Corpus Christi Judge Found Dead from Gunshot Wound
July 16th, 2013Update: Suicide
Via: AP:
South Texas authorities have confirmed that a state district judge found dead in his chambers took his own life.
The Nueces County sheriff’s Office said Tuesday it’s not clear why Judge Tom Greenwell shot himself but that a handwritten will was found nearby.
Greenwell was supposed to be on vacation at the time his body was found Monday by a cleaning crew. His body was discovered after the courthouse in Corpus Christi had closed for the day.
Authorities say he had come to the courthouse to do some work and made a few calls prior to his death.
—
Via: KIIITV:
The body of District Judge Tom Greenwell was discovered Monday evening in his chambers at the Nueces County Courthouse. He suffered what is believed to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.
Greenwell took over the 319th district court in 2001, and became the first Republican in Nueces County to win a county-wide office. He was 57 years old.
The Strange Story of Michael Boatwright
July 16th, 2013Via: My Desert:
The family of Michael Boatwright — who was found unconscious in a Palm Springs motel room four months ago and woke up speaking only Swedish — heard about his whereabouts for the first time Monday.
The Desert Sun located a sister of the 61-year-old who has spent more than 19 weeks at Desert Regional Medical Center insisting he is named Johan Ek and has no memory of his life as Boatwright. Despite the Florida identification found in his wallet, he has been speaking only in Swedish and says he does not understand English.
…
The U.S. Navy veteran — who was raised in Florida and often worked on the beaches near his parents’ Miami home — first visited Sweden in 1981, according to multiple friends.
…
Throughout the 1980s, Boatwright lived on a boat called “Honey Bea” off Rhode Island in 1984, according to the postmarks of letters he sent to Espling. He also spent time in Houston, Mexico and Newport, in addition to stints with his parents in Miami, she said.
Boatwright left Sweden for good around 2003, according to several reports.
“No one had heard from him in over 15 years,” Aftonbladet quotes friend Olle Sahlin as saying.
Boatwright was likely a 3D graphic designer and had taught English in both Japan for 10 years and China for four years, according to online profiles.
Then Boatwright flew to Palm Springs from Hong Kong on Feb. 24, the day his Chinese visa expired. He was found unconscious four days later.
‘Robots to Revolutionize Farming’
July 16th, 2013Via: AP / Time:
On a windy morning in California’s Salinas Valley, a tractor pulled a wheeled, metal contraption over rows of budding iceberg lettuce plants. Engineers from Silicon Valley tinkered with the software on a laptop to ensure the machine was eliminating the right leafy buds.
The engineers were testing the Lettuce Bot, a machine that can “thin” a field of lettuce in the time it takes about 20 workers to do the job by hand.
The thinner is part of a new generation of machines that target the last frontier of agricultural mechanization – fruits and vegetables destined for the fresh market, not processing, which have thus far resisted mechanization because they’re sensitive to bruising.
Researchers are now designing robots for these most delicate crops by integrating advanced sensors, powerful computing, electronics, computer vision, robotic hardware and algorithms, as well as networking and high precision GPS localization technologies. Most ag robots won’t be commercially available for at least a few years.
Water Requirements for NSA’s New Facility in Utah
July 15th, 2013“A significant benefit to the city” haha
Via: KSL:
More secrets, more water? The NSA data center in Bluffdale could require as many as 1.7 million gallons of water per day to operate and keep computers cool.
Initial reported estimates suggested the center would use 1,200 gallons per minute, but more recent estimates suggest the usage could be closer to half that amount.
“Our planning is anywhere from 1,000 acre-feet per year to 2,000 acre-feet per year, and that represents – if it was 1,000 acre-feet per year, that would be about 1 percent of our total demand,” said Jordan Valley River Conservancy District assistant general manager and chief engineer Alan Packard.
Packard said that amount of water – while large – could be easily accommodated and was on par with industrial operations such as soft drink bottling plants.
“At build-out, it will be several years before the data center uses that amount of water, so we have the opportunity to prepare for that through both conservation and developing new supplies,” Packard said.
Packard said the district was actively working to develop the new supplies – including those at the Southwest Groundwater Project, the Central Utah Project and additional groundwater development in the Salt Lake valley.
“It’s no more than we were already planning,” Packard said. “Our normal activities are designed to accommodate this kind of demand on our system.”
Bluffdale City manager Mark Reid described the NSA project and the new water and electrical infrastructure around it as a significant benefit to the city.
In Iraq, the Bomb-Detecting Device That Didn’t Work, Except to Make Money
July 15th, 2013Step right up, step right up, step right up,
Everyone’s a winner, bargains galore
That’s right, you too can be the proud owner
Of the quality goes in before the name goes on
One-tenth of a dollar, one-tenth of a dollar, we got service after sales
You need perfume? we got perfume, how ’bout an engagement ring?
Something for the little lady, something for the little lady,
Something for the little lady, hmm
Three for a dollar
We got a year-end clearance, we got a white sale
And a smoke-damaged furniture, you can drive it away today
Act now, act now, and receive as our gift, our gift to you
They come in all colors, one size fits all
No muss, no fuss, no spills, you’re tired of kitchen drudgery
Everything must go, going out of business, going out of business
Going out of business sale
Fifty percent off original retail price, skip the middle man
Don’t settle for less
How do we do it? how do we do it? volume, volume, turn up the volume
Now you’ve heard it advertised, don’t hesitate
Don’t be caught with your drawers down,
Don’t be caught with your drawers down
You can step right up, step right up
—Tom Waits, “Step Right Up”
I’m going through my roughly annual research binge on looking for trading systems—that actually work. I’m looking at ES this time. While I have no good news to report on the blackbox development front, the websites and books I’ve been reading about trading the ES remind me a lot of the story below about the expensive fake bomb detector.
With the ES, there is an entire economy the revolves around selling TOTALLY USELESS custom indicators, books, access to private forums, video training courses, etc. I’ve been at this for so long that I can just read the description of what’s on offer and it serves as a bit of comic relief for the grinding reality of what that backtester reports as more data is added…
Anyway, “Step right up!”
Via: Bloomberg:
What McCormick failed to mention was that the device was not, strictly speaking, his own invention, or that he knew very well it wouldn’t detect explosives. The ADE 651 was modeled on a novelty trinket conceived decades before by a former used-car salesman from South Carolina, which was purported to detect golf balls. It wasn’t even good at that.
By the time police in Britain raided his offices nine days later, McCormick had spent three years selling the Iraqi government these devices, sometimes for more than $30,000 each. The best estimates suggest that the authorities in Baghdad bought more than 6,000 useless bomb detectors, at a cost of at least $38 million.
Technical Feasibility of Decrypting HTTPS by Replacing the Computer’s Pseudorandom Number Generator
July 15th, 2013Via: Stack Exchange:
Intel has an on-chip RdRand function which supposedly bypasses the normally used entropy pool for /dev/urandom and directly injects output. Now rumors are going on that Intel works together with the NSA… and knowing that PRNGs are important for cryptography is enough to get this news spreading.
I personally don’t believe this is true, so this is entirely hypothetical: Let’s assume that indeed RdRand does what news says it does and that it indeed outputs randomness into a place where applications and libraries would look for cryptographically secure randomness.
How feasible is it that the chip’s manufacturer can predict the output of this PRNG when it passed tests from the people applying the use of this RdRand instruction in kernels?
If the chip’s manufacturer can predict the output of the PRNG to some extent, how feasible is it that they can decrypt any https traffic between two systems using their chips? (Or anything else requiring randomness, https is only an example.)
My reason for asking: http://cryptome.org/2013/07/intel-bed-nsa.htm
As said, I don’t believe everything written here, but I find it very interesting to discuss the possibility technically.
U.S. Repeals Propaganda Ban, Spreads Government-Made News To Americans
July 15th, 2013You’ll love this. A “source” explains that the reason for this is that diaspora communities in America are thirsting for U.S. Government propaganda, but can’t access it. *snort*
Via: Foreign Policy:
For decades, a so-called anti-propaganda law prevented the U.S. government’s mammoth broadcasting arm from delivering programming to American audiences. But on July 2, that came silently to an end with the implementation of a new reform passed in January. The result: an unleashing of thousands of hours per week of government-funded radio and TV programs for domestic U.S. consumption in a reform initially criticized as a green light for U.S. domestic propaganda efforts. So what just happened?
…
A former U.S. government source with knowledge of the BBG says the organization is no Pravda, but it does advance U.S. interests in more subtle ways. In Somalia, for instance, VOA serves as counterprogramming to outlets peddling anti-American or jihadist sentiment. “Somalis have three options for news,” the source said, “word of mouth, Al-Shabaab or VOA Somalia.”
This partially explains the push to allow BBG broadcasts on local radio stations in the United States. The agency wants to reach diaspora communities, such as St. Paul Minnesota’s significant Somali expat community. “Those people can get Al-Shabaab, they can get Russia Today, but they couldn’t get access to their taxpayer-funded news sources like VOA Somalia,” the source said. “It was silly.”
The Shadowy Cartel of Doctors that Controls Medicare
July 14th, 2013Via: Washington Monthly:
On the last week of April earlier this year, a small committee of doctors met quietly in a midsized ballroom at the Renaissance Hotel in Chicago. There was an anesthesiologist, an ophthalmologist, a radiologist, and so on—thirty-one in all, each representing their own medical specialty society, each a heavy hitter in his or her own field.
The meeting was convened, as always, by the American Medical Association. Since 1992, the AMA has summoned this same committee three times a year. It’s called the Specialty Society Relative Value Scale Update Committee (or RUC, pronounced “ruck”), and it’s probably one of the most powerful committees in America that you’ve never heard of.
The purpose of each of these triannual RUC meetings is always the same: it’s the committee members’ job to decide what Medicare should pay them and their colleagues for the medical procedures they perform. How much should radiologists get for administering an MRI? How much should cardiologists be paid for inserting a heart stent?
While these doctors always discuss the “value” of each procedure in terms of the amount of time, work, and overhead required of them to perform it, the implication of that “value” is not lost on anyone in the room: they are, essentially, haggling over what their own salaries should be. “No one ever says the word ‘price,’ ” a doctor on the committee told me after the April meeting. “But yeah, everyone knows we’re talking about money.”
That doctor spoke to me on condition of anonymity in part because all the committee members, as well as more than a hundred or so of their advisers and consultants, are required before each meeting to sign what was described to me as a “draconian” nondisclosure agreement. They are not allowed to talk about the specifics of what is discussed, and they are not allowed to remove any of the literature handed out behind those double doors. Neither the minutes nor the surveys they use to arrive at their decisions are ever published, and the meetings, which last about five days each time, are always closed to both the public and the press. After that meeting in April, there was not so much as a single headline, not in any major newspaper, not even on the wonkiest of the TV shows, announcing that it had taken place at all.
In a free market society, there’s a name for this kind of thing—for when a roomful of professionals from the same trade meet behind closed doors to agree on how much their services should be worth. It’s called price-fixing. And in any other industry, it’s illegal—grounds for a federal investigation into antitrust abuse, at the least.
But this, dear readers, is not any other industry. This is the health care industry, and here, this kind of “price-fixing” is not only perfectly legal, it’s sanctioned by the U.S. government.
Experimental Cancer Therapy from Immunocore
July 14th, 2013See what I did there?
Via: Independent:
Immunocore has found a way of designing small protein molecules, which it calls ImmTACs, that effectively act as double-ended glue. At one end they stick to cancer cells, strongly and very specifically, leaving healthy cells untouched. At the other end they stick to T-cells.
The technology is based on the “T-cell receptor”, the protein that sticks out of the surface of the T-cell and binds to its enemy target. Immunocore’s ImmTACs are effectively independent T-cell receptors that are “bispecific”, meaning they bind strongly to cancer cells at one end, and T-cells at the other – so introducing cancer cells to their nemesis.
“What we can do is to use that scaffold of the T-cell receptor to make something that is very good at recognising cancer even if it doesn’t exist naturally,” said Dr Jakobsen. “Although T-cells are not very keen at recognising cancer, we can force them to do so. The potential you have if you can engineer T-cell receptors is quite enormous. You can find any type of cell and any kind of target. This means the approach can in theory be used against any cancer, whether it is tumours of the prostate, breast, liver or the pancreas.
The key to the success of the technique is being able to distinguish between a cancer cell and a normal, healthy cell. Immunocore’s drug does this by recognising small proteins or peptides that stick out from the surface membrane of cancer cells. All cells extrude peptides on their membranes and these peptides act like a shop window, telling scientists what is going on within the cell, and whether it is cancerous or not.
“All these little peptides tell you the story of the cell. The forest of them on the cell surface is a sort of display saying ‘I am this kind of cell. This is my identity and this is everything going on inside me’,” Dr Jakobsen explained.
Immunocore is building up a database of peptide targets on cancer cells in order to design T-cell receptors that can target them, leaving healthy cells alone and so minimising possible side effects – or that is the hope.
The first phase clinical trial of the company’s therapy, carried out on a small number of patients in Britain and the United States with advanced melanoma, has shown that people can tolerate the drug reasonably well and preliminary results suggest there are “early signs of anti-tumour activity”, the company said.
The Amazon 1Button App Is Very Bad
July 14th, 2013I doubt that any of you have this installed, but just in case…
Via: Kotowicz:
Though intercepting HTTPS connections is possible, we can only do it via:
hacking the CA
social engineering (install the certificate)
relying on click-through syndrome for SSL warnings
Too hard. Let’s try some side channels. Let me show you how you can view all SSL encrypted data, via exploiting Amazon 1Button App installed on your victims’ browsers.
