Battery Makers Descend on Australia, Canada Cobalt Developers
March 18th, 2018Via: Reuters:
Nervous Asian battery makers are turning to early-stage cobalt projects in Australia and Canada to lock in supplies of the critical battery ingredient ahead of expected shortages as demand for electric vehicles revs up.
Mine developers say interest from Japanese and Korean firms is particularly strong as they compete with rivals from China, which has built deep supply chain ties with the Democratic Republic of Congo, the world’s top producer.
The central African country accounts for nearly two-thirds of global cobalt output and production is set to rise despite concerns over the use of child miners and rising royalties.
“We are starting to see the first signs of an arms race to secure long term cobalt supplies,” said Joe Kaderavek, chief executive of Australia’s Cobalt Blue.
“With over 85 percent of new global cobalt supply over the next decade coming from Africa, in a region where the Chinese have entrenched relationships, the Korean and Japanese cobalt processing industries are very focused upon Australian and Canadian projects.”
Related: Cobalt to be Declared a Strategic Mineral in Congo
Intel: ‘Partitions’ in New Chips Will Correct Design Flaw that Created Spectre and Meltdown
March 18th, 2018Via: GeekWire:
After security researchers were able to exploit design flaws in modern processors that lay undetected for up to 20 years, Intel said it would redesign future chips to correct those flaws, and on Thursday it provided a little more information about how that will work.
Starting with the Cascade Lake version of its Xeon server processors later this year, Intel will incorporate “protective walls” in its hardware that prevent malicious hackers from using speculative execution techniques to steal private information from the secure part of the processor. These fixes will also ship with the PC version of the Cascade Lake chips, but the tech industry has been much more concerned about the effect of these design flaws on server processors running in data centers and cloud vendors.
By 2019 Every New Ford Will Have 4G LTE Connectivity for Over-The-Air Updates
March 18th, 2018Tesla has been doing this for years, and it’s very disturbing. Of course, the justification is that changes can be made to the car to fix things over the air, without the customer having to bring the car in for servicing. I get all of that. But many people don’t realize that the vehicles are also transmitting imagery from multiple video cameras back to Tesla. The new Model 3 has a driver facing camera inside the car!
*pfft* you say. The number of vehicles Tesla is selling amounts to a noise level phenomenon.
But Ford… That’s huge.
My guess is that virtually nobody will be discouraged by these and many other privacy concerns, never mind the potential health issues. While you and I probably won’t ever buy such a car, just about everyone else will. This means that even those of us who refuse will be swept up in the surveillance networks that these vehicles will create.
Via: Ars Technica:
Ahead of this month’s New York International Auto Show, Ford released some info about its plans to adapt to the changing world of transportation. The Blue Oval says it’s “going all-in on hybrids,” including versions of the F-150 truck and Mustang sports car. The automaker is also readying six new battery electric vehicles (BEVs) by 2022, with the first due in 2020, and adding more performance versions of its SUV line up. Additionally, by the end of 2019, every new Ford will have 4G LTE connectivity, and the company is developing a new cloud platform that will deliver over-the-air updates.
11 Different Brands of Bottled Water Purchased in 9 Countries: 93% Contain Plastic Particles
March 18th, 2018Via: CBC:
The bottled water industry is estimated to be worth nearly $200 billion a year, surpassing sugary sodas as the most popular beverage in many countries. But its perceived image of cleanliness and purity is being challenged by a global investigation that found the water tested is often contaminated with tiny particles of plastic.
“Our love affair with making single-use disposable plastics out of a material that lasts for literally centuries — that’s a disconnect, and I think we need to rethink our relationship with that,” says Prof. Sherri Mason, a microplastics researcher who carried out the laboratory work at the State University of New York (SUNY).
Story of Why David Icke Met an ‘Anti-Terrorism Officer’ and a Council ‘Anti-Extremist Co-Ordinator’
March 18th, 2018Via: David Icke:
50 Million Facebook Profiles Harvested for Cambridge Analytica in Major Data Breach
March 17th, 2018Via: Guardian:
The data analytics firm that worked with Donald Trump’s election team and the winning Brexit campaign harvested millions of Facebook profiles of US voters, in one of the tech giant’s biggest ever data breaches, and used them to build a powerful software program to predict and influence choices at the ballot box.
A whistleblower has revealed to the Observer how Cambridge Analytica – a company owned by the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, and headed at the time by Trump’s key adviser Steve Bannon – used personal information taken without authorisation in early 2014 to build a system that could profile individual US voters, in order to target them with personalised political advertisements.
Christopher Wylie, who worked with a Cambridge University academic to obtain the data, told the Observer: “We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles. And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons. That was the basis the entire company was built on.”
Documents seen by the Observer, and confirmed by a Facebook statement, show that by late 2015 the company had found out that information had been harvested on an unprecedented scale. However, at the time it failed to alert users and took only limited steps to recover and secure the private information of more than 50 million individuals.
At My Lai: The Photographer Who Captured the Massacre
March 17th, 2018Via: Foto:
Ron Haeberle was a combat photographer in Vietnam when he and the Army unit he was riding with — Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment — landed near the hamlet of My Lai on the morning of March 16, 1968. Villagers weren’t alarmed; American GIs had visited the region near the central Vietnamese coast before, without incident. But within minutes, the troops opened fire. Over the course of the next few hours, they killed old men, women, and children. They raped and tortured. They razed the village.
China to Bar People with Bad ‘Social Credit’ from Planes, Trains
March 16th, 2018Via: Reuters:
China said it will begin applying its so-called social credit system to flights and trains and stop people who have committed misdeeds from taking such transport for up to a year.
People who would be put on the restricted lists included those found to have committed acts like spreading false information about terrorism and causing trouble on flights, as well as those who used expired tickets or smoked on trains, according to two statements issued on the National Development and Reform Commission’s website on Friday.
Those found to have committed financial wrongdoings, such as employers who failed to pay social insurance or people who have failed to pay fines, would also face these restrictions, said the statements which were dated March 2.
It added that the rules would come into effect on May 1.
An Expert on Presidential Pardons Emailed Reporter His Life’s Work, Then Killed Himself and His Two Sons [???]
March 15th, 2018Why was the detective concerned with debunking “conspiracy theories” related to this?
Via: Columbia Journalism Review:
I started getting a flood of emails from P.S. Ruckman Jr., a political science professor who taught at Northern Illinois University and Rock Valley College. In 10 emails containing 65 spreadsheets, he was sending his entire data set of more than 30,000 presidential pardons and commutations.
The first email said simply, “Would want you to have this and use freely.”
I had already gotten nine of the emails before I noticed them, but I immediately recognized that this was the data set—the one that made him such an essential expert on any story about presidential pardons. It was data I had often asked him to share, unsuccessfully, and now here it was, unsolicited, and out of the blue.
…
By Monday afternoon — now five days after the emails — I still hadn’t heard back, which was somewhat unusual. I went to his Twitter feed and his blog and saw no recent posts. I did a Google news search and found a headline in the Rockford Register Star from Saturday: “Sheriff’s department investigates double murder-suicide at home of RVC professor P.S. Ruckman Jr.”
His sons, found shot to death in their bedrooms in Ruckman’s house outside Rockford, Ill., had not been to school since Wednesday — the day of the emails.
…
On the way home, I called the Winnebago County Sheriff’s Office, in case the emails helped to pin down a timeline or establish his intent. (On the advice of our lawyers, I did not provide the emails or the data set itself.) The detective said the emails were potentially significant — he seemed particularly interested in the value the data had to Ruckman. For him to suddenly give it away — something he had previously been unwilling to do — might demonstrate that he was wrapping up his affairs.
And if nothing else, it should help to debunk the conspiracy theories that would inevitably pop up, he said.
Cost of Healthcare in the U.S. vs. Outcomes
March 15th, 2018Your what hurts?
Via: JAMA:
In 2016, the US spent 17.8% of its gross domestic product on health care, and spending in the other countries ranged from 9.6% (Australia) to 12.4% (Switzerland).
…
Life expectancy in the US was the lowest of the 11 countries at 78.8 years (range for other countries, 80.7-83.9 years; mean of all 11 countries, 81.7 years), and infant mortality was the highest (5.8 deaths per 1000 live births in the US; 3.6 per 1000 for all 11 countries).
Related: Comparing Deaths from Medical Treatment, Vitamins, All U.S. Wars
