Cryptogon Earnings from October, November and December
January 3rd, 2014Thanks very much to everyone who supported Cryptogon in the final months of 2013.
October:
Amazon $417.74
Amazon.ca CA$3.34
Amazon.co.uk £8.53
Banana Farmers $50
Blacklisted News $100
Conspiracyflix.com $180
DM $15
Eileen $104
iWholeSale NZ$5
JB $30
KL $25
MW $25
Pookie $75
RD $50
TM $15
October Total: 1108.88
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November:
Amazon $414.33
Amazon.co.uk £13.97
Pookie $75
AK CA$50
JK $50
KH $25
DM $15
DE $25
RL $30
JF $80
Eileen $85
RD $25
piattininm.com $90
November Total: 984.27
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December:
Amazon $585.70
Amazon.co.uk £25.13
Pookie $75
RD $25
TM $25
DE $100
PT $50
Eileen $100
dingram.com $90
December Total $1091.94
Disneyland: MyMagic+ “Vacation Management System”
January 3rd, 2014Via: Time:
Families planning trips to one of Disney’s theme parks can now get waterproof rubber wristbands embedded with computer chips in lieu of paper tickets. When scanned, the bands can act as a park entry ticket, a FastPass, a hotel room key and a credit card. The “Magic Bands” — which are currently optional — are part of a new MyMagic+ “vacation management system” that can track guests as they move throughout the park.
…
The MyMagic+ system is designed to track users’ purchasing habits, and if parents agree to certain settings, employees playing characters in the park can use hidden sensors to track children and their information; so Goofy can walk up to a child and say something like, “Hi Bobby. Happy birthday.”
U.S. Dumped Tens of Thousands of Steel Drums Containing Atomic Waste Off Coastlines
January 2nd, 2014Via: Wall Street Journal (Mirror):
More than four decades after the U.S. halted a controversial ocean dumping program, the country is facing a mostly forgotten Cold War legacy in its waters: tens of thousands of steel drums of atomic waste.
From 1946 to 1970, federal records show, 55-gallon drums and other containers of nuclear waste were pitched into the Atlantic and Pacific at dozens of sites off California, Massachusetts and a handful of other states. Much of the trash came from government-related work, ranging from mildly contaminated lab coats to waste from the country’s effort to build nuclear weapons.
Federal officials have long maintained that, despite some leakage from containers, there isn’t evidence of damage to the wider ocean environment or threats to public health through contamination of seafood. But a Wall Street Journal review of decades of federal and other records found unanswered questions about a dumping program once labeled “seriously substandard” by a senior Environmental Protection Agency official…
…
Concerned about the Farallon site, the California legislature passed the 1983 law calling for fish sampling in the area, where commercial fishing occurs. A spokeswoman for the California Department of Public Health said the law only required reports as funds were available, and they haven’t been since 1991. Plus, she said, researchers “didn’t find anything in the first survey.”
“I would beg to differ,” Thomas Suchanek, the principal investigator and lead author of the 1991 study, said recently. The study found americium, a radioactive decay product of plutonium, in some fish samples from the site as well as a comparison area about 60 miles away. The report calculated that plutonium in underwater sediment at the dump site was up to about 1,000 times normal background levels.
Research Credit: RP
NSA Seeks to Build Quantum Computer That Could Crack Most Types of Encryption
January 2nd, 2014I’ve leaned toward believing that NSA already had this capability, but maybe not.
Via: Washington Post:
In room-size metal boxes, secure against electromagnetic leaks, the National Security Agency is racing to build a computer that could break nearly every kind of encryption used to protect banking, medical, business and government records around the world.
According to documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, the effort to build “a cryptologically useful quantum computer” — a machine exponentially faster than classical computers — is part of a $79.7 million research program titled, “Penetrating Hard Targets.” Much of the work is hosted under classified contracts at a laboratory in College Park.
The development of a quantum computer has long been a goal of many in the scientific community, with revolutionary implications for fields like medicine as well as for the NSA’s code-breaking mission. With such technology, all forms of public key encryption would be broken, including those used on many secure Web sites as well as the type used to protect state secrets.
Physicists and computer scientists have long speculated whether the NSA’s efforts are more advanced than those of the best civilian labs. Although the full extent of the agency’s research remains unknown, the documents provided by Snowden suggest that the NSA is no closer to success than others in the scientific community.
“It seems improbable that the NSA could be that far ahead of the open world without anybody knowing it,” said Scott Aaronson, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT.
The NSA appears to regard itself as running neck and neck with quantum computing labs sponsored by the European Union and the Swiss government, with steady progress but little prospect of an immediate breakthrough.
Feds May Require Cars to Talk to Each Other to Avoid Crashes
January 2nd, 2014Via: ABC:
Federal officials will decided in the “coming weeks” whether to require new cars to include smart technology that would alert drivers of a coming crash, even in vehicles that are two or three cars away.
The vehicle-to-vehicle — or V2V — technology has undergone testing in recent years and has already been installed in some cars that are on the road.
A recent study by the Government Accountability Office determined that if the gizmos were widely deployed, “V2V technologies could provide warnings to drivers in as much as 76 percent of potential multi-vehicle collisions.”
…
“Widespread technology depends on other cars having the same system so they can talk to each other,” said David Wise, director of the GAO’s Physical Infrastructure Team, who wrote the GAO study.
But it also requires that the system be secure.
“Privacy is the real challenge,” Wise said. He said the V2V will likely rely on GPS-type data that could track a person’s movements.
“Who has access and how do you secure the data?” Wise asked rhetorically. He also raised the specter of someone hacking the system and causing havoc on the road.
Recovery: Retirement Unlikely for Many Blue-Collar Americans
January 1st, 2014Via: AP:
Tom Edwards grew up in a family that’s been cutting trees and hauling timber in the Pacific Northwest for more than a century. The Spanaway, Wash., resident says he has worked as a logger since he was a kid — it’s just what an able-bodied youngster was expected to do.
Now, at 53, with business in a slump and little money in savings, he’s pessimistic about his chances of retiring.
“It’s never going to happen. By the time I reach retirement age, there won’t be Social Security. There’s not going to be any money,” Edwards said. “I’ll do like my father did: I’ll work ’til I die.”
Across the U.S., such concerns are common among blue-collar baby boomers — the 78 million Americans born between 1946 and 1964. Many have jobs that provide paltry pensions or none at all, as many companies have been moving toward less generous retirement packages in the past decade.
Many boomers expect to work the rest of their lives because they have little cash put away for their old age and they worry Social Security won’t cover their bills. Some hope to move to jobs that are less physically demanding.
The share of U.S. workers who are 55 and older is expected to continue growing, according to the “The Oxford Handbook of Retirement 2013.” The group comprised 12.4 percent of the workforce in 1998. The share jumped to 18.1 percent in 2008 and is expected to be almost 25 percent by 2018.
The book is edited by Mo Wang, co-director of the Human Resource Research Center at the University of Florida’s Warrington College of Business Administration. In an interview, Wang said it’s a misconception that lower-wage workers are slackers in preparing for retirement.
“People don’t have adequate earnings,” Wang told The Associated Press. “It’s not because they don’t want to save. It’s because they just can’t.”
The Online Education Revolution Drifts Off Course
January 1st, 2014Via: NPR:
But by all accounts, the San Jose experiment was a bust. Completion rates and grades were worse than for those who took traditional campus-style classes. And the students who did best weren’t the underserved students San Jose most wanted to reach.
It wasn’t really proving to be cheaper, either, says Peter Hadreas, the chairman of San Jose State’s philosophy department.
“The people that do well in these kind of courses are people who are already studious. Or … who are taking courses for their own enrichment after they’ve graduated,” he says.
“A year and a half ago … people thought this was going to solve the problems of higher education because people would be educated for less money. That’s not the way it’s worked out.”
Now, San Jose State is scaling back its relationship with Udacity, taking more direct control of the courses it offers through the company and rethinking its commitment to MOOCs.
‘We Have A Lousy Product’
Other schools are hitting the pause button as well. A recent confirmed a massive problem: MOOCs have painfully few active users. About half who registered for a class ever viewed a lecture, and completion rates across all courses.
Sebastian Thrun, Udacity’s co-founder and a prime mover in MOOCs, magazine, “We were on the front pages of newspapers and magazines, and at the same time, I was realizing, we don’t educate people as others wished, or as I wished. We have a lousy product.”
Maniac Fascism: Court Rules No Suspicion Needed for Laptop Searches at Border
January 1st, 2014Via: ACLU:
A federal court today dismissed a lawsuit arguing that the government should not be able to search and copy people’s laptops, cell phones, and other devices at border checkpoints without reasonable suspicion. An appeal is being considered. Government documents show that thousands of innocent American citizens are searched when they return from trips abroad.
“We’re disappointed in today’s decision, which allows the government to conduct intrusive searches of Americans’ laptops and other electronics at the border without any suspicion that those devices contain evidence of wrongdoing,” said Catherine Crump, the American Civil Liberties Union attorney who argued the case in July 2011. “Suspicionless searches of devices containing vast amounts of personal information cannot meet the standard set by the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures. Unfortunately, these searches are part of a broader pattern of aggressive government surveillance that collects information on too many innocent people, under lax standards, and without adequate oversight.”
U.S. Customs at JFK Destroys Eleven Instruments Owned by Flute Virtuoso
December 31st, 2013Via: Arts Journal:
A few minutes ago, we reached the flute virtuoso Boujemaa Razgui by phone to discuss the assault on his instruments by US Customs at JFK airport.
A Canadian citizen, based in New York and with a green card employment permit, Bouzemaa was flying home from Marrakech, Morocco, when his baggage was opened by Customs at JFK.
‘I told them I had these instruments for many years and flew with them in and out,’ he said. ‘There were 11 instruments in all. They told me they were agricultural products and they had to be destroyed. There was nothing I could do. The ney flute can be made with bamboo. Is that agricultural?’
Research Credit: ottilie
The Perils of Plastic: The Problems With Debit And Credit Cards Are Deeper Than We Thought
December 31st, 2013Via: ReadWrite:
I called the regional Secret Service office—that agency is involved in both protecting the President and investigating financial crimes—and talked to the agent that was handling the investigation. He confirmed my suspicions: The problem is far worse than we imagined.
While there are no real answers yet in our area, it appears that some computer systems have been compromised either at stores or in the companies handling the processing of card transactions. In other words, a company involved in the flow of payments has been hacked. It could be more than one company. The computer hacking has exposed everyone whose cards are going through those systems. The thieves are using the ATM card information in a way that does not require the PINs.
As the agent explained it to me, what happens once the thieves have stolen a bunch of numbers from a company is that they print gift cards with their name on them and our billing information on the magnetic stripe. He said they rarely bother with printing up credit cards anymore.
Research Credit: conceptualdecay
