In June, the Defense Department’s Inspector General released a report on the US Army’s accounting, revealing that the Army had invented $6.5 trillion in “improper adjustments” ($2.8T in one quarter!) to make its books appear balanced though it could not account for where the funds had gone. (more…)
View the original here:
US Army committed $6.5 trillion in accounting fraud in one year
Univision won the auction for Gawker Media with a $135m bid , reports Peter Kafka. … the auction is a disappointing conclusion for Gawker Media owner Nick Denton, who founded the company in 2002. Last year, as rival media companies like Vice, BuzzFeed and Vox Media (which owns this site) were raising money at increasingly high valuations, Denton was arguing that his company was worth $250 million or more. The price was depressed by the circumstances of the sale: a $140m award against it after publishing a Hulk Hogan sex tape and losing the subsequent lawsuit, which was secretly funded by vengeful billionaire Peter Thiel. Though experts generally expect Gawker to prevail on appeal, it was forced into bankruptcy by the penalty and the only other bidder was Ziff Davis, at $90m. This weds Gawker to The Onion and Fusion in the Univision website stable; The Onion is very much its own thing, but Fusion’s web presence is quite similar to Gawker itself and one wonders will it blend?
Read More:
Univision to buy Gawker for $135m
In this 1915 photo, the children appear to be raising their arms in a siege heil salute of the American flag. Actually, this gesture was part of the Pledge of Allegiance ritual for decades. Then, um, Hitler happened. From Smithsonian : Originally known as the Bellamy Salute, the gesture came to be in the 1890s, when the Pledge of Allegiance was written by Francis J. Bellamy. The Christian socialist minister was recruited to write a patriotic pledge to the American flag as part of magazine mogul Daniel Sharp Ford’s quest to get the flag into public schools. At the time… Bellamy and his boss both agreed that the Civil War had divided American loyalties and that the flag might be able to bridge those gaps. His campaign centered around the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ arrival in the new world. He published his new Pledge as part of a unified Columbus Day ceremony program in September 1892 in the pages of the Youth’s Companion, a popular children’s magazine with a circulation of 500,000. “At a signal from the Principal,” Bellamy wrote, “the pupils, in ordered ranks, hands to the side, face the Flag. Another signal is given; every pupil gives the flag the military salute—right hand lifted, palm downward, to a line with the forehead and close to it. Standing thus, all repeat together, slowly, ‘I pledge allegiance to my Flag…’” Then in the 1930s, Hitler reportedly saw Italian Fascists doing a similar gesture, likely based on an ancient Roman custom, and adopted it for the Nazi party.
Read more here:
Why are these children "sieg heiling" the American flag?
Martin O’Leary not only made a cool fantasy map generator , he’s giving away the source code and has described the process at a high enough level for an idiot like me to partly understand how it works. I wanted to make maps that look like something you’d find at the back of one of the cheap paperback fantasy novels of my youth. I always had a fascination with these imagined worlds, which were often much more interesting than whatever luke-warm sub-Tolkien tale they were attached to. At the same time, I wanted to play with terrain generation with a physical basis. There are loads of articles on the internet which describe terrain generation, and they almost all use some variation on a fractal noise approach, either directly (by adding layers of noise functions), or indirectly (e.g. through midpoint displacement). These methods produce lots of fine detail, but the large-scale structure always looks a bit off. Features are attached in random ways, with no thought to the processes which form landscapes. I wanted to try something a little bit different. It’s an odd feeling to look at these instantly-generated, detailed maps and realize that they represent nothing. I feel like I’m being wasteful pressing the “Generate high resolution map.” The Uncharted Atlas is a twitterbot that posts a new map every hour.
Read more here:
Generate your own random fantasy maps
Buried nearly 2,000 years ago in Serbia, rolls of gold and silver etched with “magic spells” are baffling archaologists. Reuters reports on a “Middle Eastern mystery” unearthed at the site of an ancient Roman city. “We read the names of a few demons, that are connected to the territory of modern-day Syria,” archaeologist Ilija Dankovic said at the dig, as more skeletons from the 4th century A.D. were being uncovered. The fragile, golden and silver scrolls – which once unrolled look like rectangles of foil similar in size to a sweet wrapper – may never be fully understood. They are the first such items discovered in Serbia but resemble amulets of “binding magic” found in other countries, Dankovic said. Very Pazuzu , isn’t it?
View original post here:
Mystery magic spells, etched on gold, unearthed in Serbia
Rogue archivist Carl Malamud writes, “I just got back from the big debate on is free law like free beer that has been brewing for months at the American Bar Association over the question of who gets to read public safety codes and on what terms.” (more…)
Excerpt from:
American Bar Association votes to DRM the law, put it behind a EULA
The German newspaper Bild am Sonntag says that US investigators have discovered three more hidden cheat apps in a Volkswagen product line: these ones were discovered in 3-liter Audi diesels. (more…)
See the article here:
Return of Dieselgate: 3 more hidden programs found in VW Audi/Porsche firmware
Last week, Andrew Tierney and Ken Munro from Pen Test Partners demoed their proof-of-concept ransomware for smart thermostats, which relies on users being tricked into downloading malware that then roots the device and locks the user out while displaying a demand for one bitcoin. (more…)
Read the article:
Proof-of-concept ransomware for smart thermostats demoed at Defcon
A day after an expensive, multinational police effort to remove KickAssTorrents from the net culminated in the arrest of its founder and the confiscation of its domains, the inevitable happened . It’s back online. This morning the founder of kat.cr was arrested in Poland. It is another attack on freedom of rights of internet users globally. We think it’s our duty not to stand aside but to fight back supporting our rights. In the world of regular terrorist attacks where global corporations are flooded with money while millions are dying of diseases and hunger, do you really think that torrents deserve so much attention? Do you really think this fight worth the money and resources spent on it? Do you really think it’s the real issue to care of right now? We don’t! You don’t have to believe the rhetoric to understand how futile it is trying to push cybertoothpaste back in the cyberbottle. Effectively, all the attempt did here was turn an underground piracy site into a mainstream phenomenon, its mirrors linked to by every major news site on the internet.
Read More:
Kickass Torrents returns after a whole day offline
Who will be the first to say, “I saw it immediately. I don’t understand why anyone would have trouble finding it?” [ via ]
Read this article:
Can you find the iPhone that a woman dropped on the carpet?