Arson and terrorism suspected in forest fire on Israel's main highway

As Israel's Independence Day comes about, many festivities had to sadly be cancelled because of a huge forest fire that broke out on the highway to Jerusalem, which is now suspected to have been terrorist-based arson:

Large brushfires were blazing Wednesday in the Eshtaol Forest on the outskirts of Jerusalem, forcing the evacuations of some communities and the closure of roads.

It was the second time in the space of a week that fires in the hills to the west of the capital have led to the evacuation of residents.

The Fire and Rescue Service reported fires were raging in at least five places in the Jerusalem hills.

It's very disturbing and disgusting. Breitbart notes:

Posts on social media showed the fire advancing on the outskirts of Jerusalem, as residents abandoned cars.

מטורף האש הגיע לכביש 1 כשהכביש עמוס, איבוד שליטה באזור כלל הכוחות מפונים למקום. pic.twitter.com/CPa4icQ3fN

— שלמה ⛈️ מזג אוויר (@MezgAvirIL) April 30, 2025

No injuries were reported, other than smoke inhalation, though the fires interrupted ceremonies marking Israel’s annual Yom Hazikaron, or Memorial Day, which commemorates fallen soldiers throughout the years.

Though the rehearsal of the special soldiers' march for the occasion was specially recorded and can be broadcast, this is still a terrible incident that had to happen. As the Jerusalem Post notes, terrorism is suspected:

Terrorism is suspected in the wave of massive fires that have triggered a national emergency across parts of Israel, according to an unnamed Israeli security source speaking to The Media Line. The fires erupted on Tuesday, as the country marked Memorial Day for Fallen Soldiers and Victims of Terrorism and prepared to transition into celebrations for its 77th Independence Day.

The source confirmed that several arrests have been made in connection with the suspected arson attacks, but declined to provide further details due to the sensitivity of the ongoing investigation.

[...] “This is being treated as a national emergency,” the source said, pointing to evidence that suggests the fires were set deliberately and in a coordinated manner. The timing—on a day of national mourning followed immediately by celebrations of statehood—has raised concerns that the attacks were intended to provoke panic and undermine the national morale.

Hamas calls to set fires in Jerusalem, West Bank

Hamas posted a message encouraging Palestinians to "burn whatever you can of groves, forests, and settler homes," on Telegram on Wednesday.

"Youth of the West Bank, youth of Jerusalem, and those inside Israel, set their cars ablaze... Gaza awaits the revenge of the free," the terrorist organization wrote.

Earlier, the Jenin News Network Telegram channel called on Palestinians to "burn the groves near the settlements" in a post on Telegram on Wednesday.

As the wildfires continue to burn across central Israel, the channel posted a photo of a masked person setting fire to a field as a town burns in the background, with the text "Settlers' homes will be ashes under the feet of the revolutionaries" and the hashtag "Burn settlers' houses."

Well, if this is what Telegram allows to take place on their network, then I don't think I want to make use of their services. Anybody sane who's running a social media network should not allow jihadists to exploit their services. Who knows how much damage has also been caused in Europe as the result of the Telegram staff's incompetence? Anybody with common sense who realizes Telegram could be a bad influence should cancel their subscription immediately.

Facebook Tracks Us Even If We Don't Have Facebook

Follow up to the earlier IBA post WHISTLEBLOWER: FACEBOOK LISTENS IN ON YOUR CONVERSATIONS AT HOME AND AT WORK, from the article Facebook Is Tracking You Even If You’re Not on Facebook:

Facebook's problems just keep accumulating, drip by drip—or more like splash by splash. It’s now been discovered that Facebook not only collects and uses the personal data of its members but also collects the data of those who never signed up for Facebook.

So if you're one of those who blames Facebook users for allowing their personal data to be compromised, don't be so smug. Facebook may be sharing your personal data as well.

Daniel Kahn Gillmor, senior staff technologist at the ACLU, discovered that, although he never joined Facebook or any other social network, Facebook has a detailed profile on him.

Facebook obtains information from those not on Facebook in two different ways: from other Facebook users and by tracking people who visit other other sites on the web.

When people sign up for Facebook, they’re encouraged to upload their contacts to make it easier for Facebook to connect them with their friends. That allows Facebook to access personal contact information for people who never signed up for the platform or gave their permission to share their information. Facebook knows that these contacts are friends of the new Facebook user, and can start compiling additional details on these non-members.


[...]

Facebook also tracks individuals when they visit other websites. Whenever they click a "like" button on the website, that information often gets fed back to Facebook, along with a list of the websites visited and any Facebook-specific cookies the browser might have collected. Facebook calls this a "third-party request." As individuals do this over time, Facebook is able to accumulate a detailed profile, again, even though they never signed up for a Facebook account....

Read the entire article HERE.

It seems that any right we ever had to privacy has been permanently breached via our participation in almost anything on the web.

I'm thinking that our Age of Technology, albeit informative and convenient, has unleashed a monster and that there is no way of avoiding this monster. Maybe I'm wrong about that....

Technie Question. I'm confused.

Hillary Clinton's recent boo-hoo "apologies" seem ludicrous to me.  For one thing, her eyes are suddenly extra blue.  For another, her voice sounds phony.

Whatever.

Here's my question....

Do email addresses and web servers equate?

I have several email accounts. Here at home, all my web communication transmits via Verizon FIOS, which provides web servers.

When I'm at work or at the public library, I log onto the web and into my email accounts (All of them!) via the servers at those locations.  Logging on at work requires nothing on my part; the logging on just happens.  At the public library, via the "Accept" button that appears on my iPad's screen, I have to grant permission every time to log onto the public library's server.

Hillary is apologizing all over the place for having a personal email account.  Is that the same thing as a private server?

And is the Secretary of State really allowed to have a private server to use for official government business?

I don't personally know anyone who has his own private server sitting in corner. Do you?

The Coming FCC Regulations

As I understand the matter, these regulations will take effect on February 26, 2015. According to Hot Air, these regulations will result in new taxes, a slower Internet, and fewer choices.

From the above link:

First, President Obama’s plan marks a monumental shift toward government control of the Internet. It gives the FCC the power to micromanage virtually every aspect of how the Internet works. It’s an overreach that will let a Washington bureaucracy, and not the American people, decide the future of the online world. It’s no wonder that net neutrality proponents are already bragging that it will turn the FCC into the “Department of the Internet.” For that reason, if you like dealing with the IRS, you are going to love the President’s plan.

Second, President Obama’s plan to regulate the Internet will increase consumers’ monthly broadband bills. The plan explicitly opens the door to billions of dollars in new taxes on broadband. Indeed, states have already begun discussions on how they will spend the extra money. These new taxes will mean higher prices for consumers and more hidden fees that they have to pay.

Third, President Obama’s plan to regulate the Internet will mean slower broadband for American consumers. The plan contains a host of new regulations that will reduce investment in broadband networks. That means slower Internet speeds. It also means that many rural Americans will have to wait longer for access to quality broadband.

Fourth, President Obama’s plan to regulate the Internet will hurt competition and innovation and move us toward a broadband monopoly. The plan saddles small, independent businesses and entrepreneurs with heavy-handed regulations that will push them out of the market. As a result, Americans will have fewer broadband choices. This is no accident. Title II was designed to regulate a monopoly. If we impose that model on a vibrant broadband marketplace, a highly regulated monopoly is what we’ll get. We shouldn’t bring Ma Bell back to life in this dynamic, digital age.

Fifth, President Obama’s plan to regulate the Internet is an unlawful power grab. Courts have twice thrown out the FCC’s attempts at Internet regulation. There’s no reason to think that the third time will be the charm. Even a cursory look at the plan reveals glaring legal flaws that are sure to mire the agency in the muck of litigation for a long, long time.

And sixth, the American people are being misled about what is in President Obama’s plan to regulate the Internet. The rollout earlier in the week was obviously intended to downplay the plan’s massive intrusion into the Internet economy. Beginning next week, I look forward to sharing with the public key aspects of what this plan will actually do.

[...]

...The commissioners can see the plan before they cast their votes. But the rest of us can’t. Lobbyists will likely be able to discover key details affecting their clients, and some details will leak out in the press. But the full text of the plan won’t be made public at all before the vote....

More information at Hot Air.

An Orwellian noose is tightening.

Is there any way to prevent this?

Another Amazing "Coincidence"

EPA Says It “Lost” Emails From Employee Who Refused To Be Interviewed By Oversight Committee

That dog eats a lot of homework, doesn't he? He gets around!

Of Course!

Who didn't see THIS coming?

People who have accounts on the enrollment website for President Barack Obama's signature health care law are being told to change their passwords following an administration-wide review of the government's vulnerability to the confounding Heartbleed Internet security flaw.

The NSA And The Heartbleed Bug

Are any of us surprised to learn that this might have been the case?

From the article "NSA Exploited Heartbleed Bug for Years, Exposing Consumers":

The U.S. National Security Agency knew for at least two years about a flaw in the way that many websites send sensitive information, now dubbed the Heartbleed bug, and regularly used it to gather critical intelligence, two people familiar with the matter said.

The agency’s reported decision to keep the bug secret in pursuit of national security interests threatens to renew the rancorous debate over the role of the government’s top computer experts. The NSA, after declining to comment on the report, subsequently denied that it was aware of Heartbleed until the vulnerability was made public by a private security report earlier this month.

[...]

Heartbleed appears to be one of the biggest flaws in the Internet’s history, affecting the basic security of as many as two-thirds of the world’s websites. Its discovery and the creation of a fix by researchers five days ago prompted consumers to change their passwords, the Canadian government to suspend electronic tax filing, and computer companies including Cisco Systems Inc. and Juniper Networks Inc. to provide patches for their systems.

Putting the Heartbleed bug in its arsenal, the NSA was able to obtain passwords and other basic data that are the building blocks of the sophisticated hacking operations at the core of its mission, but at a cost. Millions of ordinary users were left vulnerable to attack from other nations’ intelligence arms and criminal hackers....

Read the entire article HERE.  The NSA has denied any malfeasance. Of course.

BTW, my Always On Watch account at AOL has been hacked! AOL was not supposed to have been affected by Heartbleed, so I didn't change my AOW password when I changed all my other passwords on Thursday evening. I've now changed my AOL password.

Feds tell Web firms to turn over user account passwords

From CNET:

The U.S. government has demanded that major Internet companies divulge users' stored passwords, according to two industry sources familiar with these orders, which represent an escalation in surveillance techniques that has not previously been disclosed. 

If the government is able to determine a person's password, which is typically stored in encrypted form, the credential could be used to log in to an account to peruse confidential correspondence or even impersonate the user. Obtaining it also would aid in deciphering encrypted devices in situations where passwords are reused. 

"I've certainly seen them ask for passwords," said one Internet industry source who spoke on condition of anonymity. "We push back." 

A second person who has worked at a large Silicon Valley company confirmed that it received legal requests from the federal government for stored passwords. Companies "really heavily scrutinize" these requests, the person said. "There's a lot of 'over my dead body.'" 

Some of the government orders demand not only a user's password but also the encryption algorithm and the so-called salt, according to a person familiar with the requests. A salt is a random string of letters or numbers used to make it more difficult to reverse the encryption process and determine the original password. Other orders demand the secret question codes often associated with user accounts.

Digital Censorship At Amazon

Surreal, but not totally unexpected (hat tip to Bloviating Zeppelin):

Amazon Secretly Removes “1984” From the Kindle

Thousands of people last week discovered that Amazon had quietly removed electronic copies of George Orwell's 1984 from their Kindle e-book readers. In the process, Amazon revealed how easy censorship will be in the Kindle age.

In this case, the mass e-book removals were motivated by copyright . A company called MobileReference, who did not own the copyrights to the books 1984 and Animal Farm, uploaded both books to the Kindle store and started selling them. When the rights owner heard about this, they contacted Amazon and asked that the e-books be removed. And Amazon decided to erase them not just from the store, but from all the Kindles where they'd been downloaded. Amazon operators used the Kindle wireless network, called WhisperNet, to quietly delete the books from people's devices and refund them the money they'd paid.

[...]

Regardless of whether you believe Amazon's promise to leave your Kindle alone, the company has tipped its hand and shown us the dark side of a culture where books are only available in electronic form. If the WhisperNet service from Kindle allows the company to delete books silently from your device, what other information might they have access to? Can the company monitor what you're reading and when - and then hand that over to law enforcement? Can it replace a book file with a different file whose content is changed?

Perhaps more than anything else, this mass deletion of 1984 has made it clear that collecting e-books is going to require some technical know-how. No e-book is truly yours unless you can get it off your Kindle and onto your computer - hopefully a computer that isn't connected to the internet

Forewarned is forearmed.

Remember The Internet Kill Switch?

Something to keep in mind right now.

The kill switch was implemented by executive order almost a year ago:

...The Executive Order appeared in the Federal Register and there were 30 days for comment. There was little if any concern, and we bloggers were simply tin foil hat folks.

[...]

...The wording for the executive order is of course lengthy and uses politician language, but the part worth pointing out is in section 5.2.It is in this section that the order states that Homeland Security will be able to monitor and control all non-military forms of communications in times of extreme measures, which is essentially giving the White House the on/off switch to the internet, according to some critics....

Orwellian times, folks.

Google And Easter

From the Daily Caller:

Google honors Cesar Chavez on Easter

On Easter Sunday, Google is honoring the birthday of the late labor organizer Cesar Chavez by placing a Chavez portrait within the middle “o” of the Google logo that appears on the homepage of the popular search engine.

While Google frequently decorates its logo to celebrate various holidays and special events, it is unclear why the company chose specifically to honor Chavez’s birthday, instead of Easter Sunday.

Chavez co-founded the organization now known as the United Farm Workers union (UFW). He became an iconic figure in the labor movement, with his stature only increasing since his death in 1993.

President Barack Obama released a statement in 2011 proclaiming March 31 “Cesar Chavez Day,” declaring, “I call upon all Americans to observe this day with appropriate service, community, and educational programs to honor Cesar Chavez’s enduring legacy.”

Google CEO Eric Schmidt was an informal adviser to both of President Obama’s presidential campaigns, a member of the Obama White House transition team in 2009 and a onetime prospect for an Obama Cabinet post during the president’s second term....

For the record, Google has been lacking any recognition of Easter for several years now.

Meanwhile, Over At Jihad Watch

Major problems, says Robert Spencer:

I really don't have all that much to report, but I wanted to let you know I'm working on it. The situation is very much the same: the comments feature is still not working, it is still very difficult to post articles at all, and other features of the site are non-functional..

Several tech experts are working on the problem. Some malicious code has been found, which makes it likely that the site was hacked, although this hacking was not a conventional one: no eradication of the main page and its replacement by a taunting message, as is the usual practice. In fact, the malicious code is apparently (if I understand the explanation correctly, which is chancy at best, since I'm no techie) slow-acting, unfolding over time. We are looking into how it got there, and who planted it.

In any case, all I can say now is that we're working on it and will have the site fully operational as soon as possible. This kind of action just shows yet again how desperately insecure and thuggish the enemies of freedom are -- they can't refute us, so they try to shut us down. And how many Leftist and Islamic supremacist sites do you ever hear about getting hacked?

Finally, thank you all very much for your many, many emails of concern and support.
Posted by Robert on February 14, 2013 8:39 AM

These problems have been ongoing for days now.

Surveillance Capabilities

Our Orwellian world:

Blogger Comments Down?

I keep getting an error message when trying to comment at any Blogspot site.

YouTube Problem?

Anyone else here having trouble getting YouTube to allow embedding?

Google Search Addition?

I just noticed something while doing a Google search via Mozilla Firefox.

In the left sidebar, I see "Location." Under that label, I see the first word of my street name, followed by my state. Just below those elements, I read "auto-detected."

Maybe I've been asleep or something, but I don't recall seeing those items in my Google-Firefox sidebar before.

Your Weekend Funny

Been there, done that:

Data Mining

Using the web comes at a cost additional to access fees:


Please read this article, as well as the embedded links, in the current edition of Time Magazine for more information.

Another interesting aspect to virtual life: Colleges' admissions departments scrutinize Facebook pages. I'm guessing that colleges' admissions departments check out other social networks, too, including blogs and Twitter.

Yet another hassle in the virtual world: the hacking of accounts. Recently, one of my homeschool students had his Facebook account hacked. As a result, he was locked out of his own account and had to watch helplessly as inappropriate material was posted in his name on his friends' Facebook walls,

I've also known friends how had their email accounts hacked with the result that everyone in the hacked account's address book received waves and waves of spam, which appeared to come from a trusted friend.

Remember the warning from Hill Street Blues as you surf the web, an arena with diminishing privacy and diminishing security:

Computer Woes

Why I'm not around much here at IBA....

I can't begin to tell you all the troubles I've been having the past few weeks! I actually dread turning on either of my computers and logging onto the Internet.

I have uninstalled and reinstalled various programs and have run various utilities, sometimes with improvement and sometimes to no avail.

The situation is maddening!

Read the rest HERE.

I'm Having Computer Issues

I have limited access to the web right now.

That limited access also includes checking my emails.

Back soon.

I hope.