Mid Atlantic: Three Million Without Power
July 1st, 2012Via: CBS:
Utility crews untangled downed power lines and tree limbs Sunday, working to get the electricity turned back on for millions of people facing a second day of 100-degree temperatures without modern conveniences like air conditioning and refrigeration.
On Saturday, many people flocked to places like malls and movie theaters in the hope the lights would be on again when they returned home. Utilities were slowly making progress, but more than 3 million people still had no electricity and could only watch their thermostats climb.
It could be several days before all the power outages are restored.
Japan Finds Large Deposit of Rare Earth Minerals
July 1st, 2012Nobody said it was going to be easy.
Via: AFP:
Japan has found a large deposit of rare earth minerals in its Pacific seabed, enough to supply its hi-tech industries for more than 200 years, a scientist said Friday.
Around 6.8 million tonnes of the valuable minerals, used in electric cars, iPods and lasers, are sitting under the seabed near a far eastern Japanese island, Tokyo University professor Yasuhiro Kato told AFP.
He said mud samples taken from an area near Minamitorishima island, some 2,000 kilometres (1,250 miles) southeast of Tokyo, indicated deposits amounted to around 220 times the average annual amount used by industry in Japan.
The seabed contained a substantial amount of dysprosium — a rare earth mineral used in the engines for hybrid cars, he said.
“Specifically on dysprosium, I estimate at least 400 years worth of Japan’s current consumption is in the deposits,” said the professor, who examined mud samples taken from the seabed around 5,600 metres (18,300 feet) down.
“We can start drilling in the mud, using oil extraction technology, within three years at the earliest and start producing rare earth minerals within five years,” he said.
The find would be the first time large scale rare-earth deposits had been discovered inside Japan’s exclusive economic zone, local media said.
Research Credit: noncompliant
Google Shopping Censors All Gun, Ammo & Accessories Results
July 1st, 2012Via: The Firearms Blog:
Google sent out an email to Google Adwords customers saying that they are going to pull all Google Shopping results for guns, ammunition, gun optics and gun accessories (Shopping results, not general search results).
Research Credit: anchoviesmegma
Merck Mumps Vaccine Fraud
July 1st, 2012Via: Courthouse News Service:
Merck has known for a decade that its mumps vaccine is “far less effective” than it tells the government, and it falsified test results and sold millions of doses of “questionable efficacy,” flooding and monopolizing the market, a primary caregiver claims in a federal antitrust class action.
Alabama-based Chatom Primary Care sued Merck on Monday, the week after the unsealing of a False Claims Act complaint two relators filed in 2010.
Those relators, Stephen Krahling and Joan Wlochowski, were Merck virologists who claim in their unsealed complaint that they “witnessed firsthand the improper testing and data falsification in which Merck engaged to artificially inflate the vaccine’s efficacy findings.”
Research Credit: ojn
Land of the Free: the Best Investigative Reporting on U.S. Prisons
July 1st, 2012Via: ProPublica:
The U.S. has the highest reported incarceration rate in the world. We’ve rounded up some of the best investigative journalism on U.S. prisons and the problems that plague them. These stories cover juvenile justice, private prisons, immigration detention and other aspects of America’s vast incarceration system.
Research Credit: noncompliant
Your Ebook Is Reading You
July 1st, 2012Via: Wall Street Journal:
In the past, publishers and authors had no way of knowing what happens when a reader sits down with a book. Does the reader quit after three pages, or finish it in a single sitting? Do most readers skip over the introduction, or read it closely, underlining passages and scrawling notes in the margins? Now, e-books are providing a glimpse into the story behind the sales figures, revealing not only how many people buy particular books, but how intensely they read them.
For centuries, reading has largely been a solitary and private act, an intimate exchange between the reader and the words on the page. But the rise of digital books has prompted a profound shift in the way we read, transforming the activity into something measurable and quasi-public.
The major new players in e-book publishing—Amazon, Apple and Google—can easily track how far readers are getting in books, how long they spend reading them and which search terms they use to find books. Book apps for tablets like the iPad, Kindle Fire and Nook record how many times readers open the app and how much time they spend reading. Retailers and some publishers are beginning to sift through the data, gaining unprecedented insight into how people engage with books.
SWAT Team Throws Flashbangs, Raids Wrong Home Due to Open WiFi Network
June 29th, 2012Via: Ars Technica:
The long-standing, heavily documented militarization of even small-town American police forces was always going to create problems when it met anonymous Internet threats. And so it has, again—this time in Evansville, Indiana, where officers acted on some Topix postings threatening violence against local police. They then sent an entire SWAT unit to execute a search warrant on a local house, one in which the front door was open and an 18-year old woman sat inside watching TV.
The cops brought along TV cameras, inviting a local reporter to film the glorious operation. In the resulting video, you can watch the SWAT team, decked out in black bulletproof vests and helmets and carrying window and door smashers, creep slowly up to the house. At some point, they apparently “knock” and announce their presence—though not with the goal of getting anyone to come to the door. As the local police chief admitted later to the Evansville Courier & Press, the process is really just “designed to distract.” (SWAT does not need to wait for a response.)
Officers break the screen door and a window, tossing a flashbang into the house—which you can see explode in the video. A second flashbang gets tossed in for good measure a moment later. SWAT enters the house.
On the news that night, the reporter ends his piece by talking about how this is “an investigation that hits home for many of these brave officers.”
But the family in the home was released without any charges as police realized their mistake. Turns out the home had an open WiFi router, and the threats had been made by someone outside the house. Whoops.
Why is SOCOM Lying About Domestic Drone Activities?
June 28th, 2012Via: Public Intelligence:
A spokesman for U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) has provided statements to publications in New Hampshire and Oregon indicating that information regarding domestic drone activities provided by Public Intelligence is inaccurate, despite confirmations from the offices of two U.S. Senators. Following our publication last week of a map of current and proposed Department of Defense drone activities within the U.S., several journalists with local publications around the country wrote articles regarding drone activities that were listed in their area. David Brooks of the Nashua Telegraph wrote about the listing of New Hampshire’s Mt. Washington as the site of a USSOCOM drone activity involving small unmanned aerial vehicles including the Raven and Wasp. Corey Pein of the Willamette Week wrote about a planned USSOCOM drone activity in Portland that was listed as utilizing the same types of drones.
When each of these reporters contacted USSOCOM for information on the drone activities in their area, a spokesman stated that the information provided in our map, which was constructed from several public U.S. Air Force presentations from 2010 and 2011, was incorrect. The spokesman, deputy public affairs officer Ken McGraw, went so far as to tell the Willamette Week that “U.S. Special Operations Command does not have nor will it have [a drone] base in Portland.” McGraw provided the Nashua Telegraph with a nearly identical statement that USSOCOM “does not have a [drone] base in Mt. Washington” and added that “US Special Operations Command does not issue the Raven or Wasp. Those two UAVs are Army pieces of equipment.”
Both of the statements provided by USSOCOM have now been found to be demonstrably false following further investigation of public documents and confirmations of drone activities from the offices of two U.S. Senators. In New Hampshire, a local newspaper has now confirmed with the office of Senator Kelly Ayotte that in 2010, Navy Special Operations Forces utilized areas around Mt. Washington to conduct training operations using Wasp and Raven drones. David Brooks of the Nashua Telegraph was further able to confirm via Army Lt. Col. James Gregory that similar exercises were also conducted in 2009 using the same types of drones.
Research Credit: noncompliant
Google Was Secretly Planting Cookies on Millions of iPhone Browsers
June 28th, 2012Via: Pro Publica:
Jonathan Mayer had a hunch.
A gifted computer scientist, Mayer suspected that online advertisers might be getting around browser settings that are designed to block tracking devices known as cookies. If his instinct was right, advertisers were following people as they moved from one website to another even though their browsers were configured to prevent this sort of digital shadowing. Working long hours at his office, Mayer ran a series of clever tests in which he purchased ads that acted as sniffers for the sort of unauthorized cookies he was looking for. He hit the jackpot, unearthing one of the biggest privacy scandals of the past year: Google was secretly planting cookies on a vast number of iPhone browsers. Mayer thinks millions of iPhones were targeted by Google.
This is precisely the type of privacy violation the Federal Trade Commission aims to protect consumers from, and Google, which claims the cookies were not planted in an unethical way, now reportedly faces a fine of more than $10 million. But the FTC didn’t discover the violation. Mayer is a 25-year-old student working on law and computer science degrees at Stanford University. He shoehorned his sleuthing between classes and homework, working from an office he shares in the Gates Computer Science Building with students from New Zealand and Hong Kong. He doesn’t get paid for his work and he doesn’t get much rest.
If it seems odd that a federal regulator was scooped by a sleep-deprived student, get used to it, because the federal government is often the last to know about digital invasions of your privacy.
Research Credit: noncompliant
Security Lapses Found at CDC Bioterror Lab in Atlanta
June 28th, 2012Via: USA Today:
A federal bioterror laboratory already under investigation by Congress for safety issues has had repeated incidents of security doors left unlocked to an area where experiments occur with dangerous germs, according to internal agency e-mails obtained by USA TODAY. In one incident, an unauthorized employee was discovered inside a restricted area.
…
The e-mails document doors being left unlocked in the building’s high-containment lab block, which includes an animal-holding area and Biosafety Level 3 labs where experiments are done on microbes that can cause serious or potentially fatal diseases and can be spread through the air. Anthrax, monkeypox, dangerous strains of influenza and the SARS virus are examples.
One e-mail by a CDC safety manager describes an unauthorized man discovered in the animal-holding area and multiple doors that were unsecured at the time. Skinner says the man was a CDC scientist but was not immediately able to provide further details about why he was in the restricted area. Skinner said the man was in an outer corridor of the BSL-3 suite of labs.
