Tom’s Weekly Tips, Links and Tidbits Newsletter

Wednesday 29th February 2012





G’day,

I trust this finds you fit and well this special leap year day.




Contents

Basic Computer User | Advanced Computer User | Health | Humour | Other




Basic Computer User


Does Windows Have One Foot In The Grave?

All by itself, the iPhone generated $24.4 billion in revenue, beating all the rest of Apple’s business combined by $2.47 billion, and beating all of Microsoft by over $3 billion. At the same time, it also came to light recently that Apple sold more iOS devices in the past year than Macs in the past 28 years. http://www.WebProNews.com



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Advanced Computer User


Alliance forms web-based rival to Android, Apple

HTML5-based smartphone platform. http://www.itnews.com.au/News/291870,alliance-forms-web-based-rival-to-android-apple.aspx



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Health


I Will Not Be Pinkwashed: Komen’s Race is for Money, Not the Cure

The multimillion-dollar company behind all those pink ribbons -- the Susan G. Komen Foundation – uses less than a dime of each dollar to actually look for a breast cancer cure... and that’s just the surface of the problem... http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2012/02/22/breast-cancer-awareness-ribbons.aspx



Why You Do Not Refreeze Thawed Food

I learned some things here. The health department would not agree with the recommendation to thaw in water, on the course I did they recommended microwave (which I would not do in a pink fit) or thaw in the fridge. http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2232/why-is-refreezing-food-bad-what-exactly-is-freezer-burn



Chamomile Tea

NEW ZEALAND INTRODUCES $50,000 FINE FOR DRINKING CHAMOMILE TEA?

Well almost!

Coming soon, to a fascist state near you...
Please spread the word now. We need to gather momentum as quickly as possible so informed voices can overturn the vested interests.



Roundup Causes Birth Defects

Don’t use the stuff! http://www.scribd.com/doc/57277946/RoundupandBirthDefectsv5



Acid\Alkaline Chart

Here’s a chart listing many foods and where they sit o nthe alkaline\acid scale http://www.envirohealthtech.com/Misc/ph%20chart.pdf



Root Canal Data

If you have a root canal this is vital reading. http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2012/02/18/dangers-of-root-canaled-teeth.aspx



White House Refuses to Release Email From Monsanto-Linked Lobbyist

I wonder why they won’t release them? http://cryptogon.com/?p=27754



Everybody Needs A Coach

Google’s CEO shares the best advice he ever received. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kngyyeMel5c



Monsanto Owns

Companies in Which Monsanto Owns Stocks

Tried to verify some of the companies in this list without much luck. Do you have an easy to find place to check it out?



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Humour


Garden Snakes

GARDEN SNAKES CAN BE DANGEROUS

Green Tree Snakes (Dendrolaphis punctulata) can be dangerous.

Yes, tree snakes or grass snakes, not brown snakes or taipans. Here’s why.

A couple in Townsville, had a lot of potted plants.

During a recent cold winter (for Townsville that is!),

the wife was bringing some of the valued tender ones

indoors to protect them from the cold night.

It turned out that a little green tree snake was hidden in one of the plants.

When it had warmed up, it slithered out and the wife saw it go under the lounge. She let out a very loud scream.

The husband (who was taking a shower) ran out into the living room naked to see what the problem was.

She told him there was a snake under the lounge.

He got down on the floor on his hands and knees to look for it.

About that time the family dog came and cold-nosed him on the behind.

He thought the snake had bitten him, so he screamed and fell over on the floor.

His wife thought he had had a heart attack, so she covered him up, told him to lie still and called an ambulance.

The paramedics rushed in, would not listen to his protests, loaded him on the stretcher, and started carrying him out.

About that time, the snake came out from under the lounge and the paramedic saw it and dropped his end of the stretcher.

That’s when the man broke his leg and why he is still in the hospital.

The wife still had the problem of the snake in the house, so she called on a neighbour who volunteered to capture the snake.

He armed himself with a rolled-up newspaper and began poking under the lounge..

Soon he decided it was gone and told the woman, who sat down on the lounge in relief.

But while relaxing, her hand dangled in between the cushions, where she felt the snake wriggling around

She screamed and fainted, the snake rushed back under the lounge.

The neighbour, seeing her lying there passed out, tried to use CPR to revive her.

The neighbour’s wife, who had just returned from shopping at Woolies, saw her husband’s mouth on the woman’s mouth

and slammed her husband in the back of the head with a bag of canned goods, knocking him out and cutting his scalp to a point where it needed stitches.

The noise woke the woman from her dead faint and she saw her neighbour lying on the floor with his wife bending over him,

so she assumed that the snake had bitten him.

She went to the kitchen and got a small bottle of whiskey, and began pouring it down the man’s throat.

By now, the police had arrived.

They saw the unconscious man, smelled the whiskey, and assumed that a drunken fight had occurred.

They were about to arrest them all, when the women tried to explain how it all happened over a little garden snake!

The police called an ambulance, which took away the neighbour and his sobbing wife.

Now, the little snake again crawled out from under the lounge and one of the policemen drew his gun and fired at it.

He missed the snake and hit the leg of the end table.

The table fell over, the lamp on it shattered and, as the bulb broke, it started a fire in the curtains.

The other policeman tried to beat out the flames, and fell through the window into the yard on top of the family dog who, startled, jumped out and raced into the street, where an oncoming car swerved to avoid it and smashed into the parked police car.

Meanwhile, neighbours saw the burning curtains and called in the fire brigade.

The firemen had started raising the fire ladder when they were halfway down the street.

The rising ladder tore out the overhead wires, put out the power, and disconnected the telephones in a ten-square city block area (but they did get the house fire out).

Time passed! The snake was caught and both men were discharged from the hospital, the house was repaired, the dog came home, the police acquired a new car and all was right with their world.

A while later they were watching TV and the weatherman announced a cold snap for that night.

The wife asked her husband if he thought they should bring in their plants for the night.

And that’s when he shot her.



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Other


5 Reasons For Aussies to Feel Comfortable

Some good economic news http://www.smh.com.au/money/planning/five-reasons-aussies-should-feel-smug-20120225-1tul4.html



From Grace Hopper, a great explanation of Nanoseconds

"Be sure to get your nanoseconds!" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEpsKnWZrJ8



Laser pulse shooting through a bottle and visualized at a trillion frames per second

Make sure to note you know just what it is you are looking at. ITS A BEAM OF LIGHT FIRST TIME EVER SEEN (in this civilization). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fSqFWcb4rE



Video of Vote Rigging Procedure

Would you like to see how elections are rigged with false voting? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwS4XMEr_qY



Top Social Media Websites Caught Censoring Controversial Content

By Washington’s Blog
Global Research, February 23, 2012

URL of this article: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=29452

Censorship By Top Social Media Websites

Facebook pays low-wage foreign workers to delete certain content based upon a censorship list. For example, Facebook deletes accounts created by Palestinian resistance groups.

Digg was caught censoring stories which were controversial or too critical of the government.

Now, even social media site Reddit – which helped launch the anti-Sopa Internet blackout and publicize GoDaddy’s slimy Sopa support – is doing the same thing.

As just one example, posts from this website are being censored by Reddit. Specifically, a friend of this site who has submitted stories to Reddit has received the following messages of rejection from a Reddit moderator named davidreiss666:

from davidreiss666 via /r/worldnews/

WashingtonBlog is not something we consider a good source for r/Worldnews.

from davidreiss666 via /r/worldnews/

Please submit that story from an alternate domain. Thank you.

And another moderator named Maxion:

from Maxion via /r/worldnews/

I am sorry but this submission is not appropriate for this subreddit.

There are certainly also more open-minded moderators at Reddit. But a couple of censors can squash discussion on entire topics.

Why Are They Censoring?

Well, censorship is rampant in America ... and social media has grown so big that it has become a target as well.

In addition, as I pointed out last year:

Wired reported on Friday:

The Pentagon is looking to build a tool to sniff out social media propaganda campaigns and spit some counter-spin right back at it.

On Thursday, Defense Department extreme technology arm Darpa unveiled its Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) program. It’s an attempt to get better at both detecting and conducting propaganda campaigns on social media. SMISC has two goals. First, the program needs to help the military better understand what’s going on in social media in real time — particularly in areas where troops are deployed. Second, Darpa wants SMISC to help the military play the social media propaganda game itself.

This is more than just checking the trending topics on Twitter. The Defense Department wants to deeply grok social media dynamics. So SMISC algorithms will be aimed at discovering and tracking the “formation, development and spread of ideas and concepts (memes)” on social media, according to Darpa’s announcement.

SMISC needs to be able to seek out “persuasion campaign structures and influence operations” developing across the social sphere. SMISC is supposed to quickly flag rumors and emerging themes on social media, figure out who’s behind it and what. Moreover, Darpa wants SMISC to be able to actually figure out whether this is a random product of the hivemind or a propaganda operation by an adversary nation or group.

Of course, SMISC won’t be content to just to hang back and monitor social media trends in strategic locations. It’s about building a better spin machine for Uncle Sam, too. Once SMISC’s latches on to an influence operation being launched, it’s supposed to help out in “countermessaging.”

SMISC is yet another example of how the military is becoming very interested in what’s going on in the social media sphere.

Indeed, as I wrote in February:

I noted in 2009, in an article entitled “Does The Government Manipulate Social Media?”:

The U.S. government long ago announced its intention to “fight the net”.

As revealed by an official Pentagon report signed by Rumsfeld called “Information Operations Roadmap”:

The roadmap [contains an] acknowledgement that information put out as part of the military’s psychological operations, or Psyops, is finding its way onto the computer and television screens of ordinary Americans.

“Information intended for foreign audiences, including public diplomacy and Psyops, is increasingly consumed by our domestic audience,” it reads.

“Psyops messages will often be replayed by the news media for much larger audiences, including the American public,” it goes on.

“Strategy should be based on the premise that the Department [of Defense] will ‘fight the net’ as it would an enemy weapons system”.

Indeed, the Pentagon publicly announced years ago that it was considering using “black propaganda” – in other words, knowing lies.

CENTCOM announced in 2008 that a team of employees would be “[engaging] bloggers who are posting inaccurate or untrue information, as well as bloggers who are posting incomplete information.”

The Air Force is now also engaging bloggers. Indeed, an Air Force spokesman said:

“We obviously have many more concerns regarding cyberspace than a typical Social Media user,” Capt. Faggard says. “I am concerned with how insurgents or potential enemies can use Social Media to their advantage. It’s our role to provide a clear and accurate, completely truthful and transparent picture for any audience.”

In other words, the government is targeting “social media”, including popular user-ranked news sites.

In addition, when you look at what the Israeli lobby has done with Megaphone software to automatically vote stories questioning Israel down and to send pro-Israel letters to politicians and media (see this, this and this), you can start to see how the U.S. military – an even larger and better-funded organization – could substantially influence voting on social news sites with very little effort.

Moreover,the military has outsourced many projects to private contractors. For example, in Iraq, much of the fighting has been outsourced to Blackwater. And governmental intelligence functions have largely been outsourced to private companies.

It is therefore not impossible that the government is hiring cheap labor to downvote stories on the social media sites which question the government, and to post pro-government comments.

(Other governments and large companies “astroturf” online as well.)

I pointed out the same month:

Government propagandists, their hired private contractors and useful idiots are creating “downvote bots” or scripts to bury stories which question the government.

One free, simple scripting program to create automatic downvotes of certain topics or news posters is called “Greasemonkey”, which is commonly used on large social news sites such as Reddit.

For example, there are some 2,480 hits ... for the google search site:reddit.com greasemonkey downvote. This is some 2,480 times that Reddit users are publicly admitting to using greasemonkey.

Propaganda agents obviously aren’t going to publicly brag about what they are doing, and you can bet that their use of downvote bots is much greater. Moreover, they probably have more sophisticated software than Greasemonkey.

Today, Raw Story reports that the Air Force ordered software to manage army of fake virtual people:

Internet users would be well advised to ask another question entirely: Are my “friends” even real people?

In the continuing saga of data security firm HBGary, a new caveat has come to light: not only did they plot to help destroy secrets outlet WikiLeaks and discredit progressive bloggers, they also crafted detailed proposals for software that manages online “personas,” allowing a single human to assume the identities of as many fake people as they’d like.

The revelation was among those contained in the company’s emails, which were dumped onto bittorrent networks after hackers with cyber protest group “Anonymous” broke into their systems.

In another document unearthed by “Anonymous,” one of HBGary’s employees also mentioned gaming geolocation services to make it appear as though selected fake persons were at actual events.

“There are a variety of social media tricks we can use to add a level of realness to all fictitious personas,” it said.

Government involvement

Eerie as that may be, more perplexing, however, is a federal contract from the 6th Contracting Squadron at MacDill Air Force Base, located south of Tampa, Florida, that solicits providers of “persona management software.”

While there are certainly legitimate applications for such software, such as managing multiple “official” social media accounts from a single input, the more nefarious potential is clear.

Unfortunately, the Air Force’s contract description doesn’t help dispel their suspicions either. As the text explains, the software would require licenses for 50 users with 10 personas each, for a total of 500. These personas would have to be “replete with background , history, supporting details, and cyber presences that are technically, culturally and geographacilly consistent.”

It continues, noting the need for secure virtual private networks that randomize the operator’s Internet protocol (IP) address, making it impossible to detect that it’s a single person orchestrating all these posts. Another entry calls for static IP address management for each persona, making it appear as though each fake person was consistently accessing from the same computer each time.

The contract also sought methods to anonymously establish virtual private servers with private hosting firms in specific geographic locations. This would allow that server’s “geosite” to be integrated with their social media profiles, effectively gaming geolocation services.

The Air Force added that the “place of performance” for the contract would be at MacDill Air Force Base, along with Kabul, Afghanistan and Baghdad. The contract was offered on June 22, 2010.

It was not clear exactly what the Air Force was doing with this software, or even if it had been procured.

Manufacturing consent

Though many questions remain about how the military would apply such technology, the reasonable fear should be perfectly clear. “Persona management software” can be used to manipulate public opinion on key information, such as news reports. An unlimited number of virtual “people” could be marshaled by only a few real individuals, empowering them to create the illusion of consensus.

That’s precisely what got DailyKos blogger Happy Rockefeller in a snit: the potential for military-run armies of fake people manipulating and, in some cases, even manufacturing the appearance of public opinion.

“I don’t know about you, but it matters to me what fellow progressives think,” the blogger wrote. “I consider all views. And if there appears to be a consensus that some reporter isn’t credible, for example, or some candidate for congress in another state can’t be trusted, I won’t base my entire judgment on it, but it carries some weight.

“That’s me. I believe there are many people though who will base their judgment on rumors and mob attacks. And for those people, a fake mob can be really effective.”

“Team Themis” [tasked by the Chamber of Commerce to come up with strategies for responding to progressive bloggers and others] also included a proposal to use malware hacks against progressive organizations, and the submission of fake documents in an effort to discredit established groups.

HBGary was also behind a plot by Bank of America to destroy WikiLeaks’ technology platform, other emails revealed. The company was humiliated by members of “Anonymous” after CEO Aaron Barr bragged that he’d “infiltrated” the group.

And see this, this, this, this.

Postscript: Gaming social media is only one propaganda technique employed by the government:

Famed Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein says the CIA has already bought and paid for many successful journalists

The New York Times discusses in a matter-of-fact way the use of mainstream writers by the CIA to spread messages

A 4-part BBC documentary called the “Century of the Self” shows that an American – Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays – created the modern field of manipulation of public perceptions, and the U.S. government has extensively used his techniques

The Independent discusses allegations of American propaganda

And one of the premier writers on journalism says the U.S. has used widespread propaganda.



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Until next time,
dream big dreams,
read widely,
think well of your fellow man,
eat food that’s good for you
and do the important things
that make a difference -
they are rarely the urgent ones!

Tom

How To Live The Healthiest Life


Tom Grimshaw creates software, healthy snacks and
is also an optimum wellness researcher/writer who
enjoys bringing you the oldest and newest tips to
improve each of your 12 pillars of Optimal Health.

Check out the special report he has compiled here
How to Live The Healthiest Life




Copyright 2012 by Tom Grimshaw - ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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