It’s Complicated: Facebook’s History of Tracking You
June 18th, 2014Via: ProPublica:
For years people have noticed a funny thing about Facebook’s ubiquitous Like button. It has been sending data to Facebook tracking the sites you visit. Each time details of the tracking were revealed, Facebook promised that it wasn’t using the data for any commercial purposes.
No longer. Last week, Facebook announced it will start using its Like button and similar tools to track people across the Internet for advertising purposes.
South Africa: Riot Control Drone Can Fire a Variety of Ammunition to Subdue Unruly Crowds
June 18th, 2014“Payload capacity of the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is 40 kg”
40KG?
Via: Defense Web:
South African company Desert Wolf yesterday unveiled its Skunk riot control drone at the IFSEC security exhibition outside Johannesburg. Armed with four paintball guns, it can fire a variety of ammunition to subdue unruly crowds.
The Skunk is designed to control crowds without endangering the lives of security staff. Bright strobe lights and on-board speakers enable operators to communicate with and warn the crowd. If things get out of control the Skunk can use its four paintball guns to disperse or mark people in the crowd. Four ammunition hoppers can load different types of ammunition such as dye marker balls, pepper spray balls or solid plastic balls. Payload capacity of the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is 40 kg but since the gun assembly weighs around 15 kg the aircraft has an excess of power.
In addition to two high definition day cameras, the Skunk carries a FLIR thermal camera for night vision capability. A camera and microphone on the operator’s station records the operators (a pilot and payload operator) so their behaviour can be monitored. Hennie Kieser, Director of Desert Wolf, said people tend to be less aggressive when they are monitored.
Desert Wolf will soon deliver the first 25 units to customers in the mining industry and the UAV will enter service around June/July.
Netherlands: Drastic Reduction in Use of Antibiotics on Farms
June 18th, 2014Via: Modern Farmer:
Along with every other livestock producer in the Netherlands, Oosterlaken is in the midst of a high-stakes, government-mandated experiment: Can large-scale meat production succeed without routine use of antibiotics? “Growth promoters,” the microdoses of everyday antibiotics given to livestock to fatten them, have been banned in Europe since 2006—but the Netherlands decided to go even further. Since 2009, Dutch farmers have cut animal drug use by half without harming either animal welfare or their own profits. Four years into the project, their accomplishment has huge implications for farming throughout the world.
“We decided that animal health, and human health, would be our priority,” Oosterlaken told me last fall in his barn, surrounded by warm plastic-lined pens where sows snoozed and new piglets squealed. “I don’t need to take antibiotics every day. There’s no reason my pigs should either.”
The Highest-Paid CEOs Are The Worst Performers
June 18th, 2014Via: Forbes:
Across the board, the more CEOs get paid, the worse their companies do over the next three years, according to extensive new research. This is true whether they’re CEOs at the highest end of the pay spectrum or the lowest. “The more CEOs are paid, the worse the firm does over the next three years, as far as stock performance and even accounting performance,” says one of the authors of the study, Michael Cooper of the University of Utah’s David Eccles School of Business.
…
Though Cooper concedes that there could be exceptions at specific companies (the study didn’t measure individual firms), the study shows that as a group, the companies run by the CEOS who were paid at the top 10% of the scale, had the worst performance. How much worse? The firms returned 10% less to their shareholders than did their industry peers. The study also clearly shows that at the high end, the more CEOs were paid, the worse their companies did; it looked at the very top, the 5% of CEOs who were the highest paid, and found that their companies did 15% worse, on average, than their peers.
How could this be? In a word, overconfidence. CEOs who get paid huge amounts tend to think less critically about their decisions. “They ignore dis-confirming information and just think that they’re right,” says Cooper. That tends to result in over-investing—investing too much and investing in bad projects that don’t yield positive returns for investors.”
UK Intelligence Forced to Reveal Secret Policy for Mass Surveillance
June 17th, 2014At least the wholly domestic traffic isn’t going down the gurgler too. *wink*
Via: Privacy International:
Britain’s top counter-terrorism official has been forced to reveal a secret Government policy justifying the mass surveillance of every Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and Google user in the UK.
This disturbing policy was made public due to a legal challenge brought by Privacy International, Liberty, Amnesty International, the American Civil Liberties Union, Pakistani organisation Bytes for All, and five other national civil liberties organisations1
The statement, from Charles Farr, the Director General of the Office for Security and Counter Terrorism, claims that the indiscriminate interception of UK residents’ Facebook and Google communications would be permitted under law because they are defined as ‘external communications’.
U.S. Health Care System Costs the Most, Ranks Lowest in International Survey
June 17th, 2014Via: CBS News:
The U.S. spends more money on health care compared with other industrialized countries, but Americans still get the least bang for their buck — and many still don’t have access to care — according to a report just published by the Commonwealth Fund. The report from the private health care research foundation examined data on expenditures, delivery and access to health care services among 11 industrialized countries: Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the U.K. and the U.S.
Overall, the U.K. and Switzerland were rated highest for factors that included quality, access, efficiency and equity of health care. The U.S., Canada and France overall ranked lowest. The U.S. was found to perform worst in areas concerning cost of care, efficiency, equity and overall health of its citizens, even though health care expenditures were highest per capita compared with the other 10 countries in the report.
“Will ISIS Plan a 9/11-Style Terror Plot Against the U.S.?”
June 17th, 2014I am Jack’s complete lack of surprise.
Via: CBS:
Republicans are sounding the warning that the next 9/11-like terror plot could emerge from the regions of Iraq and Syria that are currently dominated by an extremist group bearing down on Baghdad.
As the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) – which has already captured the cities of Tikrit and Mosul and is threatening to take the capital city as well – grows in strength and numbers, will it pose an immediate threat to the United States homeland as well?
Office of Naval Research: U.S. Marine Ground Vehicles Will Carry Lasers to Shoot Down Drones
June 16th, 2014Via: Office of Naval Research:
As the Navy prepares to deploy its first laser weapon on a ship later this summer, Office of Naval Research (ONR) officials announced June 11 that they have finished awarding contracts to develop a similar weapon to be used on ground vehicles.
The Ground-Based Air Defense Directed Energy On-the-Move program, commonly referred to as GBAD, aims to provide an affordable alternative to traditional firepower to keep enemy unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) from tracking and targeting Marines on the ground.
ONR is working with Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division and industry partners on the development of GBAD’s components and subsystems, including the laser itself, beam director, batteries, radar, advanced cooling, and communications and command and control.
“We’re confident we can bring together all of these pieces in a package that’s small enough to be carried on light tactical vehicles and powerful enough to counter these threats,” said Brig. Gen. Kevin Killea, vice chief of naval research and commanding general, the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory.
The GBAD system is being designed for use on light tactical vehicles such as the Humvee and Joint Light Tactical Vehicle. With the proliferation of UAV technology, Marine Corps leaders expect that units increasingly will have to defend themselves against adversaries trying to perform reconnaissance and surveillance on them from the air.
“We can expect that our adversaries will increasingly use UAVs and our expeditionary forces must deal with that rising threat,” said Col. William Zamagni, acting head of ONR’s Expeditionary Maneuver Warfare and Combating Terrorism Department. “GBAD gives the Marine Corps a capability to counter the UAV threat efficiently, sustainably and organically with austere expeditionary forces. GBAD employed in a counter UAV role is just the beginning of its use and opens myriad other possibilities for future expeditionary forces.”
The technologies being developed under the GBAD program are a direct response to the Marine Corps Science and Technology Strategic Plan, which calls for a mobile directed-energy weapon capable of destroying threats such as UAVs.
Australia: Concentrated Solar Facility Produces Supercritical Steam for First Time
June 16th, 2014Via: Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation:
A team of solar thermal engineers and scientists at our Energy Centre in Newcastle have used the ample sunlight flooding their solar fields to create what’s called ‘supercritical’ steam – an ultra-hot, ultra-pressurised steam that’s used to drive the world’s most advanced power plant turbines – at the highest levels of temperature and pressure EVER recorded with solar power.
U.S. IT Workers Training H-1B Replacements
June 15th, 2014This has been going on since before I left the IT world behind back in 2005. I’m surprised that there are still IT jobs to outsource in any number. Maybe they go and comeback and go again…
The feeble U.S. flag display in the cubicles was cringe inducing. Oh dear.
Via: ComputerWorld:
Training the replacement workers involved holding morning-long WebEx meetings several times a week with offshore outsourcing staff based in India. The sessions were recorded as details about the environment, including diagrams and scripts, were shared.
As they moved closer to the termination date for the U.S. workers, the overseas employees would follow or shadow, via WebEx sessions, everything an IT worker did during the day. The outsourcing firm’s onshore staff helped to coordinate these efforts, but also worked to untangle the meaning of some of the questions.
The overseas workers did not appear to have much practical experience, and the same questions were asked repeatedly, A.B. said.
Before they lost their jobs, A.B.’s co-workers decided to made a subtle and symbolic protest over what was happening: As the H-1B visa workers gradually took over the offices once occupied by U.S. workers, one employee brought in a bunch of small American flags on sticks.
The flags were retrofitted so they could fit into the walls of the cubicles.
(Computerworld viewed a photograph of the cubicle flags, but decided not to publish it to protect A.B’s identity.)
The flags were displayed, cubicle after cubicle, much like way flags are hung on homes in a residential neighborhoods on the 4th of July. They were visible to anyone walking down the hall. “That was the only thing that we could do,” A.B. said. “We felt that we were making a statement. But to be honest, I don’t think the Indian workers fully understood what was going on.”
