Australian Government Admits to Accessing People’s Private Telephone and Internet Records 5800 Times Every Week Without Warrants
December 2nd, 2012I wonder what happens when their targets/citizens run persistent VPNs located in other countries?
Via: Sydney Morning Herald:
AUSTRALIAN law enforcement and government agencies have sharply increased their access without warrant to vast quantities of private telephone and internet data, prompting new calls for tighter controls on surveillance powers.
Government agencies accessed private telecommunications data and internet logs more than 300,000 times during criminal and revenue investigations in 2011-12, a 20 per cent increase on the level of surveillance activity in the year before.
Figures from the federal Attorney-General’s Department show that on average, these agencies obtained private data from telecommunications and internet service providers 5800 times every week.
Research Credit: HW
DOE ‘Manhattan Project’ to Build New Energy Storage Technologies?
December 2nd, 2012There’s just one problem with this analogy.
The Manhattan Project cost about $25.8 billion (in 2012 dollars).
This DOE effort is $120 million over five years. That’s a noise level allocation of resources compared to The Manhattan Project.
Of course, if you need a façade to role out stuff you’ve had sitting on the shelf in the black world for some number of decades… *meh* Maybe $120 million could make a good show of it.
Via: Computerworld:
The U.S. Dept. of Energy has set a goal to develop battery and energy storage technologies that are five times more powerful and five times cheaper than today’s within five years.
To accomplish this, U.S. Energy Secretary Stephen Chu is taking some lesson from U.S. history.
The DOE is creating a new Joint Center for Energy Storage Research, at a cost of $120 million over five years, that’s intended to reproduce development environments that were successfully used by Bell Laboratories in the World War II Manhattan Project that produced an atomic bomb.
“When you had to deliver the goods very, very quickly, you needed to put the best scientists next to the best engineers across disciplines to get very focused,” said Chu at a press conference Friday that was streamed live from Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. The center will be located there.
The Battery and Energy Storage Hub project will involve six national labs, five universities — Northwestern University, University of Chicago, University of Illinois-Chicago, University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign, and University of Michigan — and four private firms, Dow Chemical, Applied Materials, Johnson Controls, and Clean Energy Trust.
Related: Afghanistan: U.S. Spends $20 Billion Per Year for Air Conditioning in Tents
The New Zealand Film Being Passed Off As North Korean Propaganda
December 2nd, 2012Really quick, to let people know to please stop submitting this:
Propaganda is a pisstake by New Zealand filmmaker Slavko Martinov. The artifice of the hoax was what grabbed the attention of mainstream media with this thing.
Here are some films that cover similar topics (and aren’t hoaxes): The Power Principle and Human Resources.
DOJ Drops Monsanto Antitrust Investigation
December 2nd, 2012Via: Mother Jones:
There’s an age-old tradition in Washington of making unpopular announcements when no one’s listening—like, you know, the days leading up to Thanksgiving. That’s when the Obama administration sneaked a tasty dish to the genetically modified seed/pesticide industry.
This treat involves the unceremonious end of the Department of Justice’s antitrust investigation into possible anticompetitive practices in the US seed market, which it had begun in January 2010. It’s not hard to see why DOJ would take a look. For the the crops that cover the bulk of US farmland like corn, soy, and cotton, the seed trade is essentially dominated by five companies: Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta, Bayer, and Dow. And a single company, Monsanto, supplies nearly all genetically modified traits now so commonly used in those crops, which it licenses to its rivals for sale in their own seeds.
What’s harder to figure out is why the DOJ ended the investigation without taking any action—and did so with a near-complete lack of public information. The DOJ didn’t even see fit to mark the investigation’s end with a press release. News of it emerged from a brief item Monsanto itself issued the Friday before Thanksgiving, declaring it had “received written notification” from the DOJ antitrust division that it had ended its investigation “without taking any enforcement action.”
A DOJ spokesperson confirmed to me that the agency had “closed its investigation into possible anticompetitive practices in the seed industry,” but would divulge no details.
Dear ITU, Please Don’t Bill Internet Use Like Phone Calls
December 2nd, 2012Via: Ars Technica:
Telcos lobby for drastic change, think content networks getting a free ride.
That’s the input that a number of former monopoly, European telecoms sent to the member states of the United Nation’s International Telecommunication Union (ITU). Why? Because, for the first time since 1988, the ITU will be negotiating new international telecom regulations from December 3 to 14 in Dubai. And that meeting will mark the first opportunity for the ITU to bring Internet issues under its umbrella.
Don’t be fooled by the opaque wording above. If that request was put into practice, service providers get to prioritize certain types of Internet traffic and “the sending party”—a network generating content, like Netflix, Youtube, and maybe even Google or Ars—has to pay for the privilege of reaching consumers. Although opinions differ on whether free, unregulated markets are the universal solution to all problems, it’s hard to argue against the success of this model in the case of the Internet. Even in places with limited broadband competition, the amount of bandwidth users get for their money has increased at rates far beyond those of any other industry.
Site 911
December 2nd, 2012Via: Washington Post:
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers plans to supervise construction of a five-story underground facility for an Israel Defense Forces complex, oddly named “Site 911,” at an Israeli Air Force base near Tel Aviv.
Expected to take more than two years to build, at a cost of up to $100 million, the facility is to have classrooms on Level 1, an auditorium on Level 3, a laboratory, shock-resistant doors, protection from nonionizing radiation and very tight security. Clearances will be required for all construction workers, guards will be at the fence and barriers will separate it from the rest of the base.
Research Credit: A
With Internet Down in Syria, Rebels Use Skype Over Satellite Links
December 1st, 2012Mmm hmm.
Via: New York Times:
In a demonstration of their growing sophistication and organization, Syrian rebels responded to a nationwide shutdown of the Internet by turning to satellite technology to coordinate within the country and to communicate with outside activists.
Related: Syria: Internet Taken Down
Was the Author of This Renesys Piece Stoned When New Zealand Was Classified as Having a Low Risk of Disconnection from the Internet?
December 1st, 2012Here is Renesys’ criterion for a country having a severe risk of being cut off from the Internet:
If you have only 1 or 2 companies at your international frontier, we classify your country as being at severe risk of Internet disconnection. Those 61 countries include places like Syria, Tunisia, Algeria, Turkmenistan, Libya, Ethiopia, Uzbekistan, Myanmar, and Yemen.
New Zealand is hanging by a single thread called Southern Cross:
Everyone knows that you don’t put all of your eggs in one basket.
In New Zealand, however, the whole damn show is A) dependent on a single submarine cable operator that is B) majority owned by Telecom New Zealand, a company that has been slapped with the largest ever fine for anti-competitive conduct in New Zealand.
One operator, two submarine cable landing points.
Low risk of disconnection?
Labour’s communications spokesperson Clare Curran said, “This shows the Government’s inaction and disregard for our international infrastructure could have equally catastrophic consequences for New Zealand. This is a crisis for New Zealand.”
And maybe Renesys should look at the facility in the central Auckland where this country has, quite literally, gone all in. The thing screams, “Take this country down. I’m right here, undefended, all in one place. Hit me.” I assume that Renesys is able to figure out this address on their own. Have a look at that, even in Google Street View and then tell me that NZ is at a low risk of being disconnected from the Internet. HAHA.
Microsoft Engineers Predicted that DRM Would Fail Ten Years Ago
December 1st, 2012Via: Ars Technica:
Can digital rights management technology stop the unauthorized spread of copyrighted content? Ten years ago this month, four engineers argued that it can’t, forever changing how the world thinks about piracy. Their paper, “The Darknet and the Future of Content Distribution” (available as a .doc here) was presented at a security conference in Washington, DC, on November 18, 2002.
By itself, the paper’s clever and provocative argument likely would have earned it a broad readership. But the really remarkable thing about the paper is who wrote it: four engineers at Microsoft whose work many expected to be at the foundation of Microsoft’s future DRM schemes. The paper’s lead author told Ars that the paper’s pessimistic view of Hollywood’s beloved copy protection schemes almost got him fired. But ten years later, its predictions have proved impressively accurate.
British Company Claims Biggest Engine Advance Since the Jet
November 30th, 2012Via: Reuters:
A small British company with a dream of building a re-usable space plane has won an important endorsement from the European Space Agency (ESA) after completing key tests on its novel engine technology.
Reaction Engines Ltd believes its Sabre engine, which would operate like a jet engine in the atmosphere and a rocket in space, could displace rockets for space access and transform air travel by bringing any destination on Earth to no more than four hours away.
That ambition was given a boost on Wednesday by ESA, which has acted as an independent auditor on the Sabre test programme.
“ESA are satisfied that the tests demonstrate the technology required for the Sabre engine development,” the agency’s head of propulsion engineering Mark Ford told a news conference.
“One of the major obstacles to a re-usable vehicle has been removed,” he said. “The gateway is now open to move beyond the jet age.”
