The New Under Ground Church-THE TRUTH MUST BE TOLD

Wednesday, May 14, 2014

Biometric Applications In Consumer Electronics Expected To Surge

May 14, 2014 | Tom Olago

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Mobile commerce technologies are projected to highly accelerate in both number and value of transactions, due to impending wide-scale integration of biometric technology into smartphones. Research consultancy conducted by the Biometrics Research Group late 2013 expects that worldwide mobile payment transactions will reach $250 billion in 2014, with over 90 million smartphones with biometric technology expected to be shipped in 2014.

Due to large number of new smartphones that will ship in 2014, Biometric Research Group expects that the smartphone mass market will drive rapid growth in consumer electronics biometrics by at least 35 percent over next five years. A major contributing factor in this growth will be increasing demand for personal devices that can conduct safe financial transactions.

Mobile payment transactions are further projected to reach $750 billion in annual transactions with more than 700 million users by 2020. Biometrics will speed mobile commerce, especially in North America, because the technology can offer a higher level of security, while providing an intuitive customer experience.

These statistics, published in Biometric Update.com,also reported that at least three-quarters of current smartphone users do not secure their devices with a passcode, potentially leading to compromise of the integrity of payment processes. “Smartphone Biometrics” such as fingerprint recognition, are touted as the ideal answer to the goal of securing the user login process in order to enable more dependable user identification.

The consultancy group predicted that Apple would initially lead in the deployment of such devices, due to fact that the firm is the first consumer electronics provider to introduce biometric technology to the global smartphone mass market. Apple did release the Phone 5S which features a fingerprint identity sensor, entitled Touch ID, built directly into the device’s home button.

Other industry leaders and competitors such as Samsung were expected to follow with similar biometric-based innovations on their mobile technology products and related systems. As of September 2013, when Apple released the iPhone 5s, Apple reportedly controlled 78% of biometric smartphone shipments, with Samsung’s share standing at 22% and all others combined at 5%.

Samsung are no longer to be left behind on biometric innovations: in February 2014, BBC.com reported that the next iteration of Samsung's Galaxy smartphone range, the S5, would feature biometric security. The product reportedly unlocks the device, powers payments via the fingerprint scanner, and offers payment-by-finger via PayPal.

Apple’s acquisition of AuthenTec Inc. in 2012, allowed Apple to obtain most of the foundational technology patents for fingerprint biometrics, along with a broad patent portfolio consisting of 200 issued and filed patents in the United States. The acquired technology reportedly utilizes an embedded sapphire crystal sensor, and also encrypts fingerprint data directly into the iPhone’s new A7 64-bit processing chip, so that biometric information will not be stored in the cloud.

A separate and earlier report from Biometric updates.com quoted the Biometric Research Group expectation that biometric identifiers such as fingerprints would eventually supplant written Apple ID passwords. By 2015, it might even become possible “to purchase new Apple devices at its retail store using your thumbprint impression”. The research firm also expects that biometric technologies will also be integrated to “phablets”, or niche mobile smartphone/tablet hybrids, which are extremely popular in Asia.

Separate reports also seem to support the upward trajectory in consumer interest towards smartphone biometrics. According to a report published in Znet.com, (based on new research by mobile network maker Ericsson, which polled 100,000 people over 40 countries) about 74 percent of respondents said they believe biometric smartphones "will become mainstream" during 2014.

More than half at 52 percent want to use their fingerprints instead of a complex alphanumeric combination of letters, numbers, and characters, while just shy of half at 48 percent are interested in eye-recognition technology to unlock their phones.

So clearly, the battlefront for biometric smartphone applications between smartphone companies will not stop with fingerprints: eye/iris recognition technologies, as well as a whole array of biometrics approved so far, are poised to gain further attention and prominence once fingerprint-based mobile security applications become standard.

What’s nextnuance.com explains: “Recently, Gartner made the prediction that 30% of all companies will use biometrics on mobile devices by 2016, as reported by ZDnet. Biometric forms of authentication are being adopted by mobile platforms specifically for the increased experience and convenience they provide on-the-go users. The question that remains is which biometrics will experience the most rapid and widespread adoption? Amongst the key players are fingerprint, facial recognition, voice biometric, iris, and vein (such as vein-palm biometrics used by Fujistu.

Plenty of choice to make consumer mobile transactions and interactions more secure, while simultaneously adding “more bottom to the bottom lines” of the smartphone companies. But should everyone smile and live happily ever after? Not quite from the consumer side: the can of worms gate crashing this party would likely be the fact that these smartphones can be used to track such private and sensitive matters as your movements, social habits and telephone records.

An extract from a recent report that illustrates this point was published on 13th May 2014 by the UK Telegraph: “….The British government's intelligence agency, GCHQ, is facing legal action over its alleged use of hacking tools to infect computers and smartphones with malicious software, to remotely hijack users' cameras and microphones without their consent…. GCHQ agents are also reportedly able to surreptitiously log keystrokes entered into a device, extract data from removable flash drives that connect to an infected computer, identify the geographic whereabouts of the user, and retrieve any content from a phone, including text messages, emails, web history, call records, videos, photos, address books, notes, and calendars.

Fortunately legal recourse and privacy groups are available to help resist GHCQ excesses. In the US, the Washington Post has recently reported that a bill that would end the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of Americans’ phone records cleared a major hurdle in the House on Thursday (15th May) and will head to the floor, where it is widely expected to pass.

But unless and until these privacy protection battles are won, it seems like we will need to get used to a major risk : our highly convenient and supposedly secure smartphones may just as easily be someone else’s spy phones – spying on us, and with the biometric factor leaving little or no doubt as to our identity.

New Survey Shows Many Americans Scramble Their Scripture

New Survey Shows Many Americans Scramble Their Scripture

May 14, 2014 | Tom Olago

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The American Bible Society’s (ABS) annual “State of the Bible” survey shows that about 20 percent of American adults falsely believe that the Bible encourages the repression of women,” and is silent on such topics as war or slavery. Geof Morin, chief communication officer for the society, states that the 88 percent of Americans claiming ownership of a Bible tend to overestimate their knowledge of it, with 82 percent considering themselves at least somewhat knowledgeable about the Bible.

These results were reported in a recent publication in Christian News.com. Answers to other related questions asked in the survey, validate Morin’s conclusion on the general ignorance of, and apathy towards the Bible. He says that of 1,012 U.S. adults polled in the ABS survey conducted by Barna Research, “43 percent can’t even name the first five books of the Bible.” Many also showed "fuzzy knowledge" of the attitudes and behaviors addressed in Scripture in relation to several critical social issues.

Most Christians however correctly say the Bible discourages prostitution, gambling and pornography; that it encourages generosity, forgiveness and patience; and that it is most certainly not silent on issues such as slavery, war and homosexuality. However, the survey also showed that there were distinct divides between “practicing Christians” — those who consider their faith important, attend church regularly and believe they are born again — and “notional” Christians who wear the label but disengage from practice.

The divisions and contrasts in view between the “practicers” on the one hand, and the “notionals” and “nones” on the other, were highlighted on several key Bible themes:

- Repression of Women: “Notional” Christians — nearly half of all participants in the survey — have a grimmer picture of the Bible’s view on women. Nearly three in 10 (27 percent) say the Bible either encourages repression or is silent on women’s status (28 percent). Among those who claim no religious identity (“nones”), 46 percent see the Bible advocating repression of women and 22 percent say it’s silent on the matter. In contrast, while 91 percent of evangelicals say the Bible discourages “repression of women,” that figure drops to 61 percent for other practicing Christians, such as mainline Protestants.

- Same-sex relationships: Strong majorities in every category say the Bible discourages homosexuality. But 24 percent of “notional” Christians, and 33 percent of “nones”, say the Bible is silent on this topic.

- War: About two in 10 (18 percent overall) also said the Bible is silent about war. However, this time the responses divided very differently: Only 11 percent of non-evangelical practicing Christians saw nothing in the Bible on this subject.

These thematic-based findings have also been corroborated in another similar but separate survey named ‘The Bible in American Life’, and conducted by the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture. In a March article titled ‘American Bible Reading Statistics Reveal Who Is Studying The Good Book And Why’ , the Huffington Post reported that “consulting Scripture for personal prayer is three times more common than turning to the Bible to learn about hot-button issues like abortion, homosexuality, war or poverty”.

According to Morin, the ABS survey was specifically intended in purpose to give the Bible society ideas for areas where it can work to strengthen Biblical literacy and help make Scripture the foundation in believers’ lives. Morin stated that “The American Bible Society wants to track what is happening in the culture and why people are less and less connecting the moral and political issues of the day with their Bibles”.

Clearly a lack of Bible studying by Americans, coupled with shallow and superficial Bible teaching in many churches, would account for the failure of many Americans to “connect the dots” regarding what happens in society and what the Bible says about it – whether directly or in principle .

The impact of the decline in interest and application of the Bible is reflected in a 2010 national survey by the Pew Research Center on overall religious knowledge focused on core teachings, history and leading figures in five major world religions. It found the most knowledgeable were atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons, who outperformed Protestants and Catholics on most questions.

Quite an embarrassment - It’s no wonder that American Christians are therefore hardly well placed to ‘to contend earnestly for the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints’ (Jude 1:3), and may instead be more easily converted by their better-read but misguided opponents and critics. They may yet be hope, however, if Christians opt to seriously heed the scripture:

Be diligent to present yourself approved to God, a worker who does not need to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth. (2nd Timothy 2:15)

Transhumanism - The Quest For Immortality

Transhumanism - The Quest For Immortality

May 14, 2014 | Ross Thompson

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Transhumanism has some spotlight at present with the release of Johnny Depps new film, Transcendence. Critics are not giving it the thumbs up though and the spotlight may be short lived.

Transhumanism is the movement whose goal it is to beat death by transferring or uploading the human personality into a robotic brain and body. One of their authors, James Barrat, has gone so far as to say that transhumanism is inevitable and when the breakthrough comes it will be the end of the human era.

In the movie Transcendence Johnny Depp plays Dr Will Caster, a leading experimenter in the field of artificial intelligence. He is also the target of anti-technology terrorists. The terrorists do him a favor by mortally wounding him and giving him the chance to be the subject of his own experiments with the help of his assistants and his wife. Will Casters body dies but he lives on as an artificial intelligence, a virtual personality.

In the real world, Google has shown a big interest in the subject, spending not millions, but billions over recent years, acquiring any company that has shown promise in the artificial intelligence or related fields. In January of this year they spent $400 million to acquire the British firm, Deep Mind. The company has not released any products as yet and because of secrecy it is not really known what they are working on except that it is to do with artificial intelligence.

High profile Transhumanism theorist, Ray Kurzweil, joined Google in 2013 as Director of Engineering. Kurzweil who apparently takes 150 pills a day and has weekly injections of an array of body boosting substances in the hope of keeping himself alive and well until the future transhumanism breakthrough, says that his present role at Google is, 'ultimately to base search on really understanding what language means.

When you write an article you are not just creating an interesting collection of words. The message in your article is information and the computers are not picking up on that. So we would like to have the computers read. We want them to be able to read everything on the Web and then engage in intelligent dialogue with the user and also be able to answer their questions'. The name tag given to this endeavour is natural language processing.

Here is a definition of the aims of transhumanism from a document put out by scientists working on the Blue Brain project, a continuing work attempting to put a simulated brain into a super computer:

"Today scientists are in research to create an artificial brain that can think, respond, take decisions and keep anything in memory. The main aim is to upload the human brain into a machine so that the man can think and make decisions without any effort. After the death of the body the artificial brain will act as the man. So even after death we will not lose the knowledge, intelligence, feelings, personality and memories of that man and they will still be available for the further development of human society".

Barney Pell, an associate of Ray Kurzweil, who has worked in Robotics and is at present involved in artificial intelligence games development, viewed the movie, Transcendence, and in an interview afterwards was asked if he thought the technology in the movie was possible and how far off are we from it?

His reply: "For the core AI technology in the movie which is intelligence vastly superior to humans, I believe it is possible that we will have such intelligences. However the technology approach in the movie in the form of uploading a personality based on scanning a living brain is more of a concept than a specific technology. I don't see anything close at present in the way of computational architecture in the scientific community today, much less an uploading approach compatible with such an architecture".

How To Create A Mind, is Ray Kurzweils most recent book. In it he also admits that the reality is that these theorys are all leaps of faith, We don't really know what consciousness is, what personal identity is, and thinking of the brain as a computer is a long way from understanding its function as a part of the human self.

Don't hold your breath, is probably the best advice we could give to someone who is thinking of putting their hope in Transhumanism.

North Korean Nuclear Threat To United States Is Very Real

North Korean Nuclear Threat To United States Is Very Real

May 14, 2014 | Tom Olago

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Should North Korea decide to attack the United States with nuclear warheads, she can finally do just that. A report from former Pentagon strategic analyst Mark Schneider, published in the journal Comparative Strategy, said that North Korea has developed nuclear warheads that could be used to strike Hawaii, Alaska and parts of the West Coast. The Blaze.com recently published these findings, adding that Schneider describes the North Korean capability as “a startling fact that the White House has worked to downplay”.

This news was also separately confirmed by The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in a separate assessment in 2013, according to Schneider’s 16-page report titled ‘The North Korean Nuclear Threat to the United States’. Schneider describes this as “disturbing news,” and further expounds that “The North Korean regime is one of the most fanatic, paranoid, and militaristic dictatorships on the planet. … While North Korea has long made occasional nuclear attack threats, the scope, magnitude, and frequency of these threats have vastly increased in 2013.”

What makes these developments (said to have advanced greatly with the help Chinese-provided technology) all the more alarming, is the fact that they come at a time when North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un, has issued various statements threatening to attack the United States.

So now that he can, would he and will he dare to attack the United States? Kim Jong Un is known for his belligerent talk, as well as for being unstable, erratic and unpredictable. Therefore, the prospect of military suicide may not necessarily discourage or deter him and his advisers. So it makes sense to assume that if he can attack he may, and probably will, so the United States should presume a status of full preparedness for such an eventuality in case it does take place.

According to Schneider, the Obama administration has worked to downplay the details of North Korea’s nuclear capabilities because it undermines the White House’s diplomatic efforts to block the country from obtaining such weapons. Hence, the White House has reportedly resorted to assuring the public that the North’s warheads are either extremely limited in their range or untested, based on the Washington Free Beacon’s report of the story. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has repeatedly stated that both Iran and North Korea are incapable of launching a nuclear attack on the U.S., sentiments that have been echoed by James Clapper, director of national intelligence.

But despite these assurances, the DIA stands by its assessment that the threat from North Korea is real. Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti reportedly confirmed in a congressional hearing on April 2 that North Korea “remains a significant threat to United States’ interests” and that “North Korea continues to develop nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles in violation of multiple United Nations Security Council Resolutions”.

The White House and DIA viewpoints are diametrically opposed, and only one or the other could be correct, so who then is fooling who? Is it those who are well placed and knowledgeable enough to be asking for extra remedial measures to protect the U.S from her enemies? Or is it those whose jobs typically require that their official statements should be politically correct and socially palatable? If the White House position is indeed correct, they are probably not enough to reassure the public in the face of assertions to the contrary made by U.S military leaders and analysts.

Based on a separate related story published in the Free Beacon, the conclusion could be drawn that if North Korea is deterred from attacking the U.S, the deterrence will much more likely to a be result of China’s publicly reported reluctance to support North Korea on this, rather than a fear of the U.S ability to counter-attack.

The report states that China has signaled that it will impose international and unilateral sanctions on North Korea if Pyongyang follows through with announced plans to set off a fourth underground nuclear test. It is noteworthy that China in the past has abstained from or opposed votes on the imposition of U.N. sanctions on North Korea, hence it would appear that China has concluded that these tests will be counterproductive to its wider interests should North Korea proceed to carry out nuclear tests as threatened.

Schneider concludes his report by stating that the Obama White House “is not well suited to handle” the nuclear threat from North Korea: “The Obama administration’s current position on the North Korean nuclear threat may very well be linked with its plans to radically reduce U.S. military capabilities in both the nuclear and the conventional arena in the near future, starting with sequestration …The Obama administration’s ‘nuclear zero’ ideology does not impress North Korea…Indeed, it may have precipitated the unprecedented nuclear attack threats from North Korea.”

Monday, May 5, 2014

I Still Love The Prodigal and His Father

Posted on May 5, 2014 by nhiemstra

I know I keep bringing up the story of the “Prodigal son.” Just keep in mind that the pattern we find in this story is: rebellion, ruin, repentance, reconciliation, restoration. This has been proven in all of our lives. I have covered this story dozens of times, and I apologize if it seems too repetitive, but some still struggle with their view of their Heavenly Father.
It is possible that they had a horrible relationship with their earthly dad, and for some reason they are trying to compare the two. If that is the case, quit.
Our natural dad is a faulty, frail, imperfect and limited human, and NOT your Heavenly Father—he simply shares the same title. There is no comparison. I tried to be a decent dad to my kids, but I was imperfect. I may have been too harsh or too critical, to them and if I was, I apologize, but even I have my faults and failings.
The story that Jesus told was an example of what I hope I demonstrated to my kids. What I am talking about is that the father must have given that son one of the greatest gifts a father can give: Love and Acceptance. That son had lived with his dad and grew to know his father’s character. During all those years growing up, he must he must have received a tremendous amount of love and support from his dad. He had to have, because otherwise, why would he return to a man who had always been angry and vengeful, who would beat him and make him pay back every cent he squandered? (see Luke 15)
The prodigal surely knew that if he returned he wouldn’t be upbraided or condemned for his sins. He probably thought, “I know my father loves me. He won’t throw my sin in my face. He will take me back.” When you have that kind of history with someone, you can always go back home. This applies to all of our relationships: spouses; friends; parent and child.
I love the way the father welcomed him with overwhelming love and forgiveness! That returning son had rehearsed all the way home what he was going to say, how he would apologize, repent and offering a heartfelt confession to his dad. But when he came face-to-face with his father, he didn’t even get a chance to confess. His father interrupted him by running up to him and wrapped his arms around him.

“When he was still a long way off, his father saw him. His heart pounding, he ran out, embraced him, and kissed him . . .” (Luke 15:20). The father was overcome with compassion, with excitement that his son was back, he covered him with kisses, saying, “I love you, son. Come home and be restored.”

That father did all of this before his son could even complete his confession. The young man was able to blurt out the beginning of his speech. But his father didn’t wait for him to finish. To him, the young man’s sin had already been settled. The father’s only response was to issue an order to his servants: “Put a robe on my son and rings on his fingers. Prepare a feast, because we are going to celebrate. Everyone rejoice, for my son is home!”
All of us have heard that story over and over. We have seen it from inside and out. But for me, I weep every time I read it. Oh, maybe you can’t relate because you have never offended your Heavenly Father or fell away from Him. But when you stand in that sons sandals and realize that your father has washed away your sins—and holds nothing against you—you will understand.
I should remind you that this is not a story for unbelievers. It is a family relationship we are talking about. An unbeliever has never yet experience the love of a Heavenly Father. This story is for those of you who belong in the family of Yehoveh and have fallen away. I am telling you, you can return home any time you are willing, like the son in the story, to repent and fall on your face and ask you Father to forgive you.
When that becomes a reality, you will experience your Father wrapping His loving arms around you . . . and it will blow your mind away. You see, once the son was broken and willing to go home, his sin wasn’t the issue to his father. The only issue on his mind was love. He wanted his boy to know he was accepted, even before he could utter a confession. That is the point God wants to make to all of us: His love is greater than all our sin. “God’s kindness is intended to lead you to repent and accept God’s will” (Romans 2:4).

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