The Cypherpunk Revolutionary, Julian Assange

Extract from an essay by Robert Manne :

By the time Assange was working on NetBSD he had been involved for several years with a movement known as the cypherpunks. It was the cypherpunks more than the free software movement who provided him with his political education. Although there are tens of thousands of articles on Julian Assange in the world's newspapers and magazines, no mainstream journalist so far has grasped the critical significance of the cypherpunks movement to Assange's intellectual development and the origin of WikiLeaks.

At the core of the cypherpunk philosophy was the belief that the great question of politics in the age of the internet was whether the state would strangle individual freedom and privacy through its capacity for electronic surveillance or whether autonomous individuals would eventually undermine and even destroy the state through their deployment of electronic weapons newly at hand. Many cypherpunks were optimistic that in the battle for the future of humankind - between the State and the Individual - the individual would ultimately triumph.

Their optimism was based on developments in intellectual history and computer software: the invention in the mid 1970s of public-key cryptography by Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman, and the creation by Phil Zimmerman in the early 1990s of a program known as PGP, 'Pretty Good Privacy'. The seminal historian of codes, David Kahn, argued that the Diffie-Hellman invention represented the most important development in cryptography since the Renaissance. Zimmerman's PGP program democratised their invention and provided individuals, free of cost, with access to public-key cryptography and thus the capacity to communicate with others in near-perfect privacy. Although George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four was one of the cypherpunks' foundational texts, because of the combination of public-key cryptography and PGP software, they tended to believe that in the coming battle between Big Brother and Winston Smith, the victor might be Winston Smith.

The rest of the essay that was found via The rest of the essay that was found via Cryptome is here : The Cypherpunk Revolutionary, Julian Assange - Written by Robert Manne



(verifying for technorati, will delete later. W2MYHFP65KN3 )

The Black Knight Satellite

From Disneyland Of The Gods, written by John Keel in 1988 :

"While both the United States and the Soviet Union were racing to launch relatively small satellites into orbit in the late 1950's, astronomers and military tracking stations were following the course of something huge. On January 4, 1960, scientists discovered two large objects in a polar orbit. To date neither the U.S. nor Russia had achieved a polar orbit. The objects were estimated to weigh at least fifteen tons. The largest U.S. satellite at that time weighed 450 pounds and the largest Soviet satellite 2,925 pounds.

Late in February 1960, the US Department of Defense formally announced that an unidentified satellite was circling the globe. It was tracked and studied by several different observatories and the National Space Surveillance Control Center at New Bedford, Massachusetts. Professor Alla Masevich, the Soviet scientist heading the Russian Sputnik tracking program, flatly denied suggestions that the mystery satellites belonged to the Soviet Union.

The press labeled the intruder "The Black Knight" and it was extensively discussed in the New York Times, Newsweek, Life, and other major periodicals.

It vanished as mysteriously as it had arrived. But it has queitly reappeared from time to time ever since and been buried in the fine print of NASA's weekly catalog of debris and objects orbiting the earth."


Link : Disneyland Of The Gods - John Keel


The Black Knight is also supposed to be inspiration for 4 of Philip K. Dick's books : Radio Free Albemuth, VALIS, The Divine Invasion, and The Transmigration Of Timothy Archer. From Radio Free Albemuth :


"Since my contact came in most strangely between 3:00 and 4:00 A.M., I realized that probably a booster satellite, of alien origin, orbited Earth, a slave communications satellite that had been sent here thousands of years ago."

There's a lot of other things connected to the story, but it's quite hard to find on the net. A lot of what is around can be found here though :

Black Knight Satellite - The Living Moon

UFO Quotes

“The phenomenon of UFOs does exist, and it must be treated seriously.” - Mikhail Gorbachev, Former Russian President

“I don’t laugh at people any more when they say they’ve seen UFOs. I’ve seen one myself.” - Jimmy Carter, Former US President

“I know other astronauts share my feelings… And we know the government is sitting on hard evidence of UFOs.” - Colonel Gordon Cooper, Former Astronaut

“The U.S. Government hasn’t maintained secrecy regarding UFOs. It’s been leaking out all over the place. But the way it’s been handled is by denial, by denying the truth of the documents that have leaked. By attempting to show them as fraudulent, as bogus of some sort. There has been a very large disinformation and misinformation effort around this whole area. And one must wonder, how better to hide something out in the open than just to say, ‘It isn’t there. You’re deceiving yourself if you think this is true.’ And yet, there it is right in front of you. So it’s a disinformation effort that’s concerning here, not the fact that they have kept the secret. They haven’t kept it. It’s been getting out into the public for fifty years or more.” - Dr. Edgar Mitchell, Former Astronaut

“We have an unidentified flying object.” - Catherine Coleman, Astronaut, During Shuttle Mission STS-73

Pancake Time

Simonton, a sixty-year old chicken farmer outside of Eagle River, Wisconsin, said he heard a strange sound outside his farmhouse at 11 A.M. on Tuesday, April 18, 1961. He looked out of the window and was startled to see a silvery metallic machine descending in his yard. As he stepped outside, some kind of hatch slid open in the upper part of the object and three dark-skinned men became visible. He estimated that these men were about 5 feet tall and between twenty-five to thirty years of age. They wore clinging dark-blue uniforms with turtleneck tops and had on apparently knitted headgear, such as is worn under crash helmets. All were clean-shaven, and none of them spoke during the brief episode that followed.

One of them stepped to the hatch, Simonton said, and held out a shiny bucket-like affair which had a handle on either side, indicating that he wanted the farmer to fill it with water. Simonton took it, filled it from his pump, and returned it to the silent man. He noticed that the interior of the craft was black, "like wrought iron," and that one man was busy at some kind of instrument panel, while the other was working at what seemed to be a stove. A pile of pancakes sat nearby. Simonton says he gestured at the pancakes, and the man with the bucket turned, picked up four of them, and handed them to him. He then attached some kind of rope to his belt, and the hatch slid shut. Joe Simonton stood with his mouth open, four warm pancakes in his hands, as the object, which had been humming throughout, began to make a sound like "tires on a wet pavement" and rose slowly into the air, moving off to the south.


More here : Pancakes From an Ultraterrestrial

NASA Scientist and Alien life, what happens next

As most people following this area should know by now, NASA Scientist Dr. Richard Hoover claimed on the 5th that he'd found evidence of Alien life in meteorite fossils. It's been reported by news outlets across the world since then, and the next thing that's happening is that he's invited other Scientists to review his paper. From the Journal Of Cosmology :

"Given the controversial nature of his discovery, we have invited 100 experts and have issued a general invitation to over 5,000 scientists from the scientific community to review the paper and to offer their critical analysis. No other paper in the history of science has undergone such a thorough vetting, and never before in the history of science has the scientific community been given the opportunity to critically analyze an important research paper before it is published."

Those reviews listed as commentaries will be added until the 10th to this page. 18 of them are already there so far : Fossils of Cyanobacteria in CI1 Carbonaceous Meteorites - Commentaries

For anyone that's not seen his original findings, they're all here : Fossils of Cyanobacteria in CI1 Carbonaceous Meteorites: Implications to Life on Comets, Europa, and Enceladus

Originally posted here : NASA Scientist and Alien life, what happens next - Last Phoenix

Tower Of Droplets

Designed by Sir Peter Cook and Gavin Robotham, and entered into the Taiwan Tower Conceptual International Competition last year, which it came second in. The tower would actually have algae growing on it which would feed fish and plants, make biofuel for powering engines, and take CO2 out of the atmosphere.

Link : Tower Of Droplets - Dezeen

Scientists say Tractor Beams are possible

From BBC :

A laser can act as a "tractor beam", drawing small objects back toward the laser's source, scientists have said. It is known that light can provide a "push", for example in solar sails that propel spacecraft on a "wind of light".

Now, in a paper on the Arxiv server, researchers from Hong Kong and China have calculated the conditions required to create a laser-based "pull". Rather than a science fiction-style weapon, however, the approach would only work over small distances.

The effect is different from that employed in "optical tweezers" approaches, in which tiny objects can be trapped in the focus of a laser beam and moved around; this new force, the authors propose, would be one continuous pull toward the source.

Rest of the article is here : 'Tractor beam' is possible with lasers, say scientists

UK MOD has just released more UFO files

From Reuters :

The government Thursday released 35 previously classified files documenting sightings of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) by the military and members of the public dating back to the 1950s.

The files contain around 8,500 pages which mainly cover the period from 1997 to 2005 and include photographs, drawings and descriptions of flying saucer sightings, as well as letters the Ministry of Defence sent eyewitnesses in response to their accounts.

Rest of the article is here : Government releases UFO sighting and policy files

And link to files at the National Archives is here, which are available free for one month : Newly released UFO files
from the UK government