LONDON —
England’s Premier League has long prided itself on the kind of soccer it
sells to the world, a compelling product that it bills as a unique
brand of high-octane, fast-and-furious soccer. So it is perhaps little
surprise that the league’s introduction this season of video assistant
refereeing — the game-pausing, controversy-inducing, fan-aggravating
replay system in growing use worldwide — has been an uncommonly bad fit
here, a case of sound and fury meeting a handbrake.
The new system has dominated coverage of the first four months of the season, where hardly a week has gone by without a major V.A.R.-induced controversy. A missed penalty at Bournemouth. A disallowed goal at Manchester United. A toe, or an armpit, inches offside at one stadium, a handball overlooked at another.
Not
even the biggest matches have been immune. Long before the final
whistle blew in Liverpool’s 3-1 victory over Manchester City on Nov. 10,
in one glaring example, the match already had been overshadowed by yet
more questions about officiating, with City Manager Pep Guardiola
quickly transformed into an internet meme over his televised outrage at
two calls in particular.
New-product launches don’t always go as planned. Thursday night’s preview of Tesla Inc.’s Cybertruck was one of the more spectacular examples, when Franz von Holzhausen, the company’s design chief, unintentionally shattered two of the pickup’s windows with a metallic ball.
Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk’s reaction? “Oh my f---ing god.”
Watch the Windows Get Smashed on Tesla's New Cybertruck
Watch the Windows Get Smashed on Tesla's New Cybertruck
Here are a few other auto-industry previews that went astray.
Black Friday is the day following Thanksgiving Day in the United States (the fourth Thursday of November). Since 1932, it has been regarded as the beginning of the Christmas shopping season
in the U.S., and most major retailers open very early (and more
recently during overnight hours) and offer promotional sales. Black
Friday is not an official holiday, but California and some other states
observe "The Day After Thanksgiving" as a holiday for state government
employees, sometimes in lieu of another federal holiday such as Columbus Day.[2]
Many non-retail employees and schools have both Thanksgiving and the
following Friday off, which, along with the following regular weekend,
makes it a four-day weekend, thereby increasing the number of potential
shoppers. It has routinely been the busiest shopping day of the year
since 2005,[3] although news reports, which at that time were inaccurate,[4] have described it as the busiest shopping day of the year for a much longer period of time.[5] Similar stories resurface year upon year at this time, portraying hysteria and shortage of stock, creating a state of positive feedback.
Moroccan singer Saad Lamjarred has allegedly been arrested in Paris for “sexual assault.”
According to Moroccan news outlet Le360,
the Moroccan star, who was staying Marriott Champs Elysées, was
reportedly arrested by the police of the 17th arrondissement of Paris,
on Wednesday 26 October. He was placed in custody before being brought
before the competent prosecutor on Friday morning.
The Moroccan singer was scheduled to perform on Saturday October 29 at Paris’ Palais des Congrés.
“We are following with great interest
this issue and contacts have been made between the authorities of both
countries to clarify this matter, “Minister of Culture, Mohamed Amine
Sbihi was quoted by Le360 as saying.
Saad Lamjarred is facing a lawsuit in the United States for another case of sexual assault.
A New York woman told the New York Post
in May that she was allegedly sexually assaulted and beaten in a
Brooklyn apartment by Lamjarred, in 2010.
Rifat Harb, the alleged victim’s
attorney claims that the Moroccan singer was “arrested and indicted, and
after posting bail, immediately fled the country, and has not returned
since.”
In recent years, Saad Lamjarred has
become a household name both in Morocco and the whole Middle East. The
Moroccan singer broke many YouTube records with is sensational songs.
In the spring of 2015 his song entitled ‘Lamaalem’ (The Boss) reached
100,000,000 views on video sharing website YouTube within three months
after the video clip was released. The song has reached over 400,000,000
on YouTube, a new record for an Arab singer.
The Moroccan singer’s captivating song has has earned him a Guinness World Record achievement.
The first presidential debate is Monday night. Hillary Clinton has some work to do. She was probably
expecting to go into the first debate ahead by double digits. WHY ISN’T
SHE LIKE, 50 POINTS AHEAD????? She certainly can’t figure it out. The latest ABC News/Washington Post poll
shows Hillary and Trump at a virtual tie, with 46 percent and 44
percent respectively. (Gary Johnson has 5 percent and Jill Stein has 1
percent.)
I used to wonder the same thing, but my younger sister was recently
polled. I was so excited when she told me and asked her who it was, but
she couldn’t remember. Because she’s a dork.
And as usual, here’s RCP’s current national polling average:
A whopping 74 percent of Americans say they plan to watch the first
presidential debate. It’ll be interesting to see what the national poll
numbers look like after that.
Las Vegas.
It’s a city that can break you, make you and wed you all in one
night. It’s a city that can turn your world upside down in a role
of the dice. With its loose morals and relaxed laws on gambling, Las
Vegas is a global symbol of excess. Having been hit hard by the
recession, Las Vegas is booming once again. Its population is
on the increase as more jobs are created in the Nevadan city.
This economic upturn is powered by the whopping 39 million people who
visit the city each year with many of them putting their casino
online skills to the test on Vegas’ gambling tables.
Such a strong
tourism industry has seen colossal hotel-casinos open along Vegas’
4mile Strip. The Mirage Hotel with its 3,000 rooms was the
first of its kind to open in 1989. A few years later the Egyptian
Luxor, with over 4,400 rooms, was built and this was soon
followed by the MGM Grand which now has over 6,000 rooms. Such vast
hotels have been bankrolled by the addictive nature of the super
casinos within them. The average visitor to Vegas spends just over
$1,000 as they look to create memories reminiscent of Hollywood
movies.
With its Mob past
and decedent activities, Vegas
is a firm favourite with Hollywood. Over the years
countless amounts of films have fed into the Las Vegas myth. From the
recent Hangover trilogy to Ocean’s 11 starring Brad
Pitt and George Clooney – Hollywood loves promoting Las
Vegas as a sinful, anything goes place and, in truth, it is! Away
from the gambling tables, Las Vegas is home to world class shopping
facilities and numerous fine dining establishments for you to immerse
yourself in. Nowhere does glamour quite like Las Vegas. In fact, you
may leave Las Vegas but Las Vegas never leaves you!
One of the vital ingredients of the 2014 FIFA World Cup™ has today been confirmed, with the announcement by FIFA and Sony Music of the artists behind the event’s official song. One of Brazil’s hottest musical talents, Claudia Leitte, will team up with global superstars Pitbull and Jennifer Lopez on the track entitled “We Are One (Ole Ola)”.
Following the success of Shakira’s “Waka Waka (This Time for Africa)” at the 2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa™, the new single, written and co-produced by Pitbull, is set to bring the passion of Brazilto the world when it is officially released by Sony Music later this year. Capturing the colourful atmosphere of the 2014 host nation, the song will ignite the excitement felt by football fans around the world in the lead-up to the 2014 FIFA World Cup™.
The announcement was made on Thursday, 23 January, at the Maracanã football stadium, with Claudia Leitte and Pitbull joining FIFA Secretary General Jérôme Valcke as well as LOC President José Maria Marin, Brazilian Deputy Sports Minister Luis Fernandes, LOC Board Member and footballing great Bebeto and two-time FIFA World Cup winner Cafu for an exclusive visit to the venue for the 2014 FIFA World Cup final.
Speaking at the Maracanã on Thursday, FIFA Secretary General Jérôme Valcke said: “FIFA and Sony Music are extremely excited to share the exciting talent of Claudia Leitte with the world, alongside such internationally celebrated artists as Pitbull and Jennifer Lopez. In my many visits to this country, I’ve heard a lot about the great Brazilian music tradition and it gives me great pleasure to see a Brazilian artist at the heart of this song. I’m sure, like me, millions of football and music fans all over the world will be eagerly awaiting the song’s release.”
“I am very happy and thrilled to represent my country at the FIFA World Cup alongside these two amazing artists who I admire and respect. I love sharing my culture and country to people through music!” said Claudia Leitte. “The FIFA World Cup is one of the biggest events on the planet, and I look forward to dancing samba with Pitbull and Jennifer Lopez in Brazil - we are one!”
“I’m honored to join Jennifer Lopez and Claudia Leitte at the FIFA World Cup to bring the world together,” said Pitbull. “I truly believe that this great game and the power of music will help unify us, because we are best when we are one.”
“We Are One (Ole Ola)” will debut later this year ahead of the 2014 FIFA World Cup™, and will be included on the upcoming “Official 2014 FIFA World Cup Album” to be released by Sony Music Entertainment. A video for “We Are One (Ole Ola)” is also in development.
FIFA and Sony Music have enjoyed a successful partnership in the World Cup’s official music programme ever since 1994. The tradition of an official song dates back to the 1966 FIFA World Cup™ in England with a song for the first Official Mascot, the lion “World Cup Willie”. Ever since, the official music programme and the Official Mascot have become an increasingly significant component of the event, providing an excellent opportunity for people other than football fans to identify with the world’s biggest single-sport event.
Official songs at recent FIFA World Cup™ competitions have included “Un’estate italiana” by Edoardo Bennato and Gianna Nannini in 1990, “Gloryland” by Daryl Hall with Sounds of Blackness in 1994, and “La Copa de la Vida” by Ricky Martin in 1998. In 2002, the official song was “Boom” by Anastacia, and there was also an official anthem by Vangelis featuring typical Korean and Japanese sounds. In 2006, “The Time of Our Lives” by the Il Divo quartet was a resounding success, followed in 2010 by “Waka Waka (This Time for Africa)” written by Shakira who performed alongside South African band Freshlyground.
Preliminary details for the sale of tickets for the FIFA Club World Cup Morocco 2013 have been announced, with VISA exclusive pre-sales beginning on Monday 14 October.
The online pre-sale, exclusive to VISA cardholders, begins on Monday 14 October and will run until Sunday 27 October. This will be for all categories, including the Category 3 reserved for Moroccoresidents.
The open sales phase, for all other payment cards, will begin on Monday 28 October, and will again include all ticket categories.
For those wishing to purchase tickets in person, the Local Sales Stations will open in Morocco in November right up until the first match day. Public Ticket Sales Counters will be located at the Agadir Stadum, the Marrakech Stadium and at other locations to be confirmed in Morocco.
For more information on Club World Cup tickets, make sure to check FIFA.com regularly for further updates.
(Reuters) - At least 35 people were killed and 50 injured when a train derailed on the outskirts of the northern Spanish city of Santiago de Compostela on Wednesday in one of the country's worst rail disasters.
Bodies covered in blankets lay next to carriages as smoke billowed from the wreckage a few hundred meters away from the entrance to the city's main station.
The train derailed on the eve of the ancient city's main Christian festival when thousands of pilgrims travel in to pack the streets.
"It was going so quickly ... It seems that on a curve the train started to twist, and the wagons piled up one on top of the other," passenger Ricardo Montesco told Cadena Ser radio station.
"A lot of people were squashed on the bottom. We tried to squeeze out of the bottom of the wagons to get out and we realized the train was burning ... I was in the second wagon and there was fire ... I saw corpses," he added.
Another witness told the radio station she had heard an explosion before seeing the derailed train.
A spokesman for the regional government's office described the derailment as an accident. But the wreckage will stir memories of 2004's Madrid train bombing, carried out by Islamists, that killed 191 people.
"We can confirm there was an accident, but we cannot confirm mortalities as yet," the official told Reuters.
The head of the surrounding Galicia region, Alberto Nunez Feijoo, said at least 35 people had died and it was too early to say what had caused the derailment.
The crash happened a day before the city's main festival paying tribute to the remains of St James, one of Jesus' 12 disciples.
The apostle's shrine in the city is the destination of the famous El Camino de Santiago pilgrimage, followed by Christians since the Middle Ages.
The city is also the birthplace of Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy.
No one was immediately available to comment from Spanish train operator Renfe whose logo was visible on the wrecked carriages.
Islam Times - The Financial Times, a renowned British newspaper reported that the British Security Services had broken into a London apartment following concerns that the residence was used for terrorist activities, only to found that the premises were used for prostitution.
The apartment which is owned by non-other than Salwa Hamad bin Jassim, the Qatari Prime Minister’s daughter, raised some serious question marks over the young woman’s moral standards and the nature of her activities when in the United Kingdom. According to witnesses Salwa was actually at the apartment in the company of a westerner.
Although the Qatari embassy tried to prevent the scandal from seeing the light of day by offering $50 million to the paper, the Financial Times refused.
In a city of boundless bling, Dubai Police also are in hot pursuit after adding a nearly $550,000 Lamborghini to its fleet.
The sports car, painted in green-and-white colors of the Dubai force, will not likely be roaring after law breakers. Instead, it will be mostly dispatched to tourist areas to show - in the words of Major General Khamis Mattar Al Mazeina, Dubai Police’s Deputy Commander General - “how classy Dubai is.”
The two-door, two-seater sports car, which can reach speeds of up to 217mph, has been painted in the green-and-white colors of the Dubai Police force. It can go from 0 to 62mph in 2.9 seconds.
The Aventador was described by Lamborghini on its website as “a one-of-a-kind piece of art.”
Moroccan football hooligans rampaged through Casablanca, mugging pedestrians and smashing up carriages of the city’s new tram system, cars and public buses. Nearly 200 people have been arrested.
Fans from the capital Rabat paraded through Casablanca before Thursday’s match between clubs from the two cities and attacked people and property. No one was reported injured.
Police said Friday that 193 people were charged with vandalism and the destruction included eight tram carriages, seven public buses and 13 cars. People described on national television being attacked in the streets and mugged by the fans as well.
An inquiry has been launched to discover why more security forces weren’t present.
There is a fierce rivalry between Moroccan football clubs and there have been outbreaks of violence outside games in the past. alarabiya
Last year, a Googler named Dr. Elie Bursztein noticed that Apple's App Store protocols weren't very secure.
Much of the interaction your iDevice had with the App Store was conducted via plain old HTTP.
Apple should really have been using HTTPS, or secure HTTP.
HTTPS, as you probably know, is HTTP traffic carried inside a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) or Transaction Layer Security (TLS) wrapper.
→ SSL/TLS uses public-key cryptography to create a secure data channel, even between users or websites that have never corresponded before. Conventional encryption, like a doorlock, relies on a single key that can lock or unlock. How to share that one-size-fits-all key before you start using it is a security problem all of its own. Public key cryptography relies on an algorithm that uses two keys. One is kept private, and the other made public. What the public key locks, only the private key can unlock.
The problem with HTTP is that if you're on someone else's network, whether it's wired or wireless, they can probably listen into all your web traffic.
Likewise, if someone else is on your network, they can do the same thing, eavesdropping undetectably.
Worse still, it's very likely that they'll be able not only to watch what you're doing, but also to modify the traffic you send and receive.
So, in an ideal world, there would be HTTPS only, since the encryption layer inhibits both eavesdropping and unauthorised modification. Nobody would use HTTP for anything.
And why not? SSL/TLS encryption can be made largely transparent both to the programmer and the user, so the difference in online experience between encrypted and unencrypted web sessions is pretty modest.
In practice, however, HTTPS isn't quite as convenient for your IT department as HTTP.
You need to get certificates signed, your private keys stored securely, and more.
That means an operational change, which means paperwork, implementation time and (you can guess what comes next) money.
Also, because every HTTPS download is encrypted uniquely for each user each time they fetch it, it's much harder to cache HTTPS traffic.
If 2000 users from the USA pull down the same image file from your database in New Zealand, you can't rely on a web cache on the USA side to serve up an identical copy of the file to 1999 of them, because each download is individually negotiated and encrypted.
That means an operational change, which means paperwork, implementation time and (you can guess what comes next) money.
As a result, a sort-of HTTP/HTTPS hybrid evolved.
You use HTTPS for the parts of the transaction that really have to be secret, such as sending passwords, credit card numbers and other Personally Identifiable Information (PII).
For everything else, you use HTTP.
That was the model used by many online services, including webmail providers and social networks, until fairly recently.
Implemented as a Firefox plugin, Firesheep listened on the network until the HTTPS-protected part of your social networking session was complete.
Then it sniffed out your session cookie, the magic token embedded in your post-authentication HTTP requests that tells Facebook, Twitter and others that you're an authorised user.
Firesheep could then pretend to be you, posting status updates, links, tweets and more from your accounts as if you had done it yourself.
Of course, even without actively hijacking your social networking accounts, an eavesdropper can learn an awful lot about you from your HTTP traffic.
After all, not everything you upload to Facebook or Twitter is inevitably intended for public consumption, so it oughtn't really to be uploaded without being wrapped in an SSL/TLS session.
Facebook, Twitter and others, bless them all, eventually bit the bullet and simply switched to HTTPS for everything. (At least, they did for web-based clients. Special-purpose mobile apps were, and some still are, a different story, but we shall ignore that issue here.)
But Apple, it seems, didn't bother with HTTPS everywhere, even for its own App Store, until 2013.
Since there's no other place to shop when you're buying or selling iDevice software, and since Apple likes it that way, you might think that Cupertino would have set the bar a bit higher.
You might also have expected Apple to react a bit more quickly after Dr. Bursztein's fairly detailed explanations of why the bar reallyneeded to be higher.
In July 2012, he explained several problems, which he's now made public, including active attacks (that's where you change HTTP content en route between server and client) by which a malcontent could steal your password, trick you into buying the wrong App, deliver you a bogus update, or quietly prevent you from applying a needed update.
Burzstein also showed that the App Store routinely uploaded an unencrypted list of already-installed Apps from your device.
That doesn't sound like much, but it is.
Firstly, some of those Apps will identify aspects of your life that would be handy for a social engineer to know: the bank you use, the newspapers you like, the games you play, the share-trading services you invest with, and more.
Secondly, the complete selection of Apps on your device may very well be unique to you, thus making it a handy form of digital fingerprint for an attacker.
Earlier this year, Apple finally made a start towards the change that many of its web traffic competitors like Google, Facebook and Twitter made some time ago, and bumped all the App Store's active content to HTTPS:
Good. (Better yet would have been to serve everything using HTTPS, but let's be thankful for what we've got.)
If you're a web developer and your web services rely on users sending you traffic that contains anything at all that oughtn't to be public, you should be doing the same.
Even data that isn't legally considered PII can be pure gold to cybercrooks, and so leaking it could be putting your customers at risk.
And you wouldn't want that, would you?
Learning more about SSL/TLS
Would you like to know more about SSL/TLS?
Here's a quarter-hour Sophos Techknow podcast, featuring Paul Ducklin and Chester Wisniewski as they explain the S in HTTPS:
Yesterday was a challenging day for the double X-chromosomed - or, really, for anybody who doesn't want to be spied on.
First, there was this Ars Technica pieceabout ratters: hackers who use remote administration tools (RATs) to gain access to (primarily) women's webcams, files and PC microphones to steal files and surreptitiously spy on victims, whom they refer to as "girl slaves."
While we wait, there's time to ponder the privacy invasions Google's glasses portends.
For one, it will be a boon to those who don't have the technical acumen to actually hack into somebody's computer and take it over like the ratter crowd.
As ReadWrite pointed out, Google's device removes the social awkwardness, and obviousness, of pointing a camera or smartphone at somebody to snap their photo or grab some video of them.
Taking the phone or camera out of the equation means that stalker types can just look and snap, or leer and record, as the case may be.
Of course, it's not only attractive women who'll be potentially targeted by creeps. It's could be children, or anybody, for that matter.
Google hasn't included facial recognition for their first iteration of Glass. I tried to find thoughts from them on whether it would be included in future versions, but I came up short. Enlighten me, please, if you've seen such.
Given the social networking giants' attraction to this technology up to this point, it's hard to imagine Google will refrain from including it in the long term.
In the meantime, the Glass-clad will have the option of quietly muttering voice commands to their Android-enabled face gear so as to do a bit of Google stalking on whomever they just met.
The invasion of privacy this promises to usher in is reminiscent of "Girls Around Me," the stalking app that tied in to Foursquare to enable users to access women's specific location, photos, Facebook details including birthdays or relationship status or schools attended, and whatever else Facebook and Foursquare's check-in functions had broadcast about its targets.
Thankfully, at least one business has already banned Google Glass.
If you’re one of the few who are planning on going out and spending your savings on Google Glasses – what will for sure be a new fad for the fanny-pack wearing never removing your bluetooth headset wearing crowd – plan on removing them before you enter The 5 Point. The 5 Point is officially a No Google Glass zone.
Nicely done, 5 Point. Thank you for protecting your patrons' privacy, particularly in your gadget-savvy city.
ZDNet's James Kendrick predicts that when public awareness of Google Glass reaches a critical mass, and when people understand that the devices can record photos, video and audio of the wearer's surroundings, we'll see more such bans.
Don't be surprised if within weeks of the Google Glasses general release we start seeing bans of it cropping up all over the place.
I hope he's right.
I'd suggest that as we await the availability of what admittedly sounds like insanely fun gadgetry, outside of the scary privacy bits, you practice the same caution with regards to your privacy around Google Glass as I recommended with Girls Around Me.
To wit: Check your applications. Stay safe. Check what they're beaming out about you. Check your children's applications. Be aware of the information your kids' apps beam out about them.
Things started to change after the 
Since there's no other place to shop when you're buying or selling iDevice software, and since Apple likes it that way, you might think that Cupertino would have set the bar a bit higher.
Google hasn't included facial recognition for their first iteration of Glass. I tried to find thoughts from them on whether it would be included in future versions, but I came up short. Enlighten me, please, if you've seen such.
Nicely done, 5 Point. Thank you for protecting your patrons' privacy, particularly in your gadget-savvy city.
