Derren Brown's Blog, page 23

Obama dead, according to Fox News

Hackers have taken over a Twitter account belonging to US broadcaster Fox News and declared President Obama dead. The @foxnewspolitics feed stated: "BREAKING NEWS: @BarackObama assassinated, 2 gunshot wounds have proved too much."

More than two hours after the malicious postings appeared, they had still not been removed.

A group or individual, calling themselves The Script Kiddies appeared to claim responsibility. Fox News said it was investigating the posts. The bizarre messages began appearing around 07.00 BST on July 4.

The first read: "Just regained full access to our Twitter and email. Happy 4th."  The next posting stated: "@BarackObama has just passed. The President is dead."

Fox News Politics is one of the Twitter accounts associated with the industry-leading cable news network.Its Twitter account carries the "verified" tick icon, indicating that the feed belongs to the organisation it claims to be.

In a statement, Jeff Misenti, vice president and general manager of Fox News Digital said: "We will be requesting a detailed investigation from Twitter about how this occurred, and measures to prevent future unauthorized access into FoxNews.com accounts."

Full Story at BBC News

Master forgery: '17th century work exposed as a fake'

It was believed that The Procuress, at the The Courtauld Institute of Art in London, was a 17th century anonymous copy of a 1620s brothel scene by Dutch master Dirck van Baburen.

After tests for a BBC One show, Fake of Fortune?, it is now accepted that the work is a forgery by Han van Meegeren, a Dutch forger who died in 1947.

As recently as 2009, the respected Art Newspaper revealed that curators at the Courtauld and the National Gallery (NG) believed the painting had "every appearance of being of 17th-century origin", as the latter put it.

Now, scientific tests commissioned for the BBC programme detected a synthetic resin similar to Bakelite mixed into the paints to mimic age.

Full story at The Telegraph

 

Scientist-Politician-Atheist Offers Own Money For Origin of Life Prize

A millionaire scientist who once ran as a Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate has just launched a $50,000 prize to promote research on the origin of life. Yes, he has an ulterior motive: He hopes that researchers working on the question will eventually prove that life's origins can be fully explained by physical and chemical processes, without invoking a creator.

Harry Lonsdale is a chemist in Bend, Oregon, who made a fortune when he sold his drug development and research company to Pfizer more than 25 years ago. Since then, he has leveraged his wealth for social, civic, and political causes, including a series of unsuccessful bids to become a U.S. senator. The 79-year-old Lonsdale is an avowed atheist who has advocated for gay rights, campaign finance reform, and environmental protections. Now, he's on a mission to accelerate the quest to understand how life originated. Over the past 2 weeks, Lonsdale has taken out ads in Science, Nature, and Chemical and Engineering News announcing an Origin of Life Research Award that includes $50,000 for the best proposal to study the origin of life and up to $2 million in potential funding to carry out the work.

Full story at Richard Dawkins

 

3 high school pupils die, Principal's hypnotism blamed

ABC NEWS claims that three Florida high school students are dead after being hypnotized by their school principal in Sarasota County, one in a car accident and two by suicide.

Principal George Kenney is believed to have hypnotized up to 75 people, including students, members of the school staff and their children. Sarasota County School District officials repeatedly warned Kenney to stop the practice, which the principal insists was only done in the interest of helping students to be motivated and focused on school work and sports.

Click here to watch the ABC News report (contains pre-roll advert)

Russian court bans Scientology literature as 'extremist'

A court in a Moscow suburb has banned works by the founder of the Church of Scientology, officials said Thursday.

The Shchyolkovo court ruled that "What is Scientology?" and other books by L. Ron Hubbard "contain calls for extremist activities," the Prosecutor General's office said in a statement.

It said that once the court decision comes into force, scientology books will be put on the federal list of extremist materials banned for release throughout Russia. The court made the ruling following a request by local prosecutors.

A court in the Siberian city of Surgut had earlier made a similar decision, but then overturned it. Scientology officials said they would protest the decision.

"There have been many legal violations, the case is unfounded and the trial was hasty," the group's attorney Sergei Korzikov told The Associated Press. "We could not defend our legal interests."

Full story at the Washington Post

 

Take part in one of Derren's TV shows. Status update.

For those of you who have been having trouble getting through might want to try again today. We've had a thousand questions about the application – the answers are below.

But if you've had trouble we so far do keep trying as the initial heavy load seems to have now died down and the servers are coping with traffic levels.

QUESTIONS:

I'm not 18 until (insert date) can I still apply?

You can apply and Objective will consider your proposal. If you aren't 18 on the date mentioned in the application then the answer is "unfortunately no".

I'm not from the UK can I still apply?

UK applicant only please. To find out where the UK is try this: http://bit.ly/1Tq9k5

Do I have to send the application back to the email I got it from?

Yes. The forms need to be sent to Objective, if you email them to us we can't forward them on, they need to come from YOUR email address.

Do I put a specific title in the subject line?

Anything will do but to make it easier please put "Completed Application".

I'm still getting a delivery failure notice, what do I do?

Keep trying each day. There's PLENTY of time to get your forms in, it's not a first come first served basis and we will be taking application forms for the rest of this week and in to next week as well.

I Never got a form, can I still apply?

Yes and for several days to come too.

How do I sign a digital format?

You can print it out and sign it, take a photo on your phone and email it to yourself and include it with the form. Alternatively take a picture of your signature and copy and paste that in to the document.

Is there any way to check if my form has been received?

Unfortunately no, thousands of people have applied and we can't look through every request we get. Sorry.

I sent in my application and got a form sent back, do you have my application?

Once we have your email that's the email we need you to send the form back with. If you apply via one email and reply via another we may not accept your form. Please only use one email address and note that once we have your email stored we can then accept a form off you.

Is this a silly trick by Derren to get us all worked up after he said there would be no questions answered?

No this is a GENUINE REQUEST. We will not be answering any questions about the show.

When is the show and what's it about?

See the answer to the last question.

I was born on a leap year and my doctor said to stay away from goateed men and I have to wash my hamster that morning – should I still apply?

No.

TV Show – What? How do I apply?

Click here.

Thank you all for your patience.

P.

Take part in my new series

Right. I'm not going to answer any questions on this I'm afraid, and neither can anyone else. For all the usual reasons. But if you're in the UK and over 18 and would like to apply to take part in my new projects, please email the address below. Your email will NOT be read, so no need to say anything: it will automatically bounce back with a big questionnaire for you to fill in and send back.

Here's the address:

derrenbrown@objectiveproductions.com

Don't do this unless you genuinely want to take part. Your decision.

X

UPDATE – Application requests will be kept open for several days – if you cant get through now keep trying over the next few days. If it's not working when you try wait a few hours before you try again, be careful not to try repeatedly in case your email program thinks you have spam. Thanks for being patient. WEB TEAM

'Anonymous' hackers declare war on Orlando

The hacker group Anonymous on Monday declared war against the city of Orlando, Florida, over the arrest of people handing out food to homeless people, according to a report in The Washington Post.

In a press release, the group announced the creation of "Operation Orlando" over the city's treatment of the Food Not Bombs group.

The Orlando Sentinel reported that what started as a spat over distributing food without a permit in a park had escalated, with Mayor Buddy Dyer describing the activists charged with the misdemeanor offense as "food terrorists."

This prompted one member, Ben Markeson, to threaten to file a defamation suit, the Sentinel reported. The Anonymous press release said the city had "ignored our warnings, and our generous offer of a cease fire."

Full Story at MSNBC

Westminster Council in the UK have also recently published a by-law that covers the same issue. Are they next?

Study raises questions on how much info the brain can store throughout life

A little practice goes a long way, according to researchers at McMaster University, who have found the effects of practice on the brain have remarkable staying power.

The study, published this month in the journal Psychological Science, found that when participants were shown visual patterns – faces, which are highly familiar objects, and abstract patterns, which are much less frequently encountered – they were able to retain very specific information about those patterns one to two years later.

We found that this type of learning, called perceptual learning, was very precise and long-lasting, says Zahra Hussain, lead author of the study who is a former McMaster graduate student in the Department of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour and now a Research Fellow at the University of Nottingham. These long-lasting effects arose out of relatively brief experience with the patterns about two hours, followed by nothing for several months, or years.

Over the course of two consecutive days, participants were asked to identify a specific face or pattern from a larger group of images. The task was challenging because images were degradedfaces were cropped, for exampleand shown very briefly. Participants had difficulty identifying the correct images in the early stages, but accuracy rates steadily climbed with practice.

About one year later, a group of participants were called back and their performance on the task was re-measured, both with the same set of items theyd been exposed to earlier, and with a new set from the same class of images. Researchers found that when they showed participants the original images, accuracy rates were high. When they showed participants new images, accuracy rates plummeted, even though the new images closely resembled the learned ones, and they hadnt seen the original images for at least a year.

Full Story with details at McMaster Uni

US Navy bought fake Chinese microchips that could be remotely shut down

Last year, the U.S. Navy bought 59,000 microchips for use in everything from missiles to transponders and all of them turned out to be counterfeits from China. Wired reports the chips weren't only low-quality fakes, they had been made with a "back-door" and could have been remotely shut down at any time.

If left undiscovered the result could have rendered useless U.S. missiles and killed the signal from aircraft that tells everyone whether it's friend or foe. Apparently foreign chip makers are often better at making cheap microchips and U.S. defense contractors are loathe to pass up the better deal.

The problem remains with these "trojan-horse" circuits that can be built into the chip and are almost impossible to detect — especially without the original plans to compare them to.

The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency (IARPA) is now looking for ways to check the chips to make sure they haven't been hacked in the production process.

Full story at Business Insider