Al-Qaeda seeks geek fanatics for Jihoo! It's official: the days of Ozzie bin Laden promotional vids featuring the fun-loving al-Qaeda big cheese holding forth at length to some antiquated VHS camcorder while lovingly fingering his AK-47 are well and truly over. Yup, the terror organisation has now, according to this chilling report, upped its game to the point where …
There are millions of people making content and trying to get eyeballs on the Internet. They have to advertise, promote, even spam to get those eyeballs....
Yet these damn terrorists just make their videos and put it somewhere on the web (via internet cafes? What they don't even need a ISP to sell them web space!). And those eyeballs magically find this terrorist recruitment videos she talks about.... they don't even have to use adwords or buy a banner ads to get those page views?!
The marketing men from Satchi and Satchi need to copy whatever the terrorists are doing! Well either that or Rita is telling another porky pie.
"Bin there, Laden it Ventures, who led a $25 million investment, was joined by the In-Q-Tel and a personal investment by ex-President George W. Bush, who commented, "it will be nice to see those good ole boys have a place to have out together online."" .. By Simon Posted Friday 14th March 2008 14:21 GMT
Very Astute and Classless, Simon. Pure Class. IT must be worth an Absolute Fortune by Now.
Quality. I haven't laughed this much in some time. Decapitation Street almost sent me over the edge of my desk.
I've now got my USB rocket launcher set on "protect at all cost" mode, just incase my comment gets traced by Al Q.
Black helicopters cos I need something like that to take me to my secret hideaway
I can do all that video stuff, animations, embedded Flash applets, the whole bang shoot. I've got a clean driving licence, I'm neatly turned out, and I can grow a beard if required.
How much is Jihoo paying? Is the workforce unionised? Are homophobia and misogyny optional or part of the EULA? Is the PhD a minimum qualification or will a couple of A Levels do?
Most importantly, will I get my 72 virgins before glorious martyrdom or afterwards?
If they are looking for graphic artists and all that surely they will need tech support as well.
"No Mr. Osama, first I need you to shut down the computer. . .yes press the power button. The power button. THE BLOODY POWER BUTTON PRESS IT. Good yes its supposed to shut off. Now take the red wire and connect it to tab B and the blue. . ."
BOOM
/mines the flak jacket
Have you thought this through? What if al-Qaeda take the hump at the article and decide to bomb El Reg's offices (or maybe the nearby pub; they stand more chance of getting people there). I for one cannot do without my daily fix at the Register. Issue all the staff with steel helmets - that way they can do without the tin foil hats as well.
...could this move to televisual perfection be our best hope of finding Osama bin Laden?
After all, if the World's favourite terrorists have suddenly become more professional, then they must be employing qualified media developers. (How the Taliban handle the copious nose candy requirements of these people must remain something of a mystery).
Which means they must have advertised.
And adverts have return addresses for the CVs and application forms.
Ergo, we can close down al Qaeda by reading the Guardian's Media section.
... the main reason (we are told) that the terrorists fail is that they are, on the whole, pretty incompetent. If we start having bright people, nay, engineers, planning terrorist outrages, we should start being frightened.
For example. I have a scheme for wiping out MacDonald's. It involves eating rather a lot of burgers, some PIC chips for timer/controllers, and a few beat-up second-hand cars. And some explosive, of course.
Making remote controlled, timed, or light/movement triggering systems is easy for any graduate electronics engineer.
I know it gets you cred points at Indymedia to make out that ricin is just some harmless stuff dreamt up by the big, bad CIA to scare us all, but for those that don't know it's a particularly nasty poison that was much favoured by the KGB (a Bulgarian assassin used a pellet of ricin to murder Georgi Markov in London in 1978 in the so-called Umbrella Assassination). In concentrated form (which is what Al Quaeda was training people to make in the Afghan camps) it is considered five times as effective as cyanide. Whilst the Police here may have been a bit overeager in looking for evidence of AQ Ricin plots, there is zero doubt that AQ has both the ability and intent to make and use poisons and Ricin in particular. Whilst the average sad little cyber-jihadi in his bedroom is probably a laughing matter you wouldn't make jokes about C4 so please stop the ricin derision.
oh yes yes ricin is soooo credible in a terror attack
is that the fact that at 3% medium concentration (10% for specificly engineered species) of ricin in ricinus seeds makes pretty spottable the refining ("good morning mister, i would like three tons of castor beans.") of the substance ? no no, let's assume they dispose already of the refined form.
so with a ton of ricinus they will have 30Kg equivalent of somewhat pure ricin. ok now the hard part
LD50 is 1mg/Kg of matter by inhalation or injection means (500mg for ingestion). unlike the Markov case, where the poison was directly administered by a small hollow pellet *directly into the circulatory system, the only somewhat realistic way you'll have to conduct a real terror attack is by aerosol.
so assuming a crowded train station (with your average terrorist being ready do die in horrible suffering by the action of his bomb) you'll have to *diffuse* with appropriate means (compressed gaz with double action valves (we wouldn't want to kill our own jihadi in the lab wouldn't we ?) or low explosive powered deflagration (black powder, nitrate/fuel etc...) with 160Kg of body matter per cubic meter at ground (probably way more at busy hours)
so assuming you want to fill 100 cubic meters of your aerosol that would represent a whooping 160 Kg of ricin to aerosolize by appropriate means (count double weight around effective payload for appropriate aerosolizer/propellant/container)
OH MY GOD NO, HULK HAS A BEARD AND A GINORMOUS SPRAY CAN OF FLY TOX
of course you can consider my ramblings as totally irrelevant. or not.
oh btw a nitrate/fuel bomb is far easier to make, and pretty effective blowing people apart. ask the IRA
I actually downloaded the nucleotide sequence for ricin from NCBI BLAST for no particular reason. To my surprise that it was freely available (and would be a cinch to use this to design PCR primers to clone it). Strange thing was, afterwards my zonealarm was registering about 200 alerts every minute for days every time I logged on to the web. I did a whois and the information that came back said "this block of IPs are reserved for special uses" or sometihing like that. I used one of those google maps-linked whois IP locating tools and it indicated a point on the north bank of the Thames in central London. This is abosolutely true, I would encourage you to try it yourselves. Seems that us biochemists are being watched by Big Brother......
I want to know why you need a PhD to work at Jihoo! and do they offer stock options?
@John Foo 1. Ricin is surprisingly easy to get your hands on, 2. In practical terms, it really sucks as a weapon. ..... just a sec. door bell. hmmm someone bought a nice black suburban... hang on... oh, SNAP!
Al Queda always has had good production for Osama's Video chats. He is in a family palace in Saudi and inserted into the Tora-bora pics using a set or CGI. His family have the money and the resources.
It would explain why the Americans can't find him in Pakistan and the family money and influence explain why they don't look harder. If a word from a Saudi Prince can stop the SFO in their tracks then they can certainly cool the hunt for a terrorist.
After all, a DV camcorder is small portable and relatively inexpensive in Dubai so why produce with such poor quality unless it helps conceal some nifty manipulation. Most of these look like they were projected onto a screen then recorded using an old VHS camcorder, and those are hard to find these days even here, let alone the NW Frontier!
Hollywood and the CIA are not the only ones who can fake videos!
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