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Katashi_itto

Katashi_itto's Journal
Katashi_itto's Journal
September 12, 2013

Tech analyst: NSA 'will kill the U.S. technology industry singlehandedly'


Alarm bells have been ringing in the U.S. tech industry since Edward Snowden's leaks of National Security Agency documents first began to surface. With each new revelation, those bells get louder as, increasingly, would-be overseas customers are looking elsewhere. The news that the NSA was working with some U.S. technology companies to create so-called backdoors into security products heightens their problem.
Just as the Shenzhen, China-based Huawei lost business after the report urged U.S. companies not to use its equipment, the NSA disclosures may reduce U.S. technology sales overseas by as much as $180 billion, or 25 percent of information technology services, by 2016, according to Forrester Research Inc., a research group in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
“The National Security Agency will kill the U.S. technology industry singlehandedly,” Rob Enderle, a technology analyst inSan Jose, California, said in an interview. “These companies may be just dealing with the difficulty in meeting our numbers through the end of the decade.” [...]

Germany’s government has called for home-grown Internet and e-mail companies. Brazil is analyzing whether privacy laws were violated by foreign companies. India may ban e-mail services from Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc., the Wall Street Journal reported. In June, China Daily labeled U.S. companies, including Cisco, a “terrible security threat.”

“One year ago we had the same concern about Huawei,” James Staten, an analyst at Forrester, said in an interview. “Now this is the exact flipping of that circumstance.”

If there's a sliver of good news in any of this, it's that the tech industry does hold some real power with the U.S. Congress and could be a critical ally for privacy and civil liberty advocates. We saw it in the fight against the anti-technology, anti-privacy SOPA/PIPA legislation. It was the engagement of tech companies that really swung the fight for privacy advocates to kill the bad bills.
Now, Google, Facebook and Yahoo are engaged in trying to bring some transparency to the demands that the NSA makes of them. They've petitioned the FISA court for permission to publish at least some information about the requests they’ve received from the NSA. That's because they're customers are demanding transparency. If those demands keep coming, and if potential customers continue to be turned away, the tech industry could start clamoring for Congress and the administration to make real reforms.


http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/09/11/1238125/-Tech-analyst-NSA-will-kill-the-U-S-technology-industry-singlehandedly
September 7, 2013

Outlast Trailer: Scarier than Amnesia?



Been playing it. I have had to play it in small doses. It's unbearable tension....
September 7, 2013

The Friday Night Magical Music Video

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It's a blue, bright blue Saturday, hey, hey
And the pain has starting to slip away, hey, hey
I'm in a backless dress on a pastel ward that's shining
Think I want you still but it may be pills at work

Do you really wanna know how I was dancing on the floor?
I was trying to phone you when I'm crawling out the door
I'm amazed at you, the things you say that you don't do
Why don't you ring?

I was feeling lonely, feeling blue
Feeling like I needed you
Like I'm walking up surrounded by me
A&E

It's a blue, bright blue Saturday, hey, hey
And the pain has starting to slip away, hey, hey
I'm in a backless dress on a pastel ward that's shining
Think I want you still but it may be pills at work

How did I get to accident emergency?
All I wanted was you to take me out high

I was feeling lonely, feeling blue
Feeling like I needed you
Like I hoped you'd call and hoped you'd see me
A&E


I always thought the intent was obvious, but apparently not ... the song is quite sad. It's about a girl who has just gone through a break up and overdoses because she's sad and lonely and misses her ex. She wakes up in A & E (the backless dress is a hospital gown) and hoped that maybe he'd stop by and see her ... but he never does. He never even calls to see if she's ok.
September 4, 2013

Syria Facts: The Complete Guide to All the Global Players Involved in the Syrian Conflict

The news media has been running wild lately over reports that the U.S. is "going to war" with Syria. The flurry began with Secretary of State John Kerry’s bold comments on Monday and Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel’s subsequent comments that the U.S. was “ready to go” should President Barack Obama order military action. By “ready to go,” the administration is talking about providing air support to the Syrian rebels much as it did for the Libyan rebellion to oust Muammar Gaddafi two years earlier.

I still have my skepticism, though. If the U.S. were going to attack Syria in any way that would alter the balance of power in the Syrian civil war, it would not be telegraphing such strikes. But Obama’s red line on chemical weapons has trapped the administration; it does not want to militarily intervene, but it cannot sit idly by after having been so explicit about what would trigger military action (or the bluff of it anyway). What the administration is really trying to accomplish is convincing a war-weary American public that this will not be a protracted affair while giving Washington time to try to secure a broad coalition of support at the United Nations, NATO and/or with the Arab League.


But while isolationists (or non-interventionists) are panicking over a possible course of action that doesn’t involve boots on the ground, what I find ironic is that the U.S., along with several other actors across the globe, have already had a covert presence within Syria for the last two years – supplying everything from intelligence to weapons to both sides of the conflict. I think it’s important to remind everyone exactly which external actors are involved in this civil war as well as what their stake is in the conflict. This is not just a battle among Syrians. This is a battle between Saudi Arabia and Iran, Iran and the U.S., Turkey and Iran, Russia and the U.S., and others with each player pursuing very different interests.

SAUDI ARABIA
Saudi Arabia and Iran are locked in a centuries-old ideological conflict, where fighters today are drawing their motivation from seventh century battles. Saudi support for the Syrian opposition is motivated by a decades-long desire to break the alliance between Syria and the Islamic Republic of Iran, Saudi Arabia’s chief rival for dominance in the Persian Gulf and the wider Middle East.

Saudi reaction to the Arab Spring has been two-fold: Containing the unrest before it reaches Saudi territory, and ensuring that Iran does not benefit from any changes to the regional balance of power. In this context, the outbreak of the Syrian uprising in the spring of 2011 came as a golden opportunity for the Saudis to strike at Iran’s key Arab ally. While Saudi Arabia lacks the military capacity to intervene directly, it has been using its oil wealth to arm Syrian rebels and, in the event that Assad falls, ensure his regime is replaced by a Sunni-friendly government.

Read More

August 26, 2013

Will Smith and Family React to Miley Cyrus's performance....



Will Smith and Family


Closer



And everyone was like this:



August 26, 2013

NSA broke encryption on UN communications: report

The US National Security Agency broke the encryption securing the United Nations’ internal video conferencing at its New York headquarters, German news weekly Der Spiegel reported Sunday, citing secret NSA documents.

The move provided the agency with “a dramatic improvement of data from video teleconferences and the ability to decrypt this data traffic,” the magazine quoted an NSA document as saying.

It said the NSA, which for months has been at the centre of revelations by intelligence leaker Edward Snowden, broke the encryption in the summer of 2012 and within nearly three weeks, had bumped up the number of decrypted communications from 12 to 458.

The NSA, on one occasion, also allegedly caught the Chinese secret services eavesdropping on the UN in 2011, it added, quoting an internal report.

Der Spiegel also claims that the US agency kept tabs on the European Union after it moved into new offices in New York in September 2012. Among documents provided by Snowden were plans of the EU’s premises, which the NSA codenamed “Apalachee.”

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/08/25/nsa-broke-encryption-on-un-communications-report/

August 21, 2013

Fukushima +18 months - What's a "melt out?" (7 min) .



After reactor #1's meltdown, the molten fuel (corium) melted through its steel containment vessel. Then the corium gathered into a big blob which has been burning through the concrete floor below. This brief animation shows most of what's happened at Fukushima, except for the reactor buildings' explosions.

"Tepco believes the uranium fuel of unit 1 at Fukushima I almost entirely melted its way through the bottom of the thick steel reactor vessel and poured to the floor of the containment structure, eating through a portion of the concrete floor of that area.."


"Creating Corium in the Lab"
Video of Lab created Corium here:

This video shows the top view of a churning molten pool of uranium oxide at 2000°C (3600°F) seen during an experiment at Argonne. Corium behaves much like lava.
http://www.ne.anl.gov/capabilities/rsta/cci/#fragment-1
August 15, 2013

Hurricane App



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From your mobile phone, call "**REDCROSS" (**73327677) and we will send you a link to download the hurricane tracking app to your iPhone or Android device or you can download them directly from the iTunes or Google Play app stores.


August 4, 2013

Hamburger chef Jamie Oliver has just won a battle against one of the largest fast food chains

Thank You to Bella Capozzi


Hamburger chef Jamie Oliver has just won a battle against one of the largest fast food chains in the world. After Oliver showed how McDonald’s hamburgers are made, the franchise announced it will change its recipe.

According to Oliver, the fatty parts of beef are “washed” in ammonium hydroxide and used in the filling of the burger. Before this process, according to the presenter, the food is deemed unfit for human consumption.

According to the chef and presenter, Jamie Oliver, who has undertaken a war against the fast food industry: “Basically, we’re taking a product that would be sold in the cheapest way for dogs, and after this process, is being given to human beings.”

Besides the low quality of the meat, the ammonium hydroxide is harmful to health. Oliver calls it “the pink slime process.”

“Why would any sensible human being put meat filled with ammonia in the mouths of their children?” asked the chef, who wages a war against the fast food industry.

In one of his initiatives, Oliver demonstrates to children how nuggets are made. After selecting the best parts of the chicken, the remains (fat, skin and internal organs) are processed for these fried foods.

The company, Arcos Dorados, the franchise manager in Latin America, said such a procedure is not practiced in the region. The same applies to the product in Ireland and the UK, where they use meat from local suppliers.

In the United States, Burger King and Taco Bell had already abandoned the use of ammonia in their products. The food industry uses ammonium hydroxide as an anti-microbial agent in meats, which has allowed McDonald’s to use otherwise “inedible meat.”

Even more disturbing is that because ammonium hydroxide is considered part of the “component in a production procedure” by the USDA, consumers may not know when the chemical is in their food.

On the official website of McDonald’s, the company claims that their meat is cheap because, while serving many people every day, they are able to buy from their suppliers at a lower price, and offer the best quality products.

In addition, the franchise denied that the decision to change the recipe is related to Jamie Oliver’s campaign. On the site, McDonald’s has admitted that they have abandoned the beef filler from its burger patties.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2092127/Jamie-Oliver-Victory-McDonalds-stops-using-pink-slime-burger-recipe.html

Profile Information

Gender: Male
Current location: New Orleans
Member since: Wed Jul 20, 2011, 09:14 AM
Number of posts: 10,175

About Katashi_itto

Well lets see, stuff about me... Veteran, Navy Admiral's Staff 2nd Fleet. I practice Kendo as my primary martial art. I am also a ranking Iaidoist (Japanese Sword). Working on a Master's in International Forensics' Accounting. Filmmaker, originally commercials, now working on my first feature comedy film, should be released Summer or Fall of 2016.
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