Category Archive: Wreckollection

Every day in Ethiopia, locals in modern farming operations protected by guards wielding AK47s pick, pack and load hundreds of tons of fresh produce that is flown to a handful of oil rich Middle Eastern cities, entirely bypassing Ethiopia, one of the hungriest places on the planet. The trip from vine to store shelf takes less than 24 hours.   Plantations like this one have become common across Africa where richer countries including South Korea and Japan, and rising powers like China and India, have begun leasing vast tracts of land. They are joined by Agribusiness and Western hedge funds that are funneling billions into the new projects in anticipation of continued global food shortages and rising food prices.   They say they’re bringing desperately needed new technologies, seeds and investment to Africa, but opponents call it profiteering and a “land grab” that is forcing poor farmers off their land and benefiting only those  governments that are inking the deals.

Nice try swine flu, let me show you how it’s really done.  Here’s one scientist who has figured out how to prevent mankind from destroying our planet.  This American biologist and entrepreneur most famous for his role in being one of the first to sequence the human genome, creates an artificial living cell by synthesizing the entire genome of a bacterium and transplanting it into another.  He hailed the new organism as, “the first self replicating species…on the planet whose parent is a computer.”   For more on that story see Terminators 1, 2, 3, etc.  Pigs don’t fly but all the “Skynets” in the galaxy won’t be able to contain airborne bacteria.

In March a South Korean warship was sunk with 46 lives lost.  An international  team of investigators found that the evidence pointed “overwhelmingly to the conclusion that the torpedo was fired by a North Korean submarine.” It added: “There is no other plausible explanation.”   Later in the year, South Korean war games near the North Korean border lead to an artillery exchange and further loss of life.   For Kor-e-an out loud, can you guys just try and get along?

In January, Google announced that it (and many other Fortune 100 companies) had been hacked.  The source of the attack that spanned about half a year was tracked back to two schools in China. The primary goal of the attack, dubbed project Aurora, was to gain access to and potentially modify source code repositories at high tech, security and defense contractor companies.   In a related story, the Chinese city of Shaoxing was identified as the source of 21.3% of all (12 billion) malicious emails sent throughout the world.

Later and elsewhere in the news, a self-replicating computer program (called a worm) designed to attack and sabotage manufacturing facilities, power grids, pipelines and nuclear plants was discovered in Iran.  The worm intercepts legitimate commands that control devices such as valves and pressure gauges and substitutes them with potentially destructive ones.   Dubbed the Stuxnet worm, it has spread to over 100,000 machines in more than 155 countries, though most are in Iran.  Experts claim “…we’ve never seen such an advanced threat that needed so many different skills to come together.” To date no-one has been able to identify the creator of this “cyber-weapon” although given that the target was almost certainly the nuclear reactors in Iran most believe it originated in the US or Israel (although it could just as easily be some evil billionaire with a cat).

Rounding out a year that saw the U.S. Coastguard protecting the privacy of British Petroleum’s effort (or lack thereof) to cleanup the mother of all oil spills, government agencies everywhere the world over were tripping over themselves in attempts to gag, smear and/or arrest WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange for his role in introducing a few barrels of declassified, “he said, she said” news leaks.