Thursday, July 31, 2014

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Judge rejects suit by Pa. teacher fired over blog

Natalie Munroe: Central Bucks, Pa., East High School teacher Natalie Munroe is seen while on hold during a phone interview at her attorney's office in Feasterville, Pa., Tuesday, Feb. 15, 2011.

AP Photo: Matt Rourke

Central Bucks, Pa., East High School teacher Natalie Munroe is seen while on hold during a phone interview at her attorney's office in Feasterville, Pa., Tuesday, Feb. 15, 2011.

By Associated Press

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit by a former suburban Philadelphia teacher fired two years ago over a blog in which she called students "disengaged, lazy whiners."

Teacher Natalie Munroe had accused the Central Bucks School District and some administrators of violating her free-speech rights by "harassing and retaliating against her" over the blog.

The Bucks County Courier Times reports that U.S. District Judge Cynthia Rufe on Friday granted the defendants' motion to dismiss the suit.

The judge ruled that Munroe's blog posts didn't provide enough value to the debate over educational reform to outweigh the district's right to maintain an "efficient" educational environment.

Munroe's attorney Steve Rovner said his client disagreed with the ruling and would appeal to the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

U.S. government warns retailers about malicious software

Getty Images: Joe Raedle

at Lorenzo's Italian Market on May 20, 2009 in Miami, Florida.

By Reuters

BOSTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Department Of Homeland Security warned retailers about a type of malicious software attacking point-of-sales systems, dubbed "Backoff," that it said is undetectable by most types of anti-virus software.

The agency released a 10-page advisory about the payment-card-stealing virus Backoff on Thursday, saying it has been observed in at least three forensic investigations into breaches of payment systems.

The U.S. government has released reports on several types of malicious software that cybercriminals used to steal payment cards in the wake of last year's unprecedented breach on Target Corp, which resulted in the theft of some 40 million payment card numbers.

Backoff is a family-of-point of sale malware first identified in October 2013 and with capabilities that include scraping memory for track data, logging keystrokes and injecting malicious stub into explorer.exe files, DHS said.

It said attackers use publicly available tools to find businesses that use remote desktop applications, then gain access to an administrative account to insert the malware.

The DHS advisory warned that such malware put both the business and consumer at risk, exposing data including names, credit card numbers, email addresses, mailing address and phone numbers.

"These breaches can impact a business' brand and reputation, while consumers’ information can be used to make fraudulent purchases or risk compromise of bank accounts," it said.

(Reporting by Jim Finkle and Doina Chiacu; Editing by Franklin Paul and Bill Trott)

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Wednesday, July 30, 2014

U.S. cellphone users hit for 'hundreds of millions' in bogus charges -Senate study: Thomson Reuters

Monday, July 28, 2014

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Pakistan mob kills woman, girls, over 'blasphemous' Facebook post

Police arrive at the houses of Ahmadis after they were torched by a mob following accusations of blasphemy in Gujranwala, Pakistan

By Syed Raza Hassan of Reuters

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - A Pakistani mob killed a woman member of a religious sect and two of her granddaughters after a sect member was accused of posting blasphemous material on Facebook, police said Monday, the latest instance of growing violence against minorities.

The dead, including a seven-year-old girl and her baby sister, were Ahmadis, who consider themselves Muslim but believe in a prophet after Mohammed. A 1984 Pakistani law declared them non-Muslims and many Pakistanis consider them heretics.

Police said the late Sunday violence in the town of Gujranwala, 220 km (140 miles) southeast of the capital, Islamabad, started with an altercation between young men, one of whom was an Ahmadi accused of posting "objectionable material".

"Later, a crowd of 150 people came to the police station demanding the registration of a blasphemy case against the accused," said one police officer who declined to be identified.

"As police were negotiating with the crowd, another mob attacked and started burning the houses of Ahmadis."

The youth accused of making the Facebook post had not been injured, he said.

Under Pakistani law, Ahmadis are banned from using Muslim greetings, saying Muslim prayers or referring to his place of worship as a mosque.

Salim ud Din, a spokesman for the Ahmadi community, said it was the worst attack on the community since simultaneous attacks on Ahmadi places of worship killed 86 Ahmadis four years ago.
"Police were there but just watching the burning. They didn't do anything to stop the mob," he said. "First they looted their homes and shops and then they burnt the homes."

The police officer said they had tried to stop the mob.

Accusations of blasphemy are rocketing in Pakistan, from one in 2011 to at least 68 last year, according to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. About 100 people have been accused of blasphemy this year.

Human rights workers say the accusations are increasingly used to settle personal vendettas or to grab the property of the accused.

(Additional reporting, writing by Katharine Houreld; Editing by Robert Birsel)

Sunday, July 27, 2014

How to Invent a Person Online

By Curtis Wallen of The Atlantic

Is it possible to be truly anonymous in the digital world?

On April 8, 2013, I received an envelope in the mail from a nonexistent return address in Toledo, Ohio. Inside was a blank thank-you note and an Ohio state driver’s license. The ID belonged to a 28-year-old man called Aaron Brown—6 feet tall and 160 pounds with a round face, scruffy brown hair, a thin beard, and green eyes. His most defining feature, however, was that he didn’t exist.
I know that because I created him.

As an artist, I’ve long been interested in identity and the ways it is represented. My first serious body of work, Springfield, used the concept of a Midwestern nowhere to explore representations of middle-American sprawl. A few years later, I became interested in the hundreds of different entities that track and analyze our behavior online—piecing together where we’re from, who we’re friends with, how much money we make, what we like and dislike. Social networks and data brokers use algorithms and probabilities to reconstruct our identities, and then try to influence the way we think and feel and make decisions.

It’s not an exaggeration to say everything you do online is being followed. And the more precisely a company can tailor your online experience, the more money it can make from advertisers. As a result, the Internet you see is different from the Internet anyone else might see. It’s seamlessly assembled each millisecond, designed specifically to influence you . I began to wonder what it would be like to evade this constant digital surveillance—to disappear online.

From that question, Aaron Brown was born.

* * *

My project started at a small coffee shop in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. With the help of Tor—a software program that uses layers of encryption to anonymize online activity—I searched Craigslist and tracked down a handful of affordable laptop computers for sale in New York City. I registered a new email address with the (now-defunct) Tormail anonymous email provider and arranged to buy a used Chromebook.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxx@xxxxxxx.com (1/27/13 - 11:23):

I ’ m punctual, I will be there on time at 1. Theres an atrium at citi center, will let you know when I ’ m there.

clcrb@tormail.org (1/27/13 - 11:25):

Perfect. See you there.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxx@xxxxxxx.com (1/27/13 - 12:59):

Im here in the atrium at 53rd and lex … Gray jacket, blonde hair. Sitting at a table

The meeting was quick. I wore a hat. I kept my head down. The man at the table in a gray jacket was a real person—in a busy public place full of cameras—who could later potentially connect me to the computer. These face-to-face moments left me the most vulnerable. If I was going to evade online surveillance, I had to avoid any ties between my digital footprint and the physical world.

When I got home I immediately reformatted the computer’s hard drive and installed a Linux partition. This meant I could encrypt and cosmetically “hide” the part of my computer that was using Linux. My new laptop would boot up Chrome OS like any other Chromebook, unless I gave it the command to boot up Linux instead. I never connected to anything using Chrome OS. And on the Linux side, I never accessed the Internet without Tor, and I never logged into anything that had any connection to Curtis Wallen.

For a couple months I poked around on the darknet—a hidden network that relies on nonstandard connections. At first, my goal was simply to exist as an anonymous user. However, I realized that this meant fundamentally changing my relationship to the Internet. I couldn’t log in to Facebook, I couldn’t send emails as Curtis, I couldn’t use the Internet the way most of us normally do. I simply couldn’t be me if I wanted to stay hidden. So my original idea began to shift. Rather than simply evade digital tracking, I began to play with the idea of generating a new digital person, complete with the markers of a physical identity. I gathered my roommates and took a series of portraits that fit the requirements for passport photos. I then carefully isolated various features from each one in Photoshop and composited a completely new face: Aaron Brown.

Up to that point, I had been largely operating on instinct and common sense. Now that my project was expanding, I figured it’d probably be a good time to reach out to someone who actually knew what she or he was doing.

I created a new Tormail account, the first evidence of my new person — aaronbrown@tormail.org –– and sent an encrypted email to the enigmatic researcher Gwern Branwen , asking what advice he’d give to someone “new to this whole anonymity thing.” Branwen replied with a simple but crucial piece of advice:

“Don’t get too attached to any one identity. Once a pseudonym has been linked to others or to your real identity, it’s always linked.”

Taking Branwen’s advice to heart, I put a sticky note next to my keyboard.

When most people think of Internet surveillance, they imagine government bureaucrats monitoring their emails and Google searches. In a March 2014 study , MIT professor Catherine Tucker and privacy advocate Alex Marthews analyzed data from Google Trends across 282 search terms rated for their "privacy-sensitivity." The terms included "Islam", "national security", "Occupy", "police brutality", "protest", and “revolution." After Edward Snowden’s leaks about NSA surveillance, Tucker and Marthews found, the frequency of these sensitive search terms declined—suggesting that Internet users have become less likely to explore "search terms that they [believe] might get them in trouble with the U.S. government." The study also found that people have become less likely to search "embarrassing" topics such as "AIDS", "alcoholics anonymous," "coming out," "depression," "feminism," "gender reassignment," "herpes," and “suicide”—while concerns over these more personal terms could have as much to do with startling Google ads, the notable decrease observed in the study suggests the increased awareness of surveillance led to a degree of self-censorship.

In other words, people are doing their best to blend in with the crowd.

The challenge of achieving true anonymity, though, is that evading surveillance makes your behavior anomalous—and anomalies stick out. As the Japanese proverb says, "A nail that sticks out gets hammered down." Glenn Greenwald explained recently that simply using encryption can make you a target. For me, this was all the more motivation to disappear.

Aaron had a face, but lacked “pocket litter”—an espionage term that refers to physical items that add authenticity to a spy’s cover. In order to produce this pocket litter, I needed money—the kind of currency that the counterfeit professionals of the darkweb would accept as payment. I needed bitcoin, a virtual currency that allows users to exchange goods and services without involving banks. At that time, one of the few services that exchanged cash for bitcoin was a company called Bitinstant. I made my way to a small computer shop in the Chinatown neighborhood of Manhattan to make the transfer.

At a small, teller-like window, I filled out the paperwork using fake information. Unwisely, I wrote down my name as Aaron Brown— thus creating one of the links to my real identity I should have been avoiding. As a result, my receipt had “Aarow Brown” printed on it. It seemed fitting that the first physical evidence of Aaron’s existence was a misspelled name on a receipt from a computer shop.

When I got home, 10 bitcoin were there waiting for me in my virtual wallet, stored on an encrypted flash drive. I made the necessary contacts and ordered a counterfeit driver’s license, a student ID, a boating license, car insurance, an American Indian tribal citizenship card, a social security card scan (real social security cards were a bit out of my budget), and a cable bill for proof of residency. The final bill came out to just over 7 bitcoin, roughly $400 at the time.

As I waited for my pile of documents, I began crafting Aaron’s online presence. While exploring message boards on the darknet, I came across the contact information for a self-proclaimed hacker called v1ct0r who was accepting applications to host hidden services on a server he managed. I messaged him with a request to host Aaron’s website. He was happy to offer a little space, under two conditions: “no child porn nor racism; Respects the rules or i could block/delete your account.”

I also set up a simple web proxy so that anyone could contribute to Aaron’s online presence. The proxy serves as a middleman for browsing the Internet, meaning any website you visit is first routed through the proxy server. Anyone who browses using the proxy is funneling traffic through that one node—which means those web pages look like they’re being visited by Aaron Brown.

Aaron’s Twitter account worked much the same way. There was a pre-authenticated form on the project website, allowing anyone to post a tweet to Aaron’s feed. As Aaron’s creator, it was fascinating to see what happened once strangers started interacting with it regularly. People would tweet at their friends, and then Aaron would received confused replies. Under the guise of Aaron, people tweeted out, jokes, love messages, political messages, and meta-commentaries on existence. I even saw a few advertisements. Ultimately, the account was suspended after Spanish political activists used it to spam news outlets and politicians.

In a sense, I was doing the opposite of astroturfing , a practice that uses fake social media profiles to spread the illusion of grassroots support or dissent. In 2011, the Daily Kos reported on a leaked document from defense contractor HBGary which explained how one person could pretend to be many different people:

Using the assigned social media accounts we can automate the posting of content that is relevant to the persona. … In fact using hashtags and gaming some location based check-in services we can make it appear as if a persona was actually at a conference and introduce himself/herself to key individuals as part of the exercise ... There are a variety of social media tricks we can use to add a level of realness to all fictitious personas.

Aaron Brown turned that concept inside out. With a multitude of voices and interests filtering through one point, any endeavor to monitor his behavior or serve him targeted ads became a wash. None of the information was representative of any discrete interests. The surveillance had no value. I’d created a false human being, but instead of a carefully coordinated deception, the result was simply babble.

***

“The Internet is what we make it,” wrote security researcher Bruce Schneier in January 2013, “and is constantly being recreated by organizations, companies, and countries with specific interests and agendas. Either we fight for a seat at the table, or the future of the Internet becomes something that is done to us.”

For those of us who feel confident that we have nothing to hide, the future of Internet security might not seem like a major concern. But we underestimate the many ways in which our online identities can be manipulated. A recent study used Facebook as a testing ground to determine if the company could influence a user’s emotional disposition by altering the content of her or his News Feed. For a week in January 2012, reseachers subjected 689,003 unknowing users to this psychological experiment, showing happier-than-usual messages to some people and sadder-than-usual messages to others. They concluded that they had “experimental evidence for massive-scale contagion via social networks” because users responded by publishing more positive or negative posts of their own, depending on what they saw in their own feeds.

The U.S. Department of Defense has also figured out how influential Facebook and Twitter can be. In 2011, it announced a new “Social Media in Strategic Communication” (SMISC) program to detect and counter information the U.S. government deemed dangerous. “Since everyone is potentially an influencer on social media and is capable of spreading information,” one researcher involved in a SMISC study told The Guardian , “our work aims to identify and engage the right people at the right time on social media to help propagate information when needed.”

Private companies are also using personal information in hidden ways. They don’t simply learn our tastes and habits, offering us more of what want and less of what we don’t. As Michael Fertik wrote in a 2013 Scientific American article titled “The Rich See a Different Internet Than the Poor,” credit lenders have the ability to hide their offers from people who may need loans the most. And Google now has a patent to change its prices based on who’s buying.

Is it even possible to hide from corporate and government feelers online? While my attempt to do so was an intensely interesting challenge, it ultimately left me a bit disappointed. It is essentially impossible to achieve anonymity online. It requires a complete operational posture that extends from the digital to the physical. Downloading a secure messaging app and using Tor won’t all of a sudden make you “NSA-proof.” And doing it right is really, really hard.

Weighing these trade-offs in my day-to-day life led to a few behavioral changes, but I have a mostly normal relationship with the Internet—I deleted my Facebook account, I encrypt my emails whenever I can, and I use a handful of privacy minded browser extensions. But even those are steps many people are unwilling, or unable, to take. And therein lies the major disappointment for me: privacy shouldn’t require elaborate precautions.

No one likes being subliminally influenced, discriminated against, or taken advantage of, yet these are all legitimate concerns that come with surveillance. These concerns are heightened as we increasingly live online. Digital surveillance is pervasive and relatively cheap. It is fundamentally different than anything we’ve faced before, and we’re still figuring out what what the boundaries should be.

For now, Aaron’s IDs and documents are still sitting inside my desk. Aaron himself actually went missing a little while ago. I used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk marketplace to solicit descriptions from strangers, and then hired a forensic artist to draw a sketch . He resurfaced on Twitter. (You can go here to try tweeting as Aaron Brown.) But other than that, no word. I have a feeling he’ll probably pop up in Cleveland at some point.

Everyone always seems to get sucked back home.

Thursday, July 24, 2014

Islamists planning imminent attack in Norway: police

Reuters: Heiko Junge, NTB Scanpix

From left, Anders Anundsen, Norway's minister of justice and public security, Benedicte Bjoernland, head of the Police Security Service, PST, and Vidar Refvik, head of the police force, hold a news conference in Oslo July 24, 2014. An Islamist militant group with ties to Syria may be planning an attack in Norway, possibly within the coming days, Bjoernland said on Thursday.

By Ole Petter Skonnord and Balazs Koranyi of Reuters

OSLO (Reuters) - Militant Islamists with fighting experience in Syria may be planning an attack in Norway in the coming days, police said on Thursday, as they deployed armed units at borders, airports and railway stations.

A small group of Norway-based militants who have gained combat experience in conflicts around the globe have become the biggest threat to the Nordic nation and up to 50 have traveled to Syria in recent years, police said.

"We have information indicating that a terrorist action against Norway is planned to be carried out shortly, probably within days," Benedicte Bjoernland, the director of the Police Security Service, the police's intelligence unit, said.

She said police had no information about the target or the nature of the planned attack so armed police, an unusual sight in Norway, would be deployed in places considered high risk.
Prime Minister Erna Solberg, who was informed of the threat late on Wednesday, delayed her holiday plans and would stay in Oslo while police mobilized both uniformed and undercover units, summoning many off-duty officers to work.

"It's most likely that there are foreign fighters involved, in which case we are talking about a small group, considering our knowledge of groups in Syria," Atle Mesoey, a security researcher at Norwegian University of Life Sciences, said.

"If police come out into the public with such a threat, it is highly credible, clearly," he said.
Neighboring Sweden and Denmark said they were not raising their own threat assessment but highlighted the broader and growing risk from Islamist militants.

Denmark said it estimated more than 100 of its nationals have left for Syria. Sweden has said its biggest security threat comes from around 200 Islamists who could become involved in militant attacks, including young people radicalized after fighting in Syria.

A botched suicide bomb attack four years ago in Stockholm and the conviction in 2012 of three Swedes for plotting to kill people at a Danish newspaper after it published cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad in 2005 have shown the Nordic countries are not immune to attacks.

Norway's biggest peacetime attack came three years ago when Anders Behring Breivik killed 77 people, mostly teenagers, at a youth camp, in a bombing and gun attack. Breivik said the attack was a fight against Muslim immigration.

NATO-member Norway has been working to clamp down on militant activity. In May it arrested three people suspected of aiding the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, an al Qaeda offshoot fighting in Iraq and Syria that now styles itself Islamic State.

(Additional reporting by Alistair Scrutton in Stockholm and Sabina Zawadzki in Copenhagen; Editing by Alison Williams; Editing by Alistair Scrutton)

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Tuesday, July 22, 2014

Protect yourself from identity theft

Getty Images: Moment Open

Person working on a laptop computer.

By Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) — It's an almost weekly occurrence: On Tuesday, Goodwill said its computer systems may have been hacked, leading to the possible theft of customers' credit and debit card information. The nonprofit agency, which operates 2,900 stores in the U.S., said it is working with federal investigators to look into a possible breach.

That follows news over the weekend that Vendini, an event ticketing service, had settled a class-action suit related to a data breach in 2013. For many people who had ordered tickets through the service, an e-mail about the settlement was their first notification that their information had been compromised. In the last year, major companies like Target, LinkedIn, eBay and Neiman Marcus have also been hacked.

The incidents are especially troubling to consumers as online and mobile shopping continues to grow. People aren't likely to stop using their credit and debit cards any time soon, and as data breaches become increasingly common, consumers don't often know what to do when a company they've done business with experiences a breach.

Here are five ways you can avoid becoming a victim of identity theft_even if your data has been compromised.

1. Monitor your bank statements. The easiest and most effective way to make sure someone hasn't made fraudulent charges to your account is to keep a close tab on your bank statements. Gartner analyst Avivah Litan recommends checking at least once a month, if not more, for any suspicious activity. If you find something that doesn't seem right, call your bank right away.

2. Use a credit card, not a debit card. Government regulations protect you from liability for fraudulent charges over $50 when you use a credit card or a debit card with a signature, not a pin number. But if you use a debit card with a pin, the regulations are murkier, and you may end up being liable for some charges.

"The best tip to avoid problems on your existing accounts is not to use debit cards, because not only is the credit card law better, but your own money is not at risk with a credit card," says Ed Mierzwinski, consumer program director at the U.S. Public Interest Research Group.

3. Get free credit monitoring. Concerned consumers can pay an organization for credit monitoring, but the government offers three free credit checks a year, something consumers should take advantage of, says Litan. The reports will show if any loans or new credit cards have been taken out in your name. Here's where to find free credit reports:

https://www.annualcreditreport.com/index.action

Also, companies that have had a data breach often offer to pay for customers' credit monitoring. Target, for example, offered one year of free credit monitoring, including identity theft insurance, to Target shoppers after its data breach last year.

4. Bank smarter. Many banks offer a service that sends an email alert when any major changes —or charges— are made to a customer's account. The alerts can be very helpful in detecting identity theft. If you want to be extra cautious, don't make money transfers online or pay bills electronically —use a check. "Paper is much more secure," says Litan. Also, experts recommend changing your passwords often. And never use the same password for banking that you use for lower-security websites. Non-banking sites tend to be easier to hack.

5. Don't rely on companies. Vendini, the latest company to report a data breach, on Friday scored a rare settlement for a class-action lawsuit about compromised data. The company, which offers ticketing services for theaters and event venues, will pay out up to $3,000 per customer for identity theft losses, but it will be difficult for people to collect their money, because it is necessary to prove that the information that was used for identity theft came from Vendini. The lesson: don't depend on companies to let you know if your data has been stolen. If you want to protect yourself, it's best to take matters into your own hands.

Saturday, July 19, 2014

U.S. judge OKs warrant for Google user's emails, stoking debate

REUTERS: Christian Hartmann

An employee answers phone calls

at the switchboard of the Google office in Zurich.

By Joseph Ax of Reuters

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A federal judge in New York has granted prosecutors access to a Gmail user's emails as part of a criminal probe, a decision that could fan the debate over how aggressively the government may pursue data if doing so may invade people's privacy.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Gabriel Gorenstein said Friday he had authorized a warrant to be served on Google Inc for the emails of an unnamed individual who is the target of a money laundering investigation.

Gorenstein said his decision ran counter to several other judges' rulings in similar cases that sweeping warrants give the government improper access to too many emails, not just relevant ones.
But he said the law lets investigators review broad swaths of documents to decide which are covered by warrants.

Google did not respond to a request for comment.

The ruling came three months after U.S. Magistrate Judge James Francis in New York said prosecutors can force Microsoft Corp to hand over a customer's email stored in an Ireland data center.
Microsoft has appealed, in what is seen as the first challenge by a company to a warrant seeking data stored overseas.

Companies including Verizon Communications Inc, AT&T Inc, Cisco Systems Inc and Apple Inc have filed briefs in support of Microsoft, as has the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an advocacy group. A hearing is set for July 31 before U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska in New York.

The government's ability to seize personal information has grown more contentious since former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden leaked secret documents in June 2013 to media outlets outlining the agency's massive data collection programs.

In June, a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court ruled police generally need a warrant to search an arrested suspect's cellphone, citing privacy concerns.

Gorenstein's ruling joined a public debate playing out among several magistrate judges, who typically handle warrant requests. It is unusual to issue lengthy opinions on such matters particularly when, as in Gorenstein's case, the judge approves the application.

In April, John Facciola, a magistrate in Washington, D.C., rejected a warrant for the Apple email account of a defense contractor as part of a kickback investigation, one of several similar opinions he has authored recently.

Last year, a Kansas magistrate denied warrant applications for emails and records at Google, Verizon, Yahoo! Inc, Microsoft unit Skype and GoDaddy in a stolen computer equipment case.
Both judges said the warrants were overly broad.

On the other hand, several U.S. appeals courts have rejected motions to suppress such searches, Gorenstein said.

Hanni Fakhoury, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, applauded Gorenstein for explaining his reasoning in writing, though he said he disagreed with the analysis.

"The more voices and opinions we can add to the discussion, the better," he said in an email.

(Reporting by Joseph Ax; Editing by Richard Chang)

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Wednesday, July 16, 2014

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Mystery 100-meter-wide hole appears at Russia's 'world's end'

Image: Video still of a crater in Yamal, Siberia (© Siberian Times via YouTube, http://aka.ms/yamal)

By Thomas Grove of Reuters

MOSCOW, July 16 (Reuters) - Researchers are to investigate a giant mysterious hole that has appeared in one of Russia's most isolated northernmost regions, state television reported.

It was unclear what had caused the gaping crater, about 100 meters in diameter, filmed from the air in Yamal, which means 'the end of the Earth' in the local Nenets language, where temperatures plummet to -50 degrees Celsius (-58 degrees Fahrenheit) and the sun barely rises in winter.

An expedition to collect soil and water samples from the site was planned for Thursday with two researchers from the Siberian-based Center for the Study of the Arctic and a scientist from Russia's Academy of Science, state news outlet Vesti reported.

TV Zvezda, broadcast by Russia's Defense Ministry, reported the person who shot the video footage as saying the hole appeared to have been caused from below and that the darker soil around its top indicated the effect of high temperatures.

Yamal, inhabited by indigenous reindeer herders, is one of Russia's richest regions in natural gas. The hole was found near the Bovanentsky gas field, leading to speculation that it could have been caused by an underground explosion.

(Reporting by Thomas Grove; Editing by Janet Lawrence)

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Tuesday, July 15, 2014

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Comcast Serves Up What May Be the Worst Customer Service Call in History

Alyssa Bereznak Tech ColumnistJuly 15, 2014

Comcast Serves Up What May Be the Worst Customer Service Call in History

You probably have your own fair share of cable-provider horror stories. But former Comcast customer Ryan Block’s may very well take the cake.

Block, the former editor of the tech site Engadget and a product developer at AOL, recently shared his story/living nightmare on Twitter. Block’s wife, the writer Veronica Belmont, called Comcast to cancel the current service because the household was switching to Astound. Belmont was transferred to the “cancellations” line and handed the phone over to her husband. That’s when the terrorizing began, and Block decided to record the conversation and post it to SoundCloud.

Comcast victim Ryan Block (Via Twitter.)

Per Block’s explanation:

“The representative (name redacted) continued aggressively repeating his questions, despite the answers given, to the point where my wife became so visibly upset she handed me the phone. Overhearing the conversation, I knew this would not be very fun.

“What I did not know is how oppressive this conversation would be. Within just a few minutes the representative had gotten so condescending and unhelpful I felt compelled to record the speakerphone conversation on my other phone.

“This recording picks up roughly 10 minutes into the call, whereby she and I have already played along and given a myriad of reasons and explanations as to why we are canceling (which is why I simply stopped answering the rep’s repeated question — it was clear the only sufficient answer was ‘Okay, please don’t disconnect our service after all.’).”

The call starts like this:

Block: We’d like to disconnect please.

Comcast rep: Why is it that you don’t want the faster speed? Help me understand why you don’t want faster internet.

Block: Help me understand why you can’t disconnect us.

Comcast rep: Because my job is to have a conversation with you about keeping your service, about finding out why it is that you’re looking to cancel the service.

Block: I don’t understand …

Comcast rep: If you don’t want to talk to me, you can definitely go into the Comcast store and disconnect your service there.

And it goes on for another seven more excruciating minutes.

But, seriously, listen for yourself. The Comcast representative’s utter determination to keep Block with the provider comes off as both unhelpful and disdainful; it’s like the worst part of every conversation I’ve had with cable provider stitched together into some cruel eight-minute sound bite. At one point, an exasperated Block even wonders aloud if the whole thing is a joke.

Since the recording has spread, Comcast released a statement on behalf of the employee, who remains unnamed.

“We are very embarrassed by the way our employee spoke with Mr. Block and are contacting him to personally apologize. The way in which our representative communicated with him is unacceptable and not consistent with how we train our customer service representatives. We are investigating this situation and will take quick action. While the overwhelming majority of our employees work very hard to do the right thing every day, we are using this very unfortunate experience to reinforce how important it is to always treat our customers with the utmost respect.”

Sure, Comcast. We’re sure you do.

Follow Alyssa Bereznak on Twitter or share your personal cable provider horror stories with her here.

Monday, July 7, 2014

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Sunday, July 6, 2014

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Saturday, July 5, 2014

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Friday, July 4, 2014

Veteran dies waiting for ambulance in VA hospital

Newscom: Adolphe Pierre-Louis, ZUMA Press

The VA Hospital located in southeast Albuquerque, N.M.

By Associated Press

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — A veteran who collapsed in an Albuquerque Veteran Affairs hospital cafeteria — 500 yards from the emergency room — died after waiting around 20 minutes for an ambulance, officials confirmed Thursday.

It took between 15 and 20 minutes for the ambulance to be dispatched and take the man from one building to the other, which is about a five-minute walk, officials at the hospital said.

Kirtland Air Force Medical Group personnel performed CPR until the ambulance arrived, VA spokeswoman Sonja Brown said.

Staff followed policy in calling 911 when the man collapsed on Monday, she said. "Our policy is under expedited review," Brown said.

That policy is a local one, she said.

The man's name hasn't been released.

News of the man's death spread Thursday at the Raymond G. Murphy VA Medical Center among veterans who were visiting for various medical reasons.

Lorenzo Calbert, 65, a U.S. Army veteran of the Vietnam War, said it was sad that a fellow veteran had to die so close to where he could have received help.

"There's no reason for it," he said. "They have so many workers. They could have put him on the gurney and run faster than that ambulance."

Paul Bronston, a California emergency-room physician and chair of Ethics and Professional Policy Committee of the American College of Medical Quality, said it may sound ridiculous that staff had to call 911 but that practice is the standard at hospitals. Typically, an ambulance would arrive faster, and other factors can stall workers trying to rush patients to the emergency room on foot, he said.

"The question I would have (is) ... was there an AED (automated external defibrillator) on site as required?" he said. Bronston said 90 percent of those who collapse are afflicted by heart problems and an AED could help them.

It was not known what caused the man to collapse or whether an AED was nearby.

The death comes as the Department of Veterans Affairs remains under scrutiny for widespread reports of long delays for treatment and medical appointments and of veterans dying while on waiting lists.

A review last week cited "significant and chronic system failures" in the nation's health system for veterans. The review also portrayed the struggling agency as one battling a corrosive culture of distrust, lacking in resources and ill-prepared to deal with an influx of new and older veterans with a range of medical and mental health care needs.

The scathing report by Deputy White House chief of staff Rob Nabors said the Veterans Health Administration, the VA sub agency that provides health care to about 8.8 million veterans a year, has systematically ignored warnings about its deficiencies and must be fundamentally restructured.

Marc Landy, a political science professor at Boston College, said the Department of Veterans Affairs is a large bureaucracy with various local policies like the one under review in Albuquerque.

Although the agency needs to undergo reform, Landy said it's unfair to attack the VA too harshly on the recent Albuquerque death because it appears to be so unusual.

"I think we have to be careful," he said. "Let's not beat up too much on the VA while they are already facing criticism."

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Thursday, July 3, 2014

Have We Been Reading the Declaration of Independence All Wrong?

National Archives The portion of the Declaration of Independence in question.

Here's some fun news for the Fourth of July: America might be reading an important passage of the Declaration of Independence all wrong. A scholar's argument that an authoritative transcription of the Declaration contains a period that isn't actually in the original document has convinced the National Archives to re-examine their presentation of the document. That's according to a well-timed New York Times story on the controversy, which could change how we read the passage beginning "We hold these truths to be self-evident."

First, let's pinpoint what's in question here. The official transcription from the National Archives reads (emphasis ours):

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

See that period? According to Princeton professor Danielle Allen, it's not actually in the original document. If she's right, then the individual rights of "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness" would share a sentence with what follows:

"— That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

Allen, speaking to the Times, argues that Thomas Jefferson intended to emphasize the second part of this passage — the role of the government — equally with the individual rights in the first part. Instead, with the period in place, there's an implied hierarchy. So you can begin to see how one little punctuation mark's presence or absence could become the subject of heated debate among those who have strong opinions about the role of government as it concerns individual liberty. Although the punctuation mark is still very much up for debate among experts, Allen has convinced several scholars that she might be on to something. The National Archives told the Times that they "want to take advantage of this possible new discovery" and find a way to re-examine the incredibly fragile original Declaration of Independence.

And that brings us to why it's so difficult to get to the bottom of this question. The handful of facsimiles that are considered early, authoritative copies of the original document differ on the presence of the period, although Allen argues that the bulk of those early copies — including the "Rough Draft" of the document — support her conclusions. So the original document could be the only thing that could put this line of questioning to rest. But the 1776 original, stored in a complex preservation system along with the Bill of Rights and the Constitution, is in really, really bad shape. It's more or less illegible. The National Archive will try to use new imaging technology to get a clearer picture of the mark in question, but it's not guaranteed to be conclusive.

If it does turn out that Allen is right, however, it would hardly be the first time a founding document has contained an error or a revision. The Constitution is basically full of small errors, for instance. And in 2010, the Library of Congress announced that it had discovered evidence of a big correction Jefferson himself made to the rough draft of the Declaration: Jefferson initially wrote the word "subjects" at one point, but later smudged out the word and wrote a different one in its place: "citizens."

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U.S. poll: more voters see Obama as worst president in modern times

Reuters

U.S. President Obama loosens his tie in the heat before delivering remarks on the economy at the Georgetown Waterfront Park in Washington.

By Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Two years into President Barack Obama's second term, more voters say they are dissatisfied with his administration's handling of everything from the economy to foreign policy, giving him the worst marks of any modern U.S. president, a poll on Wednesday said.

In a survey of 1,446 registered voters, 33 percent said Obama was the worst president since World War Two, while 28 percent pointed to his predecessor, George W. Bush, as the worst, the poll by Quinnipiac University found.

Voters were split over which of the two most recent presidents has done a better job with 39 percent saying Obama has been a better president than Bush and, 40 percent saying Obama is worse.

Most voters said Ronald Reagan, who served two terms in the 1980s, was the best president since 1945, the survey showed.

"Over the span of 69 years of American history and 12 presidencies, President Barack Obama finds himself with President George W. Bush at the bottom of the popularity barrel," said Tim Malloy, assistant director of Quinnipiac University's polling unit.

While Obama's job approval rating has inched higher to 40 percent, up from 38 percent in December, more voters gave him largely negative marks in key areas: the economy, foreign policy, healthcare and terrorism, according to the poll.

On the environment, 50 percent gave Obama positive marks.

The telephone survey, taken June 24 to June 30, had a margin of error of plus or minus 2.6 percentage points.

(Reporting by Susan Heavey; Editing by Bill Trott)

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U.S. poll: more voters see Obama as worst president in modern times