Hasta La Gadget!

You can find all kinds of things on eBay. It’s not uncommon for rare items to be sold through the online marketplace, items with a significant amount of history attached to them, both good and bad. A device that was part of the Nazi encryption equipment has been sold through eBay for $15, it was purchased by the National Museum of Computing.

This military-issue Lorenz teleprinter is extremely rare. For more than eight decades it has been collecting dust in the garden shed of a woman in Essex, England, who finally decided to sell what she thought to be a “telegram machine” on eBay.

Volunteers from the UK’s National Museum of Computing came across the eBay listing while browsing the marketplace. Members of the staff were then dispatched to check the machine at the woman’s house. She was then offered the equivalent of $15 for the machine, which she accepted.

The museum now has this crucial component along wth the Lorenz SZ42 cipher machine which is on loan from the Norwegian Armed Forces. It’s now searching for the final parts needed to restore this encryption machine to working order. Staff is calling on people across the United States to help them search for these missing parts, particularly the drive motor, which they say looks like a small rugby ball with spindles at each end.

Part Of Nazi Encryption Equipment Sold On eBay For $15 , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

Twitter has had more than its fair share of ups and downs over the past few years. It has had some bad press as well, and it certainly won’t gain good press when the most followed account on Twitter gets hacked. The account belongs to pop superstar Katy Perry who sits at the very top of Twitter’s user base with more than 89 million followers.

Naturally, when an account like Katy Perry’s gets hacked, it doesn’t take too long to notice that something is amiss. Whoever hacked her account was able to fire off some racist and vulgar tweets before Twitter took action by cleaning up the timeline and blocking the hackers from accessing the account.

It’s not exactly clear right now what happened here. Just that vulgar and racist tweets were sent out in quick succession. It was immediately clear that the account had been compromised since Katy Perry or the people who run their social media don’t send out such tweets.

Since this doesn’t appear to have happened due to a vulnerability in Twitter, it’s possible that the account could have been compromised through a directed attack. Two-factor authentication may not have been enabled prior to the hack. Twitter, or Katy Perry’s team for that matter, hasn’t confirmed how the hack came to be.

It appears Katy Perry’s Twitter — with her more than 89 million followers — has been hacked… pic.twitter.com/VmTVKJYGqj

— Ryan Parker (@TheRyanParker) May 31, 2016

Most Followed Account On Twitter Hacked , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

 Is the world ready for another smartphone? How about one that will cost $14,000 for its most basic model? Today, Sirin Labs — a startup put together by a team of founders out of Israel — used an event in London to unveil the Solarin, a privacy-first device “aimed at the international businessperson who carries a lot of sensitive information but doesn’t want to… Read More

Every six minutes in America, a baby is placed in foster care, away from the care of her parents. More than 415,000 children in the U.S. are in foster care today. Thirty percent of children entering the foster care system are babies and toddlers, and they are also the most likely to experience abuse and neglect.

These young children enter care when rapid brain development makes them vulnerable to adverse experiences that can undermine their positive growth. Strong, nurturing relationships are the essential ingredient to keeping their development on track. Yet, unmoored from their families, the plan for their care often focuses simply on safety rather than healing. As National Foster Care Month comes to a close, now is a good time to consider the role foster care can play in ensuring that children thrive.

Recently, I wrote about the need for a 21st Century Child Well-Being System that ideally would prevent abuse, neglect, and separation from family. Without such a system, we know that prevention becomes much more difficult. We should consider 1) babies’ experiences when placement in foster care is needed and 2) how we can create the 21st Century Child Welfare System called for by the Commission to Eliminate Child Abuse and Neglect Fatalities. ZERO TO THREE devotes both thought and action to applying what we know from the science to changes that can promote babies’ well-being. As a nation, we can benefit from learning more about the unique role of communities and foster parents in creating better futures for babies and families, changing the child welfare system in the process.

Contrary to what many people believe, babies are not immune to environmental and social stress and instability. In fact, babies’ brains make more than 700 new neural connections every second, and the basic cognitive and emotional architectures are formed and influenced through their daily interactions with caregivers. When babies are in loving, warm and nurturing environments, they are more likely to thrive and develop stronger connections in the parts of the brain associated with learning, decision-making, curiosity and emotional health – putting them on a path toward a healthy and productive adolescence and adulthood. On the other hand, when babies experience neglect or maltreatment, they are at much greater risk for emotional, social and cognitive damage — issues that become harder and more costly to influence down the road.

Foster care often conjures up images of children adrift in a system without a family. But in reality, caring foster parents can be a rock of stability for children while families find their footing. Many foster children thrive in their foster families and through their foster experiences. Making this a reality for all children in the system — especially the most vulnerable — however, requires a systemic change, starting with collaboration and coordination across the multitude of state organizations and agencies whose mission is to help these populations. Children and families benefit when decision-making and oversight bodies align their systems, streamline channels of delivery and increase communications.

One solution for reform is the Safe Babies Court Teams Project, a proven and holistic approach at work right now in 15 local communities in eight states around the country. Safe Babies Court Teams are led by judges and grounded in the science of early development, bringing the families whose babies are placed in foster care together with child welfare staff, legal representatives, foster parents, and community service providers. Through community-wide collaboration, infants and toddlers and their families receive focused attention that recognizes individual strengths and challenges. Interventions are offered to meet the specific needs of each child and parent. Unlike typical foster care cases where formal hearings occur every three to six months, these families and the teams of professionals hold hearings and/or family team meetings at least once a month. The goal is to support the close, nurturing relationships vital to the child’s positive early development while bolstering the family’s ability to support that development and keep the baby safe and healthy. It gives the judge the best, most complete information possible on which to ultimately make a decision about a child’s future.

The teams accomplish a larger mission as well — promoting systemic change in the way community stakeholders work together on behalf of children and families surrounded by risk. They identify gaps in services and strategies for filling them. Evaluations have found that 97 percent of babies and families in the Court Teams have their service needs met. In fact, research shows that 99.05 percent of those in Safe Babies Court Teams were protected from further maltreatment.

When a lawsuit was filed on behalf of children in Mississippi’s foster care system, it was revealed that one young Hattiesburg child entered care in 2003 at 2 ½ years old. In 16 days, she was moved three times, ending up in a shelter where she remained for three months. At the shelter she received her first medical exam, reacting in terror when the doctor tried to evaluate her for sexual abuse. Changes have since been made, and when infants and toddlers enter foster care in Hattiesburg, they are now incorporated into the Forrest County Safe Babies Court Team. They receive a developmental screening. They find medical homes with a developmental pediatrician. And each child is more likely to be placed in one foster home and remain there throughout his foster care experience.

Foster parents are a key link in the Court Team, which supports them in their role as a solid rock for babies and sometimes for the birth parents themselves. Consider the experience of a young mom in Iowa; she recounts the incredible anguish of holding her baby close with Child Protective Services knocking on the door for a removal she knew was coming. In the Polk County Safe Babies Court Team, her baby found nurturing care in the home of a remarkable foster family. The foster family provided support for the young mother, becoming mentors and parenting models. While that was unusual in the foster care world, it’s common in Court Teams.

For the foster care system, this structure is invaluable for families and children. Many states have difficulty protecting their youngest victims of abuse and neglect. And many families are left without the resources to support their individual needs ranging from economic security to mental health to housing. That is why Safe Babies Court Teams provide the structure needed to address problems and maintain the necessary support and resources designed to help families across all channels. There is no finger-pointing; the multidisciplinary team uses its experiences with families to better understand how the child welfare system works and to advocate for reforms when barriers to helping families are identified. One Florida mom summed it up in a letter to the court: “Keep those amazing people that work so hard to bring families back together and each and every person that is involved is necessary because they all had a role in helping us to complete our tasks.”

Safe Babies Court Teams have worked with 975 infants and toddlers and more than 1,100 parents. Each child benefits from child-focused services to address medical problems and developmental delays, quality early learning experiences, and frequent family time. With a spotlight on foster care this month, I hope more jurisdictions will explore the pragmatic and proven approach Safe Babies Court Teams can bring to communities that struggle to ensure the systems in place to work with parents and protect babies are as reliable and successful as possible.

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[Note: Continually thinking about how disastrous the last seven years have been, I did some imagining and research on what the world would be like if Al Gore had become president in 2001. Such a process is really about how important it is to elect the right president. I asked friends and acquaintances for their ideas, I read books by and about Gore, and I watched again his September 2000 interview with Oprah Winfrey, where I learned about his favorite book and movie and his art teacher. Here are some of my findings.]

The Presidency of Al Gore, 2001-2009

On January 20, 2001, Al Gore, the candidate who won the most votes, becomes the 43rd president of the United States.

President Gore follows up on the many urgent warnings from the intelligence agencies that Osama Bin Laden is determined to strike in the United States. The 9/11 planners are caught, and their plots are aborted.

In Afghanistan, the Taliban warns that it will destroy the two giant 1,500-year-old statues of the Buddha in the Bamiyan Valley. Much of the world sees these serene figures as symbols of wisdom beyond time, but they offend conservative Muslims. Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke talks with the Pakistani foreign minister, who reminds him that Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries in the world and suggests that if aid to the poor there is increased, the Buddhas will be spared. Gore calls the American Buddhist actor Richard Gere, who immediately raises $50 million for the Afghani poor, and the Gore administration promises $5 billion in direct aid over the next five years. The Taliban agrees to preserve the statues.

Gore’s favorite film, Local Hero, the Scots eco-comedy, becomes a best-selling DVD. The film is about how ancient values of subsistence, closeness to nature, and community defeat the rapacious forces of the oil industry. People like quoting the old Scot who puts the kibosh on the oilmen: “The business left, but the beach is still here.”

Republicans are squawking that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein is a threat to the safety of the country, that he has weapons of mass destruction. Gore asks the United Nations to send its weapons inspectors back into Iraq, and after six months of searching, they find none. Saddam is in what Eliot Weinberger calls “the ‘autumn of the patriarch’ mode: holed up in his palaces writing his trashy novels, and oblivious to the details of government.” Gore brokers a deal in which Saddam’s novels are translated into English and published and he agrees to slowly loosen up some of the restrictions on the Kurds and Shias and bring them into the government.

In 1998, as vice president, Gore proposed a NASA satellite, Triana, to provide, from a distance of 930,000 miles, a continuous view of the sunlit side of the earth. Triana would measure global warming by measuring how much sunlight is reflected and emitted from the earth and would monitor weather systems. Triana is built and launched in February 2003. In late 2004, it sends back images of the beginnings of a great tsunami that might have killed hundreds of thousands if it had gone undetected in its early stages. But Triana’s continual data feed allows people to be warned to flee to higher ground, and only a few dozen perish.

The president’s favorite book, Stendahl’s The Red and the Black, becomes a bestseller. People like quoting the book’s young hero, Julien Sorel: “So there, this is what these rich people are like. First they humiliate you, then they think they can make it up to you by monkey business!”

Recognizing that nothing good can come from the continuing Israeli-Palestinian standoff, Gore sends Holbrooke and Vice President Joe Lieberman to broker a peace. In May the two sides sign a peace accord, in which Israel agrees to go back to the 1967 boundaries, the Palestinians recognize Israel’s right to exist, and both sides renounce violence. The Republic of Palestine is founded in 2002.

President Gore has a nightmare: He becomes president on January 20, 2001, but the next day he is incapacitated, and Lieberman becomes president. In the spirit of the close election, Lieberman appoints George W. Bush as vice president on January 22. The next day Lieberman is incapacitated, and Bush becomes president and appoints Dick Cheney his vice president. The Bush-Cheney presidency starts January 23, not January 20. Immediately Bush begins abrogating treaties of long standing that kept the world at peace. Terrorists destroy the World Trade Center on September 14, 2001. Bush enacts draconian laws that make America a police state. People constantly refer to “9/14” as the day that changed everything. President Gore wakes up in his bed in the White House in a cold sweat, the dream disappearing from his conscious mind but the numbers 9 and 14 puzzling and haunting him at odd moments for the rest of his days.

As vice president, Gore signed the Kyoto Accord on Climate Change in 1998, but there were not enough votes to ratify it in the Congress, and there still are not. President Gore, however, is able to implement most elements of the treaty by executive order. He begins a process of education about global warming and publishes a book on the subject. He sponsors twenty-four hours of concerts with rock and pop stars, Live Earth, on every continent, and broadcast on television, radio, and the Web to raise awareness about climate change and global warming. A third of the planet’s population watches and hears the concerts and has a pretty good time in the process. Soon every nation has ratified Kyoto, and the climate crisis begins to ebb. The temperatures of the oceans stop rising, and thus the severity of hurricanes stops increasing.

Early in 2001, acting on urgent warnings from the Army Corps of Engineers and FEMA, the president directs that the New Orleans levees be reinforced and where necessary rebuilt, and the nearby wetlands protected and expanded. When hurricane Katrina strikes in August 2005, the wetlands absorb much of the flooding, the reinforced levees hold, and New Orleans suffers only minor damage.

People start reading Gore’s favorite philosophers, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edmund Husserl, and Reinhold Niebuhr. They quote passages like this from Merleau: “We struggle with dream figures and our blows fall on living faces.” And this from Niebuhr: “The sin of man arises from his effort to establish his own security; and the sin of the false prophet lies in the effort to include this false security within the ultimate security of faith. The false security to which all men are tempted is the security of power. The primary insecurity of human life arises from its weakness and finiteness.”

The United States and the nations of the former Soviet Union agree to destroy the nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons built up during the Cold War. The president halts and junks the Star Wars strategic defense initiative boondoggle. Every nation signs a treaty to begin eliminating their weapons of mass destruction. The military-industrial complex must now make a transition. Converting the country, and the world, to alternative energy sources other than fossil fuel and nuclear becomes a new growth industry.

The special relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom continues, as does the close relationship between the progressive governments of Tony Blair and Al Gore, begun under Bill Clinton. As planned, Blair carries through the New Labour vision of the New Jerusalem, with higher quality of life and better public services, similar to those in France. In 2008, he is re-elected for an unprecedented fourth term.

President Clinton had twice shaken hands with Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, and now President Gore sends Holbrooke to Caracas to draft a treaty of cooperation with Chávez. Gore arrives in the Venezuelan capital, where he and Chavez sign the treaty. Later, they talk about their mutual love of Victor Hugo’s great novel of the dispossessed, Les Misérables. Chávez tells Gore that he was named for its author. They quote from memory lines from the great book. Gore remembers this, about Jean Valjean: “Then he asked himself if it was not a serious thing that he, a workman, could not have found work and that he, an industrious man, should have been without bread.” Chávez responds with what Jean Valjean’s savior, the Bishop of Digne, says: “Jean Valjean, my brother, you belong no longer to evil, but to good. It is your soul I am buying for you.” Gore replies with this about the inspector who hunts Valjean: “Javert was always in character, without a wrinkle in his duty or his uniform, methodical with villains, rigid with his coat buttons.” Chávez says this about Fantine: “What is this story of Fantine about? It is about society buying a slave. From whom? From misery. From hunger, from cold, fron loneliness, from desertion, from privation. Melancholy barter. A soul for a piece of bread.”

Gore and Howard Dean, his Health and Human Services Secretary, begin having regular discussions with Canada’s Prime Minister, Jean Chrétien, about that country’s single-payer health care system. Gore plans to introduce universal health care in the United States step by step. His health care bill, narrowly passed in 2001, covers all those age eighteen and under by 2004, and everyone else by 2007.

The president invites to the White House the person who had the most influence on him, his high school art teacher. The Smithsonian exhibits some of Gore’s paintings.

By a few votes in each house, Congress passes Gore’s tax cuts for middle- and lower-income people. But also by a few votes in each house, the Congress passes tax cuts for the rich and super-rich, which Gore vetoes. The rich and super-rich continue paying their same rate. Soon, the gap between rich and poor, which has been increasing since the Reagan administration began in 1981, begins decreasing.

The undamming of rivers, begun seriously under Clinton/Gore, continues, and the ancient vibrant river life of salmon, shad, freshwater dolphin, and manatee returns.

U.S. Army Specialist Casey Sheehan becomes a Chaplain’s Assistant. In 2005, his tour of duty up, he returns to California to visit his mother, Cindy.

A bird alights on a Bamiyan Buddha.

The polar bears are swimming north and flourishing.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.