As professional hostage-takers, we never take hostages unless we have a well-thought-out plan, realistic demands, and a clear exit strategy. Any comparison between what we do and these inane Tea Party antics are derogatory and unacceptable

Said a group representing America’s hostage-takers, according to today's Borowitz Report published in The New Yorker. According to the Borowitz Report, the group has "blasted President Obama for his repeated comparisons between them and the Tea Party Republicans, calling his remarks “degrading and hurtful.”

The National Alliance of Hostage-Takers and Blackmailers (NAHTB), in a press statement sent to Borowitz, said : “For years, our members have been subjected to offensive Hollywood stereotypes of hostage-takers as crazed madmen, cackling evildoers, and worse. The President’s degrading and hurtful remarks only reinforce those negative images.”

9/19 Luckovich cartoon: Hostage taking

The Borowitz Report, however, has reported that, in order to calm down the NAHTB members, White House press spokesman offered an apology : “As you can imagine, in the heat of a crisis we often say things we don’t mean. The President regrets any hurt his remarks may have caused.” The spokesman also assured NAHTB that the President has decided to resist his temptation to call the Tea Party Republicans terrorists, lunatics, or babies in order to avoid offending other similar groups who may or may not be associated with the NAHTB.

The Borowitz Report, which keeps us informed about such important and sensitive developments taking place behind the scene, deserves to be liked and shared by more and more netizens. Political cartoons from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution\'s Pulitzer Prize winner Mike Luckovich are also eye openers.

(Courtsey : Andy Borowitz - The New Yorker's satirical Borowitz Report and Mike Luckovich)

Use Your Heartbeat as the Password and Prevent Your Heart from Hacking : We present Heart-to-Heart (H2H), a system to authenticate external medical device controllers and programmers to Implantable Medical Devices (IMDs) including pacemakers and cardiac defibrillators, which are partially or wholly embedded in the human body.

Farinaz Koushanfar, left, an associate professor of
electrical & computer engineering at Rice Univ.,
and graduate student Masoud Rostami have created
a system to secure implantable medical devices like
pacemakers & insulin pumps from wireless attacks.
(Photo by Jeff Fitlow)

Said : researchers - Farinaz Koushanfar, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Rice University, and graduate student Masoud Rostami in a paper titled "Balancing Security andUtility in Medical Devices?" According to Rice University's news release, they have come up with a secure way to dramatically cut the risk that an implantable medical device (IMD) could be altered remotely without authorization. Pacemakers, insulin pumps, defibrillators and other implantable medical devices often have wireless capabilities that allow emergency workers to monitor patients. But these devices have a potential downside: They can be hacked. Their technology would use the patient’s own heartbeat as a kind of password that could only be accessed through touch. Their research was supported by the Office of Naval Research and Army Research Office.

Can a pacemaker be hacked?

"Docs warn pacemaker can be hacked" was the headline of a news item on March 13 at NBC News which cited a report that warned users of one specific pacemaker that their equipment faced the risk of hacking. A video showing this was also presented by the NBC.

Barnaby Jack

In fact, Barnaby Jack, a security researcher, who knew the secrets of pacemaker hacking and was going to reveal those secrets at a hacker conference in Las Vegas, was found dead in San Francisco in July this year only a few days before the conference. He had extensively examined the wireless functioning of these critical life devices - pacemakers and ICDs (implantable cardioverter defibrillators) - in order to find out their vulnerability to hacking using a remote control. His mysterious death raised a few eyebrows questioning the timing of it and some people even pointed fingers to the device makers' lobby responsible for his death. 

According to Daily Mail, New Zealand-born Barnaby Jack, 35, was going to make a presentation on Hacking Humans. In his presentation, he was planning to highlight the shortcomings of commonly used pacemakers by demonstrating how he could hack into them and kill the heart patient from 50ft away with a deadly power surge triggered by a wireless transmitter. According to Barnaby,  some pacemakers could be commanded to deliver a deadly 830-volt shock from someone on a laptop up to 50ft away, confirming that the result was because of the poor software programming by medical device manufacturing companies. 

Steven Greenberg

Steven Greenberg, M.D., a leading cardiologist and a pioneer in the development and use of pacemakers - at St. Francis Hospital’s world renowned Arrhythmia and Pacemaker Center, was the first physician in the U.S. to implant the FDA-approved AccentTM RF pacemaker, the high-tech device manufactured by St. Jude Medical, Inc. 

Dr. Greenberg - who died on Dec. 12, 2012 at 56 - had said at that time : “Wireless communication is used everywhere today. Now, it can help us provide round-the-clock care for our patients through a secure notification system that can be programmed to meet a patient’s specific needs,” says Dr. Greenberg. “Rather than checking on a device a few times a year, daily alerts allow me to know about important changes in my patient’s condition or device functions so I can act more quickly in addressing any issues.”

"Cardiac pacing is a proven means of maintaining heart function for patients with various heart conditions. Over 650,000 pacemakers are implanted annually in patients worldwide, including over 280,000 in the United States. Over 3.5 million people in the developed world have implanted pacemakers. Another approximately 900,000 have an implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD) or cardiac resynchronization (CRT) device," reveals Daniel M. Storey in his patent application (number: 20130046368) for a related invention.

Heart-to-Heart Presentation by Farinaz and Rostami

Rice University engineers have created a system 
to secure wireless implantable medical devices 
like pacemakers and insulin pumps. 
Their system requires the medical worker to touch 
the patient with a programmer device to gain access 
to information on the implant. The patient’s 
unique heartbeat serves as a temporary password. 
(Credit: Masoud Rostami/Rice University)

Koushanfar and Rostami will present Heart-to-Heart, an authentication system for IMDs, at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Conference on Computer and Communications Security in Berlin in November 4-8, 2013. They developed the technology with Ari Juels, former chief scientist at RSALaboratories, a security company in Cambridge, Mass. IMDs generally lack the kind of password security found on a home Wi-Fi router because emergency medical technicians often need quick access to the information the devices store to save a life, Rostami said. But that leaves the IMDs open to attack. “If you have a device inside your body, a person could walk by, push a button and violate your privacy, even give you a shock,” he said. “He could make (an insulin pump) inject insulin or update the software of your pacemaker. But our proposed solution forces anybody who wants to read the device to touch you.”

The system would require software in the IMD to talk to the “touch” device, called the programmer. When a medical technician touches the patient, the programmer would pick up an electrocardiogram (EKG) signature from the beating heart. The internal and external devices would compare minute details of the EKG and execute a “handshake.” If signals gathered by both at the same instantly match, they become the password that grants the external device access.

“The signal from your heartbeat is different every second, so the password is different each time,” Rostami said. “You can’t use it even a minute later.” He compared the EKG to a chart of a financial stock. “We’re looking at the minutia,” Rostami said. “If you zoom in on a stock, it ticks up and it ticks down every microsecond. Those fine details are the byproduct of a very complex system and they can’t be predicted.” A human heartbeat is the same, he said. It seems steady, but on closer view every beat has unique characteristics that can be read and matched. “We treat your heart as if it were a random number generator,” he said.

The system could potentially be used with the millions of IMDs already in use, Koushanfar said. “To our knowledge, this is the first fully secure solution that has small overhead and can work with legacy systems,” she said. “Like any device that has wireless access, we can simply update the software.” Koushanfar noted the software would require very little of an IMD’s precious power, unlike other suggested secure solutions that require computationally intensive – and battery draining – cryptography. “We’re hopeful,” she said. “We think everything here is a practical technology.” Implementation would require cooperation with device manufacturers who, Koushanfar said, hold their valuable, proprietary secrets very close to the chest, as well as approval by the US Food and Drug Administration.

But the time to pursue IMD security is here, Rostami insisted. “People will have more implantable devices, not fewer,” he said. “We already have devices for the heart and insulin pumps, and now researchers are talking about putting neuron stimulators inside the brain. We should make sure all these things are secure.”

‘Shoot First’ Policy of Malaysian Police : “Home Minister Zahid is Malaysia’s top law enforcement official, yet he is promoting the illegal use of lethal force. Prime Minister Najib should be clear he won’t tolerate such statements or unlawful practices, which show a callous disregard for basic right

Phil Robertson

Said Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch. He was commenting on Malaysian home minister’s support for the police to “shoot first” when apprehending criminal suspects. Referring Ahmad Zahid Hamidi's speech justifying his stand, Robertson said : “Killings of criminal suspects by Malaysian police suggest that Minister Zahid’s disturbing remarks may already reflect the practice of some law enforcement officials. Too many people have died in a hail of police bullets for Malaysia’s leaders to continue to sit on their hands.” Human Rights Watch (HRW), in a news release of October 8, 2013, has alleged that "the home minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi made remarks in a speech in Malacca on October 6, 2013, that showed gross indifference for the right to life and the rights of the country’s minority populations." Zahid in his speech - an audio recording of which was made public by the online news portal Malaysiakini - reportedly claimed that 28,000 of some 40,000 gang members in the country were Indian Malaysians who prey on the majority ethnic Malay population. 

Home Minister Datuk Seri Dr Ahmad Zahid Hamidi

He also said : “What is the situation of robbery victims, murder victims during shootings? Most of them are our Malays. Most of them are our race. I think that the best way is we no longer compromise with them. There is no need to give them any warning. If [we] get the evidence, [we] shoot first.” 

Human Rights Watch has appealed to Prime Minister Najib Razak to remove the home minister because he has been racial and violating human rights. There have been reports of extra-judicial killings, ethnic cleansing under the guise of combating crime, and detention without trial. Human Rights Watch has highlighted specific incidences in this regard.

World Organisation AgainstTorture (OMCT)- a Switzerland based NGO - and its member organisation SUARAM, in Malaysia, have also reported serious human rights violations committed by the police and other law enforcement agencies such as the Malaysian Anti Corruption Commission (MACC) and the Immigration Department. According to a recent report of the OMCT-SUARAM, human rights violations have included torture and other forms of ill-treatment, notably unnecessary and excessive use of force and firearms when carrying out arrests and public order policing. The Malaysian Police has continued to pursue a “shoot first” policy against suspects with impunity. Since 2009, SUARAM has documented about 173 cases of police fatal shootings and 24 cases of suspicious deaths in custody, while two deaths occurred at the MACC offices. Malaysia continues to have a legal frame work that creates an environment facilitating torture and ill-treatment. A “shoot first” policy by law enforcement personnel violates international human rights law and standards. OMCT-SUARAM urged the government to show its commitment to abolish torture and other forms of ill-treatment by ratifying and implementing effectively the UN Optional Protocol to the Convention AgainstTorture (OPCAT).

In a press release today, Lawyers for Liberty - a human rights and law reform initiative - has also condemned Ahmad Zahid Hamidi’s ‘shoot first’ approach to law enforcement and demanded that the home minister must be arrested and prosecuted. "By encouraging law enforcers to ‘shoot first’, the Home Minister has effectively ordered policemen and officials to disregard the criminal justice system, due process and has legitimized the cold-blooded murder of ‘suspects’ without ever being brought before a court of law," the release said.

John Boehner to Barack Obama : "WHY AREN'T YOU NEGOTIATING???"

remarks : user eduardo2 in the readers' comments on 10/8/2013 9:44 AM PST in response to the new item "Obama renews calls on Congress to end shutdown, raise debt limit," published on Tuesday, October 8 in the Washington Post.

After reading the full transcript of President Obama’s Oct. 8 news conference on the shutdown and debt limit here, I was tempted to write my comment which I reproduce below :


jasuja wrote:
1:36 PM PST




"Significant damage has already been caused (to all the eligible entities) by the world-wide discussion of the government shut down and the default deadline of Oct. 17. I can't believe that Americans elect such foolish lawmakers who don't realise this obvious outcome of their egoistic behaviour. I hope they are NOT doing this under influence of some vested interests at the highest level, and to fulfill some ulterior motives. This is a globalised world. Someone's loss is someone else's gain. I am trying to know who is going to gain at the cost of Americans in the present uncertain scenario."

Meanwhile, I stumbled upon a very unique response from a reader (user name : eduardo2), giving the chronology of John Boehner's (Republican's) communication with Barack Obama since Oct. 2008 to Oct. 2013. I feel like sharing this by reproducing it below :


eduardo2 wrote 
10/8/2013 9:44 AM PST

Oct 2008: "You'll never get elected and pass healthcare."

Nov 2008: "We'll never let you pass healthcare."

Jan 2009: "We are going to shout you down every time you try to pass healthcare."

July 2009: "We will fight to the death every attempt you make to pass healthcare."

Dec 2009: "We will destroy you if you even consider passing healthcare."

March 2010: "We can't believe you just passed healthcare."

April 2010: "We are going to overturn healthcare."

Sept 2010: "We are going to repeal healthcare."

Jan 2011: "We are going to destroy healthcare."

Feb 2012: "We are going to elect a candidate who will immediately revoke healthcare."

June 2012: "We will go to the Supreme Court, and they will overturn healthcare."

Aug 2012: "The American people will never re-elect you, because they don't want healthcare."

Oct 2012: "We can't wait to win the election and explode healthcare."

Nov 2012: "We can't believe you just got re-elected and that we can't repeal healthcare."

Feb 2013: "We're still going to vote to obliterate healthcare."

June 2013: "We can't believe the Supreme Court just upheld healthcare."

July 2013: "We're going to vote like 35 more times to erase healthcare."

Sept 2013: "We are going to leverage a government shutdown into defunding, destroying, obliterating, overturning, repealing, dismantling, erasing and ripping apart healthcare."

Oct 2013: "WHY AREN'T YOU NEGOTIATING???"

If you look at the economic and wage structures in Russia, you will see that people get a disproportionally large amount of money for little work

Mikhail Shamolin

said: Mikhail Shamolin, President and CEO of Sistema, one of Russia's top-10 companies by revenues and the largest publicly-traded diversified holding company in Russia and the CIS. Mikhail Shamolin feels that the ideology should be completely different. "We should propagate through all the means of mass communication that only through hard work will you make a decent living," he is quoted saying in a recent news report. Shamolin said he went to the Samsung headquarters in South Korea recently and saw workers who came to work at 6:30 a.m., left at 10 p.m. and worked on Saturdays. On a different trip, he saw Chinese telecommunications workers who had mattresses for sleeping over at the office. A similar approach to work should be promoted in Russia, he said. The productivity levels of companies that work in competitive sectors are comparable to those of companies in the West, but monopolies trail far behind, Shamolin said. For example, Sberbank and VTB make $200,000 per worker annually, which is comparable to the $175,000 at Deutsche Bank, while Russian Railways makes $47,000 per worker.

B.V. Obnosov

The Director General of the Tactical Missiles Corporation - the parent enterprise which comprises 19 affiliated enterprises of Russian Military Industrial Sector - Boris Obnosov, agreed that the Russian work ethic can depress production results. "How can we create competitive products if my engineer runs off from work at exactly 5 p.m.?" Obnosov said. "You cannot force him to work for any kind of salary. It must be in his blood."

Expert Rating Agency, #1 Russian rating agency working on a global scale, has come out with its latest Expert-400 ranking survey of Russia's top companies. The total sales revenues generated by Russia’s top 400 companies amount to 1.456 trillion USD. The Expert-400 study warns that large businesses in Russia are prone to fall into stagnation if suitable measures are not taken to increase the national competitiveness by increasing labour productivity. At present the average labour productivity in Russian companies is 40 percent of that of the Fortune 500 Global companies. The survey finds that the average labour productivity of Expert-400 companies is 183,000 USD/person. This is 3.4 times lower than their Japanese counterparts, almost 3 times lower than in Western European and U.S. competitors and 1.7 times lower than in the leading corporations of the BRIC partners.

Russian President Vladimir Putin

In his election articles, Russian President Vladimir Putin had called for 1.5-time increase in operational efficiency by 2018. The tools for labour productivity enhancement - improvement of business processes, using of cutting-edge technologies and training of workers and their skill development - all involve capital investment. According to Expert Rating Agency, a 1% increase in investment leads to 0.21% growth in labour productivity. Hence in order to achieve 1.5-times increase in productivity by 2018, the top Russian companies - whose combined investment in fixed capital stood at 12.5 trillion RUB (approx. 415 billion USD) in 2012 - would require an additional 4 trillion RUB (approx. 130 billion USD) worth of investment. Presently, Top 10 leading state-owned companies account for approx. 30% of the aggregate revenues of Expert-400 list. 

According to Expert Rating Agency, Russia no longer has the market advantage in terms of cheap natural resources, labor and utilities. "Local industries pay 55 percent more for electricity than their counterparts in the U.S., while gas and coal prices for Russian power stations are on par with the American ones.

The average net salary in Russia was 23,410 rubles per month in 2012, which is higher than the wages in all other countries in the Commonwealth of Independent States as well as some European Union members, such as Hungary, Latvia and Lithuania. The lack of professionals is a key issue in the country, Obnosov said. The Tactical Missiles Corporation employs about 40,000 people, but there is a trend of workers going to higher-paying jobs at Rosatom and the defense industry.

An old fashioned workforce with relatively weak technical skills and the inability of Russian companies to absorb new technology are significant obstacles to more widespread technology use in Russia. Appropriate human capital and skills are crucial for technology absorption, as technology alone is not sufficient to achieve productivity growth.

America Is Already Politically Bankrupt: "The Blocked World Power"

The Statue of Liberty in New York is
currently closed due to the government shutdown

Says title of the article (and the described picture) by Charly Wilder in Spiegel Online International in which a review of German commentators on the United States government shutdown has been presented. One of the illustrative aftereffects given in the article includes a picture of The Statue of Liberty in New York which is currently lying closed due to the government shutdown. 

"The picture on the cover of German business daily Handelsblatt yesterday fairly well encapsulates the way the US federal government shutdown is being perceived across the Atlantic," writes Charly. The Statue of Liberty stands bound in chains, her torch hand hanging listlessly by her side. Across it reads the headline: "The Blocked World Power." 

Charly has quoted the conservative daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung as saying: "What Washington currently offers up is a spectacle, but one in which the spectators feel more like crying." This editorial also says that the shutdown is the result of many factors, both ideological and political, and involves huge risk for the US. According to this editorial, "the political establishment in Washington appears to have got rotten to the core driving the world power into a budgetary state of emergency." People are wondering how things could have been allowed to get to this point.

By and large, the Germans describe the shutdown as a "specifically American problem," and a similar government shutdown is ruled out in Berlin, where Chancellor Angela Merkel is currently discussing Germany's federal budget with her prospective coalition partner, the center-left Social Democrats.

According to Charly, Germany's right-leaning daily Die Welt has published an article titled : "The whole world pays for America's shutdown," in which Anton Böner, president of the Federal Association for German Wholesalers and Foreign Trade, has warned : "If the Americans shoot themselves in the foot right now, it is highly dangerous for the entire global economy, and of course for the German export economy."

Gregor Peter Schmitz

The German press, by and large, blames the Republicans for the current deadlock. Gregor Peter Schmitz of Spiegel Online calls their party as 'Kamikaze Party' or "Cocktail Party." Attributing the crisis to the political culture, Schmitz opines that America's mercenary political culture is responsible for the creation of such circumstances in which "a brigade of Republicans conduct themselves like a bunch of Berlusconis - as enemies of the state from within who want to cripple the country because that's the desire of their conservative voters at home."

Charly quotes Nuremberg's Nachrichten as writing: "There are fundamentalists within the world's largest democracy : The hardline wing of the Republican Party is once more crippling the United States. The Tea Party movement does not engage in democracy, but in dogmatism."  Charly also quotes a commentator writing in Collogne's Stadt-Anzeiger about the Republicans: "Here are fundamentalists at work who hold up their country to ridicule to advance their pure doctrine. What a tragedy!" Munich's national Süddeutsche Zeitung offers a slightly more depressing take, writes Charly.

According to this paper, since last few years, the United States - one of the world's oldest democracies - has been the victim of what can be called as politics of 'self-destruction.' The great tragedy is that this work of destruction isn't being wrought by enemies of democracy or greedy lobbyists or sinister major party donors. It is being done by the very people who are supposed to preserve it: the voters, the parties and the politicians."

The Republicans who have brought Washington to standstill are repeatedly and democratically elected by voters and given a mandate to block. The parties themselves are fomenting an increasingly radicalized culture that deepens political, societal and geographic divisions in the country. There are very few politicians in America who are willing or capable of thinking beyond their own electoral constituencies. Charly ends his post with this paper's conclusion: "At the moment, Washington is fighting over the budget and nobody knows if the country will still be solvent in three weeks,"  "What is clear, though, is that America is already politically bankrupt."

America's Shutdown is China's Login

Herbert Walter

Says : the title of today’s post by Herbert Walter, Ex-Chief of Dresdner Bank (who led Dresdner Bank from 2003 to 2009) and a financial wizard, in German Business Daily Handelsblatt.

Commenting on the US shutdown's impact on the Capital markets across the globe, Walter writes that 'current the bizarre financial crisis in the United States' have not much impacted the markets so far because there exists 'apparently unshakable opinion' everywhere that President Barack Obama will get his budget through and ultimately everything will be alright.

According to Walter, a higher debt limit will save the country from insolvency but the solution offered will only be for the short term. The United States faces substantial damage of its reputation through the budget disputes. As a result, Walter foresees an accelerated descent of the country as the number one world power. He feels that "Quite possibly China will take its place in the long run." China has become the world's second strongest economic power in the last 20 years and accumulated huge wealth which is evident from the facts that it is the largest creditor of the U.S. and has more than three trillion U.S. dollars foreign exchange reserves. Walter predicts that - in view of the weak and unstable US financial strength - China will reset its wealth globally for strategic acquisition of companies, real estate, commodities and natural resources. (Source: Handelsblatt)