CEO of American Title Services Found Dead; “Self-Inflicted Wounds from a Nail Gun”
February 10th, 2014Via: Denver Post:
The founder and CEO of American Title Services in Centennial was found dead in his home this week, the result of self-inflicted wounds from a nail gun, according to the Arapahoe County coroner.
Richard Talley, 57, and the company he founded in 2001 were under investigation by state insurance regulators at the time of his death late Tuesday, an agency spokesman confirmed Thursday.
It was unclear how long the investigation had been ongoing or its primary focus.
A coroner’s spokeswoman Thursday said Talley was found in his garage by a family member who called authorities. They said Talley died from seven or eight self-inflicted wounds from a nail gun fired into his torso and head.
Also unclear is whether Talley’s suicide was related to the investigation by the Colorado Division of Insurance, which regulates title companies.
The division is a part of the Department of Regulatory Agencies.
DORA spokesman Vince Plymell confirmed that the investigation was focused on Talley and the company but would not provide additional details.
Research Credit: LoneWolf
The Terrifying Surveillance Case of Brandon Mayfield
February 9th, 2014Via: Al Jazeera:
During a live Web chat in late January, National Security Agency whistle-blower Edward Snowden explained one of the least discussed dangers of bulk collection. By indiscriminately sweeping up the call records and the international communications of Americans, the government has the ability to engage in retroactive investigation, or mining the historical data of targets for any evidence of suspicious, illegal or simply embarrassing activities. It is a disturbing capability that should make even those fully convinced of their own propriety to think twice before uttering out loud, “What do I have to fear if I have nothing to hide?”
But there’s another danger that Snowden didn’t mention that’s inherent in the government’s having easy access to the voluminous data we produce every day: It can imply guilt where there is none. When investigators have mountains of data on a particular target, it’s easy to see only the data points that confirm their theories — especially in counterterrorism investigations when the stakes are so high — while ignoring or downplaying the rest. There doesn’t have to be any particular malice on the part of investigators or analysts, although prejudice no doubt comes into play, just circumstantial evidence and the dangerous belief in their intuition. Social scientists refer to this phenomenon as confirmation bias, and when people are confronted with data overload, it’s much easier to weave the data into a narrative that substantiates what they already believe.
NDR Interview with Edward Snowden
February 8th, 2014Via: NDR:
One of the major programmes that faces abuse in the National Security Agency is what’s called “XKeyscore”. It’s a front end search engine that allows them to look through all of the records they collect worldwide every day.
What could you do if you would sit so to speak in their place with this kind of instrument?
You could read anyone’s email in the world. Anybody you’ve got email address for, any website you can watch traffic to and from it, any computer that an individual sits at you can watch it, any laptop that you’re tracking you can follow it as it moves from place to place throughout the world. It’s a one stop shop for access to the NSA’s information. And what’s more you can tag individuals using “XKeyscore”. Let’s say I saw you once and I thought what you were doing was interesting or you just have access that’s interesting to me, let’s say you work at a major German corporation and I want access to that network, I can track your username on a website on a form somewhere, I can track your real name, I can track associations with your friends and I can build what’s called a fingerprint which is network activity unique to you which means anywhere you go in the world anywhere you try to sort of hide your online presence hide your identity, the NSA can find you and anyone who’s allowed to use this or who the NSA shares their software with can do the same thing. Germany is one of the countries that have access to “XKeyscore”.
Research Credit: emulsified
MIT 2014 Cold Fusion 101 Video Lectures
February 8th, 2014Via: Cold Fusion Now:
Cold Fusion 101: Introduction to Excess Power in Fleischmann-Pons Experiments began Monday, January 27, 2014 for a week of classes led by Dr. Peter Hagelstein of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Dr. Mitchell Swartz of JET Energy.
‘What I’ve Been Doing Out Here’
February 8th, 2014Becky and I were into our 30s before we started to execute our exit strategy. Our neighbors, Thomas and Catherine, pulled it off and they are only in their mid 20s.
I think that it’s a beautiful coincidence that people with core values that are so similar to ours happen to live across the road from us.
Via: b’acens and weardsetls:
Thomas and I bought a property last May. What is so special about this is that we were able to buy the place out right. We have NO MORTGAGE and NO DEBT. Our household expenses are comprised of electricity, our yearly property rates and lpg gas bottles every few months. This equates to approximately NZ$200-250 a month. For two people. The situation that we have put ourselves in is a very rare and unique one, for this country and for my native country as well. Do I feel a tiny bit liberated? Oh yes, I really do. We can do the unthinkable: Save money. Lots of money. We have no credit card debt, no vehicle debt, no loan debt of any kind. We do not live above our means, in fact, we probably live below it.
This iPhone-Sized Device Can Hack A Car
February 6th, 2014Via: Forbes:
Auto makers have long downplayed the threat of hacker attacks on their cars and trucks, arguing that their vehicles’ increasingly-networked systems are protected from rogue wireless intrusion. Now two researchers plan to show that a few minutes alone with a car and a tiny, cheap device can give digital saboteurs all the wireless control they need.
At the Black Hat Asia security conference in Singapore next month, Spanish security researchers Javier Vazquez-Vidal and Alberto Garcia Illera plan to present a small gadget they built for less than $20 that can be physically connected to a car’s internal network to inject malicious commands affecting everything from its windows and headlights to its steering and brakes. Their tool, which is about three-quarters the size of an iPhone, attaches via four wires to the Controller Area Network or CAN bus of a vehicle, drawing power from the car’s electrical system and waiting to relay wireless commands sent remotely from an attacker’s computer. They call their creation the CAN Hacking Tool, or CHT.
“It can take five minutes or less to hook it up and then walk away,” says Vazquez Vidal, who works as a automobile IT security consultant in Germany. “We could wait one minute or one year, and then trigger it to do whatever we have programmed it to do.”
Related: Michael Hastings
Frack the Drought
February 6th, 2014Via: USA Today:
The USA’s domestic energy boom is increasing demands on water supplies already under pressure from drought and growing populations, a new report says.
The water-intensive process used to extract oil and gas from shale underground — known as hydraulic fracturing or fracking — has required almost 100 billion gallons of water to drill more than 39,000 oil and shale gas wells in the U.S. since 2011, says Ceres, a green investment group.
More than half of those wells — 55% — were in drought-stricken areas, and nearly half were in regions under high or extremely high water stress, such as Texas, the report says.
To be in extremely high water stress means more than 80% of the area’s available surface and ground water is already allocated for city, agriculture or industrial use. High stress means 40% to 80% of the water is already allocated, Ceres says.
Shale development is also occurring rapidly in areas where groundwater is already being depleted by other uses, including agriculture and residential development.
Nationwide, more than 36% of the 39,000 wells drilled since 2011 were in areas already experiencing groundwater depletion, the study says.
Snipers Attacked A Silicon Valley Power Station Last Year And Nobody Told Us
February 6th, 2014See Fiber Optic Cables Cut in California (2009) for commentary that applies here as well. They called that one vandalism. Oh sure.
That one happened in April too. Hmm.
Via: sfist:
Around 1 a.m. on April 16th last year, a team of attackers cut phone likes and took out 17 power transformers at a PG&E substation south of San Jose, nearly causing a blackout throughout Silicon Valley. According to the former chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, it was the “most significant incident of domestic terrorism” involving the nation’s power grid. No one has been charged or arrested in the attack.
The Wall Street Journal, broke news of the attack today, pieced together a timeline of events that unfolded in the middle of the night, just yards from Highway 101:
The attack began just before 1 a.m. on April 16 last year, when someone slipped into an underground vault not far from a busy freeway and cut telephone cables.
Within half an hour, snipers opened fire on a nearby electrical substation. Shooting for 19 minutes, they surgically knocked out 17 giant transformers that funnel power to Silicon Valley. A minute before a police car arrived, the shooters disappeared into the night.
Research Credit: Dale and IB
Professor Tyrone Hayes, Atrazine and Syngenta
February 5th, 2014That atrazine is dangerous is just the opener. The PSYOP that Syngenta is running against Hayes is incredible.
Via: The New Yorker:
Hayes published his atrazine work in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences a year and a half after quitting the panel. He wrote that what he called “hermaphroditism” was induced in frogs by exposure to atrazine at levels thirty times below what the E.P.A. permits in water. He hypothesized that the chemical could be a factor in the decline in amphibian populations, a phenomenon observed all over the world. In an e-mail sent the day before the publication, he congratulated the students in his lab for taking the “ethical stance” by continuing the work on their own. “We (and our principles) have been tested, and I believe we have not only passed but exceeded expectations,” he wrote. “Science is a principle and a process of seeking truth. Truth cannot be purchased and, thus, truth cannot be altered by money. Professorship is not a career, but rather a life’s pursuit. The people with whom I work daily exemplify and remind me of this promise.”
He and his students continued the work, travelling to farming regions throughout the Midwest, collecting frogs in ponds and lakes, and sending three hundred pails of frozen water back to Berkeley. In papers in Nature and in Environmental Health Perspectives, Hayes reported that he had found frogs with sexual abnormalities in atrazine-contaminated sites in Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, and Wyoming. “Now that I have realized what we are into, I cannot stop it,” he wrote to a colleague. “It is an entity of its own.” Hayes began arriving at his lab at 3:30 A.M. and staying fourteen hours. He had two young children, who sometimes assisted by color-coding containers.
According to company e-mails, Syngenta was distressed by Hayes’s work. Its public-relations team compiled a database of more than a hundred “supportive third party stakeholders,” including twenty-five professors, who could defend atrazine or act as “spokespeople on Hayes.” The P.R. team suggested that the company “purchase ‘Tyrone Hayes’ as a search word on the internet, so that any time someone searches for Tyrone’s material, the first thing they see is our material.” The proposal was later expanded to include the phrases “amphibian hayes,” “atrazine frogs,” and “frog feminization.” (Searching online for “Tyrone Hayes” now brings up an advertisement that says, “Tyrone Hayes Not Credible.”)
The First Congressman to Battle the NSA Is Dead
February 5th, 2014Via: PandoDaily:
Last month, former Congressman Otis Pike died, and no one seemed to notice or care. That’s scary, because Pike led the House’s most intensive and threatening hearings into US intelligence community abuses, far more radical and revealing than the better-known Church Committee’s Senate hearings that took place at the same time. That Pike could die today in total obscurity, during the peak of the Snowden NSA scandal, is, as they say, a “teachable moment” —one probably not lost on today’s already spineless political class.
…
The Church Committee focused on excesses and abuses, implying that with the proper reforms and oversights, the intelligence structures could be set right. But as the Pike Committee started pulling up the floorboards, what they discovered quickly led Rep. Pike and others to declare that the entire intelligence apparatus was a dangerous boondoggle. Not only were taxpayers getting fleeced, but agencies like the NSA and CIA were a direct threat to America’s security and democracy, the proverbial monkey playing with a live grenade. The problem was that Pike asked the right questions—and that led him to some very wrong answers, as far as the powers that be were concerned.
It was Pike’s committee that got the first ever admission—from CIA director William Colby—that the NSA was routinely tapping Americans’ phone calls. Days after that stunning confession, Pike succeeded in getting the head of the NSA, Lew Allen Jr., to testify in public before his committee—the first time in history that an NSA chief publicly testified. It was the first time that the NSA publicly maintained that it was legally entitled to wiretap Americans’ communications overseas, in spite of the 1934 Communications Act and other legal restrictions placed on other intelligence and law enforcement agencies.
