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I have had a deal with a few of my friends who are farmers, that I will tell them when it is time to panic about the proposed expropriation without compensation. Until then, I advised them to relax. Last night after President Cyril Ramaphosa's address to the nation in which he announced the ANC's decision to propose an amendment to the Constitution to expropriate without compensation, I got many texts asking: "Is it time yet?" Let me say upfront that I think the ANC has been handling the land debate very clumsily (to put it politely). It is clear that...

In early December 2016, Adam was doing what he’s always doing, somewhere between hobby and profession: looking for things that are on the internet that shouldn’t be. That week, he came across a server inside New York University’s famed Institute for Mathematics and Advanced Supercomputing, headed by the brilliant Chudnovsky brothers, David and Gregory. The server appeared to be an internet-connected backup drive. But instead of being filled with family photos and spreadsheets, this drive held confidential information on an advanced code-breaking machine that had never before been described in public. Dozens of documents spanning hundreds of pages detailed the...

Despite the denials, South Africa’s banks have had enough. In recent weeks, all four of the biggest banks have severed their links to the Guptas, closing the bank accounts of the Gupta holding company, Oakbay Investments. The Guptas were furious. In newspaper advertisements, they said the banks were jeopardizing the livelihoods of 7,500 of Oakbay’s “employees and dependents.” The Zuma government swiftly responded by delegating three cabinet ministers to meet with the banks to settle the matter. It was an extraordinary state intervention in a private business dispute. And, critics said, it was further proof of the remarkable power of...

The company that Hillary Clinton paid to manage her private email network was the victim of a massive international hack during the period in which Clinton was employing it, Breitbart News has learned. Hillary Clinton used the company Internap as the internet service provider for her private email account during her tenure as Secretary of State. Internap, based in Atlanta, has a facility in Manhattan, near the the physical location of the IP address for clintonemail.com. In March 2011, the security company RSA was hacked. The hackers got into the company’s system through a malware-infested email sent to an employee,...

The NSA and RSA have reported to have made a deal. In exchange for "back door privileges" the NSA paid RSA $10M. Thanks in a large part to Snowden, we now know that this story is true, particularly when you read the carefully crafted statement from the RSA denying they sold a back door to the NSA -- They just happened to accept $10M from the NSA at the time they were selecting a known faulty and broken random number generator used in encryption. Now we've all read about the global fallout and protestations from foreign governments saying how upset...

Reuters reports that the NSA paid massive computer security firm RSA $10 million to promote a flawed encryption system so that the surveillance organization could wiggle its way around security. In other words, the NSA bribed the firm to leave the back door to computers all over the world open. Thanks to documents leaked by Edward Snowden, we already knew the NSA played a central role in promoting a flawed formula for generating random numbers, which if used in encryption, essentially gives the spies easy access to computing systems. A piece of RSA software, bSafe, became the most significant vector...

Details about the recent cyber attacks against security firm RSA suggest the assailants may have been taunting the industry giant and the United States while they were stealing secrets from a company whose technology is used to secure many banks and government agencies. Earlier this month, RSA disclosed that “an extremely sophisticated cyber attack” targeting its business unit “resulted in certain information being extracted from RSA’s systems that relates to RSA’s SecurID two-factor authentication products.” The company was careful to caution that while data gleaned did not enable a successful direct attack on any of its SecurID customers, the information...

Sophisticated hackers broke into security company RSA's servers and stole data related to SecurID authentication tokens, the firm's head announced late Thursday. The tokens are used by an estimated 40 million employees of large corporations and organizations. They generate a seemingly random six-digit number every 30 or 60 seconds, which the employees type in to log into virtual private networks or other sensitive systems. The RSA cryptography algorithm, which uses a 128-bit "seed" unique to each token to generate the numbers, is virtually impossible to crack. An estimated 250 million smartphones use similar RSA software to verify identity. "Recently, our...

Note: This is a SNIPPET only. Quote: GAO U.S. GOVERNMENT ACCOUNTABILITY OFFICE http://gao.gov/products/GAO-10-338 "Cybersecurity: Progress Made but Challenges Remain in Defining and Coordinating the Comprehensive National Initiative" GAO-10-338 March 5, 2010 SNIPPET: "Summary In response to the ongoing threats to federal systems and operations posed by cyber attacks, President Bush established the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative (CNCI) in 2008. This initiative consists of a set of projects aimed at reducing vulnerabilities, protecting against intrusions, and anticipating future threats. GAO was asked to determine (1) what actions have been taken to develop interagency mechanisms to plan and coordinate CNCI activities and...

US national security leaders and top cyber warriors from around the world are gathering here to plot defenses against criminals and spies that increasingly plague the Internet. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and White House Cyber Security Coordinator Howard Schmidt will take part in this week's RSA conference along with computer defense companies and technology icons such as Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and Craigslist creator Craig Newmark. "We have before us more data moving into the cloud and more sophisticated cyber criminals," said Qualys chief executive Philippe Courtot, who is among the keynote speakers at the premier event that kicks...

RSA-640 Factored By Eric W. Weisstein November 8, 2005--A team at the German Federal Agency for Information Technology Security (BSI) recently announced the factorization of the 193-digit number 310 7418240490 0437213507 5003588856 7930037346 0228427275 4572016194 8823206440 5180815045 5634682967 1723286782 4379162728 3803341547 1073108501 9195485290 0733772482 2783525742 3864540146 9173660247 7652346609 known as RSA-640. The team responsible for this factorization is the same one that previously factored the 174-digit number known as RSA-576 (MathWorld headline news, December 5, 2003) and the 200-digit number known as RSA-200 (MathWorld headline news, May 10, 2005). RSA numbers are composite numbers having exactly two prime factors (i.e.,...

South African clerics take issue with their Archbishop Number: 5692 Date: Nov 13, 2003 Bishops and clergy in South Africa for the first time are revealing their anger at what they see as the support by the Archbishop of Cape Town for Gene Robinson’s recent consecration. The Bishop of Port Elizabeth was the first to distance himself from his Archbishop with a statement describing the consecration as “unacceptable”. In a letter read out at all Anglican services in Port Elizabeth on Sunday, Bishop Nopece said: “The consecration as bishop of Gene Robinson, a man living openly in a homosexual relationship...

Mark's Reality Column VOLUME 7 - ISSUE 11 November 2003 NDUNGANE'S FABLES WHATEVER the fall-out from the primates' meeting at Lambeth, it is highly likely that, in the very near future, Archbishop Njongonkulu Ndungane will finally come out of the theological closet and openly support the pro-gay revisionists. A noun here, an adjective there and His Grace will, at last, have reached the shores of transparency. He is nearly there. Writing in the Church Times on the eve of the make-or-break gathering, +Njongonkulu stated: "There may be things we need to learn from their [homosexuals'] testimony about their closest human...

"In 1995 Sanford Robertson also had a big financial interest in the U.S. computer security industry. Robertson's investment firm had hundreds of millions of dollars tied up in a Massachusetts based computer company named Security Dynamics Inc. (SDI). Thus, in 1995 Gore had direct control of policy that also affected Robertson financially. Security Dynamics was able to import computer security hardware manufactured in China. SDI secured Hong Kong electronics maker RJP Industries to produce electronic computer security cards for sale in America. The Chinese manufactured cards are sold to major defense contractors, medical institutions and the U.S. government. Hong Kong...