Following the collapse of the Airhead America Lefty talk radio "network", a few bastions remained. In Portland, Oregon, KPOJ continued to air Lefty stuff for a while, then switched to all-sports braodcasting - to the utter astonishment and outrage of the "Blue Oregon" types, who've been unsuccessfully demanding "their" station back.
2014 will mark the beginning of a massive change for liberal talk radio across the country. In New York, WWRL 1600 AM will flip to Spanish-language music and talk, throwing Ed Schultz, Thom Hartmann, Randi Rhodes, and Alan Colmes off the air. In Los Angeles, KTLK 1150 will be dumping Stephanie Miller, Rhodes, Bill Press and David Cruz off the air in favor of Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. In San Francisco, KNEW 960 will leave Miller, Hartmann, and Mike Malloy without a radio home in the market.
Randi Rhodes hasn't been heard in the Portland market since the collapse of Airhead, which has been a positive development, because she was kind of the queen of spittle and bile. And while free speech and all that, she was absolutely corrosive. Of course, that kind of thing appeals to Lefties, but it doesn't sell airtime, which is something the Lefties have never quite understood in the talk radio arena.
They'll still have MSNBC and NPR, but market forces are closing their toxic waste out of talk radio. The Left's got to be having heart palpitations over the decision to replace her with Limbaugh in L.A.
Unfortunately for them, her spit and venom just doesn't sell.
Same reason why your 'puter needs a cold boot every now and again.
There’s new research out on how our brains are cleansed during sleep that has some interesting parallels to how we keep long running hardware-software systems up and running properly.
Be glad that your brain doesn't randomly reboot; it'd be pretty awkward. Probably somewhere along the line, that sort of thing occurred, but the resulting culling from the gene pool seems to have mostly cleared that out.
Paging Dr. McCoy: your tricorder is here. Scanadu's medical device, two inches across, replaces a number of hospital devices and lab tests:
Held to the forehead, it uses light to measure oxygen intake, an accelerometer to figure out how far the chest extends in breathing, and a small electrical plate under the thumb to measure heart rate. Other sensors, some still in development, will measure temperature, blood pressure and other body functions.
Due out late next year, it should retail for about $200. Your smartphone's about to get a whole lot smarter. You'll also save on your health insurance deductible.
This could blow Obamacare wide open, by removing various lab tests, sphygmomanometers, and stethoscopes from the billables.
CGI Group, which supposedly built the Obamacare website, was also contracted by some states to build their health insurance exchange portals, and Massachusetts and Vermont are taking steps to recover the money they spent. Barky promised that under Obamacare, buying health insurance would "be as easy as buying a plane ticket online". Yeah, about that...say, has anybody been able to keep track of the number of times this turkey's lied to us?
Heating up again in the world of science: plant information processing and learning. This has been an on-again, off-again area of study since Darwin's time, and in recent years, it's back on again.
Gagliano concluded by suggesting that “brains and neurons are a sophisticated solution but not a necessary requirement for learning,” and that there is “some unifying mechanism across living systems that can process information and learn.”
Well, at least nobody's claiming that plants scream when you eat them - truly a vegan nightmare - but there are a number of interesting attributes involving plant detection and avoidance systems that seem almost animal-like. In some respects, a resemblance to the hive-mind characteristic of animals such as bees, ants, and termites is inarguable.
“Neurons perhaps are overrated,” Mancuso said. “They’re really just excitable cells.” Plants have their own excitable cells, many of them in a region just behind the root tip. Here Mancuso and his frequent collaborator, František Baluška, have detected unusually high levels of electrical activity and oxygen consumption. They’ve hypothesized in a series of papers that this so-called “transition zone” may be the locus of the “root brain” first proposed by Darwin.
Think the NSA's bad? They're late to the game; "Surveillance Valley" has data on just about every adult in the country - and it's all for sale.
No source of information is sacred: transaction records are bought in bulk from stores, retailers and merchants; magazine subscriptions are recorded; food and restaurant preferences are noted; public records and social networks are scoured and scraped. What kind of prescription drugs did you buy? What kind of books are you interested in? Are you a registered voter? To what non-profits do you donate? What movies do you watch? Political documentaries? Hunting reality TV shows?
That info is combined and kept up to date with address, payroll information, phone numbers, email accounts, social security numbers, vehicle registration and financial history. And all that is sliced, isolated, analyzed and mined for data about you and your habits in a million different ways.
One of the largest data brokers, InfoUSA, was started by Vin Gupta back in the 1970s, quickly growing into a company worth $500 million. Its reach has expanded into at least 9 countries. Gupta was forced out around 5 years ago in a battle with shareholders:
In 2008, Gupta was sued by InfoUSA shareholders for inappropriately using corporate funds. Shareholders accused of Gupta of illegally funneling corporate money to fund an extravagant lifestyle and curry political favor. According to the Associated Press, the lawsuit questioned why Gupta used private corporate jets to fly the Clintons on personal and campaign trips, and why Gupta awarded Bill Clinton a $3.3 million consulting gig.
But as big as InfoUSA (now Infogroup) is, there several even larger brokers. And the most pervasive and intrusive of them all?
Google.
Snowden may consider himself a hero for stirring things up over NSA operations, but he didn't even scratch the surface.
Released last September, CryptoLocker ransomware has been spreading fairly rapidly. As its name implies, it encrypts all files on a system until you pay some $300. Originally aimed at businesses, it's recently been branching out into the consumer market, and it's extremely difficult to counter. It hides in an infected computer until it's identified all disk drives (including cloud drives), at which point it contacts a command and control (C2) server, derives an encryption key, and begins encrypting the targeted system. Oh, and the countdown clock in yeller at the bottom of the notification? That's how long you have to pay up before the server destroys the key needed to decrypt your files. Thus far, an estimated quarter of a million Winders systems have been infected, and around 25% of them are here in the USA.
CryptoLocker hides its presence from victims until it has successfully contacted a command and control (C2) server and encrypted the files located on connected drives. Prior to these actions, the malware ensures that it remains running on infected systems and that it persists across reboots. When first executed, the malware creates a copy of itself in either %AppData% or %LocalAppData%. CryptoLocker then deletes the original executable file.
CryptoLocker then creates an "autorun" registry key:
The asterisk at the beginning of the key name ensures that the malware executes even if the system is restarted in "safe mode."
Additional configuration data is stored in the following registry key:
HKCU\SOFTWARE\CryptoLocker or HKCU\SOFTWARE\CryptoLocker_0388
The VersionInfo value stored within this key contains configuration data encoded with the XOR key 0x819C33AE. The PublicKey value contains the RSA public key received from the C2 server during the initial network connection.
CryptoLocker cycles indefinitely until it connects to a C2 server via HTTP. After connecting to an attacker-controlled C2 server, CryptoLocker sends a phone-home message encrypted with an RSA public key embedded within the malware (see Figure 2). Only servers with the corresponding RSA private key can decrypt this message and successfully communicate with an infected system.
CryptoLocker uses strong third-party certified cryptography offered by Microsoft's CryptoAPI. By using a sound implementation and following best practices, the malware authors have created a robust program that is difficult to circumvent. The malware uses the "Microsoft Enhanced RSA and AES Cryptographic Provider" (MS_ENH_RSA_AES_PROV) to create keys and to encrypt data with the RSA (CALG_RSA_KEYX) and AES (CALG_AES_256) algorithms.
As the quoted material immediately above demonstrates, it's fairly nasty - they just discuss it in a more long-winded way while I cut to the chase and gave you the nuts and bolts at the beginning. You might want to hit that link, though, as among other things, it includes a table of the domains passing the malware along - and it's a pretty long list.
Be aware, however, that new sites are being infected and spreading the code on a daily basis. Since it goes after connected and networked disk drives, you might want to consider backing stuff up onto DVD disks. Just sayin'.
Oklahoma goose hunters the other day got something of a surprise as they trudged across the frozen landscape: a kangaroo went hopping past.
Closer to home, a 37 year-old Beaverton guy got all methed up and headed to Salem for a good time, Salem being a well-known hotspot for all kinds of fun. Andy Frey got into some trouble with a locksmith, then went into a market to hang out. Escorted off that property, he wandered into a nearby bar, where he began masturbating. Unsurprisingly, cops were called.
When a deputy found him, still with one hand occupied, he attempted to take Frey into custody, which is when things got ugly. Calling for backup, the deputy tazed Andy several times, with no effect. 15 cops from several area agencies converged on the scene and eventually got him under control.
Criminal "science" in Ames, Iowa; criminal stupidity in East Moline, Illinois.
Most researchers simply falsify data when choosing to achieve a desired outcome - the famous "hockey stick" fabrication comes to mind as a prominent example; the data were "massaged" in order to support the preordained result showing that "man-made global warming" was not a religion but a scientific fact. But Dr. Dong-Pyou Han over at Iowa State University went further: he spiked rabbit blood with samples from humans who had antibodies to HIV, making it appear that the rabbit blood was responding to an AIDS vaccine.
The fraudulent results helped an ISU research team gain millions of dollars in federal money, according to Dr. James Bradac, who helps oversee AIDS vaccine grants for the National Institutes of Health.
Millions, you say? Yep - $19 million, to be exact. And Science Marches On. The good doctor? Oh, he resigned, and faces no criminal charges. The University likely won't have to repay the grant funding.
The federal documents, which were posted on a government website, say Han agreed to be banned from participating in any federally financed research for three years. Oransky said that’s an unusually strong penalty for a scientist.
If you're a "scientist", you can get away with fraud.
Meanwhile, across the mighty Mississippi in Illinois, the cops in East Moline always get their man. Or in this case, their woman. In particular, a 72 year-old grandmother suffering from dementia and other ailments who had apparently failed to pay a ticket issued to her five years ago for failing to have her seat belt buckled. They showed up at 10:30 Saturday night, four days before Christmas, and carted her off to the Rock Island County Jail.
Ho ho ho!
Fortunately, her grandson showed up and bailed her out.
