Tuesday, November 3, 2009

The Church of Scientology’s European website was hacked and defaced earlier today by hackers claiming to be members of Anonymous. Anonymous proponents previously hacked Scientology’s main website, www.scientology.org. The group also protested the church in February 2008.

Another website run by the church, freedom-belgium.org, was also hacked and defaced. The hacked websites contain content taken from .whyaretheydead.info, a website critical of Scientology which lists members of the Church who are alleged to have died while in its care. Anonymous has stated that whyaretheydead.info was not involved in the hacking, but the hackers merely used content from their website.

This is not the first time hackers have defaced Scientology websites. In January 2008, ‘Anonymous’ hacked the Church’s international website by using a denial-of-service attack. The attack caused the website to be inaccessible for nearly 24 hours.

Wednesday, May 10, 2017

Late Sunday night and Monday morning, the website of the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) became unresponsive, which interfered with attempts by the public to express their views on the proposals currently up for comment, including one about Net Neutrality. Although comedian John Oliver on his show Last Week Tonight had asked his viewers to inundate the website with comments supporting Net Neutrality, the FCC says a DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) cyberattack, not angry HBO fans, are responsible for their website’s issues.

FCC Chief Information Officer David Bray explained in a formal statement that FCC.gov’s problems did not come from a large volume of complaints and comments, which is what Oliver had asked his fans to make, but from sabotage. “These actors were not attempting to file comments themselves; rather they made it difficult for legitimate commenters to access and file with the FCC,” said Bray.

Net Neutrality is the idea that Internet providers should not be allowed to speed up or slow down access to certain websites, which would presumably be done for payment. In 2014, the U.S. government ruled Internet providers must be held to standards similar to those of telephone companies and changed their legal classification to fall under Title II of the 1934 Telecommunications Act, which gave the FCC the legal authority to order them not to give preferential treatment to high-paying customers.

In response to a previous Net Neutrality proposal in 2014, John Oliver did a segment on the fifth episode of Last Week Tonight explaining the difference between Title I and Title II status and asking his viewers to flood the FCC’s websites with comments supporting regulation. Approximately 4 million did so, and the website crashed. Sunday night, Oliver asked the public to repeat the performance, recommending comments to make and providing a single link to take them to the exact part of FCC.gov required: “America needs you to rise — or more accurately, remain seated in front of your computer screen — to this occasion,” said Oliver on the air. “So please, fly my pretties, fly once more!” Again, the FCC website soon suffered problems.

Despite Sunday night’s issues, the FCC still received tens of thousands of comments on the proposed relaxing of the 2014 regulations, which is up for a vote on May 18.

Friday, August 19, 2005

Drug maker Merck & Co. was found liable for a person’s death concerning the use of the pain medication Vioxx, according to a jury verdict in a Texas court.

The plaintiff’s case, headed by the widow of Robert Ernst, who died in 2001 of an irregular heartbeat and of clogged arteries while on the drug Vioxx, was successfully awarded $253.4 million dollars. Vioxx was pulled from the shelves in 2004 after a study discovered it could double the risk of a heart attack or stroke if taken for longer than 1.5 years. However, the US government agency, the FDA, decided in February of this year to allow the product back on the shelves.

Merck’s stock price dropped 10% within minutes of the verdict being announced, and continued to fall hours after. There are in excess of 4,200 other Vioxx-related lawsuits pending across the USA.

The company plans to appeal the decision.

Thursday, June 23, 2011

NASA’s Cassini–Huygens spacecraft has discovered evidence for a large-scale saltwater reservoir beneath the icy crust of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. The data came from the spacecraft’s direct analysis of salt-rich ice grains close to the jets ejected from the moon. The study has been published in this week’s edition of the journal Nature.

Data from Cassini’s cosmic dust analyzer show the grains expelled from fissures, known as tiger stripes, are relatively small and usually low in salt far away from the moon. Closer to the moon’s surface, Cassini found that relatively large grains rich with sodium and potassium dominate the plumes. The salt-rich particles have an “ocean-like” composition and indicate that most, if not all, of the expelled ice and water vapor comes from the evaporation of liquid salt-water. When water freezes, the salt is squeezed out, leaving pure water ice behind.

Cassini’s ultraviolet imaging spectrograph also recently obtained complementary results that support the presence of a subsurface ocean. A team of Cassini researchers led by Candice Hansen of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, measured gas shooting out of distinct jets originating in the moon’s south polar region at five to eight times the speed of sound, several times faster than previously measured. These observations of distinct jets, from a 2010 flyby, are consistent with results showing a difference in composition of ice grains close to the moon’s surface and those that made it out to the E ring, the outermost ring that gets its material primarily from Enceladean jets. If the plumes emanated from ice, they should have very little salt in them.

“There currently is no plausible way to produce a steady outflow of salt-rich grains from solid ice across all the tiger stripes other than salt water under Enceladus’s icy surface,” said Frank Postberg, a Cassini team scientist at the University of Heidelberg in Germany.

The data suggests a layer of water between the moon’s rocky core and its icy mantle, possibly as deep as about 50 miles (80 kilometers) beneath the surface. As this water washes against the rocks, it dissolves salt compounds and rises through fractures in the overlying ice to form reserves nearer the surface. If the outermost layer cracks open, the decrease in pressure from these reserves to space causes a plume to shoot out. Roughly 400 pounds (200 kilograms) of water vapor is lost every second in the plumes, with smaller amounts being lost as ice grains. The team calculates the water reserves must have large evaporating surfaces, or they would freeze easily and stop the plumes.

“We imagine that between the ice and the ice core there is an ocean of depth and this is somehow connected to the surface reservoir,” added Postberg.

The Cassini mission discovered Enceladus’ water-vapor and ice jets in 2005. In 2009, scientists working with the cosmic dust analyzer examined some sodium salts found in ice grains of Saturn’s E ring but the link to subsurface salt water was not definitive. The new paper analyzes three Enceladus flybys in 2008 and 2009 with the same instrument, focusing on the composition of freshly ejected plume grains. In 2008, Cassini discovered a high “density of volatile gases, water vapor, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide, as well as organic materials, some 20 times denser than expected” in geysers erupting from the moon. The icy particles hit the detector target at speeds between 15,000 and 39,000 MPH (23,000 and 63,000 KPH), vaporizing instantly. Electrical fields inside the cosmic dust analyzer separated the various constituents of the impact cloud.

“Enceladus has got warmth, water and organic chemicals, some of the essential building blocks needed for life,” said Dennis Matson in 2008, Cassini project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

“This finding is a crucial new piece of evidence showing that environmental conditions favorable to the emergence of life can be sustained on icy bodies orbiting gas giant planets,” said Nicolas Altobelli, the European Space Agency’s project scientist for Cassini.

“If there is water in such an unexpected place, it leaves possibility for the rest of the universe,” said Postberg.

Friday, June 11, 2010

Turkey’s Finance Ministry has given Google a tax demand of $18.6 million, and Transport and Communications Minister Binali Y?ld?r?m called on Google to register as a taxpayer in the country to “help accelerate” the lifting of a ban on YouTube and Google services.

As The Register reported, access to search engine Google had been limited due to a block imposed on its IP set, and most of Google’s online services had been inaccessible in Turkey since June 4. The IP addresses were shared between YouTube and other Google services. As International Business Times reports, YouTube has been banned in Turkey since 2008.

Accoring to HaberTurk, which is the Turkish version of Bloomberg, Yildirim said that “YouTube is a tax-payer in 20 countries, and we want them to do the same in Turkey.” Turkey’s Finance Ministry has given Google a tax demand of $18.6 million. Y?ld?r?m called on Google to register as a taxpayer in the country, and he said that it is a step that “would help accelerate the lifting of a ban on the company’s Youtube video-sharing website.”

Reporters Without Borders condemned “the growing repercussions of Turkey’s censorship of YouTube” and quoted Turkey’s President Abdullah Gul as saying “I do not want Turkey to be included among the countries that ban YouTube and prevent access to Google.”

Several internet sites have recently been banned in Turkey. The Register reports that 3,700 websites are “blocked for arbitrary and political reasons” in Turkey, including foreign websites, sites aimed at the country’s Kurdish minority, and gay sites according to The Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). Reporters Without Borders added Turkey to the list of “countries under surveillance” in its report on “Enemies of the Internet,” issued March 2010.

Sunday, July 5, 2009

The United Kingdom’s Serious Fraud Office is to launch an investigation into the collapse of car manufacturer MG Rover. The move follows the conclusion of a four-year enquiry started immediately after the firm became insolvent.

The group of four who owned MG Rover — John Towers, Nick Stephenson, Peter Beale and John Edwards — have been accused of asset stripping. The quartet, known as the Phoenix Four, paid a symbolic £10 (approximately €15) for Rover in 2000. At that time the company received an interest-free loan from former owner BMW for £427 million (approximately €700 million) and came with a large amount of unsold stock.

Between then and Rover’s April 2005 bankruptcy, by which time there were unpaid debts of £1 billion (approximately €1.5 billion), the Phoenix Four had removed an estimated £40 million worth of assets including pensions and salaries. An enquiry was launched by ministers that was expected to take a year, but the final report was not delivered to business secretary Lord Mandelson until three weeks ago.

The government used taxpayer’s money to fund a £6 million loan to MG Rover and attempted to negotiate a deal with a Chinese company, but these efforts failed. MG Rover’s collapse caused the loss of an estimated 15,000 jobs, including with various suppliers. A former MG Rover factory does still build a small number of MG sports cars in Longbridge by Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation, who bought most of the designs.

The Phoenix Four released a statement criticising the criminal investigation. “There has never been any suggestion of improper conduct by the directors and this was confirmed in a report by the administrators PWC six months after they took over the running of the company. Four years on, any suggestion [of] another further investigation is frankly ridiculous and smacks of kicking this issue into the long grass. If the government has been so concerned to get to the heart of the matter why has it flatly refused more than 30 requests under the Freedom of Information Act which would have revealed correspondence and documents the directors believe would have shed some light on the government’s role in the affair?”

Monday, November 2, 2020

The following is the sixth and final edition of a monthly series chronicling the 2020 United States presidential election. It features original material compiled throughout the previous month after an overview of the month’s biggest stories.

This month’s spotlight on the campaign trail: the Free and Equal Elections Foundation holds two presidential debates, three candidates who did not participate in those debates give their final pleas to voters, and three political pundits give their predictions on the outcome of the election.