Nominees at Standstill as G.O.P. Flexes Its Muscle

The list of vacancies in senior economic and regulatory positions has lengthened to roughly a dozen since last November, when Republicans won enough Senate seats to prevent confirmations. The White House has not tried to fill several of the positions. Some of the people it has named have been stuck in legislative limbo, while others have given up, including the Nobel laureate Peter A. Diamond, who withdrew his nomination for a seat on the Federal Reserve?s Board of Governors.

Senators have long exercised their constitutional prerogative to derail nominations. And, for just as long, the party in the White House has accused its opponents of abusing that power. But several of the current standoffs differ in at least one respect: Republicans have said they are not opposing a particular nominee but rather any nominee, whoever it may be.

Republicans say the blockade reflects their frustration with the White House and the last Congress for passing broad policies without winning broad support. Republicans are consigned to defensive tactics because they lack the votes to pursue their own agenda.

A group of 44 Republican senators say they will not confirm a commerce secretary, or any other trade official, until the conclusion of free trade agreements with South Korea, Panama and Colombia. They have also vowed to block any nominee to lead the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, instead demanding that Democrats agree to eliminate the position and curtail the agency?s powers.

Senator David Vitter, Republican of Louisiana, blocked a vote on President Obama?s nominee to lead the Fish and Wildlife Service until the government granted 15 permits for deepwater drilling. Those conditions were satisfied last month. A separate demand by Senator Mike Lee of Utah that the Interior Department release certain documents was met last week. Now the nomination is being blocked by Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming, who wants a review of the protected status of wolves.

?The one leverage tool that the minority party in the Senate has right now is confirmations,? said Joseph Engelhard of Capital Alpha Partners, a research firm that analyzes Washington for corporate clients.

?This isn?t about any particular appointee ? Ben Franklin could come back to life and they would oppose him,? said Mr. Engelhard, a former Republican aide on the House Financial Services Committee. ?There?s just very strong concerns on their side that the process, that traditional way that the Senate likes to come to bipartisan compromise, isn?t working.?

Democratic lawmakers, regulators and even some industry groups say they are increasingly concerned that the vacancies are impeding efforts to improve regulation and spur growth.

?It?s important for agencies to have leadership that has been appointed and confirmed by elected officials,? said Joseph A. Smith Jr., whose nomination to lead the Federal Housing Finance Agency was blocked by Senator Richard C. Shelby, Republican of Alabama. ?It confers legal authority and it confers moral authority. People are more likely to listen to you.?

?It doesn?t matter that it?s not me,? Mr. Smith said. ?What?s important is that they confirm someone.?

Almost a year has passed since Mr. Shelby and Senator Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut, a Democrat who led the banking committee until he retired last year, sent a letter to the White House urging Mr. Obama to appoint a leader ?as soon as possible? for the housing agency, which supervises the mortgage companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

?We also urge you to make timely appointments to fill the positions at other federal financial regulators.? the letter said. ?A full contingent of federal financial regulators is crucial to maintaining adequate federal prudential regulation and consumer protections.?

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Insider: Verizon to introduce tiered data plans on July 7

Having been rumored since last year and partially confirmed by Reuters last month, Verizon's tiered data plan is just over the hill according to an internal memo. Select Verizon employees today received a letter announcing the upcoming "evolution" of the carrier's pricing model. Unfortunately, that particular document doesn't contain all the juicy pricing details you're looking for, but Droid Life claims to have an exclusive inside scoop.

If accurate, you can expect the changes to launch on Tuesday, July 7, which happens to fall one day after the company's 4G hotspot promotion ends. Droid Life claims that data plans will come in three separate tiers: 2GB for $30 per month, 5GB for $50 and 10GB for $80. Adding tethering to an account will cost an additional $20 a month and you'll get another 2GB of data. For instance, the bottom tier with tethering would be 4GB for $50.

Tablets will have a separate plan that provides 2GB of transfer for $30 a month, a change from $20 for 1GB. All overages, be they from a smartphone or tablet, will cost $10 per gigabyte. It's worth noting that there doesn't seem to be any separation between 3G and 4G devices, so you shouldn't have to worry about paying extra to tap into Verizon's LTE network. Also, the change only applies to new customers -- at least initially, anyway.

Although you'll be able to complete your existing contract unfazed, we imagine Verizon will lock you into the tiered structure when renewal time comes. That's not confirmed yet (again, nor is the pricing), but AT&T routinely funnels contract renewals into their metered data scheme. The carrier updated its data plans last June, offering 200MB for $15 per month, 2GB for $25, 4GB with tethering for $45, and $10 per gigabyte overages.

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Ultrasound App Lets Almost Any Phone Pay

For years, banks, cell-phone carriers, and tech companies have been experimenting with technology that enables mobile phones to connect securely over short distances and make payments in stores. Although Google and other big companies say they're committed to the radio-based technology known as near-field communications (NFC), few phones have the necessary hardware built in.

Now startup Naratte, based in Sunnyvale, California, claims it can deliver the same experience on almost any existing phone, establishing a secure link by generating a sound too high-pitched for the human ear. "All you need is a speaker and microphone, which you already have on your device," says Brett Paulson, Naratte's chief executive and cofounder. "We've built everything in software so you just download an app to get a contactless experience."

Using the technology, known as Zoosh, involves briefly holding a phone within six inches of either another handset with a Zoosh-enabled app or a dedicated reader connected to a store's checkout terminal. The devices exchange short ID tokens encoded into blips of ultrasound to identify each other, a process that takes less than one second. Then users can make debit or credit transactions of points or even cash, or let devices swap data such as contact info.

Naratte has spent two years developing the audio-processing technology needed to make the approach secure enough for payments data and robust enough to work even in noisy environments, says Byron Alsberg, the company's other cofounder and chief development officer. "Only in the last couple of years has it become possible to do the audio processing needed on a phone without adding a specialized chip," he says. As phones have begun to double as media players and interest in speech recognition has grown, playback and microphone quality have improved.

Even simple phones that can't runs apps can use the technology. Text messages with embedded audio files can allow these phones to use the system. "The criterion is: does it have MP3 playback?" says Alsberg. "That's a lot of devices."

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Adventures and Adventuring

Three of my five weapons were offline and leaving small ion trails in space, my cargo hold was full of rare and expensive artefacts and a band of pirates was chasing me down a frantically plotted and improvised course. With a route that picked its way in and out of asteroid fields through systems that were well and truly off the charts, it is fair to say I was panicking. I was also pretty sure that my eyes had stopped blinking.

I loved Freelancer; Microsoft's space trading open world game. It resembled an extremely stripped down Eve Online, but with gameplay replacing the spreadsheets. I'm aware that it was a
condensed version of games that did the same thing better and with more depth many years before, but I found it to be a deep and beautifully realised sandbox. In fact, I'm convinced that most players only ever scratched its surface.

I wouldn't be able to tell you the plot of the game, or name any of the systems, although I could tell you that they had flavours of America, England, Germany and Japan. I couldn't name any of the characters without a short trip to Google either. The game didn't leave that sort of impression on me. What I do very strongly remember, though, was having an adventure.


I've played a lot of games that bill themselves as adventure games. Some of them are point and click adventure games, some of them are 3D action adventure games and almost every triple A release involves an adventure of some description. However, I can only think of one time where I have actually had an adventure for myself.

An adventure is only ever an adventure in retrospect. At the time, it's just an ordeal that the adventurers would rather not be tolerating. It was an adventure climbing Mount Snowdon in the cold and the rain in my jeans, but at the time I just couldn't believe I was so stupid to think it was just a hill. It was an adventure getting a chest of drawers home sticking out of the back of my Ford Ka last week, but at the time it was a living nightmare going up hills, as I was worried that it would slide into the car behind that I couldn't see.

An adventure game is a comfortable experience, no matter how well it immerses you in its world. You're still playing an interactive story, and it's only once you start getting towards the open world games that the capacity to have an adventure starts to kick in. However, even then there's a danger that it will just feel like a great big toy box, rather than sparking any significant connection with the player.

For example, for all the sandbox fun to be had in GTA, I couldn't care less when one of the thugs got shot, arrested or squashed by his own stolen ambulance. In those cases, what I was doing felt like an exercise in karma, as opposed to anything that could provide sufficient tension to facilitate adventure.

With Freelancer, I had become invested in the game, and my main memory of it is a single encounter of being chased. Most of my ship had been destroyed, and I was limping from wormhole to wormhole, desperately trying to get back to civilisation so that I could hide and repair my craft after my ill- advised drift from the beaten track.

There probably wasn't even that much of a consequence if I failed, got killed or ditched my cargo, but still I felt as if failure would result in me being hunted down in the future by bounty hunters, and that I would maybe end up frozen in Carbonite and propped up in Jabba's palace.

I've never seen or experienced this sort of gameplay before or since. I've felt engaged by games, and I've even been threatened with high-stakes failure, but never has it felt quite the same as this single encounter in which I was trying to get away from space pirates.

That said, I nearly felt something similar quite recently while I was playing Mount and Blade: Warband. My medium sized army was chasing down a small band of looters while being chased by a much larger army from an enemy faction. I was the latter that provided the fear of failure. There was a feeling that this was of my own doing, and I felt outside of my comfort zone.


However, this thrill subsided shortly after the second day of chasing, when it became clear that all three armies were running at exactly the same speed and not gaining or pulling away from each other. After that, the only excitement was the realisation that sooner or later my army was going to run out of food and become highly irritable.

There was also a brief foray into genuine adventure during my time with Morrowind, as you can easily get lost in the game's huge world. After missing a crucial direction, I once ended up on the other side of the game world several hours later, being chased by a crocodile-like demon walking on two legs. Again, however, this was less of an adventure and more of an exercise in making me feel like an idiot.

I'm fed up with pre-baked sequences and scripted events in my first person shooters. I get tired of plodding through what amounts to an overly long film with hand-eye-co-ordination exercises to progress the plot. Although I love playing through some of these titles, and it would be difficult to argue that Half-Life 2, the absolute king of disguised linear gameplay, was anything other than a masterpiece, but I want to have adventures as opposed to sitting through those of someone else.

I can't help feeling that the medium would be greatly helped if more games were just a little bit more of an ordeal to play. That's not to say that they need to be frustrating, overly difficult or painful to
play, just that they should provide a bit more than 'press X not to die' and raise the stakes for failure a little higher.

Basically, I want to play more games that facilitate the experience of an adventure, as opposed to adventure games. If you know of any games ripe for adventure-mining, let us know in the forums.

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Nominees at Standstill as G.O.P. Flexes Its Muscle

The list of vacancies in senior economic and regulatory positions has lengthened to roughly a dozen since last November, when Republicans won enough Senate seats to prevent confirmations. The White House has not tried to fill several of the positions. Some of the people it has named have been stuck in legislative limbo, while others have given up, including the Nobel laureate Peter A. Diamond, who withdrew his nomination for a seat on the Federal Reserve?s Board of Governors.

Senators have long exercised their constitutional prerogative to derail nominations. And, for just as long, the party in the White House has accused its opponents of abusing that power. But several of the current standoffs differ in at least one respect: Republicans have said they are not opposing a particular nominee but rather any nominee, whoever it may be.

Republicans say the blockade reflects their frustration with the White House and the last Congress for passing broad policies without winning broad support. Republicans are consigned to defensive tactics because they lack the votes to pursue their own agenda.

A group of 44 Republican senators say they will not confirm a commerce secretary, or any other trade official, until the conclusion of free trade agreements with South Korea, Panama and Colombia. They have also vowed to block any nominee to lead the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, instead demanding that Democrats agree to eliminate the position and curtail the agency?s powers.

Senator David Vitter, Republican of Louisiana, blocked a vote on President Obama?s nominee to lead the Fish and Wildlife Service until the government granted 15 permits for deepwater drilling. Those conditions were satisfied last month. A separate demand by Senator Mike Lee of Utah that the Interior Department release certain documents was met last week. Now the nomination is being blocked by Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming, who wants a review of the protected status of wolves.

?The one leverage tool that the minority party in the Senate has right now is confirmations,? said Joseph Engelhard of Capital Alpha Partners, a research firm that analyzes Washington for corporate clients.

?This isn?t about any particular appointee ? Ben Franklin could come back to life and they would oppose him,? said Mr. Engelhard, a former Republican aide on the House Financial Services Committee. ?There?s just very strong concerns on their side that the process, that traditional way that the Senate likes to come to bipartisan compromise, isn?t working.?

Democratic lawmakers, regulators and even some industry groups say they are increasingly concerned that the vacancies are impeding efforts to improve regulation and spur growth.

?It?s important for agencies to have leadership that has been appointed and confirmed by elected officials,? said Joseph A. Smith Jr., whose nomination to lead the Federal Housing Finance Agency was blocked by Senator Richard C. Shelby, Republican of Alabama. ?It confers legal authority and it confers moral authority. People are more likely to listen to you.?

?It doesn?t matter that it?s not me,? Mr. Smith said. ?What?s important is that they confirm someone.?

Almost a year has passed since Mr. Shelby and Senator Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut, a Democrat who led the banking committee until he retired last year, sent a letter to the White House urging Mr. Obama to appoint a leader ?as soon as possible? for the housing agency, which supervises the mortgage companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

?We also urge you to make timely appointments to fill the positions at other federal financial regulators.? the letter said. ?A full contingent of federal financial regulators is crucial to maintaining adequate federal prudential regulation and consumer protections.?

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Ultrasound App Lets Almost Any Phone Pay

For years, banks, cell-phone carriers, and tech companies have been experimenting with technology that enables mobile phones to connect securely over short distances and make payments in stores. Although Google and other big companies say they're committed to the radio-based technology known as near-field communications (NFC), few phones have the necessary hardware built in.

Now startup Naratte, based in Sunnyvale, California, claims it can deliver the same experience on almost any existing phone, establishing a secure link by generating a sound too high-pitched for the human ear. "All you need is a speaker and microphone, which you already have on your device," says Brett Paulson, Naratte's chief executive and cofounder. "We've built everything in software so you just download an app to get a contactless experience."

Using the technology, known as Zoosh, involves briefly holding a phone within six inches of either another handset with a Zoosh-enabled app or a dedicated reader connected to a store's checkout terminal. The devices exchange short ID tokens encoded into blips of ultrasound to identify each other, a process that takes less than one second. Then users can make debit or credit transactions of points or even cash, or let devices swap data such as contact info.

Naratte has spent two years developing the audio-processing technology needed to make the approach secure enough for payments data and robust enough to work even in noisy environments, says Byron Alsberg, the company's other cofounder and chief development officer. "Only in the last couple of years has it become possible to do the audio processing needed on a phone without adding a specialized chip," he says. As phones have begun to double as media players and interest in speech recognition has grown, playback and microphone quality have improved.

Even simple phones that can't runs apps can use the technology. Text messages with embedded audio files can allow these phones to use the system. "The criterion is: does it have MP3 playback?" says Alsberg. "That's a lot of devices."

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Adventures and Adventuring

Three of my five weapons were offline and leaving small ion trails in space, my cargo hold was full of rare and expensive artefacts and a band of pirates was chasing me down a frantically plotted and improvised course. With a route that picked its way in and out of asteroid fields through systems that were well and truly off the charts, it is fair to say I was panicking. I was also pretty sure that my eyes had stopped blinking.

I loved Freelancer; Microsoft's space trading open world game. It resembled an extremely stripped down Eve Online, but with gameplay replacing the spreadsheets. I'm aware that it was a
condensed version of games that did the same thing better and with more depth many years before, but I found it to be a deep and beautifully realised sandbox. In fact, I'm convinced that most players only ever scratched its surface.

I wouldn't be able to tell you the plot of the game, or name any of the systems, although I could tell you that they had flavours of America, England, Germany and Japan. I couldn't name any of the characters without a short trip to Google either. The game didn't leave that sort of impression on me. What I do very strongly remember, though, was having an adventure.


I've played a lot of games that bill themselves as adventure games. Some of them are point and click adventure games, some of them are 3D action adventure games and almost every triple A release involves an adventure of some description. However, I can only think of one time where I have actually had an adventure for myself.

An adventure is only ever an adventure in retrospect. At the time, it's just an ordeal that the adventurers would rather not be tolerating. It was an adventure climbing Mount Snowdon in the cold and the rain in my jeans, but at the time I just couldn't believe I was so stupid to think it was just a hill. It was an adventure getting a chest of drawers home sticking out of the back of my Ford Ka last week, but at the time it was a living nightmare going up hills, as I was worried that it would slide into the car behind that I couldn't see.

An adventure game is a comfortable experience, no matter how well it immerses you in its world. You're still playing an interactive story, and it's only once you start getting towards the open world games that the capacity to have an adventure starts to kick in. However, even then there's a danger that it will just feel like a great big toy box, rather than sparking any significant connection with the player.

For example, for all the sandbox fun to be had in GTA, I couldn't care less when one of the thugs got shot, arrested or squashed by his own stolen ambulance. In those cases, what I was doing felt like an exercise in karma, as opposed to anything that could provide sufficient tension to facilitate adventure.

With Freelancer, I had become invested in the game, and my main memory of it is a single encounter of being chased. Most of my ship had been destroyed, and I was limping from wormhole to wormhole, desperately trying to get back to civilisation so that I could hide and repair my craft after my ill- advised drift from the beaten track.

There probably wasn't even that much of a consequence if I failed, got killed or ditched my cargo, but still I felt as if failure would result in me being hunted down in the future by bounty hunters, and that I would maybe end up frozen in Carbonite and propped up in Jabba's palace.

I've never seen or experienced this sort of gameplay before or since. I've felt engaged by games, and I've even been threatened with high-stakes failure, but never has it felt quite the same as this single encounter in which I was trying to get away from space pirates.

That said, I nearly felt something similar quite recently while I was playing Mount and Blade: Warband. My medium sized army was chasing down a small band of looters while being chased by a much larger army from an enemy faction. I was the latter that provided the fear of failure. There was a feeling that this was of my own doing, and I felt outside of my comfort zone.


However, this thrill subsided shortly after the second day of chasing, when it became clear that all three armies were running at exactly the same speed and not gaining or pulling away from each other. After that, the only excitement was the realisation that sooner or later my army was going to run out of food and become highly irritable.

There was also a brief foray into genuine adventure during my time with Morrowind, as you can easily get lost in the game's huge world. After missing a crucial direction, I once ended up on the other side of the game world several hours later, being chased by a crocodile-like demon walking on two legs. Again, however, this was less of an adventure and more of an exercise in making me feel like an idiot.

I'm fed up with pre-baked sequences and scripted events in my first person shooters. I get tired of plodding through what amounts to an overly long film with hand-eye-co-ordination exercises to progress the plot. Although I love playing through some of these titles, and it would be difficult to argue that Half-Life 2, the absolute king of disguised linear gameplay, was anything other than a masterpiece, but I want to have adventures as opposed to sitting through those of someone else.

I can't help feeling that the medium would be greatly helped if more games were just a little bit more of an ordeal to play. That's not to say that they need to be frustrating, overly difficult or painful to
play, just that they should provide a bit more than 'press X not to die' and raise the stakes for failure a little higher.

Basically, I want to play more games that facilitate the experience of an adventure, as opposed to adventure games. If you know of any games ripe for adventure-mining, let us know in the forums.

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For 2012 Hopeful, Envoy Job in China Was a Useful Detour

The president?s envoy to Beijing, former Gov. Jon M. Huntsman Jr. of Utah, a Republican who was in town for Mr. Hu?s visit, was rumored to be considering a run for the boss?s job in 2012. Happening upon Mr. Huntsman in the State Room, Mr. Axelrod confronted him.

?He said, ?I don?t know where this is all coming from,? ? Mr. Axelrod recalled, ? ?It?s way overblown.? ?

When Mr. Axelrod shared that story during an interview last week, Mr. Huntsman was completing plans for an announcement on Tuesday that he indeed intends to run for president.

Mr. Huntsman?s decision prompted a mix of suspicion and resignation among the president?s advisers: suspicion that Mr. Huntsman had not always been straight about his national aspirations, and resignation that, as one presidential strategist put it, ?There?s no loyalty in politics,? especially when it comes to across-the-aisle alliances.

Mr. Huntsman, 51, who resigned as ambassador in late April and declined to comment for this article, is joining the presidential campaign scene as a relative unknown outside Utah. Yet he is among those who are being taken most seriously by Mr. Obama?s aides, who after working with him for more than two years say he could be formidable if ? and they consider this a big ?if? ? he can navigate a nominating contest likely to be decided by voters who may view him as too moderate.

He is a Mormon whose missionary work took him to Taiwan, where he became fluent in Mandarin Chinese. He has benefited from the wealth generated by a family business, the Huntsman Corporation, that is one of the largest chemical companies in the world. He opposes abortion rights and supports same-sex civil unions.

But it is his path from the Utah governor?s mansion to the United States Embassy in Beijing and now to the presidential campaign trail that has gotten him particular attention, representing a rare moment in American history in which a member of a presidential administration turns to run against it.

Mr. Obama?s decision to name Mr. Huntsman his ambassador to China in 2009 was hailed by members of both parties as another act of political wizardry, a chance to show that the president was trying to infuse his administration with a bipartisan spirit.

The president?s aides had by then identified Mr. Huntsman, a rising star of the Republican Party, as a potentially strong opponent in 2012. And Mr. Obama?s team basked in accolades among political strategists for taking Mr. Huntsman out of the mix and packing him off some 7,000 miles away.

Mr. Huntsman?s time in China has indeed created a potential roadblock for his campaign; Mr. Obama has teased him publicly about how his service in the administration will play among the Republican faithful.

But in some ways it has proved to be a help. It has bolstered his position as the only candidate in a field dominated by former governors to have direct foreign policy experience. And it put him in proximity to some of the nation?s leading chief executives ? and potential campaign donors and fund-raisers ? as they sought assistance in doing business with China.

Diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks show meetings with the leading executives from Cisco, Pfizer and Wal-Mart; close contact with the United States Chamber of Commerce; and requests for help from the Las Vegas Sands casino, the chairman of which, Sheldon Adelson, is a major Republican fund-raiser.

On the negative side of the political ledger for Mr. Huntsman, a confidential cable in November 2009 signed by him and sent to Mr. Obama appears to credit the president for ?working with China to manage the worst of the financial crisis? and reads: ?Mr. President, your commitment to building a relationship with China that will allow us together to shape the 21st century has the attention of our country, China, and the world. We are proud to be a part of your team.?

Jeff Zeleny and Andrew W. Lehren contributed reporting.

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LulzSec teams up with Anonymous for ?Operation Anti-Security?

Despite reports that it was a war with the loose online collective Anonymous, today hacker group LulzSec has announced it is to team up with the online community to begin ?Operation Anti-Security?, a declaration which will see it attack any government or agency that ?crosses their path?.

LulzSec, famous for compromising the servers of Fox, Sony, the CIA, PBS and a number of other websites, announced its plans in its usual fashion, posting a release to Pastebin and then tweeting the link from its 217,000 strong Twitter account.

As part of the campaign, LulzSec encourages attackers to compromise government websites and flaunt the word ?AntiSec?, prompting interested parties to consider tagging buildings with the same phrase with physical graffiti art. Uniting all that wish to join them, the hacker group wants acts of corruption exposed, all in the name of Anti-Security.

Concluding its statement, LulzSec says its main priority is to ?steal and leak any classified government information, including email spools and documentation?, sending out a warning to anyone that stands in their way:

If they try to censor our progress, we will obliterate the censor with cannonfire anointed with lizard blood.

The group lists four links at the bottom of its release, one of which includes Wikileaks. Whether the whistleblowing website is involved in the campaign is unknown, it may just be included as a reference to the public release of private information.

With this announcement, we may no longer see public dumps of usernames and passwords, as the group focuses its attention on corporates and governments in its bid to free information. That said, the number of incidents is only set to increase as other online groups join the campaign.

The release in full:

Salutations Lulz Lizards,

As we?re aware, the government and whitehat security terrorists across the world continue to dominate and control our Internet ocean. Sitting pretty on cargo bays full of corrupt booty, they think it?s acceptable to condition and enslave all vessels in sight. Our Lulz Lizard battle fleet is now declaring immediate and unremitting war on the freedom-snatching moderators of 2011.

Welcome to Operation Anti-Security (#AntiSec) ? we encourage any vessel, large or small, to open fire on any government or agency that crosses their path. We fully endorse the flaunting of the word ?AntiSec? on any government website defacement or physical graffiti art. We encourage you to spread the word of AntiSec far and wide, for it will be remembered. To increase efforts, we are now teaming up with the Anonymous collective and all affiliated battleships.

Whether you?re sailing with us or against us, whether you hold past grudges or a burning desire to sink our lone ship, we invite you to join the rebellion. Together we can defend ourselves so that our privacy is not overrun by profiteering gluttons. Your hat can be white, gray or black, your skin and race are not important. If you?re aware of the corruption, expose it now, in the name of Anti-Security.

Top priority is to steal and leak any classified government information, including email spools and documentation. Prime targets are banks and other high-ranking establishments. If they try to censor our progress, we will obliterate the censor with cannonfire anointed with lizard blood.

It?s now or never. Come aboard, we?re expecting you?

History begins today.

Lulz Security,

http://LulzSecurity.com/

Support: http://www.mithral.com/~beberg/manifesto.html
Support: http://www.youtube.com/user/thejuicemedia
Support: http://wikileaks.ch/
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Four Egyptian startups are US-bound for funding

Four Egyptian startups are making their way to the US today, in an effort to pitch their ideas to investors in New York and San Francisco.

In a trip which represents a networking opportunity, as well as a chance to get more exposure, the main idea behind the venture is to take Egypt?s startup scene global, and secure the financing necessary to do so.

Kngine, which featured on our very own list of  Middle Eastern Startups you should know about, is going across the pond, along with three other companies. The semantic search engine already has an international following, but is hoping to secure both funding, as well as a mentorship to improve the product.

Kngine is joined by two mobile services companies, Vimov and Alzwad Mobile Services. Vimov is the company behind two popular iPhone/iPad apps, namely, iSimulate and Weather HD, while Alzwad Mobile Services is the company behind Gazar, a trifecta of an iPhone app with a food delivery service, TV Guide, and prayer times guide, all rolled into one. The fourth and final startup heading to the US this week is SilMinds, a hardware accelerator company for financial transaction.

Sawari Ventures,  an international venture capital firm, is behind the concept, and is supporting the four Egyptian startup companies as part of its efforts ?to identify, serve, and provide capital for extraordinary entrepreneurs who are determined to change the MENA region.?

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/me/2011/06/19/four-egyptian-startups-are-us-bound-for-funding/

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