Dispatches - How the Banks Won.

As the government prepares an emergency budget to help pay for the bank bailout, Will Hutton investigates the banks and what they’ve done with our money. He discovers that while ordinary taxpayers take the pain, for the banks it’s largely business as usual.

Hutton analyses the banks’ accounts and shows how they are using government-guaranteed funds to gamble with derivatives as they did before the crash. He also reveals how the banks are still paying vast salaries and bonuses, and City head hunters tell Dispatches how the banks hide the sums they’re really paying out.

With the help of former and current members of the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee, Hutton shows how the banks’ booming margins come from the free and near-free money the government and taxpayers gave them to save the banking system. He also investigates the banks’ intense lobbying to resist government plans for reform and highlights recent research from the OECD on how Britain is internationally unusual in the extent to which bankers have key roles in the civil service and government.

Featuring high-powered contributors such as President Obama’s banking advisor Paul Volcker, former Chancellor Alastair Darling, former City minister Lord Myners and current Business Secretary Vince Cable, Hutton shows why without urgent reform we risk the prospect of another crash – this time there won’t be any money left for a bail-out – plus the certainty of British business being starved of vital funding. With the Eurozone crisis fueling fears of another banking crash, this programme is an urgent and shocking call to action.

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Free The Network

A documentary about the Occupy Wall Street, hacktivism, and the hackers trying to build a distributed network for the Occupy movement and beyond.

You’re on the Internet. What does that mean? Most likely, it means one of a handful of telecommunications providers is middlemanning your information from Point A to Point B.

Fire off an email or a tweet, broadcast a livestream or upload video to YouTube, and you’re relying on vast networks of fiber optic cables deep underground and undersea, working with satellites high above, to move your data around the world, and to bring the world to your fingertips.

It’s an infrastructure largely out of sight and mind. AT&T, Level 3, Hurricane Electric, Tata Indicom – to most these are simply invisible magicians performing the act of getting one online and kicking. To many open-source advocates, however, these are a few of the big, dirty names responsible for what they see as the Web’s rapid consolidation.

The prospect of an irreparably centralized Internet, a physical Internet in the hands of a shrinking core of so-called Tier 1 transit networks, keeps Isaac Wilder up at night.

Wilder is the 21-year-old co-founder of the Free Network Foundation. Motherboard first caught up with Wilder at Zuccotti Park during the fledgling days of Occupy Wall Street.

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Cyberwar.

Is the US contributing to the militarization of cyberspace? Cyberwar. A conflict without foot soldiers, guns, or missiles.

Instead the attacks are launched by computer hackers. Digital spy rings. Information thieves. Cyberarmies of kids, criminals, terrorists – some backed by nation states.

But is cyber war really a threat? Can cyber war actually cripple the United States? Or is the language just sturm und drang spun up by a coalition of major arms manufacturers, the Pentagon, and Internet security firms allied with China bashers aimed at launching a new Cold War in Asia?

China has been accused of hacking into the Pentagon, the International Monetary Fund, the French government, and the CIA, as well as stealing information from major U.S. arms maker Boeing and the Japanese firm Mitsubishi.

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What is the Higgs Boson?

Scientists behind Sixty Symbols (Ed Copeland, Roger Bowley and Tony Padilla from the University of Nottingham) are doing their best to answer what actually is the Higgs Boson.

Named after Peter Higgs, an Edinburgh University physicist, the Higgs boson is crucial to understanding the origin of mass. The Higgs boson is a hypothetical elementary particle predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics. It belongs to a class of particles known as bosons, characterized by an integer value of their spin quantum number.

The Higgs field is a quantum field with a non-zero value that fills all of space, and explains why fundamental particles such as quarks and electrons have mass. The Higgs boson is an excitation of the Higgs field above its ground state.

Experiments to determine whether the Higgs boson exists are currently being performed using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN.

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Tales From the G20

           In June 2010, leaders from the twenty largest economies met in Toronto with representatives of corporate interests to discuss the policies that would shape the world for everyone else. 
Exclusion zones, overlapping layers of security fencing and an estimated 25,000 police and military personnel transformed the downtown area into an armed camp. Over 1.3 billion dollars were spent on security measures, more than all previous G8/G20 meetings combined. This documentary traces the overt breakdown in civil liberties that occurred during the Summit, from unmarked vans with snatch squads of plainclothes police to the pre-emptive arrest of activists now facing years in prison for organizing demonstrations.

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Tales from the G20 (2011) DOCUMENTARY from Wandering Eye on Vimeo.