By Erich Follath and Holger Stark

In September 2007, Israeli fighter jets destroyed a mysterious complex in the Syrian desert. The incident could have led to war, but it was hushed up by all sides. Was it a nuclear plant and who gave the orders for the strike?

The mighty Euphrates river is the subject of the prophecies in the Bible's Book of Revelation, where it is written that the river will be the scene of the battle of Armageddon: "The sixth angel poured out his bowl on the great river Euphrates, and its water was dried up to prepare the way for the kings from the East."

Today, time seems to stand still along the river. The turquoise waters of the Euphrates flow slowly through the northern Syrian provincial city Deir el-Zor, whose name translates as "monastery in the forest." Farmers till the fields, and vendors sell camel's hair blankets, cardamom and coriander in the city's bazaars. Occasionally archaeologists visit the region to excavate the remains of ancient cities in the surrounding area, a place where many peoples have left their mark -- the Parthians and the Sassanids, the Romans and the Jews, the Ottomans and the French, who were assigned the mandate for Syria by the League of Nations and who only withdrew their troops in 1946. Deir el-Zor is the last outpost before the vast, empty desert, a lifeless place of jagged mountains and inaccessible valleys that begins not far from the town center.

But on a night two years ago, something dramatic happened in this sleepy place. It's an event that local residents discuss in whispers in teahouses along the river, when the water pipes glow and they are confident that no officials are listening -- the subject is taboo in the state-controlled media, and they know that drawing too much attention to themselves in this authoritarian state could be hazardous to their health.

Some in Deir el-Zor talk of a bright flash which lit up the night in the distant desert. Others report seeing a gigantic column of smoke over...

By Shane Harris, National Journal 10/05/2009

A formidable intelligence chief, not a White House staffer, will run network security.

In May, President Obama declared cyberspace a "strategic national asset," and an unacceptably vulnerable one. In a speech at the White House, he warned of unprecedented levels of online theft, pervasive electronic espionage and the increasing use of cyberattacks in conjunction with military operations. Then he pledged to appoint a national-level cybersecurity official to coordinate the government's responses to online threats, giving such efforts "the high-level focus and attention they deserve."

But three months after the president's speech, he hadn't yet named the official, in part because more candidates had declined the job than were still in the running for it. The duties of the so-called cyber czar were poorly defined and the office's authorities were too weak to entice a number of well-qualified candidates. According to several news reports, they told the White House, "Thanks, but no thanks."

As of mid-September, Obama was still czar-less. But that doesn't mean a national-level cyber chief, watching over the country's networks, isn't already in place.

Lt. Gen. Keith B. Alexander is the director of the National Security Agency, the largest intelligence agency in the government, and with little public fanfare he has been setting up the central nervous system in the government's new campaign to defend cyberspace. The agency historically has not been a front-line guardian of civilian government networks, much less the systems that run privately owned electrical plants, dams and financial systems. But that is changing. Recently, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said NSA will provide DHS with "technical assistance" as it carries out its statutory mission to defend civilian networks and coordinate private sector protection.

Homeland Security, with its much smaller and less experienced cyber staff, will depend on Alexander and his crew for the tools, e...

Before our eyes and minds can “follow” something in our environment, we first must detect it. Similarly, before an AR application can “augment” something, the target object or place needs to be detected. Strictly speaking our eyes can’t detect a geo-location, but a GPS-enabled device can detect where it is relative to other points on the globe.

Since most of the world’s people, objects and places are not emitting radio signals which our mobile Internet devices can reliably detect, as was once envisioned in the early visions of RFID, other technologies are being used and new ones being developed for detection in AR applications. Further, even if there were tags on us (or other moving objects) and readers everywhere, RFID alone is insufficient to provide the six degrees of freedom necessary to correctly position a device relative to the object or point of interest. This isn’t to say that RFID has no place at all in AR, just that it is not a widely applicable tool for developers of today’s consumer AR applications.

Tracking for AR applications involves identification of one or more targets in the user’s field of vision or surroundings, then keeping track of the position of the user’s device relative to the recognized and/or selected object in three-dimensional space, and, for there to be an augmentation in the field of view, properly "registering" an overlay image or text to the real world object. The first two of these steps are closely aligned with the sequence which some types of robots need to perform when moving autonomously in an environment. They are also leveraging core ubiquitous computing technologies which are necessary in “intelligent environments,” as in spaces which exhibit Ambient Intelligence.

Tracking real world objects which are stationary (with fixed geo-location coordinates) has been achieved most widely and at relatively low cost using a mobile phone’s GPS and compass. There are many examples such as Wikitude, Layar and BionicEye. But there are situations in...

Communiqué from an Absent Future: The Terminus of Student Life

Introduction: 7 against Pompeii

We live as a dead civilization. We can no longer imagine the good life except as a series of spectacles preselected for our bemusement: a shimmering menu of illusions. Both the full-filled life and our own imaginations have been systematically replaced by a set of images more lavish and inhumane than anything we ourselves would conceive, and equally beyond reach. No one believes in such outcomes anymore.

The truth of life after the university is mean and petty competition for resources with our friends and strangers: the hustle for a lower-management position that will last (with luck) for a couple years rifted with anxiety, fear, and increasing exploitation—until the firm crumbles and we mutter about “plan B.” But this is an exact description of university life today; that mean and petty life has already arrived.

Just to survive, we are compelled to adopt various attitudes toward this fissure between bankrupt promises and the actuality on offer. Some take a naïve romantic stance toward education for its own sake, telling themselves they expect nothing further. Some proceed with iron cynicism and scorn, racing through the ludicrous charade toward the last wad of cash in the airless vault of the future. And some remain committed to the antique faith that their ascendingly hard labor will surely be rewarded some day if they just act as one who believes, just show up, take on more degrees and more debt, work harder.

Time, the actual material of our being, disappears: the hours of our daily life. The future is seized from us in advance, given over to the servicing of debt and to beggaring our neighbors. Maybe we will earn the rent on our boredom, more likely not. There will be no 77 virgins, not even a plasma monitor on which to watch the death throes of the United States as a global power. Capitalism has finally become a true religion,wherein the riches of heaven are everywhere promised and nowhere delivered. The only dif...

The FBI’s Data-Mining Ore

Composed of government information, commercial databases and records acquired in criminal and terrorism probes, the FBI’s National Security Branch Analysis Center is too broad to be considered mission-focused, but still too patchy to be Orwellian. Here’s the data we know about.

• International travel records of citizens and foreigners

• Financial forms filed with the Treasury by banks and casinos

• 55,000 entries on customers of Wyndham Worldwide, which includes Ramada Inn, Days Inn, Super 8, Howard Johnson and Hawthorn Suites

• 730 records from rental-car company Avis

• 165 credit card transaction histories from Sears

• Nearly 200 million records transferred from private data brokers such Accurint, Acxiom and Choicepoint

• A reverse White Pages with 696 million names and addresses tied to U.S. phone numbers

• Log data on all calls made by federal prison inmates

• A list of all active pilots

• 500,000 names of suspected terrorists from the Unified Terrorist Watch List

• Nearly 3 million records on people cleared to drive hazardous materials on the nation’s highways

• Telephone records and wiretapped conversations captured by FBI investigations

• 17,000 traveler itineraries from the Airlines Reporting Corporation

TAMPA – The Federal Bureau of Investigation is expanding beyond its traditional fingerprint-focused collection practices to develop a new biometrics system that will include DNA records, 3-D facial imaging, palm prints and voice scans, blended to create what's known as "multi-modal biometrics."

Slideshow: The changing face of biometrics
How the Defense Department might institutionalize war-time biometrics

"The FBI today is announcing a rapid DNA initiative," said Louis Grever, executive assistant director of the FBI's science and technology branch, during his keynote presentation at the Biometric Consortium Conference in Tampa.

The FBI plans to begin migrating from its IAFIS database, established in the mid-1990s to hold its vast fingerprint data, to a next-generation system that's expected to be in prototype early next year. This multi-modal NGI biometrics database system will hold DNA records and more.

Grever said that fingerprints and DNA appear to be the most mature and searchable biometrics possibilities, but the FBI is working to include iris-scan records among newer biometrics technologies to identify criminals and terrorists. The plan is to share this data with authorized U.S. and international investigative partners, as the agency does today.

The FBI's current IAFIS database remains a workhouse; it processes about 200,000 daily transactions from its 370 million 10-fingerprint records, and it just crossed the 250 million transaction mark.

The next-generation FBI database system is under design by MorphoTrak and is expected to include DNA, iris scans, advanced 3...

By BRIAN M. DOWNING

The September 11th attacks led to various responses in the American public, shock and outrage the most immediate. Subsequent polling data showed another response. Trust in government rose sharply and immediately – a curious phenomenon, for 9/11 could be readily seen as resulting from colossal government failures. The eighth anniversary should be a time of solemn remembrance, but not of unreflective support. It should be a time of assessing the ensuing wars and the competence of national security institutions.

Military

Initial campaigns in both Afghanistan and Iraq were truly remarkable and will be benchmarks for future conventional operations. Special forces and airpower worked alongside Northern Alliance fighters to drive out Taliban and al Qaeda troops in short order. In early 2003, the military plunged into Iraq and seized Baghdad in a manner that astonished all.

Soon thereafter, however, insurgencies developed. The military was slow to identify the nature of the fighting as an insurgency, and in any case acquiesced to characterizations of the fighters as only a few “dead-enders” – a judgment made by political hands in Washington with no military background or regional expertise. The military responded to the insurgencies with conventional methods of meeting force with force and calling in air power – quite effective in conventional warfare in which the military had long trained, but counterproductive against insurgencies.

Though colonels and generals who had been platoon and company commanders during the Vietnam War made the military of today, they refused to make counterinsurgency principles basic parts of its doctrines and training. Most knew that such principles had had at least some success in Southeast Asia when put to use by special forces and marines, but the post-Vietnam military reasoned that proficiency in counterinsurgency would increase the likelihood that politicians would send them off into another insurgency, which would again gravely da...

I'm driving from Tucson to the mud hut, taking a circuitous route that currently finds me staying in my wife's childhood home in western Nebraska. Along with my spouse and dog, I'm covering 4,300 miles while crisscrossing 11 states and all 4 time zones in the continental U.S. We'll circumambulate Kansas, and at one point we drove close enough to spit on the state. But it didn't seem worth the time or the saliva.

We're driving slowly and stopping often, primarily because the Obama administration's Keynesian approach to saving the industrial economy necessitates throwing money at the highway departments of every state in the country. The attendant "shovel-ready projects" are clear examples of the lengths to which industrial humans will go to sustain the unsustainable, maintain the immaterial, and generally restore the irredeemable for a few more months.

The many miles and frequent pauses reveal to any sentient animal the sheer lunacy of the living arrangements we've built for ourselves. Within the span of a couple generations, we abandoned a durable, finely textured, life-affirming set of living arrangements characterized by self-sufficient family farms intermixed with small towns that provided commerce, services, and culture. Worse yet, we traded that model for a coarse-scaled arrangement wholly dependent on ready access to cheap fossil fuels. Then we ratcheted up the madness to rely on businesses that use, almost exclusively, a warehouse-on-wheels approach to just-in-time delivery of unnecessary devices designed for rapid obsolescence and disposal.

Simply ingenious, wouldn't you say?

The entire region, formerly abundant with a multitude of edible crops, currently is brimming with a single commodity: #2 corn. It's Roundup-ready, at that, just to throw a bucket of insulting acid into the face of reason. Roundup-resistant weeds are popping up throughout the region as we bring Farmageddon to the heartland and eventually to the world....

Jacob Sullum | August/September 2009 Print Edition

The Road to Big Brother: One Man’s Struggle Against the Surveillance State, by Ross Clark, New York: Encounter Books, 140 pages, $21.95

Last October several British newspapers reported that Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s government was working on a plan to monitor every phone call, website visit, text message, and email in the country, entering the information into an enormous database that would be used to catch terrorists, pedophiles, and scam artists. Dominic Grieve, the shadow home secretary, called it “a substantial shift in the powers of the state to obtain information on individuals” and warned that “any suggestion of the government using existing powers to intercept communications data without public discussion is going to sound extremely sinister.”

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith later gave a speech in which she said the electronic dragnet would be limited to data transmitted through websites and information about the identities and locations of senders and recipients. She said investigators would still need ministerial warrants, a kind of administrative subpoena, to listen to or read the contents of communications. The speech apparently did not reassure Ken MacDonald, director of public prosecutions for England and Wales. In late October, shortly before stepping down from his post, MacDonald warned that “decisions taken in the next few months and years about how the state may use these [surveillance] powers, and to what extent, are likely to be irreversible,” adding, “We need to take very great care not to fall into a way of life in which freedom’s back is broken by the relentless pressure of a security state.”

The episode illustrated two points that are reinforced by British journalist Ross Clark’s wry, revealing book The Road to Big Brother: One Man’s Struggle Against the Surveillance State. First, despite the U.K.’s reputation as one of the most watched...

When Attorney General Alberto Gonzales held a press conference in the summer of 2006 announcing the arrests of seven young men for plotting to bomb Chicago's Sears Tower, he sounded defensive, his voice lingering a beat on each thing the men allegedly did. "Individuals here in America made plans to hurt Americans," he claimed. "They did request materials; they did request equipment; they did request funding." Gonzales admitted that the American and Haitian-born men posed "no immediate threat." But, he warned, "homegrown terrorists may prove to be as dangerous as groups like Al Qaeda. Our philosophy here is that we try to identify plots in the earliest stages possible, because we don't know what we don't know about a terrorism plot." It's dangerous, Gonzales added, to make a "case by case" evaluation that "well, 'this is a really dangerous group'; 'this is not a really dangerous group.'"

From the beginning, the allegations seemed bizarre. Allegedly led by Narseal Batiste, an underemployed construction worker, the plotters were an oddball group who dubbed themselves Seas of David. Preaching an eclectic mix of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, the seven men were known around their neighborhood of Liberty City, Miami, for practicing martial arts and wearing Stars of David. Mostly unemployed and with few resources, they seemed an unlikely bunch to blow up a landmark 1,200 miles away.

The more details that emerged about the case, the fishier it looked. The charges had come about because of a 23-year-old Yemeni clerk named Abbas al-Saidi, who'd been a police informant since he was 16. The fbi helped bail him out when he was in jail facing charges of assaulting his girlfriend. A year later, Saidi returned the favor, telling the feds he'd met a young man—Narseal Batiste—who boasted of wanting to create an Islamic state in America.

The fbi hired Saidi to cozy up to Batiste and his followers, and sent in another in...

DAVID KUSHNER

Posted Aug 21, 2009 9:50 AM

It began, as it always did, with a phone call to 911. "Now listen here," the caller demanded, his voice frantic. "I've got two people here held hostage, all right? Now, you know what happens to people that are held hostage? It's not like on the movies or nothing, you understand that?"

"OK," the 911 operator said.

"One of them here's name is Danielle, and her father," the caller continued. "And the reason why I'm doing this is because her father raped my sister."

The caller, who identified himself as John Defanno, said that he had the 18-year-old Danielle and her dad tied up in their home in Security, a suburb of Colorado Springs. He'd beaten the father with his gun. "He's bleeding profusely," Defanno warned. "I am armed, I do have a pistol. If any cops come in this house with any guns, I will fucking shoot them. I better get some help here, because I'm going fucking psycho right now."

The 911 operator tried to keep him on the line, but Defanno cut the call short. "I'm not talking anymore," he snapped. "You have the address. If I don't have help here now, in the next five minutes, I swear to fucking God, I will shoot these people." Then the line went dead.

Officers raced to the house, ready for an armed standoff with a homicidal suspect. But when they arrived, they found no gunman, no hostages, no blood. Danielle and her father were safe and sound at home — alone. They had never heard of John Defanno, for good reason: He didn't exist.

"John Defanno" was actually a 15-year-old boy named Matthew Weigman — a fat, lonely blind kid who lived with his mom in a working-class neighborhood of East Boston. In person, Weigman was a shy and awkward teenager with a shaved head who spent his days holed up in his room, often talking for up to 20 hours a day on free telephone chat lines. On the ...

The collapse of civilisation will bring us a saner world, says Paul Kingsnorth. No, counters George Monbiot – we can't let billions perish

Dear George

On the desk in front of me is a set of graphs. The horizontal axis of each represents the years 1750 to 2000. The graphs show, variously, population levels, CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, exploitation of fisheries, destruction of tropical forests, paper consumption, number of motor vehicles, water use, the rate of species extinction and the totality of the human economy's gross domestic product.

What grips me about these graphs (and graphs don't usually grip me) is that though they all show very different things, they have an almost identical shape. A line begins on the left of the page, rising gradually as it moves to the right. Then, in the last inch or so – around 1950 – it veers steeply upwards, like a pilot banking after a cliff has suddenly appeared from what he thought was an empty bank of cloud.

The root cause of all these trends is the same: a rapacious human economy bringing the world swiftly to the brink of chaos. We know this; some of us even attempt to stop it happening. Yet all of these trends continue to get rapidly worse, and there is no sign of that changing soon. What these graphs make clear better than anything else is the cold reality: there is a serious crash on the way.

Yet very few of us are prepared to look honestly at the message this reality is screaming at us: that the civilisation we are a part of is hitting the buffers at full speed, and it is too late to stop it. Instead, most of us – and I include in this generalisation much of the mainstream environmental movement – are still wedded to a vision of the future as an upgraded version of the present. We still believe in "progress", as lazily defined by western liberalism. We still believe that we will be able to continue living more or less the same comfortable lives (albeit with more windfarms and better lightbulb...

Hackers Toolkit:

In your root directory or C:/ in windows make a folder named Tools. So that you can access all tools from command prompt easily E.g.  c:/tools/example

Go surf for these tools enlisted.

• NMAP : Enumeration
• Nessus : Scanning & Enumeration
• Ethereal
• Snort  : Network Hacking
• Netcat
• TCPDump : For sniffing TCP Packets
• WinDump
• Hping2
• DSniff : Sniffing Data Packets
• GFI LANguard : LAN Security
• Ettercap
• Whisker/Libwhisker
• John the Ripper : Password Cracking Utility
• OpenSSH
• Sam Spade
• ISS Internet Scanner : Web Server Security
• Tripwire
• Nikto
• Kismet
• SuperScan : Another Great Scanner
• Cain & Abel
• SolarWinds Toolsets
• NTop
• Nemesis
• Honeyd
• Achilles
• Firewalk
• AVG Free Antivirus
• Trend Micro online scan
• Tiny Firewall
• Symantec Virus Tools
• Linux Security Audit Tool
• Firewall Builder
• IPCop
• AirSnort : Wireless Network Hacking
• SATAN
• Rootkit Hunter : To find out installed root kits.
• SpamAssassin
• grsecurity
• IP-Scanner : To scan IP Ranges

What are these tools ? Why are they used for ? How to use it ? are some of the questions that are striking your head.  Chill all dudes & babes, I am here to help you with each of the tools listed above.  All you have to do is first download them all & place in your root directory.

When ever you are reading things you must have all these tools, So I am giving you the list. And yes, Don’t forget to Subscribe to Hacking Truths, because you can’t miss such valuable updates. And yes, don’t worry about such big list, you won’t need to use all at a time, they are have wide uses in different fields like – Cracking, Wireless Networks hacking, Password Hacking, Encryption, Sniffing, Scanning & Enumeration, SQL injection & Web Hacking etc.

So have the tools, and go through their home pages & read as more as you can. For any sort of problems you have, I am just a comment away from you.

This post is made by Amol Wagh who blogs about Ethical Hacking & Exploits on Hackers Enigma Dot Com. You can Follow Amol on Twitter Here.