₦airaland Forum

he most exciting part of Friday's 50-49 double-overtime game between Royal (Simi Valley, Calif.) occurred during halftime, when one lucky fan was given the chance to kick a 40-yard field goal to win a Chevy Camaro.

Invictus Igwe, who opted into the drawing by sending a text message to a special number, thought he was being pranked when he received a call that he had been selected to attempt the kick. He practically thought he was dreaming after his kick sailed through the uprights and his Vans Pro Era shoe landed not far behind.

"I didn't even realize I didn't have one shoe until I got back over to the sideline," Igwe told USA TODAY Sports. "I still can't believe it. I called my mom and she started crying. It was the biggest blessing ever."

If it looked like Igwe had done this before, it's because he had, as a kicker at Kennedy (Granada Hills, Calif.) High School.

Igwe, who graduated from Kennedy in 2007 and will turn 25 next month, is a specialist at the Apple store and a fitness instructor at the YMCA in Simi Valley. He previously served as a volunteer assistant coach at Simi Valley and attends as many games as he can.


"I was nervous because I hadn't kicked a football in years and I've gained about 70 pounds since I graduated," Igwe said. "I almost passed out."

But when he approached the ball, he discovered that kicking field goals is a bit like riding a bike.

"It was like being back in high school," Igwe said. "I did my normal routine. Three steps back, two steps to the right, deep breath, hips at a 45-degree angle."

Igwe, who says his 2010 Honda Civic is a "perfectly functional car," elected to take the $20,000 cash prize option instead of the Camaro. He'll have to pay taxes on his winnings, but he said he plans to use the remainder to pay off his debt, open a savings account, invest, and take care of his mom back in Texas. He intends to re-enroll at Moorpark College next semester and has aspirations of attending Stanford.


"I'm going to enjoy it smartly," Igwe said of his prize.

Igwe has kicked important field goals before -- he recalled a two-point victory over Palmdale in 2005 -- but none were like his most recent kick.

"There was no pressure like the one I kicked Friday," he said.

SOURCE: http://socialhub.usatodayhss.com/component/k2/item/1003-invictus-igwe-field-goal-wins-20k-camaro

Unilorin dons break major biometric machine riddle


A team of engineers at the University of Ilorin has produced a prototype biometric machine that is capable of eliminating a major deficiency encountered by imported machines.

The team leader, Prof. Tunji Samuel Ibiyemi of the Electrical and Electronics Engineering Department, said that with the use of local content, the researchers have been able to unravel the challenge of the inability of the imported biometric machine to adequately recognise physical features of black people.

Prof. Ibiyemi disclosed that imported solutions to the challenges of impersonation, economic fraud, multiple voting, examination malpractices, election rigging, and security challenge do not work optimally among black people as they do among white people, adding that “what we have just produced one that works better for blacks.”

The don, whose research effort was sponsored by the World Bank-assisted Science and Technology Education Post-Basic (Step-B) Project, explained that “this lack of local content in the making of the machines we use for vital national assignments perhaps explain why government efforts on projects like e-voting, national identity card scheme, security intelligence on criminal citizens had not been yielding enough fruits.”
Prof. Ibiyemi led a team of three other researchers, Prof. J. Sadiku of Computer Science Department, Dr. S. A. Aliu and Dr. I. O. Avazi of Electrical and Electronics Engineering Department, to study ‘Biometric Signal Processing for Personal Application and Forensic Application’.

The Professor of Electrical and Electronics Engineering said, “An average Chinese recognises Chinese people more easily. Likewise, Americans know one another better. When I was in Britain, any black person could pick any of his friend’s identity card and go anywhere across the country unfettered. Those working at the airports will confirm to you that you need local people to identify one another.

“Most imported machines don’t recognise tribal marks. These machines raise alarm when they see a masked face. But what we have produced can recognise tribal marks, faces that are masked and faces that are disguised using cosmetics.”
Prof. Ibiyemi pointed out that the machines developed by his team are not only more cost-effective than their imported equivalents, they are also more functionally efficient. He said, “For instance, after our proposal was approved for funding and we were experiencing delays in accessing the money, we funded the development of a locally made Iris Scanner at N60, 000. But when we eventually got money to buy this equipment, we got it for N400, 000 (that is 2,500 US dollars). And the former produces sharper and clearer images than the latter.”
He explained further, “Besides this, we used machines (computers) to recognise the human face, human iris, finger prints, toe prints and sole prints. We worked on speaker and speech recognition, signature verification and hand writing verification.

“What we found is amazing. For example, using any of these parameters, we can get different patterns of iris, fingerprints, toeprints, soleprints that differentiate the 14 billion people in the world. No two persons have the same pattern for any of these parameters. In fact, the left iris pattern for an individual is different from the right side for the same individual. Similarly, the thumb print is different from the index fingerprint for each person and so on.

“No website is available within Africa for biometric data on black people. Foreign data are populated by white people. We needed black people’s data to work with, so we started our own website-www.unilorin.edu.ng/step-b/biometrics.
“We collected over one million fingerprints, 600,000 toeprints, 200 soleprints, and 374 latent fingerprints. The website is hosted in Italy. We also went to the home of lepers and took 200 soleprints. When we brought them to the laboratory, we discovered that it is easier to recognise people through their soleprints than through their fingerprints.

“Our fingerprint equipment will identify each individual. We can detect multiple voting. There are five groupings of finger prints. Using one million samples, we compared our result with US-based Federal Bureau of Intelligence (FBI) result,” he said.

http://tribune.com.ng/news2013/index.php/en/component/k2/item/22999-unilorin-dons-break-major-biometric-machine-riddle.html

IYA NGBALI: you are very correct it is against protocol and the guys there were scared to tell him,however this country is a jungle and he is the king of the jungle so anything goes

If you notice, you'll see that the way they placed his chair, he had no option but to stand on the seal. I think the blame should go to the protocol officers and the organisers. The seal should have been a foot away or so from him.

I noticed in one of the pics that the president stood ON the coat of arms...Is this right? Even though its his seal of office, it still carries the Nigerian coat of arms. My assumption is that nobody is supposed to stand on such a symbol. I am aware that recently fans of an American football club took offence at Justin Bieber for standing on their teams seal. If its not allowed in an ordinary club, should it be done on a sovereign nations seal?

Please those who are versed in diplomatic and presidential protocol, can you educate and clarify?

Some guys have even come up with a way to bypass the 4 digit code.

See Video, after showing how to do the fingerprint bypass, the guy now showed how to bypass the code and access the device.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baio0qUj2Lk

Already they have sold over 2 million units. I don't know why Apple with its uninspiring design and flawed OS should be this successful whilst blackberry whose new OS and design was hailed is about to go private. I guess its not really about having a good product anymore, its more of the hype that you can generate about your product

Another beautiful article by Segun Adeniyi, I always admire his balanced views, which is in great contrast to most writers who unashamedly take a biased stand on issues.

The Olu of Warri and His God


“Henceforth, I submit and present the title ‘ogiame’ to God, the creator, who made the sea and rules over all. Therefore, no Olu or person may bear the title or name that now belongs to God. I nullify all tokens of libation poured on the land and seas or sprinkled into the air in Iwere land. I frustrate all sacrifices of wine, blood, food, water, kola nuts and other items offered in Iwere land. In conformity with the new covenant, through the blood of Jesus, I release the royal bloodline, the chiefs of the Iwere kingdom, the Iwere people and land, waters and atmosphere of Iwere kingdom from all ties to other spiritual covenants and agreements.”

With the foregoing royal proclamation, the Olu of Warri, Atuwase II, recently decreed a stop to some ancient customs of the Warri Kingdom after publicly renouncing the traditional name ‘Ogiame’. The Olu also vowed to replace all the rituals and practices that do not conform with his new faith in Jesus Christ. But the royal father did not have the last word on the matter as he met a stiff challenge from a cross-section of Itsekiri people who called for his dethronement. By the third day of what was almost becoming a violent protest, several youths and women had erected canopies and were cooking in front of the palace gate.


However, following the intervention of the Delta State governor, Dr. Emmanuel Uduaghan, himself an Itsekiri man, the traditional ruler (who happens to be a staunch member of the Foursquare Gospel Church), had to annul his own decree for peace to reign. And with the crisis resolved, a thanksgiving service was held last Sunday with the crème-de-la-crème of the Itsekiri nation, including Governor Uduaghan, (who came with his deputy, Prof. Amos Utuama (SAN), Speaker of the state House of Assembly, Mr. Victor Ochei, and a large number of senior government officials) in attendance.


While it is noteworthy that Governor Uduaghan and other prominent Itsekiri sons and daughters were able to rally to put out the fire that could have had far-reaching consequences on the peace in Warri Kingdom, a most pertinent question remains as to whether indeed the Olu could unilaterally reject the title ‘ogiame’ which represents the ancient identity, custom, heritage and symbol of the people over whom he presides. This question is worth interrogating in view of the fact that what the royal father sought to jettison without due process were established values and deep-rooted beliefs of his people which have persisted over generations--traditions over which he was appointed to serve as custodian.


I find the Warri Kingdom crisis fascinating because it speaks to the tension between Pentecostal Christianity and tradition, especially in our country and Richard Niebuhr’s highly revealing book, “Christ and Culture”, perhaps opens some window of understanding. To demonstrate how Christians have attempted to deal with the challenge of their faith against the background of old beliefs and customs, Niebuhr identifies five approaches which he listed as: Christ against Culture; The Christ of Culture; Christ above Culture; Christ and Culture in Paradox and Christ the Transformer of Culture.


Unfortunately, the Pentecostalism that has been embraced in Nigeria today fits into the paradigm of “Christ against Culture”, a notion which rejects all the traditional African mores as archaic, backward and evil. The presupposition is that those traditions belong to some sinister gods that need to be dropped for us to prosper materially and spiritually. For that reason, many Nigerian Christians have had to change their names based on the theology that those names were dedicated to some ancestral spirits whose yokes would have to be broken for them to be free from poverty, disease and curse. While expressions of faith differ from one denomination to another, the preponderance of opinion among pastors is that our traditional heritages (sometimes including priceless artifacts, dating back to centuries) are hindrances to our faith and callings as believers hence we have to do away with them. It is within that context that we can situate the spiritual edict which got the Olu of Warri into trouble.


Now, I must make something clear: I am also a Pentecostal Christian--even with all my failings and imperfections--and I understand that one cannot serve the true God and still be worshipping idols. But I have problem with a faith that is expressed in symbolisms and even superstitions. For instance, I have listened to several songs and messages that the economic and political problems which plague our nation today can be traced to our hosting of FESTAC in 1977 during which, as the tale goes, several countries came to dump their Satanic gods on our land. Not only do I believe there was nothing wrong in our hosting FESTAC, I see no correlation between it and our inability as a nation to harness our enormous potentials for the advancement of our society.


The Warri incident is instructive because there is a constitutional dimension to it which in itself can be considered within the context of the Christian faith. The Olu for instance already has a Church within the palace and it is not on record that his people quarrel with that; so the attempt to change the tradition under which he came to power is not only wrong but indeed self-serving. Like all positions of authority, there are sacred rules that bind the leader to the community and that explains why in other climes, Kings have been known to abdicate their thrones whenever there are irreconsiliable conflicts between personal convictions (which sometimes include the love of certain women) and the traditional order.


In the particular case of Warri, the matter is even simple. If the Olu can demonstrate the true essence of his faith and his subjects could see the evidence in his deeds, perhaps he could gradually reform some of the traditions without the public drama that almost ended in hubris. The problem I see, however, is that such public profession of political Christianity has become the vogue. I have read of a minister who holds a strategic portfolio under the current administration who also doubles as the General Overseer of a Church he founded. Even if we choose to ignore the several issues begging for clarification in such God-Mammon portfolio, the question must be asked as to whether his faith is reflected in his stewardship as a public official.


But before we digress, what many fail to understand is that in order to develop our country and uplift our people, we need to burnish our cultural identity while adopting the instruments and methods of scientific civilisation. However, a fuller exploration of the issues will take us to the place of symbols in belief systems; the essential privacy of religion and indeed the tricky point of how all these intersect to sustain public order and social peace. To that extent, the peaceful resolution of the clash between the Olu of Warri’s private Christian belief and the imperatives of his public cultural symbolism as a traditional monarch speaks volumes to the rest of us.


Religion as an aspect of culture thrives on symbols and rituals. Pentecostalism of course rejects the rites of the traditional Christian churches as it is founded on the redemption work of Christ on the Cross of Calvary. But I remain unconvinced that salvation is also a function of cultural suicide. For me, there is nothing that should preclude a traditional ruler from being a disciple of Christ as well as an authentic symbol of the culture of his people. This is the crux of a debate that is waiting to be inaugurated.

SOURCE: http://www.thisdaylive.com/articles/the-olu-of-warri-and-his-god/159325/

Saintjoel, no luck with the BMW 3 Series? A friend would like to know how much it would cost to buy and clear a Mazda 323F Auto and Manual.

Hi Femmy,

Please how much would it cost to clear a Mazda 323F 1999/2000/2001? (Estate)

Thanks in anticipation

saintjoel: Sir,sking price for 2000 corolla is 800K+140K(custom duty charges).

Wil give you updates about the 3 series later.

Hi Saintjoel, still waiting for your response on the 2001 BMW 3 Series

For those saying Eto'o is old material.

Here is a clip of some of his goals at Anzhi, premiership defenders should know that they have a problem on their hands now.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFxnacrCkeM

Wooooow!!!!

I LOOOOVE Etoo. I believe he is one of the very few COMPLETE strikers left in the world. That guy can play almost any position and score any type of goal,he can shoot, he dribbles,he can score with headers, he has speed... If you don't feed him, he can work out opportunities from the midfield. The guy is just too much.

I A̶̲̥̅♏ a Barca fan, and I can't forget the spectacular goals he scored for Barca.

Honestly, just because of this move I just have to support Chelsea for the premiership this season.

Hi Saintjoel

Reading about Y̶̲̥̅̊o̶̲̥̅̊Your reputation here, I would like to find out how much it would cost to buy these cars in coutonou and how much it would cost to clear them

1999 and 2000 Toyota Corolla

2001 BMW 3 series

A nice one by Segun Adeniyi. This goes especially to those who go about spewing hatred on Nairaland.


The young Yoruba man was leaving office early to go and receive his visiting Igbo wife undergoing her National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) primary assignment in a neighbouring town when he encountered a co-worker who planted in him the seed of doubts that eventually destroyed a beautiful union and set his own life crashing down. The careless remark that would play in his head again and again was that he was being naive to believe that his wife would remain faithful, especially considering that “she is young, she is a corper…and she is Igbo!”

The predilection to stereotype and label people by blaming the conduct of one person on an entire group he or she belongs (whether by age, class or ethnicity) is for me the central message in Tunde Kelani’s movie, “Magun” (Thunderbolt). It speaks to a time like this in our nation when some Yoruba and Igbo irridentists are promoting hate speech in the name of a meaningless superiority war that glorifies some distorted accounts of the past.

The cast of the movie written by Professor Akinwunmi Isola included seasoned professionals like Adebayo Faleti, Buki Ajayi, Uche Obi-Osotule, Lanre Balogun, Wale Macauley, Ngozi Nwosu and the late Dr. Larinde Akinleye. The story is woven around Ngozi, (played by Uche, one of Nigeria’s most versatile and adored actresses who for some inexplicable reasons doesn’t feature much in Nollywood) and Yinka (played by Lanre Balogun). The duo met and fell in love at the NYSC orientation camp.

With the insinuation that an Igbo woman could not be trusted and feeling rather insecure and jealous--notwithstanding the fact that he actually met his wife a virgin--Yinka eventually sought the diabolical power of “Magun”- the mysterious chastity control which instantly terminates the life of any man who dares to “climb” a straying wife. The snag though is that if the woman played no “away game” within a certain period while still being laced with “Magun” she stood the risk of death. Being a faithful wife, it was Ngozi’s life that was in danger in the movie.

Magun is fatal and remedies are rare and often not foolproof. So the efforts to break its life-threatening effect on Ngozi provided the entertainment and the drama of existence captured in the movie. But in the final analysis, Ngozi’s redemption came from the family of her irresponsible Yoruba husband, the Yoruba native doctors, her local Yoruba guardian and finally the love-struck Yoruba medical doctor who offered himself as a guinea pig to test the efficacy of “Magun” on the altar of a five-minute enjoyment. He was lucky to survive with an experience he would never forget!

When her tribulation was over and she was confronted with the prospect of another Yorubaman as suitor, Ngozi, quite naturally, was hesitant but her father, who started out as a Yoruba antagonist, saved the day by advising her to follow her heart. He said it would be wrong to blame a whole ethnic group for the misconduct of one man, before giving us that memorable line: “A man is a man; and a race is a race”.

About four weeks ago, the Lagos State Government “deported” some people to Onitsha in furtherance of its ill-conceived policy to rid the state of destitute. But despite that the action (which is targeted at vulnerable people within our society regardless of their ethnicity) has been condemned by many, including Yoruba people, some Igbo politicians would not let the facts get in the way of an opportunity for opportunism; they termed it a deliberate action against their kinsmen. To compound the situation, some “Yoruba defenders” would also latch on to it to tell some imaginary tales about the superiority of their ethnic group. And with that, we now have a war on the internet as to who between the Yoruba and Igbo can abuse, slander or curse more than the other.

It is obvious that because our nation has not succeeded in establishing effective mechanisms to maximize the potentials in our diversity, our fault lines are ever exposed. But our leaders will do well to strengthen ethnic harmony and national unity by safeguarding and protecting equal rights of all citizens, regardless of their status or where they come from. In the absence of such guarantee of social and economic rights for all, it is no surprise that our people have become easily susceptible to the antics of political manipulators who deploy ethnicity to advance their own careers.

I am an admirer of Governor Babatunde Raji Fashola but I believe that his approach to dealing with vulnerable people in Lagos State is wrong-headed; and as it has been most eloquently pointed out by Mr Femi Falana, SAN, clearly unconstitutional. I also think he could have handled better the complaints from the Anambra State Governor, Mr Peter Obi. However, that is also no excuse for some people to make provocative statements about Lagos being a “No-Man’s-land” or parrot one-sided accounts of the civil war to rain invectives on the late Chief Obafemi Awolowo with a view to provoking reactions from Yoruba people. While I have no problem with whoever would fault Awo’s judgement on some of the critical decisions he made in the course of the war as then Finance Minister (which should always be open to debate, especially since he took personal responsibility for the choices he made), I have problems with anybody using that to stigmatise his person or the entire Yoruba people. Within the same context, I consider it unacceptable and indeed reckless that any Yorubaman would libel, insult or abuse the Igbo people to make any silly points.

However, what worries me is not so much the antics of some Igbo and Yoruba juvenile adults who spend valuable time on the internet trading diatribes but rather the dangerous seeds they are sowing for our children who read many of the intemperate postings which paint a distorted picture of who we really are. For instance, I have Igbo friends who if anything happens within their families I would be one of the first persons to be contacted. This bond of trust is also reciprocated by my family who care less about the ethnicity of those friends. Even at that, I am also aware that this sort of relationships goes beyond the personal to the political arena, notwithstanding all the posturing to the contrary.

One of the most memorable assignments I covered as a reporter with the defunct Concord newspapers in the nineties was the burial in Ikorodu, Lagos, of the late Chief Adeniran Ogunsanya. I had never witnessed anything like that before or after when thousands of people (including the high and mighty) from another ethnic group would rally to bury someone who is not their kinsman. But that is because they considered him their kinsman; which then strengthens the argument of Dr Chika Ezeanya in her recent brilliant thesis on the issue and supports the message in ‘Magun’: a man is a man; a race is a race.

There are critical issues facing our nation today that should task us, beyond the infantile debate as to which ethnic group produced the first person to eat ‘ponmo’ in Nigeria! For instance, ASUU has been on strike for several weeks now but that is not generating debate because the children of almost anybody that is somebody in Nigeria today are either in private universities at home or schooling abroad. Unfortunately, that speaks to the current issue. Three days after Lagos dumped the destitute in Onitsha, it was reported that one of them had died. The question to ask is: what were they still doing under the bridge? What has happened to the remaining of those unfortunates on whose behalf we all make noise? I will not be surprised if they are still under Onitsha bridge, left to their fate for the same reason that the Lagos State Government deported them in the first place: because they are poor, homeless people who live on the margin of society!

This “Igbo this, Yoruba that” argument is unhelpful and detracts from what should be the focus of our attention. I believe it will serve us well if we return to what the real issue is, or at least should be: Whether they are Igbo, Hausa or Yoruba and regardless of their “state of origin”, no Nigerian should be discriminated against in any part of the country on account of his or her social status. It is time we put an end to the on-going nonsensical debate between some Igbo and Yoruba commentators and face the real issues of poverty, development and national unity.

http://www.thisdaylive.com/articles/yoruba-igbo-and-media-warriors/156884/

please pics to crispgg@gmail.com

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Lead Consultants (FICO) at C2G Consulting
The following vacancies at C2G Consulting
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Job Responsibilities
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Demonstrate broad knowledge of C2G’s entire solution suite
Conduct regular status meetings with customers to resolve issues and requirements.
Deploy the requisite expertise in a timely and efficient manner to ensure access to the best available resources.
Define the implementation approach / methodology, program management tools and standards for the program.
Work Experience
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Candidates should send CV's to iarowosaye@c2gconsulting.com and include Lead Consultant(FICO) as the subject of the mail.
Deadline: 27 August, 2013

GenBuhari: ^
Many athletes compete in long jump and 100m and it does not impact there performance in the 100m.

Carl Lewis and Jesse Owens, Marion Jones both won gold medals in Long Jump, 100m and 200m.

Blessing is simply a choker in the major 100m finals.

Lets hope she could get her nerves under control for the 200m

General, you would notice from my posts that I mentioned

1. Very few and highly exceptional athletes have had any success in competing in the long jump, 100m and 200m at the same time. You were only able to mention three of those above.

2. They did so only at the olympics which lasts for like a month, hence they had ample time between the events to recover. The world athletics championship is just for two weeks, the schedule is just a day apart. Ask any athlete anywhere, they will tell you its not possible.

All sporting events have become highly competitive and technical these days, you have to be at the very top of your game to win any event. That is why lots of athletes prefer to concentrate on one or two events. Come to think of it, why has Bolt never participated in the long jump? He has the height and physical attributes for it. If it were in the 80's or the 90's, I assure you, Bolt would have been competing in that event too.

Like I said earlier, I blame her coaches who have failed to update themselves and provided her with the edge she needed to win.

Blessing messed up cause of the long jump event she participated in. There is no way you would finish such an event without being sore for a day or two, then in the 100m, she came up against fresh athletes who had not participated in any event.

For those of you who are saying she should have recovered or that other athletes have done same in the past, note that only one or two highly exceptional athletes can combine field events with track and make significant impact, also such events are only combined in competitions such as the olympics where you have a long break inbetween events.

At the world championships, she did the long jump and almost immediately did the heats for the 200metres. I knew there was trouble once I saw her qualifying time for the finals and she even tried not coming last.

Now at the 200m events, she will be coming up against athletes who are still fresh and haven't done any event, she has already done two events...only God knows if she can get anything out of this too.

I seriously blame her coaching team for this, they should have insisted she concentrated on the 100 and 200m, I've always had doubts about the quality of her coaching staff because they have failed to improve her sprint starta and even her landing in the long jump events was horrible....If she had been well trained in that, she would have had a gold medal.

I stopped using Dettol since I discovered Savlon.

The horrible after smell of dettol and septol is not there. So I don't have to go around smelling like a living dettol advert

Hi Chrisvicmall,

I want to buy some products and have it shipped by you but Im confused by the instructions on your site.

I registered but I did not get the confirmation mail.

How do I buy products, ensure that I can use the aliexpress escrow system and still have it shipped by you.

I would appreciate if you could give simple step by step directions on how to go about this.

I thought huffingtonpost does only fake news? or am I wrong

Here is the video


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqe6S6m73Zw

I came across this article on Yahoo and my heart skipped a beat. You just have to read through this and imagine what this could mean in terms of security for highly placed individuals. It could mean trying to rig an explosive on a vehicle to murder somebody or buying an armoured vehicle is totally unnecessary.

Just get a hacker to hack into the car and drive your target into a ravine or ditch at high speed.

http://autos.yahoo.com/news/hackers-reveal-nasty-new-car-attacks--with-me-behind-the-wheel--video--010808189.html?page=all

SStomping on the brakes of a 3,500-pound Ford Escape that refuses to stop–or even slow down–produces a unique feeling of anxiety. In this case it also produces a deep groaning sound, like an angry water buffalo bellowing somewhere under the SUV’s chassis. The more I pound the pedal, the louder the groan gets–along with the delighted cackling of the two hackers sitting behind me in the backseat.

Luckily, all of this is happening at less than 5mph. So the Escape merely plows into a stand of 6-foot-high weeds growing in the abandoned parking lot of a South Bend, Ind. strip mall that Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek have chosen as the testing grounds for the day’s experiments, a few of which are shown in the video below. (When Miller discovered the brake-disabling trick, he wasn’t so lucky: The soccer-mom mobile barreled through his garage, crushing his lawn mower and inflicting $150 worth of damage to the rear wall.)

“Okay, now your brakes work again,” Miller says, tapping on a beat-up MacBook connected by a cable to an inconspicuous data port near the parking brake. I reverse out of the weeds and warily bring the car to a stop. “When you lose faith that a car will do what you tell it to do,” he adds after we jump out of the SUV, “it really changes your whole view of how the thing works.”

This fact, that a car is not a simple machine of glass and steel but a hackable network of computers, is what Miller and Valasek have spent the last year trying to demonstrate. Miller, a 40-year-old security engineer at Twitter, and Valasek, the 31-year-old director of security intelligence at the Seattle consultancy IOActive, received an $80,000-plus grant last fall from the mad-scientist research arm of the Pentagon known as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to root out security vulnerabilities in automobiles.

The duo plans to release their findings and the attack software they developed at the hacker conference Defcon in Las Vegas next month–the better, they say, to help other researchers find and fix the auto industry’s security problems before malicious hackers get under the hoods of unsuspecting drivers. The need for scrutiny is growing as cars are increasingly automated and connected to the Internet, and the problem goes well beyond Toyota and Ford. Practically every American carmaker now offers a cellular service or Wi-Fi network like General Motors’ OnStar, Toyota’s Safety Connect and Ford’s SYNC. Mobile-industry trade group the GSMA estimates revenue from wireless devices in cars at $2.5 billion today and projects that number will grow tenfold by 2025. Without better security it’s all potentially vulnerable, and automakers are remaining mum or downplaying the issue.

As I drove their vehicles for more than an hour, Miller and Valasek showed that they’ve reverse-engineered enough of the software of the Escape and the Toyota Prius (both the 2010 model) to demonstrate a range of nasty surprises: everything from annoyances like uncontrollably blasting the horn to serious hazards like slamming on the Prius’ brakes at high speeds. They sent commands from their laptops that killed power steering, spoofed the GPS and made pathological liars out of speedometers and odometers. Finally they directed me out to a country road, where Valasek showed that he could violently jerk the Prius’ steering at any speed, threatening to send us into a cornfield or a head-on collision. “Imagine you’re driving down a highway at 80 ,” Valasek says. “You’re going into the car next to you or into oncoming traffic. That’s going to be bad times.”



A Ford spokesman says the company takes hackers “very seriously,” but Toyota, for its part, says it isn’t impressed by Miller and Valasek’s stunts: Real carhacking, the company’s safety manager John Hanson argues, wouldn’t require physically jacking into the target car. “Our focus, and that of the entire auto industry, is to prevent hacking from a remote wireless device outside of the vehicle,” he writes in an e-mail, adding that Toyota engineers test its vehicles against wireless attacks. “We believe our systems are robust and secure.”

Anatomy of an auto hack: With just a laptop connected to its diagnostics port, Valasek and Miller turned an innocent Prius into the world's worst amusement park ride. Here what they could do.



But Miller and Valasek’s work assumed physical access to the cars’ computers for a reason: Gaining wireless access to a car’s network is old news. A team of researchers at the University of Washington and the University of California, San Diego, experimenting on a sedan from an unnamed company in 2010, found that they could wirelessly penetrate the same critical systems Miller and Valasek targeted using the car’s OnStar-like cellular connection, Bluetooth bugs, a rogue Android app that synched with the car’s network from the driver’s smartphone or even a malicious audio file on a CD in the car’s stereo system. “Academics have shown you can get remote code execution,” says Valasek, using hacker jargon for the ability to start running commands on a system. “We showed you can do a lot of crazy things once you’re inside.”

One of the UCSD professors involved in those earlier tests, Stefan Savage, claims that wireless hacks remain possible and affect the entire industry: Given that attacks on driving systems have yet to be spotted outside of a lab, manufacturers simply haven’t fully secured their software, he says. “The vulnerabilities that we found were the kind that existed on PCs in the early to mid-1990s, when computers were first getting on the Internet,” says Savage.

As cars approach Google’s dream of passenger-carrying robots, more of their capabilities also become potentially hackable. Miller and Valasek exploited Toyota’s and Ford’s self-parking functions, for instance, to hijack their vehicles’ steering. A car like the 2014 Mercedes Benz S-Class, which can negotiate stop-and-go traffic or follow a leader without input, may offer a hacker even more points of attack, says Gartner Group analyst Thilo Koslowski. “The less the driver is involved, the more potential for failure when bad people are tampering with it,” he says.

In the meantime, Miller and Valasek argue that the best way to pressure car companies to secure their products is to show exactly what can be done with a multi-ton missile on wheels. Better to experience the panic of a digitally hijacked SUV now than when a more malicious attacker is in control. “If the only thing keeping you from crashing your car is that no one is talking about this,” says Miller, “then you’re not safe anyway.”

The post from that blog is totally not credible. I also expect that Pastor to be more discerning. I can call anybody I want with any number, claim to be anybody on the face of the planet and try to blackmail you.

I have had the same happen to me, some 419ers called me, mentioned my full name, where I worked, claimed to be policemen. They claimed to be investigating a case against me and wanted me to settle them in order to bury the case. I just ignored them.

Then the blogger who did this write up is just looking for cheap publicity, he did a write up based on an accusation by a Pastor, and linked it to a honest post by Linda who wanted to thank her fans and at the same time dispell various rumours.

Blessing Okagbare a short while ago won the long jump event at the IAAF diamond league event in Monaco with a jump of 7.04

Okagbare did not participate in the 200m event which was won by the Ivorien runner (forgot her name). Shelly Ann Frasier Price came third.

Congrats to Blessing again. She leads the long jump league standings now.

crispgg: Anybody knows where I can get this phone in Abuja?

I went around Banex plaza in Abuja yesterday looking for this phone in vain.
So I went online and found it available at parktelonline website for 15k. Didn't even know they had a shop at Banex plaza, went there to pick it up today. My wife was like wow! Beautiful phone for so cheap? She even joked about giving me her BB for it.

Anybody knows where I can get this phone in Abuja?

Is he missing? Do they have a warrant for his arrest? If yes why don't they just go to his house and pick him up?

Nigerian Police, just declare anything wanted even if its right there on top of their nose.

I hate this program, I believe its racist.
The scene where she played a nurse, there is a picture of a gorilla holding a banana on the wall. And she was making whooping sounds like a monkey.

I have seen some reviews online where people have also complained of this.

This is outrageous

But Nigeria....nobody will listen

In our country the obvious first consideration for most people in choosing a car to buy is Toyota or Honda.

Since we swear by the reliability of Japanese cars, I've always wondered why the other Japanese auto's are not making a headway in Nigeria.

Apart from the huge number of Toyota and Honda Sedans that we see on our roads, you can count on your fingertips the other Japanese cars you will see driving around.

Where are the Subaru's, Mitsubishi's, Nissan, Mazda, Suzuki, Isuzu's, Daihatsu's?

Or have our mechanics also labelled them as no go areas?

akintun: Dis is d second time in one week dat she is dipping so early. I hope she gets a good start in Moscow becos she came from way back today.

Okagbare has always been poor W̶̲̥̅̊ït̶̲̥̅̊ her starts. That is why she loses out at the 100metres most times. I believe she would do much better in the 200metres as she has more time to recover.