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Cisco is Shipping Equipment to Fake Addresses to Protect Customers; Meanwhile Amazon Refuses to Provide Any Transparency
Cisco is Shipping Equipment to Fake Addresses to Protect Customers; Meanwhile Amazon Refuses to Provide Any Transparency
Examining the distinct ways in which various technology/internet companies have responded to revelations that the U.S. government is grossly violating American citizens’ 4th Amendment rights with its unconstitutional mass surveillance can be quite telling. A really interesting case in point came across my screen today.
On the one hand, we have Cisco, which seems to be trying its best to get hardware from one place to another without the NSA intercepting it and implanting malware. On the other hand, we have Amazon, which refuses to provide even the most basic transparency report when it comes to government data requests. Thanks for nothing Bezos.
Let’s start with Cisco. The Register reports that:
Cisco will ship boxes to vacant addresses in a bid to foil the NSA, security chief John Stewart says.
The dead drop shipments help to foil a Snowden-revealed operation whereby the NSA would intercept networking kit and install backdoors before boxen reached customers.
The interception campaign was revealed last May.
Speaking at a Cisco Live press panel in Melbourne today, Stewart says the Borg will ship to fake identities for its most sensitive customers, in the hope that the NSA’s interceptions are targeted.
“We ship [boxes] to an address that’s has nothing to do with the customer, and then you have no idea who ultimately it is going to,” Stewart says.
Stewart says some customers drive up to a distributor and pick up hardware at the door.
After the hacking campaign Borg boss John Chambers wrote a letter to US President Barack Obama saying the spying would undermine the global tech industry.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
My year without Amazon | Transition Network
My year without Amazon | Transition Network.
Exactly a year ago today I wrote a piece on this blog called The day I closed my Amazon account. It set out why, and how, I had decided that Amazon was so at odds with my values that I was withdrawing my support for good. It turned out to be the most popular thing I wrote that year. It was eventranslated into German and put on YouTube. I thought it might be useful to offer some reflections on how a year free of Amazon has been. (Spoiler Alert: it’s been great).
At the end of that article, I wrote:
“It feels surprisingly unsettling, as one does after ending a relationship, but it was the right thing to do. It may be a drop in the ocean, but if enough people do it….”
It appears that a year later I’m not the only one deliberately crossing the road to avoid that great behemoth of an online retailer. A campaign called Amazon Anonymous has invited people to pledge to not support Amazon this Christmas, because they:
“don’t pay their workers a living wage. They dodge their tax. They take money away from our local shops”.
Indeed. So far signatories have pledged to not spend just over £3 million with Amazon. Of course in the big picture of Christmas spending, £3 million is but a drop in Amazon’s vast ocean, they probably wouldn’t stop to pick it up if they dropped it, but it’s a powerful statement nonetheless that has generated a lot of press coverage.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Seeing Peru’s forests through the trees – Features – Al Jazeera English
Seeing Peru’s forests through the trees – Features – Al Jazeera English.
Puerto Maldonado, Peru – In an Amazonian timber yard bordering Bolivia and Brazil, Nelson Kroll names stacks of rough-hewn hardwoods, pointing out shihuahuaco and pumaquiro species freshly felled from select tracts of the Madreacre logging concession.
“In this campaign we’ve cut 39,000 cubic metres of round timber, which is about one tree every two hectares,” Kroll, head of the sustainable tree farm, told Al Jazeera.
But lining the floors of European and American households isn’t the private-public partnership’s only source of income. Madreacre earns up to $200,000 a year in carbon credits through emissions captured by its forest. The company gets paid to leave trees in the ground.
The concession is one of more than 40 Peruvian national projects involved in the UN initiative called Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation, or REDD+. Set up by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 2005, the mechanism aims to cut emissions from deforestation in developing countries and promote sustainable forest management.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Industrial Farming Plows Up Brazil’s ‘Underground Forest’ | Climate Central
Industrial Farming Plows Up Brazil’s ‘Underground Forest’ | Climate Central.
PALMAS, Brazil – South and east of Brazil’s famous Amazon, the air becomes dryer and the humid rainforest gives way to emerald green patches of irrigated pasture carved from scrubby woods and native grasslands.
As global meat demand increases, farmers are plowing up more of Brazil’s enormous Cerrado, a unique “underground forest” where plants and shrubs store tremendous quantities of carbon in a sprawling root network.
Credit: Autumn Spanne
This is a different kind of forest, hidden in plain sight and far more threatened than the Amazon. Known as the Cerrado, it is the largest, most biologically diverse savannah region of South America, home to 5 percent of all life on the planet.
But industrial farming is fast swallowing this unique landscape. And its rapid transformation is creating a ticking carbon bomb that scientists warn could significantly affect the global carbon cycle if the current rate of destruction continues.
This enormous expanse in central Brazil was once as impenetrable as the deepest rainforest, so isolated that Portuguese settlers dubbed it Cerrado, or “closed.” Today roads connect the Cerrado’s southern boundary in the São Paulo and Mato Grosso do Sul states with its northern limits some 1,500 miles away near the Atlantic coast. Yet the Cerrado is still largely unknown, even in Brazil.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
» New Amazon Device Uses Voice Recognition to Track Users in Their Homes Alex Jones’ Infowars: There’s a war on for your mind!
Controlled by a user’s voice, Amazon boasts the device’s ability to answer questions, provide weather updates, and play music.
“Amazon Echo is designed around your voice. It’s always on—just ask for information, music, news, weather, and more,” Amazon states. “Echo begins working as soon as it hears you say the wake word, ‘Alexa.’ It’s also an expertly-tuned speaker that can fill any room with immersive sound.”
Using “far-field voice recognition,” the Echo can detect and analyze voices even when other loud noises are prevalent.
“Tucked under Echo’s light ring is an array of seven microphones. These sensors use beam-forming technology to hear you from any direction. With enhanced noise cancellation, Echo can hear you ask a question even while it’s playing music.”
