Killian Bell (3:10 am PDT, Jan 16th)

Verizon Wireless has helped a critical infrastructure company based in the United States catch one ofits developers paying Chinese workers to do his job so that he could browse the Internet all day. “Bob” outsourced all of his work to China and paid the workers just a fraction of his six-figure salary so that he could spend his time on sites like Reddit, Facebook, LinkedIn, and eBay.

Verizon has revealed the fascinating story in a new case study.

Bob (not his real name) worked at the unnamed company for a relatively long period, earning “several hundred thousand dollars a year,” and he received excellent performance reviews. He was regarding the best developer in the building, according to Verizon; his code was clean and well-written, and submitted in a timely fashion.

The thing is, it wasn’t actually Bob’s code. You see, Bob sent all of his work to China and paid workers there to do it for him for “about fifty grand annually.” So what did Bob do while he was in the office? Well, Verizon has drawn up schedule for Bob’s typical working day — this is it:

9 a.m. — Arrive at work and surf Reddit for several hours, watching cat videos.
11:30 a.m. — Take lunch.
1 p.m. — Browse eBay.
2 p.m. — Browse Facebook and LinkedIn.
4:30 p.m. — Send an end of day email to management.
5 p.m. — Go home.

At this point, it’s worth pointing out that this story isn’t at all fabricated, and it’s not a joke. It comes straight from Verizon — via The Next Web — which has published this information not because it was a large-scale data breach, but because Bob’s scam had a “unique attack vector.”

This is the most fascinating part: Bob didn’t just pull this scam with this particular company; he reportedly had it going with several companies in the area. And he’d probably still be doing it today if he wasn’t caught “accidentally.”

Verizon’s security team received a request from the critical infrastructure company that asked for help in understanding anomalous activity it had discovered in its VPN logs. The company had found an open and active connection from Shenyang, China, which was using Bob’s credentials to access itsnetwork. The connection occurred almost every day, and often spanned the entire work day.

However, part of the company’s authentication was a rotating token RSA key fob — without that, a successful connection to its network could not be made. It had initially suspected that a malware program had found its way onto Bob’s computer, but when Verizon investigated it, it was discovered that the VPN connection from Shenyang was at least six months old, which is how far back the VPN logs went.

Unable to explain how an intruder could have gained access to the company’s system, Verizon decided to take a closer look at Bob, since it was his credentials that were being used. The carrier’s case study described him as an “inoffensive and quiet” family man who “you wouldn’t look at twice in an elevator.”

After taking a look at Bob’s computer, Verizon found hundreds of PDF invoices from a Chinese consulting firm in Shenyang that was being paid to do Bob’s work.

So how did the firm gain access to the network? Bob had his RSA token mailed all the way to China.

I must say, Bob’s scam is pretty ingenious. He’s clearly gone to great lengths just so that he can spend his entire working day browsing the web. What I can’t figure out is this: if Bob was clever enough to put the elaborate scheme together just so he didn’t have to do any work, why wasn’t he clever enough to store all of his invoices on a private computer?

Millions converge as Maha Kumbh begins

Millions of people, mostly Hindu pilgrims and god-men, have gathered at Allahabad, Uttar Pradesh, to wash their sins after taking a dip at the Triveni Sangam, or confluence of holy Ganga, Yamuna and mystical Saraswati rivers.

The once-in-12 years Maha Kumbh Mela, billed as the biggest religious gathering in the world, witnessed more than 40 million people on the main bathing day in Allahabad in 2001, breaking the world record of the biggest human gathering.

The first written evidence of the Kumbh Mela can be found in the accounts of Chinese traveler Huan Tsang who visited India in 629-645 CE, during the reign of King Harshavardhana.

According to medieval Hindu theology, its origin is found in one of the most popular medieval puranas, the Bhagavata Purana.

A holy man holds a sacred lamp as he performs evening prayer on the river bank of Yamuna ahead of the Kumbh Mela in Allahabad.

God-men take part in a procession to attend the Kumbh Mela in Allahabad.

A man dressed as Kali Maa, the goddess of power, performs with a burning camphor tablet on his tongue during a religious procession ahead of the Kumbh Mela in Allahabad.

A barber shaves the head of a devotee on the banks of Ganga ahead of the Kumbh Melain Allahabad.

A devotee prays as he takes a holy dip in the waters of Ganga ahead of the Kumbh Mela in Allahabad.

Sadhus perform prayers for a peaceful Kumbh Mela on the banks of Ganga in Allahabad.

Thousands of pilgrims prepare for India's Kumbh Mela at Allahabad (City of Allah)

RSS creator Aaron Swartz ends life by hanging himself at 26


Business partners Aaron Swartz (left) and Simon Carstensen have a working lunch outside in Cambridge, on August 31, 2007. —File Photo Getty Images

Internet activist and computer prodigy Aaron Swartz, who helped create an early version of the Web feed system RSS and was facing federal criminal charges in a controversial fraud case, has committed suicide at age 26, authorities said on Saturday.

Police found Swartz's body in his apartment in the New York City borough of Brooklyn on Friday, according to a spokeswoman for the city's chief medical examiner, which ruled the death a suicide by hanging. Swartz is widely credited with being a co-author of the specifications for the Web feed format RSS 1.0, which he worked on at age 14, according to a blog post on Saturday from his friend, science fiction author Cory Doctorow.

He was later admitted to Stanford University, but dropped out after a year because, as he wrote in a blog post, "I didn't find it a very intellectual atmosphere, since most of the other kids seemed profoundly unconcerned with their studies."

RSS, which stands for Rich Site Summary, is a format for delivering to users content from sites that change constantly, such as news pages and blogs. Over the years, he became an online icon for helping to make a virtual mountain of information freely available to the public, including an estimated 19 million pages of federal court documents from the PACER case-law system.

"Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves," Swartz wrote in an online "manifesto" dated 2008.

"The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. ... sharing isn't immoral - it's a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy," he wrote.

That belief - that information should be shared and available for the good of society - prompted Swartz to found the nonprofit group DemandProgress. The group led a successful campaign to block a bill introduced in 2011 in the US House of Representatives called the Stop Online Piracy Act. The bill, which was withdrawn amid public pressure, would have allowed court orders to curb access to certain websites deemed to be engaging in illegal sharing of intellectual property. Swartz and other activists objected on the grounds it would give the government too many broad powers to censor and squelch legitimate Web communication.

But Swartz faced trouble in July 2011, when he was indicted by a federal grand jury of wire fraud, computer fraud and other charges related to allegedly stealing millions of academic articles and journals from a digital archive at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. According to the federal indictment, Swartz - who was a fellow at Harvard University's Edmond J . Safra Center for Ethics - used MIT's computer networks to steal more than 4 million articles from JSTOR, an online archive and journal distribution service.

JSTOR did not press charges against Swartz after the digitised copies of the articles were returned, according to media reports at the time. Swartz, who pleaded not guilty to all counts, faced 35 years in prison and a $1 million fine if convicted. He was released on bond. His trial was scheduled to start later this year.

'Harsh Array Of Charges'
In a statement released Saturday, the family and partner of Swartz praised his "brilliance" and "profound" commitment to social justice, and struck out at what they said were decisions made at MIT and by prosecutors that contributed to his death. "Aaron's death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach," the statement said. "The US Attorney's office pursued an exceptionally harsh array of charges, carrying potentially over 30 years in prison, to punish an alleged crime that had no victims," it added.

A spokeswoman for the US Attorney's office said they wanted to respect the family's privacy and did "not feel it is appropriate to comment on the case at this time." MIT could not be reached for comment Swartz's funeral is scheduled for Tuesday in Highland Park, Illinois. On Saturday, online tributes to Swartz flooded across cyberspace.

"Aaron had an unbeatable combination of political insight, technical skill and intelligence about people and issues," Doctorow, co-editor of the weblog Boing Boing, wrote on the site. Doctorow wrote that Swartz had "problems with depression for many years." Swartz also played a role in building the news-sharing website Reddit, but left the company after it was acquired by Wired magazine owner Conde Nast. Recalling that time of his life, Swartz described his struggles with dark feelings. In an online account of his life and work, Swartz said he became "miserable" after going to work at the San Francisco offices of Wired after Reddit was acquired.

"I took a long Christmas vacation," he wrote. "I got sick. I thought of suicide. I ran from the police. And when I got back on Monday morning, I was asked to resign." Tim Berners-Lee, who is credited as the most important figure in the creation of the World Wide Web, commemorated Swartz in a Twitter post on Saturday. "Aaron dead," he wrote. "World wanderers, we have lost a wise elder. Hackers for right, we are one down. Parents all, we have lost a child. Let us weep."

Life of Pi - A glorious homage to the magic of story telling

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/dec/23/life-pi-ang-lee-review

Life of Pi – review

Fearful symmetry: Suraj Sharma as Pi, lost at sea with a Bengal tiger: ‘The movie does for water and the sea what Lawrence of Arabia did for sand and desert.’

The Taiwan-born Ang Lee rapidly established himself in the 1990s as one of the world's most versatile film-makers, moving on from the trilogy of movies about Chinese families that made his name to Jane Austen's England (Sense and Sensibility) and Richard Nixon's America (The Ice Storm). If he revisits a place or genre it's to tell a very different story – a martial arts movie in medieval China (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) is followed by a spy thriller in wartime Shanghai (Lust, Caution), and a western with a US civil war background (Ride With the Devil) is succeeded by a western about a gay relationship in present-day Wyoming (Brokeback Mountain).

He adopts different styles to fit his new subjects, and while there are certain recurrent themes, among them the disruption of families and young people facing moral and physical challenges, there are no obsessive concerns of the sort once considered a necessity for auteurs. He has a fastidious eye for a great image but he also has a concern for language.

His magnificent new film is a version of Yann Martel's Booker prize-winning novel, Life of Pi, adapted by an American writer, David Magee, whose previous credits were films set in England during the first half of the 20th century, Finding Neverland and Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day. From its opening scene of animals and birds strutting and preening themselves in a sunlit zoo to the final credits of fish and nautical objects shimmering beneath the sea, the movie has a sense of the mysterious, the magical. This effect is compounded by the hallucinatory 3D, and in tone the film suggests Robinson Crusoe rewritten by Laurence Sterne.

The form is a story within a story within a story. An unnamed Canadian author whom we assume to be Yann Martel himself (Rafe Spall) is told by an Indian he meets that there is a man in Montreal called Pi who has a story that will make you believe in God. He's Piscine Molitor Patel (Irrfan Khan), a philosophy teacher, and he tells the curious story of his own extraordinary life, beginning as the son of a zookeeper in Pondicherry, the French enclave in India that wasn't ceded until 1954.

The movie's two central characters both obtained their names by comic accident. The deeply serious Piscine (played by Gautam Belur at five, Ayush Tandon at 12 and Suraj Sharma at 16)was named after an uncle's favourite swimming pool, the Piscine Molitor in Paris, but changed his name to the Greek letter and numinous number Pi after fellow schoolboys made jokes about pissing. He later became fascinated by a Bengal tiger in the zoo caught by the English hunter Richard Parker who called him Thirsty. On delivery to the zoo their names were accidently reversed and the tiger became Richard Parker. Was this fate or chance?

Growing up, the ever curious Pi becomes attracted to religion and the meaning of life, a spiritual journey that the film treats with a respectful wit as the boy rejects his father's rationalism and creates a personal amalgam of Hinduism, Christianity and Islam. His faith is tested as an adolescent when his father is forced to give up the family zoo, where Pi realises he's been as much a captive as the animals themselves. A Japanese freighter becomes a temporary ark on which the Patel family take the animals to be sold in Canada. But it's struck by a storm as dramatic as anything ever put on the screen, and Pi becomes a combination of Noah, Crusoe, Prospero and Job. Alone above the Mariana Trench, the deepest part of the Pacific, he's an orphan captaining a lifeboat with only a zebra, a hyena, a female orang-utan and the gigantic Bengal tiger Richard Parker for company.

Life of Pi: watch the trailer - video Link to this video

This is grand adventure on an epic scale, a survival story that takes up half the movie. It's no Peaceable Kingdom like Edward Hicks's charming early 19th-century painting, where the lion sleeps with the lamb. This is a Darwinian place that Pi must learn to command. Using state-of-the-art 3D and digitally created beasts, Lee and his team of technicians make it utterly real, as they do a mysterious island that briefly provides a dangerously seductive haven. The 227 days at sea are a test of physique, mental adaptation and faith, and Suraj Sharma makes Pi's spiritual journey as convincing as his nautical one.

He confronts thirst and starvation, finds a modus vivendi with the fierce tiger, endures and wonders at a mighty storm, a squadron of flying fish, a humpbacked whale, a school of dolphins, a night illuminated by luminous jellyfish. This brave new world is observed by a young Chilean director of photography, appropriately named Claudio Miranda. The movie does for water and the sea what Lawrence of Arabia did for sand and desert, and one thinks of what Alfred Hitchock, who used 3D so imaginatively in his 1954 film of Dial M For Murder, might have done on his wartime Lifeboat had he been given such technical facilities.

This poetic Life of Pi concludes with a fascinating, deliberately prosaic coda that raises questions about the reality of what we've seen and confronts the teleological issues involved. One thinks of the reporter's remark at the end of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." At another level, Sam Goldwyn's advice to the screenwriter comes to mind: "Give me the story and send the message by Western Union."

A bird accepts the hoopoe’s leadership.

Another bird said: ‘Hoopoe, you’re our guide.

How would it be if I let you decide?

I’m ignorant of right and wrong – I’ll wait

For any orders that you stipulate.

Whatever you command I’ll gladly do,

Delighted to submit myself to you.’

‘Bravo!’ the hoopoe cried. ‘By far the best

Decision is the one that you suggest;

Whoever will be guided finds relief

From Fate’s adversity, from inward grief;

One hour of guidance benefits you more

Than all your mortal life, however pure

Those who will not submit like lost dogs stray,

Beset by misery, and lose their way –

How much a dog endures! and all in vain;

Without a guide his pain is simply pain.

But one who suffers and is guided gives

His merit to the world; he truly lives.

Take refuge in the orders of your guide,

And like slave subdue your restive pride.

Farid Ud-din Attar (The conference of the birds)

French magazine illustrates the Prophet Muhammad's life

French magazine illustrates the Prophet Muhammad's life | The Stream - Al Jazeera English
http://stream.aljazeera.com/story/201212312344-0022454

Dec 31

Charlie Hebdo publishes a “halal” comic biography of the Muslim prophet

French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo’s publisher, known only as Charb, poses as he presents his new comic strip named “La Vie de Mahomet” (The life of Mohammed) in Paris on December 27, 2012. AFP PHOTO / FRANCOIS GUILLOT

On Wednesday French magazine Charlie Hebdo plans to publish a comic-book style biography of the Prophet Muhammad, complete with illustrations. In Islam it is forbidden to portray any image of the Prophet. Muslim authors and historians contributed to the special issue, which editor Stephane Charbonnier deems historically “halal”. For many, the publication reignites previous concerns over the magazine’s controversial cartoons.

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