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Government, opposition and public!

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The " criminal act" of petrol price hike that happened late Friday night (November 5), provoked public outrage. The hike was postponed till November 1, but was implemented on the night between November 3 and 4.

Imran Yaqub Khan Profile Imran Yaqub Khan

I am saying it a "criminal act" again and again because it was a routine decision that should have been made in broad daylight, but at 2am in the morning the news broke and the people woke up in the morning to find that a petrol bomb had dropped on them. Now the rise in prices and the pace of inflation is so fast that even the column written on inflation last week before November 5 seems old and this repeated cry is causing boredom.

Apart from petrol prices, electricity rates have also been increased. Basic electricity prices have been increased by Rs1.68 per unit. For commercial and industrial consumers, the price has been increased by Rs 1.39 per unit. For consumers using 300 units, the price of electricity has gone up to Rs13.83 per unit. The government believes that a household using 300 units of electricity is prosperous. And he can afford to raise rates, and if that is true, it would be pointless to talk about it.

Like the people under the news of inflation, the most important news of Friday was also suppressed and this was the news, the report of the Election Commission of Pakistan on the rigging in the by-election of Daska, this report is eye-opener and biggest charge sheet against the PTI government.

The Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) has detected systematic rigging in the NA-75 by-election investigation report. What do they think and do when they come to power, this report has put all the truth in front of them. This report is not limited to the disclosure of fraud but it is a criminal case. Several names have been written in this report but this systematic fraud must be thoroughly investigated. According to the report, the education department, police and district administration, ie the entire government machinery were used in the scam. The mastermind behind the rigging and its full implementation cannot be held responsible alone. Criminal proceedings should be initiated on the basis of this report and the culprits should be identified.

Reading this report, the question arises as to whether those who came with the mission of eradicating corruption have corrupted the entire government machinery. The Deputy Director of Colleges, the Presiding Officer, several officers of the Department of Education and then an army of police officers, all of which could not be managed by a single person. How SHOs remained election managers, police personnel stationed at polling stations continued to kidnap presiding officers instead of security, ignorance of returning officer and deputy returning officer, how many factors and roles are involved in this rigging. The story unfolds in layers.

Playing the role of opposition, the same PTI used to call others as ballot box thieves. Here, the entire election was rigged under the scheme. It will happen and the government will come down with a bang but now their own organized fraud has been proved. Those who call others "box thieves" are now ready for self-accountability.

The opposition's reservations about EVMs, ie electronic voting machines, seem to have come true after this report and the plan to snatch the powers of the Election Commission of Pakistan, this report has exposed the government's intentions. Who will now trust those who bulldoze the opposition and institutions and insist on bringing electronic voting machines? ۔

The political and administrative turmoil in the country over the last four or five weeks has made me think that the PTI government is on a "suicidal mission". Inflation bombs are being set off one after another and when there is a backlash against them, the captain addresses his Wasim Akram Plus (Usman Buzdar): "Whenever they ask you about performance tell them ask us after completion of five-year mandate."   

Someone reminded the captain that if he had any mandate, it was economic justice, justice system, social justice, poverty alleviation, job creation, breaking status, eradicating corruption. The captain has a long list of promises that he may not even remember.

When the captain was saying this to the Chief Minister of Punjab Usman Bazdar, surely Bazdar must have been very encouraged that whoever had to ask me gave both a deal and a relaxation but is there any politician who is surrounded by political and economic challenges? Valuable can boldly reject all these questions under the pretext of a five year mandate ?? These are the evidences on which I believe that the captain and his team are on a mission of political suicide and the captain's advice to Bazdar was apparently a message to someone else.

The role of the opposition in this situation is also deplorable. The people are dying of poverty and inflation but the opposition is not making any effort to change the public mood into a movement. It seems that the opposition is thinking that the government may fall from its own stupidity or carry out the mission of political suicide itself. Perhaps that is why the Leader of the Opposition in the Punjab Assembly and PML-N leader Hamza Shahbaz talking to the media had said that it is the national responsibility of all political parties to find a constitutional way to handle the sinking economy of Pakistan and to get rid of the incumbant government. "

According to political analysts, if the opposition awaits like this, it should know that it will not be possible to get the people out to vote without representing the people. If politicians remain indifferent to the people today, then tomorrow the people will also be indifferent to them and then no one should complain that those who raised the slogan of step up didn't come along.

 

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Technology

In US v. Google, YouTube’s CEO defends the Google way

The Justice Department on Monday grilled YouTube CEO Neal Mohan, who previously worked on Google’s advertising team, on the company’s competitiveness.

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The word of the day in US v. Google was “parking.” As in: did Google buy some of its most ascendant and dangerous competitors in the online advertising business, all the while planning on parking them off in some far-flung corner of the company so that no one could possibly upset Google’s dominance? That is a central question of the government’s entire case against Google, and it came up over and over on Monday morning.

To kick off the second week of the landmark antitrust trial over Google’s control of online advertising, the Department of Justice called Neal Mohan, the CEO of YouTube and a longtime Google advertising executive. Mohan came to Google in 2008 through Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick, which formed the basis of Google’s now-unstoppable advertising engine. Mohan also helped advocate for the acquisition of Admeld, another company at the center of the suit. He argued throughout his testimony that Google was never attempting to buy up and neuter its competitors; it was simply trying to compete.

The Justice Department grilled Mohan on one of the core tenets of its case: that Google has built an impenetrable ad empire by owning all three major parts of the adtech stack, including the system publishers use to offer ad inventory on their pages, the system advertisers use to buy and place ads around the web, and the exchange in the middle where all the buying and selling actually takes place. This empire, lawyers allege, allows no real competition and ultimately makes things worse for all parties involved, Google excepted. And whenever a possible challenger did arise, Google simply bought and shelved — or, perhaps, parked — them.

The “parking” concept came up during Mohan’s two-plus hours of testimony, when Justice Department lawyer Aaron Teitelbaum showed him an email exchange about whether Google should buy Admeld. Admeld used a technology called yield management and was making inroads into the online ad market by letting publishers assess demand from multiple ad exchanges at once.

In those emails, another Google executive wrote that “one way to make sure we don’t get further behind in the market is picking up the [company] with the most traction and parking it somewhere.” Acquiring the company in that way “would let us solve the problems from a position of strength.” In the government’s view, this seemed to be clear evidence that Google was trying to take a threat off the market.

“One way to make sure we don’t get further behind in the market is picking up the [company] with the most traction and parking it somewhere.”

In court, Mohan argued that’s not what “parking” means at all. He acknowledged that Google was interested in Admeld because Admeld was further ahead in development but said Google had no intention of shelving or shuttering the product. “That’s absolutely not what was going on,” he said.

Parking, he explained, refers to Google’s acquiring a company and then letting it operate more or less as before while it also begins to rebuild and integrate into Google’s technology stack. This process takes time — often years — and Mohan said that leaving the products running actually indicates their importance to Google as products and not vanquished enemies.

Mohan argued over and over, occasionally seeming frustrated to have to repeat himself, that Google was simply doing what it had to do to keep up. He told Teitelbaum that the goal was always “to build the best advertising stack for publishers, as well as tools for advertisers.”

In Mohan’s telling, the advertising business has always been fiercely competitive, and companies like Facebook, Microsoft, and Yahoo even attempted to build similarly all-encompassing strategies. Controlling all three parts of the process, he said, is crucial to ensuring that only good ads are placed on only good websites, that everything happens quickly, and that no nefarious actors can cause trouble.

When Jeannie Rhee, one of the attorneys representing Google, began to cross-examine Mohan, she had him reiterate the parking point in several ways. She noted an annual update email Mohan had written to his team in 2008, after the DoubleClick acquisition, in which he compared the integration to “changing the engines on a plane while continuing to fly it.” Rhee had Mohan go through some of the DoubleClick team’s most impressive post-acquisition accomplishments, too, seemingly to show the product was still being actively developed.

Mohan said incorporating startups at Google is like “changing the engines on a plane while continuing to fly it”

Mohan’s testimony offered a fairly straightforward version of the arguments on both sides of this all-important trial. In the government’s eyes, Google has an insurmountable advantage in the ads business, built on the back of illegally tying various products to each other and by buying up any company that even looked like competition. According to Google, though, deep integration is the only way to build great ad products, and its acquisitions have only ever been in service of building better products in a competitive space.

The government has repeatedly presented evidence that it’s nearly impossible to leave Google’s platforms. Switching platforms for any reason is hard, and the prospect of leaving behind Google’s advertiser demand and access to platforms like Search and YouTube makes it untenable. Publishers have also argued that Google’s advertising products aren’t at all impressive. They say they feel stuck. And as the government sees it, Google is happy to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on startups to keep it that way.

In 2011, Google did acquire Admeld, for a reported price above $400 million. (A number, by the way, that the Justice Department argues is far above Google’s actual valuation of the company — allegedly a signal of Google’s willingness to overspend in the name of crushing threats.) The Justice Department briefly investigated the deal at the time but ultimately let it close. Now, the company’s technology is part of Google’s dominant ad exchange, known commonly as AdX. All that’s left of Admeld itself is a Google support page telling publishers why AdX is so great. 

Is that the good kind of parking or the bad and possibly illegal kind? That’s up to Judge Leonie Brinkema. She didn’t have much to say during Monday’s testimony, but everyone in the room acknowledged she’s the only one who matters.

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Pakistan

Punjab Assembly Speaker urges ECP to implement Amended Election Act

He says this is crucial not only for upholding the rule of law

Published by Samiullah Farid

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Lahore: Speaker Punjab Assembly Malik Muhammad Ahmad Khan wrote a letter to the Election Commission of Pakistan, urging the ECP to take note of the legislative amendments made by the Parliament and to ensure that the provisions of the Amended Election Act are implemented fully and without delay.

He said this is crucial not only for upholding the rule of law, but also for maintaining public confidence in our electoral process and institutions.

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Regional

The biggest unanswered questions about the Hezbollah pager attack

Over the past two days, the Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah has been targeted with an attack as sophisticated and audacious as it is brutal, with the devices in their own pockets turned into deadly weapons.  On Tuesday, hundreds of pagers distributed by …

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Over the past two days, the Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah has been targeted with an attack as sophisticated and audacious as it is brutal, with the devices in their own pockets turned into deadly weapons. On Tuesday, hundreds of pagers distributed by Hezbollah to its members and associates in Lebanon and Syria exploded, killing at least 12 people, including two children, and injuring nearly 3,000. Then, in a follow-up attack on Wednesday, thousands of two-way radios used by the group exploded, killing nine people and wounding some 300, some of whom had been attending the funerals of those killed in the earlier attack. There have also been reports of solar energy systems exploding in several areas of Lebanon, but few details have been reported about these incidents. Hezbollah quickly blamed Israel for the attack. While the Israeli government has not yet commented — it rarely comments on covert actions abroad — experts and media reports are generally assuming it was responsible. It’s hard to think of another regional actor with the ability and motivation to carry out such an unprecedented operation. The attack has stunned former intelligence operatives with both its scale and sophistication. “This is a hell of an opp,” Marc Polymeropoulos, a former CIA counterterrorism specialist now with the Atlantic Council, told Vox. “It’s probably the most impressive kinetic intelligence operation I’ve ever seen.” Beyond demonstrating the prowess of the Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, what’s less clear is what this tells us about Israel’s overall strategic goals, not to mention how Hezbollah will respond or how this will impact the outcome of this conflict or conflicts in the future. Here are a few of the biggest outstanding questions and what we know about the answers. How did they do it? The emerging consensus from experts and media reports is that small amounts of explosive material were placed inside the pagers. Some reports have suggested the explosive was detonated by malware that raised the temperature of the batteries in the pagers, but US officials told the New York Times that the devices were also implanted with switches that detonated the explosive remotely. According to the Times, the pagers received simultaneous messages on Tuesday that appeared to be from Hezbollah’s senior leadership, but instead caused the devices to beep for several seconds and then explode. The pagers were from a shipment of 3,000 that Hezbollah says they ordered from Gold Apollo, a Taiwanese company. But Gold Apollo says they were actually made by BAC Consulting, a company based in Hungary, and that the Taiwanese firm merely licensed its design and trademark. Reporters have so far been unable to contact BAC, and former intelligence officials who spoke with Vox said it’s questionable whether the company even makes pagers. Hezbollah had reportedly switched from using cellphones to old-fashioned pagers several months ago to avoid Israeli surveillance. Communications are generally a point of vulnerability for militant groups. Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Hamas’s top leader, Yahya Sinwar, has abandoned electronics entirely and now relies on a system of human couriers and coded handwritten messages for communication. The attack comes several weeks after the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, reportedly by a bomb that had been planted by Israeli agents in a guesthouse in the Iranian capital months earlier. It also comes several days after a rare raid by Israeli ground forces in Syria that destroyed an alleged underground Iranian missile factory. “What we have seen over the past two months shows that Israel and its intelligence apparatus have completely infiltrated the most sensitive echelons of the entire Axis of Resistance,” said Charles Lister, senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, referring to the informal name for Iran’s network of proxy militias throughout the Middle East. It was only a year ago when the reputation of Israel’s intelligence services took a major hit with the failure to anticipate the October 7 attacks, despite abundant signs that Hamas was preparing for a major operation. It’s worth noting that while the operations in Lebanon and Iran were likely carried out by the Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence service, Israeli-occupied Gaza is the responsibility of the Shin Bet, the domestic security service. The Shin Bet official responsible for Southern Israel and Gaza resigned over that failure, as have two senior military intelligence officials. Polymeropoulos said that while October 7 damaged the reputation of Israel’s vaunted spy services, “they have now restored that notion of deterrence based on fear, this notion that Israel has eyes everywhere.” Why did they do it? Emily Harding, a former CIA analyst and director of the Intelligence, National Security, and Technology Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, noted that prior to October 7, Israel had shifted many of its intelligence resources away from Hamas toward Iran and regional proxy groups like Hezbollah. Over the past year, attention has obviously shifted to Gaza, she said, “but at the same time, they’ve clearly decided they’re not going to tolerate an imminent threat on their northern border” with Lebanon. Even as the war in Gaza has raged, Israel and Hezbollah have been exchanging fire over the Israel-Lebanon border, displacing tens of thousands of civilians on both sides. While Israel reportedly backed away from plans to launch a major preemptive strike against Hezbollah in the early days of the war, senior Israeli officials, most notably Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, have repeatedly said that a military assault will be needed to deal with the threat on Israel’s northern border. Earlier this week, Israel’s security cabinet added restoring security to the north as one of its primary war aims. Without referring specifically to the pager and walkie-talkie attacks, Gallant said on Wednesday that a “new phase” of the war with Hezbollah had begun. The question now is whether the attacks were launched as preparation for some major military action, or whether — contradictory as it may seem — this was conceived as a way to de-escalate tensions by putting Hezbollah on its heels, at least for a little while. For the moment, this second possibility looks more likely. Despite Gallant’s declaration, Israel doesn’t appear to be taking advantage of the chaos in Lebanon to launch a military invasion. It’s also possible that the timing of the attack wasn’t intentional at all. The Middle East-focused news site Al-Monitor reported on Tuesday that Israel had intended to wait longer to detonate the devices but was “forced” to move more quickly by reports that some Hezbollah members were starting to think there was something odd about their pagers. How will Hezbollah respond? Hezbollah has vowed to retaliate, saying Israel would receive its “fair punishment for the attacks.” The militia’s leader Hassan Nasrallah says he will give a speech on Thursday to address the “latest developments.” But Hezbollah’s ability to strike back may be limited by the state of chaos it currently finds itself in. “They almost certainly have little to no communication or the infrastructure to be able to coordinate not just an initial round of a retaliation, but whatever would come next,” said Lister. Harding predicted that Hezbollah’s next move is likely to be a “big internal mole hunt to try to figure out where their vulnerabilities are.” After the follow-up explosions on Thursday, “they can’t trust anything that they have right now.” Iran, whose ambassador to Lebanon was among those injured by the blasts — not a huge surprise given the close links between Iran and Hezbollah — has also claimed the right to respond. The question is whether this would go beyond the missile strike it launched in April in response to Israel’s bombing of the Iranian consulate, which killed two senior generals. Though that barrage was unprecedented in scale, most of the missiles were intercepted by Israel’s defenses, with the assistance of several other countries including the US, and the attack caused little damage. Iran President Masoud Pezeshkian also said the US shared responsibility for the attack, given its support for Israel, though Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the US had no advance knowledge of the operation. What does it mean for the future of conflict — and is my phone safe? The Washington Post’s David Ignatius wrote on Wednesday that the attacks mark the start of a “very dangerous era in cyberwarfare” in which “any device that is connected to the internet can potentially be transformed into a weapon.” But some perspective is needed. The devices themselves were not weapons. Hackers have warned in the past that it’s possible to use malware to remotely tamper with or even detonate a device’s battery, but to cause the kind of damage seen this week, you need old-fashioned explosives. As a matter of technology, this isn’t a huge advance over Israel’s killing of Hamas bomb maker Yahya Ayyash using an exploding cellphone in 1996. From a technical point of view, what was impressive was Israel’s apparent ability to “hack” the supply chain and insert explosives into so many devices. There probably aren’t that many situations other than this one where that’s possible. As Axios’s Colin Demarest writes, referring to worries that the US could be vulnerable to such an attack, “the Pentagon is unlikely to buy thousands of C-4-laden pagers for top brass.” Your iPhone is probably safe, too. But this week’s attacks represent something radically new in terms of tactics, if not technology. In international law, “booby traps” are prohibited under many circumstances, and given how many devices were detonated and the fact that civilians, including children, were injured and killed, there are questions about whether the attack met international legal standards. And then there’s the issue of whether other actors — either nation-states or militant groups — might now attempt something similar in the future. Colin Clarke, director of research at the Soufan Group, a think tank focused on counterterrorism, compared the attack to the early use of deadly drone strikes by the US. Once mainly the provenance of the US, killer drones have now spread widely to both state and non-state actors. Wars like the current conflict in the Middle East are “often laboratories of innovation for all sides,” Clarke said. “We’re going to see militant groups developing new tricks and trying to leverage emerging technologies in new ways.” Given the vast number of connected devices now in homes and businesses all over the world, there’s no lack of potential targets. Even if it would be difficult for anyone to pull off another similar attack of this scale, Clarke said it’s the sort of precedent-setting example that “could give bad people good ideas.” Few things spread faster than innovative ways to kill people in war.
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