Prometheus 6

TPB files charges against media companies

Thanks to the email-leakage from MediaDefender-Defenders we now have proof of the things we've been suspecting for a long time; the big record and movie labels are paying professional hackers, saboteurs and ddosers to destroy our trackers.

While browsing through the email we identified the companies that are also active in Sweden and we have tonight reported these incidents to the police. The charges are infrastructural sabotage, denial of service attacks, hacking and spamming, all of these on a commercial level.

The companies that are being reported are the following:

• Twentieth Century Fox, Sweden AB
• Emi Music Sweden AB
• Universal Music Group Sweden AB
• Universal Pictures Nordic AB
• Paramount Home Entertainment (Sweden) AB
• Atari Nordic AB
• Activision Nordic Filial Till Activision (Uk) Ltd
• Ubisoft Sweden AB
• Sony Bmg Music Entertainment (Sweden) AB
• Sony Pictures Home Entertainment Nordic AB

Stay tuned for updates.

Two sources familiar with the investigation said that prosecutors are looking at whether Blackwater lacked permits for dozens of automatic weapons used at its training grounds in Moyock. The investigation is also looking into whether Blackwater was shipping weapons, night-vision scopes, armor, gun kits and other military goods to Iraq without the required permits.

U.S. probes Blackwater weapons shipments
Government looks into possible smuggling to Iraq
Joseph Neff, Staff Writer

The U.S. government is investigating whether private military contractor Blackwater USA, blamed for the deaths of 11 Iraqis in Baghdad on Sunday, has been shipping unlicensed automatic weapons and military goods to Iraq.

Two former Blackwater employees have pleaded guilty in Greenville to weapons charges and are cooperating with federal officials investigating Blackwater, based in the tiny town of Moyock in North Carolina's northeastern corner.

Nooses are pranks, racists screeds are not viable threat...

Exactly what does it take for an anti-Black racist to be taken seriously nowadays?

Deputies had already stepped up patrols around the six families' homes "to keep reporters away," LaSalle Parish Sheriff Carl Smith said last night. Smith added that he did not think the posting was "any kind of viable threat," but that his officers would remain vigilant.

Neo-Nazi Web Site Probed In Jena Case
By Avis Thomas-Lester
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, September 22, 2007; A08

FBI agents are looking into a neo-Nazi Web site, which has listed the home addresses and phone numbers of the six black teenagers charged in the beating of a white schoolmate in Jena, La., a bureau spokeswoman said last night.

The Thursday posting on the site that lists the information also encourages readers to "get in touch, and let them know justice is coming."

42 Feet of Pipe Is Said to Be Missing
By WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM and AL BAKER

The standpipe that failed to provide water during the fatal Deutsche Bank fire last month was not simply breached or cut — it was taken apart, and a full 42-foot stretch of it was removed from the building’s basement, several people with knowledge of the matter said.

Various reports in the days following the Aug. 18 blaze, which left two firefighters dead, had characterized the break in the pipe as a smaller section, one whose disappearance may not have been glaringly apparent to people working in the building.

But the people with knowledge of the matter said that indeed two consecutive 21-foot sections of the six-inch diameter cast-iron pipe, which ran horizontally across a section of the basement just beneath the ceiling, were cut or dismantled, leaving a large gap in full view of anyone in that part of the basement.

“If anyone had bothered to take a look, they would have known it was not in operable condition,” one of the people said.

[P6: This is a comment on the Jena 6 demonstration I felt deserved broader distribution.]

The mainstream media's inattention to the story is very reminiscent of the mainstream media's coverage of the Montgomery bus boycott. "Most newspapers and the emerging journalism on television," write Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff in their book The Race Beat, "showed their propensity to cover the hot and simple story, not the complex one; they were drawn to the raging fire, not to the slow burn, so the successful boycott on the Negro side of the racial line went of for weeks with little notice." Mainstream reporters at that time were looking for evidence that conditions were steadily getting better and passed on hope that white moderates would lead the way in reforming their region. Even a paper as dedicated to covering Southern race relations as the New York Times failed to grasp what was transpiring. "It did not see that the overwhelming success of the two-month-old Montgomery buss boycott--which it had covered almost entirely with small wire stories--was indicative of a civil rights movement that had no intention of quitting." Most other papers and media, report Roberts and Klibanoff, also fell into this misreading of the situation. "They had no sense of the depth of feeling on either side of the racial divide, had no idea who the leaders of the civil rights protests were, frequently misjudged the commitment and motives of the leaders on both sides, played fast and loose with the names and titles of anyone outside the white power circle, and sometimes served as adjunct investigative bodies for law enforcement in trying to squeeze out whodunit information about the leadership of the civil rights protests,"

Instead of vigorously and thoroughly covering the present-day race beat, modern headline media, more often than not, engage in the kind of practice which was astutely pointed on this site during Imusgate: 1) quote the Reverends Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson; 2) point out their "past as a distraction/excuse for the current bigot eruption"; and 3) leave the discussion at that. Some say that the Jena 6 rally is the beginning of a new civil rights movement for the 21st century. It might be too early to determine whether this is the case. If it is true, however, than the mainstream media is about as uninformed of the events triggering a modern civil rights movement as the ones which triggered the previous one. I think black bloggers have pioneered a frank manner of reporting and discussing race stories that mainstream media and white bloggers will not touch and thus have the power to independently influence the actions of black protestors in a way that the mainstream will not or cannot understand.

Robert Moore..., a well-known neo-Nazi leader from Baton Rouge, La., apparently abandoned plans he had discussed on Stormfront Wednesday to protest the Jena rally, possibly while carrying guns. Instead, he wrote later, “If they DO start rioting and looting and burning and raze the town to the ground, White Pride Construction will be there the next day to help them rebuild.” In fact, Moore’s company, started in 2005, has done a great deal of post-Katrina rebuilding on the Gulf Coast — a truly remarkable thing, given that its name includes a widely known racist slogan. 

Jena Rally Sparks White Supremacist Rage, Lynching Threat
Posted By Mark Potok On September 20, 2007

As tens of thousands of people were preparing to make their way to Jena, La., for today’s anti-racism rally, white supremacists were burning up the Internet with furious denunciations, bloody predictions, promises of future violence, and calls for lynching.

Questions from people who would never hang a swastika from a tree. They got to talk about rappers, as we have come to expect.

Washington: Wait, are you and that one poster suggesting that hanging a noose in a tree was a crime?

Washington: When did nooses become racist symbols? When I was a kid we'd always make nooses in scout camp in Virginia to "string up the rustlers." It was a Western symbol with roots in all the Western movies we grew up with -- something dangerous that knot-tiers could make, but always about the Old West. Later in high school depressed friends would make them for what you'd now call "Goth" culture, but back then it was more Alice Cooper. About five years ago an African American friend said that nooses are "always about lynching." I never thought that my entire life and it's totally news to me. Is this a symbol with strong meaning in the South?

Denver: To the poster from Washington who didn't thhink hanging a noose could be a crime: The definition of criminal assault includes making threats that put another person in reasonable fear of imminent physical harm or death. It's hard to imagine a situation where hanging a noose from a tree while racially taunting someone would not qualify under that definition.

If you watch, you'll see he expected a question on the Jena 6 and was NOT looking forward to it.

If you listen, you'll see he is NOT advising the Republican candidates to attend the forum at Morgan next week.

I believe Mr. Witt has earned the front aisle seat here. He got more stuff at the Chicago Tribune, words, pictures, video and everything.

Due to a touch of insomnia you may now take the following steps.

1. Click the MyAccount link at the top of the page
2. Click the Edit tab
3. Scroll down to Theme Configuration

You'll see two options: blackface and yahoo (I claim no originality with the names, especially since I never anticipated you seeing them anyway). Yahoo is the default, blackface is the new one, and I actually believe it easy enough to read that I could switch to it permanently. I just like the current default better.

Anyway, pick your favorite theme, hit the save button on the bottom and you're good.

MediaDefender's Source Code Released
September 20, 2007
Thomas Mennecke

It hasn't been a good day, or week for that matter, for MediaDefender. Their internal emails have been leaked for the world to see, a phone conversation with a law enforcement official divulged, strategy data used against Gnutella published; and just when things couldn't possible get any worse, they just did.

According to a new torrent post over at The Pirate Bay, MediaDefender-Defender's (MDD's) have struck again. This time, they managed to release the source code MediaDefender uses in its anti-piracy efforts.

"MediaDefender-Defenders proudly presents the source code that MediaDefender use.

The source is complete for their operations regarding Kazaa, bittorrent, gnutella etc. This system is now released for the public in order to identify the decoys they set up. A special thanks to the MD employee that gave this to us."

From the town that tempts me to endorse the death penalty.

The victim in an alleged weeklong torture in Logan County was arraigned in Kanawha County Magistrate Court on multiple counts of writing bad checks.

Megan Williams is charged with offenses in Summers, Raleigh and Greenbrier counties. There are 11 misdemeanor counts of writing worthless checks, one misdemeanor count of obtaining under false pretenses and one felony count of failure to appear in circuit court in Summers County, according to documents provided by Kanawha County Magistrate Ward Harshbarger

So is this

Alaska Senator's Calls Were Secretly Taped
Recorded Conversations Between Stevens, Businessman Part of Public Corruption Probe
By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, September 21, 2007; A10

An Alaska oil contractor cooperated with the FBI by tape-recording phone calls with Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) as part of a public corruption investigation, a source familiar with the probe said last night.

The recordings done by former Veco Corp. chief executive Bill Allen mean that Stevens, who is the longest serving Republican in the Senate, was under scrutiny by the FBI much earlier than June, when the senator first acknowledged publicly that he was a subject of FBI inquiries.

Details about the recorded conversations between Allen and Stevens are unclear, including how many calls were taped, when they occurred and what information was gleaned from them.

Washington Post:

A Death in Southeast
Many questions remain to be answered.
Thursday, September 20, 2007; Page A20

A14-YEAR-OLD boy is shot to death by an off-duty D.C. police officer. The gun that the boy was alleged to have fired at the officer is missing. So, too, is the minibike that led the officer to pursue the boy. Questions, doubts and suspicions abound in the aftermath of this week's tragedy -- so city officials are right to call in federal authorities to lead the investigation.

Okay...

It's important not to prejudge the case until all the circumstances are known. Few people are exposed to the dangers that come with being a police officer.

Do they read their own newspaper ?

Maaaaan...picture mounting pain rays and evil color flashlights on these things.

As the video below shows, its something of a contrast to the Honeywell craft we looked at earlier on in the week. It's battery powered, so it's quieter -- apparently at 350 feet it is rarely noticed from the ground -- but more limited in terms of performance. Although it might seem flimsy, the video shows how stable it is in flight. It is said to be quite rugged and can return to base even if it loses two of its four rotor blades. One unusual feature is a speaker so that police can give instructions to those on the ground.

Some psychologists reason from this that subtle racism might actually be more, not less, damaging than the plain antipathy of yesterday, sapping more mental energy. Old-fashioned racism—a “No Negroes Allowed” sign, for example—is hateful and hurtful, but it’s not vague or confusing. It doesn’t require much cognitive work to get it. But if you’re the most qualified candidate for a job, and know it, and still don’t get the job for some undisclosed reason—that demands some processing.

Princeton psychologists Jessica Salvatore and J. Nicole Shelton decided to explore this idea in the laboratory. They ran an experiment in which volunteers witnessed a company’s hiring decisions from the inside. They saw the competing resumes of the candidates and the interviewer’s comments and recommendations. This wasn’t a real company, and there were no real people involved, but the volunteers believed it was all real.

Progressive blogosphere MIA on Jena 6
by: pam
Thu Sep 20, 2007 at 12:00:00 PM EDT 

[My god. The depth of ignorance and denial over the lack of progressive blogging on this story is displayed in full flower at Chris's diary at DKos, where he cross posted -- and some of the excuses are mind-boggling.]

He couldn't even bring himself to endorse the charges...and still he wants them in the penitentiary. What a special man.

I'm still wearing black, though.

Charles Murray. Of The Bell Curve. Again.

The American Enterprise Institute sponsors this pig, and I wish I could say no one pay attention to him but he KEEPS GETTING FULL COLUMNS ABOUT HIS BILE IN THE NEW YORK TIMES.

He wants to abolish the SAT...not because it unfairly favors those with sufficient wealth to prepare for it, though

Mr. Murray takes his argument a step further. “The children of the well educated and affluent get most of the top scores because they constitute most of the smartest kids,” Mr. Murray wrote. “They are smart because their parents are smart.”

It is in the genes, he believes, rejecting the notion that wealth, privilege and cultural familiarity might be responsible for success instead.

This is the same point made in “The Bell Curve.” Although the brief sections of the book devoted to genes and race dominated debates, the authors’ overarching theme was about the widening gap between the successful, wealthier “cognitive elite,” who are marrying each other and passing on their talents and smarts to their children, and the impoverished underclass, who are leaving their children a legacy of weakness.

Instead of black voters, call them the Halle Berry/Mariah Carey/Tiger Woods voters. Instead of the Latino vote, re-brand it as the Jessica Alba/Jimmy Smits vote.

You really, really don't get it.

I've been hoping for a hidden, vivid strain in my family, which is the color of the Wonder Bread I grew up eating.

Or maybe you do and it scares the piss out of you.

Mitochondrial politics
Presidential candidates and celebrities bend fuzzy ideas of race and ethnic identity to their benefit.
Patt Morrison
September 20, 2007

Here's what to watch for at next week's GOP minority-issues presidential debate at a historically black college in Baltimore: empty chairs. All four top Republicans have "scheduling conflicts."

Even Republicans get that this is a problem. "We sound like we don't want black people to vote for us," former congressman Jack Kemp told the Washington Post. "What are we going to do -- meet in a country club in the suburbs one day? "

He's right about the country club part. But maybe rounding the bases at "the black debate" or "the brown debate" as a way to win votes -- for either party -- is looking as dated as Kemp worries that the GOP could become.

Man, Oliver Willis' commenters are seriously underinformed.