Islamic State video shows killing of teen accused as Israeli spy

(GNN) - A video posted online by Islamic State militants on Tuesday showed a boy fatally shooting Muhammad Musallam, an Israeli Arab accused by the group of having signed up as a jihadi to spy for Israel's intelligence service.

The video, published by the group's Furqan media outlet, showed Musallam, 19, sitting in a room wearing an orange jumpsuit, talking about how he had been recruited and trained by Mossad. He said his father and elder brother had encouraged him.

After that, it showed Musallam being escorted to a field and then being shot in the head by a boy, described by an older, French-speaking fighter as one of the "cubs of the caliphate".

Reuters could not immediately verify the authenticity of the footage, which also appeared on Twitter feeds used by Islamic State supporters.

Israeli security officials said they were aware of the video but could not confirm that it was authentic.

The video, which was about 13 minutes long, showed Musallam on his knees as he listened to the older fighter delivering the verdict in French.

Then the boy, wearing a military uniform and armed with a pistol, stands face to face with Musallam and fires one bullet into his forehead. After Musallam collapsed, the child shot him three more times and chanted "Allahu Akbar!" (God is greatest).

In the video, Musallam repeated what he had said last month in an interview published by the group's English language magazine Dabiq, in which he said he had joined Islamic State to report to the Israelis on weapons caches, bases and Palestinian recruits. Israel and his family denied that he was an Israeli spy.

"I tell my father and my son: Repent to God. I say to the spies who spy on Islamic State: You will not be successful, they will expose you," Musallam said in the latest video, in Arabic.

An Israeli security official had said Musallam went to Syria to fight for Islamic State in October last year.

Musallam's father has denied his son was a spy, saying a month ago that his son had gone missing while on a tourist trip to Turkey.

Said Musallam and the youth's mother, Um Ahmad, wept at their home in East Jerusalem when they learned of his death. Clutching her son's photograph, Um Ahmad told reporters: "A spy of 19? How is that possible? Why would he have gone there if he were a spy?"

Said Musallam said his son had been trying to return home when he was captured. He accused the militants of forcing his son to say he was a spy before killing him just for show.

"Mohammad was told by them to say about himself that he works for the Israelis," Said Musallam said. "They took him as a victim, only to show the world, so the world would be afraid of them."

(Reuters) (Reporting by Mariam Karouny and by Ali Abdellati in Cairo; Editing by Kevin Liffey and Ken Wills)

Al Qaeda supporters in Yemen pledge allegiance to Islamic State: group

(GNN) - A group of Islamist fighters in Yemen renounced their loyalty to al Qaeda's leader and pledged allegiance to the head of the Islamic State, according to a Twitter message retrieved by U.S.-based monitoring group SITE.

The monitoring group could not immediately verify the statement distributed on Twitter purportedly from supporters of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) based in central Yemen.

AQAP is considered the most powerful branch of the global militant network headed by Ayman al-Zawahiri and has previously rejected the authority of Islamic State which has declared a caliphate, or Islamic theocracy, in swathes of Iraq and Syria.

State authority in Yemen has unraveled since a Shi'ite Muslim militia formally seized power last week and the Sunni AQAP has sworn to destroy it, stoking fears of sectarian civil war.

"We announce the formation of armed brigades specialized in pounding the apostates in Sanaa and Dhamar," the purported former AQAP supporters wrote, referring to two central provinces.

"We announce breaking the pledge of allegiance to the sheikh, the holy warrior and scholar Sheikh Ayman al-Zawahiri ... We pledge to the caliph of the believers Ibrahim bin Awad al-Baghdadi to listen and obey," they said.

Militants in Egypt's Sinai Peninsula and Libya have also joined Islamic State, signaling a competition for loyalty among armed Islamists battling states in the Mideast and North Africa.

(Reuters) (Reporting By Noah Browning; Editing by Robert Birsel)

Blinq Enhances Your Favorite Messaging Applications With Extra Information

(AsiaTimes.ga/Tech) A new mobile application called Blinq is launching today into public beta to add a layer of contextual information to your favorite mobile messaging applications. Founder Yossi Ghinsberg, who’s better known for his adventures in the Amazon (not Amazon.com, but the actual unchartered wilderness), described Blinq as “more of a hack than an app,” saying that people are tired of trying yet another mobile application. Blinq offers something different, he says.

Instead of delivering a full mobile app experience you launch by tapping an icon, Blinq is designed to augment the apps you already use. Your normal behavior doesn’t have to change.

Once installed, Blinq appears as a small white dot that pops up inside mobile messaging apps like Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, Hangouts, Skype, and SMS, for example, alerting you to new information about the person you’re communicating with. This additional information is pulled from a variety of other networks, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and more.

Blinq shows you status updates, photos and other recent activities, but its algorithms focus on highlighting the more important content. That is, if your friend recently posted two updates, one about what they had for lunch that day and another, more heavily liked update about a major life event, Blinq would only alert you to the latter.

The idea for the app, explains Ghinsberg, stems from his longtime interest in the concept of digital identities. He found that information about people was scattered around the web, and it was hard to access it when you needed it.

“We’re looking at the integrated, whole person instead of the fragmentation that’s caused because of the different platforms, the different channels and the different networks,” he says.

After teaming up with a technical co-founder Gal Bracha in 2013, the two first experimented with a larger solution, but realized soon that what they had built was too complicated and required that people change their habits. That didn’t work.

Right as they were accepted into the 500 Startups accelerator program, the team pivoted to build Blinq instead.

“We took the big idea, and reduced it,” says Ghinsberg. “Blinq is just a small white dot.”

While the app itself is consumer-facing, the concept could also work in business use cases where it could serve as something like a lightweight CRM tool. In that case, it wouldn’t be all that different from something like Rapportive or FullContact’s solution for Gmail. Those add-ons also aggregate content from a variety of networks in order to include personal and business information alongside social updates in Gmail’s sidebar.

Blinq just does this for mobile messaging apps.

The app that’s live today on Google Play is more of an MVP, meant more to test the how the market responds to the idea, the founder notes. That means the app may be buggy, and Blinq’s servers might be slow at times. But if successful, Ghinsberg says that the concept could be ported to other services beyond messaging.

Since its debut a couple of days ago, the company’s servers have imported over 250,000 contacts, and overnight, added half a million more followed by another million just last night. The team hasn’t publicized the app yet, but it has a few thousand downloads already.

The plan is to port the Blinq experience to iOS in the future, but there, the app will likely have to make some changes. Today on Android, the app works at the notification level, and is more deeply integrated. iOS, by its nature, will require more of a standalone experience, though Ghinsberg says he has some ideas about how to work around that.

Blinq has raised just under half a million in an advisory round from angel investors and 500 Startups, but will be looking to raise a million more starting next month.

Hackers announce 'World War III' on Twitter

(AsiaTimes) Hackers took over the Twitter accounts of the New York Post and United Press International on Friday, writing bogus messages, including about hostilities breaking out between the United States and China.

One tweet posted under the UPI account quoted Pope Francis as saying, "World War III has begun."

Another message delivered on the Post account said the USS George Washington, an aircraft carrier, was "engaged in active combat" against Chinese warships in the South China Sea.

The tweets were subsequently deleted.

A Post tweet later noted that "Our Twitter account was briefly hacked and we are investigating."

The fake tweets were not just about war. One posted on UPI said "Just in: Bank of America CEO calls for calm: Savings accounts will not be affected by federal reserve decision.

The Post is owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.

Several media organizations have had their Twitter feeds hacked over the past two years including Agence France-Presse, the BBC and others.

A Pentagon official said the tweet about hostilities with China was "not true." (AFP, MSN)

PlayStation Network Suffers DDOS Attack, Hackers Claim To Have Grounded SOE President’s Plane

#GNN Tech - #PlayStation Network is currently experiencing mass outages for North American users, and the reason behind the downtime is a DDOS attack for which hacker group Lizard Squad has claimed responsibility.

Sony says there haven’t been any personal details leaked in the attack, but the rolling outage persists in various locales, some ten hours or more after the attack began.

What’s unusual about this attack is that it also includes a security threat against the plane in which Sony Online Entertainment President John Smedley was traveling today.

The plane was diverted to Phoenix and is currently having its cargo inspected, following claims on Twitter posted by the Lizard Squad group that claimed the same flight had explosives on board.

Of course, it’s still possible the plane was diverted for another reason and the claim by Lizard Squad is just a coincidence, but it would be a very convenient one given the timing on all the parts involved in this convoluted story. Suffice it to say, this isn’t your typical DDOS attack. We’ll provide more information if any becomes available.

Getting My Brain Back

#GNN Tech - I can’t do it anymore. This has been a summer of social media. I’ve used it endlessly, made plans on it, chatted, read it religiously, and watched countless friends and friends of friends go on vacation.

I’ve played a game of whack-a-mole with LinkedIn invitations and I’ve streamlined my automatic Tweeting systems. I’ve watched the world buzz by 120 characters at a time. I’ve seen hundreds of beautiful photos of beaches and old castles and bars and beers and whiskeys and sandwiches and endless cats and I don’t want to see any more. I’m done.

I’m taking my brain back.

I’ve noticed a few things happening over the past few years. First, I noticed that I primarily use social media at night, in bed, staring at the iPad while my lady wife snores beside me. When I couldn’t sleep at 4am I turned on Twitter and sent messages to people I didn’t see during the day. I read Reddit more often than I read actual books and I didn’t mind it at all. Why? Because this endless stream of social garbage is apparently far more interesting than a carefully thought-out non-fiction thesis or tersely-plotted novel, let alone the kind attention of my soulmate.

We all know how social media works: it tickles the pleasure centers of the brain, encouraging us to return day after day to get that slight endorphin rush that comes with clicking a new link. For me that endorphin rush started with email and now there’s so much more data, so many more sources for distraction.

And I know why social media is a good thing. It keeps me in touch with people I’ve known for decades. It allows me to spread the word about my projects. It’s spurred revolutions of all kinds. When it’s good, it’s great. When it’s bad, it’s exhausting. I thought I could take it all in, control my consumption, but now I can’t. I’m ready to declare social bankruptcy.

So I did a few things. I deleted Facebook and Reddit from my phone and iPad. I’ve also deleted LinkedIn. I kept Twitter because it’s more like a chatroom and I kept Facebook Messenger for chatting with my long list of Facebook friends. I still have Swarm, but that will probably go next.

I might use Facebook now that Yelp is garbage for restaurant recommendations but everything else – Path, Color, Yo, Krablr – are gone. And it’s been great.

Anecdotally five or six of my peers have already followed suit. It’s been a weird summer. I remember years when everyone was into gin all summer or everyone was on the Atkins Diet. This year everyone is into social media fasts.

One friend told me that after a nice week out in the woods he checked his Facebook feed on his phone at a gas station. His heart rate went up and he felt the blood in his head pounding. He deleted the app then and there. We don’t notice how social media ruins us until it’s gone.

Maybe I’ll reinstall some of these apps. Or maybe these social media makers will fix it so I only see the things I want to see. Or maybe they don’t care because for every social media celibate there are a million people who will Facebook all day long. But, I would argue, we’re not going to give these bastards our attention much longer.

Teens are already revolting against Facebook and Google+ is a ghost town. Twitter is valueless when it comes to direct sales and is worthless as an advertising platform. In short, everything that was supposed to be good about social media – the connectedness, the reach, the ease-of-use, the fun – has been replaced by an endorphin rush.

So I’m taking my brain back. Facebook doesn’t pay me enough for my attention. LinkedIn hasn’t gotten me a single job. All the also-ran social networks offer little in the way of true value. In the end, I need to give my attention to my kids, my writing, and my reading.

I don’t need to see your cat or your Candy Crush score. Come over and we’ll grab beers and you can tell me about your favorite movie. It will be far more rewarding and maybe, just maybe, I’ll convince you to unfriend social media.

Westboro Baptist Church Protesting SF Tech Workers This Afternoon

#GNN - The #Westboro #Baptist #Church, the group known for its hate-filled picketing outside the funerals of soldiers and those who died of AIDS, has found a new target – the tech industry.

The group plans to picket pretty much every major tech company in Silicon Valley from Facebook to Reddit this afternoon.

In what looks to be a press release created in Microsoft Paint, the WBC released a statement saying it would be condemning tech companies for supporting gay rights.

The group specifically targets several tech leaders, including Mark Zuckerberg because he, “…uses every ounce of his ingenuity to find new ways to cram sodomite propaganda down everyone’s throats.” The group seems to have issues with Zuckerberg for supporting San Francisco’s Gay Pride festivities.

The WBC website picketing schedules says it will start with Instagram, move on to Facebook, Google and several other tech companies on the Peninsula and then head up to the city for more tech protests, starting with Twitter.

Tech community members have put up a “Kiss in Protest” event on Facebook, inviting all of SF to counter Westboro’s vitriol with love this afternoon. That all starts at the scheduled Twitter HQ protest on Market Street at 3:50 pm.

Reddit wasn’t originally on the schedule but was added after an AMA (Ask Me Anything) on Sunday that went just as badly as one would expect it to. The Reddit community encouraged folks to ignore the AMA. The WBC says God gave Alex Ohanian and Steve Huffman the power to create Reddit for his glory, not theirs. “[Alex Ohanian] should have used that opportunity to say “God ALONE is in charge of the Internet,” the site reads. The group now plans to picket Reddit HQ in San Francisco this evening at 5:35.

The WBC also plans on half hour demonstrations at Pinterest, YouTube, Skype, Google and Apple headquarters today.