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Thought of the Day – 01 / 28 / 2014 – CryptoCurrency – Dogecoin – What is this? – Video

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Thought of the Day - 01 / 28 / 2014 - CryptoCurrency - Dogecoin - What is this?
So today I will dicuss Crypto currency and what it is, and how it work and well what this newbie knows and doesnt know. If you wanna tip this newbie.. send d...

By: Shimey013

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Thought of the Day - 01 / 28 / 2014 - CryptoCurrency - Dogecoin - What is this? - Video

Film Review | The Fifth Estate

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From left: Benedict Cumberbatch, Carice van Houten, Daniel Bruhl and Moritz Bleibtreu.

Teodor Reljic

Films based on true events are almost always crushingly dull. This is because shoe-horning a slice of history into a Hollywood blockbuster format means that the story loses all of its immediacy and variety to collapse into complete clich.

If you want to make a film about real-life events, a documentary will do just fine. A documentary may have its limitations and will not - by definition - feature top-billing superstar actors, but at least you'll be more or less free to tell the story without the trappings of tired and all-too-familiar plot devices that we've seen in a dozen other films before: be they entirely fictional or kind-of fictional.

Of course, every rule has its exception, and we've actually been privy to one quite recently. Martin Scorcese's The Wolf of Wall Street was a wild, rollicking ride - a satire that took no prisoners (unless you - rightly - consider its prisoners to be its unapologetically venal protagonists).

But there's the rub: making an artistic effort makes all the difference, not to mention the fact that Scorcese has experience, vision and confidence in spades. Plus, his source material - a memoir penned by his subject - already snugly fits his directorial MO.

No such luck with Wikileaks drama The Fifth Estate. Cobbled together from all-too-recent events detailing the history of the controversial whistle-blowing website run by Julian Assange (Benedict Cumberbatch), it knows it has very little to go on but plugs its gaps with clichs, not creative solutions.

Much like the far superior 2010 thriller The Social Network - in which director David Lynch spun the tale of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his spurned ex-business partner Eduardo Saverin - The Fifth Estate attempts to hook its viewers by means of a similar 'frenemies' two-hander; the only difference being that instead of a revolutionary social media platform, here we're dealing with a far-more-literally revolutionary online space.

In this case, the put-upon sidekick is Daniel Berg (played by German actor Daniel Bruhl, last seen as F1 racer Niki Lauda in Rush). Just as The Social Network was based largely on the supposed injured party's (aka Saverin's) version of events, The Fifth Estate is partly sourced from Berg's own account of his time as founding partner of Wikileaks and Assange's right-hand-man. As such, the film was pre-emptively denounced as a hatchet job by Assange - currently in exile in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

But bias is the least of the film's concern. If anything, director Bill Condon (Kinsey) and screenwriter Josh Singer (TV's The West Wing) could have done with being a little less 'balanced' and a little more striking in their approach.

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Film Review | The Fifth Estate

Sam Worthington’s Gallipoli drama for the WikiLeaks era

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By Nick GalvinJan. 30, 2014, 3:25 p.m.

The Avatar star believes he has uncovered a fresh take on the Gallipoli story.

Actor Sam Worthington believes he has uncovered a fresh take on the Gallipoli story that is not "a re-telling of the last 20 minutes of Peter Weir's movie" and which will resonate with modern audiences in the era of WikiLeaks and whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Worthington will produce and star in the mini-series Deadline Gallipoli for Foxtel, which tells the story of the journalists "embedded" with the troops on the ill-fated campaign and their fight to get the truth out about how badly the fighting was going.

"Me and my producing partner John Schwarz wanted to come up with an idea so that we could be part of this 100-year commemoration of the Gallipoli campaign," Worthington says. "But we didn't want it to be the old slouch hat, bully beef kind of story.

"The more we uncovered about these journalists, the more we realised we had an All the President's Men in a war zone kind of movie where these guys actually fought to get the news out because censorship was so strong back then.

"If you look at WikiLeaks and any kind of war zone where there is censorship, the story and the idea and the themes are still as relevant today as they were back n 1915."

Worthington, best known for his starring role in Avatar, will play Age journalist Phillip Schuler, who travelled with the first convoy to Turkey in 1915.

"The soldiers themselves would have kept fighting for as long as they were told to," Worthington says. "I can appreciate . . . that spirit. The thrilling part of the drama is the story of these four journalists fighting the upper echelons of the military to get the truth out and stop the carnage."

He was tight-lipped about who was in the frame for the roles of legendary Australian war correspondent Charles Bean and journalist Keith Murdoch, father of Rupert.

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Sam Worthington's Gallipoli drama for the WikiLeaks era

Report puts Snowden-like leaks as the No. 2 threat to U.S. security

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WASHINGTON Insiders like Edward Snowden who leak secrets about sensitive U.S. intelligence programs pose a potentially greater danger to national security than terrorists, America's spy chiefs warned Wednesday in their annual report to Congress on global security risks.

For the first time, the risk of unauthorized disclosures of classified material and state-sponsored theft of data was listed as the second-greatest potential threat to America in a review of global perils prepared by the U.S. intelligence community. The risk followed cyber attacks on crucial infrastructure but was listed ahead of international terrorism.

U.S. officials previously have said it will cost billions of dollars to repair or revamp communications surveillance systems in the wake of the disclosures by Snowden, a former contract employee at a National Security Agency listening post in Hawaii who began leaking classified documents to the media in June and who later fled to Russia.

Appearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee, James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, said the leaks represent the "most damaging theft of intelligence information in our history." He urged Snowden to return the material, saying he made "the nation less safe and its people less secure."

"We've lost critical foreign intelligence collection sources, including some shared with us by valued partners," Clapper said. "Terrorists and other adversaries of this country are going to school on U.S. intelligence sources, methods and tradecraft, and the insights that they are gaining are making our job much, much harder."

Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who directs the Defense Intelligence Agency, said the leaks had endangered the lives of intelligence operatives and troops. Matt Olsen, heads of the National Counterterrorism Center, said they had made it tougher to track Al Qaeda and its affiliates.

"What we've seen in the last six to eight months is an awareness by these groups of our ability to monitor communications and specific instances where they've changed the ways in which they communicate to avoid being surveilled," Olsen said.

Investigators believe Snowden copied 1.7 million documents from NSA servers, the largest breach of classified material in U.S. history, although only a fraction have been disclosed so far. Last summer, a military judge sentenced Army Pvt. Chelsea Manning, who was born Bradley Manning, to 35 years in prison for sending 750,000 classified diplomatic cables, military field reports and other material to WikiLeaks.

Both Snowden and Manning have been condemned by critics as traitors and hailed by supporters as whistle-blowers who exposed government wrongdoing.

Only critics spoke at the hearing. Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), said the classified documents Snowden downloaded, if printed out, would form a stack more than three miles high.

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Report puts Snowden-like leaks as the No. 2 threat to U.S. security

State Department system containing classified, personal information still riddled with security gaps

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EXCLUSIVE: More than three years after U.S. Army Pvt. Bradley Manning handed over hundreds of thousands of sensitive State Department cables to WikiLeaks, the departments inspector general has warned in stark terms that State has done little since 2010 to fix an info-tech system that is riddled with security gaps, and has no plan yet for how to fix it.

At risk, the IG says, is not onlyclassified information vital to the preservation of national security in high-risk environments across the globe,but the personal information on file concerning about 192 million American passport-holders.

The public version of the inspector generals accusations -- contained in an unprecedented management alert to States top officials and in the managerial responses to the alert -- have been heavily redacted for security reasons.

The alert was circulated in the State Department bureaucracy in November. After a back-and-forth process between department managers and the IGs office, it became accessible to outsiders in mid-January.

CLICK HERE FOR THE ALERT

The problems it describes, however, have been festering far longer than that. Among other things, the alert says that:

-- between 2011 and 2013 alone, six lengthy and detailed reports on information security (five by States inspector generals office, and one by the Government Accountability Office) have found recurring weaknesses in a wide variety of cyber-security issues, including how State hands out and keeps track of passwords; certifies whether information systems are authorized to operate securely; protects its hardware, files and operating systems from hackers or other unauthorized users; and how it scans its systems to detect wayward patterns of behavior.

--In most cases, despite repeated warnings, State Department bureaucrats have not formally reported the shortcomings to other federal agencies, including Homeland Security, though the inspector generalargues it is obligated to do so.

--Nor, the watchdog says, has the department remediated the identified vulnerabilities and risks. Translation: it hasnt done anywhere near enough to fix things, and, in some cases, nothing at all.

--One reason is that portions of the bureaucracy that are specifically tasked with handling information security issues have already been identified by the inspector generals office as part of the problem. Among other things, the alert references a previous IG report on the Bureau of Information Resource Management (IRM), a section of the State Department, where, the alert delicately says, it identified a number of conditions that required managements attention.

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State Department system containing classified, personal information still riddled with security gaps


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