U.S. Navy Launches Second Missile Off Southern California Coast

November 10th, 2015

Via: ABC News:

The Navy has confirmed a second missile launch that was like the one that caused so much alarm over the weekend.

Just before noon on Monday, the Navy conducted a Trident missile test off the Southern California coast.

When the first test was done on Saturday night, thousands of people saw a mysterious green light flash in the sky from San Diego to Ventura. That created quite a stir, and ABC7 got hundreds of calls in the newsroom from people anxious to know what it was.

Because the second launch was during the day, no pictures have been seen so far.

The tests were part of the Navy’s ongoing system evaluation test, and the missiles are not armed.

Related: Social Media Nightmare or Exactly What the Navy Wanted?


Maintenance of U.S. Passenger Planes Outsourced to El Salvador, Mexico and China

November 10th, 2015

Via: The Atlantic:

Over the past decade, nearly all large U.S. airlines have shifted heavy maintenance work on their airplanes to repair shops thousands of miles away, in developing countries, where the mechanics who take the planes apart (completely) and put them back together (or almost) may not even be able to read or speak English. US Airways and Southwest fly planes to a maintenance facility in El Salvador. Delta sends planes to Mexico. United uses a shop in China. American still does much of its most intensive maintenance in-house in the U.S., but that is likely to change in the aftermath of the company’s merger with US Airways.

The airlines are shipping this maintenance work offshore for the reason you’d expect: to cut labor costs. Mechanics in El Salvador, Mexico, China, and elsewhere earn a fraction of what mechanics in the U.S. do. In part because of this offshoring, the number of maintenance jobs at U.S. carriers has plummeted, from 72,000 in the year 2000 to fewer than 50,000 today.


Belgium Tells Facebook to Stop Storing Personal Data From Non-Users

November 9th, 2015

Via: Bloomberg:

Facebook Inc. lost a fight with Belgium’s privacy watchdog after a court ordered it to stop storing personal data from people who don’t have an account with the social network.

Facebook faces a fine of 250,000 euros ($269,000) a day if it doesn’t comply with the ruling, the court said in an e-mailed statement Monday.

Belgium’s privacy watchdog had sued Menlo Park, California-based Facebook for failing to respond to its demands to bring its privacy policy in line with local laws. Facebook’s “disrespectful” treatment of users’ personal data, without their knowledge, “needs tackling,” Willem Debeuckelaere, president of the Belgian commission, said in May.

“If a surfer doesn’t have an own Facebook account, Facebook from now on will have to explicitly solicit consent and provide the needed explanations,” the Brussels court of first instance said.


Dentists Reveal New Tooth Decay Treatment

November 9th, 2015

Via: Guardian:

Scientists have developed a new pain-free filling that allows cavities to be repaired without drilling or injections.

The tooth-rebuilding technique developed at King’s College London does away with fillings and instead encourages teeth to repair themselves.

Tooth decay is normally removed by drilling, after which the cavity is filled with a material such as amalgam or composite resin.

The new treatment, called Electrically Accelerated and Enhanced Remineralisation (EAER), accelerates the natural movement of calcium and phosphate minerals into the damaged tooth.

A two-step process first prepares the damaged area of enamel, then uses a tiny electric current to push minerals into the repair site. It could be available within three years.

Professor Nigel Pitts, from King’s College London’s Dental Institute, said: “The way we treat teeth today is not ideal. When we repair a tooth by putting in a filling, that tooth enters a cycle of drilling and refilling as, ultimately, each ‘repair’ fails.

“Not only is our device kinder to the patient and better for their teeth, but it’s expected to be at least as cost-effective as current dental treatments. Along with fighting tooth decay, our device can also be used to whiten teeth.”

A spinout company, Reminova, has been set up to commercialise the research. Based in Perth, Scotland, it is in the process of seeking private investment to develop EAER.


Former U.S. Comptroller General: Real U.S. Debt Is About $65 Trillion

November 9th, 2015

Via: The Hill:

The former U.S. comptroller general says the real U.S. debt is closer to about $65 trillion than the oft-cited figure of $18 trillion.

Dave Walker, who headed the Government Accountability Office (GAO) under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, said when you add up all of the nation’s unfunded liabilities, the national debt is more than three times the number generally advertised.

“If you end up adding to that $18.5 trillion the unfunded civilian and military pensions and retiree healthcare, the additional underfunding for Social Security, the additional underfunding for Medicare, various commitments and contingencies that the federal government has, the real number is about $65 trillion rather than $18 trillion, and it’s growing automatically absent reforms,” Walker told host John Catsimatidis on “The Cats Roundtable” on New York’s AM-970 in an interview airing Sunday.


Toyota Makes £600m Bet on Artificial Intelligence

November 8th, 2015

Via: Wired UK:

Toyota will invest more than £600m in artificial intelligence and robotics for its self-driving cars and robots.

Akio Toyoda, the company’s president, announced the car manufacturer is launching a research company in Silicon Valley to develop AI and robotics for use in its cars.

The Toyota Research Institute will, according to a company press release, “make driving accessible to everyone, regardless of ability,” improve safety by embedding AI in cars, and help to discover new materials.

However the new company, which will have 200 employees and launch in 2016, will be looking to go “beyond” autonomous cars, AP reported. On the slate? Health, mobility and personal wellbeing robotics to improve all aspects of human life.


The Cyberthreat Under the Street

November 8th, 2015

It’s a bit of a worry that a nearly point-by-point facsimile of my 2002 warning about this has just appeared in the New York Times…

God damn conspiracy theorists!

If the whole thing suddenly goes pop, just know that the feds knew about this at least as far back as the mid-1990s, when I was looking at it in college. In the years since, the threat has snowballed beyond anything even I could have imagined back then while wearing my Ultimate-Doom propeller beanie.

Via: New York Times:

WITHIN the last year there have been 16 so-called fiber cuts in the San Francisco Bay Area. According to the F.B.I., someone or some group has been going through manholes to sever fiber optic cables that supply telecommunications to large sections of the region, which is home to technology companies, academic institutions and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, overseer of the nation’s nuclear weapons.

Following each incident (usually occurring late at night and involving two or three separate fiber cuts) residents couldn’t make land or mobile calls, not even to 911, or send texts or emails. Hospital records in some instances were inaccessible. Credit cards and A.T.M.s didn’t work. And forget about Googling, watching Netflix or remotely turning on a coffee maker. (For security reasons, Lawrence Livermore declined to say how the cuts affected its operations.)

When we talk about the Internet, we talk about clouds and ether. But the Internet is not amorphous. You may access it wirelessly, but ultimately you’re relying on a bunch of physical cables that are vulnerable to attack. It’s something that’s been largely forgotten in the lather over cybersecurity. The threat is not only malicious code flowing through the pipes but also, and perhaps more critically, the pipes themselves.

Most worrisome are the throughways and junctures that handle enormous amounts of Internet traffic. It would be as if a major interstate highway or crucial interchange were closed and all the traffic was forced onto side streets. There would be gridlock, and some of those side streets might collapse under the weight. Data transfer would slow significantly or come to a halt, as has happened in Northern California.

Surprisingly, there isn’t even a good map of the Internet’s highways and byways to clearly show locations that, if taken out, would severely hamper the system. “Everybody assumes somebody knows, but after a while you find out nobody actually knows,” said Paul Barford, a professor of computer science at the University of Wisconsin who has made it his mission to find out where the vulnerabilities are.

He recently completed a map of the United States’ long-haul Internet infrastructure — stretches that span at least 30 miles and connect population centers of at least 100,000 people. It took him four years of cajoling information from commercial broadband providers and collecting public records to come up with a reasonably reliable map. Notably, his research was partly funded by the Department of Homeland Security and can be accessed only by D.H.S.-approved researchers.

“What we’re trying to avoid is giving bad guys a map to do bad things,” Professor Barford said. “Now that we can see the possible pinch points in the U.S., we are looking at ways to mitigate them.”

Security experts and networking engineers said they were most concerned about where major networks converge. These are called Internet exchange points, or I.X.P.s, where networks come together like highway interchanges to trade traffic, which is known as peering.

There are about 80 I.X.P.s in the United States but only a handful, including ones in New York City, Miami, Los Angeles, Seattle and outside Washington, are vital interchanges for domestic as well as international traffic coming from undersea cables from abroad (which are also vulnerable to cuts by mislaid anchors or submarine sabotage).

Plugging into these major hubs are hundreds of Internet and mobile service providers, as well as content delivery networks such as Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft. If taken out by natural disaster (earthquake, hurricane) or a strategic attack, much of the United States, if not much of the world, would have hindered Internet access or none at all, depending on the severity and sophistication of the strikes.

“It’s crazy to see these unprotected buildings containing all this physical cabling that’s interconnecting continents as well as all of North America,” said John Savageau, an information and communications technology consultant who formerly managed I.X.P.s owned by the CoreSite Realty Corporation, a major player in the industry. “If one of these major nodes goes down, you’re going to have pain because customer performance will be seriously degraded, but if you have a coordinated attack on multiple locations, that’s a nightmare scenario.”


‘Designer Cells’ Reverse One-Year-Old’s Cancer

November 8th, 2015

Via: BBC:

The first person in the world to receive a pioneering genetic therapy has had her cancer reversed, say Great Ormond Street doctors.

One-year-old Layla Richards, from London, had incurable aggressive leukaemia only five months ago.

Doctors used “designer immune cells” to fight the cancer and say her improvement was “almost a miracle”.

It is too soon to know if she has been cured, but her progress already marks a huge moment for the field.

…

Medical staff, in conjunction with the biotech company Cellectis, rapidly gained permission to try a highly experimental therapy that had been trialled only in mice.

The treatment – designer immune cells – were the product of cutting-edge advances in gene editing.

Previous therapies have tried to add new genes to correct a defect whereas this one edited those already there.
Molecular scissors

Microscopic scissors – technically known as Talens – were used to precisely engineer the DNA inside a donor’s immune cells.

The cells were designed to seek out and kill only leukaemia cells and to make them invisible to the strong drugs given to patients.

The designer cells were then injected into Layla and she also needed a second bone marrow transplant to restore her immune system.

Now, just months after her family was told she had incurable cancer, Layla is not only alive, but has no trace of leukaemia in her body.


When a 127-Year-Old U.S. Industry Collapses Under China’s Weight

November 8th, 2015

Via: Bloomberg:

Alcoa Inc.’s latest aluminum-making cutback is signaling the end of the iconic American industry.

For 127 years, the New York-based company has been churning out the lightweight metal used in everything from beverage cans to airplanes, once making it a symbol of U.S. industrial might. Now, with prices languishing near six-year lows, it’s wiping out almost a third of domestic operating capacity, Harbor Intelligence estimates. If prices don’t recover, the researcher predicts almost all U.S. smelting plants will close by next year.

While that’s a big deal for the U.S. industry and the people it employs, it doesn’t mean much for global supplies. Alcoa’s decision to eliminate 503,000 metric tons of smelting capacity accounts for about 31 percent of the U.S. total for primary aluminum, but less than one percent of the global total, according to Harbor. For more than a decade, output has been moving to where it’s cheaper to produce: Russia, the Middle East and China. A global glut has driven prices down by 27 percent in the past year, rendering American operations unprofitable and accelerating the pace of the industry’s demise.


Former Russian Propaganda Chief, “Inspiration” for Russia Today, Found Dead in U.S. Hotel

November 7th, 2015

Via: Guardian:

Vladimir Putin’s former press secretary, who was an “inspiration” for the Russia Today (RT) news channel, has been found dead in a hotel room in Washington.

The body of Mikhail Lesin was found in a room in the plush Dupont Circle hotel on Thursday morning, the Russian embassy in Washington said, confirming reports by Russian news agencies that Lesin, 57, had died. State-owned RIA Novosti reported that Lesin died of a heart attack, citing a spokesman for his family.

Washington police have opened a “death investigation”, lieutenant Sean Conboy told the Guardian. Conboy declined to identify the subject of the investigation but said detectives were looking into the circumstances of the man’s death. Police found a body at the hotel room at about 11.30am on Friday, he said.

The Russian agency Tass reported that early investigation did not find any signs of violent death, and quoted a police spokesman, Sean Hickman, as saying security had not seen anything suspicious. Hickman said the nature of the investigation could change, depending on what was found the scene and after an examination of the body.

Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of RT, the Kremlin-directed news agency tweeted: “Lesin is dead. It’s impossible to believe. Please, everyone who knew and didn’t know him, remember him well. He was an absolutely unique man.”

RT credited Lesin with “inspiring [its] creation”, and suggested without any citation that “Lesin had been suffering from a prolonged unidentified illness”.

After the fall of communism in the early 1990s, Lesin set up Video International, which became a multi-billion dollar advertising agency and remains one of Russia’s biggest.

He served as the country’s press minister from 1999 to 2004 and was Putin’s media adviser for the following five years, before becoming a senior executive at Gazprom-Media, Russia’s largest media group, in 2013. He resigned a year later.

Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in a statement that the president “highly appreciates the enormous contribution Mikhail Lesin made to the formation of the modern Russian media”, according to Tass.

RT was set up in 2005 to convey a pro-Kremlin interpretation of world events. It broadcasts in English, Spanish and Arabic, as well as Russian, and launched a UK-focused channel last year.


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