February 3, 2012

Again the left progressives break the law and hack a website just because they aren't doing what they want them to do. 


THIS IS A ECONOMIC TERRORIST ACT AND SHOULD BE TREATED AS SUCH!


Komen website hacked amid growing backlash




Images from the Komen website: the top one showing the actual wording, the bottom image showing hacked text from early Thursday morning.
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Written by
Michael King
ATLANTA (WXIA) - Backlash from the decision from Susan G. Komen for the Cure's decision to end funding for Planned Parenthood has pushed up donations to Planned Parenthood to the tune of more than $650,000 in 24 hours, according to Planned Parenthood executives.
The local Atlanta arm of Susan G. Komen for the Cure issued a statement Thursday distancing itself from the actions of the national body, and pointing out that Atlanta's Planned Parenthood organization has never requested any funding from Komen's Atlanta branch.
"Komen Atlanta remains committed to ensuring that all women, especially the underserved, in our community have access to lifesaving breast cancer screening and support services. The decision regarding the funding of Planned Parenthood was made by Susan G. Komen for the Cure National Headquarters based on new guidelines that prohibit funding to organizations that are under local, state or federal investigation. The Atlanta area Planned Parenthood organization has never requested funding from Komen Atlanta. Therefore, this decision from Komen National Headquarters will have no impact on local Planned Parenthood centers. We understand, and share, in the frustration around this situation."
Susan G. Komen for the Cure founder, Nancy Brinker, released an internet video late Wednesday denouncing the "scurrilous accusations" against the group, which some have said are politically motivated. Many critics point to former Georgia Secretary of State Karen Handel, whose 2012 gubernatorial campaign included specific calls to defund Planned Parenthood in Georgia.
The website for Susan G. Komen for the Cure was hacked early Thursday on the heels of the organization's decision to stop providing funding to Planned Parenthood, according to The Atlantic Wire.
A headline on the site's front page which was supposed to say "Help us get 26.2 or 13.1 miles closer to a world without breast cancer" was changed to read "Help us run over poor women on our way to the bank."
The text on the site was restored a short time later.

February 2, 2012


Obama's Enemies List

David and Charles Koch have been the targets of a campaign of vituperation and assault, choreographed from the very top.




By THEODORE B. OLSON

How would you feel if aides to the president of the United States singled you out by name for attack, and if you were featured prominently in the president's re-election campaign as an enemy of the people?
What would you do if the White House engaged in derogatory speculative innuendo about the integrity of your tax returns? Suppose also that the president's surrogates and allies in the media regularly attacked you, sullied your reputation and questioned your integrity. On top of all of that, what if a leading member of the president's party in Congress demanded your appearance before a congressional committee this week so that you could be interrogated about the Keystone XL oil pipeline project in which you have repeatedly—and accurately—stated that you have no involvement?
Consider that all this is happening because you have been selected as an attractive political punching bag by the president's re-election team. This is precisely what has happened to Charles and David Koch, even though they are private citizens, and neither is a candidate for the president's or anyone else's office.
What Messrs. Koch do, in fact, is manage businesses that provide employment to more than 50,000 people in North America in legitimate, productive industries. They also give millions of dollars to medical researchers, hospitals and cultural institutions. Their biggest offense, apparently, is that they also contribute generously to nonprofit organizations that promote personal liberty and free enterprise, and some of those organizations oppose policies advocated by the president.
Richard Nixon maintained an"enemies list" that singled out private citizens for investigation and abuse by agencies of government, including the Internal Revenue Service. When that was revealed, the press and public were outraged. That conduct will forever remain one of the indelible stains on Nixon's presidency and legacy.
When Joseph McCarthy engaged in comparable bullying, oppression and slander from his powerful position in the Senate, he was censured by his colleagues and died in disgrace."McCarthyism," defined by Webster's as the "use of unfair investigative and accusatory methods to suppress opposition," will forever be synonymous with un-Americanism. Army counsel Joseph Welch's "Have you no sense of decency?" are words that evoke the McCarthy era and diminish the reputations of his colleagues who did nothing to stand up to him.
In this country, we regard the use of official power to oppress or intimidate private citizens as a despicable abuse of authority and entirely alien to our system of a government of laws. The architects of our Constitution meticulously erected a system of separated powers, and checks and balances, precisely in order to inhibit the exercise of tyrannical power by governmental officials.
Our Constitution even explicitly prohibits bills of attainder so that Congress may not single out individual citizens or groups for disfavored treatment or unequal application of the force of government. Prosecutorial power is rigidly constrained and judicially supervised so that government may not accuse private citizens of crimes or investigate them without good cause.
Whoever may be the victim of such abuse of governmental authority, the press and public almost invariably unify with indignation against it. If a journalist, labor-union leader or community organizer on the left can be targeted today, an academic or business person on the right can be the target tomorrow. If we fail to stand up against oppression from one direction, we abdicate the moral authority to challenge it when it comes from another.
This is why it is exceedingly important for all Americans to respond with outrage to what the president and his allies are doing to demonize and stigmatize David and Charles Koch. They have been the targets of the multiyear, carefully orchestrated campaign of vituperation and assault described above—and much more. It has been choreographed from the very top. When the president personally takes leadership, his political surrogates and army of allies in the press and Congress quickly and surely follow the direction and tone he sets.
The misuse of government power to damage or demean one's political enemies is abhorrent and the very antithesis of a free society and a government of laws, not men. It is time for the public to ask those engaged in these practices, "Have you no sense of decency?"
Mr. Olson, a lawyer in Washington, D.C., and a former solicitor general of the United States, represents Koch Industries.

February 1, 2012


Zuckerberg IPO Haul Could Top $28 Billion


By GEOFFREY A. FOWLER

Facebook Inc.'s impending initial public offering will likely net its 27-year-old founder Mark Zuckerberg a fortune of $28 billion.
According to IPO paperwork Facebook filed Wednesday, Mr. Zuckerberg owns 28.2% of the soon-to-be-public company, and is its single largest shareholder. If Facebook raises money at a high-end valuation of $100 billion dollars, Mr. Zuckerberg's stock would be worth $28 billion. On top of his stock, last year Mr. Zuckerberg was paid $1.49 million in salary, bonus and other compensation for his role as chief executive, according to the filing.

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A net worth of $28 billion would have placed Mr. Zuckerberg at number nine in Forbes magazine's rich list last year, following tech luminaries Bill Gates and Larry Ellison.
But even as Mr. Zuckerberg vaults into the pantheon of the world's richest people, the young entrepreneur has already proven he doesn't intend to act like a typical billionaire.
Mr. Zuckerberg grew up in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., the son of a dentist and psychiatrist. He graduated from high school at the elite Phillips Exeter Academy, where he honed his talents in science and the classics.
In the nearly eight years since Mr. Zuckerberg founded Facebook in his Harvard College dorm room, the entrepreneur has grown from a college sophomore into a leading voice for a new generation of technology entrepreneurs.

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In the early years after Mr. Zuckerberg moved his start-up to Palo Alto, Calif., he was known for wearing Adidas flip-flops to business meetings and placing little priority on building out an advertising business for his growing social network. He handed out business cards reading, "I'm CEO... b—."
Today, Mr. Zuckerberg has upgraded his wardrobe to Brooks running shoes and even dons a sports coat for special meetings, like with President Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey. And his social network has become so important to many big advertisers that they run Super Bowl ads directing customers to Facebook.
Mr. Zuckerberg has also set the tone for the lifestyles behind the latest Silicon Valley boom, eschewing the giant mansions and posh cars of the late 1990s dot-com bubble. Instead, he has lived in a modest house, and is known for his penchant for taking his dog on long walks. (He runs a Facebook page for his dog Beast, a white Hungarian Puli.) In 2011, Mr. Zuckerberg became a vegetarian.
In 2010, when the movie "The Social Network" debuted and offered a sometimes unflattering Hollywood portrayal of his behavior in Facebook's early days, Mr. Zuckerberg treated his whole company to a day at the movies to watch the film together.
Mr. Zuckerberg also didn't wait to begin establishing his reputation as a philanthropist. In 2010, amidst the fall-out from the Hollywood film, he announced the formation of a charity called "Startup: Education" and pledged $100 million to support public schools in Newark.
In December 2010, he signed a pledge—along with his former roommate and Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz—to give the majority of his wealth to charity.

January 31, 2012


How to prevent Google from tracking you

by  
Much has been made of Google's new privacy policy, which takes effect March 1. If you're concerned about Google misusing your personal information or sharing too much of it with advertisers and others, there are plenty of ways to thwart Web trackers.
But what exactly are you thwarting? You don't become anonymous when you block tracking cookies, Web beacons, and the other identifiers as you browse. Your ISP and the sites you visit still know a lot about you, courtesy of the identifying information served up automatically by your browser.

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The Electronic Frontier Foundation offers thePanopticlick service that rates the anonymity of your browser. The test shows you the identifiable information provided by your browser and generates a numerical rating that indicates how easy it would be to identify you based solely on your browser's fingerprint.
According the the entropy theory explained by Peter Eckersley on the EFF's DeepLinks blog, 33 bits of entropy are sufficient to identify a person. According to Eckersley, knowing a person's birth date and month (not year) and ZIP code gives you 32 bits of entropy. Also knowing the person's gender (50/50, so one bit of entropy) gets you to the identifiable threshold of 33 bits.
When I ran Panopticlick's test on a Mac Mini, it reported 20.89 bits of identifiable information, which according to the entropy formula would be insufficient to identify me. But maybe I want the sites I frequent to know a little bit about me. As I explained in a post from last October, personal information is the currency of the Web.
Results of Panopticlick browser-anonyity scan
The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Panopticlick scanner generates a numerical rating of your browser's anonymity.
(Credit: Screenshot by Dennis O'Reilly)
In some ways, Google's explanation of personalized ads is more informative than the company's privacy policy. Of course it's in Google's best interest to keep you in the personalized-ads fold, but the company does its best to present personalization as a boon to users. It certainly does help pay for the "free" services we've come to rely on.
Use Google's own tools to opt out of ad networks
Prominent in the Google privacy policy are links to services that let you view and manage the information you share with Google. Some of this personal data you volunteer, and some of it is collected by Google as you search, browse, and use other services.
To view everything (almost) Google knows about you, open the Google Dashboard. Here you can access all the services associated with your Google account: Gmail, Google Docs, YouTube, Picasa, Blogger, AdSense, and every other Google property. The dashboard also lets you manage your contacts, calendar, Google Groups, Web history, Google Voice account, and other services.
Google Dashboard service listings
Get information about all the Google services associated with your account in one place via the Google Dashboard.
(Credit: Screenshot by Dennis O'Reilly)
More importantly, you can view and edit the personal information stored by each Google service, or delete the service altogether. To see which other services have access to the account's information, click "Websites authorized to access the account" at the top of the Dashboard. To block an authorized service from accessing the account, click Revoke Access next to the service name.
Sites authorized to access your Google account
View the services that access information in your Google account via a link on the Google Dashboard.
(Credit: Screenshot by Dennis O'Reilly)
The Google Ads Preferences Manager lets you block specific advertisers or opt out of all targeted advertising. Click the "Ads on the Web" link in the left column and then choose "Add or edit" under "Your categories and demographics" to select the categories of ads you want to be served or to opt out of personalized ads.
Google Ad Preferences Manager categories and opt-out options
Google's Ad Preferences Manager lets you choose the categories of ads you see or opt out of personalized ads entirely.
(Credit: Screenshot by Dennis O'Reilly)
Another option is to use Google's Keep My Opt-Outs extension for Chrome. Google also participates in the Network Advertising Initiative's opt-out program. Select some or all of the dozens of online advertisers from the NAI program and then click Submit to place a cookie in your browser instructing the ad networks not to serve personalized ads.
Free add-on for Firefox and Google Chrome targets tracking cookies
Several free browser extensions help you identify and block the companies that are tracking you on the Web. For example, Ghostery (available in versions for Firefox and Chrome) adds an icon to your browser toolbar showing the number of trackers on the current page. Click the icon to see a list of the trackers and view options for blocking or white-listing specific ones.
The free Disconnect extension (also available for Facebook and Chrome) takes a more direct approach to wiping your Web tracks. Disconnect blocks tracking by Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, and Digg. It also has an option for depersonalizing searches.
Disconnect tracker-blocking pop-up window in Google Chrome
The free Disconnect extension for Google Chrome and Firefox blocks tracking by Google and other popular Web services.
(Credit: screenshot by Dennis O'Reilly)
As with Ghostery, Disconnect places an icon in the browser toolbar that shows the number of elements it has blocked on the current page. Click the icon to open a window showing the number of trackers blocked for each service. To unblock tracking for one of the services, click its entry. (Note that I tested Disconnect only with Google; also, blocking of international Google domains is not yet available, according to Disconnect's developers.)
When I tested Disconnect, I had to sign in to Gmail, Google Docs, and other Google services every time I returned to or refreshed one of those pages, which is understandable considering that blocking the cookie prevents Google from keeping you signed in. Otherwise I was able to use Google services without a problem, including search, viewing and sending Gmail, and accessing, creating, uploading, and downloading Google Docs files.
While people are rightly concerned about who is watching and recording their Web activities, at least Google makes it possible to use the company's services without being too forthcoming with your personal information. ISPs and other Web services do as much tracking as Google--or more--but garner far fewer headlines. For a detailed look at the state of privacy in the digital world, read about the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Surveillance Self-Defense project.
After all, the true threat to privacy is from the trackers we don't know about, and who aren't household names.
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