Cyber

by Darin Stevenson / Medium bitcoin Is Makeworky Unmoney bitcoin is not exactly money. It’s a potentially valuable abstraction of computational ‘work’ that ‘earns’ bitcoin value. But what is bitcoin value and what is the nature of the work? The answers are bizarre because they are nonsensical. bitcoin value is an abstraction of participation in the history of the network and its transactions. ‘Work’ is a (largely) nonuseful recomputation of, first, the transaction history of the network — which has to be reprocessed each time there is a bitcoin transaction. Then, continual banging away at some useless math with added ‘weight factor’ that makes it arbitrarily difficult for computers to accomplish the generation of a new record-set over time. ...

Civilization is not a static force. It has metastasized across the world by accelerating its own development, by transforming the blood and corpses of its victims into new weapons with which to wage its relentless war against all life Grasslands become grain monocultures feeding armies, conquering forests and mountains that become ships and swords that kill other cultures, conquering more forests and mountains, whose trees and minerals are turned into timber mills and trains, going forth to dam rivers, turning the relentless fluidity of their being to electricity to smelt iron and steel and aluminum, which in turn become guns and ocean tankers, which expand this superstructure ever further, tirelessly taking in what little wild remains, absorbing everything and everyone into this accelerating death march. ...

By Jamie Doward / The Observer Britain is exporting surveillance technology to countries run by repressive regimes, sparking fears it is being used to track political dissidents and activists. The UK’s enthusiastic role in the burgeoning but unregulated surveillance market is becoming an urgent concern for human rights groups, who want the government to ensure that exports are regulated in a similar way to arms. Much of the technology, which allows regimes to monitor internet traffic, mobile phone calls and text messages, is similar to that which the government has controversially signalled it wants to use in the UK. ...

By BBC News The government will be able to monitor the calls, emails, texts and website visits of everyone in the UK under new legislation set to be announced soon. Internet firms will be required to give intelligence agency GCHQ access to communications on demand, in real time. The Home Office says the move is key to tackling crime and terrorism, but civil liberties groups have criticised it. Tory MP David Davis called it “an unnecessary extension of the ability of the state to snoop on ordinary people”. ...

By James Bamford , Wired The spring air in the small, sand-dusted town has a soft haze to it, and clumps of green-gray sagebrush rustle in the breeze. Bluffdale sits in a bowl-shaped valley in the shadow of Utah’s Wasatch Range to the east and the Oquirrh Mountains to the west. It’s the heart of Mormon country, where religious pioneers first arrived more than 160 years ago. They came to escape the rest of the world, to understand the mysterious words sent down from their god as revealed on buried golden plates, and to practice what has become known as “the principle,” marriage to multiple wives. ...

By Jana Winter / Fox News Law enforcement agents on two continents swooped in on top members of the infamous computer hacking group LulzSec early this morning, and acting largely on evidence gathered by the organization’s brazen leader – who sources say has been secretly working for the government for months – arrested three and charged two more with conspiracy. Charges against four of the five were based on a conspiracy case filed in New York federal court, FoxNews.com has learned. An indictment charging the suspects, who include two men from Great Britain, two from Ireland and an American in Chicago, is expected to be unsealed Tuesday morning in the Southern District of New York. ...

By Allison Kilkenny / In These Times Rolling Stone’s Michael Hastings last night posted a story on an internal DHS report entitled “SPECIAL COVERAGE: Occupy Wall Street,” dated October of last year. The five-page report, part of five million newly leaked documents obtained by Wikileaks, sums up the history of the movement and assesses its “impact” on the financial services and government facilities. In an interview on Citizen Radio, Hastings talked about the monitoring by DHS and also the leaked emails from Stratfor, a leading private intelligence firm Hastings describes as the “shadow CIA.” ...

By The Associated Press WikiLeaks said Monday it was publishing a massive trove of leaked emails from the U.S. intelligence analysis firm Stratfor, shedding light on the inner workings of the Texas-based think tank. The online anti-secrecy group said it had more than 5 million Stratfor emails and it was putting them out in collaboration with two dozen international media organizations. So far, however, only a small selection of the Stratfor emails appear to have been published to WikiLeaks’ website. ...

By Russia Today Traditionally known as F*ckFBIFriday, this weekend’s eve turned into F*ckCIAFriday, as hacktivists downed the official website for the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States cia.gov. ­At approximately 3:10 p.m. Eastern time one of twitter accounts related to the hackers’ group announced “cia.gov DOWN. #UMAD?#Anonymous.” The CIA website became the latest victim in a series of attacks conducted by the elusive group of hackers against US law enforcement agencies and copyright holders. As RT reported earlier, Anonymous took credit for crashing the websites of the US Department of Homeland Security, which was quickly revived, and the FBI. ...