"So far all is quiet here except that there has been ...
" The rest of the sentence carefully penned by Lance-Corporal Ernest Ghiggioli
is missing, removed by an officer whose uncomfortable duty it was to read all of
the men's mail and remove any information that might aid the enemy or endanger
the unit.
That was crudely done by chopping out any sensitive information with a pair of scissors.
Ghiggioli was captured by the Japanese and died with hundreds of other Australian POWs when the freighter Montevideo Maru was sunk by an American submarine off the Philippines in July 1942. His letters are held in the Australian War Memorial.We recently added Stained glass mosaic Tile to our inventory.
In the days before Skype and Facebook,One of the most durable and attractive styles of flooring that you can purchase is ceramic or porcelain tiles. letters from loved ones took weeks at least, and often many months, to reach soldiers serving overseas. Sometimes a reassuring note saying all was well would arrive after a soldier had been killed in action. For both the writers and the readers, every word was treasured.
Those responsible for "OPSEC", or operational security, had an easy job of it. No longer. In the hands of a technologically skilled gen Y, social media - with its smartphones, ubiquitous computers and the promise of instant communication from almost anywhere on the planet - has changed everything irreversibly.
It is an enormous benefit to morale that ADF personnel stationed abroad for months at a time can be in constant touch with partners and children but, unless major steps are taken to shut down networks, social media takes the ability to exercise simple censorship out of the hands of the officer with the scissors.
Australian Defence Force chief David Hurley says the answer is not to try to shut down the internet but to train personnel thoroughly about the dangers of deliberately or unknowingly launching into cyberspace sensitive information that might get them or their mates killed.
Hurley tells The Weekend Australian that for the ADF to ban the use of social media would be virtually impossible.
The ADF might issue an order that no phones, Ipads or computers were to be taken into an area, "but human nature is such that someone will try to sneak a phone in somewhere".
"The use of social media on operations boils down to operational security, and ensuring - in your training on operational security and the continued reinforcement of the requirement to protect operationally sensitive information - that people don't use social media to convey information that could prejudice their welfare or their safety and the safety of their fellow soldiers, sailors and airmen," he says.
"People can talk on Skype from Afghanistan back to family any day of the week. But they just need to be conscious when they are communicating (in) any form that they protect information that is operationally important or sensitive."
"We can't listen to every communication from the battle space, so training becomes important."
In the ADF, the World War I Furphy water cart, which gave Australia the word for enthusiastically repeated but often inaccurate information, has been replaced by a much more authoritative source of material outside the official channels.
Far from trying to shut down the troops' access to social media, Hurley has embraced it by signing up to Facebook and Twitter.
"I do not intend Facebook or Twitter messages to replace official communications or the chain of command, but if you are following me online you might just hear it first," he told his information-hungry audience in the ADF.
But he warned personnel that family and friends could easily re-post or re-tweet messages to a much wider audience and that criminals or foreign intelligence agencies set up fake identities to gather information illicitly.
Even savvy young gen-Y soldiers, sailors or RAAF personnel might be giving away much more information than they intend or realise when, for instance, they post happy snaps on Facebook.
A big problem for forces deployed overseas is that an enemy that uses the internet comprehensively - as does the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan - may have the technology to untangle the data on photographs that are geo-tagged, to find out where and when they were taken. This could give away the location of an individual serviceman or woman or their whole unit.
It might be done by a foreign intelligence agency and then passed on to insurgents.
Many in the ADF have long had a near-obsessive desire for secrecy and may embrace the communications revolution with less enthusiasm than Hurley.
The ADF's reputation has taken a battering when forthright or blatantly racist or sexist comments by a small number of soldiers have found their way on to Facebook, and from there to headlines in the media.
Hurley notes that a yarn among mates that might go unnoticed in the pub could explode into a front-page story when the same information is posted online.
"Yes, there's the morale (and) welfare benefit of allowing our servicemen and women to communicate with friends and families back home, but they need to be conscious, having that level of access, of how to protect what they're doing and what their fellow servicemen and women are doing in the battlefield."
According to Australian War Memorial researcher Robyn van Dyk, there's another important consequence of the massive shift from writing in ink on paper to the cyber world, and that is the problem of tracking down and preserving a cross-section of the material that goes to and from soldiers in the war zones.
In the past, Diggers' letters and diaries provided real-time accounts of wartime life.
While much more is probably written now, it could well vanish as files are deleted or hard discs give up the ghost.
It is, however, reassuring that on a recent trip to Afghanistan she found a significant number of personnel were carefully keeping old-fashioned diaries.
While it's difficult to track the exact number of foreign buyers of Bay Area real estate, investors accounted for around a quarter of all Bay Area sales in November,Find detailed product information for Low price howo tipper truck and other products. about double the average going back to 1988, according to the real estate information company DataQuick. And real estate agents say that in some areas, one in five people making offers is either in China or buying for relatives or investors in other countries.
With its large Asian-American population, good schools and good weather, the Bay Area is a prime shopping area for Chinese eager to buy property abroad. And that's helping to push up prices here.
"The foreign investors are bringing the competition to another level," said Amy Sung of DeLeon Realty in Palo Alto, which offers a Chinese translation on the home page of its website.
"We have people who are already here who have come here to study and then they stay," Sung said. "And then we have people in the new rich, who come here with a visitor's visa or investor's visa. And there are the really high-end buyers who come here for a weekend, identify properties and then go home."
Thirty to 40 percent of all the offers are cash, Sung said. "They're buying investment properties, pretty much everything that comes to the market."
All that investor buying is helping push prices up. Absentee buyers -- mostly investors -- paid a median price of $309,000, up 22 percent from a year ago, according to DataQuick. The median price for cash deals, which typically are done by investors, was $320,000, up 27 percent from a year earlier.
David Lo, a Bay Area real estate agent, is helping friends and family in Asia buy property in Mountain House and other towns in the Central Valley.
"I've always stayed connected with friends and families in Asia. So when they heard about my real estate investment portfolio they became interested in pooling in with me," he said in an email from Taipei, where he was on business. "Location-wise, the Bay Area is ideal for Chinese nationals."
The appetite for a piece of the Bay Area is "definitely increasing," Lo said, "especially among wealthy Chinese families with young children seeking a better way of life and education in the U.S. In their eyes, America is still the promised land of opportunity, political freedom, and securer financial future."
The San Jose metro area is the top seller's market in the country, according to a ranking by Zillow of such factors as days on the market and prices near or above asking price.
"But much of that strength is driven by investor interest," Zillow chief economist Stan Humphries said in a recent report. The increased demand helps drive up prices, "particularly for less-expensive homes in these markets," he said.
"China is a growing economy and one of few countries that is still not busted by the bubble," said Gilbert Wong, vice mayor of Cupertino, which is the first choice for many Chinese buyers. "They see places like the United States and Canada as good, safe places to put their money in. It's good for us because we're coming out of a recession and we need the influx of money coming in."
Kevin Kieffer of Keller Williams in Danville said investors are targeting homes priced at $300,Find detailed product information for howo spareparts and other products.000 and less in Concord, Pleasant Hill and Martinez -- all good areas for rental housing.
"About 30 percent of offers coming in are from Chinese buyers, and for cash," Kieffer said. "Rarely is there a Chinese-financed offer that's not cash."
He said one client is looking for a home armed with $425,000 in cash wired to him by his mother in India.
"That's happening quite a bit, that money for a deal will come from many sources -- parents or relatives abroad, or whatever it happens to be," said Barbara Lymberis, president of the Santa Clara County Association of Realtors. "The seller and buyer could be domestic, but the money is global. Funds can be banked anywhere in the world and utilized anywhere in the world."
Jennifer Tasto, a broker at Property Services in Burlingame, said she has done $5 million in cash transactions in the past 12 months with Chinese buyers, becoming an expert in global money transfers along the way. One client is buying a home for her children even though they're still in elementary school. Tasto said she lost one bidding war for a Palo Alto home even though her client offered $390,000 over asking price.
She said one of her clients explained that his aim is to hold a piece of real property in a country where there is solid law and protection for property rights.
"I'm finding that in a lot of Asian countries, not just China, people cannot own land," Tasto said. "They are buying a land lease. Here, when you buy real estate, you buy the dirt."
With fewer homes on the market than normal, the competition from investors paying cash continues to squeeze out first-time buyers. But it helps boost prices, which in the long run should persuade more would-be sellers to list their homes.
Machinist Jason Poling said it took him and his wife from June to November, and 16 failed bids, before he finally got lucky on his 17th offer and snagged a $325,000 home in San Ramon. The competition was fierce with as many as 14 offers on some houses, he said. About half the bidders were investors,One of the most durable and attractive styles of flooring that you can purchase is ceramic or porcelain tiles. he said.
That was crudely done by chopping out any sensitive information with a pair of scissors.
Ghiggioli was captured by the Japanese and died with hundreds of other Australian POWs when the freighter Montevideo Maru was sunk by an American submarine off the Philippines in July 1942. His letters are held in the Australian War Memorial.We recently added Stained glass mosaic Tile to our inventory.
In the days before Skype and Facebook,One of the most durable and attractive styles of flooring that you can purchase is ceramic or porcelain tiles. letters from loved ones took weeks at least, and often many months, to reach soldiers serving overseas. Sometimes a reassuring note saying all was well would arrive after a soldier had been killed in action. For both the writers and the readers, every word was treasured.
Those responsible for "OPSEC", or operational security, had an easy job of it. No longer. In the hands of a technologically skilled gen Y, social media - with its smartphones, ubiquitous computers and the promise of instant communication from almost anywhere on the planet - has changed everything irreversibly.
It is an enormous benefit to morale that ADF personnel stationed abroad for months at a time can be in constant touch with partners and children but, unless major steps are taken to shut down networks, social media takes the ability to exercise simple censorship out of the hands of the officer with the scissors.
Australian Defence Force chief David Hurley says the answer is not to try to shut down the internet but to train personnel thoroughly about the dangers of deliberately or unknowingly launching into cyberspace sensitive information that might get them or their mates killed.
Hurley tells The Weekend Australian that for the ADF to ban the use of social media would be virtually impossible.
The ADF might issue an order that no phones, Ipads or computers were to be taken into an area, "but human nature is such that someone will try to sneak a phone in somewhere".
"The use of social media on operations boils down to operational security, and ensuring - in your training on operational security and the continued reinforcement of the requirement to protect operationally sensitive information - that people don't use social media to convey information that could prejudice their welfare or their safety and the safety of their fellow soldiers, sailors and airmen," he says.
"People can talk on Skype from Afghanistan back to family any day of the week. But they just need to be conscious when they are communicating (in) any form that they protect information that is operationally important or sensitive."
"We can't listen to every communication from the battle space, so training becomes important."
In the ADF, the World War I Furphy water cart, which gave Australia the word for enthusiastically repeated but often inaccurate information, has been replaced by a much more authoritative source of material outside the official channels.
Far from trying to shut down the troops' access to social media, Hurley has embraced it by signing up to Facebook and Twitter.
"I do not intend Facebook or Twitter messages to replace official communications or the chain of command, but if you are following me online you might just hear it first," he told his information-hungry audience in the ADF.
But he warned personnel that family and friends could easily re-post or re-tweet messages to a much wider audience and that criminals or foreign intelligence agencies set up fake identities to gather information illicitly.
Even savvy young gen-Y soldiers, sailors or RAAF personnel might be giving away much more information than they intend or realise when, for instance, they post happy snaps on Facebook.
A big problem for forces deployed overseas is that an enemy that uses the internet comprehensively - as does the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan - may have the technology to untangle the data on photographs that are geo-tagged, to find out where and when they were taken. This could give away the location of an individual serviceman or woman or their whole unit.
It might be done by a foreign intelligence agency and then passed on to insurgents.
Many in the ADF have long had a near-obsessive desire for secrecy and may embrace the communications revolution with less enthusiasm than Hurley.
The ADF's reputation has taken a battering when forthright or blatantly racist or sexist comments by a small number of soldiers have found their way on to Facebook, and from there to headlines in the media.
Hurley notes that a yarn among mates that might go unnoticed in the pub could explode into a front-page story when the same information is posted online.
"Yes, there's the morale (and) welfare benefit of allowing our servicemen and women to communicate with friends and families back home, but they need to be conscious, having that level of access, of how to protect what they're doing and what their fellow servicemen and women are doing in the battlefield."
According to Australian War Memorial researcher Robyn van Dyk, there's another important consequence of the massive shift from writing in ink on paper to the cyber world, and that is the problem of tracking down and preserving a cross-section of the material that goes to and from soldiers in the war zones.
In the past, Diggers' letters and diaries provided real-time accounts of wartime life.
While much more is probably written now, it could well vanish as files are deleted or hard discs give up the ghost.
It is, however, reassuring that on a recent trip to Afghanistan she found a significant number of personnel were carefully keeping old-fashioned diaries.
While it's difficult to track the exact number of foreign buyers of Bay Area real estate, investors accounted for around a quarter of all Bay Area sales in November,Find detailed product information for Low price howo tipper truck and other products. about double the average going back to 1988, according to the real estate information company DataQuick. And real estate agents say that in some areas, one in five people making offers is either in China or buying for relatives or investors in other countries.
With its large Asian-American population, good schools and good weather, the Bay Area is a prime shopping area for Chinese eager to buy property abroad. And that's helping to push up prices here.
"The foreign investors are bringing the competition to another level," said Amy Sung of DeLeon Realty in Palo Alto, which offers a Chinese translation on the home page of its website.
"We have people who are already here who have come here to study and then they stay," Sung said. "And then we have people in the new rich, who come here with a visitor's visa or investor's visa. And there are the really high-end buyers who come here for a weekend, identify properties and then go home."
Thirty to 40 percent of all the offers are cash, Sung said. "They're buying investment properties, pretty much everything that comes to the market."
All that investor buying is helping push prices up. Absentee buyers -- mostly investors -- paid a median price of $309,000, up 22 percent from a year ago, according to DataQuick. The median price for cash deals, which typically are done by investors, was $320,000, up 27 percent from a year earlier.
David Lo, a Bay Area real estate agent, is helping friends and family in Asia buy property in Mountain House and other towns in the Central Valley.
"I've always stayed connected with friends and families in Asia. So when they heard about my real estate investment portfolio they became interested in pooling in with me," he said in an email from Taipei, where he was on business. "Location-wise, the Bay Area is ideal for Chinese nationals."
The appetite for a piece of the Bay Area is "definitely increasing," Lo said, "especially among wealthy Chinese families with young children seeking a better way of life and education in the U.S. In their eyes, America is still the promised land of opportunity, political freedom, and securer financial future."
The San Jose metro area is the top seller's market in the country, according to a ranking by Zillow of such factors as days on the market and prices near or above asking price.
"But much of that strength is driven by investor interest," Zillow chief economist Stan Humphries said in a recent report. The increased demand helps drive up prices, "particularly for less-expensive homes in these markets," he said.
"China is a growing economy and one of few countries that is still not busted by the bubble," said Gilbert Wong, vice mayor of Cupertino, which is the first choice for many Chinese buyers. "They see places like the United States and Canada as good, safe places to put their money in. It's good for us because we're coming out of a recession and we need the influx of money coming in."
Kevin Kieffer of Keller Williams in Danville said investors are targeting homes priced at $300,Find detailed product information for howo spareparts and other products.000 and less in Concord, Pleasant Hill and Martinez -- all good areas for rental housing.
"About 30 percent of offers coming in are from Chinese buyers, and for cash," Kieffer said. "Rarely is there a Chinese-financed offer that's not cash."
He said one client is looking for a home armed with $425,000 in cash wired to him by his mother in India.
"That's happening quite a bit, that money for a deal will come from many sources -- parents or relatives abroad, or whatever it happens to be," said Barbara Lymberis, president of the Santa Clara County Association of Realtors. "The seller and buyer could be domestic, but the money is global. Funds can be banked anywhere in the world and utilized anywhere in the world."
Jennifer Tasto, a broker at Property Services in Burlingame, said she has done $5 million in cash transactions in the past 12 months with Chinese buyers, becoming an expert in global money transfers along the way. One client is buying a home for her children even though they're still in elementary school. Tasto said she lost one bidding war for a Palo Alto home even though her client offered $390,000 over asking price.
She said one of her clients explained that his aim is to hold a piece of real property in a country where there is solid law and protection for property rights.
"I'm finding that in a lot of Asian countries, not just China, people cannot own land," Tasto said. "They are buying a land lease. Here, when you buy real estate, you buy the dirt."
With fewer homes on the market than normal, the competition from investors paying cash continues to squeeze out first-time buyers. But it helps boost prices, which in the long run should persuade more would-be sellers to list their homes.
Machinist Jason Poling said it took him and his wife from June to November, and 16 failed bids, before he finally got lucky on his 17th offer and snagged a $325,000 home in San Ramon. The competition was fierce with as many as 14 offers on some houses, he said. About half the bidders were investors,One of the most durable and attractive styles of flooring that you can purchase is ceramic or porcelain tiles. he said.
没有评论:
发表评论