jad.Blog

The Ads Are Right: BP Recovers from Deepwater Horizon Spill. As for the South?

Feb 222012

The 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill is still causing tremendous ill effects on the wildlife of the Gulf Coast long after the most visible pictures faded away, and BP's profits recovered.

This April 20th will mark two full years since the start of one of the worst environmental disasters in U.S. history. It was on that date that the Deepwater Horizon oil drilling rig caught fire and sank, killing 11 on board and kicking off the release of as much as 4.9 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. British Petroleum, the company with the most visible ties to the oil platform and subsequent disaster, saw its value plummet by nearly 55% within two months. Beaches from Florida to Texas saw tarballs, oil, and dead aquatic life wash up on their shores. The fishing industry was all but wiped out in 2010 – with as much as 36% of the Gulf closed at one time to fishing, and fears from the public driving down demand and cost for what was hauled in from the catch.

Time heals wounds though, for BP at least:

On Tuesday, Robert W. Dudley, BP’s chief executive, told reporters in London that BP was “on the right path” as the company reported $7.7 billion in profit for the fourth quarter of 2011, a 38 percent increase from a year earlier. BP said production was up substantially from the previous quarter, and it expected its cash flow by 2014 to surge 50 percent past that of 2011, giving the company the financial strength to invest in exploration and pay even higher dividends.

While not back to its pre-spill valulation, BP has gained more than 76% in value since June of 2010. The company suspended its dividend in 2010 but reinstated it in 2011, albeit at half of what it once was before the crisis. Still, U.S. investors have received more than $5.3 billion in dividend payments from the company since 2011, and things are looking on the up and up. What about for the Gulf coast states, though? It’s a slightly different story.

Then One Day the U.S. Decides You Shouldn’t Have a Business

Techy Go Beep No Responses »

Feb 212012

JotForm is a website that allows users to create surveys and forms to collect information. On the 16th of February, without explanation, the U.S. Secret Service decided this site should no longer exist.

In the wake of the Megaupload take down, and the proposition for a myriad of new bills in Congress that would severely curtail freedom on the Internet, the spotlight of U.S. authorities actions on the Internet has perhaps never been as bright as it is today. Enter the story of JotForm.

JotForm is an online application that allows someone to create forms for surveys to collect information – polls or otherwise. It is free for anyone to create a form, though there are priced options available for professional organizations or anyone who winds up having an extremely popular form to fill out and bandwidth becomes a concern. When ruminations about regulating sites that allow for “user-generated content” are discussed, JotForm is one of the countless websites that falls under that banner – they provide the back end, users create the forms on their own.

JotForm has had a problem with nefarious users taking advantage of their form software to collect information from unknowing Internet users – a process commonly referred to as phishing. The company, using filtering, discovered and deleted over 65,000 such forms within the past year – but that was apparently not enough, or not the right ones for the U.S. Secret Service. Apparently a simple order from the Secret Service to the company that controlled JotForm’s domain name, GoDaddy, was enough to remove the business from the internet without so much as a notice to the actual site owner:

Popular site JotForm doesn’t host music or movies or child pornography, all of which have led US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to seize other Internet domain names without advance warning (sometimes making serious mistakes). JotForm also doesn’t create content itself. Instead, it helps customers create online forms that can then be embedded in their websites for easy data collection.

But that didn’t spare the site from having its entire business shuttered without warning yesterday as the site’s domain name was shut down at the request of the US Secret Service. JotForm’s domain name registrar, GoDaddy, redirected the site’s nameservers to NS1.SUSPENDED-FOR.SPAM-AND-ABUSE.COM—and with that, JotForm.com became unreachable and the site’s two million user-created forms all broke.

And it all may have been done without a court order.

When he saw his site was down, JotForm cofounder Aytekin Tank scrambled. He checked in with GoDaddy, which told him that the site had been suspended as part of an ongoing investigation.

“We’re very sorry, but your business can no longer exist.”

2013 Budget Proposes $39m in cuts to National Weather Service

Doppler Elevendy-thousand No Responses »

Feb 202012

The National Weather Service uses the Internet to disseminate warning information to people all around the country. Under the proposed 2013 U.S. Budget, all the staff who ensure those systems work would be cut.

With the 2013 budget proposal now released by the Obama Administration, priorities of the White House can be more accurately determined. Science continues to take a back seat in the United States, with another year full of NASA-gutting, which I’ll get into at a later time. I suppose if it is no big deal to cut the budget for scientific space exploration, it isn’t that much of a leap of faith to arrive at the reality of cutting the budget for terrestrial science in general and meteorology specifically.

The $911 million 2012 fiscal year operating budget of the National Weather Service is set to be cut by over 4% to $872 million. The trimming would save $39 million dollars or expressed another way, 26.557 minutes of the Pentagon’s expected 2013 budget. So, what do you lose by trimming less than 27 minutes of Pentagon activity? All of the information technology operator positions, ITOs, across the country would be let go. The ITO is the person who ensures all the technology at a local weather office is working, provides an extra set of eyes in busy severe weather situations if needed, and helps facilitate the transfer of information from weather forecasting systems to the much-easier-on-the-eyes output that one would see on the National Weather Service’s website.

Acceptable Birth Control: Crossing Your Legs

Writings & Musings No Responses »

Feb 172012

In spite of my best efforts to avoid the clown-car-falling-down-a-steep-cliff show that has been the Republican nomination contest for the 2012 general election, I can’t help but be drawn in by how progressively mind numbing the rhetoric from the right has gotten – in relative short order. I remember the good old days of 2004 when the hot button issue was merely riding to an electoral victory on the back of getting bigots out to vote on ban-gay-marriage state constitutional amendments, and while they were in the neighborhood, push the button for Bush. Those days seem civil. Where are we now? What are we talking about now? We are right here, in this video:

Canada in on Online Censorship Party: Safety Minister Calls Opponents Child Pornographers, Drops Mic

Techy Go Beep No Responses »

Feb 152012

Canadian public safety minister Vic Toews (Con-MB) has a message to all you supporters of your rights online: stop watching child porn.

The dizzying array of newly introduced and back from the dead Internet censorship legislation from western democracies continues to grow like weeds. Originally under the guise of protecting “content creators”, these bills have faced stiff and quickly assembled grassroots resistance from an online public that doesn’t want to see the last free place in our existence turn into a regulated, metered, and corporately controlled nightmare. Facing the defeat at the hands of logic, the proponents of online censorship have moved to plan B: you’re with us or you watch kiddie porn.

First shots across the bow were fired in the United States by Representative Lamar Smith (R-TX), with the loaded title of “Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act of 2011“, or PCIP. Provisions of the bill would require ISPs to maintain upwards of eighteen months of all your online information just in case a judge somewhere in the country was called upon to grant a wide-ranging, ill-defined search for “something”. It makes the Stop Online ~~Privacy~~ Piracy Act seem downright benign by comparison. The implicit charge for standing against this bill would be, as the title goes, that you support child pornography.

Enter public safety minister Vic Toews (Con-MB) and a piece of legislation called the “Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act“, or PCI… hey neat, this one is called PCIP too! With a name so similar, you have to wonder if the same clandestine interests are behind both pieces of legislation. Anyway.

Mr. Toews didn’t just stop at the suggestive name to define the opposition of the bill as Mr. Smith did. The implication that anyone standing against a piece of legislation would be in league with some of the most disgusting people that humankind has to offer is repugnant enough in its own right, but amid a debate that was already heating up in the House of Commons as to the full implications of this bill, Mr. Toews decided to go for the gold:

Critics of a bill that would give law enforcement new powers to access Canadians’ electronic communications are aligning themselves with child pornographers, Canada’s public safety minister says.

“He can either stand with us or with the child pornographers,” Vic Toews said of Liberal public safety critic Francis Scarpaleggia during question period on Monday, after Scarpaleggia asked about a bill expected to be tabled Tuesday.

Iran Cuts Access to Popular E-mail, Social Networking Sites

Techy Go Beep No Responses »

Feb 132012

Iran is currently seeing some of its heaviest Internet restrictions since the aftermath of the disputed 2009 Presidential elections.

As parliamentary elections slated for the 2nd of March draw closer, Iran continues to tighten its grasp on the ability for information to flow freely from the Internet to its citizens. Not yet launching a rumored “country intranet” which would effectively sever connections between the Iran citizenry and the outside world, the Islamic Republic has shuttered access to popular e-mail services GMail, Yahoo Mail, and Microsoft’s Hotmail, as well to preeminent social networks Facebook and Twitter. Thus far no explanation has been offered to citizens as to why the sites are inaccessible or when they might become view-able again – if ever.

At present, more technically savvy Iranians are able to circumvent the restrictions by using VPN servers hosted elsewhere in the world, or proxy connections – indicating that the websites are being filtered at the Internet Service Provider level. As soon as Iran completes its alleged new Intranet infrastructure, evading the Iranian censors will become significantly more difficult:

Last month the country’s information minister told the Islamic Republic News Agency that a firewalled national Internet would soon become operational. There was no word on when the government might plan to throw the switch on what essentially would be a vast “intranet,” but it could happen any day. And that prospect has cyber activists in Iran concerned. It would give the government a hand up in its cyber cat-and-mouse battle with opponents.

Right now, if Iran now blocks proxy servers and VPN connections for more than a few days, companies with branches or headquarters in the country are cut off from communicating with fellow employees around the world other than by telephone. That forces the government to open the spigot for everyone. Once the new network goes into effect, ordinary Iranians would wake up to a more censored Internet.

“I don’t know the the infrastructure that they will use but I don’t think we have a way out of that one,” said the Iranian person. “We are getting closer and closer to North Korea.”

Unplugging the country from the Internet became a key weapon in trying to fight protesters from getting the word out about the goings on inside the country after the highly controversial 2009 Presidential election that saw a new term awarded to incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, even though a large percentage of the citizenry believed Mir Hossein Mousavi was the actual victor. Violent Iranian repression of its people in the weeks and months after were broadcast to the world via YouTube – and when simple blocks were not working well enough for the country, Iran shuttered all access to the Internet for days at a time. Business interests in the country were severely harmed by the lack of communication with the outside world, and could be hurt yet again if Iran moves forward with the nationwide “intranet” scheme.

The moves thus far are drawing the ire of politicians within the country, though:

But the Mehr news agency said the restrictions were not related only to email.

“It has been a while that Internet users have had difficulty accessing domestic and news websites as well as foreign search engines and email services,” it said on its website.

These difficulties include “low speed, outage and blocking” of websites, Mehr said.

A top conservative lawmaker, Ahmad Tavakoli, criticised the new “annoying” filtering and said it should be explained.

“The new filtering measure and cutting of access to the services used by most people without prior notice… will raise the ire of educated” people, he told Mehr.

“Such annoying filtering will cost the regime dearly.”

It remains to be seen if the government will speak out publicly about this issue at all before the legislative elections, or if the Internet restrictions will have any real impact on those elections.

Greece Gripped By Fresh Austerity, Riots

Newsbyte No Responses »

Feb 132012

Sign of the times: Greek riot police, running out of tear gas, resort to tossing protesters' rocks back at them during an Athens riot on Sunday.

Shortly after midnight local time this morning, the Greek parliament passed a highly controversial new austerity bill by a 199 – 74 margin. The vote came after a day that saw 100,000 people march through the streets of Athens by daylight, descending into riot-filled chaos by nightfall. Perhaps a sign of the times for just how cash-strapped the country really is – riot police resorted to throwing stones back at protesters that were tossed their way as forces ran out of tear gas amid pleas for reinforcements.

On its economic death bed since the middle of 2010, Greece has managed to stay afloat through emergency loans and financial measures by other members of the European Union – spearheaded by the efforts of Germany. The danger of letting Greece fail could potentially be a full collapse of the entire Eurozone currency, which could usher in a severe recession that many countries will spend the rest of this decade recovering from. Each round of bailout money allocated to Greece has only been able to come after new promises to deeper and deeper cuts and more robust austerity programs. The latest round of funding that will prevent a March bankruptcy for the country is $170 billion, and came for the price of 20% public sector job cuts, a 22% minimum wage cut, and a “liberalization” of labor laws – making it easier to fire people – weakening the power of unions.

Having suffered under austerity cuts for almost two years running now, Greeks once more resorted to rioting as a last measure of protest since no other peaceful route – including elections – can seem to stop the cycle of Europe offering Greece money at gunpoint, and the country having no choice but to accept or face potential relegation to a third world country if they were forced to reintroduce their own currency once again.

Political upheavals continued before and after the vote – the week prior seeing the departure of six members of the Greek cabinet, and some 40 MPs expelled from their parties for failing to fall in line and support the passage of this bill.

In addition to protesting the bill, austerity, and a rapidly declining standard of living, Greeks directed a significant amount of anger toward Germany:

“We’ve fought several times for liberation, but this slavery is worse than any other,” said Stella Papafagou, 82, pulling down a surgical mask worn over her mouth to keep out tear gas being fired by the police to push back protesters from Parliament. “This is worse than the ’40s,” she said, referring to the Nazi occupation.

“This time the government is following the Germans’ orders,” she said. “I would prefer to die with dignity than with my head bent down.”

Germany, being the economic powerhouse of the European Union – and one of the last healthy economies left standing after the 2008 crash, has been taking a more active role in stepping in to ‘save’ Greece. Germany has been in a position to dictate the terms on which the country will be allowed to economically survive and remain on the Euro, as the alternative world of a Euro collapse would also spell significant trouble for even their mighty economy.

Winter Spills Across Europe

Doppler Elevendy-thousand No Responses »

Feb 122012

An unusual sight: a burst of heavy snow brought as much as 3" to Tripoli, Libya, on the 6th of February.

While North America has largely escaped significant cold outbreaks, the same can not be said for counterparts on the other side of the world. The cold air that has been locked up in the far northern Arctic lands around the pole has finally made a huge move over the past two weeks – to the south and west, traveling from Siberia to western Europe, the shores of the Mediterranean, and even northern Africa.

Significant snow storms have visited places that are not so familiar with so much snow all at once. As much as 3″ (7.6cm) of snow fell in Tripoli, Libya, on the 6th of February – which is probably the worst snow storm to hit the Libyan capital since the same date in 1956. Similarly in the Spanish city of Palma, which is on the Balearic Islands dozens of miles out into the Mediterranean Sea and east of the Spanish coast, also saw as much as 3″ at sea level and a staggering 30″ (76cm) in the mountainous elevations. On average Palma sees much more temperate weather in the dead of winter – highs near 60°F (16°C) and lows of 47°F (8°C). A rare snowstorm also hit Rome, bringing traffic to a standstill. In Venice, the world famous canals mostly froze over to begin the month of February. A crippling series of snow storms have hit Bulgaria, dropping as much as five feet (1.5m) of snow – the ample moisture from the Mediterranean Sea being the perfect source for moisture to be unrelentingly rung out over the mountains of southeastern Europe. An iced-over Danube River has brought import and export traffic in the region to a halt.

The unusual cold has also killed hundreds of people – many of them homeless people in southeastern Europe. Roughly speaking, the death toll since the middle of January stands at some 600 people, but as the cold continues to linger there is the chance that number could continue to rise. Continue reading »

Anders Behring Breivik, Awaiting Trial, Maintains His Killing Spree Was Right

Newsbyte No Responses »

Feb 122012

Anders Behring Breivik appears in court for his last pre-trial hearing. The trial for his terror and murder spree is set to begin on the 16th of April.

Anders Behring Breivik, the mastermind and lone perpetrator of the most violent attack in Norway since World War 2, is awaiting a trial that is expected to begin in April. In order for officials to maintain custody until that time, he must be subjected to a series of hearings. The latest of these was held last week. Though previously found criminally insane, with cameras present, Mr. Breivik was able to yet again spout off his rationale and excuses to explain away his monstrous acts:

We in the Norwegian movement will not sit and see that we are made a minority in our own country. The attacks on the government headquarters were preventive attacks on people committing cultural destruction of Norwegian culture and Norwegian ethnicity. ”I acknowledge the acts but I plead not guilty.

Mr. Breivik demanded to be released immediately - a request that was denied. The courts did order a second evaluation of this mental health, which Mr. Breivik did not comply with. In response, the courts have ordered an involuntarily evaluation lasting upwards of a month:

The Oslo district court said Friday that Anders Behring Breivik can be placed under observation for up to four weeks at the prison where he’s being held in pretrial detention.

Two psychiatrists who interviewed Breivik found him criminally insane but a second evaluation was ordered amid criticism of that diagnosis.

If the assessment of insanity is reversed, it could have a significant impact on his trial and subsequent imprisonment following a conviction. Mr. Breivik is currently charged with terrorism and murder for the 8 killed in the Oslo bombing and the 69 gunned down at the summer camp on Utøya Island. If declared not insane and found guilty, the Norwegian criminal system does not allow for the death penalty or life imprisonment. Norway’s current longest penalties include 30 years for “crimes against humanity” and 21 years in other cases, with eligibility for parole after 10 years. There is an as-yet unused penalty in Norway that could result in technical life imprisonment, known as forvaring (English: containment). Under this penalty, after Mr. Breivik’s original sentence is up, if he is determined to still be a threat to society, a board can “contain” him for up to another five years at a time, and there is no limit on how many times this can continue.

As it stands, Mr. Breivik’s trial is set to begin on the 16th of April.

New Photoset: Luminous Snow

Shutterbug No Responses »

Feb 112012

The opening night of the Luminous Field show at downtown Chicago’s Cloud Gate was met head on with some Lake Effect snow, providing some interesting results. Check it out.

( 46 photos in all )

Older Entries

jad.Blog

The Ads Are Right: BP Recovers from Deepwater Horizon Spill. As for the South?

Then One Day the U.S. Decides You Shouldn’t Have a Business

2013 Budget Proposes $39m in cuts to National Weather Service

Acceptable Birth Control: Crossing Your Legs

Canada in on Online Censorship Party: Safety Minister Calls Opponents Child Pornographers, Drops Mic

Iran Cuts Access to Popular E-mail, Social Networking Sites

Greece Gripped By Fresh Austerity, Riots

Winter Spills Across Europe

Anders Behring Breivik, Awaiting Trial, Maintains His Killing Spree Was Right

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