Everything: July 2012

Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Full Tilt Poker

POKERSTARS SETTLES DISPUTE WITH U.S. DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE
AND ACQUIRES ASSETS OF FULL TILT POKER

ONCHAN, ISLE OF MAN – July 31, 2012 – PokerStars today announced that the Company has reached a settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) Southern District of New York. As part of the settlement agreement, PokerStars has also acquired the assets of Full Tilt Poker, and has committed to the full reimbursement of Full Tilt Poker customers outside the United States.

The total amount to be paid by PokerStars is USD$547 million which will be payable over a period of three years. The money paid to the US Government will in part be used to reimburse former Full Tilt Poker customers in the United States, through a remission process to be administered by the Department of Justice. PokerStars repaid all amounts owing to its own U.S. customers shortly after it closed its U.S. operations.

PokerStars will also make available in a segregated bank account, all outstanding balances owing to all non-U.S. customers of Full Tilt Poker (an amount totalling USD$184 million), with no restrictions on withdrawals, within 90 days of completing this transaction. PokerStars has remained open for non-U.S. players, with all its licenses in good standing, without interruptions.

Under the agreement with the Department of Justice, PokerStars does not admit to any wrongdoing. Furthermore, the agreement explicitly permits PokerStars to apply to relevant U.S. gaming authorities, under both PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker brands, to offer real money online poker when State or Federal governments introduce a framework to regulate such activity.

PokerStars plans to re-launch Full Tilt Poker in most markets as a separate brand, following the appointment of a new, independent management team. Full Tilt Poker’s operations will continue to be run from Dublin, but regulatory oversight will be transferred to the Isle of Man. Further details of these plans will be announced shortly.

“We are delighted we have been able to put this matter behind us, and also secured our ability to operate in the United States of America whenever the regulations allow,” said Mark Scheinberg, Chairman of the Board of PokerStars. “This outcome demonstrates our continuing global leadership of the online poker industry, and our commitment to working with governments and regulators to ensure the highest standards of protection for players.”

“Acquiring certain assets of Full Tilt Poker strengthens PokerStars, brings welcome relief to Full Tilt Poker players who have been waiting over 12 months for repayment of their money, and benefits the entire poker community. Full Tilt Poker’s customers outside the U.S. can soon look forward to accessing their accounts and playing on the re-launched site, confident that they are supported by PokerStars’ history of integrity and our track record of delivering high-quality and secure online poker.”

“The way we have operated our business since the U.S. Department of Justice brought its claim has underlined our credentials as a responsible online poker operator,” Scheinberg continued. “In particular, the prompt repayment of our former US customers in as quick a time frame as possible demonstrated our industry-leading commitment to the segregation of customer funds. We continue to encourage jurisdictions all over the world to introduce sensible online poker regulation.”

More @ http://diamondflushpoker.com/2012/07/pokerstars-issues-media-release-confirms-settlement-acquisition-plans-for-relaunch/

POKERSTARS

Monday, July 30, 2012

Do the Olympics make money?

MoneyWatch) LONDON - As the 2012 Summer Olympics have kicked off, it's easy to imagine that all the activity, the pageantry, the swarms of purple-clad volunteers must be engaged in some highly profitable activity. Otherwise, why would so many people get sucked in?

Except the Olympics aren't a great money-spinner. Why?

Sponsors. Companies sponsoring the games don't make a ton of money because they tend to be large, well-known corporate brands, like Coca-Cola or McDonald's, that have bought into these gigantic deals for no other reason than to keep their chief competitors out. There's no question of raising brand-awareness; after all, these are the most familiar brands in the world. Given such companies' existing sales, even major public events aren't going to budge the needle and may not even cover the travel costs of all the executives who, of course, must be present for the games. So no big profits here.

Product providers. The International Olympic Committee has stringent rules governing how many and what logos athletes can wear, so the competitors' bodies themselves can't be used as human billboards (as uniforms are, say, in professional soccer in Europe). The IoC is also determined to eradicate any attempts at so-called flash-mob advertising. So the chances of hugely increasing the sales of tennis rackets, swimming suits, or running shoes are pretty slim.

Athletes. Will the competitors themselves make much money? For most, there's a huge cost in taking part in the Olympics at all. Few have sponsorship or even government support. Athletes who win a gold medal in popular sports are more likely to make their careers, but the rest will gain little beyond memories.

Tourism. Whether London or the U.K. will see a net increase in tourism as a result of the games remains to be seen. Certainly at Heathrow today there seemed to be more people leaving the country than arriving. The Queen's Jubilee and the younger royals have done what they can to attract visitors, but leaders of arts organizations, museums, theaters, and heritage sites are despondent about the huge disincentive to visit Britain at a time when congestion and queues are all that seem to be on offer to cultural visitors. Meanwhile, the Brits themselves don't want to hang around for the traffic jams.

Residents. Boris Johnson, the media-crazed mayor of London, has recently been spouting all kinds of nonsense about how important it is that people not stay home during the Olympics, but instead fight their way through traffic and transportation jams to get into work. He's fighting a lost and stupid cause. If anything can help the British economy, it will be the productivity boost generated when executives decide to work from home. Maybe a morale boost too.

Ad agencies. This is a tricky one. London currently is festooned with sports-themed ads, making it clear that every company on earth had the stunningly original idea of doing ads around winning, performance, achievement. Most of the people I know in advertising have booked their full-year's revenue by now. So they're happy. What does the rest of the year look like? They don't care.

Ad agencies aside, I've managed to find no reputable research indicating that the Olympics makes money for anyone. That doesn't mean the games are bad. The Olympics are, after all, supposed to represent the virtues of amateurhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif competition (even as the games themselves are dominated by pros of on stripe or another). Still, maybe what they are good for is to remind us that there are others things that matter in life beyond making money.

more @ http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505125_162-57480881/do-the-olympics-make-money/?tag=nl.e664

Saturday, July 28, 2012

Microsoft crypto

Tools boast easy cracking of Microsoft crypto for businesses

ChapCrack and CloudCracker reveal sensitive corporate communications -- including passwords -- protected by the popular PPTP encryption protocol, which is based on an algorithm from Microsoft, a researcher says at Defcon.

Cryptography specialist Moxie Marlinspike released tools at Defcon today for easily cracking passwords in wireless and virtual private networks that use a popular encryption protocol based on an algorithm from Microsoft called MS-CHAPv2, news that will no doubt worry many a network administrator.

The tools crack WPA2 (Wi-Fi Protected Access) and VPN passwords used by corporations and organizations running networks that are protected by the PPTP (Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol), which uses MS-CHAPv2 for authentication.

ChapCrack captures the MS-CHAPv2 handshakes, or SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) negotiation communications, and converts them to a token that can be submitted to CloudCracker.

It takes less than a day for the service to return results in the form of another token that is plugged back into ChapCrack where the DES (Data Encryption Standard) keys are cracked. With that data, someone can see all of the information traveling across the Wi-Fi network, including sensitive corporate e-mails and passwords, and use passwords that were revealed to log in to corporate networks.

The tools are designed for penetration testers and network auditors to use to check the security of their WPA2 protected networks and VPNs, but they may well be used by people who want to steal data and get unauthorized access to networks.

The processing is being done on a supercomputer running customized chips created by David Hulton of Pico Computing. It will cost $200 for a crack to go through the whole keyspace and CloudCracker, Marlinspike said.

The PPTP protocol is old and has a poorly designed authentication handshake in MS-CHAPv2, he said. "We found we can reduce the security of the protocol to a single DES encryption," he added in an interview after his talk.
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Despite the technology being outdated and broken, it is used on a huge number of enterprise networks, including those with Windows XP-based computers. The PPTP protocol remains popular because Windows XP and other operating systems support it, and operating systems continue to support it because so many organizations are using it, Marlinspike said. "We're hoping that by doing this we can break out of the [expletive] cycle," he added.

more @ http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-57481855-83/tools-boast-easy-cracking-of-microsoft-crypto-for-businesses/?tag=mncol;topStories

Business

Don't let burning bridges fall on you

Good Read:

(MoneyWatch) COMMENTARY Every good businessperson knows the importance of building quality relationships. But I'm surprised at how often people don't give the same thought to the "quality" with which those relationships end, and the possible ways in which a bad breakup can come back to haunt them.

Most business relationships don't last forever; employees move on, customers come and go, suppliers are replaced. But what goes around does indeed come around, and paths can cross again, particularly within the same industry or in small communities. More than a few times, I've seen and experienced reminders of the importance of not burning bridges with:

Employees: Many, if not most of us, still see or hear from former employees, especially if they've stayed in the same general line of work. At times those employees may come back to work for us again, or they might prove to be valuable industry connections. Imagine if your former employee goes on to become the head buyer at your biggest customer (a very big deal, and it happens). The terms on which you parted company will revisit you, either in a very good way or a very bad one. Unless it is absolutely unavoidable, no matter what the reason for separating with an employee, I always stress the importance of doing so in the most amicable manner possible. Who knows? The guy you fired may be your boss some day.

Customers: Obviously we (usually) don't want to lose them and we can't please them all, but customers will leave us for various reasons. In the worst-case scenario, if we've tried to do everything we can to win them back and failed, we should try to displease them the least. They might come back later, they might not. But needless to say, their word-of-mouth -- especially in an era in which a comment can travel the world in seconds -- can have a huge impact on your business. Customer conflict and ill-will must be avoided at all costs.

Suppliers: Vendors take many forms, from the local company that supplies your janitorial supplies to the life blood manufacturer(s) whose products you distribute. So the risks of a relationship gone bad can vary from inconsequential to catastrophic. Some suppliers (like the janitorial supply company) may be easy to replace; the more mission-critical ones, not so much. Either way, you never know when you are going to need someone -- or need something from someone -- and burning bridges with suppliers can mean anything from the simple embarrassment of coming back with your tail between your legs looking for a favor, to the disastrous impact of losing a product line, future opportunities, and your reputation with other prospective partners.

Sales representatives: If your company relies on independent sales representatives to work with your accounts, remember that while your rep force may change, those salespeople are always in touch with your customers, probably more often and more directly than you are. In all likelihood, they will also be selling competing products. So even though you've gone your separate ways, your ex-reps are still sitting face-to-face with your customers, but now possibly selling against you. There's nothing you can do about the business competition, but being a class act when you split will at least reduce or eliminate the animosity that can lead to a nastier, vindictive kind of competition.

Competitors: Although this isn't the same dynamic as the constituencies listed above and doesn't typically involve similar conclusions, it is still very much a relationship, and one that is at least as important as the rest. Some of the companies I admire most pride themselves on having cordial relationships with competitors, when allowed to do so (we feel the same way at my company). That doesn't mean they don't compete aggressively -- it just means they understand that business is business, and it doesn't have to be personal or negative. To paraphrase the name of my own column, it is, in fact, possible to "compete with class." One of the common ways in which bad karma comes around in these situations is when companies get acquired, and suddenly a once-unfriendly or even "dirty" competitor finds itself under the thumb of a former rival. It often makes it very easy for the new owner to make personnel decisions, if you get my drift.

Of course, business situations are not always rainbows and unicorns, and sometimes there is no avoiding an unpleasant end to a relationship. But whenever and however possible, it is in the interest of all parties involved to minimize bad blood and keep a philosophical, businesslike attitude -- after all, you never know who you're going to meet... again.

100

100 things that you did not know about Africa

1. The human race is of African origin. The oldest known skeletal remains of anatomically modern humans (or homo sapiens) were excavated at sites in East Africa. Human remains were discovered at Omo in Ethiopia that were dated at 195,000 years old, the oldest known in the world.

2. Skeletons of pre-humans have been found in Africa that date back between 4 and 5 million years. The oldest known ancestral type of humanity is thought to have been the australopithecus ramidus, who lived at least 4.4 million years ago.

3. Africans were the first to organise fishing expeditions 90,000 years ago. At Katanda, a region in northeastern Zaïre (now Congo), was recovered a finely wrought series of harpoon points, all elaborately polished and barbed. Also uncovered was a tool, equally well crafted, believed to be a dagger. The discoveries suggested the existence of an early aquatic or fishing based culture.

4. Africans were the first to engage in mining 43,000 years ago. In 1964 a hematite mine was found in Swaziland at Bomvu Ridge in the Ngwenya mountain range. Ultimately 300,000 artefacts were recovered including thousands of stone-made mining tools. Adrian Boshier, one of the archaeologists on the site, dated the mine to a staggering 43,200 years old.

5. Africans pioneered basic arithmetic 25,000 years ago. The Ishango bone is a tool handle with notches carved into it found in the Ishango region of Zaïre (now called Congo) near Lake Edward. The bone tool was originally thought to have been over 8,000 years old, but a more sensitive recent dating has given dates of 25,000 years old. On the tool are 3 rows of notches. Row 1 shows three notches carved next to six, four carved next to eight, ten carved next to two fives and finally a seven. The 3 and 6, 4 and 8, and 10 and 5, represent the process of doubling. Row 2 shows eleven notches carved next to twenty-one notches, and nineteen notches carved next to nine notches. This represents 10 + 1, 20 + 1, 20 - 1 and 10 - 1. Finally, Row 3 shows eleven notches, thirteen notches, seventeen notches and nineteen notches. 11, 13, 17 and 19 are the prime numbers between 10 and 20.

6. Africans cultivated crops 12,000 years ago, the first known advances in agriculture. Professor Fred Wendorf discovered that people in Egypt’s Western Desert cultivated crops of barley, capers, chick-peas, dates, legumes, lentils and wheat. Their ancient tools were also recovered. There were grindstones, milling stones, cutting blades, hide scrapers, engraving burins, and mortars and pestles.

7. Africans mummified their dead 9,000 years ago. A mummified infant was found under the Uan Muhuggiag rock shelter in south western Libya. The infant was buried in the foetal position and was mummified using a very sophisticated technique that must have taken hundreds of years to evolve. The technique predates the earliest mummies known in Ancient Egypt by at least 1,000 years. Carbon dating is controversial but the mummy may date from 7438 (±220) BC.

8. Africans carved the world’s first colossal sculpture 7,000 or more years ago. The Great Sphinx of Giza was fashioned with the head of a man combined with the body of a lion. A key and important question raised by this monument was: How old is it? In October 1991 Professor Robert Schoch, a geologist from Boston University, demonstrated that the Sphinx was sculpted between 5000 BC and 7000 BC, dates that he considered conservative.

9. On the 1 March 1979, the New York Times carried an article on its front page also page sixteen that was entitled Nubian Monarchy called Oldest. In this article we were assured that: “Evidence of the oldest recognizable monarchy in human history, preceding the rise of the earliest Egyptian kings by several generations, has been discovered in artifacts from ancient Nubia” (i.e. the territory of the northern Sudan and the southern portion of modern Egypt.)

10. The ancient Egyptians had the same type of tropically adapted skeletal proportions as modern Black Africans. A 2003 paper appeared in American Journal of Physical Anthropology by Dr Sonia Zakrzewski entitled Variation in Ancient Egyptian Stature and Body Proportions where she states that: “The raw values in Table 6 suggest that Egyptians had the ‘super-Negroid’ body plan described by Robins (1983). The values for the brachial and crural indices show that the distal segments of each limb are longer relative to the proximal segments than in many ‘African’ populations.”

11. The ancient Egyptians had Afro combs. One writer tells us that the Egyptians “manufactured a very striking range of combs in ivory: the shape of these is distinctly African and is like the combs used even today by Africans and those of African descent.”

12. The Funerary Complex in the ancient Egyptian city of Saqqara is the oldest building that tourists regularly visit today. An outer wall, now mostly in ruins, surrounded the whole structure. Through the entrance are a series of columns, the first stone-built columns known to historians. The North House also has ornamental columns built into the walls that have papyrus-like capitals. Also inside the complex is the Ceremonial Court, made of limestone blocks that have been quarried and then shaped. In the centre of the complex is the Step Pyramid, the first of 90 Egyptian pyramids.

13. The first Great Pyramid of Giza, the most extraordinary building in history, was a staggering 481 feet tall - the equivalent of a 40-storey building. It was made of 2.3 million blocks of limestone and granite, some weighing 100 tons.

14. The ancient Egyptian city of Kahun was the world’s first planned city. Rectangular and walled, the city was divided into two parts. One part housed the wealthier inhabitants – the scribes, officials and foremen. The other part housed the ordinary people. The streets of the western section in particular, were straight, laid out on a grid, and crossed each other at right angles. A stone gutter, over half a metre wide, ran down the centre of every street.

15. Egyptian mansions were discovered in Kahun - each boasting 70 rooms, divided into four sections or quarters. There was a master’s quarter, quarters for women and servants, quarters for offices and finally, quarters for granaries, each facing a central courtyard. The master’s quarters had an open court with a stone water tank for bathing. Surrounding this was a colonnade.

16 The Labyrinth in the Egyptian city of Hawara with its massive layout, multiple courtyards, chambers and halls, was the very largest building in antiquity. Boasting three thousand rooms, 1,500 of them were above ground and the other 1,500 were underground.

17. Toilets and sewerage systems existed in ancient Egypt. One of the pharaohs built a city now known as Amarna. An American urban planner noted that: “Great importance was attached to cleanliness in Amarna as in other Egyptian cities. Toilets and sewers were in use to dispose waste. Soap was made for washing the body. Perfumes and essences were popular against body odour. A solution of natron was used to keep insects from houses . . . Amarna may have been the first planned ‘garden city’.”

18. Sudan has more pyramids than any other country on earth - even more than Egypt. There are at least 223 pyramids in the Sudanese cities of Al Kurru, Nuri, Gebel Barkal and Meroë. They are generally 20 to 30 metres high and steep sided.

19. The Sudanese city of Meroë is rich in surviving monuments. Becoming the capital of the Kushite Empire between 590 BC until AD 350, there are 84 pyramids in this city alone, many built with their own miniature temple. In addition, there are ruins of a bath house sharing affinities with those of the Romans. Its central feature is a large pool approached by a flight of steps with waterspouts decorated with lion heads.

20. Bling culture has a long and interesting history. Gold was used to decorate ancient Sudanese temples. One writer reported that: “Recent excavations at Meroe and Mussawwarat es-Sufra revealed temples with walls and statues covered with gold leaf”.

21. In around 300 BC, the Sudanese invented a writing script that had twenty-three letters of which four were vowels and there was also a word divider. Hundreds of ancient texts have survived that were in this script. Some are on display in the British Museum.

22. In central Nigeria, West Africa’s oldest civilisation flourished between 1000 BC and 300 BC. Discovered in 1928, the ancient culture was called the Nok Civilisation, named after the village in which the early artefacts were discovered. Two modern scholars, declare that “[a]fter calibration, the period of Nok art spans from 1000 BC until 300 BC”. The site itself is much older going back as early as 4580 or 4290 BC.

23. West Africans built in stone by 1100 BC. In the Tichitt-Walata region of Mauritania, archaeologists have found “large stone masonry villages” that date back to 1100 BC. The villages consisted of roughly circular compounds connected by “well-defined streets”.

24. By 250 BC, the foundations of West Africa’s oldest cities were established such as Old Djenné in Mali.

25. Kumbi Saleh, the capital of Ancient Ghana, flourished from 300 to 1240 AD. Located in modern day Mauritania, archaeological excavations have revealed houses, almost habitable today, for want of renovation and several storeys high. They had underground rooms, staircases and connecting halls. Some had nine rooms. One part of the city alone is estimated to have housed 30,000 people.
26. West Africa had walled towns and cities in the pre-colonial period. Winwood Reade, an English historian visited West Africa in the nineteenth century and commented that: “There are . . . thousands of large walled cities resembling those of Europe in the Middle Ages, or of ancient Greece.”

27. Lord Lugard, an English official, estimated in 1904 that there were 170 walled towns still in existence in the whole of just the Kano province of northern Nigeria.

28. Cheques are not quite as new an invention as we were led to believe. In the tenth century, an Arab geographer, Ibn Haukal, visited a fringe region of Ancient Ghana. Writing in 951 AD, he told of a cheque for 42,000 golden dinars written to a merchant in the city of Audoghast by his partner in Sidjilmessa.

29. Ibn Haukal, writing in 951 AD, informs us that the King of Ghana was “the richest king on the face of the earth” whose pre-eminence was due to the quantity of gold nuggets that had been amassed by the himself and by his predecessors.

30. The Nigerian city of Ile-Ife was paved in 1000 AD on the orders of a female ruler with decorations that originated in Ancient America. Naturally, no-one wants to explain how this took place approximately 500 years before the time of Christopher Columbus!

31. West Africa had bling culture in 1067 AD. One source mentions that when the Emperor of Ghana gives audience to his people: “he sits in a pavilion around which stand his horses caparisoned in cloth of gold: behind him stand ten pages holding shields and gold-mounted swords: and on his right hand are the sons of the princes of his empire, splendidly clad and with gold plaited into their hair . . . The gate of the chamber is guarded by dogs of an excellent breed . . . they wear collars of gold and silver.”

32. Glass windows existed at that time. The residence of the Ghanaian Emperor in 1116 AD was: “A well-built castle, thoroughly fortified, decorated inside with sculptures and pictures, and having glass windows.”

33. The Grand Mosque in the Malian city of Djenné, described as “the largest adobe [clay] building in the world”, was first raised in 1204 AD. It was built on a square plan where each side is 56 metres in length. It has three large towers on one side, each with projecting wooden buttresses.

34. One of the great achievements of the Yoruba was their urban culture. “By the year A.D. 1300,” says a modern scholar, “the Yoruba people built numerous walled cities surrounded by farms”. The cities were Owu, Oyo, Ijebu, Ijesa, Ketu, Popo, Egba, Sabe, Dassa, Egbado, Igbomina, the sixteen Ekiti principalities, Owo and Ondo.

35. Yoruba metal art of the mediaeval period was of world class. One scholar wrote that Yoruba art “would stand comparison with anything which Ancient Egypt, Classical Greece and Rome, or Renaissance Europe had to offer.”

36. In the Malian city of Gao stands the Mausoleum of Askia the Great, a weird sixteenth century edifice that resembles a step pyramid.

37. Thousands of mediaeval tumuli have been found across West Africa. Nearly 7,000 were discovered in north-west Senegal alone spread over nearly 1,500 sites. They were probably built between 1000 and 1300 AD.

38. Excavations at the Malian city of Gao carried out by Cambridge University revealed glass windows. One of the finds was entitled: “Fragments of alabaster window surrounds and a piece of pink window glass, Gao 10th – 14th century.”

39. In 1999 the BBC produced a television series entitled Millennium. The programme devoted to the fourteenth century opens with the following disclosure: “In the fourteenth century, the century of the scythe, natural disasters threatened civilisations with extinction. The Black Death kills more people in Europe, Asia and North Africa than any catastrophe has before. Civilisations which avoid the plague thrive. In West Africa the Empire of Mali becomes the richest in the world.”

40. Malian sailors got to America in 1311 AD, 181 years before Columbus. An Egyptian scholar, Ibn Fadl Al-Umari, published on this sometime around 1342. In the tenth chapter of his book, there is an account of two large maritime voyages ordered by the predecessor of Mansa Musa, a king who inherited the Malian throne in 1312. This mariner king is not named by Al-Umari, but modern writers identify him as Mansa Abubakari II.

41. On a pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324 AD, a Malian ruler, Mansa Musa, brought so much money with him that his visit resulted in the collapse of gold prices in Egypt and Arabia. It took twelve years for the economies of the region to normalise.

42. West African gold mining took place on a vast scale. One modern writer said that: “It is estimated that the total amount of gold mined in West Africa up to 1500 was 3,500 tons, worth more than $****30 billion in today’s market.”

43. The old Malian capital of Niani had a 14th century building called the Hall of Audience. It was an surmounted by a dome, adorned with arabesques of striking colours. The windows of an upper floor were plated with wood and framed in silver; those of a lower floor were plated with wood, framed in gold.

44. Mali in the 14th century was highly urbanised. Sergio Domian, an Italian art and architecture scholar, wrote the following about this period: “Thus was laid the foundation of an urban civilisation. At the height of its power, Mali had at least 400 cities, and the interior of the Niger Delta was very densely populated”.

45. The Malian city of Timbuktu had a 14th century population of 115,000 - 5 times larger than mediaeval London. Mansa Musa, built the Djinguerebere Mosque in the fourteenth century. There was the University Mosque in which 25,000 students studied and the Oratory of Sidi Yayia. There were over 150 Koran schools in which 20,000 children were instructed. London, by contrast, had a total 14th century population of 20,000 people.

46. National Geographic recently described Timbuktu as the Paris of the mediaeval world, on account of its intellectual culture. According to Professor Henry Louis Gates, 25,000 university students studied there.

47. Many old West African families have private library collections that go back hundreds of years. The Mauritanian cities of Chinguetti and Oudane have a total of 3,450 hand written mediaeval books. There may be another 6,000 books still surviving in the other city of Walata. Some date back to the 8th century AD. There are 11,000 books in private collections in Niger. Finally, in Timbuktu, Mali, there are about 700,000 surviving books.

48. A collection of one thousand six hundred books was considered a small library for a West African scholar of the 16th century. Professor Ahmed Baba of Timbuktu is recorded as saying that he had the smallest library of any of his friends - he had only 1600 volumes.

49. Concerning these old manuscripts, Michael Palin, in his TV series Sahara, said the imam of Timbuktu “has a collection of scientific texts that clearly show the planets circling the sun. They date back hundreds of years . . . Its convincing evidence that the scholars of Timbuktu knew a lot more than their counterparts in Europe. In the fifteenth century in Timbuktu the mathematicians knew about the rotation of the planets, knew about the details of the eclipse, they knew things which we had to wait for 150 almost 200 years to know in Europe when Galileo and Copernicus came up with these same calculations and were given a very hard time for it.”

50. The Songhai Empire of 16th century West Africa had a government position called Minister for Etiquette and Protocol.
51. The mediaeval Nigerian city of Benin was built to “a scale comparable with the Great Wall of China”. There was a vast system of defensive walling totalling 10,000 miles in all. Even before the full extent of the city walling had become apparent the Guinness Book of Records carried an entry in the 1974 edition that described the city as: “The largest earthworks in the world carried out prior to the mechanical era.”

52. Benin art of the Middle Ages was of the highest quality. An official of the Berlin Museum für Völkerkunde once stated that: “These works from Benin are equal to the very finest examples of European casting technique. Benvenuto Cellini could not have cast them better, nor could anyone else before or after him . . . Technically, these bronzes represent the very highest possible achievement.”

53. Winwood Reade described his visit to the Ashanti Royal Palace of Kumasi in 1874: “We went to the king’s palace, which consists of many courtyards, each surrounded with alcoves and verandahs, and having two gates or doors, so that each yard was a thoroughfare . . . But the part of the palace fronting the street was a stone house, Moorish in its style . . . with a flat roof and a parapet, and suites of apartments on the first floor. It was built by Fanti masons many years ago. The rooms upstairs remind me of Wardour Street. Each was a perfect Old Curiosity Shop. Books in many languages, Bohemian glass, clocks, silver plate, old furniture, Persian rugs, Kidderminster carpets, pictures and engravings, numberless chests and coffers. A sword bearing the inscription From Queen Victoria to the King of Ashantee. A copy of the Times, 17 October 1843. With these were many specimens of Moorish and Ashanti handicraft.”

54. In the mid-nineteenth century, William Clarke, an English visitor to Nigeria, remarked that: “As good an article of cloth can be woven by the Yoruba weavers as by any people . . . in durability, their cloths far excel the prints and home-spuns of Manchester.”

55. The recently discovered 9th century Nigerian city of Eredo was found to be surrounded by a wall that was 100 miles long and seventy feet high in places. The internal area was a staggering 400 square miles.

56. On the subject of cloth, Kongolese textiles were also distinguished. Various European writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries wrote of the delicate crafts of the peoples living in eastern Kongo and adjacent regions who manufactured damasks, sarcenets, satins, taffeta, cloth of tissue and velvet. Professor DeGraft-Johnson made the curious observation that: “Their brocades, both high and low, were far more valuable than the Italian.”

57. On Kongolese metallurgy of the Middle Ages, one modern scholar wrote that: “There is no doubting . . . the existence of an expert metallurgical art in the ancient Kongo . . . The Bakongo were aware of the toxicity of lead vapours. They devised preventative and curative methods, both pharmacological (massive doses of pawpaw and palm oil) and mechanical (exerting of pressure to free the digestive tract), for combating lead poisoning.”

58. In Nigeria, the royal palace in the city of Kano dates back to the fifteenth century. Begun by Muhammad Rumfa (ruled 1463-99) it has gradually evolved over generations into a very imposing complex. A colonial report of the city from 1902, described it as “a network of buildings covering an area of 33 acres and surrounded by a wall 20 to 30 feet high outside and 15 feet inside . . . in itself no mean citadel”.

59. A sixteenth century traveller visited the central African civilisation of Kanem-Borno and commented that the emperor’s cavalry had golden “stirrups, spurs, bits and buckles.” Even the ruler’s dogs had “chains of the finest gold”.

60. One of the government positions in mediaeval Kanem-Borno was Astronomer Royal.

61. Ngazargamu, the capital city of Kanem-Borno, became one of the largest cities in the seventeenth century world. By 1658 AD, the metropolis, according to an architectural scholar housed “about quarter of a million people”. It had 660 streets. Many were wide and unbending, reflective of town planning.

62. The Nigerian city of Surame flourished in the sixteenth century. Even in ruin it was an impressive sight, built on a horizontal vertical grid. A modern scholar describes it thus: “The walls of Surame are about 10 miles in circumference and include many large bastions or walled suburbs running out at right angles to the main wall. The large compound at Kanta is still visible in the centre, with ruins of many buildings, one of which is said to have been two-storied. The striking feature of the walls and whole ruins is the extensive use of stone and tsokuwa (laterite gravel) or very hard red building mud, evidently brought from a distance. There is a big mound of this near the north gate about 8 feet in height. The walls show regular courses of masonry to a height of 20 feet and more in several places. The best preserved portion is that known as sirati (the bridge) a little north of the eastern gate . . . The main city walls here appear to have provided a very strongly guarded entrance about 30 feet wide.”

63. The Nigerian city of Kano in 1851 produced an estimated 10 million pairs of sandals and 5 million hides each year for export.

64. In 1246 AD Dunama II of Kanem-Borno exchanged embassies with Al-Mustansir, the king of Tunis. He sent the North African court a costly present, which apparently included a giraffe. An old chronicle noted that the rare animal “created a sensation in Tunis”.

65. By the third century BC the city of Carthage on the coast of Tunisia was opulent and impressive. It had a population of 700,000 and may even have approached a million. Lining both sides of three streets were rows of tall houses six storeys high.

66. The Ethiopian city of Axum has a series of 7 giant obelisks that date from perhaps 300 BC to 300 AD. They have details carved into them that represent windows and doorways of several storeys. The largest obelisk, now fallen, is in fact “the largest monolith ever made anywhere in the world”. It is 108 feet long, weighs a staggering 500 tons, and represents a thirteen-storey building.

67. Ethiopia minted its own coins over 1,500 years ago. One scholar wrote that: “Almost no other contemporary state anywhere in the world could issue in gold, a statement of sovereignty achieved only by Rome, Persia, and the Kushan kingdom in northern India at the time.”

68. The Ethiopian script of the 4th century AD influenced the writing script of Armenia. A Russian historian noted that: “Soon after its creation, the Ethiopic vocalised script began to influence the scripts of Armenia and Georgia. D. A. Olderogge suggested that Mesrop Mashtotz used the vocalised Ethiopic script when he invented the Armenian alphabet.”

69. “In the first half of the first millennium CE,” says a modern scholar, Ethiopia “was ranked as one of the world’s greatest empires”. A Persian cleric of the third century AD identified it as the third most important state in the world after Persia and Rome.

70. Ethiopia has 11 underground mediaeval churches built by being carved out of the ground. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries AD, Roha became the new capital of the Ethiopians. Conceived as a New Jerusalem by its founder, Emperor Lalibela (c.1150-1230), it contains 11 churches, all carved out of the rock of the mountains by hammer and chisel. All of the temples were carved to a depth of 11 metres or so below ground level. The largest is the House of the Redeemer, a staggering 33.7 metres long, 23.7 metres wide and 11.5 metres deep.

71. Lalibela is not the only place in Ethiopia to have such wonders. A cotemporary archaeologist reports research that was conducted in the region in the early 1970’s when: “startling numbers of churches built in caves or partially or completely cut from the living rock were revealed not only in Tigre and Lalibela but as far south as Addis Ababa. Soon at least 1,500 were known. At least as many more probably await revelation.”

72. In 1209 AD Emperor Lalibela of Ethiopia sent an embassy to Cairo bringing the sultan unusual gifts including an elephant, a hyena, a zebra, and a giraffe.

73. In Southern Africa, there are at least 600 stone built ruins in the regions of Zimbabwe, Mozambique and South Africa. These ruins are called Mazimbabwe in Shona, the Bantu language of the builders, and means great revered house and “signifies court”.

74. The Great Zimbabwe was the largest of these ruins. It consists of 12 clusters of buildings, spread over 3 square miles. Its outer walls were made from 100,000 tons of granite bricks. In the fourteenth century, the city housed 18,000 people, comparable in size to that of London of the same period.

75. Bling culture existed in this region. At the time of our last visit, the Horniman Museum in London had exhibits of headrests with the caption: “Headrests have been used in Africa since the time of the Egyptian pharaohs. Remains of some headrests, once covered in gold foil, have been found in the ruins of Great Zimbabwe and burial sites like Mapungubwe dating to the twelfth century after Christ.”

76. Dr Albert Churchward, author of Signs and Symbols of Primordial Man, pointed out that writing was found in one of the stone built ruins: “Lt.-Col. E. L. de Cordes . . . who was in South Africa for three years, informed the writer that in one of the ‘Ruins’ there is a ‘stone-chamber,’ with a vast quantity of Papyri, covered with old Egyptian hieroglyphics. A Boer hunter discovered this, and a large quantity was used to light a fire with, and yet still a larger quantity remained there now.”

77. On bling culture, one seventeenth century visitor to southern African empire of Monomotapa, that ruled over this vast region, wrote that: “The people dress in various ways: at court of the Kings their grandees wear cloths of rich silk, damask, satin, gold and silk cloth; these are three widths of satin, each width four covados [2.64m], each sewn to the next, sometimes with gold lace in between, trimmed on two sides, like a carpet, with a gold and silk fringe, sewn in place with a two fingers’ wide ribbon, woven with gold roses on silk.”

78. Southern Africans mined gold on an epic scale. One modern writer tells us that: “The estimated amount of gold ore mined from the entire region by the ancients was staggering, exceeding 43 million tons. The ore yielded nearly 700 tons of pure gold which today would be valued at over $******7.5 billion.”

79. Apparently the Monomotapan royal palace at Mount Fura had chandeliers hanging from the ceiling. An eighteenth century geography book provided the following data: “The inside consists of a great variety of sumptuous apartments, spacious and lofty halls, all adorned with a magnificent cotton tapestry, the manufacture of the country. The floors, cielings [sic], beams and rafters are all either gilt or plated with gold curiously wrought, as are also the chairs of state, tables, benches &c. The candle-sticks and branches are made of ivory inlaid with gold, and hang from the cieling by chains of the same metal, or of silver gilt.”

80. Monomotapa had a social welfare system. Antonio Bocarro, a Portuguese contemporary, informs us that the Emperor: “shows great charity to the blind and maimed, for these are called the king’s poor, and have land and revenues for their subsistence, and when they wish to pass through the kingdoms, wherever they come food and drinks are given to them at the public cost as long as they remain there, and when they leave that place to go to another they are provided with what is necessary for their journey, and a guide, and some one to carry their wallet to the next village. In every place where they come there is the same obligation.”

81. Many southern Africans have indigenous and pre-colonial words for ‘gun’. Scholars have generally been reluctant to investigate or explain this fact.

82. Evidence discovered in 1978 showed that East Africans were making steel for more than 1,500 years: “Assistant Professor of Anthropology Peter Schmidt and Professor of Engineering Donald H. Avery have found as long as 2,000 years ago Africans living on the western shores of Lake Victoria had produced carbon steel in preheated forced draft furnaces, a method that was technologically more sophisticated than any developed in Europe until the mid-nineteenth century.”

83. Ruins of a 300 BC astronomical observatory was found at Namoratunga in Kenya. Africans were mapping the movements of stars such as Triangulum, Aldebaran, Bellatrix, Central Orion, etcetera, as well as the moon, in order to create a lunar calendar of 354 days.

84. Autopsies and caesarean operations were routinely and effectively carried out by surgeons in pre-colonial Uganda. The surgeons routinely used antiseptics, anaesthetics and cautery iron. Commenting on a Ugandan caesarean operation that appeared in the Edinburgh Medical Journal in 1884, one author wrote: “The whole conduct of the operation . . . suggests a skilled long-practiced surgical team at work conducting a well-tried and familiar operation with smooth efficiency.”

85. Sudan in the mediaeval period had churches, cathedrals, monasteries and castles. Their ruins still exist today.

86. The mediaeval Nubian Kingdoms kept archives. From the site of Qasr Ibrim legal texts, documents and correspondence were discovered. An archaeologist informs us that: “On the site are preserved thousands of documents in Meroitic, Latin, Greek, Coptic, Old Nubian, Arabic and Turkish.”

87. Glass windows existed in mediaeval Sudan. Archaeologists found evidence of window glass at the Sudanese cities of Old Dongola and Hambukol.

88. Bling culture existed in the mediaeval Sudan. Archaeologists found an individual buried at the Monastery of the Holy Trinity in the city of Old Dongola. He was clad in an extremely elaborate garb consisting of costly textiles of various fabrics including gold thread. At the city of Soba East, there were individuals buried in fine clothing, including items with golden thread.

89. Style and fashion existed in mediaeval Sudan. A dignitary at Jebel Adda in the late thirteenth century AD was interned with a long coat of red and yellow patterned damask folded over his body. Underneath, he wore plain cotton trousers of long and baggy cut. A pair of red leather slippers with turned up toes lay at the foot of the coffin. The body was wrapped in enormous pieces of gold brocaded striped silk.

90. Sudan in the ninth century AD had housing complexes with bath rooms and piped water. An archaeologist wrote that Old Dongola, the capital of Makuria, had: “a[n] . . . eighth to . . . ninth century housing complex. The houses discovered here differ in their hitherto unencountered spatial layout as well as their functional programme (water supply installation, bathroom with heating system) and interiors decorated with murals.”

91. In 619 AD, the Nubians sent a gift of a giraffe to the Persians.

92. The East Coast, from Somalia to Mozambique, has ruins of well over 50 towns and cities. They flourished from the ninth to the sixteenth centuries AD.

93. Chinese records of the fifteenth century AD note that Mogadishu had houses of “four or five storeys high”.

94. Gedi, near the coast of Kenya, is one of the East African ghost towns. Its ruins, dating from the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries, include the city walls, the palace, private houses, the Great Mosque, seven smaller mosques, and three pillar tombs.

95. The ruined mosque in the Kenyan city of Gedi had a water purifier made of limestone for recycling water.

96. The palace in the Kenyan city of Gedi contains evidence of piped water controlled by taps. In addition it had bathrooms and indoor toilets.

97. A visitor in 1331 AD considered the Tanzanian city of Kilwa to be of world class. He wrote that it was the “principal city on the coast the greater part of whose inhabitants are Zanj of very black complexion.” Later on he says that: “Kilwa is one of the most beautiful and well-constructed cities in the world. The whole of it is elegantly built.”

98. Bling culture existed in early Tanzania. A Portuguese chronicler of the sixteenth century wrote that: “[T]hey are finely clad in many rich garments of gold and silk and cotton, and the women as well; also with much gold and silver chains and bracelets, which they wear on their legs and arms, and many jewelled earrings in their ears”.

99. In 1961 a British archaeologist, found the ruins of Husuni Kubwa, the royal palace of the Tanzanian city of Kilwa. It had over a hundred rooms, including a reception hall, galleries, courtyards, terraces and an octagonal swimming pool.

100. In 1414 the Kenyan city of Malindi sent ambassadors to China carrying a gift that created a sensation at the Imperial Court. It was, of course, a giraffe.

cuba

U.S. tourist ordered to pay $6,500 fine for illegal Cuba trip

In the latest twist to the USA's 50-year-old trade sanctions against communist Cuba, a New York man has agreed to pay a $6,500 fine to end a long-running dispute with the U.S. Treasury Department over an unauthorized trip he made to the Caribbean "isla non grata" as a tourist 14 years ago.

Zachary Sanders, now 38, had been living and teaching English in Mexico when he decided to visit Cuba for a couple of weeks in 1998. According to Reuters, Sanders did not obtain the required U.S. Treasury license, and a U.S. Customs agent became suspicious when Sanders returned to the United States through the Bahamas without declaring he had been to Cuba. The agent also seized an undeclared box of Cuban cigars from Sanders' luggage.

In 2002, the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) reviewed his case during a Bush administration crackdown on travel to Cuba, notifying Sanders of its intent to fine him for failing to return the form, Reuters says. Six years later, an administrative law judge fined him $1,000 and on the final business day of the Bush administration in January 2009, a Treasury administrator raised the fine to $9,000. He reasoned that the original fine was too low to discourage people from ignoring OFAC forms.

Sanders sued OFAC, the Treasury Department and the Justice Department in federal court in 2009, appealing the fine as arbitrary and capricious, Reuters adds. He lost and then turned to the U.S. Court of Appeals in New York, where Tuesday's settlement agreement was filed.

Sanders' lawyer, Shane Kadidal of the Center for Constitutional Rights, said Sanders' fine was still far greater than most Americans pay for violating the travel ban, and suggested he had been singled out because he was "an ideological traveler."

n increasing number of Americans are visiting Cuba legally under tightly scripted "people-to-people" programs authorized by the Obama administration a year ago, or through licenses for artists, musicians, humanitarian workers and others. But civil penalties for unsanctioned tourist travel to Cuba can range up to $7,500 for the first trip and $10,000 for subsequent trips. OFAC resolved more than 200 such cases for "a standard $1,000 settlement" from 2001 to 2004, Kadidal said, and dismissed many others with no fine at all.

Indeed, says Cuba travel expert Christopher Baker, "what's interesting here is that (Sanders) is being fined for failure to return the form, not for actual travel to Cuba."

" To my knowledge, only two people have actually been fined for illegal travel to Cuba," says Baker, who addresses the issue on his blog. "Thousands of others have paid up when they received a 'notification of intent to levy a fine,' which is a preliminary stage that can be challenged. Most importantly, no judges arehttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif in place to adjudicate any challenge, the sole exception being a brief tenure during the second Bush administration."

"Only a tiny fraction of the many thousands of U.S. citizens who continue to visit Cuba annually without a license are ever identified as such by OFAC," Baker adds. "Under the Obama administration, OFAC has refocused to more urgent priorities and during my 13 visits to Cuba within the past year, only a very small percentage of visitors returning from Cuba are being asked to demonstrate proof of legal travel."

More @ http://travel.usatoday.com/destinations/dispatches/post/2012/07/us-tourist-ordered-to-pay-6500-fine-for-illegal-cuba-trip/812249/1

Spider-Woman

OAuth 2.0

OAuth 2.0 leader resigns, says standard is 'bad'

The standard grew too far away from its roots as a simple Web authentication technology, author Eran Hammer-Lahav says, and now is insecure and overly broad.

OAuth 2.0 promised to improve authentication on the Net, but its author has resigned from the project after concluding the standard "is a bad protocol."

"When compared with OAuth 1.0, the 2.0 specification is more complex, less interoperable, less useful, more incomplete, and most importantly, less secure," Eran Hammer-Lahav said in a blog post yesterday. "I resigned my role as lead author and editor, [withdrew] my name from the specification, and left the working group...Deciding to move on from an effort I have led for over five years was agonizing."

OAuth is designed to let one Web site or software service grant limited access to another, a process that simplifies some of the ever-growing hassles of usernames and passwords. For example, OAuth gives a way for a third-party app to get permission from Flickr to post photos to a Flickr user's account. Hammer-Lahav has likened it to giving somebody a limited-privilege valet key rather than the full-privilege key that can unlock everything in a person's car.

OAuth 2.0 was supposed to improve on version 1.0, released in 2007, and it was supposed to be finished by the end of 2010, Hamer Lahav said when introducing OAuth 2.0. It's now reached the eve of completion, but OAuth 2.0's standardization at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) fell prey to the priorities of enterprise technology companies, he said.

"At the core of the problem is the strong and unbridgeable conflict between the Web and the enterprise worlds. The OAuth working group at the IETF started with strong web presence. But as the work dragged on (and on) past its first year, those Web folks left along with every member of the original 1.0 community. The group that was left was largely all enterprise... and me," he said. "The resulting specification is a designed-by-committee patchwork of compromises that serves mostly the enterprise."

He's not the only one with concerns.

"The new technology coming down the pipe, OAuth 2 and friends, is way too hard for developers; there need to be better tools and services if we're going to make this whole Internet thing smoother and safer," said Tim Bray, announcing his new role at Google working on online identity issues. Bray has a lot of cred: he helped create XML before running a lot of Android developer relations.
http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
And Ian Hickson, editor of the HTML "living standard" (but no longer the W3C's HTML5 "snapshot" of that standard) also expressed concerns about the IETF's ways.

"I wish you had had that experience before you convinced me to let the IETF get their hands on WebSocket," Hickson said in a comment to Hammer-Lahav's post, referring to a technology that enables fast communication between Web browsers and Web servers. "Same thing happened there, I ended up getting my name removed from that spec too. What a disaster."

more @ http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57481166-93/oauth-2.0-leader-resigns-says-standard-is-bad/?tag=mncol;cnetRiver

Thursday, July 26, 2012

Hacking Android phones

Hacking experts find new ways to attack Android phones

LAS VEGAS (Reuters) - Hacking experts on Wednesday demonstrated ways to attack Android smartphones using methods they said work on virtually all such devices in use today, despite recent efforts by search engine giant Google to boost protection.

Experts showed off their prowess at the Black Hat hacking conference in Las Vegas, where some 6,500 corporate and government security technology workers gathered to learn about emerging threats to their networks.

"Google is making progress, but the authors of malicious software are moving forward," said Sean Schulte of Trustwave's SpiderLabs.

Google spokeswoman Gina Scigliano declined to comment on the security concerns or the new research.

Accuvant researcher Charlie Miller demonstrated a method for delivering malicious code to Android phones using a new Android feature known as near field communications.

"I can take over your phone," Miller said.

Near field communications allow users to share photos with friends, make payments or exchange other data by bringing Android phones within a few centimeters of similarly equipped devices such as another phone or a payment terminal.

Miller said he figured out how to create a device the size of a postage stamp that could be stuck in an inconspicuous place such as near a cash register at a restaurant. When an Android user walks by, the phone would get infected, said Miller.

He spent five years as a global network exploit analyst at the U.S. National Security Agency, where his tasks included breaking into foreign computer systems.

"WILD WEST"

Miller and another hacking expert, Georg Wicherski of CrowdStrike, have also infected an Android phone with a piece of malicious code that Wicherski unveiled in February.

That piece of software exploits a security flaw in the Android browser that was publicly disclosed by Google's Chrome browser development team, according to Wicherski.

Google has fixed the flaw in Chrome, which is frequently updated, so that most users are now protected, he said.

But Wicherski said Android users are still vulnerable because carriers and device manufacturers have not pushed those fixes or patches out to users.

Marc Maiffret, chief technology officer of the security firm BeyondTrust, said: "Google has added some great security features, but nobody has them."

Experts say iPhones and iPads don't face the same problem because Apple has been able to get carriers to push out security updates fairly quickly after they are released.

Two Trustwave researchers told attendees about a technique they discovered for evading Google's "Bouncer" technology for identifying malicious programs in its Google Play Store.

They created a text-message blocking application that uses a legitimate programming tool known as java script bridge. Java script bridge lets developers remotely add new features to a program without using the normal Android update process.

Companies including Facebook and LinkedIn use java script bridge for legitimate purposes, according to Trustwave, but it could also be exploited maliciously.

To prove their point, they loaded malicious code onto one of their phones and remotely gained control of the browser. Once they did that, they could force it to download more code and grant them total control.

"Hopefully Google can solve the problem quickly," said Nicholas Percoco, senior vice president of Trustwave's SpiderLabs. "For now, Android is the Wild West."

more @ http://www.cnbc.com/id/48329778

Cuba

Signs your career is in trouble

8 signs your career is in trouble

MoneyWatch) COMMENTARY Most people go to work, get a paycheck, and spend it. Not you. If I've got you pegged right (and I'm pretty sure I do), you've got more ambition than that. A lot more. And you're smarter than that. A lot smarter. Good for you.

As we used to say back in Brooklyn, that and 90 cents will get you on the subway. Don't tell me how much it costs now; I don't want to know.

In all seriousness, brains and ambition is a pretty good start to launch a career, but it's not enough, not by a long shot. You see, there are lots of things in the corporate world that affect you, but you've got to know how to read the tea leaves.

Pictures: Self-made success stories
10 career limiting mistakes to avoid
How to spot bad career advice

So today I'm going to clue you in to the signs you should pay attention to, what they really mean beyond the corporate spin, and what you should do about them. This is important stuff so pay attention. Here's what it means when...

Everyone has moderately good things to say about you.

What it means: You're going nowhere. I know that sounds harsh, but it's true and here's why. Stars get ahead, moderate performers don't. Even if you think you're a star, if the powers that be don't agree, guess who gets to make the call? Right, not you.

What you should do: Ask questions. Go straight to your boss, your bosses, your peers, whoever, and ask them straight out how you can improve, what you can do to get from good to great. Above all, don't be defensive and make them sorry they were honest with you.

Your boss says great things about you but you're still passed over for raises and promotions.

What it means: He's sugarcoating the truth, probably because he's a wimpy boss who doesn't want to be the bad guy and doesn't have the guts to do the right thing and tell you straight what's going on.

What you should do: Same as above except ask, "What do I need to do to get promoted around here?" Again, be direct but remember that the guy clearly doesn't do confrontation, so be nice about it.

Your boss has given you the same negative feedback more than once.

What it means: You're not listening. You may think you're listening, but you're really not or you just don't want to hear what she's telling you.

What you should do: Listen. Ask leading questions like, "How can I do better?" If you disagree with the feedback, that's fine. It really doesn't matter. Just remember that she's still the boss, so at the end of the day what she says goes.

There are layoffs at your company.

What it means: Unless it's a one-shot deal where there's a market correction and the company cuts just once and deep, it's a really bad sign. Yes, I know we live in a time when layoffs are common, but they're not nearly as common at consistently good, healthy, growing companies. And those are the kind you want to work for.

What you should do: You may not have gotten axed this round, but that doesn't mean it won't happen down the road. It's probably a good idea to update your resume and LinkedIn profile and start networking a little more aggressively. Don't panic and bolt -- you might get a half decent termination package. Just be prepared.

Lots of good people are jumping ship.

What it means: Occam's Razor says the simplest answer is usually the correct one. If lots of good people are jumping ship, it's either sprung a leak or there's an iceberg up ahead.

What you should do: Start by asking one or two of your exiting colleagues what they know that you don't. If that's not possible, then you know the drill: fire up your resume and start networking -- now.

Everything is a deep dark secret.

What it means: When everyone's walking around tight-lipped, guarded, or suspiciously paranoid, bad things are afoot. If your company's always been like that, then it's dysfunctional, which is even worse.

What you should do: Unless you work for, say, Apple (AAPL) or Trader Joe's, where secrecy is part of the culture, it's time to update the resume again.

Your company isn't growing.

What it means: These days it's popular to question the relentless capitalist drive toward growth and profits. Let me tell you, that's just a bunch of Utopian garbage from people who are clueless about how business really works. If your company isn't growing, it's stagnating. If it's stagnating, then the market is passing it by. And that's just a slow, painful death spiral.

What you should do: Now that you know you're not on a rocketship to the stars, it's probably time to get out there and start looking around for a company that's actually going somewhere.

Your company isn't making money.

What it means: One or two quarters in the red is no big deal. But if it's consistently up and down, that's a sign management doesn't know how to run a company or that the company's products aren't cutting it. Speaking of which, if yhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifour company isn't at least No. 1 or No. 2 in the markets it serves, that's also a bad sign.

What you should do: Losing money doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad place to work. Depending on the balance sheet -- cash, debt, and all that -- companies can go for years and years without going under. But if they start cutting corners and perks, don't say I didn't warn you.

more @ http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505125_162-57475188/8-signs-your-career-is-in-trouble/?tag=nl.e713

Wednesday, July 25, 2012

Job application cover-letter

5 job application cover-letter disasters

1. Be sure to include one. Many people seem to think that since cover letters are optional, it's okay to omit them. I've even some trendy new job-hunting advice recommending that cover letters have fallen out of style, and so you should only submit a resume. No! The cover letter is your opportunity to own the narrative, to tell the hiring manager why you're a great fit for the job and passionate about getting an opportunity to prove yourself. If you don't include a cover letter, the hiring manager needs to scan the resume -- which takes time -- to try to figure out if you have the right skills and experience for the position. That also requires parsing language that might be specific to your last company or industry and translates poorly to the local dialect of the company you're applying to. Bottom line: If you don't take the time to send me (the hiring manager) a cover letter, your resume almost certainly goes directly into the recycling bin.

2. Don't be arrogant. Your cover letter tells me things about your personality that aren't apparent in the resume. Regardless of how skilled or talented you are, I'm going to have to work with you every day after I hire you. It's important that I can get along with you. Indeed, many companies ensure that peers get a say in hiring decisions to ensure they feel good about the candidate as well. So don't lead your cover letter (as I have recently seen) with arrogant boasts or bulleted quotes from former employers, as if you were listing features on a product sell-sheet. Don't make silly claims like, "I will get a perfect score on any evaluation you give to me." Just be yourself -- unless "you" really is that arrogant guy, in which case you should tone it way down.

3. Don't shotgun applications to every job regardless of your qualifications. This should be common sense, yet I frequently see submissions from people with absolutely no experience whatsoever applying for fairly senior publishing jobs. For instance, someone recently applied for a role as a senior writer at my company and cited experience as a salesclerk and call-center operator in the cover letter. I know there's no real downside to this strategy, in the sense that the worst thing that can happen is that you don't get the job, but remember that it takes time to send these pointless applications. Focus on roles you understand and are qualified for, and be sure to customize your cover letter accordingly. If I'm hiring a writer, your cover letter shouldn't tell me about your experience inventorying ice cream sandwiches.

4. Double check your grammar. Don't rush through your cover letter. Check it for grammar and spelling. Yes, those things matter -- a lot. Likewise, avoid exclamation points. I know not everyone is as sensitive to this as I am, but if I see an exclamation point in a cover letter ("I am very eager to get this job!"), I automatically put the candidate on probation. If I encounter two or more exclamation points in a single cover letter, the individual is highly unlikely to progress to an interview.

5. Double check the job you're applying for. There's absolutely nothing wrong with applying for multiple jobs at once -- even multiple jobs at the same company. But if you do, read your cover letter very carefully and make sure you revise the details so it accurately reflects the role you're applying for. Recently, I've gotten several cover letters that were written for the wrong position. The candidates simply applied for a different job first and forgot to update the cover letter when they sent it to me. Granted, even that's not as bad as attaching a photo of Nicholas Cage.

Monday, July 23, 2012

Questions In A Job Interview

10 Questions You Should Never Ask In A Job Interview

Read up @ http://www.forbes.com/pictures/efkk45ikgl/never-ask-for-information-you-could-have-easily-found-with-a-quick-google-search/#gallerycontent

Employees to stop job hunting

How to get your employees to stop job hunting

Do you think that most of them are engaged in their work?

Studies show that engaged employees generate an average of between a quarter to a third more profits for their companies. Fantastic, right? But here’s the question: do you think that most of your employees are engaged?

If you answered yes, chances are you’re dead wrong. According to one eye-opening study, fewer than a third of all employees can be classified as actively engaged at work. Put another way, some industry statistics show that 66 percent of employees are disengaged and 60 percent are actively looking for work.

This rampant disengagement or semi-engagement hits where it hurts – your bottom line. As HR.com writer David Bator put it, since you pay a disengaged employee 100 percent of their salary for 50 percent effort, if we assume that the average salary of an employee in a 500 person organization is $50,000, then the annual cost of disengagement for that company is over $8M, or $34,200 per day.

Yikes.

So what can companies do to reverse this trend? How do you keep your employees engaged in their work day after day, month after month, year after year?

Sure, positive employee recognition is a great way to make people feel empowered, and by extension more engaged. But a party or a gift basket will only deliver a temporary jolt of enthusiasm and won’t do much at all for the greater dynamic of your organization.

Let’s talk about some longer term strategies and tactics that will.
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The driving goal here is that each and every member of your company has a great answer to the question, “Why do you work here?” And the answer shouldn’t be “the pay” or “the half-day summer Fridays.” Salary and benefits alone do not lead to employee engagement.

What does? Well, it has to be something that feels like it originates from within each individual employee… something that empowers them. Something that makes them say “Listen to what my coworkers and I did the other day …”

Now, I hear what you’re saying: “But Ryan, we did the ropes course with the whole design team last year! Eight out of 10 “trust falls” went great, too!” (OK, I know no one said anything like that. Surely it was a 90 percent success rate with the trust falls.) And the answer is no; the usual seasonal-engagement crutch of holiday parties in the winter and cookouts in the summer simply doesn’t work as the sole “cohesion creator.”

Instead, to keep your employees enthused and engaged, you need to have programs that your employees feel that they are a part of every day. And these initiatives must make employees feel like they are contributing to the company, yes, but also, in the most successful instances, like they are a part of something even bigger.

So think big.

And what’s bigger than, say, the Earth itself? What? Well, yeah. Jupiter. And yes the Kuiper Belt is really huge, OK! You know what I mean. What I’m talking about is establishing a green recycling program that will make your employees aware that when they participate, not only are they doing good for the company, but for the planet as a whole. A recycling program is something that each and every member of an organization can participate in each and every day and it’s a fine starting point for much bigger things.

Taking things a step further, how about establishing a comprehensive corporate volunteer program, the strongest cure for employee disengagement? Few things engender a deeper sense of camaraderie than doing charitable work side by side with others. And the spirit established on an oil-slicked beach or in raising a house for a family fallen on hard times will not fade in the company lobby on Monday morning. Rather, it will pervade every aspect of every board room and cubicle.

The reason for this is simple: when people share in common cause, they grow closer together. The myriad moving parts of a larger company can often seem to function in seclusion, but by creating an exterior common cause, you can bring the varied parts – the employees from different divisions, teams, etc. – together to work in concert. The same is true for companies of all sizes, of course, but the larger the organization, the harder it can be to keep numerous employees engaged.

So you need some employee engagement strategies, then, don’t you? Well, then, let’s talk about a few:

1. Be a company people like to work for

Sounds simple enough, right? But I don’t mean that you have to be Google or some place that can afford Olde Time Pop Corn machines and Nerf arsenals in every kitchen (or even the kind of place that would want that stuff). Instead, just be the kind of place that is satisfying to work for but also provides so much more than opportunities for “work work.” That means opportunities for charitable giving, volunteering, community service activities and the like.

2. Provide opportunities for employee involvement
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Involvement and engagement aren’t quite synonyms, but they’re really close friends. And by involvement opportunities, we aren’t talking about overtime. We’re talking about facilitating giving and volunteering efforts that help employees feel connected to their communities and, by extension, your company. People like doing good things. In fact, they love it, it’s just often hard to know where and when one can do the most good. If the place they already work becomes the conduit for doing good work, you’re going to have happier, more engaged, and more productive workers on your team.

3. Listen up

Maybe you think things are going smoothly and your staff seems happy enough. But if you don’t allow your employees any autonomy in where their giving and volunteering efforts are aimed, they may end up feeling “voluntold.” Give your employees the gift of supporting their support for the charities and causes they care about most.

4. Bring employees together

Conversely, while you should allow for some cause autonomy, you also want to create opportunities for common cause. Organizing days of service, leading team volunteering events and turning fundraising ideas into reality are the key to uniting employees on a much deeper level than could ever be achieved in the workplace alone.

5. Be persistent

Your work is not done after one successful weekend spent coordinating a company-wide riverbank cleaning session. Nor is it done after a months-long partnership with Habitat for Humanity. The fact is that your work toward furthering employee engagement is never done. And that should be exciting, not daunting. Indeed, charitable work never goes out of style, and it’s the best way to inspire engagement. So try it out. Frequently.

The occasional cookout or margarita never hurts, but if you want to demonstrate staff appreciation, provide opportunities for staff satisfaction by givhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifing your employees cause to help causes.

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Saturday, July 21, 2012

Why you didn't get hired

Why you didn't get hired

(MoneyWatch) No matter what condition the U.S. economy is in, looking for work is always incredibly stressful. In the past, I've tried to help by providing tips for honing your resume and passing your interview.

Almost without exception, you never really know why you didn't get a particular job. You might have sailed through the phone interview and face-to-face meetings, only to be called a few days later by HR with the message that you were not going to be offered the position. Recently, though, the blog Job Tips for Geeks listed the most common reasons people get passed over for positions -- aside from simply not being qualified, that is.

This list is pure job-hunting gold. After all, assuming you're an otherwise great candidate, here's a slew of things to consider to fine-tune your interviewing style and the way you answer interview questions. Do any of these sound like you?

Your experience is wide but shallow. Depending on your experience, you might be depicting yourself as a "jack of all trades, master of none." There are few opportunities for people with little practical, deep knowledge.

You seem to have a sense of entitlement. Be humble in all things. This has real, practical applications. For example, don't give the hiring manager or any peer interviewers the vibe that there are only certain technical areas within your domain that you are willing to work or that you will be very difficult to collaborate with.

You don't exhibit any passion. Be enthusiastic, both about what you do and the role you are interviewing for. Employers don't want to hire someone who is only looking for a paycheck; they want someone who is invested in their career and in the company.

You don't know how the rest of your organization works. It's important to know how the entire sausage is made. If you're asked questions about a process at your employer that you weren't directly connected to and can only say "I don't know," then you're not getting hired -- even if you are the enormously knowlehttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifdgeable in your particular field. There's enormous collaboration in business today, and you're expected to understand at least the basics of everyone else's roles so you can contribute.

Your experience is not transferable. You might be awesome, but if you've spent a long time in a single role or company, it might look like your knowledge, skills, or experience won't transfer to the new company without considerable re-training. If that's you, prepare ahead of time to be able to speak to those kinds of concerns.

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How to become a $600K per year 'supertemp'

(MoneyWatch) The U.S. Labor Department's most recent jobs report was pretty bleak. But buried in it was an intriguing statistic: Employers added 25,000 temporary jobs in June. That's almost a third of the total net new jobs that month.

When we think of temps, we tend to think of low-end clerical workers brought in to process extra paperwork during an industry's busy season. But according to Jody Miller, CEO of consulting firm Business Talent Group, we're now seeing the rise of the "supertemp" -- high-end professionals who parachute in to solve problems, then ship off to the next project. Think of them as one-person consulting firms, like Bain or McKinsey on a smaller scale.

"There are a whole lot of things businesses need to get done that don't need that," says Miller, alluding to having multiple teams of consultants billing millions of dollars, "but need that level and quality of thinking and ability." Plenty of the supertemps Miller's company places command per diems of $2,500 (or more). That can equal more than $600,000 a year, without the bureaucratic headaches of working long-term for any particular company.

So how do you become a $600,000 per year supertemp? First, you need experience, perhaps at a consulting company or as a high-level executive somewhere. Then you need these four things:

1. Evidence of results. "The people who really do well in this are people who are doers," says Miller. "You've got to be someone who likes to go in and get something done." Maybe it's writing business plans for new products or turning around factories, but whatever it is the work is going to involve rolling up your sleeves. Getting paid for pure advice tends to be a different line of work.

2. The right skill-set. "The place where you can provide value should be either something that's pretty broadly applicable, like being a pricing expert across a lot of industries," Miller says. Or if it's a niche, you should be "smart about who needs that niche." You need people with deep pockets and lots of potential work.

3. An entrepreneurial mindset. The free agent lifestyle isn't for everyone. You can use an agency like Miller's to find work, but until the talent-matching market is more developed, "You've got to be comfortable selling yourself, networkinhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifg, and using your contacts to get introductions," he says. "You're getting business the way a company gets business."

4. Your own team. High-end supertemps increasingly have their own network of people to call, should you need expertise in a particular subject area or a skill that complements your own. To be a high-priced temp, you need to be able to solve any problem a client might have, pronto. But if you can do that, you're well on your way to being in demand whenever you'd like to work.

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Burning bridges

Thursday, July 19, 2012

Facebook users warned

'You have been tagged': Facebook users warned that picture emails may infect their PCs with a virus

A new virus is spreading via one of the few emails we ALL click on - alerts that you have been 'tagged' in a picture on Facebook.

The emails, which look like Facebook's own alerts, directs users to a page to view the new picture they have appeared in.

People often follow such links to ensure they are looking their best - or at least not looking their worst.

The new spam campaign instead redirects the user to a site which attempts to infect the computer with malicious software - but a few seconds later, is redirected to a real Facebook page.

People could be infected without even being aware the attack had happened.

'Be wary of emails claiming to be from Facebook, and saying that you have been tagged in a photograph,' says Sophos Security's Graham Cluley.

'SophosLabs has intercepted a spammed-out email campaign, designed to infect recipients' computers with malware. If you click on the link in the email, you are not taken immediately to the real Facebook website.'

'Instead, your browser is taken to a website hosting some malicious iFrame script (which takes advantage of the Blackhole exploit kit, and puts your computer at risk of infection by malware).'
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There are certain giveaways that the email is not all it seems, however - the email is misspelt, with the word 'Faceboook' instead of 'Facebook'.

'Even if you didn't notice that 'Faceboook' was spelt incorrectly, you could have seen by hovering your mouse over the link that it wasn't going to take you directly to the genuine Facebook website,' says Cluley.

more @ http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2175803/Facebook-fans-warned-picture-emails-infect-PCs-virus.html

Everything