Border Security: Congress Just Doesn’t Get It

The Defense Appropriations bill that passed Congress on Nov. 8 did not include a popular amendment to provide $3 billion for border security that included funds for fencing, unmanned aerial vehicles and ground sensors.

The border security amendment, sponsored by Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.) was approved by the Senate in a 95-1 vote on Oct. 3. When House and Senate leaders negotiated the final terms of the bill in recent weeks, they removed the border security provision and its funding. The defense fiscal 2008 spending bill passed the House, 400-15, and the Senate, in a voice vote, on Nov. 8.

Chinese connection to malware

Portable hard discs sold locally and produced by US disk-drive manufacturer Seagate Technology have been found to carry Trojan horse viruses that automatically upload to Beijing Web sites anything the computer user saves on the hard disc, the Investigation Bureau said.
Around 1,800 of the portable Maxtor hard discs, produced in Thailand, carried two Trojan horse viruses: autorun.inf and ghost.pif, the bureau under the Ministry of Justice said.
The tainted portable hard disc uploads any information saved on the computer automatically and without the owner’s knowledge to www.nice8.org and www.we168.org, the bureau said.

The affected hard discs are Maxtor Basics 500G discs.
The bureau said that hard discs with such a large capacity are usually used by government agencies to store databases and other information.
Sensitive information may have already been intercepted by Beijing through the two Web sites, the bureau said.
The bureau said that the method of attack was unusual, adding that it suspected Chinese authorities were involved.

Gordon Brown: I love the USA

Prime Minister Gordon Brown hailed the US as “our most important ally over the years, a country that we share values with”.
And Mr Brown added: “The strength of our relationship with America is incredibly important to the future of the world.”
His remarks to Sky News left gaffe-prone Foreign Office Minister Lord Malloch-Brown out on a limb.
The toff peer — dubbed “B*****k Brown” over his off-message outbursts — was branded a “liability” by officials. [ed note: I love the Brits — can’t you just hear someone say, “Here comes ol’ B******k Brown.” Heh]

The Wonders of Socialized Medicine, Part 8540

A parliamentary inquiry into Sydney’s Royal North Shore (RNS) hospital has heard a claim of live cockroaches being killed on operating theatre tables during surgeries.
A submission from retired RNS doctor Henry Sleye Hughes also claims some of the hospital’s operating tables are so old, one broke in two while a patient was anaesthetised.
New South Wales Health Minister Reba Meagher was the first witness to front the inquiry, set up after 32-year-old Jana Horska miscarried in the hospital’s emergency room toilets after waiting two hours for treatment.

Sen. Kerry attacks Rush Limbaugh

“At first I thought, that’s not Rush, that’s just the OxyContin talking. Nonetheless, this is a despicable but unsurprising new lie from a man whose closest brush with combat came when customs officials tried to take away his Viagra. This portly peddler of hate is once again wrong on the facts. John Kerry served his country with honor in Vietnam, and has fought for his fellow veterans ever since. The lies and smears of the Swift Boat Veterans for Bush were disproved conclusively in 2004 by the men who fought by John Kerry’s side in Vietnam, by the military’s own records, by investigative journalists, and by the incredible contradictions that exposed these right wing smear artists…..[ed note: It’s been 1013 days and counting since Sen. Kerry promised to sign Form 180 and make his records public.]

Defense Bill has funds for Falcon Space Bomber

The new program, dubbed Falcon, for “Force Application and Launch from CONUS,” centers on a small-launch-vehicle concept of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The agency describes Falcon as a “a reusable Hypersonic Cruise Vehicle (HCV) capable of delivering 12,000 pounds of payload at a distance of 9,000 nautical miles from [the continental United States] in less than two hours.”

Hypersonic speed is far greater than the speed of sound. The reusable vehicle being contemplated would “provide the country with significant capability to conduct responsive missions with quick turn-around sortie rates while providing aircraft-like operability and mission-recall capability,” according to DARPA.

Human Cloning “just a matter of time”

Unless the world bans human cloning it may be just a matter of time until we share the Earth with exact copies. This is according to a major UN policy analysis released this morning.

The report’s authors propose outlawing human reproductive cloning while allowing restricted therapeutic cloning as the most viable “compromise” option for the international community to adopt.

So much for the great 11/11 cyber jihad attack…

There’s a lot of hype circulating around about a Jihad application meant to wage cyber war in the near future. A lot of people have speculated and while the experts are dismissive, the topic is still getting a lot of press and worrying average users. I took a bit of time to examine the binary and I don’t believe it poses a huge threat. [snip]

All told, the little bits of analysis make the code look to be written by high school or early college kids. If their network gets large enough, maybe they could have caused harm. Right now the websever isn’t working and the app seems like a no-go. I’d suggest everyone block traffic to the server http://al-jinan.net and stop worrying.

Chinese pandas forced to migrate to find food …. (I blame Bush)

Giant pandas are being forced to move from a remote mountainous area in southwestern China due to food shortages as their staple bamboo withers, an animal expert said Monday.

Most of the pandas’ favorite arrow bamboo in a 217,000 square-mile region of Sichuan province is going through a once-in-60-year cycle of flowering and dying before regenerating, said Yang Xuyu, deputy head of the province’s Wild Animal Preservation Station.

The pandas are moving to other areas of Sichuan, which has about 40 reserves of various sizes.