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Pirate Bay Liberates: Refuses to Take Down 3D Printer Plastic Gun Plans

May 13, 2013 by AnonAF

liberator

 

File-sharing site The Pirate Bay says it has no plans to remove the blueprints for the ‘Liberator’ gun – which can be used to create a functional weapon using a 3D printer – despite the US State Department forcing the original host to take down the files.

Designed by radical US libertarian Cody Wilson, the Liberator is the world’s first fully 3D printed firearm. When it was unveiled on Wilson’s DEFCAD website earlier this week, it was immediately downloaded by hundreds of thousands of people, with millions more getting the design off file-sharing websites.

The US State Department then asked Wilson to take down his blueprints, citing a possible violation of arms export regulations pending review, which he has done.

But The Pirate Bay (TPB), the Swedish-founded torrent website, which is currently operating through a domain name registered on the Caribbean island of Saint Maarten, does not plan to follow suit.

“TPB has for close to 10 years been operating without taking down one single torrent due to pressure from the outside. And it will never start doing that,” a senior insider told TorrentFreak news portal.

As well, as free speech, in justifying its decision TPB invoked a defense that echoed the National Rifle Association’s unofficial slogan (‘Guns don’t kill people. People kill people’).

“The problem is not the object but what you do with it. Just as with a cooking knife.”

Although Wilson has posted a video of himself successfully using the one-shot pistol that has garnered more than 3 million views on YouTube, it is not clear how practical or safe it would be to re-create the blueprints. Wilson used an $8,000 second-hand Stratasys Dimension SST printer, which makes three-dimensional objects by ‘printing’ a series of layers on top of each other with polymers.

Similarly to Wilson himself, Pirate Bay believes the blueprints are not to be taken at face value (“We laugh at their gun love since it’s so obviously the wrong way to go.”) but are a starting point for a public debate on personal freedoms and state authority.

“We think that the good thing about the discussion about 3D printers and their gun laws might bring more focus on the double standards that the US is having and hopefully – people will start printing signs to protest against the guns, the corruption and the threats against freedom of speech that the US is pushing on us,” said the Pirate Bay insider.

Regardless of the file-sharing portal’s stance, and edicts from the US State Department, it is almost impossible to remove files from the internet once they have been shared, as long as there is demand. At the time of writing, the blueprints remain a popular download on most file-sharing websites based across the world, and even if they were all shut down simultaneously, the files could easily be re-uploaded from the millions of hard disks on which they are already stored.

source.

Posted in activism, revolution |

Russia Not to Tolerate Further Israeli Attacks on Damascus

May 7, 2013 by AnonAF

putin-damascusTEHRAN (FNA)- Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, while in Shanghai, was given a sharp dressing-down by Russian President Vladimir Putin, a warning that Russia would not tolerate further Israeli attacks on Damascus and would respond.

Putin did not say how, but he did announce he had ordered the acceleration of highly advanced Russian weapons supplies to Syria.

Israeli Debkafile’s military sources disclosed that the Russian leader was referring to S-300 anti-air systems and the nuclear-capable 9K720 Iskander (NATO named SS-26 Stone) surface missiles, which are precise enough to hit a target within a 5-7 meter radius at a distance of 280 kilometers.

In his phone call to Netanyahu, the Russian leader advised the prime minister to make sure to keep this in mind.

Since Syrian air defense teams have already trained in Russia on the handling of the S-300 interceptor batteries, they can go into service as soon as they are landed by one of Russia’s daily airlifts to Syria. Russian air defense officials will supervise their deployment and prepare them for operation.

Moscow is retaliating not just for Israel’s air operations against Syria but in anticipation of the Obama administration’s impending decision to send the first US arms shipments to the Syrian rebels.

Intelligence agencies in Moscow and the Middle-East take it for granted that by the time Washington goes public on this decision, some of the Syrian rebel factions will already be armed with American weapons.

That the measure was in the works was signified by the introduction Monday by chairman of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee Bob Menendez of legislation allowing the US to provide arms and military training to the Syrian rebels.

US military instructors have been working with Syrian rebels at training camps in Jordan and Turkey for some months. So putting the arms in their hands only awaited a decision in Washington, the Israeli website alleged.

Putin’s message to Netanyahu was intended to reach a wider audience than Jerusalem, such as Barack Obama in Washington and President Xi Jinping in Beijing ahead of Netanyahu’s talks there Tuesday.

source

Posted in Russia, Syria, zionism |

There Is No Way Back From Here

May 4, 2013 by AnonAF

There Is No Way Back From Here. A Documentary about Kosovska Mitrovica.

Posted in Kosovo |

Obama Steps Ups Strategy of “Regime Change” Against Latin American Left Governments

May 4, 2013 by AnonAF

obama_lamericaby Mark Weisbrot

Recent events indicate that the Obama administration has stepped up its strategy of “regime change” against the left-of-center governments in Latin America, promoting conflict in ways not seen since the military coup that Washington supported in Venezuela in 2002. The most high-profile example is in Venezuela itself, during the past week. As this goes to press, Washington has grown increasingly isolated in its efforts to destabilize the newly elected government of Nicolas Maduro.

But Venezuela is not the only country to fall prey to Washington’s efforts to reverse the electoral results of the past 15 years in Latin America. It is now clear that last year’s ouster of President Fernando Lugo of Paraguay was also aided and abetted by the United States government. In a brilliant investigative work for Agência Pública, journalist Natalia Viana shows that the Obama administration funded the principal actors involved in the “parliamentary coup” against Lugo. Washington then helped organize international support for coup.

The U.S. role in Paraguay is similar to its role in the military overthrow of democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya of Honduras in 2009, where Washington hijacked the Organization of American States (OAS) and used it to fight the efforts of South American governments who wanted to restore democracy. Zelaya later testified that Washington was also involved in the coup itself.

In Venezuela this past week, Washington could not hijack the OAS but only its Secretary General, José Miguel Insulza, who supported the White House (and Venezuela opposition) demand for a “100 percent recount.” But Insulza had to back down, as did Spain, the United States’ only other significant ally in this nefarious enterprise – because they had no support.

The demand for a “recount” in Venezuela is absurd, since there has already been a recount of the paper ballots for a random sample of 54 percent of the voting machines. The machine totals were compared with a hand count of the paper ballots in front of witnesses from all sides. Statistically, there is no practical difference between this enormous audit that has already happened, and the 100 percent audit that the opposition is demanding. Jimmy Carter called Venezuela’s electoral system “the best in the world,” and there is no doubt about the accuracy of the vote count,even among many in the Venezuelan opposition.

It is good to see Lula denouncing the U.S. for its interference and Dilma joining the rest of South America to defend Venezuela’s right to a free elections. But it is not just Venezuela and the weaker democracies that are threatened by the United States. As reported in the pages of this newspaper, in 2005, the U.S. government funded and organized efforts to change the laws in Brazil in order to weaken the Workers’ Party. This information was discovered in U.S. government documents obtained under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act. Most likely Washington has done much more in Brazil that remains secret.

It is clear that Washington did not see the mildly reformist Fernando Lugo as threatening or even radical. It’s just that he was too friendly with the other left governments. The Obama administration, like that of President Bush, does not accept that the region has changed. Their goal is to get rid of all of the left-of-center governments, partly because they tend to be more independent from Washington. Brazil, too, must be vigilant in the face of this threat to the region.

 

Mark Weisbrot is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, in Washington, D.C. He is also president of Just Foreign Policy.

Posted in capitalism, imperialism, Latin America |

9 Burning Questions About the Boston Bombing

April 27, 2013 by AnonAF

questionThere have been conflicting crime scene accounts from police about basic facts.

One week after Tamerlan Tsarnaev was killed and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev captured, there are more questions than answers surrounding the Boston Marathon bombing and its violent climax involving a carjacking and two shootouts and the murder of an MIT policeman.

Some of the confusion comes from the police, whose statements have been contradictory or wrong, and were later retracted. Some of the confusion comes from new details that have emerged prompting more questions, such as the FBI’s tracking of the older brother and his mother. And others are media speculation, such as whether Tamerlan killed his teenage brother’s best friend and two others on the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, because they were pot dealers and exerting a bad influence on Dzhokhar.

Let’s try to sift through what’s known and unknown, correct and incorrect.

 

1. The bombing. We know the Tsarnaev brothers were singled out as the top suspects. Yet some bloggers reported that there were nearly identically dressed people who also left black backpacks at the race’s finish line. We don’t know their motives, or if anyone else was involved or knew about their plans. The brothers were apparently poor, so there are lingering questions about how they bought the explosives they used and their getaway car.

2. The MIT killing. It’s not clear why the brothers killed the MIT police officer, though speculation is that they wanted his gun. Reports that they robbed a 7-11 were untrue. The evidence they killed the MIT officer comes from the young Chinese man whose Mercedes SUV they carjacked; he told police and the media that the brothers told him they did.

3. The carjacking. The carjacking victim emerged from seclusion and gave a detailed account to the Boston Globe, saying that he ran for his life at a gas station, not that he was let go because he was a foreigner, as earlier media reports suggested. He said the brothers told him that they were the bombers and that they had killed the MIT officer and might go to New York—prompting city officials to demand more federal anti-terror funding.

4. Bombs yes, guns not so much?The initial police reports said that the pair was heavily armed with guns, including an assault rifle. But that apparently was untrue as photos of the Thursday night confrontation were posted online, showing only one brother was armed with a gun, it’s not clear what kind of firearm.

5. Tamerlan’s death. How the older brother died is another open question. Watertown police said that he ran toward a line of officers (leaving his brother behind in the SUV), while firing a handgun, but he ran out of bullets just yards in front of them. They say he was tackled to be taken alive, but that his brother ran over the body while driving the SUV through the police lines. A gruesome photo of Tamerlan’s dead body shows bullet wounds and gashes. Later reports say that most of the 200 rounds fired in this confrontation were from the police.

6. False information on attempted suicide?Dzhokhar ended up hiding in a boat in a backyard not far from the shoot out. He did not shoot himself in the neck to try to kill himself or fire on police from the boat, as was initially reported by police; he had no firearms in the boat, according to more recent accounts by federal officials. What prompted authorities to open fire on Dzokhar is still unclear.

7. The family and the FBI.Tamerlan was known to the FBI. He had been interviewed by agents after Russia singled him out as dangerous. He was listed on an FBI terrorist watch database. His mother, who is a citizen but moved back to Dagestan, was also in that FBI database. Since his death and her other son’s arrest, she has given press conferences denying their involvement. Press reports said that both she and Tamerlan became devout Muslims. Other reports said Dzhokhar told police from his hospital bed that the family was angered by America’s wars in Islamic countries.

 

The FBI links raise all kinds of questions. Did this surveillance radicalize them further? Did agents even try to recruit Tamerlan? The question of who else knew about the bombing plot—and who might have supported or encouraged it—is still murky.

8. The triple pot murder.Media coverage of the bombers has swung between speculation that they had ties to overseas terrorists to the theory that they were lone wolf actors. The revelation that the younger brother was a pothead, and that the Sept. 11, 2011 triple murder of his friend—a pot dealer—and two others might be related to the bombings is another Pandora’s box. Some writers suggest that Tamerlan could have done it, as the crime occurred during a particularly devout period of his return to religiousity, and it anticipates the callousness of the marathon bombing.

9. The evidence trail. There’s still much to be learned about the bombers, including what their lives online will yield. The brothers had computers, e-mails, YouTube pages and other accounts that are being scrutinized. All of this suggests that the larger truths behind the bombing and its violent aftermath have yet to emerge.

source

Posted in "war on terror" |

Alexander Dugin: “We Must Help People”

April 24, 2013 by AnonAF

dugin4pt

 

The Fourth Political Theory struggles for the cause of peoples but it is made not for the peoples. It is a call for intellectual elite of every human society rejecting the hegemony in all senses (philosophical, social, political, IR). This time the people can not help us. This time we must help people. Against us is nothing more than alternative intellectual elite, but hegemonic one. All its material power is but illusion, the phantasm: the text, the discourse, the words that is what really counts. Its force lays in the thought. And on the level of the thought we have to fight and finally win. The mass, all that is massive is nothing, pure privation. Only the thought really is, really exists. But the thought is polar. Our thought against their. The peoples are dreaming Titans. Their huge power is nothing compared with light flight of the lonely gods. They always loose acting for themselves, the Titans. It is easy to manipulate the great masses, much easier than to persuade the few. The quantity is enemy of quality. The more the worse. Capitalist elite thinks differently. That error will be fatal. For them. And we are going to prove it.

–  Alexander Dugin

Posted in 4PT, revolutionary quotes |

Brave New War: Wall Street Loses $200 billion Over Tweet

April 24, 2013 by AnonAF

nyse

A single hoax message sent via Twitter, the social media platform, erased billions of value from US stock markets on Tuesday, drawing attention to an electronic Trojan horse that hackers may manipulate with apparent ease.

A picture may contain a thousand words, but a single fake tweet can blow a hole in financial markets in seconds.

That was the costly lesson learned on Tuesday as a tweet allegedly from the Associated Press went the global rounds just before 1:08 p.m., reporting two explosions in the White House and that President Barack Obama had been injured.

Within minutes AP personnel swung into damage control, attempted to reassure the tweet was a hoax. But the damage was already done: The bogus message sent the Dow Jones Industrial Average into a tailspin, shaving 150 points, or about 1 percent, in the blink of an eye.

Here is the effect that the fake Tweet has on other markets: the S&P 500 Index, the NASDAQ Composite Index, and crude oil all dropped 1 percent. At the same time, the yield on the 10-year US Treasury note fell 4 basis points and the CBOE Volatility Index (the so-called fear index), surged 10 percent.

The fallout from the fake tweet, which came as the nation remains on edge following the attacks at the Boston Marathon, was compounded by new technology that can ‘read’ social media messages and place bets accordingly, experts say.

The two-minute period of panic selling forced the Dow down from around 14700 to 14554. By 1:13 p.m., a mere 5 minutes after the message was picked up by traders, the market had recovered most of the ground that had been lost.

Despite the brief pandemonium, the Dow at the closing bell was up 152.29 points, or 1.05%, at 14719.46.

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), said it is investigating trade activity that occurred at the time of the tweet, recently gave companies permission to release vital information through social media such as Twitter and Facebook.

The computer programs that are able to decipher the messages “are incredibly sophisticated,” Eric Pritchett, chief executive at Potamus Trading, a brokerage firm that specializes in electronic trading, told the Wall Street Journal. A program “reading the feed and seeing ‘blowing up’ can also read the one saying the account was ‘hacked,’” Pritchett said.

SEC officials said it was too early to determine if the hoax was an effort on the part of some individuals to profit from the confusion, but some are pointing to such a possibility.

“Imagine a situation where knowing a tweet of this kind can cause a market to go down,” Giovanni Vigna, co-founder and chief technology officer of the security firm Lastline, told WSJ. “You buy at a low price, and when the market rebounds, you make a profit.”

Meanwhile, the seven minutes that elapsed before the market understood it was the victim of a hoax would have given any perpetrators plenty of time to pocket a huge profit.

“Mom-and-pop traders could hardly move in time to profit off the dip, but seven minutes is an eternity in the world of high-frequency trading, where equities are exchanged in fractions of a second,” the business news outlet Quartz reported. “Trading bots could certainly have bought index funds at the bottom of the plunge, quickly profiting as the rest of the market realized that the AP tweet was wrong.”

Tuesday’s incident represents a weak link in the way Wall Street does business, where getting information fast sometimes means the difference between millions – even billions – of dollars. Thus, too many investors seem ready to eschew calm fact-checking and place all their trust in largely unregulated social media as a form of news gathering.

“In many respects, Twitter is the latest news wire of Wall Street. Investors have come to rely on the social medium for minute-by-minute news and opinion,” Jack Ablin, chief investment officer at BMO Private Bank, said in emailed comments to MarketWatch. “We have to recognize Twitter for what it is, a social media site, and an unfiltered news source.”

A group calling itself the Syrian Electronic Army on Tuesday claimed responsibility on its own Twitter feed for the AP hack.

The FBI is investigating the incident, said Jenny Shearer, an FBI spokeswoman in Washington. She declined to elaborate on the details.

source.

Posted in activism |

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