money from TreasurySource: Reuters Federal Deposit Insurance Corp (FDIC) might have to borrow money from the Treasury Department to see it through an expected wave of bank failures, the Wall Street Journal reported. The borrowing could be needed to cover short-term cash-flow pressures caused by reimbursing depositors immediately after the failure of a bank, the paper said. The borrowed money [...]
- Google Earth increasingly compliant with censorship requestsSource: The Raw Story Google has becoming increasingly compliant to government requests to block purportedly sensitive information — including images of Tibet, military installations and even a General Electric research plant — according to a new report prepared by the Open Source Center for the Bush Administration’s Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell and reports circulated [...]
- Proposals in the UK to monitor all communicationsSource: guardian.co.uk In the Queen’s speech this autumn Gordon Brown’s government will announce a scheme to institute a database of every telephone call, email, and act of online usage by every resident of the UK. It will propose that this information will be gathered, stored, and “made accessible” to the security and law enforcement agencies, local [...]
- 100 Already arrested in DenverSource: huffingtonpost.com The Associated Press reports that, as of early Tuesday, about 100 people have been arrested following the breakup of a protest by Denver police. The confrontation erupted Monday night as police in riot gear tried to disperse a crowd of about 300 people that was disrupting traffic near the Denver City and County Building. Police said [...]
- U.S. consumers may pass on convenience and organic foods
Aug
12
Source: CNN.com
Fossil fuels that keep our planet running — oil, natural gas and coal — were created from the decomposition of plants, plankton and other organic material over millions of years.
A California lab has developed genetically altered bacteria that eat sugars and excrete a form of diesel oil.A California lab has developed genetically altered bacteria that eat sugars and excrete a form of diesel oil.
Today, scientists all over the globe are working to create fuels with the same properties but without that pesky 100 million-year wait. And “renewable petroleum” is now a reality, on a small scale, in some laboratories.
The biotech company LS9 Inc. is using single-celled bacteria to create an oil equivalent. These petroleum “production facilities” are so small, you can see them only under a microscope.
“We started in my garage two years ago, and we’re producing barrels today, so things are moving pretty quickly,” said biochemist Stephen del Cardayre, LS9 vice president of research and development.
How does it work? A special type of genetically altered bacteria are fed plant material: basically, any type of sugar. They digest it and excrete the equivalent of diesel fuel.
Aug
12
Ready for Disaster? ‘Preparedness Movement’ Members Say They Are
Filed Under survivalism | Leave a Comment
Full story at: abcnews.go.com
Let’s face it: The news these days can be a little depressing.People can’t drive because gas is too expensive, the price of food is skyrocketing, families are losing their homes, the stock market is tanking and the Arctic ice caps might be melting, plunging the planet into serious trouble.
A lot of people take in all this news, shrug it off and just push on with life.
But not everyone.
Watch the story tonight on “Nightline” at 11:35 ET.
At the Tom Brown Tracking, Nature and Wilderness Survival School in Waretown, N.J., they’re preparing for the worst. The school attracts people from every corner of the nation who want to learn how to build a fire, make stone tools and absorb an American Indian lifestyle and philosophy.
Brown said the word “survivalist” conjures “images of a bunker stocked with food and ammunition, or a soldier, or some dirtbag suffering on a glacier.”
But he says that couldn’t be further from the truth.
“Survival is like the garden of Eden. It’s like going home,” he said.
Aug
12
U.S. Cities Would be Locked Down, Quarantined Under Pandemic Flu Response Plan
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Source: naturalnews.com
The federal government would need to quarantine infected households and ban public gatherings to contain pandemic flu, according to a computer simulation study conducted by researchers from Virginia Tech and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“You wouldn’t go out to the movies. You wouldn’t congregate with people,” said researcher Stephen Eubank. “You’d pretty much be staying home with the doors and windows battened down.”
The consensus among health experts is that a pandemic, or global epidemic, of influenza is inevitable. The last such pandemic, in 1918, killed between 40 and 100 million people.
Because of the belief that a pandemic cannot be avoided, researchers are instead looking into ways to limit its effects. In the current study, researchers used a computer to model the hypothetical spread of flu pandemic in the city of Chicago under various containment scenarios. They found that a vigorous early response could reduce the infection rate by 80 percent.
Aug
8
It was simply a matter of time
Source: Neowin.net
This week at the Black Hat Security Conference two security researchers will discuss their findings which could completely bring Windows Vista to its knees.
Mark Dowd of IBM Internet Security Systems (ISS) and Alexander Sotirov, of VMware Inc. have discovered a technique that can be used to bypass all memory protection safeguards that Microsoft built into Windows Vista. These new methods have been used to get around Vista’s Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR), Data Execution Prevention (DEP) and other protections by loading malicious content through an active web browser. The researchers were able to load whatever content they wanted into any location they wished on a user’s machine using a variety of scripting languages, such as Java, ActiveX and even .NET objects. This feat was achieved by taking advantage of the way that Internet Explorer (and other browsers) handle active scripting in the Operating System.
While this may seem like any standard security hole, other researchers say that the work is a major breakthrough and there is very little that Microsoft can do to fix the problems. These attacks work differently than other security exploits, as they aren’t based on any new Windows vulnerabilities, but instead take advantage of the way Microsoft chose to guard Vista’s fundamental architecture. According to Dino Dai Zovi, a popular security researcher, “the genius of this is that it’s completely reusable. They have attacks that let them load chosen content to a chosen location with chosen permissions. That’s completely game over.”
According to Microsoft, many of the defenses added to Windows Vista (and Windows Server 2008) were added to stop all host-based attacks. For example, ASLR is meant to stop attackers from predicting key memory addresses by randomly moving a process’ stack, heap and libraries. While this technique is very useful against memory corruption attacks, it would be rendered useless against Dowd and Sotirov’s new method. “This stuff just takes a knife to a large part of the security mesh Microsoft built into Vista,” said Dai Zovi to SearchSecurity.com. “If you think about the fact that .NET loads DLLs into the browser itself and then Microsoft assumes they’re safe because they’re .NET objects, you see that Microsoft didn’t think about the idea that these could be used as stepping stones for other attacks. This is a real tour de force.”
While Microsoft hasn’t officially responded to the findings, Mike Reavey, group manager of the Microsoft Security Response Center, said the company has been aware of the research and is very interested to see it once it has been made public. It currently isn’t known whether these exploits can be used against older Microsoft Operating Systems, such as Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, but since these techniques do not rely on any one specific vulnerability, Zovi believes that we may suddenly see many similar techniques applied to other platforms or environments. “This is not insanely technical. These two guys are capable of the really low-level technical attacks, but this is simple and reusable,” Dai Zovi said. “I definitely think this will get reused soon.”
These techniques are being seen as an advance that many in the security community say will have far-reaching implications not only for Microsoft, but also on how the entire technology industry thinks about attacks. Expect to be hearing more about this in the near future and possibly being faced with the prospect of your “secure” server being stripped completely naked of all its protection.
Aug
6
Large Illegal Gun Market
Filed Under Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
Quite the interesting peek into bits of the Pakistani culture…enjoy.