Phillipines - US want to return on on their former colony

Another move in the great game for Indian and Pacific Oceans. This time The Pentagon had revealed that the United States are going to get the access to naval bases and ports in Phillipines

This Eastern-Asian state was an American colony for a long time. Only 20 years ago US army was still stationing there and now as China is getting more and more active, the Americans are willing to return there - according to DefenseTech and Reuters agency.

American "return"to Phillipines will not mean that new military bases will be built. Pentagon ensures that the only thing they want is the access to the phillipinian bases and airports.

DefenseTech authors have noticed that the information had shown up soon after Pentagon had revealed on the press conference that American battle ships will be placed on the Singapore territory.

Let's remind several moves in the region which took place recently:

• China declares to create its first naval base abroad,
• The United States are tightenning its relations with Australia and Japan,
• China had finished their first aircraft carrier,

Russians should count on themselves

As a response of NATO's anti-missile defence system, Russian authorities had decided to create their own shield, which will defend them against potencial attack from the West. Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin had informed about this plan on his Twitter account on Sunday. It was response to words said by NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who announced that the shield will be established to defend European population, Rogozin replied that its Russian version woul be created in the same purpose.

The negotiations about the anti-missile shield are being held for years. During previous Russia-NATO summit in Lisbon on November 2010 both sides declared cooperation and consulations on this field, but during recent months the situation had changed and it seems to get much worse. It can be connected with the growing tensions in the Middle East, especially in Syria, where Russia and China are blocking all UN resolutions against the government in Damascus.


There are also other problems - both sides claim that there are totally different reasons to install the shield. According to Russians the rockets would be established to close to their borders, while Americans insist that the shiled would be only for defensive purposes in order to defend Europe against rockets coming from North Korea and Iran.

FBI and Scotland Yard are being eavesdropped by Anonymous

Anonymous are getting stronger. When I heard about them for a first time, there were only some news about their attack on another website. Since that time Anonymous members had made an important progress and today they are able to break into well-protected servers, to steal data or to eavesdrop the talks.


This time the group had revealed 15-minutes-long record of a conference between FBI and Scotland Yard workers. What is most interesting, the conference was about Anonymous and during the talk one of speakers had said:


"I'm not sure if there are only two of us over here".

 

Time for New Bretton Woods?

A Chinese New Year has begun recently. We can expect a new are in Chinese history in this Year of a Dragon. 

 

China will establish a new financial order - this is opinion of Philip Coggan, a journalist of The Economist, who claims that if the trends will not change China will be the strongest economy in 2020.

This growth of Chinese power can be already noticed and even if juan will not become world's main currency, many important changes will be spotted in world's financial order. One of most possible scenarios is establishing a new treaty similar to the one from 1944 in Bretton Woods. After this summit a new world's financial order for coming decades was established.

What is that order going to look like? According to Robert Zoellick of the World Bank quoted by Coggan, new system “should also consider employing gold as an international reference point of market expectations about inflation, deflation and future currency values.”

We can doubt if American government would agree on such treaty and loose priviledges it has, but in author's opinion in this case another factor on which Americans haven't got any influence - their public debt held mostly by the Chinese.

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Censorship on Twitter

Facebook and Google owners were many times accused on breaking the privacy rules. In fact after a while both companies admitted that they can gather a lot of data about us. Until now it seemed that microblog services such as Twitter would be quite safe, how much information can be revealed in only 140 letters after all? It seems that enough. 

Few days ago media were informing about the British citizen, who was arrested on the airport in the US, controlled and sent back home, just because of what he had written on Twitter.

fot.ralaenin/sxc.hu 

This case is a perfect example of how much our posts are being followed and at suspicious information is being stored. It still seemed that the microblogs are still the most trustful and universal ways to communicate in the web. They have proven it during the last year's Arab Spring.

Freedom of speech is one, and business is business, that is why Twitter owners had decided to follow Google and start to block some particular information. These oficial "filters" would be used under demand of the authorities of each country, this way unwanted information would be unavailable for people outside its territory. 

The authors from Vbeta had noticed that on Twitter's blog post the examples of Germany and France were reminded as the countries blocking nazi content. Everything's great but we can be sure that these won't be only this contect which is going to be blocked. We must agree - it's a great rhetoric figure.

FBI i Scotland Yard are being eavesdropped

Anonymous are growing in power. When we heard about them for the first time, there were only some news about the pishing attacks on another websites. Since that time Anonymous members had made an enormous progress and today they are able to enter servers and steal confidential data. They have also learned how to eavesdrop because this time the group had revealed 15-minutes-long record from the conference between FBI and Scotland Yard members. What is most interesting, the subject of the conference was the Anonymous case and one of the speakers said:

"I'm not sure if there are only two of us here"

As we can see his intuition didn't fail him, nevertheless the record got into the web and it is now available here:

Russian intelligence is changing its tactics

Russian president had obliged the intelligence to change their tactics in order to fight with the "world terrorism". During Thursday's meeting with Igor Sergun, the director of GRU, the largest and most important Russian intelligence agency, Dymitriy Medvedev had claimed that the agency should open itself on the cooperation with foreign institutions and cooperate with them to fight terrorism.

“Changes in the world situation have required adjustments to be made to intelligence mechanisms and their implementation" - said Segun on Thursday,

During the meeting Sergun presented a report informing about the recent state of GRU. He stated that the organisation has a unique type of intelligence activity, because only GRU is being focused on all existing types and directions of spying.

According to Medvedev another important task of GRU is "“uncover in a timely way any imminent attack or development of a situation that could pose a threat to the country’s security,"

The international terrorism is still the largest modern global threat - he added. 

“We must reveal terrorists’ weapon and finance supply chains and, pursuing a preemptive tactic, foil their plans.” - said Medvedev

You should notice that Medvedev didn't precise what kind of terrorism Russia is going to fight with. We should consider, what kind of threat he had in mind? Was is islamic terrorism? In Russia, where many soldiers are muslims it is hard to say anything about the threat from this side. It is of course still important case of the Chechen conflict, but Moscow considers it as its "internal problem" so we can doubt if this conflict can be connected with international terrorism. We can talk about the modern cyberterrorism, but would such it be 

source: RT

So, what is left?

Mind controlled computers - a new revolution is coming

A computer giant representatives had announced another technological revolution.

According to IBM we can expect that computers will be controlled by thoughts. Special devices will be able to read our brain waves and do what we will want them to do. 

That's not all. It will also end energy wastes, as according to the scientists we will soon be able to load batteries just by doing our daily activities like running or walking.

Of course we can understand sceptics who are less optimistic about that. The technology sorrounding us more and more is a proof that something which seemed impossible now is available.

There is something more. If these electronic devices would be able to receive orders from our thoughts, would it be also possible to register something more? If the technology to send brain waves is already developed, maybe the whole process can be reversed?

Are bacterias going to save humanity?

The amazing adaptive ability of such microorganisms as bacterias and viruses was very often the real curse of humanity. Vaccines and other forms of healing seem to be unable to follow these still mutating organisms. Sometimes on the other hand the abilities can be quite useful. 

Not quite a long time ago it was proven by a spieces of bacteria living in the waters of Gulf of Mexico. After the oil spill, the services organised by people seemed to loose with sourrounding ecological catastrophy. 

They suprisingly received a help from hydrocarbon-eating bacterias. These microorganisms had changed the oil into much simpler substances like water or carbon dioxide. 

Now the scientists had informed that this process can be turned back and the bacterias can be used in biofuel production. These small creatures are creating ethanol - one of the best alternative fuels which can be used to run human vehicles. If the technology will be succesful it can be a revolution in the whole fuels market. 

Why? 

First of all it is connected with specific characteristics of seaweed, which don't need any special fertillizers. What is more these plantations can become even more useful. As Wynne Perry from Live Science said: "Cultivating seaweed along three percent of the world's coastlines, where kelp already grows, could produce 60 billion gallons of ethanol".

Until today its cultivation was quite difficult due to the fact that the sugars in the seaweed -algynats could not be used in biofuel production on industrial scale. The Berkely University scientists had solved this problem, they mutated E.coli bacteria which can now be able to change these sugars into much useful glucosis.

There is nothing else to do as to hope, that the scientists who claim that we are on the way to a new era, are right. We need to remeber that there are many people who can loose a lot on these solutions. 

Free Internet – has it ever existed?

The fact that government suddenly revealed its plans to sign the controversial agreement ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) caused a real storm on the Internet; also many governmental websites became a target for the group of Anonymous.

Only a few weeks ago nobody has heard about this document. In Poland the first information was given by the “Dziennik Internautów” in 2009 – it was about a mysterious document being secretly prepared. I wrote about it on “Kod Władzy” blog when eight countries signed this document often ignoring the democratic procedures.

In spite of publicity around the Anonymous, their attacks are more spectacular than dangerous – they just try to attract attention to this controversial act. The declarations of publishing the politicians’ secret documents seem to be more serious. However, we can assume that the Anonymous are totally serious in their ideas. It is mainly because they have already proved their efficacy in hacking into servers of different companies and stealing data from them. This was the case of PayPal, VISA, Mastercard and Stratfor where the hackers stole e-mail addresses and credit cards numbers.

It is possible that they are not lying.

Although the controversies about this agreement caused uproar in Poland, it is not the first step towards limiting the “freedom on the Internet”. As a matter of fact, the Web has been limited since a long time ago.

The limits can concern many spheres and they also depend on cultural or religious background, on the political system or history. For example, the broadly discussed Chinese Internet; according to the OpenNet Initiative’s reports, China does not comply with the criteria in three main areas: political, social and security area.

Censorship in North Korea is not surprising, but what about imposing limits by Seoul? As we can see, also the South Korea has put some appropriate restrictions by preventing people to enter the websites which praise their southern neighbor.

The situation in the Middle East is also different. Apart from the political reasons that make entering on the websites of the Muslim Brotherhood impossible, the religious reasons are also important. They are visible in e.g. blocking the porn websites, but it is not the end of such actions. The government of Saudi Arabia makes efforts in order to prevent the internauts to come across the websites informing how to become a Christian.

Free Europe?

Maybe the examples of some Asian authoritarian countries are not astonishing, but when we speak about the European Union, which is generally considered as liberal, such limits can be a surprise for the reader. The limits concern the content appearing under a general category which is “the speech of hatred” persecuting religious and ethnical minorities. For example in France and Germany the government fights against websites promoting Nazism.

Apart from the mentioned content, the question of copyrights is also significant – it was a reason for the big debate on ACTA. We should know that this subject has been broadly discussed by European countries since a long time ago; the new agreement is only an international aspect of this discussion. Let us take France as an example. According to the latest edition of the “Internet Enemies” report (published since 2006 and edited by the organization “Reporters without borders”) this country was found in the category “Under Surveillance” after when the government introduced a new law aiming to “civilize the Internet”.

Till now, as the Reporters without borders claim, France is the only country which violates freedom on the Internet in such way that it needs to be put in their report.

Let’s return to the copyrights. The main reason why governments are trying to create new regulations is the fact that internauts can freely copy data from the Internet. People who rule the countries will be certainly interested in some publications such as the Oxford Internet Institute’s report from 2011 which shows that technological progress won’t make the freedom of speech bigger – it will rather enable the government and the police to easily control the Web. In April 2011, “The Telegraph” informed that the EU wanted to introduce

a European “firewall” which won’t be designed to protect the Internet from the attacks from outside but in order to enable blocking the servers located outside the EU. This idea wasn’t put into practice, but who knows when the politics will think about it again.

Other regulations concerning copyrights caused a real storm in the EU – the “Pirates Movement” has come into being as a result of growing popularity of the Pirates Party in Sweden. They want to abolish the existing limits concerning copyrights; they are also against the general European division into right and left.

What about Poland?

In spite of the wave of protests against ACTA, the document itself and comments about it are worth seeing. According to Tymoteusz Barański from the Republican Foundation, the Polish law gives more powers than ACTA. This information is not surprising considering the fact that the European Union’s report from 2011 showed that the Polish people are the most invigilated society in EU.

On the other hand, one of the most controversial things about ACTA is the fact that it contains many basic and general concepts. What is more, ACTA seems to be a document written from the perspective of a particular group of people. As Barański says: “ACTA is mainly focused on protecting those who have the intellectual property rights and it doesn’t determine the rules of using the protected content by every-day users.

As we can see, we cannot say that the freedom on the Internet has always existed. However, many newly introduced laws and regulations will enlarge the number of limits. Even when such commentators as Anthony Wile from the “Daily Bell” say that it is the beginning of war for freedom on the Internet, we need to remember that its freedom has been finished a long time ago.

German secret services observing Die Linke politicians

Der Spiegel had revealed on Suday 22th that German Internal Affairs Ministry had ordered their intelligence agency to follow several members of the Left Party (Die Linke). In a quoted document with the date of January 4th 2012 we can read that The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) is following 27 of 76 German parliament members as well as 11 regional parliament deputees. The names of the politicians remain unknown.

Die Linke is the party with the strong base in former DDR states. Many of their prominent activists were connected with former communist authorities. Since it was created in 2007, Die Linke had become one of mayor political powers in Germany. Its popularity had weakened social democratic SPD.

These connections with DDR and East-German communist party SED are the reason why for many people, especially West-German politicians, Die Linke is considered as a threat for existing status quo. Several politicians on the other hand, like the Green Party leader Volker Beck claim, that the services should pay much more attention on the neo-Nazi gropus, especially NPD. According to data published by Der Spiegel, intelligence operations against that party cost about 590 thousands euro per year, while similar activities against Die Linke took only 390 thousands euro.

According to intelligence workers no secret actions were taken against Die Linke, the politicians are only being observed.


That case is another scandal in Germany recently. In quite short period Karl-Teodor zu Gutenberg - one of Christian Democrats' leaders plagiatarism was revealed, then informations about the activities of neo-nazi underground were published, German intelligence was hiding the information about its connections with former nazis, finally Chaos Computer Club hackers' group had informed media about the inwigilation taken by the government against its citizens. From these pieces of information we see clearly, that there are many important things happening in Federal Republic.

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Doomsday Clock on 11:55

When this clock will show 12:00 there would probably be nobody who will be able to write about it. Doomsday Clock is active since 1947, it was created in order to show in a symbolic way how the humanity is close to its final extinction.

Since the information about it was published for a first time the authors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists published by the Chicago University had moved its arms for several times. At the beginning, it was showing 11.53. The most dangerous time was in 1953 when, according to scientists we were just "two minutes" to the end of the world. The second moment was in 1984 (11:57) and the arms race between the US and USSR. Thus, only few years later the Cold War ended and the situation seemed to get better and after two main rivals had signed the START1 treaty, the arm had moved to 11:43. The blow of optimism remained only for several years, we are now observing that the clock is going back to "midnight" once again.

Quite meaningful is the fact, that the scientists from Chicago had added one more criterium in 1990's - the climate change. It is, together with the growing tensions in the international relations, the reason why on January 10th the arm has gone back to its position from 2007.

Is the situation in the world so bad? If we look at the arms and compare their position with the previous one, we will notice that there is still pretty much space left. There was much worse after all. Of course, there was and we need to remeber about that, but on the other hand the clock itself is just a kind of symbolic indicator which is being designed by relatively small group of scientists. They are just humans and they make mistakes just like all people do.
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