A Texas woman recently learned that she had a 21-year-old outstanding warrant for her arrest, a felony embezzlement charge, and had likely been passed up for jobs over two decades – all due to a Sabrina the Teenage Witch video tape.

While video rental stores have been largely rendered extinct by changing technology and the rise of streaming services, 52-year-old, Caron McBride has long been haunted by the ghost of entertainment’s past.

The 52-year-old recently learned that she had run afoul of the law in neighboring Oklahoma when she tried to get her name changed on her drivers’ license following her marriage.

She then learned of the charges against her for renting the tape, which she has no recollection of ever watching.

Either way, her name was used to rent the VHS tape at Movie Palace in Norman, Oklahoma, on Valentine’s Day in 1999.

Following the duration of the 10-day rental period, the tape wasn’t returned – and was referred to law enforcement.

Prosecutors argued that McBride had “wilfully, unlawfully and feloniously embezzled” the tape, which was valued at a stunning $58.59.

And while the story faded into the annals of shuttered video rental venues in 2008, her criminal record continued to persist.

Upon learning of her felony embezzlement charge, she called the Cleveland County District Attorney’s office in Oklahoma and learned about the charge “over the VHS tape.”

“I had to make her repeat it because I thought, this is insane,” she said. “This girl is kidding me, right? She wasn’t kidding.”

“I thought I was going to have a heart attack,” she told KOKH.

She’s pretty sure that the “felony embezzlement” charges likely narrowed her job prospects and led to her rejection by prospective employers in at least five cases over the past 20-plus years.

“It’s a serious issue. It’s caused me and my family a lot of heartache financially because of the positions I’ve lost because of those two words. Something’s got to give,” she told KFOR.

On April 21, prosecutors finally dropped the charges citing the “best interest of justice,” but McBride must still have her record expunged.

McBride believes that the man she lived with at the time may have rented the video for his two young daughters.

“I’m thinking he went and got it and didn’t take it back or something,” she said. “I have never watched that show in my entire life — just not my cup of tea.”

A shadowy company set up last September linked to a DARPA / FBI contractor who peddled a ‘lawful intercept’ internet spy device to government agencies and law enforcement a decade ago, took over a massive portion of the Pentagon’s idle internet addresses on the day of President Biden’s inauguration, according to an in-depth investigation by the Associated Press.

The valuable internet real estate has since quadrupled to 175 million IP addresses which were previously owned by the US Department of Defense – about 1/25th the size of the current internet, and over twice the size of the internet space actually used by the Pentagon.

“It is massive. That is the biggest thing in the history of the internet,” said Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at network operating company Kenntic.

The company, Global Resource Systems, was established by a Beverly Hills attorney, and now resides in a shared workspace above a Florida bank.

The company did not return phone calls or emails from The Associated Press. It has no web presence, though it has the domain grscorp.com. Its name doesn’t appear on the directory of its Plantation, Florida, domicile, and a receptionist drew a blank when an AP reporter asked for a company representative at the office earlier this month. She found its name on a tenant list and suggested trying email. Records show the company has not obtained a business license in Plantation.

Incorporated in Delaware and registered by a Beverly Hills lawyer, Global Resource Systems LLC now manages more internet space than China Telecom, AT&T or Comcast. –Associated Press

One name is linked to Global Resource Systems in the Florida business registry – that of Raymond Saulino – who as recently as 2018 was listed in Nevada corporate records as a managing director of a cybersecurity/internet surveillance company called Packet Forensics. According to the report, “The company had nearly $40 million in publicly disclosed federal contracts over the past decade, with the FBI and the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency among its customers.”

In 2011, Packet Forensics and Saulino, its spokesman, were featured in a Wired story because the company was selling an appliance to government agencies and law enforcement that let them spy on people’s web browsing using forged security certificates.

The company continues to sell “lawful intercept” equipment, according to its website. One of its current contracts with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is for “harnessing autonomy for countering cyber-adversary systems.” A contract description says it is investigating “technologies for conducting safe, nondisruptive, and effective active defense operations in cyberspace.” Contract language from 2019 says the program would “investigate the feasibility of creating safe and reliable autonomous software agencies that can effectively counter malicious botnet implants and similar large-scale malware.”

Saulino is also listed as a principal with a company called Tidewater Laskin Associates. Incorporated in 2018 (and sharing the same Virginia Beach, VA address as Packet Forensics – a UPS store – with different mailbox numbers), Tidewater obtained an FCC license in April 2020 for unknown reasons.

Calls to the number listed on the Tidewater Laskin FCC filing are answered by an automated service that offers four different options but doesn’t connect callers with a single one, recycling all calls to the initial voice recording.

Saulino did not return phone calls seeking comment, and a longtime colleague at Packet Forensics, Rodney Joffe, said he believed Saulino was retired. Joffe, a cybersecurity luminary, declined further comment. Joffe is chief technical officer at Neustar Inc., which provides internet intelligence and services for major industries, including telecommunications and defense. -AP

And now a company linked to Saulino, which didn’t exist before September, took control of a massive chunk of the Pentagon’s internet space on inauguration day for unknown reasons.

According to a terse and opaque explanation from the Pentagon’s Brett Goldstein – head of the Defense Digital Service which is running the project, the military hopes to “assess, evaluate and prevent unauthorized use of DoD IP address space” and “identify potential vulnerabilities” in order to defend against cyber-intrusions by global adversaries who consistently infiltrate US networks – occasionally from unused internet blocks. What that has to do with Global Resource Systems is anyone’s guess.

Explanations for what the internet space could be used for are purely speculative, and include “honeypots” – machines set up with vulnerabilities laid as bait to draw hackers, “Or it could be looking to set up dedicated infrastructure — software and servers — to scour traffic for suspect activity.”

“This greatly increases the space they could monitor,” said Madory.

Why did the Pentagon choose Global Resource Systems – a company linked to a ‘spooky’ individual – on inauguration day? “As to why the DoD would have done that I’m a little mystified, same as you,” internet pioneer Paul Vixie told AP.

More via AP:

Deepening the mystery is Global Resource Systems’ name. It is identical to that of a firm that independent internet fraud researcher Ron Guilmette says was sending out email spam using the very same internet routing identifier. It shut down more than a decade ago. All that differs is the type of company. This one’s a limited liability corporation. The other was a corporation. Both used the same street address in Plantation, a suburb of Fort Lauderdale.

“It’s deeply suspicious,” said Guilmette, who unsuccessfully sued the previous incarnation of Global Resource Systems in 2006 for unfair business practices. Guilmette considers such masquerading, known as slip-streaming, a ham-handed tactic in this situation. “If they wanted to be more serious about hiding this they could have not used Ray Saulino and this suspicious name.”

Guilmette and Madory were alerted to the mystery when network operators began inquiring about it on an email list in mid-March. But almost everyone involved didn’t want to talk about it. Mike Leber, who owns Hurricane Electric, the internet backbone company handling the address blocks’ traffic, didn’t return emails or phone messages.

Despite an internet address crunch, the Pentagon — which created the internet — has shown no interest in selling any of its address space, and a Defense Department spokesman, Russell Goemaere, told the AP on Saturday that none of the newly announced space has been sold.

Republished from ZeroHedge.com with permission

For the first time, scientists have created embryos in a lab that contain the cells of both humans and monkeys.

Scientists hope that by creating chimeric embryos – embryos containing cells from two distinct species – they might be able to create organs for people who desperately need transplants.

Over 100,000 people in the United States lone are currently on a waiting list for organ transplants crucial to saving their lives, but the supply of donor organs has dropped significantly since the pandemic began unfolding.

Researchers have attempted to inject human stem cells into the embryos of pigs and sheep in recent years in hopes of growing organs for transplants, but this hasn’t yielded positive results. Scientists are hoping that by turning to macaque monkeys, which share a greater genetic similarity to humans, they may have more success.

In a study published Thursday in the journal Cell, researchers in the U.S. and China injected 25  pluripotent stem cells from humans into embryos from macaque monkeys.

After one day, the researchers detected human cells beginning to grow in 132 of the embryos. They embryos ultimately survived for 19 days.

However, bioethicists have raised concerns about the potential for abusing medical regulations that currently govern the treatment of animal and human subjects, as well as the possibility that a rogue scientists might potentially spike living creatures with human cells.

“My first question is: Why?” Kirstin Matthews, a science and technology fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute, told NPR. “I think the public is going to be concerned, and I am as well, that we’re just kind of pushing forward with science without having a proper conversation about what we should or should not do.”

Researchers insist that the study serves purely humanitarian goals that could save countless lives in the future.

“This work is an important step that provides very compelling evidence that someday when we understand fully what the process is we could make them develop into a heart or a kidney or lungs,” said University of Michigan professor Jeffrey Platt, who was not involved in the study.