Environmental
Eyeless Shrimp and Fish With Tumors: The Horrific Consequences of BP’s Spill
Almost two full years after the BP oil spill, a panel of experts gathered at the 17th annual Tulane Environmental Law Summit, to present the continuing impacts of the BP Oil Spill. That spill began with the April 20th, 2010 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon drilling unit used by BP 40 miles off the Louisiana coast. Eleven men lost their lives. The resulting spill of oil into the Gulf of Mexico stands as the largest oil spill in U.S. history and the second largest environmental disaster in this country to date besides the nearly decade-long Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Scientists at the summit presented recent photographs of shrimp with no eyes and fish with cancerous tumors born long after the gulf was declared “safe” for fishing.
Monsanto taking over global agriculture
Published on Apr 18, 2012 by RTAmerica
Monsanto has been on a mission to control US agriculture. With the help of politicians and regulation agencies, the biotechnology company has been putting many farmers out of business. Many critics of the company believe it is the right of the people to know if they are consuming genetically-modified food. Jeffrey Smith, author of Seeds of Deception, joins us with more on the Monsanto.
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Cyber Space
CISPA gets a rewrite but still threatens Americans’ privacy
Foes of controversial legislation rally before expected vote next week, with scant success so far: latest draft still allows Internet companies to share customer data and communications with the National Security Agency.
New revisions to a proposed federal cybersecurity law still would permit Internet companies to hand over confidential customer records and communications to the National Security Agency.
A recent torrent of criticism prompted the politicians behind the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act to circulate a revised version (PDF) of CISPA this evening before an expected floor vote next week. But the authors made only relatively minor tweaks.
The legislation remains so broad that the NSA could vacuum up “all sorts of sensitive information like Internet use information and the contents of e-mails,” ACLU legislative counsel Michelle Richardson told CNET.
CISPA is experiencing a milder form of the same kind of Internet backlash that doomed the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP early this year.
Advocacy groups, including the American Library Association, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the libertarian-leaning TechFreedom, launched a “Stop Cyber Spying” campaign today — complete with a write-your-congresscritter-via-Twitter app — and the bill has now drawn the ire of Anonymous. A letter (PDF) sent today by more than two dozen organizations, including the Republican Liberty Caucus, urges a “no” vote on CISPA, and more than 669,000 people have signed an anti-CISPA Web petition.
Anonymous downs Home Office site for second time
By Tom Espiner, ZDNet UK
Anonymous has brought down the Home Office website for the second time, even though the department had prior warning of the hacking collective’s campaign of weekend attacks.
Hackers connected to Anonymous brought down the Home Office website for the second time in a matter of days. Image credit: Anonymous
A flood of traffic sent to Homeoffice.gov.uk led to intermittent outages on Saturday, but did not compromise internal systems, the government department said on Monday.
“The site was temporarily unavailable,” a Home Office spokeswoman told ZDNet UK. “The site was targeted by a distributed denial-of-service attack, and was flooded by the volume of traffic.”
Last weekend, the Anonymous group launched its Operation Trial at Home (OpTrialatHome) campaign to protest the extradition treaty the UK has with the US. NASA hacker Gary McKinnon, TVShack website operator Stephen O’Dwyer and Christopher Tappin have been affected by the treaty, which critics see as unbalanced.
Those attacks took down the websites run by the prime minister’s office and the Ministry of Justice, as well as the Home Office. Anonymous activists were successful for a second time in a matter of days because they varied their attack, the Home Office said in a statement on Monday.
“DDoS attacks are a difficult problem to tackle,” the government department said. “The threat environment is changing constantly, with hacktivists using different tools and techniques to frustrate existing defences.”
One of the hacktivists behind the UK Anonymous 2012 Twitter feed declined to tell ZDNet UK which attack tools the group had used at the weekend.
The Impending Cybersecurity Power Grab – It’s not just for the United States
EFF, OpenMedia.ca, CIPPIC and a number of civil society organizations have declared this to be ‘Stop Cyber Spying Week’ in protest of several controversial U.S. cybersecurity legislative proposals, including the bill currently before Congress and the Senate called CISPA, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing & Protection Act of 2011. While ‘Stop Cyber Spying Week’ is focused on U.S. initiatives, Canadians should be concerned as well as the adoption of a privacy-invasive U.S. cybersecurity strategy is likely to have serious implications for Canadian civil liberties. For this reason, Canadian civil society groups have joined the protest. In general, Canadians would do well to remain vigilant.
Using the guise of ‘cybersecurity’, CISPA aims to mobilize Internet intermediaries to institute a sweeping, privacy-invasive, voluntary information-sharing regime with few safeguards. The U.S. cybersecurity strategy, embodied in CISPA and other legislative proposals, also seeks to empower Internet companies to deploy ill-defined ‘countermeasures’ in order to combat these threats. Use of these powers is purportedly limited to situations addressing ‘cybersecurity’ threats, yet this term is so loosely defined that it can encompass almost anything – even, potentially, to investigate potential breaches of intellectual property rights!
The cornerstone of the privacy-invasive CISPA component is the establishment of private-public partnerships for information sharing. This creates a two-tiered regime that, on the one hand, facilitates the collection of personal Internet data by private Internet companies as well as the sharing of that information with the government and, on the other, allows government agencies to share information with private companies.
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Survival / Sustainability
If you have never made your own soap before, this the first of a two-part lesson.It is soap making for the total beginner. I have been making soap for years and recently decided to try to develop a recipe for a reliable batch of soap using ingredients I can easily obtain, instead of ordering exotic oils by mail.I am guessing this would make it easier for other people who are curious about making soap but don’t know how to begin.
Traditionally, people used a combination of wood ash and lard to make soap. The Soap Factory has an interesting account of the history and chemistry of soap making and the traditional methods of rendering fat and obtaining potash from wood ash. I applaud the homesteader who chooses to make soap using materials at hand and traditional methods. Those of us who want to make things easier need to purchase their materials. In place of wood ash we can easily find lye at any hardware store. The oils are more difficult. Many homemade soap recipes use coconut oil, palm oil and olive oil as the base ingredients. Soap made from these oils is nice and hard, it lathers well and it is soothing to the skin. The problem for me is that it is not that easy to find hydrogenated (solid at room temperature) coconut oil and palm oil where I live. When I am going to make a large quantity of soap, like many batches for holiday gifts, I don’t mind ordering oils by the mail from Columbus Foods. They have a “Soaper’s Choice area of their website with just about any exotic oil you could want in quantities as small as 7 pounds. For smaller and one-time batches, this is not practical. You can’t store oil for long periods of time because it gets rancid, especially in my very hot (in the summer) Chicago home. I thought maybe other people have avoided making soap due to the difficulty of obtaining supplies. Also, some people do not want to use palm oil because of environmental concerns. I decided to develop a very simple and basic soap recipe for the beginner using supplies you can buy easily. We still want to make a batch of soap that is hard, produces lather and is gentle to the skin, but we are going to use oils that you can find at the grocery store and pharmacy.
For Part 1 of this soap making tutorial you will gather all of your materials. Next week you can combine them into a batch of soap.
Last week you gathered your materials and supplies. This week you can finally make your soap!
First, I’d like to remind you about safety. This is a project that uses a very dangerous material. Lye is sold in the drain cleaner department with lots of other nasty chemicals because it heats up to a very high temperature when it gets wet and literally burns through the stuff clogging your pipes. You do not want to get it on your body or in your mouth or eyes. You should plan on wearing gloves and eye protection when you are around the lye and make sure it is not anywhere where a child or pet can get near it. Store the unused lye in a safe spot with other dangerous household chemicals. You will only be using a few tablespoons of lye for this recipe. While caution needs to be exercised you will not have a giant cauldron of boiling lye to work with. This is another reason why this is a good batch for the beginner.
Step 1
Measure the oils. Use a small lightweight bowl to measure each oil and add it to the cooking pot. (This should be a no-stick or stainless steel pot.) Measure and pour each oil separately. If you are not sure how high your scale goes, divide the olive oil into two. Each time you put the empty bowl on the scale make sure to clear the scale so that it starts at zero before you add anything. Wipe the bowl clean between oils. Measure 13 ounces of corn oil, 23 ounces of olive oil, and 2 sticks of cocoa butter (2 ounces total.) Slice up the cocoa butter first for quicker melting. Put the pan containing the oil on the stove to wait for the next step.
Step 2 
Following the safety guidelines, take one empty glass jar and put it on the scale and carefully weigh out 4.8 ounces of lye. You should have newspaper under the scale that you can gather up and throw away when you are done, in case any grains pop out of the jar. In another glass jar pour in 12 liquid ounces of water. Let the water sit until it is room temperature. When it is ready, pour the lye into the water and stir it in using a rubber spatula. Never pour the water into the lye. The lye goes into the water. Protect yourself from the fumes. This is the most dangerous part of the soap making process, when the lye water will quickly heat up to a very high temperature. Stir until the lye is dissolved and plan to revisit the lye water periodically to make sure everything is dissolved. Put it somewhere safe to cool down. If lye gets on you, quickly wash it off. It will sting slightly if it gets on your skin but can blind you if it gets in your eyes.
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Activism
13 Arrests as Occupy New Haven Camp Closes
The protesters, believed to live in one of the last Occupy encampments in New England, have been in a legal battle with the city.
Wednesday, Apr 18, 2012
New Haven police have made at least six arrests.
Thirteen Occupy New Haven protesters were arrested as police moved them from their camp on the New Haven Green on Wednesday morning.
The city began cleaning up the green on Wednesday afternoon and officials estimate that the cost for cleanup will be $25,000, while the city expects the whole cost associated with the protest will be around $145,000 in taxpayer money.
The city also plans to assess the property to ensure that the trees are healthy because they have not been properly watered.
The deadline for the protesters to leave was 8 a.m. after the group lost its appeal in federal court in New York on Tuesday.
Occupy signs were gone and most of the tents were down before that.
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