The Driverless Revolution May Exact a Political Price
November 21st, 2017Via: Los Angeles Times:
In its race to embrace driverless vehicles, Washington has cleared away regulatory hurdles for auto companies and brushed aside consumer warnings about the risk of crashes and hacking.
But at a recent hearing, lawmakers absorbed an economic argument that illustrated how the driverless revolution they are encouraging could backfire politically, particularly in Trump country.
It was the tale of a successful, long-distance beer run.
A robotic truck coasted driverless 120 miles down Interstate 25 in Colorado on its way to deliver 51,744 cans of Budweiser. Not everyone at the hearing was impressed by the milestone, particularly the secretary-treasurer of the Teamsters, whose nearly 600,000 unionized drivers played no small roll in President Trump’s victory last year.
Driverless vehicles threaten to dramatically reduce America’s 1.7-million trucking jobs. It is the front end of a wave of automation that technologists and economists have been warning for years will come crashing down on America’s political order. Some predict it could rival the impact of the economic globalization and the resulting off-shoring of jobs that propelled Trump’s victory in the presidential election.
“This is one of the biggest policy changes of our generation,” said Sam Loesche, head of government affairs for the Teamsters. “This is not just about looking after the health and welfare of America’s workers, but also their livelihoods.”
Washington isn’t ready for it. The Trump White House already has indicated it sees it as some future administration’s problem. Silicon Valley remains in shock over Treasury Secretary Steven T. Mnuchin’s remark in the spring that economic fallout from this type of automation is 50 to 100 years off and “not even on my radar screen.”
Meet the Man Who Has Lived Alone on This Island for 28 Years
November 21st, 2017Via: National Geographic:
Seventy-eight-year-old Mauro Morandi often walks along the rocky shores of Budelli Island and looks out over the disconsolate sea, feeling dwarfed by the phantom forces that tug and twist the tides.
“We think we are giants that can dominate the Earth, but we’re just mosquitos,” Morandi says.
In 1989 on a stretch of water between Sardinia and Corsica, with a crippled engine and anchor adrift, Morandi’s catamaran was gripped by these same inexorable forces and carried to the shores of Budelli Island. When he learned that its caretaker was retiring from his post in two days, Morandi—long disenchanted with society—sold the catamaran and took his place.
He has lived alone on the island for the past 28 years.
Google Collects Android Users’ Locations Even When Location Services Are Disabled
November 21st, 2017Shocker.
Via: Quartz:
Many people realize that smartphones track their locations. But what if you actively turn off location services, haven’t used any apps, and haven’t even inserted a carrier SIM card?
Even if you take all of those precautions, phones running Android software gather data about your location and send it back to Google when they’re connected to the internet, a Quartz investigation has revealed.
Since the beginning of 2017, Android phones have been collecting the addresses of nearby cellular towers—even when location services are disabled—and sending that data back to Google. The result is that Google, the unit of Alphabet behind Android, has access to data about individuals’ locations and their movements that go far beyond a reasonable consumer expectation of privacy.
Quartz observed the data collection occur and contacted Google, which confirmed the practice.
The cell tower addresses have been included in information sent to the system Google uses to manage push notifications and messages on Android phones for the past 11 months, according to a Google spokesperson. They were never used or stored, the spokesperson said, and the company is now taking steps to end the practice after being contacted by Quartz. By the end of November, the company said, Android phones will no longer send cell-tower location data to Google, at least as part of this particular service, which consumers cannot disable.
“In January of this year, we began looking into using Cell ID codes as an additional signal to further improve the speed and performance of message delivery,” the Google spokesperson said in an email. “However, we never incorporated Cell ID into our network sync system, so that data was immediately discarded, and we updated it to no longer request Cell ID.”
Peter Sripol’s Home Built Electric Plane
November 20th, 2017I have a young son who’s interested in aviation, so I knew about Peter Sripol from his FliteTest days. Peter’s segments were always our favorites on FliteTest because his builds were completely over the top.
When I saw that Peter was building a real electric plane with R/C grade motors, 3D printed parts and stuff from his local home improvement center, I was almost afraid to tell Owen about it—because I thought that Peter might have lost his mind. But since Owen has been building “planes” out of everything from logs to corrugated iron for years, I had to share this project with him.
We watched the videos of Peter building his plane and Owen asked if I thought Peter would survive trying to fly it. I said that I hoped so, and that, “Some guys are willing to take their lives in their hands to push the envelope. Peter is one of those guys. While what he’s doing might seem nuts to a lot of people, I think he feels like he has to do it.”
Incredibly, he did it!
Fly, Peter, fly!
Via: Peter Sripol:
The Fixers Using Recycled Laptop Batteries to Power Their Homes
November 20th, 2017Thanks for everything you do, Jehu.
Via: Vice:
Massive U.S. Military Social Media Spying Archive Left Wide Open in AWS S3 Buckets
November 18th, 2017Via: The Register:
Three misconfigured AWS S3 buckets have been discovered wide open on the public internet containing “dozens of terabytes” of social media posts and similar pages – all scraped from around the world by the US military to identify and profile persons of interest.
The archives were found by UpGuard’s veteran security-breach hunter Chris Vickery during a routine scan of open Amazon-hosted data silos, and the trio weren’t exactly hidden. The buckets were named centcom-backup, centcom-archive, and pacom-archive.
CENTCOM is the common abbreviation for the US Central Command, which controls army operations in the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia. PACOM is the name for US Pacific Command, covering the rest of southern Asia, China and Australasia.
Vickery told The Register today he stumbled upon them by accident while running a scan for the word “COM” in publicly accessible S3 buckets. After refining his search, the CENTCOM archive popped up, and at first he thought it was related to Chinese multinational Tencent, but quickly realized it was a US military archive of astounding size.
“For the research I downloaded 400GB of samples but there were many terabytes of data up there,” he said. “It’s mainly compressed text files that can expand out by a factor of ten so there’s dozens and dozens of terabytes out there and that’s a conservative estimate.”
Just one of the buckets contained 1.8 billion social media posts automatically fetched over the past eight years up to today. It mainly contains postings made in central Asia, however Vickery noted that some of the material is taken from comments made by American citizens.
Support Cryptogon with Bitcoin Cash
November 17th, 2017High fees and slow confirmations have made Bitcoin very unpleasant to use. How about supporting Cryptogon with some of your cheap to use and fast confirming Bitcoin Cash? Current cryptocoin addresses are always on the support page.
Want to send some other coin? Just let me know and I’ll generate a wallet address for you. Thanks!
Say Hello to $3 Trillion in Forgotten Debt
November 17th, 2017Via: Bloomberg:
Companies have been on a borrowing binge, but you wouldn’t always know the full scale of their liabilities by looking at the balance sheet. This makes it hard for investors to compare businesses that fund their activities in different ways. Happily though, that’s about to change.
How come? The answer is buried in the notes to financial statements (you know, the ones you don’t bother reading). It’s here that companies have parked about $3 trillion in operating lease obligations, according to Bloomberg data. For non-financial companies, those obligations equate to more than one quarter of their long-term (on-balance sheet) debt.
Operating leases are actually pretty similar to debt. They represent money companies will be obliged to cough up in future to rent things like planes, ships and retail floor space. But right now you won’t find them on the balance sheet.
Airliners And F-15s Involved In Bizarre Encounter With Mystery Aircraft Over Oregon
November 17th, 2017Via: The Drive:
Something quite out of the ordinary occurred in the skies over Oregon on October 25th, 2017. A mystery aircraft was flying in daylight hours among the steady stream of airliners that traverse from south to north, between locales in California and Nevada and cities like Portland and Seattle and beyond. The incident began, at least as best we can tell, around 4:30pm near the California-Oregon border and resulted in multiple pilot eyewitnesses, recorded air traffic control audio, and eventual confirmations from both the FAA and North American Aerospace Command (NORAD) that it did indeed occur.
Boston Dynamics Atlas Robot Does Backflip
November 17th, 2017Via: Boston Dynamics:
