A major theorem of cryptography is that anything that be done with a trusted authority can be done without1 a trusted authority.  This theorem can be applied to currencies, too. Anything that can be done by a central bank can be done without a central bank .  The central bank for the United States of America, as you probably already know, is the US Federal Reserve.  The stated dual mandate of the US Federal Reserve System is:
 
“The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and the Federal Open Market Committee shall maintain long run growth of the monetary and credit aggregates commensurate with the economy’s long run potential to increase production, so as to promote effectively the goals of maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates.”

To state this in other words, the dual mandate is:
1.  Stable prices
2.  Maximum employment
 
However, the real dual mandate for the US Federal Reserve during the past five years has been :
1.  Bail out the US Government.
2.  Bail out the Big Banks.

The US Federal Reserve System is the trusted authority that is now losing the trust of the average American and people worldwide.  The US Federal Reserve System has been monetizing the debt of the US Federal Government and buying the toxic mortgages being held by major US banks.  Debt monetization, quantitative easing, discount window lending, or whatever new name that the Federal Reserve comes up with, it simply means more money printing.  This results in price inflation for real things, such as food and gas. Debt monetization is advanced warning that a fiat currency is about to die or a government is about to go bankrupt and renege on its obligations.  The US Dollar is a fiat currency just  like all the other worldwide central reserve currencies.  Fiat currencies have no intrinsic value except the value that is forced by the government upon the people.  Sooner or later, all fiat currencies revert to their true value of zero.

Now, because of the Internet, there is an alternative currency called Bitcoin.  Bitcoin takes the basic theorem that anything that be done with a trusted authority can be done without a trusted authority and applies the theorem to the combined fields of cryptography and currency, which is now known as cryptocurrency.  Bitcoin is the most popular cryptocurrency that exists today. The best way to start learning about Bitcoin is to download the free application at the following link:
 
http://bitcoin.org/

A good definition of Bitcoin can be found in the Intro part of the readme file in the download.
   
Bitcoin is a free open source peer-to-peer electronic cash system that is completely decentralized, without the need for a central server or trusted parties.  Users hold the crypto keys to their own money and transact directly with each other, with the help of a P2P network to check for double-spending.   
 
The application costs nothing to download and it is available for the major operating systems (OS):  Linux, Windows, and Mac OS.  The download takes a short time depending on the Internet connection speed.  However,  it may take over a day for the application to fully sync up with the Bitcoin system. Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer application.  There is no central infrastructure, server, or database.  Each user is both the client and server.

In Bitcoin, blocks are the files that contain all the transactions. The first time a user downloads the app there will be tens of thousands of blocks to load. However, once these blocks are loaded, a user just has to load the recent transactions. On a average day, there are about 200 blocks to load. The app is fully synched when all blocks have been loaded. The green check mark reflects the app is in sync.
 
The units of currency are called bitcoins (BTC).  Bitcoins have value because work is needed for its creation.  Bitcoins are mined.  The mining is done virtually by miners throughout the world with computers that have fast central processing units (CPU) and powerful graphics processing units (GPU).  However, the average users can just buy bitcoins through various exchanges and sites located on the web just as one would buy gold or silver coins. One of the main benefits of Bitcoin is that a user can transfer cash from one user to another user.  A user can buy things from various vendors located anywhere in the world by way of the Internet.  All of this can be done without using a bank,  money order, Western Union, or even PayPal.  The file that holds the bitcoins is called wallet.dat in Windows.  The wallet.dat file is just like a real wallet. If a user loses the wallet or the wallet is stolen, then the cash is gone, too.  Multiple backup wallets can be created and stored; however, Bitcoin prevents double spending. In Windows, as seen in the screenshots below, wallet.dat is located under Users -Username – AppData -Roaming -Bitcoin. The backup copies of the wallet should be stored at various locations, such as on a secured cloud server or a on a flash drive. The wallet.dat file should be encrypted before its stored. Bitcoin advises that encryption passwords and the wallet passwords should be at least 20 characters long containing uppercase letters, lowercase letters, numbers, and special characters.

“Your Bitcoin Address” that reflects the unique identifier for each Bitcoin owner. Each wallet can have multiple addresses. The benefit of anonymity is that a person can buy things or send money to people or organizations without anyone knowing their identity. Just for practice or as a learning experience, you can send bitcoins between two addresses on the same computer. Or download Bitcoin on two computers, and send money between the two addresses. Also, you will see that bitcoin transactions usually takes seconds to occur between the sender and receiver.

Bitcoin has now adapted to furnishing the app for Android cell phones. Now, users can transfer and make transactions with bitcoin using Quick Response (QR) codes. As seen below, QR codes are the checker board barcodes that also represent the Bitcoin address in a different format than the alpha-numeric format. An Android handset with the Bitcoin app can scan QR codes. 

Bitcoin is not just for computer nerds and crypto-geeks. Survivalists apply the basic cryptography theorem that anything that be done with a trusted authority can be done without a trusted authority to many aspects of daily living. Unfortunately, the US Dollar and the Federal Reserve System penetrate all areas of life for the average American. The average American struggles paycheck to paycheck, year after year, due to the actions of the US Federal Reserve System, which is creating more and more US Dollars every year. Bitcoin provides a viable alternative to the US Dollar and the US Federal Reserve Banking System. Year to date, Bitcoin has gained over 100% in value versus the US Dollar and the other major world currencies. Bitcoin was launched back in January 2009 by a person or persons named Satoshi Nakamoto. At this time, the total market value of all bitcoins is approximately $125 million. There are over 10 million bitcoins in circulation with each worth at around $12.25. The total amount of bitcoins that will be mined is 21 million and the mining operations will stop in the year 2140 by designed. Anyone can be a miner or a person can be a member of a mining pool like Bitminter. There are many mining pools on the Internet. Mining pools combine the computing power of individual miners in order to mine more efficiently. Mining can be costly due to the mining rig that a user may have to set up as well as the electricity to power the rig. So, each user will have determine if its cost effective to become a miner.
  
YouTube is a good source of information and education about Bitcoin from users around the world. Most of the content is very informative and straightforward. Be careful if a video, or some company, states that it can double your bitcoins if you just send your bitcoins to them. This is the equivalent of someone saying, “Send me an ounce of silver and I will send you back two ounces of silver the next day.” This is a common scheme which appeals to the greedy as well as the naive user of Bitcoin. Please remember, there is no chargeback system with Bitcoin as there is with debit and credit cards. Once the bitcoin is sent, then its gone. The below video is a good start for a beginner. There are more detailed videos at YouTube as you become more comfortable with Bitcoin and have more questions that need to be answered.
  
Cited Works:
Dan Boneh,  Stanford Online Cryptography Course:  Introduction-Course Overview (Stanford University)
Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago,  The Federal Reserve’s Dual Mandate, (October 2012)

Article source: http://www.survivalblog.com/2013/01/the-case-for-the-bitcoin-cryptocurrency-by-j-mcg.html

In early 2012 the U.S. Congress authorized the FAA Air Transportation Modernization and Safety Improvement Act. Within this bill is a provision calling for the deployment of some 30,000 robotic drones over the skies of America by 2015, arguably the boldest overt domestic surveillance initiative to have ever been introduced in the land of the free. With an average of some 600 drones allocated per state, this future network of highly advanced surveillance systems promises to give law enforcement, military and intelligence assets unprecedented video and audio access into the lives of every single American.

Privacy advocates are justifiably outraged.

But whenever government attempts to institute a ban on contraband items, or pass draconian laws, or introduce new tracking and surveillance methods, rebellious elements within the target populace rapidly develop counter-strategies and technologies to marginalize the threat.

Oftentimes, billion dollar government initiatives and development projects are rendered almost useless by low-tech strategies and designs.

Artist and fashion designer Adam Harvey, who objects to the authoritarian nature of the global surveillance state, has done just that.

In an effort to  counter the high-tech integrated drone surveillance systems soon to be fused into intelligence networks across the country, Harvey and a group of partners have developed a line of clothing dubbed Stealth Wear.

Making its debut on January 17th, the Stealth Wear line will include hoodies, scarves, hats, and t-shirts that will make the wearer invisible to thermal imaging cameras widely used throughout the unmanned aerial vehicle community.

The idea is that the material blocks heat signatures, captured using infrared sensors, which give people away to surveillance helicopters or drones from the skies above. [link]

The flagship Stealth Wear line will include:

• The anti-drone hoodie and anti-drone scarf: Garments designed to thwart thermal imaging, a technology used widely by UAVs.
• The XX-shirt: A x-ray shielding print in the shape of a heart, that protects your heart from x-ray radiation
• And the Off Pocket: An anti-phone accessory that allows you to instantly zero out your phone’s signal

Via: Adam Harvey Projects

Harvey and his project team aren’t just limiting the scope of their work to anti-drone technology either.

They’ve introduced new techniques to counter computer vision (CV), also known as facial recognition.

CV Dazzle is camouflage from computer vision (CV). It is a form of expressive interference that combines makeup and hair styling (or other modifications) with face-detection thwarting designs. The name is derived from a type of camouflage used during WWI, called Dazzle, which was used to break apart the gestalt-image of warships, making it hard to discern their directionality, size, and orientation. Likewise, the goal of CV Dazzle is to break apart the gestalt of a face, or object, and make it undetectable to computer vision algorithms, in particular face detection.

Because face detection is the first step in automated facial recognition, CV Dazzle can be used in any environment where automated face recognition systems are in use, such as Google’s Picasa, Flickr, or Facebook

Source: CV Dazzle

They’ll also be launching a product called Off the Pocket for your cell phone, a technology that is capable of zeroing out your phone’s broadcast signal, making it invisible to GPS and mobile network triangulation.

Building off previous work with CV Dazzle, camouflage from face detection, Stealth Wear continues to explore the aesthetics of privacy and the potential for fashion to challenge authoritarian surveillance. Presented by PRIMITIVE at TANK MAGAZINE HQ will be a suite of new designs, made in collaboration with NYC fashion designer Johanna Bloomfield, that tackle some of the most pressing and sophisticated forms of surveillance today.

Source: Primitive London

Accompanying each project will be videos and tests revealing the process behind each technology and counter technology.

Author:
Mac Slavo
Views:
Read by 1,954 people
Date: January 11th, 2013
Website: www.SHTFplan.com

Copyright Information: Copyright SHTFplan and Mac Slavo. This content may be freely reproduced in full or in part in digital form with full attribution to the author and a link to www.shtfplan.com. Please contact us for permission to reproduce this content in other media formats.

Subscribe To Our Newsletter

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SHTFplan/~3/Pt1PY5knoFM/stealth-wear-new-counter-surveillance-clothing-makes-you-invisible-to-drones_01112013

A precog in the film Minority Report who can see the future and predict events. Photo courtesy of Dreamworks/20th Century Fox

Who needs the freaky precogs of Minority Report to predict if someone’s likely to commit murder when you have an algorithm that can do it for you?

New crime-prediction software used in Maryland and Pennsylvania, and soon to be rolled out in the nation’s capital too, promises to reduce the homicide rate by predicting which prison parolees are likely to commit murder and therefore receive more stringent supervision.

The software aims to replace the judgments parole officers already make based on a parolee’s criminal record and is currently being used in Baltimore and Philadelphia.

Richard Berk, a criminologist at the University of Pennsylvania who developed the algorithm, claims it will reduce the murder rate and other crimes and could help courts set bail amounts as well as sentencing in the future.

“When a person goes on probation or parole they are supervised by an officer. The question that officer has to answer is ‘what level of supervision do you provide?’” Berk told ABC News. The software simply replaces that kind of ad hoc decision-making that officers already do, he says.

To create the software, researchers assembled a dataset of more than 60,000 crimes, including homicides, then wrote an algorithm to find the people behind the crimes who were more likely to commit murder when paroled or put on probation. Berk claims the software could identify eight future murderers out of 100.

The software parses about two dozen variables, including criminal record and geographic location. The type of crime and the age at which it was committed, however, turned out to be two of the most predictive variables.

“People assume that if someone murdered then they will murder in the future,” Berk told the news outlet. “But what really matters is what that person did as a young individual. If they committed armed robbery at age 14 that’s a good predictor. If they committed the same crime at age 30, that doesn’t predict very much.”

Shawn Bushway, a professor of criminal justice at the State University of New York at Albany told ABC that advocates for inmate rights might view the use of an algorithm to increase supervision of a parolee as a form of harassment, especially when the software produced the inevitable false positives. He said it could result in “punishing people who, most likely, will not commit a crime in the future.”

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/C2C-InTheNews/~3/3zD_AhyqXbM/

Anthropologists decoded early Mayan hieroglyphics from four codices, finding the Maya accurately predicted modern-day astronomical phenomena. Shown here, an image from the so-called Dresden Codex.
CREDIT: Public Domain

LONG BEACH, Calif. — The Maya, best known these days for the doomsday they never foretold, may have accurately predicted astronomical phenomena centuries ahead of time, scientists find. 

A new book, “Astronomy in the Maya Codices” (American Philosophical Society, 2011), which was awarded the Osterbrock Book Prize for historical astronomy here at the American Astronomical Society conference Monday (Jan. 7), details a series of impressive observations made by Mayan astronomers pre-16th century.

Anthropologist husband-wife team, Harvey and Victoria Bricker have devoted their lives to understanding the pre-Columbian Maya and how they understood the world around them. The Brickers conducted most of their work by translating complex hieroglyphics to see what Mayan scribes felt was most important to record on parchment.

By decoding early Mayan hieroglyphics from four different codices housed in Madrid, Paris, Mexico and Dresden, the Brickers tracked how the night sky would have looked to the Mayans when they were alive.

“We’re dealing with real data,” Harvey Bricker said. “They’re not just squiggles.”

The Brickers translated the dates cited in the Mayan calendar to correspond with our calendar and then used modern knowledge of planetary orbits and cycles to line up the Maya’s data with ours. It was surprisingly accurate. [Image Gallery: Amazing Mayan Calendar Carvings]

In fact, the Brickers found the astronomical calendar dated to the 11th or 12th century accurately predicted a solar eclipse to within a day in 1991, centuries after the Mayan civilization had ended. The 1991 eclipse occurred on July 11.

The team also found that the Maya had a fair number of superstitions surrounding observable heavenly bodies in the night sky. On the friendly side, they had the sun and the moon — a god and goddess, respectively — whose cycles were easy to map, predict and keep track of. In the not-so-friendly camp were Venus and Mars. The motions of those two planets usually signaled doom and destruction depending upon their place in the sky, the Brickers found.

The manuscripts warned that if Venus shines upon children, old men and women or healthy young men at certain points in its orbit, then harm would come to them. Because the Maya wanted to make sure these potentially dangerous moments didn’t interfere with the lives of their people, Harvey Bricker said, they kept extremely detailed records of where Venus and other planets appeared in the night sky on certain days.

Mars — an animalistic god — signified gloomy days to come for everybody.

“There was thought to be a relationship, and not a happy one, between phenomena associated with Mars and agriculture,” Harvey Bricker said.

Follow Miriam Kramer on Twitter @mirikramer or LiveScience @livescience. We’re also on Facebook  Google+.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/C2C-InTheNews/~3/74ljEMZrNVM/26070-maya-predicted-1991-solar-eclipse.html

Especially lately. China is enduring its coldest winter in nearly 30 years. Brazil is in the grip of a dreadful heat spell. Eastern Russia is so freezing — minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit, and counting — that the traffic lights recently stopped working in the city of Yakutsk.

Bush fires are raging across Australia, fueled by a record-shattering heat wave. Pakistan was inundated by unexpected flooding in September. A vicious storm bringing rain, snow and floods just struck the Middle East. And in the United States, scientists confirmed this week what people could have figured out simply by going outside: last year was the hottest since records began.

“Each year we have extreme weather, but it’s unusual to have so many extreme events around the world at once,” said Omar Baddour, chief of the data management applications division at the World Meteorological Organization, in Geneva. “The heat wave in Australia; the flooding in the U.K., and most recently the flooding and extensive snowstorm in the Middle East — it’s already a big year in terms of extreme weather calamity.”

Such events are increasing in intensity as well as frequency, Mr. Baddour said, a sign that climate change is not just about rising temperatures, but also about intense, unpleasant, anomalous weather of all kinds.

Here in Britain, people are used to thinking of rain as the wallpaper on life’s computer screen — an omnipresent, almost comforting background presence. But even the hardiest citizen was rattled by the near-biblical fierceness of the rains that bucketed down, and the floods that followed, three different times in 2012.

Rescuers plucked people by boat from their swamped homes in St. Asaph, North Wales. Whole areas of the country were cut off when roads and train tracks were inundated at Christmas. In Mevagissey, Cornwall, a pub owner closed his business for good after it flooded 11 times in two months.

It was no anomaly: the floods of 2012 followed the floods of 2007 and also the floods of 2009, which all told have resulted in nearly $6.5 billion in insurance payouts. The Met Office, Britain’s weather service, declared 2012 the wettest year in England, and the second-wettest in Britain as a whole, since records began more than 100 years ago. Four of the five wettest years in the last century have come in the past decade (the fifth was in 1954).

The biggest change, said Charles Powell, a spokesman for the Met Office, is the frequency in Britain of “extreme weather events” — defined as rainfall reaching the top 1 percent of the average amount for that time of year. Fifty years ago, such episodes used to happen every 100 days; now they happen every 70 days, he said.

The same thing is true in Australia, where bush fires are raging across Tasmania and the current heat wave has come after two of the country’s wettest years ever. On Tuesday, Sydney experienced its fifth-hottest day since records began in 1910, with the temperature climbing to 108.1 degrees. The first eight days of 2013 were among the 20 hottest on record.

Every decade since the 1950s has been hotter in Australia than the one before, said Mark Stafford Smith, science director of the Climate Adaptation Flagship at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization.

To the north, the extremes have swung the other way, with a band of cold settling across Russia and Northern Europe, bringing thick snow and howling winds to Stockholm, Helsinki and Moscow. (Incongruously, there were also severe snowstorms in Sicily and southern Italy for the first time since World War II; in December, tornadoes and waterspouts struck the Italian coast.)

In Siberia, thousands of people were left without heat when natural gas liquefied in its pipes and water mains burst. Officials canceled bus transportation between cities for fear that roadside breakdowns could lead to deaths from exposure, and motorists were advised not to venture far afield except in columns of two or three cars. In Altai, to the east, traffic officials warned drivers not to use poor-quality diesel, saying that it could become viscous in the cold and clog fuel lines.

Meanwhile, China is enduring its worst winter in recent memory, with frigid temperatures recorded in Harbin, in the northeast. In the western region of Xinjiang, more than 1,000 houses collapsed under a relentless onslaught of snow, while in Inner Mongolia, 180,000 livestock froze to death. The cold has wreaked havoc with crops, sending the price of vegetables soaring.

Way down in South America, energy analysts say that Brazil may face electricity rationing for the first time since 2002, as a heat wave and a lack of rain deplete the reservoirs for hydroelectric plants. The summer has been punishingly hot. The temperature in Rio de Janeiro climbed to 109.8 degrees on Dec. 26, the city’s highest temperature since official records began in 1915.

Reporting was contributed by Jodi Rudoren from Jerusalem; Irit Pazner Garshowitz from Tzur Hadassah, Israel; Fares Akram from Gaza City, Gaza; Ellen Barry and Andrew Roth from Moscow; Ranya Kadri from Amman, Jordan; Dan Levin from Harbin, China; Jim Yardley from New Delhi; Anne Barnard from Beirut, Lebanon; Matt Siegel from Sydney, Australia; Scott Sayare from Paris; and Simon Romero from Rio de Janeiro.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 11, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated part of the name of the organization for which Omar Baddour works. It is the World Meteorological Organization, not the World Meteorological Association. It also misspelled the name of a location in Cornwall, England. It is Mevagissey, not Megavissey.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/C2C-InTheNews/~3/DZRg-ztpyHs/extreme-weather-grows-in-frequency-and-intensity-around-world.html

Thanks to the film Signs, most people, even those without interests into the fringe, fortean, and Ufological have at least a cursory knowledge of crop circles and their designs. While it might still be far too cold for their to be any crops in Connecticut, they still got the circles.. in the snow.

Residents of New Haven first noticed the patterns appear downtown early this morning, but not very many of the locals were too impressed.

“I think it’s somebody who has a lot of time on their hands, so they decided to have some fun in the snow,” Gloria Caprio told WFSB Channel 3. Even internationally recognized crop circle detective and author of Circular Evidence Colin Andrews took the time to check out the strange symbols.

“The lack of symmetry, which I have seen around the world with regard to crop circles isn’t here. The spiral symmetry from an elevated position lacks preciseness,” he said with a very authoritative British accent.

Apparently, Andrews has investigated Snow Circles in the Netherlands, but claims that the largest photographed snow circle was actually photographed outside of MIT in Boston in 1993. You can check out the photograph of that formation here, but be forewarned: it lacks symmetry.

You can scope out the full Channel 3 piece on the Connecticut Snow Circles at Fox5 Vegas.

——————————————————————————————————————————————————-

jQuery(‘.nrelate_default’).removeClass(‘nrelate_default’);

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/C2C-InTheNews/~3/npPUEKPpnU0/