Taco Bell Unveils Mobile Ordering
October 28th, 2014“Cashiers and food service workers: You’re pretty much screwed.”
—Seattle Hikes Minimum Wage to $15 Per Hour
Via: USA Today:
Food used to be what drove folks into restaurants. But these days, it’s also increasingly the technology behind it.
That’s why two major restaurant chains, Taco Bell and Outback Steakhouse, made marketing waves on Tuesday, not with new product rollouts, but with industry-leading technology announcements.
Taco Bell went way outside the bun to unveil an advanced mobile app that lets folks order and pay on their smartphones and then walk or drive in and pick up their food.
‘Ambulance Drone’ Prototype Unveiled in Holland
October 28th, 2014Via: AFP:
A Dutch-based student on Tuesday unveiled a prototype of an “ambulance drone”, a flying defibrillator able to reach heart attack victims within precious life-saving minutes.
Developed by Belgian engineering graduate Alec Momont, it can fly at speeds of up to 100 kilometres per hour (60 miles per hour).
“Around 800,000 people suffer a cardiac arrest in the European Union every year and only 8.0 percent survive,” Momont, 23, said at the TU Delft University.
“The main reason for this is the relatively long response time of emergency services of around 10 minutes, while brain death and fatalities occur with four to six minutes,” he said in a statement.
“The ambulance drone can get a defibrillator to a patient within a 12 square kilometre (4.6 square miles) zone within a minute, reducing the chance of survival from 8 percent to 80 percent.”
Painted in emergency services yellow and driven by six propellers, the drone can carry a four kilogramme load — in this case a defibrillator.
It tracks emergency mobile calls and uses the GPS to navigate.
Once at the scene, an operator, like a paramedic, can watch, talk and instruct those helping the victim by using an on-board camera connected to a control room via a livestream webcam.
The prototype has already attracted the interest of emergency services including that of Amsterdam, the Dutch daily Algemeen Dagblad said.
British Spies Allowed to Access U.S. Data Without a Warrant
October 28th, 2014Via: National Journal:
British authorities are capable of tapping into bulk communications data collected by other countries’ intelligence services—including the National Security Agency—without a warrant, according to secret government documents released Tuesday.
The agreement between the NSA and Britain’s spy agency, known as Government Communications Headquarters or GCHQ, potentially puts the Internet and phone data of Americans in the hands of another country without legal oversight when obtaining a warrant is “not technically feasible.”
The data, once obtained, can be kept for up to two years, according to internal policies disclosed by the British government. GCHQ was forced to reveal that it can request and receive vast quantities of raw, unanalyzed data collected from foreign governments it partners with during legal proceedings in a closed court hearing in a case brought by various international human-rights organizations, including Privacy International, Liberty U.K., and Amnesty International. The suit challenges certain aspects of GCHQ’s surveillance practices.
It is well known that the NSA and GCHQ closely share intelligence data with one another, as part of a long-standing surveillance partnership. Some details of the agencies’ spy pact were exposed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden last year, including the existence of GCHQ’s Tempora program, which taps into fiber-optic cables to scoop up online and telephone traffic across the Web for up to 30 days.
But this is the first time the British government has disclosed that it does not require a warrant to access data collected and maintained by its American counterparts. The revelation appears to counter statements made by an oversight committee of the British Parliament in July of last year that “in each case where GCHQ sought information from the U.S., a warrant for interception, signed by a minister, was already in place.”
Cryptogon Readers Send Contributions
October 28th, 2014Update: The KLs of Cryptogon
Three different KLs sent funds this month. I’m going to first name last initial to keep things clear. Kelle L sent $20 earlier in October and $30 just now. Thank you.
—
Thank you.
Ken L $25
Eileen $75
Assange: Google Is Not What It Seems
October 28th, 2014
Via: Newsweek:
It was also in 1999 that Schmidt joined the board of a Washington, D.C.–based group: the New America Foundation, a merger of well-connected centrist forces (in D.C. terms). The foundation and its 100 staff serve as an influence mill, using its network of approved national security, foreign policy and technology pundits to place hundreds of articles and op-eds per year.
By 2008, Schmidt had become chairman of its board of directors. As of 2013 the New America Foundation’s principal funders (each contributing over $1 million) were listed as Eric and Wendy Schmidt, the U.S. State Department and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Secondary funders include Google, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and Radio Free Asia.
Schmidt’s involvement in the New America Foundation places him firmly in the Washington establishment nexus. The foundation’s other board members, seven of whom also list themselves as members of the Council on Foreign Relations, include Francis Fukuyama, one of the intellectual fathers of the neoconservative movement; Rita Hauser, who served on the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board under both Bush and Obama; Jonathan Soros, the son of George Soros; Walter Russell Mead, a U.S. security strategist and editor of the American Interest; Helene Gayle, who sits on the boards of Coca-Cola, Colgate-Palmolive, the Rockefeller Foundation, the State Department’s Foreign Affairs Policy Unit, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the White House Fellows program and Bono’s ONE Campaign; and Daniel Yergin, oil geo-strategist, former chair of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Task Force.
The chief executive of the foundation, appointed in 2013, is Jared Cohen’s former boss at the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, Anne-Marie Slaughter, a Princeton law and international relations wonk with an eye for revolving doors. She is everywhere, issuing calls for Obama to respond to the Ukraine crisis not only by deploying covert U.S. forces into the country but also by dropping bombs on Syria—on the basis that this will send a message to Russia and China. Along with Schmidt, she is a 2013 attendee of the Bilderberg conference and sits on the State Department’s Foreign Affairs Policy Board.
There was nothing politically hapless about Eric Schmidt. I had been too eager to see a politically unambitious Silicon Valley engineer, a relic of the good old days of computer science graduate culture on the West Coast. But that is not the sort of person who attends the Bilderberg conference four years running, who pays regular visits to the White House, or who delivers “fireside chats” at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
Schmidt’s emergence as Google’s “foreign minister”—making pomp and ceremony state visits across geopolitical fault lines—had not come out of nowhere; it had been presaged by years of assimilation within U.S. establishment networks of reputation and influence.
On a personal level, Schmidt and Cohen are perfectly likable people. But Google’s chairman is a classic “head of industry” player, with all of the ideological baggage that comes with that role. Schmidt fits exactly where he is: the point where the centrist, liberal and imperialist tendencies meet in American political life.
By all appearances, Google’s bosses genuinely believe in the civilizing power of enlightened multinational corporations, and they see this mission as continuous with the shaping of the world according to the better judgment of the “benevolent superpower.” They will tell you that open-mindedness is a virtue, but all perspectives that challenge the exceptionalist drive at the heart of American foreign policy will remain invisible to them. This is the impenetrable banality of “don’t be evil.” They believe that they are doing good. And that is a problem.
Research Credit: alvinroast
Extensive U.S. Mail Monitoring Revealed
October 28th, 2014Via: Dallas Morning News:
The U.S. Postal Service reported that it approved nearly 50,000 requests last year from law enforcement agencies and its own internal inspection unit to secretly monitor the mail of ordinary Americans for use in criminal and national security investigations. The findings serve as a rare public accounting of the Postal Service’s mass surveillance program.
The number of requests are contained in a little-noticed 2014 audit of the surveillance program by the Postal Service’s inspector general. They show that the surveillance program is more extensive than previously disclosed and that oversight protecting Americans from potential abuses is lax.
The audit, along with interviews and documents obtained by The New York Times under the Freedom of Information Act, offers one of the first detailed looks at the scope of the program, which has played an important role in the nation’s vast surveillance effort since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
The audit found that in many cases the Postal Service approved requests to monitor an individual’s mail without adequately describing the reason or having proper written authorization.
Deepwater Horizon Spill Left an Oil Ring the Size of Rhode Island on Sea Floor
October 28th, 2014Via: The Verge:
There’s an oil ring the size of Rhode Island at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico and researchers say it belongs to oil company BP. According to a study published yesterday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, about 10 million gallons of coagulated oil now coats the sea floor, following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill that resulted in 172 million gallons of oil being spilled into the Gulf in 2010. The rest of the oil, however, is still largely unaccounted for.
“Based on the evidence, our findings suggest that these deposits are from Macondo oil that was first suspended in the deep ocean, then settled to the sea floor without ever reaching the ocean surface,” David Valentine, one of the study’s authors and a biogeochemist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told the National Science Foundation.
More: Fallout Plume of Submerged Oil from Deepwater Horizon
Pot Oil “Miracle in a Bottle” Cure Could Land Mom in Jail
October 28th, 2014The boy had pain so severe he didn’t want to live anymore. The pot oil helped him after 18 other medications didn’t. Now his mother is facing jail.
Via: CBS:
In March, one mother traveled to Colorado to get a bottle of cannabis oil in hopes of easing the agonizing pain her 15-year-old son has lived with for the past three years.
What she calls a mother’s instinct may land her in jail, reports CBS News correspondent Adriana Diaz.
“I broke the law, but I did it to save my son,” Angela Brown said.
For years, the Minnesota mom searched for a way to end her son’s chronic pain.
Trey appeared healthy, but a baseball accident in 2011 led to a build-up of pressure inside his head.
A line drive to Trey’s head caused bleeding in an area of his brain the size of a golf ball. Doctors feared he wouldn’t survive.
But when he finally woke from a medically induced coma, his mother said the old Trey was gone.
“He’s the shell of himself,” Angela said. “He’s in so much pain, and that causes depression.”
With depression came daily migraines, muscle spasms and uncontrollable outbursts.
“I cry like every day before I go to bed,” Trey said.
And the pain is intense.
“Like my brain is about to blow up, cause there is so much pressure,” he said.
To try to ease his pain, Trey’s parents tried 18 different medications, but little helped. Angela believes some of the drugs’ side effects even made her son suicidal.
“He told me, ‘mom, I don’t want to live, I can’t do this anymore,'” Angela said. “It’s not fair, it’s not fair. I have been so angry.”
But through out it all, she’s tried to be as positive as possible.
“People keep saying, ‘Oh you’re so strong,'” she said. “No I’m not! I begged him and I said, ‘We will find an answer.'”
Desperate, she began researching the benefits of medical marijuana. The family drove to Colorado and obtained a bottle of cannabis oil. It’s legal there, but not in Minnesota.
Angela said after a few drops, Trey’s pain melted away.
“It was a miracle in a bottle,” she said.
But the miracle didn’t last.
“It stopped the pain and stopped the muscle spasms,” Trey said. “It was helping me go to school until it then got taken away and then school was really hard again.”
It was taken away when his teachers asked why he was doing better in school.
“I said ‘Well, I gave him an oil that we’d gotten from Colorado,'” Angela recalled. “‘It’s derived from a marijuana plant.’ And then you could feel the tension in the room.”
A week later, the sheriff’s department confiscated the oil and county prosecutors charged Angela with child endangerment and requiring child protection. If convicted, she could face up two years in prison and $6,000 in fines.
“It’s asinine,” Angela said. “I didn’t hurt my son; I was trying to prevent him from being hurt.”
While she recognizes the substance is illegal in Minnesota, she defended herself saying it’s “not illegal in other states.”
CBS News reached out to the county prosecutor, law enforcement and Trey’s school district.
All declined requests for an interview citing the on going case.
Company Finds Out The Hard Way It’s Illegal To Pay $1.21 An Hour In America
October 27th, 2014Via: Huffington Post:
This takes egregiously low wages to a whole new level.
A Silicon Valley company that digitizes images said Thursday that an “administrative error” led to it paying eight workers flown in from Bangalore, India just $1.21 an hour to work 120-hour weeks installing computers in the company’s headquarters.
Electronics For Imaging paid the workers $40,000 in back wages and overtime and a $3,500 fine after the U.S. Department of Labor investigated the payroll violation based on an anonymous tip, a department official told The Huffington Post.
“These folks were not only not getting time-and-a-half when working extremely long hours, they weren’t making the basic minimum wage,” Michael Eastwood, assistant district director for the Labor Department’s San Francisco division said.
In a statement, the company said it didn’t realize it was illegal to pay workers temporarily in the United States the same wages they earn in their home countries. The $1.21 was equivalent to what the employees made in Indian rupees.
…
Wage theft is nothing new in the Silicon Valley region. Last year, Bloom Energy Corporation was forced to pay out nearly $64,000 in back pay and damages to 14 workers from Mexico who were paid just $2.66 an hour.
Research Credit: ottilie
Jeb Bush ‘More Than Likely’ Eyeing 2016 Run
October 26th, 2014Via: CNN:
Yet another Bush family member is weighing in on whether or not former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush will run for president in 2016.
“I think it’s more than likely that he’s giving this a serious thought in moving forward,” his eldest son, George P. Bush, told ABC on Sunday.
“If you had asked me a few years back, I would’ve said it was less likely,” said Bush, who himself is running for political office for the first time as Texas land commissioner.
“The family will be behind him 100% if he decides to do it.”
George P. Bush is the fourth member of his father’s immediate family to weigh in publicly on his dad’s potential candidacy. And while he says he thinks his father is “still assessing it,” other members of the family have not been shy about publicly pressuring Jeb Bush to consider a bid.


