Kerfuffles

According to Fox News Health Tips “STAY HEALTHY” we are told that if we are craving chocolate “The dark variety is the healthiest. Dark chocolate is high in flavanoids, which reduces the risk for blood clots and studies show it reduces cholesterol as much as 10 percent.”

What we are NOT told is that some “high end” chocolate also is high in melamine, which is NOT good for you, as it destroys the kidneys. Of course, melamine, is not a natural ingredient of chocolate, but is added to chocolate candy for some reason by the British manufacturers of chocolate whose chocolate factories are in China, not in England, as most of us assume.

British candy maker Cadbury said Monday it is recalling 11 types of Chinese-made chocolates found to contain melamine, as police in northern China raided a network accused of adding the banned chemical to milk.

A Cadbury spokesman said it was too early to say how much of the chemical was in the chocolates made at its Beijing plant.

“It’s too early to say where the source was or the extent of it,” said the spokesman, who declined to be identified because of company policy.

American manufacturers such as Kraft foods and Hershey’s and Mars, the makers of Snicker’s bars and M&Ms want you to know (believe?) that no melamine tainted milk from China was used to make the food products they distribute in the United States. Are we lucky or what?

Kraft Foods, the maker of Oreo cookies, and Mars, the maker of M&Ms and Snickers candy, said they believe Indonesian authorities were mistaken when they announced they had found melamine in samples of their products made in China.

“We don’t use any milk ingredients from China in any Oreo products, no matter where they are made or sold,” said Claire Regan, a Kraft spokeswoman.

Mars said, in a statement on its Web site, it is confident there’s no melamine in any of its chocolate or candy made in China and called the Indonesian results “completely inconsistent” with test findings from other government and independent labs in Asia and Europe.

So far, only a local agency has checked the products for melamine, but the levels found were considered very high.

Melamine in food products is considered safe by Hong Kong health authorities at 2.5 parts per million or less.

(Associated Press)

Why is Chinese Milk Poisonous?

Let’s see. First the suppliers watered down the milk so they could cut their costs of supplying milk. But that resulted in the milk showing a protein deficiency. So then they added Melamine, a toxic industrial chemical, that has no nutritional value but is high in nitrogen. The high nitrogen makes the watered down milk test as high in protein.

Is this Capitalism run amok, or is this how Communism operates? And when did the Chinese start consuming milk? Chinese Tainted Milk Scandal

I have now learned that my yet to arrive Hewlett-Packard laptop, was not stuck in the Indiana snow, nor stuck on a JetBlue airplane, as I feared was the cause of its delayed arrival at my home. My new computer has been stuck in customs in Indianapolis since very early on the 16th of February. Why would it take five or more days to inspect a little laptop and pass it? My new computer was promised to be at my door 10:30 am on Monday, February 19th. It never arrived, and until today, the FedEx tracking site never bothered to change the arrival date, even after it was long past.

I phoned FedEx today and they were very efficient and helpful, however there is nothing they can do to get 312 computers through customs. Now I do not even have an arrival date. Apparently it is when all 312 HP computers are hand checked by United States Customs. So I am only one of more than 300 people awaiting their new HP Vista computer.

Is this normal? When I made the order there was no advisement that it may take many days for a laptop computer to clear customs. In my mind I am fretting that there may be a bigger issue here. Is something amiss with these computers? Have the Chinese secretly installed some spyware that may be a security threat to the United States? If so, I may be better off to cancel my order and get a Vista-installed Lenova or Vaio, as they seem to be available. I think I will do some checking on those computers.

Maybe I should contact HP and listen to what they have to say.

BREACHED!
Great Balls of Fire and Alleluia! - Good news for this America’s Independence Day Week-end. The “shot heard ’round’ the world” rings onward. Freedom isn’t free, but neither can man’s yearnings for it be manacled, shackled and imprisoned for very long!

Academics break the Great Firewall of China | CNET News.com

Computer experts from the University of Cambridge claim not only to have breached the Great Firewall of China, but have found a way to use the firewall to launch denial-of-service attacks against specific Internet Protocol addresses in the country.

The firewall, which uses routers supplied by Cisco, works in part by inspecting Web traffic for certain keywords that the Chinese government wishes to censor, including political ideologies and groups it finds unacceptable.

The Cambridge research group tested the firewall by firing data packets containing the word “Falun” at it, a reference to the Falun Gong religious group, which is banned in China.

The researchers found that it was possible to circumvent the Chinese intrusion detection systems by ignoring the forged transmission control protocol resets injected by the Chinese routers, which would normally force the endpoints to abandon the connection.

“The machines in China allow data packets in and out, but send a burst of resets to shut connections if they spot particular keywords,” explained Richard Clayton of the University of Cambridge computer laboratory. “If you drop all the reset packets at both ends of the connection, which is relatively trivial to do, the Web page is transferred just fine.”

Clayton added that this means the Chinese firewall can be used to launch denial-of-service attacks against specific IP addresses within China, including those of the Chinese government itself.

The IDS uses a stateless server, which examines each data packet both going in and out of the firewall individually, unrelated to any previous request. By forging the source address of a packet containing a “sensitive” keyword, people could trigger the firewall to block access between source and destination addresses for up to an hour at a time.

If an attacker had identified the machines used by regional government offices, they could block access to Windows Update, or prevent Chinese embassies abroad from accessing specific Chinese Web content.

Judith Miller - Source or Leaker?
So, why in the world did Judith Miller spend almost three months in jail when she didn’t have to? She was released from confidentiality by her source before she ever began her jail sentence. Apparently, only Judith Miller and the prosecutor know the answer. Come October 28th, it will be interesting to see, if they let the rest of us know just what is going on.

“There is speculation that Judith Miller is protecting herself. Could she have been the source of the leak about Valerie Plame’s CIA status that made it to several Bush administration officials and to Robert Novak and reporter Matthew Cooper. Judith Miller had done reporting on WMD (weapons of mass destruction) which she based on secret CIA sources. Valerie Plame, wife of Joseph Wilson, worked on WMD for the CIA. Put two and two together. Judith Miller, good reporter, likely knew who Plame was.” ~~“Why is Judith Miller in Jail?”, Kerfuffles, 11 July 2005

“The Plame-Wilsons and Judith Miller” and WizBang writes that it is the “Plame End Game“. Let’s hope he is right. The image of Lady Spy Plame and Superboy Wilson is from Pete at IHillary.

As China Attempts to Control Internet

BEIJING (AP) - China said Sunday it is imposing new regulations to control content on its news Web sites and will allow the posting of only “healthy and civilized” news. (My Way News)

Great try, China. Now, let us see just how successful you will be with trying to overcome natural law; man’s innate yearning to be free. It will be interesting but perhaps a bit bloody to watch China’s attempts to reign in the country’s 100-million Internet population, which is second to only the United States, with 135 million users.

The new rules take effect immediately to “standardize the management of news and information” regarding current events and politics. The stated goals of censorship are certainly laudatory: “healthy and civilized news and information that is beneficial to the improvement of the quality of the nation, beneficial to its economic development and conducive to social progress“. However, as humankind’s experience shows, quashing of the freedom to speak against the state does not lead to such dreams, only to the nightmares of human intellectual slavery.

The communist government already blocks Internet material it deems to be critical of the state, subversive, or pornographic. Online dissidents expressing contrary opinions are regularly arrested. Just this month, according to WaPo, e-mail account information provided by Yahoo Inc. (YHOO) helped lead to a 10-year prison term for a Chinese journalist who had written about media restrictions in an e-mail.

In a recent post I found that the believers in freedom of the “international” Internet community are finding stealth methods for the Chinese cyber freedom fighter to successfully use:

Blogging Anonymously
Bloggers are often the only real journalists in countries where the mainstream media is censored, such as in Iran and China. If they displease the government, they could be arrested. Reporters Without Borders has produced a PDF handbook to help them, with handy tips and technical advice on remaining anonymous and to bypass censorship. The “Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-dissidents“also covers how to set up and make the most of a blog, to publicise it using search-engines and to establish its credibility through the observing of ethical and journalistic principles. How to Blog Anonymously

In addition, bloggers living in the free world will be more than willing to publish onto their own blogs, news and commentary coming from the Chinese freedom-fighters.