Pakistan on Sunday blocked access to Twitter in response to blasphemous
material posted by users on the microblogging and social networking website, a senior government official said.
This has been done under the directions of the Ministry of Information Technology. It’s because of blasphemous content,
said Mohammed Yaseen, chairman of the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) — via Reuters
According to a recent investigation by the Swedish news show Uppdrag Granskning, Sweden’s telecommunications giant Teliasonera is the latest Western company revealed to be colluding with authoritarian regimes by selling them high-tech surveillance gear to spy on its citizens. Teliasonera has allegedly enabled the governments of Belarus, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Georgia and Kazakhstan to spy on journalists, union leaders, and members of the political opposition. One Teliasonera whistle-blower told the reporters, The Arab Spring prompted the regimes to tighten their surveillance. … There’s no limit to how much wiretapping is done, none at all.
The investigative report, titled Black Boxes
, in reference to the black boxes Teliasonera allowed police and security services to install in their operation centres — which granted them the unrestricted capability to monitor all communications—including Internet traffic, phone calls, location data from cell phones, and text messages—in real-time. This has caused concern among Swedish citizens and Teliasonera shareholders, who had previously been assuaged by assurances from the telecommunications company that they follow the law in the countries in which they are operating. After a meeting with Peter Norman, Sweden’s Minister of Financial Markets, the chairman of Teliasonera’s board of directors issued a statement, announcing that they had launched an action programme for handling issues related to protection of privacy and freedom of expression in non-democratic countries, in a better and more transparent way
— via redwolf.newsvine.com
Open your wine bottles in style with this kraken cork screw featuring an incredibly detailed resin-cast squid design. This sculptural piece sits atop a stainless steel corkscrew — via Shana Logic
If those Lotto numbers come up this week and you fancy heading off to the sun, you might want to book a viewing at this Vasco Vieira-designed four-bedroom modernist property in Vale do Lobo, Portugal.
Modernism from the modern era, this is an amazing build and a great location — close to the beach and with views of the Ria Formosa Nature Reserve and the Atlantic Ocean.
So the lap of luxury and a price to match. €2,750,000 is that asking price — via WowHaus
Evelin Kasikov‘s The Portrait Project is a set of 10 stitched portraits, all based on the same grid. Images are created by using different stitching methods and thread thicknesses. The grid consists of squares, crosses and diagonal lines. Each image is created by using some or all of the layers — via CRAFT
One of two Jaguar cubs born at the San Diego Zoo on 27 April takes its turn on the scale. The 12-day-old cub, which weighs 1.9kg, is still too young to get on and off the scale on its own. The two unnamed siblings will remain in the den for a couple of months until they are able to walk outdoors on their own. Keepers have yet to determine the sex of the cubs. The pair are the first Jaguars born at the San Diego Zoo since 1989 — via ZooBorns
The United Kingdom just welcomed it’s first-ever Wolverine cubs at Cotswold Wildlife Park. While the trio were born in January, the cubs are just now making their debut from the den. Born to mom Sharapova and her mate Sarka, the cubs are part of the European Endangered Species Breeding Programme (EEP). There are only eighty wolverines in zoos worldwide — via ZooBorns
Have you been deluged with media inquiries?
Absolutely. In the beginning we were just sort of tickled with it. It’s just such a cool story that you can’t not share it. The fear is that you beat something to death but at this point I’m just still delighted with the mysticism of it. We picked up John Waters hitchhiking! What on earth? I’m just sort of rolling it over in my brain like I lost a tooth up there or something.
Now what do you say to conspiracy theorists who think that John Waters is a huge fan of Here We Go Magic, and this was just orchestrated as a publicity stunt to promote the band?
[Laughs] Wow. That would… I’d be completely awed. I would push that story, I wouldn’t mind at all! But the truth is we actually picked him up hitchhiking. It was a complete and utter coincident — via redwolf.newsvine.com
All too many of us are ever-eager to upgrade to the latest and greatest whatever. Whether they be computers, washing machines, or clothes, if something goes wrong or next next arrives, we’re on to the next purchase.
Part of it, too, is that we don’t actually know how to repair our stuff. And our world is set up so it’s dramatically easier to cut and run than sit and fix. And so our landfills overflow with slightly damaged goods … a less-than-convenient truth that threatens our economic and environmental health
This may be changing. In The Netherlands, former journalist Martine Postma stumbled onto an idea that tacks the word repair
onto the familiar green mantra, reduce, re-use, recycle
. The result is community-based Repair Cafes where folks come together to fix their broken items. What started as a few neighbours in Amsterdam helping each other out has, two years later, become a much bigger deal, with 30 groups springing up around the country — via redwolf.newsvine.com
In OSX Lion Apple decided to hide the Library folder where most of your configuration and cache files are located. This is fine for most people, but for those of us who like to tinker it’s a bit annoying. Developer Daniel Jalkut wanted an automated way to automatically show the Library folder at login, so he put together a simple Applescript — via Lifehacker
If you don’t want your Twitter account to show up on Google the best way to hide it is to change your name in your profile settings or alter your settings so your account is private. Even if you change your account to private every tweet prior to that change is still public and Google will cache those tweets for a long while. So what do you do if you need to hide that angry tweet that shows up in a Google search but you already deleted? Twitter’s suggestion is to take it straight to Google — via Lifehacker
If someone told you they killed a rabid mountain lion with a frying pan, would you believe it?
Chino Valley resident Brandon Arnold has such a story, and he has witnesses to prove it.
Arnold, 24, his girlfriend Tessa Gerdes and seven of their Chino Valley friends, including three children, were camping 4 May at a remote spot on the Tonto National Forest, near the Verde River off Bloody Basin Road, when the story of a lifetime unfolded.
They were getting ready to make breakfast at about 6.45am when a large animal jumped out of the bushes onto the back of Arnold’s dog Apollo, a 90-pound lab-pit bull mix.
It was hard to tell what it was when it jumped out of there covered with grass and smelling like a skunk,
Arnold’s friend Donald Jones said. I thought it was somebody’s dog, so I was just pissed off somebody brought a mean dog to camp.
Jones grabbed the neck of both the animals to try to pull them apart.
That’s when they all figured out the other animal wasn’t a dog.
Jones let go real fast.
I started screaming at the top of my lungs, ‘Holy (bleep), it’s a mountain lion!’
Arnold recalled.
The lion ran into the mesquite bushes and Apollo ran after it while the men frantically looked for the nearest weapon. Jones grabbed a camping table and Arnold grabbed a 14-inch cast-iron skillet heating up on the propane stove. Arnold got to the lion and dog fight first and did what he had to do to save Apollo.
The first time I had a clear shot I just swung the pan and hit him right on the head,
Arnold said. It was like a cartoon — he just kind of stopped and I hit him again. He got stiff and fell over
— via redwolf.newsvine.com
A sketchy look at family life: Daddy’s on childcare duty while mummy gets the ice creams
Steven Harris Architects designed the Casa Finisterra in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico — via CONTEMPORIST
Chrome/Firefox: Non-US users know the pain of having services blocked from them pretty well, and YouTube is no exception. If you’re tired of stumbling on videos you can’t watch, ProxTube will fix the problem by unblocking all US-only videos for anyone to see — via Lifehacker
The competition watchdog will launch an investigation into clothing importers who are reaching agreements with overseas suppliers to stop selling their products to Australians on websites or instructing them to lift their web prices.
Australian Competition and Consumer Commission chairman Rod Sims has acknowledged that anti-competitive practices revealed by The Age last week could breach competition legislation.
He said an investigation would be launched, and companies found breaking the law would be prosecuted. We are extremely committed to having a close look at this,
he said — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Kodak has confirmed it used weapons-grade uranium and housed a fully functioning nuclear reactor in an underground lab near Greece, New York for 30 years, according to news reports.
And according to the Democrat and Chronicle, almost nobody in the community knew about it — until now.
The small nuclear reactor was housed in a 14- by 24-foot concrete room beneath the basement-level of Building 82 in Kodak Park.
Described as resembling Robby the Robot from a 1950s science fiction movie
by the Democrat and Chronicle, it contained 3.5 pounds of highly-enriched uranium.
A spokesman for the film and camera company and former scientist for the firm told CNN that such an amount was less than one-tenth of the amount necessary to make a crude nuclear device — via redwolf.newsvine.com
A nearly complete skeleton of a towering Tyrannosaurus bataaris set to go on auction on Sunday, 20 May.
The skeleton measures some 2.4-metres tall and 7.3-metres long.
This is the first full Tyrannosaurus specimen to go on auction since Sue
, a Tyrannosaurus rex, sold for $8.3 million in 1997, said David Herskowitz, director of Natural History at Heritage Auctions, the auction house conducting the sale.
The Tyrannosaurus bataar was uncovered in the Gobi Desert roughly eight years ago and has an estimated value of $950,000. Also called Tarbosaurus bataar, this species is an Asian relative to the North American T rex — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The Metropolitan Police has rolled out a mobile device data extraction system to allow officers to extract data within minutes
from suspects’ phones while they are in custody.
The capability would be particularly useful if the police force were to face a similar situation to the riots last August, which were reportedly coordinated mainly via BlackBerry Messenger (BBM). At the time, there appeared to be confusion around whether or not police could access the data from rioters’’ phones, although BlackBerry owner RIM promised to co-operate fully with the police. The new system being used by the Met is Radio Tactics’ ACESO data extraction system across 16 boroughs in the capital — via redwolf.newsvine.com
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