[ENGLISH.ALARABIYA.NET] Idaho State University’s president said on Thursday he had been in talks with Saudi and Kuwaiti education officials seeking to allay concerns about students from those countries facing anti-Muslim harassment in the college town of Pocatello.
The discussions with officials from the two Gulf states, which together account for about 1,000 of the foreign students enrolled at Idaho State, were disclosed as school officials sought to determine the origin of anti-Muslim propaganda being distributed anonymously via DVDs on campus.
Separately, police in Pocatello have opened a hate-crime investigation into an attack on a man of Middle Eastern descent who was stabbed in the arm earlier this week for no other apparent reason than his appearance, Police Chief Scott Marchand said.
The off-campus assault was reported to police by the hospital where the man, who was not a university student, was taken for treatment, Marchand said.
Idaho State President Arthur Vailas said he was unaware of any individual complaints of anti-Muslim discrimination or harassment other than those cited in recent media accounts, such as a New York Times ...which still proudly displays Walter Duranty's Pulitzer prize... story last month about campus tensions faced by Saudi and Kuwaiti students.
"I expect all students to bring forth their concerns. The only way we can help is for people to come forward and we can look into the cases," Vailas told Rooters in an interview on Thursday.
But Vailas said the university was consulting with higher education officials from Soddy Arabia ...a kingdom taking up the bulk of the Arabian peninsula. Its primary economic activity involves exporting oil and soaking Islamic rubes on the annual hajj pilgrimage. The country supports a large number of princes in whatcha might call princely splendor. When the oil runs out the rest of the world is going to kick sand in the Soddy national face... and Kuwait, whose students account for nearly 10 percent of the school’s 11,000 undergraduates, to address concerns about Islamaphobia.
The Arabic-language Kuwaiti daily newspaper Al-Qabas and English-language outlet Gulf News reported on Thursday that the two Gulf nations were suspending scholarships earmarked for Idaho State and transferring their respective students at that school to other universities.
Kuwait’s higher education minister was quoted as saying some 400 students were facing racial discrimination at the Pocatello campus.
Vailas said he had no indication that the 535 Kuwaiti students or 481 Saudi students were being transferred elsewhere.
The US attorney for Idaho planned to meet publicly with international students from predominantly Islamic countries as part of a push announced this week by the US Justice Department to stem discrimination against Muslim, Arab, Sikh and South Asian Americans following bully boy attacks in Brussels, Gay Paree and San Bernardino, Caliphornia, an impregnable bastion of the Democratic Party,.
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Kuwait’s higher education minister was quoted as saying some 400 students were facing racial discrimination at the Pocatello campus.
But nothing compared to the virtual slavery suffered by thousands of Filipinos in Kuwait.
#4
Exactly g(r)om. We don't discriminate here. They just don't like the fact that we refuse to allow their evil practices. Permit-less concealed carry now in effect. "An armed society is a polite society" just sayin....
[INDEPENDENT.CO.UK] A man appears to have deleted his entire company with one mistaken piece of code. By accidentally telling his computer to delete everything in his servers, hosting provider Marco Marsala has seemingly removed all trace of his company and the websites that he looks after for his customers. Ummm... No backup?
Mr Marsala wrote on a forum for server experts called Server Fault that he was now stuck after having accidentally run destructive code on his own computers. But far from advising them how to fix it, most experts informed him that he had just accidentally deleted the data of his company and its clients, and in so doing had probably destroyed his entire company with just one line of code. This has gotta be from some sort of IT Onion...
The problem command was "rm -rf": a basic piece of code that will delete everything it is told to. The "rm" tells the computer to remove; the r deletes everything within a given directory; and the f stands for "force", telling the computer to ignore the usual warnings that come when deleting files. Yep. That's what it does.
Together, the code deleted everything on the computer, including Mr Masarla’s customers' websites, he wrote. Mr Masarla runs a web hosting company, which looks after the servers and internet connections on which the files for websites are stored. He should be backing up, his customers should be backing up, and I have a hard time believing the whole shebang was run on a single server.
That piece of code is so famously destructive that it has become a joke within some computing circles. Everybody and his girlfriend knows about it.
Normally, that code would wipe out all of the specific parts of the computer that it was pointed at. But because of an error in the way it was written, the code didn’t actually specify anywhere ‐ and so removed everything on the computer.
"I run a small hosting provider with more or less 1535 customers and I use Ansible to automate some operations to be run on all servers," wrote Marco Marsala. "Last night I accidentally ran, on all servers, a Bash script with a rm -rf {foo}/{bar} with those variables undefined due to a bug in the code above this line." 1535 sites? On one machine? With no backups? Sounds like he had one physical server and a number of virtual servers.
With no backups, either machine or virtual. I suspect he will have considerably fewer customers a week from now.
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04/16/2016 00:00 ||
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You hear legends and rumors of this sort of thing. This is the first time I have seen a documented case of the awesome power of the mis-applied 'rm -rf'
"... Modify the user's password minimum from 6 to 32 letters, give the password a 1 day lifetime, set it so that they HAVE to use the password generate utility when they change their password (so their password will always be something that looks like vaguely pronouncable line-noise), add a secondary password with the same as the above, then redefine their CLI tables so that the only command that works is DELETE, and all other commands point to it."
Beautiful. Shit I'm good.
He calls back.
"MY FILES ARE GONE!", he screams, panicking.
"Did you have a backup?", I ask, as sweet as pie.
"But that's what you people are supposed to do!", he sobs.
"Yeah, well we did - but then we switched to those 8mm tapes, and they're the same size as the ones in my video camera, so I've been using them to tape the neighbor's sex romps..."
I hear the revolver go off, but what the hell, it's 5pm, and not my problem...
#8
In 5 years there's going to be some hacker movie called "RM -RF" staring Nicholas Cage.
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Safe bet: Nicholas Cage stars in everything...
Posted by: Steve White ||
04/16/2016 10:01 Comments ||
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I see lawsuits in his future...
Sounds like he used a tool to run the same command on all his servers... And the journalist is an idiot.
I've seen something similar. A customer had just upgraded to a new Tandem nonstop system and the field engineer started taking down the old system. The first thing he started as to 'relabel' (read reformat) all the disks. Unfortunately he was working across the network on the new production system. Oops!
[THEMOSCOWTIMES] The head of the State Duma's ethnic affairs committee has denounced a "Miss Russia" beauty pageant contestant from the predominantly Muslim region of Dagestan ...a formerly inoffensive Caucasus republic currently bedevilled by low-level Islamic insurgency, occasional outbreaks of separatism, ethnic tensions and terrorism, primarily due to its proximity to Chechnya. There are several dozen ethnic groups, most of which speak either Caucasian, Turkic, or Iranian languages. Largest among these ethnic groups are the Avar, Dargin, Kumyk, Lezgin, and Laks. While Russers form less than five percent of the population, Russian remains the primary official language and the lingua franca... for posing for photographs in a bathing suit, and suggested she should stop disclosing her Dagestan origin, media reports said Wednesday.
But 21-year-old contestant Albina Ildarova, the daughter of two kickboxing athletes, came right back with a sharp retort.
Continued on Page 49
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“What is the world coming to. Such daughters should be buried alive,” a commentator on social networks said, according to a screenshot posted by LifeNews. Yet another one chimed in: “Somebody shoot her.”
[Khaama (Afghanistan)] An Afghan man has reportedly been tossed in the clink Book 'im, Mahmoud! in western Herat ...a venerable old Persian-speaking city in western Afghanistan, populated mostly by Tadjiks, which is why it's not as blood-soaked as areas controlled by Pashtuns... province of Afghanistan allegedly for smuggling a teenage Syrian girl from The Sick Man of Europe Turkey ...the only place on the face of the earth that misses the Ottoman Empire.... .
According to the local security officials in Herat, an investigation is underway regarding the alleged smuggle of the girl from Turkey.
Provincial governor’s front man Jilani Farhad said they are aware regarding an alleged smuggle of a 16-year-old girl from Turkey.
He said an investigation is underway and it has been reported that the girl is originally hailing from Syria.
According to Farhad, the arrested man is originally a resident of Ghor province and was keeping the girl in Injil district of Herat province.
Turkey is host to millions of refugees who have fled civil war from Syria as well as Afghan migrants colonists who have left the country during growing instability.
Scores of Afghans are leaving the country and heading towards Turkey in a bid to reach the European countries by travelling through the Turkish waters.
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Hat tip One Free Korea. From last month but it's useful to demonstrate the tentacles North Korea has out in Africa. The tap-dancing to get around the plain meaning of UN sanctions is just what you'd expect...
DEPUTY prime minister and international relations' minister Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah has confirmed the existence of a North Korean-built munitions factory in the country, but said the factory was not in contravention of any United Nations' sanctions against the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
Nandi-Ndaitwah said the Namibian government was not involved in anything untoward, and that government has cooperated with the United Nations and openly answered and forwarded information requested by the UN.
The deputy prime minister was responding to questions by The Namibian after a UN Security Council investigative report was leaked. The UN was investigating whether North Korea was in contravention of its sanctions, especially the Asian country's nuclear armament programme.
Continued on Page 49
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Yet another United Nations cock-up dating back decades, which has not surprisingly resulted in communist rule. They've also been quite fond of the Chinese for many years. Their new Nork friends should come as no surprise. Wat jy saai sal jy maai. (What you sow shall you reap).
[ENGLISH.ALARABIYA.NET] The Saudi cabinet has issued a decree which restricts the Saudi Committee of Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice (often referred to as "inquisitors religious police" by Western media) to pursue and arrest violators, and has required members of the Commission to report violators to the police or the anti-narcotics force, al-Riyadh Arabic language daily has reported.
According to al-Riyadh, the above decision was part of a detailed decree which sought to organize the framework of the committee’s operation. The below is a translation of the report which is based on the cabinet minutes.
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North Korea attempted and failed to launch what experts believe was an intermediate-range ballistic missile on Friday in defiance of U.N. sanctions and in an embarrassing setback for leader Kim Jong Un, drawing criticism from major ally China.
The failed launch, as the reclusive country celebrates the "Day of the Sun" on the birthday of Kim's grandfather, follows the North's fourth nuclear test in January and a long-range rocket launch in February, which led to new U.N. sanctions. But the North has nevertheless pushed ahead with its missile program, supervised by Kim, in breach of U.N. Security Council resolutions.
A U.S. government source told Reuters on Friday the missile never got off the launch pad, instead bursting into flames on the ground. It was not yet clear what caused the failure but further tests are expected, said the source, who asked not to be named.
China, North Korea's most important economic and diplomatic backer, has been angered by Pyongyang's nuclear tests and rocket launches in the face of U.N. sanctions that China also has backed. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said the U.N. Security Council was clear on North Korean rocket launches.
"At present, the situation on the peninsula is complex and sensitive," he told reporters. "We hope all parties can strictly respect the decisions of the Security Council and avoid taking any steps that could further worsen tensions."
Chinese state media was more direct.
"The firing of a mid-range ballistic missile on Friday by the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), though failed, marks the latest in a string of saber-rattling that, if unchecked, will lead the country to nowhere," China's official Xinhua news agency said in an English language commentary.
"... Nuclear weapons will not make Pyongyang safer. On the contrary, its costly military endeavors will keep on suffocating its economy."
All this is true. Still not sure if the Chinese really mean this or if the Chinese leaders are placating the rubes (Obama, the Democrats, the MSM, the UN). When they stop the oil from going into North Korea then we'll know they're serious...
The U.S. Defense Department said in a statement the launch at 0533 Korea time (2033 GMT Thursday) was detected and tracked by the U.S. Strategic Command, which also assessed it had failed.
The missile likely was a Musudan, South Korea's Yonhap news agency said, an intermediate-range ballistic missile with a design range of more than 3,000 km (1,800 miles) that can be fired from a road mobile launcher but which has never been flight-tested.
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Taking action against it's satellite would seem not to be in China's best interest. A successful launch would put China in an uncomfortable position. Critical missile components undoubtedly come from China. Dot.dot.dot. It would be interesting to see the real reason the launch failed.
A ranking North Korean military officer in charge of conducting intelligence operations defected to South Korea last year, Seoul's defense ministry said Monday, as the North's leader is tightening his grip on the regime. A North Korean senior colonel, whose name has been withheld, defected in 2015 after working at the North's reconnaissance bureau tasked with carrying out espionage missions against the South, the ministry said.
"(The North Korean military official's defection) is a fact, but we cannot make public detailed information (about him)," Moon Sang-gyun, a ministry spokesman, said at a regular press briefing.
A source familiar to North Korean affairs said that the officer is viewed as an elite among North Koreans who have defected to the South.
"He is believed to have stated details about the bureau's operations against South Korea to authorities here," the source said.
South Korea's spy agency said last year that since taking power in late 2011, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has had more than 70 senior officials executed in an effort to tighten his grip on the communist regime. A number of North Korea's working-level officials based in foreign nations have sought asylum apparently to avoid Kim's so-called reign of terror, according to various sources.
Beats being torn to pieces by an anti-aircraft gun...
The North's Reconnaissance General Bureau deals with intelligence gathering and espionage operations in foreign countries, and is also responsible for cyberwarfare. The bureau is known to be behind Pyongyang's alleged cyberattack on Sony Pictures Entertainment in 2014.
Kim Yong-chol, a new party secretary handling inter-Korean affairs, had served as the head of the bureau since 2009.
In a separate case, a North Korean diplomat stationed in an African country and his family members defected to South Korea in May last year, said another source having knowledge about North Korea.
Last week, a group of 13 North Koreans who used to work at an overseas restaurant en masse defected to South Korea, the first mass defection since 2011. North Korean-run restaurants in foreign nations have served as a source of hard currency for Pyongyang.
The latest case came as the U.N. Security Council and major countries have slapped tougher sanctions on North Korea for its January nuclear test and long-range rocket launch in February.
South Korea's intelligence agency and other government organizations, meanwhile, have started processing the defectors to find out the motivation behind their action, according to a government source. There are more than 28,000 North Korean defectors in South Korea, with some 1,280 North Koreans entering the South last year, according to Seoul's unification ministry.
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04/16/2016 00:00 ||
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Hopefully he's been treated very well and was permitted to keep his contacts in the North. Not sure why these defections are being publicized however.
Around 10 North Korean workers dispatched to Angola have died of yellow fever in the southern African country, a U.S. radio outlet said Friday. About 450 people have been confirmed to be infected with the viral disease in Angola since the first case was reported in December in the country's capital, the Washington-based Radio Free Asia (RFA) report said.
Among those that caught yellow fever, 178 have died so far, with the disease spreading rapidly in nearby countries, the RFA said, quoting sources. It said some 1,000 North Korean workers are in Angola, including construction workers and medical staff, the report said, referring to the workforce North Korea dispatches overseas to earn money.
The recent deaths of the North Koreans calls into question the quality of North Korea's yellow fever vaccine and the veracity of North Korea's claims to have inoculated its workers sent to the African country, according to the report.
Those who became sick have asked to be repatriated, but the North Korean government has opted to not comply out of fear that they could cause the disease to spread at home, the media company said.
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To paraphrase Mr. Bond, James Bond: "Yes, of course they did."
...Crosswise has developed a cross-device identification system based on big data, data science and machine learning that identifies, which PCs, phones, tablets, digital TVs and other connected devices are being used by individual consumers. This, according to Oracle, "enables marketers and premium publishers to realize the benefits of cross-device advertising, personalization and analytics." In other words, help advertisers target appropriate consumers.
#1
Crosswise has developed a cross-device identification system based on big data, data science and machine learning that identifies, which PCs, phones, tablets, digital TVs and other connected devices are being used by individual consumers.
Which Oracle will lease to the NSA and DNC for 50 million a year.
The Baltic Exchange’s main sea freight index tracking rates for ships carrying dry bulk commodities extended gains on Thursday, mainly propelled by firmer demand for bigger shipping vessels.
The overall index, which factors in rates for capesize, panamax, supramax and handysize shipping vessels, climbed 30 points, or 5.29 percent to 597 points.
The capesize index rose 87 points, or about 12 percent, to 831 points, its highest this year.
Average daily earnings for capesizes, which typically transport 150,000-tonne cargoes such as iron ore and coal, rose $669 to $6,184.
A healthy amount of iron ore booking activity on the back of stronger Chinese steel prices has been the main driver of the improvement for capesizes, ship brokerage firm Clarksons Platou said in note on Thursday. Shipments of iron ore account for about a third of sea-borne volumes on the larger capesizes.
The panamax index was up 22 points, or 3.24 percent, at 700 points.
Average daily earnings for panamaxes, which usually carry coal or grain cargoes of about 60,000 to 70,000 tonnes, rose $170 to $5,577 on Thursday.
Among smaller vessels, the supramax index rose 8 points to 514 points, and the handysize index was up 13 points at 309 points.
Source: Reuters (Reporting by Apeksha Nair in Bengaluru; Editing by Koustav Samanta)
[WASHINGTONPOST] Politicians in the Czech Republic are set to put decades of debate to an end this week by officially announcing a new name for the country: Czechia. That's Czech for "Betty."
In a meeting with news hounds this week, Foreign Minister Lubomir Zaoralek said he supported the move, suggesting that foreigners often mangled his country’s name when he met them abroad. "It is not good if a country does not have clearly defined symbols or if it even does not clearly say what its name is," Zaoralek said, according to the Czech News Agency.
When the decision does go through, Czechia will officially become the conventional short-form name for the country, while the Czech Republic will remain the conventional long-form name.
Posted by: Fred ||
04/16/2016 00:00 ||
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Sounds too much like another Country you would not want to tour.
#4
Undialyzed dude of Bohemia,
I wonder what cured your uremia?
[loooooooooong pause]
Well, whether 'twas celery,
Or maybe the Keller, ye
Piss like the Lion of Nemea!
[NYTIMES] Senator Bernie Sanders ...The only openly Socialist member of the U.S. Senate. Sanders was Representative-for-Life from Vermont until moving to the Senate for the rest of his life in 2006, assuming the seat vacated by Jim Jeffords... did not get to meet with Pope Francis inside Vatican City on Friday, but it’s not because the pontiff didn’t want to.
Pope Francis sent a handwritten note to those attending a conference at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, including Mr. Sanders, saying he had planned to stop by the event around 7 p.m. local time, but could not because of a planned trip to the Greek island of Lesbos.
The note was sent to Msgr. Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, a senior papal official and the academy’s chancellor, who read the pope’s words: "Yesterday I realized that today was going to be very complicated because of my trip to Lesbos. Today I confirm this situation and would like to apologize for not being able to attend. I kindly ask you to greet the speakers and participants, requesting their understanding for this situation. I will keep them all in my prayers and good wishes, and send them my heartfelt thanks for their participation. May the Lord bless you. Fraternally, Franciscus."
Mr. Sanders, an ardent admirer of Pope Francis, called for a return to moral principles and a more just world economy, echoing the pontiff’s words and praising his leadership during a 15-minute address before the academy, a group that examines social, economic and environmental issues and is housed within a 16th-century villa inside Vatican City.
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04/16/2016 00:00 ||
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Last night when I was on the stair
I met a man who wasn't there
He wasn't there again today
I wish, I wish he'd go away!
So the great Bern made a speech to a man in another country?
[Wash Examiner] Lawmakers themselves couldn't seem to believe that Friday's House Armed Services hearing on waste in Afghanistan involved discussing a herd of Italian goats. Not really that bad an idea. Afghans raise and export goats. It probably would have helped a lot to provide vet services to make sure the breeding herd was healthy.
"This is the kind of stuff that belongs on 'Last Week Tonight with John Oliver,' not as a subject of a congressional hearing," said Rep. Jackie Speier, D-Calif., and ranking member of the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations hearing, referencing a satirical news show on HBO.
The Pentagon spent $6.1 million shipping Italian male goats to Afghanistan to mate with female Afghan goats to make cashmere as one of several initiatives to boost the Afghan economy after the war. It does sound pretty pricey for goats. Just doing a quick search, billies were going for a couple hundred dollars for average weight 95 pounds in Iowa last month. That's an awful lot of shipping and handling. It probably would have been cheaper to air freight them from Iowa. I think I'd like to see some itemized receipts on that project.
But many of the female goats were infected with a disease that could have wiped out the whole herd, Speier said. As a result, only two of "those fancy Italian goats" are still usable, she said. So the Afghan goats gave the Italian goats a dose of clap. [Rolls eyes]
I heard something about a similar story a while back. But in that story the locals ate the pricey studs.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[INDEPENDENT.CO.UK] A man appears to have deleted his entire company with one mistaken piece of code. By accidentally telling his computer to delete everything in his servers, hosting provider Marco Marsala has seemingly removed all trace of his company and the websites that he looks after for his customers.
"I run a small hosting provider with more or less 1535 customers and I use Ansible to automate some operations to be run on all servers," wrote Marco Marsala. "Last night I accidentally ran, on all servers, a Bash script with a rm -rf {foo}/{bar} with those variables undefined due to a bug in the code above this line."
[THEMOSCOWTIMES] The head of the State Duma's ethnic affairs committee has denounced a "Miss Russia" beauty pageant contestant from the predominantly Muslim region of 
[Wash Examiner] Lawmakers themselves couldn't seem to believe that Friday's House Armed Services hearing on waste in Afghanistan involved discussing a herd of Italian goats.
