Scott Air Force Base: “Normal Suspicious Package” Sends Three People to Hospital
August 31st, 2011Via: Washington Post:
Three people from Scott Air Force Base in southwestern Illinois were hospitalized with rashes Wednesday and parts of the facility were evacuated after a suspicious package arrived at the base’s mail center.
Capt. Kathleen Ferrero said 14 people were decontaminated on site and the three others were treated at a hospital in Belleville, Ill., then released. All were near the area of the base’s mail center and may have been exposed, she said.
Air Force Lt. Benjamin Garland said the hospitalized people showed no symptoms other than the rashes.
Ferrero said she did not know what the package contained and would not address media reports that it smelled like sulphur.
With the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks less than two weeks away, Scott spokesman Thomas Kistler said no extra precautions were in place on the base. He said officials are not treating this as a potential terrorist incident.
“I think they’re treating it as a normal suspicious package right now,” he said.
The package discovered Wednesday morning prompted precautionary evacuations of the base’s education center, bowling alley and other services near the mail center. Kistler said officials were confident there was no reason for anyone else to leave.
“We have evacuated an area around the package but we haven’t enlarged the evacuation area,” he said. “We don’t anticipate there’s any danger to the rest of the base or to the community as a whole.”
AI vs. AI. Two Chatbots Talking to Each Other
August 31st, 2011HAHA. Isn’t it reassuring to know that these types of systems are trading stocks, bonds, currencies, commodities and derivatives millions of times per second?
Never mind the killer robot applications…
Have a nice day!
Via: Cornell University / YouTube:
Research Credit: jakdmsy
‘Smart’ CCTV Could Track Rioters
August 31st, 2011Yeah, in other words, ‘smart’ CCTV could track anyone.
I’d be shocked if it turned out to be the case that this wasn’t already operational for the British equivalent of MAIN CORE, assuming there is one (which I do).
Via: BBC:
CCTV that can automatically monitor criminal behaviour and track suspects is being developed by UK scientists.
Researchers at Kingston University have created a system that uses artificial intelligence to recognise specific types of behaviour, such as someone holding a gun.
The technology is capable of following a person across multiple cameras.
Privacy campaigners warned that it might be used to target groups such as political protesters.
However, the developers insisted that their invention would allow police to focus on law breakers and erase images of innocent civilians.
The technology works by teaching a computer to recognise specific types of public behaviour, known as “trigger events”.
Research Credit: noncompliant
Obama DOJ: John Yoo Memos on Spying Must Stay Secret
August 31st, 2011Via: The Atlantic:
What was Bush Administration lawyer John Yoo thinking when he wrote various legal memos declaring that the president has the power to spy on American citizens without getting a warrant or telling anyone about it?
The Obama Administration isn’t telling:
The Obama administration has refused to declassify a secret memo from the George W. Bush presidency that justified the warrantless spying conducted by the National Security Agency (NSA).
Matthew Aid, a writer who’s covered the NSA and surveillance policy, requested a copy of a 2001 Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) opinion by John Yoo that discussed the legal grounds for electronic spying without permission from a special federal court. The Department of Justice mostly denied Aid’s Freedom of Information Act request, saying the redacted information in the OLC opinion was “classified, covered by non-disclosure provisions contained in other federal statutes, and is protected by the deliberative process privilege.”
They did release 8 sentences from a 21 page memo.
Said John Yoo: “Intelligence gathering in direct support of military operations does not trigger constitutional rights against illegal searches and seizures.”
Related: Appeals Court to Weigh NSA Dragnet Surveillance
Research Credit: noncompliant
Seasonic Fanless Power Supplies
August 31st, 2011I’m doing more book length reading at my computer and the power supply fan noise just had to go. I’d estimate that the power supply was making about 75% of the total system noise. Maybe 15% was CPU fan noise, with the rest of the noise split among the video card fan, case fan and hard drive.
I wasn’t going to go full freak and build a liquid cooled rig. Since I just wanted a large reduction in noise, I focused on the power supply, which was the core of the problem. After a bit of research, I found a totally silent power supply: The Seasonic 460 Watt X-Series Fanless Power Supply. This thing is not quiet. It’s silent. 0 dBA.
Seasonic X-Series 460 Watt Power Supply - Look Ma, no fans!
I bought and installed this unit and WOW, although it costs much more than commodity-class power supplies, the drastic reduction in overall system noise is very worth the added expense (in my opinion). I just wanted it so that I could concentrate more effectively, but maybe some of you could use this for your home theater computers or studio sound recording rigs, etc.
I’m going to try the cheap and allegedly good Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus as an alternative to my stock Intel Core 2 Quad heatsink and fan. Apparently, this Cooler Master unit is very quiet at the lowest (600 RPM) speed, which is how it would run on my system most of the time.
That’s all I have planned for now. My case and junky Radeon 3650 GPU fans hardly make any noise at all, so I’ll just be leaving them alone. And I’m not ready to shell out for a solid state drive just yet.
But…
If you want to take this a bit further, without going to liquid cooling, you could use a solid state drive and a passively cooled video card, which are both completely silent.
Just a quick note on passively cooled video cards: There are plenty of low performance / silent video cards out there. But I got curious about how far gaming cards went with passive cooling. As of right now, the king daddy of silent gaming video cards is the PowerColor SCS3, which is a Radeon HD6850. You have to see the heatsink on this card:
Powercolor SCS3 - Radeon 6850
HAHA. Good luck fitting that thing in your case. Anyway, that’s all the quiet computing trivia I have for you this morning.
Disclosure: I have no relationship with any of the companies who’s products are mentioned in this post. I am an Amazon affiliate.
Cryptogon Readers Sign Up for Hosting with BlueHost
August 31st, 2011Thanks to the owners of three different domains who signed up for hosting with BlueHost. I received $270 as a result.
None of the sites are active yet. If you signed up for hosting and want me to mention your site here, just send me an email from the domain that you used to set up your BlueHost account and I’ll post it. Thanks again for your support.
Cryptogon Readers Sent Contributions in August
August 31st, 2011Thanks to the five readers below who sent contributions in August.
Pookie $75
Eileen $100
AB $50
MW $20
CW $50
America’s Secret Libya War
August 31st, 2011Via: Daily Beast:
The U.S. military has spent about $1 billion so far and played a far larger role in Libya than it has acknowledged, quietly implementing an emerging “covert intervention” strategy that the Obama administration hopes will let America fight small wars with a barely detectable footprint.
Officially, President Obama handed the lead role of ousting Muammar Gaddafi to the European members of NATO. For this he was criticized by Washington war hawks who suggested that Europeans working with a ragtag team of Libyan rebels was a recipe for stalemate, not victory.
But behind the scenes, the U.S. military played an indispensable role in the Libya campaign, deploying far more forces than the administration chose to advertise. And at NATO headquarters outside Brussels, the U.S. was intimately involved in all decisions about how the Libyan rebels should be supported as they rolled up control of cities and oil refineries and marched toward the capital, Tripoli.
The Libya campaign was a unique international effort: 15 European nations working with the U.S. and three Arab nations. The air offensive was launched from 29 airbases in six European countries. But only six European nations joined with the U.S. and Canada to fly strikes against Gaddafi’s forces. The scale of the unpublicized U.S. role affirms hawks’ arguments: a divided NATO simply couldn’t have waged the war it did without extensive American help. What the hawks underestimated was the U.S. ability to operate without publicity—in military lingo, beneath the radar.
Research Credit: MS
Google Wants to Become an Identity Service
August 30th, 2011Oh sure.
Via: Business Week:
Ever since Google (GOOG) launched its new Google+ social network, we and others have pointed out that the search giant clearly has more in mind than just providing a nice place for people to share photos of their pets. For one thing, Google needs to tap into the “social signals” that people provide through networks such as Facebook so it can improve its search results. There’s a larger motive, too: As Chairman and former Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt admitted during an interview in Edinburgh over the weekend, Google is taking a hard line on the real-name issue because it sees Google+ as an “identity service” or platform on which it can build other products.
Japan: Simple ‘Wind Lens’ Triples Output from Wind Turbines
August 30th, 2011I love all the talk about the costs, as areas around Fukushima are to be permanently abandoned because of radioactive contamination.
Via: Discovery:
The wheel in the sky keeps on turning — or at least it will if a Japanese renewable energy professor’s “Wind Lens” turbine design is realized. Resembling giant white rims, these offshore turbines have the potential to produce up to three times as much energy as a standard offshore one.
Yuji Oyha, a professor of renewable energy dynamics and applied mechanics at Kyushu University in Japan, and his team presented their wild vision for wind power recently at the Yokohama Renewable Energy International Exhibition. The “Wind Lens” design is essentially a hoop roughly 360 feet in diameter — a brimmed diffuser — that functions like a magnifying glass. Blades turn quickly within the diffuser, so quickly that they could increase the energy output two or threefold, according to CNN International. One of these “lenses” should be able to power a household.
