Oregon's U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley (D) has a lot to answer for to Oregon voters – primarily around Obamacare. Beyond the disastrous roll out problems with Obamacare, which passed four years ago, there are the larger issues for Sen. Merkley of lying to voters and refusing to work across the aisle on health care reform.
Sen. Merkley lied to Oregon voters in 2009 when he told them that "If you like your current health insurance, you will be able to keep it." It's a statement that's still up on his web site. Yet even left-leaning PolitiFact called that the Lie of the Year last year.
When Sen. Merkley and fellow Democrats rammed Obamacare through Congress four years ago, they passed it without a single Republican vote. The only bipartisan votes on Obamacare came with the 34 Democratic NO votes in the U.S. House.
The fact that they passed Obamacare without a single Republican vote demonstrates a complete unwillingness by Sen. Merkley and other Democrats to work across the aisle. They ignored the plans put forward by Republicans, including the House GOP plan drafted by Rep. Tom Price (R-GA) and The Patients' Choice Act of 2009 introduced by U.S. Senators Tom Coburn, M.D. (R-OK) and Richard Burr (R-NC) and U.S. Representatives Paul Ryan (R-WI) and Devin Nunes (R-CA).
Oregon deserves a U.S. Senator who doesn't lie to them and one who is willing to work across the aisle.


We will provide photos from gadgets in our collections, subject to various conditions. Photographs are provided for personal study or non-commercial research, and can't be used for different functions until you request and receive written permission from LHSA to take action. A really high coronary heart price may counter your exercise while a low heart rate all through the train regimen hints at some coronary heart ailment, which may want fast medical consideration. For example, a center- aged person with a healthy lifestyle should have a heart charge near 90- 153 heartbeats per minute throughout a workout session.
Those are the advantages of Obamacare – the law that Republicans want to repeal. Although it's fascinating – once you ask Republicans whether they'd repeal the benefits I just talked about, whenever you say to them, well, do you think it is the suitable thing to do to let young individuals stay on their parents' plans to allow them to hold insurance, or do you wish to stop seniors from getting more reductions on their prescribed drugs, then they're going to say, no, no, no, we like these. These things are okay. (Laughter.) So they do not like Obamacare in concept, but some of the part parts, a minimum of people who ballot well, they do not mind.


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FBI Holds Career Information Session for Team USA Athletes
Team USA Athletes Welcomed by FBI
Bureau Holds Career Information Session for Olympians and Paralympians
Associate Deputy Director David Bowdich speaks to U.S. Olympic and Paralympic athletes during a career information session at FBI Headquarters in Washington, D.C., on October 1, 2016. The Bureau hosted the event for athletes interested in pursuing full-time careers following the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.
For some U.S. Olympic and Paralympic athletes, choosing a full-time career path will be their next challenge now that they've returned home from the 2016 Summer Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro. The FBI intends to make that process easier through a hiring initiative that introduces athletes to job opportunities at the Bureau.
More than 70 Team USA members visited FBI Headquarters in Washington, D.C., Saturday to learn how their athletic and educational experiences could be applied to positions at the FBI. Special agents, intelligence analysts, and human resources specialists were all on hand to share the variety of options currently open to prospective candidates.
The October 1 visit began with opening remarks from Associate Deputy Director David Bowdich, who highlighted the FBI's mission and core values and stressed the importance of maintaining a diverse workforce.
"We need to do everything we can in our power to mirror our country, and we're taking great strides to diversify to the best of our ability," said Bowdich. "It will make us more effective as an organization."
While Saturday morning's visit was the first time the FBI has welcomed such a large group of Olympians and Paralympians to its Headquarters, recruiting dedicated athletes to join the workforce is nothing new for the Bureau. Special Agent J.R., for example, continues to train with and compete on the U.S. men's rowing team when he isn't supporting investigations out of the FBI's New York Field Office. In addition to winning several medals in rowing races around the globe, he counts a gold medal from the 2004 Athens Summer Olympics among his accomplishments.
"The athletic passion on display at the games in Rio can be directly applied to the shared commitment of working for the FBI and keeping our country safe."
J.R., FBI special agent and U.S. men's rowing team member
U.S. Olympic athletes tour an exhibit prior to attending a career information session at FBI Headquarters in Washington, D.C., on October 1, 2016.
J.R. shared his path from Olympian to special agent and described how he was able to translate his learned dedication and teamwork mantra to being a member of the FBI.
"It was an to honor host fellow Olympians at FBI Headquarters as they begin to research and consider new careers," he said. "The athletic passion on display at the games in Rio can be directly applied to the shared commitment of working for the FBI and keeping our country safe."
Attendees at the recruiting event represented a cross-section of Olympic teams, including synchronized swimming, shooting, diving, soccer, and rowing. U.S. women's national field hockey team member Kathleen Sharkey joined fellow teammates in touring Headquarters and taking part in the recruiting information session.
"It was interesting to hear about the FBI culture and all the job opportunities there were," Sharkey said. "Coming from a team sport myself, I would thrive and enjoy working in this type of environment."
Like many of her fellow Olympians, Sharkey is now back at home considering what her next steps are going to be now that the Summer Games are over. As the FBI continues to partner with organizations like the U.S. Olympic Committee on its recruiting initiatives, dedicated athletes across the country can find a new home working alongside a motivated team of public servants.
Violent Carjackers Sentenced
Case of violent carjackings in and around the Atlanta metro area that resulted in the dismantlement of a criminal gang thanks to the partnership between the FBI and local law enforcement authorities.
National Cyber Security Awareness Month 2016
During National Cyber Security Awareness Month, the FBI and its partners encourage everyone to reflect on the universe of cyber threats and on doing your part to secure your own devices, networks, and data.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


ATV tour adventure trail from Chiang Mai offer free Transportation for city center hotels (Hotel outside Chiang Mai needs to pay extra more for 500 THB more).
Q-3. Choose time of morning group OR afternoon group : Program Starts From 8:30 AM / 9:00 AM OR 1.00 PM / 1.30 PM daily.
Add in the booking notes your Passengers. Prices: Adults (11+) = 2100 Thai Baht / Child (7 > 11) = 1600 Thai Baht *** To be paid in cash the day of the tour.
ATV tour adventure trail from Chiang Mai. This is a typical great hard adventure ATV trip, you will be passing and exploring local trails of many varieties. You will see incredible panoramic views! This wide variety of trails ranging from flat to narrow, rocky, and some technical passes. Drive ATV in a cool country side trails for two hours with amazing mountain views.
This 3 hr. riding trip will be good and suitable for: Experienced drivers, pace at faster speed. Difficulty: Moderate to Hard.
Itinerary: Starts From 8:30 AM or 1:00 PM daily – ATV adventure trails 3 hr.
08.30 – 09.00 AM OR 01.00 – 01.30 PM. Meet your private English-speaking guide at your hotel lobby, start ATV tour adventure trail from Chiang Mai.
Arrive at ATV camp to enjoy all the ATV briefing. Let's go and enjoy riding on moderate to hard difficulties adventure trails, passing through many amazing panoramic mountain views.
3 hour ATV riding after briefing.
02.30 PM OR 07.30 PM. Return to your hotel.
RETURN TIME: Approximately 02.30 PM OR 07.30 PM.
Accident insurance. All equipment Safety Standard. Protection gear.
Bring sunscreen, insects repellent spray.
Camera. Should bring only little cash for your extra snacks, Beer, tips.
Children from 7 to 11 years old pay reduced price.
ATV tour adventure trail from Chiang Mai, itinerary and timing above are approximate and may be modified without notice to fit local weather conditions. If above tour does not meet your requirement and you wish to customize your own tour, please feel free to contact us and tell us your preference. We will do our best to provide the best service we can.


Designed for students and professionals who require an overview of textile materials and processes this is a comprehensive one volume textbook. Details are given on the main types of natural and synthetic fibres, the key processes involved in converting fibres and then transforming yarns into fabrics and finishings. From design and manufacture to marketing this is a definitive guide to textiles.


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Lawyer's Stomach "Flipped" When He Got Caught in a $400,000 Scam
According to a recent report in Texas Lawyer, Houston attorney Roy Elizondo has been living a nightmare for the past five years, ever since he fell victim to a fraudulent check scam that has been hitting lawyers all over the nation.
He remembers the exact moment the stressful ordeal started. He and two lawyer friends were preparing to play a round of golf back in September 2014, when an employee from Elizondo's bank called to say a $496,850 cashier's check from a client, which he had deposited into his Interest on Lawyers' Trust Account, or IOLTA, had a problem with its signature authorization. After Elizondo called the bank that issued the cashier's check, he learned the document was counterfeit.
The horror was that the day before, Elizondo had wired nearly $400,000 from that fake check to a Japanese bank account. The transaction left his account with a six-figure overdraft. "My stomach flipped at that point. I was so overwhelmed," said Elizondo, who practices personal injury and first-party insurance law. "I was like, 'Oh, shit! This is a huge loss.'"
In the five years since then, Elizondo has been embroiled in a dispute with Cadence Bank, where he kept his IOLTA account, over who is liable for the lost funds, which the bank has been demanding for Elizondo to repay. Representing himself pro se in the trial court and on appeal, he won a 2-1 ruling in Houston's First Court of Appeals, which decided that the loss was Cadence's fault.
The court found a bank employee had done the wire transfer without verifying that the cashier's check had cleared and that the funds were available for transfer. It ruled the bank's failure breached a wire transfer agreement between the bank and Elizondo.
"These cases are going on all over the country," said Elizondo. "Courts are divided all over the country. I'd say the majority of cases, especially in New York, find in favor of the banks."
The scams are so common that the New York City Bar issued an ethics opinion to explain lawyers' ethical duties after an IOLTA scam. The opinion said since 2009, email scams have swindled lawyers of $70 million.
"One experienced ring obtained $29 million over a two-year period from seventy lawyers in the United States and Canada," said the opinion, which added that banks often sue lawyers to recover lost funds, which can raise serious ethical issues, since money in IOLTA accounts really belongs to clients.ch.
Det. George Schilter of the Webster Police Department's Criminal Investigations Division, who is an attorney and has handled many fraudulent check scam cases, said that the IOLTA scam has been hitting attorneys across the country in tremendous volume.
"The only thing that lawyers can do to protect themselves is to make absolutely sure that if they take in money for which they are expected to make a pay out," Schilter said. "Give those sources of the income sufficient chance to clear."
Elizondo said that his firm is often targeted by scammers, but their schemes are obvious and easy to spot. This one was different–the scam was very sophisticated. Elizondo said he went through everything the scammer sent him and it looked legitimate. The supposed client had a plethora of documentation, and he believes they hacked email accounts from real companies, which had real websites. They used common legalese and knew the right things to say to convince him to act quickly.
The majority opinion in Cadence Bank v. Elizondo explains the background of the case. "Elizondo fell victim to a sophisticated check-fraud scam," wrote Justice Laura Carter Higley, joined by Justice Sarah Beth Landau.
A supposed international client emailed Elizondo for representation "in a run-of-the-mill collection action," and he took the case. The client said the supposed debtor had settled and would mail a cashier's check for Elizondo to deposit into his IOLTA account. The client then told him to wire the funds to someone in Japan.
"The client emphasized that time was of the essence, explaining that the dispute with the debtor had disrupted its cash-flow and caused it to fall into arrears with various entities with which it did business, including the holder of the Japanese bank account," the opinion said.
The wire transfer went through, and then the very next day, the fake check was dishonored and returned to Cadence Bank unpaid. Cadence charged back the full amount of the check. This resulted in a negative balance of $398,980 in Elizondo's IOLTA account.
"Cadence demanded that Elizondo repay the overdrawn funds. Elizondo refused," the opinion said.
In November 2014, Cadence sued Elizondo, claiming he breached his deposit agreement, which authorized the bank to charge back the funds, and that when he deposited the fake check, he breached his warranty that signatures on the check were authentic and authorized.
Elizondo countered that the wire transfer form was a valid contract that required the funds to be wired from a verified collected balance, and Cadence breached the agreement by wiring the funds from an unpaid check, which had caused the overdraft.
The trial court sided with Elizondo by issuing a take-nothing judgment, and Cadence appealed.
The First Court ruled that Elizondo did breach his warranties by depositing the fake check, but that the wire transfer agreement had a material term that said it was the bank's duty to transfer the funds from a verified collected balance, meaning the funds were actually collected, not just provisional. Cadence breached that agreement.
"If a customer spends provisional funds based on the bank's misrepresentation regarding the status of the check settlement process, and the bank then charges back those funds, thereby causing an overdraft, the customer may assert common law defenses to the bank's right to recover the overdraft," the opinion said.
We have certainly seen many lawyers caught up by these kinds of scams and their stomachs do 'flip', to put it mildly. Besides all the usual precautions associated with these kinds of scams, be especially careful not to wire funds until you have evidence from the bank that the check has really cleared. And turn a deaf ear to all the reasons why a wire transfer is urgently needed at once. That's a red flag if there ever was one.
Email: snelson@senseient.com Phone: 703-359-0700
Digital Forensics/Cybersecurity/Information Technology
https://senseient.com
Posted on May 30, 2019 at 10:00 AM | Permalink
NIST is Pleased to Give You an Artificial Intelligence Brain Freeze
You know you're in trouble when you don't even understand the abstract of a document. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) announced last week that a draft white paper is available for comment. The paper is called An Application of Combinatorial Methods for Explainability in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. I am not even sure I understand the title.
To quote from NIST: "This short paper introduces an approach to producing explanations or justifications of decisions made in some artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) systems, using methods derived from those for fault location in combinatorial testing. We show that validation and explainability issues are closely related to the problem of fault location in combinatorial testing, and that certain methods and tools developed for fault location can also be applied to this problem. This approach is particularly useful in classification problems, where the goal is to determine an object's membership in a set based on its characteristics. We use a conceptually simple scheme to make it easy to justify classification decisions: identifying combinations of features that are present in members of the identified class but absent or rare in non-members. The method has been implemented in a prototype tool called ComXAI, and examples of its application are given. Examples from a range of application domains are included to show the utility of these methods."
Brain freeze yet?
The public comment period for this document ends on July 3, 2019 and you can download the white paper here.
Stolen NSA Tool Wreaks Cyber Havoc on US Cities
As the New York Times reported on May 25th, for nearly three weeks, Baltimore has struggled with a cyberattack by digital extortionists that has frozen thousands of computers, shut down email and disrupted real estate sales, water bills, health alerts and many other services. What we didn't originally know? A key component of the malware that cybercriminals used in the attack was developed at the National Security Agency (NSA), according to security experts briefed on the case.
Since 2017, when the NSA lost control of the tool, EternalBlue, it has been picked up by state hackers in North Korea, Russia and, more recently, China, to cut a path of destruction around the world, leaving billions of dollars in damage. But over the past year, the cyberweapon has come back and is now showing up in the NSA's own backyard.
It is not just in Baltimore. Security experts say EternalBlue attacks have reached a high, and cybercriminals are zeroing in on vulnerable American towns and cities, from Pennsylvania to Texas, paralyzing local governments and driving up costs.
The NSA connection to the attacks on American cities has not been previously reported, in part because the agency has refused to discuss or even acknowledge the loss of its cyberweapon, dumped online in April 2017 by a still-unidentified group calling itself the Shadow Brokers. Years later, the agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation still do not know whether the Shadow Brokers are foreign spies or disgruntled insiders. Well, that's comforting, isn't it?
Thomas Rid, a cybersecurity expert at Johns Hopkins University, called the Shadow Brokers episode "the most destructive and costly NSA breach in history," more damaging than the better-known leak in 2013 from Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor. "The government has refused to take responsibility, or even to answer the most basic questions," Mr. Rid said. "Congressional oversight appears to be failing. The American people deserve an answer."
The NSA and the FBI declined to comment.
Since that leak, foreign intelligence agencies and rogue actors have used EternalBlue to spread malware that has paralyzed hospitals, airports, rail and shipping operators, ATM.s and factories that produce critical vaccines. Now the tool is hitting the United States where it is most vulnerable, in local governments with aging digital infrastructure and fewer resources to defend themselves.
On May 7th, city workers in Baltimore had their computers frozen by hackers. Officials have refused to pay the $100,000 ransom.
Before it leaked, EternalBlue was one of the most useful exploits in the NSA's cyberarsenal. According to three former NSA operators who spoke on the condition of anonymity, analysts spent almost a year finding a flaw in Microsoft's software and writing the code to target it. Initially, they referred to it as EternalBluescreen because it often crashed computers — a risk that could tip off their targets. But it went on to become a reliable tool used in countless intelligence-gathering and counterterrorism missions.
EternalBlue was so valuable, former NSA employees said, that the agency never seriously considered alerting Microsoft about the vulnerabilities, and held on to it for more than five years before the breach forced its hand.
The Baltimore attack, on May 7, was a classic ransomware assault. City workers' screens suddenly locked, and a message in flawed English demanded about $100,000 in Bitcoin to free their files: "We've watching you for days," said the message, obtained by The Baltimore Sun. "We won't talk more, all we know is MONEY! Hurry up!"
Today, Baltimore remains handicapped as city officials refuse to pay, though workarounds have restored some services. Without EternalBlue, the damage would not have been so vast, experts said. The tool exploits a vulnerability in unpatched software that allows hackers to spread their malware faster and farther than they otherwise could.
North Korea was the first nation to co-opt the tool, for an attack in 2017 — called WannaCry — that paralyzed the British health care system, German railroads and some 200,000 organizations around the world. Next was Russia, which used the weapon in an attack — called NotPetya — that was aimed at Ukraine but spread across major companies doing business in the country. The assault cost FedEx more than $400 million and Merck, the pharmaceutical giant, $670 million.
One month before the Shadow Brokers began dumping the agency's tools online in 2017, the NSA — aware of the breach — reached out to Microsoft and other tech companies to inform them of their software flaws. Microsoft released a patch, but hundreds of thousands of computers worldwide remain unprotected.
Hackers seem to have found a sweet spot in Baltimore, Allentown, Pa., San Antonio and other local, American governments, where public employees oversee tangled networks that often use out-of-date software. Last July, the Department of Homeland Security issued a dire warning that state and local governments were getting hit by particularly destructive malware that now, security researchers say, has started relying on EternalBlue to spread.
The costs can be hard for local governments to bear. The Allentown attack, in February last year, disrupted city services for weeks and cost about $1 million to remedy — plus another $420,000 a year for new defenses, said Matthew Leibert, the city's chief information officer.
He described the package of dangerous computer code that hit Allentown as "commodity malware," sold on the dark web and used by criminals who don't have specific targets in mind. "There are warehouses of kids overseas firing off phishing emails," Mr. Leibert said, like thugs shooting military-grade weapons at random targets. The malware that hit San Antonio last September infected a computer inside Bexar County sheriff's office and tried to spread across the network using EternalBlue, according to two people briefed on the attack.
Until a decade or so ago, the most powerful cyberweapons belonged almost exclusively to intelligence agencies — NSA officials used the term "NOBUS," for "nobody but us," for vulnerabilities only the agency had the sophistication to exploit. But that advantage has hugely eroded, not only because of the leaks, but because anyone can grab a cyberweapon's code once it's used in the wild.
Some FBI and Homeland Security officials, speaking privately, said more accountability at the NSA was needed. A former FBI official likened the situation to a government failing to lock up a warehouse of automatic weapons.
In an interview in March, Adm. Michael S. Rogers, who was director of the NSA during the Shadow Brokers leak, suggested in unusually candid remarks that the agency should not be blamed for the long trail of damage. "If Toyota makes pickup trucks and someone takes a pickup truck, welds an explosive device onto the front, crashes it through a perimeter and into a crowd of people, is that Toyota's responsibility?" he asked. "The NSA wrote an exploit that was never designed to do what was done."
At Microsoft's headquarters in Redmond, Wash., where thousands of security engineers have found themselves on the front lines of these attacks, executives reject that analogy. "I disagree completely," said Tom Burt, the corporate vice president of consumer trust, insisting that cyberweapons could not be compared to pickup trucks. "These exploits are developed and kept secret by governments for the express purpose of using them as weapons or espionage tools. They're inherently dangerous. When someone takes that, they're not strapping a bomb to it. It's already a bomb."
Brad Smith, Microsoft's president, has called for a "Digital Geneva Convention" to govern cyberspace, including a pledge by governments to report vulnerabilities to vendors, rather than keeping them secret to exploit for espionage or attacks. Last year, Microsoft, along with Google and Facebook, joined 50 countries in signing on to a similar call by French President Emmanuel Macron — the Paris Call for Trust and Security in Cyberspace — to end "malicious cyber activities in peacetime."
Notably absent from the signatories were the world's most aggressive cyberactors: China, Iran, Israel, North Korea, Russia — and the United States.
Is anyone surprised that we are aligned with the bad guys here? Mind you, I understand that we don't want our hands tied if others are free to do what they want.
It reminds me of the quote from Admiral Josh Painter in The Hunt for Red October: "This business will get out of control. It will get out of control and we'll be lucky to live through it."
Yes, Alexa Does Eavesdrop on You!
Recording and keeping the recordings? Sure, it happens to millions of us with its assistant Alexa in microphone-equipped Echo speakers.
As the Washington Post reported, aside from muting Echo's microphone, you cannot stop Amazon from making recordings of your conversations with Alexa. Many smart-speaker owners STILL don't realize it, but Amazon keeps a copy of everything Alexa records after it hears its name. Apple's Siri, and until recently Google's Assistant, by default also keep recordings to help train their artificial intelligence systems.
The author of the article listened to four years of his Alexa archive and found thousands of fragments of his life: spaghetti-timer requests, joking houseguests and random snippets of "Downton Abbey." There were even sensitive conversations that somehow triggered Alexa's "wake word" to start recording, including his family discussing medication and a friend conducting a business deal.
Alexa keeps a record of what it hears every time an Echo speaker activates. It's supposed to record only with a "wake word" — "Alexa!" — but anyone with one of these devices knows they go rogue. I have personally counted dozens of times when mine recorded without a legitimate prompt. What wakes it is sometimes explicable - and sometimes not! Amazon says it has improved the accuracy of "Alexa" as a wake word by 50 percent over the past year. Not that I can discern!
What can you do to stop Alexa from recording? Amazon's answer is straight out of the Facebook playbook: "Customers have control," it says — but the product's design clearly isn't meeting our needs. You can manually delete past recordings if you know exactly where to look and remember to keep going back. You cannot stop Amazon from making these recordings, aside from muting the Echo's microphone (defeating its main purpose) or unplugging the darned thing.
Amazon says it keeps our recordings to improve products, not to sell them (sounds a lot like Facebook's line). But anytime personal data sticks around, it's at risk. Remember the family that had Alexa accidentally send a recording of a conversation to a random contact? We've also seen judges issue warrants for Alexa recordings.
Alexa's voice archive made headlines most recently when Bloomberg discovered Amazon employees listen to recordings to train its artificial intelligence. Amazon acknowledged that some of those employees also have access to location information for the devices that made the recordings.
Apple, which is much more privacy-minded in other aspects of the smart home, also keeps copies of conversations with Siri. Apple says voice data is assigned a "random identifier and is not linked to individuals" — but exactly how anonymous can a recording of your voice be? Why doesn't Apple give us the ability to say not to store our recordings?
The unexpected leader on this issue is Google. It also used to record all conversations with its Assistant but last year quietly changed its defaults to not record what it hears after the prompt "Hey, Google." But if you're among the people who previously set up Assistant, you probably need to readjust your settings.
Recently, the California State Assembly's privacy committee advanced an Anti-Eavesdropping Act that would require makers of smart speakers to get consent from customers before storing recordings. The Illinois Senate recently passed a bill on the same issue. Neither is much of a stretch: Requiring permission to record someone in private is enshrined in many state laws.
The article's author found much more Internet of Things mischief. When he had a midnight snack, Google knew. His Nest thermostat, made by Google, reports back to its servers' data in 15-minute increments about not only the climate in the house but also whether there's anyone moving around (as determined by a presence sensor used to trigger the heat). You can delete your account, but otherwise Nest saves it indefinitely.
Then there are lights, which can reveal what time you go to bed and do almost anything else. Philips Hue-connected lights track every time they're switched on and off — data the company keeps forever if you connect to its cloud service (which is required to operate them with Alexa or Assistant).
Every kind of appliance now is becoming a data-collection device. The Chamberlain MyQ garage opener lets the company keep indefinitely a record of every time the door opens or closes. MSonos speakers, by default, track what albums, playlists or stations you've listened to, and when you press play, pause, skip or pump up the volume. At least they hold on to your sonic history for only six months.
After quizzing these companies about data practices, the author learned that most are sharing what's happening in his home with Amazon, too. Our data is the price of entry for devices that want to integrate with Alexa. Amazon's not only eavesdropping — it's tracking (potentially) everything happening in your home.
Amazon acknowledges it collects data about third-party devices even when you don't use Alexa to operate them. It says Alexa needs to know the "state" of your devices "to enable a great smart home experience." But keeping a record of this data is more useful to them than to us. You can tell Amazon to delete everything it has learned about your home, but you can't look at it or stop Amazon from continuing to collect it.
Google Assistant also collects data about the state of connected devices. But the company says it doesn't store the history of these devices, even though there doesn't seem to be much stopping it.
Apple does the most admirable job operating home devices by collecting as little data as possible. Its HomeKit software doesn't report to Apple any info about what's going on in your smart home. Instead, compatible devices talk directly, via encryption, with your iPhone, where the data stays.
Amazon and other tech companies say they need our voice data to train their artificial intelligence.
"Any data that is saved is used to improve Siri," Apple said.
"Alexa is always getting smarter, which is only possible by training her with voice recordings to better understand requests, provide more accurate responses, and personalize the customer experience," Beatrice Geoffrin, director of Alexa privacy, said in a statement. The recordings also help Alexa learn different accents and understand queries about recurring events such as the Olympics, she said.
Noah Goodman, an associate professor of computer science and psychology at Stanford University, said it's true that AI needs data to get smarter.
"Technically, it is not unreasonable what they are saying," Goodman said. Today's natural language-processing systems need to rerun their algorithms over old data to learn. Without the easy access to data, their progress might slow — unless the computer scientists make their systems more efficient.
But then he takes his scientist hat off. "As a human, I agree with you. I don't have one of these speakers in my house," Goodman said.
I'll confess to having Alexa - but I am darn careful about her use - and given what we know now about our devices connected to Alexa, I am reluctant to venture any further in the IoT world within my home.
C U in Court: Text Messages Remind Defendants to Show Up
Everything about law is changing. Who would have thought that courts would text messages to defendants to show up on their court dates?
But as reported by Virginia Lawyers Weekly, courts around the country are embracing text messages as a way to nudge people into showing up for their hearings. On any given day, up to half of defendants fail to show up for their scheduled proceedings. No-shows cost the courts time and money, and failure to appear can cost defendants their freedom.
Public defenders and court administrators are using text reminders in more than a dozen states, including Virginia, California, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Florida and Washington.
Richmond Public Defender Tracy Paner said the reminders have been a huge help to her clients, who are often struggling with poverty and chaotic family lives, in addition to dealing with the fallout from an arrest. Missing a court date can spur a judge to issue a bench warrant, which can lead to a citation or arrest, fines and even jail time.
"If you're hustling and you don't know how you're going to pay your rent and looking for a job and wondering where you are going to get food, kind of the last thing on your mind is your court date," Paner said. "If we can help with that, that's easy for us."
In Richmond and Petersburg, the Virginia Indigent Defense Commission used a grant to set up a pilot program. The commission contracted with Uptrust, a San Francisco-based company whose software integrates with the public defender's case management software to access the names, cellphone numbers, court dates and other information to track cases.
Uptrust's software builds a schedule of reminders for each defendant and automatically sends texts on those dates. The messages are typically sent 10 days, one week and one day before a scheduled hearing. Some texts also include customized messages reminding people to seek time off from work, arrange for child care and figure out how they will get to court.
In New York City, researchers who studied a pilot program found that from March 2016 to June 2017 text messages that combined information on planning, what to expect and the consequences of not going to court led to a 26 percent drop in the number of no-shows.
In Arizona, after court administrators started a pilot program last year, the text reminders for criminal court hearings helped reduce the number of failure-to-appear warrants issued in Scottsdale Municipal Court by 51.9% during its first three months.
Uptrust charges an initial fee of $10,000 to $20,000 and a $2 fee for each person who receives text reminders.
In Spokane, Washington, public defenders began using a texting system in September, not only for court date reminders, but also to let defendants know there's a daycare facility inside the courthouse where their children can stay while they're in court. What a great concept, having a day care center in the courthouse!
This is not the world in which I grew up as a lawyer - but I applaud the effort to adapt to the modern world and serve the cause of justice with technology. On the other hand, I hope I don't ever receive one of those "C U in Court" texts!
Two Law Firms Lost Over $117K to Cybercrime Network
I have been following this story for several days thanks to Dave Ries, but found that yesterday's ABA Journal contained a very concise summary.
A law firm in Washington, D.C., and a law office in Wellesley, Massachusetts, are among the victims of malware attacks by an overseas cybercrime network.
The law firms were not identified in a Department of Justice press release announcing the dismantling of the cybercrime network in an international law enforcement operation. The Associated Press has coverage here. The May 16 press releases are here and here.
The cybercrime operation used GozNym malware to infect computers and capture banking login credentials. The conspirators allegedly created lookalike internet pages for the victims' financial institutions. They then accessed the bank accounts and transferred money, converting it to bitcoin.
Members of the network are being prosecuted in four different countries. In the United States, indictments have been filed in the Western District of Pennsylvania. Prosecutions also are pending in the countries of Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia.
Bulgarian authorities arrested one of the accused men, Krasimir Nikolov, and extradited him to the United States in December 2016. Ten others have been charged, including five Russians who remain at large. Alexander Konovolov of Tbilisi, Georgia, is the alleged network ringleader.
According to the indictment, filed April 17, the conspirators sent a phishing email in February 2016 to the D.C. law firm from the "Quicken Billpay-center." The recipient was directed to click a link to view the invoice. Clicking the link caused the GozNym malware to be downloaded onto the recipient's computer.
About nine days later, one of the defendants used the recipient's credentials to gain access to a Bank of America account. The defendant tried to access $97,520, resulting in a loss of $76,178.
A defendant who used GozNym to capture banking credentials at the Wellesley, Massachusetts, law office gained access to a Brookline Bank account using online banking login credentials. The defendant transferred $41,000 from the account.
As you might imagine, other businesses were also victimized. Tens of thousands of computers were infected worldwide, primarily in the US and Europe.
According to the Indictment, the defendants conspired to infect victims' computers with GozNym malware designed to capture victims' online banking login credentials; use the captured login credentials to fraudulently gain unauthorized access to victims' online bank accounts; and steal money from victims' bank accounts and launder those funds using U.S. and foreign beneficiary bank accounts controlled by the defendants.
The defendants reside in Russia, Georgia, Ukraine, Moldova and Bulgaria. The DOJ said the operation was an unprecedented international effort to share evidence and initiate criminal prosecutions against members of the same criminal network in multiple countries.
Nicely done DOJ and its partners. And this is yet another reminder of the importance of educating law firm employees about phishing attacks!
San Francisco First Major U.S. City to Ban Facial Recognition Technology
The New York Times (sub.req.) reported that on May 14th San Francisco banned the use of facial recognition software by the police and other agencies. The action makes San Francisco the first major American city to block a tool that many police forces are turning to in the search for both small-time criminal suspects and perpetrators of mass carnage.
The authorities used the technology to help identify the suspect in the mass shooting at an Annapolis, Md., newspaper last June. But civil liberty groups have expressed unease about the technology's potential abuse by government amid fears that it may shove the United States in the direction of an overly oppressive surveillance state.
Critics said that rather than focusing on bans, the city should find ways to craft regulations that acknowledge the usefulness of face recognition. "It is ridiculous to deny the value of this technology in securing airports and border installations," said Jonathan Turley, a constitutional law expert at George Washington University. "It is hard to deny that there is a public safety value to this technology."
Similar bans are under consideration in Oakland and in Somerville, Mass., outside of Boston. In Massachusetts, a bill in the State Legislature would put a moratorium on facial recognition and other remote biometric surveillance systems. On Capitol Hill, a bill introduced last month would ban users of commercial face recognition technology from collecting and sharing data for identifying or tracking consumers without their consent, although it does not address the government's uses of the technology.
Matt Cagle, a lawyer with the A.C.L.U. of Northern California, on Tuesday summed up the broad concerns of facial recognition: The technology, he said, "provides government with unprecedented power to track people going about their daily lives. That's incompatible with a healthy democracy."
The facial recognition fight in San Francisco is largely theoretical — the police department does not currently deploy such technology, and it is only in use at the international airport and ports that are under federal jurisdiction and are not impacted by the legislation.
The ban prohibits city agencies from using facial recognition technology, or information gleaned from external systems that use the technology. It is part of a larger legislative package devised to govern the use of surveillance technologies in the city that requires local agencies to create policies controlling their use of these tools. There are some exemptions, including one that would give prosecutors a way out if the transparency requirements might interfere with their investigations.
Mr. Cagle and other experts said that it was difficult to know exactly how widespread the technology was in the United States. "Basically, governments and companies have been very secretive about where it's being used, so the public is largely in the dark about the state of play," he said.
But Dave Maass, the senior investigative researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, offered a partial list of police departments that he said used the technology, including Las Vegas, Orlando, San Jose, San Diego, New York City, Boston, Detroit and Durham, N.C. Other users, Mr. Maass said, include the Colorado Department of Public Safety, the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office in Florida, the California Department of Justice and the Virginia State Police.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection is now using facial recognition in many airports and ports of sea entry. At airports, international travelers stand before cameras, then have their pictures matched against photos provided in their passport applications. The agency says the process complies with privacy laws, but it has still come in for criticism from the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which argues that the government, though promising travelers that they may opt out, has made it increasingly difficult to do so.
But there is a broader concern. "When you have the ability to track people in physical space, in effect everybody becomes subject to the surveillance of the government," said Marc Rotenberg, the group's executive director.
In the last few years, facial recognition technology has improved and spread at lightning speed, powered by the rise of cloud computing, machine learning and extremely precise digital cameras. That has meant once-unimaginable new features for users of smartphones, who may now use facial recognition to unlock their devices, and to tag and sort photos.
But some experts fear the advances are outstripping government's ability to protect privacy.
Mr. Cagle and others said that a worst-case scenario already exists in China, where facial recognition is used to keep close tabs on the Uighurs, a largely Muslim minority, and is being integrated into a national digital panopticon system powered by roughly 200 million surveillance cameras.
American civil liberties advocates warn that the ability of facial surveillance to identify people at a distance, or online, without their knowledge or consent presents unique risks — threatening Americans' ability to freely attend political protests or simply go about their business anonymously in public. Last year, Bradford L. Smith, the president of Microsoft, warned that the technology was too risky for companies to police on their own and asked Congress to oversee its use.
The battle over the technology intensified last year after two researchers published a study showing bias in some of the most popular facial surveillance systems. Called Gender Shades, the study reported that systems from IBM and Microsoft were much better at identifying the gender of white men's faces than they were at identifying the gender of darker-skinned or female faces.
Another study this year reported similar problems with Amazon's technology, called Rekognition. Microsoft and IBM have since said they improved their systems, while Amazon has said it updated its system since the researchers tested it and had found no differences in accuracy.
Warning that African-Americans, women and others could easily be incorrectly identified as suspects and wrongly arrested, the American Civil Liberties Union and other nonprofit groups last year called on Amazon to stop selling its technology to law enforcement.
But even with improvements in accuracy, civil rights advocates and researchers warn that, in the absence of government oversight, the technology could easily be misused to surveil immigrants or unfairly target African-Americans or low-income neighborhoods.
To no one's surprise, I agree with Mr. Cagle. I would add that the technology is hardly reliable as numerous news stories have made clear. So it presents more than one kind of danger. And the idea of being tracked all the time by the government is simply incompatible with democracy.
FTC Again Calls for Single Federal Privacy Law
As Naked Security reported on May 10th, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is again advocating the long-discussed, much-debated, when-in-the-world-will-this-happen national data privacy law, the lack of which keeps the country from parity with the EU and its General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), or with the state of California with its California's Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). As readers of this blog know, I think it is insane that we do not have a national privacy law.
FTC commissioners testified recently before the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee. They addressed how a national privacy law could regulate how big tech companies like Facebook and Google collect and handle user data.
Besides consumer protection, the FTC is looking for more power. Commissioners asked Congress to strengthen the agency's ability to police violations, asking for more resources and greater authority to impose penalties. At this point, as lawmakers squabble over the details of various approaches to a national law, the US lags behind European and other nations that have acted to rein in the growing might of big tech.
Lawmakers tend to agree with me that we need a new, single federal privacy law. At this point, we've got a confusing hodgepodge of state laws and a slew of proposed federal laws. It makes no sense at all.
Some have called for a clear, strong message to tech companies about the necessity to change their behavior after they're found guilty of privacy rule violations. This is punishment a la Senator Wyden's "throw-the-execs-in-jail" proposal. I am a big fan of that proposal because nothing else seems to impede the complete abandon with which tech companies do whatever they like with our data to enrich themselves and their companies.
U.S. Military's Hacking Arm Gearing Up for 2020 Elections
As The Washington Post (sub.req.) reported on May 8th, Russia viewed the midterm elections as a "warm-up" for 2020. The U.S. military's hacking division (U.S. Cyber Command) is treating it that way, too.
In the run-up to the presidential election, U.S. Cyber Command is surging election defense efforts that proved useful during the midterms, including probing allies' computer networks to glean insights about Russian threats. Cybercom is also working more closely with election defense teams at the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI, and with industry sectors that are targeted by Kremlin hackers and might have early warnings about threats facing the election.
"Our goal is to have no interference in our elections," said Maj. Gen. Tim Haugh, who heads the command's cyber national mission force. "Ideally, no foreign actor is going to target our electoral process." Cybercom is the only outfit among the myriad federal state and local government agencies tasked with protecting the 2020 election that is allowed to punch back against Russian hackers -- and it's using its new authorities granted during the Trump administration to be more aggressive in cyberspace.
The military's preparations for 2020 also include sharing information with DHS under a program launched by former defense secretary Jim Mattis and former Homeland Security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen. That operation continues despite the secretaries' departure. And Cybercom is also partnering with DHS to build closer ties with critical industry sectors under a program called Pathfinder, he said — beginning with the financial services and energy sectors.
The idea behind Pathfinder is that DHS clues Cybercom into the digital threats facing those industries -- and then Cybercom goes looking for information that will help them defend themselves. And that information, in turn, might be useful to election security efforts.
CyberCom, which shares a leadership structure with NSA, didn't confirm the Symantec report. But officials argued that adversary hackers stealing the tools you use against them is pretty common – and it's something NSA and CyberCom take into account before using the tools.
Once the U.S. government or anyone else uses a previously secret hacking tool, it loses value pretty quickly, Maj. Gen. Karl H. Gingrich said. "Safeguarding [hacking tools] is a priority for us and they're safeguarded," he said. "But then they're used in the environment and once they're out there, they're out there . . . It's part of the risk assessment."
House Administration Committee Democrats plan to release an election security bill in the next few weeks and are seeking Republican co-sponsors. That will mark the first stand-alone election security bill in the House this Congress. Goals for that bill include providing financial support for election infrastructure, fostering accountability for election technology vendors, and preventing election hacking.
In the Senate, sponsors of the Secure Elections Act already shared plans to reintroduce their bill in the next couple of weeks. That's the bipartisan bill that came closest to passing last Congress — but prospects don't look great for it passing this time around. A spokesman for Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) says he also plans to reintroduce an election security bill from last Congress that had stricter requirements — including a mandate for paper ballots or backups.
Wyden's bill, the Protecting American Votes and Elections Act, was popular among Senate Democrats including numerous 2020 presidential candidates, but didn't win any Republican co-sponsors. And neither Senate bill reached a vote on the floor.
While that surprises no one, I hope there is a different outcome this time around!
Feds Are Spending Millions to Hack Into Locked Phones
The Washington Post (sub.req.) reported on May 13th that federal agencies are spending millions to hack into locked phones.
A $1.2 million tab for iPhone hacking technology at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement underscores how pervasively law enforcement is cracking into passcodes and other security features Americans use to keep their information private.
ICE contracts — one for $384,000 in September and another for $819,000 this month — will go to the agency's Homeland Security Investigations unit, which focuses not just on immigration crimes but also on drug trafficking, child exploitation and money laundering. ICE declined to say how the hacking tools will be used, but the contracts come amid heightened concern about warrantless searches of phones and laptops that ICE and Customs and Border Protection conduct at airports and other points of entry amid an immigration crackdown by President Trump.
Federal law enforcement agencies have complained for years that advanced encryption systems are crippling their investigations and allowing criminals and terrorists to "go dark" online. They've called on tech companies to help them bypass those encryption protections, and the FBI even waged a high-stakes court battle against Apple over the issue in 2015.
But law enforcement's claims about the danger posed by encryption have been repeatedly undermined by internal watchdogs and its own errors. And the federal spending spree on hacking tools offers yet another suggestion that law enforcement may be finding ways around encryption without tech companies' help.
The American Civil Liberties Union and Electronic Frontier Foundation sued the government over those searches in 2017 and say they found that "CBP and ICE are asserting near-unfettered authority to search and seize travelers' devices at the border." That includes "for purposes far afield from the enforcement of immigration and customs laws" including "investigating and enforcing bankruptcy, environmental, and consumer protection laws," the advocacy organizations said.
The ICE contracts are with the company Grayshift, which markets one of the most popular iPhone hacking kits to law enforcement agencies. The company has been involved in a back and forth game with Apple for the past year with Apple trying to block Grayshift's ability to hack into locked iPhones and Grayshift seemingly finding new ways in.
The pace of new federal contracts would suggest Apple hasn't won that fight.
Grayshift has inked $2.6 million in deals with federal agencies since 2017, including ICE, the Secret Service, the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration, according to information on a government spending database.
Despite a steady stream of warnings about the dangers of encryption since 2014, law enforcement has struggled to provide clear evidence that encryption substantially stymies its investigations.
In the most high-profile case in 2015, the FBI asked a federal court to compel Apple to help it crack into an encrypted iPhone used by San Bernardino, CA, shooter Syed Farook. The bureau ultimately withdrew its demand, however, after an unnamed third party offered to help it hack into the phone for a hefty fee.
In that case, the unnamed company appears to have helped the FBI disable a safeguard that would have wiped the phone's contents after too many incorrect guesses at the passcode — similar to services offered by Grayshift. With that safeguard disabled, the FBI was presumably able to run a computer program that tried all possible passcode combinations until it landed on the correct one.
The Justice Department's own inspector general later found the FBI had rushed into litigation against Apple without exhausting other options — and some FBI staffers believed the bureau was more interested in setting a legal precedent than in accessing the phone's contents.
The FBI later acknowledged it had dramatically overstated the number of encrypted devices it was blocked from accessing because it accidentally double-counted instances that were maintained in multiple databases. FBI Director Christopher Wray had claimed the bureau was unable to access about 7,800 devices connected with crimes in 2017, but the real number was closer to 1,200, officials acknowledged.
Games and lies. You would bloody well think the FBI Director would have the correct numbers - and had them checked twice before citing phony numbers. Frankly, when I want the truth about privacy issues, I turn to the American Civil Liberties Union and Electronic Frontier Foundation.


Here is a preview of a new Christmas promotional format that leverages a third-party multi-promotion Facebook widget. The new format supports multiple artists (18 UMG Latin artists in this case) and other advanced features. Stay tuned for more examples and information.


Non of these rules should be set in stone, but there needs to be some structure to ensure this is a productive use of time.
Keep time and rotate who is on the keyboard every 10 to 15 minutes.
Everyone gets time at the keyboard, even non-programmers.
Take a story from start to finish, or in other words: from planning to coding, to testing, to done.
Take breaks when you want.
A session should span an entire workday.
These guidelines have worked for some teams, but they're not as structurally important.
Use this time as an opportunity to train.
Invite "spectators" and non-dev stakeholders, but make sure everyone has a reason to be there.
Voluntary attendance; this won't work for everyone.


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What is Poland known for?
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reflections on his mother's experiences as a refugee, and of his own Jewish heritage. WikiPedia:Poland Commons:Category:Poland Dmoz:Regional Europe Poland
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. Following the partitions of Poland the paintings were left to the college, which set up the Dulwich Picture Gallery under a trusteeship in a building designed by Sir John Soane, which became Britain's first public art gallery. Since 1995 the Gallery has been an independent registered charity. International use The Makaton Core Vocabulary is adapted for use in different countries; signs from each country's Deaf community are used, along with culturally relevant Makaton symbols. For example, in the United Kingdom, Makaton uses signs from British Sign Language (BSL). Makaton is used extensively throughout the UK, but has also been adapted for use in over 40 countries, including Poland, New Zealand, France, Germany, Portugal, Greece, Kuwait and Japan. Other lances Another lance has been preserved at Krakow, Poland, since at least the 13th century. However, German records indicate that it was a copy of the Vienna lance. Emperor Henry II (Henry II, Holy Roman Emperor) had it made with a small sliver of the original lance. Another copy was given to the Hungarian king at the same time. date Feb 23, 2010 The 1988 Polish (Poland) film And the Violins Stopped Playing also has Porajmos as its subject, although this has been criticised for showing the killing of Roma as a method of removing witnesses to the killing of Jews. Ian Hancock & Dileep Karanth, ''Danger! Educated Gypsy'', Univ of Hertfordshire Press, 2010, p.256 The governments of some Nazi German allies, namely Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania, also contributed to the Nazi plan of Romani extermination, but this was implemented on a smaller scale and most Romani in these countries survived, unlike those in Ustaše Croatia or in areas directly ruled by Nazi Germany (such as Poland). The Hungarian Arrow Cross (Arrow Cross Party) government deported between 28,000 and 33,000 Romanies out of a population estimated between 70,000 and 100,000. WikiPedia:Poland Commons:Category:Poland Dmoz:Regional Europe Poland
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, Hungary, Norway, Finland, and Russia, the natural symbol transformed into the letter H (possibly for ''hart'', German for ''hard''): in German music notation, H is B in Northern Europe (i.e. a B
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-numbered years since 1984, although there was no World Championship in 1996, and there was a World Championship in 1997. Asian nations began sending national teams to international events in 1980, and teams from nations in Oceania and North America began competing in the 1990s. Athletes from twenty-six nations attended the 2000 World Championship in Nanjing, China, the first to be held outside of Europe. IARU
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, Poland, Yugoslavia, and France. '''Andrzej Szarmach''' (born October 3, 1950 in Gdańsk, Poland) is a former Polish (Poland) football (football (soccer)) player. '''Andrzej Szarmach''' (born October 3, 1950 in Gdańsk, Poland) is a former Polish (Poland) football (football (soccer)) player. * ''Murder, She Said'' – features extensive railway scenes. Based on the novel ''4.50 from Paddington'' by Agatha Christie * ''Night Train (Night Train (1959 film))'' (1959) - Polish (Poland) film by Jerzy Kawalerowicz * ''North by Northwest'' (1959) Alfred Hitchcock thriller starring Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint and James Mason '''Lestek''' (also '''Leszek''', '''Lestko''') is the second legendary duke of Poland, and son of Siemowit, born ca. 870–880. Though proof of his actual existence is unclear, if he did exist, he must have been an influential person, because the tribes that lived in what is now Poland were known as "Lestkowici". '''Siemomysł''' (died WikiPedia:Poland Commons:Category:Poland Dmoz:Regional Europe Poland
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master Chigorin (Mikhail Chigorin). Into the next decade, he continued to perform well in local tournaments, most notably winning the Leningrad Championships (Leningrad City Chess Championship) of 1922, 1924, and 1925 (jointly). At a national level too, he enjoyed an excellent record at the Soviet Championship (USSR Chess Championship); third in 1920, second in 1923, co-champion at Leningrad in 1934 (tied with Ilya Rabinovich at 12 19), and outright champion at Tbilisi in 1937 with 12.5 19. left thumb Levenfish (left) takes on Botvinnik (right) in their 1937 match (Image:Botwinnik-Levenfish 1937.jpg) WikiPedia:Poland Commons:Category:Poland Dmoz:Regional Europe Poland
complex relationship
, the 1931 suppression of the emigre publications coincided with Rasulzade's expulsion from Turkey, and some saw it as the result of caving in to Soviet pressure. In reality, the reason went deep into the complex relationship between Turkey and Azerbaijan. Tensions had been growing toward the end of the decade, and by 1930, they had reached a boiling point. In reply to Turkish criticism that the Musavat was neglecting the cause of Turkic unity, Rasulzade published
. '''''The Great Escape''''' is a 1963 American film about an escape by Allied (Allies of World War II) prisoners of war (prisoner of war) from a German POW camp (Stalag) during World War II, starring Steve McQueen, James Garner, and Richard Attenborough. The film is based on the book of the same name (The Great Escape (book)) by Paul Brickhill, a non-fiction account of the mass escape (Stalag_Luft_III#The_.22Great_Escape.22) from Stalag Luft III in Sagan (now Żagań, Poland), in the province of Lower Silesia, Nazi Germany. Some of the characters are composites of real men. The film was made by the Mirisch Company, released by United Artists, and produced and directed by John Sturges. In the Karnstein Trilogy, based loosely on J. Sheridan Le Fanu's early vampire novella ''Carmilla'', Hammer showed some of the most explicit scenes of lesbianism yet seen in mainstream English language films. Despite otherwise traditional Hammer design and direction, there was also a corresponding increase in scenes of nudity in the films during this era. The ''Karnstein Trilogy'' comprises: * ''The Vampire Lovers'' (1970), featuring Polish (Poland) actress Ingrid Pitt * ''Lust for a Vampire'' (1971) In 2001 a twinning agreement was officially established with the Polish (Poland) district of Racibórz. *Mały Kieżmarski Szczyt (north face), Tatra Mountains, Slovakia about 900 m denivelation (vertical rise) *Giewont (north face), Tatra Mountains, Poland, 852 m above '''Polana Strążyska''' glade (Glade (geography)) *Kazalnica Mięguszowiecka, Tatra Mountains, Poland 576 m above the Czarny Staw pod Rysami *Giewont (north face), Tatra Mountains, Poland, 852 m above '''Polana Strążyska''' glade (Glade (geography)) *Kazalnica Mięguszowiecka, Tatra Mountains, Poland 576 m above the Czarny Staw pod Rysami *The six great north faces of the Alps (Great north faces of the Alps) (Cima Grande di Lavaredo 450 m, Eiger 1,500 m, Grandes Jorasses 1,100 m, Matterhorn 1,350 m, Petit Dru (Aiguille du Dru) 1,000 m, and Piz Badile 850 m) right 150px thumb POW memorial in Hemer (File:Duloh Gedaenkstaette.jpg) The first Polish POWs arrived in October 1939, and had to sleep on the floor as the beds were still not finished. Inadequate equipment remained a problem throughout the whole of the war, both because the material was needed at the front, and also because the camp was permanently overpopulated. At first the inmates were mostly from Poland and France, but after the beginning of the war with the Soviet Union in 1941 Soviet POWs quickly became the majority. Range and habitat The cave bear's range stretched across Europe, from Spain to Eurasia, from Italy and Greece to Belgium, the Netherlands and Great Britain, across a portion of Germany through Poland, then south into Hungary, Romania and parts of Russia, Caucasus and northern Iran. There have been no traces of cave bears living in northern Britain, Scandinavia or the Baltic countries, which were covered in extensive glaciers at the time. The largest numbers of cave bear remains have been found in Austria, Switzerland, southern Germany, northern Italy, northern Spain, Croatia, Hungary, and Romania. The huge number of bones found in south, central and east Europe has led some scientists to think that Europe may have once had literal herds of cave bears. Some however point out that though some caves have thousands of bones, they were accumulated over a period of 100,000 years or more, thus requiring only two deaths in a cave per year to account for the large numbers. WikiPedia:Poland Commons:Category:Poland Dmoz:Regional Europe Poland
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;ndash; but more difficult – route, over the Berezina and Drut (Drut River) rivers. The army was moved from its winter camp near Radoszkowice in June 1708; the movement was plagued by poor road conditions and weather. '''Robert Warzycha''' ( ) (born August 20, 1963 in Siemkowice) is a Polish (Poland) former professional association football player. He is currently the head coach of Columbus Crew in Major League Soccer
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no formal Jewish education as a child; the family could not afford to join a synagogue and did not live very long in any single place. Listed by population #Usedom (76,500 people, split between Poland and Germany) #Rügen (73,000 people, belonging to Germany) Napoleonic Wars St. Cyr was a stoic in an age of pragmatism and glory. His refusal to sign the proclamation of congratulation for declaring empire was soon met when his name
PLEASE DO NOT make any changes to the following section before discussing them on the discussion page (Talk:Poland). Thank you. ------
'''Poland''' , making it the 71st largest country (List of countries and dependencies by area) in the world and the 9th largest in Europe. With a population of over 38.5 million people, Poland is the 34th most populous country (List of countries by population) in the world, the sixth most populous member of the European Union (Member state of the European Union), and the most populous post-communist member of the European Union. Poland is a unitary state divided into 16 administrative subdivisions (voivodeship).
Many historians trace the establishment of a Polish state to 966, when Mieszko I (Mieszko I of Poland), ruler of a territory roughly coextensive with that of present-day Poland, converted to Christianity. The Kingdom of Poland (Kingdom of Poland (1025–1385)) was founded in 1025, and in 1569 it cemented a longstanding political association (Polish–Lithuanian union) with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania by signing the Union of Lublin, forming the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. The Commonwealth gradually ceased to exist in the years 1772–1795, when the Polish territory was partitioned (Partitions of Poland) among Prussia (Kingdom of Prussia), the Russian Empire, and Austria (Habsburg Monarchy). Poland regained its independence (History of Poland (1918–39)) (as the Second Polish Republic) at the end of World War I, in 1918.
Two decades later, in September 1939, World War II started with the invasions of Poland by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union (as part of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact). More than six million Polish citizens died in the war. Project in Posterum, Poland World War II casualties. Retrieved 20 September 2013. Holocaust: Five Million Forgotten: Non-Jewish Victims of the Shoah. Remember.org. AFP Expatica, ''Polish experts lower nation's WWII death toll'', Expatica.com, 30 August 2009 Tomasz Szarota & Wojciech Materski, ''Polska 1939–1945. Straty osobowe i ofiary represji pod dwiema okupacjami'', Warsaw, IPN 2009, ISBN 978-83-7629-067-6 (Introduction online.) In 1944, a Soviet-backed Polish provisional government (Polish Committee of National Liberation) was formed, which, after a period of conflict, falsified referendum (Polish people's referendum, 1946) and elections (Polish legislative election, 1947), gave rise to a satellite state Rao, B. V. (2006), History of Modern Europe Ad 1789-2002: A.D. 1789-2002, Sterling Publishers Pvt. Ltd. of the Soviet Union, ''Polish Republic'' (''Rzeczpospolita Polska''), renamed to the People's Republic of Poland (''Polska Rzeczpospolita Ludowa'') in 1952. During the Revolutions of 1989, Poland's Marxist–Leninist government was overthrown and Poland adopted a new constitution establishing itself as a democracy under the name ''Rzeczpospolita Polska'', often referred to as the "Third Polish Republic" (''III Rzeczpospolita'').
Despite the vast destruction (World War II casualties of Poland) the country experienced during World War II (Occupation of Poland (1939–45)), Poland managed to preserve much of its cultural wealth (Culture of Poland). There are 14 heritage sites inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage (List of World Heritage Sites of Poland) and 54 Historical Monuments (List of Historic Monuments (Poland)) and many objects of cultural heritage (Objects of cultural heritage in Poland). Since the end of the communist period (People's Republic of Poland), Poland has achieved a "very high" ranking in terms of human development (Human Development Index), as well as gradually improving economic freedom. http: www.heritage.org research reports 2015 01 asia-pacific
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Help Local Charity Feed 500 Families this Thanksgiving - Yo! Venice!
Venice based charity Badge of Heart aims to feed 500 families this Thanksgiving and they'd like some help with the cause.
They currently have a Thanksgiving fundraising sale, "for our last push, we are offering 50% off plus free shipping on select Men's and Ladies T-Shirts," says charity founder, Officer Ken Lew of LAPD Pacific Division.
For Badge of Heart merchandise or to simply donate some cash go online to http://www.badgeofheart.org.
"All proceeds go towards our Thanksgiving Turkey give away. Please tell your family and friends," says Lew.
Read more about Badge of Heart here.


The XD(M) pistol from Springfield Armory redefines what a polymer pistol can be. It has everything you want and need in a pistol such as superior ergonomics, reliable performance, and features that make it easy and intuitive to use. The fully adjustable rear sight and fiber optic front sight allow for startlingly fast sight acquisition. The Competition series, at 5.25", has the longest slide and barrel of any XD(M), which maximizes accuracy, controllability, and sight radius, The lightening cut allows for faster cycling and use of a larger variety of loads. It also features a match grade barrel, minimal-reset trigger, and mega-lock frame texture, for a serious competition pistol ready to help you bring home first place. This 9mm model has a black frame with a black melonite slide and includes three 19-round stainless steel magazines.


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ABOUT FDx
Philosophy of Service
FDx Team
Funders, Partners & Stakeholders
BCGEU
FDx Main Office
FDx West Office
FDx Canal Flats
Victim Services – RCMP
Helplines & Emergency Numbers
FDx Resources
Womens' Outreach
For 24/7 Safe Home Helpline, call 1-800-200-3003. For all Family Dynamix services, call 250-342-5566.
Quick Exit
Women's Outreach provides support and advocacy to women who have been abused or who are at risk of being abused.
Program Objective:
To provide support and advocacy to women who have been abused or who are at risk of being abused. We believe that no one deserves to be abused and that there are alternatives to living with abuse.
The WOW program at Family Dynamix is a referral and support program for women and their children, who have experienced or are at risk of domestic violence or domestic abuse. The program assists with supporting women who require long-term support after they leave are in the process of leaving and/or living in an abusive relationship.
We help women to overcome the barriers that hinder and sometimes prevent them from being able to safely leave a relationship with an abusive partner. We provide information about options, alternatives, and available services along with emotional support, while decisions and plans are being made.
WOW has a close connection with many Columbia Valley and provincial wide programs that address women's issues and is bridged many services in the Columbia Valley community, including, but not limited to:
Invermere hospitals, medical clinics
Mental health and substance use services
Local elementary and secondary schools and college
Columbia Valley RCMP
Ministry of Children & Family Development
Kootenay Employment Services
If you would like to talk to one of our caring Support Workers about your situation, please email or call at:-
wc@fdx.family
West Office Hours
Monday to Friday, 9 am to 4 pm.
West Office Phone Number
Monday to Thursday, 8.30 am to 4.30 pm
Main Office Phone Number
If you need to stay at a shelter Our Women's Information & Safe Homes Program is available where someone is on duty 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, call 1-800-200-3003.
It is important to note that women do not have to leave their relationship, stay at one of our private safe homes or make a police report in order to access our services. We respect and support the woman's right to make her own decisions. The journey is hers and we support her choices to leave or to stay.
The WOW services include but are not limited to:
Supportive counseling and advocacy
Accompaniment to appointments
Assistance in securing housing
Help in accessing the police and legal systems
Obtaining income assistance
Providing knowledge and education on life skills
Referrals to second-stage housing
Mental health and/or addictions resources and referrals
Family, and parenting supports
Referrals to government and community-based agencies
Employment coaching and education
Family Dynamix is committed to supporting women who have been abused or who are at risk of being abused.
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Family Dynamix acknowledges that we deliver services on the unceded shared territories of the Ktunaxa and Secwepemc people and the chosen home of the Columbia Valley Métis Chartered Community.
FDx Main
Families, Individuals & Housing
FDx West
Early Years & Women's Services
RCMP Detachment
FDx Victim Services
Families, Individuals & Women
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