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(ChrisGoldNY)

There you are in Lesotho, enjoying a nice cold Maluti beer and feeling pretty pumped about the Instagram picture you’re totally going to take to show your friends back home how exotic everything is here. But oh, what’s that? It’s just another one of the 210 brands owned by Anheuser-Busch InBev and SABMiller? The beer world is starting to feel a bit smaller, and there’s good reason.

The last 10 years have seen quite a bit of conglomerating, consolidating and otherwise shmushing together of the world’s beers, notes NPR’s Planet Money (with a super cool beer map graphic you should check out). The two king companies and others have spent about $195 billion buying up brewers from all around the world.

Maybe you didn’t notice, either because you’ve had your face buried in foam or because most of the time, companies don’t crow about their beer acquisitions and instead keep the familiar brand names exactly as they were.

The reality is Anheuser-Busch InBev and SABMiller own over 200 brands based in 42 countries— 18 of which are right here in the U.S.

This world-suds-domination plan has come to light in the media more recently, as Anheuser-Busch InBev is currently trying to gobble up the world’s seventh largest brewer, Grupo Modelo. If it does, it’ll control 46% of the beer market in the U.S. That’s why the Department of Justice’s anti-trust alarm bells have been ringing.

So take a closer look at that exotic vacation brew before you apply a Lo-Fi filter and note its uniqueness. Its daddy could very well be a super huge corporate entity, but at least it still tastes good. If it doesn’t, stop drinking it.

Beer Map: Two Giant Brewers, 210 Brands [NPR Planet Money]

SOURCE The Consumerist

New submitter BetterThanCaesar writes “The Swedish Pirate Party and their ISP Serious Tubes have received a letter from ‘The Rights Alliance’ (formerly Antipiratbyrån, The Swedish Anti-Piracy Bureau), demanding they cease supplying Internet access to The Pirate Bay. Referring to the final sentence on the four Pirate Bay profiles, they threaten with legal action if access is not removed by February 26. On her blog, party leader Anna Troberg calls the letter ‘extortion,’ pointing out that (translated from Swedish) ‘[i]t is not illegal to provide The Pirate Bay with Internet access. There is no list of illegal sites that ISPs cannot provide access to.’ (google translation to English).” The letter sent (in Swedish). Update: 02/20 14:58 GMT by U L : richie2000 notes that hosting isn’t quite right; they’re just routing traffic to TPB: “We’re not hosting TPB, we’re just routing traffic to them. Just like an ISP. Serious Tubes routes traffic to the Pirate Party, so they’re even more removed. But, last night, Portlane, one of the ISPs that routes traffic to Serious Tubes, was pressured into cutting their transit to ST, even if they were just a provider to a provider to a provider to TPB.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SOURCE Slashdot

sfcrazy writes “Mark Shuttleworth has for the first time talked about the privacy issues in Ubuntu Dash after being criticized by EFF and FSF. He mentioned some changes in the way use can ‘disable’ the search results. However the company has showed that under no circumstances they will disable the online search by default as demanded by EFF and FSF. Shuttleworth was simply spinning the wheel moving things around to give an impression that something has been done where as the core problem remains — Dash sends keystrokes by default and legally every user agrees to send such keystrokes to PRODUCT.canonical.com server to be shared with partners like Facebook.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SOURCE Slashdot

It’s strange enough that so many people were able to capture video of the meteorite that streaked over Russia on Friday exploding over populated areas causing injury and large amounts of damage. We knew as of Friday that the meteorite had exploded with enough force to knock glass windows out of many buildings in the cold Siberian portion of Russia.

Today we have more reports of damage caused by the meteor explosion and they are as bizarre as some of the damage reports from tornadoes we’ve heard over the years. For instance, in the city of Chelyabinsk, Russia some high-rise buildings had the glass blown out of every window on the top floor while other buildings had only the glass from the bottom floor destroyed. Even that’s not the most bizarre report of damage caused by meteor.

Some citizens living within the city are reporting that the external windows of their apartments remain intact while glass jars in dishes inside the home were destroyed by the meteor explosion. Some citizens also reported that their electronic devices were destroyed by the explosion. One citizen reported that a glass bottle he was holding shattered in his hand.

Scientists say that glass was destroyed by pressure waves created as the meteor fragment decelerated. These low-frequency waves are called infrasound. Scientists say that these waves can bounce off buildings causing them to be stronger in some places than others and can resonate with glass explaining wine bottles and dishes might have shattered inside of homes otherwise unaffected by the meteor.

While some apartment dwellers had their windows blown out, apartments next door with the same Windows remained intact. Scientists are estimating that the meteor is the largest to have entered the Earth’s atmosphere since 1908. Current reports pegged the number of people injured at 1200, mostly from falling glass. NASA estimates that a meteor of this size hits the Earth about once every 100 years. The city of Chelyabinsk, Russia has about 1 million citizens.

[via NYT]

Strange damage reports surface after Friday’s Russian meteor explosion is written by Shane McGlaun & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

SOURCE SlashGear

Bob the Super Hamste writes “On Tuesday Comcast announced that it would accelerate its acquisition of NBCUniversal and purchase the remaining 49% owned by GE for $16.7 billion. Previously GE and Comcast were expected to operate NBCUniversal jointly until mid 2014 with Comcast having the option to extend that out until 2018. So far there are not details on when the deal with be completed but the article indicates that Comcast’s complete acquisition of NBCUniversal will be completed years earlier that initially thought.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Bob the Super Hamste writes “On Tuesday Comcast announced that it would accelerate its acquisition of NBCUniversal and purchase the remaining 49% owned by GE for $16.7 billion. Previously GE and Comcast were expected to operate NBCUniversal jointly until mid 2014 with Comcast having the option to extend that out until 2018. So far there are not details on when the deal with be completed but the article indicates that Comcast’s complete acquisition of NBCUniversal will be completed years earlier that initially thought.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SOURCE Slashdot

During the State of the Union speech, President Obama revealed that he signed an executive order to push through the establishment of “voluntary cybersecurity standards.” This comes after a series of cyberattacks that have been made public, revealing the extent to which American media and companies have had to deal with increasing cybersecurity issues from both within and abroad.

The executive order will lead to the creation of a group led by the feds to work with private companies in the creation and implementation of voluntary standards. This follows an attempted cybersecurity bill that was put forth last year and that ultimately died in August. The Obama administration stated that this executive order is only the beginning, and that it would continue to push for an approved cybersecurity bill.

Said President Obama during the speech: “America must also face the rapidly growing threat from cyberattacks. We know foreign countries and companies swipe our corporate secrets. Now our enemies are also seeking the ability to sabotage our power grid, our financial institutions, our air-traffic control systems. We cannot look back years from now and wonder why we did nothing in the face of real threats to our security and our economy.”

Over the last few months, many companies – particularly media companies – have come forth and made public the fact that they were hacked, sometimes from forces outside of the country, and sometimes by groups from within. The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and New York Times have all recently come out and said they were hacked by China, for example.

[via Wall Street Journal]

President Obama signs cybersecurity executive order is written by Brittany Hillen & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

SOURCE SlashGear

Presto Vivace sends this news from the Hill: “House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) and ranking member Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Md.) said Friday that they plan to re-introduce the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) next week during a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. The bill is aimed at improving information-sharing about cyber threats between government and industry so cyberattacks can be thwarted in real time. … It would also encourage companies to share anonymous cyber-threat information with one another, and provide liability protection for businesses so they don’t get hit with legal action for sharing data about cyber threats. ” You may recall CISPA from last year, when it was hailed as being even worse than SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act. We discussed why it was a bad bill back then; the new version is reportedly identical, so all of the same reasons will apply. The bill stalled last year against White House plans to veto it. Congressman Rogers said this about privacy fears: “We’re talking about exchanging packets of information, zeroes and ones, if you will, one hundred millions times a second. So some notion that this is a horrible invasion of content reading is wrong. It is not even close to that.” Don’t worry folks; it’s just zeroes and ones.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SOURCE Slashdot

An anonymous reader writes “According to an Al-Jazeera report, ‘Charlottesville, Virginia is the first city in the United States to pass an anti-drone resolution. The writing of the resolution coincides with a leaked memo outlining the legal case for drone strikes on U.S. citizens and a Federal Aviation Administration plan to allow the deployment of some 30,000 domestic drones.’ The finalized resolution is fairly weak, but it’s a start. There is also some anti-drone legislation in the Oregon state Senate, and it has much bigger teeth. It defines public airspace as anything above your shoelaces, and the wording for ‘drone’ is broad enough to include RC helicopters and the like.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SOURCE Slashdot

Just this past Saturday, it officially became illegal for anyone to unlock a smartphone without the carriers’ consent. Obviously, this fired up a lot of people, who argue that if they buy an unsubsidized phone without a contract, they should be able to do what they want with it. And now, it looks like there’s a White House petition going around that seeks for the unbanning of phone unlocking.

27-year-old app developer Sina Khanifar decided to take a stand, and created a petition that asks the White House to reverse the ruling and create legislation that makes carrier-unlocking legal again. The petition is already over a third of the way there, with more than 35,000 signatures. However, per the White House’s changes, it needs 100,000 signatures before it goes through.

It took under a week for the petition reach over a third of its goal, but it needs to reach the 100,000 mark by February 23 before it can be passed over to the Obama administration for consideration. While many White House petitions in the past were a bit farfetched and, frankly, kind of ridiculous, this is one petition that is worth your signature.

Hopefully the petition will reach its goal, and if it gets passed along to the Obama administration, we’d like to be optimistic and say that there’s a good chance that the administration will highly consider overturning the new law, but we’ll ultimately have to wait and see until next month when the petition ends.

[via PC World]

Phone unlocking ban cooks up White House petition is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

SOURCE SlashGear