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8/26/2004

Apocalypse Now: OVER A MILLION BARRELS OF OIL A DAY LOST TO DEPLETION :.

Behold, The End:

The world is now losing more than a million barrels of oil a day to depletion - twice the rate of two years ago - according to a new analysis published this month in Petroleum Review, the oil and gas magazine of the Energy Institute in London.

The analysis shows that output from 18 significant oil-producing countries, accounting for almost 29 percent of total world production, declined by 1.14 million barrels a day (mb/d) in 2003. The annual rate of decline also appears to be accelerating, contrary to the widely held view that depletion progresses slowly.

Based on data in the latest BP Statistical Review of World Energy, production from this group of 18 countries peaked in 1997 at 24.7 mb/d and by 2003 it had fallen to 22.1 mb/d. In 1998 their total production dropped by less than one percent, whereas last year it declined by nearly five percent.



Rise of the Machines: X-47B Combat Drone :.

Oh sure, we definitely need this... How would we get by without this?

And I can't fire up a yurt:

A US defence contractor has received more than $1bn in funding to build a prototype unmanned fighter aircraft for the American military.

Northrop Grumman will build at least three full-scale flight prototypes for the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) over five years.

The contract win will allow Northrop to continue work on its X-47B combat drone.

It is hoped that many unmanned fighters would be networked and controlled from land or from an aircraft carrier.

Key missions envisaged for the vehicle include suppression of enemy air defences, precision strike, electronic attack and surveillance deep into enemy airspace.



British Bobbies Get Boots with Built-in Microchips! :.

The nightmare is unfurling faster in the U.K. than anywhere else:

British bobbies are all set to wear jackboots with built in microchips as part a drive to make policing the British capital safer.

According to The Mirror, the British Home Office plans to use the microchip boots not only to locate cops on the beat, but also to reach them in an emergency.

This whole move is part of the police's five-year strategy to keep beat officers in touch with their bases.

Emphasising the need for modern technology, Home Office brass said that though the dangers of misuse could not be ruled out, it was still necessary.



Mercenaries, Money and Political Connections :.

Busted:

Simon Mann (51)
The leader of the alleged coup plot in Equatorial Guinea, Simon Mann has spent all of his adult life in the murky worlds of special forces and mercenaries.
The son of an England cricket captain who made a fortune from the Watney's brewing empire, Mann followed the establishment route of Eton and Sandhurst before becoming an officer in the SAS. He left the army in the early 1980s, moving into the security business. In 1993 he set up a mercenary outfit, Executive Outcomes, with the controversial entrepreneur Tony Buckingham. It made millions protecting oil installations in Angola from Unita rebels, and operated against insurgents for the Sierra Leone government. A subsidiary company, Sandline International - set up with a former Scots Guard officer, Tim Spicer - famously shipped arms to Sierra Leone in contravention of a UN embargo.

Married with several children, Mann has houses on the Solent in Hampshire and close to Mark Thatcher in Cape Town. He is currently residing in a cell in Chikurubi prison outside Harare.

Ely Calil (58)
The Chelsea-based millionaire, who is accused by the Equatorial Guinea government of helping to organise the coup from his home in west London, made his fortune by trading Nigerian oil. During his years in London he developed discreet links with senior Tory and Labour politicians. At one time he was financial adviser to the disgraced Tory peer Lord Archer. In 1999 the then disgraced Peter Mandelson rented one of Calil's luxury flats in Holland Park for a year, shortly before he was rehabilitated as Northern Ireland secretary.

In June 2002, Calil was arrested by French police in connection with the payments of millions of pounds in illegal commissions in 1995 by a subsidiary of the French oil giant Elf Aquitaine to the Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha. He was later released on appeal without charge, although the payments are still under investigation.

Calil, who has vehemently denied any involvement in the coup plot, has hired British lawyer Imran Khan to fight the high court action brought by the government of Equatorial Guinea.

David Hart (60)
The government of Equatorial Guinea has issued a warrant for the arrest of this Old Etonian businessman with links to the Thatcher family, and claims it has evidence to show he helped to fund the coup plot.

Hart was Margaret Thatcher's chief enforcer during the miners' strike - he handed out money to strike breakers from a suite at Claridges - and served as a special adviser to Malcolm Rifkind and Michael Portillo under previous Tory governments, writing the ill-judged Who Dares Wins conference speech.

Hart is known to have excellent access to the US administration and worked closely with the former CIA director William Casey in the early and mid-1980s.

More recently he has worked as a middle man for a number of defence contractors, and has even written a play. He lives on a 500-acre estate in Suffolk.

Nick du Toit (48)
A former member of the special forces unit of the South African Defence Force - used by the apartheid government in the fight against the ANC - Du Toit was detained with 14 other men in Equatorial Guinea on suspicion of being the mercenaries' vanguard.

After leaving the defence force in the early 1990s, Du Toit is believed to have worked with Mann at Executive Outcomes. He also became involved in business dealings across Africa, including diamond mining in Democratic Republic of Congo and Angola, and fishing rights off the coast. During the 1998 coup attempt in Sierra Leone he was doing diamond deals in the country.

Du Toit was arrested in the capital of Equatorial Guinea, Malabo, immediately after the failed coup attempt, and confessed to being part of the plot.

His wife, who lives in South Africa, claimed afterwards that he had been tortured.



Induce Act :.

Bend over, you're about to get Longhorned by B. Gates and his confederacy of dunces:

Until recently, much of the discussion among tech enthusiasts about a controversial anti-piracy bill known as the Induce Act has focused on the proposed law's improbability.

Put forth by Sens. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), the bill has been ridiculed by techies as so poorly written that it could unintentionally ban an infinite range of everyday tools -- iPods, DVD burners, even paper and pencil.

But since its introduction, nine co-sponsors have signed on, both Democrats and Republicans.

And significantly, that list of co-sponsors now includes two of Congress' most influential members: Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tennessee) and Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-South Dakota).

Also known as the Inducing Infringement of Copyrights Act (SB2560), the bill would punish tech companies and consumer electronics makers who develop tools that could "induce" or encourage users to make unauthorized copies of copyright material such as music, movies or software.



Seas Seen as Viable Power Source :.

What if the U.S. Government spent $100 billion on this instead of an illegal and unnecessary war in Iraq?

Undaunted by past failures, a new wave of entrepreneurs is seeking to generate electricity by channeling the energy of the Earth's oceans.

In experiments from Southern Australia to Scotland to Northern California, startup energy firms and researchers will be testing a host of technologies in the coming months aimed at generating electricity from the sea.

Among the most ambitious, planned for this fall, is a 486-ton wave turbine that converts wave motion into electricity and will be anchored off the coast of Australia, 150 miles south of Sydney. Energetech, the Australian company that developed the turbine, said it will be the "first plant in the world to make wave energy commercially viable." A similar turbine is to be installed off Point Judith, Rhode Island, in 2006.

Escalating oil prices and worries about global warming have shifted the quest for renewable energy sources into high gear. While wind and solar claim most of the attention, and hopes are high for high-tech hydrogen, the dark horse in this race may be the restless energy of the sea.


8/25/2004

Potential Cyberwar Event Today? :.

Software based attacks, like the one described in this piece, are nothing to worry about in the scheme of things. Network managers have several ways of dealing with them. If terrorists start cutting fiber and blowing up rackspace here and there, on the other hand... well, that's a different ball of wax altogether.

Two years ago, I wrote an essay called Cyberwar: How Terrorists Could Defeat the U.S., and Why They Won't. The main point of the essay was that if "the terrorist threat" was real, "the terrorists" would attack the physical information infrastructure of the United States.

I explained how simple a matter it would be to deliver a kill shot to the United States, and I said that "the terrorists" wouldn't do this because "the terrorists" are a creation of the elite, and the elite need the Internet to keep swindling the rest of us.

But....

Now, two years after I wrote that thing, I wouldn't be surprised if critical network infrastructure was physically destroyed. The global economy is teetering on the brink of collapse. When the macro-scale looting has finally run its course, and the collapse is imminent, why no provide an excellent excuse for the collapse?

Hmmmm. What do you think the reaction on Wall Street would be if, say, the Internet was taken down for a few weeks or months? Hmmmm... Take away the flow of information and you take away the flow of money. Take away the flow of money and you bring down the show. It's really that simple. Nevermind the chaos that would be created in all aspects of our modern, tech centric lives. It's the money, honey. That's what matters.

And why did the Federal Reserve begin transferring money over an Internet-based system this month? The ATM (Asynchronus Transfer Mode) based infrastructure, with its secure, dedicated circuits and decades long track record of reliability were scrapped for a system that relies on Internet infrastructure!!! Crawling with worms, dDOS attacks and script kiddies? Oh sure. Why not?

As for today's potential attack? * yawn * Wake me up when multiple OC-768s go down, we lose a few root DNS facilities and electromagnetic pulse weapons start popping the big iron routers and switches used to move the long haul, intercity and transcon traffic:

e-Jihad Begins Thursday, Internet Predicted to Melt Down by Mid-day

You should probably starting backing up that gig of gmail to local storage. According to a Russian news site, Kaspersky Labs states that terrorists will launch attacks which will paralyze the Internet this Thursday. This tragically coincides with two weeks of script kiddie attacks (which were scheduled to begin this past Sunday) aimed at disrupting the Republican national convention. In addition, many college students are back on campus this week, which provides the e-terrorists and i-subversives with a veritable candyland of insecure boxes on big pipes. Faced with this triple threat, our beloved Internet will surely fall.

The ISC would like to go out on a limb and predict that the Internet will not vaporize into a cloud of nothingness this Thursday, but if it does, it's been our pleasure to help stave off its inevitable annihilation this long.



Oil Gaps Down :.

Shorts have been slaughtered on this thing for weeks. Now the people that went long around $49 are busy collecting their entrails off the ground:

Oil prices fell nearly $2 to just over $43 on Wednesday, dragged down by heavy losses in U.S. gasoline futures after summer driving demand failed to meet expectations.

U.S. light crude ended down $1.66 at $43.55 a barrel after falling to its lowest level of $43.22 in 11 sessions.

London Brent last traded down $1.62 at $40.70 a barrel.

Prices are now down nearly $6 from record highs last week.


8/23/2004

Apocalypse Now: Barbie Clothes, Accessories and Perfume for Adult Women :.

Barbie is about to break out of her curvaceous plastic mold and turn into a living breathing person. At least that's what toymaker Mattel hopes will happen when the company launches its Barbie line of clothing and accessories for women later this year.

El Segundo, Calif.-based Mattel, the No. 1 toymaker, showcased its new Barbie brand of vintage T-shirts, cocktail dresses, shoes and coats last week in New York at the International Licensing show.

The Barbie couture clothing collection for adult women, which debuted last spring in Japan, will hit stores in the U.S. stores as early as this fall, said Richard Dickson, senior vice president of Mattel worldwide brands consumer products.




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