Venezuela to Shut Down for a Week to Cope With Electricity Crisis
March 16th, 2016Via: Bloomberg:
Venezuela is shutting down for a week as the government struggles with a deepening electricity crisis.
President Nicolas Maduro gave everyone an extra three days off work next week, extending the two-day Easter holiday, according to a statement in the Official Gazette published late Tuesday. Maduro had originally said over the weekend that the extended holiday would only apply to state employees.
The government has rationed electricity and water supplies across the country for months and urged citizens to avoid waste as Venezuela endures a prolonged drought that has slashed output at hydroelectric dams. The ruling socialists have blamed the shortage on the El Nino weather phenomena and “sabotage” by their political foes, while critics cite a lack of maintenance and poor planning.
The $78 Trillion Pension Problem
March 16th, 2016Via: CNBC:
Dreams of lengthy cruises and beach life may be just that, with 20 of the world’s biggest countries facing a pension shortfall worth $78 trillion, Citi said in a report sent on Wednesday.
“Social security systems, national pension plans, private sector pensions, and individual retirement accounts are unfunded or underfunded across the globe,” pensions and insurance analysts at the bank said in the report.
“Government services, corporate profits, or retirement benefits themselves will have to be reduced to make any part of the system work. This poses an enormous challenge to employers, employees, and policymakers all over the world.”
The total value of unfunded or underfunded government pension liabilities for 20 countries belonging to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) — a group of largely wealthy countries — is $78 trillion, Citi said. (The countries studied include the U.K., France and Germany, plus several others in western and central Europe, the U.S., Japan, Canada, and Australia.)
The bank added that corporates also failed to consistently meet their pension obligations, with most U.S. and U.K. corporate pensions plans underfunded.
Countries with large public pension systems in Europe appear to have the greatest problem. Citi noted that Germany, France, Italy, the U.K., Portugal and Spain had estimated public sector pension liabilities that topped 300 percent of gross domestic product.
Improvements in health care mean retirees need to string out their income for longer. Meanwhile, the increase in the retirement-age population versus the working population is straining government pension schemes.
NSA Intercepts for Law Enforcement
March 16th, 2016I said it back in 2013 when we learned about parallel construction. It’s NSA’s infrastructure.
The cat was completely out of the bag back then.
Via: Privacy SOS:
The wall separating “foreign” intelligence operations from domestic criminal investigations has finally, fully collapsed. The FBI now plans to act on a rule change initiated by the Bush administration and finally massaged into actionable policy by Obama: Soon, domestic law enforcement agencies like the FBI will be able to search through communications collected under the mysterious authority of executive order 12333. Now, FBI agents can query the NSA’s database of Americans’ international communications, collected without warrants pursuant to Section 702 of the 2008 FISA Amendments Act. That law put congress’ stamp of approval on the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program, which was widely denounced as totalitarian when the New York Times‘ James Risen exposed it to the world in 2005.
$20,000 Honda Civic Comes with Self Drive Mode for Highways
March 16th, 2016Via: Fast Company:
Honda is adding features to its $20,000 Honda Civic LX that will make the entry-level car able to drive itself down the highway, reports the Wall Street Journal.
Drivers can take their hands off the wheel and their feet off the pedals when the car’s driving in highway conditions with clearly visible lane markings and a vehicle in front for the Civic to follow, according to the report. Carmakers are increasingly adding features such as automatic lane-keeping assistance, adaptive cruise control and automatic breaking to lower-end models, according to the Journal. General Motors is reportedly set to launch a version of the Chevrolet Cruze with similar features later this year.
While manufacturers emphasize that the cars aren’t intended to be fully self-driving like the vehicles famously being tested by Google, federal regulators are interested in making the technologies, collectively known as “advanced driver assistance systems,” available in more vehicles to help prevent accidents often caused by increasingly distracted drivers, according to the report.
Related: Google to Urge U.S. Congress to Help Get Self-Driving Cars on Roads
AlphaGo Seals 4-1 Victory Over Go Grandmaster Lee Sedol
March 16th, 2016Via: Guardian:
Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo program triumphed in its final game against South Korean Go grandmaster Lee Sedol to win the series 4-1, providing further evidence of the landmark achievement for an artificial intelligence program.
Lee started Tuesday’s game strongly, taking advantage of an early mistake by AlphaGo. But in the end, Lee was unable to hold off a comeback by his opponent, which won a narrow victory.
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AlphaGo’s win over Lee is significant because it marks the first time an artificial intelligence program has beaten a top-ranked Go professional, a victory experts had predicted was still years away. AlphaGo beat European Go champion Fan Hui in October, but Lee was expected to be a tougher challenge.
More: South Korea’s Go Association Awards Google’s AlphaGo AI Highest Ranking
The New Mind Control
March 14th, 2016Don’t let this one slip down the page without clicking through!
This piece doesn’t mention virtual reality, but VR is going to be an integral part of this, “unseen dictatorship.”
It’s easy to pass off clunky RV tech demos as some sort of passing fad.
Yep, I remember the 1990s too.
But it’s different this time.
With the next generation, high end headsets the user’s consciousness is completely transported into the digital world running on the system. The experience is extremely immersive. If the web-as-we-know-it is a suitable platform for mind control… Well holy shit, what will this thing be used for?
Via: Aeon:
Packard had uncovered a much bigger problem, however – namely that powerful corporations were constantly looking for, and in many cases already applying, a wide variety of techniques for controlling people without their knowledge. He described a kind of cabal in which marketers worked closely with social scientists to determine, among other things, how to get people to buy things they didn’t need and how to condition young children to be good consumers – inclinations that were explicitly nurtured and trained in Huxley’s Brave New World. Guided by social science, marketers were quickly learning how to play upon people’s insecurities, frailties, unconscious fears, aggressive feelings and sexual desires to alter their thinking, emotions and behaviour without any awareness that they were being manipulated.
By the early 1950s, Packard said, politicians had got the message and were beginning to merchandise themselves using the same subtle forces being used to sell soap. Packard prefaced his chapter on politics with an unsettling quote from the British economist Kenneth Boulding: ‘A world of unseen dictatorship is conceivable, still using the forms of democratic government.’ Could this really happen, and, if so, how would it work?
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And what if new means of control were developed that were far more powerful – and far more invisible – than any that have existed in the past? And what if new types of control allowed a handful of people to exert enormous influence not just over the citizens of the US but over most of the people on Earth?
It might surprise you to hear this, but these things have already happened.
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In most countries, 90 per cent of online search is conducted on Google, which gives the company even more power to flip elections than it has in the US and, with internet penetration increasing rapidly worldwide, this power is growing. In our PNAS article, Robertson and I calculated that Google now has the power to flip upwards of 25 per cent of the national elections in the world with no one knowing this is occurring. In fact, we estimate that, with or without deliberate planning on the part of company executives, Google’s search rankings have been impacting elections for years, with growing impact each year. And because search rankings are ephemeral, they leave no paper trail, which gives the company complete deniability.
Power on this scale and with this level of invisibility is unprecedented in human history. But it turns out that our discovery about SEME was just the tip of a very large iceberg.
Putin: “The Main Part” of Russian Armed Forces in Syria Will Start to Withdraw
March 14th, 2016Via: Reuters:
President Vladimir Putin announced out of the blue on Monday that “the main part” of Russian armed forces in Syria will start to withdraw, telling his diplomats to step up the push for peace as U.N.-mediated talks resumed on ending the five-year-old war.
Syria rejected any suggestion of a rift with Moscow, saying President Bashar al-Assad had agreed on the “reduction” of Russian forces in a telephone call with Putin.
Western diplomats speculated Putin may be trying to press Assad into accepting a political settlement to the war, which has killed 250,000 people, although U.S. officials saw no sign yet of Russian forces preparing to pull out.
The anti-Assad opposition simply expressed bafflement, with a spokesman saying “nobody knows what is in Putin’s mind”.
Russia’s military intervention in Syria in September helped to turn the tide of war in Assad’s favour after months of gains in western Syria by rebel fighters, who were aided by foreign military supplies including U.S.-made anti-tank missiles.
Putin made his surprise announcement, made with no advance warning to the United States, at a meeting with his defence and foreign ministers.
Mathematicians Discover Prime Conspiracy
March 14th, 2016Via: Quanta Magazine:
Two mathematicians have uncovered a simple, previously unnoticed property of prime numbers — those numbers that are divisible only by 1 and themselves. Prime numbers, it seems, have decided preferences about the final digits of the primes that immediately follow them.
Among the first billion prime numbers, for instance, a prime ending in 9 is almost 65 percent more likely to be followed by a prime ending in 1 than another prime ending in 9. In a paper posted online today, Kannan Soundararajan and Robert Lemke Oliver of Stanford University present both numerical and theoretical evidence that prime numbers repel other would-be primes that end in the same digit, and have varied predilections for being followed by primes ending in the other possible final digits.
“We’ve been studying primes for a long time, and no one spotted this before,” said Andrew Granville, a number theorist at the University of Montreal and University College London. “It’s crazy.”
Minecraft to Run Artificial Intelligence Experiments
March 14th, 2016Via: BBC:
Minecraft is to become a testing ground for artificial intelligence experiments.
Microsoft, owner of the popular video game, revealed that computer scientists and amateurs will be able to evaluate and develop AI software using its virtual landscapes from July.
The company says Minecraft is more “sophisticated” than existing AI research simulations and cheaper to use than building a robot.
$1400 Device Can Cause LTE Mobile Phones to Use Compromised 2G Networks
March 13th, 2016Via: Bloomberg:
Phones now operate on more sophisticated 3G and 4G (also known as LTE) networks. In theory, IMSI catchers can pinpoint only the location of these phones, not listen to calls or read texts. But none of that matters if the IMSI catcher in question can just knock a phone call back down to 2G. Enter Harris’s Hailstorm, the successor to StingRay. “It took us a while to stumble onto some documents from the DEA to see that the Hailstorm was a native LTE IMSI catcher,” the ACLU’s Soghoian says. “It was like, ‘Wait a second—I thought it’s not supposed to work on LTE. What’s going on?’?”
They found a hint to the answer last fall, when a research team out of Berlin and Helsinki announced it had built an IMSI catcher that could make an LTE phone leak its location to within a 10- to 20-meter radius—and in some cases, even its GPS coordinates. “Basically we downgraded to 2G or 3G,” says Ravishankar Borgaonkar, a 30-year-old Ph.D. who has since been hired at Oxford. “We wanted to see if the promises given by the 4G systems were correct or not.” They weren’t. The price tag for this IMSI catcher: $1,400. As long as phones retain the option of 2G, calls made on them can be downgraded. And the phone carriers can’t get rid of 2G—not if they want every phone to work everywhere. The more complex the system becomes, the more vulnerable it is. “Phones, as little computers, are becoming more and more secure,” says Karsten Nohl, chief scientist at Security Research Labs in Berlin. “But the phone networks? They’re rather becoming less secure. Not because of any one action but because there’s more and more possibility for one of these technologies to be the weakest link.”
