Mood:  bright

How to Get Past Filters:

A Guide for Students

Posted by Joe Anybody at 6:13 PM PDT

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Mood:  sad

 Z3 Readers will not be surprised to read this unscrupulous attack on our personal liberties and privacy when crossing the border. Yes my fellow faithful readers ..we are getting screwed. If you ever thought America had freedom and liberty ...those days are over! Yes now days "freedom and liberty" only means Attacking other countries". Now days expected privacy, personal non-illegal papers, letters, and files all belong to the Homeland Security. Hitler is smiling! The real terrorists are stealing "in the name of the law" Our lives now..... BELONG TO THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT

First we took our shoes off, dumped our baby bottles and chap stick in the trash, background checks, sniffing machines smell us a s we walk by, disrobing, frisking, and now your lap top and cell phone is theirs for life

How does it feel to be "fucked" ...heheh! Good Ole American Freedom at its best .....

Homeland Security:

We can seize laptops for an indefinite period

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has concocted a remarkable new policy: It reserves the right to seize for an indefinite period of time laptops taken across the border.

A pair of DHS policies from last month say that customs agents can routinely--as a matter of course--seize, make copies of, and "analyze the information transported by any individual attempting to enter, re-enter, depart, pass through, or reside in the United States." (See policy No. 1 and No. 2.)

DHS claims the border search of electronic information is useful to detect terrorists, drug smugglers, and people violating "copyright or trademark laws." (Readers: Are you sure your iPod and laptop have absolutely no illicitly downloaded songs? You might be guilty of a felony.)

This is a disturbing new policy, and should convince anyone taking a laptop across a border to use encryption to thwart DHS snoops. Encrypt your laptop, with full disk encryption if possible, and power it down before you go through customs.

Here's a guide to customs-proofing your laptop that we published in March.

It's true that any reasonable person would probably agree that Customs agents should be able to inspect travelers' bags for contraband. But seizing a laptop and copying its hard drive is uniquely invasive--and should only be done if there's a good reason.

Sen. Russell Feingold, a Wisconsin Democrat, called the DHS policies "truly alarming" and told the Washington Post that he plans to introduce a bill that would require reasonable suspicion for border searches.

But unless Congress changes the law, DHS may be able to get away with its new rules. A U.S. federal appeals court has ruled that an in-depth analysis of a laptop's hard drive using the EnCase forensics software "was permissible without probable cause or a warrant under the border search doctrine."

At a Senate hearing in June, Larry Cunningham, a New York prosecutor who is now a law professor, defended laptop searches--but not necessarily seizures--as perfectly permissible. Preventing customs agents from searching laptops "would open a vulnerability in our border by providing criminals and terrorists with a means to smuggle child pornography or other dangerous and illegal computer files into the country," Cunningham said.

The new DHS policies say that customs agents can, "absent individualized suspicion," seize electronic gear: "Documents and electronic media, or copies thereof, may be detained for further review, either on-site at the place of detention or at an off-site location, including a location associated with a demand for assistance from an outside agency or entity."

Outside entity presumably refers to government contractors, the FBI, and National Security Agency, which can also be asked to provide "decryption assistance." Seized information will supposedly be destroyed unless customs claims there's a good reason to keep it.

An electronic device is defined as "any device capable of storing information in digital or analog form" including hard drives, compact discs, DVDs, flash drives, portable music players, cell phones, pagers, beepers, and videotapes.

Posted by Joe Anybody at 12:16 PM PDT

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Mood:  surprised

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A congresswoman said Thursday that her "jaw dropped" when military doctors told her that four in 10 women at a veterans hospital reported being sexually assaulted while in the military.

A government report indicates that the numbers could be even higher.

Rep. Jane Harman, D-California, spoke before a House panel investigating the way the military handles reports of sexual assault.

She said she recently visited a Veterans Affairs hospital in the Los Angeles area, where women told her horror stories of being raped in the military.

"My jaw dropped when the doctors told me that 41 percent of the female veterans seen there say they were victims of sexual assault while serving in the military," said Harman, who has long sought better protection of women in the military.

"Twenty-nine percent say they were raped during their military service. They spoke of their continued terror, feelings of helplessness and downward spirals many of their lives have taken since.

"We have an epidemic here," she said. "Women serving in the U.S. military today are more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire in Iraq."

As of July 24, 100 women had died in Iraq, according to the Pentagon.

In 2007, Harman said, only 181 out of 2,212 reports of military sexual assaults, or 8 percent, were referred to courts martial. By comparison, she said, 40 percent of those arrested in the civilian world on such charges are prosecuted.

Defense statistics show that military commanders took unspecified action, which can include anything from punishment to dismissal, in an additional 419 cases.

But when it came time for the military to defend itself, the panel was told that the Pentagon's top official on sexual abuse, Dr. Kaye Whitley, was ordered not to show up despite a subpoena.

"I don't know what you're trying to cover up here, but we're not going to allow it," Rep. Henry Waxman, D-California, said to the Defense official who relayed the news of Whitley's no-show. "This is unacceptable."

Rep. John Tierney, the panel's chairman and a Democrat from Massachusetts, angrily responded, "these actions by the Defense Department are inexplicable."

"The Defense Department appears to be willfully and blatantly advising Dr. Whitley not to comply with a duly authorized congressional subpoena," Tierney said.

An Army official who did testify said the Army takes allegations of sexual abuse extremely seriously.

"Even one sexual assault violates the very essence of what it means to be a soldier, and it's a betrayal of the Army's core values," Lt. Gen. Michael Rochelle said.

The committee also heard from Mary Lauterbach, the mother of Lance Cpl. Maria Lauterbach, a 20-year-old pregnant Marine who was killed in December, allegedly by a fellow Marine.

Mary Lauterbach said her daughter filed a rape claim with the military against Marine Cpl. Cesar Laurean seven months before he was accused of killing her. Watch dead Marine's mom demand change »

"I believe that Maria would be alive today if the Marines had provided a more effective system to protect the victims of sexual assault," she said.

In the months after her daughter filed the rape claim, she said, the military didn't seem to take her seriously, and the onus was on "Maria to connect the dots."

"The victim should not have the burden to generate evidence for the command," Lauterbach told the Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs. "Maria is dead, but there will be many more victims in the future, I promise you. I'm here to ask you to do what you can to help change how the military treats victims of crime and to ensure the victims receive the support and protection they need and they deserve."

Another woman, Ingrid Torres, described being raped on a U.S. base in Korea when she worked with the American Red Cross.

"I was raped while I slept," she said.

The man who assaulted her, she said, was a flight director who was found guilty and dismissed from the Air Force.

Fighting back tears, Torres added, "he still comes after me in my dreams."

The Government Accountability Office released preliminary results from an investigation into sexual assaults in the military and the Coast Guard. The GAO found that the "occurrences of sexual assault may be exceeding the rates being reported."

"At the 14 installations where GAO administered its survey, 103 service members indicated that they had been sexually assaulted within the preceding 12 months. Of these, 52 service members indicated that they did not report the sexual assault," the GAO said.

The office found that the military and Coast Guard have established policies to address sexual assault but that the implementation of the programs is hampered by an array of factors, including that "most, but not all, commanders support the programs."

"Left unchecked, these challenges can discourage or prevent some service members from using the programs when needed," the GAO said.

Tierney said, "what's at stake here goes to the very core of the values of the military and the nation itself.

"When our sons and daughters put their lives on the line to defend the rest of us, the last thing they should fear is being attacked by one of our own."

All AboutU.S. Department of Defense • Sexual Offenses • Criminal Sentencing and Punishment

Posted by Joe Anybody at 7:08 PM PDT

Updated: Monday, 4 August 2008 6:43 PM PDT

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Mood:  incredulous

Torture Hearings

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/07252008/watch.html

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/07252008/watch2.html

Z3 Readers check this out

there is a few videos

text transscripts

interviews

all on recent information about the USA using Torture

Please Check This Out

Posted by Joe Anybody at 8:29 PM PDT

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Mood:  irritated

Panopticon

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

It has been suggested that Panopticon (Internet culture) be merged into this article or section. (Discuss)

Panopticon blueprint by Jeremy Bentham, 1791

The Panopticon is a type of prison building designed by English philosopher Jeremy Bentham in 1785. The concept of the design is to allow an observer to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) prisoners without the prisoners being able to tell whether they are being watched, thereby conveying what one architect has called the "sentiment of an invisible omniscience."^[1]

Bentham himself described the Panopticon as "a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example."^[2]

[edit] Conceptual history

Bentham derived the idea from the plan of a military school in Paris designed for easy supervision, itself conceived by his brother Samuel who arrived at it as a solution to the complexities involved in the handling of large numbers of men. Bentham supplemented this principle with the idea of contract management; that is, an administration by contract as opposed to trust, where the director would have a pecuniary interest in lowering the average rate of mortality. The Panopticon was intended to be cheaper than the prisons of his time, as it required fewer staff; "Allow me to construct a prison on this model," Bentham requested to a Committee for the Reform of Criminal Law, "I will be the gaoler. You will see ... that the gaoler will have no salary — will cost nothing to the nation." As the watchmen cannot be seen, they need not be on duty at all times, effectively leaving the watching to the watched. According to Bentham's design, the prisoners would also be used as menial labour walking on wheels to spin looms or run a water wheel. This would decrease the cost of the prison and give a possible source of income.^[4]

Bentham devoted a large part of his time and almost his whole fortune to promote the construction of a prison based on his scheme. After many years and innumerable political and financial difficulties, he eventually obtained a favourable sanction from Parliament for the purchase of a place to erect the prison, but in 1811 after Prime Minister Spencer Perceval (1809-1812)^[5] refused to authorise the purchase of the land, the project was finally abandoned. In 1813, he was awarded a sum of £23,000 in compensation for his monetary loss which did little to alleviate Bentham's ensuing unhappiness.

While the design did not come to fruition during Bentham's time, it has been seen as an important development. For instance, the design was invoked by Michel Foucault (in Discipline and Punish) as metaphor for modern "disciplinary" societies and its pervasive inclination to observe and normalise. Foucault proposes that not only prisons but all hierarchical structures like the army, the school, the hospital and the factory have evolved through history to resemble Bentham's Panopticon. The notoriety of the design today (although not its lasting influence in architectural realities) stems from Foucault's famous analysis of it.

[edit] Panoptic prison design

Prison Presidio Modelo, December 2005

Prison Presidio Modelo, Inside one of the buildings, December 2005

The architecture

incorporates a tower central to a circular building that is divided into cells, each cell extending the entire thickness of the building to allow inner and outer windows. The occupants of the cells are thus backlit, isolated from one another by walls, and subject to scrutiny both collectively and individually by an observer in the tower who remains unseen. Toward this end, Bentham envisioned not only venetian blinds on the tower observation ports but also maze-like connections among tower rooms to avoid glints of light or noise that might betray the presence of an observer

—Ben and Marthalee Barton ^[6]

The Panopticon is widely, but erroneously, believed to have influenced the design of Pentonville Prison in North London, Armagh Gaol in Northern Ireland, and Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia. These, however, were Victorian examples of the Separate system, which was more about prisoner isolation than prisoner surveillance; in fact, the separate system makes surveillance quite difficult. No true panopticons were built in Britain during Bentham's lifetime, and very few anywhere in the British Empire.

Many modern prisons built today are built in a "podular" design influenced by the Panopticon design, in intent and basic organization if not in exact form. As compared to traditional "cellblock" designs, in which rectangular buildings contain tiers of cells one atop the other in front of a walkway along which correctional officers patrol, modern prisons are often constructed with triangular or trapezoidal-shaped buildings known as "pods" or "modules". In these designs, cells are laid out in three or fewer tiers arrayed around an elevated central control station which affords a single correctional officer full view of all cells within either a 270° or 180° field of view (180° is usually considered a closer level of supervision). Control of cell doors, CCTV monitors, and communications are all conducted from the control station. The correctional officer, depending on the level of security, may be armed with nonlethal and lethal weapons to cover the pod as well. Increasingly, meals, laundry, commissary items and other goods and services are dispatched directly to the pods or individual cells. These design points, whatever their deliberate or incidental psychological and social effects, serve to maximize the number of prisoners that can be controlled and monitored by one individual, reducing staffing; as well as restricting prisoner movement as tightly as possible.

[edit] Panopticon-inspired prisons

• Carabanchel Prison — Madrid, Spain
• Caseros Prison — Buenos Aires, Argentina
• Chi Hoa — Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
• Huron Historic Gaol — Goderich, Ontario, Canada
• Kilmainham Gaol — Dublin, Ireland
• Koepelgevangenis (Arnhem) — Arnhem, The Netherlands
• Koepelgevangenis (Breda) — Breda, The Netherlands
• Koepelgevangenis (Haarlem) — Haarlem, The Netherlands
• Millbank Prison — London, United Kingdom
• Modelo Prison — Barcelona, Spain
• Mount Eden Prisons — Auckland, New Zealand
• Old Provost — Grahamstown, South Africa
• Panóptico — Bogotá Prison (today the National Museum of Colombia)
• Pelican Bay State Prison — Del Norte County, California, USA.
• Port Arthur, Tasmania Prison Colony — Port Arthur, Tasmania, Australia
• Presidio Modelo — Isla de la Juventud‎, Cuba
• Round House — Fremantle, Western Australia, Australia
• Stateville Correctional Center — Crest Hill, Illinois, USA.
• Twin Towers Correctional Facility — Los Angeles, California, USA
• Insein Prison — Insein, Burma

[edit] Other panoptic structures

The Panopticon has been suggested as an "open" hospital architecture: "Hospitals required knowledge of contacts, contagions, proximity and crowding... at the same time to divide space and keep it open, assuring a surveillance which is both global and individualising", 1977 interview (preface to French edition of Jeremy Bentham's "Panopticon").^{[citation needed]}

The Worcester State Hospital, constructed in the late 19th century, extensively employed panoptic structures to allow more efficient observation of the inmates. It was considered a model facility at the time.

The only industrial building ever to be built on the Panopticon principle was the Round Mill in Belper, Derbyshire, England. Constructed in 1811 it fell into disuse by the beginning of the twentieth century and was demolished in 1959. ^[7]

Contemporary social critics often assert that technology has allowed for the deployment of panoptic structures invisibly throughout society. Surveillance by closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras in public spaces is an example of a technology that brings the gaze of a superior into the daily lives of the populace. Further, Middlesbrough, a town in the North of England, has put loudspeakers to the CCTV cameras. They can transmit the voice of a camera supervisor.^[8][9]

[edit] In popular culture

• Closed-circuit television is similar to the methods used in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four by the thought police to control the citizenry. At any moment, a person may or may not be being observed via a telescreen, though whether one is being watched at any given moment is unknown to that person.
• The popular film Gilda (1946) features a panoticon-style headquarters in the casino of Nazist crimelord Ballin Mundson (George Macready). This menacing office and control base allows Mundson to oversee his gambling empire, and also provides Johnny Farrell (Glenn Ford) with a means to keep a check on the activities of the film's eponymous femme fatale (Rita Hayworth).
• In the British TV science fiction series Doctor Who, the main room of the Capitol on Gallifrey (the Time Lords' home planet) was called the Panopticon, although it apparently did not have a panoptic design. (It may have been called that because events there were televised to the whole planet.)
• The 1993 science fiction film Fortress features a heavily panoptic multi-level structure, albeit wholly underground. Most of the control over the structure and the inmates is given to the prison's central computer in similar vein to above literature, with ultimate leverage still exercized by the half-cyborg prison director.
• In Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novella, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, the Vicario brothers spend three years in the "panopticon of Riohacha" awaiting trial for the murder of Santiago Nasar.
• The 2004 sci-fi adventure The Chronicles of Riddick employs a similar underground structure, which is set deep within the recesses of a planetoid enduring extreme ground temperatures day and night.
• The 1998 video game Sanitarium features a mental asylum designed as Panopticon.
• In the 2004 video game Silent Hill 4: The Room, there is a prison that is seemingly based on the Panopticon design.
• Post-metal band Isis's 2004 album Panopticon takes both its title and its central lyrical theme from the Panopticon design.
• In the video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas there is a desolate area of countryside named 'The Panopticon'.
• In the television show LOST much of how the Others watched Jack Shepherd, James "Sawyer" Ford, and Kate Austen was very similar to the Panopticon. The character John Locke even takes the name of Jeremy Bentham in Season 4.

• In the book "The disreputable history of Frankie Landau-Banks" by Lockhart, E. panopticon is referenced many times and acts as a subplot for the book.
• John Twelve Hawks writes about panopticon as a model for society in his book The Traveler

[edit] Criticism

The growth of panoptic monitoring technologies has provoked backlashes by privacy advocates. However, some observers argue that these technologies don't always favor the hierarchical structure outlined by Orwell, Bentham, and Foucault, but can also enable individuals, through inverse surveillance or sousveillance, to appropriate technological tools for individual or public purposes. Still others predict a balanced state of a universal "participatory panopticon" in which there is an equiveillance, or equilibrium of monitoring and control structures between parties.

[edit] References

[edit] See also

• Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault
• Big Brother, a character from the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four
• Big Brother, the popular reality television series
• London's "ring of steel"
• Governmentality, and the Foucaultian idea of Biopower
• Information Awareness Office
• Mass surveillance
• Omniscience
• Right to privacy
• Totalitarianism
• The Transparent Society by David Brin also Kiln People
• The Traveler by John Twelve Hawks
• video surveillance
• Panopticon (album) by Isis (band)
• Panopticon (Internet culture)
• Total institution

[edit] External links

• Panopticon — by Jeremy Bentham (online version)
• Special Issue on the Panopticon — Surveillance and Society
• Scare tactics: embedded reporting and the Panopticon effect

Posted by Joe Anybody at 10:49 AM PDT

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Mood:  don't ask

June 30th, 2008

Z3 Readers Check out he Big Brother Article I found here:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=1368&tag=rbxccnbzd1

Big Brother Getting Bigger Part 1: USA

The FBI has confirmed to Popular Mechanics that it’s not only adding palm prints to its criminal records, but preparing to balloon its repository of photos, which an agency official says ‘could be the basis for our facial recognition.’ It’s all part of a new biometric software system that could store millions of iris scans within 10 years and has privacy advocates crying foul. Quoting: ‘The FBI’s Next Generation Identification (NGI) system, which could cost as much as $1 billion over its 10-year life cycle, will create an unprecedented database of biometric markers, such as facial images and iris scans. For criminal investigators, NGI could be as useful as DNA some day — a distinctive scar or a lopsided jaw line could mean the difference between a cold case and closed one. And for privacy watchdogs, it’s a duel threat — seen as a step toward a police state, and a gold mine of personal data waiting to be plundered by cybercriminals.

Read more thoughts on the subject here:

The Slashdot article mentions that Privacy advocates are up in arms over this, and rightly so.  From the Washington Post article that Slashdot comments on:

To enable global sharing of data, NGI is to be built to technical standards shared by the departments of Homeland Security, Defense and State, as well as by Britain, Canada and other countries, Bush said.

Which is great, because those organizations have such a prooven track record of building things to secure technical standards (you should note the sarcasm).  The Washington Post article continues:

The FBI also hopes to offer a service allowing employers to store employees’ prints, subject to state privacy laws, so that if employees are ever arrested, the employer would be notified.

Great.  Joint privacy abuse by government and commercial… exactly what America needs more of.  A final point about privacy from the Washington Post article:

Privacy advocates said that the work is proceeding before the technologies have been prooven. “Congress needs to do a better job of assessing how taxpayer dollars are being spent, particularly on programs that impact the privacy rights of Americans,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

That bold portion reads so obvious, but there it is.  We’re going to spend billions on something that is eroding our privacy.  It’s a celebration, so enjoy yourself.

You know, I think I watched a movie about this… there were these things called pre-cogs and they could predict the future…  and they’d know if you committed a crime before you knew you’d commit the crime.  Then these military police forces would come arrest you and you’d have no idea what was going on, and there was no point in running, because all over the streets were these biometric devices that could scan your face and recognize you and have the police on you within seconds.  No point in running, that is, unless you are Tom Cruise.

Despite my fiendishly good looks and charming wit, I am not Tom Cruise, and this scares the jeebus out of me from a privacy standpoint (that’s not a mis-spell, it’s a Homer Simpson quote).  I’m not sure I’m as worried about the police using it against me (since I’m not a criminal), as I am about the precedence it starts to create.  I think that technology is currently far outpacing our government’s capability of keeping up with it, which I’m assuming puts the fear into them.  I fear a world where our government makes snap decisions on things it may not understand that could have lasting ramifications.  I also fear the rapid loss of our civil liberties that’s occurred since 9/11. 

Posted by Joe Anybody at 7:08 PM PDT

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Mood:  accident prone

FEMA

Seeks immunity from suits over trailer fumes

Z3 Readers this article was copied from here: 

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080723/ap_on_re_us/toxic_trailers

By MICHAEL KUNZELMAN,

Associated Press WriterWed Jul 23, 3:08 PM ET

The Federal Emergency Management Agency asked a federal judge Wednesday for immunity from lawsuits over potentially dangerous fumes in government-issued trailers that have housed tens of thousands of Gulf Coast hurricane victims.

Lawyers for victims of hurricanes Katrina and Rita accuse FEMA of negligence for sheltering them in trailers with elevated levels of formaldehyde, a preservative used in construction materials that can cause health problems.

But a government attorney told U.S. District Judge Kurt Engelhardt that the FEMA's decisions in responding to a disaster, including its use of travel trailers after Katrina, are legally protected from "judicial second-guessing."

"It is what the legislative branch is supposed to second guess, and they are doing that," Department of Justice attorney Henry Miller said, referring to a series of congressional hearings on formaldehyde concerns.

Plaintiffs attorney Gerald Meunier said FEMA can be held liable for providing hurricane victims with trailers that didn't meet federal safety standards and weren't designed to be long-term housing.

"Some of these people are still living in these trailers almost three years later," Meunier said.

Engelhardt took FEMA's request for immunity under advisement and didn't indicate how soon he will rule.

The judge is presiding over several consolidated cases filed against the federal government and the companies that supplied FEMA with tens of thousands of trailers after Katrina made landfall on Aug. 29, 2005, and Rita struck about a month later.

FEMA spent more than $2.5 billion to purchase more than 140,000 new trailers from recreational vehicle dealers and trailer manufacturers after the storms.

The lawsuits accuse trailer makers of providing FEMA with shoddily built units in a rush to meet the agency's unprecedented demand for emergency housing. Plaintiffs lawyers also claim FEMA ignored concerns about formaldehyde levels in trailers for months after Katrina.

"At what point do you say, 'We know there's a crisis here, but there is a minimal standard where people have got to be protected against danger,'" Meunier said.

Earlier this year, federal officials announced that tests on hundreds of occupied FEMA trailers and mobile homes detected formaldehyde levels that were, on average, about five times higher than what people are exposed to in most modern homes.

Miller said FEMA fielded its first formaldehyde complaint from a trailer occupant in March 2006 and only had seven or eight complaints by June 2006.

"What was the alternative (to using trailers)?" Miller asked. "To move them to Baton Rouge, to move them to Arkansas, to move them to Texas?"

Lawyers for the plaintiffs want the cases certified as a class action on behalf of tens of thousands of current and former trailer occupants in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas. Engelhardt hasn't ruled on that request yet.

Posted by Joe Anybody at 7:08 PM PDT

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Mood:  accident prone

Optimize your hard drive in three easy steps

By Peter Butler, CNET editor
07/15/2008

If you're like most people, your drive quickly fills up with music, images, and other personal data.
And even if you're good about archiving content onto DVDs or external drives, your PC's hard disk is often still pushing full capacity. To keep your machine running at top speed, you have to perform regular maintenance. Here are steps you can take to optimize your hard drive:

Step 1: Analyze your drive
First, identify how much disk space you're using with WinDirStat. This free software, based on the Linux application KDirStat, offers you an informative visual display of your hard-drive usage. It can also analyze your local devices, but let's for now stay focused on just your local drive. Depending on the size of your disk, the initial WinDirStat scan may take quite a while. Grab a cup of coffee and come back.
When you return, you'll see all of your files (for the drive or directory you decided to scan) displayed in a rainbow of colors. WinDirStat assigns colors to each file type, such as MP3, ZIP, EXE, JPG, and so on. By default, the files that take up the most space are colored blue, the second heftiest are red, and the third largest green. After the first 10 color-labeled file types, the rest appear in gray--but you can change these settings and colors through the Options menu.
Once you've identified where your disk space has gone, you can then more easily decide where you can save space. WinDirStat is loaded with features for managing your files, such as the ability to automatically delete files without even bothering with the Recycle Bin.

Step 2: Manage your files
After you've analyzed your usage with WinDirStat, it's time to quickly rid yourself of unnecessary files, such as application data for uninstalled software, temporary Internet files, and "recent document" lists. Enter CCleaner.
This helpful, free utility separates its optimization process into two windows, one for Windows and one for third-party applications. Simply select the items that you'd like to clean, such as Windows log files, Chkdisk file fragments, or Flash player application data, and then hit "Analyze." Depending on how many items you're analyzing, you'll soon have a list of files that you can delete.
Even though we're talking about smaller items on your computer, the number of files quickly adds up. Don't be surprised if CCleaner ends up saving you a few gigabytes of disc space.

Step 3: Defrag your drive
So you've backed up and deleted the files you no longer need and cleaned your machine of unnecessary system and application files. If you've deleted enough, you'll immediately notice the extra room, but you might not see any improvement in your PC's performance. That's because you also need to defragment your disk.
When you save and delete files on your hard drive, you're sending different parts of the same disk file over different areas of the disk. Those parts, called fragments, make it harder for your system to quickly access them and can definitely degrade your disk performance in the long run.
Windows comes with a built-in disk defragmenter, but I find it to be rather slow and unfriendly. We recommend Auslogics Disk Defrag, an excellent freeware program that offers one-click defragmenting and shows you information about the defragmentation process as it's happening with a helpful visual display. Also, while both programs can't fully defragment your hard drive unless you have 15 percent of drive capacity available, Auslogics can still provide a partial defragmentation if you have less.
If you haven't defragmented your hard drive in a while, you should see a noticeable improvement in your system performance. For some people, the difference will be negligible, but for digital pack rats like me, a regular defrag is essential.
Let me know in the comments below if you're also a fan of any of these programs, or if you've a better method for keeping your hard drive optimized.

This page was found here on

http://help.cnet.com/9602-12576_39-0.html?messageID=2510926

Posted by Joe Anybody at 12:13 PM PDT

Updated: Tuesday, 22 July 2008 12:20 PM PDT

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Mood:  sad

 Z3 Report Readers

I found this article today at this link. I am shocked and sick to read how this can go on. This ws not an isolated situtation .... <7/22/08>

Sex slave:

'Every day we were raped'

• Story Highlights
• Bosnian Muslim woman was raped daily while held by Serb soldiers during war
  
• Jasmina says she begged for late-term abortion of attacker's baby after she escaped
  
• Still traumatized, she says she never wants to return to her former home city
  
• But Bosnian government policy may send her back there, she fears
  

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina (CNN) -- The outbreak of war seemed like a joke to Jasmina, then just 19 years old. She dreamed of being an economist and says she played with her toddler son and baby daughter as if they were toys.

But in April 1992, the Serb soldiers took over her city of Bijeljina, in northeast Bosnia near the border with Serbia, and began to kill, torture and terrorize the Muslims there in a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing.

"Whole families were disappearing during the night. Sometimes we could see their bodies in the gardens, sometimes not even that," Jasmina told CNN.

"The men from my family were beaten up the first day. ... My mother just disappeared. I never found out what happened."

Paramilitaries loyal to Arkan, the Serbian ultranationalist later indicted for crimes against humanity, came to the home Jasmina shared with her husband and extended family to search for valuables and weapons. When they found no guns they started beating her husband, said Jasmina who asked CNN not to use her last name to protect her children.

"Then they started torturing me. I lost consciousness. When I woke up I was totally naked and covered in blood and my sister-in-law was also naked and covered in blood. ... I knew I had been raped and my sister-in-law too." In a corner, she saw her mother-in-law, holding her children and crying.

"That same day we were locked in our house. That was the worst, the worst period of my whole life. That's when it started.

"Every day we were raped. Not only in the house -- they would also take us to the front line for the soldiers to torture us. Then again in the house, in front of the children," Jasmina said through a translator, remembering the 10 other women who were brutalized with her.

"I was in such a bad condition that sometimes I couldn't even recognize my own children. Even though I was in a very bad physical condition they had no mercy at all. They raped me every day. They took me to the soldiers and back to that house.

"The only conversation we had was when I was begging them to kill me. That's when they laughed. Their response was 'we don't need you dead.'"

Once at the front line there were women soldiers who tortured her with a bottle and then slashed at her throat and wrist when it broke. Then the troops cut one of her breasts with a bayonet, said Jasmina, now looking older than her 35 years.

"It lasted for a year. Every day. ... Not all the women survived."

Tens of thousands of women were raped in Bosnia and the other parts of the former Yugoslavia between 1992 and 1994 during the rule of

 Radovan Karadzic,

according to estimates by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. See a timeline of Karadzic's rule »

Karadzic was captured this week after years on the run and now will face war crimes charges at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. The tribunal, set up to try war crimes suspects, established for the first time that rape was a crime against humanity and that rape was "used by members of the Bosnian Serb armed forces as an instrument of terror."

For Jasmina, some relief came one day in 1993 when a familiar face, an older Serb who had been a friend of her parents, appeared at the house where she was being kept. Jasmina was told he had bought her as a prostitute but, once in a car with him, the man said he was saving her. "I owe this to your parents," he said.

He drove Jasmina and her children to the front lines, gave something to the Serb soldiers there and directed her towards the Bosnian position, saying "Now you are free to go."

"I was very weak, I weighed only 45 kilos [99 pounds]. I carried both my children for more than a kilometer to the Bosnian side."

Jasmina was safe, but scarred. "I felt ashamed, I wanted to die, to disappear somehow. I couldn't take care of my children, others did that, I just didn't have the strength or the will."

A new low came when doctors began to treat her in one of the refugee centers around the city of Tuzla.

"They discovered that I was pregnant, six months pregnant and I didn't know that. It was too late for any abortion, but I kept saying I didn't want that child."

The gynecologist pleaded with Jasmina to have the child and give it up for adoption, saying it was too dangerous to try anything else. But that was no option for Jasmina. "I didn't want to hear about that, about giving birth to that child at all."

Finally, medics said they could try to abort the child but it was a very risky operation that only 1 in 100 women would survive. "I begged them to do it," Jasmina said, pausing to remember an 18-year-old girl who had the same operation on the same day as her and died. Jasmina herself continues to have gynecological health problems stemming from her abuse.

Months later, her husband arrived at the same refugee center after managing to escape a camp in Serbia. A man he broke out with was killed by a mine.

"It was such a difficult moment for me. I wasn't even sure if I wanted him to be dead or alive. I knew that he knew what had happened to me so it was very, very difficult for me," Jasmina said.

"I thought he was going to leave me and take my children because of everything that happened. But he told me he was not going to ask me about anything. And that he also went through terrible things himself so he didn't want to discuss anything." Yet still she says she cannot look her husband in the eye.

Jasmina said she was unable to talk to the therapists in Tuzla and tried to kill herself in 1995 -- the first of three suicide attempts.

"I will never be OK," she said, adding that she believes God kept her alive for a reason.

She now lives in a modestly furnished apartment in a tower block in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina. She has been there since 2001 with her husband and children.

Her dreams now are for her children. She believes it's critical she give them some stability, but says that's impossible when she doesn't know from day to day if she will be evicted.

She does not own the apartment and all property must be returned to rightful owners under the terms of an annex to the U.S.-brokered peace agreement that ended the war.

The same pact allows for the return of all refugees and displaced people -- more than half of the country's people left their homes during the war according to the International Organization for Migration -- and the re-establishment of the mixed ethnic communities that had lived peacefully for centuries before the war.

The Office of the High Representative for Bosnia-Herzegovina, an international body set up to oversee the implementation of the peace agreements, says almost all property rights have been restored. But it is impossible to say how many people have gone home and how many have sold their houses, leaving cities and towns like Bijeljina "ethnically cleansed" as the warmongers had planned.

A law enacted in September 2006 does include a section that homes should be provided for victims of sexual torture during the war. It is not clear who should implement the act and there is no agency making sure the law is enforced, according to the Ministry for Human Rights and Refugees.

Meanwhile, authorities say Jasmina should return to her mother-in-law's rebuilt house in Bijeljina. But she says she will never go back to the place where she lost 39 members of her family and where her abuse began.

It is a fear shared by other women, according to Alisa Muratcaus, the president of the Association of Concentration Camp Survivors -- Canton Sarajevo -- a group that offers classes and other support to Jasmina and 1,200 other women around the capital, including 150 victims of mass rape.

"Many of our members must deal with the realities of return. Not all members are able psychologically to return to regions in which they suffered such extreme human rights abuses," she told CNN.

"No one raped women has returned to their pre-war houses, since it is immoral and inhuman to request their return while the war criminals who tortured them are still free and live in these regions."

The Sarajevo municipality that owns Jasmina's apartment says it does not plan to evict her and that any such directive would come from the Ministry for Human Rights and Refugees.

Saliha Djuderija, head of the Ministry's Department of Human Rights, said she was aware of victims who could not face returning to the places where they were tortured and was working on a solution. In the last couple of years, between 15 and 20 women have been given somewhere to live, but lack of funding is restricting the help that can be given. Priority was given to women who testified against their attackers and Jasmina is not in that group as her case is still unsolved.

But if her future is in doubt, Jasmina's mind is made up. "I'm not going to take my children to Bijeljina. I told my children when I die, don't take my bones to Bijeljina. I don't want to hear about Bijeljina. It doesn't exist for me," she said, flashing anger for the first time in a lengthy interview.

Then she shows a picture of her daughter, a beautiful young woman, but even that causes Jasmina pain as she remembers how the soldiers picked her out. "I was beautiful once. It cost me my life."

All AboutRadovan Karadzic • Ratko Mladic • Bosnia and Herzegovina

Posted by Joe Anybody at 11:46 AM PDT

Updated: Tuesday, 22 July 2008 12:20 PM PDT

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Mood:  celebratory

<videos>

2 parts -

Film of the Impeachment Vigil Protest

on July 17 2008

author: Joe Anybody        e-mail: iam@joe-anybody.com

One Solid Year Of Weekly Protesting For Impeachment 2007-2008

See all the videos from this

year long vigil protest on my

 website here

Posted by Joe Anybody at 4:10 PM PDT

Updated: Monday, 21 July 2008 5:32 PM PDT

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