LAPD Adds Drones to Arsenal, Says They’ll Be Used Sparingly
May 31st, 2014*wink*
Via: Los Angeles Times:
The Los Angeles Police Department has acquired some eyes in the sky.
On Friday, the department announced that it had acquired two “unmanned aerial vehicles” as gifts from the Seattle Police Department.
The Draganflyer X6 aircraft, which resemble small helicopters, are each about 3 feet wide and equipped with a camera, video camera and infrared night-vision capabilities.
In making the announcement, however, department officials were at pains to make it clear the LAPD doesn’t intend to use the new hardware to keep watch from above over an unsuspecting public. If they’re used at all, the remotely controlled aircraft will be called on only for “narrow and prescribed uses” that will be made clear to the public, the statement said.
That, according to LAPD spokesman Cmdr. Andrew Smith, would include situations involving barricaded suspects or hostages in which police need to see inside a building as they decide how to respond.
German Foreign Intelligence Agency Wants to Access Social Media Sites in Real Time
May 31st, 2014Via: Deutsche Welle:
German media has reported that the country’s foreign intelligence agency wants to access social media in real time. The agency reportedly wants to expand digital operations out of fear of falling behind other countries.
Feds Say it Could Take 2 Years to Seal Nuke Dump
May 31st, 2014Via: AP:
It could take two years or more for the federal government to seal off hundreds of potentially dangerous containers at its troubled underground nuclear waste dump in southeastern New Mexico, the U.S. Department of Energy said in a filing Friday.
Responding to an order from the New Mexico Environment Department to detail its plans, the department gave broad ranges that indicate it could take a minimum of about 100 work weeks — and possibly twice that long — to secure the rooms at the now-shuttered plant where more than 350 containers of toxic waste from decades of building nuclear bombs at Los Alamos National Laboratory is stored.
The report notes that the investigation into a Feb. 14 radiation leak that contaminated 22 workers with low-levels of radiation and indefinitely shuttered the Waste Isolation Pilot Project isn’t complete and could affect the work.
NSA Collecting Millions of Faces From Web Images
May 31st, 2014Via: New York Times:
The National Security Agency is harvesting huge numbers of images of people from communications that it intercepts through its global surveillance operations for use in sophisticated facial recognition programs, according to top-secret documents.
The spy agency’s reliance on facial recognition technology has grown significantly over the last four years as the agency has turned to new software to exploit the flood of images included in emails, text messages, social media, videoconferences and other communications, the N.S.A. documents reveal. Agency officials believe that technological advances could revolutionize the way that the N.S.A. finds intelligence targets around the world, the documents show. The agency’s ambitions for this highly sensitive ability and the scale of its effort have not previously been disclosed.
The agency intercepts “millions of images per day” — including about 55,000 “facial recognition quality images” — which translate into “tremendous untapped potential,” according to 2011 documents obtained from the former agency contractor Edward J. Snowden. While once focused on written and oral communications, the N.S.A. now considers facial images, fingerprints and other identifiers just as important to its mission of tracking suspected terrorists and other intelligence targets, the documents show.
Spies, CEOs and Politicians Gather for Bilderberg Conference
May 30th, 2014Via: CNBC:
It’s a guest list that most conference organizers can only dream of, with attendees ranging from royalty to business leaders, spies to politicians.
But this isn’t any conference – this is the Bilderberg conference, a top-secret annual gathering attracting the richest and most powerful people from across the globe.
Attendees at this year’s Bilderberg meeting, which kicks off in Copenhagen, Denmark, on Thursday, include Google’s Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt and Christine Lagarde, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund.
TrueCrypt Developers Abruptly Quit
May 29th, 2014truecrypt.ch has been established for those who want to continue TrueCrypt’s open source development.
Via: Krebs on Security:
The anonymous developers responsible for building and maintaining the free whole-disk encryption suite TrueCrypt apparently threw in the towel this week, shuttering the TrueCrypt site and warning users that the product is no longer secure now that Microsoft has ended support for Windows XP.
Graphene Atmospheric Electricity Collectors
May 29th, 2014There’s not a lot of continuous current available from this, but I still found it interesting.
Maybe when they move that thing higher up…
Via: Laser Saber / YouTube:
Being a Cynic Linked to Tripled Risk of Developing Dementia, Finland Study Suggests
May 29th, 2014Via: National Post:
Cynics are three times more likely to develop dementia than those who have faith in humanity, a study has shown.
Believing that others are motivated by selfishness, or that they lie to get what they want, appears to radically increase the risk of cognitive decline in later life.
London’s Nitrogen Dioxide Pollution Worse Than Beijing’s
May 28th, 2014Via: Bloomberg:
London has a dirty secret.
Levels of the harmful air pollutant nitrogen dioxide at a city-center monitoring station are the highest in Europe. Concentrations are greater even than in Beijing, where expatriates have dubbed the city’s smog the “airpocalypse.”
It’s the law of unintended consequences at work. European Union efforts to fight climate change favored diesel fuel over gasoline because it emits less carbon dioxide, or CO2. However, diesel’s contaminants have swamped benefits from measures that include a toll drivers pay to enter central London, a thriving bike-hire program and growing public-transport network.
“Successive governments knew more than 10 years ago that diesel was producing all these harmful pollutants, but they myopically plowed on with their CO2 agenda,” said Simon Birkett, founder of Clean Air in London, a nonprofit group. “It’s been a catastrophe for air pollution, and that’s not too strong a word. It’s a public-health catastrophe.”
Microsoft Working on Real-Time Audio Translations for Skype Conversations
May 28th, 2014Via: Microsoft:
Skype Translator results from decades of work by the industry, years of work by our researchers, and now is being developed jointly by the Skype and Microsoft Translator teams. The demo showed near real-time audio translation from English to German and vice versa, combining Skype voice and IM technologies with Microsoft Translator, and neural network-based speech recognition.
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Skype Translator first will be available as a Windows 8 beta app before the end of 2014.
