‘The Last Pictures’
October 3rd, 2012Via: Computerworld:
The problem: You want to send images into space and you want them to last 5 billion years. The solution: A gold-plated disc.
That’s the idea behind The Last Pictures project, which is scheduled to blast off in the next few months.
The project involves attaching a silicon disc encased in gold to the outside of a communications satellite. The disc will include just 100 etched photos, which are meant to be a cultural artifact for aliens to find if mankind is no longer here when they come knocking.
The disc, designed by researchers at MIT and Carleton College, is filled with images chosen by artist Trevor Paglen and a team he put together, who are working with the nonprofit arts organization Creative Time and the media and satellite company EchoStar.
More: The Last Pictures
Historical Cell Phone Location Data: No Reasonable Expectation of Privacy, According to U.S. Government
October 3rd, 2012Via: Computerworld:
Individuals have no reasonable expectation of privacy in historical cell phone location data collected and maintained by phone companies, a federal prosecutor said in oral arguments Monday before a three-judge panel from the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans.
The court is reviewing an appeal from the U.S government in a case pertaining to the government’s authority to collect historical cell phone location data from a phone company without obtaining a formal search warrant first.
Federal prosecutors in the case have maintained that the Stored Communications Act (SCA) of 1986 allows them to use a relatively easy-to-obtain court order, called 2703 (d), to force a cellphone company to turn over historical cell-site location information on specific subscribers.
‘So, who does gain from the drugs trade?’
October 3rd, 2012The private prison scam is a key component of this as well.
Via: Al Jazeera:
Clearly a small number of criminals make significant sums from the trade. But most people are working for little more than subsistence wages, from the peasants growing coca plants in the Andes or opium poppies in Afghanistan to the dealers on the streets of Western cities. Even those few of the latter who avoid arrest or violent death and rise to the top face the constant danger from law enforcement and from their competitors. Though the drugs trade has become a symbol of easy, if immoral, money, much of it is demanding and difficult work, where the penalties for miscalculation are severe.
So, who does gain from the drugs trade? One unambiguous winner is the Western banking sector. In recent years a series of American and British banks, including Wachovia and HSBC, have been caught providing banking services to drug dealers. Bankers don’t move money around for nothing. They receive commissions for the service. And they are only part of a much larger infrastructure of lawyers, company formation agents, accountants and tax advisers who help turn the proceeds of crime into untraceable capital.
The benefits for banks don’t stop there. Antonio Maria Costa, the head of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, told the Observer newspaper that “in many instances, the money from drugs was the only liquid investment capital” that the banks could access during the credit squeeze of 2008. “There were signs,” he said, “that some banks were rescued that way.”
‘Fusion Centers’ Threaten Civil Liberties While Doing Little to Counter Terrorism
October 3rd, 2012Via: Los Angeles Times:
A federal domestic security effort to help state and local law enforcement catch terrorists by setting up more than 70 information-sharing centers around the country has threatened civil liberties while doing little to combat terrorism, a two-year examination by a Senate subcommittee found.
The so-called fusion centers were created in 2003 after the Sept. 11 commission concluded that federal, state and local law enforcement agencies needed to collaborate more in counter-terrorism efforts.
Funded by federal grants, the fusion centers were intended to share national intelligence with state and local law enforcement and to analyze potential terrorist activity detected by police. Homeland Security Department officials have credited the centers for helping uncover terrorist plans, including a 2009 plot to bomb the New York subway.
But the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, in a 146-page report released Tuesday that reviewed intelligence reports from fusion centers between April 1, 2009, and April 30, 2010, “could identify nothing that uncovered a terrorist threat, nor could it identify a contribution any fusion center made to disrupt an active terrorist plot.”
Autonomous Killer Robots More Ethical Than Human Soldiers
October 2nd, 2012Oh sure.
Via: CBS News:
Drones could soon operate without the help of humans.
Agence France-Presse is reporting that the Pentagon wants its drones to be more autonomous, so that they can run with little to no assistance from people.
“Before they were blind, deaf and dumb,” Mark Maybury, chief scientist for the U.S. Air Force, told AFP. “Now we’re beginning to make them to see, hear and sense.”
Ronald Arkin, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, believes that drones will soon be able to kill enemies on their own independently.
“It is not my belief that an unmanned system will be able to be perfectly ethical in the battlefield, but I am convinced that they can perform more ethically than human soldiers are capable of,” Arkin told AFP.
Arkin added that robotic weapons should be designed as “ethical” warriors and that these type of robots could wage war in a more “humane” way.
Related: Living Under Drones
Backlog: 860,000 Disability Claims from American Veterans
October 2nd, 2012Via: CNN:
The Department of Veterans Affairs said it is on track to process 1 million disability claims this year.
With the war in Iraq over and the one in Afghanistan winding down, the VA is sorting through a backlog of more than 860,000 disability claims from American veterans. More than a quarter of those vets — 228,000 — have been waiting for a year or more.
3-D Printer Company Seizes Machine From Desktop Gunsmith
October 2nd, 2012Via: Wired:
Cody Wilson planned in the coming weeks to make and test a 3-D printed pistol. Now those plans have been put on hold as desktop-manufacturing company Stratasys pulled the lease on a printer rented out for Wiki Weapon, the internet project lead by Wilson and dedicated to sharing open-source blueprints for 3-D printed guns. Stratasys even sent a team to seize the printer from Wilson’s home.
“They came for it straight up,” Cody Wilson, director of Defense Distributed, the online collective that oversees the Wiki project, tells Danger Room. “I didn’t even have it out of the box.” Wilson, who is a second-year law student at the University of Texas at Austin, had leased the printer earlier in September after his group raised $20,000 online. As well as using the funds to build a pistol, the Wiki Weapon project aimed to eventually provide a platform for anyone to share 3-D weapons schematics online. Eventually, the group hoped, anyone could download the open source blueprints and build weapons at home.
Until Stratasys pulled the lease, the Wiki Weapon project intended to make a fully 3-D printed pistol for the first time, though it would likely be capable of only firing a single shot until the barrel melted. Still, that would go further than the partly plastic AR-15 rifle produced by blogger and gunsmith Michael Guslick. Also known as “Have Blue,” Guslick became an online sensation after he made a working rifle by printing a lower receiver and combining it with off-the-shelf metal parts.
White House Secret Meetings to Consider Unilateral Military Strikes in North Africa
October 2nd, 2012Via: Washington Post:
The White House has held a series of secret meetings in recent months to examine the threat posed by al-Qaeda’s franchise in North Africa and consider for the first time whether to prepare for unilateral strikes, U.S. officials said.
Traders Spy on Oklahoma Hub With Satellites, Sensors and Infrared Cameras
October 2nd, 2012Via: NPR:
The bottleneck of crude stored in Cushing, Okla., has become the country’s “biggest bank vault of oil,” Businessweek’s Matthew Phillips writes. And it’s only getting bigger.
The clog — which is pushing down the price of West Texas Intermediate crude from Oklahoma, creating a gap with its international rival, Brent — is making traders rich.
Information is everything, and traders are using high-tech extremes to extract data about oil storage and flow from the high-security oil hub. Photographers in helicopters? That’s relatively low-level when it comes to these storage tank spy games, Businessweek reports:
Recently, photographers have started using infrared cameras to peer inside the tanks. The difference in heat can often show where the oil line is.
Aerial photography is common. A bird’s-eye view allows analysts to estimate storage levels by calculating the angle of shadows cast by massive tanks’ floating roofs.
And that’s just the beginning.
A private “energy intelligence” company called Genscape is funding much of the high-tech surveillance, reports Businessweek, whose parent company — Bloomberg — also does their own Cushing surveillance by way of twice-weekly satellite flyovers.
Research Credit: rs
Deprived of Nature, Kids Exposed to ‘Shocking’ Amount of TV
October 2nd, 2012Via: Common Dreams:
In addition to the troubling 80 minutes of TV that the average child in the United States watches each and every day, a new study released on Monday found that the amount of “secondhand” exposure to television for young children was “staggering” and should be of additional concern to parents and pediatricians both.
Research Credit: Jb
