Venezuela: ‘We Want Food!’
May 18th, 2016Via: AFP:
It was around noon when a food truck rolled up to a Venezuelan state-subsidized supermarket in the town of Guarenas just east of the capital.
But, to the fury of the long line of people waiting out front, the cargo wasn’t unloaded. Instead soldiers took it away.
“We want food!” the crowd roared in protest, to no avail. Some tried to run after the truck.
Lockheed Martin Wants Orbital Laboratory for Mars
May 18th, 2016Via: Popular Science:
Before our species set foot on the moon, we orbited it first. The same will probably be true for Mars, and on Wednesday, Lockheed Martin plans to unveil its vision for a spacecraft that could make it happen. The “Mars Base Camp,” as the company is calling it, would set up a laboratory, staffed by 6 astronauts, in Mars orbit in 2028.
Up to now, NASA has outlined the first few steps to Mars. It’s building a heavy-lift rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS), and working with Lockheed to build the Orion crew capsule. The rocket and capsule will launch for the first time, uncrewed, in 2018, and then in 2023 they’ll carry astronauts into deep space, just beyond the moon, for the first time ever.
But after the moon it’s still a very long way to Mars, filled with unknowns, and then once you get to Mars, landing is a whole new challenge. This is where NASA’s plans get particularly vague.
Six astronauts could live in Mars orbit, piloting rovers and UAVs
“We think that orbiting Mars is a necessary precursor to landing humans on the surface,” Tony Antonelli, Lockheed Martin’s chief technologist for civil space exploration, and a former NASA astronaut, told Popular Science. “NASA has that in their plans, and we’re coloring in the details.”
Although NASA didn’t commission Lockheed to come up with the Base Camp concept, the company is hoping the space agency will consider the design as it continues to solidify plans to land on Mars in the 2030s or 40s.
FindFace
May 18th, 2016Via: Guardian:
If the founders of a new face recognition app get their way, anonymity in public could soon be a thing of the past. FindFace, launched two months ago and currently taking Russia by storm, allows users to photograph people in a crowd and work out their identities, with 70% reliability.
It works by comparing photographs to profile pictures on Vkontakte, a social network popular in Russia and the former Soviet Union, with more than 200 million accounts. In future, the designers imagine a world where people walking past you on the street could find your social network profile by sneaking a photograph of you, and shops, advertisers and the police could pick your face out of crowds and track you down via social networks.
In the short time since the launch, Findface has amassed 500,000 users and processed nearly 3m searches, according to its founders, 26-year-old Artem Kukharenko, and 29-year-old Alexander Kabakov.
Visitor Logs Show Google’s Unrivaled White House Access
May 18th, 2016Via: watchdog.org:
A project examining White House visitor logs shows the Obama administration has extended an open door to Google.
Johanna Shelton, Google’s director of public policy — in effect, the company’s top lobbyist — has visited White House officials 128 times since President Barack Obama took office in 2009.
To put that in perspective, senior lobbyists for other companies in the telecommunications and cable industry — including Comcast, Facebook, Amazon, Oracle and Verizon — have visited the White House a combined 124 times in the same span. (That data goes through October 2015.)
The Google Transparency Project, the work of Campaign for Accountability, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that works to expose corporate influence on government, identified policy pushers for the 50 biggest lobbying spenders and counted how many times they appeared in the White House visitor logs.
Alphabet Inc., the parent company of Google, spent $16.6 million on lobbying in 2015. That was the twelfth most of any company, and the most by a technology firm, just above AT&T’s $16.4 million and Comcast’s $15.7 million.
Anne Weismann, executive director of the Campaign for Accountability, told Watchdog.org those logs don’t reveal the discussion of the meetings, just who attended them.
“You don’t know what the meetings are about, but the fact that someone has that level of access at the White House is revealing,” she said. “It certainly suggests a level of influence.”
Oil Giant Total to Acquire Battery Maker Saft for $1.1 Billion
May 18th, 2016Disclosure: I sell solar power systems in New Zealand.
—
*chortle*
If you can’t beat ’em…
Via: GTM:
Total, a French oil and gas giant with a $120 billion market cap, just offered to acquire French battery specialist Saft for $1.1 billion. That represents a 38 percent premium over Saft’s recent closing stock price. The supervisory board of Saft has approved the friendly acquisition offer.
Patrick Pouyanné, CEO of Total, said the offer is part of his firm’s goal to “accelerate its development in the fields of renewable energy and electricity, initiated in 2011 with the acquisition of SunPower.” In 2011 Total acquired a controlling interest in SunPower, the maker of high efficiency solar modules and project developer, for around $2.3 billion.
Google, Apple, Tesla Veterans: Startup Developing Self-Driving Truck Kits
May 17th, 2016Via: The Verge:
Former employees of Google, Apple, Tesla, Cruise Automation, and others — 40 people in total — have formed a new San Francisco-based company called Otto with the goal of turning commercial trucks into self-driving freight haulers. Prominent staffers include former Google Maps lead Lior Ron and Anthony Levandowski of Google’s self-driving car team.
Rather than building their own trucks, Otto is hoping to make hardware kits for existing truck models that would either be installed by service centers, or possibly at the factory if the company is able to forge manufacturer partnerships. Unlike Google’s self-driving car project, Otto would at least initially focus on highway driving, which account for the overwhelming majority of a typical truck route; the human drivers would still handle surface streets, loading, unloading, and the like. Right now, the company is testing with the Volvo VNL 780, but hopes to work with many so-called Class 8 trucks, which are the largest, heaviest trucks on American roads.
Stanford Quantifies the Privacy-Stripping Power of Metadata
May 17th, 2016Via: Tech Crunch:
More proof, if proof were needed, of the privacy-stripping power of metadata. A multi-year crowdsourced study, conducted by Stanford scientists and published this week, underlines how much information can be inferred from basic phone logs cross-referenced with other public datasets.
(Reminder: the former director of the NSA and the CIA, General Michael Hayden, has asserted: “We kill people based on metadata” — which suggests rock solid confident in the inferences that spy agencies are able to draw from metadata. Hayden reiterated this point in an on stage interview last week at TechCrunch Disrupt New York. “Metadata’s incredibly powerful,” he said. “Metadata shouldn’t get a free pass.”)
The research paper, entitled Evaluating the privacy properties of telephone metadata, details how the scientists investigated what they describe as the “factual assumptions that undergird policies of differential treatment for content and metadata”, underlining how easily they were able to generate detailed intelligence from metadata.
Their study is based on crowdsourced telephone metadata from more than 800 volunteers (using an Android app to pull the relevant metadata off the participants’ phones) cross-referenced with social networking information and other public data sets, such as Yelp and Google Places.
“We find that telephone metadata is densely interconnected, susceptible to reidentification, and enables highly sensitive inferences,” the paper authors write.
Related: Hemisphere: A Massive Drug Enforcement Database Containing Decades of Telephone Metadata
Chicago Airports Recommend 3-Hour Cushion For Security Lines Tuesday
May 17th, 2016Via: CBS:
While the Transportation Security Administration has announced plans to hire 800 new officers, the wait for security at Chicago’s airports could be getting worse.
Tuesday morning, the city’s Aviation Department advised anyone flying out of O’Hare or Midway airports to show up three hours before their flight’s scheduled departure time. That’s even longer than the two-hour cushion the TSA has suggested for domestic flights.
Over the past several days, many passengers have said they missed their flights in Chicago, even after following the TSA’s recommendations to show up two hours early for a domestic flight, because they’ve had to wait up to three hours in line for security.
Battelle Fielding 100 Drone Zappers to Pentagon, Homeland Security
May 17th, 2016Via: Defense Tech:
The military has turned to a directed energy frequency jammer mounted on an assault rifle-type frame to deal with the growing threat of small drones to military bases and troops in the field.
Officials of Battelle, the non-profit research and development organization based in Columbus, Ohio, said Monday the Defense Department and the Department of Homeland Security had signed off on buying 100 of its “DroneDefender,” billed as the “safe” solution to warding off intruding unmanned aerial vehicles.
Battelle officials at the Navy League’s 2016 Sea-Air-Space Exposition at National Harbor in Maryland outside Washington, D.C., said they could not discuss the unit cost or the total cost of the sales to the departments.
“It’s a portable solution to stop portable drones,” said Rich Granger, a Battelle business development director for Mission and Defense Technologies.
The DroneDefender has two triggers — a “command and control” trigger to sever the link between the pilot and the UAV, and a second trigger to jam GPS links to the drone.
The device can intercept drones out to 400 meters. Once the drones are disabled, they are programmed to hover safely to the ground, said Kim Stambler, a Batelle business development and sales leader.
Fastest Selloff of U.S. Debt Since 1978
May 17th, 2016Via: CNN:
Central banks are dumping America’s debt at a record pace.
China, Russia and Brazil sold off U.S. Treasury bonds as they tried to soften the blow of the global economic slowdown. They each sold off at least $1 billion in U.S. Treasury bonds in March.
In all, central banks sold a net $17 billion. Sales had hit a record $57 billion in January.
So far this year, the global bank debt dump has reached $123 billion.
It’s the fastest pace for a U.S. debt selloff by global central banks since at least 1978, according to Treasury Department data published Monday afternoon.
