Judges Threaten California Governor Jerry Brown with Contempt of Court Over Prison Overcrowding
April 13th, 2013Via: Los Angeles Times:
A panel of federal judges Thursday threatened to hold Gov. Jerry Brown and other state officials in contempt of court if they do not quickly produce a plan to remove thousands of convicts from California’s packed prisons.
In a blistering 71-page ruling, the jurists rejected Brown’s bid to end restrictions they imposed on crowding in the lockups. The state cannot maintain inmate numbers that violate orders intended to eliminate dangerous conditions behind bars, they said.
Brown and other officials “will not be allowed to continue to violate the requirements of the Constitution of the United States,” the judges wrote.
“At no point over the past several months have defendants indicated any willingness to comply, or made any attempt to comply, with the orders of this court,” they said. “In fact, they have blatantly defied them.”
The judges gave the state 21 days to submit a plan for meeting the population target by the end of the year. Administration officials said they would appeal the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Huge Attack on WordPress Sites Could Spawn Never-Before-Seen Super Botnet
April 13th, 2013Via: Ars Technica:
Security analysts have detected an ongoing attack that uses a huge number of computers from across the Internet to commandeer servers that run the WordPress blogging application.
The unknown people behind the highly distributed attack are using more than 90,000 IP addresses to brute-force crack administrative credentials of vulnerable WordPress systems, researchers from at least three Web hosting services reported. At least one company warned that the attackers may be in the process of building a “botnet” of infected computers that’s vastly stronger and more destructive than those available today. That’s because the servers have bandwidth connections that that are typically tens, hundreds, or even thousands of times faster than botnets made of infected machines in homes and small businesses.
“These larger machines can cause much more damage in DDoS [distributed denial-of-service] attacks because the servers have large network connections and are capable of generating significant amounts of traffic,” Matthew Prince, CEO of content delivery network CloudFlare, wrote in a blog post describing the attacks.
Related?: Temporary Outages
Possible Bounce Points for Gold
April 13th, 2013Warning: This is not a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any financial instrument.
tl;dr: Possible bounce points to watch on gold: ~$1500, ~$1300 and ~$1154
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Gold has been caught in a sideways grind since 2011.
That ended today with a big red candle, breaking it down and out of the range.
The media has set the tone that shorts have easy sailing ahead. This is complimented well by the Squid’s recent short call on gold:
Investment bank Goldman Sachs Group Inc. said Wednesday that gold’s prospects for the year have eroded, recommending investors close out long positions and initiate bearish bets, or shorts.
The path of least resistance has been short for months.
All of that said, shorts should consider paring it down, closing it out or reversing it long (short term) into $1450.
Look at the weekly chart. Just ahead, you’ve got nearly overlapping 200 EMA and the 38.2% Fib retracement. Do you really think the Squid’s technicians didn’t see these before the press release was issued, and that they will short into these? I doubt it.
Spot Gold, Weekly Interval
If it decisively takes out the 38.2%, the 50% (~$1300) is near a January 2011 pivot. The 61.8% (~$1154) sits on a July 2010 pivot.
DARPA’s ‘Physical Intelligence’ Brain
April 12th, 2013Via: National Defense Magazine:
The next frontier for the robotics industry is to build machines that think like humans. Scientists have pursued that elusive goal for decades, and they believe they are now just inches away from the finish line.
A Pentagon-funded team of researchers has constructed a tiny machine that would allow robots to act independently. Unlike traditional artificial intelligence systems that rely on conventional computer programming, this one “looks and ‘thinks’ like a human brain,” said James K. Gimzewski, professor of chemistry at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Gimsewski is a member of the team that has been working under sponsorship of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency on a program called “physical intelligence.” This technology could be the secret to making robots that are truly autonomous, Gimzewski said during a conference call hosted by Technolink, a Los Angeles-based industry group.
This project does not use standard robot hardware with integrated circuitry, he said. The device that his team constructed is capable, without being programmed like a traditional robot, of performing actions similar to humans, Gimzewski said.
Participants in this project include Malibu-based HRL (formerly Hughes Research Laborary) and the University of California at Berkeley’s Freeman Laboratory for Nonlinear Neurodynamics. The latter is named after Walter J. Freeman, who has been working for 50 years on a mathematical model of the brain that is based on electroencephalography data. EEG is the recording of electrical activity in the brain.
What sets this new device apart from any others is that it has nano-scale interconnected wires that perform billions of connections like a human brain, and is capable of remembering information, Gimzewski said. Each connection is a synthetic synapse. A synapse is what allows a neuron to pass an electric or chemical signal to another cell. Because its structure is so complex, most artificial intelligence projects so far have been unable to replicate it.
Hacker Uses Android to Remotely Attack and Hijack an Airplane
April 12th, 2013Update: No, That German Hacker Probably Can’t Hijack an Airplane with Software
An alarming dispatch from the Hack In The Box security conference in Amsterdam arrived on Wednesday: a hacker says he’s found a way to take over airplane controls. That’s probably not true. At least according to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the European Aviation Safety Administration (EASA) and Honeywell, the maker’s of the cockpit software, it’s not. The FAA, for one, says, “The described technique cannot engage or control the aircraft’s autopilot system using the FMS or prevent a pilot from overriding the autopilot.” The agency assures America that this hack “does not pose a flight safety concern because it does not work on certified flight hardware.”
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For the lulz.
Via: Computer World:
The Hack in the Box (#HITB2013AMS) security conference in Amsterdam has a very interesting lineup of talks [pdf]. One that jumped out was the Aircraft Hacking: Practical Aero Series presented by Hugo Teso, a security consultant at n.runs in Germany. According to the abstract, “This presentation will be a practical demonstration on how to remotely attack and take full control of an aircraft, exposing some of the results of my three years research on the aviation security field. The attack performed will follow the classical methodology, divided in discovery, information gathering, exploitation and post-exploitation phases. The complete attack will be accomplished remotely, without needing physical access to the target aircraft at any time, and a testing laboratory will be used to attack virtual airplanes systems.
20,000 U.S. M-16s Stolen from Unguarded Warehouse in Kuwait
April 11th, 2013And Now: America’s Uncleared War: Nearly 20,000 Foreign Mercenaries Fight In Syria
Thanks to alvinroasting for sending this in.
Via: Global Research:
The civil war in Syria has opened opportunities for foreign mercenaries and about 20,000, financed by Afghan drug trafficking, have been fighting in that Middle East country, according to Russia’s Federal Drug Control Service Director Viktor Ivanov.
“Transnational organized crime groups can ensure an inflow of a huge number of criminals and mercenaries from certain countries to any part of the world with proceeds from heroin sales,” Ivanov was quoted by the Ria Novosti news agency as saying on Thursday.
He said 15,000 to 20,000 mercenaries were concentrated in Syria “destabilizing the situation in that country,” he said without giving any evidence to support his claims. It was transnational criminal groups and not Taliban who pose the greatest threat in Afghanistan, he added.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich said earlier this month that Syria was turning into a “center of attraction” for international terrorists in the ongoing civil war between rebels and government forces.
—End Update—
Part of the Syria op?
Via: World Tribune:
Kuwait has reported the theft of a massive amount of U.S. weapons. The Interior Ministry said thieves broke into a warehouse and stole a huge amount of firearms and ammunition. The ministry said 20,000 U.S.-origin M-16 assault rifles and 15,000 rounds for 9mm pistols were stolen.
“There were no guards during the break-in,” the ministry said on April 7.
Boeing Subsidiary Spectrolab Sets World Record for Solar Cell Efficiency
April 11th, 2013Via: Boeing:
A Spectrolab solar cell recently set a world record by converting more energy from the sun into electricity than any other ground-based solar cell without solar concentration.
The Boeing [NYSE: BA] subsidiary’s achievement in ground-based solar cell efficiency was verified by the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo.
The cell converted 37.8 percent of solar energy using a new class of high-efficiency multi-junction solar cell, created from two or more materials and leveraging Boeing technology that makes semiconductor materials more reliable. The record was set without concentration, the common practice of having lenses or mirrors focus solar rays on the cells.
How the Pentagon Used Video Games to Spy on Users Worldwide
April 11th, 2013Via: Democracy Now:
Research Credit: ottilie
U.S. Rice Imports Contain Harmful Levels of Lead Paper Withdrawn by Author
April 11th, 2013
Via: Natural News:
But the authors themselves discovered worrisome discrepancies when they sent the samples to a third-party lab for verification. According to an email acquired by Natural News, the results from this third-party lab showed all sub-ppm levels of lead, not the much higher numbers the Tongesayi team had reported.
Why the Tongesayi team did not conduct third-party lab verification before announcing the results has not been explained.
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Via: BBC:
Analysis of commercially available rice imported into the US has revealed it contains levels of lead far higher than regulations suggest are safe.
Some samples exceeded the “provisional total tolerable intake” (PTTI) set by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) by a factor of 120.
The report at the American Chemical Society Meeting adds to the already well-known issue of arsenic in rice.
The FDA told the BBC it would review the research.
Lead is known to be harmful to many organs and the central nervous system.
It is a particular risk for young children, who suffer significant developmental problems if exposed to elevated lead levels.
Because rice is grown in heavily irrigated conditions, it is more susceptible than other staple crops to environmental pollutants in irrigation water.
…
Rice from China and Taiwan had the highest lead levels, but Dr Tongesayi stressed that all of the samples significantly exceeded the PTTIs.
Dr Tongesayi has also worked on quantifying arsenic contamination – and is in effect working his way through the heavy metals one by one to determine their prevalence.
The problem, he said, is the range of agricultural practices around the world.
“If you look through the scientific literature, especially on India and China, they irrigate their crops with raw sewage effluent and untreated industrial effluent,” he explained.
“Research has been done in those countries, and concerns have been raised because of those practices, but it’s still ongoing.”
Dr Tongesayi also said that the increasing practice of sending electronic waste to developing countries – and the pollution it leads to – exacerbates the problem.
PC Shipments Post the Steepest Decline Ever in a Single Quarter
April 11th, 2013Via: IDC:
Worldwide PC shipments totaled 76.3 million units in the first quarter of 2013 (1Q13), down -13.9% compared to the same quarter in 2012 and worse than the forecast decline of -7.7%, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly PC Tracker. The extent of the year-on-year contraction marked the worst quarter since IDC began tracking the PC market quarterly in 1994. The results also marked the fourth consecutive quarter of year-on-year shipment declines.
Despite some mild improvement in the economic environment and some new PC models offering Windows 8, PC shipments were down significantly across all regions compared to a year ago. Fading Mini Notebook shipments have taken a big chunk out of the low-end market while tablets and smartphones continue to divert consumer spending. PC industry efforts to offer touch capabilities and ultraslim systems have been hampered by traditional barriers of price and component supply, as well as a weak reception for Windows 8. The PC industry is struggling to identify innovations that differentiate PCs from other products and inspire consumers to buy, and instead is meeting significant resistance to changes perceived as cumbersome or costly.
