Through her activism to topple Liberia’s violent dictator, Leymah Gbowee was able to restore her own faith in humanity. Listen how she brought one of the world’s most violent dictators to give up, peacefully:
The Man Who Changed Lives – One Meal at a Time
Written by: Cadence
What made a man with the world at his feet, give up 5 star surroundings for the poverty-stricken streets of Madurai, India?
Narayanan Krishnan had graduated with a degree and was on track to become an award-winning chef in Switzerland, when he took a trip to his Indian hometown.
It was here that a single moment would change his life forever. He saw an elderly man who was forced to eat his own faeces through desperate hunger. Recognising that so many were starving and filthy, living in dire poverty, the chef decided to devote his life to helping the man and others like him.
Since 2002 he has done just that, providing food, hygiene and a friendly face to the homeless, elderly, sick and mentally ill in Madurai. He cooks traditional meals to ease their hunger, and provides a wash, haircut and shave to help the destitute begin to feel human again.
Narayanan says “the food will give them physical nutrition. The love and affection which you show will give them mental nutrition”. The inspirational chef added “food is one part. Love is another part”. In a country where the caste system still prevails, Brahmins like Narayanan are the highest regarded status in society. It is unheard of for members of the social elite to interact with the homeless in this way.
In its initial year, he fed around 30 people using his own personal savings. By 2011, Krishnan had served 1.7 million meals. In 2013 the project developed into The Akshaya Trust, a residential home housing 450. By providing shelter, care and three healthy meals a day, the aim is to restore human dignity and change lives. In 2010 he was awarded a place in the top 10 in CNN’s Heroes 2010 list, and even spoke at one an independently organised TEDx event.
Last month, The Akshaya Trust was cleared of allegations that illegal organ transplantation and sexual harassment were taking place within the home. The claims, made by a 21-year-old mentally disabled woman, were thrown out by a Madras high court. Having tormented the charity since June, Akshaya is finally free to continue its work.
Despite these setbacks, Narayanan’s message is still something we can all learn from. He said: “There are thousands and thousands, and lots and lots of people suffering. What is the ultimate purpose of life? It’s to give. Start giving. See the joy of giving”.
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Sources
http://akshayatrust.org/krishnan.php
http://akshayausa.wordpress.com/
www.youtube.com/watch?v=4k5XZ6qU1eg#t=308
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/madurai/Court-says-no-sufficient-proof-against-Akshaya-trust-closes-PIL/articleshow/42392080.cms
How The Pirate Bay Servers Became Secure To Avoid Police Raids and Detection
Written by: Cadence
With millions of unique visitors every day, The Pirate Bay has a well-deserved place within the top 100 most visited websites on the web. The BitTorrent site has powered on through years of persecution from authorities around the globe, evading shut down requests and aggressive threats, and bouncing back from police raids and prison sentences.
Created in 2003, the torrent site successfully avoided authorities until 2006. It was then the U.S. and Swedish Governments’ work with Hollywood film association MPAA led to a raid. Servers and piles of equipment were seized and three were questioned by police, although they were later released.
In 2009, the website’s luck eventually ran out. Four individuals were found guilty of breaching copyright law in Sweden, including co-founder Peter Sunde, who has maintained his belief that file-sharing for personal use should be legal. After a moderately successful appeal their prison sentences ranged between four and ten months, with a hefty $4.8 million fine. Remarkably, though, the content exchange site remained live through all of this.
11 years since its creation, the Pirate Bay is still going strong. Despite occasional downtime, the website has bounced between .org and country code top-level domains such as .sx (Sint Maarten), .pe (Peru), .gy (Guyana), .gl (Greenland) and .se (Sweden), and also hopped between multiple hosts.
Countries and ISPs have blocked access to the Bay across the globe, but even that hasn’t deterred its millions of regular users. It has become common knowledge that these restrictions can be easily circumvented by VPNs and mirror and proxy sites.
Last month, it was revealed how the elusive Pirate Bay has managed to avoid detection in recent years. It’s all down to a monumental change to cloud hosting, using numerous providers around the world. As traffic goes through a load balancer, none of the hosts know that it’s The Pirate Bay using their services, keeping IP addresses safe.
The Pirate Bay currently has 21 virtual machines (VMs); a form of virtual hardware used to run the operating system remotely. Eight of these are used to serve web pages, six to handle search queries and two to run the database. The others are used for the proxy site, torrent storage, the controller, load balancing and statistics. If the website’s cloud servers are closed by police, the VMs can be moved quickly and relatively easily.
While other torrent websites have succumbed to their setbacks, The Pirate Bay is still standing. Its ability to shift shape, combined with a striking determination, has achieved a victory for file-sharing for what looks like many years to come.
Links: Protect your PC and mobile devices from hackers & governments and surf anonymously
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Sources:
http://thehackernews.com/2014/09/the-pirate-bay-runs-on-21-raid-proof.html
Edward Snowden to Receive Hollywood Makeover With Joseph Gordon-Levitt
Written by: Cadence
Joseph Gordon-Levitt will be taking on the role of whistleblower Edward Snowden in a forthcoming biopic. Oliver Stone will be writing and directing The Snowden Files.
The movie will be based on ‘The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World’s Most Wanted Man’, written by Guardian journalist Luke Harding, and ‘Time of the Octopus’, a novel by Snowden’s lawyer Anatoly Kycherena.
The movie is currently in pre-production stages, with release scheduled for 2016. It is likely filming will begin at the end of 2014 or early 2015.
Former NSA contractor Snowden is currently living in Russia as part of a temporary asylum agreement. He faces a 30-year prison sentence if he returns to the US, for releasing details of large scale surveillance undertaken by intelligence services. The movie will likely cover Snowden’s revelations of the government’s PRISM program, which used clandestine methods to harvest communication records from citizens across the US.
Actor Gordon-Levitt has previously undertaken key roles in The Dark Knight Rises, Looper, Inception and Lincoln. Stone is experienced in working in the political genre, having directed biopics Nixon and W. about former presidents Nixon and George W. Bush. He also directed documentary series The Untold History of the United States, which looked beyond the official versions of key events since WWII, including the War on Terror.
Fans of Snowden will be hoping the film is more truthful than 2013’s The Fifth Estate, an adaptation of the Wikileaks story with Julian Assange portrayed by Benedict Cumberbatch. The movie was condemned by the website itself, which leaked a script and released a 4,000 word memo exposing its biased inaccuracies.
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Sources
http://www.thewrap.com/oliver-stones-edward-snowden-film-starring-joseph-gordon-levitt-goes-to-auction/
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/sep/22/joseph-gordon-levitt-edward-snowden-oliver-stone-nsa-whistleblower-film
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3774114/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_1
http://wikileaks.org/IMG/html/wikileaks-dreamworks-memo.html#about