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Mike Williams, chief electronics technician aboard Transocean Deepwater Horizon: For months, the computer system had been locking up, producing what the crew deemed the “blue screen of death.” “It would just turn blue,” he said. “You’d have no data coming through.” Replacement hardware had been ordered but not yet installed by the time of the [...]

The shocking truth that even the Washington Post was afraid to state openly — that America’s shadow government is run by homosexuals: I wouldn’t want to be on the WaPo‘s design team right now.

(Know your meme.) McClatchy (Blumenthal, “FDA nears approval of genetically engineered salmon,” 2010-07-11): And the modified fish, all females, would be sterile so that they couldn’t breed with wild fish if any escaped, the company said. You gotta be some sort of crazy liberal DFH to think that’s anything but either (a) awesome or (b) [...]

An aside of rare bluntness from Reuters about one legacy of US military adventurism: The resort town has been known for its vibrant nightlife and sex trade since the days of the Vietnam War, partly due to its proximity to an American air force base at the time. The US pulled out of Vietnam in [...]

Computerworld: Hackers behind the rootkit responsible for crippling Windows machines after users installed a Microsoft security patch have updated their malware so that it no longer crashes systems, researchers confirmed today. See also: “FIRE, Detroit, GOP, Microsoft.”

(kw)

NYTeims (Bagli, “A Whistleblower at the Deutsche Bank Building Is Now an Outcast,” 30 Nov’09): [Marshal Greenberg] is suing the contractors who employed him, Bovis Lend Lease and the John Galt Corporation, accusing them of retaliating against him for telling the truth. Bovis, in court papers, has denied his claims. The kicker: Galt has yet [...]

Xe: The joint audit by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction and the United State Department of State Inspector General released yesterday does not, as some press reports have suggested, allege that Blackwater was ever complicit in overbilling the United States government for work it performed in Iraq in 2006 and 2007. The audit [...]

“Pirates and Plants” @ Flickr, ULed 2009-07-15: Indeed: WiReD.

Bernie Kerik’s Flickr photostream includes gems like Officer Kerik in ’93… …“plainclothes” (modulo the assault rifle) Kerik escorting Susan Rosenberg (ca. ’83?; SR playing ping pong here)… …authentic arrest scenes… …and, indeed, pretty much his entire rise and fall. Except for his mugshot: The kommissar disappears: (Left: Flickr, plemeljr, 8 Feb ’05 [detail]; right: m3t00, [...]

NYT [Insert sardonic Economist caption here.]

The Guardian reports on an NYC anarcho arrested for twittering whereabouts of police at Pittsburgh G20: Elliot Madison, 41, from Queens, had his home raided and was put on $30,000 (£19,000) bail after he and Michael Wallschlaeger, 46, were tracked to the Carefree Inn motel in Pittsburgh during the summit on 24 and 25 September. [...]

CRN (Macpherson, “Safety first for IT executives in China,” 16 Sep ’09) quotes Mark Bregman, Symantec’s CTO: “I don’t let my IT department near my laptop.” Also noteworthy: “I was advised by people in three-letter agencies in the US Government to weigh the machine before I left and when I got back [from China].” (Q: [...]

Cryptome catalogs it.

Jordan Zinovich and Hans Plomp: Before warlords toppled Somali dictator Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991, Somalia had a kind of stability recognized by the “community of nations.” As early as 1971, Somalia’s fishery was considered an increasingly promising economic resource. By 1982, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden, the UK, and the USSR had negotiated fishing [...]

Sergey Aleynikov’s defense: ‘I wasn’t stealing software — Goldman Sachs incorporates GNU software into its high-frequency trading algorithsms…’ Where are all the Slashdottirs when you need them?

…only to read this: “New Calls for Regulating Airspace over Hudson” Go team.

Epic Firefox error dialog courtesy of “‘Going Google’ with Google Apps”: Priceless.

(hk)

Teh Grauniad on ‘internet users’ in Hull, England, subject to a local-monopoly ISP that appears to be run by a sadist: “It is evident that we have been exceeding the expectations of copyright owners, the media and internet users[....] So, we have changed our policy to move in more line with the industry standard approach, [...]

Creepy email .sig: In any large population, there are some people who aren’t very bright. That’s not their fault, it’s just in their genes. As an engineer, I have a responsibility to design things that won’t kill off the slower ones, just as I have a responsibility to design things that won’t harm my neighbor’s [...]

NYT infographic on ursine cryptography: Where’s Jared Diamond when you need him to reaffirm your master narrative?

Bullitt County, KY, scammed by very detail-oriented Ukrainians. One small and surprisingly “human” part of a much more laborious process, documented by Brian Krebs: [T]wo of the 25 so-called “money mules” who were hired to act as intermediaries in this scam [...] were females under the age of 35 who initially were contacted after placing [...]

BBC, “Billions stolen in online robbery” (3 Jul ’09): Space trading game Eve Online has suffered a virtual version of the credit crunch. One of the game’s biggest financial institutions lost a significant chunk of its deposits as a huge theft started a run on the bank. One of the bank’s controllers stole about 200bn [...]

Softpedia (6 Jul ’09): Customers of Eircom, the largest Internet service provider in Ireland, experienced serious DNS slowdowns and weirdness over the weekend. Users from different parts of the country reported that trying to open legit URLs in browsers redirected them to advertising pages. Some of them suggested on forums that there were two separate [...]