Last week the alarm was raised when the House of Representatives passed the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act or CISPA, which would essentially allow a free flow of information between private companies and the federal government. Fears were heightened, as those of us who live our lives online had some serious concerns about how this bill would destroy our right to privacy by allowing the government to have access to our private account information without our knowledge. After a seemingly endless barrage of tweets and status updates urging individuals to get angry, the bill was shelved today the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. It will mostly likely take months for a new cyber security bill to be drafted.
While Congress is adamant that file sharing is an integral and indeed crucial part of cyber security, it remains difficult, if not impossible for law makers to draft legislative language allowing for us to catch would be hackers without encroaching on individual privacy rights. Currently top American intelligence officials are warning that our nation is experiencing a greater threat from hackers than we are from traditional terrorists. This combined with more and more corporations lobbying for tougher anti-piracy legislation means that our elected officials are going to have to solve this conundrum sooner rather than later.
A large reason for the failure of CISPA to make it to a floor vote on the Senate was the threat of a veto by President Obama if the bill reached his desk. While the President should be keeping the issue of national security at the forefront of his mind, it's refreshing to think that in his second term Barack Obama is still focusing on the rights of the people. With legislation involving the internet having far more support among Republicans than Democrats I would not be surprised if the House waited a few more years before reattempting this legislation in the hopes that the odds will be more in their favor. Of course at the same time all it would take is one major cyber attack for the tides to turn in support of an online Big Brother.
In Kreuzberg, Berlin, virtual currency Bitcoin has expanded off the internet to become a favoured medium of exchange in real shops and bars. Joerg Platzer, the owner of bar Room 77 is helping to establish what he believes to be the world's first Bitcoin local economy
A shocking report detailing horrific atrocities committed against Brazilian Indians in the 1940s, 50s and 60s has resurfaced – 45 years after it was mysteriously ‘destroyed’ in a fire.
The Figueiredo report was commissioned by the Minister of the Interior in 1967 and caused an international outcry after it revealed crimes against Brazil’s indigenous population at the hands of powerful landowners and the government’s own Indian Protection Service (SPI). The report led to the foundation of tribal rights organization Survival International two years later.
The 7,000-page document, compiled by public prosecutor Jader de Figueiredo Correia, detailed mass murder, torture, enslavement, bacteriological warfare, sexual abuse, land theft and neglect waged against Brazil’s indigenous population. Some tribes were completely wiped out as a result and many more were decimated.
The report was recently rediscovered in Brazil’s Museum of the Indian and will now be considered by Brazil’s National Truth Commission, which is investigating human rights violations which occurred between 1947 and 1988.
One of the many gruesome examples in the report describes the ‘massacre of the 11th parallel’, in which dynamite was thrown from a small plane onto the village of ‘Cinta Larga’ Indians below. Thirty Indians were killed – just two survived to tell the tale.
A Karajá couple with their baby, who has died of flu.
Other examples include the poisoning of hundreds of Indians with sugar laced with arsenic, and severe methods of torture such as slowly crushing the victims’ ankles with an instrument known as the ‘trunk’.
Figueiredo’s findings led to an international outcry. In a 1969 article ‘Genocide’ in the British Sunday Times based on the report, writer Norman Lewis wrote, ‘From fire and sword to arsenic and bullets – civilisation has sent six million Indians to extinction.’ The article moved a small group of concerned citizens to set up Survival International the same year.
As a result of the report, Brazil launched a judicial enquiry, and 134 officials were charged with over 1,000 crimes. Thirty-eight officials were dismissed, but no-one was ever jailed for the atrocities.
The SPI was subsequently disbanded and replaced by FUNAI, Brazil’s National Indian Foundation. But while large swathes of Indian land have since been demarcated and protected, Brazil’s tribes continue to battle the invasion and destruction of their lands by illegal loggers, ranchers and settlers and the loss of land from the government’s aggressive growth program which aims to construct dozens of large hydroelectric dams and open up large-scale mining in their territories.
Survival International’s Director Stephen Corry said today, ‘The Figueiredo report makes gruesome reading, but in one way, nothing has changed: when it comes to the murder of Indians, impunity reigns. Gunmen routinely kill tribespeople in the knowledge that there’s little risk of being brought to justice – none of the assassins responsible for shooting Guarani and Makuxi tribal leaders have been jailed for their crimes. It’s hard not to suspect that racism and greed are at the root of Brazil’s failure to defend its indigenous citizens’ lives.’
Note to editors:
- Extracts from the report are available on request.
An exciting and new water treatment breakthrough has been announced that will now make the removal of fluoride from the drinking water supplies of the world’s poorest people more affordable than ever.
Researchers from Rajasthan University in India have discovered that the Tulasi plant, also known as Holy Basil, can be used to significantly reduce the amount of fluoride in drinking water.
At present, the most reliable methods used to remove excessive fluoride from drinking water are either too expensive or not suitable for the environments where they are needed most.
The method discovered by researchers from Rajasthan University is safe, cheap and readily available, making it an ideal alternative for communities who can’t afford to use the more advanced techniques of removing fluoride that are readily available in the West.
An experiment was conducted in the Yellareddyguda village of Narketpally Mandal. The researchers soaked 75mg of Tulasi leaves in 100ml of water that contained 7.4 parts per million of fluoride in the water.
After only soaking the Tulasi leaves for eight hours, it was discovered that the level of fluoride in the water was reduced from 7.4 parts per million, to only 1.1 parts per million.
At present, the World Health Organization recommends that the safe level of fluoride in drinking water is between 0.5 to 1 parts per million.
This new water treatment option could now provide the world’s poorest people an opportunity to remove excessive fluoride from their drinking water supplies.
However, more research is still needed to identify and validate the effectiveness of using Tulasi leaves as a means of removing fluoride from drinking water supplies.
Considering the cost-prohibitive nature of other more reliable water treatment techniques, if the Tulasi plant is conclusively proven to be effective in removing fluoride from drinking water, then we may witness a revolution in water treatment, providing options to areas where none currently exist.
Launching a lawsuit against the very company that is responsible for a farmer suicide every 30 minutes, 5 million farmers are now suing Monsanto for as much as 6.2 billion euros (around 7.7 billion US dollars). The reason? As with many other cases, such as the ones that led certain farming regions to be known as the ‘suicide belt’, Monsanto has been reportedly taxing the farmers to financial shambles with ridiculous royalty charges. The farmers state that Monsanto has been unfairly gathering exorbitant profits each year on a global scale from “renewal” seed harvests, which are crops planted using seed from the previous year’s harvest.
The practice of using renewal seeds dates back to ancient times, but Monsanto seeks to collect massive royalties and put an end to the practice. Why? Because Monsanto owns the very patent to the genetically modified seed, and is charging the farmers not only for the original crops, but the later harvests as well. Eventually, the royalties compound and many farmers begin to struggle with even keeping their farm afloat. It is for this reason that India slammed Monsanto with groundbreaking ‘biopiracy’ charges in an effort to stop Monsanto from ‘patenting life’.
Jane Berwanger, a lawyer for the farmers who went on record regarding the case, told the Associted Press:
“Monsanto gets paid when it sell the seeds. The law gives producers the right to multiply the seeds they buy and nowhere in the world is there a requirement to pay (again). Producers are in effect paying a private tax on production.”
The findings echo what thousands of farmers have experienced in particularly poor nations, where many of the farmers are unable to stand up to Monsanto. Back in 2008, the Daily Mail covered what is known as the ‘GM Genocide’, which is responsible for taking the lives of over 17,683 Indian farmers in 2009 alone. After finding that their harvests were failing and they started to enter economic turmoil, the farmers began ending their own lives — oftentimes drinking the very same insecticide that Monsanto provided them with.
As the information continues to surface on Monsanto’s crimes, further lawsuits will begin to take effect. After it was ousted in January that Monsanto was running illegal ‘slave-like’ working rings, more individuals became aware of just how seriously Monsanto seems to disregard their workers — so why would they care for the health of their consumers? In April, another group of farmers sued Monsanto for ‘knowingly poisoning’ workers and causing ‘devastating birth defects’.
Will endless lawsuits from millions of seriously affected individuals be the end of Monsanto?
An easy-to-use EEG cap could expand the number of ways to interact with your mobile devices.
One day, we may be able to check e-mail or call a friend without ever touching a screen or even speaking to a disembodied helper. Samsung is researching how to bring mind control to its mobile devices with the hope of developing ways for people with mobility impairments to connect to the world. The ultimate goal of the project, say researchers in the company’s Emerging Technology Lab, is to broaden the ways in which all people can interact with devices.
In collaboration with Roozbeh Jafari, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at the University of Texas, Dallas, Samsung researchers are testing how people can use their thoughts to launch an application, select a contact, select a song from a playlist, or power up or down a Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1. While Samsung has no immediate plans to offer a brain-controlled phone, the early-stage research, which involves a cap studded with EEG-monitoring electrodes, shows how a brain-computer interface could help people with mobility issues complete tasks that would otherwise be impossible.
Brain-computer interfaces that monitor brainwaves through EEG have already made their way to the market. NeuroSky’s headset uses EEG readings as well as electromyography to pick up signals about a person’s level of concentration to control toys and games (see “Next-Generation Toys Read Brain Waves, May Help Kids Focus”). Emotiv Systems sells a headset that reads EEG and facial expression to enhance the experience of gaming (see “Mind-Reading Game Controller”).
To use EEG-detected brain signals to control a smartphone, the Samsung and UT Dallas researchers monitored well-known brain activity patterns that occur when people are shown repetitive visual patterns. In their demonstration, the researchers found that people could launch an application and make selections within it by concentrating on an icon that was blinking at a distinctive frequency.
Robert Jacob, a human-computer interaction researcher at Tufts University, says the project fits into a broader effort by researchers to find more ways for communicating with small devices like smartphones. “This is one of the ways to expand the type of input you can have and still stick the phone in the pocket,” he says.
Finding new ways to interact with mobile devices has driven the project, says Insoo Kim, Samsung’s lead researcher. “Several years ago, a small keypad was the only input modality to control the phone, but nowadays the user can use voice, touch, gesture, and eye movement to control and interact with mobile devices,” says Kim. “Adding more input modalities will provide us with more convenient and richer ways of interacting with mobile devices.”
Still, it will take considerable research for a brain-computer interface to become a new way of interacting with smartphones, says Kim. The initial focus for the team was to develop signal processing methods that could extract the right information to control a device from weak and noisy EEG signals, and to get those methods to work on a mobile device.
Jafari’s research is addressing another challenge—developing more convenient EEG sensors. Classic EEG systems have gel or wet contact electrodes, which means a bit of liquid material has to come between a person’s scalp and the sensor. “Depending on how many electrodes you have, this can take up to 45 minutes to set up, and the system is uncomfortable,” says Jafari. His sensors, however, do not require a liquid bridge and take about 10 seconds to set up, he says. But they still require the user to wear a cap covered with wires.
The concept of a dry EEG is not new, and it can carry the drawback of lower signal quality, but Jafari says his group is improving the system’s processing of brain signals. Ultimately, if reliable EEG contacts were convenient to use and slimmed down, a brain-controlled device could look like “a cap that people wear all day long,” says Jafari.
Kim says the speed with which a user of the EEG-control system can control the tablet depends on the user. In the team’s limited experiments, users could, on average, make a selection once every five seconds with an accuracy ranging from 80 to 95 percent.
“It is nearly impossible to accurately predict what the future might bring,” says Kim, “but given the broad support for initiatives such as the U.S. BRAIN initiative, improvements in man-machine interfaces seem inevitable” (see “Interview with BRAIN Project Pioneer: Miyoung Chun”).
The world's most evil corporation, Monsanto, has taken a new interest in conventional food crops, which the company is currently trying to seize ownership of in Europe by exploiting a little-known loophole in European patent law. And a petition created by the human rights group Avaaz, which has already garnered nearly two million signatures in less than two weeks, may help stop this unscrupulous takeover of food by drawing global attention to it.
According to Avaaz, European patent law is currently written in such a way as to allow corporations the option to literally patent natural plant varieties and conventional plant breeding methods, even if they have been utilized by farmers and gardeners for centuries. As a result, Monsanto and others are beginning to file for these patents, which could allow them to eventually require farmers to pay royalties and buy seed every year for non-GMO, natural crops.
"Companies like Monsanto have found loopholes in European law to have exclusive rights over conventional seeds," explains the Avaaz petition. "Many farmers and politicians are already against this -- we just need to bring in people power to pressure these countries to keep Monsanto's hands off our food."
Coordinated effort required to stop Monsanto takeover of food supply
Avaaz is calling on powerful European nations like Germany, France and the Netherlands to take action now to stop this corporate takeover of the seeds of life. Since grassroots awareness of Monsanto's seed-seizing tactics is already strong in each of these countries, it would be prudent for them to collectively strike back against this affront to food freedom by voting to eliminate the patent law loopholes that could allow the biotech bullies to assume ownership of nature.
"As concerned citizens, we urge you to take the lead to fix European patent law by calling on the Administrative Council of the European Patent Organization to close the loopholes that allow corporations to patent plant varieties and conventional breeding methods," states the petition, as directed specifically to the governments of France, Germany and the Netherlands, all of which are member states of the European Patent Convention.
"Clear and effective safeguards and prohibitions are needed to protect consumers, farmers and breeders from the corporate takeover of our food chain."
According to Avaaz, the petition went viral quickly after being established on April 9, 2013, achieving one million signatures in less than two days. And you can help keep the momentum strong by not only signing the petition yourself, but sharing it with your friends and family.
You can also participate in the official March Against Monsanto, a global grassroots effort to expose the truth about the dangers of GMOs; question the duplicitous complacency of governments with regards to the GMO issue; and advocate for a global boycott of Monsanto-owned companies. You can learn more about March Against Monsanto by visiting the group's Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/events/147274678766425/
