Obama To Israel: F@%k You!

Tonight President Barack Hussein Obama and the leaders of Europe have told the Mullahs of Iran:  Kill the Jews.  The P5+1 leaders have caved in to all of Iran's demands and will lift the sanctions.  (Although they claim that they will reinstate them again.)

Representatives of Iran and Western powers reached an interim deal on Iran’s controversial nuclear program early Sunday morning, after a weekend of intensive talks in Geneva.

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said, “Yes, we have a deal,” as he walked past reporters crowding the hotel lobby where marathon negotiations had taken place over the past five days. Asked if there was a deal, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said “Yes” and gave a thumbs up sign.

Diplomats refused to spell out details of the talks, but a senior Obama administration official said that the West had not conceded an Iranian right to produce nuclear fuel through uranium enrichment, a key sticking point in previous negotiations.

The official said the deal included an agreement that Iran would halt progress on its nuclear program, including a plutonium reactor at the Arak facility. The deal also calls on Iran to neutralize its 20-percent-enriched uranium stockpiles. Tehran has also agreed to intrusive inspections under the terms of the deal.

According to a Western diplomat quoted by Reuters, the deal would grant Iran access to $4.2 billion in foreign exchange.

In a statement Sunday morning, US President Barack Obama said the deal opened up a “real opportunity to achieve a peaceful settlement.”

“It won’t be easy,” he said, “and huge challenge remain ahead, but through strong and principled diplomacy, the United States will do our part” to deny Iran nuclear weapons. Obama acknowledged that the deal may be hard to stomach for some of Washington’s allies in the Middle East, saying, Israel and the Gulf countries, “have good reasons to be skeptical.”

The West has been seeking a six-month agreement to partially freeze Iran’s nuclear program while offering Iran incentives through limited sanctions relief. If the interim deal holds, the parties would negotiate final-stage deals to ensure Iran does not build nuclear weapons.

The agreement built on the momentum of the historic dialogue opened during September’s annual UN gathering, which included a 15-minute phone conversation between Obama and Iran’s new president, Hassan Rouhani, after three decades of US-Iranian estrangement.

“The Iranian people’s vote for moderation and constructive engagement, plus tireless efforts by negotiating teams are to open new horizons,” Rouhani said in a statement Sunday morning.

“Agreement in Geneva: first step makes world safer. More work now,” US Secretary of State John Kerry said in a comment tweeted by the State Department Sunday morning. The statement was retweeted by Rouhani’s account.

Kerry and his counterparts from Russia, Britain, France, China and Germany headed for Geneva Friday after diplomats said Zarif and EU representative Catherine Ashton had made significant progress.

A previous round of talks between Iran and the six world powers ended November 10 with no deal, even after Kerry, Lavrov, the foreign ministers of Britain, France and Germany and a Chinese deputy foreign minister flew in and attempted to bridge differences.

The United States and its negotiating partners had signaled they were ready to ease some sanctions in return for a first-step deal that starts to put limits on Iran’s nuclear program.

They wanted Iran to stop enriching to a level higher than its main stockpile and only a technical step away from weapons-grade uranium as part of such a deal. They also sought to limit overall enrichment, as well as a formulation that would reduce the proliferation danger from the Arak reactor, which, if completed, would produce enough plutonium for up to two weapons.

But they insist that the most severe penalties — on Tehran’s oil exports and banking sector — will remain until the two sides reach a comprehensive agreement to minimize Iran’s nuclear arms-making capacity.

No details on relief offered have been made public. And the US administration has not commented on reports from congressional officials that Obama’s team estimates Iran could get $6-10 billion in benefits over six months for rolling back its nuclear program.

Several US senators — both Democrat and Republican — have voiced displeasure with the parameters of the potential agreement, arguing that the US and its partners are offering too much for something short of a full freeze on uranium enrichment.

SOURCE

My sources tell me that Iran got everything they wanted.  The right to enrich uranium, their nuclear program intact, the relaxation of sanctions.  Israel on the other hand have been shafted up the ass.  Iran doesn't have a peaceful nuclear program.  They have made that clear over the last decade.

On September 30, 1938 then Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain disembarked a plane from Germany, waved a piece of paper and stated clearly:

We have achieved peace in our time.

Click here if the video fails to load.

A year later Europe erupted in war.  For Chamberlain also believed that this was the first step and he could negotiate a lasting peace.

History is repeating itself in spades.

We haven't become safer by this treaty, but it is only a matter of time before a Regional War will break out.  A war that will become a World War.

How Digital Detectives Deciphered Stuxnet, the Most Menacing Malware in History

By Findalis of Monkey in the Middle

This comes from a rather long article, but it is very insightful into the mystery that is Stuxnet.  It will take years to unravel the full story, but this is what has been discovered so far:

It was January 2010, and investigators with the International Atomic Energy Agency had just completed an inspection at the uranium enrichment plant outside Natanz in central Iran, when they realized that something was off within the cascade rooms where thousands of centrifuges were enriching uranium.

Natanz technicians in white lab coats, gloves and blue booties were scurrying in and out of the “clean” cascade rooms, hauling out unwieldy centrifuges one by one, each sheathed in shiny silver cylindrical casings.

Any time workers at the plant decommissioned damaged or otherwise unusable centrifuges, they were required to line them up for IAEA inspection to verify that no radioactive material was being smuggled out in the devices before they were removed. The technicians had been doing so now for more than a month.

Normally Iran replaced up to 10 percent of its centrifuges a year, due to material defects and other issues. With about 8,700 centrifuges installed at Natanz at the time, it would have been normal to decommission about 800 over the course of the year.

But when the IAEA later reviewed footage from surveillance cameras installed outside the cascade rooms to monitor Iran’s enrichment program, they were stunned as they counted the numbers. The workers had been replacing the units at an incredible rate — later estimates would indicate between 1,000 and 2,000 centrifuges were swapped out over a few months.

The question was, why?

It wasn't apparent to either the IAEA or the Iranians what was happening.  It took the Iranians a year to discover the culprit.

On June 17, 2010, Sergey Ulasen was in his office in Belarus sifting through e-mail when a report caught his eye. A computer belonging to a customer in Iran was caught in a reboot loop — shutting down and restarting repeatedly despite efforts by operators to take control of it. It appeared the machine was infected with a virus.

Ulasen heads an antivirus division of a small computer security firm in Minsk called VirusBlokAda. Once a specialized offshoot of computer science, computer security has grown into a multibillion-dollar industry over the last decade keeping pace with an explosion in sophisticated hack attacks and evolving viruses, Trojan horses and spyware programs.

The best security specialists, like Bruce Schneier, Dan Kaminsky and Charlie Miller are considered rock stars among their peers, and top companies like Symantec, McAfee and Kaspersky have become household names, protecting everything from grandmothers’ laptops to sensitive military networks.

VirusBlokAda, however, was no rock star nor a household name. It was an obscure company that even few in the security industry had heard of. But that would shortly change.

Ulasen’s research team got hold of the virus infecting their client’s computer and realized it was using a “zero-day” exploit to spread. Zero-days are the hacking world’s most potent weapons: They exploit vulnerabilities in software that are yet unknown to the software maker or antivirus vendors. They’re also exceedingly rare; it takes considerable skill and persistence to find such vulnerabilities and exploit them. Out of more than 12 million pieces of malware that antivirus researchers discover each year, fewer than a dozen use a zero-day exploit.

In this case, the exploit allowed the virus to cleverly spread from one computer to another via infected USB sticks. The vulnerability was in the LNK file of Windows Explorer, a fundamental component of Microsoft Windows. When an infected USB stick was inserted into a computer, as Explorer automatically scanned the contents of the stick, the exploit code awakened and surreptitiously dropped a large, partially encrypted file onto the computer, like a military transport plane dropping camouflaged soldiers into target territory.

It was an ingenious exploit that seemed obvious in retrospect, since it attacked such a ubiquitous function. It was also one, researchers would soon learn to their surprise, that had been used before.

VirusBlokAda contacted Microsoft to report the vulnerability, and on July 12, as the software giant was preparing a patch, VirusBlokAda went public with the discovery in a post to a security forum. Three days later, security blogger Brian Krebs picked up the story, and antivirus companies around the world scrambled to grab samples of the malware — dubbed Stuxnet by Microsoft from a combination of file names (.stub and MrxNet.sys) found in the code.

As the computer security industry rumbled into action, decrypting and deconstructing Stuxnet, more assessments filtered out.

It turned out the code had been launched into the wild as early as a year before, in June 2009, and its mysterious creator had updated and refined it over time, releasing three different versions. Notably, one of the virus’s driver files used a valid signed certificate stolen from RealTek Semiconductor, a hardware maker in Taiwan, in order to fool systems into thinking the malware was a trusted program from RealTek.

Finish reading here.

If they had known what they were dealing with they should have left it alone.  While not a Trojan Horse, Stuxnet acted like a Trojan Horse.  What scared the experts was that Stuxnet was so efficient at what it did and how it stayed hidden.  Its ability to remain in the system even after it was "removed" has driven the Iranians crazy.

Stuxnet was NOT written in someone's basement.  It was an effort by a government or governments to take out or at least slow down the Iranian Nuclear Program.  At best it has given the world a few years breathing room.

Hat tip to Israel Matzav

An Israeli Fable

By Findalis of Monkey in the Middle

I received this in my inbox and thought you would love to read it.

Iran has crossed the nuclear threshold and is testing its Shihab-3 long-range missile. King Ahmadinejad has just delivered a TV address in which he celebrates Iranian invincibility and lets it be known that he has no intention of sparing the Zionist entity. The United States has issued a carefully-worded reproof while at the same time extending the hand of peace and assuring its allies that containment, sanctions and dialogue remain the best policies under the circumstances. But no one in Israel sees a silver lining in a mushroom cloud and all prepare for the inevitable. Fearing abandonment from above, the rabbis raise their voices as one, in humble prayer to the God of Israel.

And lo! their prayers are miraculously answered, for the Lord has taken pity on His suffering people at last and His heart has softened. An iridescent rainbow arches across the sky and suddenly the Heavens open and a golden stairway reaches from Jerusalem to the empyrean. A Voice is heard over all Israel commanding, “Come, My people! Hearken to My Word!” And one by one, family by family, neighborhood by neighborhood, religious and secular, scholar and laborer, leftist and rightist find themselves in Jerusalem, as if Time had contracted to an eternal instant, and all proceed to climb the golden staircase into the Lord’s beneficent embrace.

A silence covers the land. A heavenly wind arises, the earth begins to shake, and cities, villages, farms and buildings vanish as if they had never been. Not even a Starbucks remains. In the twinkling of an eye gardens, groves, orchards, greenhouses, vineyards, every cultivated field, all the work of industrious Jewish hands turn back to desert and malarial swampland, leaving only desolate hamlets and clumps of shriveled lemons and puckered olives. Bewildered Palestinians, foreign journalists, NGOs and European plenipotentiaries look about in stunned disbelief for there is nothing there any longer to slake their enmity—except locusts, mosquitoes, drought and barrenness, as it was before the great aliyah. Even the tree and the stone are perplexed at the disappearance of the Jew hiding behind them, sheltering from Abdullah who is equally nonplussed.

At the same time, the world’s infrastructure collapses. Every Israeli invention that has ever been adopted by mankind—cell phone components, computer algorithms, firewalls, voice mail, wireless LAN, search engines, SMS (texting), video platforms, desalination plants, insect control methods, agricultural drip technologies, medical applications, chemical discoveries and more, indescribably more—cease to exist. The world is bereft. The nations send up a plaintive wail. The General Assembly disbands for lack of a purpose. The United Nations Human Rights Council packs up and goes home, as does the Organization of the Islamic Conference. There is nothing left for them to do. In despair, men look about for someone to blame but find only themselves and their cankered resentments. Even Iran has begun to tremble.

The Jews in Heaven look down and are overcome with sorrow. They plead with the Lord to forgive erring humankind but His heart has now hardened. Men will reap the desert, winnow the dust and harvest destitution. Then the gates of Heaven close, although the jubilant strains of Havah Nagilah sung by the choir of angels can still be discerned, growing ever fainter.

King Ahmadinejad sits forlornly on his throne, pining for the bomb he would lovingly stroke before bedtime to inspire his dreams. It too has evaporated. Beside him, the Hidden Imam, the Mahdi, who has chosen this moment to make his long-deferred appearance, with a mixture of fury and resignation addresses the hapless monarch. His words echo in King Ahmadinejad’s ears.

“Why couldn’t you wait, you idiot?”

Be careful of what you wish for, you might get your wish.