HOW WE BROKE SYRIA'S BLACKOUT

An Anonymous member on the 40 hours he spent fighting to bring Syria back online

On Tuesday May 7th  2013, the Syrian government shut down internet access to the entire country leaving
helpless civilians and opposition activists trapped in the information darkness. As I write this I am struggling to stay awake, having spent the last 40-ish hours contacting hackers and crackers all over Syria who have, despite the extreme conditions, managed to create their own work arounds. A work around is simply a method of connecting to the internet that works around the blocks.

ONE PERSON I SPOKE TO REPORTED HEARING LOUD GUNFIRE FOLLOWED BY A CUT OFF OF THE PHONE LINE. HE COULDN’T GET BACK THROUGH AGAIN.

For a while now Anonymous has been monitoring the ongoing situation in Syria as rebels attempt to take control of the country from President of Syria, Bashar al-Assad. Over the last few days, Anonymous, Telecomix and other hacking groups have worked through the night to help Syrians bypass the blackout by cold calling people, offering dial up codes as well as info on how to get their home routers working. One person I spoke to reported hearing loud gunfire followed by a cut off of the phone line. He couldn’t get back through again. The actual Internet itself in Syria was turned back on by the government following our dial up trick. People were getting back online anyway by that point.

This isn’t the first time Syria has lost Internet access. On the 29th of November 2012 it was closed for 48 hours. The official line was that it was taken down to disrupt communications between rebel forces which were attacking Demascas airport. There were fears the government was hiding military acts it didn’t want the world to see.

In this latest shut down the government has accused terrorists of cutting Internet cables. There are four different sets of cables linking Syria's Internet to the outside world, three of which run underwater and the fourth overland in Turkey. The idea that terrorists could not only reach all four cables but also cut them at exactly the same moment seems, frankly, ridiculous to us, considering that any rebel element would use encrypted Internet communications to communicate between groups, and the loss of the Internet would be a massive blow.

SERVICES WHICH CONNECT NETWORKS TO THE MAIN INTERNET BACKBONE OUTSIDE THE COUNTRY WERE SYSTEMATICALLY TURNED OFF BY THE GOVERNMENT MAKING CONNECTION TO THE STANDARD INTERNET IMPOSSIBLE.

The most feasible explanation was put forward by an analyst named Matthew Prince who explained that services which connect networks to the main Internet backbone outside the country were systematically turned off by the government making connection to the standard Internet impossible.

In a two year conflict which has seen over 70,000 people killed, the Syrian people have been using forums and websites to spread information on the dead and missing. Not to mention where the next bullet may be coming from. The internet is also vital in exposing the brutality of the crisis in the hope that international pressure will cause the Syrian government to stop the fighting.

Just last Sunday we watched in horror as Israel dropped what was believed to be a nuclear device on the city of Damascus. The explosion caused at least a kilometre high mushroom cloud so big it sparked its own lightning. This is not about sides. It isn’t really even about the revolution. This is about the people who are left huddled in the darkness.

Source From : http://anonnews.org

Stephen Hawking Biography

Stephen Hawking

Biography of Stephen Hawking

Stephen William Hawking was born on 8 January 1942 (300 years after the death of Galileo) in Oxford, England. His parents' house was in north London, but during the second world war, Oxford was considered a safer place to have babies. When he was eight, his family moved to St. Albans, a town about 20 miles north of London. At the age of eleven, Stephen went to St. Albans School and then on to University College, Oxford; his father's old college. Stephen wanted to study Mathematics, although his father would have preferred medicine. Mathematics was not available at University College, so he pursued Physics instead. After three years and not very much work, he was awarded a first  class honours degree in Natural Science. 

Stephen then went on to Cambridge to do research in Cosmology, there being no one working in that area in Oxford at the time. His supervisor was Denis Sciama, although he had hoped to get Fred Hoyle who was working in Cambridge. After gaining his Ph.D. he became first a Research Fellow and later on a Professorial Fellow at Gonville and Caius College. After leaving the Institute of Astronomy in 1973, Stephen came to the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics in 1979, and held the post of Lucasian Professor of Mathematics from 1979 until 2009. The chair was founded in 1663 with money left in the will of the Reverend Henry Lucas who had been the Member of Parliament for the University. It was first held by Isaac Barrow and then in 1669 by Isaac Newton.  Stephen is still an active part of Cambridge University and retains an office at the Department for Applied Maths and Theoretical Physics. His title is now Director of Research at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology. 

Stephen Hawking has worked on the basic laws which govern the universe. With Roger Penrose he showed that Einstein's General Theory of Relativity implied space and time would have a beginning in the Big Bang and an end in black holes. These results indicated that it was necessary to unify General Relativity with Quantum Theory, the other great Scientific development of the first half of the 20th Century. One consequence of such a unification that he discovered was that black holes should not be completely black, but rather should emit radiation and eventually evaporate and disappear. Another conjecture is that the universe has no edge or boundary in imaginary time. This would imply that the way the universe began was completely determined by the laws of science.

His many publications include The Large Scale Structure of Spacetime with G F R Ellis, General Relativity: An Einstein Centenary Survey, with W Israel, and 300 Years of Gravity, with W Israel. Stephen Hawking has three popular books published; his best seller A Brief History of Time, Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays, The Universe in a Nutshell, and most recently in  2010, The Grand Design. 

Professor Hawking has twelve honorary degrees. He was awarded the CBE in 1982, and was made a Companion of Honour in 1989. He is the recipient of many awards, medals and prizes, is a Fellow of The Royal Society and a Member of the US National Academy of Sciences. 

Stephen was diagnosed with ALS, a form of Motor Neurone Disease, shortly after his 21st birthday. In spite of being wheelchair bound and dependent on a computerised voice system for communication Stephen Hawking continues to combine family life (he has three children and three grandchildren), and his research into theoretical physics together with an extensive programme of travel and public lectures. He still hopes to make it into space one day.

The universe

Will the Universe expand forever?

The fate of the universe is determined by a struggle between the momentum of expansion and the pull of gravity. The rate of expansion is expressed by the Hubble Constant, H_o, while the strength of gravity depends on the density and pressure of the matter in the universe. If the pressure of the matter is low, as is the case with most forms of matter we know of, then the fate of the universe is governed by the density. If the density of the universe is less than the "critical density" which is proportional to the square of the Hubble constant, then the universe will expand forever. If the density of the universe is greater than the "critical density", then gravity will eventually win and the universe will collapse back on itself, the so called "Big Crunch". However, the results of the WMAP mission and observations of distant supernova have suggested that the expansion of the universe is actually accelerating which implies the existence of a form of matter with a strong negative pressure, such as the cosmological constant. This strange form of matter is also sometimes referred to as "dark energy". If dark energy in fact plays a significant role in the evolution of the universe, then in all likelihood the universe will continue to expand forever.

INFINITE UNIVERSE?

 The density of the universe also determines its geometry. If the density of the universe exceeds the critical density, then the geometry of space is closed and positively curved like the surface of a sphere. This implies that initially parallel photon paths converge slowly, eventually cross, and return back to their starting point (if the universe lasts long enough). If the density of the universe is less than the critical density, then the geometry of space is open (infinite), and negatively curved like the surface of a saddle. If the density of the universe exactly equals the critical density, then the geometry of the universe is flat like a sheet of paper, and infinite in extent.

The simplest version of the inflationary theory, an extension of the Big Bang theory, predicts that the density of the universe is very close to the critical density, and that the geometry of the universe is flat, like a sheet of paper.

MEASUREMENTS FROM WMAP

The WMAP spacecraft can measure the basic parameters of the Big Bang theory including the geometry of the universe. If the universe were flat, the brightest microwave background fluctuations (or "spots") would be about one degree across. If the universe were open, the spots would be less than one degree across. If the universe were closed, the brightest spots would be greater than one degree across.

Recent measurements (c. 2001) by a number of ground-based and balloon-based experiments, including MAT/TOCO, Boomerang, Maxima, and DASI, have shown that the brightest spots are about 1 degree across. Thus the universe was known to be flat to within about 15% accuracy prior to the WMAP results. WMAP has confirmed this result with very high accuracy and precision. We now know (as of 2013) that the universe is flat with only a 0.4% margin of error. This suggests that the Universe is infinite in extent; however, since the Universe has a finite age, we can only observe a finite volume of the Universe. All we can truly conclude is that the Universe is much larger than the volume we can directly observe.