Thursday, July 31, 2014

Greg Hunter, “Weekly News Wrap-Up 8.1.14”

“Weekly News Wrap-Up 8.1.14”
By Greg Hunter’s 







Musical Interlude: 2002, “We Meet Again”

2002, “We Meet Again”

"For This Is What We Do..."

- Gregory David Roberts, “Shantaram”

"Vulcan Guiding Principles"

"Vulcan Guiding Principles"
By Moon
"Ideally, do no harm. Harm speeds up the heat-death of the Universe, and indirectly, your own.
More practically, do as little harm as possible. We are creations of a Universe in which entropy exists, and therefore see no way of escape, but we do not need to help it.
Harm no one’s internal, invisible integrities. Leave others the privacies of their minds and lives. Intimacy remains precious only insofar as it is inviolate: invading it turns it to torment. Reach out to others courteously: accept their reaching in the same way, with careful hands.
Do not murder. The spear in the other’s heart is the spear in your own; you are he. All action has reaction: what force you inflict, inevitably returns. The murder of the other is the murder of your own joy, forever.
As far as possible, do not kill. Can you give life again to what you kill? Then be slow to take life. Take only life that will not notice you taking it. To notice one’s own death increases entropy. To die and not notice it increases it less, but still does so.
Cast out fear. Cast out hate and rage. Cast out greed and envy. Cast out all emotion that speeds entropy, whether it be love or hate. Cast out these emotions by using reason to accept them, and then move past them. Use in moderation emotions that do not speed entropy, taking all care that they do not cause others pain, for that speeds entropy as well. Master your passions, so that they become a power for the slowing of the heat-death.
Do no harm to those that harm you. Offer them peace, and offer them peace again, and do it until you die. In this manner you will have peace, one way or another, even if they kill you. And you cannot give others what you have not experienced yourself.
Learn reason above all. Learn clear thought: learn to know what is from what seems to be. This is the key to everything: the truth of reality, the reality of truth. What is will set you free.”

Surak’s concept of cthia, the guiding principle of Vulcan society, as written by Diane Duane in her novel, “Star Trek: Spock’s World.”

"A Look to the Heavens"

Click image for larger size.


"The Wish to Be Generous"

"All that I serve will die, all my delights,
the flesh kindled from my flesh, garden and field,
the silent lilies standing in the woods,
the woods, the hill, the whole earth, all
will burn in man's evil, or dwindle
in its own age. Let the world bring on me
the sleep of darkness without stars, so I may know
my little light taken from me into the seed
of the beginning and the end, so I may bow
to mystery, and take my stand on the earth
like a tree in a field, passing without haste
or regret toward what will be, my life
a patient willing descent into the grass."

~ Wendell Berry,
“The Collected Poems, 1957-1982”

"What Is Life?"

"What is life?
It is the flash of a firefly in the night.
It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime.
- Crowfoot, Blackfoot Warrior and Orator

"Who Are You? How Do You Know?"

- Henry Rollins

"As Far As We Can Go..."

- “Fox Mulder,” "The X-Files"

The Daily "Near You?"

Horton, Michigan, USA. Thanks for stopping by.

"Promise Me..."

- Christopher Robin to “Pooh”

"Life is A Journey- Don't Be Afraid"

"Life is A Journey- Don't Be Afraid"
Author Unknown








- Author Unknown, found here: 

Chet Raymo, “Universal Constants, Universal Consensus”

“Universal Constants, Universal Consensus”
by Chet Raymo

“I received a book in the mail, as I sometimes do, for potential review on this blog, James Stein's “Cosmic Numbers: The Numbers That Define Our Universe”. I often write here about books I read, but I don't review. I did glance at Stein's book, however. It has an audience, but it's not for me; been there, done that. The subtitle is provocative, however. The idea that a dozen or so numbers "define the universe." That's a mind-blowing concept.


Click image for larger size.

Look again at the Hubble Ultra Deep Field photograph. above Those myriad of galaxies. Those yawning light-years. That infinitude of worlds. And, as far as we know, the fundamental constants are the same everywhere,

The human mind has thrown a net across the cosmos. And as we have brought the galaxies into our ken, so have we come to realize that we too are part and parcel of the fabric of cosmic space and time. Exceptional clarity. Impenetrable mystery.


"Never Alone..."

But are in constant company of things and beings
As you seek them, so they seek you.

- Rumi, “The Book of Mirdad”

"How It Really Is"

Technology: “'BadBIOS': "And Now, You're Really Hosed"

"And Now, You're Really Hosed"
 by Karl Denninger

"This isn't good at all...* When creators of the state-sponsored Stuxnet worm used a USB stick to infect air-gapped computers inside Iran's heavily fortified Natanz nuclear facility, trust in the ubiquitous storage medium suffered a devastating blow. Now, white-hat hackers have devised a feat even more seminal- an exploit that transforms keyboards, Web cams, and other types of USB-connected devices into highly programmable attack platforms that can't be detected by today's defenses.

This just plain sucks. What they've done here is figure out that (unfortunately) many of the common USB controller chips are reprogrammable in the field and there is no verification of what's loaded to them. Apparently there is also enough storage (or, in the case of a pen drive, lots of storage!) to do some fairly evil things. At the core of this problem is the fact that a USB device has an identifying "class" and vendor ID. If the "class" is one the computer knows it will attach it, usually without prompting of any sort. This is especially bad if the "class" presented is what is known as a "HID", or "Human Input Device"- like a mouse or worse, a keyboard.

Yes, you can have more than one keyboard connected, and all are active at once. And yes, this is as bad as you think it might be. The worst part of it is that various virus and anti-spyware programs can't detect it because the code doesn't run on the host machine, it runs on the device. All the computer sees is a "keyboard"- but it's not really a keyboard, it's your USB pen drive that sends a key sequence down that invokes something (e.g. a browser to go to a specific bad place.)

This can be detected if you're paying attention, but most people don't. You can see what classes a particular device attached, but few people will look and current operating systems don't prompt, with good cause. How do you answer such a prompt if you're plugging in a keyboard- that isn't yet allowed to attach? Ah, there's a chicken and egg problem, eh?

In any event there ARE defenses against this, but they will require significant operating system patches and then a paradigm to be taken care of with USB- which will help, but not prevent these sorts of exploits.  As it sits right now, unfortunately, mainstream operating systems are wide open to this sort of abuse.

For example, if my keyboard is plugged into USB Port 2, and it has a Vendor ID of "X" and a device type of HID/Keyboard, then any other port, or this port, that sees a different vendor ID and/or ANY HID/Keyboard device would bring up a warning that a user input device, specifically a keyboard, was attempting to attach. You could then say "Yes" or "No", and if the device that popped up that prompt was a webcam or USB data stick go looking for your sledge hammer to get a bit of an upper-body workout taking care the problem.

But as it sits right now the only way you'll catch it is if the vendor and device ID don't match a loaded set of drivers and thus the system has to go looking for them- in which case you will get a warning. Sadly, for the common abuses of this (e.g. keyboards and mice in particular) you almost-certainly already have such a driver on the system and thus you're unlikely to catch it. Yeah, this is a problem...  and a pretty nasty problem at that."
*“BadUSB” Exploit Makes Devices Turn 'Evil'”
"Meet “badBIOS,” The Mysterious Mac and PC Malware That Jumps Airgaps"
by Dan Goodin



"We were like, 'Okay, we're totally owned,'" Ruiu told Ars. "'We have to erase all our systems and start from scratch,' which we did. It was a very painful exercise. I've been suspicious of stuff around here ever since." In the intervening three years, Ruiu said, the infections have persisted, almost like a strain of bacteria that's able to survive extreme antibiotic therapies. Within hours or weeks of wiping an infected computer clean, the odd behavior would return. The most visible sign of contamination is a machine's inability to boot off a CD, but other, more subtle behaviors can be observed when using tools such as Process Monitor, which is designed for troubleshooting and forensic investigations.


Over the past two weeks, Ruiu has taken to Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus to document his investigative odyssey and share a theory that has captured the attention of some of the world's foremost security experts. The malware, Ruiu believes, is transmitted though USB drives to infect the lowest levels of computer hardware. With the ability to target a computer's Basic Input/Output System (BIOS), Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI), and possibly other firmware standards, the malware can attack a wide variety of platforms, escape common forms of detection, and survive most attempts to eradicate it.

But the story gets stranger still. In posts here, here, and here, Ruiu posited another theory that sounds like something from the screenplay of a post-apocalyptic movie: "badBIOS," as Ruiu dubbed the malware, has the ability to use high-frequency transmissions passed between computer speakers and microphones to bridge airgaps.

Bigfoot in the age of the advanced persistent threat: At times as I've reported this story, its outline has struck me as the stuff of urban legend, the advanced persistent threat equivalent of a Bigfoot sighting. Indeed, Ruiu has conceded that while several fellow security experts have assisted his investigation, none has peer reviewed his process or the tentative findings that he's beginning to draw. (A compilation of Ruiu's observations is here.)

Also unexplained is why Ruiu would be on the receiving end of such an advanced and exotic attack. As a security professional, the organizer of the internationally renowned CanSecWest and PacSec conferences, and the founder of the Pwn2Own hacking competition, he is no doubt an attractive target to state-sponsored spies and financially motivated hackers. But he's no more attractive a target than hundreds or thousands of his peers, who have so far not reported the kind of odd phenomena that has afflicted Ruiu's computers and networks.

In contrast to the skepticism that's common in the security and hacking cultures, Ruiu's peers have mostly responded with deep-seated concern and even fascination to his dispatches about badBIOS.

"Everybody in security needs to follow @dragosr and watch his analysis of #badBIOS," Alex Stamos, one of the more trusted and sober security researchers, wrote in a tweet last week. Jeff Moss—the founder of the Defcon and Blackhat security conferences who in 2009 began advising Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano on matters of computer security—retweeted the statement and added: "No joke it's really serious." Plenty of others agree.

"Dragos is definitely one of the good reliable guys, and I have never ever even remotely thought him dishonest," security researcher Arrigo Triulzi told Ars. "Nothing of what he describes is science fiction taken individually, but we have not seen it in the wild ever."

Been there, done that: Triulzi said he's seen plenty of firmware-targeting malware in the laboratory. A client of his once infected the UEFI-based BIOS of his Mac laptop as part of an experiment. Five years ago, Triulzi himself developed proof-of-concept malware that stealthily infected the network interface controllers that sit on a computer motherboard and provide the Ethernet jack that connects the machine to a network. His research built off of work by John Heasman that demonstrated how to plant hard-to-detect malware known as a rootkit in a computer's peripheral component interconnect, the Intel-developed connection that attaches hardware devices to a CPU.


Of course, it's one thing for researchers in the lab to demonstrate viable firmware-infecting rootkits and ultra high-frequency networking techniques. But as Triulzi suggested, it's another thing entirely to seamlessly fuse the two together and use the weapon in the real world against a seasoned security consultant. What's more, use of a USB stick to infect an array of computer platforms at the BIOS level rivals the payload delivery system found in the state-sponsored Stuxnet worm unleashed to disrupt Iran's nuclear program. And the reported ability of badBIOS to bridge airgaps also has parallels to Flame, another state-sponsored piece of malware that used Bluetooth radio signals to communicate with devices not connected to the Internet.

"Really, everything Dragos reports is something that's easily within the capabilities of a lot of people," said Graham, who is CEO of penetration testing firm Errata Security. "I could, if I spent a year, write a BIOS that does everything Dragos said badBIOS is doing. To communicate over ultrahigh frequency sound waves between computers is really, really easy."

Coincidentally, Italian newspapers this week reported that Russian spies attempted to monitor attendees of last month's G20 economic summit by giving them memory sticks and recharging cables programmed to intercept their communications.

Eureka: For most of the three years that Ruiu has been wrestling with badBIOS, its infection mechanism remained a mystery. A month or two ago, after buying a new computer, he noticed that it was almost immediately infected as soon as he plugged one of his USB drives into it. He soon theorized that infected computers have the ability to contaminate USB devices and vice versa. "The suspicion right now is there's some kind of buffer overflow in the way the BIOS is reading the drive itself, and they're reprogramming the flash controller to overflow the BIOS and then adding a section to the BIOS table," he explained.


He said he suspects badBIOS is only the initial module of a multi-staged payload that has the ability to infect the Windows, Mac OS X, BSD, and Linux operating systems. "It's going out over the network to get something or it's going out to the USB key that it was infected from," he theorized. "That's also the conjecture of why it's not booting CDs. It's trying to keep its claws, as it were, on the machine. It doesn't want you to boot another OS it might not have code for." To put it another way, he said, badBIOS "is the tip of the warhead, as it were."


With the speakers and mic intact, Ruiu said, the isolated computer seemed to be using the high-frequency connection to maintain the integrity of the badBIOS infection as he worked to dismantle software components the malware relied on. "The airgapped machine is acting like it's connected to the Internet," he said. "Most of the problems we were having is we were slightly disabling bits of the components of the system. It would not let us disable some things. Things kept getting fixed automatically as soon as we tried to break them. It was weird."



The Economy: "How America's Working Stiffs Got Stiffed"

"How America's Working Stiffs Got Stiffed" 
by Bill Bonner




We were in China for only a few days. We have no idea what calamity the central planners will cause there. But we can take a fair guess of what they will do to America. Broadly, China's feds build too many factories, malls and apartments. America's feds encouraged the opposite error – borrowing and spending too much for consumption purposes. China's real wages doubled in the last 10 years... after doubling in the previous 10 years. That is why the Chinese feel so much better off. They ARE much better off. "Yes, we know there may be a slowdown... or even a financial crisis... coming. But we have gone ahead so far so fast we can put up with a little backsliding," said our friend cheerfully.

Losing Ground: Americans are not likely to be so cheerful about it. They've lost ground, not gained it. And now, down at the bottom of the pay ladder, US workers are fed up. From Bloomberg: "Thousands of fast-food workers from restaurants such as McDonald's Corp. and Wendy's Co. walked off the job beginning today to protest for higher pay. 

American fast-food and retail workers have been striking this year for higher wages, and the protest starting today seeks wages of $15 an hour, 66% higher than the $9.02 that US fast-food cooks earn, on average. In April, employees from McDonald's and Yum! Brands Inc., which owns the KFC and Taco Bell chains, joined workers from Macy's Inc. and L Brands Inc.'s Victoria's Secret chain in walking off the job in Chicago and New York for higher pay. 




Today, a median wage earner gets $30,000 a year – 10 times as much in nominal terms. But now, despite the feds' phony numbers, he has much less buying power. Without even staring to calculate the effects of higher taxes, health care and education expenses, we can see he has to devote at least a whole year's wages to buying a new family car – twice as much as in 1950. As for the house, that's five years of wages – also twice as much as it was in the 1950s. 



Wednesday, July 30, 2014

"The Last Whale"

 "As I rocked in the moonlight,
And reefed the sail.
It'll happen to you
Also without fail,
If it happens to me.
Sang the world's last whale."

- Pete Seeger

“North America: Massive Numbers of Sea Creatures Dying Along the West Coast”

“North America: Massive Numbers of Sea 
Creatures Dying Along the West Coast”
by Michael Synder

“Never before have we seen so much death along the west coast of North America. Massive numbers of sea stars, bluefin tuna, sardines, anchovies, herring, oysters, salmon, marine mammals and marine birds are dying, and experts are puzzled. We are being told that we could even see "local extinctions" of some of these sea creatures. So are all of these deaths related? If so, what in the world could be causing this to happen? What has changed so dramatically that it would cause massive numbers of sea creatures to die along the west coast? The following are 15 examples of this phenomenon. Most scientists do not believe that these incidents are related. But when you put them all together, it paints quite a disturbing picture... 

1. A "mystery plague" is turning sea stars all along the west coast of the United States and Canada into piles of goo... Sea stars, commonly referred to as starfish, have been dying off in alarming numbers along the entire West Coast, from Baja, Mexico, to Alaska. According to reports from the Seattle Aquarium, some parts of Puget Sound and the San Juan Islands have seen population declines of up to 80 percent. 

On the Oregon coast, according to CoastWatch Volunteer Coordinator Fawn Custer, "Last December, we had less than 1 percent of sea star wasting. By May 1, more than 5 percent of sea stars were affected. Now, I would say, in some areas, it is up to 90 percent." A marine epidemiologist at Cornell University says that this is "the largest mortality event for marine diseases we've seen". 


3. Sardine, anchovy and herring populations have dropped dramatically along the west coast in recent years... Pacific sardine populations have shown an alarming decline in recent years, and some evidence suggests anchovy and herring populations may be dropping as well. The declines could push fishermen toward other currently unmanaged "forage fish," such as saury, smelt and sand lance, stealing a critical food source relied on by salmon and other economically important predators. 

In response, the Pacific Fishery Management Council is considering an ecosystem-based management approach that recognizes the fundamental role of forage fish in the Pacific marine food web. Tiny, but abundant, these small schooling fish feed on plankton and, in turn, fill the bellies of Oregon's iconic marine species, including salmon, sharks, whales, sea lions and sea birds.

4. "Record numbers of distressed sea lions have washed ashore in California" for the second year in a row. One news report described these distressed sea lions as "malnourished and dehydrated, too weak to find food on their own". 

5. Marine birds are "disappearing" in the Pacific northwest... From white-winged scoters and surf scoters to long-tailed ducks, murres, loons and some seagulls, the number of everyday marine birds here has plummeted dramatically in recent decades. Scoters are down more than 75 percent from what they were in the late 1970s. Murres have dropped even more. Western grebes have mostly vanished, falling from several hundred thousand birds to about 20,000.

6. Those that work in the seafood industry on the west coast are noticing some very "unusual" mutations. For example, a red king crab that was recently caught in Alaska was colored bright blue

7. Pelicans along the California coastline are "refusing to mate". This is being blamed on a lack of fish for the pelicans to eat. As a result, we are seeing less than one percent of the usual number of baby pelicans. 

8. The oyster population in the Pacific is falling so fast that it is being called "the great American oyster collapse". 

9. The population of sockeye salmon along the coast of Alaska is at a "historic low". 

10. Something is causing herring off the coast of British Columbia to bleed from their gills, bellies and eyeballs. 


12. Back in May, more than six tons of anchovies died in Marina Del Ray over a single weekend. 


14. Earlier this month, thousands of dead fish were found on Manresa Beach


Could it be possible that at least some of these deaths are related to what has been happening at Fukushima? We do know that fish caught just off the shore from Fukushima have been tested to have radioactive cesium that is up to 124 times above the level that is considered to be safe. And we also know that a study conducted at the University of South Wales concluded that the main radioactive plume of water from Fukushima would reach our shores at some point during 2014


Just consider what one very experienced Australian boat captain discovered when he crossed the Pacific last year. According to him, it felt as though "the ocean itself was dead"... "The next leg of the long voyage was from Osaka to San Francisco and for most of that trip the desolation was tinged with nauseous horror and a degree of fear. "After we left Japan, it felt as if the ocean itself was dead," Macfadyen said. "We hardly saw any living things. We saw one whale, sort of rolling helplessly on the surface with what looked like a big tumour on its head. It was pretty sickening. I've done a lot of miles on the ocean in my life and I'm used to seeing turtles, dolphins, sharks and big flurries of feeding birds. But this time, for 3000 nautical miles there was nothing alive to be seen." 


What do you think? Is Fukushima to blame, or do you think that something else is causing massive numbers of sea creatures to die?"
“Fukushima Equals 6,000 Hiroshima Bombs Today, More Tomorrow; 
There is No Place On Earth to Escape the Rad”
A search for "Fukushima" on this blog would be most instructive...

Manuel Iman, “This Moment Called Now”

Manuel Iman, “This Moment Called Now”

"A Look to the Heavens"

Click image for larger size.

Paulo Coelho, "Defeat"

by Paulo Coelho

"Does a leaf, when it falls from the tree in winter, feel defeated by the cold? The tree says to the leaf: ‘That’s the cycle of life. You may think you’re going to die, but you live on in me. It’s thanks to you that I’m alive, because I can breathe. It’s also thanks to you that I have felt loved, because I was able to give shade to the weary traveller. Your sap is in my sap, we are one thing.’


Does a young man, rejected by his first love, declare that love does not exist? The young man says to himself: ‘I’ll find someone better able to understand what I feel. And then I will be happy for the rest of my days.’


Wait patiently for the right moment to act. Do not let the next opportunity slip.


"Why We Don’t Remember: The Gift of This Journey"

"Why We Don’t Remember: The Gift of This Journey"
by Madisyn Taylor, The DailyOM
- Kahlil Gibran




"Past Life, Near Death Experience, Reincarnation Studies"
Rebirth scientific research:

BBC documentary on Near Death Experiences:

A baffled US homicide detective proves his past painter life!

CG Jung: Death is not the end & then What?

The Cardiologist on the Near-Death Experience 1

The Cardiologist on the Near-Death Experience 2

"My Purpose..."

“The long day wanes; the slow moon climbs; the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars...”

~ from “Ulysses,” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

The Daily "Near You?"

Anacortes, Washington, USA. Thanks for stopping by.

Chet Raymo, "ICBW IDTS"

by Chet Raymo


Well, that's one novel I will never read. At my age, I might as well try to learn Finnish as the language of TXT MSG. I've had a mobile (as they call them in Europe) for three years now, and I've yet to have an incoming call. Not surprising, since no one has my number, and even if they did the phone is never on. I had an instant message once, but it was in English, from another IM illiterate. The mobile is a handy thing, which I take with me when I travel. I have a cheapo calling plan that gives me 100 minutes for 90 days. I've never used more than 10.

I know a cultural revolution is passing me by, and IMHO a rather significant one. It's like we are all being raptured out of our bodies into the ether. In the new dispensation, protoplasm is less important than pixels. Me, I'll stay in the world where we still go eye-to-eye, hold hands, mush lips, and make babies in double beds.

A hundred years ago, it was the telephone, which "Scientific American" magazine then saw as "nothing less than a new organization of society- a state of things in which every individual, however secluded, will have at call every other individual in the community, to the saving of no end of social and business complications, of needless goings to and fro." Another pundit of that time proclaimed an "epoch of neighborship without propinquity." Or, as I suppose we'd say now, ILY W/O F2F. Propinquity survived the telephone. Propinquity will doubtless survive TXT MSG There are some things we can't get via that tiny scrolling screen. A decent haircut? A dozen red roses? A coronary bypass? BCNU...”

The Poet: Jeanne Lohmann, "Questions Before Dark"

"Questions Before Dark"

"Day ends, and before sleep
when the sky dies down, 
consider your altered state: 
has this day changed you?  
Are the corners sharper or rounded off? 
 Did you live with death?  
Make decisions that quieted?  
Find one clear word that fit? 
 At the sun's midpoint did you notice a pitch of absence,
bewilderment that invites the possible? 
 What did you learn from things you dropped
 and picked up and dropped again? 
Did you set a straw parallel to the river, 
let the flow carry you downstream?"

- Jeanne Lohmann,
"The Light of Invisible Bodies"