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vrijdag 30 november 2012

What listening to a story does to our brains



In 1748, the British politician and aristocrat John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich used a lot of his free time for playing cards. One of the problems he had was that he greatly enjoyed eating a snack, whilst still keeping one hand free for the cards. 

HERE

Syria Has Just Been Taken Offline


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donderdag 29 november 2012

Liberal VVD ensure majority support for scrapping blasphemy laws


There is now majority support in parliament for an end to the ban on blasphemy because VVD Liberal MPs have thrown their weight behind the plan.
The VVD refused to support efforts to lift the ban during the life of the previous government in order not to upset the fundamentalist Christian group SGP, whose support was needed in the upper house of parliament.
The D66 Liberals and Socialist party have drawn up a private members bill to have the blasphemy laws scrapped from the statute books, news agency ANP reports. This is a 'milestone in terms of criminal law', a spokesman for D66 said.
The blasphemy legislation dates from the 1930s.
The SGP said the decision to remove the ban on blasphemy is a 'painful loss of a moral anchor and a symptom of a spiritual crisis'. The party believes the Netherlands should be governed according to Biblical principles and has three seats in the lower house of parliament.

D E N A - Cash, Diamond Rings, Swimming Pools

Fashions For Men - Yoko Ono



VIA

woensdag 28 november 2012

....



 »As far as I am concerned, Art is short for Arthur.«

(Keith Richards, The Rolling Stones)

EyeSee Mannequin

Thanks to Almax and Kee Square – Spin-Off of Politecnico di Milano – from now on the mannequins will not only display your collections and encourage the consumer to enter the store. This product will do much more; it would make it possible to "observe" who is attracted by your windows and reveal important details about your customers: age range; gender; race; number of people and time spent.


VIA

Worlds Largest Graffiti - Santiago Sierra


“Worlds Largest Graffiti” von Santiago Sierra, Smara Refugee Camp, Algerien: “In October 2012 the letters “S.O.S.” were carved into the ground of Western Sahara/Algeria near the Saharaui refugee camp Smara in collaboration with Artifariti and the Frente Polisario. The graffiti measures 5 km x 1,7 km, which makes it the largest graffiti in the world. The piece refers to the Saharaui peoples struggle for independence from Moroccan rule in the almost forgotten West Saharan conflict. For 36 years they have lived in makeshift conditions under the provisional arrangement of the refugee camps in the Sahara desert, south east of Tindouf.”

VIA

New York Arts Practicum participants in a session of David Horvitz's "Life Drawing" at Zuccotti Park, 2012


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Sickratman - Evvel a Dalban

maandag 26 november 2012

Secret Leaked Video of Petraeus Outburst

New webtrend #milking

After planking and batmanning, the web world now has milking - a new internet craze sparked by a Newcastle student after he posted this video on his Facebook account.

Bikini Kill wdc 1992

A Film by Tamra Davis

Ghost Singles dating site



CHAT AND DATE

rated r us - monochrome



Our favorite sock puppets Kiki and Bubu have some feelings, so they sign up for an online dating site. When the People of China want to become their friend, they are excited. However, sending the People of China a video of themselves proves to be difficult: Their content gets flagged as inappropriate and taken down from YouTube. On the long quest for knowledge which follows, Kiki and Bubu learn all about Internet censorship. And love.

Its raining migrants!

due to lack of political repressions

The Moscow authorities have refused to grant permission for a rally against “political repressions” and “violations of human rights,” saying that state law does not recognize such a phenomenon in the country.





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'because they did nothing to stop HIM falling in love with an activist'

A former undercover police officer is suing Scotland Yard for failing to ‘protect’ him against falling in love with a woman in the group of eco-warriors he was sent to infiltrate.

READ

zondag 25 november 2012

https://support.kaspersky.com/wks6mp3/antihacker

at 17:29 hours
STILL THERE?

Frank O'Hara on the painter Larry Rivers

I have known Larry Rivers since 1950.... It was at a cocktail party we met, as one always meets people in New York, and waving at the crowd he said, "After all it's life we're interested in, not art." A couple of weeks later when I visited his studio for the first time...he said with no air of contradiction or remembrance, "After all, it's art we're interested in, not life." His main interest was obviously in the immediate situation.



Researchers Show DHS How Hackers Can Redirect Drones With GPS


Researchers at the University of Texas demonstrated to officials at the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) how drones could be hacked into through their navigation systems.

Known as “spoofing”, a false signal through the Global Positioning System (GPS) could be used to “trick” the drones into going onto a new course.

Thousands of drones will be released into US skies by the federal government, law enforcement and university research purposes. Todd Humphreys, assistant professor for the Cockrell School of Engineering believes that GPS satellites, which are not encrypted for civilian use, are a weak spot in the surveillance scheme. Humphreys stated: “The dirty fact is it’s an open signal, and easily hacked.”

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Robert Wilson - Shakespeares Sonette - Sonett 66

dead class - tadeusz kantor

zaterdag 24 november 2012

Losing Humanity

The Case against Killer Robots

With the rapid development and proliferation of robotic weapons, machines are starting to take the place of humans on the battlefield. Some military and robotics experts have predicted that “killer robots”—fully autonomous weapons that could select and engage targets without human intervention—could be developed within 20 to 30 years. At present, military officials generally say that humans will retain some level of supervision over decisions to use lethal force, but their statements often leave open the possibility that robots could one day have the ability to make such choices on their own power. Human Rights Watch and Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic (IHRC) believe that such revolutionary weapons would not be consistent with international humanitarian law and would increase the risk of death or injury to civilians during armed conflict. A preemptive prohibition on their development and use is needed. A relatively small community of specialists has hotly debated the benefits and dangers of fully autonomous weapons. Military personnel, scientists, ethicists, philosophers, and lawyers have contributed to the discussion.

They have evaluated autonomous weapons from a range of perspectives, including military utility, cost, politics, and the ethics of delegating life-and-death decisions to a machine. According to Philip Alston, then UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, however, “the rapid growth of these technologies, especially those with lethal capacities and those with decreased levels of human control, raise serious concerns that have been almost entirely unexamined by human rights or humanitarian actors.”[1] It is time for the broader public to consider the potential advantages and threats of fully autonomous weapons.

The primary concern of Human Rights Watch and IHRC is the impact fully autonomous weapons would have on the protection of civilians during times of war. This report analyzes whether the technology would comply with international humanitarian law and preserve other checks on the killing of civilians. It finds that fully autonomous weapons would not only be unable to meet legal standards but would also undermine essential non-legal safeguards for civilians. Our research and analysis strongly conclude that fully autonomous weapons should be banned and that governments should urgently pursue that end.

  HERE

[-empyre-] Debt Culture--types of debt (Brian Holmes)

Annie McClanahan wrote: Because the state is so incredibly powerful, any student debt mass default/debt strike movement would have to set up really powerful structures for mutual aid. That's why I find the Student Debtor's Pledge (http://www.occupystudentdebtcampaign.org/student-pledge/) in which signers pledge to default once 1 million others have similarly promised a much more powerful organizing model than the Rolling Jubilee (which uses a philanthropic system to collectively buy back non-secured loans, anonymously, but in no way threatens the debt system as a whole

I agree with the above, signed the plege almost a year ago (as adjunct faculty) and began researching about student debt, writing about it and talking about it publicly whenever possible. However, the sobering thing is that to date, only some 4,500 debtors have signed that pledge, and only some 600 faculty. Like Annie, I doubt the moral argument is the decisive one that stops people from taking action. The stronger forces appear to be fear of the legal system and simple apathy, or the sense that one has no agency whatsoever to effect change. Perhaps a third force is self-interest, since the expansion of the university system from the 1970s up to 2008 was predicated (without anybody ever talking about it) on each university's capacity to draw in the revenue stream of student debt. And it's still going on.

How can crippling debt become an issue on campus, given that the students have yet to be affected by it, while the faculty are actually paid with student debt? How to break the status quo of isolation and corruption? What can we do to transform the basis of social solidarity that Annie talks about in her post?

One of the things that always interested me was how the rebellious students of the 1960s were reintegrated to the capitalist system after a decade of deep disaffection. In the late 1990s, the rhetorical mechanisms of this reintegration were demonstrated in books like "The Conquest of Cool" by Thomas Frank or (with a more extensive sociological apparatus) "The New Spirit of Capitalism" by Boltanski and Chiapello. The basic idea was that changes in marketing and management styles had put to rest the alienation experienced by young cadres in the 1960s and 70s, to the point where we were living in a new kind of networked dream world (a new ideology). Demonstrating this in detail seemed like a breakthrough at the time. Yet the magnitude of the current problem makes that work appear totally inadequate.

In fact the crisis of the 1970s, and the threat it posed to capitalism as a whole, was overcome through a tremendous expansion of middle-class status, representing not merely an ideological but also an economic cooptation of those who were needed to manage the major social transformations that we call globalization. From the 70s onwards the core functions of governance became Trilateral (US-Western Europe-Japan) and a transnational capitalist class gradually emerged (as described by Leslie Sklair or William Robinson). The 1990s and especially the 2000s were marked by the urban phenomenon of megagentrification, or the construction of giant new metropolitan centers to serve this new class, whether in Asia, Eastern Europe, Latin America, or in the older core regions. Today, the Trilateral envelope has been ruptured. State, financial, corporate and millitary actors now have to contend with sovereign forces across the entire planet. Members of the global middle classes (that's us) use computer networks to contact peers across the world, to organize business, pleasure, or occasionally, revolt. But how did this occur? How did we get here?

Right now I'm reading "The New Depression" by Richard Duncan, who gives a surprising answer (you can also read a long interview with him, posted for free at newleftreview.org). According to Duncan, we got here by shifting from capitalism to creditism. In 1968, Johnson revoked the law requiring the US to back its currency with 25% reserves in gold. The Bretton-Woods system then collapsed in 1971, and not only did the world's currencies begin to float against each other, but also the US began issuing increasing amounts of paper and electronic dollars. Meanwhile we began importing far more than we exported. Corporations in the producer countries, especially Japan and later China, ended up with the excess dollars. The governments of those countries then printed more of their own money, bought up the dollars, and invested them in US bonds (including huge amounts of government-backed housing bonds). All this sovereign money creation served as the basis for the issuance by private banks of much larger amounts of credit -- and the capitalist system expanded wildly on the basis of what Marx would have called "fictitious capital."

The point, however, is that the fiction was effective. The endless factories and entirely new cities that now cover the coastline of China are there to prove it -- and on a smaller scale, you might also have a look at the shiny new physical plant and complex corporate and international partnerships of all the more successful universities. The global middle classes were created and integrated to the neoliberal version of capitalism by means of a credit bubble that has expanded continuously since the 1970s.

Since 2007, the Federal Reserve has isued many trillions more dollars worth of this imaginary but effective money, most recently via the QE3 program that is designed to pump out $40 billion *per month* for an indefinite period. This is being used to go on bailing out the banks and sovereign investors by purchasing toxic assets, especially those based on mortgages, which account for some 40% of total US debt. The immediate effect of quantitative easing is to reflate stock and commodity prices (incidentally sending food prices through the roof). Over the middle term, the aim appears to be to bring everything back to the status quo ante. The current economic model - from wage stagnation and predatory lending to global just-in-time production and devastating climate change - is being propped up by the Fed with help from the EU, Japan and China. It is as though they believed a new expansion of capitalism were possible, that all the currently disaffected people could be brought back into the system once again, and that we could end up with a fully integrated global governance: the scenario of the 1980s and 90s, reloaded at a higher power.

The other, undiscussed but in my view far more likely scenario, is one of major breakdowns in international economic relations, resulting in conflicts exacerbated by climate change. Something like a variation on WWII, a rolling planetary civil war whose first act has been the Arab Spring - arguably sparked by the historic rise in food prices in 2010.

How to make student debt a focus of struggle on college campuses? How to challenge the reckless pursuit of creditism on the global scale? The questions are linked. Because of the orders of complexity involved, only the university can produce a counter-discourse to the neoliberal creditism that currently governs our planetary society. But we know how the university works: people just get lost in all that complexity. Only a social movement of students, grads, adjuncts and (with more difficulty) professors, acting in solidarity with the other debtors in our societies, can give such a counter-discourse the force of acts, the real power to refuse the status quo.

let's do it,
Brian

_______________________________________________
empyre forum


EMPYRE MAILING LIST

donderdag 22 november 2012

woensdag 21 november 2012

Tango at the Lenin's head in Ulan-Ude

http://persecuting.us

One million U.S. citizens are sorted by political affiliation and exposed to public persecution in the aftermath of the 2012 presidential election.

For months, Paolo Cirio secretly stole data from Twitter.com on over one million Americans. Using a sophisticated sifting process, he determined the political affiliation of those people and scored their public statements and social connections in terms of the likelihood that they aligned with a political position.

HOW

Persecuting.us offers a platform where everyone can take part in a participatory model pushed to extremes, engaging people in surveying and persecuting each other in a form of info-civil-war of political polarization, which can potentially erupt into defamation, intimidation and oppression of domestic enemies.

This art project is a massive citizen-sorting database organized along political lines, much like the private holdings that have amassed databases of voters in order to influence and monitor the electorate.

SOCIAL SORTING

During the last election, Twitter was used to track down people’s opinion, promote candidates by buying trending topics in public debates and invite citizen participation through tweeting their political statements. However, Twitter is a private company which monitors, manipulates and sells data on personal and public trends.

ANTISOCIAL MEDIA

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maandag 19 november 2012

world's greatest electrician


VIA

5 Broken Cameras Full Length IDFA 2012

antistress for free!! - fra biancoschock


  VIA  

Tony Benn to BBC "If you wont broadcast the Gaza appeal then I will myself"

'Change your abortion law to save lives' grieving father tells Irish PM



Mrs Halappanavar died in agony at University Hospital Galway after doctors refused her pleas to abort her miscarried baby and told her that Ireland was a Catholic country and that she had to abide by its laws on abortion.

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Die Goldenen Zitronen - Mila

...

Christoph Schlingensief: 

"So finish ... this is not meant for the public."

zondag 18 november 2012

Why Gaza?





MAKING THE CONNECTIONS

Portraits of Soldiers Before, During, and After War



Photographer Lalage Snow, who is currently based in Kabul, Afghanistan, embarked on an 8-month-long project titled We Are The Not Dead featuring portraits of British soldiers before, during, and after their deployment in Afghanistan.

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zaterdag 17 november 2012

I benefited from apartheid



I benefited from apartheid' T-shirt sparks South African race row T-shirt by film-maker Roger Young polarises online commenters, with some praising gesture and others defending colonialism.
 
  MORE

general's hospital

Improvised footballs from Africa

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vrijdag 16 november 2012

Tip: Killing the Monsters



18 Nov 2012

A poor musical about real life!

Musicals are made in times of crises and recession. They are vehicles for escapism and hope. We are in this together. And this is why we propose a poor musical about a quest. The quest for happiness as a human condition, and the quest to make a musical together as a performative situation …every night anew.

 HERE

Tip: Fabian Hinrichs met Die Zeit schlägt dich tot in Stadsschouwburg Amsterdam



zaterdag 17 november 2012, 20.30 Grote Zaal

 HERE

Why We Oppose

donderdag 15 november 2012

The hacker group Anonymous has vowed to support Palestinians as the conflict in Gaza

#OpIsrael | #AntiZionist | #FreePalestine | #Anonymous MORE

Battleground Twitter



As the Gaza conflict rages online, is social media now an instrument of war?

#Gaza Updates


. Lots of Iron Deo

. Lots of iron dome action in the sky, intercepting rockets

On Nov. 14, 2012, the IDF targeted Ahmed Jabri, the head of Hamas' military wing, in the Gaza Strip



First Twitter war declaration? Israel announces Gaza operation on social media site



The days of declaring way with a lengthy proclamation signed by a prime minister or president are in the past. Israel announced on Tuesday that it was launching a strike on the Gaza Strip with a single tweet.

HERE

woensdag 14 november 2012

Oh, So You Are Afraid Of


VIA

Totalitarian :CCVR road ads campaign



"Well, it's not like that. Usually, the victim is an innocent. Drive cautiously, save a life!"
 A campaign initiated by The Centre Of Consultancy For The Road Victims.

Unfortunately No Ceausescu :(

VIA

Berlin > Collegium Hungaricum > IPUT / Tamás St. Turba



Tamás St.Auby (superintendent of IPUT in 1991):

"(...) In early 1991, when one fraction of the tribes from the Carpathian Basin wanted to destroy the Statue of Liberty on [Budapester] Gellért Hill and another wanted to keep it, Júlia Lorrensy, the fantastic French artist of Hungarian descent, holding a cocktail glass to her red smiling lips and forming a question mark with her black eyebrows, said to me: "What's the point of this whole hullabaloo?! All anybody has to do is cover it in a white sheet, cut out two holes for its eyes and voilà!: there's for them the spirit of freedom!". Suddenly everything became clear to me and I swore right then that I would make this transformation. Laughing, we finished our drinks and leaned back contently in our leather armchairs.

(...) On 29 June 1992, the day of the Red Army's First Farewell to Budapest, the Statue of Liberty's Soul 1992 W was waving above the city. I only ended up changing two motifs from the original plan: First, in order to protect the rights of the artist's personality and take into consideration the tradition of exo-psychology, I gave the piece another name - Lorrensy still fled the country -, and second, I replaced the eye holes with two giant painted black dots to avoid the mountain air's corrosive effects - the public authorities had allowed the transformation, but only for four days.

(...) Finally, the transformation occurred in the last moment, in the first moment of the collapse of the Soviet Union[ss1]. Such an opportunity will never arise again! - And the people who think radically different today don't think any differently."

(Excerpt from the Description of the Transformation - Budapest, 1 June 2002, T.St.Auby)

P.S.:
The 40-meter-tall Statue of Liberty on Gellért Hill in Budapest was inaugurated as the >Monument of Liberation< from the Nazi regime by the Soviet Troops in 1947. The Soviet commander had hand-picked the sculptor himself and supervised the monument's construction personally. The sculpture had, during those 45 years, become the symbol of Budapest. After 1989, many party-run and civil organisations tried to initiate the removal of the sculpture, but the effort failed as a result of popular opposition.

P.S. 2:
IPUT (International Parallel Union of Telecommunications)

(Trust.ee in bankruptcy of IPUT : Tamás St.Turba, the Agent of NETR AF /Neo-Socialist. Realist. IPUT's Global Counter Arthist.ory-Falsifiers Front/)

IPUT was founded by Tamás Szentjóby in 1968 in Budapest. It started to deal with the theme of the St.Rike in 1972 and with the Subsist.ence Level St.andard Project 1984 W (SLSP 1984W) in 1974. The dispatcher of IPUT was charged with non-art-artistic and political subversion and was sent to exile by the pseudo-socialist authority in 1974. While the SLSP 1984W-operation continued in Geneva in 1975, IPUT established the Near-East.- European Free University for West.-European Jobless People (Ast.Ronomy-, R'n'R- and St.Rike Departments). After the fall of the Iron Curtain IPUT returned to Hungary. IPUT organizes referendums against free sex in order to get the Subsistence Minimum Allocation for the Eternal Jobless People financed by the military budget. ("DOWN WITH THE ELECTION ! - LONG LIVE THE VOTE !") From 1991 the new superintendent, Tamás St.Auby (today Tamás St.Turba) is a lecturer at the Intermedia Creche of the Hungarian Mercantile-Military Penalty- University of Fine Arts. In 2001 IPUT founded NETR AF (Neo-Socialist. Realist. International Parallel Union of Telecommunication's Global Counter-Arthist.ory- Falsifiers Front), and established the Portable Intelligence Increase Museum containing ca. 1,100 digitized artworks dating between 1956 and 1976 - tolerated or forbidden at that time and neglected since. IPUT is participating in the show "Desire Freedom. Art in Europe since 1945" at the German Historical Museum with the Portable Trench for Three Persons (1969).

HERE

Berlin>Collegium Hungaricum>Vertigo of Freedom


The exhibition Vertigo of Freedom (Schwindel der Freiheit) explores the darker side of freedom and the anxiety and dizziness it is capable of producing. Artists work in a field in which an unbounded, uncompromising quest for freedom is essential. It is they who feel its tremendous weight most intensely, for art is the only realm of human activity that requires absolute freedom, one without limitations. Although the concept of freedom is, in general, tacitly understood as being positive and coherent, there are still, more than twenty years after Europe (Schwindel der Freiheit) explores the darker side of freedom and the anxiety and dizziness it is capable of producing. Artists work in a field in which an unbounded, uncompromising quest for freedom is essential. It is they who feel its tremendous weight most intensely, for art is the only realm of human activity that requires absolute freedom, one without limitations. Although the concept of freedom is, in general, tacitly understood as being positive and coherent, there are still, more than twenty years after Europe's reunification, extremely different ideas about what freedom means in Eastern, Western, Northern and Southern Europe (not to mention what it means among non-European cultures). Indeed, we do all not stand upon a firm, common ground - the current financial crisis has made that quite clear. It is the artists, as the most sensitive membranes of society, who can - and should - reflect this conflict in their work, just as a seismograph measures the vibrations of an earthquake. In this sense, Vertigo of Freedom presents various ways in which artists have dealt with freedom after the end of the Cold War.

- Kata Krasznahorkai Berlin, October 2012

VIA

Rihanna exploits #seapunk genre in SNL performance, genre is now over



#Seapunk is a genre that doesn't really have any music, it is just an 'aesthetic' that involves 1990s electronic vibes, Second Life and virtual reality graphics, and failed Microsoft Windows aesthetics. The 'movement' never really had a following, but it was just kinda funny that a musical genre existed only in the context of a Tumblr/Twitter hashtag. This 'visual aesthetic' may or may not be popular on the internet, which means it is 'kewl', which means that mnstrm 'artists' will exploit it and 'bastardize' 'what once was pure.'

 MORE HERE

Doctors Talk to Vegetative Patient...

Trolly [ commenter ]:"He’s been in a vegetative state for 10 years? Surely he is ALMIGHTILY bored. Couldn’t they have asked him whether he’s happy?"

HERE

zaterdag 10 november 2012

Rolling Jubilee


A bailout of the people by the people. We buy debt for pennies on the dollar, but instead of collecting it, we abolish it. We cannot buy specific individuals' debt - instead, we help liberate debtors at random through a campaign of mutual support, good will, and collective refusal.

The Jubilee begins November 15 with "The People's Bailout," a variety show and telethon in NYC. All proceeds will go directly to buying people's debt and cancelling it. Want to donate while we're still setting up?

Find out more about the Jubilee.

woensdag 7 november 2012

http://fuckbank.biz

A post-colonial audiovisual essayist, using as his tools cheap midi controllers, usb devices and undiluted aggression exorcised from the depths of an amnesiac Australian culture… Revulsion in every direction. A burning black hole of explosive anger – given a physical shape by a body trapped in circumstance. A body that is barely able to contain itʼs energy. 

Emile Zile 

Artist i respect check:

HERE

what of it?


VIA

Wing - Safe Computer

Ass for Gas - m4w - 28 (Queens, NY)

I have four (5) gallon and four (2) gallon red gas storage containers filled with premium unleaded gas.

I originally stocked up to supply gas to run the generator, but now I have electricity.

Tired of waiting 4-8 hours just to find out that a gas station is out of gas?

Well, I'm ready, willing, and able to trade the gas (and container) in return for something non-financial.

However, you must make the initial offer, and I'll have to decide if it's even worth accepting.

You know how much gas I have, now it's all a matter of how much you want and what you're willing to offer.

Replies without a picture will be ignored.

Interested only in white and non-ghetto hispanic.

    Location: Queens, NY
    it's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests

PostingID: 3386276747


HERE

dinsdag 6 november 2012

Current prices on the Russian underground market

* Hacking corporate mailbox: $500
* Winlocker ransomware: $10-20
* Unintelligent exploit bundle: $25
* Intelligent exploit bundle: $10-$3,000
* Basic crypter (for inserting rogue code into a benign file): $10-$30
* SOCKS bot (to get around firewalls): $100
* Hiring a DDoS attack: $30-$70/day, $1,200/month
* Botnet: $200 for 2,000 bots
* DDoS botnet: $700
* ZeuS source code: $200-$500
* Windows rootkit (for installing malicious drivers): $292
* Hacking Facebook or Twitter account: $130
* Hacking Gmail account: $162
* Email spam: $10 per one million emails
* Email spam (using a customer database): $50-$500 per one million emails
* SMS spam: $3-$150 per 100-100,000 messages

fan steals penalty mark

Chris Rock - Message for White Voters