11/17 defcon: shall we play a game?

US general: we're cleared to cyber-bomb enemy hackers*

senate to debate cyber legislation in 2012*
what is the 'sopa' bill & why is it causing such a ruckus?*
websense predicts an explosive 2012 for cyber crime*
diaspora co-founder ilya zhitomirskiy passes away at 22*
idf, mossad & shin bet back online after day of computer malfunctions*
US satellites compromised by malicious cyber activity*
6 guys in a capsule: 520 days on a simulated mars mission*

supercomputer predicts revolution through 'culturomics'

from singularity hub: A new type of software has been shown to predict revolutions by mining news reports around the world. Retrospectively mining the news for the past 30 years the software indicates points at which the likelihood for a revolution is high. When put to the test – bingo! – the software showed spikes just before the recent Egyptian and Libyan upheavals. It was also able to sift through world news to retrospectively pinpoint Osama Bin Ladin’s location to within 200 km. In the emerging science of ‘culturomics’ that tracks cultural trends through the written word, the software was the first to demonstrate that news coverage can be used to predict future events.

The software sifted through news reports from nearly every country in the world. Major sources were from the global news databases such the US government-run Open Source Center which provides foreign open source intelligence, Britain’s equivalent BBC Monitoring, as well as the New York Times’ archive that dates back to 1945. In all, the body of data included over 100 million news articles. The story elements were woven together into a mind-boggling web of 100 trillion relationships. To crunch the massive amount of data the SGI Altix supercomputer Nautilus was enlisted. Its 1024 Intel Nehalem cores give it a total processing power of 8.2 teraflops (trillions of floating point operations per second).

The strategy for pulling out relevant information included two main techniques. ‘Sentiment mining’ involves counting the number of words in a document that are categorized as positive, such as “good” or “nice,” or negative, such as “terrible” or “horrific.” Changes in the tone of a regions’ news documents over time correlates with the sentiment of the people in that region. A major dip in tone, as when the frequency of negative terms rapidly increases, means the natives are getting restless. An unprecedented dip could spell revolution. The second technique, called ‘full-text geocoding,’ matches sentiment to geographic locations.

wikileaks confirms billy meier on peak oil

The Billy Meier contactee story surfaced, again, in the press this past week. Cables provided by Wikileaks, supposedly, confirm Billy's past warnings about peak oil. An Examiner.com article by Mike Albee reports, "..cables contain a warning from a senior Saudi oil executive that the countries oil reserves may be vastly overstated". Billy Meier has issued many prophetic statements and predictions, over the years. Michael Horn, a representative for Meier in the United States, reminds the public in this article that Meier made similar statements back in 2008. The present writer is more impressed by Meier's concern about disturbances of tectonic plates deep within the Earth. "Meier warned decades ago that there shouldn't be any more oil drilling - especially offshore - since it further destabilizes the tectonic plates." The Peak Oil concept fails to impress since vested interests have pushed the idea for the past decade--even if true! The past week's Wikileaks episode seems clearly a psyop to discredit all discussion, an attempt to make everyone jaded and weary of a topic when it's so plainly tortured. This discourages asking the real queston, cuo bono, i.e., who benefits? The present writer will venture to predict higher high gas prices this summer!

gerald celente: internet nuke bomb waiting to go off

from russia today: Gerald Celente, the founder of the Trends Research Institute, believes that the Internet will empower the youth of the world to unite to start a revolution that will overthrow the existing deadlocked elitist establishment. He predicts that in 2011 every citizen is going to realize that the Great Recession the world has been living through is actually a Great Depression, because the American establishment is "running out of schemes."