What the Fluck
December 6th, 2013The piece below is about how journalists confronted the money power last century, but how they’re failing to do so today. The theory is that we need journalists to let us know that we’re being bent over a barrel, because we’re somehow confused about what’s happening to us. More muckraking journalists will save the day!
What Adam Curtis doesn’t seem to understand is that most people like what’s being done to them on that barrel. Most people in the big consumer societies not only suffer from mass amnesia, but also from Stockholm syndrome. In other words, this situation is much more consensual than it was in the days of the robber barons—sick and twisted as it is.
Countless books and articles have already been written about who’s doing what to whom and guess what: Close to nobody gives a damn. So, write more, Adam Curtis and get others to write more and better books and articles explaining… this shit sandwich we’re in.
Are the the hordes of grossly overweight zombies, who trample each other to spend money that they don’t have on crap that they don’t need, going to read this reporting and experience some sort of epiphany? I doubt it.
If the main barrier to reaching positive outcomes was a general lack of understanding about what was happening, that could be handled. But better journalism isn’t going to help when ignorance, stupidity and zombie consumerism are revered and desirable traits for people to have in a society.
Via: BBC:
At the same time American society was rocked by scandal after scandal along with terrible stories of the effect of growing inequalities. Politicians were bribed, policemen arrested and beat up innocent men and women, adulterated food was sold, and terrorists threw bombs. While the gap between rich and poor grew wider and wider.
But none knew what to do about it. The genteel middle classes who believed in reform were baffled and confused.
They knew that all these scandals were somehow a part of the enormous changes that were happening to American society. But they also knew that the new technologies and giant industries were bringing amazing benefits and transforming their world and the way they related to each other. Nobody seemed to be able to understand the true dimensions of what was happening.
Newborn-to-Toddler Apptivity™ Seat
December 5th, 2013Television and other entertainment media should be avoided for infants and children under age 2. A child’s brain develops rapidly during these first years, and young children learn best by interacting with people, not screens.
—American Academy of Pediatrics
In other news: Screen Time Resulting in Children Turning Up to Doctors with Motor Delays, Decreased Muscle Strength.
This is madness.
Via: Fisher-Price:
Fisher-Price Newborn-to-Toddler Apptivity™ Seat
Soothing, entertaining and technology all in one great grow-with-me seat for baby! Lock your iPad® device inside the case to protect from dribbles and drool. Play and learning are at baby’s fingertips, with free apps you can download for your iPad®. Look for apps with black and white images to enhance visual skills, soothing apps with nature scenes, learning apps and more. With all the fun and excitement of apps, this seat still has all the great features of a baby seat: Overhead toys, motion, adjustable 3-position seat recline, rotating toy bar and a mirror that reflects baby’s image when your iPad® device is removed. Easy adjustments let you extend the use from newborn to toddler. Durable case for all generations of iPad®, excluding iPad® mini. iPad® device not included.
Nissan Begins Autonomous Vehicle Trials on Japanese Roads
December 5th, 2013Via: Autoblog:
Earlier this week, the Japanese automaker tested a self-driving Nissan Leaf electric vehicle on public roads for the first time and proclaimed the exercise a success in driverless motoring.
Nissan equipped the vehicle with its so-called Autonomous Drive feature and took the car out onto Sagami Expressway in Kanagawa prefecture. The car, the first with Autonomous Drive to receive a license plate in Japan, is programmed to merge, change lanes and maintain a safe distance relative to other vehicles, all without the aid of a driver’s controls.
Someone’s Been Siphoning Data Through a Huge Security Hole in the Internet
December 5th, 2013Via: Wired:
In 2008, two security researchers at the DefCon hacker conference demonstrated a massive security vulnerability in the worldwide internet traffic-routing system — a vulnerability so severe that it could allow intelligence agencies, corporate spies or criminals to intercept massive amounts of data, or even tamper with it on the fly.
The traffic hijack, they showed, could be done in such a way that no one would notice because the attackers could simply re-route the traffic to a router they controlled, then forward it to its intended destination once they were done with it, leaving no one the wiser about what had occurred.
Now, five years later, this is exactly what has occurred. Earlier this year, researchers say, someone mysteriously hijacked internet traffic headed to government agencies, corporate offices and other recipients in the U.S. and elsewhere and redirected it to Belarus and Iceland, before sending it on its way to its legitimate destinations. They did so repeatedly over several months. But luckily someone did notice.
And this may not be the first time it has occurred — just the first time anyone has noticed.
Analysts at Renesys, a network monitoring firm, said that over several months earlier this year someone diverted the traffic using the same vulnerability in the so-called Border Gateway Protocol, or BGP, that the two security researchers demonstrated in 2008. The BGP attack, a version of the classic man-in-the-middle exploit, allows hijackers to fool other routers into re-directing data to a system they control. When they finally send it to its correct destination, neither the sender or recipient is aware that their data has made on unscheduled stop.
The stakes are potentially enormous, since once data is hijacked, the perpetrator can copy and then comb through any unencrypted data freely — reading email and spreadsheets, extracting credit card numbers, and capturing vast amounts of sensitive information.
The attackers initiated the hijacks at least 38 times, grabbing traffic from about 1,500 individual IP blocks — sometimes for minutes, other times for days — and they did it in such a way that, researchers say, it couldn’t have been a mistake.
Confirmed: NSA Tracking Cellphone Locations Worldwide
December 4th, 2013In summary, my thesis was that the NSA operation that Tice was involved with was related to tracking individual Americans, on the ground, in real time, using the mobile phone networks…I’m pretty sure that it knows more about all of us than we can imagine.
I refuse to accept that this only targets foreigners and that collection on Americans is incidental. Washington Post goes to an NSA source for this absurd reassurance. Give it another few weeks or months for the lunatic conspiracy theorists to be proved right yet again.
Via: Washington Post:
The National Security Agency is gathering nearly 5 billion records a day on the whereabouts of cellphones around the world, according to top-secret documents and interviews with U.S. intelligence officials, enabling the agency to track the movements of individuals — and map their relationships — in ways that would have been previously unimaginable.
The records feed a vast database that stores information about the locations of at least hundreds of millions of devices, according to the officials and the documents, which were provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. New projects created to analyze that data have provided the intelligence community with what amounts to a mass surveillance tool.
In scale, scope and potential impact on privacy, the efforts to collect and analyze location data may be unsurpassed among the NSA surveillance programs that have been disclosed since June. Analysts can find cellphones anywhere in the world, retrace their movements and expose hidden relationships among the people using them.
Google Working on Some Sort of Robotics Project
December 4th, 2013Via: New York Times:
In an out-of-the-way Google office, two life-size humanoid robots hang suspended in a corner.
If Amazon can imagine delivering books by drones, is it too much to think that Google might be planning to one day have one of the robots hop off an automated Google Car and race to your doorstep to deliver a package?
Google executives acknowledge that robotic vision is a “moonshot.” But it appears to be more realistic than Amazon’s proposed drone delivery service, which Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive, revealed in a television interview the evening before one of the biggest online shopping days of the year.
Over the last half-year, Google has quietly acquired seven technology companies in an effort to create a new generation of robots. And the engineer heading the effort is Andy Rubin, the man who built Google’s Android software into the world’s dominant force in smartphones.
The company is tight-lipped about its specific plans, but the scale of the investment, which has not been previously disclosed, indicates that this is no cute science project.
At least for now, Google’s robotics effort is not something aimed at consumers. Instead, the company’s expected targets are in manufacturing — like electronics assembly, which is now largely manual — and competing with companies like Amazon in retailing, according to several people with specific knowledge of the project.
A realistic case, according to several specialists, would be automating portions of an existing supply chain that stretches from a factory floor to the companies that ship and deliver goods to a consumer’s doorstep.
Medical Radioactive Material Truck Stolen in Mexico
December 4th, 2013Update: Found, “But Officials Aren’t Sure Whether Any of the Cobalt is Missing”
Via: CNN:
A pair of thieves in Mexico may have stolen more than they bargained for when they targeted a truck this week.
The stolen vehicle was carrying delicate cargo — a radioactive element used for medical purposes that also can be used to make a so-called dirty bomb.
Mexican authorities said they’d found the stolen truck and at least some of the radioactive cobalt on Wednesday.
But officials aren’t sure whether any of the cobalt is missing, said Juan Eibenschutz Hartman, head of Mexico’s National Commission for Nuclear Security and Safeguards.
The container containing cobalt was found about a kilometer away from the truck and had been opened, he said.
—
Via: BBC:
A truck carrying medical radioactive material has been stolen in Mexico, the UN’s nuclear watchdog says.
Mexico told the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that the truck was carrying a “dangerous radioactive source” used for cancer treatments when it was stolen on Monday.
The radiotherapy source was being taken from a hospital in the northern city of Tijuana to a waste storage centre.
It was stolen near the capital, Mexico City.
Mexico’s Nuclear Security Commission said that at the time of the theft, the cobalt-60 teletherapy source was “properly shielded”.
But the commission warned it could be “extremely dangerous to a person if removed from the shielding, or if it was damaged”.
Local media reported that the truck, a 2.5-tonne Volkswagen Worker, was stolen by armed men at a petrol station in Tepojaco, on the outskirts of Mexico City on Monday morning.
“Lockup Quotas” Guarantee Profits for the U.S. Private Prison Industry
December 4th, 2013Via: In The Public Interest:
Shar Habibi looks at the rise of “lockup quotas” in private prisons; quotas where states guarantee that prisons will be filled at rates of 90 percent or even higher. She argues that these quotas mean that even if communities realize their objective of lower crime rates, taxpayers will see no benefit, as they have to pay for prisons as if they were filled to capacity.
In 2012, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the largest for-profit prison company in the United States, sent a letter to 48 state governors offering to buy their public prisons. CCA offered to operate state prisons in exchange for a 20-year contract that included a guarantee from the governors that the prisons would be at least 90 percent filled for the entire term. In other words, taxpayers had to agree to a 90 percent “lockup quota” or else have to pay for empty prison beds.
Thankfully, no governor took CCA up on this particular offer. But unfortunately for U.S. taxpayers, and for the very idea of justice, “lockup quotas” are already a very common occurrence in contracts between state and local governments and private prison companies. According to a new study from In the Public Interest (ITPI), a comprehensive resource center on the outsourcing of public services to for-profit corporations, 65 percent of private prison contracts that we studied contain these quotas…
Mission Acomplished: Afghanistan Opium Harvest at Record High
December 4th, 2013Via: BBC:
Afghan opium cultivation has reached a record level, with more than 200,000 hectares planted with the poppy for the first time, the United Nations says.
The UNODC report said the harvest was 36% up on last year, and if fully realised would outstrip global demand.
Most of the rise was in Helmand province, where British troops are preparing to withdraw.
One of the main reasons the UK sent troops to Helmand was to cut opium production.
Green Energy Versus a Grid That’s Not Ready
December 4th, 2013In other news: Germany Hits 59% Renewable Peak, Grid Does Not Explode.
Via: Los Angeles Times:
Energy officials worry a lot these days about the stability of the massive patchwork of wires, substations and algorithms that keeps electricity flowing. They rattle off several scenarios that could lead to a collapse of the power grid — a well-executed cyberattack, a freak storm, sabotage.
But as states, led by California, race to bring more wind, solar and geothermal power online, those and other forms of alternative energy have become a new source of anxiety. The problem is that renewable energy adds unprecedented levels of stress to a grid designed for the previous century.
Green energy is the least predictable kind. Nobody can say for certain when the wind will blow or the sun will shine. A field of solar panels might be cranking out huge amounts of energy one minute and a tiny amount the next if a thick cloud arrives. In many cases, renewable resources exist where transmission lines don’t.
“The grid was not built for renewables,” said Trieu Mai, senior analyst at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
The frailty imperils lofty goals for greenhouse gas reductions. Concerned state and federal officials are spending billions of dollars in ratepayer and taxpayer money in an effort to hasten the technological breakthroughs needed for the grid to keep up with the demands of clean energy.
Making a green energy future work will be “one of the greatest technological challenges industrialized societies have undertaken,” a group of scholars at Caltech said in a recent report. The report notes that by 2030, about $1 trillion is expected to be spent nationwide in bringing the grid up to date.
