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ANOTHER VIEW: War is not a game – Times Herald-Record

Posted on July 29, 2020 by admin

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette| Times Herald-Record

War is not a game. But impressionable kids may not be able to tell the difference if the U.S. military continues its esports recruitment.

The U.S. Army, Navy and Air Force have all launched esports teams and have been using popular video game streaming websites, such as Twitch, to drum up recruitment.

Active and reserve personnel have been hopping online to stream themselves playing video games and, in the process, talk with viewers about a range of topics, including the opportunities afforded by military service.

Recruit numbers have been down, and the military is turning to modern platforms to expand its reach. But the military's esports teams quickly found themselves embroiled in controversy. Automated links would drop into the Army's Twitch chats that told viewers they could win a premium Xbox controller in a giveaway. But these links reportedly took viewers to a recruitment webpage with no reference to any contests or giveaways.

Active and reserve personnel have been hopping online to stream themselves playing video games

When one considers that a large portion of Twitch users are underage, primarily 13- to 17-year-old boys who may just want a nifty video game controller, and that military recruitment of people under 18 is illegal, what the military is doing raises numerous red flags. What's more, both the Army and Navy esports operations have been accused of violating some users' freedom of speech rights after banning those who posted questions about war crimes committed by the United States.

The American Civil Liberties Union and the Knight First Amendment Institute have both stated that these bans likely violate the First Amendment and should be reversed immediately. Due to the controversy, the Army unceremoniously suspended its efforts to recruit via Twitch. Meanwhile, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., recently introduced an amendment to a House Appropriations bill that would ban the military from using video game streaming sites for recruitment, calling the strategy "irresponsible."

Whether the practice is ended voluntarily or by legislation, the military's Twitch experiment should be shuttered for good. While military service is a noble and patriotic act, conflating that service with the bloody theatrics of violent video games is a recipe for disaster. Throw in phony giveaways, marketing to children and violations of the First Amendment, and it is clear the military should figure out a better way to modernize recruitment.

ANOTHER VIEW: War is not a game - Times Herald-Record

Were Not in Kansas Anymore Harvard Law School Petitions FSIS on Cell-Based Meat and Poultry Labeling – JD Supra

Posted on July 29, 2020 by admin

Harvard Law Schools Animal Law & Policy Clinic (Clinic) submitted a petition on June 9 to the USDAs Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS), urging it to adopt a labeling approach for the emerging category of cell-based meat and poultry that does not overly restrict speech and that respects the First Amendment.[1] In its response of July 23, FSIS indicates that it considers the document a request for future rulemaking.[2]

The petition indicates that the Clinic focuses on high-impact opportunities to improve the treatment of animals through litigation, policy analysis and applied academic research. From this perspective, the Clinic views development of these technologies as just such an opportunity, and it advocates adoption of labeling policies that would appear to facilitate widespread public acceptance of these products.[3] More specifically, the Clinic maintains that there is no need for the development of new regulatory standards of identity in this area, that such products should be allowed to be labeled with traditional nomenclature such as hamburger, and that additional labeling disclosure should not be required absent compositional differences in the finished product or additional food safety risk.[4]

Although the first two elements of the request are not surprising, the third is more aggressive. Without directly saying so, the petition strongly suggests that the government would not have a legal basis for requiring that a given pound of hamburger be labeled as cell-based unless it failed to meet such a standard. In doing so, it does a fair amount of constitutional saber rattling in support of a broad reading of the concept of commercial free speech.[5] How this line of argument can best be reconciled with the occasional vagaries of FSISs prior label approval processor with the concept of the Consumers Right to Know that has so animated other labeling issues of recent interest, such as mandatory disclosure of bioengineered ingredientsremains to be seen as the rulemaking process in this area unfolds.

Substance aside, the existence and submission or the petition itself is noteworthy, since one does not often see the words Harvard Law School and FSIS included in the same sentence. This suggests that the particular issue has resonated within a larger community than the one normally engaged in debates over meat and poultry regulation, a reality that is certain to persist.

[3] Petition to FSIS, at 12, 19-20.

[View source.]

This Year, the Stuttgart Peace Prize is Awarded to Julian Assange. – PRESSENZA International News Agency

Posted on July 29, 2020 by admin

Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks imprisoned in London for a year, received the Stuttgart Peace Prize 2020. The prize is awarded by Die Anstifter and aims to promote the right to unconditional freedom of information and of the press.

Annette Ohme-Reinicke, president of Die Anstifter, said the crackdown on Assange was also against comprehensive political information for all.

Heike Hnsel, Member of Parliament and Deputy Chair of the Die Linke parliamentary group, said: I am very happy with this award given to Julian Assange, who has suffered political persecution from the United States for years due to his journalistic work and who is now in danger of extradition to the United States. This award recognizes investigative journalism and is a strong message in defense of press freedom. Recognizing the peaceful and political dimension of the work of the founder of Wikileaks is for him a very important support. As British justice treats Julian Assange as a dangerous criminal and keeps him in the most secure prisons, Assange is awarded this tribute for the US war crimes revelations in Iraq and Afghanistan. I am waiting for the German government and the EU to stop being blind and finally offer political asylum to Julian Assange.

Assange, who has been in Belmarsh High Security Prison in London for a year, awaits a hearing to decide on his possible extradition to the United States where he is accused of espionage. His detention was denounced as torture.

The Peace Prize will be awarded in December in Stuttgart. With this award, Die Anstifter pays tribute to people who fight for peace, justice and solidarity. The prize has been awarded annually since 2003, some of the previous winners are: Sea Watch, Ashley Erdogan, Emma Gonzalez, Jrgen Greslin, Edward Snowden, etc.

See as well :

If Julian Assange is extradited, it is the end of the rule of law in the West Eva Joly (Interview)

Juan Branco: The Greek people should put pressure on Julian Assange for asylum (in Greek)

John Shipton in Berlin: father and ambassador of Julian Assange

Bitcoin Scaling Tech Could Have Saved Companies and Users $500M in Fees: Report – CoinDesk – CoinDesk

Posted on July 29, 2020 by admin

A new study from Bitcoin startup Veriphi finds companies and users sending bitcoin transactions could have saved more than half a billion dollars in fees if all companies, including wallets and exchanges, had used the most up-to-date technology.

Each bitcoin transaction has an optional fee tacked on. Users have the ability to choose the amount of this fee. If the Bitcoin blockchain is particularly busy, seeing too many transactions at once, a higher fee will ensure a transaction gets picked up by miners and goes through faster.

Bitcoin fees cost an average of about $3 per transaction, according to Bitcoin statistic site bitinfocharts. Fees rise with demand. There have been times in Bitcoins history, particularly in 2017, when fees exploded due to increasing demand. Bitcoin has limited space for transactions, so users had to pay higher fees if they wanted their transaction to go through faster.

These fees are a pain, so bitcoin developers have spent a lot of energy on carving out more Bitcoin block space to make room for new users and their transactions while keeping within the actual block-size constraint of 1 MB.

Transaction batching and SegWit

Veriphis report concludes companies could have saved 21,131.97 BTC in fees (worth $195 million) if all transactions from January 2012 to June 2020 had used a technique called transaction batching.

Transaction batching is a way of sending multiple transactions at once in order to cut down on paying for each individual transaction. This option is more likely to be used by companies, like exchanges Coinbase and Kraken, which send several transactions at once, rather than singular users.

Plus, users could have saved 36,685.72 BTC in fees (worth $339 million) if SegWit had been used on all transactions from August 2017 to June 2020. That adds up to a total of 57,817.69 BTC, worth more than $534 million at the time the report was released.

SegWit, officially added to Bitcoin in 2017, is a technology that allows for more space for transactions per block.

Even though SegWit was activated nearly three years ago, each individual wallet and bitcoin service needs to individually add support for these types of transactions. In some cases, individual users still need to opt in to using SegWit-enabled addresses for their transactions.

As can be expected, wallets and other bitcoin services have so far adopted SegWit at their own pace. Adding a new way to send transactions isnt a trivial task and requires engineering bandwidth; as such, some companies have not prioritized making the necessary infrastructure changes to their platforms.

If average fees grow higher than users would like, however, users who want to save on fees may jump from these slow-to-act platforms over to a bitcoin wallet or exchange thats adopted SegWit.

Bitcoin fees and the next bull run

That said, Gustavo J. Flores, Veriphi head of product and research argued that both SegWit and transaction batching have been around for years. And users of these wallets and services could have saved a lot of money if these technologies had been used for that entire time.

I saw the news a couple of months ago of Coinbase integrating transaction batching into their system and I thought how late that was, given that batching has been around since 2011 or 2012. We were wondering, how big was the impact of all these companies and users that hadnt adopted batching and Segwit? And it turned out to be a pretty substantial number: half a billion dollars, Flores told CoinDesk.

Now that bitcoins price has jumped to more than $11,000, perhaps signalling the start of the next bull run, its time to consider a scenario where fees might be on the rise again.

In the report, Veriphi encourages any person or entity responsible for sending many transactions to think about best practices for saving money on fees.

The savings potential presented is significant and those conducting large amounts of transactions should seriously consider employing these tools in order to remain competitive and save money.

The leader in blockchain news, CoinDesk is a media outlet that strives for the highest journalistic standards and abides by a strict set of editorial policies. CoinDesk is an independent operating subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which invests in cryptocurrencies and blockchain startups.

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Bitcoin Scaling Tech Could Have Saved Companies and Users $500M in Fees: Report - CoinDesk - CoinDesk

As Bitcoin tops $11,000 level, investor interest in India on the rise – Livemint

Posted on July 29, 2020 by admin

Bitcoin prices surged past the $11,000 level on Tuesday, marking a steep recovery from its recent lows of around $5,000 in March 2020. The cryptocurrency was trading at around $10,972 at the time of writing this report on Wednesday.

The covid-19 crisis had battered financial assets across the world in March, including cryptocurrencies. Along with the rebound in prices, interest in cryptocurrency in India has also staged a recovery, say experts. A Supreme Court of India ruling in March, striking down the Reserve Bank of Indias (RBI) ban on crypto payments imposed in 2018 has also acted as a tailwind for the cryptocurrency investment.

There is a huge positive sentiment around Bitcoin right now. With its prices going up, a lot of dormant holders are coming back and traders are trading more to book profits. Bitcoins price rally is also causing other altcoin prices to increase. As a result, were seeing a big jump in our trading volume. It will be exciting to see where Bitcoin price lands next," said Nischal Shetty, founder and CEO, WazirX, a cryptocurrency exchange in India.

Altcoins are other cryptocurrencies that were launched after the success of Bitcoin.

Sumit Gupta, co-founder and CEO, CoinDCX, another cryptocurrency exchange, outlined two reasons for the rebound. The surge in bitcoin prices comes amid a rush for safe-haven assets that are considered alternatives to cash and stocks. It has been fueled by the covid-19 pandemic that has driven the global economy into a recession," he said. Theres also the decreased supply of available bitcoin, attributed to the halving of coins in circulation that happened earlier this year," he added.

An inbuilt feature of bitcoin mining is the halving of rewards given to bitcoin miners for mining the cryptocurrency periodically (usually every four years). This tends to cut in half, the new bitcoin that is released into circulation.

Ajeet Khurana, member, Blockchain and Cryptocurrency Committee of the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) and former CEO of Zebpay focused more on the participants in the crypto market to explain the surge in bitcoin prices.

The common investor in any asset class is primarily driven by asset price inflation. The trader in an asset class is driven by volatility, and expects to make money on price movements in both directions. For both of these, bitcoin has been a delight in the recent past," he explained.

Khurana also believes that crypto investors do not invest in other asset classes and hence the rise in bitcoin prices could fuel a surge in crypto market participants, both investors and traders. In other words, the cult-like following of cryptocurrency gets strengthened when there is a rally in its prices.

Despite the Supreme Court ruling on RBIs payments ban, cryptocurrency still does not have a regulatory framework in India. Moreover, a draft government bill may criminalize the mere possession of cryptocurrency in its current form as we reported here.

Investors should take this into account while evaluating the cryptocurrency market.

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As Bitcoin tops $11,000 level, investor interest in India on the rise - Livemint

Bitcoin fees have spiked 500% this month – Decrypt

Posted on July 29, 2020 by admin

Bitcoin's price may be soaring, but so are transaction fees. In the past month, the average cost of sending Bitcoin has risen by more than 525%.

Per data from Bitinfocharts, Bitcoin's transaction fees currently average $5.80 a pop. The vast majority of the spike was realized in the last three days, coinciding with Bitcoin surpassing $11,000. Fees have doubled in just the last three days.

Fees typically spike with higher network usage and given Bitcoin's recent rally above $11,000 as well as the added demand it's generatedits not a big surprise.

The high fees correspond with the jamming of Bitcoin's transaction queue, known as the mempool. Mempool data peaked on July 24, with around 80 megabytes worth of transactions waiting to be processed on the network. When theres a backlog, those wanting to send Bitcoin raise fees so that theyre processed quicker (because miners are more likely to process transactions with higher fees).

The last time Bitcoin transaction fees rose this high was back in May. After Bitcoin's quadrennial halving, the average Bitcoin fee observed a two-year high of around $6.60. It dropped back down afterwards, which should happen this time around too.

Network fees on Bitcoin's closest rival Ethereum are also spiking, up 180% this month, and hitting $1.4 on average. And its having a knock-on effect on the decentralized finance (DeFi) industry. With higher transaction fees, DeFi apps, such as Compound and Uniswap, end up becoming much more costly to use.

Workside hedline is 32pts and it’s hereyy – Minneapolis Star Tribune

Posted on July 29, 2020 by admin

One of the most colorful people I've ever known was Al McGuire, coach of Marquette University's men's basketball team, which won the 1997 national championship. He used to say that when his team's normally disciplined offense spun out of control, the action resembled "scrambled eggs."

The same thing happens when writing spins out of control.

Take the passage below, about President Donald Trump's commutation of Roger Stone's sentence; Stone was convicted of lying to Mueller investigators about his involvement with the Russian effort to derail Hillary Clinton's campaign.

From the New York Times: "Mr. Trump repeatedly praised Mr. Stone and others for refusing to aid the investigation. In a December 2018 tweet, he singled out Mr. Stone for resisting 'a rogue and out of control prosecutor,' adding, 'Nice to know that some people still have guts!'

"'It is possible that by the time the president submitted his written answers two years after the relevant events had occurred, he no longer had clear recollections of his discussions with Stone or his knowledge of Stone's asserted communications with WikiLeaks,' the Mueller prosecutors wrote in a passage disclosed last month as a result of a lawsuit."

Scrambled eggs.

Did you have any idea who was being quoted in the paragraph that starts: "It is possible that by the time the president submitted his written answers "?

A reader has to slog through 41 words to arrive at the source of the quote the Mueller report. Clear writing would avoid dragging readers through that mess. Clear writing takes exacting work.

The solution: When you have back-to-back quotes from different sources, the second quote screams for attribution where it starts. Try this:

"Nice to know that some people still have guts!"

Prosecutors in the Mueller investigation, responding to a lawsuit filed on the president's behalf, recently disclosed this passage: "It is possible that by the time the president submitted his written answers "

The revised text unscrambles the eggs; it keeps us reading, without forcing us to excavate.

Twin Cities writing coach and Emmy Award winner Gary Gilson, who taught journalism at Colorado College, can be reached at writebetterwithgary.com.

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Workside hedline is 32pts and it's hereyy - Minneapolis Star Tribune

The New Big Three Revived the News Monopoly We Busted – Rush Limbaugh

Posted on July 29, 2020 by admin

RUSH: Theres a congressional hearing going on today. The same House committee, the Judiciary Committee. This is a hearing into antitrust monopolistic practices of big tech. You have Tim Cook from Apple there. You got Zuckerberg from Facebook there. Youve got Bezos from Amazon there. You got the Google CEO, Sundar Pichai, Pichai, whatever his name is. Theyre all there, and theyre being hit hard by Jim Jordan and others.

The purpose of the hearing is multifaceted, as you will hear in a sound bite we have of Jim Jordan. Hes choosing to go after them for their anti-conservative bias, particularly Google and Facebook: Their search results in case of Google and Facebook for their shadow banning and Twitter. Jack Dorseys there as well.

And then there are others who are going after them on monopolistic grounds like Apple and its App Store and the fact that basically these people have no competitors. And when a competitor pops up, they buy them and shut them down and silence them. So theres Its, as I say, a multifaceted attack on Big Tech.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Now to the audio sound bites. Here is Alex Marlow. Alex Marlow was on with Tucker Carlson last night. Alex Marlow is the editor-in-chief at Breitbart, and this is an example of how Google is essentially trying to erase Breitbart from existing via its search engine. So Tucker Carlsons question: Give us an example of what youve learned that Google is doing to your site.

MARLOW: Gradually since the 2016 election, Googles been diminishing our search results and then all of a sudden, in May of this year, we virtually lost all Google traffic, all search traffic altogether. Let me give you some specific pieces of data: A Google track, something called a visibility index. This is sort of like their Nielsen score.

Thats when your content shows up on one of their pages. Breitbarts is down 99.77%. Overall, our Google traffic is down nearly two-thirds. If you want to search for Joe Biden or Biden, the chance of you getting a Breitbart article are virtually zero, virtually no opportunity for you to get it unless, of course, you add the word Breitbart.

RUSH: All right. Now, I know theres a number of different reactions that you can have to this. A, its obvious what Google is doing here. They are practicing censorship, and theyre doing everything they can, via their search engine and results, to eliminate conservative websites. They are also using the fact that they control internet advertising, to deprive conservative websites of any Google-related advertising.

And most of the advertising on the internet sadly is run through Google. They own it. It is their primary source of income. And they are defunding conservative websites and blogs. And theyre also eliminating conservative websites and backlogs from any search results. Now, you can argue, Its unfair, they shouldnt be. But look. Theyre Google. They can do what they want to do. The idea that we should expect a bunch of leftists to treat us fairly is kind of naive.

I dont want to be cruel here, but Google is what it is. I mean, if youre gonna end up somehow becoming dependent on them, then you ought to realize that at some point theyre gonna turn on you. Its like the story of the scorpion and the frog, or pick your animal. Scorpion hitches a ride across a lake on the back of a turtle. And the turtle says, I dont want to take you because youre gonna kill me.

No, no, no, I wont, I wont, youre gonna save my life, youre gonna get me across the lake. So the turtle takes the scorpion across the lake. And as sure as you can count it, they get to the other side, the scorpion stings the turtle and kills it. And the turtle, I thought you said that you werent gonna sting me.

And the scorpion said, What did you think I was gonna do? Im a scorpion. Its what I do. I sting you. Google is the scorpion. Now, maybe when this all started Google was fair or more fair than they are now. But to expect a bunch of leftists this would be like expecting the Democrat Party to give us access and to have the Democrat Party promote our point of view for 40 or 50% of the day. We would never expect that to happen.

And yet there is this expectation that Google should. Well, but its the only search engine. No, its not the only search engine. Theres all kinds of search engines out there. Theres DuckDuckGo. Theres Bing, which is Microsoft. Look, I dont want to appear to be insensitive. Because I understand. I understand the problem. Google is the search engine of search engines. And they ought to be playing fair since they have so much power.

And thats what this hearing is about today. The monopolistic power that these tech companies have and theres always the threat of antitrust legislation unless they straighten up. But the Democrats are not gonna do anything to harm Google. The Democrats are not gonna do anything to harm Facebook. The Democrats arent gonna do anything to harm Twitter.

And the Democrats run the House. So the idea that the Democrats are going to do anything to damage their political partners? Thats kind of the wrong expectation. I want you to hear nevertheless Jim Jordan during his I guess this is his opening statement today. This is how he kicked off what he thinks this is all about.

JORDAN: Ill just cut to the chase. Big techs out to get conservatives. Thats not a suspicion. Thats not a hunch. Thats a fact. July 20 of 2020 Google removed the home pages of Breitbart and The Daily Caller. Just last night we learned Google has censored Breitbart so much, traffic has declined 99%. June 16th, 2020, Google threatened to demonetize and ban The Federalist. June 29th, 2020, Amazon bans President Trumps account on Twitch after he raises concerns about defunding the police. June 4th, 2020, Amazon bans a book critical of the coronavirus lockdown written by a conservative commentator.

May 27th, 2020, Amazon Smile wont let you give to the Family Research Council and the Alliance Defense Fund, but you can give to Planned Parenthood. Facebook, June 19th, 2020, takes down posts from President Trumps reelection campaign. November 1st, 2018, Facebook silences a pro-life organizations advertisement. May 19th, 2016, former Facebook employees admit Facebook routinely suppresses conservative views. And I havent even mentioned Twitter.

RUSH: Why would we expect them to behave any differently than this? Do we not know who liberals are? Do we not know what they do? Do we not know how they operate? Now, I know, look. Again. Theyre all promising to be fair. Googles denying that theres any bias. And Facebook, Zuckerberg, they deny theres any bias. And the same with Twitter. Jack, no, we dont have any. Theyre out there lying through their teeth about it. But in terms of their behavior, they are who they are. Theres not a single thing about what Googles doing that is a surprise.

Now, they definitely have a monopoly on searches. There is no question that. And so its a legitimate question. Why should they be allowed to be a monopoly when IBM wasnt allowed to be one? Microsoft was not allowed to be one. Standard Oil was not allowed to be one. AT&T, Ma Bell, not allowed to be one. So why is Google allowed to be one? The answer is because they are partners with the Democrat Party. Its that simple.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: So Ive got this sound bite from Zuckerberg. I dont think Im gonna have time to get it in because the question is longer than the bite. But you gotta hear this. Here is what he was asked by James Sensenbrenner, Republican, Wisconsin. He said, It was reported that Donald Trump Jr, got taken down (from Twitter) for a period of time, because he put something up of the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine. There still is a debate on whether it is effective. Wouldnt that be up to somebody else to say, okay, what somebody posted on this really isnt true?

In other words, hes asking the question of Zuckerberg that I asked yesterday. Who on Twitter is the medical expert that can immediately proclaim that this Nigerian doctor doesnt know what shes talking about? Who is the medical expert at Twitter, at Facebook? Who is it that has the authority to claim that a doctor doesnt know what shes talking about and can pull down any reference to that doctors comments? Zuckerbergs answer coming up.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I just watched this loco weed, this guy Jamie Raskin, this Democrat from Maryland, ask an epic question of Zuckerberg. These guys have got Cambridge Analytica on the brain. This question was all about (doing impression), So you allowed the Russians to tamper in the election. You allowed Cambridge Analytica to turn America into a bunch of anti-Semites and a bunch of racists. Theres millions of people in Cambridge Analytica, and Cambridge -

Cambridge Analytica is just one conservative outfit that used Facebook like the Democrat Party and thousands of organizations use Facebook. But because there was one conservative group that found a way to turn Facebook to its advantage, we gotta single em out and we gotta destroy em, and Zuckerberg, you gotta explain, how did you let this conservative outfit use your company so effectively?

Now, Zuckerberg started to answer as soon as the break ended, so I havent heard his answer. I think, you know, all these guys, Zuckerberg and Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai, when these things are over, they probably get together, Can you believe these idiots that the American people have elected? They sit perfunctorily through these hearings and they tell these people what they think they want to hear and then they end it and go home and nothing ever changes.

Google is gonna remain a monopoly on search. Google, Facebook, whatever, is gonna remain a monopoly on whatever it is. Twitter is gonna remain the sewer that it is. And theyre all going to remain tied to the hip of the Democrat Party. Now, heres Zuckerbergs answer. Question he was asked by Sensenbrenner, It was reported that Donald Trump Jr, got taken down (from Twitter) for a period of time, because he put something up of the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine. There still is a debate on whether it is effective. Wouldnt that be up to somebody else to say, okay, what somebody posted on this really isnt true, heres what the facts are, rather than having a Twitter or Facebook take it down?

Its a great question. Its what I raised yesterday. Who is the medical expert at Twitter or Facebook that can, on the fly and within minutes, claim that the Nigerian doctor doesnt know what shes talking about? Nor does anybody in her doctors group know what theyre talking about. Who is it at Facebook that knows these things? Who is it at Twitter? Heres Zuckerbergs answer.

ZUCKERBERG: We do not want to become the arbiters of of truth. I think that that would be a bad position for us to be in and not not what we should be doing. But on specific claims, if someone is gonna go out and say that hydroxychloroquine is proven to cure COVID, when in fact it has not been proven to cure COVID and that that statement could lead people to take a drug that in some cases some of the data suggests that it might be harmful to people, we think that we should take that down. That could cause imminent risk of harm.

RUSH: Yeah, but we dont want to be arbiters of truth. See, we dont want to be arbiters of truth except on hydroxychloroquine, and then we will be arbiters of truth. This business of research that suggests it might be harmful to people is bogus. Its a Lancet survey and story and a research bunch and still up there. Lancets a magazine. Its bogus. There have been so many bogus studies and reports of the dangers of hydroxychloroquine, and theyve all been debunked.

And thats why hydroxychloroquines making a comeback because there are doctors around the world who are using it, who swear by it, whove never lost a patient. And they dont understand why in the world, in the medical community, its not being advocated. Its cheap. Theres your answer. Its plentiful. It has 50 years of market testing. Its an anti-malarial drug, thats its primary usage, but you talk about clinical trials and all that, hydroxychloroquine has had 50 years. They dont need to have massive testing here with COVID-19. They have, and doctors with using it because in their experience it works.

But I just think, folks, that the real question is: so Donald Trump Jr. retweets the Nigerian doctor, and others do, and they get immediately taken down, their accounts suspended. Which means that somebody at Twitter and somebody at Facebook is claiming to be a medical authority, and we dont know who they are. Now, Dr. Simone Gold is the leader of the group that Dr. Immanuel is part of, Stella Immanuel is a Nigerian doctor. Shes the one that led the group on the steps of the Supreme Court. And it was her video that went viral, 20 million views before they were able to take it down.

By the way, my tech blog buddies, they are angry as hell at that. They cant believe that 20 million people saw it before it was taken down. Its irresponsible. Somebody at Facebook and somebody at Twitter must pay. So it got out there. But Dr. Simone Gold says: Our website host, which is Squarespace, has just completely and arbitrarily shut down our website, claiming a violation of their terms of service. This is crazy. We are a group of doctors advocating for a better understanding of COVID-19 and its available treatment options. This is outrageous. Were not subverting anything. Were not purposely countering medical ethics. Were not making anybody sick. Were advocating for a better understanding of COVID-19. They take us down.

Their website host has canceled them, not just Twitter and Facebook. But here we go. Michigan hospital study says: Treatment with Hydroxychloroquine Cut Death Rate Significantly in COVID-19 Patients Treatment with hydroxychloroquine cut the death rate significantly in sick patients hospitalized with COVID-19 and without heart-related side-effects, according to a new study published by Henry Ford Health System.

Our analysis shows that using hydroxychloroquine helped saves lives, said neurosurgeon Dr. Steven Kalkanis, CEO, Henry Ford Medical Group and Senior Vice President and Chief Academic Officer of Henry Ford Health System. As doctors and scientists, we look to the data for insight. And the data here is clear that there was benefit to using the drug as a treatment for sick, hospitalized patients.'

From the Desert Review: Local Doctor Pushing Proven Treatment Of COVID Into National Debate A front-line local doctor treating COVID-19 patients claims to have figured out what works to keep his patients alive. He claims to have answers on better controlling, and curbing, a pandemic that knows no boundaries. Dr. George Fareed is a physician who can be spotted during football season as local high schools field doctor working with athletes from Holtville, El Centro, Imperial, and lately, with Brawley Union High School.

Its really tragic, in a way, because the use of hydroxychloroquine I mean, theres doctors all over the country, some who know each other, some who dont, theyre all singing the praises of this drug. This would be a massive, massive conspiracy here. At any rate, if this is all true, then the hydroxychloroquine cocktail, azithromycin, Z-Pak, zinc, whatever, would solve some of the very basic problems that were now facing. Its a preventative. It would prevent hospitalizations. It would keep the hospitals and ICUs from being overrun with COVID-19 patients. It apparently can be used early on in hospitalization to prevent patients from requiring ventilators, can reduce the length of a hospital stay.

Does it strike any of you as strange that theres literally no desire and no interest on the part of so many in the medical community to even consider it? Hydroxychloroquine, all you have to do is mention it, and it is immediately impugned and ripped to shreds. There is no curiosity whatsoever from the people well call the nonbelievers.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Folks, I got a theory here about whats going on. And the theory might irritate some people, but let me share it with. Okay, 24 and 8, Mike. Have them standing by. Go back to 1988. In 1988, there were the big three ABC, CBS, NBC and then you had the New York Times, the Washington Post. That was the media. They owned it.

There were only three TV networks and the two big papers, and that was a monopoly. They owned it. They owned what to report, what not to report. They owned commentary. Then this show kicked off in August of 88, and we busted their monopoly. For the first time, for the first time in generations maybe first time ever there was an alternative to the liberal dominance in news and information controlled by CBS, NBC, ABC, and the newspapers.

So this show begins, then Rush Limbaugh the TV Show, then a number of other conservative radio talk shows, nationally and locally, then Fox News. And pretty soon the blogosphere and websites. And pretty soon there is this massive, right-wing, alternative media that busts up the mainstream medias monopoly and they still havent gotten over it!

They are still trying to recapture the days of glory when they were able to get rid of anybody they wanted to with one of two stories. Theyd get rid of Nixon, get rid of any Republican they wanted to because they had. That all ended in August of 1988. I think that even though its taken them 30 years, they have now begun to reestablish their control of the flow of news and information and theres a new big three now.

Its not ABC, CBS, NBC anymore. Its Google, Facebook, and Twitter. I think the Democrat Party and Big Media have gone ahead and conceded that if theyre to get their dominance and their monopoly in news back, its gonna have to be with Google and Twitter and Facebook. I think those are the new big three replacing ABC, CBS, NBC from all the way back in 1988 and years before.

Now, it took them 30 years to recover from what started in 1988. But thats what were facing. Now, ABC, CBS, NBC are still powerful. Dont misunderstand. CNN, all that. But the real monopoly in news now is Facebook and Twitter and Google with their search engine, because it is those three who can eliminate conservatism on the Web. They can eliminate by denying advertising revenue.

They can deny them presence in search engines. They have tried to take me and this program out I cant tell you how many times, and theyve failed. Do you know why? We have never been dependent on them. I have never been dependent on social media for a dollar of revenue generated by this program. We do it independently. We dont depend on some foreign sales outfit, some conglomerate that sells advertising for everybody.

We do it ourselves.

So its the same thing. Where the media didnt make me, they cant break me. The media is not responsible for any of my revenue. They cant take it away. They can try. They can institute these boycotts. They can try to destroy me, my reputation, all that and theyve tried numerous times. Theyve failed. So they can be beat, or they can be stopped. But not if you depend on em for either revenue or search engine results or what have you.

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The New Big Three Revived the News Monopoly We Busted - Rush Limbaugh

EU Plans To Use Supercomputers To Break Encryption, But Also Wants Platforms To ‘Create Opportunities’ To Snoop On End-To-End Communications -…

Posted on July 29, 2020 by admin

from the there-are-better-ways dept

They say that only two things are certain in life: death and taxes. But here on Techdirt, we have a third certainty: that governments around the world will always seek ways of gaining access to encrypted communications, because they claim that things are "going dark" for them. In the US and elsewhere, the most requested way of doing that is by inserting backdoors into encryption systems. As everyone except certain government officials know, that's a really bad idea. So it's interesting to read a detailed and fascinating report by Matthias Monroy on how the EU has been approaching this problem without asking for backdoors -- so far. The European Commission has been just as vocal as the authorities in other parts of the world in calling for law enforcement to have access to encrypted communications for the purpose of combating crime. But EU countries such as Germany, Finland and Croatia have said they are against prohibiting, limiting or weakening encrypted connections. Because of the way the EU works, that means the region as a whole needs to adopt other methods of gaining access. Monroy explains that the EU is pinning its hopes on its regional police organization:

At EU level, Europol is responsible for reading encrypted communications and storage media. The police agency has set up a "decryption platform" for that. According to Europol's annual report for 2018, a "decryption expert" works there, from whom the competent authorities of the Member States can obtain assistance. The unit is based at the European Centre for Cybercrime (EC3) at Europol in The Hague and received five million euros two years ago for the procurement of appropriate tools.

The Europol group uses the open source password recovery software Hashcat in order to guess passwords used for content and storage media. According to Monroy, the "decryption platform" has managed to obtain passwords for 32 cases out of 91 where it the authorities needed access to an encrypted device or file. A 39% success rate is not too shabby, depending on how strong the passwords were. But the EU wants to do better, and has decided one way to do that is to throw even more number-crunching power at the problem: in the future, supercomputers will be used. Europol is organizing training courses to help investigators gain access to encrypted materials using Hashcat. Another "decryption expert group" has been given the job of coming up with new technical and legal options. Unfortunately, the approaches under consideration are little more than plans to bully Internet companies into doing the dirty work:

Internet service providers such as Google, Facebook and Microsoft are to create opportunities to read end-to-end encrypted communications. If criminal content is found, it should be reported to the relevant law enforcement authorities. To this end, the Commission has initiated an "expert process" with the companies in the framework of the EU Internet Forum, which is to make proposals in a study.

This process could later result in a regulation or directive that would force companies to cooperate.

There's no way to "create opportunities" to read end-to-end encrypted communications without weakening the latter. If threats from the EU and elsewhere force major Internet services to take this step, people will just start using open source solutions that are not controlled by any company. As Techdirt has noted, there are far better ways to gain access to encrypted communications -- ones that don't involve undermining them.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, Diaspora, or Mastodon.

Filed Under: backdoors, encryption, eu, hacking

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EU Plans To Use Supercomputers To Break Encryption, But Also Wants Platforms To 'Create Opportunities' To Snoop On End-To-End Communications -...

Corporations Must Step Up to the Plate to Enhance the Security of Cloud Computing – Security Boulevard

Posted on July 29, 2020 by admin

Now that weve passed the midpoint in 2020, one thing in the cybersecurity world has become crystal clear: The need for better security within public clouds must be addressed by enterprises once and for all, and that entails cryptography.

No question, enterprises large and small have realized the benefits of rapidly deployable, reasonably priced and extremely scalable public computing infrastructure. According to Forbes, the global cloud computing market will reach $411 billion this year.

But what about the security? Is it up to snuff?

Not really, even though some public cloud purveyors offer some encryption as an option and sometimes by default. This step is hardly foolproof, however, and that should come as no surprise. After all, data in the cloud is stored with a third-party provider and accessed over the internet. This means visibility and control over that dataincluding its securityis limited.

Fact is, cloud service providers treat cloud security risks as a shared responsibility. The good news is that some cloud companies allow clients to encrypt their data before sending it to the cloud, and its becoming increasingly clear that thisor possibly the additional option of adopting a few other proven, state-of-the-art fixes for cloud securityis the preferred route for truly security-conscious enterprises.

That enhanced data encryption in the cloud makes sense began circulating roughly two-and-a-half years ago, when technology and cloud giant Accenture confirmed that it inadvertently left a gigantic store of private data access across four unsecured cloud servers. This exposed highly sensitive passwords and secret decryption keys that could have inflicted considerable damage on the company and its customers.

Since then, misconfigured cloud settings have caused multiple incidents of data exposures in the Amazon Web Services cloud. In addition, a misconfiguration error in Microsofts Azure cloud exposed 250 million technical support accounts. Meanwhile, MVISION Cloud, a unit of McAfee, analyzed the encryption controls offered by more than 12,000 providers and found yet more shortcomings. While 82percent of cloud service providers encrypt data in transit between the user and the cloud service, not even 10percent of cloud providers encrypt data once its stored, MVISION found.

According to CloudPassage, a software-as-a-service purveyor that provides security for private, public and hybrid clouds, one of the worst mistakes made by public cloud companies is having easily hacked administrative credentialsessentially the keys to the kingdom. As it turns out, attackers can execute a breach with a badly configured set of privileged credentialsa common occurrence, unfortunately, when a cloud company cuts corners in a rush to market.

Other mistakes among public crowd companies include exposed data assets, weak network access control and poor event logging, which impedes efforts to detect, contain and analyze compromises in the cloud.

On the bright side, there are companies today that help enterprises adopt cloud encryption. Oneborn out of research done at MITis cybersecurity company PreVeil, whose end-to-end encryption could redefine cloud-based cybersecurity in a way that doesnt interfere with workflows while still enabling popular cloud-based machine-learning applications.

Another company with a different approach to the same end goal is Zscaler, which offers a Secure Web Gateway in the cloud via software-as-a service. No hardware is required. Zscaler decentralizes cybersecurity protection, allowing data to flow back and forth from a public cloud rather than redirecting it to clients own physical data centers.

Another form of cryptography enhances the breadth of the science by offering fresh analytical capabilities as well as securityhomomorphic encryption (HE). HE is attracting more attention from select technology companies such as IBM, Microsoft and Google, and startups such as Enveil, and slowly growing. HE makes it possible to analyze or manipulate encrypted data without revealing the data to anyone, offering huge potential in areas with sensitive personal data such as in financial services or healthcareareas in which the privacy of a person is paramount.

The biggest barrier to widespread adoption of HE is that it is still very slow and so not yet practical for many applications. Nonetheless, company researchers are working diligently to speed up the process by decreasing the required computational overhead.

Microsoft, for example, has created SEAL, a set of encryption libraries that allow computations to be performed directly on encrypted data. SEAL is partnering with companies to build end-to-end encrypted data storage and computation services. Googleanother tech giant that has moved into the fieldlast year unveiled an open-source cryptographic tool similarly focused on analyzing data in its encrypted form with only the insights derived from the analysis visible, not the underlying data itself.

An even more futuristic development that cryptography-minded folks should be aware ofalthough in this case, in a blatantly negative senseis quantum computing, based on the principles of quantum physics.

At least a decade away, ultra-fast quantum computers could perform calculations exponentially faster than classic computersin the wrong hands potentially enabling the destruction of the encryption protecting their data. Fortunately, there is also some good news on this front. The National Institute of Standards and Technology is already pushing researchers to analyze potential problems in this post-quantum era. Meanwhile, IBM has already successfully demonstrated a quantum-proof encryption method it developed.

For now, here are six security tips for companies moving to public or even multi-cloud environments and concerned about cryptography and related security disciplines.

+ Get the basics right.Establish a strategy for multi-cloud encryption and the management of cryptography keys before expanding to more advanced crypto technologies.

+ Leverage encryption as part of your broader IT security efforts.Companies that dont have effective data classification and/or a prioritization program in place tend to struggle with data encryption. Data classification policies and tools facilitate the separation of valuable information that may be targeted from less valuable information.

+ Build in crypto agility.This refers to the capacity for an information security system to adopt an alternative to the original encryption method without significant change to system infrastructure. Be ready to replace or retire your deployed cryptography as needed.

+ Ensure that only authorized users can access data.This is critical to prevent tampering by anyone inside or outside the organization. Audit access controls regularly to ensure their validity.

+ Develop robust plans for business continuity and disaster recovery of crypto keys.Inventory keys and cryptographic libraries so you can recover your data alongside your protection mechanisms.

+ Make sure your cryptography is integrated intothe DevSecOps world.Ensure that DevOps teams choose crypto libraries that follow secure coding practices.

In the final analysis, encryption is tough stuff, but extremely important in the world of security. Companies that embrace it and incorporate it properly are taking an additional big step to protect their data and their reputation in a world inundated by embarrassing, hurtful and costly cyber-breaches.

Now that cloud computing has introduced encryption widely, security-minded companies are under growing pressure to keep the ball rolling and help move on to next steps.

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Corporations Must Step Up to the Plate to Enhance the Security of Cloud Computing - Security Boulevard

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