The Very First Porsche Was an Electric Vehicle
January 28th, 2014Via: Cnet:
The very first Porsche, an electric carriage, sat untouched in a warehouse for 111 years, but now it’s come home.
On June 26, 1898, Ferdinand Porsche’s “Egger-Lohner C.2 electric vehicle,” better known as the “P-1,” rolled on to the streets of Vienna for the first time. In 1899, the P-1 took the gold medal (by a full 18 minutes!) against a field of other electric vehicles in Berlin. Then in 1902, as Porsche put the first all-wheel drive passenger car into production, the P-1 was parked in a warehouse…where it sat untouched for the next 111 years.
Baltimore: Speed Cameras Issue Hundreds of Thousands of “Erroneous” Tickets
January 28th, 2014Via: Baltimore Sun:
Baltimore’s speed cameras likely charged motorists for thousands more erroneous tickets than previously disclosed, according to data from a secret audit conducted for the city last year and obtained by The Baltimore Sun.
Consultant URS Corp. evaluated the camera system as run by Xerox State and Local Solutions in 2012 and found an error rate of more than 10 percent — 40 times higher than city officials have claimed. The city got those findings last April but never disclosed the high error rate, refusing calls by members of the City Council to release the audit.
The city issued roughly 700,000 speed camera tickets at $40 each in fiscal year 2012. If 10 percent were wrong, 70,000 would have wrongly been charged $2.8 million.
City Council members reacted with dismay and anger when told Wednesday of the audit’s results, asking why the Rawlings-Blake administration didn’t reveal the high error rate months ago and take steps to fully refund fines paid by motorists.
Scientists Find Ancient Plague DNA in Teeth
January 27th, 2014Via: AP:
Scientists say two of the deadliest pandemics in history were caused by strains of the same plague and warn that new versions of the bacteria could spark future outbreaks.
Researchers found tiny bits of DNA in the teeth of two German victims killed by the Justinian plague about 1,500 years ago. With those fragments, they reconstructed the genome of the oldest bacteria known.
They concluded the Justinian plague was caused by a strain of Yersinia pestis, the same pathogen responsible for the Black Death that struck medieval Europe. The study was published online Tuesday in the journal, Lancet Infectious Diseases.
The two plagues packed quite a punch. The Justinian Plague is thought to have wiped out half the globe as it spread across Asia, North Africa, the Middle East and Europe. And the Black Death killed about 50 million Europeans in just four years during the 14th century.
“What this shows is that the plague jumped into humans on several different occasions and has gone on a rampage,” said Tom Gilbert, a professor at the Natural History Museum of Denmark who wrote an accompanying commentary. “That shows the jump is not that difficult to make and wasn’t a wild fluke.”
The plague is usually spread to humans by rodents whose fleas carry the bacteria.
“Humans are infringing on rodents’ territory, so it’s only a matter of time before we get more exposure to them,” Gilbert said.
NSA Targets ‘Leaky Apps Spew Everything’ from Smartphones
January 27th, 2014Via: New York Times:
When a smartphone user opens Angry Birds, the popular game application, and starts slinging birds at chortling green pigs, spies could be lurking in the background to snatch data revealing the player’s location, age, sex and other personal information, according to secret British intelligence documents.
In their globe-spanning surveillance for terrorism suspects and other targets, the National Security Agency and its British counterpart have been trying to exploit a basic byproduct of modern telecommunications: With each new generation of mobile phone technology, ever greater amounts of personal data pour onto networks where spies can pick it up.
According to dozens of previously undisclosed classified documents, among the most valuable of those unintended intelligence tools are so-called leaky apps that spew everything from the smartphone identification codes of users to where they have been that day.
Dimon Gets 74 Percent Raise After Billions in Fines
January 27th, 2014Via: Bloomberg:
After agreeing to pay $23 billion in penalties and settlements in 2013, JPMorgan Chase (JPM) Chief Executive Jamie Dimon was rewarded today by the board he chairs, receiving a 74 percent pay raise to $20 million.
Dimon has presided over a series of costly settlements with government investigators, including paying $13 billion for mortgage activity that helped lead to the financial crisis and $2 billion for failing to do anything about signs that client Bernie Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme. But in the amoral logic of the stock market, each payout has been met with gains in the company’s stock price, as investors see one fewer uncertainty looming over future profits.
Legal Pot: The Gateway Drug to State-Run Banking?
January 27th, 2014Via: Bloomberg:
If ever a hippie dream existed, it would probably look something like what’s being proposed in Washington by Democratic State Senator Bob Hasegawa. He wants to open a state-run bank specifically to serve Washington’s newly legal marijuana industry. The proposal would solve two real problems: Pot businesses would no longer be trapped in an all-cash economy thanks to federal laws that prohibit banks from handling drug money, and the state would send less money to Wall Street.
Cryptogon Reader Sends NZ$100
January 27th, 2014Thanks, Windhorse.
Why Are U.S. Corporate Profits So High? Because Wages Are So Low
January 27th, 2014Automation is the key, but this piece doesn’t mention it.
The companies have, “Still managed to boost profits beyond anything ever seen before because they’ve got away with employing as few workers as possible at as low a rate as possible.”
I’ve got news for Jamie McGeever at Reuters: Companies only ever employ as few workers as possible at as low a rate as possible.
How, then, are companies managing to keep increasing profits with fewer people?
Smart Machines: IBM’s Watson and the Era of Cognitive Computing by John E. Kelly III and Steve Hamm
Eventually, all of this hits the wall because there aren’t enough people with enough income to keep consuming stuff.
In any event, with one in seven people requiring the dole to avoid starvation in the U.S., I think it’s safe to say that we’re not going to get the Star Trek package when it comes to how all of the whiz-bang technology is impacting society.
Via: Reuters:
U.S. businesses have never had it so good.
Corporate cash piles have never been bigger, either in dollar terms or as a share of the economy.
The labor market, meanwhile, is still millions of jobs short of where it was before the global financial crisis first erupted over six years ago.
Coincidence?
Not in the slightest, according to Jan Hatzius, chief U.S. economist at Goldman Sachs:
“The strength (in profits) is directly related to the weakness in hourly wages, which are still growing at just a 2% nominal pace. The weakness of wages and the resulting strength of profits are telling signs that the US labor market is still far from full employment.
Companies have not been unable to raise prices much because of the economic recovery has been fragile. But they’ve still managed to boost profits beyond anything ever seen before because they’ve got away with employing as few workers as possible at as low a rate as possible.
Recovery: Working Age People Make Up Majority of Those Receiving Food Stamps
January 27th, 2014Via: AP:
In a first, working-age people now make up the majority in U.S. households that rely on food stamps — a switch from a few years ago, when children and the elderly were the main recipients.
Some of the change is due to demographics, such as the trend toward having fewer children. But a slow economic recovery with high unemployment, stagnant wages and an increasing gulf between low-wage and high-skill jobs also plays a big role. It suggests that government spending on the $80 billion-a-year food stamp program — twice what it cost five years ago — may not subside significantly anytime soon.
Food stamp participation since 1980 has grown the fastest among workers with some college training, a sign that the safety net has stretched further to cover America’s former middle class, according to an analysis of government data for The Associated Press by economists at the University of Kentucky. Formally called Supplemental Nutrition Assistance, or SNAP, the program now covers 1 in 7 Americans.
The findings coincide with the latest economic data showing workers’ wages and salaries growing at the lowest rate relative to corporate profits in U.S. history.
Google Chrome Bug Lets Websites Listen to Your Conversations
January 26th, 2014Via: IBTimes:
A bug in Google’s Chrome web browser enables malicious websites to activate your microphone and spy on conversations that happen next to your computer, even after you’ve left the website.
Tal Ater, a web developer in Israel discovered the exploit while working on a JavaScript Speech Recognition library called annyang.
The internet giant seems dismissive of the problem, however.
In a statement, Google said: “We’ve reinvestigated and still believe there is no immediate threat, since a user must first enable speech recognition for each site that requests it.”
In a video he filmed with a voice-over artist, Ater shows how websites that legitimately turn on your microphone to enable speech recognition, can continue to record and listen in on conversations in the background even after you have left the website.
His video shows that every word of the script the voice-over artist was reading aloud has been recorded by Chrome’s speech recognition feature, even after the website has been closed.
According to the video, the information captured from the conversation is then sent to Google’s servers, analysed and then sent back to the website which was originally authorised by the user to record the conversation.
Within earshot
Once the information is in the hands of the website, anything can happen to it, and Chrome’s speech recognition feature can pick up anything said within earshot of the computer once it is switched on and has Chrome running.
The malicious website could hide information being recorded beneath a banner ad, Ater suggests.
The Chrome bug also enables attackers to programme the speech recognition feature to stay dormant, and only start recording conversations if the user says certain keywords near the computer.
Research Credit: almaverdad2
