The Crime You Have Not Yet Committed
March 8th, 2016Precrime (today usually spelled “pre-crime”) is a term coined by science fiction author Philip K. Dick. It is increasingly used in academic literature to describe and criticise the tendency in criminal justice systems to focus on crimes not yet committed. Pre-crime has been defined as ‘substantive coercive state interventions targeted at non-imminent crimes’. Pre-crime intervenes to punish, disrupt, incapacitate or restrict those deemed to embody future crime threats. The term pre-crime embodies a temporal paradox, suggesting both that a crime has not occurred and that the crime that has not occurred is a foregone conclusion.
Via: Bloomberg:
Computers are getting pretty good at predicting the future. In many cases they do it better than people. That’s why Amazon uses them to figure out what you’re likely to buy, how Netflix knows what you might want to watch, the way meteorologists come up with accurate 10-day forecasts.
Now a team of scientists has demonstrated that a computer can outperform human judges in predicting who will commit a violent crime. In a paper published last month, they described how they built a system that started with people already arrested for domestic violence, then figured out which of them would be most likely to commit the same crime again.
The technology could potentially spare victims from being injured, or even killed. It could also keep the least dangerous offenders from going to jail unnecessarily. And yet, there’s something unnerving about using machines to decide what should happen to people. If targeted advertising misfires, nobody’s liberty is at stake.
For two decades, police departments have used computers to identify times and places where crimes are more likely to occur, guiding the deployment of officers and detectives. Now they’re going another step: using vast data sets to identify individuals who are criminally inclined. They’re doing this with varying levels of transparency and scientific testing. A system called Beware, for example, is capable of rating citizens of Fresno, California, as posing a high, medium or low level of threat. Press accounts say the system amasses data not only on past crimes but on web searches, property records and social networking posts.
Related: The NSA’s SKYNET Program May be Killing Thousands of Innocent People
At Secretive Meeting, Tech CEOs and Top Republicans Plot to Stop Trump
March 8th, 2016Now you’re looking for the secret… but you won’t find it, because of course you’re not really looking. You don’t really want to know. You want to be fooled.
—The Prestige
I’m trying to understand this Trump situation and the hysterical freakout that’s ensuing in elite and media circles.
Trump could have been vote-frauded into oblivion by now.
Why hasn’t that happened?
My best guess is that the primary purpose of the Donald Trump candidacy—whether he knows it or not—is to escort Hillary to the White House by simply drawing attention away from the Clintons’ life of crime.
You know, so all of that doesn’t come up during the sElection.
We can hear about the Donald’s hair and ex-wives and how hipsters are talking about fleeing to Canada, etc. I don’t remember which site, but mixed in with this bilge was a story about a cat with a long tongue that’s famous on the Internet.
Mena. Vince Foster. Mary Mahoney. The rest of it. *pfft*
Emails. Benghazi. Double *pfft* The recent Hillary stuff is chicken scratch compared to the 1980s and 1990s. I hardly mention the recent stuff. It’s noise level, relative to what went down in past decades.
Yep, Trump is a good whipping boy and the best distraction since Bin Laden.
And the next thing you know, the Clintons are back in the White House.
Almost as if by magic.
How many Bush presidencies would that make? I lose count.
I think it was Bill’s facilitation of the Mena enterprise that made the Clintons ultimately untouchable. The willingness to play ball there meant that these two were good to go. Bill got his turn. Now Hillary’s up.
Via: Huffington Post:
Billionaires, tech CEOs and top members of the Republican establishment flew to a private island resort off the coast of Georgia this weekend for the American Enterprise Institute’s annual World Forum, according to sources familiar with the secretive gathering.
The main topic at the closed-to-the-press confab? How to stop Republican front-runner Donald Trump.
Apple CEO Tim Cook, Google co-founder Larry Page, Napster creator and Facebook investor Sean Parker, and Tesla Motors and SpaceX honcho Elon Musk all attended. So did Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), political guru Karl Rove, House Speaker Paul Ryan, GOP Sens. Tom Cotton (Ark.), Cory Gardner (Colo.), Tim Scott (S.C.), Rob Portman (Ohio) and Ben Sasse (Neb.), who recently made news by saying he “cannot support Donald Trump.”
Along with Ryan, the House was represented by Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Fred Upton (Mich.), Rep. Kevin Brady (Texas) and almost-Speaker Kevin McCarthy (Calif.), sources said, along with leadership figure Cathy McMorris Rodgers (Wash.), Budget Committee Chairman Tom Price (R-Ga.), Financial Services Committee Chairman Jeb Hensarling (Texas) and Diane Black (Tenn.).
Philip Anschutz, the billionaire GOP donor whose company owns a stake in Sea Island, was also there, along with Democratic Rep. John Delaney, who represents Maryland. Arthur Sulzberger, the publisher of The New York Times, was there, too, a Times spokeswoman confirmed.
“A specter was haunting the World Forum–the specter of Donald Trump,” Kristol wrote in an emailed report from the conference, borrowing the opening lines of the Communist Manifesto. “There was much unhappiness about his emergence, a good deal of talk, some of it insightful and thoughtful, about why he’s done so well, and many expressions of hope that he would be defeated.”
Navy Secretly Conducting Electromagnetic Warfare Training on Washington Roads
March 8th, 2016Via: TruthOut:
Without public notification of any kind, the US Navy has secretly been conducting electromagnetic warfare testing and training on public roads in western Washington State for more than five years.
An email thread between the Navy and the US Forest Service between 2010 and 2012, recently obtained via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by Oregon-based author and activist Carol Van Strum in November 2014, revealed that the Navy has likely been driving mobile electromagnetic warfare emitters and conducting electromagnetic warfare training in the Olympic National Forest and on public roads on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula since 2010.
U.S. Military Spending Millions on Cyborg Implant
March 8th, 2016“A spokesman for DARPA told CNN that the program is not intended for military applications.”
Oh sure. It’s to help the injured vets, save kittens and make rainbows etc.
I like the comments from the cognitive scientist interviewed for the piece.
“Boondoggle.”
“My guess is that it’s a waste of taxpayer dollars.”
And flush go the millions down the toilet.
Via: CNN:
The U.S. military is spending millions on an advanced implant that would allow a human brain to communicate directly with computers.
If it succeeds, cyborgs will be a reality.
The Pentagon’s research arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), hopes the implant will allow humans to directly interface with computers, which could benefit people with aural and visual disabilities, such as veterans injured in combat.
The goal of the proposed implant is to “open the channel between the human brain and modern electronics” according to DARPA’s program manager, Phillip Alvelda.
…
A spokesman for DARPA told CNN that the program is not intended for military applications.
…
However, Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist and professor of psychology at Harvard, was skeptical of the proposed innovation, calling the idea a “bunch of hype with no results.”
He told CNN, “We have little to no idea how exactly the brain codes complex information” and cited the problems from foreign objects triggering brain inflammation that can cause serious neurological issues.
Pinker described “neural enhancement” for healthy brains as being a “boondoggle,” but he suggested that there could be some benefit for people suffering from brain-related diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.
In its announcement, DARPA acknowledged that an implant is still a long ways away, with breakthroughs in neuroscience, synthetic biology, low-power electronics, photonics and medical-device manufacturing needed before the device could be used.
DARPA plans to recruit a diverse set of experts in an attempt to accelerate the project’s development, according to its statement announcing the project.
Pinker remained skeptical, however, telling CNN: “My guess is that it’s a waste of taxpayer dollars.”
BMW Sees Its Future Shift to Ultimate Self-Driving Machine
March 7th, 2016Via: Bloomberg:
BMW AG, which became the world’s largest maker of luxury cars by focusing on Autobahn thrills, is shifting gears to automated driving as urbanization and changing attitudes toward cars redefine transportation.
No, Turning On Your Phone Is Not Consenting to Being Tracked by Police
March 6th, 2016Via: The Intercept:
The Maryland Court of Special Appeals on Wednesday upheld a historic decision by a state trial court that the warrantless use of cell-site simulators, or Stingrays, violates the Fourth Amendment.
The trial court had suppressed evidence obtained by the warrantless use of a Stingray — the first time any court in the nation had done so.
Last April, a Baltimore police detective testified that the department has used Stingrays 4,300 times since 2007, usually without notifying judges or defendants.
The ruling has the potential to set a strong precedent about warrantless location tracking. “Police should now be on notice,” said Nate Wessler, a staff attorney with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. “Accurately explain your surveillance activities to a judge and get a warrant, or risk your evidence being thrown out.”
Stingrays mimic cellphone towers, tricking nearby phones into connecting and revealing users’ locations. Stingrays sweep up data on every phone nearby — collecting information on dozens or potentially hundreds of people.
MIT’s New 5-Atom Quantum Computer Could Make Today’s Encryption Obsolete
March 6th, 2016“all you have to do is go in the lab, apply more technology, and you should be able to make a bigger quantum computer”
So the only thing preventing a more general purpose quantum computer is money and enough engineers…
Hmm…
Via: PC World:
Much of the encryption world today depends on the challenge of factoring large numbers, but scientists now say they’ve created the first five-atom quantum computer with the potential to crack the security of traditional encryption schemes.
In traditional computing, numbers are represented by either 0s or 1s, but quantum computing relies on atomic-scale units, or “qubits,” that can be simultaneously 0 and 1—a state known as a superposition that’s far more efficient. It typically takes about 12 qubits to factor the number 15, but researchers at MIT and the University of Innsbruck in Austria have found a way to pare that down to five qubits, each represented by a single atom, they said this week.
Using laser pulses to keep the quantum system stable by holding the atoms in an ion trap, the new system promises scalability as well, as more atoms and lasers can be added to build a bigger and faster quantum computer able to factor much larger numbers. That, in turn, presents new risks for factorization-based methods such as RSA, used for protecting credit cards, state secrets and other confidential data.
The development is in many ways an answer to a challenge posed back in 1994, when MIT professor Peter Shor came up with a quantum algorithm that calculates the prime factors of a large number with much better efficiency than a classical computer.
Fifteen is the smallest number that can meaningfully demonstrate Shor’s algorithm. Without any prior knowledge of the answers, the new system returned the correct factors with a confidence better than 99 percent.
“We show that Shor’s algorithm, the most complex quantum algorithm known to date, is realizable in a way where, yes, all you have to do is go in the lab, apply more technology, and you should be able to make a bigger quantum computer,” said Isaac Chuang, professor of physics and professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT.
“It might still cost an enormous amount of money to build—you won’t be building a quantum computer and putting it on your desktop anytime soon—but now it’s much more an engineering effort, and not a basic physics question,” Chuang added.
Driverless Big Rigs to be Trialed in UK
March 6th, 2016Via: BBC:
Driverless lorries are to be trialled in the UK, Chancellor George Osborne is expected to confirm in his Budget speech this month.
The Department for Transport said the UK would “lead the way” in testing driverless “HGV platoons”.
The technology enables vehicles to move in a group, using less fuel, it said.
The Times reported trials would take place on the M6 in Cumbria later in 2016, with vehicles in convoy headed by a driver in the leading lorry.
The tests would take place on a quiet stretch of the motorway, it said.
The paper said the plans could result in platoons of up to 10 computer-controlled lorries being driven metres apart from each other.
It said the chancellor was preparing to fund the trials as part of plans to speed up lorry deliveries and cut congestion.
Fukushima Disaster Nearly Destroyed Japan, Government Nuclear Safety Adviser Majored in Economics
March 5th, 2016Most nuclear power plants in Japan remain offline.
Via: NZ Herald:
Japan’s prime minister at the time of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami has revealed the country came within a “paper-thin margin” of a nuclear disaster requiring the evacuation of 50 million people.
In an interview to mark the fifth anniversary of the disaster, Naoto Kan described the panic and disarray at the highest levels of the Japanese Government as it fought to control multiple meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station.
He said he considered evacuating Tokyo and all other areas within 250km of the plant, and declaring martial law. “The future existence of Japan as a whole was at stake,” he said. “Something on that scale, an evacuation of 50 million, it would have been like a losing a huge war.”
Kan admitted he was frightened and said he got “no clear information” out of Tepco, the plant’s operator.
He was “very shocked” by the performance of Nobuaki Terasaka, his government’s nuclear safety adviser.
“We asked him, ‘Do you know anything about nuclear issues?’
“And he said, ‘No, I majored in economics’.”
Monsanto Sues to Keep Glyphosate Off California List of Carcinogens
March 5th, 2016Via: Reuters:
Monsanto Co stepped up its defense of a widely used weed killer on Thursday by filing a lawsuit in California seeking to prevent glyphosate, the main ingredient in its Roundup herbicide, from being added to the state’s list of known carcinogens.
The seed and agrochemicals company said it filed the suit against the state’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA) and the agency’s acting director, Lauren Zeise, in California state court, according to the filing seen by Reuters.
California law requires the state to keep a list of cancer-causing chemicals to inform residents of their risks.
OEHHA said in September that it planned to add glyphosate to the list after the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classified it as a probable human carcinogen last March.
Monsanto has disputed assessment, citing decades of studies deeming glyphosate safe, including a 2007 study by OEHHA that concluded the chemical was unlikely to cause cancer.
