Feds Say it Could Take 2 Years to Seal Nuke Dump
May 31st, 2014Via: AP:
It could take two years or more for the federal government to seal off hundreds of potentially dangerous containers at its troubled underground nuclear waste dump in southeastern New Mexico, the U.S. Department of Energy said in a filing Friday.
Responding to an order from the New Mexico Environment Department to detail its plans, the department gave broad ranges that indicate it could take a minimum of about 100 work weeks — and possibly twice that long — to secure the rooms at the now-shuttered plant where more than 350 containers of toxic waste from decades of building nuclear bombs at Los Alamos National Laboratory is stored.
The report notes that the investigation into a Feb. 14 radiation leak that contaminated 22 workers with low-levels of radiation and indefinitely shuttered the Waste Isolation Pilot Project isn’t complete and could affect the work.
NSA Collecting Millions of Faces From Web Images
May 31st, 2014Via: New York Times:
The National Security Agency is harvesting huge numbers of images of people from communications that it intercepts through its global surveillance operations for use in sophisticated facial recognition programs, according to top-secret documents.
The spy agency’s reliance on facial recognition technology has grown significantly over the last four years as the agency has turned to new software to exploit the flood of images included in emails, text messages, social media, videoconferences and other communications, the N.S.A. documents reveal. Agency officials believe that technological advances could revolutionize the way that the N.S.A. finds intelligence targets around the world, the documents show. The agency’s ambitions for this highly sensitive ability and the scale of its effort have not previously been disclosed.
The agency intercepts “millions of images per day” — including about 55,000 “facial recognition quality images” — which translate into “tremendous untapped potential,” according to 2011 documents obtained from the former agency contractor Edward J. Snowden. While once focused on written and oral communications, the N.S.A. now considers facial images, fingerprints and other identifiers just as important to its mission of tracking suspected terrorists and other intelligence targets, the documents show.
Spies, CEOs and Politicians Gather for Bilderberg Conference
May 30th, 2014Via: CNBC:
It’s a guest list that most conference organizers can only dream of, with attendees ranging from royalty to business leaders, spies to politicians.
But this isn’t any conference – this is the Bilderberg conference, a top-secret annual gathering attracting the richest and most powerful people from across the globe.
Attendees at this year’s Bilderberg meeting, which kicks off in Copenhagen, Denmark, on Thursday, include Google’s Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt and Christine Lagarde, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund.
TrueCrypt Developers Abruptly Quit
May 29th, 2014truecrypt.ch has been established for those who want to continue TrueCrypt’s open source development.
Via: Krebs on Security:
The anonymous developers responsible for building and maintaining the free whole-disk encryption suite TrueCrypt apparently threw in the towel this week, shuttering the TrueCrypt site and warning users that the product is no longer secure now that Microsoft has ended support for Windows XP.
Graphene Atmospheric Electricity Collectors
May 29th, 2014There’s not a lot of continuous current available from this, but I still found it interesting.
Maybe when they move that thing higher up…
Via: Laser Saber / YouTube:
Being a Cynic Linked to Tripled Risk of Developing Dementia, Finland Study Suggests
May 29th, 2014Via: National Post:
Cynics are three times more likely to develop dementia than those who have faith in humanity, a study has shown.
Believing that others are motivated by selfishness, or that they lie to get what they want, appears to radically increase the risk of cognitive decline in later life.
London’s Nitrogen Dioxide Pollution Worse Than Beijing’s
May 28th, 2014Via: Bloomberg:
London has a dirty secret.
Levels of the harmful air pollutant nitrogen dioxide at a city-center monitoring station are the highest in Europe. Concentrations are greater even than in Beijing, where expatriates have dubbed the city’s smog the “airpocalypse.”
It’s the law of unintended consequences at work. European Union efforts to fight climate change favored diesel fuel over gasoline because it emits less carbon dioxide, or CO2. However, diesel’s contaminants have swamped benefits from measures that include a toll drivers pay to enter central London, a thriving bike-hire program and growing public-transport network.
“Successive governments knew more than 10 years ago that diesel was producing all these harmful pollutants, but they myopically plowed on with their CO2 agenda,” said Simon Birkett, founder of Clean Air in London, a nonprofit group. “It’s been a catastrophe for air pollution, and that’s not too strong a word. It’s a public-health catastrophe.”
Microsoft Working on Real-Time Audio Translations for Skype Conversations
May 28th, 2014Via: Microsoft:
Skype Translator results from decades of work by the industry, years of work by our researchers, and now is being developed jointly by the Skype and Microsoft Translator teams. The demo showed near real-time audio translation from English to German and vice versa, combining Skype voice and IM technologies with Microsoft Translator, and neural network-based speech recognition.
…
Skype Translator first will be available as a Windows 8 beta app before the end of 2014.
Google Web/Search History Disable Does Absolutely Nothing
May 28th, 2014Classic: For Exercise in New York Futility, Push Button:
Millions of dutiful city residents and tourists have pushed them over the years, thinking it would help speed them in their journeys. Many trusting souls might have believed they actually worked. Others, more cynical, might have suspected they were broken but pushed anyway, out of habit, or in the off chance they might bring a walk sign more quickly.
As it turns out, the cynics were right.
The city deactivated most of the pedestrian buttons long ago with the emergence of computer-controlled traffic signals, even as an unwitting public continued to push on, according to city Department of Transportation officials. More than 2,500 of the 3,250 walk buttons that still exist function essentially as mechanical placebos, city figures show. Any benefit from them is only imagined.
Via: Jacques Mattheij:
There seems to be some kind of misunderstanding about the Google Search/Web History disable switch that google provides to its more privacy conscious users. It’s not exactly the most advertised feature (you won’t find it in your profile page) to begin with, but once you do find it (it’s on the history page, you have to click the little ‘gear’ on the top right and then click the button to switch it off) there is no guarantee whatsoever that google does anything except for changing what they display to you. So if you are under the impression that this changes something about what data google collects on you or how they will use that data then you are likely wrong.
…
So the only thing that fancy switch does is to limit what you see, but it definitely does not limit google’s ability (or desire) to collect data about you, and you can rest assured that that is exactly what they’ll be doing.
So all you’re being given here is a false sense of privacy.
Why Germany Dominates the U.S. in Innovation
May 28th, 2014Via: Harvard Business Review:
Reading the headlines, you might think that the most urgent question about national success in innovation and growth is whether the U.S. or China should get the gold medal. The truth is: Germany wins hands down.
Germany does a better job on innovation in areas as diverse as sustainable energy systems, molecular biotech, lasers, and experimental software engineering. Indeed, as part of an effort to learn from Germany about effective innovation, U.S. states have encouraged the Fraunhofer Society, a German applied-science think tank, to set up no fewer than seven institutes in America.
True, Americans do well at inventing. The U.S. has the world’s most sophisticated system of financing radical ideas, and the results have been impressive, from Google to Facebook to Twitter. But the fairy tale that the U.S. is better at radical innovation than other countries has been shown in repeated studies to be untrue. Germany is just as good as the U.S. in the most radical technologies.
What’s more important, Germany is better at adapting inventions to industry and spreading them throughout the business sector. Much German innovation involves infusing old products and processes with new ideas and capabilities or recombining elements of old, stagnant sectors into new, vibrant ones.
Germany’s style of innovation explains its manufacturing prowess. For example, many, if not most, of the Chinese products we buy every day are produced by German-made machinery, and the companies that make them are thriving.
It also explains why Germany’s industrial base hasn’t been decimated, as America’s has. Germany is better at sustaining employment growth and productivity, while expanding citizens’ real incomes. Even with wages and benefits that are higher than those in the U.S. by 66%, manufacturing in Germany employed 22% of the workforce and contributed 21% of GDP in 2010. The bottom line: German manufacturers are contributing significantly to employment growth and real income expansion.
In the U.S., by contrast, fewer and fewer people are employed in middle-class manufacturing jobs. In 2010, just under 11% of the workforce was employed in manufacturing, and manufacturing contributed 13% of GDP. Inequality is on the rise, and the country’s balance of payments is getting worse.
