In a stunning release, the mysterious hacker organization "Anonymous" has published audio of an international coordination conference call between the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the British Scotland Yard, revealing officers' secret communications on investigations into the group's recent exploits.
The FBI and Scotland Yard have both said they're investigating how hackers obtained the conference call's audio. A document published online, presumably by a member of "Anonymous," reveals that the hacker or hackers were privy to law enforcement email communications, giving them access to the login information for the call.
During the call, which took place on Jan. 17, law enforcement agents discuss their investigations into a number of high profile hacks, and British officials divulge that they had delayed arresting two juveniles to prevent interference with an FBI probe.
Initially, American and British agents just joke around as they wait for colleagues to join the call. Then they discuss the particulars of one young hacker who's allegedly a "wannabe," and a "pain in the bum."
A Scotland Yard agent later adds that they've been "speaking with the Irish" and "looking to share some intelligence with them" about another hacker.
The FBI reportedly said that the audio was obtained "illegally," but it was still available on YouTube by Friday afternoon.
Shortly after the FBI took MegaUpload.com offline for allegedly facilitating copyright infringement, hackers claiming "Anonymous" affiliation took credit for crashing the U.S. Department of Justice website on Jan. 19.
Immediately thereafter, they also took credit for crashing the websites of Universal Music Group, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), saying their attacks were a response to those groups' support for recent anti-piracy legislation that was defeated by the first-ever mass online work stoppage protest.
They also took credit this month for hacking the Twitter account of Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), then posting messages correcting his grammar and highlighting his support for the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA).
It's not clear if hackers obtained access to the Justice Department's secure servers ahead of their distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, which could explain how they learned of the conference call.
The video below was published to YouTube on Friday, Feb. 3, 2012.
Former President Donald Trump on Wednesday bizarrely said that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is not allowed to bring criminal charges against him.
Writing on his Truth Social platform, the former president posted yet another caps-heavy tirade against Bragg's investigation into his 2016 hush-money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels.
"The Rogue prosecutor, who is having a hard time with the Grand Jury, especially after the powerful testimony against him by Felon Cohen’s highly respected former lawyer, is attempting to build a case that has NEVER BEEN BROUGHT BEFORE AND ACTUALLY, CAN’T BE BROUGHT," Trump wrote.
In fact, charges were brought against former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards after prosecutors alleged that he used campaign donations to cover up an affair he was having while on the campaign trail.
Trump concluded his rant with an attack on Bragg's priorities as Manhattan DA.
"If he spent this time, effort, and money on fighting VIOLENT CRIME, which is destroying NYC, our once beautiful and safe Manhattan, which has become an absolute HELLHOLE, would be a much better place to live!" he fumed.
Bragg has not yet formally indicted Trump, despite Trump's claims over the weekend that he would be arrested on Tuesday of this week.
In the 19th century, Charles Darwin was one of the first to notice something interesting about domesticated animals: different species often developed similar changes when compared to their ancient wild ancestors.
But why would a host of seemingly unrelated features repeatedly occur together in different domesticated animals?
In a new paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, we argue that currently popular explanations aren’t quite right – and propose a new explanation focused on big changes in the way domesticated animals live. Along the way, our theory also offers insights into the unexpected story of how we humans domesticated ourselves.
Shared changes under domestication
The most commonly shared change is tamer behavior. All domesticated animals are calmer than their wild ancestors naturally were.
That’s probably not very surprising. Ancient humans would’ve preferred docile animals, and likely selected breeding stock for tameness.
But other common changes don’t seem at all useful to humans – or to the animals themselves. Like shorter faces, smaller teeth, more fragile skeletons, smaller brains, and different colors in skin, fur, and feathers.
But each change occurs in more than one domesticated species.
Wild self-domestication
Surprisingly, very similar changes sometimes also appear in wild animals, leading some scientists to think they “self-domesticated” in some way.
The bonobo (a great ape closely related to the chimpanzee) is one famous example of an animal that has undergone these changes without human intervention. Urban foxes are another.
Bonobos are a species who are believed to have ‘self-domesticated’. Shutterstock
Wild self-domestication is most common in isolated sub-populations, like on islands, and may overlap with a similar phenomenon known as the “island effect”.
Perhaps more surprisingly, modern humans also show features of domestication syndrome, when compared to our ancient ancestors. This suggests we also self-domesticated.
Some scientists argue these changes made us more sociable, helping us to develop complex languages and culture.
So a clearer understanding of domestication syndrome in animals might improve our knowledge of human evolution too.
What causes domestication syndrome?
In recent years, two main possible explanations for domestication syndrome have dominated scientific discussion.
The first suggests it was caused when ancient humans selected animals for tamer behavior, which somehow triggered all of the other traits too.
This idea is supported by a famous long-running Russian fox-breeding experiment which began in 1959, in which caged foxes were selected only for tameness but developed the other “unselected” features as well.
The second hypothesis complements this first one. It suggests selection for tameness causes the other features because they’re all linked by genes controlling “neural crest cells”. These cells, found in embryos, form many animal features – so changing them could cause several differences at once.
More than selection for tameness
However, our new research suggests these two ideas oversimplify and obscure the complex evolutionary effects at play.
For one thing, there are problems with the famous Russian fox experiment. As other authors have noted, the experiment didn’t begin by taming wild foxes, but used foxes from a farm in Canada. And these pre-farmed foxes already had features of domestication syndrome.
What’s more, the experimenters didn’t only select for tameness. They bred other foxes for aggression, but the aggressive foxes also developed domestication syndrome features.
And in a similar experiment conducted in the 1930s, caged rats developed the same common changes, including tamer behavior, despite no deliberate selection for tameness, or aggression.
So, it seems domestication syndrome might not be caused by humans selecting animals for tameness. Instead, it might be caused by unintended shared effects from the new domestic environment.
A new hypothesis for domestication syndrome
Crucially, it’s not just new forces of selection, such as a human preference for tameness, that matters. The removal of pre-existing selection is just as important, because that’s what naturally shaped the wild ancestors in the first place.
For example, domesticated animals are often protected from predators, so wild traits for avoiding them might be lost. Competition for mating partners is also often reduced, so wild reproductive features and behaviors could decline, or disappear.
Domesticated animals are also usually reliably fed. This might alter certain features, but would certainly change natural metabolism and growth.
Caged rats have also been seen to develop signs of domestication syndrome. Oxana Golubets / Unsplash
In effect, we argue there are multiple selective changes at work on domesticated animals, not just “selection for tameness”, and that shared shifts in evolutionary selection would often cause shared changes in features. Even across different species.
Our new hypothesis highlights four ways that selection shaping wild animals is often disrupted by domestication. These are:
less fighting between males
fewer males for females to choose between
more reliable food and fewer predators, and
elevated maternal stress, which initially reduces the health and survival of offspring.
Several of these might resemble “selection for tameness”, but using this one term to describe them all is misleadingly vague, and obscures other changes in selection.
So how did we domesticate ourselves?
Well, one current theory is that sociable “beta males” began cooperating to kill alpha bullies. This changed how competition worked among males, leading to fewer big and aggressive males.
But our hypothesis suggests other effects also played a role. For example, our early ancestors evolved the capacity for shared infant care. In our chimpanzee relatives today, sharing care of an infant would likely trigger extreme stress for the mother – but our ancestors adapted to this increased stress and gained an effective survival strategy.
Adapting to the increased maternal stress that accompanies separation from infants (either for shared care or domestication) may be one of the drivers of ‘domestication syndrome’. Shutterstock
More reliable food access due to group foraging and sharing, plus collective defense against predators, might also have made us more sociable, more cooperative, and more complex, while promoting other changes commonly seen in non-human domesticated animals.
Whatever the specific drivers in each species, recognizing multiple selective pathways better explains the domestication syndrome, and reaffirms the complexity of evolutionary effects shaping all life on Earth.
In the early Eighties, when “High Tech” was still written with quotation marks and the region was starting to become known as The Silicon Valley, tennis buddies Bob Medearis and Bill Biggerstaff took their idea for a new bank to a poker game in Pajaro Dunes. Their wives and children would be joining them at their Monterey Bay beachfront rentals the next day, but Friday night the two men gathered their close friends, made a big dinner and explained the plan to open a bank specifically for tech companies. They would call their customers “clients” and name their business after the region’s trendy...
