These guys are going to get busted. I for one am leaving as a member.
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By Gordon Thomas
LONDON – Agents for Britain's MI5 intelligence service have discovered that Muslim doctors trained at some of Britain's leading teaching hospitals have returned to their own countries to fit surgical implants filled with explosives.
Women suicide bombers recruited by al-Qaida are known to have had the explosives inserted in their breasts under techniques similar to breast enhancing surgery. The lethal explosives – usually PETN (pentaerythritol Tetrabitrate) – are inserted during the operation inside the plastic shapes. The breast is then sewn up.
Similar surgery has been performed on male suicide bombers. In their cases, the explosives are inserted in the appendix area or in a buttock. Both are parts of the body that diabetics use to inject themselves with their prescribed drugs.
The discovery of these methods was made after the London-educated Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab came close to blowing up an airliner on Christmas Day with explosives he had stuffed inside his underpants.
Hours after he had failed, GCHQ – Britain's worldwide eavesdropping "spy in the sky" agency – began to pick up "chatter" emanating from Pakistan and Yemen that alerted MI5 to the creation of the lethal implants.
A hand-picked team was appointed by Jonathan Evans, the head of MI5, to investigate the threat. He described it as "one that can circumvent our defense."
Top surgeons who work in the National Health Service confirmed the feasibility of the explosive implants.
In a report to Evans, one said:
"Properly inserted the implant would be virtually impossible to detect by the usual airport scanning machines. You would need to subject a suspect to a sophisticated X-ray. Given that the explosive would be inserted in a sealed plastic sachet, and would be a small amount, would make it all the more impossible to spot it with the usual body scanner."
Explosive experts at Britain's Porton Down biological and chemical warfare research center told MI5 that a sachet containing as little as five ounces of PETN when activated would blow "a considerable hole" in an airline's skin which would guarantee it would crash.
Other scientists at the research center on Salisbury Plain confirmed that a suicide bomber posing as a diabetic could detonate the sachet implanted in his or her body.
A doctor at a London teaching hospital who had advised the Security Service added:
"As long as a bomber has the paperwork confirming he is a diabetic and must carry his injection syringe with him all the time on a long flight, there is every chance he will be allowed to pass security after he is checked. Obtaining the paperwork is easy. Every day this hospital has headed paper stolen by its staff for all sorts of reasons. Forging the name of a consultant is easy. The only way to be certain that the bomber is a genuine diabetic would be to call the hospital. I can't imagine security at a busy airport like Heathrow taking that much time. And the chances were that even if a call was made to a hospital the doctor wouldn't be available."
Instead of containing medicine for diabetics, the syringe would contain the liquid to activate the explosive in the sachet.
All the bomber would have to do is to go to the aircraft toilet like Abdulmutallab did on Christmas Day and inject himself to pierce the sachet and there would be an instant explosion.
So far MI5 agents have established that as many as 50 Muslim doctors with the required surgical skills have returned to Pakistan and Yemen in the past two years.
"When you add that number to doctors who went to local medical schools in those countries you begin to see the extent of the threat these human bombs pose," said an intelligence source in London.
While the Home Office, the political master of MI5 said, "we never comment on security threats," the chairman of the Commons Counter-Terrorism Sub-Committee, MP Patrick Mercer, said:
"Our enemies are constantly evolving their techniques to try to defeat our methods of detection. These body bombs are one of the most frightening methods and we must take this into urgent account."
GCHQ agents have focused their satellite surveillance of the mountains in the north of Yemen after the latest "chatter" on Arab websites indicated that the surgically enhanced bombers are hiding in an al-Qaida base waiting for their surgery to heal before they are sent out into the world.
Gordon Thomas is the author of the newly published, "Secret Wars: One Hundred Years Of British Intelligence Inside MI5 and MI6."
Google made a big sweep a couple months ago and de-activated about 20% of their Adsense publishers. My personal account which I used for this blog was deactivated for “posing a significant risk to the Google Adsense program”. Well guys, that account had been in use for over 6 years and was generating about $30/month in Adsense revenue to me. How big a risk is that to the powers that be? After appeal there was no detailed response, just “we can turn you off for any reason at any time and we don’t have to tell you why. Telling you why might reveal our secrets of how we determined you were a deadbeat in the first place.” Ok, so my $30 a month Adsense account was a threat to national security. The revenue barely covered hosting costs.
So I took my lumps and am going to go without ads and eat the hosting costs. Over at Kashless, we are starting a new project and I set up an Adsense account for that. Same name on the account, different email, different address (the company). After two days and NEVER having deployed Adsense with that account code (site still in development), I receive an email from Google saying that account has been de-activated for posing a “significant risk to the Adsense program”. The only thing I can think of is that the smarty pants at Google have some logic that snoops out people trying to get around an Adsense account de-activation by setting up another account and cuts those people off at the knees. Well that is certainly their right and privilege. But here is a news flash Google: “The new account is for a new business totally unrelated to the old one!” And the account was NEVER deployed on ANY site. I can understand if they had logic which said “oh, on this URL there was an Adsense account that we deactivated and now there is another Adsense account there from a similar guy, so lets deactivate”. But it seems that Google is using an Hammer and their logic is too broad.
All that is going to do is cause start-ups to go to another ad platform. Advertising.com, Burst, Adbrite and the rest should be thanking Google. Actually I am thanking Google because now I will be using a different ad network and maybe someone else will get enough scale to compete with Adsense. Adsense is sewing their own demise.
]]>Here are today’s losers:
Yahoo messenger: I mean really, who uses Yahoo anymore?
afreecodecVT. No idea why it is there. Probably needed for some obscure video project long forgot.
Comcast High Speed internet installation wizard. Never works to diagnose my connection problems and contains tracking software that lets Comcast stalk you. No good.
Comcast desktop doctor: ibid
McAfee security scan. Using Microsoft instead. No reason to pay for virus protection.
Player. No idea what this is, probably some download for a media playback i never use anymore.
Sohail’s gmail notifier. was supposed to fix the problem of opening gmail as default mail client when clicking on a MAILTO: link in browser. Didn’t. Still looking for a solution.
TokBox. Was in love, never use it anymore. Have Google Talk, don’t need a UI for that at $9.99 a month.
SupportSoft Assisted Service: YAT (Yet another Trojan)
Yahoo Toolbar, software update, search protection: Yahoo, Really?
YourMinis AIR widget thing: Was curious, Never used it.
]]>My #1 need for a calendar application has always been publishing free/busy to the world and allowing people to self-schedule. For many years I have had assistants to manage the multiple do-loops with customers, partners, employees asking the endless question “does this time work? What about this? What time zone?”. Yesterday a friend turned me onto Tungle.me. They have simplified the public access to free/busy in a very elegant way. Check out mine at http://tungle.me/martingtobias. Easy set up, simple sync with Google. Only hic-up was that Tungle choked on my 11,000 contacts. I have added my Tungle page to my email footer. Now whenever the email is “we should meet, have coffee, etc.” I just say “grab a time at tungle.me/martingtobias”. Everyone I have pointed there has gotten it initiatively. They just select a couple times, i get an email with a link, i click through, confirm one, and everyone’s calendar is automagically updated. Here is the brilliant thing in the Tungle.me business model. Everyone gets a Tungle.me invite. Totally viral. I probably gave them 10 new customers the first day from the 10 people scheduling meetings with me.
So far so good. Love it.
]]>Lets start with a couple random ones.
1. Obama’s spin city speech was totally weak last night. Unfortunately the Republican response was weak as well. Obama is trying to move with the political winds, but still clinging to his liberal health care, big government is good base. He can’t have both. I am still clinging to my god and guns Mr. Obama.
2. Obama was stupid to attack the Supreme Court right in front of him.
3. I am going to have a VERY big announcement on Feb. 8. Bigger than the iPad. Believe me.
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Interestingly though, we have seen quite a spike in traffic, membership and postings this year BEFORE Christmas. Not sure if it is people making room for all the new stuff coming, or looking for free Christmas presents, but traffic is up about 30% this last week and over 5,000 new members have joined in the last month. Many new people are finding us through our recent partnership with RecycleBank. Many members are also finding holiday shopping deals through our partnership with eBates to get cash back web shopping. I have also found our partnership with NextWorth personally useful as they sent me cash for an old cell phone!
Merry Christmas all and to all good reuse and recycling!
]]>I hope John has been paying the insurance bills....
I'm Martin Tobias and I endorse this message.
Tax cuts and tax credits work to get people spending money. People spending money stops the recession. It is just not that hard guys.
]]>“The Craigslist syndrome - too many flakey people who want everything for nothing. I just sold my pickup truck. I listed in on Autotrader, Craigslist and vFlyer. Every contact I got from Autotrader was a good, solid person who had money and was interested in buying a truck. Every contact I got from Craigslist was either a kook, a lowballer or a righteous pundit who wanted to tell me all the things that were wrong with my ad, my truck, etc. Never got a single serious lead from Craigslist. Sold the old truck for 5k to a nice gal off of Autotrader. She paid cash and knew that she was getting a good buy.”
My brother’s experience gets to the heart of the issue many sellers have with on-line marketplaces: They want qualified buyers and as low signal to noise ratio as possible. While the #1 benefit of any marketplace is scale, enough buyers and sellers, once over that threshold, reducing friction is the #1 benefit. It seems that AutoTrader in cars is doing a good job reducing friction between buyer and seller delivering quality experience on both ends. I am going to ask him why he didn’t list on eBay. Most likely the cost. If you can get it sold on the free market places, why?
The take away for me is to provide a low friction, high traffic marketplace for a low cost. That is what we are doing at Kashless.org for the Free Category.
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