True, I’m afraid: too true…
Recent Comments
RSS feed
Hacking NASDAQ
July 26, 2013 — xanthippaIt seems that five men fro Russia and the Ukraine have pulled off the biggest hack yet:
‘The case, brought by US attorneys in Manhattan and New Jersey, is the largest hacking scheme ever prosecuted in the US, Department of Justice officials said. From 2005 to 2012, the four Russian nationals and a Ukrainian penetrated the private networks of the Nasdaq stock exchange, Citibank, PNC Bank, Heartland Payment Systems, 7-Eleven, JCPenney, Hannaford Brothers, and others, prosecutors alleged in indictments unsealed Thursday morning. The hacking gang traded text strings that exploited SQL-injection vulnerabilities in the victim companies’ websites to obtain login credentials and other sensitive data, then installed malware that gave them persistent backdoor access to the networks.’
Read the full article at arsTechnica here: http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/07/nasdaq-is-owned-five-men-charged-in-largest-financial-hack-ever/
(Apologies – for some reason, the post crashes when I try to embed the link…or put on tags…or just about anything: still having internet connectivity problems.)
Walter E Williams – Social Justice vs Self Ownership
June 25, 2013 — xanthippaFrom first principles, there can be no other conclusion that non-voluntary taxation/deprivation of any individual of the fruits of their labour (i.e. violating their property rights) is, in fact, a form of slavery.
Let’s not forget that under the feudal system of serfdom, at the beginning, the workload required of the serf was relatively light: for example, in Poland, it was 1/2 day per week of labour per adult serf. But, as time went on, this amount kept creeping up and up, until, between the work required of the serfs for their lord and the Church, all adults and children laboured 6 days a week, from sundown to sunset.
With the growth of our government, forced taxation will inevitably lead to the same level of oppression!
Oh, you say, but we have more personal freedom than serfs ever did.
Perhaps, for now.
After all, the lord could control who may or may not travel (no fly list, anyone? … try to cross a border without a passport), the guilds controlled strictly who may or may not practice which trade (try practicing a trade without a license now – under Ontario’s new regulations, you may not even cut another person’s hair without first being accredited by and paying license fees to the government) and you could only live where your lord permitted you to (try building a house on your own property in Ontario – good luck!)
Worth a thought, isn’t it…
UPS vs. FEDEX: Ultimate Whiteboard Remix
June 10, 2013 — xanthippaWhat was that about government coercion?
And those pesky ‘free markets’?
Milton Friedman – Free Markets and Human Freedom
June 10, 2013 — xanthippaParticularly important now…
As the one branch of the US government that actually listens to its people – the NSA – collects information about everyone, many people are saying that if a person is not doing anything illegal, they have nothing to fear from the loss of privacy. If you read this blog regularly, you know my contempt for this mode of thinking, because…
The more you know about someone, the more you know what is important to them and how they make their decisions – the more easy it will be for you to coerce them.
Knowledge is power…always was, always will be. And, even the most innocent things, strung together in certain ways and presented in a spun way, can make a person look guilty of something if the government decides they don’t like the way they are complaining about something.
Milton Friedman has it right – freedom is being free of coercion.
Dependency on government for services – from public transport to medicare to food stamps – opens one to easier and easier coercion, as does the loss of privacy. That is why totalitarians always foster dependence and erode privacy.
And that is corruption of freedom!
Xanthippa's Chamberpot 