Man Who Was Making Film About American Dictatorship Found Dead in Home Along with Wife and Child
January 19th, 2015Via: Star Tribune:
In the white rambler in the 1000 block of Ramsdell Drive in Apple Valley, a terrible sight awaited police: The bodies of a man, woman and child lying in the living room, the perpetrator and victims of an apparent murder-suicide.
The bodies may have been there for up to four weeks before they were found Saturday afternoon; neighbors next door and across the street said they hadn’t seen the family since before Christmas.
Authorities have not officially identified the people found in the home, but neighbors, real estate records and other data showed they were David T. Crowley, 29; his wife, Komel Crowley, 28, and their 5-year-old daughter, Rani. A black handgun lay nearby.
…
David Crowley worked out of his home as a filmmaker and screenwriter. In a trailer on YouTube, he is credited as writer and director of a movie-in-progress called “Gray State.” The frenetic trailer shows scenes of a militarized police force, gun violence and some kind of citizen insurgency. The trailer solicits online donations to help finance the project.
Related: graystatemovie.com, Gray State Movie YouTube Channel
Russia’s Net Outflows Hit Their Highest Level Ever
January 18th, 2015Via: Business Insider:
Net outflows by companies and banks reached $151.5 billion in 2014, more than two times as much as in 2013, according to the Russian Central Bank . The last time the level of outflows was this high was during the global financial crisis in 2008, when it reached $133.6 billion.
The fourth quarter in particular saw a huge spike. Net outflows surged up to $72.9 billion, from $16.9 billion in the previous quarter, following the drop in oil prices and the ruble’s plunge.
Holder Limits Seized-Asset Sharing Process that Split Billions with Local, State Police
January 18th, 2015I’d like to believe that, sometimes, good news is just good news and not some setup for more body cavity searches and surveillance.
This is Cryptogon, though, so if there is another shoe to drop, someone will post it pretty quick.
My guess is that the states will just make up ways to keep the shakedowns going.
Via: Washington Post:
Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on Friday barred local and state police from using federal law to seize cash, cars and other property without warrants or criminal charges.
Holder’s action represents the most sweeping check on police power to confiscate personal property since the seizures began three decades ago as part of the war on drugs.
Since 2008, thousands of local and state police agencies have made more than 55,000 seizures of cash and property worth $3 billion under a civil asset forfeiture program at the Justice Department called Equitable Sharing.
The program has enabled local and state police to make seizures and then have them “adopted” by federal agencies, which share in the proceeds. It allowed police departments and drug task forces to keep up to 80 percent of the proceeds of adopted seizures, with the rest going to federal agencies.
“With this new policy, effective immediately, the Justice Department is taking an important step to prohibit federal agency adoptions of state and local seizures, except for public safety reasons,” Holder said in a statement.
Research Credit: ottilie
Belgium: Troops Deployed on Streets
January 17th, 2015Domestic troop deployments now in France and Belgium.
Via: Time:
Belgium’s defense ministry said Saturday said that the country is deploying hundreds of troops to guard possible terrorism targets, including Jewish sites and diplomatic missions after deadly raids on an Islamist cell.
As many as 300 military will be stationed at locations like the U.S. and Israeli embassies in Brussels and NATO and European Union institutions, Reuters reports. They will be supporting regular police.
“It’s very important to say that this wasn’t a simple decision, but it was necessary, at a time when police are overly engaged, for the army to enter in a supporting role,” Defense Minister Steven Vandeput told reporters.
The Birth of D Weapons
January 17th, 2015Via: Spiegel:
According to top secret documents from the archive of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden seen exclusively by SPIEGEL, they are planning for wars of the future in which the Internet will play a critical role, with the aim of being able to use the net to paralyze computer networks and, by doing so, potentially all the infrastructure they control, including power and water supplies, factories, airports or the flow of money.
During the 20th century, scientists developed so-called ABC weapons — atomic, biological and chemical. It took decades before their deployment could be regulated and, at least partly, outlawed. New digital weapons have now been developed for the war on the Internet. But there are almost no international conventions or supervisory authorities for these D weapons, and the only law that applies is the survival of the fittest.
Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan foresaw these developments decades ago. In 1970, he wrote, “World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.” That’s precisely the reality that spies are preparing for today.
The US Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force have already established their own cyber forces, but it is the NSA, also officially a military agency, that is taking the lead. It’s no coincidence that the director of the NSA also serves as the head of the US Cyber Command. The country’s leading data spy, Admiral Michael Rogers, is also its chief cyber warrior and his close to 40,000 employees are responsible for both digital spying and destructive network attacks.
Robots Roam Hallways of San Francisco’s Newest Hospital
January 16th, 2015Via: cnet:
Meet Eve, a short, refrigerator-wide robot. While it doesn’t have arms, or a head, its portly frame can haul heavy loads, dispense supplies and travel long distances.
Eve is one of 25 autonomous robots programmed to help the staff of San Francisco’s newest hospital. When the University of California, San Francisco, Medical Center at Mission Bay opens on February 1, Eve and its comrades will be cruising the corridors to bring supplies to and from the pharmacy, kitchen, lab and stock rooms.
Elon Musk Plans to Build Hyperloop Test Track
January 16th, 2015Via: cnet:
Billionaire and entrepreneur Elon Musk is getting more hands-on with the Hyperloop.
Musk, who heads up both space transportation outfit SpaceX and electric-vehicle maker Tesla Motors, casually announced via Twitter on Thursday that he’s decided to help accelerate development of his vision for near-supersonic tube transportation, first outlined in August 2013.
Musk said he will build a five-mile test track for the still-theoretical system for students and companies to use. A possible location would be Texas, he added, where presumably there is plenty of flat land to go around.
GM Bolt: Pure EV, 200 Mile Range, $30,000, 2017
January 16th, 2015Via: MIT Technology Review:
GM today unveiled an all-electric concept car, called the Bolt, which it says will have a 200-mile range. That’s comparable to the range of Tesla’s electric luxury cars, but the Bolt will cost around $30,000 (while a Tesla will sell for between $70,000 and $94,000).
The Bolt, a compact hatchback, will be launched in 2017, GM says, making it a competitor to a mid-priced, mass market car that Tesla is working on. Electric cars could be a lot more attractive to consumers if they could travel as far as gasoline vehicles can travel between refueling.
GM would not discuss anything about the battery design or chemistry that would allow the Bolt to reach a 200-mile range. Success will mean either developing an entirely new battery technology, or—more likely—greatly lowering the cost of lithium-ion batteries. LG Chem, which supplies lithium-ion batteries for GM’s existing electric-gas hybrid car, the Volt, has previously announced that it plans to supply batteries for cars with a 200-mile range.
GM started trying to develop a 200-mile range electric car in 2012, about the time it licensed what had seemed to be breakthrough technology based on research at Argonne National Laboratory, which had been further developed by the startup, Envia. Soon after, however, that technology was shown to have a fatal flaw—it didn’t store as much electricity as initial tests suggested.
Tesla Motors predicts it will be able to deliver a 200-mile range, $35,000 car by 2017, in large part by scaling up production of existing battery technology.
A Cyberattack Has Caused Confirmed Physical Damage for the Second Time Ever
January 16th, 2015Via: Wired:
Amid all the noise the Sony hack generated over the holidays, a far more troubling cyber attack was largely lost in the chaos. Unless you follow security news closely, you likely missed it.
I’m referring to the revelation, in a German report released just before Christmas (.pdf), that hackers had struck an unnamed steel mill in Germany. They did so by manipulating and disrupting control systems to such a degree that a blast furnace could not be properly shut down, resulting in “massive”—though unspecified—damage.
This is only the second confirmed case in which a wholly digital attack caused physical destruction of equipment. The first case, of course, was Stuxnet, the sophisticated digital weapon the U.S. and Israel launched against control systems in Iran in late 2007 or early 2008 to sabotage centrifuges at a uranium enrichment plant.
Related: The Birth of D Weapons
Hardware Maintenance
January 16th, 2015This email is notification of planned hardware maintenance Friday morning, 16 January, 2015, between 00:00 hours and 4:00am MDT (UTC/GMT-6), for the server which hosts cryptogon.com.
The maintenance will include approximately 45 minutes of downtime for your website while the server is powered down, the hardware changes are made, and the server is powered up again.
