France to Keep 10,000 Troops on Streets
March 16th, 2015Via: Russia Today:
As the threat of attacks by Islamist extremists remains high in France, President Francois Hollande has decided to continue the deployment of 10,000 troops on the streets across the country.
“The threat of terrorist attack against our country remains high. The head of state has decided to maintain the level of the army on the national territory at 10,000 troops in support of security forces from the Interior Ministry,” Hollande’s office said in a statement after a meeting of senior ministers, AFP reported.
A total of 7,000 troops will be monitoring and protecting religious buildings that are “particularly threatened,” the statement added.
Among other sites that are being patrolled by the troops are stations, media buildings and various other possible targets for terrorists.
Egypt Unveils Plans to Build New Capital East of Cairo [???]
March 14th, 2015Via: BBC:
The Egyptian government has announced plans to build a new capital to the east of the present one, Cairo.
Housing Minister Mostafa Madbouly said the project would cost $45bn (£30bn) and take five to seven years to complete.
He said the aim was to ease congestion and overpopulation in Cairo over the next 40 years.
The announcement was made at an investment conference that aims to revive the Egyptian economy.
Cyclone Pam
March 14th, 2015Cyclone Pam is coming through, so we’re almost certainly going to have our power cut. Hopefully, the transceiver that provides Internet access to our valley won’t be damaged. Our ISP just emailed and they’re saying that this storm is definitely packing winds strong enough to damage their transceivers.
The worst of it for us will hit tonight and tomorrow. As usual, no updates means some sort of storm related outage.
Via: New Zealand Herald:
Gisborne will see the first effects of Cyclone Pam – one of the Pacific’s worst storms ever – early this afternoon, with galeforce winds and huge swells expected to lash the east coast from midday today.
The storm is thought to have claimed up to 44 lives as it hit Vanuatu, destroying buildings and tossing trees and debris across the capital. Eight were confirmed dead last night. There were unconfirmed reports last night of damage in other islands including Kiribati, Tuvalu and the Solomon Islands.
Swells up to 9m are expected in the Gisborne region, and emergency manager Richard Steele said winds of up to 150kmh had been predicted. “[These] will cause damage especially in areas exposed to the southeast.”
Momma, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Programmers: “A System Tends Toward a Giant Ball of Mud Given Enough Time”
March 13th, 2015I’m one of the early backers of Star Citizen, easily the most ambitious video game project of all time. Never mind that I don’t own hardware that’s minimally powerful enough to play the initial alpha release modules, or an internet connection with datacap large enough to download the final client (which could top 100GB) once it ships. Details. Details.
Regardless, I still follow development progress. One of the features of their Around the Verse show that I especially enjoy is Bug Smashers with gameplay programmer Mark Abent.
I don’t expect “normal” Cryptogon readers to subject themselves to this, but I’ve queued up Mark’s Bug Smashers segment from the latest Around the Verse for those of you with one or more propellers in your beanie. Click through and watch that.
Now, check this out.
Via: Medium:
This is insanity. The way we build software right now is completely fucked.
Why Hacking a Tesla Battery May Foreshadow an Energy Revolution
March 13th, 2015Disclosure: I sell solar power systems in New Zealand.
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Guys are recovering the battery packs from wrecked electric cars and using them for off-grid solar systems.
In the spirit of Quake 3, I salute you:
Via: Bloomberg:
Afoot is an unprecedented worldwide effort — equivalent to a kind of a tech-age version of the Manhattan Project that built the atomic bomb — to amp up, transform and reinvent the humble battery into an element that could profoundly change the global energy paradigm.
Related: Do It Yourself LiFePO4 Energy Storage System
New Barbie Doll Sends Speech from Children to Mattel Over Internet
March 12th, 2015Via: Washington Post:
At a recent New York toy fair, a Mattel representative introduced the newest version of Barbie by saying: “Welcome to New York, Barbie.”
The doll, named Hello Barbie, responded: “I love New York! Don’t you? Tell me, what’s your favorite part about the city? The food, fashion or the sights?”
To revive the sinking sales of its flagship brand, Mattel is bringing Barbie to life with voice-recognition software that will allow the doll to “listen” to children speak and give chatty responses. It will learn over time, remembering your dog’s name and adjusting to new topics.
This WiFi-connected Barbie may soon be a hit among children used to tinkering with iPads, but children’s privacy advocates are crying foul. Hello Barbie may be more accurately called “eavesdropping” Barbie, says one advocacy group. Another popular description? Creepy.
Hello Barbie works by recording a child’s voice with an embedded microphone that is triggered by pressing a button on the doll. As the doll “listens,” audio recordings travel over the Web to a server where the snippets of speech are recognized and processed. That information is used to help form Hello Barbie’s responses.
800,000 Microinverters Remotely Retrofitted on Oahu—in One Day
March 11th, 2015Disclosure: I sell solar power systems in New Zealand that include Enphase products and services.
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Enphase systems are now helping stabilize the grid in Hawaii.
Via: IEEE:
Utilities are asking more of the rooftop solar systems that increasingly are popping up throughout their distribition grids. As we profile in this month’s Spectrum, leading utilities are deputizing solar system’s inverters to function as junior grid regulators to help stabilize the grid. Hawaiian Electric Company and inverter manufacturer Enphase Energy just showed how swiftly such upgrades can happen.
In a single day Enphase and HECO remotely reprogrammed some 800,000 microinverters attached to individual photovoltaic panels on Oahu, accounting for roughly 60 percent of the island’s distributed solar capacity according to Ameet Konkar, Enphase Energy’s senior director for strategic initiatives. Those systems deliver up to 140 megawatts, nearly as much power as the state’s largest conventional power plant, says Konkar.
Oahu needs higher-functioning solar systems because it leads the U.S. in per capita solar penetration, with 12 percent of residential customers operating rooftop systems. Island grids are more susceptible to even small perturbations, such as occurs when trees fall on wires and lightning strikes. The solar upgrade will help HECO’s grid ride through the resulting power glitches.
Whereas standards required solar systems to shut down at the first sign of substandard AC voltage and frequency, HECO and Enphase’s upgrade instructs the PV microinverters to ride through such irregularities. Like the momentum in a conventional power plant’s spinning turbines, the solar systems’ enduring power generation should help restabilize the grid’s AC signal.
New Smoking Gun Further Ties NSA to Omnipotent “Equation Group” Hackers
March 11th, 2015Via: Ars Technica:
Researchers from Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab have uncovered more evidence tying the US National Security Agency to a nearly omnipotent group of hackers who operated undetected for at least 14 years.
The Kaspersky researchers once again stopped short of saying the hacking collective they dubbed Equation Group was the handiwork of the NSA, saying only that the operation had to have been sponsored by a nation-state with nearly unlimited resources to dedicate to the project. Still, they heaped new findings on top of a mountain of existing evidence that already strongly implicated the spy agency. The strongest new tie to the NSA was the string “BACKSNARF_AB25” discovered only a few days ago embedded in a newly found sample of the Equation Group espionage platform dubbed “EquationDrug.” “BACKSNARF,” according to page 19 of this undated NSA presentation, was the name of a project tied to the NSA’s Tailored Access Operations.
“BACKSNARF” joins a host of other programming “artifacts” that tied Equation Group malware to the NSA. They include “Grok,” “STRAITACID,” and “STRAITSHOOTER.” Just as jewel thieves take pains to prevent their fingerprints from being found at their crime scenes, malware developers endeavor to scrub usernames, computer IDs, and other text clues from the code they produce. While the presence of the “BACKSNARF” artifact isn’t conclusive proof it was part of the NSA project by that name, the chances that there were two unrelated projects with nation-state funding seems infinitesimally small.
The CIA Helped Develop Planes that Scrape Cell Phone Data
March 10th, 2015Via: The Verge:
The US may be using cellphone-sniffing planes to find suspects across the world, according to a new report from The Wall Street Journal. In November, the Journal revealed the US Marshal’s secret program to locate specific fugitive through airplane equipped to mimic cell towers. Flying over an urban area, the planes can pinpoint the location of a single number amid a million or more phones. The new report shows the technology first originated with the CIA, which guided the initial deployment of the planes by the Marshal Service. Furthermore, Journal sources say continues to be used to locate intelligence targets overseas.
If true, the report unveils a powerful weapon in US intelligence efforts abroad, but also reveals a troubling trend of foreign intelligence tools used for domestic law enforcement purposes. The plane-mounted cellphone detector is a potentially ingenious tool for intelligence gathering, but it seems to have moved from CIA intelligence work to domestic fugitive tracking with little to no oversight, a troubling reminder of how easily tools designed for the War on Terror can be put to domestic ends.
Disney’s Magic Band
March 10th, 2015A cautionary tale.
Via: Wired:
Will the world at large ever become something akin to Disney World, loaded with sensors attuned to our every move, designed to free us? There are signs. It’s already starting to appear on Disney cruise ships, and Staggs says airlines, sports leagues, and sports teams have asked about the technology. “We’re just at the beginning of understanding what to do with this,” he says. What Staggs doesn’t share, but what former team members do, is that Disney already has conceived, designed, and engineered many more features that seem to border on science fiction—features even more ambitious than delivering your food to you without your having to ask.
The MagicBand contains sensors that let guests swipe onto rides and allow Disney to pinpoint their location. At Be Our Guest, they’re what enable the radios in the table and ceiling to triangulate your location so your server can find you. If Disney decides to install those sensors throughout the park, a new world of data opens up. They could have Mickey and Snow White find you. They might use the park’s myriad cameras to capture candid moments of your family—enjoying rides, meeting Snow White—and stitch them together into a personalized film. (The product teams called this the Story Engine.) But they might also know when you’ve waited too long in line and email you a coupon for free ice cream or a pass to another ride. And with that, they’ll have hooked the white whale of customer service: Turning a negative experience into a positive one. It recasts your memories of a place—that’s why casinos comp you drinks and shows when you lose at the tables.
Though Franklin wouldn’t comment on the particulars of these possibilities, he did offer an intriguing summary of them. “What people call the Internet of Things is just a technological underpinning that misses the point, ” he says. “This is about the experiential Internet. The guest doesn’t need to know how it happened. It’s about the magic of the food arriving.”
