Daniel Estulin on the Bilderberg Group and the Venetian Black Nobility

DNA-Destroying Chip Being Embedded Into Mobile Phones

According to Dr. Boian Alexandrov at the Center for Nonlinear Studies at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, terahertz (THz) waves destroy human DNA. The waves literally unzip the helix strand. Now a team of technologists at UT Dallas are planning to take chips broadcasting THz waves and embed them into mobile phones for use as an imaging system for consumers, law enforcement and medical personnel… a potentially deadly technology that could eventually kill or sicken millions of people.

The controversial THz scanner technology used by the TSA at many of the nation’s airports is being adapted for cell phone use. Studies of terahertz radiation have caused experts to raise alarms over the significant health risks to humans.

Recently major media touted a new chip that permits the adaption of a THz generating device to be embedded into cellular phones.

Is the price for seeing through walls, a grisly death?

The excited press painted grand pictures of such technology being used by consumers to see through walls and objects, while health professionals like physcians might incorporate the technology to seek out small tumors inside patients without the need for invasive surgery.

THz radiation unzips the DNA molecule

In a breakthrough study conducted by Dr. Boian Alexandrov at the Center for Nonlinear Studies at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and a team of physicists, they discovered terrifying evidence that exposure to THz radiation builds cumulatively and affects human and animal tissue DNA. In essence, it tends to unzip the DNA molecule.

The Los Alamos scientists paper, DNA Breathing Dynamics in the Presence of a Terahertz Field reveals very disturbing—even shocking—evidence that THz radiation significantly damages the DNA of the people being directed through airport scanners and all TSA workers in close proximity to the machines.

Their synopsis: “We consider the influence of a terahertz field on the breathing dynamics of double-stranded DNA. We model the spontaneous formation of spatially localized openings of a damped and driven DNA chain, and find that linear instabilities lead to dynamic dimerization, while true local strand separations require a threshold amplitude mechanism. Based on our results we argue that a specific terahertz radiation exposure may significantly affect the natural dynamics of DNA, and thereby influence intricate molecular processes involved in gene expression and DNA replication.“

What all that means is the resonant effects of the THz waves bombarding humans unzips the double-stranded DNA molecule. This ripping apart of the twisted chain of DNA creates bubbles between the genes that can interfere with the processes of life itself: normal DNA replication and critical gene expression.

Likely to cause cancer

David J. Brenner, a Columbia University doctor and expert on the effects of radiation stated that it’s quite likely the TSA scanners will cause cancer in some individuals.

Source: Red Ice Creations

Twitter Apparently Not Handing Over Jack Without A Search Warrant

When last we checked in with the legal struggle over Occupy Wall Street and Twitter accounts, it didn’t look great for anyone looking to keep their DMs out of court. At issue: The state wants data associated with a protestor charged with disorderly conduct. A judge ruled the defense can’t fight a subpoena, because–as the legal thinking went–the information on Twitter belongs to the company, not to the individual user. And Twitter’s policies seem to suggest they’ll hand material over in the event of a subpoena.

But it appears it won’t be quite that simple for the DA’s office. Rather than complying with the order, Twitter just filed a motion to quash it.

We reached out to Twitter for comment and received a statement from Legal Counsel Ben Lee: “As we said in our brief, “Twitter’s Terms of Service make absolutely clear that its users *own* their content.” Our filing with the court reaffirms our steadfast commitment to defending those rights for our users.”

The motion identifies several problems with the order, starting with the idea users don’t own their tweets. Apparently, according to the company’s terms of service, users do retain rights to the content posted on the site, and the document “expressly permits users to challenge demands for their account records.” The motion also alleges that the order for Twitter to produce ”basic user information” compels the company to violate the Fourth Amendment (that would be the one regarding search and seizure), as well as the Stored Communications Act.

The document concludes that, “Twitter respectfully requests that the Court quash the Order and direct the District Attorney to request a search warrant for the desired records.”

Translation: Come at me, bro.

The ACLU’s blog explains the implications:

This is a big deal. Law enforcement agencies—both the federal government and state and city entities—are becoming increasingly aggressive in their attempts to obtain information about what people are doing on the Internet. And while the individual Internet users can try to defend their rights in the rare circumstances in which they find out about the requests before their information is turned over, that may not be enough.

For the curious and/or legally inclined, the motion is here.

Source: Beta Beat

Oracle v. Google and the Dangerous Implications of Treating APIs as Copyrightable

There has been no lack of ink spilled on the legal battle between Oracle and Google surrounding Google’s use of Java APIs in its Android OS. And no wonder, what with testimony by both Larrys (Page and Ellison), claims of damages up to $1 billion, and rampant speculation that a ruling in Oracle’s favor could change the way we all use the Internet. Today, we got our first taste of where this all might be heading: the jury came back with a finding that, assuming APIs are subject to copyright, Google has infringed at least some of Oracle's. But significant outstanding questions remain, including whether copyright can in fact apply (the judge alone will decide this) and whether Google made a legal fair use of those APIs (we believe it did).

What’s really at stake here? This first stage of the trial concerns whether Oracle can claim a copyright on Java’s APIs and, if so, whether Google infringes those copyrights. (In 2010, Oracle bought Sun Microsystems, which developed Java.) When it implemented the Android OS, Google wrote its own version of Java. But in order to allow developers to write their own programs for Android, Google relied on Java’s APIs. (For non-developers out there, APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) are specifications that allow programs to communicate with each other. So when you read an article online, and click on the icon to share that article via Twitter, for example, you are using a Twitter API that the site’s developer got directly from Twitter.)

Here’s the problem: Treating APIs as copyrightable would have a profound negative impact on interoperability, and, therefore, innovation. APIs are ubiquitous and fundamental to all kinds of program development. It is safe to say that all software developers use APIs to make their software work with other software. For example, the developers of an application like Firefox use APIs to make their application work with various OSes by asking the OS to do things like make network connections, open files, and display windows on the screen. Allowing a party to assert control over APIs means that a party can determine who can make compatible and interoperable software, an idea that is anathema to those who create the software we rely on everyday. Put clearly, the developer of a platform should not be able to control add-on software development for that platform.

Take, for example, a free and open source project like Samba, which runs the shared folders and network drives in millions of organizations. If Samba could be held to have infringed the Microsoft’s copyright in its SMB protocol and API, with which it inter-operates, it could find itself on the hook for astronomical damages or facing an injunction requiring that it stop providing its API and related services, leaving users to fend for themselves.

Another example is the AOL instant messaging program, which used a proprietary API. AOL tried to prevent people from making alternative IM programs that could speak to AOL's users. Despite that, others successfully built their own implementations of the API from the client's side. If copyright had given AOL a weapon to prevent interoperability by its competitors, the outcome for the public would have been unfortunate.

Setting aside the practical consequences, there’s a perfectly good legal reason not to treat APIs as copyrightable material: they are purely functional. The law is already clear that copyright cannot cover programming languages, which are merely mediums for creation (instead, copyright may potentially cover what one creatively writes in that language). Indeed, the European Court of Justice came to just that conclusion last week. (Ironically enough, when Sun Microsystems was an independent company, one of its lawyers wrote amicus briefs arguing that interoperability concerns should limit copyright protection for computer programs.)

Improvidently granting copyright protection to functional APIs would allow companies to dangerously hold up important interoperability functionality that developers and users rely on everyday. Let’s hope the judge agrees.

Source: Electronic Frontier Foundation

Food Matters

How Bitcoin may undo the Apple/Facebook 30% sales tax

As little as five years ago, virtual currencies only had a very niche role in the internet ecosystem. You might see one used to maintain the internal economy of a massively multiplayer online game, but that was just about it. There was simply no need for them, as video game purchases cost more than $40 and were generally done in retail stores. The other form of monetization was subscriptions, and these cost more than $10 per payment, an amount high enough that the transaction fees involved in transferring money through credit cards were bearable.

Then, however, something happened. As the smartphone revolution took over the digital world, a new market for casual games appeared, games which are made by independent developers making a few hundred thousand dollars at most and close to nothing on average and which rely on quantity to earn their largest gains – one of the most popular titles so far, Angry Birds, sells its different versions for $1-$2. The same happened in social media, releasing a completely new class of games based on playing them with your friends and relying on a different model to generate their income: micropayments. The core game would be free, but players who wanted to get ahead could buy additional in-game content or equipment for a low price per piece. Even in the traditional video game market, developers who could not compete with major game production studios for quality adopted microtransactions as their main business model. And such models work; the gamers that are drawn into such games the most may end up spending hundreds or even over a thousand on them, one small item at a time.

However, there is a problem: the credit card fees. Online money transmission services like credit cards and Paypal have a two-part fee structure, with a percentage component of 2-4% and a fixed fee component of 20-30 cents. For a $10 purchase, for example, paying with Paypal (2.9% + $0.30) requires a total fee of 69 cents, giving $9.41 to the payee. For a $2 purchase, however, the fee is 36 cents, or 18% of the purchase price, and for a $0.99 app that figure would almost double. For this reason, Apple’s App Store and social media gaming companies have come up with the same solution: pay into an account in lump sums and spend from there. With social media companies, since players would not necessarily know ahead of time which game they were going to spend their money on and might even want to only spend $2 on each of ten or twe

Apple, meanwhile, went with the centralized solution: require all apps sold for their platform to go through Apple’s centralized payment system, which generates considerable revenue as they take a 30% cut of all revenues. Some developers tried to bypass this restriction by sending their users to make in-app purchases elsewhere, but Apple eventually banned the practice. And Facebook, with its new Facebook Credits system, is seeking to do the same. Replacing the choice of competing virtual currencies with a mandate to use their own, they intend to extract the same 30% tax that Apple does from all revenues made within their ecosystem. Also, the move serves to help lock users in to Facebook itself, as independent currency providers would have gladly allowed users to spend their money at any social media platform they prefer while now quitting Facebook entails leaving your deposit behind. Also, much like credit card merchant agreements, Facebook’s new terms of service also prevent game developers from offering discounts to users making purchases outside of Facebook. The end result is that Facebook wins, and everyone else loses. In fact, as any economist would quickly point out, the harm to the users, developers and competing social media platforms is much greater than the gain to Facebook as the policy isn’t just a money transfer – it’s also a deadweight loss dampening the incentive for innovation. Some are so frustrated by this move that they have set up a website, stopfacebookcredits.com, to criticize the move and are even considering filing an antitrust lawsuit.

While some are only concerned about this specific application of Facebook’s near-monopoly power, moves like these are ultimately symptomatic, a mere part of a larger ongoing trend toward the proprietarization of the internet. The internet’s original infrastructure, largely developed by Tim Berners-Lee, was designed to be open and public so that anyone could use it, and it was this strength that caused protocols like HTML to win out over proprietary alternatives. Everyone was equal on the internet, and you did not need anyone’s permission to participate. For the first few years of the internet, this paradigm largely remained. Email was designed from the start to be federated, people maintained personal webpages under their own control and online forums were accessible to everyone. Now, however, the situation is slowly sliding in the opposite direction. The focus of our online activities drifted away from the internet to proprietary “walled gardens” built on top of the internet, accessible to no one but those who are already inside. In 2011, Google lost its position as the most visited site on the internet to Facebook, and its response was to build yet another walled garden, Google+. As the internet began to be monetized, there were no decentralized or federated protocols in the spirit of HTML to do so; instead, we rely on credit cards and Paypal. And these new giants are waking up to the potential to turn their newfound power into profit. Each individual move may be protested, fought and perhaps even banned, but the problem will only persist and grow as long as we deny the core principle that made the internet so strong in the first place: that the basic infrastructure on top of which everything else relies must be open and accessible to all.

There are signs of hope, as OpenID has become a fairly successful standard for authentication to online services, Diaspora has appeared as an alternative to Facebook and Google+ and credit cards and Paypal are under attack by Bitcoin. Indeed, if Bitcoin succeeds the very motivation behind the battle over Facebook Credits may cease to exist as no one would be willing to pay a central provider 30% of their profits. Once free is the norm, for better or for worse changing it is a steep uphill battle. But it is situations like these that remind us why such efforts are necessary in the first place, and why it does not suffice to simply shame the business or petition the government into giving users a temporary reprieve or marginal improvement. The internet is the greatest laboratory of innovation and driver of technological progress that the world has ever seen, and the reason for its initial success is not any central body pushing its development to extract a profit but the sheer openness and freedom of it all, and such freedom must be defended in order for it to survive.

Source: Bitcoin Magazine

Hang On – All Is Being Revealed

What a perfect analogy. The Truth is coming to light in so many areas right now and this excavation is so representative of this entire phenomenon. All along we thought these were just massive heads that were mysteriously placed here on Easter Island by a civilization gone by, for whatever esoteric purpose.

Only now just a few months ago we find out they’re whole enormous statues–which makes it even more fantastic. Joke’s on us!

Read more: Zen Gardner