Monitoring Hurricane Irma
September 8th, 2017Equifax Says Cyberattack May Have Hit 143 Million Customers
September 8th, 2017Via: Bloomberg:
Equifax Inc. said its systems were struck by a cyberattack that may have affected about 143 million U.S. customers of the credit reporting agency, shedding light on one of the largest and most intrusive breaches in history.
Intruders accessed names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses and driver’s license numbers, Equifax said in a statement. Credit card numbers for about 209,000 consumers were also accessed, the company said. Equifax shares dropped more than 8 percent in after-hours trading.
Hackers Send Silent Commands to Speech Recognition Systems with Ultrasound
September 8th, 2017Via: Tech Crunch:
Security researchers in China have invented a clever way of activating voice recognition systems without speaking a word. By using high frequencies inaudible to humans but which register on electronic microphones, they were able to issue commands to every major “intelligent assistant” that were silent to every listener but the target device.
SpaceX Launches U.S. Air Force X-37B
September 7th, 2017Via: Bloomberg:
SpaceX successfully launched a classified Air Force drone from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida as Hurricane Irma barrels toward the state.
Space Exploration Technologies Corp. launched the Air Force space plane around 10 a.m. local time Thursday, despite warnings earlier in the morning the weather was only 50 percent favorable for the mission. Irma was forecast to be about 900 miles southeast of the launch site during Thursday’s take-off, with a separate storm system causing the earlier lift-off uncertainty, according to the nearby Patrick Air Force Base.
The launch was the fifth mission for the 11,000-pound autonomous spacecraft, but the first involving SpaceX.
New Zealand: Polluted Paradise
September 7th, 2017Update: Part 2: Government Backing Policies Destroying Water Resources
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Via: Al Jazeera:
I also discovered that the country is harbouring a disturbing secret, little known to the rest of the world: its freshwater is in severe crisis. Two-thirds of New Zealand’s rivers are too polluted to swim in and half its lakes are irreversibly damaged.
This pollution, say many independent environmentalists, scientists and economists, is primarily a by-product of the laissez faire growth of the country’s dairy industry. The government, dairy industry, and irrigation lobby disagree. They say it’s a legacy of over 100 years of farming.
I set out to investigate why New Zealand, a country which markets itself as a clean, green paradise, has in fact got disturbing water pollution problems which only appear to be getting worse.
Research Credit: KB
U.S. House Unanimously Approves Sweeping Self-Driving Car Measure
September 6th, 2017Via: Reuters:
The U.S. House on Wednesday unanimously approved a sweeping proposal to speed the deployment of self-driving cars without human controls by putting federal regulators in the driver’s seat and barring states from blocking autonomous vehicles.
The House measure, the first significant federal legislation aimed at speeding self-driving cars to market, would allow automakers to obtain exemptions to deploy up to 25,000 vehicles without meeting existing auto safety standards in the first year. The cap would rise over three years to 100,000 vehicles annually.
Plastic Fibres Found in Tap Water Around the World
September 6th, 2017The ground up plastic is turning up in sea salt that people are eating now.
Via: Guardian:
Microplastic contamination has been found in tap water in countries around the world, leading to calls from scientists for urgent research on the implications for health.
Scores of tap water samples from more than a dozen nations were analysed by scientists for an investigation by Orb Media, who shared the findings with the Guardian. Overall, 83% of the samples were contaminated with plastic fibres.
The US had the highest contamination rate, at 94%, with plastic fibres found in tap water sampled at sites including Congress buildings, the US Environmental Protection Agency’s headquarters, and Trump Tower in New York. Lebanon and India had the next highest rates.
European nations including the UK, Germany and France had the lowest contamination rate, but this was still 72%. The average number of fibres found in each 500ml sample ranged from 4.8 in the US to 1.9 in Europe.
The new analyses indicate the ubiquitous extent of microplastic contamination in the global environment. Previous work has been largely focused on plastic pollution in the oceans, which suggests people are eating microplastics via contaminated seafood.
“We have enough data from looking at wildlife, and the impacts that it’s having on wildlife, to be concerned,” said Dr Sherri Mason, a microplastic expert at the State University of New York in Fredonia, who supervised the analyses for Orb. “If it’s impacting [wildlife], then how do we think that it’s not going to somehow impact us?”
Research Credit: tochigi
Feds Give Top-Secret Clearances to Murderers, Rapists
September 6th, 2017Via: McClatchy:
Under a crushing backlog in the issuing or renewing of security clearances, federal authorities have given interim clearances to people they later discovered were murderers and pedophiles, a senior government official said Wednesday.
“This is very, very dangerous,” said Daniel E. Payne, head of the Defense Security Service, a federal office that oversees the granting of temporary clearances.
Payne said roughly 100,000 people hold interim clearances while working for companies with Defense Department contracts or at 13,000 cleared facilities and plants around the country and as they await a full comprehensive background investigation.
“I’ve got murderers who have access to classified information. I have rapists. I have pedophiles. I have people involved in child porn,” Payne said. “This is the risk we are taking.”
German ‘Flying Taxi’ Firm Lilium Raises $90 Million
September 5th, 2017Via: Reuters:
Lilium, a German start-up with Silicon Valley-scale ambitions to develop a 5-passenger “flying taxi”, has raised a second, $90 million round of financing from top tech investors, making it one of the best-funded electric aircraft projects to date. The company, which took in $11.4 million only last year, has emerged as one of Europe’s hottest start-ups for attempting to solve hard physics problems for a new category of aircraft capable of vertical take-off and electric powered jet flight.
Lilium said on Tuesday the new funding round, led by Chinese internet giant Tencent, is joined by LGT, the largest family-owned investment firm in Europe, based in Liechtenstein; Atomico, a top European venture firm; and Obvious Ventures, whose co-founder, Evan Williams, is a co-founder of Twitter.
In April, Lilium said it was developing a five-seat “flying taxi” after mounting successful test flights of a two-seat jet capable of a mid-air transition from hover mode, like drones, to wing-borne flight, like conventional aircraft.
Wing-borne, electric-powered flight allows commuter aircraft to travel five or six times the distance of drones, a Lilium executive said. A 20-km (12-mile) trip from Manhattan to JFK Airport could take as little as five minutes, he estimated.
Japan Preparing for Evacuation of Tens of Thousands in South Korea
September 4th, 2017Via: Japan Times:
As tensions on the Korean Peninsula reach new heights with Pyongyang’s latest nuclear test, Japan is planning for a possible mass evacuation of the nearly 60,000 Japanese citizens currently living in or visiting South Korea.
“There is a possibility of further provocations,” Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said at a Monday meeting with ruling coalition lawmakers. “We need to remain extremely vigilant and do everything we can to ensure the safety of our people.”
In response to North Korea’s sixth nuclear test, Japan and the U.S. seek to ratchet up economic pressure on the rogue state through an oil embargo and other measures. But U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis on Sunday also said any threat to the U.S. or its allies “will be met with a massive military response — a response both effective and overwhelming.”
