Smartphone Given You a Lobotomy? There’s an App for That
December 20th, 2011Via: Engadget:
Do you have an iPhone 4S? Do you drive a car? Do you have amnesia? If you answered yes to at least two-and-a-half of these questions, you’ll probably be interested in Find My Car Smart — a Kickstarter project that wants to help dudes find their cars, with the help of Bluetooth 4.0 technology. The system is relatively straightforward, consisting of nothing more than an iOS app (available now on iTunes for $0.99), and a USB-based Bluetooth proximity adapter. All you have to do is download the app, stick the dongle in your car, and let your iPhone 4S automatically mark your parking spot. Whereas similarly-designed apps typically require users to manually record their car’s location before leaving the lot, Find My Car Smart allows you to forget even that, since the app will automatically record your GPS coordinates.
Programmers Win DARPA Prize for Reconstructing Shredded Documents
December 20th, 2011Make sure to keep reading to the end…
Via: Bloomberg:
To most people, 10,000 slivers of shredded paper are as good as trash. To three coders in San Francisco, they’re a challenge—especially when the jumbled mass of paper once made up five classified government documents.
The trio were not hackers trying to steal state secrets, but participants in a contest run by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), the government group that funds high-tech military research. In October, Darpa offered $50,000 to the first group to piece together the shredded documents or the one that made the most progress by Dec. 4. In previous Darpa tournaments, participants have been asked to build robotic cars or use the Internet to find balloons scattered across the country. The goal of the paper shredder puzzle was to unearth technologies that could be used for national security.
“I figured I know enough really damn good programmers that I could get a few people together and we might be able to win it,” says Otávio Good, the entrepreneur behind the iPhone app Word Lens, which translates foreign-language text as it’s viewed through the phone’s camera. Good and his partners, a software engineer working at Lockheed Martin (LMT) and a mobile app maker, spent 600 hours combined piecing together the five shredded pages. Out of nearly 9,000 teams, theirs—which they called “All Your Shreds Are Belong to U.S.”—was the only one to complete all five puzzles, which they did with two days to spare.
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Two weeks in, Good’s team was stumped by the fourth sheet of paper, which was more of a challenge because the words were irregularly spaced and written on unlined paper. “I think everybody hit a wall on puzzle four and didn’t know what to do,” Good says. Then he happened on an article about a little-known government project: The U.S. Secret Service has been working with manufacturers of color laser printers to place tiny, imperceptible yellow dots on printed pages so that the government can track the machine that produced them. Good put the puzzle under a blue-light filter and saw the dots. “It was a breakthrough moment,” he says. “The pattern of dots is practically a map for how everything comes together.”
Flashback to 2004 on Cryptogon: Government Uses Color Laser Printer Technology to Track Documents
Research Credit: noguru
Swedes Arrested for Butter Smuggling
December 19th, 2011Via: Telegraph:
Two Swedes have been arrested by Norwegian police for smuggling more than 250kg of butter into the country, offloading one consignment for more than £25 a packet.
The two men, from the Northern city of Umea, managed to make their first delivery before a police patrol stopped their van on Saturday evening.
“They allegedly sold the coveted butter packets in Beitstad Steinkjer before they drove north along the county road 17,” police officer Lars Letnes told Norway’s Adresseavisen newspaper.
“Then they were stopped by a police patrol, which found 250kg of butter in the small van.” A sudden spike in demand has left Norway with a butter shortfall of between 500 and 1,000 tonnes, leaving the country’s citizens facing Christmas without their seven traditional varieties of home-cooked biscuit.
Swedes have posted nearly 100 adverts on the local auction website Blocket offering to drive butter across the border at prices ranging from £20 to above £50 a pack.
The poster of one of the adverts, Yusuf, from Gothenburg, told the Daily Telegraph that he was now making two trips a week to service clients in Oslo, the Norwegian capital, but refused to give more details.
Research Credit: Douglas
50 Economic Numbers From 2011
December 19th, 2011Via: Economic Collapse Blog:
#1 A staggering 48 percent of all Americans are either considered to be “low income” or are living in poverty.
#2 Approximately 57 percent of all children in the United States are living in homes that are either considered to be “low income” or impoverished.
#3 If the number of Americans that “wanted jobs” was the same today as it was back in 2007, the “official” unemployment rate put out by the U.S. government would be up to 11 percent….
Former Mexican Govrnment Officials Work for U.S. Intelligence
December 19th, 2011Via: AFP:
At least 80 former Mexican government officials are currently working as informants for US intelligence agencies, the daily La Jornada reported, citing senior Mexican officials.
Most of them are gathering information for the US Drug Enforcement Agency, the prestigious daily reported.
Senior officials in the attorney general’s office and the interior ministry said that those informants work as spies, gather and analyze information, and follow cases on request.
“We have not dismissed the possibility that current government employees are also working for the Americans in combination with their ex-colleagues,” a senior government official who has participated in counternarcotics meetings with US officials told the newspaper.
The spying case came to light during a probe into whether the DEA has laundered drug money seized from criminal groups in Mexican territory, La Jornada reported.
On December 4, The New York Times reported that undercover US counternarcotics agents have laundered or smuggled millions of dollars in drug proceeds to see how the system works and use the information against Mexican drug cartels.
Related: DEA Launders Mexican Profits of Drug Cartels
North Korean Leader Kim Jong-il Dead
December 19th, 2011Via: Reuters:
North Korean leader Kim Jong-il died of a heart attack while on a train trip, state media reported Monday, sparking immediate concern over who is in control of the reclusive state and its nuclear program.
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South Korea, still technically at war with the North, placed its troops and all government workers on emergency alert, Yonhap news agency reported. But Seoul’s Defense Ministry said there were no signs of any unusual North Korean troop movements.
Homeland Security: Paying with Cash?:
December 19th, 2011Paying with cash, eh?
Via: YouTube:
Contributions from American Expatriates to Ron Paul’s Presidential Campaign
December 19th, 2011FYI for American expatriates: If you want to contribute money to Ron Paul’s campaign, here’s what you need to do. Send an email to Finance Director, John McCardell (johnm@ronpaul2012.com) stating that you are an American citizen living abroad, then call him at 703-563-6130.
Egypt Intensifies Crackdown on Street Protesters
December 19th, 2011WARNING: EXTREME VIOLENCE.
Via: Sydney Morning Herald:
Egypt’s military rulers escalated a bloody crackdown on street protesters over the weekend, chasing down and beating unarmed civilians, even while the Prime Minister was denying in a televised news conference that soldiers were using any force.
In a highly incendiary development, video cameras captured soldiers stripping the clothes off women they were beating on the pavement of Tahrir Square.
The contradiction in the military-led government’s statements and actions appeared to represent a shift in strategy by the military council.
After trying for months to preserve some credibility and collaboration with the political elite, the ruling generals on Saturday scarcely acknowledged the demands made by their newly appointed civilian advisory council that the military cease its violence and apologise to demonstrators.
Instead, as the crackdown entered its second day, the military council appeared to be playing to those Egyptians impatient with the continuing protests and eager for a return to stability.
”The military council is responsible for everything that happens,” Ziad el-Elaimy, a newly elected member of parliament who was beaten by the military police, said in a television interview.
Breakthrough Could Double Solar Energy Output
December 18th, 2011Via: Science Daily:
The efficiency of conventional solar cells could be significantly increased, according to new research on the mechanisms of solar energy conversion led by chemist Xiaoyang Zhu at The University of Texas at Austin.
Zhu and his team have discovered that it’s possible to double the number of electrons harvested from one photon of sunlight using an organic plastic semiconductor material.
“Plastic semiconductor solar cell production has great advantages, one of which is low cost,” said Zhu, a professor of chemistry. “Combined with the vast capabilities for molecular design and synthesis, our discovery opens the door to an exciting new approach for solar energy conversion, leading to much higher efficiencies.”
Zhu and his team published their groundbreaking discovery Dec. 16 in Science.
The maximum theoretical efficiency of the silicon solar cell in use today is approximately 31 percent, because much of the sun’s energy hitting the cell is too high to be turned into usable electricity. That energy, in the form of “hot electrons,” is instead lost as heat. Capturing hot electrons could potentially increase the efficiency of solar-to-electric power conversion to as high as 66 percent.
