DPS recently published a tutorial on how to do portraits on a white background. How to do this isn’t anything new or innovative, and should be something most pro photographers know how to do.
The sad part is, Amazon has recently been granted a patent on how to do just this, so DPS could in theory be sued by Amazon for patent infringement. For something photographers have been doing for 50 years or more.
The return of polio is also due to an ill-informed anti-vaccine campaign — not one driven by people confused by a fraudulent study, but rather by the Taliban. Many of the new cases are in Pakistan and a variety of nearby countries. The Taliban has been arguing for a while that vaccinations and vaccination drives are really efforts by western intelligence and/or imperialism.
The problem is: the CIA basically confirmed that for them by using a fake vaccination campaign to find Osama bin Laden a few years ago. Suddenly, crazy rumors about vaccination programs simply being fronts for the US intelligence community weren’t just more reasonable, they were flat out confirmed. And, soon after that was all revealed, suddenly the rates of polio shot up? Right around the same time that polio vaccination workers started getting killed in Pakistan?
This should be a clear example of why the US policy of spying on everyone everywhere, and having secret court orders forcing companies to reveal information isn’t in anyone’s best interest..
Germany’s black-red “grand coalition” government has now tightened the rules for awarding sensitive public IT contracts. In cases of doubt, suspicious companies will now be excluded from such contracts. And companies now have to sign documents to the effect that no contracts or laws oblige them — nor can they be coerced — to pass on confidential data to foreign secret services or security authorities.
The new rule would seem to be aimed primarily at American companies. These companies, as numerous Snowden documents reveal, regularly pass on information to the U.S. spy agencies. At the NSA, a separate Special Sources Operations department deals with cooperation with “strategic partners,” as agents call such companies. The companies say they are merely following the laws of the respective country, and so far this explanation has been accepted.
But since April, any company that cannot guarantee that foreign services or authorities will not obtain any of their data is being excluded from federal contracts in Germany. A spokesperson for the Ministry of the Interior said that the aim of the new rule is to prevent “the flow of data worth protecting to foreign security authorities.”
… at least not until next time
The administration’s response Friday said that under CIA policy, established by CIA Director John Brennan in August 2013, “the Agency will make no operational use of vaccination programs, which includes vaccination workers.” The letter also said the agency “will not seek to obtain or exploit DNA or other genetic material acquired through such programs.”
The cynic in me also notices how this new policy doesn’t really stop the CIA from setting up their own fake “vaccination programs”, just from using genuine vaccination programs.
(…) people are already pointing out that by firing the opening shot with criminal charges, the DOJ may be opening the floodgates against the NSA, FBI and others for similar charges in other countries. Obviously, China will almost certainly hit back with charges — possibly even trying to arrest some folks in that country. But the ridiculousness of the situation may also lead other countries to levy charges against specific individuals within US intelligence — thereby making life a lot more difficult for US intelligence officials in the near future.
Last month, after Lavabit lost its appeal, we noted that the court avoided the major constitutional issues, focusing on how the company and its founder Ladar Levison mucked up procedural stuff early on, effectively barring him from raising the more serious constitutional issues on appeal. We pointed out that this was unfortunate on many levels, but also noted that this shows how important it is to get a good lawyer early on, rather than trying to handle things yourself. Levison has now written a more thorough explanation over at the Guardian, in which he seeks to explain why gag orders and other issues made it almost impossible for him to get good legal help, leading to the procedural issues later on
… because what the world really needs is more indoctrination of children
You might want to start with fixing your own spelling errors.
