Wednesday 7 January 2015

The European Union Times

Slur platform wants to be new online market for leaked info

Posted: 06 Jan 2015 02:37 PM PST

The new Slur platform, an open source, decentralized marketplace for selling secret information for bitcoin, aims to protect whistleblowers by granting anonymity to both buyers and sellers, what WikiLeaks failed to do, the platform developer told RT.
The Slur platform will have no restrictions on types of information that can be sold or the motives behind the selling, said Thom Lauret, spokesman for u99 Group, the developer of the platform, which will be launched in July.
Sellers will encrypt and upload their data anonymously and only the winners of the auction will receive decryption keys, this will give protection to whistleblowers, he said.
The information WikiLeaks distributes “always came at a price,” said Lauret, adding that at stake was the whistleblowers’ freedom, their assets and lives. He claimed that the Slur platform will protect the material interests of its whistleblowers.
WikiLeaks which was officially launched in 2007 and since then has released thousands of sensitive documents in its quest for transparency. The leaks have contained classified materials from Afghan war logs to Guantanamo files.
Similar to WikiLeaks, Slur wants to expose information that will have the power to “decimate the authority and resources” of governments and corporations, he said.
RT: Slur as much as WikiLeaks stands for public’s free access to the truth. How free is it when people have to pay?
Thom Lauret: You are correct in that the truth will come at a price. But then the information WikiLeaks distributes always came at a price. Until recently that was at the expense of the whistleblowers. They paid with their freedom, with their assets and by risking their lives. Slur introduces a balanced system that protects the material interests of whistleblowers in exchange for the risks that they take. The Slur marketplace is not exclusively for compensating whistleblowers, however. It’s a general platform for selling secret information regardless of motives. But several features of the Slur marketplace were created with the public interest in mind. Crowd bidding for instance introduces a dynamic where the public can pool their funds into a single bid and use the collective financial leverage of the group to reveal secrets that perhaps would not otherwise have become accessible. The crowd bidding dynamic can also deal a crippling economic penalty to any organization intent on suppressing a leak by winning their own secrets at auction.
RT: How do bidders know that the information they purchase is something they need?
TL: The winner of an auction has an opportunity to view the information before the seller gets paid with a network protocol holding the funds in Escrow. If the information isn’t genuine or not what was promised then it is possible to file a dispute. In that case, five randomly selected users on the network will be allowed to view the information and will vote on to whom the disputed funds should go.
RT: What effect will the introduction of the Slur project have on the online community?
TL: We hope that when the online community witnesses firsthand how convenient and profitable it has become to sell their private information and how that same information can then be turned against them. But they will see the benefit in and take the appropriate steps to protect their privacy – such as encrypting their communication and shunning services like Google and Facebook that for the past decade have been selling every detail of their users’ personal life to third parties for profit.
RT: If this Slur platform allows users to trade classified documents and court records, won’t it be illegal?
TL: For the users that depends on the jurisdiction in their location. But even in locations where participation is illegal the law is unenforceable since the market shields users’ anonymity. Source code is considered protective free speech in the US, therefore it is not illegal for us to write the program so long as we don’t profit from the trades between the users – and we do not.
RT: Do you think this has the potential for abuse – with governments and corporations obtaining game-changing information about their enemies or allies?
TL: In the short term, governments and corporations can use the market to their advantage. But in the long-term it will decimate their authority and resources. So we don’t consider such scenarios as abuse. There are no restrictions with regard to the types of information which can be sold because the central objective of the Slur project is to undermine and destabilize the establishment.
RT: The NSA has been trying to go after Tor users for a while now, but seemingly with little success. Do you think enough has been done to ensure this project will be NSA surveillance proof?
TL: The Tor network stands secure to the best of our knowledge, but we have taken the opportunity to armor the protocol further since this new application obviously will become a high priority target for intelligence agencies. In addition to the encryption Tor uses peers on the Slur network will have another layer of encryption based on a different line of mathematics. We’ve also built an open-source processor with security features designed to protect both the Tor relay and slow market applications. This is achieved by separating those processes from the host operating system with hardware-anchored cryptographic isolation. The system on chip is based on an OpenSPARC T1 by Sun Microsystems with substantial enhancements to the hypervisor and two cryptographic co-processors. That will be released in about a month and the designs for the development board and the logic of the system on chip will be of course open source.
Source

Argentine Supreme Court clears 9/11 truther extradition

Posted: 06 Jan 2015 02:36 PM PST

In an unprecedented move, the Argentinean Supreme Court under the pressure of the US Justice Department agreed to extradite Kurt Sonnenfeld, a former Federal Emergency Management Agency official who revealed the US government’s connection with the 9/11 attacks. Sonnenfeld has been living in Buenos Aires for more than 10 years and according to the Denver district attorney he is charged with killing his wife back in 2002. The former agent, however, claims his wife killed herself and that prosecutors framed him for her death to prevent the truth about 9/11 from coming to light Sonnenfeld disclosed hours of classified footage and wrote a book entitled “The Persecuted” recalling the facts that eventually transformed him into one of the worst US enemies. According to him, the US government not only knew about the attacks on the World Trade Center, but also had a role. Human rights organizations blasted the Supreme Court decision.
Although the Supreme Court ruled the extradition request of Kurt Sonnenfeld admissible, it is up to the Argentinean President to decide whether to carry on with the sentence or to grant him political asylum.
Human rights organizations affirmed they are currently conducting last minute negotiations with the government to accept Sonnenfeld’s plea to stay in the country.
The extradition of Mr. Sonnenfeld stirs up new tensions between Argentina and the US, and the final word from President Kirchner is now eagerly awaited both by the US embassy and his closest relatives.

Ebola lockdown in Sierra Leone extended for 2 weeks

Posted: 06 Jan 2015 02:30 PM PST

A woman walks past signs warning of Ebola in Freetown, Sierra Leone.

Authorities in Sierra Leone have extended the Ebola lockdown in the northern Tonkolili district of the West African country for two weeks in a bid to contain the outbreak.
“The lockdown is extended for another two weeks to intensify monitoring efforts by all sectors in the district as we need this mopping up operation until January 17,” Tonkolili coordinator Salieu Bah said on Sunday.
He also added that people had been “reluctant to comply with health rules” by “late reporting of suspected Ebola cases and undertaking secret burials.”
A five-day lockdown had been announced by the government in the badly-hit north of the country late December.
The lockdown was extended as the government adopted “additional screening measures” at the international airport in the capital Freetown, after two workers seemingly caught the disease.
Sierra Leone’s Health Minister Abubakarr Fofanah said the monitoring of workers at the airport would be done “on a 24-hour basis to detect any suspicion of Ebola on a worker or traveler.”
“A case of Ebola was detected and confirmed … on Friday involving a person who worked at the airport up to mid-December but had not worked since that time,” the National Ebola Response Center (NERC) said.
Another airport worker who had been in contact with the aforementioned person has not come to work since Christmas Day, apparently due to developing the disease.
The Ebola outbreak has killed nearly 8,000 people around the world, almost all of them in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea, the three West African countries hardest hit by the disease, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Friday.
Ebola is a form of hemorrhagic fever, whose symptoms are diarrhea, vomiting, and bleeding. The virus spreads through direct contact with infected blood, feces, or sweat. It can be also spread through sexual contact or the unprotected handling of contaminated corpses.
Source

Bill Gates Wants People to Drink Poop Water

Posted: 06 Jan 2015 02:26 PM PST

Billionaire Bill Gates wants to quench the world’s thirst. But instead of inventing a new method of utilizing rain water, the computer programmer wants people to drink recycled poop.
In his latest article on his blog site GatesNotes, the co-founder of Microsoft unconvincingly tries to sell the idea that drinking processed shit water is a good thing.
“I watched the piles of feces go up the conveyer belt and drop into a large bin,” Gates casually describes. “They made their way through the machine, getting boiled and treated. A few minutes later I took a long taste of the end result: a glass of delicious drinking water.”
“The water tasted as good as any I’ve had out of a bottle,” Gates declares in an obvious attempt to overcome the natural human reaction of revulsion. “And having studied the engineering behind it, I would happily drink it every day. It’s that safe.”
While the idea of Bill Gates sipping on a glass of fresh poop water may be tremendously humorous, the sip takes a more menacing turn upon the realization that the billionaire is actually considering recycled water as a solution for eliminating human waste in poor countries.
Gates, via his tax-free globalist front organization The Gates Foundation, is providing seed money for treatment facilities that specialize in transforming poo into water and electricity.
According to Gates, drinking water derived from feces is necessary because toilets in third world countries don’t drain properly and because people in those areas “simply defecate out in the open.”
“The waste contaminates drinking water for millions of people, with horrific consequences: Diseases caused by poor sanitation kill some 700,000 children every year, and they prevent many more from fully developing mentally and physically,” Gates says.
Toilets aren’t viable because they “require a massive infrastructure of sewer lines and treatment plants that just isn’t feasible in many poor countries,” Gates argues, pointing to poop-recycling water plants as an “ingenious” solution.
Of course, money is also an incentive.
“The entrepreneur that owns this processor will get paid for the input, the sludge, and that same entrepreneur would get paid for the outputs, the electricity, the water and the ash,” explains bio-energy engineer Peter Janicki.
Thankfully, “It might be many years before the processor is being used widely,” Gates says, but the former CEO of Microsoft indicates he’s committed to fulfilling his shit-drinking vision.
“It’s the ultimate example of that old expression: one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.”
Source

Fracking caused Earthquake boom in Ohio town

Posted: 06 Jan 2015 01:13 PM PST

In March 2014, hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, caused 77 earthquakes in a small Ohio town that had no previous experience with seismic activity, according to a new study. One quake was large enough to be felt in neighboring areas.
Fracking in Poland Township, Ohio was halted two days after the area was hit with a magnitude-3 earthquake along a hidden fault in rock which was deep beneath a natural gas well in the Utica Shale, according to research published in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America.
The study’s authors said the magnitude-3 quake was “one the largest earthquakes ever induced by hydraulic fracturing in the United States.”
All 77 quakes occurred between March 4-12, the study found.
Besides the magnitude-3 quake, the study reported that most of the seismic activity was not felt by Poland Township’s population, which numbered 14,960 in the 2010 census.
No previous seismic activity had occurred in Poland Township, which sits near the Pennsylvania border, and the quakes stopped once fracking operations were put on hold, according to lead study author Robert Skoumal, a graduate student in seismology at Miami University in Ohio.
To unleash oil or natural gas, fracking requires blasting large volumes of highly pressurized water, sand, and other chemicals into layers of rock. The contents of fracking fluid include chemicals that the energy industry and many government officials will not name, yet they insist the chemicals do not endanger human health, contradicting findings by scientists and environmentalists. Once used, toxic fracking wastewater is then either stored in deep underground wells, disposed of in open pits for evaporation, sprayed into waste fields or used over again.
Fracking has been linked to groundwater contamination, an uptick in earthquakes in other states, exacerbation of drought conditions and a host of health concerns for humans and the local environment.
Ohio and many other US states, including Oklahoma and Texas, have been subject to intense amounts of fracking in recent years, as the effects of the process have caused controversy from coast to coast.
For instance, a separate study released in October found that fracking had a direct connection to some 400 micro-earthquakes in the eastern Ohio town of Canton.
Last month, New York became the first US state to ban fracking.
“I cannot support high volume hydraulic fracturing in the great state of New York,” said Howard Zucker, acting New York State Health Commissioner. He equated fracking to second-hand smoke, the health risks of which were not fully understood until many years of scientific studies were conducted.
A fracking ban was recently instituted in Denton, Texas, a town of 123,000 located on top of the natural gas goldmine that is the Barnett Shale formation, the birthplace of the much-maligned oil and gas extraction method.
Meanwhile, dozens of other US cities, towns, villages, and counties have passed measures against the practice, according to Food and Water Watch.
In November, cities in Ohio voted on fracking ban measures, with mixed results. The cities of Gates Mills, Kent, and Youngstown, all located in northeast Ohio, near Poland Township, voted down bans, while the town of Athens approved one.
Yet city bans are not always sure to remain in place, as local ordinances against fracking can run afoul of state laws that allow the process, as is the case in Ohio.
In Colorado, for instance, state officials have worked to supersede local, voter-approved bans through the legal system.
Source